vsaluki

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Everything posted by vsaluki

  1. Beyond Good and Evil

    Good input from Marblehead and blacktrack8. The next question that occurs to me about good and evil is - are good and evil purely human constructs. Massive destruction and creation are a part of our universe. Planets and Galaxies are ripped apart and sucked into black holes every day. The earth has cycled through drastic changes (ice ages) and had most of it's life extinguised by asteroids and volcanic erruptions. Species have appeared and disappeared forever. Some animals will kill far more than they can eat when certain circumstances arrive. Intelligent animals like killer whales will catch an play with seals, tossing them around like rag dolls, before finally killing them. And yet, no one attaches the name "evil" to these kinds of events. Destruction seems to be an integral part of the workings of the natural world. Sometimes that natural destruction includes great pain for living creatures. But we don't think of this kind of destruction in moral terms. Only the actions of humans are labled "evil". Having identified the good and the evil, we then play a game that consumes much of our life energy called, "Good must win". These games are often so complex that the participants can play on opposites sides of the game and both sides can claim that they are fighting for the good while others are siding with evil. Huge reserves of emotion go into these games. Hatred for, and anger at, the other side is commonly an integral part of the game. People are sometimes ready to kill each other over the outcome of the game. Moral judgements are a necessary part of the game. We must be able to judge our opponents as morally lacking, or, as evil. Without that kind of division, we can never see ourselves as agents of good while seeing our opponents as agents of evil. Ego is the animal that is demanding to be fed. The more we are involved in the game and the more we forget that it is a game, the better the ego is fed. Most people never, for an instant, see these games as anything other than deadly serious. They believe that the outcome of humanity hinges on having their side win.
  2. Beyond Good and Evil

    Here are a couple more indirect reflections on good and evil by Chung Tzu. Chapter 2. If "all appear to be doing what they rightly should", this would seem to indicate that no one is doing evil. Also Chung Tzu, Chapter 2.
  3. Beyond Good and Evil

    Would you consider the old testament as new age? How are Lao Tse's and Chung Tzu's explanations that there is no good or evil new age? Where do you find this? Does the Yuandao disagree with the Toa Teh Ching on the subject of good and evil? If so, where and why? Do the oral transmissions disagree with what is said in TTC. If so, where and why?
  4. Beyond Good and Evil

    That's fine. The old testament is a load of garbage with a very few jewels mixed in. Anthropologists have traced many of it's stories to previous civilizations. For example, the Sumarians came up with the story of the flood. So we don't know the source for much of the stuff that is in the old testament. But I have no qualms about picking a jewel out of a garbage dump. In this case, I backed the interpretation up with similar ideas from Lao Tse and Chung Tzu. There are many more sources available for the same idea. As I get around to it I will try to supply some more of them.
  5. Beyond Good and Evil

    Good response. Genesis speaks about Adam and Eve eating of "the tree of knowledge of good and evil". This is obviously something that god didn't want them to do. So one can interpret the tale as being about obediance and disobediance to god - followed by punishment for disobediance, or one can look a little closer. I'm unwilling to look at god as a despot who hangs out temptations just to test his power of control. To me this story - wherever the Hebrews got it from - is a mystical story. Not eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is not an obediance test, it is a warning about acquiring a knowledge that is a false knowledge. In a sense, when Adam and Eve eat from the tree, their entire perspective on life changes. For example, they become ashamed of their nakedness. Once they ingest the fruit, they begin to parse life into that which is good and that which is evil. And once they make those mental distinctions, they have fallen from grace. Before those mental distinctions, Eden was Eden. After those mental distinctions, Eden is still Eden, but their perceptions have changed it into a place that is alien, hostile, and containing evil.
  6. Move to Outer Space or Face Extinction

    I think that it was as late as 1972 that Alan Watts predicted that mankind wouldn't make it past the year 2000. What basic ecological and sociological facts do you see as leading to our destruction?
  7. Move to Outer Space or Face Extinction

    Hawking is a great physicist with extreme knowledge in a very limited area. Concerning the survival of mankind, he knows no more than a chicken farmer.
  8. Beyond Good and Evil

