Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas R Hofstadter

Godel's theorem showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, and that no fixed system could represent the complexity of whole numbers.

Gödel showed that for any formal axiomatic system, there is always a statement about natural numbers which is true, but which cannot be proven in the system. In other words, mathematics will always have a little fuzziness around the edges: it will never be the rigorous unshakable system that mathematicians dreamed of for millennia.

We are going to see that particles are - in a certain sense which can only be defined rigorously in relativistic quantum mechanics - nested inside each other in a way which can be described recursively, perhaps even by some sort of grammar.... These real particles are said to be renormalized - an ugly but intriguing term. What happens is that no particle can even be defined without referring to all other particles, whose definitions in turn depend on the first particles, etc. Round and round, in a never-ending loop.

Every real particle's existence therefore involves the existence of infinitely many other particles, contained in a virtual "cloud" which surrounds it as it propagates. And each of the virtual particles in the cloud, of course, also drags along its own virtual cloud, and so on ad infinitum.

Thinking about 'Thoughts without a Thinker'

 That is, while science is quite capable of discussing the world without a maker, it is still searching for appropriate ways of discussing thoughts without a thinker. Fortunately, Indian Buddhist analyses of mind are already expressed in a philosophical language which avoids the postulation of experiential subjects without diminishing the importance of the experiential dimension—a language which therefore provides rich opportunities for dialogue with scientific approaches to understanding mind. This is possible because there is a growing consensus in Western thought and science that we may understand ourselves and our world more deeply if we think in terms of patterns of relationships rather than of reified essences or entities—if we think, in short, in terms of dependent arising.

Whatever exists comes about dependent upon its enabling conditions and persists as long as such conditions persist..."what complex of conditions operates in what recurrently patterned ways in order to typically give rise to what kind of phenomena?" But this focuses our attention upon patterns of arising rather than on actions of agents; and patterns are relational, not substantive, and arising is dynamic, not static.5 The Buddhist dismissal of selves, essences or unchanging entities, therefore, does not arise from logical propositions derived from first principles, such as 'all is change,' as much as it follows from the form of the question being raised, "how do things come to be?" —a point which is all the more obvious by a similar disavowal of essences, entities or substantive selves in modern science.

Many, if not most, scientific works on brain and consciousness reject the notion of a "unified, freely acting agent." For example, brain scientist Richard Restak (1994, pp. 120-121) argues: "Brain research on consciousness carried out over the past two decades casts important doubts on our traditional ideas about the unity and indissolubility of our mental lives," particularly "the concept of ourself as a unified, freely acting agent directing our behavior." Lakoff and Johnson (1999, p. 268): "The very way that we normally conceptualize our inner lives is inconsistent with what we know scientifically about the nature of mind. In our system for conceptualizing our inner lives, there is always a Subject that is the locus of reason and that metaphorically has an existence independent of the body. As we have seen, this contradicts the fundamental findings of cognitive science." 

Thinking about 'Thoughts without a Thinker'

The mind is inherently embodied.

Thought is mostly unconscious.

Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious.

Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative.

Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.

Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.

For example, there is no Cartesian dualistic person, with a mind separate from and independent of the body, sharing exactly the same disembodied transcendent reason with everyone else, and capable of knowing everything about his or her mind simply by self-reflection. Rather, the mind is inherently embodied, reason is shaped by the body, and since most thought is unconscious, the mind cannot be known simply by self-reflection. Empirical study is necessary.
There exists no Kantian radically autonomous person, with absolute freedom and a transcendent reason that correctly dictates what is and isn't moral. Reason, arising from the body, doesn't transcend the body. What universal aspects of reason there are arise from the commonalities of our bodies and brains and the environments we inhabit. The existence of these universals does not imply that reason transcends the body. Moreover, since conceptual systems vary significantly, reason is not entirely universal.

Since reason is shaped by the body, it is not radically free, because the possible human conceptual systems and the possible forms of reason are limited. In addition, once we have learned a conceptual system, it is neurally instantiated in our brains and we are not free to think just anything. Hence, we have no absolute freedom in Kant's sense, no full autonomy. There is no a priori, purely philosophical basis for a universal concept of morality and no transcendent, universal pure reason that could give rise to universal moral laws.

       The utilitarian person, for whom rationality is economic rationality--the maximization of utility--does not exist. Real human beings are not, for the most part, in conscious control of--or even consciously aware of--their reasoning. Most of their reason, besides, is based on various kinds of prototypes, framings, and metaphors. People seldom engage in a form of economic reason that could maximize utility.

...The grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience creates a largely centered self, but not a monolithic self....Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false. The correspondence theory holds that statements are true or false objectively, depending on how they map directly onto the world--independent of any human understanding of either the statement or the world. On the contrary, truth is mediated by embodied understanding and imagination. That does not mean that truth is purely subjective or that there is no stable truth. Rather, our common embodiment allows for common, stable truths.

If we are going to ask philosophical questions, we have to remember that we are human. As human beings, we have no special access to any form of purely objective or transcendent reason. We must necessarily use common human cognitive and neural mechanisms. 

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.

Philosophical reflection, uninformed by cognitive science, did not discover, establish, and investigate the details of the fundamental aspects of mind we will be discussing. Some insightful philosophers did notice some of these phenomena, but lacked the empirical methodology to establish the validity of these results and to study them in fine detail. Without empirical confirmation, these facts about the mind did not find their way into the philosophical mainstream.

           Philosophy in the Flesh

           The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

Philosophy in the Flesh

the Sixth Patriarch

Body is the bodhi tree

Heart is like clear mirror stand

Strive to clean it constantly

Do not let the dust motes land

Shenxiu

Bodhi really has no tree

Nor is clear mirror the stand

Nothing's there initially

So where can the dust motes land?

Huineng

If one can completely come to grips with this basic truth expressed by Huineng (easier said than done... you still wanna win the Lotto and you know it), enlightenment can happen in an instant. Hence, the true path to Buddhahood isn't the direction of hard work and the acquisition of even more knowledge and scriptures, as indicated by Shenxiu. The truer path is along the road of intuitive insight, where we progress beyond mere logic and reasoning and become one with wisdom and understanding.

How can we traverse this path? With our entire being, rather than just one hemisphere of the brain. Too much intellectual sophistry leads nowhere except ever more confusing and confounding complexity. It's time we recognize the fundamentals and come to the simple yet profound realization that, hey, all this Tao and Zen stuff ain't the mystical, mysterious stuff that only inscrutible Orientals can understand! When you get right down to it, the ancient masters and sages are really trying to tell us to stick to the basics and keep it simple. Simplicity and clarifying, penetrating basic truths - these are the essence of Tao and this is the golden nugget of knowledge we have come all this way to find.

the Sixth Patriarch

The Sutra of Hui Neng

He who treads the Path in earnest
Sees not the mistakes of the world.
If we find fault with others, p. 247
We ourselves are also in the wrong;
When other people are in the wrong we should ignore it;
It is wrong for one to find fault with others.
By getting rid of the habit of fault-finding,
We get rid of one source of defilement.
When neither hatred nor love disturb the mind,
Serene and restful is our sleep.
...
To seek enlightenment by separating from this world
Is as foolish as to search for a rabbit's horn.
Right views are called "transcendental,"
Erroneous views are called "worldly,"
But when all views, both right and erroneous, are discarded,
Then the essence of Wisdom manifests itself.
...
If we get rid of the sin within our own mind
Then it is a case of true repentance.

Conceptions of the Self in Western and Eastern Psychology - Yozan Dirk Mosig

Reification is the process by which the mind makes a thing (res), or a material object, out of a concept or an abstraction. By extension, it is making a thing out of a form, a shape, a configuration, a Gestalt, a perception, or an image. It is to “thing” an event or a phenomenon, to transform an ongoing, fluid process, into a frozen and static spatial or temporal cross-section of the same, endowing such construction with the qualities of reality and separateness.

Because of the delusory nature of any labeling process, with its consequent reifications, any attempt to offer a name for the unnamable Reality must always fall short, although sages have offered terms such as Thusness, Tathagatagarba, Buddha Nature, Dharmakaya, Suchness, the Big Self, the Absolute, or the Tao.

