Truth, Action, Hamlet, Betty Blue, Descartes

Something I should have sorted out as a child as it has massive implications on how I would spend my life.

Spent yesterday with politicians. Politicians do stuff, or at least plan the process of doing stuff, marshalling people's wishes in the process. I was introduced as being "clever", obviously a false reputation had preceded me. But it got me thinking about truth and action. I am a root a Platonist, even while Buddhism completely rejects Platonic ideas. A Buddhist tree growing in Platonic soils still.

For me if there is a Truth to be discovered then people will discover it eventually in the course of time and there is nothing to do. If people are wrong about Climate Change for example then it will become very apparent and they will eventually change their minds. As the evidence for Climate Change becomes more obvious the number of doubters will naturally diminish, and vice versa if it turns out to be a false alarm or much more complex than we thought then this will gradually win over the proponents. Like a type of Efficiency Theory the population of people that hold an idea will be based on the balance of evidence. The more obvious one sides get the more people will support that side. Money and propaganda can only fool people for so long. Even in a Matrix where a computer has direct access to our senses and evidence we can easily argue that we have been hijacked (arguments missing from the films). The Truth will out. This is 100% the essence of Plato.

Politicians and activists however are not Platonic. They believe that the Truth is not enough and people must be persuaded. Obviously persuasion works on both sides, if people can persuade on one side, they can persuade on the other. This is why I am not a person of action. Wait and see is my motto. "Everything comes to those who wait." Unlike my father I am not politically minded. I am a "realist."

But this sets up a different version of Truth: Constructivist. Politicians must believe that the truth is built by the actions of people. When we win a war we are "making the truth." This is what the Realists find so phoney about war, "the winners write history" they say with derision of the efforts of fighters. But if Truth really is constructed then we do need to take action, because the efforts of the activists are what write the Truths of tomorrow. Science has a problem here also, because it means that the work of experimenters and theoreticians is not what discovers the Truth but what makes it. This is how science fiction writers can come up with inventions centuries before they happen for real. Our imaginations make the technology and discoveries and we go out and make them.

Constructivist vs Realist must be the biggest divide in how we live our lives. The active people building and changing things versus the passive people who watch the seasons change and the world unfold.

Taking a Baysian approach, as I do, the truth is probably in the middle... but is that truth just decided by me, or did I discover it? Not so simple to decide now!

To Hamlet asks:

"Whether ... to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles"

And while he is contemplating suicide, for me it is also the question of "action" in general. Should we "Be or not Be". Sartre would agree thoroughly. "To Be" for Sartre would happen only when we take action, when we make the decision what the Future hold do we make that future and become something ourselves. For Hamlet "To Be" he must take action. And while he suffers the slings and arrows he is not existing. The Existential Hamlet is a Constructivist believing that to Be he must take action. Although Shakespere's Hamlet is an irony, since the action he wishes to take is to kill himself - a punch in the nose for Existentialism and Sartre. If action is how we exist, then what when we kill ourselves?***

But a Realist Hamlet would not link "Being" to "Action." The real Hamlet is a thinking Hamlet, he exists fully in a state of contemplation of the contradictions and schisms in his reality, of the treachery and violations that underpin his new reality. The very action of speaking these lines is all Hamlet needs "To Be." for a Realist the Truth is already written, and Hamlets needs do nothing but let that Truth reveal itself. He just happens to be the first because of the encounter with the Ghost... but then Hamlet might also question the Ghost at the beginning - not the most reliable witness even it is was believed to be his father! What Truth is being revealed? Perhaps he should not be so hasty and let things unfold (but indeed the Ghost turns out the right).

*** I wrote an essay to myself in 1997 themed on SRH (before it has a name). It lies in the problem of thinking what you are thinking. Or the problem of a film portraying its own reality. Suppose we have a film about certain events, that "truthfully" portrays them, perhaps even used "real footage." Common such versions are stories about writers. You can write the story of your own writing of the story "The Orchid Thief" is a great example. I always thought "Betty Blue"was a good example to as I believe Zorg was writing "Betty Blue" itself (he never tells us). But the question in the latter then is: does Betty exist? If its a fictional story then she is made up, but if the story is about him writing it then she gains the same status as the story. She after all gets him to publish the one under his bed (which cannot be Betty Blue by SRH as she is instrumental in bringing it to press). We know the story is real, we are watching it, so it mean's she must be real too. At the time I interpreted her as his Yungian "anima" figure: a literary portrayal of his female creative force. So the story really does dramatise its own creation. But then we have an SRH moment at the end where he is writing, and we can presume he has written up to the end of the book that we are watching. In the action of writing he cannot write the very moment of writing (by SRH), so he is thinking. "Tu ecris? Non, je pense". This is as important a statement in Western literature as "I think therefore I am" to me.

