galen_burnett

TLDR. post is 9 paragraphs in length. I enjoyed my time with it a lot and learned a great deal about life from it [§1, 3]; I found the structure of the practice to be fairly flawed and a bit nebulous, and progression in it to be often frustrated [§2, 3, 4, 5, 6]; competition is very valuable, but competitive martial-arts will injure you thus causing you all sorts of trouble [reoccurs throughout]; fighting video-games are a great alternative [§7] §1. I practised ‘Chinese traditional martial-arts’ for several years, finishing with it about ten years ago (the usual suspects, taichi, bagua, mantis, etc.). I learned a great deal about life from it; I enjoyed it hugely at the time and was more-or-less a-romantically besotted with my marvellous teacher; I admired his ability, strength and personality, and I wanted to emulate him. I greatly enjoyed training with and hanging out with my good friend and training partner too, whose generosity and hospitality were seemingly boundless, it must be said! I surely would not be the person I am today (for better or worse), and would not have gone through the personal transformation I had in my early twenties, nor had any cool Kundalini astral-body experiences, without it. §2. But I don’t have any desire to return to it. Although I enjoyed it greatly at the time, I never looked at it, at the time, with an objective eye, as I think I now am able to. I don’t think the odds are high that the things I learned in those arts would overcome the real experience of an hypothetical soldier, boxer, or MMA fighter. I never had any real-life fighting experience; whereas those fighters mentioned do have such experience. What we practised was only ever a simulation of a real encounter, and a fairly incomplete simulation at best. Furthermore, as it wasn’t competitive, the structure of the training was weak: the focus of training would change throughout the years, and there were no goals beyond comparing my own ability with my friend’s and teacher’s; by goals I mean achievements in combat ability, I guess—there was an optional syllabus which I have to say I did enjoy a lot working my way up, but a huge part of that was solo-work. Also my progress was greatly influenced by the changing training preferences of my teacher, as his own focus would shift between taichi, mantis and bagua; this not necessarily hindering my development per se, as surely each of those arts informed the other; but it did hinder a strong focus being targeted on any particular aspect of the martial-arts. I think my experience as described above was probably fairly typical. §3. Today, I can appreciate that one reason for training this stuff is the wider learning one gains through the practice about the body and mind, about relationships with people, about the flow and mechanics of life, and about human nature, to name but a few things. But a scruple I have with it is that the system that was practised to facilitate that learning—the classical martial-arts—seems to me now to be somewhat contrived and artificial, even in its more ‘authentic’ and ‘efficient’ varieties. As I said above, I would doubt the reliability of the skills learned in those arts when applied to the real-world; and yet those skills are necessarily studied in those arts with great attention to detail and with much diligence, as if they were to be applied to a real situation. To compound this unease of mine with the whole thing, there is the fact that it was not competitive, so there was not even a way to properly test those skills, even in a controlled environment; it not being competitive, the ‘rules’ of engagement in sparring-practice were never cut very clearly and could be a little ambiguous; a lack of clear rules-of-engagement meant that one never really had assurance and confidence to be free in experimenting with one’s techniques, for fear of hurting the other person or even yourself. §4. Furthermore, I began to hit a wall towards the end of my time with those arts. I was beginning to realise that in order to learn how to manipulate a person’s weight one needed to practise with the tension both on and off: there needed to be a switch that could put both persons into either a resistive active fighting-state, in which the centre-of-gravity is difficult to find, or a passive docile state in which it was easy to find. The centre-of-gravity of a person simulating an attack-position in the docile mode would be easy to find; but difficult to find in the opposite extreme mode of tension and resistance. Once the position of the centre-of-gravity and the easiest route to it had been found in a particular posture, utilising a person’s ‘docile’ mode, then it could also be found in their ‘resistive’ mode. But pretty much all of the time people were completely unwilling to enter that docile mode to facilitate the practice; push-hands just was always the other guy being very tense in every direction that I would try to push or pull him in, and then just me swimming around him and shooting in the dark trying to guess where his centre could possibly be. I would overcompensate for them then: I’d go into rag-doll mode, in the hopes that at least this way I might be able to learn something about the way they used their weight; to be pushed around by them while not distracting my focus with trying not to be pushed, but rather staying relaxed enough to observe them properly while I was being pushed. Also I hoped that doing so might get the message across that two rams butting heads wasn’t getting anyone anywhere, and to say so verbally, to the effect of ‘you’re supposed to relax, like he says so, you great meat-head!’ never seemed appropriate for some reason. One of the reasons why I learned most when practising with my teacher is because he was incomparably more willing to take turns in being pushed around than everyone else, thence I could learn about his centre. It was so weird in class: the teacher was telling me to relax and feel out their centre and not worry about being pushed, but whenever I did that, of course everyone acted like I was killing the manly rah rah vibe, and ceased to be willing to engage properly. So while on the one hand push-hands was blocked by that, progress in contact-sparring was also blocked—though not quite as much as push-hands was, I think—by not ever being able to really pull the stops out, by having to drive with the brakes on all the time, due to people either not wanting to bother with sparring-gear, just plain not wanting to be that aggressive, or else for fear of injury. §5. Thinking further on the difficulty in progressing in push-hands, as described above in §4, I was wondering how it could be then that teachers become so adept