Back on to SRH - coin flip contradictions

Quickly first: what has SRH got to do with poverty? (if I'm going to try and unify the topic of this blog). SRH was the name given to an insight that self cannot support self, and that "self" implies "other". This was to contradict and suggest there was a contradiction in the belief of a "self contained" self. At least in human mind, "self" appears to imply a "unit self" that can be unplugged from "other" and exist by itself. This flavour of "self" conception infect science and logic in the belief that there is a "truth" or "axiom" that can exist independently, upon which everything else is based but which itself is not based. In essence this is the same idea as God, that there is a single, irreducible entity which is the source of all things, but itself has no source. SRH was just a much needed name "Self Reference Hypothesis" for this insight that ultimately nothing exists by itself. Now the relationship with poverty, is that poverty can only exist if things can be isolated. But since everything depends upon everything else there is no poverty.

Back to blog.

Create a coin toss scenario:

Heads: decide the meaning of this coin toss by coin toss.

It comes down heads. We apply the rule, and it says apply the rule.
It comes down tails. We look at the rule to see what this means, and it says don't use the rule. Problem is we already did, and if we didn't then we can't resolve the coin toss.

Simple liar paradox in coin flips.

Interesting to explore tho, because the problem arises because we are already committed to the meaning before we read the contradiction. These are temporal SRH where we commit to one state, only to find it asks us to uncomit.

--- Addendum 26 May

Another version is:

Heads: should I use coin flips to make decisions?

Result heads: I should use coin flips to make decisions.
Result tails: I should not be using coin flips to make decisions.

Normatively we'd just stop using coins from this moment on. But logically you could say we've run into a problem because we just made a decision by a method that said we should use that method. In other words how valid was this decision?

The point from SRH perspective is that we already made a decision to use coin flips to make make decisions. So setting the next decision to be "should I make decisions this way" gives an insight into what "should" means in English rather than anything else. In logic we would say something like "are decisions made by coin flip true?" And there is the liar paradox. But in English we fudge this out by saying "should" to mean "it is correct" but we aren't going to do it this time. So when we coin lands on tails, despite already having made a decision with the coin, that we are taking as valid, we now think that decisions made by coins is no longer valid - decided by the coins!

What this illustrates is the complexity of "prior" which is what SRH has been struggling with. In this case "temporal prior". In fact we have always aready made the decision to use coins to make further decisions, and when we decide to rest the decison on a coin of "shall I use coins?" we are not contradicting what has gone before, i.e. the prior, but determining the future.

But removing the dimension of time: "is it ALWAYS a good idea to use coins to make decisions?" CANNOT be decided by a coin! And this is SRH. We are then contradicting the prior, in this case a logical prior. If the "prior" is a decision to use coins, then we cannot ask those coins whether we should use coins, because we already did. SRH does exist, but defining how the prior binds us is provide complex (as argued before I suspect there is a contradiction in even defining rules about the relationship of prior to a state of affairs... and infinite regress of priors of priors... would being able to define the limits of freedom of a system with priors, define priors to those limits?). It is quite possibly undefinable what the limits of a system based on SRH are! That SRH is itself a contradiction, but a peculiar one where it must be a contradiction to be true (Godel style).

However we can ask the softer question "is there ever a time that coins can decide?", but if we use a coin to decide this we cannot know the validity of the answer. If it comes down heads (yes), then we don't know if this is one of those times, and all other outcomes undermine the validity of the outcome.

As a friend pointed out we have a "third" way here: true/false/undecided. And this 3rd option is "outside" the system of true/false. Every system (which is complex enough to have self referemce) must have a "outside the system" outcome. This is SRH.

Now a classic case of self reference which is generally considered valid is the definition of the natural numbers by induction:

We take a starting number "1" as an axiom which belongs to set N.
We then define a successor S(n) to define a new member of N, where n is a member of N.

Then S(1) -> 2, S(S(1)) -> 3 etc

Now from an SRH perspective the interesting thing here is N. We already created the set N prior to the rules of membership. Can we define these axioms without pre-defining the domain of the function S.

I need do some reading and thinking on this. But induction is considered probelematic by some as it looks like things are being degined by themselves, in other words there is no definition occuring and the prior was already there...

to be continued...

Eckhart Tolle - what more is there to say. This is it, said better than anyone else.

So progress has at least achieved one thing: it has developed a youtube algorithm that eventually recommended this video. Well I have read and heard a lot of stuff, and searched in my own life and had a few insights and here is a man explaining what the crowning achievement is. The extinction of self and the emergence into the eternal and blissful indissolvable and perfect now.

I note how poverty for those who have returned to the homeland of the self means nothing. The true sustenance we seek is within, but our return home is blocked by egotistical desire to conquest the world and ignorance that running into the kaleidoscope of sensory phenomena and thoughts that spring up eternally is actually forgetting the present and the peace at the heart of our lives from where we come at every moment.

