How would you counter this hypothesis to the ‘Enlightenment’ idea?

[Daniel]

50 minutes ago, liminal_luke said:

 

The discussion has been good!  I wondered if you were using the word avoid to mean "to make void"...ie to experience as empty of separate identity?

 

The goal, as I understood it from Buddha's teaching is emptiness and a realization ( which I would describe as denial ) of any self.  My self, any other self, and anything unique and spiritual, for lack of a better word, is the enemy of Buddha's teaching.  Technically, I suppose a proper word would be detachment, not denial.  But from this detachment is the realization that every "thing" including "me" is empty, aka 'void'.  That's what I was thinking.  And then, I employed a little word-play, "a-voiding all sensations." 

 

edit to add:  continuing to explore this, I found the following under mahayana in the nirvana entry on dharmawiki.  LINK

 

"When the Hīnayāna speaks of no self, it is in reference to the manifest forms of presently existing life; the intent is to alert people to transcend this level, and attain Nirvāṇa. But when this flowed into the world of learning, especially when it was disseminated in the West, some people thought that the Buddhist idea of no self was nihilism and that it denied the soul, and they maintained that Buddhism is atheistic. This is really a joke."

Edited August 21, 2023 by Daniel

[liminal_luke]

1 hour ago, Daniel said:

 

The goal, as I understood it from Buddha's teaching is emptiness and a realization ( which I would describe as denial ) of any self.  My self, any other self, and anything unique and spiritual, for lack of a better word, is the enemy of Buddha's teaching.  Technically, I suppose a proper word would be detachment, not denial.  But from this detachment is the realization that every "thing" including "me" is empty, aka 'void'.  That's what I was thinking.  And then, I employed a little word-play, "a-voiding all sensations." 

 

 

At the risk of sounding self-contradictory (again!), I think that people who realize they have "no separate self" actually appear, by most standards, to have a strong sense of self.  These aren't people who have lost all particularity, who don't have defined characters and characteristics,  who change with the wind because they don't know what they stand for, who struggle to make decisions.  In a sense one becomes who one really is, one's self, by losing the sense of self.  

 

(I'm not actually a Buddhist so I'm happy to be corrected, but this is my impression.)

 

(I'm not usually the Bible quoting type but went looking for a quote and found this: to find your life you must lose your life -- and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  To me, this gets at part of the paradox of loss/gain of self inherent in Buddhism.)

Edited August 21, 2023 by liminal_luke

[C T]

Whenever the notion of "not self/non-self/no self" arises per discussions within a Buddhist context, it is imperative to support/enhance the convo by including at least a basic understanding of the Two Truths as propounded by Nagarjuna. 

 

https://www.learnreligions.com/doctrine-of-the-two-truths-450002

 

@Daniel

 

 

[galen_burnett]

On 19/08/2023 at 10:21 AM, C T said:

 

You can't even if you wanted because your hypothesis (within the context of Buddhism) is so very flawed. Matey. 

 

dw about it. i won’t disturb you again. you can go back to sleep now.

[galen_burnett]

On 19/08/2023 at 11:26 AM, Pak_Satrio said:

I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of this amazing thread. My eyes are wide open now and I truly feel enlightened for the first time ever. 
 

I literally burned every book in my house after reading your comments, I don’t need that false knowledge when I have real wisdom right in front of me.

 

I thank you for teaching me, senpai.

@Pak_Seito oh no. your razor-sharp words have made me so angry and annoyed. oh no. oh no. what will i do. i’m so angry. i could shout something.

[galen_burnett]

@Ajay0 19/08/22

 

Your first paragraph and wherever you reiterate its points throughout the rest of your comment: i mean, i can tell you, you’re just flat-out wrong on that account. As a contrasting example: just because someone is physically athletic doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t read books—people with balanced interests exist, you know…

 

