Michael writes:
> I simply don't believe this claim.
I know that LOL. What interets me is the basis for your rejection of this claim. You never offer any evidence that what I am saying is false.
> Do you accept the ban on gay marriage? Would you accept the loss of your right to vote?
No and no. But the fact that I want gay marriage and the right to vote does not impact the veracity of the principle of no-self.
> Why do you describe yourself as a resister, if you accept limited freedoms?
Because if I didn't resist there would be no freedom at all. I have always believed that those who fetishize choice/individualism are overreacting to the determinism of much of Abrahamic philosophy and the oppression of church rule in Europe during previous centuries. Faced with one extreme, they swung to another. Neither is very useful since both are based on misconceptions of reality.
Something Viktor Frankl once wrote impressed me a great deal. A human being he said has free choice in two areas: a) the attitude he displays to the hand he is dealt in life and b) how he plays the hand.
> If the self is merely an illusion, why worry about what happens to your self in any area?
Because I exist. I have never denied my existence; I have merely asserted that I have no-self.
Tahir writes:
> "Illusion of self"? When the torturer tortures and the tortured screams where is the illusion of self?
A person being tortured still has no-self. When I was passing a kidney stone and in great pain, I still had no self. When I have an orgasm with my husband, I still have no-self.
How is having no-self inconsistent with feeling pain when tortured?
> Do both feel each other's pain?
No, unfortunately. If they did torture would never happen. But it is individualism that permits torture to arise: the pain is being inflicted on another, therefore, since it is not happening to me it is okay.
But even the way you write that sentence shows how much you have bought into dualistic thinking and individualism. "Each other's pain" In order to have an "other" there has to be a self to contrast it with. On one level of reality there is Tahir and there is Brian; on another there is no such distinction. Now the first level is the easiest one to live on. It is the level of attachment to desires. It is the one that needs capitalism in order to satisfy those desires. It is the level that permits torture.
The other level of reality is the one a Buddhist would call the true level of reality as opposed to the "illusory" one we experience in our ignorance. Again, Nagarjuna's The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way will explain this much better than I will.
> Thanks, but I'm going to try to look after my little "self" as long as I've still got it. Communism to me means the full emancipation of individuality, which I feel is denied under capitalism.
What does it mean to fully emancipate an individual?
> I want much more self, not less.
What does it mean to have/want more self? Are there advantages to having more self? If yes, what are they? Is self an unfixed attribute that changes over time?
Dennis writes:
> . . . but I suspect that Brian, believing that this world is illusion, understands that the pain of flesh is "real," as is "death," would not dismiss the cries of the tortured.
A small correction. I do not believe that the world is illusion. If I get up from my desk and hit my knee on the corner of it, I feel pain. Because of ignorance most human being misperceive the world and that misperception is what is illusory. What we do in order to maintain this illusory sense of self and world is where our troubles begin.
Dwayne writes:
> It's my understanding the issue is not that the self is an "illusion" as it is impermanent and unfixed, subject to change depending upon ever shifting conditions which shape our perceptions and responses.
Exactly.
> Non-Buddhists have similar concepts explaining this observation but, unlike Buddhist thought, don't follow them to their logical conclusions regarding the nature of the self.
I had never viewed it this way; it is an improvement on what I thought.
> For example, what happened to the self I was at age 16? We say that I 'grew up' or evolved into adulthood,
leaving behind my teen self via time and experience.
Exactly. Where is the 16 year-old Brian? He existed. But now he doesn't. How can that be if there is a permanent self.
> We're comfortable with the notion of change over time but not with the idea that our personalities may be
fundamentally composed of fragile and ever re-arranged thought objects.
I have found that the greatest resistance to Buddhist thought is the notion of no-self. I have witnessed people have severe adverse reactions to this concept. The notion of selfhood is so ingrained from the beginning of our lives -- a sense of soul, of being unique, different -- that by the time we come of age where we can question such assumptions, the ideas are accepted as reality.
Instead of questioning these concepts, we set about reinforcing them with materialisms, like hiding a hole in your pants or a run in your stocking with gloves, books, newspapers, etc. The hole is still there, it is merely covered up. Better yet we buy a new pair of pants, but the same problem can crop up again: another hole. What did Eliot write: against these fragments I have shored my ruins (something like that).
We never acknowledge empty nature of existence. Instead we try to counterbalance it with increasing materialisms and notions of individualism.
Ted writes:
> I think it depends on what's meant by "illusion of the self." If this involves as its ideal the dissolution of a particular kind of self, it's consistent in this respect with the view of the ideal I would attribute to Marx. This isn't so if it involves dissolution of the self per se, however.
It involves the dissolution of self in any form. How would you define self?
> Still another would be to transform the temptation into, among other things, greed and a sadistic obsessional approach to "knowing" as in the scientific materialist conception of "science" dominant in "modernity" (the response of a somewhat stronger but still immature fragmented narcissistic self).
As a Buddhist I would say that a person is trying to fend off any inklings or knowledge of the non-existence of self. Hence, the continual and increasing purchase of material objects used to reinforce the material self (which of course doen't exist). Capitalism is the economic system devised to facilitate this erroneous behavior.
> At the other end of this continuum is the strong, integrated rational ego accepting its own mortality and seeking union through rational knowing and acting, the highest form of this union being union with other selves in relations of mutual recognition.
My Buddhist take would be that the union is already there. One does not need so much to seek it out as to clear away the debris of materialism and materialistic thinking from in front of the windshield. The state of mutual recognition is the Buddhist notion of the co-dependent origination of reality. As a Buddhist I accept the fact that I die every nanosecond.
> This seems to me to be Marx's idea of the actualized human "essence."
I do not know Marx well enough, but that might correspond to the concept of buddha nature (which I am still learning about and not sure I agree with).
Ian writes:
> As if living had only one point or purpose.
I do not think we can determine the purpose of life, but I do think that we can through observation see what people do in their lives. From my own observation combined with what I have read, people spend a great amount of time trying to avoid suffering.
>From a Buddhist standpoint, I also observe that most of what people do only increases suffering rather than relieve it.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister