It doesn't connect to reality (was Re: Ralph where's Waldo Emerson)
Tang Huyen
DharmaTroll wrote:
> I, like you, was so quick to think that experiences like that aren't
> highly conditioned, and are 'direct' in some way. Now I do think the
> experience (his, mine, anybody's under stress or tripping) is
> authentic, but the conclusions reached (in my case "I am God") are
> highly conditioned interpretations. Words like "Kensho" to me aren't
> objective, and I think we all have moments where we see things in a
> new, fresh way, but this isn't 'evidence' of anything, such as that
> "Zen is right, and everybody else is wrong", which would be the worse
> possible way to spin such an experience.
>
> For me, it was letting go of my old Catholic world view, of being an
> alien 'soul' trapped in a stupid body in a stupid material universe
> made of stuff. Suddenly I felt I was the fruit on the tree, and grew
> out of nature, instead of being an alien trapped in it. Now the seeds
> of those ideas had been planted in my head by Kapleau, Watts, and Ram
> Dass already, so when I suddenly let go of my normal assumptions, and
> felt less separate and more connected to everything, I immediately
> clung to the first new interpretation that made sense of things, and
> that was pantheism. That doesn't make it evidence that pantheism is
> 'true'. It really is only evidence that my mind likes to cling to
> interpretations. As does Kapleau's.
>
> So it seems to me that even in authentic spiritual experiences (and I
> don't consider being in Zen Boot Camp and sleep deprived and hit with
> sticks to be more 'authentic' than tripping -- Kapleau could have had
> the same experience with less masochism had he just gone out to the
> woods and swallowed some acid, shrooms, or DMT), there is a ton of
> interpreting going on. There is something about the direct experience
> claim -- in that we drop our received view, but what we describe is
> again a new interpretative structure (and NOT some kind of objective
> description of some Ultimate Reality or other such bullshit). In my
> case, tripping on acid inspired me to take philosophy classes such as
> the Buddhist one which led me to serious meditation practice. But I
> don't go for it as any evidence for anything, except the realization
> that my normal, old conditioned views were arbitrary, and that reality
> was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever anticipated.
>
> [snip]
>
> Not at all. Were he in a Catholic retreat setting, he'd have
> experienced being filled by the Holy Spirit, and being loved
> unconditionally by Jesus. And you'd be saying to me "is this not a
> clear indication that Jesus H. Christ was truly the only begotten son
> of God who gave his life so that our sins may be forgiven?" Oh yes,
> you would.
>
> [snip]
>
> No. It just means that if you believe that story, then when you are
> tripping or stressed, you'll experience what you've been taught to
> belief. It only indicates how theory-laden experience is.
>
> [snip]
>
> Not at all. I had the same experiences. Only that he, and you, are
> quick to cling to interpretations and stories. In terms of having a
> different story, and thus clinging less to your old stories, it's
> invaluable as an experience. Clinging to some new "non-Dualist make me
> one with everything" shit is just going from the frying pan into the
> fire.
>
> [snip]
>
> No, you're taking this out of context and cherry picking. The Buddha
> wasn't just another Brahmanist, and was instead talking about specific
> subjective states called jhanas, not about the nature of the world.
> But I'll have to deal with this another time.
<<Words like "Kensho" to me aren't objective,
and I think we all have moments where we see
things in a new, fresh way, but this isn't 'evidence'
of anything, such as that "Zen is right, and
everybody else is wrong", which would be the
worse possible way to spin such an experience.>>
Wow! So you're a stooge of mine, on the issue
of mental culture and attainment being purely
subjective and strictly sentimental.
<<So it seems to me that even in authentic
spiritual experiences>>
Wow! So you can read minds! How do you
know that the spiritual experiences of others
are "authentic"? On what criteria? For an
objectvisit and physicalist like you, would you
first reduce all such experiences to matter and
then compare them *on that basis* and
adjudge them "authentic"?
<<The Buddha wasn't just another Brahmanist,
and was instead talking about specific subjective
states called jhanas, not about the nature of the
world.>>
I have no problem with such an interpretation,
which happens to be my own, but if such
experiences are "subjective states called
jhanas, not about the nature of the world", then
are they not just plain woo-woo?
<<In my case, tripping on acid inspired me to
take philosophy classes such as the Buddhist
one which led me to serious meditation practice.
But I don't go for it as any evidence for anything,
except the realization that my normal, old
conditioned views were arbitrary, and that
reality was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever
anticipated.>>
Wow! You're now in full-blown woo-woo!
You got the "realization" that <<my normal, old
conditioned views were arbitrary, and that
reality was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever
anticipated.>> If your old, normal conditioned
views are arbitrary, does that invalidate your
objectivist, physicalist view? On what basis
do you take your objectivist, physicalist view to
be superior (correspoding more to truth and
reality) than any other view of anybody who is
not insane?
My advocation of leaving aside conventional
norms and standards and opening up happens
to be based on the same reasoning, namely
<<the realization that my normal, old
conditioned views were arbitrary, and that
reality was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever
anticipated.>> That is the gate to mystery and
wonderment. So you're a stooge of mine, again!
More recently you wrote:
<<That takes some creativity and ingenuity to test
then. If it can't be easily tested, then we need to
be creative. I have no problem with that. But if it
can't be tested in principle, that is if logically, it is
in principle untestable, and unfalsifiable, then it is
meaningless. Because that means it doesn't
connect, you see. It doesn't connect to reality. To
be untestable in principle means that it doesn't
relate at all in any way to the real world -- if it did
it would be testable. So if it's just not easy to test,
that's ok, and we need to explore further. If it's
untestable in principle, then it's necessarily
bullshit.>>
This is very much along my line of thinking, as I
say that spiritual states are perpendicular or
orthogonal to the world and float above the world,
independently of the world ("Because that means
it doesn't connect, you see. It doesn't connect to
reality.") That is what calm, equability and
serenity are all about.
So, according to you, spiritual experiences are
subjective and aren't 'evidence' of anything, and
you <<don't go for it as any evidence for anything,
except the realization that my normal, old
conditioned views were arbitrary, and that
reality was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever
anticipated.>> All that is presumably untestable,
in principle, and <<If it's untestable in principle,
then it's necessarily bullshit.>>
So you go for bullshit, right? Or is there something
in your reasoned argument that escapes me?
Tang Huyen
DharmaTroll
wrote:
We agree to some extent. I'll say more below.
> <<So it seems to me that even in authentic
> spiritual experiences>>
>
> Wow! So you can read minds!
No, just palms. And only then when something is written on them.
> How do you know that the spiritual experiences
> of others are "authentic"? On what criteria?
Certain behaviors make me think they might be faking it, or that they
have interpreted something else in a mistaken way. Just as when
someone says "I'm in love" and is glowing, sometimes I (we) can
correctly guess that this is infatuation, a bright shiny high that
will fade when the dopamine 'honeymoon state' wears off. I can't know
for sure, of course, but there is evidence from their behavior that
they are not truly in love, just infatuated (as that old song goes,
"when your heart's on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your
eyes.") I'm saying that often, I think that "smoke gets in their
eyes".
> For an
> objectivist and physicalist like you, would you
> first reduce all such experiences to matter and
> then compare them *on that basis* and
> adjudge them "authentic"?
I don't see what "reducing them to matter" means. In fact, these
things take place on the higher levels of organization. Everything
that exists, I'm going to say, is ultimately matter/energy and
physical, but when I say someone is mistaken in their interpretations
(or mistaken in their claiming that they don't interpret and instead
have a magical portal to some objective transcendental reality), I'm
not talking about quantum physics and organic chemistry. So I don't
see what you're talking about. Indeed, physicalism doesn't mean that
psychology can be --explained-- by physics, only that the
psychological is supervenient over the physical (that is, if you had
had a different thought or experience, then different neurons would
fire or at least some other different physical state would have
occurred). Or maybe you had something else in mind?
> <<The Buddha wasn't just another Brahmanist,
> and was instead talking about specific subjective
> states called jhanas, not about the nature of the
> world.>>
>
> I have no problem with such an interpretation,
> which happens to be my own,
Yeah, we've always been on agreement with that point. Though a lot of
folks want to say, "well, the Buddha really was saying the same thing
as the Brahmanists, just saying it in a different way." And that's
been a source of quibbling since -- well, since the days of the
Buddha.
> but if such
> experiences are "subjective states called
> jhanas, not about the nature of the world", then
> are they not just plain woo-woo?
I'm not sure. What I call woo-woo isn't the claim that jhana states
exist, but that in them one has some magical portal to objective
reality, that one can know some objective truth about the universe and
even transcendental 'planes' outside the universe, etc.
The states themselves could eventually be grounded in mapping the
jhanas to specific brain activity and so forth. As I said in one post,
one of the higher jhanas seems to be describing the brain ignoring the
sensory input, such as the impulses from the optic and auditory
nerves, so that one creates a kind of inner 'sensory deprivation'
tank. If we have monks that claim they can at will go into this state,
and we have sophisticated enough brain-scans to show that no matter
what the sensory input, there are no reactions in the brain, that it
really isn't processing the sense data, then we'd have pretty strong
evidence that this jhana was what it is claimed to be. In that way the
jhana would be grounded in the real, tangible world, and not in woo-
woo talk about gaining mystical knowledge of the universe, or of other
realms, etc.
>
> <<In my case, tripping on acid inspired me to
> take philosophy classes such as the Buddhist
> one which led me to serious meditation practice.
> But I don't go for it as any evidence for anything,
> except the realization that my normal, old
> conditioned views were arbitrary, and that
> reality was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever
> anticipated.>>
>
> Wow! You're now in full-blown woo-woo!
Nah, I don't think so, Tang, but continue, please.
> You got the "realization" that <<my normal, old
> conditioned views were arbitrary, and that
> reality was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever
> anticipated.>> If your old, normal conditioned
> views are arbitrary, does that invalidate your
> objectivist, physicalist view?
No. I'm not talking about views about the stars really being out there
and having burned for billions of years. I'm talking about
psychological views of thinking that if I have enough sex, money, and
security, and cling to them hard enough that I'll be happy and a
worthwhile person -- those kinds of views, not my views about physics
and astronomy, Tang.
> On what basis
> do you take your objectivist, physicalist view to
> be superior (corresponding more to truth and
> reality) than any other view of anybody who is
> not insane?
Verification with precision and from multiple sources. Unlike the
theories of matter/energy of centuries ago, we have amazing precision
and test our theories in ways not dreamt up before a century ago. I
really have a lot of data that makes be buy into the view that the
universe has been around 13.7 billion years (though I'm flexible and
if new data comes up that adds or subtracts a billion or two, I'm
going to go with that), and that the Earth has been around about a
third as long, and that we evolved along with all the life on this
planet over millions and millions of years. I have an amazing amount
of evidence about evolution, even though tons of nutters want to claim
that their 'creationism' theory is right that it was created 6000
years ago. I don't simply have a differing and equally deluded opinion
-- I have an overwhelming amount of correlating evidence for all of
this. These folks aren't insane, and there are millions of them, and
some have Ph.D.'s, but I have overwhelming evidence that they are
wrong. And others who are sane but claim that the universe can't exist
without being observed -- and in fact my strong evidence suggests that
for most of its 13.7 billion years the universe did just that --
existed without being observed, and that this subjectivity and
consciousness and looking back at itself is new and only has shown up
recently in the cosmic picture.
Indeed, my claim is that awakening has nothing to do with denying the
Big Bang or the existence of cats and stars: it's about the non-
arising of craving, aversion, and delusion. The deluded views I'm
talking about don't have to do with astronomy or physics, but about
how we live our daily lives, about our emotions, our needs, and our
living from day to day. Whether one has the truth about the orbits of
the planets and understands Einstein's, Newton's, and Kepler's laws,
or whether one thinks we live on a flat earth with turtles all the way
down, or whether or not one thinks we are in the Matrix -- none of
that has anything to do with the non-arising of craving, aversion, and
delusion -- and that's why I laugh at the world-deniers claims to have
the high ground on spirituality. As I said to Fu, if anything,
thinking others are illusions are an excuse to kill and harm them, and
be un-spiritual.
Btw, there are many passages where the Buddha asserts a common-sense
objectivist, physical understanding. One of my favorites occurs in the
Samannaphala-suttanta, where there is a description of how after
experiencing the clarity and serenity of the 4th jhana, the Buddhist
yogin comes out of the jhana reflects on his psychophysical existence
and says:
"With his thought thus serene, made pure, translucent, cultured,
devoid of evil, supple, ready to act, firm and imperturbable, he
applies and bends down his thought to knowledge and vision. He comes
to know: 'This body of mine has material form, it is made up of the
four great elements, it springs from mother and father, it is
continually renewed by so much rice and juicy foods, its very nature
is impermanence, it is subject to erasion, abrasion, dissolution, and
disintegration, and there is this consciousness of mine too, bound up
on that it depends'."
Wow, this is exactly what I say; and in this sutta, the Buddhist yogin
after experiencing the 4th jhana, is in touch with his physicalism,
and even understands that consciousness is a bodily/brain function.
That passage is exactly how I view the world, and in that passage, how
I view the world is how the Buddhist yogin comes to also see things
after experiencing the serenity and clarity of the 4th jhana. Awesome,
isn't it? Truly the Dharmatroll is wise, and the nutters who babble
about the physical world being an illusion are deluded and pathetic.
Wouldn't you agree, Tang?
> My advocation of leaving aside conventional
> norms and standards and opening up happens
> to be based on the same reasoning, namely
> <<the realization that my normal, old
> conditioned views were arbitrary, and that
> reality was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever
> anticipated.>> That is the gate to mystery and
> wonderment. So you're a stooge of mine, again!
Well, it's more like we're co-stooges, I'd say.
But yes, I agree with you about that. But it's about my conditioned
views about psychological issues, not my studying about astrophysics
and evolution.
> More recently you wrote:
>
> <<That takes some creativity and ingenuity to test
> then. If it can't be easily tested, then we need to
> be creative. I have no problem with that. But if it
> can't be tested in principle, that is if logically, it is
> in principle untestable, and unfalsifiable, then it is
> meaningless. Because that means it doesn't
> connect, you see. It doesn't connect to reality. To
> be untestable in principle means that it doesn't
> relate at all in any way to the real world -- if it did
> it would be testable. So if it's just not easy to test,
> that's ok, and we need to explore further. If it's
> untestable in principle, then it's necessarily
> bullshit.>>
>
> This is very much along my line of thinking, as I
> say that spiritual states are perpendicular or
> orthogonal to the world and float above the world,
> independently of the world ("Because that means
> it doesn't connect, you see. It doesn't connect to
> reality.") That is what calm, equability and
> serenity are all about.
Well, to some extent I'm in agreement with you Tang, but not
completely.
When I'm talking about not connected to reality, I mean the words and
terms. If I claim that there are little fairies that lovingly guide
the leaves to the ground in the fall, you may ask, and you should ask,
"well, what do they look like, how big are they, or do you even have a
sample of their poop?" And if I say, no, the fairies are ineffable,
you can't see, hear, feel, smell, or taste them, and they are outside
of space-time, then you can ask, well, how can you even say that they
'guide' the leaves down? And when I point to intuitively knowing they
are there as I see the spontaneous flutter of the leaves falling, you
can say, "I have a simpler explanation that doesn't invoke ineffable
fairies, and that is Brownian motion and wind currents, etc., and
besides, if they are ineffable and can't be felt, how could they
possibly push the leaves and cause the leaves to flutter? And I say,
"well, they have transcendental energies, you see, that's how!" What's
happened is that I've just added more words and terms that just don't
mean anything. None of it is grounded to reality, to flesh and blood,
and actual leaves and air and so forth. You can legitimately ask what
is the difference between there existing such fairies and their not
existing such fairies, and I can't demonstrate any at all. Indeed, you
can even ask me, "if they are 'outside of space-time', then how can
you say there are fairies and not just one fairy, as quantity is bound
up in having distinct spacio-temporal locations?" The more you probe,
the more I am revealed as full of deva-dung, and the more I have to
make up more nonsense terms to explain the first nonsense terms, and
soon I have a whole vocabulary of words, many of them with capital
letters, and I think I've explained everything, when I've said
nothing, as none of it is grounded in the real world. That's why it's
bullshit.
What you're saying isn't about using words and terms that don't in the
end correspond to something tangible in reality, but rather you're
talking about experiences having to do with calm, equability and
serenity. But these terms are social terms: we can see to a large
extent when someone is serene and so forth. You in fact attack others
when you claim that they are not serene, yet have claimed such things.
I say the same about you, and so forth. So these things are somewhat
connected, by our behavior and interactions with people and the world.
Again, we can't know for sure if someone has a lasting state of
serenity, but we can tell if they don't, if they kick puppies, etc.,
right? So the longer we are around someone and they remain serene, the
more evidence we have that they are enlightened. If people are
constantly around someone, take Sid, for 45 years after he sat under
the tree and the apple fell on his head or whatever, and he's been
serene and compassionate and so forth for all that 45 years, we have
very good reason to think he was enlightened.
> So, according to you, spiritual experiences are
> subjective and aren't 'evidence' of anything, and
> you <<don't go for it as any evidence for anything,
> except the realization that my normal, old
> conditioned views were arbitrary, and that
> reality was a lot more mysterious than I'd ever
> anticipated.>>
Well, spiritual experiences can be insightful, and things can 'click'
and one might see the error of one's delusion, or realize how one has
been in denial about something, and in a strong enough way that one
won't easily return to one's previous habit. But I don't like the woo-
woo transcendental claim that one has had an objective (direct) seeing
of some higher plane of reality, unless one can demonstrate objective
evidence for this for all to see (if it were, say, an out of the body
experience, one could 'float' one's spook into a sealed bank vault and
count all the money or whatever and then demonstrate one could
actually spirit into the vault, but this has never, ever happened).
> All that is presumably untestable,
> in principle, and <<If it's untestable in principle,
> then it's necessarily bullshit.>>
What's testable is one's actions. If the experience was profound, then
there would be a corresponding change in one's behavior afterwards.
Supposing one was fully awakened after a profound experience, like Sid
after sitting under the tree. We would have strong evidence of it from
observing Sid's subsequent behavior, as I said above. Same with
Robbie. But Robbie is whiny and moody still, so if Robert claimed to
have been enlightened, I would say his behavior falsifies that claim.
He doesn't claim that. He merely claims some kind of woo-woo
supernatural whatever, and that's what I"m suggesting is probably
bullshit, and my guess is that he had a normal but unusual experience
which he put all sorts of interpretations into, and I'm just saying
that there's no good reason to invoke magic or transcendental woo-woo
as the most likely explanation of his heightened and weird
experiences, that's all. I'm not saying that isn't possible, just that
it's not the explanation most likely to be right.
> So you go for bullshit, right?
Well, I do agree with you a lot, don't I? Heh.
> Or is there something
> in your reasoned argument that escapes me?
>
> Tang Huyen
I don't know.
We have to get a little more clear exactly what we're talking about.
Again, your closed-loop talk is problematic to me because of the
problem of denial and self-delusion. If there were no connection to
reality, then there would be no difference between your (anyone, not
you in particular) being enlightened and serene, and your deluding
yourself and being miserable and insane, but believing that you are
enlightened and serene. For there to even be a difference between
those two, there has to be a connection with reality, and with others
observing and interacting. If there isn't a difference between those
two possibilities, then talk about being serene is meaningless. But
it's not meaningless. We want to be serene in a meaningful, robust
way, I think. I'd be curious to see what you, and anyone else, has to
say about this.
