Actually, the point of the Buddhist sandwich is that not everything is made of bread, nor the ham and cheese between. We have the Eater, with awareness, and we have the World-Sandwich, and the Eating. But beyond that we have the unseen world of spirit to which we go after eating the andwich, a sort of PortaPotty for dumping gross materials prior to exiting for the next meal. That much, most spiritually inclined religions agree upon. The Buddhist's point is that the space in which all this occurs is essentially empty, and all of the stuff that we think of as ultimately real and personal, right down to the teetch that we eat with, is actually self-arising out of emptiness.

""But that emptiness from which everything arises is no mere emptiness. It is filled with potential. The potential to create.  Sure, there is no fixed manner in which things have to be created, but one experiences according to what one creates.  What one experiences is real for as long as one experiences it. Regarding "as long as,"  since all of time exists in the same eternal now, one can never get completely away from what one has created. One can only evolve to the point where one enjoys a perfected result.

In his third book Ultimate Journey, Robert Monroe writes about returning to where he came from.  He found that the experience of manifestation is gone through, because the basic state we started with wasn't complete, and needed to be added to.  This goes along with my feeling that manifestation "isn't" just one big fat mistake. Dagwood made the sandwich because he wanted to eat it.""

At this point we can take several equally valid approaches. One is that this is due to the "Uncaused Cause". Or we can side with science as say that it's all a matter of thermodynamics (which is another term for the Uncaused Cause), and then develop symbolic expressions that explain this process. (That's where I work.)  Or we can side with Hindus and say that this is all a projection from the mind of the Absolute Self (aka Brahman, God, etc), which is the Uncaused Cause projected into the world as the Mind that thinks the world, and in which we all share. Or Buddhists call it emptiness, the nature of which gives rise to structures that resemble reality and folks like us.

""My feeling is that reality is just simply reality, and it can't be categorized according to our concepts of physical and non physical. There is only one reality, and whether this reality appears as pure awareness (emptiness), love, or the ability to create, it is all the same thing.  Because of love and because we can create, awareness, the emptiness, has something to be aware of. What would be the point of having awareness, if there wasn't a Dagwood sandwich to eat?""

The dogmatism that is the target is the assumption that any aspect of reality is "real", permanent and absolute.

""Just because a Dagwood sandwich can be made in many different ways, this doesn't mean it wont fill your tummy. The key is to learn to make a sandwich that won't give you indigestion. Perhaps this is part of the reason we are all here. We're learning to make Dagwood sandwiches without getting indigestion.""

In specific, the "anatta doctrine" objects to the notion of a God who has physical embodiment, and sits on a cloud with a Cosic Flyswatter looking for sinners to whack, or a soul that is invariable, like a lump of coal, together with the idea that we are individually enduring ego states, as opposed to evolving awareness, or the concept of an eternal world with some kind of intrnsic validity.

""I don't believe that God is an old man in the sky who sits on a throne. There are people who have experienced cosmic consciousness. During such an experience they find that the divine source of all is aware of everything that takes place within it.  I don't understand why this possibility is so hard to understand. If we can be aware of think about everything that happens within our energy field, then why can't the source being in which everything takes place be aware of and think about everything that takes place within its energy field. Buddhism doesn't tend to speak of this omnipresent being.

Regarding Souls, if energy can accumulate to form chains of thought, bodies, planets, stars and such, why can't it accumulate to form Souls.  If an Eastern teacher had an experience of higher self in a disc/oversoul sense, he or she wouldn't be so quick to deny the existence of a Soul.""

Instead, the lesson from Siddhartha is that everything is contingent, an evolving aggregate, and rooted in nothing except the logic of its own nature. Thus, it can project itself, and by projecting it interacts, acquires knowledge, makes choices and grows. Were this untrue, it could do nothing (as in the ontology of Bishop Berkeley q.v.), and would be non-interactive, hence dead and invisible.

""If the energy with which we create is a part of divine reality, then what we experience is real even if we can change the manner in which we create. Especially if our experience determines whether or not we are happy.

If one came to the conclusion that all is empty, wouldn't one have to make use of manifested creative mind energy in order to realize this? After all, how could pure awareness/emptiness realize anything specific?""

Incidentally, this is the Madhyamaika Pransangika interpretation to which I subscribe. It is better expressed in the Prajnaparamita Sutra, or the present teachings from Nagarjuna et al. There are other similar interpretations by other Eastern sects, like the Svatrantikas etc, including pure idealism and naive nihilism. These generally seem to have technical issues that don't resolve very well, as they generally trail off into infinite regressions and unreslved contingencies. "Eastern philosophy" is not all of a single kind and opinion, but varies, much like the contents of a Dagwood.

Actually, for people on this Forum, there's nothing new here except perspective. For the common ego-dominated people of the world, some of these ideas are a bit shocking and unsettling, as they destroy the notion of a fire-escape religion, what I tend to refer to as "the magic of Voodoo Christianity", substituting in its place the notion of personal responsibility. But so are ghosts, afterlife experiences and the seemingly mysterious operation of karma unsettling to many.

""I used to be a big fan of the Buddhist teachings you speak of.  Eventually I learned it was dualistic to consider the manifested part of existence as something other than God, just a big delusion.

I was a really big fan of Ramana Maharshi.  At the time I used to think, so what if I become enlightened when there is still a universe full of suffering beings? How could I possibly be happy if this is the case? One day I had this really deep insight which told me that we all wake up in the same eternal now. Therefore, when one wakes up, one finds that there is no more suffering, because all others have also awakened.

This is part of the reason I liked Ramana and Certain Buddhist teachings so much.  They helped me relive my insight that when I wake up, I'll find there are no other suffering beings to worry about.

However, eventually, I realized that if I have to experience inperfection despite what I realized above, then everybody else has to do the same. It is just that we all do so at the same time, even though in a linear sense, it seems as if people in different time periods do so at different times. When Ramana would tell his followers they don't have to worry about things such as Wars because it is all a dream he was wrong, because despite how illusory things might be, we suffer while we are in the dream. Sometimes, quite horribly. Therefore, I believe it is important to do what we can to improve the World, so our brothers and sisters of so called future generations don't have to go through unnecessary suffering.""



dave