Originally posted by Xebsball
Its everyones action, there is indeed Collective Karma
Wich prevails over yourself is Personal, but you cant deny the existance of the collective
I can deny it all day long because I don’t subscribe to the concept in the first place.
“But I still think Dr. Phil is a big tool.”
he’s got the right message. that’s all that matters.
“but how are you defined without limiting? where do others end and you begin? where do others begin and you and? are you what you define yourself?
but if you change, are you still you? or some other you?”
look! an unrelared tangent!! catch it quck before it runs away.
sure ok
what im syaing is there is indeed on buddhism a thing called collective karma or something like that. i recall asking about it and reading about it when i studied some buddhsim, dude. not sure if on all types of buddhism though.
i myself aint buddhist, christian or anything, so i dont subscribe to anything too
Originally posted by Merryprankster
look! an unrelared tangent!! catch it quck before it runs away.
??
in times like this Rurouni Kenshin would say: “Oro??”
he’s got the right message. that’s all that matters.
Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. I have an extensive background in psychology and some writing experience. I should just join the guy on the gravy train and start writing self-help books.
Or, you could be like Dr. Phil and write diet books even though he has no dietary training at all.
Well sure, why limit myself to writing books on a topic on which I have some knowledge/training.
I think I’ll write books on the history of Chinese martial arts as well and maybe some pseudoscientific books on exercise physiology. 
dwid …
The point is that admonitions like this are ultimately empty and are really the precursors to pursuing change rather than useful means to improving oneself. They are the basis for the truth of suffering of Buddhism but offer little in the way of Cause of suffering, Cessation of suffering, or Path.
i agree with dwid here. answers like this are for philosophy books that can’t help but be vague. they have their place, and they are certainly valid, but they aren’t the end complete. if a real live teacher had nothing more to offer than these types of answers, i would likely think he was no better off than i and liked to use circular logic to convince me otherwise. just like dr. tool.
Greetings..
Destiny, the place you choose to go (and you can choose again and again).. Fate, that which interupts your journey to the place of your choosing.. Ritual, some contrived notion that attempts to blend destiny and fate.. Human, the poor schmuck that has to figure it all out.. Enlightened, the human that attends to the present situation and sees destiny and fate as distractions… Martial artists, no one’s figured them out yet, but.. sado-masochistic philosophers with a penchant for abusing internet priviliges comes to mind…
JK.. be well…
PS: suffering is an illusion that we choose.. it serves our self-pity appetite.. you say you suffer, i say you whine..
PS: suffering is an illusion that we choose.. it serves our self-pity appetite.. you say you suffer, i say you whine..
I’ve never taken the “suffering” in a Buddhist context to be the same as literal suffering. I think you’re taking some liberties to make a point. Anyway, if suffering is just a descriptor for where you begin your path, it’s basis is more as a motivator than as an excuse for self-pity.
dwid
Greetings..
Sorry, i was just playing around a bit.. but, i do tire of so many Buddhists using the excuse of suffering to validate their condition.. the moment we give away our inherent ability to create our own destiny, we abandon our true nature and become slaves to the “doctrine du jour”..
Be well..
I understand. I get tired of people of any faith who use their religion to subsidize their laziness.
I kind of thought you might be joking. For some reason it just didn’t sound like you…
kaboom!
the best bombs are made with Horse sh.it and gasoline!
lol
Many times when some flunky would walk up to a master and ask " Master, what is enlightenment" they would be promptly caned.
why?
because they in that instant of pain became enlightened. That moment of short sharp shock smacked them into the true reality vis a vis the abrupt pain.
The pain, the suffering is at that point the enlightment as it simply represents “the moment”, everything that is to come hasn’t and everything that was, is gone.
also, as an addendum, there is more of course, but then, the tao that can be spoken of is not the real tao.
cheers
Sorry, i was just playing around a bit.. but, i do tire of so many Buddhists using the excuse of suffering to validate their condition.. the moment we give away our inherent ability to create our own destiny, we abandon our true nature and become slaves to the “doctrine du jour”..
i think this is why nietzsche saw buddhism as passive nihilism
isn’t nihilism passive enough in its own right?
read on a bathroom wall
~nietzsche is dead - signed GOD
An imagined (annotated) dialogue by Bertrand Russell written during the second world war.
The question is: if Buddha and Nieztche were confronted could either produce an argument that would appeal to an impartial listener?
