Some great videos on spiritual/psychological topics

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From the above video—the path to God is through Unknowing (the Cloud of Unknowing as I've heard it called in Christian mysticism). Because God is utterly beyond all knowing. You can't approach Him through any Names or Knowledge, only by negative means.

Well, this sounds a lot like "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao," and various statements about Buddhism and Emptiness.

It also sounds like a description of the unconscious or some aspect of it projected out into the Cosmos. Which by the way is the only way we can know anything in the unconscious—it can't be experienced directly, only through projection.

Here's some scientific evidence showing that meditation, prayer and faith create real, measurable changes in brain activity, which in turn create the religious experience:

• What religion does to your brain @ MedicalNewsToday

Some people seem to feel that this diminishes or obliterates religious claims altogether. But then, I subscribe to the idea that religion has always been internal (though experienced as external, as the contents of the unconscious always are), and that the divine is some aspect of the unconscious. Ergo it's no less real now, produced in a lab through magnetic stimulation, than it's ever been. Either way it's the transcendent experience and produces profound changes in a person's outlook and mentality and life. I've experienced what I believe to be small doses of it, and nobody can tell me they were just an illusion or that they weren't real (whatever that means). I think the only thing damaged by this new evidence is a very literalist/materialist set of ideas—ie the exoteric conception of religion.

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My approach to this is to offer somebody either a decent, properly tuned-up car, or a pile of car parts dumped in their driveway. All the ones needed to build the car. Plus a case of oil and a can of gas. Honestly, which would you rather have? I mean, according to the radical materialist's own argument, a car is just a bunch of parts. Personally I'll take the car, so I can just start it up and drive away. It's going to take him a long time to assemble all those parts properly so they actually function as a car. And that's if he can figure it all out—it's like the world's most impossible jigsaw puzzle. I doubt he'd be able to do it without highly specialized knowledge and the tools used in an automotive assembly line. And if he wants, I'll have all those dumped in his yard too.

Oh, and if we're talking a living thing, let's say an animal, not only do all the atoms need to be arranged into very specific molecules and those into tissues and those into the right organs, and those assembled properly to form a body, but there needs to be blood and bile and all kinds of other liquids, and it all needs to be healthy and functioning, and then it needs to also be alive and consciously aware. I'd like to see him take a pile of atoms and do all that.

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One of the really good ones. Well ok, they're all really good. A couple of years ago I watched a bunch of these, I don't remember how many now. And my computer no longer shows me which ones I've watched, it's apparently cleared that memory. Or it's because I was on a different computer then, I'm not sure. Maybe I kept track in Evernote of where I was. But it wouldn't be a terrible idea to watch the whole thing again. Pretty sure I made it up into the teens.

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Wow. This is perfect.

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This one is foundational. It's about the story of Buddha, his early origins, and how he tried many different approaches to life. Basically the ones represented by the various Greek philosophies of the classical Athenian period. There was hedonism, trying to reach happiness by sating all the hungers and lusts and just living to have fun. Then there was asceticism, the denial of all those same impulses. Neither one got him to wisdom or happiness. Then he met a Mendicant, a wise man, who has given up owning things and satisfying or denying the appetities. And now basically he moves into an Eastern version of Stoicism, but with a few differences.

This is where I encountered a lot of the ideas I discussed when I was posting so feverishly about the differences between the Masculine and the Feminine way—aka the male and female gaze. Females are human beings, males are human doings, they have to accomplish things to become a male. Always pursuing something—the prey animal, the carreer, later the career goals, the girlfriend, the wife, the better house, the better car, more money etc. I'm actually mixing a couple of different ideas together here, but they're very close to each other. I realized in that little mini-series of posts that the masculine way is genre fiction, where you need a highly active and assertive protagonist who squares off against opponents and must complete the hero's journey in order to accomplish his goals. And the feminine way, simply being, is literary fiction. No forward drive, no goals, just drifting or immersed in suspenstion. It's the difference between the Western approach to life and the Eastern—the Yang and the Yin.

He gives great tips in this video about how to approach the way of Being, to get in touch with the unconscious more, to open up to intuition, inspiration, the quiet inner voices, the inner muse, etc.

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