According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of a [personal] self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of “me” and “mine,” selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world, from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.”

What this means is that they cannot have any existence except in terms of the interconnected net of causal conditions that made their existence possible. All things (including human beings) are composites, in other words, they are composed of parts, and have no real existence other than as temporary (impermanent) collections of parts. They are essentially patterns, configurations, orGestalten rather than objectively existing separate entities. They possess no separate essence, self, or soul that could exist by itself, apart from the component parts and conditions.

the whole is more than the sum of the parts ............it is equally true that a gestalt cannot continue to exist when separated from its parts. The gestalt, the “whole,” cannot exist by itself; it does not have a separate self or “soul.”

There is no separate, independent self or soul that would be left if we removed form (which includes the body), feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. While these aggregates are together, the functioninggestalt we call a person exists; if they are removed, the gestalt ceases to be.

Form is empty of reality when separated from perceptions, feelings, impulses, and consciousness. And what about feelings? They also cannot exist by themselves. Feelings are feelings about something, about one’s body, one’s perceptions, one’s impulses, one’s state of consciousness.

The teaching of “dependent origination” is at the core of the Buddha’s teaching or Dharma. In its simplest expression, dependent origination is a law of causality that says “this is, because that is; this is not, because that is not; when this arises, that arises; when this ceases, that ceases.” Despite the apparent simplicity of this formulation, it is a farreaching principle, that leaves nothing untouched, and, in fact, causally connects everything in the universe, for it implies that all phenomena, whether they be external objective events or internal subjective experiences, come into existence depending on causes and conditions without which they could not be. These causes and conditions can themselves be either internal mental states or external events.

But the concept of anatta does not negate the person, nor does it diminish it. On the contrary, it empowers the individual by erasing the boundaries of separateness that limit the personal ego or self. The person becomes transformed from an isolated and powerless individual struggling against the rest of the world, into an interconnected integral part of the universe. The person’s boundaries dissolve, and the person becomes the universe. This is the realization known as enlightenment, the emergence of the big self, the Self with capital S, which is boundless.

When we carry a burden, it is heavy; when there is no one to carry it, there is not a problem in the world! ~ Achaan Chah

Since upon realizing the universal oneness of all, the “selfless Self,” everyone and everything is oneself, this transcendent wisdom generates universal compassion and caring of everyone as oneself. To hurt another becomes to hurt oneself; to help another is to help oneself. True wisdom is automatically manifested as universal compassion, just as true compassion manifests itself as wisdom. Wisdom and compassion are dependently arisen, they “inter-are.” In the final analysis, wisdom is compassion, and compassion is wisdom

According to Vasubandhu, all that can be experienced to exist is “mind only,” or the mental processes of knowing. There is experience, but there is no subject (no atman) having the experience....Being aware of the phenomenon of awareness results in the mistaken notion of an inner perceiver who is having the awareness and who is separate from it...These “seeds” are “watered” by con scious activities, so that, for example, engaging in kind or compassionate thoughts makes the seeds of compassion ripen and grow (i.e., become more powerful), so that it will be easier to think compassionately next time. Allowing oneself to indulge in anger or hatred waters the corresponding seeds, so that it becomes easier to grow angry and to experience hate. This is why mindfulness of thoughts is so important, and why the “right effort” aspect of the Eightfold Path deals with cutting off negative or destructive thoughts as soon as they appear, while nurturing positive ones. This develops positive mental habits rooted in the seeds of the alayavijnana (storehouse consciousness), and has far-reaching effects on the life and well-being of the individual.

Western psychotherapy is designed to effect such change in persons experiencing psychological or behavioral disorders, while Eastern disciplines affect primarily the practical everyday life of normal or healthy individuals. Buddhist psychology is concerned with the alleviation of the unnecessary suffering caused by the delusion of the separate self in human beings in general. The delusion of separateness results in cravings, grasping, clinging, greed, selfishness, hatred, fear, feelings of alienation, loneliness, helplessness, and anxiety, which afflict those “healthy” as well as “unhealthy.”

Western psychotherapy, in its efforts to heal the neurotic individual, attempts to strengthen the ego, or to foster the development of a stronger “self,” and yet it is this very notion of self which Buddhist psychology sees as the root cause of human suffering. Eastern psychotherapy attempts to dissolve the experience of the self-as-separate entity and replace it with a feeling of interconnectedness, the non-self or selfless Self implied in the Buddhist concept of anatta. This radical change is seen as the key to liberation from dukkha, the dissatisfaction and suffering of human existence.

Nevertheless, it is not enough for the healthy, liberated individual to eliminate the delusion of the separate self. While understanding universal interconnectedness and absolute reality, the emptiness or nothingness of Buddhism, the person needs at the same time to experience reality in the relative sense, where individual identities exist. The integration of the two levels of awareness, the absolute and the relative, is essential for the normal functioning of the healthy human being in society. When crossing the street, it is not enough to contemplate an approaching car and to realize that we are one with it. Although it is true that the car, the road, our bodies, and everything else are nothing more than temporary collections of countless particles (or fluctuations of energy, at the quantum level of analysis) and that all there is, is an ocean of energy, where car, road, and person have no more reality than the transient shape of a wave on the surface of the ocean, unless we act in the relative plane, and get out of the way of the car, the collection of skandhas that allows this awareness to occur will be promptly dissolved. What is needed is appropriate action in the relative world, while maintaining awareness of the big picture.

It could be argued that the self needs to be strengthened before it can be abandoned. Culture may play a critical role in this process. The delusion of the separate self is likely to be stronger in individuals raised in individualistic societies, such as those of Europe and America, and may be weaker in collectivistic societies, such as those of China or Japan, where the harmony (wah) of the group takes precedence over the needs of the individual. Western approaches may be extremely valuable in giving the person (primarily in individualistic societies, but to some extent also in collectivistic ones) sufficient self-confidence and maturity to discard egocenteredness. This in turn prepares the individual to transcend the isolation of the separate self through the realization of the universal interconnectedness stressed by Buddhist psychology as the gateway to wisdom and compassion.

 

Conceptions of the Self in Western and Eastern Psychology

In this present moment is peace

In this present moment is peace

once you breath in and experience peace
it is gone for peace is not an experience

once you breath in and experience peace here
it is gone for peace is not found in space

once you breath in and experience peace now
it is gone for peace does not exist in time

In this present moment I am not
In this present moment I am
beyond experience, beyond space, beyond time

Small Boat, Great Mountain - Amaro Bhikkhu

The Search for Freedom

And I had a profound intuition that freedom is possible—that there is this potential we have as human beings to be totally free, and that there is something utterly pure, uninhibited, and uninhibitable within us

 It never crossed my mind that freedom could come only from within. Until then, I had been looking for freedom in that which was inherently bounded. My misguided way of finding freedom was by defying conventions, by trying not to be inhibited by the rules of society or the dictates of my personality or the conditioning of my body. I appeared free on the outside, but on the inside I was a prisoner of my beliefs and behaviors. It was only by turning my attention inward that I could discover the freedom that was already there... It is not like we need to become free. It is a matter of discovering that quality of being that is inherently unhindered and unbounded.

Conventional Truth and Ultimate

Truth The longer I stayed, the more I began to pay attention to Ajahn Chah’s repeated emphasis on the relationship between convention and liberation, conventional reality and ultimate reality. The things of this world are merely conventions of our own creation. Once we establish them, we proceed to get lost in or blinded by them. This gives rise to confusion, difficulty, and struggle. One of the great challenges of spiritual practice is to create the conventions, pick them up, and use them without confusion. We can recite the Buddha’s name, bow, chant, follow techniques and routines, pick up all these attributes of being a Buddhist, and then, without any hypocrisy, also recognize that everything is totally empty. There is no Buddhist!... if you think you really are a Buddhist, you are totally lost.

What Is a Living Being?

A certain amount of spiritual maturity hinges on understanding the nature of conventional reality. So much of our conditioning is predicated on the assumption that there is such a thing as a “real” living being. We see ourselves in terms of the limitations of the body and the personality, and we define what we are within those bounds. We assume then that other beings are also limited little pockets of beingness that float around in the cosmos.

Where Are We?

Mind does not exist in space. Three-dimensional space exists only in relationship to the world of physical form.

 The material form is giving us the clue of separateness, but that separateness is entirely dependent on the material world. In terms of mind, place does not apply. The mind is not anywhere. We are here, but we are not here. Those limitations of separate individuality are conventions that have a relative but not an absolute value.
 We create the illusion of separateness and individuality through our belief in the sense world. When we start to let go of the sense world, particularly the way we relate to physical form, then we start being able to expand the vision of what we are as beings. It’s not even a matter of seeing how we overlap with other beings; it’s a matter of realizing that we are of a piece with other beings

The Middle Way

 Meditation is a special kind of dance in which we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the practice of deconstructing the materialistic view of reality. The challenge is simultaneously to hold on and to let go; it is to see clearly what we are doing and at the same time see through it.

The way to know if what we are doing is worthwhile is to ask, “Does this lead to the end of suffering or does it not?” If it does, continue. If it does not, we need to switch our attention to what will. We can simply ask ourselves, “Am I experiencing dukkha? Is there a feeling of alienation or difficulty?” If there is, it means that we are clinging or hanging on to something. We need to see that the heart is attached somewhere and then make the gesture to loosen up, to let go. Sometimes we don’t notice where the suffering gets generated. We get so used to doing things in a particular way that we take it as a standard. But in meditation, we challenge the status quo. We investigate where there is a feeling of “dis-ease” and look to see what’s causing it. By stepping back and scanning the inner domain, it’s possible to find out where the attachment is and what’s causing it.

The Limitations of the Conditioned Mind

“Whenever you have feelings of love or hate for anything whatsoever, these will be your aides and partners in building parami (daily life practices that give the mind a firm ground in Dhamma (truth)). The Buddha-Dharma is not to be found in moving forwards, nor in moving backwards, nor in standing still. This, Sumedho, is your place of nonabiding.”

 In terms of physical reality, there is a coming and going. But there’s also that place of transcendence where there is no coming or going. Think about it. Where can we truly go? Do we ever really go anywhere? Wherever we go we are always “here,” right?

There is that sphere of being where there is no earth, no water, no fire, nor wind; no experience of infinity of space, of infinity of consciousness, of no-thingness, or even of neither-perception-nor-non-perception; here there is neither this world nor another world, neither moon nor sun; this sphere of being I call neither a coming nor a going nor a staying still, neither a dying nor a reappearance; it has no basis, no evolution, and no support: it is the end of dukkha (suffering). 
(ud. 8.1) Pali Canon, Udana aµ (the collection of “Inspired Utterances” of the Buddha)

“Where” Does Not Apply

This is the point that these teachings on nonabiding are trying to draw us to. The whole concept and construct of where-ness, the act of conceiving ourselves as this individual entity living at this spot in space and time, is a presumption.

 In the world of quantum physics, scientists now use such terms as “the well of being” or “the sea of potential” to refer to the primordial level of physical reality from which all particles and energies crystallize and into which they subsequently dissolve. The principle of non-locality in this realm means that the “place where something happens” cannot truly be defined, and that a single event can have exactly simultaneous effects in (apparently) widely separated places. Particles can accurately be described as being smeared out over the entirety of time and space. Terms like “single place” and “separate places” are seen to apply only as convenient fictions at certain levels of scale; at the level of the ultimate field, the sea of quantum foam, “place” has no real meaning. When you get down into the fine, subatomic realm, where-ness simply does not apply. There is no there there. Whether this principle is called nonabiding or non-locality, it’s both interesting and noteworthy that the same principle applies in both the physical and mental realms.

Still Flowing Water

Ajahn Chah would then explain that the mind’s nature is still, yet it’s flowing. It’s flowing, yet it is still. He would use the word “citta” for the knowing mind, the mind of awareness. The citta itself is totally still. It has no movement; it is not related to all that arises and ceases. It is silent and spacious. Mind objects— sights, sounds, smell, taste, touch, thoughts, and emotions—flow through it. Problems arise because the clarity of the mind gets entangled with sense impressions. The untrained heart chases the delightful, runs away from the painful, and as a result, finds itself struggling, alienated, and miserable.

“When” Does Not Apply

There’s a verse about time by the Sixth Zen Patriarch that I love to quote. It says:
In this moment there is nothing which comes to be. In this moment there is nothing which ceases to be. Thus, in this moment, there is no birth and death to be brought to an end. Thus, the absolute peace is this present moment. Although it is just this moment,there is no limit to this moment, And herein is eternal delight.

Birth and death depend on time. Something apparently born in the past, living now, will die in the future. Once we let go of time, and if we also let go of thing-ness, we see there can be no real “thing” coming into being or dying; there is just the suchness of the present. In this way, there is no birth or death to be brought to an end. That’s how this moment is absolutely peaceful; it is outside of time, akaµliko.

We use such phrases as “this moment,” but they are not quite accurate because they still can give us an impression of the present as a small fragment of time. For even though it is just a moment, the present is limitless. In letting go of the structures of the past and future, we realize that this present is an infinite ocean, and the result of this realization is living in the eternal, the timeless.

Oil and Water

We can see the true nature of mind, mind-essence, which knows experience and in which all of life happens; and we can see that that transcendent quality is devoid of relationship to individuality, space, time, and movement. All of the objects of the world—its people, our routines and mind states—appear and disappear within that space.

Breathing and Walking

Mindfulness of breathing is a good way to work with this insight. Just notice the feeling of the breath as you follow the sensation of it. The breath is moving, but that which knows the breath is not moving.

The Faster You Hurry, the Slower You Go

Ajahn Sumedho talked repeatedly about being enlightened rather than becoming enlightened. Be awake now; be enlightened to the present moment. It is not about doing something now to become enlightened in the future. That kind of thinking is bound up with self and time and bears no fruit

“If your peace rests on the meditation mat, when you leave the mat you leave your peace behind.”

 When we give our hearts to whatever we do, to whatever we experience, or to what is happening around us, without personal agendas or preferences taking over, the space of rigpa, the space of awareness, is exactly the same.

The Buddha Is Awareness

When you come right down to it, awareness is not a thing. Nevertheless, it is an attribute of the fundamental nature of mind. Ajahn Chah would refer to that awareness, that knowing nature of mind, as Buddha:

The type of effort we need to develop is that which involves being clearer but doing less....We can relax without switching off, and consequently we can enjoy the fruits of our work. This is what we mean by letting go of becoming and learning to be. If we’re too tense and eager to get to the other end, we’re bound to fall off the tightrope.

We practice to end suffering, yet we get so attached to working with things in the mind that when the dukkha stops and the heart becomes spacious and empty, we can find ourselves feeling lost....When grasping ceases, the ultimate truth appears. It’s that simple. But the Buddha’s response was brief and succinct. He replied, “The cessation of grasping is deathlessness.” That’s it. On this point, the Dzogchen and Theravaµdan teachings are identical. When grasping stops, there is rigpa, there is deathlessness, the ending of suffering, dukkha-nirodha... If we don’t rush through looking for the next hit and we pay attention to the ending of dukkha, we open ourselves to purity, radiance, and peacefulness. By allowing our heart to fully taste what’s here, all so-called ordinary experience blossoms and opens, beautifully adorned like a golden orchid; it keeps getting brighter and clearer.

 Atammayataµis the realization that, in truth, there cannot be anything other than ultimate reality. There is no that. In letting go, in the complete abandonment of that, the whole relative subject-object world, even at its subtlest level, is broken apart and dissolved.

