🤔 Metaphysics vs. Religion consideration 🤔

Hey! How you doing there? It's been a crazy busy week last week. I actually like making videos about stuff that no one else is discussing, especially if it's an important topic. I first have to start off by saying that what anybody believes is none of my concern and, you know, not to be blunt, but I mean I frankly don't care and it's certainly none of my business. Beliefs, unfortunately, are the reason why there's so much strife and conflict in the world because people think that they are their beliefs. I've said this over and over again. I made specific videos about it. It's like, I believe! What do you believe? Well, you're my enemy now. You know, brother against brother, literally, for example. People identify themselves as their beliefs. This video is not about beliefs, however. This is about religion and, of course, that's kind of a vague term and I actually am not. And, by the way, please, I've had this thrown at me a few times where people have no idea who I am and, of course, why would they? They've not met me or anything. Whatever you do, please don't ever call me an atheist. Yeah, I'm not one of those. I'm the furthest thing from that. Names and appellations don't really mean anything and, if ever anything, you say I'm a Neoplatonic Platonist, but that doesn't mean anything either. This monistic metaphysics, specifically, is to be a metaphysician or Sophia Perennis. You can look up Sophia Perennis online. It's not a group or an entity. It's actual conviction regarding the truth and absolute truth relative to the good or the one, i.e. the Agathon. It doesn't matter. Brahman. It doesn't matter what language you use. There's a passage, and I forget who said it. It's been repeated many times, that religions divide and spirituality unites people. Of course, I kind of despise the word spirituality, but I can actually say that I'm an expert on this topic as it not regarding Christianity, but I know it's exactly the same in Christianity. You have the Protestants not really debating with the Catholics. It's like, oh, you're ultimately all a bunch of Christians, and yet they'll really, in many instances, they'll have nothing to do with each other. You can find countless examples of this in different religions. You know it. I don't need to mention their names. We all know exactly who they are, but in a specific one, I'm going to talk about a pie piece of a specific one, and that would be Buddhism. The word Buddhism doesn't mean anything. That's a word only created a few centuries ago. Originally, so-called Buddhism was just nothing other than a neo-sarmonic movement of monistic metaphysics. In the ancient Pali, it says Gautama is a teacher of Advayavada, which is just a Pali word for the Sanskrit word Advaita, as in Advaita Vedanta. For example, in the case of Upadisha Sahasra in the Veda Churamuni, composed by Sri Sankaracharya, the founder of Advaita Vedanta. It's nothing new. There's nothing new underneath the sun. Even in Gautama's time, circa 600 BCE, things have become completely corrupted, completely ritualistic. You have a bunch of nonsense going on where nobody was interested in understanding the truth of the heart of the matter. So it was not anything new. But I wanted to talk about that piece regarding that. Specifically, too, if you go to a bookstore, and I've said this for decades now, that if it's trash, it keeps getting reprinted, and if it's really, really good stuff, it goes out of print immediately, and it's impossible to find, or it's insanely rare and expensive. If not one, then both, or you have to go to the university library to be able to find it. People are not interested in the good stuff. I mean, they say that they are, and they truly are by their nature, but they read all this stuff that is written by nominalists, academicians, and since I'm only gonna be talking about one slice of the pie regarding religion, specifically Buddhism, it applies to the entire pie, it doesn't matter which religion it is, that those yellow-robed guys running around Southeast Asia, and I'm not picking on them, specifically they're called Theravadins. They used to be called Sarvastivadins, and the term is Sarvastivada, literally Sarve Vastivada, literally means this is all there is, ism, meaning materialism. So the Europeans, specifically the British and the Germans, the Germans and the British, they actually had entourages that went there to find out, you know, what are the teachings, and of course, if you actually have, you know, a highly secularized, highly religious group of people, this is what this means, you know, you know, you don't read ancient Bible, this is what this word means, and this is, you know, they brought that back to England and the Germans, well there's this religion down there, Buddhism, there's yellow-robed guys, Theravadins, and this is the translation for these teachings, and of course, all interpreted through a commentarialist lens. We're talking about religion here, where a metaphysics, a true pure metaphysics, a genuine liberation ontology, which is metaphysics, not religion, i.e. a spiritual practice, a true Sophia Perennis, because the truth must be universal, it cannot be specific, there's no such thing as specific truth regarding metaphysics, it has to be universal truth, it cannot, well, that's the truth in that religion, but over here, this is a different truth, like no, the truth must be undivided, universal, it cannot be temporally specific, in other words, you know, and I'm not going to pick on any belief here, but you know, it's highly illogical, you know, until this great guru, the head of Badabing faith came