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  hardie karges 4:07 am on November 26, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Calvin, duality ( 5 ), ego ( 33 ), Four Noble Truths ( 18 ), Freud ( 4 ), Hardie Karges ( 240 ), hungry ghosts, maharishi ( 2 ), Maharshi, Mary Baker Eddy, predestination   

  Buddhism in the Bardo Realm: Facing Reality  

  

  All critiques, analyses, and deep discussions of arcane doctrines fall flat in the face of reality. The only important thing is the reduction of suffering. That’s why the Buddha made suffering the focus of his Four Noble Truths, the bedrock of Buddhism, without which there would have been no Buddhism. Because this is the heart and soul of Buddhism, long before the superstitions began creeping in, the past lives and the hungry ghosts and the glittering deities and the evil wicked monsters. And don’t forget the fancy metaphysics, which can be just as superstitious as gods and demons.  

  Because metaphysicians like to talk about perfection, and duality, and free will, and ego, without a shred of proof as to the veracity of any of it—or even the empirical presence of any of it. Who’s ever seen ego? Not Freud. Who’s ever seen predestination? Not Calvin. Who’s seen perfection? Not Mary Baker Eddy. Who’s seen duality? Not Maharshi nor Maharishi. Yet they can all expound on the topics as if they really exist, verbs putting on long pants and a suit to become nouns, leave the hiking boots for tomorrow, in case the latest vehicle won’t fly. 

  But the Buddha probably knew that he was on to something so sublime that it was simple enough to satisfy the threadbare renunciant while subtle enough to satisfy the schooled philosopher—but only for a while. Because soon enough, they’ll be wanting more more, bigger bigger. Just like celebrants banging the drum, the religionists will want more dogma, and the devotees will want more karma. And Original Buddhism will become Big Rig Buddhism, and then there will be Diamond Dog Buddhism, at the same time there’s Crazy Wisdom Buddhism, and so, soon enough, we’ll be right back where we started, and someone will have to sit down and try to figure out what to do next. Hi. 

   

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  hardie karges 2:00 pm on February 21, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: caste ( 5 ), Eckhart Tolle ( 13 ), karma ( 50 ), meditation ( 190 ), past lives ( 8 ), predestination, racism ( 10 ), rebirth ( 37 ), Right Speech ( 5 ), samma vaca ( 8 )   

  The Two Major Schools of Buddhism: Past Life or Present Moment… 

  

  You can’t be a ‘present moment’ Buddhist and a ‘past life’ Buddhist at the same time, since the two concepts are contradictory. And this is probably more important than any modern distinction between Theravada and Mahayana, Tibetan or Zen, simply whether you believe in past lives or not, karma and rebirth supposedly the causes and effects of that process.

  So the present moment is mostly a convenient escape, with ET extending the landing chute, because no present moment really exists, any more than a past life, but the latter is more onerous than the former, which can vanish with the flick of a whisker, while the past lives will never go away, as long as it is believed in.

  Because past lives are all about predestination, and the submission to a supposedly higher will, when one is more than enough. And if this all likely began with the best of intentions, it soon became a stage prop to the caste system, i.e. racism, the idea that some are born with latent superiorities, while others are born with obvious deficiencies.

  Thus your station in life is pre-determined by the events of a previous life, and there is little you can do to change it. None of that has any basis in science, of course, the racism nor the past lives. But still we have to deal with it, day by day, the racism of Aryan superiority not only in India, but in Europe and Amerika and in the latter-day colonies Down Under.

  Predestination is the philosophical side to the same phenomena of past lives, the idea that ‘it is all written,’ notwithstanding the fact that nothing at all was written until a few thousand years ago, still the image is powerful, script on paper, replicating itself into countless lifetimes and universal ages.

  Calvin the Presbyter made great gains with a similar theory in the Western world, details left to the deacons of stupas and steeples, the main takeaway that we are not in control, PERIOD. And that might not be such a bad thing, if the ulterior motives of religion are to be taken at face value.

  After all, aren’t all religions most similar in their insistence that we subject ourselves to a higher will? For all Christianity’s eternity and infinity, the need to obey God is paramount, the only question now or later, prodigal or prescient. And so it is with Islamic submission and Hindu embrace, we Buddhists left to fill in blanks that the others have all left unfilled.

  But the ‘present moment’ is something else entirely, and at its best in countering the pernicious superstitions of karma, especially the kind that jumps generations to bounce back and bite you when you least expect it, in the next life. Belief in the present moment provides a convenient counterpart to challenge all that. I would go not nearly so far as ET in extolling its virtues, since its virtues to me are simply those of meditation, whether with single focus or field focus, the result is the same.

  To shut off the internal dialogue, even for a moment, is to return to proto-consciousness, paleo-consciousness, before language took over and came to own it. Now languages conquer peoples and acquire new lands, our hapless selves but tools of the medium, neither rare nor well done. Samma vaca is right speech. Right speech is good speech. Silence is preferable to bad speech. Words matter…

  hardie karges and Five are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Five 7:46 am on February 22, 2021 Permalink | Reply

    What tradition of Buddhism were you trained in, Hardie? And is this “present moment Buddhism” something that people teach?

    You say “You can’t be a ‘present moment’ Buddhist and a ‘past life’ Buddhist at the same time” – but you can, and that is the whole point. Because the present moment never had a beginning (you recall one?) and has no end – it cannot have because it has no duration – that tells us that the “present moment”, i.e. conscious awareness, does not end at death. That’s all you need to know, you don’t need to remember past lives, or believe anything other than your experience (which is only ever of the ‘present moment’, as above, that IS your experience).

