work in progress
Well-Known Member
I was hoping to have the time to read through all the posts before commenting....but unfortunately that didn't work out. So, I just want to say here that philosophical idealism...that our mind or thoughts are the only reality, is something I had to reject, and the idealistic thinking in Buddhism and other eastern traditions, is why I can't accept them at any fundamental level.
To be accurate, Buddhism acknowledges that "anatta" or the self is an illusion, but still maintains that the experience of reaching the enlightened state is the only thing that can be considered true reality. I had a back-and-forth on this subject a little while back, and my thinking is that any divine mystical experience has to be processed and interpreted through the limitations of the brain's neuroprocessing capabilities. So to me, that means that the self...or the mind....or even the enlightened self is still a mental experience created by a physical brain, and just as subject to delusion and misperception as the interpretations we have of the world through sensory information.
The modern picture of the mind as it is studied through correlating mental experiences with brain imaging, shows consistently that our sense of ego or self is not much more than a useful illusion continuously generated by the brain, because a unified self that is highly and emotionally concerned with the welfare and the preservation of the complete physical body is going to survive and flourish over any creature that was unable to generate this sense of consciousness.
