Best Of
Perfect things and what is real
It seems to me that humans can imagine that which is perfect, but it doesn’t exist in reality. For example you can teach a small child that two parallel lines will never meet, but even a gifted artist cannot draw two lines which are perfectly parallel. They are going to meet at some point. Or take Euclid’s description of a line, which is that which only has length. What line drawn on paper does not have thickness?
Similarly the human mind contains many concepts which are these ideal visions: God, justice, fairness and so on. These are things which either do not exist or exist imperfectly only. It seems to me once this is understood, ones whole relationship to the ideals changes.
Jeroen
Laughter and the sense of being
I wanted to talk about the experience of being while you are laughing. It is difficult to be mindful while you laugh, but after you have had a good, deep laughter, immediately afterwards you can examine the memory of it and get a glimpse… Osho once said that this is what it is like to be a buddha.
So what I experience is a kind of absence of mind, and a space filled with light, and cheerfulness, a living, jolly, tinkling place of the sense of song and bells. Pure joy, sheer dance, overflowing energy. Not at all serious but playful.
It was my mother who occasioned this. We were eating dinner, and she had put on her spoon an amount of powdered Parmesan cheese. Just as she brought this to her mouth to eat, she suddenly drew a deep breath, as if in preparation for a sneeze, with as result that she sniffed up a good amount of the Parmesan cheese! She was hacking and coughing for a good ten minutes, and I had to laugh so hard…
It was afterwards that I started to recall how great it felt. Laughter is a wonderful thing…
Jeroen
Re: Benefits of a Loving Mind
"Our local Tibetan Lama says that there is no enlightenment without developing both wisdom and compassion."
Quite right.
The emergence of enlightenment is a product of and concurrent with the development and growth (expansion) of wisdom and compassion. That is a foundational determinant.
In example:
Devadata was most knowledgeable, but lacked the base of both wisdom and of compassion, leading him upon an evil, path.
The Buddha was, naturally also most knowledgeable. This arising from his base of infinite wisdom and infinite compassion which enabled him to teach and share his enlightenment - to the teach and share Dharma for all people.
Peace to all
Lionduck
The Knowledge That Matters
Doug's Dharma has started a series of videos on knowledge recently that I've really been liking. So far he's talked about the disconnect between conviction and valid knowing and this latest one on the deeper kind of knowing that has come up a bit here lately.
He talks about how there's a difference between information, knowing that something is true, and the deep, integrated knowledge that changes behavior. Like the knowing everyone has that we'll die one day and the knowing someone with a terminal illness has. He talks about how in the west Socrates talked about this deeper knowing, but then Aristotle talked about the difference between the intellectual knowing and doing wasn't about knowledge it was about will, and that is what caught on in western thinking.
He doesn't discount study. But says the point of practice is to integrate that information deeply so it becomes this sort of deeper, felt knowledge.
person
Re: Good and Bad People
I pose a question here:
Which is worse:
The commission of acts of evil (bad actions)
(or)
Seeing the bad/evil/negative actions (knowing such actions are bad)
and doing nothing.
A famous person said that true evil not someone doing something evil, but (aware of the evil) good people doing nothing.
Someone also said, "The easy path is to do nothing: The hard paths is to take action."
Lionduck
Re: No Buddhist Quotes
This came from a fellow named Jung:
On the one hand, I undoubtedly form part of nature, while on the other hand objective
nature is known to me as a phenomenon of my mind only.
Lionduck
Re: Maitreya — an AI Buddha?
A boulder, no matter how often awash in river waters, will never turn into a seed.
The Dalai Lama did say something quite fascinating once: if a being had the karma to be born in such a body, it would be.
Meaning, if we made some sort of vessel for a consciousness to alight, it's possible we could be inviting someone in to the cosmic-party via such a vessel.
Not the same as inventing/constructing/creating consciousness. More like, consciousness simply is, and it needs a house-with-windows to enter into.
the issue of interiority is well noted, how the roots of a plant are the genius-loci of the organism itself, i wonder what that looks to be for a robot-with-consciousness-capacity?
But anyway, don't let me feed your wishfulness, the current state of LLMs is closer to water sliding down a bumpy surface than it is to some being experiencing something, and relaying experiences back n forth.
All that said, the membrane between "self and other" is rather porous. It would be a good use of energy to keep a bunch of virtuous monks on staff at the data center. I'm confident their strength would permeate into the rest of the apparatus. But try explaining that to overconfident materialist-extremists! 
august
Re: Benefits of a Loving Mind
@august said:
Hi everybodyBuddha Shakyamuni spoke about the benefits of a lovingmind and in fact, Maitreya will attain complete unsurpassed awakening through the practice of metta or lovingkindness!
I would love to discuss metta with you.
love or metta in tantra is to weave together. in zen i try to weave wisdom of the earth with loving ways of bodhi. in example of a tantric act a tebetan seeker lore of meeting maitreya. he was walking and saw a wounded dog. the dog had maggets on him. the tibetan man acted with out thought of self, deeply moved and save the dog and magget
by using his tougue and transported the magget and in my version on his hand and carried the magget to a dead corpse. the dog transform into maytree-awe the one the tibet man was looking for. and maytreeawe says to find me in u was love absent a ego fear. from your natural boshi you were one with awareness, instinct born of loveing way to solve a problem
the leesen trust your bodhi that instinctively weeve wisdom and lovingkind ways. there is the guru mayteeawe reside in u as a tibet tantra.