Schopenhauer would certainly concede your points 1 through 4 my friend! In fact he argued the significance of these things quite forcefully. (As for Ajahn Brahm I don't care much for his approach in general, so I don't have anything to add there.)DooDoot wrote: ↑Fri Jan 19, 2018 4:04 am
But, again, this argument above is mere word-play. It has no basis in evidence or reality. Knowable reality is:
1. When the body is fatigued, due to a lack of food, the mind becomes fatigued.
2. When the body is exhausted due to sleep deprivation, the mind will collapse into unconsciousness sleep.
3. When the body lacks certain hormones & chemicals, the mind becomes depressed.
4. When the body is charged with certain hormones & chemicals, the mind becomes animated.
5. While Ajahn Brahm may discern the mind expands in clarity in rupa jhanas as the body ceases impingement as a stressful sense object, thus believing body & mind are separate, once the mind enters into arupa jhana the mind starts to fade in the the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, until disappearing in nirodha samapatti.
Schopenhauer's take on these things was actually quite complex, and in my opinion ultimately inconsistent and untenable, but I won't get into all that as its off topic and I'm fairly certain no one cares all that much what the old curmudgeon thought (readers digest version: he rejected personal immortality, he rejected a "subject without an object," and he didn't hold consciousness to be some kind of "fundamental reality" or the creator of all...in fact he rather violently criticized the german idealists, Hegel, Fichte, et al for all this).
Nevertheless as a general critique of naive realism and materialism I have to disagree with you, the principle underlying the argument is quite profound and devastating to those theses, but not so clear if you haven't struggled with his entire corpus as the passage is embedded in a great deal of context. Apologies for the derail, I was just expressing my excitement that someone else enjoyed the passage.