About NDE there is a whole system of yogic practice which allows seasoned users to access NDE states at will. Also they learn to control the process of
actual dying to the point of going through extended process of passing away which involves being in meditation for a couple of days and manifesting only
some of the medical markers of death but not all that would be required to confirm death. These techniques are developed in several religious traditions but
their most advanced form is present in Bon and Tibetan Buddhism. The methodology is called bardo yoga and this dying process is called thukdam.
Thukdam is considered an average achievement in the circles of experts on bardo yoga and there are more advanced feats. However tukdam is best
documented, happens fairly regularly in these circles and is currently undergoing research. The attempts to study it in a scientific fashion are relatively
fresh and ongoing but this bardo yoga methodology is part of a larger body of so called dzogrim psychosomatic practises which are said to give their
practitioners precise control over many physiological functions of the body. Some of the easier techniques (like tummo yoga which is often used as a support
for bardo yoga) have been already researched well and a team by prof Herbert Benson from Harvards has confirmed their effectiveness. Interestingly enough
these methodologies directly draw from observations made about human cognition by Nagarjuna.
Many findings by bardo yoga practitioners predate similar discoveries made in the West that are based on studying the instances of clinical death. By predate
I mean at least 900 years.
Addressing NDE phenomena without precise knowledge of the aforementioned subjects is a seriously limited attempt at best.
The irony is that after reading your website it seems that your work has many similarities to Nagarjuna's work. Though the latter seems more refined, nuanced and balanced in how it approaches the question of spirituality. To name the diffence Id say that while your work is named "anti-spirituality" his would be a kind of "a-spirituality".
Then, looking there ... I just don't see the difference with Buddhism (and I see no similarity at all with my own work, so that I wonder
where the heck he claims to have found any such similarity). So much all the same crap. Of course any religion has its sects with small differences, and
people there can be so much indoctrinated into giving extreme, intolerant importance to the microscopic details of their specific doctrines, so that anyone
with a very specific belief can proclaim that it has absolutely nothing to do with any other religion or spirituality, just because... there is no other religion or
spirituality which is exactly the same as his.
So, really, WTF is this madness of pushing forward this very specific name of doctrine which I never heard of before, priding it for being altogether the
best friend and the best enemy of Buddhism (regardless the contradiction) ? What the heck is this way of blindly assuming that it must surely the best way
of disagreeing with Buddhism, so that whenever someone comes up with a good reason to disagree with Buddhism then to be worth anything it must surely
be a less good version of the same ?
I dismiss it all as worthless, because, just like Buddhism, it is all about spending one's life talking about nothing. Being obsessed about nothing, believing
that all is nothing, that nothing is all what exists, that we should be obsessed about nothing, dedicate our life to doing nothing, thinking nothing, thinking about
nothing, wondering what is nothing, and therefore also incidentally, entering vain dispute about nothing and how to exactly understand nothing, against anyone
who happens to understand nothing a bit differently. Now why the heck should I care how much different schools have their slightly different understanding of
nothing ? So then I did take a couple of hours to look through these articles and their lists of topics, and found there... nothing interesting. By this I don't mean
that I found any interest in their nothing, but rather that I found nothing there, and no interest there either. The only "interest" I found is that I found there the tetralemma so laughable. What a ridiculous way of messing with basic logic. As if any random way of putting
together words to form a sentence that looks well-formed by the rules of our miserable usual grammar would suffice to form a meaningful proposition. As
commented elsewhere about "arguments by absurdity", to playfully break the rules of basic logic is not a valid way
of transcending them. Since I studied mathematical logic at a high level, how could I still look up to a philosophy putting forward such a kindergarten-level
game of pseudo-logic as if it was a great reference work ? Haha. He proudly puts it forward : "If I had any position, I thereby would be at fault. Since I have no position, I am not at fault at all.
If there were anything to be observed through direct perception and the other instances [of valid cognition], it would be something to be established or rejected.
However, since no such thing exists, I cannot be criticized". So, yes, he is talking about nothing, and telling nothing about it. That is, he is just wasting everybody's time
speaking for nothing. There is a more modern phrase to qualify this : it is not even wrong. And that precisely means
that such a doctrine is just worth putting to the flames and forgetting it altogether.
