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There was mention in the OP about psychology starting to discover things that lined up with the teachings of Buddhism. Can you go into more detail about what exactly those things are?
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May 10, 2013 16:18
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There's a zen center nearby where I live and I'm considering checking it out. Specifically they practice Zazen. After checking out their web site it looks to be very highly ritualized; bells signal the ends/beginnings of meditation periods, proper times to bow, proper ways to bow, etc, etc. Is most zen/Buddhism like this or does it vary according to the particular flavor?
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Jul 8, 2013 18:37
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Extreme lay person here, but what about the possibility that they were an even better person in the last life, like someone who was this || close to enlightenment (or whatever) and then screwed up right at the end? Maybe they were even just someone who was more rich in the last life than they are in this one, and they lost some of that as a result of bad karma, but not enough to drop them down into 'not rich'. None of that even gets into the ideas that karma is just cause and effect, not reward or punishment; or the impermanence principle (rule, law, whatever) which says that there is no 'same person' that's reborn over and over again.
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Aug 29, 2013 04:59
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Been following the thread for a while and there's a couple things I'd like to comment on in this post. First, I'm not sure why you're mentioning the background of atheists. Some people are raised in the way that you say, this is true. Others are raised in the opposite way, and come to have opposite beliefs. You can even find people in both camps who were raised one way, then later came to adopt the other camp's view. So what? The mere fact that a person got their beliefs by being raised a certain way is no reason to either support or reject those beliefs. It even seems to be in line with the idea of Karma if Karma is understood as cause and effect, as some people in this thread have mentioned. I'm not sure I buy this line that anyone who doubts the more mystical aspects of Buddhism generates a conflict between that person and Buddhism. That seems to imply that several people in this thread who call themselves Buddhists are not actually Buddhists, yet if their conflicting beliefs come from Buddhist sources, then the conflict is indeed within Buddhism itself. The classical five materialist senses are taste, touch, seeing, hearing and smelling. Thought is not a sense in this, and other views, but an activity. I'd be very wary of citing things like theoretical physics in examples unless you have some idea of the math behind them. For example, I understand that since the Higg's boson was found, that wound up invalidating several varieties of string theory, although I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong about that. It is also at this point not known if the laws of physics break down inside of a black hole. The laws of physics as we understand them might break down, but that doesn't mean the laws themselves do. Also, the way in which experiments are carried out kind of flies in the face of this idea that it's narrow-minded. Discoveries get made only when someone stops to consider that there might be something else out there that we haven't noticed before. Why haven't we noticed it? Because we can't directly observe it with the five senses. So we build something that will allow us to detect it, or at least its effects, and then translate the detected results into something we can see. You also mentioned that the standard model has flaws. So? Science does not claim to be the end-all, be-all answer for everything ever. It only claims to be a good process to understand the empirical world. Taking the stance that the empirical world is all there is requires something more than just science to get there. You mention that there is unbelievable stuff in the world. Again, so what? Just because there is no readily apparent material explanation does not mean that there is no material explanation at all. It's also contradictory to claim the unknown, explicitly or implicitly, for your side. If you don't know what it is, how is that support for the existence of psychic phenomenon unless you know or at least have some reason to believe it's psychic phenomenon? All this amounts to is a strange sort of Psychic of the Gaps style argument. Furthermore, what do you mean by 'real' when you say 'real world'? If you mean the physical world, then at least in principle psychic phenomenon or their effects should be observable in some way. Yet in most tests, and especially in tests with strict controls in place, the phenomenon and its effects disappears. Psychic believers have a term for this, though I don't recall what it is at the moment. Basically they're coming up with stuff to justify that their paradigm (real psychic stuff) is the right one, which is something that you yourself cautioned against, and which I agree with. Finally, you don't have to just flat out deny that Politico article to weaken the psychic stance. You can start by pointing out some of the problems I've outlined above (we don't know quite how she did it, so it must be psychic!) or do some research and propose an alternative explanation. Which I'm probably not going to do, because so far there seem to be a lot more Sylvia Browns in the world than genuine psychics anyway.
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Oct 7, 2013 00:16
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ObamaCaresHugSquad posted:Hey that's a huge misunderstanding of everything I was trying to say. I'm gonna PM you. Hey everyone else, don't pretend you know anything about me or my state of mind. Very few of you, if anyone, understood me correctly. And I think the suggestions for me to go to therapy are ludicrous. I am well liked at school, I've gotten offers from many teachers for recommendations, no one considers me crazy, I am considered helpful and insightful. None of you have any idea, so don't pretend. I'm going to clear up what I said for this individual, who obviously took some of what I said to heart, in a maladaptive way, and I feel remorse for that. ObamaCaresHugSquad posted:Please stop attempting to back up your case with "all these people said this". It makes no difference to me how many people said something. This is you trying to hide in the crowd. It is a common tactic among fools.
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Dec 8, 2013 18:35
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ObamaCaresHugSquad posted:I might as well use the kind of logic that you people listen to, shouldn't I? Just this once, at least. I'm sick of people being quick to judge using tangential statements based on strawmen. That's most of what transpired in the past few pages. I made my arguments clearly and they were still misunderstood. I even said "don't suppress emotions" pages ago and it was ignored. The point is to say that for someone who is lost in the forest, but sees the tree line, you certainly don't act like it very much. The most that can be said is that you are sinking to ad hominems just like they are and that you're misunderstanding them just like they are you. That doesn't seem to be the case. They get that you think emotions are pain/attachment/tainted/etc. They just disagree with it by drawing a line between attachment and emotions. Their observation being that emotions are things that happen spontaneously regardless of whether you are attached to them or not. It seems like according to them emotions are no more an attachment than your leg moving when the doctor taps your knee is an attachment. Attachment is its own thing which can certainly play upon emotions, it might even be an emotion itself. Yet for all that, "I want to feel happy" is different than "I feel happy." You deny this. Fine. Why? You've stated many times that emotions are attachment, that by necessity they are craving, or aversion or whatever. I think that I and most others don't see why that is so. Also to save you some time, I know I'm not a Buddhist, so don't bother with that.
