http://www.takuin.com/the-landscape-of-the-dreamer/

You’ve left a wonderful comment here, and I will respond in the next post on the blog. When it is ready, I’ll leave a link here so you might find it easily.

Thank you very much…

The question about what’s beneficial to humanity only has meaning within the context of the dream of self, which is, by definition, not real. Any story generated to explain dualities of cause and effect or beneficial versus harmful (etc.) are meaningless. And yet sometimes stories are generated. Who is there to have an opinion on the matter? No one. And yet opinions seem to happen sometimes. Curious.

From outside the dream, your question is meaningless. There is no such thing as “beneficial” or “harmful”. There is no cause and effect. There is only what is. “Our” ideas about it are irrelevant. “We” are not even real. If “we” aren’t real, how can “our” ideas have any validity at all?

In response to the post above me, your response to Sass, if there are no separate individuals, how can we assign fault to them? Fault can only exist in a dualistic framework.

Cheers and namaste.

This is very important, you know. The ‘patient’ believes they need the help, the medicine, or whatever it is. If we are speaking of a real physical ailment, it is certainly something that can be handled over a period of time. But there is no real progressive betterment in the mind. That is not to deny the seeming reality of minds trapped within the confines of thought, however.

I think you have pointed out the entire structure of these ‘relationships.’ If we go deeply into this, we may find it is no more than an unnecessary treatment for a non-existent problem. It all comes back to the person needing to be ‘fixed.’ That, and perhaps the person supposedly in possession of the cure.

Spiritual commodities are one of the hottest things going. But it may be doomed to promise the possible while leaving us hungry.

I used to say (and I may have lifted this from someone else, I can’t remember), a chef is more important than a guru. The chef can take your order and successfully satisfy your need and remove your hunger. But the guru shows you the menu, tells you how great it all is, and leaves you with nothing but an empty stomach.

But I suppose it really is not the guru’s fault. It is on the shoulders of the person pressing the guru for a full stomach.

1. Well, I find this recent conversation I had with a friend of mine, who is a doctor. He was sick that day, but told me that he wouldn’t take any medicine and would just allow the immune system of the body to deal with it. And as much as possible, he prefer to not prescribe medicine also to his patients; however, patients are so stubborn, they expect all the time that they need medicine. Yet this same friend of mine, takes medicine prescribed to him by his psychiatrist.

2. It got me into thinking, is the body equipped enough to deal with physical problems but not with psychological ones? And in relation to your question, is the role of the “spiritual doctor” something like that of a medical doctor or that of a psychiatrist?

3. Certainly, all of them are “teaching” something but what does it mean to be spiritually sick, is it akin to being physically sick or mentally sick? Is the body, by body I include the brain, not equipped to “cure” this sickness without any help from anybody or anything?

4. If “spiritual doctors” aren’t like medical doctors, what are they then? Some sort of an artist, perhaps, who can be “classical” or perhaps “avant-guard”?

5. Finally, help is sought because it’s needed, whether that need is imagined or real both by the person offering the help or by the person in need, help still function on the basis of need. If this is the case, “spiritual teaching” is just another commodity in the market, if there’s demand there’s supply. In this sense, spiritual teaching is helpful to humanity because it satisfies a need, just like medicine. Nothing else. Now whether or not, they “cure” some sort of sickness, I guess we have to inquire what is this sickness made of, perhaps decode its DNA, and eradicate it with some sort of vaccination, just like we did with viruses that are no longer heard of today.

1. “We go to listen to someone speak.” Presumably, he speaks in order to be heard. So we help him by going to listen. If we give the speaker money we help him survive to keep on speaking. If making money is why he speaks, we help him fulfill his business plan.

2. “We may or may not have a realization.” If we have a realization and then go speak of it, then we help others have a realization. If we don’t but go speak as if we did, then we help others have a realization. “If you understand, things are just the way they are. If you do not understand, things are just the way they are.”

The realizations that members of our audience have may or may not have anything to do with the one of which we speak.

3. If we make money by speaking, then we help everyone to whom we later give the money. We help those in our audience who need to make money, by showing them a way to do so.