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Originally Posted by Gem
and it's ironic that they are considered nouns, really.
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Yeah - Atta is of the domain of inference - not pure experience.
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Originally Posted by Gem
The word 'anatta' (Pali) comes from the older sanskrit word 'anatman'
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The greatest misconception and misapprehension that is found in Buddhism. The source of all useless and exhausting speculations that have filled pages of nonsense.
Sorry about that; but it is the fact of a Buddhism that refuses to study the narrative of the time. A Buddhism that refuses to handle the categories and the concepts behind the terms. A Buddhism that refuses to remove the useless and effete content that is in the container (that does not really represent the words in the Teaching,) and to come up with what was in that container in the time of Buddha (and before).
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Originally Posted by Gem
Not the no-self, but the knowledge that is the distinction between what occurs as a thought and the enduring quality that sees that thought come and go.
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As an Aussie, you must know about David Chalmers and his Qualia?
Personnaly, I consider the mental (Mana) as something uninteresting per se. And although I find the Belgian guy in the Meditations (one of the interlocutor of Descartes,) as one of the most brilliant philosopher ever!. I am mostly interested in going further up into the search of the unmanifested, so to speak. For I have reached the total casting out of the mind on many occasions and the promises are very enticing.
Don't get me wrong. I love to discuss things of the mind (citta,) of the mental (mano) and of consciousness (viññāṇa;)
but I would like also to go further into the qualities and properties of this illusory self as not-perception, etc.
And I must confess that if were to discuss these subjects of the mind, it would be purely to show the mere annoyance of it all. About the necessity of this annoyance. About this painful byproduct of dependant origination.
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Originally Posted by Gem
Buddhists do have a self, but unlike the concept of 'ego' which is a noun that refers to an entity, the Buddhist considers this self to be a conditioned process or action or reaction and frames it as a verb, and by cultivating equinimity or dispassion, the mind naturally tends toward the passiveness of being, which is birthless and deathless, or what might be called 'the eternal soul' in other religions.
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I agree in a way. (see further down the analogy of the spectator and the dancer)
The self is the "influence" (at bare level,) that ends in the Ego (through the processes of dependant origination and aggregations).
The self is the process of pervasiveness that starts
with the influence and ends
in the Ego. It is not really the Ego, but a contributor (so it is not wrong to call it so, although it is not the Ego in its entirety).
As far as an Equanimity seen as the "mother of deathlessness;" Buddha would have told you: "there is still, in what you say, something that belongs to this world; and that holds you to death and rebirth".
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Originally Posted by Gem
I struggle with terms like 'the illusion' or or 'the illusory self' because illusion refers to something seems like a thing, but it's not the thing it seems to be
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It is not a mirage. It is like the influence that a spectator has on a dancer, (who (to make it even simpler) does not see the spectator, because of the spotlight, although he feels his presence.)
Yet, this "influence," [that is some sort of "illusion of the spectator" for the dancer,] is more than just the "stuff" that triggers the dance. It is the flowing aggregation of this "influence" with the all performance of the actor. It is the dancing AND the influence alltogether. The self (or Atta) is the "influence" of the spectator that turns somewhat real, when aggregated to the dancing. It is the ego of the dancer that builds up.
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Originally Posted by Gem
there isn't anything that is actual, there is only what appears to be as it appears.
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That sounds much like Third Period Buddhism, a.k.a. Bahya-artha-sunyata (Gupta era (roughly 4th - 5th century CE)) -
Idealism.
You should read Stcherbatsky's Buddhist logic.
But this is not pristine Buddhism as taught by Buddha. Pristine Buddhism was this at the beginning:
- It was the ideal of a human Buddha who disappears completely in a lifeless Nirvana.
- An egoistic ideal of a personal Salvation.
- A radical Pluralism.
- The physical and mental elements established by this pluralism, being real interrelated elements, or cooperating forces.
- A classification of these elements into five groups (skandha), twelve bases of our cognition (dyatana) and eighteen component parts of individual lives (dhatu).
- An ultimate reality of these elements.
- And Causality as the functional interdependence of every element upon all the others; and not as the production of something out of other things.
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but the knowledge that is the distinction between what occurs as a thought and the enduring quality that sees that thought come and go.
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The gist of it all.
The distinction (the dancing) that is born from the encounter between 1. the self (the influence of the Self (the spectator)) and 2. the Ego less the influence (the dancer). The aggregation born of dependant origination (which implies distinction and aggregation).
Then what occurs, is the dancing (done by the dancer under influence) - the Thought.
And the quality that sees what comes and go is the self (a self that is both the influence of the
Self per se, AND the
self (influence of the Self, within the Ego). - Enduring for a while though (as far as Buddhism is concerned).
So, if you were to put that in the view of some Searle or Patricia Churchland; it should be seen only from the point of view of an Ego, without self, whose "qualia" (for instance) would be purely neurological (a materialistic view).
But Buddhism is not a materialistic philosophy.
So you must see it from a Chalmers point of view. A Chalmers that say: "But where does this unexplainable qualia come from?" - However, what Chalmers does not grasp is that a "stuff" like qualia is not either neurological or a "something coming out of nowhere." But both, so to speak.
Hope that helps.
Linear Mode
