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Post by Summerless on Jul 12, 2018 7:16:27 GMT -5
I've been Buddhist for a long time now - this includes practices from the almost countless sects and lineages. I find myself oscillating between more austere 'Zen' type practices and other more esoteric and tantric traditions such as Vajrayana or sometimes Dzogchen, but it has all been Buddhist. However, I am also greatly interested in terms of study or incorporation of other paths and have studied many 'Left Hand' occult traditions, finding value in some and finding others to be hokey or misguided. In terms of occult practices, the works of Andrew Chumbley are rather provocative and alluring, some currents from Ixaxaar have been particularly interesting as well.
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Post by thekeeper on Jul 16, 2018 15:18:06 GMT -5
wyverngarden , great post. I've yet to read any Bataille but now I have some motivation. I've had Laruelle's Future Christ sitting on my bookshelf for probably a year now and I've yet to start it. Marion's God Without Being sits beside it. I think I'm pretty clear on what you've outlined here, and the concept and difficulty of 'being within immanence' (without that specific title) is something I've thought of often over the years. I don't even know where to begin with describing my own spiritual conceptions. Laruelle's basic idea which he calls "non-philosophy" ("non" in the sense of "non-Euclidean") is to expose all philosophy as having this invariant structure (similar to spirit/matter) that results in a tear in the fabric of immanence. He calls this structure "Philosophical Decision". Non-philosophy is thus an axiomatic transformation of philosophy (which can be applied to any specific philosopher's work) that suspends Philosophical Decision and thereby converts thoughts "of" to thoughts "within". I'm unsure how this is really different from philosophy itself besides like a different framing.
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Post by wyverngarden on Jul 17, 2018 19:26:37 GMT -5
wyverngarden , great post. I've yet to read any Bataille but now I have some motivation. I've had Laruelle's Future Christ sitting on my bookshelf for probably a year now and I've yet to start it. Marion's God Without Being sits beside it. I think I'm pretty clear on what you've outlined here, and the concept and difficulty of 'being within immanence' (without that specific title) is something I've thought of often over the years. I don't even know where to begin with describing my own spiritual conceptions. Laruelle's basic idea which he calls "non-philosophy" ("non" in the sense of "non-Euclidean") is to expose all philosophy as having this invariant structure (similar to spirit/matter) that results in a tear in the fabric of immanence. He calls this structure "Philosophical Decision". Non-philosophy is thus an axiomatic transformation of philosophy (which can be applied to any specific philosopher's work) that suspends Philosophical Decision and thereby converts thoughts "of" to thoughts "within". I'm unsure how this is really different from philosophy itself besides like a different framing. Wow -- I'm really impressed to encounter another person interested in Laruelle. I'm very "self-taught" in these matters, I studied engineering long ago, but a variety of spiritual/mystical experiences — including many which most would term as ‘crazy’ — which is just to say that they don’t show up at all for default modes of thinking — also struggles to create as a musician/artist -- have led me down some different paths and a lot of my readings are guided by this journey. Laruelle's non-philosophy, as best as I can explain, attempts to suspend the decisionist principle (similar to how non-Euclidean geometry suspends the parallel postulate, allowing parallel lines to cross such as on curved surfaces) and with it any philosophy's claim to sufficiency, or the idea that everything is philosophisable. This allows non-philosophy to treat philosophy as material, to process it by means of generative schema in the form of textual games, which generates philosophical theory-fictions in which elements of transcendence are in some sense folded back within immanence [Again, I'm put off a bit by the emphasis on the textual and my lack of comprehension of many aspects of Laruelle's project. I have only an anthology, From Decision To Heresy, I do find some of the material, such as "What is Non-Philosophy?" readable but other stuff a bit less so. Mostly I haven't given it time but I will get around to it one of these years... Indeed this approach does seem rather nonsensical. But the more you think about it, we treat music theory in this way. We understand that more or less each piece of music generates its own way of listening to it, as well as its own formalized theory. Yet we have no problem for instance combining African polyrhythms and Western harmonic progressions, or putting together serialism and tonality as the Minimalists did. Our impulse to do this comes not primarily from theory but out of our own listening and interest, thus our constructions which may be said to