I do. It' just that of course the community is fraught with conflict and strife; but that doesn't make what I said wrong. — Banno

And the Jews in Nazi camps created their meaning, made their life meaningful, in communty with the Nazis.

I'm not saying that what you said was wrong. I'm saying it sometimes has brutal, sadistic applications, and, of course, clandestinely endorses conformism. So much for authenticity.

Calling something "realistic" in the hope that this way, it will sell better ...

The few times that I have tried to meditate — Michael Zwingli

So what exactly did you do when you "tried to meditate"?

Mankind did not evolve as a being which is devoid of desire and/or agon. We evolved from former social mammals which were competitive to the core of their psyches, and which subdued that innate competitiveness only insofar as was necessary to coexist within an evolutionarily advantageous social group. Within the group, competitiveness reigned, as it still does within the core of the human psyche today. — Michael Zwingli

You've brought this up before, but I hesitated addressing this much.

In short, if you're eager to compete, religion/spirituality is a brilliant venue to do so. Corporate sharking is small fry in comparison to the power games that go on in religion/spirituality. Pretty much any religion/spirituality, regardless of its doctrine.

Competing for positions of power within the hierarchy, competing in humiliating others, competing in elevating oneself, competing for financial and other resources within the religious/spiritual organization. It's all just one big competition.

Whatever you say. You are not replying to what I have written anyway, so why would I respond. Your posts are so far off target that they are irrelevant. — Banno

No, you're not that shallow. I think you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The communality you so highly praise is fraught with conflict and strife, which you conveniently refuse to admit.

Every meditator knows it requires serious discipline to sit with long unpleasant stretches and to untangle all the mind’s difficult issues.

that's what I was referring to. — Wayfarer

Well, you sounded quite defeated in your previous comment.

If you're referring to the Goenka retreats, I completed one of those in 2007-8, and have no criticism of them.

Of course you don't, given how gung-ho you were. :wink:
I actually admire people who can meditate like that -- the sheer willpower they have!

Actually, I think the awakening that Buddhism refers to is not pleasurable, it's exceedingly painful, as evidenced by the suffering that the Buddha himself went through in his six-year solitary sojourn. — Wayfarer

Which he dismissed as a dead end, something that can be skipped.

It is the abandonment of self-concern, egocentrism in all it forms.

I don't see it that way at all. Framing it that way sounds like, for one, operating out of a no-self doctrine. It's a view very popular in some of Buddhism esp. in popular Western Buddhism. But it's hard (I think impossible) to support it with the Pali canon, given that there we read things like this:

“‘This body comes into being through conceit. And yet it is by relying on conceit that conceit is to be abandoned.’ Thus it was said. And in reference to what was it said? There is the case, sister, where a monk hears, ‘The monk named such-&-such, they say, through the ending of the effluents, has entered & remains in the effluent-free awareness-release & discernment-release, having directly known & realized them for himself right in the here & now.’ The thought occurs to him, ‘The monk named such-&-such, they say, through the ending of the effluents, has entered & remains in the effluent-free awareness-release & discernment-release, having directly known & realized them for himself right in the here & now. Then why not me?’ Then, at a later time, he abandons conceit, having relied on conceit.

https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN4_159.html

For two, it echoes the old Mahayana vs. Theravada conflict, and Mahayana accusing Theravada of being "selfish" (and all kinds of inferior). (Just remember that while Mahayana places such emphasis on compassion and liberating all sentient beings before oneself, they also believe that you and all those sentient beings don't really exist.)

It can be an unthinkably long time between those opportunities, however. — Wayfarer

Well, whenever you're ready.

Like I said earlier, there is no universal should in Buddhism the way such shoulds exist in most other religions. All that the buddhas say is, if you want to be free from suffering, you should do such and such. But beyond that Buddhism is not a religion of commandments the way most other religions are.

This is a very important point to understand. Buddhism has no grip on you, unlike most other religions.

In Sōtō Zen, which is the first book I read on the subject - the well-known book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - there is a constant admonition throughout the text, 'practice for no gaining idea.' The message being, if you think you're going to get something - enlightenment, or some great experience - then you're 'wasting your time on your little black cushion'. — Wayfarer

In the short-term, yes.
Theravada takes a different view on this. Namely, it sees meditation as a matter of skill, developing a skill, mastering a skill. It very much conceives of meditation as a matter of gaining something. One should have goals for one's meditation and should work toward meeting them.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu talks about this a lot. E.g.

The Joy of Effort

When explaining meditation, the Buddha often drew analogies with the skills of artists, carpenters, musicians, archers, and cooks. Finding the right level of effort, he said, is like a musician’s tuning of a lute. Reading the mind’s needs in the moment—to be gladdened, steadied, or inspired—is like a palace cook’s ability to read and please the tastes of a prince.

Collectively, these analogies make an important point: Meditation is a skill, and mastering it should be enjoyable in the same way that mastering any other rewarding skill can be. The Buddha said as much to his son, Rāhula: “When you see that you’ve acted, spoken, or thought in a skillful way—conducive to happiness while causing no harm to yourself or others—take joy in that fact, and keep on training.”

Of course, saying that meditation should be enjoyable doesn’t mean that it will always be easy or pleasant. Every meditator knows it requires serious discipline to sit with long unpleasant stretches and to untangle all the mind’s difficult issues. But if you can approach difficulties with the enthusiasm that an artist approaches challenges in her work, the discipline becomes enjoyable: Problems are solved through your own ingenuity, and the mind is energized for even greater challenges.

This joyful attitude is a useful antidote to the more pessimistic attitudes that people often bring to meditation, which tend to fall into two extremes. On the one hand, there’s the belief that meditation is a series of dull and dreary exercises allowing no room for imagination and inquiry: Simply grit your teeth, and, at the end of the long haul, your mind will be processed into an awakened state. On the other hand there’s the belief that effort is counterproductive to happiness, so meditation should involve no exertion at all: Simply accept things as they are—it’s foolish to demand that they get any better—and relax into the moment.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/joyeffort.html

Try sitting still for hours on end with your legs crossed watching your breath. It's the very definition of un-fun.

There is a very famous secular Buddhist/Hindu teacher and very famous retreats are named after him. They teach there to "watch the breath", "bare attention" and such. People sometimes go crazy at those retreats or afterwards.

It's a cautionary tale of how wrong things can go when a variation of a Buddhist meditation practice is divorced from the ethical and metaphysical system of Buddhism.

Mankind did not evolve as a being which is devoid of desire and/or agon. We evolved from former social mammals which were competitive to the core of their psyches, and which subdued that innate competitiveness only insofar as was necessary to coexist within an evolutionarily advantageous social group. Within the group, competitiveness reigned, as it still does within the core of the human psyche today. Because of this, I feel that Buddhism preaches an essentially unnatural doctrine. I'm not saying that this doctrine is inherently "bad" or "evil", just that it is unnatural. — Michael Zwingli

It is. It's often said that Buddhism "goes against the flow".

The man who has been able to to relinquish all of his desires and longings in the pursuit of Nirvana seems to have become essentially inhuman to me.

Yes.

If one has relinquished or utterly subdued one's essentially human qualities in the pursuit of a cessation of a Samsara which is non-existent in the first place, then all one is left with is bliss, and to have sacrificed essentially human (competitive) purpose for the simple achievement of bliss seems to me a bad trade.

What I find peculiar in all this is your continued interest in Buddhism. It reveals that your basic understanding of religiosity is shaped by Abrahamic religions, ie. "religion is something you must do".
Someone unburdened with an Abrahamic past would just shrug their shoulders and dismiss Buddhism with an idle hand gesture. But here you are, obsessing about it.

the Buddha may be viewed as,
one guy who had an extraordinary experience
— I like sushi
...but all who have followed him have not have the same experience as experientially as did he, based upon what I have noted above. Have not all but Siddhartha, then, according to the Zen admonition, simply been "wasting their time" on their little black cushions? — Michael Zwingli

Yes, yes, the old "I want to be a rightfully self-enlightened Buddha, or nothing. I rather have nothing, be nothing than be merely an arahant."
That's the ultimate competitiveness, the ultimate risk-taking: refusal to take an established path in favor of "doing one's own thing".

However, it bears noting that the Buddha himself said things like this:

"Rahula, all those brahmans & contemplatives in the course of the past who purified their bodily actions, verbal actions, & mental actions, did it through repeated reflection on their bodily actions, verbal actions, & mental actions in just this way.

