I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
I feel a little timid about trying to answer this because at this point, I know that people can talk about these things intellectually forever and it just won’t… click. It’s so hard to write about too because if I tried to write in a way that very perfectly reflects my experience, the text becomes weird and cumbersome ( and then when I don’t, people try some gotchas like “ahaa but you refer yourself as “I”, doesn’t that mean you still believe in an individual self”, no but writing more precisely gets in the way of the message ).
First, believing whatever I want to believe is definitely a danger and actually you see this a lot in spiritual discourse that leans towards Buddhism, especially via New Age stuff and “McMindfulness”. Many people happily discard the mainstream beliefs but then they get hooked on their idea of what is true. But the merciless approach that Zen Buddhism has is that nothing you think about is totally true. It’s more like a reflection in a mirror ( Interestingly Plato was also alluding to this in his Allegory of The Cave, so this realization isn’t unique to Zen ).
That includes the concept of “objectivity”. Objectivity relies on the idea that there is some external third party to human experience. But once I looked, or more like was forced to face it, I realized that there is no such thing. I can exchange ideas with what appear to be other people and have an agreement. Like we can probably both agree that we’re looking at a screen now. I anticipate an objection here on the “other people”. I don’t know if “other people” exist outside of me but I know that I don’t have control over anything that appears in my mind. Something that I can call “other people” appears, and they have their likes and dislikes and it can be painful if I’m not respectful of that. This is where compassion teachings come in.
Oh and I’m not anti-science at all. Science is great at revealing patterns in the way things appear. Happy to go get my vaccinations and all that.
Tell me you had a certain experience without telling me you had a certain experience.
Were you taught to not talk in certain terms about how your world “shattered”? Because I was.
I was, yes. I think even if I wasn’t I probably wouldn’t use those terms anyway since in online discourse it never looks good.
Okay, thank you for explaining.
I admit I don’t get it, but maybe I’ll consider reading that book. It seems I had a mistaken idea about Buddhism. Or at least Zen Buddhism.
What they describe is similar to the discourse in western philosophy about the mind and the objective reality. There is no way to prove or disprove that the reality exists outside of the mind of the observer, i.e. that solipsism is true or false. But it also follows that solipsism is practically useless. So we must agree that we probably have a shared experience with other people, which we’ll call ‘reality’. Then the question is, how close the experience of one observer is to that of other people. This is where stuff like qualia comes in, which posits that it’s impossible to qualify immediate perceptual experiences, because each person only refers to what they themselves have experienced. It could easily be that one person’s sensory experience and perception of the world is wholly different from that of another person. It seems, though, that in practice we have a shared vocabulary for our perceptions and use that to build our knowledge of the world.
@SenK@lemmy.ca does this sound like an accurate interpretation of your concept?
Somewhat but I have quibbles with solipsism as people very often mistake it for what I’m talking about. Solipsism, as a philosophical position, remains trapped in the duality of “self vs. world,” endlessly debating whether the world is “out there.” Zen, on the other hand, points directly to the experience prior to that division - the awareness in which both “self” and “world” arise as dependent, interrelated appearances. As I said, there is a whole world before thought. Solipsism still operates on the level of thought. Zen takes another step back from that, and that’s a very important distinction. Which unfortunately is very hard to explain because explanation itself is just thoughts. I can’t describe that which is inherently undescribeable.
The deeper point is that the observer itself is just another perception, not a fixed entity having experiences. The shared vocabulary we use isn’t proof of an external world; it’s just what happens when awareness interacts with itself, creating the appearance of separation and then appearing to bridge it with language.
Zen asks, what is true, before you think about it.
Edit: Solipsism is kinda like the immature little brother of Zen that’s (noisily) playing in the same pool but won’t go to the deep end.