goldisheavy

At first, it looks like you're getting it, but by the last paragraph it's obvious you don't understand it. You were right the first time. Both yin and yang are important and are one whole. So there is no need to rescue the bumbling idiot in the last paragraph. The bumbling idiot can remain the same. You don't have to regard him as a man of virtue. Nor does he have a "proper" place to which he needs to be restored. If you think things have proper places, you don't understand sages at all. Lao Tzu bashes addiction to yang. While it's not anti-yang, it IS anti-obsession-with-yang. So in some sense it can be seen as anti-yang as well. It's a correction. It's an antidote. When there is too much yang, you add yin. When people are too happy you add depression to balance it out and harmonize it. In fact, you don't need to consciously add it. It arrives by itself! That's the mysterious action of Dao. To a sage, dirt is not dirty. Heaven is not heavenly. A particle of dust is not small. A universe is not large. Why not? Because sage, through a contemplative frame of mind avoids fixations. A sage understand that to think that universe is large and that a particle of dust is small is a narrow, limited and unproven view which can lead to disappointment as easily as it can lead to success, and therefore exercises caution. If you don't view politeness as inherently good, and if you don't view coarse behavior as inherently bad, it doesn't mean you rescue someone or restore something to their proper place. Just avoid fixating your mind. Let your mind be more alive.

It's ok. Just don't take yourself so seriously. It's all a big joke anyway.

Clowns and balloons often go together. Of course clowns like to pop balloons for fun, but maybe that's what the balloons are for when clowns come out? I don't know. I've always liked circus since I was little. Oh I don't know. Does milk sweeten or embitter the candy? I have no idea. No, that's very wrong. When people seek liberation, it is some kind of experience that prompts them. When people want water they know what thirst feels like. When people want freedom, they know what imprisonment feels like. Both freedom and imprisonment are products of mind. Both thirst and the slaking of thirst are of mind. The boundary between the conscious and sub/unconscious mind is an imaginary one. Is is dogmatic? It's not my job to judge myself. I leave that up to you. Here's a list of claims you make: 1. You have nothing. 2. You are not enlightened. 3. You never claimed to be enlightened. 4. You're a man like us. Of these claims, only #3 is perhaps NOT preposterous. Every other claim on that list is without basis. Conventionally it's considered a sign of humility to go around claiming that you are nothing, and so forth. However, among sages, such manner of behavior is considered to be anywhere between dubious and stupid. It's called "false humility". In order for you to know for sure you are not enlightened, you must know what being enlightened is like. And in order to know that, you must already be enlightened. So if you are not yet enlightened, you cannot know that you are not enlightened. For all you know, you are in fact enlightened. I believe you have some really interesting things to say, but for Pete's sake, can you split your writing into some paragraphs? I have hard time reading this blob of text. Just hit the return key twice every so often, preferably in a logical place.

Xabir, I love your explanations. Good stuff. If you continue like that, I can retire in peace.

This kind of message will never be understood by non-mystics or non-contemplators. So don't bother trying. This is not logical positivism. Daoism is not a science of establishing all good traits and eliminating all the bad ones. It's not about how to be happy all the time. Don't you get it by now? I guess not. Similar hints appear in Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) as well. Same hints appear in Zen/Chan: http://www.wwzc.org/translations/allMistake.htm (the first poem).

Just ask, "What is the role of convention in our lives?" or "What is the role of convention in my life?" That's a better way to ask the same questions, in my opinion. But I think those are great questions though.

