Showing posts with label Sam Harris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sam Harris. Show all posts

Sam Harris is an atheist, anti-Judeo-Christian author who is nevertheless interested in spirituality and more accepting of Buddhism and Dzogchen.

In a discussion topic where someone criticised Sam for criticising religions, Soh commented:


Sam Harris has legitimate concerns about fundamentalist religion but rather than targeting specific religions, he would be better off understanding and explaining the different levels of development contributing to acts of extremism like Ken Wilber https://www.kosmosjournal.org/.../integral-spirituality-2/ , and the different forms of religion and spirituality. You can find genuine mystical and contemplative spirituality in any given religion, and you can also find extremists in any religion. It has got to do with the level of development of an individual's consciousness in the spiral dynamics.
Clearly, even in Islam, Sufism is a [at least comparatively] non-violent tradition focused on contemplative practice and spiritual awakening. Its interpretation of holy war and struggle is mostly in terms of inner struggle against the 'ego' (the highest struggle is the struggle against the self, according to a famous sufi master). It is my hope that people in the world, not necessarily they have to turn into Buddhists or Buddhism, but at least within each religion, more and more people get attracted to the more contemplative, mystical, and genuinely spiritually transformative aspects of their religion (sufism, kabbalah, christian mysticism, etc etc) and transcend the merely ethnocentric and mythic-literal aspect of religions predominant in less developed forms of religious practices [which covers the majority of religious practice currently] throughout the world.
 
And although Buddha has never condoned (unlike certain other religions' scriptures which I acknowledge does speak about 'holy struggles', having studied the scriptures of all religions myself many years ago) even once an act of violence** in the name of his teachings or religion, nevertheless, "Buddhists" at the ethnocentric level of development have historically been involved in violence as well, one way or another.
 
So the problem isn't so much the scriptures alone, but equally important the need to raise human consciousness up the levels and states of consciousness, in terms of spiral dynamics and the levels of spiritual awakening. One will always interpret and understand the scriptures from the perspective of one's depth of psychological and spiritual development.
 
On Sufism:
 
"The Sufi is expected to go through ascending spiritual stations (maqamat) ultimately conductive to a direct experience of the truth. This path may encompass visionary experiences and ecstatic states (hal). It is often described as moving up to the stage of ‘annihilation’ (fana) of the self, with the final goal being the return of self and subsistence in God (baqa). Existence in the world of multiplicity is therefore somehow illusory, true existence being an attribute of the only God, i.e. it is an attribute of unity. Among the celebrated Sufi masters who better formulated this idea (often referred to as the doctrine of the ‘unity of the being’, wahdat al-wujud), is the Andalusian metaphysician Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), who exerted an influence on subsequent Muslim thought comparable to that exerted by Plato on Western philosophy. Faithful to the Qur’anic tenet that nothing on earth is permanent except the face of God (Q. 28. 88: All things perish, except His Face), the Sufi’s ultimate goal is to get rid of their ego and the world of multiplicity to subsist in communion with God in the abode of unity."
 
On Buddha's position about violence:
 
“Monks, even if bandits were to sever you savagely limb by limb with a two-handle saw, he who gave rise to a mind of hate towards them would not be carrying out my teaching”. – Buddha
"Bhikkhus, even if bandits were to sever you savagely limb by limb with a two-handled saw, he who gave rise to a mind of hate towards them would not be carrying out my teaching. Herein, bhikkhus, you should train thus: 'Our minds will remain unaffected, and we shall utter no evil words; we shall abide compassionate for their welfare, with a mind of loving kindness, without inner hate. We shall abide pervading them with a mind imbued with loving-kindness; and starting with them, we shall abide pervading the all-encompassing world with a mind imbued with loving-kindness, abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility and without ill will.' That is how you should train, bhikkhus.
Buddha: "Bhikkhus, if you keep this advice on the simile of the saw constantly in mind, do you see any course of speech, trivial or gross, that you could not endure?"
Bhikkhus: "No, venerable sir." 
 
Buddha: "Therefore, bhikkhus, you should keep this advice on the simile of the saw constantly in mind. That will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time."” – Buddha





...........


 
ONLY BREATH


Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam or Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.


Coleman Barks, Tr., The Essential Rumi (San Fransico: Harper Collins, 1995)

Rumi

Persian poet
Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Balkhī, Mevlânâ/Mowlānā, Mevlevî/Mawlawī, and more popularly simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, Hanafi faqih, Islamic scholar, Maturidi theologian, and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. Wikipedia