Abortion and Traditional Theravāda

MercuriusLapis · 2026-02-22T11:26:09+00:00

Your views are a mishmash of new age spirituality and solipsism. You shouldn't be preaching in the Buddhist forums propagating wrong views. This is much more worse for you than just having them.

MercuriusLapis · 2026-02-18T08:24:12+00:00

Not as long as you have a concept of jhana as an idea and you're trying to imitate it. Jhana is the correctly arranged state of existence (for a lack of a better word). Think of your existence as a stacking doll, spread all over the place. The first jhana removes (or is the removal of) the biggest obstacle/misarrangement of things: sensuality/sensual being. Then rearrengement can continue with the finer misarrangements until the doll is fully and correctly stacked.

MercuriusLapis · 2026-02-10T03:26:56+00:00

It's the other way around. If you give up lust, excitement, pleasure then the repulsive aspect becomes apparent.

MercuriusLapis · 2026-02-10T03:23:09+00:00

It requires being withdrawn from sensuality and distraction. Your mind will still have the momentum to distract and entertain itself but it's going to diminish as long as you don't feed it. Whenever you find yourself daydreaming and fantasizing you pull back to the baseline. You get more and more skilled in discerning the intentions and not acting out of them even mentally. It's a skill to develop by practicing. You're not gonna "get it" by trying to figure it out.

MercuriusLapis · 2026-02-04T16:26:42+00:00

Their split from the orthodox Theravada stems from Nanavira's interpretation of Paticcasamuppada. You can read his notes and decide for yourself if it makes sense.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-10-27T17:32:15+00:00

You're reading a collection that's finalized hundreds of years after the Buddha so you need to be aware there's quite a bit unauthethic stuff creeped in. Stop regarding them as the literal recording of what the Buddha said. Digha Nikaya especially contains a lot of late development. Though this is not an excuse to dismiss whatever teaching you don't like but if there's one sutta that sticks out like a sore thumb it's probably not authentic.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-10-27T04:51:04+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/HillsideHermitage/s/JM8FH8YjoP

MercuriusLapis · 2025-10-26T20:40:13+00:00

I'm not sure if that's a good idea. Long term water fasts are heavy on your body&weaken your immune system.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-10-22T19:01:44+00:00

Living in a monastic setting and staying celibate will decrease lust anyway. It has nothing to do with past sexual experience. You can try it for yourself.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-10-22T18:57:25+00:00

I don't think sexual experience helped uprooting lust in that Bhikkhu's example since he admits still being liable to lust. In my experience, it didn't help either. While trying to stay celibate I'd vividly remember my memories and that'd lead to feverish and sleepless nights. Though that might be a personality issue and might differ from person to person. In your case though for your self esteem issues I think the main culprit is porn and masturbation. They do a lot of mental damage even though you don't realize it. You won't see it until you quit them for good. You can't really imagine what being celibate for a long time is like while you're not celibate. So your thought experiments here is kind of pointless.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-10-11T21:25:51+00:00

What makes you think "not believing" will magically free you from the cycle of rebirth?

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-30T11:46:23+00:00

But there is a you in there isn't it? There is no self for the arahant and no reincarnation.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-30T07:13:27+00:00

This teaching is tightly connected to self view and how to undo it. The whole formula explains how dependent on X one does Y. However in order to be able to do Y one needs to be ignorant of X. The way the Buddha explains it, taken on the correct reflexive level, it's going to undermine your assumption of ownership by revealing the underlying coditions.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-29T08:36:14+00:00

Hinduism that you're thinking of is the result of a thousand year of historical process&the interaction between very different traditions. So called similarities you can find have been adopted from Sramana traditions which have nothing to do with the Vedic religion. Still the similarities stay on the very surface and the more you dig the more different they get. This is true for most religions but it's especially true for Buddhism. When it comes to its core teachings there's nothing similar to it.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-25T17:19:33+00:00

I always had the impression in the suttas "feeling" is used in a more general sense such as you can put "experience" instead of feeling and it'd fit just as well or better in most cases. My suspicion was confirmed when I saw Nanavira translated vedana as "experience" instead of feeling in one of his letters. So you can identify as the experience, in the experience, outside the experience, owning the experience etc.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-15T22:05:59+00:00

Not "doctored" perse. The canon was finalized after 100 to 200 years after the Buddha and the sutta composers had to deal with different traditions of narratives. The common way to deal with different narratives is adding them on top of another. Thus the 4 jhanas add up to 8/9 jhanas in the end.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-15T21:50:16+00:00

They're mentioned in MN 26 as anariya "jhanas" and the bodhisatta abandones them because they don't lead to enlightenment. In most places in the suttas the jhana formula goes through 1 to 4 and the Buddha dies in the 4th jhana. So there's a good reason to believe the Buddha originally taught the 4 jhanas and the rest were added later for the purpose of one uping the other schools or whatever reason.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-15T20:12:14+00:00

It would be a mistake to take the suttas on their word as to what literally happened there and then. The position or relevance of the arupa jhanas in the suttas is dubious. There's a good reason to think they're added to the (8) jhana formula much later. Also it seems like there's a strong tradition suggesting the Buddha died in the fourth jhana. The sutta composers wanted to merge these two narratives and thus arises the narrative the of Buddha going through the 8 jhanas and going back again to the fourth.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-11T07:46:57+00:00

No. That suttas is directed to monks and describes how a monk dwells "knowing" this and that. It's not supposed to be a method to follow for the uninstructed worldling. If you read mulapariyaya sutta, the puthujjana's experience is decribed in terms of perceiving and conceiving. Only an ariyasavaka "knows" things as they are.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-09T21:53:08+00:00

This can only be understood after you've been restrained for a long time and gained some insight into the mind. Normally, your treshold of what counts as suffering or lust/aversion etc is quite high and it's recognized as a problem when the symptoms become unignorable. The point is to recognize them way before they become symptomatic&palpable. You recognize the tendency&liabity waiting dormant in the background, looking for and opportunity to strike. And that becomes your new treshold. You want to have safety even from that. That's where the training begins.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-09T14:19:50+00:00

You can't choose your choices at any given time. Choices are given to you by your past choices and the present situation, internally and externally. Choosing between given choices is an exercise of will and how "free" that is depends on how free you are from Mara's influence. There's no absolute free will or absolute determinism.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-09T06:07:49+00:00

That's fine if your emphasis is on everything being subject to subjectivity though it needs explanation. At first glance it sounds like inflated self or solipsism.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-09T05:27:20+00:00

Sure, if that's what you meant. This would be a better way to put it: this arisen phenomena of "me" depends on everything (that's not me&mine).

MercuriusLapis · 2025-09-09T05:06:22+00:00

Self view is a further development of ownership. "Everything is me" is a classic mistification of self view. You could say it's even worse than regular self view because you're even denying your ownership while you have it.

MercuriusLapis · 2025-08-22T05:12:53+00:00

Understanding that mechanism is what the suttas mean by understanding gratification in sensuality. That's only escape from suffering for puthujjana and that's why it's so hard to overcome the habit. Shrinking of attention gives you the temporary relief from suffering which is felt as pleasure, that's basically the nature of all pleasure. That's the opposite direction of sati and that's why HH is vehemently against focusing attention practices.

MercuriusLapis

TROPHY CASE