Having read that book by Ven. Walpola I think an important understanding has emerged. Consider this:
Have you a memory of something that causes you distress, worry or suffering? OK remember it now and suffer a bit.
Doesn't the argument go like this: I have remembered something that has really happened, or is really happening. Because it is real, it means that is exists whether I remember it of forget it. Because the memory causes me suffering, it means that the thing causes me suffering; and because the thing is real then the suffering is real, well founded and should remain with me.
What this line of reasoning hides from us is a very, very, very important fact: we don't suffer when we forget about it. When we are asleep the memory stops and we don't suffer. If we were to die; the same. Even if we are distracted by something else, the mind is no longer on the object of suffering and it stops.
What this should point out to us (when we are correctly alerted to it as Walpola does) is that the suffering is not created by the thing but by the memory, and the suffering and the memory (like the thing) are temporary things which arise and decay. They are not eternal.
There are 2 profound points here. (1) That it is the mind, not the reality, where the suffering is created and happens. (2) That there is a higher reality which transcends the separate arising and decaying moments of our minds.
Switching for a second to the Abrahamic view this parallels the difference between God and devil. God is the higher reality which transcends the momentary arising and decayings and exists at all times and in all places, while any particular devil comes and goes and is only ever causing suffering at one place and time.
The problem of sin then is no longer the view of absolute evils that have been committed either in our personal hisories or in world histories, but rather the attachments that caused those evils which persist through history as long as we don't learn, and the attachments to memories which do the same.
Wisdom saves us from wrong doing. Most importantly humility and acknowledgement of wrong doing and suffering (both our own and others) . Repentence and forgiveness being the way of the wise. Denial and justification the way of the ignorant.
Friday, 26 December 2008
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
Note
An old idea hatched with a friend was the realisation that capitalism was secretly designed to make you unhappy bcause if you were happy then you would not shop or work and th economy would collapse. I realise today that really a lot of hat has been argued so far is a version of that. Human Societies become self serving at the expensive of the human collective they are supposed to represent because people either come to rely upon the identity or power that they gain through heirachy within these societies, or in an economy the livelihood that it affords them.
The economic collapse is the greatest Christmas present we could be given because it relieves us of much of the burden of work. According to one tabloid large numbers of people are taking an unprecidented 1 month holiday this Christmas - why not take more there is no longer any ork to do.
But the catch is not a reality it is just an unfortunate feature of the current economy that if you don't work then the whole distribtion system collapses too and no-one can receive even the essentials. Thus because we aren't working on making x-boxes and interior decorating we must starve. This is the problem that the new economic theory that surpasses the antequated capitalist system must solve.
The problem then can be reduced maybe entirely to "attachment". It is the attachment of ordinary people to extra-ordinary social organisation and status that is the ultimate problem maybe. A new economic theory must offer people satisfactions and rewards separate from what they do! So that the "doing" becomes a means and not an end, otherwise people keep on "doing" beyond utility and even to disutility.
Consider the growing requirement to be economical with resources. Despite talk to reduce, reuse and recycle we are also expected to buy more to keep the economy running? The economy has reached a point long ago where its "doing" is becoming disutility.
===
On subject of old ideas. Harmonic Structuralism seems to be returning into favour. It was a means of objectively separating Nazism from Democracy. The "good" is the largest harmonic group. Nazis are limited by their opposition to certain minorities and neighbouring politics. They are good for their limited membership. Democracy is better etc etc
===
Progress. Qualitatie and Quantitative progress. Was trying to think of any qualitative progress. Do we yet eat anything that was not discovered long ago? Well to date there are no artifiial foods - i.e. artificial foods are just cheap copies of wild foods. There are no man made tastes or foods yet. Entertainment is not new and nothing we have developed is qualitatively different from sitting around the fire hearing a well told story (if you have ever experienced complete absorption into narrative so that it is as good as real). Even in medicine we have been operating and giving medicinies all of history. Genetic modification has occured in farm animals, wheat and dogs so even this cutting edge of science is just new tools for old methods. Is there anything new?
If not maybe it is simply because man-kind has not changed. We still have 5 senses and the same brain. This very much supports my argument for seeing through the aura that surronds all things modern.
===
OK signing off. Hopefully in the new year I can tie up the negative analysis and start to synthesise a full working positive hypothesis of life - I need to ... somewhere in all of this I've got to live! Merry Christmas
The economic collapse is the greatest Christmas present we could be given because it relieves us of much of the burden of work. According to one tabloid large numbers of people are taking an unprecidented 1 month holiday this Christmas - why not take more there is no longer any ork to do.
But the catch is not a reality it is just an unfortunate feature of the current economy that if you don't work then the whole distribtion system collapses too and no-one can receive even the essentials. Thus because we aren't working on making x-boxes and interior decorating we must starve. This is the problem that the new economic theory that surpasses the antequated capitalist system must solve.
The problem then can be reduced maybe entirely to "attachment". It is the attachment of ordinary people to extra-ordinary social organisation and status that is the ultimate problem maybe. A new economic theory must offer people satisfactions and rewards separate from what they do! So that the "doing" becomes a means and not an end, otherwise people keep on "doing" beyond utility and even to disutility.
Consider the growing requirement to be economical with resources. Despite talk to reduce, reuse and recycle we are also expected to buy more to keep the economy running? The economy has reached a point long ago where its "doing" is becoming disutility.
===
On subject of old ideas. Harmonic Structuralism seems to be returning into favour. It was a means of objectively separating Nazism from Democracy. The "good" is the largest harmonic group. Nazis are limited by their opposition to certain minorities and neighbouring politics. They are good for their limited membership. Democracy is better etc etc
===
Progress. Qualitatie and Quantitative progress. Was trying to think of any qualitative progress. Do we yet eat anything that was not discovered long ago? Well to date there are no artifiial foods - i.e. artificial foods are just cheap copies of wild foods. There are no man made tastes or foods yet. Entertainment is not new and nothing we have developed is qualitatively different from sitting around the fire hearing a well told story (if you have ever experienced complete absorption into narrative so that it is as good as real). Even in medicine we have been operating and giving medicinies all of history. Genetic modification has occured in farm animals, wheat and dogs so even this cutting edge of science is just new tools for old methods. Is there anything new?
If not maybe it is simply because man-kind has not changed. We still have 5 senses and the same brain. This very much supports my argument for seeing through the aura that surronds all things modern.
===
OK signing off. Hopefully in the new year I can tie up the negative analysis and start to synthesise a full working positive hypothesis of life - I need to ... somewhere in all of this I've got to live! Merry Christmas
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Profit?
Profit arises when income exceeds costs. How is this possible however? Two identical companies competing in a true free market if they had surplus wealth would use this to increase wages or lower prices so as to attract better staff or more customers. Surplus wealth would thus always disappear.
Of course it is never a free market and this example illustrates this point most definatively.
In the jobs market a surplus of prospective employees in a particular market reduces wages. That is competition between people to get a job means that they will accept lower and lower wages even to the point of absurdity because being alive but exploited is preferable to being starving. In the case of skilled employment such a glut of individuals would cause people to reskill, but for unskilled labour there is no such escape from competition. A surplus of unskilled staff means that companies will always make profit on wages, and it also encourages companies to reorganise toward unskilled "division of labour" for this reason. This is quite a different explanation of profit from Smith's economies of scale in the famous pin factory.
Imagine pin making was broken down from 1 skilled task into 10 even more skilled tasks, maybe using highly complex machinery. Then while factory output might increase a hundred fold the supply of staff skilled enough to operate the machinery would vanish. They could then charge whatever they liked from the capitalists and the profit would vanish. Any company trying to cut wages would lose its precious staff to competitors.
The situation with prices is simpler. In theory any company with profit could reduce its costs and out compete its competitors. However as far as I can see there two factors which limit market freedom. Copyright and patents mean that capitalists can control production of products, and the odd behaviour of luxury goods where increasing prices can increase sales because the the increase perception of quality.
What happens to profit? As far as I know it is either invested back into the company, gets distributed in bonuses or is used to pay off the capitalist owners. So infact there is no such thing as profit anyway, it only exists because of the way that capitalists like to look at the system of production.
Bonuses aren't really bonuses they are just wages based on performance rather than on contract. It makes sense to me to have all wages based like this. When you work for a company you contribute a share of the labour and you get a share of the income - that is what actually happens, it just gets dressed up in meaningless rhetoric as a labour contract. If the company makes no money then you can't have a wage regardless what the contract says - it is just paper; reality is what we need to look at (seems to be linking into the previous block of posts on rules and laws). Companies then fail in a discrete fashion which is another falasy.
In reality companies ascend and decline gradually - but it is all hidden by creative accounting and the meaningless announcement of "profits" (which I'm arguing don't represent anything) and are unrealistic. It is only when the creative accounting can no longer hide the truth that the company seems to implode. If wages were represented as a share of income then wages would rise and decline (rather than profits) with the fortunes of the company, and companies would naturally shed staff and costs as they declined.
The real crime tho in profits comes from the capitalist skewing of business. The most important people in any company are the "staff" and the "clients". It is the relationship between these two aspects of humanity which determine success and failure. Afterall "staff" can be "clients" and vice versa - the terms denote not individuals but modes by which humans interact (wrt previous posts on participation and the nature of society). I notice a profound misunderstanding by many people on this point - that some people take their "position", "role" and "modus operandi" personally so that it says something about "themselves". (On going enquiry into "self" but I take Buddha's point that it has no reality.)
Material production can be viewed as the servicing of needs. But "needs" are mostly satisfied in all the worlds societies - without this people in these societies would have died out! Production in "developing" societies is not about needs. I've been enquiring privately into what it really is about and formed the current opinion - after much reading - that it is about culture. It is the culture of capitalist societies that people interact through the mode of production. An alternative culture is to interact through the modes of fun, festivals and family (to quote Charles Handy). Capitalist societies have simply adopted the culture of "work". All the rhetoric about progress and development is simply ediface to a culture, like tree spirits ediface to animist rituals.
I see this awkward post is twisting around as it negotiates the point. I'll have to refine these points at later stages...
Staff and clients are not the point of view of capitalists. Instead Returns on Capital are the point. Companies exist and indeed their existence depends upon the attitudes of the capitalists. It is the capitalists who buy a right to sit in on meetings not the people who actually make up the company or even the people who use the services. It is returns on capital around which the whole system is centred.
And, why is this? It is historical. The system in which we live has evolved out of the feudal system and the ancient system of taxation. Previously the people were taxed through land tax (rent). Now they are taxed through capital tax (dividends). It is the evolved inequality by which a very small minority continue to avoid work.
The avoidance of work holds a fascinating place in society and one that I am exploring in my book. Of note is the taboo and moralistic nature of avoiding work. The very people who live on capital income are the ones who preach about the "work shy" - not working is a privilage something that must be earned, and previous one that was given by Royal decree to the highest classes. By contrast Working, in its understanding as a culture that dictates human interaction, is simply a system which prolongs the oldest features of human society that it can't bear to deal with humans as equals and likes the existence of closed groups and heirachies.
A real nexus of ideas here that hopefully will tease out more coherently in the future (or even eventually into a book).
Of course it is never a free market and this example illustrates this point most definatively.
In the jobs market a surplus of prospective employees in a particular market reduces wages. That is competition between people to get a job means that they will accept lower and lower wages even to the point of absurdity because being alive but exploited is preferable to being starving. In the case of skilled employment such a glut of individuals would cause people to reskill, but for unskilled labour there is no such escape from competition. A surplus of unskilled staff means that companies will always make profit on wages, and it also encourages companies to reorganise toward unskilled "division of labour" for this reason. This is quite a different explanation of profit from Smith's economies of scale in the famous pin factory.
Imagine pin making was broken down from 1 skilled task into 10 even more skilled tasks, maybe using highly complex machinery. Then while factory output might increase a hundred fold the supply of staff skilled enough to operate the machinery would vanish. They could then charge whatever they liked from the capitalists and the profit would vanish. Any company trying to cut wages would lose its precious staff to competitors.
The situation with prices is simpler. In theory any company with profit could reduce its costs and out compete its competitors. However as far as I can see there two factors which limit market freedom. Copyright and patents mean that capitalists can control production of products, and the odd behaviour of luxury goods where increasing prices can increase sales because the the increase perception of quality.
What happens to profit? As far as I know it is either invested back into the company, gets distributed in bonuses or is used to pay off the capitalist owners. So infact there is no such thing as profit anyway, it only exists because of the way that capitalists like to look at the system of production.
Bonuses aren't really bonuses they are just wages based on performance rather than on contract. It makes sense to me to have all wages based like this. When you work for a company you contribute a share of the labour and you get a share of the income - that is what actually happens, it just gets dressed up in meaningless rhetoric as a labour contract. If the company makes no money then you can't have a wage regardless what the contract says - it is just paper; reality is what we need to look at (seems to be linking into the previous block of posts on rules and laws). Companies then fail in a discrete fashion which is another falasy.
In reality companies ascend and decline gradually - but it is all hidden by creative accounting and the meaningless announcement of "profits" (which I'm arguing don't represent anything) and are unrealistic. It is only when the creative accounting can no longer hide the truth that the company seems to implode. If wages were represented as a share of income then wages would rise and decline (rather than profits) with the fortunes of the company, and companies would naturally shed staff and costs as they declined.
The real crime tho in profits comes from the capitalist skewing of business. The most important people in any company are the "staff" and the "clients". It is the relationship between these two aspects of humanity which determine success and failure. Afterall "staff" can be "clients" and vice versa - the terms denote not individuals but modes by which humans interact (wrt previous posts on participation and the nature of society). I notice a profound misunderstanding by many people on this point - that some people take their "position", "role" and "modus operandi" personally so that it says something about "themselves". (On going enquiry into "self" but I take Buddha's point that it has no reality.)
Material production can be viewed as the servicing of needs. But "needs" are mostly satisfied in all the worlds societies - without this people in these societies would have died out! Production in "developing" societies is not about needs. I've been enquiring privately into what it really is about and formed the current opinion - after much reading - that it is about culture. It is the culture of capitalist societies that people interact through the mode of production. An alternative culture is to interact through the modes of fun, festivals and family (to quote Charles Handy). Capitalist societies have simply adopted the culture of "work". All the rhetoric about progress and development is simply ediface to a culture, like tree spirits ediface to animist rituals.
I see this awkward post is twisting around as it negotiates the point. I'll have to refine these points at later stages...
Staff and clients are not the point of view of capitalists. Instead Returns on Capital are the point. Companies exist and indeed their existence depends upon the attitudes of the capitalists. It is the capitalists who buy a right to sit in on meetings not the people who actually make up the company or even the people who use the services. It is returns on capital around which the whole system is centred.
And, why is this? It is historical. The system in which we live has evolved out of the feudal system and the ancient system of taxation. Previously the people were taxed through land tax (rent). Now they are taxed through capital tax (dividends). It is the evolved inequality by which a very small minority continue to avoid work.
The avoidance of work holds a fascinating place in society and one that I am exploring in my book. Of note is the taboo and moralistic nature of avoiding work. The very people who live on capital income are the ones who preach about the "work shy" - not working is a privilage something that must be earned, and previous one that was given by Royal decree to the highest classes. By contrast Working, in its understanding as a culture that dictates human interaction, is simply a system which prolongs the oldest features of human society that it can't bear to deal with humans as equals and likes the existence of closed groups and heirachies.
A real nexus of ideas here that hopefully will tease out more coherently in the future (or even eventually into a book).
Monday, 15 December 2008
Idling... Tom Hodgkinson
Finally catching up with some stuff that maybe makes sense :-)
http://idler.co.uk/
Tom Hodgkinson my new hero and the first since Kierkegaard!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/tomhodgkinson
Blimey it makes sense!
http://idler.co.uk/
Tom Hodgkinson my new hero and the first since Kierkegaard!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/tomhodgkinson
Blimey it makes sense!
Buddhism - "I" got it !!!!!!!!!!!!
Its not been quick coming that is for sure but two nights ago I finally got the key to Buddhism and the ending of suffering. [Still in beta though as it's not fully tested]
Verses 48 & 49 from the Dhammapada
The man who gathers flowers (of sensual pleasure), whose mind is distracted, and who is insatiate in desires, Death brings under his sway.
As a bee without harming the flower, its colours or scent, flies away, collecting only the honey, even so should the sage wander in the village.
Always it has troubled me quite what this means. How do you take the honey while leaving the flower?
It has always seemed to me that to want the honey means that one is drawn to the flower and only when one doesn't want the honey will one be free from the flower. Thus desire makes us slaves to passions and victims of suffering when our desires are not met.
But aha! I got it now :-)
The problem is the Ego. We can view ourselves like a ball with a copy of ourselves rolling around inside. The outer ball is really big and has room for everything. But the little ball inside has to be either here or there. We put a flower inside the big ball and the big ball is quite happy enjoying the honey and the scent. We take the flower away and the big ball has something else inside it which is gets on with. Thr problems begin when the little ball rolls over to the flower. It starts to enjoy the honey and scent but in a different way - it fills itself with the flower so that when the flower goes it is empty. It then struggles to get the flower back, rolling around the big ball calling everything not-flower and creating disharmony.
The problem is not in the desire of the pleasures or the sensations but in the taking sides. The inner movement whereby we say "this is mine", or "I am enjoying myself", or "this is good (for me)". Such rejoicing is the sin because it is not enough for it to be what it is and our enjoyment to be what it is, we add an extra imperceptible clause to the agreement which states that "it is mine". Which is great while it lasts, but then we get the "it is not mine" when the experience ends. Because we have taken sides we are faced with having to change sides, or live with the experience of "being without" or being with what "is not mine". This empty negativiness which is conjoured magically from nowhere confuses us, we can't understand where it has come from, our "taking sides" self then takes against the negativeness and it all kicks off and we are negative and miserable.
We were so confused and furious at the suffering that has magically occurred that we never read the small print of the contract we signed. It clearly states that what we are currently experiencing "now belongs to us" so that what happens to it happens to us also. When it goes, so do we. Ego's don't like this, the feeling of being destroyed is exactly what they are built to resist. What is an ego afterall this doesn't exist! That can't stand on a mountain and proclaim to all lower beings around it that - it exists and it knows this fact for sure. The mountain turns round and tediously says: yes you exist there at the moment, but I can assure you that later you will have wandered to the other side of me, and for a while you won't even exist. It is not you that is constant but me who is everywhere that you walk. The ego doesn't listen - everything is from its point of view, again, and again, and again. The mountain (which is the true self) on the other hands sees the many sides and the coming and going and doesn't grasp at one one of the many things that lie across it. They are all mine says the mountain, is any of them are.
Ego's are selective. This one, not that one. I take Your side, not your side. I will fight for you againt them. They are right, you are wrong. I like You, I don't like you. This one is good, that one is bad. Egos love opinions and styles and fashions anything that sets them on one side or another. It is not that all these sides and styles and fashions don't exist.. its not even that arguments can't be right or wrong it is the taking of sides, the claiming one side of Mine, taking it personally, and in rejection of the other that causes the suffering. It is the rolling around of the small ball into position and being so small not being able or willing to move off that causes the tension.
There are times as we have seen in the last few years when the whole society goes mad. When hundreds of thousands of people are killed unnecessarily and millions of lives made a misery in your own name and with your own money given in good faith in taxes. People you trusted have willfully abused that trust and lied openly without even taking the time to lie convincingly. A sham operation designed to obscurate and shake off all the responsibility that comes with representative power. People whose expensive and endless efforts to protect their pretence to good dismally fail to disguise the hidden and unilateral agendas of a ruling minority. People who have the nerve to blacken the name of goodness and religion by claiming authority over people who are accused of no greater crime than their own. And they have never commented it or apologised.
I speak obviously of the war in Iraq. Personally I believe that what is said above is true and it amazed me that there are still people who endorse the war in Iraq which unless they know something I don't, still remains to be justified in any way even as we enter the end game of the conflict. It was pure bloody mindedness.
Yet analysis of the argument above determine whether I experience any suffering from this situation. It all depends not on the reality, but whether I myself take sides. It seems a priori that we should take sides with what is correct and true, and hence the confusion and anger at those who take sides with what cannot be correct or true - even with the entire press at the feet and the money to fund any amount of propaganda they still haven't tried to justified the war. Yet it is a fact that people take sides and worse even take sides with what seems absurdity. Taking sides is clearly not the display of truth. Regardless the truth, different people take different sides. It can't be argued here that the war in Iraq was correct because it is so clearly incorrect. It is a fact that people take sides with the incorrect side - even after deep and reasonable debate.