"All those brahmans & contemplatives in the course of the future who will purify their bodily actions, verbal actions, & mental actions, will do it through repeated reflection on their bodily actions, verbal actions, & mental actions in just this way.

"All those brahmans & contemplatives at present who purify their bodily actions, verbal actions, & mental actions, do it through repeated reflection on their bodily actions, verbal actions, & mental actions in just this way.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.061.than.html

The Buddha sees himself as part of a tradition and as having discovered something that is already there. He didn't invent anything new.

"Buddha" is actually a title, not a personal name. A buddha is not unique. There is one buddha per cycle of the Universe. The cycles go on and on, and a buddha is said to appear in each one. This is where a buddha so significantly differs from a figure like Jesus: Jesus is unique, one for all times; if you miss his train, you're done for eternity, you've missed your chance. But in Buddhism, it's not like that. If you don't feel like it this time around, there's always a next rebirth, no pressure.

Please, understand that, given the shortcomings of my vocabulary, I only use the term "masturbatorial" as a shorthand for "pertaining to the pursuit of pleasure as a primary objective". — Michael Zwingli

It's because of these shortcomings of your vocabulary that it's difficult to the point of impossible to have much of a discussion here. Your knowledge of Buddhism is, at best from tertiary sources, or quartary and further removed. It would simply be too much to go over the whole doctrine in these posts.

I want you to look into the foundations of the advice/insight you give here. It's that same old "everyone is responsible for themselves", even as you try to sugarcoat it with references to communality.

No, your resorting to neoliberalism shows your true colors.

Meaning is built - it is what you do. And what you do, you do together with other people.

Creating meaning is inherently a communal activity.
— Banno

Enter power games, hierarchy, and all that which eventually makes life so meaningless and so inauthentic.
— baker

Only if you allow it to. — Banno

Yes, yes. The Jews, for example, have "created their meaning" "together with other people" -- with the Nazis.

What you've got going there is a nice little recipe for rigidly obeying social norms under the guise of authenticity. Because if your "true self" happens to match social norms, then you're just not inauthentic or acting in bad faith, now, are you.

IOW, you sound exactly like the advice one finds in women's magazines -- "By all means, be yourself, find your own meaning and purpose in life: as long as it's what society dictates that it should be."

Meaning is built - it is what you do. And what you do, you do together with other people.

Creating meaning is inherently a communal activity.
— Banno

Enter power games, hierarchy, and all that which eventually makes life so meaningless and so inauthentic.
— baker

Only if you allow it to. — Banno

The refugees at the border of Poland and Belarus, stuck there for days, neither state is letting them pass:



They are "allowing it".

“you can always make something out of what you've been made into”

Ms. Thatcher has taught you well.

Meaning is built - it is what you do. And what you do, you do together with other people.

Creating meaning is inherently a communal activity. — Banno

Enter power games, hierarchy, and all that which eventually makes life so meaningless and so inauthentic.

You've been criticizing the order in which the various forms of theism developed, from polytheism to monotheism. Evolutionarily, there must be a reason for why it happened this way. How could it be otherwise?

I imagine there might be endless possible readings of a given person in the context of sociological, historical and psychological influences. How do you determine you have an appropriate reading of these influences in constructing an explanatory system? — Tom Storm

Is that even the aim?

Look at the academic texts published about other (academic) texts, people, and events. In one sense, academia exists in order to produce a vast variety of views of the same things.

(I was once at an introductory lecture of a new professor. His doctoral thesis and so his lecture was on the application of systems theory in literary studies. The head of the department, his immediate boss, a woman in her 40's/50's, gave him the approval for the position of lecturer, but on the topic of systems theory, she made a derisive remark to the effect of "But we both know that's not true, and that's not how to approach literature." She was old-school like that. It was both funny and sad to watch.)


If your quest is in more general terms: Most people are confident that they can quickly know the truth about another person, and they insist in this to the point of being willing to publicly criticize the person for it, up to and including killing them.

Just look at this forum. One would think that people with advanced degrees in philosophy or people who are at least interested in philosophy would care about whether they have the correct idea about another poster's views. But for the most part, they don't. Most people function by the principle "You are whatever I say that you are. I define you. I am the arbiter of your reality. And you better comply, or I will punish you."

