Perennial Philosophy

[Kafei]

Holy walls of text Batman!

OK, I'm a masochist and have read them all. What I see is a lot of "I believe", "I think", "maybe", "it may seem", etc. Facts and evidence? None.

The evidence is at the very beginning of the second post. I did try and make this succinct, but unfortunately, this is as succinct as I could make it. I apologize for its lengthiness, but I assure you, each paragraph makes a valid point.

[the_antithesis]

Before I get started, I'd like to say that this post actually got me banned from the ThinkAtheist forum ....

And you thought you would not receive the same treatment here, why?

[Kafei]

(edit) btw, if I have misinterpreted the intent of the post by assuming GSOgymrat's mention was something of a summary, forgive me. I'll read the wall of text later and correct if necessary.

Yes, I'd appreciate your feedback if you have the time to read it later, because I feel the examples you gave for this "oneness" is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a different phenomenon altogether.

And you thought you would not receive the same treatment here, why?

Because I start out here saying that the "God of LSD" is not what this is about. I also link to the "Entheogen Theory of Religion" thread at the ThinkAtheist forum where I sort of get into this stuff with a fellow TA member there. If you see the back-and-forth dialogue we have, you'll notice I answer all the questions he has, and yet at the very end he misconstrues this concept as some form of proselytizing. I created this thread after the fact, and it was that particular member that reported me. This post actually goes over the concept in detail, and if assimilated or understood, you'll find quite clearly that this is not what that TA member claimed it was about.

[Kafei]

Why does no one use thesis statements anymore? I'm not reading a goddamn wall of text whose subject I don't know.

Well, that's the reason for the walls of text. It's to introduce someone who is new to a concept like this, and make sure most important aspects are covered as in neurological explanations, other theories and speculations, etc.

[Hijiri Byakuren]

Well, that's the reason for the walls of text. It's to introduce someone who is new to a concept like this, and make sure most important aspects are covered as in neurological explanations, other theories and speculations, etc.

Then use a fucking thesis statement so I know what I'm walking into. My goodness, did they not teach you this in highschool?

[wolf39us]

yep, I read the first sentence and immediately went ADD

No thanks to the wall of text

[Kafei]

Have you ever heard a mushroom called amanita muscaria' ? It's natural lsd. It's also known as toadstool. It's estimated that people have started to use it in rituals tens of thousands of years ago to feel that 'oneness' and enlightenement of supreme spirituality, however it is also known about its violent affects and if you considered some of the rituals, it is some sort of gore horror movie before beautiful oneness.

Of course, I'm familiar with Amanita muscaria. It's not natural LSD, unless you were using that as some kind of metaphor, but actually contains muscimol which is not even in the same tryptamine family as LSD. Psilocybin mushrooms aren't as toxic as Amanita muscaria and the use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms predates that of Amanita. Psilocybe species are far less toxic than that of Amanitas, and are actually the preferred mushroom for shamanic use.

In short it is very ancient. It has been prohibited by Romans in west and replaced with wine in festivals, because of it is uncontrollable violent effects.

Are you familiar with the Elusinian mysteries?

However the question of how the idea(s) of a supreme creator or religion was born or evolved do what they are now do not need an answer based on psychedelic experiences. Yes we know almost for sure that 'divination' and 'prophesying' or anything of the sort used some kind of drugs, similar substances, but also fastening and extreme isolation did the same job. People often used these for prophesying and religious experience too. It's text book initiation ceremony in most ancient cults and mystic schools. If you starve people in dark for some time, feed them specific stuff only, I promise you some of them will start to hallucinate at some point.

I'm not sure if you read the entire post as I had to separate it into two parts because of the character limit, but I actually address this issue at the beginning of the second post. You see, even in the case of the naturally induced "mystical experience" by way of fasting or other ascetic means, there is strong speculation that this may be a natural induction of N,N-DMT which your own body makes. So, it comes back to "psychedelics" even in the case of the natural method.

If you desire to get the bottom of the how the idea of a creator was born, you are in the wrong place of the map. The map far bigger than your perception suggests. Your op also treats the problem in a homogenous way, as something developed everywhere the same, determined by similar factors in a linear historical line. Incorrect. Wrong. History doesn't work that way, human cultures did not-do not develop that way.

I find the "creator God" to be trivial in comparison to this phenomenon I'm speaking about. Are you familiar with the notion of "Brahman" in eastern religion? It's how the Hindus viewed "God," but you see, their notion of God is not even an entity for starters. This boggles the mind of a lot of atheists who've grown up always imagining God as some form of all-powerful, all-knowing entity. The sort of God that George Carlin made fun of, the so-called "sky daddy." I believe this phenomenon in consciousness reveals something more profound than a "creator God." The states of samadhi that Hindus engaged in allowed them to translate their experience into this notion of Brahman, you could call it an afflatus, perhaps. Likewise, in shamanism, in engaging in altered states through the use of ayahuasca or psilocybin-containing mushrooms, similarly profound ideas were drawn out of the experience.

Now, as for the "creator God," I believe that this sort of notion of God came later. For instance, in ancient shamanic civilizations, when things like the mushrooms became scarce and were no longer part of the main rituals, then the Gods became the "God of wheat," the "God of corn," etc. The loss of the connection to this experience gave way for less creative notions of deities which usually were in the form of some kind of entity. Now, as I said, the original divine concepts contained no entity at all. I'll give you example below. Alan Watts describes the idea of "Brahman" or how it's also stated in Buddhism, "The Self."  Listen out for 'The final Self.'

Alan Watts - What Buddhism's About

Humans didn't first imagined or hallucinated the god and then got in to work to build a system on it. One God  is very young compared to understanding of a divine creator in human history.

To the contrary. You're obviously not familiar with Perennial Philosophy or I take it any of these type of altered states either whether induced naturally through a discipline like meditation or through psychedelics. I think you'll find these states of mind are far more profound than the notion of a "creator God." If you're religious, sure, you might think that you've witnessed God at the peak of this experience; if you're a UFO nut, you might be inclined to believe that you've fused consciousness with an extraterrestrial that is eons and eons ahead of us in evolution; if you're an atheist, you might use a more mathematical diction and believe at the height of the experienced you glimpsed a "higher dimension." In either case, something profound, transcendental, and interconnected is intuit by the individual.

The terms you used in your post lack historical perception. I will take 'mysticism'. It was not what we understand now. (Mysticism  has become what it is defined by scholars in contrast of abrahamic religion and then ages of enlightenment and reason.) For ancient cults, some series of explanations of patterns in nature itself are mysticism. So there are schools for it. Mathematics is mysticism. 22/7 mystic. 0 is mystic. 5, 7, 9. Apple in half, barnacles, birds and their behaviours, before all that trees. Shapes of leaves...etc. Anything in nature, around them. because there isn't anything else.

Mysticism is a theosophical approach of understanding the nature of the universe and of consciousness. The way it associates itself with mathematics is because the hallucinogenic imagery seen in these experiences are usually that of a mandalic-type. Mandala is an old word for a enclosed, circular geometric pattern, but today a more modern term for mandala is fractal. These fractals contain very precise mathematics as you've described, and perhaps you're familiar with "Phi," etc.

Idea of one creator is however needs a long way to come, because it needs larger scale of tyranny. And a very complicated set of conditions to afford that.

The idea of a "creator God" is already a false notion to begin with. I believe a "creator deity" was born out of the fanciful imagination, not the mystical experience.

What is the question to ask to start this kind of inquiry? You need one, because it doesn't work like 'drugs existed and they used it to develop some idea about god because it made them feel one; it fits'. You can ask what was the role of drugs in ancient cults or in evolution of monotheistic god, but you cannot give an answer starting from because they imagined it under influence (meaning first they invented the concept.) Obviously you can, but it would be telling another fairy tale. Bullshit.

Like the person I met in ThinkAtheist, you've obviously misconstrued what I'm trying to get at here. This is not an explanation for a "God" of any sort. What I'm saying basically is that in ancient times when people would have these type of experiences it was of such profundity that "God" was simply a metaphor to attempt to describe an ultimate state of consciousness. I'm not sure if you'll take the time to view the video I linked you to, but this concept of "the final self of all selves" is closer to what you might experience during a mystical experience. This is why I've used the word "panesthesia" in the post, but it seems your response was only toward the first section of the post, not the second. You may have mistakenly skimmed through the first post thinking that's all I typed, but you may have overlooked the second portion which is right below the first post.

This is the problem with home made ideas. Social science, anthropology, history require you to ask relevant series of questions in the beginning to arrive a specific factor that you suspect it played a significant role in the process. The 'largest' question we can achieve is asked by anthropology and it is 'what can I know about humans cultures?'

For me, the answer to that question is that obviously, these very early human cultures had an entire complex of hallucinogens that they were using in a very ritualistic fashion. Take the Aztecs, for instance. They had an entire cornucopia of hallucinogens that they used. If Terence McKenna's right, it may go back even further than that. Have you heard of the "Stoned Ape hypothesis"? McKenna proposed the idea that even when we were roaming the African veldt as hominids, we came across the psilocybin mushroom growing out  of the dung of the ungulate animals. Including this item in our diet over the span of perhaps 100,000 years is actually what propelled us to evolve into self-reflecting human beings in the first place. In fact, I even link at the top of the original post to a thread at ThinkAtheist where the members there discuss this concept at length. The thread itself is about 40 pages long and an interesting read and contains a lot of links to McKenna's lectures, etc.

If it's an ancient historical one you desire to question, you are in a more difficult, dark area of the map. Again, you cannot start with literature or personal experiences, because you think it fits. Social scientists been there, done that long time ago, almost every time they fell on their nose. It's bullshit. In short, you need to change perception.

I could say the same to yourself. Would you be willing to take up one of Terence McKenna's sugggestion of the "heroic dose" or perhaps try ayahuasca? You'd not only change your perception, but undergo a metanoia ever afterward. Terence used to say, "If you think I'm bullshitting you, why don't you go try five dried grams of mushrooms, and then come back and tell me I'm full of shit. I doubt you'd be able to."

[Kafei]

Then use a fucking thesis statement so I know what I'm walking into. My goodness, did they not teach you this in highschool?

But it's not a thesis. I personally don't view it as much text. I read blogs and posts on average far larger than this, but I'm a heavy reader, so maybe to me it's not so daunting. Would writing "thesis" actually get you to read it? I mean, if that amount of text turns you off, then ignore the post. Why bother even leaving a comment?

I apologize for the lack of brevity, but I tried to make it more concise. I really did. Unfortunately, this is about as succinct as I could put it.

[Kafei]

Thank you! I noticed some contradiction in the first post. Saying transient experiences aren't subjective is one of them. Also, Buddha himself never believed in the majority of what the various school's taught, or that he had divine guidance, or was a god. People that have prefrontal lope epilepsy have the types of experience that past religious leaders have had. We all have a psychedelic chemical in our bodies that can cause all of this. Nothing new here---accept that some people believe in magic, and think these experiences are objective, so do those that are insane. Solitary

What I mean by "aren't subjective," is they're not subjective in the traditional sense of the word. In other words, these experiences contain archetypes and motifs that cannot be reduced to the individual's personal unconscious. Instead, these experiences are often described as "universal" or a kind of tapping into "collective unconscious" to use a Jungian term. I realize we all possess the most powerful psychedelic that is manufactured naturally within our own bodies. Temporal lobe epilepsy can also cause experiences quite like this one. I do take into account that there is many paths to having these types of experiences. There's meditation, a stroke or temporal lope epilepsy can cause this as in Jill Bolte Taylor's "Stroke of Insight," you can attain it through ascetic means such as taking body through extreme measures, a near-death experience can cause this experience to happen, powerful magnets can cause this to occur as in the example of the "God helmet," and then there's the shamanic use of psychedelics which seem to be the most reliable path to it with not much risk if you can manage to take the necessary precautionary efforts.

