Schopenhauer was the first point of reconnection between our two search parties, the Abrahamic and Brahmanic

Combining Western Know-How with Eastern Be-Who from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

As the two world-historical streams -- the Abrahamic and Brahmanic -- meandered and ramified, they took very different courses before arriving at oddly parallel conclusions. In the West, science pursued the material world down to the atom, eventually passing beyond it to discover an implicate realm of unbroken wholeness flowing beneath our misleading perceptions of duration and solidity. Vedanta proceeded in the opposite direction, tracing the illusory contours of our world-representation down to the explicate self, and then smashing it to discover another vast realm of unbroken wholeness and unity beneath our contingent and transient egos.

In the West, Kant and later Schopenhauer (his biography by Magee is outstanding) took metaphysics as far as the Western dualistic paradigm would allow, to the threshold of the noumenon, the unknowable ultimate reality that lay hidden behind our evolved perceptions (or what we like to call O). Kant maintained that we could only know the phenomenal world, the one revealed by our senses and categories of thought. Whatever lay outside those categories was utterly unknown and unknowable for us.

Schopenhauer went further than Kant, in that he realized that fleeting glimpses of the noumenon could be experienced, for example, in sexual union or in moments of aesthetic exaltation, especially through music. By the way, note that noumenon must be singular, not plural; there can be no "noumena," because that already presumes an egoic standpoint detached from it. In Coonskrit, it would be analogous to suggesting that there could be more than one O, when we all know there can onely be (n)one.

Schopenhauer never imagined that we could actually evolve beyond the neuropsychological walls of the ego and know the noumenon directly. That is, until he discovered the Upanishads, which you might say was the first point of reconnection between our two search parties, the Abrahamic and Brahmanic.

(Although there is, of course, much interesting, perhaps kooky, speculation as to how much Jesus was influenced by Eastern ideas, and why not? First century Palestine was an extraordinary melting pot of religious influences, and we can really have no idea what Luke exactly means by the statement that Jesus "grew in wisdom and stature" (2:52) or how he did it, for what does the Son of God need to learn in order to grow and become wise, and from whom does he learn it? Very early on, Jesus began to be officially "Helenized" at the same time he was de-Judaized, which is perhaps why some of the early fathers who gave Christianity more of a Vedantin twist are still regarded with suspicion, e.g., Denys -- who seems to have been familiar with Eastern ideas -- and his greatest acolyte, John Scottus Eriugena.)

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Where Merleau-Ponty is quick to see a gap where th...":

You know I get the impression from all of these guys that prattle on about various philosophies of the body that none of them are actually involved in any form of consistent discipline of the body via hatha yoga, tai chi, aikido, pilates, rolfing, and of the various body-based methods of psycho-physical transformation that were pioneered at Esalen and described (for instance) in the masterful The Future of the Body by Michael Murphy. Posted by Anonymous to Feel Philosophy at 9:17 AM, February 06, 2008