Re: I guess this is where I end up............

brian mitchell wrote:

Something is true, why not all is true?

Well, it was a two-part proposal: that there is truth and that we can
know it (as such). So if you've come to the realization that everything
is true, that is a truer understanding than someone who goes round
saying: "this is true, this isn't," and you *know* that it's a truer
understanding.

Yes, especially since the stuff that is even less than true (globally speaking), my emotions and experience is as inescapably true as anything ever gets for me. "Truth" can't be more intimate/closer than that.

If everything is true, is everything meaningful? That is another question, the answer to which depends on our projects.

That being said, I also think it is impossible (note the reductionism) to live a satisfying human life without indulging in projections. Satisfaction being itself erroneous, it needs some erroneous ingredients.

You know, don't you, that if you hadn't decided to be a Lama you'd have
made an excellent Jesuit?

Who needs Jesuit ruses if they have indulgences that can make the karmic effect of the worse things disappear by the power of mantras etc. ?

Who are these lucky beings? (and I hope you didn't mind being called a
potential Jesuit).

I was one of those lucky beings :-) Every morning we would recite a big number of various mantras that would undo this and that and even allowed you to build up credit.

No, I am always very grateful to people for calling me things. It proves their trust in me that they thus show me their deepest insecurities. ;-) And if I feel I can trust them too, I will reward them with bits of my own shadow.

My favourite instance of Jesuitical
path-smoothing concerns the problem of smoking during prayer retreats.
The advice was that though of course one should never smoke while
praying, it is quite acceptable --even laudable-- to pray while smoking.

Nice :-) You can bring bits of the sacred in the secular, but don't dare to bring bits of the secular into the sacred.

But also taking merciful account of the failings of human beings, which
I thought your "erroneous ingredients" was doing.

Yes, that's even a better way to look at it.

Yesterday I read about one monk asking the other who just explained to him that the entire world is a pure plane, the sphere of ultimate reality: "if that is the case, where can I ***?".

That neatly shoots down what the pure-plane monk wants, but what does
the other monk want? Why is he a monk?

To learn? I read it in Bernard Faure's Sexualités bouddhistes (The Red Thread in English?) I believe.


. . . to say "Jonathan has
explained..." is not for me the 'Truth which stops the mouth of
thought.'

You are free to err :-)
:-)

Justice as a basic felt concept is about truth, its discovery and
establishment.

Then who is just if he can get away with anything?

I didn't mean 'discovery' in a narrow detective sense so much as a
developmental one. Recently in human history the notion of certain
inalienable rights has emerged and is gaining ground. This is an
extension of our sense of just relationship.

Ehmm, it seems to me that even more recently those inalienable rights have been alienated again... and that process is going on

Why should we weigh and balance everything? Because if you forget the smallest thing (who knows the proper value of things) the whole concept of justice collapses. It's not a useful concept...

I would agree that forgiveness, just letting go, is a more useful
concept *after* the fact, but a sense of what is good and just and fair
in our dealings with one another seems deep-rooted and probably
necessary. Buddhism has its "right relationship", it doesn't propose a
total laissez faire attitude to things.

That is true. But intention isn't enough. I wrote in another thread how (at least in the West) belief (intention) seems more important than actions and their collateral damage. You can go to Latin America and convert the pagans, conquer the barbarians to bring them the civilisation of the Pax Romana, conquer Europe to overthrow the monarchy, destroy the Establishment to bring power to the people etc etc and not be held totally accountable for the collateral damage because you meant well.

My interest in this is sort of anthropological. We have these very basic
(structural, I'd say) concepts, do they refer to anything, a) outside in
the larger universe or, b) in the inherent nature of the psyche? At the
very least I think we need a true sense of the magnitude of the task
involved in surrendering them.

I don't know from what the need of rules has evolved, since we came down the trees. Every day more new rules are created. I expect it's the rules creating the rules, a perpetuum mobile.

. . . and especially if you are looking for peace of mind.

Which I don't know that I actually am. Are you?

I am more or less in peace. But I know how fragile my peace is and how it depends on conditions. I am uncertain about how it will go, when the going gets rougher.

The desire embedded in notions of karma and sowers
reaping is that the universe be intrinsically ordered, not random. Are
you arguing for a totally random universe?

