galen_burnett

@Daniel give me a minute to process all that and i’ll get back to you

@Mark Foote Well no matter our particular definitions of the varying degrees of good and bad feeling, the crux of the matter is the candy in the pinata, which after all we seem to agree on… And well i only included the things i said about Duality in order to refute the Bliss thing. If we agree on that, then we can disagree on the nature of Duality, because we are both in the end arriving at the same conclusion regarding the crux of the argument. So if you agree with me that the ‘ultimate attainment’ is a fallacy, then why do you follow Buddhism? [i could actually presume good reasons for doing so, regarding general constructive principles to live life by, but i’d rather you explain] the piñata on the rope is a very good analogy

@Shadow_self “tangled up in mental knots”? lol whatever dude. It’s not tangled at all, it’s coherent; you can’t point out any of said knots because they’re not there. you’ve given a quote that suggests Buddhists do not actually think Nirvana is Bliss (and i don’t know whom you think you’re scoring points with for funky spellings btw); but otherwise literally the only tiny distance you’ve gone to try to refute any of my “mental knots” is to say “let’s start with the black and white fallacy”—and proceed to say nothing at all on that matter whatsoever lmao! you see intelligence and sophistication, can’t be bothered to engage with it, and so write it off as “over-intellectualised” and “mentally knotted” without presenting any argument whatsoever to support that allegation!! clown! “not sure logic is on your side”—not sure because you’re too lazy and vain to try to follow it and so have just jumped to that conclusion anyway. bruh—opposites cancel! don’t make me take you back to pre-school to show you that! Nirvana’s a scam according to my own ontology; my ontology is coherent enough; i won’t post it because it would be long and tedious for everyone else and also even if you said you wanted to hear it i wouldn’t waste my time writing it out for you as you’ve demonstrated quite clearly already that you don’t read anything i write properly. suffice it to say: yin-yang are fundamental to existence; as is consciousness; consciousness is subject to perpetual oscillation between pain and joy forever under the rule of yin-yang; therefore there is no Kingdom of Heaven nor Nirvana; therefore anyone proselytising such a state is trying to sell something that doesn’t exist; therefore they are scamming people. I don’t need to have spent loads of time studying Buddhism to realise that it presents the goal of the attainment of perfect Bliss, nor do i need to have done that in order to deny that assertion from my own world-view! clown! I don’t need to have been a Catholic monk for 30 years in order to say that Catholicism is bs! “You dont understand the concepts begind the argument you are attempting to make”. i guess you mean cause-and-effect? i mean, what, i say one thing leads to another—what’s the matter with that? “dependant origination” is a term exclusive to a particular philosophy. in case you haven’t noticed, i’m arguing from outside of that philosophy, and so your exclusive terms don’t exist in my vocabulary! clown! you are obliged to explain any exclusive terms you use such as “dependant causality” or “abra-kadabra” or “open sesame” or “taking the jewel from beneath the bucket”. whatever “dependant causality” is, no doubt it is missing from my hypothesis, and that does not invalidate it in the slightest, in the same way as i don’t need to include all the esoteric terms of Christian Orthodoxy inside an argument that refutes the Kingdom of Heaven and the divinity of Jesus Christ! If you have the philosophy that spiderman is real, and i give an argument why he’s not which focuses on the improbability of such a genetic-mutation taking place, it doesn’t invalidate my argument if i haven’t included in it takes on the military effectiveness of the green goblin’s arsenal nor a philosophical discourse on “with great power comes great responsibility”; it’s not my job to cover all the esoteric things included in your philosophy—it’s your job to use those things to counter me if they are able to! “Alrght then... I guess you wont mind me pointing out the logical fallacies and bias ill do one of each per post if you like...otherwise this would be a bit long winded Lets start with the Black or white fallacy - Suggesting there is a zero sum between polarities (pleasure and pain as example) Your problem is one of your understanding. As per your own words” except you proceed to stop right there, without illustrating in any way how my argument is a logical fallacy nor how i have bias! The quote you’ve given seemingly suggests that these philosophies don’t in fact believe in ultimate bliss; but really you’ve just cherry-picked something to make it look like that while forgetting that i do actually have eyes to see with and ears to hear with and so can very easily see all the other literature and pictures and hear everyone else talking about “the bliss of ultimate attainment”; how incredibly vain and dim of you to think anyone could be fooled like that! you clown! again, you are trying to sneakily redefine the words “joy, happiness, bliss” which childish strategy i’ve refuted elsewhere in this thread: you can’t say “it is like bliss” to an impressionable person you think you have on the hook, then say to someone who challenges you “i never said it was like bliss!”. how slimy. “That aspect of your argument is refuted, and redundant.” lmao “Unless of course you want to move the goalposts (engaging in another logical fallacy) to redefine the word feelings, or Nirvana” right, so now you’re just blindly throwing back at me a criticism i made against your camp like a petulant child—“no you’re smelly!” oh most divine sage! please lead me to healing with your great omniscience into my health condition! get out of here you absolute loser. your final sentences are just embarrassing. you’re like an edgy 14 year old. you must live a funny life. well done on impressing literally no-one, you complete fool. p.s. it is possible to include more than one sentence in a paragraph—may be a helpful life-hack for you.

