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kore wrote

Reply to comment by celebratedrecluse in by !deleted8217

Damn, that sucks about Trungpa. Perhaps it was a bad idea to give a specific author, as that always makes it easy for ad hominem attacks to substitute for meaningful discussion about the ideas presented. I would encourage you not to develop an opinion of Buddhist philosophy based upon his character. The idea of no fixed self is one of the central ideas of Buddhist philosophy.

If you mean egoist after Stirner, I think that what Stirner called der Einzige, literally "the Unique", fatefully translated to English as "The Ego", is actually compatible with many Eastern philosophies.

Some buddhist who doesn't really understand Stirner at all and just hears about "egoism" would say that the idea of ego is the "spook of all spooks" and that the ego is just another construction and Stirner is an idiot for not seeing this, but based on my reading of Stirner's Critics this is not at all what Stirner meant by der Einzige and he actually was getting at something that I definitely agree with.

Take for example, the sentence

Stirner names the unique and says at the same time that “Names don’t name it.” He utters a name when he names the unique, and adds that the unique is only a name.

Compare with e.g. Daodejing verse 1

The Way as “way” bespeaks no common lasting Way, The name as “name” no common lasting name.

Also this quote from Stirner's Critics

The unique, however, has no content; it is indeterminacy in itself; only through you does it acquire content and determination. There is no conceptual development of the unique, one cannot build a philosophical system with it as a “principle,” the way one can with being, with thought, with the I. Rather it puts an end to all conceptual development.

I now take the liberty of replacing "The unique" with "The ego" in the first sentence and you are left with

The ego has no content

Which could have come straight from the mouth of Siddartha Gautama a.k.a. Buddha

The rest of that quote from Stirner, the idea of the unique only acquiring meaning "through you" i.e. through some form of mediation and the idea of putting an end to conceptual development is exactly what I brought up in my first comment, what does it mean to have an experience without mediation, and see things as they really are?

So it seems I may be somewhat of an egoist after all ;)

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celebratedrecluse wrote

There's a lot to be gained from studying various philosophies and religions, but my point is not to dispute the usefulness of such a tradition to an individual, but rather to critique the power relationships created by spirituality as a set of actually existing social phenomena.

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