True enough, though whether someone decides to take the medicine or not, does not determine whether or not the diagnosis was correct.tiltbillings wrote:We can hold as an intellectual concept that samasara is not an "out there thing," but that is not really going to do anything for us as an intellectual concept. It only becomes meaningful in terms of insight into the rise and fall of what is experienced -- the khandhas, or the all
Well, you "start from where one is", but to attempt to quantify the required "degree of meditative experience" and then extrapolate that requirement out to others (when one does not have the ability to penetrate the minds of others)... is to lapse back into the first mode of discernment - that of the "out there". There are many factors.tiltbillings wrote: Of course the reality is that one has start from where one is, which is obvious in the suttas. There is a necessary transition from from the first to the second, given that the second, to be meaningful, really requires a fair degree of meditative experience.
In other topics I've called out this variable use of word "conditioned". In the context of the Dhamma, or paticcasamuppada, it ultimately traces back to being "conditioned by avijja" and it is therefore "sankhara". To then interchangeably use the word "conditioned" to refer to anything that may have a cause (either "out there" or "in loka" - such as, "the mountain is conditioned by the rain and wind", "the human body is conditioned by the ovum and the sperm", "the body is conditioned by food and oxygen") is to shift the frames of reference and create inconsistencies in meaning.tiltbillings wrote:Except the conditioned experiential perceptual process still functions, arahants still remembers stuff, sensations based upon the body still arise and fall, thoughts/cognitions come and go, and Mara still visits. The difference is that all of this is no longer conditioned by greed, hatred, and delusion -- it is unconditioned, asankhata. It is empty is the perception of any sort of thingness, any sort of of grasping or aversion based upon the misapprehension of experience.
All I know is that I will not be going to an arahant and saying, "Here monk, these are your aggregates" or "Here monk, this is your experience - explain it to me with worldly frames of reference". I will let the arahant explain, as it accords to them to do so.
Metta,
Retro.