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From: rpw3@fortune.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Re: Thou Art God (but who is that?) - (nf)
Message-ID: <2026@fortune.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Dec-83 11:05:33 EST
Article-I.D.: fortune.2026
Posted: Fri Dec 16 11:05:33 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 19-Dec-83 00:18:32 EST
Sender: notes@fortune.UUCP
Organization: Fortune Systems, Redwood City, CA
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#R:unc:-637500:fortune:21900003:000:1523
fortune!rpw3    Dec 16 02:44:00 1983

Tim Maroney says (with LOTS of hacked editing):

	"I am sorry... I haven't been in my best mood lately, for a
	number of reasons...  It is particularly frustrating...
	to see someone espouse this sort of unashamed egotism and
	wish-fulfillment as the highest goals of religion...  when in
	fact the goal is a willed self-transformation into a being
	which is superior due not to its "powers", but because of its
	beauty -- because of what it is, not what it can do.

This is sort of why I never could cut the traditional "Western" religions.
They never had any way to deal with WHY one felt "sorry", or "frustrated",
and past a certain point one wasn't even allowed to comment on the problem.

Buddhist psychology (called "abhidharma") for me presents a much better
working model of exactly how we manage to continually fall into these
traps, and how to avoid them. The main trap is, in fact, thinking that
there is something/somewhere else to be. If we are to be able to work
with our state of mind, then our current state of mind must already be
workable, otherwise we could never escape the "while(1)can't;" that so
often cripples our typical "self-help" schemes (the "Woody Allen" loop).
Whatever path we choose must start with where we are. Whenever we discover
we're fooling ourselves again, we have to drop it. That is the essence of
meditation.

Rob Warnock

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