This is actually a very common question in the spiritual circles, and I think it should be answered. My answer is this. At the ultimate level of analysis, things are baseless, and thus are unfathomable. However, we also recognize that there is a relative level, which is not strictly separate and not strictly distinct from the ultimate, but we feel and talk about it differently. We know that 5 kilos of apples is not the same as 2 kilos of ice cream. We know that to buy apples you don't go into an ice cream shop. You could just throw up your hands and say, "It's all unfathomable! Stop trying to understand... apples and ice cream are unfathomable..." But in reality they are fathomable for us, aren't they? You know how to buy ice cream. You know how to buy apples. You can, with little difficulty, learn how to grow apples and learn how to make your own ice cream. While you may not fathom the ultimate essence of apples, you can fathom a damn good deal about apples. To develop one's powers of reasoning by attempting to fathom various features of one's own experience is an ornamentally good and an ornamentally useful process. It's not useless just because the usefulness is ornamental in nature. Recognizing this is important to avoid nihilism. Besides, you cannot avoid an easy (for a contemplator) counter-question: How do you know things are unfathomable? The only way to be certain that things are unfathomable is to fathom all the things completely. If you don't have complete understanding of all things, you don't have the proper grounds to state that things are unfathomable. But if you do have complete understanding of all things, then you have fathomed them, because understanding and fathoming are just two words that mean the same thing. Saying that things are flat-out unfathomable is a little too extreme of a statement. A more modest statement can be more honest. Maybe say, "when you try to fathom things, you can never complete that process or reach a conclusion, because what it means for a thing to be itself is an ongoing, ever-incomplete, and ever-complete process. It's ever-incomplete because the meaning changes in an ongoing fashion as the informational field changes. It's ever-complete because nothing can be done to make things more complete than they already are, ongoing-ly." Something like that. Something more modest and more nuanced. I guess it doesn't fit into a sound bite as nicely. Doesn't make for a good slogan.

Not too horribly bad, but it's very traditional in a bad way and too formulaic for my taste. There's too much recycled advice that's actually not good to follow sometimes. Be careful. Nice music and beautiful pictures can tie this less than optimal advice to your heart and it may be hard to untie it later. So if you're a sentimental person, this is one way you can be manipulated. Get those emotional buttons pushed with cute kids and beautiful music.

Good stuff! Ask him what lineage he belongs to, and if it's not some famous lineage, tell him to go screw himself. Just kidding! Just kidding! Don't kill me. Why don't you bow to him next time you see him. Just a slight nod of your head is enough as a sign.

In that case I have to agree with you completely.

One could even say that Buddhism is struggling to maintain a separate identity. How ironic, when Buddha has preached that all self-delineation is a deviation from Dharma (the way things are, the truth of things, the true way, etc.).

To know the answer to that, you have to delve deeply into the experience and the deepest perceptible meaning of the unliberation or lack of liberation. When you experience lack of liberation, what is it exactly? Familiarize yourself with it at all levels. Feel it. Know it. Etc. Then you will know for yourself what the absence of that will be like. Exactly. You have better insight than the person you are learning from. The world is often upside down like that. People who should be teachers act as students and people who should be students act as teacher. However, in a way you deserve what you get. Why? Because you don't recognize your own wisdom yet and seek outside of yourself, so you deserve to be a student of any teacher you select for yourself, since you haven't internalized authority and responsibility yet. All experience is pure. There is no such thing as a dirty experience. If you listen carefully to xabir, you will understand that ALL is empty, and not just subject. That's the part you don't seem to understand yet. Your mind is focusing emptiness in a preferential and biased manner only on the subject, while you conceive of the object as truly thus. In other words, you objectify experience and you hold this objectified experience to be the essential and substantial truth, and you hold subject to be a distortion. From a Buddhist perspective that's very wrong. A correct view is to hold both subjective and objective experiences to be empty, without preference toward objectivity or subjectivity. So one doesn't hold up subjectivity as something false or as an interference, and one doesn't hold up objectivity as something definitely true and substantial. And vice versa as well. No bias. All is equally empty. All experience is pure. There is no dirty experience.

