Love was — as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages — a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again? Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience — self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light — constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work. ---Ok, this just seems lazy. There are commentatorial traditions everywhere founded on the idea of syncretism (probably an early shamanic technique) and harmonizing the traditions through interpretation of metaphorical/allegorical symbolism, and more importantly, you need someone who understands their beliefs at a high enough level of complexity to recognize this. This article anyway makes Harris come off as espousing pure anatman as the only reality undergirding religion and religious experiences (though he did get the universal love experience, from his own testimony), when (especially in advanced Buddhist philosophy and advanced Hindu philosophy (Aurobindo)) its actually much more complex than this, and to approach everything in a kind of binary self/no self kind of way i think is lacking... Harris: The feeling that we call “I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is — the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself — can be altered or entirely extinguished. brainpickings.org/2014/09/15/sam-harris-waking-up-spirituality/ Aurobindo: It is not surprising that the overwhelming power of this experience from the impersonal pole of the Duality should have moved the sages to declare this to be the one way and an impersonal Superconscience to be the sole truth of the Eternal. But still to the seeker standing at the opposite pole of the Duality another line of experience appears which justifies an intuition deeply-seated behind the heart and in our very lifeforce, that personality, like consciousness, life, soul, is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:38:37 +0000
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