Shrug, I’ve run many times into Protestants who tried to explain Catholicism to me. It’s not limited to “exotic” religions.
Spell this out for me. Describe someone you’d say is living in reality; tell me what you figure a typical month would look like for them. Do they eat and drink? Do they sleep? And, sure, broad strokes, here, but: what, exactly, would they do?
It has to fit. Buddhism exists because of compassion, in that the Buddha turned away from Nirvana to teach only because of his compassion for the suffering of others. It’s a fundamental concept. If someone’s understanding of Buddhism doesn’t include compassion, then their understanding is incomplete, and flawed.
I know that you are just going to run with your own personal interpretation of Buddhism, regardless of what anyone says, and that’s fine. But I am stressing this aspect of compassion to you, because you are hurting yourself, and it is hard to watch and say nothing. Meditation on compassion helped me enormously when I suffered from that existential hopelessness that you can get from Buddhist meditation. And I want to emphasize that it is scripturally sound.
Your going to the extreme but I cannot remember a time in my life when the sight of a womans breasts didnt excite me. I think it’s built in. Nobody hat to tell me a womans body isnt attractive.
I prefer the less crude phrase of the same meaning: “you do you.”
And what behaviors were you unavoidably compelled to engage in because you found them attractive?
Just what I was thinking. Opening this thread was completely worthwhile because I ran across this nugget of pure gold.
And? If you went to work for Stalin, that would also require that you give up a lot for it.
If there’s some benefit from Buddhism to the self, then that person should still be in some way saner, grander, or otherwise an improved human being over others. A novice should still approach that direction, even if they don’t arrive at the end point just as a person who practices running will be better at running than a couch potato even if they still can’t come close to Usain Bolt.
Or, even to take the worst case and assume that it’s a binary switch where you suddenly go from nothing to all, and there’s never any slightest good that happens because of training Buddhism in the middle territory, that would still mean that some percentage of people, both now and through history, would have existed who had become enlightened and walked among the others. We would expect those to be influential people with a positive effect on the rest of society. Buddhist societies, by influence of these individuals should have been improved compared to Christian and Muslim and Incan, etc.
If you feel like a superhero who has discovered the truth, but you can’t seem to do anything positive for the world, then you’re simply an expert at self-delusion.
If you can train yourself to slow down your heart and raise your body temperature, your can train yourself to believe that you’re the best thing in the world and that you know something that others do not.
There is only one way to discern between good and self-delusion, and that is by being able to observe goodness. If you can’t see it appear then, regardless of how certain that person is of their greatness, all that has been proven is that they are a person who is personally convinced of his own greatness.
And if it is a binary switch then, unless you succeed at finding truth, you will have wasted all of that time, when you could have spent it saving babies from burning buildings. And if your first act after enlightenment isn’t to go save babies, then truth looks a whole lot like sociopathy.
Isn’t there a term for “doing yourself?”
Yes, you should forget all of it. You misunderstand it completely and have only retained the pieces that make you miserable. Walk away.
Of course it is.
Walk away from what you think you’re chasing, walk where your feet take you. Only then will you be on the path to enlightenment.
If I had a dollar every time I heard that!
Whoever thought up that load of malarkey spent far to much time meditating and not enough time masturbating.
It isn’t Buddhism that is keeping you from being happy. It’s that you are picking out parts of it that you don’t understand and using them to make yourself miserable.
Regards,
Shodan
He’s only happy when it rains.
Not an illusion, just virtual.
Is there really much difference?
I’ve seen it said that we are now living in an age of do it yourself syncretic religions. Meaning that people cherry pick and then mix and match from all the established religions, and maybe from some that aren’t. It is a matter of endless debate as to whether or not you should experience or study religion by yourself, or under the guidance of an existing practitioner / priest / monk/ teacher. The latter approach can avoid some of the intellecctual pitfalls and misunderstandings, given that religion is in effect self-created anyway and every religion ends up splintering into factions, often warring.
Perhaps coincidentally, this thread turned up at the same time as the one who atheists and god? Is this proof of god’s existence by the two threads being complementary, a sheer coincidence, or quantum mechanics in action? Bewildered minds need to know.
No - he’s a miserable person who’s using bits and pieces of Buddhism to justify his own misery.
I mean technically it is because the ultimate truth that they look at is that there is no babies to save, no death, or birth, no self or other, no sexuality, that is ultimate reality.
I’m not doing this because I want to be miserable, I would drop this in a heartbeat if it were wrong. But it’s not wrong and that is what hurts. The fact that much of what I loved in life is an illusion or a lie hurts, and I just can’t un-see or un know what Buddhism told me.