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Stephen Batchelor

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dookie On December 16, 2023
Foolish Bombu





, United Kingdom
#1New Post! Jan 27, 2021 @ 10:12:54
Stephen Batchelor comes in for a lot of stick in Buddhist circles. This is pretty much par for the course - any human being who strays from any given "orthodoxy" will attract the wrath of those who need the structures of creed and doctrine to feel justified.

As I see it he remains true to the Dharma. Remains true to the Pali Canon; in fact true to the whole range of Buddhist texts and scriptures, sutra's or whatever. True to the Dharma.

From the very earliest texts.....

"So you should you train yourself: “in the seen, there will be only the seen; in the heard, only the heard; in the sensed, only the sensed; in that of which I am conscious, only that of which I am conscious.” This is how you should train."

(UDĀNA)

Most want more. Will always want more. Will seek to justify whatever more they use to justify themselves by the descent into wars and inquisitions; greed, hatred and ignorance.

Stephen Batchelor begins his book "After Buddhism" with reference to one of the earliest records of the Buddha's own method of discourse:-

A well-known story recounts that Gotama — the Buddha — was once staying in Jeta’s Grove, his main center near the city of Sāvatthi, capital of the kingdom of Kosala. Many priests, wanderers, and ascetics were living nearby. They are described as people “of various beliefs and opinions, who supported themselves by promoting their different views.” The text enumerates the kinds of opinions they taught:

The world is eternal.
The world is not eternal.
The world is finite.
The world is not finite.
Body and soul are identical.
Body and soul are different.
The Buddha exists after death.
The Buddha does not exist after death.
The Buddha both exists and does not exist after death.
The Buddha neither exists nor does not exist after death.

They took these opinions seriously. “Only this is true,” they would insist. “Every other view is false!” As a result, they fell into endless arguments, “wounding each other with verbal darts, saying ‘The dharma is like this!’ ‘The dharma is not like that!’”

The Buddha commented that such people were blind. “They do not know what is of benefit and what is of harm,” he explained. “They do not understand what is and what is not the dharma.” He had no interest at all in their propositions. Unconcerned whether such views were true or false, he sought neither to affirm nor to reject them. “A proponent of the dharma,” he once observed, “does not dispute with anyone in the world.” Whenever a metaphysical claim of this kind was made, Gotama did not react by getting drawn in and taking sides. He remained keenly alert to the complexity of the whole picture without opting for one position over another.


Well, not taking a position is frowned upon by most.

What is your position?

(This post can safely be totally ignored)
dookie On December 16, 2023
Foolish Bombu





, United Kingdom
#2New Post! Feb 01, 2021 @ 10:27:04
More from Stephen Batchelor:-

The purpose of the Buddha’s teaching is not to resolve doubts about the nature of “reality” by providing answers to such conundrums but to offer a practice that will remove the “arrow” of reactivity, thereby restoring practitioners’ health and enabling them to flourish here on earth.
dookie On December 16, 2023
Foolish Bombu





, United Kingdom
#3New Post! Feb 02, 2021 @ 12:10:33
Mr Batchelor speaks of what he describes as a "metaphysics of hope and fear". Maybe today many will deny having a "metaphysics" at all but as I see it there is always some "ground" that provides some sort of base to our lives. A life perhaps of anticipations and epitaphs (rather than "hope" and "fear" ), missing out on the present moment.

Stephen Batchelor writes:-

Dharma (Buddhist) practice requires the courage to confront what it means to be human. All the pictures we entertain of heaven and hell or cycles of rebirth serve to replace the unknown with an image of what is already known. To cling to the idea of rebirth can deaden questioning.

Failure to summon forth the courage to risk a nondogmatic and nonevasive stance on such crucial existential matters can also blur our ethical vision. If our actions in the world are to stem from an encounter with what is central in life, they must be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication. Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of hope and fear.


Well, that's it for now. Hope you are all keeping safe.
dookie On December 16, 2023
Foolish Bombu





, United Kingdom
#4New Post! Feb 02, 2021 @ 21:45:16
The first three posts on this thread have been inspired (!!) by dipping into the first chapter of Stephen Batchelor's book "After Buddhism". In another of his books, "Buddhism Without Beliefs" he points to the possibility of freedom ....

After speaking of a psuedo integrity that responds to a moral dilemma only by repeating the gestures and words of a parent, an authority figure or a religious text, he writes:-


( we sometimes act ).... in a way that startles us. A friend asks our advice about a tricky moral choice. Yet instead of offering him consoling platitudes or the wisdom of someone else, we say something that we did not know we knew. Such gestures and words spring from body and tongue with shocking spontaneity. We cannot call them "mine" but neither have we copied them from others. Compassion has dissolved the stranglehold of self. And we taste, for a few exhilarating seconds, the creative freedom of awakening.


Maybe what is referred to is simply, ultimately, a very refined determinism. Mechanical learning ground down, internalised, its workings so quick as to appear "spontaneous".

Then again, maybe it has affinities with the "truth that makes us free".

Alan Watts said something somewhere relating to this. I'll try to find it and post it. Not that anyone seems particularly interested, but its keeping me amused during the rigours of Lockdown.
dookie On December 16, 2023
Foolish Bombu





, United Kingdom
#5New Post! Feb 03, 2021 @ 08:32:24
As promised/threatened in the previous post, Alan Watts adding his two cents worth to the interminable free will v determinism debate:-


There is another theory of determinism which states that all our actions are motivated by “unconscious mental mechanisms,” and that for this reason even the most spontaneous decisions are not free. This is but another example of split-mindedness, for what is the difference between “me” and “mental mechanisms” whether conscious or unconscious? Who is being moved by these processes? The notion that anyone is being motivated comes from the persisting illusion of “I.” The real person, the organism-in-relation-to-the-universe, is this unconscious motivation. And because this person is it, they are not being moved by it. In other words, it is not motivation; it is simply operation. Moreover, there is no “unconscious” mind distinct from the conscious, for the “unconscious” mind is conscious, though not of itself, just as the eyes see but do not see themselves.

Obviously, this brings in the implications of "non-dualism" (aka "eastern thought" aka "mumbo jumbo"......even Christian mysticism when it contemplates the Godhead beyond the "God of the Bible" and the implications)


Does this all help with boiling an egg? With the "end of suffering"? That would depend upon our own minds capacity to see connections, the level of interest we have for anything beyond our current mental habits (or, as Stephen Batchelor would say, our "reactivity" )
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