    I hope that I didn't imply anywhere that good and evil were things. And I don't think that Lao Tse or Chung Tzu consider them to be things. I think the meaning of their writing is that there is no good or evil - if you call them processes or abstractions - doesn't matter. Good and evil are categorizations and identifications that are false and unnatural. Chung Tzu calls it a "distinction", and again, he indicates that the distinction is artificial.
  9. Gulf Oil Spill & Continuous Outpour

    http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/cleaning-up-the-environment-one-more-reason-to-develop-the-outer-continental-shelf/ Check the pie chart about half way down the article. http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=57272 Is that your opinion, or has there been a trial and a verdict. Yes, and as I discussed, there will be more safeguards after this. No, and despite the fact that surgeons are very highly trained and despite the fact that they work to all kinds of regulations, they still screw up surgeries from time to time. But I wouldn't recommend that we stop doing surgery, or that surgeons are greedy evil people, or that we cover them with so much paperwork and regulation that they will stop working. I understand that most of the things that we use in our lives can have bad outcomes from time to time. I just don't go alarmist about it. No, I never said that. What I said was that we shouldn't bitch and moan and go off in alarmist hysterics. Yes, the predictions of the demise of man have been going on for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But we just seem to live longer and longer. If lifespan is related to pain and suffering, then we seem to be having less and less of it since we are living longer and longer. Of course there have been huge die offs that have happened through the entire history of the earth. They were happening long before there was mankind. Maybe you should scold mother nature for her complete lack of compassion for living things. Of course if pain and suffering is your real concern, then you should be grateful for all that mankind has built to insulate himself from the pain and suffering that nature would inflict on him. Our nice homes insulate us from the pain of cold and the pain of heat. And those greedy evil people from BP make it possible to avoid much of that kind of pain and suffering. Certainly I shrug off the kind of irrational alarmism that I see here. And I also understand that most species come and go. If, as individuals, we die tomorrow or if we die in a hundred years, it will involve pain and suffering. If as a species we die off in 500 years or in 5 million years or when our sun dies, it makes no difference unless you believe that there is some ultimate goal that must be achieved by mankind. If you do, I would like to know what it is. Or maybe you believe that spiritual being can only manifest as the naked ape. First of all, what immense suffering, trauma, disease and death? Every indication is that we are going in exactly the opposite direction. Certainly a few oil spills are not going to bring about anything that even remotely resembles your description. Second of all, if everything in my life is over, then so be it. I don't think of my life as limited to a bag of skin, bones and muscle walking the earth. I don't think of "spiritual cultivation" as a goal that I need a long life to achieve. In fact, I believe that all creation is sourced from a creator (Self, God, Tao, Whatever) in every second that it exists. And that process isn't going to interrupted by an oil spill in the Gulf - which is also sourced from that creator. Regarding your comment about reaping what I have sown because I have equanimity while there is suffering, I think you would have to apply that same accusation to Lao Tse, Chung Tzu, and most spiritual sages since there has always been suffering and since they were always striving for equanimity. Regarding the reaping and sowing part, do you think that someone or something will punish me for my equanimity. Who or what would that be?
  10. Gulf Oil Spill & Continuous Outpour

    The IPCC originally declared that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Someone finally checked out the references for that claim and found that there were none. Further checking revealed that a Russian scientist, who was never actually referenced, had come up with a figure of 2350 for the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers. The IPCC admitted their error. They were only off by 315 years. Furthermore, the streams that are fed by the glaciers only get about 5% of their water from the Glaciers. The rest is snowmelt and rain run off. Imagine if the glaciers were not shrinking. Then the water that they collected and stored each year would be equal to the water that they lost in break off and run off. In other words, stable glaciers would have a net contribution to downstream water of zero. As Mark Twain said, "The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated." Same applies to the earth and mankind. Relax!
  11. Gulf Oil Spill & Continuous Outpour

