GENIUS FORUMS

It just seems that a sense of poetry would convince someone to value overused words less. Shakespeare hit the pinnacle of meaning for the verb. A philosopher would, on top of a poet, see how much we predicate from “to be”, and the tall order I make. An academic, thirdly, would see that one loses not...

There are several words that I have learned not to use (a teacher criticized me for using them). I don't use the verb "to say" or the adjective "nice". One can always find a better way to express one's true meaning. I classify "to be" as a word like that. People use it ...

As I understand it, “to be” comes with conceptual luggage that only recently philosophers have addressed. Heidegger laid the groundwork in “Being and Time”, where he essentially defined the verb to be. I find it a monumental accomplishment. With no English Heidegger forthcoming (as in, someone willi...

Robert Anton Wilson wrote a brief informative essay about the advantages of E-prime. I’ll link it here as a starting point.

https://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm

I present to you English Prime, or E-Prime. E-Prime transforms the English language by removing every instance of the verb "to be" from discourse. This includes be, was, is, are, am, exists, becoming, et cetera. It forces one to use stronger, more precise words than "to be" (othe...

I just read an article where a 19-year old girl in China jumped to her death to a cheering audience. For anyone unfamiliar with Confucianism, it is essentially a religion of perfection. One is expected to master oneself, to live harmoniously with one"s family, and thus bring about a utopia. I d...

I don't understand why true opposites cannot exist. Would you elaborate? All knowledge is either empirical or absolute. The only knowledge that can show true opposition is absolute. Empirical knowledge, by its very nature, does not have a logical opposite. If you think that the only knowledge that ...

Enlightenment is the realization that no metaphysical beliefs are ever certain. It is best expressed in terms of the tetralemma. For any truth statement x, there are four distinct truth values: x, not-x, not x and -x, and neither x nor -x. We usually use the concept of selfhood to explain why this l...

The goal of psychiatry seems to be to show people how to be contented and productive, and I see nothing in your chakra-based view that would contradict that goal. That's a criticism by the way! The chakra-based view is not necessarily a damnation of mental illness. Anti-psychiatry failed, and even ...

Russel Parr, I like the model that starts at insanity and then ascends to enlightenment. I plan to discuss this with my aunt (a PhD in psychiatric nursing) to see how well my model stands up to the medical mythos. Both of us have been involved with psychiatry for long enough to know that there are p...

Everyone has some experience with the astral plane, whether or not they are aware that such is what it is when experiencing it. It is tied to dreams and drugs, and is our capacity for an ecstatic trance. Astral projection is our first encounter with the weird, a plane separate from the raw material ...

Why does over/misuse of a word make it nonsensical to someone who has a fixed definition of it? Words are social; as I said, they work like a game. If you don't even bother to approximate the definitions of others, you have forfeited sense. If everyone calls a knife a spoon, except one person who c...

The moment you cannot see goal of purpose of something, without exception there's a losing of connection and meaning, a static situation, a mind "in rest", perhaps even paralysed, giving birth to the view. I notice that you don't refer to truth in your entire post. Is truth, to you, no lo...

Everyone needs to sleep sometimes, but that you came here with that indicates to me that you were ready to hear the alarm clock. I listened to a 19-hour audiobook of the history of philosophy (in light of epistemology), and the end left me here. The narrator attempted his own hand at a solution, bu...

Everyone plays language games. These are the rules by which we communicate. A football player broadcasts his language game in his performance on the field. A professor entrusts his language to his students. But the most challenging language game is the Truth. Speaking of Truth in natural languages c...

jupiviv wrote:However, the path *to* enlightenment has a definite end which Gautam and others have described in different ways.

How would you describe the end?

Why does the path need to be some actual recipe? Logically the path cannot be worldly in the sense of another method to accomplish some end game because it seems that still would mean it's causally connected to the world in terms of experiences, conditions, goals or phenomena and that would counter...

Basically, he proclaimed four truths: life is suffering (symptoms), there is a cause of the suffering (truth of causality), there is a way to stop suffering (cure), and there is a path that ends all suffering (treatment plan). The path is known as "the Noble Eightfold Path", and most of Bu...

Cahoot, Isn't the desire to modify natural law (sin) itself a part of natural law? Nothing that exists is outside of natural law; hence, sin is nothing. Beneath which and contradiction aside, without an "ought", there's no particular reason to sin or not to sin. What you are describing is ...

Cahoot, How does one find non-relative definitions of sin? I assume that if you want morality to be absolute, and you can't base it on facts without running into the is-ought problem, you are forced to create morality from thin air. You may as well be arguing about aesthetics: which set of morality ...

I’ve known people who have the view: hate the sin and not the sinner. This suggests that good and evil somehow exist independent of “you.” This turns opinions into facts, and I am not sure I am willing to make that mistake. Morality tells us what we should do; facts describe what is. The simple fac...

What good is is entirely dependent on who you are. I doubt any amount of reading will change what you already ultimately perceive as good. But revealing biases is still progress. In that vein, here's a quiz that might show you what you value.

Kunyab, It seems as if enlightenment is not a objective thing but a matter of opinion. Enlightenment is where opinion finally crashes against the reef of fact, the closest point to objective truth that a subjective being can get. The old "A=A". After that is an Infinite abyss. One can also...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)

Not all tautologies are A=A, though, so this still isn't the name.

Alex Jacob, Have you located in your studies or in your observation of people a, say, 'negative use' of these doctrines? I see in Buddhist doctrine the potential for misuse: I recall a "meditation club" at university which involved a bunch of people sitting around a room trying not to do a...