Fruitzilla

You do sound like Steve Ballmer tho....

Hi nac, You seem to take it as a given that words are there to point to singular physical objects "out there". That's what you base your critique on at least. I think that's a rather crude vision of language that some people just don't share. The view of language as being a system to provide accurate descriptions of real existing "things" has been done away with quite nicely a few times in history. Cassirer and Wittgenstein being my favorite language-experts. Hence my comments on anti-essentialism as not being to the point. I think you'll love Wittgenstein. His "blue book" is online here. Cassirer in his "Language and Myth" does some very good anthropological work about how language and meaning come about.

This is part of what I meant by taking anti-essentialism too far. You've got a hammer and everyone here looks like a nail to you. ( I made my first comment to you so I could make this one. I knew you'd react like this.) I don't like to be preached at mindlessly and mechanistically , and I can imagine that's a common trait amongst humans. Why not engage in genuine conversation? Since everything exists only in relation, why not relate? It's alive and fun and very integrative. Integration is the flip side of deconstruction and you'll have to realize that thoroughly, otherwise you'll never go beyond extremes

As long as it honks like a car, and drives like one, I'll call it a car. Just because something is a verb, doesn't mean it has to convey a undividable essence. Sometimes anti-essentialism can be taken too far.

Aaaaah, you caught him. From the Pali Cannon, "The Longer Discourse on The Distruction of Craving" : This makes it pretty clear that dependent arising/origination is a teaching tool, not an ontological statement of any sorts.

Not to be a wiseass or anything, but where do you think practice comes in in these sorts of situations?

Actually, what I found is that people aren't that different from other people. Religion makes less difference than usually assumed.

I won't, I've had enough. Goodbye Vajra, have a good trip

Probably If you read the Chang Tzu (the only Taoist book I really read) , you'll see lots of skepticism (although much softer than the Dawkins kind) and not much idealism. But I do think we can conclude that not everyone is in need of the same cure. Reptillian heaven is mamallian hell!

Every Day Zen and Nothing Special by Charlotte Joko Beck. First and best spiritual books I read.

Hehe, and so we keep going around and around. I'm not a mahayana buddhist ( of the non-Zen kind ), so I don't agree with your explanation. You're not of my ilk, so you won't agree with my interpretation. By the way , does the electricity appropriate a new wire after the wire disintegrates? I don't think we're anywhere near the same wavelength alas.

Vajra, You've turned things around 180 degrees. Anyone but you seems to see it pretty clearly. You say you're being a mirror to us, while in truth it's the other way around. You talk about other people reifying things, while in truth you're the biggest reifier of them all. Seriously, it's incredibly obvious.

I read the article, but it was pretty hard to make heads or tails of it. Anyway, it was pretty much based on antiquated concepts of the nature of the world/human beings, while the Allan Wallace stuff I read has a more contemporary outlook. Too hard to lay one over the other for me. And it still doesn't answer how an immaterial consciousness can interact with a material body. Unless it proves somewhere that the question is not appropriate, which I didn't get from it. Anyway, thanks for the trouble!

Interesting! I think I'll hunt down an introduction to chinese philosophy to get all of this into perspective. Any reccomendations?

Hah! You must have missed Bhikku Pesala and Kalavinka.

Not at all, it was just something I saw a lot of at e-sangha, and wondered about.

You're expounding the creation story as found in the Nirvana Sutra, which isn't accepted by all Buddhists schools. So in that sense it's just that. One creation myth among many. This is not to say it can't be true within a certain context. It's just not the context in which I framed my question. One thing that is interesting though, is that it seems to imply that mind and matter aren't different things, just permutations of the same principle. Let me restate: 1) Most buddhists I talk to/read ( especially on e-sangha ) advocate a mind-body dualism. Allan Wallace seems to be very popular among these folk. 2) They hold to the fact that neural activity and thought are only correlated. 3) Furthermore, they hold to the fact that immaterial causes cannot give rise to material results, so arguing that the mindstream can continue on after the death of the body. All of this (especially point 3) leaves the big question as to how the immaterial gives rise to the material. I've never seen it answered on there.

I'm not looking for mythological descriptions, I'm looking for a philosophical explanation to what seems to me to be a flaw in Buddhist thought.

I've read quite some Buddhist polemics, and especially the mind/consciousness-body split never made sense to me. To prove the existence of a mind apart from a body, Buddhists say that a material cause (ia body or a brain) can't have an immaterial result (a thought or moment of consciousness). If this is so, how does the mind interact with the body? I never got that, and never saw an explanation of it. Saying self is a combination of consciousness and body is a gross oversimplification imho. Self is a combination of so many factors (biological, historical, social, to name few) it boggles the mind. Cheers.

Sonny, you're too much. Really, you are. To make use of any kind of "spiritual" experience, or whatever you want to call it, you need a bit of maturity. You really can't behave like you do and claim any kind of capacity. Get real, for god's sake.

It does seem like it, doesn't it? Thanks for the joke and the welcome!

Hehe, I rest my case

Usually, some conversation between adherents of different religious paths is a good thing, IMHO. It's actually the reason I registered here. But, what I've seen here is preposterous. I guess it's the nature of the net to have people acting like spoiled teenagers with no sense of propriety at all, while claiming higher attainments ( as if that means anything! ) than anyone and running roughshod over every thread they can find. Apologies for the grumpy introduction

EU, EU and EU. Maybe someday I'll end up somewhere else

Hi all, I'm a former Buddhist and current Alexander Technique teacher student. After reading the Tao Te Ching and Chang Tzu recently I found it has much in common (wu wei especially) with the Technique. Although some e-sanghians seem to have invaded this place currently, I hope to have some nice discussions here