I don't get Buddhism

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

Once again, we are off to an inauspicious start. Exactly: another general description intellectual contraption.

They can originate in Western philosophy and religion or in Eastern philosophy or religion.

To wit:

What contradiction regarding the nature of what things and relationships in what particular context? Again, as though before we go there, we’ve got to be clear in our mind about the definition and the meaning of the words we will use that by and large will hardly ever actually leave our minds and become entangled in what we either can or cannot demonstrate is true for all of us in our interactions.

In other words, suppose you were able to grasp Buddhism without any ignorance of anything at all? Suppose you had a complete comprehension of it?

How would that change my point?

The same with Western narratives. If someone was able to actually transcend all ignorance and comprehend rationally all that is of most importance in our interactions with others, where would that leave them in regard to that which is of most importance to me in regard to both philosophy and religion: morality here and now, immortality there and then.

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

So, sure, why not, through either God or No God, extend that frame of mind to value judgments. One is either right about the morality of abortion or they are wrong. And, even though a distinction can clearly be made between the objective fact of having an abortion and conflicting subjective reactions to the morality of choosing to have one, you simply embrace one or another rendition of obligatory or deontological or metaphysical morality as true. Thus, from Plato to Kant to Ayn Rand, it’s the reality in your head that counts.

That way the act of being beaten or burned and one’s point of view regarding the morality of the beating and the burning become interchangeable in the objectivist’s mind.

Now on to the East…

Okay, so what are the “four corners” here?

What does happen to enlightened people after day die? How, choosing each corner at a time, would one go about demonstrating that this is in fact what happens to enlightened people after they die?

After all, were there not people like me around back then who refused to just accept what people believed about things like this “in their head”? Buddhist or not. Or, perhaps, since the “vicious circle” is really only created in one’s head, then why not the solution as well.

And, again, the reason that this is just “how people thought” about things like this [then and now] is because, in convincing yourself that it is true, it comforts and consoles you. Whether it be in regard to Nirvana or Heaven or the Promised Land or Paradise or Canaan or Elysium or Arcadia.

The only thing that really changes on this side of the grave are the particular behaviors that one is obligated to embody in order to pass muster on the other side.

Why on earth would anyone choose an article called… Beyond true and false
Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing

and expect it to answer questions about whether abortion is moral or not?

And he actually expressed a kind of frustration that the article was not meeting your needs.

Here’s in reaction to just the very beginning of talking about non-contradiction, it seems to me, Iamb has no idea what non-contradiction is. He writes what he always writes without even trying, it seems, to integrate anything he is citing. Now I think it would be tricky to do this, but the following does not respond to, integrate or critique what he quoted. It seems merely triggered by what he quoted.

Then we have this…

and

He is asking people what it would mean in relation to his ‘point’ if we had completely knowledge of Western tradition?
I mean, must one actually point out the idiocy. We aren’t the person who has this, so how could we possibly answer.

He complains that there isn’t a particular context…as if the article said it was going to resolve something like conflicting goods or immortality. When in fact, oddly enough givne the title, it is talking in broad terms about how what seemed just plain wrong, in terms of logic, in Buddhism, is not not considered to be. IOW the article is on topic and one not directly related to his issue, but it is failing somehow since it is not answering his question.

Sound familiar?

Yup, that’s how he treats us.

I am putting his quotes in a different order…in case someone thinks this is unfair they can check his posts above to see if I have changed something significant…

OK, again, first issue: who does he think he is talking to? He is asking non-Buddhists to answer what they would answer or could resolve if they had complete Buddhist knowledge. Now it is the internet and I am sure one can find people idiotic enough to answer that, but…why bother?

As always, I am attempting to spark an exchange between those who embody one or another religious denomination; or are on one or another perceived spiritual path to enlightenment. As that relates to the behaviors they choose on this side of grave. As that is reflected in their moral philosophy. As that is derived from one or an rendition of God or His equivalent.

As that can be understood by me given the manner in which I perceive discussions of this sort as embedded in my own moral philosophy derived from my assessment of dasein confronting conflicting goods out in a world where political economy is always going to be an important factor in human interactions.

Or, for those do not subscribe to either God, religion or an objective morality, how they manage to sustain “I” without it fracturing and fragmenting as mine has.

Given a particular context explored in depth.

