so I there there are a few Buddhists on here and I think it’s honestly a good help. Me along with a lot if other people I’ve talked to get depressed a lot by simply thinking too much. In Buddhism, meditation clears your mind and calms you. it also has a peaceful lifestyle associated with it.
I often think of Buddhism as a philosophy more than a religion. Buddha himself claimed that he was not perfect and his teachings are based more on your opinions while most religions give you specific commands and rules.
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Just don’t eat any cows or like, chickens or something.
Essence of buddhism is mindfulness. Essence of mindfulness is witnessing. not for some specific hours but moment to moment all day.
If a religion decides to disguise itself and no one’s around to bear witness to it, can it sufficiently pass itself off as mere philosophy?
It’s hard drawing a line between religion and philosophy especially in this case. Depends the reincarnation process seems to be in my opinion the most religious part of Buddhism
A religion typically focuses around a deity of some kind. You could argue that Buddha was a deity, but since everyone is basically Buddha, I think it makes more sense to classify it as a body of ethical precepts. Thus, philosophy. It doesn’t try to answer ultimate questions and instead focuses on the here and now.
Buddhism is a fascinating topic for a number of reasons:
1 The writings of the buddha were based on observations, the starting block of all scientific method: there is a case to be made that the buddha was the first experimental psychologist. In fact, I have a friend who has studied in depth the original buddhist texts, and he says that they are paragons of logical rigor, that would be perfectly at home in any western university’s logic faculty. No less a person than einstein proclaimed that if there was any religion that was closest to the findings of (modern) physics it definitely was buddhism. And the dalai lama has proclaimed that should science find that certain tenets of buddism are false, then buddhism would have to change those tenets: something unheard of in common dogma-based religions.
2 That being said, one might think that buddhism is a philosophy/psychology, rather than a religion: this is a common claim in the west. However, for those who know buddhism from the inside, and in the countries where it is dominant, there is no question that buddhism has as well aspects that we would definitely recognize as typically religious: dogma (ie excepting things just because authority says so), obedience to authority, rituals, etc.
3 What personally interests me about buddhism (for the moment) is their practice of meditation to alter specific states of mind. The buddhists call their meditation ‘medicine’, because to them the cause of all suffering is our misapprehension of the nature of reality; something meditation can try to cure.
I’m particularly fascinated by the meditative practices to increase compassion: indeed, in a study of long-term buddhist meditators, it has been shown by functional MRI studies, that the longer one has been meditating, the more activated were the regions correlated with compassion. To wit, the buddhists have a tradition of increasing compassion via a specific technology that they have developed: that of buddhist meditation. To me this blows my mind. There is a story of a buddhist monk (perhaps apocryphal) that had been tortured in China. They asked if at any point he felt fear. He replied, ‘yes, i was afraid I was going to lose my compassion for the people who were torturing me.)
4 Related to this, and very useful in a psychological vain is the notion of mindfulness (something that we in the west could learn a lot from). Basically, the idea is to be constantly aware of your inner states (which implies you ‘inhabit the moment’ in the parlance of the west), since the only reality for human beings are our inner mental states (happiness, sadness, anger, compassion, love, etc). This implies that your state of mind — even if ‘activated’ by external factors — is all that is real for us.
This is separate from the buddhist notions that ultimately there is nothing (not even our mental states); apparently, there are layers of nothingness, so even what we consider to be nothing is still something: my friend the scholar said he knew someone who basically went crazy trying to contemplate the notion of nothingness.
5 Lest one think, that this smacks of new-age bullshit, the U.S. self-help movement, and everything removed from the hard facts of material suffering in the world, the dalai lama has stated unequivocally stated that he considers himself ‘half-buddhist, half-marxist’.
He even applied to be a member of the chinese communist party when he was in china in the 1950’s, a time of hard-core Maoism. But he considers communism (at least in its non-totalitarian forms) to be a system which is dedicated to removing suffering from people.
in paragraph 2 meant to say accepting instead of excepting
fucking internet is making me illiterate
Is the Dalai Lama a llama? If so, I want to join whatever religion he’s leader of.
Great Duderino. Thanks for posting all of that. Nice.
