Progressive Liberalism is a Mental Dissorder (merged)

[u crank]

Originally Posted by chopper92

Not much talk about submarines here. Still interesting stuff tho' and pleasing to see so much scepticism in you Americans - I'm just an ignorant Englishman who's just worked out that DNC = Democrats National Convention.

Was it Abe Lincoln who said "Judge not lest ye shall be judged"?

Welcome to SUBSIM chopper92.

Abe may have said it but he was quoting Matthew 7:1.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by chopper92

Not much talk about submarines here. Still interesting stuff tho' and pleasing to see so much scepticism in you Americans - I'm just an ignorant Englishman who's just worked out that DNC = Democrats National Convention.

Was it Abe Lincoln who said "Judge not lest ye shall be judged"?

Come over here into the ignorant Englishmans corner, we have biscuits, not cookies, and scones, not biscuits...and most importantly of all, we have tea!

[Ducimus]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

And you won't see it on GT. General Topics is the grab bag for everything not game or submarine-related. It also has a monopoly on bad manners and poor behavior on the site, so tread at your own peril and be mindful of the trolls.

Quoted for emphasis.

Basically, this forum is the community punching bag to vent our frustrations or talk about nothing in particular. It could very well be the reason why elsewhere, everyone is well behaved. When i visit the silent hunter subforums, ill have my submarine simluation hat on. In general topics, I wear no hat, but instead have a bag of peanuts, and popcorn ready for the hilarity that may or may not ensue. Since its election year, its been mostly political lately.

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

In general topics, I wear no hat, but instead have a bag of peanuts, and popcorn ready for the hilarity that may or may not ensue. Since its election year, its been mostly political lately.

Pass the popcorn please.

[Ducimus]

Originally Posted by u crank

Pass the popcorn please.

[u crank]

That's the only way to eat it.

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

And that sounds like a man who has not the smallest clue what he is talking about.

You could as well say that Martin Luther King was a fascist trying to censor free speech ,and polishing his narcissistic ego only when attending huge crowds.

Like Takeda said. MLK never burned a library.

The difference here is ownership Skybird. If it's your scribbles on a piece of paper then feel free to crumple, fold, spindle, mutilate, even use it as toilet paper, to your hearts content. But you and Hui Neng, however enlightened you claim to be, have absolutely no right to do that to other peoples scribbles.

[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.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by u crank

That's the only way to eat it.

Ya think?

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

You cannot say in words what "it" is. You can only say in words what "it" is not.

It all sounds great Sky and you have every right to believe in that stuff if it floats your boat but it's also besides the point.

Please don't get the idea that I think your guy is some kind of brigand. I don't. I just think that he had no right to destroy other peoples property like that. It's just another form of "ends justify the means" argument and while you can dress it up in the most noble of intentions it's wrong none the less.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

It all sounds great Sky and you have every right to believe in that stuff if it floats your boat but it's also besides the point.

Please don't get the idea that I think your guy is some kind of brigand. I don't. I just think that he had no right to destroy other peoples property like that. It's just another form of "ends justify the means" argument and while you can dress it up in the most noble of intentions it's wrong none the less.

Property...? This is all what it is about for you...??? Simple materialistic possession claims...? Wowh.

That is as absurd as the church selling the divine forgiving of sins for money (if you were poor, than you have a problem), or a priest saying that believers cannot enter God's paradise in the afterlife if entrance violates earthly laws and treaties and the curch's statutes on who can enter when and how and what dress to wear on that occasion.

You value the message as lower than the paper it has been fixed on. A Krämerseele you are! ( a bean-counting salesman that is). Very German it sounds, too - not in a complimentary way, though.

But very religious it sounds as well. The surface counts more than the fundament. Obey. Don't seek rescue by your own. respect the authority of the - well, the authorities.

August, I tried to make it clear earlier. In the face of the transitoriness of all things being, and your life as well, nothing is important than to learn who you are and to learn how to avoid booking (due to lacking insight) another round on the wheel of life, because that turning fo the wheel means entering the realm of transitoriness again, and thus: means endless suffering. That is the basic logic behind Buddhism. Various sectarian major traditions later introduced variations of this, some focussing on a more social, altruistic view, others more on a more self-centered view, but that is not important here now.

