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Old 02-01-2020, 07:39 AM
Phaelyn Phaelyn is offline
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I would also point out as far as Anatta, and The absence of a self something or someone is without this self. If this perceiver did not exist, a teaching like Anatta would be pointless, in fact the entirety of Buddhism would be pointless as there would be no one and nothing existing to practice it, study it, learn from it etc. No one to end suffering in, no one to be suffering, no one to experience nirvana or liberation, no one to be enlightened. No-self is not being properly translated into English either in my opinion.

So obviously if something is there to be enlightened or not enlightened, Buddhism does not deny a consciousness or the perceiver or even a soul. Soul is another word that is not being translated correctly into the English definition. I think the correct English translation of Buddhism into English would be our entire identity is false or delusional because we have mistaken the self made up by thoughts and memory and habitual thinking etc to be the actual self, and we can live more happily and peacefully without identifying with these things as ourselves. The word "ego" for this false self comes close but it is actually more than we normally associate with that word.

Buddhism would say all ego based interpretation is also false or delusional as the ego construct is false. How we "picture" our structure is false. Buddhism takes it to the extreme and asks one to stop all identification with the interpreter but then without consciousness itself discerning the false from the true, liberation could not take place, so there is "interpretation" going on. But the difference is one kind of interpretation has it's source as the ego and thought and the other source is experiential knowledge. This leads to the conclusion that "consciousness" or the "perceiver" is a lot more complex than we assume it to be. Consciousness itself is a kind of "self" or identity and it has qualities, like awareness and understanding and knowledge in varying degrees and all of this would survive the death of the body. One could even argue consciousness has "personality."
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