at push-hands, how do they overcome this difficulty of only having stubborn inflexible training-partners and thence progress to higher levels of skill. One supposition is that a student with talent is picked-out by their teacher and given access to private training with the teacher, in which the teacher themselves acts as a docile dummy for the student to manipulate in order to become familiar with the mechanics of the practice. Another guess is that with some luck and talent a student is able to struggle upwards to a point where they have students of their own, and at which point they are able to use those students to practice on: namely during demonstrations in classes where no student would ever dare be stubborn and would always yield like a spaniel, thus providing the teacher with the invaluable insight into the mechanics of the centre-of-mass of the body—the same experience I described myself searching for in §4. A cynical thought would be that some people find gullible training partners who always are willing to do as they ask (to be docile and allow the other to learn through their softness) in return for something which the sly person baits them with, and either entirely never delivers on that promise or else only partially delivers on—just enough to keep the gullible person on the hook—; but I admit that does seem a bit farfetched. And who knows, maybe the way around this obstacle is to just keep hammering away at it until it gives [shrug]. §6. I guess the premise of what I was practising was “let’s make a simulation of fighting and use it learn about life”—cool! great idea in theory—except, the simulation was often very buggy and broken, it seemed, and ill-defined. Also, I only ever got to train with people a few times a week at best; which is a bizarrely low practice-rate considering that really the meat of the practice is in partner-work—I mean, you kinda need a partner in order to fight!—and solo form-work etc. I found to be helpful (to a degree) though really supplementary; and when also considering that you can practice with a partner 24/7 in a fighting video-game by virtue of the internet. I guess one of the chief frustrations was always ‘who won?’: of course the question was never actually asked after a bout of push-hands or sparring, but really, it is two people ‘fighting’, at the end of the day, for dominance of the space, and I think there should be rules clear enough to enable a points-system to determine outcomes of those ‘fights’; basically just because it’s so valuable in gauging your progress. Also, if we accept that without real-life fighting experience, as soldiers and competitive fighters have, probably most of what we learn in these arts is not applicable to the real world, beyond scaring off a disrespectful drunkard, or committing criminal acts against the frail and the elderly; and so then isn’t pretty much the whole discussion of ‘what would work in real-life’ kind-of just redundant? and doesn’t the redundancy of that discussion hugely undermine much of the practice, when so much focus is placed on trying get techniques and movements to simulate real-life combat as closely as possible? It just seems like a large suspension-of-disbelief is required at some point to stick with it. §7. I’m going to use a fighting video-game now as a comparison. I hope you’re not sickened by the notion of video-games, as many in alternative circles seem to be (and not just alternative circles, society generally stigmatises them unfortunately). Super Smash Bros. is a competitive fighting-game in which two players try to knock each other off the screen. The action takes place on a floating stage in the air and defeat comes from being sent off of either side of the screen, being sent up to the screen’s upper edge, or being knocked off the stage’s perimeter to the screen’s lower edge; the more damage a player has received the further they can be flung. There are no set combos in this game, unlike a traditional fighting-game like Street Fighter; rather the player must make use of every opportunity and opening they can to outwit and pressure their opponent using various play-strategies and intricate button-inputs, and are always at risk at every moment of being interrupted by their opponent’s counter-play and having the tide turned on them. The skill-ceiling is limitless; the rules are crystal-clear; cheating impossible; all the attack-moves, blocks, dodges, and movement-options you could use are already all present, programmed into the character’s move-set, which the player must then spend thousands of hours mastering through using them in battles (with a little supplementary solo-practice, where the pressure and heat of battle is absent, too). The competition is fierce and ruthless, and the glory, wealth and fame of being the world-champion only goes to someone prepared to commit an amount of practice equating to ten to twenty thousand hours or more to the game—ten years of playing pretty much all day every day, and that’s probably a very conservative estimate. It’s a near-perfect simulation of combat; a wonderful and incredible feat of both game-design and computer-engineering; and being entirely virtual carries no physical risk whatsoever (beyond postural issues and the general health-traps of working with computers). In comparison with classical martial-arts, the outcome of a game of Smash Bros. is always unequivocal—you win or you lose!—and so also it’s easy to judge how your skill compares to the next person’s and so read on how you need to improve and progress. [Smash Bros. is a Nintendo game designed to be accessible to children, nothing like the infamous violence and gore of Mortal Combat is present; ironically, while being the least violent of the competitive fighting-games, and despite the supernatural abilities of the characters, it surely is the game that best simulates real-life combat, due to the flow and mechanics of its play. Its music absolutely rocks, too]. §8. Super Smash Bros. is the best way to experience the excitement and fun of combat, in my opinion. In classical martial-arts the pool of people to practise with was limited to less than five; the rules of the game were never clear; and being able to practise fully and freely depended hugely on the other person’s grace and patience. In competitive martial-arts, the road to success is clear for you to progress along, but you will probably not reach the end of that road without sustaining life-long injuries. §9. So here are my questions for you? Why do you practice it and do you have any goals with it? Are you tempted by competitive martial-arts? Do you relate to the problems I’ve described in this post, and if so, how do you manage them?