I’ve been practicing Zen Buddhism for 9 years. Not just light practice, but weekend retreats. I spent a week at a Zen monastery just two weeks ago. I practice every day. It’s a practice of the mind. I heard a quote a couple weeks ago, “At some point in your meditation practice you understand that you’re completely INSANE.” I am at that point. As you observe your mind in action you realize it’s totally screwed up and I’ve been living most of my life following this screwy mind of mine, letting it lead me around like I had a ring in my nose. Then you realize you are not your mind. You are not your thinking. You are Buddha-nature or spirit or soul, but you’re not those fucked up thoughts running around and around your head. So, for me, the practice is to observe my thoughts and do not become attached to them.
The Buddha had 84,000 teachings in his 40 years of teaching. Someone asked him if he could condense all of his teachings. The story goes that he said, “Sure. Do not attach to anything.” Don’t attach to your thoughts, your money, your situation, the people in your life, don’t even become attached to your life. That doesn’t mean don’t love and respect these things, but don’t hold so tightly.
There is so much written about Buddhism and Zen practice, but it’s best not to read so much. Just practice practice practice putting down your thoughts. Doing it is better than reading about it.
You really know a lot about this. Where are you from? I’m here in the west as you figured out and I’ve only had one Buddhist to actually talk to and he’s the reason I’m a Buddhist in the first place.. Well trying to be. I really want to visit Tibet sometime to learn more about Buddhism or somewhere else because it’s not quite the same here in the US.
Randall – that’s brilliant.
good post duderino, randall.
You guys should take a gander at Taoism as well.
Buddhism differs from most religions in that there is no “personal savior”. A Buddhist does not find salvation through an external source. Enlightenment is found within.
“Buddha” is a title. The first guy to attain Buddha- hood was named Siddhartha. Sid wasn’t born as some supernatural deity – he became enlightened, or a Buddha, after working hard to achieve that goal.
Humanity has a knack for tainting, corrupting, misunderstanding, ruining or watering down ideas. Over time definitions of concepts can change, and the original message gets clouded due to misinterpretation, or adding superfluous rituals/pomp/ceremony that were never specified as being part of the program.
I think of Buddhism as a DIY philosophy. (Do It Yourself). Reject the dogmatic aspects others have introduced a find your own way. That’s how Sid did it.
@lorax
i don’t know if the dalai (the sheep) is a llama — i think he may be an alpaca
@dw
i’m just a complete diletante (probably due to ADD tendencies I have), and in no way am i a follower of any guru (i just quoted the dalai lama twice, because i’m aware of those quotes, not because i’m a devotee)
wrt to buddhism in the west vs the east: buddhism posits such a radically different view of reality (u could almost make the claim that all religions/cosmovisions of the world are on one side, and buddhism is on the other, since buddhism at its core posits ultimately there is nothing (but again, this part of buddhism is probably the most difficult (and perhaps dangerous to your mental sanity π to get into
this is why i don’t trust western buddhists — especially of the hollywood variety (well i probably don’t trust people from hollywood wrt anything): the world view of buddhism is so different from what we know that it is not easy to adopt such a radically different one
however, one warning is in order wrt to experiencing buddhism in its native countries: much of what you’re going to see in daily life (i traveled a bit in SE asia, but not because of interest in buddhism) 1)pagan suprestitous rituals that have nothing to do with buddhism, but are still practiced, and 2)buddhists bowing down before HUMONGOUS, and i mean HUMONGOUS, statues of the buddha (often times made of gold or covered with gold leaf)– something that seems completely incongruous to the ideas inherent in buddhism
@randall
the mindfulness that you mention (observing your thoughts,and realizing that they are just thoughts, and not YOU) is at the core of buddhism so we can have a situation where two people experience the same external influence, but experience two completely different inner/mental states: the external experience does not necessarily have to produce a given inner mental state
we can prove this by exactly what you mention: if you can observe your thoughts, just as you observe a chair, you realize that the thought is not YOU, but rather something external to YOU, that you happen to be experiencing at the moment, ie it is contingent
no one (i guess except under the influence of good psychedelics π would say, ‘i am the chair’
however the duderino does abide by ‘i am the walrus’
Say what you want about the tenants of national socialism. At least its an ethos.
to say “your thoughts are not part of you” is to betray the nature of the beast, or rather, human existence, in this case.