Buddha would open the argument by speaking of the lepers outcast and miserable; the poor toiling with aching limbs and barely kept alive by scanty nourishment; the wounded in battle dying in slow agony…from all this load of sorrow he would say a way of salvation must be found and salvation can only come trough love.
Nieztche would (when his turn came) burst out: good heavens man. You must learn to be of tougher fibre. why go about snivelling because trivial people suffer? Trivial people suffer trivially, great men suffer greatly, and great sufferings are not to be lamented, because they are noble…your ideal is a purely negative one, absence of suffering, which can only be completley secured by non existence. I on the other hand have positive ideals - for the sake of great men (like Napoleon) any suffering is worthwhile.
For my part I agree with Buddha as I have imagined him. Nietzche despises universal love; i feel that it is the motive power to all I desire with regards to the world. His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is rapidly coming to an end.
rbt,
nietzsche makes a distinction between active and passive nihilism.
in his view, buddhism just let stuff happen, where-as christianity actively sought to reduce life to meaninglessness.
kl,
that phrase is impossibly overused, in response to thus spake zarathustra… “…have not you heard? God is dead!”
THZ is an allegorical book, and the meaning of “god is dead,” is quite clear when taken in context: nietzsche’s point was that values, virtues, life’s meaning, are man-made; as is god - if man does not need god conceptually to create/enforce/dictate value and virtue, then for all intents and purposes “god is dead.”
nf,
i think BR doesn’t do nietzsche’s primary concern -questioning what a “right” value or virtue is- justice. there are very few of nietzsche’s personal values that i think are particularly useful…which is BR’s (quite valid) point, but his concept of questioning value/virtue itself is quite valuable (no pun intended).
nietzsche is usually brought up by wanna be rebel/independent thinkers who desperately want to look non-conformist (not you, nf or kl…or me, IMO), based on what amounts to his rather sociopathic value system. many consider him nihilistic, which i believe to terribly inaccurate. he was anything but. he chose to affirm life and defined that for himself. it takes a tremendous amount of brilliance, confidence, independance, and perhaps, the madness of tertiary syphilis to free yourself to create a value system.
quite frankly to some extent we’re all his followers. nietzsche had a profound influence on (IMO was the first) moral relativists/humanists. to a large degree, we view personal moral frameworks, and engage in relative moral judgments because of his work. it’s practically existential morality. it had a profound and lasting effect on our approach to life.
MP
(apologies for brevity)
Nieztche’s penetrating critique of orthodox christian morality was timely and long overdue IMO. The subordination of the great by the mediocre through the mediocres strategy of strength in numbers (the medicore by definition always outnumbering the great) is an important insight and one that should not be overlooked. It also echoes some of Rousseaus earlier views on the nature of society, the laws that it (society) lays down and in particular those that concern property rights (perhaps the most ill defined and hardest to justify of all so called natural rights unless you subscribe to the view that what you own is whatever you can stop others from taking)
That said Nietzches philosophy did (however inadvertantly) pave the way for a later strand of social darwinism that took many forms, the most extreme of which reached its logical conclusion in Belson, Dachau, and Auschwitz.
Of course there are many ethical questions which aren’t easy to settle and which only add fuel to the moral relativists fire- abortion is one that springs to mind. Another is the one for ten problem i.e. should you kill one healthy person for their organs in order to save ten terminally ill people wo would otherwise die without the transplant (Nietzche would probably say it depends entirely on the relative merits of the individuals concerned- indeed 10 healthy mediocre men should die to save one unhealthy great man)
Kants maxim- act as if the object of your actions were to be a general rule (i.e. what would happen if every one did what I was doing) makes life easier IMO but was loathed by Nietzche who described him as a moral spider.
Anyway too heavy for KFO so ill stop there.
Nieztche’s thought is fundamentally undermined by a number of perversions he held axiomatically; making his religious and social critiques vacuous to all but those who share his perversions.
Most notable - his ‘will to power’ - presumes a mercantilist or neo-feudalist ethic as the essential character of human subjectivity. That this simply isn’t the case destroys his perspective. That he lived in an age where philosophy had already evolved past this failing, yet failed to follow suit himself, tells us much of his character. That his thought went on to inspire so many repugnant ideologies is then unsurprising.
But if there is anyone more immanently useless than Nieztche, it is surely Rousseau, so the comparison is apt.