Speculations on Göbekli Tepe through to Buddhism

So while most of the country was complaining about HRH Prince Philip's RIP effect on the schedules I chanced upon an amazing CH5 offering "Ancient Mysteries: Eden Revealed." It steals a chapter out of a book I want to write, but nice to know someone thinking along the same lines... and added considerably more... so established wisdom is these Megalithic monuments (like above) were erected at the START of farming. They represent the first work done by human beings that had become settled and had the spare calories and local investment to do such things. But an 11k yo megalithic site at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is pre-farming!!!! Hunter-gatherers built this. So it was not built to set-in-stone productive farm land, but to mark something more ancient. So why does it coincide so close with farming (the original barley genes come from this area)? Researchers interviewed for this program suggest that it was a ritual site, and farming developed to meet the food requirements of the pilgrims/revellers. Quite reasonably given how grain was used ever since, it was added to water to sterilise it and make beer. So essentially you would have had something akin to a modern music festival with feasting. 11k yo the people were identical to us, so would they be any different. This is likely pre-class too (so no warriors/priests imposing fascist control either.. after all if you piss of hunter-gatherers they just leave and hunter-gather somewhere else - no concept of investment or capitalism). It is pretty apparent to me Garden of Eden is a record of the start of human work and what a difficult life it was when hunter-gathering stopped. You can find interviews with Amazonian and African hunter-gatherers post-contact trying out Capitalisms and just not-understanding why anyone would live like this: why do I need money or work when I can just go into the forest and find everything I need they universally complain. The switch to work and capitalism was hard, and led to laborious days harvesting and grinding of seeds, nutrient deficiency, arthritis, and crowded living conditions. But calories were higher and populations grew and slowly expanded to displace the hunter-gatherers (as happened with mass slaughter in the New World and is still happening in Amazon). The CH5 program added Capitalism as another reason we never returned to hunter-gathering. Once investments had been made in the lifestyle they acted to weigh us down.. which is the traditional understanding of Megaliths also... more a fascist control mechanism like Castles of a rising elite. And that is pretty much the modern Western world already in place. So I've speculated why in middle ironage C5th BC people around the world were saying the same thing Logos(pre-Socratics), Dao(Lao-Tze) or Dharma(Buddha) which are all anathema to Capitalism and being weighed down by worldly attachments*. Was this a final memory of the wisdom of hunter-gathering before mankind got sucked into the swamp of material attachment? There's a lot to consider in Megaliths anyway.

*subtle point: non-attachment is not rejecting worldly things (they are here whether we like it or not) but its remaining hunter-gatherer amongst them.

Just as a bee in a flower

harming neither hue nor scent

gathers nectar, flies away,

so in towns a Wise One fares.

[Dhammapada, vs 49]

Tragedy of Commons?

In reality Tragedy of Commons only happens in capitalist countries. Which points to the problem.

There's a story told in many versions about how traditional economics works. It was told to me by some Nepalese in the form of some fishermen who always caught 2 fish every day. Sometime they would catch them quickly but sometimes it would take a whole day to catch them. The fishermen are questioned. On the day when the fish are common why don't you catch as many as you can and then sell them for profit. The fisherman simply says he doesn't need them.

That story perfectly illustrates why Tragedy of Commons has only emerged as a problem in Capitalist countries. The idea of working not for what you need but rather for its own sake to accumulate capital has switched human behaviour towards unlimited exploitation. Human life has ceased to have any meaning, it is just production and consumption for its own sake. For the fisherman fishing, the way of life and the actual quality of the fish they catch all having central meaning to their lives. They are after all fishermen: that identity is central to their lives. What is the Capitalist other than a machine for accumulating more capital.

So security is probably the most important issue here. The Capitalist is secretly anxious and insecure. They accumulate capital in a vain attempt to fend off the day they have nothing. But it is a self generating anxiety. In a country where everyone is desperately trying to accumulate infinite capital for themselves there is huge competition, and resources are fought over. If you don't fight you lose. This causes the very anxiety that drives desperate resource accumulation. So Tragedy of Commons is actually self generating. The moment you don't trust other people and think they will start exploiting a resource is the moment you start thinking how to exploit it. The very idea of Capitalism is itself the tragedy.

Does Population Matter?

