--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "richardwillytexwilliams" <willytex@...> wrote: > > > > > > So I am trying on another version of nondualism which > > > involves a bit of reductionism that labels the mind > > > body split as an illusion, an artifact of how our > > > brain operates... > > > > maskedzebra: > > Am I all alone in exclaiming how beautifully wise and > > sober and acute this analysis is? > > > Well, it hasn't been established that the world of the > senses is an "illusion" - that may be an assumption. > > If this world we experience is just a dream, an illusion, > then what is the constructed character of knowing? Are > we each dreaming the same dream - it would seem so, since > we all agree that a table is a table and a door is a door. > > There is a lot to be said about accepting the mind-body > duality as reality. It makes a lot more sense to accept > the duality rather than accept that events are an > illusion and therefore, not real. > > Who in their right mind would climb to the top of a red > ant hill on fire and shout "I don't exist - it's all > just an illusion!" > > Adyashanti: "Get rid of all of your illusions and what's > left is the truth. You don't find truth as much as you > stumble upon it when you have cast away your illusions."
RESPONSE: I should have stipulated that my praise of Curtis's analysis of Adyashanti applies only to the videoand not to Curtis's recent assumption about "the mind body split as an illusion". I completely disagree with Curtis here; I am an orthodox dualist all the waythe physical and the metaphysical are not made of the same thing. But let me stop right here: I do think that the disposition in Curtis to go the reductionist neurological route is an appropriate and heuristic corrective to his submission to the Hindu mysticism he absorbed into his mind at MIU, and then in proselytizing on behalf of TM as chairperson of the TM Center in Washington. Of course he will deny that his present tendencies intellectually are in any way driven by his past association with the TM Movement (and its religious beliefs). But for me, his interest in, even his belief in, eliminative materialism (if he will accede to that description of his belief system) is the perhaps necessary antidote for clearing out all the mystical deceit lodged in his and bodyor just in his memoryfrom being a teacher of TM and a follower of Maharishi. I think he is doing all of us a favour by so scrupulously sticking to the scientific and naturalistic model of reality. It means HE CAN'T GET DECEIVED. So, even as I can't go there with him (and hold out for a much more complex and post-Catholic reading of the universe and the selfI think of myself as a Mysterian, with a difference), I nevertheless find his way of seeing reality the (as Wallace Stevens might say) "necessary angel" for seeing through someone like Adyashanti. >
