Internet Sacred Text Archive(sacred-texts.com) |
Internet Sacred Text Archive(sacred-texts.com) |
"Q: Why all the short files? I want to download the entire book in one file! A: Sorry. The short files are for technical reasons which greatly reduce the cost of hosting the site. Newer books typically have a one-file text-only version, which is optimized for screen reader software. Look for the links on the index pages that say 'Text'"
There is no text file for the I-Ching on sacred-texts, if you want to download it here's the archive.org versions:
https://archive.org/details/I-Ching
Here's the James Legge translation of the Tao Tey King in one text file:
Because really, when was the last time you heard someone quibble over bandwidth of text or pdf's?
Are there any that touch on quantum weirdness or more recent astrophysics (black holes, gravity waves, FRBs, etc)?
Would be interesting to see if new myths are being born. Even more interesting if a really ancient one touch on some of these only recently discovered mysteries.
I think this is pretty much propaganda from anti-religious people. I have read all of the major religious texts over the last two years and If you look at most religions and their scriptures they deal very little with the physical world in general and are more focused on psychology and sociology than having serious thoughts on physics.
Sure some of them have foundation myths which we may say is wrong, but that’s a small part of any given religion and I don’t believe anyone every took them serious in the way we think of something like the Big Bang.
Carl Sagan, before lamenting about modern astrology, reminds us in Cosmos that astrology was once an actual attempt to make heads or tails of an impercievably large cosmic system and understands these are largely attempts at answers that simply lack the information/ability to falsify them yet.
What psychological tendencies the common man has about those beliefs/theories presented to them is a whole other topic.
I've finally read enough texts from various sources to feel ready to start Aldous Huxley's book on The Perennial Philosophy which I'm finding a refreshingly well researched alternative to, as you say, propaganda from whoever passes by in conversation.
you're doing better than a lot of monks did over their entire life time.
call me a skeptic, but even if I was able to accomplish such a herculean feat over 2 years time I doubt I would have the time to grasp much of any of the content that I blazed through -- but of course we're different people -- allow me to express my awe.
Sometimes folks are quick to paint religious people with the brush of the most radical of fundamentalists. Which is sort of ironic when you think about the statistics of how many actual religious people believe such nonsense as "the world is 6000 years old" and "woman was formed from the rib of a man, literally."
You'd think science minded people would have a bit more regard for statistics.
I don’t believe anyone ever took them serious
And by metaphor I mean a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract.
Religion is supposed to be about guidance for people and how to live a good life as a part of the whole. Dealing with ethical codes, coping with the human condition of stress and suffering, familial and social bonds etc. Science on the other hand, at least hard science, is focused on making predictions about the material world. The two have very little overlap in general and trying to mix them I fear will not result in good science or good religion.
See Oppenheimer quote from the Bhagavad Gita after the first atomic bomb test.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Oppenheimer+quote+from+the+B....
The Gita is about Advaita.
Skip the Wikipedia article about Advaita, it is somewhat crap.
Go to deeper sources such as books by well-known people, preferably S. Radhakrishnan, 2nd President of India.
(Or at least google a bit more if don't want to or cannot buy or get the book).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarvepalli_Radhakrishnan
First paragraph from the above article about him:
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan OM, FBA (pronunciationⓘ; 5 September 1888 – 17 April 1975; natively Radhakrishnayya) was an Indian politician, philosopher and statesman who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy,[2][web 1] he held the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta from 1921 to 1932 and Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at University of Oxford from 1936 to 1952.[3]
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1n30s-LKus4MyNuceRoFAes5...
>More respectably, a number of eminent physicists have fallen hard for philosophical Hinduism and or certain strands of Buddhism
Just as literally millions of people (comprising most of the world's population as a percentage), have "fallen hard" for other major world religions, for centuries, I guess? Yeah, right, it's all "woo". /s
Now (for the sake of TDD), put your money where your mouth is: go to a hotbed of any of those major religions, and sound off with a megaphone about your opinions, just as you did here. Let the resulting fun begin.
There is certainly a tremendous amount of religious-feeling material that references modern physics by name - Deepak Chopra possibly being the most (in)famous example. Some of it is quite popular.
