Don's Inquiry

[Robert A. Holland]

I am still interested; are there other folks out there?

 

Bob Holland

[Seth-Reino Ekström]

Yes, I am  also here!

Skickat från min iPhone

3 apr. 2017 kl. 15:35 skrev Robert A. Holland <phi...@att.net>:

I am still interested; are there other folks out there?

 

Bob Holland

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[Joseph Rowe]

Greetings, Bob Don, and others... it's been a long time since I visited here, but I'm still very interested, and glad to see this new, easier-to-use format.
I'd like to share an experience in communication of  a very difficult philosophical notion, traditionally almost impossible to define, but made unexpectedly clear and elegant by the insight, and innovative language of Franklin Merrell-Wolff.
Recently, while visiting the SF Bay area, I was kindly invited by Sagrada, an Oakland bookstore, to give a talk about  gnosticism, in relation to the Gospel of Thomas. I knew that one of my main problems would be how to clear up the considerable confusion about the meaning of that word — which, like the word gnostic, is derived from the Greek word gnosis. But what is gnosis? And who are the  gnostics? How are they different from mystics? I knew in advance that I had to first clear the ground, by distinguishing between the more ancient, universal, and authentic meaning of gnostic, from the (usually capitalized) Gnostics, who constituted a very diverse religious-philosophical movement,  during the centuries before and after the life of Jesus, and centered mostly in Alexandria, and the eastern Mediterranean. These so-called Gnostics were primarily characterized by a type of belief-system, and often a very provocative mythology, which (however picturesque and fascinating to many, including Jung) has little or nothing to do with gnosis in its original sense. Henry Corbin, the great French philosopher of comparative religion, maintained that a  gnostic could be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or totally secular  — and he went on to say that when two true gnostics meet, they  recognize each other immediately, cutting right through the Gordian knot of differences of religion, culture, and even of language. The term mystic is much broader, and vaguer — all gnostics are mystics, but  that doesn't say much, because most mystics are not gnostics. But even Corbin had a hard time saying what gnosis is, other than pointing out that it comes from the same Indo-European root as the Sanskrit jñana.  As most people on this forum probably know, jñana was the spiritual path of Shankara, and Dr. Wolff considered it to be his own, as well.
Mulling all this over before the workshop, I opened my copy of The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, for the first time in years. Turning "at random" to the discussion of aphorism 54, I stumbled upon the clearest, simplest, and most elegant definition of gnosis I've ever seen: Knowledge through Identity ... (also known as Introception).
What a discovery. Far more than just a skillful means of communication, or yet another vain attempt to speak the unspeakable, it dissolves masses of philosophical confusion with one stroke, and invalidates irrelevant, fatuous questions (of the sort, "But how do you know? What is your evidence?" etc). Of course the phrase Knowledge through Identity cannot be truly understood by someone who has never experienced gnosis, or at least had a taste of it. But it can at least trigger, or awaken a subconscious recollection of it... and perhaps serve as a kind of beacon-reminder, quieting the discursive, chattering mind, bringing it back to the silent ground of consciousness-without-an-object, where gnosis already IS.

On Monday, April 3, 2017 at 8:35:04 AM UTC-5, Robert Holland wrote:

[Bob Majhi]

Yes I'm interested

On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 8:35 AM, Robert A. Holland <phi...@att.net> wrote:

I am still interested; are there other folks out there?

 

Bob Holland

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[Don Salmon]

Joseph, can you perhaps say something on the typical mainstream Christian attack on the gnostics - that somehow they are "dualistic" setting up matter and spirit as irrevocably opposed?

I've never understood that criticism, as it seems to me that gnostic writings like the gospel of thomas are radically embodied, understanding "knowledge through identity" as reflecting the "always already" Oneness of body, mind and Spirit. 

http://www.remember-to-breathe.org/Breathing-Videos.html 

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[cocrea...@shaw.ca]

 

Dear Joseph et al;

 

Thank you for the stimulating entry.

From: Joseph Ro

Sent: Monday, April 3, 2017 9:44 AM

To: Franklin Merrell-Wolff Fellowship Discussion Group

Cc: Joseph Rowe

Subject: [fm-w], {Franklin Merrell-Wolff Fel Re: Don's Inquiry

 

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[Chuck Post]

Wow.  Joseph, what synchronicity.  

