Hoo

We also find the affirmation theme:

I don't take this authoritative (imagine that!) but it's beautiful and it certainly influenced me.

Please, pick nits, share as you see fit. I'm not terribly attached to the term "mysticism" ("heresy" might work), but I mentioned "concept" also. I hi...

It's a good forum. I find great conversation here.

Thank you for elaborating, first. The words aren't that important, but I view the spiritual in terms of concept and feeling. I don't think it has to b...

I was exposed to this theory about 20 years ago. Jung was a key figure for me, though I don't vouch for everything he said, of course. But this is the...

Thank you, friend, and welcome to an exciting conversation.

We probably have a different meaning in mind for the word "mysticism." There may indeed be heights that I never have and never will attain. But I writ...

No, I don't think so. People love their political self-righteousness if not their religious self-righteousness. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Yes,...

Exactly! Jesus is the Devil. That's why he had to be publicly executed. But of course I'm talking in symbols here. And you're right that there are all...

I hear you, and I respect that. But it's my understanding that Christianity largely shaped the notion of the individual as sacred and free. Protestant...

I think I can quote this, too, because Nietzsche was absolutely something of a mystic. His superman is an updated Christ image. (Or that's my reading....

This might interest someone.

Ah, Wayfarer, come on, man. I don't live so wild these days. I'm trying to get a PhD in math over here. I like my pleasures serene these days. But why...

I respect that. For me it was a pushing of that kind of cynicism further, into itself finally. If a thinker is locked in to the idea that happy people...

Well, that's pretty macho, Kevin (your "tough shit"). Sometimes, yes, it's worth the hassle. But the problem is always the opportunity cost of other b...

I think we are tool-users in our blood, "meant" (or wired) to be happy and adapt. I think we agree there. I don't dispute at all your right to challen...

Maybe it's the contingency of the world he find absurd. It is absurd. "Why is there a here here?" I've never been convinced by metaphysical answers. B...

I like the radical simplicity, but must it be as Plotinus sees it? Maybe. For all I know, there are 777 varieties of profound or heightened experience...

Do you know Nausea? There's some other stuff more directly about instrumentality, but that's a great passage on absurdity and contingency.

It was Being and Nothingness that disappointed me in terms of style, though I love the ideas and themes. I actually think Nausea is occasionally truly...

Yes, I agree. It's the most general and therefore necessarily an abnormal or revolutionary discourse. "I think "sophistry" as its primordial ground, b...

I'm not against power structures. Politics will always be with us. Like I said, I want my religion to be beyond all that in its essence, even if it in...

I actually read I and Thou very young, probably too young -- but I always remembered that he capitalized "Cause." It stuck with me, this archetype of ...

As I see it, a general structure of law and sin pervades life. Even progressives who scoff at religion themselves obsess over whether they are guilty ...

If I'm close to another position, all the better. I really love Hegel and the conceptual evolution of self-consciousness. Ideas can glow. We can passi...

First, I'm enjoying discussing such a grand issue! From my perspective, the inner Christ transcends the scriptural Christ. Saint Paul has no authority...

Perhaps, perhaps. Really I just loved those passages I quoted and whipped up a thesis to have an excuse for conversation around them. I'm no "Heidegge...

For me, this puts us outside of God, beneath God. Frankly, I don't have a sharp notion of God. I'm tempted to say that God is the totality, reality it...

Thanks for the tip. I have to be honest though and say that I can only see duty as part of the Law that "my" so-called Christ (name doesn't matter) "t...

Beautiful quote. I relate to some of that. I've experienced some of that myself. But I don't think there's a difference in quality but only a differen...

We very much agree here. Render unto Caesar and Newton what is theirs. Brush your teeth. Eat well. Learn a trade or a profession. But let "faith" or "...

I hear you. I don't want to bring some kind of law or truth on these profound matters. When I reflect on my own experience, I'm satisfied with the "ju...

I think it's about the harmonization or unity of a personality. It usually hurts to be of "two minds." We can, of course, divide the self into various...

I think there's an image or persona (Christ) or symbol of radical freedom and radical at-home-ness that can be "lit up" in a person's soul. For Blake,...

I opened the passage and thought it was great. I want to read that book. I read both Kojeve and Wittgenstein's TLP with something like a mystical or s...

The vision I'm trying to share includes a chasm between prudence and politics on one side and access to a feeling beyond all politics and sin on the o...

Well, the context was men and boys, and Socrates was put to death for something like sin:

Epicurus' 'hedonism' is not ours, though.

I liked Topos the best. Very nice.

I was looking into Plato's notion of love and was shocked to see Hegel there -- or so much of Plato in Hegel. That underlined bit is the "Hegel." Frus...

I can say that I'm thankful for secondary sources. What others have made of Hegel or found in him has been (for me) as good as it gets. The secondary ...

Maybe we're getting at the same thing. Duty and prohibition and innocence and haunt humanity. We are bound by our desire to bind. The impossible objec...

How about the elevation of desire? I like Plato's Symposium. I relate to an erotic element in religion. Sex is at the heart of "life-death" as opposed...

Thanks! Being is the limit concept. Everything is a being. But being has no particular content, for exactly that reason. I think consciousness is like...

I agree. It's very hard to resist beating others over the head with our idiosyncratic packaging of the "sacred." For me there is "true religion" in lo...

I like that you insist that desire is good. I think religion is often framed in terms of a set of prohibitions. Instead of virtue being its own reward...

I actually got into math by contemplating the idea of unity. Every thing as thing is an intelligible unity. Whatever else it has, it is wrapped up in ...

For me that's where philosophy gets exciting. Reason finally looks into itself. Demystification takes a long, hard look in the bathroom mirror.

I'm starting to feel my way in. I was reading last night well into the dawn, after hours spent here. I had to slow down. He's very thorough, very pati...