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Buddha and Mind

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Re: Buddha and Mind

#71

Post by bgroat »

krapp wrote: post #69
bgroat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not strictly true, RE: Lewis. His opinion was even cooler. Basically, Jesus was either: - A liar - A lunatic - The Lord And any three of those is incredible and worth learning about. He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization. A con artist who did the same thing. Or literally god, and people are so cynical that ~75% don't believe it

>He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization. I'd argue Rome had a lot more to do with that than Jesus. If Emperor Constantine hadn't found Christians to be expedient to his own political ends, the religion would probably have remained a strictly local Jewish cult, or been stamped out by Rome altogether.

I don't have skin in this game, you're probably right.

All I know is what Lewis thought on the matter.

Re: Buddha and Mind

#72

Post by zamfi »

krapp wrote: post #69
bgroat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not strictly true, RE: Lewis. His opinion was even cooler. Basically, Jesus was either: - A liar - A lunatic - The Lord And any three of those is incredible and worth learning about. He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization. A con artist who did the same thing. Or literally god, and people are so cynical that ~75% don't believe it

>He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization. I'd argue Rome had a lot more to do with that than Jesus. If Emperor Constantine hadn't found Christians to be expedient to his own political ends, the religion would probably have remained a strictly local Jewish cult, or been stamped out by Rome altogether.

That’s only true if the Christianity itself is fungible — would Constantine have found any other set of teachings followed by the same group equally useful?

Re: Buddha and Mind

#73

Post by Trasmatta »

sunshineforever wrote: post #52
carrolldunham wrote: post #50

Check out the miserable fate of "Culadasa" (author of the Mind Illuminated) if you want to see what kind of Midas touch situation can come of meditation without the companion practise of virtue, particularly restraint. e: (Midas because the guy claimed to be so "enlightened" and "living in the moment" that he lost the ability to worry about say, other people's feelings, right and wrong, causing harm etc. Acted then i…

Can you link to this story?

The tl;dr is that he was hiring prostitutes and lying to his wife about it.

EDIT: seems like there's a lot more to the story, and I think the poster you're replying to is assuming only the worst possible interpretation: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/...

Also, apparently he now has terminal cancer, and likely has less than a year to live. He's staying with family, which makes the above posters comment about "he is now isolated, leaving his very-much-extant sensual longings starved.)" seem untrue and unnecessarily cruel.

Re: Buddha and Mind

#74

Post by allenleee »

raz32dust wrote: post #31
cwkoss wrote: post #24

"In meditative states, the monks had remarkable control over their body temperature and oxygen intake. They could use their body heat to dry wet towels placed around them, where most people would shiver uncontrollably. They could raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. Some could even spend a night on a rocky ledge at an elevation of 15,000 feet in the Himalayas, where temperatures f…

I was also curious about this. Looks like it is slightly exaggerated [1] It is 17 degrees Fahrenheit, and the study mentions 8.3 degrees Celsius. A linked follow up study in 2013 was able to reproduce temperature increases between 1 and 6 degrees Celsius [2] Also, the results suggest that "...the peripheral temperature increases are primarily the result of increased peripheral blood flow due to peripheral muscular ac…

You might want to check this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCXr7rxTLBE

Re: Buddha and Mind

#75

Post by Trasmatta »

schoen wrote: post #28

> Much of the doctrine is not acceptable to a modern Western worldview, so researchers of meditation have to cherry-pick the parts of Buddhism they like and ignore the rest. For example, they might draw from certain passages of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta about developing mindfulness of the breath and body but overlook other passages about meditating over a corpse at a charnel ground. Or they might integrate into their re…

> but overlook other passages about meditating over a corpse at a charnel ground

As morbid as that is, I feel like I would actually gain a lot of value from doing that...

Re: Buddha and Mind

#76

Post by bgroat »

optimalsolver wrote: post #70
bgroat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bit of a backdoor experience into mindfulness through my background in lucid dreaming. And I completely agree that people need to handle their psychic health before they go down these rabbit holes. Reality can get very fuzzy for anyone, let alone someone who's already depressive, manic, or dissociative.

>I have a bit of a backdoor experience into mindfulness through my background in lucid dreaming Could you elaborate on this? How does it help?

90% of lucid dreaming is just becoming extremely aware of your surroundings, and your experience of your surroundings, and whether they're real.

