Lucky7Strikes

Yes I see your point. It's very simple. And afflicted mind is a condition. Cause effect, karma does not matter. Without a doer, the agent of action, everything is simply a conditional event. NO DOER = NO CHOICES = NO FREE WILL If there is no free will of the individual, who can we praise and who can we blame?

Xabir, I understand completely where you are coming from. The bottom line is you deny the individual with free will. Go at it, let everything be rolling pile of dirt including the Buddha, the eight rightfold path being followed, enlightenment gained. No different or better than a serial killer "happening" without a doer, whether it simultaneous, dependently originated, or by causes and conditions. Everyone chained. As for the rest of the post, I will try to answer later. But this is the main point I want to emphasize and you are afraid to admit. Oh and another point: There is subject/object duality, but neither the subject or the object are established. Please try to understand this. You give reality to a state of awareness. It's like a person who gets high, loses sense of time, and says "in reality there is and never was the flow of time, and when I'm sober I'm just unawakened to that experience of "true" reality.

It means everyone is chained to causes and conditions and that Buddhahood is no different than rain falling from the sky.

Shayne's wrong. He is reifying a state of awareness as reality. You must be have the ear to hear sounds. And the ear arises from the creative habit of awareness to see itself as a human body, and experience the human realm. No we must be aware of the world by choice and intent. When awareness cuts through the limitations of the body, it can transition into different states/realms of being. In it, the sounds the body hears is no longer heard. Hearing arises depedently with the conditioned state of awareness. .... Attention is a form of awareness. The self, a presumed locality of the "I" is always empty, because it arises dependently to whatever the experience is. Not one, not two. . But other than that, it was beautifully written! But Xabir, I'm still waiting for a valid explanation why your paradigm is not determinism, since there is no doer, there is also no free will. According to you, phenomena liberates and enters illusion on its on accord and has always been so.

I'm just saying causes are made up. I don't doubt the benefits of full lotus and fasting. I understand what you are saying, kind of, the inference of the I-thought traces thought to awareness itself. I guess you can call that shen, the manifest body as jing and the interplay as qi. But you can't resonate closer with reality. Reality is whatever that is experienced.

I'm conscious right now. . Meditating and energetics are freeing awareness from its attached states and learning various ways of manifesting it. And to experience absolute consciousness too. And I'm not speculating. . And that is you! The Void is indeed playful!

There are no established causes and conditions. There is the relationship of A causing B, but the distinctions are made by the mind due to habit, or just spontaneous reasoning if you do not have attachments, as in you don't hold that relationship to be objective. We also have to put cause into the context of time. For example, the desire of ice cream is due to habits, and the cause for that desire can be that you are attached to the experience of taste, holding it to be true abiding pleasure. But upon fully realizing that that pleasure is totally subjective, that it is awareness clinging onto that state of being, taste, you are no longer chained to the impulse of that habit arising and leading you to get ice cream. You have control over it, and it no longer becomes a chaining habit. The cause is changed. I'm not sure that's a good example...it makes more sense when you see that reality is simply a manifestation of awareness intent as are the causes and conditions that govern it. A self existent thing, a self aware awareness simply doesnt make sense. Same with consciousness. You need to be conscious OF something to know you are conscious. You can abide in that state if "isness" or whatever, but you inevitably return to a time frame to reflect on that state. When you dream (not lucid or transcendent dreaming, but...normal dreaming), often the opposite happens. You are often unconscious within it. Events and memories happen, but it is only after you wake up these things become apparent. I thought the poem was very to the point. Thanks Dwai!

You are confusing content with the action itself. Intent is continuous because awareness and manifest phenomena dependently arise, meaning the interaction cannot cease. There is no break in intent. The decision "not to move" is intent just as the decision to move. Your analogy isn't very fitting here. Actually it does mean it's not there. A person who has never seen the color yellow, will never know it without discovering it. And we can only say that in that person's reality, the color yellow does not exist but as a potential. What you wrote above still doesn't explain fully why your view isn't deterministic/fatalistic. Dwai, if you've followed all these metaphysical discussions, I've often agreed, disagreed, changed my opinions, developed new ones and so on. That was a nice poem, but it sees awareness indepedently , which makes no sense because awareness must be "of" something. Nothing can self exist. To exist you need a reflection. Can the eye see itself?

Oh sorry I read your post wrong. The contents of causes and conditions are subjective creations of awareness. But that doesn't mean there aren't causes and conditions. It's like a painter who sits to paint, and to know of his own existence, he has to paint, and there are characteristics (causes and conditions) to that painting, but it is subjetively created (usually by attachments and habits) by awareness through intent.

not making effort, not making intent, is also intent. Presence-awareness is effortlessly present when awareness can experience that state and become accustomed to it. Habitualize it. And how do circumstances arise? Don't they arise from past circumstances through cause? Or are you saying that the past arises from the present also? Ah, the past and present are interdependent. What distinguishes this moment from the next then, or the previous moment? "reaction to circumstances" And where do these circumstances arise from, the past? Ahhh, intentions and circumstances (if we take that to mean whatever experience that comes about) are interdependent. So they are not one.... No but it is determined by previous conditions. And the condition before that. And how do conditions manifest? By causes...so causes after causes..... I don't get what you mean, because you have not thought this through. According to you, the thoughts, thinker, the reflection are all simply happening without a doer but based on causes and conditions. Man, that is determinism. NO PERSON = determinism. NO DOER = determinism. NO FREE WILL = determinism. Rolling pile of dirt. NOTE: When I say awareness and what it is aware "of" are interdependent, I am not saying that awareness arises from that specific content of manifestation. Like my awareness is not dependent on the body. But it is dependent on the "nature" the "characteristic" of existing phenomena, such as the "body" ness. EXACTLY. That's my point. Apparently, in Xabir's model of reality, all this is simply arising and fading away of causes. So there's me typing this post, or rather, "typing" is being done.

And so Pero, how does one reach Buddha hood when one is just the passing of causes and conditions? How does one reach there when there was never a "you"?

Awarness can be localized. But finding it, you won't find anything there. It is like going from point A to point B to find point B. And getting at point B, you'll go, huuuuh, where is point B? There's nothing there! So when you say that the sense I am arise, that is stupid. YOU ARE THAT ARISING. And when you say I sense and I, that is also purely nonsensical.

This happens through intent. It is effort. Your only argument against determinism...is that it is extreme. If conditioned are caused by previous conditions, and choices are made by these conditions, that is determinism. "arise and vanish on their own": that is determinism. Xabir this is so blatantly clear. Why don't you see it. This means that enlightenment happens by causes and conditions. It is another "arising" and "vanishing." This is a wrong view. And the dead nothingness is recognized in the later arising of awarness that makes the paticular distinction of "then" and "now." There is no "gap" in intentions. Intention and change are simultaneous, it's the interplay of "I" and the "other." NO there is no true division, but the characteristic of division. You are seeing things in extremes. The bondage comes in designating awareness, attaching it to a certain experience or a locality, like I Amness or I Am NOTness.

Those sensations aren't "real" or established either. Positive intent is active interaction from which one's awareness is localized. It's like moving from point A to point B. Relativity is consciously shifted from a focal point of awareness, the body, in a seemingly unmoving "objective" world. Negative intent in he whole letting go process where awareness is decentralized. You don't have a sense of "I" anymore in extreme states of letting go because no center is held. But Xabir, again.... What about free will? Is the Buddha just a rolling pile of dirt? Why do you practice if you deny free will? Is it just...destined? It's a beautiful statement! SHUDDUP RALIS!! .

