Wayfarer

Well when I took it, it was still legal! (Now I'm showing my age.)

Not for nothing that Timothy Leary call his book 'The Politics of Esctacy'.

the latter contains this gem:

I've got that book. Are you sure the author is Catholic? I have a strong feeling it is actually by Stephan Hoeller. @Hoo - will respond later, I'm *su...

As I said before, it's 'the finger and the moon', i.e. 'religion' is the sign. And religion doesn't have a single meaning, either, there is brutal, re...

I don't believe in a Jehovah.

I don't know! I don't have any particularly ideas here, it's just an observation. I do notice that at Dharmawheel, where I also post, there is essenti...

That's as good a statement of cultural relativism as we're likely to see! To bastardise Voltaire, 'though I may disagree with what you say, I see no r...

Mormons believe a lot of crazy stuff in my view. When a schoolchild, we used to sing Jerusalem, by Blake - stirring hymn, but never believed for an in...

My thoughts exactly. incidentally, I have told this anecdote before - some years back, there was a sensational news story that an archeologist claimed...

This is in line with the 'culture of consent' i.e. the only criterion for ethical worth in sexual relationships is consent and mutual enjoyment, the o...

'Integral spirituality' is Ken Wilber's terminology. Not that I'm a Wilber acolyte, but it's an indicator of a genre.

It is an approach that would be quite compatible with today's 'integral spirituality'.

A paragraph from Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition which captures many important ideas in mysticism: (Y) Bolds and come comments added. source

But then, what drew me to Buddhism was the 'finger pointing at the moon' analogy - that any religion is simply a signpost, or a finger pointing at the...

Well, it is true that if what even a fraction of what is said about religions in today's world were actually true, then you would have to be intellect...

Thank heavens for small mercies. X-) I am sure 'religion' recognizes that, in fact, is built around it. Certainly, that insight is often corrupted and...

Relate that to OP. From the viewpoint of secular philosophy the Christian story can only be understood symbolically. But, talking in philosophical ter...

My whole interest in the question grew out of a rejection of organised religion, but what has happened in Western culture has changed my attitude. I t...

To those who believe there really is a life beyond, and that you do in this life has consequences, then it's no longer a hypothetical question but som...

Trying to rationalize the basis of the Christian religion on the basis of 'what I can figure out' is surely a definition of futility.

If you abandon all faith then you would not be able to use currency or insurance. Such conventions only operate on the basis of faith. When the stockm...

I suppose I should add, in respect of Hume's observations about the divergence of facts and values, that this still holds, in fact more so now than ev...

It is a false dichotomy, insofar as what is objective and what is subjective are inter-connected - they're not ultimately separable. Within convention...

Wasn't it Thomas Jefferson who embarked on a project to 'naturalise' the life of Jesus? There's a summary here, saying that he was reticent about disc...

What I said is, if you're not wedded to physicalism - physicalism being that belief that reality is solely physical - then you're not inclined to rule...

I hear you but I think an awful lot gets written off nowadays against 'judge not....'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lives_in_the_Shadow_with_J._Krishnamurti I agree with the point about gnosticism not being a single school, or even a sc...

these "accidents of biochemistry" are very abstract and distant from the world I live in... Ask the proverbial man-in-the-street what is the basis of ...

Apologies, written in haste. My first encounters with the literature of mysticism, were with the Indian 'advaitins'. Advaita is a philosophical school...

Second the above. I went to some of the Science and Nonduality (SAND) conferences in California - some of the speakers were genuine, but there was a l...

That it is a discussion of exceedingly subtle matters. Personally I find it a bit unseemly. Sartres' dissertations on alienation and meaningless are d...

From the quoted passage above: 'For so long as someone is not equal to this truth, he cannot understand my words'.

Regarding whether God exists - belief in God isn't, or ought not to be, a proposition about something that exists. It is an interpretation of the natu...

There's been a lot of work done over the last few centuries by critical scholarship, which re-assessed the sources, the chronology of the accounts, an...

Some Meister Eckhardt quotes: 'He is your being, but you are not his' 'The eye with which I see God, is the same eye as with which God sees me'.

Kantian - 'thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind'. Regarding 'all states being material', explain this: a set of m...

Philosophy is neither religion nor science. It drops you at the border. Incidentally, I differ with the first line in the OP Existence (metaphysics) T...

Sartre was a highly educated man, heir to European philosophy, and he well understood subjects such as the nature of being, in a way that the facile '...

Sartre has got zero to do with mysticism. If you wanted an anti-mystic, you'd be hard pressed to find a better example. Hell is other people, and all ...

From the SEP entry on Sartre:

The trouble is, in this context, that Sartre and Nietzsche were avowed atheists. (I wrestled with Being and Nothingness as an undergraduate, I literal...

The difference is that in Christian thought, the idea of 'becoming God' would be a grave heresy. There is the idea of theosis, or divine union, but th...

ahem, I think not. He got charged with heresy for saying much less. 'Divine union' is not the same as 'apotheosis'.

Right. But in all seriousness, it is a discipline, and it does have roadmaps and routes, even though from the outside it seems like complete anarchy. ...

That's why it's called 'mystical'! X-)

That's a fair question so I'll stop being facetious and try and explain it. The problem is going to be that to try and explain it, I will have to appe...

Old title but (like the title) a perennial.

Non-conceptual is what 'the direct path' is about, and of course we can't 'make sense' of it, because to make sense of it, is to try and process it in...

I really hate to pick nits, but it's not about 'feeling'. Mystical insight might be accompanied by feeling but it is first and foremost noetic. //edit...