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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (11340)	4/14/2001 3:56:51 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

I am not sure he can control "it". Most of the teachings have to do with controlling the self. The miracles of Buddhism are like the story of the flax seed from a house where death has never been. While there are mystic Buddhists, it is not a religion for mystics alone. Everything that one's reason can contemplate, can be included in Buddhism. It can embrace learning and change, since it can be a philosophy. You can turn anything into a religion, but Buddhism is not (imo) necessarily a religion. You keep talking about it as if it was a religion and it really isn't. Christianity is always a religion, because it involves a Deity- that's the core of Christianity. Buddhism does not necessarily involve a deity. I don't believe in Deities of a Buddha nature anymore than I believe in Christian deities. But I like the teachings of the Philosopher who is recorded as Buddha. Who he was, what he was, doesn't matter. His philosophy is useful and reasonable.

To: Neocon who wrote (11340)	4/15/2001 2:03:04 PM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

To the Buddhist, nature is samsara, the delusion of the senses, that hides our fundamental nature. I think that we tend to be particularly all unaware that we are thinking all the time . Our "nature" is that we are thinking creatures, and the incessant stream of thoughts leave very little time to be truely free. Nature is not illusion , just a background , but one that also incessantly changes even if one lives in some nice bucolic pastoral place. Our actions are mostly driven usually without being first undertaken in awareness , and driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that course thru our minds often like a wild running river. ( the key is to learn to still the river ) One rarely sees throughout human history mankind rising to any state of civilization and not finding things in a tempest torrent-tossed agitated state with flood after flood of calculated conflicts , heated passions or mass hysterias . Like most of history , so it goes within our own lives, almost everyone of us caught up in the torrential happenings , that winds up submerging our lives . It is in the torrents within our own minds that this state of constant agitation originates. It is not that nature is an "illusion ' , but that state of mind each of us all carry within ourselves which to more or lessor degree projects that certain madness upon the world . Though some of us have sweeter madnesses than others... ....some of us are even Forest Gumps ! ;-) Mars