It is like, imagine you are a caricaturist, so you draw some comics, then someone comes to notice that you make some pictures and comes up to say "hey, did you ever
check that you may be reinventing the wheel as there is a super great old arts school founded by a great painting Master with his great ideas how to paint. Check this." So
then you see some details, that he had the super originality of offering a middle way with respect to the following tetralemma
Now, I remember that some of the "greatest" of these Spiritual Masters (and I don't care from which exact school they are) are consistent enough with their own teachings, to go as far as to also eat nothing - at least according to some sayings. Actually I do think both deserve to go together, because, how could one decently let one's life keep depending on something which on the other hand one dismissed from topics of interest ? Now assuming this to have been actually achieved (and I do not care whether this is actually the case or not), I am still not impressed. Because, if the goal of eating nothing was to nullify one's impact on the environment (and I cannot see what better goal there could be from a moral viewpoint), then the same goal could be reached much more simply and easily by eating from public trashes. I would already be quite more impressed if they went as far as getting a woman to make a healthy child while eating nothing. Here by "more impressed", what I precisely mean is that I would find it quite more impressive than a typical Guinness record (which I am not usually interested in), though still essentially of the same nature. Because, again, it only brings that kind of impressiveness beyond the basic moral value of eating from public trashes. By the way, for my very poor erudition (sorry) I did not happen to hear of any mention of eating from public trashes from any spiritual doctrine, and I am quite curious to hear any mention of such. I am aware of the obstacle of the fact that spiritual teachings are usually addressed to whole groups of people for them to all practice the same things together at one place, while technical constrainsts only let the possibility of eating from trash for a small minority of the people staying at any single location. Yet I would expect spiritual lifestyles to also develop in other configurations without this obstacle. But I guess that such undertakings could also be blocked by other drawbacks, such as
So, my position against all this is that as long as there is nothing to talk about, there is no point to argue about it either.
Now letting aside the concern of experience, let us come to the concern of truth and knowledge, whatever the topic of this knowledge may be. Where may any knowledge come from to us, and with which reliability ? It may be roughly split into
Moreover, among information sources, I pointed out both cases of Seth and Christian Sundberg. And as not anyone may know them I must point out that they are specially noteworthy cases of information sources, as they are not just any mediators or even NDErs.
While Christian Sundberg does practice meditation and OBEs, he is much more than this, as he is a Pre-Birth Experiencer : he remembers some aspects of his life on
the other side before being born. Now it is much easier, more powerful and reliable as an information source on the other side to just not have forgotten it (well he only remembers
a little bit of it, but...) than starting from scratch (birth amnesia) to painfully try to "discover" stuff by meditation, isn't it ? Probably, no matter how much work someone invests in the
best meditation practices, without having that starting advantage, the range of possible discoveries such practice can bring from the other side won't be able to compete.
As for Seth, his unfair advantage is even greater : he is not even a human, but a former human who finished his series of human incarnations quite a while ago, then went on to explore
some much deeper realities before coming back to tell his testimonies by regularly taking over a woman in trance.
On their side, "discoveries" of meditators are usually roughly summed up to the description of the experience of being a miserable human desperately stuck in the obsessive
attempt of trying to catch miserable hints from these spiritual realms which we precisely came to Earth to not see, while not understanding why not everybody else shouldn't be stuck
in the same desperate obsession.
See, in terms of sources of information from the other side and putting everything into proper perspective, dedicated meditators just can't compete against those 2.
Why try to compete, by the way ? Actually, the quest for truth isn't a competition (even if there are possibilities to take it so as a possible experience among others). Among the
reasons for this, 2 big ones are that
And for what I could quickly saw about Madhyamaka, it appears to be pretty much the same as Buddhism and opposed by the views of Seth, Christian Sundberg and generally the bulk of other NDErs. And no, the possibilities for these to not have considered the specific case of Madhyamaka is of no relevance here, so that them starting to study it would be a waste of time and change absolutely nothing of their conclusions, because they got their knowledge in legitimate and independent ways, which did NOT consist in looking at Buddhism, finding something a little bit incorrect there then deciding to adopt diametrically opposite positions by lack of imagination of how these little defects could be corrected.
