Martyn wrote:Dechen Norbu wrote:Martyn wrote:Most people are shit, including most so-called Buddhists, so it's no big loss.
The sooner this cancer is gone the better.
This is a very deluded thing to say as you are reducing people to their flaws.
Defects are not intrinsic, but adventitious. People are like that due to ignorance, an innate ignorance they don't even know they need or can dispel.
It's a moral imperative for those who know this attaining wisdom to a point in which they can help others to free themselves from the ignorance that ultimately causes so much suffering. Everyone wants to be happy, everyone wants to go home and that home is our true nature, free from any malice, any stain, any defilement. As we lost our way home and don't even know where it is, we take temporary substitutes for it and while at it hurt others, ourselves and create samsara.
The sooner this cancer is gone the better, as you say, but in this case the cancer is ignorance, not people.
Best wishes.
No, I stand by what I said.
You talk about ignorance, and don't even say what people are ignorant of.
You are "towing the party line" and quoting what you have read, not what you know to be true.
No, I speak from my own experience, and from looking at the world - most people are ---- (funny how others can use that word but I get censored.)
Best wishes.
EDIT I believe the Buddha said, if I recall correctly, that the problem with society is that people are "miserly and only care about themselves." Which is the same thing I'm saying when I say people are ----.
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You start off by insulting me by saying my argument is wrong and "very deluded."
Then you end with "best wishes."
WTF?
Sometimes we assume people have some basics understood and that is a mistake I made.
Let me try to explain this in a nutshell addressing your points one by one.
I'm in good will and this will be the last post I'm making on this board, so bear with me for a while.
The kind of ignorance I'm talking about is called avidya and it is an innate type of ignorance that is, in the end, the cause of samsara. It is also translated as delusion and it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reality. Due to it, you have the belief that there is a solid self, separated from a world outside that is independent.
Jeffrey Hopkins states:
[It is] ignorance that drives the entire process... [Ignorance] isn't just an inability to apprehend the truth but an active misapprehension of the status of oneself and all other objects—one's own mind or body, other people, and so forth. It is the conception or assumption that phenomena exist in a far more concrete way than they actually do.
Based on this misapprehension of the status of persons and things, we are drawn into afflictive desire and hatred [i.e. attachment and aversion]... Not knowing the real nature of phenomena, we are driven to generate desire for what we like and hatred for what we do not like and for what blocks our desires. These three—ignorance, desire, and hatred—are called the three poisons; they pervert our mental outlook.
Ringu Tulku states:
In the Buddhist sense, ignorance is equivalent to the identification of a self as being separate from everything else. It consists of the belief that there is an "I" that is not part of anything else. On this basis we think, "I am one and unique. Everything else is not me. It is something different."...
From this identification stems the dualistic view, since once there is an "I," there are also "others." Up to here is "me." The rest is "they." As soon as this split is made, it creates two opposite ways of reaction: "This is nice, I want it!" and "This is not nice, I do not want it!" ...
On the one hand there are those things that seem to threaten or undermine us. Maybe they will harm us or take away our identity. They are a danger to our security. Due to this way of thinking, aversion comes up... Then on the other hand there are those things that are so nice. We think, "I want them. I want them so much..." Through this way of thinking...attachment arises.
You say:
You are "towing the party line" and quoting what you have read, not what you know to be true.Let me put it this way. If you think well enough about the quote above, reasoning will be enough to make you second guess your initial assumption. With practice, you deepen your insight about what are we (not an immutable self with those internal flaws) and what is the cause of our suffering. It becomes more than written words and integrates your experience as living knowledge. There's a sudden understanding of the phenomena and you keep it with you through meditative stabilization.
Instead of considering people's flaws intrinsic, like something that they can't get rid of, you see them as adventitious, not belonging to their real nature. That goes a long way in helping you understand that if the flaws are not intrinsic to people, and if the flaws are what is bothering you, then the "cancer" are not people (whose flaws are ultimately due to ignorance), but those flaws you abhor. Good. So people are suffering and hurting others because of those flaws and there is a way for them to overcome that situation. That's where Dharma comes into the picture as it brings the way through which you deal adequately with the problem. I'm sure other members will offer help explaining whatever you need if there's something in my post that you are not still getting.
When I said it was a very deluded thing to say, I meant it in the sense that by considering the people equal to their flaws, you show that you are very much under the influence of that delusion which makes us misapprehend reality. So, although I can do a stupid thing, we all do, that doesn't mean I'm a stupid person. I classified the statement you made, not yourself, who probably are not more deluded than I am now.
Indeed I wish you well. The fact that you state something that I considered "very deluded", doesn't stop me from wishing you well. For instance, I love my wife very much. That doesn't mean we never say very deluded things to each other. Yet, there's love among us? See? Easy to understand, right?
So, best wishes!