The body is in our mind rather than the mind in the body, right? What do we know about our body? We can see it. We can hear it. We can smell it. We can touch it. Where does seeing happen? In the mind. Where do we experience touch? In the mind. Where do we experience smelling? Where does that happen? In the mind. Everything that we know about the body, now and at any previous time, has been known through the agency of our mind. We have never known anything about our body except through our mind. So our entire life, ever since infancy, everything we have ever known about our body and the world has happened in our mind. So, where is our body? It doesn’t mean to say there isn’t a physical world, but what we can say is that the experience of the body, and the experience of the world, happens within our mind. It doesn’t happen anywhere else. It’s all happening here. And in that here-ness, the world’s externality, its separateness has ceased....When we realize that we hold the whole world within us, its thing-ness, its other-ness has been checked. We are better able to recognize its true nature.

Reflective Inquiry

Oftentimes thinking gets painted as the big villain in meditation circles: “Yeah, my mind. . . . If only I could stop thinking, I’d be happy.” But actually, the thinking mind can be the most wonderful of helpers when it is used in the right way, particularly when investigating the feeling of selfhood. There’s a missed opportunity when we overlook the use of conceptual thought in this way. When you are experiencing, seeing, or doing something, ask a question like: “What is it that’s aware of this feeling? Who owns this moment? What is it that knows rigpa?(awareness)” The deliberate use of reflective thought or inquiry can reveal a set of unconscious assumptions, habits, and compulsions that we have set in motion. This can be very helpful and can yield great insight. We establish a steady, open mindfulness and then ask: “What is it that knows this? What is aware of this moment? Who is it that feels pain? Who is it that is having this fantasy? Who is it that is wondering about supper?”

Fear of Freedom

The Buddha said that the letting go of the sense of “I” is the supreme happiness (e.g., in ud. 2.1, and 4.1). But over the years we have become very fond of this character, haven’t we? As Ajahn Chah once said, “It is like having a dear friend whom you’ve known your whole life. You’ve been inseparable. Then the Buddha comes along and says that you and your friend have got to split up.” It’s heartbreaking. The ego is bereft. There is the feeling of diminution and loss. Then comes the sinking feeling of desperation.To the sense of self, being is always defined in terms of being some thing. But the practice and teachings clearly emphasize undefined being, an awareness: edgeless, colorless, infinite, omnipresent—you name it. When being is undefined in this way, it seems like death to the ego. And death is the worst thing.

“When were you ever made any the less by dying?” Rumi

Attending to the Deathless

In cosmological terms, the best place for liberation is in the human realm. There’s a good mixture of suffering and bliss, happiness and unhappiness here.

 This gesture of attending to the deathless is thus a core spiritual practice but not a complicated one. We simply withdraw our attention from the objects of the mind and incline the attention towards the deathless, the unborn. This is not a massive reconstruction program. It’s not like we have to do a whole lot. It’s very simple and natural. We relax and notice that which has been here all along, like noticing the space in a room. We don’t notice space, because it doesn’t grab our attention, it isn’t exciting. Similarly, nibbanaµ (freedom from cycle of birth and death) has no feature, no color, no taste, and no form, so we don’t realize it’s right here. The perceptual systems and the naming activity of the mind work on forms; that’s what they go to first. Therefore we tend to miss what’s always here.

The Anatomy of Cessation

  Geographically, it is impossible to journey to the end of the world. It’s only when we come to the cessation of the world, which literally means the cessation of its otherness, its thingness, will we reach the end of dukkha, unsatisfactoriness. When we stop creating sense objects as absolute realities and stop seeing thoughts and feelings as solid things, there is cessation. To see that the world is within our minds is one way of working with these principles. The whole universe is embraced when we realize that it’s happening within our minds. And in that moment when we recognize that it all happens here, it ceases. Its thingness ceases. Its otherness ceases. Its substantiality ceases.

Touching the Earth

It is saying that even though we might have this enlightened, free space internally, it needs to be interfaced with the phenomenal world. Otherwise, there is no completion. This is why meditating with the eyes open is, in a way, such a useful bridge. We cultivate a vast internal space, but it is necessarily connected to the phenomenal world. If there is only an internal, subjective experience of enlightenment, we’re still caught.

But in reaching out to touch the earth, the Buddha recognized, yes, there is that which is transcendent and unconditioned. But humility demands not simply holding to the unconditioned and the transcendent...That gesture of reaching out from the transcendent is saying: “How could fully engaging with the sense world possibly corrupt the innate freedom of the heart? This freedom is uninterruptible, incorruptible, unconfusable by any sense experience. Therefore why not allow it all in?

Another phrase that expresses this same principle is “cittam| pabhassaram, akandukehi kilesehi,” meaning “the heart’s nature is intrinsically radiant; defilements are only visitors.” (a 1.61) It’s pointing out the fact that the heart’s nature is intrinsically pure and perfect. The things that appear to defile this purity are only visitors passing through, just wandering or drifting by. The heart’s nature cannot truly be corrupted by any of that.

Following from the zensite.com

Impurities are our false thinking and clinging (to things as real)
 'Expel all concurrent causes. Do not give rise to a single thought'
To lay down a thing is to lay down everything for ever, and this is called the laying down of all concurrent causes. When all concurrent causes have been laid down, false thinking will vanish with the non-arising of differentiation and the elimination of all attachments.

話頭 (hua-tou) refers to the practice of realising the origin or empty essence of thought, as it manifests in the mind as ‘words’. Through holding the hua tou, and caring for it appropriately, the light of wisdom (prajna) will appear, and the Mind Ground will be fully realised without error or hindrance, here and now. The hua tou turns the mind (as a sense organ) back upon itself so that with repeated enquiry, the mind's essence is realised.  All the sense organs, regardless of their distinctive sensory function, emerge from exactly the same‘empty’ (sunya) base, and therefore the return of one sense to its base is the automatic return of all senses to the original base.  It is the deep questioning of the word 'Who?' that is the most important factor - Who is hearing?, Who is writing?, Who is dragging this body around?, etc.  It is the enquiry that is the hua tou, rather than the content of its structure.  Whatever hua tou is used, the focusing of the mind upon the question brings the thoughts into one single stream, from their previously scattered condition.  Then all the thoughts, as they emerge from the empty base - regardless of their nature and content become immediately transformed and channelled into the hua tou. This is how Charles Luk (1898-1978) explains the hua tou practice:

‘When men were attached to material things, people of high spirituality became rare. The masters were then obliged to devise a poison-against-poison method called the hua t’ou which consists of the giving rise to a feeling of doubt (yi-qing – ‘doubting mind’) about WHO the seeker of Enlightenment is. Emphasis is on the word WHO which supports this vital doubt which comes from the student’s eagerness to know that which practices the Dharma. He knows that his body and intellect will cease to exist when he dies and are, therefore, transient and cannot realise permanent reality. He is keen to know about the prime mover of all his activities; hence his doubt which, growing larger and larger, will submerge his body, mind and environment to form a mass of fire which destroys all thoughts, feelings and passions like a re-hot stove which melts the snow that falls on it, as the masters put it. His monkey mind cannot stay in this scorching fire, and its death is automatically followed by the resurrection of his true mind which is pure and clean.

All beginners are inclined to give rise to all kinds of (false) thoughts; they have a pain in the legs and do not know how to undergo the training. The truth is that they should be firm in their determination to escape from the round of births and deaths. They should stick to the hua t'ou and no matter whether they walk, stand, sit or lie, they should grasp it. From morning to evening, they should look into this (word) "Who" until it becomes as clear as "the autumn moon reflected in a limpid pool". It should be clearly (and closely) inquired into and should be neither blurred nor unsteady. (If this can be achieved) why worry about the Buddha stage which seems unattainable? 

ZenTeachings/Master_Hsu-Yun_Discourses_and_Dharma_Words

Wise Kindness: Loving Is Not Liking

 As a preface to that, it’s also important to understand that loving everything doesn’t mean we have to like everything. Metta is better understood as “the heart that does not dwell in aversion.” Not dwelling in aversion towards anything, even our enemies....We need to recognize that there is no enemy. There is Dharma. There is no them or that or it. It all belongs. Fundamentally, everything belongs and has its place in nature....As soon as we find ourselves judging our own minds or the people around us with harshness, cultivating justifiable hatred for the government or our thinking minds or our erratic emotions or our damaged lives, there’s no vision of reality; it’s obscured. The attitude is not in accord with truth. So that hatred, that aversion becomes a sign for us that we’ve lost the path.

