Summary of some key points from my advanced thoughts within my Judeo-Buddhist philosophy in a few bullet points

This article is intended for those who read the basic works on my Judeo-Buddhist philosophy, but not my work Deep In the Ocean Is a Hidden Treasure (Manderscheid 2023). I hope that this summary helps to give an overview about the very key points of my latest thoughts.

• God is the very first principle! [Schmitz, 2023: 173]
• God is a flawless, perfect unity! [Schmitz, 2023: 37]
• Every human-being has a basic goodness, God gave them a free will, and in that very moment where one has the possibility to decide – through reason – and is not driven by instincts anymore, in that very moment, it is up to us whether we decide for good or bad. [Schmitz, 2023: 40] – Excursus on God’s existence: The idea that God could exist is not disproved by science. [Schmitz, 2023: 68]
• Though we all have a basic goodness, due to our suffering in life we become defiled, and as a result, we have to clean our mind. [Schmitz, 2023: 149]
• We can learn what causes suffering to us and how we cause sufferance to others and start to change ourselves. [Schmitz, 2023: 52] – As a result, we seek for a purification of our defilements. [see below] Anyways, some people do not realize their own suffering, and think that they have no need for purification, but in fact, every human-being has to deal with the question of suffering as the Buddha taught. [Schmitz, 2023: 73]
• Through our suffering, we save all the negative experiences without being aware of it. [Schmitz, 2023: 123]
• Reason as a whole can only be found in the Objective Good which is The Good, and thus God, who is free from suffering and defilements. [Schmitz, 2023: 166]
• As God is good, all the good we receive comes from Him. [Schmitz, 2023: 10] But just because everything is for good, not everything that ever happened is reasonable, we might misunderstand the Good or are too defiled through our suffering. [Schmitz, 2023: 167] Suffering leads to evil deeds, we hurt others out of our own pain. However, when somebody tortures others, it also makes the mind of the one who tortures being tortured – and therefore the soul is tortured as well. [ibid.] To overcome this suffering, we have to strive for enlightenment and purify ourselves. [Schmitz, 2023: 172; also see below]
• The desire for God is a desire for purification. [Schmitz, 2023: 291]
• Purification means a spiritual cleansing of one’s defilements in my philosophy. [Schmitz, 2023: 168]
• Enlightenment is a purification in my point of view, and as such a repairment of the world, tikkun olam, in a Lurianic sense. [Schmitz, 2023: 205]
• Our own ignorance often hinders our process of purification. [Schmitz, 2023: 249]
• The purification has to be done spiritually. [Schmitz, 2023: 291]
• There are different ways of purification, but most commonly it is done through meditation, such as metta.
• Metta shall lead to mental purification, well-wishing and benevolence. [Schmitz, 2023: 251]
• Yoga is also a great way of contemplation. As someone who proposes a Judeo-Buddhist philosophy which incorporates the Platonic teaching, it is no surprise that I suggest a philosophical yoga in a Grimesian way. [Schmitz, 2023: 79]
• Some people wrongly think that overcoming sufferance means to be always on the bright side of life. However, every human-being has flaws and no one is perfect. As such, we will always encounter difficult situations which we have to handle. [Schmitz, 2023: 53]
• Buddha and Jesus fulfil the same functions in their respective religions: The Buddha preached the equality of all human beings and wanted to abolish the castes. He sought to take away people’s suffering. In the same way, Jesus wanted to take away our suffering through his suffering! [Schmitz, 2023: 65]
• We shall not take a pantheistic approach, but we can use a panentheistic approach: we find God in everything, because He is the only true Being, while everything else just borrows its Being and thus does not exist independently from God. As we are conscious beings, we do find divine essence inside, but man is not divine himself. [Schmitz, 2023: 16 f.]
• We might talk of several forms of revelation, but revelation always hints at God, He reveals one thing about Himself or His Creation, but an overall understanding of God can only be assumed, but never empirically proven, and this is why we need to respect and tolerate all the different religions, since no particular denomination booked the right to be considered the truth for once and for all. [Schmitz, 2023: 21]
• We are wanted by God and He has a plan for us. [Schmitz, 2023: 27]
• I seek to understand God’s plan which He has for us, but on the other hand, I also think critically and question everything. And I want my readers not to blindly follow any denomination, but also to question everything and think critically. Doubt is the source for progress. [cp. also Schmitz, 2023: 35]
