Just joking, but pornographers never used the telegraph, as far as I know, but they did pick up on the potential of photography pretty quickly. It took them something like a century to devise phone porn -- the "1-900 XXX xxxx" call-in numbers introduced in the 1980s — Bitter Crank
If you're saying that people can be full time mums or dads and work and do everything they need to do and be totally committed to this then you have a much friendlier idea of commitment. Which I welcome. I have not seen this in any of meditation communities I have known over the years; Hindu or Buddhist in derivation. — Tom Storm
sorry: I don’t know how to “copy and paste” a quote, if that’s the term. I’m very new to the internet) — Todd Martin
About fifteen years ago, I took two years off and devoted myself to full-time meditation practice. I became a resident at a Zen center in Northern California (there were eight of us). Of the all the people who do this sort of thing (very, very few), a minuscule amount of the them are actually willing to do what it takes to go for it.
In my experience, most people just want to live a nice, simple, balanced life (and who can blame them) — synthesis
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. — Zeny proverb
That’s a funny way of putting it. It suggests that those willing to “go for it” are out of balance (forsaking a nice simple balanced life), and makes me think that the those going for it are merely attempting to get where others are naturally. — praxis
Context counts for a lot. — Wayfarer
Well, that’s a valid point. A Christian might say that the Buddha never denied ‘the God of Abraham’ because the two traditions were culturally remote. A Christian also should say, I think, that ‘God’ is not a God at all - not like Shiva or Vishnu or Baal or Zeus, or any of the other pantheist deities, but is of an entirely different order altogether. Although that is a distinction that atheists are probably not inclined to recognise.
(Also notice that the Indian ‘deva’ and the English ‘divine’ both spring from the same Indo-European root.)
If you ever encountered the writings of Thomas Merton or his successors, or the Jesuits like Raymondo Pannikar, (e.g. here)they have very interesting reflections on the relation of God and Buddhism, but it’s a pretty long way off the beaten track. — Wayfarer
This resembles Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis:Just throwing this out there: even if God exists, maybe he doesn't want us to believe or pray to him. Maybe God created us wanting us to be atheists. — Gregory
(emphasis, etc are mine)He who loves God cannot [expect] that God should love him in return. — Ethics, 5p19
What's your take on the history of the god concept? — TheMadFool
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