Wooden shoe wrote:Hello Nick, you wrote:
Of course not since acquiring the freedom to become a person instead of a thing requires the harmonious cooperation of mind, body, and spirit which is denied by secular progressive education. To accept it means that our "being" is relative and if being is relative, what is the highest quality of being? We're back to pondering the dreaded G word not as a personal God but as "Being," as a "source."
But this reasoning of the secular being a problem is just as true for the religious one. Just a different beast.
Having gone to a religious school and talking to others who have, when you try to be an individual in a religious school you find out in a hurry that it is a beast.
So religion is no solution to the problem, it is just another beast.
My solution is Buddhism, no deity, no laws to make you behave within certain boundaries, just gain self knowledge at your own pace, and start to work on minimizing the self.
Simple in concept, but not easily done, however I continue.
And it makes me free from having to judge the motives of others.
Hi John
I am not aserting the personal God of Christendom and Judaism but rather the source outside of time and space we can experience through grace.
The problem is the nature of human being. We exist as a plurality. Buddhism will agree. This condition puts us in Plato's cave since this plurality puts us into opposition with ourselves. It doesn't matter if people believe in Buddhism, Christianity, or Judaism for example . If it is a projection of cave life, its exponents just turn in cycles in response to external influences: (force.) Cave life denies the transforming force.
Esoteric Christianity acknowleges the necessity for the help of grace which permeates the universe and how to be open to it. That is its advantage expecially in the West where chaotic influences are so strong.
The Eightfold path sounds nice but who can follow it? It is through grace that our inner contradictions can be reconciled. Trying to follow the Law of Judaism or the Eightfold path in denial and through our own initiative will lead to the same results as Christendom when it manifests Jesus' teaching as the Spanish Inquisition.
Names are meaningless without acknowledging the human condition described in Buddhism through the Parable of the "Burning house"
Hostility takes its place in Plato's cave or the Burning House in response to forces. It is only a rare few that acknowledge the human condition who can make the necessary efforts to consciously transcend it and become human rather than reactive "things" subject to forces they do not understand.
Man would like to be an egoist and cannot. This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and the source of his greatness." Simone Weil....Gravity and Grace
