Seriously, they even discourage "unnecessary talk" and teach people to "enjoy silence". How the fuck can you enjoy the absence of a human need? Humans are social creatures, we all need small talk every now and then.

Buddhism really isn't everything it's cracked up to be, it doesn't really make you a better person or anything like that. Just really, really boring and uninteresting to be around with (at least proper Buddhists anyway).

Self-discipline is something we should all practice and even cherish at times, but we also need to free ourselves from ourselves, do whatever we want to occasionally.

And what's with the whole drawing beautiful art and then destroying it straight after? Presumably something to do with disowning material posessions and not becoming too attached to anything, but it's fucking art. Art shouldn't be thrown in the bin, it deserves something more than being destroyed.

That's my two cents anyways.

Discuss.

Life is Suffering, but it doesn't have to be, if you do what is right, think what is right, etc etc. That is pretty much true Bhuddism. Many Bhuddist traditions are unconnected to the teachings of Bhudda.

quote:Originally posted by Abrahim:

Life is Suffering, but it doesn't have to be, if you do what is right, think what is right, etc etc. That is pretty much true Bhuddism. Many Bhuddist traditions are unconnected to the teachings of Bhudda.

You mean Siddharta? Do different sects of Buddhism accept different Buddhas?

quote:Originally posted by Boblong:

You mean Siddharta? Do different sects of Buddhism accept different Buddhas?

I'm pretty sure different sects of Bhuddism and different nations claiming to follow Bhuddism all have their variations, adaptions, additions, and subtractions. Some focus on other aspects, some ignore certain aspects. Essential Bhuddism minus layers of tradition piled on is Simple and a positive model to live life by.

What is dull to you may not be dull to others.

what did they do to you

The idea is to understand more by decreasing the level of constant "chit-chat" in your mind. Maybe if you shut up for five minutes you might learn something about yourself, or the world around you. Or maybe you'd just sit and think "I'm bored" for a while before jumping back to your computer games and reality T.V. Whatever floats your boat.

Yeah, actually try to be quiet and listen for a while. You'd be surprised how much it can change you. Really.

you can toss in weed smoking too and they'd probably approve

quote:Originally posted by Boblong:

You mean Siddharta? Do different sects of Buddhism accept different Buddhas?



Siddhartha was just this current age's Buddha. According to Buddhist belief, there have been countless Buddhas in the past, and there will be many more in the future.

By not having an opinion or judging you save energy, that energy is used to put into other endeavours that will help you reach your goals and dreams quicker.

There is no darkness, pain and suffering, control and torture when you realise these are only concepts that stem from the ego. The ego is born because of the concept of space makes you feel like you are separate! You cannot use terms like pain and suffering in regards to wanting to get over your ego, when it is your ego that makes those concepts up itself to give it some sort of identity. Since the ego is inseparable from fear/desire, it conceptualises everything in terms of fear/desire. Its overpowering fear of weakness, loneliness and death makes their polar opposites, namely power, relationships and survival its overpowering desire. It sees every boundary line between these opposites as a potential battle line.

All conflict and suffering are a result of the conceptual victim drawing conceptual boundaries and seeing the resulting split pairs as desireable/fearful, friend/foe, loveable/hateful. Suffering must continue as long as wholeness appears to be split into opposing pairs. Until you disidentify and understand this, you will always be suffering and fighting a losing battle. Otherwise the world will always been seen as a fearful/desireable place until this occurs.

The first law of the ego, is there there is ALWAYS someone to blame. There is no “THEY”. “They” is what you have made up in your head. Since the ego is nothing but a concept, other concepts can appear to be threats to it including some concepts about the ego itself. Some of these conflict with the ego's self-esteem, such as concepts of being wrong, weak, defective, unattractive or guilty. The ego reacts to any of these threats by attacking, and thereby tends to see other seeming individuals or made up entity's as guilty, enemies or victimizers.

You see the ego always sees itself as the victim, never as the victimizer, and thus is able to justify virtually any action in defence of itself. The ego finds it very easy to ally itself with other "Concepts" because it finds strength in concepts. Since the concept of "I" requires the concept of it's polar opposite the non-"I" the "I" see's everything being into divided pairs. The concept of right necessarily requires the concept of wrong, good requires evil, God requires Satan, guilty requires innocence, light requires darkness, health requires illness, rich requires poor, knowledge requires ignorance etc. All these are merely concepts that are formed by drawing conceptual boundaries between the opposites in an inseparable pair of concepts. These boundaries are purely arbitrary and can be moved as the occasion demands.