Thoughts occur “within” the brain… which IS, not only “part of” you, but is your central cognition mechanism. All of the brain’s activity is “part of you,” because that is how the brain, a part of you, “acts” to process information, to serve its purpose.
If we are what we do (which we are, just as much as we are our bodies), then we are also what our brain does.
So… we are, and aren’t, our thoughts. I am whatever i think i am… even if i think something different than what i actually am, even if others can objectively confirm that i have thought incorrectly, and that the thoughts i express, do not match my actual self.
If my thoughts are not me, but are instead, “some external thing happening to me,” then how can i ever hope to control my own thoughts? My brain is mine. I should be able to control it… if not completely, then at least very significantly. Thoughts are simply electrical signals occurring in patterns in the brain. Thoughts can be controlled, to an extent, even if they are the result of experiencing an external stimuli, ie: “something external happening to me.”
There are things our bodies do unconsciously, involuntarily, or even subconsciously. Are these things “external forces (within our own bodies) happening to us?” No. We are simply doing things without realizing, because we’re… developed, to do those things, without having to consciously control them.
I think there has been too much new-age metaphysical-ism put onto buddhism, while some of the old traditional or conventional ways have been clung to, as if gospel… when that sort of misses the point, and even dilutes the intent of what buddhism was about.
You have to strip away all the arbitrary and superfluous “rituals” and such, to really begin to understand it… but people have added all kinds of unnecessary stuff, which then gets perceived as included under some new vague blanket term of “buddhism.”
So, maybe i AM the chair? Or maybe i just know the difference, and where to draw the line, between “feeling” the chair, as myself… and believing oneself IS the chair, since they are capable of experiencing the chair, as a person interacting with it.
You can’t observe your thoughts “as you observe a chair.”
The chair is a physical object outside of you, whereas your thoughts are a series of actions occurring within your physical, biological operations.
Have you ever tried to sit on your thoughts? It doesn’t work.
I usually cringe when people get all “wow’ed out” and mind-blown over… non-mind-blowing things.
@Clevername…. Ah….still writing textbook worthy passages I see….lol but I agree 100%
@cn
a few points:
1 since you seem to be a fairly hardcore material reductionist (correct me if i’m wrong): the buddhists would say ‘the chair’ doesn’t exist…you say, ‘that’s absurd’..,they say ‘give me an EXACT location that describes the whole space that the chair occupies’…YOU CAN’T because due to quantum fluctuations at the edge of the chair particles are coming in to and fleeting out of existence continually (as postulated and verified by the laws of quantum electrodynamics)…but the chair surely exists you say…well, what you are seeing at any given moment (and remember the ‘moments’ that we observe are always with a time-delay from what is happening in the world outside our brain) is simply THE SPACIALLY STATISTICAL AVERAGE OF THE POINTS IN SPACE THAT THE ATOMS OF THE CHAIR OCCUPY…thus, when a buddhist says, ‘the chair doesn’t exist’, in the sense that you can’t point to an EXACT location where the chair resides, he is technically correct
these might seem like pedantic, irrelevant arguments…for theoretical physicists these are matters of central importance
2 to more important matters: if the mind (ie what we experience) is simply an epiphenomenon of the brain (the material matter) and one is a materialist, then the brain creates the mind, AND every mind state should be correlated with a clearly defined brain state… what is implied, as far as i can understand, is that brain creates mind, ie brain predates mind
if this is true, explain to me the studies of functional MRI (fMRI) (different studies from the ones that I mentioned above) that show that meditators when meditating can create changes in brain states as measured by fMRI (you can say that our brain states are always changing, which certainly is true, but these can be ascribed to involuntarily phenomena as a purely physical reaction to external stimuli…but here we have a chicken and egg problem — if the brain predates the mind, how can the mind ON PURPOSE, ie through the voluntary act of meditating, cause changes in physical brain states, brain states that are supposed to determine our mind (not vice versa)
3 you ask ‘If my thoughts are not me, but are instead, Γ’β¬Εsome external thing happening to me,Γ’β¬Β then how can i ever hope to control my own thoughts?’
again, i’m not preaching, i’m not a buddhist, whatever that means, by any stretch of the imagination bu meditation (buddhist or otherwise) definitely can help (many people, at least) to control your own thoughts
the notion of observing your own thoughts is something i experienced when i used to practice another type of meditation (non-buddhist)…it may be a radical idea, but i can assure you it’s a liberating one
does this conversation exist?
And, if it does exist, can you avoid becoming attached to thinking about it?
Oh, wait, that would just lead us back to asking CN’s question a second time.
the important point is what does its existence imply for each of us
the deeper issues of existence vs nothingness don’t interest me so much and don’t have,as far as i can see, any relevance for our lived lives
the question of observing your own thoughts, on the other hand, does have TREMENDOUS potential for bettering our lives, because just as you wouldn’t want to be prisoner to a chair (certainly not an electric one:-), you wouldn’t want to be prisoner of your thoughts: in the same way that you can accept that a chair is contingent (ie not indispensable) you can do the same with your own thoughts
a really important point: one can easily see how this line of argumentation can be taken to an extreme, for example, ignore all types of real physical suffering, saying, ‘well once you learn to control your thoughts, the suffering will go away, since the thoughts (the emotional suffering) are just the ‘trace’,as it were of the external stimuli of physical suffering
there have been in fact studies along these lines, and they’re quite eye-opening (even ones not having do with meditation… they’re studies on happiness, especially by this psychologist dan gilbert, he has good talks on youtube
anymore, for my own moral compass, due to my upbringing i’m want to downplay the importance of externally-induced physical suffering…i fear a slippery slope where atrocities will be forgiven, and the perpetrators will go unpunished
but one should know, that for all its talk of controlling inner states (and again, the great majority of people who are from buddhist countries don’t regularly practice buddhist meditation; for them, buddhism is simply part of their culture/civilization), buddhism preaches radical compassion and a commitment to the alleviation of suffering in all its forms, (even if in a philosophical discussion their monks would say that the ULTIMATE cause of suffering is something else)
as a caveat: : in a part of burma there is bascially ethnic cleansing by buddhists against the minority muslim population (the rohingya), that could quite easily turn into genocide…and my friend the scholar has told me that one of the ‘incarnations’ of the buddha is the buddha that kills.. so the story is never so simple as we want it to be
lol.
And, if it doesn’t exist… why should i worry about it?
I think that it’s kinda silly to deny the chair you’re sitting in, exists… regardless of whether i have a complete, quantum-thermodynamic, expert interpretation of what, exactly, and where, the “chair” actually /is/. All i really need to know about the chair, is that i can sit in it, and that it retains its form when i do. If i can sit in/on it, there is no reason for me to question whether the space between its atoms requires a more complex definition of “is.”
The chair is being a chair, right now, and thus, exists.
I doubt the original buddha knew much, if anything, about the space between atoms in seemingly solid material. Perhaps he glimpsed it in an epiphany…
I think one of the fundamentally appealing aspects of buddhism is that it prefers simplicity over arbitrary complexity, but doesn’t need to needlessly reduce the necessarily complex, in the event it cannot be absolutely understood.
Also: i don’t know what a material reductionist is. I think it probably has something to do with accepting that things are pretty much what they seem to be, in most cases… without needlessly overcomplicating things… such as a chair is a chair, even if there’s “space between its atoms.” According to my orientation to, and experience of what i call “chair,” i can say that “wood is wood,” and that a chair made of wood does exist. A chair made of dreams, does not… even if the dreams are actual electrical patterns occurring in an actual brain. When people say “dreams,” they mean the idea itself, and not the electrical signals, waves and patterns, causing the experience.
When people say “chair,” when people sit on a “chair,” they’re referring to and experiencing the actual chair, not all the space between the atoms which comprise its materials. The whole chair includes not just the space between the atoms, but also those atoms, and all the material properties manifested by their arrangement.
