The Crime of Anti-Gentilism

The key idea of Anti-Racism is that people should not be divided by race. Human beings have inherent worth that goes beyond things like race.

The reason why Ideologies like Nazism are rejected by the West is because their politics divides people by race.

By contrast the West believes that the law and your opportunities should not be affected by your race. Whatever race you are your access to law and opportunity should not be affected by that race.

This is a two sided weapon. While people have race, we cannot prejudice against, or for, people based on that race.

To welcome someone into your home because they are the same race as you, is the same crime as barring someone from your home because of their race.

Now obviously people of the same race have a natural affinity. You will necessarily be born to parents of your race, and you will therefore be brought up in a family and community of your race.

But the crime occurs when you judge people not as family and friend but as a race. True these overlap, but they are different.

There is a well known crime of Anti-Semitism. But there is a less well known but equally serious crime of Anti-Gentilism. And here we see the weakness in Judaism and Jewish identity.

Because the Jews divide people into Jews and Gentiles they create a problem for themselves. Yes prejudice against Jews is a serious offence. But unfortunately so is prejudice on the other side of the this fence. In fact Jews gain nothing by creating this division. What appears to be gain by creating a racial identity and community, is all undone by the consideration of their necessary relationship with Gentiles. You cannot escape.

But it is all highly problematic in the first place. At the heart of Judaism and Jewish identity is the belief that God "chose" the race of Jews, to make them "first amongst nations." Written into the very heart of Judaism is Anti-Gentilism.

In fact there is no such thing as a Gentile. If you lived your whole life in the jungles of South America you would never know you were a Gentile. You need to meet a Jew before they tell you you are a Gentile. So in fact this whole bubble exists only within Jewish belief. Only Jews believe they are first above other nations, and only Jews know who the Gentiles are, and in fact only Jews know who the Jews are. None of this really exists.

And if Jews do not really exist then Anti-Semitism and Anti-Gentilism don't really exist. Our person in the Amazonian jungle seeing the Holocaust on film would just seen humans treating other humans insanely. They would have no idea about the "identities" of the people or what motivated them.

So people need be very careful when they talk about Anti-Semitism in the Gentiles because on one hand there is the great risk of it being attended by Anti-Gentilism on the Jewish side, and on a deeper level neither Jew nor Gentile really exist.

Jesus, the most famous Jewish prophet, struggled with exactly this. He began life in the Jewish community and saw God as the God of the Jews, But as his mission progressed he was forced to see that God was God of all people who believed regardless race.

And this is the other point. What is a Jew? Some say a race: you can only be born a Jew and others say a religion: you can convert and adopt the belief yourself.

The English word "Jew" comes from the Hebrew "Yehudi" meaning "from the Kingdom of Judah".

But I have also heard it argued that the spiritual meaning is just anyone who keeps the covenant with God. You cannot be born a Jew. You are circumcised and must perform the actual acts that amount to keeping the covenant. Anyone who does not keep the covenant regardless anything else is not a Jew. And anyone who does keep the covenant regardless anything else is a Jew.

That means a Gentile is really just a sinner. And now we are far away from race, racism, community, identity and literally everything that the NAZIs got so wrong and also the Zionists in Israel.

What does Anti-Semitism mean in this context? The Semites are a whole class of tribes from the Levant region of the Middle East. Why should anyone have hatred of an arbitrary subset of these tribes?

I will use a capitalised "Jew" to mean a follower of God's Law here and small case "jew" to refer to the physical tribe.

The reason why jews are victims of such prejudice lies in the very concepts they have that separate themselves from other people.

It is true that Jews are first amongst all nations because they obey Gods Law. This is just saying that the Righteous are better than Sinners. It is kind of an obvious statement.

But to say that jews are first amongst all nations is just nonsense. This is like the NAZIs saying that the aryan race was superior. How can you mix ideas of race and superiority?

So the mistake the jews make is to think that their race is superior and from this come ALL the problems they have ever faced.

It may sound crazy to criticise the jews for not understanding their own religion and beliefs, but all the Jewish prophets spend ALL their time telling people of the region that they had it all wrong. Jesus again most famously was put to death for challenging the status quo in the region by telling all the Zealots and Pharisees and even the Sanhedrin that they had it all wrong and did not know God. Essentially Jesus is telling them that while they follow the Law by its word, they have lost sight of its meaning. And this is exactly what the jews to this day have done. They are jews just in name and it has lost all meaning, You can see this in Israel right now. There is nothing Jewish about the people in Israel. They are just ordinary jews and have no relationship with God.

Now God punishes people who ignore him! Anti-Semitism you could see as a punishment from God for claiming and using the name Jew in a sacrilegious way. Never call yourself Jew unless you dare believe you are keeping the covenant with God. And if you do use the name Jew and you are not fully Righteous then expect the wrath that comes with that.

So Anti-Semitism on many levels is highly problematic.

Are America and Israel terrorists?

 So Google gives this definition of "terrorism":

Now since 1945, in order to avoid a recurrence of the wars that plagued Europe and America, "authorisation" has been granted by the UN.

That means anyone using violence without a UN Resolution is a terrorist.

So therefore America, Russia, Israel, Britain, Saudi-Arabia, Palestine, Yemen, ISIS, Al-Qaida etc and scores of people in Africa are all terrorists! And if you supply weapons in any unauthorised violence you are supporting terrorism and therefore a terrorist too.

So in fact the entire West is a Terrorist! The War on Terror then has been a complete failure as unauthorised violence has only spread since 2000.

Of the major land masses the only ones not terrorists at the moment are China and India.

This puts UK in a difficult position. It is opposed to Terrorism, does not cooperate with Terrorists nor even negotiate with terrorists and yet its main ally America is a terrorist. By contrast the majority of the Commonwealth is not terrorist.

So UK's only correct option here is to break all agreements with America and its allies, and stop co-operation with the West.

For many countries this would be problematic but as Brexit has shown Britain is resilient and with the remnants of its Empire in the form of the Commonwealth has very strong trading partners already in place. Combining forces with the UN, Britain could move to the right side of History and uphold the developments that came after WW2 looking forward to a positive world that opposes terrorism, fear, oppression and unilateral undemocratic action by states.

The problem with Solidarity

The greatest achievement of the West is the formal appreciation of the value of human life.

Humans are valuable.

They do not need a market price to find value. While you could buy and sell humans--as happened in the slave trade--the West now recognises this does not give humans their worth. As a result humans cannot be bought or sold, their worth is intrinsic.

This idea is not new. In Christianity God loves all who truly repent. While this does put a condition on God's Love it places our value beyond the limits of mere mortal characteristics like wealth, skill, usefulness or race.

The irony of course is that within the Jewish religion race is still a defining feature of worth, but that has been discussed already in this blog, and underlines why Judaism is an extremist belief system at odds with Western values.

Despite this formal declaration of intrinsic human value the West has been slow to embody these values. It still adopts a Capitalist economic system that affords wealth to a minority and relative poverty to the majority, and it still engages in weapons production and war which sets one group of humans against another. Both these belief systems are extremist and against Western values.

These inequalities and injustices in the West led by the end of the 18th Century to the rise of Socialism which sort for a fairer world and the promotion of the value of human beings above all else.

The core of the Marxist flavour of this was the Class Struggle where humans were seen as divided across a class divide between the Capitalists who owned and the Workers who did not own.

The perception of this divide led to Solidarity between the people who felt this divide an injustice to them.

However isn't it immediately obvious that such Solidarity contradicts the fundamental belief in human worth.

If we wish to respect human worth we should remove boundaries and division. Celebrating a division like the Worker Class, even if only while we remove it, is a contradiction.

This problem is seen most obviously now in all the Rights Movements. You have Blacks unified through their blackness asking for equality for Blacks. That is a straight contradiction. You can't ask for equality from a platform of division. It is doomed to failure.

The most ridiculous version of this is Israel. A country supposedly built to protect people from division and prejudice whose very foundations are built upon a division of people into Jews and Gentiles. It is doomed to fail.

It is commonly noted that drives to protect a particular group in fact increase prejudice against that group. This is obvious. The cause of prejudice is division, so increasing that division by defining groups to protect only amplifies the problem.

Solidarity, Rights, Identity Politics, Anti-politics (like Anti-Racism, Anti-Sexism, etc) all contradict the fundamental culture of the West which is value for the human being them self.

A human should be valued regardless their race, colour, sex, gender, class etc and so solidarity between sub-divisions of people is actually against the principle of human value.

You cannot value someone more, or less, because they share, or do not share, your race, colour, sex, gender, class etc.

So while the rise of Socialism in the 19th Century was built upon the growing awareness that humans are to be valued in and of themselves, it was immediately derailed by Solidarity between groups against other groups.

The way forward is to pick up the, now dropped, baton of Equality and strive for a world where people value each other because they are people and ignore everything else. All those floundering in the mire of politics need be helped out toward the light.

There are 2 things to add to this.

(1) Division is the main tool of the powerful to control the mass. "Divide-and-Conquer" the British called it. Religion and race are the classic divisions used by politicians around the world to gain control of people. Get people in-fighting and they won't fight you. So its essential for the Elite to cause in-fighting between people in order to keep control. The internet has invented "Cultural Marxism" to suggest that Marxism is being used to control people by getting them to fight over silly identity issues. Indeed Marxism says that History is propelled forward by conflict over social contradictions (dialectics), but it is technically wrong to suggest that Dialectics is being exploited by the powerful: Dialectics is bigger than that: the powerful and the powerless are both instruments of Dialectics! I mean what is the meaning of "powerful" if there are not "powerless" and vice-versa. So how impossible then for the powerful to exploit dialectics! Rather we see simply that divisions have always been promoted by the powerful because conflict enhances their control. So to establish peace and equality between people does ultimately mean abandoning politics.

(2) The account given here comes under the banner of Humanity. The idea that humans are a species joined collectively by sharing a common ancestry and identity. This idea goes back to creation myths like Adam and Eve (where it is never clear whether they were the first Jews are the first Humans - an ambiguity convenient to Christians). Sharing the same parents ultimately means we are all brothers and sisters. This is 1000s of years before Darwin and his ideas were not radical, only the mechanism he proposed was new. But some people Jews in particular would reject this idea of a shared humanity between people. For Jews people are not the same, and this idea is shared with Racists the world over which think that say Black and White people are different. In the UK Army I was once showed a video of burns victims and a squaddie pointed out that one of them had been black until his skin came off: "we really are all the same underneath" he said with some revelation. But the idea that humans are not all the same underneath persists at all levels all the way up to whole States like Israel. So the battle ground that holds the world back from the vision above lies in these kinds of arguments that still very much exist. Worth noting that a key feature of Buddhism is the recognition that all beings Suffer. This is the solidarity that joins all feeling creatures. But it is not a solidarity that divides people, but a solidarity that comes from having awareness in the first place. This reveals another problem with what is said above. The Unity of Humans above is actually rather limited. Really the equality and respect for beings need not stop at Humans and ultimately extends to all creatures. 

How does Ego stop us Enlighten?

 So the problem description for Enlightenment is: how do we get free? 

What is the nature of Ego? Ego needs stuff to define itself with. It is like the cart above. As we get things we like we put them in the cart to keep them and define ourselves with. Completely instinctively we collect things that we feel we need to define us. These can be anything: I won a race at school, I am good at piano, My wife loves me or they can be negative: I am not good, I am a failure, I am too short.

The most dangerous thing we can put in the cart is: I am on the path to Enlightenment, or I have made spiritual progress.

The problem for the donkey of course is the more it puts in the cart the less free it is!!!!

What the donkey needs is to take things our of the cart, or even better take the harness off and not pull a cart at all.

But the cost of having no cart is we cannot carry anything any more and that is quite a commitment. Freedom and No Possessions or Possessions and no Freedom. It seems like there is no choice: always go for freedom. But when we come to do it, it is very hard to actually let go.

And because we have been collecting things in our cart since the moment we were born, or perhaps even before, its quite unnatural to set them aside and live without them.

The whole process is very unintuitive to start with. When we sit to meditate at the start and even deep into meditation we put it in our cart! I am meditation. I do meditation. I have made progress in meditation. I can see more clearly. I am improved. I am progressing to Enlightenment. All these thoughts are okay as long as we strictly put them down again. But like a drug addict we pick them up and chances are we will slip back into storing them in the cart. This is the danger of ego. Without constant mindfulness things get put in the cart and we start to own them. Guaranteed if we ever make any spiritual progress give it a few days and it will go in the cart and soon we won't be living the actual progress but instead go to carrying the award medal around our neck to prove we did it. This is actually attachment and being burdened again!

Its a very tricky path out of ego, like balancing a pin on its end, and take constant mindfulness, constant filling up of our cart and constant emptying it again. Even incredibly evolved practitioner, I hear, treat this problem of Ego with constant respect and wariness: it is incredibly hard to beat and guaranteed if we ever do beat it, it will just become more baggage! That is until we really do cut the harness that binds us to the cart. 

Attachment, Non-Self, Emptiness

I never understood how these are all connected.

Great so we understand that when you think about what things are made of you have above all other things the sense of mass. Hold an apple in your hand and it has weight. Great this is a thing, it is something and its there.

Well yes and no. What actually are we talking about? The sensation in our hand, the thought in our head, a day dream where we suddenly realise there is no apple yet and we were just planning to get one. What exactly are we talking about? Well the sensation in our hand is not an apple! I mean it would take some feeling to get more data and then some thought to decide that it was an apple. We open our eyes and realise we've been tricked by a plastic model. Just mucking around we say, totally irrelevant we all know what an apple is, I eat them every day.

That is all just sensations and thoughts. You cannot escape that.