 I think it’s helpful to recognize this because what we think we’re capable of is very different from what we actually are capable of. We might think, “I could never do that. That’s impossible for me.” Yet I tell you, it is possible. That potential is there for all of us. And when we find that quality of total acceptance and absolute nonaversion, where there’s kindness and compassion, then there’s a tremendous quality of ease and release, a real nondiscrimination at last. For what kind of wisdom are we developing if it packs up and departs as soon as the going gets rough—as soon as the weather gets too hot, the “wrong” person is put in charge, or the body gets sick and uncomfortable?

A sincere spirit of loving-kindness is the most challenging thing to establish in the face of extreme bitterness and pain because to do so requires finding spaciousness around these experiences. This is where the heart most easily contracts and impacts itself. But we can pick up that quality and say, “Yes, this too is part of nature. This too is just the way it is.” Then, at that moment, there’s an expansion around it. We feel the space of emptiness that surrounds and pervades it and we see the whole thing is transparent. No matter how dense and real the feeling of “I and me and mine” is in that holding, we see in that spaciousness that not only is there space around it, but there is also light coming through.

True wisdom, far from being beyond the practice of kindness, actually depends on such undiscriminating acceptance of the beautiful and the ugly alike. When we stop running away from things that are apparently painful, even unbearable, and fully engage in the gesture of acceptance and surrender, there is a magical transformation. We transform the so-called difficulty and move into an entirely different state... Intensity is transformed by the purity of reflection. And when we are dealing with our own emotional life, that same kind of open and clear reception has a way of transmuting the emotional state. It doesn’t suppress it. The emotion shrivels; the energy of it gets changed into something that actually enlivens and brightens the mind—the heat is transformed into light...when the heart is completely liberated, it’s impossible to deliberately harm another being. It’s impossible to act acquisitively. It’s impossible to take advantage of another being sexually or use your sense world indulgently. It is simply impossible. You can’t lie or use speech in a harmful or deceitful way. It’s as if the force of spiritual gravity won’t allow it. There’s nothing there that could cause you to bend the truth.... Goodness feels good because the attitude resonates with reality. Lying and harming feel bad because they are dissonant with that reality of what we are. It’s as simple as that.

I am often reminded of a couple of lines from the verses of the Third Zen Patriarch, where he says, "All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind’s power.” These teachings have been around for years, haven’t they? It seems to me that this is exactly the guidance we receive from the Tibetan tradition, particularly that last line, “with no exertion of the mind’s power”—no person doing anything. This is pointing to the intrinsically pure and free quality of mind. We take on certain conventional practices, like calming or brightening the mind, or waking up the mind, but we are just bringing the conditioned realm into alignment with the already existent basic reality. The intrinsic nature of mind is already totally peaceful, totally energetic, and totally awake. That’s its inherent nature.

Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha

I find this a very helpful way of talking about it: the Buddha is that which is awake, that which knows, so taking refuge in the Buddha is taking refuge in the awareness of the mind. The Buddha arises from the Dharma. The Buddha is an attribute, knowing is an attribute of that fundamental reality. The Dharma is the ultimate object, the way things are. Its characteristic is emptiness. The Buddha is the ultimate subject, that which knows, that which is awake. So when the ultimate subject knows the ultimate object, when the mind that knows is aware of the way things are, what comes forth is Sangha, compassionate action. Sangha intrinsically flows forth from that quality. When there’s awareness of the way things are, then compassionate skillful means naturally arise and flow from that. The three refuges, as you can see, are all interwoven.

“To Be, or Not to Be” Is the Wrong Question

‘All exists’ is one extreme; ‘Nothing exists’ is the other extreme....The Buddha wouldn’t take the side of existence, being, and he wouldn’t take the side of nonbeing. He points out that “being is true” and “I am” both side with eternalism. And to say “nonexistence is true” or “I am not” sides with annihilationism, with nihilism.

The verses of the first Tsoknyi Rinpoche tell us: Mara is the mind clinging to like and dislike, so look into the essence of this magic, free from dualistic fixation. Realize that your mind is unfabricated primordial purity. There is no Buddha elsewhere. Look at your own face.

Another way that Ajahn Mun phrased it, in his enlightenment verses called “The Ballad of Liberation from the Khandhas,” is with this show stopper: The Dhamma stays as the Dhamma, the khandhas stay as the khandhas. That’s all. In the Sanskrit that would be skandhas: the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness. So the Dharma is the Dharma and the skandhas are the skandhas. There is the conditioned; there is the unconditioned. There is mind; there is mind-essence. That’s it. This is all we need to know.

Life Affirmation and Negation

So, similarly, when people ask, “What happens to the self when the body dies?” The answer is basically the same. The whole conception of the self is based upon a misapprehension, so the question doesn’t apply. The way we see our “selves” is a fundamental misapprehension that needs to be corrected. The practice is about learning to see clearly, to awaken to what really is.... said the Buddha. “Let me give you an example. Suppose we have a little fire burning here, made out of grass and sticks. And I say to you, ‘Have we a little fire here?’ You would say, ‘Yes, there’s a fire here.’ If we put the fire out, and then I ask you the question, ‘Where did the fire go? Did it go north, south, east, or west?’ What would you reply?” Vacchagotta said, “Well, the question doesn’t apply. It didn’t go anywhere, it just went out.” And the Buddha said, “Exactly so, Vacchagotta. The way you phrased the question presumes a reality that does not exist. Therefore, your question is not answerable in its own terms. ‘Reappear’ does not apply; ‘does not reappear’ does not apply . . .” (m 72.16-20)

He also made the point that, if the Tathaµgata had talked in terms of an “eternal and blessed life,” many of his disciples indeed would have been delighted with the idea but would have tended to cling to it with a passionate longing that would disturb all true peace and freedom. They thus would have become enmeshed in the powerful net of craving for existence. And while clinging to the idea of a beyond, for which by necessity they had to borrow all the coloring from this life, would they not have clung even more to the present, the more they pursued that imaginary beyond?

The Buddha replies: “Those who have reached the end have no criterion by which they can be measured. That which could be spoken of is no more. You cannot say ‘they do not exist.’ But when all modes of being, all phenomena, have been removed, all ways of speaking have gone too.” (sn 1076) This is what we refer to as parinibbana; it is where words and thoughts run out. It’s the rigpa zone. All language is based upon dualistic conceptions. So the Buddha is really being resolute by saying, “All ways of speaking have gone, too.” Beyond here, the buses don’t run. This is the end, the borderline. Language and concept can apply up to this point but not any further.

The Buddha is trying to discourage the habit of filling up space with ideas or some kind of belief or form. Instead, he is encouraging a direct realization of the truth so that we know for ourselves what that transcendent quality is. He’s encouraging us to establish that quality of knowing, of rigpa. Rather than creating an idea about something or an image or a memory of it or a plan to get it, we need to keep waking up to that, to keep coming to that. And that in itself is indescribable. We can talk about things like knowing, emptiness, lucidity, clarity, and so forth, but when the mind is fully awake to its own nature, the words run out. This is the “parinibbaµna effect”; it is an event horizon and marks a boundary with that which is beyond the realm of words. When the mind is truly awake, do we evaporate? Are we frozen solid? No. In fact, we are more alive than we have ever been before. There is a quality of total aliveness. Yet there’s also a complete lack of definition. In that moment we’re not male, we’re not female, we’re not old, we’re not young, we’re not any place, there is no time. It’s ownerless, timeless is-ness.

What are the four kinds of clinging? They are:

clinging to sense pleasure;
clinging to views and opinions;
clinging to conventions, to gurus, to meditation techniques, to an ethic, to specific religious forms; and
clinging to the idea of self.

