taoism and sufism

[Nungali]

3 hours ago, Lairg said:

Is there a difference between Solomon the Great and Suleiman the Magnificient?   The first is in the Old Testament and the second is in the Middle Ages.  Both built temples and had large empires

 

A couple of thousand years difference .

 

Solomon was know for his Great wisdom .

 

And Suleiman was known for his  magnificent  ......

 

 

 

 

 

 turban

 

 

 

[Lairg]

1 hour ago, Nungali said:

A couple of thousand years difference .

 

You may be aware of the work of Anatoly Fomenko.  There are strong patterns between ancient and recent history - to the extent that it is hard to distinguish them statistically.  Even the names seem to be recycled.  Hence the proposition that history repeats.

[Nungali]

Yes , that is one of the differences too .

 

 

I think they might be called 'archetypes'  .  You probably know of the four major male ones .

[Lairg]

Not to mention the 16 crucified world saviors

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Sixteen_Crucified_Saviors

 

Henry Ford nailed it:  History is bunk!

[Nungali]

and I think 'history repeats '  isn't exactly the proposition .

 

But I do prefer this glimpse ;

 

"

Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

Julian Barnes

[Nungali]

2 minutes ago, Lairg said:

Not to mention the 16 crucified world saviors

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Sixteen_Crucified_Saviors

 

Henry Ford nailed it:  History is bunk!

 

What ?   Henry Ford nailed 16 crucified  world saviours   ? 

 

History is bunk !    But apparently 'alternative history'  is not  .  Nor  is it bunk if  one decides to quote history on wikipedia to show that history  is bunk   

 

 

 

 

 

 

and this forum is about Daoist Texts   

 

 

 carry on Bums ....

 

[Lairg]

I seem to have upset you.  That was not my intention

[Cheshire Cat]

12 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

It helps to NOT  , only cite  part of what I wrote , eliminate some,  and then comment on THAT  .

 

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to contradict what you're saying nor to generate a debate. I just wanted to add a piece of information.

 

[terry]

On 9/1/2022 at 7:19 PM, Lairg said:

 

For millennia humans have recounted their experiences with non-physical intelligences - even being saved from disaster.   

Fortunately humans now know that only material things exist.   

 

I once had complaints about people becoming scared at night on a forest path through a local nature reserve.   They had never heard of any local crime.

 

When I went to see the place at night there was a dark cloud a bit bigger than a human, near a junction in the path.   So I stepped into the cloud and suddenly could not see the leaves on the path.  The dark cloud was a thick darkness.

 

So I took the dark energy through myself and then discharged it upwards.  Then I could see the leaves on the path again.   There were no more reports of being scared.

 

It turned out that there had been a suicide just there in 1918 by an escaped German POW.

 

 

 

  

 

 

  People in hawaii drive me crazy with their talk of spooks, walking wide around grave yards and going all weird about "iwi" or bones. There are valleys people won't go into, lava tubes are avoided. "Sacred" places "protected" from "outsiders." 

 

   One classroom at kohala high had to be exorcised by religious kupuna over some knockings and furniture moving and wild tales. The people involved were mollified by the rituals and the classroom no longer suffers from psychic phenomena. I was amazed and disheartened at the educated and otherwise reasonable people (my wife and her friends) who took this nonsense seriously. Just more signs of the apocaplypse like anti-science and magic and ghosts. All distractions from the Real, which also thrives on imagination.

 

  I don't doubt you experienced something. We are very intuitive and who knows how we know things. Not from spooks though.

 

[terry]

22 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

perhaps this is a good time for a bit of introspection ?

 

 

 

lol

 

 

22 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

 

You seemed determined to massage things to make your criticisms seem valid . ....  whatever .

 

 

 

lol

 

 

22 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

 

So you should not . Which is why I immediately ut up an example to show t just is noot my opinion .... I note you ignore that part , and focus on me pointing you at it ... but ignore it .   ?

 

I am starting to see the problem of religion manifesting here .

 

Might be time to grab my hat and coat and seek less  ' harnessed' discourse .

 

 

 

my yoke is easy, my burden light

 

 

 

22 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

If you cannot see he stage of development the human race is in COLLECTIVELY , to which I was referring , and I think you knew that , and need to turn things this way  all I can suggest is .....

 

you try the 'more than one view'  way of looking at things ...   Even three ways is a good start .

 

 

 

 

yeah it was a dig, I knew you couldn't do it...

 

not even three! pretty sad...

 

 

it's the meanings that are important, bra...not the words...

 

blah blah blah

 

abracadabra

 

 

[terry]

21 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

 

 

I  won't  say more (  due to the religious turn this discussion has taken ) 

 

 

 

let me see, what was the subject here? oh yes, taoism and sufism...