The point for the Ego to realise is that the Iraq issue is clearly huge and covers many territories all the way from the clearly correct and truthful world, to hazy worlds of political and personal contingency. People have many things to gain by taking different sides, and not everyone is only interested in the "truth". Plus we know there are deep layers of secrecy that disguise the real motives and reasons for the war. And yes it is supposed to be a Democracy and these people are supposedly elected - but that is another many sided discussion.
If the ball of my ego rolls around into the shadows and the people who are not so free to observe from the touch lines like myself - suddenly the soup thickens , the light grows dim and the arguments less pellucid. My ego resists doing this for fear that it may lose membership of its side, that side it has invested so much reputation in supporting; for fear that it heaven forbid it might turn to the unpleasant world of shadows itself. These are the small minded fears of the ego which has no choice but to exist in one place at a time. If it goes there, it will no longer be here. If it explores the darkness, it will no longer be in the light. Yet unless it explores the darkness, it's light is very small and threatened. So it is bias that comes from taking sides - regardless the actual terrain that exist - that causes the suffering.
What Ego is not however is self-confidence or allegiance. We can quite aimeably support a football team, a company, a wife, a family, parents, brands, tastes, fashions, likes and reject dislikes, and incorrectness but the ball of the ego must not be allowed to get brought into the game. None of these sides are "mine" and each exists in dialectic and relation to what we in the same move reject. A wife will by definition always define the many other women who are not-wife. It is only a problem however if our ego aligns with her and she becomes "mine" - normalised in many cultures unfortunately - but not the foundations for happiness. When she becomes "mine" then the thought of losing her becomes painful, and the meeting of another woman who we like, if it attracts the ego, causes pain also. The key to "my muse" lies in that very name! My experience of meeting the "One" has an instantaneous subclause - she's "mine". In a Kierkegaardian fashion it was a "mineness" that I realised was shot through with imperfection and in a Kierkegaardian fashion (a man I forgot I modelled myself on) the justice lay in a spiritual world of justice so that she could remain "mine" even while the evidence of the world lay contrary.
I imagine Buddhga means that equanimity and middle-path is characterised by the stillness of the small ego ball. Its strict restraint so that it rolls neither to one side or the other. If we can keep it dispassioned and without claim to any parts of the stream of many sided happenings that pass through "our" (unsided ;-) ) minds and lifes then the mind is liberated and we are happy and without suffering. This way we can experience, but have no suffering. This way we can live, but have no survival.
Verses 48 & 49 from the Dhammapada
The man who gathers flowers (of sensual pleasure), whose mind is distracted, and who is insatiate in desires, Death brings under his sway.
As a bee without harming the flower, its colours or scent, flies away, collecting only the honey, even so should the sage wander in the village.
Always it has troubled me quite what this means. How do you take the honey while leaving the flower?
It has always seemed to me that to want the honey means that one is drawn to the flower and only when one doesn't want the honey will one be free from the flower. Thus desire makes us slaves to passions and victims of suffering when our desires are not met.
But aha! I got it now :-)
The problem is the Ego. We can view ourselves like a ball with a copy of ourselves rolling around inside. The outer ball is really big and has room for everything. But the little ball inside has to be either here or there. We put a flower inside the big ball and the big ball is quite happy enjoying the honey and the scent. We take the flower away and the big ball has something else inside it which is gets on with. Thr problems begin when the little ball rolls over to the flower. It starts to enjoy the honey and scent but in a different way - it fills itself with the flower so that when the flower goes it is empty. It then struggles to get the flower back, rolling around the big ball calling everything not-flower and creating disharmony.
The problem is not in the desire of the pleasures or the sensations but in the taking sides. The inner movement whereby we say "this is mine", or "I am enjoying myself", or "this is good (for me)". Such rejoicing is the sin because it is not enough for it to be what it is and our enjoyment to be what it is, we add an extra imperceptible clause to the agreement which states that "it is mine". Which is great while it lasts, but then we get the "it is not mine" when the experience ends. Because we have taken sides we are faced with having to change sides, or live with the experience of "being without" or being with what "is not mine". This empty negativiness which is conjoured magically from nowhere confuses us, we can't understand where it has come from, our "taking sides" self then takes against the negativeness and it all kicks off and we are negative and miserable.
We were so confused and furious at the suffering that has magically occurred that we never read the small print of the contract we signed. It clearly states that what we are currently experiencing "now belongs to us" so that what happens to it happens to us also. When it goes, so do we. Ego's don't like this, the feeling of being destroyed is exactly what they are built to resist. What is an ego afterall this doesn't exist! That can't stand on a mountain and proclaim to all lower beings around it that - it exists and it knows this fact for sure. The mountain turns round and tediously says: yes you exist there at the moment, but I can assure you that later you will have wandered to the other side of me, and for a while you won't even exist. It is not you that is constant but me who is everywhere that you walk. The ego doesn't listen - everything is from its point of view, again, and again, and again. The mountain (which is the true self) on the other hands sees the many sides and the coming and going and doesn't grasp at one one of the many things that lie across it. They are all mine says the mountain, is any of them are.
Ego's are selective. This one, not that one. I take Your side, not your side. I will fight for you againt them. They are right, you are wrong. I like You, I don't like you. This one is good, that one is bad. Egos love opinions and styles and fashions anything that sets them on one side or another. It is not that all these sides and styles and fashions don't exist.. its not even that arguments can't be right or wrong it is the taking of sides, the claiming one side of Mine, taking it personally, and in rejection of the other that causes the suffering. It is the rolling around of the small ball into position and being so small not being able or willing to move off that causes the tension.
There are times as we have seen in the last few years when the whole society goes mad. When hundreds of thousands of people are killed unnecessarily and millions of lives made a misery in your own name and with your own money given in good faith in taxes. People you trusted have willfully abused that trust and lied openly without even taking the time to lie convincingly. A sham operation designed to obscurate and shake off all the responsibility that comes with representative power. People whose expensive and endless efforts to protect their pretence to good dismally fail to disguise the hidden and unilateral agendas of a ruling minority. People who have the nerve to blacken the name of goodness and religion by claiming authority over people who are accused of no greater crime than their own. And they have never commented it or apologised.
I speak obviously of the war in Iraq. Personally I believe that what is said above is true and it amazed me that there are still people who endorse the war in Iraq which unless they know something I don't, still remains to be justified in any way even as we enter the end game of the conflict. It was pure bloody mindedness.
Yet analysis of the argument above determine whether I experience any suffering from this situation. It all depends not on the reality, but whether I myself take sides. It seems a priori that we should take sides with what is correct and true, and hence the confusion and anger at those who take sides with what cannot be correct or true - even with the entire press at the feet and the money to fund any amount of propaganda they still haven't tried to justified the war. Yet it is a fact that people take sides and worse even take sides with what seems absurdity. Taking sides is clearly not the display of truth. Regardless the truth, different people take different sides. It can't be argued here that the war in Iraq was correct because it is so clearly incorrect. It is a fact that people take sides with the incorrect side - even after deep and reasonable debate.
The point for the Ego to realise is that the Iraq issue is clearly huge and covers many territories all the way from the clearly correct and truthful world, to hazy worlds of political and personal contingency. People have many things to gain by taking different sides, and not everyone is only interested in the "truth". Plus we know there are deep layers of secrecy that disguise the real motives and reasons for the war. And yes it is supposed to be a Democracy and these people are supposedly elected - but that is another many sided discussion.
If the ball of my ego rolls around into the shadows and the people who are not so free to observe from the touch lines like myself - suddenly the soup thickens , the light grows dim and the arguments less pellucid. My ego resists doing this for fear that it may lose membership of its side, that side it has invested so much reputation in supporting; for fear that it heaven forbid it might turn to the unpleasant world of shadows itself. These are the small minded fears of the ego which has no choice but to exist in one place at a time. If it goes there, it will no longer be here. If it explores the darkness, it will no longer be in the light. Yet unless it explores the darkness, it's light is very small and threatened. So it is bias that comes from taking sides - regardless the actual terrain that exist - that causes the suffering.
What Ego is not however is self-confidence or allegiance. We can quite aimeably support a football team, a company, a wife, a family, parents, brands, tastes, fashions, likes and reject dislikes, and incorrectness but the ball of the ego must not be allowed to get brought into the game. None of these sides are "mine" and each exists in dialectic and relation to what we in the same move reject. A wife will by definition always define the many other women who are not-wife. It is only a problem however if our ego aligns with her and she becomes "mine" - normalised in many cultures unfortunately - but not the foundations for happiness. When she becomes "mine" then the thought of losing her becomes painful, and the meeting of another woman who we like, if it attracts the ego, causes pain also. The key to "my muse" lies in that very name! My experience of meeting the "One" has an instantaneous subclause - she's "mine". In a Kierkegaardian fashion it was a "mineness" that I realised was shot through with imperfection and in a Kierkegaardian fashion (a man I forgot I modelled myself on) the justice lay in a spiritual world of justice so that she could remain "mine" even while the evidence of the world lay contrary.
I imagine Buddhga means that equanimity and middle-path is characterised by the stillness of the small ego ball. Its strict restraint so that it rolls neither to one side or the other. If we can keep it dispassioned and without claim to any parts of the stream of many sided happenings that pass through "our" (unsided ;-) ) minds and lifes then the mind is liberated and we are happy and without suffering. This way we can experience, but have no suffering. This way we can live, but have no survival.
Oil to run out 2020 -> the nature of the system
Just read an article by George Monbiot on the International Energy Agency's 2008 report on oil. Forget the details of the picture we can't do anything about that what is staggering is what I've come to accept about the establishment ... the IEA are incompetent. Yet the British government and governments around the world take what they say as gospel.
I was 9 when I realised we were going to run out of oil (and thereby plastic and fertiliser and almost everything). If we take something and it isn't put back then it will run out. Its clearly not the complexity of the picture which must be hampering people from seeing the reality.
The IEA presumably funds people to do a job. Apparently this year is the first year that they have actually done a study into oil reserves! Previous years are guestimates. What have they been doing!
Yet it is the same picture the world over from institution to institution. It is interesting to me that the much more complex global warming issue has managed to make it into mainstream politics. I admit I never foresaw global warming as a child, for me it was much more tangible stuff like population, land supply and food which were going to be the problems. Climate is a much less tangible thing. Yet some how the people with power have been persuaded down this road.
