One thing that all Internet chat rooms that discuss either Buddhism or Zen have in common, the participants are trying to interpret Dharma through their culture. A personal interpretation is not really personal. It is cultural. Very seldom does a chat room discussant realize that their 'personal view' which they endeavor to uphold is filled with cultural assumptions and opinions. They are not really seeing Buddhism or Zen in the light of day on its own terms. Of course, there are few things in modern culture that are starting to fall within the general framework of Buddha Dharma which help us to see Buddhism in its proper light both of which are coming from academia, most notably, the work of Donald Hoffman (Conscious realism and the mind-body problem).
There are two examples for me that are gradually putting an end to the West's three-hundred plus years romance with materialism. These two are consciousness or mind is absolute—not particulate matter—and the end of our long held belief in object permanence. Physical or objective reality doesn't exist in the way we imagine it exists. According to the Lankavatara Sutra,
[To imagine] individual forms is wrong, it puts one in bondage; they are born of Mind due to the false imagination of the ignorant; based on the relativity they are discriminated.
If anything, the individual forms we endlessly encounter and have to deal with are useful fictions. By the same token, physicalist theories of objective reality are makeshift and unreliable; not to be trusted. This includes physicalist theories of the mind-body problem which adhere to the belief that our human experiences are caused by objects such as neurons and the brain, in general.
The full moon that we see is certainly not true reality. Instead, it is a species-specific perceptualization or in Buddhist terms, a composition. The night moth on my front porch doesn't see the human composed full moon. Its body, which is a unique structure, treats signal-information much differently than we humans could imagine. As human beings, our protein structure treats signal-information peculiar to our ownneeds. Our eyes and visual field are much different than a moth's. But, fundamentally, we are minds or the same, conscious agents such that we are always willing out and shaping our future existence. Such an agency is, itself, undying while its countless, conditioned expressions are finite, consisting of birth and death. According to the Buddha, this psychophysical experience of ours has been previously composed and willed out (cp. SA, 260, 65c-66a). He calls it former karma.
With our present cultural prejudices, Buddhism and certainly Zen can only penetrate so far. Both are limited to preaching to the choir—a very small choir. Their adversaries are not small. They do not wish to hear the message. Physicalism is not going to leave the stage without a fierce, protracted fight. Making matters worse, many of those who come to Buddhism and Zen do not accept the primacy of spirit or Mind; much less are they willing to surrender their belief in object permanence: that object reality is not an illusion.
If materialists just studied their own "sciences" more they would see on the top end of quantum mechanics that object permanence is an illusion; furthermore they would see all of these notions of Mind being supreme over what they call Matter, being reinforced over and over throughout the information gleaned from Quantum Mechanics.
The only reason they cling to their materialistic view is because it is easier for them to understand, safer for them to understand (egoistically) and it doesn't put them in an uncomfortable position about what this all means (rather, they can go back to the mind-numbing activities of the day to day world, deluding themselves into believing they are these shadows they see rather than the very light that animates them).
It's just another way for people to hide from the truth, it's no real fight, it's just a bunch of children scared of the preconceived bogeyman.
Posted by: Mr.Nobody | January 29, 2016 at 09:51 AM