galen_burnett

@Ajay0 well you’re just trying to sabotage the argument in the same way that i’ve described others doing, and again, you’re not contributing anything new to the conversation—everything you said has already been covered elsewhere in this thread. it sure is strange to say “no point thinking about it” for a philosophy with such a huge body of literature behind it it… you do realise words can only be written when thoughts are engaged, don’t you? and really you should go ahead burn all that literature then, if you want to support your argument there. and then it just comes down to you trusting an ‘enlightened’ person that their claim to Ananda is verified—but if it’s all beyond words how can that person even tell you that in the first place..? [again i’m just repeating myself now] any attempt to refute my hypothesis in this thread has just collapsed under its own weight like a dry sand-castle. the only way for you to persuade me is to show me a real-life Buddha; but that’s besides the point—you don’t need to persuade me, it’s i who is trying to persuade you, all you need to do is ignore my words and reaffirm your trust in your idol or guru through thinking again about how cool they are. ”proper intellectual understanding”… i like that phrase lol, it would be cute if it weren’t so bigoted and dogmatic

to anyone reading this in the future: if my replies suddenly cease it’s because they banned me (which i’m expecting honestly); in which case they’ll probably remove this comment as well, if not the whole entire thread—so whatever 🤷

target? i’m sure you couldn’t so much as hit a lake with a pebble

Fun questions to answer, but first i just need to observe that they don’t seem to have any direct bearing on the argument of the OP; are you deliberately concealing their direct relevance? or else maybe you just want to discuss some philosophy in general some more; i guess probably the latter as you ignored the most recent question i directed towards you (unless you’ve devised a clever argument against me that begins with a question for the opponent…). also of course i’m aware that your comment is not necessarily directed at myself, else you would’ve tagged me in it. ”Does extinction exist?”. So ‘extinction’, in the dictionary is the act of being made extinct, right? “the dinosaurs were erased from the earth before they could develop intelligence, and so became extinct”. And though very similar to ‘extinguish’ has the nuance of usually applying to species of animal, whereas ‘extinguish’ applies to other things ‘being snuffed-out’. So that’s just what society usually takes those words to mean—which i say because of the trouble that’s been caused already in thread by Semantic Discord. Does ‘extinction’ exist? Well, it’s a relative concept, isn’t it: for us, besides the odd survivor like Nessie, the dinosaurs on the surface of the earth are no more; for us, they are extinct. But objectively, when a dinosaur dies, it doesn’t just vanish from existence: it’s body decomposes and the chemical elements freed in that decomposition then go and become part of the soil and atmosphere; so really, the dinosaur’s body just changes form and goes elsewhere; while its soul carries on into another animalistic incarnation (presumably). “Is absence an object?”. I would apply the same reasoning as above of relativity to this question too: Grendel is absent from the vicinity of the king Beowulf’s great hall in the day-time, but that doesn’t mean he’s disappeared into thin-air, he’s just elsewhere… But sure we can consider ‘absence’ as an object or form or thing or quality as this helps us use it in speech: to just say a person has the quality of absence, or has ‘the object’ of absence tied to themselves (if you like, as a very roundabout way of saying “they’re not here”) is much more sensible than expounding on the relativity of the concept of ‘absence’ each time. I guess you could even extrapolate this argument to any and all Forms: you could take any object or Form and argue that at the most fundamental level its boundaries blur and mesh with those of all the Forms that surround it, even scientifically this is true; and that therefore all Forms are ultimately only relative to each other in their existence and that therefore ultimately there is only Formlessness and that all Forms are therefore illusory and invalid and subordinate to the great oneness of Formlessness; but to conclude that is to then invalidate all the real-life experiences and interactions we observe in our lives that depend on the distinction of Forms—how can we make any sense of a computer without being quite confident in the distinction between the different parts of its hardware and software? So we need Forms in order to Function, regardless of the underlying Formlessness of it all. Buddhists say the ultimate is to merge one’s Consciousness with that Formlessness, and I say that that cannot be done, due to the arguments I’ve already presented in this thread regarding Consciousness being intrinsically bound to Form—any given observer must necessarily exist as a Form in order to observe at all in the first place. And I guess here is where we bring it back to the OP after-all. Buddhists say “all Forms are unreal and illusory”; i say “nothing is more real than Form”. Buddhists say Consciousness can witness the Formlessness of it all; I say it can’t, as to do so would be a Form observing itself, which is impossible—yes, Consciousness is this great sea of Formless energy, but as Consciousness is still a Form it cannot observe that Formlessness in its entirety, an observer can only observe another Form, a Form cannot observe itself. Self-reflection is your ‘shard’ of Consciousness observing different aspects of the body-mind it is inhabiting, which different aspects are other shards of Consciousness separate to (though in harmony with) your Soul. And to counter the seeming contradiction i’ve presented, “how can Consciousness be at once a Form as well as the Sea of Formlessness?”, i say that the Sea of Consciousness is itself a Form, the ultimate Form, which can never observe itself in its entirety due to no other Form existing outside of itself. A ‘shard’ of Consciousness can indeed observe a ‘field’ or ‘stretch’ of its entirety—just looking around your room you are validating that—but never the whole thing; and therefore there will always be ‘shards’ of itself that contrast with whichever ‘shard’ is being taken as the current ‘observer’ and will thence cause that ‘observing shard’ trouble. “Does a candle generate darkness after being extinguished?”. Again I think the same argument applies here regarding ‘darkness’ as an object, as the one I used regarding ‘absence’ as an object in the Beowulf example above. It’s useful to think of darkness as an ‘object’ as then we can use ‘darkness’ in other contexts—we can then copy-paste the concept of darkness into other ideas. But ultimately, what is darkness but the going-away of one form of energy (visible-light) and the instantaneous filling of the space it leaves behind with other forms of electromagnetic-energy (which modern science either knows or does not know about) that are otherwise repelled by visible-light? And so we arrive at the same conclusion of this sea of intermeshing forms that swim around each other, which forms can at the atomic level be seen to have fuzzy boundaries. So then we say ‘all is Formless’ and then we’re on the same track as the greater part of the paragraph above this one. Odd that none of the wise seers in this thread attempted to answer these questions… maybe there was a glitch that hid your comment from them—we should ask the admin team about it perhaps?

