/er/ eastern religion general

What's the best way to get in to zen buddhism?

Watts a good entry? Or is Daisetz Suzuki better?

The Way of Zen by Watts is a good entry

Read Suzuki too, you don't have to pick just one, user.

Go to Japan, find a master, meditate, and have him beat you whenever you lose focus. Unironically, that is how you into Zen.

zen flesh zen bones is good, lots of Koans, little poems, pictures. good with weed, mushrooms, lsd, etc

Has anybody read Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent? If so, thoughts?

Or you're dullard egocentric smug brainlet ass just can only interpret things from face value and get "annoyed" and "disgusted" when presented by anything outside of the consumerist paradigm you've been spoon fed your entire life.
>pic related
Pro tip: it's you
Nothin' personal, kid.

I'm going to spend a week living in a Buddhist monastery that practices Thai Forest Tradition. Any good reads about this particular tradition that will get me to the mood?

You sound very angry, OP.
It's not good for you. I think you should take a deep breath and relax.

What the Buddha taught
Four foundations of mindfulness
Heart of buddhist meditation
Guide through the visudimaggah

Ajahn chah collections of talks perhaps

Also sayadaw pandita, sayadaw u pandita

Sattipatana sutta

>did what better?
Spirituality

You should try mediating : ^)

do not listen to anything these people said listen carefully: Dogen stole the Zen teachings without receiving mind seal from a Chan patriarch. he made up his Satori event and there is zero verification of it by Rinzai masters in china. Totally made up from a made up lineage. all Japanese Zen is illegitimate and fake. It has nothing to do with chan. Dogen is a fucking christfag Shintoist who dressed up Zen for Shoguns and the Emperor. It has nothing to do with Chan. Do not get into the meditation cultist Soto zen and do not use Rinzai shit from japan. They literally write down pre-made answers to Koans and have a system of attainment set up which is 100% in contradiction to what the Tang masters (who all legitimacy in all zen lineages, comes from)

Here’s what you’ll do:

Original Teachings of Chan (by some Chink)
Red Pine’s Blood Stream Sermon (Red Pine is a whyte man who translated a bunch of wisdom texts, he stayed with the Chinese like a smart man)
Thomas Cleary’s Blue Cliff Record Translation (do not fucking get a jap translation or any koan books that they’ve touched for the aforementioned reasons)
Lin-Chi Lu (it is he story of Master Lin-Chi’s sayings)
Sun Faced Buddha (Mazu’s sayings)
Sayings of Chao-Chou (Joshu in nipponese, he is the greatest of the Tang masters and considered the last worthy master in human history)
Sayings of Laymen Pang (he is the only laymen to ever have been given the mind sealg
Sayings of Yun-Men (he is the one whose famous for single word utterances, Jap masters copy him like faggots)
Sayings of Nanquan (He is the master who chopped the cat in half, extremely intelligent human being who also was a master poet, him and Yun-Men were beautiful writers, look up their poems they’re free online)
Sayings of Foyan (he is the last Chan master to record everything)
other people to read: Bankei and Fa-yen

Blue Cliff Record, Mumonkan (Wu-Men, another master poet and lesser master wrote this book, try to find a chinese-english translation, the Japs use this book to indoctrinate new monks, with pre-written answers like the slimy nips they are), Book of Serenity (or Tranqulity, depends on translation), Iron Flute (very tennuous scholarship, may be a forgery made by japs) and Wood block records (same issues as previous title)

DT Suzuki and the other Suzuki had no fucking idea what the fuck Chan (not Zen) was about

quick etymology; Dhyana is sanskrit for Mediatation or Wisdom (literally), Channa is the Chinese transliteration, its shortedened to Chan, Japs translate as Zen, Koreans as Seon, Chan Buddhism is not the same thing as Chan. Chan Buddhism is proto-Chan with Daoism and mahayana Buddhism attached

Chan masters HATED buddhists and used to go out of their way to mock them, literally attacked them with fists and rods, would cast them out of their temples and would reduce them to tears and stuttering in front of hundreds of people

Empress Wu was the first royal to start abusing Chan and sponsoring it for indoctrinating people. this was middle of the Tang dynasty. Chan masters had to flee execution and persecution constantly. The Platform Sutra (Huineng, sixth patriarch) had to flee this kind of bullshit. the jap masters never dealt with this, their tradition has no blood or iron behind it. many Chan masters lost their tongues, hands and heads to the State.

Song dynasty literati romanticized Chan and created the milieu for the Shoguns and Dogen to steal it and turn into a bushido aristocratic cult. It is not for the elites

Chan masters lived in temple-communes and spent most of their day working. gardening and doing carpentry and traveling hundreds of miles of foot their whole lives to visit other masters.

Couple more things, turning words are words which undo the bindings of consciousness, all Real Koans and Chan poetry is loaded with turning words. You will know exactly why its called a turning word when you read the sayings of the tang masters. When you then compare it to the Nips its fucking outrageous that they even associate themselves with it. the one is totally inexplicable and the other reads like reigious indoctrination. Do not let these people lead you around. Chan does not require a teacher anymore. You are the teacher. No one has received the mind seal in over a thousand years. Maybe Wu-Men was the last one. Chao-chou was the last one who really had it. DT Suzuki and his Soto meditation cult have nothing to do with chan. It never left China and its only origins in India come from bodhidharma’s teacher who taught a special version of Buddhism called the Lankavatara Sutra school of Dhyana, the meditation school of Buddhism. Chan masters do not recognize Mahayana, Vajrayana or Theravada as real at all. They reject it completely as religious, they are anti-religious. Watts says correcty, “Zen is really the religion of no-religion” and he is correct. You will see what i mean, also they are not atheists and Bodhidharma strictly prohibits: Nihilism, Materialism and Idealism.

One more master: Huangbo, i left him for last because his works border on Occult and Metaphysical and until you have a background in the others his will read like Idealism and you will get confused and overwhelmed

Read their sayings, their sermons, their koans and the commentaries on them.

terebess (dot) hu is how you will find all the works i referenced

lib g3n (dot) 1o is how you can probably find the rest

Original teachings of Chan is your basic guidebook, the Chink who wrote it is retarded but useful, just look past his religious interpolations

have fun. also if any of you want to know more about Chan, you should probably practice Chan instead of reading about it.

read counter-currents.com/2013/06/spiritual-virility-in-buddhism/ instead.

>Chan masters do not recognize Mahayana, Vajrayana or Theravada as real at all. They reject it completely as religious, they are anti-religious.
If you had any idea of how utterly retarded your thinking process was, you'd probably drop dead immediately.

you talk so much of virility and manliness because you no longer have it in you

keep taking your happy pills

Don't start with Zen if that's what you're doing, it's a bad gateway to buddhist principles. You can get into it later but it's best if you look into Siddhartha's roots first.

>b-b-but op, you're just angry!!
>do meditation, lol
>here, read listen to this podcast; it PROVES that desire is bad because buddhism helps you deal with anxiety at work

>Dude just live in the moment don't think too hard

Its garbage like this which is why "Eastern Religion" exists as a category.

user, I appreciate your post and saved the references, but don't you think that this story about "he stole from them, he didn't even respect the original thing" and etc is a completely weird approach to this? I don't doubt it that it was so, but if we are really going to do this, we will notice that there is no original.

You could also say Siddharta shat on the ascetics, didn't go full training, betrayed hinduism or whatever. Ip Man was criticized for teaching wushu to an american. Yogananda was also criticized for the same reason. In a completely different setting, Luther did not respect the tradition of christianity up to that point. Couldn't an hindu say that those chinese got everything wrong about buddhism? Isn't history exactly like that? Everyone who brought something new, or stretched the boundaries of a certain way of life was criticized by predecessors. I'm not saying they are right over their predecessors, but that I don't think it's about something "legitimate" versus something "fake", they are other things, in time each revolution creates their own tradition. Where does legitimacy comes from?

Not to mention if I haven't read Alan Watts I would never be interested by your post and discover what's beyond japanese Zen.

Dont read anything, just practice 8 fold path. And if you're going for a retreat out of the blue, you're going to have a bad time. It's pure torture.

>reads somewhere that Zen is not about theory and that books have nothing to do with it
>advises people not to read anything and just get into it

I hope the irony is clear

The Record of Tung-Shan

My only knowledge of eastern religion comes from people shilling meditation as some sort of way to improve your productivity as a wage slave / student devoid of any spiritual or religious context.