But, you seem to put religions into the box of the religion you occupied in the past. One where it was all about the connection between objective prescribed or proscribed behavior and an objective afterlife. There are many other approaches to religion that you dismiss as contraptions because they don’t fit in that box. The Buddhism of my experience is ill suited to your model. It’s all about the rewards of meditation in the present moment. It’s not primarily about some objective morality or some future afterlife. The bliss of meditation is the result of a practice that is compassion toward myself. A peaceful self is more able to express compassion toward others. A peaceful and compassionate life is its own reward. No need to know what comes after. After never comes. We always live in the present. Cultivating awareness of that fact through meditation is the centerpiece of Buddhism according to my experience.

iambiguous–Concerning your kind of objective religion there is a Zen saying that applies. “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him.”

Peachy. But notice that in no way did you respond to the specific points I made about how you do this and in what context. As pointed out earlier in the thread, you are posting to non-Buddhists or people who take certain pieces of Buddhism at best - when there are in fact Buddhist forums, with experts. Second you are asking people how you or they would react IF they had a complete knowledge of Buddhism (and then also Western philosophy). Even that is silly in an expert forum for Buddhism and is extremely silly here, because how could anyone claim, here to know what it would be like and what one would think and say when one had a knowledge one does not currently have. Third, you just took a randomly chosen Buddhist article that did not deal with morality and only dealt with the afterlife in an example of how Buddhist logic differs from traditional Western logic. IOW it never goes on to look into what this might mean for someone who wants to nail down what they might experience in the afterlife, if anything, because that is not the topic of the article. This is trolling, if a complicated form of it.

You respond to my post as if I was criticizing what you want. My post was focused on the problems related to how you go about trying to get what you want.

YOu chose a not relevent article from a subject you know little about. You do not respond to the points made in the article, but rather cite from the article portions that you then follow with a repetition of you questions and ideas. You challenge people to assert what they would say if they had knowledge they do not have.

This is silly stuff and, as usual, you cannot admit any of it was silly, or at best, not clearly written.

IOW, as has been pointed out before, you assume that others are not fragmented and fractured because of contraptions So first you ask for their beliefs, then demand an argument that demonstrates that every rational person should follow their path, then if they can’t tell them they are using an intellectual contraption to stay whole. That they are comforting themselves with irrationality. And you do this, oddly, when they very practices they engage in have been show scientifically to reduce states that are unpleasant.

MOST important however: You never demonstrate that your fragmentation is actually caused by your beliefs or lack of them. This is assumed. And others must assume that their lack of fragmentation is caused by their belief system.

It’s not, for example, your sense that you must be able to resolve conflicting goods and fine an argument that all rational people would follow that causes your suffering. It’s not health issues and isolation. It’s not your particular dasein that was too rough on your psyche. It’s not PSTD or some other psychoemotional issue. It’s got nothing to do with your parenting of losses in your love life. We just must assume along with you that your fragmentation is rational, the outcome of bare rational thought, so anyone not fragmented bears the onus for proving that they are not using some intellectual contraption to irrationally soothe themelves. Your problem, oddly, has little to do with dasein. It is the ground experience everyone is hiding from. And you somehow know this (though you are willing to admit you might be wrong, but this possibility never leads to any actual exploration of the possibility that your fragmentation might have something to do with completely other things)

While you never need to demonstrate to all rational people that being fragmented and fractured is the natural state of anyone without irrational beliefs. You know why you feel the way you do and experience your self or ‘self’ the way you do. So, we don’t even have to look at that - which of course Buddhism would offer one very concrete way of actually looking at that experientially. It is off the table. Iamb’s ideas are off the table. Other people’s ideas bear the burden of proof and they must be able to convince all rational people.

You really think you know what you are doing?

A self-admitted fragmented and fractured person who sees no reason at all to question his modus operadi despite the fact that he is fragmented and fractured.

Now you can say ‘he is focusing on me’, well, sure, in part. Here I am primarily focusing on what you are doing, then what you are implying, and all of that sure does make me think certain things about you, but here you are participating in a discussion forum and my critique of that participation is central to this and other posts. And imagine, since for you it could only be imaginary, imagine if I am right, then my posts are not simply a critique, they would actually have something to offer you in relation to your needs, which is supposedly central to your purpose here.

Here is one reaction to that at Quora:

[b]Ben Rode, The King’s Council at The Rode Institute

People who don’t truly understand this statement think that it means to resist charlatans who claim they are enlightened. Crucify the teacher…

Here’s the trick: In order to see the Buddha, you have to BE the Buddha. If you aren’t the Buddha, you can’t really understand the Buddha. Once you understand the Buddha, you can let him go. Not before.

Once you stand nose to nose with the Buddha (you “meet him on the road”) then you have no more to learn from the Buddha. At that point, holding on to those teachings becomes a crutch. an identity. No teaching is meant to be held onto. They are meant to provide an experience for where you are at in the moment. Hear the same thing later, and it will provide a new meaning, and a new experience.

