When I’m older than you I will have lots of money and I will
shower you with many gifts. I will by then be a 130 year old
philosophy professor and you will be a wayward young adult
with mental problems. Our roles will be completely reversed
but it will be fun, mate.
I don’t think this thread is at all inappropriate to the pub. If y’all want it moved, I’ll be happy to move it.
I don’t want it moved. I want it to stay right here.
In that case forget I mentioned it 
So…
Jim, from the very little I know of Buddhism (I intend to learn more), I don’t doubt that Camus would regard the taking of refuge in The Buddha as an act of Bad Faith… as judged by Camus’s values.
But on the other hand…
…is so compatible with the Existentialist insistence on personal responsibility that one can imagine Camus finding Buddhism hard to dismiss in its entirity!
Hard to discount one’s subjective experience of the world to the extent that the concept of ‘self’ can be discarded! I honestly can’t imagine ever being able to do that. To be honest I’m not really sure that I understand what you mean by ‘there’s no self’. I perceive, empirically, that there is an awareness inhabiting my body: a sentience that feels to me like ‘self’.
I find Camus’s revolt far easier to conceive than the discarding of the belief in self, although apparently no easier to achieve
Revolt, to a rational, near-atheist agnostic like me is probably the closest to a refuge I can see. There is no escape from suffering - particularly from fear and the classic Existential Angst - outside of death. One can either stumble on in terror and bitterness, as was apparently Philip Larkin’s way, or one can attempt to embrace the positive, but unspeakably harsh, outlook of Camus and Sisyphus.
That in itself is a kind of refuge. In proposing an Absurd absence of built-in meaning, and No Way Out of our stark situation, Camus paradoxically almost offers meaning and thereby a degree of the comfort he insists should not be sought!
Oy vey, how is a person to live?
While I know that Buddhism is a religion and a lot of people don’t like to discuss religion and I am a Christian and a non-universalist, I still love to talk about religion even if I disagree with much of it (and I do) and I don’t think a thread about Buddhism or Islam or whatever other faith should necessarily be moved just because it’s religious in nature. Religion and faith, even when dicussed in personal ways, are not always as heated or controversial as politics.
I totally agree, Cran. I just felt that my response to Jim might be straying a bit from the OP’s intended focus, and I am aware that some people have kicked up over the mention of religion outside the quarantine area - as you probably remember 
Sorry to have confused matters. 
edited typo
confusion rules the pub, bub.
Your thoughtfulness is appreciated, buddhu. You did not confuse matters. I was able to follow what you were doing and why you were doing it with no problem whatsoever. It’s like Denny said. 
not much like!
Hey, common, I’m only 129!
Buddhu, the whole anatta (no-self) thing in Buddhism is
really hard to grasp, I agree. The subjective sense of
self, of ‘me-ness’ is very strong. It takes a whole lot of
meditation practice (e.g. a retreat lasting 10 days,
in silence except for interviews with teachers, sitting
and walking from 5 Am till 9 at night) and then,
somewhere around day 7 you suddenly notice
‘Hey, there’s nobody in here!’ Completely
unexpected. Constant attention to the mind/body,
to thoughts, sensations, emotions, sleepiness,
restlessness, craving, aversion…and then you
see it’s an empty stream of transient states,
each causing the next, nobody in it doing any
work, nobody underlying it, no subject,
just the stream. It seems we are like onions,
all peel, no pit.
It’s as if I said, ‘There’s a little man in the automobile
and he works so hard! He pedals like crazy and
he makes the windshield wipers move and he
shouts ‘Honk!’ when we hit the steering wheel.
That poor little man!’
And you say, no, there’s nobody in there, and
you open the car’s bonnet and we look inside and
you show me all the parts and complicated
machinery. Nobody in it at all, it turns out.
Well, when one looks inside oneself,
reall looks, there’s no little man in here either.
The lights are on but nobody’s home, though
one has to look really hard and long to penetrate the
sense of self, the feeling of me-ness, what
the Buddha took to be the thick delusion borne of
inattention and craving that creates so much
pain (and pleasure) in human life.
Existentialism is a lot more accessible, definitely,
and you don’t get hemorrhoids!
This is exactly what I was saying. When Buddha says it, it’s ok? But when I say it, albeit not so gracefully, it’s not ok?
By yourself. You have to save yourself. Lift yourself up and walk.
There were newspapers a hundred years ago with sufficient sources of information that it likely would have been reported in other parts of the world.
I never got to this thread until after I posted on the spin-off that evaporated while I was still writing. Since I worked so hard on one of my interminably rambling posts, there’s no reason why y’all shouldn’t have to suffer through it, so here it is again. (Life is hard, and then you die.) 
I can’t speak for Jim, but here’s my take on it.
A big part of it is impermanence. Note Jim’s quote, ‘Things made of parts come apart again sooner or later.’
It’s even more extreme than that. Things made of parts are constantly changing, both in their content and in the arrangements of their component parts. And no component part is a unitary, unchanging whole. As far as we’ve been able to go down, every “thing” is found to be composed of other “things”. There may be an end, but it’s not clear that we will know when we’ve reached it.
