goldisheavy

I think this is a damn fine advice Stig! Thank you very much.

I suggest you put this confusion on hold and read the rest of the text. Then find a few other translations and read those as well. Then, give it time to digest. Bring it to mind for contemplation for some time, like say for a month. Then if you are still confused, come back with your question. The reason I say this is because it's hard to understand Chuang Tzu's (Zhuangzi's) intent from the first line. So read more first. You'll have a better impression of what Chuang Tzu means if you read more of his thoughts. And since Chuang Tzu didn't speak English, you may want to read multiple translations as well, to make sure you understand the disagreements between translators and to allow your own interpretation to emerge.

First you say this: Then you say Are you sure you're not confused? Because if the second quote is correct, then why would you have a problem with a woman wanting you for your status and material possessions? I think as long as you make a sharp distinction between what you are and what you possess, you'll have trouble understanding the situation. In any case, I think you should try being more down to Earth in your thinking about matters such as these. For example: "I am rich now and of course the woman wants to bathe herself in my riches. I became rich because I enjoy riches. Surely I can understand when another person, a woman, also enjoys riches. I am a lazy man and would accept more riches than I deserve. As a CEO I don't work very hard compared to the workers in my company, and yet I get paid 500 times more for something that's clearly not 500 times more effort. Since I understand myself to be greedy, I can also understand when someone else, a woman, is also greedy and wants to bathe herself in maximum possessions with minimum effort -- that's what I want! Since I enjoy abusing people in order to gain advantage, I understand why a woman will enjoy abusing me to gain an advantage. If I shared all my possession with all the parties that had a hand in my success, I wouldn't be rich at all. No wonder women will marry a man for his money, and divorce to take a half." See, when you come down to Earth like that, it all becomes simple. You don't need Taoism to understand this at all.

Hard to say. This could be good or bad depending on your state of mind. It's like you're saying, "I'm about to drink 2 glasses of water, will it be good for me?" I'd say yes unless you already suffer from water poisoning, in which case I'd say no, as even 1 extra glass could kill you. There is no way to prove emptiness with experience. Because if you single out some experience as proof of the empty nature of phenomena, you probably hold on to the idea that the other phenomena do not make their own empty nature evident. That's a very bad idea to cherish and as long as that idea is there, you don't quite understand emptiness of the Buddhist variety. Hard to say. Is conception a conception? Well, if you understand that there are no stable identities than maybe you understand that there is no substantial difference between what is considered conceptual and what is considered non-conceptual. It's much better and easier to dig into the identity as a principle, and to use other things as examples or targets for your identity contemplation. Once your contemplation of the emptiness of enduring identities of all phenomena reaches maturity, the question about your own identity will have been resolved by then, automatically. On the other hand, if you try to approach your own self-identity head on, you risk becoming deluded, because in that case, the risk is that your mind will attach itself to a conclusion of some kind and will fail to reach an unconcluded and open state. I think this can be both helpful and harmful. It's helpful in a sense that this can lead to a healthy relaxation with regard to phenomena. It's harmful in that the context for "volitive activity has now ceased" is the idea that "volitive activity has previously been operative". However, if you believe that volition can be operative one moment, and yet cease another, you clearly don't understand the nature of volition as a single experiential continuum that embraces strong exertion on one end and utmost non-interference on the other end. You must understand the singleness of this entire continuum of volition and avoid the mistake of associating volition solely with exertion, which is what worldly beings do.

