http://lifeasahuman.com/2010/mind-spiri ... s-a-dream/
(I especially liked Ahmeds' reply) :
Upon first reading this, I was tempted to say what a load of New Age baloney but then my Buddhist equanimity kicked in and I did not say it. I do know now why you (Rick) were so reluctant to discuss or debate this with me in person, you had already committed your assertions to print.
“Our life is nothing more than a constant series of responses to random events.” This might be the world according to Rick Bateman but it is not the world according to the Buddha. Such concepts as random events, magic, divine intervention and even luck are not in the least compatible with Buddhist philosophy. The central teaching in Buddhism is the doctrine of Pratityasamutpada or “dependent origination”.
According to the Buddha; “When this exists, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases.” Doesn’t sound like this is describing random events; (The Oxford English Dictionary defines “random” as: having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring without method or conscious choice; haphazard.). I perused numerous Buddhist sources and I could not find any justification for your assertion, in fact quite the opposite; Buddhist philosophy states that any event is the result of previous events and as such can not be random. I spent a whole day trying to be aware of all the events that I was “responding” to and I can say without equivocation that there was not a random event to be seen. I wish there had been one; like Lotto Max drawing my ticket for the 50 million. From the book “How to See Yourself as You Really Are” by H.H. the Dalai Lama; “An event is not under its own power but depends on many present causes and conditions as well as many past causes and conditions.” How is an event meeting those criteria even remotely “random”? I will let Matthieu Ricard have the last word on this (I assume you you know Matthieu Ricard; a Tibetan Buddhist monk since 1972, author of numerous books on Buddhism, and also being the French interpreter for H.H.). From his book “The Quantum and the Lotus”; “Even though phenomena lack reality, they do not happen at random.” and “The world is definitely not random or arbitrary.”
As long as I am on a roll. You say: “It is often heard from Buddhist teachers, that life is nothing but a dream and awakening no different in either case.” What teachers would this be and where do they say it and do they have a foreign accent? I think what the Buddha did say was to regard our life as a dream, not that our life was a dream. He did that to illustrate the illusory nature of everyday phenomena; just as dreams are an illusion so is the stuff of everyday life. Another important tenet of Buddhism is that of “emptiness” or in other words that all phenomena lack inherent existence. Seems that you have taken literally that which was meant to be taken metaphorically.
You say: “While lucid dreaming I would check to see if things had the same physical characteristics as the real world. Of course they did —–.”In the next paragraph you state “——– the physical characteristics of things in the dream are different than the waking state —-.” Which is it then; first you say they are the same and then you say they they are different? How can a dream have physical characteristics anyway? It’s a dream for Christs sake, nothing physical about it (unless you are having a nocturnal emission, I suppose). Step in front of a speeding bus in your dream and you will wake up in the morning no worse for the wear; do the same in real life and you will be fortunate to wake up in a hospital covered by a full body cast and swathed in bandages. The foregoing should pretty well establish which state has physical characteristics and which one does not, would you not agree?
You say: “——-; when you are awake, you are in the same state of consciousness as when you are dreaming.” Really? I think that it is a well established fact that we are not as “conscious” when we are sleeping, dreaming or not, as when we are awake. How many people die in house fires while dreaming away in their beds? Had they been in the “same state of consciousness” as when awake they would have headed for the nearest exit to escape the conflagration, would you not think?
You claim that: “Buddhism teaches that all things are temporary due to their dependence on other things for their existence. This is only part of the truth ——.” Ah, so the Buddha only got things partly right and now Rick Bateman is going to set the Buddha straight. “Not only are all things temporary but their creation, existence and dissolution are all driven by random events.” Talk about hubris!
Ahmed
