Part of being a diehard materialist is to believe there is nothing beyond the scope of our sensory awareness. The psychophysical body is all there is. When it craps out—that’s it. Being a diehard materialist also means to be overly skeptical of spiritual states, especially of reincarnation and transcendent states of consciousness which go beyond the body’s senses.
Borrowing a simile from the Dantabhumi Sutta (M. iii. 130–31) it is like two friends going up the slope of a mountain. Instead of both going to the top of the mountain one friend decides to stay at the foot of the mountain. When the other friend reaches the top the friend at the foots asks him what he sees. The friend at the top replies, “I see delightful parks, delightful woods, delightful stretches of level ground, delightful ponds.” But then the friend at the foot of the mountain says this is impossible, it cannot be. So the friend at the top goes down to the foot of the mountains and drags his friend by the arm to the top so that he can see for himself. The friend, now at the top, admits his error because he was “hemmed in by this great mountain slope and thus could not see what was to be seen.”
Needless to say, a modern day materialist is not going to go up the mountain. He would close his eyes if he were forced to. I am certain, too, that a Buddhist who believes the Buddha denied the self (attâ/atman) is not going change no matter the evidence to the contrary. When Galileo invited some learned men to look through his telescope there were some who refused. They said that whatever they saw through this new instrument would be no doubt diabolical—a work of the devil.
Why did the friend who decided to stay at the foot of the mountain not believe the report of his friend who was at the top? There is one thing for sure, the friend at the foot of the mountain deceived himself. The materialist also deceives himself by hanging onto the childish belief in naïve realism, that our sensory perception of the external world is a direct copy of it.
My master told me;
"Those who speak don´t know, and those who know don´t speak. By this sole reason, our Lord Buddha never uttered a singel word and yet we bath in the light of his inexhaustable dharmas to this very day. How do you think this is even remotely possible?"
Posted by: minx | February 19, 2012 at 04:47 PM