EOL is here :-)

http://www.eol.org/

10 most painful stings...

http://www.abcnews.go.com/Health/PainManagement/story?id=4342241&page=1

Still waiting for the EOL to come online...

Only working link to Encyclopedia of Life so far...

http://www.ngbw.org/eol/index.html

Extreme pilgrim

Caught the last of the Extreme Pilgrim series on iPlayer last night. Like him or hate him, this is an excellent series and the last was the best doing a retreat in the Egyptian mountains near the monastery of St Antony the Great.

3 take home points:

1) He is advised that any attempt to do spiritual practice will be met with opposition by the devil, and the greater the progress the harder the tests. This is identically echoed in eastern religions also where it is described as the accelerated fruition of negative karmas.

2) He is advised that the mentality is that if he prays and purifies then all mankind has prayed and is purified, and if he does not then all mankind is the worse. With this mentality he will be encouraged in the right path. Again this is similar (tho not the same) as the eastern practice of transfering merits and seeking to benefit others through our practice.

3) He discovers that he has been numb, and the clarity and life flows back into him as he begins the struggle to separate good from evil within himself. This reminds me of a similar realisation many years ago, that the centre of life is the continual quest to seek good over evil (that is truth of falsity - not in the knowledge but in the moral sense). I hadn't realised that the failure to pursue the truth makes us dead inside - a problem i feel is becoming epidemic.

Coolest Adverts...

finally found it ... coolest ad in the world from 2004

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ErRa-YShBJs

and another most excellent ad...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUfsOQ6IWOI

One from the 80's...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhQWfQ55NKg

Everything is non-self

When asked, if their a soul or a self, Buddha reportedly answered that we should identify everything as non-self.

Self is an unthinkable thing. The previous investigation into self-reference highlights the intrinsic problems of self. If we really had any relationship with ourselves, so that we might truly be able to refer to something as "self" would not that self be non-self referential? For if that self was self-referential then it would refer to itself and not-ourselves and if it was not self-referential then it would not be ourself since we are by definition in relation to it. In other words "can the mirror image really be us?". If the reflection is us then who is it a refection of? and if it is not us then how can it be our reflection. Neither are true, but neither are false either. Can a reflection really be of itself? It defies explanation. It is dialectical in european parlance, and certainly non-dualistic.

and so is the self.

More obviously where is the world are we? Can we point to anything in the world that we call ourselves? We might begin by pointing at the body. But what if we lost a part of our body, which bit is ourself? And so begins an endless process of finding the object whose reflection we call ourself.

Basically as far as we are concerned there is no thing called the self, because all the things in the universe are not ourselves. Indeed that is exactly what we are... not all the things in the universe! That is the great realisation that atman is brahman, it is the great realisation that the self is empty, of Hui Neng that because we are empty (or negative) there is room for the whole universe to exist... of Kierkegaard (quoted excellently in Waynes world) "If i name thee, I negate thee"... of Heideggar when we says that Being hides itself in the creation of the many beings... Being (ourself) is the negation of all th things, indeed is negative by the objective things of which we are actually "NOT" any of them. This is not nihilation but a very deliberate relationship between what IS and what must therefore NOT be, the two in an inexplicable relationship and marriage.

In society to make things confusing exists the double negation. "Gosson you are late" screams my teacher. My teacher is not-me. But to him I am not-him. He is my mirror reflection and I am his mirror reflection. So my mirror reflection is pointing at me and calling me his reflection... "Gosson!!" that is to say he is shouting, gosson You are late, I am not. So I am faced with a double negation and the apparent existence of myself standing in the class room being singled out as "late". Actually the double negation is not the same as "me" who cannot be identified in the room, and the double negation, this doppleganger, is this strange imposter in the world a ghost who I can verify does not exist yet other people seem to believe in.

But they have maybe fallen under the spell of self, just as I am dicing with.

Above is the issue of existence, of life, of death, of authenticity, delusion, and evil in a nutshell.

Am I going mad? because the further down this road I go, the further away I seem and the more mad the world then becomes... a sure sign of madness. Life also gets harder. I wonder if this really is the path, which while my desire to walk it is stronger than ever, I realise is a path that I would not wish anyone else to walk because this really is into an unknown wilderness.

Do only good.
Do no evil ever.

Notes on Natural World

Excellent program on BBC's Natural world...Earth Pilgrim, a Year on Dartmoor: 28th Jan 2008

Man is not humble enough to accept that he is part of Nature.

So he wages war on Nature, seeing what he can take, rather than what it give.

In so doing he wages war upon himself.

Satish Kumar



note to self: my problem in this argument has been that if man is Nature, then what Man does is Nature... somehow Satish avoids this problem... find out how!