It’s not so hard to see the truth of this in the external world. Over a few decades, you can replace literally every part of an automobile. Yet, we still somehow consider it to be the “same” automobile. On the other hand, we can start removing parts from an automobile, yet for quite a while we’ll continue to consider it to be 'essentially the “same” automobile. But, suppose we start assembling those removed parts. At some point, does it become the “original” automobile? And, what if the original automobile just gradually rusts to pieces. At exactly what point is it no longer an automobile at all? We can talk back and forth about exactly what we mean by “same” and “automobile”, but it seems obvious that there is no unitary and unchanging essence that we can refer to to make our decision about what is and is not “the same automobile”.
People are like automobiles. They are made up of parts that are made up of parts, and so on. Again, it’s easier to see this in another person than in ourselves.
At first glance, the problem is that we have what seems to be a (more or less) continuous memory of our lives. In my mind, I seem to have some essence–my identity–that has remained unchanged from my earliest memories. I am somehow the same person I was at the ages of 4, 9, 17, 23, 36, 44, and 59–and yesterday. And yet, there may not be a single subatomic particle in my body that was there during the earliest days of my memory.
But, as Jim said, this is not just about philosophy. It’s about experience. One kind of meditation practice involves looking for that essence; trying to locate and identify that unchanging core. Nothing is more convincing than experience. Of course, it takes a kind of leap of faith to believe that it might be worth our while to devote so much time and effort to something that claims to produce nothing more than the end of one kind of suffering.
Being a fan of scientific knowledge, I was first drawn to Buddhism by what I saw as the logical consistency of the various arguments that I found. Practice, including meditation, has helped make it “real” to me. This is my path. Different people will find different approaches that make sense to them–or, they won’t.
Given that it’s only practice that produces results, getting to the point of beginning practice is also important. This is one point where philosophy has a place. A lot of writing–and talking–about Buddhism is confusing because it’s directed at people who are already at some point along the path. It speaks to their experience. It may not make much sense to someone who lacks the relevant experience. This is particularly true of the early anecdotal writing about Zen: Some guy is raking a garden. A pebble clicks against a rock, and he is suddenly enlightened. The problem is that the story omits the eight (or however many) years that the guy had spent in meditation and other related activities.
So, my kind of prosletyzing is to present arguments to people who are a lot like me, as far as their attitudes and mental outlook–self-identified as rational, logical, materialistic, etc. So, I go for logical arguments. These arguments are no better than any other kinds of arguments–about morality, love, identification with the Universal, and so on. They’re just the kinds of arguments that appeal to me. They also have little to do with the practice of Buddhism. They are just advertising–sucker bait, you might say.
So, one question a logical person might have is, why should we have this sense of self if it’s all baloney? I see lots of bits and pieces of fact that seem to relate to this question. I’ll start off with a really shallow, superficial statement about some of these.
Before I start, it’s important to mention that it’s pretty much impossible to talk about the world without using language that seems to assume a kind of essentialist belief. That is, it’s hard to speak directly about the constantly changing universe. We have to use verbs and nouns and other parts of speech that seem to imply essence and permanence. It’s tough, but that’s the way it is. So, I’ll just say that nothing I say from this point on should be taken to imply that I am contradicting what I’ve said about impermanence and no self. But to qualify every word in every sentence would produce something even worse than my usual verbiage.
I should probably also say that “no self” doesn’t mean that there is “nothing”. It also doesn’t mean that our perception of the world and our organization of it into objects and patterns is totally without merit. It’s not that the world is formless and that we are unjustified in imposing order on it in our thoughts. For me, it’s mostly about impermanence.
Tenshin Reb Anderson, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, once pointed out that the distinction between self and other is crucial to survival. I have to know where “I” end and everything else begins. Other distinctions are equally important to survival, both to the individual and to the individual’s lineage. An animal needs to be able to distinguish friend from foe, prey from predator, mate from rock, offspring from food, and so on.
So, it makes sense from the standpoint of natural selection that we should have developed skills in those realms. Survival doesn’t require that we have the ability to see “pure truth” (if there is such a thing); it only requires that we see enough to survive. In a way, by seeing ourselves as individuals apart from the rest of our environment, we guarantee that we will survive as individuals.
Where humans may–or may not–differ from other animals (and plants) is in our abstraction of our separateness. Terrence W. Deacon (Symbolic Species) hypothesizes that symbolic thought is what sets us apart from other species. His claim is that it is symbolic thought that underlies language–and is even a necessary precondition for the development of language. A telling point is that even though many species seem to be quite “intelligent” in terms of learning or figuring out how to achieve goals, none of them has developed even the simplest form of language. (To get this point, it’s important to understand the difference between true language and other forms of communication. Note that humans also have non-linguistic forms of communication. Non-linguistic communication is not simply an inadequate or underdeveloped form of language. It’s a different kind of thing. As Deacon says, non-linguistic communication can even be essential to disambiguating linguistic communication. The same sentence can mean many different things depending on the accompanying body language–thus the need for smileys on the 'Net.)
