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Just out of curiosity, what is the Buddhist theory of imagination? Is that mainly a Western concept? The question has some relevance to a book I'm writing, as well as some relevance to some personal experiments I'm performing.

Thanks,
haquan

Author: sunseaboy

This is a great question, because teh western theroies are mostly out of the Humanities disciplines, I'd say, such as Coleridge's view of Primary and Secondary Imagination, with Primary similar to theories of Awareness in Buddhism. Tibetan traditions make use of imagination in visualization practices and also visualization in meditation, including tantric visual formation of mandalas and fully dimensional visualizations of bodhisattvas and dakinis culminating in dissolution into rainbow light and white light to dissolve into the embodiment of the qualities represented by the symbolic deity. Imagination involves skillful means of practice for empowerments. See Allan Wallace perhaps for more technical exploration. I'm interested to see where this goes! Brett

What is it that you mean by "imagination"? If you read the Pali suttas, I'm not sure you will find any such discussion of a "Buddhist" theory of imagination.

Now, of course, if you are asking about how Tibetan Buddhism might respond, then possibly we are speaking about a totally different animal altogether. But within the discourses gathered in the Pali canon, I don't think there is any such discussion.

What there is discussion of, which might approach what you may be interested in examining, is the term "papanca" which refers to the mind's ability to proliferate thought, or "imaginings" to take it a step further, in the form of proliferation in the realm of concepts or conceptual thinking.

For an excellent discussion of this term as it is used within the early Buddhist schools, see Bhikkhu Nanananda's book "Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought."

Briefly, papanca-sanna-sankha is something that is to be recognized and dropped within one's practice. This term refers to "concepts, reckonings, designations or linguistic conventions characterized by the prolific conceptualising tendency of the mind." Such a phenomenon holds the mind back from recognizing "things as they are" or from being able to "see clearly." In a wider expanse of its meaning, I supposed this could be compared with "imaginings." Although I would think that "imagination," in its capacity of inventiveness (resourcefulness in dealing with new or unusual experiences), is something related but different from "imaginings/visualizations" as these two terms might be used within a method of Buddhist praxis.

Well - I would clarify imagination to include our ability to generate sensory experience internally, either consciously or involuntarily - so dreams would possibly be the archetypal experience of this, but also the internal monologue, and even objects of visualization like mandalas.

When reading about imagination, I found that some people believe that it is the faculty that allows us to make sense of our sensory sensations - sort of how we imagine the entirety of an object even though we only see part of it - it made me wonder if it had anything to do with the experience of formations...

It sounds like you might want to read Abhidamma.

The Asian contemplative traditions have focused strenuously on the realm of subjective experiencing for millenia at this point.

My sense is that in this area, comparatively speaking, Western models and vocabulary are quite primitive.

Western scholars,scientists, researchers still have to argue and justify any interest in subjective experience at all. It's often seen as being esoteric at best and irrelevant at worst.

B. Alan Wallace takes these themes on robustly and comprehensively in many of his books. And they're well-worth checking out. The Taboo of Subjectivity and Contemplative Science are two that come to mind.

My feeling is that this question of a Buddhist perspective on imagination is just utterly huge. Very hard to sum it up succinctly. I'm not currently worrying about this much, because with such clear instructions for practice, I'm more interested in getting my yogic chops up.

Have you read any abhidamma? Ever encountered the concept of the 'alaya vijnana' or alaya storehouse or substrate consciousness?

Well, people can and have spent entire lifetimes on this stuff. So it's there to be appreciated. Good luck.

Well, no, I had not read Abhidamma - though I had come across the concept of "mindstream" before, through the works of Tarthang Tulku. The Abhidamma sounds pretty dense, and difficult to interpret from what I've read about it (Im not so good with lists), but thank you for the recommendation - I will, of course, check out B. Alan Wallace. Definitely agree that Buddhist conceptions are more phenomenologically sophisticated regarding subjective experience than Western conceptions..

It is interesting, of course, that the practices of Buddhism can produce a large number of enlightened beings, who then divide into camps and proceed to argue about the implied metaphysics of the condition. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but it means something - perhaps that practice is more important than philosophy, as you suggest.

Part of the reason I'm interested is that recently I discovered that the research indicates that imagination is the mechanism behind hypnotic trance, and it has more to do with this faculty than anything else. This leads one to begin thinking of dreaming, the archetypal imaginatory activity, and then to wonder about the relationship between these states and hallucinations and delusions... It also makes me wonder about the relationship to the samatha jhanas given that these states seem to be the closest to hypnotic trance.

The samatha jhanas, when practiced correctly, are the epitome of a "concentrated, purified and cleansed, unblemished, free from impurities, malleable, workable, established, and stable (imperturbable)" mind state. In this state (the fourth jhana, that is), the mind is bright, aware, alert, percipient, and unruffled. It is as tranquil as it will ever get and still be conscious. Such tranquility is used for clear seeing or insight practice (vipassana). It is from this state that discernment is fostered and the mental effluents are ended. This is the exact opposite of an hypnotic trance.

Hypnosis works on suggestibility and an overly relaxed mind that is lacking in mindfulness (sati). The elimination of sati is what allows the suggestibility to do its work. In other words, a mind that is in hypnotic trance is incapable of dealing with suggestions given it by the hypnotist. While it may not always follow the suggestions, it is certainly unaware (consciously, that is) that it is being held under suggestibility. The hypnotized mind is dull, sluggish, and open to influence from outside sources, the complete opposite of the mind in fourth jhana.

If you will follow my suggestion to look into the meaning and significance of the word "papanca" along with the suggested readings, you would likely have whatever answer it is that you are seeking. There is too much material for me to attempt going into any detail here. That's why I suggested the Nanananda book. The "conceptualizing tendency of the mind" of papanca is probably the equivalent of the "imagination" as you conceive it. And yes, papanca does have something to do with "the experience of formations" (in the sense of mental formations or sankhara/volition, the fourth aggregate).

Have you ever been hypnotized? I think you would be surprised by the experience. Most people actually report feeling "bright, alert, percipient, and unruffled." Suggestibilty has been somewhat discredited as an explanation, and forms a bit of a circular argument (She's hypnotizable because she's suggestible. How do we know she is suggestible? Because we can hypnotize her). Despite the name, it has little to do with sleep either - in fact the EEG of a hypnotized subject is identical to someone who is awake and alert with their eyes closed. The subject is, in fact, aware of the suggestions of the hypnotist, and may choose to disobey them.

In self hypnosis, I'm capable of generating full virtual reality experiences indistinguishable from lucid dreaming. Ingram says 4th jhana is where most magick is worked - again, this jhana is indistinguishable from trance on both counts.

It seems like you may have some misconceptions regarding hypnosis, what it is, and what it is not, which is not uncommon with media portrayal. I'll look more into papanca, though my initial survey made me think it had more to do with thoughts...

Yes, I have been hypnotized. I was speaking from experience, not from "media portrayal." Years ago, I took a course in self-hypnosis, although at the time I didn't think that it worked on me. It didn't help me with any of the issues I was working with at the time.

What I have noticed is that a kind of hypnosis can take place while watching television, when the mind becomes very relaxed, and during those times I notice that my mindfulness was lacking, which is likely a key element in the suggestibility working. During those times, my mind was dull and sluggish and could easily have accepted suggestibility. What I have noticed also is when sati is present, suggestibility is less likely.

"It seems like you may have some misconceptions regarding hypnosis." That may be, although I doubt it.

"Ingram says 4th jhana ... is indistinguishable from trance on both counts."
Well, I think I know what he's talking about with regard to his comparison of 4th jhana, although again, it may be just a difference in perception. I have experienced 4th jhana states that are similar to trance, in a mind without sati. However, I have also experience these same states when, though tranquil, sati is present and the mind is bright, alert, percipient, and unruffled, anything BUT a trance. So I suppose it depends upon who is having the perception.

With regard to papanca, Bk. Nanananda has observed in his book that papanca means "prolificity in ideation" and that it "is a more comprehensive term hinting at the tendency of the worldling's imagination to break loose and run riot." I suppose it also depends upon whose definition of papanca one looks at and accepts. His definition coincides with my experience of what he's talking about.

Here is a good article on hypnosis and it's link to imagination if you are interested: http://www.fmsfonline.org/hypnosis.html

There may be something to the papanca thing - though most of what I've read so far is about how papanca causes conflict - and I'm not sure imagination always does - we have imagination to thank for the Theory of Relativity, Kekule's benzene rings, etc.

I was reflecting on your comments yesterday, and I realized that while I had not experienced lack of mindfullness with hypnosis, other trance states, particularly the excitatory ones (drumming, exhaustion, etc.) when one is attempting invocations (spirit possession, or if you prefer, archetypal indentification) can have the effect of "losing time" - parts of the trance you may not remember, etc - that's one of the criteria for success in the operation actually. Interestingly, some magickal theoreticians like Dave Lee cite Arthur Deikman's notion that insight oriented meditation leads to development of the "observing self" - a transcendent function - which as it develops begins to encompass a larger and larger context, while "trance" per se, is a dropping away of context - an absorbtion into the experience. Lee notes that the mystic traditions shy away from trance states because they lead to the development of Siddhis, a potential distraction. He goes on to claim that the most important magickal work involves a divided attention: absorption with maintenance of the observing self. This definitely corresponds to my experience of Tantra.

What I've been doing lately is noticing *how much* of my experience is actually imaginatory. It's amazing how much of one's day is spent dealing with phantasms, and fantasy that have no concrete connection to one's present sensory experience. To an extent this is useful for surviving in social reality, but it's quite interesting to note...

In my view, 'present sensory experience' is also along the spectrum of imagination. (The quotes are not for irony or sarcasm, but because I'm referring to a phrase in your last paragraph.)

For me, one of the joys of the era we are in now is that we can approach subjective experience and awareness as phenomenological objects. We are still only able to do this in a relatively primitive way. But at least it's possible.

(neuroscience/brain imaging techniques, cognitive science, computer science all contribute to making this possible in a way that it was not before.)

Prior to this, most of the philosophies about the mind and imagination were guided by metaphor, tradition, and.or 'whatever sounds cool to intellectuals'.

I think it's nice these days to have concrete realities to which we must be accountable. Not that our sentient awareness can be reduced to MRI scans and artificial intelligence experiments. But at least those things can function as conceptual guardrails.

I think that from one perspective it could be stated that Buddhism's entire project is to make possible a more harmonious and effective functioning of imagination.

Traditionally, the term 'imagination' has connoted 'the not real' or 'the not yet real'. So there was 'empirical reality' and then there was 'imagination'.

I think this is a misguided dichotomy. To have any experience at all requires the mental generation of elements--my basic definition of imagination. We're just spoiled because of how well our imaginations tend to work most of the time. But a quick look at a couple of Oliver Sacks' books shows how contingent the whole thing is.

It's extremely precious. That's why if one is able to experience a world with anything like stability, it is best to take advantage of that to cultivate.

We always stand on the ground of 'That which is Certain' and on its basis look out towards 'That which is not Certain'.

Our contemplative luminaries have cultivated very solid stances on some very powerful Certainties, but that does not change the basic state of affairs. The Uncertain still surrounds. And there may always be those who seek it out with an aim to discuss it.

At any rate, we might as well get as far along this path as we can.

Nigel,

I personally agree with the conventional dichotomy. And with that said, I feel that your definition of imagination is perhaps stretched too far.

There are several clear distinctions, below.

I cannot choose to stop perceiving the world. I cannot shut off my eyes, nor my ears, nor my tongue, nor my skin, nor my nose. The raw data which streams through these senses does so without the need of an entity's will. Perception happens, but there is no need for a one which to perceive of that perception. Think about an eye transplant surgery-- the eye still does it's job regardless of the human it's placed in. This is a crude example, but I hope it helps illustrate my point. Eyes see, and the intellect reasons; the two are not dependent upon each other to function.

Imagination is a faculty of said intellectual reasoning and also a function of memory. The ability to imagine phenomena of various sorts is contingent upon prior experiences (memory) and the willful recall and organization (intelligence) of the elements stored in memory. Things which are imagined are always segments of phenomena which were perceived through the sense organs. In example, I must imagine an ET-alien as something human-like, or possibly a combination of a human and other plants/animals. That's because I've never seen an alien. I can only imagine an "alien" by arranging things I have seen ("human," "minerals," "insects") which are themselves gestalts of things such as light, pressure, vibration, and so forth.

Cont.

And so to further my alien-talk, the most subtle entity I can imagine is one made of light, vibration or pressure. Hmm, sounds like a Deva; coincidence? Point being: imagination is dependent upon actual sense perception through the organs which is recalled through memory. Why can't we imagine the unimaginable? Because the sense organs have never come into contact with those things. And if they DID, they would then be imaginable. (Btw, Hume talks about this quite a bit if I recall correctly).

Anyhow, the perception of intellect and aperception of this world seem to be distinct in how they are felt when perceived, the method through which they are perceived or recalled, the biological functions from which they are derived, and the conditions which they depend upon for their arising.

Thoughts?

Trent

Well insofar as we perceive separate independent objects and entities rather than pure meaningless sensation, 'imagination' is employed - I think I even referred to that in an earlier post above - what I meant was really - sometimes I'm engaged in fantasy that has nothing to do with what I'm experiencing by means of my body (or imagine to be my body if you prefer). For instance I might be engaged in fantasy about how I may respond to this post while driving and be more tuned into that than the road.

Now is 'physical reality' (if there can be said to be such a thing) "along the spectrum of imagination?" (Quotes here also for the reason you used them, no sarcasm - single quotes imply my question of whether it's the best term to use). Well, here it gets a bit sticky for me. It's certainly 'enmeshed' in imagination - but is it identical? This formulation also raises the question of what the spectrum encompasses - more solid to more ethereal? The spectrum has some discrete wavelengths methinks. If it were really just "solid" imagination, why all the technical difficulties in creating psi effects? I can hella levitate in my imagination. ;)

I agree with most of what you say here, including the association of imagination with memory - though currently I see dreaming as the archetypal form of imagination (which itself has an association with memory).

Here's my main point: Can you choose to stop imagining? You can do so by attending closely to present experience (the power of Now stuff) - which is, in fact, more sensations. You *can* also choose to stop perceiving with the eyes for instance, by becoming so involved with imagination, that awareness of the sensory world drops away. Ask my wife what I'm like when I read a good novel - she can call for me loudly several times, and I won't even hear her.

David,

First, I agree with your thoughts on dreaming.

Next, yeah I can choose to stop imagining. Furthermore, I can get into states (which will be stages in the future) in which imagination does not function and stays "suppressed" without attention by me. This is a byproduct of the elimination (or temporary cessation) of the affective self.

As for choosing to stop perceiving with the eyes, I think this is quite a different circumstance than to stop imagination. When you stop imagination, the phenomena cease to be. (Or if "you" cease to "be," then imagination also ceases to be.) It's not that the phenomena isn't perceived, but that it never happened at all. You cut it off before anything manifests.

This is starkly different from dulling one's senses by becoming engulfed by imagination. The road can still be recalled by memory (it was perceived and used to guide you home), regardless of how engrossed you were in thought. To further support this, people are often conscious of the actual sensed world without needing to perceive of it directly. This is apparent when we're awoken from sleep, when we remember things in classes we slept through (personal experience!), and so on. I know I have read empirical studies about this, but I have no idea where to find the sources.

This further validates my point: sense perception happens regardless of whether "you" perceive it at all. The only way to stop perceiving a sense is to defile it with some faculty of imagination, or to destroy the sense organ itself.

Lastly, in regard to post 14: the two (imagination and the "pure senses") only seem to be entangled until a point when they are separated. Through a viewing of a momentary separation of the two, the distinction becomes clear. "Clear" in this case, is also quite the pun!

Thoughts?

Trent

To add a bit (couldn't edit the above due to the character limit), you can also stop directly perceiving a sense by attending to the other senses. This seems kind of obvious, but I mention it just in case. As for why? Can't say I know-- I suppose the brain needs a bandwidth upgrade!

Best,
Trent

"There may be something to the papanca thing - though most of what I've read so far is about how papanca causes conflict - and I'm not sure imagination always does..."

There most assuredly is "something to the papanca thing" with regard to how early Buddhism viewed the damaging effects that one's "out of control" imagination (papanca sanna sankha) can have on one's peace of mind. Although I'm not sure it has anything to do with what you might like to use it for with regard to "magick" — other than to display the delusive effect of magick.

What you have read regarding "papanca causing conflict" should probably be seen within the context of the information that you are reading and within the context of what was taught by early Buddhism through the Pali discourses. The following two links should help to clear up your "impression" of this Pali word:

http://dharmastudy.com/suttas/madhupindika/
http://dharmastudy.com/suttas/madhupindika/#fn195018

(see next post for a continuation)

It is a brief study of the Madhupindika Sutta: The Ball of Honey (MN 18). It gives a better outline of the word and its related three-word variation than I have thus far been able to render. The following quotes will be found in the text. I place them here to help emphasize the context in which papanca was taught.

"Thanissaro Bhikkhu explains that 'the word papañca has had a wide variety of meanings in Indian thought, with only one constant: in Buddhist philosophical discourse it carries negative connotations, usually of falsification and distortion. The word itself is derived from a root that means diffuseness, spreading, proliferating. The Pali Commentaries define papañca as covering three types of thought: craving, conceit, and views. They also note that it functions to slow the mind down in its escape from samsara.' "

Bh. Bodhi: "It seems, however, that the primary problem to which the term papañca points is not 'diversification,' which may be quite in place when the sensory field itself displays diversity, but the propensity of the worldling's imagination to erupt in an effusion of mental commentary that obscures the bare data of cognition. In a penetrative study, 'Concept and Reality in Early Buddhism', Bhikkhu Ñanananda explains papañca as 'conceptual proliferation,' and I follow him in substituting 'proliferation' for Ñanamoli's 'diversification.' The commentaries identify the springs of this proliferation as the three factors—craving, conceit, and views—on account of which the mind 'embellishes' experience by interpreting it in terms of 'mine,' 'I' and 'my self.' Papañca is thus closely akin to maññana, 'conceiving,' in MN1 (…)

Trent has it down pat! Excellent explanation.

Well, as I said, I'll have to read more about papanca. The difficulty I have now, besides ignorance, is whether it is appropriate to treat conceptualization as identical to imagination. The production of images may well be associated with conceptualization, but I believe there are some primal levels in which it's experienced differently - dreams being the prime example. I've recently been reading some of Robert Bosnak's books. Bosnak is a Jungian therapist who believes that dream figures have an "independent" existence - that dreams are, in a sense, "real" in a similar way to the way we define the ordinary world as real. Ramsey Dukes claims to have performed the Turing test on the dream people while lucid dreaming, and they passed.

I don't believe successful magick leads to delusion more than any mundane activity, but that's a separate topic. Magick is a separate but related field to mysticism - it has different ends and aims. As far as magickal uses for this material - that's not my motivation for discussing this. I'm simply doing as the Buddha suggested and trying to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, and validating everything in my own experience.

Yabaxoule may have a point - but I believe that it is often the case that imagination is perceived unconsciously rather than simply ceasing to be. I suppose fruition causes a cessation of sensory experience eh?

i pretty much agree with trent too.

this is a subject quite close to my heart (haha pun) as it is one that touches on the very nature of the relationship between freedom, suffering and desire. i see imagination as being feeling-felt - it arises only due to desire.

is freedom from suffering a freedom of not desiring - or a freedom of not resisting desire.. of understanding something 'true' about its nature? i say its the former, and not the latter. freedom from suffering is the end of desire completely, in its entirety. and as such, freedom is also the end of imagination.

so there's no uncertainty about what i mean, i mean that freedom comes from abandoning desire - and thus, the affective, as well as imaginative, faculties - completely.

"Well, as I said, I'll have to read more about papanca."
Agreed. That's why I provided the links I did. Short of reading Nanananda's book, which goes into much more rigorous and fascinating detail regarding papanca and how it is explained in early Buddhism, that was the best I could do with what is available on the Internet. But, one has to do more than just a superficial reading of "Concept And Reality"; one needs to look up all the discourse references, read all the footnotes and understand them from the context of one's own experience, in order to get a better idea and to see for oneself what is being referred to. Nanananda makes a very convincing case for his take on papanca and how the Buddha meant it to be understood within the context of the cessation of dukkha. Remember, despite what modern writers may wish to convey, the Buddha addressed only one area and one area only: "I make known just suffering and the cessation of suffering."

"...but I believe that it is often the case that imagination is perceived unconsciously rather than simply ceasing to be."
And you would be correct for the untrained worldling. Such unconscious perception and proliferation makes up a big part of the worldling's dukkha. The training helps the untrained "puthujjana" (worldling) begin to bring the unconscious into his consciousness. It helps him see how unconscious mechanisms have been ruling his life, and to be able to slow the mind down enough so that he may begin to see these unconscious mechanisms for himself and, more importantly, how they work so that he may put an end to them when they are affecting him in an unwholesome way!

It is not the case that there is something wrong with "imagination" in general. There are certainly moments when imagination is very helpful. The Buddha was addressing imagination as it applies to dukkha and the proliferation of dukkha.

I'd like to approach this slowly and carefully so that I can be sure of what you're expressing here.

The eye, strictly speaking, gathers light and shadow and focuses it onto the retina. The eye doesn't see anything. It's like a microphone for light. What does the seeing are everything from the optic nerve to the visual cortex and even beyond that to the pre-frontal cortex.

There is no raw data, per se. There is no particular reason why we represent electromagnetic radiation from 700nm to 400nm as colors and shapes. We could just as easily represent it as what we call touch or sound. And other animals with other brains generate different experiences based on the same stimuli.

In my view, things like intellect, imagination, sight, are just apparent. There is just the propagation of neurotransmitters in various patterns, and the subjective interpretations that go along with them.

I've not said this as well as I'd like because I'm in a rush. But who knows, maybe we can have fruitful cross-fertilization here.

"and as such, freedom is also the end of imagination....freedom comes from abandoning desire - and thus, the affective, as well as imaginative, faculties - completely."
greco makes a very good point here, and one that perhaps needed to be made from a slightly different angle.

When one "sees things as they are," one sees them with dispassion and equanimity as a result of having realized the truth of the 4NTs. What once may have been a "desirable" phenomenon is now seen for the "ball and chain" (dukkha) that it actually IS. Such clarity of sight and vision has a way of focusing the mind on what is REALLY important, and not just on what one wishes, believes, or momentarily perceives is important due to personal preference or prejudice.

"i see imagination as being feeling-felt - it arises only due to desire."
Precisely! How one is "affected" (emotionally, that is) by a phenomenon affects how one "feels" (vedana) about the phenomenon. This in turn can give rise to papanca regarding the "feeling" that one has experienced, and hence it influences "how one thinks about" the phenomenon. When the phenomenon is not seen as it actually is, as dukkha, then feeling (vedana), assisted by nama-rupa, takes over giving rise to desire.

The freed individual does not cultivate papanca because he knows the delusion before it even has a chance to arise. His mind is no longer ruled by affective emotions. He sees these emotions, if they arise, and knows how to deal with them in order to preserve his peace.

Just so I'm straight on this, is it that you don't want to imagine, or you can't imagine? I'm guessing it's the former, as Daniel mentions he still astral travels sometimes. You guys dream, don't you? If I were to describe the location of an object to you, you could, presumably, imagine the location of the item and how to locate it. It is also true that desire can fuel fantasy, and that if you are free from desire, you'd be free of these particular phantasms. But what is the source of these other imaginations that I give above, if not desire? Perhaps any motivation can create imaginary content.

Nigel, I believe you and Y are describing things from two different, incomensurable frameworks. Y seems to be interested in rigorous phenomenological description, while you are referencing a neuroscience perspective. The findings of either one have to be independently reconciled within the context of their particular framework.

So you guys are making it sound as if an enlightened person is absolutely detached from their own emotions, or other peoples. Presumably I'm misinterpreting that.

Author: han2sen

haquan: I don't think there would be a "Buddhist theory" of the imagination because Buddhism is largely a syncretic phenomenon, it doesn't prescribe a world view in which one works from. Rather it takes the cultural, personal, and psychological stuff we come with and works with that.

Your take on imagination is interesting. Please consider that your experience of the "real" world is merely a mental reconstruction of what the senses process. Accuracy of perception is maintained individually and socially and in the west that practice is called science. The mental processes that "create" reality are really the same ones that are used to "create" the imagination.

One can choose to stop percieving the world through certain meditative states where the sense "turn inwards". Imagination doesn't exist in these states either.

Dreaming is an interesting process, a necessary one. In several studies, the dreamer is awakened during the dream cycle repeatedly until they have finished their night's sleep. In otherwords, they are allowed to have deep sleep, but no dreaming. The result is a dramatic loss of short term memory of the previous day. This comes from my Psychology 101 class text book, you can find it there. The other interesting connection to dreaming is that the Tibetans list it as one of the Bardos, shamanic schools exist which do dreamwork alone especially in the Amazon, dreaming triggers cortical theta rhythms in the cerebrum, and the volume of nnDMT released by the pineal gland spikes. The suggestion has been brought up that perhaps dreaming is in fact an altered state of consciousness.

Imagination is crucial to creativity, so if you want to see what that is in the Buddhist context you really have to survey 2600 years of Buddhist art, architecture, design, craft, music, theater, dance, and literature.

Author: han2sen

Avoiding the siddhis is practiced not because it is a potential distraction but because (1) it inflates the already deluded ego and (2) it is often mistaken for enlightenment. It is like acid, mantras, kundalini, if this stuff leads to enlightenment then everyone would be enlightened. This should be rather obvious.

Again, siddhis, kundalini, jhanas, entheogens, etc. - not enlightenment. Magical work is not directed to the attainment of non-attachment. Rather it is using psychic power to effect a certain result regardless of whether it manifests attachment or non-attachment. In otherwords, the practicioner can end up in a worse state than where they started from in respect to achieving liberation. It all depends on their intent. But the potential is there to abuse it, and you certainly can see this in practice with some of the major gurus and dharma teachers too who remain mired in lust and intoxication, greed and materialism.

Author: han2sen

Greco: On the other hand, we could establish a simple experiment devoid of desire or motivation, to imagine a certain object, and to verify whether or not imagination is bound to desire or not.

Also regarding desire, there is a whole aspect of the Pali dealing with right desire & motivation - the four right exertions - sammappadhana - it is the craving, lust, greed & all that nasty stuff we don't need. I humbly submit for your consideration that desire, imagination, and normal mental functioning are all possible when liberation is attained.

h a n s e n

I appreciate that Buddhist thought is very diverse and there may be widely diverging opinions on phenomenon that don't linguistically correlate in a precise fashion to the Western concept of "imagination."

What are those mental processes, specifically?
Regarding the relationship of creativity to imagination - surely the Arahants do not lose their capacity for creativity? If not they must have imagination, or something else which replaces it.

Your comments on magick are right on the money, at least in terms of how they apply to practical sorcery. As I mentioned earlier, mysticism and magick are different fields with different concerns, though not unrelated. Often practical magick has the effect of having one learn the hard way about their attachments, so self knowledge and insight become crucial at a certain stage of proficiency to avoid self-destruction. One advantage of magick is that while sometimes people pursue mysticism for selfish ends (conscious or unconscious) which prevents them from progressing until their personal issues are resolved, while magick has people deal with their selfish ends head on. After a while, you see where it gets you if you have half a brain. Unfortunately, a lot of magicians don't. Where you're wrong, however, is that there is no reason why magick can't be used for the attainment of non-attachment. As a matter of fact, magick, and magickal techniques have been used for this end for thousands of years, both within the Western and Eastern traditions.

hmmm...well, I don't feel that the frameworks are incommensurable. Because I find I am still able to appreciate your and Trent's statements while looking through the neuro framework. Maybe the frameworks are just not yet well-integrated or well-reconciled. That's why I want to discuss it slowly and not just quickly jump to 'that's not true, because...'.

It seems to me that perhaps what some here are referring to as 'imagination' is what I might call 'fantasy' or 'abstract fantasy'.

All conventional mental process from the most primitive--seemingly 'physical'--to the most abstract and free-form is based on translation and metaphor. Also, each and every mode of mental representation has its limits and characteristics: both in the possible representations it can generate and in the degree of agency with which an individual human being can intentionally guide it.

The reason I say that all conventional mental process is based on translation and metaphor is that it has to occur in a particular medium and grammar.

Anything that seems to 'fit' together has a grammar or set of principles guiding its structure. That which has a particular grammar can be said to constitute a domain defined by that grammar. Bringing things into that domain requires translation, or 're-presentation', into the terms of that domain's grammar.

Metaphor is the process of creating a form in a particular domain that corresponds to/is analogous to form(s) in another domain. Sensory consciousness is a clear example of this.

One framework that would also be useful to integrate here is that of the five skandhas: Rupa (form/materiality), Vedana (feeling/valuation), Samjna (perceptual definition), Samskara (intention/volition/movement), Vijnana (consciousness). All coming together in every experience of conventional consciousness.

hansen,

well, submission received, and both accepted and rejected. accepted in the sense that this is the liberation i know and in what i know other arahats to experience. rejected in that i do not think this is as far as humans can go - this is far from as far as humans can go.. and is necessary to go in order to live in total freedom. to see desire for what it is - whether right or wrong desire - is to abandon it completely. i speak from momentary, yet repeated, experience here (which now informs my intent in every moment) when i say that desire is not inherent in actuality, is not fundamental to experience, and is not necessary for intelligent and beneficial functioning and living. i am talking about a complete absence of suffering - which is also the absence of desire.

imagination is bound to identity, which is, at root, the sense of being itself.. which is simply desire swirling together - passions in motion. without this identity, i have found, and continue to find, that no imagining happens.

again, so there isnt any uncertainty, i want to make it clear that when i talk about the experience of the complete absence of suffering, i am talking about the experience of a total abeyance of a sense of being and of all urges.. no affective charge whatsoever. its absence reveals infinitude, and quite obviously so i find - something which directly knows itself does not feel about itself.

haquan,

i have no desire to imagine more than i already do, and as i notice my identity unravelling, and desires diminishing, i also notice that i imagine less (and perceive more).

if you were to describe the location of the object to me, i would use your description to location the object - no imagination necessary.

desire leads to the phantasms of fantasy, yes.

i am not free of desire. however, i am working toward the end of being - and thus the end of desire.

sometimes i wonder if enlightened people are likely to simply not see how what remains of their identity is purely their urges and feelings and the imaginative constructs those prop up, and that its not over - the end of suffering in total - until all that is over.

prisoner,

I have a hard-line rule of always asking any stupid question that I think of - I think it's going to be easy to understand why I was the kid the Sunday School teacher hated for asking difficult questions. First right now, I'm hungry. I'm going to wait until the end of this post to eat, because I'm all about delayed gratification, but until then, I wouldn't mind getting up, going to the fridge and seeing if any of those delicious cherries are still there. They may not be there, but I'll eat them before anything else if they are (as I write this an image of the cherries flashes in my minds eye) - because this is what I sense would be most nourishing to my body. Right now, I'm not too hung up on whether the cherries are still there or not - it's definitely not going to ruin my day. (Papanca might be if I started worrying about whether the cherries were there, imagining different scenarios - what if my daughter ate them, etc). Right now, I'm desiring the cherries, though I'm not particularly aware of suffering because of it. Actually, I'm grateful to have food to eat at all. I'm thinking that an Arahant in my situation would also note the sensation of hunger, and also notice the idea that cherries would be most appropriate to fulfill this need - or at the very least would still get up after the post and get some food - choosing the cherries if they were available.

The point I'm trying to make is that emotions connect with biological survival needs - they are, in many cases, elaborations of such needs. The other thing I'm having trouble with is, what provides the source of motivation and intent, if not desire?

Whether you would use the literal description without creating mental representation to locate an object sidesteps the point, which is that if you had a concrete problem that required the use of imagination, you would be capable of using it.

There were strawberries in the fridge. As it turns out , I originally wrote "berries" forgetting that I even had strawberries. I made the cherries up - imagined them actually. I was trying to think of an appropriate example and an image of those Ranier cherries popped up. I did, in fact, go look in the fridge after, and was surprised by the berries. I washed them and drizzled honey over them, and ate them over the porcelain kitchen sink. The cold strawberry juice burst into my mouth and mixed with the luscious honey with every bite. They were the best strawberries!

Now who all imagined that or experienced either imagery or somatic sensations, smell or taste, as they read the above?

As a serious question prisoner, in the sense that Sartre considered it the ultimate philosophical question - and I would be upset if you took it as an actual suggestion - If you want final release, why not suicide? If desires are connected with our bodies, the ultimate liberation would be liberation from our bodies. I think this even corresponds to Buddhist dogma as well. It's a certain logical extension of the first NT as well. If life is suffering, then the end of suffering would be the end of life. It seems a bit quicker than all this sitting (and waiting).

Why not just accept that suffering is part of life? You know, suffering vs. liberation is a duality. If you think about it, you must surrender your desire for liberation as well to be truly free from desire. Its a bit of a paradox.

Han2sen you say that magickal practices may lead to the aspirant to a worse place from a mystical point of view, but ego inflation and false enlightenments occur at least as often in mystical traditions - in fact, the examples you gave were from the mystical tradition. The ego inflation does tend to be more subtle and insidious in mystical traditions, however, as outright displays of megalomania are somewhat more taboo.

David,

As you say in post #34, emotions are indeed elaborations. In other words, they are redundant and unnecessary. The source of motivation could come from a number of things, including a genuine care for one's self or others; desire is not requisite.

Also in regard to #34, you may not be particularly aware of the suffering, but I assure you that it is there if you are imagining anything at all. Try not to complicate this, it's really simple. If you are imagining anything, it's because you are trying to feel some way about something that does not currently actually exist to your senses at that time. No matter how subtle that wish is, it is still going to induce suffering. There is a gap between what is (actually sensed) and what is desired (imagined), and hence the suffering piggy-backs into experience; perhaps disguised behind tasty cherries.

In regard to #35, I did not imagine any of that as I read it (thankfully in a state of utter cessation right now). Imagination is just not as necessary as it would like to appear to be. It is suffering disguised as something "undeniably necessary." To relate this to a familiar schema, it is like getting rid of one's sense of "watcher," or one's "doer." The separate self never watched or did anything; it only seems that way. And in this case, imagination did not tell you that you're hungry, nor did it tell you how to find the strawberries; it only seems that way. All three cases are examples of a redundant process trying to oppose, change or cover up what is actually happening in experience.

Suicide is not necessary for complete freedom, because the body does not passionately desire or suffer of it's own accord. The end of suffering is part and parcel with the end of being. That does not have to mean the end of one's body. The paradox is lost: freedom can happen and the worth of it's attainment self evident.

Y,
Explain what you mean by "a genuine care" and how it differs from desire. The prisoner announces an end to all affect. Period.

I reread my passage, and I didn't have much imagery either (wasn't terribly evocative, really - I had a word limit and all that) - but significantly I did experience some imagery when I wrote it. If you'll recall, I didn't imagine strawberries - I imagined cherries. But I neither had, nor wanted cherries - I wanted a good example to use, which my imagination supplied me with.

So you are telling me that neither you or the prisoner could enjoy a novel, or play a game of chess (which requires visualization for over the board analysis) - or engage in any form of creative problem solving? And you don't dream at night either?!! I'm not buying it.

I don't feel I'm complicating anything, I'm pointing out experiential phenomenon, that so far, have not been explained, even though the explanation has been repeated.

I'm not necessarily claiming that suicide is the only way to achieve complete freedom, just that it's the most expedient. He's a no-returner, why does he want to live? The Boddhisattva vow can't possibly hold up - after all, who made that vow? The question was "why not?"

Incidentally, do you guys have the capacity to experience love? Joy? Wonder?
The "end of being" is starting to sound a bit like the Vulcan's final purging of emotion - so Arahantship is not the end of desire and compassion? Thought it was...

Hi,

I'll answer these, but don't expect them to appease you. And with that said, I'm not going to argue them much more, as they are off topic and the imagination theme of this thread is worth continuing.