well go and cry about it! it was you who was rude in ignoring my questions which i even took the time to copy and paste from the OP into a new comment directly to you, and you didn’t even decline to answer them—just flat-out ignored them! i hope you get ignored a lot in your next life so can appreciate how hecking disrespectful it is. and, considering that, i was pretty civil towards you!

sure, but you can’t not be aware that “Should I be suddenly transported to a realm of everlasting bliss, believe me, it will come as a complete surprise. I'm far enough from the Mount Everest of spiritual achievement that it doesn't make much sense to speculate.” is exactly the sort of the thing you’re supposed to say as someone aspiring for Buddhahood…; you can’t not be aware that that game is played by pretending not to notice nor desire the ‘prey’ (Bliss) so that said prey will be lured unwittingly into your lap whereat it can be snatched… which is just dishonest really at the end of the day.

@liminal_luke i hope you all have a nice circle-jerk there 👌. with enough false smiling and loud clamouring reason can indeed be drowned, so dw about it 👍 who knows, maybe you’ll all become glorious Buddhas in that single precious moment while you’re all there 😮

@Mark Foote thanks, that was much clearer and more direct, with a good heads-up as to what the quote was about at the end before including it. but personally i’m not really interested right now in discussing different practices, unless it has bearing on the argument of the OP. regarding our slight disagreement at the start of your most recent message: think about the process of learning to belly-breathe; at first one’s breath is high in the chest naturally; as one consciously practices one can sink it into the belly, but in the beginning it will return to chest when the practice ends; but after enough time the breath will stay in the belly no matter whether you’re thinking about it or not; the practice is then “subsumed into the autonomic-nervous-system [the part of the nervous-system that controls automatic functions of the body like the heartbeat and, for some people like me, flipping-out in online forums…]”. it’s the same for children learning to walk or run.