implicitly make use of theory, don't actually arise from that level, but from within the immanent process of creation itself, as a Being-within immanence. We recognize that nobody wrote more perfect counterpoint than Bach, not only because of Bach's genius, but because the very notion of counterpoint was completed only in his fugues and is in some sense meaningless without these examples at hand. But Laruelle's way is not the only path towards these insights. For instance, Heidegger's opposition or strife between Earth and World (i.e., immanence and transcendence) in The Origin of the Work of Art, I find a bit more insightful. It bears to keep in mind that Laruelle is foremost a writer and thus he is primarily interested in what can be done textually. Most of my reading has focused on Bataille and Heidegger as of late. In part as a way of getting up to speed. But I really do appreciate Heidegger as one of the most profound thinkers in the Western tradition. Early Heidegger ( Being and Time) is in some ways traditional transcendental philosophy (while still being a remarkable work that finally overturns the Enlightenment worldview, something neither the Romantic thinkers, nor Kierkegaard, nor Nietzsche could successfully do) and exactly fits the mold of Laruelle's criticisms. But in the late Heidegger there emerges a real respect for immanence and for multiple (historical) understandings of Being, not simply Dasein in its monolithic aspect. Incidentally, I saw in the other thread, you're reading Nick Land as well. I'm also fascinated by him, have the Fanged Noumena book but have yet to dig in. I wonder if you're familiar with Nicola Masciandaro, another incredibly interesting and little-known thinker, actually most of what he writes is experimental fiction or theory-fiction (under various pseudonyms) with gnOme press. But some essays I've seen are pure gold. What Land is to vaporwave, Masciandaro is to black metal and dungeon synth. Seriously. He's also written on black metal though most of that material was ten years ago. I'd recommend his essay "Unknowing Animals", a major influence on my thought/art/music/whatever. He's totally one of us in spirit. www.academia.edu/590649/Unknowing_AnimalsFor better or for worse I think fifty years on people will remember Laruelle, Masciandaro and Land and perhaps forget some of the other trendy thinkers, Graham Harman for instance, who has a rather reductive, opportunistic and in the end quite silly reading of Heidegger. He focuses essentially on the tool-analysis and the gulf between that and the implicit ontology of Latour which is radically non-anthropocentric. Which is an interesting problem as there's no way to derive Latour's understanding of technology from Heidegger's, although both are profoundly phenomenological. But in solving this problem, Harman deletes everything that is interesting about Heidegger, the existentiality for one, and he's for instance completely insensitive to the late Heidegger, who has his own way of moving beyond the anthropocentrism in Being and Time. So I think Harman, Morton and so on create more problems than they solve, but are still important in the basic questions they recognized. But that's another topic.
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Post by firstofr on Jul 18, 2018 1:37:28 GMT -5
Sorry for bumping this dead thread, but I'm Jewish, culturally, religiously and ethnically, although since I'm a religion major in college, I find all religions fascinating. I'm actually going to Finland to study Christian theology. I'm very into asceticism, and that translates a lot into many themes in my music. I'm a guy who's generally really interested in mysticism and obscure aspects of religion, so in that way I love all religions. Much of my music is also influenced by Buddhism, as it was one of my formative introductions to other religions when I was a youth. The 108 in my name comes from the auspicious number in Buddhism and Hinduism, because there are 108 sanskrit letters. You're going to need money I suppose. Theology doesn't make much, so here's a good site with loans in Finland hope it helps you joustoluotto heti.
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Post by poppet108 on Jul 18, 2018 14:46:00 GMT -5
Sorry for bumping this dead thread, but I'm Jewish, culturally, religiously and ethnically, although since I'm a religion major in college, I find all religions fascinating. I'm actually going to Finland to study Christian theology. I'm very into asceticism, and that translates a lot into many themes in my music. I'm a guy who's generally really interested in mysticism and obscure aspects of religion, so in that way I love all religions. Much of my music is also influenced by Buddhism, as it was one of my formative introductions to other religions when I was a youth. The 108 in my name comes from the auspicious number in Buddhism and Hinduism, because there are 108 sanskrit letters. You're going to need money I suppose. Theology doesn't make much, so here's a good site with loans in Finland hope it helps you joustoluotto heti. turns out that I'm actually staying back in the States, and not studying abroad.
