Re: (Excessive?) Complexity

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 10/02/2025 07:50, rbowman wrote:

That was a problem when I was reading Buddhism. Those people love
lists.Four Aryan Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, the Twelve Links of
Dependent Origination, and on and on.
 

Buddhists are very smart people.
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They probably invented the phrase 'bullshit baffles brains'
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While the unenlightened are busy memorising the lists, the enlightened ones sit in the sun happy and content with their minds completely empty....not pestered by the ones busy memorising the lists...
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I think Schopenhauer had list envy when he wrote 'On the Fourfold Root of
the Principle of Sufficient Reason'.

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I always thought that was a bit of a circular argument, things exist because they need to exist to create the world in which they exist...
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Taoism is much simpler. What is the Tao.  The Tao is not anything . It just *is*.
The moment you introduce causality as a necessity, you end up with a worldview that needs a Prime Cause.
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The secret is not to introduce universal  causality as a necessity in the first place.
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People are too fixated on finding the One True Viewpoint rather than accepting that all viewpoints are arbitrary, none are ultimately rue and some are more useful than others.
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Buddhists understand that there are no true viewpoints and if you let go of all of them the world can be whatever you want it to be, subjectively. It just is, that's all. And it is way beyond what you make of it.
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So relax. You have unravelled the mystery as far as you can, and it was all in your mind mostly. The closest you get to the truth is what you experience when your thinking mind is gone. Stopped.

Agnosticism is very veautiful. There is no need for forced explanations beyond a certain point. The sooner one accepts that, the sooner one frees oneself from pointless metaphysical speculation.
Since I was reading some Schopenhauer this weekend, he does have a point though, that there is a strong built in need in the human race for pointless metaphysical speculation, that doesn't lead anywhere. He had a lot of interesting things to say about religion.