ThePriceJustWentUp posted:

Or rather, if mindstream is a symbol for self-consciousness, then I've got that in spades. But if mindstream is the absence of mind, the destruction of it, and the allowing of the world to work its own magic, and so the mindstream is a symbol for the world, then I have little to no experience of that. So I was asking you which it is. And you seem to be saying it's neither, it's something else. Some other distinction to make about individuals and their relation to the world. None of your answers have addressed this. HHDL doesn't seem to address it either. I don't think he knows.

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Alright. He says that there's no *unchanging* soul. But there is one that changes from moment to moment and that is what you are describing with the river analogy. And that's the mindstream. And so that stream constantly changes and moves and fluctuates. But at the end of the day it is still a stream! It still has a certain structure, a certain behavior. It follows itself. Cause and effect. That he does not seem to deny. This just seems to be a more careful way of affirming a self. A storehouse for thoughts and emotions and behaviors. They deny one kind of self but affirm another kind. I didn't know this mindstream business had crept into Buddhism. Maybe it's been there for a while. I never noticed it. To me, self is self. The whole structure needs to be eradicated. I feel the fraudulent weight of the whole thing and come what may. I really have no choice anyway. And I don't intend to put out any kind of soapbox in the world until it's all over and done with, if I ever do at all.

The self that thinks it is changing is actually never changing. It is just as static and rigid as it ever was. It wants to tell itself it has changed and that it will change, but it never will. The self is like a person with that bone disease where every bump and scrape grows bone instead of tissue and eventually they are encased in bone. It is rigid and yet violent. This stream business is another way to fool yourself into thinking you are evolving, progressing, moving forward. This is all the basis of delusion. There is no progression, no evolution. No change is possible. There's only the world, and there's not even that.