galen_burnett

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About galen_burnett

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  1. i'm busy with something else for a while. will reply afterwards.
  2. Sorry again to be dense lol! That ‘edit’, you mean “pretty much” no Buddhism was brought over to the West?
  3. Regardless of what I’ve said before, honestly, good luck with your challenges, I can relate to addictions and anxiety (it’s horrible, I know) and I feel you there ✌️
  4. I’d probably need to read the thread I asked you for to fully understand what you’re getting at in this comment Daniel, the ‘householder’ stuff, etc. As an aside: 10-20k hours is a general figure for the time it takes to get very good at something; which translates to really actually quite a manageable cost if one commits to something—like, it’s just 5 hours of practice in something a day for 10 to 15 years. Albeit sitting meditation would be much harder, I think, to practise 5 hours a day for than, say, a competitive video-game or playing a musical-instrument would be; but even if we halve that rate to just 2-3 hours a day that’s still only about 30 years… 30 years of a moderate daily commitment and you can become a Buddha! you can transcend existence and become one with God itself! BECOME THE NUMERO-UNO! glory awaits! I mean, there’s a bit of a disparity there between the enormously vast complexity of the thing one would be ‘conquering’—life itself—and the relatively meagre price of that achievement… a few hours a day for not even half of one life-time… it sounds a lot like an attractive offer at a casino honestly 🤩
  5. “Systems” that have what function? to Enlighten? What is Enlightenment, please? “methods” don’t matter… so you yourself have no ‘system’ nor ‘method’, no practice, no spiritual-tradition you adhere to?
  6. Sorry to be dense Daniel, are you implying that he’s lying about his history, as it might be unfeasible to spend 20 years in one tradition (Tibetan) and then go and reach the top-rank in another (San Francisco Zen)?
  7. Can I have a link to this thread please Daniel?
  8. So I think it does not differ from theirs because your own views have actually been entirely shaped by them, and that your own explanation for what you have seen for yourself through personal investigation is actually just your teachers’ and tradition’s interpretation of your experience. “I can see how:” You can see how the sages reconcile those ideas referred to in that comment of Michael Sternbach’s you are there replying to? “…could be a provisional understanding used as a teaching scaffolding. My personal experience is that all abstractions such as realms or other worlds are empty of any reality of their own, incompatible with Nagarjuna's explanations of time, space, and self.” Please explain this assuming your audience has no knowledge of Narajuna. “[…] I can only see cosmologies as conceptual constructs, not really having any reality that we can truly experience ourselves.” Well, I think you are forgetting that you definitely have your own cosmology as set out by your descriptions of Non-Duality and Enlightenment. A cosmology doesn’t have to be formed by purely intellectual speculation you know; a cosmology can definitely be formed out of one’s ‘real experience’. ‘Cosmology’ is synonymous with ‘ontology’, a world-view; you definitely have one of those. Is your own cosmology an empty useless conceptual construct as well then? or is yours a wonderful exception? “Even those experiences have a certain relative reality of their own, though it is advisable to hold what is "real" lightly and without reification. “ Elaborate please. ‘To reify’ is to make an abstract concept more concrete or ‘real’—that second clause of yours is very obscure. “[…] tightly held beliefs […]” I maintain that you seem to certainly have some of these. “Experiencing them is the natural consequence of dropping tightly held beliefs and stopping the process of explaining them away. “ Do you mean that in order to experience deeper things one needs to open one’s mind and not try to ‘explain away’ the super-natural with ‘rational’ or ‘mundane’ reasoning (like saying a ghostly apparition was ‘just the wind’, or that a UFO was just a ‘weather-balloon’)? “You can talk about it, but (as neo-Advaita chap Adyashanti says) you have [to] intend to "fail well" in the best case scenario. It really isn't expressible, primarily because our language, which depends on subject/object relationships, is not suited to the task. It isn't a subject/object "thing" to experience.” No: either you can explain it or you can’t even have the faintest notion of it. Logic is maintained while it is talked about, clearly; if it is real or experienceable then that thread of logic that starts in talking about it may be maintained all the way up to the experiencing of the thing itself; there may be a point where one’s limited understanding and field-of-view prevent one from describing the thing any further, but there is no point where, given a great enough field-of-view, the logic-thread must necessarily break.
  9. I understand ‘omnipresent’ to be all-pervasive, at all places at all times; you are equating the word with everything that ‘is’ and everything that ‘is not’… I guess I can see that, ‘everything that is’ and ‘everything that is not’ makes up infinity, and an omnipresent being would pervade all of infinity and so would be one with infinity. Is that it? What did you mean by that second sentence though?
