How would you reply to these arguments by a philosophy Professor against non-self?

Control means choice, and no one chooses to intentionally suffer. Hence suffering is not self/chosen.

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I think this is a vital point. Whatever experience of altered states of consciousness one has, through jhanas or through psychedelics, all it does is provide a different level of experience. It is just a data point for observation.

It is Right View in combination with these extra data points that enables awakening.

A very simplified take on this can be as follows; Our conceptual constructs, Nama, become fixed like in hardened wax. Experiences like Jhana or other states of altered consciousness, serve to soften the wax to enable the fixed constructs to move, and to be seen for the first time. Without this ‘movement’ they remain invisible. This is part of the ‘eggshell’ that needs to be broken through.

However, dependent on the other constructs operating, interpretations are developed. Just like in primitive societies that witness technology that is then explained or interpreted using their own frameworks (magic, spirits, etc). without Right View, these experiences are interpreted in various ways.

It is the coming together of Right View, as the Buddha taught, together with the experience of Jhana, that enables awakening. One can have jhanas all day long, but without Right View they are just another experience and subject to proliferation.

Note: it is the resultant combined effect of the interaction of Right View and Jhana that yields the results - not any one of the components in isolation. And the last part of the ‘eggshell’ (the most firmly fixed construct of Nama) is conceit of self - ‘I am’…

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Very well said, unfortunately it’s popularly taught out there that meditation is the solution to all problems and people mostly believe by “simply” meditate, they can attain a peace of mind or some spiritual attainment. While some people might be able to achieve some “temporary” peace of mind in meditation, but that’s not even the main purpose of meditation.

It is like you said meditation must be combined with one of the most important aspects and that is “ethics”. If one thinks, speaks, acts with greed, hate, delusion often in their everyday life. It’s not going to help them in their meditation practice. It’s like one is already on fire, and by thinking, speaking, acting with greed, hate and delusion often in their everyday life. Their pouring more gasoline on themselves making the fire more bigger (more stressed out mind, more suffering) and then they try to go into meditation to try to put out this big fire. Even if they are able to put out some parts of the fire, but they’re still on fire and then they go back into the world and repeat the same process again . . . Such a process doesn’t make sense at all . .

“Ethics / morality” is the first step. When one lives a moral life, staying away from the 10 dasa akusala as much as possible. Their minds naturally would be less stressed and more receptive to be able to understand the teachings of the Buddha dhamma. Their meditation would also improve. Going back to the fire burning us example. By living a moral life, that is like putting out the fire that’s burning us and when one goes to meditate, one would have a much easier time meditating for whatever purpose their doing it for.

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Why do you assume that your current state when writing that post is not altered state of consciousness ?

Buddha said that everything are fabricated/altered by mind and I don’t think this excludes our daily experience

Only nibbana is unaltered state of consciousness the others states are altered or fabricated

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Vinnana is one of the khandhas. The Pancakkhandhas (five aggregates) is Anicca.

What is Anicca, it leads to Dukkha (suffering/pain/unfulfilling, etc) . . . One can see this in this verse

“yadaniccam tam dukkham, yam dukkham tadanattā”

Not awareness, but avija and tanha.

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13 posts were split to a new topic: Let’s talk about Jhana!

To me, it’s a hard question to answer as there are variables and I’m not 100% sure of my own understanding related to your question. But I can share some ways with you where you can contemplate on it.

To begin one got to understand how we see. I’ll copy and paste what one of my teacher’s wrote.

Connection Between Mind and Matter

In Buddha Dhamma, analysis of rupa directly provides the connection between mind and matter.**

  • In Abhidhamma, there are 28 types of rupa. However, there are only a few types of rupa that are sufficient to start our discussion here.
  • We will start with six types of rupa directly related to the mind and are essential in sensing the external world. First, there is hadaya vatthu, the “seat of the mind,” where thoughts (citta) arise. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and body touching sensations are sensed at five pasāda rupa: cakkhu, sota, ghāna, jivhā, and kāya.
  • We are accustomed to the idea that we see things with our eyes, hear with our ears, etc. But all those five physical sense faculties just have inert matter. Inert matter cannot “sense” or “feel” anything.
  • Let us review that process with a “seeing event.” When eyes capture the image of an object, the brain analyzes that signal and passes over to cakkhu pasāda in the gandhabba. Then the cakkhu pasāda transfers it to the hadaya vatthu (seat of mind) and that is when we experience that particular “seeing event.” That sensory process starts with a rupa coming to contact with the mind. Phassa is the Pali word for that contact.
  • Upon receiving that “signal” a citta (loosely translated as a thought) arises with the “seeing sensation.” That is cakkhu viññāna.
  • But cakkhu viññāna is much more than taking a picture with a camera. Simultaneously with seeing that image, a set of mental factors arise in the mind. The mind recognizes (saññā) the object and generates some initial “actions.” That involves recalling past experiences with the “manasikāracetasikā and incorporating various other cetasikā like joy (piti) or hate (dosa.)

