GENIUS FORUMS

It's hard to believe perhaps, and one shouldn't just believe, but wise people end up saying the same shit through history, like a broken record - apart from it not being broken! The reason they say the same things is that they discovered the same obvious stuff about consciousness, truth, life and death. Lets pretend we're just imagining it and the sage in question never existed or was talking about something else entirely: then why not just hi-jacking him and assume that, as a sage, he would have meant it in the most reasonable, consistent, ultimate sense possible; as wisdom is unified by its own nature. Post-mortem sanctification brought to you by the Mortician!

And we've been here before.

ok...no more links (for a while...unless i need "proof" to back up my claims)...

Alex T. Jacob wrote:Buddhism offers: ethical stimulation.

Today as i pondered all the NWO stuff (i never knew what it was all about until a few days ago)...i thought to myself...well if this IS true...Buddhism offers a path of peace...Buddhism even makes peace with the demons and frequently wins them over towards renouncing evil ways...there are stories about demons praising Buddhas teachings...

Ok...about rebirth...the only way it made any sense to me was thinking that we are ONE...whom/whatever is "reborn" is like a cell being renewed (as our cells in our body die and are renewed.)

There is ONE consciousness...in which all the cells (sentient beings) are connected to...but we have our own batteries (brain).

LOL...now you see why i provide links.

And finally....nothing inherently exists. The image you see of yourself is a product of millions of processes that made it...nothing can inherently exist....as everything is connected...when one species dies out...it starts a chain reaction.....everything is DEPENDENT on everything else for it's survival....take away the SUN and see what happens...take away WATER, AIR....we are very fragile on this planet.

i don't know. i seriously don't know the absolute truth about anything.
even logic is flawed (scientists can't even figure out how life begain through logic...it's all theory)
We could all be brainwashed by these alien beings . Maybe compassion, love,kindness,humbleness...are only controlling our behavior to be subservient & passive.

i seriously don't know anything anymore.

jupiviv wrote:Only delusion, i.e, a lack of consciousness, would lead a person to think that he is a subject of time, instead of time itself, and therefore timeless.

So why are you aging rapidly ?
How can you be time itself
and timeless ?

jupiviv wrote:") he becomes fully conscious and therefore understands the truth about himself as a timeless logical entity, like everything else around him(

and does he also recognize women as being that "timeless logical entity" too ?

: )

Kunga wrote:

jupiviv wrote:Only delusion, i.e, a lack of consciousness, would lead a person to think that he is a subject of time, instead of time itself, and therefore timeless.

So why are you aging rapidly ?
How can you be time itself
and timeless ?

I don't think I'm aging rapidly, but I get your point. Aging, birth and death are not the same as consciousness. They are all separate things.

I am timeless because I'm not the subject of time, that is, the subject of something separate from myself. And it doesn't make sense to say that I am the subject of myself. Note that this is based on my definition of time which I think is most logical, and which other people may not share.

Jupiviv wrote: "Aging, birth and death are not the same as consciousness. They are all separate things."

And earlier:

"Your definition is based on the spurious reasoning that the body is somehow separate from the consciousness. In fact, anything that causes consciousness is one and the same as consciousness."

According to the second definition, body and consciousness are 'together', and the one produces the other. The body is the 'cause' of consciousness. This negates the first quote.

Diebert writes: "It's hard to believe perhaps, and one shouldn't just believe, but wise people end up saying the same shit through history, like a broken record - apart from it not being broken! The reason they say the same things is that they discovered the same obvious stuff about consciousness, truth, life and death. Lets pretend we're just imagining it and the sage in question never existed or was talking about something else entirely: then why not just hi-jacking him and assume that, as a sage, he would have meant it in the most reasonable, consistent, ultimate sense possible; as wisdom is unified by its own nature. Post-mortem sanctification brought to you by the Mortician!"

There is an endless stream of wise people, and they say wise things, but they don't always agree. Not in these ultimate senses. They evince one excellent quality: the need or the desire to ponder, and to live in such a way that their living renders 'fruit'. One whole problem that I believe we have certainly encountered, as the result of the death of a whole World View and another that is coming to be formed, is that we are still forced to muck around in the old inheritances, the old bodies (or corpses, to remain fully tongue in cheek). It almost seems to resolve to being a matter of personal choice if one believes in reincarnation or not.

What is gained in believing that you and me and everyone, at death, ceases to exist? (David once compared his existing to a cloud. How and why would one ever imagine that a random assemblage of vapor in the sky, that forms and reforms, would 'reincarnate'?)

Alex T. Jacob wrote:According to the second definition, body and consciousness are 'together', and the one produces the other. The body is the 'cause' of consciousness. This negates the first quote.

If the body causes consciousness, then it is part of consciousness. If it ceases to cause consciousness(eg., as Kunga pointed out, an aging body) then it ceases to be part of consciousness.

The Tibetan Buddhist idea of reincarnation - a consciousness moving from one body to the other - is wrong because they separate the conscious entity(soul) from the bodies which it supposedly inhabits. It is possible for the consciousness to move from one body to another(eg., if the brain were transplanted from one body to another,) but that is the province of science, not Buddhism.

i imagine this planet & ourselves ....and see it in the Universe.............where are we ?
it's like the importance of a grain of sand in the Universe.
our "existence" is( as if) we really do not exist in the grand totallity....but yet we are living large...as if we are all that exists...it certainly appears that way....
our death is like a fart passing.

i have been reborn in my children (DNA).

whatever the truth is regarding rebirth if it helps one to be a better person on this earth (imho) is all that matters.
the TRUTH is optional.

Buddha didn't have an answer for everything.

Jupiviv wrote: "If the body causes consciousness, then it is part of consciousness. If it ceases to cause consciousness (eg., as Kunga pointed out, an aging body) then it ceases to be part of consciousness."

If consciousness arises in bodies and is intimately bound up with them, when the body deteriorates, so does consciousness. Consciousness would be, then, just as fragile as a body and just as subject to change. I think this is inescapable as conclusion from your proposition. It would seem that you provide consciousness with an abstract existence independent of the body.

"The Tibetan Buddhist idea of reincarnation - a consciousness moving from one body to the other - is wrong because they separate the conscious entity (soul) from the bodies which it supposedly inhabits."

I think the doctrine is quite a bit more complex than that. There are many intricacies in the reasonings of the Vedic philosophers and metaphysicians, they are really quite surprising. I left all my notes on the matter back at the 'hippy camp' of my youth, but if memory serves, Vedic doctrines propose an 'atman' or a kernel of divinity that is 'irreducible' and eternal---and yet untouched and unaffected by any event in incarnate existence (hold on a sec, I can't find my hashpipe---I'll be right back!). (*opening of drawers, swearing, then an 'ah-ha!'*).

Okay, I'm back, now where were we? Oh yes: it is this particle, if you will, that 'moves' from body to body, but the individual, conditioned person, it would seem, falls asunder just like the body does at death. I think that the idea is that 'consciousness' (that is, Divinity), according to this view, is ever-existing, eternal and untransformed. This is the bedrock from which existence springs. And they recognize this, and their whole belief-system is constructed upon it. These people had a very strange metaphysic, it is true, but they were not at all dummies, and their use of logic was anything but unsophisticated. Their view of the world and their penetration into the mysteries of it (even if it were a projection of inner content) was pretty magnificent.

The problem with this Edifice is that, like our own Medieval Roman Catholic Christian creation from which our own minds and consciousnesses have been born, it is crumbling, or it has crumbled, or better still it is in a slow crumbling-death process that, like our own, takes centuries and leaves behind tumbled down ruins with imposing statues of the divinity with one arm and sparrows flitting about while a herd of goats tugs at the weeds; old roads that start out cobbled and fine but peter out as you head toward the mountain pass; and a computer terminal on your desk and over in the corner a Shiva-puja or Durga-puja and the television is tuned to a station broadcasting world financial news and your kid's application to an Ivy League College sits on top of a pile...

Kunga wrote: "Buddha didn't have an answer for everything."

Oh yes he did, and does. If you enter into the structure offered by the magnificent (excuse the repeat of that word, I am stoned out of my mind and just like the sound of it) religious, soci-economic, legal and ethical and metaphysical systems that have been created in certain epochs by men, systems that explained everything and organized everything, and if you can forget your doubt, and if you can shut-out the outside noise, if you can keep the tentacles from coming in under the door and through your teevee and through the print-media scattered across the coffee-table and digging themeselves into the very fibres of your mind, your hope, your imagination; and if you can avoid or even deny the implications of a total revolution in the understanding of the physical universe that has attacked and eroded all previous edifices, then I assure you 'the Buddha has an answer for everthing'.

♪♪♪I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering
Where it will go....♪♪♪
______________________________________________________

This one goes out to Diebert...

Alex T. Jacob wrote:If consciousness arises in bodies and is intimately bound up with them, when the body deteriorates, so does consciousness.

Again, you're making the mistake of separating the consciousness from the bodies it inhabits, which is not logically possible to do. Birth and death arise when we attach ourselves to things we are not. Here's a quote that I like from the Bhagvad Gita - "the unreal never is, the real never is not."

Alex Teerth Jacob asked:

• “ What is gained in believing that you and me and everyone, at death, ceases to exist? ”

The same gain as believing you or me or anyone would resurface somewhere. Only those under the spell of inherently existing somewhere in time will ponder much about ceasing or rebirthing into some afterlife. Feel free to argue for the benefits of that spell for the ego in already backdated psychological models.

Jupiviv wrote: "Again, you're making the mistake of separating the consciousness from the bodies it inhabits, which is not logically possible to do. Birth and death arise when we attach ourselves to things we are not. Here's a quote that I like from the Bhagvad Gita - "the unreal never is, the real never is not."

Oh no. I am trying to repeat back to you what I think you are saying. There are certain constraints imposed by language, and that is why I say 'arises in', etc.

• The unreal never is, the real never is not.

Right. With that you are smack in the middle of one of the most outlandish and 'scientificaly impossible' structures of belief. It is a marvevellous place for the imagination to romp and cavort.

On this forum we get to witness people strung on a torture-rack between scientific materialism and Aristotelian logic and certain manifestations of a Vedic ordering of perception.

Or maybe it is less a torture-rack and more a Carousel? Oh come on everyone! let's go for a ride!

PS: I have mastered Diebert's indents. I grow more powerful by the post!

Alex T. Jacob wrote:Kunga wrote: "Buddha didn't have an answer for everything."

Oh yes he did, and does.

Well this is what i was refering to (His silence) :

http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/ar ... a_rem.html

Alex T Jacob wrote:What is gained

is lost.