Jetsun

Because of what I represent. To suggest it is aggressive is to misuse the word. I do not represent any kind of existential threat here.

 

That people 'come here' for different reasons is not disputed. I'm talking about those who want to argue with me. It takes two to tango. You would rather I was not here, but you haven't figured out why you wish it. All this you hide from yourselves. You refuse that reason is mans only absolute, yet that refusal to accept it is an absolute.

 

I know you don't have a clue what the dao is, you cannot define it, then you say that it has to be a particular thing that you are unable to define.

 

Some people are here looking for a tribe. Yet what is offered to them but the impossible and the unreachable. The path of no path. Where are you guiding these seekers Jetsun ? - to a place you can neither define, reach, describe or understand. You offer only faith, as if that is the Dao that one must simply believe and and revelation shall be achieved. Not one of you ever had and not one of you ever will.

 

I am fighting for men's minds, you are fighting for their feelings.

 

If people want faith I leave them to it. If they want to trust their emotions over their cognition I do not interfere. This is why I never - except once by mistake-get involved in practice forums. I only ever respond to posts framed as questions, portrayed as facts, or directed towards me. At those times there is a chance for open debate. That 90% argue with me does not make me wrong. I'm a minority of one, not because I try to be, but because I am. You would be better to respect it rather than continually playing the man. Either argue the point, or don't argue at all. I may get banned, but certainly I cannot be cowed by ad hominems. Those who are unable to do much but post ad hominems are simply added to the ignore list, they have lost the argument and therefore have departed the field. If others cannot stomach my arguments I suggest they do that also, or simply ignore my posts. It isn't difficult unless of course the traffic isn't one way ;-) 'don't throw rocks in glass houses'.

Well, to asssert that reason is mans only absolute is to deny all the wisdom traditions which have been discussing these subjects for thousands of years. It is deny the entire spiritual wisdom of India and of the traditions such as Buddhism, Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, as well as the experiences of thousands of Saints and Sages from all traditions through world religious and spiritual history, many of whom had far greater minds than you Karl.

I am not here to guide seekers, yet what I often talk about isn't faith it is experience, experience anyone can reproduce. Your issue is that you classify anything which you haven't personally experienced or anything you can't grasp with your own limited mind as faith or imagination. I am not fighting for peoples feelings or for faith, I am saying that there is something.. experience, awareness, wisdom, intelligence beyond reason, which transcends reason, is ultimately far greater and more profound than reason.

You mentioned the analogy of the finger pointing at the moon in another post which is a saying originating from Buddhism, do you really think that what the Buddha was pointing at in all the thousands of Sutras and teachings is reason? He had to point towards whatever that is rather than speak of it directly because it cannot be grasped by reason or by the intellect, yet it still exists. Why do you think some religious texts speak in Parables and Zen Koans are contradictory and nonsensical? because they are trying to break you out of your normal mind of reason into what it is that is beyond, into the embodied experience of it rather than a mental understanding of it.

If many hundreds of thousands of people throughout history in all different countries and eras have said that there is this transcendent aspect to reality which can be experienced by anyone it is folly in my view to just assume that it doesn't exist, or that is just some kind of emotional imagination, you just limit your own life and potential.

Look at the moon and not the finger. I must fight for some-thing. You must fight for some-thing. Do you even know what it is ?

 

All this crap about coming here to 'share' is a sham. Why are you really here ? It's a question I am asked many times by those who are dishonest-either evasively or who are in ignorance-about their purpose. Why do you fight me ? If your purpose is to listen and learn then what are you doing drawing your mental sword ? I present no existential threat to you, so perhaps you should question what your intention is - I know mine.

What are you fighting for? seems like aggressive posturing and an obsessive need to win and be right to me. Just regular warlike mentality and just another person who thinks their own limited world view is the correct one .

It can't really shock you that people come here for different reasons than fighting surely? this is a Daoist board where people discuss their individual experiences and practices as well as debating, once in a while people clash heads, whereas you clash heads with over 90% of the people here, so it is clear not everyone has the same mentality as you do.

Studying anything gets tiresome and boring at a certain point, even if your into it, G.I Gurdjieff explained this phenomenon of energy by law using what he called the 'law of octaves'  which describes how we start out with a lot of enthusiasm and energy doing something but then eventually it becomes difficult and tiresome so we give up, but if you persist and give extra energy when it is most difficult, or get a shock to motivate you, then it will revert around again to being easy and flow with energy rather than being destroyed. 

