10 ms·
No one has attained Enlightenment through Zen nor meditation in human history. Buddha himself never claimed he was enlightened through meditation. That's a fabr
No one has attained Enlightenment through Zen nor meditation in human history. Buddha himself never claimed he was enlightened through meditation. That's a fabrication of Buddhist monks whose level of consciousness is quite a bit lower than that of Gautama. Nowadays, the misunderstanding has been passed down for thousands of years, so what I'm saying now seems unacceptable in modern society.
If you accept that meditation is a way to get Enlightenment then it opens the possibility that anyone can be Enlightened. But in human history, only one or two men had the evidence that they could perceive everything in the world and could tell the Truth. Instead, Buddhists will tell you that you have to experience things to understand and prove them. But that is not the case of a scientist, philosopher, and Enlightened Beings - all of which can immediately show evidence when they point out something in truth.
The term of Enlightenment means "opening eyes to what is in the reality". It's used similarly in Eastern languages to mean "to realize".
So a truly enlightened being can point out things in reality exactly as they are and can tell the law of how the world works.
So when you learn about happiness from an Enlightened Being, he doesn't teach you about sitting in meditation until you can train yourself not to care about happiness anymore. That's a way to lose yourself in the end.
Instead he can teach you exactly what the conditions are for happiness which must be fulfilled in order for you to be happy.
If someone claims he's Enlightened and teaches about happiness then they must be able to point out that where happiness is, what it is, what is the way to happiness, and what is the cause to lead you to the goal of happiness.
The reason why attachment is a problem is that attachment is one of the sources to make karma, and you can't be happy forever without conquering your karma (before it conquers oneself).
Things in the world operate by a very simple principle - and this principle lies at the essence of what is taught by all Enlightened Beings when they teach about "what is" in the world. But because the monks and Zen masters didn't learn this principle, I can realize that they don't know anything about true Buddha's teaching.
I'm telling you this because I'm worried that people will fall into danger practicing Zen and other forms of Buddhism. The truth in Buddha's teaching has degraded to the point that no one can know Buddha's teaching through the existent Buddhism - which although superior because of Buddha's teachings, nowadays has a similar quality to Christianity and other religions. I've seen people deceived so many times by monks and it's getting worse as time goes on.
If you are interested in Blueprint's (Paul Shapiro) theory, and check out the "true" Buddha, you can find more info here:
http://www.members.tripod.com/tathagata2000/ http://www.members.tripod.com/tathagata2000/
Paul has even made a ipphone app for him here: http://itunes.apple.com/app/enlightenment-lite/id449546123?mt=8&patnerId=30 http://itunes.apple.com/app/enlightenment-lite/id449546123?m...
No?
> No one has attained Enlightenment through Zen nor meditation
Maybe because no one has attained "Enlightment", whatever that means. Go say the rosary.
My understanding is limited, but I thought that enlightenment was a buddhist term used to describe significant subjective perceptual changes which are more likely to occur with enough quality meditation practice. I was under the impression that there are thousands of people alive today, in various traditions like Zen, who claim to have experienced these changes in perception in various guises.
a truly enlightened being can point out things in reality exactly as they are and can tell the law of how the world works.
Is this derived from a particular definition of enlightenment? I'm not really familiar with the buddhist religious texts etc.
Good question.
Enlightenment, in the context you mentioned, indicates that you abandon one consciousness and get a new one.
However, what happens through meditation is not the same as that and it has a different point than Enlightenment - meditation is an activity for changing your mind, and the result of modern meditation is that your mind gets darker and you can lose yourself. People can see lots of illusions in the darkness of their minds, and within a relatively short period of time through meditation they can make contact with some very strange phenomena.
What is the source of the strange phenomena in their consciousness? It can happen because they contacted an external consciousness. If the practitioner is weak-willed, the wandering consciousness will enter them immediately and can push their own consciousness out of the way and just drive their body. At that moment, they will show a different kind of behavior, oftentimes claiming knowledge of something that they didn't see with their own eyes (what they don't know).
