Being cruel will lead to attachment. It’s not a coincidence that the Buddhists don’t talk about love (as in the Judao-C tradition and also, say, t he Bhakti Hindu traditions). The compassion is not about yourself or another’s self. It is about reducing suffering, in general. You have compassion because suffering sucks and nothing is someone else. There’s no other to get pissed off at for their shortcomings. There is no self that is being gipped or mistreated. And in fact the Sanskrit word refers to what would be phenomenologically self-compassion and compassion for ‘others’.
It is not moral, it is not interpersonal, it is not being a good guy.
Buddhism argues, in my terms, that it is teaching not to keep grabbing hammers and hitting any head with them. It doesn’t matter if it is ‘your’ head or ‘someone else’s’ head, since that is a distinction based on illusions.
Compassion, in Buddhism, also entails and is entailed by there being no selves.
He’s shifting focus. I don’t think it is conscious. We are discussing religions/spiritualities perhaps psychological therapeutic modalities would fit the category.
People do not take up Naziism with the central goal of feeling better, changing things over just what one is in direct contact with. Nor Communism. These are political belief systems which fit in another category. One does not choose pedophilia to see if it improves one’s sense of well being. It is a built in tendency and also is not in the same kind of category.
The reasons one would or would not engage in these political opinions and practices (with the political ones) or the behaviors are not the same categorically as the reasons for choosing Buddhism. Different types of goals, not just goals. Different categories of processes not just different processes.
So it is no surprise that other criteria than the single one you mentioned (and you did not preclude others which he took as assumed) is incomplete/not applicable.
And also the reset in Buddhism often comes when the pattern (and not the soul) is reborn. It’s not like all Karmic mechanisms are supposed to be immediate. It’s not instant, whatever John Lennon may have said. And yes, then also what you are saying. It may seem to that person and others that their cruel actions are working, but according to Buddhism there is still a great deal of suffering, often more than their victims experience.
Personally, I don’t believe this. I don’t think Buddhism is right on this issue - not that I think cruelty is either ok or a good strategy. But in Buddhism it’s not as if you got out and push an old lady down on the street and then 5 minutes later you get violently mugged. If that were the case, everyone would notice instantly and the actual problems of the pattern would never be experienced. The bully would very quickly learn not to be a bully, not because of the dukkha caused by illusory beliefs that make his bullying seem like a bad strategy, but because he would like getting hit in the face. So the pattern would need, mechanistically, more time to allow greater learning. And the ‘being fooled by the seeming success of the pattern’ you could call taking pain killers for a broken arm. It might work for a while.
And the main point of any particular religious denomination is to suggest that your search is over. Become “one of us” and you are on the most authentic path. Now, yeah, some here are willing to acknowledge this as a “leap of faith”. But others are more fierce in insisting that if you don’t swallow their own Scripture hook, line and sinker you will endure one or another rendition of eternal damnation.
Go ahead, ask them.
And that’s before we get to the millions and millions of folks around the globe who never go looking in the first place. Instead, from the day they are born into some family/community/nation they are indoctrinated to ever and always embody a God/the God/our God.
Right?
In other words, the way religion actually works in the day to day lives of the true believers out in the world that we live in.
And how is my own point above not a reasonable way in which to react to your point? If you make the distinction thinking or feeling that your life is better after becoming something than before it, any and all religious and secular behaviors/communities can be used as an example.
Same thing. This encompasses any one of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sacred and secular communities that have existed down through the ages.
How on earth can you possibly know what went through/goes through the minds of all the millions of Nazis, Communists, serial killers, pedophiles there ever were, are now or ever will be?
Like you, me and all the rest of us here, they are “thrown” out into a particular world at birth. They are indoctrinated as children to see this world as others see it. They then have vast and varied experiences growing up that can take them into untold number of “sets of circumstances” that nudge or propel them into embodying all manner of conflicting moral and political value judgments. Then the rest is history.
Right?
But my point revolves precisely around the fact that with so much at stake – enlightenment/morality on this side of the grave, immortality/salvation on the other side of it – we mere mortals are confronted with literally hundreds of different “paths” to take: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups
And these are just the purported “major” denominations.
Right?
Again, given what is at stake on both sides of the grave, how close do you yourself have to be in sync with what is “in fact true”?
You wish to live your life in a more enlightened manner. As this relates to, among other things, your interactions with others from day to day. And, then, in whatever manner, these behaviors are linked to that which you would like the fate of “I” to be after you die.
