Do you believe in Buddhism?

[d-T-r]

depends what part of you is doing the deciding.

Budai was still a Buddha i think.

you knew what i meant anyway

[fractal]

he might be fictional like jesus tho

[kidshuffle]

Plenty of gems from Lao-Tzu!

Mozi > Lao-Tzu

[mks]

I study Buddhism and Taoism informally meaning I don't belong to any official group or a sangha. Things like the Noble Eightfold Path including ideas like Right Speech, Right Action, Right Thinking etc. and working on non-attachment have been extremely helpful to me in my everyday life and in trying to be a better person.

I also practice Tai Chi Chuan and Chi Kung, which to me are like meditation in motion.

[AxeD]

The poll lacks a 'of course not' option.

















there is no poll

(but if I had to choose a religion..)

[Ricky_Spanish]

So how does karma work with someone like Jeffrey Dahmer? I mean he didn't really have any 'free will'. His brain was fucked, as far as I'm concerned, he's pretty much blameless.

[parson]

perhaps this video might shed some light on how karma relates to dahmer
http://illuzia.net/en/videos/clips/world

[nousd]

now & zen

[SCope13]

non-believers in an actual karmic structure to reality oughtta look into what science is telling us about what's really going on.

the science confirms the experiences. time and space don't even really exist. the distance between me and you is like the distance between items on my desktop. we're living in a hologram. a hologram, which apparently has a designer. a video game which apparently has rules and ways to bend the rules.

Please elaborate. What do you have to back all this up?

[AxeD]

No but there's a relation between distance and time and that relation is different when your looking at items on your
desktop compared to people all over the planet right.

[Ricky_Spanish]

perhaps this video might shed some light on how karma relates to dahmer
http://illuzia.net/en/videos/clips/world

nope.

I always find a good barometer of a persons objectivity about these kind of things is how seriously they take the possibilty of:

infinite nothingness...(utterly meaningless, incalcuably small period of life)...infinite nothingness

The persons involved with that website and people like that in general wouldn't consider that notion for a second.

But if you want someone who actually has a mathematical understanding of quantum physics and some kind of understanding of the issues involved to legitimise that kind of idea, then may I suggest John Haeglin or Fred Alan Wolf (aka Dr. Quantum).

There are numerous ways I can think about the role of the observer in quantum mechanics that in no way suggest that consciousness is the fundament of reality. I don't rule it out utterly, but it just seems a rather naive and egocentric idea.

Anyway, my point is Dahmer, (and indeed all psychopaths) have no free will. You can no more blame psychopaths for their actions than I can blame you for taking a piss, when the urge becomes irresistable. You are your brain, you are the pattern of neuronal connections laid down by your genetics and environmental stimuli. Psychopaths literally have different brain functioning. If I was to alter your brain in a certain way (maybe with a hammer) , I could change your personality completely - (This kind of occurence is well documented).

The only way i can relate what is posited in that video to the free-will argument is if you sit in your brain detached from the inner workings, neuro-chemistry, genetics, and environment, making choices. Which makes no sense whatsoever.

Dahmer had impulses and urges, without the willpower to refuse them for his whole life. Why should Karma take a big sloppy sh1t on him? I'm pretty sure you have never felt a constant irresistible urge to kill. Do you take credit for not trying to lobotomise someone, killing them and eating them? You don't have the impulse, hence no credit for not doing it.

[Ricky_Spanish]

non-believers in an actual karmic structure to reality oughtta look into what science is telling us about what's really going on.

the science confirms the experiences. time and space don't even really exist. the distance between me and you is like the distance between items on my desktop. we're living in a hologram. a hologram, which apparently has a designer. a video game which apparently has rules and ways to bend the rules.

Please elaborate. What do you have to back all this up?

He's right, but i disagree about a designer.

the conspiracy is that reality is a projection

You know what man, can you offer me up some credible evidence towards this? What are your sources?

...

It's a very interesting proposition based on solid foundations about black holes and entropy. To summarise:

Firstly: Information can never be destroyed, not even by black holes. This is THE MOST fundamental law in thermodynamics.

The maximum informational content/mass of a black hole is equal to the surface area (importantly though, NOT the volume which you might presume) divided by the planck length. Which means that in order to describe everything within the black hole you can do that with as many bits of information as can be crammed into the surface area in planck units.