[stromboli]

I have a degree in English Literature. I have written books' worth of research over the years, and probably half a books' worth on here. You really need to learn how to convey your thoughts more succinctly. A thesis statement at the beginning, making summary points and condensing your thoughts would serve you much better. That is all I'm saying. Drunkenshoe more aptly said what I would say already. Done here.

[Kafei]

I have a degree in English Literature. I have written books' worth of research over the years, and probably half a books' worth on here. You really need to learn how to convey your thoughts more succinctly. A thesis statement at the beginning, making summary points and condensing your thoughts would serve you much better. That is all I'm saying. Drunkenshoe more aptly said what I would say already. Done here.

If you actually take the time to read it, I don't think you'll find where I could cut corners. Trust me, I've done this. I tried to make it as succinct as possible. I've responded to Drunkenshoe, by the way. I really don't think you're done here, unless you're simply not interested, because I don't think you've really gone into this deeply enough. I think I could point out certain things to you that would be interesting, but I don't think you'd be interested, anyway since you didn't even take the time to read it. You tried understanding the post by someone else's misinterpreted summary, and then you end with the idea that you and Drunkenshoe share the same perspective, and so his answer is your answer. I happen to disagree with Drunkenshoe, and I've answered very specifically her concerns.

[wolf39us]

I've answered very specifically his concerns.

her

[AllPurposeAtheist]

So some people get ripped and see 'god', woo or whatever you want to call it then come up with some cockamamie ideas and whalla!  Hey! If we had the power over life and death and the mechanisms to make others enforce our cockamamie notions we too could be the enlightened ones.

[Solitary]

What I mean by "aren't subjective," is they're not subjective in the traditional sense of the word. In other words, these experiences contain archetypes and motifs that cannot be reduced to the individual's personal unconscious. Instead, these experiences are often described as "universal" or a kind of tapping into "collective unconscious" to use a Jungian term. I realize we all possess the most powerful psychedelic that is manufactured naturally within our own bodies. Temporal lobe epilepsy can also cause experiences quite like this one. I do take into account that there is many paths to having these types of experiences. There's meditation, a stroke or temporal lope epilepsy can cause this as in Jill Bolte Taylor's "Stroke of Insight," you can attain it through ascetic means such as taking body through extreme measures, a near-death experience can cause this experience to happen, powerful magnets can cause this to occur as in the example of the "God helmet," and then there's the shamanic use of psychedelics which seem to be the most reliable path to it with not much risk if you can manage to take the necessary precautionary efforts.

Even if they are suppose to be archetypes they are still subjective experiences and not objective experiences. also, phycology and psychiatry are not science accept for neurology, and even that is open to speculation. Everything you talk about can be done by stimulating the brain, which is an objective object, but the experience is still a subjective one. You are using word gymnastics and the fallacy of Non sequitur which not logical. There are no connections between those experiences and the past or objective reality accept the human brain. Are you a Deepak Chopra fan? Solitary

[Solitary]

What's up with all these New Agers trying to prove God exists because of subjective experience that don't prove anything about reality. This is still religious BS in a new wrapper. This is why I don't like philosophy like I did when younger. It is why Einstein was correct after showing that his theories were tested in objective reality. The mathematics of quantum mechanics works even if it isn't understood, but to translate this not understanding, which is ignorance, therefore God did it, is disingenuous at best.  Solitary

http://www.philosophy-religion.org/perennial/index.htm


The philosophia perennis or Perennial Philosophy affirms that a direct insight into the nature of Reality is a universally human possibility -- whether it be gained after practice of spiritual disciplines and study of scriptures or through a wholly unanticipated illuminating experience of union with God or the Ultimate. A result of such awareness is the confidence that we have devolved from a single Source and the process of spiritual development is completed and perfected in our return to that One.

