goldisheavy

Right. It's another concept.

Without mind there would be nothing to cognize emptiness as a concept (and that's all it is). Without mind there would be nothing to cognize "outside mind." If you believe something outside mind exists, you do so with no evidence, on blind faith alone. Can you jump outside your own mind to verify that something outside your mind exists? No you cannot. So if you believe something exists outside the mind it's purely faith. And indeed, most beings do have unswerving faith in things that are other than mind. They see an appearance suggestive of space and they construe "space." They see an appearance suggestive of wood and they construe "wood." They see an appearance suggestive of a street and they construe "street." They see an appearance suggestive of a cloud and they construe "cloud." This is what mental fermentation is. Bodhisattva behaves differently. When bodhisattva experiences an appearance suggestive of wood she thinks, "that's an appearance suggestive of wood." When bodhisattva experiences an appearance suggestive of a street she thinks, "that's an appearance suggestive of a street." No actual street is construed in the appearance of a street. No wood is construed in the appearance of wood. No matter is construed in the experience of matter. In other words, bodhisattva's mind is not led away by the suggestive appearances. Bodhisattva is more honest. When seeing an appearance she acknowledges it only as such and nothing more. This puts an end to mental fermentation.

Tools for what?

You do not return to the beginning of the day at the end of the day, but there is always another day. Ash can be made to return to firewood in the mind of a bodhisattva who has attained tolerance of the inconceivability of phenomena.

Heartmind is the core of your being. You're always experiencing it at all times, but sometimes it's hard to recognize it. Like during an overcast day even though you cannot see the sun distinctly, it's still sun's light that illumines everything. Similarly, your heartmind lights up the whole world at all times. When you are awake heartmind lights up this world here. When you are asleep, it lights up your dreams. It's always shimmering in one way or another. It is in this world and beyond. When you meditate it is not enhanced. When you are ignorant it is not dulled or damaged in any way. It is constant. It's what maintains your body's function. When your body passes away, if you continue to maintain beliefs and habits of a human being, it's the heartmind that will manifest another body and identify with it. If you believe in nothing at all in an honest manner, it's a belief and not a non-belief. In that case, heartmind manifests a formless realm. If you understand the nature of your beliefs and their effects, then regardless of which realm you appear in, you'll be endowed with extra powers, such as calm, wisdom, and compassion, or perhaps even humor and tolerance as well. Anyway, I am just one of the peeps. Other peeps will be saying other things as they always have. It's up to you to decide what heartmind is. The reason you can decide what heartmind is, is because of your heartmind. If you decide you don't have it, that's heartmind's function. If you decide you have it, that's heartmind's function too. Heartmind is your day to day mind but it's also beyond your day to day mind. You're a creative being. It's not the case that you're merely learning about what is. Instead you are always orchestrating your meanings. You'll decide what heartmind means for you one way or the other. It is the heart of your own mind.

I think he knew something but found it not worth his precious time to explain. So instead of helping the guy learn to think better he just told him to swallow a bunch of Kool-aid. I think in general Buddha was a very condescending man. I agree. Assumptions can be limiting. I mean, I do assume Buddha knew what he was talking about. I guess I could just drop that altogether. I was just assuming Buddha didn't want to bother explaining things and so he used such replies to avoid getting dragged into conversations he considered might potentially be endless. OK, I buy that.

Uh, oh... That's an interesting and new (for me) way to think about what it means for something to be transcendental. Thanks for that. So De Nile is not just a river in Egypt, eh? Absolute is relative and relative is sometimes absolute. Can you dig it? What do you mean by divided light? What other types of light are there? Wouldn't m c squared always be greater than c? How can mc^2 be less than c? It seems to break the rules of mathematics if c is a positive number, which I think it is. Plus the equation itself is meaningless anyway, because mass is irrelevant for our discussion. If I understand correctly, mass becomes infinite at the speed of light instead of canceling itself out. That's kind of why the acceleration stops too (so then things can't go faster than the speed of light because they become too massive to keep accelerating). But I am not a physicist and will gladly accept corrections from anyone who studies physics for a living. Light doesn't feel a thing. It's us who feel things like pain or bliss. What do you mean by undivided light? How is it clear? Is divided light dirty or obscured in some way? I don't understand these references. This is probably interesting for all the physicalists out there. These kind of speed of light gyrations don't grab me at all. It just doesn't feel personal or intimate. It all feels distant and irrelevant to me. I can't relate. This is the most round about way to explain things. It's kind of interesting, but I do hope you stop talking about light as if physics was in any way relevant. If I really want to find you, I look inside myself. You don't need fancy physics to explain why so. It's all about how the projection of the world works. All living beings live inside of me. And I also live inside of all living beings. All living beings live inside of each living being. Each living being lives inside of all living beings. Through this experience, Angulimala acquired a taste of the present. Thus, when Buddha said, “Come, bhikkhu,” Angulimala removed his garland of fingers and became a devotee of the light. (A bhikkhu is a fully ordained male monastic). One taste of the present brings a realization that the past is not real, and who really wants what’s unreal besides the unreal? No dodginess,...nothing happens "now." Things appear to happen in the perceived now or present,...because the senses can only perceive the past,...that's the delusion. Anything and everything you see,...right in this perceived moment,...is in the past. There is no Present, instant, or now in Time! I don't agree with you, but it is an interesting thought to entertain.

Words do not mean anything to you.

Such as? My position is that overall Buddha was a good doctor who said and did many helpful things. But once in a while he would have a brain fart. And he wasn't perfect. What's your position?

Todd, if there were a discipline such as mental gymnastics, you'd be a gold medalist. You're really stretching things in a huge way here. Are you desperate to rescue Buddha's image? Doc knows best, just let the doc handle it. I get it. "Doctor it hurts when I lift my arms." "Don't lift them." I think there is a good reason why we are told to "seek another opinion" when consulting doctors. Experts do not all agree on everything, and I am not even going to get into the problems with expertise itself. Actually things brings to mind something that really happened to me. I went to a doc once with my eye problem and he was telling me how it could happen. He said it could be hereditary. I said, "Nope, no such thing in my family history." He said, "It could happen if you have scratched your eye before and it never healed properly." I said, "Nope, this never happened." At this point the doctor got angry and told me that I probably just don't remember getting scratched and that he knows better than me how these things go. He was a fucking jackass. I wish I could spit in his face. He just wanted his 15 mins with me to be over and he didn't give a shit about my problem. Just wanted to charge my insurance and get a move on. I was just slowing his beautiful day down with my irrelevant questions and interjections. I even wanted to tell him the history of my condition and he just waived it all away, he knows better, he studied such things. He's got it.

Words like "individual," "self" and "I" are tricky. There is an ignorant aspect to those words and an enlightened aspect. An individual is not merely that which is individuated. Self is not merely something different from and complementary to other. And I am not merely who I currently believe I am. Because this is so, you have to honor both the wisdom and the ignorance in those terms. As they say, don't throw away the baby with the bathwater.

I see. We can take this further. We can say something can either be transcendental or not. So transcendental is already a condition, but it's also not a condition. How about this one: relative and absolute. Is absolute defined relative to relative? If yes, then absolute is relative. If relative is relative, then it's conditional, then there are conditions when relative is not relative, so relative is at least sometimes absolute. I understand the bit about here vs there, but you're a bit dodgy about the now. Things do happen. And they do happen now. Dreams or not is irrelevant. There is a sense in which whatever is happening now is not actually happening, but you are not explaining that sense. It's now. And it's here. "Here" has another meaning. It's not just opposite of "there". It also means it's wherever you find yourself and this "wherever" is not necessarily split into parts, such as part here and part there, but rather, it's whatever currently appears, as contextualized by whatever does not appear. Both here and now are good words when used right, but they can lead to a misunderstanding. Now is not something static like the present moment, which tries to capture a segment of the consciously apparent whole which is not even the total whole. There is, but to understand how it happens, you have to change what you believe individual is. That's correct. Meanings don't stand on their own. Meanings are only meaningful within context. Context is just a further group of meanings that is further contextualized by other meanings. These other meanings are contextualized further. Eventually known is contextualized by unknown. All this then hangs in the middle of nowhere, supported by nothing. Like mushrooms in the clouds and like a blind man seeing rainbows. Just because when you explore the context you cannot reach a definitive point when to stop your exploration does not mean meanings are not explained by their context. Meanings exist. To deny this is blind ignorance. The meaning is not static, yes. The meaning cannot be definitively nailed down, yes. But the meaning is not altogether absent.

Even letting go just one core belief would send your life into a tail spin. You'd cry like a baby. I'm not saying it cannot be done. I believe it can be. But you have to be serious and understand the implications. If what you're doing has no day to day implications then you're doing nothing of significance.

Don't know about Taoism or Buddhism, but I like to think of ignorance as a result of ignoring something.

You are committed to the view that views are to be transcended, right?

That's your view, and it's not even an honest one. I mean, you don't really believe what you're saying in the hearts of hearts.

