Arbitrary absolutism: the values of the house philosophy

[Kelly Jones]

Laird,

I am really not rigid and inflexible. If I were, I'd lambast people with my views without ever considering theirs. I'd never listen. I'd never explain my reasoning, but just state conclusions and get aggro if anyone disagrees. I'd have no rational basis for my conclusions. I'd pull cross-patched stories out of thin air to support my ego, that had absolutely nothing to support them either in the way of evidence or reason.

But in reality, this doesn't happen at all.

I tend always to provide my thought processes, often step-by-step, for others to examine how I've arrived at a conclusion. I expose everything for them to investigate for errors. That openness is a really important part of my communication. I try never to assume others can understand how I've reached a conclusion, but patiently examine what they say, so as to gauge what they have already understood. And, if they don't understand, are getting frustrated, and suddenly start to attack me to defend their position, then I am careful to pursue the discussion in as focussed a way as possible, and prevent them from getting more exciteable and agitated. Along these lines of being a philosophical midwife, I provide arguments that are not verbose or complicated or obscure, but plain-speaking, simple, and without fanfare; my responses have substance, the definitions are provided (and explained further if needed), and they rarely stray from the topic. I am courteous, and don't rush people.

All of this contradicts very much your claim that I am rigid, inflexible, and close-minded. Instead of confirming me as someone who refuses to examine anything outside a little prism, it shows that you refuse to examine what I have to say. So I ask, why are you wrong about me? The most likely answer is: you don't like what I have to say. You don't want to explore it. You'd rather reject it, in favour of your own views, then demonise me as insane, brainwashed, dogmatic, malicious, stupid, etc. etc. etc. Why? Because you think this behaviour excuses you from examining what I have to say. Why are you so close-minded?

So, if you are willing to crack open your mental shutters a little, I ask you to look again at my response to your belief that I, and others here, are at a loss to explain the Totality. You need to engage with my reasoning if you wish to take this further, instead of making groundless accusations.

.... the Ultimate Truth of the house philosophy, even taking into account the Hidden Void, can only explain why any finite phenomenon is as it is by claiming that it was "caused by all that is not it", but this can't explain why the Totality of all that is, is the way that it is, and is not some other way.

Laird, the Totality of all that is is, by definition, all.

Notice that a finite phenomenon is caused by what it is not.

But the All includes all. There is no not that can cause it.

This is why the question, "What causes the Totality?" is meaningless.

You're confusing two different identities: a part of the whole, and the whole of which it is part.

[edit: Adding some further explanation.
Asking why something is the way it is, is a causes-based question. It seeks to know what a thing's nature is, and what the alternatives are. A thing's nature boils down to causation: what makes it so. Seeking to understand what the alternatives are, is a process that looks for other causal conditions. But asking for the causes of the Totality misunderstands that there is no causation apart from itself. Asking for alternatives implies that it could be other than non-finite. All these sorts of questions are meaningless, and are derived from a misapprehension of the nature of the Totality.]

[edit 2: corrected my and Laird's names to attribute the quotes of who said what]

..

[David Quinn]

Robert, it's clear that you are still way out of your depth in these matters ... Incidentally, for those who are interested, this is the same Robert Larkin with whom I had a formal debate a few years ago on another forum ...

It's amazing you'd choose to be so pretentious given you've saved the record of that debate.

I consider it an interesting document. I'm perfectly happy with every aspect of it.

We can still see that by the end of it you'd deteriorated into hysteria, comparing yourself to martyred Jesus and Socrates and comparing me to Adolf Hitler.

Well, in my defense, you were depicting Kevin, Dan and myself as undesirables who were exerting an insidious influence on the web and that if you had your way you would shut Genius Forum down. But don't worry, I did say that you were too timid to be a Hitler.

As I noted at the time, whatever result anyone else had and has gotten against you I was the individual who made you publicly shit your pants. Your behavior and your debating were deplorable.

I stand by it all. :)

DQ: All of the wisdom in Buddhism and Taoism rests on A=A, since both are about identifying what nirvana/Tao is and making it more visible to others.

RGS: No, sir. We're dealing with something beyond the sphere of thought. As Tao te Ching observes:

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.

