/x/ - Paranormal/Schizo

Perhaps for many fans and students, the most difficult aspect of embracing Bruce Lee's philosophy comes from the seeming impossibility of reconciling his revolutionary ideas with what is often the perspective of a Christian. Much of what Lee said and preached seems to be in direct opposition to Christian theology. That is, until now.

With recent discoveries in the world of theological archaeology, a new image of Christianity is developing that bears an undeniable resemblance to Bruce Lee's philosophical school of thought.

These discoveries, perhaps the most profound development in Christianity since the Reformation, have rebooted a long-dead school of Christianity known as Gnosticism. The Gnostic School of Christian veneration was developed from apostolic teachings concurrently with orthodox Christianity, but by 180 AD, the Catholic Church had declared Gnosticism a heresy, ordering the executions of its followers and the destruction of its gospels and texts. religious. Backed by the might of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church was extremely successful in its efforts to eradicate Gnosticism, and by the end of the 4th century the Gnostic movement was virtually dead. All that remained was fragmentary evidence of its former existence, mainly from the writings of the Catholic clergy who condemned it.

That all changed in December 1945, when an Arab merchant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman discovered a clay jar in the fields of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. What he found inside was something almost miraculous: the papyri of thirteen codices containing fifty-two sacred texts from the Gnostic tradition, gospels with a proclamation of legitimacy that challenged the standard Christian Bible.

What is Gnostic Christianity and how is it related to Bruce Lee? The Gnostic tradition finally had its beginnings several centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. The term Gnostic is derived from the Greek gnosis, meaning "knowledge" or the "act of knowing." And most importantly, gnosis means knowledge of an internal nature, as opposed to knowledge acquired from the external world through science.

Contrary to popular belief, Catholicism was just one of many Christian sects that developed from the teachings of the apostles of Jesus Christ. It was not until the end of the second century that Christianity was finally established in its Catholic (literally, "Universal") form. Before that there were many different groups of Christians, all of them equally legitimate, among which were Pauline Christianity, Jewish Christianity and Gnostic Christianity. Just as there were many different groups, there were also many different gospels, written by the apostles and their students, each varying their approach to the message of Christ.

For Gnostic Christians, the path to salvation was not an external adherence to Church doctrine, but rather an internal journey leading to enlightenment and salvation. Inward reflection would reveal the spark of God that resides in each of us, the knowledge that we are all, in some sense, a part of God.

If all of this sounds like a very familiar theme to students of Bruce Lee's philosophy, that's because it is. Like Bruce Lee, Gnostic Christians were concerned with finding the "cause of their ignorance." Like Lee, they believed that "all knowledge leads to self-knowledge." "It's an intriguing parallel that had never occurred to me," says Anton Maximovlaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of The Gnostic Gospels, the authoritative study of the Nag Hammadi discoveries. "But at the time I knew little about Bruce Lee except his public image."

It is equally interesting to note that the Nag Hammadi discoveries were not available to the public until the late 1970s, years after Bruce Lee died. Lee never had the opportunity to study them, which makes the parallels between his philosophy and Gnostic Christianity all the more compelling.

One of the most complete and revealing documents of the "Gnostic Gospels" recovered is the Gospel codex of Saint Thomas, which begins with the words: "These are the secret words that the living Jesus spoke, and which, Judas Thomas, the "Twin," he wrote. In this codex, Jesus states:

If you take out what you have inside, what you take out will save you. If you don't bring out what you carry inside you, what you don't bring out will destroy you.

This passage echoes the words of Bruce Lee, who said:

The maturation process does not mean becoming a captive of conceptualization. It is coming to realize what resides in our deepest self.