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@liminal_luke yeah ok. pax. but i’m a little wary of you, you slippery meerkat

@Shadow_self lmao. you can see the title of the post right? that’s my question. if there’s such a good counter in that text that has not already been addressed by the rest of the thread why don’t you go and present it? you’re basically going to keep strafing between “here is the golden text that conceptualises it” and “it cannot be conceptualised, only experienced”, so whatever. “over-intellectualised”?? you mean, i’ve actually thought about things, actually made a coherent train on logic, rather than just accept some cool sounding stuff from some cool looking yogi.what have you used to examine my argument?? intellect! so, using intellect, you have examined my argument, and found it to be unacceptable due to it expressing too much intellect. lol. well, of course it is fine, who suggested otherwise? and yes, i like logic a lot and find it to be very cool, rewarding and comforting. my own ontology deduces that happiness and pain will always balance in equal measure—and i’m down with that. seems to me it’s you guys who aren’t happy with 50/50 and instead want more and more more. what’s my problem dude? i don’t understand cause-and-effect?? what bruh?? just, what? please don’t just pluck cool words out the air in the hopes of impressing people. i’m seeking the fun and competition of philosophical debate, and a couple of people on this thread have stepped up to that, so thanks to them. i’m not seeking understanding, as far i can see i understand enough—go ‘work’ yourself lmao! please keep your prescriptions, thank you, i’m quite certain they’d be ineffective.

Bruh, this is a thread made up of words; as are the books these philosophies are written down in. As soon as you write a word you are engaging with concepts. If you want to communicate experientially rather than conceptually then go do that. And if what your argument boils down to is “it has to be experienced to be understood” then why link a book to me in the first place?! you should’ve rather linked a website for a scheduled talk by some revered guru where i could go and witness his great grace. You’ve literally just said “he doesn’t understand because he hasn’t experience it”—so no matter even if i did go and read your reference, it would have done me no good, because i need to experience it! so what on earth are you doing linking me a book in the first place?! to inspire me to seek experience? I’ve already stated in this thread, which you must not have read properly, that i am familiar with Eastern philosophies—i’m over that hill, i was enchanted by them once upon a time, i knew quite well their fundamental principles and tenets, and then i moved on. i’m sure there’s no book you could refer to me that would re-enchant me with those philosophies. not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, there is a lot of good and truth in them; but the Nirvana scam is what i’m getting at.

@liminal_luke “just a word”, again, this sort of statement really just serves to obfuscate the argument by sinking it into semantic discord, just in the opposite direction to the others who have a super super carefully crafted precise definition of it: to say “it’s just a word” and to say “it has a very special definition, different to what you find in a dictionary” is the same smoke-screen strategy of evasion. When we can’t argue logically we try to sabotage the argument by doing things like moving the goal-posts and changing definitions, or else by trying to invalidate terms that the argument takes as premisses—it’s a strategy as old as time, and i’m sure you could go to any elementary-school-yard in the world and find it being deployed. Look, you may humour and impress others saying things like “i am a human contradiction”, but i’m here for a logical argument, i value logic, i’m not impressed by ‘cool dudes’, and saying things like that just makes me think you’re not serious and so weakens any argument you might otherwise have in my eyes. And you clearly do not think of it as “just a word” otherwise you wouldn’t have said something as edgy and laconic as “pleasure is not happiness” in the first place; this rather clearly implies you do have quite an intricate and careful definition for the word (happiness), probably just what everyone else on this thread defines it as honestly Otherwise—yes!—that’s exactly how most people would define it: the spectrum of good experiences, which is what the definition of any dictionary would imply also. And honestly I don’t think people are reading the thread properly because i’ve said this i think at least twice already: you can’t take a point on a spectrum off the spectrum and put it apart from the rest of the spectrum—to say there is this golden state of bliss which can be got and kept permanently which is nothing like any other experience of happiness, which other experiences are then disposed of forever—it’s just illogical, and if we’re using words then logic needs to be respected entirely! I agree there are extremes to any spectrum, and those extremes are visited now and then; but it’s impossible to stay at the extremes, or at any point on the spectrum for that matter. It’s fine also to think deeply about the qualities of these different shades of joy; but usually in these philosophies this sort of thinking is only inspired by the notion that there is an ultimate superior degree of bliss which should be defined and sought after, hunted, and obtained, and then used to decorate one’s abode with. You have already said that you don’t believe the Bliss of Enlightenment is permanent—but then what do you believe in then? You haven’t outright stated you don’t believe in the idea, which of course you would have stated in a post like this that argues against the idea, if you did not believe in it. You either believe in Nirvana, in ‘permanent-bliss’—and don’t try to tell me that that’s not what these philosophies are proselytising, they definitely are—or you don’t. If you can’t tell, i’m trying to ‘smoke you out’ because you’re coming across as very contrarian, which, i repeat, is no good if you want to persuade anyone with reason; to try and argue with someone while being contradictory is like trying to dig a hole with a spade made of paper. Maybe you would persuade someone with your image or personality, and this is really, I think, what hooks people onto these philosophies in the first place—the charm of the guru—; but not me, i value logic when it comes to forming ideas and am very suspicious of any and all ‘gurus’. Sorry if it’s the case that you just haven’t made up your mind. I have indeed presumed that you do think one way or the other—and don’t tell me you believe both! impossible!

@liminal_luke I don’t understand how you can at once accept that the ordinary pleasures in life are valid and yet deny that you are happy when you have them. Like, when you laugh, you are happy! Simple as that. When you finish a good book or film or game—you are satisfied, and you are happy! When you eat a nice thing after being hungry—you are happy. To idolise ‘happiness’ as this grand attainment and treasure that you can only attain by much work and diligence and application—Nirvana, Sahasraha, Satori, etc—is just deluded in my opinion and is a mind-prison, just like the Kingdom of Heaven construct is for the Christians and Muslims. Happiness is not a permanent state! Buddhism itself says that all things are impermanent! Including happiness! It is transitory, and you are experiencing it every day, more-or-less, whenever you feel good, and in-between the annoying times, without acknowledging it. Happiness is not a kingdom that can be conquered, it is what the dictionary says it is—as simple as that. Life is enormously deep and complex. It doesn’t matter if the stimuli that satisfy the average human don’t do it for one’s self; if one just carries on one will find that greater and greater, more refined, pleasures and joys and satisfactions will present themselves to one’s self—just never anything that is a ‘forever ocean of liquid ecstasy’ for example.

