Re: Buddha

In a message dated 9/25/2002 10:13:37 AM Eastern Daylight Time, PAULYKDB@cs.com writes:


> Dear John Landon,
>     I think Buddha was a genius whose intelligence was Einsteinian in strength.
> Why don't you comment on this in a letter to the WSN list?


Few religious traditions have been as lucky with founders as Buddhism. Already by -600 in the middle of India we have someone who, without ever having heard of modern science, seems to be thinking in, I won't say scientific terms, but rationalistically. I know that sounds paradoxical, since we associate Buddhism with mystical consciousness and all that. In fact the basis of the great yogas is plain vanilla simple consciousness (period, over and out) and its transformation via attention. That's it. That's the foundation of the great Shangri La. The point at which these things turn into 'mysticism' is all too often a point of no return in their decline, chaotification, and mumbojumofactification (a new noun). 
You can see Gautama sifting from India's indigenous spiritual tradition to recast the basic issues in non-Hindu terms. I don't want to denigragte Hinduism, but the form of the Indian lore was made ready to ship globally by Buddhists. 
Buddhism was influenced by such things as Jainism. Buddhism's rationalistic bent is actually quite visible to some degree in a man like Mahavir whose place was as one of the last of an already very ancient tradition. There is a great debate over the sources of all this. Toward the end of the nineteenth century some people like Deussen began to suspect the origin was NOT the Vedic tradition, and that these yogas were indiginous before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. Not that has become ultra controversial as the idea of an Aryan invasion is being challenged. 
Be that as it may, the gesture of Buddhism was to strip the basis themes from Hindu content and make them universal. 

The issue is the basic 'self-consciousness' of man. This shade of distinction between 'consciousness' and 'self-consciousness' is the simplest and most primordial of human pyschologies, genuine evolutionary psychologies. Self-consciousness is simply the power of attention brought to passive consciousness. This simple gesture is almost beyond man's psychology as such, and only occurs in the incidents of attention that we experience daily. But for that reason self-consciousness is a property of human existence, occurs twenty times a day. A point to remember before the gurus start repacking what you already have, but don't exercise. 

It is this self-consciousness in more elaborate versions that gets muddled into mysticism. But none of that is important to the issues of liberation which take consciousness into self-conscicousness thence beyond consciousness into the 'fourth state'. The lore of the latter is simply absent in Western tradition.

Anyway we see Buddhism appear in perfect concert with our classical eonic phase (i.e Axial period). Amazing is it not? But we see, as Mike Alexander notes, a spectrum, between philosophy and something more. The transition between consciousness and self-consciousness expresses that spectrum perfectly and it is not accident philosophy blends into issues of consciousness. Note that Hegel explicitly distinguishes consciousness and self-consciousness (in a very wooden way). 

So there is a lot to consider in the issues of Buddhism and the eonic model. Especially in relation to the different modern 'Enlightenment' period. But people try to denigrate modern rationalism as contradicting some mysticism, but this is already New Age Muddle at work. Reason and self-consciousness have no intrinsic opposition, and the conflict merely indicates the frequent mechanical nature of what passes for 'rationality'. But as we see the who tradition of evolutionary consciousness is at risk of preemption as with the Brahmins and Hinduism. 

The modern left needs to get its act together on these questions, because there is an important contribution in the critique of the ideology of religion.  But that needs to be aware of what these ancient issues were about.  The middle men are always at work, and the simple issues of consciousness are transformed into mystifications and by the by you find yourself a peon in a hierarchy of brahmins, where the original subject wasn't even Hindu/ 

It is hard to know where all this comes form. Perhpas very early forms occurred during the Paleolithic and died out everywhere else. But we see the eonic phase resuscitating the lore, streamlining it, and shipping it outward globally.....

John Landon
http://eonix.8m.com