And please re-read my previous post. Your "explanation" is unnecessarily too convoluted. The problem is with "ground of being" is that it carries baggage. I guess I can allow that he is ignorant of that.Goofaholix wrote:If you read my previous post you’ll see I did exactly thattiltbillings wrote:Not my loss. He is not saying anything I have not heard before and said a lot better by others. The problem is not one of you guys have even tried to make sense out of "ground og being." What does it mean?
“So he starts off talking about calm and continues on to describe it as a ground of being, "ground" speaks to me of solidity and stableness and non airy-fairiness, "being" I suppose could refer to a living being but even so it makes no sense as a creation of a belief in Atman, to me in his usage here he is talking about be-ing as opposed to do-ing as this is a very important factor of a state of calm. So calm is a solid stable non airy-fairy state of letting go of doing and just be-ing”
This makes a lot more sense to me than saying he is defining calm as Atman then contrasting it with Atman as you appear to be doing.
[quote="="Goofaholix"]
Could be so, but why is it necessary to defend the virtue of Huxley and Tillich?[/quote] Huh? No one is defending the virtues of Huxley and Tillich. The point is that "ground of being" has conceptual baggage. To ignore it, if you know it, is unskillful.tiltbillings wrote:The benefit of the doubt would be that he really has no clue as what it means by those who coined and shaped the expression such Huxley and Tillich.
If one is learning the Dhamma, it is best to have it carefully and accurately presented.="Goofaholix"]Yes, true if one is primarily learning the dhamma on the conceptual level, however if one is primarily learning the dhamma on the conceptual level then I think this is the least of your worries.tiltbillings wrote:This is a lot of conceptual contortion-ism to get at something that could have been stated very clearly and very simply.
tiltbillings wrote:That might make sense if we were reading something written that was intended to be mulled over, but in a talk that moves from one point to another, not so much.
Which is why there is no need for something like "ground of being."Listening to dhamma talks is not like listening to a maths or science lecture, unless perhaps if your teachers are Burmese. A dhamma talk uses conceptual language to point to something beyond the conceptual level.
There are plenty of teachers who do quite well with presenting the Dhamma.I for one appreciate teachers who don’t just regurgitate tired old phraseology but speak from the heart finding new ways of expressing old truths and challenging my thinking and attachments.
No police here; just wondering why such a concept - as I have pointed out what it is in the two quotes above - is used by a Buddhist teacher.You might not be into that, that’s fine, but I think setting yourself up as the phraseology police is not really a skilful way of listening or reading a dhamma talk and seems a bit of a baah humbug type attitude.