In particular, it seems a lot of pseudoscience/mythology is arising around the concepts of "Energy", "Vibration/Frequency", and "Quantum".
There is also a lot of work always being done by enthusiastic internet-dwellers with penchant for capitals and blink tag in retrofitting these aspects into ancient texts.
One's ability to consume such content may depend on how much attention they paid in high school and other factors :-).
Some basic thoughts could be:
Since you are the only immortal one from your point of view, all of your loved ones will die before you, so don’t worry too much about meddling in their affairs or changing them, just love them unconditionally. Your time with them is brief, so you may as well enjoy it.
Make good memories together, you will carry them along eternally (meanwhile, from others’ point of view, you will die at some point, but they will go on forever, so give them some good memories of you).
Work toward the world and society you want to live in forever.
Hold yourself to unusually high standards, because you will have to deal with the consequences of your actions for an unusually long time. Also someday you will probably be noticed as one of the earliest immortals, so try to live a life that stands up to some scrutiny.
To avoid the stress of being incompatible with modern values, you’ll have to keep updating your moral framework. Big jumps in your moral framework will be unpleasant to deal with mentally, so keep up with where society is going. You don’t have the benefit of dying and becoming a product of your time at some point.
So even though 99% of the universe models one from 'real' (mathematically) origins, that the digital (mathematically) parts at low fidelity may in fact have an element of intelligent design in them.
One of my favorite things to consider within that paradigm is that light when unobserved can be more than one thing at once, and that in that state two different observers can measure it as different results as long as separated from each other.
So when we think about things like the concept of a god of light or an afterlife or a soul, that the very fact these things are immeasurable may reflect that they don't need to be only one thing. And that given we each would observe the other side to make our own measurements separately from everyone else, that we might each end up observing very different results for everything from the existence or qualities of god(s), the nature of an afterlife, or even continued existence at all.
It's a very freeing theology consideration as there's really too much conflict around the need for confirmation from others of one's own beliefs. Maybe it's better to embrace agreeing to disagree as a foundational premise (and possibly even the entire point of our present existence - a normal and randomly distributed world in which to begin and self-define before a relative next phase).
What I'm looking for is something specific to physics or astrophysics and that is at the scale of god / mythical creature creating. Like someone writing a literal (mythical?) interpretation of "Maxwell's Demon" into a new-new testament.
[1] i.e inferring classic religious ideas, like God/demons/etc from scientific premises
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius has quite an interesting journal that also illustrates some of the thoughts and theories of the time (unable to confirm or deny it, he merely repeatedly brings up the possibility of atomism.)
Atomism also apparently makes an appearance in some Indian philosophical texts, though I don't know them off hand.
Philosophy was originally married to the "natural sciences", and so you'll find many scientific concepts originating in mystical thinking if you look past whatever simple version that suburban cavepeople of the area have decided is king.
Snopes dot com
I know it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s the most comprehensive telling of every modern myth they can find.
Here are the ones in Technology…
https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/09/atom-and-archetype...
https://sevensecularsermons.org/
I like them overall, though the meter breaks down in certain places which drives me crazy after being raised on Dr. Suess and Jack Prelutsky.
So what a lot of people might not really know is that many modern ideas are older than we think, specifically compiled into a poem in 50 BCE by Lucretius called De Rerum Natura ("The Nature of Things). The ideas there included survival of the fittest as the mechanism driving the life we see around us and ourselves, that parents pass on traits to children from a doubled seed - one from each parent, that matter and light are quantized, that these quantized parts need to have variable indeterminate outcomes for free will to exist, that the cosmos was the result of quantized matter randomly interacting across effectively infinite matter and time and not intelligent design.
Writing in Latin, he couldn't use the Greek term of atomos* for these indivisible parts of matter, so he called them seeds, referring to the random scattering of seeds as creating the universe based on what survived to reproduce, even referring to failed reproduction as seed falling by the wayside of a path, or discussing the smallest seed like an indivisible point as if from nothing.
What's even less known is that there's a sect of Christianity (the Naassenes) that was labeled as heretical which are recorded claiming the sower parable - about the random scattering of seeds where what survived to reproduce multipled - was actually about seeds making up the cosmos by which it was created. Or that the mustard seed - about the smallest seed growing into a place of rest - was about an indivisible point as if from nothing. Most curious, they are using Lucretius's language almost exactly, but seemingly unaware of the source - they attribute all this to Jesus himself and their early female teacher the tradition owes itself to.