Each teaching is a stepping stone to take you to the next level of understanding. Holding onto a teaching keeps you in place. It holds you into an identity.

“Kill the Buddha” doesn’t mean the Buddha is bad or wrong. It means you don’t need him anymore. In order to be done with him, you must first use him up.

Each teacher can only show you what they know. Once you know that, you will add to it what you know and transcend those teachings. Use the truths AND untruths of teachings to help you find your own truths. Then let go of the teachings. Then kill the Buddha. Not before.[/b]

Or, perhaps, as Michael Beraka at Quora suggested:

Like all Zen tropes, this famous dictum is multifaceted and highly dependent on context.

So, what’s your assessment? How multifaceted is it in any particular context of your choice.

And, more to the point [mine], how is this sort of assessment reconfigured from a “general description intellectual contraption” into an assessment of the behaviors one chooses on this side of the grave as that pertains to what one thinks one’s fate will be on the other side of the grave given the religious values that one holds near and dear here and now.

In other words, the part that you ever and always wiggle out of addressing by turning everything here into a discussion of me instead.

My kind of “objective religion”? In what [detailed] sense do you ascribe this to me?

You ignored my explanation above. Why should I repeat myself or elaborate further, when you haven’t responded to what I already said? I do think it’s funny that you said that I turn everything into a discussion about you and then you asked me what kind of a objective religion I ascribed to you. Ha!

And around and around we go.

Here is how I think about “I” at the existential juncture that is identity, value judgments and political economy:

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

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.

You see this in the abortion wars all the time. Those that are adamant at either end of the political spectrum, those who are willing to accept moderation, negotiation and compromise, and those, even in acceding to democracy and the rule of law, who recognize how thinking and feeling about their own value judgments [b]never gives them any real solid ground to stand on.[/b]

I’m simply trying to ascertain the extent to which you feel more or less fractured and fragmented than I do out in a particular context when for whatever reason others challenge what, as a political prejudice rooted in dasein, you believe about abortion.

For me it is in how I have come to believe this instead of that because of the points I raise here on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382

How is it different for you…given your own intertwining of experiences and what, among other things, philosophy has taught you about identity, conflicting goods and political power intertwined in turn to your reaction to a particular set of circumstances.

But my point is that this sort of thing can never be fully understood or demonstrated other than by way of trying to grapple with your own personal experiences out in a particular world understood in a particular way, given your own particular access to information, knowledge and ideas.

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.

The rest is just you back up in the clouds of general descriptions. It’s not so much that you “focus in on me” as that in doing so you remain embedded in your intellectual contraptions. We need a context. An attempt on our part to explain [to the best of our ability] what goes on inside our head when we either experience a situation in which our moral philosophies come into conflict with others, or in regard to a conflicting good [like abortion] that is always popping up on the news.

Note to others:

What on earth is he talking about? How is my post above responding to his post as he describes it here? What haven’t I responded to?

Oh, and what exactly was his “explanation” above as it relates to the behaviors he chooses on this side of the grave as that relates to his thinking about either Buddhism or any other religious path that connects the dots between here and now and there and then.

Here’s what you didn’t respond to:

Are you aware of your perseverative and impoverished rhetoric? I underlined some of it above. And what’s up with the desperate hand waving?

I’ll just have to wait for someone [other than karpel tunnel of course] to explain to me what in the hell you are talking about.

Either that or you can bring a particular value judgment of yours down out of the clouds and explain to us how it precipitates a set of behaviors based on what you now think your fate will be after you shuffle off this mortal coil into the beyond.

Or explain to me [yet again] why you refuse to go there.

Iambiguous is a closeted dictator who has zero self reflection or awareness.

I can prove the pro-choice argument beyond any reasonable doubt, and iambiguous will say, so what in fact is my friend Mary supposed to choose?!?!

Well it’s not a fucking choice if I told her how she HAS to choose?!?!

In iambiguous’ strange universe, either we are all robots or everything is completely determined!! Honestly? Wtf!! But this is what he really believes!

But that’s not enough. It even gets worse. Iambiguous is of the belief that if ANYONE ever changed their mind about something, that NOBODY can know ANYTHING forever and ever and ever.

All because iambiguous himself didn’t know everything to start with, this is a deep ego wound to iambiguous (who is a classic narcissist)… if iambiguous could ever be wrong about anything, then all human and beyond knowledge must be wrong!

