I’d love to hear from some who have trouble with Eric’s last paragraph. I grew up a devout atheist, convinced math and science held the keys to the universe.
On the other hand, I thought theists believed in some horrible, psychopathic old man in the sky who loved nothing more than to smite those he called evil (who he created) and send them to eternal torment.
If I had read a paragraph like Eric’s even as a very little kid I would have competed agreed.
In fact, I DID read a paragraph just like that, though not till I was 17. That very moment (May 10, 1970) i looked up from the book (remember, not having read any philosophy or theology, so my vision was not put in any formal terms) and I knew as clearly as I knew I existed that “God” was the walls and ceiling and floor and the book and my body and mind and all the trees and houses lining my street an the hundreds of people I saw in my mind blindly crossing streets in Tokyo and New York (I don’t know why those cities came to mind but that’s what came to me)
Now, was that pantheism or classic theism or panentheism or non dual Vedanta? Yes, no aAll of the above and none of the above.
I KNEW at that moment, though I was preparing to be a music major at Juilliard, that one day I woudl work on integrating psychology and spirituality And it was just about 30 years later to the day I received an email from the head of a foundation who had gone to South India where he met a friend of mine, and told him he wanted to pay someone to write a book on Sri Aurobindo and my friend said, “Talk to Don, he’s obsessed with Sri Aurobindo and psychology.” And I received enough money to not work for a year and ended up spending 5 years on the book.
And that’s only one 100th of what I saw that day 54 years ago. This is all so obvious to me - it was even obvious in 1975 when I came across the first book I read by Sri Aurobindo and REMEMBERED having worked on the same topics in another life time in the 1930s or 40s.
Is the Divine confined to one reilgion? How could She be? Are we not all equally Her children (yes, all of us)? Was Christ not, as Eric stated, asking us to love God with all our mind, heart, body and life and soul? And our neighbor - LITERALLY - as ourselves? And hasn’t She spoken something fundamentally similar (though individualized, specialized, unique-ized, for each culture, for each era) to all?
I’d love to hear from some who have trouble with Eric’s last paragraph. I grew up a devout atheist, convinced math and science held the keys to the universe.
On the other hand, I thought theists believed in some horrible, psychopathic old man in the sky who loved nothing more than to smite those he called evil (who he created) and send them to eternal torment.
If I had read a paragraph like Eric’s even as a very little kid I would have competed agreed.
In fact, I DID read a paragraph just like that, though not till I was 17. That very moment (May 10, 1970) i looked up from the book (remember, not having read any philosophy or theology, so my vision was not put in any formal terms) and I knew as clearly as I knew I existed that “God” was the walls and ceiling and floor and the book and my body and mind and all the trees and houses lining my street an the hundreds of people I saw in my mind blindly crossing streets in Tokyo and New York (I don’t know why those cities came to mind but that’s what came to me)
Now, was that pantheism or classic theism or panentheism or non dual Vedanta? Yes, no aAll of the above and none of the above.
I KNEW at that moment, though I was preparing to be a music major at Juilliard, that one day I woudl work on integrating psychology and spirituality And it was just about 30 years later to the day I received an email from the head of a foundation who had gone to South India where he met a friend of mine, and told him he wanted to pay someone to write a book on Sri Aurobindo and my friend said, “Talk to Don, he’s obsessed with Sri Aurobindo and psychology.” And I received enough money to not work for a year and ended up spending 5 years on the book.
And that’s only one 100th of what I saw that day 54 years ago. This is all so obvious to me - it was even obvious in 1975 when I came across the first book I read by Sri Aurobindo and REMEMBERED having worked on the same topics in another life time in the 1930s or 40s.
Is the Divine confined to one reilgion? How could She be? Are we not all equally Her children (yes, all of us)? Was Christ not, as Eric stated, asking us to love God with all our mind, heart, body and life and soul? And our neighbor - LITERALLY - as ourselves? And hasn’t She spoken something fundamentally similar (though individualized, specialized, unique-ized, for each culture, for each era) to all?