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    hardie karges 7:54 am on February 22, 2021 Permalink | Reply

    I have an MA in Buddhist Studies, so I am ‘trained’ in all of them. No, ‘present moment’ Buddhism is not taught, to my knowledge, unless you want to credit Eckhart Tolle with it. I use poetic license to conduct my thought experiments, in hopes of reaching a higher truth, or at least a different one. Interesting that you begin by disagreeing with me, and end by more-or-less agreeing with me. You are obviously a present moment Buddhist, if you are a Buddhist at all, good choice (even if you don’t believe in death, which is a bit of a dicey proposition)…

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  hardie karges 10:03 am on January 10, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 429 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), emptiness ( 29 ), eternity ( 4 ), infinity ( 7 ), MAGA, Muslim ( 2 ), predestination, present moment ( 5 ), reincarnation ( 14 ), Shaivite, Trump ( 2 )   

  Buddhism and the Limits of Control… 

  

  Self-control isn’t really about controlling anything. It’s about right actions. And this is an important distinction for Western audiences, who simply abhor any limit to their supposed freedoms, whether real or imagined, whether they be MAGA-hat-wearing Trumpists or Buddhists who refuse to give up the Christian core which promises them eternal life.

  So all of a sudden rebirth doesn’t sound so bad, notwithstanding the fact that for most traditional Buddhists that is a curse, not a gift. Nevertheless, we must plead ‘skillful means,’ in order to save the seeker from the grips of false doctrine, whether Muslim or Shaivite, and so admit them into the fold, then work out the details later.

  And in fact a world with no limits is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on unsuspecting adherents to Christianity, Capitalism, and Democracy, but that is our fate, and now we must deal with it. It was instrumental in getting men to the moon, and now we must figure out how to save the earth that they left behind. It created the fires of industry, and now we must figure out how to put the fires out.

  Still the eternalists never give up, assuring us that there are more of us out there somewhere in the Universe, with not one shred of evidence to support it. Like Trumpsters counting votes in absentia, the statisticians count humans by virtue of logic, not math. But the only thing infinite is Emptiness, and that is not the World. That is the possibility that there might be a world.

  Once there actually is a world of perception and cognition and stuff, then it is immediately limited by its very existence and its imminent death. So it is simply better to accept the profound limits of human existence, rather than talk about them, since that might make some people sad, that they may not be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and so forth, and so on.

  And so it is with control. That implies a limit on freedom, so people don’t want to hear about it. They want to hear that they are the center of the universe, and can do whatever they damn well please, torpedoes be damned at the same time. There’s only one problem: it’s a lie. Limits define us, by definition, and so are profound, and to be embraced, for that is the predestination that is so often secretly desired, almost as much as infinity, the two concepts of which are mutually exclusive, infinity and predestination.

  It’s almost like the Buddhists who believe in reincarnation at the same time that they believe in the present moment. You can’t do that, not without egregious assaults to fundamental logic and basic agreement of terms. And so avoidance of wrong actions is every bit as important as the execution of right actions. And if that is control, then so be it. Truth is more than a balanced equation. It is a balanced life…

   
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  hardie karges 7:45 am on May 6, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: atheism ( 4 ), belief ( 4 ), Buddhism ( 429 ), cyclic existence ( 4 ), Dalai Lama ( 12 ), Dyaus Pita ( 2 ), karma ( 50 ), predestination, Prithvi Mata ( 2 ), rebirth ( 37 ), system, Triple Gem ( 2 )   

  Update on the Buddhist Update: Hard work… 

  

  Now the last thing I expected when I ‘finally got serious about Buddhism’ a few years ago was that there were people still decidedly attached to the three-in-one concept of rebirth-past lives-retributive karma, to the extent that without it Buddhism was simply not functional, and would never survive. Others of us, on the other hand, think that WITH it it’s simply not functional and will never survive…

  But Buddhism is just like any other religion derived from the remote past, bedraggled with the baggage of preceding generations, and left to fend for itself against the challenges of the future. So many self-described atheists would simply prefer to call the whole thing off, while at the same time affirming their own belief systems—whether secular humanism, democracy, socialism, but mostly materialism—without seeing the slightest bit of irony, even if they prefer to ignore the logical inconsistencies… (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 5:49 am on August 13, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: consciousness ( 29 ), DNA ( 44 ), DOGMA ( 5 ), ego ( 33 ), Holy Grail, intelligent design, predestination, Science ( 25 )   

  Buddhism and Science: Pre-destination is the Holy Grail… 

  …of religion, science, and life, too, the mostly unrequited wish that “it’s all written,” whether in script or bar-code, to the point of retro-fitting the logic that may or may not have actually led up to some fait accompli, though that accomplished fact was never predicted even at the point of inception. This is the need for happy endings, and the one overriding narrative that drives all others, the one theory of everything…

  How many times has something unexpected happened and the first thing you think is, “Well, I guess that it was (or wasn’t) meant to be.” I know you’ve thought that. We all have. That’s a gut reaction. But sometimes I think I take it too far, to the point of filling in the details to justify that conclusion, when the fact is simply: much of life is random. There IS no predestination, and there IS no particular logic leading up to any particular event. Sh*t happens. Truer words have never been spoken… (More …)