From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Aug 15 2004 - 17:57:21 BST
Dan, Scott and all Moqers:
Dan said:
The MOQ would say a self, a human being, consists of four levels of value
plus undefined Dynamic Quality. Buddhists practice to kill the intellectual
self through meditation and mindfulness while sustaining the social self and
biological self.
Scoot Roberts replies:
Some Buddhists may see it that way, but not all by a long shot. I quoted
Robert Aitken (a Zen master) on this recently. The purpose of meditation
and mindfulness is not to kill the intellect but to improve it, by learning
to silence monkey mind. One also, as a Buddhist, learns logic and applies
it to oneself not to kill the intellect but to rid the intellect of
limiting beliefs.
dmb says:
I think there is a great deal of misunderstanding on this matter and one of
the most common mistakes revolves around it. As Wilber puts it, a person
with no ego is not a saint, but is a psychotic. The mystic has not abandoned
the ego or the intellect entirely. Its just that she no longer identifies
with her ego. Intellect then becomes transparent, so to speak. Pirsig
describes the same mistake with respect to the beat-poet version of Zen...
"The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just two
directions to go: toward biological quality and toward DQ. The
revolutionaries of the '60s thought that since both are anti-social and
since both are anti-intellectual, why then they must be the same. That was
the mistake.
American writing on Zen during this period showed this confusion. Zen was
often thought to be a sort of innocent 'anything goes'. If you did anything
you pleased, without regard for social restraint, at the exact moment you
pleased to do it, that would express your Buddha-nature. To Japanese Zen
masters coming to this country this must have have seemed really strange.
Japanese Zen is attached to social disciplines so meticulous they make the
Puritans look almost degenerate."
And then there is the matter of having to "return to the marketplace". The
idea here, I think, is that its irresponsible to permanently kill social and
intellectual patterns. We get them out of the way, we put them to sleep
through mastery in order to see beyond them, to see through them, and then
act accordingly.
Thanks,
dmb
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