(Nick) Religious Studies PhD candidate (Rice University), MA History of Religions (University of Chicago), MA Eastern Classics (St. John’s College)
Anchorage, AK
Joined August 2012
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My most recent work on the relationship of memory to tantric mysticism and its contemporary relevance as evaluated through the lens of musical-autobiographical memory, presented a few weeks ago at this year's American Academy of Religion conference.
academia.edu/63985103/The_Wh…
"The supreme objective is attainment of oneness amongst the three factors, namely, the individual, the universal, & the transcendent, which has been expressed by the word trika (trinity)... This is the sense behind the word kula, all-inclusive, for it."
-Abhinavagupta TL 4.35.32
"After departure from this world, one attains that state on which his mind was meditating throughout his lifetime... whatever one was meditating on throughout his life, the impressions created by that meditation, however distant they might be, will be awakened"
-Abhinavagupta
"The yogin is superior to the learned (jñánin) because the fruit of yoga is knowledge (jñána)."
-Abhinavagupta, Commentary on Bhagavad Gita 6.48
Time is the relation between events, so without time, there are no events. If one has transcendent experiences that they believe are timeless, there cannot be events in that experience. If there are events they may however be in another temporal register. Time opens up vertically
“Tangled grasses lie matted with death,
but generals keep at it, and for what?
Isn’t it clear that weapons are the tools of misery?
The great sages never waited until the need for such things arose.”
-Li Po, ‘War South of the Great Wall’
“Once you drink enlightenment and wisdom,
why go searching for gods and immortals?”
-Li Po, ‘Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon’
“Watching the distant falls hang there, river
headwaters plummeting three thousand feet in flight,
I see Star River falling through nine heavens.”
-Li Po, ‘Gazing at Lu Mt. Waterfall’
seems to be alluding to the Dao as celestial river flowing down from the Great One (Pole star)
"Spirit is nowhere and yet everywhere. The perfect man can penetrate the minds of others because he is based on the One. Spirit is perforce called the One and the Way. It is best to call it spirit."
-Shao Yong, "Supreme Principles Governing the World"
"The natures of human beings & other things are like sunlight penetrating through small cracks in the roof or walls of a thatched hut. Because of the different lengths & sizes of the cracks, the amount of sunlight is different; nevertheless it all is the light of the sun"
Chu Hsi
"By viewing things is not meant viewing them with one's physical eyes but with one's mind. Nay, not with one's mind but with the principle inherent in things. There is nothing in the universe without principle, nature, and destiny. These can be known"
-Shao Yong
“Followers of (all) religions find it increasingly necessary to take note of the total cosmic religious environment, which of course includes religions other than one’s own. All religions in one or another way, psychologically and/or historically, connect with one another.”
-Ong
“The Infinite had woven itself a new limited wonderer trapped inside a burden of flesh at the dissolution of which years later it would readmit to its imageless ecstasy which is not only eternal like God but I am God as you are who am me as I am you.”
-Kerouac
"contradictions, which bedevil thinking on the matter of immortality (and transcendence)... but which may be stilled by poetry through they prove an endless riddle for philosophical argument (stilled in the sense of calmed and also preserved)."
-E. Griffiths