 

religions

 

god

 

 

no need to say more, eh?

 

[terry]

19 hours ago, Lairg said:

I seem to have upset you.  That was not my intention

 

perhaps some spiritual bicarbonate of soda for that tummy

 

 

[terry]

Excerpt From: Idries Shah. “The Sufis.”

 

One day Nasrudin was sitting at court. The King was complaining that his subjects were untruthful. ‘Majesty,’ said Nasrudin, ‘there is truth and truth. People must practise real truth before they can use relative truth. They always try the other way around. The result is that they take liberties with their man-made truth, because they know instinctively that it is only an invention.’

The King thought that this was too complicated. ‘A thing must be true or false. I will make people tell the truth, and by this practice they will establish the habit of being truthful.’

When the city gates were opened the next morning, a gallows had been erected in front of them, presided over by the captain of the royal guard. A herald announced: ‘Whoever would enter the city must first answer the truth to a question which will be put to him by the captain of the guard.’

Nasrudin, who had been waiting outside, stepped forward first.

The captain spoke: ‘Where are you going? Tell the truth — the alternative is death by hanging.’

‘I am going,’ said Nasrudin, ‘to be hanged on those gallows.’

‘I don’t believe you!’

‘Very well, then. If I have told a lie, hang me!’

‘But that would make it the truth!’

‘Exactly,’ said Nasrudin, ‘your truth.’

[terry]

op cit

 

 

Nasrudin used to take his donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw. Since he admitted to being a smuggler when he trudged home every night, the frontier guards searched him again and again. They searched his person, sifted the straw, steeped it in water, even burned it from time to time. Meanwhile he was becoming visibly more and more prosperous.
Then he retired and went to live in another country. Here one of the customs officers met him, years later.

‘You can tell me now, Nasrudin,’ he said. ‘Whatever was it that you were smuggling, when we could never catch you out?’

‘Donkeys,’ said Nasrudin.”

[terry]

One of the aspects of the misuse of names as symbolic substitutes for actual realities is the problem of labeling. Like "muslim" or "taoist" or "sufi" or whatever. I am a [your identification here]. And if I am identified, then I am going to identify you in a similar fashion. You blanky blank.

 

In positive terms, we have our genuine shared humanity.

 

THE DIVINE IMAGE

(william blake)

 

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

 

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, his child and care.

 

For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine:
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

 

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.

 

 

We nonetheless dismiss the human form and focus on the heathen, turk and jew. This labeling is deliberately reinforced by elites and politicians who benefit by social stratification, or imagine that they do. Like russian/trumpy disinformation which stokes hatred between any groups that can be opposed in order to keep people's minds off of being systematically exploited and especially to keep them from combining in their own interests. Disruptive ignorance is promoted and moderating good sense marginalized, algorhythmically.

 

Vivekenanda thought that every individual should have their own religion. If everyone is an individual, no one is special.

 

Labeling people and identifying with labels just enables people to buy into conflicts. People can hold grudges for centuries if the conditioning is maintained.

 

Anyhows, here's a story about labeling I thought interesting...gabriel marcel wrote this in 1951 so the bureaucratization by the state has been superseded by capitalist controllers via social media....

 

from the mystery of being, marcel

 

 ...the essential point to grasp now, is that in the end I am in some danger of confusing myself, my real personality, with the State’s official record of my activities ; and we ought to be really frightened of what is implied in such an identification.

 

This is all exemplified in a book called The Twenty-Fifth Hour by a young Rumanian called C. Virgil Gheorgiu. In this extraordinary novel, we see a young man who has been falsely denounced to the Germans by his father- in-law and is sent to a deportation camp as being a Jew; he has no means of proving that he is not a Jew. He is labelled as such. Later on, in another camp in Germany he attracts the attention of a prominent Nazi leader, who discovers in him the pure Aryan type; he is taken out of the camp and has to join the S.S. He is now docketed as ‘Pure Aryan, member of the S.S’. He contrives to escape from this other sort of camp with a few French prisoners and joins the Americans; he is at first hailed as a friend, and stuffed with rich food ; but a few days later he is put into prison ; according to his passport, he is a Rumanian subject. Rumanians are enemies; ergo . . .Not the least account is taken of what the young man himself thinks and feels. This is all simply and fundamentally discounted. At the end of the book, he has managed to get back to his wife, who has meanwhile been raped by the Russians; there is a child, not his, of course; still, the family hope to enjoy a happy reunion. Then the curtain rises for the Third World War, and husband, wife, and child are all put into a camp again by the Americans, as belonging to a nation beyond the Iron Curtain. But the small family group appeals to American sentimentality, and a photograph is taken. ‘Keep smiling’, in fact, are the last words of this interesting novel…

 

 

 

[terry]

from de mello, song of the bird

 

 

THE SPIRITUAL HEART ATTACK

Uncle Tom had a weak heart and the doctor had warned him to be very careful. So when the family learned that he had inherited a billion dollars from a deceased relative they feared to break the news to him lest the news give him a heart attack.