This evening I have to give a talk to the local Mensa Club.  I chose Nag Hammadi and the gnostic gospels.  In preparation, I bought three of Leloup's books, which you translated into English.  [thanks for that!]   Kind of a small world.

Elaine Pagels' book is another source, as I try to cram for tonight.

That you found a most suitable definition in Franklin's terse "Knowledge Through Identity" brings everything home.

I don't know who it was that said this, but I'm glad they did:  "There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it."

Thanks for getting back in touch, Joseph.

Chuck Post

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[Joseph Rowe]

On Monday, April 3, 2017 at 2:51:57 PM UTC-5, Don Salmon wrote:

Joseph, can you perhaps say something on the typical mainstream Christian attack on the gnostics - that somehow they are "dualistic" setting up matter and spirit as irrevocably opposed?

I've never understood that criticism, as it seems to me that gnostic writings like the gospel of thomas are radically embodied, understanding "knowledge through identity" as reflecting the "always already" Oneness of body, mind and Spirit. 

I'll be happy to, Don — (latte-night mood, as it were, quite loquacious ;--{()} ....the "Christian" attack you're talking about is yet another example of the sort of confusion I was referring to in the previous post. It results from long-established, but careless, and misleading usages of the term "Gnosticism", often by scholars who, it seems to me, should know better. In fact, the dogmatic Christians  you refer to were, most likely, attacking a number of ancient, decidedly dualistic doctrines, that have been traditionally — and  mistakenly —  characterized as Gnostic — mistakenly, because gnosis, as you have correctly  understood, has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of indictment of matter,  nothing to do with any disdain of incarnation, nor with any sort of mind-body split, etc. On the contrary, gnosis is always an overcoming of that sort of thing. Gnosis is a transcendence, which some  philosophers have called  trans-dualism (a term which seems preferable  to non-dualism) All the dualistic. "Gnostic" doctrines you alluded to, whether attacked by Christians or not,  are  irrelevant, and alien to the spirit of gnosis ... yet the misnomer persists, on and on, not unlike the idiotic misnomer of "Indian", applied to native Americans...
However, virtually all the Christian authorities who have been righteously condemning "dualism" down through the centuries —  from the diatribes of Irenaeus against the so-called Gnostics, to medieval Catholic condemnations of the "dualism" of Mani, and of the Cathars — remind me of the old saw about "the pot calling the kettle black" ...

The Gospel of Thomas (see this link of mine) is a superb example of a profound, authentic, non-dualistic, gnostic text — and yet, neither Yeshua himself, nor his disciples (including Thomas himself) who recorded that gospel, and practiced its teaching,  used the  Greek word gnosis, at least in that text ... however, it is virtually certain that  Rabbi Yeshua (who was not some sort of populist, "Mediterranean peasant" who spoke only Aramaic!)  spoke Greek very well. He is recorded as using a  Greek philosophical term (the word nous) in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
On the other hand, The Gospel of Judas — to offer a notorious, fascinating example that comes to mind — is routinely characterized as a "Gnostic" text ... and yet, it is one which is obviously very dualistic, if  not entirely so ... far more dualistic, and far less gnostic, than the Gospel of Thomas.  In any case, this fascinating, heretical text, attributed to Judas Iscariot, has  little, if any relation to the ancient notion (the only legitimate one, in my sense)  of gnosis, or jñana, as defined by Henry Corbin. 
However, to get back to the subject of those Church Fathers we've been talking about  — they had just as big a problem with authentic gnosis, as they did with the dualistic, pseudo-Gnosis you referred to!