The ego does not exist. It is nothing but a presumption--the presumption that if thinking experiencing, or doing occurs there must be an entity that thinks experiences, or does. It is the identification of nonlocal consciousness with a thought in the mind. As a result of this identification, the experience of freedom that is really a property of the quantum self becomes limited and is falsely attributed to the ego, resulting in the assumption that the "I" entity has free will instead of being a completely conditioned product of repeated experiences.

If we believe that we are egos, we will believe that our consciousness are separate from other consciousness and that we are free to choose. However at the same time, we will contradictorily perceive ourselves as being inside and subject to space and time and as the victim of our surroundings. The reality is that our TRUE IDENTITY is the nonlocal, unitary, unlimited consciousness which transcends space and time, and the experience of our true identity is the infinitely free, unconditioned quantum self.

Here comes a nice little paradox. The ego is the belief that it is free to choose, but it is not. The quantum self is freedom itself, but it is not a separate entity that can choose. The BELIEF in FREE WILL depends on a perceived separation or dualism between a controller and a controlled. Within the quantum self there is no separation or isolation, there is no entity, so there is no dualism. Hence there is no concept of free will in the state of pure or primary awareness.

The experience of true freedom comes from the quantum self, whereas what we think of as free will comes from the noncreative, conditioned imaginary ego. Whenever we experience infinite freedom, it is a result of a momentary disidentification from the conditioned ego, permitting the experience of the freedom of the unidentified quantum self to be revealed. This is true freedom, without the restrictions of being a limited individual and without the burdens and responsibilities of having to make choices. During these moments, there is no individual "I". When reidentification occurs, the conditioned "I" reappears and then claims to have been free.

Wouldn't you like to be able to train yourself to only feel the emotions you wish to experience, rather than react to it in the basic instinctive survival mode?

I guess being able to make decisions from the future on how you will act now is also boring?

I don't know just some thought, because there is no scientific reason why, the future can't determine the past instead of the past determining the future.

[This message has been edited by realitycourse (edited 05-22-2006).]

Who da hell is dis guy encroachin on my intellectual territory! lol just kidding, but Realitycourse, I wanna talk to you on MSN, AIM, or YAHOO!

When buddists debate certain concepts or ideas that the budda taught, they would have one guy arguing from buddist teachings, and the other arguing as someone directly opposed.

They would do thid in full acting mode, getting angry, shouting and even screaming.

This info is from my housemate, who lived in a buddist temple for 2 month in napel.

Thats where Brad Pitt learnt acting...

According to "What the Buddha Taught (1974) by Walpola Rahula, faith and belief paled no part in the Buddha's original teachings. In that view we would consider Buddhism to be a teaching, not a religion. Rahula says on Page 8 of his book

[Almost all religions are built on faith-rather blind faith as it would seem. But in Buddhism emphasis is laid on seeing, knowing, understanding and not on faith or belief..However you put it faith or belief as understood by most relions has little to do with Buddhims. The question of belief arises when there is no seeing---seeing in every sense of the word. The moment you see, the question of belief disappers]

Plus the purest of teachings are often corrupted by unenlightened teachers. Buddhism became a religion when it's teachings were corrupted by the introduction of the "I" entity. In contrast to Rahula's purist description todays actual teaching of Buddhism includes a great deal of religious dogma..

Ie In the Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide To It's History and Teachings 2001, by Donald S Lopez Jr

"The buddha taught that all beings in the universe are sbuject to rebirth without beginning. All beings in the universe were present, somehwere in the universe when he taught the path to freedom in India. Some who had good fortune to hear his teachings and put them into pratice were able to follow the path and free themselves from rebirth. Others, less fortunate have continued to be reborn again and again.

