goldisheavy

I did not like the morilizing in the Surangama Sutra, but the philosophical content of it is truly excellent. Anyone interested in enlightenment should real the Surangama Sutra at least once. It's one of the best debunkings of many false ideas people habitually have about reality.

As soon as you admit the concept of mind, you have to admit the concept of something other than mind. If you say it this way, I will agree. But mind is not the concept of mind. You hold an idea of what a mind is in your mind. If you let go of that idea the mind is still there in a relaxed condition. In other words, the mind is not any idea or belief that arises in it. The mind is thus hard to describe and hard to know properly.

Mind is the ultimate source of everything. You can say that the mind is the ultimate nature of everything. Or the nature of mind is the nature of everything. All these say the same thing. Funny, because I often recommend Nagarjuna to physicalists. Remember, Nagarjuna is the monk who reputedly milked cow's portrait to get real milk.

That's not what dependent arising means. Dependent arising does not postulate any ultimate limitations, only provisional ones. Literally it means right now, given your circumstances, you cannot shoot a fireball out of your hand. It doesn't mean it can't ever be done. We see this happen in dreams. I've been lucid in many of my dreams. In most lucid dreams I could fly, but not in all! The fact that I've been lucid and yet unable to fly in some dreams shows me something important. Patterns have some weight to them, and sometimes even knowing that all your patterns are a dream is not enough to break them. Why? Because knowing has depth to it. Not all knowing is equally deep, profound and sure. Two people can know the same thing but if one knows that thing in a deeper way, the results will be different for each of the two.

This is a complicated question. I'll tackle the "what is possible" first. The mind has no inherent limitations in terms of its ability to experience things. The field of vision does not impose its own conditions on what is seen. The field of hearing does not impose its own conditions on what is heard. In other words, senses in and of themselves allow any possibility. Let's take an easier example than the one you offer. The example is a person walking through the wall of a building. Is there anything in the field of vision to make this impossible? No, there is not. So why isn't this possible in day to day life? It's because of the structuring power of beliefs. The belief in the material integrity of objects is so strong that our life experience simply confirms what we believe. But nothing in our senses offers a barrier for such an experience. In other words, if this experience happened, your field of vision would see it just as easily and happily as it sees anything else. The field of vision itself doesn't discriminate. So, back to your example. Put aside what you believe is possible and look at your example purely from the POV of senses. Could the senses ever perceive what you describe? I think the answer is yes. I mean, when I read your description, I can imagine this happening. It's as if I am there at the scene. I can see it happen in my mind's eye. So the rule of thumb is: if you can imagine it, it is possible. The total array of possibilities always exceeds your power of imagination, if anything. But is it probable? That's another question. And, how probable is for one person to end up a victim and another a bully? Well, how strong are all people? Are all people equally strong? Do some people have the ability to impose themselves on others? I think even in our mundane world the answer is yes, obviously. We also know weak people can become stronger by exercising. And strong people become weaker when they get old. So who is strong and who is weak is not something fixed, and yet, differences do exist. And at the ultimate level we can say you consent to everything that happens to you, but it wouldn't be compassionate to exaggerate this in our day to day life, because in our day to day life we have only limited conscious choice, and we should treat each other well and help each other if we can. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Look what Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra says:

OK, imagine you want to know what it feels like to live life as a weaker person. You load up a backpack (rucksack) with 50 kilos of stuff, and sling it on your back. You go around as usual, but now every action is harder and more awkward to perform because part of your ability is taken up to maintain the 50 kilos (plus the weight of the backpack) on your back. But you are having fun. You've always been strong and grown bored of strength, and this life as a simulated weaker person is interesting. At some point you forget you were ever strong. You forget there is roughly a 50 kilo burden on your back at all times. Down the line you grow tired of being weak and want to be strong again. You can imagine what happens next. As with all comparisons, this one is not 100% accurate. Even the strongest person on Earth doesn't feel bored of one's strength because our conditions here don't make any level of strength redundant, since there is always something much heavier than you can handle no matter how strong a human gets. So the idea of getting bored with strength is hard to sympathize with in the example, because in our human condition we can't easily imagine why would anyone be bored of a quality we generally consider to be helpful in every case. As for the veil of ignorance, the veil is simply a set of beliefs which distort and misrepresent reality. The distortions arise almost universally from claims pinching reality in some way, in other words, from making reality seem more patterned and less flexible/malleable than it really is. These beliefs are not something shallow and obvious. The strongest and most core ones are deeply buried in the subconscious mind and we don't go around expressing them because they are agreed to so deeply, there is no point in even discussing them. For the most part (but not always) the beliefs we tend to discuss tend to be the ones we might disagree over, or the ones we have some doubt in, etc. Core or deep beliefs are discussed only rarely and usually by spiritual people (not necessarily the same thing as people who claim to be spiritual). The reason limiting beliefs are so hard to expose is because due to the nature of mind limiting beliefs become vividly manifest in our life. So when we go about life, our life hardly ever contradicts our limiting beliefs. Life experience mostly reflects limiting beliefs and conforms to them. It's only due to the nature of the uncertainty principle that sometimes events happen which challenge our core beliefs. But those events are rare. It's much more normal and expected for life to conform to our core beliefs than to contradict them. This is the reason why the veil of ignorance remains submerged in the fogs of unconsciousness so easily and so readily -- there is not much in life that contradicts ignorance, because ignorance has the power to create and to manifest. It should be obvious that ignorance is not inherently bad. Ignorance is generally considered to be the negative aspect of limitation (limiting belief). If you embrace a limitation and forget about that fact, it becomes ignorance. Limitations are creative forces, and thus they can be positive and compassionate. Even the ability to forget limitations can be positive. It's thanks to the veil of ignorance you get to go on a joy ride of being a human, to feel the thrills and the chills, the gains and the losses of the human life. But ignorance becomes negative when you no longer enjoy the ride as is, and want to either get off the ride or go on a different kind of ride, with different limitations from this one.

I agree. Great, so I get two things from this paragraph: The order of experiences is not always the same. People experience various mystical states in different order. Both the experience of personality and the experience of impersonality are just appearances. Neither is truer than the other, neither is inherently true. I don't get this part. Thusness asked you to do something, and that's why things have meanings that they do? There is nothing inherent about impersonality and lack of agents either. In other words, lack of agents is dependently arisen with the presence of agents. Do you see this?

I don't think there is only one way. We have options. My choice at this time is to recognize other sentient beings on par with myself as a sentient being. The other sentient beings are points of view, just like I am a point of view. No point of view is inherently more or less valid, which gives us flexibility in how to regard other sentient beings. This presents some freedom of choice in how to regard all things. Not this scenario, but the one in the following quote. The mind ultimately knows all possibilities, so the choice is made with regard to unmanifest potential. The manifest is infinitely tiny compared to what all varieties of form and situations there could potentially be. From a sentient being point of view, most of the potentials are unknown, so the choice is not a fully conscious one, because the sentient being does not appreciate all the options available to one. But even the most ignorant sentient being still experiences some degree of choice consciously. Subconsciously the picture looks differently entirely. Subconsciously we are all buddhas, and our minds do know all the infinite options available to them, so the choice is a real choice at that level. In a mundane down to earth life we experience what is known as habit or inertia. This means our experience falls into stable cyclic patterns. As ordinary sentient beings we have almost no choice in changing these habitual patterns directly because we're not away of the level of the mind these patterns emanate from. It's similar to being numb to something. If your legs fall asleep from sitting and become numb, you can't easily move them around. You can only move that which you feel. So the more conscious and aware some being becomes, the more scope or range the intent of that being acquires. Another way to look at intent is not as having more or less range, but just being different. Instead of saying buddha's intent has more range, we can say that a buddha and a sentient being have the same range of intent, just a different flavor, so to speak. In this sense a sentient being is a buddha who chooses to be a sentient being, so the range is the same, but some of the power of intent is intentionally soaked up in maintaining the veil of ignorance, which then becomes subconscious and almost invisible in the experience of a sentient being. This way of seeing recognizes the ultimate equality of all intents, but it may be harder to understand. Not only that, but one has to know that leaf could become a bug. Obviously most people know just the opposite: that leaf can never become a bug. This is what we call beliefs. If we accept materialistic core beliefs then it makes no sense for leafs to become bugs. But beliefs are mental fabrications at the ultimate level of insight. In other words, beliefs are only true because at some level we make them true ourselves. Very few (and only the most abstract) considerations are inherently true. Most truths we deal with are true only provisionally. Beyond the known manifested and unmanifested features, and into the infinite unknown ones, yes.