WE LOOK AT CLOSELY. Now you have to look at closely. You need to have the intent to look closely to notice all these things. That's conditional. "Me" does not begin or end. It is unborn. It is the very basis of all existence. Existence cannot be without consciousness. It CAN be localized, it can also be delocalized. Dependent origination as in: Awareness and phenomena, the objective aspect in the subject/object experience are both dependent. You can't be aware without something to be aware "of" Nor can anything be said to exist without being aware of it. If awareness and the existent were one, non-dual, as you put it, they wouldn't dependently originate, they would be ONE. Again, all these insights require the intentions of awareness. When it is dual, it is dual. When it is non-dual, it is non-dual. But at the end of the day it returns to a state of duality, of subject and object relation because one needs to reflect on the experience in order to perceive it. Can you perceive without a perceiver and the perceived? You can only perceived the state of deep sleep as a past experience later on in time. Again, time is a particularity created by the mind, a subject/object relationship in order for it to be aware of itself. That;s right awareness can seemingly, only seemingly, disappear when the manifest phenomena merges into it, the things perceived to be "not-I." Sound cannot be said to arise if you are not aware of it. NOOOOOOO. WITHOUT EXERTING!! That is effort. Effortlessness is effort. It is intention. Letting go is an intention it is movement of awarness. Reality IS subjective knowing. I interact in the world, I can change it, change my perceptions of it. Co-create it with others.

This thread is stupid. . It's so stupid, it's mind-boggling. When Zen master Joshu left his master at the age of eighty he famously claimed that he would learn from a six year old if there was anything to be learned and teach whoever needed it.

And what experiences the eye? Read this paragraph from beginning. And if awareness has always been one seamless experience undifferentiated from phenomena, are you saying phenomena experiences itself? That sentience and insentience are one? That's ridiculous. It CAN be experienced that way, but that is not ultimate. Space and time are paticularities the mind creates to see itself in relation to phenomena. This is how existence is seen, a self-awarness arisen. Play around with your awareness throughout the body. You can put it here, there, give it a source, make it be everything, and even make it nothing for a while.

YOUR ENTIRE PARADIGM OF REALITY DENIES FREE WILL. Ok so he says that there is not free will. Great. HAHAHHA JUST A ROLLING PILE OF DIRT. Your Buddhism reifies the manifest. Advaitan reifies awareness as independent "thing." Both are extremes. Denying free will just defeats the whole purpose of attaining enlightenment. You and your teachers are wrong. This it wonderful. Thank you Marblehead! . I would say that the mystery is the awareness, consciousness. Where do I find this in Taoist texts?

It's serious man, very, very serious. I have yet to hear you own opinions on any of this. So please share. I think the trouble comes from trying to designate awareness. It isn't a field, or a source, or a all encompassing thing. It can be all these things. For example, you can aware of parts of your body, but on another level the wholeness of it. Awarness can also move through a perceived space, or time, but at the same instance see the totality of it. It's something to be experimentally realized to see how it works. It's quite fascinating. It is truly without a self.

I agree, the ego is absent of location or inherent existence. The nature of reality is always changing according to the various manifestations of awareness. Reality is always changing according to YOUR perspective. The experience of I Amness or Anatta are simply a different state of awareness. Actually no, smell comes from habitual being, a patterning of awareness that has manifested this body, and so there is the nose which senses smell. Awarness moves through intent. But when you are not aware of the smell, can you say that you are actually smelling? Denying free will...I'm sorry but that is absolute nihilism and determinism. Then there is no need for me to practice, there is no salvation to all creation. Then why do you practice? You are reifying manifest phenomena, the objective world when the world (which can be form, formless, or whatever that is experience itself) is dependent on the mind. The sense are created by the grasping of the mind. Ignorance is the first chain. Awareness and phenomena are not one, but not two. Both are dependently arisen, this is the basis of any existence. And it creates, it has a will, it has a self but that self is not defined or limited or inherent. It is the void. And please do not confuse this with the infinite universe or whatever. Every man is a universe onto himself.