But isn’t it impossible to not pursue the things you like? Forget about the ‘hedonistic’ pleasures for a moment—what about the ‘spiritual’ pleasures you chase? Do you not practise your spiritual-practice because you believe doing so will give you more experiences and insights and life-adjustments and transformations that you like? Surely you only practice because you have experienced benefits—got good things—with it before, and so you continue with it as you reckon more of those good things await you further along. So is that not a pursuit, a ‘grasping’, an ‘attachment’, a ‘hankering’. Could you actually be happy without your spiritual-practice? And if not, then surely you are attached to it! I make no distinction between animals chasing prey or foraging leaves, people chasing wealth, and practitioners pursuing health and well-being benefits and spiritual-experiences. Each of those parties goes through trouble to get their reward, gets some pleasure from that reward, and inevitably feels at least a slight degree of disappointment with their reward—c’est la vie. Though I know that Buddhists do make a distinction between those parties as they think that the latter are on the path that will get them perfect Bliss—but I’ve already said many times that I think they’re wrong there.

@thelerner Regardless of that we disagree on the interdependence of pain and joy, I think you’ve yet to state or imply what your position is regarding Enlightenment? Is there such a state in which you can be perfectly at ease with everything? [Obviously, I say there isn’t and that there will always be things that make you flee from them—always will be things you try to escape and other things you chase.]

Well yes that’s basically what my argument concludes too: that joy and pain cancel each other with a net-zero outcome. But there is nothing that “comes after it”; that’s just how it goes on forever, the interplay of joy and pain and the forever unfolding drama and adventure of life that they weave together. So if your Nirvana is annihilated with Samsara then it makes no sense to make Nirvana a goal, right? You may as well seek Samasara if you’ve just equated them.

@zerostao lol yes maybe it would

Absolutely, yes suffering is required for the existence of joy. They complement and balance and drive one another. ‘Suffering’ is inclusive of all degrees of pain and annoyance, not just the extreme. You don’t have to actively try and suffer, nor actively try snd remember the bad times, it all happens automatically. You only enjoy the sun because you know of times without the sun, you only enjoy walking because you spend time being still (try walking forever and see how long that stays being fun…), you only enjoy the company of others because you spend time without them. You only know what pleasant things are because you know what it’s like without them and because you know what their negative counterparts are like. “if we can appreciate better than normal”. Well, yes, if you are better than normal, then you are happy… but how do you get “better then normal” without having “normal” in the first place? I’m not saying an exotic life is required for happiness nor anything of the sort—that’s what Buddhists claim, honestly (does the Enlightenment experience not sound incredibly exotic after all?); and of course happiness is found in a moderate ordinary life. But just because your life is ‘normal’ doesn’t mean you won’t suffer. Suffering isn’t just whips and chains and fires you know. It’s all sorts of little daily things that tick you off too, which are just as valid as ‘bad’ experiences as gross extreme traumas as well. But really I’m not too sure what you’re getting at. You seem to be putting words in my mouth like I said we need to self-flagellate or something to be happy.

I just saw this, Again, this philosophy is trying to separate the desired ‘bliss’ from other states of happiness; this is the same thing being addressed throughout the replies to this post. It doesn’t yield any discussion really because it’s essentially just moving the goal-posts: I’m saying “the idea exists that Enlightenment is perpetual great happiness; here’s why I think that’s a non-reality (opposites, Duality, etc.); now how do you support the Enlightenment idea I am arguing against?”; and then people proceed to just evade it entirely with “what is happiness? how do you define happiness?”. If you’re going to redefine fundamental concepts like happiness and pain away from the commonly-accepted definitions, then there can’t be any discussion, because you’re basically saying “no, the sky is pink, actually”. In order to think most of these replies to be in any way coherent I would have to accept your redefinition of pain and joy—how on earth would I do that?! the only way to do that would be to surrender the logic I know and subscribe blindly to Buddhism—and why then would I do that?! So you see outside of your own niche, your argument doesn’t stand, and I have to conclude that there isn’t really any opposition to the argument I presented in the post. The only way I could be persuaded is if a Buddhist could show me someone that I could believe was actually ‘perfectly happy’, and I don’t think that’s happening. I don’t think this is going anywhere; or else I think I’ve seen all that I need.

@C T Isn’t it apparent that I have no such special definition of happiness? I think because you subscribe to such a definition yourself, you presume other people to have one; but no, like probably most people outside of the circles of Eastern philosophy, I do not have any special definitions for happiness and suffering, the world makes relative sense to me without them. Your second sentence implies that you would indeed ask, for sake of the coherence of the discussion, what you say you’re not asking for in your third sentence; so regarding the post itself, just read ‘bliss’ as ‘great happiness’.