The word "Dharma" just means "the truth of things as they are" or "the true way things are", etc. It refers to insight and realization in the widest, most general and most abstract way possible. For example, Hinduist traditions use the word "Dharma" as well as the Buddhist ones. That's because "Dharma" is a generic word. It's not some secret club that you join and become a card carrying member of. So I think it becomes obvious why in order to know Dharma you have to have wide experience, and then it is obvious why if having wide experience is useful, it's good to practice diverse methods, at least some time. To have a broad perspective, to have much experience that's not all the same thing, all of that is a good thing that enriches one's own being and therefore one's own insight and realization. Not really. I started with the goal of becoming the greatest magician ever. This goal has lead me to Buddha Dharma (among other types of Dharma) because I have recognized Buddha as one of the greatest magicians to have ever been written about. If you reflect for a second on what it takes to perform magic, then you'll see that nothing less than perfect enlightenment will suffice.

There is a really good book out there called "Take off your glasses and see". I have it. In it the doctor who wrote the book describes one very good moment. He tests 20/20 on the chart. Then he puts his eye into the machine, and machine tests the refraction of the eye lens in a very physical manner, and the machine gives the readout of him having semi-strong myopia. So the machine says that physically he has myopia, but he tests on all the charts 20/20. The doc invites people to give him random tests to make sure he didn't subconsciously memorize the chart, etc. He then comes to conclusion that we don't see with our eyes. He then gives some other stories to support that. He gave the story of one blind guy who had his eyeballs be physically destroyed, who could see shapes of light, like trees or people. Etc. We see with the spirit. So, first of all, you don't need to explain what happens in the eye. It's not relevant. Secondly, if you really must have a physical story to believe in yourself, then know this. Eye muscles can shorten and elongate the eyeball. Basically whatever physical change you can conceive of, the body has a way of manifesting it. I believe with the right training a person can grow a new eyeball even. Or see 20/20 without eyeballs, like Paul Muad'Dib (A cool character from a sci-fi novel "Dune"). It's all possible at the ultimate level.

But experience is always structured via beliefs, which are theory-like when you examine them closely. This is why theories work so well in practice in many areas of life. Experience is belief, theory and practice, they are not two distinct things. It's the same process. Theory is experiential. Experience is theoretical. It's a frame of mind.

Resolving concerns is a mystical process. It's not the same as finding a clear solution. The person develops intimate familiarity with concern formation and dissolution and develops mental/heart flexibility, a kind of deep psychic skillfulness, similar to how skiers navigate the steep slopes of the mountain. They don't necessarily know in advance, "Here I will turn left, there I will turn right." What they have is a very good sensitivity of the terrain, and their bodies have been trained to accommodate the rigor of skiing, and the combination of sensitivity and tolerance allows the skier to spontaneously move in such a way as to negotiate the slope in a skillful and seemingly effortless manner. Resolution of concerns is similar to this. The energy that causes concerns is still there "in the system" so to speak. However, it's no longer polarized or fractured mentally, and the sharp angles do not appear as much. Things become smoother. Further, the person develops greater sensitivity and can see a concern develop well before it is even recognized as a full blown "concern" by an ordinary person. So a lot of time an enlightened person doesn't even see the concern bloom all the way. At other times, the energy of concern is gracefully flowing in a manner that causes the least inner struggle. So resolving a concern is not like reaching a conclusion or telling yourself a story about a solution, although these elements can be part of the resolution, the resolution itself is a mystical process that cannot be fully explained by solutions. It has more to do with sensitivity, insight, and intent. Resolution of concerns is an ongoing process. It's not like "OK, my problems are all resolved, period, end of story." It's an ongoing process where the problems abide in a resolved state and where the mind is behaving such that it's not a welcome ground for the arising of unresolved problems. It's an ongoing happening. It's continuous. When you ask for proof, what do you accept? It's kind of like saying, I want payment, but will you accept payment in chicken eggs? Dollars? British pounds? Time share slots? Time with a prostitute? A delivery of donuts? Foot scratching? What kind of payment do you accept? Proofs are like that. When someone demands proof, that person is unsatisfied and demands to be satisfied, and often the person takes on a hostile stance where they will make ever effort to remain unsatisfied (the so-called "skeptic"). When something has been proven to you, it means what? It means that you've accepted certain performances and appearances as part of the story for something and you relent. However, this "you relent" part is essential! If you make up your mind to never relent, you can seek proof indefinitely for anything! You can even demand proof that you are a human being, and no matter what proof is supplied to you, you don't have to become satisfied. You can press for more and more proof. Since proving things is based on personal satisfaction and convention, what I am describing is beyond the realm of proof/disproof. I am describing the ultimate concerns. Those always lie beyond proof. The way it works is as follows. I speak. You listen. You make a decision as to whether or not what I say makes sense or is useful. But what I don't be doing is proving anything, and if you're smart, you won't even be asking for proof! If you ask for proof, you're asking to be tricked, because there is no reason you should ever stop questioning anything. When you decide to stop questioning something, it's a mystical process. It's not based on reason or rationality. We all intuitively understand that we have to have some "good faith" to live life. If we question everything, we cannot live comfortably. However, this is just intuition. It's not the truth. It's also how we get tricked and lied to and taken advantage of and it's also the same mechanism that keeps us ignorant. This kind of "good faith" non-questioning is at the basis of tradition and conservatism. Just become sensitive to this. Understand this process as it impact your life experience. There is no solution and no approach is ultimately "better", but you'll know what works for you if you develop that sensitivity I am talking about. An enlightened person has to have extraordinary mental flexibility and extraordinary level of tolerance. Anything less and it's not enlightenment. Someone with extraordinary mental flexibility and tolerance can perform what others call "miracles". They are not really miracles. It's like if you see a flexible person wring their hands out of hand cuffs, or wring themselves through the toilet seat, it may look like a miracle. But the reason is looks miraculous is because we understand that we don't have this flexibility and thus we could never do any such thing. But more than that, we think that it's impossible to EVER develop such flexibility and that neither us nor any members of our species can develop it (thus this level of flexibility is anathema to our perceived identity, and identity includes species identity into personal identity too), and when you see a member of your species defy your ingrained preconceptions, it appears miraculous. A miracle is nothing more than an experience that the mind judges as "this should not be possible." It's a judgment. That's all it is. So, since miracles are not a big deal, yes, an enlightened person should be able to perform them. The more the better. That doesn't mean miracles are why people should become enlightened. But it's a side-effect. It's kind of like putting your body through a toilet seat is not why you should develop flexibility. You develop flexibility to have good health and good life. But as a side-effect or symptom of excellent flexibility you can put your body through the toilet seat. It's a good test of flexibility. It's also a good way to cut off a lot of bullshitters. It's also a way to keep yourself humble. So if you cannot do any such thing, you shouldn't be too arrogant. It's a way to know one's limitations in an honest way. Another example is one of strength. A good test of strength is to do 100 push-ups or to lift 600 lbs barbell off the floor. But we don't develop strength specifically to do push-ups or to lift barbells! That would be a total waste. So a miracle is just like that. It's a performance that demonstrates some ability, but it's not the reason why you have that ability. If your ability has no way of being tested, do you really have an ability? It's just a way to be honest.

Jen A Kins, That's real magic you got there.

when looking for advice, be aware that the context is your own mind when giving advice, understand there is no person outside of yourself who receives it when in a fight, express yourself honestly and forthrightly when fighting more than one person, don't rely on convention when choosing a teacher, look for someone just like yourself, only further along, like a long lost brother if you meet someone and fall in love, let the love take over completely when you have nothing to do, do nothing when you feel life is testing you, test it right back when you have to do something that you are afraid of, let the fear bloom within and continue when people don't agree with the way you live, first reflect, then make a decision

Well said.