@Pak_Satrio not many people know this but that’s actually me in the cover-art. got stunted growth unfortunately, but c’est la vie

@Pak_Satrio LOOK just neeeeeveeermiiiiiiiiiind

@Pak_Satrio i didn’t know you were that young; your comment would have upset me if you were older like the rest of the people here, or else were some seething edge-lord teen doomed to degeneracy, but you seem alright then honestly. i was besotted with these philosophies at your age as well, so i can’t fault you. i have to tell you that you’re deluded believing in Nirvana, but it probably doesn’t matter so much at your age, you’re still figuring things out a lot and that’s a great part of the adventure of being that age, and having a belief in anything at that time in life can probably only do more good than harm. it just becomes a problem if you journey into adulthood with institutional delusions like that as then the tendency is to become bigoted and closed-minded and zombified which turns one into another brick in the wall perpetuating the status quo. there’s still plenty of time, and it could well be an open mind of yours that absorbed these philosophies into yourself, in which case i hope for your mind to remain open and brave and free. peace. [of course you could be an old p**** in reality leading me on in which case that is annoying and i will delete this comment if i ever find that out]

@Ajay0 i swear if one more NPC comes along with the n’th reiteration of this dead-end Semantic Discord i’m going to [insert inappropriate action]. do you realise you’re the 1,567th commenter to say that here? “So obviously depending on such fickle and superficial sources of happiness would not be a worthwhile investment of our time, energy and resources.” lol if you think investing in the attainment of this ‘bliss’ of yours will be worth all your ‘time, energy, and resources’ i’m afraid there’s a bit of a rude awakening waiting for you someway—waaaaaaaay way—down the line… [it’s starting to sound like an echo-chamber in here… no, no that can’t be right, surely; these are bright people, awakened people, graceful people, people who think for themselves…]

@thelerner thanks for the honesty at least, it’s appreciated. well you’ve stated your views and no amount of reasoning from me is going to persuade you otherwise, i’ve already plastered it all over this thread. my only questions left for you would be ‘why do you believe in it?’, ‘what about life makes it seem possible to you?’, ‘who has persuaded you through their personality or words or otherwise that it is real?’, but i’ve already written out those questions in the OP and probably elsewhere as well, and you won’t answer them, like everyone else here, so this is getting annoying and beginning to feel like talking to a brick wall. whatever, i can guess the answers to those questions on my own of course with a lot of confidence; doesn’t matter. good to know you do cold-water stuff anyway, i’ll get back into that too one day. also, yes the body improving in its health and efficiency can be seen as a physical enlightenment, but again, there’s no ‘end’ to this imo

@Nungali cool man. good job in amplifying how foolish you all look.

@Pak_Satrio where does the logic stop being coherent and start being stupid then? because in order to have a verbal concept of ‘enlightenment’ you need logic in the first place, you need logic to construct ideas no matter how fallacious those ideas may be—and you clearly have formed such a construct, and therefore used logic to your advantage at least to a certain degree, due to your mention of ‘enlightenment’. all i’ve done is examine and follow that logic through to a sensible conclusion. it’s very primitive and infantile of you to just call me stupid without offering a single coherent criticism of my argument, and that says a lot about your character. and on top of that you’ve chosen the brand of an enormously greedy and morally-corrupt corporation to express yourself through… ”we like logic, but only when it suits us, thanks” also “get some cultivation done so you can actually experience enlightenment”; thanks for verifying my allegations earlier in the thread that people had been trying to deny the notion of ‘enlightenment’ being the goal in order to sabotage the argument—as if they ever needed verifying.

@Mark Foote sorry dude but i can’t take you seriously when you’re so vague like that. you just keep evading my questions either with long tangental quotes or otherwise. thanks for that honest line about your teenage years, that’s probably the most i’ll get from you on this. peace.

@zerostao censorship… the repression of free speech and expression. yes, we need more of that.. ’volleys’ lmao, yes, volleys of projectile-diarrhoea