DQ: Are you seriously saying that Lao Tzu never thought about the Tao, never identified what it is, never distingished it from what it is not, never developed any knowledge about it? That the urge to write the Tao Te Ching just popped into his brain without him even understanding why?

Now how can you read the quotation from the Laozi itself and ask such boneheaded questions. If you knew the material you'd understand that thought having been put into its proper place the Dao can flower. It's a true pity you can't be touched by something so simple and so eloquent.

Since you didn't deal with my questions, let's try a different approach:

In your opinion, did Lao Tzu know the Dao or not. Yes or no?

-

[RobertGreenSky]

David,

You stand by everything you wrote in the debate? I stand by some of what I wrote. I certainly admit that in the companion thread I had a fit about Weininger. Weininger had intolerable prejudices but he also suffered mental illness and he ought to be an object of some pity. He was a very sick man, a self-loathing Jewish anti-semite living in a bigoted Vienna that aided in the formation of amongst others Adolf Hitler. I never read Sex and Character - who in their right mind would, absent necessity - but since the debate I learned Weininger relied in part on Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote in 1905 after Weininger's suicide that Weininger was a genius. Chamberlain also wrote:

You have immense achievements ahead of you, but for all your strength of will I do not regard you as a violent man. You know Goethe's distinction between force and force. There is the force that stems from and in turn leads to chaos, and there is the force which shapes the universe.... It is this creative sense that I mean when I number you among the constructive men rather than those who are violent.

- Houston Stewart Chamberlain, letter to Adolf Hitler, October 7, 1923
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaste ... erlain.htm
Hitler attended Chamberlain's funeral in 1927.
See Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Chamberlain

I have no wish to boycott the Jew, or by any such immoral means to attempt to solve the Jewish question. Nor will Zionism solve that question; as H. S. Chamberlain has pointed out, since the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, Judaism has ceased to be national, and has become a spreading parasite, straggling all over the earth and finding true root nowhere. Before Zionism is possible, the Jew must first conquer Judaism.

- Sex and Character, p. 90 'The Jewish question' was solved a few decades later.

'The Jew's sin is smirking at the Good, as the simpleton's sin is smirking at wisdom.'

- from "A small sample of Aphorisms From Weininger's Notebooks," Translated from the German by Martin Dudaniec and Kevin Solway.

I know you've acknowledged Weininger as a kind of 'little brother'. What about your little brother's writings do you appreciate?

'... thought having been put into its proper place the Dao can flower ...' [- Larkin]

Since you didn't deal with my questions, let's try a different approach:

In your opinion, did Lao Tzu know the Dao or not. Yes or no?

I did try to answer with something significant, unlike your questions. Buddhism and Daoism are not about 'identifying' enlightenment and Dao; they are instead about preparing the way for the practitioner to be psychologically transformed. (Btw, not once in 35 years reading have I ever come across any source, whether J. Krishnamurti or any voice in Daoism, Zen, or Buddhism, who ever wrote a damned thing about A = A, not once! You're bullshitting yourself about its significance.) Humans are thinking creatures but Laozi was a mystic who found a different dimension beyond the capacity of dualistic thought to apprehend. When thought is put into its proper place the Dao can flower. The Dao can be described after the fact but it cannot itself be discovered through thinking which is too limited for that purpose; how can the dualistic apprehend what is beyond the dualistic?

The highest notes are hard to hear;
The greatest form has no shape;
The Tao is hidden and without name.
The Tao alone nourishes and brings everything to fulfillment.

- Tao te Ching, 41, tr. Gia-fu Feng, http://www.terebess.hu/english/tao/gia.html

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Tao te Ching, 1, ibid.

The Dao is not the thinking about the Dao, which Laozi himself said! That which is 'without name' is itself beyond thinking; we can only think about it after the fact. Laozi described the Dao after the fact but he was transformed by the Dao, he heard the highest notes, through another dimension of existence. 'Know' is the wrong word to be using.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

It's amazing you'd choose to be so pretentious given you've saved the record of that debate.

I consider it an interesting document. I'm perfectly happy with every aspect of it.