For Descartes he is thinking the very story of himself doing thinking itself, and when he gets to the point of thinking about the very moment of thinking he makes the SRH jump to "being". No longer thinking but "being." His existence suddenly jumps from the page, just as I believe Betty does in Betty Blue. You cannot think about the very moment of thinking, and more than a writer can write the very action of writing, or me type the very action of typing. If we could do these things, then the story would write itself and these words would be writing themselves. No! they are necessarily subordinate to the actual typing that is happening. The marks appearing on my computer screen logically must come first, the key pressed, the electronics the computers all this must be in place before the meanings can be inferred.

So this is all very Realist. Descartes can't construct his thoughts, Zorg cannot turning the act of writing the book into the words being written and Hamlet already "is" in order to deliver his soliloquy, Sartre is wrong since suicide is an act which negates existence making action bigger than both being and non-being, and politicians are wrong since they cannot be the reason why they believe what they believe. I didn't mean to side with Realism here, that is very unsatisfactory: I wanted to respect the dialectic. But a recap of my own thoughts. Some more work to do...

Does an open door let out the warmth or let in the cold? Dialectics.

Apparently simple question: surely both. Simple it is not.

At first look, in the common situation, an open door in Winter is noticed because of the cold draft. We close the door to stop the cold air coming in. So yes cold is coming in.

The cost conscious might have a second level of worry that it is the loss of warmth, that they have paid money to heat the house. Heating up the outside world is a big waste of money . So they will see the heat escaping as the main thing.

Same situation both view points are true.

But surely only one thing is happening. Lets get atomic and do some physics to see what is going on.

Everything has some heat, which in physics is the physical energy of its atoms. Something warm has more physical energy than something colder.

So when a door is left open in Winter the air starts to mix bring air with less energy in and letting air with more energy out. So it appears that yes warm air inside is being replaced with cold air outside, and vice versa. Q.E.D.

Not so fast.

Suppose room temperature is 20oC all winter and then a day in Summer comes that is 20oC outside and we open the door. Would we ever say that warm air was coming in, and warm air is going out? 20oC was definitely warm air in the Winter and we firmly closed our door to keep it inside, but now there is warm air outside it doesn't matter and we open our door not noticing the air that is mixing.

In fact then 20oC is not actually "warm" air at all. It is only warm when outside is colder. Warmth is really relative.

So in fact there is more going on than just warm air leaving in Winter and being replaced with cold. While the air movements are purely physics what we are talking about and interested in is really the difference in temperature between the air coming in and that leaving. For this reason once we notice cold air coming in, we know for a fact that warm air is leaving. They are necessarily bound together. You can't have one without the other! To quote Newton: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Now this looks like Dialectics at work!

So we see that subtly hidden in the opening of the door comes a situation of mutually reinforcing opposites. The colder it is outside the warmer it is inside and vice versa, and the more we want that door closed. Hot/Cold are inter-dependent. It is this inter-dependence of opposing forces in fact which ever stimulated someone to notice that the door is open in Winter while not in Summer. No one ever says close the door in Summer you are letting the air mix because the issue of hot vs cold is not being created. That event of "you are letting the heat out" is actually created by the contrast of cold and hot. Without the contrast there is nothing in the air itself that causes this.

Hot and Cold do not exist by themselves but always together in a pair. And when the contrast ceases so they too evaporate into nothing because at root they are nothing. There is no substance called cold or hot, there is nothing there other than them pushing against each other. This is perfect Yin-Yang in action.

So the answer is more than both, but necessarily both as if they were one... even while they are opposites. The whole situation is one thing, but composed from 2 ways of seeing it that depend on one another. And they are exactly dependent on one another so that without the cold there is no hot and vice versa. When the air outside warms up in Summer the whole hot/cold thing just disappears without a trace and the door just becomes a thing of privacy and security once more... which are themselves things caused just like hot/cold by dialectics.. as indeed if we look into it is everything!

