nathan wrote: ....Usually the same people who have a fundamental religious devotion to the cult of the PhD.
Funny thing about the "cult of the PhD", is that the primary concern of the sciences is to investigate things as they are, rather than to cling to speculative metahpysical views. Rather in line with the transcendent teachings of the Buddha, actually...
Those options seem counterproductive as, also in living experience, these lead to much greater suffering for myself and for others whereas I do find the teachings are literally and precisely the medicine I actually need in all regards. Useful for such far flung things as dealing effectively with the kamma that arises now which was created in past lives. Dealing effectively with heavenly beings and ghosts in my neighborhood. Living in peace with all earthly beings, both alone in the wilderness with fearsome wild beasts and when walking amongst the hypnotized masses of humanity and all of their deadly machinery.
No one is telling you that you cannot hold to your beliefs in speculative views. However, you seem to take issue with, and deride, others for not holding to your beliefs in speculative views:
Would it be best to keep those facts to myself and simply 'play along with everyone'. Most particularly with those who delusively think that the extensive discourses by the Buddha regarding such things as other realms, an untraceable long prior existence in bondage to being and becoming or the ongoing and insurmountable difficulties in overcoming the downward momentum of a wholly degenerate age and of the horrors that yet await humanity in times to come are 'simply hindu fairy tales' that corrupt monastics stuffed into the cannon when no one was looking.
You claim to be wounded by unnamed persons who claim "label" you:
Just because 'you have to play along to get along?' Because, that far out stuff matches up with the evening news very well actually. Does the daily underscoring of these facts in direct experience make me a 'fundie'? Should I feel inferior to someone because now they have come up with yet another label and feel at liberty to apply it to whoever they like?
Yet you are throwing out your own labels for those who do not follow your mandate to believe in your pet speculative views:
Most particularly with those who delusively think that the extensive discourses by the Buddha regarding such things as other realms
Pot. Kettle.
Is this the sort of thing I should be doing for the benefit of other people?
Your labeling and derision doesn't seem to hold much benefit, actually.
Would that help someone, maybe help someone's book sales? To falsely present myself as completely out of touch with the visceral reality of the present moment so that it could fit this idealized notion of a religious wing nut
You seem to be asking for the same sort of self-condemnation from those you deride.
....to suit a handful of people who want to 'update the teachings'...
Actually, it's not a matter of "updating the teachings" at all: The transcendental teachings have been there all along, taught by the Buddha himself, (though largely ignored nowadays) for those who are willing to give up speculative metaphysical views.
to match up with contemporary delusions of grandeur on the part of people who are our modern day 'best guessers'?
Ah, Appeal to Innuendo. Nice. There is no "guessing" involved at all when one does not cling to speculative metaphysical views.
I'm just curious to know where this whole line of reasoning is headed.
It seems to point to a general intolerance for those who do not hold or cling to your speculative views, and a need to attempt to bully and control what others think, as if that could ever happen.
Maybe I should make myself scarce so that I don't 'get in the way of progress'.
Have at it. Or perhaps it might be more constructive to examine what it is that makes you feel so threatened, to feel so much dukkha, about folks who don't hold to your speculative views. The Buddha mentioned this sort of thing in the Brahmajala Sutta, BTW:
146. Bhikkhus! When any of the samanas and brahmanas who speculate on the past, or the future, or both the past and the future, and adhere to beliefs relating to them, assert the many and varied (wrong) views about the past, or the future, or both, all of them are caught in the net of this discourse with all their sixty-two categories of wrong views, and if they try to rise (or sink), they rise (or sink) within the net, for all their views fall within the net of this discourse.
Of course, he also spoke of those of us who do not hold to such speculative views, right there in the same Sutta:
145. Bhikkhus! When a bhikkhu knows correctly the origin of the six sense bases of contact, their cessation, their pleasantness, their danger and the way of escape from them; he realizes the dhammas (Morality, sila; Concentration, samadhi; Wisdom, panna; Liberation, vimutti) that surpass all these (wrong) views.