| | Author: Tracy. Forum: Dharma Overground Discussion Forum
I almost posted this in the thread "Fruition, emptiness and primordial awareness" but then decided it was too much of a tangent because it didn't respond to the original question OR the latest comments in any meaningful way. But it is related to it. I'm asking about the relationship between emptiness and fruition, because this author I read seems to suggest that Buddhism is all about one and not the other.
I just finished reading Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith, in which he claims to describe the universal essence of contemplative and mystical experience. It's strange, because what he calls the universal contemplative experience sounds like what people on this forum are calling primordial awareness or seeing emptiness, but he doesn't mention nirvana (cessation) at all in anything I've read by him. I'm wondering why he does that, if he really experiences emptiness but not cessation, or if he declines to write about nirvana in his mainstream writing career for other reasons (although, gee, writing about empty awareness is pretty weird on the scale of things).
A passage from TEoF: "If you will persistently look for the subject of your experience, however, its absence may become apparent, if only for a moment. Everything will remain-- this book, your hands-- and yet the illusory divide that once separated knower from known, self from world, inside from outside, will have vanished. . . . Once the selflessness of consciousness has been glimpsed, spiritual life can be viewed as a matter of freeing one's attention more and more so that this recognition can become stabilized."
[continued...] |