    One of the spiritual philosophers that I respect and admire is Alan Watts. I think it was in the late 60s or early 70s that he declared that mankind would not survive beyond the year 2000. I still read Watts. But I skip over the parts where he gets his eco/political side into an uproar. When I hear people mixing spirituality with ecological alarmism and politics I simply yawn. The world's oceans naturally leek more oil than the BP well in the Gulf. They always have. The BP well incident will come and it will go and nothing will change. Accidents will never stop unless activity stops. Try to live your own life without accidents. You can't unless you live in a straight jacket and a padded cell. These days an accident happens anywhere in the world and everyone is screaming that we have to stop everything and change our evil ways. Nonsense. People seem to think that we need to stop "the big greedy companies" before they destroy us. But we live longer than every before. The romanticized "natural" life styles that some people aspire to were a life style where most people didn't make it to 40. And you can still have that lifestyle if you actually want it. There is nothing to get excited about here unless you love to wallow in disasters and warn of Armageddon. Eventually the Gulf well will be shut down. Then we will implement a system to check out all remote well cut off valves. For example, a government inspector will go to every well once a month and activate the remote shutoff valve. If it works, the well continues operation. If it doesn't it gets shut down until the problem is fixed. Why is it that people so love to tear their hair out about the destruction of mankind. First of all, the very idea is a big yawn. Second of all, the idea is also a big "so what". Why must mankind survive for eternity; or even past next week for that matter? Species have come and gone on the face of the earth for most of it's 4.5 billion years. Life resumed after the earth turned into a giant snowball, after it was hit by comets, after it was hot enough for aligators to live near the north pole. Big changes are the norm. The Sahara desert has a cycle of going green and going barren that is 20 thousand years long. Just live life and stop trying to demonstrate that you are a holier defender of mother nature than the next guy. The tragedy of life is not in the bad things that happen. The tragedy is to waste life being obsessed with worrying about what has and will happen. The tragedy is to divide life into "those people" who are greedy industrialists and "us people" who are spiritual defenders of Gaia. Such narrow minded models of mankind have never accompished anything.
  12. This is another perfect example of the type I described above. You used reason to turn my statement, "There is nothing to be accomplished", into your strawman statement, "there is nothing to do". Then you could explain, "look at this fool, he doesn't understand the whole picture, but I do, so aren't I clever". Now the other side of the coin, "there is nothing to do" may well be, "there is nothing to avoid doing". But that is not the other side of my statement - which is why you had to use reason to change it before you had the tools to show us your cleverness. My statement is about not being attached to the outcome of your actions. It is about not living life as though it has a final purpose and destination. You knew that. So the other side of the coin would be, what, "there is no accomplishment to be avoided". That would still be saying that there are accomplishments to be had even if you were not trying to achieve them - and that would be wrong. Now if you look at this thing honestly, you can see that we are playing the reason game and we are achieving absolutely nothing. No one is learning anything of value. No one is any more awake. No one is experiencing life as a unity because of this discussion. Egos are chaffing and flaring. But nothing is being accomplished.
  13. This is propably a perfect example of why Lao Tze and Chung Tzu distrust reason. How does a person misunderstand a simple statement like, "you can't explain 'red' to a person who has been blind all of their lives". Well, you have to go very far out of your way to misunderstand it. You have to use reason to misunderstand it. You don't want to understand it. Rather you want to argue and you want to win an argument. So you apply reason to the simple statement so that you can turn it into a strawman for something else that you can argue with. You have made reason the handmaiden of the ego. And in doing so you have moved further away from experiencing the world as unity. Instead you have taken a position of me versus other that distinguishes the ego as the unique entity that must be nurtured. This is how most of mankind lives their lives and this is how they use reason almost every minute of every day. Of course Lao Tzu and Chung Tzu have no objection to using reason for something like fixing that plugged up pipe in your basement. Rather their attitude comes from using reason in ways that make our lives stressed, combative, and delusional. Of course most of us will say that we have no intention of using reason to make our lives stressed, combative, and delusional. Certainly the ego isn't so flagrant that it declares itself the motive for every action. Even when it is. That is why self observation (mindfulness) is so important and so powerful.
  14. I'm sorry, but you can't share your spiritual experiences with others any more than you can explain "red" to a person who has been blind all their lives. I think there is a valid question in asking, would an awakened individual actually want to explain their experience to others. Such a person would know that the information is not transferable through language. So would a person in sync with Tao want to point at the moon when he knew full well ahead of time that people will only see his pointing finger. Perhaps, such an individual might do no more than invite you for an evening walk to let you decide on your own to look at the moon - or not to look at it. I even have some doubts that a person in sync with Tao would entertain the idea that the rest of humanity should be awakened; or the idea that humanity or life needs to be saved or improved. There is nothing to be accomplished. The journey is the point. There is no goal to the journey. I think the man of Tao will leave improving the world to the Confusians. He will consider that the best way to improve the world is to leave it alone. The bird in flight that leaves no path behind.
  15. Tao Teh Ching #71 Hua-Ching Ni Translation: "He who regards his intellectual knowledge as ignorance has deep insight. He who overrates his intellectual achievement as definite truth is deeply sick. Only when one is sick of this sickness can one cease to be sick. One who returns his mind to the simplicity of the subtle truth is not sick"
  16. I take that to mean that you believe that you don't know what something is unless you know the symbol or word for it. I would disagree. And the sensation is a sensation that I could distinguish from other sensations without knowing the symbol for the sensation. I would argue that poetry does nothing to enhance love. It only romanticises it to be other than what it really is. Such poetry is simply food for the ego. Another important thing to consider is that reason demands that you parse the world into things that you can identify. Things that you can reduce to simpler things and make generalizations about. Items that you can transfer information about or mentally manipulate information about. This all goes against actually experiencing the world as a unity. Tao Teh Ching #19 Hua-Ching Ni translation End the endless search for segmented, intellectual knowledge, and set your mind above worry and vexation.
  17. It's important to understand that you can't find god through reason. This is an important theme in both Tao and Zen. The point of the koan is to teach you that reason has limits. Reason is abstract and symbolic. Tao or the experience of god is not at all sybolic. It is direct. For example, try to explain the feeling of love using reason. No explanation will ever help you get the insight that you get from the experience. Furthermore, if you try to reason about love - how you should find it, what it should be like, what you can expect - you are likely to prevent it from happening.
  18. Taoist Philosophy

