No he doesn't. He jumped into the septic tank and then devoted his life's work to disinfecting as much as he can. But I don't see the point in jumping into the septic tank if you want to get clean, other than as a spectacle for others that want to study cleaning techniques.
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I don't think that an idea can be tainted by the one who has it. But by the same account, no idea can be accepted without having a pretty good idea about why it should be treated as truth.
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That's correct - I wasn't arguing otherwise. (And by the same token, you can't judge the validity of an experiential claim (e.g. if use your attention in X way, you will observe Y result) until you've followed those instructions.)
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The teaching of practices is of course a very different thing than the teaching of ontological, moral or ethical precepts.
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My claim is that there are practices that can give you access to observations that cannot be accessed by looking through a scanning electron microscope, carrying out a statistical analysis, or deriving a conclusion from a set of axioms.
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Absolutely, and each observation has to be explained. The frame of the explanation itself cannot be generated by divine revelation.
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Explanations are constrained by language. Some things can't be understood no matter how well it's explained (e.g. what a headache feels like). The issue with mystics is they try to explain gnostic knowledge in the same terms physicists explain electrons. This causes confusion.
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Ex: Claims made in Vipassana are inherently experiential. Thus they can only be understood by experience. Nothing divine about it. In vipassana, you learn the nature of experience. In science, you learn how physical systems behave/function. They are completely separate projects.
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I tend to disagree. Science is simply the systematic, criticizable pursuit of knowledge. The nature of experience is a kind of knowledge, and separation is not the right way. Vipassana may have a scientific and a practical and a cultural aspect.
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