[MD] Reification of Gravity, Subjects, Objects, etc.

[118]

Hi Marsha,

We could ask: Why do we differentiate the way we do?  Is it not
natural?  From a modern neurobiologist point of view (and invoking
your patterns), we could state that the patterns without create the
patterns within.  Nerve firing and the consolidation of enforced
patterns is inherent in our thinking.  The point is not to try to
escape from this, but to embrace it.  The subject object divide is not
our enemy, it is our friend.  We can fight this all we want with other
patterns, but this is counter intuitive.  Recognizing that brings more
harmony.

Cheers,
Mark

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 10:44 AM, MarshaV <valkyr at att.net> wrote:
>
> Since static quality and Buddhism's conventional truths are synonymous, let me add two more quotes:
>
> "There are different domains of relativity ...  Such truths are contingent upon perspective.  This routes us back to a central issue of Buddhism:  reification.  Reification is taking something that is true relative to ourselves and believing it to be true independently of ourselves."
>     (Wallace, B. Alan, Buddhism with an Attitude, p.138)
>
>
>    "Even when the mind is settled in meditative stabilization without human conceptual constructs, it is not considered by Buddhist contemplatives to be entirely free of all traces of conceptualization.  One's inborn sense of a reified self as the observer and the reified sense of the duality between subject and object are still present, even though they may be dormant while in meditation; and when one emerges from this nonconceptual state, the mind may still grasp onto all phenomena, including consciousness itself, as being real, inherently existing entities.  To penetrate to the fundamental nature of appearances and their relation to consciousness, it is said that one must go beyond meditative stabilization and engage in training for the cultivation of contemplative insight."
>    (Wallace, B. Alan, 'The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of Consciousness', p.112)
>
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> On Dec 31, 2010, at 1:07 PM, MarshaV wrote:
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>> From a review of the book ‘Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground’.
>>
>> How do we deal with the complexity of experience? Well, we 'seek and find, or project, a simplifying pattern to approximate every complex field ... by lumping (ignoring some distinctions as negligible) and by splitting (ignoring some relations as negligible). Both ... create discreet entities useful for manipulating, predicting and controlling ... [but] may impose ad hoc boundaries on what are actually densely interconnected systems and then grant autonomous existence to the segments. Even the contents of our own consciousness have to be dealt with in this way, resulting in our array of fragmented self-concepts, and we just put up with the anomalies that arise. Buddhism, he explains, agrees that discovering entities is conventionally indispensable, but attachment and aggression arise through reifying them, which violates the principle that all things are interdependent, and all entities are conditional approximations."
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>> http://www.westernbuddhistreview.com/vol4/buddhism_and_science.html
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