You are confusing result with process.
You may think so, but I disagree, strongly.
Ancient medical systems, such as Chinese acupunture, have achieved some good results. But they did it through non-systematic observation over centuries of hit-or-miss.
If you want to believe that the Dualistic Scientific Method or Cartesian Science, if you want to believe that Modern Science, and I contest that this is an article of faith in the west, that it started in the 16thC then I will disabuse you of the notion, and say that it came a bit later, being sometime between then and when it was named so. Descartes was born in 1596 and died in 1650 and had as much philosophy in him as science, just like the Buddha. It’s a bet I’m willing to take, you? Despite that they took different tacks from each other they both landed up playing God, but if you insist on trying to slice up reality I’ll leave it to you as to exactly where you think the cut is to be made, in the between, in the between that is, between where this method did exist and where it didn’t.
Cartesian Science says Life+Death are basically what we got, in life there is everything, in death nothing, this is the Materialist view, it leads to either or formulations, which can be dangerous in a networked age. The Buddhists contend that Birth+Death = Life, this is the Natural View. The question is what are we made of. Now what sounds more logical to you.
If you think that a system like Ayurveda which roughly translated means Life Sciences, has no Modern Science in it despite it being god knows anywhere from 5000 to 10000 years old more before that in the mists of time, then why is it still being used today, do you really think that things in those days were just hit and miss, that they just got lucky that some shit stuck. This is preposterous on the face of it, I hope you are recoiling in horror at your naiveté or is it your innocence, just plain old fashioned naivety. If not I would ask to what extent you’ve examined and attempted to understand, even in just a laymans way, this science that you think is unscientific. On the most mundane level for eg have you ever had an Ayurvedic massage which you might want to try some sometime. If you find yourself going to India, pm me and I will tell you what the mootie is that you need for your tummy, for any head lice and this is the only thing that I found works, or for malaria, without side effects thank you. And it won’t exactly break the bank. None of this means that your science is bad stuff so by all means use it, and for a couple a hundred extra bucks you can get what you need to treat the above. If you don’t believe me, pm me after you’ve had a couple of go rounds on this.
It’s a bit of a gaul don’t you think to not only state the obvious, which of course is true, that modern western science started around when you said it did or even if you didn’t say that exactly that, you know what I talking about, when in actual fact it doesn’t seem like you know what you’re comparing it against, which you’re not really interested in doing by the looks of things, in the first place. For example you mention Acupuncture and how it got started, so tell me what you know and find me an exact start date for it and we can talk, since these things seem to be important to you, as if taking millions of empirical observations are not scientific, like intuiting some stuff stuff, or something. Discussion of Fevers was written by a Taoist some 2200 years ago and this book contained 113 medical prescriptions using 100 varieties of herbal, animal, and mineral drugs, including some recipes that are still in use today. It also includes a detailed diagnostics based on Taoist principles of Yin and Yang, the five elemental activities of earth water fire metal and wood and the three treasures of essence, energy and spirit. Sun Ssu-mo discovered a cure for goiter which is something we know is an iodine deficiency, well how come he discovered a nutritional cure for this troublesome disease 1000 years before it was even discovered in the west, and how come he discovered what came to be known as beriberi and figured out a nutritional cure a thousand years before the west did which was in 1642. The PROOF was that his patients got better when they took their Mooti, what part don’t you understand.
Do you think he just made the stuff up and got lucky. In those days, the deal was preventative medicine, the idea was to keep your patients healthy, not just cure them when they got sick, docs were on some sort of retainer or something and you didn’t have to pay if you took ill. Despite those Easterners approaching this conundrum from exactly the opposite direction to that which was taken in the west, Occams razor would still posit that this was more than just luck. How could this man possibly have done this, if he wasn’t on the cutting edge of modern science. If you insist on being scientific about it fine. At what exact point was it, as I asked in the first paragraph, that this funky medicine became ancient enough to be considered unscientific, which is nothing more than a change in the conditions, Pray tell, where is the causal juice. The danger as I said last night in a post to Neocon, is not to get ethnically confused in the beginning, because it leads to intellectual complications later on. Don’t get me wrong I think that modern medicine is miraculous when appropriate, and I think that the ancient healing arts are miraculous when appropriate. Besides I like things called arts, bwtfdik.
Modern medicine had advanced far more rapidly and with more daring because it has a method, which is the scientific method, to PROVE whether some idea is actually valid or not, and to prove it quickly, in a few months or years, not centuries. Once the idea has been shown to be scientifically proved, other doctors will accept it and build on it. Without a process that leads to accepted proof, it can take centuries for advances to spread, if ever.
You seem convinced that Time has something do with it and it has, but without realizing that the truth is Timeless which you know is true too, so what are you actually saying that’s new or true. Must be some kind of time warp. What of all these scientific riddles that haven’t been solved yet even though they’ve been with us for a long long time. Things like in maths for example that have had every high powered computer on the planet thrown at them, perhaps for hundreds of years, yet they are still are not solved. What has this got to do with the application of modern scientific principles which makes things happen quickly dammit. In the Life Sciences, despite the great leap forwards, we still can’t exactly say when life begins. What’s up with that. To answer this burning question some decide on a medical determination, others a philosophical one, or a religious one but apparently these can’t really be used to prove anything in a scientific sort of way, so if nothing provides the true answer, what then do we really know, and why after all this time don’t we know it with any sort of scientific certainty if Cartesian Science is so damn hot. Dividing shit up doesn’t mean squat in a case like this.
