RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Stickman2 6/18/19 5:39 AM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Matthew O'Connell 6/18/19 7:14 AM
RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Stickman2 6/18/19 11:19 AM
RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Edward 6/18/19 10:58 AM
RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Stickman2 6/19/19 10:11 AM
RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Matthew O'Connell 6/18/19 11:37 AM
RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Stickman2 6/18/19 12:15 PM
RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Chris M 6/19/19 6:44 AM
RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Stickman2 6/18/19 6:54 PM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Not two, not one 6/18/19 2:16 PM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Stickman2 6/19/19 10:02 AM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Chris M 6/19/19 10:18 AM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Edward 6/19/19 10:51 AM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! S. 6/19/19 12:29 PM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Not two, not one 6/19/19 12:48 PM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö 6/19/19 8:17 PM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Stickman2 6/19/19 11:14 AM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Chris M 6/19/19 12:16 PM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Stickman2 6/19/19 1:24 PM
RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain! Not two, not one 6/19/19 12:36 PM
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Stickman2, modified 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 5:39 AM
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RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

Posts: 375 Join Date: 7/24/17 Recent Posts
One thing that strikes me is that this conversation sounds identical to one held by unenlightened people - with all the language of self, thought and emotions like anger and frustration.
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Matthew O'Connell, modified 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 7:14 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 7:14 AM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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I like your comment and wonder what it says about you, your expectations, beliefs, and fantasies. What do 'enlightened' people sound like and who are your favourites? Adi Da? The Dalai Lama? Sogyal Rinpoche? Thich Nhat Hanh? Kenneth Folk? ...
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Stickman2, modified 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 11:19 AM
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RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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Yeah I still haven't figured that out, and of course when I'm fully awakened I might have to use all that language myself. There I go - myself. So until then I have to operate on the trust that things are paradoxical and different further up the path. I've had moments of insight enough to know that it's possible to experience life radically differently from the standard self-oriented one, which helps in the trust bit.

If you're trying to critique me, though, and plop me in a box of buddhist sheep because I don't waffle on about Deleuze and Lacan etc, forget it, I like my socialsts to actually be effective and do things for the poor, rather than finger each other's intellectual bums at Harvard all day.
Edward, modified 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 10:58 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 10:58 AM

RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

Posts: 129 Join Date: 6/10/19 Recent Posts
Stickman2:
Yeah I still haven't figured that out, and of course when I'm fully awakened I might have to use all that language myself. There I go - myself. So until then I have to operate on the trust that things are paradoxical and different further up the path. I've had moments of insight enough to know that it's possible to experience life radically differently from the standard self-oriented one, which helps in the trust bit.

If you're trying to critique me, though, and plop me in a box of buddhist sheep because I don't waffle on about Deleuze and Lacan etc, forget it, I like my socialsts to actually be effective and do things for the poor, rather then finger each other's intellectual bums at Harvard all day.


was looking forward to that reply. didn't disappoint. 
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Matthew O'Connell, modified 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 11:37 AM
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RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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No, not at all. I'm rather fascinated by human fanatsy generally and in particualr the fantasies that continue to linger around ideas of 'enlightenment', which is so poorly defined, and defended. It also ends up being so inhuman, more often than not, and one thing that Daniel demonstarted, to my real pleasure, was a whole lot of depth of humanity.

As for socialism, I'll leave that to others to ponder.
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Stickman2, modified 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 12:15 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 12:15 PM

RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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Fair enough. On the definition front I have good news for you, it's not called enlightenment any more, it's called PNSE, which should make things much clearer emoticon
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Chris M, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 6:44 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 12:33 PM

RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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PNSE is, as far as I can tell, a trade name invented and used by one person. It's a superset of things that includes a vast array of experiences.  As a subject of one of that person's studies, I hope "PNSE" does not become the preferred terminology. Personally, I like the word "awakening." PNSE as a way to describe it is too indistinct for my tastes.

Not that I want to argue about my preferences.
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Not two, not one, modified 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 2:16 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 1:54 PM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

Posts: 1038 Join Date: 7/13/17 Recent Posts
Stickman2:
One thing that strikes me is that this conversation sounds identical to one held by unenlightened people - with all the language of self, thought and emotions like anger and frustration.

So, one way to think of it is not-self rather than no-self. So rather than nihilism, it is letting go of clinging to things are are impermanent and ... not-self. You are not your body, you are not your emotions, your are not your perceptions, you are not your urges, you are not your observations, and so on.