along, everybody else was doomed to purgatory, but when he came along, then you had the opportunity to be saved, that would be a temporal liberation faith, I'm going to use the word faith instead of religion, it's completely illogical, I mean, liberation must be atemporal, and truth can never be specific, because this is not only factual, I mean, it's Occam's razor, and it's logic, and it's wisdom, you cannot have, you know, freedom, liberation, or heaven, whatever word people want to use, doesn't make any difference, that is specific and temporal, in other words, before the great guru, the great, you know, the great, great entity, yeah, came along, everybody was doomed, but when they came along, you had the opportunity to be saved, that's not me going after anybody, that's just me speaking as someone from Sophia Perennis, or the tradition of monistic metaphysics, vis-a-vis the Greeks and the Indians, and there's no such thing as Greek monistic metaphysics versus Indian metaphysics, there's different ways they talk about it, but nothing is known except to the modality of the knower, anyway, getting back to so-called Buddhism, they brought that back to Europe, and of course, it spread to America, but it was all an interpretation based upon a religious, an extremely skewed religious position, it does not reflect original Buddhism at all, people say, how do you explain, what's your most succinct way to explain Buddhism? First, I'm going to give you A.K. Kumaraswamy, Dr. A.K. Kumaraswamy, he wrote dozens of books, knew 27 languages, brilliant man, I was a friend of his son, Rama P. Kumaraswamy, he gave me the right soul of his father's works, he famously said, Buddhism is most famous today for everything it originally never taught, and to be more succinct than that, my own analogy is that, to say what modern Buddhism is, 99% of it, is that you imagine a Christian that has never read the Bible, never wants to read the Bible, is utterly resistant to reading the Bible, and doesn't believe in Jesus, it's like, what? What? Yeah, just imagine a Christian, which of course is really impossible, will never read the Bible, never wants to read the Bible, and gives no credence whatsoever, that's what Western, actually most of it is, the Atman denying, soul denying, nihilism, which is completely unoriginal to Buddhism, completely, it's antithetical to doctrine, it's antithetical to common sense, it is completely unreflective of the original article, I've had thousands of people over the decades telling me, it's like, you know, I was completely repulsed, something deep within my core, I've literally had this said to me thousands of time over the decades, completely repulsed when I read, you know, like a Wikipedia article, it's usually like, or I picked up a, and I won't mention the authors of these books, but they're in every little, filthy little bookstore, these little paperback books, written by these people that are superficially peaceful, you know, they wear robes, and they go around, you know exactly who I'm talking about, and I say, they wrote that Buddhism is a soul denying, moral philosophy of, you know, be good to your neighbor, pet your dog, and you know, don't do anything bad, which of course is conducive to what is good, I'm not advocating anybody do anything bad, obviously, but that's not what it is at all. It's like, well, how would you know? It's like, well, if we're gonna have a discussion about Buddhism, we actually have to talk about what it did and did not teach, barring a time machine, the only pre-sectarian corpus of Buddhism specifically is the Pali Nikayas, Digha Nikaya, Majjhima Nikaya, Angotara Nikaya, Samyutta Nikaya, Kodaka Nikaya, and specifically the oldest sections thereof, like the first book of the Samyutta Nikaya, the Sagatvaga Pali, Udana, Iribhutaka, Suranapada, and I spent 24 plus years translating ancient Pali. It's an ancient dead language, and it's really fascinating because we have a dream in ancient Pali. It's been a dead language now for thousands of years, that's always fascinating. I won't get into that though. And nobody has time for that. What they do is they go to the bookstores, they read these books which are religions, and like I said, I'm talking about a wedge of religion here, just Buddhism, but it's reflected all throughout the entire pie of the countless wedges of various other religions. And people are stuck in their little beliefs, but I don't care what anybody believes, I'm only interested in facts, logic, and wisdom, what necessitated we must follow, which follows Ockham's razor, which is never a specific truth, because in metaphysics there can be no specific truth. It must be universal truth, or it's not truth at all. And it cannot be temporal. You know, before Grandmaster Bada Bing came along, everybody was doomed to purgatory. Well, that's completely insane. Well, you know, when he came along, you're saved. Well, okay, if you want to believe that, that's fine, I don't care what anybody believes, but that's completely absurd. I mean, it's just, it's just like wackadoodle crazies. Like, how, what level of crazy is that? I got a, I got a way to express that level of crazy. It's this kind of crazy. It's that kind of craziness. It's, it's insane. Here's another fact. Dr. A.K. Kumaraswamy, I don't mean to keep talking about him, he knew 27 languages. Like me, he spent decades delving in, didn't read commentarial trash. He knew what it said. Didn't read this commentarial belief-based filth written by these figureheads. We have a cult of personality, of course, when we start reading that stuff and believing what these commentators say. It's like, why don't