Friday, May 3, 2013

Trungpa: Naturalism & Polytheism

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"In meditation, you experience the precision of breath going in and out. You feel your breath: it is so good. You breathe out, breath dissolves: it is so sharp and good, it is so extraordinary that ordinary pre-occupations become superfluous. So meditation practice brings out the supernatural... You do not see ghosts or become telepathic, but your perceptions become super-natural, simply super-natural." .....http://www.glossary.shambhala.org

"Late in the 1970s, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche expressed his long-held desire to present the path of meditation in secular terms. He developed a program called Shambhala Training, based on a legendary enlightened kingdom known as Shambhala. During the 1980s, he increasingly turned his attention to the propagation of teachings that extended beyond the Buddhist canon.....".....www.shambhala.org .....http://www.scoop.it/t/kirikounotes

"Paganism (from Late Latin paganus, pāgus (“area outside of a city, countryside”) is a broad term typically pertaining to indigenous and historical polytheistic and non-theistic religious traditions.......pāgānus m (feminine pāgāna, neuter pāgānum)......http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism

"In a wider sense, it has been used as a label for any non-Abrahamic folk/ethnic religion. It was historically used as one of several pejorative Christian counterparts to "gentile" (גוי / נכרי) as used in the Hebrew Bible - comparable to "infidel" or "heretic". Modern ethnologists often avoid this broad usage in favour of more specific and less potentially offensive terms such as "polytheism", "shamanism", "pantheism", or "animism" when referring to traditional or historical faiths."....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism

".....ancient idolatry lingered on in the rural villages and hamlets after Christianity had been accepted in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire.....the closeness to nature of rural people, who may have been more resistant to the new ideas of Christianity than those who lived in major urban centers and were cut off from the cycles of nature and the forms of spirituality associated with them......Less than twenty years after the last vestiges of Paganism were crushed with great severity by the emperor Theodosius I, Rome was seized by Alaric in 410. This led to murmuring that the gods of Paganism had taken greater care of the city than that of the Christian God."......http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism

"Heathen is from Old English hæðen "not Christian or Jewish"....Both "pagan" and "heathen" have historically been used as a pejorative by adherents of monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam to indicate a disbeliever in their religion...The oldest Abrahamic religions are, in chronological order of founding, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Bahá'í Faith.".....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions

"Pagan Religions are characterized by the following traits:
Polytheism: Pagan religions recognise a plurality of divine beings, which may or may not be considered aspects of an underlying unity (the soft and hard polytheism distinction)
Nature-based: Pagan religions have a concept of the divinity of Nature, which they view as a manifestation of the divine, not as the "fallen" creation found in Dualistic cosmology.
Sacred feminine: Pagan religions recognize "the female divine principle", identified as "the Goddess" (as opposed to individual goddesses) besides or in place of the male divine principle as expressed in the Abrahamic God."........Pennick:A History of Pagan Europe (1995)

"Earth-centered religion is a system of religion based on the veneration of natural phenomena. It covers any religion that venerates the Earth, Nature, or fertility gods and goddesses, such as the various forms of goddess worship or matriarchal religion. Most Indigenous Indian religions can be included in Earth religion. Some find a connection between Earth-worship and the Gaia hypothesis. Earth religions are also formulated to allow one to utilize the knowledge of preserving the Earth."....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_religion

" Ancient Tibetan Bonpo Shamanism.....The shaman's religion is a pagan religion of nature where the human being is seen as a part of nature and not as something existing in opposition to it. The purpose that is taught here is to live in harmony with the natural environment on a very personal and intimate level, as did early humanity generally in the days before our now omnipresent urban-industrial civilization spread across the face of the earth like a corrosive cancer......The shaman was the first of all humans to speak with and walk with the Gods.....This ancient Tibetan shamanism and animism, the pre-Buddhist spiritual and religious culture of Tibet, was known as Bon, and a practitioner of these shamanic techniques of ecstasy and ritual magic, the methods of working with energy, was known as a Bonpo. ..... the word Bonpo meant someone who invoked the gods and summoned the spirits. Thus a Bonpo was an expert in the use of mantra and magical evocation. Mantra or ngak (sngags) is sound and sound is energy." .... 1989 by John Myrdhin Reynolds...Practice of Dzogchen in the Zhang-zhung Tradition of Tibet

"Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior and Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala —explore the vision of an ancient legendary kingdom in Central Asia that is viewed as a model for enlightened society and as the ground of wakefulness and sanity that exists as a potential within every human being."....The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa

"The famous Buddhistic traveller Alexandra David-Neel writes in 'Les Nouvelles Littéraires', 1954, p.1 that Shambhala - is to be found at Afghanistan - near or at the city of Balkh.

Abraham had grown up in a pagan land. Even his family were pagans, worshipers of many gods. "And Joshua said to all the people, 'Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, 'From ancient times your fathers lived beyond the River, namely, Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, and they served other gods.'" (Joshua 24:2). .....at age 28 Abraham confronted Terah, and Terah admitted to Abraham that he was right but pleaded with him not to voice his disapproval of idolatry lest they be killed. At age 60, Abraham actually burned down a pagan shrine before leaving Ur......

"In discussing pilgrimage places in the Hindu tradition, it is important to say a few words about the number and diversity of deities in Hinduism and about the iconic and aniconic forms in which those deities are found. The personification of the mysterious forces of the universe into the anthropomorphic deities of the Hindu tradition involves both a convergence into certain supreme deities (the main three deities today are the gods Shiva and Vishnu and the goddess Shakti) and a splintering into a myriad of lesser deities. Certain writers call this polytheism, but the term is inaccurate in this case. No Hindu seriously believes in the multiplicity of gods but rather is aware that each of the many gods and goddesses are merely aspects of the One God (who is also the god of all other religions). The majority of Hindus ally their beliefs with one or the other of the three cults, worshipping Shiva, Vishnu, or Shakti as the highest principle. In doing so they do not deny the existence of the other two deities but regard them as complementary, though minor, expressions of the same divine power. Hinduism is thus, in its essence, monotheistic; a Hindu's worship of a particular personal deity is always done with the awareness that all deities are simply representations of one unconditioned, transcendental, supreme existence, known as Brahman. Each of the greater and lesser deities is understood as a sort of window or lens through which the whole of reality may be glimpsed.".....http://sacredsites.com/asia/india/pilgrimage_places.html

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John Hopkins.....Northern New Mexico….May 2013

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