Thursday, 29 August 2024

The genocidal crimes of Britain, Capitalism and Churchill (yet again)

Reiterating, yet again, the crimes of British Imperialism, Capitalism and Churchill.

So while millions of Jews were dying at the hands of Hitler, millions of Bengalis were dying at the hands of Churchill. (Arguably the Jews were killed by Churchill too as he was the one who started the war and cut off their food supplies).

It wasn't until reports of bodies piled high in the streets of Bengal reached Britain (with letters like Major X Y complaining he could barely get to his gentleman's club for all the bodies he needed step over) that the British public started an uproar.

British people have always been opposed to Imperialism, Wars and the mass enslavement and slaughter of foreigners ever since the Georgian rise of the Empire; there was always some guilt at the way cheap goods appeared on our shelves (even in 1700s), and we still are, although a bit weary now after centuries of endless wars (UK has fought over 800 years of war since start of Capitalism--by far the world's highest--, and US has fought inside and outside the country for all but 16 years of its whole existence) and atrocities committed by our own country, and now joined by America, and then lied about in absurd propaganda. Churchill's response was "they deserve to die for breeding like rabbits" armed with his genocidal hatred of Indians.

Eventually popular demand led to the stopping of food exports so the Bengalis could feed themselves. Hitler didn't have this option to end his famine as the British and Russians were activity stopping food supplies.

SO Churchill murders 3 million and writes them out of history, kills 12million and blames it on Hitler (over 50% of victims of the German famine (aka Holocaust) died from the effects of starvation post war). And arguably is responsible for all 80 million deaths for avoiding peace at every opportunity of which there were at least 3 major opportunities.

Yah Imperialism (controlling foreign economies and thereby politics from London) and Capitalism (owning foreign businesses and extracting wealth from other countries) has basically been a crime and it is still on going and seemingly unstoppable. While Blacks were pulling down statues the actual one that really needs to come down is Churchill in Parliament Square.

Monday, 26 August 2024

Metaphyics = magic

This could be a depressing post for some. 20 years ago I would have not liked reading it.

What is the world made from?

What is a wall made from?


One perfectly good answer is: bricks. Another perfectly good one is atoms. And another, slightly less satisfying, but perfectly good one is: energy.

Energy is very close to the bad answers.

The point is that the world is divisible all the way down to the the plank length, or perhaps we are still to discover smaller. Who knows. But we go looking and we find things that compose other things and we say they make them.

There is another way of thinking though which answers: matter. Who knows what matter actually is. Its a lose idea that simply derives from a feeling that there is a "solid" world out there and it must be made of something. "Matter" is metaphysics and it is junk.

No one too worried about that.

But then there is the other great question. What am "I" made from. Well some say "matter" so that is junk. I'm pretty sure no one thinks "I" is made of atoms. But there are ideas that "I" or at least consciousness is made from "quantum superposition state." Well possibly it is composed from such things. But like with things in the world there is no substance or stuff like "matter" that we are made from. In the case of "I" it is for many something like a spirit or soul. Some generic unspecified stuff that the self is made from. But it goes in the same bin as "matter."

Have I said enough to pick out a particular view of the world that it is made of things with a fundamental "essence." A cat is a cat because it has some "catty" thing inside it. And I am a conscious, thinking, feeling, breathing human because I have some "soul" inside me. All such thoughts fail because we simply take the thing we are trying to explain and make a "substance" which we feel effuses through the thing to make it what it is. This is pretty much what metaphysics is. In the bin.

So this is a bit depressing now because we think OMG is my whole life, existence identity no different from a table? How bland, soulless, poetry-less, pointless, arbitrary, valueless. It looks like all the joy and "stuff" is sucked out of life and we become inanimate beings.

Now this occurs because we are "bound" to the world. Well partly because we may have relegated the world to a boring place of "matter" so very much our own fault, but some are more scientific yet it offers no relief. When we find that a human body is just made of atoms we have the existential crisis that "I" am nothing but atoms. I remember a girl after some LCD drug experiences having a complete breakdown. She understood the powerful effect of the chemical on her body and feelings, but she then came to view her whole existence and "self" as nothing but chemicals. She was bound to feelings. They gave her, her compass in life and she then lived a life of aesthetism enjoying the world and the feelings it gave her. To suddenly have this equated with a chemical she took undermined her whole existence. I have no idea how this went for her, but eventually hopefully she realised it was right, but her mistake was to think she was "feelings." To think we are made of feelings is just more junk metaphysics.

I can wrap this up quite quickly. All the things we think we are can only be ideas, appreciated by our brain. Our eyes and ears don't see things that are "made of things." A song of a bird is just that. With analysis from our brain we can break it into things like frequencies and notes. But in our ear it is just sound. If we wanted to start thinking of substances we would ask what is "vision" made from, or what is "hearing" made from. Odd questions that really have no answer. Sound is just that, sound. It is not made of anything. I know "qualia" were hypothesised as the components of sensory experience, but achieves nothing. All metaphysics is just thoughts. And as such it only answers analytic questions like what is the wall made from? Answer bricks. How many are there? We count. This is brain stuff. This is what the world is made from.

Still depressing? Well the thing to realise is that we are neither our senses nor our thoughts. Perhaps some will think well I am inside the Mind looking out at the senses and the thoughts. And where is the Mind? asks Buddha in the Shurangama sutra. Well listener who thinks the Mind is watching the sense you have a problem because the Mind cannot be in the senses while it is watching them, so it is not in the sights or the sounds or the thoughts! So they say there is the sense of self as a separate consciousness. Unsure of this at the moment. Perhaps it is this consciousness that we confuse with the Mind above. But of course the consciousness of self just occurs in the Mind also. We cannot even say that the Mind resides within me! And perhaps we ask so what is mind made from? So big step back to seeing that as a thought and an analytic answer can only occur within the Mind itself. The Mind is made of such thoughts and answers when they happen!

So we see that metaphysics and all the thinking surrounding metaphysics is just trying to create a concrete foundation for some beliefs we have. Wrong beliefs. And from this we hope to get some certainty and solidity to the world. And when that goes wrong we tend to panic and make up some more thoughts to fill the gap. It gets pretty crazy with people thinking about multi-dimensional beings, or multiple universes or universal consciousnesses. I mean maybe these are true, but they are not actually answers to what we are looking for. We are not looking for substances to lay down under a belief in our self. We are looking to unbind from all that. Like the girl if we identity with things in the world then we are going to get nasty surprises when they try to shake us off.

There is no reality in metaphysics. It is simply our brain looking to avoid reality and create ways to carry on believing we somehow exist amongst and are bound to the world.

Mind/Body Problem solution

Only a quick stub of basis of the idea.

I've never liked it when people describe the fruits of meditation as seeing the world like a film. This seems to enhance the problem of the self being separate from the world. And it is Dennett's problematic Cartesian Theatre.

But recently I find a use for this.

If someone asks what the path of Buddhism is you could argue it's seeing the difference between the Samsaric world of causation and motion which is the film that is unfolding, and the seeing itself.

In our busy lives we spend most of our time "absorbed**" into the film.

A monk once asked a pupil "what does an orchestra wait for before playing?" and of course it is silence. Music exists within a silent space. So in the same way the film of sensory and perceptive mind objects is all playing out in a "silent" space. You cannot experience this silent space directly because you are hearing a symphony play, but implicitly the sounds exist because of the silence that was proven at the start.

That story of the impatient pupil demanding the monk teach him what enlightenment is while having his tea cup filled to over flowing. The pupil grows angry accusing the monk of being so stupid that he can't even pour some tea. The monk replies that the pupil is like the cup: too full to receive teaching. But of course there is a deeper analogy here because he is also teaching enlightenment, because the mind is like an empty cup and the world only can exist within it because it is empty. The vast manifestation of the world around us so solid and real is only there because the mind is silent and empty.

Now this is a revision of plenty in this blog.

The new point is to reconsider the analogy of the film as the manifest reality of the world, and the cinema as the silent empty mind hosting this.

Quick point: the mind is not "watching" the world. "Watching" is a process that occurs all by itself in consciousness. When consciousness arises then manifestation happens "within" the consciousness. The egotistical view is that the consciousness happens and then there is still "someone" being conscious. Consciousness does not need a viewer. Consciousness is the word that we give to the appearance of things. While this indeed does require a thing and a watcher for the consciousness to arise, once the consciousness is there, there is no second viewer inside the consciousness owning the consciousness. Consciousness is all you need for things to manifest. There is no watcher of consciousness. Consciousness IS the watching.

So the Cartesian Theatre is better now. There is no "watcher" sitting in a seat manifesting the film. The film IS the manifestation and it effectively watches itself.

We are "inside" the cartesian viewer of Dennett's construction.

So what is the cinema in this analogy then?

It is the Mind within which the manifestation of the world happens.

So now Body/Mind issue. How many Minds are there? 

We start off down the path that well there is this body and senses and thoughts and perceptions and "my world." Sitting in the cinema seat there is one viewer paying their ticket and seeing their version of the film.

It all looks very like One. And then there are other people sitting in other seas doing the same thing so really there are many minds.

But we have shifted this along now. We are "inside" that cartesian viewer. All there samsaric events are projected into the film screen now. Even the thoughts of I am sitting in this seat have now been projected onto the cinema screen. Even the idea of lots of people sitting in seats is now projected into the film.

The "One" is now part of samsara, the one is in the film. The "many" other people is now also projected into the film.

The cinema now is the open silent space and white canvas onto which all this film activity is manifest. It is One cinema, but it is boundless so it is an unusual one. And the key thing is it is no longer connected to a mortal finite self which is now projected into the film.

So the body/mind problem arises because we don't step back far enough; we fail to step back behind even ourselves. And when we do this obviously we enter this odd world apparently impossible where we have stepped back behind our self. So who stepped back if we are behind our self? Well this is the remarkable thing actually letting go of the self is possible, and when we do this we find "we" were always behind our self all the time. We were the silence and emptiness that allowed even our whole precious self to manifest.

So the innovation here is that the very bizarre act of letting go of the self, seemingly impossible and contradictory from the perspective of the self, is suddenly no issue at all from the perspective of silent pure Mind of which there is kind of One but lets not put a boundary on it.

From the perspective of the person sitting in the cinema it's that moment when they realise that actually they and everyone in the cinema is part of the film they are watching. The "watching" itself is part of the film.

I have made realisation like this before, but always was left with someone in the seat looking at the realisation. The Matrix (1999) film is no different. Yes the viewer of this film gets the existential wake up that perhaps they are not sitting in a cinema, but that just get replaced with sitting in the Nebuchadnezzar. Do Neo, Morpheus, Trinity ever wonder whether The Matrix reality they are trying to crack might just be part of a greater Matrix that keeps people busy by giving them an escape path from the world matrix and a whole new game of trying to defeat the matrix - which is of course just another way to keep people taking blue pills. Red pills are just a different kind of blue pills. There is no end to the telescoping Inception (2010) or time frames like Primer (2004). How many realities can there be? Once we have shown a way from one reality to the next by mathematical induction it is infinite. The point is that all causal phenomenal "realities" with story lines and narratives are part of a Great Film. There no getting out of the grand narrative like this. You can't talk, or blog your way out as any move like this is just laying a new narrative and a new chapter of the story.

The getting out is when we let go of the "character" we are following, who we want to proceed through time and narrative, and even get out. We let go of Neo and leave him to his world. We let go of our self and leave them to the causal ocean of Samsara to live and die, where things unfold all by themselves. All the thoughts and plans and narratives find themselves projected into the cinema screen. When we see the full expanse of reality we see it was always there, but just for a split second we got absorbed into following the life and thoughts and predicament of a character. I say "we" got absorbed, well such a thought is just the predicament of another character. We let go of them all.

So this solves the Mind/Body problem because once we let go of an identity and narrative then we also solve the problem of "how many?" We can count the people in a story, but they cannot count the readers. Well its me we think, I am reading. But that is just another narrative. Who is reading you?

Thursday, 22 August 2024

The New Reality = brainwashing

The Mike Lynch's yacht was unsinkable.

It's interesting this. US mafia hit job definitely. The Americans are coming! and the Brits thought the Russians were bad.

But how to square with people saying it was a "tornado?"

Well how does the US operate these days: "Critical mass."

You get enough people saying the same thing and it sticks.

So there may be people out there saying they saw a bomb, but you pay off enough people including the media and investigators to say it was a tornado and people will kind of go "oh perhaps I saw it wrong." This is how human minds works and the US have worked it out (lot of research based on Goebbels et al.)

We are heading into the New American Century where what we think we know has actually been very carefully crafted by the establishment and is complete bullshit. Well we are already there: 95% of what people think they know for sure is rubbish (if they check it up) but US is going for 100% now.

Tuesday, 20 August 2024

The gambler and the philosopher are not wise.

Probably a stub from a note I found. This follows up some posts a while ago on probability, and the probability of actual events.

If we are flipping coins what is the probability we get 3 Heads in a row. It is 1/2*1/2*1/2 = 1/8

Of the 8 possibilities only one is HHH.

Simple.

Now suppose we throw 3 heads. Then we ask what is the probability?

Well we have 2 answers now:

(1) Answer one is asking the question before the throw the 3, which is 1/8.
(2) But if we mean what is the chance of having throwing 3 Heads now the answer is 1 because we have just done that.

A concrete result is probability 100%. This is reminiscent of Wave Collapse in Quantum Physics. Up until the point of "observation" things exist in an uncertain state {H/T} that is the coin can be either H or T. But after "observation" then it becomes concrete. It is odd that this common sense law of the universe, is considered "quantum" when we are all familiar with it in our every day lives.

This is the excitement of gambling: before the roulette wheel is spun there is a 18/38 probability you will get Red. If we believe it is an unbiased wheel and we place £1000 on Red, then we are in a uncertain state all of a sudden. We are 47.3% the winner of £1000 and we are 52.6% the loser of £1000. For many feeling for a short while the 47.3% winner of £1000 is very exciting. It is the closest they will come to riches in their life (if that is what they want).

But the thing to note here is the fundamental difference between the "superposition" of uncertainty of being 47.3% winner and the concrete reality of being an actual winner with 100%.

Now all this is possible because of the Mind. I used to joke with a friend that he owed me £1 for not having thrown his pencil case on the floor. Basic protection racket. Then he would upgrade it to £100 for not having hit me. Then £1000,000 for not having killed him. All money out of no where, just valuing possibilities that had not happened, and we were just purely inventing with our minds. This is the trick of Capitalism and Insurance. People can make you think about things that don't yet exist and get you to pay for them.

This is the power of the mind!

But apart from getting us to part with money we don't need to (probably) it has a deeper problem.

As we approach Enlightenment we begin to look at the world "as it is" and we start to separate it from the "thoughts" we have about it.

"As it is" is the 100% reality, when it dawns on us we won or lost. "as we think it is" are all the probabilities of what might happen. In gambling the options are carefully limited so our minds think they know the future. Of course we may have a heart attack before we get the winnings so "winning" is not as certain as we "think." Reality and Think are at odds. This is Rupa and Nama in Indian languages: Form and Name. How it appears and what we think about it. Very important difference.

When we start to look at Rupa closely we start to see the inadequacy of Nama. Wittgenstein comments on how the name "red" is so utterly disconnected from the actual experience of Red. They have nothing in common and we can't even begin to place how they are connected. Hence his theory of "Language Games" where rules of play govern words and instruct us how we use them IN our lives. Words are things embedded alongside the things we play with. But however we look at it, the world of Rupa, the forms and the "real" things is quite distinct from the world we think. Rupa is the world where everything is 100%, it is certain, it is there, it is real and is happening (to indicate that what "has" happened is actually Nama as we have given it a name and are thinking it since it is gone into the Past already).

But as we start to feel that the wold is unfamiliar authentically we can trip into an inauthentic version of this where we start to question things philosophically.

We start to ask questions like "how weird is it that we all have mothers." When you think about it, its the weirdest thing in the world that we are all born! The more you think about it the more odd and absurd it seems and the more you begin to feel it is unfamiliar and the more you think you actually know nothing about life at all. All very Joni Mitchell talking about clouds.

But note we are in the world of Nama now. The world of possibilities and probability. We are examining what we know of the world. We can start to fantasise and imagine what if we were not born, what if we started very small and grew. Or other crazy ideas like we have always existed and took a physical form. People have some difficulty dealing with death so we have souls, but if we have souls then we were never born either. We have no Rupa for any of this, this is all Nama and us thinking about the world.

There is a particular mind set where we refuse reality all together. Everything becomes a point of theory and every event becomes a data point to think about. But we do not value "reality" anymore. This essentially is Plato. The world of "Forms" existing in some general abstract world replaces reality.

But this is odd. We noted at the start the the world of "thought" is a world of "possibilities." When the roulette wheel turns we are not the winner yet. We are only thinking about being the winner. Yet Plato seems to think that the Winner exists in some perfect world already. Well he thinks the Loser exists up there too. Whether we become the Winner of the Loser is just an arbitrary irrelevant fact. In both cases we become just the window through which the perfect world of forms shines.

Everything above has been turned on its head.

Well lets just close this down now without justification. If there is one form of interest in Plato's world it is that he is Wrong. Altho proof is rather easy. Is there a Form for the World of Form itself?

It is very dangerous to start giving thoughts any reality beyond themselves. Before the Roulette wheel has stopping spinning we are absolutely neither a winner of a loser and any emotions and experienced we have about that uncertainty are based purely upon unreal thoughts.

Likewise when we philosophise about the world, and start to examine all the possibilities and start to see the world as it is, as rather odd and weird and unfamiliar this can quickly become dangerous as we start to replace the reality of the world with questions and fantasies.

However this should not close down the one very valuable experience which is seeing that our thoughts about the world really don't fit, Joni Mitchell style or even Suzanne Vega "Language" style. Seeing our thoughts as inadequate and realising that the world we thought we knew we actually don't know is an essential experience is separating Names and Forms and brings us very close to truth and enlightenment. But to reiterate this is different from the philosopher looking at all the possibilities like  a gambler and wondering why we ended up in this odd world, and what world we could be in like a winning world. This world we have is 100% probable and that completely separates it from all the thoughts we may wonder and dream about.

 

Monday, 19 August 2024

Sunyata (emptiness) & Madness

Disclaimer I am not enlightened and like everyone, at some level, am seeking to throw off the shackles that bind me to the world.

Now recently I've returned to a similar place I was as a child. There are many ways to shake yourself out of your complacent assumptions about the world. For me it was this one:


When biology lessons start to teach you that the brain is the "centre" of perception you have a rabbit hole opened up.


The issue is that you have 2 ways to refer to your experience. Sound familiar from Gödel type isomorphic proofs that cause contradictions via multiple ways of referring to things. You have the normal way which is to experience things as you always have. But now you can also consider that everything you are experiencing is a process in your brain. This means that when you see a flower in a vase on the table, you have both the flower present in your experience, but also the thought that this is really occurring "in" your brain. When asked where is the "flower" you have several answers now.
(1) The flower is in the vase on the table
(2)  The flower is also in our brain as a virtual flower.

But this gets more involved because is not the vase and the table, in fact everything we can see ALL in our brain?

This begins by realising that what we see is really the image in our eye rather than what is really there.


This is how TV works. There is no real candle in the TV, all it needs to do is simulate the image in the eye for the brain to then think it is looking at a candle.

This is a very complex rabbit hole. For example consider at which point does the "real" candle become the "image" of the candle. We might argue that the light being reflected or generated by the candle is the "image" as the "real" candle remains on the table while the image is transmitted in light to our sensory organ (the eye). But the eye is not enough to see. If you cut the optic nerve you go blind. So the "light" on the retina is not enough, that is converted to nerve signal that must make it to the visual cortex for us to see anything. So where is the "image." And then you get to the famous mind/body issue of at which point do the physical processes and electrical signals become the conscious "image" that we see. And where in the brain does this occur? Well with modern scanning we can see which parts of the brain become active during seeing the candle. But obviously the brain activity does not look like a candle. And pointing to our head when asked where the candle is does not make sense as the candle is on the table. But then we realise that not just the candle but the whole space including our heads and brains are also in our head. But this is nonsense. How can our head be inside our head? And there is another avenue in this rabbit warren. If the "real" candle is on the table and the "image" is in my head then the real candle is not the same as the image, and we can never experience the "real" candle as we can only see images. This is classically referred to as the noumenon being the "real" entity and the phenomenon being the conscious experience. But really this is just mind/body problem again because how are they linked? Are they linked in the real or the phenomenal world or is there a 3rd world. Okay that is a quick walk around the upper sections of the rabbit warren if you take the red pill. But none of this is the real point.

We can just go Matrix (1999) here as they approached this too, the thing to note is that there is no difference* between sitting in a world with flowers in vases and candles and sitting in a pod with all this being faked to our senses by a computer. Or before the film Matrix it was brains in vats in laboratories. 


* In fact there is a difference but it's complex and not relevant here.

Now I wonder if there are 3 types of people here:
(1) Those that just accept it as a factual possibility that our sense experience could be generated by a computer. They are Blue Pill people who hear it, but it makes no change.
(2) Those that actually put themselves in the picture, and realise that there experience right now might be generated by a computer simulation. In other words this is no longer idle speculation but a realisation that upends their whole life and existence in a seemingly unavoidable way. These are the Red Pill people who go down the rabbit hole. What I used to love about Philosophy is that just sitting in my bedroom as a child I could go on bigger adventures than anyone in the world. 

Here I'll break before getting to Type 3 people. (2) is the kind of revelation that changes everything like a religion. One day we take the world one way, and in an instant everything changes. Feeling we are really in a pod in a dystopian world is however un-nerving and destabilising. Its great for a bit of fun, but what if Matrix was true and we really do live in a horrible world like that? And while Matrix is just a film, we realise that "where we are" is quite possibly nothing like where we think we are. I remember one night lying awake very concerned that perhaps I was dreaming while lying in a ditch of dead bodies during a war. Not conducive to a good night sleep.

The reason for this blog is to note that this destabilising feeling is exactly what people experience as they approach Enlightenment.

When Buddha says that suffering is caused by attachment, he is referring to our habitual need to grasp at a particular world view and reality. We know the world is impermanent and this thing we grasp is liable to change but we ignore it, like "My Muse" who you never think is never going to die did die. I was permanently attached and that hurts when it changes. But letting go is not a simple thing either. There is a reason we grasp and risk the pain. Letting go is destabilising and it takes time to get used to this feeling. It is actually the feeling of freedom, but like flying it is a horrible feeling for those used to standing on the ground. It is literally like jumping off the high diving board, until we are used to it the feeling of free fall is unpleasant. So is Enlightenment.

I think a lot of people will run away from (2) above because they feel the start of the destabilising feeling and rush back to (1) where they hear it, but stay bound to their world view. Isn't this the commonest thing in the world. "Global Warming" is gradually becoming accepted even by once committed rebels, and we are getting used to the instability of thinking about our climate no longer being so friendly. It is the same thing. We attach to what is safe and known, and we ignore change. But not being able to change leads to pain. But being able to change is destabilising at the start.

Being able to change, seeing ultimately that there is no fixed thing to attach to, feeling that instability as freedom this is Sunyata. And that means that people running away from (2) are running from Enlightenment. This is why we remain in ignorance.

There seems to me to be two main ways to Enlightenment and letting go: questioning the Who? like Eckhart Tolle or questioning the Where? What ultimately shook Mr Tolle free was asking "Who is suffering?" When we are having a bad time Who really is having this bad time? Do we really know them? What are they really like?

For me there is the other approach which is this exposition in this blog which is the "Where am I?" Am I sitting on this chair? Am I in a brain in a vat? Am I in a pod in world ruled by the Matrix? The very fact that I can get confused on this matter and feel the instability of not knowing is actually the key to the fact that we don't need to have an answer to this. We are no where! "Absolutely" that is. I am sitting in the chair this is just a fact. Perhaps that is in simulation creating in my brain which is in a vat, so really I am in a vat. But perhaps the idea I am in a vat is itself a simulation that is being given me. The point is that in absolute way we are No Where. We are only ever relatively somewhere. I discussed this before with regards to relativity. But here I want to look at the feeling of instability that comes with this and leads us back to holding, certainty and not really wanting to know.

Now in some poor mental health states there is a thing called Dissociation where we feel separated from reality and our self. This can lead to experiencing or living different selves, including forgetting who we are. It can feel like separation from the world, and that it is not real. A meditation master when asked about mental health said that this is something that should be treated by a trained professional. However in the context of this blog I am looking at the feeling of instability. Dissociation is obviously not enlightenment, it is the brain's way to deal with stress and suffering by breaking up aspects of itself like identity and reality. I'm not sure if it is linearly connected but Psychosis would be the extreme case where we start to invent new realities to help us escape pain. All of this is just standard suffering and Samsara caused by holding on. Letting go is letting go of all this and more. So I wonder even in the midst of mental crisis which must create instability much as above where we start to lose the old certainties, if we hold out through this we can use it to let go. It was after all the depths of mental illness and depression that led Eckhart Tolle to let go.

So what of Type 3 above. If type 1 hear things that may destabilise but ignore, and type 2 plunge in and go on the white knuckle ride, type 3 can handle letting go and don't even experience instability like a high board diver who is now unafraid of the feeling of weightlessness, is no longer on a thrill ride, and now relishes this experience of pure freedom where they can display their skills like a Buddha uses his freedom to do wise things.

The sad demise of the West in the hands of the Cowboys

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/storefront/

I was at least prepared to accept that Capitalist media platforms while more expensive might have given you more choice and so access to more good stuff. Just spent the weekend signing up Amazon Prime, Paramount+ and History only to find that for £19/mo or £228/yr (cf. BBC £159) and then wasting the rest of the time realising there is nothing to watch! About 1ep into a dozen shows which now ignoring.

Then turn on BBC Radio 4 this morning and have more fun than I've had since Friday. "Standing Up For the Classics" is one just really good BBC show, or perhaps "Add to playlist" (Tues), "News Quiz" (Fri). American Capitalism really is junk. #DestroyAmerica and rid the world of the pollution. Oh and had the awful experience of seeing a English classic viz. Lord of the Rings utterly trashed and turned by the CIA into unapologetic US war propaganda. Perhaps that should say #DestroyAmericaWithExtremePrejudice

In the same way as science is now telling us that Capitalist/American food is dangerous for your health, hopefully soon science will start to tell us that exposure to Capitalist/American media will damage you wellbeing too. And eventually we will realise that America in general is just bad for this planet.

The rising UK prison population

Obviously a complex subject, but lets take a macro look first:

Let us note that the US is #6 in the world for incarceration rate. You are more likely not to be free in the US than any country in Earth (except El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, American Samoa).

You are 4.5 times more likely to be put in prison by US than China, 1.6x Russia and 3.3x UK.

Now the US "we're tough on crime" argument doesn't extend this far they actually HAVE more crime.

So why does the US have so much more crime than the UK or any other country?

And as the UK adopts US policy is it any surprise we have rising crime?

Pure coincidence that the US government has totally failed its people creating a broken society that tops out globally on all measures of social disintegration from drug use, to violent and sexual crime, to theft... they have even stolen £1t from the UK recently with the CDO crisis in 2008.

SO the obvious move is to remove all West leaning UK governments with extreme prejudice, and to stop moving UK policy towards the US. In fact if UK governments are in any doubt about what policy to adopt the simple rule of thumb is to do the opposite of what Washington is doing.

Now the UK is under the Washington Dictatorship do we actually have the freedom to adopt our own policies. No we don't.

This leaves the UK with no option but to declare war on Washington in order to gain its freedom. And this is actually the situation that many other countries face like Iran, Russia, China, all of South America, Africa more or less, North Korea, Belarus, India in fact the majority of the world.

So when the US speaks of WW3 it is not wrong, however WW3 will be the world seeking freedom from Washington and not as Washington likes to fantasise further expansion of the power of Washington like we saw in WW2.

