The Human Condition According to Gautama

rat_spit · February 25, 2021, 2:51am

What’s superstitious about joy? Rapture? Pleasure?

Have you never listened to an inspiring piece of music and felt rapture?

Open to personal verification. Personal experience is what defines meditation.

But if you want some MRI studies on mediators - I’ll dig one up that I know of. Give me a moment.

I’ve suffered from Sacroiliac joint dysfunction for years and years. NSAIDS - didn’t help; stretching didn’t help.

Meditation helped. And of course - you your self use breath meditation. You should know the personal advantages of spending time focusing on the breath.

Medication? Meditation? Why not use both?

Actually the first Buddhist council was held immediately after the Buddha’s death

The First Buddhist council was a gathering of senior monks of the Buddhist order convened just after Gautama Buddha’s death in c. 400 BCE.[1][2] The story of the gathering is recorded in the Vinaya Pitaka of the Theravadins and Sanskrit Buddhist schools. It is regarded as canonical by all schools of Buddhism, but in the absence of evidence from outside the Buddhist sutras some scholars have expressed doubts as to the event’s historicity.[citation needed]

Case study on the effects of Buddhist meditation on the brain

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/np/2013/653572/

Abstract

We report the first neural recording during ecstatic meditations called jhanas and test whether a brain reward system plays a role in the joy reported. Jhanas are Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that imply major brain changes based on subjective reports: (1) external awareness dims, (2) internal verbalizations fade, (3) the sense of personal boundaries is altered, (4) attention is highly focused on the object of meditation, and (5) joy increases to high levels. The fMRI and EEG results from an experienced meditator show changes in brain activity in 11 regions shown to be associated with the subjective reports, and these changes occur promptly after jhana is entered. In particular, the extreme joy is associated not only with activation of cortical processes but also with activation of the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the dopamine/opioid reward system. We test three mechanisms by which the subject might stimulate his own reward system by external means and reject all three. Taken together, these results demonstrate an apparently novel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject.

Sheldon · February 25, 2021, 6:44am

I give up, what?

Never touched her…

So no then, just like alien abduction stories it’s all in the mind of the person claiming it, and just like those fantasies, I’m going to remain dubious.

Another claim, see if you can guess what I’m going to ask next?

The efficacy of one is supported by sufficient objective evidence. So I ask again what has this to do with you evidencing claims for the supernatural?

rat_spit · February 25, 2021, 7:18am

The answer is “nothing”. It is quite “normal” to experience all of these things in a daily basis.

Meditation simply allows you to feel these things at will.

Nothing? What does that mean? Never felt rapture, man? The spine tingling sensation of an inspiring monologue? No?

Of course. Right up there with the most absurd anecdotes. Okay. Not open to reason.

If you want to depend on NSAIDS and opioids your whole life - while something less addictive and more effective exists (however you are too sceptical to even try it) - it’s your loss.

Let’s start with the study. What are your feelings about that? I posted it specifically for you and your objective evidence.

Of course - when I finally do post scientific method - Sheldon has nothing to say. Can’t be bothered to read it, perhaps?

Sheldon · February 25, 2021, 7:58am

So you asked me a question that has nothing to do with my post, and that you knew the answer to? That’s bizarre…

So you’ve claimed, what has this unevidenced claim to do with the question of whether you can demonstrate any objective evidence for any of the supernatural claims you’ve made about your religious beliefs?

Clearly I was being facetious, as you’re asking another irrelevant straw man, which has nothing to do with my post you are ostensibly responding to.

Not if you’re claiming my reason should encompass beliefs in woo woo for which no objective evidence can be demonstrated. Tacking the word reason onto your claims doesn’t make them valid, anymore than describing them as logical makes them rational.

Claims need sufficient objective evidence to support them before I’ll believe they’re valid.

All claims…

False dichotomy fallacy. What I want has no bearing on the proven efficacy of opioids in preventing pain, and the paucity of evidence for your claims about meditation, and more importantly the woo woo supernatural claims about Buddhism in general.