• We need to find God ourselves, others cannot do that job for us. If we want to reconnect with Him after human-beings turned away from Him for so long, there is a way to do so. But only we can go this way on ourselves. One shall not be in a church just to be a socially-accepted member, but because one really has a faith in our Creator and realizes His miracles. [Schmitz, 2023: 36]
• The believer of every religion is able to be resurrected. [Schmitz, 2023: 27]
• The Holy Spirit is the divine essence, and the divine essence is the spiritual quality of God. [Schmitz, 2023: 27]
• When we talk about Jesus, what counts is not that he was called Jesus, what counts is that he was spiritual perfection on this earth. [Schmitz, 2023: 28] As such, Jesus represents a spiritual quality, same as the Buddha Gautama and Xuan Yuan.
• What we can say is that God is spirit/mind, because this benevolent creation cannot be the result of some blind coincident force. Hegel proposed that the spirit exists threefold: there is spirit in itself (God), spirit for itself (the Son of God) and spirit in-and-for itself (the Holy Spirit), so that the one spirit unfolds in its Trinity. [Schmitz, 2023: 28]
• God as someone who is difficult to grasp, who seems so abstract to us, gives us guidance throughout the stories of the Scripture, so that He becomes less abstract and we are able to become closer to God. [Schmitz, 2023: 28]
• Every human-being is equal in front of God, so every human-being should be regarded equal on earth, too. [Schmitz, 2023: 29]
• God reveals Himself in nature, so we can grasp Him through our environment and accept Him through reason, and as reason is divine. [Schmitz, 2023: 36]
• We can connect with God, if we purify our mind from our illusions and defilements. [Schmitz, 2023: 36] – The communication with God actually leads to a cleansing, because God reveals what the world is like and only God is able to reveal truth, because truth is attained through the soul. [Schmitz, 2023: 80]
• As God is a perfect unity, He cannot split Himself, yet we mirror God because He created us in His image (Genesis 1:27), so there must be an essence within God which is divine and through which we can grasp divine attributes. This is the Holy Spirit: it is the divine power [Schmitz, 2023: 37]
• Jesus stands for our faith, our emuna. As such Jesus is reflecting our hope to overcome the deep abysm between our immanent, materialistic world and God who is transcendent. [Schmitz, 2023: 50] – Furthermore, Jesus stands for purity, He is a purifier. [Schmitz, 2023: 288]
• The Father is God, the Holy Spirit is the divine essence, the soul, reason, and the Son stands for emuna, because the Son is understood as a reflection of the Father, so if we have seen the Son, then we have seen the Father (John 14:9): It seems to be a process of affirmation. Our faith is not anymore abstract, but receives a firm basis. [Schmitz, 2023: 111]
• It is not enough to believe in God, as some people claim to be followers of Jesus Christ but behave ignorant or act against the Ten Commandments willingly. Therefore, emuna is not blind following but actual faith which means that we have to clean our mind and always reflect ourselves to follow the commands of our Creator with gratitude and good faith. [Schmitz, 2023: 127]
• God created us out of love. [Schmitz, 2023: 38] Because God is love and if God is love, then He loves the whole Creation, and therefore also all human-beings and all those who worship Him regardless of their particular religion. [ibid.; see also Schmitz, 2023: 54]
• God’s love is not limited. [Schmitz, 2023: 39]
• When we love others and show compassion, we seemingly act in God’s will. [Schmitz, 2023: 39]
• God protects the poor and teaches a lesson to the mighty who are oppressing the poor. The injustice against others makes God angry, because He is justice as a whole, He is absolute goodness, so everything which lacks that-which-is-good is in opposition with what God wants for this world. [Schmitz, 2023: 57]
• God’s wrath is an imagery for the unstandable circumstance of injustice and unrighteousness. [Schmitz, 2023: 66]
• To make a better world out of this place and protect God’s Creation, we have to speak up for justice and defend the weak ones. [Schmitz, 2023: 44]
• Since God is love, and love is the absence of violence and anger, any act of violence cannot be justified with God. [Schmitz, 2023: 80]
• There is no good without God, as God is absolute goodness and the source of all goodness. [cp. Schmitz, 2023: 115]
• God created nature in this way so that everything in nature (here in the sense of environment in the perceptional world) does what it ought to do.  [Schmitz, 2023: 148]
• Certain qualities must be of divine nature, so they must be inherited in God, but yet, we cannot grasp God as a whole. If God did not inherit certain attributes, then He would be nothing than a machine in the Aristotelian sense, the unmoved mover. But if creation is a conscious process then God must have a conscious quality as well. As the creation is a conscious process, God is conscious as well and therefore must inherit attributes which point to His consciousness. Yet, we cannot say that the list of attributes which I proposed is complete.  [Schmitz, 2023: 174]
