Is there an objective reality or not in Dzogchen theory?

[ralis]

What everyone posts here is their own opinion, but that does not mean all opinions are accurate. Someone may have the opinion that the safest way to drive a car is to go as fast as you can at all times... even in residential neighborhoods or by schools when children are present... that is their opinion and they are entitled to it, however that does not mean it is a good idea or an accurate assertion.

 

Opinions are judgments that are in regards to subjective matters. What you are positing is that your opinion of Buddhist theology carries more weight as compared to the opinions of others posting here. I have a problem with that.

[asunthatneversets]

Opinions are judgments that are in regards to subjective matters. What you are positing is that your opinion of Buddhist theology carries more weight as compared to the opinions of others posting here. I have a problem with that.

 

"I have a problem with that", well, obviously. You have a problem with anything that you perceive as a correct statement in contrast to an incorrect position, unless those proclaiming the accurate position mirror your own sentiments. When your own views are mirrored then you are quite happy playing the role of an authoritative position on how things should or shouldn't be. You actually play that role most every time you post in opposition of something. Acting as if you are standing up against authority or authoritarianism, yet all the while expressing a view that you deem to be reasonable or accurate, thus acting as precisely that which you appear to be rejecting.

 

Anytime I advocate for anything that remotely resembles a 'correct position' you are going to have an issue. Why is that? Because you extrapolate and project notions of authority and authoritarianism wherever you perceive someone suggesting there is a right view that accords with a defined system.

 

You see no value in a defined system, you misinterpret an appeal to a correct view as identifying with a belief system or merely taking what paternal figures say at face value... which goes back to misconceptions of what Buddhism is or entails as a methodology. There is an intricate web of causal presuppositions and projections that originating from you which are all derived from fundamental errors in understanding. You don't investigate these errors but take them to be "the way it is" and so you end up spewing your projections all over everything that becomes a target due to your mistaken understandings and/or other underlying issues with authority.

 

At any rate, the buddhadharma is not a theology, it is an empirical method to actualize tangible and lived epistemic insights through radical shifts in non-conceptual perception. So that is mistake number one on your part; the misunderstanding that we are discussing a belief system like the majority of religions, we are not. What we are discussing are systems which if followed correctly will produce experiential realizations completely divorced from conceptuality or belief. And that means there are correct ways to actualize those insights and incorrect views which will prevent that wisdom from flowering. It is not a damn game where we can promote a feel-good laissez-faire attitude that all views are equal and we can make up whatever crap we want, slap a label on it and its good to go.

 

There is such thing as "right view" [samyag-dṛṣṭi], and that right view is applied so that it eventually collapses itself and is abandoned in the end (due to liberation having been actualized). Therefore right view is incredibly pertinent and indispensable.

 

Which is why Śākyamuni says in the Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā sūtra:

"If even my correct teachings are to be abandoned, how much more incorrect teachings?"

 

The correct conventional view leads to the correct ultimate view, which exhausts all views; conventional and ultimate. You are fixated on ideas of "right" views as opposed to "wrong" views because (in addition to various other underlying issues with the aforementioned principles such as authority and so on) you don't understand Buddhism. From the same sūtra:

 

"Subhuti, do not maintain that the Buddha has this thought: 'I have spoken spiritual truths.' Do not think that way. Why? If someone says the Buddha has spoken spiritual truths, he slanders the Buddha due to his inability to understand what the Buddha teaches. Subhuti, as to speaking truth, no truth can be spoken. Therefore it is called 'speaking truth'."

Edited August 13, 2014 by asunthatneversets

[asunthatneversets]

No.

That wasn't a yes or no question.

 

According to me subjectivity is not a weakness. It's a strength. But according to you it's a weakness.

What does subjectivity have to do with this?

 

You think you are more objective than ralis is when it comes to assessing some doctrine (Dzogchen in this case).

Not more objective, and I don't think ralis and I were even discussing Dzogchen, you and I were though. Ralis just came out of left field with a complaint about something that was said.

 

So when I say "weakness" I am taking your own perspective to speak to you. I don't actually share your perspective myself though. What I am saying to you would make no sense if I said it to myself because I don't operate in the same frame of mind as you.

I'm not even sure what you're talking about so I can't really comment.

 

I don't see how ralis plays an authority. Does ralis demand that you agree with him because he said so?

I know I certainly don't demand people agree with me.

 

If anything, you seem to be all bent out of shape when people don't agree with you, not ralis.