Initiation into Hermetics is like a gym workout. If you do it, you'll get stronger, but you won't know why you're getting stronger. In other words, it lacks the wisdom component and just tells you all the hands-on exercises but not the why behind them. Zen Buddhism is just standard Mahayana Buddhism, and as such, it has a wisdom component. This is what an understanding of the empty nature of phenomena is for. All phenomena are empty of inherent existence -- when you understand what this means and what it implies, you have at least some of the wisdom. One of the things this means is that once you understand emptiness your mind cannot be derailed by any phenomena. In other words, you will no longer be automatically buying into appearances as would be a normal thing to do without such contemplation and wisdom development. Normally when people see a car, they think, "it's a car" and that's it. This means their mind is running away with the appearances, taking them in only at their superficial value. So when it comes to Initiation into Hermetics, I think it has a lot of useful exercises, but if you don't have a wisdom aspect to supplement it with, what might happen is you might become more delusional than the normal deluded state. Normal state of human beings is deluded because when they see appearances they only understand that "something is out there." For example, if the rain is falling on their head, they run for cover. They don't understand that rain is just (there is a disclaimer here tho) an appearance in the mind. They think it's actually, honest to God raining. So appearances tend to take on unwarranted actuality and the mind becomes unimaginative and rigid in dealing with such appearances (hence, no magic, for example). So it's enough that we are deluded about day to day appearances. Now imagine you succeed with IIH and summon an entity. Without wisdom, you will think it's an actual honest to God entity there, and your immersion into the delusive quality of the dream will intensify, as you now have to contend with another added aspect in your dream as if it were real. So for example, this entity might not do what you want and might scare you. Without wisdom, you will definitely be scared, because you will think this entity has actuality behind it. Etc... and all hell might break loose from there on. As for BK Frantzis, I can't comment as well as I can on the other two things, because I haven't read much of BK Frantzis. But from what you are describing here, it seems to have the same flaw as IIH -- namely it appears to lack the wisdom aspect. So what will happen is that at some point some amazing experience will develop and you will think "Aha, this is the actual Universal Consciousness". In some sense, this kind of delusion is not as bad as taking various additional entities for real, but in the long term, it's still as bad because the trap hasn't been disarmed. It's like living on a stick of dynamite. All is fine as long as the fuse doesn't go off. Having wisdom is like having a mental immune system. It's a very good thing. So all these methods, in my opinion, will produce amazing results. In a way, as far as getting results, I think IIH and BK Frantzis are actually better than Buddhism. Buddhism has over-emphasis on the wisdom, but not enough work to teach you how reclaim your status as a mage. But if one has to err though, I think it's better to err on the side of too much wisdom and not enough creativity. If you err on the side of too much creativity and not enough wisdom, that can be a lot worse (at least in the short to medium term). As for the disclaimer above, saying "just an appearance" has a deceptive quality. In one sense it's true that all appearances are "just appearances" but on the other hand, this tends to allow people to underestimate the power behind some appearances. Some appearances have apparent inertia, and are not easy to change under certain conditions. So for example, if you are stuck in a fire, you can make it so that you don't burn and don't suffocate... and just because that ability is possible we can say "it's just an appearance." But because doing that is non-trivial under many conditions, we need to have a healthy doze of respect for appearances and not call them "just an appearance" without at least some caution. This respect for appearances should not translate into buying into those appearances though. So there is plenty of nuance here.

If I lived in Australia within 10-30 mins of the place, I'd check it out.

Taken from http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/chomsky1.html I thought this was very insightful and very relevant to people here as well.

It's not a big deal. I just thought it was funny. I guess the original point got exhausted and it was the right time for the thread to go into a new direction.

Marble, since I've had some exchanges with you already, I have come to believe that you neither understand nor even want to understand non-physicalism. Therefore I will say that your statement above is nonsense, but I am not going to bother to justify it, as I understand you already made up your mind and don't give a rats ass. Impossible. The best physicalists can manage is to ignore their reliance on spiritual ideas. It's nothing more than a pretense. If you confront physicalists about feelings or dreams, they won't deny those, but they will give a cop-out excuse "oh it's just brain chemicals dancing... there are no real feelings, just the signals in the brain." Basically they will deny their own experience in preference to their conceptual model, which is completely faith-based, as there is no way to receive evidence of substance, since all you have are the senses, and deducing substance from just sense-appearances is utterly impossible -- thus substance is always an assumption, a faith. Substance is like the Christian God. You take it on faith as a physicalists, because there is no evidence of something other than insubstantial sense-appearances. Buddhists are non-physicalist atheists. Atheism does not imply physicalism. Atheism means you do not believe in a deity, that's all. Buddhists do not believe in a deity, but Buddhists also do not believe in substance. If you believe in substance, you're not a Buddhist. I won't even dignify this with an answer. Send me a PM if you ever get serious.

This is funny. Somehow this thread turned into "Isn't Chomsky just the best?" adoration. Yes, I like Chomsky too, but that's not why I posted the quote. I think Chomsky was trying to make an interesting point in that quote... Maybe I should have attributed the quote to "anonymous" so as to not divert attention from the contents of the quote to the character of the author. This is how the copyright law gets in the way of good discussion sometimes.

