I don't get Buddhism

Yup.

Let’s look at the nihilistic hockey players.

They’re not trying to change the rules for “no reason”. Their reasons are fairly clear … gain a personal advantage, an advantage for your own team and a disadvantage for the opposing team. (Sure, that’s rational.)

But if every player, coach and spectator is yelling for these changes, then there won’t be much of a game.

The greater underlying “structure” is that all the participants want a game of hockey to be played.

That trumps limited personal desires for an advantage.

It’s decided ahead of time that certain rules will be used to play. They aren’t dropped off by God on stone tablets but they’re objective rules that make the game possible. And they’re founded on what people objectively consider to be fun, fair, challenging, entertaining.

What’s more pathetic, that this is your attempt to actually make a substantive point, or that this is your attempt to be…clever?

Okay, I’m done with this idiot.

Note to others…

If you don’t have anything better to do, please go back and tote up how many times he has been “done” with me. :laughing:

Though, sure, that he has now chosen to depict me as an “idiot” is, well, a disappointment.

You know, if he really means it. :sunglasses:

What an asshole.

In regard to the original concern of the OP… one should spring clean one’s mind, like one does one’s home and life.

Anything else?

It’s a good metaphor. Throw in ‘air the rooms’ now that one can. Of course to practicing Buddhists, then, it is always Spring clearning.

Yeah, I can be an asshole. Particularly [here] when, subjunctively, I come to embody [in any particular post] an ineffable combination of “the polemicist” and however I think this…

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest.

…is applicable to me. After all, I am no less grimly fractured and fragmented in regard to understanding my own self.

But on this thread – on all threads relating to religion – my main objective revolves around grasping the manner in which others are still able to accept one or another assessment of objective morality derived from one or another rendition of God or Enlightenment.

That’s it. And, for others [like KT], how are they not as fractured and fragmented as “I” am given that they too reject objective morality and a transcending moral font.

But: only insofar as the discussion is brought down to earth.

What does that mean? Well, I can only tell you what “here and now” it means to me. How, in other words, it is intertwined existentially in my understanding of human interactions in my signature threads.

Though, sure, by all means, really mean it this time and move on to others. If for no other reason that, these days, I don’t even take your posts seriously.

A hockey game is down to earth.

A hockey game is a context.

A hockey game is an opportunity to examine morality and ethics.

Nuff said.

:chores-mop:

:laughing:

Or, for once Iambiguous could actually consider that it is not beliefs about objective morality that lead to his feeling fragmented and fractured. Consider that his pain comes from something else. Like actually considers this. That it might have to do with his social relationships or lack of, past traumas, habits of dealing with problems that might have worked ok when he was younger but less so now, his particular situation, repeated disappointment and a lack of tools to move forward with what matters to him and so on. Notice that he is as usual putting the onus on others. Let’s see what they think that I don’t. Then he will decide that belief X
is what makes them not fragmented.
Then they will be asked to prove to all rational people that belief X or strategy X is the one all people should have or follow.
Then if they can’t it is a mere contraption.

Rather than him engaging real, honest intropsection. What do his beliefs do to create his fragmentation? Beliefs about what one must do. Beliefs about how one cannot try anyting until one knows that all rational people should. What do fears about potentially changing and being fooled again by a belief system do to him. How has the past affected him. What does his current situation’s various qualities do to him on a feeling level. How does his social life meet or not meet his needs. And so on.

What could he DO rather than think about that might not solve the entire issue, but might help him take small steps towards feeling better and perhaps doing something else later on a more cognitive paradimatic level. What might he be DOING right now or not DOING that leads to him feeling fragmented and fractured. Oddly he just assumes he knows the source of his pain, when pretty much all modern cognitive science suggests we are often wrong about such things.

No. The only possible approach is basically to see what intellectual contraptions other people have, judge them as not sufficient to convince every human on earth, and therefore feel comfortable not doing anything new, since other people are just comforting themselves.

We have the onus for his problems, oddly enough. In practical terms, anyone not in his pain bears the onus in the discussion for justifying to every rational person on earth why they do not have his pain. That is not where the onus lies.

Whereas, in fact, he bears an onus, in his own life, for himself, to challenge his own conclusion that his pain is caused by what he thinks it is and then also that his approach to solving it is an effective one.

He has chosen a path shown via his posting in ILP.

Should every rational person follow that path? Might not this path actually be comforting to him, a comforting intellectual contraption?

I think it is. I think what it does is reassures him that other people, if they are in less pain than him, are merely soothing themselves (read: fooling themselves).

Sure, he’s still in pain, but he is not being fooled and their solutions are not real solutions but just placebos.

He is reassuring himself.

It’s the only comfort he has left. Which would be fine, who couldn’t sympathize. But he presents as someone wanting to have a philosohpical discussion.

And that is NOT what will happen.

Yes… a regular process of airing our thoughts, to still and settle our minds and thus our selves, and this maintenance of mind then becomes reflected in the body, in also being strong and healthy… the mind body symbiotic connect.

I find, that the only time that mindfulness becomes more constant for me, is in new situations that I haven’t faced before… like being faced with new sights and sounds, or having to interact with a new group of people over a long period of time, or when faced with negative or manipulative types… as to maintain such a constant, in a Western environment, would be very tiring indeed.

But of course, one has to have a mind to do all that, in the first place. ; )

Yes. Mindfullness. That is the derivative by and around which all aspects of morality seems to converge upon, and it becomes typical of any ethically reduced motivation.