I could care less if people agree with me or not, I just don't like seeing inaccurate or fabricated information paraded as being in line with a system that is quite clear about its view.

 

You seem to think you have some objectively correct insights into Dzogchen, like you really have your finger on the Dzogchen pulse or something, and like you have a privileged position compared to ralis whom you view as an irrelevant upstart.

I have no idea what ralis thinks or knows about anything related to Dzogchen, the little he has shared about his experience with the meditations wasn't all that convincing but I didn't say anything.

 

Obviously! Why would you undermine the chair that you one day hope to sit on yourself.

Hmm, I'd never seek a position of authority or attempt to teach so I'm not sure what chair you're referencing.

 

You have worldly ambitions and your destiny is entwined with the humans.

No idea what you're talking about.

 

This means your perspective on Dzogchen is worthless because Dzogchen is not for those who want to remain human.

Human? You have some strange notions of Dzogchen.

 

This is my opinion and there is nothing you can say or do that will change it, short of you renouncing your humanity in a way that will be apparent to me, which I doubt you're planning on.

Well, being that Dzogpachenpo isn't Sūtrayāna I won't be renouncing anything anytime soon. But have fun with that.

[Apech]

--- Moderator Message ---

 

Everything from 'hypocrisy' to 'Bill Clinton' moved to the Pit.

 

-- Message Ends ---

[Simple_Jack]

 

The function of Dzogchen, Mahāmudra, Perfection of Wisdom is to transcend limitations, not to stay bound in them.

 

...the view of Dzogchen, Mahāmudra and Mahāmadhyamaka are not partial at all since they are based on direct [yogic] perception of reality.

 

...the Buddhist view is not actually a verbal construct, and for that matter neither is Buddhist awakening.

 

For example, one needs only to understand the dependent nature of afflictions to become a stream entrant and so on, becoming free of the fetters. This does not require elaborate philosophy. It merely requires confidence in the teaching of dependent origination and the four truths of nobles.

 

Likewise, for the realization of emptiness on the path of seeing, one simply has to reflect on the absence of extremes (for a very long time, albeit), as Shantideva states, "when neither an entity or a non-entity remain before the mind, at the time, the mind is pacified", and this too is an experiential view.

 

In the case of Vajrayāna, the view, such as it is, is based on the experience of the example wisdom at the time of direct introduction or the third and fourth empowerments. Unfettered equipoise in the mind essence, or "ordinary awareness" is the view of Vajrayāna.

 

~ Loppon Namdrol

 

 

"The mind is no-mind. The nature of the mind is luminosity."

~ Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra

[GrandmasterP]

( Apech)... Everything from 'hypocrisy' to 'Bill Clinton' moved to the Pit.

 

-- Message Ends ---

 

 

"From hypocrisy -TO - Bill Clinton"

See under...

"World's shortest journeys"

 

 

Edited August 14, 2014 by GrandmasterP

[Simple_Jack]

I think that I'm being entirely fair about this despite considering Greg to be a friend and an all-around extremely decent guy. The interesting thing is that although I consider that he has a phenominal philosophical understanding of Atmananda Krishna Menon's writings and I found him extremely helpful in clearing up a couple of technical points during our correspondence, I believe that he hadn't realised nirvikalpa samadhi for himself at the time of writing The Direct Path - A User's Guide.

 

Let's see what Greg Goode has to say nowadays:

 

http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2014/08/greg-goode-on-advaitamadhyamika.html

 

Dr. Greg Goode wrote in Emptything:

 

It looks your Bahiya Sutta experience helped you see awareness in a different way, more .... empty. You had a background in a view that saw awareness as more inherent or essential or substantive?

 

I had an experience like this too. I was reading a sloka in Nagarjuna's treatise about the "prior entity," and I had been meditating on "emptiness is form" intensely for a year. These two threads came together in a big flash. In a flash, I grokked the emptiness of awareness as per Madhyamika. This realization is quite different from the Advaitic oneness-style realization. It carries one out to the "ten-thousand things" in a wonderful, light and free and kaleidoscopic, playful insubstantial clarity and immediacy. No veils, no holding back. No substance or essence anywhere, but love and directness and intimacy everywhere...

 

........

 

Stian, cool, get into that strangeness! There is a certain innocent, not-knowing quality to strangeness that counteracts the rush to certainty, the need to arrive, to land.

 

I still don't get your "no compromise" point. Can you rephrase it, but without the words "between" or "compromise"?

