!! I would never in a billion years "chastise" you for having emotions. I always look at it that we each put down our thinking as it relates to an earlier post. I have nothing against emotions, just that I like to bare in my mind what is solely emotional from that which is independent of my emotions. I have a great emotional attachment to stars and trees but I also have a detatched view where I am assimilating questions and answers not directly of my choice but still formualted and arrived at with the sole intention of understanding more about stars and trees.
Perhaps chastise was the wrong word. In a thread earlier in the week, you seemed to indicate that whereas you thought that I enjoyed my feelings, you enjoyed science.
Yet here, if I understand her correctly, Penelope is saying that decisions are better made with emotion (which she calls awareness; I would argue the two are different things, but that is an aside) than with thought. To which you seemed to agree, which contradicted your earlier assessment that you preferred science (which is bound to thought) rather than my ideas about experience, intuition, and "feelings." I am finding the ebb and flow confusing. But the latter part of your discussion here assists- you are saying you enjoy both feelings and thought, but like to try to separate the two. That's fine and dandy when one studies stars or trees, or feels for them, but when it comes to decision-making, humans are notoriously bad at separating thought from emotion. The two go hand in hand.
I agree there is a catch 22 in there. But we can only do the best we can with what we have.
Indeed, and that is a statement that runs both ways, n'est pas? One can't criticize one approach of human thought whilst ignoring that the same criticism applies to the criticism itself. One can't call out flaws in one thing by using the same flaws to do so. It doesn't make any sense (except in a circular fashion).
Yet it seems to me like a few of you are trying to ring fence Buddhism, and the Buddhism of affluent western indulgence at that, but fail to see just how ritualised it is.
Why is ritual a bad thing to you?
When I read a Buddhist teaching I see an invitation to self indulgence that is not as pronounced in the Abrahamics, so if anything Eastern modes of meditation require more, not less, reliance on the ego. To think because the meat of the ego is applied over hours of diligent schooling and practice prior to any effort at meditation somehow removes the ego is naive.
You'll have to provide some examples and evidence here, because to be honest I don't know what you are talking about in terms of "an invitation to self-indulgence," "reliance on the ego" and "removal of the ego." Perhaps start with explaining what you are meaning by "ego" and then how this relates to reliance on it for meditation. Further, as CZZ tried to explain, I don't think the point of meditation is removing the ego. My own experience is that it is more like one starts to consciously observe one's own thoughts, rather than just thinking and feeling without awareness. It is a coming to awareness of each moment, of one's body, mind, environment, etc. I don't know how much of that applies to CZZ or other people who meditate.
The past century has seen such an expansion in education and communication that the collective of human knowledge has become almost an entity in its own right. It can no longer be acceptable to pass ones intrepretation of what reality is through just a few excersises and expect to understand or reach some enlightenment.
That assumes enlightenment is tied to knowledge. One can have a great deal of knowledge and still be quite poor in understanding and awareness. Many doctors, for example, have acquired a great deal of knowledge about the human body, but if they are lousy at listening and understanding their patients, they might make poor diagnoses. Then there is the problem of specialization. There is so much knowledge that everyone either specializes or fails to get real depth in any one area, and either way, one's interpretation of reality becomes narrow-minded and limited. Either one fails to grasp the reality of any one aspect of the universe, having only a passing knowledge of a great many things or one grasps only a tiny sliver of the universe in depth and fails to have the knowledge to connect the dots to everyone else's knowledge.
The knowledge itself is a network, a system of distributed cognition in society. It isn't an indepedent entity that any one person can fully access.
Yet one needn't despair that enlightenment is impossible because the system of knowledge is distributed rather than concentrated. I think there are ways around this, but I don't think Tao would like my views on that.
It is like Feynman said about Quantum Physics, "Anyone who says that they understand Quantum Mechanics does not understand Quantum Mechanics". The same is true about the human condition.
We are always limited in our knowledge. Whether or not we must be limited in our awareness or understanding is another matter. I think part of the key there is our scope of time and focus.
