whocoulditbe?

A good blog post about this I saw a while ago:

Very much my experience. Being online at a young age was a good way of filling my brain with evil nonsense of every kind from before I understood enough to see through the intentions of the people writing it, and ending up haunted by it all for life. But I have never had any long-term online friends.

I hadn't clocked this aspect of Judaism before. Kind of cool.

The Taiping Heavenly Rebellion certainly did lead to a lot of harm, but I don't blame that on its Christian–Taoist–Confucian syncretism. The harm comes down to circumstance. There was some conflict during the spread into China of Buddhism, which was no less alien than Christianity, but for the most part Buddhism has gelled very comfortably with Taoism and to a lesser extent Confucianism.

http://www.chinaknowledge.de/ Not focussed on Taoism, but a very usuful free reference work including articles on Taoist literature and history. And it's more trustworthy than Wikipedia, at least excluding his stuff on modern geopolitics.

Please don't base your arguments on the output of the lie machine. I believe the reference to the term ishi no denrai (which would be 意思の伝来) is a fabrication based on its attempt at reverse translation from the English. The correct name is probably 以心傳心 ishin-denshin, which looks suspiciously similar only in the romaji form. That's probably only the tip of the iceberg. The whole stage theory it's produced is far too neat. But you can't blame the thing. An LLM is like a overpowered toddler with way too much knowledge and no understanding.

bad recording but very cool

The old gradualism vs. subitism, eh? When Buddhism gets mixed in, the idea of the "spiritual child" seems to be similarly divided between the idea of the 如來藏 rulaizang, translating tathagatagarbha, and the 養聖胎 yang shengtai.

I haven't read any of them, but there are several books attempting to reconcile Taoism with Christianity that might please you: The Tao of Christ: A Christian Version of the Tao Te Ching – A translation from a Christian perspective. Seems to lift language from the KJV and shape it around the polysemy of the Chinese original. You might enjoy it but I expect it's mostly just misleading. Christ the Eternal Tao – An Eastern Orthodox Christian essay on Christ and Taoism. I'm sure that the theological differences behind the East–West Schism shine brightly here. The Tao of Jesus: An Experiment in Inter-Traditional Understanding – A scholarly work comparing sayings of Jesus with Taoist ones. Seems interesting but superficial to me. (Set up an archive.org account to read this one) The link between Chinese philosophy and the European mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, facilitated by the Jesuits, will also surely interest you. There is a book and a paper on the subject.

"If one tethers one’s heart severely and imprisons it, one can give one’s spirit many liberties" – the big F. N., Beyond Glue and Needle, Chapter 4

This looks really good. We need more stuff that spells out the link between philosophical Daoism and alchemical practices.

identical

neurosis

You have the right idea there. Asking personal questions shouldn't cost £36! Anyway: Have you ever realised all too late the significance of words you at first took to be ordinary? What sensation do you associate most with the past, and why? Is there any memory that you once thought was close to your heart, but which drifted away from your awareness until years later? If you see your life as divided into phases, when did the most recent one start? How about the one before that? Is there anything you previously considered essential, that you now do without every day?

What are you hinting at? Gender transition? not quite. there is only one kind of sin - a bad one. while the karma can be either good or bad. Maybe the assertion that we're made in God's image posits a kind of good karma in contrast with original sin. On the other hand, you see it used to indicate the inadequacy of a given action as much as to justify human dominance over the earth. But is good karma usually understood in terms of adequacy (i.e. dharma)?

This whole way of thinking is unpopular with me. Pascal's wager vibes.

There's the argument that religious faith is just the same kind of trust that is required for any grasp on reality, whether applied to experience or second-hand information, see Swinburne on credulity and testimony, blah blah blah.

Faith is a compromise employed by people who have had their own experiences and wish to proselytise. But in some contexts, the wish to proselytise seems to devalue the experience in some way, so both Buddhism (convinced by Brahma Sahampati) and Daoism (by Yin Xi) include some kind of reluctance to share the doctrine in their origin stories.

"Unity, solidarity, combination, harmony, balance, stalemate, deadlock, rest, constancy, equilibrium, solidity, attraction, etc., as we see in daily life, are all the appearances of things in the state of quantitative change. On the other hand, the dissolution of unity, that is, the destruction of this solidarity, combination, harmony, balance, stalemate, deadlock, rest, constancy, equilibrium, solidity and attraction, and the change of each into its opposite are all the appearances of things in the state of qualitative change, the transformation of one process into another. Things are constantly transforming themselves from the first into the second state of motion; the struggle of opposites goes on in both states but the contradiction is resolved through the second state. That is why we say that the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and relative, while the struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute."

Karma and original sin might both better be called "original trauma," since they cause sorrow and sickness, but do not on their own deserve to be treated with shame. Cupis dissolvi.

brainworm

More detail on this opinion? I don't know much about Dzogchen except that it has a lot of Bon elements.

The valley is porous?