I don't get Buddhism

Mindful of that you’re doing, feeling, sensing, thinking, what’s happening around you.

We’ll need a context of course.

As if the process you are displaying here “over and over” as described by Karpal Tunnel above is not enough of a context. You refuse to see what you’re doing: what the Buddhists call the chatter of the monkey mind in your case in hyperdrive.

Ah, I forgot. You are never in a context or part of one for others. Your words and actions and choices are never part of a context. You have transcended. Me, I foolishly thought you were alive and making the choice to seek answers via repeating certain abstract demands for proofs of objective morals online with strangers. Making this choice and not others, and then presenting any other choice as implicitly foolish. I even thought presenting evidence of this objectivist position by quoting you and then also referring to what seemed fairly undeniable - your process here online - were part of one person’s context, yours, and how it played out concretely in this thread, for example. How in this context we have a person choosing one way to get knowledge over others and claiming that this process is a must and one that holds for ‘we’. Silly me.

There’s the various Buddhisms, where one generally engages, and investing quite a bit of time, in mediation and sometimes contemplation and service type activities and often intentionally reduces the amount of abstract thinking and striving with thinking in general. IOW…that approach.

Then there’s - oh, I laugh at my naivte - what I pointed out as your approach - posting on line with the request that people produce a proof that one choice is better than all others such that all rational people should choose to follow it.

There are of course many other possible choices IN THIS CONTEXT.

But I was pointing out that in this case (read:context) a real live person, you, is choosing to engage in an activity that has NOT BEEN demonstrated to be the right one for all people. Pointing out that, in this context, you are doing precisely NOT what you say we must do.

Despite this, this person asserts that

But he, this specific individual, you does not wait for HIS CHOICE to be so confirmed and engages in the practices of his path anyway. Oddly ignoring his ‘must’. He engages in his part, one of many, despite not having demonstrated to everyone it is the only rational one.

That’s a context. Instead of disagreeing with my description of the context or dealing with any points made…

you, as usual, repeat something you’ve said before, that does not apply, as if it does apply.

But you know why people get irritated with you. It has nothing to do with your behavior as a discussion partner.

And who the fuck is this ‘we’?

Objectivism again. You want some other kind of context. You want. Not we’ll need.

What to focus on? That there was a clear context and your response is idiotic?

Or the objectivism in your idiotic response.

Or perhaps it was you being ‘wry’ as an evasion.

No, no, no…a real context.

In other words, one that revolves around a set of circumstances in which your religious beliefs prompt you to choose behaviors you think to be moral as this relates to what you believe your fate will be after you die. You know, in having chosen those behaviors.

On this thread, in particular, as it pertains to things like karma, enlightenment, reincarnation and Nirvana. If you are a Buddhist.

Or, if, like me, you don’t believe in either objective morality or God or a posthumous existence, you are not “fractured and fragmented” when confronting “I” in the is/ought world as, say, a pragmatist.

That sort of context.

Ah, a real context. The objectivism just continues, lol.

What I pointed out was ‘not’ a real context.

It’s not that you want a specific thing, right now. It’s not that you have preferences, about what we talk about now. It’s that what you demand is real and what I point out and notice is not even real.

As if the context I was pointing out did not address specific arguments and points you’ve made in the thread and not just in recent posts here either.

All you are doing here is saying…

hey, I don’t want to talk about that. (perhaps because you don’t want someone to point out the implications of arguments you’ve made or points you made, perhaps for some other reason)

But you couch it in objectivist terms. Your interests now (though not at other times in the thread) are the real contexts.

You one silly boy, I thought you were a nihilist.

There is evidence that Buddhist practice benefits many people, as you have acknowledged. So far you have never produced any evidence that your choice has helped you or anyone else. And yet, you demand proof that all rational people should engage in Buddhism before you would. Proof is for math and symbolic logic. But we have evidence that it is a better path than yours since there is no evidence yours benefits anyone. And, of course, while engaging in Buddhism, you could continue asking people for proofs of their moral positions.

This is real, human life. This is real. We make choices without having all the answers. Without knowing for sure.

That is the general context as far as I can see. And the specific context, in this thread, is that your criterion for not choosing buddhism (yet) makes no sense.

Real contexts. It’s not like you have an answer to anything, certainly not immortality and morals. And you have no evidence your choice does anything good.

Yet you cling to it in the face of others that at least have some evidence backing them.

And via incredulity and writing in the second person plural and using words like ‘must’ you present your choice as if it was not only objective, but the only rational one.

Note to others:

A little help here in closing the gap between my rendition of a context and whatever the fuck he seems to be so perturbed about above.

It all seems rather obvious to me. People believe in religions – either on their own or through indoctrination – because this seems crucial to them in choosing the good things, the right things, the moral things to do on this side of the grave. And this is important to them because [existentially] a connection is made between doing the right thing here and now and gaining access to immortality and salvation there and then.

Religion in a nutshell!!

Only Buddhism embodies a narrative that in many important respects is different from the major religious denomination in the West.

Now, as I see it, there are Buddhist here who are willing to at least make the attempt to convince me their take on both morality and mortality is demonstrable.

Though, sure, if they feel the onus rest on me to go out and interact with them for days or weeks and months and pin this down for myself, then we can agree to disagree regarding the more reasonable approach to deciding things like this.

We can have another take on this. We can do what we want. There is no must. That is for the objectivists. It’s scary, I get that. What if there is some good out there and what I want is bad. But here we are. You can’t mock the objectivists on the one hand, look down on them.

and then say that we MUST wait for one of them to produce the proof. We must…must…wait for one of these people that you gloat over being able to defeat…

we must wait for one of them to prove something before we can start following our own personal preferences and doing things that fit what we value?

That’s an objectivist stance and a weird one.

Your path is to not try anything else until people you mock not only as fish but fish ina barrell prove something to you. You are hinging your life on the argumentative skills of people you mock as easy to defeat.

And this is a must. And this is the real context.

Nope, it’s still all about me and nothing about the behaviors one chooses here and now in any specific context as that relates to what they want their fate to be there and then after they die.

Really, I don’t know how to make this fundamental aspect of religion any clearer!!

i’ll check in again in a couple of years, or not Iambiguous.

This describes a Sufi story that is also used in the social sciences as a concept, The Streetlight Effect…

Buddhism and Sufism have a number of similarities. I often think of this story when I think of you Iambiguous. When one reads your posts one finds enough information to show you more or less know the Streetlight Effect is in action in you.

Or we can use a Zen Koan that is more complimentary…

Good luck.

I know, none of that solved all your problems or proved which path all rational people should realize is THE right one for everyone.

Perhaps humbleness, a realistic version, cuts down on some of the pain and fracturedness.

Any Sufists here?

If so, let me ask you to explore with me the behaviors you choose on this side of the grave as that relates to what you imagine is in store for you after you die.

As for the streetlight, isn’t that basically what religion is all about? You go to the light because it will seem considerably more comforting and consoling then stumbling about in the dark.

And, believe me, it doesn’t get much darker than the manner in which I construe “I” here as basically a fractured and fragmented existential contraption living in an essentially meaningless world about to be obliterated once and for all in tumbling over into the abyss that is oblivion.

Unless, of course, someone here is able to convince me otherwise.

You know, before I succeed in in convincing them instead. :open_mouth: :astonished: :open_mouth:

Biggus ain’t looking for anything.

It just seems that he is by the roundabout way that he presents his points.

“We need a demonstration …”

No. He wants to show that there is no demonstration. He makes sure that there isn’t one.

I think that you misunderstand what he is doing.

He is not waiting for an answer. He knows that there is no answer.

The fish try to convince him by they can’t because he controls whether he is convinced or not. He holds all the cards. Therefore, he is always going to win.

Getting the fish to jump around is part of the entertainment. :animals-fishblue: :animals-fishgreen:

Sure, I’ve said similar things. Sometimes take it at face value. Sometimes not. Nothing’s gonna shift this.

The only model of religion that seems to interest iambiguous is the objective one that he once held with an imaginable omni-god and a literal heaven and hell. That’s the religion which seems to fuel his obsessive, perseverative ambivalence. The only version of Buddhism he is willing to engage on amounts to the same thing. His preoccupation seems to hold him in a perpetual recapitulation of the crisis of his loss of faith and the resulting overwhelming terror of oblivion. Perhaps his mindset can be best understood in the context of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory

ya’ll niggas is gettin played by biggs. this dude ain’t scared of oblivion or fractured or any of that shit he pretends to be. that’s part of his game, man. it’s all tongue-in-cheek. what he’s doin is subliminally suggesting that all ya’ll are scared and fractured and shit, or else you wouldn’t be hanging on so dearly to the crap you want to believe/hope is true. the irony is, he’s saying that what ya’ll niggas is doing is terror management theory because you ain’t got the cajones to be nihilists.

when will the day come when philosophy is no longer terror management theory?

you folks need to face your mortality squarely and find your inner tyler durdens.

If so, he’s lying because he has described how fear of oblivion for himself and people he cares about is chewing him up.

no he’s bullshitting again. he won’t admit it publicly, but he’s starting with the affirmation of man, and he works his way backwards using cyyn-nicism. the time monitor. the space maasurer.