3 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
    1. we're telling ourselves hey no elephant in my house nothing to worry about whereas the self that we really think we have is that self which is always 01:16:36 subject never object always agent never patient that self that is the enjoyer that stands opposed to the world and experiences it that acts on the world 01:16:49 the self that has a mind and has a body but is not itself a mind or a body that's the serpent and chandra kerdi thinks that if we don't pay attention to that serpent if we don't understand what 01:17:02 it is we believe ourselves to be in our heart of hearts we will never succeed in dispelling the illusion and hume also is trying to identify here 01:17:14 the serpent and he's identifying it as the idea that the word self even means anything

      !- Chandrakurti : don't fool yourself about the elephant - keep your eye focused on the serpent - the actual FEELING and BELIEF that you are what experiences the mind and body, that you are the subject that witnesses all objects - this is the REAL sign that you are attached to the serpent, still caught in the self illusion. --This is the subtle self deception that is extremely difficult to overcome, the innate self illusion that comes from a lifetime of affective conditioning - to upright this innate self-illusion requires monumental effort - actions speak louder than words! - Hume is in essence saying the same thing as Chandrakurti

  2. Jul 2022
    1. 16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

      Adam Smith thought that there were two sides to us, one side is our concern for SELF, that gets what it needs to survive but the other side is our empathic side for OTHERS, we cares for the welfare of others. His economic design theory distilled into THE WEALTH OF NATIONS was based on the assumption that these two would act in a balanced way.

      There are also two other important and related variables at play that combine with Whybrow's findings:

      1. Death Denialism (Ernest Becker) A growing meaning crisis in the world due to the waning influence of Christianity and significant misinterpretation of most religions as an immortality project emerging from the psychological denial of death

      John Vervaeke's Meaning Crisis: https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/

      Glenn Hughes writes about Becker and Denial of Death: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fernestbecker.org%2Flecture-6-denial%2F&group=world

      1. Illusion of Immediacy of Experience Jay L. Garfield explains how philosophers such as Nagarjuna, Chandrakurti and Dogen have taught us to beware of the illusion of the immediacy of experience that consists of two major ways in which we mistaken conventional, relative reality for intrinsic reality: perceptual faculty illusions and cognitive faculty illusions. https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world
    1. what happens um when we're thinking about our inner states one of the things that we need to recognize is that our introspection when 00:22:54 we we become aware of our beliefs our desires and our hopes and our fears and so forth is all done through language and on the model of language when i decide that i believe that john dunn 00:23:07 gave a great talk this morning when i believe that hal roth is a great scholar of zen and when i believe that alan wallace gave us a beautifully inspirational talk about the role of practice and contemplation in the 00:23:19 understanding of the self and i introspect that way i'm using those sentences alan gave that great talk john gave us a great talk about pramana and so forth as models for my inner states and i'm not 00:23:32 doing that because i looked inside and saw little english sentences in my brain i'm looking i'm doing that by using language as a kind of introspective model that's a matter of self-interpretation 00:23:44 it's easy to forget that because it feels so immediate so language gives us the concepts that we use to think about the world but it is also the model for the concepts of our propositional attitudes like belief 00:23:58 desire knowledge and so forth and as a model we have to recognize that the model the map isn't the reality to go back to what john uh reminded us of he reminded us of earlier introspection in 00:24:11 terms of language gives us an interpretation it doesn't give us an independent reality that is being interpreted and when we think about the madhyamaka 00:24:23 of nagarjuna and chandrakiri we remember that to be empty is to be empty of any intrinsic nature and if we follow chandra charity as i suggested earlier that means that it is to exist only 00:24:37 dependent on conceptual imputation and what i am suggesting now is that all of our inner cognitive states that we introspect we encounter only through a conceptual imputation only through 00:24:50 interpretation only through language and that is they exist conventionally not intrinsically even though they might appear to us to exist just as we see 00:25:02 them and to do so intrinsically

      Another key point:

      Language is the tool we use for introspection and as Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti hold, are empty of intrinsic nature. All inner cognitive states that we introspect are attained only through linguistic conceptual imputation so can only exist conventionally and not intrinsically.

      This underscores the importance of the symbolosphere, of symbols and language.