I don't get Buddhism

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.

Believe it or not, odds are in the favour that a thief or burguler may be more mindful than a mormal person. Mindfulness means more alert, vigilant and focussed on himself and surroundings, knowing and witnessing very clearly what is happening in one’s mind. 100% focus and commitment. it has nothing to do with ethics. Mindfulness may happen for both reasons, right or wrong. It is merely a mental state not thought out conclusions.

With love,
sanjay

Yes, if you are outside the law or outside the local moral codes, to protect yourself you have to pay more attention. Be on the lookout.

I think that mindfulness can relate to a plethora of situations. As you guys say, being a criminal, I think would predispose someone to being naturally more mindful. But generally, there are situations where everyone is more mindful. In circumstances where there is immediate danger, or even when engaged in tasks that require us to concentrate more I believe that our general awareness (or mindfulness) increases and perhaps our reaction times too.

Beyond true and false
Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing
Graham Priest

Does that clear things up for you?

Because I’m still really confused.

The language that we use is derived from the biological evolution of life on Earth. It has [so far] culminated in brains able to invent language in order to communicate what individual minds have become conscious of to other thinking and feeling minds. Now, communicating “conventional reality” is more or less objective depending on the extent to which what is being discussed combines elements from both the either/or world and the is/ought world.

Some things are crystal clear to all of us. Other things are open to dispute. Language is just one more factor that allows us to make this crucial distinction between what we think or believe is true and what we are able to demonstrate that all other rational men and women are obligated to think and believe is true as well.

This combines both genetic and memetic components of human interaction, as well as the manner in which the conscious mind is intertwined in the subconscious and the unconscious components of the human brain intertwined in turn in ever more primitive components of the brain – the id, the libido, the instincts that drive us going all the way back to the evolution of life on earth.

Now, with death of course we are calling upon language to communicate something that, to the best of my current knowledge, no component of the brain has had any actual substantive contact with. We can only extrapolate regarding our own demise based on the experiences that we have had with respect to the death of others.

So, to speak of immortality or salvation or Heaven or Hell or reincarnation or Nirvana is to merely assume that what others have told us about them or what we have thought up about them. Isn’t this basically the extent to which our beliefs are demonstrable?

Of course there have been any number of articles and books and films from those who profess to have been on the other side. But have any of them provided evidence that goes beyond the language they use to describe this?

And, in regard to the writings of Nagarjuna in the Mulamadhyamakakarika, what on earth does modern logic make of it all such that this particular “world of words” reflects a “good thing”?

Then, in particular, this part:

What language relating to what assessment of conventional reality? And what “ultimate reality” relating to the condition of the “enlightened dead person” one claims to have experienced in “meditative states”? A reality that one is not able even to describe with words, let alone demonstrate as an actual “thing”.

How is the fact that this is all “ineffable” not basically a clue that the belief itself is more a psychological component of “I”?

The “I” you speak of seems to stand for ego consciousness. You assume that consciousness is the whole of the psychological individual. But knowledge of the phenomena that can only be explained on the hypothesis of unconscious psychic processes makes it doubtful whether the ego and it’s contents are in fact identical to the whole. Neuroscience has confirmed the existence of unconscious processes. They must really belong to the totality of the individual even though they are not components of the conscious ego. If these processes were part of the ego they would necessarily be conscious because everything that is directly related to the ego is conscious. Consciousness can be equated with the relation between the ego and a psychic contents. But unconscious phenomena are so little related to the ego that people like yourself do not hesitate to deny their existence outright. Nevertheless, unconscious processes manifest themselves in an individual’s behavior. This has been demonstrated numerous times in controlled psychological experiments. See Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow, where he cites numerous studies. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. To understand Buddhism would take a profound comprehension of the wisdom tradition’s relation to the unconscious psyche. Or you could just keep treading around the ninth circle of hell. :wink: