Mark,
Who's fighting it? Certainly not me. - No one, not even neurobiologists, know what consciousness is or how it works. It probably has many co-dependent conditions, some that perhaps extend beyond brain and body. Marsha On Dec 31, 2010, at 1:59 PM, 118 wrote: > Hi Marsha, > > We could ask: Why do we differentiate the way we do? Is it not > natural? From a modern neurobiologist point of view (and invoking > your patterns), we could state that the patterns without create the > patterns within. Nerve firing and the consolidation of enforced > patterns is inherent in our thinking. The point is not to try to > escape from this, but to embrace it. The subject object divide is not > our enemy, it is our friend. We can fight this all we want with other > patterns, but this is counter intuitive. Recognizing that brings more > harmony. > > Cheers, > Mark > > On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 10:44 AM, MarshaV <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Since static quality and Buddhism's conventional truths are synonymous, let >> me add two more quotes: >> >> "There are different domains of relativity ... Such truths are contingent >> upon perspective. This routes us back to a central issue of Buddhism: >> reification. Reification is taking something that is true relative to >> ourselves and believing it to be true independently of ourselves." >> (Wallace, B. Alan, Buddhism with an Attitude, p.138) >> >> >> "Even when the mind is settled in meditative stabilization without human >> conceptual constructs, it is not considered by Buddhist contemplatives to be >> entirely free of all traces of conceptualization. One's inborn sense of a >> reified self as the observer and the reified sense of the duality between >> subject and object are still present, even though they may be dormant while >> in meditation; and when one emerges from this nonconceptual state, the mind >> may still grasp onto all phenomena, including consciousness itself, as being >> real, inherently existing entities. To penetrate to the fundamental nature >> of appearances and their relation to consciousness, it is said that one must >> go beyond meditative stabilization and engage in training for the >> cultivation of contemplative insight." >> (Wallace, B. Alan, 'The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of >> Consciousness', p.112) >> >> >> >> >> >> On Dec 31, 2010, at 1:07 PM, MarshaV wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> >>> From a review of the book ‘Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground’. >>> >>> How do we deal with the complexity of experience? Well, we 'seek and find, >>> or project, a simplifying pattern to approximate every complex field ... by >>> lumping (ignoring some distinctions as negligible) and by splitting >>> (ignoring some relations as negligible). Both ... create discreet entities >>> useful for manipulating, predicting and controlling ... [but] may impose ad >>> hoc boundaries on what are actually densely interconnected systems and then >>> grant autonomous existence to the segments. Even the contents of our own >>> consciousness have to be dealt with in this way, resulting in our array of >>> fragmented self-concepts, and we just put up with the anomalies that arise. >>> Buddhism, he explains, agrees that discovering entities is conventionally >>> indispensable, but attachment and aggression arise through reifying them, >>> which violates the principle that all things are interdependent, and all >>> entities are conditional approximations." >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> http://www.westernbuddhistreview.com/vol4/buddhism_and_science.html >>> ___ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
