"Discussing illusions plays such a big role in the Perfection of Wisdom literature because the Buddhist texts state that there is a close connection between the existence of illusion and the existence of suffering. According to the Buddhist worldview, the existence of suffering is neither a necessary feature of the world nor the consequence of a specific fact about the past (such as the fall of Adam), but is rather due to an intellectual error that is mistaken about the way things exist. Suffering is produced by a wrong view of the world, a view that is in fact so much part and parcel of our habitual way of thinking that we are not aware of its perspectival nature any more. More worryingly, the mere intellectual insight into its falsity does not mean that the illusion goes away, in the same way that mere intellectual insight that the two line in the diagram below are the same length does not alter the fact that the lower line appears to be longer.
<---------> >---------< "That's why the absence of suffering last night seemed so ominous and her change to what looked like suffering today gave Phaedrus a feeling she was getting better. If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Suffering is the negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process. All these battles between patterns of evolution go on within suffering individuals like Lila. And Lila's battle is everybody's battle, you know?"-Lila "Another immoral way of killing the static patterns is to pass the patterns to someone else, in what Phaedrus called a 'karma dump.' You invent a devil group, Jews or blacks or whites or capitalists or communists - it doesn't matter - then say that group is responsible for all your suffering, and then hate it and try to destroy it. On a daily personal level everyone has things or people they hate and blame for their suffering and this hatred and blame brings a kind of relief."-Lila ... "The aim of the Buddhist enterprise is therefore not just to show that all things are like illusions because the way they appear is different from the way they are. Its aim is to bring about a complete change in how we perceive and conceptualize phenomena. In this way ignorance is cleared away and, one hopes, suffering will completely disappear." (Westerhoff, Jan, 'Twelve Examples of Illusion) > Marsha: > I suggest the primary goal of RMP for the West, with his presentation of the >MoQ, is to overcome a subject-object-metaphysics. Has this topic become >unplugged? > ___ 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 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