The mystery of length?

An incredibly deep zoom of the  Mandelbrot set. If you have a 15.6" screen then after 1 minute the set is the size of the known universe.

This is a key feature of reality that it has scale and we can zoom in and zoom out. As a result we need to chose our measurement standard, that is our scale. For distance we chose the French Metre. How big is the Metre?

The largest known distance is the universe estimated at 10^27m and the smallest theoretical distance is the plank length at 10^-35m so we're quite big when you look at the whole picture. But we don't see the whole logarithmic picture we see it linearly which is where scale comes in.

Once you chose your scale then you step around at this scale and miss all the details. At the start of the set above very nearly all that will be revealed is within a single pixel. Without a lot of computing power you will only ever see this high level. I have tried before and once it gets below machine size 64bit parameters you must virtualise arithmetic which gets very time consuming. Few people every develop a very short scale for stepping around the Mandelbrot set and so most of it is hidden. Exactly as the world was before the invention of the microscope and the telescope.

For some unfathomable reason while the world is just a single entity, we experience it at a scale. We experience it like a fractal into which we can zoom in and out. This is the deep mystery of length. More thought to do...

We might think that the best scale is the middle. But the Manelbrot zooms out infinitely in both directions. This means that any scale you chose for the Mandelbrot has an infinite zoom in both directions. There is no middle. Just as Zero is not actually the middle of the number line so 10^0 = 1 is not a special level of zoom for the Mandelbrot (zoom scales are exponential). Yet the "interesting stuff" does start at this scale with imaginary numbers of the order of 2 and below. Likewise what is special about the scale of humans? 0.1mm is the middle scale of the known universe. Is there something special about this level? Or if the universe scales infinitely in all directions (which would break current theories) perhaps there is no middle size and however large you are things can ge infinitely larger of smaller.

What is watching when we meditate?

We like to identify with things: from possessions like my car, to people like my wife, to senses like my memories or what I can see, and especially what I like and what I think.

But it is simple to reflect on that fact that none of these is permanent. At some time in the past we have none of these. Ironically its the most temporary that we hod the closest. I was not thinking what I am think now last week else I would have written this blog then. This idea is new.

Things that are new have been created, and if I saw that they were created then I am not them as I was not created with them.

So we find we are sitting there watching our car being bought, going rusty and getting a new one, we watch our lives go past. We are not our lives then, but somehow spectators on them.

So what then are we? The reason for this blog is to tie this in with "psychic" experiences.

I have experienced people at a distance. I believe we are at some level aware of other people even when they are not in our senses. And this is more than just "thinking" of other people. It appears that there is another space in which we connect to people that is beyond what we see, hear, smell, taste, feel and think of them.

I speculate that this other realm is the same realm that what it is that can watch and reflect on my life. It is as though there is a "sky" to our lives that arcs over everything that is on the ground, and this sky is so vast that it extends to other people as well. We all live under one sky and one sun, we are all connected under this sky. This is no way stops our individual plots of land having their own sights and sounds but it means that when we withdraw away from all this and reflect upon it we are drawing back onto a world that connects us all and in which we can feel other people.

This blog arises from a question asked to me on reincarnation and the soul. Theoretically we can argue that there is no self. Yet in our lives we have a strong sense of other people that is non sensory and beyond just thinking of objects. Other people are connected to us very fundamentally and instinctively. Neuroscience says that we have "mirror neurons" that means we instinctively mirror the feelings of other people but this is sensory and thought. There is a deeper level than this which may be beyond the brain. To explore...

Goodness, Self, Desire and Evil

This is kind of the crux of morality: when I want something I can go and get it but what when I come into competition with other desires? The problem of evil arises when we have the power to force our will on others.

There are many positive sides to humans for example Mercy where we allow our will to subside in favour of another's interests. We have this amazing ability to take another's place, not just theoretically, but genuinely let our own view point go and absorb into another's point of view. I think of an angry king over reacting to some insult, and then seeing the fear in the perpetrators eyes suddenly realising that the crime was only small and feeling their fear instead.