Genuine care differs from desire because it's dispassionate and not based on any self, affective or otherwise. It's just "caring." That does not require affect, so it still fits with what Tarin states.

In regard to novels, chess, etc. When anyone has a complete cessation of affect, imagination will also cease. Neither chess nor novels require visualization to engage in-- the intellectual capacity to engage in rational thought is not the same as imagination. And whether you buy that or not is no matter to the person experiencing it; some 5.9 billion + people also think they're a separate self that will have an afterlife.

As for a reason to live: life is intrinsically meaningful. The lack of passion and suffering makes this even more so, as the world becomes quite enjoyable. Further, whatever existential meaning life has is up to each individual to decide. If that weren't the case, no one would be free, because the agendas would already be laid out at birth.

When the affective self ceases, love ceases also. Love is a self based feeling, and requires a being to be the reference point. Love is replaced by the "genuine caring" I mention, which is experienced as far more intimate and caring than love. It's an acceptance not pent up on a self's conditions and demands. Conditions are accepted as they arise, including the vast array of human personalities. Joy and wonder are different, as they do not reference a being in the same way as love. Felicitous feelings such as those are, so far as I can see, a primary theme in the experience, which gives credence to life being intrinsically meaningful and enjoyable.

Trent

reply to 34

for desire to occur, there must be someone there who desires. sensate experience gives rise to affective experience (feelings) when there is an amorphous, swirling sense of being in residence, and doesn't when there isn't. feelings, and desire, are indicative (and symptomatic) of that being itself, as is imagination.

hunger is a feeling overlaid on signals the stomach sends that indicate how food would be appropriate. there is no affective component implicit in either the direct perception of those signals (as sensate experience), or in the cognitive interpretation that occurs thereupon.

the capacity for feelings have evolved in connection to biological survival needs. yet, is continuing to perpetuate them necessary for continuing to survive? speaking from experience, i say no. the nature of being - the capacity for feelings - is destructive and harmful, to oneself and others, and its absence would be no loss, as the absence of being reveals something much more remarkable anyway. apperception - knowing oneself as one actually is - reveals a world where being need not (and cannot) exist. it is an unmistakable perfection and only shows itself in the total absence of imaginative distortion.. though hints of it peek out when the veil of being is thin.

can you give an example of a concrete problem that requires the use of imagination?

and to 35

'Now who all imagined that or experienced either imagery or somatic sensations, smell or taste, as they read the above?'

i did, both visual imagery as well as somatic sensations.

'As a serious question prisoner, in the sense that Sartre considered it the ultimate philosophical question - and I would be upset if you took it as an actual suggestion - If you want final release, why not suicide?'

because i enjoy my life and intend to keep living it. it is truly a marvel to be alive, and to be here, conscious, and sensately aware. also, i do not consider the world illusory - thus it makes sense for me to care about other human beings. doing what i can to bring about peace on earth is a worthy goal, and one i can only do alive. because i see how it is actually possible, for each individual to do this, i am not plagued by doubt and despair about it, and have no need for faith and hope that it *must be possible*. it *is* possible, clearly.. im doing it.

(cont.)

'If life is suffering, then the end of suffering would be the end of life. It seems a bit quicker than all this sitting (and waiting).'

life isnt suffering, being is suffering. being - as this intuitive sense of presence - is not necessary for humans to survive and function and have a good time going about it. and a diminishment of being is a diminishment of suffering.. the more 'i' see that 'i' dont need to protect 'myself' (because the nature of the actual universe is inherently benign), the more 'i' can fade into oblivion.. this body and mind can really take care of its own needs. knowing this oblivion, and aiming right into it, is really the most beneficial thing that 'i' can do. i suppose you could call it a kind of suicide. ;)

'Why not just accept that suffering is part of life? You know, suffering vs. liberation is a duality. If you think about it, you must surrender your desire for liberation as well to be truly free from desire. Its a bit of a paradox.'

because the human condition can change, and is worth changing. it is changed not by surrending (and thus transcending) desire, but abandoning being completely, each moment again. no paradox here..

I'm thinking that you either don't play chess, or you're not very good.

Ok let's try this a different way. Tell me how you experience rational thought from a phenomenological point of view. How would you reason about a chess position for instance? Would you hear a voice in your head talking about the position? Would you experience formations - and if so, what sense modalities might be employed?

I more or less agree with your existential comments, with the exception of your comments on love, but would like Tarin to speak for himself. Love is not actually based on self - rather the opposite. It is an elaboration of biological needs, and it is not superfluous, but rather completely necessary.

"can you give an example of a concrete problem that requires the use of imagination?"
Absolutely. You're an Arahant, and as is poplular with many Arahants living in Western Society these days, you've kept your day job - as a graphic designer. Today your boss comes in with an assignment - you are to create the concept design for a logo for a company that rents dental equipment by the name of "Summit" - you have to incorporate the image of a dragon, and one other mythical beast of your choosing. You care about keeping your job.

Thank you Tarin, for accurately observing your experience and reporting it.

Incidentally, I agreed with, and would even applaud your other explanations and comments. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "abandoning being" - but this is because my background is in Western philosophy and I sense that you may be using the term "being" in a different way than it is generally used in Western philosophy. My own experience leads me to believe that a more accurate formulation is that it is self-centeredness that leads to suffering, and this is what must be absolutely abandoned.

Now, why did you experience those internally produced sensations when reading the passage? I very much doubt that it was either desire, or self-centeredness, but rather intrinsically bound up with how you understood or "made sense" of my words.

I'll submit that I believe all spiritual experiences, no matter where they fall on the maps, with the exception of fruition (and possibly super-sensory satori type experiences - though this could involve overlap) involve imagination.

Author: han2sen

haquan: I'd like to change tack here since the group has individually each stated their case and nothing is moving.

To what extent is the "imagination" thread an oblique reference to the prior thread "Imagine" ?

I always liked John Lennon's music. For me, John Lennon was the Beatles.

I enjoy this forum too, but have spent hours looking for my initial post, to view replies to it, and I am kind of stuck there. Also there have been some serious service problems with wetpaint, sometimes it is not running.

"it is truly a marvel to be alive, and to be here, conscious, and sensately aware. also, i do not consider the world illusory - thus it makes sense for me to care about other human beings. doing what i can to bring about peace on earth is a worthy goal, and one i can only do alive. because i see how it is actually possible, for each individual to do this, i am not plagued by doubt and despair about it, and have no need for faith and hope that it *must be possible*"

I find this statement very elegant and agree 100%

I am not sure I know what arahant means, the thread seems to be revolving more around that than the topic of imagination. I don't need to spend a minute trying to imagine what arahant means.

I wish my introduction survived the posting process. I am at a serious loss here.

h a n s e n

reply to 43

'Now, why did you experience those internally produced sensations when reading the passage? I very much doubt that it was either desire, or self-centeredness, but rather intrinsically bound up with how you understood or "made sense" of my words.'

because, as i experience being ('i' *am* being), i have the capacity for visualising.. and for dreaming, and fantasising, and all the rest of it.

my goal isnt to suppress imagination, its to cut at the root of being by paying attention to what im actually experiencing. and yet, what i find is the clearer my experience is, the less imaginative it is.. and when its totally clear (such that being goes into abeyance and apperception arises), its also totally unimaginative. no visual imagery, no somatic sensations.. no affective memory. as if it never existed.

'I'll submit that I believe all spiritual experiences, no matter where they fall on the maps, with the exception of fruition (and possibly super-sensory satori type experiences - though this could involve overlap) involve imagination.'

i agree.. which is why i do not locate peace within spiritual experiences, nor as coming from the transformation engendered by spiritual experiences, nor do i consider that spiritual experience leads to the abandoning of being. the utter tranquility of apperception - experience in the absence (or abeyance) of being is non-imaginative - and non-spiritual.

reply to 42

while love is not based on self, it is firmly rooted in being. it is an affective state which antidotes negative feelings (like fear and/or hatred), but by doing so, affirms them. to love is to overcome fear - not to see that there is actually nothing to fear. a crucial difference, as far as freedom is concerned.

regarding my hypothetical graphic design job, it is easy to speak as an arahat, as i am an arahat. were i a graphic-designing one, i would probably use the wealth of easily accessible information on the internet to look up designs of dragons and other mythical beasts and pick out traits or details from the images i find inspiring, and create something suitable, simple and logo-like from those pictures. where is it that you find imagination to be necessary? and why do you bring arahatship in here?

It's hard for me to describe right now, because I am not in that state as of right now; thus I can't reflect on it easily without imagination getting in the way. Try to look at your experience and see the raw intelligent side of your mental faculties and then simply remove the imaginary parts. I'm not sure I can explain it much better than that, even if I was experiencing it. It feels really "normal," regardless of how counter-intuitive it may be to attempt to imagine such a thing. Perhaps the reason it seems weird is because it's basically impossible for imagination to imagine it's own absence!

Post 46. Tarin, I am of the opinion that love is also selfish because the feelings belong only to the person feeling it. When I reflect on love, it seems that I almost always imagine some grand story involving myself and another, and that it makes me feel good, accepted, and so on. As such, love seems to me to be just as selfish a feeling as hate, albeit a more pleasant sensation due to its affirmative nature. To cite an extreme example, many people are "addicted to love" as the song goes.

Hansen, I'll look around a bit for your post-- sometimes they get lodged in odd places due to wetpaint being a piece of crap. Looking forward to the new dharmaoverground.org for sure.

To #44:
I wish your initial post had survived too! Actually I think I saw the "Imagine" thread, didn't want to post under it, and couldn't come up with a better title. The oblique association is interesting though, now that you mention it.
Sorry about the jargon, didn't know you were new here... This is going to come up again so...An Arahant, or Arhat, is the final stage of enlightenment acording to Theravada Buddhism (*including the Buddha*) - in Mahayana one becomes an arahant before becoming a Bodhisattva. First path = stream entry or Sotapanna. Second path = once returner or Sakadagami 3rd path = no returner or anagami 4th path = Arahant "The fourth stage is that of Arahant, a fully enlightened human being who has abandoned all fetters, and who upon decease (Sanskrit: Parinirvana, Pali: Parinibbana) will not be reborn in any world, having wholly abandoned samsara." So it is actually a little confusing for these guys who say they are fully realized still have work to do. Incidentally the founder of the site, Daniel Ingram http://www.interactivebuddha.com also claims the attainment of 4th path. Interestingly, Daniel has in the past vehemently claimed that all the faculties available to an ordinary human are still available to an enlightened person, including the ability to think, to think "I", and presumably "imagination" given the title of his first post to the website. That's why I was so shocked when these self-proclaimed Arahants claimed they *did not* have the capacity, or had it in a greatly diminished form.

Yeah, John Lennon rocks! Did you ever read his interview with Rolling Stone where he speaks of his disillusionment with spiritual practices that attempted to "kill his ego'? Also obliquely relevant....

I'll take a different tack too - so when you visualize a Mandala, you are utilizing imagination, yes? Is this papannca?

"I am of the opinion that love is also selfish because the feelings belong only to the person feeling it."

Love has a thousand manifestations. It can be selfish and it can be selfless. It can be jealous. It can be between two people and be beautiful or it can be between two people and be ugly, even violent. It can be the love of a person, thing, an idea, even another emotion. It can arise solely as the result of having an experience of the very simplest thing when there is no one there for it to beling to. Which of these versions of love are you referring to?

And then, of course, everything you feel "belongs" only to the person feeling it. Are all the things you feel sefish? Pain? A sneeze? An itch? There's no one there to feel any of that, and yet.... there is. There is a "me" that assumes everything orbits around it and then there's a realization that that "me" is just a bunch of processes that occur and conspire to create an illusion of "me." Either way, I feel the same things.

I think some rigorous definitions need to be worked out for the terms being used here.

Lennon forever!

Physical pain, sneezes and itches are felt as the body. They do not belong to it-- they ARE it. Me-feelings and I-thoughts are not the same; those implicitly assume that there is an entity within the body that "should be" referred to. And when a person ceases his or her me-feelings and i-thoughts, there is no imagination to be found, nor are there the affective faculties which propped up those delusions.

As a side note, Daniel disagrees with Tarin and I on several of these points. We discussed it a bit in MN. That discussion appears to be a work in progress, and whatever result the few of us arrive at is quite irrelevant. This does not have much to do with "arhatship." At the end of the day, simply take our positions as mere theory. Ponder and test, and see how it all works out for you.

Trent

No. It is not papanca in the way that the Buddha used the term. You're attempting to conflate "papanca" with "imagination" (papanca=imagination) without making any apparent attempt to understand what the word means or refers to. I've given you a link to a larger definition and explanation, but if you haven't taken the time to read or to understand it from that, then the ball is still in your court. (See post #18)

You are attempting to comprehend this using a mind that has been conditioned by Western philosophy, and it is that conditioning and those views that are holding you back, in addition to the limitations of a forum like this where explanations can come across as being rather wooden and inflexible unless you know the level of understanding that the other person is speaking from and about. So it is no wonder that you're having a difficult time understanding what is being pointed out here, by several people who, despite your current impression of them, actually do KNOW what they're talking about.

The example of "visualizing a Mandala" does not apply. It is an invalid example. The comment given by Thanissaro Bhikkhu in the link I gave mentions that "the word papañca has had a wide variety of meanings in Indian thought, with only one constant: in Buddhist philosophical discourse it carries negative connotations, usually of falsification and distortion....it functions to create baneful distinctions and unnecessary issues." Papanca refers to the mind's tendency to distort reality, to misunderstand phenomena through wrong view or whatever.

Author: han2sen

haquan: haquan sure has an interesting array of cerebral activity. I am somehow reminded of how i was set me on the path of endless search engine clicking, sukkha, which during sitting meditation, is a very pleasant, very satisflying, in fact, very physically pleasurable sensations within and between the two cerebral lobes. Energy cycles through them both but not chaotically as in epilepsy, but rhythmically (at least his is my experience, my perception of it). I'm thinking haquan's cirquitous questionings mimic this pattern...

Yesterday I had 30 minutes solid of piiti, I was ready to get to the end of it almost as soon as it started. It is a bit like being plugged into 120 volt electric current. Only at the conclusion did it start to mellow out just a little. One of the things I noticed from this is how excruciatingly slow it seems to move, and I was reminded of how sometimes it seems to be outside time entirely.

Fortunately todays experience was back to some of the sukkha, and in thinking about it I realized that it is sometimes accompanied by feelings of boundless space. Okay, this is off topic. But I have also had both working together sometimes. And I have had something beyond space, time, thought, and feeling as well. So...

Arahat is a decent milestone by any accounts and it's not easy to dismiss reports of it. If one has even a few minutes of annatta, the idea that it can be more durable is something one has to believe in.

Beliefs are very deceptive however. I don't put a lot of stock in belief, even if the belief is well supported. But I can see that belief is a power greater than anything in moving the events in the world. I just happen to feel that non-attachment is a greater and more trustworthy power.

When one's immersed 24/7 in practice, particularly the practice of seeing what really is, direct perception of reality, it is likely that imagination does not play a great part

to #32 "to see desire for what it is - whether right or wrong desire - is to abandon it completely. i speak from momentary, yet repeated, experience here (which now informs my intent in every moment) when i say that desire is not inherent in actuality, is not fundamental to experience, and is not necessary for intelligent and beneficial functioning and living. i am talking about a complete absence of suffering - which is also the absence of desire."

can you choose to not allow your mind to wander? does the arahat's mind wander?

to # 33, "i am not free of desire. however, i am working toward the end of being - and thus the end of desire."

so its like, once arahatship is attained, what remains are the past karma from life, conditioned responses and habits. is this the same process that a bodhisattva would go thru and all enlightened beings go through as the next step?

is it easier to abandon desire once arahatship is attained? since wisdom is there already? and assuming the mind doesnt wander, thus it would make most sense to aim and strive all the way to arahatship, so that dealing with their 'stuff' and bad karma becomes no problem.
_________________________
my apology for this being off-topic. pls disregard if not beneficial

Yeah IanAnd2 - I read the article 2 days ago. I think I understand what papannca is (actually quite well given the nature of my work) and agree that imagination plays a role in it, as it does in so many cognitive activities - but not that it is identical to imagination, which I defined early on as the internal production of sensory experience. Why is the mandala an invalid example of imagination? You don't say.

Actually I'm resonating with a Dzogchen model right now: "Sentient beings have their energy manifested in 3 aspects:
1. 'dang' (Wylie: gDangs) - Energy of an individual on the dang level is essentially infinite and formless.
2. 'rolpa' (Wylie: Rol-pa)
3. 'tsal' (Wylie: rTsal)

In the form of rolpa, energy forms appear as though seen with 'the eye of the mind'. Many practices of thödgal and yangthig work on the basis of functioning of the rolpa aspect of individual's energy. It is also the original source of the sambhogakaya deities visualized in Buddhist tantric transformational practices and of manifestations of one hundred peaceful and wrathful deities in bardo." (Wikipedia)

Chris, I view love as a meta-emotion - an organizing principle of our emotional states - which are in themselves, highly bound to social relationships and social signaling. The best defintion I ever heard was M.Scott Peck's: "Love is the will to nourish the spiritual growth of another individual or individuals." The Dalai Lama wrote a book with Paul Eckman that I think might be useful to look at. From a neurological perspective the limbic system - the part of the brain that processes emotion is enmeshed with the same processes involved with short term memory and provide a mediating function between higher abstract thought and our physiology on both instantaneous and long term time frames. Extinguishing these functions is both undesirable and impossible.

haquan: "Yeah IanAnd2 - I read the article 2 days ago."
Apparently, it didn't make much of an impression on you, or you wouldn't have asked the follow-up question.

You asked the question: "Is this papanca?" in reference to your "different tack" regarding visualization of a Mandala. And I answered: No, it is not papanca. There was no mention of there being "an invalid example of imagination." Where did you come up with that from? You were asking about papanca, weren't you? It is an invalid example of papanca. Sabe?

Reread the third paragraph in post #51 if you're still in the dark about its being an invalid example.

Ian, I'm responding to this post in my role as moderator. Please keep in mind that discourtesy adds nothing to the discussion; it often weakens an otherwise good argument by creating the appearance of defensiveness. This is a great discussion and you can help keep it on track by treating others with patience and respect.

Thanks in advance,

Kenneth

Ah - I was under the impression that you were claiming all imaginary activity was papannca, which is why I asked the question. Apparently we actually *are* in agreement that visualizing a mandala *does* utilize imagination and is *not* papannca. So we must be in agreement that papannca accounts for some, but not all imaginary activity, and is therefore not it's source. I'm glad we have a consensus on that - but it still leaves the question of what the actual source is. Personally, I'm digging the Dzogchen 3 energy model, which neatly ties this topic into dream yoga. What do you think about the Dzogchen formulation?

Anyway, to continue, Chris - emotions are really primitive (mammalian species specific) cognitions that relate to survival - and given how most mammalian species are socially interdependent for survival, emotions are an aspect of our social relatedness. They provide the cognitive substrate for our neocortical thought - so if you don't have them, your formal or rational thought is flawed. To ostracize all one's emotions is to forsake our biological and evolutionary heritage. So one might not have awareness of the emotions, but they still occur, and express themselves. I'm sure we can all think of a time we rationalized something - that's just such an example. If we could somehow "burn out" or excise that neural circuitry we'd probably give ourselves a form of autism, or in a best case scenario - Asperger's syndrome. More likely though, what Trent and Tarin are up to is creating profound dissociative states that allows their emotions to drop out of awareness. They very well could induce a kind of alexithymia in themselves with enough practice and anchoring of the effect. The psychotherapeutic approach is to increase awareness of emotions and integrate them. Cont.

So long as we remain human, we are stuck with emotions one way or another, including some negative ones, just like we are stuck with body functions that are sometimes unpleasant such as waste elimination. If we repress, supress, or dissociate from them, they will affect us negatively, so we have to experience them dispassionately and release our attachment to having or not having them.

As Jung once said, "The basic problems of human life are fundamentally insoluble - they can only be outgrown."

Interestingly the Bon tradition is consistent with this formulation - they believe the way to deal with emotion is to let it flow through you and be released - otherwise it forms a karmic trace. If one attempts to supress or contain an emotion - or in this case, all emotion, it still creates a negative karmic trace through aversion.

David,

This is not at all what we are up to. The affective faculties, imagination and etc that are being eliminated are happening as byproducts of the elimination of our lasting identity/sense of being. There is no suppression going on, it's all a very willed opening into self-immolation. Furthermore, these emotions do NOT still occur when the sense of being is gone or diminished. You would have to interact with us in person to know that, because the forum lends itself more readily to the projections of the readers browsing these words.

Why not forsake our biological and evolutionary heritage? Seems to me that humanity's tried-and-true way of being has so far caused millions of deaths through war; and rapes and murders and depressions and so forth. Unfortunately, the "wisdom of our elders" has failed in a big way. So long as there is a sense of self, we'll continue to destroy ourselves like idiots.

With that said, perhaps the reason our stance seems odd, bad, scary, or counter-intuitive is because you have a vested interest in remaining an independent entity. I encourage everyone to challenge the assumptions that have been handed down for generations, as they are not nearly as strict as they seem. One only needs to open their eyes to see the incredible things some humans are doing. Daniel Tammet is one example. To me, some of his abilities as a human being make "no being/emotion/imagination" seem like child's-play by comparison. Maybe that's just because I suck at math :].

Trent

"Physical pain, sneezes and itches are felt as the body. They do not belong to it-- they ARE it. Me-feelings and I-thoughts are not the same; those implicitly assume that there is an entity within the body that "should be" referred to. And when a person ceases his or her me-feelings and i-thoughts, there is no imagination to be found, nor are there the affective faculties which propped up those delusions."


So, Trent, with no-self comes absolutely no imagination, ever? Really?

Yes, really. But no-self in this case pertains to the affective faculty, the "me" that feels. That is not the same self commonly referred to as no-self, so I am not contradicting MCTB, buddhism or anything of the like. Different self, different practices, different results.

Please elaborate further, Trent. I'm left with the impression that "no imagination" means you cannot, or will not, be able to envision a world different than that which you encounter right now. So you would be left without the means to improve your physical existence. It would be like the engineers at NASA not being able to envision, and thus build, a new launch vehicle. Yes? No?

Different self? Are you saying the "self" you're referring to differs depending on the tradition?

Different practices? Do they have a name?

Different results? Different attainment? Different realization? Different.... well, just what exactly is different in this context? I suspect you believe you've discovered an extension of Buddhism, yes? Something very few people know about and practice?

Also, just what do you mean by "affective faculty?" There's nothing on it anywhere that I can find except a second-hand report on the Neuro-Sci newsgroup about some poor person in Australia who claims not to have an imagination because he has gone beyond enlightenment:

http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/neur-sci/2003-December/056413.html

Chris,

Yes, that's right, you could not envision a world that way because there would be no imagination. However, that does not mean a person could not intellectually think through such things, plan steps to bring about change, and then create that change. Imagination is only one (redundant) process of the mind. As such, to find it missing is not a problem in and of itself. It is actually quite a peaceful experience.

That "poor guy in Australia" is not so helpless as the second hand report implies. You can read about him and find the answers to your other questions on a website he maintains (http://actualfreedom.com.au/sundry/map.htm). I'll leave the rest up to you since those answers are far from this threads' topic. With that said, I am going to cease posting in this thread unless new content arrives in regard to the original theme: imagination. (Things are starting to get a bit redundant).

Trent

Trent,

What you are talking about is not a particularly new idea, it's a reformulation of Stoicism, but it's still misguided and pernicious. You are going to mess yourself up pursuing that endeavor.

