Which is why demanding a verbal proof of nirvana online is like trying to learn how to ride a bicycle by reading Newton.
if we can’t use a word to describe this state of ‘nirvana’, how would we ever be able to identify the state as such? unless joe says to bob ‘what i’m experiencing now is nirvana… this is what it is like’, bob wouldn’t be able to know this state was ‘nirvana’ instead of that other state. moreover, how could bob be sure what he thinks is ‘nirvana’ is actually what joe thinks is ‘nirvana’? if bob has an experience that’s nothing like the experience joe calls ‘nirvana’, could joe know it?
Case in point: when I was younger, doing drugs, a part of me thought I had achieved enlightenment. Now I look back on that and laugh. But how is one to know? What is enlightenment supposed to feel like?
Pro - How would you describe an orgasm?
Yes.
This laughter would be a beginning of the work.
That’s why you need a master to help guide you.
We have a word to describe it…nirvana. However if you haven’t even meditated for five minutes and have no interest in buddhism or meditation, what the fuck is that word going to mean to you. What does Higg’s Boson mean to some Jivaro tribal member avoiding civilization. Think of all he or a child, not that they are the same in other ways, would need to do, to have that word mean something. I can tell you that my wife had heard the word labor, but she was incredibly shocked by what it actually was like. And yes, there is the problem of other minds. But that’s true for all sorts of things. There are all sorts of experiences we can say we are having that others will have a hard time knowing if we are or not or if we mean the same thing as they would if they honestly asserted it. And yet these states exist.
You can read descriptions, but even with mundane, pretty much everyday experiences, if you have not experienced them, then at best you just get hints. If you have never been bloated or had a headache, you will probably be surprised to find it is not quite like you imagined when you heard about it.
why focus on the end state? If one can achieve nirvana using meditation, well, trying to figure out in advance what it will feel like is not helpful anyway. And if you cant it is also a wasted discussion. If you want to learn how to scuba dive but youve never swum and you’ve looked at images and you can’t tell if you, in particular would like it…
well trying wading, then get some swimming training, then…
etc.
If you get information along the way, like you don’t like getting wet at all, then you’ve learned something.
’
We already knew what Francium was before we had even discovered it, let alone have invented a word to call it by.
ROFL
Bertrand Russell on Religion, with Buddhist Commentaries
Albert Shansky believes many of Russell’s opinions on religion are surprisingly in tune with those of the Buddhists.
Here though Russell and the Buddhist are in the same boat with all the rest of us. Grappling with time given the evolution of life on planet Earth. And at this particular point in time going back to either the Big Bang bringing time into existence or to the possibility that time antedate’s the Big Bang going back instead to the existence of God. Or, strangest of all, coming into existence along with everything else out of nothing at all.
And how would we go about explaining the “function” of that?
In other words, an explanation that makes sense given the gap between what science has been able to extrapolate so far from a set of assumptions about the laws of nature and all that it still needs to explain before a “theory of everything” can be connected to the actual things that matter does in interacting with other matter [living or otherwise] across space given before, now and later.
But then comes a “spiritual” element in which the speculations/conjectures start to topple over all the more into greater and greater leaps of faith. When connecting the dots between words and worlds:
What the fuck does that mean?! How would one take an assessment like this and use it to explain his or her behavior from point A now to point B then?
And blades of grass are one thing, human beings another thing altogether. How would this sort of conjecture make it easier to understand things like karma or living on an enlightened path, or imagining the time when we are dead and gone from this world?
Then this part: Spacetime, beingtime and dasein.
It’s writing like this that leads people to believe that your intention, not likely a conscious one, is not to learn, but to present a kind of learned helplessness as inevitable. You take a quote from a Zen teacher, a tradition you know nothing about, but pluck it out of the air of any of a number of Buddhisms. This tradition is ALWAYS focused primarily on experiential learning, with words used rarely in that training and at those points the masters think the student is receptive given what the student has learned. You don’t know anything about Zen, you don’t practice the meditation, you don’t even have any interest in it. You are not drawn to it and are skeptical it would be useful for you.
And yet you flail your arms as if plucking some piece of text from a tradition you have no interest in and no experience of should immediately make sense. And the implicit argument on your part is
it’s all bullshit
or
you, Iamb, are some cosmic victim since if it does make sense, you can’t figure it out.
Of course if you took bits of text from an advance ceramics course, a medical book, a book on partical physics, on Laban exercises in acting, on swimming underwater, and also had no experience at all of any these fields or processes, it would not
suddenly
make sense to you.
But you…the King of the implicit argument, since you take no responsibility for your situation which you present as inevitable, sometimes perhaps just for you, but generally, really for us all,
throw out this quote like some lazy ass teenager who thinks no one could possibly do a geometry proof because, while he doesnt do his homework, isn’t inerested, doesn’t listen in class
it should just work out magically for him on the test.
You’re a lazy whiny little teenager.
Now someone might get drawn in and try to explain what the guy meant. Someone who did have meditation experience, experience with the way language is used in Zen Buddhism, a context, a wider set of ideas, from that specific tradition, in which this quote sits.
And if they do fall into the trap of responding to you, you can wield your bloody incomprehension
as if your inability to get anywhere with anything is evidence that it’s just a ‘bunch of words’, and that one cannot benefit from whatever tradition you are whining about in the moment, and implicitly and even sometimes openly that they are fucked up for believing it means anything. They must be objectivists, they are serious philosophers, they have contraptions - which means that they don’t have your courage and must soothe themselves.
That you are:
The one good man bravely facing his confusion and incomprehension
read, the myth of Iambiguous.
Garden variety trolls open a thread with something that immediately triggers emotions. Get people riled up.
Your trolling is more insidious. You try to draw people in to futile discussions.
Now you will dismiss this as me ‘trying to reveal who you really are’,
rather than for one second trying to learn about
what you are doing. As if we can all just assume that I couldn’t be on to something here. As if your behavior here isn’t part of your problem, the problem you are always whining about, but cling to since no one could possibly know anything about you, despite us getting to see you act out
for years, in a repeated pattern. No, we couldn’t possibly have noticed anything about what you do here that might be true. You can just dismiss it. No one can learn anything about someone else. Which is precisely what teenagers think when presented with adult responses to their habits also.
Being a whiny teenager is a process, an activity. You needn’t continue it.
I am not trying to reveal who you are. I am pointing out what you are doing.
Some people learn from these kinds of responses.
Being proud of not learning from anything is also an option. Enjoy it.
Nope, it still sounds like a personal problem to me.
Unless, of course, he’s right. 
And just to be clear. I think Iamb is toxic to have a ‘dialogue’ with Iamb - I put that in quotes because I don’t think that is possible. But it can be interesting and perhaps useful to react to what he is doing and to some of his implicit positions.
Note to others:
Let’s bring this down to earth.
As I have been abundantly clear in regard to religious narratives, my own interest revolves around connecting the dots between the behaviors that someone chooses on this side of the grave, what one imagines their fate to be on the other side of the grave, and how that is intertwined existentially – “here and now” – in the beliefs they embrace in regard to God or spirituality or enlightenment.
But: that the discussion pertain to a set of circumstances most here will be familiar with. A context in which behaviors are chosen by those who call themselves Buddhists or Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus or Shintos or Sikhs or Taoists etc…
How do they as individuals connect these dots? You all know how I connect them.
I propose that we engage in discussions [here or on a new thread] such that KT will be able to describe in more detail the relevancy of his accusations against me above. In particular the manner in which I am “toxic”.
On the other hand, I have already come to my own conclusion regarding the, at times, toxic reactions of many to me. In particular the objectivists.
To wit:
1] I argue that while philosophers may go in search of wisdom, this wisdom is always truncated by the gap between what philosophers think they know [about anything] and all that there is to be known in order to grasp the human condition in the context of existence itself. That bothers some. When it really begins to sink in that this quest is ultimately futile, some abandon philosophy altogether. Instead, they stick to the part where they concentrate fully on living their lives “for all practical purposes” from day to day.
2] I suggest in turn it appears reasonable that, in a world sans God, the human brain is but more matter wholly in sync [as a part of nature] with the laws of matter.
And, thus, anything we think, feel, say or do is always only that which we were ever able to think, feel, say and do. And that includes philosophers. Some will inevitably find that disturbing. If they can’t know for certain that they possess autonomy, they can’t know for certain that their philosophical excursions are in fact of their own volition.
3] And then the part where, assuming some measure of autonomy, I suggest that “I” in the is/ought world [as the embodiment of dasein] is basically an existential contraption interacting with other existential contraptions in a world teeming with conflicting goods — and in contexts in which wealth and power prevails in the political arena. The part where “I” becomes fractured and fragmented.
You’re quoting people who are not here to connect the dots.
You seem mainly interested in expressing your own reactions.
Nope, definitely nothing new here.
You know, in my opinion.
I guess that you are content with what you are doing and you will continue doing it.
On this thread, I am content to note that [so far] I don’t get Buddhism differently than others don’t get Buddhism. Why? Well, by and large, given the the manner in which I construe the self here as an existential contraption grappling with value judgments subjectively/subjunctively out in a particular world understood from a particular point of view.
Unless of course someone is able to convince me that there is in fact a necessarily correct way to get it. And then goes on to demonstrate how, in getting it correctly, they are able to encompass in turn how this enables them to embody an enlightened path on this side of the grave in order to attain what they imagine their fate to be on the other side of the grave.
Really, come on, here, what else is there?
We choose words that best describe the life that we live from day to day. Only here they revolve around value judgments that often come into conflict in either a God or a No God world.
Why your words and not mine? All we can do in this regard is the best we know how.
I wrote about the inadequacy of words. As did others. It’'s the most recent theme in this thread.
There is more in life than words. I can’t put it into words for you.
I can attest to that. My experience is that of being pulled into a web from which it is extremely difficult to escape. As long as you know how to escape, a ride with Biggy can be fun.