Right, I think we should accept the world of common human (and animal) experience as the real world, and we should live in an attitude of respect, love and even reverence for that world…the only world we really know.
Of course I hold little hope that such an orientation will become universal or even widespread.
I’d say that if we enjoy metaphysical speculation or find some poetic dimensions in it then it would not be a waste of time.
Taking our ruminations seriously…thinking they could give us definitive answers or certainty could cause time wasting in the sense of leading up a garden path that really goes nowhere.
There are people who are Advaita Vedantists and they seem very much at peace. Their lives and our lives don’t seem to be in step. If I were to guess I’d say you’re a practicing Buddhist.
Well, I have aspired to that, but my middle-class modern urban mindset constantly finds ways of sabotaging it. But, yes, to me the whole rationale for philosophy is philo sophia, love~wisdom, as something to aspire to, even if it often seems hopelessly remote from the mundane realities of life.
There is a current Advaita teacher who has a large youtube presence - Swami Sarvapriyananda, director of the venerable New York Vedanta Society. That Society was established in the 19th Century following the US tour of the estimable Swami Vivekananda, He lectured at the World Parliament of Religions and then toured America by train for some months, wowing crowds everywhere he went, and planting the seeds of modern Vedanta in America. Sarvapriyananda’s talks are worth the listen, he’s a thoroughly modern monastic.
Wisdom has eluded every attempt to gain it. I wouldn’t consider the issue at hand (Atman/anatman) to be important but I’m quite dreading the question, “do we have a self?” Currently, I don’t know how to answer it.
@BestGuessYet any ideas?
How should we live?
People think differently about this question. Yesterday in my feed, a fortune cookie message popped up. Not very uplifting, but definitely worth rumination.
I was expressing my own feeling about taking metaphysical speculations seriously. “Why bother with it” was also an invitation for you to explain what point taking such speculations seriously has for you personally. In other words what do you hope to gain?
Not a matter of gain or loss. One of the points repeated again and again in the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which I’m sure you will know, is to ‘practice without any idea of gain’. That is because the idea of getting or becoming is a fundamentally ego-centred attitude. The Zen practitioner has to put aside ideas of getting and becoming. That is one of the things that’s so difficult about Zen! On the one hand, you’re expected to pursue a very rigorous and often painful method of practicing, but on the other, perish the thought of ‘getting something from it’.
Wayfarer provides an inside account of Buddhism’s core beliefs for which I’m grateful. John is right to ask what may come out of the thread. My interest is largely hinged on the paradox. It’s not a paradox? Not impossible. Perhaps a lack of comprehension, but what is apt to be misunderstood by Descartes’ I am and Buddha’s I am not. I feel perfectly I am, as the thinker of these thoughts followed by the writing of these words. I also completely understand that when I dismantle my I into parts I am not. Am I or am I not? One could say that Descartes and Buddha were on different paths. I don’t see how that’s possible as the path is narrow.
Hi, Scorpion. That question has perplexed me for awhile now. I was thinking about it just yesterday, and I recalled a memory.
I was seven years old and standing in the schoolyard when I suddenly became aware of myself. I saw myself as being myself, watching the scene.
It’s hard to describe, but it was apparently an outstanding event. I have kept that memory and revisited it from time to time.
I think it’s the power we humans have over the other animals. We can view ourselves as an actor in the world, and so we can study that actor and move him around, watching him in the past and imagining him in the future.
So I don’t think of my self as an object so much as a sort of insubstantial narrator, a point of view creature who can look even at himself.
Something in that general direction.
I think.
Maybe.
I appreciate you sharing a personal story. Very moving. I hope you remember more fond moments from your past. However you didn’t guess. 
Well, I would argue that guesses can appear in long stretches of prose, so I might quibble with you about whether I guessed.
If you ask me to guess whether there is or isn’t a self, I can’t honestly do it with a Yes or No. ‘Self’ is an English word, but what does it mean?
So my attention goes to describing the thing at which the word tries to point, for me.
I see the self as a construction of the mind, the guy our minds make to face the world. In the case of humans, we are able to examine that guy just as we examine other items we encounter. The narrator can examine the narrator.
Nowadays, we can even examine words. Like “justice”, for example. We can sit and muse upon what justice actually is.
Of course, we have to use other words to examine that one.
So it’s complicated.
Ok.So you make hidden guesses. Good to know. Why though? 
Some things can be complicated but what I ask is not.
You don’t need to answer if you’re disinclined to do so. Sorry if you were pulled away from more important matters. 
Well, it doesn’t seem so to me. It seems I gave you my best guess.
Are you maybe thinking that guesses must be binary? Or something?
I have no idea what that means to you. You’d have to communicate your meaning to me somewhat thoroughly before I could form an opinion one way or the other.
They just look like words to me. You want me to pick my favorite words from your list? Or something?
P.S. I just found my magic glasses. The forum will be happy to know that the answer is #2. Clear as glass.
“This is how he (i.e. the uninstructed person) attends inappropriately: ‘Was I in the past? Was I not in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? Having been what, what was I in the past? Shall I be in the future? Shall I not be in the future? What shall I be in the future? How shall I be in the future? Having been what, what shall I be in the future?’ Or else he is inwardly perplexed about the immediate present: ‘Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where is it bound?’
He explains that by framing existence around these self-referential questions, one generates views like “I have a self” or “I have no self”, which is the source of bondage.
So, Buddha was right and Descartes wrong. That means cogito ergo sum is fallacious. One can be thinking (or something else) and not exist. 
@Wayfarer thanks for replying. If I am then Buddha is wrong, but if I’m not, who is it that pursues nirvana?
I can’t help but feel that you’re still not getting it. As I’ve said any number of times, the reality of self is not a black-and-white, exists or doesn’t exist, y/n type of question. The thrust of the quote I gave above is that worrying about the self - do I exist or not? What will become of me? and so on, are regarded by the Buddha as (to be blunt about it) unproductive questions, not conducive to liberation. All of them revolve around ‘I, me, mine’ and concern with oneself.
I appreciate this conversation we’re having. I’ve learnt a lot from it. Please don’t take my persistence, on what is probably a trivial/simple point im Buddhism, to mean your effort has been wasted.
Perhaps I’ve failed to put the matter in the right context of Buddhist ideas and hence the comprhenension failure. To me it just doesn’t make sense to seek enlightenment if I don’t exist. Put another way, I practice Buddhism only to discover I don’t exist (nirvana).
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring
Its shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
Drinking deeply sobers us again
Thanks
Right, I have Suzuki’s book and have read it a few times over the years. But it addresses the correct attitude for practice, not for metaphysical speculation.
Why would I spend years studying the history of ideas if I did not expect to get anything from that study? Obviously one thing gained from that would be (hopefully) a grasp of all the different ideas in philosophy. But then you might ask what would be the purpose of gaining that understanding beyond whatever enjoyment is derived from it, or whatever creative uses it could be put to.
thanks for being a good sport! I realise that what I’ve been saying might be challenging and I appreciate your receptivity. And no I don’t count myself amongs the ‘noble disciples’ who has managed to cut off all the ‘kleshas and asavas’. I’m just as much a student as I always was and probably always will be.
@John I don’t see myself has having been engaged in metaphysical speculation in this conversation. It’s a philosophical discussion to be sure, about concepts and ideas from both Descartes and Buddhism, but I don’t see the discussion as being metaphysical in the Aristotelian sense of that word.