goldisheavy

Now that you mentioned art, I should mention something. All great artists and all great art proceed from spiritual flaws. A person needs a craving to be an artist. A person needs to want to share some message with humanity. Art becomes authentic in proportion to how straightforwardly and faithfully an artist expresses oneself. By necessity, at the limit of sincerity, the convention has to buckle in the face of great art, because all convention demands that participating beings suppress certain parts of themselves, and a great artist reaches a state of lack of inhibition in pursuit of sincere expression. This lack of inhibition will fly in the face of convention quite naturally. So without any desire or attempt to copy anyone, simply by having a craving to share some kind of message, an artist reaches the apex of one's art at the same time convention becomes privately transcended by that same artist. So these flaws lead to states beyond the flaws under the right circumstances. So as an artist, what personal flaws do you bring to the table? What cravings? What passion? If you yap about dispassion all day long, is that your passion? Are you sincere? An artist without passion is just a machine of no consequence and no interest whatsoever. Boring. From a Buddhist POV passions are poisons, and yet you need those poisons to be a great artist.

By the way, if your art is anything like what you talk about here on this forum, then I won't be surprised if your art is some pathetic Xerox of some other artists you admire.

Art? You mean, expressing yourself within the allowable limits of convention is your creativity? You want to be a regular human being, right? Cause that's what I see. You're happy being a human. You have the same aspirations, hopes, dreams and fears as a human. When your body wears itself out, you'll die as a human having been born a human. Since your craving for humanity is not yet over, after your body enters into a dysfunctional state your own mind will reform a human-like realm where it can continue to pursue its human-like cravings and delusions. Is this satisfactory for you? If yes, by all means, you shouldn't change a thing. Keep plugging.

So, what is the difference between a Xerox machine and yourself? Approaching yogic doctrines from a POV of scholar is a total waste of time. Scholars imagine there is some objective and impartial way of understanding whatever they study. The scholars do not understand they bring their biases, hopes, and fears into everything they study. Their impartiality is simply a pretense. And the objectively "correct" way of understanding any yogic doctrine simply doesn't exist as such. There is no such thing. Yogic doctrines were created by yogis for personal enjoyment and consumptions of other yogis. They are to be digested and mixed with personal experience and sensibilities. There's no way to be unbiased about them. Instead these doctrines should be approached with an attitude of "How can this enhance my experience?" Yogis have a personal, intimate relationship with the teachings. Five yogis have five different and equally valid approaches to the same set of teachings. They're valid on account of intimacy as opposed to being reflective of some non-existent objective standard. You can tell a real yogi by how they speak. They tend to be familiar with the doctrines, but they don't need to quote them and they generally have their own way of expressing profound truths. You can also tell by the values they bring to conversation. Is adherence to a doctrine an important value? If yes, then it's definitely not a yogi. Is personal experience important? Then it's probably a yogi. Or you can observe how the person weighs convention vs private experience. If the private experience is held higher than convention, that's a yogi. If convention is held higher, then it's an ordinary being. The point here is not that you should try to be more like a yogi. On the contrary. Be whoever you like and do whatever you enjoy doing. That's what I am saying. But meanwhile, try to understand, you can't fool the noble Sangha by constantly quoting this or that snippet of whatever. If you want to belong to the Sangha, you need to move beyond quotations and doctrines. In other words, if you want to be a part of this community, you can't continue as before.

Do you consider quoting people you admire to be creative?

Sure you're obsessed. Look at the content of your posts. What do you tend to talk about? You always dress up your personal opinions in the words of others. So you quote this or that, or you speak from this or that doctrine. You're always hiding behind the achievements of others and you're never naked. Take away madhyamaka, dzogchen and other fluff, and what do you have left? What can you discuss? Do you ever do anything other than recycle the words of others? Have you found anything for yourself that wasn't printed in some book?

He doesn't have a single original thought because he's too afraid to stand on his own two feet.

What you lack is appreciation. You're obsessed with the doctrines. This is like being obsessed with the screwdrivers.

You're completely clueless. You speak as if there is some objective meaning behind Dzogchen or Madhyamaka. This is why I continue to suggest that people like you should not worry about discerning the doctrines. It's a waste of time. Instead, try to understand yourself. Understand your limitations and overcome them. Can you?

So that's what you got out of what I said? If this is the level of your reading comprehension, you can be certain that you don't understand anything you've read so far. I mean, you bring this same mindset to everything else you read too. I'm sure you don't turn on this kind of bad reading comprehension exclusively to read my posts. lol This must be a pretty constant quality for you.

You didn't understand anything I said. I wasn't comparing views in terms of superiority and inferiority.

All this is nonsense. I'm too lazy to reply point by point. So I am going to ignore it and reply to the last line. Trying to convey the nature of the various paths using literary devices of path lengths is not a good way to convey anything. Why not? Because there is no objective standard of judgment.

There is no objective standard for accuracy. Even if 10 people think strawberry ice cream is the best, it doesn't mean anything much.

I think I need to be explicit here, because people don't take subtle hints well. When I say "points the mind back to itself" a lot of you don't get what I am actually saying. So let me completely rephrase it. When most people think of the mind, they think it's something inside the skull, something small, something that perceives and inter-operates with some environment that is objective and external to the mind. The main good thing about Yogacara is that it completely and radically rejects this view. There is nothing outside the mind. There is no real interaction, but only appearance of such, because all the "parts" are not true parts, since they do not have individual existences. In other words, what appears as an assemblage of parts or things is just an illusion. What appears external is also an illusion. In some sense you really need to hold a solipsist view here to practice yoga correctly. The problem with solipsism though is that it constitutes a rigid commitment, just like Madhyamaka is a rigid commitment, whrereas a flexible mind is a mind that can undertake any commitment. In solipsism the commitment is to one's own perspective. In Madhyamaka the commitment is to avoiding the views like the plague. However, what a yogi would ideally want is none of the above. Instead, a yogi wants flexibility. How can you be flexible with a mind chained to just one commitment? Why not believe in God for a week? Why not be a physicalist for a week? Why not be a mind-only adept for a week? Of course, the reason is results. If you go south for a week, you don't go very far south. If you go north for a week, you don't go very far north compared to if you went north for 50 years. However, once you've criss-crossed the whole Earth, do you really need to go South for 50 years? Of course not. That's the exercise of someone who is still exploring the surface of the Earth. Once you understand the surface, you can now go whereever, at will. And this freedom is the ultimate goal in the end. I suggest that people here really explore solipsism fully before doing anything else. That's because solipsism is the most vicious and most direct counter to the idea of objective reality. Only this slam will be enough to dislodge the mind from its dormant state for many of you people. Anything else is just too subtle and too non-confrontational to do any real work before your body exhausts itself in this lifetime.

You missed the point.

Madhyamaka's ultimate view is absence of views. Madhyamaka fails to produce confidence in the mind for this reason: it consists purely of denials. It doesn't assert or defend anything that would be reliable for a practitioner. Of course that's the whole point. But that's a double-edged sword. This can be very bad for many people. In fact, I don't like madhyamaka and I consider it worthless for myself, even though I understand it completely and I know what its secret intention is. In other words, Madhyamaka purposefully dispenses with narratives, but narratives is how people gain (and lose) power. The point is, it's infinitely superior to switch to an empowering narrative instead of simply trying to dismantle all the narratives. And the cool thing is that it's possible to hold a narrative with confidence while also knowing it has no ultimate truth. This is something Madhyamaka doesn't teach. This is purely a yogic/tantric endeavor. Which is to say, learning how to manipulate one's own worldview to one's own advantage is the endeavor of those who want to learn how to transform their own experiences in an infinite variety of ways as opposed to growing comfortable and acquiescent to whatever appears by default through the power of calcified habit. There is no objective way to determine the length of the path, btw. All the claims of seven lifetimes, aeons, etc... it's all just posturing.

Weird that you think the clumsy eight consciousness model is what Dzogchen teachings borrow. Splitting the mind into eight distinct consciousnesses is probably the worst aspect of yogacara. The main point of yogacara is to point the mind back to itself. In simple terms, the practitioner should seek to understand the power of one's own mind. Holding different kinds of worldviews confidently is part of the mind's power. Each worldview generates a different kind of realm. Doing this unconsciously and through clinging is samsara. Understanding this power and regulating one's own worldview accordingly is nirvana.

This is like saying that clinging to a mommy's leg gives one confidence to run freely.