It reads like a collision between a small cube and a large square somewhere in Flatland. And understandably, no matter which side is regarded as cube or square, each side will experience the sense of having had the upper hand in every aspect at the end of such encounter.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

I never read Sex and Character - who in their right mind would, absent necessity.

All those who endlessly comment second-hand on all but everything.

[RobertGreenSky]

I never read Sex and Character - who in their right mind would, absent necessity.

All those who endlessly comment second-hand on all but everything.

I don't have to read the entire work to criticize it - quotations were made and if you'd like to support the lunatic then why don't you do so? As to whether David or I might see ourself as the better in the debate, I suspect it's likely both of us also see ourselves far your superior as thinkers and writers - I know I do.

[Ryan Rudolph]

Laird,

In terms of this example, the emotion that might arise might be something like compassion for ignorance.

Laird, you are being a tad idealistic, and ignoring how the mind actually operates, lets be honest with ourselves, reacting from a place of 'emotional' compassion constantly is not all that feasible. This is because this compassion is a temporary emotional state, and it is only experienced when one observes a sufferer that one can identify with personally from experience. However, it would be exhausting to constantly feel the suffering and ignorance of the world, and respond from that place every time, and the mind is not geared towards that. The rational mind is more neutral by default, neutral meaning, without the processes of gross emotions, and so a logical approach is a better candidate in my opinion in dealing with ignorance.

Moreover, in defense of logic, logic prevents one from becoming overly hateful, callous and resentful towards the masses. And logic is compassionate because it implies a mental concern towards the other. Someone who is logical is showing a compassion of sorts without any choice at all, they are trying to clarify someones thought without forethought or a decision to do so. It is automatic, concern for the other is pre-determinedly written into the very fabric of logic.

[David Quinn]

In your opinion, did Lao Tzu know the Dao or not. Yes or no?

Buddhism and Daoism are not about 'identifying' enlightenment and Dao; they are instead about preparing the way for the practitioner to be psychologically transformed. (Btw, not once in 35 years reading have I ever come across any source, whether J. Krishnamurti or any voice in Daoism, Zen, or Buddhism, who ever wrote a damned thing about A = A, not once! You're bullshitting yourself about its significance.) Humans are thinking creatures but Laozi was a mystic who found a different dimension beyond the capacity of dualistic thought to apprehend. When thought is put into its proper place the Dao can flower. The Dao can be described after the fact but it cannot itself be discovered through thinking which is too limited for that purpose; how can the dualistic apprehend what is beyond the dualistic?

The highest notes are hard to hear;
The greatest form has no shape;
The Tao is hidden and without name.
The Tao alone nourishes and brings everything to fulfillment.

- Tao te Ching, 41, tr. Gia-fu Feng, http://www.terebess.hu/english/tao/gia.html

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Tao te Ching, 1, ibid.

The Dao is not the thinking about the Dao, which Laozi himself said! That which is 'without name' is itself beyond thinking; we can only think about it after the fact. Laozi described the Dao after the fact but he was transformed by the Dao, he heard the highest notes, through another dimension of existence. 'Know' is the wrong word to be using.

Okay, I'll concede a little ground to you, in the hope that you will also concede a little ground to me. I grant you that there is a particular sense in which the conscious opening up to the Dao does involve going beyond all thought. In other words, we might be able to agree on the general principle that enlightenment involves the cessation of all conceptualization. The discussion would then turn on what exactly is meant by the "the cessation of all conceptualization".

In turn, you would have to concede that reasoning and discriminating thought does indeed play a vital role in the process of awakening. We only have to look at the Lao Tzu quotes that you have provided above. In these quotes, Lao Tzu is openly discriminating between what the Tao and what it isn't. For example, he says that it is "hidden" and "without name", and that it is not something that can be "told" or put into words. Lao Tzu is clearly showing that he has identified what the Tao is, that he has applied his thought to it and drawn logical conclusions about it, and so on. Surely, this is obvious.

So what do you think? Are you able to accept that the Tao can indeed be conceptualized and reasoned about, just as Lao Tzu has done, while at the same time maintaining that the experience of it is, in a certain sense, beyond thought?

-

[Unidian]

In your opinion, did Lao Tzu know the Dao or not. Yes or no?

No, Laozi did not 'know" the Dao. Rather, he lived, experienced, and intuited the Dao directly, without need for "knowing" or other intellectualizations. He had transcended such needs, unlearning and jettisoning them day by day, rather than clinging to them as philosophical merit badges.

In my view, the fact that a path of intellectual inquiry and wrestling with logic and concepts is necessary to transcend that same path itself and enter into what is beyond is not in question. All mystics agree on this, as I think David and Robert do as well, below the surface of the squabbling.

The trouble, of course, occurs when this intellectual "booster stage" (to use a rocket analogy) is exalted above the free-flight stage which occurs after the booster separates and drops back to Earth. Only the ego could desire to celebrate the engines rather than the payload, so to speak.

The primary objection to QRS philosophy is (and always has been) the emphasis placed on the "booster stage" rather than the free-flight which occurs when the booster is dropped. "Oh, come look at the Saturn V rocket, with 25,000 tons of thrust and the most massive engines ever built by man. Marvel at its power! Nevermind the fact that it is to be discarded at the first available opportunity in order to free the astronauts for their real journey."

Those who refuse to disengage the booster stage will go hopelessly off-course. Ground control to Major Quinn...

[Kelly Jones]

Take responsibility for your own views, Nat. It's your objection, no one else's.

In practice, who is qualified to speak of leaving behind the vehicle of reason? Only the one who has gone all the way, and no longer has any love for their irrational mind. So it's practicallly a worthless objection to make, anyway.

It's only a valuable objection for those who don't want to leave unreason behind, who have attachments to protect.


...

[Diebert van Rhijn]

It might help to know the ancient Chinese character in the text for "spoken of" or "expressed" is also: Dào, notwithstanding the undetermined fluency of a language-in-formation at the time; new, uncommon meanings or constructs were being made up all the time. Therefore one should not underestimate the complexity of the poetry of the first lines, which are meant to condense, summarize with great skill, the essence of all that follows. So it reads more like: the tao which is being tao is not the unbeing tao. Or perhaps: the manifest, relative nature differs from the unmanifest, absolute nature.

Tao could be also mean 'wisdom', 'reason', 'idea', which is all pointing to the "constant" or "eternal" idea: a "wisdom of the absolute". A good other symbol for the unchanging and constant in everything is A=A. So the first line becomes in all its modern ugliness: A≈A ≠ A=A

"If forced to give it a name, I would call it Great. Because it is Great means it is everywhere. Being everywhere means it is eternal. Being eternal means everything returns to it." (25 - Byrn).

[Dan Rowden]

Nat is only posting because Robert is here. That's an attachment that Nat has yet to deal with. Cut him some slack.

[David Quinn]

In your opinion, did Lao Tzu know the Dao or not. Yes or no?

No, Laozi did not 'know" the Dao. Rather, he lived, experienced, and intuited the Dao directly, without need for "knowing" or other intellectualizations.

Once again, it is curious to observe your deep-seated allergy towards "knowing". It's as fascinating as it is comical.

I'm telling you right now that no one can write a book about the Tao in the way that Lao Tzu did without knowing what it is. He was very specific in informing the reader about what the Tao is (e.g. that it is unborn, eternal, ever-present, indefinable, formless, beginningless and endless, flowing everywhere, the source of all things, etc), and he was very specific in his reasonings about it (see below). There is no question that he knew it.

You have a serious problem with your conception of the Tao if it causes you to deny such an obvious reality.

He had transcended such needs, unlearning and jettisoning them day by day, rather than clinging to them as philosophical merit badges.

He clearly did have need to intellectualize when he wrote the Tao Te Ching. The whole project was an intellectual one, utilizing concepts and reasoning, albeit inspired by a deeper wisdom. I can see the existence of this reasoning in every line of the Tao Te Ching, but I'll draw your attention to a couple of the more obvious instances:

Heaven and earth last forever.
Why do Heaven and earth last forever?
They are unborn,
So ever living.

Even the most dull-witted should be able to see that conceptualizing and reasoning is taking place here. The reason why Reality is eternal is because it is unborn (and therefore incapable of death).

Another example:

Without going outside, you may know the whole world.
Without looking through the window, you may see the ways
of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.

