[Donna]

Looks like this is really taking off. As follows (in chronological order):

-Donald (Roman Catholicism)
-Dagoth Ur (Islam)
-Paradigm (Anglo-Catholicism)
-Potemkin (Daoism-Mictlantecuhtli devotion)
-annatar1914 (Old Believer/Old Calendarist Orthodoxy)
-noemon (Old Calendarist Orthodox Hellenism)
-RhetoricThug (Mahayana Buddhism-Gnosticism-Eastern esotericism)

[RhetoricThug]

Yes, yes...

I'm glad we are gathering forces. It's too bad the Irregular Co-Masonic Lodge of PoFo didn't receive this much attention

[Dagoth Ur]

That's because we're all real Masons and we are here simply to confuse you Illuminated.

[annatar1914]

That's because we're all real Masons and we are here simply to confuse you Illuminated.

Are you being on the level, being square with us?

Lol, i'm a terrible punster when it comes to Masonry.

[Paradigm]

No secret handshake for you.

[annatar1914]

No secret handshake for you.

That's okay.

I just prefer the secrets. Not 'secrets' as in a hidden Arcanum, but that which lies hidden within our hearts, the "Nous".

[Andrea_Chenier]

Donald, I wasn't joking before! My spiritual believes have pretty much turned back to full Roman Catholicism by now. My politico-economic worldview stays marxist, though. I didn't openly admit it earlier because I feared SN-RF purges but since everyone is currently having religious turns, I may as well apply for this group

[fuser]

Good Job as SN-RF's spy, Andrea.

Now you must delete this pm.

[Andrea_Chenier]

I follow in the steps of our heroic comrade Ramón Mercader

[Donna]

@Andrea_Chenier: It wasn't necessary to worry about that. I am also a member of SN-RF (as well as Paradigm). As far as SN-RF goes, what's important is your opposition to organized reaction and liberal-capitalism, not your religious beliefs.

Updated list:

-Donald (Roman Catholicism)
-Dagoth Ur (Islam)
-Paradigm (Anglo-Catholicism)
-Potemkin (Daoism-Mictlantecuhtli devotion)
-annatar1914 (Old Believer/Old Calendarist Orthodoxy)
-noemon (Old Calendarist Orthodox Hellenism)
-RhetoricThug (Mahayana Buddhism-Gnosticism-Eastern esotericism)
-Andrea_Chenier (Roman Catholicism)

[RhetoricThug]

I'm very excited to talk about EGO with Potemkin... In secret, of course
Speaking thoroughly on the eternal now or Dao.

I'd also like to hear Catholicism's approach to self and being in relation to God or Universe.

We need to start up discussion

I'd like to thank Donald for being PoFo's spiritual leader. Thank you Donald! Our directive is an interesting one.

[annatar1914]

I'm very excited to talk about EGO with Potemkin... In secret, of course
Speaking thoroughly on the eternal now or Dao.

I'd also like to hear Catholicism's approach to self and being in relation to God or Universe.

We need to start up discussion

I'd like to thank Donald for being PoFo's spiritual leader. Thank you Donald! Our directive is an interesting one.

Here's something brief concerning the stance of Orthodoxy in relation to Anthropology;

Anthropology
Adam naming the animals in Paradise.



"Orthodox Christian anthropology teaches that man was created by God to worship him in communion with him, made in his image to attain to His likeness. All human beings are thus of infinite value, because they bear the indelible stamp of their Creator. All human beings are composed of both a soul and body, which are permanently part of human nature. Man was created sinless, but not perfected, and so though Adam was pure when he was created, he was created as a being of dynamic progress, capable of growing more and more like God.

At the fall of man, Adam and Eve not only sinned in violation of God's commandments, but their ontological state shifted. Their nature was not changed in itself, but the image of God in them became obscured by sin, which is an ontological separation from God. Fallen man is thus not totally depraved, but rather suffers from the disease of sin which renders holiness much more difficult to attain to.

All of mankind suffers from the effects of sin (death, sickness, and all evils), even if a particular individual may theoretically not have committed any personal sins. Guilt does not enter into Orthodox anthropology, since it is essentially a legal category and not directly relevant to the existential reality of man's sin illness. Thus, even if the term original sin is used in Orthodox theology, it is understood not as a transmitted guilt for Adam's sin, but rather as an inherited disease which may be cured in salvation, enabling the Christian thus to return to the dynamic path of growth in God's likeness."

And more detailed, an article from Orthodox Theologian Christos Yannaras, who also covers the RCC stance;

jbburnett.com/resources/yannaras/Yannaras_ess-hyp-pers-nrg.pdf

[annatar1914]

Started threads in the 'religion' section with three of the downloaded works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite therein.

Enjoy!

[Killborn]

I'm in.

Esoteric Apotheosis Christianity

[Donna]

Updated:

-Donald (Roman Catholicism)
-Dagoth Ur (Islam)
-Paradigm (Anglo-Catholicism)
-Potemkin (Daoism-Mictlantecuhtli devotion)
-annatar1914 (Old Believer/Old Calendarist Orthodoxy)
-noemon (Old Calendarist Orthodox Hellenism)
-RhetoricThug (Mahayana Buddhism-Gnosticism-Eastern esotericism)
-Andrea_Chenier (Roman Catholicism)
-Killborn (Esoteric Apotheosis Christianity)

[Political Interest]

This looks like some sort of gathering held in Moscow during the early 1990s...

[annatar1914]

This looks like some sort of gathering held in Moscow during the early 1990s...

Or 1890's.

This club is where the real politics behind the geopolitics will be discussed, I'm sure. Here, I'm posting some quotes I like from Vladimir Soloviev;


Vladimir S. Soloviev Vladimir S. Soloviev > Quotes

Vladimir S. Soloviev quotes
“Suicides also involuntarily prove that life has a meaning, for their despair is due to the fact that life does not fulfill their arbitrary and contradictory demands. These demands could only be fulfilled if life were devoid of meaning; the non-fulfillment proves that life has a meaning which these persons, owing to their irrationality, do not wish to know (instances: Romeo, Cleopatra).”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev

“Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value.”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, The Meaning of Love

“True spiritual love is not a feeble imitation and anticipation of death, but a triumph over death, not a separation of the immortal form from the mortal, of the eternal from the temporal, but a transfiguration of the mortal into the immortal, the acceptance of the temporal into the eternal. False spirituality is a denial of the flesh; true spirituality is the regeneration of the flesh, its salvation, its resurrection from the dead.”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, The Meaning of Love

“The central fact of biblical history, the birth of the Messiah, more than any other, presupposes the design of Providence in the selecting and uniting of successive producers, and the real, paramount interest of the biblical narratives is concentrated on the various and wondrous fates, by which are arranged the births and combinations of the 'fathers of God.' But in all this complicated system of means, having determined in the order of historical phenomena the birth of the Messiah, there was no room for love in the proper meaning of the word. Love is, of course, encountered in the Bible, but only as an independent fact and not as an instrument in the process of the genealogy of Christ. The sacred book does not say that Abram took Sarai to wife by force of an ardent love, and in any case Providence must have waited until this love had grown completely cool for the centenarian progenitors to produce a child of faith, not of love. Isaac married Rebekah not for love but in accordance with an earlier formed resolution and the design of his father. Jacob loved Rachel, but this love turned out to be unnecessary for the origin of the Messiah. He was indeed to be born of a son of Jacob - Judah - but the latter was the offspring, not of Rachel but of the unloved wife, Leah. For the production in the given generation of the ancestor of the Messiah, what was necessary was the union of Jacob precisely with Leah; but to attain this union Providence did not awaken in Jacob any powerful passion of love for the future mother of the 'father of God' - Judah. Not infringing the liberty of Jacob's heartfelt feeling, the higher power permitted him to love Rachel, but for his necessary union with Leah it made use of means of quite a different kind: the mercenary cunning of a third person - devoted to his own domestic and economic interests - Laban. Judah himself, for the production of the remote ancestors of the Messiah, besides his legitimate posterity, had in his old age to marry his daughter-in-law Tamar. Seeing that such a union was not at all in the natural order of things, and indeed could not take place under ordinary conditions, that end was attained by means of an extremely strange occurrence very seductive to superficial readers of the Bible. Nor in such an occurrence could there be any talk of love. It was not love which combined the priestly harlot Rahab with the Hebrew stranger; she yielded herself to him at first in the course of her profession, and afterwards the casual bond was strengthened by her faith in the power of the new God and in the desire for his patronage for herself and her family. It was not love which united David's great-grandfather, the aged Boaz, with the youthful Moabitess Ruth, and Solomon was begotten not from genuine, profound love, but only from the casual, sinful caprice of a sovereign who was growing old.”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, The Meaning of Love