The chair is a chair, and the conversation exists, even if you can’t point to a specific location where the bits are stored (they are actually stored in multiple locations) on a memory material, and exactly which lines are used for each transmission, and where each photon erupts from each screen…
Besides, who ever said that “a location” must always only be “a point in space” without area or volume? A location can be more than one-dimension. A location can be an area or a volume as well. A location can be a range. A location can even be an arc through the timeline of a state passed through, by any object. In fact, it is impossible for us to represent a single point, without area or volume as a side effect. The chair is not a point; it’s a chair, which has mass and volume, and therefore its “location” must be described as such.
If you want to get really crazy, imagine yourself as not a point, or an area, or a volume… but as a volume /through time/. Try to visualize… everything and every place you’ve ever done or been or occupied, connected in sequence. Now, try to connect all of your actions to their relevant moments, and all of the both direct and indirect, immediate and extended impacts, of every change you ever affected during your existence.
From the moment of your conception, through birth, growth, travels, interactions with others… everything you’ve ever done… now step back and view your entire total of “nows,” as an arc, representing a volume’s passage through various states and time.
Conception >>> cessation.
THAT, is who “you” are. All of it. Even though we are only ever experiencing the current “now” moment, dreams of possible futures, and memories of the past.
“What” we are, goes a little further, and feeds the worms, from a permanent stasis.
Now imagine… more than 100 Billion people have lived and died, before today… and all of them had their own “volume action time arc,” and there were innumerable connections, influences, interactions… and there’s a sort of organic fractal pattern to all of it.
@cn
1 the chair point was more for pedantic reasons; i’m not particularly interested in it (although, in fairness, the argument i gave you is directly from one of the most greatest physicists of the 20th century, richard feynman)
2 > accepting that things are pretty much what they seem to be
according to that assertion, then out goes quantum mechanics, the most successfully tested scientific theory in history (albeit, it might be incomplete, and nobody knows what it really means) — BUT IT WORKS..without it computers wouldn’t exist
3 your volume/arc points are what physicists do when they use something called ‘phase space’
“pretty much” does not mean “absolutely only.”
It allows for adjustments in details, but understanding that there is “space” between “atoms,” does not change the nature of my experience of the chair; it simply adds more complexity to my understanding of what matter is, and how it exists.
The chair is still a chair, despite an increase in the complexity of how we interpret and define the chair. I can still sit on it, and it still retains its form (within spec) when i do. Quantum mechanics should not result in saying “the chair is not a chair.” The chair is a chair, even if it’s more complex than a direct human experience of it would seem. And in this way, things are indeed “pretty much” what they seem, even if a more thorough investigation of them reveals more information about their composition. The chair is a relatively stable composition of atoms… but the wood is still wood, and the chair is still a chair. We just don’t really “need” to know the atomic composition of everything we encounter.
We could substitute “chair” with “universe.” The universe exists… even with all the space in between all its material parts and particles. At least we can know how to make a chair. π
Phase space eh? Interesting. I didn’t know the concept had a name. This happens to me a lot, actually. I reach many of the same concepts that “actual scientists” reach, but through my own observation and interpretation of the world, and without “studying science.” I would have liked to have the opportunity to learn such things in a more conducive and accelerated setting, but i didn’t encounter that opportunity.
the issue with the chair is not so much the space between the atoms, but rather that thermal fluctuations wrt the atoms at the edge of the chair wind up making those atoms not be part of the chair anymore
it happens to me as well wrt ideas i have that i later find out are then scientific/academic concepts with an ‘official name’; this doesn’t happen so much in the quantum realm, however, since what goes in the quantum realm has no correlation with our everday experience (that’s why the great physicist feynman said, ‘no one understands quantum mechanics’ — and he won the nobel prize for developing the theory of quantum electrodynamics !
fwiw einstein said ‘imagination is the most important thing of all’ — he was talking about the ability to make scientific discoveries
wrt studying science, with the internet, it is now possible to obtain the knowledge that a beginning PhD student has, for free, in your home, and with no commitment to anything
if you’d like references, just shout
i don’t do it (beyond dabbling my toes in the water) either because my tendencies towards ADD don’t allow it, or because I really don’t have as much interest in the subject as I think I do