Now what does a post-Washington world look like? Obviously the collapse of a super power like Washington will create a power vacuum. But actually all the world was done at the end of WW2: we have the United Nations that upholds International Law and the brokering of disputes between nations. Only a crazy country like America would have moved to weaken and marginalise the UN.

But as argued throughout this blog the very move to destroy the Axis countries in WW2 was a portent to the view of Washington that the world should be rules by a single Dictatorship.

Well a Global Dictatorship might be acceptable if it was any good, but unfortunately of all countries it is America the very most ignorant and incapable country. They have no history beyond genocide and slavery and they have no insight into progress or the future. To compensate for this the US has tried to stop history and debate, and has pushed the Western world into a malaise of post-modernism where all voices have been dumbed down and all challenges to Washington power silenced. We exist in a very fragile peace created by a social anaesthetisation where Washington hopes the brainwash the world into a state where they do not question or even have the power to take control of their lives. Unfortunately it won't work. The very forces that drive Washington into the role of Dictator are the forces that will drive people away from that Dictatorship.

And yes prison populations may rise as people start to rebel against the nonsense and the anaesthetisation that Washington represents, but ultimately the very forces that drive all of this will break it. Empires rise and Empires fall and all those involved in these pointless activities will die.

Sunday, 18 August 2024

Is Quantum Weirdness a result of SRH?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2444045-the-odds-of-quantum-weirdness-being-real-just-got-a-lot-higher/

Not read the article and this is a lazy stub for a broad idea that is developing.

But crudely we know from SRH that you cannot build a theory upon its own conclusions. This renders the conclusions empty, tautological and don't progress your theory. Put another way a theory can only ever develop what is already given to it. Put that way theorising is really just uncovering things not obvious in the starting position. Synthetic A Priori would in this understanding be building no higher than the a priori on which it is founded.

It follows from this that theories of the "normal" must not be "normal." Where is the explanation power of just explaining the "normal" from normal foundations. If we wish to actually build a theory of normal it must be not normal.

I also see a possibility of a type of Noether's Theorem here where what we are calling "normal" say for example "continuous valued" or "local causation" are theoretic features which are just part of some deeper symmetry.

I guess in mathematics which is not hindered by constant need to parallel some preconceived "reality" and can explore pure abstract thought we have an analogy for the depth of possible theories that will be unearthed in the future. Just as we once struggled with moving from "normal" counting numbers to abstract negative numbers and then zero and then fractions and then irrational numbers so we will soon be happy moving away from the "normal" in physics as we must draw on deeper abstractions to explain the current stage.

This blog has always had no belief in a Grand Unified Theorem because the question will then exist as to why the universe has this law, which will just be the spring board to further study. The Full Employment Theorem is analogous which uses Godel to prove that there is no limit to algorithm and computing development. In a similar way if we ignore an idea of a "fixed reality" then a similar infinite development exists in all sciences. Even if we ever did fully understand the "fixed reality" we would always be faced with the question why this reality and not another.

So some "weirdness" with respect to the field of understanding is a necessary condition of anything with explanatory power.


Is Hegemony Freedom?

Having recently been to Trieste I see this sign at the Headquarters of the Free Trieste Movement.



The idea is that treatises to divide the UN mandate between Italy and then Yugoslavia are invalid. But what is odd is that it was the US and UK that ratified the London Memorandum in 1954 that first divided the region. So why are they asking for a super power to come back when they want Independence. This is extraordinary, contradictory and very confused.

Now that is a lengthy route into what I want to say here about Freedom and Hegemony.

When a soldier fights they believe they are fighting for the "right side." In its extreme form they believe they are fighting for God. This is very evident in the Bible that those fighting with "God's favour" will be victorious and have the "right" on their side.

Slightly less extreme you see this in pagan worship as well that people are always seeking the "favour of the gods." With the favour of the gods we will be blessed and victorious and when we lose and become a back water of life it is because we are no longer favoured. We need do more observances to the god or change gods in pagan thought.

Now the Jews are God's favoured and it seems they can do no wrong. I personally believe this is nonsense and a misunderstanding of what it is to be "Jew". A Jew is anyone who obeys God. It logically follows that a follower of God is so favoured because they live according to the Law of Heaven. Science is really just a development of this, that obeying the Laws of the Universe makes things go right. All the same ideas.

This is where Hegemony comes in. When Empires take over they spread an Imperial brand that places "right" in the hands of the authority. You either accept this Hegemony or you face the violence of the Empire. Most famously Christianity took on the Hegemony of the Roman Empire. You have people obeying different "Laws of the Universe" and believing they have "Right On Their Side." Christians sure their God will protect them and ensure their righteousness, Romans believing in the power of the Roman State and their gods.

This is how wars happen. People like to think they have Right On Their Side (ROTS) but most obviously in war both sides believe in their own ROTS. Normally military arguments and history try to establish that the winner of the war had the ROTS and the loser had Wrong On Their Side (WOTS) but this is not true. Who would fight for WOTS? Did Germans fighting in WW1 or WW2 think they were wrong? Who would do that?

This is the point of war. The victor by definition claims ROTS and the loser however just they feel their war was has to accept they had WOTS.

But this is not actually true! It is not what happened. ROTS was transformed into WOTS by victory.

I have always wondered its a good thing that the US won WW2 because if the NAZIS had won then the world would be over run by evil. Just as well! I mean was it a dice throw? Were we that close to living under evil?

See above, this is a misunderstanding. Had the NAZIS won then they would have had ROTS and the US would have been WOTS.

Crazy we think how could they justify the Holocaust and Fascism. Well as this blog points out a lot the US has got away with centuries of Black Slavery and the complete Holocaust of American Indians and has waged war across the planet killing 100s millions of people to spread Capitalism and its Empire. It would have been much easier in fact for the NAZIS to get away with what they did! And unlike the US who is spreading a Totalitarian Empire rules from Washington, the NAZIS were trying to make a multi-pole world ruled from multiple centres. In fact a much more advanced idea than what the US is trying now.

So it is quite easy to see that the victors get to transform the ROTS of the defeated into WOTS. This in fact is why we should not fight. Whatever happens someone gets to have ROTS. Easier just to negotiate and sort this out without fighting. It doesn't really matter who gets the ROTS.

And that is the point here. Freedom is not gained by fighting for a particular world view, universal law or ROTS. It is gained through peace, tolerance and acceptance of multiple ROTS.

Jews are a problem here because deeply embedded in their erroneous world view is this idea that there is a just one truth to the Universe. Muslims have the same problem. Christians too to some extent, despite their teacher denouncing worldly possession, dogma and war.

So Hegemony is absolutely not Freedom.

And that creates a problem for the West at the moment because all news channels and commentators talk as though their is one truth which is carried by America. Now we are not saying that America is wrong, I joke in this blog that America is Satan simply to show that such a view point exists and the US is not beyond scepticism and distrust. But ultimately we are saying that US represents the interests of the American people only. That may share some things in common with other people, but it is not the same as other people's interests. There cannot be a Hegemony in a free world, and since the US talks freedom it cannot be an Hegemony. The fact that the US pushes Hegemony and avoids fundamental criticism is the criticism. And the idea of a single Truth for the world is actually Totalitarianism. And we saw this at the start because the idea of "Allies" which looks like mutualism has become "US Led" which reveals the real meaning of a collaboration like this: a Don and henchmen. It was the "Axis" with its focus on a multi dimensioned world offering freedom to various quarters of the world which really offered the world freedom, but we have been tricked away from this diverse world into the current Totalitarianism of a US Hegemony. Clearly very powerful as the Italian speaking people in Trieste are motivated to tell the world in English they want a superpower speaking a different language 7000 km away to take over.

