Pill Pod 205 - Pills Discovers Buddhism
Added 2025-04-25 20:22:59 +0000 UTCAfter a long hiatus, Pills returns to the main show with some new musings over The Last Samurai, Buddhism and the phenomenology of religion. The Kyoto School and Nagarjuna were mentioned in the episode, but we didn't get into much depth this time 'round.
Comments
Lmao @ western buddhist revisionism; buddhism has plenty of spiritual and """superstitious""" beliefs that the notion that it's a religion without a god is ignorant
Tabrys
2025-06-23 16:57:39 +0000 UTCFor me Evangelicalism is scarier than Catholicism. They learned a lot from the Catholic church tho. Buddhism is ‘lite,’ of all the religions, on “belief. “ And this is a good quality. Durkheim in beginning of ‘religious forms book’ is really good on Buddhism. He quotes scholars saying, ‘Buddhism is a religion without God.’ A Philosophy/religion/ practice. Practice is the ritual element that is always linked to the refreshment of the soul, of life of the body… as Durkheim points out… this effect is originally real in the sense that it comes from collective ritual and produces a force or permits the experience of a force greater than the self, the collective. Thus originally material and not an illusion, this in place of Freud’s oceanic which I do think Freud says is an illusion as far as he knows. Ritual/rites r Inspiring, renewal … what the collective and the individuals need from the sacred in order to have sense of well being living/working in the profane. In any case Buddhism is a way to be in the paradox of why there is something rather than nothing, bc this something is an expression of nothing, as Pills has pointed out at length elsewhere. Buddhism’s letting go … being with the no-thing. The use value of meditation.
Zachary Manenti
2025-05-22 00:16:54 +0000 UTC“ What I will call the key monotheist idea is this: the mutual exclusivity, at the ultimate level, of Being and Non-being, of goodness and badness, of purpose and purposelessness. Atheism is the nonadoption of these mutual exclusivities. Atheistic mysticism is the religious ecstasy of this vision.” From “Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond” Brook Ziporyn 2024. Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy and Comparative Thought in the Divinity School at University of Chicago. Orientalism much 😂 Long before Nagarjuna there was a Daoist philosopher called Zhuangzi. Ziporyn is definitely a fan of Zhuangzi. The following gives a taste of the relationship between their philosophies: https://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-MISC/101801.htm ‘Don’t worry I’m still a materialist’.. Carlo Rovelli “ Helgoland. Making sense of the Quantum Revolution” where Nagarjuna gets trotted out in support of Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) interpretation. Essentially taking Niels Bohr’s Complementarity Theorem (when we measure a particles momentum its position is meaningless (rather than just uncertain) and vice versa) and applying it to the entire universe. There is no essence at the centre of matter-things only exist is their relations. And stirring the whole Niels Bohr thing up with Post-structuralism..Karen Barad “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and Entanglement of Matter and Meaning” So for this dish pig, the Chinese philosophy of the Dao, the anti Platonist Niels Bohr interpretation of QM and his followers, combined with a Poststructuralist atheism leads to a rejection of both metaphysics and constructivism replaced by a Real which is both a transcendental real (Thomas Nail) and a plane of immanence because there is no outside to see which it is. Again: “Atheistic mysticism is the religious ecstasy of this vision”
Swamp Wallaby
2025-05-13 10:11:21 +0000 UTCI think you guys might be interested looking into the works of Francisco Varela. Here you can connect Chile's Cybersyn, Heidegger, Systems Theory and Buddhism. As inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgZMPcrRmio
Dalia
2025-05-09 13:20:15 +0000 UTCAs I had advised you, you are working on poetry. Maybe you started independently. I realized several months ago that no amount of words could describe my room. Then how the heck am I going to describe the world and the underlying metaphysics using philosophy(This is my spiritual event like yours). For several months, I have been writing some kind of poetry, to escape this pain of definition and over-determination I encounter in my field, sciences. Poetry (in other words sophistry) is definitely concise, but its most seductive quality is its musical content and fluid nature. It is liberating in a sense, and puts me back to the world, humble and fresh. "Not a single thought comes close to the experience of swimming like fish, skiing on an icy terrain, or sing and blegh like a GOAT." Thus my anti-philosophy philosophy began. I am as clueless as I began listening to your podcast, except now, I know the fact.
TheUltimateBird
2025-04-28 17:32:02 +0000 UTCon second thought, maybe not necessarily 'democracy' just yet, because myths are handed down from the past and not yet reinvented with the advent of 'democracy'. that said, it's interesting to trace athenian democracy relative to their own myths, since the democracy came from oligarchy, of course it would appear to them as radical democracy (before/beyond myth) but to us, looking back, as oligarchic democracy (with slavery™). following this we could also track the shifts produced by syncretism between ancient egyptians, romans, and greeks! fascinating imo
vigasz
2025-04-28 00:37:49 +0000 UTC31:30 I've been thinking about this a lot recently in terms of group identifications. if you know Freud's myth of the primal horde/father then you know there is a foundational transgression which limits (and thereby enables) positionality, retroactively revealing a 'truth' for the subject if psychically internalised (knowledge). i want to propose that these foundational transgressions are called 'sacred crimes' and can be redeployed towards an analysis of 'historical' traces in groups (or paradigmatic grouping of groups, i.e. society). if anyone has a 'real name' for this please let me know. e.g.: murder of the primal father -> remorse, guilt, law. theft of surplus value -> profit-motive, redistribution, class struggle. etc. in this view, ancient greek paradigm of interpretatio graeca is not so dissimilar to ours (multiple different group identifications relativised and hierarchised, some truths matter more than others, other truths not considered knowledge). so a paradigm shift (like an anti-racist stance) will naturally also involve new sources of truth and knowledge production and otherwise rearrange relations between groups. for example, the myth of Zeus and Cronus might encode a historical shift from the domination by a particular group (or none!) to a paradigm dominated by a coalition of elite groups (mythification of tension between anarchy/absolutism, oligarchy, and democracy)
vigasz
2025-04-28 00:16:59 +0000 UTC