Population Matters is a charity that addresses concerns about population growth. When I was 13 I awoke to these concerns when I divided the Earth land by the population. At time of writing it is 1/16km2 (255m2).

This 1/16 of a km must supply all our food and resources we will need in our life and any children we produce (else we steal from someone else).

So we have the population concern whose illustrious worriers include Sir David Attenborough. 

https://populationmatters.org/news/2018/10/05/sir-david-attenborough-we-must-act-population

But the world is unequal. A person in the US uses twice the resources of someone in the UK. If everyone on the earth lived like people in the UK then all the world's resources would be used. Not everyone can like like an American. But if everyone lived like a Nepali then only 1/50 of the Earth resources would be used.

If we all lived like Nepalis then we could expand the human population 50 times! Population is not the problem. The problem is that Nepalis want to live like Americans, and Americans don't want to live like Nepalis.

I've explored this throughout this blog so won't go into detail here but the Americans are wrong not to want to live like Nepalis and the Nepalis are wrong to want to live like Americans. It is especially ironic for Nepalis because a true Nepalis shouldn't even be listening to US propaganda. They have their own guru Siddhartha Gautama of the Shakya tribe. I don;t remember anywhere Siddhartha extolling the virtues of expensive living. Indeed he said that such behaviour leads to suffering!

Death sweeps away
The person obsessed
With gathering flowers,
As a great flood sweeps away a sleeping village.
...

As a bee gathers nectar
And moves on without harming
The flower, its color, or its fragrance,
Just so should a sage walk through a village.

[Dharmapada: Flowers]

As Buddha says the world is there to be enjoyed, but we do that enjoyment lightly without collecting, storing or being drawn to the objects of pleasure. The Capitalist or the person desiring what they do not have has only death awaiting for them. All this in reality are empty, they have a coat of perceptions added to them by the mind from which they are almost imperceptibly different. Anyone very skilled in meditation who can develop a suitably subtle mind will be able to see the difference between Nama and Rupa that is Name and Form, and see the process of the mind upon the void of emptiness. Those who pursue these illusions are like dogs chasing their tails, wrapped up in a world of fruitless activity. Such is the world of Capitalism that consumes the world's resources.

So to those with an ear close to the ground the problem is not population. It turns out to be a fundamental error in how the West thinks that leads to Capitalism and all the associate problems. There are reasons that these problems have arising in the age of Capitalism and not before!

Is Entropy really a measure of disorder?

 From wiki:

The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, and is constant if and only if all processes are reversible.

 Armed with this Boltzmann concluded that the universe would always inch towards increased entropy (assuming that it was not reversible which means assuming that time flows forward).

 So what is the end game?

Well one thing we know is that the 2nd Law itself does not change. The universe remains permanently and incredibly structured under the laws of physics.

Now if thermodynamics really was that profound wouldn't it effect the very structure of the universe? Why do the Laws remain constant?

We have SRH here. To form any construction e.g. the laws of thermodynamics we must establish a foundation which cannot then be effected by the construction. Whatever that foundation is that we built the laws of thermodynamics upon it remains outside the scope of the laws.

When we create a foundation we do it with the intention of giving our construction some "power." The problem however like the Little Mermaid is that to get that power we have struck a bargain with the devil. Nothing is free. The bargain is that this power cannot be used to change the foundation. If we want to change the foundations later then we cannot have a very powerful system. It is this that needs to be formalised into a general theory. However what we are looking for with SRH Theory is a powerful foundation for the reason why powerful foundations cannot change themselves. We would need to show that changing the foundations of any theory causes a contradiction, or requires an outside. No system has the explanatory power to understand its own foundations. Power must come from outside etc etc  

Anyway: There will always be an outside.

SRH was part inspired by this necessity for systems to have an outside, that the idea of a system being self contained is a contradiction.

SRH was the realisation that God is always present in human endevour no matter how much we wish to construct a rational world, it always depends upon assumtpions that are established outside the system.

In logic the Axioms are these mysterious starting points that in some views are considered "self evident" or more broadly just the smallest set of starting points that do not contradict and from which all other theorems are derivable from the rules. Needless to say the rules themselves cannot be derived from the axioms because how could you "derive" the process of derivation. This is pure SRH.