===

The point here is perhaps quite hard to grasp. The writers of the sign above have made a glaring error in thinking that the US can help them. The US in fact caused the problem. Why would anyone associated the US with freedom? The US has done more to enslave and bind people into war and debt than any other country. The US is in fact the epitome of slavery. But people associate it with Freedom because of the intense propaganda that people in the Empire have experienced which has created a consensus of opinion that is actually completely false. This consensus of lies is the Hegemony. No one questions it because everyone has been very carefully brainwashed to agree so they don't even notice that they are no longer free to think clearly and truthfully.

I have given the following example many times in this blog.

If you ask someone in Europe or America and possibly even Japan (all parts of the US Empire) why the US dropped the atomic bombs they will say "it ended the war more quickly and so saved lives"

Now I bet the average person has never even thought about this let alone read about it. If you ask people to reference that opinion they have no idea where they got it from. They cannot even remember who told them it, or how they came by it. Was it school, their friends, parents, a documentary, the news: we can't actually remember. It is somehow a fact that everyone knows.

So where did this opinion come from. Its important to realise this is Pentagon propaganda. Created in 1945 and put out across all news channels across the Empire. Once it takes hold then people repeat it as though it was true.

But if we actually stop to think its a very one sided view. Do people really think the Japanese held this view? Did the Japanese soldiers welcome the bombs cos it ended the war more quickly? Perhaps they did. In which case had the Japanese invented the bomb first the American soldiers would have welcomed their cities being bombed to end the war more quickly. Really?

We know that the Americans would not have welcomed the Japanese dropping atomic bombs on their cities so why do we think the Japanese would?

It all starts to unravel now. The Americans would not have welcomed atomic bombs on their own cities even if it had saved lives by ending the war more quickly. So we see that the US propaganda is just nonsense.

The truth is that US dropped the bombs because it ensured a quick resolution to the war for the US. Kind of obvious we don't need to be told that. The Japanese would have done the same had they had the bomb for the same reasons. People just want to win wars. SO the US conducted the two worst terrorist attacks in human history on innocent civilians just to win the war. This is no moral justification, its just a fact.

But it turns out even this is not true. The bombs did not end the war. The Russians declaring war on Japan is what ended the war. There was actually no reason to destroy the lives of 100,000s of innocent men women and children. It was pure blood lust. Probably easier for Americans to do because they are racists and killing slopey eyed people is easier than killing whites. See the NAZIs are no different from Americans. In fact I don't think the NAZIs would have dropped the bomb; the Americans are a particularly bad breed of psychos who kill and then justify afterwards.

So why did the Americans drop the bombs if it was not the stop the war. Well what the Americans did next is a clue.


While no one else on the planet even had atomic technology the US started stock piling nuclear weapons while lying to the West that the USSR was a nuclear threat.

Meanwhile the rest of the world had seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they knew that the Americans both had and were prepared to use nuclear weapons on innocent civilians to commit previously unthinkable acts of brutality. So while the US had to lie to the West about threats, for the rest of the world the US was a a very real and present danger. This way the US triggered an arms race and this was very much about collapsing the Soviet economy and directing world progress towards the pointless activity of building nuclear weapons. Now once the US had wasted the USSR's time and resources in making weapons they then scaled back proving that actually the US did not view the Soviet Union as a real threat and had just lied. A pure trick and strategy to waste the lives and time of people outside the US. This unfortunately is the time wasting game playing mentality of Americans who have so little imagination for the future of humanity that all they can do is obstruct and time waste. This is why they dropped the bombs, to pull the world into an irrelevant nuclear competition.

Now the difference between reality and what everyone in the West has been programmed to believe is Hegemony. And it is extremely subversive and pervasive as it affects the minds of everyone who does not stop to examine what they think and look for references.

Seen this way Hegemony is clearly the opposite of freedom!

Saturday, 17 August 2024

Rings of Power is a chilling portent of US Totalitarian aspirations

There are few people in England I meet these days who do not think we are being ruled by an non-democratic elite. The question is just who these are?

SO there is a large array of ideas from Bilderberg club elites, to international satanic paedophile cults, to shape shifting aliens and lizards (see John Carpenters "They Live " (1988) or Kenneth Johnson's "V" (1984) ).

But as usual people's minds are getting carried away with them. There are much simpler candidates.

WW1 was the defeat of various empires and the creation of the League of Nations headed up by Great Britain, France, Japan, and Italy. Holy Roman Empire, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were completely destroyed and broken up into various new countries like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland in the East of Europe and Ottoman Empire was broken up into Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey. Its important to realise, as Google's AI agent Astra points out, that the reason for creating these countries was to limit the power and the countries and ethnic groups in these regions to make them easier to rule. It's also important to see how the war was created and who was allowed to join. The Ottoman Empire wanted to fight with UK but was not allowed to, thus setting them up for conquest and defeat by the British Empire.

Now English politicians Lloyd George is on record as saying after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles that there will be war in 20 years owing to the absurd terms of the treaty. He was right, exactly 20 years and 3 months later there was war again.

Now WW2 followed a similar pattern. The resurgent German Empire and allies from the League of Nations namely Italian and Japan were lined up for conquest and assimilation. But this time while UK presented itself as the manager of the war really this was the Swan-song of the British Empire and the sorry affair of the British expeditionary force being humiliated at Dunkirk sealed the end of British power. The US Empire simply took over with D-Day and met the Russian Army in Berlin to divide Western Asia up into Europe, and to the East the US took the Japanese Empire. Now Churchill was arguing for WW2 to continue with fighting against the Red-Army to make incursions into the Russian Empire but popular opinion was now moving against war and the US settled for a slow drawn out war of attrition called the Cold-War.

So we get to 2020 and the end of the US rearmament program called "Joint Vision" where the US has designed a military with "Full Spectrum Dominance" capable of winning in any theatre of war. Now this will be essential when fighting the Russians during winter as we have been expecting the US to do since 1945. Previous dictatorships like Napoleon and Hitler have failed during Russian winter so the US Dictatorship is going to turn up prepared.

But developing a suitably capable army is only half the problem. You also need to brainwash your population to agree to funding and supporting war. The US with Hollywood and widespread education has engineered quite a consensus. Consider this picture from Trieste, Italy taken this summer.


 Let's be clear what we are seeing here. We are seeing Italians writing political slogans in a foreign language asking for foreign superpowers to come back and presumably take over their country. How does that square with thinking they are free? Of course the irony is that the person who make this sign clearly doesn't realise that US never left! Their army follows order from the US and their economy and national policy, as part of Europe, follows orders from Brussels which was set up by the US to rule over Europe and which answer ultimately to Washington. An Italian friend points out that for 15 years after the end of WW2 Italy was subjected to complete US brainwashing on all channels and education to accept Europe, and obviously via Hollywood and other channels to accept the US as the dominant country in the world. Brainwashing on an intensity it is hard to comprehend is behind this very confused sign which thinks that US imperialism is freedom.

