goldisheavy

It's a good response and not a game. The truth is that no statement can capture Dharma perfectly and every teaching that tries to express Dharma can be improved upon. That's not a game, that's the dance of wisdom. Or you can think of it as an educational game.

I didn't see it personally but I am certain it's a rocket. I base my certainty on one of the videos where the trajectory is pretty obvious and it's a trajectory of rocket.

Nice!

This kind of fixed attitude is an obscuration. Any fixation creates suffering, including neutral fixation. Strictly speaking nothing can be thought of as "in and of itself" since nothing has an authentic established self. There is no such thing as "thought in and of itself." The self doesn't arise no matter what. Even if you cling it doesn't arise. Clinging is empty and no amount of clinging causes the self to arise. In Buddhism this is axiomatic. Not exactly. There are no actions in the sense that actions cannot be delineated reliably and authentically. All thoughts are equivalent to no-thought since thoughts cannot be delineated reliably and authentically. If you have any kind of self, it can never diminish by definition. If something diminishes, it isn't self. On the other hand, if you have no self, you can't lose yourself, ever. But yourself is not the same thing as self. Yourself is a colloquial term and self is a technical one. Self doesn't exist. But you exist. You are not a self but you are yourself and not someone else.

I find many parallels and agreements between Buddhism and Taoism, but I also appreciate their uniqueness. I like Chuang Tzu on his own terms, and not as some Buddhist-lite or some shit like that. At the same time I like many vajrayana practitioners on their own terms and not as Daoists-lite. I am also completely happy to accept Dzogchen on their own terms and not as continuation of Buddhism. I always find it hilariously funny when Dzogchen people try to establish their Buddhist cred and bona fides prior to speaking. Who cares? What if Dzogchen has nothing to do with Buddhism? Does that make it worse or less valid? Not in my eyes. But a lot of people cling to lineage way too much and they believe teachings are worthless unless they can trace themselves back to Buddha Gotama or back to Lao Tzu or back to Fu Hsi or whatever.

This is the most insane and logically incoherent statement I've ever read from you CowTao. Seriously. I am disappointed. Aspiring after the levels of realization and liberation means deviating from bodhi, Aspiring to obtain happiness is the great suffering, Aspiring to attain the state beyond thought is another thought: If you understand this, do not seek anything else! --Princess Gomadevi Or this translation: Hoping for bhumis and liberation postpones enlightenment; Hoping to attain bliss is great suffering; Hoping for nonthought is itself a thought: When you realize this, give up seeking.

That's a very false and ignorant statement. That kind of meditation is not "common to pretty much any tradition" as you put it. You can crank it down the same way you cranked it up. Use your intent. Do a cold water visualization in the same area and allow yourself to feel a soothing feeling. You should drop your pride of the heat, because it's your pride in that "achievement" that keeps it going. Once you distance yourself emotionally and mentally from the heat, you'll find it won't be too hard to pacify it.

I recommend skipping the first 30 minutes of the talk, straight to the science portion of the talk, which is what's new and interesting. The first 30 mins contains all the boring stuff we've heard, oh, about 1000 times or so. Thank you for posting this CowTao. I loved the science portion of the talk.

Get lost. Seriously.

Yes, I think under certain conditions logical contradictions do arise given these two beliefs. If you believe that the soul of a person is objectively a thing, obviously one thing can only be in one place at a time. This means, if the soul reincarnated, it's not available as an ancestral spirit. If the soul is sticking around as an ancestral spirit, it either chose not to reincarnate or failed to reincarnate in some way. If you believe that people instead of souls have individual mindstreams, that's a little different. A mindstream is less thing-like than a soul. A mindstream is still unique and individual, but just like any stream, it can split and flow into two different directions simultaneously and both resultant streams can claim to be the same "ancestral" stream. So at this point your conception is less thing-like, but it is still halfway thing-like. You can go even further than that. You can say that mindstreams are individual only with respect to potentiality, but not with respect to any actuality. What does this mean? It means you don't consider any experiences or events as actual. Instead you think of them as merely vividly apparent as opposed to granting them any degree of actuality. Then mindstream's individuality is expressed in terms of different visionary potentials and not in terms of different actualities. If you can understand what it means, you could say that I carry the likenesses of individualities of various people in my own mindstream, while you do the same from your own perspective and that neither is more nor less valid, neither is actual, but both can be apparent within their own POV. What this means is that when I die, I may experience reincarnation, but someone who used to know me as a friend, will retain a likeness of me in their mindstream and that likeness will be available to speak as an ancestral spirit. In this way of thinking, neither the ancenstral spirit appearance nor the appearances that arise to my own perspective are inherently valid or inherently invalid. This mode of understanding is the hardest to understand because it is non-substantialist at its core and is highly abstract. So depending on how refined your understanding is, there either is or is not a conflict. Considering that most people who believe in spirits tend to think of spirits as actual things, there probably is some degree of conflict between the two views.

What would that entail? A big negative number? Hmm... I hope most of us here are beyond such things. Maybe I am naive.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/07/tom-lubbock-brain-tumour-language I read this and it was very fascinating. I say it is brilliant. It is very spiritual and revealing to my mind. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Actually I am not against a well thought out moderation/karma system but such a system will practically never appear on any commonly used php forum software. Such systems are hard to design well and easy to design wrong, just like encryption software. Anyway, I don't think the pluses and minuses are a big deal if they're just there for personal information of forum users. If moderators make their decisions based on those, at least in the naive and silly state this forum's karma design is in, that would be a shame.

Marble, but lots of posts are valuable to me and I don't click the "plus" sign. I think it's idiotic and I refuse to participate. That doesn't mean my failure to click some buttons indicates lack of value. So if someone makes judgements based on that number, those are probably flawed judgments.

I agree completely. Look at it this way... e-sangha was heavy on moderation, and where are they now? Their karma was to crash and burn. Any place that tries to control what people say is a dishonest place and it is destined to fall sooner or later. I'm all for disagreements and debates, but shutting someone up is wrong. I would only make an exception to this policy for obvious abuse, such as posting 20 links to some commercial site, etc... Basically using TTB as a free sales platform is spam and abuse. So anyone who uses TTB as a free sales platform should be banned. If you want to discuss spiritual matters, stick around, even if your opinion is unpopular and even if you curse every 3rd word. I have no problem. If you want to sell crap, buy ads like every other business, but don't post on forums. That's the only kind of moderation I approve of. If you're a long time member who participated in many meaningful discussions and you want to recommend some book or product, fine. If you are here and all 3 of your posts are sales pitches, that's not fine.

Here's an interesting blog post about Buddha's death, based on Stephen Batchelor's research (of the Pali Canon) and writings: http://ecbuddhism.blogspot.com/2010/03/buddha-untold-story-who-killed-gautama.html

Well if you read Pali Canon, it's pretty clear that Buddha decided to die. Buddha gave Ananda a chance to ask for Buddha to stick around, given Buddha's psychic ability to do so. Buddha asked Ananda three times about it and three times Ananda didn't understand that it may be a good idea to ask Buddha to live longer. So Buddha decided enough is enough, time to die. Also Buddha had an encounter with Mara where he said something like, "Oh don't trouble yourself Mara, as I am not going to be in this world much longer." Something like that. So basically Buddha died according to his own intention to die, if you believe the stories anyway. And if not, there is no point in discussing it anyway. When Buddha died he was kind of old, right? Wasn't he 80? Many people die before that age. But again, those are the stories. We have no way to verify this kind of information about Buddha's life now.

Presumably two Buddhas would simply agree with each other. However Buddhas argue with sentient beings all the time. It's essential. Even highly developed Buddhists who are considered to be high level Bodhisattvas and who can perform miracles, they argue. Read here about the debates between Candrakirti and Candragomin, both while not Buddhas would effectively be Buddhas to you considering their wisdom and yours: http://books.google.com/books?id=bzb-Gih7k1EC&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=candrakirti+debate+candragomin&source=bl&ots=tQY-huqOPl&sig=07_lIzEX6dQiPULSQxv5GSls_dE&hl=en&ei=pg3aTJ-zPIu8sQOXrbmKCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=candrakirti%20debate%20candragomin&f=false

I used an NLP technique before even knowing someone else called it 'NLP'. This just shows that many of these things are primordial wisdom and available to us all if we only listen. Anyway, I found that when cars honked I jumped a bit. I didn't like that. What I would do is replay the events in my mind as they occurred, but without me jumping. Did that work? You bet. After doing this only a few times all jumping stopped. Did I get enlightened? Not really. It was just a small and practical effect. I already knew at the time that the mind was very powerful, so when it worked, it wasn't big news to me. I think NLP is very valuable in the same way energy practice is -- it is functional. It gets you some level of tangible here and now results. It can also help you become wiser and more enlightened by allowing you to see just what is possible when you use your mind creatively. Also, if you look at some of the Buddhist meditations with meditational deities, you'll see that it's straight up NLP, but Buddhists had it thousands of years ago. Take for example this sequence of meditations done over some years: first you meditate with Buddha's head facing yours. Then you meditate with Buddha's head over yours. Then you meditate with Buddha's head inside your head. Then you meditate replacing your head with Buddha's head. Then you mediate inside the Buddha's whole body. Then you do the same meditation and recognize yourself as Buddha. There is a practice like this in Buddhism. In a way NLP is just many of the same techniques practiced in spiritual circles but without the baggage of foreign traditions, and plus with some extra Western baggage instead. So you get rid of a lot of baggage and add some of our own baggage, and that's what you get. That's my view of it.

I always thought that the Australian aborigines had an interesting culture that's worth studying. I never withheld my respect to begin with, so it's kind of an absurd topic.

It is no easy task to separate a drunk from his bottle.

I'm going to throw this wildly unscientific guess out there: it's because you loved her! Isn't it amazing? People can love each other and sometimes they love each other despite the abuse. So why does this happen? It happens because we recognize that a person is not 100% this or 100% that and even people like Hitler had some redeeming qualities. Anyway, it's time to relax and let it pass. There is no need to deny anything or pretend anything, just wait a bit and time will help. Also some perspective helps too.

Post some quotes. I am having hard time getting excited about this book. What is good about it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/magazine/07religion-t.html?_r=2&partner=rss&amp=&%2359;pagewanted=all&%2359;emc=rss&pagewanted=all If you get hit with an annoying registration page, all you need to do to get rid of it is to clear the cookies for nytimes.com domain and reload the page. (In Firefox, right-click on the page, select "view page info", then "security" at the top right of the popup, then "cookies", then click "delete cookie" a number of times until all the nytimes.com cookies disappear; I'm using Firefox 4 beta, but I am pretty sure it's more or less the same for FF 3.6). Interesting article.