But we are easily blinded to other people. We see it all the time in the news. I think of the pilot of the Elona Gay who I bet would not even raise a fist to his children, but ever-the-less says he would do it again and incinerate 80,000 men, women and children apparently with no mercy at all. This is an extreme form of blindness, not of the eyes but of the heart and mind. This is pure evil, there is nothing more serious.

Traditionally the "self" sits in the middle of this battle between the wishes of others and the wishes of oneself. We would hope in a caring community that our own wishes would be considered by others so we don't feel defensive. But we live in a selfish world and many people do not grow up feeling that their wishes are taken seriously others. This leads to defence, and in extremes vindictive rejection of the wishes of others. A wall can form and people can become cut off from the outside world. They become negative and cruel.

But at the same time people with excessive desires may "feel" that their wishes are not taken seriously because they just have to many wishes. They say a poor man can live in a rich man's house but not vice-versa. People with many desires, the greedy, will find that other people simply cannot keep up with their demand. They will be perceived as demanding by others, and in turn they will feel that people don't care for them.

Jesus would be the archetypal opposite. Total self sacrifice may make you poor, but you will find the world very accommodating to you and you will live a peaceful life. Well perhaps not - Jesus was also demanding of the officials and the Roman Empire turned against him... but we imagine in the end he was peaceful and is certainly very loved for his sacrifice.

Obviously from this account the difference of whether you feel people take your wishes seriously or not is a lot to do with your expectations and how demanding you are. Demanding people may think they are getting a lot, but the reaction they experience for getting a lot is actually stress. Giving people may think they are losing, but the reaction they get is acceptance and peace.

In this way it is easy to see why the path of generosity, selflessness and giving is favoured by those who wish to live in community and peace. While those who wish to fight and have tense relations with people chose the path of taking.

But I wanted to examine some else. Nietzsche, the Libertarians and the extreme Libertines would argue to hell with that analysis. Our True Nature is to seek power and do whatever we want even to the expense of other people. If we are powerful then abusing that power is what we can hope to do. It seems bad people in the press mostly seek to abuse power. Someone has a car they want, lets just take it. Even if that means directly confronting them and even killing them, who cares lets just take it. This is like the crew of the Elona Gay : whatever the rational justification might be in a crime (e.g. they are rich they can afford it, they are worthless no one cares if they die, they are the enemy they need to die, by dying they will stop the war and save lives, I am under orders etc) this covers up the deeper issue that there is no mercy. Soldiers are actually trained not to have mercy, but this is what makes people into criminals. There is no justification for lack of mercy. The US talks such a load of nonsense. For example their argument for Hiroshima's destruction was that it would save lives by ending the war soon. If this is to be believed then had the Nazis gained the bomb first and bombed the US until it surrendered that would have saved lives too. Yet I don't think the US means this at all. What they meant by Hiroshima is that we have a chance to win the war quickly: in other words with the bomb they developed the power to gain their wishes at the expense of many hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. This is pure evil, the same that fills the news pages, and it is the issue of this post.

So here's the deal: when we find we have power what is to stop us from using this to get what we want, and to deprive others of what they want? This is the Devil's Question to us that Nietzsche and the Libertines like De Sade asked.

Well normally the question is not raised as what we want is roughly in line with what other people want. We would not steal from our friend because we value their friendship. But what if we start to dislike someone do we steal from them then?

Now I'm going to short circuit this with the truth as I do not have time to explore the ramifications of that question right now. The problem as with many posts here is to do with the self.

Someone once told me that the Ego was bad. I asked why. Their answer has proved to be excellent. The Ego is not the whole self, it is the part of us on parade: the self-determined, strong , independent, self-identifying, the bit that stands up and we show off to the world. Or if the World is not interested its the bit that stands in front of a revolutionary army against the world. However its not our whole self, and it quite often works in its own interests which often damage the whole self.

Beautiful examples are when we are angry. You have insulted me, I will take revenge. But often in our rage we make a fool of ourselves and end up being hurt even more. Violent offenders fit this category. It must have seemed such a good idea to "lose it" and go on the rampage. Not so smart on reflection when they wake up in prison or dead. Tho often people are so wrapped up in their ego that they refuse to accept they were wrong, digging themselves deeper and deeper into the falsehood.