To call this perennial is to say that such an insight reappears in diverse times and places, not limited to any particular culture, class, or community. In more formal words, this philosophy has been described as


"the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality behind the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in [one] something identical with divine Reality and the ethic that places [one's] final end in the knowledge of the Immanent and Transcendent Ground of all things."

In other words, the term philosophia perennis is intended to describe a philosophy that has been formulated by those who have experienced direct communion with God or the Ultimate. However brief the experience, it transforms the thinking mind of the experiencer, so that they are never the same again. Such revelatory experience, captured however dimly in symbols supplied by human language or by whatever artistic expression, however often repeated through the ages by people of all races, genders, cultures and religious beliefs, open onto the Perennial Philosophy.

More than half a century ago, Aldous Huxley gave this title to an anthology that he edited. In the type of experience central to it, whether called archaic or primordial or mystical, the veil of materiality is rent and mistaken certainties are dispelled.

For the reader, Huxley's anthology may validate and verify that moment in which self-knowledge moves one beyond the felt limitations of "a foul stinking lump of himself," as the classical British text of spiritual instruction, The Cloud of Unknowing, described it. Are such texts of spiritual instruction and the experiences of traditional mystics still of value today? Perennial Philosophy responds with an emphatic Yes!

One way of expressing the central insight of the Perennial Philosophy is with the phrase That Thou Art, taken from the Sanskrit of the ancient Upanishads. The phrase teaches that the immanent eternal self is realized to be one with the Absolute Principle of all existence, and that the true destiny of human beings is to discover this fact for themselves, to find out Who and What they really are. Among the other vivid expressions of this insight are these:

BYAZID OF BISTUM: "I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, "O Thou I!"

ST. CATHERINE OF GENOA: "My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other except my God Himself."

YUNG-CHIA-TA-SHIH: "The inner Light is beyond praise and blame; like space, it knows no boundaries, yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and fullness. It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it. You cannot take hold of it, but equally, you cannot get rid of it."

MEISTER ECKHART: "The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them; the more He is within, the more without. Only the transcendent, the complete other, can be immanent without being changed by the becoming of that in which it dwells."

And what is the That which the Thou can discover itself to be?

RUYSBROECK: "In the Reality unitively known by the mystic ...we can speak no more of any creature but only of one Being... There were we all one before our creation, for this is our super-essence."

ST. BERNARD: "Who is God? I can think of no better answer than He who is. Nothing is more appropriate to the eternity which God is. If you call God good, or great, or blessed or wise, or anything else of this sort, it is included in these words, namely, He is."

How can one attain inner certainty of That?

Perennial Philosophy offers a seemingly paradoxical answer. The obstacle to unitive knowledge of That is obsessive consciousness of being a separate self. Attachment to I, me, or mine excludes unitive knowledge of God.

WILLIAM LAW: "Men are not in hell because God is angry with them . . . they stand in the state of division and separation which by their own motion, they have made for themselves.

ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS: "The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of divine union . . . held by the bonds of human affections, however slight they may be, we cannot, while they last, make our way to God."

ALDOUS HUXLEY: "We pass from time to eternity when identified with the spirit and pass again from eternity to time when we choose to identify with the body."

What help is available?

PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA: "They are on the way to truth who apprehend God by means of the divine, Light by the Light."

When is it available? Consider the following affirmations:

JOEL GOLDSMITH: "I am in union with the divine Intelligence of the past, the present and the future. No spiritual secret is hidden from me . . . There is this transcendental Being within me which I am and to which I have access forever. . . . That infinite divine Consciousness of God, the Consciousness of the past, and the present and the future, is my consciousness at this moment."

ALDOUS HUXLEY: "We are on a return sweep towards a point corresponding to our starting place in animality, but incommensurably above it. Once more life is lived in the moment. The life now of a being in whom love has cast out fear, vision has taken the place of earthly hope, selflessness has put a stop to the positive egotism of complacent reminiscence and the negative egotism of remorse.

"The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time."