It's not wise to make an enemy of yourself. Your ego just does whatever the real you tells it to do. Stop blaming your ego for your troubles. The ego is not conspiring against you as if it had independent existence. The ego is your action, like a clenched fist. Clenched fist is your doing and unclenched hand is your doing also. So ego is like the clenched fist and non-ego is like an unclenched hand. The fist is not conspiring against your hand. It's all you from top to bottom. It's you who relaxes and it's you who is tense. It's you who believes one thing and then another. If you believe you can relax, relaxing is easy. If you believe tension is your true nature then relaxing is challenging. But the buck stops with you, the real you. You should not say "I have an ego." Say instead, "I am egoing." Ego is an action, a verb. Beliefs are verbs too, such as, "I am believing." Everything is a verb. Intent is the key.

That's fine. I was just joshing ya.

Vmarco, you make an interesting point that I generally agree with. I just have some questions here. In this list, do you mind specifically going over these three: Transcendental God Here and Now Individual Wholeness Please tell me where do you see the contradictions. For the record, I don't believe in God, so please don't read more into my question than is necessary. I just want to see how the logic here works out. Thank you in advance.

Any two glowy people will always agree about everything, am I right? Or am I right?

If you take oxymorons for granted, they don't have the power of koans.

Druid tradition is dead and it was based in Europe. Hopis are Native Americans. How are the two related?

The guy in question is not an evil person. His mistake was trying to cash in on religious appeal. Disrobing was a good option, but a better option is to avoid the whole mess to begin with. If you associate with any religion you just invite trouble upon yourself because people will judge you based on your associated religion and they'll judge your associated religion based on you, both. That's one big messy hairball.

Todd, As Taomeow has pointed out you cannot cure poison without knowing what it is. So asking at least one or two questions about the arrow is not out of place. So the example shoots itself in the foot, so to speak. If the example used an ordinary unpoisoned arrow, it would fit the narrative better. If the arrow is unpoisoned, of course you just yank it out, clean the wound, bind it, and you're done. If the arrow is poisoned, you can yank the arrow, but that alone will not save the man. The burden is always on the disciple anyway. It's the disciple who contemplates and inquires. It's the disciple who meditates. It's the disciple who gets tense or relaxes. It's the disciple who discovers the root of the problem, whatever the problem is. Other people are accessories to the disciples own work. Spiritual burden is unlike the physical burden. If you carry a heavy rock and I am stronger than you, I can just take the rock off you and carry it for you. Spiritual burden, unlike the rock, cannot be mechanically separated from the person it afflicts. Since you are so fond of quoting the Bible, "Everyone must carry their own cross" or whatever (I have no interest in the Bible whatsoever). EDIT: I don't think the expression about the cross is in the Bible. It's a common expression in the USA, apparently.

Asking how the world comes about is not an irrelevant question. Then that's the time to suggest that assuming things you don't know is unhelpful. Point out assumptions inherent in the question. Wrong. When you're talking about exams, that's just bringing up ordinary circumstances of this life that are known and verifiable by all. Bringing up past lives, future lives or hells with the intent to scare people is fear mongering. These things cannot be verified and even Buddhas know them only on inference while on Earth because Buddhas only experience the current moment, the now, just like everyone else. Although for Buddhas such things are strong inferences like yesterday for us is a strong inference, still, the condition of an ordinary being has to be respected. Fear mongering is a practice of magnifying the perception of fear using unfair and manipulative tactics with the idea to use fear as motivation. Fear is a poor motivator for two reasons. First on the path of wisdom fear will begin to weaken. As soon as fear weakens, if fear was your main motivator, your progress will stop. Second, when someone is motivated by fear, the goal is to get to a place of less fear. If nirvana is sought as a merely less crappier place than this one, it short sells enlightenment. It expresses the path in purely negative terms. So we're not going toward something fun, great and awesome, but we are just avoiding something that sucks. That's not good. Beings should be liberated from their fears, and yes, exams shouldn't be feared either. Failing exams shouldn't be feared. People should study science and other subjects out of love and not out of fear. If fear is the only reason you live and do things, something is very wrong with you and your life, and what you need is not more fear or to buck up, you need a life, value and worldview re-examination. As for faith, I agree that faith is a good quality when one has faith in the good possibilities. When one has faith in a cynical outcome, then faith is of no help. Either way, telling someone "this is not the question you should be asking" is not going to increase faith. It's going to make you sound like a dick though, unless you can explain why not, such as pointing out assumptions and engaging in a meaningful non-evasive dialogue where you meet the concerns head to head instead of dodging them or shuffling them aside. If you claim to know infinite past lives and the destinies of all men, and you make all other kinds of grandiose claims, then it's absolutely correct to demand answers to all manner of questions. If you can't answer something simple, such as "how this world comes about" then it correctly throws all your grandiose claims in question. And people are right to be skeptical because this world is full of crackpots. It's one thing to trust in the possibility of enlightenment, and it's another thing to think that some random dude with pretty robes has the answer for you. Having no faith in Gotama does not imply having no faith in enlightenment.