--DharmaTroll
"It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty
that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some
direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so
many times before in various periods in the history of man."
-Richard P. Feynman
Charles E Hardwidge
news:3294734d-11d0-416b...@f16g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
> We want to be serene in a meaningful, robust way, I think. I'd be curious
> to see what you, and anyone else, has to say about this.
Gun go bang. Bitch screams. What more is there?
--
Charles E Hardwidge
Keynes
wrote:
>
>Again, your closed-loop talk is problematic to me because of the
>problem of denial and self-delusion. If there were no connection to
>reality, then there would be no difference between your (anyone, not
>you in particular) being enlightened and serene, and your deluding
>yourself and being miserable and insane, but believing that you are
>enlightened and serene. For there to even be a difference between
>those two, there has to be a connection with reality, and with others
>observing and interacting. If there isn't a difference between those
>two possibilities, then talk about being serene is meaningless. But
>it's not meaningless. We want to be serene in a meaningful, robust
>way, I think. I'd be curious to see what you, and anyone else, has to
>say about this.
>
>--DharmaTroll
>
The assumption that mind is in body dooms awakening
from the get go. The best that one can hope for in that
case is just a little less friction and discomfort on the
way to annihilation. The terms of that view are strict.
It is the adamant assertion of one's self. No way out.
No possible dropping of self, self-concerns, self-ish
aims, self-ish pains, and a self-ish end.
Any vision or insight will be reasoned to be a simple
mind fart of no significance, a mere microgram of
neurotransmitters and a trace of vanishing electricity.
As Scrooge told the ghost of christmas past,"You may
be just a bit of undigested potato. There's more of gravy
than the grave about you." This is the consequence of the
assertion of the physical mind in a physical body.
It's the scientism game full bore.
That view takes great faith in the conjecture that
mind is as physical as a brain, in spite of the 'hard
problem' of connection that has not yet been solved.
Modern science pretends that there is no problem,
but that doesn't make it so. It's just begging the
question. The mind body problem still stands.
(The physical mind in physical body acting
according to cause and effect reasons us to be
meat puppets, mere mechanical machines. However
scientism fears to take that final and fatal step. So
disobedient are it's worshippers. Not even they
will put up with that much nonsense.)
Be that as it may, for practical purposes, even
neuroscientists admit that all we know of the
world is in one's mind. What may exist beyond
one's mind can't be known, and such material things
can't really matter (until they enter one's mind).
Cause and effect over time is a useful conjecture,
but it isn't physically demonstrable. The mysteries
of time are mind boggling. It can't be explained,
and certainly can't actually be experienced. It may
be a built in quirk, or a deficiency that allows us
to believe in time without any evidence. We do
know that folks generally have no sense of time.
We need all the clocks and calendars because we
really have no idea what time it is. It's always
now, and now is always much of a muchness,
different but the same.
The scientism view is a rational abstraction that
we can think about, or confine our thinking to
without ever actually experiencing such a thing
as time, change, or cause and effect.
IMO there are two ways to take buddhism.
One can either take practice on it's own terms,
or one can try to fit practice into one's own terms.
But trying to adapt buddhism to one's own solid
convictions (which must be less than adequate
or why bother in the first place?) must fail right
from beginning to end. It takes delusion as it's
first premise, builds on that, and won't let it go.
So we are advised to observe and not to rationalize.
(Rationalism is dualism. Dualism self destructs in
paradox. That tool will never suffice.) Observe.
Be alert. Don't go to sleep on your feet.
As far as ineffibility goes, what isn't ineffible?
We can tag and name things, and some times
indicate some things, but not a thing can be
adequately described or explained. All we
can do is point and grunt. One mumble leads
to the other in the chain of babble. And on that
shaky ground we build our castles of reason.
Mumbo jumbo. Kreegah! Bundolo.
zenworm
wrote:
> "DharmaTroll" <dharmatr...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
aim?
ZN ;D
jubilation for no reason owned by no one
Charles E Hardwidge
news:boedg5103ns6v981t...@4ax.com...
> As far as ineffibility goes, what isn't ineffible?
> We can tag and name things, and some times
> indicate some things, but not a thing can be
> adequately described or explained. All we
> can do is point and grunt. One mumble leads
> to the other in the chain of babble. And on that
> shaky ground we build our castles of reason.
> Mumbo jumbo. Kreegah! Bundolo.
You really do talk pseudo-scientific handwaving bollocks at times.
--
Charles E Hardwidge
Charles E Hardwidge
news:b5ydnZ80rqECcZjW...@supernews.com...
>
> So you go for bullshit, right? Or is there something
> in your reasoned argument that escapes me?
You're doing a good impression of reasoning that was fashionable during
1970's Britain and popular shows of the time like Arthur of the Briton's. It
won't be long before you're hanging out the window of a Ford Granada and
shouting "Geezer!" at everyone.
Tang-a-bang-san is the man,
Tang-a-bang-san is the man,
Tang-a-bang-san is the man,
Oh, do-do do-do do-do, oh.
I'm a howling wolf an' I whoo-hoo-hoo.
--
Charles E Hardwidge
DharmaTroll
> The assumption that mind is in body dooms awakening
> from the get go.
Actually, rather than your usual nutter stuff, Keynes, here you are
making the cry of the common Cartesian mind/body dualist, a Platonic
view that is still popular among the masses, even though most
contemporary philosophers and scientists have dispensed with it.
That is, you presuppose a spook, a self, a thing called the 'mind',
and then you object that this spook is 'in' the body. This is indeed
the ultimate irony, as you babble about being a 'NonDualist' in your
religious dogma, yet you are fiercely a mind/body dualist in the
philosophical sense of the word.
If you don't make the presupposition that mind is a thing separable
from a body, then you don't have to fight the idea of this thing
called mind 'in' the body. Only the brain and heart and liver and
other organs are 'in' the body. Mind is just what the brain 'does'. It
is process, function, not a 'thing', not the soul that you go for,
couched in all your woo-woo terms, that makes you disgusted with what
has strikingly become almost a brute fact that brains are conscious.
Keynes:
> As far as ineffibility goes, what isn't ineffible?
Charles:
> You really do talk pseudo-scientific handwaving bollocks at times.
Yep, he sure does. The real, tangible world, including cats, trees,
stones, and even brains, are not 'ineffible' and imaginary. And wow,
Charles didn't even say anything crude: he just pretty much spelled
out the obvious this time. You must be on his good side, Keynes.
And I even left in a barb for you and the other dogmatic pups to
bounce on and insult me for being egoistical or whatever, and you
didn't even take the bait, but just went on babbling like a lunatic.
Too bad you didn't comment on my quoting the Buddhist text, or are
have I embarrassed you too many times when you just babble your usual
"that was a lie the Buddha told to ignorant Indian dolts who didn't
understand the true teachings written centuries later by other sects
that added all sorts of Transcendental stuff to Buddhism". Again, I
repeat:
Btw, there are many passages where the Buddha asserts a common-sense
objectivist, physical understanding. One of my favorites occurs in the
Samannaphala-suttanta, where there is a description of how after
experiencing the clarity and serenity of the 4th jhana, the Buddhist
yogin comes out of the jhana reflects on his psychophysical existence
and says:
"With his thought thus serene, made pure, translucent, cultured,
devoid of evil, supple, ready to act, firm and imperturbable, he
applies and bends down his thought to knowledge and vision. He comes
to know: 'This body of mine has material form, it is made up of the
four great elements, it springs from mother and father, it is
continually renewed by so much rice and juicy foods, its very nature
is impermanence, it is subject to erasion, abrasion, dissolution, and
disintegration, and there is this consciousness of mine too, bound up
on that it depends'."
Wow, this is exactly what I say; and in this sutta, the Buddhist yogin
after experiencing the 4th jhana, is in touch with his physicalism,
and even understands that consciousness is a bodily/brain function.
That passage is exactly how I view the world, and in that passage, how
I view the world is how the Buddhist yogin comes to also see things
after experiencing the serenity and clarity of the 4th jhana. Awesome,
isn't it? Truly the Dharmatroll is wise, and the nutters who babble
about the physical world being an illusion are deluded and pathetic.
Wouldn't you agree, Tang?
The Samannaphala-suttanta wonderfully states exactly the opposite of
the Nutter Keynes, that "there is this consciousness of mine too,
bound up on that it depends, on material form, it is made up of the
four great elements, it springs from mother and father, it is
continually renewed by so much rice and juicy foods, its very nature
is impermanence, it is subject to erasion, abrasion, dissolution, and
disintegration."
--DharmaTroll
Appledog
Of course there is so much more (and yet, more refined) meaning in the
original Japanese that is simply lost in the English translation.
-
zenworm
wa?
ZN :D
absolute permanent perfection overflowing without action
brian mitchell
>Btw, there are many passages where the Buddha asserts a common-sense
>objectivist, physical understanding. One of my favorites occurs in the
>Samannaphala-suttanta, where there is a description of how after
>experiencing the clarity and serenity of the 4th jhana, the Buddhist
>yogin comes out of the jhana reflects on his psychophysical existence
>and says:
>
>"With his thought thus serene, made pure, translucent, cultured,
>devoid of evil, supple, ready to act, firm and imperturbable, he
>applies and bends down his thought to knowledge and vision. He comes
>to know: 'This body of mine has material form, it is made up of the
>four great elements, it springs from mother and father, it is
>continually renewed by so much rice and juicy foods, its very nature
>is impermanence, it is subject to erasion, abrasion, dissolution, and
>disintegration, and there is this consciousness of mine too, bound up
>on that it depends'."
Whose translation are you using here? I looked this up and came upon
Thanissaro Bhikkhu's translation, which gives:
In the same way --with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and
bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and
attained to imperturbability-- the monk directs and inclines it to
knowledge and vision. He discerns: 'This body of mine is endowed with
form, composed of the four primary elements, born from mother and
father, nourished with rice and porridge, subject to inconstancy,
rubbing, pressing, dissolution, and dispersion. And this consciousness
of mine is supported here and bound up here.'"
I draw your attention to the difference between 'thought' in your
version and 'mind' in TB's, since discernment is involved, I prefer
'mind' over 'thought' here. But more importantly, I wonder if you see
any distinction between 'mind' and 'consciousness'? Consciousness,
according to this sutta, is wound through the body like a vein (of
mineral, I suppose) through a gemstone, but it is the *mind*,
concentrated, purified, etc, which discerns this fact.
Then, of course, you only quote the bit that seems to support your
"objectivist, physical understanding," ignoring all the following
sections on the development of paranormal powers, mind reading, and so
on, which the Buddha cites as among the fruits of the contemplative
life. And from the early training sections of the sutta I came across
this:
"Abandoning abusive speech, he abstains from abusive speech. He speaks
words that are soothing to the ear, that are affectionate, that go to
the heart, that are polite, appealing and pleasing to people at large.
This, too, is part of his virtue."
DharmaTroll
Yes, you can probably interpret even that in a Cartesian mind/body
dualist way. Of course you can. But the Buddha didn't separate mind
and body the way soulists and you woo-woo Harry Potter folks do. In
the 21st century where we pretty much know as given that brains are
conscious and the universe is 13.7 billion years old and expanding,
does it really give you a sense of being spiritually one-up that you
believe in only 4 elements and in mind-reading and clairvoyant dreams
and a flat earth, or whatever your superstitions happen to be? I just
don't get how fundamentalists can buy their own propaganda, whether
it's the Born-Again Christians or you Born-Again Buddhists.
> Then, of course, you only quote the bit that seems to support your
> "objectivist, physical understanding," ignoring all the following
> sections on the development of paranormal powers, mind reading,
Hey, all sorts of claims of such, and spirit possession too, were
made. Reincarnation, too. But there's no evidence for any of them, and
none have been demonstrated. If you have such powers, then tell me
what am I eating right now? Or have one of your woo-woo dreams and
tell me whose party I'm going to be at tomorrow.
I don't ignore those sections; I take them as about the culture at the
time. Everyone believed in them, and evil spirits and spooks, too. But
we live in the 21st century now, Brian, and we know that viruses cause
influenza, not evil spirits (influenza comes from 'influence' of woo-
woo beasties). So are you seriously saying, "Gee Trollpa, why don't
you blindly believe all the superstitions and primitive science ideas
of ancient India, because that's what being a Buddhist really is?" Are
you frakking kidding me?
> And from the early training sections of the sutta I came across this:
>
> "Abandoning abusive speech, he abstains from abusive speech. He speaks
> words that are soothing to the ear, that are affectionate, that go to
> the heart, that are polite, appealing and pleasing to people at large.
> This, too, is part of his virtue."
Of course you left out the next verses, which say, "Except in the
Usenet hell realms: there, kick the buttinski of Harry Potter blind
faith believers who are like farmers who ignore the eggs and only
collect the chicken shit."
--DharmaTroll
brian mitchell
>On Nov 20, 9:48�pm, brian mitchell <brainm...@fishing.net> wrote:
>> Whose translation are you using here? I looked this up and came upon
>> Thanissaro Bhikkhu's translation, which gives:
>> In the same way --with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and
>> bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and
>> attained to imperturbability-- the monk directs and inclines it to
>> knowledge and vision. He discerns: 'This body of mine is endowed with
>> form, composed of the four primary elements, born from mother and
>> father, nourished with rice and porridge, subject to inconstancy,
>> rubbing, pressing, dissolution, and dispersion. And this consciousness
>> of mine is supported here and bound up here.'"
>>
>> I draw your attention to the difference between 'thought' in your
>> version and 'mind' in TB's, since discernment is involved, I prefer
>> 'mind' over 'thought' here. But more importantly, I wonder if you see
>> any distinction between 'mind' and 'consciousness'? Consciousness,
>> according to this sutta, is wound through the body like a vein (of
>> mineral, I suppose) through a gemstone, but it is the *mind*,
>> concentrated, purified, etc, which discerns this fact.
>
>Yes, you can probably interpret even that in a Cartesian mind/body
>dualist way...
It's not a matter of interpreting. The sutta uses two terms,
'consciousness' and 'mind' (or something else) so it clearly means to
distinguish between them. If you're going to quote the sutta as
authoritative support for a particular view then you have to be a bit
rigorous in your reading of it. Are you actually interested in whether
there *is* a distinction to be made between consciousness and some
other faculty or is your use of the sutta merely tactical?
> But the Buddha didn't separate mind and body...
You haven't yet established this. Can you do so, using this or any
other sutta?
>> Then, of course, you only quote the bit that seems to support your
>> "objectivist, physical understanding," ignoring all the following
>> sections on the development of paranormal powers, mind reading,
>
>I don't ignore those sections; I take them as about the culture at the
>time...
When Keynes says that some of things Buddha said were tailored to the
understanding of the uneducated and superstitious, etc, you jump on
him and accuse him of being a dishonest apologist, now here you do the
same thing. That sutta follows a carefully organised sequence in which
each succeeding section represents an advance in the concentration and
purification of the mind and all the sections on the various powers
come *after* the part about the discernment of consciousness. If
you're going to browse through the suttas and just take the parts
which agree with what you already believe while dismissing the rest as
cultural ignorance, why bother with them, or Buddhism, at all?
Do you think there's anything the modern mind can usefully *learn*
from these ancient texts, or are they just interesting but recklessly
wordy historical artefacts?
herbzet
brian mitchell wrote:
> When Keynes says that some of things Buddha said were tailored to the
> understanding of the uneducated and superstitious, etc, you jump on
> him and accuse him of being a dishonest apologist, now here you do the
> same thing.
It should be becoming clear by now that you're dealing with a troll.
I don't bother reading his posts anymore -- a waste of time & energy.
I read some of the posters who reply to him, but often I'll just
skip that too, if it's clear they're just hooked into the endless
argumentation that trolls enjoy.
--
hz
Charles E Hardwidge
news:4B078015...@gmail.com...
The endless preening, circle jerking, overlong threads, and nitpicky
arguments make me click "catch-up" pretty fast. I binned 300 comments
yesterday without even bothering to look at them.
--
Charles E Hardwidge
Keynes
wrote:
>
>That is, you presuppose a spook, a self, a thing called the 'mind',
>and then you object that this spook is 'in' the body.
You're the one who insists on making mind
a physical lump of personal body fat. (Why
don't you accept my theory of a steam powered
mind instead? (Runs on wood OR coal.))
>This is indeed
>the ultimate irony, as you babble about being a 'NonDualist' in your
>religious dogma, yet you are fiercely a mind/body dualist in the
>philosophical sense of the word.
Actually not.
The mind is all that is 'knowable' at all.
The physical world (if there is one) is in the mind.
Or else it can't matter.
In the past, 'reality' was all about gods and demons.
These days 'reality' is all about electro-chemistry.
In a few years no doubt 'reality' will be all about
quarks, neutrinos, dark matter, and dark energy in
11 dimensional space-time plus whatever seven
other dimensions get fashionable. It's spooks, spooks,
spooks all the way down. All woo-woo all the time.
Fortunately we have the same old material to
work on as the Buddha had, and the woo-woo
fashion of 'reality' of this day has nothing much
to do with it. (Except to be dropped and forgotten
as completely irrelevant to skillful living.)
>Keynes:
>> As far as ineffibility goes, what isn't ineffible?
A picture is worth 10,000 words, and yet it falls
short of actual seeing. The senses by which we
apprehend everything are not reducible to simple
linguistic grunting. That voice in your head (which
apparently you can never shut up) has hypnotized
you into imagining that you know anything about
anything. Well, you don't. You can't tell your ass
from your elbow, and consequently you can't profit
from plain old experience, despite your 'training'.
You take the tags for the things themselves. You
prefer them. They make 'sense'. And you dare to call
that 'intelligence'.
Every day you become more ignorant and deluded
as you gather pointless trivia and publish it everywhere.
You are an anti-buddhist preaching shrilly in a buddhist
forum. But you have no shame. You don't know it.
You are unconscious. That is your crime and your
punishment.
"Keynes, it's always you, you, you. Why can't you talk about me, me, me."
-- DramaTroll His Own Self. (You better believe it!)
^@%>---*=#**
"Charles E Hardwidge" <bo...@invalid.invalid> wrote in message
news:EnONm.7201$Ym4....@text.news.virginmedia.com...
my hero
^@%>---*=#**
dramadroll is an excellent reactive memorization
bot. he can remember tons and tons of useless
information and parrot it back ad nauseum ad infinitum.
he reminds me of the old writer's quote; "that which you
write which you think is creative probably isn't very
original, and that which you write that you think is
original probably isn't very creative".
DharmaTroll
The terms mean somewhat different things and are used in different
contexts. Consciousness is vinnana, and mind is mano.
> If you're going to quote the sutta as
> authoritative support for a particular view then you
> have to be a bit rigorous in your reading of it.
Only if someone asks me to. Better to start with a baiting statement,
I have found. The flamers will hurl insults, the nutters will babble
nonsense, and anyone actually interested in Buddhism will ask a decent
question or two and want some clarification. You seem to be in the
latter category. Congratulations, Brian.
> Are you actually interested in whether there *is* a
> distinction to be made between consciousness and some
> other faculty or is your use of the sutta merely tactical?
That completely depends on to whom I'm responding.
> > But the Buddha didn't separate mind and body...
>
> You haven't yet established this.
> Can you do so, using this or any other sutta?