And since you opened by indicating I "believe" something in there. I have a very sober view on these things, even cold-blooded, I sometimes got told. I do not know whether the wheel-of-life thing and reincarnation is to be taken literally or not - for evaluating that I lack own experience and background knowledge on the fundamentals running the universe. Karma to me only means: every cause has a reaction, and the link may be so complex and going over multiple levels and instances that it is hard to see maybe - and still: every cause has reaction. On enlightenment, I do not sign for for example Tibetan ideas on entering the land of Buddha in the four directions of the sky, nor do I think that a hundred thousand kneeling-downs on your way to the next shrine does you any good in your karmic balance sheet. What drives me is the uncertainty over the question of why things are, why I am and what this life is all about. Why is not simply nothing? What is my mind that thinks, and what are the things that I normally pressume to be like I see and hear them, while I know that their appearance is only an image, a construct in my brain - what is their real nature, then? How can I find out when I have no chznace to ever expereince their real essence direclty by my senses and my intellect? How to leave both behind and gain the immediate expereiunce? Can this even be had as long as I separate myself from them by thinking of them as "them" and think of myself as "me"?

And I think it is helpful to gain an attitude of mind, a mental discipline if you want, that does not immediately judge and thus rule in favour and against perceptions and ideas the very moment our senses have sent another sequence of chemical-electrical stimuli into our brains. I think to start by staying inactive and observe, may be helpful to see how things are moving, and gaining insight into their inside, their real nature, the patterns they form. It may also show helpful for myself - in order to stay calm, to become less and lesser a playing ball of my rampaging emotions and fears and other mental projections that I superimpose onto the world. The fear of never getting answers, not knowing what is after this life, still is there. But this way, it sometimes has become bearable, and cannot command me around anymore. Enlightenment seen this way is an attitude of mind, a state of mind. And although you alwaqys have it in full, it never stops to emrbace more and unfolds, like about evolution can be said that in any moment there is total perfection in every species existing, for it has reached as best a design as that design could have unfolded and developed in the time that has so far been available.

Believing has as much to do with it as it is a question of believing when you make a choice on whether you prefer the taste of lemon tea or peppermint. You check both, and then you know what you like. It is an empirically founded decision. Religions make even this complicated again, bringing in divine wills and heavenly laws when to drink what and why something else is claimed to be forbidden. That is believing, August. Basing on the common German translations of these terms, "belief" meansto take something that cannot be checked and analysed, as factual and proven truth nevertheless, a claim on a deity existing for example. "Faith" is somethign else. It is an empirically justified trust that comes from own and direct experience and is strengthened further by the results of such checks and analysis.

"Dear God, give us trust, but save us from believing" - this was written in these or very similiar words by Aldous Huxley, in "Island".

No easy answers there. Just images of reflections inside reflections, endlessly. He who wants easy answers and rules to follow, indeed just should pick up and read a manual and at the end make a test with multiple-choice items always offering just one answers. But that is a human life wasted, I say, a waste of human ressources and potentials (that waste is what makes me so hostile and angry towards religions). It's energy could as well have been spend to form a pigeon learning to pick a key to get a corn rewarded.

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Property...? This is all what it is about for you...??? Simple materialistic possession claims...? Wowh.

Well either you respect other peoples personal property and right to worship God as they see fit or you do not. Apparently you and your book burning hero do not and calling me stupid foreign names isn't going to change or justify that.

Entering someones place of worship and destroying religious texts because you don't believe in what they say is nothing more than criminal vandalism. A hate crime on par with Islamists destroying Buddhist statues or burning the Library at Alexandria. I don't care if that's not what Hui Neng was about. As far as i'm concerned such behavior invalidates anything else this guy has to say.

You're like every other Zealot i've ever met. So convinced that your beliefs are the only "correct" beliefs possible that you're willing to justify just about anything. The truth of the matter is you do not have, and never will have, the right to tell others what they may or may not believe in.