Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Quotes - discussion
marcitko
Veteran
Hello everyone,
Thought we might enjoy a thread for discussing the Buddhist quotes we post in the "Buddhist quotes" thread.
@Jeroen posted:
“Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.”
— Zen Proverb
I wonder if the "cherish" part is important? I ask this because it seems to me that even very advanced and/or realized practitioners/teachers still hold opinions, just maybe in a light and non-attached manner?
Anyway, just a thought to get us started.
3
Comments
This could also be a generic quotes discussion thread, if you can still alter the topic title, @marcitko…
I think opinions that are lightly held, that you are ready to let go of when the need arises, are less harmful than those that you will passionately defend. But still, the personality is a patchwork of opinions, and it is ‘the coloured glass through which we perceive reality’.
The kind of thing I think or say, is if "I were king of the world, such and such". Meaning, yeah this is what I may think about something at the moment, but I'm just one person with a limited understanding and perspective. I'd never say what I think goes, I've simply been wrong or changed my mind enough times now to realize it makes no sense to have strong opinions.
But I suppose I do try to seek the truth, at least in terms of worldly information. Maybe the truth this quote is talking about is more of the spiritual realization sort. In that realm the idea of letting go to allow an underlying luminosity to come forth makes sense.
Sure. I can't seem to change it any more. I've asked the mods to change it, hope they will see it.
Also, as my avatar says, "how something appears, is always a matter of perspective" and "Don't believe everything you think"
Felt the need to say a few words. As an examination of the poles of human existence I find this accurate and encouraging. I've argued to people who want to join the military for noble reasons (to protect others) that being a peacemaker is noble as well.
What I wanted to say though is the thing that bothered me a bit about the quote. It's that it is very polarized and dualistic. The majority of people exist on a spectrum somewhere between those two poles. The world isn't divided up into saints and sinners.
It’s interesting, but it speaks to goals as well. The number of actual winners is small, but the number who idolise winning and wish to be winners themselves is much greater. It is almost a default in our society, especially in America, where a big part of Donald Trumps appeal is to be seen as a winner.
When I effectively ended up retiring at age 40 I was confronted by this, that when you let go of this goal suddenly most of society becomes uninteresting to you. It’s as if you discover that your own interest has been secretly largely in a form of power and self-expression through power, and that giving that up has removed a driving force that has shaped your actions.The winning mentality had entered by the back door that self-expression created.
This was really when I found out that I had been on the wrong track; that entertainment was largely dissipation but could be redeemed though what it had to say about larger ideals, but that games as a medium was largely unsuited to this. Which was when I became interested in writing.
I think this is an area where our similarities diverge. I'm very much not about ideals, but balance and integration. I see winning as yang energy and the other as yin energy. Regarding winning, if you look at it in terms of comparison with others, yes there are only a few at the top. If you look at it in terms of comparison with yourself, then anyone can "win", external vs internal. I also don't generally look at it as a zero sum competition, though I recognize that much of the world does. My attitude in general is much more process oriented than goal oriented, just worry about doing the things that improve your mind and life, let the outcomes take care of themselves.
I’ve found that any attempt to ‘see things as’ becomes a projection of ideas by the mind, not clear seeing at all. In my experience it has been best to leave such complications and live in a simpler way, waiting for the urges of normal life to drop away.
‘The mind is like a glass of muddy water. Sit still doing nothing for long enough and all the mud settles to the bottom and clarity arrives.’
Be warned though, it may take a few years or even decades of solitude.
The end result for me was to leave the mind and start observing more my feelings. I discovered that ‘I’ and ‘mine’ were just thoughts, that possession was illusion, that the primal feelings were kindness and love, that fear and anger were more distortions caused by the mind.
I will end my mornings musing on a cat-related note of kindness and patience… cats make me happy.
I suppose I do have a goal, which is driven largely by circumstance, if I were in similar shoes to yours I might have a different goal. I don't have the ability, or at least don't want to abuse the system and attempt to claim disability, to retreat from the world. So my goal is to 'be in the world, but not of the world'. That being the case it seems like a bad idea to abandon all striving unless I want to be homeless and destitute. So I'm not sold that your approach is the superior way.
I’m not sure there even is a superior way, given that we all seem to walk our own paths 🙏
Perhaps all we can do is talk about what helps us on our path, what has made us successful in striving for inner peace, clarity, and kindness. In the hope that perhaps we inspire someone else to try one of our techniques.
For me it began with reading Buddhist books, on the sutras by Edward Conze, on mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh and on the Dhamma by Ajahn Chah. These inspired me to pursue purity, awareness, knowing the mind. That and many beach walks started me on my path. It’s funny how something as normal as reading, when you slow it down, can become a meditation and a contemplation.
Abandoning negative mind states came a little later. It was an improved understanding of what was beneficial to me, that made me consider that negative mind states were, as is said about anger, “like holding a hot coal and expecting the other to get burnt.” They pervert the mind towards negative karma and are of little actual use. It is better to dwell in the Brahma Viharas as much as possible.
Then peace comes, and with peace and solitude clarity and kindness.
Awareness has helped me on the path , that is, through meditation one gradually becomes aware of being aware of becoming aware. Which gives thought breathing space(aka timeout) between thoughts becoming wholesome or unwholesome actions...
"Awareness is fundamentally non-conceptual before thinking splits experience into subject and object.
It is empty, and so can contain everything, including thought. It is boundless. And, amazingly, it is intrinsically knowing."
And
"Every moment is a moment of events and no moment passes by without an event...One can not notice a moment without noticing events taking place in that moment...Therefore the moment one tries to pay bare attention to is the present moment !"
I've found meditation helps to stop the mind from becoming tied up in (k)nots
One thing that has really benefitted me is short spans of vipassana meditation. I do this lying down on my back, watching the rising and falling of a spot a couple of inches below the navel as I breathe in and out. I tend to use a slow tempo of the breath and relatively shallow breaths, as if I was sleeping.
When you do this, you will feel “drawn into the depths” and you may see and hear things that are unusual. It is important to say or do nothing — it will all work itself out, the meditation is there for you to not be a doer. Just remain focused on breathing and watching that spot, as it goes up and down.
The right receptive attitude helps prolong the meditation, and if you do this for a long time or often it will start to end naturally, with a feeling of emptiness or a sudden impulse to get up and attend to some everyday task. Osho once said “meditation is a knack”, and i think this is true, if you can’t get this to happen try varying the shallowness of the breath and the tempo. It’s like searching a room for the right spot…
I remember coming across this quote in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now where Tolle talks about going deeply into the present moment. Apparently Rinzai often asked it of students to get them to notice how much of their thinking was associated with the mind bringing the past into the present, and so obscuring the present moment, or the mind projecting into the future, and taking the focus away from the here and now.
Indeed, if you contemplate this for a while, you discover that in the now there is nothing lacking, when you let all the things related to the past - like past injustices or injuries - and those related to the future - like worries and fears - drop away. It is a kind of mental hygiene, not binding yourself to thoughts of the past or the future.
Tolle says elsewhere that just one serious grievance, something unforgiven, a feud, can be enough to keep the mind going on its tracks of watching the past. I would suggest reading The Power of Now if you want to go more deeply into this saying of Rinzai’s.
my doggy way be and do;
[
every step is closer to u--know theyself
polly earth to be and do...doggy walk on...
suprising dog nature is human nature,
....imo on topic of that buddhist quote.
we are allowed to an opinion. but as a daoist buddhist we cling not to it. its a fact opinions come and go, changes in time. its like this, opinions change--based on new fact informations--opinions is optional if the truth of a fact rings true
that buddhist quote is the maturity of the seeker. eye on truth because its obvious like the universal truth all die from starz to us. it just fun see other opinion in my opinion but grounded in facts the kin to truth.
awareness middle way we can accept both truth and opinion.
proverbs our wow-mom-derful inheretence. our wealth and keepsake.
our past masters shows us the truth is in us. you are the living truth of dependent origination from samsara. our mom our mom earth matters. dont spending your whole life debating truth but live your life on because opinions is subject to debate.
make up proverb; eat the dirt. mom earth loves you.ie dirt spinach
In secular Sufism Idries Shah talks a lot about unloading. Where we are so clever and already 'knowing' that we have to unload.
Zen explains it this way, in a story often repeated:
A professor went to visit Nan-in, a Zen master, to ask him about Zen. Nan-in kindly welcomed him and began to make tea. He filled the professor’s teacup full and then continued pouring the tea, overflowing the cup.