I'm always amazed at how few people (Christians or not) are aware that our understanding of early Christian history, and of the true teachings of Jesus, have undergone an amazing and unprecedented revolution, since the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, just after WWII  —  it's taken many decades for our culture(s) to fully digest the implications of those texts —  I never cease to be amazed at how little-known these revolutionary, new interpretations still are, to this day. Few people realize that almost all the prevalent, popular, "historical" ideas (Christian or not) of 1) who Jesus was; 2) of what his original, and deepest teachings were; and 3) of who his closest disciples, and early followers were ... are still derived, even today,  directly or indirectly,  from the extremely-successful pseudo-history of Christianity, promulgated by the Roman Church, and its four-and-only-four, canonical Gospels. 4) Even fewer people realize that one of the least-known, overriding, ideological aims of the early Roman Church, was to establish a fiction of the existence of an early, "mainstream" Christianity — oddly unchallenged by secular historians, and even by all the Eastern orthodoxies — a fiction whose hidden purpose was to discredit; to disempower; and finally,  to completely extinguish all traces of the number-one threat to the notion of a "mainstream" and its ambitious, Roman-friendly (and Jewish-unfriendly) worldview. This threat was of course the influence of the school of Thomas — an apostle whom the early followers of Jesus remembered as Yeshua's "twin", and closest disciple, along with Miriam of Magdala  (until the publication, in the next generation, of the tremendously-successful counter-propaganda of the "one whom Jesus loved", in the Gospel of John, around 90 C.E.)
  However, the threat of the Thomas school, represented  by the ancient, gnostic wisdom of original teachings of Yeshua, turned out to be no match at all for the skillful, aggressive polemics and strategies of the John school. By the time of Constantine, all copies of the Gospel of Thomas had been suppressed. The writers of  the book of John brought to fruition one of the most spectacular propaganda successes of all time.For over sixteen centuries, no one could even read the Gospel of Thomas, and the legend of the "doubting Thomas" became so much a part of the Christian story, that it seemed to take on the aura of historical fact. Hardly anyone noticed that this story occurred nowhere but in the book of John. Even now, long after Nag Hammadi, few people are aware of an important scholarly consensus (Pagels; Ruprecht; the Jesus Seminar, et al, etc  etc), to the effect that the so-called "doubting Thomas" story, along with the other two derogatory stories about Thomas, which only appear in that book, were all clever fabrications, written by one or more of the authors of John (certainly not the apostle John himself, who neither wrote the gospel that bears his name, nor was even aware of its existence, in all probability). These redactors were eloquent, skillful writers, poets, and masterful propagandists, who were anxious to discredit the gnostic view of Jesus's teaching, as exemplified primarily by the Thomas school.  They aimed to replace the trans-dualistic, gnostic view with the dualistic, soteriological (and ultimately, imperialistic) views of the John school.
In a recorded talk about her book Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels summed up the difference between the two versions of Jesus as follows, more or less (my own paraphrase of her thesis, for which I take sole responsibility...):  "The Jesus of  Thomas would say: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as are you; but the Jesus of John says: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as you are not — unless you believe in me, as the Son of God — not just a Son of God, as the perfidious Jews say, but the ONLY Son of God. In fact, I'm God Himself ...  but you're not, and don't forget it!"

Check out these links: Pagels  .....          Ruprecht

http://www.remember-to-breathe.org/Breathing-Videos.html 

On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 12:44 PM, Joseph Rowe <neoan...@gmail.com> wrote:

Greetings, Bob Don, and others... it's been a long time since I visited here, but I'm still very interested, and glad to see this new, easier-to-use format.
I'd like to share an experience in communication of  a very difficult philosophical notion, traditionally almost impossible to define, but made unexpectedly clear and elegant by the insight, and innovative language of Franklin Merrell-Wolff.
Recently, while visiting the SF Bay area, I was kindly invited by Sagrada, an Oakland bookstore, to give a talk about  gnosticism, in relation to the Gospel of Thomas. I knew that one of my main problems would be how to clear up the considerable confusion about the meaning of that word — which, like the word gnostic, is derived from the Greek word gnosis. But what is gnosis? And who are the  gnostics? How are they different from mystics? I knew in advance that I had to first clear the ground, by distinguishing between the more ancient, universal, and authentic meaning of gnostic, from the (usually capitalized) Gnostics, who constituted a very diverse religious-philosophical movement,  during the centuries before and after the life of Jesus, and centered mostly in Alexandria, and the eastern Mediterranean. These so-called Gnostics were primarily characterized by a type of belief-system, and often a very provocative mythology, which (however picturesque and fascinating to many, including Jung) has little or nothing to do with gnosis in its original sense. Henry Corbin, the great French philosopher of comparative religion, maintained that a  gnostic could be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or totally secular  — and he went on to say that when two true gnostics meet, they  recognize each other immediately, cutting right through the Gordian knot of differences of religion, culture, and even of language. The term mystic is much broader, and vaguer — all gnostics are mystics, but  that doesn't say much, because most mystics are not gnostics. But even Corbin had a hard time saying what gnosis is, other than pointing out that it comes from the same Indo-European root as the Sanskrit jñana.  As most people on this forum probably know, jñana was the spiritual path of Shankara, and Dr. Wolff considered it to be his own, as well.
Mulling all this over before the workshop, I opened my copy of The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, for the first time in years. Turning "at random" to the discussion of aphorism 54, I stumbled upon the clearest, simplest, and most elegant definition of gnosis I've ever seen: Knowledge through Identity ... (also known as Introception).
What a discovery. Far more than just a skillful means of communication, or yet another vain attempt to speak the unspeakable, it dissolves masses of philosophical confusion with one stroke, and invalidates irrelevant, fatuous questions (of the sort, "But how do you know? What is your evidence?" etc). Of course the phrase Knowledge through Identity cannot be truly understood by someone who has never experienced gnosis, or at least had a taste of it. But it can at least trigger, or awaken a subconscious recollection of it... and perhaps serve as a kind of beacon-reminder, quieting the discursive, chattering mind, bringing it back to the silent ground of consciousness-without-an-object, where gnosis already IS.

On Monday, April 3, 2017 at 8:35:04 AM UTC-5, Robert Holland wrote:

I am still interested; are there other folks out there?

 

Bob Holland

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[Don Salmon]

Thank you so much Joseph. This is important and timely information.

Jan and I are going to start leading a "contemplative practices" group in May.  It's part of a very interesting project.

Last September, we attended a few Meetups of a Christian contemplative group at a Methodist church in East Asheville.  The facilitator had gone through Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault's "Wisdom School" (Bourgeault is openly calling for a nondual Christianity; unfortunately she's been way too influenced by Ken Wilber but otherwise I think a lot of what she is writing is extremely interesting).  But the facilitator had very little experience and the group didn't seem to be getting off the ground so we stopped attending.

Not quite sure what prompted me, but in late December, I wrote a note to the facilitator and the church pastor, asking about the group, and making some suggestions about what direction it might go in (they were getting very few attendees at that point).  They asked us to join them for a planning meeting and we learned about their project.

A fairly large organization called "Missional Wisdom" - based in Dallas but with branches in Portland, OR, Atlanta and Asheville, is sponsoring a project to create a commons - a community center, tied in with the Bethesda Methodist Church and the "Haw Creek Commons" next door - that will serve the 7000 households in the East Asheville neighborhood of Haw Creek. Their plans include a co-working center, sustainable gardening, mindfulness as part of a larger health project for the community, a co-kitchen for chefs in restaurants in the neighborhood, and a number of other things.

At the first planning meeting (with the head of Missional Wisdom and a few dozen folks who have been involved in planning the past 2 years) I suggested that - given that the word "contemplation" is featured throughout their literature, it could be a good thing to have a contemplative practices group that could serve as a kind of "resource" for all their activities, a hub to "feed" into the other groups.

The really amazing thing to me - and I had to check this with everyone there several times to believe they really meant it - is that they were perfectly conscious that, since their aim was to provide services to everyone in the neighborhood, that mean the practice group had to be open to all beliefs and no beliefs. This being weird Asheville, that means everyone from fundamentalist Baptists and fundamaterialist atheists to Wiccans, Earth Goddess worshippers, Sufi/Buddhist/channelers, and Lord knows what else!

They were totally fine with it.

So we're taking "contemplative neuroscience" as our foundation. Most folks in the beginning will probably be Christian oriented, but in the Centering Prayer groups we've attended in Asheville (and even in more conservative Greenville, SC) everyone seems to be quite open to the contemplative neuroscience perspective.  

So, to bring it back to your letter, what seems to energize so many folks we come into contact with in the contemplative Christianity community is exactly this nondual, truly gnostic approach.  In fact, what really fascinates me, coming from the Aurobindonian world, is that I'm finding that people in the Christian nondual community understand much better what Sri Aurobindo is about, and are less resistant to him, than many I meet in the Buddhist and Vedanta communities.  One might speculate this is because Sri Aurobindo is more "Western," but I have almost never met an Indian Bhakta, Vedantin, Jain, Sikh or Buddhist who rejects Sri Aurobindo. Mostly I find the Western intellectuals (Wilber, being Exhibit A) who have a rather rigid understanding of meditation and Indian philosophy in general being confused about it.

Anyway, your letter comes at a perfect time. I've been spending a good deal of time studying the Christian mystics in the last few months in preparation for our group.  Your letter provides a great deal of food for thought.

Thank you!

http://www.remember-to-breathe.org/Breathing-Videos.html 

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[Don Salmon]

By the way, Sri Aurobindo distinguished four kinds of knowledge (Matthijs Cornelissen, over at www.ipi.org.in, has several excellent articles on this - http://ipi.org.in/texts/cyk/mc-knowledge.pdf):

Here's Matthijs' summary: 

1. Separative knowledge by indirect contact is the ordinary, sense-based knowledge that we have of the physical world around us. Sri Aurobindo calls it separative because it goes with a clear sense of separation between the observer and the observed. He calls it indirect, because it is dependent on the physical senses. A tremendous collective effort goes at present into the development of this type of knowledge, and as it is the bedrock of science and technology, it plays an ever-increasing role in our society. It is this type of knowledge that makes the continuous stream of ever more fancy gadgets possible, and perhaps as a result of this, there is an increasing tendency to think that this is the only type of knowledge that really works and is worth cultivating.

2. Knowledge by separative direct contact has a much lower status both in contemporary science and society. When applied to ourselves, it is known as introspection, the knowledge we acquire when we try to look pseudo-objectively at what is going on inside ourselves. In this type of knowledge, the usual sense-organs are not needed and in that sense it is direct, but it is still separative because we try to look at what is going on inside ourselves “objectively”, that is, as if were looking at ourselves from the outside. Psychology cannot do very well without introspection, as it is the simplest, and in some areas only way to find out what is going on inside one’s mind, but it is notoriously difficult to make reliable. Classical behaviourism tried for many years to avoid it entirely, but at present psychology is making an extensive use of self-reports based on introspection. We will see later how the Indian tradition has tackled the difficulties inherent in introspection and we will discuss some of the methods it uses to enhance introspection’s reliability. I am inclined to think that these Indian methods are not only logically impeccable, but also indispensable if we want to take psychology forward.

3. Knowledge by intimate direct contact is the implicit knowledge we have of things in which we are directly involved. When applied to ourselves it is known as experiential knowledge. Sri Aurobindo calls it again direct because the sense organs are not required, and by intimate contact because one knows the processes that are taking place not by looking at them from outside, but by being directly with them. When I’m very happy, for example, I need not observe myself to find out whether I am happy or not. If I would look at myself in a (pseudo-) objective manner, through introspection, I would say something like “Hey, I’m happy”, and this would imply a certain distance from the happiness. But I can also stay directly with the happiness, and exclaim, in full identification with my feelings, “What a great day it is!” If I do the latter, I also know the state I am in, but not in a representative, objective manner. I know then what I am as if from within, through a direct intimacy with the inner state or process.8 It might appear as if the introspective mode of knowing oneself goes more with the mind, while experiential knowledge, knowledge “by being with”, goes more with one’s feelings and body-sense, but this is not always the case: When one fully identifies with one’s thoughts, for example, there is a mixture: the thought itself belongs most likely to the realm of “separative knowledge”, while the implicit, pre-reflective self-awareness of “being busy thinking” belongs to the realm of “knowledge by intimate direct contact”. Knowledge by intimate direct contact is used in many forms of therapy and all kind of psychological training programmes, but till now it does not seem to have received the theoretical attention it deserves.

