Can we link back to this the next time you venture into a thread about Christianity? 
That flag and wind thing is actually an authentic Zen proverb. It’s not meant to be taken as a claim that the flag and the wind literally don’t exis (actually what the proverb says is that the flag aned thw wind don’t move). It’s a statement that the perception – the concept of “movement” is a construct of the intellect – an imposition of consciousness, of meaning, of categorization – that would not exist without consciousness. It’s somewhat similar to the old “tree in the forest” gag. It’s got a hint of quantum physics in it too (nothing exists until we perceive it).
We’re talking about actual experiences, not ideas or beliefs. Beliefs come into play only when attempts are made to explain them.
Sure. For the record, I think that Christian mystic and visionary experiences access pretty much the same state of consciousness. It just gets interpreted differently. William James talke about it as the universal religious experience. The people who really get blown out tend to go beyond specific doctrine and get left with he “we are all one” kind of vibe. Sometimes, both historically and presently, this aspect of the experience has made them reluctant to talk about it becuase it can be seen as heretical.
I also think Jesus was a mystic, by the way. Mohammed too.
As long as we are agreed that there is no magic involved, I think your points are well made all along this thread.
It is when the jump is made to something going on beyond the physical processes in the brain that the slide into nuttiness and error begins, regardless of the underlying religion.
One can step back and see that there is a common thread among true believers throughout all successful religions: their greatest leaders and thinkers seemed to have some sort of “deeper” experience than those around them. To an objective observer this is obvious proof that they are all wrong as soon as they begin ascribing any of this deeper experience to anything outside of natural law.
I had the good fortune to be raised on the Indian subcontinent and got to see my share of holy men with assorted backgrounds. They are as nutty as anyone else’s Holy Folk. Silly little Zen anecdotes and pithy sayings bear no more relationship to the way the world works than any other religious contribution.
None of this is to say the Enlightened aren’t feeling special. Only that their enlightenment is chemically and physically based. It’s not an inside scoop on the Real Meaning of the Universe.
I was just going to say this. There’s enlightenment and there’s enlightenment. Many unenlightened people are that way because they aren’t interested in learning. I know people who NEVER watch the news, NEVER read newspapers (or anything else, for that matter) and have no interest in hearing other points of view. If you’re talking about “religious enlightenment”…'nother whole subject.
Enlightenment, Cosmic Consciousness, or the expansion of mind and perception does not belong to any religion. There are some religions that teach their followers to become enlightened through meditation. But there are many ways to become enlightened. I recall the story of the western man who went to Tibet to become enlightened. He found the most advanced Holy Man and asked him to teach. The Holy man said he didn’t have the time and sent the western man on to his students to learn. The first student told him he must forget everything he has learned to become enlightened. The second said he must learn everything there is to learn, and the third told him he was already enlightened. Angry and frustrated he went back to the Holy man and demanded to know why the students had told him conflicting ways to become enlightened. The Holy man replied "all the students were correct, “it was your impatience that defeated you.”
You don’t have to work at becoming enlightened to achieve it. Sometimes it just happens, as it did to Siddhartha, founder of Buddhism, through a near death experience. Saul (Paul) had such an experience on his way to persecute the early Christians. It happens to many through near death experiences. Other spiritual experiences can also achieve enlightenment. If you don’t want to wait you can meditate your way to enlighenment.
What is enlightenment? The discovery of yourself, who you really are and what you are doing here.
“Cosmic Consciousness” by Burke.
Meh, that’s just semantic excuse-making, like countering that there wasn’t a flagpole (and if I replied “well, if not a pole, than whatever the flag is hanging on”, the response could easily be “why do you assume the flag is hanging on anything?”). No matter what objection someone raises, the illustration is so vague that there’s always some “you don’t fully understand” escape clause.
I’d say a more useful interpretation is nothing matters until we perceive it. There could easily be life in Andromeda, but we lack the tools to detect it. Until such time, the matter is utterly irrelevant. If the monks walk over the horizon, they change their sphere of perception and the flag’s waving or non-waving (or existence and non-existence) becomes moot to them because they can no longer perceive it.
I guess the alleged wisdom of the elder monk continues to escape me. His position may as well have been expressed in solipsism argument we had a while back - an assumption that everything is (or may be) just an illusion is useless.
