--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradh...@...> wrote: > > On Feb 14, 2009, at 1:06 PM, TurquoiseB wrote: > > > I'm trying to "pin down" what the thinking is that > > leads people to do this -- announce their enlight- > > enment and then act as if the Big E gives them a > > Karmic Get Out Of Jail Free card, and that they no > > longer have any responsibility for their actions > > from that point onwards. > > From both a Buddhist/Abhidharma perspective and an Advaita > Vedanta perspective it appears to be a confusion and/or failure > to experientially grok the Two Truths, the relative and the > absolute.
This is my opinion as well. Well said. The "failure to take responsibility" is often based, IMO, on an actual *disdain* for the relative. It isn't real. It's Maya. Who the fuck *cares* about these figments of the imag- ination we encounter in the world that they laughingly call "real?" That is the larger point I was hoping to get into with Dawn, but she bailed. This distinction between the Two Truths. IMO (and O is all that it is), when one has become so enamored of a philosophy as to believe the dogma of that philosophy over one's everyday experience, and over common sense, a boundary may have been crossed. What else could one call the belief that the world around us, the relative world we interact with daily and touch and feel and around whose events we plan our lives, is "not real?" And yet, that is the core belief driving many of the people who post to this group, as far as I can tell. It all goes back to the distinction between hierarchical and relational thinking I rapped about last week. If one believes that the description of the relative world as Maya, as "illusion," is "higher" or "more true" than the description of that world as real, then one has effectively written the relative world and its cares and responsibilities out of the equation. At the "lowest level" of one's belief system, those who believe this have bought into the belief that the relative world is on a "lower" plane. After all, it doesn't really exist. And we know this because the POV that our teacher told us was "highest" says that it doesn't really exist. Therefore, how much credence should we pay to its puny "rules and regulations?" All these other beings out there don't really exist. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke and realize that they don't exist, and only we do.