Yeah. Explaining the physical personality in terms of material
elements, all of which are understood from the perspective of human
experience, Sid was able to avoid annoying philosophical controversies
generated by a more objectivist physicalist approach, such as the mind-
body problem. Sid did speak of the human person as a psychophysical
personality: namarupa. Yet the psychic and the physical were never
discussed in isolation, nor were they viewed as self-subsisting
entities. For Sid, there was neither a "material-stuff" nor a "mental-
stuff", because both are the results of reductive analysis that go
beyond experience. There were some exceptions to this, such as when
pressed to define the physical and mental components by someone who
assumed them to be separate, Sid responded by saying that rupa is
contact with resistance (patigha-samphassa), where as nama is contact
with concepts (adhivacana-samphassa), so that both nama and rupa were
thus forms of contact. (See the Digha-nikaya 2.62.)
Look, the mind (mano) is considered to be one of the 6 senses, along
with the other 5 physical ones, and the object of this sense is
thoughts. Consciousness (vinnana), on the other hand, is one of the
five aggregates, as well as one of the four nutriments, and I think
that passage I had quoted before was using it in this sense. Sid
refers to four nutriments which are essential for such a being to
remain human (bhutanam va sattanam thitiya) and for human beings who
are yet to come (sambhavesinam va anuggahaya): (1) material food,
gross or subtle (kabalinkaro aharo olarinko va sukhomo va); (2)
sensory contact (phasso); (3) mental dispositions or volitions
(manosancetana); and (4) our pal consciousness (vinnahana). (From the
Majjhims-nikaya 1.261.)
Look, the bottom line is this: consciousness (vinnanam) is intended to
explain the continutity in the person who is individualized by
dispositions (sankhara). Like the other constituents, consciousness
depends on the other four aggregates for existence as well as
nourishment. Consciousness is neither a permanent, eternal substance
nor a series of discrete, momentary acts of conscious life united by a
mysterious self or spook. Hence, consciousness cannot function if
separated from the other aggregates, especially material form (rupa),
but must act with other aggregates if thoughts are to occur. And that
is exactly my (and most neuroscientists') understanding of the brain.
When consciousness is so explained, it's natural to wrongly think of
it as something separable from the brain/body, which was how the
substantialists responded to the Buddha, wo replied that consciousness
is nothing more than the act of being conscious (vijanatiti vinnanam).
(From the Majjhims-nikaya 1.292.) Which is just precisely what I mean
when I say that consciousness is what the brain 'does'.
> >> Then, of course, you only quote the bit that seems to support your
> >> "objectivist, physical understanding," ignoring all the following
> >> sections on the development of paranormal powers, mind reading,
>
> >I don't ignore those sections; I take them as about the culture at the
> >time...
>
> When Keynes says that some of things Buddha said were tailored to the
> understanding of the uneducated and superstitious, etc, you jump on
> him and accuse him of being a dishonest apologist,
Well, yeah, he claims that the core teachings are "upaya" or watered-
down lies for ignorant dolts. Fine if he said this about being able to
reach up and touch the sun, but not about Dependent Origination.
> now here you do the same thing.
No, I never claimed that superhero powers were lies taught to the
ignorant because they can't understand the dharma. I think everyone,
Sid included, believed lots of such stuff, and were wrong. However,
the Buddha wisely tried to not speculate on what wasn't or couldn't be
experienced. As for past lives -- if superhero powers existed, then
one could in principle see one's and others' karma and past lives and
verify them. But as for what happens after the Buddha dies and there
is no more karma for rebirth, does he cease to exist or continue to
exist in some woo-woo way, the Buddha didn't answer, again because it
was beyond his possible experience. So Sid's radical empiricism nicely
compensates for whatever cultural assumptions or beliefs he got wrong.
I'm not claiming he lied to anyone.
> That sutta follows a carefully organised sequence in which
> each succeeding section represents an advance in the concentration and
> purification of the mind and all the sections on the various powers
> come *after* the part about the discernment of consciousness. If
> you're going to browse through the suttas and just take the parts
> which agree with what you already believe while dismissing the rest as
> cultural ignorance, why bother with them, or Buddhism, at all?
Because I'm interested in psychology/spirituality of the Buddha, and I
could care less about the physics and astrology of the time. What the
Buddha says about craving, aversion, and delusion and the ending of
these and how to get there is important to me. That doesn't entail
believing in only four elements in chemistry, or that mind-reading or
clairvoyance, or a flat-earth or physical hard past lives exist.
Again, that's the farmer collecting the chicken shit instead of the
eggs.
Let me digress with an analogy to put this in perspective, Brian.
Christians do that all the time with the misunderstood book of
Revelation. Hollywood Lee the other day grumped about that sutra. But
it's only a problem for literalists who believe in fortune-telling.
The book is about the state of Rome at the time, and is fascinating if
you don't try to rip it out of its culture and start babbling that it
is foretelling the Israel/Iran upcoming nuclear war that will usher in
Armageddon or some other woo-woo babble.
The same with Leviticus. Were you a Christian dogmatist instead of a
Buddhist one, you'd be asking how dare I ignore the strong claims that
homosexuality is an abomination. And I'd point out that you missed the
point and were collecting the chicken shit instead of the eggs again:
there are many passages with other things, such as wearing a combo of
two fabrics weaved together, like a 50/50 T-shirt, and eating shrimp
or whatever, and on and on. It is neither a universal law nor just
silly ancient bullshit, as the fundie will try to force you to choose
between. Rather, the pagans that were overrunning Israel did all these
things: wear mixed fabrics, eat certain exotic foods, and fuck people
of the same gender, and the point was to differentiate the Israelites
from them, and by not adopting their customs, not dilute the Jewish
faith. The strategy worked. And it has not a damned thing to do with
legalizing gay marriage in 21st century America.
> Do you think there's anything the modern mind can usefully *learn*
> from these ancient texts, or are they just interesting but recklessly
> wordy historical artefacts?
Yes, one can learn a lot from the Torah, if one isn't a literalist
clinging nutter who doesn't see the bigger picture. If you understand
the cultural and geopolitical significance and context, then there is
much rich teaching in those books. If you take Revelation to be a
brilliant political statement about Rome in antiquity, then great. If
you babble it's about the world about to end today, or that bigotry
against gays is justified, then these ancient texts do more harm than
good.
And the same goes with Buddhist texts. If you take them to reinforce
pseudo-science woo-woo and beliefs that mindreading and literal past
lives exist or that the world is inside your mind (when really your
head is up your ass), then these ancient texts do more harm than good
as well. As always, it's totally up to you. (Were I an ESThole, I
would add 'ASSHOLE!' at the end.)
The flaming pups who responded aren't worth separate posts to punt
them over the fence, but here's a quick response to the yappers.
Herbzet flames:
> It should be becoming clear by now that you're dealing with a troll.
> I don't bother reading his posts anymore -- a waste of time & energy.
Good riddance! The whiner has kill-filed himself for me. How
efficient!
And ^@%>---*=#**" flames:
> dramadroll is an excellent reactive memorization
> bot. he can remember tons and tons of useless
> information and parrot it back ad nauseum ad infinitum.
No, actually, I have a pretty bad memory, and I can't even remember
people's names when I see them again. I go out of my way to use
pneumatic devices to remember the names of hot chicks, so that I won't
be embarrassed when I see them again at a party and they say hi, and
call out my name. And no, I don't have any of that shit memorized. I
understand the patterns and the overarching picture, but I paste in
all those quotes and Pali words from websites. Without Google, I'm
just a plain old intuitive genius, without all the firepower, I must
admit.
Last and also least, the Nutter Keynes pontificates:
> You're the one who insists on making mind
> a physical lump of personal body fat.
No, the brain is the physical lump, and a very complex one.
Consciousness is what the brain 'does'. Even the Buddha says so (see
my above sutta references).
> (Why don't you accept my theory of a steam powered
> mind instead? (Runs on wood OR coal.))
Because as always, you're wrong as well as deluded.
> The physical world (if there is one) is in the mind.
No. That would by definition make the mind a 'soul'. Which makes you a
nice Cartesian Dualist if you claim we each have one, or a Hinduist if
you claim that everyone shares the same one. Btw, how on Earth (or in
your Transcendental Nondual Candyland) are you going to generate
enough steam to power an engine larger than the known universe? You've
saddled yourself with a hell of an engineering problem, nutter-dude.
Btw, Keynes, you've ironically repeated the same mistake as last year,
by claiming that the physical world is 'inside' the mind, that you did
with your woo-woo astronomy claims. You see, the universe doesn't have
an 'outside', so it can't be 'inside' anything. As you recall, you
asked:
> If space is flat, it must have a surface,
> an end of the universe. Where is it?
And I replied, "This is also wrong, Keynes. There is no observational
evidence for a boundary to the universe, nor is there any theoretical
justification for one. Current cosmological models have no such
features."
Well, I guess Fu was right, you're totally incompetent in at least two
things: (1) Astrophysics; and (2) Buddhism.
> Every day you become more ignorant and deluded
Yeah, that might be right. I peaked in chess at about age 25. But I
don't think dementia is setting in just yet. My dad is exactly twice
my age and in perfect mental health and physical health, and he walks
two miles every day. So I'm not even at half-time yet. So you have a
long wait if you think the Alpha-Troll is goin' down anytime soon.
Heh.
--DharmaTroll
"Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize
they were the big things."
-Robert Brault
^@%>---*=#**
And ^@%>---*=#**" flames:
> dramadroll is an excellent reactive memorization
> bot. he can remember tons and tons of useless
> information and parrot it back ad nauseum ad infinitum.
>No, actually,
actually? you always seem to be
claiming actuality as when you said
that reality was real but you had no evidence
that this was true. you also claimed i
didn't have robert's book which you had
no way of knowing one way or the other
and you exaggerate ad nauseum ad infinitum
anything anyone says completely out of
proportion and then call them nutters because
of your lopsided lackluster exaggerations.
you're nothing but a joke.
DharmaTroll
>
> >No, actually,
>
> actually? you always seem to be
> claiming actuality as when you said
> that reality was real but you had no evidence
> that this was true. you also claimed i
> didn't have robert's book which you had
> no way of knowing one way or the other
Yeah, and when you produced evidence on the contrary, and falsified my
guess, I immediately said, "oops, I was wrong."
It's by making mistakes and getting it wrong and then correcting
myself, that I end up the Alpha-Dog in the end, and you pups the
little yippers I punt over the fence, you know, while you just keep
repeating the same blind faith year after year.
> you're nothing but a joke.
The whole universe is nothing but a joke.
And the joke's on you, pipsqueak!
Bwahahahahahahahahha!
--DharmaTroll
"Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom."
-Merry Browne
Keynes
wrote:
>
>No. That would by definition make the mind a 'soul'. Which makes you a
>nice Cartesian Dualist if you claim we each have one, or a Hinduist if
>you claim that everyone shares the same one. Btw, how on Earth (or in
>your Transcendental Nondual Candyland) are you going to generate
>enough steam to power an engine larger than the known universe? You've
>saddled yourself with a hell of an engineering problem, nutter-dude.
" That would by definition make the mind a 'soul'."
Why? You insist on reasonable duality, either 'this' or
necessarily 'that'. You assume there is some knowable
'truth' that you can pin down once and for all.
In fact you think you know it already.
And yet you are searching for some buddhist
peace of mind and can't find it. The very act
of habitual searching must prevent any finding.
You carry the raft of grass and sticks on your head
like some sort of crown, yet you have never dared
to even get it wet. Let go of the lifeline, coward.
According to the Buddha, the 'All' is just the skandas,
and anyone making any other assertion must be
embarrassed by complete lack of evidence.
Name and form are to be disregarded as delusion.
"In the seen, just the seen." If you could only see,
you would cease to be such a damn silly fool.
"What is the Buddha? (awakening)"
-- "Three pounds of flax."
-- "The cyprus tree in the garden."
-- "A dried up stick of shit."
What more do you need to know?
liaM
> It's by making mistakes and getting it wrong and then correcting
> myself, that I end up the Alpha-Dog in the end, and you pups the
> little yippers I punt over the fence, you know, while you just keep
> repeating the same blind faith year after year.
Asura dog, poor dog
^@%>---*=#**
On Nov 21, 2:29 pm, "^@%>---*=#**" <yom...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >No, actually,
>
> actually? you always seem to be
> claiming actuality as when you said
> that reality was real but you had no evidence
> that this was true. you also claimed i
> didn't have robert's book which you had
> no way of knowing one way or the other
Yeah,
i got this ugly sorta mutated goat tied
up in my back yard and i got this little
bag of rubber bands that i shoot at him
and he's so damn near sighted that every
time i shoot a rubber band at him he thinks
i am launching an ICBM. he's a funny guy.
zenworm
halfawake
love hearing about your dirty laundry. the contents of your
narcissistic magnifications are sooooo fascinating... <snore>
robert
herbzet
Charles E Hardwidge wrote:
> "herbzet" wrote:
> > brian mitchell wrote:
> >
> >> When Keynes says that some of things Buddha said were tailored to the
> >> understanding of the uneducated and superstitious, etc, you jump on
> >> him and accuse him of being a dishonest apologist, now here you do the
> >> same thing.
> >
> > It should be becoming clear by now that you're dealing with a troll.
> >
> > I don't bother reading his posts anymore -- a waste of time & energy.
> >
> > I read some of the posters who reply to him, but often I'll just
> > skip that too, if it's clear they're just hooked into the endless
> > argumentation that trolls enjoy.
>
> The endless preening, circle jerking, overlong threads, and nitpicky
> arguments make me click "catch-up" pretty fast. I binned 300 comments
> yesterday without even bothering to look at them.
Yeah, the pickin's are pretty slim lately. Which kind of includes your
posts too, no offense, but at least your posts are edited for brevity.
I still wonder why you post to alt.zen et al, at all. (Heh.)
You have an interest in buddhism?
--
hz
brian mitchell
>It should be becoming clear by now that you're dealing with a troll.
>
>I don't bother reading his posts anymore -- a waste of time & energy.
Well, you are gruff and perfect.
btw, according to my dictionary, 'apperception' already has a narrowly
defined meaning:
"apperception, n. mind's perception of itself"
so the ap- prefix seems to denote reflexivity. I hope this is just a
minor spanner.
brian mitchell
>On Nov 20, 11:07�pm, brian mitchell <brainm...@fishing.net> wrote:
>> DharmaTroll wrote:
>> >On Nov 20, 9:48�pm, brian mitchell <brainm...@fishing.net> wrote:
>>
>> It's not a matter of interpreting. The sutta uses two terms,
>> 'consciousness' and 'mind' (or something else) so it clearly means to
>> distinguish between them.
>
>> > But the Buddha didn't separate mind and body...
>>
>> You haven't yet established this.
>> Can you do so, using this or any other sutta?
>
>Yeah. Explaining the physical personality in terms of material
>elements, all of which are understood from the perspective of human
>experience, Sid was able to avoid annoying philosophical controversies
>generated by a more objectivist physicalist approach, such as the mind-
>body problem...
I thought objective physicalism was what you promoted. Psychophysical
supervenience and so on. And I thought the prime virtue of this
position was that it did away with the mind-body problem.
> Sid did speak of the human person as a psychophysical
>personality: namarupa. Yet the psychic and the physical were never
>discussed in isolation, nor were they viewed as self-subsisting
>entities. For Sid, there was neither a "material-stuff" nor a "mental-
>stuff", because both are the results of reductive analysis that go
>beyond experience...
But this is exactly what several people here, including myself, have
proposed, and which you have rejected. It is impossible in experience
to separate an object from one's awareness of the object; they are the
same. Objects in themselves exist only as concepts and can't be
perceived. It is you that insists on "material stuff," objects in
themselves, ultimately real whether perceived or not. Some others here
do also propose "mental stuff," (eg, awareness of awareness) which I'm
not so sure of.
> There were some exceptions to this, such as when
>pressed to define the physical and mental components by someone who
>assumed them to be separate, Sid responded by saying that rupa is
>contact with resistance (patigha-samphassa), where as nama is contact
>with concepts (adhivacana-samphassa), so that both nama and rupa were
>thus forms of contact. (See the Digha-nikaya 2.62.)
This still leaves both as subjective responses, doesn't it?
>Look, the mind (mano) is considered to be one of the 6 senses, along
>with the other 5 physical ones, and the object of this sense is
>thoughts...
Does that make sense to you? It basically says that mind and thoughts
are the same thing, as any sense and its objects are
indistinguishable. A lot rides, though, on what we mean by 'thought'.
What do you say thought is? Something a bit less circular than "what
the brain does" I hope. And in the absence of thought, what is there?
> Consciousness (vinnana), on the other hand, is one of the
>five aggregates, as well as one of the four nutriments,,,
Quite a lot more substitution of terms, which doesn't get us any
closer to knowing what consciousness (or the act of being conscious)
actually is. In this respect, all of us are just as qualified to
experiment and discover as any neuroscientist, or does the fact that
we would have to employ the mind and consciousness to carry out the
exploration somehow *dis*qualify us?
>Look, the bottom line is this: consciousness (vinnanam) is intended to
>explain the continutity in the person who is individualized by
>dispositions (sankhara). Like the other constituents, consciousness
>depends on the other four aggregates for existence as well as
>nourishment. Consciousness is neither a permanent, eternal substance
>nor a series of discrete, momentary acts of conscious life united by a
>mysterious self or spook. Hence, consciousness cannot function if
>separated from the other aggregates, especially material form (rupa),
>but must act with other aggregates if thoughts are to occur...
Why do you yoke thought and consciousness so closely? Does thought
only ever occur in consciousness (many psychologists would disagree)?
What happens to consciousness in the absence of thought?
> And that
>is exactly my (and most neuroscientists') understanding of the brain.
>When consciousness is so explained, it's natural to wrongly think of
>it as something separable from the brain/body...
?? (Did your enthusiasm somehow separate the theme from your
brain/body?)
> . . . I think everyone,
>Sid included, believed lots of such stuff, and were wrong...
I don't think you can hold the Buddha up as the arch-empiricist while
also saying he believed in a lot of superstitious mumbo-jumbo. The two
are in stark opposition. The only way I can think of to get around
that is to say that those who wrote the suttas fifty years or so later
added a lot of their favourite cultural junk but that leaves you with
the problem of deciding which is authentic and which isn't. To do that
on the basis of what you happen to believe 5000 years later seems to
defeat the object of applying to the suttas in the first place.
>> why bother with [the suttas], or Buddhism, at all?
>Because I'm interested in psychology/spirituality of the Buddha...
I understand what you mean by 'psychology' but I have no idea what you
mean by 'spirituality' or why you would use such a spooky term.
> . . . What the
>Buddha says about craving, aversion, and delusion and the ending of
>these and how to get there is important to me...
Ok. But all that is free-floating in contemporary culture now. You
don't need to consult dubious and ambiguous scriptures for that.
> That doesn't entail
>believing in only four elements in chemistry, or that mind-reading or
>clairvoyance, or a flat-earth or physical hard past lives exist...
You're not consistent. You apparently believe in the four jhanas and
the insights which can arise within them --and I say "believe" because
I doubt you've actually attained to all those states-- but you baulk
at the stages in concentration/purification supposed to follow on from
them, such as the mind-created body and mind-reading. I haven't
attained to any of those states myself and have no idea whether any of
those further faculties or powers actually exist but I don't think I,
you or anyone could know until we were able to enter the fourth jhana
at will and carry on from there. If you don't want to follow that
path, it would be more honest to just march along with evolutionary
psychology and leave the rest alone.