“The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for ANOTHER the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very centre of our personal life. This is characteristic of every kind of love, but predominantly of sexual love; it is distinguished from other kinds of love by greater intensity, by a more engrossing character, and by the possibility of a more complete overall reciprocity. Only this love can lead to the real and indissoluble union of two lives into one; only of it do the words of Holy Writ say: 'They shall be one flesh,' i.e., shall become one real being.”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, The Meaning of Love



“There is only one power which can from within undermine egoism at the root, and really does undermine it, namely love, and chiefly sexual love. The falsehood and evil of egoism consists in the exclusive acknowledgement of absolute significance for oneself and in the denial of it for others. Reason shows us that this is unfounded and unjust, but simply by the facts love directly abrogates such an unjust relation, compelling us not by abstract consciousness, but by an internal emotion and the will of life to recognize for ourselves the absolute significance of another. Recognizing in love the truth of another, not abstractly, but essentially, transferring in deed the centre of our life beyond the limits of our empirical personality, we by so doing reveal and realize our own real truth, our own absolute significance, which consists just in our capacity to transcend the borders of our factual phenomenal being, in our capacity to live not only in ourselves, but also in another.”
― Vladimir S. Soloviev, The Meaning of Love



The intrinsic possibility, the basic condition of unity with Divinity is found thus in man himself — the Kingdom of God is within you [Lk 17:21]. But this possibility must pass over into reality, man must manifest, disclose the Kingdom of God concealed in him, for this he must combine the explicit effort of his free will with the covert action of Divine grace in him — the Kingdom of God is taken by force, and applied efforts take possession of it. Without these personal efforts the possibility will remain just a possibility, a token of future blessing is lost, the embryo of true life will die away and perish. Thus, the Kingdom of God, perfected in the eternal divine idea (‘in heaven’), potentially inherent in our nature, is necessarily at the same time something perfectible for us and through us. In this respect it is our undertaking, a task for actualization. This understand and this task cannot be confined to the isolated, individual existence of separate persons. Man is a social creature, and the loftiest undertaking of his life, the ultimate goal of his efforts lies not in his personal destiny, but in the social fortunes of all humanity.

– Vladimir Soloviev, “On Counterfeits,” in Freedom, Faith and Dogma. trans. Vladimir Wozniuk (Albany New York: SUNY, 2008), 150-1.



"As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure."

"But if the faith communicated by the Church to Christian humanity is a living faith, and if the grace of the sacraments is an effectual grace, the resultant union of the divine and the human cannot be limited to the special domain of religion, but must extend to all Man's common relationships and must regenerate and transform his social and political life."

Dear friend, do you not see
That whatever we look upon here
Is but reflection, merely a shadow,
Of what is invisible to our earthly eyes?

Dear friend, do you not know
That the jarring noises of the world
Are but an echo distorted
Of triumphant harmonies?

Dear friend, do you not sense
That in all the world is only
What one heart says to another
In silent greeting?
~ by Vladimir Soloviev

[Potemkin]

This looks like some sort of gathering held in Moscow during the early 1990s...

Yes. Yes it does, PI. Now speak no more of this.

[The Clockwork Rat]

I've started reading the bible, have considered going to church, have contemplated Daoism or some form of paganism, but simply do not find religion or spirituality in the esoteric. The experiences I have had that could be considered relatively close to spiritual have come from listening to music, sex, drugs, or daydreaming in the forest. I also experience something approaching a meditative state whilst practising the hyeung of Kuk Sool.

I don't know if this is sufficient, but I'd like to think you'd trust me not to be a dick.

[Goldberk]

Sad to see so many leftists going away from rational thought towards mysticism