“the Buddha”—any proponent of Enlightenment.

@C T I’ve addressed this many times throughout this thread. To try and redefine what happiness and suffering are is sophistic, in my opinion, and weak argument.

@Mark Foote Buddhists think what the Buddha says to think; the Buddha thinks happiness and suffering are not opposites. The Buddha thinks there exists a ‘happiness’ which is aloof from all other happiness. I completely disagree with the Buddha, and that’s that I guess. “[…] has nothing to do with perpetual bliss.” Dude, who are you trying to kid? It’s very very obvious to anyone who listens to talks or reads books on these matters that the ‘perpetual bliss’ of Enlightenment is absolutely the hook of those ‘religions’, and the reason why millions of people subscribe to them, just like the Kingdom of Heaven for the Muslims and Christians. Sahasraha, Attainment of Dao, Samadhi, Satori, Enlightenment, Heaven, it’s all the same thing—meditate or pray for long enough and you’ll break free from suffering into perfect bliss. No, I repeat, I am not wondering what the Buddha thought about things. If people can only reiterate what the Buddha said then I’m only interest in hearing about why they subscribe to him. I’m not going to bother writing that out again. Happiness and suffering don’t need to be defined. Everyone knows what they are—everyone can be joyous, everyone hurts. To play as the devil’s advocate for a moment: to try to redefine what it means to hurt and to be happy would be exactly the sort of thing someone would do in order to manipulate others into living a certain way for his advantage: “nah nah nah, you’re not actually happy, you see; you need to do this many flagellations before you realise what happiness actually is—trust me, I’m happy all the time!”.