>And the same goes with Buddhist texts. If you take them to reinforce
>pseudo-science woo-woo...
If you take them to reinforce anything you're on the wrong track. You
can't learn what you already know, or think you know.
herbzet
brian mitchell wrote:
> btw, according to my dictionary, 'apperception' already has a narrowly
> defined meaning:
> "apperception, n. mind's perception of itself"
> so the ap- prefix seems to denote reflexivity. I hope this is just a
> minor spanner.
Of course, I took as my authority wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apperception
which gives three definitions, the third of which is:
In epistemology, apperception is "the introspective or reflective
apprehension by the mind of its own inner states"
which seems more-or-less consonant with your dictionary.
Robert and I have provisionally agreed to use "apperception" as broadly
opposed to perception, i.e., apprehhension via the mediation of the senses.
We are thus implicitly, and consciously, distinguishing apprehension of
things "out there" via the senses, and apprehension of anything else,
which implicitly comes from "in here".
This is obviously objectionable in several ways, but
a) Ya gotta start somewhere
and
b) I take this as the ordinary western mode of chunking and bagging
experience.
My purpose is to discuss this stuff in terminology that is understandable,
more or less, to ordinary people.
I wanted to say "understandable to the average codder." Would that
make sense to someone who says "spanner"?
--
hz
liaM
Stop thinking about it. Just do it.. But how ? Meditation.
DharmaTroll
> DharmaTroll wrote:
> >On Nov 20, 11:07 pm, brian mitchell <brainm...@fishing.net> wrote:
> >> DharmaTroll wrote:
> >> >On Nov 20, 9:48 pm, brian mitchell <brainm...@fishing.net> wrote:
>
> >> It's not a matter of interpreting. The sutta uses two terms,
> >> 'consciousness' and 'mind' (or something else) so it clearly means to
> >> distinguish between them.
>
> >> > But the Buddha didn't separate mind and body...
>
> >> You haven't yet established this.
> >> Can you do so, using this or any other sutta?
>
> >Yeah. Explaining the physical personality in terms of material
> >elements, all of which are understood from the perspective of human
> >experience, Sid was able to avoid annoying philosophical controversies
> >generated by a more objectivist physicalist approach, such as the mind-
> >body problem...
>
> I thought objective physicalism was what you promoted.
> Psychophysical supervenience and so on. And I thought
> the prime virtue of this position was that it did away with
> the mind-body problem.
No, the prime virtue of this position is that it's probably how the
world is. It doesn't do away with the mind-body problem. It simply
excludes such beasties as "souls". How brains are conscious is still
pretty much a complete mystery. But it helps to kick out people
babbling about spooks so that we can then intelligently look at the
problems. Sort of like kicking out Sarah Palin and her death-panels
talk before you start a serious discussion about health care. If you
seriously think that the trees in your backyard don't exist and will
dissolve into nothingness if you close your eyes or believe that they
aren't there, I similarly want to boot you out of the room before I
have any kind of discussion about reality or what is.
> > Sid did speak of the human person as a psychophysical
> >personality: namarupa. Yet the psychic and the physical were never
> >discussed in isolation, nor were they viewed as self-subsisting
> >entities. For Sid, there was neither a "material-stuff" nor a "mental-
> >stuff", because both are the results of reductive analysis that go
> >beyond experience...
>
> But this is exactly what several people here, including myself, have
> proposed, and which you have rejected.
No. As this is what I have said, I wouldn't have rejected it if you
had 'exactly' said this; rather, I would have said, "that's what I
said, too." So you said something else.
> It is impossible in experience
> to separate an object from one's awareness of the object;
> they are the same.
If you qualify that you are talking about "in your experience of the
tree", sure. But that's not the same as saying that the tree doesn't
exist, and is a function of your experience, as are dream sensations.
For example, if you tell me that if I run you over with a tank, so
that you are flattened and dead, that the tree will no longer exist,
that it only , then I'll say that you are wrong, and that your view is
incoherent.
> Objects in themselves exist only as concepts
Ok, then we utterly disagree. So let me clarify this with one of my
ridiculous, absurd examples. If the tree only exists as a concept,
then when I run you over and flatten your ass with my tank, there will
no longer be a tree in the backyard (assume I'm not cheating and I
didn't flatten the tree with my tank too, while I was having fun
flattening you). So are you really saying that if you no longer have
concepts (e.g., I run you over with a tank), then trees won't exist,
with leaves and bark and roots and birds' nests? 'Cause if that's what
you're saying if you say that real trees are 'only concepts', then all
I can say is that you're bonkers.
> and can't be perceived.
It can't be perceived by you if I flatten your ass, damn straight!
> It is you that insists on "material stuff," objects in themselves,
> ultimately real whether perceived or not.
Right. Basic sanity. Someone once babbled your line in person with me
and closed his eyes and said "you don't exist because I'm not
perceiving you". I slapped him really hard across the face, and used
my favorite line, "that was the sound of one hand clapping, fool!"
I'm not claiming to know that 'solid stuff' exists, only trees. That
is, I don't know much about quantum physics (which is only in its
infancy), and I'm willing to say that there is no 'stuff' at all, just
a bunch of fluctuating probability waves of energy, whatever the hell
that really means, but in any case, the tree is planted in the ground
whether I perceive it or not, or conceive of it or not, or whether I
even exist or not. I don't need to know the ultimate composition of
trees to strongly suspect that they are still in my backyard when I'm
not looking out the window, and that my ego doesn't just conjure them
up out of magical fluff every time I look up. Rather, my brain's
representation of the sense-data from my optical nerves is re-created,
not the tree in the backyard reflecting the light into my eyes.
The Buddha above is talking about the mind and body, that they always
go together. He isn't saying that trees don't exist. What I've found
is that Buddhism is helpful because it is so practical and pragmatic
and empirical. But nutters are disappointed unless Buddhism is
psychotic and says "science is wrong: we're all literally in the
Matrix" or something like that: in other words, it is just "Doctor
Phil" as Robbie says, unless it contains some Harry Potter Magic.
Nonsense!
We can extrapolate how long various species took to evolve. We can
know with as much certainty as we have that the sun won't go supernova
tomorrow that there were trees around before we evolved and could have
any concepts of them. We can infer this from fossils, from radioactive
dating, etc. If you say, "well, when we observe the fossils, our egos
(or Mind or God or soul or whatever) magically create those past
trees, which weren't there until we perceived the fossil," then I
start to think you're incoherent or nutz like Keynes. Egoists love to
feel they are of supreme importance, that they create the universe,
that the universe is inside of them. I go for a more humble naturalist
view, that the universe would be how it is whether or not we evolved
or could experience it, and I have the fossils and background
microwave radiation and so forth to back me up.
> Some others here do also propose "mental stuff,"
> (eg, awareness of awareness) which I'm not so sure of.
I'm not so sure Robbie is invoking souls (mental stuff) but he might
be. If I ask him, he'll have a hissy fit and insult me and probably
not answer the question. What I think he's doing is simply trying to
reduce Buddhism to Hinduism, and that if he can distill a pure "I am
this" loop, that it will catapult him into a realization that he is
the limitless being, the entire universe, and not a particular ego
trapped in a smelly corpse of flesh and blood and shit. I have
problems with Robert's project, but not just because he seems to be
positing transcendental spooks. I find that what is transformative in
meditation and being present to our experiences is that I get to know
my habits and neuroses, and thought patterns, and the awareness of
them changes them, sometimes dissolving them to some degree. Robert
wants to ignore paying attention to the actual human neurotic stuff,
which I find most transformative, and he wants to focus on an abstract
concept of Atman=Brahman, and have an extraordinary god experience of
waking up and realizing that he is the universe in a magical way. So
to me, he's getting away from the transformative process and
distracting himself with abstract woo-woo magic. If he posits "mental
stuff", that's even worse in my view, but even if he doesn't, I have a
problem with running away from being present to our neuroses in
everyday life and trying to unlock the magic loop that will have us
blissfully no longer being a person but being the Anima Mundi or World
Soul which has been hiding from Itself by pretending to be a limited
ego. And so forth.
> > There were some exceptions to this, such as when
> >pressed to define the physical and mental components by someone who
> >assumed them to be separate, Sid responded by saying that rupa is
> >contact with resistance (patigha-samphassa), where as nama is contact
> >with concepts (adhivacana-samphassa), so that both nama and rupa were
> >thus forms of contact. (See the Digha-nikaya 2.62.)
>
> This still leaves both as subjective responses, doesn't it?
No. The Buddha was a psychiatrist, not a physicist. He didn't know nor
care about what stars were made of or why they moved the way they did.
What he cared about was human suffering. And our suffering didn't have
a damned thing to do with what stars are or of what they are composed
or why they twinkle or spin about the sky the way they do. So when you
keep saying "the Buddha wasn't talking about phenomenology, but was
talking about physics and ontology when he discusses perception, " all
I can say is, no, you're mistaken, and that's looney tunes. Look, all
your suffering is tied up with your experiencing, and the Buddha is
saying, "Dude, you grasp at things and you read permanence into the
world, and when it isn't as you wrongly expected to be, you suffer,
and then you grasp even harder." He's not saying that trees and stars
don't exist, that giant hydrogen furnaces billions of light years away
aren't really there, but are just 'concepts'. What he's saying is that
everything you experience is your interpretation of sense data from
the senses, and that you interpret in ways that lead you to grasp.
He's not discussing the nature of the trees and stars that are causing
your sense data. Like McCoy, Sid says, "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not
a physicist!"
> >Look, the mind (mano) is considered to be one of the 6 senses, along
> >with the other 5 physical ones, and the object of this sense is
> >thoughts...
>
> Does that make sense to you?
Yes.
> It basically says that mind and thoughts
> are the same thing,
No. Thoughts are the data and mind is the processing of them.
> as any sense and its objects are indistinguishable.
No. Your eyes are not stars, nor are they trees. That's just wrong. If
your eyes were stars, or became stars, you would be instantly
vaporized before you even could say "twinkle, twinkle, little star."
> A lot rides, though, on what we mean by 'thought'.
> What do you say thought is?
A thought is a pseudo-auditory sensation and/or a pseudo-visual
sensation. Thoughts resemble visual and auditory sensations, but they
are weaker, and more hollow. The pseudo-auditory thoughts are the most
common (with me) and are highly symbolic in nature, as they are
composed of English sentences or sentence fragments most of the time.
> Something a bit less circular than "what the brain does" I hope.
Well, of course thoughts are something that the brain does, among
thousands of other things. And no, it's not circular. The difference
between pseudo-auditory thoughts and auditory sensations, is that the
auditory sensations are produced by interpreting data from the
auditory nerves, that the ears have produced by resonating with
compressional air waves, whereas the thought is entirely an internal
brain affair, triggered by interaction of various processes of the
brain and not by an external sense organ.
> And in the absence of thought, what is there?
Tons of other brain functions. There is space between thoughts a lot
of the time, especially so when meditating. One purpose of sitting
still is that when the body slows down, thoughts slow down as well, so
that instead of the normal waterfall, there can sometimes be just a
drip, drip, drip. But there are still tons of sensations, and when the
thoughts slow down, I can focus on all the sensations, such as tons of
swirlings and tinglings, and twistings, and pressure and warmth; and
even with my eyes closed, there are tons of flickering sensations,
that seem to form shapes but immediately dissolve, like the fuzz on a
television tuned to a blank station. And so forth. There is tons of
stuff going on in those moments when there is no thoughts. Eating, for
example, is much more fulfilling with no or few thoughts. All the
sensations of chewing and tasting and swallowing are amazing, though
usually I am too busy multitasking and engaging in thoughts (sometimes
very productive ones) or I'm talking to another person, so I don't
really fully experience all those amazing sensations -- they just
blend into the background like white noise.
> > Consciousness (vinnana), on the other hand, is one of the
> >five aggregates, as well as one of the four nutriments,,,
>
> Quite a lot more substitution of terms, which doesn't get us any
> closer to knowing what consciousness (or the act of being conscious)
> actually is. In this respect, all of us are just as qualified to
> experiment and discover as any neuroscientist,
No, we're not. We are only qualified in saying how consciousness
feels. And we're usually quite deluded about it.
> or does the fact that we would have to employ the mind and
> consciousness to carry out the exploration somehow *dis*qualify us?
It doesn't disqualify us, but we simply have to be wary of jumping to
conclusions that are biased by our subjectivity. For example,
consciousness as we experience it seems to have lots of interesting
properties, and we can at least observe these, such as for starters:
(1) Globality; as in ‘global workspace’; conscious items are always
integrated into an overall world-model,
(2) Presentationality; present in the now, temporal immediacy,
(3) Convolved holism; objects of experience are made up of collections
of other objects in a nested hierarchy,
(4) Dynamicity; the perceived world flows through constant changes,
(5) Perspectivalness; we experience the world from a point of view,
and
(6) Transparency; we cannot see the works – the neural processing
which gives rise to our experience is excluded from conscious
experience.
> >Look, the bottom line is this: consciousness (vinnanam) is intended to
> >explain the continutity in the person who is individualized by
> >dispositions (sankhara). Like the other constituents, consciousness
> >depends on the other four aggregates for existence as well as
> >nourishment. Consciousness is neither a permanent, eternal substance
> >nor a series of discrete, momentary acts of conscious life united by a
> >mysterious self or spook. Hence, consciousness cannot function if
> >separated from the other aggregates, especially material form (rupa),
> >but must act with other aggregates if thoughts are to occur...
>
> Why do you yoke thought and consciousness so closely?
> Does thought only ever occur in consciousness
> (many psychologists would disagree)?
> What happens to consciousness in the absence of thought?
Well there may be unconscious thoughts, that makes sense to me, though
I'm rather agnostic about it and just use the term for it's practical
value, such as describing someone's motivations for doing something of
which they aren't aware. Are those motivations thoughts? I don't know.
Not in the normal sense, but if you want to call them thoughts, then
we'd have "unconscious thoughts". And again, when consciousness is
without thought, in those moments sensations are much more intense. As
I've said before, not only do I enjoy this in meditation, but it's why
I love roller-coasters. Going up the first big hill there are extra
thoughts and fear, and those "I have a bad feeling about this"
thoughts, and "one of these days I'll have to write a will, as I'm old
enough to have one" thoughts; and then swoooosh and I let go, both of
the rails and of the thoughts and my mind is empty of thoughts and
there is only the whoosh of me flying through the void, and it's and
unbelievably amazing experience, much like orgasm. I tend to think
that enlightenment would be like that sometimes, but I think that this
is a mistake to think that less thoughts are better: the problem is
that we have stupid thoughts and don't think enough, critically. So
while not having thoughts is great for eating, screwing, and riding
roller-coasters, more importantly, ridding ourselves of obsessive
stupid thoughts is important so that we will be free to think
intelligent and creative thoughts.
> > And that
> >is exactly my (and most neuroscientists') understanding of the brain.
> >When consciousness is so explained, it's natural to wrongly think of
> >it as something separable from the brain/body...
>
> ?? (Did your enthusiasm somehow separate the theme from your
> brain/body?)
That sentence isn't grammatically correct, as it contains a category
mistake. A 'theme' can only be separated or not-separated from another
'theme'.
My point is that the Buddha doesn't treat 'consciousness' as something
that happens apart from the other aggregates. However, that doesn't
mean that stars don't happen unless there are people around. There are
simply no experiences of stars when people aren't around (or other
sentient beings, such as Klingons).
> > . . . I think everyone,
> >Sid included, believed lots of such stuff, and were wrong...
>
> I don't think you can hold the Buddha up as the arch-empiricist
> while also saying he believed in a lot of superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
Sure I can. He accepted it just as I'm an empiricist and I accept
"Dark Matter". It makes sense, and the math is there to indicate that
it exists. A few centuries from now, folks will retrieve a copy of my
posts and say, "look at all that superstitious mumbo-jumbo that the
DharmaTroll believed -- I mean -- come on: 'dark matter'? That was as
idiotic as alchemy and spirit possession. How can you possibly say
that the Dharmatroll was a radical empiricist?"
Same thing. The Buddha accepted stuff like I accept dark matter. His
focus was on psychiatry, that the normalcy of people was mental
illness, and he went after its symptoms, its cause, and its remedy. As
for things like physics, he went with the received practical views of
his culture on all sorts of things, but what he questioned was our
understanding of ourselves, and that's why he talked about dependent
origination, and not about the rings of Saturn.
> The two are in stark opposition.
No the aren't at all. The Buddha accepted practical things such as
dark matter, but also stated that we didn't know anything with
certainty, as he rejected the contemporary ideas of objective certain
knowledge that others professed.
> The only way I can think of to get around
> that is to say that those who wrote the suttas
> fifty years or so later added a lot of their
> favourite cultural junk but that leaves you with
> the problem of deciding which is authentic
> and which isn't. To do that on the basis of
> what you happen to believe 5000 years later
> seems to defeat the object of applying to the
> suttas in the first place.
Are you assuming that the Buddha was omniscient? There is no problem
if you see the Buddha as human and living in a culture. He accepted on
provisional pragmatic grounds whatever his culture said about various
things, just as I accept dark matter, after I checked out the
alternatives and reasons for it. I don't "believe in" dark matter, but
I provisionally accept it as the most likely explanation for weird
shit like inflation and so forth. Similarly, if you asked the
enlightened Sid if the world was flat, he probably would have said,
"yeah, as far as I know". That doesn't make his teaching any less
valuable, not by one bit.
> >> why bother with [the suttas], or Buddhism, at all?
> >Because I'm interested in psychology/spirituality of the Buddha...
>
> I understand what you mean by 'psychology' but I have no idea what you
> mean by 'spirituality' or why you would use such a spooky term.
By spirituality I mean ethics. There is psychology, in that I want to
be happy and free from suffering, and the craving, aversion, and
delusion that causes it. But then there is ethics. I want to lead a
good life. In Buddhist terms, by spirituality, I mean I want to
exhibit compassion, loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity,
called the "god-qualities" or "spirit-qualities" (the brahma-viharas).
Unfortunately, the language is biased by supernaturalists, so that
"materialism" ethically means something bad (hedonism), while
"spirituality" means something good (ethical), because those that
believed in woo-woo spirits and saw the body and the earth as evil
made up the terms, at least in our culture. So while literally
'spirits' are make-believe woo-woo, and 'material' is what exists, I
will call a greedy money-grubbing asshole a "materialist" and a kind,
caring person "spiritual" or "saintly". A good discussion of the
unfairness of these terms by woo-woo-ists and nutters can be found in
Dan Dennett's book "Breaking the Spell", btw.
> > . . . What the
> >Buddha says about craving, aversion, and delusion and the ending of
> >these and how to get there is important to me...
>
> Ok. But all that is free-floating in contemporary culture now. You
> don't need to consult dubious and ambiguous scriptures for that.
Yeah you do. And hijackers are constantly trying to read the suttas as
woo-woo magic books, so understanding what the Buddha actually taught
is helpful to make sense of all the secondary literature and to
discuss Buddhism. I don't know what you mean by free-floating. Even
most folks around here who call themselves Buddhists aren't clear
about the Buddha's teaching being the non-arising of obsessive
thoughts of craving, aversion, and delusion. As I said above, Robert
wants to instead say that Buddhist awakening is really a woo-woo
magical realizing that you are god.
> > That doesn't entail
> >believing in only four elements in chemistry, or that mind-reading or
> >clairvoyance, or a flat-earth or physical hard past lives exist...