IOW, people ordinarily don't ask the question you do, they find it absurd.


That said, I, personally, wouldn't ask myself that question either, but would just focus on the interaction at hand, rather than seeking to get a definitive idea of who the other person is.

My thought is this, if humanity could deal with the obvious meaninglessness of life, and realize that all we have is each other, could we not move on to a higher level than to dwell in delusions and denial. — boagie

We already do that. It's called "popular culture".

Once, there was the Theatre of the Absurd. Now, we're living it.

Realism. A bunch of interacting entities (that are neither good or bad) is more comparable to humans than some ideal. — I like sushi

IOW, political correctness.


To say that the development of god-belief should have taken a different course is to argue against the Theory of Evolution. Do you really want to go there ...

Don't get all excited yet. The trial is far from over.

I guess not but there's a way to makes sense of my statement. We're not supposed to see the truth! — TheMadFool

??
Why not? Says who?

Yes, that is what observation instructs. I do hope you realize that my tongue was planted firmly in cheek for that last bit. — Michael Zwingli

Speak plainly. What exactly are your misgivings about Buddhism, and why?

All animals endure hardships to get their holy grail. Even worms! — frank

Really? What is the holy grail of worms?

Externalize, externalize, externalize.
Always use you-language.

Millennia of philosophy down the drain.

I understand. It's just simpler to use concepts that we're, the majority are, familiar with. It muddies the water rather than clarifies the issue but then that's the whole point I suppose. — TheMadFool

The point isn't to "muddy the water". Concepts need to be clarified. In different religious contexts, the same word can mean different things. This is something to clarify, lest we continue with the wrong understanding.

Well, in my opinion, yes. More significantly, though, I think that Gautama rather ignored the power of those human qualities which underpin "life as it is usually lived", in particular the universal mammalian drive for social status and what is properly called in human social contexts "authority" (but in actuality is good old-fashioned "dominance"); these things that the Ancient Greeks referred to as ἀγωνίᾱ (agonia, "struggle", "competition"). Renunciation of these "agonistic" drives is certainly possible, but only makes sense within the peculiar Hindu cosmological view within which Buddhism is based, one in which individual consciousness survives the body, the continuous reincarnation of said consciousness is fact, and cessation of said continuity of reincarnation is possible. — Michael Zwingli

No, nothing so elaborate is needed to see the problems inherent in the desire to dominate. One only needs to be aware of the limits of one's resources in order to pick one's battles (more) wisely, and sometimes, this means, not going into battle at all.

I would argue that the practitioner who believes in Samsara and has become a Buddha, thought to have achieved moksha, is living in delusion based upon his acceptance of this cosmology. Even so, he has achieved the delightful bliss which the renunciation of desire imparts. However, for both him (because Samsara appears to be as false a doctrine as 'heaven' and 'hell') and the so-called 'secular Buddhist', whose practice is not based upon Samsara but on the achievement of said bliss alone, the entire Buddhist enterprise seems, as I have said elsewhere, a mere masturbatorial exercise, and the ultimate goal thereof seems akin to the pursuit of orgasm ("good feeling").

I'll try to keep this criticism of Buddhism in mind ...

For my part, I would rather struggle on agonistically in search of world domination, even if it makes me miserable. Perhaps, though, this is because it has not yet caused me enough agony, has not yet made me miserable enough.

There is no such thing as "miserable enough", there is no rock bottom to hit after which one would be automatically and sufficiently inspired to change one's course.

No ad hominems on my part, just apt observations readily corroborated by your posts. — 180 Proof

There you go. Exactly like the slave owners, religious people, etc. etc.

You define me.
Objective reality is on your side.
I am whatever you say that I am.
You speak The Truth.

Fair to infer from this statement you also believe that "probably many slaves" weren't as human as the "slave owners". — 180 Proof

It's a type of reasoning you're well familiar with and do not shy back from practicing.

Look at yourself, the disparaging things you say about me. You surely expect me to believe them, to see you as the person who defines me.

I recently read a book, the link to which I provided to Wayfarer, which deals with the hindrances. I'm not claiming my terminology is "normal". Abandoning the hindrances would be to cease to respond to their demands, would it not? To abandon them would be to be liberated from them, no? — Janus

I'm just saying that you have a terminology that is novel to me.