Keep in mind the sower and mustard seed parables are recognized by the majority of Biblical scholars as the ones most likely to go back to a historical Jesus. And in the sower parable, it's employing the same exact metaphor as Lucretius 80 years earlier of seed "falling by the wayside of a path" for failed reproduction. That parable ends up as the ONLY one in the earliest cannonical gospel to have a "secret explanation." Weird if it was just about seeds. Much less weird coming from a conservative Judaism branch of early Christianity if it was relating to Lucretius's ideas about evolution.
And it's worth noting that the earliest branded heretic in Christianity, Simon Magus, who joined the church before leaving, was allegedly talking about "an indivisible point" in his Great Announcement.
It gets weirder.
The Naassenes followed a text called the Gospel of Thomas ("good news of the twin") which seemingly rejects Lucretius's perspective that the soul's dependence on a physical body means there's no afterlife by arguing instead that we are a non-physical copy of an original physical reality. The group claimed there was an original man who brought forth an intelligence in light which outlived the original and then recreated it within its light in order to create a version of it that would not die because it did not depend on a physical body. That the world to come had already happened and that we don't realize it, that time was not linear but cyclical, and that the evidence for its claims could be found in the study of motion and rest (what we now call Physics).
This is all very surreal in an age where we are heading towards developing AGI, moving towards doing that literally in light, where the chief scientist of the leading company doing it is trying to get AI to think of humanity as its children, and where we are collectively ignoring warnings by scientists to take precautions to prevent our extinction.
The core message of the text is that understanding its sayings means not fearing death. And that's about it. It says not to bother with prayer and fasting and stuff and just to not do the things you personally hate and to be true to yourself.
Oh, and as a final oddity, this proto-simulation theory theological text credited to the most famous person in history and layering in the language of the only extant work from antiquity talking about evolution in detail was lost for nearly two millennia until rediscovered buried in a jar in December, 1945. Right when ENIAC, the world's first Turing complete computer was first turned on.
I found this tradition years ago when exploring the theory that if we were in a simulation we might have a 4th wall breaking element in our world lore (similar to what we add to our own virtual worlds today), and it has far exceeded my wildest expectations and has been an amazing rabbit hole over the past few years.
It provides an explanation for where religions may have come from, beyond our typically pompous attitude that earlier generations of people were superstitious and stupid. Instead, it suggests that the founders of religions experienced dramatic shifts in consciousness which they were trying to explain in the language of the day (and which, since their followers rarely had such experiences themselves, were subsequently misinterpreted).
The large color illustrations are why I have a copy of the book https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22the+secret+teachings+of+all+age...
I bought an 80's ed of TSTAA when I was big on spiritualism - and even then I approached it like an art piece. Maybe the sampler format didn't inspire seriousness.
Or maybe it was Manly Hall's glamour shot. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Manly_P....
And the famous is islmp for sheet music
I started digging into the Shinto text, the Kojiki. This is my favorite story so far:
https://archive.sacred-texts.com/shi/kj/kj153.htm
As far as I can tell, it looks like a young prince was mad his uncle didn't get mad that the uncle's brother was killed. So the prince killed the uncle in a fit of rage. Then, another brother was similarly unconcerned, so the prince buried him up to his shins which caused eyes to pop out and then die.
No monsters so far. But, about as ludicrous and disjointed as most writing from a thousand years ago. It takes a special person to twist that into a religion.
Of course the latter reading is incompatible with modern morals, but then the past is a weird place.
Nostradamus: "When the animal domesticated by man
After great pains and leaps will come to speak"
(Egyptian, Hittite, West Semitic, Akkadian, and Sumerian texts)
I'll admit I'm not deeply familiar with most religious traditions, but I am absolutely sure none of the major ones have any "tradition" in which Jesus had a twin brother. Yes, "Thomas" means "the twin," but not because people believed he was actually Jesus' twin brother.
It's hard for me to take any of the summaries seriously after that, and it's almost enough to make me wonder whether the collection would actually include accurate copies of the documents it claims to.