>
> You're not consistent.
Yes I am. You simply don't understand me and jump to silly
conclusions.
> You apparently believe in the four jhanas
I don't "believe in the four jhanas". That's silly. I simply
understand what is meant by them, and whether they actually exist as
states as they are described I don't know. I think they are a
distraction, because they come from the pre-Buddhist Brahmanical
traditions which are laced with woo-woo. I try to understand them, for
example, as how the Buddha was differentiating his system from those
of his contemporaries. To rip them out of their historical and
cultural context and "believe in them" would be absurd to me, as I'm
not a fundamentalist who believes in things.
> and the insights which can arise within them --
> and I say "believe" because I doubt you've actually
> attained to all those states-- but you baulk at the stages
> in concentration/purification supposed to follow on from
> them, such as the mind-created body and mind-reading.
Again, I'm not a fundamentalist, so I don't rip things out of their
historic and cultural context. As far as I know, nobody has such
states and then reads mind. And the mind-created body isn't a literal
material duplicate of oneself -- to explain that would take it's own
thread. I suspect you jump for joy and say "oh boy, magic that I can
believe in that will go with my magic clairvoyant dream beliefs and
let me feel that I'm one-up on everyone and that Einstein and all
those scientists are idiots while I know about the secret magic and am
better than everyone else." That's how Keynes and every
fundamentalist, whether Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or Hindu
likes to think.
I'm perfectly consistent with this stuff just as I am with Star Trek
physics. To enjoy and 'get' Star Trek, warp drive and teletransporters
don't have to exist: they merely have to be consistent with the rest
of the story, so that the story is plausible. In the same way,
superhero powers, past lives, and so forth, don't have to exist -- I
don't have any belief in anything I haven't seen someone demonstrate
-- but they have a lot of meaning and are used to differentiate the
Buddha's philosophy from others and so forth. Ripping these things out
of their historical and cultural and religious context and saying
"Buddhism is about believing in mind-reading" is as silly as saying
"Judaism is about being punished for eating apples".
> I haven't
> attained to any of those states myself and have no idea whether any of
> those further faculties or powers actually exist but I don't think I,
> you or anyone could know until we were able to enter the fourth jhana
Just as you won't know if Jesus is the Son of God or Mohammed is the
true Prophet of God until you enter the Pearly Gates. In other words,
that's question-begging. Since you say you have no idea whether or not
such states exist, and hopefully that means you don't claim to know
that superpowers exist, I assume that means you don't know anyone with
superpowers, right?
Note that all religions talk of various superpowers or miracles. But
they are all different. To really understand talk of jhanas, again,
it's helpful to understand how all religions work, and what the
contemporaries of the Buddha believed, what was accepted as common
background knowledge of the culture, and all sorts of texture like
that. Trying to talk about jhanas outside of a cultural/historical/
religious context is a big mistake, and again, is up there with people
who predict the end of the world from Holy Books. (They have so far
been wrong 100.0% of the time, btw, but they all have excuses as to
why this is so. )
> at will and carry on from there. If you don't want to follow that
> path, it would be more honest to just march along with evolutionary
> psychology and leave the rest alone.
No, it's not a matter of choosing evolutionary psychology or blind
faith fundamentalism. Deluded fundamentalists almost always try to
shove things into two choices. That's nonsense. There is no reason to
'believe' in anything like jhanas. If you are able to gain
superpowers, then at that point you can demonstrate them. But
personally, from all I've read and practiced of Buddhism for years, it
has nothing to do with special states and magical superhero powers,
and everything to do with lessening the craving, aversion, and
delusion which I experience in my everyday life. People who on the one
hand want to deny reality (cats don't really exist when they seem to
have walked behind the couch) or posit all sorts of woo-woo (that
people can read minds or reach up and touch the sun if they are
enlightened enough) are silly to me, and to me seem to miss the entire
project of Sid's, which has to do with lessening all the craving and
aversion and delusions in our lives that lead us to suffer and go
around bothering each other with our stupid opinions. Denying reality
on the one hand and positing woo-woo on the other are distractions. If
you do Buddhism, you find out that it's not the trees that don't
exist, but rather the sense of a permanent self relating to them that
doesn't exist. It's not about the trees and stars, nor about magic and
superpowers -- it's about us, and about our suffering.
> >And the same goes with Buddhist texts. If you take them to reinforce
> >pseudo-science woo-woo...
>
> If you take them to reinforce anything you're on the wrong track.
> You can't learn what you already know, or think you know.
Sure I can. I can take Buddhist texts to not reinforce woo-woo but to
reinforce good habits and critical thinking. And I almost always learn
what I already know. I couldn't learn math unless I knew math. Without
a strong understanding of algebra and geometry and trigonometry, I
couldn't learn calculus. Everything I learn I relate to what I know
and have learned, and I correct and expand and build upon it. If I
couldn't add, I wouldn't be able to do calculus. Similarly, I can't
really know what such texts are saying without a wide range of
knowledge. It's not a matter of ripping quotes out of holy books and
believing them. Ever.
--DharmaTroll
"The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is
a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will
lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of
an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into
the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best
possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent
upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is
wisdom."
-Dietrich Bonhoeffe
Keynes
wrote:
>
>No, the prime virtue of this position is that it's probably how the
>world is. It doesn't do away with the mind-body problem. It simply
>excludes such beasties as "souls". How brains are conscious is still
>pretty much a complete mystery. But it helps to kick out people
>babbling about spooks so that we can then intelligently look at the
>problems. Sort of like kicking out Sarah Palin and her death-panels
>talk before you start a serious discussion about health care. If you
>seriously think that the trees in your backyard don't exist and will
>dissolve into nothingness if you close your eyes or believe that they
>aren't there, I similarly want to boot you out of the room before I
>have any kind of discussion about reality or what is.
>
Dependent origination as well as anicca, anatta, and dukkha all
affirm the 'non-existence' of all things. The appearances are
not to be regarded as existing, least of all body/mind/self.
Here is where folks go astray. By taking the world seriously
as an 'existing' process one fares on in self-ish distraction,
attempting to protect and please the 'self' but always failing.
It makes people greedy, envious, hateful, violent, despairing,
grieving, fearful, and despicable. We can see all this
in the 'egos' of others, but seldom in our 'selves'.
The only cure is to examine this 'self' that has a mind
(or vice versa) and lives in a body (or vice versa).
What powers and abilities does this self have?
One can think, but he can't choose what to think.
One can wish he were different than he is, but he
can't do anything about that either. Everyone is
virtually a stranger to his own self with no power
over it, and a firm desire to look outward blaming
others and excusing his own wretchedness.
There is no enduring entity such as a self. It's made
to order on the spot, and not to anyone's wishes or
expectations.
We don't know what we think until we think it.
We don't know what we say until we say it.
We don't know what we do until we do it.
Any 'self' there might be is not under anyone's self-control.
Why claim it? Why serve it? Why regard it all? There are
many other much more interesting things in the world than
loathsome and crippling 'self-consciousness'.
>We can extrapolate how long various species took to evolve. We can
>know with as much certainty as we have that the sun won't go supernova
>tomorrow that there were trees around before we evolved and could have
>any concepts of them. We can infer this from fossils, from radioactive
>dating, etc.
Does this relate in any way to liberation? Does it matter?
It seems to bind and condition one solidly in samsara.
Sort of like clinging to body/mind/self as one's first premise.
Where can one go from there?
>If you say, "well, when we observe the fossils, our egos
>(or Mind or God or soul or whatever) magically create those past
>trees, which weren't there until we perceived the fossil," then I
>start to think you're incoherent or nutz like Keynes. Egoists love to
>feel they are of supreme importance, that they create the universe,
>that the universe is inside of them. I go for a more humble naturalist
>view, that the universe would be how it is whether or not we evolved
>or could experience it, and I have the fossils and background
>microwave radiation and so forth to back me up.
When you impute one-upmanship to everyone it's really
yourself you're talking about. Who has an ego at stake here?
Keynes doesn't exist. (Neither does anybody else.)
Nothing 'exists' through time. Anicca, anatta, dukkha.
Every moment is brand new, free, clear and unbound.
Charles E Hardwidge
news:4b09e830$0$930$ba4a...@news.orange.fr...
> Stop thinking about it. Just do it.. But how ? Meditation.
40 posts of bullshit.
Right Click->Catch Up.
--
Charles E Hardwidge
DharmaTroll
> On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:18:06 -0800 (PST), DharmaTroll <dharmatr...@my-deja.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> >No, the prime virtue of this position is that it's probably how the
> >world is. It doesn't do away with the mind-body problem. It simply
> >excludes such beasties as "souls". How brains are conscious is still
> >pretty much a complete mystery. But it helps to kick out people
> >babbling about spooks so that we can then intelligently look at the
> >problems. Sort of like kicking out Sarah Palin and her death-panels
> >talk before you start a serious discussion about health care. If you
> >seriously think that the trees in your backyard don't exist and will
> >dissolve into nothingness if you close your eyes or believe that they
> >aren't there, I similarly want to boot you out of the room before I
> >have any kind of discussion about reality or what is.
>
> Dependent origination as well as anicca, anatta, and dukkha all
> affirm the 'non-existence' of all things.
No, they do not. Not being permanent nor having a soul or essence does
not mean that trees don't exist and that seeing a tree is the same as
visualizing an imaginary tree in your head, which you keep insisting
are the same thing. Again, Nutter-Dude, if you think visualizing a
truck is the same as a real truck and that real trucks don't exist
simply because they are compositions of parts, or because they are
impermanent and have no soul or essence, and are not self-caused, then
put your magic fairy dust where your mouth is and step out in front of
a fast-moving one on the highway. Besides, you've already told me that
Dependent Origination to you was 'upaya' or a lie told to ignorant
dolts in India (arahants) who couldn't handle the Buddha's true
teachings. Now go prove that trucks on the highway don't exist, Nutter-
Dude.
--DharmaTroll
Keynes
wrote:
>On Nov 23, 1:13 am, Keynes <Key...@earthlinkspam.net> wrote:
>> On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:18:06 -0800 (PST), DharmaTroll <dharmatr...@my-deja.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> >No, the prime virtue of this position is that it's probably how the
>> >world is. It doesn't do away with the mind-body problem. It simply
>> >excludes such beasties as "souls". How brains are conscious is still
>> >pretty much a complete mystery. But it helps to kick out people
>> >babbling about spooks so that we can then intelligently look at the
>> >problems. Sort of like kicking out Sarah Palin and her death-panels
>> >talk before you start a serious discussion about health care. If you
>> >seriously think that the trees in your backyard don't exist and will
>> >dissolve into nothingness if you close your eyes or believe that they
>> >aren't there, I similarly want to boot you out of the room before I
>> >have any kind of discussion about reality or what is.
>>
Booting is what you do best.
Intelligent discussion on reasonable terms, not so much.
>> Dependent origination as well as anicca, anatta, and dukkha all
>> affirm the 'non-existence' of all things.
>
>No, they do not. Not being permanent nor having a soul or essence does
>not mean that trees don't exist and that seeing a tree is the same as
>visualizing an imaginary tree in your head, which you keep insisting
>are the same thing. Again, Nutter-Dude, if you think visualizing a
>truck is the same as a real truck and that real trucks don't exist
>simply because they are compositions of parts, or because they are
>impermanent and have no soul or essence, and are not self-caused, then
>put your magic fairy dust where your mouth is and step out in front of
>a fast-moving one on the highway. Besides, you've already told me that
>Dependent Origination to you was 'upaya' or a lie told to ignorant
>dolts in India (arahants) who couldn't handle the Buddha's true
>teachings. Now go prove that trucks on the highway don't exist, Nutter-
>Dude.
>
>--DharmaTroll
Since you affirm dependent origination, then you deny existence.
You can't have both, Rational Do0dy.
(I don't affirm it, because it is a kludge to appeal to folks stuck
in the race against time called samsara.)
What do you suppose it means to get beyond the influence of karma?
DharmaTroll
> On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:04:46 -0800 (PST), DharmaTroll <dharmatr...@my-deja.com>
Not at all. As usual, nutter-dude, you don't have a clue about what
the Buddha actually taught. Dependent origination doesn't say that
nothing exists, and that trucks can't smack you if you stand on the
highway because they are mere appearences and not real trucks. Not
being self-caused has nothing to do with existing. No wonder you
claim that Dependent Origination is a lie taught to ignorant dolts who
didn't have the secret teachings about Harry Potter that you
pontificate.
--DharmaTroll
DharmaTroll
> wrote:
>
> >No, the prime virtue of this position is that it's probably how the
> >world is. It doesn't do away with the mind-body problem. It simply
> >excludes such beasties as "souls". How brains are conscious is still
> >pretty much a complete mystery. But it helps to kick out people
> >babbling about spooks so that we can then intelligently look at the
> >problems. Sort of like kicking out Sarah Palin and her death-panels
> >talk before you start a serious discussion about health care. If you
> >seriously think that the trees in your backyard don't exist and will
> >dissolve into nothingness if you close your eyes or believe that they
> >aren't there, I similarly want to boot you out of the room before I
> >have any kind of discussion about reality or what is.
>
> Dependent origination as well as anicca, anatta, and dukkha all
> affirm the 'non-existence' of all things.
Nope, that's a complete misunderstanding of Buddhism, Nutter-Dude.
Again, you think that Buddhism really means that trucks are only
appearances and can't hit you, so go check it out -- walk in the
middle of the expressway and find out.
Ironically, the magical soul which you call 'Mind' that you claim the
world is inside, that's what doesn't exist, nutter-dude, nor any of
your other capital-lettered nonsense. The permanent unchaning 'Mind'
you believe in is what is rejected by anatta and anicca, and not the
real vibrant, interconnected ever-changing world of stone, trees,
cats, and stars, which you pretend are figments of your demented
imagination.
> Nothing exists through time.
Again, just the opposite: everything exists through time: that's just
what anicca means. Whereas permanance (being eternal and timeless)
doesn't exist. Once again, you have the Buddha's teachings completely
ass-backwards. But you know this. That's what makes you such a good
stooge to kick around, Nutter-Dude.
--DharmaTroll
Hollywood Lee
You might consider the possibility that dependent arisal is merely a
convenient description of our mental habits and doesn't really have
anything to do with the world shorn of our mental overlay. That the
arisings and cessations that the Buddha described with the concept of
dependent arisal involve our habits of thinking that give rise to
suffering, attachment, clinging and on. Once the clinging ceases (or in
T's version, mentation ceases), dependent arisal as a concept ceases as
well.
So Keynes, surprisingly enough, may be correct that dependent arisal is
mere upaya, though not for the reasons he imagines.
DharmaTroll
That would be a rather interesting irony, I do admit! I tend to think
of Keynes as a logical knave, as the negation of what he says is much
more often true than the comments he makes (though sometimes it is so
incoherent that the negation is just as nonsensical as his positive
assertion).
In terms of the external world, often D.O. is sometimes taken to be
congruent with not self-caused, or that all things are 'empty'. This
would rule out souls and gods and 'Mind' and Prime Movers, as D.O.
would mean that everything that exists is necessarily caused by other
things, and thus everything that exists is completely interdependent
on everything else, and nothing is ever self-caused. I'm assuming that
because everything is 'empty' of self-existence and self-cause, Keynes
hijacks D.O. to mean 'only an appearance" as he claims that there are
only appearances and that nothing exists which cause any of these
appearances, and this is dead wrong, as real extant trucks actually do
(partly) cause the appearance of a truck coming toward us. And that he
can test whether there is just an appearance by running in front of a
speeding 'appearance'.
But then again, if I'm going to discuss this with you, Lee, I'll not
be so sloppy and look up this stuff to have a serious conversation.
Keynes is a comic relief guy, a stooge who likes to say nonsensical
things. My only fear is that I'll get a post from some kid who says,
"Grandpa Keynes was killed by a truck on the Interstate today, after
claiming that he was going to prove to his nemesis Trollpa that the
world didn't exist. Why would you tell my Grandpa to kill himself?
What kind of a sick monster are you? He has dementia and psychosis but
he's harmless when he takes his pills, and when he put on his tin-foil-
hat and argues his demented nonsense on the internet, it's the only
kind of fun he had left. Why did you tell him to kill himself? What
were you thinking? Now I don't have a grandpa anymore." Hopefully
Keynes is just a normal dogmatic religious nutter and not seriously
demented, or else I wouldn't post such things.
--DharmaTroll
DharmaTroll
Specifically, Lee, I think it was Nagarjuna in the MMK. The reference
I have is chapter 24, verses 18 and 19, where N equates D.O. with
Sunyata, based on convention: “in as much as beings dependently co-
arise they are empty in their nature.” In this way things don't either
utterly exist permanently, nor are they non-existent, which sounds
about right for reality, where we have everything in flux and
consisting of 99+ percent empty space, and the rest is vibrating waves
of probability.
--DharmaTroll
Hollywood Lee
That's ok, but much of what I am thinking has little to do with
canonical sources. I can understand, from my own experience, why people
would examine their mental processes, assumptions, and thinking errors,
as they get me into unnecessary trouble all of the time. And the
happenstance of letting go, especially of those emotional reactions that
accompany egoistic imaginings, makes sense to me as well from an
experiential perspective.
Dependent arisal then seems to map well back onto this experience, both
in the arising and cessation sequences.
But how do you take this mental/psychological understanding of dependent
arisal and see it as a applying to the world shorn of our mental
overlay? That is, is it really the case that we can determine that the
world, stripped of our conceptions, is interdependent, not self caused
and on. While I think science generally suggests that the material
world is some sort of quantum mystery that is in a state of flux and
change, does that really have anything to do with Buddhism?
> Keynes is a comic relief guy, a stooge who likes to say nonsensical
> things. My only fear is that I'll get a post from some kid who says,
> "Grandpa Keynes was killed by a truck on the Interstate today, after
> claiming that he was going to prove to his nemesis Trollpa that the
> world didn't exist. Why would you tell my Grandpa to kill himself?
> What kind of a sick monster are you? He has dementia and psychosis but
> he's harmless when he takes his pills, and when he put on his tin-foil-
> hat and argues his demented nonsense on the internet, it's the only
> kind of fun he had left. Why did you tell him to kill himself? What
> were you thinking? Now I don't have a grandpa anymore." Hopefully
> Keynes is just a normal dogmatic religious nutter and not seriously
> demented, or else I wouldn't post such things.
Heck. At the high school reunion, he wasn't willing to jump off the
trestle, let alone walk across the tracks for fear of a train hitting
him. You got no worry.
Keynes
wrote:
>On Nov 23, 12:22 pm, Hollywood Lee <hollywood...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 11/23/2009 9:41 AM, DharmaTroll wrote:
>>
>> > On Nov 23, 7:51 am, Keynes<Key...@earthlinkspam.net> wrote:
>> >> Since you affirm dependent origination, then you deny existence.
>> >> You can't have both, Rational Do0dy.
>>
>> > Not at all. As usual, nutter-dude, you don't have a clue about what
>> > the Buddha actually taught. Dependent origination doesn't say that
>> > nothing exists, and that trucks can't smack you if you stand on the
>> > highway because they are mere appearences and not real trucks. Not
>> > being self-caused has nothing to do with existing. No wonder you
>> > claim that Dependent Origination is a lie taught to ignorant dolts who
>> > didn't have the secret teachings about Harry Potter that you
>> > pontificate.