So, first it is suggested that you actually make contact with a spiritual/religious community and explore the manner in which they have come to embody this relationship in their denomination.
You do this. But it doesn’t persuade you.
So, then it is argued that it didn’t persuade you because you didn’t try hard enough to be persuaded.
And, indeed, this outcome can be ascribed to contact with any one of hundreds of different religious communities out there.
It’s always your fault if you don’t latch onto one or another spiritual path. And not the fault of the denominations in being unable to actually demonstrate that what they believe about human existence before and after we die is in fact true.
You make general statements about what goes through the minds of objectivists and religious people all the time. Yet, when I make the same sort of general statement ,then there is problem with it.
That’s the kind of hypocritical bullshit that really pisses me off in these interactions with you.
You have one set of rules for yourself and another set for everyone else.
Yes, but such statements come from the thoughts and the feelings of particular minds out in a particular world historically, culturally and circumstantially. A world awash in contingency, chance and change. A world in which new experiences, new relationships and access to new information, knowledge and ideas can reconfigure the thoughts and the feelings of those minds. And not just in regard to you and I and karpel tunnel and felix dakat and the Buddhists here.
And, come on, please:
Over and over and over again on this thread, I request that our exchanges take those general statements out into the world of flesh and blood human interactions relating to sets of circumstance in which enlightenment, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana are explored more substantively.
But then you come back with another “general statement” about that.
So maybe it might be better if you stopped interacting with me. No hard feelings from my end if you do.
Okay, let’s focus in on a context of your choice relating to the main components of Buddhism. Then as the exchange unfolds you can note specific instances of me doing this.
Or, if something other than Buddhism suits you more, you can start a new thread.
Who argued that? not me, the perso quoted
He made up stuff. He added a Santa Claus deity to a system that does not have it. my criticism had bithing to do with his not participating in a religion I don’t participate in and am critical of. I never said anything about him ‘not being persuaded,’ not that you even realize how much you twist things to make yourself comfortable.
And then, how could you possibly have missed that I was not persuaded by Buddhism? I have mentioned this many times in the thread, including recently.
The opening quote there is from my post. Yet, here is more that I never said. I never said you should latch onto a spiritual path. I made suggestions about how to learn about it, if you were interested.
You have made lots of claims about why people attacks you or get irritated.
But the simple truth is, you don’t read well. You are disingenous. You can never admit you are wrong about anything. You accuse people, regularly, of things you do regularly, you hijack threads.
It’s your ugly behavior that leads to many people’s reactions to you. Sure, some people may be devastated by their inability to convince you to do something or believe something. That’s possible. But most people here have pointed out precisely what bothers them and there is a wealth of evidence to back up what they are claiming you do.
Weren’t you suggesting that Horgan, while trying Buddhism, failed to be persuaded because he didn’t try hard enough. That’s what I took it to mean.
Horgan’s point seems to focus in on how Santa Claus was invented to keep children nice instead of naughty. In other words, kids believe that an omniscient entity exists able in fact to “know if they are naughty or nice”. Same with God in most Western denominations. He is the “cosmic judge”.
Okay, so what of Buddhism? What in the universe is up there/out there that brings about a particular reincarnation? That can be turned to in order to assess enlightenment and karma given the behaviors that we choose from the cradle to the grave?
Is it merely what Buddhists believe “in their head” or is there a way in which to demonstrate it to others such that only a fool wouldn’t choose Buddhism as the true – the only – path to Nirvana.
Whatever the quote from whatever the source, it’s telling that after someone takes the advice of another to try interacting with a particular religious community, does so and is not persuaded, it then still becomes his fault because he didn’t try hard enough. Meaning the only time someone tries hard enough is when he is at last persuaded. The objectivist mentality.
Indeed, how many times have I heard this myself from religious folks that I interacted it with. I call it the “Mary Lewis Syndrome”. A long and painful story.
Then of course “the harangue”. A blistering rebuke reinforcing all the more why the problem here is me.
Again, as with Phyllo, I ask you to choose a context in which the main components of Buddhism can be explored more substantively, more substantially. Then, as the exchange unfolds, you can point to specific instances of me doing all of these things.
And, as with Phyllo, if you prefer a context involving something other than Buddhism, start a new thread.
The point is not that Horgan was not persuaded by Buddhism. The point is that if he had researched Buddhist texts, he would find that the Buddha never associated karma with a cosmic judge who dishes out rewards and punishments.
I’m talking about karma. KT is talking about karma.
You keep asking people to explain Buddhism to you. So when you post a quote about Buddhism and your reaction to it, I point out the errors in the quote. KT points out the errors.
We’re discussing karma in a thread about Buddhism.
Yet you react as if we (KT and I ) are not discussing Buddhism substantively.
We should ignore everything that you post about Buddhism? How are you going to learn anything about it?
Does anyone appreciate that the guy who says he doesn’t “get Buddhism” is mansplaining Buddhism to iambiguous by request? It’s agonizing to read Mr. Biguous continue to recycle the same responses that he has made to me and virtually everyone he has conversed with on the subject.
I think Biggie’s right brain atrophied somewhere along the way, if he ever had one. He preseverates on the same verbal abstractions “over and over” without comprehension of O’s POV.
My involvement with Buddhist meditation is consciously phenomenological. I would think it would dovetail nicely with Iam’s Dasein.
But, ironic to me, it is precisely my existential/phenomenological approach that he rejects because I recognize that I cannot represent Buddhism objectively.
As Kierkegaard said “Subjectivity is Truth.” My experience of Buddhism is no more or less than my experience of Buddhism. A religion that is devoid subjective experience is dead. And every experience of a religion is unique. That’s why Kierkegaard addressed the “single individual”. In spiritual matters it’s the qualia that counts!
Okay, given the behaviors that Buddhists choose…behaviors thought to encompass enlightenment, karma, reincarnation, and Nirvana in a no Santa Claus/no God religion…how does the universe function in order to connect the dots between here and now and there and then.
Note to committed Buddhists:
Give it your best shot. If there is no “cosmic judge” when it comes time for you to be reincarnated into a bacteria or a toad or a leopard or the next generation of human being, what does makes it happen?
Other then by way of what Buddha insisted was true based on what he thought up in his head all those years ago. Isn’t Buddhism basically just another faith based religion? Nothing is able to be demonstrated about the fate of “I” after death, but it sure does make one feel good to believe that it’s not the obliteration of “I” for all the rest of eternity.
No. It’s no where near the manner in which I construe a substantive exchange here. Don’t just talk about karma. Note how you factor it into your life over the years when choosing behaviors that you deem to be “the right thing to do”. And then what happens when you bump into others who insist it’s the wrong thing to do. And then those who insist not only that it’s the wrong thing to do but that if you don’t stop doing it their God will punish you.
Why his scripture here instead of Buddha’s? Or why the Buddha’s instead of all the hundreds of others?
And what on earth are you able to demonstrate is in fact true much beyond what you do believe in your head “here and now”?
And that’s before we get to the components of my own moral philosophy. Noting how they are and are not applicable to you.
And here [from my frame of mind] the discussions must unfold relating to a set of circumstances that most here will be familiar with. And even though we may have attempted this before and failed to break through, there’s really no better recourse than to try, try again.
Or, sure, figure it’s hopeless and move on to others instead.
No, I ask Buddhists to explain how the manner in which they construe the meaning of enlightenment, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana is factored into the behaviors they choose over the course of their life “here and now” and how they connect this dot to what they imagine the fate of “I” will be “there and then”.
Given particular experiences in their lives – important experiences – that they feel were especially important in bringing about their thinking. Then I ask them to note to the best of their ability how they might go about demonstrating that what they believe “in their head” about Buddhism [on both sides of the grave] is in fact true. Just as I would of any other religious denomination.
Clearly, what I deem to be of “substance” here is not what you do.
And you make it seem like that which you construe to be errors is all that it takes to make them that.
Well you’re asking me what Buddhists think. How the fuck would I know? Ask a Buddhist. Or read a fucking book about Buddhism where the author claims to know.
I know what Buddhism is to me. And I can’t be wrong about that.
I don’t claim to know what Buddhism is as a Kantian thing- in- itself which is what you seem to demand. I don’t see anyone here in dialogue with you that is claiming that they know that. That’s what you demand.
The only way I know of to make religion meaningful to you is to enter into it subjectively and thus have a religious experience that convinces you. If you are impervious to prayer or meditation or active imagination (Jung’s method) try Psilocybin or Mescaline or Ayahuasca. You’re just playing word games.
It’s agonizing to read Mr. Biguous continue to recycle the same responses that he has made to me and virtually everyone he has conversed with on the subject.
