Spelare wrote: ↑Fri May 25, 2018 3:41 am
PeterC wrote: ↑Fri May 25, 2018 3:26 amBut what is the point of "playing with words and concepts"? Does it help in our practice of the Dharma?
Yes. As someone who works with adolescents for a living, you might want to relax your rigid concept of pedagogy. Play is integral to learning.
It may surprise you to learn that I'm not an adolescent.
But again you're struggling with the meaning of words, which makes your advocacy of "playing with words and concepts" more than suspect. The sort of "playing" that you're doing in an educational context with adolescents is very different from the "playing" that confuses the teachings of Dzogchen with tirthika Dharmas.
Applying consistent reasoning is not a "rigid concept of pedagogy". Without it, the study of the view is nothing more than aesthetics.
No, because the concepts in question are, as others have pointed out, explicitly analysed and rejected in countless Dharma texts who describe them as wrong views, and the paths associated with them as wrong paths that do not lead to liberation.
Which we must confirm for ourselves. Until we are genuinely satisfied and convinced, pretending to be so is a barrier to the arising of genuine understanding.
You confirm through investigation, reasoning, practice, etc. Not through abstract intellectual conceptualizing
To borrow what I think must be an old Tibetan cliché, we don't give our "nose-ropes" to anyone, no matter who they are. We practice and explore freely, to the full extent of our capacity and to the best of our knowledge.
Well, we certainly hand our nose-ropes to someone if we intend to practice Vajrayana. But that's an aside. Again you're struggling with specific meaning of phrases. We practice and explore, yes, but if "freely" means by trying to integrated into the Buddhadharma views that it explicitly rejects, then not quite that freely.
I feel this dead horse has been flogged enough for one day. Perhaps you should, in the course of playing with concepts and freely exploring, consider the possibility that everyone else on this thread might have a valid point?