Not necessarily. I said the thing about Atman in my OP, which I wrote well after my second post. In the “Buddhism Without Boundaries” forum, I wasn’t even accepted as a new user (try registering to see what may have been the basis of their rejection). To be sure, when I then replied to the admin’s email by showing him my post (about flowers and all that), he never mailed me again. I then went to the “Dharma Wheel” forum, which was one of his recommendations, and they accepted me as a user but rejected my introductory post (again the flower post). The reason they gave was that I spoke of my attainments, which is explicitly forbidden. I then replied with the following message, to which I again never received a response:
Dear Admin,
Thank you for your message. You were indeed the only staff member to send me feedback.
I’m trying to edit my initial post into accordance with the ToS. Thus I just edited the sentence where I explicitly used the word “attainment”:
Original: “I post the piece below because I think it’s a pret-ty good exhibition of my current level of attainment (I wrote it less than 48 hours ago).”
Edit: “I post the piece below because I think it’s a pret-ty good exhibition of my current understanding of Buddhism (I wrote it less than a week ago).”I’m at a loss for editing anything else, though. I mean, even when I say “I should write Me [instead of “me”], because I AM the Mind”, I’m just trying to communicate my understanding of Buddhism. Even if it’s an adequate rendition, I may not at all understand what I’m saying (I may be a monkey with a typewriter, so to say).
I could add qualifiers like “I think” and “in my view”, if you want, or write some kind of disclaimer. I don’t think wisdom can help implying itself, however. [The ToS reads: “ii) It is strongly recommended that posters do not make claims of higher attainments as it tends to cause disruption. If anyone feels that they have such attainments, they should use that wisdom to help guide the discourses, rather than to draw attention to oneself.”]
Please let me know if you think I’m hopeless.
::
If you want to be serious, I suggest you collate all the opinions re atman and anatman [anatta] from all the relevant schools of both Hinduism & Buddhism, and therefrom demonstrate why your view is true.
Yeah, I’m not really interested in scholarship like you. I’m interested, not in the truth about Hinduism and Buddhism, but in the metaphysical truth–which they both claim to teach. If both their claims are true, what I say about them must be true.
Your approach is quite disrespectful, by the way. Quite arrogant.