So you can have all the details of a 3 dimensional macro world encoded in just 2 dimensions on the surface area of the universe, like a hologram. And Maldacena has recently shown that string theory in Anti de Sitter space, (ie what we experience) is equivalent to conformal field theory defined on the boundary of the Anti de Sitter space (ie the surface area of the universe)

It's equivalences like this that bear the hallmarks of actuality. Im just saying that from memory so it's a bit coarse, if you want the full sp then:

Leonard Suskind


Rahpael Bousso

[parson]

non-believers in an actual karmic structure to reality oughtta look into what science is telling us about what's really going on.

the science confirms the experiences. time and space don't even really exist. the distance between me and you is like the distance between items on my desktop. we're living in a hologram. a hologram, which apparently has a designer. a video game which apparently has rules and ways to bend the rules.

Please elaborate. What do you have to back all this up?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Holographic-U ... 0060922583

[noam]

karma is a metaphor...

like most religious concepts

[hoody]

i don't know very much about Buddhism but what ive seen seems to make a lot of sense and of all the theory's on what happen's to you when you die for some reason the Buddhism theory makes the most sense to me



and i do like the way this dude thinks

[parson]

[bright maroon]

...over 80% of all serial killers of the sexual socio/psycho pathic sort
report having an exceptionally overbearing mother...

So - I'm going to go out on a limb and say - that would be karmic return on the mother...
- to have a ruined son...

The biggest hole in this assertion is that socio/psycho paths are also known to be consumate liars and manipulators...



cause and effect is a fairly scientific concept though...
maybe the difficult thing with Karma would be the unconnected retributions...

seriously - I have problems believing in caste systems
- or that cats and predators are dejected inferior creatures worthy of scorn...
to be bossed over - because they are murderous..

I do think it's good to strive to be a better person...

althought I'm not sure why - considering that currently people generally don't respect that
unless you can back it up with money and success...
(this being a rather negative blanket statement based on my own completely fallible cultural perceptions)

I do believe things reverberate though...In a way that I can't explain

...more than just viral subculture

[noam]

seriously, to anyone that genuinely believes in 'karma' as an actual thing, and not just a threat that if you act like a tnuc you might get in shit at some point (the same as christianities 'do unto others...' meme) then fuck serial killers, how do you explain the suffering of innocents?

[d-T-r]

seriously, to anyone that genuinely believes in 'karma' as an actual thing, and not just a threat that if you act like a tnuc you might get in shit at some point (the same as christianities 'do unto others...' meme) then fuck serial killers, how do you explain the suffering of innocents?

Because all suffering and karma is collectively inter-twined and not just an individual thing.It's a misconception to believe it's just our own and no body else. Or just some body else's and not our own. Everyone's suffering is equally our own and everyone's triumph is equally our own because we literally only exist collectively and not independently.

The suffering of 'innocents' is the result of the suffering of the sum-total of humanity that created the environment to suffer in the first place.

Humanity creates conflict amongst it's self, and that conflict leads to suffering. Who ever happens to be in the cross fire, also suffers. 'innocent' or not.

at this point, word's like innocent and guilty aren't really appropriate anyway when we look at everything as operating in a unified way despite the layers of subjectivity and individuality we identify with. When there's no 'other' to blame, we realize the conflict is routed internally but has been projected externally ,then back and so on.

Everything is as it is ,and there are innumerable ways to play the blame game but it all boils down to the individual and collective Ego or sense of self and other.

We seek to 'gain' but at the expense of others (and our own) loss, and we try and avoid loss, at the expense of others (and our own) gain.

Humanity has always been in a battle to find equanimity between it's creative and destructive capacity. When we see that our external world (society incl. suffering +liberation) is a projection of our inner world, then that's how we see karma applies it's self.

Society is just as much as a mental construct as our thoughts, as our thoughts continually reshape it.

When we see karma as a cycle of cause and effect hardwired into an evolving ethical system, then we can see what it's there for.

We know suffering exists and we're all effected by it. this very thread and the trail of responses is also karma in action. Our behavior inclinations and tendencies that we picked up from the 'previous' dictate how we respond and perceive the present.

When we see the inter-connected nature of all things then we don't take our own role for granted in the ever unfolding chain of events we experience. Every thought, every word, every action contributes to the collectively shared experience. Choose carefully what and how you contribute to yours and others lives.

Buddhism only really has legs to walk when it's rooted in compassion for others and self i think. and unlike a lot of other teachings, it is willing to evolve and reshape it's self as the world around us does the same. For the most part though, the template realized back then, still mostly applies to now, just with a lot of other factors contributing to the self-prescribed complexity of it.

Buddhism or not, karma or not, If Compassion's something not worth aiming for in a self-conflicted word then i don't know what is

[parson]

seriously, to anyone that genuinely believes in 'karma' as an actual thing, and not just a threat that if you act like a tnuc you might get in shit at some point (the same as christianities 'do unto others...' meme) then fuck serial killers, how do you explain the suffering of innocents?

innocent is your own imperfect judgment.