Meditating with Descartes
Karen Parham asks how close Western philosophy gets to Buddhism.
This is clearly the part where those among us who do not have any in-depth experience with disciplines of this sort, are more or less completely in the dark.
But my point of view revolves more around the part where Buddhists who do achieve this level of discipline either are or are not out in the world like all the rest of us.
In other words, you make it to the realms of the infinite, but, in your interactions with others in any particular community, your behaviors either come into conflict with others or their behaviors come into conflict with you. One or the other of you is than able to create a situation [legal or political] in which someone’s behaviors are going to have to change or they will be punished.
And then the part [for me] where one is able to demonstrate how these higher, more enlightened forms of consciousness insure the continued existence of “I” beyond the grave. Aside from merely insisting that this is what they believe in their head.
That’s important to me because there are dozens and dozens and dozens of additional religious practitioners out there all insisting that, no, only if you become one of them, is this possible. Folks who insist that God is anything but a “distraction” to them.
How could God be thought of as a distraction to Descartes? Isn’t he but one more philosopher down through the ages who recognized how truly fundamental this “transcending font” was in sustaining a teleological component in human existence. Not to mention immortality and salvation? No God, no “I” to think at all.
So then it comes down to how deep in a No God world the realizations of mere mortals can go. In fact, I’d like to believe that my own existential narrative here is enough to keep most philosophers busy all the way to the grave.