Isn't it better for you to simply state this as your position, rather than attribute it to Christian spiritual tradition, even though no one understands the latter that way?lorenzop wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 5:18 pmThe desire to maintain the thinking-self is very strong - and all efforts will be sought to keep it - but the thinking-self doesn't exist. There are only thoughts about the thinking-self, thoughts to rehearse and cling to with other thoughts. The thinking-self is the shiniest and perhaps most glorified of the golden calves.AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 1:37 pm There is nothing about "surrendering every past, present, and future thought, sensation, perception" in the text, and much about the opposite. This is one of those 'debates' that it's pointless to have until the other person first realizes they don't really know anything about the topic... so I will just mention here that every Christian thinker, past, present, and future, disagreed that the Thinking-Self dissolves at death, including metaphysical idealist thinkers. Christian spirituality is not about escaping from the world into impersonal and unconscious bliss, but about redeeming the world through the Thinking heart.
As for the bold, I have no idea where you got that from. My view, the esoteric Christian view, is that 'salvation' is for every human being who heeds the call to evolve lovingly and knowingly into the spiritual realms. It doesn't require any philosophical knowledge at all. Moreover, we have multiple lifetimes to heed the call, but the longer we wait the more difficult it becomes.
Then, we have to ask ourselves, if we start with the conviction the thinking-self is illusion, how likely are we to understand arguments to the contrary? We will attribute the lack of understanding to someone else's inability to communicate rather than our own dogmatic conviction. This happens a lot on this forum.
Finally, we have to ask whether we are forsaking the one and only faculty we are most intimately famiar with, which keeps us alive, sane, and able to appreciate truth, beauty, and goodness in the world around us? It is the only faculty which would allow us to perceive the flaws of our convictions, if those flaws existed. We have very conveniently blocked out the only faculty which could reveal those flaws to us. This is the infernal loop of abstraction discussed in latest essay which is now the creed of Western culture, more than ever before. We can even sense how our desire for the non-thinking reality is a desire to remain in a perpetual state of dreaming.
When we dream, we literally abandon most thinking capacity. Now imagine waking life was also experienced as a dream (or nightmare). If that feels appealing to you, then this feeling should at least be admitted as the source of one’s philosophical and spiritual disposition. I can admit the appeal of remaining awake and perceiving ever-more conscious meaning influences my own spiritual disposition. At the same time, though, this disposition, by ita very nature, leaves intact the Thinking faculty which could potentially discern the flaws of its own reasoning down the road. It is the faculty which provides the potential for us to stop repeating the same small pallette of thought-actions over and over and expecting different results. The thinking-Self, by its very nature, is the only Self who can perceive its own idolatry for long enough to overcome it.