Originally posted by protonman
In a world obeying cause and effect there can not be a third class like the one you describe.
Your minds are limited, my mind is limited. All we can rely upon is the testimony of those who have a greater clarity in their minds. Just as we see cars and tress and know they are real some people can see electro-magnetic fields and more subtle phenomena and understand them as obviously as we understand everyday objects. Until we reach the point where we can see all phenomena as easily as we see an apple in our hand we are no different than a blind person with a walking stick navigating a vast forest
I have two questions I'd like to ask you.
The first is, how can you be certain that "Buddhist" teachings are what the Buddha himself taught? My studies of "Buddhist" doctrine that developed after the Buddha have convinced me much of it has nothing to do with anything the Buddha taught.
For example, jump ahead a thousand years after the Buddha’s death and you find prolific temple building, sutra copying and chanting, relic veneration, pilgrimages to and circumambulation of commemorative monuments (the stupas), worship of semi-divine beings, along with a plentiful collection of stories, philosophic works, new “scriptures,” and beliefs—none of which had been taught or recommended by the Buddha.
My point is, without the presence of the realized Buddha to keep things of track, the
religion of Buddhism may have wandered far from what the Buddha was really talking about. Your ideas about "Buddhist logic" particularly strike me that way.
As far as I can tell, there is only one logic, which is a thought system for describing how things are ordered. We can rely on logic because most of the observable world is ordered; if it weren't ordered, logic would be useless to us. So logic is how our mind "follows" the ordered aspects of reality.
I myself have extensively studied the conversations of the Buddha, and I have yet to find a single instance when he strayed from what is considered proper logic today. Study his dialogues, for instance, and in a very Socratic way (or was Socrates doing things in a Buddhist way), the Buddha leads his students to conclusions with brilliant logic. While his premises might not be considered suitable for an empirical setting, I cannot see how anyone today would view his logic as other than "normal."
My second question takes off from Ahrkron's point that, ". . . given your assertion that 'if there were a moment it was not changing it would be permanent,' you still need to prove . . . nature does not contain a third class of objects, that change some instants, while remain unchanged the rest of the time . . ."
My quesion is, why couldn't there be some aspect of existence which is both quite mutable and absolutely unmutable? I'm not trying to be mystical, but rather set up an explanation for something I know the Buddha taught.
He said, "“There is, monks, that plane where there is neither extension nor motion. . . there is no coming or going or remaining or deceasing or uprising. . . . There is, monks, an unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded . . . [and] because [that exists] . . . an escape can be shown for what is born, has become, is made, is compounded.”
Hmmmm. A paradox? Not necessarily. The idea of a "plane" could be interpreted as a ground state of existence out of which all apparent reality arises. In that case, the "parts" we see are actually forms of this ground state. Since the way parts are raised out of the ground state is through order, that's why logic works when thinking about them.
However, while logic works with "forms" it does not work with the ground state. That is why the Buddha taught only a direct experience of the ground state (
samadhi) could reveal anything about it.
I'll add this in case you might be interested, if I were to hypothesize about the problem you are having here, it is that you have all the Buddhist stuff mushed together into one big mess, and you are trying to show the irrelevance of physics when there is no need to. Physics is understood one way, and what the Buddha was pointing to is known another. Why try to mix the two?
