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The Perennial Philosophy?
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Read The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley It has great insight into how divinity or one-consciousness is apparent throughout all religions. No ELI5 but it's a great book that gives a great synopsis between various religions.
Not a Sikh! Just a synthesizer, a fledgling seer; everywhere I look, there is the True Guru.
Aldous Huxley is the original synthesizer. I'd recommend the Perennial Philosophy. It's a brilliant source of quotations and inspirations and elucidations for someone like yourself who sees and seeks the truth in all faiths.
Another book that really helped me put things into perspective was "The Perennial Philosophy" by Aldous Huxley. I don't see it recommended enough. You should check it out:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Perennial-Philosophy-Interpretation-Mystics/dp/0061724947
Absolutely, my friend. I'm sure most of these can be found online for free, but I have just listed the Amazon links for familiarity (I prefer books as opposed to online).
Books
Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy
Two powerfully insightful Youtube Channels (many more are similar):
Film
In the end, all of these (and much, much more) seem to confirm the truths we find and experience in psychedelics.
:)
-Don Bo Byuti
Nobody But I
G*9*D
You may like Perennial Philosophy! It claims all religions are expressions of the one Source/God/Nature/etc, and acknowledges we are all just connecting to the same God through different lenses (religions/cultures). It helps cast a more unifying light on humanity's interactions with the divine.
The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley is a nice showcase of the philosophy.
Hello friend. It seems you've stumbled across Perennialism. Enjoy. https://www.amazon.com/Perennial-Philosophy-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061724947
There ae some other theological ideas in your text that you'll encounter elsewhere. Remember that in the end: no one can ever know
Cheers.
The interesting choice, I'd think, would be Aldous Huxley's <em>The Perennial Philosophy</em>, which demonstrates with selections from numerous scriptures the points on which these mostly overlap, which points he articulately argues happen to be the truest points of philosophy.
And, naturally, as a contibutor to the creation of <em>Pandeism: An Anthology</em>, I'd be partial to that as well (or its funner sequel, <em>Pandeism: An Anthology of the Creative Mind</em>.)
There's actually a conversation I think under this parent comment, between me and the user techtrekzz you might enjoy. We talk about the distinction and how some beliefs intersect between the two.
For a non-anecdotal take, I would suggest checking out Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entries on both Pantheism and Panentheism. See those here and here, respectively. You of course do not have to agree with everything there, especially since there are so many flavors of both. This is just a good starting point to see what the prevailing thoughts and philosophies are, and where you fit in. This can easy become a rabbit hole, so enjoy the ride!
Personally, I lean Panentheist because I believe that God is transcendent above the universe, but remains entirely imminent as well. Pantheism does not typically include this transcendent aspect. Another huge distinction between the two is the definition of God's personal vs. impersonal nature. Many Panentheists believe God is more accessible for direct communion than classical Pantheists. The final thing that pushed me firmly into Panentheism was intense religious experiences that validate this idea. Not great proof for other people, but invaluable to me.
You may also like Perennial Philosophy, which states that all religions are at their heart sharing a single truth and "Absolute Principle". The best book on this, which is filled to the brim with quotes Pantheists and Panentheists alike can relate to, as well as a background narrative to support the philosophy's argument is The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. Check it out here.
I hope this helps! Enjoy the journey, always explore new ideas! :)
Hello!
I'm a late-20's male INFJ, born into a Sikh family. Though I'm not religious, I am spiritual (see here: https://samharris.org/a-plea-for-spirituality/).
As I've grown older, I've started to appreciate my Sikh heritage, specifically for: the focus on seva (service); the insistence on equality (though it is inconsistently practiced); the assertion of the unknowable nature of 'god'; the hymns we enjoy at temple; and more. I've learned that I don't need to become an orthodox Sikh in order to enjoy these components, and I also appreciate how Sikhs do not look down on the unorthodox.
But I've also learned a lot from other sources, such as:
- Western philosophy (http://philosophizethis.org/ is a great podcast)
- Eastern philosophy (ranging from the Upanishads to Alan Watts' material)
- Scientific research (e.g. "The Unbearable Automatacity of Being")
- Various blog posts like Joan Tollifson's "How Simple Can This Be?" (http://www.joantollifson.com/writing21.html) and Umair Haque's "The Whole Universe Is In You" (https://umairhaque.com/why-the-whole-universe-is-in-you-c2afef9e2e4c)
- Liberation Unleashed (http://www.liberationunleashed.com/)
- Books like Aldous Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy" (https://www.amazon.com/Perennial-Philosophy-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0061724947), Sam Harris' "Waking Up" (https://samharris.org/books/waking-up/), and Andrew Boyd's "Daily Afflictions" (https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Afflictions-Connected-Everything-Universe/dp/0393322815)
- Psychedelic experiences (see https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalPsychonaut/)
- This INFJ subreddit!
- and much more
Ultimately, I believe each seeker's spiritual journey is unique and, in this day and age, we are SO lucky to have access to thousands of years worth of material and guidance. And Sikhism is as good as any other doorway into relishing the mystery of each present moment.
Happy to chat more over DM if you'd like :)
Non-conceptual experiences are common when meditating, they are not crazy, there are volumes of experiences and internal phenomena listed and categorized in books and papers if you wish to looking into that area.
People have been having the same experience you had for all of recorded human history, in every culture around the world.
Aldous Huxley even wrote a book about it. "The Perennial Philosophy"
or free at
((wall of text incoming))
Heya man. Thanks for the post. Very groovy stuff.
Have you ever thought about awakening in terms of the scientific method?
Ask a question. Do background research. Form a hypothesis. Test your hypothesis through experiment. Confirm the results. Analyze the data (compare findings to beginning research) and draw a conclusion.
ASK A QUESTION
Your question is the easiest part. It is: Am I missing something?
DO RESEARCH
If I may be so frank as to start with you. Your atheism isn't a belief, it's a taking of sides. If I had to guess, at a certain level you feel obligated to fall into the camp of atheism not as a affirmative action but in reaction to the perceived irrational behavior and beliefs of creationists, etc. You have to make sure the world knows where you stand: against the anti-science wackos. This is ego; and I mean that not because you're wrong and they're right -- that has nothing to do with it. It's ego because it's an identity of yours that has developed entirely out of "othering" a group of people -- it is an identity that sunders the world into factions of Us v. Them. It's the most seductive and prevalent game the ego plays. Now I would actually have more in common with an open-minded "atheist" like you than any Bible-thumpin' creationist. I'm not saying you're not correct. I'm just calling a spade a spade.
When our identity is wrapped up in the ego's game of Us v. Them, we will subconsciously resist any effort to reconcile the sides, to admit that there is any worthwhile, rational explanation to help the other side. That's what you feel as the cognitive dissonance with your own, intensifying experiences of awakening. That's what has stopped you from being able to even discuss the "mystical" side of religion without falling into a disparaging tone. It is because at a very subtle level your identity is wrapped up in thinking that the world is divided into two camps, and thus you have become blind and even a little grumpy towards things that might disagree with this presumption.
This egoic maneuver that manifests in technical terms as confirmation bias is the real psychological priming you should be concerned about. That's what makes you (and all of us) only perceive that which fits our narrative about the world. And that's what makes you secretly gleeful when a previously unknown spiritual mechanism is debunked! We all want truth, but we also enjoy being right, being confirmed. It feels good.
Now all of this is important to go into because, at this stage of the scientific method, what question you ask depends on where you are coming from. For those who seek spiritual answers due to depression or anxiety, the question is often: what is the cause of suffering? And the follow-up, how do I live without suffering? That's not you -- well, it is at a certain level, but not really. You seem to have accepted that life just comes with a general sourness to it that you cannot shake, not for very long anyways, and that everyone seems brokenhearted in some way or another. No. You've come to terms with all of that, in a sense. What concerns you, what keeps you up at night is the fact that you seem to have covered all your corners. You are an exceedingly rational and intelligent person. And yet you cannot shake the feeling that there is an angle that you have not yet deduced. Hence the question: What am I missing?
The next stage of research is looking for the cohesion in religion. This is doing research beyond finding an obviously wrong straw man to attack, for example a line of argument as you might find from a creationist or Bible literalist. Now this next part of research could be an entire novel, and indeed it has been. A great example is The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. His is a book that shows that when you dig deep, past the differences of language or ritual or pronunciation, you eventually reach a core area whereby all the seemingly separate religions are connected by a single shared esoteric truth. This is important stuff to read not because it is right and atheism is wrong, but because it will shake your perceptual world a little bit, and that's absolutely necessary on the spiritual path. Plus, by reading the masters you are confronted face-to-face with the raw, undeniable data that human history is filled with thousands upon thousands of sages from different countries and backgrounds who have all come back from heightened states of consciousness to say, essentially, the same thing. I'm not saying the data proves anything right now. But the data is there; it should not be ignored.
Okay, presumably we've done the research and culled some seemingly shared insights about Ultimate Truth, whatever that may end up to be. Here is a smattering, an example, that I will use to form the hypothesis.
From the Tao Te Ching (China; 6th century BCE) >"The Tao that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging Tao."
>"There are few in the world who attain to the teaching without words."
>"Learning consists in adding to one's stock day by day; the practice of Tao consists in subtracting day by day: subtracting and yet again subtracting until one has reached inactivity."
From the Taittiriya Upanishads (India; 6th century BCE) >Realizing That from which all words turn back,
>and thoughts can never reach,
>one knows the bliss of Brahman and fears no more.
From the Dhammapada - Teachings of the Buddha (India; 6th century BCE) >You alone must make all the effort, masters can only point the way
Lankavatara Sutra - Buddhist teaching (India and China; 350 CE) >With the lamp of word and discrimination one must go beyond word and discrimination and enter upon the path of realization.
Jalal-uddin Rumi, Sufi (Islamic) mystic (Turkey; 13th century CE) >Reason is like an officer when the King appears;
>The officer then loses his power and hides himself.
>Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.
Meister Eckhart, Christian Mystic (Germany; 13th century CE) >Why dost thou prate about God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.
From the Shri Guru Granth Sahib (India; 16th century CE) >People talk on and on about Him; they consider this to be praise of God. But rare indeed is the Guru who is above this mere talk.
FORM A HYPOTHESIS
Here's a simple one culled from the 'research' notes above: Knowledge and language are separate.
Or, in terms of your question: I am missing something because I am focusing only on conceptual knowledge, when there is another avenue of knowledge available to humanity: a rare, silent type of knowledge that the Tao Te Ching describes as "the teaching without words." Hidden in this hypothesis is an entrance to a rabbit hole. I don't know how you will react to this hypothesis, whether it will be with a "duh" or a "prove it".
But yes, it is a rabbit hole because as soon as you provisionally accept the hypothesis, it means that you provisionally accept that human rationality and ordinary conceptual knowledge is not the only way of knowing reality. It means that the intellect is just one side of you; that there is an ancient side to you that has been repressed and ignored for so long, that all you can do is describe the feeling as "it seems like theres something missing but I can't explain." Call it left brain v. right brain, whatever floats your boat. But you feel this way because there is a fire deep inside you that has never had its proper acknowledgement or release and you will continue to feel this way until you make an empty space in your life without the chatter of the mind, without the automatic obedience to thought, without implicitly thinking that arms-length intellectualizations are the only and highest way that a human can know reality.
So the obvious question is, what can I know without language, what can I know directly, without the use of concepts? The rabbit hole goes on and on because, as the sages above all basically confirmed: with this silent type of knowledge you can know "God" or Ultimate Truth!! You can't know God through reason, or language, or concepts, which is difficult to swallow because it's what you've structured your life around and is how you do 99.9999% of all your knowing. But you can know this Ultimate Truth nevertheless.
TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS
There really is no short-cut here. You gotta do what all the mystics did. You gotta meditate. You gotta study and fill yourself up with truth and conceptualizations of truth until you're ready to jump beyond the rational limits of the mind to experience a true moment of revelation. Revelation is not so spooky. It is basically you realizing in every cell of your body that thing that you said "yeah, yeah, heard it a million times" about. You've heard it, but you've never realized it. You've held it at the arms' length of the intellect, but it has not entered your heart. Do you have a meditation practice? It seems like you already have an intuitive grasp on what meditation is; it might just be a question of making it more methodical. Making more and more space in your day for the search for this "knowledge without words."
CONFIRM THE RESULTS
You gotta keep meditating, even after you glimpse truth beyond intellectualization. You need to see that it comes in driblets; but it is still something you can wrap in awareness and thus plot your progress. At this stage you've also got to tighten up your life, you've got to desire truth more than you've desired anything else in your entire life.
ANALYZE THE DATA
Does your experience confirm with what you found in research? Remember, even the Buddha had to struggle for eight+ years before he had his realizations. So if it takes you a long time, that's pretty normal. No reason to give up and declare that awakening doesn't exist just because it hasn't happened in six months or even six years.
>However, "eternal life" is typically held in theist circles to mean an eternal continuation of mortal life - i.e., the souls in Heaven will retain the same memories, the same personality, the same character traits as they had on Earth. But if this is the case, do they also retain the same sinful human nature?
>There are two possibilities: either there is sin in Heaven or there isn't. The teachings of virtually all religions mitigate against the first option, and with good reason. If there is sin in Heaven, it can't be that much better than Earth.
I've often thought about this myself. For their ideas to remain internally consistent in this regard, there must be no motivation to sin, once they reach heaven. If it is the paradise that they say it is, then all our wants are met, and there is no reason to commit a sin.
In order to fully satisfy the question, however, it appears that you have to draw from Eastern belief systems as well (which naturally undermines the Christian world-view, which can create a whole other set of questions). In the Eastern tradition -- and I realize that I am over-generalizing -- the mind in the body that we currently inhabit is limited to human capacity. Of course, the theory of mind-body dualism is itself problematic, in that it appears to be unprovable, untestable, and unfalsifiable, at least using Western techniques of understanding this scenario.
But the point is, the Eastern tradition indicates that, when we die, the soul-self from our recently-departed human body is reunited and absorbed into a more sophisticated, higher self that does not suffer from the neurological limitations of the human mind. In this higher self, we are not susceptible to the greed, sloth, and other "deadly sins" that plague us here on Earth.
To the atheist mind, this probably sounds all too convenient, but there is some theological basis for this system, arguably amplified most effectively by Aldous Huxley, who wrote a book on the subject.
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