I go to the original source? They all said the same thing. All of these little books on the bookshelf, and they had the same issues in the early 1900s, literally. Caroline Augustus Foley Rees-Davids, co-founder of the Polytech Society, and I used to be a member of the Polytech Society, say, she, and this is in the early 1900s, this is when Buddhism in the West, and it had been corrupted before that in England and in Germany, because they brought that stuff back. The religious muck. The religious, you know, muck. They brought that. She called these miserable little books on Buddhism. She was the most prolific, and still is today, the most prolific Pali translator who ever lived. Brilliant woman. Her books on the Wayfarer. Her books are impossible to find. Thank God I digitized them. Yes. Her three-volume set, The Wayfarer Words on Buddhism. Another great book on genuine Buddhism, which is incredibly impossible to find. Actually, it's been reprinted now. Used to be impossible there for a long time. It's George Grimm, G-R-I-M-M, called Doctrine of the Buddha. Brilliant book. Accurate, logical. It's based in doctrine. It's based on what things actually teach. We're talking about genuine metaphysics. We're talking about Sophia Perennis. We're talking about, and I hate to use the word spirituality, but something that is diametrically opposed to the belief systems of conventional dogma of religion. We're talking about a universal truth that is atemporal. It must be atemporal, and it must be universal. It cannot be a specific truth in metaphysics. A specific truth in metaphysics is like talking about dehydrated water. It doesn't exist. It can't exist. It's completely illogical. A little passage here from Kumaraswamy, and he's said this many countless thousands of times in his various writings over time. He's talking about bad commentarial books, religious books written about Buddhism. He said, And he's accurate about that. Also, this notion of Hinduism. I see this word. It's completely meaningless, and when I've talked about this in other videos, many, many, many Indians have said, you're completely right, man. You're the first American or Westerner that has mentioned this fact. There's no such thing as a religion of Hinduism. People call Hinduism, and I'm going to give you a couple of quotes here. There's no such thing as a religion of Hinduism. There's a Dvaravidanta, Advaravidanta, Sanatana Dharma, the followers of the Gita, on and on and on. There's all these different things called Hinduism. There's no such thing as a religion of Hinduism. Let's get to an actual citation here. Hinduism has never prepared a body of canonical literature or a common prayer book. It has never held a general council or convocation, never defined the relationship between laity and clergy, never regulated or the canonization of saints or their worship, never established a single center of religious life, never prescribed a set of training for its priests, encyclopedia of religion and ethics, page 712, volume 6. I don't know if anybody has concerns. Yeah, it refers to a people, by the way, the Hindu people that occupied a position near the river. It comes from the Indo-Arya word for the sea. Sindhu refers to these people that occupied a region of the Indus River. The word Hinduism has no connection to any specific religion at all but a people in an area. From the point of view of religion, the Vedic literature divides itself into two parts, the Rig Veda. I wanted to get into that stuff. We're talking about religion. I have no interest in religious texts per se because they are completely attached to belief systems. And these belief systems, by their own very definition, every one of these religions are temporal, which metaphysics cannot apply. Sophia Perennis, metaphysics can never apply to anything that has a temporal start. Before the great guru, Bada Binkh, came along, everybody was doomed. Completely impossible. And they all believe in a specific, everybody else is going to Hades, but we're going to heaven. It cannot be a specific truth, nor can there be a temporal truth. And these are two of, and there are five primary earmarks of religion that are part of religions. I have no part of any of that. I want nothing to do with the religions and belief systems. What about what you believe? What I believe is also too irrelevant. I'm interested in facts, logic, and wisdom. And it is a materialist position, of course, that metaphysics is somehow opposed to physics. And that's completely ludicrous. I study a field theory in physics as much as I've studied metaphysics. And to think that physics is one thing and metaphysics is another is as stupid as saying that this side of the rock is something totally different than this side of the rock, because we're talking about the stone ultimately. In absolute truth, there could be no distinction between physics and metaphysics. We're looking at ontology versus empirical physics or physical things. We're talking about the existential universe versus the ontological transcendent, non-empirical universe, or specifically what the Greeks called the cosmos, the mythos, the noetic cosmos, and the cosmos, the ethos, the forms, and matter, gross matter, mass, magnitude, phenomena. Whereas in the universe, of course, phenomena and what precedes phenomena, that being noumena, which of course is the realm of metaphysics, of which the Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists, Iamblichus, Proclus, Numenius, Sirianus, Plotinus, Demetius, on and on, talked about and expounded about at great length. And that's the only thing I'm interested in. What you're interested in is, of