[jon boy]

what i hate is when people, especially gilrs start to tell you that they are 'really spiritual'. they are normally the types that think they can right poetry and you have to sit there and pretend its good when all your thinking is, if there is a god, why!

[Glice]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

Humans need constant assurance that they are not A) reponsible for anything and B) that no matter how meaningless and arbitrary existence seems, it "really" is not.

I agree. Except to say that I think it's a grave misunderstanding of religion in general when 'religious' people do this. Pplz nd 2 lrn2Kierkegaard.

[knox]

Originally Posted by jon boy

what i hate is when people, especially gilrs start to tell you that they are 'really spiritual'. they are normally the types that think they can right poetry and you have to sit there and pretend its good when all your thinking is, if there is a god, why!

this makes me think.

[pbradley]

Originally Posted by jon boy

what i hate is when people, especially gilrs start to tell you that they are 'really spiritual'. they are normally the types that think they can right poetry and you have to sit there and pretend its good when all your thinking is, if there is a god, why!

Maybe a month ago, I would have given you a long treatise about re-appropriating a pre-Christian definition of 'spirituality' but I care less about that now.

[pbradley]

Before my last post, I explained what I would classify as my phenomenal reception of spiritual experience. As for my philosophical approach to metaphysical concepts, I try to combine apophatic theology with theological non-cognitivism in such a way that I oscillate between Kierkegaardian absurdism and Wittgensteinian quietism.

LOL PHILOSOPHY NAME DROPPING! Does this have teeth enough for you, Glice, or where you referring to hasty atheism?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Glice

Oh, also, isn't the Pali canon utterly inapproachable within one lifetime?

 

[pbradley]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

I also read a lot of Alan Watts in my 20s.

Ugh, I utterly distaste Alan Watts and I'm not precisely sure of why. In fact, I think I have a general skepticism about Western-appropriated Eastern spirituality. Maybe it's because Eastern metaphysics feel claustrophobic to me. There's not enough room in the attic (or, more accurately, basement) for me.

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

By the way, if you are highly religious or have religious inclinations or rely on some sort of divinity for your life's meaning, beware of reading Nietzsche-- it can make you temporarily mad.

Temporary madness is not necessarily an ill. It maybe be, even, the symptoms of the cure.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pbradley

Ugh, I utterly distaste Alan Watts and I'm not precisely sure of why. In fact, I think I have a general skepticism about Western-appropriated Eastern spirituality. Maybe it's because Eastern metaphysics feels claustrophobic to me. There's not enough room in the attic (or, more accurately, basement) for me.

Some Frenchies I can't recall have argued that it's impossible for Westerners to get Eastern spirituality, but I think nobody has the monopoly on ways of thinking-- it can be absorbed with enough study and/or exposure to it. What's lacking is the social aspect of it-- so while everyone can understand, it's a lot harder to live it. And hippies are a joke.

You probably dislike Watts because he was a writer of popular books, not a "serious" philosopher. I mean, he wrote in plain non-technical English.

Originally Posted by pbradley

Temporary madness is not necessarily an ill. It maybe be, even, the symptoms of the cure.

Oh, I never said "don't read it", I merely warned him of the effects. It's like a good emetic that cures indigestion-- but the puking can be intense.

[pbradley]

I don't think Eastern spirituality is strictly impossible for Westerners. I can't even see how that judgment could be made assuming the truth of the judgment. lol French, I guess. Anyway, there was a time that I was interested in investigating Eastern spirituality, but what I found was, for the most part, disappointing. What was interesting only buttered me up for Heidegger, who I'm more and more coming to consider a dead-end. I'm beginning to suspect Asian exceptionalism at play.

As for Alan Watts, it wasn't merely that he was a popular philosopher. I also got the sense that he served as fashion fodder for pretend spirituality. For example, he's the kind of guy I imagine the millionaire CEOs with the Zen garden in their office would listen to commune with the "Tao" of the free market. I had a business major friend who told be that he was both a Buddhist and an Objectivist. He never mentioned his philosophical beliefs after my extensive verbal critique. He was the first to introduce me to Watts, by the way.

And Nietzsche explains himself: Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. This was always a spiritual aphorism.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pbradley

And Nietzsche explains himself: Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. This was always a spiritual aphorism.

come on, he never said that. he said that one should live as to be able to say "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger". this doesn't apply to everyone. "what doesn't kill me leaves me crippled" is the most common occurrence. like your MBA friend.

[pbradley]

My MBA friend was crippled for taking on things that didn't challenge his values but merely affirmed them through the most immediate thinkers.

