Progressive Liberalism is a Mental Dissorder (merged)

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Skybird

We all must get found by the one koan in our life that hits us almost like a jumpkick right into the face. And when it has found us, then we must deal with it. Somehow. It's the one question in our lives that is more important and overwhelming than any other there is. And for everybody, it might be a different one. The risk is total, utmost dispair - the chance is utmost freedom. Not shortcuts, no refunds.

What if this leads one to....God?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by u crank

What if this leads one to....God?

Another dead end in human intellectual, dualistically structured, categorical thinking.

Go beyond the term "God". Transcend the letters and words, leave all these conceptions and intellectual categories behind, and all what you consider to be your ego. Burn the bible, storm the library, tear down the church. It means nothing, only inflames your mind with colourful fever, and it burns so hot and shines so bright that it bl,inds your eyes and you cannot see the real things anymore. You must not reach something, you have to give up something. All that is your real essence and nature, is already yours, and always has been, and always will be, but you plaster it with illusions, and hide it from yourself. We must not learn to do something, we must learn to let things. "God", "reality", "ideas" - the veil of Maya, disguising from our eyes the reality behind. Nobody must go anywhewre, we are already there, and never have been somewehre else. We are running in place, becoming tired, sweating, becoming exhausted - but we do not move away one step fro m where we are. Still we think it is a race, a competition for being first, being doiminant, and all the violence and supression, all that immorality and fanatism, all that hate and intolerance religions are more responsibloe for thany any other casue in human history of the poast 5000 years, is coming from this - our halucination that we are in a race, that we must progress, must be victorious, must advance and be the first.
We are like hamsters in a running wheel.

Seeing this can only be had at the price of giving up the conceptions of our"selves", and give up our idea about our egos. In other words, like I sometimes summarise it, self-realisation can only be had at the price of self-transcendence, if you want to become your real self, you have to give up your self.

Let go "God". Stop running, and let the wheel come to a rest. Then step out. And see how it feels to come to rest.

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Spirituality: to ask for where one comes from, where one goes, and why life and cosmos do exist. Spirituality is a state of an asking mind. - The spiritual mind knows that it does not know.

Originally Posted by Skybird

Seeing this can only be had at the price of giving up the conceptions of our"selves", and give up our idea about our egos. In other words, like I sometimes summarise it, self-realisation can only be had at the price of self-transcendence, if you want to become your real self, you have to give up your self.

If my 'spiritual mind' knows that it does not know, how then do I know who the real self is?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by u crank

If my 'spiritual mind' knows that it does not know, how then do I know who the real self is?

You are asking in what way to stirr a glass of water in order to clear it best. Must I tell you how to breathe? Must you want to tell the sun to rise in the morning and to settle in the evening? Can any written manual on how to breath help you to breath better? Will the sun shine brightier because you write down your theory on how to make it so? Ever tried to explain somebody how to keep the balance when putting one feet before the other, and how to not fall off a bicycle?

You do not need a second head on your shoulders. There already is one. Its the one you were born with. The idea that for 60, 70 years manifestates itself in your temporary form, has been there before you came, and it will be there after you have gone. Like soap bubbles embrace all the same space when they are there, and the space remains the same when the bubble bursts, and another one appears. The space inside and outside is always the same. The ocean is the same water, no matter what patterns waves form on its surface. Why this noise about debating how to be water best?

That sounds strange? What Hui Neng illustrated and what I try to get across time and again is that all this theory and all this making of many words and clever thinking and intellectual differentiation between categories can never tell what the essence, what the real nature of things and life and everything is. Words can only describe and point out what "it" is not. Thats why all claimed "holy scriptures" telling people what some cosmic superpower is and what it wants, are false scriptures. They in fact express the total antithesis to what they claim they are.

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Skybird

You are asking in what way to stirr a glass of water in order to clear it best. Must I tell you how to breathe? Must you want to tell the sun to rise in the morning and to settle in the evening? Can any written manual on how to breath help you to breath better? Will the sun shine brightier because you write down your theory on how to make it so? Ever tried to explain somebody how to keep the balance when putting one feet before the other, and how to not fall off a bicycle?

You do not need a second head on your shoulders. There already is one. Its the one you were born with. The idea that for 60, 70 years manifestates itself in your temporary form, has been there before you came, and it will be there after you have gone. Like soap bubbles embrace all the same space when they are there, and the space remains the same when the bubble bursts, and another one appears. The space inside and outside is always the same. The ocean is the same water, no matter what patterns waves form on its surface. Why this noise about debating how to be water best?