When the other spirit enters them, their own consciousness just becomes dormant and feels less of a burden so people mistake this for nirvana and peace. People don't recognize this about themselves and only try to change their mind through meditation because they don't know the structure of consciousness and how the mind is generated. The fact is that people's consciousness doesn't change very much without Enlightenment, so no matter how much they practice meditation they won't be able to know Buddha's teachings until they open their eyes to how the world works.
There are two things in the core of consciousness - karma, and virtue. If you have more karma it makes your mind darker, and if you have less Karma and more virtue (conscience), it makes your mind brighter. This happens because what you have done gets input into yourself again.
Because people have their own karma, they have their own perspectives and perceptive ability, but can't easily find out what result in their life comes from what questions they have because they can't see what causes lie in themselves and what kind of problems they have. That's why we need a good teacher. Buddha noted that common people always see things in the exact opposite way, and it's because they have karma.
On the other hand, an Enlightened one can realize what is in the actuality because he burned out his karma completely and doesn't use his mind to perceive the world. As a result of stopping and removing his karma, he can recover his own consciousness, and if he can keep his life then he comes to attain his Enlightenment through his life activities teaching what he can see. It's through this teaching that Enlightenment is attained, but until now this teaching hasn't been passed down properly.
So the reason why meditation doesn't work to produce Enlightenment is that it's not a way to recover and save oneself - it's a way to abandon oneself and never be reborn. It's the exact opposite of Buddha's teaching!
I don't have to find evidence for your claims, the burden is on you to support them. Anyone who says no one has ever attained enlightens through meditation is lying. I know he's lying because such a statement is literally impossible to support rationally and scientifically, no evidence can be provided for such a statement.
Don't make claims you can't provide evidence for, and most especially don't make claims that are impossible to provide evidence for. Learn the difference between matters of fact and matters of opinion. You are speaking of your opinions and presenting them as facts, facts require evidence, opinions do not.
Evidence can only support successful ways of becoming enlightened; positive assertions that are falsifiable. You may say this is known to work, or that is known to work. Evidence cannot say nothing else has ever worked.
You also claimed enlightened beings must be able to rattle off an answer to any question of what's happening in reality. Find another word, that is not the accepted meaning of enlightenment, you are trying to redefine it to fit your masters own extreme definition of the word, one so extreme it only includes him and Buddah.
> Anyone who says no one has ever attained enlightens through meditation is lying. I know he's lying because such a statement is literally impossible to support rationally and scientifically, no evidence can be provided for such a statement.
This is where there is a difference between your level and my level of understanding about the world.
What you said about knowing that someone who makes a non-falsifiable statement is a liar, is actually a lie. It's not only the fact that you didn't understand the statement (and therefore can't accurately judge if it's falsifiable), and besides the fact that you yourself do not know if there will be anyone in the future who manages to prove the statement (you're making the same mistake you're pointing out), but there's another, more essential reason that I know you don't know what you're talking about.
An apple tree only knows how to produce apples because that is what is encoded in its nature (origin). There is nothing in the world that shows some kind of behavior or result that it doesn't already have inside its nature.
The reason I can say confidently here that the practice of meditation does not lead to enlightenment and that no truly enlightened being would teach that it does, is the simple fact that meditation has a certain effect (result) on human beings (which sometimes differs slightly within small boundaries depending on individual, unless the person is already enlightened himself), and that effect on human beings is orthogonal to that of enlightenment as well as nirvana. Meditation will never be able to produce an Enlightened Being, and no one who had Supreme Enlightenment came out of any schools or religions, because they are trying to go in opposite directions - practicing meditation can create karma, but you have to remove all your karma to experience nirvana and have the possibility of being Enlightened. That is to say that Enlightenment (also known as salvation), as well as nirvana (liberation) are in the opposite direction of the goals of meditation (no suffering, darkness/closing your eyes, stopping the flow of your mind/one-pointed concentration, letting external spirits come in or practicing compassion for them, abandoning oneself, not having any attachments, and practicing not to be reborn again). The result of Enlightenment is that you save yourself, and can begin to save others. The result of meditation is that you kill your soul and die forever. So there are some basic things you've learned from others about Buddha's teaching that don't match the reality of life, and that in itself lets me know it's not the teaching of a real Buddha. Do you yourself honestly believe that a living Buddha would teach people the way to die forever? The point of him coming to the world was to show us that we are our own saviors and are capable of saving ourselves.