I’ve not read it, just post a synopsis of the conclusions, and then link the peer reviewed studies that replicated the results.

You didn’t even tell us what the conclusions of it were, and one study is hardly sufficient, do you understand what peer review means?

Come on now ratty, what precisely are you claiming, what are the conclusions of that study, and how does that support your position. Has the study been replicated, how many times?

Most importantly, what has it to do with my insistence that you demonstrate sufficient objective evidence for your supernatural claims about Buddhism and meditation?

You can’t simply point to natural functions of the brain, and claim meditation does this, as if that validates the woo woo superstitious claims for Buddhism you’ve made elsewhere. We are all aware, or should be, of the well documented placebo effect, and of course correlation is not causation.

I’m teetering on the brink of using the word sophistry, don’t push me over…

Sheldon · February 25, 2021, 9:23am

"Dwelling at Savatthi… "Monks, the ending of the effluents is for one who knows & sees, "

Effluent? Yuch…

“For one who knows what & sees what is there the ending of effluents?”

They seem obsessed with sewage?

“Such is form, such its origination, such its disappearance. Such is feeling, such its origination, such its disappearance. Such is perception, such its origination, such its disappearance. Such are fabrications, such their origination, such their disappearance. Such is consciousness, such its origination, such its disappearance.’ The ending of the effluents is for one who knows in this way & sees in this way.”

Gobbledeegook…

Whitefire13 · February 25, 2021, 10:33am

The Vinaya Piṭaka (Sanskrit, first written down in Pali within the Theravadan communities of Sri Lanka, probably during the 1st century bce.

…(the oldest and smallest of the three sections of the Buddhist canonical Tipiṭaka (“Triple Basket”)
… The Pali canon was written down in the first century CE.

I’m learning lots! You don’t answer my questions, ratty so I google. So let’s get this straight.

The Buddha is raised in a royal family BUT he is unable or doesn’t see the “wisdom” in writing shit down. He trusts “word of mouth” as wisdom for,
Oh - a few hundred years…
TO BE AN accurate way of communicating IMPORTANT knowledge (Hahahaha).

LOTS in common with Jesus - hey! I just thought of something when I said “Jesus”… the writing of Jesus’ words were around that 100 year mark (CE) - so there must have been some religious competition going on…

Buddha followers “man, we better write this shit down- some other dude’s followers are yapping and writing…”

Sheldon · February 25, 2021, 10:38am

Indeed White, the cynic in me can see that when peddling woo woo, the written word is fraught with danger.

After all you have plausible deniabillity if you said something that is proved wrong later, and it becomes expedient to deny saying it, but writing it down, and claiming its author is infallible, presents a problem later if it turns out to be bullshit…a trap more than one religion has fallen into.

Sheldon · February 25, 2021, 11:20am

I did ask how you know this? Any answer likely to be forthcoming?

Or is it simply to be another argument from assertion fallacy?

boomer47 · February 25, 2021, 9:46pm

The Buddha is said to have died in 480 bce. So his utterances were transmitted and accurately, orally, for 300 years.

I’m unable to believe the gospels were orally transmitted even 60 years after Jesus’ putative death. Why on earth should I accept Buddhist claims of 300 years? Sounds like special pleading to me.

Cognostic · February 25, 2021, 10:46pm

BUDDHISM: IS BULLSHIT -

Enlightenment is ill-defined and a quest of it indistinguishable from simply maturing and educating yourself.
All cultures have had some form of meditative or spiritual practice, nothing special in Buddhism. Assertions of higher plains of existence, talking to the dead, experiencing actual places, astral projection, or levitation, and any other woo woo attached to meditation must be demonstrated. You feel more relaxed. Fine. You contemplated your existence. Fine. You did not need any religious ideology to do either of those things.
The quest for detachment and “the middle way” are in complete contradiction to one another. Buddhism searches for the alleviation of suffering through total detachment… no middle ground here … and while they are detaching from the world, there are rituals to learn, dipshit vocabulary to posses, philosophy to adhere to, believe in, and accept, and a “right way” to think about things and do things.
The fundamental principles of Buddhist though are corrupt. The core of the faith is rotten. It is based on a foundation of superstition and assertions of esoteric knowledge without sufficient evidence.
Karma… Shall I beat a dead horse? You are born poor, deformed, retarded, ignorant, whatever, because that is your karma. Accept it. Your kid is killed because that was his Karma and your karma. Your wife dies of Cancer, that is her Karma and your Karma is to suffer over her death. Accept it. To hide there bad Karma, Koreans would kill female babies. Husbands were given female babies because of some evil the wife had done. The wives were blamed. (I know the reality. The Korean Government subsidized several popular movies when I first arrived here 1997, explaining genetics and the father’s role in determining sex, to stop the baby killing.) If a family had a child that was deformed or mentally deficient, they were sent to the islands to pick fruit. The family denied having the child. They would move to a new city. Everyone knows the family is being punished for the bad Karma they have earned. Karma is shit!
Reincarnation: Esoteric woo woo bullshit with no significant evidence capable of standing against critical inquiry. Energy moves on. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The argument; “I find it useful” is as ignorant a position as any other religious zealot asserting he or she finds his or her religious belief “useful.” Your “TESTAMONY” is bullshit. The information has always been out there in the world. The fact that you happened to find it in a Buddhist ideology, SAYS NOTHING ABOUT THE VALIDITY OF BUDDHISM. To get to what is real in the Buddhist tradition, you have to wade through a fuck ton of horseshit. No different that looking at Christian scriptures and finding a couple that have some real depth to them.

In a quest to “free your mind” and become “detached” you have closed all the doors and windows, trapped yourself in a silly esoteric belief system, and can no longer see the world around you without filtering it through your Buddhist colored glasses. Instead of expanding your mind, you have merely jumped from your previous perception of the world, into an alternate perception of the world and it feels like expansion because it is new to you. It is not expansion. It is a little bubble of religiosity. And once it is explored, there are other little bubbles. If you explore enough little bubbles, one day you may recognize them for what they are and then wonder if there is anything more…

BUDDHISM IS SMOKE, MIRRORS, AND BULLSHIT, FROM THE GROUND UP!

boomer47 · February 25, 2021, 11:44pm

Forget where I saw this. Millenia ago there was a temple famous fort its talking statue of a god. Eventually it was discovered that there was a little door at the back where a priest would crawl in and become divine.

Heron/Hero Of Alexander , (10-70 ce) was a mathematician and genius, inventing and building a large rang of mechanisms. One would open and close huge temple doors. The ordinary believers thought it was their god .

Among many other things, Heron invented a steam engine. It was never developed beyond a toy and curiosity. No need because of available slave
labour?

Seems to me that people have been gullible at least since the neolithic when Shamans could turn into animals. It is my opinion that all human actions have reason, at least initially***. Animism answered a lot of questions and helped people be less afraid of the dark. I think that remains a basic reason for religion today

***In my family there were some fascinating little superstitions: Never put a hat on the table, never open an umbrella indoors. No one was able to tell me why. However, I remain convinced there was once a reason. Or even that the superstitions were misremembered practices of centuries past.

Whitefire13 · February 26, 2021, 12:02am

Haha - it’s still here in Canada, eh! Seriously many natives still believe in “shape-shifting”, medicine men, magic/curses and the such.

Wendigo.

boomer47 · February 26, 2021, 4:54am

Yeah, I know. Spent sometime studying the Kwakuitl people of the general BC area. (potlatches) UBC on Victoria has the best collection of Kwakuitl artifacts in the world. Their ceremonial masks and totem poles are wonderful.

Sheldon · February 26, 2021, 6:50am

Ding ding ding ding…we have a winner…

A natural process causes natural symptoms, Hitchens’s razor applies to the woo woo that’s added.

By gad sir, but you’re on fire…

Exactly, but if this upsets anyone, get over it, it’s your fucking Karma.

Precisely, such claims outrage reason, and deny science, and are based on naught but unevidenced anecdotal superstition.

rat_spit · February 26, 2021, 8:13am

Ahem. Let’s maybe back this up a bit.

You claimed and continue to claim that the content in the sutta linked was and is superstitious woo woo.

I asked you what was superstitious about, for example, rapture - joy - or pleasure?

Was your response. Then this facetious piece of work. Intellectual dishonesty. Like I somehow know when you’re avoiding the answer to a question in a cutesy tootsy way, right?

Facetious? Why? Perhaps you would have to admit that while listening to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy - you felt immense rapture throughout your entire body? Perhaps you know there is nothing superstitious about Ode to Joy? Or the rapture that you would experience from listening to it?

Perhaps I know how to replicate that feeling at will and you do not? Now who’s being facetious?

Except of course you’ve listened to Ode to Joy and felt immense rapture? Or is it Bach? Or Mozart? Or the Beatles perhaps?

Is it still woo woo? Rapture? Is rapture woo? Pleasure? Joy? And how do we account for these experiences, honestly?

With “objective” evidence? Can you explain the qualia of “red” without referring to subjective experience?

In the absence of an objective viewpoint that would establish the qualia of red, are we to assume that the colour we both see is different? Where you see red, perhaps I see green? Are we that fucking far gone, here?

Which part is woo? The subjective experience of Joy - or Pleasure - or Rapture? Enough with the facetiousness.

I offered you an abstract and a link. If you could be bothered to read the article you would arrive at the “conclusions” section in about five minutes.

For Christ sake! All this time, you’re demanding “objective evidence” - and then you turn away like a spoiled brat who doesn’t want to eat his spinach.

Read the science behind the woo. It’s right there in the link.

What I’m claiming and what the study concludes may be two different things. The study involves an fMRI reading of the meditators brain during heightened states of ecstasy.

I’ve never been in such a machine while meditating, so how can I compare the participants experience with my own?

The study has never been replicated. For several reasons. Buddhist meditation comes in a large variety of shapes and forms. The participant is a lay man with “x” number of years studying under “y” guru.

To find a participant with the same resume would be next to impossible.

Yeah. Lust, Ignorance, and craving for existence. Once you see the disgust in these things you are ready to abandon them.

Half way there, Shelly.

Fazah

He quite simply didn’t have any paper. And his adherents put his words to memory.

Like many ancient traditions in India, oral recital was the way things were done.

Look at the Vedas, if you’re interested. Ancient - predating Buddhism by at least 500 years.

Transmitted orally for generations - until someone had the bright idea of writing them down on pieces of bark. Paper wasn’t readily available at the time.

It’s recorded in the suttas. We take it on faith. We believe it because oral traditions were the standard at the time. Ananda was known has the Buddha’s assistant.

We have a record of him reciting everything he’d ever heard at the first Buddhist Council following Gautama’s passing.

rat_spit · February 26, 2021, 8:33am

Enlightenment is defined as the ending of the effluents. This is achieved upon entering and emerging from an attainment known as “the cessation of perception and feeling”.

The Buddha acknowledged that the efficacy of his teachings would die out 400 years after his passing. Mainly because he allowed women into his order. Had it not been for the nuns, the dhamma would have lasted a thousand years after his death.

The probability of someone living in this day and age with the same insight as the Buddha is rare.

Dismissing his teachings is therefore easy for you. You are like the remaining 99 % of people who simply do not GET it.

You’re thinking of later Buddhism in its monasticism and evolution into Mahayana along its path towards east Asia.

The Buddhists I know of are homeless beggars following the path of a sramana.

Faith that chanting “Amitabha” will land you in a Buddha Pure Land? Sure. That’s Bullshyte.

Faith that “joy leads to rapture - rapture to tranquility - tranquility to pleasure - pleasure to concentration - concentration to insight - insight to disenchantment - disenchantment to dispassion - dispassion to freedom - freedom to knowledge and vision of release”?

That’s a nine step program which starts with faith.

In the context of rebirth, karma makes sense.

The Buddha has stated that the project of explaining each and every fortune or misfortune by way of karma cannot be accomplished.

Good people wind up in bad situations. Evil people wind up in good situations.

In general, if one is aiming for Heaven - one is better off refraining from killing, stealing, lying, and sexual misconduct.

Past life recollections and third eye visions suffice to provide evidence for these claims.

Sheldon · February 26, 2021, 11:32am

Nope, I suggest you re-read my original response, its quoted at the end of this post.

Exactly, you have selected things you know are natural phenomena, then created a straw man fallacy by implying I have suggested they’re not, when I have made no such assertions, why only you can know?

That wasn’t facetious, I’ve made no claims about those phenomena. So why are you asking me this…?

When you already know they’re natural phenomena and I’ve not said otherwise?

You’ve lost me? What was the purpose of your loaded straw man question? What has it to do with me refusing to believe any claims made without sufficient objective evidence, including any all superstitious beliefs for anything supernatural?

Because it was the second irrelevant question you asked in response to my post, as it has nothing to do with what I’d said.

I give up, who? You’ve now switched from loaded straw man questions to cryptic ones.

What does that have to do with…my post quoted below, that you’re responding to? I never mentioned music or rapture?

You’re not making any sense sorry. Does an emotional response to music require woo woo, did I ever suggest it did, is there an objective explanation for this natural phenomena?

Where did I claim that? Now you’re just making shit up. It’s also clear those are all natural phenomena whose origins don’t need any woo woo or superstition to explain them. So this is just bizarre…

I don’t know about you, but I try not to make unevidenced assumptions, I think I’ve been pretty clear on that.

What on earth are you talking about, seriously?

Any claims that have little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.

What are the conclusions in that link, is it peer reviewed research, who peer reviewed it, how many times and by whom has it been replicated to produce those claimed results.

Come on ratty, you may want to accept the first claim that supports your religious beliefs you can Google online, but I’m under no obligation to do so.

If something is scientifically valid, then it can’t be woo woo, by definition. What are claiming science has validated?

Be specific, I’m not doing the research for you. And I’ll bet my house science has not validated anything supernatural.

Well then why fucking link it?

So a medical procedure confirming a natural phenomena, how does this demonstrate any objective evidence for anything supernatural exactly? You do know what superstitious means don’t you?

So not only do it’s conclusions have nothing to do with the objections I raised in my post, they involve a test group of one, ffs give me strength.

That wooshing sound is White’s point, going over your head.

So you don’t know it then, just an unevidenced biased assumption.

Dear oh dear, with a bar for belief set as low as faith, literally anything can be believed, but please don’t use words like know or imply it’s knowledge anyone possesses.

Ok, your bizarre tangential questions seem to have entirely lost my original post, so I’ll quote your post and my response below, please read it carefully.

If you want my opinion on your beliefs, and one assumes you do since you’ve asked, the you will have to be specific about the claims you’re making here, the attachment was endless gobbledeegook, and I quoted three lengthy passages to show this. I’m not wading through it all as I’d be none the wiser as to what you’re asking me to comment on, and my generic response about the criteria I’ll accept has you running off at bizarre tangents with unrelated questions based on erroneous assumptions.

Sheldon · February 26, 2021, 11:37am

Argumentum ad populum fallacy.

Sheldon · February 26, 2021, 11:38am

HahahahahahahahahahahHahahahahahahahahahahHahahahahahahahahahahHahahahahahahahahahahHahahahahahahahahahah…

Whitefire13 · February 26, 2021, 12:56pm

Ratty - your standard for evidence is way too fucking low!!! Raise the bar a bit, eh? I understand rodents love their wheel to run circles in, BUT after awhile, doesn’t it get old?

BTW … send me $100 and I’ll return to you a million! Just think of all the peace of mind you could buy with it!!! Seriously, have faith - there are some here (on this forum) who can vouch for me that I’ve sent them a cool million!