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.
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.