@Sahaja thanks. those online search resources sound useful. well Damo’s in Bali isn’t he..? and i don’t have any space-time teleportation devices on me nor any contact details for the ET’s, and i’m just a pauper supported by government benefits in the meantime with my house to fix as well so i won’t be getting over there any time soon i don’t think… After spending almost 10 years with this problem i’m pretty sure it’s root is in energy or chi. having read a good amount of his Comprehensive Guide to DNG i even now suspect it could well be extremely deeply rooted ‘emotional debris’ forms of chi stagnation, left over from hard times in the past, with that kundalini surge i had just exacerbating it all; in which case the system won’t fix me until well well into the process, probably at around the time of developing fully the MCO. there’s a chance i guess that the early foundation work up to Stilling the Jing will fix it… and my teacher is very aware of my problem now and yes he obviously thinks it can be fixed with the system. he’s advanced in it himself having at least reached the MCO. but honestly it sounds like it would probably take years and years. so in the meantime, considering that it could be ‘emotional debris’ i think repeated fasts could work after all: very very long water-fasts that purge right down to the deepest layers. so i’ll be doing some more of that at some point (which will be fun… 😫😫😫)

@Lois😆 ‘free-to-play’ in the gaming world is synonymous with ‘gambling’ lol. you see the free-to-play format is structured so that while it is indeed free to play it initially, the producers get their cut from the micro-transactions placed within the game; most of the good content is locked behind pay-walls and ‘loot-boxes’, which are basically just lucky-dip bags, a closed bag that you buy which could have any variety of things in ranging from the worst to the best, with the odds-bias skewed quite heavily towards the worse end—not allowed to see inside the bag before purchasing, of course. almost always these games are fairly low quality as a result of this stuff. but anyway.

[deleted]

I was going to post a long take on my view on practising classical martial-arts, but I understand now that this probably isn’t the right forum-site for that. But if anyone’s interested let me know and I’ll post it. (I generally talk about why I fell out of love with it and my personal criticisms of it, after having practised fairly intensively in it some years ago.)

@C T ok pal. that’s cute.

@Shadow_self you clearly got lost on your way to reddit.com you absolute edge-lord. good job wasting both mine and your own time with your complete nonsense. my argument is there for whomever wants to read it; as is your regurgitated dribble; but i guess only until you go and screech to mommy mod and daddy mod, good thing i’ve got screenshots for another time. you’re an ass, and you probably smell like one too. have fun, Shadow Lord