 

Anything can be denied. And is. There is one prominent Advaita teacher that I like who likes to say "You can't deny that you are the awareness that is hearing these words right now."

 

This kind of gapless continuity, so prized in Advaita, is readily denied in other approaches to experience:

 

you. can't. deny. that. you. are. the. awareness. hearing. these. words. right. now.

 

I remember feeling during one retreat, just how many ways that this could be denied. From a different model of time and experience, there are gaps and fissures all over the place, even in that sentence (hence. the. dots). Each moment is divided within itself, carrying traces of past and future (retention and protention). The first "you"-moment and the second "you"-moment are not necessarily experienced by the same entity. Each "I" is different. Entitification itself is felt as autoimmune, as divided within itself, and any "gaplessness" is nothing more than a paste-job.

 

Not saying one of these is right and the other wrong. Just pointing out how something so undeniable can readily be denied!

 

......

 

Emptiness group:

 

Awareness and Emptiness.

 

Many people, myself at times as well, have thought that Advaitic, atman-style awareness and emptiness are the same thing. When I began to study Nagarjuna, I was reading through a lens colored by the Advaita teachings. You know how they go, Awareness is the Self and very nature of me. The psychophysical components are certainly not me. I remain the same through the coming and going and changing of the components.

 

At that time, I had had trouble understanding 50% of the key line in the Heart Sutra,

 

"Form is emptiness and emptiness is form."

 

I got the "form is emptiness" part. But I couldn't grok the "emptiness is form" part. Thinking that Advaitic Awareness=emptiness, I was used to thinking that Awareness IS, whether universes arise or not. How can Awareness equal its contents? And if it did, why even call it global Awareness? The contents could speak for themselves," I was thinking.

 

Also, many Advaitic-style teachings proceed by refuting the phenomena (thoughts, feelings and sensations) but retaining THAT to which they arise. That was the type of teaching I was used to, and it colored my approach to Madhyamika.

 

So it was very easy to read the Buddhist notion of "emptiness" in this same way. But it began to get a little puzzling. In my readings of Prasangika Madhyamika (which never mentions a global awareness), they never say that anywhere that emptiness=awareness. Nevertheless, I was supplying this equivalence for myself, making the mental substitution of one highest path's highest term with another's.

 

As I continued, there seem less and less evidence that Madhyamika was doing this, but I didn't encounter anything that knocked the idea away. It got more and more puzzling for me.

 

And then one day I read this from Nagarjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Sloka IX:4, about the "prior entity," or a subject or owner or substrate for what is seen and heard. (translations from the Garfield edition).

 

"If it can abide Without the seen, etc., Then, without a doubt, They can abide without it."

 

Then it dawned on me! The independence (and hence the dependence) that Buddhism is talking about is two-way, not just one-way. If A is logically independent from B, then B is logically independent from A.

 

If you can have a self that doesn't depend on things seen, then you can have things seen that do not depend on a self.

 

So, for Nagarjuna, can you really have a self that is truly bilaterally independent from what is seen?

 

No, because of his next sloka, IX:10:

 

"Someone is disclosed by something. Something is disclosed by someone. Without something how can someone exist? Without someone how can something exist?"

 

With these two verses, I finally understood the two-way dependence that Buddhism was talking about. And both halves of that important line in the Heart Sutra finally made sense!!

[gatito]

I've said repeatedly that I think that Greg misunderstood the fundamental point of Krishna Menon's teachings when he wrote The Direct Path - A User's Guide and I haven't got the faintest idea why you continue to quote him at me.

 

What's your point Jack (in your own words - if you can manage to speak for yourself....politely )

Edited August 14, 2014 by gatito

[Tibetan_Ice]

...

 

For example, one needs only to understand the dependent nature of afflictions to become a stream entrant and so on, becoming free of the fetters. This does not require elaborate philosophy. It merely requires confidence in the teaching of dependent origination and the four truths of nobles.

 

...

 

~ Loppon Namdrol

The definition of stream here is much too simplistic. According to Ajahn Brahm, a stream enterer has recognized "no self" which is no small feat.

[Simple_Jack]

He's referring to the 12 nidanas; dependent origination = anicca --> dukkha --> anatta = 12 nidanas.

[Tibetan_Ice]

He's referring to the 12 nidanas; dependent origination = anicca --> dukkha --> anatta = 12 nidanas.

Merely understanding and having confidence does not get you the experience of No Self.

 

He makes it sound like it is an intellectual exercise.