There is a difference between fault finding and calling for responsibility. The goal in fault-finding is to spank the faulty person, usually as a sort of scape goat, so as to avoid dealing with the real issue. Responsibility is about asking the person to stop ignoring some aspect of the situation and to deal with it. This might simply involve becoming conscious of the ignored aspect and doing nothing about it. Dealing with the no longer ignored aspect can mean conscious action or conscious and aware inaction. So for example, if I go along the street and someone pilfers my wallet, that's not my fault. But it is my responsibility to some extent to deal with what happened to me and my wallet. Perhaps that's not fair, but that's how life is sometimes. Things become our responsibility whether we like it or not, often through no fault of our own. In some imaginary ideal world things that are not my fault would not become my responsibility to any extent. And finally there are two ways to call for responsibility. One is a selfish and one is compassionate. The selfish way is to lump 100% of responsibility on the person in question. That's a selfish way. This way you feel like you yourself are off the hook, and the troubled person has to pick up 100% of the slack. Compassionate way instead of lumping responsibility shares it or distributes it. So the troubled person picks up say 50% of responsibility, and those who are helping pick up the other 50% of responsibility. This means no one is ever off the hook. We are all in the situation together. We are not abandoning the person even while we call for personal responsibility. Sadly people who call for personal responsibility are often selfish pricks in reality and they just want to shift 100% of the burden onto the victim. However, not everyone who calls for personal responsibility does it as a 100% lump. Some of us do it as a fair distribution instead of a lump, without letting ourselves completely off the hook. Just my 2c.

If they had some wild experiences like false awakenings, lucid dreams, seeing visions in meditation that look as real as anything can be real, etc... perhaps they'd question their assumptions. Or perhaps not. More experience is not always the answer to all our problems. It can help if the person is ready to be helped. But there are people who experience amazing things and simply ignore the amazing experiences or file it all away into a safe mental bin called "hallucination" or "dream" and never think of it again. Sometimes what gets a person out of this condition is a logical argument and not more experience. So sometimes more experience can help and sometimes what helps is more rigorous and more uncompromising reasoning. But underneath all that, I believe there has to be a basic willingness to accept at least some change. If someone is not willing to accept any change in the worldview, I believe that someone will not benefit from anything, be it more experience or better logic. And besides, we tend to think that our way of life, the more magical way, is better. At least I certainly think so. But I imagine many people appreciate a non-magical way much more. It's a matter of taste. Do you like strange things happening all the time? Do you like normality and a solid routine? Do you appreciate that when you open the door to your room, your room is still there just as you expect, instead of a magical forest or some other weird dimension? So what I am saying is, I can appreciate other people wanting to live a less magical and more mechanistic kind of life. The only thing is, if I believe someone reasons incorrectly, I have no respect for that. So I am willing to accept people's choices in some ways, but not always their reasons for those choices. I guess I am not 100% accepting. (only 95%?)

I hear ya. I can't imagine what would the point of power be if power was the top priority. It seems to me power is always acting in service of something else, be it noble or ignoble. Although power for the sake of power can be seen as power working for creativity as the higher purpose. So even power as number one priority can be positive, at least in my mind. So I lied. I can imagine it.

There is no conflict. I would even say that love without power is lukewarm, anemic and helpless. Love is best when inseparable from power. Power is the ability to orchestrate change. It can be violent and males often think of power as violence, but it doesn't have to be violent at all. Most power play (male or female) is subtle and barely noticeable. In fact the best power is subtle power because you cannot resist or block that which you don't see.

I don't believe the truth is at the core of all religions. That's being too kind and too politically correct for my taste. I think all religions are limited and dogmatic to an extent, but some are better than the others, and some religions are downright violent and oppressive in their doctrinal propositions, and only the most politically correct person will fail to see it.

False dilemma. Power has nothing to do with imposition or overcoming resistance (male view of power). Power is the ability to orchestrate change and power can be equally powerful in both male and female aspects. Orchestrating change does not necessitate a male approach to power. Women can be more powerful than men while still being healthy and happy women. Think of it this way. Vacuum is powerful. And so is a pressurized container. Pressurized container bursting outward is male power. Vacuum sucking violently inward is female power. Both kinds of power are equally powerful and equally violent if need be, and/or equally compassionate if need be. A vacuum bomb is an example of yin power at work. A black hole is yin power, female aspect. A star is yang, male aspect. Stars and black holes are equally powerful. It would be stupid to say otherwise. What's more, yang goes into yin and yin goes into yang. There is no clear boundary. Women are partly men and men are partly women. You are part woman vortex. How do you like that?