So the next level question is what are thoughts and sensations made of! Infinite descent set up here, cos if we insist on giving a "made of" answer we will never win cos whatever we say can have a "what is that made of?" asked of it. What is God made of?

The thing ultimately is things are just what they seem, no "made of" anything. They are empty.

That is one derivation of this obvious--when you see it--feature of the world. I gave a similar one a while ago regarding walls being made of bricks.

So emptiness. Great in the bag.

Non-self comes immediately next. So what am I made of? Well if all there is, is just thoughts and sensations, where am I?

So we get smart and go into the consciousness and say well I am the one who is aware. Kind of close. But what happens to us when we sleep. Who is sleeping? So we won't find our self in consciousness.

But the real problem at each stage is attachment. We are grasping onto things.

When we sit to meditate there is (probably) this overwhelming sense of taking someone with us to the cushion.

I am going to meditate, I am sitting to meditate, I am meditating. We are leading someone through all this.

It's so obvious that we never think about it. It's a rucksack we gradually got put on us when we were very young, or a pair of glasses we have always worn. We never think to take them off. That weight is just us, we are use to it, its what comes of existing.

Wrong!

The weight of having to drag this person around comes by a more exact name: attachment.

Now this seemingly harmless weight and attachment is actually the whole reason we get born and die!

Woah! WTF how did we get here?

Sitting on a cushion we have a weight. We have a mass, we are made of something, we exist. If I fall down the stairs it hurts, my body is physical and injured this is all very real.

No different from the apple!

Literally no different. Just sensations and thoughts.

No! we protest. I can eat an apple and so what. But I fall down the stairs and hit my head badly and I am dead. Big f**king massive deal.

So lets get clear about that. Yes massive head trauma will kill a human. So yes that body that falls down the stairs will die.

But this is not the issue. Lots of people die every day: quick calculation with 8 billion and 70 years of life each on average (assuming no population change) about 300,000 people die every day. It's not such a big deal.

But to me, when I lose MY life that is literally the end of the world.

Well its the end of the road for this body, and these eyes, and this brain and memory and emotional system. Yup that all ends. But does the world end?

No the world carries on just as before.

Its an odd thing then that the world carries on just as before with no real change, but somehow I vanish in a cataclysmic end.

That never felt right even from the start. Two completely different sides to death.

But we are really just back to sensations and thoughts. These end.

And so comes Oblivion we then argue.

No.

Oblivion where?

No oblivion in the world. 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust and there was not 1 drop of oblivion created. 80 million people died in total and not one drop of oblivion was created.

Where does this oblivion happen?

And to who?

It makes no sense.

People imagine that somehow the lights go out and they are cast into darkness. Or they realise that death means death and the film just ends, so in fact not even oblivion.

Seems wrong that everything should just hit a brick wall for one person but be of absolutely no fundamental effect on anything or anyone else.

Well we can relax because there is just one world and it is unaffected by death.

The problem sitting at the heart of all this is that bloke we think we take to the meditation cushion.

In reality that bloke is just a physical mass of body, some thoughts and whatever else is going on.

There is always something going on.

Stuff goes on all the time, it has absolutely nothing to do with us. We don't need to be present for it to be going on. Eyes see by themselves, brains think by themselves, hearts beat by themselves, consciousness is aware all by itself. We have no job or role in this world, there is nothing for us to do. We not need to be here. Were we to leave it would make no difference.

Perhaps we get depressed at the thought we're of no use and can just leave the room.

But once we have gone the room is exactly the same. The eyes still see, the brain still thinks, the consciousness is still aware. Things are just as they were.

This "smell" of "me" that hangs around, that taints the world around me, that makes thinks mind and puts a weight at the centre: that is attachment. Its made out of holding onto the things around us and making them mine.

And although that seems trivial this holding is why we think death happens to us, and why ultimately we feel that birth happened to us.

Sure it happened to this body. This body has senses and thoughts and it is well capable of studying all this and thinking long and hard about its own creation and ultimate demise. But its all just sensations and thought.

===

On subjects of consciousness there is this odd thing called self-consciousness. Now we know from SRH (see earlier blog)  that consciousness cannot be conscious of "itself" : this sets up an infinite regress. Yet there is this very off feature of higher levels of consciousness that they know they are conscious. I am not just conscious of a candle, I know that I am conscious of a candle.

If we attach to consciousness as self then we get into an SRH mess. What must be true and reveals our attachment is that the Present Moment does not come from consciousness. Consciousness itself depends on Present Moment. But we attach to consciousness thinking that this is "my" version of Present Moment, "my" perspective, "my" opinion etc. Very weak foundations for when we fall asleep what becomes of it all! No reason to hold on to, or attach, to consciousness as foundation of anything. It is not me or mine!