When I google up scientific method, there is lots and lots of information on the subject, but nothing is said about how much time anything is supposed to take, or that using it makes anything go any faster. True, it seems that more and more is being done in less and less time these days but then again lots of scientists will say things like, “oh well once we discovered this, then that became quite easy and we got to here really quickly”. This brings me to what you left out of your equation, which is the confounding existence of the condition we call Complexity. When such exists with it’s brothers and sisters, in glorious manifestation and whose names you don’t even want to know, and the actual physical objective is to deduce oneself and one’s own mind, as compared to everything else say, well the particularity of this condition can make any result, insufferably difficult to determine, no matter how modern the method. To date modern science is having a hard time detecting where our minds are at, so they sort of stick it back into the brain, lol. The buddhists simply say that mind is a non physical continuum that changes all the time. It’s one thing to dice and slice things up and to scientifically define some thing like Gravity, this is a profound accomplishment, no doubt, to describe accurately Natural Law. Now when you take on the whole kit and kaboodle, It can take a while. Since Newtons discovery is something you’d call Modern Science, but the Buddhas is not, what Law is it do you think that he was on about, the Synthetic one.
Again, you never said so the first time, but how much time do you have to devote to figuring out whether or not this is junk science, good grief I wonder where that word came from and why, politics I guess, because sometimes it can take as much time as it does for a mosquito to move a mountain. Don’t say you haven’t been warned, but this condition can be ameliorated by the short cuts and the tricks picked up along along the long long way. You can decide to use them or not, we all walk this walk, and we land up where we land up. Because of the unique dialectic involved in this stuff there is no such thing as faith, they simply don’t have a word that precisely corresponds to what we know of as faith, but I couldn’t lay that on you last night, it just felt a bit much so I held off, but here it is, the corresponding ideation in their religion, is to our ideation of logic and reason, and they are just about the most humble people that you will ever have to deal with in your life. Profoundly so.
The problem is, is that due in part to Descartes shenanigans, and don’t get me wrong I thank god for him, well we lot turned out to be pretty different which is not surprising given what we know about dependent origination and all that, but given the degree of global integration or disintegration it’s time to learn some new, old tricks. This is where most folks get the vapours. because as we know things do have causal power inherent existence because Descartes could prove it, couldn’t he or at least he thought he could, or that’s what we believe anyway, that things themselves have causal power, some inherent existence, some juice down there that connects things together as I think Frank alluded to a while back.
Descartes, like the Bhuddha started with himself to determine his own existence, but then things got very very different. René realized that to doubt his own existence means that he must exist, which is a fair enough point I’d say and being a Christian he then went on to deduce the existence of God and the rest of the physical world. As we found out, this worked, but with limits. Things didn’t quite work out that way for the Buddha though who took conventional reality as his starting point and what he discovered were these 5 aggregates, 4 of which were non physical. Well the poor chap what he had to do was to figure out how these related, given the conventional material world and all. To do this he had to develop some tools and he invented one called the diamond drill, long before Descartes time, which he used for insight. He deduced the doctrine of the Emptiness of Causation (no inherent essence or existence) and the doctrine of Dependent Origination and then further deduced that these two doctrines were in fact identical to each other, and that together, as one, that these two truths accounted for both the conventional and the ultimate nature of reality, which it turns out he discovered were one and the same thing.
The doctrine of dependant origination could easily contain, any notions that Descartes would have of the physical or conventional world, But the most profound difference over the notion of causal power is what it so hard for westerners to understand imo. In this regards, so far the Buddha is more than a little ahead of Descartes on this particular point, and that’s the problem right there, it’s not a point, it’s a process, its both at the same Time. Nagarjuna’s teaching on the Middle Way proves the theory quite exquisitely imo, but space and time are limited here, should we say. The locus of this theory is the mid point between the two extreme philosophical views of nihilism where nothing exists, and reification where everything exists. In gobbledygook, such a point is achieved by taking conventions as the ontological foundation, thus rejecting the entire wretched business of a philosophical search for the ontological foundations of convention. Really it’s much easier just to read the Eightfold Noble Path and go on your merry way. You can only get into this stuff deeply if you are very very serious about it. I have an on and off fatal attraction. The confounding thing is that the scientists are discovering that in the physical world, this ancient and “unscientific” view keeps on corresponding to the reality that they can observe.
The great difficulty in all of this is in using language and to ignore almost the normative meanings of the words because these are symbolic by nature and not of any essence themselves. Carving out any particular phenomena for explanation or for use in explanation depends a lot more on our explanatory interests and language than on any joints that reality actually presents to us. Through addressing the question of the potential existence of an event in it’s conditions, this concealed relation between praxis and reality emerges. You see the way I see it, there is good religion and bad religion, yours truly GWB.
Two simple yes or no questions, to get to the bottom of this Nadine, and this is not to get into veneration or anything because there is a lot of Buddhist crap out there, but one, do you believe the Buddha actually existed and two do you believe it is possible to achieve Liberation. I can’t really keep posting like this during the week, so until next time, you can have the last word. |