• Philosophy is so noble, because it reveals God’s Creation to us. [Schmitz, 2023: 182]
• Philosophy means serving God, even Socrates saw his investigations as community service for the Athenians in the name of the God. [Schmitz, 2023: 182; cp. also Schmitz, 2023: 201]
• We are connected with God, we have an intimate relationship with Him. [Schmitz, 2023: 182]
• As philosophy is a service for God, of course, we can take religious texts and try to extract their philosophical content out of them. Religion and philosophy were always very closely related. Of course, we should always place reason over revelation and ought not take literal any text which claims to be an immediate revelation of a divine being, but we can take these texts and analyze their philosophical content. [Schmitz, 2023: 208] – God is an object of philosophy and it is even the root of philosophy: gaining knowledge not on dogmatism, but on reasoning about God’s Creation! [Schmitz, 2023: 211]
• If the belief in God is determined on rites, and rites determined on classes, then it leads to a spiritual estrangement. [Schmitz, 2023: 192]
• So only if the divine revelation is available for everyone, we can install peace and harmony on this planet, because every human-being has the potential to connect with God. [Schmitz, 2023: 192]
• It is worthless to know liturgy, but not implementing the wisdom of God in daily life. [Schmitz, 2023: 193]
• We ought not to imagine God as a static being, a man with grey hair and long beard, but as a dynamic active being. [Schmitz, 2023: 193] – So as dynamic active force, intellect, love, everything is in motion and God is not like the Aristotelian unconscious machine which only assures that the cosmos keeps on moving, but everything flows out of Him and unfolds this brought cosmos. [Schmitz, 2023: 194] – Nature follows immediately out of God, because nature in Chinese understanding is a ziran, or as Germans call it a Selbst-so. Nature acts naturally by doing what nature ought to do. [Schmitz, 2023: 196]
• The word Dao meaning “way” is a great fit to name God because God is the Way! He revealed His Way to us! Following His nature is the Way! Anyways, God Himself has no particular name, we simply call Him God, because human-beings try to name everything, so we need a word for description’s sake, yet, we cannot fully grasp God. [Schmitz, 2023: 193]
• The Glory of God is attested through His many miracles and wonders. When we feel God’s presence, we feel protected and safe! We feel that He is with us! [Schmitz, 2023: 195]
• God loves us unconditionally. [Schmitz, 2023: 195]
• God exists naturally and as nature flows out of God, it is inseparably bound to God. [Schmitz, 2023: 196]
• I think that God is transcendental and therefore ought to be understood as an eternal being beyond being in time. [Schmitz, 2023: 196]
• If everything unfolded out of God in a perfect way, then we all would be perfect and free from any mistake. But since we are not perfect, the manifestation is imperfect, but still good (ki-tov). [Schmitz, 2023: 204]
• God cannot be explained with common language, though we can try to describe different qualities of God. [Schmitz, 2023: 206]
• Despite being active, God has also everlasting characteristics, so He is not object to change, which might be a paradox, but as God is not fully graspable for human-beings, we have to accept that this paradox must somehow be true. So though God is not separable and is an inseparable oneness, there is something active and passive in Him which remains mysterious to us. [Schmitz, 2023: 208] – I think that God’s existence and His attributes are everlasting, they are not object to change; yet God Himself is not unmovable, static, ‘dead’, but dynamic and alive. [Schmitz, 2023: 211] All dualisms vanish in God’s unity, so dualisms such as male – female, static – dynamic, etc. do not exist anymore when we talk of God. [ibid.]
•  If God wants to create something, then He can do it, which means that His will is the cause of existence! [Schmitz, 2023: 213]
• We have to start to cherish God’s Creation and His love, because He created us, so that we repair the world! [Schmitz, 2023: 285]

Now what can we say to those who still doubt or reject God, when we quote the Bible as a source of wisdom, as they will probably say that the Bible is not relevant to them. Well, imagine for a second that the Bible was not the word of God, but purely man-made, then we can still say that the Bible is extremely important because it unfolds the wisdom of the Ancient people in Israel back then. We can understand their worldview, their knowledge, their life situation and learn from them for today. So in any case, whether someone shares the belief in God or not, one can still accept the Bible as a legitimate work for reference.

Timo Schmitz, 29 March 2023

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