So they sought the services of the local pastor, who assured them he would find a way.

 

"Tell me, Tom," said Father Murphy, "if God, in his mercy, were to send you a billion dollars, what would you do with if?"

 

"'I'd give half of it to you for the Church, Father."

When he heard that, Father Murphy had a heart attack.'

[terry]

from gabriel marcel, the mystery of being:

 

 

…there is one obvious point that can be made here  it is that after I have shirked for a long time the recognition of a painful truth, I can find a real consolation in opening my mind to it; the essential quality of this consolation lies in the fact that, by opening my mind to the truth that hurts me, I have put an end to a long and exhausting inner struggle. 

 

But what sort of struggle was it? Let us recall some points we have previously made. We cannot properly talk of a struggle against the facts; for let me repeat it, the facts have no existence or power that is intrinsic to themselves; we ought to talk, rather of a struggle against oneself. Here again we find that ambiguity in the notion of the self which I have so often remarked on: the self that is all desire has been fighting against what I shall from now on call the spirit of truth.

But what is it in the self that feels this consolation, this sense of liberation, which is certainly felt when a painful truth has been recognized? Can we think of this spirit of truth as itself capable of feeling joy or of feeling pain? And on the other hand is it not a contradiction in terms that the desiring self, which has in a sense been conquered in the battle, should feel a strange satisfaction in its own defeat? Must we at this point insert some third, mediating term shall we speak of a self which is neither the desiring self nor the spirit of truth? But who can fail to recognize that this dissociation within the self is artificial and that we cannot isolate, in order to transform them into distinct entities, the various aspects of a single life, which is, precisely, the life of one self? What we have to grasp and we can only succeed in doing so by exorcizing every deceptive metaphor is that, in the light of truth, I succeed in diminishing that permanent temptation that assails me to conceive reality, or to represent it to myself, as I should like it to be. In the light of truth, in the presence of truth; it is just however obscure this may seem as if this truth possessed a stimulating power, as if it were able to purify me, as a sea wind can or the piney tang of the forests.

[terry]

On 9/2/2022 at 3:33 PM, Lairg said:

 

You may be aware of the work of Anatoly Fomenko.  There are strong patterns between ancient and recent history - to the extent that it is hard to distinguish them statistically.  Even the names seem to be recycled.  Hence the proposition that history repeats.

 

 

think of all the hockey stick graphs showing great changes in the last hundred years, most obviously population...

 

the history of the human race is reaching a crescendo...

 

patterns will not keep repeating on historical time scales...

 

only question is how fast the lemmings go off the cliff...

 

and how complete the mass extinction

[Lairg]

2 hours ago, terry said:

patterns will not keep repeating on historical time scales...

 

It is more that historians copy known eras when they write ancient history.

 

In the real world Martin Armstrong's AI system keeps finding historical cycles with the system making accurate predictions up to 30 years ahead.  So there must be cycles in planetary and human processes.

 

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/understanding-cycles/discovering-cycles/

 

 

[terry]

from gabriel marcel, the mystery of being

 

 

What are we to understand by an ideal city? Let us put aside every characteristic that belongs specifically to a material city. What remains is the idea of a place where people live together and where exchanges of goods and services of all sorts take place. Certainly, when we talk of such exchanges, we evoke once more an image of physical transactions. I bring along some banknotes and I buy an object which has a stated price. But, after all, there are other exchanges of an infinitely more subtle kind. I go into a museum, for instance, and I bring with me a certain number of ideas, or rather a preliminary grounding of experience, which enables me to understand, or rather to appreciate, works of art that might otherwise have left me indifferent. It may be objected that it is improper to speak of an exchange in this instance, since I give nothing to the work of art; but that is only true from a grossly material point of view. There is a deeper sense in which one can say that the work is enriched by the admiration it inspires and that it undergoes, in a sense, a real growth and development. This mysterious phenomenon which cannot, of course, leave any palpable traces belongs, in a way, to the ideal city. Let us notice, in passing, that a town, when it deserves the name of a town, and is not a mere juxtaposition of buildings, has itself something of the function of the museum; it offers spiritual nourishment to those who live in it, and they in their turn help on the growth of what one might call its spiritual substance.