course, your own proclivity. I have no interest, by the way, that's also one of the earmarks of any belief system, is you want to sway people or you want to browbeat them. Now, I've been accused, and rightly so, of browbeating ignorant nonsense, but that doesn't mean I care about demeaning anybody's beliefs. What does somebody believe in my business? It makes them happy. Who cares? It can be completely illogical, completely ignorant. Why do I care? People are always going after other people for what they believe. It's none of my business. I don't care. It doesn't affect me. You are not affected by what other persons believe or don't believe, because belief is not who you are. Nobody is their belief. Beliefs. People always think that. It's like, you attacked me. It's like, no, you said something completely ignorant, and I pointed out facts, logic, and wisdom, that what you said was illogical and nonsensical. You made a silly claim for which you have no evidence, and you don't have to have objective evidence, and there's never any objective evidence for the discussion of metaphysics, but it must follow necessitatively that it be logical and wise and point towards the good. If it doesn't point towards the good, then it is not metaphysics. It is materialism and evil. There's only two actual beliefs in the world. There is that which points towards the good, and that which points towards evil and materialism. Of course, this is nothing other than the conjugate geometry of the entire universe, like the magnetic and the dielectric. That is ultimately all there is. That which points towards the good, and that which points towards evil and materialism and phenomena, and the fascination with material and phenomena. Because I was asked this question before, and people said, what about which religion? I don't care. Whatever you do, don't call me an atheist, though. A true atheist, by the way, is a metaphysical atheist. A metaphysical atheist only believes in phenomena. They are, by definition, anatomists. It is a religion. An atheist will profusely deny this fact, but it is, by every definition, a hard, fast religion. It has a belief system, and they postulate radically absurd, illogical things, such as spontaneous generation of energy or matter. Or spontaneous, well, it took billions of years. The crazy idea, it's like pointing out the splinter in someone else's eye, but you can't see the log on your own. They'll point out some of the crazy religious absurdities, but they themselves will postulate, oh, where did anything come from? Nihilex nihilo. They can't define energy. They can't define where they came from. It's the one miracle that they pray for the most. Atheists do, if you get, you nail them down, and you can hardly ever nail them down, because they're sophists. It's like nailing down jello. They actually pray for, not literally, but they pray for spontaneous generation of everything. It's like, well, they say, well, there's a Big Bang. It's like, oh, okay, the Big Bang of what? Of course, there is no Big Bang. Big Bang, by the way, which is really funny, the Big Bang, which is a mental creation by a Catholic priest, look it up, is the very same thing espoused by the atheists, who would never, ever agree with anything a priest, much less a Catholic, or any Christian would say. It's very, very funny, honestly. They will postulate nihilex nihilo. From naught came everything. It's like, you ultimately must get back to a foundation. Where did things come from? They don't believe in anything other than materiality. It's like, where did that come from? Energy, and the Big Bang. Well, where did that come from? Nihilex nihilo. From naught comes naught. They pray for the great miracle of everything coming from nothing, which is impossible. They will point out everybody else's absurdities, which 99% of the time is accurate, what they say. That's crazy. That's crazy. It's like, well, you're right, but let's look at something way more crazy. Way more crazy is nihilex nihilo. Atheism is a religion. That's another reason, because when we say atheism, people think they're diametrically opposed, too, by the way. Not that I'm trying to go after atheism here. But atheism and religion are the exact same thing. They're illogical, absurd, temporal, specific truth belief systems, which are based upon abstractions, absurdities, hyperbolic rationalizations, concepts, and ideas, which are illogical. You can't nail them down, because a true atheist, by the way, you can look this up, is a metaphysical atheist. Look up metaphysical atheism, which means that they absolutely assert that there's nothing other than phenomena. There's a radio, but no signal. A sock puppet, but no hand underneath it. So please, whatever you do, don't ever call me an atheist. Whatever you do, please don't do that, because that's just another religion. People think it isn't. They say, well, atheism is an anti-religion. It's actually the religion of anti-religion. But it itself postulates absurdities. And no one ever talks about this. It itself, by its very definition, postulates radical absurdities, which are astronomically impossible. And they believe in spontaneous... Actually, they'll keep transplanting it. That's the other trick that atheists love. They'll say, where did life come from? Well, transpermia. It's probably some microbes hitchhiked a ride from planet X to planet Earth, and that's where life came from. It's like, okay, we could run with that for a little while. Then we actually have to go back to planet X. It's this type of regression. It's a sophistic methodology to decline answering the question that they could never answer. Also, too, they