[Buddha-l] What is direct experience?

[lemmett at talk21.com]

> it gives meaning to my life and is not causing
> me suffering
> because it is attached to things, it causes suffering
> because I am supposed
> to disregard it as something valuable, like 'I'm supposed
> not to feel bad,
> because it's just my Me and my I is not worth it.' What
> life experience can
> one gain if suffering is regarded as illusory and a sign of
> weakness? The
> taboo on the self as a rhetorical device is for me a deal
> breaker in
> Buddhism, but I understand that as an instrument to inner
> quiet is serves
> well. If we consider the Self as a consistent and
> integrated whole of tested
> perceptions and presumptions (a paradigm of selfperceived
> wisdom), than I
> see nothing wrong in it and laying a taboo on such a self
> resembles an
> obsessive denial of trusting one's own life experiences as
> embodied in a
> personality.
> 
> Stefan

Hello again,

I probably think of the disregard for me and mine not as some Kantian moral principle but more as a practical code that helps. Neither have I gone any way to denying that there is a self as in conventional knowledge about the world; though it seems somewhat strange to call all that "me".

But now I don't know what you mean by existential de-selfing, because you seem in your last email to be just denying the self certain ontological states not a role in existential projects.

I really hope that my contributions to this thread and others does not devalue the academic credibility of Buddha_L but those are indeed my opinions. Thanks,

Luke