mysticism
What is God?: Process theologians
The book nobody finished Whitehead published Process and Reality in 1929. Almost nobody read it. 351 pages of metaphysics in prose that makes Hegel seem breezy. It proposes something that rearranges every assumption behind the God debate: reality is not made of things.... What is God?: Mystics
The thing that happens We are not going to argue about it. We are going to describe it. You are sitting — or walking, or washing dishes, or in one documented case being struck by lightning — and the boundary between you and everything else dissolves. Not metaphorically.... What is God?: Theists
Sixty years of prayer That is what our grandmother has. She does not know the word "epistemology." She woke this morning at five, as she has every morning since she was nineteen, and spoke to someone. Not the ceiling. Not a concept.... What is God?: The Story
The word that shattered In 2023, Pew found that 80 percent of Americans say they believe in God. When asked what they mean, responses fractured so completely the researchers abandoned their coding scheme. Some meant a person who listens. Some meant a force.... What makes learning about the ultimate easier in the modern era, and what makes it harder?: Perennial philosophy
The same mountain In 1945, Aldous Huxley assembled what the mystics had been saying for three thousand years in different languages: the Sufi and the Vedantin and the Christian contemplative and the Zen practitioner are describing the same territory. The vocabularies differ.... What is consciousness?: Contemplatives
The fish asks about water There is an ancient story. A fish swims to an older fish and asks, "What is this thing called water?" The older fish says, "You were born in it, live in it, will die in it. You are looking for the one thing you cannot lose." That is the entire debate.... Micro-transformation: unitive practice from Russian Orthodoxy ☦︎
Fun fact: Ceaselessly, inwardly repeating the Jesus prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” from your heart has consistently led to stabilized unitive state-stages (Theosis) for more than a millennium. This practice is called the Hesychasm.... ... No belief is true, no matter how popular or plausible
You do me an amazing honor to suggest my first post is an entire philosophy, or worldview. I’m not that clever. This is neither dual, nor non-dual, not a philosophy, as that would lead to nihilism or solipsism if you’re lucky.... ... No belief is true, no matter how popular or plausible
We say "God is," and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. I think my main critique of your excellently provocative first point, and the way you’ve been backing it up, is that it seems to be entirely deconstructive, and (at least of the original... 🕊️“Awakening” and “enlightenment” are terribly vague terms for most people. 🕊️
Awakening
andenlightenment
are terribly vague terms for most people.sometimes referring to the universal, undeniable sense of being that is so simple and everpresently already here that we almost never think to pay attention to it (without training), except when something is so beautiful or horrible that it knocks us out of meaning making and we’re confronted with the immensity of experience.
Sometimes we mean an abiding realization/resting in the conscious knowing of that alwaysness: nonduality; a persistent state of nonsymbolic experience; seeing that the constructed nature of the world and self are so ephemeral and empty that our experience is better understood as a dream; union with a divine quality of love and surrender into the fullness of experience.
Other times we mean a total perfection of being human—not just the abiding realization, but some obviation of all shadow material (cleaning up)—repressed and split off self-bits, unconscious motivations, unhealthy or self-destructive habits).
many believe enlightenment (whatever it is) solves more problems than it actually does. Yes, well said, I agree! I like Ken Wilber’s way of separating out "Waking Up" from "Growing Up" from "Cleaning Up" and basically saying they’re completely orthogonal — where Waking Up is...