The last four lines of the Metta Sutta are about the ending of clinging:

By not holding to fixed views
the pure-hearted one
having clarity of vision
being freed from all sense desires
is not born again into this world

 Rebirth cannot happen without ignorance and clinging.
Contact, feeling, craving, clinging, becoming. Then becoming leads to birth. At birth, there’s no turning back. The baby can’t go back inside again. At becoming it is almost too late to break the cycle. Once there is birth then it’s sealed—there is necessarily the whole lifespan, and during that lifespan there’s going to be sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, despair, aging, sickness, death.

In very practical terms, the nature of ultimate reality is not the problem—it sustains itself. The problem is that the heart loses sight of reality because of its addiction to craving.

We don’t feel unremitting bliss all the time, do we? If we intuit that there is an ultimate reality, which is pure and perfect and blissful, why don’t we continually experience that? What’s in the way? The reason is because of avijja and tan\haµ, ignorance and craving.

The pain is saying: “This really hurts. But somehow I know that this is not the ultimate reality.” We also know that “I can do something about this; it’s up to me.” So the faith that something is doable arises, and that faith is what launches us on the path of transcendence.

There is a feeling of hunger, a lack, or a longing that comes from the experience of suffering. If we are not awake to what’s going on, we think that what we lack is some thing—the new job, the new car, the new partner. Or we lack perfect health. We lack a decent meditation practice. We shouldn’t be hanging out with the Tibetan lamas; we should join the Theravaµdins at Abhayagiri. We should rejoin the Christians. We should move to Hawaii. It goes on and on. We go after any kind of external object or internal program to find the missing piece. This is the cycle of addiction, and it is a very common experience.


The Portable Retreat

 vajra song of the first tsoknyi rinpoche (tibetan)

Don’t wander, don’t wander, place mindfulness on guard;
Along the road of distraction, Mara lies in ambush.
Mara is the mind, clinging to like and dislike,
So look into the essence of this magic, free from dualistic fixation.
Realize that your mind is unfabricated primordial purity;
There is no Buddha elsewhere, look at your own face;
There is nothing else to search for, rest in your own place;
Non-meditation is spontaneous perfection so capture the royal seat.



Ajahn Amaro Small-Boat Great-Mountain

Death is Optional - Yuval Noah Harari

The basic process is the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness. Throughout history, you always had the two together. If you wanted something intelligent, this something had to have consciousness at its basis. People were not familiar with anything not human, that didn't have consciousness, that could be intelligent, that could solve problems like playing chess or driving a car or diagnosing disease.

Now, what we're talking about today is not that computers will be like humans. I think that many of these science fiction scenarios, that computers will be like humans, are wrong. Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn't really need consciousness.

It needs intelligence. And intelligence is a far easier thing than consciousness. And the problem is, computers may not become conscious, I don't know, ever ... I would say 500 years ... but they could be as intelligent or more intelligent than humans in particular tasks very quickly.

Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, to take just one example, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can basically break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic.

death-is-optional

se·nes·cence  the condition or process of deterioration with age.

• loss of a cell's power of division and growth.

t 

Machete Season - Jean Hatzfeld

"For my part, I offer you an explanation: it is as if I had let another individual take on my own living appearance, and the habits of my heart, without a single pang in my soul. This killer was indeed me, as to the offense he committed and the blood he shed, but he is a stranger to me in his ferocity. I admit and recognize my obedience at that time, my victims, my fault, but I fail to recognize the wickedness of the one who raced through the marshes on my legs, carrying my machete. That wickedness seems to belong to another self with a heavy heart. The most serious changes in my body were my invisible parts, such as the soul or the feelings that go with it. Therefore I alone do not recognize myself in that man. But perhaps someone outside this situation, like you, cannot have an inkling of that strangeness of mind."

"All genocides in modern history have occurred in the midst of war - not because they were its cause or consequence but because war suspends the rule of law; it systematizes death, normalizes savagery, fosters fear and delusions, reawakens old demons, and unsettles morality and human values. It undermines the last psychological defenses of the future perpetrators of the genocide. The farmer Alphonse Hitiyaremye summed it up his own way: "War is a dreadful disorder in which the culprits of genocide can plot incognito."

"In Germany as in Rwanda, genocide was undertaken by a totalitarian regime that had been in power for some time. The elimination of the Jew, the Gypsy, or the Tutsi has been openly part of the regime's political agenda from the moment it took power, and had been repeatedly stressed in official speeches. The genocide was planned in successive stages. It thrived in the disbelief of foreign nations. It as tested for short periods on segments of the population."

"In Germany and in Rwanda, efficient preparations preceded the formal decision on extermination, as if the decision were too appalling to be announced in public until it was already being carried out."

"Killing could certainly be thirsty work, draining and often disgusting. Still, it was more productive than raising crops, especially for someone with a meager plot of land or barren soil. During the killings anyone with strong arms brought home as much as a merchant of quality. We could no longer count the panels of sheet metal we were piling up. The taxmen ignored us. The women were satisfied with everything we brought in. They stopped complaining.
For the simplest farmers, it was refreshing to leave the hoe in the yard. We got up rich, we went to bed with full bellies, we lived a life of plenty. Pillaging is more worthwhile than harvesting, because it profits everyone equally."

"At the risk of offending historians of the Holocaust with this quick summary of their work, I would say that most of them - in particular Raul Hilberg, and his monumental study The Destruction of the European Jews - see four stages in the unfolding of the event: The first stage brought humiliation and loss of rights; next came designation and marking (armbands, yellow stars, writing on walls); then deportation and concentration; and finally complete elimination, through famine in the ghettos, shooting in the areas conquered by the German army, and gassing in the six specialized camps. These stages overlapped rather than succeeded one another in rigorous succession, and they were linked by continuous repression in the pogroms, as well as by plundering and expropriations, which were important for ensuring the support of a decisive segment of the population."

"As Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a teacher in Ntarama and a survivor of the marshes, confirms: "The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. Two teachers, colleagues with whom we used to share beers and student evaluations, set their shoulders to the wheel, so to speak. A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor -they all killed with their own hands… They wore pressed cotton trousers, they had no trouble sleeping, they traveled around in vehicles or on light motorcycles... These well-educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes. For someone who spent his life teaching the humanities, as I have, search criminals are a fearful mystery."

Ignorant of mechanized agriculture and agronomic technology, Rwanda's peasant society made no attempt to modernize the carnage, ignoring all scientific, medical, and anthropological experimentation, employee no efficient industrial techniques such as gas chambers and no ingenious methods to economize effort. The army did not use helicopters, tanks, or bazookas, while lighter weaponry such as grenades and machine guns came only sporadically into play, and then simply for tactical or psychological support..

In the fields, labor was manual. Therefore, the killings in the marshes were manual, and they proceeded at the pace of a seasonal culture.

Alphonse Hitiyaremye says that at one point, "We hurried things up, because the killing season was coming to a close. It promised to spare us the labor of one harvest, but not two. We knew that for the next season, we would have to take up our machetes again for other, more traditional jobs."

In the land of philosophy that was Germany, genocide was intended to purify being and thought. In the rural land of Rwanda, genocide was meant to purify the earth, to cleanse it of its cockroach farmers. The Tutsi genocide was thus both a neighborhood genocide and agricultural genocide. And in spite of its summary organization and archaic tools, it was outstandingly effective." 

I'll explain. When you receive a new order, you hesitate but you obey, or else you're taking a risk.When  you've been prepared the right way by the radios and the official advice, you obey more easily, even if the order is to kill your neighbors. The mission of a good organizer is to stifle your hesitations when he give you instructions.

For example, when he shows you that the act will be total and have no grave consequences for anyone left alive, you obey more easily, you don't worry about anything. You forget your misgivings and fears of punishment. You obey freely.

At bottom, we didn't care about what we accomplished in the marshes, only about what was important to us for our comfort: the stocks of sheet metal, the rounded-up cows, the piles of windows and other such goods. When we met a neighbor on a new bike or waving around a radio, greed drove was on. We inspected roofs along the way. People could turn mean if they heard about some fertile land already snapped up behind their back's. They could turn meaner than in the marshes, even if they were no longer brandishing there machetes.