And no, in reply to "Addressing NDE phenomena without precise knowledge of the aforementioned subjects is a seriously limited attempt at best", there is no use of any old teaching for addressing NDE phenomena, because NDE are not phenomena in need to be interpreted. Rather, NDE clearly and directly speak for themselves (at least most of them), while human life (and life on Earth in general) is a phenomenon which NDE and related sources of insight can address; and, while many NDE are not very deep, some are much deeper due to circumstances unrelated with any voluntary practice, thus becoming self-sufficient with no special need of complementary insights from the latter (except for those personally interested with such practice of course).
While the idea of investigating ontology would basically in itself look like a good one, it turns out to be not so just by putting it in its proper background. Namely, I would say (in coherence
with the more reliable information sources mentioned above), that the idea of incarnating as a human to investigate ontology could be about as ridiculous as the idea of incarnating as a fish
to try to climb a tree. (Unless of course, the real goal was to make an experience of miserable failure... which, I must admit, may be more or less a good description of a major dimension of the
purposes for so many of us to incarnate here, that is, to experience miserable failure through many kinds of experiences, not only the investigation of ontology).
Indeed, seriously, why come into a world of shadows and undertake a search for the real stuff there ? If only you made the effort of analyzing these shadows very precisely, namely by
the study of theoretical physics, then it may give you chances to discern some hints about how these shadows could be formed and which
kind of real stuff they may reflect. But if you're just going like "these shadows are shadowy" then you're not likely to reach anywhere that way. To just focus and endlessly comment
on the impermanence of what you chose to focus on, is a waste of time. But being ignorant about eternal things does not imply that such things do not exist.
Precisely, a fundamental error here, I guess, is to focus on the example of physical objects as candidate real things, then argue that these things are inessential (a point to which I'd agree) and then extrapolate from there to argue in the emptiness of all things. The error then, is to have focused the analysis on a wrong example. The assumption that physical objects would be the best candidate essential things from which other things would be made, is just an illusion of perspective due to the inappropriate choice of a human incarnation to investigate the issue.
Already, if only instead of incarnating as an average human you chose to incarnate as a mathematician, then you would have an easier time considering the other case of mathematical
objects and understanding these as clear and eternal ones. For example, you cannot destroy the number π (even if you forget its name and the decimal convention to represent numbers,
it will no more be written in the same way, but its core concept and value remains). Once I pointed out this example (mathematical objects) to a supporter of some Buddhist doctrine or similar
(now I could not find this old piece of debate in my mailbox to check details...), he first did not reply, then later explained that the argument made him lose his nerves, a feeling which did not fit
his teachings, and that is why he did not reply as he needed to calm down... so they have their favorite lines of reasoning and are unprepared for other approaches...
One might try to reply that
the number π is not a good example, because it is not in itself an object of attachment. And that is true. Actually, no single mathematical object is worth anything individually, even for pure math,
but their point is the role they take in a given context, that is, a branch of mathematics. Then, one can argue that some branch of mathematics, or even mathematics in general, as a complex
open-ended system, can be
a genuine object of attachment. But then what the heck could it bring to say that all this stuff would be "empty", of... of what, by the way ?
By the way, maybe it is only that I saw too briefly, the doctrine does not seem to mention any specific example of object, either generally, or more specifically objects of attachment, just to
check if we can effectively apply to something their abstract generalities about the non-essentiality of objects, and the supposed erroneous belief in their essentiality by common people
(??? who, how, and who cares ???) and that such supposedly widespread (?) belief of essentiality in those objects, supposedly also objects of attachment, would lead these people to suffering in...
any possible future time when these objects would vanish. So, as an example of object I was personally attached to outside math, which
hopefully more people can understand and relate to, let me pick Mozart's Requiem... so, how proceeds the mistaken belief of its essentiality, and how can the attachement to it lead to suffering ?