If Deacon is right, our tendency to symbolic thought may be what distances us from direct experience. A chicken may feel hunger and act accordingly, but I may say, “_I’_m hungry. I guess _I’_ll finish writing this post and then go make myself a burrito–or maybe a cheese omlette.”
I find Camus’s revolt far easier to conceive than the discarding of the belief in self, although apparently no easier to achieve >
>
I think that the belief in self isn’t too hard to discard–it’s the habit of acting on that belief that’s hard to get rid of.
Revolt, to a rational, near-atheist agnostic like me is probably the closest to a refuge I can see. There is no escape from suffering - particularly from fear and the classic Existential Angst - outside of death. One can either stumble on in terror and bitterness, as was apparently Philip Larkin’s way, or one can attempt to embrace the positive, but unspeakably harsh, outlook of Camus and Sisyphus.
That in itself is a kind of refuge. In proposing an Absurd absence of built-in meaning, and No Way Out of our stark situation, Camus paradoxically almost offers meaning and thereby a degree of the comfort he insists should not be sought!
It’s sort of like playing rolls on the whistle. First you get some idea of what’s to be done. After that, it’s just practice, practice, practice.
I should admit that some of the way I see this may just be an unanalyzable matter of personality. I’ve never been big on angst–even between my Christian and Buddhist days. In college I was quite jealous of some of my friends who were going through all sorts of doubts and agonies.
My shortsightedness also extends to meaning. I’ve never felt a need for meaning in my life. In fact, I’m not even sure what “meaning” means. It’s as unfathomable as “free” will.
Oy vey, how is a person to live? >
Nike has the answer: Just do it! 
You’re too kind, Cynth. Thanks.
As for Denny, the guy’s a space cadet - I doubt I’d ever confuse him! 
Kidding, Denny!
Jim and Darwin: Guys this is just fascinating. Thanks for so much food for thought. It’s the start of the working day, so I won’t get a chance to chew properly for a while.
Nonetheless, Jim, I can see what you’re saying, but in my current state of experience and perception I can’t take it on board. I’m not dismissing what you say at all, just admitting that I don’t have experience of the states of mind you and Darwin describe, so the concept of realisation of no self is meaningless to me - not something I can envisage at all. My ego is evidently even more bloated than I thought!
I definitely need to learn more about this.
Darwin, yes I know what you mean - it’s like the story about a guy who tried to get off a criminal charge for something he did years ago by claiming that every cell in his body had been replaced at least once, therefore making him literally not the same person who committed the crime, and therefore not accountable.
I don’t really buy the automobile analogy. Yes the replacement of parts one at a time doesn’t prevent us from considering it the same vehicle, even after every part is replaced. However there is (unless you’re Stephen King) no Ghost in that particular Machine. You are describing our perception of the car, not the car’s perception of itSelf. In the case of mySelf - I seem to perceive continuity of experience and consciousness. While my parts are constantly being replaced, the consciousness that is the apparent result of all those interacting bits and pieces seems, at any one moment, to feel an unbroken link throughout the linear history of previous states. Presumably, then, memory plays a huge part in developing a sense of Self.
The sum seems to be more than the parts, which is less evidently the case with an automobile. Let’s consider what might be a greyer area… a football team! A team made up of many sentient members. Not only are the component cells of each member replaced over time, but members themselves come and go. Still, it seems that both team and fans consider the team to be the same entity.
I’m not sure that one works, actually, but I’ll leave it up there for ridicule!
Doh. Work really does call. I’ll try again later.
I’m really enjoying this one 
Thanks all.
As one of the aforementioned complainers about religious pontification in the Pub I would liek to clarify that I object to proselytizing by anyone, not just Christians. Leaving this door open on the Pub means that no-one can tell a joke or voice an opinion without having it drowned out by OT religious beliefs. I do not deny anyone the right to hold or voice such beliefs/opinions, just that these should be done on a separate board. For instance, if you want to start up a religious counterpoint to some thread in the Pub, simply put a link to your thread in the religious forum and invite interested parties to partake of your religious cant there.
Now that I have muddied the waters further, I would like to point out a missing element in Darwin’s treatise - the empirical. We can note that the ego/sense of self is not real, that it is a useful abstraction for getting by, like the concept of money, but it is only through direct experience of the state of selflessness that we can verify what the Buddhas say.
To talk about a non-verbal experience seems so much noise. I suppose its okay to go into great rambling diatribes if you are proselytizing to introduce gnostic concepts to the uninitiated, but does this belong in the Pub? I don’t think so, but a link and an invitation to a separate religious forum seems to me to be a fair compromise.
djm
DOH! 
I would respectfully suggest that some Pubs have a more interesting and erudite clientele than others.
This is one of them
Slan,
D.
It is at an interesting part of the cycle right now!
Do you want a cookie?