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And it was from a Hindu, Swami Satprakashananda with his Christmas talks on "Jesus Christ, the Son of God," that I received the strongest confirmation--by an outside examiner, as it were--of Jesus's divine nature." --
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Huston Smith |
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7a98455
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sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse, A difficult path is this--the poets declare!2 Science
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Huston Smith |
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6ab4be9
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A sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse, A difficult path is this--the poets declare!2 Science
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Huston Smith |
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III. Buddhism The Man Who Woke Up Buddhism begins with a man. In his later years, when India was afire with his message and kings themselves were bowing before him, people came to him even as they were to come to Jesus asking what he was.1 How many people have provoked this question--not "Who are you?" with respect to name, origin, or ancestry, but "What are you? What order of being do you belong to? What species do you represent?" Not Caes..
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Huston Smith |
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18a6b38
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And is it true? And is it true, This most tremendous tale of all... That God was Man in Palestine And lives today in Bread and Wine. (John Betjeman, Christman)
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Huston Smith |
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33c2783
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God has made different religions to suit different aspirations, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole-hearted devotion.
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Huston Smith |
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6518c5c
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For all we know, the larger part of the motive for trying to expand science is not self-serving; it is merely mistaken. The idealistic element in it is its desire to achieve in the understanding of man what science has achieved in the understanding of matter. Its mistake is in not seeing that the tools for the one are of strictly limited utility for the other, and that the practice of trying to see man as an object which the tools of scienc..
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Huston Smith |
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f17480f
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For "what the soul is to the body of man," Saint Augustine was to write, "that the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church."
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Huston Smith |
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I am become death, the shatterer of worlds; Waiting that hour that ripens to their doom. This
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Huston Smith |
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We need the courage as well as the inclination to consult, and profit from, the "wisdom traditions of mankind." --E.F. Schumacher In"
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Huston Smith |
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016bb53
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He renamed India's untouchables harijan, "God's people," and raised them to human stature. And in doing so he provided the nonviolent strategy as well as the inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s comparable civil rights movement in the United States. Gandhi"
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Huston Smith |
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You can find God in the world of everyday affairs as readily as anywhere.11
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Huston Smith |
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9f68baf
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Derived from the root s-l-m, which means primarily "peace" but in a secondary sense "surrender," its full connotation is "the peace that comes when one's life is surrendered to God." This makes Islam--together with Buddhism, from budh, awakening--one of the two religions that is named after the attribute it seeks to cultivate; in Islam's case, life's total surrender to God. Those who adhere to Islam are known as Muslims. Background"
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Huston Smith |
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0e5c2b1
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Everything I do for my private wellbeing adds another layer to my ego, and in thickening it insulates me more from God.
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Huston Smith |
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Conversely, every act done without thought for myself diminishes my self-centeredness until finally no barrier remains to separate me from the Divine.
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Huston Smith |
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ef6f6d8
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And Americans were--before the Vietnam War, before the Iraq wars--the darlings of everyone everywhere. On a second world trip a decade later, on which I took students for academic credit, the most treasured gift we could give was a John F. Kennedy half-dollar. There
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Huston Smith |
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be76d9a
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Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is the highest value.... He enters a battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if he were attending a funeral. (ch. 31) That
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Huston Smith |
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5cdeb1e
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A nation can assume that the phrase "under God" in its Pledge of Allegiance shows that its citizens believe in God when all it really shows is that they believe in believing in God."
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Huston Smith |
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118a6f1
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Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to how they connect, students are given no sense of the whole, if indeed their instructors think a seamless fabric of knowledge exists.
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Huston Smith |
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fed23eb
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The Infinite discloses itself, as much of itself as our finite minds can comprehend, by building the universal grammars of language and religion into our brains. We did not create those grammars; they were bequeathed to us.
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Huston Smith |
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The Transcendent was my morning meal, we had the Eternal at lunch, and I ate a slice of the Infinite at dinner.
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Huston Smith |
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He is admitting that he is trapped, which realization leads to his desperate cry that we have already quoted, "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 14:24). In whatever words it is the cry that every alcoholic has repeated. If there is to be a liberation, it will have to come from without, or better, from above: a higher power."
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Huston Smith |
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Religiously conceived, the human opportunity is to transform flashes of illumination into abiding light.
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Huston Smith |
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that there is no reason he should grieve. He will perhaps say it was too early for me to leave for the forest. But even if affection should prevent me from leaving my family just now of my own accord, in due course death would tear us apart, and in that we would have no say. Birds settle on a tree for a while, and then go their separate ways again. The meeting of all living beings must likewise inevitably end in their parting. This world pa..
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Huston Smith |
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518db15
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The only thing that is unqualifiedly good is extended vision, the enlargement of one's understanding of the ultimate nature of things.
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Huston Smith |
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b1bb923
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Just as a man carrying on his head a load of wood that has caught fire would go rushing to a pond to quench the flames, even so will the seeker of truth, scorched by the fires of life--birth, death, self-deluding futility--go rushing to a teacher wise to the ways of the things that matter most.
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Huston Smith |
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4714029
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Do not seek after truth. Merely cease to hold opinions.
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Huston Smith |
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There are worse kinds of infidelity than the sexual. I was living with one of the most interesting women in the world, and too often my attention was elsewhere.