From what I can understand, if one is missing either the physical eye or the cakkhu pasada (well just say the eye sense base). Then one won’t be able to see physical reality. Some examples of this would be people without the physical eyes, obviously they can’t see physical reality. Or some people have physical eyes, but are blind (especially the people who are born this way).

But . . . now imagine if someone ended up getting blind later on in their lives. Even though they are blind, but they can recall their previous “seeing experiences” and as well use their imagination to imagine what might be infront of them. I don’t know if this can be consider as seeing physical reality.

As for Jhana’s,

I’m not sure if you ever had vivid dreams, but that can also be consider another way of “seeing” things.

As well, there’s OBE (out of body experiences). I never had one before, but from what I know. People who had OBE experiences are able to “see” things as well. In both case of vivid dreams and OBE experiences, both can be said “seeing without the physical eyes”.

I haven’t gotten that far in my understanding of all these fine details yet. This is the best I can offer you as of now. But the most important thing and my advice to you is make sure you build a solid foundation of your understanding of the Buddha Dhamma. What I mean by this is focus on as much as possible on learning, contemplating and understanding about Anicca, Dukkha, Anatta, The four noble truths and Paticca Samuppada.

From my personal experience, those 3 core teachings are so deep, there’s so much to learn / understand about them. It is something that I still focus mostly on after about 4-5 years of learning and practicing the Buddha Dhamma.

It is taught that Arahants who have completed the path went to the Buddha to ask for advice. The advice Buddha give them. “Contemplate on Anicca, Dukkha, Anatta”. So you can see how important and how deep Anicca, Dukkha, Anatta is.

These days people are taught Anicca as impermance and Anatta as no-self. All I got to say is that’s barely scratching the surface and it’s like using the tail of an elephant to describe what an elephant is.

As for Jhana’s, even though jhanic pleasures are the only pleasures in this world that the Buddha recommends, but one should not seek or get attached to them. One doesn’t need to attain any jhana’s to attain magga phala. For me, I don’t seek them, if they come they come, if not that’s okay as well. The one’s seeking jhanic pleasures has to be very careful, because one can easily get attached to them and there’s other dangers as well. But one seeking jhanic pleasure is still better off than one’s seeking sensual pleasures from this world.

I’m sorry I’m not able to answer your question completely, I hope what I shared with you will be of benefit to you on your path.

with Metta,

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If that’s the case we can call jhana as the state where you are divorced from the 5 physical senses but you can still hear and see it’s just that you don’t use any physical sense to do that

I think buddha indeed believe that there is a self but it’s not what we imagine or we can’t imagine it at all we can’t conceptualize it at all it’s like describing what sweet is to people who never taste it it’s just useless

So buddha’s way to describe self is just by refuting what’s not self if we can imagine or conceptualize something then it’s not self

I think nibbana is self but buddha refuse to recognize it as self not because it’s not self but because people can mistaken something to be nibbana even though it’s not thus clinging to that state and suffer due to the impermanence of that state

So if we crave something then that thing is not self for what’s the use of craving something that’s ours in the first place ?

So we should not crave nibbana instead we should crave cessation of suffering because suffering is not self we can get it now the cessation of suffering is simply the given up the letting go of suffering which is not self in the first place but mistakenly assumed to be ours

We don’t need to crave anything instead we need to stop to crave to not selves like the 5 aggregates

This is not craving but the undoing of all craving in the end we will be craveless to all objects because we should not crave all these objects in the first place

I’d like to reiterate what a few people already mentioned: Any experience has first of all the nature of an experience, i.e. it comes and goes. So while anatta or liberation probably have an experiential aspect, this can only be a superficial layer.

But experiences (or what underlies them) also have ripple effects in the mind. The joy of a tasty meal lingers on for an hour, and even the memory of it can be joyous. Other experiences (or what underlies them) like jhana or “seeing god” or an NDE can have ripple effects throughout one’s life.

Buddhist liberation - and proper realization of anatta - obviously cannot just be an experience. Allegedly, it constantly ripples through the mind, or even destroys some of its main components. Yet, it’s superficial to search for its main criteria in consciousness, or in experiences.

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Does not the burden of the argument rest on the other foot? We don’t have to defend the thesis of an absence; it is up to those who postulate a “self” to prove its reality.

The Buddha’s argument against a self was not that in one particular state a self cannot be perceived but that there is no way of perceiving a self no matter what state one is in. And this means that even in the most subtle of refined states of mind what is taken as a self lacks the characteristics of self (permanence, etc.)

Now to consider intrinsic bias. The difference is that in the metaphysical systems, you meditate based on a theory of a hidden, unobservable truth, and at a certain level of realization a new metaphysical reality reveals itself confirming the theory.

In Buddhism, you meditate on such observable facts as “consciousness is impermanent”, which is obvious to even the most trivial reflection. What we see as we go deeper into meditation is not that there is some metaphysical reality that supervenes, but rather, that the ordinary everyday empirical observation that “consciousness is impermanent” remains true, no matter how deep you go.

Say we are teaching two people to swim at the beach. We want to encourage them, to give them the confidence to go further. To one of them we say, “If you swim far out into the water, you will see Atlantis in front of you.” To the other we say, “See how the seabed slopes down here? As you go further from the shore, the water will gradually get deeper as the seabed continues to slope down.” In both cases we are giving them a idea of what to expect that will shape their experience to some degree. But the manner in which that plays out is very different.

(In a more general sense, beware philosophical arguments that demand the impossible. The mind works by getting a general idea what to expect, then implementing it in reality. Sometimes it turns out how we expect, sometimes not. But no system, no science or teaching or philosophy can discover anything new without a prior set of concepts and ideas to guide you.)

Someone who realizes nibbana as an arahant does not have to prove that they have discovered some hidden dimension of reality. They merely observe that greed, hate, and delusion no longer arise.

Of course people are frequently mistaken about this, just as people are mistaken about any other empirical statement. But the fact that some people have made mistakes tells us nothing about whether some people have not made mistakes.

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These are all excellent points, and I really like this

Indeed the scientific method as described e.g. by Galileo is in agreement with this.

If I understand your argment correctly then, in Buddhist practice one goes on to confirm something that is

‘obvious to the most trivial reflection’

At the same time ariyas who possess right view and and have abandoned self-view are extremely rare (and apparently see the world in a totally different way - Ajahn Brahm uses for example the metaphor of an explosion).
How would you reconcile the two facts?

To see that this consciousness is impermanent is trivial. See, there it goes! I was aware of this, now I’m aware of that! It’s gone!

But to see that all consciousness is impermanent is hard, and that’s what deep insight based on jhana is for.

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Ok your argument is that since the object of consciousness (what you are conscious of) changes, then it is impermanent.
I gather from talks by Ajahn Sumedho (or by Eckhart Tolle, who apparently spent a lot of time at Amaravati) that even though the object of consciousness (or awareness, as they call it) is changing, the underlying awareness (as it were) is always there, as the condition for being conscious of this or that. Is that not how consciousness should be understood?

I had students challenging me about the same point when I said that no neuroscientist has been able to locate consciousness or a self. Indeed you may remind your professor that what he calls “self” cannot be an ontology but only the product of different processes interacting. As in the simile of the chariot (see also Bhikkhuní Samyutta 10 S.i,135), what we call “self” is an aggregate of neuro functions that have no real essence to it. You cannot own your sense of self since if some of the neuro synaptic connections fail in the right place (front lobe), you literally lose the sense of self, and you may also lose control of the behaviours which you considered “your self”. (For more, you can read here)
If you can lose the sense of self, that self it’s not permanent but an illusion produced by your brain to interact with internal and external stimuli.
Hence the Buddha was spot on in his explanation of non-self and not philosophically but neuro-scientifically.
:pray:

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He’s not my professor - I wish I was that young to be a student :wink:

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If one asks: Did you sleep well last night?
Probably and hopefully, you would answer: Yes, I had a good night sleep.

But how do you know that it was a good nights sleep? Was it the absence of awareness, or was it awareness of absence that informed you?
When I answer this question, I just know it, but can’t point to any experience.

I probably was not able to word my doubt clearly above; when speaking about consciousness I am not sure whether what is meant is what we are conscious of (say the words you’re reading now) or else the ‘spaciousness’, as some teachers call it, within which different objects of consciousness appear and disappear.
The objects of consciousness are indeed always changing, but consciousness itself is considered by some teachers to be always there. Though it would not seem to be a constant, since for example your awareness is enhance after meditation.
Hope this makes some sense…Would be interested in any comments…

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Hi Stef,

Yes, there are some teachers who talk about an unchanging, underlying awareness. That is not the understanding I get from most other teachers, or the suttas, but I do not have the experience to verify it one way or another, so to me it’s part of my investigation (to continue observing my awareness/consciousness/etc).

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thank you for your feedback. Yes like you say it does not seem to correspond to the suttas. However also considering consciousness in terms of the everchanging series of objects of consciousness is a bit puzzling since although we have the impression that at each instant we are conscious of a different object, it also feels as if the one being conscious does not constantly change.

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