The insight is like a crack in mindlessness, when one does no longer feel the pressing need to abstain for a late involvement in topics like this, where such attempts to sew up comprehensive and even unread precursors, for the most part, -can be assumed to conform to prior sets of logical chains. Therefore they only appear to adhere to be prone to insightful and mindful summation.

No, the presumption that a non objective state of affairs,l ; where constructed objective criteria, ethically sound, either lays a foundation, or,not if all such constructions are primordial or a posteriori, have outlived their usefulness. Distinctions generally have been supplicated with less and less marginality, uncertainty has risen between publicly held moral guidelines and expressions of private leading moralists of the kind that have had long track records of resounding ethical authority behind their certainty.

Really, the idea of reduciability between the one and the other is no longer envisioned by a mysterious natural fallacy. wlWhen asked the same question say 50 years ago, the question would have been answered differently, there was less assurance of interplay between them.

What does this imply? That the nexus between a sound pseudo scientifically based system of ethical considerations and the insightful subjective realm of possible inferences are overtly becoming more mutually identified equivalently. Based on such things like revelation and axiomatic biblical interpretation are merely separated by a mylor sheet, consisting of interpenetrable quantic-quality of unobserved connections, which morph changing abstract-and real forms of structural modes , upon closer observation?
The conformance always follows the initial exposure, but the primal question ultimately sinks to : how non objective is a quantitive nominal insight? Or, how non subjective are the limited sets of reduced configurations within the possible scenarios that de-limit those type of conditional possibilities?

Finally, to squeeze such formative and developmentally , increasingly unstable mindful states within the constraints of long held narrative performances, leads to more, not less antithesis, alluding the built in expectation of plotting some kind of thesis-hypo-thesis graph based on probable expectation , to signal the coming of summary decisions ,describing quickly drawn up synthesis.

It will become more anathema, then not, to expect any resolution, giving rise to fortresses of nihilistic acuity.

This wasn’t aimed at you btw… I hope you didn’t think it was? I was referring to not so long ago when my thoughts could not manifest, so I had to mainly rely on my long term memory, until my short term memory was able to burst through the surface and be acted on.

Such phenomena are currently known as modern illnesses, but many don’t know how, or can’t, heal themselves from them… complacency breeding inability.

Mindfulness has nothing to do with ethics. You can be mindful while doing something unethical and you can be mindful while doing something ethical.

This wasn’t aimed at you btw… I hope you didn’t think it was? I was referring to not so long ago when my thoughts could not manifest, so I had to mainly rely on my long term memory, until my short term memory was able to burst through the surface and be acted on.

Such phenomena are currently known as modern illnesses, but many don’t know how, or can’t, heal themselves from them… complacency breeding inability.[/quo

Hello MagsJ!

Ilnesses are largely metaphoric nowedays , and references are obliquely expanded to include even them selves in a non bounded totally eclipsed sets of variables.

Maybe such is the state of Buddhism nowadays, the Nothingness is not really consistent with a blank slate.

Vampires are probably more prevalent to this sort of thing : having their life reversed upside down day by night.

Mindfullness is doing something ethical, but that is exactly the point : doing right things , the emphasis on doing " rather then merely in accordance to some thought up truth"

Up in realization the distinction fades.

What is this if not yet another gigantic “general description intellectual contraption.”!!

He left out this part:

But: only insofar as the discussion is brought down to earth.

What does that mean? Well, I can only tell you what “here and now” it means to me. How, in other words, it is intertwined existentially in my understanding of human interactions in my signature threads.

How, then, pertaining to a situation we are all likely to be familiar with, in a world of conflicting value judgments, is his own understanding of human interactions in a No God world different?

In other words…

Now, with regard to an issue like abortion, to what extent are your own value judgments understood by you given that at one end of the spectrum are those who, re God, ideology, deontology, enlightenment etc., believe that they are in sync with the real me in sync with the right thing to do. While those at the other end of it [folks like me] see their value judgments as “existential contraptions”…moral and political prejudices rooted in dasein, confronting conflicting goods ultimately “resolved” by those in any particular community who have the political and economic clout to call the shots. Legislatively, say.

and

Thus, taking into account all of those experiences and access to information, knowledge and ideas that you did not encounter. How your life and your thinking about it might have been profoundly different given a different trajectory. And then the part where, in a world of contingency, chance and change, new experiences and ideas can reconfigure “I” again. And then the part where philosophers are able to take that into account in attempting to pin down the optimal or the only rational thinking and feeling and behaving. In regard to abortion or any other conflicting good.

So, let him note a set of circumstances in which moral and political values often come into conflict. With or without God. Talk about how he would react to the behaviors he observed. I’ll note how I would react to the behaviors in turn.

Then, as the discussion unfolds, he can ask me those specific questions above. He can make the specific observations he always makes about me. Only in regard to the actual situation at hand.

In other words, forget “belief X.” What does he believe, what do I believe? How did we come to believe what we did given the actual existential trajectory of our experiences? And, given the fact that these conflicts are often derived precisely from of the manner in which I construe “I” here as an existential contraption, what, using the tools of philosophy, can we conclude comes closest to a “moral obligation” on the part of all rational human beings.

Let’s see what “happens” then.

Mindfullness has nothing to do with ethical behavior as phyllo said. One can find ethical precepts in Buddhism and this would cover

I am sure there are lots of people practicing mindfulness out there, and practicing it well, who few of us would want near our children.