Who is holding the bear?

 

When we sit to meditate we take this body/mind./person and we sit them down and we get them to concentrate. This person is me we think.

But actually how can this person be me? I am looking at this person! I am looking at what they are feeling and what they are seeing and thinking. This person is existing but existing over there. I cannot be this person,

But I cannot be anybody because were I to be someone else I would just be the thoughts and feelings and senses of this other person and those would be where ever they were but not over "here" with "me."

The picture of the bear being held above is actually how we see the whole world including every part of what like to call "me." It's all over there. Just replace the bear with a thought we are having or a feeling or anything we think is "me" and its all the same. "me" is ALWAYS being held over there.

The person behind the camera here can never be seen. If we turn the camera around to show the body its important to note we are still not BEHIND the camera! You can't get behind the camera because there is nothing behind the camera!

Now we can look at a real wedding photo shoot and see the photographer on one side and the married couple on the other side of the camera. We know there is someone there behind the camera. But this only works for what we can sense. The analogy does not work for sense itself!

You can sense people in front and behind a physical camera. You know there is physically someone holding that bear above. But we are not talking about that. We are talking about who is behind what you are seeing right now as you read this blog!

That space behind what you are seeing cannot be accessed because it does not exist. There is no one and nothing there! And if there was it would just become something else we were looking at and experiencing and it would just be in front of the camera again.

There is a feature of experience that what is "sensed" occurs there (in a way). Literally in vision it is there, but also more generally what appears in experience is Present and so is not me, for I am doing the experiencing.

So the I actually becomes nothing, it just becomes the experience itself, and every time we make the mistake of thinking we have an experience of our self, we can just step straight back out and see that we are doing the experiencing and not the thing experienced. This step is always open to us whatever is being experienced.

I AM THE EXPERIENCE NOT THE EXPERIENCED.

===

At risk of messing the above up, I have person experience of the next level to this. When using normal visual experience because of the way the eyes work looking ahead, visual space just exists going ahead. We cannot see behind our head. It is feature of visual experience that I used above to set up the camera with the seen in front and the non-existent behind.

But actually there is a space above this that occupies all space. When you experience this you experience a space that lies in all directions even behind your head. Now there really is no place for an imaginary self to exist. You become the brightness of space itself.

The confused being must perish

It's a huge problem that the apparent vehicle to enlightenment is itself the problem.

This is why all Religions focus on subservience, submission and sacrifice.

Buddhism is often seen as a kind, peaceful and passive religion. Christianity is a bizarre cult of death and cannibalism. But actually both equally lead to the sacrifice of self: Buddha under a Bodhi tree, Jesus on a wooden cross.

So when we come to finally give up our worldly craziness and running around and actually draw our mind into either concentration (focused on a thing) or mindfulness (present moment awareness) who is doing this?

Same question: when we come to sit in meditation who is actually doing this?

These are especially odd questions when we observe that the process we undertake in meditation is actually an opening of our heart and mind to the world. A letting go of the being that apparently came to sit.

The truth is that this physical creature with all its bodily functions, and all its mental brain processing and sensing and feeling of emotions: this entire being happens by itself without any other input.

Even the bit which is going "okay what I'm going to do now is this" that is just a brain process.

Ah we go. So that makes "me" a "watcher" who just looks in on everything the body is doing but I am free and will leave this body when it died.

Absolutely NO. Even that is just a thought being had by the body!

From previous posts: "I" exists nowhere. You can't be sitting outside the body or disconnected from everything that is going on just watching it all passing by. Why does the body need someone passively sitting there watching it? What a waste of everyone's time.

But to think this completely distils out the problem. Such a thought is the very essence of unenlightenment. If you could bottle that thought, like a chilli sauce, you could poison anything with it. 

What is good about that thought is we no longer confuse our self with any phenomena. This is great. We are not so confused that we think we are our car, our house, our family, our job, name, body, senses and possibly thoughts too.

But we still haven't cut the fundamental root to thinking we are somebody residing separate from the world.

As a result we remain a person/being and just remove our self outside everything, still watching as mush as we used to when we sat inside the body or even our house (ready to chase intruders off our land). We still carry the fundamental problem of being somewhere and someone and something.

It is pointless. It achieves absolutely nothing now. Yet until we are ready to stop clutching at this teddy we are still bound. We know the teddy is not real now. We know there is no soul inside it. Yet it gives us comfort to clutch it. True growing up is when we put the teddy down and walk way.

It may break out heart to leave our self, to stop cherishing this being that we have bound to all these years from the moment we our senses and thoughts began to form. This being so cherished (hopefully but not necessarily) by our parents. But how much better to let it go now than be forced into a panic to drop it when it dies.