So there is an argument that happiness only exists if it has suffering as a reference point. This is a conclusion that can be arrived at if you consider that the idea of everything existing in pairs and as opposites—the idea of Yin and Yang—is fundamental to existence; in this argument, happiness and suffering (I’ll say joy and pain hereafter as they’re shorter words) are not considered to be exceptions to this rule of Yin-Yang opposites, but rather are just another manifestation of Yin and Yang—albeit the most fundamental manifestation of Yin-Yang, as what experience could ever there be in Duality without shades of joy and pain? The argument is that joy can never be separated from pain because joy and pain define each other; they are a pair of opposites, like North and South; they refer to each other to give themselves meaning; without one the other ceases to exist. If all you ever saw was the colour blue then before long you would forget entirely what the other colours were, and the idea of colours, along with the colour blue itself, would then cease to be; considering, say, the greatest joy to be the colour blue in this analogy, the greatest pain as red, and all the degrees of pain and joy in-between—‘rather pleased’, ‘fine’, ‘bit off today’, ‘pretty annoyed’, etc.—being represented by the other colours. [*I know red and blue aren’t directly opposite each other on the colour-wheel, I guess cyan and orange are really, but it suffices for this post.] What’s more, in Eastern thought itself it’s considered that opposites give rise to each other in rotation: mess gives birth to cleanliness, which then becomes messy again; night to day, to night; pressure to expansion, closing into pressure once more; and so on. In this argument it is assumed that joy and pain behave in the same way: the most perfect heaven can become a hell of tedium and constriction if you stay there for too long; and the most violent hell can be inured to and got used to with enough time, until it even becomes a place of amusement and intrigue. Also, in this argument it is assumed that any and all levels of joy—even the very highest, most ultimate, degree of it imaginable—are still just ‘joy’, that all degrees of joy are as valid as each other; there is no splitting of hairs in this argument regarding the possibility of some greatest happiness existing ‘outside the bounds’ of ‘joy’—such a notion doesn’t make any sense from this point of view. I should note here that in this argument while all degrees of joy are considered as ‘valid’, it is accepted that not all beings will gain the same degree of joy from the same stimulus: a TV soap-opera may delight some people while be anathema to others, and meditation may be enormously relaxing and revitalising for some while incredible boring and dull for others; but this point is universally agreed upon by most, I think. There is the further matter of how ‘refined’ each degree of joy (or pain) is, and this actually comes relatively close to agreeing with the concept of an ultimate happiness actually, but stops short enough to still disagree with it considerably—but it is a tangent for another time. The notion of attainment of ‘perpetual-bliss’ is common throughout Eastern spiritual-practices and philosophy: it can be found in yoga, in Buddhist philosophy, and in Daoism (the attainment of Dao), going by various names (I’ve cited some of them in the tags of this post). It is the notion that, with diligence etc. , a person can transcend the plane of Duality and merge with the Non-Dual, whereat awaits perfect bliss and harmony for them, which they may abide in forever after. If we accept the argument that joy and pain are essentially dualistic opposites, then how can we sever them, throw out one, keep the other