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Dec 8, 2013 19:57
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ShadowMoo posted:May be off-topic but I subscribe to the notion that the self is inherent to the structure of the brain like a hologram. If you were to scoop out a piece of someone's brain, they would still be themselves, just missing a small piece. ShadowMoo posted:Difficult question. If you were to delete one file off your hard drive, you wouldn't think you changed the identity of the computer. Reformat the hard drive, you think that you are starting with a new computer. Switch out the CPU or the video card without changing the contents of the hard drive and to an outside observer there is no change in the identity of the computer. Essentially the 'self' as one would determine it rests on a continuum with the parts making up the whole. Non-buddhist chiming in. The examples you're giving sound something like wrong view (wrong thinking?) from a Buddhist perspective. Also the portion I've put in bold seems to contradict your first statement. If the self is, in part, some parts that make up a whole, then how can a whole which is missing a piece still be the same self? For example, say we have a cake. Then someone cuts a slice out and eats it. Is it still the same cake? The natural tendency is to think that it is, but that doesn't mean that it makes sense. 'Same' in at least one sense means 'is identical with itself'. The cake now has a piece missing. The cake before did not. They're not identical, so they're not the same cake, and to insist otherwise is wrong view. What you need to do is explain why thinking of these cakes as "the same" makes sense.
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Dec 22, 2013 17:37
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What exactly is meant by "abrahamic mindset"? It that another way of stating the "I have a soul/I am me" way of thinking?
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Jan 1, 2014 23:59
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Prickly Pete posted:Is that similar to Pascal's Wager? The idea that even if there is no further existence, living by a certain moral code is at least beneficial in this life, so why not? [derail] It's a similar set up, but with different payoffs. Pascal's point is that if you live a hedonist life and you're wrong, you suffer eternally. If you live a chaste life and you're wrong, you maybe suffer some while you're alive (by denying yourself hedonist pleasures) but then that's it. If you live a hedonist life and you're right, you win something. If you live a chaste life and you're right, you win even more than if you were to live a hedonist life and be right (eternity in heaven beats temporary pleasure in life). So hedonism either gets you the worst or a middle result, while being chaste gets you a middle or the maximum result. The rational conclusion, then, is to be chaste. The difference is that Pascal is saying that living a worse life in the here and now is worth the risk, where as Buddha seems to be saying that there is no risk, practicing Buddhism is still better than a hedonistic life even if there is no such thing as rebirth. Then it falls apart when you realize that Pascal is talking about believing in accordance with the Catholic tradition, but the wager itself offers zero guidance on figuring out which religion is the correct one. He also thinks that religion makes you dumb. Also that religion making you dumb is ultimately a good thing, because that helps you believe. [/derail]
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Feb 28, 2014 17:40
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PriceJustWentUp, you are posting almost literally exactly the same stuff you posted before being banned. Why do you continue to engage?
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Mar 8, 2014 21:18
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:... As near as I can tell, people are acknowledging it. They aren't accepting it, but they're acknowledging it. What more do you want?
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Mar 8, 2014 21:49
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Just based on my casual interest in Buddhism most of that sounds like the opposite of the point of getting into Buddhism. Especially if they literally went with 'fake it 'till you make it' for sadness or any of the other emotions aside from maybe happiness I guess. That sounds like a tacit admission that if you don't have much inner anger/sadness/whatever to channel, then you're supposed to cultivate those feelings inside of you until you can start channeling them when part of the point of getting into Buddhism in the first place is to cultivate those negative feelings less and positive feelings more.
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Aug 31, 2014 23:10
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Mostly lurking the thread and not a practitioner, but here we go anyway. I don't see how rejecting Christianity is necessarily a statement of ego. I mean, one of the founding beliefs of all Abrahamic religions is this idea of a permanent creator god, but according to Buddhism that would be wrong-view or something, correct? Pretending to go along with it seems like willfully participating in a wrong view, so that's got to stop. Since your church hasn't received the subtle message it might be time to state it overtly. How they react is up to them, not to you. If you're reluctant because you want to maintain attachments to your old self and your family, that is what I'd chalk up to ego. Depending on how fervent they are in their beliefs about Christianity, there may not be a way to break this sort of news to them without causing hurt feelings unless you can manage to guide them away from Christianity a little bit to begin with. I feel like I want to say more, but I think I'm starting to ramble so I'm going to stop here.
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Nov 22, 2014 05:42
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Mr. Mambold posted:Ok. Nbd, except that guy is maybe looking to this thread to change his mind with a brilliant argument ( which is in itself wrong thinking) because he ought to do his own homework. Purple Prince posted:I seem to have made a terrible mistake about Buddhism's view of attachment, but at least I'm not alone in doing so. Sounds like he did. Not sure what you're complaining about.
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Jul 25, 2015 05:15
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NikkolasKing posted:This is pretty hosed up. Seems like it might be less about orientalism and more about appropriation in general. Pointing to the general trend of taking anything that we (white people) find novel or exotic and in some way making it ours while then turning around and telling the source of that novelty that they're bad for doing it/doing it wrong/are just less than us in general.
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May 12, 2019 22:17
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