William,
Bill! may answer just as he will.
I'd say that the people you work with, William, may never have realized their
Buddha nature if they have not ever practiced.
It takes practice of a suitable sort to awaken. Not *just* a lack of
intellectual functioning in the moment.
Nor do people awaken to Buddha Nature when they are anesthetized, while the
intellect sleeps.
I doubt that Bill! is saying that people with little going on upstairs or who
have become progressively demented have an easier time in awakening.
I would say that such a person would still need to practice. And it might be
difficult for them to encounter practice if they need to be cared for by
others, in a milieu where Zen practice would not be an entry high up on the
list of medical or other services that these people require. No, it would
never ever appear on the list.
I'll put it bluntly in this way: No practice, No awakening.
If none of the one, then none of the other.
So, what's the hindrance from the intellect? Simply, when, and while the
intellect is functioning actively, one does not awaken. When one is thinking,
one is in, or on, or of, the relative plane. But when the intellect does not
interject and interfere by its movements and its taking center-stage, only the
original mind is left.
In a demented person, even if the intellect is largely lost, I think the
connection to the original mind is blocked by some short-circuited element, or
orphan process, or thread of the intellect.
In the demented person, perhaps some intellectual process refuses to cease, or
cannot cease, like the HAL-9000 in the movie 2001. It had to be removed, by
"Dave".
In the case of the demented person, the person is stuck. And can not only not
express himself/herself, but cannot wake up, either, because some remnant of
the intellect has its foot in the door and will not allow that door to close
naturally.
That door can close naturally in a healthy person, who practices in proper ways
and has cooperating circumstances.
The demented person may thus not be ABLE to practice, and practice in any case
is probably not offered to the person, so practice is or becomes moot.
BTW, in a healthy-brained person, even once the door closes, the intellect may
still enter in again. Sometimes all too soon. Other times, one goes for very
lengthy periods, awake, and also enjoys completely dreamless sleep, for weeks
or months.
Through continued practice, one can use everything freely, and never stick
anywhere. The intellect can be raised and used and lowered, like a shop-window
cover, opened and allowed to rest again; it need not always be spinning its
wheels uselessly, generating phantoms, and wasting gas. It can be our TOOL: It
is NOT "us".
And, so we practice!
By Intellect, I mean the active reasoning faculty. I do not mean Memory!
Bill! may have his own ideas. He usually does, I'm glad to see.
Best,
--Joe
> William Rintala <brintala@...> wrote:
>
> Pardon my insistence here. Bill's posts below he states that "An autistic
> person can certainly realize Buddha Nature since that only requires
> sentient-ness, not any intellectual quality" and I infer that the Rational
> mind
> is similarly a hinderence since he states that "'perceptions' IMO are the
> concepts (illusions) created by our discriminating, rational mind (intellect)
> which post-processes experience with such rational actions as filtering,
> augmenting, categorizing, evaluating, etc..." . In my work I see many
> people
> with advanced dementia/Alzheimer's. These people are sentientand their
> egos,
> memories and intellect have all been stripped away. Have they realized
> buddahood? If not then what else remains to hinder that from happening? Or
> conversely what has been lost that prevents it?
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