Anyway, I'm not going to argue Nietzsche. I have a sense that he crippled you enough as it is.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by pbradley

My MBA friend was crippled for taking on things that didn't challenge his values but merely affirmed them through the most immediate thinkers.

don't know. maybe he was really trying.

Originally Posted by pbradley

Anyway, I'm not going to argue Nietzsche. I have a sense that he crippled you enough as it is.

what sense? spider sense?

Originally Posted by pbradley

My spirituality is entirely passive and silent. I let it come to me and I tell no one.

i have a sense that this is really about how a priest fucked you silently in the ass and you liked it, so you let him come to you and told no one.

spider sense.

[Glice]

I think the thing with 'adopting' 'Eastern' spirituality is that it's difficult to be 'orthodox' in it. I often have this conversation with people who identify with Buddhism. They rarely have any idea of what sort of Buddhism they're interested in and have minimal understanding of the potential brutality of it - you all know the Zazen practice of twatting people over the head as they meditate, I'm sure.

I don't think being an inauthentic 'Eastern' practioner is really a problem; the problem comes when you realise that 'Eastern spirituality' produces and maintains some very strict dogmas. I mention the Pali canon being hideously expansive earlier because the idea of dominion over the writing of a culture is often impossible, or at least exceptionally difficult. To the protestant, there's a book that you could read in a week with minimum difficulty. People can say what they want about whatever they want, 'religiously', but I think it can definitely do a disservice to a religion to render it as some exoticised mourning for lost Christianity.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Glice

I think the thing with 'adopting' 'Eastern' spirituality is that it's difficult to be 'orthodox' in it. I often have this conversation with people who identify with Buddhism. They rarely have any idea of what sort of Buddhism they're interested in and have minimal understanding of the potential brutality of it - you all know the Zazen practice of twatting people over the head as they meditate, I'm sure.

haaa haaa haaa haaaa. it's true!

the whacks (on the back, not the head) are actually meant to relieve you of pain while they also cause it. as it happens, when you sit a long-ass time trying to keep your spine straight your muscles begin to cramp up and spasm. usually the thing (i forget what's called, i hate that they keep japanese names for a stick, but what can you do) is requested rather than given, at least in the school i know a bit about. i know this girl who was denied it because she was "asking too much" for it, ha ha ha. i've never gotten actually too hardcore with this practice as i mistrust *any* kind of organized *anything*, so i haven't been to the place in a while, but the pain in your ass and legs and everywhere can get pretty horrid without any overhead twatting. flies crawl on your face and you aren't supposed to move. fuck!

also, there's 2 main kinds of zen: soto is the gentle one, was made for peasants, rinzai is the s/m one, it was designed for the samurai class, the stoic bastards.

Originally Posted by Glice

I don't think being an inauthentic 'Eastern' practioner is really a problem; the problem comes when you realise that 'Eastern spirituality' produces and maintains some very strict dogmas.

also, "eastern spirituality" as such doesn't exist-- there more theoretical disputes in hinduism and buddhism than there ever were in the christian middle ages. it's fucking mind-boggling. sect upon sect upon sect.

Originally Posted by Glice

I mention the Pali canon being hideously expansive earlier because the idea of dominion over the writing of a culture is often impossible, or at least exceptionally difficult. To the protestant, there's a book that you could read in a week with minimum difficulty. People can say what they want about whatever they want, 'religiously', but I think it can definitely do a disservice to a religion to render it as some exoticised mourning for lost Christianity.

right, but i don't think even the thais themselves read the whole beast-- there might be a few monks that devote their lives to that but i seriously doubt the general populace is acquainted with more than a fraction. so, say, a western scholar can have greater knowledge of the pali canon than a thai monk. it's how the religion influences the social fabric that westerners have harder access to-- you can read all the confucius you want, but until you live in china and get how confucianism is embedded in all manner of social forms, you won't really "get" it.

still, not all buddhisms are heavily scriptural or too focused on texts themselves (e.g. zen, or nichiren buddhism, to cite a couple of examples).

however, if you wanna look at ancient texts you can always approach the thing one sutra at a time. there are, of course, hierarchies within the thing, there's your essential texts and there's commentaries and there's commentaries on the commentaries, etc. i've never read shit of it though.

Originally Posted by Glice

People can say what they want about whatever they want, 'religiously', but I think it can definitely do a disservice to a religion to render it as some exoticised mourning for lost Christianity.

sorry, i didn't get your meaning here. who does this?

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

it's how the religion influences the social fabric that westerners have harder access to-- you can read all the confucius you want, but until you live in china and get how confucianism is embedded in all manner of social forms, you won't really "get" it.
.

This is true, and I think one of the fundamental paradigm (almost) dichotomies between the so-called East and West, as since the Protestant Reformation, is that the mystical traditions of the West were subjugated under the veil of rising sentiments of authoritarianism and pre-nationalism and intellectualism which replaced the cultural fabric of spiritual pursuits in the Western Tradition. In the West, folks are far to pragmatic and materialistic (not in the moral sense) to weave a rich socio-cultural tapestry of spiritual perceptions which are quite familiar in the East. Gone were the days of Saint Francis and what replaced it is the practical religion of Sir Isaac Newton, who of all things invented calculus in feeble but sincere attempts to decode the Gematric code of the Bible in order to determine the mathematical date of the Apocalypse (serious shit, after over a decade and dozens of notebooks filled with tables and equations he determined it to be 2060) which from the perspective of the even the most indifferently religious person from the East is comically inept to say the least. How can you use intricate mathematics to discover mystical and spiritual understandings? To the the East, the Western theologians and philosophers since the 17th century have been WAY to left brain about things, and have in fact been too intellectually and brain oriented in the first place, since the Spiritual is not found in the mind or the brain, but rather the Heart.

The real question yet to be asked is what is the substance of the Spirit in the first place? If we must discuss spirituality, surely we must first introduce the various discussions over the meaning of "spirit" which is in itself quite a diverse topic..

[pbradley]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

what sense? spider sense?

No, the ironic and facetious kind.

[Glice]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

also, "eastern spirituality" as such doesn't exist-- there more theoretical disputes in hinduism and buddhism than there ever were in the christian middle ages. it's fucking mind-boggling. sect upon sect upon sect.

I'd question that - only because I've struggled massively to put Christian middle-ages Theology into anything like a consistent context; you'll get a general trend - say, millenarianism, Joachimism - which gets massively complicated by what Marxists and Hegelians would call a historical material dialectic, often focussed around (Aristotelian) Techne. There's also the ongoing, long-standing dialogue with other faiths - Judaism and Islam - which doesn't really stop until towards the end of the middle ages. Something that fascinates and frustrates me is you'll get people of the same or contemporaneous cloisters - say, Richard and Hugh of St Victor, Abelard - who are capable of enormous gulfs between their thoughts. Plus, the perigrinatorial nature of their writing means that our received notions of 'academic consistency' are well off. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin for me represent not just a change in Theological orientation but also a seismic shift in Theo-academic writing - in a sense, what we understand as analytical and academic now is inherited from their style. I don't know if you've tried, say, John Chrysostum, but he's an absolute fucker to approach from a modern perspective.

This very much depends on how you interpret differences in the writers. For the non-Theologian (and I'd include myself in that category), the differences between, say, Duns Scotus and Eriugena are fairly minimal, but within the temporal context, read in a 'properly' Theological way, the differences are enormous.

Otherwise, I agree entirely with what you're saying.

Originally Posted by Ned

sorry, i didn't get your meaning here. who does this?

It's those people who say that 'Buddhism is more a philosophy than a religion' but who've never come across the 'life is suffering' idea. There's a tendency amongst them to say that Buddhism reflects good actions, being kind to each other, without having the imperial, stratified dogmatic terrorism of the Catholic church. For me, I don't think Buddhism necessarily means the sort of analytical study we associate with the protestant traditions (that is, the absolute, fundamental centrality of a single text), but that by no means means taht Buddhism is a religion absolved of its problems. I wouldn't criticise Buddhism per se, but I think a very glib, cursory awareness of it can quite quickly reveal a very self-centred (though ego-less) absolution of the practitioner from her or his involvement in society; further, there's a minimal emphasis on love, which is a concept that appears elsewhere, and diffusely, while it operates square at the centre of most Christian thought. That's what I mean by 'mourning for lost Christianity', because naif-Buddhists do tend to make assumptions about 'orthodox' Buddhism that reflect more a failure of Christianity's epistemology to be consistent with itself more than a necessary strength to Buddhist thought.

I don't want this to come across anti-Buddhist (the contrary, in fact) but it's one of those cultural paradigms of 'positive stereotypes' that don't really reflect the 'truth' of a culture (even though I've had minimal personal experience with that culture). It's like that thing of 'oh, black people all dance well, don't they?'

[knox]

Originally Posted by jon boy

what i hate is when people, especially gilrs start to tell you that they are 'really spiritual'. they are normally the types that think they can right poetry and you have to sit there and pretend its good when all your thinking is, if there is a god, why!

I'm really spiritual. Come to my poetry reading.

[jon boy]

Originally Posted by knox

I'm really spiritual. Come to my poetry reading.

will there be booze?

[knox]

Originally Posted by jon boy

will there be booze?

there's no spirit without booze.