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Agent 888

@Agent888488

(Nick) Religious Studies PhD candidate (Rice University), MA History of Religions (University of Chicago), MA Eastern Classics (St. John’s College)

 Anchorage, AK
rice.academia.edu/NicholasCollins
Joined August 2012
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My most recent work on the relationship of memory to tantric mysticism and its contemporary relevance as evaluated through the lens of musical-autobiographical memory, presented a few weeks ago at this year's American Academy of Religion conference. academia.edu/63985103/The_Wh…
The White String: Musical Exegesis, Autobiographical Memory and Pratyabhijñā (Self-Recognition

The White String: Musical Exegesis, Autobiographical Memory and Pratyabhijñā (Self-Recognition

The function of music in relation to autobiographical memory is explored in terms of the Śaiva philosophy of Pratyabhijñā (self-recognition), and the aesthetic theory of one of its leading figures,...

academia.edu
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“For Lou Salome, the origin of (the idea of) God in the human imagination does not negate the objective existence of some form of godhead. The independent motion of the soul generates psychic realities which attain a corresponding species of objectivity.” -Polikoff
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"the commentary (Udana 98) states that the last phrase ('darkness is not found') is added in case someone should think nirvana was permanently dark; but there is no darkness in nirvana because no matter (rupa) exists there." -Steven Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities
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“This diaphaneity is all-encompassing: a transparency of space & time as well as of light, of matter & soul as wel as of life & death. ‘Everything that stems from spirit is transparent’ for the transparency of the spiritual pervades the whole & the whole is transparency” Gebser
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"contradictions, which bedevil thinking on the matter of immortality (and transcendence)... but which may be stilled by poetry through they prove an endless riddle for philosophical argument (stilled in the sense of calmed and also preserved)." -E. Griffiths
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“Metaphysics and mysticism are best reintegrated into one single area of research… the secret of metaphysics is mysticism.” -Peter Jones
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Aurobindo on intellectual work as a route to gnosis (jnana yoga):
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“Seeing self by self, a yogi, being satisfied in self, experiences a supreme & endless pleasure, graspable by the intelligence though it is beyond the senses; the yogi in it becomes fixed & stable, never moving away from the reality. Once gotten nothing is better.“ -Gita 6.20-22
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“If the interest in postmodernism is limited to a celebration of the fragmentation of the ‘grand narratives’ of post-enlightenment rationalism then, for all its intellectual excitement, it remains a profoundly parochial enterprise” -Homi Bhabha
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“It would be worthy of the age to print together the collected Scriptures or Sacred Writings of the several nations, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Persians, the Hebrews, & others, as the Scripture of mankind. This would be the Bible, or Book of Books.” -Thoreau
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“Aurobindo conceives of the world as chock full of joy. Living exclusively in a surface consciousness we are not privy to all that is going on in terms of delightful experience, but our everyday ups & downs are like aesthetic experience to the truest part of ourselves” -Phillips
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Henri Bergson (‘Two Sources of Morality and Religion’) on love and mysticism. Tbf the Hindu bhaktas got there first
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"An emotion is an affective stirring of the soul, but a surface agitation is one thing, an upheaval of the depths another. In one the oscillation of the parts without any displacement of the whole; in the other the whole is driven forward." -Henri Bergson
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“Thought is matter, but of a fine and not coarse substance.” -Kandinsky
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"Since the fruition is not attained immediately all at once, become adept in the visions step by step." -Only Child Tantra (Bstan pa bu gcig, 13th c.)
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"The repeated framing of these (psychoactive) substance-based techniques as 'trainings' indicates that their goal might be limited to producing liminal sensory perceptions & experiences... Nowhere is the final awakening of buddhahood promised, only liminal experiences" J. Gentry
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The divide between subjectivity & objectivity is erected on the foundation of inaccessibility - we can’t see others’ minds or experience their experience (or so we believe). But that would collapse if we found a way to measure or observe inner states, which we can partially do…
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…now through EEG and other technologies, though not to the extent that is needed to dissolve the divide. But if technology opens up inner experience to view outside of that person’s subjectivity, we would have to admit that inner experience is as objective as anything else.
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What is the difference between the objective existence of unobserved creatures living in the Mariana Trench and the thoughts that live inside human experience?
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“Archetypes may be real without being rigid, and enduring without being uniform in their expression.” -Jorge Ferrer
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Lack of experiential data vis-a-vis gnosis isn’t a counter argument, it’s the absence of data needed to make a counter argument. “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” (Niels Bohr)
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