Esoteric Buddhism?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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Well to start with, VO refers to both ideas and physical beings. Ideas value other notions in terms of themselves, that is how sciences and philosophies work, they integrate what is encountered in their terms, so do notions in general. So I synchronized thought with being - ‘selfvaluing’ is valid at the same level as thought as it is as physicality. Selflightening does not apply to notions in that way - notions don’t self lighten…they don’t discharge… Selflightening doesnt set terms. The term ‘terms’ isnt relevant. But it is the key to VO, and also works well with the WtP.

There’s more to it than that - ‘value’ is a strange term standing ‘between mind and matter’ uniting them - but I am exhausted and no longer the philosopher that I was. I cant reach the depths of VO anymore. And I had really only begun to explore them.

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The first thing I conceived of as a self-valuing is the scientific method.

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I disagree. This actually sounds very Platonic to me… Instead of “notions”, which is kind of an odd term in this context, let’s just say “ideas”. Ideas are not Platonic; they do not exist in some timeless realm:

‘Still with the false dualism… An argument, like any meme, only exists physically: for example, on paper, or on a computer, or yes, in a brain.’
https://forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopic.php?p=730183#p730183

And:

‘[A] mental phenomenon is simply how a certain physical phenomenon experiences itself. The print [on printed paper] is meant to cause a physical phenomenon: a certain brain state or a part of such a state.’
https://forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopic.php?p=730380#p730380

So if physical phenomena (e.g., papers, computers, brains and their states) self-lighten, then—

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I think that this might apply to what you said:

As my teacher once said, “If you can’t control your mouth, there’s no way you can hope to control your mind.’ This is why right speech is so important in day-to-day practice.

Right speech, explained in negative terms, means avoiding four types of harmful speech: lies (words spoken with the intent of misrepresenting the truth); divisive speech (spoken with the intent of creating rifts between people); harsh speech (spoken with the intent of hurting another person’s feelings); and idle chatter (spoken with no purposeful intent at all).

Notice the focus on intent: this is where the practice of right speech intersects with the training of the mind. Before you speak, you focus on why you want to speak.
Right Speech | Buddho.org

With friendly greetings
Bob

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Iain McGilchrist answered the question that your wiki page brings up in 2009:

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Huh? You think ideas don’t work on each other as ideas?

So much for abstraction.

Let me try to explain.
Obviously a notion involves the brain. But you or I don’t actually grasp “1” in terms of the brain. You’re not actually tracing it back to the brain when you add it to another “1”. So you’re being intellectually dishonest if you don’t take “1” as a notion, but only as a brain process. In fact the notion is known/seen, the brain process is not (by you or me). We believe in it, but that is not the business of epistemic philosophy.

Of course, the brain process only works to logical result if you process a notion, or an idea, ‘mimetically’. That is to say qua it being notion/ idea.

Thus in the purest of intellectual honesty, ideas are seen to work on each other, to value each other in their own terms. Regardless of any truth value of the outcome, of course. The brain, without being part of the abstract equation, does its work to make this happen. So you and I both believe.

Rephrase; the idea of VO exists, and has effects. That is known by me with absolute certainty. I have a credible, virtually unassailable hypothesis (idea) about what this idea is made out of. (brain)
The existence of the idea is directly known, regardless of its causes and grounds. Therefore the idea of the idea is valid as an idea of a discrete cause.

Also in this light, do consider the scientific method qua method as a seflvaluing / willing to power. Method in general as selfvaluing.

@Bob, yes I knew you were going to ignore concentration, method, which was Buddhas focus.

Please don’t pretend to be friendly when you avoid addressing what I put before you and find a sneaky way of making this about me. That is certainly not ‘right speech’.

Case; Buddha, Nirvana, The 8 fold path vs running out of fuel.

Good is good and bad is bad (yes morality is really that easy)
67

Is an idea, or a notion, sustained because it self-values or because it accords with something meaningfully true? I wonder. In my mind I have the idea of cats. This is a grand idea with many aspects and branches to it. Many images and sensory data points. Including memories and imaginings.

This cat-idea that I have, which exists specifically as it exists only in my own mind, for you have your own cat-idea which despite having similarities to my own cat-idea is going to be different in many ways; as I am attempting to examine it in my mind I wonder how it continues to exist as it is. It does not decay over time, but why? Because it is valuing itself and trying to survive? Hm, I don’t think so. I think it continues to exist in my mind and not decay over time because it is a TRUE IDEA for one part, and it is a MEANINGFUL IDEA for another part. I.e. this idea both comports accurately with reality therefore is useful to me in day to day interactions with reality whenever anything cat-related comes up in my experiences, and it also happens to generate or indicate or hold enough intrinsic meaning for me personally so I have an innate incentive to keep using the idea.

Perhaps this isn’t the direction you wanted to take things, but I am only speaking honestly here. I cannot see how ideas can be classed as either living things or as akin to physical mass-energetic objects. The reason is that ideas are their own unique category of things, as I see it, purely abstract metaphysical objects. Like facts. A fact (for example, the fact that the cat-idea exists in my mind precisely as it does and for me only in that way) is a purely abstract metaphysical thing. It has no physical or energetic form or being. Because even if you obliterated all the brains in existence which were able to know this fact, the FACT ITSELF would not change. This is because facts are another way of saying truths. And truth itself is eternal and immutable.

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Yes, in the meantime I’d realized you probably meant something along these lines. It’s like Husserl telling the young Strauss he should not begin with the roof (physical nature) but with the foundation (phenomena, objects of consciousness). But ironically, this means beginning, not with the scientific understanding of the world, but with our natural, pre-scientific, common-sense understanding… So you and I are back at our disagreement about common-sense. I think your scientific understanding, too, still depends on common sense—common-sense understanding being understanding in terms of “things possessing qualities”. Your “1” would actually be a thing dispossessed of all its qualities. The word for such dispossession is, indeed, “abstraction”.

Now abstraction is actually a form of lightening. When we move from “apple” to “fruit”, for example, the thing must be lightened of its quality of roundishness, for a fruit may also be pear-shaped, for instance. And roundishness is itself also a self-lightening. In fact, every quality is a thing possessing the quality of being a quality. And likewise, a thing can never be dispossessed of the quality of thinghood. Thinghood, however, is nothing else than self-lightening. A self-lightening can never be lightened of the quality of self-lightening, even though everything of which it is lightened has itself the quality of self-lightening.

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Good is good and bad is bad (yes morality is really that easy)
69

Buddhism is not nihilism because it installs moral and ethical values in terms of social interactions. No attachments doesn’t necessarily mean the goal is embracing emptiness but rather instead means building something better in spite of it.

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In this context, what Jakob means by ‘self-valuing’ may be that the concept “a round fruit” cannot lighten its quality of roundness on the concept “a square thing”; it can only lighten its quality of being a fruit on it—in which case the former becomes “a round thing” and the latter “a square fruit”. The term on which the former values the latter is then its own term “fruit”, and, conversely, the term on which the latter values the former is then its own quality of being something more abstract than a fruit (just as “a fruit” is more abstract than “an apple” or “a pear”). We see the same principle among physical things: an atom cannot absorb indefinitely many electrons, for example. So in the hypothetical scenario that all a certain concept could do to another concept would be to lighten its quality of roundness on it, and this other concept has the quality of squareness, the said lightening cannot happen and the concepts don’t exist for each other; likewise in the hypothetical scenario that all a certain atom could to to another atom would be to lighten an electron on it, but the other atom is already “saturated” with electrons (and, in both scenarios, I’m sketching the situation that no lightening can occur the other way round, either).

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Talk about being laughable. You post your bitching with your former friend in this thread and then want to preach to me? What a joke!

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The school of Buddhist thought that most interests me is Yogacara. It is a school of Buddhist thought that our entire reality is consciousness based.

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Reading the Wiki page:

According to Bruce Cameron Hall, the interpretation of this doctrine as a form of subjective or absolute idealism has been “the most common ‘outside’ interpretation of Vijñānavāda , not only by modern writers, but by its ancient opponents, both Hindu and Buddhist.”[22]

Do you think this is true?

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Yes, I subscribe myself to that form of Buddhist thought.

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This, to me, seems to be the main difference between Yogacara and Madhyamaka:

“An important difference between the Yogācāra conception of emptiness and the Madhyamaka conception is that in classical Yogācāra, emptiness does exist (as a real absence) and so does consciousness (which is that which is empty, the referent of emptiness), while Madhyamaka refuses to endorse such existential statements. […]
While Madhyamaka generally states that asserting the ultimate existence or non-existence of anything (including emptiness) was inappropriate, Yogācāra treatises (like the Madhyāntavibhāga ) often assert that the dependent nature (paratantra-svabhāva ) really exists and that emptiness is an actual absence that also exists ultimately.[92] In a similar fashion, Asaṅga states ‘that of which it is empty does not truly exist; that which is empty truly exists: emptiness makes sense in this way’.[99] He also describes emptiness as ‘the non-existence of the self, and the existence of the no-self.’[91] Classical Yogācāras like Vasubandhu and Sthiramati also affirm the reality of conscious appearance, i.e. that truly existent stream of dependent arisen and constantly changing consciousness which projects false and illusory subjective minds and their cognitive objects. It is this real flow of conscious transformation (vijñānapariṇāma) which is said to be empty (of duality and conceptuality).[100] Against the radically anti-foundationalist interpretation of Madhyamaka, the classic Yogācāra position is that there is something (the dependent nature which is mere-consciousness) that ‘exists’ (sat) independently of conceptual designation (prajñapti), and that it is this real thing (vāstu) which is said to be empty of duality and yet is a basis for all dualistic conceptions.[101]”

Against this, Georg Picht writes:

“The ultimate truth is the flux of things with the contradiction that it contains within itself.¹ Torn into its opposites and formless, this ultimate truth is not world, either. There is only an unreal world; the real is nothing but pure negativity, time, or, as Nietzsche also calls it: suffering. But pure negativity has, by itself and out of itself, no subsistence:² it is only as it produces show³ out of itself, which, however, because it stands in opposition to it, is itself not real either but only a show. […W]ithout show, the eternal flux has no subsistence. It must produce show out of itself. Show therefore belongs to its truth.” (Picht, Nietzsche, pp. 251-52, my translation.)

These are Buddhism’s two truths, the conventional and the absolute truth. I would argue, however, that the phrase “it produces show out of itself” is misleading, since the “pure negativity” of emptiness itself arises dependently from the interdependently arising “false and illusory subjective minds and their cognitive objects”: 'tis these subjects which are empty, of independent and non-arisen (and thereby non-dissolving) existence.

¹ The contradiction between past and future.
² Bestand.
³ Schein.

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Lately I have been studying the differences between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism where Yogacara is the closest fit to my interpretations of what Buddhist thought should encompass.

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“My sword leans against the sky.
With its polished blade I’ll behead
The Buddha and all of his saints.
Let the lightning strike where it will.”
-Shumpo Soki

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78

That’s magnificent.

“It is said that after reciting this poem, Shumpo gave a single “laugh of derision”
and died.”

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Japanese samurai warrior class. Some of the Zen sayings are hard to mentally grasp because they border on absurdity or obscurity.

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.

Such as..? :nerd_face:

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