I have a lot of agreement for what you are saying......but.....to understand my posts you should understand that my belief system is very different from most posters here. For me having no doctrine of self is probably the key concept. In working toward no doctrine of self I start from the opposite side from most. My default belief is that there is no self in me or in the world anywhere....and of course this view is in fact a doctrine of self. But I can not just snap my fingers and change my views so I continue to firmly be of the view that ther is no self anywhere. I believe strongly in The All and The World as the Buddha defined them in the suttas.......but unlike most people I fully believe that understanding experience as being just that is a major key in moving toward the goal....this means that I tend to deny the existence of the "external world" as most people view it.....if I must give an opinion about the external world I would say that it's existence is just conjecture.nowheat wrote:Certainly each individual's efforts add to the whole, but as long as one's effort is being directed toward *one's own future happiness* as more significant than the effect they have on others, how far will they progress? Do you not see that? If you see it some other way will you explain it to me?chownah wrote: Wouldn't an animal need to be REBORN as a human to be liberated?.........oooooops........there is that rebirth thing again.
Given that all the beings in the world as taken from the buddha's perspective would be all the beings you experience which in turn would be all the external selves you mentally construct then it seems to liberate all of them they would have to undergo no further births.......for me this means stop fabricating selves for them.........(just one way to look at it)
Or, What better way to do the most toward universal liberation than to liberate one's self? Even though I am not liberated I do firmly believe that my attempts at working toward that goal are what has contributed the most toward development of compassion for all life.
chownah
When you say "what better way to do the most towards universal liberation" and describe working for just one's own liberation, are you suggesting that to just go off by oneself and meditate in the woods is the most one can do? If the Buddha had done that, would we have as many people practicing for liberation? I'm really not understanding your point of view on this, and would love clarification.
Do understand that I do typically walk around feeling like a self and seeing others as being selves but I see this as just my state of delusion and I often touch base on having no doctrine of self....especially when experience turns negative. And I walk around as if there was an external world and I can function quite well in it thank you so I'm not a slack jawed drooler.
All of this about me is to show you how hard it is for me to reply to what you are saying. You talk about whether a self should work towards it's future happiness and my most honest answer to this is that all a self ever does is to work towards it's future happiness and this is a strong indication of why we should have no doctrine of self. You talk about saving the world and I think you mean the external world and my view is that it's existence is just a conjecture and it is better to see the world in more definite terms I.e. as the sum total of our life's experience and nothing more.....on other words it is a product of the self. I think that most people think that my thinking is so whacked out that it is first very difficult to convey exactly what I am talking about and second they usually just reject it anyway which is fineas I have become used to being not understood.
So, I agree with a lot of what you are saying but I have to decode it into my belief structure, formulate an answer, code it back onto your belief structure, and then express it in writing......and on top of this I have only got a touch pad for typing and an automatic spell corrector which mostly just changes sutta into sutra and basically seems to be working against me.
I hope this is not too much of a rant but I thought it might help you to understand my replies.
chownah