Oeaohoo

You didn’t offend, I was just wondering where you got the 40% figure from.

You demand evidence but only on your own terms, whereas the claim that the relationship between relative existence and God is analogous to the relationship between waking and dreaming is something which has to be realised for yourself. The only possible form of evidence for this very advanced teaching is a direct realisation; this is one of the reasons why this teaching, before the world became so dissolute, was always kept secret. There are many ways to realise this truth: contemplation and prayer, devotion and faithfulness, morbid or active asceticism, anagogical (mystical) study of religious texts, yogic exercises and meditation, and so on. If you aren’t going to pursue this realisation for yourself, you would do best to simply forget about it and move on with your life.

Yeah, that's right! The reason those AUTHORITARIAN ABRAHAMIC CONSERVATIVE FASCIST PIGS want to stop people driving 300mph down pedestrian highways is... THEY'RE JUST AFRAID. THEY CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH. JOIN ME in your sports car for the RIGHTEOUS RESISTANCE against EVIL and FASCISM in which we will race through the streets and destroy innocent lives in the name of... LOVE and TRUTH!

My experience is that the only real confidence is one which is grounded in the immutable and unshakeable nature of the metaphysical plane and the Supreme Identity. Incidentally, this is why one of the most significant and universal metaphysical symbols, the World Tree or Tree of Life, is often depicted with roots in Heaven rather than Earth: 'This ancient Aswattha tree has its root above and branches below. That is pure, That is Brahman, That alone is called the Immortal. All the worlds rest in That. None goes beyond That. This verily is That.' - Katha Upanishad, Verse 2.3.1.

@WokeBloke Both of us are only a part of God’s creation - but our ultimate identity and real nature is not other than God. If you wanted to put it poetically, you could say that we are only a part of no part apart.

@WokeBloke I as the human being typing this message am not God, nor is Leo or any other human being. We are all just little rays emanating from the sun of God - will you take that literally too? As we are partial emanations of God, however, it is possible to retrace the journey which led us into this illusion of separateness and realise the true identity from which we emerged.

Language matters but language has different functions. In traditional interpretation of religious scripture it was understood that there are four ways to understand a text: literally, socially, philosophically and “anagogically”. This funny last word refers to “a mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text, especially scriptural exegesis that detects allusions to heaven or the afterlife.” The teaching that we are living in a dream is an anagogic one. No. The individual human is one of an infinite panoply of emanations of God. None of these emanations are separate from God, however, because God is the All. Our human lives are relatively real; The only thing that is absolutely real is God.

@WokeBloke You shouldn’t take these high-level teachings too literally: the problem here is that you are understanding imagination in a dualistic sense in opposition to reality. The purpose of teaching that “this is a dream in the mind of God” is simply to point you towards the realisation that mundane existence is only relative and hence is not ultimately Real. God is living all of these lives not any individual human being.

It is only a fitting analogy to say that life is a dream. The analogy breaks down when you start to compare the lucid dreamer with the Awakened One. A dream occurs within the consciousness of the individual soul whereas the dream of this world occurs in what the Ancient Greeks called the Soul of the World. Thus, a lucid dreamer can attain to relative omnipotence within the dream because he is its only conscious witness. However, the Awakened One understands that, whilst consciousness is an indivisible unity, they share this consciousness with everybody and even everything else in the dream. Only God is omnipotent: the Awakened One is one who has annihilated all sense of otherness and so exists in total alignment with God’s will.

The most important dream I have had was a set of trials in a forest setting which seemed to have the purpose of both a purification and a preparation. After the last trial was successfully complete, a wall of pure Light - which was not of the same dimensional space as the rest of the dreamscape - arose from the ground and slowly climbed upwards. As it was arising I walked under the veil and found myself totally absorbed in a blissful unity of Light. Then, unfortunately, I woke up!

Most people on here are American so you might find this interesting. I once had a dream where a golden key had come in the post. This key was a small disc which emanated a numinous and arcane quality. The key came with a letter which stated that, whilst this was my key, I had to deliver it to the nearest government authority as soon as possible. I was originally going to take it to the local council but, as I was leaving the house to go and do this, the radio was on and it announced that Donald Trump was for some reason residing in my hometown (this was when Trump was still in office). The letter simply stated that I had to give my magical key to a government authority so I thought I would take it to Trump instead! As it turned out, he was staying just down the road from me… and the door to his house was cracked open! I walked in to an empty kitchen and shouted, “Is anybody home?” After a brief period of silence, a reply came from the next room in a deeper and more resonant version of Trump’s voice, “You should knock before you come in!” I waited and the door to the next room opened, out of which came Melania Trump! I greeted her and explained my situation, “I am here to give you my golden key.” She, however, had no idea what I was talking about, “what do you mean? What is this key? What are you doing in my house?” The conversation became increasingly heated, with me trying to give her my golden key and her being flabbergasted and even outraged by this whole situation, until… it turned into a wet dream between me and Melania Trump!