And if we learn to let go now, we are saved the whole problem of grasping another one in the future. What is called rebirth or reincarnation.

The point here is not that there is a "spirit" floating around grasping onto bodies. That is more of the confusion above of passive entities watching the world.

The point is that we stop trying to be an entity at all. We stop trying to get inside things, inhabit them or identify with them. There is nothing to do the inhabiting beyond the world that is already here! The spiritual idea of demon possession has a flaw: what if a demon possess the demon and so on ad infinitum. Classic logical regression argument. If you need to get into something to exist, then something can get into you! You cannot win in this way. We take none of this world as an example or reflection of our self. Sure we can support a football team, or a music band or a person such as we think we are. We can support them, but we are NOT them.

Which done badly might make us think we are God or something, and superior to all the other beings we see. But this still makes the mistake of "being something." When we let go of being something, we also see that there are no real beings "inside" anyone else. There is just the world.

Ouch isn't that a lonely world?

Letting go done badly again. This is still attached to the idea of beings. we only think "lonely" because we still think of "myself" and "other people."

Letting go means not taking things as important. I am not a thing, you are not a thing. There is no I or You really. I mean there is in a trivial sense of "do you want to go shopping with me?" even an enlightened being says that. The difference is that the unenlightened being thinks the whole of reality is built on that foundation of "me" and "you." The enlightened being sees "me" and "you" like it would a pet cat and dog.

So that raises the issue of "carefree." An enlighetened being is "carefree." That might sound like careless. But in fact its the opposite. Why do people do bad things? In every case its because they only see half the picture. The most evil thing we can think of is a sadistic murder, done for its own sake. This is the absolute extreme of evil. But really all it is is someone being 100% confused. Okay there is the issue of why would someone take pleasure from killing with a knife say. At the end of the day killing is just taking a knife and cutting some flesh. Not much to it really. A butcher does this all day long. Someone working in a clothing shop cuts fabric all day long. It's just cutting, big deal. So perhaps there is sexual stuff in there, in that thoughts of male/female and other things can trigger a sexual response. But the real pleasure really comes from the killing "someone." Immediately that should link to the discussion here. How can you kill someone if people don't really exist? Might have jumped ahead too fast, to be really accurate I guess "suffering" could be linked to sexual arousal (anything could be linked to sexual arousal in theory, it's just a neural pathway) so there might be this complication. But at end of the day the ultimate evil is hurting "someone." Normal morality says we protect people, if only because we would want to be protected our self. As Jesus says "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" [Luke 6:31, Matthew 7:12]. But why should this be true? You can see a King or a Sadist thinking the opposite. I am King I can do whatever I want and my subjects must put up with it. You might think that was "carefree." But really it's the opposite. The (bad) King and the Sadist are the opposite of carefree, they care for themselves (too much)! The are full of the burden of caring for them self. This is why we think caring for other is hard work. If we fill our life caring for ourselves there is no room for anyone else. Being "good" can seen exhausting. It's why people (especially today) shy away from religion: they think it will take up too much time and not leave enough time for them self. I often struggle to offer food (a practice of mental sharing before a meal) because I am hungry and just want to eat. The thought of "other people" having my food is an unwelcome pressure. Living like this is heavy and burdened and difficult because we have too much care! It is just care for our self. There is a class of confusion called Libertarian and its even more extreme cousin Libertine where "freedom" come from doing what we want. That means caring for our self. The difference is that the Libertine (like de Sade) cares for no-one but themself and the Libertarian like J.S.Mill  (1806 – 1873) says that we care for our self where it does not cause harm to others. I always felt that the accounts of J.S. Mill would be impossibly complicated having to measure up the freedom between all the people he met to ensure he never went into "freedom debt" with anyone and took more than was fair. Very much a thinker of the European Free Market Capitalist Enlightenment. But from the discussion here all these types of "care" are burden because they do not deal with the problem which is "being bound" to selves. Being truly carefree is letting go of the self. Then there is no one to hurt, and no one to take pleasure, and no one to do accounts for. What would an enlightened sadist do in charge of a pet shop where a particular rabbit was scratching all the other rabbits. You might think they put that bad-rabbit in the cages to watch the rabbit causing harm. But who is gaining that sadistic pleasure? Actually just the bad-rabbit (the analogy is the the sadist is like the bad rabbit - they are one and the same), and because the sadist is no longer that bad-rabbit the pleasure is no longer his! It is just sadistic pleasure floating in the void. But there is also the pain of the other rabbits floating in the void too. Not being attached to anything, the enlightened sadistic bad-rabbit no longer takes sides and sees it all. So what does the enlightened sadistic bad-rabbit do? Well the obvious thing is to separate the rabbits. That's tough on the sadistic rabbit who gets miserable not being able to get kicks from inflicting pain, but its good for everyone else. But because we are also the sadistic bad-rabbit we find we have isolated our self and taken steps to improve the situation. An enlightened being automatically ends up doing what is crudely called "good" because they do not take sides and have no stake in the game anymore. They are truly carefree. So the greatest evil actually goes on a course correction automatically if/when enlightenment arises (which is the same as dropping the self). Or to turn that around evil is simply a measure of the degree of binding to self, in other words the degree to which we are not free! That's should come as a surprise to the Libertines!

