Replies to a couple of posts..
Daniel M. Ingram:
@ CCC: Ok. Short sentences. Simple readers. Got it. Advice: Avoid Dickens. Read Hemingway.
All joking about your comprehension level aside, I went back through that sentence carefully and looked for places where the standard rules of American grammar would require commas, semicolons or full-stops (periods). I find none. I agree, the sentences is long. Please inform me of where you would add these additional marks of punctuation, as I don't find that the rules as I learned them dictate that it needs them. Oh, yes, BA in English Literature should be added to the list.
Christ alive, talk about acting like a prick. Your sentences running on forever is a sign of mania, rather than overwhelming intelligence. Please decide whether your authority is coming from your relationship with reality, or your degrees and diplomas, which confer nothing special but that fact you could memorise things for your exams.
The part of your post about sitting in jhana for three months and "letting your intention fly" leads where exactly? Because you convinced yourself you once moved a flickering flame in a dark room it is absurd to quote that as anything resembling a power. The buddhist texts say that after arahantship, with much work one can cultivate the powers of super-hearing, seeing and hearing other planes of existence and such. Turning invisible and the rest. It took buddha seven years after his enlightenment before he had any powers to show. Be humbled by your lack of powers, rather than build up nonsense of thinking you know where to scratch someone's back where its itchiest or flying in your dreams.
I'm a pretty die-hard Buddhist, so I don't really care about this debate.
But you must admit, the world would beat a path to your door if you could get together a group of yogis who could demonstrate these powers in a scientifically convincing way. If successful, the legitimacy this project would lend to your teachings and the enormous audience it would introduce them to makes it seem like just about the most meritorious project anyone on the planet could be working on at the moment.
You're not a very good die-hard buddhist if you think showing off powers would lead to enormous merit and would lead people to enlightenment. The gross nature of the desire for powers would not be a natural link to the right sort of practice that would destroy fetters. Imagine the person sitting on the ground cross legged, imagine what would be in their mind, "quick, come on, lets get some enlightenment, lets get some abilities...come on mind, quick, lets get some fruits and powers, this will be great! I can help all the starving people in the world, I can materialise a billion bananas a minute for all those starving africans, why has no one done this before, this is great!!!"
A few minutes later they would give up, not being able to attain any sort of concentration that could lead to jhana. That was only a practical evaluation of your scenario, and not to do with the buddhist texts. Why do you think gautum forbade his people to show powers? Why do you think you know better than him? In the tens of thousands of years of human civilisation, why has no god-man with amazing jhanic powers conquered the world? Because the kind of clearness approaching the level of powers would have a clearness regarding other things. It is not some lucky coincidence that powers exist and they are not wildly used and abused.
Anyway don't get excited, Daniel hasn't any supernormal powers to show. If he had powers he wouldnt be begging for money on his website,
That said, if you just happened to be completely loaded (say $10,000,000+ range), overwhelmed with gratitude for my book or some email, and can't be talked out of giving me some huge chunk of change that you can easily afford, alright, you win... ;)
Yeah, the arahant with superpowers who wants money. Why not materialise what you need? And no, his sleeping dreams surprisingly don't count.
To the OP, what were you looking to get out of the book? If you are still on the level of pure materialism, as the hindus say, the lowest chakra, then why are you even reading the book. You're a materialist remember? Just ink on a page. The mind is the brain cells. Existence is some kind of accident in the uncaring universe. You're a materialist right? Food and sex are good and then you die. Let's colonise the whole universe using science although there is no real meaning to it. Yeah, cool. Let's put nanomachines into our blood that provides constant heroin-like pleasure, but with a clear mind. Yeah, go materialism!! Aaah the wonders of science, the savior of mankind.
The answer is not on a plate for you in the conventional sense. But the big joke is, it is. Attain jhana. People on the a&p may well be very deluded but they have gone at least beyond materialism.
I have been doing jhana meditation for the last year and have attained many fruitions on deeper and deeper levels. Ones where the sky rains petals. In the last few months I have built up to six hours a day. I have not attained release from the final five fetters yet but I am close. I see people floundering here and on the kenneth folk forum. People who consider forty minutes a "long sit". These people are never going to attain arahantship in this lifetime. Buddha did not teach dry insight, it is extremely perverse and overly difficult, I would not be surprised if Buddha classified it as extreme asceticism.
THE FETTERS ARE REAL The seeds of sexual desire and ill will can be burned out! Then you are an anagamin. You can still have sex if you feel it is the right thing to do, and you can still go through the motions of anger because the body and the human realm is made out of gross karmas. The fetter system is extremely good and true.
It may seem I am upset with Daniel Ingram in this post but I have no ill will at all. ill will is a part of wrong view which, simply, I have seen through. The purpose of my writing on this forum is to lead people toward what is best, away from wrong view of which there is bucketloads on this and other websites and forums.
I am not some kind of saint though. An anagamin is scum, really. Gross desires such as a rebirth in extremely pleasant circumstances is disgusting, but I have not destroyed it yet. When one can see existence in context, after arahantship, and after attaining the powers, they will then be long past even wanting to display them, it's as simple as that.
Everything Daniel writes about wanting to combine the scientific method and enlightenment is purely and simply a wrong view which he will not relinquish. There would always be a 'can not follow' moment, between an enlightened man explaining something, and a regular person listening. Say there is some scientifically controlled experiment to take place. A fully enlightened man capable of conjuring a flame in the air and is going to do it infront of scientists.
Ok, the test happened, lets analyse the data. The flame appeared here.....consumed the resources of so and so...bla bla bla...
What comes next? Nothing can. A new theory maybe. But the materialist observer can never move beyond the effects and the results, they are always on the back foot. Buddha was a good talker and explainer, but he had limits. The 'unanswerable questions' are not really unanswerable, but would require the sort of mad speech that would never even evade the fact that every listener would fall into a trap someplace. I am not going to try and use the gross matter of language to do what buddha didnt bother doing.
I am just writing to counter the nonsense that is being said. If I was an arahant and destroyed the fetter of restlessness,I wouldnt bother. And when it happens, I wont.
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