Essential works for different traditions? Do I just jump into like the Pali canon or what?

yes its an ongoing joke in zen my friend, if you studied it at all you’d know that this is one of the paradoxes from the tradition. if you don’t study you’re just making things up, if you only study you’re a pretender too. Read a book
no this is a fact and if you read the sayings of those masters you’d know im correct. they reject Buddhism outright and don’t recognize vajrayana, theravada or mahayana as legitimate or real. They go out of their way to call them names, mock their sutras, burn their sutras, beat them up and laugh at them. Read Chao-chou and Mazu, they fucking despised Buddhist monks
lol typical
no you have it wrong, first of all his title is Buddha, Guattama is the position in the lineage of Buddhas he came from. second of all, Dogen is famous for faking his mind seal session and making up an entire lineage of poorly attested masters in Southern china who themselves did not have legitimate ancestry going back to Lin-Chi, the great founder of the Rinzai sect. You should never read Dogen unless you are interested in shinto-buddha jesus syncretism with christianity, because that’s what the Shobogenzo reads like.

All of those other people are religious figures and have nothing to do with Chan. Alan Watts was a naive, sensitive man who was one of the first people to come into contact with the Tang masters who wasn’t a Nip faggot. The Nips took Chan and first turned it into a meditation-Buddhajesus cult with Dogen as the Pope basically and then the Shoguns took it and transformed it into a Bushido-Military psychopath cult with pre-written answers to the Koans and a strict military-religious hierarchy. The masters of China did not do this and had nothing to do with this kind of thinking or behavior. Do not insert your own shit into another tradition unless you don’t give a shit about it.

There is my list, there is my take, you can go study buddhajesus meditation cult shit that’s been transformed by the aristocracy of Japan or you can study Chinese Chan which is what it is.

“B-but the Zen Buddhists got me into it” i don’t care even a little bit and emotional interpretations like that are again mocked in Chan viciously. you’ve never seen or read Chan before, you and most westerners have no idea outside of cartoonish Nipped out interpetations of it, what its like.

see i delineate everything you need for Chan. No meditation cult necessary, no meditation magic, nothing like that. Just read through their canon, ignore the Japanese entirely and you’ll see it. Also:

Chuangzi, Liezi, Daodejing, I-Ching, Upanishads (Chandogya and Mandukya), Brahma Sutras (Adi shankara’s commentaries especially), Tibetan Book of the Dead, Vedas and Saraha’s Adamantine Songs

Have fun all of you, and remember not to get turned around by words and other people.

No no no.
Yet another deluded lost soul (pardon the pun), led astray by an infatuation by the apparent iconoclasm of the Chan masters.

If you actually bother to "tsan" these matters around in your little head and get your noggin a-joggin', you might begin to wonder why they were all - to a man - monks, an monks who upheld the Vinaya, who underwent the traditional training process, ad in other words held a normative view of the Buddhist teaching, except when suitable students became otherwise too attached to said trappings and what not and needed to be jolted out of their comfort zone. You've clearly gone the opposite direction and overdosed on the Zennist.
Don't be such a schmuck, mate.

>no you have it wrong, first of all his title is Buddha, Guattama is the position in the lineage of Buddhas he came from
The prince turned ascetic is Siddharta, who allegedly attained enlightenment and was therefore a Buddha, a title. I know this, but why did you tell me about it? I was not talking about buddhahood, but about the man Siddharta. Did you even read me or are you trying to show off knowledge, bro?

You proceeded in your monologue about Chan without even addressing what I was saying.
>All of those other people are religious figures and have nothing to do with Chan.
Because I was not talking about Chan, I was talking about a relationship between authority, change and claims of legitimacy. You are telling me Dogen is shit and so on and that Chinese have a completely different take that was disrespected, I got that the first time and don't doubt it. I cannot attest to the legitimacy of Japanese Zen, I just question the legitimacy of "legitimacy" as way to evaluate ideas and practices to begin wih. Of Chan, of Buddhism, but of everything else as well.

>Do not insert your own shit into another tradition unless you don’t give a shit about it.
Do you really mean this or is it a freudian slip?

>you have it wrong
>you have no idea
>you've never seen it
u dont know me bro, i didn't say anything

Is this worth a read?

I think you would be very hard-pressed to seriously argue that the Greeks did spirituality better than the eastern religions.