Once you find out a few times that they aren't it can pretty fundamentally change some of your perceptions

Re: Buddha and Mind

#77

Post by amanaplanacanal »

bgroat wrote: post #65
Barrin92 wrote: post #48

Think the article is right in its diagnosis of mindfulness. Jack Dorsey going on a meditation retreat so he can go back and be even more productive at building the things that send everyone to meditation retreats has always been kind of funny to me. The trend to turn spiritual practices into some sort of self-help healthcare to me is honestly just abysmal. In many ways it is worse than just not doing them at all. C.S…

That's not strictly true, RE: Lewis. His opinion was even cooler. Basically, Jesus was either: - A liar - A lunatic - The Lord And any three of those is incredible and worth learning about. He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization. A con artist who did the same thing. Or literally god, and people are so cynical that ~75% don't believe it

Only if you assume that everything written about him is accurate. If his biographers were mistaken or made things up, then he could have been just a regular religious reformer.

Lewis seems like a smart guy, so I’m not sure how he missed that possibility.

Re: Buddha and Mind

#78

Post by krapp »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #77
bgroat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not strictly true, RE: Lewis. His opinion was even cooler. Basically, Jesus was either: - A liar - A lunatic - The Lord And any three of those is incredible and worth learning about. He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization. A con artist who did the same thing. Or literally god, and people are so cynical that ~75% don't believe it

Only if you assume that everything written about him is accurate. If his biographers were mistaken or made things up, then he could have been just a regular religious reformer. Lewis seems like a smart guy, so I’m not sure how he missed that possibility.

Bear in mind that Christianity was an oral tradition and there were dozens or more gospels and various traditions like Gnosticism which would later become heresy, and none of the canonical gospels are believed to have been written sooner than a century after Jesus' lifetime, and not by their attested authors. It would literally be impossible for everything written about him to be accurate.

CS Lewis' Jesus is the result of judicious editing by the Council of Nicaea leaving a lot on the cutting room floor.

>Lewis seems like a smart guy, so I’m not sure how he missed that possibility.

He was a Christian. By definition he believed in the correctness of scripture. He wasn't actually trying to consider rational alternatives to Jesus' divinity, but to convince the listener that simply accepting Jesus as a moral teacher was absurd with a classic false dichotomy - that one must either accept Jesus as the Son of God or dismiss him as a lunatic. Of course, those aren't really the only possibilities, as the criticism page on Lewis' trilemma shows[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_trilemma

Re: Buddha and Mind

#79

Post by mbg721 »

krapp wrote: post #78
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you assume that everything written about him is accurate. If his biographers were mistaken or made things up, then he could have been just a regular religious reformer. Lewis seems like a smart guy, so I’m not sure how he missed that possibility.

Bear in mind that Christianity was an oral tradition and there were dozens or more gospels and various traditions like Gnosticism which would later become heresy, and none of the canonical gospels are believed to have been written sooner than a century after Jesus' lifetime, and not by their attested authors. It would literally be impossible for everything written about him to be accurate. CS Lewis' Jesus is the resu…

For better or worse, Christianity's explanation of that is that the eyewitnesses didn't expect to have to write about it for future generations; Jesus said he'd be right back.

Re: Buddha and Mind

#80

Post by nsomaru »

Barrin92 wrote: post #48

Think the article is right in its diagnosis of mindfulness. Jack Dorsey going on a meditation retreat so he can go back and be even more productive at building the things that send everyone to meditation retreats has always been kind of funny to me. The trend to turn spiritual practices into some sort of self-help healthcare to me is honestly just abysmal. In many ways it is worse than just not doing them at all. C.S…

I studied Vedanta in India at an Ashram for 4 years continuously without break.

One of the things my master would emphasise a lot was that physical yoga is the first stage on the spiritual path and meditation is the last. But he says they are easy to teach and have become completely commercialised in the West only because they are both really easy to instruct.

He cautioned us against the perils of meditation when you are unqualified, pointing out that it may lead to mental illness. In general, the qualification for meditation is total uparati, withdrawal from the world. A state of mind where the objects and beings of the external world have no sway on the mind at all — he would say “there is no push from within, there is no pull from without.” He said trying to meditate with the mind of a typical Westerner is like suddenly putting a brick wall in front of a car speeding on the highway. You will crash and it will be painful.

Some of the Upanisads have lines which repeat which say “this must not be spoken of” — being suitable only for prepared students, but now people walk around talking about illusions and maya like it’s just another How to Win Friends and Influence People or something.

If anyone is interested in reading his perspective on meditation, the chapter with the same name in Vedanta Treatise by A Parthasarathy is instructive.

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