“Your comment on it is far from helpful.”
Seems I was unable to meet your expectations. It was not my intention to confuse you, but to speak of how I see. You may be in for a lot more disappointment.
Don’t think I’ll bother any further.
The Buddha spoke of enlightenment.
The student spoke of not being enlightened.
The Buddha said he did not want to be followed.
The student followed.
The Buddha did nothing.
The student asked a thousand questions.
The Buddha rolled his eyes without rolling his eyes.
I just don’t know what to do about it, or how other people ignore it.
Radical Acceptance is a skill I struggle to improve. I am jealous of those who can be spit on (metaphorically), and carry on with a level head.
I’m physically a pacifist, never having been in an actual fight in my life and never being in a situation where it was even a possibility (believe it or not, I played hockey for decades and never fought, which is quite rare around these parts).
But when it comes to discussing ideas and opinions, I’m on the other end of the spectrum.
I think that illogical/irrational arguments get me way more wound-up than an illegal hit or a nasty slash across the back of the legs, because they impact the real world, where a hockey infraction is irrelevant the second the game is over.
That doesn’t really help here since the situations in the link don’t apply to Buddhism itself. I mean that Koan about true nature that I briefly mentioned has me torn because of what I thought to “really be me” might just be a lie and that eats at me. I mean I know some say that there is no true nature and that humans change and shift (though there are some personalities and traits that endure). But I don’t know anymore, I don’t think radical acceptance helps here.
I just don’t like the thought that what gave my life meaning and direction was a lie.
Buddhism and Psychology
Buddha was great practic psycholog
His psychological doctrine lives more than 2560 years
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"However, this is still something important to consider. Buddhism is very much so a religion, rather than a simple philosophy. There are many great secular purposes that can be derived from buddhism- Psychology for example has recently found a ton of copacetic values within much of buddhist practise, or is arriving at what buddhism has been doing for centuries. Still, buddhism requires a good bit of practise and study, and it is more than a philosophy because it fulfills a spiritual role, soteriology and supernatural concepts aside buddhism is a praxis by which we arrive at abnegation of ego-differentiated self. It is a vehicle for mystic experiences as any long-term buddhist practioner will assure you. The great trouble here is what has been the biggest weakness of buddhism- It is a monastic faith at it's heart. This means that among the laity a sort of "low" religion has emerged- You do things that make a good buddhist just because that's what you do. You give food to monks and lamas, you say a few prayers, and that's that. But these trappings and material clingings all have a purpose as a means of engaging the mind in certain activities. Take the tibetan prayer wheel for instance: On the surface you turn it and that gives you good merit, which means a better birth. But deeper than that, the wheel is a praxis by which you engage in the mental experience of having prayed without the activity of prayer, it is useful for not only illustrating the divide between participation and agency, but as well encourages that ego-death state by means of a tacit participation in compassion practise.The faith is built entirely around the idea that all that we percieve, and experience is mediated, often greatly, by language and learned or assumed concepts that have become a deep part of out intellectual processes: Cognition and Emotion. The mystic attainment in buddhism is that which allows one to enter a psychological state of consciousness capable of affording participation in an unmediated world. The mediated world, it is argued, leads to cognitive and emotive processes that are not ultimately desireable reactions to the stimuli of the world. The question of these religious trappings in relation to attaining this psychological ego-death is that many of means we might use to reach this unmediated state are forms and methods that are themselves mediators of the world. The low religious, or lay, application of this high religious pursuit becomes the application of those means which are ding-fur-sich: sometimes linguistic means like koan, sometimes cognitive ablations like mantra recitation, sometimes tactile methods of conditioning such as mala. It is generally acknowledge that the most efficient vehicle for attaining this kind of ego-death in any permanence is still that of meditation- the conditioning of the mind to guide it towards conditioning ego-death as a default measure to ensure a finality in the assumption of that mental-psychological state. However those means which function as ding-fur-sich do so and are done with the understanding that their practise and encouragement conditions the end-goal of nonmediated participation. Often buddhism avoids this kind of deep analytical discourse because it is not usually itself one of those means which encourages those conditions, being a linguistic and conceptual construction of dialectic that is reliant upon the assumption of those learned concepts that lead to mediated, rather than unmediated, participation. The dialectic becomes that which reifies mediative-mind."
I don’t know, I just don’t have an answer to much of what Buddhism argues. I don’t even get what they means by meditated or if its good or bad.
I like how Buddhism focuses on eliminating suffering. I don’t know of any other religion that does that, except for Scientology, which I’m not convinced it a religion but a clinical philosophy. I’ve felt better when I studied Buddhism in my teens and 20s. It lifted me up, but I vaguely remember some metaphysical stuff I disagreed with. Buddhism is more like mental health through entertainment for me, but the aesthetics do lift me up.
Philosophicus
I’m entirely sure I follow. For me Buddhism just increased my suffering, not reduced it.