It's fairly well accepted that the limbic system, common to all mammals, is the organizing source of our emotional experience. All mammals are capable of the complete range of emotions we experience as humans, and vast amounts of accumulated experience, especially insofar as to survive with other mammals, is encoded in it's structure. The limbic system is over a million years old, while the neurological epicenter of "higher thought", the neocortex is only about 100,000 years old. Significantly, you don't see any other mammalian species with the kinds of problems that you cite. It seems much more logical to assume that these problems, and the shape the world is in, has more to do with the "higher functions" - rational thought and language - than it does with our emotional selves. Or perhaps, it's our ability to integrate these two different kinds of cognitions - after all the cytoarchitecture of these two lobes is quite different, suggesting that they process information in radically different ways. But at any rate, it seems pretty clear how we are different from these other species. Do animals have a separate sense of self? More than likely, this is also a "higher" function. Luckily, there is something extremely easy, and relatively safe that can remove these higher functions - a lobotomy.

Do animals have imagination?

So if you thought that it was getting a lobotomy that would lead to "the end of being" (and it well might), would you get one? Presumably you would not - because higher thought is part of what makes us human. Just so for our emotions. If you ablate the limbic system of a rat mother, she can not care for her pups and they will die - if you ablate it's tiny neocortex, it cares for them fine. This is how crucially bound up with our physiology and ability to relate to members of our species these functions are. I would think that they are part of our connection to the earth.

In terms of abandoning our heritage - look at how well social experiments doing just that have turned out. I suggest you start with the Communist Revolution in China, and how indigenous societies are faring. In karmic terms, our heritage is part of our collective karma - and we must be part of how that collective karma is released. Dealing with emotions is part of the moral discipline. If you accept that a buffalo living in a herd does not have a separate sense of self, but does have the full gamut of mammalian emotions, then it can't be true that emotions derive from a separate sense of self.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche has this to say: "...it is not that emotions in themselves are negative. All emotions aid in survival and are necessary for the full range of human experience, including the emotions of attachment, anger, pride, jealousy, and so on. Without the emotions we would not live fully. However, emotions are negative insofar as we become ensnared in them and lose touch with deeper aspects of ourselves. They are negative if we react to them with grasping or aversion, because we suffer a constriction of consciousness and identity."

I would think that reacting to what we formerly experienced as our individual self with aversion would also have harmful consequences.

The physical senses are all symbolic representations of external phenomena. Those external phenomena, electromagnetic radiation, air disturbances, etc., are symbolically represented as subjective experiences. They are symbolically coded in the 'languages' of vision, pain, tactile sensation, etc.,

So any neurally mediated awareness, even the ones that are erroneously termed 'direct sensation' are already imaginings. What people here seem to be calling 'imagination' is just a more complex, abstract, and higher-order version of the very same processes.

Again, I think it's useful to consider the 'five skandhas' framework. Rupa is the physical foundation of subjective experience. But all four of the other skandhas involve mental generation, a creative process.

Questions of intentionality/agency are interesting and important. But putting those aside momentarily, we are still fundamentally creatures of imagination.

Language too is grounded in this basic process of representation and metaphor. It is just a higher-order version of the same thing.

That same basic process occurs at its most primitive whenever one neuron generates and transmits a neurotransmitter cocktail on the basis of neurotransmitters that it in turn received from an adjacent neuron. Metaphor is present from the bottom to the top.

And what else is imagination?

Author: AlanChapman

Hello everyone,

Seeing as everyone appears to be an arahat these days, no one will mind if I take the crass step of proclaiming myself one - backed up by a public record that can be corroborated by peers - and giving some 1st person perspective on what it is like for someone who has experienced enlightenment.

First of all, enlightenment is the realisation that ‘just this’ is completely satisfactory, perfect and Whole, just as it is, and always was!

‘Just this’ includes my body, and the faculties of emotion, thought (which is actually imagined sound), imagination, pleasure, pain, habit, perspective, and belief. This is not an exhaustive list.

Enlightenment is only the end of not directly knowing reality, nothing else. Enlightenment is not the end of any human faculty, because – get this – the subject (I prefer ‘subject’ to ‘self’ because ‘self’ can be confused with being a human being) never existed in the first place!

I’ll make this as clear as I can: human faculties exist without a subject, even prior to enlightenment, because the subject never existed in the first place. Never did.

After enlightenment, the faculties – including imagination and emotion – remain, because they never did depend on a subject. Not at all.

(cont.)

Author: AlanChapman

Now, with the realisation of ‘no subject’ (non-duality), it is true that the content manifesting through the faculties changes, but most of it changes over a very long time. Habits built on ignorance – belief in a subject – are replaced by habits built on the Truth of Wholeness. If the arahat is not careful, eventually he or she will end up like the corny, peaceful, beatific, old sage of the spiritual ‘master’ stereotype.

Habitual attachment and aversion decreases, but the faculty of desire or want remains. (Looking forward to the future, or longing for the past, still occurs, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy these phenomena just as they are, nor does it mean I am not ‘present’ (a misleading term used all too frequently to mean non-temporal. A topic for another thread perhaps...))

Fantasies based on a subject decrease, but the faculty of imagination remains. (I really like science fiction because I love imagining what the future will be like. But instead of looking for an enduring satisfaction in such fantasies, I can now enjoy them just for their own sake, because they are perfect and Whole.)

Anger and hate decrease, but the faculty of emotion remains. (It disappoints me when people misrepresent enlightenment either through a lack of experience and/or taking the time to try and understand their experience properly; a hang up from my ‘subject’ days? Or a genetic predisposition? But my frustration is just what it is, perfect and Whole, and I do not suffer with it, or find it unsatisfactory.)

(cont.)

Author: AlanChapman

So, if you have no imagination, it is not because you are an arahat, it is because you are a boring human being.

For those of you who are not arahats or enlightened, I hope the above goes someway to restoring an accurate expectation of what it means to have experienced enlightenment.

For those of you who have experienced enlightenment, I hope the above helps you understand your realisation, if you don’t already.

For those of you who suspect you have experienced enlightenment, I hope the above will help in some way to confirm or deny your suspicions. Because you can be sure, this is what it is like for the arahat. No ifs, buts, maybes, or appeals to interpretation or opinion.

Thank you Alan for your sobering interlude. Well said.

Hi Alan

Have you ever had a nature experience? Where everything is felt to be perfect just the way it is, right now, right here? This is very different to being OK-with-everything-as-it-is.

In my experience, there is no imagination and no affective faculty for the duration of one of these nature experiences. It is a pure sensory perception, with thought freed from the shackles of feelings.

These are not boring in any way. In fact, if there is boredom, it is impossible to have one of these experiences.

Craig

Author: AlanChapman

Hello Craig,

That was a joke. It was a pun on what is normally meant by 'having no imagination'.

Do you think being an arahat is a state that comes and goes?

Enlightenment is the realisation that enlightenment has nothing to do with states, stages, nature experiences, mystical experiences, spiritual crises, imagination or no imagination, feeling or no feeling, or any other thing for that matter. The Unconditioned is unconditioned, and Wholeness is so complete it contains its own self negation: every single experience possible. For the human being, that means being a human being, and human beings have an imagination and desire too. I think it is wonderful.

"So, if you have no imagination, it is not because you are an arahat, it is because you are a boring human being."

Alan, you have said pretty much what needed to be said. You deserve huge kudos for it, and I thank you. I believe what's going with these message boards of late is an ego-centric need for attention or authority. That's the elephant that's been sitting in this room for months. It's disappointing, but not unpredictable, that this results as there appears to be no strong mechanism (i.e.; an authority figure) willing to call foul.

It's just plain silly to state that you have absolutely no imagination and, seemingly, be proud of that. I say you should seek professional help if that's the condition you find yourself in. Of course, I doubt that's the real condition this person finds themselves in, but their desire for attention and/or authority has gotten them to this conclusion. Or maybe they're just confused about what really matters.

If in the pursuit of a better world you are willing to denounce and destroy those very attributes that make us most human then you have arrived at a very strange place. I think, if there is a salvation for the human race, it lies not in that direction at all. We need our human faculties. We may need to understand them, to harness them, but that's what Buddhism is about. That other, obviously nonsensical stuff, belongs elsewhere.

Daniel, I'm disappointed in these developments, a la my message to you yesterday. I think you need to examine this issue very carefully given what you say you want to do here - or on the new site - versus what's actually going on. You are risking your goals because people with maturity and independence, looking for a place to talk with others of like mind, will not find it here.

"I am going to cease posting in this thread unless new content arrives in regard to the original theme: imagination. (Things are starting to get a bit redundant)."

A decision which, it seems to me, requires some amount of imagination. I mean, you sort of actually have to be able imagine the consequences of posting more or less and act on the scenario thus created in your mind.

Hi Alan

Haha sorry I get it now.

I am in complete agreement with everything else you wrote, and I have been living what you described for the past 8 months. Thank you for your openness about the realisation, as I do fall into one of the categories of confused sods you listed

Btw I really like your use of the term subject, it does add more clarity than the word 'self'.

Craig

Jeez, you guys are blowing this so out of proportion that it's not even funny. You're not even reading our posts and are going hog-wild to stomp out a system that disagrees with your own. Seek first to understand, then be understood. (Please!)

You can read, MULTIPLE INSTANCES of where Tarin and I both state "this has very little to do with arhatship." Of course your imagination continues on with arhatship, and so do your feelings. No one has said anything opposed to this. This thread is about a DEFINITION OF IMAGINATION, not a DEFINITION OF HOW ARHATS IMAGINE. CONTEXT people CONTEXT!

Lastly, you may want to consider just how ridiculous it is to doubt the two people you're doubting, given the posts on this site. The total amount of practical advice Tarin and I have given to this community in terms of forum replies is nearly more than everyone else's put together. You can verify this quickly on your own, and I pray you see the point of my saying so.

Relax people. Have a couple of beers. Do some actual meditation rather than witch-hunting. Go for a jog or eat some candy.

Peace,
Trent

"you may want to consider just how ridiculous it is to doubt the two people you're doubting, given the posts on this site. The total amount of practical advice Tarin and I have given to this community in terms of forum replies is nearly more than everyone else's put together. You can verify this quickly on your own, and I pray you see the point of my saying so."

Trent, really. Quanitity of message board comments and self-proclaimed expertise aren't validation for much in my book.

You seem to be saying that someone who posts a lot should not be doubted. More specifically, you seem to be saying that *you* should not be doubted.

I doubt that.

In fact, whenever I hear someone say "do not doubt me," I become suspicious of both their message and their motives. Each of us is accountable for the things we write. Everything we write stands or falls on its own merits. To ask us to believe you because you post a lot is an insult to our collective intelligence.

Volume != Credibility

Kenneth

Author: AlanChapman

No, Trent, this has everything to do with arahatship. Tarin stated:

‘this is the liberation i know and in what i know other arahats to experience.[but] i do not think this is as far as humans can go - this is far from as far as humans can go.. and is necessary to go in order to live in total freedom. to see desire for what it is - whether right or wrong desire - is to abandon it completely.’

If no one else will say it, then I will: Whatever it is that Tarin believes is arahatship, it is not it. And if you agree Trent, then you also do not know arahatship.

Arahatship is beyond freedom. If you still think ‘you’ are not completely ‘free’, then you are not enlightened. Period.

Yes, undesired habits and attributes still lurk for the arahat, but I can tell you now, the arahat is not bound by them, because there is NO SUBJECT, NEVER HAS BEEN. Freedom is an issue that results from ignorance; no ignorance, no issue.

Said another way: enlightenment is the discovery that the chains were never locked in the first place. If you proceed to throw away the chains, it does not change the fact that you are already free, and always have been, does it? There are no degrees of freedom with enlightenment.

Of course, you can appeal to interpretation, different frameworks, different selves(?!), bad communication, the failure of language, and so on, but I will say it again: if you do not recognise what I have described above, then you have not experienced enlightenment. No argument! Be honest with yourself, and make an informed decision as to where you think you are, and as a result, what you think enlightenment is.

Author: AlanChapman

Tarin, Trent: Do you really ascribe to this?

'The fashionable practice of meditation, sitting silently and retreating from the world of the senses, is a means of dissociating from the physical world and retreating into an imaginary ‘inner’ world where feeling and fantasy are free to run riot. One is actively extolled to abandon sensible thought, to surrender one’s will to a divine Energy or Entity, and to completely trust one’s feelings. This practice of giving full reign to one’s ‘good’ instinctual passions and narcissistic imagination while denying and attempting to transcend the ‘bad’ instinctual passions and grim reality has inevitably led to an impassioned delusion – the delusion of mortal human beings believing themselves to be God-realized or immortal God-men.