That sounds strange? What Hui Neng illustrated and what I try to get across time and again is that all this theory and all this making of many words and clever thinking and intellectual differentiation between categories can never tell what the essence, what the real nature of things and life and everything is. Words can only describe and point out what "it" is not. Thats why all claimed "holy scriptures" telling people what some cosmic superpower is and what it wants, are false scriptures. They in fact express the total antithesis to what they claim they are.

What you are saying here is the very basis of Eastern religion/philosophy. There is no answer or the answer is right/wrong. Whatever thoughts I have are the right/wrong answers and it doesn't matter any way because you can't know the right/wrong answer. All is relative to what makes 'me' happy or satisfied that all is well.

Is this enlightenment or is it madness?

"Ah get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift"

I like a little truth on my enlightenment/madness quest.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by u crank

What you are saying here is the very basis of Eastern religion/philosophy. There is no answer or the answer is right/wrong. Whatever thoughts I have are the right/wrong answers and it doesn't matter any way because you can't know the right/wrong answer. All is relative to what makes 'me' happy or satisfied that all is well.

Is this enlightenment or is it madness?

Its your summary that does not match the thing you claim to have summarised.

Enlightenment is an all-or-nothign at-all thing. It cannot be gained step by step, but in total completeness only, suddenly. And it is nothing that is gained, but is something that is left behind. It is no qulaity, and no divine reward for doing the right things and living the right life. It is a state of mind. And this mind is fully aware of itseld, of life and world, and it does not overshadow these by its own judgements. In the words of socalled radical constructivism, it is the mind that is free to stop the construction process of perception - or to run it freely by own will and in full understanding of the process (miost people are totally unaware of the mechnaism by which their mind censors their perception, and how their intrinsic motivations influence it further: we do not find the "reality" in the process of perception, but we construct, and invent it).

Such a mind accepts responsibility, because somebody knowing how he himself is the cause of the way in which he organises and constructs perceptions, cannot claim somebody else as guilty for having caused it. Such a mind is free and unhindered, because it can arrange the perception patterns any way it wants. And such a mind is tolerant, because the freedom it experiences in its free choice to construct in this or that way, or not at all, it necessarily must realise to be the basis for the other'S mind, too.

Western psychoanalysis claims the automatic link between perception and reaction - which most often is an act of judging something - cannot be broken. Eatern mediation shows that one can absolutely learn to break up that automatism very well, but that takes discipline and dedication. And thus, learnign this taskes time. Many years in most cases. I would even say most people learn this all life long. Almost all.

I just have destroyed a long reply to somebody else, accidentally, when correcting some of my usualy many typos. Too bad. Will come back to it later. Ignoring how local sectarians have turned it into religion nevertheless for poltiical and control ambitions, Buddhism by core and essence is no religion. Like atheism is no religion, too. But Buddhism is atheistic. It does not tell you what to believe - it tells you not to believe at all, but to test and check and analyse yourself, and after empirically checking your own experiences, you then shall make a decision based on the common sense ethics of what is good both for the one and for the many, where as "many" here can refer to a context going beyond that of human community, and can include other life, nature, the ecosphere that we share with so many others). There is no deity whose commands are to be obeyed, and there should be no rites and rituals keeping people locked like running hamsters in a wheel, running al, the time, but not getting anywhere. But the busy mind is the mind that does not think about asking questions - and that is what religions really want: to prevent sovereign, educated, independent. own thinking. At least it is what they acchieve, and they seem to be not too unhappy with it.

[Skybird]

August,

Hui Neng was no barbar and no vandal, nor was he a conqueroir destroying other cultures by burnign their museums. what he is said to have done there, means that he iullustrated in a drastic way that if monks in the monastery wanted to become "enlightened", they had to give up the false belive that there is sometbign that could be gained, could be acchieved by doing the right procedures, or writing smart clever little theories about the nature of things and the meaning of life or to just trust and put blind faith into written scriptures.

Zen and Chna love to act by example, and they usually dispise long teahcings in words and writings. A simple act says so much more than a thousand words.

In Chan, which is the original China-based root of the tradition that later reached Japan and there turned into what today is called Zen, there is a strong mistrust against written delivery of traditions, because the intellectual as well as cognitive condensate - what together we call thinking - is organised in patterns and runs in structures that are not free, but gets heavily influenced by culture, education, envrionment input. Different body language and digfferent facial expression and mim ics as well as differing abilities to realise and correctly interprete these, for example is one consequence from these differences. Anbother is the totally different structure of languages - you cannot linearly translate Chinese into western languges like you tr alsate German into English.