Let us see how these very simple remarks can throw some light on the notion of the ideal city itself and on its connections with the notion of truth.

As always, we have been tempted to cling to a physical representation. Just as the city of stone or wood is laid out to get the best light available, so we have imagined the ideal city as constructed in such a fashion that it can be illuminated by a truth that is external to it. But the relationship is not the same in both cases ; where the city of stone or wood seems to have a prior existence in itself without the light being a necessary constituent part of that existence, the ideal city, as we have glimpsed, does draw its verv existence from that other light which is truth. This certainly gives us only a very abstract and general grasp of what we are talking about, but it is enough to show how impossible it would be to represent the ideal city in an objective fashion. The best image, indeed, that we can here evoke that city by, is the simple one of a discussion about ideas in which both the conversationalists are so interested in their topic that each forgets about himself, which is to say, really, about the personal impression that he is making on the other; for the tiniest touch of self-complacency would lower the tone of the discussion. The very soul of such discussions is the joy of communicating, not necessarily the joy of finding that one's views agree with another’s; and this distinction between communication and agreement has great importance. It is just as if two climbers were tackling the same hill, up different approaches ; allowing that the climbers can communicate directly with each other, at any moment, through portable radio or television sets.

But there is something paradoxical in this situation, even when our imagination has grasped it properly. Truth is at once what the two conversationalists, or the two climbers, are aware of striving towards and it is also what pushes them up their hill ; which is to say that it is at once in front of them and behind them, the love of truth may be a sort of mysterious joy in moving against this intelligible background, within this intelligible setting? Though the joy certainly is a precarious and threatened one.

 

[terry]

from the liner notes back  of another side of bob dylan

 

 

 

"i could make you crawl
if i was payin' attention"
he said munchin' a sandwich
in between chess moves
"what d' you wanna make
me crawl for?"
"i mean i just could"
"could make me crawl"
"yeah, make you crawl!"
"humm, funny guy you are"
"no, i just play t' win,
that's all"
"well if you can't win me,
then you're the worst player
i ever played"
"what d' you mean?"
"i mean i lose all the time"
his jaw tightened an' he took
a deep breath
"hummm, now i gotta beat you"

[terry]

from the dionysian vision of the world, friedrich nietzsche

 

Dionysian art is centered on the play with intoxication, with the state of ecstasy. There are two powers above all else that elevate the naive men of nature to the self-forgetting of intoxication: the drive of springtime and narcotic drink. Their workings are symbolized in the figure of Dionysus. In both states, the principium individuationis is sundered and the subjective disappears entirely before the erupting force of the generally human, indeed, the common-to-all, the natural. The festivals of Dionysus not only forge a union between man and man, but reconcile man and nature. The earth offers up its gifts freely, the wildest beasts approach peaceably; the flower-garlanded wagon of Dionysus is drawn by panthers and tigers. All the enclosing boundaries laid fast between persons by necessity and contingency disappear: the slave is a free man, the noble and the lowly-born unite in the same Bacchic choruses. In ever-greater throngs, the gospel of "the harmony of worlds" rolls from place to place. Singing and dancing, the human manifests himself as member of a high, more ideal commonality; he has unlearnt walking and speech. But more: he feels himself enchanted and he has actually become something other. As the animals speak and the earth gives forth milk and honey, so there sounds out from him something supernatural. He feels himself a god; what else lives only in his power of imagination, he senses now within himself. What are images and statues to him now? The human is no longer artist, but has become artwork; he is as ecstatically and exaltedly transformed as before he saw the gods transformed in dreams. The artistic force of nature, no longer that of a human, now reveals itself-a nobler clay, a more precious marble here is kneaded and hewn: the human. This human, formed by the artist Dionysus, stands in relation to nature as the statue does to the Apollonian artist.

 

Now, if intoxication is nature's play with the human, then the Dionysian artist's creating is play with intoxication. If one has not experienced it oneself, this state can only be grasped by analogy: it is similar to dreaming and at once feeling the dream to be a dream. Just so, the servant of Dionysus must himself be intoxicated and at the same time lying in wait behind himself, observing. It is not in alternation between clarity and intoxication, but in their entanglement, that Dionysian artistry shows itself.

[terry]

the other world, the imaginal world…

 

might as well post this here, I guess…

 

   The spiritual world is difficult to think about concretely, as the concrete world is opposed to it. We have to make distinctions even to think about it. What was seamless to our ancient ancestors is dualistic to us now, we need to conjure up another world to encompass it.

