And another thing! I would just like to share my suspicion that the excitement shown in your comment above (your actual understanding of the buddhist teachings not withstanding) may be due to the fact that the claim âwe are everything and nothingâ appears to go against the overbearing dictat of logic/rationality.
However, in the Buddhist philosophy, âEverythingâ and âNothingâ might not be opposites, nor mutually exclusive. ie Emptiness is form (everything is nothing) might not be the equivalent of A=notA.
Itâs complicated. There may be no inside or outside. Or another way to put it is that there is never an inside without a corresponding outside; and, vice versa, there is no awareness of the outside without a corresponding inside awareness.
Right. Thatâs the point of this thread, yes, to question the actuality of psychological separation.
Take our deepest inside experience: first-person subjectivity. MY thoughts, MY feelings, MY perceptions, MY inner world. Yet all these are inextricably connected to and dependent on the outside: people, animals, plants, trees, all manner of âthingsâ that enable us to think and feel and to be.
Itâs very rare that our questions come through without some kind of answer secretly or carelessly attached. So to answer the question, âAre we separate?â with any positive or negative assertion only means that the answer is present even before the question is posed. Everything that usually follows the posing of the question is then merely a formality of finding the best pathway to the answer. But, in such matters as this, it is very clear that any answer must invariably smother and kill off whatever energy and vitality our question possesses. Because, whether we are separate or not, the question brings us together for a brief moment or two in an area where there is neither separation nor connection, which is to say that it brings us into the heart of a dialogue. In this dialogue, which has nothing to do with the two of us or the twenty of us investigating, the human mind is exploring its own complex nature as a living fact. This mind can look, listen, touch, and make use of all the senses, which means there is a dialogue with existence, a direct dialogue with life, not a post-mortem about something already dead and gone. This mind is yours as much as mine, so it doesnât make sense to talk of two minds exploring together. We may have different memories of different experiences and different ideas; and then we might talk of exploring together, hoping one day to resolve our countless differences. But a dialogue is not that kind of exploration. A dialogue truly begins when we delegate everything to the question and watch what happens when our mind is alive with it.
Do we love one another? This too is a question from which all sense of meaning and majesty is drained once any answer is given to it. It is the same as our original question, really, but using other words. For both of these questions we donât know the answer, but if we are tempted to utter the phrase âI donât knowâ in place of âYesâ or âNoâ this also is not in itself a satisfactory response. At the moment, we have only the question.
I genuinely donât understand why do you want to insist on calling it Self?
Obviously, when the psychological self ends, so does all psychological labelling - so there are no labels or words for what happens ânextâ. We might call truth coca-cola or pepsi! But obviously whatever word is subsequently used for that no-thing is an indication of its meaning.
If we use the word âtruthâ it is pretty self-explanatory. If we use the word âcreationâ - so long as one understands the particular meaning given to that word - then one has a sense of what that word conveys. Ditto with the word âgroundâ (as in âground of beingâ, âground of birth and deathâ, etc). - Maybe a better word for you might be âmindâ (as in the âmind that is outside of the brainâ)?
But the word âSelfâ - at least as we commonly use it - concerns not only what may not in fact have any true existence at all, but which also is the singular cause of all the harm, evil and suffering in the world - from Putin to Trump, from authoritarianism to consumerism, from the selfishness of social and racial prejudice, to the selfishness of humankind on the devastated planet earth.
The feeling of self-centredness, of âself-nessâ, is the very thing that has to come to an end - the very thing that must die - for the sake of social harmony, as much as for the possibility of truth or creation. You must see this.
So why do you want to stick to the word âSelfâ?
I am saying that an understanding on the efficiency of thought within the superficial structure, created by the movement of thought, must lead to belief and identification with any kind of authority or ideal. It is not a matter of partiality, but a matter of the quality of the mind.
PS:
Delegating the matter to the question, as P⌠Dimmock suggests, always has to do with thinking getting ahead of âobserving what is happeningâ and steering the discussion in the directions in which it has always moved anyway and the mind lives with it. The different experiences and ideas appear in everything you watch, like you know what steps to take by leaving the house and see the road on where you are.
No, no missing. My interest is in subjective activity. There is this involuntary probing of what one hears, sees, or reads within the conceptual structure in which one so finds oneâs way in life. And this probing is involved in perception and not the action of a subject who has need or reason to do so. For example, if you start a question with a âwhyâ, you are already dealing with that problem without knowing it.
Your questioning me on my view of life, the universe, and everything has made me more conscious that I trust logic when it comes to debate, math, engineering, science, but not so much when it comes to the spirit and heart. For me, all bets are off there, the field is wide open!
You probably knew this about me already, but now I know it too.