No Stupid Questions

Warning: religion, philosophy, nondualism and metaphysics are my trains. I wrote you a thesis before realizing what I had done. You're not going to hurt my feelings if you don't read the freaking book I just wrote. Lmao. Sowwy

I'm pretty new to TEC, to be honest. Grew up Baptist, but that wasn't a good fit for various reasons, and sort of just did my own thing for a long time. Ended up finding the Episcopals when I decided I wanted to try going to church again. Helluva difference, being in a liturgical tradition, and I like it a lot.

Re: Buddhism V advaita:

So, it's not so much about what one fills that the other lacks as it is about... Perspective? If multiple groups are all saying something similar, but with different focuses, intentions, inflections, verbage, et cetera, I think it's interesting to examine both, find their commonalities and differences, and try to understand the underlying message. Buddhism speaks of emptiness, Advaita of illusion. While Buddhism tells us there is no self, advaita says there is no self except the self, the singular Brahman. I'll be honest in that I am really new to Buddhism, and most of my advaita comes from Vivekananda and Ramakrishna and others labeled neoadvaita, but there is a lot of traditionalist thought and teaching in there, too. But I think, ultimately, they're saying very similar, if not the same, things, and that by allowing yourself to float a bit between them you get to understand them a bit more. Kind of like how if you learn Italian and Spanish and Romanian you might have a much easier time understanding some old Latin texts. **

Re: Kashmiri Shaivism:

If you're at all interested in nondualism you've got to check out Kashmiri Shaivism! Very cool tradition. It's a nondualism tradition, but with Shiva as the focus instead of Brahman. It's independent of Advaita, and IIRC significantly older. Like, potentially Indus Valley civilization old. Prevedic old. Though, obvious any living tradition has changed in that amount of time. There are several really good YouTubers that do advaita info (and if you're anywhere near NC then Swami Sarvapriyananda from the Vedanta Society of NYC is going to be in Raleigh in March, and I'm hopefully going to be there), but there's less info on Kashmiri Shaivism. There's the Kauai's Hindu Monastery also called Himalayan Academy, but I don't remember if they're specifically Kashmiri or not, but I do think they're ultimately nondualist, or qualified nondualists. I'll look around and find some resources if you're interested.

And yeah, Jainism is fascinating! Though so strict. I can't imagine being brought up in that tradition. I have Catholic Guilt by association, and I'm not even Catholic. Lol. I can't imagine what the idea of that strict an understanding of Karma would do to my psyche! Lmao

And I have actually just recently begun reading about Sikhism again! I love their ideas around universality of religions.

Are you at all familiar with Meister Eckhart? Turns out, there's a Christian nondualist tradition!

Sufism is another really interesting entry point into Abrahamic nondualism, too. Though it's a minority viewpoint even within Sufism, a minority trend in Islam, from what I understand. If you're interested in that Tawhid is a good keyword for search and Let's Talk Religion has an excellent video (or several) on Islamic nondualists and mysticism

I'm gonna stop writing there, because this is already a wall of text. Sorry!

**

I lied. Bit more on what I was saying about Buddhism and Advaita. I look at religion the same way I look at language. You have language families that share a common ancestor proto language, and we can see that with philosophical thought as well. Hell, it's often along the same lines. Indo-european languages are often spoken by groups of people that also had similar religious thought. There are deep similarities between Greek and Roman paganism and the Vedic gods, for instance, as well as with Norse paganism.

Above language families you have the more speculative language phylum, and so on it goes. I think that, ultimately, if you trace the root of a word back far enough, you often find it is present in some form in a proto language shared by seemingly disparate languages, and then working forward again you can find all of these cognates in other languages, and how this simple word in proto Germanic, or PIE is now present, but significantly different, in millions of people's lives.

I apply that same thinking to religion. We see similar concepts, myths, stories crop up in areas that, on the surface, have completely different religious structures. Hinduism and Judaism appear to be completely different, but Hinduism and Zoroastrianism influenced each other to a considerable degree (they even call each other's gods demons and demons gods. Deva/Deava, Asura/Ahura.). Zoroastrianism in turn influenced the crap out of the region, and that includes ancient yahwism and Judaism. There are parts of Leviticus that are almost identical to Zoroastrian texts. Judaism, and in turn Christianity, were also heavily influenced by Hellenistic Greek traditions (sometimes positively, by adopting things, sometimes negatively by making their rejection of them a staple of their faith). Nothing exists in a vacuum (on earth anyway. Lol), and there's so much influence on everything that, much like with language, there exists a sort of continuum of belief. Sure, there are definitely still languages, we need that mutual intelligibility to communicate, but from a really broad historical view, they're all basically connected. Isolates notwithstanding.

Jesus, I am so sorry for how long this comment is.