Andy Lowry @AndyLowry@qoto.org

@pbinkley
Footnotes for me always! And don't puddle them all together at the end of a chapter, either, you damn fools.

@jayarava
What I mean is that there is nearly nothing other than DNA patterns that would link me to the 1957 me. Would there even be a single cell still alive? Maybe a stray neuron here and there. So I'm unable to claim to be the 1957 person, since that person ceased to exist. That person died incrementally and had his cells scattered to the winds a long time ago. The information contained in that body DOES live on, though, physics-wise-speaking.

(I guess it boils down to what one thinks "identity" is. Which is a tricky one in itself.)

I have read your Theseus, though it's been long enough that I remember nothing of it other than being surprised to see it. Will add it to re-read list!

@jayarava
Ah, gotcha! Yes, agreed. Nothing at all wrong with everyday! It's the only door we can even knock on, after all. 😀

@jayarava
Oops sorry! Those ARE in there. I forgot. In fact, that's what one of the loose pages is a bookmark for. Used them as supplemental material for your anupalambhayogena essay of May 2018, and in my personal Top Ten of the works collected.

@jayarava
What he meant was that if you try to define it or pin it down in some way, you'll be out of luck. Is this 1957 photo of me really a photo of me? You know, ship-of-Theseus discussions where the problem is what you mean by "me" or "this." Most of us are several different people during the course of a day in subtle ways. One of the other teachers there calls that kind of thing un-pin-downable, which I like.

@jayarava
Well damn. Printing this last "Cessation" document means I need a size upgrade to my official Jayarava folder. Silly me, thought I could get away with a 2" binder. 🙄

The only non-you material in that binder is the famous Nattier article.

(I like to print them so I can scribble little notes about things I want to get more info on. Probably be questions forthcoming on this one!)

@jayarava
The sun DOES go around the earth, but the math is much clumsier from that perspective. 😜

It's not the self that disappears, but the everyday normal ever-present internal "me" reference almost all of us rely on all the time. An event happens, but it doesn't happen to me, it just happens, if that makes any sense.

The temporary, in and out experience of this kind of thing isn't a big hairy mystical deal. Musicians and athletes get in states like that all the time, where everything just happens by itself. "Flow" and all that. The biggie experience where death isn't a problem anymore and everything you see seems to be as though for the first time seems to me to be just a more thorough version of the same basic thing.

@jayarava
Okay, but there are times when that autopilot sense-of-self just dissolves. It can be brought back pretty easily and usually does by itself anyway, after an hour or so. I've seen several possible explanations for that, usually having something to do with artificially wearing out the brain's Default Mode Network and forcing its shutdown (which is why and how koans work when they do, I reckon). Anytime something like that has happened with me, there was an intense unresolvable-by-logic problem I desperately wanted an answer to. Never used koan study myself, despite belonging to the Linji bunch that focuses on it, just happens by accident every time.

The best writing I've seen on the topic of no-self is that of the Christian ex-nun Bernadette Roberts. Her "The Experience of No-Self" is astonishing, partly because the poor woman had a permanent (!) kensho or awakening or whatever and then spent the rest of her life trying to explain and describe it using Christian terminology.

Always been a little sad that she didn't have any Buddhist friends who could have told her that words already existed to use in talking about the things she was talking about, but then again reading through her decisions on what to call things and how to discuss them is interesting in its own right.

Her book costs more than I think it should, but is available for loan on the trusty Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/experienceofnose00robe

@chipmcdonald
"Staying quiet while people work around #cancer patients or the elderly, with no masks."

"Does anybody #mask in the medical community now? "

Although our local hospital does require masking in any of their facilities (Dignity Health), my handy combo radiation/chemo/immunotherapy oncology place does not. Crazy, ain't it?

And although said hospital and associated offices do at least require masks, they no longer run a temp check when you walk in before letting you back into the area you need to go. 🙄

@jayarava
I can think of a certain teacher from way back who might have made reference to the wriggling of eels.

@jayarava
Banal, sure, but it's not something people are much aware of while going about their day.

When my most recent teacher did his intro-to-Buddhism courses, he'd say that "it's not that there's no self, it's just that if you look for it you can't find it," which I thought was not bad especially in that setting where someone may have never encountered such a radical concept before.

@jayarava
I've noticed that when I sit down at my desk and reach out for my fancy-schmancy DasKeyboard with the bouncy Cherry Brown switches I like best, I tend to be wordier than with the laptop I use in the evenings while in the easy chair. If I ever force myself to use an iPad or phone for the purpose, I bet I'd be far more laconic. 😉

@jayarava
I have trouble sometimes in shifting gears between the later Mahayana notion of sunyata and the EBT one. It'll always just be a product and extension of anatta with a big dash of anicca at heart for me, which of course the suttas' version is too-- but I think of it as a direct insight rather than a practice to undertake.

@jayarava
Took a course in Nagarjuna, have three three different translations, and still know less than when I started. 😉

@jayarava
Depends on what one's after, I suppose. I do recognize that I perhaps overdo it a bit now and then. Might just be that feeling of jailbreak celebration I'm still having after leaving that other place. I have read some rather long-form articles here and been grateful that people can do that without having to track down every number in a numbered thread.

@shlowry
Delighted to make your acquaintance! I'm given to understand that my paternal lineage originated through Scotland, though I haven't done the genealogy myself to track it down. Once they waded ashore here, the Irish and Scots quickly became "Scots-Irish". I don't know if that's because they had a more-or-less common language in Gaelic on arrival or just preferred each other's company.

On the use/distraction dilemma, I guess it depends on which you prefer it to be. I use it for both, as @Daniel_Berky also seems to do.

What's made the experience more useful and entertaining for me is to just follow everybody that says something even remotely interesting or funny, and then follow anyone and everyone who follows me. Oh, and of course @donmelton is a must-have to get started, as his followers and interlocutors are a wide-ranging sample of the sorts of entertaining and informative engaging correspondents one might stumble upon. (Hi Don!)

@SrRochardBunson
Oh, that's always a fun book. Have been glomming onto new translations as they appear for almost fifty years now. The most fun I've had with that lately have come from putting Star's "Definitive Edition" side by side with Henrick's Ma Wang Tui work. Even managed to pick up a little Classical Chinese-- Pleco has a really great dictionary plugin for Classical/Literary Chinese that has been extremely useful (it's digital and more easily searchable than I would have expected).

It's not hard to make the work say most anything you want it to say, so it's interesting to look at it word by word as the Definitive does. 😉