Literary Discussions

I am 62 years old and have had curious and diverse experiences, a Liberal Arts education at St. John's, living in a Greek and a Russian monastery, learning to get by in modern Greek, Russian and church Slavonic, studying 2 years of Integral, Differential Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations (and I mean 16 hours a day every day), working as a computer programmer in the 1970s through 90s in Mfg, Wholesale, Retail, Engineering, Service, spending 2 years in a Guyanese Hindu temple and two years in a Korean Zen temple, reading several hundred books on psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, (I am probably the only layperson to have read books on Rorschach from every decade and learned to administer and interpret tests).... MY POINT BEING that whenever anyone asks me ANYTHING.... I answer based upon the GESTALT of all these multidimensional experiences over 50 years, and I can think about them all at once, and there is nothing marvelous about this for it is quite naturally how the brain works... BUT... sutras, threads, sentences, syllogisms are ONE DIMENSIONAL, so even though I can realize something in an instant, it takes me hours or days or months to do a transformational projection from that multidimensional gestalt into the linear one dimensional nature of speech, argument, narrative discourse.... because essentially what one tries to do with discourse is to RECREATE that multidimensional experience of years in the audience.  For me to truly UNDERSTAND the notions of, say, Hans Kung, it is not sufficient for me to simply read a book by Hans Kung but rather I must in some sense BECOME Hans Kung with all his years of experiences.  This is the truth which Hallaj, the first Sufi martyr, martyred at the hands of Orthodox Sunni because he exclaimed "I am one with Allah" - as he was being led to the gallows he said "if I had had YOUR experiences then I should have no choice but to execute me BUT if you had had MY experiences then you would have no choice but to exclaim I AM ONE WITH ALLAH."