The experience in my case is that I was once so fond of that piece of music that I repeatedly listen to it a large number of times, until... I was kind of bored. Yet this exhaustion of taste for it, did not seem to
translate into any kind of mourning. And this piece of music itself cannot die, as, thanks to modern technology (and even before), our ability to get it repeated lasts forever. But if it didn't, that is, this
Requiem could happen to die or get destroyed, then we'd clearly have to sing another Requiem in its honor.
Now, among the fundamental differences between Buddhism and the Seth teachings (I would even say oppositions ; I generally see more oppositions than agreement there), are that, for Seth,
Leaving aside the divergence of answers on ontology, let us come back to the divergence of attitude towards investigation in this field : how wasteful it is to try investigating it as humans.
That is how modern science is born : by the principles of logical positivism and its rejection of metaphysics. Most philosophers failed to understand it,
since they usually fail to understand almost anyting, namely by mistaking it as a candidate ontological dogma, by their craziness of interpreting anything in such ridiculous terms.
Rather, I see it as a pragmatic, socio-empirical move : we observe that all philosophers of previous centuries who tried to investigate ontology got stuck in a proliferation of
candidate view with no objective means to decide which is better ; therefore let us forget it all and reorient our efforts to other, hopefullly more productive topics and methods
of investigation. What the heck would it mean to say that objects or phenomena have or don't have an essence anyway ? Now if you argue that objects and phenomena depend on each other,
then very well, we can make something from this claim, namely, undertake to focus our study on observing and analyzing the structure of their connections ! And an advantage of this
study that needs to be used is that connections are empirically verifiable; and the understanding of the found structures can then give hints on the nature of phenomena.
For example, if the causalities are found to be deterministic then each new event can be said to be a mere puppet of the previous events, while non-deterministic laws let us qualify the new events
as having their own originality.
For example, if it is claimed that following some philosophy or practice leads to happiness, no matter if this happiness
is named "end of suffering" or whatever, then before believing it we need to verify it by some sociological study, with a kind of poll following some people along time, asking them how they feel and
which philosophy and practice they are trying to follow, then years later asking them again how they feel, and see which philosophy or practice was more likely to lead to bester results.
However we need to be very careful to avoid a number of loopholes such as
Now an important point making logical positivism and its non-essentialism differ from being a philosophy or doctrine in the usual sense, and especially from the other kind of non-essentialism of Madhyamaka or Buddhism, is that it only takes a few minutes to explain it all and move on to where it invites us to move on. There is no point to invest more time in the obsession to deny the existence of something one does not believe in. As famously expressed by Neil deGrasse Tyson on a slighly different topic:
Then ontology, which seems to be the main focus of Madhyamaka, is the least of my works, for the reason I explained above, that is, it is mostly vain to try digging into it as humans. Not that I didn't write anything there. I did, and, apart from some notes in texts with different main topics, my main text focusing on this topic is there, and I do not know of any other work by others so clear and correct on the same aspects to the topic (so much for how vain I think most works by others are). Yet I still won't call it a work, because it is only a few pages which took a short time to write. It is just the few aspects of the topic which I see humanly possible to see clear and fully understand. Yet it has no claim to be exhaustive since, as I said, I consider Seth's creation story as deeper. Yet the latter, dealing with other aspects of the topic than those I wrote, will not have any consequence on my work. There is no sense trying to "compete" with him trying to build over it to do anything better on the same topic. He is self-sufficient and it was enough for me to quote him.
Rather, the present page is actually typical of the usual style of my "work" in philosohical matters. And I usually don't care whether anyone generally, and even les "philosophers" specifically, like or not, or find anyhow valuable or not, what I write.
Expanding on comparing the multiplicity of meditation practices to that of sports. Then I could say that my interest in spiritual issues are roughly to meditation practices what watching documentaries about space exploration would be to practicing sports (except that watching documentaries sounds like total passivity, while I'm somehow active but on a completely different level, the intellectual one). So, I just don't think that the practice of high jumps could help me compete with Neil Armstrong in reaching the moon, even though I admit he must have got his own hard physical training. And I won't try to compete in Solar System travel with any space probe either.
Let us finish with a question specifially about the Madhyamaka philosophy : how to explain that it could lead a philosophy student who studied and loves it, to write me messages as completely ridiculous as those I quoted above ?