The Eastern religious fervour for worshipping mortal men and women as immortal Gods is an affront to intelligence that does nothing but perpetuate human misery, suffering and enslavement to ancient fears and ignorance. Any chance of an actual peace on earth is readily and eagerly forfeited for an imaginary peace after physical death … or, for the rare few, the chance to feel like God-on-earth.'

Absolute ignornace of what enlightenment - and so arahatship - actually is, and taken from the AF website mentioned up thread. I have no beef with people who want to eradicate desire (each to their own), but I fail to see why this vile, ignornat drivel is being promoted on a website dedicated to discussing the reality of enlightenment and how to go about acheiving it.

Chris and Kenneth: My inbox is full of comments stating that I helped people with breakthroughs. My e-mail inbox is also full of messages from 2 students who have gotten first and second path with my help. I know that Tarin is in a similar situation, and so your arguments are moot. The results are there, and my point remains valid.

Alan, In that sentence, Tarin is validating that arhats have feelings and imagination because he is not done with AF. Then he goes on to say that he doesn't believe that arhatship is the end, because he clearly sees that the affective self is a problem and perpetuates the sorrows of this world. That has nothing to do with whether or not he understands arhatship or not.

I disagree with the fundamental stance of your entire critique, for the same reason that others disagree with mine. I do not care what you think you have obtained, and I can clearly see by the cunning nature of your posts that you are not as free as you think you are. I have read your site (and love it by the way, it's great work), but my point is that I can see your emotional self as clear as a sore thumb. So please, don't preach to me; I see through you without effort.

Finally, saying "the subject has always been free" is a no brainer and has no baring in this argument. Everyone is doing practice for a reason, we don't write 500 page books saying "Look man, chill out, you've always been free" on every page. That's not the point. People don't feel free until they've rearranged their heads.

Lastly, you may want to work on your arrogance, as it makes you seem extremely inauthentic and hurtful in general. You'll notice that neither Tarin or myself are telling people off, calling anyone out, or laying down statements like "no argument, be honest with yourself." We're simply offering what we know through our experience, and what we think that means.

Again, Alan, it does not matter whether we believe that or not. This thread was not about actualism, it was about a definition of imagination. We generally don't mention actualism at all, and have been very careful not to do so. Sure, it leaks out now and again, but it's not entirely unrelated to this site.

If you feel the need to blast the possible beliefs of others', then perhaps you should examine why you feel compelled to do so at all. Is that really in the best interests of a harmonious world? Has your attainment of arhatship stopped you from being selfish and rude? Are you really trying to understand AF, or are you just taking a few snippets here and there and getting upset about it? Are you really responding because you care about the fate of humanity, or because you care about the investment you have in enlightenment? Come now, a bit of observation to one's "self" is in order.

Trent

the arahat, unbound from all his undesired habits and attributes as he is, still 'habitually' (haha) experiences drive and desire, **the very existence of which is an identity**. whether its a personal one (a separate self) or an impersonal one ('the observer is the observed') makes no difference in this regard. you can 'no subject, never has been' all you want, but to lack that identity (and thus those drives and desires totally) is so palpably superior to merely understanding that there is no 'you' to be bound to them that your claim of what constitutes freedom comes off as feeble.. what a mediocrity, when there is so much better within reach.

some arahats have better things to do than sit around perpetuating the root cause of the malice and sorrow endemic to the human condition (a condition in which the enlightened still clearly share).

tarin the arahat

"the arahat, unbound from all his undesired habits and attributes as he is, still 'habitually' (haha) experiences drive and desire, **the very existence of which is an identity**."-theprisonergreco

Drive and desire constitute an identity?

Tarin, this is incorrect. The recognition that actions occur without a doer is the very essence of enlightenment. How could an arahat not know this most basic of truths?

Kenneth the human being

that actions occur without a doer (and that thoughts take place without a thinker) does nothing to change the fact that feelings are not felt without a feeler - and a feeler does not exist without a be-er, otherwise known as a being. that being is what i refer to as the identity constituted by drive and desire.

put simply - annoyance (for example) does not even begin to arise without someone there to be annoyed. for someone to call such a thing a 'habit' is a disingenuous ploy employed by the cunning entity in residence to deflect attention from its existence and operation. it is not a habit, it is the movement of the entity itself.

how could an arahat not know that in order to feel offended (for example), one must feel oneself to be something that can take offence?

..because he's too busy being unbound from his 'habits', perhaps?

(This is indeed, about Arahantship {meaning this subject, imagination} notwithstanding Alan's comment, which I also agree with. Thank you Nigel, for your contribution which is highly relevant to what I'm about to say)

To the quote: I think you and Yabaxoule may be claiming different things, if I read his responses correctly. Obviously Tarin, this is nothing personal...

but you're still not getting it...

If you closely examine your actual experience of "practical thinking, creative thinking, or problem solving" WITHOUT PRECONCEPTIONS you will notice...

(and it pains me to have to give you the answer here)

...that they are in fact characterized by internally produced sensations or combinations therof, no matter how subtle. That is, with the possible exception of fruition, *every* element of our experience is created from "visual / audio / olfactory / haptic / kinaesthetic imagery" - our very thoughts themselves!

Even formations, are composed of complexes of sensations synesthetically experienced. The only thing beyond those (formations) is emptiness.

This is the meaning of the phrase "everything is merely sensations".

Why is it that you don't know that?

David

"that actions occur without a doer (and that thoughts take place without a thinker) does nothing to change the fact that feelings are not felt without a feeler"-Tarin

No, this is incorrect. Feelings do not require a feeler. To see this is the essence of enlightenment.

" - and a feeler does not exist without a be-er, otherwise known as a being."-Tarin

No, this is incorrect. Feelings do not require a be-er or a being. To see this is the essence of enlightenment.

"put simply - annoyance (for example) does not even begin to arise without someone there to be annoyed."-Tarin

No, this is incorrect. Sometimes annoyance arises, along with the sense that "I" am annoyed. Sometimes it doesn't. There is no one here to be annoyed in either case. The "I" that comes and goes is a mental construct that is seen through with enlightenment.

The things you are saying don't hold up to scrutiny.

Hi Alan, from my perspective I see where you're coming from and I acknowledge that it can appear the way it appears to you from your currently espoused view (the Right View of buddhism) which you seem to have thoroughly embraced. But based on my understanding, it is still a view - because I can embrace it and feel done and free and everything you describe, or I can let it go and not feel done or free at all. What do you think of that suggestion? Also, you spoke about how enlightenment is freedom. I thought I might point out that Richard called enlightenment Absolute Freedom until he decided he had gone beyond it into a yet-more-free stage of development.

'Sometimes annoyance arises, along with the sense that "I" am annoyed. Sometimes it doesn't. There is no one here to be annoyed in either case.'

and thus will annoyance continue to arise.

'The "I" that comes and goes is a mental construct that is seen through with enlightenment.'

and this 'i', this 'mental construct', is but the tip of the iceberg. malice and sorrow are not mental constructs, they are passional. their movement is the real 'i', their existence is the real suffering, is what causes wars, murders, suicides, rapes, tortures, domestic violence, is what prevents peace on earth, is what prevents two people from living together in complete, unfettered, uninterrupted harmony day in and day out, day after day. to say there is no feeler feeling its feelings is a disingenuous ploy employed by the cunning entity in residence to deflect attention from its existence and operation.

'earth to kenneth...'

(reposting my reply from the baptist's head forum)

because its not the case. in addition to the mental imagery i sometimes experience (which i sometimes also dont), i experience thought as an image-less sense of its own - that part's always there. however, its only recently that ive begun noticing that clearly, so i invite you to check your own experience as well. its clear to me that i have 6 senses, not 5.

Yes more than 6, or perhaps just 1as they quite blend together for me in different proportions. The term kinaesthetic is wholly inadequate to describe that particular realm of experience - and it is perhaps 4 different types of sensations.

There is intrinsic meaning, yes, but it cannot be separated from the sensations. The sensations are intrinsically meaningful - they are the machine language of our brain if you will. You will notice there is a feeling tone with each one as well.

Author: AlanChapman

Hello Trent,

‘I can clearly see by the cunning nature of your posts that you are not as free as you think you are.’

Do you think this might be because you do not understand what the freedom of enlightenment is? I’ve tried to explain to you what it is like, and yet you still think there is a subject here who is a ‘prisoner’ of his emotions.

‘I can see your emotional self as clear as a sore thumb. So please, don't preach to me; I see through you without effort.’

It’s a shame you can’t see through yourself; maybe then you would realise that your freedom isn’t an issue anymore.

‘Lastly, you may want to work on your arrogance, as it makes you seem extremely inauthentic and hurtful in general. You'll notice that neither Tarin or myself are telling people off, calling anyone out, or laying down statements like "no argument, be honest with yourself." We're simply offering what we know through our experience, and what we think that means.’

I am saying that you have either made a mistake in your judgement of your position, or you are lying; either way, you are making claims about the nature of enlightenment that are simply wrong, and I will not let that go unchallenged, because it is unhelpful, misleading, confusing, and truly ‘hurtful’ to anyone who might take your advice as authentic.

‘Are you really responding because you care about the fate of humanity, or because you care about the investment you have in enlightenment?’

And there we have it! You think enlightenment doesn’t live up to the hype – as proclaimed by the AF site under ‘the failure of eastern spirituality’ - and that AF can take you further. Have you considered that enlightenment doesn’t live up to the hype because you haven’t experienced it yet? That goes for both you and Tarin.

Author: AlanChapman

Hello Craig,

My view is Buddhist only in so far as Buddhism accurately describes my experience of enlightenment. My view is also the same as the 'right views' of Thelema, Sufism, Christian mysticism, Advaita Vedanta, Hasidism, Taoism, Gnosticism, and Gurdjieff's Fourth Way (to name a few). That's because there are very real and obvious 'features' to enlightenment that do not depend on view in any way. The earth is still round no matter how much you view it as flat, and if you perform certain experiments, you can prove it for yourself. Your view changes as a result of the experience; it shouldn't be the other way round!

If you can change your view and not feel done or free, then your completion or freedom is the result of a view, not of experience. This means you are not a arahat.

If Richard believed he had attained Absolute Freedom but later realised he had not, then he made a bad judgement of his position. It happens all the time. Hell, I thought I was Absolutely Free after my first A&P. But I didn't make the mistake of thinking that fruition was somehow more Absolutely Free; I just realised that I had misidentified my experience.

By the way folks, this is where it gets a little dicey...

I could certainly be fooling myself as much as Tarin here, and the confounding thing is that the experiences at this level are subject to suggestion or expectation.
I remember the above as some long standing conclusions I've drawn. I need to re-check it directly, but that's going to require getting into a fairly high state of absorption in order to have the resolution necessary, which I have not had time to perform yet...

Hi Alan

I have given this some thought and it is not possible for me to let go of the view which got me to this place, because that view has already been let go of. I apologise for wording that poorly, it didn't work out the way I had intended.

But I believe it is entirely possible to take up a view as a basis of further investigation post-arahatship.

I do not believe arahatship precludes one from holding a view. Do you disagree?

Craig

My personal observation is that ihis isn't really about Actualism or arahatship or anything that high and mighty. It's about folks who needs the attention and the validation of other people. The Internet,and this message board, have provided you with a nice platform that allows them to get what they want.

Truth be told, I don't think the Actualists really understand Actualism or they'd run away from it. Far from being the humanity-saving thing they believe it to be, it's actually a humanity-denying thing.So what they're really running from is their humanity, that which they cannot shed. So rather than becoming true Buddhists and believing that compassion, generated by a deep understanding and acceptance of what makes them human, they want to erase their humanity (emotions, imagination, etc.) and decry it in the name of "helping others." It's unfortunately easy, in a place like this, to fool some of the people some of the time, but... well, you all know the last clause of that P.T. Barnum quote.

What upsets me most is the thought that the person who set this all up, and his original collaborators (who probably for related reasons are now nowhere to be found), are being used for this little charade.