It does all seem very random, and the reactions of the institutions that we phantasmogorically believe run the show (when actually they don't even exist - they are just people) seem very random anyway.
As visitors to India often remark it's a country where one has to believe in God to explain how anything ever happens in such a chaotic world. Is the Human destiny one of luck, a continuation of the serendipity which originally produced us, or is anyone actually capable to steering the boat? During my short life I've certainly only seen evidence to contradict the last one.
Piece of personal psychology. I realise at this point that it is the hypocracy of power that riles me. Power expects diligence, responsibility and competence (especially in the employment system) - just listen to all the rubbish we have to pour out in interviews (I was honest once and the interviewer told me in these exact words: I should have lied!)- and we assume this is the nature of the system... or at least I have. I'm a slow learner it seems but actually it looks more like a process of self-delusion where we say these things to make ourselves believe them.
The system is not like this. All it demands is allegience to the System. In evolutionary terms the survival strategy of the system (how is has survived) is not so much because its inherent merits but because it selects for members who are loyal, and especially members who will work to destroy rival groups. Just look at the American's and Communism/Socialism. Thus groups and systems survive.
In this view The System is not an intelligent God given higher feature of Human Life but rather an emergent property. Modernism Enlightenment thinkers liked to think of the system in its positive light of co-operation, goodness, harmony, order probably because economically and politically it suited their place in the world - it was benevolent. I've always been deeply aware that where a system supports one person it is always at the expense of someone else. Only equanimity and complete egalitarianism can avoid this and this is not a system by definition.
Hmmm back to self reference - Egalitarianism is not a system because to identify any components and to place them in fixed relation in any way requires an order which must lie outside the system and so impose itself upon the system. It is non-egalitarian then. Only a self-determining order can be egalitarian but is this possible or even meaningful? Order is always one group imposing (maybe by invitation in a Rousseau like fashion) on another. Anyway order is always in dialectic with dis-order so there is no stable social system - all systems are temporary and conditional. Only systems which accept this have any chance of longevity.
Note on Progress: Occurred to me recently that maybe all systems track a parabolic trajectory - a rise and fall. Researching on Progress it has been astonishing the certainty with which European Enlightenment (and now American) thinkers seem to assume that progress is a constant vector. Even Dawkins accepts that evolutionary trends are temporary - adaptation improves within a context and then when the context changes it becomes mal-adaptation. We see that in the economic system at the moment. Companies which had tuned themselves to a world of cheap credit and even 18months ago were the most successful now find themselves maladapted and extinct. "The only certainty is change" goes the narrator of the Japanese TV show Monkey (Buddhist Monkey-King (Hsiyu-Chi) profoundly at odds with the Chinese hegemony of Confusionism and Cosmic Order). As Buddha says in his great dependent-origination teaching - external causes and conditions are solely responsible for the arising, sustaining and decay of all things. (the pattern of Indoaryan gods: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of Hinduism; God, Holy Spirit, Jesus of Christianity; maybe even Tiw, ?, Woden in NW Europe). Systems are really governed from outside themselves - what is not the System! No system can govern itself. I guess the Greeks profoundly realised this in tragedy, irony and hubris.
That links to the self-reference thing. I noticed recently that my challenge is not to self-reference exactly. Clearly a sentence can be used in such a way as to denote itself. Thus "This sentence is composed of seven words" makes complete and trouble free sense. And I can add some more interesting examples to this.
The next sentence is not being read. But while the last sentence is now not being read this sentence is being read. The references come into context and go out of context.
The problem is not with self-reference but maybe rather with self-identity. Something can't be itself. That flies in the face thousands of years of philosophy so I say it only tentatively. The problm lies in the way that you identify "itself". I've always had a problem with this notion - I'll explore it in due course [just noting it here].
So to summarise this regurgitation of recent ideas: the dawning realisation is that their is no goal to human existence. The belief that we can enter the world to make lasting changes for good is a profound misunderstanding of reality. Recognisable humans have been on this planet for a million years or so in that time we have each lived lives of value and satisfaction. Been faced with struggles, difficulties, triumphs and celebrations. We have all had life. The idea that one persons life is more valuable or better lived only makes sense within a context. Within the education system of Western society we can achieve great things - but cast into the arctic snow fields and we need other skills. Its all contextual. We have statues around London of great men - few women. Clearly in this omission alone we can see that they are not absolutely Great, simply successful within the rules of the game and the context of the time. To Innuit Indians they are not great at all. Their lives were not absolutely well spent in that sense. However they were well spent in the sense that participation in the world is the foundations of worldly life and worldly happiness. Be it leading a seal hunting party, or being project manager in a big company the essence is the same : of participating in the game. That is the value of life. It is not the system itself, or what the system does that matters but simply the taking part. Gordon Brown is having a great time because the economic downturn has created a whole new set of games to play. If other people start playing them better tho he might lose his place in the game and then he won't be so happy.
I still find this hard to accept absolutely tho. Is all life just a series of inter-personal language games and socially constructed opportunitiues for inter-personal participation. Is having a job simply the being part of the human race? The "doing ones job well" simply valued by the importance the game places on it?
Self-reference will blow this apart instantly. Is the meaning of this simply the playing the blogging game, and the finding a power and position in society by criticising it? Am I simply playing a game here? Well the sentence "playing a game" must be more than a game else it loses its meaning.... I must find a rigorous way of arguing this self-reference point...
In society I see most people admittedly just playing an interpersonal game. That is what I found so tedious in my last employment - it was just a toy company, taken out of the box and assembled by instructions to give the bosses something to play with. There was no heart in it, no sincerity and no real purpose. Surely these things are beyond the games and the systems? Surely running out of oil is actually a big deal? A realisation that the status-quo is only temporary and we should look a bit further than the extant system for our sustinence?
That article...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/15/oil-peak-energy-iea
I was 9 when I realised we were going to run out of oil (and thereby plastic and fertiliser and almost everything). If we take something and it isn't put back then it will run out. Its clearly not the complexity of the picture which must be hampering people from seeing the reality.
The IEA presumably funds people to do a job. Apparently this year is the first year that they have actually done a study into oil reserves! Previous years are guestimates. What have they been doing!
Yet it is the same picture the world over from institution to institution. It is interesting to me that the much more complex global warming issue has managed to make it into mainstream politics. I admit I never foresaw global warming as a child, for me it was much more tangible stuff like population, land supply and food which were going to be the problems. Climate is a much less tangible thing. Yet some how the people with power have been persuaded down this road.
It does all seem very random, and the reactions of the institutions that we phantasmogorically believe run the show (when actually they don't even exist - they are just people) seem very random anyway.
As visitors to India often remark it's a country where one has to believe in God to explain how anything ever happens in such a chaotic world. Is the Human destiny one of luck, a continuation of the serendipity which originally produced us, or is anyone actually capable to steering the boat? During my short life I've certainly only seen evidence to contradict the last one.
Piece of personal psychology. I realise at this point that it is the hypocracy of power that riles me. Power expects diligence, responsibility and competence (especially in the employment system) - just listen to all the rubbish we have to pour out in interviews (I was honest once and the interviewer told me in these exact words: I should have lied!)- and we assume this is the nature of the system... or at least I have. I'm a slow learner it seems but actually it looks more like a process of self-delusion where we say these things to make ourselves believe them.
The system is not like this. All it demands is allegience to the System. In evolutionary terms the survival strategy of the system (how is has survived) is not so much because its inherent merits but because it selects for members who are loyal, and especially members who will work to destroy rival groups. Just look at the American's and Communism/Socialism. Thus groups and systems survive.
In this view The System is not an intelligent God given higher feature of Human Life but rather an emergent property. Modernism Enlightenment thinkers liked to think of the system in its positive light of co-operation, goodness, harmony, order probably because economically and politically it suited their place in the world - it was benevolent. I've always been deeply aware that where a system supports one person it is always at the expense of someone else. Only equanimity and complete egalitarianism can avoid this and this is not a system by definition.
Hmmm back to self reference - Egalitarianism is not a system because to identify any components and to place them in fixed relation in any way requires an order which must lie outside the system and so impose itself upon the system. It is non-egalitarian then. Only a self-determining order can be egalitarian but is this possible or even meaningful? Order is always one group imposing (maybe by invitation in a Rousseau like fashion) on another. Anyway order is always in dialectic with dis-order so there is no stable social system - all systems are temporary and conditional. Only systems which accept this have any chance of longevity.
Note on Progress: Occurred to me recently that maybe all systems track a parabolic trajectory - a rise and fall. Researching on Progress it has been astonishing the certainty with which European Enlightenment (and now American) thinkers seem to assume that progress is a constant vector. Even Dawkins accepts that evolutionary trends are temporary - adaptation improves within a context and then when the context changes it becomes mal-adaptation. We see that in the economic system at the moment. Companies which had tuned themselves to a world of cheap credit and even 18months ago were the most successful now find themselves maladapted and extinct. "The only certainty is change" goes the narrator of the Japanese TV show Monkey (Buddhist Monkey-King (Hsiyu-Chi) profoundly at odds with the Chinese hegemony of Confusionism and Cosmic Order). As Buddha says in his great dependent-origination teaching - external causes and conditions are solely responsible for the arising, sustaining and decay of all things. (the pattern of Indoaryan gods: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of Hinduism; God, Holy Spirit, Jesus of Christianity; maybe even Tiw, ?, Woden in NW Europe). Systems are really governed from outside themselves - what is not the System! No system can govern itself. I guess the Greeks profoundly realised this in tragedy, irony and hubris.
That links to the self-reference thing. I noticed recently that my challenge is not to self-reference exactly. Clearly a sentence can be used in such a way as to denote itself. Thus "This sentence is composed of seven words" makes complete and trouble free sense. And I can add some more interesting examples to this.
The next sentence is not being read. But while the last sentence is now not being read this sentence is being read. The references come into context and go out of context.
The problem is not with self-reference but maybe rather with self-identity. Something can't be itself. That flies in the face thousands of years of philosophy so I say it only tentatively. The problm lies in the way that you identify "itself". I've always had a problem with this notion - I'll explore it in due course [just noting it here].
