The greatest liars are enlightened?

[Bird Larry]

Zen Buddhists say Buddha was the greatest liar. Lao Tzu says Tao cannot be fathomed and its basically a hide and seek game. Lao tzu said "it is my understanding that rich men pretend to be poor, and geniuses pretend to be dumb. So stop trying to be virtuous!" 

In the beginning of my journey, I hated anybody who didn't tell the truth, or was denying facts. But i came to grow that Truth in the right sense of the word has nothing to do with 'facts' or ... whatever. Am I wrong about this? Hypocrisy can be a virtue? IT only depends on how you use hypocrisy, right? 

[zeroISinfinity]

There is and there can only be Truth. 

[Moksha]

The Buddha was a liar only in the necessary way. How else could he enrobe himself with personality, and return to tell his followers what he saw? Even the pointing to pure source is a lie. He was the best liar one could possibly be.

[The0Self]

You are reading this sentence right now. You are you. Buddha is Buddha.

You are not reading this sentence right now. You are not you. Buddha is not Buddha.

It is not possible to speak the truth.

It is not possible to speak the untruth.

Reality is Reality.

Reality is not Reality.

[Leo Gura]

Why you gotta make it so twisted?

[Preety_India]

There is a certain truth to what you are saying. 

 

[Nahm]

Impossible to tell the truth, yet there are no liars. 

[zeroISinfinity]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Why you gotta make it so twisted?

 

6 hours ago, Nahm said:

Impossible to tell the truth, yet there are no liars. 

❤️

[Gesundheit]

The awake can pretend to be sleeping, but it does not work the other way around.

[Bird Larry]

@Gesundheit thats what im talking about! Precisely the thing that is confusing me about enlightened masters! Only truthful people can lie absolutely?

[Gesundheit]

2 minutes ago, Bird Larry said:

@Gesundheit thats what im talking about! Precisely the thing that is confusing me about enlightened masters! Only truthful people can lie absolutely?

Since the map is not the territory, anything said about the territory is technically practically a lie. So the moment anyone opens their mouths, they're already committing falsehood, because the mind confuses the map and the territory all the time. From that, I have concluded for myself that silence is the only way to be truly truthful, and that thinking is the only way to be deluded. If you stop talking and thinking, all dualities will vanish. And by definition, lies are nothing but a duality. Truth is one, a lie is two.

Also, keep in mind that making judgements about lies is also a lie because judgement is duality. So demonizing lies won't work.

[Bird Larry]

 

13 hours ago, Moksha said:

The Buddha was a liar only in the necessary way. How else could he enrobe himself with personality, and return to tell his followers what he saw? Even the pointing to pure source is a lie. He was the best liar one could possibly be.

Cool bro. 

[PurpleTree]

is it really a lie if someone tries to point to the truth but the truth can not be told.

but "someone" still tries their best?

wouldn't a lie be intentionally stating a falsehood, which this really isn't?

[Bird Larry]

@Leo Gura  im not sure of what you mean leo. Please enlighten me

[Moksha]

2 hours ago, PurpleTree said:

is it really a lie if someone tries to point to the truth but the truth can not be told.

Every teaching has the potential to be treacherous, if people mistake it for the truth itself. To his credit, the Buddha warned people about this, and differentiated the pointing finger from the moon. At least he pointed, instead of pretending the moon didn't exist.

[Gesundheit]

2 hours ago, PurpleTree said:

is it really a lie if someone tries to point to the truth but the truth can not be told.

but "someone" still tries their best?

wouldn't a lie be intentionally stating a falsehood, which this really isn't?

Actually, it is a lie. The reason why someone would even try to communicate truth is because they're lying to themselves about the fact that it doesn't really matter. It matters to them for whatever reasons, so they talk about it.

Plus, truth cannot be recognized through logic. It is realized through intuition, such as metaphor and analogy. So the content is almost always a red herring. The context carries the message. And people always focus on the content. This makes language an extremely poor medium for transferring truth. And so here we are.

[Forestluv]

@Bird Larry There seems to be some muddling of the concept of “lie”. We could make a distinction between the form of “lie” a  Zen master makes to a student and the form of “lie” a crook tells to a police officer. 

If we are hiking in nature and I say “look over there! A bear!”. It is technically a lie since it is both a bear and not a bear. At the quantum level, it is not “a bear”. It is immaterial energy of infinite potentiality. Yet that isn’t very practical if my friend is about to get attacked by a bear.

If I became a park ranger and told visitors how to be protect themselves from bears in the park, it is a story of truth in one context and a story of lies in another context. Yet this is distinct from someone making up a story about how they beat up a bear to impress some women. That would be a different form of lie.

There is also the context of good natured fun. Years ago, I reached expert levels of skiing. Sometimes I would pretend to be a beginner. I would snow plow my skies and be very unsteady, like I was about to fall. It would get everyone’s attention. People would get out of the way, since it looked like I was a beginner out of control and about to fall. Then I would suddenly switch to parallel skiing and rapidly ski down the slope as an expert. People would be surprised and many would laugh. In one context, I was “lying” about my abilities - yet it was in good fun and no one got hurt. ? 

[Byun Sean]

I think this is where relativity of points of view come in and how language works.

 

If you tell the average joe shmoe on the street that awakening is realizing that you are God and everything is infinite imagination, how much does that 

do to help him really and communicate what awakening is? He has no idea what the hell those words mean.

At best he will attach some meaning of what he's associated 'God' and 'imagination' with in the past and make a mental model out of that.

 

Language is only useful to the extent we can communicate by emitting certain sounds to create meaning in the mind of another person. Thus,

awakened people may speak in these weird anecdotes because they appreciate how reality is being seen from many different points of view.

 

And if you think about it reality only exists as an infinite number of different points of view. Thus hard 'facts' through language are not absolute, 

but only absolute from a certain point of view.

 

At the same time the absolute is absolute so this is where things get wack.