    I'm a huge fan of Chuang Tzu. But before reading him I already had many of the same thoughts. Because of that, when I read Lao Tzu, before I read Chuang Tzu, a lot of it fell in place. I wouldn't throw Lao Tzu out. The TTC is very condensed, even though it seems very simple. You are suppose to know when Lao Tzu is being ironic - though most people don't. And sometimes when people may think that he is being ironic, he is not. Even the translators don't seem to know sometimes. I would say that if the TTC is someone's first exposure to spiritual literature it is a complete waste of time. But if you have some experience, it can be a good way to get re-grounded occasionally. I'd like to be able to call together a panel of about 10 translators and let them hash out a new translation. The more mystics on the panel the better.
  19. What makes Buddhism different?

    No alpha and omega. Just alpha. But you do have a point. I never did buy the arguement of life as a kind of theater. It seems to be an answer that is just made up to satisfy an unknow. Very much like the answers that you provide! I'd rather stick with things being unknown, even if an answer seems to be a convinient straw to grasp. Not that I like not knowing. But until there is something substantial, I think it's the best response. That way you don't have to throw out old crap if you ever do stumble on a good answer. Old crap doesn't like to be thrown out. You seem to be blocked on that suffering thing. Like I said before, I don't experience life as suffering. And the infinite rebirth thing is also your construct. I don't believe it either. The idea that life must come with an instruction manual is something that is also shared by the three Abrahamic religions. Yes, Tao says that a path must be uniquely yours. No eightfold this and four noble that. It's the path of a single bird in flight as opposed to Dorthy following the yellow brick road. There is nothing to follow. There is no trail left behind. There is no starting point and no destination. All that is needed is the realization of how easy, enjoyable and liberating it is to fly. It's one of the reasons that I like to think of Tao as being about radical individualism. P.S. I'm speaking metaphorically. Don't anyone jump off a building!
  20. Is meditation necessary for self realization?

    Sorry, don't mean to sound like a cryptic guru or something; but who is it that is trying to break the ego down. I'm not trying to say don't meditate. But if you do it in that goal oriented fashion, then it's just the ego looking for ego enhancing results. Sneaky little bastard that ego. Gotta watch him all the time. Which possibly moves us to the subject of mindfulness.
  21. Taoist Philosophy

    I'm afraid that the story of his life makes me think of him as a bit of a fraud. 90 Rolls Royces? On the other hand, he was very bright and he gives excellent explanations of many religious concepts. His opinion is that Tao will be the last man standing after religions all sort themselves out. He has good things to say about many of the worlds great spiritual teachers. But he says that the one with whom he identifies almost completely himself is Lao Tzu.
  22. Is meditation necessary for self realization?

    It's a good question. First I believe that you can get to the unitive concept through reflection. But grasping the concept is not the same as experiencing the world in that way. It's like being blind and having someone explain the color red to you. You get it, but you don't experience it. Can a grasp of the concept help you get to where you can experience the world that way? I don't know. I do believe that meditation can help you quiet the mind. And I don't think that frantic people who are being whipped around by what they think is reality have much hope. So I would say that meditation increases your chances, but it doesn't guarantee success and non meditation doesn't guarantee failure.
  23. What makes Buddhism different?

    Psychological suffering is also relieved when those who are not Buddhists experience the world as unity. Compassion becomes superflous because all is self and life is lived that way. It's like someone telling you to be compassionate to yourself. It's unnecessary. Compassion outside of the unitive experience is mostly false because it is imposed as an ideal and a goal rather that having it occur as a spontaneous reaction. Well, at least one thinks one does.