@Daniel [‘§’ references are to those of your previous message] §1 Yes, I agree. And this is i guess an introduction for what you are about to say in the following paragraphs. §2 Yes, I agree. But I think the concept of ‘good feeling’ and ‘bad feeling’ are simple enough to not warrant a complex definition; not vague—i don’t think there’s anything vague about a good nor a bad feeling (except in the edge-case of the bitter-sweet, but i think that’s a tangent)—just simple. I don’t think trying to give them complex definitions has any merit in the context of this argument, beyond trying to validate the Ultimate Bliss concept through semantic discord, which matter i’ve already addressed many times elsewhere. The dictionary definitions for words of ‘good feeling’ and ‘ bad feeling’ are enough to support my hypothesis, and I have yet to see any good argument that suggests otherwise. §3 “The material conditional is a fickle beast, as such, most logical proofs employ the contra-positive, what I think you're observing as "contrarian", in order to interact with a logical proposal.” I thought liminalluke contrarian because he was at once saying “pleasure is not happiness” and then going on to say how we can be happy just through experiencing daily “pleasures”. I don’t think liminalluke was employing the Contrapositive (‘A is false therefore B is false’, in argument against ‘A is true therefore B is true’), i really don’t see any connection there at all, he was just being self-contradictory, which is just flat-out incoherent. Don’t really see why you’ve brought a discussion of the Material Conditional and the Contrapositive into the matter. “This is natural” it’s not too clear what you are referring to by the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’. I guess, by your following sentences, you mean by it ‘the application of logic’. I don’t think I’ve generated any Paradoxes of Material Conditional, where an example of such a Paradox would be thus (quoted from Google): “it is definitely raining (1st premise; true); it is not raining (2nd premise; false); George Washington is made of rakes (Conclusion); as there is no possible situation where both premises could be true, then there is certainly no possible situation in which the premises could be true while the conclusion was false.” [As an aside, Wiki tells me that despite what you say at the start of §3, Material Conditional and Material Implication are the same, and I don’t really care to get into semantic discord on this as it seems to be besides the point]. I think my logic works fine: it is based on my collective life-experience, intuition and intellectual knowledge: my hypothesis runs through that collective body logically, with the joints that are most vulnerable to refute being where it must be taken on trust by others that I have experienced certain unusual things, and also the parts where I make some necessary leaps of deduction in the absence of concrete knowledge. I disagree that I’ve over-intellectualised anything, as, like I said, a large part of my hypothesis is based on tangible experience; the intellect of the hypothesis is just a natural connecting of everything i can see, and that i know, together into a string. §4 You’re talking about what it means for an argument to be defeated. It kinda just sounds like you’re getting your camp ready for ‘defeat’… like “defeat is not so bad—think about it this way…”. All ontologies break eventually, including my own—I understand and admit this—; therefore any attempt at figuring out life is ultimately futile—but it’s still fun and supportive and comforting to try nonetheless, as you can still figure out a lot of it with respect to one’s own point of view, through developing an ontology (or in the case of Buddhists etc. assuming another person’s ontology). But I repeat, no-one has been able to meaningfully refute anything I’ve said so far. We’re all human beings living in society in 2023 on the surface of planet Earth, right? So a lot of our experiences are common between us. The differences in opinion in philosophy arise when we come to try and deduce the deeper things which we can’t know concretely due to the limitations on our scientific understanding of life. I assert that all things can, in the end, be understood scientifically by the highest intelligence imaginable (by God, say); all matters of life and death and the soul and the material and immaterial can with omniscience be understood logically, just like mathematics in a book (the exceptions to this being the small handful of ultimately unanswerable questions of “why and how does anything exist?” and “what is consciousness?”, and also, in my opinion “why is it that all things necessarily balance?”). So our disagreements come when we deduce different things about these deeper more elusive matters, such as the exact procedure of reincarnation for example, the finer details of which our beyond our current ken. But what can happen when two parties engage in philosophical debate is that one party presents a world-view that does indeed relate to the experience and knowledge of the other party and does so in such a way as to join it all together more coherently for that second party than the world-view previously held by that second party did: someone subscribing to Buddhism recognises that the ontology of Buddhism makes more sense to them than that which they previously held (I guess usually people don’t have much of an ontology at all before subscribing to published philosophy, and that’s fine, we all start somewhere, and I myself was like that once). What am I doing here? I’m trying to ‘defeat’ the philosophy of Ultimate Bliss by placing in opposition to it what I think would be recognised by an open mind as a more coherent ontology; i don’t necessarily want anyone to assume for themselves my own ontology, rather i just want to shake people up enough so that they can realise that Ultimate Bliss is a fallacy—it would be cool if they thereafter developed their own ontology which was impressive enough for me to need to make changes to my own, and so forth. Yes, hostility can easily arise in this sort of thing, we’re touching on very sensitive stuff, but c’est la vie. Regarding what one should think upon being defeated (“agnosticism; trivialism”), I already touched on that in my previous sentence; and really that’s a ‘post-game’ matter, I think, additional to the main discussion (which is the matter of the existence of Ultimate Bliss). No, I agree, defeat does not mean you have to throw out absolutely everything you used to know; my own ontology is in fact informed greatly by Eastern philosophies—as in, I once subscribed to those philosophies, was ‘defeated’ by my current ontology, yet I have retained a lot of what I used to think in my new world-view. I’m not going for a nuclear-attack here on Eastern philosophy; I’m just targeting something very specific about it. §5 Yes I agree a purely intellectual understanding of life is an ignorant one; and though it may perhaps seem like my own is of that nature, due to the relative complexity of my writing when compared to the average post on the world-wide-web, I must assure you, as I mentioned above in one of my paragraphs in response to your ‘§3’, my world-view has developed out of a mix of experience, intuition and intellectual knowledge. As it happens, I get very flustered and annoyed with these obtuse atheists who deny all notions of anything existing beyond what they can see using computers and microscopes. “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”; while I understand why you’re using it to illustrate the closed-mindedness of ‘logicians’, it’s not a great example with which to demonstrate the failings of logic: this maxim also goes by ‘festina lente’ (‘hasten slowly’ in Latin), and can be expanded to ‘start slowly and carefully, and over time the efficiency that that you will develop through that careful attention will yield great speed’—and in that expanded form it is completely logical, there’s no contradiction there; it just seems contradictory (and is not really that hard to see through) when you condense it verbally to ‘festina lente’; and I’m sure logical philosophers of antiquity such as Plato or maybe Cicero would not have got confused by this. “But when I say defeat, I only mean that it is not true in this case, but might be true in others depending on the connections and relevance between the phenomena.” Are you saying that while Ultimate Bliss may well be refuted and deduced to be non-existent here, it can still exist elsewhere? If so, I don’t follow your reasoning there… I don’t think you can ever ‘prove’ the law of Non-Contradiction to be non-universal: a ‘proof’ requires in itself the law of Non-Contradiction to hold fast. Ultimately, I think the law of Non-Contradiction does indeed break at some point when trying to grasp the nature of reality; but it does so at a point beyond the considerations of suffering and bliss; and in any case, the breaking of logic does not in any way validate the existence of Ultimate Bliss, just like it doesn’t necessarily validate the real-life existence of Super Mario—absurd, no? You seem to be throughout this message trying to validate contradiction, which is the ultimate way one could think of to sabotage my hypothesis: if logic is defeated, there can be no arguing, no theses nor hypotheses, so no-one is right and no-one is wrong and so Ultimate Bliss is real if i say it is real, as is Pinocchio… I made a brief search for Modal Logic but couldn’t see how it relates at all to our discussion. As an aside, please know that I have not studied Western philosophy much at all, so any esoteric terms you use of that field will be unfamiliar to me and I will need to research them if you do not explain them. Well, no, the law of Non-Contradiction, the existence and power and use of logic is not rare at all; it is absolutely everywhere you look and the whole world as we know it collapses without it: without it there is no day and night, no living creatures, no machines nor technology, no words, no nothing. [Also, what do you mean by “classical logic has no hierarchy”?] §6 “Further, almost any internal process cannot be modeled using classical logic because it is better modeled as quantum phenomena. Particles in a quantum domain are known to occupy two distinct "places" at the same time violating the law of non-contradiction.” Well, the whole discussion so far has been about trying to validate liminalluke’s contradictory statements; but you seem to now be trying extend a justification of contradiction to “internal processes” and thence, I guess, to the validation of Ultimate Bliss. And yes, of course you can model an internal-process on logic: we practice A and B and C in yoga and then we get to state Z—logic! it’s not “we bounce around randomly and somehow end up in desired state Z through some quantum glitch”. Yes there is apparent contradiction in quantum physics, but I’d bet my life that those contradictions will be resolved with a greater knowledge of the science and it is naive to try and use our current limited understanding of that science to validate contradictions in logic. “In this way, internal processes are, somewhat, isolated systems.”. No, I don’t follow you there, I don’t see how you’ve arrived there from a consideration of quantum-physics. Isolated systems don’t exist. And it’s trivial to say the internal is isolated because we can’t see it with our eyes: it can be ‘seen’ with all our other senses! And so your logic in “Because of this, I think it's good to retain a bit of caution applying rigid external logic systems to internal human dynamics like happiness and suffering.” doesn’t follow for me. Neither do I see a connection between your reference to “closed systems” in your fifth paragraph and this reference to “isolated systems” here; in the fifth paragraph you seem to say “logic only works in closed systems” yet here you’re saying both that people are “isolated systems” yet somehow logic should not be applied to them, despite what you stated in the fifth paragraph… Happiness and suffering are bound to logic due to them being a pair of opposites, like any other in Duality, and thus are bound to the ‘law of balance’ in Yin-Yang.

@Mark Foote your second message. It’s kinda difficult to work out what you’re trying to say here. I guess you’re talking about how practice leads to ‘non-practice’; how with enough time a practice is subsumed into our body and psyche, into our autonomic-nervous-system, such that we no longer even need to think about it and the practice and the benefits of the practice all happen automatically? like how with enough time spent belly-breathing eventually the body will belly-breath on its own. But I still don’t really see how that relates to the section you quoted… the only thing i can think of to say further on that, without knowing more clearly how you’re trying to link all this together, is about how practices are just tools for us to get from A to B and can be discarded once arrived at B. but beyond B there is no such place where no more practice in needed: beyond B there will be new situations to contend with that require new practices, and so the cycle repeats.