Or......I do. A word is enough. I haven't time, or space to tease out exactly what philosophy people hold from their own lips and generally when getting close to illustrating a philosophical conflict they will withdraw faster than turtles heads. So, I just put the lettuce out and then they can attack it. I admit freely that it is a technique I employ, but many here do the same without knowing it. In attack mode people reveal themselves far more than in defence. I think this is common to martial arts fighters too. Draw out the opponent and get them to commit to a move. It's better than posturing.

There is a fundamental dishonesty in just filling in the gaps of your knowledge with assumptions, an intellectual dishonesty towards yourself and others. The reality is you just don't know, you may think this persons philosophy fits in with models you have in your own mind but in all truth you simply don't know, but you aren't willing to admit or live with not knowing, which is why you fill in the gaps with whatever suits your own agenda the best.

Not hardly. It's implicit in how people answer. From the general direction of the argument it's easy to uncover the fundamentals. It shouldn't be a suprise, anyone can do it if they learn to explore their own philosophies.

The common theme I see from you is that you make assumptions from people's posts and then demolish an argument based on those assumptions, which may have nothing to do with the persons beliefs or intentions. This thread is yet another example of this. So maybe you don't see as much as you think you do.

You are transparent to me, but completely opaque to yourself. I glean your meaning on a thousand different levels that you are not even dimly aware of. I could pick any one of these, but you would not see it.

So you are omniscient now    Karl the Guru 

I don't know exactly how you are drawing these conclusions. 

 As far as I can see nothing I have said contradicts anything you have said. If you work 9 hours a day you are far more likely to chat and go on facebook because you need a break, 6 hours a day not so much. The main thing I was pointing out is the difference between the USA and the rest of the OECD

When I heard about how little holiday you guys get in America from the companies you work for that seemed like slave labour. Here we get 4-5 weeks a year and public holiday which I consider quite a small amount, many other European countries get far more, which is better for society, family and the individual. Companies convince us that they need to squeeze everything out of you in the name of being competitive, yet studies have shown that you work far more efficiently doing about 6 hours work a day with decent holiday to keep you fresh and motivated. 

One of the most disturbing things I think Wikileaks is showing is just how much Goldman Sachs runs the US government. It pretty much decides who gets what post in government https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-revelation-isnt-hillary-clinton  and Hillary is clearly their person https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/16/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-wall-street-goldman-sachs-speeches, and as Joeblast links above shows they even have the meetings of the Clinton Foundation at Goldman HQ

Where is the democracy if an investment bank runs your country? It got its claws into Europe too during the financial crisis

I would say there is a lot of negative culture and ideas in schools in all sorts of areas, at least in state schools. When I was there there was generally a very negative attitude towards intelligence in general, so you would pretend not to be intelligent and pretend you didn't work hard or do your homework, at my school the geeks would get bullied and beaten up. There is certainly a negative attitude around girls doing things like maths, science and computing in that it was seen to be not cool or geeky and girls generally enter puberty at an earlier age so the desire to fit in, attract a partner and the whole teenager thing where you like to be part of the herd kicks in a bit sooner. So many girls may give up on maths and computing sooner than they should even if they may be good at it or enjoy it. 

One cannot heal beyond their own clarity.

This isn't true in my experience, one can through devotion or submission to a higher power become a vessel for that intelligence to do the healing. For example the healer who probably comes closest to Christ in terms of miracle healing is John of God, and he does it through submitting to the intelligence and skill of Master spirits and allowing them to work through him rather than him being enlightenmed himself.

Why not teach seed drilling, hand riveting or horse shoeing ? These were all vital skills in the 1800s. Coding isn't a high level skill, it does not engage cognitive development. Coding is no use without a product that needs to be coded. It isn't a stand alone skill.

 

I don't know how old you are, but I lived through the ICT revolution from its very beginnings. I have seen how quickly the skills change to the extent that learning one kind of thing is pretty much useless for any other kind of thing.

 

We need entrepreneurs and that cannot be taught. Education should not be about turning out shovel ready workers, but adults that can learn new skills from the basics. Programming is related to language, maths and science. It is a good grounding in those subjects that is required, with an opportunity to take up skills as they appear but not necessarily at school itself.

Baffling set of opinions to me, can you personally code in any language?

