How do I unlock the secrets of the Zohar...

how?

There's no secret. It just blabla irrational nonsense and obsessive affirmation of Jewish so-called chosedness.

You know how Rebbe Yeshua bar Yosef said that he was God, but also his own father, and the smell that Yahweh makes that only Jews can detect? You know how Christians square this circle by saying that "God" is actually the nature that the entities have, rather than the actual entities themselves? You know how Catholics make Mary the fourth person in the Trinity, and the Orthodox make Sophia and the Patriarch the fifth and sixth?

Well what if we scrapped all of that but took the basic concept and replaced "this apocalyptic preacher" or "that apocalyptic preacher's mom" with stuff like "Being", "Becoming", or "Consciousness"? And then we setup a system wherein a Jew (and only a Jew because Goyim lack souls) can meet the ten persons of Yahweh and therefore ascend to... do something, no one is quite sure what.

And then when you describe this ascension as a marriage you not only get Valentinian Gnosticism but also Teresa of Avila's Bridal Theology, which is actually an interesting case of Jewish Christians making something, non-Christian Jews taking it and iterating upon it, and then a Conversa taking it and reintroducing it back into Christianity.

Schizo ramblings

He's describing various traditions you retard. Even if you think those traditions are schizo, all he's doing is relating them, not endorsing them.

He's doing a bad job then because Catholics don't believe Mary is the fourth person of the Trinity

He's clearly being polemical. I don't agree with it either and I know exactly what he's talking about and would disagree with him on it, and I'm charitable enough to understand the post for what it is and not need to lash out pettily. Saying "schizo ramblings" is just uncharitable, his post qualifies as an effortpost and you should at least meet it on its own merits and with equal effort.

Low effort posts like yours are typical of phoneposters and tourists from other forms of social media who really just want a downvote button.

Based my upvote button

Retard

Do you follow any tradition yourself or is this purely scholarly interest? I've been reading Faivre and Versluis recently on the parallels between Bohmean theosophy and gnosticism (which were noted by the theosophists themselves), as well as Scholem on the crossovers between Kabbalah, Islam, and Christianity. Versluis even mentioned an old rumor that Pseudo-Dionysius was a more orthodox neo-Platonist who deliberately accommodated neo-Platonism to Christianity while the former was waning and being persecuted by Justinian, to ensure it at least survived. It's an interesting theory at least. Versluis sees a continuity between gnosticism, medieval mysticism and Kabbalah, theosophy, and modern Sophiology, but he also doesn't believe it's a vague discursive continuity. He pretty openly believes that they are all genuine visionary traditions and the reason they relate similar visions is because they are seeing the same shit.

The reason for variations is what the theosophists would diagnose as fixation at the "astral," and I believe what the the gnostics would call fixation at the psychical (as opposed to the pneumatic) level. Basically, cataphatic forms like the mythic personifications of gnostic myths are always in danger of becoming reified and taken for the actual things of which they are only meant to be symbols. I could see there being historiosophical explanations for the classical mind being especially prone to reifying mythic and anthropomorphic forms.

Based doesn't count, thank you friend.

Tradcath LARPer who comes to Yea Forums not to read and engage with things, only for little opportunities like these (UM SWEETIE? CATHOLICS DON'T WORSHIP MARY?) to continue your zoomer identity crisis LARP. Link me to your twitter account with all the ironic "did I mention I'm CATHOLIC?" buzzwords and references in your bio.

Keep watching all those youtube videos explaining your own theology to you, when you can't even sit still long enough to process a three paragraph post. Put the phone down and try contributing to a discussion for once. Ideally read a book first.

Ibn Arabi does kind of insert Christian theology right into the heart of Islam, but he does it in a way that is a rather clever critique of it. The other poster is a schizo.

Gnostic schizo garbage

You talk with a gay lisp in real life

Mary worship is idolatry. At least Orthodoxy clarifies that Sophia is not to be worshipped.

Not him, but you are a schizo who feels a need to show off, too bad you're not really saying much.

I don't know what you think I'm trying to show off. I sincerely get annoyed when I see effortful posts getting glorified downvotes as replies. Especially when I can tell exactly how it happened. In this case, that guy saw a long post he had no intention of reading, skimmed it on his smartphone, saw one thing his twitter-conditioned pea brain could reply to without much effort, and posted on reflex. That's not just disrespectful and sad, it's how twitter's style of discourse is slowly colonizing Yea Forums, because retards like him are crossposting and bringing their bad habits here.

I don't care if people do it to me because I know I can ignore it, it mostly annoys me when I see it happen to other posters, because I worry the other user will be dissuaded from making more good posts. I guess I'm protective of the one forum I have left that isn't like everywhere else, watered down to nothing for zoomers like you.

Read Garrigou Lagrange

Catholics actually don't believe Mary is the fourth person of the Trinity and I don't see the point of claiming they do other as a deliberate tell that you know nothing about Catholic Theology and have no interest in learning about it.

What by him? I've read Maritain and Gilson but only seen him mentioned here.
>His great achievement was to synthesise the highly abstract writings of St Thomas Aquinas with the experiential writings of St. John of the Cross, attempting to show they are in perfect harmony with each other.
This sounds interesting though.

Cope. Mary worship is idolatry and this is well known. Good luck getting into Catholicism, I can see you're new.

Kaballah is trash, and its widespread popularity among "intellectual" circles of the "West" prove they are all Jews.

Why would a traditionalist give a fuck about idolatry?

Christian interest in Kabbalah goes back at least to Ficino, the Platonic Academy (of the Medici), and Renaissance hermeticism.

I was just trying to demonstrate to the low effort faggot(s) that low effort posts like that are obnoxious and pointless. Whether it's repeating "Cope" or "Schizo."

The only thing you're demonstrating is the you're seething. Either get the theology right or don't post

>Christian
You're all Jews.
There's no such thing as the "West" or Europe. You're just Jews. It's like how all Muslims are Arabs.

you can stop crying anytime

You're the one who doesn't know Mary worship is idolatry. Learn about Catholicism before posting this embarrassing cope.

The eternal prot

I literally just told you I am trying to demonstrate how stupid this kind of shallow posting is, I even gave it away and then did it again, and you still can't get it. Phoneposting and twitter have permanently fucked your brain. You only scan for keywords so you can tell what "side" someone's on and respond with the opposite keyword.

You're just shitting the thread up with your cope

You're all irredeemable trash.

You are

You can't "relate" a tradition while misrepresenting it to the point of caricature. You're spent the entire thread whining about TradCaths but the point would be just as pertinent if he said Buddhism is a scientific religion that doesn't believe in the supernatural.

god I wish abrahamism just disappeared from the face of the earth

what passage of the zohar discusses jews ascending through all ten parts of the sefirot? thats simply not true. all that can be done is raising israel up to malkuth.

(Sethian) Gnostics are basically Jews (or 'proto-orthodox Christians') who knew about Platonism (probably also Middle Platonism). They also lived under Roman authority, which they viewed negatively. Those factors combine into the idea of immaterial Platonic entities, which have a unique relationship to a chosen people, and which supervene on a false authority. They also did very creative readings of texts like Genesis to support their ideas.

Moses de León and his circle combined existing Jewish traditions with Neoplatonism, to create a system where there is a chosen people with a special relationship to a system of immaterial Neoplatonic entities (which are much more dynamic than Platonic / Middle Platonic ones). There's no false ruler but they did take the creative reading stuff even further (to the level of gematria).

You can use Hermeticism as another point of comparison, which also probably influenced by Platonism and written under a negatively-viewed authority (though the author is not Jewish this time).

Luckily they were BTFO by Augustine, the greatest religious thinker of antiquity.

