[MD] The Intellectual Gauntlet

[MarshaV]

Greetings,

". . . Strange that she'd come to Kingston on a boat called the Karma. It 
was unlikely anyone aboard knew what that word really meant. It was like 
naming a boat 'Causal Relationship.' Of all the hundreds of Sanskrit words 
he had learned so long ago, dharma and karma had hung on longest and 
hardest. You could translate and pigeon-hole the others but these never 
seemed to stop needing translating.

The Metaphysics of Quality translated karma as 'evolutionary garbage.' 
That's why it sounded so funny as the name of a boat. It seemed to suggest 
she had arrived in Kingston on a garbage scow. Karma is the pain, the 
suffering that results from clinging to the static patterns of the world. 
The only exit from the suffering is to detach yourself from these static 
patterns, that is, to 'kill' them."
(LILA, Chapter 32)


This is why it seems so silly to be battling over the exact definition of 
the Social Level versus the Intellectual Level, or the individual versus the 
collective.  It's the clinging to the static patterns that is the cause of 
suffering.  When one begins to see what those patterns are, and what they 
are not, they begin to die and there is a whole new perspective available. 
To dismiss or undervalue the Eastern perpective and/or Buddhist philosophy 
is missing something very valuable.

As Bo would say:  Enough!

Marsha