Thus the sage knows without travelling;
He sees without looking;
He works without doing.

Another:

Look, it cannot be seen - it is beyond form.
Listen, it cannot be heard - it is beyond sound.
Grasp, it cannot be held - it is intangible.
These three are indefinable;
Therefore they are joined in one.

And another:

The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and to
the right.
The ten thousand things depend on it; it holds nothing
back.
It fulfils its purpose silently and makes no claim.

It does not show greatness,
And is therefore truly great.

Clearly, Lao Tzu didn't have a problem conceptualizing the Tao and reasoning about it. But for some reason you do.

In my view, the fact that a path of intellectual inquiry and wrestling with logic and concepts is necessary to transcend that same path itself and enter into what is beyond is not in question. All mystics agree on this, as I think David and Robert do as well, below the surface of the squabbling.

The trouble, of course, occurs when this intellectual "booster stage" (to use a rocket analogy) is exalted above the free-flight stage which occurs after the booster separates and drops back to Earth. Only the ego could desire to celebrate the engines rather than the payload, so to speak.

The primary objection to QRS philosophy is (and always has been) the emphasis placed on the "booster stage" rather than the free-flight which occurs when the booster is dropped.

Okay, lets run with this analogy. You seem to be saying - here at least - that the rocket booster stage (i.e. the intellectual process of abandoning delusions) is necessary before one can enter into deep space and free-flight (let's call it "liberation"), which is good to hear. However, you then seemingly contradict this by openly objecting to the emphasis I place on this rocket booster stage, even though (a) you have affirmed that it is necessary for free-flight and (b) hardly anyone else in the world emphasises it.

On the face of it, this sounds confusing, even incoherent. One would think that if you had any kind of compassion towards your fellow beings, you would be wanting to help as many people as possible climb aboard the rocket booster stage so that they too can shoot up to the free-flight stage and join you there in liberation. But no, you "object" to this sort of thing, even going so far as to castigate those who do offer this kind of help. It's very strange.

It is like (switching analogies) someone being rescued from a burning rooftop with the help of a helicopter and rope, and then once free, turning around and doing everything possible to prevent others from also being rescued, even going as far as criticizing and mocking the rescuers for wanting to continue their work.

If you truly are a liberated being, Nat and if you have any kind of interest in helping others become liberated, then your attitude doesn't make any sense at all. At best, it comes across as insane. However, everything changes if we drop the idea that you are a liberated being. Then it all falls into place.

This is how I see the situation. You do have some insight (and Robert too, although he constantly obscures it with his emotionalism and defensivess), which means that you did once board the rocket booster at some point in the past and shot upwards to some degree. However, it wasn't long before you quickly jumped off the rocket again (long before the stage of liberation) because the journey was scaring you too much. Since then, you have endeavoured to fashion a kind of half-and-half life - one that is neither spiritual nor worldly - wherein some of the minor insights that you picked up early in the flight (e.g. that reality is purposeless and godless) were comfortably married to your long-standing attachments (e.g. your aversion to work, your fundamental aimlessness, your girlfriend, etc), all of it blessed by a lazy, populist interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. And that is the sum total of your achievements to date.

This being the case, it comes as no surprise that you are quick to speak against any kind of real spiritual work at every avaliable opportunity - rubbishing the process of abandoning delusions, kicking spiritual concepts, mocking great truths, undermining the value of reason, and so on. Anything to soothe that troubled conscience of yours and put your own cowardly laziness in the best possible lght.

"Oh, come look at the Saturn V rocket, with 25,000 tons of thrust and the most massive engines ever built by man. Marvel at its power! Nevermind the fact that it is to be discarded at the first available opportunity in order to free the astronauts for their real journey."

Yes indeed, that is exactly what you did. You discarded serious reasoning and the will to enlightenment at the earliest opportunity.

-

[Kelly Jones]

Nat is only posting because Robert is here. That's an attachment that Nat has yet to deal with. Cut him some slack.

Do you really think Nat is actually able to deal with attachments in any real sense, given his lack of understanding about the nature of reason? He's missing the lodestone. His dialectical monadism is nothing like a rocket booster, and more like pretty fireworks. I don't understand why you baby him.


...

