Best Of
Re: No Buddhist Quotes
“The journey is long because we do not take the first step.”
— Indian saying
Jeroen
Re: About control: to pursue it or not?
@marcitko said:
Coming from a background of being too lazy and unfocused, I much prefer control and the phases of my life when I was systematically "winning over myself" a.k.a. learning to control myself.Free will can be trained, like a muscle, and ever more things can be controlled.
@Jeroen said: An illness, a death in the family, a car accident… life doesn’t seem to lend itself to control.
Life, not. But our response, yes. Body, emotions, speech, thought: all of these can be controlled. And what a difference they can make!
There's that saying "go with the flow". Sure, if you're already blessed with wonderful habits. But if not? I vote for "go against the flow" a.k.a. "win over yourself" again and again and again and again. It really does work.
"Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions." Eliud Kipchoge (Marathon GOAT).
PS. If someone has a different background, maybe an A-type personality always on the gogogo that tries to control everything, maybe they will have an opposite view to the above.
Agreed, its all about the balance and direction. Disciplined towards what? If you're too loose, tightening it up a bit is good. If you're already tight, more discipline isn't the way. And then what are you disciplined about? Disciplined to meditate daily or eat better is different than being disciplined at the gun range or poker table.
So it isn't like discipline or letting go are good or bad in themselves. They're skillful or not as medicine in relation to what any individual needs at the time.
person
Re: About control: to pursue it or not?
We have choice. To strive for control is to fail to see choice. Chaos is always present. When we understand choice vs control, we gain true control. True control does not come from directing everything. That is an impossible task. For we cannot see everything and that which we do not see or are not aware of is beyond control.
When we have choice, we are fluid, we can adapt readily to our situations of the moment. We can adjust for alternatives, we are free. We are not bound by the need of total control. We can not control the river. But we can choose to use it's currents, it's characteristics to navigate it, utilizing those currents, making the river our highway instead of our nemesis. In human interactions, in our internal interactions, choice is the ultimate control. We can maneuver within the flow of interaction. Thus we have control, not of the others thoughts or actions, but of our own which enables us to navigate the rivers of interaction.
Put another way, a ship upon the sea has no control over the sea. The ship's pilot, however, chooses the speed, direction and overall relation to the sea to navigate the ship upon the sea.
Thus we see that Control is an illusion, an impossible task whereas Choice is a reality our control is actually our ability to choose, regardless of the circumstance. What we may seek as "Control" is actually Choice - We have the "control" of choice. Control is the illusion while choice is the reality.
Peace to all
Lionduck
Re: About control: to pursue it or not?
Coming from a background of being too lazy and unfocused, I much prefer control and the phases of my life when I was systematically "winning over myself" a.k.a. learning to control myself.
Free will can be trained, like a muscle, and ever more things can be controlled.
@Jeroen said: An illness, a death in the family, a car accident… life doesn’t seem to lend itself to control.
Life, not. But our response, yes. Body, emotions, speech, thought: all of these can be controlled. And what a difference they can make!
There's that saying "go with the flow". Sure, if you're already blessed with wonderful habits. But if not? I vote for "go against the flow" a.k.a. "win over yourself" again and again and again and again. It really does work.
"Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions." Eliud Kipchoge (Marathon GOAT).
PS. If someone has a different background, maybe an A-type personality always on the gogogo that tries to control everything, maybe they will have an opposite view to the above.
marcitko
Re: About control: to pursue it or not?
Control implies that you want to influence something. A baby learns to control bowels and muscles and learns to walk and run in order to control where they go and what they do there. A person controls their love life in order to find a partner and manage their family and home life. People want to control their work life in order to have the lifestyle they want.
What kind of control would you want over subtle bodies? What do you want them to do or not do? If you don't have any aim or goal control seems something you would not want.
zorro
Re: The Plant Medicine Path
Thank you for that, I ended up watching most of the interview. He is an interesting character, he says he is a Christian and therefore he believes in external beings of evil, which they call the antichrist and which they say is trying to manifest as ‘the machine’. But then he says his literary style is one of exaggeration, which is what makes him hard to grasp, he talks a lot in archetypes and fragments of memes.
His book appears to be an attempt to understand the modern age. It puts me in mind of something that Terence McKenna used to say, that mankind as a species “extrudes technology”, as a kind of matrix within which we exist. There is an extensive discussion of AI, as a kind of ultimate manifestation of that matrix.
This is very much about a way of looking at Western civilisation as a kind of agent of creating the machine, and so in a way his book “Against the Machine” is a critique of Western civilisation.
Jeroen
"Buddha's Teachings" - in 1,000 years, how will they know?
This may have already been mentioned in another thread but on Facebook, at least here in America, I have seen a big rise in popularity of social media pages with names like Buddha's Teachings or even just The Buddha.
Unsurprisingly they are full of quotes that are not from recognized teachings but are mostly just self-help nuggets. Many of them are benign and may even be good advice, but I realized that this whole large language model, or whatever AI is supposed to do on the research side, is not going to be able to differentiate between this stuff down the road.
Obviously Buddhism looks very different for us than it did for people 2,000+ years ago, but I think even just a few centuries from now, the concept of Buddhism may not look like anything we would recognize today.
Re: "Buddha's Teachings" - in 1,000 years, how will they know?
"Buddha's Teachings" - in 1,000 years, how will they know?
Thus have I heard:
Through realisation, as they have known throughout the millennia.
The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path...
the nature of suffering and the way to its cessation.
We all stray from the path at times, and most of us come to see that we have.
Some realise it sooner than others, yet the light of awareness always finds its way through.
Shoshin1
Re: "Buddha's Teachings" - in 1,000 years, how will they know?
Books last quite a long time, in paper form. There are people who have bought all the volumes of the translated Pali Canon. In digital form, who knows how long the files will be copied and re-copied.
But perhaps online archives like Access To Insight will stay the course and provide the authentic words of the Buddha to LLMs.
Jeroen
Re: "Buddha's Teachings" - in 1,000 years, how will they know?
Buddhism has changed and will continue changing until the world has forgotten the Buddhadharma. Then, a new Buddha will arise, and turn the Wheel of Dharma