So we come at last to to 2022's Amazon offering "Rings of Power" apparent next instalment of the "Lord of the Rings" fantasy series.

But something is wrong. It says it is based on Tolkien but firstly Amazon does not have rights to Tolkien meaning it cannot actually put Tolkien into film, and secondly there seems to be no interest in following Tolkien here. Tolkien himself emphasized, many times, when questioned whether the "Lord of the Rings" world was supposed to mirror wars in Europe that his work was not intended to be an allegory for World War II or any specific historical event and went further on his views on allegory in general:

"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence."

So "Rings of Power" (ROP) does not honour Tolkien's ideas and creation of a fantasy world entirely self contained and immanent. ROP is blatantly an allegorical representation of US post-war power in Europe, references wars entirely intended to be WW1 and 2, and believes that the "evil" in Middle-Earth or better Europe, is still not destroyed requiring further intervention from the US foreshadowing Pentagon designs for a WW3.

This is all fully consistent with the creation in the 20th Century and expansion of an American Empire in the 21st century. The American do call the 21st Century the "American Century" so they fully believe that the Globe must become and American globe. If anyone ever doubted what Totalitarianism was they are already looking at it in the US desire for Global Control and Hegemony. The great irony here is that much maligned "Axis" powers were not Totalitarians, not looking at a globe rules by one Empire, but rather looking at a world of power sharing (hence multiple axes) between multiple regions. The divorce of the US from the UN in 2003 just underlines how the US has no interest in International Law or power sharing and has a vision of a globe ruled from Washington. Those idiots in Trieste have literally no idea what they are really asking for!

"Rings of Power" is clearly CIA funded brainwashing at its most naked, raw and dangerous. Designed to pollute the minds of a generation to accept a racially divided world (Elves rule Men) and one built on fake mythology like the manufactured rewrite of history that the US is promoting in schools about "evil" in Europe to divert people from seeing the true evil which is the rise of Americana and Washington Totalitarianism.

Actually very concerning indeed. If we thought Nazism was scary, Americanism is orders of magnitude more pervasive and dangerous. String warning here for those concerned with "freedom" to review what they are subjected too with full awareness of how brainwashing works and who is trying to brainwash them!

But in answer to the opening speculations we don't need invent International Conspiracies of baby sacrificing Elites or shapeshifting Aliens to explain the consolidation of power we are experiencing in the West we need only look to America and Washington.

Sunday, 11 August 2024

America's rather crude attempts at whitewashing history laid bare at the Olympics

The problem for #Washington is that we in Europe do understand #Irony. While #Hitler was supposed to use the 1939 Olympics to promote NAZIS (he didn't that is just Washington propaganda) look at how Washington uses the Olympics these days to promote the West.

North Korea turns out to be the most efficient team at the Olympics but has no mention in the official Olympic table, and Russia would have placed #2 in the table had Washington allowed them to send more than 32 athletes, but none of their results are in the Official medal table either. Clear "attempts" by Washington to whitewash people out of history. This contradicts official IOC rules that competitions are just between athletes and not countries, which means that the US is breaking Olympic rules to penalise athletes based on the country they represent. But if there is one thing we have learned about the US it is a completely illegal operation with no regard for law.

Sadly America's crude moves look clumsy and the Cowboys look like well cowboys trying to manage an Empire. Still it was fun to watch the #McOlympics but we have further reason to ignore everything the Americans say and to treat their rather laboured perspective in things with extreme caution.

North Korea actually fielded the most efficient Olympics team

Well here is the surprise of the 2024 Olympics: North Korea entered just 16 athletes but walks away with 6 medals, giving their athletes a 37.5% success rate. This turns out to be the highest in the world.

Obviously the more disciplines you enter the more medals, but this metric biases against team sports.

S.Korea only manages 22.6%. China does well at 23.5%. USA actually does okay at 21.1%. GBR 19.8%. Embarrassing failures are India at 5.1% Germany 7.7%. Israel 8.0%. New Zealand 10% (does much better looking at just golds).

Now I wonder whether the Imperial press is going to cover this achievement especially given that the IOC officially states that the Olympics is strictly just about individual athletic performance and not about Countries, the corollary of which is that individual athletes officially cannot be affected by which country they represent? The Official Olympic table does not even mention North Korea. America's Imperial influence laid bare for all to see. #WashingtonIsPathetic

Russia places #2 in total medals at the Olympics

Final Olympics medal table.

AIN was only allowed 32 competitors but if you scale up to USA's 592 then Russia places #2 in the total medals table. Quite a result!


Saturday, 10 August 2024

The Bank of Nature vs Money Bank

I got extra understanding of an old economic tale.

This Nepalese guy said that along the river behind his school fishermen would gather every day. Some days they would fish into the afternoon and some days they would just fish in the morning. When asked why they did this they said:

"we fish until we have what we need"

The school boys then said well why not fish all day to get more than you need and sell the surplus to make some money.

The fishermen said:

"why do we need money, when we want something we just come to the river and fish"

Now I had not fully understood this before.

The point is that the fishermen knew there were always fish in the river, and when they wanted anything they could just fish them, and sell them at market and get what they wanted.

What the boys was proposing was similar but instead of using the river as a bank, they wanted the fishermen to do the work up front, sell the surplus fish and put the money in a bank account for the future.

So what is the difference between the two methods?

Well the key thing to note is:

"Bank of Nature" has been in operation for millions of years.

"Money Bank" literally only a few thousand.

And since the invention of Money Bank all the World's resources are depleted and Planet Earth is facing a catastrophe.

Now I came to this from a video about how to become wealthy. The key insight was attributed to Jewish families and in my own language it is "never sell assets." So that is an individual starts some business. They invest the profits and the business grows. They then open up a new business and apply the logic to that. When they die they pass the business to their children who do the same, and you can see that this mushrooms over the generations. Sure there are rocks in the road, bad economic times, businesses fails, even unreliable members of the family spending too much capital, but as long as the key concept is there, and people pick up again from disasters and start investing back into the business it will grow. But of course this is "Money Bank" thinking because all the while the individual is doing more work than they need and banking the surplus.

Now it is interesting that this Capitalist type thinking is attributed to Jewish thinking. It reminds me of a key story in the Bible in Genesis 14

41 When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream: He was standing by the Nile, when out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside those on the riverbank. And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows. Then Pharaoh woke up.

He fell asleep again and had a second dream: Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk. After them, seven other heads of grain sprouted—thin and scorched by the east wind. The thin heads of grain swallowed up the seven healthy, full heads. Then Pharaoh woke up; it had been a dream.

This is where Joseph turns up and warns pharaoh of a 7 year famine so the pharaoh puts Joseph in charge of filling grain stores to hold out the famine.

This issue of times of plenty and times of famine of course is something well known to anyone in the Northern Hemisphere due to the seasons. The cyclic nature of times and abundance is I could argue is the most important thing in these cultures apart from the cycle of birth and death itself. Everyone is familiar with the Greek story of  Persephone and her annual visit to Hades which explains winter, and in Norse mythology the character of Balder dying each year is very reminiscent (and possible derived from) the story of Jesus visiting the underworld and then being resurrected.

So we could argue that the idea of "Bank of Nature" got tainted in the North by the annual removal of abundance, and in the Middle East by the periodic famines. I remember working my way through translated Babylonian tablets in the British Library and a key feature was the common sign off "see you if we survive the coming famine." The spectre of Nature letting you down seems to have been forefront in people's minds at the time.

But let us not forget that even by the time of the Babylonians 4500 years ago the world was deeply into the world of "Money Bank." All our modern thinking was firmly established by 5000 years ago. You need go back to 12,000 years ago to get to the remnants of Bank of Nature thinking, which is why that story from Nepal is so extraordinary because that is literally a window into our really ancient Past.

SO if we go back before the Neolithic to the days when "Bank of Nature" was the normal way of thinking we go through a really profound change which is possibly hard for modern humans to make, but a change that is embedded and preserved in all the religions: the idea of Ego.

Genesis is a record of this transition from Bank of Nature to Money Bank.

Remember how the Garden of Eden is described in Genesis 2

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. 

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work (לְ×¢ָבְדָ×”ּ) it and take care of it.

Remember But then after the fall Mankind's relation with the world is different:

through painful toil (בְּ×¢ִצָּבוֹן) you will eat food from it all the days of your life [Genesis 3: 17]

So while mankind was never free from "work" it transitioned from taking care of a garden to hard labour.

In Genesis 2:15 the word for work is ×œְ×¢ָבְדָ×”ּ. I have literally no knowledge of this so just making tentative exploration. This meaning seems cognate with the normal English word "labour" and especially under Capitalism where you will work for a master.

After the fall the sense is of anger and pain בְּ×¢ִצָּבוֹן at the labour needed to eat. The land is cursed and food is not easy to come by.

If we return to our Nepalese fishermen they do not toil. The river is forthcoming with fish. Sometime they are easy to catch, sometime it takes until the afternoon but there is no especial toil or pain involved. People trust the Bank of Nature to be generous.

That generosity comes from natures ability to "grow". Once the fishermen have fished their fish, they come back tomorrow and there are more fish. The river is growing, and they are profiting from that growth. This is why it is a "Bank of Nature."

Once the idea of "Money Bank" started then people started to "own" natural resources like rivers and that profit become something they owners. If a Money Bank lent you money to buy a river, they understood the Natural Profit present there in and they expected a cut of the profit. So the idea of usury was born.  

We see here the emergence in Money Bank thinking of the move from simply enjoying the Bounty of Nature to it being exploited for profit. And the thing to note is that this became associated with "toil."

When we go back in time before Money Bank we go back to a time before toil. When we respected, and nurtured nature and if we did anything it was just to encourage the Bank of Nature. For this respect we got an easy life.

But Money Bank thinking broke this and led to hard lives.

But I still need to address the nagging doubt of what happens when Bank of Nature lets you down. The famine years that humans started to work and store up capital in defence of. And then once you have a grain store of surplus then you can start trading and business. Perhaps close covered short selling existed even in the ancient world. Perhaps people bought and sold delivery notes for stores of grain at the start of Money Bank thinking.

So the key, key, key thing to note is that a human being them self is on loan from the Bank of Nature (BON)!

Where does a fish come from in the BON way of thinking? It is somehow created by Nature. And where does a new fish come from? It is born and nurtured by the fish in the river. It all happens by itself.

So where does a human being come from? It is exactly the same.

So a human being in BON thinking does not see themselves as a separate Capitalist trying to maximise profit from a subdued world they own. In BON thinking they are part of that same world. When they profit from that world they profit from themselves. When they exploit that world they exploit themselves.

We sort of see that in modern market place thinking where people are encouraged to see themselves as assets in a market place and to use and exploit themselves for profit that they will then own and benefit from.

So cutting this blog down because essentially everything here has been said before: the remaining link is SIN. While the Bible translates SIN as "missing the mark" or being unskilful to use the Buddhist word, it stems from one key mistake and that is "I."

Yahweh is very important in the Bible because G-d is the "I AM." This reminds us that we are not the "I AM." Yet it is habitual in our lives to think that we are the "I AM." We think that at the heart of our life is this "ME" and I direct and own it all.

This is clearly nonsense.

Saw recently someone asking how the "permanent consciousness" at the centre of our lives ties into Buddhism. The reply simply pointed out that we can barely remember what happened yesterday how can we argue that the consciousness is permanent through time? If the consciousness is only temporary we are really running out of places where we can have this "I AM." It is an illusion. There is no permanent fixed "I AM" at the centre of our lives. This is the weakness of Money Bank (MB) thinking it is built around the idea of an "owner" who takes over the growth and profit of their portfolio. And in so doing the "owner" ceases to be part of the world that is owned. (an example of SRH). This taking the self of into a private world is the essence of SIN. It is unclear to me whether the curse that G-d handed out in Eden was punishment for Eve disobeying God or whether it is the natural consequence of turning from G-d. when you develop the "I AM" within you then life becomes hard. 

Meanwhile the BON thinking is inclusive and does not make a distinction between the fisherman and the fish. They are both part of Bank of Nature.

So when there is a famine in MB thinking then the owner will see prices of food rise and it was important to predict this so that their portfolio value would rise. Proponent of free-market will argue that enough Joseph's predicting a famine will lead automatically to stores being filled with grain and people buy grain with a view to future price rising. It all works. Fantastic MB vindicated.

But it does so with the world divided from Capital and Owner.

In BON way of thinking it is quite possible that a drought may dry up the river and the fisherman no longer have any fish. In these times humans look to Nature for a solution. Perhaps they migrate, perhaps they try other food. There is evolution, adaptation, change. And perhaps they starve and die out. Death is not mystery to people it happens to us all. In BON we go back into the soil when the Bank of Nature calls for us. We were always only ever on loan and there is nothing to protect and hide from G-d.

The question then is which is better BON or MB. I have always thought BON is the truth regardless. MB is built upon BON they are not exclusive. Religious people learn to think BON even while running businesses.

But for me I have always thought once you are firmly established in BON thinking. Money Bank loses its relevance. You cannot buy a Sunrise, you cannot buy Love or Happiness. You can save for a disaster, but you will die one day anyone and while you can pass that wealth onto you children at end of day it is not you who will enjoy it, and if all they do is learn your way of doing things then neither will they. Better to let it all go, sell your portfolio, and just visit the river when you need something.

But the problem there is that MB is so incredibly destructive that  soon all the rivers will have no fish and the Planet will be destroyed and we will have no choice but to go begging to Capitalist for our food and sell our souls to painful daily toil just to eat. The serpent really was clever in the Garden of Eden and he really did curse us didn't he!

Done it: proof that Jewish thinking is limited. Spent most of the day avoiding triggering ChatGPT but it got there.

So previously I was accused of Anti-Semitism but done carefully ChatGPT will go there. The point in simple terms is that being a Jew binds y...