and then escape into Non-Duality with it? How can we smuggle a dualistic entity—i.e. joy—into the realm of Non-Duality? Wouldn’t Non-Duality be devoid of all experience whatsoever—blanker than blank—as all experiences in existence, including all forms of joy and pain, belong to Duality? even ‘experience’ itself can be thought of as being a dualistic opposite to ‘non-experience’ (though non-experience is impossible to comprehend). Rather than, say, Sahasraha (see Tantric yoga stuff) being an experience of the Non-Dual, isn’t it more apt to consider it as an experience of boundlessness, of formlessness, of unity, of mergence, of the infinite? which qualities are still within the realm of Duality, and therefore the Sahasraha experience itself could still be considered as a dualistic experience. In addition, if the happiness of Nirvana—said to be beyond the ‘illusory’ joys of Samsara—resides in the incomprehensible realm of the Non-Dual, then how can anything—including ‘illusory’ joys of Samsara—be compared to it? If it is beyond all things, how can those who tell of it liken it to anything at all, including to ‘illusory’ joy? How can they say “you know what ‘nice feelings’ are, right? Well Nirvana is ‘nice feelings’ times 100!” when Nirvana is supposed to be completely unlike anything that can be experienced in Duality, including pleasure and pain; so surely, then, there is no way to say that Nirvana is ‘nice’, as ‘nice’ is ‘dual’ and Nirvana ‘non-dual’; and yet, are we not in Eastern spiritual-practices encouraged to seek Nirvana for it being supposedly ‘nice’? So how would you counter this argument and uphold the notion of attainable ‘perpetual-bliss’? Have you met anyone who claimed to have attained it? If so, what made you believe them? If that person was indeed sincere in their claim to that experience, how did that person know themselves that they were not just experiencing a very long ‘high’? Also, how could that person have been operating in Duality if they had entered Non-Duality? If you believe in it after having read or heard about it, what that you have read or heard counters this argument? If both the experience itself and any attempt to explain the experience are beyond logic—due to ‘logic’ being tethered to Duality, and ‘ultimate attainment’ residing beyond Duality in Non-Duality—then how do you know about it in the first place and how are you able to talk about it or think about it—as knowledge, thought and speech all belong to the great despot of Duality—? If it is an intuition of yours that it is real, are you really willing to surrender your whole life in an attempt to attain something based on a gut-feeling? If you deduce its existence by extrapolation of your own life experiences—spiritual ones included—how do you do so?: what about your own experiences hints at the possible attainment of ‘perpetual-bliss’? There is a further argument against the notion of ‘perpetual-bliss’ which concerns itself with permanence-impermanence and with beginnings and ends and ‘ultimate attainments’, and though the argument in this post touches on this—through considering how opposites continually roll and transform into one another, and through questioning the true nature of an Enlightenment experience such as Sahasraha a couple paragraphs above—it’s divergent enough to leave it out here. As an aside, I am not debating here that great spiritual-experiences exist—they certainly do—; neither am I debating the immortality of the soul nor of consciousness—it certainly is—; neither am I denying enlightenment when considered as the notion of a progression through higher and higher levels of awareness, ability and intelligence; this is just an argument against the idea of the existence and attainment of ‘perpetual-bliss’.

