Sas,
This caught me by surprise, hadn't expected talk of the soul from you.
quote:
Since we can't look directly into someone's soul we can't see the evil without the acts.
You know I gotta ask for your definition of "soul".
In an earlier reply you mentioned semantics. I have always been impressed with Korzybski's insights. Jar is fond of quoting one of his basic premises for general semantics "the map is not the territory". Language is abstraction. And an awful lot of inaccurate or confusing mapping arises with the use of the "IS" of identity. Is the statement "the sky is blue" true or false? Well under what conditions? Korzbski recommended a more explicit statement that avoided using "is" as an identity. "In the daylight after sunrise and before sunset if the sky is not overcast it will appear blue to a human with normal color vision".(an example I just made up) Now yes of course we know that that is what is meant when we say the sky is blue. All that is implied and that example is harmless. But problems can arise in other situations.
From my personal viewpoint inspired by whatever misunderstanding I have of eastern thought, semantics, Wittgenstein etc I'm going to ask some questions about persons and entities.
My viewpoint is that persons are processes in time. A living body with very complex brain functioning. Grossly change that brain function and the total organism and it's personality will change drastically. Would you consider Hitler evil after some trauma to his brain eliminated his ability to feel anger or be aggessive? You could still judge policies and actions under his direction that occurred before his brain was changed as evil. Would you say that he still possessed an evil soul?
A key but rarely examined concept that many western religions depend on is the soul, or a concept of a person as a discreet entity.
Buddhist philosophy has a resonance with contemporary scientific understanding of organisms.
One illustration of sunyata and pratitya-samutpada is the Jewel Net of Indra (see above). Another is a rainbow. We know that a rainbow is real in some sense, because we can see it, locate it, measure it, and so forth. However, it is also clear that a rainbow is no "thing", but rather the product of various forces interacting as sunlight shines through an atmosphere that has water droplets in suspension. Mahayana thinkers have asserted that all phenomena, including especially individual human beings, are like this, inasmuch as it is impossible to locate any basic particle or entity that is dependent in no way for its definition and existence on the relationship that it has to other things. All things are, therefore, "empty" and "dependently co-arisen"
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I use the analogy of a tapestry. Imagine one of those popular mass produced ones of the Last Supper. The brown threads that make up Jesus's beard also run through Judas's hair and Peter's chair. None of the figures are made independently, only the pattern of the threads identify them. We write and think in the language we learned. I didn't create this language, nor most of the ideas. Yes unique phenomena arise.
One of the core insights of the Buddha was that there was no permanent self, no soul. He spent some years watching his mind at work thinking, sensing, feeling and saw that it is a flux, a stream whose contents are constantly changing albeit at differing rates. This is just like the universe, like life on this planet. A complex series of mutually interdependent interactions. Our lungs would make no sense if plants did not provide oxygen. Our lungs our only part of that total functioning.
My fundanmental criticism of near eastern religions is not even that they claim books written by humans were infallible information provided by god when the books contain easily falsified information. But rather the religions are built on a concept of a person that can't be supported.
There are no permanent entities such as persons, and I'm not speaking of just the physical organism. This of course is not the way I experience myself, and it's not the everyday commonsense way of looking at the world. But common sense can't always be depended on to be accurate and this fallacy which does seem to be a key component in our human functioning is the source of many errors. The Buddha's prime teaching is that this fallacious sense of being an entity, the ego, is suffering.
This is badly put I know. I am beginning to see that my interactions on this forum have the function of me clarifying my thoughts for my own understanding if no one elses. And yes references to loci such as lfen, Sasquatch make sense even when self referential. It's only when that self referecne is taken as evidence that a permanent entity exists that it results in error.
lfen
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