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I'd agree, no essence.

Nope, I don't have to let personal stylistic preferences blind me to the ultimate truth. Taoists should know that. I was just wondering if Taoism is compatible with gritty complexity for a change. We're supposed to believe in a natural balance of opposites, so you'd think that makes sense, but no. Apparently, the Tao is simple, NOT complex. Ah well, Taoism is only relevant to the simple side of my spirituality then. Thanks for sharing your experiences! If there's a (no doubt soteriologically relevant) cul-de-sac, I think it's getting absorbed in an all-embracing, illusory simplicity or an equally illusory complexity that obscures one's awareness of the other side. I hope you don't mind me being frank about my opinions. I can't post a detailed response since you've given me nothing to go on save for cryptic hints that I'll waste my life on complexity and then, if saved, die a simple man, (lol) so read the above posts to find out why I don't buy into views partial to simplicity. I'm aware that western philosophy presents a very one-sided report of how reality works, but I think the ones who preach simplicity at the expense of complexity just replace one warped view with another. How can you have flexibility if you're not prepared to look at the whole picture? And I can't see how simplicity alone can be the complete picture. Not only is it counter-intuitive, the reasons advanced for it don't make sense to me either. I'm just disappointed they turned out to be the usual anti-awareness arguments. "Look away from the rational mind and you'll see it our way." I know that. The difference is that once I'm done looking away, I look back. And whenever possible, I prefer to look both ways simultaneously. (although complexity holds more attractions for me, personally) Hopefully, not at all. There's no reason to be attached to complexity in order to believe it's as relevant to spirituality as simplicity is. (just my personal opinion on the subject) Thanks!

Thanks, I promise not to lose sight of the overall idea of philosophies and religions when embroiled in their details and vice-versa. PS. I'm turning in. It's 5 AM and I've been awake all night. cya!

Sorry to say, this is exactly what I mean when I say that oversimplification glosses over subtlety. This is a generalization. Plus, I would question what you mean by "look at". If you mean "get a superficial feel for", especially aspects that are obvious and/or immediately relevant, then I agree. But if you mean "to thoroughly understand the totality of", then it's often simpler to begin with a bottom-up approach. "Look at" the fundamental building blocks and work your way up, then turn around, "look at" the structure in a holistic light and work your way down to areas of interest. Perceive the object analytically, holistically, phenomenologically, ... in every rational view that applies to it at the same time. Each of those views has its place in the complete picture. This is the best way to fully internalize something "in its totality". That is, "simplicity" consists of a small, but wide collection (ie. a flywhisk sample) of holistic clues about the object. "Complexity" is the totality. Again, I disagree with your metaphysical outlook. This is not at all how I visualize complexity. For me, complexity is a celebration of the richness of experience. What's more, I can prove that while your view is beneficial in certain scenarios, it can also result in a skewed picture of reality when held to exclusion of other perspectives: (watch in full-screen if possible) Simplicity is merely superficial experience arising out of deeper processes within the object. Once more, I disagree that objects have an "essence" apart from the phenomena giving rise to the details presented to our senses. Is this a necessary component of Taoist beliefs? The simpler the view, the less we know about the object. Nor by looking at a zen sketch of one, which is the simplest and most holistic view of a pig I can think of. By studying the tail, we can know the totality of the tail, including the knowledge that it's attached to something else. Uh huh. Look at it, interact with it, study it, cut it open, etc. The more you explore, the better you'll understand. >.< What is The True natural environment of a pig? What does "looking at it" there involve? Running with the pig herds? How do you know it's a pig and not something else camouflaged as a pig? Are you sure you will just know? Looking at a pig in its natural environment conveys no information about it in a holistic sense. It gives us very limited data: what the pig looks like in its natural environment. We can't even predict much about what other pigs look like in their environment. And gained something. Perhaps the ancestors of domestic pigs willingly submitted themselves to human care for fleeting lives of food and pleasure. Of course, they don't have the intellect to be aware of their own death. They just went with their flow as we went with ours. In countries where pigs are well taken care of, you don't see them fighting to run away. This has no direct connection with this discussion, just wondering out loud. A domesticated pig is a domesticated pig, a wild boar is a wild boar. All further speculations of relative worth are subjective value judgments. Neither the farmhouse nor open wilds are optimal environments for either creature by any stretch of the imagination. The questions "what is a pig" and "what makes a pig" only differ pragmatically, in the degree of detail being asked for and areas of focus. The former is a general query that would elicit responses about how to recognize a pig before rambling into further details, while the latter specifically limits the discussion to anatomy. This pragmatic construction is an aspect of English grammar, not a general feature of natural language. Nothing "makes" a pig a pig, ultimately. Certain phenomena interact in certain ways, giving rise to pig-like behavior. There is no pigginess beyond that fact. If it's an alien philosophy that can't be described in simple terms, does it still have an essence? Definitely, but we disagree on what the "basics" are. You say it must be a bird's eye view. I say it can be anything depending on who you are and your areas of interest. Simplicity and complexity are also relative. And never lose sight of the complexity that gives rise to holistic experience.

