Unbelievable 01:07 - the real main streamNeedleman, Nasr, and New Earth

Being raised an American Catholic in the typical mid-century mode and then lapsing hard in some post-Sixties way revolving around Tao and Zen and holy agnosticism, I now find myself fascinated with the fact that there’s an esoteric undercurrent in Christianity itself running beneath the dogmas and creeds with its sacred wisdom flowing through the lake of the Christ and originating from the singular source on high.

There seems to be three streams of knowledge running through western thought. Jacob Needleman describes a split that occurred beginning with Saint Augustine and becoming wider during the Enlightenment: the thinking function of reason and the emotional function of belief becoming two separate rivers. The former became the scientific materialistic profane mindset of the contemporary world and the latter that blind faith of religious fundamentalism.

Seyyed Hosseiin Nasr in a series of lectures (and available online[looking to purchase it last night, I discovered it; talk of synchronicity]) writes “the process of desacralization of knowledge has reached the citadel of the sacred itself, that is, religion. As a result…, the world of faith began to appear as something totally separated by a chasm from the ground upon which “thinking” men stood. The reaction… is despair in man's attempt to understand and make sense of reality so that he must make a leap in order to make sense of things. In theology likewise the thought… requires a leap into “the upper story of faith.”

But that main river of sacred wisdom, although marginalized still flowed through Clement of Alexandria; Origen; Dionysius the Areopagite; John the Scot or Scotus Erigena; Meister Eckhart; Nicholas of Cusa; Jacob Boehme; Franz von Baader

Is it now rejoining with the primordial streams of east and west and new earth?