So where Nietzsche and the Libertines are wrong is that the self which seeks to gain at the expense of others, is just a small part of our true self. That thought "lets just do what we want" is actually a mirage: there is no real gain here it is just an empty reflection on sand. The True Self is vast and unfathomable with tentacles that stretch out far into the world. When we act from the Ego those distant tentacles get cut and we end up isolating ourselves. Prison is not a conspiracy, it is a metaphor of what happens when our Ego takes over: isolation. A priest once explained to me that Hell is best explained as complete isolation.

The beauty of mercy and compassion is that they are antidotes to the ego, breaking through the mirage and giving us real water. With these "good" sensibilities we are reaching out into the world, into other people and breaking down the walls of our isolation.

Unfortunately this simple truth is rather fossilised in ancient teaching of the battle between Good and Evil which have rather lost their meaning in the modern secular world.

Zen answer to question: How many people are there on Earth? OR God vs Man

This is one I struggle with, but got a good insight yesterday. We know that there is exactly one universal entity (sort of), and we know that everything originates from this entity. This is "fact" (ish).

Religions express this fact in many ways. The simple version is God the Creator. This is especially the Jewish (Abrahamic) idea that is the basis idea of Judeism, Christianity and Islam. Science is tainted by this view combined with Plato where God becomes Truth: there is exactly one Truth but it is hidden by all the data that must be put together to find the universal laws of creation (obviously where those laws - and science itself - comes from is beyond the scope of Science! q.v. SRH). True science which purely hypothesises and discovers endlessly is not a religion - it is a machine. Other views are more nuanced. In Hinduism the "creator" part is separate from the "universal" part. Brahma created the world, but the universal he created is divided by illusion into Brahman and Atman which are the same, but the true universal origin greater even that Brahma is represented by a sound Om. I make reference to Buddhism below which brings the most subtle ideas to the table.

The Hindu version gets close to the answer to the question of how many people there are. In the realm of thought there are about 7 billion. In the realm of ego there is one. But in realty there are none. What does that mean.

There is a self. But if we examine our self, our egos, closely we run into problems. Firstly we know that there are other people. We live in a world of other people - they taught us almost all we know for example including the language that we use in our thoughts. I did not invent "English" or these characters that I write. It is true no one may ever read what I write here, but it doesn't matter because the thing I am doing in thinking and writing is learned and given to me by my community of people. Writing itself is evidence that there is more to this world than myself. So we hypothesis that other people are exactly like myself - give or take. Yet in relation to others I know that I have a special relationship with myself (or so it appears). When I sense the world I am in the front row of the experience, and while I can share this with others, each of us seems to be in front row to their own experience. Certainly when I try to describe something that only I saw, I run into this problem that clearly this is something for me. When I fall in love it is useless trying to share this with others, because it is I that is in love, and they are spectators on my experience (and probably more concerned with their own loves for which they are front row).

But this apparently solid state of affairs of being front row on my own life crumbles just as easily as the ego on inspection. But this is where it gets complex because the ideas which follow are not present in English. English is great for living the life of English culture, which is a private property, clearly defined selves and public interactions, friendships and families. But it goes no further.

The new idea is from Buddhism and is called sunyata in Pali language. It is transliterated into "emptiness" or "suchness" in English. I prefer Emptiness but with the caveat it could just as well have been called "fullness". Either way it is to do with the "heaviness" of the world and the answer is not that it is heavy or light but neither. In English the world is heavy, so we naturally antidote this in the West by saying that Sunyata is "lightness" (of being) or emptiness. But if you go too far then you need add a bit more heaviness, and then keep playing around with the scales until you no longer notice the "heaviness" or "lightness". The goal is the keep adding cold and hot water to the bath until we don't notice the temperature any more, lightness and heaviness until we are free.

Returning to selves we have got to the situation where there are 7 billion individuals all front row in their lives and sharing more or less their lives together. But now we look deeper.