Further reference on Buddha's views on kamma: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors...kammafruit.html

I don't know. If he simply states that awareness is in some way separate from phenomena and just leaves it at that, I believe he's hoping that you will intuitively agree or agree based on your own prior analysis. Awareness can be shown to have a non-fluctuating aspect to it. You can do that by examining fluctuations themselves and noticing that fluctuations have context and that context does not fluctuate relative to the fluctuation under examination. So for example, let's say you see a wave appear in the ocean, approach in your direction and collapse on the shore. You could say the wave arose and ceased. However, this cannot happen in vacuum. As it was about to arise, you had a proper context primed for such discernment. This context did not itself arise together with the wave. So the context is many many "things" (everything other than wave). It's things like you standing at the shore. You having your eyes open. You being in good health. You being not intoxicated. And so on. I just show a crude tip of the iceberg here. Now, you can notice that contexts can change too. That's fine. So you can regard context as a phenomenon in and of itself. In that case you will have to recognize that context changes within a wider context. And so forth. This is the endless contextuality of perception. There is no limit or boundary which you can reach whereupon you might proclaim, "I now know the context in full; I now have exhaustive knowledge of the context." This non-exhaustion of context is one of the reasons Buddhists talk about emptiness. Since you can always point to something unchanging during change, it is possible to see that change is not the ultimate nature of phenomena. Buddha use references to change only to attack the idea that there is some unchanging substance. However Buddhas do not mean to propose change as a new kind of dogma because the aim is to combat all mental fixations rather than to develop a "correct" mental fixation.

For reference: This is a Sutta and a commentary that describe how Buddha's conception of kamma differed from some other (simpler and more naive) ideas about kamma during Buddha's time. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.101.than.html

All insight is indeed experiential. Thus claiming some insight as "experiential" is wrong, because you're implying that some other insight is non-experiential. And VH has indeed confirmed this when he said he used the word "experiential" to distinguish conceptual from non-conceptual insight. My point was that insight is just insight. It's beyond categories. It shouldn't be labeled as "experiential" because what other kind is there? It's like saying "wet liquid water". What kind of other-than-wet liquid water is there? Isn't all liquid water wet? If yes, let's not call it wet liquid water. Let's just say "liquid water" and we're done.

No, we use words like shimmeringness to start a discussion. Luminosity is actually beyond fluctuations, but to understand this you must first draw attention to the process of fluctuations and look at it, checking it for self-sufficiency. Are changes self-sufficient? If you answer yes, you don't need luminosity as a concept, but if you answer no, you mean to say changes are empty and then you need luminosity to explain how is it that changes can proceed at all if they are not self-sufficient. Luminosity is not empty of anything because it's not a thing in the first place, and it's not a process. If luminosity were an object, of course it would be empty. Luminosity as a word of English language is empty. The finger is empty, but not the proverbial moon. We use emptiness to go beyond emptiness. Are pre-conditions fully sufficient to produce the next event? Buddha's answer is no. This is why events are not exactly conditioned. They are not unconditional either. We use the apparent conditionality to begin our examination, but we don't stop there. We keep going. All definitive statements can be criticized -- that's the point of Prasangika-Madhyamaka. Even very beautiful statements, when taken to be definitive fall under Bodhisattvas' critical gaze. The traditional Hindu view, which Buddha has poo-poo'ed, was that pre-conditions determine the next event definitely, certainly and completely. Thus, your were bound to karma in a deterministic fashion, like a train is bound to the railroad. So in Hindu view, whatever you do now determines, 100%, what will happen to you in the future. Buddha has rejected this point of view. In Buddha's understanding past karma, thus pre-conditions are operative but non-absolute. Thus according to Buddha it's possible to change one's destiny for the better, no matter what actions you have performed in the past. In Hindu's view, once you, say kill someone, you will experience the effect of that killing in a definite and strictly determined manner. In Buddha's view the picture is more complicated because, basically, conditionality is empty, and emptiness doesn't just mean conditionality can function (emptiness is required for function), it also means it's unstable and has an element of chaos to it.