believe given enough random phenomena over time, we'll produce complexity and beauty in nature. Kind of like if you put 100 monkeys in a room with 1,000 typewriters, and they start pounding on the typewriters over 5 billion, 10 billion years. Eventually, if you give enough monkeys enough billions of years, they will eventually, on their pounding on the keyboard, produce a 12-volume set of perfect Shakespearean literature. You know and I know that that is completely impossible. You give those monkeys all the typewriters in the world. They have a billion monkeys and a billion typewriters. Ain't never going to produce a 12-volume set of Shakespearean literature. It ain't ever going to happen. I find it peculiar and odd that they'll actually point out everybody else's absurdities, but they can't see their own gigantic log of absurdity in their own eye. Not that I meant to actually go after atheism, and I wasn't. I was just pointing out facts about the stuff that they espouse. This is not any going after religion or religious beliefs, because once again, I don't care what anybody believes. It's none of my business. I just don't care. It doesn't affect me. What other people espouse, I don't try to convert anybody into anything. I will debate them. That doesn't mean I'm trying to get them to change their mind about anything. It's wonderful that you believe that, but it makes no sense. It doesn't follow. There can be no specific truth, and there can be no temporal truth. Those are diametrically opposed to metaphysics, both in whole and in part. That is why I have nothing to do with religious systems of any kind, ever. Buddhism is exactly like that today. I was talking about one section of the Pali of a religious belief, and Buddhism is exactly like that. Everything Buddhism taught originally is completely opposite, almost entirely opposite to everything that these little books you find in the bookstores say. Buddhism was originally a liberation ontology based in wisdom, the transcendence thereof, disobjectification from the psychophysical self. It's the reason why the most repeated phrase in ancient Pali the body or the psychophysical is not the soul. Of course, it's not. Every Buddhist today, 99.999%, Buddhism taught that no soul is completely different than Hinduism. There's no such thing as Hinduism. There's no such thing, is it? No such thing. There's no such thing as a religion of Hinduism. It doesn't exist. I've had thousands of Indians say, man, I never can believe I heard a Westerner say that. You're so right, man. Westerners don't understand anything. I'm like, well, thank you. That gets me back to the original point. How do you define a Buddhist? Well, in the general sense, it'd be like a Christian that's never read the Bible, never wants to read the Bible, and doesn't believe in Jesus. It's like, what? That doesn't make any sense. Exactly right. It doesn't make any sense. Original Buddhism never denied the soul, and it was not about morality, because when you reach the other shore, the boat is of no use anymore, right? There is what is conducive to liberation, but conduct has nothing to do with liberation other than being conducive to it. Oh, the path is conduct and being a good person. No, it's not. It's about wisdom and transcendence through disobjectification, the growth of wisdom, and no longer identifying with the false self, i.e. the existential self, because that is the root of suffering. That root, of course, is the primordial attribute of avidya, i.e. agnosis, which of course is number one in paticca-samupada, if you know what paticca-samupada is. Translated incorrectly is dependent origination, but we'll just go with dependent origination. Ignorance of what, by what, and due to what is a real question, and nobody ever asks themselves that question. Number one is avidya. Geez. We're not talking about conventional, worldly ignorance. We're talking about transcendent ignorance, and it doesn't really mean ignorance. It literally means the extrinsic attribute of the absolute, like light and illumination. Light would be the absolute, and illumination, which is the attribute of light to go forth, would be synonymous with avidya or agnosis. Anyway, I hope you like this video. I hope it sheds some answers on a couple things, because nobody else in any video is talking about this stuff, basically because they're clueless about it. Maybe you just don't want to know. People just don't want to know about that stuff, but you'll never read these in little miserable books that you see in the philosophy section of a bookstore. It's just, the good stuff never gets reprinted. The only thing that keeps being reprinted and being written is garbage. This is why, over the decades, I've had thousands and thousands of people say, oh my god, thank you, I had no idea original Buddhism was so, you know, so logical, so pure, a genuine liberation ontology. I just thought it was a soul-denying nihilism of morality. I was like, I know! If you go to any Google website or any silly little book you find in the bookstore, that's what Buddhism is portrayed as. It is, Buddhism is about being moral, you know, being pure. You know, it's a soul-denying nihilism. It's just like, nirvana is like being, you know, extinguished like a fart in the wind. It's like, ah, there's bliss. Oblivion! There's no such passage of any such thing. There's no soul-denying anything. There's only that which is not the soul. A, B, C, X, Y, Z is not the soul. That's not a denial of the soul. There is no soul. They would say there's no soul followers. There's no soul. Stop asking me. There's no such passage. So, anyway, thanks for watching.