From: jchristian@desire.wright.edu
Newsgroups: rec.martial-arts
Subject: Re: guts and spirits
Date: 6 Jan 93 21:52:48 EST
Organization:  Wright State University 

 [stuff about Plato and Nietzsche]

> What does either of them know?  Who cares what either thinks? Each of us in
> individual and must face our own death.  No one can provide insight into it
> for anyone else.  One must examine these issues personally, not with
> intellectual pursuit (book knowledge).

Would it be wrong to assume that you're reading this board because you have an
interest in what other people think?  And are you suggesting that we shouldn't
bother reading books because they're essentially useless?

  [stuff about mind/body/spirit]
 
> But if I accept the yogic version of soul (which I do), the soul is like the
> essence of your awareness.  It does not need the body at all.  This is a
> crucial distinction to understand.  Hindu scriptures say, "the soul changes
> bodies like the body changes clothes..."

Careful.  Quoting from a book like that will make it sound like an intellectual
pursuit on your part, and you wouldn't want that.

Why doesn't the soul need a body?  The Hindu aspiration to achieve atman exists
in part because we have a mortal form.  Is there a reason why the soul inhabits
the body?  Or is it just an accident to be ignored?
 
> I'd never trust an egghead German to tell me anything about a soul anyway.  I
> say this with some authority ( .50 percent German here).  What was Nietzche's
> (any relation to "toastchees?") practice which gave him such insight into
> being?  At least a yogi can tell you "try this for several years and you will
> come to know your soul..."  All a philosopher can do is talk and drink
> cappuccino.  Who're you going to trust?  Personally, I think Nietzche is a
> pompous know-it-all.  No one ever seems to have asked him 1) who the hell are
> you?, and 2) how the hell do you know?  Anyway I suspect this wouldn't have
> shut him up.

Fortunately for most of us, we can go through life expressing our opinions
without people asking us who the hell we are and how the hell do we know.  And
I think you're being broad in your generalizations.  Do you have the same
criticisms of Einstein's philosophies of being and reality, while we're
discussing egghead Germans?
 
> Why is everyone so hung up on "agreement."  Who cares about anyone's
> "agreement."  What I love about the east is ***PRACTICE***.  There is no
> equivalent to the eastern practices of yoga or qigong*.  All the west has ever
> been able to do is blab.  As though if you say it loud enough, or well enough,
> it's true.  Birth is true, life is true, death is true--talk is cheap.

Wow.  You've got a serious case of anti-West paranoia going for you.  I'll be
the first to agree that Westerners have their hangups and that talking a lot is
one of them, but you're sadly mistaken if you don't think a similar spirit of
debate and speculation doesn't happen in the East.  If you can spare a moment
of anti-intellectualism and pick up a few books, you'll find quite a number of
interesting intellectual arguments that have been generated from Eastern minds.

Jeff
Newsgroups: rec.martial-arts