Community > Posts By > katsuninken
Topic:
Is yoga a religion?
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Yoga itself is one of the Vedic schools, but using the postures doesn't mean you walk that path. That would be like saying meditation makes you a Buddhist.
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I was also not aware that lack of omniscience somehow equated to stupidity. Does that mean that mortal beings are stupid?
I am a believer in divinity, and a follower of a "spiritual deity" as you call it. And I consider the divinity I follow to be quite real, yet nowhere in any of my scripture can I find anything requiring this force to be omniscient. Then again, nowhere in the texts is there a definition of what makes the divine divine, save belief. The secular definition of divine also does not say anything about omniscience, now that I've looked it up. Neither does the definition for god, in fact. To be honest, I'm not really sure what a divinity "knows" has anything to do with anything. Now what it understands, that's a different story. |
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Topic:
the individual religion
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Kaigen is a Shinto syncretic mysticism that draws heavily from Zen Buddhism. It translates to "opening of the eye" and gets its name from a Buddhist ceremony performed on Buddhist statues. It is often considered a subset of Shingon, specifically Shingi Shingon. I guess whether you consider it a subset of Shinto or of Zen depends on where your emphasis lies. To be honest, though, it doesn't really matter. Shinto and Zen have become so intertwined that there's no separating them. Zen incorporates kami, and Shinto incorporates bodhisattvas.
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Omniscience is a requirement to be a god? What a curious idea.
I thought that belief is what made a god. Does the divine think the divine is a god? Does it believe in a higher power? Is the divine an artist, compelled to create, then awed by what it wrought? |
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I hate Nietzsche, but:
"Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks - those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest." A divine being that knows neither birth nor death, beginning nor end, created creation out of curiosity. To know what it is to live, life was created. To know time, mortality was created. Creation is the divine force experiencing experience, seeking to learn and know itself through the myriads ways of existing. This was not done out of need, for there is no need for anything to exist. It was simply an experiment to answer the question, "what am I?" |
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Topic:
the individual religion
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I have long believed that it is simply not possible for any two people to share the same religion. Though I practice Kaigen, how I interpret Kaigen is going to be worlds different from anyone else that follows the same path, simply because they are not me. It might be very similar, but still not the same.
It's the same with Wiccans. Put 13 Wiccan in a room and ask each of them to describe their religion and you will get 14 different answers. Zen Buddhism, which is half of Kaigen, has a saying: "Should you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him." The reason for this is Zen knows that the Buddha is not the way. He can't be, because the only way is your own. And part of that way is to learn that everything you experience is illusion. It is simply perceptions warped by the three layers of physical being: physical sensation, the thinking mind, and separation (or looking through the lens of I). Because of the filters on perception we all have, no two beliefs can be alike. Should all of us here have [insert deity of choice] arrive and we all experience its presence, each of us will come away from the experience with something different, perhaps to the point that we all looked upon the same force but saw something completely different from each other's perception. But then again, that's the nature of religions rooted in mysticism. The questions are far more important than the answers. |
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