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Huston Smith |
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After all our time living together, my identity is not self-contained: I am the way I am because she is the way she is. This "marriage of true minds" Shakespeare spoke of does not occur at the wedding nuptials but after sixty-five years of wedlock we may be getting there."
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Huston Smith |
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2477b4d
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Building upon this early conception of the Church, Christians came to think of it as having a double aspect. Insofar as it consists of Christ and the Holy Spirit dwelling in people and suffusing them with grace and love, it is perfect. Insofar as it consists of fallible human members, it always falls short of perfection.9 The worldly face of the Church is always open to criticism. But its mistakes, Christians hold, have been due to the huma..
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Huston Smith |
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I had not yet gotten around to the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson's Consilience. When I did read it, I discovered on page 286 that people follow religion because it is "easier" than empiricism. That struck a nerve, and provoked a response I shall be candid enough to report. Mr. Wilson: When you have endured an eight-day O-sesshin in a Zen monastery, sitting cross-legged and motionless for twelve hours a day and allowed only three and one-half ..
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Huston Smith |
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e8b2c15
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Religion arose out of celebration and its opposite, bereavement, both of which cry out for collective expression.
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Huston Smith |
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9a457b0
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We live in a fantastic century. I brush aside the incredible discoveries of science, and the razor's edge between doom and fulfillment onto which they have pushed us, to speak of the new situation among peoples. Lands across the planet have become our neighbors, China across the street, the Middle East at our back door. Young people with backpacks are everywhere, and those who remain at home are treated to an endless parade of books, docume..
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Huston Smith |
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349dfe6
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We should witness all things non-reactively, especially our moods and emotions, neither condemning some nor holding on to others.
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Huston Smith |
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9fcd5cf
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For what is a human being? A body? Certainly, but anything else? A personality that includes mind, memories, and propensities that have derived from unique trajectory of life experiences? This, too, but anything more? Some say no, but Hinduism disagrees. Underlying the human self and animating it is a reservoir of being that never dies, is never exhausted, and is unrestricted in consciousness and bliss. The infinite center of life, this hid..
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Huston Smith |
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604a4b5
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These are what people really want, and they want them infinitely. To state the full truth, then, we must say that what people really would like to have is infinite being, infinite knowledge, and infinite bliss. Moksha is the release from the finitude that restricts us from the limitless being, consciousness, and bliss we desire.
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Huston Smith |
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b14fa1f
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What if the interests of the self were expanded to the point of approximating a God's eye view of humanity? Seeing all things under the aspect of eternity would make one objective toward oneself, accepting failure as on a par with success in the stupendous human drama of yes and no, positive and negative, push and pull. Personal failure would be as small a cause for concerns as playing a loser in a summer theater performance. How could one ..
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Huston Smith |
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c2eff24
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We need to approach this question of being not only spatially, but also in terms of time. Our everyday experience provides a wedge for doing so. Strictly speaking, every moment of our lives is a dying; the I of that moment dies, never to be reborn. I endure through the moments-experiencing them, without being identical with any of them in it singularity. Hinduism carries this notion a step further. It posits an extensive self that lives suc..
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Huston Smith |
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c1ed5d9
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We have seen that psychology has accustomed us to the fact there is more to ourselves than we suspect. Like the eighteenth century European view of the earth, our minds have their own darkest Africas, their unmapped Borneos, their Amazonian basins. Their bulk continues to await exploration. Hinduism sees the mind's hidden continents as stretching to infinity. Infinite in being, infinite in awareness, there is nothing beyond them that remain..
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Huston Smith |
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c4a359b
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How can such a love for Being be engendered? The things for the world clamor for our affection so incessantly that it may be marveled that Being who can neither be seen nor heard can ever become their rival. Enter Hinduism's myths, her magnificent symbols, her several hundred images of God, her rituals that keep turning night and day like never ending prayer wheels. It is obtuse to confused Hinduism's images with idolatry, and their multipl..
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Huston Smith |
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d001d75
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All the basic principles of Bhakti yoga are richly exemplified in Christianity. From the Hindu point of view, Christianity is one great brilliantly lit highway toward God, not greater than other paths, but more clearly marked. On this path God is conceived differently than in jnana yoga, where the guiding image was of an infinite sea of being underlying the waves of our finite selves. This sea typified the all-pervading Self, which is a muc..
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Huston Smith |
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The bhakta's approach include repeating God's name, as in praying without ceasing "keep the name of the Lord spinning in the midst of all your activities." Washing or weaving, planting or shopping, imperceptibly but indelibly these verbal droplets of aspiration soak down into the subconscious, loading it with the divine."
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Huston Smith |
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8f0ec3e
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The last is the worship of God in innumerable forms. Each is a symbol that points to something beyond; and as none exhausts God's actual nature, the entire array is needed to complete the picture of God's aspects and manifestations. But though the representations point equally to God, it s advisable for each devotee to form a lifelong attachment to one, so only then can its meaning deepen and its full power become accessible. The ideal form..
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Huston Smith |
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c28eaff
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Raja yoga with asanas (poses and breathing) is a way of leading the inquirer to direct personal experience of the "beyond that is within." Its method is willed introversion, one of the classic implements of creative genius in any line of endeavor. Its intent is to drive the psychic energy of the self to its deepest part to activate the last continent of the true self"
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Huston Smith |