Meditating with Descartes
Karen Parham asks how close Western philosophy gets to Buddhism.
Well, the koan I am most interested in exploring is this, “what is it like to be dead?” And, “what does it mean to behave in an enlightened manner”?
And, where, given a particular context, does one draw the line between one’s “reasoning faculties” and one’s “intuition”?
And what can that possibly mean in regard to death itself?
Again, in regard to my own interest in religion – morality and mortality – what “appropriate responses” has anyone here come to? And what specifically is the distinction that is made between not solving something but still being enlightened about it? Cite some examples please.
Yes, but what religion does for many is to subsume the answers to questions of this sort in the religion itself. For most this means God and His mysterious ways, but what does it mean for Buddhists? If no God, what actually brings one to Nirvana – the universe itself?
On the contrary, with respect to the “solutions” that Western Philosophers have arrived at in regard to the questions/koans that most interest me, their “euphoria” and “enlightenment” is, in my view, predicated only on what they have managed to convince themselves is true “in their head”. And that can be almost anything. Whereas for me, in regard to identity, value judgments and political power intertwined at a particular existential juncture, it is not what one believes is true but what one can demonstrate as the obligation of all rational people to believe is true in turn.