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Post by thewoodwose on Sept 14, 2018 12:40:30 GMT -5
I strongly identify personally with Luciferianism although I use that term and Satanism interchangeably to describe my personal path. I find power and comfort in Satanic imagery and really identify with the figure of Lucifer on a personal level. I wholeheartedly believe in the rebellious nature of Satanism and the aspirations of gaining enough knowledge in order to become your own god and be in control of your life. I'm not theistic though, I'm more agnostic as I don't care enough about the possibilities of the existence of a deity or deities but I'm open to the idea. I truly won't know until I die.
I'm sure it sounds typical for being a black metal related genre and some people consider it edgy but the belief system is really personal to me and having been raised by really bad evangelical parents it helps me come to terms with being in control of myself and my life.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 18, 2018 6:25:51 GMT -5
I strongly identify personally with Luciferianism although I use that term and Satanism interchangeably to describe my personal path. I find power and comfort in Satanic imagery and really identify with the figure of Lucifer on a personal level. I wholeheartedly believe in the rebellious nature of Satanism and the aspirations of gaining enough knowledge in order to become your own god and be in control of your life. I'm not theistic though, I'm more agnostic as I don't care enough about the possibilities of the existence of a deity or deities but I'm open to the idea. I truly won't know until I die. I'm sure it sounds typical for being a black metal related genre and some people consider it edgy but the belief system is really personal to me and having been raised by really bad evangelical parents it helps me come to terms with being in control of myself and my life.
Your post made me « smile » because I've had exactly the opposite experience. My parents are atheist and anti-christian. They never tried (so they thought) to impose any opinion or belief on me. They never judged my deeds or ideas. And it never made me feel FREE ; just trapped in a cosmic bad joke where nothing was real — or wrong — and nothing has weight or importance. No challenge, no goal, nothing. Which made me end up Catholic. Of course, our choices are real choices, but I see I'm not the only one trying to repair a somewhat fucked up education.
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Post by Summerless on Sept 18, 2018 8:25:34 GMT -5
I strongly identify personally with Luciferianism although I use that term and Satanism interchangeably to describe my personal path. I find power and comfort in Satanic imagery and really identify with the figure of Lucifer on a personal level. I wholeheartedly believe in the rebellious nature of Satanism and the aspirations of gaining enough knowledge in order to become your own god and be in control of your life. I'm not theistic though, I'm more agnostic as I don't care enough about the possibilities of the existence of a deity or deities but I'm open to the idea. I truly won't know until I die. I'm sure it sounds typical for being a black metal related genre and some people consider it edgy but the belief system is really personal to me and having been raised by really bad evangelical parents it helps me come to terms with being in control of myself and my life.
Your post made me « smile » because I've had exactly the opposite experience. My parents are atheist and anti-christian. They never tried (so they thought) to impose any opinion or belief on me. They never judged my deeds or ideas. And it never made me feel FREE ; just trapped in a cosmic bad joke where nothing was real — or wrong — and nothing has weight or importance. No challenge, no goal, nothing. Which made me end up Catholic. Of course, our choices are real choices, but I see I'm not the only one trying to repair a somewhat fucked up education.
Insightful stuff, I wonder how many of us have our particular spiritual beliefs as a result of attempting to mend something we deemed broken. I'm kinda right down the middle on this one: half of my family was atheist, the other half was Greek Orthodox, both seemed appealing and liberating in some senses and not quite right for me/inhibitive in others.
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Post by thewoodwose on Sept 19, 2018 10:40:28 GMT -5
I strongly identify personally with Luciferianism although I use that term and Satanism interchangeably to describe my personal path. I find power and comfort in Satanic imagery and really identify with the figure of Lucifer on a personal level. I wholeheartedly believe in the rebellious nature of Satanism and the aspirations of gaining enough knowledge in order to become your own god and be in control of your life. I'm not theistic though, I'm more agnostic as I don't care enough about the possibilities of the existence of a deity or deities but I'm open to the idea. I truly won't know until I die. I'm sure it sounds typical for being a black metal related genre and some people consider it edgy but the belief system is really personal to me and having been raised by really bad evangelical parents it helps me come to terms with being in control of myself and my life.
Your post made me « smile » because I've had exactly the opposite experience. My parents are atheist and anti-christian. They never tried (so they thought) to impose any opinion or belief on me. They never judged my deeds or ideas. And it never made me feel FREE ; just trapped in a cosmic bad joke where nothing was real — or wrong — and nothing has weight or importance. No challenge, no goal, nothing. Which made me end up Catholic. Of course, our choices are real choices, but I see I'm not the only one trying to repair a somewhat fucked up education.