It's funny, the theosophical stuff I'm reading would mostly agree but ends up at a completely different conclusion, namely that they are genuine visionary traditions, or at least that genuine visions are actually underlying whatever diffuse discourses and mutual influences exist. I guess your thoughts on the parallels between Zoroastrian, Jewish, and later Sufi and Christian mystic visionary traditions would be similarly genetic/diffusionist etc?

I guess the problem is that once you get past a certain point it becomes too speculative either way. I'm personally interested in parallels between Buddhist descriptions of siddhis, things like glowing or becoming radiant, and Jewish and Zoroastrian descriptions of radiance upon enlightenment. But a diffusionist would probably say that is too vague to be worthy of structural comparison.

Do you have any thoughts or literature recommendations on the Hellenistic-Jewish-Egyptian syncretism in Ptolemaic/Roman Alexandria that might have had such an influence on later Middle/Late Platonism? I know of only a few authors who wrote on this, especially on Philo, one is Runia I think.

I whined about this particular tradcath because he was a stupid zoomer who doesn't know how to have a discussion. The guy didn't solely distort Catholicism, he presented one viewpoint on it as part of a continuum of similar instances of visionary traditions in the Abrahamic religions, semi-polemically.

It's like if a pure monist said polemically "The Christians think there are three Gods and the Muslims think there are two (Allah and the 'uncreated' Quran) and the Jews think there is either one or a dozen if they're kabbalists!" You'd still get his point even if you disagreed. If a Muslim came in and started crying about how the uncreatedness of the Quran isn't dualism, and isn't the same as trinitarianism "which is polytheistic" and so on, I would call him a short-sighted moron too. If you want to respond to the guy, do it on meaningful terms with effort. Call him a retard for distorting ALL those religions in the same way, or for simplifying the theologies of many religions to compare them in a simplistic way (the numbering and gendering of the divine).

The problem isn't taking issue with him, the problem is that the person taking issue with him was a lazy moron who just said "schizo ramblings" as a downvote button because he tried to process more than two lines of text and got frustrated, and his grug brain went "me not like you say Catholicism not correct! You say too many words not explain why you insult Catholicism!" What I was trying to prove in my forced exchange was that me just repeating "cope lol" is the same level of effort as "schizo" or any other downvote word, and it's unproductive. But I was overly optimistic that I could teach a zoomer anything.

bump

>It's like if a pure monist said polemically "The Christians think there are three Gods and the Muslims think there are two (Allah and the 'uncreated' Quran) and the Jews think there is either one or a dozen if they're kabbalists!" You'd still get his point
Actually I'd think he's an ill informed retard who has based his position on misunderstandings of what Christians and Muslims believe. Like if I said I don't believe in Evolution because it's absurd to think that a monkey one day gave birth to a human would you defend me because I was clearly "being polemical" or would you say that I misunderstand evolution and my objection is moot?

They are quite obviously nonsensical schizo ramblings and despite your long boring protests that he was really just being ironic or whatever he's displayed an ignorance of classical theist traditions that undermines whatever point he was trying to make. Literal Gnostic garbage not worth engaging with in the least. Any more than I would waste my time on a Young Earth Creationist who had the aformentioned understanding of evolution

>The problem isn't taking issue with him, the problem is that the person taking issue with him was a lazy moron who just said "schizo ramblings" as a downvote button because he tried to process more than two lines of text and got frustrated, and his grug brain went "me not like you say Catholicism not correct! You say too many words not explain why you insult Catholicism!"
I'm not even Catholic I'm a traditionalist.

>What I was trying to prove in my forced exchange was that me just repeating "cope lol" is the same level of effort as "schizo"
He was wrong, you are wrong and you continue to seethe unreasonably about it being pointed out.

The problem is that you don't know what you're talking about and can only relate to these things based on pretty pictures on the internet. You're more concerned with the arbitrary aesthetics of these traditions than with their actual contents and concepts, so of course you can't relate to them or engage with them unless they're packaged in memes on reddit.