Exactly. That's why you need to face the music. Use English and clarify your meaning in pure English. No, there are not any kind of stages. You're making up these stages as you go along. These stages can be vividly apparent or even pragmatically useful to you in your life, but they don't actually exist outside your mind, outside your personal taste for such things. Don't be lazy. Use the longer expressions and speak English. Same with any doctrine of no self. It's a logical complement. It's just the other side of the same coin of suffering.

CowTao, I watched more videos on that youtube channel, and I can tell you these guys are physicalists. They don't really see that mind is a fundamental reality. They think the mind is merely a product of brain activity. So while they are smarter than an average bear, they are still stupid.

Very nice. I agree with everything there except the reference to the brain at the end. Now this should be taken further. What this guy calls "infinite" is actually mind. Why? Because finite and infinite are perspectives and not objective reality. There is nothing that's objectively finite nor is there anything that's objectively infinite. When you realize that the entire world is nothing but perspectives, then you realize the mind is the primary reality and not substance or anything else that appears to the mind. Having a perspective, and changing from one perspective to another is what the mind does, voluntarily. The entire analysis this guy performs happens with regard to what is readily apparent. He needs to go further and consider the non-apparent, the so-called "mystical" realm he rejects. For example, when I look in the mirror I recognize the face there as myself. Why? Because I've come to expect myself to look a certain way. This expectation is not something that's readily apparent, but it is there in the mind. I've had a dream when I looked in the mirror and saw nothing. I freaked out. Why? I was expecting to see something. I didn't see what I expected, hence I freaked out. To really sharpen the point, let's consider light. How do I know what light is? I know what light is because I know what darkness is. So for example, if I go into a perfectly dark room, even though there is no contrast that's apparent in the room, just perfect endless darkness, I still recognize it as darkness even in the absence of any contrast as far as the obviously apparent phenomena go. So how do I know it's dark in the dark room? I know it because I also know what light is. So even if there is no contrast for me to go by, I can still compare what I see to everything else that I know. And these things are not merely categories. Like light and dark they are cognitive complements. Cognitive complements are more basic than categories. So in order to see anything in the world I must a-priori know what the world looks like. If I don't know what the world looks like, when I observe the world I don't recognize the world as the world. I will think it's all garbage or even irrelevant background noise. The reason I can recognize the world is because the world exists in my mind as knowledge. I know the world before I see it. If I don't know the world I can't see it, just like if I don't know what my face looks like, I can't see it in the mirror. This is not obvious to everyone. In fact we can examine things further and realize not only does the world exist in mind, but it exists only in my mind, or only in your mind from your perspective. Here I mean it's not just that the mind is what overlays the boundaries over the external-to-the-mind world, but the whole thing, boundaries, and whatever is between them, all of it is in the mind and nowhere else. In the video I get the impression he thinks the mind is merely producing the arbitrary boundaries to overlay on top of the real and external-to-mind world. It's not only the boundaries, it's whatever between them is mind-made too. So a perfect endless smooth stretch of blackness is mind-made because you need to know what light looks like to recognize blackness as blackness. You need a mental context of some sort to have any sort of recognition of any kind, not just the boundaries and contrasts. And to take it even further, this guy should talk about intent. For example, using intent you can transform the leaf on the ground into a bug and have it fly away. That's something this guy doesn't even want to touch with a ten foot pole, because imagine how crazy people will think he is if he says that? But it's true. One huge aspect he doesn't touch on is that all the contents of mind are volitional. They're the way they are in dependence on our volition or intent. How can you walk along the street? When you move your feet you're volitionally changing the relationships in the mind. You're altering meanings in the mind. Of course walking around is a very conditioned, very patterned exhibition of intent, so we don't think of it as magical. An enlightened being can manifest intent in ways that are beyond ordinary habitual patterns and such displays will appear magical and nonsensical to someone who expects familiar patterns. Beyond the manifest being contextualized by known unmanifest, like the manifest perfect darkness appears that way because we know what light is like and this isn't it, so the light is a known which is unmanifest, both light and darkness are contextualized in terms of something else, something hidden. Because all knowns have meaning in terms of unknowns, which are infinite. So when I see the dark room as dark, not only do we have two knowns playing off each other light/dark, but the known light/dark combo is also playing off a total unknown, which for obvious reasons cannot even be named or mentioned since it's unknown. But logically we know known in terms of unknown. We know what it's like to know things because we know what it's like not to. So an unknown is a kind of known too. We know what it's like not to know. At this point we are front and center in the Mystery.

Good. It looks like your way of thinking works well for you, so there is no reason to change it.

Here's another example of how to use the power of the mind: This is a Chinese version of sound healing (or one of many Chinese versions):

Tibetan sound healing from the Bon tradition: Introduction: Syllable A: Syllable OM: Syllable HUNG: Syllable RAM: Syllable DZA: My own note: all these healing techniques rely on the power of mind to heal. These specific videos rely on the chakra mental fabrication to heal the mental fabrication of the body and the mental fabrication of life circumstances. Because all phenomena are mental fabrications, this represents just one way out of a million and one ways to deal with the problem. I'm just putting these videos here to give people a taste of what is possible and not to offer it as some kind of authoritative or exclusive solution. I don't use chakra conceptions for anything at all. I don't use them for spiritual practice and I don't use them for healing either. Nonetheless these techniques are valuable because they show one good example of how you can go about using the power of the mind to heal.

Maybe you can share a story or two when you feel like it. As for keeping my eyes out, they are always out, like a frog.

Here's a healing technique from SpringForestQigong called "Sword Fingers":

I believe you and I respect such methods a good deal. I like what I've heard from Chunyi Lin's Springforest Qigong. However, I don't consider myself qualified to talk about qigong. I do similar things as what Chunyi Lin talks about, but if I coat what I do in Chinese terminology and jargon, I will simply deceive people, which is not my intention. I think my methods are every bit as powerful and effective as any qigong you'll find anywhere, even on Wudang mountains. But I will not call it qigong just to gain more attention or more perceived validity. So, I hope people who feel qualified and competent to talk about qigong will step forward and say something. Looks like you're doing some of that Rainbow, and thank you for that. You are better positioned to talk about qigong than I am. There are many others here who know a thing or two about qigong. Those folks can jump in at any time. Here's an example of what Chunyi Lin talks about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_1sPDntOTs I've also seen other good videos of Chunyi Lin showing how to heal various blockages. Maybe I can find them. The video above is a general practice video which I think will have a healing effect in its own right, even though it's not aimed at healing one specific ailment.

I don't understand this kind of behavior. Instead of taking the site on its own merits you are instead parsing everything there looking to confirm your expectations. You expect every enlightened person to express these insights you picked up from Thusness. When you fail to find them, or even, when the same insights are worded in an unfamiliar manner, you conclude the writing is trash and refuse to make a constructive comment. That's a very ignorant attitude on your part. I think Thusness has significantly damaged your ability to think for yourself. You seem to gingerly admit that the site has some merits. Maybe you can speak of those merits next time. Try to put down your anatta dogma and try to understand what is being said to you on that page as if you're hearing for the first time. Your anatta baggage is really interfering with your comprehension. Go back to normal English. In normal English "no self" means something. Go with that simple meaning. Don't go with your retarded Buddhist perversion of meaning. Once you sort out the matter in normal English, then take another look at the Buddhist jargon and see if perhaps it's a bit nihilistic or off. This is why it's so critical to think for yourself. You need space to get away from all the doctrines and jargon and just think in normal terms, think honestly in a way that reflects how you really feel and think day to day. I think half of your problems will go away once you stop using Pali words altogether. Use only English words. Don't ever say "anatta" one more time, because that kind of jargon hides ignorance behind it. Say "no self" or "not self" etc... Trust me, you'll sound a lot less intelligent once you start using normal English.

Hi K, If you don't like the 'either or' mentality, you may be interested in what David Chalmers has to say. After you replied I've edited another video with David Chalmers at the end of the post. Personally I do reject the reality of matter completely, and there is a good reason for it. I'm just tired of constantly explaining it to people. I used to be a lot more keen on these kinds of explanations in the past, but when these philosophical arguments happen, who am I trying to convince? If I argue for non-materialism am I trying to convince the person I am arguing with or myself? There is probably a lit bit of both. Since I've already convinced myself my desire for such arguments has dropped off significantly. Interested parties can find all sorts of good information about this without my help. After all, I figured it out without a non-physicalist live friend helping me. If I can do it, anyone can.