But returning to the top, it is hard. When we are bound to self it looks like the self does everything. We live our life through this teddy and take it everywhere (or more the teddy takes us everywhere!). So we pick teddy up and put him in meditation and get him to watch his breath and it is hard. But what we don't see (yet) is we are not teddy. We are in fact nothing and nowhere.

We could say as we struggle with the teddy on the cushion, with it wanting to get up or its mind wandering, that really teddy comes to be on the cushion because we are there to see it. If we were not there then teddy would not be struggling on the cushion. You need to be there for a tree falling to actually be heard. So this correctly identifies that the key thing is not the body struggling to meditate on the cushion, but is something else that is awake to the present moment and is aware that teddy is struggling on the cushion. A child may act out a story with a teddy, but a bit or reflection shows the child that they are not the teddy. However now STOP. That is enough. What happens next normally when we realise our place in Present Moment is that we simply rip the "self" out of the meditating body on the cushion and put it in some place like "consciousness" so we say "I can see, or I am conscious etc" and we immediately steal Present Moment for our self and quickly whitewash over the insight there that actually Present Moment comes first before any thoughts of "me." When Present Moment takes over from "Body On Cushion" and we see that the Reality here in the room comes from the Present Moment not the "physical entity" then STOP. That is perfectly far enough. One step into "my consciousness" or whatever we think next is too far and back into self.

This sense of having to put a solid self into meditation only comes around because we are still confused. It looks like submission and humility when we still have attachment to self. But once that attachment is gone it is free and easy. The pleasure that comes from meditation is the pleasure of feeling carefree, the relief at some level from holding teddy so tight. But when we finally put teddy down, wow apparently it is very noticeable indeed. Eckhart Tolle famously went to living on a park bench for a while, Buddha sat under a tree for 40 days. When we finally put this burden down, wow the body is no longer tricked into this difficult struggle to protect "us." The world there after works all by itself unobstructed by this blind alley of veneration to a non-existing self. Saying that we realise how confused the atheist is. I bet all atheists ultimately abandon God to make room for themselves. Its good to let go, but not really any use if we just transfer that holding to something else. Its the holding itself we need be attentive to.

==

This also solves the question that led me to temple in the first place. How I reasoned can a Buddhist community operate if enlightenment is a personal responsibility? So this is built on the foundation of "self" so the problem is obvious. As above, true it is the self that must grab itself and get onto the meditation cushion. But this is only the case as long as there is a grasping of self. Let go of self and its just a body getting onto the meditation cushion and focusing on the breath.

So Jesus and Buddha are not so far apart. Jesus most definitely had to let himself go to die on the cross without resistance or anger. But Buddha did the same when he touched the ground to ask for witness that he had seen through the illusion of Mara and no longer bound to a being that was coming from aversion and heading towards desire. Its not the aversion or the desire that was the point, it was that there was no holding to a being and so no way to come or go.

It's a shame they always put a person at the centre. Various things have been said about the Buddha. Once someone said to me to bow properly because Buddha is yourself. Its all very confusing because the root problem here is holding. But if we are to hold better to hold Buddha than whatever we think we are. But in the picture the ring of serenity around Buddha is not pushing out the fear and desire, it is showing that buddha is not bound to that body in the centre that might itself harbour fear and desire. This is where the Crazy Schools in Tibet and Vajrayana comes from. An enlightened being is bodily different from anyone else. Put them in the laboratory and they are the same as an unenlightened. They have the same bodily desires and mental processes. All except one: they no longer waste time on the belief they are somehow connected to the body. and as said above this is far more profound that becoming a disembodied spirit that can float off. They no longer grasp for any position or embodiment, realising they are nothing and no where.

That last line still sounds weird. How can something be nothing and no where? Easy when we just ignore being a thing in the first place, and so don't even grasp out for anything like a body or a person. 

Where is Enlightenment?

This perennial question is becoming ever clearer.

So what do we know?

