Religion Eastern Religion Thread

Curved_Sw0rd

Just Like That Bluebird
Honestly this stuff interests me greatly despite my Catholic predispositions. And Alan Watts has been a rather big help in helping me understand it clearly.

Just so it's clear this is a thread to discuss Eastern Religion and similar practices like Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen, and the philosophies behind them. And to kick things off... Here's a video of Watts going over the philosophy of Zen. I say philosophy because that's a more accurate term than religion for this particular subject here.



In here Watts discusses the origins of Zen (and Buddhism by proxy), originating in China and migrating to Japan over the course of many years. It's more of a way of life than an outright religion.

Zen is a form of Buddhism, which is not quite a religion in the way say, Protestantism is. Watts compares it here to Psychotherapy. It's (Buddhism, not just Zen) about changing your state of Consciousness. Buddha translates to "Awakened One" which is to imply everyone else is asleep in a metaphorical sense.

I'm struggling a bit to summarize here, as Watts, in his effort to explain things with metaphor and comparisons, makes it difficult to generalize without directly quoting him verbatim. Anyway, Watts goes on to describe how we tend to view our "Self", our Consciousness, how we tend to think it sits behind our face or in our chest. We think of other people as being in the same boat, just not us. And we think of nature as outside, unthinking and without Consciousness.

Buddhism is meant to turn that "Singular Point" means of thinking about yourself on its head, where you are no longer one thing but everything. The wave is not separate from the ocean. Your sense of identity is not lost in this way, but it offers a sort of separation, a sense of harmony.

The video ends there. There's clearly more to it, but that's a good starting point for getting a feel for Buddhism, I think.
 
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The Crisis of the Modern World. I strongly encourage reading René Guénon's magnum opus. He succinctly describes the why, and how, of loss of the spiritual traditions and mindset which the Eastern faiths still find as normative. A similar treatment is given, at a greater remove, by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. In both cases the universality of the message is plain, but in the west we have led the way in separating the religious and material realms and so have descended further from religious knowledge than in the east, where the interconnection of the spiritual and material worlds remains normative.
 

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