We cannot deny that there is one Earth. There may be 7 billion bedrooms, or 3.5billion if we all share a bed with a partner. sibling or friend. But, all these bedrooms occupy the same planet. Where does the space come from to have 7 billion front row seats? How when we all occupy the same world do we each have a different view of things? Now we need to start exploring sunyata and moving into the centre (middle path in Buddhism). Some say our brains have a model of the world in which we inhabit (Matrix style - Richard Dawkins has argued this). Some take this as far as to say that our own experience is an illusion (Daniel Dennett). But the majority go the opposite direction and say that it is the world that is an illusion (George Berkeley the most extreme in the West). I like Hegel who realises that what we call the world is actually just ideas, and when we try to think of how this comes about we are like an astronomer using his telescope to find out how a telescope works. Kant tried to find out if the telescope worked, but all the while using the telescope. (This is the first example of SRH I can think of in literature.) So "the world" being ideas (don't underestimate ideas) makes it not so very different from what we previous called "ourselves" in this view. Loosely some kind of mental stuff - like a computer software in modern analogy. So what in fact is the difference? Surely only an idea. But clearly that isn't the end of the quests because we just kicked the ball into the question what is an idea?

To short circuit many thousands of years of pondering this question and my realisation yesterday. As we examine the Atman (the sense of self, and being front row in our lives) we chip away at what we are. Initially we reject the physical world as not us: I am not actually my car even tho it is mine, or my house or any material thing except possibly my body. But I can lose my arms and legs: they aren't really me. And we quite easily get to the brain and sensory apparatus (these thought experiments were being had thousands of years before modern science told us of brains and neurons so it doesn't really matter what we think - it's the journey that counts). So then we get more philosophical and realise that what we "see" really belong to our eyes and brain rather than us - easily provable if we go blind. When I close my eyes I don't lose myself, or more extreme go blind. In fact what can't we lose and still be our self. We can lose everything is the shock realisation! I can lose my car, my job, my partner, by legs, my eyes and people will still meet and talk with me (returning to language again). Even if I get dementia and lose my memory and my ability to recognise things, people will still meet and talk with me. I can even die and become mummified and people will come and see me. At which point I realise they are not talking to me at all!!! I can become an online avatar and people will still meet me. All these things that they talk to are not me. So what is me? The point is that there is nothing there that is me!! This is what Buddha called Anatta (non-self).

But!!!!! don't go extreme on this. Back to Sunyata and the balance. In English the world is heavy, there is very much weight. When we see that we don't carry any of it, and that we are nothing we explode and go to the extreme of feeling light having dropped the burden and spin off into space. Warning! A person who carries nothing is as useless as someone who carries it all. We probably need to start loading up with stuff again if we get too light with this view. If we are nothing then how are these experiences right now, my life actually going on: how am I reading! I didn't just evaporate, nothing has changed! In fact since I am writing, and who ever is reading this, it is mostly just an idea anyway.

So back to the question of how many people. There are 7 billion people to speak to, or which I am one. But I am a special one because this part of the world shines bright for me, while other parts of the world are just imagination for me. But I am wrong if I think that this means that there are 7 billion souls out there, none of us equates to these people in reality. Once we examine in depth we see that no one equates with their body or their thoughts, because taking the world at face value of bodies and thoughts means that we are all separate - like monads. Yet there is one world with a single mass of atoms made into people. The solution lies in the middle. The special brightness of my own life and existence is not down to me, there is no me here after all. Everything I could name as part of me is something in every way I can lose, even my consciousness I lose every night when I sleep, and one day I will die. None of this is me. But the same is true for everyone else. The more I give up, the more alike everyone else I become. If I hold my name then I am different from everyone with a different name, if I hold onto how my face looks I live independently until I meet someone who looks like me, if  hold on to my ideas I am individual until I meet someone with similar ideas, if I hold on to my experiences I am individual until I meet someone with the same experiences and so on. I can even donate parts of my body to others. None of this is me. If I gain power from the "value" of these things like I have a noble family name or title, or learned ideas, or great experiences then I lose that power when I meet someone better.

Yet if I see all these things as not me, but don't go too far so as to identify with the void or nothingness or vacuity so that I go to the other extreme and feel worthless and irrelevant. If I balance the scales and let go of the heaviness of being all these things, and reject the other form of heaviness of rejecting and not wanting all these things. If the scales are perfectly balanced then I find I can abide with other people as if they were myself. There is no vast void between us, we are not separate but we are not the same. This "sunyata" balance is so important. We juggle our ideas to grasp it. We probably swing from "we are separate each living out own life", to "we are are the same all mixed in a cosmic soup" and oscillate back and forwards. We may get really smart and decide that we are both separate and joined at the same time, or wrestle with the idea that we are neither separate nor joined. But Buddha makes very clear "sunyata" is none of these. Purely mental ideas fail us.