No. It’s not like that at all. There’s no question of physical existence in the story. No one in the story says the flag or the wind don’t exist, and it’s not really intended to be an observation about the flag at all. Its intent is to use the mpving flag illustration as a tool for triggering a cognitive change. It tries to get you to look at something in a different way, from a different angle, which will cause a reorientation in consciousness. All Zen koans are like that. None of them are really about what they’re about. On the surface, they always seem nonsensical. To use an analogy, they’re kind of like those magic eye puzzles. It’s all just colored dots until you change the way you look at it.
That’s a good way of putting it. A Zen master would then tell you that the next step is to realize that personal perceptions don’t matter.
That’s not what the monk is saying. Nothing is being called an illusion in this particular koan. There is no attempt to argue that anything isn’t real. The intent is to trigger a change in consciousness.
Then I’m fully enlightened because I understand (at least on the level of an educated lay person) the interaction of light on coloured cloth, reflected and absorbed by the eye and converted to electrical impulses that trigger elaborate sensing mechanisms in the human brain.
Heck, I grasped that as a child when I understood that light has a finite speed and when I looked at my mother across the room, I wasn’t seeing her but rather how she was some nanoseconds in the past, and even that was just light reflected and altered. In practice, though, it was easier to just treat this illusion like it was, in fact, my mother. I suppose the fact that I still remember this insight decades later means it was a small-z zen moment, a zenette, if you will.
In any case, I’ve never met a Zen koan that was nonsensical in the sense I found it utterly confusing. I’ve met many that were useless, though, and prompted the teller to add additional qualifiers when the conditions of the koan were analyzed (“well, if you want to know if the tree makes a sound, can we agree on a definition of what ‘sound’ means?”) or simply reply that any effort to analyze the koan was pointless, which strikes me as mighty convenient.
Adding a qualifier to a koan means that the teller either does not believe in your ability to understand, or his (presuming) ability to convey. In either case though, the koan i proffered isn’t about a flag waving in the wind, but, as Diogenes so eloquently pointed out, a method to realign or reposition the mind to see where it did or could not see before.
You understand the “the interaction of light on coloured cloth, reflected and absorbed by the eye and converted to electrical impulses that trigger elaborate sensing mechanisms in the human brain” because it can be explained in texts and in lectures and with enough empirical evidence to convince you.
What you don’t know is if the light exists because of the cloth, or the cloth because of the light. Seeking enlightenment, as hard as it is to explain in words or write in text, shows that there is an answer to those questions and others like it. The knowledge of the answer changes you fundamentally, but does not effect you in the least (see the hemmorhoid example).
Well, heck, if you can put yourself in that frame of mind, any idea will seem to make perfect sense. Red is blue, fish is cat, the yellow pride of ostrich harm, etc. Flashes of insight are certainly useful when trying to overcome a specific problem, but how the waving of a flag demonstrates this in any useful way is unclear. I prefer Asimov’s description of Archimedes’ Eureka moment.
Well, actually the light exists because of fusion reactions in the sun, or the plasma of a burning torch or a incandescent light-bulb filament or other light source. Since these effects are predictable and replicable, that’s what I’ll bet on.
Well, it’s an answer in the sense that is satisfies the person and leaves no lingering doubt, but so does the “doublethink” concept described in Orwell’s 1984. Toss all rules and preconceptions (empty your teacup, as it were) and anything goes. Maybe that feels empowering, which is why it persists as an ideal to be actively sought.
Enlightment isn’t knowledge. There isn’t anything to know. Like I keep saying, it’s a state of consciousness…or maybe it would be better to say it’s a level of awareness about our own consciousness. There is no information involved. You don’t know anything you didn’t know before (except maybe about yourself). Buddha means “awakened” and I think that works somewhat as a reference point. The cliched comparison is to say that it’s a state of super-awareness which is to normal consciousness as normal awareness is to dreaming awareness. I think that overstates it. It’s more like the difference between being awake and alert and being half-asleep.
Have you ever played a sport or a musical instrument or engaged in any serious creative pursuit? Athletes will often talking about being “in the zone.” They will have short periods during gameplay in which they talk about an elevated level of awareness and a dropping away of conscious thought where they speak of being “in the moment,” “reacting without thinking” and similar phrases. It’s that night where a basketball player can’t miss a shot or a hitter at the bat sees a ball as a big as pumpkin moving in slow motion. They can’t make these moments come, but they all know what each other is talking about when they talk about it.
Musicians can get this too. I would get nights on stage where it seemed like my fingers were moving by themselves, where I had an acute awareness of what everybody else in the band was playing and solid, intuitive knowledge of what every note was going to sound like before I played it. I wasn’t thinking about what came next when I improvised, I just did it.
I think most everybody probably gets periods like this when they’re really engrossed in some kind of creative activity. Nobody can ever make it happen on demand but I think everyone kind of knows what being “in the zone” is.
Eastern enlightenment is kind of about achieving that mental state – that level of awareness – all the time.
No, just an intutive grasp of physics…which might be considered Zebn itself, I guess.
The koans aren’t supposed to be analyzed. They don’t have answers. They are intended shock or confuse or flip the mind into a different level of awareness.
Things have moved on a bit, but let me just note that, if Diogenes isn’t claiming that enlightened states aren’t any different from the kind of moods one gets into with drugs, then I guess I have no disbelief. As Chief Pedant said, I know it’s possible to get into states where one feels really special, but beyond the feeling, I don’t think there’s anything to it; i.e., I don’t think one really is tapping in to any deep mysteries of the universe by doing so. Though it’s a bit unclear, now, to me, whether enlightenment is something you hit now and then and then come back down, or something you gain and stay in for life.
Incidentally, the yoga/meditation/etc. research you linked is really interesting, though I still have trouble swallowing my skepticism about parts of it. Some bits seem more plausible than others. I’ll have to look more into it.
I liked your post. You have a lot of understanding.
“A Course in Miracles” has a workbook full of small mediatations aimed at breaking through thoughts.
Hm. Overnegation and the edit window’s gone. Alright, let me reword, and add a little more in: “if Diogenes isn’t claiming that enlightened states are any different from the kind of moods one gets into with drugs, nor that they are concretely, categorically superior to normal consciousness, then I guess I have no disbelief”
And do they succeed? I mean, if one can accomplish complex feats without thinking about it, I’d expect Zen Buddhists to dominate the Olympics and chess tournaments and, yes, the music industry.
Sometimes. Usually not.
Why would you expect that? It doesn’t give you talent. It just allows you to express it better.
Doesn’t it follow? Buddhists are about 6% of the world population, ~60 million people. There have to be some athletes and chess players and musicians in there who, we might expect, would dominate their fields.
That’s a pretty small minority and Buddhist practice is not going to make anybody bigger or faster or stronger.
Michael Jordan practiced Zen meditation.
I don’t know that very many Buddhists play American sports but they dominate martial arts. I don’t know how many play chess but they’re very good at Go. It sounds like you’re expecting Buddhists to not only excel at a level beyond the norm for non-Buddhists but that you’re expecting to excel at sports and arts outside their own culture. A few other Buddhist adherents or practicioners of Eastern meditation include the Beatles, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Phil Jackson (9 NBA titles), Leonard Cohen, George Lucas, Michael Stipe, Oliver Stone and Tina Turner. I’m sure there are other, but I’m not a catalogue. A lot of athletes employ meditation or yoga but they’re not necessarily Buddhists. I never specified Buddhism anyway.
Basically, if you already have some talent or ability, meditative or consciousness altering techniques can help ypu express them better but it won’t give you talent which isn’t already there.
Bryan, the responses you are getting from Diogenes express much better than anything that I could say what I would like to say. We differ only in that I was eventually able to see religious meaning in my experience. And it changed how I interpret Christianity.
Another thing that it changed was that I am more receptive to what I could learn from the teachings of other religions – mainly Buddhism. And I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface.
While I was trying to describe to you what it is like to draw on your inner resources from a quiet, relaxed, mindful and alert state – which is only just what I said it is – somehow that sounds like Scientology. It sounds like Thoreau at Walden Pond to me, and a small group of monks living in Grenoble, France or my dad fishing on his one week a year vacation.
Inner resources = creativity, originality, inventiveness
At any rate, there is not much that I know that isn’t answered much better by DtC, so I’ll pass unless there is a question for me.
I still think you are fuuny as hell.