Well a close look at the world of senses will show that actually we've got it all completely wrong.

In Buddhism they say "non-self" but this manifests in misunderstanding almost everything.

The world of vision which the Shurangama Sutra investigates at depth at the start is a world that is completely topsy turvey.

As argued thru this blog how we understand "space" makes no sense.

Essentially things are "in" space so "where is space itself?" Kant ends up with Transcendental Condition for the Possibility of Space.

But immediately we can see, and quite logically too, that space itself is "no where." The whole point of space is to put things in, so it itself is not anywhere!

But whoa that breaks everything. It means that the visual space that we kind of think lies "around us" is actually no where. Welcome to the groundlessness of emptiness.

Now we are pretty sure that we are never-the-less "involved" in seeing somehow. Some thoughts suggest that seeing involves the brain which is in the body. So we think that space is somehow created in the body. But then where is the body? Is the body inside the space that is made in the brain? IS the brain inside the visual space. Is the visual space outside the head, but its contents inside the head. Is everything outside, in which case what is inside to make "me" up? Which ever way you turn it doesn't make sense. No need to follow all the confusions about where the mind, consciousness, brain or self is enough to realise that its all wrong.

No time to write in depth, but investigating this question of "where" smashes up vision completely. It turns out that vision itself occurs nowhere, which means it can't be linked to the body!

Once we are seeing a world that itself occurs no where. Then where is the "self?" Well it turns out on investigation that the self is no where either, which means that too is not linked to the body!

And if self is not linked to the body then it means other bodies do not have a self linked to them either.

Well we do, that is ego. But we are talking True Self, the one wrapped up in the heart of the whole nature of Reality, not the ego which we look at from the outside (and is just somewhere at the centre of our vision and senses).

Exploring True Self deeper, we see that it is no where, and it belongs to no one, and it starts to become the same as the sense that the world exist.

Now in usual thinking we've pushed our self into the corner where the universe exists by itself (created by God perhaps or the Big Bang) and we exist separate from the world and have free will and our own private existence.

But we just smashed up all the possibility of world and self being distinct because at the highest level they are no where, and you need be somewhere to be separate.

So actually as science says there is just one reality, one universe all joined up. Well they play with multi-verse but its still all joined up at some level.

If there is just one reality then there can't be a separate self and world. There is just Reality.

Ouch a new source of groundlessness. You mean I don't exist?

So this is the process of "letting go." All these unfounded beliefs give us handles that we think we need hold onto to stop sinking or floating off. Or better floors on which we think we need to stand. But when the ground gets removed we get a bit panicy thinking we will fall, or--like above--cease to exist. But we quickly find out that nothing happens. We were never being supported by this floor, we never needed it. When we realise we are truly no where and nothing then we realise we need no floors or handles at all. There is no where to go, no way to go extinct or fade or vanish, there is really nothing to do or hold on to or get stressed about or worry about. So on one hand groundlessness is destabilising and fearsome but this is just us getting used to realising we never needed to hold onto anything at all. A bit like a kid having arm bands removed in the swimming pool only to realise they floated anyway. We are light and float anyway, no need to do any holding on or swimming. I mean if we did where are we heading?

This is the host/guest distinction in the Shurangama. The guests of a hotel turn up, stay and then go. But the inn keeper: where to do go?

When we see there is just One reality that generates our experience of the world all by itself without anyone being involved then we see that the world can happen all by itself and no one needs to be present. So its not that we don't exist, its that this handle to a "person" or a "being" was never needed. You can live your whole life, and the time before and after without being fundamentally someone or something! :O

We are always on the outside of things. Buddha says "all things are non-self" with emphasis on the "things." Take anything and we experience it from the outside. Even a stomach ache or headache is "over there." Heideggar calls this "Dasein." The thing we are inside is the whole universe, outside all the things. This is the switch or the letting go. We go from trying to be inside things like the "body" or the "self" which is ridiculous, to realising that we are outside all these possible things. Have a thought, one of the most intimate and private things we think are is and inside us. Where is it? Well actually in a funny way its not near us, its a bit away at a "distance" so that we can watch it. Perhaps its in the same room, but its still not right here. Or actually neither in or out, we are no where, and that no-where is the "where" that gives things their somewhere.

Seems like a complete radical upset when first seen, but actually it is just resetting the way we experience the world to the way it is. It's a seeing through the mistakes we simply got used to not look at.

That is closer to what is enlightenment.

= There is another version of this "where" approach that is the "who" approach. This is what smashed up Eckhart Tolle state of unenlightenment. The point is not that anything changes, we are still the exact same person in the same world as before. The difference is that we no longer think we live in the body, or even in the world, we just don't exist anywhere and we are no one.