 

   Those familiar with the yi jing may be able to “grasp” this other world as the upper trigram, with the lower trigram symbolizing the material world as we know it, the world of seeming and politics. The upper world is one of merit, virtue, spiritual wayfaring and advancement. While the mystic who dwells there is not particularly interested in advancement, it is the nature of the place to change, for better or for worse.

 

   In the yi we have pairs of opposites  at every juncture: yin yang at the basic level and then increase and decrease, danger and clarity and all the oppositions of the hexagrams. Upper and lower are distinguished in terms of virtue, whether base or elevated. Goodness, kindness, generosity, sincerity, honesty, and so forth are esteemed and honored in the upper trigram, and given power. In the lower trigram we see the world of money, physical force, lies, opinion, persuasion, advertising buying and selling; the world of individual advantage, competition and the struggle for existence. The world of life and death, generation-corruption. The world everyone knows and believes in.

 

   The other world, upper world of the upper trigram, the imaginal world of the mystics and the mental “clearing” of the philosophers, was simply taken as reality by our ancestors, which is why we have their legacy in scripture, song and story; and which is fundamentally built into all our languages. Linguistic science has tried hard to build up language from basic nouns and verbs referring to sensory inputs and find that language is at root metaphoric and mystical, resonant with archetypes and primordial preconsciousness.

 

   We are in the position of needing to rediscover things that were quite evident to the greeks, ancient confucians taoists and zen maters, the hebrew prophets, egyptian hermetics etc etc. Unfortunately for us the enlightenment tradition has taken us far from the symbols used in ancient times, embedded in consciousness and language though they still are. There have been visionaries even into the modern era who composed travelogues of this other world, blake, dante, swedenborg. They all used their own metaphoric language but swedenborg’s effort to transpose this transcendent world into mundane imagery is worthy of notice.

 

   Swedenborg used christian imagery but altered it to suit him, abandoning the trinity altogether and composing a new narrative much more congenial to neoplatonism. And as henri corbin has noted, swedenborg’s visions are similar the sufism of suhrawardi and ibn arabi, and to the vast literature of spiritual romances in persian.

 

   These maps and visions are not significant of themselves, they are important because they may show us the way to begin to make sense of our own inner terrain, and enable us to navigate by means of inspiration and intuition the ways of god as she appears as her divine names, as patience and mercy and beauty and might.

 

   In the upper world as visualized by swedenborg the lord is the spiritual sun, the source of truth/light and goodness/warmth. Heaven and hell are composed of angels, the spirits of the dead. They are ranked and located in spiritual spacetime by their virtues, the demons who enjoy like amusements in their hells and angels of similar minds in their various heavens, where they live much as we do in towns and with jobs and recreations and so forth only perfected. Swedenborg works this out in great detail but what I am concerned with is to transpose his ideas into a contemporary sensibility of this space essentially lost to us as a culture, or at least point the way.

 

   So. my friends, try look at he world with the added sense that each individual human has a place and destiny in a great field of virtue, and that like minded people are graded and associated with their kind. That the good live in a community of similar good people and that the demonically inlined seek their own level as well.

 

   Swedenborg additionally saw this gradation and collection as a whole in the form of a great man, a human figure which in the aggregate was the lord, from the toenails to the eyebrows.

 

   The mundane world is where we may make progress toward where we will find ourselves in the afterlife. We choose here to hang out with lowlifes or to seek the company of the wise and virtuous. 

 

   If you have ever felt yourself more connected to ancient virtue than to your contemporaries, you may be able to relate to what I am saying. The point, however, is to assert that people of virtue are more connected to their angelic counterparts than they are to their mundane  families and friends.

 

   Henry corbin’s central insight was what he called “the angel out ahead.” Every being - even god - has an angel leading them on. Their own personal angel, one’s character as fate (“character is destiny” said mystic heraclitus). Students of the yi jing know that everything is in constant motion, constant flux; anicca, or impermanence. The individual is not a static snapshot of an existing thing but a dynamic work in progress at all times. We are as we are drawn.

   

   

   

[terry]

rumi tells the story…

…Of muhammed as a child of nine or ten. He was sent to the countryside for seasoning, as boys were in those days, to learn the ways of desert pastoralists.

 

   One afternoon young muhammed was tending his flock of sheep when a yearling took off into the brush and ran away. He chased after it through thickets and brush for over an hour until the animal fell, bleeding and exhausted as he was himself. He now had to pick it up and carry it back to the flock through the brush in the dark. He looked at the creature with tears in his eyes and said to it, “I understand why you did this to me, my dear one, but why oh why did you do this to yourself?”

 

   God, observing this, said, “One day this boy may become a prophet.”