If it is the 'one' thing that you eschew then that is the thing which I choose to focus on. I have established something like a formula and a way to proceed relationally to the methodology that you 'cling to'.Seeker wrote:This is exactly the sort of thing you won't see any of us write! You are clinging to this story, and it's just a story. You don't seem to have 'grokked' that. The personal story, the drama, the victim, the history. The story of the history of "Self" is the one thing here that we eschew. At least you won't hear me talking about my nationality or what my parents were like, and you definitely won't hear me speaking about the 'position of tension and conflict' it puts me in. Again, see below.
But allow me to say a few things as I think that this might help you to understand my orientation better: One thing is that very little of what you talk about - with heroic intensity - is incomprehensible to me. But I do not only mean intellectually or conceptually. I mean it in the sense that you describe 'epiphany': realisations and understandings that occur in one. But, I seem to have required going in a different direction, and it is possible that my position is a further evolution of your own, though I doubt that you will agree since that fact is rendered *impossible* by your own assertions and self-declarations.
I am not sure how to proceed in summarizing your position. One is required to reduce it, or encapsulate it, and to express it in a few simple predicates. The gist of it is that 'the world' is not real; the world is a projection of the mind and of consciousness; this projection is unreal in itself and can be halted (or perhaps modified); and that you do this and that, too, this is 'enlightenment' or the steps/steps that result in 'enlightenment'. When one has done this (or basically stopped doing the 'projecting' or, to use Patanjali's terms, when 'the modificatins of the mind have been stilled') one discovers the nondual 'truth' of all things.
In its essence, and there are numerous variations of method and praxis that the basic definition allows or, to put it more accurate, produces. So, with that said, I will say that 'all of this' is idea-material that is not unfamiliar to me and, in some degree at least, I have *experienced*. But I would rather say that the experience of the ideas, and the possibilitiy, and the *epiphany* to use your term (which means, to me, an experience that comes to one without one having sought it; ie independent of one's will), have certainly had their effects in me. And, in actual point of fact, my thrust is as a result of where my internal investigations have led me. But where I differ from 'you' (speaking to the declared neo-Buddhist tribe) is a pretty radical difference. Just above I posted some selections which, to all appearances, would seem to turn 180 degrees against the praxis that you recommend.
So, instead of defining and giving oneself exclusively to a transcendental praxis (your position is transcendental in the generally-understood philosophic snese), I would not negate the transcendental pole, not in any sense, but I would and I do recommend understanding 'self' and 'person' very differently, and acting in accord with a different understanding. This 'transcendentalism' is not foreign to Indo-European philosophy or praxis, yet transcendental ideas or the idealistic position (relationship to Idea essentially), seems to function very differently. As I have said many times, and I say it because it appears true to me, your praxis is one that destroys your relationship to your matrix. It does not link with your matrix. It operates like a foreign intrustion.
Your ideas and the praxis resulting from the experience has no definable relationship with those 'things' that are the products of culture, civilisation, governance, law, metaphysics, ethics - none of this. Your ideas lead to cessation of relationship; avoidance; withdrawl; and defining a platform - as you do, and with tremendous energy and desire - to which you can bring other people. Remember that this was the original platform of our Beloved Founders: They established themselves as reformers, as challengers, as Zen gadflies, as revolutionaries, taking a position against 'flowey feminine culture', torpid unawareness of self, the insanity of the non-thinking position, 'irrationalism', etc. Like you they propose (each in a different way I suppose) an awakening in Self or to Self.
It is not (not exactly) that I find this 'wrong'. But I believe that what I see and understand about it is something that they (and by extension you) cannot see: a destructive, acidic aspect of it. I have written about this very extensively and won't repeat it here. In my view, a man's spirituality and life must be relational to his matrix. One's spirituality must flow organically if you wish from his matrix, from his traditions, and by that I mean what has made him him. To critique Buddhism of the religious and metaphysical idea-forms of the Indian subcontinent is beyond the scope of my posts, yet I'd suggest that this needs to be done. I might say though that the 'Aryan spirit' of the Indo-Aryan races and cultures was dulled by contact with the tropical regions and the indigenous culture of that region. It is not 'ours'. But - and this must be noted and stressed - you will regard this statement, as it has to do with the 'story' of one's actual biological and psychic realness, which you consider a fantasy, a 'delusion', as fundamentally false. Not partly false and needing modification but metaphysically false. Absolutely false.
And my discourse arises to challenge your assertions which I see as expressions of metaphysic and discrimination. I mean a discrimination that requires modification, that is limited, and that in itself disassociates one from one's real life: biological and psychic.
Thus, I reject your definition of 'enlightenment' and must attempt another: sophersune. Witht he word and the ideas behind the word I choose to link not with the Indian subcontinent and a nihilistic relationship to existence, but with the Greek and Pagan European relationship to life and experience. The difference, I suggest, is crucial. With this, I can include everything that arises in 'our traditions', and in our matrix, our bodies, our cultures, our sciences: everything.
You simply disappear like the Cheshire Cat.