You can still adopt a provisional self in a particluar frame of reference. You can simplify 'self' as your organism boundary, as your shared history in community, as the sum of all your choices and urges, as the integrated flux of observed phenomena. They are all true from a particular perspective. But you are not wedded to any of them - you can put them on or take them off like a coat, according to the weather.

You do get rid of the illusory clinging self that was the focus for angst and suffering. But that was never you anyway, it was just an out of control feedback mechanism. It's like you were constantly getting jabbed with an electric cattle prod. And then it stopped. 

Or it's like you were forced to wear four layers of clothing while living in the Sahara, and then you get to choose your wardrobe. And today I am going to wear my ontological argument hat, which is pretty spiffy.  But it's a hat - I don't mistake it for my head. 

Hope this is useful
With metta

Malcolm

Form is none other than emptiness
Emptiness is none other than form
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Stickman2, modified 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 6:54 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/18/19 6:54 PM

RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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My dear fellow, I wouldn't dream of arguing.
I think the most apt term would be RSMH, which is rainbow smorgasborg of mindless hapinesses.
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Stickman2, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 10:02 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 10:02 AM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

Posts: 375 Join Date: 7/24/17 Recent Posts
"One way to think of it is no self rather than not self"

Well, that thinking will be another phenomena that is observed by.... what ?
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Stickman2, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 10:11 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 10:11 AM

RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

Posts: 375 Join Date: 7/24/17 Recent Posts
Edward:
Stickman2:
Yeah I still haven't figured that out, and of course when I'm fully awakened I might have to use all that language myself. There I go - myself. So until then I have to operate on the trust that things are paradoxical and different further up the path. I've had moments of insight enough to know that it's possible to experience life radically differently from the standard self-oriented one, which helps in the trust bit.

If you're trying to critique me, though, and plop me in a box of buddhist sheep because I don't waffle on about Deleuze and Lacan etc, forget it, I like my socialsts to actually be effective and do things for the poor, rather then finger each other's intellectual bums at Harvard all day.


was looking forward to that reply. didn't disappoint. 

Well, you know, life has a rhythm doesn't it ?
I just (mentally) plot the strength of European welfare states against the proliferation of academia's favourite French philosophers and I don't see a positive correlation.
A more encouraging plot would be strength of welfare state vs number of ex-coal miners in government - which would I think be more positive, but the coal industry is doomed, and is post-doom in the UK.
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Chris M, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 10:18 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 10:15 AM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

Posts: 5117 Join Date: 1/26/13 Recent Posts
Well, that thinking will be another phenomena that is observed by.... what ?

Another phenomenon. That's really all this is - process after process. Nothing sacred, nothing separate. Lots of assumptions are made, lots of illusions are generated, but the actual process is... just process.

(I'll ignore the fact that you misquoted curious  emoticon )
Edward, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 10:51 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 10:51 AM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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i've never understood what not self vs no self distinction is supposed to mean. Everything is not self is logically equivalent There is no self.
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Stickman2, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 11:14 AM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 11:12 AM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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Chris Marti:
Well, that thinking will be another phenomena that is observed by.... what ?

Another phenomenon. That's really all this is - process after process. Nothing sacred, nothing separate. Lots of assumptions are made, lots of illusions are generated, but the actual process is... just process.

(I'll ignore the fact that you misquoted curious  emoticon )

They say that language defines reality, so if I say I quoted Curious accurately then it is so. In the beginning was the word.... emoticon
S, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 12:29 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 11:31 AM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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Sometimes (while asleep) you can dream about a world that you are watching and controlling without finding yourself in it. 

It's like watching TV or playing a video game.

Have you ever had a dream that was like watching a movie? Or a dream where you change shape, or become someone else?

I think it is common to have a dream that messes with your sense of self, or hides it. The point is that there is still a camera eye's view that pretends to be watching a scene. There is an artificial partition in experience between "you" and "not-you." The artificiality of this is especially well demonstrated when you are dreaming, I think. When you are dreaming you don't have to have a head, eyes, or a body in your dream. So where does the sense of framing come from? The same issue actually arises when your attention is devoted to something you are really engaged in (like if you are lost watching TV, lost in a thought, or in a deep state of concentration where your sense of the body is missing).

The artificial viewer is present much of the time in the form of an annoying blind spot. You keep trying to turn the camera around. It actually creates an enormous amount of really hard to describe but pervasive suffering, and dissolving that artificial viewer by finally catching it (or more accurately letting go of the search for it in a state of highly aware, expansive, voluminous equanimity where you aren't missing much in the field of awareness) is liberating. 

It's like a huge amount of your mental energy is spent in a fearful, hysterical attempt to center yourself somewhere in the universe. This means many things. It is a perceptual dysfunction, like a wasteful activity of the brain to hold onto the rails of reality and orient our point of self-reference unnecessarily. It can also generate existential nausea and self-identity issues. It could also make us identify or dis-identify with our conventional daily or physical forms of suffering (that is me! that is not me!) in absolutely painful ways. 

After enlightenment there is often a sense that something like pain exists but that it occupies a percentage of the field of awareness proportionate to its intensity relative to the larger perceptual volume. Your hand hurts but it's just your hand and you might be experiencing much more than just how your hand feels. I think someone has put it that pre-enlightenment suffering is multiplicative and post-enlightenment suffering is additive, although you may find there to be other painful (but still somehow "nice") psychological changes like an increased openness to heartbreak after enlightenment.

Bringing it back to the questions of self and no-self, a person who has become enlightened still has a body and a personality. They have a human body and a human personality. They are still a mammal with mammalian needs, including emotional ones. They are still a human with a lot of human drives. "Self" is not "the body" but there still is a body. "Self" is not the personality or your humanity, but you still have both. They use language like a human being with language and grammar would. 

It is common for enlightened people to see through their drives/desires/craving now in different ways and for the baseline of reduced suffering to allow them to manifest a process of increasing purifications, but there is no 100% rule for how the residual karma and mind/body trauma even of a being who has uprooted the seeds of karma will play out. Some desires might appear to intensify as other desires/fears that blocked them before dissipate (e. g. getting angry might become easier, or a happier person might become more confident and that could open up possibilities of lust that did not have a chance to be experienced before due to blockages). Very complex equations.

Once you see clearly that the self can be anything, and you can clearly see it can be everything (self-other merging, subject-object merging, foreground-background merging, assuming a standpoint of all of reality in the later insight stages with the expansiveness of awareness), you are close to eventually (hopefully) triggering the insight the self is nothing, which is actually a visceral and permanent shift. It is a direct experience and not an intellectual insight. It is like "a record flipping over in the brain." 
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Chris M, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 12:16 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 12:16 PM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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They say that language defines reality, so if I say I quoted Curious accurately then it is so. In the beginning was the word.... emoticon

And to think I took you seriously there for a minute  emoticon



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Not two, not one, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 12:36 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 12:36 PM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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Stickman2:

Well, that thinking will be another phenomena that is observed by.... what ?

You can't fool me young man.  It's turtles all the way down!
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Not two, not one, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 12:48 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 12:48 PM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

Posts: 1038 Join Date: 7/13/17 Recent Posts
Edward:
i've never understood what not self vs no self distinction is supposed to mean. Everything is not self is logically equivalent There is no self.

The five clinging aggregates are not self. But there is a moment by moment flow of dependently arising experience within a particular frame of reference. It's the ripples on the ocean. Not the ocean. Not the rhythm of the waves. Not the wind.  :-) 
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Stickman2, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 1:24 PM
Created 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 1:24 PM

RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

Posts: 375 Join Date: 7/24/17 Recent Posts
Chris Marti:
They say that language defines reality, so if I say I quoted Curious accurately then it is so. In the beginning was the word.... emoticon

And to think I took you seriously there for a minute  emoticon



No no no, I have it on Great Authority, by people at [hushed awe] Harvard, that this is so. I, personally, define, or rather, socially construct, Harvard as a orphaned hedgehog sanctuary, and it's amazing what hedgehogs come up with.
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Linda ”Polly Ester” Ö, modified 4 Years ago at 6/19/19 8:17 PM
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RE: RE: Daniel Ingram on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast: new terrain!

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curious:
Edward:
i've never understood what not self vs no self distinction is supposed to mean. Everything is not self is logically equivalent There is no self.

The five clinging aggregates are not self. But there is a moment by moment flow of dependently arising experience within a particular frame of reference. It's the ripples on the ocean. Not the ocean. Not the rhythm of the waves. Not the wind.  :-) 


That’s beautiful!

And I love the humor of this thread.

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