Subject: Buddhism and Anatman (was Oath of the Abyss)
From: nagasiva@luckymojo.com (nigris (333))
Orig-To: thelema93-l now @egroups.com

50000119 IVom

333:
> > reincarnation is fallacious. there is nothing to put
> > into the meat again. fantasies pacify our existential
> > angst so that the Herd will not be overly upset.
> > identification of the locus of present will with previous 
> > will is what is called 'karma' and leads to the very
> > angst that fantasies such as reincarnation are meant
> > to address (albeit inconclusively). 
 
a correspondent wrote:
> ...please supply more information on your
> concept against Reincarnation, and Anatman.

scientific experimentation does not yield evidence supporting
anything nonphysical which departs upon death or arrives upon
or previous to birth. most cases of 'past lives' claimed are 
easily explained as wish-making fantasizing and, based on
their content, are often dismissed by virtue of anachronism
or numerological contrivance (e.g. why so many reincarnations 
of famous people?).

the Logos ANATTA or anatman, is that of 'no soul' or 'no self'.
over time this has been interpreted in a variety of ways, such
that today we have Buddhists claiming all manner of metaphysic
from qualified reincarnation to that bordering on nihilism.

my understanding of the term is that a 'person' is very much
like a water wave, whose content changes as time wears on,
whose internal experience arises, disintegrates and disappears
in cyclic fashion, and whose external identification may lead
to what is called 'rebirth' or 'reincarnation'. thus social
tendencies (which I'd associate with 'karma') create the 
illusion of a continuity of personal being, when really there
is no separate 'self' to be found, no 'own being' or 'I' that
can be isolated under any rigorous meditative examination.
the case is the same whether one is speaking of some kind of
'soul' or 'atman' as one is speaking of an 'I'.

how this applies to Thelema is a very interesting issue.
if there is no Thelemite, then what is a 'true will'?
if the "individual" is a shifting field of emanating and
disintegrating motivations, then why should there be any
continuity of 'willforce' at all? is will, like ego,
another figment of imagination subject to dispelling in
the experience of the attention-bearing mystic?
 
> > the Magus Gautama destroyed the fallacy of the continuous 
> > "self" so called with the utterance of his Logos "anatman".

>    Also...is the "Magus Guatama" reffering to the
> Illustrius Buddha, or another person?

Gautama Buddha, the mythohistorical figure (akin to Jesus
Christ in the descriptive mythologizing surrounding the man),
is said by Crowley to have uttered the Logos "ANATTA". he is
sometimes also called things like 'Sakyamuni Buddha' or
'Tathagata', but these are more descriptions or offices ('Muni 
of the Sakya clan', 'One Who Has Gone By', respectively) than 
names per se.

blessed beast!

nigris (333)