Processes are more subtle than things, that's one. Second, things are not all that should be considered. So if you only consider things, you're still missing the point. Is Nirvana a thing? No. Is it a process? Also no. Since such mystical concepts as Nirvana exist, you cannot call your work "done" if all you examine are things. Luminosity is not a thing and it's not an event. When does luminosity begin? When does it end? If it's an event, it must be time bound. But if you dare to point at a beginning or end of luminocity, you will fail in a debate with qualified opponents (of which I am one).

Sorry, I fundamentally disagree. Luminosity is a quality of shimmeringness or livingness of awareness. It's a sense that there is experience (even if that experience is an experience of nothingness) rather than a non-experience. There is no such thing as non-perception or aperception from the ultimate point of view. Perceptions can be very subtle and unfamiliar, and that's the problem. Because perception can lie outside of what we are wiling to validate using our validation framework, we think there is a state of aperception. In reality the flaw lies with our validation framework, which we need to revise and question. This is addressed in the Surangama Sutra. To give you an simple example, when the person opens their eyes, they say, "I see". When they close their eyes or enter into a dark room they say, "I can't see". The real answer is "you can see darkness". Seeing darkness and seeing little specs of light with your eyes closed is still seeing, but ordinary being have a validation framework with which they compare objects of sight. So if the objects matches a valid idea, let's say you see a lamp, and lamp is a valid idea of a valid object, you recognize it as "seeing". Buddhists learn to unlearn this habit though. This is seen as a phenomenological trap in Buddhism. So if you come to a point in meditation where you recognize absence of what you thought perception were, that's still a perception and the problem is with what you thought valid perception were like -- your validation framework. That's an unhelpful and deluded distinctions because concepts are only known as they are experienced and experiences that you consider "non-conceptual" are indeed symbolic. To understand why, you need to understand the nature of symbols. Again, it's your validation framework that's blocking your insight right now. Currently you will only acknowledge certain experiential formations as concepts but not others. This is a bias and a prejudice that's peculiar to your own mentality. You can, with practice, undo it.

Interdependent arising is not a thing, true. But because it is a process it is still subject to criticism.

Luminosity is not an event though. Thus it does not arise and does not cease. You need luminosity to be operative prior and post arising, prior and post cessation to notice such events (arising is an event, cessation is an event). There is no such thing as "experiential" insight. Don't get arrogant. All insights are just insights. Saying that some insights are "experiential" is just being puffed up over one's mystical experiences and nothing more. In Buddhism there is indeed an acknowledgment of transcendent quality, so don't try to talk your way out of it. I can quote straight from Pali Canon, not to mention Mahayana Sutras to support this. So interdependent arising is not "the God of Buddhism" so to speak. Don't over-adulate it. It's a good tool. Use it. Don't marry it.

Is there a condition under which dependent origination is inoperative? If yes, then dependent origination is itself dependent, but then it also means that dependent origination is not always what it seems to be, as it implies a transcendent and independent quality. If no, then dependent origination is itself independent, thus showing that dependent origination is not the whole story, again. You can use dependent origination against itself. And you should. That doesn't mean dependent origination is false or useless, but let's say, it is a lot more mysterious and less obvious than some people imagine it to be. There are other way to attach DO. So all the DO lovers should not be too smug, imo. DO is a great tool though. Also I like interdependent arising as a better translation. DO is a bad translation in my view. Interdependent arising highlights the bi-directionality of conditionality. Bi-directionality is important to understand. So for example, things that affect mind are, in that exact same relation, also affect by mind. In other words, it's not the case that a produces b produces c and so on. It's more correct to think this way: a <---> b <---> c <-----------------> There is no predefined vector within dependence. It is our mind that creates the directionality. There is no inherent directionality within phenomena.

And I will say, if you cannot test something, why are you accepting it at all? Why would something untestable have currency in conversation at all, except for the artistic value? Furthermore, how does building a social hierarchy that dispenses signs of authorization (like certificates, degrees, lineage seals of approval, etc.) improve the value of untestable information? If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig. If you polish a turd it still doesn't shine. This is excellent. So what makes you and your art valuable is that it can be tested. It's not your credentials that make it valuable. We can test those too. We test them by performing critical analysis. We test them by performing thought experiments. And we test them by sincerely embodying the concepts we wish to test in our very lives to see if they make a difference. It's definitely possible to test any worthwhile spiritual, philosophical, or social idea. It might be tricky in some cases, but not impossible. And I think it's worth the effort too.