[Buddha-l] there he goes again (sam harris)

[Richard Hayes]

On Monday 30 October 2006 12:21, Gad Horowitz wrote:

> how about the experience of the self as similar to an illusion?

How would that work? It seems that one can have an experience of some sort 
that one later figures out was an illusion. But the figuring out is not part 
of the experience itself as much as it is part of what one makes of the 
experience. So what I'd find it more satisfactory to say is that one has an 
experience of some kind and then later says about it that it was an 
experience the content of which was a self, but since one has been taught by 
Buddhists that there is no self, then one reasons that the experience that 
was putatively of a self must have been an illusion. By the time one has 
arrived there, it seems to me that one has strayed quite far from the 
original experience. 

What one makes of any experience is likely to be conditioned by the beliefs 
one already has. If those beliefs are dogmas, then one might come up with a 
conviction that experience has shown that one's dogmas are truths.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes