Steve, perhaps anartaxius has staked out a brilliant position with regard to waking state. You know, the one where we have static beliefs, and play a stupid game of duality. So what? Enlightenment is BY ITS VERY NATURE, non-attachment, and so these types of carefully crafted scenarios, designed to challenge one side of a duality, don't mean jack to an enlightened person.
An enlightened person can obviously express an idea, in the moment, but to try to hold onto a belief, is impossible. The nervous system no longer supports it. Beliefs are used as crutches, and an enlightened person doesn't need crutches. It is a different way of functioning than before. Less thought - more silence, and more direct action. The integration of the subjective and the objective; always a proponent of Reality. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <steve.sundur@...> wrote : Damn, nothing like bring the conversation down to earth. I find it both readable and interesting. I think it is one thing to be the devils advocate, which is a means to have someone defend, or clarify their position. It is quite another thing to engage in cavil, or at least misrepresentations for the purposes of getting a rise out of people, or really, to just elevate one's point of view. You obviously see the dynamics here differently, which is fine, but at least you've staked out your position, and I respect you for that. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Ann, at least took the time to write more than a couple of one liners. I do indeed think Barry makes up stuff to meet his own agenda. Don't we all. Jim makes up all sorts of stuff too. I make up stuff. Most of what others write about Barry, including me is stuff they make up. Our minds are good a fabricating shit. It is a necessary skill in order for it to attempt to figure out the world. I do not see that Jim, for example, is making up less than Barry. One of the primary ways to go after someone's beliefs is to be a contrarian, to deliberately state you think the opposite of what the other guy or gal thinks, even if you do not really believe that. Now this is objectionable to some. I do not object to Barry because I don't see him and other people really as persons, they are objects in my field of experience. On FFL, everyone is a text object in my field of experience. My body is an object in my field of experience. Now calling everyone, you even, as an object does not mean I, in person, will interact with you as if you were an inanimate object. I can hold conversations, more or less. I tend not to like small talk. People here mostly talk about how other people behave, which I find boring. There are few substantive conversations. Curtis is good for a substantive argument. Barry less so, he does not seem to have a lot of patience, so if you want to communicate with Barry, you have to be succinct, not like me, but one or two line retorts like Jim fires off are mindless, they usually show no deep thought. People on the Internet are not necessarily the same as they are in person. Distance and anonymity, the lack of physical contact allows certain darker sides of our personalities shine. Most of what I think of others would probably seem very strange to those others. Jim says certain things about others, and I don't see it at all; Judy did this all the time. Barry does it too. The target of such comments almost invariable say that is not what they think. So the real question, as I see it, is why do we think what we think is true, and so little of what others say they think, especially about us, we think is false? This mismatch of reality among we human beings is rampant. One needs a certain flexibility to deal with it without going nuts. There is a woman here with me; we have very divergent views on many things, often including the nature of enlightenment, but we get along pretty well and have for some time. I make up stuff all the time to puncture her belief system, she calls me a contrarian, but the trick is to make her laugh, to see the absurdity of a position. I doubt very much Barry is as serious about what he says as most people on this forum take things. he has been beaten around by the spiritual con as much as any here, but unlike you, Jim, and others, I think he understands the spiritual con better than most. Barry does repeat many themes many many times. For all I know he could be a computer. There have been experiments on the Internet where a computer program posts to social forums and people think it is a real person. I tend to like people who have good intellects rather than emotional responses. These tend to be people who have much more slack in their belief systems, are willing to consider themselves idiots at times, and to consider the status quo, or the prevailing peer paradigm as potentially bonkers. You seem much more a people person than I am. Also, I like much smaller mammals than you do, ones that can't kill you, and which require low maintenance. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <awoelflebater@...> wrote : This is a non starter Xeno for one simple and real reason: bawee never speaks to what people actually believe - he simply makes stuff up to fit his own agenda. Consequently you have taken all this time to write a small essay and it is groundless because your first premise is out to lunch possibly, and most likely, as a result of the fact that you simply don't read bawee's post carefully enough to have figured this small factoid out. Xeno, 99% of what bawee claims people believe is not what they believe at all. When I and others object to his never-ending tirades saying the same thing over and over and over again it is not because he is attacking our beliefs, it is because he makes up stuff about what he thinks various people actually believe and it is all BS to suit his self-centered agenda. I object to the person bawee, not to any 'attacks on my beliefs'. He has no interest in what anyone really thinks, he simply gets off on tooting his horn as the 'independent thinker' who isn't subject (in his own fantasy world) to any dogma or run-of-the-mill paradigms. You certainly don't 'get' him at all Xeno. There is only one thing to know here - bawee is all about bawee. He doesn't give a crap about anyone else; his advice, his opinion doesn't seek to enlighten anyone or to encourage dialogue it exists only to allow him a platform on which to stand and watch himself pontificate. The guy is a bore. The fact that you took the time to try and convince anyone here of any other possibility is only going to make you look silly. So, as much as I'd like to address the rest of your post here I can't because I don't think you have a real clue about what you are talking about in this instance.