I’m doing the Lotus Nei Gong process and have a very good teacher in it (UK). But my teacher says it’s hard to say how long the process takes for different people. If you yourself have gone through the process from being a beginner to ‘stilling the Jing’ (getting your abdomen warm), from there to ‘interconnecting and expanding the Huang’, and from there to developing the Microcosmic Orbit, and whatever the stages are thereafter, how long did it take you to get to each stage, and at what sort of rate of practice? I’m especially curious as to how long it takes to both get to the stage of the abdomen warming up (’stilling the jing’, this seems to be the first key stage) and then to the point of developing the Microcosmic Orbit. Myself I’m pretty much right at the beginning; though have done some qigong (fairly intensively I guess) in the past with a different teacher/ school, and otherwise my body’s in good shape from a yoga point-of-view. I’m practising this system in order to fix a chronic health-problem with my back.

i'm busy with something else for a while. will reply afterwards.

Sorry again to be dense lol! That ‘edit’, you mean “pretty much” no Buddhism was brought over to the West?

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 ✌️

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 🤩

“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?

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)?

Can I have a link to this thread please Daniel?

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.

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?

Ah yes I see now. Thanks. Yes that’s a pretty good analogy actually for the concept.

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.

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?

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.

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…

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?

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt this time. But I also need to deduce from this that you are oblivious to how obnoxious it is to say, without personal provocation, that someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about—“[…] who is trying so bravely to make sense of these ideas here […]”, no, I understand full-well what I am attacking here—which lack of tact raises some doubts about your character. “[…] number of problems with the initial proposition as it is presented that would require entirely re-stating the premise in a new way.” Really don’t know what you’re trying to say here; what “problems” are there with the hypothesis of the OP? Why on earth does the OP need “re-stating”? The OP is written well, attacking the notion that ‘perpetual-bliss’ may be attained through spiritual-practice. “[…] true curiousity and the intention to truly understand the topic.” I don’t think you’re aware of how condescending you’re being here, and therefore how much you are undermining your own position in the view of anyone who is not one of the converted. Your distinction between idealogues and seekers: you have determined me in your own mind to be someone ‘seeking the truth’; behind this labelling is an attempt to invalidate my argument by implying that I am a ‘lost soul’ who can’t see the truth, though they seek it, and will likely never find it without proper instruction, and so lashes out at things they don’t understand in their ignorance and bewilderment. You would offer a stronger argument if you resisted such temptations to undermine your opponent; the only points you’re scoring otherwise are with the converted. Meanwhile your seemingly kind and gracious wording of this is just an attempt to blind me to this strategy. On the other hand, you yourself are coming across very strongly as an idealogue: reiterating so much of the rhetoric that I have argued throughout the thread to be coming from an unreasonable and stubborn position of delusion. “I wouldn't personally believe anyone who told me about some "golden heaven" that exists somewhere else either.” You’re saying in this paragraph that you yourself have experienced and seen what the philosophies talk about, including the ‘perpetual-bliss’ of Enlightenment, and so there is no need to believe in it, for you have seen it to be true. Well, I can only say that in fact you have not and are mistaking wonderful experiences you’ve had for what others have told you they are [see my point in a previous reply to you regarding the Roswell UFO]. I support my argument with everything I’ve said in the thread; you with your vouchsafe alone. Besides, how would you ever have had those spiritual-experiences in the first-place if you did not believe in what your ‘teachers’ had told you was possible! you only pursued the detailed practices set out for you by your ‘teachers’ because you believed in what they told you was possible—yet you try to invalidate the notion of belief. “I DID express my opinion earlier in the thread.” Cite it please. “I don't buy a perpetual "bliss" exactly […]” Explain your ambiguity there implied by “exactly” please. As for the rest of that paragraph: I agree, pleasant experiences can be had through spiritual-practice, though I absolutely deny that one can enter a state of ‘perpetual-bliss’ through such practise, in which one is happy 100% of the time, and I even deny that a state may be attained where the ratio of good-times to bad-times is anything other than 50/50; I still don’t believe that you deny the possibility of ‘perpetual-bliss’ so please elaborate on why you think it is fallacious. Your final paragraph. You say the other Eastern philosophies are valid; well, yes, to an outsider, they are quite clearly all branches of the same tree, with the same degree of validity or invalidity. Yes they are all belief-systems, at least with regard to the ‘heaven’ of Enlightenment, which belief is a delusion. Having said that I admit that a lot of what is taught in those philosophies about life is true and can indeed be seen for one’s self; however, almost certainly some faith will be required from any novice in the honesty of any teacher of those philosophies if they are to commit enough time to the practice to see their first revelation for themselves. “Understanding how things are doesn't require a massive crenellated concretion of beliefs, it just requires creating the space that allows the underlying nature of things to well up.” That’s right. But the unpleasantness comes when the leaders of these philosophy-religions claim that ‘heaven’ can be conquered having firstly built the trust of their students through allowing those students to see for themselves real life-truths that those teachers have thitherto described to them. “Nothing to buy, nothing to believe, nothing to worship.” No. The deceived students give the guru their time and energy is pursuit of the fallacy of ‘heaven’; belief, as I have explained, is intrinsic to these teacher-student systems even if just in the initial stages of practice; in general, the guru definitely gets a power-trip from his adoring followers. ”You could decide that there are qualities of both agnosticism and gnosticism in this […]” By agnosticism you are referring to what you have talked about regarding ‘seeing for one’s self the truth’ and not taking anything for granted. But taking “gnosticism” to refer to the esoteric Christian sect, I can’t see how gnosticism bears relevance; perhaps you were merely looking for an opposite word to ‘agnosticism’? in which case you just mean that ‘knowledge may be found through these practices’?