>what Christians AND Muslims believe
Yes, that's why I said you would say he's mischaracterizing both. You wouldn't just say "don't insult Quran don't say Allah is polytheistic!" if you were a Muslim, you would say "this is a really shallow interpretation of the Abrahamic religions' theological justifications of things like the Trinity, Sophia, Logos, or the Quran." So we agree, a reasoned rebuke is a good rebuke. The problem is the original idiot (you?) didn't do any of this, he just downvoted a post he didn't even read fully, in a lazy, partisan manner. That makes him (you?) a mental child.

>They are quite obviously nonsensical
No, they were quite sensible and understandable to anyone who can read, even if you disagree with them. I disagree with that other poster and disagreed with him again in the post you're replying to, and I didn't feel the need to say YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND THEOSOPHY DUDE YOU'RE SCHIZO. Because my brain hasn't been poisoned by twitter.

If you're a Traditionalist then you should agree with that other poster, which makes your confusion all the more confusing. Also, no offense, but I don't believe you can process either Traditionalist writings or traditional texts themselves with your reading comprehension. You are a very stupid, reactionary person. And I don't mean reactionary in the fun sense, I mean you have conditioned reactions and the mentality of a teenager who gets most of his ideas from youtube videos.

>No, they were quite sensible and understandable to anyone who can read
You just admitted they were predicated on misunderstandings. I'm not wasting time typing out a long rebuke when a single point is sufficient. Schizo ramblings are not worth taking that amount of time to dismantle them, pointing out the root of the issue is enough

>t. schizo
Schizo ramblings are not worth taking that amount of time to dismantle them, pointing out the root of the issue is enough.

Yes, I personally believe the other poster you're referring to, who is infinitely more ingenuous and intelligent than you despite the fact that I probably disagree with his entire worldview (at least if I'm interpreting him correctly, as above, as not believing in an objective metaphysical correlate of the visionary traditions in question, i.e. as believing only in a diffusionist and genealogical explanation for their similarities), is ultimately wrong. That has nothing to do with what I'm saying, again and again, which is that you can be wrong and still be civil and constructive.

No one cares what you are doing or not doing, because you never say anything either way. Your initial zoomer downvote post was sad, but all your pathetic scrambling to justify it because you know you're wrong is much worse. The sooner you stop the better, for yourself most of all.

You are not only stupid, you are stubborn and acting in an immoral, anti-intellectual manner. And I mean intellectual here in the sense of intellectus, so you are sinning against gnosis. You are obstructing constructive discussions of these topics by letting your childish ego get in the way, to save face on an anonymous forum. This isn't an argument, this is me trying to help you out because I am probably twice your age and was once as much of a terminally online douche as you are now.

Feel free to get one last "seethe" or "schizo" reply in, dumbass. I'm writing these things because they're true, not because I want some random teenager with an ego problem to listen to them. Although I hope you do listen, I'm just also aware it may take years for the inner meaning of this exchange to percolate through your stupid little zoomer brain.

Jewish theology = Greek philosophy

You're a pseud who is seething because your discord buddies gnostic ramblings got dismissed put of hand and are trying to save face with a "Yes ok his argument is retarded but at least I listened to him" hail mary.

Honestly after 20 posts of pathetic cope trying to score points after mistakenly thinking I'm Catholic you should've crawled back into your hole in shame after realizing you constructed a strawman to rage at

Bruh. Just take the L

lmfao youve spent over 24 hours seething about a topic you dont understand

No, fuck off, you're a fucking schizo. I've spent this entire thread arguing against you, and I keep winning.

>I won't respond anymore
>responds
Funny you mention discord since you clearly conceive of all online exchange as pointless bickering, like a battle for clout on some forum or chatroom with persistent identities. I'm not your parasocial discord friend or enemy and no one is keeping score of who "takes the L" or who "ratios" whom, zoomer. You don't gain or lose followers from this.

You remain a child who can't read. Bump.

You're such a sperg