All wars generate savage temptations  that are more or less murderous. The bloodthirsty madness of combatants, the craving for vengeance, the distress, fear, paranoia, and feelings of abandonment, the euphoria of victories and anguish of defeats, and above all a sense of damnation after crimes have been committed-these things provoke genocidal behavior and actions. In other words, panic or explosive fury and the desire to crush the enemy once and for all lead to massacres of civilians and prisoners, campaigns of rape and torture, deadly deportations, pure devastation in all directions. Sometimes non-military actions result as well: the poisoning of rice fields with pesticides, the slaughter of buffalo herds, the forced conversions to foreign religions and cultures. But to confuse these war crimes-even when they tend, in their collective insanity, to destroy a civilian community-with an explicit and organized plan of extermination is a political and intellectual mistake, symptomatic of our culture of sensationalism.

"War happens when authorities want to overthrow other authorities to take the wrong own turn at the trough. A genocide-that's what an ethnic group wants to bury another ethnic group. Genocide goes beyond war, because the intention last forever, even if it is not crowned with success. It is a final intention," says Christine Nyiransabimana, a farmer, in an astonishing echo of the "final solution."

In the Rwandan family, the main is the first one responsible for right and wrong actions, the in the eyes of the authorities and neighbors. If a woman wanted to hide Tutsi acquaintances, she had to get permission from her husband, because if she was found out, of course he was the one condemned by his neighbors to cut those acquaintances with his own hand, in public, right in front of his house. It was a punishment of some importance. It was a big thing to cut a person with whom you had shared years both good and bad.
The women were less deciding, they were less punishable, they were less active. They were in the second rank in that activity of genocide.
But really, in the Tutsi camp it was quite the opposite. The killings were more serious for the wives than for the husbands, if in addition they were raped at the end and saw their little ones get cut before their eyes.

It was not difficult to obtain sincere and detailed accounts from soldiers in Vietnam, from torturers for the Argentine dictatorship or in the Algerian war, from militiamen of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from secret policemen in the Iraqi or Iranian detention camps - sometimes by following the maxim of Oscar Wilde, "Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

The Saturday after the plane crash was the usual choir rehearsal day at the church in Kibungo. we sang hymns in good feeling with our Tutsi compatriots, our voices still blending in chorus. On Sunday morning we returned at the appointed hour for mass; they did not arrive. They had already fled into the bush in fear of reprisals, driving their goats and cows with them. That disappointed us greatly, especially on a Sunday. Anger hustled us outside the church door. We left the Lord and our prayers inside to rush home. We changed from our Sunday best into our workaday clothes, we grabbed clubs and machetes, we went straight off to killing.

In the marshes, I was appointed killing boss because I gave orders intensely. Same thing in the Congolese camps. In prison I was appointed charismatic leader because I sang intensely. I enjoyed the alleluias. I gladly felt rocked by those joyous verses. I was steadfast in my love of God.

"You will never see the source of a genocide", he says. "It is buried too deep in grudges, under an accumulation of misunderstandings that we were the last to inherit. We came of age at the worst moment in Rwanda's history: we were taught to obey absolutely, raised in hatred, stocked with slogans. We are an unfortunate generation."
He also says, "there are situations that set you singing if you win or crying if you lose", an unwitting plagiarism of the same observation made by Robert Servatius, Adolph Eichmann's lawyer, at his trial in Jerusalem: "There are some actions for which you are decorated if you succeed and sent to the scaffold if you fail."

When the Tutsis were caught, many died without a word. In Rwanda people say "die like a lamb in the Bible." Of course in Rwanda there are no sheep, so we have never heard their cry.
It sometimes touched us painfully that they awaited death in silence. Evenings, we would ask over and over, "Why no protest from these people who are about to leave? Why do they not beg for mercy?"
The organizers claimed that the Tutsis felt guilty for the sin of being Tutsi. Some interahamwe kept saying they felt responsible for the misfortunes they had brought upon us.
Well, I knew that was not true. The Tutsis were not asking for anything in those fatal moments because they no longer believed in words. They had no more faith in crying out, like frightened animals, for example, howling to be heard above the mortal blows. An overpowering sorrow was carrying the people away. They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths. 

Holy the Firm - Annie Dillard

"The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead. It all comes together. In a twinkling. You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle which accomplishes all philosophy."

"Has he no power? Can the other gods carry time and its loves upside down like a doll in their blundering arms? As though we the people were playing house - when we are serious and do love - and not the gods? No, that day's god has no power. No gods have power to save. There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time's tumult of occasions, abandones us to the god of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy."

"The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams; but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the millstones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other - for world and all the products of extension - is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arching to the realm of spirit bare.

"... The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by its sun - but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.      
But how do we know - how could we know - that the real is there? By what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name, and by what freak chance and why did the capacity to prehend it evolve? "

"I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready at hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation's dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were; God kann nicht anders ( God can do no other). This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery."

"And we need reminding of what time can do, must only do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God's blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone. Who are we to demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?) We forget ourselves, picnicking; we forget where we are. There is no such thing as a freak accident. "God is at home," say Meister Eckhart, "We are in the far country."

"The higher Christian churches - where, if anywhere, I belong - come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom."

"Scholarship has long distinguished between two strains of thought which proceed in the West from human knowledge of God. In one, the ascetic's metaphysic, the world is far from God. Emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the world is yet infinitely other than God, furled away from him like the end of a long banner falling. This notion makes, to my mind, a vertical line of the world, a great chain of burning. The more accessible and a universal view, held by Eckhart and by many peoples in various forms, is scarcely different from pantheism; that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, if nowhere else."

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times."

Human Evolution is Driven by Consciousness

You see from Dawkins’ perspective consciousness is created by biology, therefore, it cannot have any affect on biology. This is the strictly materialistic view. However, there is evidence which suggests this might be incorrect.

For example, stress is a major killer. It leads to high blood pressure, heart disease, and there is even some evidence that it can cause or exacerbate cancer. But, if Dawkins’ theory is correct and biology controls consciousness and not the other way around, then we should not be able to affect our own biology through sheer will. And yet, through relaxation techniques we can lower our blood pressure. We can make a conscious decision to exercise or reduce our caffeine intake to lower our stress levels. These are common conscious decisions which alter our physiology.

Human Evolution is Driven by Consciousness

"The new results indicate that as brains grew larger and entered the world in a less developed state, it became increasingly advantageous to relax the genetic control of their organization, essentially providing a bigger, blanker canvas for adapting and learning. This greater ability to fashion our brains in response to our environment, the study maintains, could provide a link between biological evolution and cultural evolution."

humans-can-outlearn-chimps-thanks-more-flexible-brain-genetics

"There is no centre of the universe! According to the standard theories of cosmology, the universe started with a "Big Bang" about 14 thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever since. Yet there is no centre to the expansion; it is the same everywhere. The Big Bang should not be visualised as an ordinary explosion. The universe is not expanding from a centre into space, rather, the whole universe is expanding and it is doing so equally at all places, as far as we can tell"

"In a conventional explosion, material expands out from a central point. A short moment after the explosion starts, the centre will be the hottest point. Later there will be a spherical shell of material expanding away from the centre until gravity brings it back down to Earth. The Big Bang—as far as we understand it—was not an explosion like that at all. It was an explosion of space, not an explosion in space. According to the standard models there was no space and time before the Big Bang. There was not even a "before" to speak of. So, the Big Bang was very different from any explosion we are accustomed to and it does not need to have a central point."

Where is the Centre of the universe

Either Image

Either God has made man in his image,
or man has made god in his.
Either way, it is a poor reflection of one on the other,
for if God has made man in his image,
then what does that suggest of God?
If man has made god in his image,
then what was does that suggest of man?

The Moral Equivalent of War - William James

"Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted upon it; we did but inherit it, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do."

"Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it."

"Peace" in military mouths today is a synonym for "war expected." The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that "peace" and "war" mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is thereal war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the "peace"-interval."

"But inordinate ambitions are the soul of any patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance."

"Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military character in stock — if keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces of perfection,...."

"When the time of development is ripe the war must come, reason or no reason, for the justifications pleaded are invariably fictions. War is, in short, a permanent human obligation."

