Chris Gartner: To me, identifying as a primate is absolutely no different than identifying as an eternal soul. Both are still identities, and “cherished opinions”.
Freedom is surely freedom from identity (as anything at all) I’d add that if one embraces the “not knowing” of Zen, then clinging to an identity isn’t not-knowing. Not knowing means not knowing. There are certainly many in the spiritual scene who deny our ordinary humanity. (I’m not one of them) We simply don’t know if we are eternal souls. Poo-pooing souls can only be an opinion. Regardless of people clinging to the notion of souls for comfort, we really don’t know they don’t exist. It’s not “fact” that there is no soul. We also simply don’t know we are merely soul-less primates. That’s not a “fact” either. All the so-called scientific, and biological “proof” we point to could all be in a dream for all we know.
Robert Saltzman: With all due respect, Chris, when you say, "identifying as a primate is absolutely no different than identifying as an eternal soul," that is a classic case of false equivalence. It most certainly is different. One is, as you say, a "cherished opinion." The other is an undeniable fact unless you resort to "we could all be dreaming," which means that there are no facts.
To say that we could all be dreaming is not just a false equivalency—claiming, falsely, a sameness between two items that are not the same. No. It's the nuclear option that makes everything equally dubious and insubstantial, and so blows up any chance of communication. Once you drop that bomb, I lose all interest in listening to you. Why? Because if I hear you out and try to reply in a reasonable way, as we humans like to do and need to do, you can always drop another “dreaming” bomb and so write off any idea you dislike without really taking it in and considering the nuances and implications.
So let's suppose that we are not "just dreaming," and that there are factual differences between one kind of thing and another. Then we will see that one does not just imagine being a primate human animal. No. One’s identity as an animal should be evident every time you eat or defecate, both of which you must do, like it or not, if you want to survive.
Yes, some human primate animals believe that they have or are “eternal souls,” and others don’t, but regardless of what one thinks about souls or the lack of them, we all bleed when cut and must have air and water to survive, etcetera, just like any other animal.
So beliefs and opinions belong to one ontological category and hearts and bones are quite another. They are not comparable. When you conflate them—when you squish them together—that is only a pretext for magical thinking: “Everything is just a matter of opinion, so I can believe anything I like, regardless of evidence or the lack of it.”
I am not saying that “souls” do not exist. I have never said that. Because you cannot prove a negative, no conjecture however bizarre can be ruled out with total confidence. I cannot say that there are not fairies living at the foot of the garden either, or that Zeus is not enthroned on Mount Olympus, but, for me, neither of those beliefs is in play. As I see it, the so-called “eternal soul” falls into that category—ideas that some people entertain for which I see no evidence, and so have no reason to believe.
I cannot agree that “Freedom is surely freedom from identity (as anything at all),” as you said. If pretending that you don’t exist at all and have no point of view on anything is the standard for freedom, none of us is free until we are in the grave.
To me, freedom involves seeing things more as they are in each moment, and less as we wish they were or want them to be.
If souls are an important concept for you, fine by me. I won’t dispute it. Whatever floats your boat. But the claim that all of us are just dreaming anyway so that any one thing is “absolutely no different” from any other, is not just poor logic; it's silly talk. If you think about it for five minutes (leaving the spirit vs. matter controversy out of it), you probably will agree. If not, come by for lunch. I’m serving shit sandwiches on rye.
A student is walking with her teacher. Feeling full of herself, she begins to boast. “Yes,” she says, “thanks to you, I have realized my true nature. Since the material world is only a dream, what happens to this body is meaningless. In fact, bodies don’t really exist at all. They are just objects in consciousness. Blah, blah, blah, etcetera.”
Finally, the teacher can stand no more of this drivel. He takes the student by the shoulders and kicks her hard right in the shin.
“Ow, ow, ow,” cries the student. “Why did you do that?”
“How’s that for your true nature?” says the teacher.
>>>Chris Gartner: To me, identifying as a primate is absolutely no different than identifying as an eternal soul<<< Not just false equivalent, but patently absurd. Although identification with anything whatsoever is unwise, accepting being a human primate with a limited lifespan (I prefer the more elegant and scientific description of "me* as "A sack of occasionally quasi-conscious bacteria with a limited lifespan") is provable beyond a quasi-reasonable doubt, identifying as an eternal soul without providing some objective evidence is UFN (Utter Fucking Nonsense)