[RobertGreenSky]

Okay, I'll concede a little ground to you, in the hope that you will also concede a little ground to me. I grant you that there is a particular sense in which the conscious opening up to the Dao does involve going beyond all thought. In other words, we might be able to agree on the general principle that enlightenment involves the cessation of all conceptualization. The discussion would then turn on what exactly is meant by the "the cessation of all conceptualization".

In turn, you would have to concede that reasoning and discriminating thought does indeed play a vital role in the process of awakening. We only have to look at the Lao Tzu quotes that you have provided above. In these quotes, Lao Tzu is openly discriminating between what the Tao and what it isn't. For example, he says that it is "hidden" and "without name", and that it is not something that can be "told" or put into words. Lao Tzu is clearly showing that he has identified what the Tao is, that he has applied his thought to it and drawn logical conclusions about it, and so on. Surely, this is obvious.

So what do you think? Are you able to accept that the Tao can indeed be conceptualized and reasoned about, just as Lao Tzu has done, while at the same time maintaining that the experience of it is, in a certain sense, beyond thought?

- David

I certainly agree that as you wrote, 'reasoning and discriminating thought does indeed play a vital role in the process of awakening.' Nagarjuna pointed out in 'Awakening', MMK 24:

The dharma taught by buddhas
Hinges on two truths:
Partial truths of the world
And truths which are sublime.
Without knowing how they differ,
You cannot know the deep;
Without relying on conventions,
You cannot disclose the sublime;
Without intuiting the sublime,
You cannot experience freedom.

(- Stephen Batchelor, Verses From The Center, p. 123)

Laozi relied on convention to 'disclose the sublime' but intuiting the sublime is the 'opening up to the Dao [involving] going beyond all thought'. Intuiting the sublime is the meditative discipline and not the study and analysis preceding the discipline.

Writing about the Tao is not conceptualizing the Tao in the sense of having 'intuited the Dao directly' (Unidian, above). 'The Tao is hidden and without name' means the Tao is beyond conceptualization. 'The nameless' is 'the sublime' and it must be intuited rather than conceptualized. 'The Tao cannot be conceptualized' is by necessity a concept, but it is true (conventionally) nonetheless.

Thus we agree yet we disagree; what else is new? There is room under the sun for myriad views as long as we end up on the same page.

[RobertGreenSky]

Nat is only posting because Robert is here. That's an attachment that Nat has yet to deal with. Cut him some slack.

Laird, Nat, and I were chatting in Skype last night and I wondered why Unidian hadn't been posting. Nat did post and nicely so, as always. Nat has posted here in my absence and probably in Laird's absence also. I suspect it amuses him to post here. As with Laird and myself we exercise the wits without real expectation of getting through to anyone.

[RobertGreenSky]

[You are] ... rubbishing the process of abandoning delusions, kicking spiritual concepts, mocking great truths, undermining the value of reason ...

- David to Unidian

What a fine description of Zhuangzi that would make.

[RobertGreenSky]

You do have some insight (and Robert too, although he constantly obscures it with his emotionalism and defensivess), which means that you did once board the rocket booster at some point in the past and shot upwards to some degree.

- David to Unidian

You also have some insight. Finally - after six years - we've gotten an admission that there is something beyond thought and which Nat and I have been arguing that entire time. Glad you finally caught up a bit. Keep up the good work but remember that the concept of the journey is not the journey. That would be like your mistaken interpretation of Tao te Ching.

Forty-seven

Without going outside, you may know the whole world.
Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.
Thus the sage knows without traveling;
He sees without looking;
He works without doing.


Forty-eight

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

tr. Gia-fu Feng, http://www.terebess.hu/english/tao/gia.html

In both 47 and 48 Laozi is discussing wu-wei. Note that above Nat had effectively paraphrased:

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.

Knowledge in the pursuit of Tao is explicitly rejected! Nat knows it, I know it, and maybe one day you will 'know' it also. That's the kind of very special knowledge that gets you free of the booster.

Of my being defensive and emotional, I don't think either the Buddha or Laozi ever engaged in asinine psychologizing for sake of flattering themselves. I'm emotional and defensive, you're stodgy and egotistical; we'll both have to live with ourselves I guess.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

'The Tao is hidden and without name' means the Tao is beyond conceptualization.

