Notes from a tattered old college textbook, part one.

I have a surviving college “textbook” from the early 1970s, now extremely tattered with many pages detached from the binding spine of the book.  It is Philosophies of India by Heinrich Zimmer, edited by Joseph Campbell and published by Princeton as part of the Bollingen Series.

It was Joseph Campbell who actually shaped the final product, based on Zimmer’s notes “for a course of lectures delivered at Columbia University in the spring of 1942…”  Since Campbell found that Zimmer’s notes (developed in his final years) on what would be the final chapters of this book, “The Way of the Bodhisattva, The Great Delight, and Tantra”, turned out to be “very sparse and only partially developed”,  Campbell had to make do with what he could find in the way of material on those subjects.

I will periodically post here my own notes as I re-read this book (in a sense getting into the way-back machine and dropping in on Dr. Bazemore’s classes at Humboldt State University during the early 1970s).

The book’s chapters are organized in three parts:  The Highest Good, The Philosophies of Time, and The Philosophies of Eternity.

The first part has two chapters, The Meeting of East and West and The Foundations of Indian Philosophy.  Each chapter is further divided into sections.

The Meeting of East and West begins with The Roar of Awakening and the opening paragraph curiously begins with a statement that perhaps was only beginning to really ring true during the time I was attending college:

We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ.  This is the real reason why we become both vexed and stimulated, uneasy yet interested, when confronted with the concepts and images of Oriental wisdom.  This crossing is one to which the people of all civilizations come in the typical course of the development of their capacity and requirement for religious experience, and India’s teachings force us to realize what its problems are.  But we cannot take the Indian solutions.  We must enter the new period our own way and solve its questions for ourselves, because through truth, the radiance of reality, is universally one and the same, it is mirrored variously according to the mediums in which it is reflected.  Truth appears differently in different lands and ages according to the living materials out of which its symbols are hewn.

So, with that I will begin my note taking.  The times then were certainly very different than they are nowadays, in so many ways, and even though now much of what was taught to so many of us who were then so young is now a very ingrained part of our culture (teachings and understandings from the so-called “eastern traditions”), I feel that it’s a useful practice this renewed “notetaking” in order to perhaps refresh the relevance the philosophies for our own time….now.

By the way, the reference to the “thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ” is largely a reference to the works of the Upanishads and then a little later the teachings of the Buddha.

Articles soon to be written.

~ A report on visiting Shree Maa and her ashram community on Valentine’s Day 1999, during their Shiva Ratri celebration.

~ A report on Darshans with Ammachi.

~ A report on experiences associated with “Adi Da Samraj” and some issues related to him and his community of devotees.

~ A review of The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts.

~ An examination of the life, work and teachings of Krishnamurti. 

All of the above persons were significant influences in my life.  In one way or another.

~ An examination of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and its primary “workbook” Get Out Of Your Mind and Into Your Life by UNR’s Steven Hayes.

~ Practices related life and “universal” energy/forces (such as kundalini yoga, chi kung, the meditation practice described in the ancient Chinese text The Secret of the Golden Flower and more).