It means all human and machine endevours are self-limiting. The very foundations that we accept to get started, become the yoke around are necks that hold us back. The good thinker is very light footed and picks up and puts down rules as needed, and when the restrictions of that set of foundations becomes too limiting they put the tool back down. The good thinker therefore has no fixed foundation. There are, and can be no fixed foundations to good thinking because those very foundations would become the prison.

Now perhaps the logically minded might think that good-thinking requires exactly this prison to remove the possibility of bad thinking. But the prison becomes our thinking then, and as we have seen we would be unable to see the assumtions that underly the prison. And wasn't the idea of logic to determine in a transparent way what bad thinking was. Yet if we just have prison guards telling us what is good and bad thinking we are as blind as before. This was Hegel's critique of Kant, that his search for the foundations of Reason (which ended in a museum of transcendental conditions which were suppose to lend authenticity to Reason) were like an astronomer using his broken telescope to investigate itself. How would the astronomer know given that all he has is the one telescope. He wouldn;t know what a good or bad telescope was.

So we always end up at the same place, the start. We can build our construct and go some interesting places, but we always come home.

Hmm what actually is Anti-Semitism?

 Its going to come as a shock to Margaret Hodge (and I suspect many Jews) that actually they have never experienced Anti-Semitism.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-hodge-labour-anti-semitic-abuse-b74084.html

I love how this articles goes off on a anti racist tirade without actually establishing evidence of any anti-semitism. Such is the modern hysteria.

So Hodge says:

she “dies soon”, others calling her a “Zionist stooge” and “funded by Israel”, and other racist and misogynistic abuse.

is problematic. Really? Wishing someone "dies soon" is ugly but is just standard trolling, nothing anti-semitic here. Calling someone a "stooge" is pretty standard in politics too, just suggesting that they are being bent by greater political powers. If someone said she was a "banking stooge" how would that be racist? And being funded by Israel is just the same. If someone had said she was funded by USA would that be racist? Israel is just a country.

The problem Hodge has found for herself is because she is Jewish and arguing in favour of Israel she is obviously going to get the type of comments she gets. If she thinks that's anti-semitic the quickest way to end this is just to argue for another country.

This is a perfect illustration of how the Jews have entered into a group psychosis and paranoid delusions of persecution. All Jews alive today need to realise that the Holocaust has ended and only a literal handful of them today ever experienced it. The rest are like the rest of the planet as only having heard about it. No excuses for PTSD or any other psychological illness. Time to get over it and move on.

Its a strong lesson to Non-Jews not to get sucked into this paranoia and mental illness. I heard about "Jerusalem Syndrome" recently, I think medical books should document "Jew Syndrome" also and Margaret Hodge can be their normative case.

"Jew Syndrome" is a bit like Narcissism, where everything that happens to you gets interpreted as being because of your Jewishness. So when someone says "they hate you" most people don't even take it personally, they just realise that this person doesn't like them. The Narcissist gets obsessed and takes is very personally. And the Jews thinks they hate them because they are Jewish. They then interpret it as Anti-Semitism and so a crime. They don't realise that they might actually be a dirty little smuck and would be hated Jewish or not.

The test for people with "Jew Syndrome" is just swap out the "jewish" part of it and see if it still makes sense.

So for Margaret Hodge. If someone say "hope you die soon" imagine you are not Jewish and see if they still want you dead. If someone calls you a "stooge for Israel" imagine you are Russian and arguing for Putin and see if they still call you a "stooge for the Kremlin." etc etc

This is how stupid "Jew Syndrome" is. The Nazis were all Germanic Saxons. They were Nazi because they were Germanic Saxons. This means that if you criticise a Nazi you are not just arguing against anyone who believes that Germany is the homeland of Germans but an actual German. Being German the Nazi beliefs are therefore racial, and not accepting them is anti-germanic. Are we really going to say that destroying the Nazis was racist? Utter absurdity. And Germans who adopted Nazi ideas cannot say they had no choice being German, and finding people criticising their Nazi ideas does not become an attack on their being German.      

So as the American say: Jews just get over yourselves already.

No-one but Jews and Nazis actually care about Jews. The real problem here is that the Jews will poison the world with their nonsense. We are going to get other races with "Jew Syndrome" and its going to mess up all the progress that has been made with racism.

The moment people cannot enter into discussion about things because one or other of the members of the discussion starts taking everything personally then its game over for freedom of speech and the end of a unified world of non-racism. The moment a white person cannot speak to a black person cos either the white person or the black person is going to interpret anything negative as a personal racist attack then its game over. The Jews are just absolutely the worst at this and do need to be internationally called out before they succeed in messing everything up.

The Germans tried this with the idea that Germany belonged to Germans and that they were the "first amongst nations." Had this idea spread then every country would have become the homeland of its racial people, and each country would be at war as it sparred to become the master race. Thankfully only Israel has adopted these ideas. But they need to end if we stand any hope of ending racism once and for all. It means that ironically that the Jews stand as the biggest hurdle to ending racism in the world today. How many Jews actually realise this. Margaret Hodge for certain doesn't.

btw the very worst anti-semitism I heard was in an exchange from Mel Gibson to Winona Ryder. At a party apparently he called her "an oven dodger." Now unlike anything that Margaret Hodge has ever heard this can only be applied to Jews, Russians, Gays, and Roma. And it not only makes reference to the mass slaughter of people in Concentration Camps by the Nazis but it suggests that Winona Ryder should have been among them. If Winona was French for example this wouldn't work. It passes the Anti-Semitism test. So as argued I think most modern Jews have never actually experienced any Anti-Semitism and what they have is entirely in their heads for which they need a psychologist rather than the police.

The H-Bomb shortened the War

People really do talk absolute nonsense, and on certain subjects no one ever stops them.

To everyone who thinks the H-Bomb shortened the war perhaps they would have liked to have been a victim of the bomb and do their part in shortening the war.

But obviously we didn't need an H-Bomb to shorten the war. If all the soldiers had just committed suicide one night the war would have been over instantly. And if they wanted to save lives then just lay your weapons down and it would have been over instantly without any loss of life. In fact never even go to war and nothing would have happened.

No people chose to go to war and chose to die, and they did so to win. The H-Bomb helped the Allies win. And it was dropped not to shorten a war to save lives, but to hasten a victory for the Allies. Which is obvious if anyone thinks about it.

If Japan or Germany had got the H-Bomb first and used it on defenceless civilians they would have shortened the war too, but would have been viewed as Evil. And that is the correct view. It was Evil, and the people who both used it and supported the use of it are Evil. 

===

On the subject of shortening the war the absolutely best way to have done that would have been for Germany to have massacred the 338,000 Allied troops at Dunkirk in 1940. That would have been the end of the war and it would have saved the lives of 80 million people and the Holocaust would not have even been triggered. The Germans would have been seen as complete Heroes for quickly and decisively defeating the British Empire and liberating the world. With control of the Middle East, Germany would have easily found lands for the Jews and would have (probably with mutual agreement) relocated them all from Europe. But the Germans made a critical mistake of expecting rational behaviour from Churchill and unfortunately he did not surrender and so while British troops were spared it was only for them to prolong a war that destroyed Europe and let the US take over and rob everyone of their freedom.

And all her paths are Peace

So goes the poem by Cecil Spring-Rice, 1918

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,^[9]
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

And it captures the irony, contradiction and hypocrisy at the heart of those who choose violence. There can only be peace amongst those for whom all paths are Peace. If any path leads to violence then you can have war.

If a flow diagram was written for the Peaceful Heart then there would be no way to get to violence.

Yet for a large part of Humanity they do not have this skill to find Peace and many paths lead to violence.

War obviously is the greatest failure of the heart that seeks peace. But what an absurdity that those who have partaken in war and have chosen violence are considered to have anything to do with Peace when they have had everything to do with unrest, violence, hurt and harm.

Now it is true the Path of Peace is made difficult. In times of War the violent will persecute the peaceful. Those who refuse to bear arms against their fellow man will be ousted from communities, will be disgraced by their countries and will probably be charged with criminal offences and find themselves in gaol. But Jesus taught us most graphically that to defeat the Devil we will often be treated as criminals and we must be prepared to die a criminal to really choose the path of Peace. It is ironically the weak ones who give in to peer pressure and collective expectations and pick up weapons when it is quite obvious that by doing so they are taking the path of violence and only contributing to the bloodshed and unrest.

It has been argued in the blog many times that violence does achieve a type of peace that I have called The Pax after the Pax Romana. There is now a Pax Americana. This is the peace that arises when you have a tyrant that is so strong that no one can rebel.