Like I said…a “condition”. :wink:

That the article which you complain about doesn’t have anything to do with what you complain it doesn’t do for you. That’s one example. Another was that you asked people to answer

to answer

what their responses and opinions would be if they had complete knowledge of Buddhism

or

Western philosophy.

I pointed out the absurdity of this question.

It’s trolling or a loss of rationality in the post as a whole.

That’s a couple of things I said in the first post and then again in the second.

And yet you cannot find what you did not respond, despite having responded to NO points I made and some of them being repeated twice.

And then that you don’t take these questions where experts might actually be.

So you throw up your hands to the gallery. Poor you dealing with the crazy person (whose posts you are unable to actually read).

[/quote]
Exactly. In a thread someone else started about Buddhism, one of your criticisms of my post is that it does not do what you want. What my post did was critique your use of a Buddhist text, point out assumptions in your post in the thread and a number of other practical and philosopical lines. But because of your in practice solipsism here, a post is problematic if it doesn’t demonstrate the afterlife is X or conflicting goods are resolved as Y.

YOu are a functional narcissist.

And that is precisely what you did to the randomly picked Buddhist article about logic in Buddhism and how this is being reevaluated, now, in Western philosophy.

You took some random post out of Buddhism and critiqued it for not doing what you wanted it to.

And the reason seem to be so you can keep posting in the thread without merely repeating yourself completely, when you have nothing new to say, so perhaps some non-expert Buddhist fan, here, might come and fail to do what you want them to do

rather than actually trying Buddhism or whatever.

You’re a troll. How could you possibly have read those two posts and not noticed things that were central to them that you did not respond to. If you are dyslexic or nearly blind, let us know. But you actually played to the gallery after failing to read or deciding to pretend.

This is a basic reading comprehension failure, repeatedly, or worse just plain lying.

It is utterly amazing how much you say you might be wrong, but never once admit to having been wrong.

Back on ignore until I notice you seem to be luring in others.

I already explained that. Apparently you can’t comprehend my explanation. You just talk around it. You haven’t even demonstrated that you read it. Like I said there are many other approaches to religion than the one you’re stuck on.
I think Buddha was an agnostic who sought practical means of alleviating suffering. So his religion is outside your box. You would have to think outside the box to get it. But, you seem to be very attached to being stuck inside the box.

Fine. Do that.

But my offer still stands:

Based on my assumption that…

The part that has “fractured and fragmented” my own particular “I”.

With me, it’s less a question of being right or wrong about these relationships and more an effort to explore how, using the tools of philosophy, it can be determined if there is a right and a wrong way to grasp them.

Out in a particular context out in a particular world understood in a particular way. Something that [in my own opinion] you and phyllo and felix avoid like the coronavirus. On this thread for example.

As soon as anyone tries to discuss right and wrong it gets labelled as an existential/intellectual contraption in the head. And that’s the end of that discussion.

It’s like trying to play a hockey game without any agreed rules. A frustrating waste of time.

If you establish “this is what right is like” and “this is what wrong is like”, then you can talk.

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

Well, which is it? Or is asking that entirely missing the point of being enlightened?

But: How could contemplating one’s fate after death ever really be a waste of time? After all, the time we spend from the cradle to the grave is basically a blink of the eye compared to the eternity to come. In particular when it seems entirely reasonable to connect the dots between living as an enlightened human being on this side of the grave and whatever that portends for “I” in eternity.

From my frame of mind time is wasted instead when your thinking about this never goes much beyond what you believe is true “in your head”. Indeed, why not spend considerably more time contemplating ways in which to demonstrate that what the Buddha noted in his sutras is in fact “the case”.

Why? Because to the best of my knowledge no one ever has. So the focus always comes back to the way in which you think about being enlightened. That can be used to bring about the actual benefits of a disciplined mind. A more contemplative and serene outlook on life.

No small thing of course. But that is just not my own “thing” in regard to religion. I’m more intent on grappling with morality and immortality. What in this regard does it mean to live as an enlightened human being.

And here there is either demonstrable arguments or there are not.

Here we go again. Another “general description intellectual contraption” that tells me absolutely nothing about the things that “I” want to “get” about Buddhism. How, in a particular situation involving behaviors chosen here and now in order to impact one’s thinking about there and then, does one encompass these “empty” things?

For example, If those here who do claim to “get” Buddhism properly contemplate the ongoing global clamor over the coronavirus, how does “emptiness” fit in there? How are all things here to be understood as related to everything else? If no “intrinsic” nature then how is the enlightened man or women to interact with others in a context in which this disease does become a full blown global pandemic?