Walker wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 2:20 pm
- Indeed he should give an answer, given his strident emotions that are ruling his thoughts, much like a King rules.
Actually the unfelt emotions in DS and probably you also are ruling your thoughts. It's the people who judge emotions the most who are driven by them, because they are not integrated.
And really, you can't come up with some other options than
God is a sadist
or
Everyone who is raped deserves it
?
- Dattaswami, the logic of what you present has yet to be refuted here. Thus, your reasoning is irrefutable. Perhaps better minds can refute it elsewhere, at some other dance.
I pointed out the implications of his 'logic' here.
viewtopic.php?p=614472#p614472
and elsewhere.
Instead of showing where this is wrong, suddenly he wants to know what MY position on the suffering of innocents is. A typical evasive maneuver. And it is a basic flaw in reasoning to think this would somehow let him off. That post was mostly mocking. There are other posts where I point out the obvious fact that he is telling victims this while also saying one should not.
*
- Iwannaplayto’s presentation is a presentation of emotional feelings, rather than rationality. He imagines how people will feel based on what he feels, and bases everything on that.
What did I imagine people would feel that you think is not the case?
- His sense of outrage does not allow for intellectual detachment. For instance, objectively speaking, abortion causes at least as much harm to the body as words, since abortion kills.
Right, but in DS's system any harm that happens is deserved harm. That would include any harm the mother does to herself by getting the abortion. Or the harm having the kid does to her body. That would also be deserved. All harm would be deserved. There would be no way for any harm to not be deserved. I won't even bring up the statistics around which causes more harm to the mother's body, cause then you'll go off on some tangent as if this was about abortion.
It's you who can't think logically. But futher, notice that you only dealt with the abortion issue. IOW you found what you think is a good objection to that one, but failed to respond when it had to do with murder or any other violence or harm.
Yes, emotions are present when I read about universal victim blaming. But the signs of your denied emotions and DS's are all over how evasive and distracting you both are. It's fine that you guys have emotions. You both likely think, and it may be true for you, that one has to choose between emotions and reason. And for this and other reasons you judge emotions and this makes it harder for you to integrate. Well, guess what's going on behind the scenes. I mean DS cannot address my posts at all in some of his responses. He'll bring up issues I never raised as if they are relevant.
And if you have some clever defense of the guru, this is so much less important that actually noticing what is happening. Clever denial is a big part of the problem. What's so scary about for you this guru having some serious flaws in both his conception of Karma and ability to notice his assumptions?
Why does that scare you so much, W?
- Dattaswami, here is the gist of the opposing view to karma, Western style, and why. I would like to stress that these statements are objective assessments … not personal proclamations of belief. They are made in the spirit of explaining the gist of why karma causes upset in the West. For those who think everything someone writes is personal belief rather than an assessment, we make the font large, and by so doing illustrate the purpose of variation and caps in The Realm of Font ...
This does not cover my objections.
An Assessment of Modern Western Thought, as it pertains to this thread.
- People in the West like to think they are strong individualists, that they determine everything they are, with their choices. This is interesting because so many do the same thing without questioning what it is that they do, do … such as driving to the yoga class which for some reason must be group activity in the West, rather than just walking to the market and enjoying that healthy experience.
LOL; you are saying this in defense of someone who is simply repeating the same tired cliches of HInduism that have been around for a long time. He cannot think for himself, or he might not think so binarily about the two options mentioned above. Neither of you has given a moment of thought to it.
- Such Individualists who all drive to the yoga class are born pure, unaffected by the corrupt humans. When they get older and realize their individuality, realize how individuals are supposed to cope with the problem of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune … which is all the unfairness of the world … they realize that the mean old world, and the mean old God that created it, is why they suffer. Slings and arrows are seen as problems, rather than the experience of Life.
Strawman based on your binary thinking. I don't think God is mean, though I do think God is old.
- Therefore, the thinking goes that individuals must return to, “The Garden.” The Garden refers to the pure state, before consciousness was corrupted by the imperfections of the world. In this line of thinking, if humans can make the world uncorrupted then humans themselves will be purified, not to mention all the innocent creatures that are eating each other raw and uncooked, just to survive.
Nope, a false generalization. I am sure some people think this way, but neither of you is capable of not generalizing or noticing the contradictions in DS thought. I mean, the guy said you should never tell victims that their rape, say, is punishment sent for past sins. He can't even manage to admit that he is telling people here and elsewhere at his ashram and online the same old, cliche bs, who are victims or have been victims. He contradicts himself, but cannot admit it.
But you revere him as swimming in a river of knowledge. For you there must be no flaws in this man. I couldn't possibly have been pointing out something he is confused about.
- Of course, since The Individual is born innocent, pure, and uninfluenced by anything in the world until born and the elements touch The Individual (because the individual is the body), and because The Individual is not an Individual until it leaves the birth canal of the mother, then any notions otherwise are not to be tolerated. No sir, not at all.
I do not believe tabula rasa ideas about humans. I have argued against them. I think people can be born with all sorts of unpleasant traits. I believe that people can have done bad things in past lives. You are making false assumptions. However, I don't believe that all victims deserve their abuse. That it is necessarily aGod approved punishment for past sins. Neither of you can really look at individuals and discern. You have an idea in your heads and cannot distinguish between individuals. You see your ideas, like all fanatics.
It must be fair and just...and you do not feel your fear about what it might mean if it was not always fair and just.
- Notions otherwise will cause the intellectual noggin to explode, and the Individual’s feelings will take over and run the thoughts, and run the world with emotion.
Kissing the gurus ass and defending what you think must be the truth is driven by emotion. If you really believed this guru was what he thinks he is, you wouldn't feel the need to come and post like this. And you think he hasn't dealt with Westerners? Come on. How did you get so uninformed and naive? Westerners have been heading towards him and his predessesor for decades. If you truly thought he was swimming in a river of knowledge you'd trust him to know about Westerners and be able to understand them. But you think he needs to hear your limited theories about Westerners. Or you just want to impress Daddy.
- This is why folks in the West have such difficulty with the Christian concept of Original Sin.
Now you really got it assbackwards. It's the East that doesn't have that concept - except where, say, Christianity made inroads. Yes, in the East you can have the idea that people have committed sins in previous incarnations and are born with that baggage, but that is NOT original sin. Google that and see if your hallucinations are anything but that. You know, see if your hallucinations fit either Hinduism or Buddhism or Taoism. And by the way, in the East you can also not have 'sin' with the heavy Western sense in it. I was actually a bit surprised how much DS focuses on Sin and Punishment. He might need to go to some of the other gurus who tend to see it more as patterns of confusion and habit that need to be dissolved by certain unpleasant experiences and not at all as punishment. It's an even more unpleasant version of Karma than many of his peers have, victim blamers all.
These facile judgments of me and others who are critical of DS and his beliefs might work on people who have little experience with these things, but from what you write and say, I would guess you have never been to the East and have mostly your own ad hoc notions of Hinduism and other systems Eastern. I doubt you have much direct experience of Eastern people, Eastern religions in practice in the East, gurus and their ilk. A typical bricolage-based Westerner, dabbling and picking and choosing, with a mish mash of pseudo-Eastern ideas, with little integration, not even noticing which Eastern religion the ideas come from and unable to separate them out from Western misunderstandings of Eastern ideas.
Also, I notice that you don't deal with any logical errors I have supposedly made in my emotionally driven posts, but just label my thinking emotional. IOW facile crap.
See if you have the courage to actually feel into why you felt the need to intercede. On face value, you're explaining, and poorly with the fallacy of generalization tossed, to DS about Westerners, lol. But what's really going on? Hm.
Go ahead, post some lazily thought out rebuttal, but on your own time, in private, for integrity's sake, see if you can what is really going on for you when you jump in here.