This is a retrospective of week 32, 2024 (2024-08-05–2024-08-11).
I’ve started reading two books this week: Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by Charles Taylor, and Christ Way, Buddha Way: Jesus as Wisdom Teacher and a Zen Perspective on His Teachings by Tim Langdell.
Charles Taylor writes the following about his book Cosmic Connections:
[T]he book is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection; by “connection” I mean not just any mode of awareness of the surrounding world, but one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration. My hypothesis is that the desire for this connection is a human constant…
—Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
And what has also been different has been the name for what we seek connection to. “Cosmos” is an older word. Today people talk about our alienation from Nature, from the natural world, from “wilderness” (Thoreau’s “wildness”), from the environment which we have been treating as a mere instrument…
There is an important path to truth through the articulation of personal experience, of our emotions, which we explore through art, or poetry in the widest sense. In this search, imagination plays a crucial role.
—Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
This notion of expression connects up to a new ideal of…freedom, as full self-realization; this goes beyond the notion of negative freedom, freedom from… It also includes, while going beyond, the new understanding of freedom as autonomy…
Tim Langdell writes the following about Christ Way, Buddha Way (italics in the original text):
What the book is about…is looking at Christ’s teachings again as if for the first time and seeing that in many respects his teachings parallel the teachings of Buddha and his style of teaching resembles that of Zen masters.
—Tim Langdell, Christ Way, Buddha Way: Jesus as Wisdom Teacher and a Zen Perspective
This does not mean Jesus was “Buddhist” (although Mahayana Buddhist teachings had reached the Middle East by his time) but rather because what he taught is universal truth, we should not be surprised to find parallels with the Buddha’s teachings.
It has been said by leading scholars that quite possibly the single worst translation of any word in the entire Bible is the word metanoia. …
—Tim Langdell, Christ Way, Buddha Way: Jesus as Wisdom Teacher and a Zen Perspective
Metanoia is made up of two parts: “meta” which means above or beyond, and “noia” which means mind or thought. Literally, then, what Jesus was teaching was that in order to enter the spiritual state he called “Heaven” (or, “Heaven within you”) you must first go beyond thinking…
Or put even more simply, in order to enter Heaven—which Jesus makes clear is here and now in this moment—you must experience a spiritual awakening. Does this surprise you? Perhaps it should… Yet that is precisely what it is.
I’ve also seen a documentary about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He saw the larger emergence of the universe and reached beyond the theories of Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Henri Bergson.
I think he was trying to say we’ve lived in a world that we thought was static, unmoving… And all of a sudden, he realized, this is changing. This is moving. This is dynamic.
—Mary Evelyn Tucker, Forum on Religion & Ecology, Yale University
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin gave primacy to the evolution of consciousness with its capacity for love and free choice. He claimed that the universe ultimately is a spiritual universe, and that the evolution of consciousness utlimately bends towards a point in the deep future, which he called Omega.
This is one of the most intriguing things about Teilhard [de Chardin], Spirit-Matter, the phychic dimension of the material world. That matter is not dead. It’s not inanimate. Evolution is not purposeless or random, but it is inflused with Spirit.
—Mary Evelyn Tucker, Forum on Religion & Ecology, Yale University
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had the following to say about Love:
Love is the most univeral, most mysterious, and most awesome of all cosmic energies. Considered in its full biological reality, love, that is to say the attraction of being to being, is not peculiar to humans. It is a general property of all life. Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other, so that the world may come into being. This is no metaphor, and it is much more than poetry.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
For more quotes, visit https://www.teilhardproject.com/love/.
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