The approach is more with heart than mind (but actually both). We can feel our way into the space between ourselves and others, looking closely we see that the walls all break down. But we don't reassemble new walls to demarcate our new understanding. Understanding is something I have, and you don't. If I demarcate understanding and ideas then I am different from you. I can argue with you to make us agree, but the divide is there to bridge or separate. The goal is to let go of these things, so ideas are not the goal.

We feel ourselves into the gap, realising that all the things we call ourselves are indeed there, but they are not really us because there is "no me" or is "no" me in there (neither quite balances the scale). Anything I find I can stand aside from. In doing this I feel I lose, but in reality if I make it, it brings me closer to reality, what is there and what previously I called other people.

In this way there is just "one" reality. I write with a small "one" because when you start to see it, its not demarcated from other things like a "king on his throne" but gentle resting there between the heavy things and the 7 billion named people of this world.

Reply to my own post 24/01/2007 "I done it :-)"

the post
No I didn't do it. 11 years later I have done it, but it is slow and not euphoric for me. It takes time to let go when you are no enlightened, but its just the way the road goes. Some days strong, other days can't go on. It seems we must suffer sometimes, and in ways we never imagined possible. We make it worse for ourselves when we try to escape this pain, holding on to youthful ideas that somehow I am a good person and somehow I don't deserve to suffer. If there is a grim reaper of souls, there is a grim sower of sorrows and we feel sometimes that they got the wrong person... but this is the greatest sorrow to think this. All sorrow is mine, and something I must shoulder. It can't last forever, but it can last for many years... not a continuous uniform sorrow but waves on a stormy sea. Sometimes we go under, but wait and we come up again. Eventually the storm subsides. Eventually a day comes when you find that you don't think of her. Then you claw back your addiction, you feel guilty, you feel the emptiness of loss and would rather have pain than nothing. It is a long journey to eventually sit in the sun again, and just feel what you feel without fear and struggle. To just feel sad without feeling you sit on the edge of a void of despair and disaster, to feel happy without trying or needing to. I imagine the enlightened or like this even when someone truly close dies. They courageously just feel sad and loss without struggling, brave enough to just be what they are in despair, not trying to shake it off, not trying to bring back the Past, not pretending to be anything but what they are which is sad, lonely and depressed. This is what humans do, it is how we are made. But seeking to be someone different, to pretend to be strong, to want happiness so much that we can't be sad, to be afraid of suffering and to fear the void and emptiness of being lonely and sad... to struggle against all these things is the real pain. And like a fly in a spiders web the more we struggle the more the fangs of suffering stick in. Take it on the chin: you got hurt, it went wrong, you are infallible, you are feeling empty, you failed, you aren't as awesome as you thought. Your true friends won't abandon you, the world most certainly won't abandon you (its been here 5 billions years - a lot longer than you), but most importantly you won't abandon you. Its a painful journey, but one that must be walked either willingly or kicking and screaming it doesn't matter. The sun is always shining, we just can't always see it behind the clouds. So no I didn't do it then, but I have done a lot better since.

Nephron data processing

Have no idea what this is called in real computer science but giving it this name for now.

An app faced with the problem of caching data that is retrieved from a source has 2 choices.

(1) They can create a model that reflects the data to be stored. A dynamic approach.
(2) Or they can pick the data they want according to a static model and ignore the rest (to urine exactly like the nephrons of the kidney).

(1) has the advantage that the designer doesn't need to actually code the model. A list of data in the cache can be produced generically so that at no point does the coder ever need to know the details of the model. This is wonderful if the model is likely to change in the future. However it also means that all garbage also gets processed by the system, and introducing malicious contents is easy (once encryption security on the data channel has been compromised).

(2) A static model makes more work for the coder, and it makes the app more rigid and inflexible. Changes to the model will not be shown up in the app and will require a new version. But it has the great advantage that the end user is better protected from garbage and malicious intent. Any data the consumer doesn't expect is sent to urine, like a toxin in the blood stream.

I just opted for nephron data processing myself hence the post.