streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 2:20 am on December 14, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: binary ( 3 ), Boolean logic, Buddhism ( 428 ), Hardie Karges ( 239 ), language ( 144 ), meditation ( 189 ), mindfulness ( 34 ), religion ( 158 )   

  Buddhism and Language, With and Without… 

  

  Language is a tool, not a weapon. It is a gift, not a curse. It all depends on the circumstances, time and place and details of the chase. To be honest, it is almost impossible to imagine life without language, since not only do we habitually think in a language, but for many people the two are inseparable. And that is why meditation is practiced, is it not? Yes, I think it is, because we can think without it, using what I often call ‘mental maps’.   

  Now, meditators and fellow travelers can gleam and bliss out about ‘insight’ and ‘calm abiding’, but the modus operandi is to cut off the language, or at least slow it down, if not exactly swatting thoughts away like flies on our windshields. The fruit of this activity is not something we can control, but only comment upon, for better or worse. Meditation may or may not provide ‘calm abiding’, much less insight, though those are worthy goals, I feel, but it can reduce the dependency on language, and that helps. It’s interesting that in some languages, to think and to feel are interchangeable concepts, but not so much in English. 

  The important point to remember is that not only are thought and language not synonymous, but the one is not even necessary for the other. Because, not only do animals think without language, but so do computers, i.e. they use machine language. Machine language is binary, 0’s and 1’s, and its (Boolean) logic corresponds to that, more than, less than, equal to, etc., i.e. ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’. This can just as (or more) easily correspond to all the phenomena of existence as the more familiar Aristotelian logic that we are familiar with, variations on if/then syllogisms. Your dog and cat have little need for that, and you could probably do with less. All you really need is mindfulness. 

   

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  hardie karges 4:40 am on December 1, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Boolean logic, Buddhism ( 428 ), consciousness ( 29 ), Four Noble Truths ( 18 ), Hardie Karges ( 239 ), language ( 144 ), meditation ( 189 ), mindfulness ( 34 ), neuron, philosophy ( 101 ), samadhi ( 13 ), sati ( 17 ), spirituality ( 27 ), thought ( 15 )   

  Buddhism 202: Thoughts and Thinkers 

  

  Samma sankappa, one of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths, is Right Thought = Good Thought, not No Thought. For no thought, maybe samma samadhi is better, Right (Good) Meditation. It’s very popular for New Age-y Buddhists to talk about ‘thoughts without thinkers and/or ‘thoughts that think themselves’, as if they were both particle and wave out there floating around looking for a pickup gig, but that implies that thoughts are bad, and the Buddha never said anything like that.

  I think that the confusion comes with the role of language in thought, and its somewhat checkered past. Because no one would dare say anything bad about sati, i.e. consciousness, mindfulness, or awareness. That’s sacrosanct in Buddhism. And it’s a form of thought, also, but without language. Dogs do it; cats do it. All animals do, to a greater or lesser degree. But: like Boolean logic, we invented language, and now that we have it, it’s hard to go back, at least not full time. And there’s no real reason to.

  Because thought can be a good thing, and the linguistic variety is likely the most powerful type, BUT: it can also be destructive, both to society and to the personality, aka ‘self’. On the metaphysical plane, not only is it not ‘non-dual’, with its definitive subjects and objects, but it’s also argumentative and unsettling, arguably war’s greatest weapon. And while I don’t advocate a return to the ‘non-dual’ lives of bonobos and chimps, I do strongly advocate daily meditation. Because, no matter how powerful linguistic thought can be, its non-linguistic cousin meditation can be much more peaceful. That’s samadhi.

  But this can be a contentious subject for debate, because, on the one hand, thoughts DO just pop up sometimes unannounced and often unwanted. And we DON’T always have total recall, much less immediate recall. But that doesn’t mean that we are passive listeners and watchers of thoughts as they pass in and out of our brains or minds, for lack of better words to portray a very abstract subject. Remember the old saying: ‘Practice makes perfect’? Well, neuroscientists have one, also: ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together.’ That means that we establish neural pathways that can be considered our own, in that they are distinct from that of others. So, yes, to a certain extent, thoughts have thinkers, and thinkers have thoughts. We’re the living proof.
   
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  hardie karges 5:34 am on December 2, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Boolean logic, Boy Scouts, consciousness ( 29 ), JESUS ( 21 ), kilesha ( 11 ), logic ( 14 ), Middle Path ( 53 ), mindfulness ( 34 ), philosophy ( 101 ), reification ( 4 ), religion ( 158 ), samadhi ( 13 ), sati ( 17 ), syllogism ( 2 ), Thailand ( 75 ), Thich Nhat Hanh ( 8 )   

  Boy Scouts: be prepared. Buddhists: not so fast… 

  

  The Golden Spires of Shwedagon Pagoda

  This is one of the problems I have with Buddhism, the whole ‘no-thought’ paradigm, that always seems to find currency, notwithstanding the fact that the Buddha never said anything like that, not to my knowledge, anyway, and the term sati, which has taken on the meaning of ‘mindfulness’, probably had no such lofty connotations at the time, the problem now being one of vagueness, if not deliberate obfuscation, in order to inspire awe and reverence, apparently, as if it is untranslatable to the ordinary mortal…

  But it certainly is a common ordinary word in modern standard Thai, something like simple ‘consciousness’ or ‘mind’, so ‘mindfulness’ is a marketing hook to sell a fad to the West, that special sauce and some righteous hocus pocus, such that the makers of the film ‘Samadhi’ have to explain that the term is untranslatable to English, notwithstanding the fact that it is done all the time outside the rarefied circles of New Age fad religions… (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 7:19 am on May 14, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: B. Alan Wallace, Beatles, Boolean logic, Buddhism ( 428 ), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi ( 3 ), meditation ( 189 ), metaphysics ( 5 ), stress ( 2 ), Transcendental Meditation ( 4 )   

  Beyond Buddhism: The Metaphysics of Meditation… 

  

  Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka

  Meditation has increasingly gained adherence in the Western world, since its initial mass-marketing roll-out as Transcendental Meditation (TM) under the guidance of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1960’s, with such illustrious disciples as the Beatles, a Beach Boy or two, and Donovan, among others, any feeling that it was all hype at the time, eventually assuaged by glowing and growing reports of its therapeutic value, BUT…

  What exactly is that therapeutic value? Stress reduction is the most obvious benefit, and the reason that many schools and business places have instituted a ‘quiet time’ of a quarter-to-a-half-hour or so, once or twice a day, or even as little as five minutes a pop. Now I’m not sure exactly how much good can be attained from so little time, but I guess anything is better than nothing… (More …)