If you accept the extra-terrestrial world-view as David Icke and the Ancient Aliens series have predominantly worked to develop, what reservations could you have to doubt or deny the extra-terrestrial nature of the world’s religious icons? I honestly thought his joke was disgusting, I don’t think any laughing emojis are appropriate at all.

In this comment of yours you are trying to argue that an experience of union with the Non-Dual—synonymous with the Void—can be had, and that the Void is beyond all concepts; you are arguing this because your argument would then follow that such a union equates to Enlightenment or arrival in ‘perpetual-bliss’. I make points below in argument against. No, nothing that exists can be without a concept, I’m afraid—if you are saying something exists then you have an idea of what that thing is and therefore it can be conceptualised, ‘idea’ being synonymous with ‘concept’. “We have experience of knowing things all the time that aren't conceptualized”. No, we don’t; we often come across things we can’t effectively describe nor understand, but that doesn’t in any way mean that those things are therefore without concepts or forms. “Any time the mind is quiet and we are present with what is happening there is knowing, but without the conceptual overlay.” No, you cannot know something without conceptualising it; one can have a vague sense of something with being able to grasp it, but that vague understanding is only due to the limitations of one’s intelligence and comprehension; even a vague understanding requires a rough conceptualisation of the object. “Many of these are non-dual experiences […] “ No they’re not; what I’ve already said in this comment supports this rebuttal as does much of what I’ve said elsewhere in the thread. “[…] we can see that time, space, and self are all missing from the moment of experiencing.” No. Time continues whether you appreciate it or not, it waits for no man, for so sannyasin; not sure how you came to the conclusion that space itself could ever be invalid, nor do I see how that even supports an argument for Non-Dual experiences; the ‘self’ will always be necessarily present in any experience whatsoever, due to what I’ve said elsewhere in the thread about frames-of-reference. “I have successfully guided many people to notice how this is and point it out (commonly called "pointing out instruction" in the Tibetan Buddhist traditions). “ You have provided an explanation for their experience when they could not describe it at all—that doesn’t at all mean your explanation is accurate: the residents of Roswell in the 1950’s couldn’t make head or tail of the UFO crash, that doesn’t mean the explanation the press gave of a ‘weather-balloon’ was accurate. Honestly it sounds like you’re just repeating a lot of rhetoric that you’ve learned by rote from your ‘teachers’ without actually considering how incoherent it is to anyone outside the bubble in which that rhetoric is professed. I’m well aware of how romantic and impressive it sounds—but I can cut through that. Regarding gnosis, one can receive ‘downloads’ from mysterious other-worldly sources—it happens. But you need to clarify how you get from referencing gnosis to the conclusion that all things are void, as both the way you’ve worded that final paragraph as well as the point you’re trying to make with it are obscure. Having read a bit further in the thread I think I remember you saying to the effect of “no, form and void are equally valid”, pretending to agree with me, whereas here you are trying to imply really that Forms are subordinate to the Void by choosing the adjective “contrived” to describe Forms, with all the negative connotations that word possesses today. Furthermore, though I agree that all Forms are made of a fundamental ‘stuff’, that ‘stuff’ is not ‘void’, it is as real and as material as the Forms themselves.

No, such a comprehension is not possible; not that you were asking me, but I’ve stated my opinion on this and my reasoning behind it, I think, more than once elsewhere in the thread. Not even ‘God’ is capable of such a comprehension, as he himself would also be a finite being—I deduce this from the premiss that being conscious necessitates having a Form and therefore also limits.

Please say clearly why you are seeking this.

Could you explain this a bit further please? I believe I know both what a Rational Number is—anything that can be divided to give a non-infinite Quotient—and a Real Number is—any non-Imaginary Number.

(page 15) I think both your comment there as well as Michael Sternbach’s are sensible in their own ways.