Posts Tagged mysticism

Heidegger on Schleiermacher’s Second Address

Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 23, 2011

Heidegger card

Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.

- Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951)

Schleiermacher’s On Religion provided me a kind of Rosetta Stone by which to decipher certain Heideggerian concepts. Heidegger discussed On Religion’s Second Address in lectures he gave on religion in 1920-21. I agree with those who believe Schleiermacher’s influence remained well into Heidegger’s later writings, and I feel that in any event the Second Address informed Heidegger’s monism.

Heidegger’s later gnomic talk of “the relation of man and space” is more understandable to me if viewed through the prism of Schleiermacher’s “third realm” of religious intuition, separate and distinct from either conceptual thought or moral action.

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B.S. about Jesus and Buddhism

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on October 28, 2010

Could Jesus have been taken to India as a child and taught Buddhism? Hmmm? Hmmm? Here’s something that apparently showed on the BBC at some point:


Watch on youtube.

OK, some silly speculation here (and more amusingly told in Christoper Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal),but a few points of comparison are made here between the teachings of Christianity (and how they’re “unprecedented” as far as Judaism is concerned) and Buddhism.
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Glimpses of Zen: No Self vs. Big Self

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on October 15, 2010

As mentioned on the podcast, our original intention was to cover Zen, but that seemed difficult without covering some of the history. Nagarjuna was a big influence on Zen, particularly in the “Reasoning” reading where he urges disassociation from even Buddhist doctrine itself, i.e. the transcendence of all views. That’s the kind of mind-bending apparent self-contradiction that Zen is famous for.

Here’s a quick clip of Nyogen Yeo Roshi talking about the illusory nature of the self and your experienced world:

Watch on youtube.

Roshi here tells us to appreciate the beauty of the illusory world; we just don’t want to get stuck in it. He argues that the present is an illusion because it’s temporary, because the passing of time makes all events past unreal, because they can’t be produced for reexamination in their fullness. (I don’t find this particular point convincing in the least, myself.)
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Episode 12: Chuang Tzu’s Taoism: What Is Wisdom?

Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on December 6, 2009

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:50:14 — 101.0MB)

Discussing the “Chuang Tzu,” Chapters 2, 3, 6, 18, and 19.

It’s the second-most-famous Taoist text and the most humorous, with anecdotes about people singing at funerals and jumping out of moving coaches while drunk. What could it possibly mean to “make all things equal?” and how is the Taoist sage different from our other favorite paragons of virtue (hint: magical powers)?

Featuring special guest panelist Erik Douglas, another U. Texas philosophy grad school dropout now living in England, who knows more about Eastern philosophy than we do.

Read along with us.

The end song requires explanation: I had a “New Age” period where I investigated Eastern philosophy, tried to be cheerful all the time, and was generally insufferable. This song, “Pass Time Incorporeal,” is an artifact of that time, with lyrics from early fall 1989; the recording is from 1993. It finally slipped out on a 1996 album of similar goofiness rejected from my “real” albums called “Black Jelly Beans & Smokes.”

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