new.morning wrote: "I am particularly interested in the one for which a particular type of passivity is the prescription to most things."
authfriend wrote: "I don't recall anyone here ever expressing such a prescription. (snip) But I'd be surprised if anyone here would defend it." Edg: I read in, er, maybe the Srimad Bhagavatam, that if everything was "understood," then one should just lay down on the ground and stop living -- only eating "like a snake who must wait for food to come to it." Something like that. Pure passivity. I love the concept as a variant of the "God's Will" concept. If God wants me to save the world, well, he'll have use His ooogabooga brain to figure it out -- He won't be counting on my local nervous system with its parochial, partial, pitifully limited POV to come up with the insight needed to save the world. A meat robot has to be directly and divinely inspired as to where and when it might deliver an Alexandrian cut to the world's Gordian Knot. "Divinely" means, sorta, coming from a source of information that is only available to a robot that has become aware of the least aspects of its programming.....ritam level, God-conscious level -- like that. The enlightened robot is one in which the "ego part" has finally "got it" that it is merely the "I" functionality of robot's programming and that it, ego functionality, is not the actual observer of the robot's thoughts, but that, instead, an "outside" presence, awareness, consciousness observes all of the robot's inner and outer actions and that this presence no longer identifies with the "robot's ego." What the robot comes up with next is something the robot is usually unable to predict, and it is something the "outside" observer is unattached to -- as a movie screen is unattached to the "happenings" upon it. So, the observer is always there but it is seemingly passive about what the robot does when the robot ego is invalidated and no longer considered sentient. Once the observer recognizes -- re + cognizes -- its non-robotness, the entire world of the robot becomes entirely unimportant and insignificant regarding the observer's eternal and transcendental status. The observer understands that "all this" is as ephemeral as the shadows on the walls of Plato's Cave. That is to say, exactly like each of us experiences when we awaken in the morning and consider the value of our night's experiences while dreaming -- who cares if I just won the lottery in the dream? -- dream money don't count no how in wake retail shops. Like an airplane propeller that still spins when the engine has been "shut off," the robot's programming continues spinning "its story," until the robot's programming begins to come to terms and begins to "deal with" "this presence," and thus it begins to refine its programming "towards silence." The robot begins to have clarity about its subtleties. Issues of the robot world begin to pale and drop into the background, and the robot begins to manifest symbols of the growing silence with whatever words and actions it can muster up. Like the villagers who try to help Baby Krisna hold up the mountain with their sticks, the robot tries to help silence do its thang in just this manner. Nothing really needs to be done by anyone, but everyone wants to help even if it's merely symbolic helping. Just so, does the robot continue after enlightenment. The heart values begin to dominate until love is seen in every nook and cranny, and then, finally, after coming to clarity about its god-like programming delicacy, the robot can finally begin to see its harmony with the quantum foam that now becomes its "new ego." Unity dawns. Then, even this unity comes to understand that it is a manifestation too, and that the quantum foam is held in the arms of silence complete, and that all this is that silence. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is a robot that claims it is in tune with the foam, but the Ramana Maharshi robot teaches "tune schmune" -- the real deal is the silence beyond -- a silence that is merely symbolized by awareness, consciousness, existence, conceptuality. Edg