So to summarise this regurgitation of recent ideas: the dawning realisation is that their is no goal to human existence. The belief that we can enter the world to make lasting changes for good is a profound misunderstanding of reality. Recognisable humans have been on this planet for a million years or so in that time we have each lived lives of value and satisfaction. Been faced with struggles, difficulties, triumphs and celebrations. We have all had life. The idea that one persons life is more valuable or better lived only makes sense within a context. Within the education system of Western society we can achieve great things - but cast into the arctic snow fields and we need other skills. Its all contextual. We have statues around London of great men - few women. Clearly in this omission alone we can see that they are not absolutely Great, simply successful within the rules of the game and the context of the time. To Innuit Indians they are not great at all. Their lives were not absolutely well spent in that sense. However they were well spent in the sense that participation in the world is the foundations of worldly life and worldly happiness. Be it leading a seal hunting party, or being project manager in a big company the essence is the same : of participating in the game. That is the value of life. It is not the system itself, or what the system does that matters but simply the taking part. Gordon Brown is having a great time because the economic downturn has created a whole new set of games to play. If other people start playing them better tho he might lose his place in the game and then he won't be so happy.
I still find this hard to accept absolutely tho. Is all life just a series of inter-personal language games and socially constructed opportunitiues for inter-personal participation. Is having a job simply the being part of the human race? The "doing ones job well" simply valued by the importance the game places on it?
Self-reference will blow this apart instantly. Is the meaning of this simply the playing the blogging game, and the finding a power and position in society by criticising it? Am I simply playing a game here? Well the sentence "playing a game" must be more than a game else it loses its meaning.... I must find a rigorous way of arguing this self-reference point...
In society I see most people admittedly just playing an interpersonal game. That is what I found so tedious in my last employment - it was just a toy company, taken out of the box and assembled by instructions to give the bosses something to play with. There was no heart in it, no sincerity and no real purpose. Surely these things are beyond the games and the systems? Surely running out of oil is actually a big deal? A realisation that the status-quo is only temporary and we should look a bit further than the extant system for our sustinence?
That article...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/15/oil-peak-energy-iea
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Intensive agriculture the least efficient
Not got the datas with me but if you measure the total energy in and energy out then the simplest agricultural systems in the semi nomadic tribes produce about 2ce the energy that is put in through human labour. This declines rapidly until you have the American intensive agriculture system using 4 times as much energy as it gets off the land. The reason why it is so cheap is because oil is cheaper than human labour - but by diminishing returns the marginal cost of extracting that extra yield from the land is always increasing. Amazingly Adam Smith and Marx and others seem to my eyes to have missed this fundamental factor our of their economic models!
Two important features of this. The cost of fuel and the cost of intensive agriculture are linked- as we saw recently in the commodity markets and mysteriously no-one ws able to explain! It also means that creating bio-fuel intensively is a big blunder.
American feeds 40% of the world with the produce from its grain belts. This is only feasable at current fuel prices. The money spent in Iraq might not be so random if we consider the food implications of Opec power. At the same time the red flag should be waving for all those countries who are in the process of dismantling their subsistence/traditional farming communities and traditions. What the hazy eyes western school boys call "development" is actually the building of "dependency" and what lies ahead is huge aid debt and starvation. It has been seen throughout Africa for decades but still the aid agencies blame it on bad-government, civil war and climate. Everything except cash crops and western economic intervention.
Its another obvious fact that if humans were as incapable as the "top" of the pile say the bottom of the pile are then the human race would have gone to extinction millions of years ago. Like so much in this topsy turvey world it is actually the bottom of the pile who support the top and it is the top of any trophic system which goes extinct when times change.
Its sad for UK (where I live) that we have no traditional agriculture any more and no workforce who could farm the land were oil and petrol machines and fertiliser to run out or become too expensive. Agriculture is certainly somewhere I may look to be employed if only because food is something I actually do need. I've certainly no faith in the smoke and mirrors of current economic theory and management.
Two important features of this. The cost of fuel and the cost of intensive agriculture are linked- as we saw recently in the commodity markets and mysteriously no-one ws able to explain! It also means that creating bio-fuel intensively is a big blunder.
American feeds 40% of the world with the produce from its grain belts. This is only feasable at current fuel prices. The money spent in Iraq might not be so random if we consider the food implications of Opec power. At the same time the red flag should be waving for all those countries who are in the process of dismantling their subsistence/traditional farming communities and traditions. What the hazy eyes western school boys call "development" is actually the building of "dependency" and what lies ahead is huge aid debt and starvation. It has been seen throughout Africa for decades but still the aid agencies blame it on bad-government, civil war and climate. Everything except cash crops and western economic intervention.
Its another obvious fact that if humans were as incapable as the "top" of the pile say the bottom of the pile are then the human race would have gone to extinction millions of years ago. Like so much in this topsy turvey world it is actually the bottom of the pile who support the top and it is the top of any trophic system which goes extinct when times change.
Its sad for UK (where I live) that we have no traditional agriculture any more and no workforce who could farm the land were oil and petrol machines and fertiliser to run out or become too expensive. Agriculture is certainly somewhere I may look to be employed if only because food is something I actually do need. I've certainly no faith in the smoke and mirrors of current economic theory and management.
The Employment Machine Stops
Following from E.M.Forsters short I'm beginning to see the nature of the employment machine having made a stand against it in June. It is particular revealing at the moment because the machine is in big trouble anyway. I've been "unemployed" before (like when I was born ;-) ) but this time it's a full study in contrast to having been employed for almost 10 years and is being backed by a lot of research which I aim to compose into some form of book/novel.
What is emerging to my mind is that it really is a kind of "God delusion" of its own. You only need to hear the pronouncements of politicians to see that they are the most deluded on this subject.
Apparent as the economy slows we need to spend more to make more jobs so that we can work more. What if we don't want to work more? Can't we use the same logic to say that if we spend less we won't need to work so much?
But we got a society hooked on credit and over spending so clearly we do want all this stuff. But we have all the credit because our pay cheques aren't in yet and that is because we don't work hard enough. So depends how you look at it - we like spending, but we don't like working 20hrs a day to pay for it all.
It shows up other absurdities. Each year the economy becomes 4% more efficient (stats I got from some European government annual employment publication). That is what gave my last boss such a headache - each year we just got better at what we did. Normally they promote you to keep you bad at what you do, but the company only had 8 people so they were stuck. Instead the bosses had to outlaw efficiencies to keep the work rate down using the ISO9001 to fix inefficient work practices. Layers of management were also introduced to slow down communicated and increase paperwork, checking and delays. It was straight out of Parkinson's criticism of the UK civil service. It reminds me also of the economist Thorstein Veblen who argued that economy is the process by which human productivity and creativity is stifled to maintain the possibility of class. It sounds absurd until you actually see it happening.
Reading Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" I can further believe it. In something like Smiths own words (but I've not the quote with me at the moment) the division of labour will reduce labourers to the very lowest that they can possibly be. Meaning that the reduction of labour to small repetitive tasks will atrophy people to the state of vegetable existence. He thought the resulting wealth would stimulate the arts and compensate in leisure time for this unfortunate side effect.
There is so much to write I could keep going and do the book - so I'll stop here. Anyway back to 4%: if things are becoming more efficient why do we still do basically the same hours work per week as we did 10,000 years ago? This is a very hard statistic to calculate (this one is crudely based upon work on foraging communities I've a lot more work in this direction). But, if you think about it there are only so many hours in a day and we would be hard pressed to work much harder than we do!
One answer is that we consume so much more. There's a limit to how much we can eat (altho in America they are pushing that one!). So it must be the gadgets we own. There are only so many clothes we can own, tables, cars, houses, TVs, phones ... Some people do try and earn and spend as much as they can. And when you can't buy any more you can start buying designer stuff which is made in the same factories just sold much more expensive. Society really has reached about the limit of consumerism I think. I'm sure it can be pushed further. What we need is another indispensible gadget like the mobile phone that we simply can't live without and we can start a new industry and put ourselves back to work - for a bit until efficiency makes us redundant again. I wonder how far this can go.
Maybe we've found out since the "unbelievable" economic growth experienced in the last 10 years has been just that unbelievable - it was all a lie. The growth in UK has been 80% in the public sector. I don't know if that is true in US. That is The government made the jobs! Easy credit has created a bubble that has enabled us to keep making jobs for ourselves without having to actually pay. The money in our pockets has been flowing from the bottomless pit of banks via credit cards into shops and into our wages. It's all an illusion.
What the world needs is an economic system that actually factors in freedom from the economic machine because it simply can't keep creating jobs forever, while at the same time becoming more efficient at 4% a year.
And ignoring all this said, it is personally much more obvious. Why do we spend so much time at "work". Can't we do all the things we do at "work" in our free time? We spend huge amounts of time outside the machine but we probably are so deluded that we don't notice.
Sleep is non-economic. Yet the alarm is set by the economy.
The toilet is non-economic.
Sex is non economic. Except for those who want to pay for what is free to everyone else.
Eating and digestion are non-economic.
Breathing is non-economic.
Love for our parents and family is non-economic.
Love for our fellow people is non-economic.
DIY is non-economic. Except for the things we get from the shops - unless our mate can get them for us.
Gardening is non-economic. ditto.
Playing a musical instrument ...
I can go on endlessly. Yet despite it's small involvement in life we are dominated by money, the work we do to get it, and the things we can buy with it. The politicians talk like the economy was an important part of our lives - its almost irrelevant!
It can never happen - this is just an exercise to escape the delusion - but everything that everyone does as part of the "economy" could be done in our free time. We would not have any money from looking after the old person for a day, or attending an accident in the street, or teaching a kid to count, or planting a row of potatoes so we wouldn't know if some people were just sitting around doing nothing while we did all the hard work - but actually that isn't the point of work it is! The point of work is the looking after the old person, the attending the accident, ... All this could be done as part of our lives, as the things we do as members of our communities and for our fellow people for no other reason than what else is there to do but hang out with our fellow people and live together? This is life.
Put the specks of economy on and you become a politician and suddenly it all changes. You get absurd claims like we need to spend more to make jobs and you won't even realise what a clown you look. Problem is most of us don't see what clowns the politicians and economists look because we too are under the veil of economy. Down the job centre believing that we need a "job" to get "money" before we can "live" as though they handed out "life" at the job centre or over the counter of the high street.
It is a very long and complicated story how we got into this Alice in Wonderland topsy turvey world here in the west. There is no way back now, we have got to learn to live with the machine we built. The sad thing is that the rest of the world is slowly being drawn into it. Enclosure acts in India forcing farmers off the land they've occupied quite sustainably for hundreds is not tens of thousands of years onto the dole queues is the start of the upside down world where we look to politicians and economies to give us life - when the blood pumps through my veins not theirs!