Philosopher catfight. lol See why it's a better idea to relax in the shade than discuss it to death? Analysis paralysis. Experiences are subjective and incommunicable through natural, non-technical language. For all we know, everyone in this thread and even Sri Nisargadatta experienced the same thing, but chose different words to express themselves. Not that it matters either way. The question is, what would YOU experience when you meditate? No one else can answer that question for you.

After all, don't simplicity and complexity go hand in hand to create harmony in nature?

OP: The web of Dependent Origination. The statement "prove that I'm really talking to you" is framed in such a way that it is, by definition, impossible to prove logically. You don't have to "really" be talking to me for me to know that if I sprayed you with a hose, you'd sputter and shut up for a while. This isn't avoiding the question. The very fact that I can know this with near certainty makes "reality" vs. "unreality" meaningless notions that exist only in the human imagination. (unless I'm dreaming, you're secretly a cyborg, etc etc. such mistakes in tracking the intersubjective causal continuum results from incomplete information, lapses in perception and awareness. these can be corrected by noting how the mandala of sense-experience reacts to "your" inputs, not that you're "other" than it.) This approach to phenomenological analysis is common to both mainstream science and Buddhism IMHO.

Huh? I'm confused, is this directed at me? PS. Still dunno if this is directed at me or not, but I'm about to leave, so just in case it is, none of this is relevant to Buddhism. There might be some misconceptions on your part because Buddhism is totally down with logic.

You can't prove or disprove empirical claims with absolute logical certainty due to their very nature. All you can do is note: this is what I sense, and if it's interacted with in this fashion, then this is how my sensation and associated contextual deductions change every time. Moreover, do I sense that all other people notice the same phenomenon? And science has this in the form of mindbogglingly huge databases of evidence, because in the real world, it's impossible to know things with any degree of certainty beyond it. In fact, the concept of "proof" only makes sense within two highly specific domains of knowledge: mathematics and logic, neither of which are directly concerned with phenomena arising in the world of sense, but with meta-phenomena. When people say otherwise or demand non-logical and non-mathematical proof, they're projecting habits of mind learned from these limited, toy domains into areas where they are inapplicable. Nowadays, this is called the ludic fallacy. It's what Plato did with his philosophy of all-encompassing objective idealism inspired by Euclid's geometry. Therefore you asking for incontrovertible "proof" that my view is not deluded rests on an implied logical fallacy. Since nothing beyond the scope of these two subjects can have either concrete proof or disproof of absolute validity, even science, which is based on an empirical epistemology, is only relatively (but increasingly) true: http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm Such non-objective topics (including specific views) are always subject to reinterpretation and reevaluation, like this: I'm sorry for implying that you did. A linguist explains how epistemic relativism applies to natural language, which is far out compared to science: http://www.zompist.com/rants.html#63 More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory Please read the science link and the first language one, if at all possible. Thanks.

Meh, if you want to find out how reality works, you go take a closer look at said reality. If you see that it's ultimately causal and non-deterministic at once, then reality is ultimately causal and non-deterministic at once irrespective of what anyone has to say on the matter. Case closed. What can I say? Seems simple and obvious to me.

durkhrod chogori: We call ourselves Buddhists because the Buddha's teachings are valid in our judgment, not the other way around. PS. TBH, I never liked the book which this thread is about. I don't see what the big deal is, really.

3bob: It must experience both in order to reach the Buddhist realization of emptiness. Emptiness isn't the simplistic idea that nothing's real or nothing exists. ( ) "Emptiness" is a direct translation of Shunyata. This word has different semantic connotations in Sanskrit, where it signifies something akin to "neutrality". It takes considerable intellectual effort just to understand the real concept of Shunyata, let alone realize it in everyday life. It's nothing like getting stuck with a fixed, narrow label that one has slapped onto all phenomena after a certain stage of spiritual practice, more like searching for, identifying and then adopting the most flexible, beneficial and rational framework within which to contextualize one's experiences. If I ever discover a better view than the Buddhist Right View of DO-Emptiness, I swear I'll drop it without a moment's hesitation.

Phenomenology definitely represents a meeting place of Eastern and Western thought. Husserl himself said he had been inspired by Eastern ideas, and wanted to reconcile them with western rationalism.