There are plenty of online coding courses without waiting for the Government to introduce them. In my experience the state education system is so slow at changing that the things taught will be so out of date. It's also likely that there won't be any need for coding after all that education.

 

We should be educating young adults how to educate themselves then offering external pathways for their particular interests. This battery hen style system doesn't work.

When you learn one coding language it gives you the basis and teaches you the fundamental approaches to learning any of the others, even if that language is out of date. I don't see coding being useless for a long long time, in many ways it is becoming more and more important now, its in all our fridges, kettles, watches, cars, etc, its pretty much the basis for everything these days. I'm all for a revolution in education, but before that happens all kids at a young age should be learning to code in school, it can even be quite creative and fun.

The government are late at introducing ICT to the national curriculum, all school kids should have been taught to code at least 5 years ago. It will take a while to catch up but I'm sure they will

One way of looking at it is that anger is protecting something, so at least from its own perspective it is doing something compassionate. Getting in touch of the love behind this dynamic can soften things enough for the more tender and hurt feelings to emerge, and from there it can be enquired whether there is actually anything to protect or whether the anger is operating from old outdated beliefs, programming and defences which are no longer appropriate.

Just thought I'd add a practical way of working with anger seeing as we're on the subject.

When the mind is quiet, is it possible to become angry?

Well anger can arise at any time, it doesn't have to disturb awareness or take your identity. But what I mean is in daily life anger arises once in a while in everyone, if you have a liver there can be anger, so what use is a Sutra which says you should never get angry or you will go to hell for it? It's just guilt tripping to control people

When it comes to the teachings on anger that is one thing in some Buddhist scriptures I don't agree with, I think modern psychology has a far healthier relationship to it by accepting it's place and function. It is probably a distortion of the teachings or something inserted to disempower people to tell them they should never get angry.

This is not true, more and more evidence is found that the consciousness is generated by the brain, there is no such a thing as consciousness outside the brain. As soon as the brain cease to function the consciousness is gone. This is why you loose consciousness under anesthesia or if you get a blow on your head. OBE and NDE are not an argument for the "consciousness outside the brain/body" concept. OBE and NDE can be explained as brain generated "experiences".

This talk is really interesting about how the brain works:

 

This just proves that the brain has an effect on states such as thought and emotion, it says nothing about what causes consciousness, which is why it is still regarded as the "hard problem" of neuroscience. With regards to OBE and NDE there are numerous cases of people obtaining information about things in their OBE which they couldn't possibly have known, the story of Anita Moorjani is one example. Also when you lose consciousness such as when you are sleeping another form of consciousness is still present such as dreaming, plus it is possible to train yourself with Yogic techniques to be aware and lucid in such states even during the deepest part of unconscious sleep.

Alan Wallace is a good resource about the dogma surrounding consciousness studies:

"Many materialists argue that mental processes are identical to or are nothing more than functions of their neural correlates, while others dogmatically propose that consciousness and all kinds of subjective experiences don’t really exist at all! Although many materialistic theories of the mind-body relationship have been proposed, none of them lend themselves to scientific verification or repudiation, so they are merely hypotheses or speculations, not scientific theories. And they are certainly not scientifically established facts, despite the fact that the scientific and popular media commonly equate the mind and brain, without any compelling reasoning or empirical evidence."

https://cup.columbia.edu/author-interviews/wallace-meditations-buddhist-skeptic

Also I saw a programme on tv yesterday about a boy being born with only 2% of his brain, yet he was still alive and functional and conscious, how is that possible if consciousness is created by the brain?

There's no need for consensus. Open your eyes and there it is.

 

Was Sri Auronindo a scientist who has found evidence of these different cognitive area within the brain ?

 

Scientists haven't found anywhere in the brain which is the cause of consciousness, it is still a complete mystery to science

But you could say that he was a scientist in the sense that anyone can experience and reproduce the different mental states by using specific techniques and meditation. 

Not to mention the denigration that I received for asking for clarity. When someone has 'an experience' that they are unable to describe in terms of existent reality, then it must be fantasy.

 

If I tell you I had the experience of flying to New York I could describe it in terms you would recognise. You won't actually experience the flight, but you can grasp the conceptual elements. If I say I experienced heaven then you might rightly ask if I meant utmost joy, if I said that I meant Gods Kingdom then I cannot define anything except in fantasy terms. I can say ephemeral spirit clouds and Angels and we can both imagine it, but there is no connection with existent reality. I cannot say how I got there, where the place is, what the Angels were, nor how I was supported on clouds. Fantasy.