The Greeks had a standard patheon of proto-Indo-European gods found in almost all Indo-European cultures, the Greek and Roman religions mostly lacked any profound deeper metaphysical teaching. When you did find that in the Classical world it was in the mystery religions that they turned to because the traditional Greco-Roman religion was lacking the essential features that give a deeper meaner.

Compare that to Hinduism and Buddhism which offer incredibly profound and clearly laid out metaphysical teachings that deal with the most fundamental aspects of reality and existance. They also offer a wealth of information regarding practices that bring immense benefit to the practitioner which are directly and immediately verifiable by anyone who practices them.

The romantic facination that westerners have with the classical world prevents them from realizing that the Greco-Roman religions were relatively primitive and not particularly unique. There is nothing at all about these religions that people really feel have any value now except as artistic inspiration. Compare that with 2000 year old Hindu and Buddhist texts dealing with the nature of reality or exercising control over ones mind that people still find fascinating and valuable.

Buddhism - What the Buddha Taught + The Dhammapada
Hinduism - Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines + The Bhagavad Gita
Daoism -Tao Te Ching
Confucionism - Analects

That's pretty much the TLDR

If you want to go deeper into Buddhism then Bhikku Bodhi is good, the Diamond, Heart and Lotus Sutras are all worth reading.

For Hinduism you want to ideally read the prasthanatrayi (Upanishads+Brahma Sutras+Bhagavad Gita) accompanied by the commentaries from the master of whichever Vedanta school floats your boat. Once you've wrapped your head around Vedanta there is the Bhagavata Purana, the Yoga Vasistha, the Shiva Puranas and many other great texts.

There are a few other Daoist and Confucian thinkers who were addendums to the head honchos, if you really dig the texts written by the founders than the later ones are good too.
It's even easier to make snide inaccurate generalizations about the Abrahamic religions

Seriously, just watch a bunch of Watts then read what anons recommend. Watts is not perfect, he is telling you his own personal view of it, but I think he is the perfect person to "break the ice" of western thinking and will make everything eastern much more easy to get into it. There is a series on youtube called "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life".

Avoid the snippets with shots of the ocean and classical music tho

Also, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse can help you get a sense of it. It's short, easy and simple and is basically a novel from the perspective of someone who practices eastern spirituality. Don't stop there because you won't learn anything about any actual doctrines but it can help you test the waters.

If you're just going to say that any parts of Classical Religion that don't fit your arbitrary and uneducated views of "deeper metaphysical teaching" then the exact same could be said of Hinduism. Hinduism is, after all, just a standard Indo-European pantheon without any deeper metaphysical truths and any and all deeper metaphysical truths aren't ACTUALLY part of Hinduism, they're just philosophical currents running parallel to it.

From a Buddhist perspective, is it wrong to focus on the idea of self vs. no self? Given that the Buddha refuses to answer a question posed in these terms, it seems that getting hung up about it should be discouraged, and and knowing the truth of dependent arising is all that matters. Is that correct?

Dude, when you focus on something, other things get out of focus. If you close in on something, you lose the bigger picture. This is more of the issue than what you are focusing on.

Buddhism is not worried on what is correct or not in the way you put it, we are all gonna make it brah(quite literally). Start from where you are. If that particular problem worries you, learn to deal with it until it doesn't. It's very common for us to think about that because it is contrasting to how westerners feel. To say something "should be discouraged" is as if others were doing the work for you, as if you were to blindly follow some rule that says you shouldn't worry about it. It creates yet another point of tension when you can't stop thinking you should stop thinking about it. That can really confuse you from asking yourself why that is such a problem and realizing that it isn't.

Most westerners will never be able to take part in the buddhist tradition properly. Guenon explains this.

I'm only asking out of curiosity - The question has no bearing on my state of mind at all. Your response does sync up well with the Buddha's in that knowledge is only important in so far as it helps us follow the path, and that most of this metaphysical stuff has to be understood firsthand with meditation to get a true understanding of it. Still, this is a key concept of Buddhist philosophy, so I'm interested in knowing what you all make of it.

>he hasnt read parmenides

>If you're just going to say that any parts of Classical Religion that don't fit your arbitrary and uneducated views of "deeper metaphysical teaching" then the exact same could be said of Hinduism.

You were disparaging eastern religions in general not just Hinduism, what I said is also true with any of the other eastern religions.

>Hinduism is, after all, just a standard Indo-European pantheon

Conpletely wrong on many levels. The early Vedic texts is actually in all probably the closest representation we have of the actual Indo-European religion. The type found throughout Europe is a degeneration of what it looked like originally where the higher meaning is mostly lost and it transforms into a pantheon of human-like gods representing natural forces.

The Vedas are one of the oldest texts in any IE language. The Rig Veda gives many descriptions of solar/lunar cycles and star alignments that would only be seen by someone at the north pole and within the arctic circle. These indicate that the early portions of the Rig-Veda were composed many thousands of years ago, possibly up to 10 or 11 thousand years ago near the end of the last ice age when the artic north was habitable. This would mean the Vedas are the only remaining solid connection to the original religion of the proto-Indo-Europeans during the era when the first IE language developed and that the Vedic tradition has been passed down orallyfor thousands of years. So no, its not just another typical IE pantheon. Rather it's THE Indo-European religion, passed down for many generations by a priestly caste until finally committed to writing around sometime in the 2nd millenium BC.

1/2

>without any deeper metaphysical truths and any and all deeper metaphysical truths aren't ACTUALLY part of Hinduism, they're just philosophical currents running parallel

This is laughable. Hinduism has the deepest and most comprehensive set of metaphysics out of all the major religions and this is something all the Traditionalists have noted. Hinduism presents a systematic view of the universe, the individual, the nature of the divine and it's relation to the individual, It's foundational texts exhaustively examine and debate these topics and similar ones. It presents an enormous corpus of valuable advice on directly reaching metaphysical states, attaining related knowledge and on uniting oneself with god. Furthermore all the important metaphysical teaching are exoteric and freely available to anyone with the capability to understand them instead of it being only found in secretive and inaccesible groups. All of this fits perfectly into the overarching religious framework and is indeed derived from it.

The idea that Vedanta and other metaphysical Hindu schools of thought are not Hindu or exist outside of Hinduism is absurd. Vedanta literally means the 'culmination of the vedas'. It has that name for a reason, all of Vedanta directly traces its roots to the Vedas and is almost entirely derived from them. The main test of orthodoxy in Hinduism is whether or not it adheres to the Vedas, the reason Vedanta and similar subjects are orthodox is that justification for them is found in the vedas and they are the natural conclusion and implication of the Vedas.

The reason almost all post-Vedic Hindu texts are massively influenced by Vedanta is because it's the natural step in Vedic thought and is thus entirely within and is an essential part of Hinduism.

>Western Muslim convert says Westerners can't be Buddhists
Wow.

Where should one start with Hinduism?

Remember, rituals are important.
You can't simple divorce the philosophy from the rituals, because the rituals are simply processes that get you where you want
Look up Swami Nityananda's website, they have a fuckton of translations (native, not by shitty westerners who distort shit) for different text with references and stuff
Also, beware not to discard Nityananda because of his unproven murder charge. He's incredibly knowledgeable. There are speculations about the involvement of Christian missionaries who are targeting hindu religious figures. A big menace.
For the philosophy you'll find lots of texts, not a problem
But Hinduism=philosophy+rituals, very loosely speaking.

First spend a bit of time on Wikipedia or Britannica so you have some familiarity with the various gods, concepts, and things like reincarnation, karma, avatars, brahman, maya, atman etc.

Then read 'Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines' by Guenon. This is an incredibly helpful guide to understanding Hinduism and eastern doctrines generally. It prepares you for studying the actual texts themselves.

The proper route which takes a long time is then to read the prasthanatrayi (Upanishads+Brahma Sutras+Bhagavad Gita, the word translates to 'the three sources') in addition to the commentaries on them by Vedanta Thinkers, after that you have the later texts like the Puranas etc. Optional hardcore mode is to start with the Rig-Veda before the three sources. You would benefit from reading any of them alone even without commentary but to really understand Vedanta you are supposed to read them all along with commentaries. Some good non-commentary works on Advaita Vedanta (the most widespread and influential school of Vedanta) by Adi Shankara include Upadesasahasri, Aparokshanubhuti, Vivekachudamani and Drg-Drsya-Viveka.

The Bhagavad Gita itself is intended to be a summary of Vedantic thought and so reading that alone would help you get it quickly over anything else if you have limited time but make sure to read Guenon's intro book first, it's crucial. Some greats texts in addition to the three sources are the Yoga Vasistha, the Bhagavata Purana, the Padma Purana, the Shiva Purana, Linga Purana and Vishnu Purana.

There is a free PDF online of Guenon's book but its worth owning a copy.

archive.org/stream/reneguenon/1921 - Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines #page/n3/mode/2up

>The exception proves the rule

>the Greek and Roman religions mostly lacked any profound deeper metaphysical teaching.
>ignorant of Kerenyi
>ignorant of Evola
>ignorant of Dumezil
>ignorant of Fustel de Coulanges
Just go away and play with traffic

>Given that the Buddha refuses to answer a question posed in these terms,
Once, in one Hinayana sutta. You'll find plenty of examples otherwise in the Mahayana canon.

fuck off buddhajesus cultist go ask for alms and make offerings to statues and sit with your eyes closed for hours. you’re honoring da Buddha jesus with your inability to read a fucking book
>Siddhartha legend
fake and gay
>b-but i heard that the Zen masters loved Buddha
you heard wrong
>i wasn’t talking about Chan
you’re right you were talking about Dogen’s fake buddha cult that he started using the Zen stories from the Tang dynasty, the one that was so fake they had to use it as propaganda for the military and make up fake answers to Koans! How wild is that? You know what having prewritten answers to koans is the equivalent of? That’s like pretending to receive the holy spirit when you’re in church, its like miming ecstasis, its like faking an orgasm. Gud for you buddy, you can be a lying nip too.
>i question the legitimacy of legitimacy
no you don’t, you wouldn’t learn physics from someone whose not trained in physics. shut your fucking mouth
>freudian slip
you’re doing it already in this post i mean every word
>u don’t know me BRO
i can see right through you. go feel good, take some acid, meditate, pick up a cult religion for a few years, get laid.

remember no read, no teach

you read, you understand

reason and practice. but all you want to do is practice your own reason. have you read the Outline of Practice? no? oh ok go do your own thing sport. These guys? You’re way too enigmatic and rougish for them. Chan probably has lots of rules and stipulations, you’re a free spirit. A free-wheeling type who doesn’t get held down by books.

Fake it till you make it baby, just like everything else with you people

>you’re honoring da Buddha jesus with your inability to read a fucking book
sez the plonker who advocates burning said books. Right...
Cough up the Ardent pill, you cockjockey.

You are just talking to yourself there, bro.

You shouldn't want that anyway. Buddhism is about methods to achieve Enlightenment, at least the oldest one we know from Suttas.

Now I think I know why Chan isn't popular. Read about reasons you should practice Right Speech in Suttas

>knew
>Zen

this guy does not represent Chan, which is very much a normative Buddhist path.

koans don't work on modern people

why does zen appeal so much to turbo-autists? is zen the definitive smug religion?

Not at all, it's just the beats didn't fully understand Zen yet consequently shaped the Western impression of Zen

that doesn't make any sense
it's the fucking rule that all great philosophers are unique exceptions
it's patently true

The discussion was about Greco-Roman religion. One Greek philosopher who dealt with metaphysics but who wasn't in any way a canonical part of the religion in no way refutes the notion that the Greco-Roman religion was lacking a central metaphysical teaching on par with anything in the east.

you obviously dont know what you're talking about. there are no texts by parmenides. it is a platonic dialogue that went on to inspire all neoplatonists. literally every greek philosopher had a metaphysical theory

Good to see this nice thread. Real gem here.
I would like to know about Shingon and tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. It looks very interesting but difficult to find material/ sources about it.

pot calling the kettle black
completely cut off
its not popular because retarded religious cultists can't get into it and its not open to most humans, also getting punched in the gut and laughed at for making a fool of yourself tends to irk people as does being told to go wash your bowl or till the fields.
no the masters were the opposite of smug, the image of humility actually. But again you'd have to read a book and not be entitled little pleasure seekers to understand it. It has nothing to gift you and only things to take away from you.

Neoplatonism and philosophers =/= The traditional Greco-Roman religion

A bunch of individual people coming up with their own differant metaphysical views is not the same as a coherent metaphysical system traditionally taught as an essential feature of a religion as it is with Hinduism.

again, you have literally no knowledge of the history of philosophy

>I'll just namedrop a bunch of names without explaining why they are relevant and act like that's an argument

The funny thing is that most of the people you cited held views that reinforce my point.

I never said that Greco-Roman culture was devoid of metaphysical wisdom and associated teachings. Some of the mystery cults and groups like the neoplatonists propagated genuinely metaphysical teachings.

The problem though is that these were not at all orthodox or mainstream features of the traditional Greco-Roman religion. The Neoplatonists were a small group who mostly influenced other philosophers and Christianity but not the actual religion itself. In order for metaphysical knowledge to be properly disseminated, understood and incorperated by the culture as a whole it needs to be systematically taught as part of a traditional orthodox religious doctrine. This absence of traditional metaphysical teachings is what led people to abandon the religion for mystery cults and christianity.

>Károly Kerényi
>Fustel de Coulanges
Neither of them focused on metaphysics but wrote about the importance of religion and belief in Greek life, the fact that the Greeks were very religious in no way means there was some metaphysical teaching going on. Excessive focus on worship and faith can indeed be anti-metaphysical as demonstrated by most modern christian sects.

>Duzemil
I'm familar with his ideas but I'm not aware of anything he thought that contradicts what I said at all.

>Evola
This is the funniest one, Evola believed most of the stuff I wrote and almost all his writings focus on the dharmic faiths and the ideas associated with them, he wrote that italy should return to the traditional roman religion because it was more suitable to building an empire but as far as I'm aware he never claimed there was some profound metaphysical teaching in it, he mostly said that about Hinduism and Buddhism in fact.

That's not even the subject of the discussion, you keep reverting to non-sequiturs after you get BTFO, you havn't refuted anything I wrote but just come back with insults and things that aren't even related.

of what one does not know, thou shall not speak
protip:thats a sartre quote

im explaining to you why i dont want to ‘refute’ you. youre not even close to knowing what youre talking about. im not going to tutor you bruh

Jesus you guys how hard is it to admit that you're wrong?

I admite many things about Greco-Roman culture and there is a lot of good things to it. It's not the end of the world if it's true that it their religion had a less comprehensive metaphysical teaching then the east. They don't have to be the best at everything.

When you autistically argue against such a simple and obvious point you look like fools. You'll never grow intellectually if you're so unwilling to rexamine your own views when challenged.

>hubris
nice reddit words you got there faggot

you're a dangerously stupid person

im much smater than you man. im not here to sharpen my arguing knives

Yea you sure showed how smart you were when I provided detailed responses rebutting each of your points and then you stopped trying.

Maybe it was evola then. But guenon definitely wrote about east vs west

just to clarify that stuff, Guenon never said westerners couldn't be buddhists, he just said that they couldn't be western AND buddhists, if they adopted buddhism properly they would take part on the eastern tradition, but that would never work as a solution civilization-wise for all the west, a regeneration from inside should occur, maybe influenced by the east, but never directly by people that just adopt the eastern traditions and then come back to proselytize or similar, as a renewed western tradition should fit the contingent aspects of the west

a regeneration from the inside may be occuring. if jung has any kind of say on the matter; beliving that western civilisation is already well on the path of developing its own spiritual traditions.

I began my meditation practice 6 months ago after reading "The Power of Now," employing the use of Headspace and some random advice on mindfulness from the r/meditation subreddit. I wanted to find a cure from my brain fog, anxiety, depression, and depersonalized state of mind.

During this period of cultivating awareness and improving focus, I decided to turn my focus inwards and follow thoughts through their life cycle, as to get a better understanding of my mind. Please note, during this time I did not believe in meditation at all and was only practicing as a science experiment.

I would dedicate my initial 15 minutes of practice with breath meditation until I turned focus inward. On my second attempt I was able to get to the "source" of my recursive and unnecessary thinking and conceptually "planted a flag" so I can refer to the area later. My practice was about 1.5 hours daily. 30 minutes focused on "cave diving" and the other hour on pure mindfulness meditation.

As I continued to analyze my thoughts, I began to organize and label them (whilst remaining detached). IMMEDIATELY after conceptualizing/organizing/labeling a thought, I felt a physical sensation of relief and clarity that I have never felt in my life. I felt a gap in my thought process. A sort of space that I created on my own terms which I was them able to fill with really anything. I became addicted to this level of control.