The supreme objective of Gnostic Christians was direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence, which they believed was accessible to individuals who sought them through internal reflection. Unlike the Orthodox Jews and Christians, who believed that God and man were separate, the Gnostics taught that self-knowledge is the knowledge of God. When writing about the Coptic Gospel of Thomas in his book The Secret Sayings of Jesus, Robert Grant states that, "The kingdom of God is almost entirely within, unrelated to time or history. Self-knowledge is fundamental." (3). This insight into the state of being is similar to the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. It is known that early Christians were in contact with Buddhists in South India, and modern scholars believe that the Buddhist movement had an impact on the early formations of Christianity. "There are quite a few factors that would provide a partial explanation or correlation of Bruce Lee's philosophy with that of Gnosticism, and I'm not sure that anything would explain it completely," says Dr. George James, Professor of Religion and Philosophy. at the University of North Texas. "Buddhism began in northeastern India. By the 1st century AD it had spread westward into what is now Pakistan. There it encountered the culture of the Greeks, which had spread there under Alexander the Great. There are some evidence that there was a Buddhist community in Alexandria in Egypt around the 1st century AD. The form of Buddhism that prevailed in this region was called Mahayana. It is a form of Buddhism that was influenced and supported by the Taoist ideas prevalent in the part. Southern China. Contact between Taoism and Buddhism as Buddhism spread throughout Southern China is sometimes seen as a decisive factor in the development of what came to be called Zen Buddhism. The routes of exchange that led to Buddhism China also brought Chinese ideas back along the same routes to the Middle East and India. It was clearly a time of great intellectual ferment. In light of these crossroads of development of the time we should not be surprised to find ideas that are characteristic of Buddhism and India. Taoism, and people influenced by these traditions in the forms of Christianity that prevailed in the 2nd century."

For Gnostic Christians, self-revelation was at the heart of their spiritual salvation. Jesus said in The Book of Thomas the Contender:

Now, since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine yourself, and learn who you are, in what form you exist, and how you will become. Since you will be called my brother, there is no place for you to be ignorant of yourself. And now that you have understood, since you have already understood that I am the knowledge of the truth. So as long as you accompany me, even though you are misunderstanding, you have already (indeed) come to know, and you will be called "he who knows himself." For he who has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself at the same time has already achieved knowledge about the depth of everything. So, you, my brother Thomas, have contemplated what is dark for men, that is, what they ignorantly stumble against.

Gnostic Christians are monists, in the sense that they believe that we are all fragments of God that have been separated from the greater whole. This idea of ​​the unity of all things is shared by Chinese Taoism, by which Bruce Lee was greatly influenced.

Bruce Lee said:

Taoism is a philosophy of the essential unity of the universe (monism)…the return of everything to the primitive, divine intelligence, the source of all things.

From this philosophy naturally flourished the absence of desire for dispute and strife and struggle for advantage. Despite the teachings of humility and meekness of the Christian Sermon on the Mount it finds a rational basis, and a gentle temperament is engendered in man.

Here Bruce Lee makes the connection between the teachings of Jesus and the Taoist concepts of harmony and docility. Of the connection between Lee's Taoist influences and Gnosticism, Dr. Pagels is quick to point out that, "Taoism developed at the same time as this Gnostic tradition, historically speaking."

Describing the concept for his philosophical story "The Silent Flute," Bruce Lee said, "Basically, this is a story of one man's fight for liberation, a return to the original meaning." of freedom"(6). In that, he described the goal of Gnosticism perfectly.

Unlike the Catholic Church, which insisted that redemption was available only through the dictates of the physical church, Gnostic teachings expressed an idea of ​​salvation that came from inner self-discovery of the true nature of the "self" and his relationship with God. For Gnostics, the "I" is a spark or seed of the Ultimate Being imprisoned in human form and awaiting re-awakening. Those who fail to achieve this awakening must go through the process again in another life. This is very comparable to the Buddhist Dharma, which teaches that the individual must continue to reincarnate in the physical plane until he or she achieves enlightenment, at which point he or she will ascend to nirvana. For the Gnostics, nirvana meant reuniting with the Ultimate.

For John Little, the director of the Bruce Lee Educational Foundation and chief historian of the Bruce Lee Estate, the similarities between the Gnostic tradition and Bruce Lee's philosophy speak to the universality of his thought. "The Gnostic Gospels are very interesting not only because they share many similarities with the thought of Bruce Lee but, predating Bruce, they also share many similar positions with Buddhists and Hindus; of which the human "root" of "there is nothing but one family," that Bruce was so interested in searching for.

Both the Gnostics and Bruce Lee rebelled against the idea of ​​an organized doctrine. The main cause of the Catholic Church's attack on Gnosticism was that it spoke against the "oppressive ecclesiastical forms" of Orthodox Christianity.

