Mukunda wrote:Interesting. When western converts to Buddhadhamma see life long practioners, born into the tradition, doing something they don't understand or approve of, it's the people who've lived the tradition for centuries who are wrong, or superstitious. We never stop for even a minute to consider that just maybe we don't know as much as we think we do.
Its not necessary to speak of wrong or superstitious, they are though operating within a different paradigm.
I have worked with people who are distressed and depressed and hysterical,for many years. I have never seen anyone whose behaviour could not be explained by far more simple and straightforward means than possession. Its just not a model that is needed in our culture.
PeterB wrote:I have never seen anyone whose behaviour could not be explained by far more simple and straightforward means than possession. Its just not a model that is needed in our culture.
So does that mean that everyone who may demonstrate such symptoms are always cured by more "simple and straightforward means"? Seems to me drugs are often a crap shoot, and many times have serious side effects. Counseling and other therapies may take months or years to be effective (or may not be at all). So who's really being more "simple and straightforward"?
Mukunda wrote:Interesting. When western converts to Buddhadhamma see life long practioners, born into the tradition, doing something they don't understand or approve of, it's the people who've lived the tradition for centuries who are wrong, or superstitious. We never stop for even a minute to consider that just maybe we don't know as much as we think we do.
Well said Mukunda. The Buddha taught of other realms and other beings. It is comforting to explain it all away as "everyone back then was rather simple minded and not as intelligent as we advanced beings today, so he had to use childish explanations not to upset them."
with metta
Chris
---The trouble is that you think you have time---
---Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe---
---It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---
I dont think that I said anything that could be interpreted that way.. I said that there are a number of paradigms here which are consistant to themselves but not necessarily compatible to each other.
Neither did I say that a straightforward explanation of the causes of psychological distress implies that such distress is necessarily easily relieved.
PeterB wrote:Neither did I say that a straightforward explanation of the causes of psychological distress implies that such distress is necessarily easily relieved.
My point is, I don't think things are as straightforward as we'd like to believe they are. And thinking they are is just another form of belief and superstition.
when we insist to judge, what we refuse to accept/understand, as "superstitious" without keeping an open mind to further investigate its connection to reality,
and when we insist to judge what we accept to accept/understand as "reality" without keeping an open mind to further investigate its connection to reality,
....we might deviate from reality/truth, hereby coming closer to illusions and facilitating the ego to expand!!
“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Learn this from the waters:
in mountain clefts and chasms,
loud gush the streamlets,
but great rivers flow silently.
- Sutta Nipata 3.725
I really enjoy Dawkins. I also feel that at the core Buddhism is a highly practical secular philosophy for self discipline and cultivation which should be studied and look at as such, while leaving the superstition out of it. I think everyone would benefit from this more than have water dumped over their heads and screaming.....unless of course they needed a bath then the water would be useful.
“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Learn this from the waters:
in mountain clefts and chasms,
loud gush the streamlets,
but great rivers flow silently.
- Sutta Nipata 3.725
Maybe that splash of cold water had the same (or better, healthier and faster) effect on that woman as a long western style psychiatrician therapy with chemical drugs. Like the Ajahn Chah Exorcist story. Who knows