On the contrary. The two truths doctrine, which by the way Dzogchen rejects, is a trap because it robs the person of confidence. Under the influence of the two truths doctrine the person continues to cling to convention and fears entering extraordinary states of experience (mind).

Namdrol could never win a debate with me. There is little point in posting his words. If Namdrol wants to try his hand, he can show up here and do so himself.

So (supposedly) an irrefutable view of Madhyamaka is not a security honeypot for the ego? This must be a joke. Indeed. Read something like "Buddhahood without Meditation" which is from a later cycle, and you can see mind-only all over it. The mind-only language always sneaks back in. There is no need to be ashamed or to avoid it. It's not logical inherently. It appears logical. There is nothing that is inherently so, remember? LOL Ego security? So a view that supposedly cannot be assailed in a debate has nothing to do with ego security? Do I get this right? I don't know about "never." There can be some surprises, sure.

I don't like this formulation of the pitfall, because it's too theoretical. What's the practical implication? What can those people who haven't fallen into the pitfall do that those who have fallen into the pitfall cannot? That's what needs to be made clear. If there is no practical difference, then there is little point in such abstract distinction. The whole point of the mind-only doctrine is to alter the quality of one's experience in a fundamental way. Since the mind is ultimately a capacity rather than some object, mind-only is already perfect from the start, and that's why it's been preached in the semsde series of Tantras to begin with. There was never a strict need to correct such exposition or improve it, but nonetheless Tibetans went ahead and improved it with the further cycles of Dzogchen Tantras. The whole point of the mind-only doctrine is to foster mental flexibility in the context of confidence. Madhyamaka has a flaw in that it doesn't develop confidence, since it appears to deny the mind's existence by relying on reason, which is a quality of the mind. This is why Madhyamaka is best suited for debates as opposed to meditation and/or yoga. In yoga you're not trying to win a debate, and so the conceptual cleanliness of Madhyamaka is pointless, since you're not doing yoga to impress others with your conceptual cleanliness. To do yoga properly you need confidence and certainty, as opposed to vacuous abstractions. Ordinary source of confidence is convention, which is no good for yoga. Both mind-only and madhyamaka uproot convention, however madhyamaka leaves one confused in the end, with nothing to lean on. This only appears like a good thing to those who prize conceptual cleanliness or a conceptual roundness and smoothness. But yoga is not just some ball of concepts. In the course of yoga practice you need to learn mental flexibility. You need confidence to succeed. Confidence cannot be given by hazy concepts which don't even appear to dismantle physicalism/convention strongly, and madhyamaka is so refined that I've seen many people claim to be prasangikas while still fully clinging to physicalism at the same time, which is amazing, and is evidence of how pitiful madhyamaka is in practice. All these doctrines are skillful means as Namdrol said. And Madhyamaka is pitiful because its pursuit of absolute smoothness and perfect symmetry in its conceptual outline is wasted on most people. In other words, madhyamaka is generally not helpful and not skillful. Understand that your mind exists as a capacity primordially. It has no starting point. It has no ending point. Understand that all that you know and experience are states of mind. Understand that all is conditioned by volition. From this point forward, develop more and more mental flexibility, continually seeking to recover more and more primordial freedom. That's the path of simplicity and confidence. You don't take what I say here into a debate. You use it for yoga. If you want to debate with chuckleheads, feel free to use Madhyamaka to win arguments. When you retreat back to your own space, drop Madhyamaka and use mind-only doctrine for actual practice. That's my advice. Basically Madhyamaka is for others. Mind-only is for oneself. Madhyamaka is public. Mind-only is intimate. That's the distinction.

People always try to figure out how everything is. This "everything is" is a collapse of infinite possibilities into just one. But because all such collapsed states are questionable precisely because of other possibilities, there is no calm, no rest in looking for how everything is. There isn't any single way in which everything abides. Instead you are left with possibilities. To take one of these possibilities and rest in it fully without denying other possibilities is one way to exercise one's freedom. This way you can, for example, go west without hesitation, even though the entire time you go west you know you could have been going east or south or up. To make a choice while understanding other choices are just as valid, to be certain of that choice without demanding a collapse of possibilities, it is to become at ease with one's subjectivity.

Why don't you think about it. I could give you a link or spell it out, but why?

Is there anyone here who thinks they can get fresh results while fully clinging to a stale worldview? Everyone here already knows what sort of results are attainable using physicalism as the worldview.