Mysteries of Human Nature - 4 views
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And those who continue in any of the numerous forms of spiritualism as the antithesis of materialism have to consider their own faith as in some sort a divine dispensation, and materialism as a divine infliction -- both, in the last resort, as a mystery
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Anthony Santagato on 22 Feb 12Helena Blavatsky postulated the idea of a middle ground between spiritualism and materialism each viewed polar opposites but in need of some sort of bridge. This aligns with the Buddhist Madhymaka school of thought supported by Naraguna taught a middle way between emptiness and the phenomenal realm of existence. Both had to be taken into account in order to reach enlightenment
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Human vision can be directed toward the horizon we call birth or toward the horizon we call death. In the one case there is the gradual extinction of the light of memory, in the other of the light of imagination. As to what is beyond these horizons the human being has only hearsay "whereon to stand." Out of this secondhand material the average man constructs or adopts the mental and moral position of either spiritualism or materialism. Either position is of necessity insecure because both deny the fundamental characteristic of human consciousness -- the desire or will to experience, to learn, to know for oneself.
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It seems as thought the spiritualists have shut down their capacities or faculties of the human mind whereas the materialists only the rational and phenomenal experience. I think Blavatsky is saying that wisdom is located in the mind and that a person wil need their empirical knowledge to access the realms that reside beyond the phenomenal and conventional reality
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So fixed is our concern with one or the other of these two poles or alternating phases of human existence that we are unable or unwilling to consider Self as distinct from them, but are absorbed in them far more than observant of them.
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never thought of it this way...this is the human experience condensed into simple duality of thinking and living and thinking or grappling with the experiences of living. Rising above both levels of being as in being totally aware of and monitoring our thinking is not natural or comfortable....then observing what drives our actions which of course is connected to the processes of the mind and visa versa also requires wisdom and training...
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THE great mysteries of Life and Death present to the materialist a question of survival which, on his own terms, can never be decided. For if death were actually the finality of all existence, there would be no means of ascertaining the fact. The philosophy of materialism is purely negative -- a reductio ad absurdum.