_ _ but still, something or other doesn't quite 'give' for any of us _ _Aemilius wrote:Because they have become enlightened, because they have seen the world as pure, that samsara is really nonexistent, therefore i am, or we are, a pure manifestation of enlightenment.
A superficial understanding of anatman could clearly lead to conclusions that aren't plausible in the real world of cause and effect that we inhabit - 'Nonsense', if you will.
A few years ago a fashionable western philosopher (probably doing his best to convince anyone listening that he wasn't a triple oxymoron ) made the claim that anyone who understood how a single conscious mind could literally split into several consious minds -none of them any more continuous with the original than any of the others- understood the nature of reality, and that anyone who didn't _ _ didn't. {Was it you, Aemilius? } I felt inspired -as well as somewhat frustrated- by my own befuddlement on reading this, but it hasn't become any clearer over the years, and I wonder how much insight the writer had behind the cloak of scientifically-respectable mysticism he wore.
It's easier for me (atleast) to imagine being reborn as an entire ant colony or something, each 'new' mind-stream actually a fragment of the old one in conventional terms. Although this was apparently the OP's premise (and I don't see how the mechanics of that situation would work in any case), it was worth exploring the alternate possibility of a mind-stream that multiplies away from itself, rather than simply sub-dividing within an overall umbrella. {There's an image!} I just wonder how any of us can really grasp the corresponding reality sufficiently for this 'multiplication of mind' to be a useful concept - as well as how it can be sufficiently compatible with paticca-samuppada (and any other ways in which conventional reality can be observed to operate) to be a valid one.
The fact that no-one's presented a thorough defence of either position (for or against 'multiplication of mind') since atleast the middle of page 2 (I was put off reading up 'til there by some cranky algebra ) makes me wonder if this is too knotty a debate to settle either way. The idea of what we see as an instance of a fundamental level of reality (Mind) turning from singular to plural is hard to swallow, but if an advanced level of technology is needed to split sub-atomic particles, then maybe an advanced level of 'realisation' is needed to split the mind? _ _