In nature animals competing for resources never fight unless they think they have a chance of winning. A very powerful Tyrant keeps the peace easily as no competitor will risk a fight. And in animals the equation is simple as battles are one-on-one. In humans calculating your chance is more complex as battles are co-operative affairs and as has been seen many times in history a smaller well organised force and defeat what looks like overwhelming odds. Also humans are prepared die for ideas which muddies the water in a way animals never have to confront. 

But any silence achieved through this is not true Peace. When the Pax Tyranni fails then violence breaks out again. We saw that in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was "toppled" (literally as well as figuratively). This is not to say that violence was bubbling under the surface of Hussein's Iraq but it was to say that peace was not understood and when the conditions arose for violence people turned to violence automatically and unavoidably.

The truly peaceful NEVER chose violence under ANY circumstances. There is no excuse. Christians know this as Jesus never turned to violence even on The Cross. Yet even in the name of Christ many people have turned to violence demonstrating how little they really grasped the Path of Jesus. Some might argue that Jesus did display anger and violence for instance when he got angry with the money lenders in the temple shouting and over turning tables. Perhaps we can make a distinction here between getting angry and wishing to harm. We often do things when we are angry that we regret afterwards. The state of anger is a mystery. But violence and war is a way of life, it is far more than just a momentary loss of balance. 

Its a huge irony for the religious that every single person who died in WW1 and WW2 with a gun in their hands and hatred for the Germans in their hearts will find themselves in Hell. Maybe they will be surprised at this, but if they look at what they really desired it will be clear to them. A truly peaceful person would never have hated for their foe in the first place, they would have turned the other cheek when wronged, and would have profound pity and compassion for all those on all sides so blinded by the devil that they seek to harm each other.

In WW2 not the Japanese nor the Italian but just the Germans have a particularly grave mark against their name which seems to justify violence against them. But we know that no-one fighting in WW2 actually knew or cared about the Death Camps. That all came to provenance after the war. But this detail is actually irrelevant for the person of peace. Even in the full knowledge of the Holocaust there is still no reason for violence. Peace is always unconditional. If you see someone committing violence you don't then start yourself. Chances are they are only committing violence themselves cos they saw someone else committing violence. Violence is an infection it must stop somewhere. And that somewhere is with the Army of Peace.

So how do you handle Genocides like the Holocaust? First to note that many genocides have gone unhandled: Armenian, Rwanda, American Indians to name just 3. But we can agree that all genocides should not take place, and yet must also agree that each peoples is capable of Geocide. It is not something that only Germans or Turkish or Americans do.

We know when genocide happens there are people who have not accepted the path of peace. There are many peaceful routes open to us. First might be to politically reject them and economically reject them. The Treaty of Versailles after WW1 was not in response to Genocide it was actually ultimately the cause of Genocide. Rather than punish the German people then, when they hadn't actually done anything wrong other than lose a war, they should have been punished after the creation of concentration camps to fuel their economy. But the West actually just escalated trade with Germany and fuelled the creation of Concentration Camps. I can write on and on about this. The roots of the Holocaust do not lie in Germany at all but in the actions of all the countries who set up the conditions. If people really wanted to stop Holocaust the opportunities were present endlessly and always Peacefully.

Ultimately there will always be people prepared to harm other people for whatever reason. And we can always set up Pax Tyranni to avoid the conditions where they might be violent. The Holocaust could have been easily averted with wise government from the Allies. Germans where not especially racist before the loss of WW1 and the Versailles agreement. But if we really wish to have a world of Peace we need start setting down the roots of true peace which means refusing anything to do with violence or people who are or espouse violence in any form.

This would mean in the West for example not paying taxes if they will be used on violent means, or at the very least applying political pressure on all those who believe that some paths should lead to violence.

We are a far from, perhaps even further from, true peace now than ever before. And the Pax Americana leads the violent into a belief that they are somehow miraculously peaceful these days while clearly haven't learnt nothing but a respect and love for war that we see during Remembrance Day. We should be ashamed of this scar on humanity and all those involved should bow their heads in shame and if anything try to distance themselves from involvement in this Darkest Hour of mankind's existence where 80 million lost their lives for nothing. There is nothing to show for their sacrifice and people still don't say never again even after all this suffering. It seems Mankind enjoys suffering and the more the better. But the Peaceful reject all this. May all her paths really be peace.