A problem with sex

Just skipped thru and episode of the L-word cos someone told me I'd find one of the actresses attractive n I just realised what is the major wrong with sex especially those people who defgine themselves in terms of sex... have you ever noticed how much more selfish and self centred gay people are than straight people on average?

well i used to think it was because the gay person can find themselves sexually attractive that they are more narcisistic.

But I realise just now its not to do with gay/straight but to do with sex. The problem with sex is that it feels really good to us. It's like a drug. And the problem with getting hooked on our own pleasures is that it draws us into a world of "us". The whole external world starts to become orientated around how we can get our "fixes". It's bad in drugs, but what makes sex very bad is that we start tomanipulate other people in order to get our own fix.

Now other people are orientated the same way so it seems to be ok on the surface that both people are getting what they want. But really they are doing it at the expense of the other person. There is no "relationship" beyond the coincidence that they both get pleasure from touching.

This is far removed from the true "ecstatic" state of mind of existing "outside" oneself where we put other people before us, and even attend to their pleasures before our own. This would be love.

So there is nothing wrong with who we find attractive, but there is something wrong in making such a big deal out of it! Really its not important if we are gay or straight and much more that we pay attention to the people around and whether they are happy. That is the danger of homsexuality that it, more often than heterosexuality, becomes a way of life that people strongly identify with ... its a subset of the Me Me attitude which is the path to inauthenticity and non-ecstatic existence.

Heteroxesuality is not something people normally identify with ... its the just way things are. Heterosexuals are lucky to be able to just get on with their lives and worry about other things. Homosexuals are unlucky cos they need to fight for a space to be themselves. But once this is done, get on with life and other people and stop going on about it. There are some prejudice people but everyone else is cool and doesn't really care.

Accidents and Creativity

How is it that new things come out of the ether?

Innovation is caused by what we call "mistakes" where we fail to propagate our expectations.

The other half of the process is being able to incorporate the mistake and that it development.

Thus penecillin was found through bad laboratory practice, but then incorporated into the labs thinking.

The same with the recent developments in organic conductors, and with music and it seems evoliution where devlopment awaits mistakes.

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/06/roll-over-darwi.html

What is Christianity?

People call themselves Christians. I call myself a Christian but I thought to note here the question of what this means.

Christianity seems to have a few flavours.

Personally I think Jesus' coming to Earth was to teach people Love. When asked what the most important commandments were he said, Love only the Lord God, and Love your neighbour as yourself. His dying on the cross was to show us just how far we should be prepared to go in the name of Love. He took no action to save himself, he showed us to Love and never hate to the bitter end.

In America Jesus seems to have become some authoritarian figure who will stamp his power on the Earth come the last judgment. His ultimate power justifes the Nation of Christ, it is the creation and the destruction of Earth and the creation of Life eternal. We need only believe in God and Jesus for this version.

Forgiveness of sins is another strand. Being morally good puts us in Gods good books. Jesus died on the cross in place of us because we are sinners and if we accept that Christ died for us then we have our sins forgiven. But we need to repent and aim to emulate Christ's perfection also, belief is not enough just to clear our sins.

There is no one interpretation and clearly the disciples have hought long and hard and given their interpretatons esp. John and Paul. But those interpretations are not the whole of Christ.

That there is no cenral dogma and no single explanation of Christ or what he was here to teach it makes mch more sense to me now why no-one is ever able to teach Christianity that clearly. Obviously theologians have done enormous work to tidy it up, but the stories came from many places and Christianity is not one thing.

Are My Documents really mine?

I noticed yesterday that Windows does a clever trick. Each user has their files kept in a folder with their name. However that folder is changed to "My Documents" for the user that is logged in. Looking around the file structure we are faced with an interesting event, one that seems to reflect a real condition of being a self and having a mineness which Windows implements. But is it real? and what actually is mineness?

Is it necessary firstly? Windows could easily keep the names on the folders and it is simply a process of memory to remember who we are so that we can access our own files.

"My Documents" is the same word for each person, however we each interpret it to mean ourself, or more exactly it has a different meaning depending upon its context; in this case under which user you logged in.

So in the sense that we each have a different body and eyes n brain we each find ourself in a unique situation which is called mineness because it is unique.

However mineness also suggests that it belongs to us, or that it is our uniqueness which makes it unique. Actually this is not true. My experiences are unique, my actions unique, no-one else is writing this blog. It is unique. However that uniquess comes and goes and to hold onto a passed action or event that was unique so that it somehow has a stamp on it which defines it cotinuing uniqueness is false.

Yes I may have written the accounts.xls file a week ago and when someone finds it they may ask how it got there and it is true that I wrote it then. But i didn't write it as i am now, and i have laid it down and forgotten avbout it for a week. If i continue with the file now i need to remember what i was doing otherwise i'm just like anyone else. Within that week it might lose its value and get deleted, so all that mineness is negated and replaced by a new mineness.

Its just a note this... but its just lubricating this notion of self I'm investigating at the moment.

The Greatest Attachment

My Lab partner jai just came up with an inspiration insight...

After watching Dr Who last w/e he was taken by the fact that Dr Who once becoming a human didn't want to return to being the Dr because he had become attached to the human form. So it is with us Jai noticed.

Explaining that again just now he solved the biggest mystery I've had about the nature of self.