What is emerging to my mind is that it really is a kind of "God delusion" of its own. You only need to hear the pronouncements of politicians to see that they are the most deluded on this subject.
Apparent as the economy slows we need to spend more to make more jobs so that we can work more. What if we don't want to work more? Can't we use the same logic to say that if we spend less we won't need to work so much?
But we got a society hooked on credit and over spending so clearly we do want all this stuff. But we have all the credit because our pay cheques aren't in yet and that is because we don't work hard enough. So depends how you look at it - we like spending, but we don't like working 20hrs a day to pay for it all.
It shows up other absurdities. Each year the economy becomes 4% more efficient (stats I got from some European government annual employment publication). That is what gave my last boss such a headache - each year we just got better at what we did. Normally they promote you to keep you bad at what you do, but the company only had 8 people so they were stuck. Instead the bosses had to outlaw efficiencies to keep the work rate down using the ISO9001 to fix inefficient work practices. Layers of management were also introduced to slow down communicated and increase paperwork, checking and delays. It was straight out of Parkinson's criticism of the UK civil service. It reminds me also of the economist Thorstein Veblen who argued that economy is the process by which human productivity and creativity is stifled to maintain the possibility of class. It sounds absurd until you actually see it happening.
Reading Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" I can further believe it. In something like Smiths own words (but I've not the quote with me at the moment) the division of labour will reduce labourers to the very lowest that they can possibly be. Meaning that the reduction of labour to small repetitive tasks will atrophy people to the state of vegetable existence. He thought the resulting wealth would stimulate the arts and compensate in leisure time for this unfortunate side effect.
There is so much to write I could keep going and do the book - so I'll stop here. Anyway back to 4%: if things are becoming more efficient why do we still do basically the same hours work per week as we did 10,000 years ago? This is a very hard statistic to calculate (this one is crudely based upon work on foraging communities I've a lot more work in this direction). But, if you think about it there are only so many hours in a day and we would be hard pressed to work much harder than we do!
One answer is that we consume so much more. There's a limit to how much we can eat (altho in America they are pushing that one!). So it must be the gadgets we own. There are only so many clothes we can own, tables, cars, houses, TVs, phones ... Some people do try and earn and spend as much as they can. And when you can't buy any more you can start buying designer stuff which is made in the same factories just sold much more expensive. Society really has reached about the limit of consumerism I think. I'm sure it can be pushed further. What we need is another indispensible gadget like the mobile phone that we simply can't live without and we can start a new industry and put ourselves back to work - for a bit until efficiency makes us redundant again. I wonder how far this can go.
Maybe we've found out since the "unbelievable" economic growth experienced in the last 10 years has been just that unbelievable - it was all a lie. The growth in UK has been 80% in the public sector. I don't know if that is true in US. That is The government made the jobs! Easy credit has created a bubble that has enabled us to keep making jobs for ourselves without having to actually pay. The money in our pockets has been flowing from the bottomless pit of banks via credit cards into shops and into our wages. It's all an illusion.
What the world needs is an economic system that actually factors in freedom from the economic machine because it simply can't keep creating jobs forever, while at the same time becoming more efficient at 4% a year.
And ignoring all this said, it is personally much more obvious. Why do we spend so much time at "work". Can't we do all the things we do at "work" in our free time? We spend huge amounts of time outside the machine but we probably are so deluded that we don't notice.
Sleep is non-economic. Yet the alarm is set by the economy.
The toilet is non-economic.
Sex is non economic. Except for those who want to pay for what is free to everyone else.
Eating and digestion are non-economic.
Breathing is non-economic.
Love for our parents and family is non-economic.
Love for our fellow people is non-economic.
DIY is non-economic. Except for the things we get from the shops - unless our mate can get them for us.
Gardening is non-economic. ditto.
Playing a musical instrument ...
I can go on endlessly. Yet despite it's small involvement in life we are dominated by money, the work we do to get it, and the things we can buy with it. The politicians talk like the economy was an important part of our lives - its almost irrelevant!
It can never happen - this is just an exercise to escape the delusion - but everything that everyone does as part of the "economy" could be done in our free time. We would not have any money from looking after the old person for a day, or attending an accident in the street, or teaching a kid to count, or planting a row of potatoes so we wouldn't know if some people were just sitting around doing nothing while we did all the hard work - but actually that isn't the point of work it is! The point of work is the looking after the old person, the attending the accident, ... All this could be done as part of our lives, as the things we do as members of our communities and for our fellow people for no other reason than what else is there to do but hang out with our fellow people and live together? This is life.
Put the specks of economy on and you become a politician and suddenly it all changes. You get absurd claims like we need to spend more to make jobs and you won't even realise what a clown you look. Problem is most of us don't see what clowns the politicians and economists look because we too are under the veil of economy. Down the job centre believing that we need a "job" to get "money" before we can "live" as though they handed out "life" at the job centre or over the counter of the high street.
It is a very long and complicated story how we got into this Alice in Wonderland topsy turvey world here in the west. There is no way back now, we have got to learn to live with the machine we built. The sad thing is that the rest of the world is slowly being drawn into it. Enclosure acts in India forcing farmers off the land they've occupied quite sustainably for hundreds is not tens of thousands of years onto the dole queues is the start of the upside down world where we look to politicians and economies to give us life - when the blood pumps through my veins not theirs!
Simonyi Professorship
This is truely a great year the stars are shifting and the constellations that have made up the abysmal last decade or dissipating. Along with the election of Obama which ends one of the Human races most depressing periods when so much potential was decimated and turned to so much futile ignorance, Richard Dawkins retires from the Simonyi chair at Oxford. I remember lamenting the day that chair was created and he instated, I can't believe it was 13 years ago!!! In my opinion he was not the guy to give it to, and he has wasted it. Negative arguments about God are neither the place of scientists, nor a constrructive use of either religion or science - they just dissipate energy pointlessly. Our new man Marcus du Sautoy is a much more practical and positive man and seems set to reinvigorate the public enthusiasms with actual science! I hope the same can be said for Obama and America. Really it is so depressing that there is so much power in the world and literally no-one who can utilise it... and worse as I've noted such an ocean of sheeps who will do the bidding of any idiot (most extraordinarily Zimbabwe). It really takes a brave man to stand his ground it seems and there are few brave men.
Saturday, 13 December 2008
God is not great?
I see the Dick n Dan show (aka Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) has a new bum chum. I'm a bit behind the times but I finally see Christopher Hitchens book in the shops. I'm not being dragged into the cheap sensationalism of the title but I see that both Dick and Dan are having unreserved orgasms over the cover of this book and so i might just be bothered to get it from the library read it and then defaecate on it. How these idiots get so many trees taken down in their names astounds me. I got as far as actually reading some Dawkins (something I avoided all through my Zoology BSc) and I've read some Dennett and there is no doubt they are excellent minds .... with the added warning on the label that you don't exceed the stated dose and do not take them internally!
They suffer from the same error that the American government seem to suffer from. A bullet will kill the bad guy. [I can't argue with that]. And the bad guys are over there [ok if you say so]. So therefore lets strafe the area over there and we'll kill the bad guys ... [um no its not that simple.]
Problem with Dick n Dan and the new third man in the menage-a-trois Chris is that they don't even know what God is so how can they argue about it? As I've pointed out before Dick by his own (unintended) admission on a TV show in UK showed that he lacks the part of the brain that provides spiritual experience. Instead he concluded that spiritual experience is just brain activity - lets see how many more books he writes without brain activity. That is the level of the stupidity in their camp (pun?).
From what I've gathered already Chris's book isn't anything to do with God at all. Its an attack on Religion. I agree whole heartedly. I would extend his critique to all human groups! As I've done in this blog. The very notion of human society in any sense beyond the spontaneous co-operation and friendship of human's is a monster - it is no less than Aushwitz in disguise. The types of human society to treat with greatest suspicion are those arrogant enough to name themselves. I hope Chris can extend his analysis of the errors of group membership to the groups to which he belongs e.g. his intellectual bum chums n most notably Atheism.
Atheism is a nihilist group. It has no substance at all except the rejection of God. It is just another religion. The three bum-chums think there is a religion to be had in rationalism and scientific truth, but wasn't religion the problem? No human's are a profound problem to themselves - they love waving banners and calling themselves things and fighting the opposition. Our three antagonists here are just the same.
Its the 60 anniversary of the declaration of human rights. On radio a Burmese student recalled the day in 1968 when the junta began a terrible crack down on the protesting students. A girl, maybe only 14 or 15, climbed upon one of the tanks only to be blown back onto the street by the machine gun. What makes one man recall that moment with horror, and another presumably take his pay packet back to his own wife and daughter after a good days work? It is a question that has weighed on my own mind for years... especially after reading Barefoot Gen that is the moment I was finally changed forever. I walked into the library supposedly to find a job. The book caught my eye. I read the cartoon cover to cover and when I emerged from the library blinking in the sunlight, like an insect from its cocoon, the whole world was changed irrevocably. The buildings, the cities, our lives were like fragile paper that in a split second could all be vapourised by a falling bomb. There is no argument here just nihilation. There is nothing to say. That was 1996.
I realise this week that actually the evil lies in taking sides, in particular it is: our ego grasping a side. Whenever we take sides egotistically (i.e. as they do in all American films), that is pick up a weapon to protect a side we are taken in by the devil. It is exactly what Luke was learning in "The Empire Strikes Back". That anger and hatred draws you closer to the other side, makes you become that which you are opposed and hate. Those who seek to be good will make themselves evil if they stand egotistically against it. This is what Jesus taught us. While he could have summoned all the powers of Creation to decimate the puny Roman persecutors instead he did not fight. He showed them love and compassion even through his mortal doubt and final moments. This way he died free from the weaknesses of mere mortals. He had defeated death. Whether you believe in actual physical rebirth is irrelevant - the victory was had on the cross. What value is a physical existence when you have faced persecution and death without anger or fear!
The problem with Dick, Dan and Chris is that they are just ordinary people stuck in the up and down world of careers and family. They publish a book or two, have a few arguments, join a few societies, make a few speeches, write a few papers, defend their positions, have a few students, get married, work on their income, get a reputation and a name and just do all the ordinary territorial/survival things - their achievement when the bomb drops is no different from the worms and the birds.
In this increasingly secular world that is all our existences are becoming. A glass of wine over the TV in the evening and life's fine enough and that will do. And then death will come... What-ever (said in that whiney teen America way).
Listening again to the radio last week I was struck by a dramatisation of Joseph Black (the Scottish scientist 1728-1799) but it was the last bit of him musing on his death bed whether God was a mouse that struck me. One day I too will be on my deathbed staring at the inevitability that I will be finally passing into that void, and the question "what lies beyond" will no longer be an interesting intellectual question - but a most pressing urgency for me for in an hour or so I will be facing it.
There is no answer. We cannot answer with any confidence in those moments. There is nothing to say. Be it God or Nothing that awaits it makes no difference for neither of these things can be said or grasped by our small and conditional minds. In either case there is only the profound silence and the waiting to be engulfed by the incomprehensible. It is the avoidance of this which "makes cowards of us all" to quote Hamlet. There is only silence.
OK so I don't like silence more than the next man .. look at me writing into space here. I've had my glass of wine, watched the X factor final and delay going to bed. But there is no real escaping the incomprehensible nature of death, and no real escaping the incomprehensible nature of God. That is why the 3 voices mentioned above singing into the darkness are so pitiful, the slow motion replay of their atoms being vaporised as the nuclear radiation over excites the orbital configurations of their mortal existences. Is this what materialism and atheism and a world without God means to them?
Maybe God really is just a bad idea and its time to think up some better ideas. Sadly God is not an idea. He is not empirical either so no data there. He can't be see. He does even have a material form. He is an enigma. It is true that the non-believers give him a name and give people an earthly membership - but this is the weakness of the bomb-makers not of God. Yes God did create the universe. Yes God is present at this moment throughout the universe. Quite a conumdrum isn't it. Simpler if we just dismiss it rather than accept that maybe our minds are not big enough to grasp it. Too humbling.
Well I don't know for sure either, but I don't give up so easy. Those who make it to the higher realms only get there through astounding feats of goodness and self-mastery - it is not for those who satisfy themselves in worldly gains. Not a criticism just a fact. I realise last week also that it really is a matter of the red pill or the blue pill (from the Matrix). You can't do both. If you take the red pill however it will be a path that takes you to your limits - it is not easy at times and many fail and end up worse than if they had not taken the pill at all. God is not an easy path! I sometimes feel in moments of weakness that even if Heaven is as great as they say it is, it was not worth the difficulty of the path!
We all know what is Good. Arguing about God doesn't get us off the hook. We all know deep down what purity is. We all know what we should do. These are facts. All that remains is to avoid these facts or the face them. All our lives (I known mine is) is a huge exercise in running from what I know is true. I am running from myself. I am running from God. Does it matter whether God is great or not? Does it matter whether I am great or not?
They suffer from the same error that the American government seem to suffer from. A bullet will kill the bad guy. [I can't argue with that]. And the bad guys are over there [ok if you say so]. So therefore lets strafe the area over there and we'll kill the bad guys ... [um no its not that simple.]
Problem with Dick n Dan and the new third man in the menage-a-trois Chris is that they don't even know what God is so how can they argue about it? As I've pointed out before Dick by his own (unintended) admission on a TV show in UK showed that he lacks the part of the brain that provides spiritual experience. Instead he concluded that spiritual experience is just brain activity - lets see how many more books he writes without brain activity. That is the level of the stupidity in their camp (pun?).
From what I've gathered already Chris's book isn't anything to do with God at all. Its an attack on Religion. I agree whole heartedly. I would extend his critique to all human groups! As I've done in this blog. The very notion of human society in any sense beyond the spontaneous co-operation and friendship of human's is a monster - it is no less than Aushwitz in disguise. The types of human society to treat with greatest suspicion are those arrogant enough to name themselves. I hope Chris can extend his analysis of the errors of group membership to the groups to which he belongs e.g. his intellectual bum chums n most notably Atheism.
Atheism is a nihilist group. It has no substance at all except the rejection of God. It is just another religion. The three bum-chums think there is a religion to be had in rationalism and scientific truth, but wasn't religion the problem? No human's are a profound problem to themselves - they love waving banners and calling themselves things and fighting the opposition. Our three antagonists here are just the same.
Its the 60 anniversary of the declaration of human rights. On radio a Burmese student recalled the day in 1968 when the junta began a terrible crack down on the protesting students. A girl, maybe only 14 or 15, climbed upon one of the tanks only to be blown back onto the street by the machine gun. What makes one man recall that moment with horror, and another presumably take his pay packet back to his own wife and daughter after a good days work? It is a question that has weighed on my own mind for years... especially after reading Barefoot Gen that is the moment I was finally changed forever. I walked into the library supposedly to find a job. The book caught my eye. I read the cartoon cover to cover and when I emerged from the library blinking in the sunlight, like an insect from its cocoon, the whole world was changed irrevocably. The buildings, the cities, our lives were like fragile paper that in a split second could all be vapourised by a falling bomb. There is no argument here just nihilation. There is nothing to say. That was 1996.
I realise this week that actually the evil lies in taking sides, in particular it is: our ego grasping a side. Whenever we take sides egotistically (i.e. as they do in all American films), that is pick up a weapon to protect a side we are taken in by the devil. It is exactly what Luke was learning in "The Empire Strikes Back". That anger and hatred draws you closer to the other side, makes you become that which you are opposed and hate. Those who seek to be good will make themselves evil if they stand egotistically against it. This is what Jesus taught us. While he could have summoned all the powers of Creation to decimate the puny Roman persecutors instead he did not fight. He showed them love and compassion even through his mortal doubt and final moments. This way he died free from the weaknesses of mere mortals. He had defeated death. Whether you believe in actual physical rebirth is irrelevant - the victory was had on the cross. What value is a physical existence when you have faced persecution and death without anger or fear!
The problem with Dick, Dan and Chris is that they are just ordinary people stuck in the up and down world of careers and family. They publish a book or two, have a few arguments, join a few societies, make a few speeches, write a few papers, defend their positions, have a few students, get married, work on their income, get a reputation and a name and just do all the ordinary territorial/survival things - their achievement when the bomb drops is no different from the worms and the birds.
In this increasingly secular world that is all our existences are becoming. A glass of wine over the TV in the evening and life's fine enough and that will do. And then death will come... What-ever (said in that whiney teen America way).
Listening again to the radio last week I was struck by a dramatisation of Joseph Black (the Scottish scientist 1728-1799) but it was the last bit of him musing on his death bed whether God was a mouse that struck me. One day I too will be on my deathbed staring at the inevitability that I will be finally passing into that void, and the question "what lies beyond" will no longer be an interesting intellectual question - but a most pressing urgency for me for in an hour or so I will be facing it.
There is no answer. We cannot answer with any confidence in those moments. There is nothing to say. Be it God or Nothing that awaits it makes no difference for neither of these things can be said or grasped by our small and conditional minds. In either case there is only the profound silence and the waiting to be engulfed by the incomprehensible. It is the avoidance of this which "makes cowards of us all" to quote Hamlet. There is only silence.
OK so I don't like silence more than the next man .. look at me writing into space here. I've had my glass of wine, watched the X factor final and delay going to bed. But there is no real escaping the incomprehensible nature of death, and no real escaping the incomprehensible nature of God. That is why the 3 voices mentioned above singing into the darkness are so pitiful, the slow motion replay of their atoms being vaporised as the nuclear radiation over excites the orbital configurations of their mortal existences. Is this what materialism and atheism and a world without God means to them?
Maybe God really is just a bad idea and its time to think up some better ideas. Sadly God is not an idea. He is not empirical either so no data there. He can't be see. He does even have a material form. He is an enigma. It is true that the non-believers give him a name and give people an earthly membership - but this is the weakness of the bomb-makers not of God. Yes God did create the universe. Yes God is present at this moment throughout the universe. Quite a conumdrum isn't it. Simpler if we just dismiss it rather than accept that maybe our minds are not big enough to grasp it. Too humbling.
Well I don't know for sure either, but I don't give up so easy. Those who make it to the higher realms only get there through astounding feats of goodness and self-mastery - it is not for those who satisfy themselves in worldly gains. Not a criticism just a fact. I realise last week also that it really is a matter of the red pill or the blue pill (from the Matrix). You can't do both. If you take the red pill however it will be a path that takes you to your limits - it is not easy at times and many fail and end up worse than if they had not taken the pill at all. God is not an easy path! I sometimes feel in moments of weakness that even if Heaven is as great as they say it is, it was not worth the difficulty of the path!
We all know what is Good. Arguing about God doesn't get us off the hook. We all know deep down what purity is. We all know what we should do. These are facts. All that remains is to avoid these facts or the face them. All our lives (I known mine is) is a huge exercise in running from what I know is true. I am running from myself. I am running from God. Does it matter whether God is great or not? Does it matter whether I am great or not?
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
Back to Buddhism 4real
Finally got around to picking up Walpola Rahula's "What the Buddha Taught"... it had answers to most of my remaining questions on Buddhism and set me back on track...
A whole load of things coming together at the moment ... a "life" coming into perspective and I wonder if the difficulties (part expressed in this blog) but going back all my life are just random or have a direction and a fit together into a big jigsaw puzzle... it started to look that way last week.
I'm researching a book as a vehicle for all these issues and finally they're coming together.... its called officially "Human Ecology". It encompasses the whole range of difficulties I face accepting the Western lifestyle of what for me is pointless "labour and production". It becomes even more absurd when you hear politicians saying that we must "shop" to save the economy! What if we don't need anything? The economy drives our lives, its a machine that we have come to serve and it no longer serves us.
But people are too afraid to challenge the dogma of the last 250 years, and the dogmas of growth and progress.
The reading I have been doing is actually pointing to the unbelieveable conclusion that there really has been no progress ever in human existence. But to get this conclusion you need to step outside the box which measures everything in techonology and profit.
Western society fits into what you might call a "slave society" but the slaves have been replaced with machines running on fossil fuel. In theory then like all slave societies we should be getting a large educated leisure class. This is what I have been championing myself. Oddly despite the economy becoming 4% more efficient year on year there are not 4% more people not needing a job. Why is this? On the surface it is growth - the belief in endless progress. In the machine it is because there is no accepted distribution system to people without a job (unless they have capital and can sponge off the economy through interest charges and dividends). This is why the capitalists hate "the work shy" because that is what characterises capitalists - the ability to get an income without doing any work. Not a criticism just a fact of the system. Someone somewhere has to stop working because there are not enough jobs to go around! And the dogma has it that the rich can stop working, but the poor "should" work.
This feeds into the ancient social heirachy view of mankind. That people form "classes". Not necessarily economic, there are blood-line classes (the Kennedy's, Bush's etc) and social classes like the Indian Vedic system. But however you look at people they form into groups and but distance between one another. Good to be in a gang because you get that feeling of society, but it labels you and puts you against other gangs: humans sadly look to form society not realising that at the same time they are excluding other people and creating division and anti-society.
What has been totally missed out of the view so far is the actual corner stone of human "life" and also the root question of this blog: what is all this really about and trying to achieve. Well thanks to Buddhism I've a way into that question once and for all!
The straight answer is that the meaning of life is "nothing".
That sounds like b**ls**t but it conceals a very profound truth. The problem with the human mind is that it tends to give far too much importace to itself - to its faculties of thought, imagination, dreaming, emotion, memory etc. Well we can dream all day, and think all day, and feel fantastic or rubbish all day but actually it makes not a blindest bit of difference to the "world". All this is just one side of human experience.
The other side is "reality". Now that is a truely hard thing to grasp because we "think" how can I grasp reality without my "mind". See the mind really hates the thought that maybe it is not really all that important. It will fight this point forever so I won't take it up here... (I'm in a hurry).
Buddha decalres on enlightenment that "there is now no longer survival". Noone seems to make a big deal out of that... but its the key. Human life (like it or not) is characterised by survival - be that finding food, medicine, a job, education, family, being "cool", carrying a gun or credit card: its all about surviving or maintaining ourselves.
Buddha points out that there is nothing which lasts forever. If it did it would always be here, and it would never go. In such a world we wouldn't need to work for starters. There is no thought, emotion, thing that we have always had and losing it makes us want it back - this is the root of survival.
We have some imagination of things that live forever - God, the soul, myself (maybe if we believe in life after death). But these are exactly that: imaginations. They are fine and just as good as the thoughts and imaginations of people who don't believe these. But we must be clear there is nothing in reality that leads us to this belief. That's just plain and simple.
But the point is not to fill our imagination with lots of things that we "think" do inhabit reality. That makes us the same as the people who fill their imaginations with things that are not in reality. That doesn't escape the mind. The point is to be sensitive to reality as an ongoing process. It is in that sensitivity that we find "life" - not the thoughts, theories, books and science that issues in vast array from experiences of reality.
When we accept reality as a thing separate of our "thoughts of reality" then we are on the way. I spent years of my life confused on this point because I argued (and can argue still here) that surely all knowledge is in the mind and so we can't experience reality directly - see Descartes and many, many dualists since. Whatever we conclude however we must ask: is that a knowledge or is that reality? How for example can we gain "knowledge" that knowledge is separate from reality? What is truth if we can't experience "reality". Its a mine field of twisted mirror imagies: don;t get bogged down in it that is my advice. Basic point: if you "experience" then just do it and do it properly and with commitment and worry about what you call your experience some other time.
So when we see reality we find that it isn't really "this way" or "that way" it is just its way. It is the mind which steps in and compares and measures things - this way, that way, right way, wrong way, good way, bad way. Actually silly mind - there is only ever "the way". When we see that it is, then we see that what was "survival" and the tight rope over the pit of sadness, loss, death and all the bad things we fear if we stop surviving: is actually just reality and not so fearful after all. There is no pit, all things that can happen are quite natural, none are good and none are bad in reality: only good/bad against our imaginations and our minds and our wishes and wants.
A life without wishes and wants than? Is it possible? I'm still trying at the moment but now I'm making some progress. Its odd that we fear not having the things we want because we imagine that "nothing" is depressing. The economists think that being poor and having no job are depressing. Actually its the "economy" that makes us think that. When asked on Radio 4 last week what made us happy, the woman who had been explaining the new research that showed that happiness does increase with wealth, said that "going on holiday with friends" would be a good way to spend your money rather than on all the new gadgets. In other words the new research has found nothing: that the things that are free - friends and a good time are what we should seek and not the things that are expensive and "new". My argument here has always been if its new and you've been happy before, then it means you don't need it. If you've never been happy before then maybe you are looking in the wrong place. "New = ignore" in my book. (I wondered who was paying her to do the research: just the usual "new" American rubbish.)
So "nothing" is the answer because the mind wasn't the right person to answer it! It is Reality that must answer the question of "life", and what is in our minds is just the dogmas of morality, religion, science, economics, politics ... that are vainly trying to compete with reality.
A whole load of things coming together at the moment ... a "life" coming into perspective and I wonder if the difficulties (part expressed in this blog) but going back all my life are just random or have a direction and a fit together into a big jigsaw puzzle... it started to look that way last week.
I'm researching a book as a vehicle for all these issues and finally they're coming together.... its called officially "Human Ecology". It encompasses the whole range of difficulties I face accepting the Western lifestyle of what for me is pointless "labour and production". It becomes even more absurd when you hear politicians saying that we must "shop" to save the economy! What if we don't need anything? The economy drives our lives, its a machine that we have come to serve and it no longer serves us.
But people are too afraid to challenge the dogma of the last 250 years, and the dogmas of growth and progress.
The reading I have been doing is actually pointing to the unbelieveable conclusion that there really has been no progress ever in human existence. But to get this conclusion you need to step outside the box which measures everything in techonology and profit.
Western society fits into what you might call a "slave society" but the slaves have been replaced with machines running on fossil fuel. In theory then like all slave societies we should be getting a large educated leisure class. This is what I have been championing myself. Oddly despite the economy becoming 4% more efficient year on year there are not 4% more people not needing a job. Why is this? On the surface it is growth - the belief in endless progress. In the machine it is because there is no accepted distribution system to people without a job (unless they have capital and can sponge off the economy through interest charges and dividends). This is why the capitalists hate "the work shy" because that is what characterises capitalists - the ability to get an income without doing any work. Not a criticism just a fact of the system. Someone somewhere has to stop working because there are not enough jobs to go around! And the dogma has it that the rich can stop working, but the poor "should" work.
This feeds into the ancient social heirachy view of mankind. That people form "classes". Not necessarily economic, there are blood-line classes (the Kennedy's, Bush's etc) and social classes like the Indian Vedic system. But however you look at people they form into groups and but distance between one another. Good to be in a gang because you get that feeling of society, but it labels you and puts you against other gangs: humans sadly look to form society not realising that at the same time they are excluding other people and creating division and anti-society.
What has been totally missed out of the view so far is the actual corner stone of human "life" and also the root question of this blog: what is all this really about and trying to achieve. Well thanks to Buddhism I've a way into that question once and for all!
The straight answer is that the meaning of life is "nothing".
That sounds like b**ls**t but it conceals a very profound truth. The problem with the human mind is that it tends to give far too much importace to itself - to its faculties of thought, imagination, dreaming, emotion, memory etc. Well we can dream all day, and think all day, and feel fantastic or rubbish all day but actually it makes not a blindest bit of difference to the "world". All this is just one side of human experience.
The other side is "reality". Now that is a truely hard thing to grasp because we "think" how can I grasp reality without my "mind". See the mind really hates the thought that maybe it is not really all that important. It will fight this point forever so I won't take it up here... (I'm in a hurry).
Buddha decalres on enlightenment that "there is now no longer survival". Noone seems to make a big deal out of that... but its the key. Human life (like it or not) is characterised by survival - be that finding food, medicine, a job, education, family, being "cool", carrying a gun or credit card: its all about surviving or maintaining ourselves.
Buddha points out that there is nothing which lasts forever. If it did it would always be here, and it would never go. In such a world we wouldn't need to work for starters. There is no thought, emotion, thing that we have always had and losing it makes us want it back - this is the root of survival.
We have some imagination of things that live forever - God, the soul, myself (maybe if we believe in life after death). But these are exactly that: imaginations. They are fine and just as good as the thoughts and imaginations of people who don't believe these. But we must be clear there is nothing in reality that leads us to this belief. That's just plain and simple.
But the point is not to fill our imagination with lots of things that we "think" do inhabit reality. That makes us the same as the people who fill their imaginations with things that are not in reality. That doesn't escape the mind. The point is to be sensitive to reality as an ongoing process. It is in that sensitivity that we find "life" - not the thoughts, theories, books and science that issues in vast array from experiences of reality.
When we accept reality as a thing separate of our "thoughts of reality" then we are on the way. I spent years of my life confused on this point because I argued (and can argue still here) that surely all knowledge is in the mind and so we can't experience reality directly - see Descartes and many, many dualists since. Whatever we conclude however we must ask: is that a knowledge or is that reality? How for example can we gain "knowledge" that knowledge is separate from reality? What is truth if we can't experience "reality". Its a mine field of twisted mirror imagies: don;t get bogged down in it that is my advice. Basic point: if you "experience" then just do it and do it properly and with commitment and worry about what you call your experience some other time.
So when we see reality we find that it isn't really "this way" or "that way" it is just its way. It is the mind which steps in and compares and measures things - this way, that way, right way, wrong way, good way, bad way. Actually silly mind - there is only ever "the way". When we see that it is, then we see that what was "survival" and the tight rope over the pit of sadness, loss, death and all the bad things we fear if we stop surviving: is actually just reality and not so fearful after all. There is no pit, all things that can happen are quite natural, none are good and none are bad in reality: only good/bad against our imaginations and our minds and our wishes and wants.
A life without wishes and wants than? Is it possible? I'm still trying at the moment but now I'm making some progress. Its odd that we fear not having the things we want because we imagine that "nothing" is depressing. The economists think that being poor and having no job are depressing. Actually its the "economy" that makes us think that. When asked on Radio 4 last week what made us happy, the woman who had been explaining the new research that showed that happiness does increase with wealth, said that "going on holiday with friends" would be a good way to spend your money rather than on all the new gadgets. In other words the new research has found nothing: that the things that are free - friends and a good time are what we should seek and not the things that are expensive and "new". My argument here has always been if its new and you've been happy before, then it means you don't need it. If you've never been happy before then maybe you are looking in the wrong place. "New = ignore" in my book. (I wondered who was paying her to do the research: just the usual "new" American rubbish.)
So "nothing" is the answer because the mind wasn't the right person to answer it! It is Reality that must answer the question of "life", and what is in our minds is just the dogmas of morality, religion, science, economics, politics ... that are vainly trying to compete with reality.
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