I think there are several context-sensitive definitions. There is something we can call an enlightening experience. An enlightening experience is an experience which elucidates some heretofore obscure relationship or pattern (which is basically a relationship with more of a 3 dimensional feel to it) or a dynamic (which is a pattern through time). The most simple and stupid and at the same great example of this, is like turning on a light bulb in a dark room. You could feel things with your hands in the dark room and you had a good idea of where things where, but when the light comes on, you can see at once, at one glance, where everything is, what size it is, etc... you don't have to feel one object at a time, and you get an overview. Further more, if those objects are moving or living, if you feel them, by the time you go around feeling one object after the other, the old one has changed. When the light is on, you see the changes instantly as they occur within a bigger space, here and now, without having to involve yourself too closely with the individual objects. So an enlightening experience is like that. As such the insight that results from this kind of experience is usually relative and context-sensitive. Enlightening experiences do not have to be mystical. They can be ordinary too. They can be conceptual. For example, having a conversation with a philosopher can be enlightening. It doesn't have to be some mystical zen moment, although it can be. It's just not limited to that. Slipping on ice can be an enlightening experience, and getting yelled at can be one too. It all depends. There is also a state of enlightenment as a spiritual end-goal. In that sense, it's a state that I would define as a resolution of all concerns. Most people have many many many concerns. Concerns are not sporadic. Concerns are arranged into a hierarchy and meaningful networks and all the networks merge into one network of concern. There are basic or fundamental concerns and from those flow out medium level concerns and further out you get to the trivial concerns. For a normal person, first of all, they are not even aware of the structure of that network. They are usually not aware of the deepest levels of those concerns and focus mostly on the trivial concerns while the deepest concerns remain tacit/implicit. Never mind resolutions! So an enlightened person is someone who is: a) utterly familiar with all possible concerns that people can manifest within the same realm as the enlightened person manifests in, knows how they can connect and flow out from one another, and c) has resolved all of these concern networks for oneself, down the the core levels. This resolution is not something extreme though. It doesn't mean the person has become insensate or insentient. It means that concerns no longer dominate the life of the mind and heart. When concerns are non-dominant, they add flavor and fun to life. When concerns dominate, they become oppressive. There is a big difference. Trying to enter into any extreme state, like into a state of extreme absence of concerns, usually masks a deep-rooted concern that's not been unearthed yet. Besides having uprooted the dominance of all concerns, an enlightened person also understands how beliefs structure experience and knows, therefore, how to manifest any kind of experience into being, including magic and miracles and what have you. Ideally an enlightened person not only knows this, but also practices it to some extent. But this also doesn't enter into any extremes. If the person becomes extremely reliant on magic, then something has not been dealt with at the level of concerns. It's like trying to overcompensate for a fear with magical power. When one's fears are small and needs are modest, magic is a nice to-have, but not something you have to rely on per se. It's part of life, but it's not dominant. At the same time, what is normal for such person is also different, so perhaps what is normal for an enlightened person seems magical for a non-enlightened and vice versa, what seems normal for unenlightened seems magical to the enlightened, but not in the extreme measure. It might just slightly seem so sometimes. Experiences can be enlightening, but enlightenment is not an experience, because enlightenment is something that is ongoing, it does not come and go like experiences do. An enlightened man has all kinds of experience, and this experience, either all of it or some of it can be called enlightening, but I would never say that enlightenment is an experience. Enlightenment is an abstract concept. Enlightenment exists compared to unenlightenment. Enlightenment is a set of criteria that an enlightened person fulfills. Enlightenment cannot exist without experience or apart from experience, but it's not an experience per se. A person who gets tricked by the contents of their own experience time and time again begins to realize that one doesn't understand one's own mind. Then they simultaneously understand that since they don't understand their own mind, it's possible to understand it (that's the two sides of the same coin). So the labels of unenlightenment and enlightenment arise. And these labels are pretty abstract and transcendent. They transcend all specific experiences, but they also rely on all occurring experiences for their meaning. See above. I think it's impossible to fall accidentally from the state of enlightenment. But an enlightened person can choose to forget their state of enlightenment consciously and on purpose, in order to re-experience the game again.

