First of all, thanks ahimsaman, for the PM invitation to this thread.
I’m going to relate a bizarre belief system (I can’t call it a theology), from a woman who worked at a polling place with me (16 hours!) one year.
She explained that Jesus, Mary and John were Essene mystics.
On the cross, Jesus didn’t really die, but put himself into a deathlike trance. Longinus didn’t plunge the spear into Jesus’ heart, but just pricked the skin.
In the tomb, Mary and John healed Jesus and he brought himself out of his trance. He spent the time between his burial and reaurrection in a Buddhist temple in India. By this time, I was too flummoxed to ask her how he got there.
This was her story and she stuck to it. After all, she learned it from her swami!
By way of explanation, for three years, she and her then-husband lived in a tee pee on a vacant lot in a college town north of here.
Fortunately, she is an extremely pleasant person and wasn’t offended at all when I told her I thought this all completely bizarre and ridiculoous.
The reasdon I bring it up here is that her whole philosophy was derived from eastern religiions.
This is NOT to say that all practitioners of eastern reilgions are bizarre. Heck, we have our unusual Christians, too.
Now to the point. She believed in reincarnation, and in each reincarnation we are supposed to learn something that makies us better than we were in our last incarnation. This is the karma thing.
Since I am in a wheelchair, I allowed as how I must’ve really screwed up in my last life. She disagreed, saying only there was “something” I had to learn, and she had no idea what it might be.
Is the learning thing from one incarnation to another a Buddhist belief?
A comment to
Exporter, centering prayer and Christianity are incompatible. I refer you to this URL
catholic.com/thisrock/1997/9711fea1.asp
There are other articles on the same topic. Just type in “Centering prayer” into the CA search engine.
ahimsaman, you might want to take a peek at that, too.
Everything I have heard about eastern religions indicate they relate to Chrishtanity like oil and water. If one does Yoga or one of the martial arts simply for exercise and recreation, there is no problem, but the underlying philosophies are inimical.