  10. Ah yes I see now. Thanks. Yes that’s a pretty good analogy actually for the concept.
  11. Right, so the first part of your reply in which you quote the Zen priest is describing a ‘preparatory’ practice to get to ‘shikantaza’. What is ‘shikantaza’? another word for Enlightenment to be added to the tags at the top of the OP? In the two paragraphs that follow that part you talk about the challenges of that practice. You then go on to differentiate between ‘bliss’, ‘happiness’ and ‘ease’. You now reject the notion of ‘bliss’ which is ironic as in the beginning of this thread everyone was rejecting the notion of ‘happiness’ in preference for ‘bliss’… So you’re not interested in ‘bliss’, but you seem to be saying that the ‘[permanent] cessation of determinate thought’ may be attained, and that with it comes a happiness—so if that ‘cessation of determinate thought’ is permanent then so would be the happiness that comes with it… and you then say that you are currently at a stage in your practice when you are “at ease”, like a sage; are you “at ease” perpetually, right now, then? “[…] happiness has ceased apart from equanimity […]” Please explain what is meant by this line. “Gautama taught a way of living that included that "other things" experience.” Whatever do you mean by “other things”? “I get it that things beyond the range of the senses can be involved in walking me around.” Please explain what you mean by “walking me around”. “The notion that "I am the doer, mine is the doer with regard to this consciousness-informed body" has taken a hit, for me.” Are you trying to describe the experience of ‘being breathed’ here? “The cessation of ("determinate thought" in) feeling and perceiving, not likely for me. You're right, doesn't sound blissful, the disturbances associated with the six sense-fields. He said there was a happiness, but I'm guessing it's like the happiness of the cessation of determinate thought in inbreathing and outbreathing--thin!” ‘Not likely for you’—so you don’t think you’ll reach Enlightenment in this lifetime? You don’t seem to have read my previous comment correctly: I said that you seemed to think that “cessation of determinate thought” was the desired Enlightenment; I didn’t really say anything pertaining to whether I myself thought “cessation of determinate thought” sounded blissful or not; and in the the “slight disturbances” bit of my comment I still was presuming that you would be getting 99% happiness in your Enlightenment. You’re really starting to confuse me: at the start of this quoted paragraph you are doubting that “cessation of determinate thought” would be nice; then at the end of the paragraph you are saying that “cessation of determinate thought” equates to happiness! Do you have many varieties of “cessation of determinate thought” then..? “[…] and outbreathing--thin!” Was “thin” a typo here? otherwise what on earth do you mean by “—thin!” please? You still haven’t answered with regard to why this “cessation of determinate thought”—which I am presuming is equated with Enlightenment (again, you haven’t commented on that point)—would be considered “ultimate”. You seem to think attaining this “cessation of determinate thought” will bring you happiness—again, my question is how much happiness then? I have to say that the last sections in which you quote August Sesshin and yourself, regarding the details of a certain practice, are at best obscure and at worst irrelevant to the questions I asked you in the comment to which you are here replying.
  12. Why would that ever be a desirable thing? “[…] it is the understanding of life and Order […]” I understand life to a certain extent, I also understand the concept of ‘order’, I am also able to apply a certain degree of order to my life; does that make me Enlightened? What esoteric concept are you referring to by giving ‘order’ a capital-letter? “[…] which does involve dualities […]” Many that have been in this thread would disagree with you and would tell you that ‘the Enlightened Mind’ is beyond Duality. “[…] enlightenment of ALL […]” Very obscure, please elaborate. “[…] engage in it, or withdraw […]” This implies that it is not a place nor state one would want to stay in perpetually. “[…] for they see both the good and the bad […]” So do I: am I a Buddha then? “The Bliss that is described is essentially the satisfaction of knowing.” Is that ‘perpetual-bliss’? or is it a ephemeral sensation of great happiness, transitory like any other feeling? I know things, but I can’t say contemplating my knowledge is always, nor even often, blissful. Why is it blissful for a Buddha to know things?
  13. Note: the part I officially quoted has nothing to do with my reply here other than referencing the comment of yours that I am here replying to—I should rather have officially quoted the part that I have italicised just below instead… “But it goes without saying that some of the other Buddhist schools are more talkative in this regard, and they also take different stands on the nature of enlightenment and ultimate reality.” Do you yourself have a take on “ultimate reality”? If so, is “ultimate” reality more valid than the “ordinary” or “non-ultimate” reality? Have I got this right?: in this reply of yours to Stirling you are saying that indeed the notion of an attainable ‘heaven’ exists in Eastern philosophies—‘the pure land’; then you are saying that you are trying to work out for yourself what these philosophies mean by the Void, through comparisons with other philosophies like that of Plato, Socrates and Pythagoras, and, by extension from the Void, what is meant by the Non-Dual.
  14. Honestly I actually wouldn’t be surprised if he was being honest about this. I’ve yet to read ahead in the thread to learn more about this though…
  15. Sorry Daniel, I don’t quite understand here. So, the Zen priest is denying that one ‘can become anything special’—that’s what “they are denying”, right? But that it is in contradiction to the ‘spiritual-heights’ that the priest is secretly aiming for, which would indeed make him very special; is that what you were originally commenting on?