Change My View: Causal determinism and the conclusions of neuroscience that free will does not exist are incompatible with zen seeing.

That we can identify, quantify, describe, measure, and track discriminatory divisions within our environment, that we can explain function accordingly (causal determinism is true, but we still act as free, morally responsible agents when, in the absence of external constraints, our actions are caused by our desires) seems to give us the legitimate license to overrule what Bodhidharma was pointing at.

Cultural preconceptions are applied to what would otherwise be unborn or original mind, or ordinary mind. Cause and effect continue to reign. Action is bound, but (adherents to the preconceptions) say zen is still a useful adjunct to a basket of coping skills to make the best out of a Faustian Bargain. Especially amusing is that where humans have imposed their own cause and effect, in the domain of their man made culture, their pretend institutions, their made up explanations and views, where rewards and punishments, legal consequences, and standards DO apply..... in these constructs, the same individuals who made a Faustian Bargain to deny non-doing, are seemingly willing to brush it all off to "everything is buddha". Which it technically is, but come on, is the irony not apparent? They are saying the folly of make believe is buddha, but ordinary mind is deterministic.

Culture acts as a preconception, an unspoken agreement, an implicit understanding, and its consensus allows us to imagine ourselves to be conscious flukes in a material world that only spit us out by accident against all odds, and where the foundational structure is playing a joke of only thinly disguised determinism against us.

Explaining function, and categorizing reality into discriminatory divisions obviously has its place in technology and the applied sciences, but how far can explaining function, and categorizing reality into discriminatory divisions go? Can they take us to more than modeling reality, can they take us to ultimate cause, to the deepest understanding? Or are they most valuable in exposing the limits of any rational approach, exposing that control of any function is ultimately limited to the methodological constructs employed? The same wall that Bodhidharma faced is still there today without having moved at all. Zen seeing still applies just as it always has. Except we have created an environment where no sane person is going to even mention "perfectly realized".

Submitted October 17, 2020 at 06:35AM by rockytimber https://ift.tt/3jeLnWp