Over the next two weeks, I somehow managed to wipe my mind to the point that I existed in the most pure state of my entire life. My mind was both empty yet craving for knowledge. But beyond that? Every single ailment disappeared. Anxiety, depression, depersonalization, brain fog. Just evaporated. I couldn't read a paragraph before forgetting what I read. In a span of two weeks I was able to remember entire pages. The music I made became alive in a capacity I always felt was there but I only actualized for myself at this point. My speech was flowing, no breaks, and always with confidence behind every word. My short term memory kicked on and I also began remembering things with enough detail that I felt I was rexperiencing it right at that moment. I felt I was given a new lease on life in a unquantifiable way. This lasted for weeks.

Unfortunately, in my hubris, I let go of all that, assuming I transcended my mental limitations, and one day, woke up and realized I was back at square one.

I figured, no problem, got there once and I can do it again. But that is not the case. I have since been meditating for 5 months and have gotten nowhere. Employing the same techniques do not work. Employing new techniques do not work. I was able to find a God mode in myself in 2 weeks and with 5 months of meditating I am nowhere further than where I've started.

Guenon didn't understand the first thing about Buddhism. That much needs to be said.
But I think you are confusing what he said about Westerners converting to Hinduism instead.
Also, his remarks at the end of East and West are largely a joke, since he never really believed that either Freemasonry (!) nor Catholicism could ever regain their traditional status.
In private, he advised his correspondents to convert to Islam. In fact, we can hardly call this "in private" since it was largely his stock reply.

If you bothered to read the thread instead of regurgitating this nonsense you’d know meditation does nothing

Is the Power of Now good?

I think that's rather unfair to say to the Western tradition, to be honest.

From about the Hellenic period to the end of the Roman period there was many, many competing schools of classic philosophy that expounded just as much metaphysical and ontological ideas as the Easterns. Neoplatonism, Neopythagoreanism, Hellenized Judaism, etc. all developed elaborate cosmologies and ideas of the perceptibly of the cosmos. I would even argue that the eastern Mediterranean around the years before and after Christ was similar to the hotbed of philosophical activity that gave rise to Buddhism, orthodox Hinduism, etc.

Granted, I will accept that these ideas were probably less well-developed or explained as their eastern counter-parts, but they most certainly existed and had broad degrees of support from society, and to say otherwise its to engage in some sort of weird Hindu fetishism.

Truth is universal after all.

Go see a psychoanalyst

none of you have the slightest clue what you’re suggesting to each other, its like watching a bunch of starving animals afflicted with rabies tear each other to pieces

Insight needs to be tempered with compassion, otherwise it is not true insight.

Strive to practice mettabhavna, dana, etc and you will find yourself making great progress.

what do you want to know exactly? it's a rather broad topic

I agree, but you too

That's life, a bunch of confused faggots telling each other where to go and a bunch of other faggots telling each other where not to go. Veeky Forums amplifies that because we are all user and so you have no clue if it is a 12 year old with a Naruto headband telling you to kill yourself.

I know I've been seeing a psychoanalyst for a couple of years and realized that I did not know what I needed when I was most desperate and while others were giving me this and that advice, my analyst was actually listening to me and helped me listen to myself. I only recommend it because I think it's an advice of no-advice, it's an advice to look further into the situation instead of making a quick diagnostic of the problem and try to fix it immediately by the solutions others throw at us. "I'm anxious, so I'll meditate" makes sense, but why is one anxious in the first place? This is something neither me or another anons or that user in particular can tell of himself as of now.

Introduction to the study of the hindu doctrines Is more of an instruction to radical traditionalism than hinduism. But it is good nonetheless

>he made up his satori event

Many of the Traditionalist views shared by Guenon are also views shared by mainstream Hindu figures and expressed in the literature or are views that are highly similar to them so it can be hard to separate the two.

The Trad view of a perpetual metaphysical teaching shared by most traditional cultures is basically the Sanatana Dharma view of Hindus.

The Kali Yuga is basically a TLDR of what trads think of modernity. Hinduism is not as stridently anti-progress and anti-science as the trads but the trad critique of the progress- and science-oriented modern world aligns with most Hindu texts which often advise against focusing on the emphemeral and instead advise focusing on and fulfilling one's Dharma. It can be difficult to understand the traditional Hindu worldview without this sort of background knowledge.

As long as you don't uncritically adopt all the views expressed within and realize that Hinduism is not 100% against science/progress it's a pretty good introduction.