Bernardo's talk with Lance Butler

[AshvinP]

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.

The 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.

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?

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.

[lorenzop]

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?

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.

I could name it as my position but that would be false as it is the Perennial Philosophy . . . I'd agree it (aka Perennial Philosophy) is not the prominate postion today assumed by Western civilization or most modern theologians.
Your bolded above is perhaps the last ditch effort to save the thinking-self . . . I can think my way to right action, I can think my way to unbounded freedom, I think my way to having it all, etc.
Your position is not supported by scripture - scripture advises 'not my will but Thy Will'.
Surrendering the thinking-self is how to become a devotee of God.
It's not living in a dream, it's living a life of freedom with the full support of Nature.

[AshvinP]

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?

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.

I could name it as my position but that would be false as it is the Perennial Philosophy . . . I'd agree it (aka Perennial Philosophy) is not the prominate postion today assumed by Western civilization or most modern theologians.
Your bolded above is perhaps the last ditch effort to save the thinking-self . . . I can think my way to right action, I can think my way to unbounded freedom, I think my way to having it all, etc.
Your position is not supported by scripture - scripture advises 'not my will but Thy Will'.
Surrendering the thinking-self is how to become a devotee of God.
It's not living in a dream, it's living a life of freedom with the full support of Nature.

We don't have to go further than the first chapter of the first book to see how and why you have inverted the 'perennial philosophy':

"So God created man in His own image;
in the image of God He created him;
...
And God looked upon all that He had made, and indeed, it was very good."

Is a "very good" creation something we need to abandon completely, as if it's a fantasy dream world which we only liberate from after death and our sense of identity dissolves? What is the image of God if not the Spirit who lives in us as "Thinking" i.e. the Logos from whom we get logic? How can we freely choose to follow God's will without first knowing what His will is? These are exceedingly simple questions with equally simple answers - "my yoke is easy and my burden is light" - and it is only the egoic intellect which makes them complex. That intellect devises theological doctrines and abstract concepts of 'perennial philosophy' to make things more complicated so we lose sight of what is plain and evident. It is no different than what the religious fundamentalist does as well, those same fundamentalists you probably cannot stand to be around.

Instead, we can simply perceive how our living Reason brings us back to the Divine simplicity which our intellect divided and made complex. This is the very reason why philosophy and science are meaningful pursuits - what would they be without Reason? Without that Reason, that Biblical knowing, we are forced to simply take our own desires, opinions, and feelings and declare them to be "Thy will". Now we have made ourselves our own god, because we are only following our own subconscious creations without knowing it. How could we know it if we declared our own Thinking to be illusory and evil from the outset? That is exactly the pride and idolatry so cautioned against in scripture. It is no fluke that the Sun and the Light happen to be the pervasive, cross-cultural, trans-temporal symbols for thinking, knowledge, and understanding.

"You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Your light must shine before people in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven."

[Not my account]

(B)
Need to explain why this is not a version of solipsism.

Asked and answered here.

My apologies for crediting you for the question when it was Ashvin who you were summarizing. I’ve updated the description, and I’ll make sure to include it in the subtitles.

[AshvinP]

(B)
Need to explain why this is not a version of solipsism.

Asked and answered here.

My apologies for crediting you for the question when it was Ashvin who you were summarizing. I’ve updated the description, and I’ll make sure to include it in the subtitles.

I'm just coming across this now, so pretty late to the party. But actually you had it right the first time - I didn't ask that solipsism question.