Next, In Chan, enlightenment is seen as something that comes in total only, not in small quantities. It is a sudden, total experience sometimes described as a breaking-through. when the time is ripe and a student ios close to it, it was not rare that the master picked radical measures to make him jumpingk, running, falling, crawling over the last meter towards thwe "goal". The used their whip. The slapped them in the face. They yelled at them in sudden surporise. They kicked them, or threw them out of a window or down a shallow hill - whatever they saw fit. See it as a final slam of the fist on the table to wake up the student and make him suddenly aware.

Why isa this acceptable, you ask. Because, in this lkife, everything is uncertain and we cannot be sure of anything. Death is all alrund and can reach for us just any molmnent. There is no time to waste. To reach realisation of oneself, as enlightenment sometimes is described, is the only thing that counts. I the face of omnipresent death and the fact that all we do and acchieve is doomed to fail, apart again and to have been in vain, nothing else counts. Mediation, enlightenment - that is an issue of life and death. That sounds pathetic, but it is the simple truth. I would even go one step further and say: it is not about meditating, but about dying. And what has to die, is the illusion of what we call our ego.

What to you appears to be as an act of lacking civilisation (in case of China!?), of barbary and vandalism, in fact was an act of great love and affection, of deep insight, dedication and determination. What Hui Neng said when he destroyed the scrolls, was this: don'T accept bullsh!t, don't waste time, come to your senses and focus with all your power on what really counts. He also showed that way that any attempt to explain and to form theories and models about enlgithenment, must fail due to the limits of human language - and it is a neurophysical fact that our intellectual thinking runs along the schemes established by the structures of the languages we speak. Language patterns decide on thinking patterns, and vice versa. Since both are limited, they cannot form a correct image of the unlimited. Every verbal hint on what enlightenment is, necessarily must be misleading for that reason.

You cannot say in words what "it" is. You can only say in words what "it" is not. So, throw away the darkness of all blind conceptions and terms and labels. Free yourself of everything.

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Its your summary that does not match the thing you claim to have summarised.

Agreed. It was a very broad generalization done in haste.

Originally Posted by Skybird

Enlightenment is an all-or-nothign at-all thing. It cannot be gained step by step, but in total completeness only, suddenly.

Have had a similar experience.

Originally Posted by Skybird

And it is nothing that is gained, but is something that is left behind. It is no qulaity, and no divine reward for doing the right things and living the right life. It is a state of mind.

Again, a similar experience.

Originally Posted by Skybird

And this mind is fully aware of itseld, of life and world, and it does not overshadow these by its own judgements.

Such a mind accepts responsibility, because somebody knowing how he himself is the cause of the way in which he organises and constructs perceptions, cannot claim somebody else as guilty for having caused it. Such a mind is free and unhindered, because it can arrange the perception patterns any way it wants. And such a mind is tolerant, because the freedom it experiences in its free choice to construct in this or that way, or not at all, it necessarily must realise to be the basis for the other'S mind, too.

An on going process and a challenging one for sure.

I would ask this question, Skybird, in regards to any so called enlightenment. Is it only enlightenment when it meets the criteria set by some people who claim to have achieved it or claim to know what it is? What right do they have to make such a claim? This smacks of the same kind of religious indoctrination and dogma that some here have railed against. I realize that meditation and Buddhism are Atheistic in belief but since atheists believe that God is an invention of man then in all cases we are left with the mere opinions of other humans regardless of how they arrived at them.

Originally Posted by Skybird

..and there should be no rites and rituals keeping people locked like running hamsters in a wheel, running al, the time, but not getting anywhere. But the busy mind is the mind that does not think about asking questions - and that is what religions really want: to prevent sovereign, educated, independent. own thinking. At least it is what they acchieve, and they seem to be not too unhappy with it.

Now I am afraid it is you who is making a generalization. There are many people who have a religious/theistic/spiritual life who do not live like this nor do they allow others to dictate the path that they should take. Quite the opposite in fact. Yes there are many obedient sheep, but I would question their actual belief and their knowledge about that belief.

Originally Posted by Skybird

Buddhism by core and essence is no religion. Like atheism is no religion, too. But Buddhism is atheistic.

Maybe so but Buddhism has some remarkable beliefs. One is rebirth, a process whereby beings go through a succession of lifetimes as one of many possible forms of sentient life, each running from conception to death. I wonder if you believe this.

I for one do not care what I come back as, as long as it is not a hamster.