Janus

I discovered that the self is ineffable, cannot be captured in any model and is best discovered and expressed through evocation in poetry. music, pain...

That begs the question.

I don't see how we can coherently conjoin them.

OK, well I meditated for many years and practiced Tai Chi for many years also, and have tried to "know myself" through general self-awareness in all m...

Assuming for the sake of charitability that this is an accurate account, all it could be taken to truthfully recount is that 'when you closely observe...

It seems to me that defining the self as memory amounts to a very impoverished conception. Memory is a function, so such a definition would seem to be...

In you…rapt Far shiver I And at the Ferns The arms… Mountains, myriad of touches of my desire …of Your dreams I Am; Your much burned Love…fingered Ent...

What makes you believe that the perceiver, as opposed to merely its faculties, can be perceived?

I drank quite a lot when I was young, and regularly throughout the years that I ran a contracting business. I think drinking is a form of self-medicat...

But why should we think that self is memory, rather than being that which remembers?

What leads you to say that? You asked how you could be the same person as Napoleon. So why would thinking about what it means to be a person in the fi...

Sorry, I didn't make it clear enough that it was a rhetorical question. I think the point for me about the limitations of an analogy like this is that...

Thanks, interesting, but I can't make much sense of the OSI Model, though. Can information be quantized? My tendency is to think that what makes a per...

How about setting up a bookshop where members can offer their books for sale and give a commission to the site?

I come to this thread a little late. I have not read all of it so there is some danger that I might repeat what others have already said. First get cl...

Of course people can still have feelings of praise and blame; I wasn't disputing that. What I meant is that without the premise of freedom, moral resp...

Some people are compassionate and others are not. If determinism is the case then people cannot be praised for possessing, or blamed for failing to po...

What you're failing to see is that the ordinary everyday feeling of being morally responsible is based upon the feeling of being free and the belief t...

To me it seems more sensible to think of the soul as 'having a body'; the soul is not "had", rather it is the having, so to speak.

Agustino might have asked you if there is an invisible pony club if I hadn't beaten him to it. Of course this question in no way reflects my views, it...

Actually I want to clarify that I wasn't agreeing that you are justified in treating as a propositional claim, only that you could not even be justifi...

I can't see any relevance in what you say here. If libertarian free will is, according to rational thought, inexplicable, and you want to conclude fro...

That's as it may be, but I'm not talking about the feeling or moral responsibility; I'm taking about the rational justification of the idea of moral r...

That's not the kind of freedom that makes sense of moral responsibility, and of praise and blame in general.

Sorry I missed this earlier. You started out by saying that the "permanent unchanging self" either exists or doesn't; isn't your treating it as a prop...

Sorry, I somehow missed your response here. I would say there is a difference between sinning and turning away from God. No one is perfect. My point w...

All this shows is the limitations of the rational mind to understand freedom. Freedom cannot be determinately modeled in 'causal' terms, because that ...

Yeah, it seems like a misunderstanding then, because it wasn't that I was wanting to confine conventionality to language, but to assert that linguisti...

I don't deny this, but I would add that offering cake, being in rooms together and speaking languages are all conventional ( which really just means '...

I can agree with that; it tells me to live intuitively, skillfully, ethically, intelligently. In one or another, depending on cultural differences, of...

Yes, but I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if someone misjudges the quality of a painting, for example, it's no big deal; but if they misjudge the ...

It depends on how it is interpreted. If it is interpreted "dogmatically" (in a fundamentalist way) then it is fundamentalism, obviously.

Sure, according to you (and me) not "fair dinkum", But that is the problem with the whole 'guru' thing; it's presented as objective fact as to whether...

You're mistaken if you think I've missed that. In fact my entire point has been that there is no genuinely private use in the sense that even your 'pr...

Likewise :) I agree with what you say here; but I would add that the "higher level" is not something which can be determinately formulated. Wherever t...

My point is only that your "telling" has not, and cannot be, dissociated from conventional use, whether your "use" is private or shared; it inevitably...

I don't so much "react against" the idea of "higher authority" as just plain disagree with it. I think you are inappropriately imputing an unjustified...

I thought we were discussing actual novel shared usages which had the potential to be conventionalizable. In any case, those phrases are meaningless, ...

Yes, well I do think the problem with "popular perennialism" is its attempt to synthesize "the outlines of a truly perennial philosophy" because I don...

What is "an unchanging permanent self"? Surely you need to know what something is, before you can deny it? Matters of interpretation are properly herm...

Are you confident that you have understood what I meant to say there? What exactly do you think I am saying there that leads to your conclusion? If yo...

I would say it is not a propositional claim at all, because such claims are proper only in the empirical sphere. Reading it propositionally; what woul...

The problem is that you are thinking of 'anatman' as a propositional claim. Actually the value of the realization of 'no-self' is present in many trad...

I don't understand why you say this. We have had many conversations where I have avowed my long-term interest in Buddhism and Advaita, and the phenome...

I would say that outside the ambit of fundamentalism, they do not; but that fact does not entail the kind of universalism that is a polemic to exclusi...

Beebert started this thread called "Jesus or Buddha"; since the interest in comparative religion is obvious why would s/he not want to read one of the...

You are thinking of this in unhelpful 'black and white' terms; it's either "universalism" or "mutually exclusive truth claims". This kind of 'proposit...

So, you didn't mean to suggest that the "20 year old" you spoke of had experienced genuine repentance?

Have you considered the possibility that once there is genuine repentance retrogression is no longer an option?

For a balanced, highly nuanced and profoundly philosophical view of Christianity in relation to Buddhism and Advaitism I would highly recommend The Rh...