Dear Patrick, Thanks for your comment. I have read your articles and clearly we are reflecting on the same issues as each other! I would have lots to discuss with you on this. I guess the first point would be to ask whether shifting our sense of identity is actually an experience of anatta (which is Pali not Sanskrit by the way). Many of us have cause to shift how we identify during the course of our lives - divorce, new jobs, sudden poverty and so on - but would you say that this is always and necessarily an experience of anatta even for non-Buddhists who are not aware of that idea? Surely the tendency to want to identify with something is still very much there, and we simply move our identity from one persona to another. We "fill the void" very quickly. And in my understanding anatta is not a void. It is rather the experience of things and ourselves being completely fluid, impossible to pin down, and entirely interdependent with everything else...
My second point is to ask you how exactly robots have helped your meditation practice. That is not really clear for me from the articles I have read. Thanks for engaging.
Sci-Fi fables about robots etc can be very helpful in giving us new perspectives and a way to discuss intangible subjects such as "identity." The TV show "Westworld" imagines a scenario where robots have achieved sentience and no longer follow the "identity scripts" that humans programmed into them. The robot called Maeve "wakes up" from delusion just like the classic tale of the Buddha's awakening -- she becomes aware, and is suddenly free to respond to the world authentically, moment by moment, without needing to fill the void by constructing a new artificial identity.
All of this is metaphorical, but even a robot fable can provide genuine insights about lucid "rigpa." Anyhow, this is probably all too much text for a comments section :-) Nice to meet you!
I haven’t had a chance to view The Beast yet, but robots have definitely helped my meditation practice: https://open.substack.com/pub/brightvoid/p/zen-and-robots?r=9euw0&utm_medium=ios
Dear Patrick, Thanks for your comment. I have read your articles and clearly we are reflecting on the same issues as each other! I would have lots to discuss with you on this. I guess the first point would be to ask whether shifting our sense of identity is actually an experience of anatta (which is Pali not Sanskrit by the way). Many of us have cause to shift how we identify during the course of our lives - divorce, new jobs, sudden poverty and so on - but would you say that this is always and necessarily an experience of anatta even for non-Buddhists who are not aware of that idea? Surely the tendency to want to identify with something is still very much there, and we simply move our identity from one persona to another. We "fill the void" very quickly. And in my understanding anatta is not a void. It is rather the experience of things and ourselves being completely fluid, impossible to pin down, and entirely interdependent with everything else...
My second point is to ask you how exactly robots have helped your meditation practice. That is not really clear for me from the articles I have read. Thanks for engaging.
Hi Dominique!
Sci-Fi fables about robots etc can be very helpful in giving us new perspectives and a way to discuss intangible subjects such as "identity." The TV show "Westworld" imagines a scenario where robots have achieved sentience and no longer follow the "identity scripts" that humans programmed into them. The robot called Maeve "wakes up" from delusion just like the classic tale of the Buddha's awakening -- she becomes aware, and is suddenly free to respond to the world authentically, moment by moment, without needing to fill the void by constructing a new artificial identity.
All of this is metaphorical, but even a robot fable can provide genuine insights about lucid "rigpa." Anyhow, this is probably all too much text for a comments section :-) Nice to meet you!
Thank you Dominique. The scientific understanding of enlightenement is such an important topic. Please continue to explore!