"Thus, the Buddha divided what he taught into, perhaps a set of doctrines and a set of rules. [collectively known as the Dharma] What is encompassed by this Dharma is indeed vast. It can include chanting the Buddha's name, circumambulating his relics, protrating before his image, copying, reading or reciting his words, painting his image, taking and maintaining vows, sitting in meditation, exorcising demons, visualising oneself as the Buddha, placing flowers before a book, buring oneself alive"

Buddhism in this form has little to do with nonduality. Because of its emphasis on dotrine and rules instead of understanding, seeing and knowing. Buddhism as a religion tends to reinforce the imaginary "I" entity and its sense of doership and there for it is unlike to eliminate individual suffering.

Organized religion is only worse than one thing- organized crime.

quote:Originally posted by VegetaRobGT:

Organized religion is only worse than one thing- organized crime.

What about genocide?

quote:Originally posted by S t o y v e:

Seriously, they even discourage "unnecessary talk" and teach people to "enjoy silence". How the fuck can you enjoy the absence of a human need? Humans are social creatures, we all need small talk every now and then.

I disagree entirely. I find pleasure in solitude, moreso than in company. On top of that, you specified "unnecessary talk". That means if talk is necessary (or a human need, as you say) then it isn't 'unnecessary talk' and is OK.

Anyway, I find you learn alot more if you listen and observe people. You get to where you can read people extremely well, you get a good grounding of how a trustworthy person handles themselves. You observe things that you couldn't have had you been running your mouth.

Another reason unnecessary talk is discouraged would be that too many times we speak without thinking. In day to day life, this it's seemingly trivial whether you ramble on about something without thinking about it first. But in doing so, you train yourself to speak before thinking. And when a time comes in which what you say matters very much, you are not as ready to censor yourself as you would be had you been practicing in day to day life.

i agree for the most part with elephintitis, you live and you learn; the question is how much are you willing to learn?

i understand that much of the Rizen sect focuses on the 'middle way' or 'threefold path' that incorporates many ideals towards acheiving enlightenment (although having stayed with a retreat following Soto-zen i wouldn't know too much about that)

What they don't state is that most people endure a semi-aware state of enlightenment that some people even fear.

imagine having a hole in your mind, a void that whispers to you in your sleep, that creates your dreams and ambitions.

imagine mastering the drive that compells your humanity and the animal inside of you.

Here are some descriptions of enlightenment;

A light that gets brighter the stronger you meditate.

The ultimanium of human wisdom.

Mastery of the mind.

quote:Originally posted by One_way_mirror:

i agree for the most part with elephintitis, you live and you learn; the question is how much are you willing to learn?

i understand that much of the Rizen sect focuses on the 'middle way' or 'threefold path' that incorporates many ideals towards acheiving enlightenment (although having stayed with a retreat following Soto-zen i wouldn't know too much about that)

What they don't state is that most people endure a semi-aware state of enlightenment that some people even fear.

imagine having a hole in your mind, a void that whispers to you in your sleep, that creates your dreams and ambitions.

imagine mastering the drive that compells your humanity and the animal inside of you.

Here are some descriptions of enlightenment;

A light that gets brighter the stronger you meditate.

The ultimanium of human wisdom.

Mastery of the mind.

That light is mentioned in other than Bhuddism.

Before I die I would like to spend a year in a temple somewhere in Asia in as much quite as possible. I too prefer silence over talking to most people. Meh, people bore me http://www.totse.com/bbs/frown.gif (http://www.totse.com/bbs/frown.gif)

Do only boring people get bored?

quote:Originally posted by realitycourse:

Do only boring people get bored?

To this day I've never felt or experienced "boredom".

bore2 ( P ) Pronunciation Key (bôr, br)

tr.v. bored, bor·ing, bores

To make weary by being dull, repetitive, or tedious: The movie bored us.

n.

One that is wearingly dull, repetitive, or tedious.

(People might have to be more detailed, accept the uniqueness of every new moment.)

quote:Originally posted by S t o y v e:

[B]Self-discipline is something we should all practice and even cherish at times, but we also need to free ourselves from ourselves, do whatever we want to occasionally.

/B]

I will just respond to this. How are we freeing ourselves if we do what "we" want. Your just feeding your ego, bro. You are obviously to selfish for buddhism.

Disidentification from your emotions so there is no neural connection hardwired to your brain, allowing you to be free. Even though there are instances where it is inevitable that you will come across something, this emotion may still be there, but what you have done is not hardwired it to your brain.

This can only done by monitoring each thought and emotion, and ask yourself..

Who really is feeling that emotion?