I have just been rereading a collection of reviews which Guénon wrote in Studies on Hinduism on Aurobindo’s books. I thought you might find it interesting so I have copied some highlights out below (you might be able to see where some of my anti-progressive views come from!): ‘Sri Aurobindo […] is a man who, although he perhaps sometimes presents the doctrine under a rather too “modernised” form, has no less incontestably a high spiritual value. For him, it is a question “not only of rising from ordinary ignorant mundane consciousness to the Divine consciousness, but also of bringing down the supra-mental power of this Divine consciousness into the ignorance of the mind, of life, and of the body, and of transforming them, of manifesting the Divine even here below, and of creating a Divine life in matter.” This amounts to saying that the total realisation of the being includes not only the “Supreme”, but also the “Non-Supreme”, both the unmanifested and the manifested aspects finally uniting as it were indissolubly as they are united in the Divine. Perhaps the author’s insistence on showing a difference with “the other Yogas” risks an incorrect interpretation; there is in fact nothing “new” here, for the teaching has always been that of the Hindu tradition as well as of the other traditions (the Islamic tasawwuf in particular is very explicit in this regard). If the first point of view seems more in evidence generally than the second in expositions of Yoga, there are several reasons, but let it suffice to point out, first, that the “ascent” must necessarily precede the “redescent”; and then that the being that has truly realised the “Supreme Identity” can therefore, and for that very reason, “move at will” in all the worlds (this excludes, of course, that in the “redescent” he must once again find himself enclosed in individual limitations). It is therefore a mere question of “modality” and not of a real difference as to the goal, which would be strictly inconceivable; but it is worthwhile to stress it, since too many people tend to see innovations where there is only a perfectly correct expression or legitimate adaptation of traditional doctrines and to attribute to individuals a role and an importance which they could never have. Responding to a rather “sentimental” question regarding the reasons for suffering and evil in this world, Aurobindo rightly answers that all possibilities must be fulfilled, and that it is division and separation that give birth to evil insofar as these possibilities are considered in isolation from each other and from their principle. In sum, what we consider as evil, that is to say as a negation, is such only in consequence of our ignorance and our limited horizon. What is more contestable is that he seems to admit not only a spiritual evolution for each being but also evolution in the sense of a “progression” of the world in its totality. This is an idea which appears very modern to us, and we do also do not see how it can agree with the very conditions of the development of all manifestation. After all, how can such affirmations be reconciled with the least understanding of the traditional doctrine of cycles, and more particularly with the fact that we are presently in the darkest period of the Kali-Yuga? On the other hand, if we sufficiently understand what is not expressed very explicitly, he appears to think that “ascending realisation” is insufficient in itself and that it requires completion by “descending realisation”; at least, some of his expressions allow this interpretation of his thought. But why then oppose liberation as he understands it to what he calls an “escape from the world”? As long as the being remains in the Cosmos (and by that we mean not only this world but the totality of manifestation), however elevated the states he can reach, they are always only conditioned states which have no common measure with true liberation. Liberation can only be attained by leaving the Cosmos, and it is only thereafter that the being can “redescend”, in appearance at least, without any longer being affected by the conditions of the manifested world. In other words, “descending realisation”, very far from being opposed to “ascending realisation”, on the contrary necessarily presupposes it; it would have been useful to clarify this so as to leave no room for equivocation, but we want to believe that this is what Aurobindo means when he speaks of “an ascension from which one no longer falls back, but whence one can take flight in a winged descent of light, strength and Ānanda.”’

Personally, if I am reading something that I really want to internalise and integrate I will first read it aloud and then re-read and mull over it internally. Reading something aloud is more helpful for attaining a superficial understanding of something - because your eyes, ears and mouth are all processing the same information - whereas mulling over it internally is a better way to understand its full ramifications and its relationship to the context of the book and your understanding as a whole. Maybe you haven't yet mastered speech and enunciation in general: if you are focusing on these then you'll likely be too busy focusing on speaking the words rather than understanding them!

You can even make a very persuasive case that modern leftism and progressivism originated with Christianity: In its opposition to the Roman, Nordic and Celtic conception of virtus - from the root vir meaning man, not man in general but as opposed to woman, from whence derives virility - and its correspondingly one-sided emphasis on Love over Truth and Compassion over Wisdom; in its subversive and revolutionary character which has slowly eroded the Greco-Roman patriarchal family structure and the ancient Indo-European Cult of the Ancestors: "Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother" and "I do not come to bring peace but the sword"; in its eclectic and syncretistic origins which make of it a sort of proto-multiculturalism - Christianity arose out of the decadence and spiritual chaos of late Antiquity and drew all sorts of peculiar influences from the collapse of the Roman Empire which had grown to encompass almost all of the civilised world - and its corresponding emphasis on universalism and "catholicity" over discrimination and homogeneity; and so on. Not only this, but Christianity replaced the historiography of cyclic decline and involution (which can be found in such diverse sources as the Vedas, the Zend Avesta, the Laws of Manu, the Nordic sagas, Hesiod) of earlier mythology and replaced it with one of linear evolution and therefore "progress" towards Salvation and Redemption in Christ the Messiah. This is why Christian conservatism and traditionalism is so absurd; you might as well call it "revolutionary conservatism" or "reactionary progressivism"! Anyway, maybe Nietzsche was right to describe Christianity as "the final stages of disease meekly announcing themselves"... Edit: Reflecting on it, I am inclined to append the passage from which this last quotation derives because it is so relevant today, particularly in that with his usual prophetic genius Nietzsche predicts a "European Buddhism" as "Nihilism"! What else is the endless spiritual bypassing and "non-duality means I can sit on my sofa and watch Netflix all day" which you find in almost all new-age circles today?

This is definitely one of the biggest weaknesses of the progressive left today. I would say that this is a sort of failed appeal-to-emotion: evasive phrases like “communities of colour” (of course, this is basically just a way to say: non-white communities…) are designed to create a feeling of safety and inclusion and not box anyone into a narrow ethnic group, but it has the opposite effect because it makes people feel like they will be persecuted if they aren’t up to date with the latest silly vocabulary. When mothering turns into smothering! Not if it is counterbalanced by a stronger emotion which says “if I care about white ethnic homogeneity I am a fascist and that is the worst thing anyone can be! I will lose all of my cosmopolitan friends and maybe even my job.” The base instinct is more toward surviving and being in conformity with one’s surroundings: this sets a different criteria for Blue and Red states.

Not every white Christian American values ethnic homogeneity above all else. Since the reframing of America’s self-concept that took place with the victorious defeat over fascism and the civil rights movement, many people in this demographic have come to view the advancement of their own ethnic interest as inappropriate and bigoted. Many forms of Christianity today are quite left-leaning and there has always been an element of universalism (the literal meaning of “catholicity”) in Christianity.

Exactly. Of course this is not the only explanation for what you are describing though. Many people simply vote as they have always voted; some will vote simply because they prefer one candidate (at the local or national level) to another, even if it is for totally superficial reasons; and I am convinced that many vote based on nothing at all! I’m not sure I agree with you that the Republicans have a stronger emotional appeal. If anything, Democrats appeal more to the emotional level, or maybe you could say that they appeal to different emotions: Republicans appeal more to emotions of duty, patriotism and national strength, security, ethnic kinship and family, whereas Democrats appeal more to safety, inclusion, tolerance, acceptance of weakness, love and compassion for the excluded and rejected.

That’s a bit like asking why Muslims generally don’t support Christianity: most traditionally oriented people are oriented around a specific tradition, not tradition as such; add to this that a significant part of tradition is ethnic homogeneity (remember that the word nation itself comes from the Latin word natio which means “birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe”) and it should be clear why non-whites would not be supportive of Republican-style tradition!