Bruce Lee himself may have experienced some of these "oppressive ecclesiastical forms" when he was educated under the Catholic system at La Salle College in Hong Kong. He may have been frustrated by the rigidity of doctrine and the inability of Catholics to question their dogma. Father Donald W. Hendricks of the Archdiocese of New York writes: "What a Catholic believes by faith, he believes absolutely. He is ready to take the Church at its word on what constitutes a danger to his faith."

When he later wrote on the subject of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a fundamental theme of Catholic education, Lee reflected on his Catholic school experience, saying: "What is annoying about such arguments (despite the fact that my early schooling in Hong Kong was led along these lines by Roman Catholic priests) is the overwhelming fact that I can either accept or reject them regardless of their validity." It is very likely that Lee's own experience with Catholicism may have influenced his decision to reject the concept of "styles" and rigid organization. Bruce Lee's words in the book Artist of Life correspond with the views of the Gnostic tradition:

Through an error repeated over time, the truth, becoming a law or faith, places obstacles in the path of knowledge. The method, which is in its main substance ignorance, encompasses "the truth" within a vicious circle. We should break such circles not by seeking knowledge, but by discovering the cause of ignorance.

From Phillip's Gospel:

The names given to the mundane are very misleading, since they divert our thoughts from what is right to what is wrong. Despite the fact that one who hears the word "God" does not perceive what is right, but perceives what is wrong. So also with "the Father" and "the Son" and "the Holy Spirit" and "life" and "light" and "resurrection" and "the Church (Ekklesia)" and everything else; People do not perceive what is right but perceive what is wrong, unless they come to know what is right. The names you hear in the world are deceiving.

In the Gnostic view, organized religious dogma is a trap that blinds the believer into thinking that they have found salvation while their "true self" remains unawakened. This is an argument that Bruce applied to martial arts, specifically, and to life in general: The founder of a style may be exposed to a partial truth, but as time passes, especially after the founder has died, " His" postulates, "His" inclination, "His" conclusive formula; we constantly learn, we never finish; They become a sect, a law, or—worse yet—a harmful faith. Creeds are invented, solemn ceremonies of reinforcement are prescribed, separatist philosophies are formulated and, finally, institutions are erected, so that what might have begun as a kind of fluidity of its founder is now solidified, fixed knowledge; an organized and classified answer presented in a logical order; a cure-all preserved to condition the masses. By doing so, the well-defined followers have made this knowledge not only a sacred altar, but a tomb in which the wisdom of the founder is buried.

The Catholic Church cannot overcome the problems inherent in its own organization and, even with the threat of heretical "Gnosticism" destroyed, the inevitable fracture of the universal church finally took place with Martin Luther and the Reformation of the Middle Ages. From this movement many different sects of Christianity flourished, each with their own religious doctrine reflecting their own views and society. "All versions of Christ are interpretations," says Dr. Joe Barnhart, a Christian scholar and author of Religion and the Challenge of Philosophy. "Christ represents the identity of God in man." Despite this, what was one becomes many again, with Christianity finding itself in a self-defeating cycle of dogmatic conflict. This, in Bruce Lee's view, was the logical end to any system that became too rigid and organized, lacking fluidity. "Many more 'different' approaches would arise, probably as a direct reaction to the 'truth of others.' Very soon these approaches would also become large organizations, each claiming to possess the 'truth' to the exclusion of all others."

Both Bruce Lee and Jesus were about leading their students toward freedom, whether it was freedom from religious salvation or the freedom to express themselves fully. Like Bruce Lee, Jesus saw himself as a guide to the seeker; the one through which one could find the roots of one's own transcendence. As Lee said: "A teacher, a really good teacher, is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to truth."

There was another characteristic that Bruce Lee shared with Jesus. Says Joe Hyams, a student of Lee and author of Zen in the Martial Arts: "He often spoke in parables." Both Bruce Lee and Jesus were inclined to use parables as a method of indirectly teaching a point they wanted to make. Very often, like the teachings of Jesus, it was left to Lee's students to find the meaning in the story.