4. Knowledge by identity is for Sri Aurobindo the first and most important of these four types of knowledge. In the ordinary waking state it is, however, hardly developed. The only thing we normally know entirely by identity is the sheer fact of our own existence. According to Sri Aurobindo it does play, however, a crucial role in all other types of knowing. In experiential knowledge (type 3) this is clear enough, as here we tend to identify with our experience. In introspection (type 2) it is less immediately apparent, as we do not fully identify with what we see, but try to observe what goes on inside ourselves, in as detached and “objective” a manner as we can muster. Still, in introspection we recognise that what we look at is happening within our own being. In sense-based knowledge (type 1) the involvement of knowledge by identity is the least obvious, but even here knowledge by identity does play a role in at least two distinct ways: The first is that even though we normally feel a certain distance between ourselves and the things we observe “outside” of us, we still see them as part of “our world”, we feel some inner, existential connection between ourselves and what we see. The degree of this sense of connectedness may, of course, differ. On one extreme, there are the mystics who feel in a very concrete sense “one with the world”; on the other extreme, there are forms of schizophrenia, in which hardly any connection is felt between one’s self and the world; the ordinary consciousness wavers somewhere between these extremes. The second manner by which knowledge by identity supports all other forms of knowledge is not through this existential sense of connectedness, but through the structural core of their cognitive content. According to Sri Aurobindo, the information the senses provide is far too incomplete and disjointed to create the wonderfully precise and coherent image that we make of the world. He holds that there must be some inner knowledge, some basic “idea” about how the world should hang together, that helps to create meaning out of the raw impressions, which our senses provide. According to the Indian tradition knowledge by identity can provide this as it is the core-element of all forms of intuition,9 and, as such, the source of the deep theories about reality that guide our perception, the fundamental rules of logical thinking, a large part of mathematics, and the ability to discriminate between what is true and false, real and unreal. Once fully developed and purified, Sri Aurobindo considers it the only type of knowledge that can be made completely reliable. Within Indian philosophy it is known as the knowledge of the Self, ātmavidyā, which contains the largely subconscious link that exists between our individual consciousness and the cosmic consciousness that sustains the manifestation as a whole. 

 

http://www.remember-to-breathe.org/Breathing-Videos.html 

On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 3:04 AM, Joseph Rowe <neoan...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Joseph Rowe]

Don, I'm delighted to hear about this initiative towards a non-dualistic (or trans-dualistic, as I prefer, since the prefix "non-" seems a bit dualistic ;-) form of Christianity — or more accurately, of the teachings of Jesus. The latter may be finally undergoing a resurrection, after almost two millennia of lies and distortions ... which seems even more miraculous to me, than the supposed physical resurrection!
I'll never forget what I heard Thich Nhat Hanh say to a first-time participant at a meditation retreat in France: a woman who described herself as a "lapsed Christian" and was wondering if she should convert to Buddhism... He said:  "It is not my purpose to convert you, or anyone, to Buddhism. More than this, I especially hope that the practices, and the Buddhist teachings which you learn here, will help you to discover the hidden treasure in the teachings of Jesus."

Good luck, and keep us posted on further developments!

http://www.remember-to-breathe.org/Breathing-Videos.html 

[Joseph Rowe]

 "There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it."

I love it!
Thanks, Chuck and warm regards to you!

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[Rich Murray]

It's wonderful, having read Richard Rohr's midnight sharings for years, to see this profound liberating sharing...  by the way circleofa.org has just given a 2,000 page fully correct revised edition of A Course In Miracles, based on 7 years of shorthand notes from 1965 --1972... Look it up on amazon.com for 60 reviews... all creative blessings peace joy, brother Rich

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[Don Salmon]

Hi Joseph: I just started Cynthia Bourgeault's "The Wisdom Jesus."  She not only speaks of his nondual wisdom, she has a chapter on the "tantric jesus."   I feel like I'm reading the Aurobindonian version of Christianity. And Larry Duggins, the president of Missional Wisdom (who are sponsoring the Haw Creek project in Asheville) strongly recommends Cynthia's work.  For a good introduction, you might enjoy the 4 part "Heart of Centering Prayer' series of talks she gave at the Boston College Divinity School -     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TufpAQUXpTo 

http://www.remember-to-breathe.org/Breathing-Videos.html 

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