Message-Id: <199904070717.DAA04215@websmtp1.bellsouth.bigfoot.com>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: A more
From: "joe dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net>
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 03:51:16 -0400
At Wed, 07 Apr 1999 06:19:01 +0100, you wrote:
>
>Joe Dees wrote:
>
>> The claim in contention is that the belief that there is a "self" is an illusion.
>> However, illusion cannot exist in the absence of someone who is under the spell of an illusion.
>> Either there is a self, or there is not. If there is a self, then there is no illusion.
>> If there isn't a self, then there is no one to be under the spell of an illusion, so there is, once again, no
>> illusion. Methinks that some fundamentalist Buddhists without an understanding
>> of their own religious doctrines are nevertheless attempting to inject them into a
>> scientific discussion. When Zen masters such as D. T. Suzuki and others such as
>> Dogen and Hui-neng insist that the self is nothing, they mean it in the way that
>> the existentialists mean it; as no-thing, i.e. not a static thing, like a rock, but as a
>> dynamically recursive becoming.
>
>I would take your remarks more seriously if you had used the word
>'illusion'.
>As I understand 'delusion', it refers to pathology, as in
>hallucinations, etc,
>associated with mental disease, and is not synonymous with 'illusion'.
>
Hokay, reread it. Happy now? I have taught both comparative religion and philosophy at the college level, and I can assure you that I am neither naive nor under the spell of an illusion nor deluded about these things. Karma can be dogma sometimes.
>
>'Either there is a self, or there is not' is naive.
>
>Suzuki, Dogen, and Hui-Neng take the same view as the existentialists ?
>I think you are mistaken, both in that, and in your opinion re
>"dynamically recursive becoming", whatever that is when it's at home.
>
You think wrongly. My study "Existential Phenomenology and Zen Buddhism" draws the parallels quite clearly.
Where "dynamically recursive becoming" is at home is in a description of self/soma/world/other consciousness which combines the insights of Aron Gurwitsch's, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's, Don Ihde's and Richard M. Zaner's phenomenologies, Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology, contemporary cognitive science (Dennett, Fodor, Pinker, Damasio and others), and the disciplines of semiotics and memetics.
>Chris.
>http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~chrislees/tao.index.html
>
>
>===============================================================
>This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
>Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
>For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
>see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
>
>
Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher
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===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit