radarmark
Quaker-in-the-Making
This thread becomes curiouser and curiouser... I like it!
Another dualist !Upon thinking about it, that just might work.
Let me add a couple of Niels Bohr quotes to the mix:
There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
~Niels Bohr
That's why I write in such convoluted English. I had a Bohrian brain transplant... actually I am just such a skeptic, but such a mystic that I know the truth that I cannot know (kinda like the dislexic insomniac who laid there all night wondering if there was a D!g).
Pax et amore omnia vincunt!
I think St Paul touched on a big point when he spoke about 'scandalising' the community — Try telling people they should love something that cannot be known or imagined, that lies beyond our every concept, etc., is a tough message to absorb.
Added to that, the idea that one should love one's neighbour, and serve one's neighbour, with no expectation of reward, and for no reason other than it's just the right thing to do ... not a very powerful incentive.
Well, IMO, materialism prospers in China (the demand for shark fin soup) and Japan (the kogyaru or the toy car racers), maybe not deeply in their souls (but there are still a lot of communits in both) but in their habits and ideologies.
Unfortunately materialism is rampant everywhere.
Funny, famous rabbis have thought anyone could be a Jew and a Buddhist because there was no concpt of G!d in Buddhism. Yet at the same time Sokei-an Roshi and Suzuki Roshi taught that the body of truth was G!d (though in a much closer to Process Theology way). Very good insight, Linitik!
Slight imbalance? Which is leveraging the other?Balance could be achieved if the practical were to become ideal, however in practice the ideal is not practical enough. Its corners are too sharp and its demands are too intense. Ideally then the ideal must differ from the practical, so a slight imbalance is the child of the ideal.
Important in Buddhism:
Two Truths
...but they weren't the only ones:
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The ancient Egyptians also had the "Hall of the Two Truths," where the heart was weighed against the Feather of Maat.
Do you accept only one truth, or two truths, and why?
Beliefs are explanations that cannot be proven to be true...I believe that life must exist elsewhere in the Galaxy and Universe.
Truth in this case is subjective
Dzogchen has the upper hand here, IMHO. Two truths (both virtually unknowable) is less preferable than one big virtually unknowable truth. Both the "commonsense" (nītattha) and "absolute" (neyyattha) truths can be looked at as sub-species of what western philosophy just calls truth (if we accept the Greek tradition and include ideas in the mind).
In the High Holy Days of Newton and Einstein, the "absolute" was lost (as idealism or metaphysics or beyond scientific method). Well now "commonsense" is lost (if quantum theory is true) as well, leaving us with only nītattha minus scientific truth which is pretty much truth-for-the-unwahed-and-uneducated, called post-modernism. So neither is very useful (both much too vague for what most people want and kinda antiquated for those who see the neyyattha as perfectly acceptable).
Did that make sense at all?
At least, he seemed to have identified God as the absolute Creator, although he did declare in another video that he never could think of God as a personal divine Being. But he made it very clear that, contrary to public opinion, he was not a pantheist or attheist for that matter.Ben