Author: AlanChapman

Hello Craig,

No, I'm not saying an arahat cannot hold a view. I am saying somethings - especially enlightenment - do not depend upon a given view. Like the earth being round, regardless if we think it is flat. Like the moon being rock, regardless if we think it is made of cheese.

People can experience enlightenment and still have a wrong view of it. Some people can have no experience of enlightenment, but hold the view that their experience is enlightenment. Wholeness or completion - being 'done' - is not a view, it is a fact for the arahat. So if you hold the view that you are Whole, but then change your view and the Wholeness is gone, then it was never really Wholeness, because Wholeness is not a view.

As an arahat, you can have all different kinds of views about Wholeness, some more accurate than others, but the view never changes the inescapable reality of Wholeness.

Alan.

It would probably be a good idea to go back to the beginning of this thread and to re-read it slowly.

A Buddhist theory of imagination would be as complicated and multi-layered as a Western scientific theory of physical reality.

Haquan, you clarified your definition of imagination in post 3 writing:

" I would clarify imagination to include our ability to generate sensory experience internally, either consciously or involuntarily - so dreams would possibly be the archetypal experience of this, but also the internal monologue, and even objects of visualization like mandalas."

The discussion has continued for 5 pages beyond that.

But have you gotten any more clarity on your initial area of interest?

I think it's good to talk about things like this slowly sometimes. So things don't snowball to the point where the original question is forgotten.

What is meant, for example, by 'internally'? When we say 'generating sensory experience internally'.

I think that is a case of using a traditional, common-sense framework which may lead to errors or misunderstandings.

'Internally'. Inside of what?

I, personally, would prefer 'mentally'. As in, mental generation of sensory experiences. But that term requires discussion and consideration as well.

Anyway, I'm suggesting that we go back to the beginning.

For example, Haquan, what do you think regarding your original question now that two+ weeks have passed?

Alan,

I disagree with you here for fundamental reasons. Wholeness is still just a view, regardless of who you are or what situation you're feeling or thinking it. That's because it's completely relative. Some dude may think he's "whole" when he gets married, and perhaps he's genuinely happily married. Then he meets his mistress and suddenly he's not whole, or perhaps even more whole than he was before; how come? Of course, this is a rather crass example, but it's not hard to see my point. Assuming you are not already actualized, I am guessing that if you experienced a PCE, you would know exactly just how lacking arhatship is by comparison. Without that experience, of course arhatship is the bee's knees; just like being 2nd path is dang nice compared to normal experience (and hence why people can get stuck in lower paths).

Trent

1. Also, how about a consideration of the Five Skandhas as one of Buddhism's more accessible, though still extremely comprehensive, experiential anatomies.

Where would the construct of 'imagination' fit into the five skandhas.

2. It's also important to remember that Buddhism (and all contemplative traditions) add the dimension of 'developmental depth' to any framework of mind, experience, and consciousness. In other words, imagination for one who has not cultivated the path will definitely work differently than imagination for one who has; as will all mental processing.

but along the same lines:

3. Look at the words attributed to the Buddha. It's replete with metaphor, analogies, comparisons, similes, and word-pictures. 'as numerous as the sands of the desert' 'X is like Y'. 'If X happened it would be as if Y, Z, and Q had all happened'. At least we can say that the historical Buddha as recorded and passed down to us had a very active faculty of imagination.

It's hard to find a sutta that is not full of those kinds of examples. He was constantly using imagination to synthesize newer and more effective ways to communicate the dharma.

Yeah, well, the Buddha Gotama was not fully, absolutely realized in the truest sense. He just didn't go far enough after attaining his buddhahood. He wasn't AF ;-)

Author: Adam_West

I'm afraid I'm flabbergasted by the idea that anyone here thinks they are unable to imagine. It is so fundamental to basic functioning in daily life, working memory and the effective functioning of the central executive in navigating complex tasks as to be an absurd discussion! If someone were to tell me they could not imagine how someone was going to respond in a social situation in 30 seconds time to the behaviour/conversation/action I was about to execute; or they could not imagine where they were going to put the new couch they just purchased in a room that will require repositioning of the furniture, and imagination of said couch placed in position that will achieve a desired outcome - and even spun around the right way simply to get it in the door; or that they could not imagine themselves scratching their own head five seconds in the future; or plan their day tomorrow; or me typing this; and yet they once could. I would suggest they likely have some kind of psychological or neurological damage brought on by trauma of some kind. Perhaps a small stroke or aneurysm. I'm no M.D., so they would be referred to a doctor quick smart.

What I have described above is common, normal use of our faculties. To be unable to do so would be completely disabling to successful functioning in daily life in every domain - self-care, social and occupational. One could, as has been alluded to, make use of trial and error, as we often do, since most of us have really terrible imaginative abilities. Or some recall of past experience, or reference to what is known about social norms etc. However, to even logically deduce solutions to present or future problems or create plans from social norms, past experiences, trial and error etc. like - if X then Y, but not Z - would be fatally difficult, if not impossible without imagination. The whole thing is simply absurd!!

[cont.] Edited for spelling etc.

Author: Adam_West

All things being equal, this is the most amazing discussion in recent memory, given the emphasis on 'personal insight' into one's phenomenological experience.

I estimate this is a fascinating studying in adopting and internalizing the writings, declarations and expectations of an authority figure as is well documented in cult-like scenarios. It truly is amazing how individual beliefs - adopted or otherwise - have such a dramatic effect on our interpreted experience of reality. Social constructionism is alive and well!! Amazing!! Sites like these are a sociological bonanza! ;-P

In kind regards,

Adam.

so there's no confusion (if its even possible at this point in the thread), i use the term 'imagination' to mean mental imagery. imagination is not the same as thought, as thought can and does occur, operate, and function just fine without mental imagery. hopefully, anyone who chooses to engage me any further in this discussion will do so with the understanding that this is what i mean.

Author: Adam_West

Hi Tarin!

Thanks for the clarification! When you say, mental imagery, do you mean visualization? As in, can you visualize me and thus imagine me typing right now?

Or could you visualize, or someone actualized, visualize themselves wearing a combination of clothing they have not worn before, and thus, decide if they want to wear them without trial and error, or referring to past experience, social norms or some other kind of knowledge?

Thanks!

In kind regards,

Adam.

'Thanks for the clarification! When you say, mental imagery, do you mean visualization? As in, can you visualize me and thus imagine me typing right now?'

yes, visual, as well as audible, or haptic, or kinaesthetic, or olfactory, or gustatory (though i have trouble with the latter two). anything seen with 'the mind's eye', heard with 'the mind's ear' ... you get the drift.

'Or could you visualize, or someone actualized, visualize themselves wearing a combination of clothing they have not worn before, and thus, decide if they want to wear them without trial and error, or referring to past experience, social norms or some other kind of knowledge?'

i could visualise that, yes. an actually free person (like richard of the af trust homepage), no. though he probably wouldnt have trouble finding a suitable combination because he could always just refer to past experience (memory) in order to select it. which is what im also doing as well anyway, whether or not i visualise the process.

you're welcome and i hope that answers your questions.

Author: Adam_West

@ Tarin: "i could visualise that, yes. an actually free person (like richard of the af trust homepage), no. though he probably wouldnt have trouble finding a suitable combination because he could always just refer to past experience (memory) in order to select it. which is what im also doing as well anyway, whether or not i visualise the process."

Let us assume that most, if not all, visualization is a recombination of past visual experience and thus visual memory. Excluding intuitive or psychic flashes that do not rely on sensory experience and memory, and are pure creativity or something a priori. If Richard can visualize himself wearing a new combination of clothes from past memories and thus make deductions and so decide about what to wear or not, under what circumstances does Richard not experience visual images. As it stands, with what we've established so far, he experiences imagery like everyone else. That is, he can imagine by drawing on memory like everyone else. Perhaps you mean when he draws on visual memory (of the clothing) he does not re-experience it as visual and the memory somehow translates as knowledge of past experience with no visual component? Or perhaps you mean he does not experience random, involuntary imagery like most people do, like day dreaming or visually based thoughts popping into his mind?

Thanks for the further clarification!

In kind regards,

Adam. Edited for grammar.

'Let us assume that most, if not all, visualization is a recombination of past visual experience and thus visual memory. '

i do not assume this.

'Perhaps you mean when he draws on visual memory (of the clothing) he does not re-experience it as visual and the memory somehow translates as knowledge of past experience with no visual component?'

yes, as memory of past visual experience does not require a visual component (as in visualisation/visual imagery). thought alone can do the job.

'Or perhaps you mean he does not experience random, involuntary imagery like most people do, like day dreaming or visually based thoughts popping into his mind?'

also yes. according to his account, he does not daydream, nor does he experience visual imagery (seeing anything his eyes do not).

Author: Adam_West

Thanks Tarin. I appreciate you taking the time to clarify. Ok, so what he describes is inconsistent with known cognitive science. No biggie, unless you take that stuff seriously.

I appreciate the no visual imagery thing is relevant to a broader philosophy of mind and metaphysics that Richard is narrating. In brief, why is no visual imagery significant outside of its curious anomalous nature? I assume it is somehow linked in the chain of suffering that prevents "actual freedom"?

Thanks!

In kind regards,

Adam.

Author: AlanChapman

@Haquan: Apologies for rotting your thread earlier!

Author: han2sen

Thanks Adam - in post 27 i said

'The mental processes that "create" reality are really the same ones that are used to "create" the imagination."

but i think you have said it better here - this whole discussion is purely imaginary -

- and makes me very reticent as to which brand of arhantship I choose to sign up with

me, as far as imagination I cannot function as a human being with the particular set of responsibilities I have regardless of the outcome or result

all mental constructs are mental constructs, no matter what the state of attainment

- upasaka hansen

Author: han2sen

Actualism? I had no idea about this. Very elementary penguin. I cast my lot with the "many worlds'' school. Funny, actualism reminds me of Ayn Rand.
- hansen

I knew there was something disturbingly familiar! No wonder my instant distaste for it!

Nigel - good points! I would change "internal" to "any sensation that cannot be attributed to direct stimulation of the sensory organs." I think this thread has helped me clarify some things - namely the pervasiveness of imagination - and I think that I'm starting to understand how it interacts with our perception of physical reality.

By the way I went ahead and *closely* re-examined my experience. I can sit in an attitude of mental silence for quite some time, but when I do think there are usually sensations that "blossom" into auditory monologue. I can suppress this latter and experience what I think are formations behind (below?) the thought. I intuitively "know" their meaning or what they would translate into in language. When I deconstruct the protothoughts and the sense of meaning of them, what I find is that this sense of meaning is composed of very subtle senses of proprioception. So this is the same result as before...

Tarin, the reason you must resort to visual imagery to reason about a chess position is that every position is a gestalt that can not be reduced further to axiomatic principles or symbolic logic - this is a fact, and is recognized by chess experts. For instance, in the theory of corresponding squares, it is known that one cannot determine the corresponding squares except through brute analysis - that is you either have to have a physical set in front of you and play out different lines of play, actually moving the pieces around on the board, or you have to see the whole board in your head and do the same thing. There is no other way to represent the position... Sorry but this is a logical fact

and yet, i can often-times clearly distinguish thought from any and all mental imagery, and i have on numerous occasions noticed a marked absence of any affective tone whatsoever from the sensations i experience. what i experience is that when there is no somatic charge underlying it, neither affect nor imagery occur (and with no practical incapacitation suffered).

It seems like we are on the same page finally.

When I say affective tone, I experience it rather one experiences the subtle sense of emotion carried by a musical tone (and this may be the basis for it in this experience).

I am aware of a sense of "meaning" or relevance to the body-mind that may appear to be independent of the sensations, but when I try to look at that sense of meaning it always deconstructs into subtle sensations that are essentially empty. This has lead me to conclude that the sensations have their own intrinsic syntax at this level - that is, below the level of symbolic representation. Rather the way that music has an intrinsic syntax and inherent meaning, in fact.

Now there is some technical difficulty in making this interpretation, because the meaning is very associated with the sense of awareness itself - and as soon as you turn to look at it, you are not looking at it, but rather a phantom of it, a memory, and it becomes the new object of the meaning making.

There is something similar to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work here.