Re: No speeding trucks (was Re: Dramatrollery)

On May 9, 8:59 am, DharmaTroll <dharmatr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> If a poster said (and not with irony or satire) "I am an enlightened
> once-returner" or "I am a fully enlightened arhat" or whatever, I
> wouldn't even need to test them -- I'd assume their nutz to begin
> with.

Why would you assume that? Do you mean you would assume that without
investigating further to make sure?

> Now I remember (and maybe only Tang and Evelyn were around this far
> back) that Theravad claimed to be a "stream enterer".  But that didn't
> count: for when I questioned him as to how he knew that he reached
> that threshold that meant he was enlightened to the extent that he
> couldn't slip back and had exactly at most 7 rebirths left in which he
> would become fully enlightened -- which is the definition in the
> Buddhist mythology -- he confessed that he didn't mean that by the
> term.  Rather, he was appropriating the term as metaphor for someone
> who has entered a spiritual path seriously to the point that it had
> changed his life significantly and there was no going back to the dark
> ages of his spiritual adolescence.  Fair enough.  But that's just an
> interesting use of the traditional terms in an interesting
> metaphorical way.  The guy was cool, but a bit neurotic, and I thought
> his use of the term was a nice metaphor.  But that's not the kind of
> case I'm talking about.

Seven rebirths?

> I mean when self-righteous kooks come here claiming to know
> everything, then I have no problem with Tang putting them to the test,
> and I do that too.  I do remember some looney-tunes nutter who babbled
> about "Dark Zen" and the Jehovah's Witness-like Nichirenegades are
> pretty out of touch and so forth.  Those guys are fine to take the
> battle to, sure.  And I have no problem with Tang taking them apart.
> But Tang, you used to constantly pick on Evelyn, our nice den-mother
> granny, mostly because you didn't like the practices of the particular
> sect that she found the most helpful.  But with people like my pal
> Jigme, who was a bright, creative, sensitive poster that Tang bullied,
> I don't get it -- as he never claimed to be enlightened or holier-than-
> thou, but he was a cool Buddhist dude who was witty, funny, and always
> worth the read.  So I'm all for mud-wrestling with the nutters, but
> not for the continued insulting of interesting posters, and then
> coming up with this "it's their fault I harassed them because they
> chose to post here" stuff is ridiculous.

Before the other day I never suspected that Tang's misrepresentation
of what I said in an earlier post was intentional. Yet now after what
Ev and you have said I'm beginning to think it was.

The main problem, if any, I have with all of this stuff you guys go on
about is that it has no application, no use. It's all mental - all of
it - terms and conditions, ifs and thens, dogma read from books. The
last time I trolled looking for a use for any of this (4-5 days ago I
think), no one answered my post.

> Personally, I don't have to wait for self-righteous triumphalistic
> posters to 'crash': if one merely states "my sect is the best sect and
> everyone else's is inferior to mine" or "everyone else's goes to level
> 10, but only mine goes to 11", etc., that's enough for me do dismiss
> them as ridiculous.  They may still make good points or recommend good
> books, but no serious good teacher could possibly make such an
> ignorant claim.

What if such a claim was objectively true? How do you know it is
ridiculous?

>  Same thing with claiming that only guys can get
> enlightened and girls have to be reborn as dudes to be enlightened. If
> someone takes such cultural crap literally and goes along with the
> ***ism of it, they are seriously deluded.

Pretty much everyone can see through that one by now I'd hope.

>  So you don't have to try to
> psychoanalyze them as Tang does; most of the time deluded people who
> make grandiose claims can be dismissed just from the silliness of the
> kinds of claims they make -- they don't have to have a temper tantrum
> and crack under pressure of interrogation from Cardinal Tang's "mental
> waterboarding" to see that they are nutters.

I think that if what you say is true, I would enjoy Tang's mental
waterboarding if he ever gets around to focusing on me. Seeing as how
I'm an enlightened master and stuff. Since you seem to know a lot
about it and I am new here - does he use stuff like argumentum ad
hominem, etc? Does he make stuff up about the people he waterboards?
Or is it all factual and straightforward?

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