We were also responding to another one of "Edg walks into a bar"
moments. IOW, it was as if Edg was walking into a bar, waving his arms
and shouting and the clientèle saying "WTF!" Of course if it really was
a bar he would have been promptly shown the door. :-D
On 12/16/2014 03:12 PM, anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] wrote:
What I wrote was a discussion, not a prescription. By your own
admission, narcissism would be your main stumbling block. We all tend
to believe what we think is true, but how often does that work out?
Agreeing and disagreeing is just giving yourself strokes. By the way,
I have never done a koan. I had an interest in Zen, but was never a
practitioner, that was just an exercise in analysis.
Note, that to Barry, a narcissist is meat grinder fodder. I have a
theory (it is 'just a theory' kind of theory rather than the
scientific kind), and that is some people think brilliantly and
quickly; others less brilliantly and less quickly, and it takes those
longer to learn things, but maybe they can learn them if they slow
down a bit. I think more quickly and deeply than some, and yet there
are those that can think circles around me. So with them I have to
slow down and be more deliberate to find out if I can match them or
not. And sometimes it comes out on the not side.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
See? See? NOW THIS IS A PROPER FFL RESPONSE. I might sorta disagree
with a lot of it, but man o man does it give you a challenge to shore
up your axioms.....or change. Nice.
I don't think I'm a cultist -- may not ever actually have been one in
my true-believer days -- narcissism protects me from a lot of that
kind of "tar baby caught" mind traps. Narcissism always has me
believing MY thoughts and dwelling within them to excess -- makes it
hard to listen to anyone, and so when someone like Nisargadatta CAN
break into my me-cave and keblammo my most loved axioms and scatter
them like bowling pins, it attracts me like a 20 year old redhead.
However, if not a cultist, I am a fool who pursues folly like a dog
going after a pretendedly-thrown ball.
So, maybe not much of a diff -- I walked talked and quaked (Howard the
Initiator) as a role instead of as a brainwashed zombie.
As for the wonderful koan concept being inserted into this discussion,
I say, neat trick! It does seem to gather some loose ends into a nice
knot. But maybe it's a Gordian, maybe it's a Windsor....just sayin'.
Ha ha.
First of all, I'm not a spiritual practitioner. I read Nisargadatta
here and there -- sometimes not, sometimes a lot -- mostly on a daily
basis. My intent is to see if I agree -- if so, then I read on. If
not, I will read that again and again until I reach clarity. I've
gone days on just a couple of sentences that "didn't feel right." Not
obsessed, but having some perplexity peppering my day. Even at this
late stage, Nisargadatta says stuff that is not intuitively obvious to
me -- not a surprise -- and so I get to gnaw on stuff until it's
swallowable.
But I don't do Zen. I'm not trying to evolve anymore. I don't know
if koans actually have any spiritual worth, but some folks claim big
for it. Go for it, says me, but nope not for me. My intellectual
clarity is NOT much of a tool, but it does keep me having to read
the-rest-of-a-paragraph in a lot of essays. Mix up awareness and
consciousness, and I just don't have the time to see if you DO have
clarity about anything else. It's a rough filter, but that's what I do.
And thank you again, Anartaxius -- I haven't got your intellect, so I
consider it a favor that you've stopped to lend a hand. Put a merit
badge on your Brownie sash!
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote :
The human mind cannot parse infinity, or infinities. The awareness
versus consciousness issue is the goad for the 'path of
enlightenment'. It shows up in various guises.
* Reality versus illusion
* Absolute versus relative
* Consciousness versus 'pure' consciousness
* Silence versus thought
* Being versus action
* Unity versus diversity
* God versus person hood
* Enlightenment versus ignorance
These kinds of statements are really subterfuge koans. Statements that
defy logic, but seem on the surface to be logical, as if they are
somehow meaningful in terms of 'what really is'.
The human mind has a gravitational pull toward connectedness, seeing
similarities, giving us an intuitive (if not necessarily correct)
sense that the universe is somehow all of one piece and together.
After all, we see it as somehow all together. As we navigate this
place, we have to account for the differences we see. The mind is
pretty good at this too. It is just when it tries to parse the whole
thing all at once, it runs into the logical stumbling block, because
parsing means to split.
So when we come across a phrase, as in Nisargadatta, that awareness is
not equivalent to consciousness, the mind is led on its merry way, and
if it is considered important enough, it will not stop trying to parse
the difference. If one defines awareness = consciousness, no problem,
no need to think about it, one less problem to solve. Consciousness or
consciousness/awareness by itself is a thorny enough issue alone.
These phrases in the spiritual trade are what in script and fiction
writing is called the MacGuffin, the elusive goal of the protagonist
(and other characters in the story as well) are pursuing. The focus of
attention. A MacGuffin is not necessarily germane to the plot, which
in this case is your traverse of life. Except in the spiritual trade,
the goal is a unity, so parsing is contrary to the goal, but that is
just what a koan does, it gives the mind a problem to solve that has
no rational solution, but it is short enough that the mind can
manipulate it easily. Thus, by being handed a longer, more seemingly
relaxed paradox, you are being deliberately misled. While this may
seem pointless, or even possibly malicious, if it goes on long enough
one of three things will happen.
* You will tire of it and give up.
* Or, if you are somewhat dull, you will pursue the idea until you
die, and that means you are religious or a cultist, and
unthinkingly enamoured and obsessed to a lesser or greater degree.
* Or, at some point the mind short circuits and realises it has been
had, because it sees the 'unity' was always there and it
completely missed it because it was making up shit about it, often
with a little help from friends, well wishers, and other
interested parties who likewise have been caught in, or exploit
the making up shit spiral.
The first and third outcomes result in people leading normal, probably
fairly well-balanced lives. The second outcome though results in
people trapped in a world of fantasy so deeply entrenched it leads to
a least annoyance to the the fairly well balanced types, and sometimes
to death, as in the case in the past few days of that nut case in
Sydney, Australia, who was trapped in a religious fantasy. (Note: I
was watching a new panel discussion about the self-styled Muslim
cleric who took hostages, and the one of the panellists made that
comment that 'this situation has nothing to do with religion'!)
The basic difference between these phrases and a 'real' koan is the
non-rationality of the structure is hidden by a long chain of
inferences so it seems to be a plausible statement to a mind looking
for a way out of whatever predicament it is imagining it is in at the
moment. One might call these ideas and their supporting arguments
'long-form koans'. I am not saying one should avoid doing this, as
this kind of thinking might lead to a more fulfilling life somehow,
but that in the back of your mind it might be worthwhile to keep in
mind that someone might be playing a trick on you, and that person
might not be someone else.
