Look, I'm a Jhana essentialist. I have experienced states that, to me and to more accomplished practitioners, fits with the formal descriptions of the Jhanas.
I'm not saying the stuff doesn't work. I am making a critique of the philosophy and the approach, not the craft.
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perhaps, then I misunderstood, or chose to grind my own axe. I'm just not sure that suffering can't be gotten rid of, effectively, for example, so I'm not sure it's a ridiculous philosophy. (Dukkha, otoh, well, perhaps not. But if you don't care, that's very close.)
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Yeah, I came at that particular problem from my own cyclothymic baseline.
I have periods where suffering is an overwhelming constant and I wish only for its end, and periods where it feels hardly relevant at all.
Over time, that both damages and immunizes you.
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There may be stable states which avoid it. The core Mahayana criticism of Theravada is that Arhat nirvana is not a stable state. Eventually you will fall out of it. That is unacceptable to them. Arhat is not a stable state, whereas Buddha level is. (Again, no idea if true.)
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So, things I agree with:
- Only an accomplished practitioner can say what something is really like, experientially.
Things I disagree with:
- Accomplished practitioners are qualified to deal in absolutes.
How do they know what does or doesn't end? I don't see how they could.
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They can't know it eternally. They can know it for years, and if you believe in spiritual bodies (and if you don't most of cultivation Buddhism and Hinduism is bullshit to you), then you can speak for centuries and millenia at the least.
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Westeners have tried to gut out the post-life spiritual part of Buddhism and Hinduism. But it appears to be fairly integral to most practices. You also can't understand enlightenment Taoism without it, or Jainism, or Sikhism.
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not that there aren't traditions that say that's bullshit, but they were always very minority viewpoints. And of course Shamanism without spirits is, well, pretty close to entirely missing the point.
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I agree with keeping an internal consistency in your techniques, but that's not necessarily the same as adopting the ontological implications.
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some things are very difficult to do without accepting the metaphysics for at least as long as you are doing them. But it's probably a matter of FACT whether, say, spirits exist or not. At one point we couldn't confirm non dual awareness, now we can see it on brains scans.
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Of course. Material science is only material science. Our hubris about its prowess has been overturned uncountable times already.
"For at least as long as you are doing them" - that's what I meant. Accepting them as necessary parts of the craft, if nothing else.
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anyway, need to head out. I just feel that people tend to be a bit/lot more certain about some of these things than they should be