Why do we believe in a self at all? It stems from the fact that if you put a in pin into "me" then "I" feel pain while if you put a pin into "you" then "I" do not feel pain. Thus we naturally work to protect ourselves from pain and become indifferent to the pain of others.

But logicians will notice a circularity to this argument. 'If you put a pin into "me" then "I" feel pain' is hardly an explanation for the arising of self since we would need to know what self was in the first place to know where to put the pin!!

Never-the-less there is this feature of the world that certain things produce tangible pain and other things create pain in others but its not as tangible.

What the re-explanation from Jai provided was the insight that regardless of whether we experience the tangible form of subjective pain or the other-type of observed objective pain : in neither scenario is there need for a concept of self!! Before I had been unable to escape the thought there was.

Thus if we treat subjective pain, and objectibe pain as just features of the same world... why then treat one as Self and the other as Other.

There really is no need to think "myself" special, afterall everyone does so it sort of takes the specialness out of special ;-)

Thus we can let go of any notion of self.

The right path

It is still a mystery this life thing. I understand that death is the ultimate issue for the living; that death forms a limit upon the self beyond which we cannot escape because with death we lose ourself.

I also understand that the pursuit of pleasures is vacuous, it is like following a football team fortunes forever changing and the days just roll away.

It seems that the world is like a reflection in a broken mirror, each facet bringing a new but distorted and fravtured image of the whole. The many people, desires and things of this world just refelctions of a deeper reality which never changes. Get hooked on each facet, rushing from one pleasure or pain to another and we never see the broken nature of the image, or the underlying nameless reflection.

The true life it seems is one which must be quite boring to those who are involved in this endless journey and struggle to move from one place to another. The true life is one of peace and indifference. Not heartless and dead, but alive and fully awake to all things.

It is a long journey for me to accept this. Still I struggle through the hall of mirrors and reflections still believeing that there is a refelction that is better than the rest. That hope keeps me bound. To fully let go it seems is to abandon life, to throw away the only thing i have.

Soon I hope to realise that this thing which I think I have is itself worthless and impermanent, this life being just a personal event of little significance and limited value. Abandon the belief in myself as the only vehicle and accept the eternal unbroken reality - that must be the way. But how?

MSN from a friend on Middle Path

The buddha does not want us to follow the double path- desire and indulgence on the one hand and fear and aversion on the other.the middle way means "i will not take interest in pleasure or pain. i will lay them down". it is hard at first, we are like pendulum being knocked from one end to another just be aware of pleasure he teaches. anger, fear, dissatisfaction are not the path of the yogi but the path of worldly people. the tranquil person walks the Middle path or right practice, leaving grasping on the left and fear and aversion on the right.

Apparently when buddha preached his first sermon, he discoursed on these 2 extremes because this is where attachment lies. the desire for happiness kicks from one side; suffering and dissatisfaction kick from the other. these 2 are always besieging us. but when you walk the middle path, you put the 2 down.

When we follow these extremes, we will simply strike out when we are angry and grap for what atracts us, without the slightest patience or forbearance. how long can we go on being trapped this way? consider this: when you like something, you follow after it when liking arises yet it is just drawing you on to seek suffering. this mind of desire is really clever. where will it lead you next?

The buddha teaches us to keep laying down the extremes. this is the path of right practice, the path leading out of birth and becoming. on this path, there is neither pleasure nor pain, neither good nor evil. Our path is straight, the path of tranquility and pure awareness, calmed of both elation and sorrow.

When the heart/ mind is unattached, it is abiding in its normal state. when it stirs from the normal because of various thoughts and feelings, the process of thought construction takes place in which illusions are created. learn to see through this process. when the mind has stirred from normal, it leads away from right practice to one of the extremes of indulgence or aversion, thereby creating more illusion, more thought construction.

Good or bad only arises in your mind. if you keep a watch on your mind, studying this one topic your whole life, i guarantee tat you will never be bored."

"Alas, the mass of humans filled with desiring just strive for pleasure and always bypass the middle, missing the Path of the Excellent One, the path of the seeker of truth. Attached to birth and becoming, happiness and suffering, good and evil, the one who does not travel this Middle Path cannot become a wise one, cannot find liberation.

The futility in society

Having studied social animals at college i am well aware of continual processes at work determining relative status.

In rabbits for example it has been shown that they spend half their time on the look out for predators and half their time checking out the position and attitude of rivals in the herd. Bearing in mind a dominant rabbit can disembowel a rival with one kick it is clear where the danger lies in rabbits.

Now that I am moving in wider social circles I am amazed at how much time is wasted by humans with the same concerns.

I have noted this phenomenon a few blogs ago but now see that the prevalence of maintaining relative status in humans accounts for far more than the 50% in rabbits more like 90%.

Everyone I know is involved in tit for tat struggles whether bitching and back biting to jealousy and keeping up with the Jones. It is worse in immigrant populations also.

A study on apes showed that the dominant apes are those who are able to resist the temptation to tit-for-tat struggle and save themselves for major battles. The same advice seems to work for humans.

Studies show that it is relative status which determines happiness far more than absolute quality of life - at least for people who have escaped the life of basic necessity. This is why societies do not get happier as they get richer.

Humans are indeed wasting their lives in social game play. It is a clear decision this week to avoid all this completely and anyone who is involved in it, which is everyone. And simply exist in the awareness of what actually is regardless of its relative merits.