the reason why you should not try to escape the world

[TTT]

Edited May 13, 2009 by TTT

[goldisheavy]

I think this is very well said.

 

Those teachers who disregard the perceptions of others (100% of their reality) and refuse to meet them where they are will fail to help them. In fact, damage can be done by encouraging students to reach far beyond where they are without offering intermediate steps.

 

This is very appropriate. I am probably guilty of this some of the time. I hope not too much, but if someone accused me of this and gave even a half-decent example, I would probably not hesitate to admit my fault in this.

 

This is why I try to caution people about teachers. Teachers are just little kids of the universe themselves. Teachers see a cool thing and they want to share it no matter what. Often the teacher doesn't consider what it means to share this cool thing from the point of view of the student. So, it's like excitedly throwing a ball to someone, which is very light for you, but weighs 200 tons for another person, and accidentally killing them in the process.

 

I don't think this can even be prevented. Teachers feel the world with their own senses. To a teacher this ball is light. They have to use a lot of imagination and speculative thinking to try to imagine and think that perhaps it's very heavy for some. It's more easy and natural to rely one your own perceptions of the world and to not consider your student's perceptions. Teachers don't have time to interview students for 1 month straight to get all the ins and outs of the student's world view, and the potential for damage is immense.

 

So, if we can see teachers as kids, and students as other kids, both playing together, we can avoid a lot of trouble. The trouble begins when we think that teachers are adults and that they somehow take full responsibility for the students. In reality teachers are irresponsible rascals who want to have as much fun with life as you, even if that means they have to kill you accidentally.

Edited May 13, 2009 by goldisheavy

[forestofsouls]

Great post. A good counterpoint to the neo-Advaita group.

[Birch]

Now I feel terrible for saying I was having fun with this. Agree with all above posters so far. Thanks for the reminder.

[DalTheJigsaw123]

Wonderful post! Thank you.

[Uncle Screwtape]

I think Taoism teaches us to work within the illusion. That this is how we engage with the world and, as such, the world and everything in it is real enough. Of course we know about non-duality, but I don't see that the duality needs to be negated. Taoism talks about alignment, not negating. The three realms of people, events and things; substance without form and form without substance; and time, space and the universe, are to be brought together. With the world of physical things where we begin, in just the same way we build foundations before constructing the rest of the house. The duality and non-duality exist side by side. There is movement within stillness and stillness within movement. Apparent paradoxes but not really. I think it depends where we shfit our focus to at any one time. Sometimes we need a broad field of vision that excludes nothing, but sometimes we need to zero in on a detail.

 

For me, I understood so much more about Taoism when I began to look at the things it said as either applying to the lower three realms or to the higher ones and knowing exactly where each belongs. I know dividing up and detailing and labeling is something a lot of people think we ought not to do, but Taoism was handed down by people who did exactly that. The wuji, taiji, yin-yang, bagua sequences is an exacmple of such a thing. They broke down infinite complexity to its working parts then built it up again back toward infinity and oneness.

 

And when wuji gave way to taiji they understood that stillness did not end and movement begin; rather, stillness is the unchanging hub around which the ten thousand things revolve in time and space. It's all happening now.

Edited June 1, 2009 by Uncle Screwtape

[Gerard]

Bla, bla, bla, bla.

[gendao]

Well, true. We learned it in high school quantum physics. But is this a useful view of our world? Can we continue to function with such a view when taken on the level of the intellect alone? Not likely.

Ya, quantum physics subsumes relativistic physics which subsumes Newtonian physics...

 

However, we are still primarily subject to the general laws of Newtonian physics in our ordinary lives on our level of physical interaction.