As for the details of abandoning the hindrances: this is worked out very well in the doctrine, see here, for example:

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an09/an09.064.than.html
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/wings/part3.html#part3-d
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel026.html

To say that one ceases to "respond" to them is very abstract.

In Buddhism, a deva is not a permanent identity, it's a type of body that one can be born into if one has the merit.
— baker

Yes, I'm aware of that. What's your point?

This was in reference to an ongoing discussion as to whether and how Buddhism is theistic. While in Buddhism, there are deities, which could nominally make Buddhism "theistic", given that those deities are not such by their inherent nature, they are categorically different beings than the gods we know from other religions.

Well yes, I am an ardent antinatalist. — schopenhauer1

And the only one you're making happy with that is yourself, and even that not very much.

A non-sentient robot is a tool. A sentient slave used like a non-sentient robot is not a tool but is, in effect, a torture victim, a slave. The latter is dehumanizing. So they are not comparable (i.e. category error); sentience, acknowledged or not, makes all the difference. — 180 Proof

Is it indeed dehumanizing if there is disagreement about what is going on?

The slave owners didn't think they were dehumanizing the slaves. Probably many slaves didn't view their treatment as dehumanizing either, but, depending on the particular system of slavery, as a punishment, or "just the way things are".

What I want to bring to your attention is a rather simple fact. Slavemasters were treating human slaves back when slavery was the norm the same as we intend to treat robots in the future. The sentience of human slaves was completely ignored i.e. human slaves were treated as if they weren't sentient. In other words human slaves were equivalent to robots for all intents and purposes.

Thus, I was just curious about how all of us - white, yellow, black, and brown - having a family history of slavery would feel about using robots because there's no difference between slaves and robots. The fact that slaves were/are sentient human beings is irrelevant because they were treated as if they weren't. That's the whole point of slavery and robotics - in the latter case, sentience is absent and in the former case, sentience is deemed absent. — TheMadFool

Yes.

What I'm seeing here are two things:
1. You display more sympathy and empathy for other people than average humans.

2. Your line of reasoning seems to work on the premise that people (should) internalize the identity as ascribed to them by others.
E.g. that if a slave owner believes that slaves are in some essential way subhuman, and expects his slaves to believe this about themselves, that the slaves will or should believe it.

To what extent is one what other people claim that one is?

A person's identity is not autonomous, and is to an extent determined by other people's claims about said person's identity. One cannot escape other people's ideas about who one is.

I don't think Trump's fascination for Putin is anything more than one inflated roid-ridden bodybuilder admiring an even more inflated roid-ridden bodybuilder standing nearby in the gym. — Tom Storm

No. Putin cares about ruling a country. Very few high politicians nowadays care about ruling. Most are just intoxicated with holding a position of power, or with getting the benefits that being so high up gets them and their cronies. In some countries, to begin with, the political system is set up in such a way that prevents the accumulating of much power in the hands of one person or one party, so politicians in those countries can't focus on ruling even if they wanted to.

But Putin is an old-school ruler. As a personality, he thus simply can't be very pleasing. But he rules.



(I suspect part of the problem with Putin are his face and his demeanor -- Slavic-Mongolian. Westerners generally aren't used to those races and can't read those faces properly.)

on those distractions. If those are gone, those people crumble under the futility of the task.

The real feat would be to face the boulder and the mountain sober, focused, fully aware of the futility of the task.

Humility can take one only so far.

(Sorry, technical problems, the edit button doesn't work from my phone.)

Being able to calmly endure all kinds of hardship is the holy grail for many people.

Those who seem to be succeeding at it do so by relying on distractions, and not because they had found a way to master hardship. Their success" depends

@frank @Manuel

But if the punishment is eternal, I cannot imagine a situation in which someone could be happy, even if Camus supposes this to be the case. — Manuel

And he made plans to get baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. So much for his integrity.

There are probably some nearby. — frank

Too bad these happy sisyphuses refuse to share their secret to success!

watched Trump meet Putin here. Strange that the US President was a total toadie for the Russian President. It simply is bizarre. — ssu

It's evidence that there is someone who can outsmarten Trump. It's a consolation.

There is such a thing as a happy Sisyphus. It takes balls to get there. — frank

Really? I'd love to know who are those people.