I don't argue for or against. I acknowledge my insignificance, my lack of power, and even of commitment (were I to believe I did have power). We wanted freedom and free will so bad and what has it done to/for us? Are we any happier because of it? No, it gave us more responsibility than we can carry and that is good for any man.

You feel this strongly, it seems. If only we hadn't eaten that damn apple!

Yes, very strongly. I don't want the responsibility anymore because I feel "we have been cheated" (or I was too gullible or fooled myself) about the freedom. I am ready to give up chosing, because the more "choice" I seem to have, the worse I feel. And I lost the illusion of continuous progress, which fed the ambitions of former generations.

Such a big subject. I think we're creatures of knowledge, of mind, and I
think knowledge and responsibility are inseparable. It comes back to
consequences. Knowing, as I do, that mankind will turn anything it finds
into a weapon, am I going to reveal to them this galactic-scale power
source I happen to know about?
Nonetheless, I have to admit that the notion of completely giving
everything up into the hands of God (or something of that scope) is
*deeply* appealing.

Yes, although I guess there are thousands of different ways of formulating what you said. :-)

A system is order is symmetry. Is reality symmetric or balance? Could anything ex-ist if it doesn't stick out, in other words if it isn't in some way dissymmetrical.

I seem to have come late to this subject so I'm not sure what you're
going towards with your symmetry theme.

I am afraid I don't know myself. It's Jonathan who kept bringing up symmetry and then I started thinking on it. I have no idea if it makes sense and if it goes anywhere, but I try.

Superficially I'd have to agree
that ex-istence implies sticking out, being separate, etc. Reality, I
have to suppose, would be neither symmetry nor dissymetry but the
dynamic interaction between them. We probably stick out, merge, stick
out, merge, in all kinds of ways at all kinds of times, would be my
guess.

We can only notice whatever sticks out. Everything that *happens*. Perhaps *happen* is a better word than exist. "I exist" calls up too many unnecessary side questions, whereas "I happen(s)" would be more correct.

The question then remains: is there a moral
component to how the universe is ordered (if it is)?

The answer often is that if God doesn't exist, we need (the deep need you mentioned) him to exist as a moral counterweight. But that deep need is felt because of the way we function. Could we function differently?

I wonder that. Things have nature. At the top I'm suggesting that truth
and trust in it are so essential to mind that there would be no mind
without them. What is our nature? What else creates us and can't be done
without? I really don't know. Conscious awareness, I suppose, would be
one thing.

Yes, but is it a thing? And if it is an assembly (thing), what is it assembled from?

Above that level there is the things we do because we're conditioned
that way by tradition, habit, and so on. That can be changed, with
difficulty. What did you have in mind?

I don't know. We are so deeply conditioned by these things that it is difficult to see clearly. But less doing and more seeing would be a possibility. Perhaps that's what you mean with conscious awareness.

Every step I make, every breath I take can be and probably is the cause of flinging excrement onto someone. I can't stop it and I can't help it.

Why are you so helpless?

Shouldn't I be helpless?

I don't know.

It's not a problem for me, because it seems it's a default state. Like solitude. They can be "covered by the illusion of" (some) control and sharing life, but ultimately and especially in the beginning and end of our life, we are confronted with those default states.

Is it intentional, a conscious path? "Touch
nothing, leave everything as you found it," makes you free?

If one does enter the game of symmetry, one can only play the game or rather the game plays one. If one accepts one's helplessness, and doesn't feel need to "be free", then I guess one is as near to freedom as possible. The concept of freedom is a huge trap.

But the real and acute sense of being fatally confined is a misery.

The sense may be real and acute but what is the nature of the limits that confine us?

I would so much like something better.

Change the image of what is happening...

That simple? How do you relate to movements such as NLP which set out to
simply re-condition the mind along "better" paths?

I have never tried it, does it work? I am very wary of paths (better or worse). It seems they may be different ways of functioning, but it seems still to be about "functioning".

. . . We could throw flowers and express our mutual love. :-)

But why would the image of loving flowers be any truer than the image of
lumps of ***? Show me that all this isn't just sophistry (please).


No, but love is an exit and allows us to break out of the closed circle (symmetry).
.