No, no, no. this position results from over-relaxation. It has nothing to do with the tension. It has more to do with slouching and slouching is basically chilling or relaxing. How do you sit on a couch? Do you sit straight up? Or do you lay like a towel, allowing your body to fall fluidly however it pleases? Slinking around is a form of relaxation. So when you try to act like you're on a couch when you're standing up, you end up slouching. It's kind of like when you'd rather be sleeping or napping, but you have to be standing. That's what it is. Not every posture problem is caused by tension. Some are caused by over-laxity. If I had to make an inference from this posture to a mental state, the words "space cadet" come to mind.

Great post by "Defender". Excellent! We have to make a distinction between what we claim we believe and what we actually believe. Actual in-the-bones belief is rarely accompanied by claims. For example, how many people go around proclaiming that gravity affects them? No one right? People might want to calculate the effect of gravity but never want to calculate if it's real or not. That's true belief. It doesn't even occur to the person to question the existence of something. That's core belief in action. When magic works, it works because your intention is coherent within your belief system. And by belief system I mean real core beliefs and not the claimed beliefs, which usually have more to do with "what I think I should believe if I were a good person" than with reality. So if you hang around mages, what you learn is that most spells that work very well are the kinds that don't break our belief in physical laws and other such things. They work around those laws (if those laws pose limitations) or via those laws (if they do not pose as limitations), but never against. So in our current realm right here, there is very little magic involving fireballs or levitation. That doesn't mean it's not possible, just very improbable at the moment.

Thing is, some people might get something from mantras and prayers! If the belief structure they live in is coherent with what they are doing, it will work. I support the guy who made those videos NOT because he's right! But because he poses good questions, and if any spiritual person wants to be real, they must become responsible, and they must know how to think about such questions intelligently and in a nuanced manner and how to discuss them without freaking out. I think this guy is bringing more honesty into both religion and spirituality, at the very least. He probably thinks he's promoting atheism, but in my eyes, that's not what he's doing.

I buy that, but you cannot ignore the documented in the Pali Canon historical fact that Buddha was surrounded by over a thousand Arhats (I originally made the number smaller not to seem ridiculous and to be more conservative). Clearly there is a huge gulf of a difference there between 1k + and none or 2. I mean roughly 3 orders of magnitude of difference. I daresay that if Buddha's success with "producing" Arhats was legitimate, then based on how many capable students modern teachers have, they have to be deemed failures or fakes. You can't just make it "blame the student" game 100%. Buddha was surrounded my morons too and yet he still managed to get 1k+ people enlightened according to the writings. There is also a distinct possibility that Buddha himself was fraud. This is a good point, except one thing. No one knows what the highest potential is. Therefore there is always ineliminable doubt whether or not someone was brought to the max potential or to only 10% of their max. As soon as we find a way to measure and quantify max potential, we'll have this problem resolved.

I don't even know if enlightenment is real the way people think about it. In particular, Buddha time and time again made a judgment of people as if he lived in their skin, but when people made similar judgments of him, he dismissed them as preposterous, since, those people are not him and not enlightened (and he's the one who will determine who is enlightened or not, which is convenient). Basically Buddha was an asshole. If Buddha appeared today, like if he showed up on TaoBums and behaved the way he had 2500 years ago, you all would assassinate his character in no time, and perhaps rightly so. You'd then also miss half of the good points he had to make together with his characters, because many of you, once you decide someone's character is not so good, you ignore that person completely, which is not wise. You also have to keep in mind that many morons have excellent character. And some ne'er do wells have excellent wisdom too. What happened was that Buddha would pronounce someone an Arhat, and that was that. It was never quantified in any way. An Arhat is someone who has destroyed the 3 fetters of attachment, aversion and ignorance and who has reached total unbinding. However there is no test, nor a way to concretely demonstrate any such thing. It always came down to Buddha making a personal judgment. The Suttas are very interesting. If you read them, there is a lot of dirty laundry there, if you just keep your attention to detail sharp and keep your mind in a contemplative mood (as opposed to adoring or worshiping).