Phenomenology is a systematic study of how knowledge is extracted from sense-experience. It's founder Edmund Husserl used to spend hours absorbed in meditation. He was infamous for staring at a copper bowl for hours at a time, analyzing every input from his senses and what can be rationally deduced from them. Online resources: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=husserl (Husserl's Ideas, Crisis, etc in English; Logical Investigations in German) A comprehensive report by, IMHO, a rather sucky philosopher: http://www.thelogician.net/2b_phenome_nology/2b_pheno_frame.htm I highly recommend Neal Stevenson's latest SF novel Anathem, especially if you're not well acquainted with western philosophy. It's strongly influenced by the rationalist tradition to which Husserl and Godel belongs.

No central core, like a soul, can be discovered that contains a being's true, absolute and unchanging Self. How does it follow that we cannot exercise free will? There's simply no contradiction between no-self and non-determinism. The most you could say is, it follows from the view of DO that events must be at least partially conditioned by the environment, the storehouse of karmic causality, which is perfectly true. Causality is real, but it doesn't have to imply a wholly deterministic mechanics. I'm aware that I've posted this more than once before, but I find Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics of prehension a clear and coherent picture of how non-deterministic causality works: http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2736&C=2474 (this is a theologian's description; for more info, see: http://www.iep.utm.edu/processp/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ http://www.forizslaszlo.com/filozofia/folyamat_es_valosag/Whitehead_PR_Part5_Final_Interpratation.pdf ; book: http://books.google.co.in/books?id=USetoelBRewC&dq=Quantum+Mechanics+and+the+Philosophy+of+Alfred+North+Whitehead&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=aDtlTP-TMYPZcYrPyNgK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false ) Quantum Mechanics, not Black-Hole-In-Your-Brain Mechanics, but real Quantum Mechanics fully supports this view of reality. Quantum systems behave in a manner that's both causally conditioned and non-deterministic at the same time. As a simple example, an isolated neutron is an unstable particle that decays to form a proton, radiating a W- boson. In this case, a neutron that isn't involved in some kind of stabilizing relationship with other particles is a necessary condition for the process of weak decay to take place. On the other hand, there's no telling when the neutron is going to undergo decay or why each instance of degeneration takes place. In fact, the "why" question is ontologically meaningless in this scenario. The neutron has an unstable energy field that has the freedom to undergo a breakdown, and at some point, this eventually happens. The weird part is, you can "reset" this tendency towards collapse simply by routinely confirming that the neutron is still intact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect What's predictable in this process is that out of a statistically large sample of neutrons, around half tend to decay within the first 15 minutes, (half life) half of that within the next 15 minutes, and so on indefinitely. These statistics are the only determined aspect of subatomic radiation, even which half undergoes deterioration being inherently unknowable, because it's undetermined. BTW, remember what I said about some researchers suspecting that organic brains might be non-deterministic quantum devices? Quantum computers don't merely operate by means of an entirely new paradigm which can solve problems that classical computers, no matter how fast, have trouble with, but it turns out they also have a sense of intuition, even those that only perform simple calculations with handful of qubits. Here's one example: http://www.physorg.com/news11087.html

This is a gateway into Mahayana, an indication that the foundational vehicle of Buddhism may be incomplete in some respects. The fact is, no human being has the unlimited wisdom required to save everyone all the time without causing harm to anybody. It's a worthy goal, to be sure, but until we get there, we must work with what we've actually got. For example, we know that it's impossible to kill without causing suffering and dulling awareness in the world, therefore killing is necessarily bad karma. OTOH, Bodhisattvas recognize that acting in ways which always create good karma is not the point of spiritual practice. We're just as responsible for inaction as any other act.

Can any of the Taoist meditation practices be identified as Samatha or Vipassana? Does Buddhist energy manipulation fall into either of these two categories? PS. Does Taoism teach forms of analytical meditation?

Could you please post one specific example? I only remember seeing him discuss his own beliefs.

I agree, but then, what else would you expect from the first Panchen Lama's teachers? Any thanks goes to Alexander Berzin for making such a great online resource available for free.</ad>

GeoBall: I don't know how to thank you enough. _/\_ No offense, I like cute responses. Just thought I'd clarify the nature of my question, though.

The complete, unadulterated and unadorned truth. PS. It may not be easy to discern, but it's available to all sentient beings just the same.

Would you count the deepest actual nature as an enlightened being?

Thanks. Some actual meditative techniques would be helpful...

As the Heart Sutra puts it, "Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form". In other words: Source: http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/e-books/published_books/gelug_kagyu_mahamudra/pt2/mm_06.html PS. Forms are called "empty" when they're found to be emergent experiences constituting a part of larger conglomerations of phenomena arising in impermanent configurations as a result of interdependent causation by all phenomena as a whole, the names we ascribe to them being chosen for human convenience, and not to reflect self-existent essences. If we apply this to all forms perceived through the indriyas, then Emptiness and DO become synonymous. Um... this is Mahamudra though, not Dzogchen.

Thank god! Einstein was a horny bastard.