One argument that the Catholic Church had with the Gnostic tradition is that the Gnostics claimed that they were banned from the secret teachings of Jesus that he shared with a select few. This was directly opposed to the Catholic Church's position that all of Jesus' teachings were freely given and shared with all of his followers. For the Gnostics, Jesus was more selective. Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas: "I reveal my mysteries to those who are worthy of my mysteries. Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." It is known that Bruce Lee sometimes kept information to himself, and other times he shared it with only a select few of his students. "Jeet Kune Do is not for everyone," Bruce said. "I have taught many students, but very few have become my disciples. Many of the students do not show their ability to understand, nor how to apply it in the correct way."

It has often been argued that Bruce Lee has been deified, turned into a kind of religious figure in his own right. A recent post by a Bruce Lee fan on an Internet discussion forum suggested that, "It is not inconceivable that Bruce Lee was, in fact, the second Messiah, his message was so powerful." "'Messiah' is simply anyone with a message, and Bruce Lee's message is one worth hearing," says Dr. George Braddock, a civil servant in the United Kingdom. "He was radical. He was unique. And ultimately his teachings could become a religion, even though it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing." For some fans, the division between reverence and "veneration" has become blurred. Bruce himself made no such claims, arguing that he was just a man with a vision. "Well, let me put it like this," he told British journalist Ted Thomas. "To be honest and all, I'm not as bad as some of them, but I'm definitely not saying I'm a saint, okay?"

It should be noted, however, that Gnostic Christians recognize that Jesus was not only the revealer of truth, and that others will also speak of these things in the course of human history. They, for example, recognize the visions of Buddha, Mohammed and Lao-Tzu. Therefore, the Catholic Church itself is no longer the rigid institution it used to be. The historic second Vatican Council of 1962-1965 developed further advances in Catholic thought and doctrine. Under Pope John XXIII, the Catholic Church made a statement addressing religions and philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism, recognizing that "the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is not true and sacred in these religions… which often reflect a ray of that Truth that illuminates all men."

More recently, Pope John Paul II made a trip to New Delhi, India, where he met with numerous religious leaders from Asian belief systems. His trip was intended to promote peace between different religious groups. "No state, no group has the right to control either directly or indirectly the religious convictions of a person," the Pope told religious leaders during his Apostolic Exhortation. He later paid tribute to the late Mahatma Gandhi at a memorial where, before leaving, Pope John Paul II wrote in the visitors' book, quoting from Gandhi, "A culture cannot survive if it claims to be exclusive." Shortly after, in March 2000, Pope John Paul II stunned the world by issuing a sweeping papal apology, the first such apology ever given by a Pope in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. In the apology, the Pope alluded to the Church's violent destruction of Gnostics, as well as the religious persecution of other faiths, and apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church, saying: "we humbly ask for forgiveness."

Bruce Lee himself was, perhaps, a Gnostic. In an interview with writer Alex Ben Block conducted in the summer of 1972, Block asked Bruce if he believed in God. He replied: "To be perfectly frank, not really." Although this statement seems empathetic, it is possible that he simply would not have been convinced of the existence of a god, because he made several references to a god or someone supreme over the years that suggested he was at least open to the possibility. But, being the critical individual that he was, he refused to accept the existence of a Supreme Being on the basis of faith alone. At the same time, he had great respect for people of faith. "I cannot and will not 'mock' faith when reason seems to be such a sterile thing," he said. Bruce felt driven by something, however, and sometimes wondered about the source of this driving. In a letter to her friend Pearl Tso, she wrote: "Whether it is the God-Over or not, I feel this great force, this uncovered power, this something dynamic with me. The feeling defies description, and [there is] no experience with the which this feeling can be compared to. It is something like a strong emotion mixed with faith, but much stronger."

Today, Gnostic Christianity has been resurrected, like the Phoenix, from the discoveries at Nag Hammadi. New Churches have been established, including the Ecclesia Gnostica of the United States and the Eglise Gnostique Catholique Apostolique of France. Their numbers are growing. Likewise, Bruce Lee's philosophies have enjoyed a recent growth of support, which over time will increase as people are led to his message of self-actualization and personal exploration.

this is the shit i wanna see on this board

thank you

Didn't read, but it's certainly an interesting idea

>>4906
New York City coal

>>4758
Ecclesia Gnostica is listed as a fag church on wikipedia, I know one thing, E.G. aren't Cathars (in fact, they don't seem to renounce sexuality at all)