Easter special... Where West meet East
Easter, also called Pascua or Resurrection Sunday, is a Christian festival and holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead
Many concepts are the same between west and orient civilizations. Today I want to revise the concepts Chaos-Order and (tàijítú) Yin-Yang similarities. Both represents the deepest level of existences.
Both philosophies are related to the dualism, for example light (day) and darkness (night). Every part develops from each other. Thus, neither cannot exist without the other and they are opposite forces. Although these are antagonists, there are not in constant conflict and always tend to be in balance, or at least should be.
Is in this material antagonism where the life originated, both in Christianity as in Taoism.
Jordan Peterson discussed the tree of life in a way that is perfectly connected with Taoism. Read the transcript from his interview with Tim Ferriss.
Tim Ferriss: “It is deeply strange. One of the images that I paused on in one of your lectures online, is an older lecture I believe, was a side-by-side comparison of two drawings. Or I should say a piece of artwork of the Scandinavian tree of life and the Peruvian Amazonian tree life. And if you don’t mind taking a moment just to describe that? Or I could try to recall it. It was really striking. And then you, shortly thereafter, had a drawing your son had put together, and the overlap was really hard to wrap your head around in some respects.”
JP: “No. The drawing my son made, yeah, I have it in my office. He was about six when he made it. It’s stunning. On one side, there’s a forest full of pine trees. And then, there’s a river running down the middle. Then, on the other side, there’s a town. But the town is all mushrooms, like Amanita muscaria mushrooms, so all the houses have mushroom caps. And so, there’s order on one side and chaos on another, and the river runs between them. And then, out of the river, grows a beanstalk.
And the beanstalk stretches up to Heaven. The clouds are there, and St. Peter is there by the gates. It’s not like my son had any particular Christian religious education. He didn’t. We didn’t go to church, and I saw him draw that. And I thought, “That’s unbelievable. I can’t believe you drew that,” because it’s a shamanic drawing. It’s chaos and order. Those are the two subsets of existence. Right at the point they meet, out of the river grows the tree of life, it reaches up to Heaven.
The shaman, they climb the tree of life, then they go to Heaven. And Mircea Eliade, and people who studied the shaman, many of them thought that if the experience was drug-induced, that somehow it had been pathologized. That wasn’t part of the actual tradition, but I think that’s completely wrong. People have been using psychoactive drugs to transcend their consciousness for God only knows how long. One of the most interesting hypotheses I ever encountered, I think that was Terence McKenna.”
Although you may find a terrific difference between cultures, some core ideas remain the same. Taoism is base in constant movement between forces; but Christianity represents this dualism all over the Bible, most interesting from the Genesis book. Remember that these books were writing up to hundreds of years later after Jesus’s death, so it is natural that those scriptures used specific educational languages for that period.
If you are interested in this subject, we can discuss further in the comments or in the newsletter.
Also, it is said but not proven, that Jesus went to India some time during his lost years.