The whole of our reality lies essentially "beyond conceptualization" - this is not as profound as one might like it to sound like. But only the clear insight how it is so, that it necessarily has to be, can provide an antidote to all the misconceptions held stubbornly in place, our build-in traps, all the concepts being wheeled unsuspectingly into the - often emotion ridden - back door. So there's a real possibility of mistake when putting Tao so far away beyond understanding and hiding it from any "deep knowing". This is essentially what centuries of interpretative traditions do to any well written, precise text. It might not be about vague intellectual leaps but it's certainly about a tremendous feat of a sound, unfettered mind.

"Knowledge in the pursuit of Tao is explicitly rejected!"

Not true, all the traditions make a very specific distinction between the two types of knowledge. The knowledge of the 'infinite', about the constant, eternal, Nagarjuna's "deep knowing", they are not merely "meditative discipline", unless the mediation would extent to every deep thought indeed, perfecting understanding through ruthless attention.

[mensa-maniac]

Laird is talking here about provisional assumptions, not beliefs. At least that is how a more conscious person operates - taking nothing for granted, thinking of the future in terms of proposals and tentative assumptions.

Belief represents the end of consciousness. A person with a belief is saying to the world that further than this he will not go.

-

Mensa says: "Belief represents the end of consciousness. A person with a belief is saying to the world that further than this he will not go" Exactly right! A belief limits finding a more suitable answer!

Also a delusion is not only a mistaken belief, it is a chemical imbalance, if a person is delusional they are suffering with a chemical imbalance of the brain.

[RobertGreenSky]

'Knowledge in the pursuit of Tao is explicitly rejected!' is an unfortunate way of putting it. Again, we must approach conventionally but the fruition lies in a dimension beyond thinking. People like Diebert consistently ignore the purport of Nagarjuna and Laozi despite its presentation here.

Everything is real and not real.
Both real and not real.
Neither real nor not real.
That is Lord Buddha's teaching.

—Mûla-madhyamaka-kârikâ 18:8, quoted in Garfield (1995: 102)


The Victorious ones have said
That Emptiness is the relinquishing of all views.

- (MMK XIII : 8)


The Tao is hidden and without name.
The Tao alone nourishes and brings everything to fulfillment.

Tao Te Ching 41

We might also suggest that it is mystical penetration into Dao which brings nourishment and fulfillment. Can merely thinking about the Dao be efficacious when thinking would anyway be 'naming'?

[RobertGreenSky]

Everything is real and not real.
Both real and not real.
Neither real nor not real.
That is Lord Buddha's teaching.

- Mûla-madhyamaka-kârikâ 18:8, quoted in Garfield (1995: 102)

Robinson (1957: p. 294), building on the foundations of Liebenthal (1948)[22] to whom he gives credit, states:

What Nagarjuna wishes to prove is the irrationality of Existence, or the falsehood of reasoning which is built upon the logical principle that A equals A.... Because two answers, assertion and denial, are always possible to a given question, his arguments contain two refutations, one denying the presence, one the absence of the probandum. This double refutation is called the Middle Path. [emphasis evident in Robinson][23]

- Catuṣkoṭi, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catu%E1%B9%A3ko%E1%B9%ADi
bolding theirs.

Told ya.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

.. fruition lies in a dimension beyond thinking.

Then be modest and start with introducing some dimension to your thinking! To me your "buddha for dummies" appears lifeless and uninspired. This forum is about genius, it's about the spark, the brightness of thoughts, the quality of consciousness which can be present internally, inwardly connected, in each and every mentation becoming expressed, no matter the intellectual baggage and chattering traditions ones drags along each step of the way.

[RobertGreenSky]

Diebert is oblivious and he is now set on ignore.

[skipair]

As far as the rocket analogy goes, I've said it before and I'll say it again, it is ALL ABOUT the booster stage. That is the meat and the everything. Any talk of the end, whether it be a free flying freedom, unthinking heaven, or anything that objectifies the understanding will lead minds astray into fantasy building. There is ONLY intense fascination in honest knowledge, going step by step through the issues, or there is nothing of philosophical value. True stuff.