"The horror makes the thrill; and when the question is of getting the extremest and supremest out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. The weakness of so much merely negative criticism is evident — pacifism makes no converts from the military party. The military party denies neither the bestiality nor the horror, nor the expense; it only says that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is worth them; that, taking human nature as a whole, its wars are its best protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that mankind cannot afford to adopt a peace economy."


The Moral Equivalent of Wat

The Social Conquest of Earth - Edward O. Wilson

"To form groups, drawing visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups - these are among the absolute universals of human nature and hence culture."

"prepared learning - the inborn propensity to learn something swiftly and decisively."

"People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They trust them more, relax with them better in business and social events, and prefer them more often that not as marriage partners. They are quick to anger at evidence that an out-group is behaving unfairly or receiving undeserved rewards. And they grow hostile to any out group encroaching upon the territory or resources of their in-group."

"The struggle to control vital resources continues globally, and it is growing worse. The problem arose because humanity failed to seize the great opportunity given it at the dawn of the Neolithic era. It might then have halted population growth below the constraining minimum limit. As a species we did the opposite, however. There was no way for us to foresee the consequences of our initial success. We simply took what was given us and continued to multiply and consume in blind obedience to instincts inherited from our humbler, more brutally constrained Paleolithic ancestors."

"Further, the mind consists not just of this inner world but also of the sensations and messages that flow in and out of it from all other parts of the body. To advance from robot to human would be a task of immense technological difficulty. But why should we even wish to try? Even after our machines far exceed our outer mental capacities, they will not have anything resembling human minds. In any case, we do not need such robots, and we will not want them. The biological human mind is our province. With all its quirks, irrationality, and risky productions, and all its conflict and inefficiency, the biological mind is the essence and the very meaning of the human condition."

"With enough population and wealth, the public services of art, sciences, and education can be added - first for the benefit of the elite, then, trickling down, for the general public. The heads of state sit upon a throne, real or virtual. They ally themselves with the high priests, and clothe their authority with rituals of allegiance to the gods."

"The ascent to civilization, from egalitarian band and village to chiefdom to state, has occurred through cultural evolution, not through changes in genes."

"No statistical genetic differences between entire populations have yet been discovered that affect the amygdala and other controlling circuit centers of emotional response. Not is any genetic change known that prescribes average differences between populations in the deep cognitive processing of language and mathematical reasoning - although such may yet be detected.
The stereotypes by which inhabitants of different nations, cities, and villages are often characterized might also have some hereditary basis in fact. However, the evidence suggests that the differences have a historical and cultural origin rather than a genetic one."

"Human nature is not the genes underlying it. They prescribe the developmental rules of the brain, sensory system and behavior that produce human nature."

"Human  nature is the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are the "epigenetic rules," which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory.These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make."

"As epi in the word "epigenetic" implies, the rules of physiological development are not genetically hardwired. They are not beyond conscious control, like the autonomic "behaviors" of heartbeat and breathing. They are less rigid than pure reflexes such as eyeblinks and knee jerks.

"The behaviors created by epigenetic rules are not hardwired like reflexes. It is the epigenetic rules instead that are hardwired, and hence compose the true core of human nature. The behaviors are learned, but the process is what psychologists call "prepared." In prepared learning, we are innately predisposed to learn and thereby reinforce one option over another. We are "counterprepared" to make alternative choices, or even actively to avoid them."

"Their parallel in medical genetics is the "susceptibility" genes of cancer, alcoholism, chronic depression, and many other of the more than a thousand known inherited diseases. Those who possess the genes are not absolutely condemned to acquire the trait, but in certain environments they are more likely than the average person to do so."

"The epigenetic rules of behavior that affect culture, and have arisen by natural selection, act the same way but have the opposite effect. They are the norm, and strong deviations from them are likely to be scrubbed out by either cultural evolution or genetic evolution, or both.

"As defined broadly by both anthropologists and biologists, culture is the combination of traits that distinguishes one group from another. A culture trait is a behavior that is either first invented within a group or else learned from another group, then transmitted among members of the group."

"The elaboration of culture depends upon long-term memory, and in this capacity humans rank far above all animals. The vast quantity stored in our immensely enlarged forebrains makes us consummate storytellers. We summon dreams and recollections of experience from across a lifetime and use them to create scenarios, past and future. We live in our conscious mind with the consequence of our actions, whether real or imagined. Placed out in alternative versions, our inner stories allow us to override immediate desires in favor of delayed pleasure. By long-range planning we defeat, for a while at least, the urging of our emotions. This inner life is why each person is unique and precious. When one dies, an entire library of both experience and imaginings is extinguished."

"What was the driving force that led to the threshold of complex culture? It appears to have been group selection. A group with members who could read intentions and cooperate among themselves while predicting the actions of competing groups, would have an enormous advantage over others less gifted. There was undoubtedly competition among group members, leading to natural selection of traits that gave advantage of one individual over another. But more important for the species entering new environments and competing with powerful rivals were unity and cooperation within the group. Morality, conformity, religious fervor, and fighting ability combined with imagination and memory to produce the winner."

"The genetic basis of human language acquisition," the researchers conclude, "did not coevolve with language, but primarily predates the emergence of language. As suggested by Darwin, the fit between language and its underlying mechanisms arose because language has evolved to fit the human brain, rather that the reverse."

"What genes prescribe or assist in prescribing is not one trait as opposed to another but the frequency of traits and the pattern they form as cultural innovation made them available. The expression of the genes may be plastic, allowing a society to choose one or more traits from among a multiplicity of choices. Or else it may not be plastic, allowing only one trait to be chosen by all societies."

"Are people innately good, but corruptible by the forces of evil? Or, are they instead innately wicked, and redeemable only by the forces of good? People are both. And so it will forever be unless we change our genes, because the human dilemma was foreordained in the way our species evolved, and therefore an unchangeable part of human nature. Human beings and their social orders are intrinsically imperfectible and fortunately so. In a constantly changing world, we need the flexibility that only imperfection provides."

"Nevertheless, an iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete: the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection we to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selections were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies"

"coercive empathy, meaning that unless people are psychopaths, they automatically feel the pain of others."

"Human beings are prone to be moral - do the right thing, hold back, give aid to others, sometimes even at personal risk - because  natural selection has favored those interactions of group members benefitting the group as a whole."

"The learning of complex information and its storage in memory are deliberate, painstaking processes, but the loss of information seems to take place with no trouble at all."

As the seventeenth-century essayist Francois de La Rochefoucauld observed, "Modesty is due to a fear of incurring the well-merited envy and contempt which pursues those who are intoxicated by good fortune. It is a useless display of strength of mind; and the modesty of those who attain the highest eminence is due to a desire to appear even greater that their position."

"indirect reciprocity, by which a reputation for altruism and cooperativeness accrues to an individual, even if the actions that build it are no more than ordinary."

"The power of organized religions is based upon their contribution to social order and personal security, not to the search for truth. The goal of religions is submission to the will and common good of the tribe."

"The illogic of religions is not a weakness in them, but their essential strength.... For outsiders openly to doubt such dogmas is regarded an invasion of privacy and a personal insult. For insiders to raise doubt is punishable heresy."

"Religious faith offers the psychological security that uniquely comes from belonging to a group, and a divinely blessed one at that. At least within the immense throngs of Abrahamic faithful around the world, it promises eternal life after death, and in heaven, not hell - especially if we choose the right denomination within the many available, and pledge to faithfully practice its rituals."

"Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small."

"Humanity is a biological species in a biological world. In every function of our bodies and mind and at every level, we are exquisitely well adapted to live on this particular planet. We belong in the biosphere of our birth. Although exalted in many ways, we remain an animal species of the global fauna. Our lives are restrained by the two laws of biology: all of life's entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life's entities and processes have arisen through evolution and by natural selection."

"The more the physical processes of consciousness have been defined by scientific research, the less has been left to any phenomenon that can be intuitively labeled as free will. We are free as independent beings, but our decisions are not free of all the organic processes that created our personal brains and minds. Free will therefore appears to be ultimately biological."