>>
>> You might consider the possibility that dependent arisal is merely a
>> convenient description of our mental habits and doesn't really have
>> anything to do with the world shorn of our mental overlay. That the
>> arisings and cessations that the Buddha described with the concept of
>> dependent arisal involve our habits of thinking that give rise to
>> suffering, attachment, clinging and on. Once the clinging ceases (or in
>> T's version, mentation ceases), dependent arisal as a concept ceases as
>> well.
>>
>> So Keynes, surprisingly enough, may be correct that dependent arisal is
>> mere upaya, though not for the reasons he imagines.
What reasons might those be?
I just pointed out a simple logical difficulty,
not a complete exposition of the subject.
Don't we all think way too much?
>That would be a rather interesting irony, I do admit! I tend to think
>of Keynes as a logical knave, as the negation of what he says is much
>more often true than the comments he makes (though sometimes it is so
>incoherent that the negation is just as nonsensical as his positive
>assertion).
Not surprising since I always contradict you in a vain
attempt to make you consider or reconsider something.
But you are adamantly ignorant and probably will remain so.
Ego is your refuge. All that matters is self-agrandisement.
Winning. Winning what?
Here's a clue - if you want to be admired, loved, and respected,
you first must become admirable, lovable, and respectable.
(Bet you never thought of that.)
>In terms of the external world, often D.O. is sometimes taken to be
>congruent with not self-caused, or that all things are 'empty'. This
>would rule out souls and gods and 'Mind' and Prime Movers, as D.O.
>would mean that everything that exists is necessarily caused by other
>things, and thus everything that exists is completely interdependent
>on everything else, and nothing is ever self-caused. I'm assuming that
>because everything is 'empty' of self-existence and self-cause, Keynes
>hijacks D.O. to mean 'only an appearance" as he claims that there are
>only appearances and that nothing exists which cause any of these
>appearances,
Existence requires (unchangeable) essence that endures
through time unchanged. There are appearances but they
can't be said to exist. That would make them ultimately
real and worth regarding. (The common samsaric view.)
Gain and loss, life and death are appearances too, but
they have no 'physical' basis, simply conjectural mirages
of more 'substantial' mirages.
>and this is dead wrong, as real extant trucks actually do
>(partly) cause the appearance of a truck coming toward us. And that he
>can test whether there is just an appearance by running in front of a
>speeding 'appearance'.
This is completely beside the point.
You are assuming a reality beyond experience.
If that ain't woo-woo, what is?
>But then again, if I'm going to discuss this with you, Lee, I'll not
>be so sloppy and look up this stuff to have a serious conversation.
Oh really?
What happens when the Buddha goes behind the sofa in college?
Does he collect $200 from EST culties? Does he emanate dark
energy? (Why not? woo-woo is woo-woo.) If you see any
dark matter, the best thing to do is flush it right down.
>Keynes is a comic relief guy, a stooge who likes to say nonsensical
>things. My only fear is that I'll get a post from some kid who says,
>"Grandpa Keynes was killed by a truck on the Interstate today, after
>claiming that he was going to prove to his nemesis Trollpa that the
>world didn't exist. Why would you tell my Grandpa to kill himself?
>What kind of a sick monster are you? He has dementia and psychosis but
>he's harmless when he takes his pills, and when he put on his tin-foil-
>hat and argues his demented nonsense on the internet, it's the only
>kind of fun he had left. Why did you tell him to kill himself? What
>were you thinking? Now I don't have a grandpa anymore." Hopefully
>Keynes is just a normal dogmatic religious nutter and not seriously
>demented, or else I wouldn't post such things.
>
>--DharmaTroll
Come on. You don't have a clue what you're doing or why.
All you have is an ego master that you suppose is your own self.
You're carelessly creating guilts and regrets that must be paid for.
Every time you think you're doing something smart, you're
actually doing something stupid that you'll be sorry about.
Get off the high horse and see for yourself.
Hollywood Lee
> Existence requires (unchangeable) essence that endures
> through time unchanged.
So, according to this, my mom's fruitcake exists. But who mandated this
particular definition?
Keynes
zenworm
appetite?
ZN :D
absolute permanent perfection overflowing without action
DharmaTroll
That's the Eternalist definition. Keynes has finally confessed!
And, while your mom's fruitcake exists, things that actually exist are
always in flux and changing (thing of rivers). In science, the world
is composed of processes/events, not things. "Things" are mere
conventions and grammatical fictions, the reality itself is always a
process/event in flux through time
Unless Keynes eats your mom's fruitcake.
Then it remains a fruitcake.
--DharmaTroll
DharmaTroll
No, it doesn't. But when nutters (e.g. Keynes) and believers (e.g.
Brian) try to define Buddhism in terms of denying the reality of cats
and stars, and in terms of superhero powers, then I take the battle to
them.
Whether you think the world is flat or round, or whether the moon is
made of matter/energy that is a sort of quantum mystery that is in a
state of flux or a big ball of unchanging swiss cheese, has nothing to
do with Buddhist practice.
It's about mental illness in the human condition, and the cure of this
mental illness by ending the arising of obsessive patterns of craving,
aversion, and delusion. And that's all it is. But it people wanna
argue flat earths or that we're in the Matrix or that space aliens are
among us, bring'em on: I'll kick their butts! Whew Who!
> > Keynes is a comic relief guy, a stooge who likes to say nonsensical
> > things. My only fear is that I'll get a post from some kid who says,
> > "Grandpa Keynes was killed by a truck on the Interstate today, after
> > claiming that he was going to prove to his nemesis Trollpa that the
> > world didn't exist. Why would you tell my Grandpa to kill himself?
> > What kind of a sick monster are you? He has dementia and psychosis but
> > he's harmless when he takes his pills, and when he put on his tin-foil-
> > hat and argues his demented nonsense on the internet, it's the only
> > kind of fun he had left. Why did you tell him to kill himself? What
> > were you thinking? Now I don't have a grandpa anymore." Hopefully
> > Keynes is just a normal dogmatic religious nutter and not seriously
> > demented, or else I wouldn't post such things.
>
> Heck. At the high school reunion, he wasn't willing to jump off the
> trestle, let alone walk across the tracks for fear of a train hitting
> him. You got no worry.
Shew! I feel a whole lot better now!
--DharmaTroll
DharmaTroll
No, we don't think critically enough. And when that happens we end up
with babbling nutters like yourself that talk a lot and don't say
anything.
> >That would be a rather interesting irony, I do admit! I tend to think
> >of Keynes as a logical knave, as the negation of what he says is much
> >more often true than the comments he makes (though sometimes it is so
> >incoherent that the negation is just as nonsensical as his positive
> >assertion).
>
> Not surprising since I always contradict you
Yeah, that actually -would- explain why you're wrong about everything!
You do make a good stooge.
> Here's a clue - if you want to be admired, loved, and respected,
> you first must become admirable, lovable, and respectable.
> (Bet you never thought of that.)
Well that was my concern in grade school, but then I discovered
Machiavelli, and read his awesome masterpiece "The Prince" and he
convinced me that it's better to be feared than loved. That goes
double for a Superhero!
> >In terms of the external world, often D.O. is sometimes taken to be
> >congruent with not self-caused, or that all things are 'empty'. This
> >would rule out souls and gods and 'Mind' and Prime Movers, as D.O.
> >would mean that everything that exists is necessarily caused by other
> >things, and thus everything that exists is completely interdependent
> >on everything else, and nothing is ever self-caused. I'm assuming that
> >because everything is 'empty' of self-existence and self-cause, Keynes
> >hijacks D.O. to mean 'only an appearance" as he claims that there are
> >only appearances and that nothing exists which cause any of these
> >appearances,
>
> Existence requires (unchangeable) essence that endures
> through time unchanged.
That's called eternalism, and you've just confessed!
No, existence requires no essences and being always in flux.
Everything that is real and existing, such as cats, trees, stones, and
stars, are impermanent and have no essences. You try to say "no, you
have to have a woo-woo essence or soul to exist, and so nothing exists
except for Mind, which is my eternal timeless Ego". Guess what,
Keynes: it's the woo-woo Mind (your ego) that doesn't exist, whereas
the world does exist.
> >and this is dead wrong, as real extant trucks actually do
> >(partly) cause the appearance of a truck coming toward us. And that he
> >can test whether there is just an appearance by running in front of a
> >speeding 'appearance'.
>
> This is completely beside the point.
No, it's exactly the point. It's the real world, fool.
That is precisely the entire point!
> You are assuming a reality beyond experience.
> If that ain't woo-woo, what is?
I'm making a justified inference, and even though you are so pompous
that you think the world couldn't function without your ego, it can
and it has, and it did for billions of years, and I have the
background microwave radiation. And again, you can test it by walking
in front of a fast-moving truck, or even just shoving your head into a
bucket of water. And you'll soon see what is mere appearance and what
is real.
See, subjective experience is what we start with, but it tells us
nothing about the world. Then we have to observe and test and infer to
find out what's outside our silly biased subjective babble, if we want
to know about the stars, or about cats or trees or stones.
When you were in the mental institution, Keynes, with only a TV set on
the wall, remember how you used to watch TV from your padded cell and
then swore that there were no actors, no directors, no cameras, that
there was only the appearances on your screen. But you were wrong, and
it turned out that there was good reason to infer that the TV was
representing real actors, even though the storyline of the movie was
made up. Well, the same thing goes for cats, trees, stones, and stars.
And whether you watch them or not, the stars don't care. They don't
need your ego and your attention to exist. Get over it, Nutter-Dude.
--DharmaTroll
Keynes
wrote:
>On Nov 23, 4:16 pm, Keynes <Key...@earthlinkspam.net> wrote:
>> Here's a clue - if you want to be admired, loved, and respected,
>> you first must become admirable, lovable, and respectable.
>> (Bet you never thought of that.)
>
>Well that was my concern in grade school, but then I discovered
>Machiavelli, and read his awesome masterpiece "The Prince" and he
>convinced me that it's better to be feared than loved. That goes
>double for a Superhero!
>
Well, it's true that some folks are afraid of clowns...
Déjà Flu
In my horrible materialist scientism-ist view, D.O. is the
way *everything* is, all the time. It would be a real shocker
to find out that Sid *just* meant the stuff of psychology.
There is nothing that can exist (or come into existence)
all by itself. Likewise, anicca, anatta, dukkha are clear as
day to me - it's exactly how *everything* is. If it were not
so, the universe would cease to exist and could not have
existed in the first place. Just a single permanence would
destroy it (as would "god" or an "unbecome" or something
really incredibly stupid like, "absolute permanent perfection
overflowing without action".
Imagine, fex, D.O.'s opposite - I.O. - which already implies
the intention of thingness and the entire stack of turtles.
Everything depends on the nature of nothing.
"Why is there something rather than nothing?
Because nothing is unstable."
-- Vic Stenger
Déjà Flu
<sorry>
> It's about mental illness in the human condition, and the cure of this
> mental illness by ending the arising of obsessive patterns of craving,
> aversion, and delusion. And that's all it is.
<ibid>
If only it were that simple.
--
Ubi dubium ibi libertas
brian mitchell
>On Nov 22, 5:00�pm, brian mitchell <brainm...@fishing.net> wrote:
>> DharmaTroll wrote:
>> It is impossible in experience
>> to separate an object from one's awareness of the object;
>> they are the same.
>
>If you qualify that you are talking about "in your experience of the
>tree", sure...
But your experience of the tree is all there is. It is only through
contact with the tree that you know anything about it, so 'Tree' is a
confluence of matter and mind. You can by an effort of thought
abstract the tree from your experience of it, but that is a
reification of only a part. Quite useful, and that's what
consciousness does, reify objects of sense, but we should be clear
about what is actually going on.
> But that's not the same as saying that the tree doesn't
>exist, and is a function of your experience, as are dream sensations...
It's a shame you can't hear this without roaring off into an erroneous
rant. No-one is saying that the tree doesn't exist, only that it
doesn't exist as a thing-in-itself, or that if it does we couldn't
know it as such anyway. What we experience is contact *with*
[whatever].
>> Objects in themselves exist only as concepts
>
>Ok, then we utterly disagree. So let me clarify this with one of my
>ridiculous, absurd examples. If the tree only exists as a concept,
>then when I run you over and flatten your ass with my tank, there will
>no longer be a tree in the backyard (assume I'm not cheating and I
>didn't flatten the tree with my tank too, while I was having fun
>flattening you). So are you really saying that if you no longer have
>concepts (e.g., I run you over with a tank), then trees won't exist,
>with leaves and bark and roots and birds' nests? 'Cause if that's what
>you're saying if you say that real trees are 'only concepts', then all
>I can say is that you're bonkers.
See above. It seems to me that I'm simply parroting the suttas here
where they describe the interactions of the aggregates and the arising
of consciousness. Our experience is of the consciousness of things not
of things-in-themselves-sans-us. If that seems too obscurely
nit-picky, it matters in one significant respect, which is that when
we reify the tree we at the same time reify ourselves as the
experiencer of the tree.
>I have
>problems with Robert's project...
As I expect he will have problems with your characerisation of it.
> but not just because he seems to be
>positing transcendental spooks. I find that what is transformative in
>meditation and being present to our experiences is that I get to know
>my habits and neuroses, and thought patterns, and the awareness of
>them changes them, sometimes dissolving them to some degree...
I also think it important to be aware of the operations of thought and
to bring what is buried up to the surface, but I have been doing that
for a while now and find I'm less convinced of the transformative
effect of this. I think it's important because if one can't look
clearly at one's own product, there's not much hope of being able to
look clearly at the processes which produce. To use an image you may
enjoy, the monkey-mind flings its shit everywhere and I think it's a
mistake to get too distracted by the shit and lose sight of the
flinger.
> Robert
>wants to ignore paying attention to the actual human neurotic stuff,
>which I find most transformative, and he wants to focus on an abstract
>concept of Atman=Brahman, and have an extraordinary god experience of
>waking up and realizing that he is the universe in a magical way...
I have noticed that you are a gradualist rather than a "sudden
awakening" type. Some sort of awakening or transformative realization
is what I'm in the game for, which is why I'm mostly interested in
questions of mind and consciousness.
>> >Look, the mind (mano) is considered to be one of the 6 senses, along
>> >with the other 5 physical ones, and the object of this sense is
>> >thoughts...
>>
>> Does that make sense to you?
>
>Yes.
Good. This is the kind of area that interests me. I want to know if
there is only one mental sense or several, and what its or their
objects are, and whether the division between physical and mental
sense(s) *makes* any sense. I think there is at least one more
physical sense than the traditional five and others which shade into
the mental, and I am astounded that memory doesn't seem to figure at
all in the Buddhist understanding of mind and consciousness. Why is
that, do you think?
>> It basically says that mind and thoughts
>> are the same thing,
>
>No. Thoughts are the data and mind is the processing of them.
This doesn't feel real to me.
>> as any sense and its objects are indistinguishable.
>
>No. Your eyes are not stars, nor are they trees...
See above about experience as an amalgam, reification, etc.
>> A lot rides, though, on what we mean by 'thought'.
>> What do you say thought is?
>
>A thought is a pseudo-auditory sensation and/or a pseudo-visual
>sensation...
Interesting that you only acknowledge the sensational (literally)
aspect of thought and thinking and not the mental functioning. Why
thought? What is it doing? The sensations you speak of strike me as
just a stage in the expression of thought rather than the whole of it.
>> And in the absence of thought, what is there?
>
>Tons of other brain functions. There is space between thoughts a lot
>of the time, especially so when meditating...
If you refer only to the sensations, then yes, but the thinking
process and the consciousness from which it arises are usually still
grinding on, ime, as evidenced by the fact that more
thought-sensations occur.
> But there are still tons of sensations...
You keep coming back to sensation.
>> > Consciousness (vinnana), on the other hand, is one of the
>> >five aggregates, as well as one of the four nutriments,,,
>>
>> Quite a lot more substitution of terms, which doesn't get us any
>> closer to knowing what consciousness (or the act of being conscious)
>> actually is. In this respect, all of us are just as qualified to
>> experiment and discover as any neuroscientist,
>
>No, we're not. We are only qualified in saying how consciousness
>feels. And we're usually quite deluded about it.
Oh? How does consciousness feel? Are you referring to sensations
again? Do you look beyond sensation at all?
>consciousness as we experience it seems to have lots of interesting
>properties, and we can at least observe these, such as for starters:
>(1) Globality;
>(2) Presentationality;
>(3) Convolved holism;
>(4) Dynamicity;
>(5) Perspectivalness;
>(6) Transparency;
Having said we are only qualified to say how consciousness feels, and
barely even that, you go on to propose a whole raft of properties for
consciousness, presumably through direct observation, or did you read
about it? I don't know that I agree with the whole list; 2 and 5 seem
likely.
>My point is that the Buddha doesn't treat 'consciousness' as something
>that happens apart from the other aggregates. However, that doesn't
>mean that stars don't happen unless there are people around. There are
>simply no experiences of stars when people aren't around (or other
>sentient beings, such as Klingons).
Indeed, and experiences of stars is what matters. Knowledge (data)
about stars is purely conceptual and meaningless without the
experience.
>> > . . . I think everyone,
>> >Sid included, believed lots of such stuff, and were wrong...
>>
>> I don't think you can hold the Buddha up as the arch-empiricist
>> while also saying he believed in a lot of superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
>> The two are in stark opposition.
>
>No the aren't at all. The Buddha accepted practical things such as
>dark matter...
Heh.
>Are you assuming that the Buddha was omniscient?
I'm assuming that he went further into comprehending the nature of
mind and being than either you or I have (or probably will) and that
to conceive of him as a projection of oneself, with one's own
proclivities and limitations, though natural, is probably a mistake.
I'd say also that the term 'Buddha' means someone who has awakened to
absolute reality, not someone just muddling through their own confused
psyche. When saying the Buddha was human there's as much danger of
dragging him down to your own deluded level as there is of
over-glorifying him into some kind of deity.
>> > . . . What the
>> >Buddha says about craving, aversion, and delusion and the ending of
>> >these and how to get there is important to me...
>>
>> Ok. But all that is free-floating in contemporary culture now. You
>> don't need to consult dubious and ambiguous scriptures for that.
>
> . . . I don't know what you mean by free-floating. Even
>most folks around here who call themselves Buddhists aren't clear
>about the Buddha's teaching being the non-arising of obsessive
>thoughts of craving, aversion, and delusion...
Perhaps because you've added the "obsessive thoughts" part yourself in
order to psychologise it. I think you're as guilty of distortion
through reduction as anyone else may be of distortion through mystical
romanticism.
> . . .And the mind-created body isn't a literal
>material duplicate of oneself -- to explain that would take it's own
>thread...
Please start it.
> . . . Since you say you have no idea whether or not
>such states exist, and hopefully that means you don't claim to know
>that superpowers exist, I assume that means you don't know anyone with
>superpowers, right?
It means that I have no idea whether such states exist and are
attainable but that I'm open to the possibility of them existing
because there is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence plus some
experiential evidence of my own. I'm more afraid of stupidly boxing
myself into a narrow consensual reality than of embarrassing myself
with a few woo-ist extravagances.
Hollywood Lee
Perhaps, though the traditional rendering of anicca, dukkha, and anatta
(sabbe sankhara anicca, sabbe sankhara dukkha, sabbe dhamma anatta)
suggests to me that the Buddha didn't declare all phenomenon as anicca
but only those that are composed or fabricated.
That may just be the limits of the agenda set by the Buddha for his
approach, and you may be right that all phenomenon are impermanent and
conditioned, but I'm not sure how I could confirm that as true nor would
it seem that proving the truth of such a view is as important as the
focus on mental fabrications and their cessation.
zenworm
on the verge
if by: "something really incredibly stupid"
it is meant: "something mentationally unfermentable"
this is getting very close to the uncertainty of freedom
Do you expect that rationality can explain paradox?
ZN :D
Déjà Flu
Did I say anything about "traditional rendering" or did you
somehow imagine I take that stuff as some kind of empirical
truth? Are we arguing "law" here? I wasn't. I was relating
to experience - personal and scientific.
Why would D.O. be something allegorical and "mere upaya"?
In any mode of examination, inside or outside of what the brain
does? It's how the universe works, as obvious as can be
to me. Is it not to you?
> That may just be the limits of the agenda set by the Buddha for his
> approach, and you may be right that all phenomenon are impermanent and
> conditioned, but I'm not sure how I could confirm that as true nor would
> it seem that proving the truth of such a view is as important as the
> focus on mental fabrications and their cessation.
You can confirm it by observation from the hypothesis. If the
hypothesis proves correct, we have a theory. If something is
proved permanent by observation, our theory is incorrect. The
more impermanence we find, the better our theory holds true.
Found any permanence lately?
Not for your personal salvation, perhaps. But isn't it important
in understanding how life itself is (arrgghhh...I swiped this from
Thitch!) interdependent? And how all things are interdependent?
How D.O. must be considered, understood, in every action?
Nevermind - I really don't care about Sid's supposed agenda.
I suspect the Buddhist Bibles are as fictitious as the Xian Bible
or the Koran, but for the extra millennium or so of rewrites.
They reek of Hindu and mystic revisionism, rotting scrolls and
personal salvation to me. That, after all, seems to be what it's
all about.
Just my take as an unwashed heathen.
yr hmbl svnt,
Flu
Déjà Flu
...
> on the verge
...
of what? fermentation? a proper latin motto?
hot buttered popcorn? I'd hope so by now.
Hollywood Lee
I've only ever lived in this particular universe and it hasn't gone away
yet. But that is just a snippet of time and it seems that this will
change as does most else in my experience. But the permanence or
impermanence of phenomenon don't seem to matter overly much to a
psychological agenda - if that matters to you.
>
> Not for your personal salvation, perhaps. But isn't it important
> in understanding how life itself is (arrgghhh...I swiped this from
> Thitch!) interdependent? And how all things are interdependent?
> How D.O. must be considered, understood, in every action?
Oh, I don't know. It's pretty poetry and all, but such interdependence
doesn't really motivate me one way or another in how I act or think day
to day as other concepts seem to have greater influence.
> Nevermind - I really don't care about Sid's supposed agenda.
Well, you were the one who first mentioned anicca, anatta, dukkha in
this thread, so I was just following the flow.
Keynes
>Hollywood Lee wrote:
>> but only those that are composed or fabricated.
>
>Did I say anything about "traditional rendering" or did you
>somehow imagine I take that stuff as some kind of empirical
>truth? Are we arguing "law" here? I wasn't. I was relating
>to experience - personal and scientific.
>
>Why would D.O. be something allegorical and "mere upaya"?
>In any mode of examination, inside or outside of what the brain
>does? It's how the universe works, as obvious as can be
>to me. Is it not to you?
>
It's an entirely logical way to model reality which carries the
naive from public assumptions to their paradoxical conclusion.
There are lots of similar logical arguments from the sutras
that show the futility of the common mental modeling.
But it isn't about rational modeling in the end.
Awakening/nirvana goes beyond dualistic reason.
But few wish to take that final step. They prefer
to pretend that they have some sort of useful
understanding.
>> That may just be the limits of the agenda set by the Buddha for his
>> approach, and you may be right that all phenomenon are impermanent and
>> conditioned, but I'm not sure how I could confirm that as true nor would
>> it seem that proving the truth of such a view is as important as the
>> focus on mental fabrications and their cessation.
>
>You can confirm it by observation from the hypothesis. If the
>hypothesis proves correct, we have a theory. If something is
>proved permanent by observation, our theory is incorrect. The
>more impermanence we find, the better our theory holds true.
>Found any permanence lately?
>
Cause and effect can't escape cause and effect.
Explaining everything with that samsaric model
is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>Not for your personal salvation, perhaps. But isn't it important
>in understanding how life itself is (arrgghhh...I swiped this from
>Thitch!) interdependent? And how all things are interdependent?
>How D.O. must be considered, understood, in every action?
Non-action, non-calculating, no-self is the ideal.
(Actually the fact of things, simply to be 'realized'.)
zenworm
stillness
DharmaTroll
> DharmaTroll wrote:
> >On Nov 22, 5:00 pm, brian mitchell <brainm...@fishing.net> wrote:
> >> DharmaTroll wrote:
> >> It is impossible in experience
> >> to separate an object from one's awareness of the object;
> >> they are the same.
>
> >If you qualify that you are talking about "in your experience of the
> >tree", sure...
>
> But your experience of the tree is all there is.
You might think that if you're a narcissist and say "everything is
always about me". A lot of hot girls are like that.
But no, the tree is, the stars are, and the entire universe of
trillions of stars, billions of light years across is, whether your
ego interacts with them or not.
> It is only through contact with the tree that you know
What you 'know' is epistemology, not ontology.
What you know is a teeny-weeny subset of "what is".
Unless you're simply a narcissistic egomaniac.
> 'Tree' is a confluence of matter and mind.
No, tree is a plant, independent of any mind. Your concept and
experience of the tree is a confluence of matter and mind. Your
experience and concept are not the physical tree rooted in the ground.
> > But that's not the same as saying that the tree doesn't
> >exist, and is a function of your experience, as are dream sensations...
>
> It's a shame you can't hear this without roaring off into an erroneous
> rant. No-one is saying that the tree doesn't exist,
You are. "Doesn't exist" means "mind-dependent" means "hallucination"
or "representation". It's ashame you have to insult me, as I hear you
loud and clearly, but I think there is an alternative to your "it's
all about me" view. That is, the question is what is causing the mind-
confluent "tree experience" and the "tree concept". If the answer is
other thoughts and memories, then the experience is a "hallucination
of a tree". If the cause is a mind-independent tree, then the
experience is "an experience of a real tree." To conflate the two is
delusion.
> only that it doesn't exist as a thing-in-itself,
Of course it does, but it is not self-caused and has no essence -- I'm
not going that "naive realism" or "eternalism" route. I'm just saying
that it's independent of your mind. So you can't know with complete
certainty that it exists. It might be a trick.
> or that if it does we couldn't know it as such anyway.
Exactly. But we can infer it with high probability if we do some
empirical work.
> What we experience is contact *with* [whatever].
Yes, and then we can analyze the cause of that contact. This is
exactly the dilemma DesCartes faced. He concluded that we could be in
the Matrix (the modern version of the near-omnipotent genie), and we
can never know for sure that we aren't. But we can know with a very,
very, very high probability that the tree is real and that our
contact, our concept, our experience -- are all of a real extant tree.
We just can't know directly with certainty that this is true, ever.
Descartes beautifully and brilliantly demonstrated this point. But the
way out of this is to say, so what? You say, "I'll take 99.9999999
percent, sure!" and you accept the tree and the stars as a pragmatic,
reasonable inference.
Which fits fine with Buddhism, as Buddhism is not grasping the concept
of the tree, not imbuing permanence onto it, not craving and desiring
it. That doesn't mean we don't make the reasonable inference that the
mind-independent tree exists, and that the cat is really behind the
couch. Yeah, we might be in the Matrix. Yeah, Keynes may be right that
his ego (or our shared superego Mind) has created the illusion of the
universe; and yeah, Falwell may be right, that a jealous, bloodthirsty
God will torture us for eternity for not having the right
superstitions. But these possibilities are so infinitesimal, that
practically they aren't worth worrying about.
> It seems to me that I'm simply parroting the suttas here
Ouch. Parroting the sutras or the Bible is a really bad idea.
> where they describe the interactions of the aggregates and the arising
> of consciousness. Our experience is of the consciousness of things
> not of things-in-themselves-sans-us.
I think we can agree if you're saying that the Buddha only cared about
doing psychotherapy, and for psychotherapy, he was only discussing our
experiences. That's what Hollywood Lee says, and I can go with him on
that. What the sutras don't do, is say that trees don't exist. What
they say is that what's needed for Buddhist psychotherapy (i.e.,
getting from deluded to awakened) is all about problems with our
experiences, and grasping and craving that occurs with them, and our
being deluded doesn't have anything to do with the actual trees. The
Buddha is not taking a physics or metaphysics view that says "real
trees don't exist", however. Yes, later schools, and Hinduist schools,
and Bishop Berkeley take such stances, but the Buddha isn't doing that
in his teachings. That's what I'm saying. Nor is the Buddha making a
positive statement that the trees do exist, so if you want to deny the
world, I don't think you are going against Buddhism, which is neutral
ontologically, and only deals with the grasping and craving associated
with our experiences.
> I have noticed that you are a gradualist rather than a "sudden
> awakening" type. Some sort of awakening or transformative realization
> is what I'm in the game for, which is why I'm mostly interested in
> questions of mind and consciousness.
Yeah, it's because the "transformative realization" usually goes with
woo-woo or magical realms or becoming God or something, so the gradual
awakening seems more natural to me, and the 'Eureka!' type seems more
supernatural. Some teachers try to integrate them, with metaphors such
as a pot of water boiling, that it is gradual, and then finally the
boiling occurs suddenly. That sounds reasonable to me as well. But as
most of the folks here who take the battle to me are zennies, whereas
the Theravadins such as Lee and Jigme are usually in agreement with
me, let me quote the Zen passage that most makes sense to me about
awakening, and which also tries to integrate both views:
from Shunru Suzuki, _Zen Mind, Beginners' Mind_:
"If you continue this simple practice (zazen) every day, you will
obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something
wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special. It is just
you yourself, nothing special. As a Chinese poem says, 'I went and I
returned. It was nothing special. Rozan famous for its misty
mountains; Sekko for its water.' People think it must be wonderful to
see the famous range of mountains covered by mists, and the water said
to cover all the earth. But if you go there you will just see water
and mountains. Nothing special. It is a kind of mystery that for
people who have no experience of enlightenment, enlightenment is
something wonderful. But if they attain it, it is nothing. But yet it
is not nothing. Do you understand?"
I think I do. But I may be deluded. It's happened before.
> >> >Look, the mind (mano) is considered to be one of the 6 senses, along
> >> >with the other 5 physical ones, and the object of this sense is
> >> >thoughts...
>
> >> Does that make sense to you?
>
> >Yes.
>
> Good. This is the kind of area that interests me. I want to know if
> there is only one mental sense or several, and what its or their
> objects are, and whether the division between physical and mental
> sense(s) *makes* any sense. I think there is at least one more
> physical sense than the traditional five and others which shade into
> the mental, and I am astounded that memory doesn't seem to figure at
> all in the Buddhist understanding of mind and consciousness. Why is
> that, do you think?
I think memory is part of the 6th sense. And I have no idea what you
mean by another physical sense. You're not an ambassador from another
planet, are you? That would be cool. If not, you're probably talking
woo-woo of some magic sort, I fear.
> >> It basically says that mind and thoughts
> >> are the same thing,
>
> >No. Thoughts are the data and mind is the processing of them.
>
> This doesn't feel real to me.
Yes, your intuitions go another way. Probably why you crave the
transcendental, as mine crave the natural. But our feelings and
intuitions are conditioned and tell us nothing (even though it is in
the nature of them to think we have a special one-up-ness, but like
inferring the real tree, here we need to infer that others have
feelings and intuitions as strong as ours but leading in different
directions.
> >> as any sense and its objects are indistinguishable.
>
> >No. Your eyes are not stars, nor are they trees...
>
> See above about experience as an amalgam, reification, etc.
See above about experience of something not being the actual tree,
etc., causing the experience.
> >> A lot rides, though, on what we mean by 'thought'.
> >> What do you say thought is?
>
> >A thought is a pseudo-auditory sensation and/or a pseudo-visual
> >sensation...
>
> Interesting that you only acknowledge the sensational (literally)
> aspect of thought and thinking and not the mental functioning.
> Why thought? What is it doing?
What's it doing? It's arising, and then disappearing.
And then there is another one.
> The sensations you speak of strike me as just a stage in the
> expression of thought rather than the whole of it.
No, all thoughts are reducible to sensations, I'd say. But at the
content level they can convey information.
> >> And in the absence of thought, what is there?
>
> >Tons of other brain functions. There is space between thoughts a lot
> >of the time, especially so when meditating...
>
> If you refer only to the sensations, then yes, but the thinking
> process and the consciousness from which it arises are usually still
> grinding on, ime, as evidenced by the fact that more
> thought-sensations occur.
Well, thoughts bubble up from the unconscious, seemingly from nowhere,
and every moment of consciousness involves billions and billions of
neural firings, and the conscious experience is the tip of the
iceberg, so somehow thoughts bubble up out of that unconscious
labyrinth: that's the metaphor I use.
> > But there are still tons of sensations...
>
> You keep coming back to sensation.
Yeah, that's 'cause I meditate a lot.
Everything comes back to sensation.
> >> > Consciousness (vinnana), on the other hand, is one of the
> >> >five aggregates, as well as one of the four nutriments,,,
>
> >> Quite a lot more substitution of terms, which doesn't get us any
> >> closer to knowing what consciousness (or the act of being conscious)
> >> actually is. In this respect, all of us are just as qualified to
> >> experiment and discover as any neuroscientist,
>
> >No, we're not. We are only qualified in saying how consciousness
> >feels. And we're usually quite deluded about it.
>
> Oh? How does consciousness feel? Are you referring to sensations
> again? Do you look beyond sensation at all?
>
> >consciousness as we experience it seems to have lots of interesting
> >properties, and we can at least observe these, such as for starters:
> >(1) Globality;
> >(2) Presentationality;
> >(3) Convolved holism;
> >(4) Dynamicity;
> >(5) Perspectivalness;
> >(6) Transparency;
>
> Having said we are only qualified to say how consciousness feels, and
> barely even that, you go on to propose a whole raft of properties for
> consciousness, presumably through direct observation, or did you read
> about it? I don't know that I agree with the whole list; 2 and 5 seem
> likely.
Well, both. That list comes from Metzinger's "The Ego Tunnel".
Metzinger is a friend of Susan Blackmore, whom I also like a lot and
has written fascinating stuff about consciousness as well.
> >My point is that the Buddha doesn't treat 'consciousness' as something
> >that happens apart from the other aggregates. However, that doesn't
> >mean that stars don't happen unless there are people around. There are
> >simply no experiences of stars when people aren't around (or other
> >sentient beings, such as Klingons).
>
> Indeed, and experiences of stars is what matters.
To you maybe, not to the aliens who populate them!
> Knowledge (data) about stars is purely conceptual and
> meaningless without the experience.
Not at all. You're falling back into narcissism and egoism again!
Knowledge about what we don't experience, such as dark matter and dark
energy, whatever they are and turn out to be, is super meaningful and
the most interesting thing on the cutting edge of astrophysics these
days. One thing that tons of meditation has done for me, btw, is to
shift from the narcissistic ego view that only my experiences matter,
to curiosity and fascination with the mystery of things like dark
matter.
> >> > . . . I think everyone,
> >> >Sid included, believed lots of such stuff, and were wrong...
>
> >> I don't think you can hold the Buddha up as the arch-empiricist
> >> while also saying he believed in a lot of superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
> >> The two are in stark opposition.
>
> >No the aren't at all. The Buddha accepted practical things such as
> >dark matter...
>
> Heh.
>
> >Are you assuming that the Buddha was omniscient?
>
> I'm assuming that he went further into comprehending the nature of
> mind and being than either you or I have (or probably will) and that
Of mind, but he was a psychiatrist and said nothing of physics.
> to conceive of him as a projection of oneself, with one's own
> proclivities and limitations, though natural, is probably a mistake.
Then don't do it. I don't. Unless that is an accusation. I go out of
my way to see what the Buddha actually taught. What I keep finding is
that folks for centuries pile all sorts of extra stuff into the
Buddha's teachings, going to the point of even denying the Buddha's
original teachings. There are a plethora of magic realms and beasties
and states in Buddhisms. They don't interest me. The Buddha's original
pragmatism and empiricism does interest me.
> I'd say also that the term 'Buddha' means someone who has awakened to
> absolute reality,
Well, that's woo-woo, I'd say. If you want to say that the Buddha's
awakening in to absolute reality involved realizing that there is no
absolute reality to realize, but that there is the end of craving,
aversion, and delusion, and that we can never have objective knowledge
of an absolute reality that his contemporaries craved and posited,
then I'd agree. But you instead want to say that the Buddha was just
like his contemporaries. Of all I've studied, I've read that the
Buddha was saying something different, and his message was unique
because it rejected the possibility of objective knowledge of an
absolute reality. Later Buddhisms added back in what the Buddha
excluded. So your view is perfectly Buddhist, but I don't go for it,
and like his original teaching that objective knowledge of an absolute
reality isn't possible. Buddhists have been bickering over that shit
for centuries, so we aren't going to convince each other here, and can
only agree I suppose that historically there have been brilliant
Buddhists on all sides of the issue.
> When saying the Buddha was human there's as much danger of
> dragging him down to your own deluded level as there is of
> over-glorifying him into some kind of deity.
Well, sure, those are the pitfalls of the extreme of either view.
> >> > . . . What the
> >> >Buddha says about craving, aversion, and delusion and the ending of
> >> >these and how to get there is important to me...
>
> >> Ok. But all that is free-floating in contemporary culture now. You
> >> don't need to consult dubious and ambiguous scriptures for that.
>
> > . . . I don't know what you mean by free-floating. Even
> >most folks around here who call themselves Buddhists aren't clear
> >about the Buddha's teaching being the non-arising of obsessive
> >thoughts of craving, aversion, and delusion...
>
> Perhaps because you've added the "obsessive thoughts" part yourself
No, that wasn't mine. I picked up that terminology from teachers. I
like it because it makes sense and relates to my experience and
practice.
> I think you're as guilty of distortion
I'm guilty of relating Buddhism to my experience and practice and not
just blindly believing dogma. I find that to be a positive thing. You
may not. If so, we'll have to agree to disagree on that. On that note,
that reminds me of an old Taoist story, so I'll tell it and stop with
that.
--DharmaTroll
(from Chuang Tzu)
Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book.
The wheelwright P'ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel,
laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to
Duke Huan, “This book Your Grace is reading—may I venture to ask whose
words are in it?”
“The words of the sages,” said the duke.
“Are the sages still alive?”
“Dead long ago,” said the duke.
“In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and
dregs of the men of old!”
“Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books
I read?” said Duke Huan. “If you have some explanation, well and
good. If not, I'll kick your ass!”
Wheelwright P'ien said, “I look at it from the point of view of my own
work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too
gentle, the chisel slides and won't take hold. But if they're too
hard, it bites in and won't budge. Not too gentle, not too hard—you
can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can't put it
into words, and yet there's a knack to it somehow. I can't teach
[explain] it to my son, and he can't learn it from me. So I've gone
along for seventy years and at my age I'm still chiseling wheels. When
the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be
handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but chaff
and dregs of the men of old.”
DharmaTroll
> On 11/23/2009 7:57 PM, Déjà Flu wrote:
>
>
>
> > Hollywood Lee wrote:
As usual, I like both what you (Lee) and you (Fu) say.
