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.