I honestly probably differ from a few Satanists in that I don't really like atheism to the point where I feel it can end up being just as bad as evangelical christianity. I also don't see a problem with Catholics or moderate christians so long as they aren't trying to push things onto me.
It's rather interesting that our upbringings could be considered by some to be complete opposites but neither seemed to really work. I guess that resonates well with my opinion that rampant atheism and evangelical christianity are two sides of the same coin.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 19, 2018 14:03:05 GMT -5
Your post made me « smile » because I've had exactly the opposite experience. My parents are atheist and anti-christian. They never tried (so they thought) to impose any opinion or belief on me. They never judged my deeds or ideas. And it never made me feel FREE ; just trapped in a cosmic bad joke where nothing was real — or wrong — and nothing has weight or importance. No challenge, no goal, nothing. Which made me end up Catholic. Of course, our choices are real choices, but I see I'm not the only one trying to repair a somewhat fucked up education.
I honestly probably differ from a few Satanists in that I don't really like atheism to the point where I feel it can end up being just as bad as evangelical christianity. I also don't see a problem with Catholics or moderate christians so long as they aren't trying to push things onto me.
It's rather interesting that our upbringings could be considered by some to be complete opposites but neither seemed to really work. I guess that resonates well with my opinion that rampant atheism and evangelical christianity are two sides of the same coin.
This is a coin called stupidity, conformism and narrow-mindedness. I consider the Bible and the Catholic dogmas as being the one and only good and the only truth (which doesn't mean I can't love or respect someone who thinks differently). But even the good and the truth become stupidity, evil and oppression when forced down your throat. That's a tragic side of life.
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Post by thewoodwose on Sept 19, 2018 14:17:51 GMT -5
I honestly probably differ from a few Satanists in that I don't really like atheism to the point where I feel it can end up being just as bad as evangelical christianity. I also don't see a problem with Catholics or moderate christians so long as they aren't trying to push things onto me.
It's rather interesting that our upbringings could be considered by some to be complete opposites but neither seemed to really work. I guess that resonates well with my opinion that rampant atheism and evangelical christianity are two sides of the same coin.
This is a coin called stupidity, conformism and narrow-mindedness. I consider the Bible and the Catholic dogmas as being the one and only good and the only truth (which donesn't I can't love or respect someone who thinks differently). But even the good and the truth become stupidity, evil and oppression when forced down your throat. That's a tragic side of life.
I definitely agree. If I saw someone push my own beliefs on others I would definitely not think highly of them myself.
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Post by crushingteeth on Oct 22, 2018 3:52:18 GMT -5
I've been Buddhist for a long time now - this includes practices from the almost countless sects and lineages. I find myself oscillating between more austere 'Zen' type practices and other more esoteric and tantric traditions such as Vajrayana or sometimes Dzogchen, but it has all been Buddhist. However, I am also greatly interested in terms of study or incorporation of other paths and have studied many 'Left Hand' occult traditions, finding value in some and finding others to be hokey or misguided. In terms of occult practices, the works of Andrew Chumbley are rather provocative and alluring, some currents from Ixaxaar have been particularly interesting as well. Fascinating! Are there differing ritualistic practices you personally participate in regarding each of the Buddhist philosphies? ------ I subscribe to absurdist philosophy, positivism, and non-spiritual Buddhism (of the Stephen Batchelor variety). I also hold positivity in high regard in my life. Positivity begets positivity, whether it be an innate human psychological phenomenon, or a metaphysical energy based one (and I'm most certainly not trying to make the argument of either/or). There is no denying in my mind that positive attitudes and behaviors change how you interpret your life, change the emotions in others interacting with you, and change the atmosphere around you. This bleeds into how I treat my body, the earth, and animals as well! I abstain from consuming animal products, from drugs/alcohol, and make sure to exercise regularly. Anyways, this is just my personal philosophy, and if this is a matter of spirituality then I guess I'm quite off topic. I enjoy reading about all the philosophies, spiritual journeys, and religious views in this thread. I'm learning quite a bit!
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Post by altrusiangrace on Feb 5, 2019 18:27:58 GMT -5
anyone interested in Gnosticism, Paganism, Jung, Psychedelics, and the occult in general check out Aeon Byte podcast on bandcamp - thegodabovegod.bandcamp.com/
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