Again, you believe Bliss is special, i do not. I say the ‘law of opposites’, that all things—including good and bad feeling—balance, is inviolable; you say it can be transcended. At the end of the day, it’s a leap of faith of my own to trust in this ‘law of opposites’: i have no omniscience, i only have my own limited experience and knowledge and insight with which to make sense of things. Among other things that germinated the idea in me are my time spent in the martial-arts and qi-gong and the familiarity i had with the concept of Yin-Yang therein, a book of Plato’s, and a contemplation on the nature of choice and free-will. We have both made a leap of faith to arrive at our respective ontologies. This ‘law of opposites’ makes a lot more sense to me than the idea of Heaven—I haven’t had any spiritual experience that suggests to me that such a state is real, and i’ve even had a few minor Satori experiences myself. Whereas I can look around me and contemplate the universe and find my ‘law of opposites’ making sense pretty much everywhere i look, it seems to me that all of the supportive evidence for your ‘perpetual-bliss’ is just people claiming that they have seen people attain it or have attained it themselves—which is incredibly dubious and subjective. Your whole ontology is based on the premise that Samsara can be escaped into Nirvana—what a complex premiss! It is extremely unlikely that a person would deduce something like that for themselves while contemplating life, without the influence of someone else proselytising it! And as such, there is nothing in your literature which can logically refute someone who says “it doesn’t exist”, as the premiss of Nirvana isn’t built on anything but the word of someone else—it doesn’t connect in any coherent way to the world-view of a denier, which it would need to do in order to have logical purchase on that denier. the Bible is the same: there is nothing in the Bible that can refute someone who denies the divinity of Jesus Christ, because that assertion is just based on the word of someone who says it is the truth. All of these world religions are the same in their formation: a societal-leader or admired individual tells those under his influence that there is a Heaven, they believe him and thenceforth propagate that belief down through the ages. 

 

Subscribers to ‘perpetual-bliss’ of Eastern philosophies are an upgrade on Christians and Muslims, who will completely blindly believe what their patriarch tells them without question and without any analysis whatsoever; but the former are still not thinking for themselves yet. 

 

Your own experience may well resonate with the teachings of a ‘Buddha’ [read as, “any professor of Enlightenment”] This is because the ‘Buddha’ is clever and wily in forming the illusion of Bliss for you: he validates experiences of yours of harmony and peace and oneness that you get through following his instructions on meditation—this is how he buys your trust, as well as by utilising his smooth and charismatic personality—; then, once you trust him, he says “and if you keep going you will get into Heaven”—everything he has said so far has turned out to be true, so why wouldn’t this also be? the beings who devised these mind-prisons are very very clever and have no-doubt spent thousands if not millions of years manipulating races such as the homo-sapiens throughout the universe. Again, Jesus Christ: i believe the guy was indeed real and really did do all the fantastical things written about him—but just because he is an highly advanced ET or else a powerful spirit-being or lower-case ‘god’, doesn’t at all mean he is the almighty and omniscient God of creation! Pet-owners appear as gods to their animals—but that doesn’t mean we are in fact Godhead.

 

So the bit about the microscope. You and the ‘Buddha’ will say i have not gone deep enough—so the deeper we go the stronger our microscope—to see it for myself; you have not ‘attained’ it yourself or else you would not be arguing with me like this, so you have also been told that you “just need to go deeper”. Can’t you see how uncannily similar that is to the rhetoric of a scam-artist? “Just keep going, I promise you it is there at the end…and in the meantime just keep giving me your time and energy”, “well okay, if you say it’s there then it must be…”. It is indeed a very clever ploy to persuade you all that “thinking is wrong”, “thinking leads you away from Bliss”, whereas in reality he just doesn’t want you to think because if you did his spell over you would break—very clever indeed, because his argument is even supported by the very tangible fact that often peace and tranquility and good feeling can be temporarily felt through stilling the mind. 

[galen_burnett]

@old3bob

Please explain how your first comment relates to the OP?… and are you actually agreeing with me in your second comment? but you really lost me on the third one…

[galen_burnett]

@steve 19/08/23 your first comment: you’ve immediately contradicted yourself there.

your second comment: i agree that such a thing can be experienced, just not that it can be kept. i maintain that all good feelings and bad feelings must balance; which doesn’t and shouldn’t stop us chasing the good feelings, be they in amusement parks, restaurants, movie-theatres, romantic-relationships, while walking in nature, or in the depths of spiritual practice. a spiritual-high can be achieved after a lot of work, but then the event has happened and life goes on and the next thing is on the horizon to be pursued—and that’s how it goes on forever, and that’s fine. 

[galen_burnett]

@Mark-Foote 19/08/23. that last quote of yours was good. Yes, I’ve said elsewhere, all ontologies break eventually because unfortunately the concept of infinity is fundamentally mind-breaking. I like what that author says because he validates the importance of working as best we can within infinity—of ignoring the futility of everything that the monster of infinity shrouds us with, essentially. It’s just important to me that an ontology stretches as far as it can before being engulfed by the paradox of infinity, and the notion of the Kingdom of Heaven or Ananda doesn’t stretch so far, really. my own ontology stretches quite far, but it too breaks when it reaches the conclusion that everything has already happened and that nothing new can ever happen and so Consciousness while under the illusion that each moment is new, is in fact kind-of ‘dead’, yet ‘alive’ simultaneously—it’s not a nice thought really; it also concludes that everything negates in the end through polarity, annihilates, leaving basically a net-zero outcome, which gives one pause…

