streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 3:12 am on June 8, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bharata, Buddhism ( 431 ), dharma ( 35 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), Hinduism ( 28 ), language ( 146 ), meditation ( 192 ), sanatana dharma ( 2 ), Socrates, Thai Forest Tradition ( 6 ), Vipassana ( 14 )   

  Buddhism: Dharma is a law of Nature… 

  

  Dharma is a law of Nature, not a law of men. That much must be acknowledged, even if the details are a little bit sketchy. After all, it would be much too easy just to call it the ‘law of the Buddha’, since it precedes that event by a thousand years or so, even if the details are still no less sketchy. But the Vedic Brahmanists used the word profusely, as if the meaning were obvious, and so we could probably surmise that the term meant something like Socrates’s ‘good life’ or just ‘living right.’

  Project that concept into the future Sanatana Dharma and you’ve got the phrase that traditional natives from India, Bharat(a), use to call the vast field of knowledge and belief that we call Hinduism. But I think that Buddhism refined the concept, even without limiting it, not really, as something analogous to the Middle Way, a path between luxury and lack. Add to that the early Buddhist association of dharma with jati, life, to refer to nature, dharmajati, and the symbiosis is complete.

  Dharma is irrevocably connected to nature, without much concern for who gets the credit. And that is the Holy Grail for modern creator-less religion, of course, something nature-based and at the same time rational and open to science. Bingo. That’s Buddhism without the superstition, meditation-based, Vipassana, discipline without all the deities. Now reference the Thai Forest Tradition, or any other forest tradition, and the circle is complete, also. Nature is our temple, and dharma is our practice.  

   

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  hardie karges 4:56 pm on February 2, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), causes ( 2 ), conditions ( 2 ), Einstein ( 11 ), Hardie Karges ( 242 ), language ( 146 ), meditation ( 192 ), philosophy ( 103 ), Plato ( 17 ), religion ( 158 ), Science ( 25 ), shunya ( 11 ), Socrates, spirituality ( 27 ), Theravada ( 51 ), Vajrayana ( 22 ), zero ( 13 )   

  Buddhism 499: Causes and Conditions… 

  

  It’s not enough to temporarily alleviate a bad situation, but better to permanently change the causes and conditions that created it. This gives the lie to the dismissive notions that Buddhism is only interested in the ‘present moment’, and that ‘thoughts have no thinkers’, and other casual self-disses that imply that Buddhism is superficial and unconcerned with deeper meanings. The Buddha never said that, and nothing could be further from the truth. Those are popular modern themes, but the historical reality is quite different.

  In fact, Buddhism has been extremely concerned with causes and conditions since day one. And if that’s readily apparent in the earliest Theravada Buddhism, it’s a frank obsession by the time of Vajrayana. Never is there a call to cease suffering without a simultaneous call to end the causes of suffering. I think it’s even fair to say that this was likely something of a revelation in that pre-scientific time. Because in that era prior to the scientific era of experimentation, deep contemplation was the next best thing.

  Even Einstein knew that from his deep thought experiments, and the Socratic dialogs of Plato at or around the same time as the Buddha’s sutras were a dualistic echo of the same approach. It requires deep thinking and difficult training, not just a fly catcher nabbing a thought or two on their way through the garden to the kids’ pool. It’s even very possible that it was Buddhist monks who invented (yes, invented) the zero, something which would not catch on in the West for almost 2000 years. It first existed as a concept in shunya, before making the jump to higher math. How do you transfer the liquids between two full containers? You need an empty container. That’s a zero. Think about it. Then meditate. That’s a zero.
   
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  hardie karges 3:46 am on June 9, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 431 ), dialectic ( 13 ), dialogues, Hardie Karges ( 242 ), meditation ( 192 ), metaphysics ( 5 ), Middle Path ( 55 ), physics ( 13 ), Plato ( 17 ), religion ( 158 ), Socrates   

  Buddhism and the Middle Path with Feeling  

  

  The fact that there is always a middle position between two extremes is not Buddhist. That’s business: buy low, sell high or just split the difference and celebrate the art of the deal, haha. The fact that there is a path is Buddhist. The middle position between extremes is also fundamental to the Socratic dialogues and resulting Platonic dialectic. And this is very compatible with Buddhism, in which a thesis and corresponding antithesis result in a higher synthesis.  

  The path comes into play over the passage of time, as multiple compromises and corresponding dialectics form a pathway over time. This assumes that the accumulated decisions and compromises are of a similar nature, such that the path has meaning in and of itself and they are not a series of isolated incidents. Why is this significant? Because this is your life, by analogy, at least, a path through the wilderness.  

  And we are all searching for something, aren’t we, mostly happiness and fulfillment, in this life, the rewards for which are not always monetary nor measurable in any way? The human dimension is one of feeling, above and beyond all thought and language, all physics and metaphysics, all rhyme and reason. Because if something just doesn’t feel good and feel right, then it’s mostly worthless, at the end of the day. For all our pretenses and pretensions, we are still animals, after all, pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.