[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[Dirk Bruere]

john-c-wright at sff.net wrote:

>Dirk Bruere writes:
>
>  
>
>>There is the experience, and then there is the 'explanation' which is 
>>the cultural context in which you place it.
>>Different cultures will provide different explanatory frameworks.
>>While the experience stands as it is, the explanation does not.
>>The clearest 'context free' analysis, which is no analysis (subtle 
>>joke), is Zen.
>>    
>>
>
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>If the hunger for the spirit world is sent from the spirit world, like music
>heard across a starry sea, promising a farther shore, then the hunger has a
>proper object to satisfy it; an object not found on any earthly shore. All
>spiritual travelers depart from matter and materialism in their search:
>mysticism, by which I mean specifically the search for knowledge by
>non-rational, non-sensory means, is the common ocean onto which all such
>travelers embark. 
>
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>
You are again casting the experience into the cultural context with 
which you are most familiar.
Reality is not dual. There is no spirit world and no material world. 
They are the same.

>Now then, at this point, the skeptic can say that these so-called different
>travelers all ferried themselves to islands existing in their imaginations only,
>and brought back reports fished up from merely dreams and hallucinations: no
>wonder they disagree. 
>
>The point is well taken. And yet, it is ships that sailed from England that
>colonized North America, not elsewhere, and our language bears the stamp of that
>ancestral isle. South America bears the stamp of Portugal and Spain. The
>descriptions of the Spanish Main do not match the descriptions of New England. 
>
>If we were as skeptical of claims of the New World as we are of claims of the
>spirit world, each contradiction between the traveler's tales would encourage
>our disbelief. 
>
>Likewise, the spiritual travelers who set off from Calvary and those who set
>sail from the Deer Park in Benares may have reached the same New World, but not
>the same continent.
>
The general consensus amongst mystics (even modern ones) from the Buddha 
to St John of the Cross is that it is the *same* reality.
It is casting the experience into a language and context that creates 
the differences.

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>My experience tells me that Zen is like the first step of seamanship. One must
>  
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My experience tells me it is the last.

>You may think it terribly un-multicultural of me to believe that the Jews
>discovered (or were chosen to receive) a monumental truth by which all the
>nations of the world would be blessed, and that the Messiah appeared among them,
>not elsewhere. Perhaps so, but I cannot picture it happening any other way. It
>  
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I don't think it un-multicultural, but a position of ignorance of  the 
historical Jesus, of mysticism and all the religions that have a Messiah 
from Isis and Horus to Baldur of my religion (Asatru). Jesus is but a 
latecomer in the line of Messiahs, and all the trappings from the virgin 
birth, the rising from the dead, the travels to the underworld etc etc 
have a long pedigree stretching back into pre-history. The Jews 
invented/discovered nothing with respect to the Messiah, but did inherit 
a vast amount from their neighbours and predecessors. Ever read the 
Garden of Eden story from Sumeria?

-- 
Dirk

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