[galen_burnett]

@Daniel 19/08/23. Thanks a lot for your reply! You really grilled me and I’ll need to take some time to properly reply to it (internet is down so am using my phone and signal which isn’t good enough for replying to your sophisticated message). I’m sorry if I was too rude before, it wasn’t at first clear to me how different you are to the rest of them. I hope I can answer you without my ontology collapsing and sending me into an existential crisis 🤯

[galen_burnett]

On 19/08/2023 at 10:19 PM, Nungali said:

 

That dont matter

 

 

as

 

 your head be MUCH bigger than a lake  ..... its kinda hard to miss . 

huh.

[C T]

36 minutes ago, galen_burnett said:

dw about it. i won’t disturb you again. you can go back to sleep now.

Too bad. You could've learnt something useful. Cest la vie. 

[galen_burnett]

6 minutes ago, C T said:

Too bad. You could've learnt something useful. Cest la vie. 

well i’m glad i tickled you nonetheless. how much time and energy are you planning on sinking into this passive-aggressive tennis-match btw? i thought you were trying to become a Buddha? isn’t this rather divergent? as for me, well, as you may recall from the OP, good and evil, waste and profit, it’s all one to me 🤷. could you teach me how to take epic selfies maybe?

[old3bob]

" "Whoever digs a pit will fall into it"

[galen_burnett]

8 minutes ago, old3bob said:

" "Whoever digs a pit will fall into it"

i’ve yet to read a section of thread that was created over yesterday, so i guess maybe this links with that section? but otherwise i really don’t know what you’re trying to say here.

[galen_burnett]

@anshino23 yo are you just gonna still nice and comfy in the bleachers then?

[C T]

58 minutes ago, galen_burnett said:

well i’m glad i tickled you nonetheless. how much time and energy are you planning on sinking into this passive-aggressive tennis-match btw? i thought you were trying to become a Buddha? isn’t this rather divergent? as for me, well, as you may recall from the OP, good and evil, waste and profit, it’s all one to me 🤷. could you teach me how to take epic selfies maybe?

Thanks I guess, for proving my earlier point about having a convoluted understanding around the notion of perpetual bliss from a Buddhist perspective. Your refusal to accept this shortcoming is most telling, but don't worry, you're not the first on TDB, and rest assured won't be the last. 

 

I think you're more interested in your own perceived though very much unfounded 'brilliance' at twirling words (see your replies to Daniel and Mark) to dress them up daintily in a vain attempt to hide your ignorance. 

[Ajay0]

 

On 8/19/2023 at 11:38 PM, Daniel said:

 

With the highest respect, whenever someone says "you cannot ... " when it comes to a non-dual or unitary perspective that indicates, at least to me, that they have not achieved the non-dual / unitary perspective.  "You cannot..." is a consequence of a dualistic perception. 

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_peak

 

 What is your experience ? 

 

If I may ask, did you find it hard to use functional speech that denoted such dualistic terms as suggested, during the experience of nondual perception !

Edited August 21, 2023 by Ajay0

[Ajay0]

 

On 8/20/2023 at 2:40 AM, Nungali said:

Try a dose of despair  or severe mourning

 

But that still comes under unhappiness !

 

Quote

'The Self'  and 'Buddha nature' are the same  ... or have equal value here  ? 

 

What do you understand by the Self ? 

[whocoulditbe?]

3 hours ago, galen_burnett said:

@Ajay0 19/08/22

 

Your first paragraph and wherever you reiterate its points throughout the rest of your comment: i mean, i can tell you, you’re just flat-out wrong on that account. As a contrasting example: just because someone is physically athletic doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t read books—people with balanced interests exist, you know…

 