@Daniel Yes, the significance of the contrasts of Forms to an observer is great when the observer can only see or experience a few Forms—without the distractions of a multitude of other Forms then even the slightest differences between two Forms in your field-of-attention would be augmented, I agree. And, on the other hand, with a multitude of Forms to choose from to place one’s attention on it is easy to avoid noticing differences or contrasts between Forms by simply transferring your attention to a new Form when those differences arise; that is, say those differences between Forms are unpleasant, then to get away from the discomfort that those differences present one can simply go to another Form instead. An analogy. Say I am backing up my computer. I am anxious about losing all my data. There is the ‘Form of my life in which my data is preserved for me to access and use when I please’; and then there is the ‘Form of my life in which I lose it all’... The anxiety in me arises because it seems to me that the life in which I lose it all will yield no happiness at all; I cannot see any other Forms of my life which would be pleasant, besides the one in which my data is preserved. I cannot perceive more than two Forms in this scenario (the two versions of my life with different preservation-states of my data) and so the contrasts between those two Forms are greatly accentuated. But if, say, I could instead see other Forms of my life in which, yes, I lose all my data, but yet I am still happy, then both that anxiety and the contrasts between the two originally considered Forms (‘data preserved’ and ‘data lost’) diminishes. The deduction from this, as you say, seems to be that the more Forms we have access to, the easier it is for us remain happy: the greater the variety of our options in life, the less chance there is of being cornered. Alright. Seems like we’re nearly arriving at the conclusion that attainment of Non-Duality equates to ‘perpetual-bliss’. But there are some steps in the logic we need to make sure of first. So, the greater the variety, the greater our choices, the lower the chance of suffering. Here’s the trouble though: one Form can never encompass all the other Forms. No matter how versatile and adaptive one Form or person may be, they will never be able to assume all the other Forms into themselves, such that they have harmony with all the Forms; there will always be another Form out there to contrast with themselves. This is because in order for a Form to be a Form at all it needs to have boundaries and definitions, it needs to be able to be contrasted with other Forms; Forms are defined by other Forms. A bird can only exist as a ‘bird’ because it lives in a world in which there is at least one other thing that is not a bird; it is only because there exists a thing which is not a bird that we can look upon the bird and say “that must be a bird, then”. So long as you can feel and sense and have awareness, you will remain a Form. Furthermore, no matter how many Forms are within your field of awareness, as long as you can observe other Forms, you will remain a Form; an observer of Forms is necessarily a Form in itself, and therefore subject to harmony as well as dissonance with those Forms it observes. And so the only escape from this is to become ‘Form-less’, and the only thing that could ever be said to be ‘Form-less’ is the ‘state of existing’ itself, because there is no contrast to the ‘state of existence’; there is no such thing as non-existence; neither is there any variety of states within the ‘state of existing’—everything exists equally as much as everything else. The ‘state of existing’ is not conscious, it does not feel nor sense, it is just a state. But as soon as consciousness appears, however, on this canvas of existence, you have a Form. Consciousness always has a quality to it, it can always be qualified and described in some way; it is always feeling or sensing in some regard. In any given state, consciousness can be compared to itself in anther state: ‘jovial’ consciousness or feeling can always be contrasted to, say, ‘melancholy’ consciousness or feeling. Consiousness can never be experienced as ‘everything at once’; that would be a null state, a zero-consciousness, an annihilation. What experiencers of Enlightenment claim to be as an experience of Non-Duality, is in fact not an experience of unity with absolutely everything—no—; rather, such amazing experiences are ‘simply’ an expansion of one’s consciousness, a great increase in the field of one’s awareness, such that it may feel as though you have become one with everything, when in fact you have just harmonised in one moment with more Forms than you were previously in harmony with. Let’s say that in such an experience the Forms one harmonises with include absolutely everything that existed inside of your previous field-of-awareness; this would give the illusion that absolute harmony with everything had been achieved. But the experiencer I’m sure will soon realise that there do indeed exist Forms yet beyond their ‘Enlightened’ field-of-awareness, which will in time come into contact with them and thereby cause them both joy and pain, just as they used to experience in their ‘unawakened’ state. And regarding the ‘perfect bliss’ that is inferred from reaching this ‘dissolution of the boundaries of Forms’: I have already said elsewhere that I don’t think it makes sense to propose a state of happiness that exists apart from all other happiness; no, there is no degree of ‘wetness’ that sits apart and aloof from all other degrees of wetness; there is no speed nor velocity which sits apart and aloof from all other speeds of motion. If you’re calling it ‘bliss’ then it is a sensation bound to the spectrum of happiness, otherwise you wouldn’t have chosen the word ‘bliss’ to describe it; there is no taking one point on a spectrum off of the spectrum and putting it in a jar—that just makes no sense at all, you can’t take the colour blue off the colour wheel and discard all the other colours—; and if in this state of Unity you are experiencing ‘bliss’ then you are still a Form—a state of consciousness subject to feeling—and therefore, as I have laid out in this reply, you are therefore not ‘Form-less’ and therefore there will indeed be other Forms out there that will inevitably upset you in their contrast to your own Form. Essentially, what your argument of the merging of all Forms suggests to me is a scenario where everything soups together into one great puddle, including one’s self, and then one is somehow just a happy (again, somehow the Form of ‘happiness’ has been salvaged from the merging of all things) puddle… Fin. Just doesn’t sound right to me. But thank you for stimulating me!

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@Daniel I could presume what you mean by that; but instead could you please explain what “the forms become insignificant” would mean.

@Nungali Maybe my post will answer your question in a roundabout way; personally I don’t trust the application of classical martial-arts to the real-world in the absence of real-life fighting experience; maybe the large forms are a perversion of much denser forms that were practised at the time when those arts actually were training soldiers for battle? Otherwise though, I guess maybe the idea is something like that by being familiar with a movement when performed on a larger scale it makes it easier to perform it on a smaller scale; by analogy the little details in a picture or edited video require you to zoom-in really closely to put them there in the first place, no good trying to insert small details into a picture while standing at normal viewing distance; it’s not a great analogy, but then, like yourself, I don’t think I ever really understood clearly why the movements were so broad in forms. I think I heard that the large movements are good for maintaining the strength and flexibility of the body also.

@Michael Sternbach Thanks for that pointer!

Please see the title.