You both make sense here, and I like both your perspectives.
--DharmaTroll
^@%>---*=#**
"DharmaTroll" <dharm...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:588a413d-bbb3-499b...@e31g2000vbm.googlegroups.com...
>You might think that if you're a narcissist and say "everything is
>always about me". A lot of hot girls are like that.
everything 'is' always about me.
that ol' i am he as you are he stuff.
>But no, the tree is, the stars are,
nope. they only appear to be.
> and the entire universe of
>trillions of stars, billions of light years across is, whether your
>ego interacts with them or not.
ego just appears to be too.
>What you know is a teeny-weeny subset of "what is".
and what should never be
>No, tree is a plant, independent of any mind.
nope. your perception of tree
says it's a plant. 'tree' is oblivious
to your concept recontextualizations.
> Your concept and
>experience of the tree is a confluence of matter and mind.
even your concept about his concept
is mere preceptual recontextualization
squeezed into the infinitesimal filtering
slice of the cosmic cookie that you
call you.
> Your
>experience and concept are not the physical tree rooted in the ground.
again, tree rooted into ground is
only your perceptual sensory input
followed by feeling analysis and has
nothing to do with reality.
Lee Rudolph
>"DharmaTroll" <dharm...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
>news:588a413d-bbb3-499b...@e31g2000vbm.googlegroups.com...
>>You might think that if you're a narcissist and say "everything is
>>always about me". A lot of hot girls are like that.
>
>everything 'is' always about me.
>that ol' i am he as you are he stuff.
Up against the wall, Russ!
Lee Rudolph
Tang Huyen
"^@%>---*=#**" wrote:
> "DharmaTroll"
>
> >But no, the tree is, the stars are,
>
> nope. they only appear to be.
Nope. They only appear to appear.
Tang Huyen
^@%>---*=#**
"Tang Huyen" <tanghuyen{delete}@gmail.com[remove]> wrote in message
news:lY6dnb6bitqAS5bW...@supernews.com...
now you're gettin it
DharmaTroll
^@%>---*=#**
>Heh!
heh only appears to appear too
^@%>---*=#**
> And again, you can test it by walking
>in front of a fast-moving truck, or even just shoving your head into a
>bucket of water. And you'll soon see what is mere appearance and what
>is real.
simply because you can feel the truck
hit you or your need for oxygen in the
bucket doesn't prove out that what you
are experiencing is real. just because you
feel something doesn't necessarily authenticate
it. i once again ask you in the midst of your
babbling drool, what authenticates your
feelings? where is the substantiation for
what you feel? where is your proof that
your feelings are even occurring?
i feel things during lucid dreaming
so by your slippery convoluted logic
my dreams are also real.
by this very same logic if my dreams
cannot be authenticated as anything
more than a fleeting fancy of nonsense
then neither can your so-called reality.
Déjà Flu
<zap!>
> by this very same logic if my dreams
> cannot be authenticated as anything
> more than a fleeting fancy of nonsense
> then neither can your so-called reality.
It's not "logic" and you know it.
Wanna try a non-dream experiment?
Put your hand in the machine.
And stop being silly just because you don't like
DT's eggo waffles. You've been awfully cranky lately
(not that I blame you, but still..) and even Tang's
got his knickers bunched again - over nothing.
Don't you guys have enough maharashi dolls and
secret code rings to play with? Sheesh...
^@%>---*=#**
"D�j� Flu" <cha...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:irKdnSMQ6tgB-5HW...@posted.toastnet...
> ^@%>---*=#** wrote:
>
> <zap!>
>
>> by this very same logic if my dreams
>> cannot be authenticated as anything
>> more than a fleeting fancy of nonsense
>> then neither can your so-called reality.
>
> It's not "logic" and you know it.
> Wanna try a non-dream experiment?
> Put your hand in the machine.
that's no proof of anything
except your own personal
feelings. if you're trying to
say that your personal feelings
prove that reality is authentic
excuse me while i laugh my
ass off.
Déjà Flu
(heh)^(2(!))
"They" seem to appear to squirrels and pigeons too.
Oneshoe asked,
"Does a duck have buddha-nature?"
Bashful answered,
"Quack!"
^@%>---*=#**
so first you claim that reality is
authentic because you have personal
feelings and now you claim to know
what is seeming to squirrels and
pigeons. you've become a one man
laugh riot.
Tang Huyen
"^@%>---*=#**" wrote:
> "Tang Huyen"
>
> > "^@%>---*=#**":
>
> >> "DharmaTroll"
>
> >> >But no, the tree is, the stars are,
>
> >> nope. they only appear to be.
>
> > Nope. They only appear to appear.
>
> now you're gettin it
The Oneness is, in and of itself, and deigns
to appear as the Manyness, but actually
does not appear and only appears to
appear. The Manyness appears, but is not.
So which one is more real? And which one
lies awake at night wondering whether the
other one has more fun?
Tang Huyen
possum
> "Déjà Flu" <cha...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>>>now you claim to know
what is seeming to squirrels and
pigeons.>>>
that's not an ability to be scoffed at generally. ask the squirrels
and the pigeons. what does the 'bigmonkey/little critter 'being
wrong' ratio look like now?
<cream-crackered> possum
possum
wrote:
that really is nice. thank you tang, for bringing a smile to my
face.
possum
zenworm
FUB(E)AR(S)?
ZN :D
Déjà Flu
> On Nov 24, 6:05 pm, D�j� Flu <cha...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> ^@%>---*=#** wrote:
>>
>> <zap!>
>>
>>> by this very same logic if my dreams
>>> cannot be authenticated as anything
>>> more than a fleeting fancy of nonsense
>>> then neither can your so-called reality.
>> It's not "logic" and you know it.
>> Wanna try a non-dream experiment?
>> Put your hand in the machine.
>>
>> And stop being silly just because you don't like
>> DT's eggo waffles. You've been awfully cranky lately
>> (not that I blame you, but still..) and even Tang's
>> got his knickers bunched again - over nothing.
>>
>> Don't you guys have enough maharashi dolls and
>> secret code rings to play with? Sheesh...
>
>
> FUB(E)AR(S)?
hush. just settle down a bit and jen will
take care of things. he has a good way with it
when he's not upset about something or other.
Déjà Flu
...
> FUB(E)AR(S)?
...
y'know, I almost missed the secret massage
puts a new light on things, soto speak...
Hollywood Lee
>
> "DharmaTroll" <dharm...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> news:fb148691-19cb-4177...@m33g2000vbi.googlegroups.com...
>> And again, you can test it by walking
>> in front of a fast-moving truck, or even just shoving your head into a
>> bucket of water. And you'll soon see what is mere appearance and what
>> is real.
>
> simply because you can feel the truck
> hit you or your need for oxygen in the
> bucket doesn't prove out that what you
> are experiencing is real. just because you
> feel something doesn't necessarily authenticate
> it. i once again ask you in the midst of your
> babbling drool, what authenticates your
> feelings? where is the substantiation for
> what you feel? where is your proof that
> your feelings are even occurring?
>
> i feel things during lucid dreaming
> so by your slippery convoluted logic
> my dreams are also real.
So putting aside the definitional loaded question of what is real (or
not), are you claiming that there is no difference (experiential,
ontological, and on) between getting hit by a truck in waking life
versus a lucid dream?
zenworm
Awareness!
ZN ;D
jubilation for no reason owned by no one
Keynes
wrote:
You have the keys to the kingdom, and you go and stick 'em in a truck?
possum
> On 11/24/2009 2:51 PM, ^@%>---*=#** wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
why are you asking? you can't disprove it.
possum
possum
> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:59:00 -0700, Hollywood Lee <hollywood...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> >On 11/24/2009 2:51 PM, ^@%>---*=#** wrote:
>
> >>news:fb148691-19cb-4177...@m33g2000vbi.googlegroups.com...
> >>> And again, you can test it by walking
> >>> in front of a fast-moving truck, or even just shoving your head into a
> >>> bucket of water. And you'll soon see what is mere appearance and what
> >>> is real.
>
> >> simply because you can feel the truck
> >> hit you or your need for oxygen in the
> >> bucket doesn't prove out that what you
> >> are experiencing is real. just because you
> >> feel something doesn't necessarily authenticate
> >> it. i once again ask you in the midst of your
> >> babbling drool, what authenticates your
> >> feelings? where is the substantiation for
> >> what you feel? where is your proof that
> >> your feelings are even occurring?
>
> >> i feel things during lucid dreaming
> >> so by your slippery convoluted logic
> >> my dreams are also real.
>
> >So putting aside the definitional loaded question of what is real (or
> >not), are you claiming that there is no difference (experiential,
> >ontological, and on) between getting hit by a truck in waking life
> >versus a lucid dream?
>
> You have the keys to the kingdom, and you go and stick 'em in a truck?
keynes! something wierd is happening to my timing. and my spelling.
DharmaTroll
> On 11/24/2009 2:51 PM, wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > "DharmaTroll" <dharmatr...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
I dare one of these nutters such as ^@%>---*=#** or Keynes to actually
walk in front of a speeding truck if they actually believe this. In
lucid (and non-lucid) dreams, I've crushed an oncoming truck or tank
with my bare hands, like Superman, the way I crush the ridiculous
arguments of these disingenuous yippers on these boards. However, in
real life, a real, tangible truck would crush me just as it would
crush these transcendental snake oil peddlers. And it wouldn't matter
if they closed their eyes and didn't perceive it.
--DharmaTroll
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs."
-Lily Tomlin
Evelyn
:-) :-) :-)
I think you are channeling Jen!
--
Evelyn
"Even as a mother protects with her life her only child, So with a boundless
heart let one cherish all living beings." --Sutta Nipata 1.8
^@%>---*=#**
"possum" <jhk00B0S...@spambox.us> wrote in message
news:34fb5529-524f-4225...@g27g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...> "D�j� Flu" <cha...@gmail.com> wrote in message
<cream-crackered> possum
-----------------------------------------------------
walk like an egyptian
^@%>---*=#**
"Hollywood Lee" <hollyw...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:heidlj$ocv$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
there may be a different end result
but there is still no evidence to actually
show that either reality or my dreams
are real or not real. establishing an
agenda as to realness or illusion
is simply perspective negotiation
in an attempt to define and explain
what may in the end be unexplainable.
"reality" is neither real nor un-real.
^@%>---*=#**
---------------------------------------------------------
since we have established that your only
proof that objects are real are your personal
feelings i would like to thank you for having
them so that reality, the entire universe and
maybe beyond, are authenticated by you and
you alone.
^@%>---*=#**
"Evelyn" <evely...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:hej26s$qbo$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
>
> "Tang Huyen" <tanghuyen{delete}@gmail.com[remove]> wrote in message
> news:La6dnRjJH_h05JHW...@supernews.com...
>>
>>
>> "^@%>---*=#**" wrote:
>>
>>> "Tang Huyen"
>>>
>>> > "^@%>---*=#**":
>>>
>>> >> "DharmaTroll"
>>>
>>> >> >But no, the tree is, the stars are,
>>>
>>> >> nope. they only appear to be.
>>>
>>> > Nope. They only appear to appear.
>>>
>>> now you're gettin it
>>
>> The Oneness is, in and of itself, and deigns
>> to appear as the Manyness, but actually
>> does not appear and only appears to
>> appear. The Manyness appears, but is not.
>> So which one is more real? And which one
>> lies awake at night wondering whether the
>> other one has more fun?
>>
>> Tang Huyen
>
>
> :-) :-) :-)
> I think you are channeling Jen!
i got so many goats in my backyard
now i'm running out of rubber bands.
^@%>---*=#**
> The Oneness is, in and of itself,
can the oneness be in and of itself?
wouldn't "in and of" be a duality to
begin with and then when added to
the original oneness makes a thrice
compounded triple threat?
>and deigns
> to appear as the Manyness,
appears so.
> but actually
> does not appear and only appears to
> appear.
dunno. seems you'd inevitably have
to go ad nauseum ad infinitum with
does not appear but only appears to appear
to appear to appear to appear and so on until
your reverse transcriptual maze echo pathway
recontextualizations are only a shadow of their
former selves. [if you knew woo-woo like i know
woo-woo, oh oh what a gal]
>The Manyness appears, but is not.
so far so good.
> So which one is more real?
neither one is real nor unreal
since real and unreal are simply
limited and filtered concept agendas
that are negotiated to attempt to explain
reality to ourselves but failing at it miserably
simply from the notion of how small
a slice of the cosmic pie incorporates
what we think of as "ourselves". the
individual has a limited spectrum of sight
and sound so it's likely that our propensity
to reason and feel are also like an infinitesimal
amount of the available nuances of true feeling
and reasoning.
And which one
> lies awake at night wondering whether the
> other one has more fun?
fun is biased? i want a refund.
Evelyn
Hollywood Lee
So, are you asserting there is no difference? Simple question for you,
keynes, frank, anyone.
Hollywood Lee
You have an agenda of inserting back in a definitional debate that I've
expressly asked you to set aside. Why do you do this?
So again, do you assert there is no difference (experiential,
ontological, and on) between getting hit by a truck in waking life
versus a lucid dream? You suggest that the end result "may" be
different. Only "may"? Really?
Lee Rudolph
>On 11/24/2009 10:58 PM, possum wrote:
>> On 25 Nov, 04:59, Hollywood Lee<hollywood...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 11/24/2009 2:51 PM, ^@%>---*=#** wrote:
...
>>>> i feel things during lucid dreaming
>>>> so by your slippery convoluted logic
>>>> my dreams are also real.
>>>
>>> So putting aside the definitional loaded question of what is real (or
>>> not), are you claiming that there is no difference (experiential,
>>> ontological, and on) between getting hit by a truck in waking life
>>> versus a lucid dream?
>>
>> why are you asking? you can't disprove it.
>
>So, are you asserting there is no difference? Simple question for you,
>keynes, frank, anyone.
I must be missing something.
As I have understood it, since first becoming acquainted with the notion
35 years ago or so, a "lucid" dream by no means has to be a "veridical"
dream: to say that a dream is "lucid" or "not lucid" is to make a claim
about one's ego-stance in the dream. Checking Wikipedia, I find confirmation
of my understanding: "A lucid dream is a dream in which the sleeper is aware
that he or she is dreaming. When the dreamer is lucid, he or she can actively
participate in and often manipulate the imaginary experiences in the dream
environment." (The word "imaginary" in that quotation would be tendentious
in the context of the present discussion, and I am happy to drop it.)
On that understanding, how could there *not* be a "difference (experiential,
ontological, and so on)"--at least a salient potential difference, if not
in every case an actualized difference--"between getting hit by a truck
in waking life versus a lucid dream"? I have no personal experience of
"getting hit by a truck", but I do have personal experience of "getting
hit" (on my body) by other (less momentum-laden) objects, and impersonal
but highly personalized experience of "getting hit" (on the automobile I
am driving) by automobiles (though not trucks); in none of those cases
have I been--nor would I expect to be--able to "manipulate the []
experiences". On the contrary, in my occasional lucid dreams I *am*
indeed able to "manipulate [] experiences" of that sort (including
such experiences as "getting hit" by the surface of the earth after
falling from a height).
I suppose that if my ego-stance were appropriately adjusted, possibly
by the ingestion of psychotropic drugs, I could feel that way about
"waking life" too. But that would be (induced) psychosis, nicht wahr?
I am definitely missing something.
Lee Rudolph
^@%>---*=#**
there may be incidences wherein
someone dreams of being killed
by a truck and actually dies like
say from fright because the dream
is so realistic. i contend that the basic
substance of dreams is no different
than that basic substance of the waking
state in the physical manifestation. if
the stuff that dreams are made of and
the stuff the physical manifestation are
made of is similar then if one is real then
both are. when the truck hits you in the
waking state your body would get smashed
for certain but in the dream it may or may not
simply because dreamscapes are more loosely
defined as to "rules of attributes" so to speak.
Keynes
wrote:
>On 11/25/2009 4:53 AM, ^@%>---*=#** wrote:
I'll grant you the past, and the present, but not the future.
Go fish.
Hollywood Lee
There "may" be incidences? Please, do use the power of google and show
me these incidences. Were they flattened?
> i contend that the basic
> substance of dreams is no different
> than that basic substance of the waking
> state in the physical manifestation. if
> the stuff that dreams are made of and
> the stuff the physical manifestation are
> made of is similar then if one is real then
> both are. when the truck hits you in the
> waking state your body would get smashed
> for certain but in the dream it may or may not
> simply because dreamscapes are more loosely
> defined as to "rules of attributes" so to speak.
So, if the basic substances are the same, then tell me what you predict
would occur to the two test groups in the following experiment.
We take two randomly selected groups of people who are skilled at lucid
dreaming and place each member from each group into their own private
environmentally controlled room for a 4 week period, with no interaction
from the outside. Participants from both groups are encouraged to
engage in lucid dreaming when they sleep, with the only difference being
that the rooms for the Group A participants do not have any food, water,
or other nourishment of any kind. They are told that all nourishment,
if any, must be "consumed" from the basic substances within their lucid
dream. Group B participants have rooms that are identical to the group
A rooms with the exception of a well-stocked refrigerator, pantry, water
and on and are allowed to eat withing the dreams or during their waking
state.
So, given your assertions, you would predict that both groups would
re-emerge from their rooms after 4 weeks in substantially the same
physical and mental state, equally nourished - right?
Hollywood Lee
No, I think you have it about right.
DharmaTroll
> "Hollywood Lee" <hollywood...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:hej9sm$hri$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
>
>
>
> > On 11/25/2009 4:53 AM, ^@%>---*=#** wrote:
>
> >>news:heidlj$ocv$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> >>> On 11/24/2009 2:51 PM, ^@%>---*=#** wrote:
>
They would have to die for real, physical reasons, such as stress from
the dream producing a real heart attack in their objectively existing
physical body, Nutter Dude. I've died many, many times in dreams, but
the worst that's ever happened to me from it in real life is waking up
all sweaty. Same with wet dreams.
That is no argument that trees are imaginary, you huckster!
> i contend that the basic
> substance of dreams is no different
> than that basic substance of the waking
> state in the physical manifestation.
'Manifestation' my ass. What you are saying is only that neural
firings in the brain create both the 'substance' of dream experiences
and waking experiences, but because you "don't believe in brains" you
babble this in your woo-woo "manifestation" talk.
> if
> the stuff that dreams are made of and
> the stuff the physical manifestation are
> made of is similar then if one is real then
> both are.
Again, brains create both experiences. So what? Being real isn't about
having an experience. That's what you nutters keep missing. Being real
is about the cause of the experience, which is opaque to the
experiencing itself. That is, whether a real tree is causing the
experience via the proper channels (reflecting electromagnetic
radiation of the visible spectra into the visual sense organs which
then transmit electrical signals to the brain as it is creating the
experience), or whether no real tree is causing the experience, which
may resemble the experience of actually seeing a tree.
> when the truck hits you in the
> waking state your body would get smashed
> for certain
For certain? You've just confessed to being a materialist, and a hard-
core naive realist! Even I don't say this would happen for certain or
even that the truck exists (I say only 99.99+%, as we could be in the
Matrix or be deceived by a nasty genie, so we could never know that we
would die 'for certain' rather than the truck just go through our
body). You've just undermined your whole woo-woo position and taken a
sane realist physical stance to make your point, Keynes. You blew it.
Busted. Loooooozer!
--DharmaTroll