Again, you believe Bliss is special, i do not. I say the ‘law of opposites’, that all things—including good and bad feeling—balance, is inviolable; you say it can be transcended. At the end of the day, it’s a leap of faith of my own to trust in this ‘law of opposites’: i have no omniscience, i only have my own limited experience and knowledge and insight with which to make sense of things. Among other things that germinated the idea in me are my time spent in the martial-arts and qi-gong and the familiarity i had with the concept of Yin-Yang therein, a book of Plato’s, and a contemplation on the nature of choice and free-will. We have both made a leap of faith to arrive at our respective ontologies. This ‘law of opposites’ makes a lot more sense to me than the idea of Heaven—I haven’t had any spiritual experience that suggests to me that such a state is real, and i’ve even had a few minor Satori experiences myself. Whereas I can look around me and contemplate the universe and find my ‘law of opposites’ making sense pretty much everywhere i look, it seems to me that all of the supportive evidence for your ‘perpetual-bliss’ is just people claiming that they have seen people attain it or have attained it themselves—which is incredibly dubious and subjective. Your whole ontology is based on the premise that Samsara can be escaped into Nirvana—what a complex premiss! It is extremely unlikely that a person would deduce something like that for themselves while contemplating life, without the influence of someone else proselytising it! And as such, there is nothing in your literature which can logically refute someone who says “it doesn’t exist”, as the premiss of Nirvana isn’t built on anything but the word of someone else—it doesn’t connect in any coherent way to the world-view of a denier, which it would need to do in order to have logical purchase on that denier. the Bible is the same: there is nothing in the Bible that can refute someone who denies the divinity of Jesus Christ, because that assertion is just based on the word of someone who says it is the truth. All of these world religions are the same in their formation: a societal-leader or admired individual tells those under his influence that there is a Heaven, they believe him and thenceforth propagate that belief down through the ages. 

 

Subscribers to ‘perpetual-bliss’ of Eastern philosophies are an upgrade on Christians and Muslims, who will completely blindly believe what their patriarch tells them without question and without any analysis whatsoever; but the former are still not thinking for themselves yet. 

 

Your own experience may well resonate with the teachings of a ‘Buddha’ [read as, “any professor of Enlightenment”] This is because the ‘Buddha’ is clever and wily in forming the illusion of Bliss for you: he validates experiences of yours of harmony and peace and oneness that you get through following his instructions on meditation—this is how he buys your trust, as well as by utilising his smooth and charismatic personality—; then, once you trust him, he says “and if you keep going you will get into Heaven”—everything he has said so far has turned out to be true, so why wouldn’t this also be? the beings who devised these mind-prisons are very very clever and have no-doubt spent thousands if not millions of years manipulating races such as the homo-sapiens throughout the universe. Again, Jesus Christ: i believe the guy was indeed real and really did do all the fantastical things written about him—but just because he is an highly advanced ET or else a powerful spirit-being or lower-case ‘god’, doesn’t at all mean he is the almighty and omniscient God of creation! Pet-owners appear as gods to their animals—but that doesn’t mean we are in fact Godhead.

 

So the bit about the microscope. You and the ‘Buddha’ will say i have not gone deep enough—so the deeper we go the stronger our microscope—to see it for myself; you have not ‘attained’ it yourself or else you would not be arguing with me like this, so you have also been told that you “just need to go deeper”. Can’t you see how uncannily similar that is to the rhetoric of a scam-artist? “Just keep going, I promise you it is there at the end…and in the meantime just keep giving me your time and energy”, “well okay, if you say it’s there then it must be…”. It is indeed a very clever ploy to persuade you all that “thinking is wrong”, “thinking leads you away from Bliss”, whereas in reality he just doesn’t want you to think because if you did his spell over you would break—very clever indeed, because his argument is even supported by the very tangible fact that often peace and tranquility and good feeling can be temporarily felt through stilling the mind. 

Dude, why are you speaking so loudly?

[doc benway]

3 hours ago, galen_burnett said:

@steve 19/08/23 your first comment: you’ve immediately contradicted yourself there.

your second comment: i agree that such a thing can be experienced, just not that it can be kept. i maintain that all good feelings and bad feelings must balance; which doesn’t and shouldn’t stop us chasing the good feelings, be they in amusement parks, restaurants, movie-theatres, romantic-relationships, while walking in nature, or in the depths of spiritual practice. a spiritual-high can be achieved after a lot of work, but then the event has happened and life goes on and the next thing is on the horizon to be pursued—and that’s how it goes on forever, and that’s fine. 

 

If you ever want to discuss my contradiction, please point it out. Perhaps I could learn something that way. 

 

Contradictions in spiritual discussion sometimes have a different significance than they do in rational arguments. I have benefited from this guidance from a great poet and teacher.

 

“And if you want a point of departure for this new journey of soul, don't choose an intention, don't choose a prayer, don't choose a therapy, and don't choose a spiritual method. Look inwards and discover a point of contradiction within yourself. Stay faithful to the aura and presence of the contradiction. Hold it gently in your embrace and ask it what it wants to teach you."

~ John O’Donohue

[Michael Sternbach]

3 hours ago, old3bob said:

" "Whoever digs a pit will fall into it"

 

"Whoever digs a pit needs a pit-digging unit." 😉

[silent thunder]

Pits are for digging and dirt is for filling...

[C T]

[iinatti]

.

Edited September 27, 2023 by iinatti