Your reply is so full of wowo nonsense that I won't bother to rebut it piece by piece but I'll end with this. You completely fail to understand evidence based thinking and falsifiability and thus your opinions are not remotely rational, they are emotional. You need to learn to stop trying to explain yourself, and start providing evidence that anything you say is true. You just look like a crazy person to me; I doubt I'm alone in this assessment.
I'm not interested in your opinions of why you're right, I'm interested in evidence of your claims. If you don't have that, you aren't worth my time.
> You need to learn to stop trying to explain yourself, and start providing evidence that anything you say is true. You just look like a crazy person to me; I doubt I'm alone in this assessment.
> I'm not interested in your opinions of why you're right, I'm interested in evidence of your claims. If you don't have that, you aren't worth my time.
You are not alone in your 'assessment', sir, and to be quite honest, I gave you what I consider to be logically sound evidence that meditation can't lead to Enlightenment, but you won't find the evidence of this statement from me since I don't meditate. Therefore I am asking you to go look at what really happens to people who practice meditation and then confirm how what they can see, how they behave, and what kind of problems they have, are different from some people in human history who really had opened their eyes completely. If you don't want to, that's your loss. But even if I show you evidence by bringing the people in front of your eyes, if you don't want to confirm the axioms I set forward nor check the results of them, if you just reject me without confirming, then how can I be sure you properly understood my meaning in the first place?
Science and philosophy are two sides of the same coin, and you can't recognize evidence until you can understand what it means. I regret that I couldn't have had a proper conversation with you.
> I gave you what I consider to be logically sound evidence that meditation can't lead to Enlightenment
You did no such thing. You just told me why you think that, based on nonsense woowoo about karma, rebirth, and spirits; that is not logic, and it is certainly not rational. You've given me zero reason to believe anything you say.
> but you won't find the evidence of this statement from me since I don't meditate
Then you shouldn't be speaking with authority on the matter; you clearly know nothing about it.
> the goals of meditation (no suffering, darkness/closing your eyes, stopping the flow of your mind/one-pointed concentration, letting external spirits come in or practicing compassion for them, abandoning oneself, not having any attachments, and practicing not to be reborn again).
You've clearly confused the practice of meditation with certain religions that use the practice as part of their woo woo nonsense.
Meditation isn't about any of that; meditation is simply about learning to control the tool that is your mind rather than letting it control you. It is the practice of awareness without the incessant chattering of the mind. It is about learning that you are not your thoughts, nor are you a slave to them. There's nothing mystical about it.
> Therefore I am asking you to go look at what really happens to people who practice meditation and then confirm how what they can see, how they behave, and what kind of problems they have, are different from some people in human history who really had opened their eyes completely.
I didn't ask you to give me homework, I ask for evidence that your claims about meditation are true. You've provided none. If you can't back up claims you make, don't make them.
> Science and philosophy are two sides of the same coin, and you can't recognize evidence until you can understand what it means.
No they are not. Science is a philosophy, one based on evidence and logic. None of which you have shown here.
> I regret that I couldn't have had a proper conversation with you.
I don't believe you do. I believe you regret being asked for evidence of your claims.
How can you know what Enlightenment is very correctly? does that mean that you are yourself Enlightened? If so, that would explain how can you sanction everyone else's Enlightenment, like all of Zen monks, etc.
Also, how do you know that indeed a Buddha comes every 3000 years? where is the Truth pointing to that?