The professor exclaimed — “Stop! The cup is already full, no more will go in!”
Nan-in responded: “Like this cup, your mind is already full of ideas and opinions. There is no room for anything new. To understand Zen, you must first empty your cup — open your mind and free it from preconceived notions.”
As Epictetus once said,
“You can’t learn that which you think you already know.”
"More tea, Vicar?" - 'All Gas and Gaitors' TV series
I like this. In my experience its a bit more like there is a separation between the ego and the ideas/ideals or they sort of fade out and take on a much less concrete substance. Perhaps as one progresses further than I they do disappear fully?
In my mind I separate spirituality with the everyday world. I think the everyday world needs them to function well and promote human flourishing, which I think the bolded stuff gets to.
I have noticed this, the disappearing of beliefs and emotions over time, that it happens with me. For example the anger I felt back in November at Osho and his communes and the abuse that happened there is now gone. It has taken 5 months or so. I think it is the spirit that inclines towards letting go.
It’s a question of whether you keep feeding these things. The more attention you give them, the more you keep bringing them back, the longer they last. I think that as you advance on the path, you stop feeding your beliefs and they begin to fade.
Me too.
We hold on to many things:
Like onions, they make us cry.
Just like onion layers, they fall away.
No Onion.
Union.
I thought this was a neat quote, but perhaps we need more inspiration from our mythology than science can provide.
I'm wondering the spirt the quote was made in. I don't think he's saying that ancient science is the equivalent of modern science, at least I hope not. To me its more saying that people need stories, that they provide a framework for our lives giving us purpose, direction, meaning and that science now provides that story.
Yuval Noah Harari talks a lot about this and the need for stories to inspire, I can't remember if he's mentioned science not fully being up to the task or its come from elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if he has, it sounds like something he might say. I've been waiting like 7 months now on the library waiting list for his most recent book with still an estimated 9 weeks to go. If you haven't read his stuff, I highly recommend it. Or watch a few of his talks.
I came across it in this interview, about 11:00 if you want the context:
Arguably since the last ten years or so, a new archetype has arisen — that of the Internet Influencer. This is about the predominance of marketing in the social marketplace over truth and science. This also shows up in the mess that peer-reviewed papers are in, with lots of make-work research and little of real significance showing up.
What do you mean by "make-work" research?
Well, if you look at the latest examinations of the scientific research system, it shows that a lot of papers get written only to get funding for the authors. They are work for the sake of work, not to pursue the goals of worthwhile scientific knowledge, and the peer review system has become complicit in this, letting a lot of papers reach the publishing stage even when they have very little value.
This is compounded by big money interests sponsoring papers on for example climate research or drug viability. That is another source of papers which aren’t really pure research, for the sake of the science.
I'm not especially familiar with the make work aspect of current scientific publishing. But there are recognized problems in the field, and there are efforts to try to clean it up.
It’s true that there have been some efforts to look at this, but what I have heard is that they ran into unspecified “difficulties” and have largely been failures. Some are probably still ongoing.
Not sure what you mean by difficulties and failures. There are known problems in scientific publishing and proposed solutions. Reforms are almost always difficult to implement. Failure implies to me that the attempted solution didn't resolve the problem and to my knowledge there hasn't been enough time or widespread adoption to make that claim. If by failure you mean the reforms haven't been adopted though, then yes they have failed to change the system so far.
Further difficulties are about science reporting, its almost always sensational and reports on the findings of a single study. A maxim I try to take to these days is that 90% of what you find in science publishing is wrong or incomplete and 90% of what you find in science text books is right.
In general, I worry about trust in the scientific process and science literacy among the population. I think it does need to clean up its house or more and more people are going to stop trusting what they hear and think all information is the same.
I have 6+ years of experience working in scholarly publishing.
If you've got any questions, I'm happy to answer honestly, based on my experience and (often limited) knowledge.
Then @marcitko you probably have much more of an informed view on the state of scholarly publishing than we do… I was just basing my opinion on a couple of articles I read about it not so long ago.
I was tremendously lucky that my first mentor ie. the editor-in-chief, for whom I was the editorial assistant, had super-high professional and ethical standards. So, even though we were a small scholarly journal in a small country, I do believe I have experience as to how scholarly publishing looks like when it's done well. Through a professional association, I later interacted with some of the best in the world, and they basically do everything as we did then. So, my general stance is that the journal-level "system" - and there are best practices and flowcharts for pretty much any situation - can work very well. Still, nothing is perfect...
One of the problems is that the quality of peer review varies massively. On the extremes, one guy will invest what looks like 10 minutes, and another girl will invest what looks like 5 days. Similarly to how scholars are not taught how to teach, they are also not taught how to peer review. For both, it's assumed you'll figure it out. I think both are teachable skills, so should be taught. There's a curious absence of best practices in that domain too, or at least I'm not aware of them. In my view, the system (double-blind reviewing by two scholarly experts) will stay in place until the AI guys make it obsolete. This will IMO come quite fast: 3 to 10 years. For good or ill, I don't know.
But before we criticise peer reviewers, we should understand that they are the real heroes of scholarly publishing. Why? Because they most often do it for free, and usually without receiving anything whatsoever in return, not even career-advancement "points", and it's very difficult to make a case that they do it for selfish reasons. Hooray, proof that people are generally NOT just selfish!
I don't have hands-on experience with the big publishers that own hundreds of journals. I am critical of them in several respects. But I basically know as much about them as any of you if you took the time to read a bit about them so I'll leave them alone. I thought this article was very good though: https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2020/08/kronikk/money-behind-academic-publishing
All I know about is some of the reporting I've heard on the subject of science publishing.
There are several issues, the one that I remember now is that of the need to produce positive results. That a study that doesn't find what they were studying has a hard time getting published. Thus the researchers will play with the data to get positive results (I think this is called P hacking), basically they'll paint the target they're aiming for after they see where the data leads. The proposed solution would be to pre register experiments for what you're looking for and for journals to agree to publish regardless of the findings, as null results are just as important to the accumulation of knowledge as positive results.
I've read about such ideas and think they're cool!
Even though I enjoy the topic, maybe we can leave "solving all the problems of the world" to another thread...
This struck me as being a deep truth. If we resist and continuously struggle, we suffer and are bound by our ideas of purpose or injustice, while to come to true freedom and transformation of the self we need to accept what is.
I find this last quote has an interesting bearing on the question ‘skeptical or cynical’. In a way acceptance is a life-positive path, leading to functioning of the being beyond the mind, whereas skepticism is based in doubt, disbelief and inquiry and leads to more proliferation in the mind, and is thus ultimately life-negative.
The quote is talking about acceptance of ourselves as a transformative experience, so it may not fully apply to other areas. I read it as being a form of self compassion, or the practice of RAIN, recognize, allow, investigate, non-self.
In a recent psychology interview I listened to, the guest was making an argument for an open minded skepticism. That gullibility and cynicism are on opposite ends of a spectrum that aren't desirable. I suppose if one had to choose only between being open minded and closed minded, being open would be the option that would allow for a life affirming path. In my experience though it also lets in things that can destroy life and health, like a cell some things need to be permitted entry and some things need to be blocked for life to flourish. I too think the best path is a balanced one that is open to possibilities, but ultimately has some sort of sorting function between what is allowed and what isn't. It can be both/and rather than either/or.
Done. Better late than never! 😄
To me this begs the question, what is delight truly? I recall when I was a child I used to delight in toys — Lego, marbles, plastic pistols. Those feelings have become very much less over the years, and I now have difficulty recalling when I last felt delighted about something. The very activity of play seems to disappear.
Buddhist monks let go of all possessions, including toys. The whole idea of possessing things, of being given something for yourself, is consigned to the wastebin. Somehow, on some level, this concept entered me when I started looking at the Thai Forest Tradition, it was like some part of the inner me that believed in modesty and frugality agreed that this was ultimately where I was headed.
It’s rare that you see older people who still delight in something. I will be 53 later this year, and I feel this draining of the spirit creeping up on me, a kind of drawing down of the energies of youth. I’d like to be one of those older folk who still have a sense of lightness, kindness, fun.
I’d like to be one of those older folk who still have a sense of lightness, kindness, fun.
>
Think you'd enjoy listening to Bob Harwood. Says that throughout his life he just did what sounded like fun
Celebrated his 80th birthday by hiking up a Colorado 14k-er. Businessman, construction/contractor, family guy... widely considered to be enlightened, and I see no evidence to the contrary. Current hobby: trading stocks 
No Thai hermitness necessary apparently 