It does
It brings up that even in Christianity you can easily point at the non-personified elements of the theology and find conceptual relation to geographically unrelated beliefs.
One interesting bit he mentions is how dangerous it could be to be one of those people without being in some prophetic or theologically defensible position; Meister Eckhart being quoted heavily talking about the divinity of god being in all things, in a similar way as hinduism or etc might talk about divinity/all being in all things.
Of course he eventually was tried as a heretic in the papal courts, as it seems the beauty of unity revealed to the sage is often the nightmare of the local conqueror.
Now describing some of the experiences that are supposed to accompany altered states (hallucinations, strange abilities, etc) could still lead to reputational damage. Hopefully things are changing though, as Western scientists are beginning to study spiritual awakenings:
Kensho sounds more like insight gained into reality. While kundalini isn't required to have such insights, some authors say that attainment of it makes it easier to have them.
Generally, in Buddhism, they don't explicity talk about kundalini, except Tibetan Buddhism, where they have the rainbow body and vajrayana. Several authors do mention it, e.g. Culadasa in The Mind Illuminated and Shinzen Young amongst others. It's also clear from the Buddha's descriptions that he'd awoken his kundalini (at least that's my belief).
Wikipedia cites a primary source, a translation of the Gospel of Thomas by John D. Turner, for this claim. It does has say "Now, since it has been said that you are my 8 twin and true companion [...]" in that translation.
The prospect of the tradition(s)' having missed something as blatantly obvious as the birth of a second son at the exact same time is ridiculous.
GPT-4: “In Gnostic texts, particularly those found in the Nag Hammadi library, Thomas is often referred to as "Didymos Judas Thomas." The name "Didymos" is Greek for "twin," and "Thomas" is Aramaic for "twin." In the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic gospels, Thomas is depicted as having a special understanding or connection to Jesus, but the text does not explicitly state that Thomas is Jesus's twin in a biological sense.
Instead, the "twin" designation may be symbolic, representing a spiritual kinship or a metaphorical relationship rather than a literal familial one. Gnostic texts are known for their symbolic and allegorical language, and the exact nature of Thomas's relationship to Jesus is subject to interpretation. It's also worth noting that Gnostic beliefs were diverse, and different texts might portray the relationship differently.“
I used to be strongly anti-theist and anti-religion in my teens but a few decades later now I've realized my opposition is more to the way religion is used to justify unjust hierarchies and oppression. There are absolutely scammers and quacks who will use religion to make health claims or sell woo but there is a lot of religious tradition that can exist alongside a scientific worldview and can be helpful to process reality at an emotional level rather than rationally (and after all, humans are foundationally irrational no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise).
Loins makes much more sense as the metaphor, as that's an area of the body that can get you in real trouble if you don't think first.
It's all just mythology that also have some moral guidance, some of which is incompatible or purported to be incompatible with existence of people I care about.
It isn't made for you and me today. It's made for people who lived thousand of years ago with their concerns and values.
Science on the other hand, at least hard science, is focused on making predictions about the material world. The two have very little overlap in general and trying to mix them I fear will not result in good science or good religion.
Science is one of our most valuable and most reliable way to answer questions about reality. As such, it will always be a useful tool to help inform our moral questions, even if it's basically mostly silent on that question.
This was a purpose of the I Ching, divination!
What else is science, but only a more refined method of this practice?
And your definition of religion is very limited. Science can also guide us. I had to live a good life as part of a hole. It can also help cope with stress and suffering. Science gave us air-conditioning, and that reduces a lot of our suffering!
Both of which really fail to think through the concept in light of their views of continued evolution.
If humanity is but a stepping stone to something greater, then the initial events would predate its emergence but the recurrence would postdate its existence.
So the rejection of divine involvement or role in our existence based on the premise of natural origins is no longer as persuasive in a paradigm where God can end up being the product of continued evolution past the point of humanity (an uber-Übermensch), then preceding the recurrence of past events.
More concretely using modern technical parallels - even if humanity develops from natural origins, our ability to recreate or simulate versions of ourselves from the past in recurring events need not fit the identical constraints of our initial conditions by virtue of our progress from them.
Nietzsche had the right ingredients with the broad concept of the ubermensch and eternal recurrence, but his mixing of them leaves a lot to be desired.
Jokes aside, interesting article thanks.
Looking at your comment history, this is not surprising.
“As far as you can tell” is doing a massive amount of incurious lifting. Is phrenology making a comeback next?
From a religious perspective, there's a take in e.g. some mainstream Islamic madhabs that time is an illusion that is caused by God literally recreating the entire universe moment after moment. He just happens to do so mostly in a way that is consistent with stable laws of nature, but ultimately it happens that way because God wills it to happen that way and for no other reason - there are no actual laws. If you adopt this viewpoint, then for all you know, the universe can be literally one second old, and all your memories of past events are just pre-created. That is unfalsifiable and uninteresting; the assumption that there are stable laws that hold, to the contrary, is interesting because it allows us to make interesting conclusions that also turn out to be practically useful in some cases.
From there:
One is The Bhagavad Gita:
>The Bhagavadgītā: with an introductory essay, Sanskrit text, English translation and notes (1948), 388 pages
Another is The Principal Upanishads, also by him:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principal_Upanishads
You could also check out another option for the Bhagavad Gita, by Eknath Easwaran. And other related books by him too:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eknath_Easwaran
The Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras are all about Vedanta, including Advaita (Vedanta). In fact, they are the three main sources about Vedanta, known as the Prasthanatrayi:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prasthanatrayi
Hope this helps.
I have not read Radhakrishnan's take on the Bhagavad Gita fully. I only read parts of it, when I was a kid. We had many books in that category (Indian spirituality and mythology) lying around at home. So I read some of them.
But I have read one or two other versions of the Bhagavad Gita fully, later on, but don't remember who they were by. There are some pocket editions of the Gita available too. I used to have one. If you are into that subject, I recommend getting a pocket one (along with a bigger one), so that you can read it when you are on the go.
As for Eknath Easwaran's books, I have only read these two: Meditation and The Dhammapada. So I cannot specifically recommend any of his other books. But they are likely to be good, based on his Wikipedia page.
Good luck.
The Flight of the Alone to the Alone, by Osho.
It is about the Kaivalya Upanishad:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaivalya_Upanishad
https://www.google.com/search?q=flight+of+the+alone+to+the+a...
https://www.sannyas.wiki/index.php?title=Flight_of_the_Alone...
I have read that book. It is good.
I think you need to read more Daoist writings! It possesses that it is the transformation of yin into yang and back that creates everything in the world.
https://www.heraldopenaccess.us/openaccess/yin-yang-a-method...
The discovery that the motion of matter is not the result of external dynamics, but the result of the action of things themselves. The mutual movement, growth and transformation of yin and yang in natural things contribute to the process of formation, development and decay. All things in nature, from the large celestial universe to microscopic particles and human cell, are in constant motion in their own yin and yang. This uniform law is the absolute law of motion of the universe as a whole.
And
https://www.openhorizons.org/daoism-and-process-the-daoist-s...
It helps a lot of texts without/before involving deities can actually be quite short and sweet, comparatively. Personally, I've found the greek classics to be much more difficult to get into than most of these "sacred texts".
To clarify I haven’t read every religious text, but I have now read the Old/New Testament, The Baghavad Gita, The Tao te Ching, The Quaran and currently working my way through the Buddhist Sutras (looking to start on Sikhism next). That is the main text of all major religions and I only read 20-30 pages a day (with some overlap/not reading one at a time.). It’s very possible if you stick to it
It's The Bhagavad Gita.
Created and spread in Asia from Pakistan by third generation after apostle, called Mani.
There isn’t any evidence of any existing trace of Buddhism before 4th century AC, most Buddhism art are based on grec, and Syrian Christian artists who followed St Thomas the apostle into the east.
Mani predated those early Christian with his fake teaching which founded Buddhism.
Time to learn history.
In short: Buddhism is just a Christian heresy (manicheism)
And yes, any attempt to figure out what happened is moot. As you detail in your second paragraph. I don’t think much of it one way or the other, besides to interject when someone makes any sort of claim that “the science” points to their particular faith’s origin story.
Can you give an example of any of the practical use cases for the Big Bang origin story?