There is very little consensus on what comprises this existent reality. 

For example some say there is just consciousness and no super consciousness, whereas someone like Sri Aurobindo (who many people recognise as one of the greatest Indian philosophers and Yogi's of recent times) classifies mind as 

Higher Mind, Spiritual Mind, Inner Mind, Psychic Mind, Mind Proper, Thinking Mind, Dynamic Mind, Exterior Mind, Vital Mind, Physical Mind, Mechanical Mind, Mind of Light Intuitive Mind, Overmind, Supermind. There is no consensus in almost anything, it all depends on what perspective you look at things from.

Aw yeah jump on the one asking the difficult questions. Please tell me none of you teach this stuff.

Well you can do it without denigrating others experience as fiction/fantasy 

Amusing, Karl.  "It appears" (you can just say "I'm going to make some possibly large assumptions and just roll on from there") that you've once again gone on and contrived an entire argument from a false premise.  

That is pretty much what has happened every time I have tried to have a conversation with him. 

The whole idea of getting higher and higher or progressing up the chakras to eventually lead to enlightenment is not what matches up to my understanding, you can have the energy go up to the higher centres leading to high states and bliss, but there is always a coming down after, what goes up must comes down. States are always temporary and transient and by law are balanced by their opposite, which isn't the peace of recognising what is ever present. Non-duality contains it all, including duality, contains the high and low, and there is no linear progressive attainment of it because it is here right now. But the space of non-duality isn't necessarily empty in the way we regularly understand it, it can exhibit qualities, for example in Hinduism they recognise the different divine qualities of this space including the completely loving embrace of the Divine Mother or Devi, as well as the raw destructive power of Kali and many more. 

In many paths man is considered a microcosm of the universe, all the forces in the universe play themselves out inside of man, is made in God's image etc. So within man you have the entirety, love, rage, anger, bliss, everything is inside of us. The ego imagines some kind of state of perfection where all the "bad" emotions are overcome and only positive ones remain, but maturity is realising that everything is inside of you including all the negative. By accepting it inside of you you stop rejecting and judging it on the outside, which is the more compassionate place to be and you also stop projecting it all out in the world as a way to avoid seeing it in yourself.

People choose to take on debt.

They choose Governments with housing, health and education policies which aren't laissez faire free market.

They choose Governments that maintain low interest rates for borrowers so they can consume more stuff now than later.

They choose state controlled capitalism over free markets, wealth distribution over property rights and welfare over self sufficiency.

 

These four things are the root of the problem. All of them create unsustainable bubbles and a distorted economy. It means houses, education and health are far more expensive than they would otherwise be. It means a high cost government that has to borrow and print to sustain the appearance of stability with the consequent massive debt landing on the heads of the tax payer, saver, the prudent, entrepreneur, consumer and employee. It means those who borrow get a free lunch off those who don't. It means those who are less productive eat off the plates of the most productive.

 

There's your debt slaver for you. Quick and easy. The more we want Governments to interfere in markets and provide services, the greater the debt becomes. Of course Governments won't tell you the horrifying truth, this is all coming to an end very soon and those in the Government and using most of the services and redistribution will kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

 

If you were an objectivist the reason becomes very clear. It's a simple moral truth. Don't steal, don't take values you haven't earned, don't lie to yourself that it's fine, don't blame the productive and the succesful for your lack of wealth.

 

Here's the truth you buried deep, if you support this kind of Government welfarism and market interference you are holding your own chains and those of everyone else. You are the slaver by choice. You are morally bankrupt and are dragging the world down with you.

You think people chose the environment they are born in, chose the economic and political climate they grow up in and enter into as adults. Get real

I guess if everyone was an objectivist and saw the world just like you everything would be fine, yeah right.. like you hold all the answers 

The fact is if you want a higher education, at least in the UK, you enter adult life with a minimum of £30,000 debt, probably a lot more in the USA, then if you want your own home it is almost impossible in the current climate no matter how thrifty you are without a lot of help and huge mortgage. This is the climate people inherit not one they have created. 

Then you get Tories who inherit most of their wealth and opportunity and have never done a proper job in their entire lives and take what they can from the state telling people that they should work hard for their wealth to earn your keep, get on your bike, that the poorest are "scroungers". One even came out yesterday that the solution to housing is for grandparents to hand over all their houses to their grandchildren. Its beyond a joke