There is definitely a tragic element underlying the whole thing; ironically, it is like the tragic pathos which underlies the Christian message. To me the jester leaping over the tightrope-walker is a dream-like metaphor for the fundamental problem with Nietzsche’s life and philosophy: he (as the tightrope-walker) had awakened a transcendent force within himself (which he perceived as a jester, because transcendence makes a mockery of all partial and limited identifications) which insistently drove him on towards the destruction of all limitations (“philosophising with a hammer”). However, without the appropriate context and training he was not able to master this transcendent force and so it overcame him, driving him down into the abyss. That being said, I find passages in The Antichrist particularly and the fourth part of Zarathustra to be raucously funny! Well, he specifically says that Jesus still had the overwrought passion of early life and so his teaching was contaminated by a one-sided escapism and a contempt for mundane things, almost like a rebellious teenager. I would say that Zarathustra suffers from the opposite problem, in that he esteems the earth and the body over spirituality. There is a very weak passage in which Zarathustra basically denies all metaphysics: However, towards the end of Zarathustra, particularly with the motif of the Eternal Return, he increasingly transcends this one-sided emphasis on impermanence: ‘That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of Becoming to one of Being’; ‘Every moment begins existence, around every “Here” rolls the ball “There”; The middle is everywhere’. The final song, The Seven Seals (or: the Yea- and Amen- Song) is very beautiful and a true spiritual revival! It is very striking how Nietzsche seems to have rediscovered the teaching of the subtle body. His description of the Seven Seals maps perfectly onto the system of Chakras of Tantra, and consider the opening to his description of the Last Man: “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? Thus ask the Last Men and they blink. For the earth has now become small, and upon it hops the Last Man who makes everything small.” Love is the Heart Chakra; Creation is the Throat Chakra; Longing is the Third Eye; and a Star is The Thousand Petalled Lotus of pure transcendence; thus, the Last Man only has access to the lower, material and animal centres of the body. I see Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Nietzsche breaking away from all of the rotten assumptions of a profane and atheistic world and so making a profound rediscovery of transcendent wisdom. The greatest mistake I see in people who discuss it is that they take specific teachings of Zarathustra (particularly the prologue and the Superman) without regard for their context within the book as a whole. It has to be understood more like a symphony, an unfolding narrative who’s culminating crescendo is the Great Midday in which all oppositions are reconciled and everything is once more harmonious. Hahaha, it is probably so! I haven’t read much Aurobindo. Would you recommend a particular book of his? If you are interested, the works of René Guénon have been very valuable to me, particularly his books Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, The Multiple States of the Being and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.

Being traditionally oriented doesn’t necessarily correlate to voting for the Republican party. The Republicans might have grown more right-wing but they certainly haven’t become better representatives of tradition. It is the neocon free-market strand of the right which is just as vacuous and subversive as the socialism of the left. Also, the white majority in America is getting smaller (I believe it is around 60% now) and non-white people of a traditional orientation are much less likely to vote Republican. I would describe myself as traditionally oriented but I would never vote for a party like the “Conservatives” of my country or the Republicans because I don’t think they stand for any real tradition.

I have more of a Dionysian temperament. Leo’s deepest teachings are more profound but Nietzsche has been more important to me personally. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody was the first book that I read religiously, in the sense of returning to it again and again and always discovering a deeper level of meaning. What about yourself? Incidentally, the name Oeaohoo is from a Theosophical text which my favourite composer Scriabin used to great effect in the choral part of his symphony Prometheus: The Poem of Fire. This is very Dionysian music. It means Logos or the Absolute:

@AtheisticNonduality Condensing what I have said above, I would say that Nietzsche was a prophet and a magician (in the sense of one who seeks to unite contemplation with action) whereas Leo is more of a contemplative and an intellectual (in the higher sense). In Nietzsche’s own terminology, he is more Dionysian whereas Leo is more Apollonian. What makes you say that 40% of Americans are like this? Is this from a poll or was it how many people voted for Trump in the last election?

Haha, it made sense before anyway! I see what you mean about teaching style. I have recently been reading some Gnostic texts and they were extremely insistent on emphasising the apophatic aspect of God. On the one hand it is a very enigmatic and intuitive way to express truth; on the other hand, it is quite imprecise and lends itself to a vague and formless teaching which could be exploited to smuggle in anti-spiritual ideas. Incidentally, some of the Gnostic Creation myths have a slightly “hyper-dimensional” quality in that out of the “Pleroma” or Silence are produced various different worlds or “aeons”. It might be interesting to expand this model to include those metaphysical systems which fit in between the gaps of the levels you currently have. For example, I would say that the German idealism of the 1800s (Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) exists somewhere between Physicalism and Analytic Idealism in that, whilst everything here is seen as Will and Idea, the “everything” in question is mostly physical. I don’t have such a clear idea on what would fill the gaps of the other levels but here are some examples: between animism and religious dogmatism would be modern forms of paganism which are now forced to set themselves apart from Christian dogmatism, and between religious fundamentalism and physicalism would be Biblical literalists.

@Bird Larry None of the people you mentioned denigrate knowledge except as a possible hindrance for certain people and at a certain point on the spiritual path. For example, OSHO was probably confronted with a lot of mediocre intellectuals who had a merely bookish knowledge. Buddha was confronted with Brahmans who could recite the Vedas but didn’t know their true Self. This kind of knowledge is stagnant and dead. However, there is another kind of knowledge: why else did all of these people spend most of their time speaking to people? What else is Gnosis? Jnana Yoga is literally “the path of knowledge”! One translation of Buddha is: “One who Knows”.

@AtheisticNonduality I assume Leonian means Leo’s philosophy? The thing I have always valued most highly in Nietzsche is his radical disdain for all of the mundane ways in which people divide up their lives: work and play, for example. Even in the preface to his first book on Greek tragedy he had criticised those ‘who will find it distasteful to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, if they can see art as no more than an entertaining irrelevance, an easily dispensable tinkle of bells next to the “seriousness of life”: as if no one was aware what this contrast with the “seriousness of life” amounted to. Let these serious people know that I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life”. Leo on the other hand loves to distinguish between different areas of life: you can work on your relationships, your career, your business and so on, “ad infinitum”! Nietzsche largely rejected progressivism - “progress is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea” - and even evolutionism whereas Leo strongly believes in progress. The Last Man, the most despicable man, that Zarathustra prophetically describes is very much in conformity with the eschatology of other religions whereas Spiral Dynamics denies this in favour of a seemingly infinite evolution. There is an overblown hyper-masculinity in Nietzsche (the “blond beast” and so on) whereas I would say that Leo’s teachings and even more so the Actualized community are more feminised. Their style of presentation is probably the most noticeable difference. As part of the project of active non-duality that I have already mentioned, Nietzsche sought to abolish the distinction between style and substance: ‘The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.’ Leo, on the other hand, speaks in a mostly neutral, if a little preachy, tone and only occasionally slips into an emotional outburst. In MBTI terms, I would say that Nietzsche is much stronger with Te and Leo with Ti: Nietzsche is probably an INTJ (like us, I believe) while Leo is an INTP. On the other hand, they have a lot in common. Nietzsche had a very clear vision regarding the limitations of positivism, materialistic atomism, the false idol of scientism and all of that sort of thing which Leo is also very strong on. The perspectivism and radical deconstruction of late Nietzsche is similar to some of Leo’s teachings, and whatever remains in Nietzsche of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical idealism would also be in accordance with this. There are many hints towards even a metaphysical non-dualism in Nietzsche’s later works, but - in my opinion these works represent a study in the Left-Hand path - it is a sort of inverted non-duality where, like in Heraclitus and in certain strands of Buddhism, everything is reduced to mere flux and becoming: “Now just as people distinguish between lightning and its flash, and interpret the latter as the action which is performed by a subject which is called lightning, so also does popular morality distinguish strength from the expression of strength, as though behind the strong man there existed some indifferent neutral substratum which enjoyed the freedom to express strength or not. But there is no such substratum, there is no “being” behind the action, the effect, the becoming; “the agent” is a mere accessory to the action. The action is everything. In point of fact, people duplicate the action, when they make the lightning flash, it is the action of an action; they make the same phenomenon first a cause, and then, secondly, the effect of that cause. The scientists fail to improve matters when they say, “Force moves, force causes”, and so on. Our science is still, in spite of being cool and calculating, a dupe of the tricks of language, and has never rid itself of that superstitious channelling “the subject”…’ It is a variation on the teaching of anatman, with a peculiar emphasis on immanence and a certain kind of naturalism that are motivated by his anti-Christian prejudices. This makes his philosophy quite dangerous because he refuses the necessary self-annihilation and opening up of oneself to transcendence, which in my opinion is why he went insane. Another thing I have always valued in creators of any kind is the sense of witnessing the unfolding of a character, which I think you can see very clearly in Nietzsche and Leo’s work. There is probably much more that could be said but this is all that comes to mind right now. The best commentary I have come across on Nietzsche is this little essay: https://www.anthologiablog.com/amp/cosmopolitan-view-of-nietzsche-by-ananda-coomaraswamy