I have said it, but its funny how you don't always even understand the depth of your own words, let alone the depths of others. Strong feelings are what throw us out of the now. Very pleasant feelings may make us leave the peace of our present now as we feel inadequate without these feelings and so we go in search. The addict feels without this feeling they cannot exist, but it leads them out of the now in missing the experience in the past and looking forward to it in the future. Likewise very horrible feelings are the opposite. We cannot bear to stay in the present with these feelings and we wish for the future to come to free us. We live in fear of the bad feeling coming and refuse to stay in the present in case it comes for us. We destroy our lives so that we never have to come home to ourselves and face sharing the present now with this feared feeling. This is why often great loves, when they fail lead to great despair because during the process of loving we were drawn away from our self, and when the love is gone we find ourselves lost in a barren land far from home. Looking into the future and dreaming of the past we keep ourselves away from the reality of now and the perhaps frightening gaze of now. But if we make resolution to be good, to be upright and to be able to stand with our own selves so that we can start to love ourselves then we can return home and rest blissfully with what we truly are, peacefully just being as Tolle himself did.

I don't really need to say anything other than justify why Tolle is on this blog, he has perfected this and says it the best... 

Are things getting better and does it matter? Everything is fine.

This relativistic argument has emerged many times in this blog so gets its own page now.

If things are getting better then our children will enjoy better lives than us. And their children even better than them.

But, problem. It means that I am expected to live my whole life in far worse conditions than my grand-children, and my children is worse conditions than them.

Does this mean that my whole life is therefore worse? This is the dangerous implication of the development idea.

Usually we spin that the other way. My life is much better than the past and we celebrate the improvements.

But it seems those improvements don't exist, because compared with the future they are actually worse.

So it means that how "good" things are depends entirely on how you look at it, and not in the actual state of affairs.

So "Development" is just a way of looking at things, it isn't a real state of affairs at all and it has no bearing on our lives!

We can be happy regardless the state of development, or perhaps better we just ignore the development idea. This means that all countries, and all people rich or poor can live equal lives since the difference lies only in how they think about things.

This is the final death knell of "Materialism." It does not matter what your state of affairs, it makes no difference.

And this ends obsessive resource use. There is no need for technological innovation or progress, no need to better ourselves or improve things. Everything is just fine, it has always been so.

BUT and big but. This does not end anything. Mankind is creative, we have innate desire to be better and to end suffering and wrongs. This does not change. Life goes on. What changes is that we realise that measuring our happiness based upon whether things are better or worse is a myth. Things are always better and worse it just depends how you look at them.

The Myth of Population causing ecological crisis: how and why to enjoy poverty

Capitalism is about growth. Easy to find resources are cheap and more likely to have technology created around them to create profit and provide investment for capitalists. Essentially a version of Parkinson's Law exists for Capitalism. Rather than "work expands so as to fill the available time" the whole success of capitalism rests on "exploitation expands so as to fill the available resources." As a result regardless the human population size capitalism will use up the world's resources.

Growth is usually regarded positively and called "development." But this is a spin on a deeply dangerous and damaging philosophy designed to support a global oligarchy of investors who are able to derive a free income from "returns on investment" relieving them from having to work.

Capitalist/Development spin notes the "benefits" that people in developed countries enjoy like increased life expectancy, health and technology. But it never looks more deeply at what makes "life" itself.

As argued at length in this blog, a simple relativistic argument illustrates the problem with the Development way of thinking. Development is only good when we compare with the Past. But our children will enjoy a better life that us, which means it makes our life worse compared with the Future. If we can live a whole life in worse conditions than the Future then how important really was development? While arbitrary for humans, development has very real costs for the environment that can't be ignored. 

Some "facts" on the population myth using global biocapacity data from Global Footprint Network. This data probably doesn't mean much, but it will indicate the idea here that development and capitalism is the problem not population.

Currently the world uses 141% of the available bioproductivity of the planet.

If we all lived like UK then that would rise to 400% (so economic development is a very bad idea because it is not sustainable).

If we all lived like Eritreans then that number would fall to 25% of global productivity. The current human population would only use 1/4 of the planets renewable resources. Alternatively we could increase the population 4x if we were prepared to live like Eritreans. Ironically I am both prepared to live like an Eritrean and not have children so I'm doubly "wealthy."

While in relative human terms Capitalism has improved things, it has filled the global space incredibly efficiently. In a matter of a century it has grown to use all the annual biocapacity and a further 41% from fossil resources.

But in absolute terms this strength is its weakness: creating a population of humans whose needs are as large and damaging as possible. It was the very worse system that humans could have developed, but it is the one which supports the aristocratic divide best enabling a small population of people to exploit the mass better than ever before.

By contrast pre-capitalist societies like Eritrea enable their population to live on a 1/16 the resources of the UK. Critics will say that Eritreans live in poverty and are not happy, but this is obviously nonsense. Eritreans live like they have done for thousands of years, and more like humans have lived for millions of years. If humans have always been unhappy then its a failure of evolution if nothing else that we didn't adapt to our environment better. What is much more likely is that modern ways of thinking have changed us and started the need for a struggle to adapt our environment toward our new ways of thinking. This is the real nature of Modernity.

In retrospect its a massive shame the Eritreans didn't start evangelising their wise way of life 500 years ago and invade and colonise the very backward West. And its a very sad shame than many brainwashed Eritreans today feasting on media images think that they are poor and backward in global terms rather than the people who actually hold the keys to the future. It is them who should be teaching us how to live our life happily with less, rather than us teaching them how to live their lives with more.

There is a Chinese saying that it is harder for a rich man to live in a poor man's house than for a poor man to live in a rich man's house. This simple statement explains why development is only ever one way, and also illustrates perfectly the power and wisdom of the poor man. The poor man can live happily in both rich and poor houses, while the rich man has trapped himself in luxury finding it hard to step outside. The rich may think they are powerful, but as irony is always very ironic it is the rich in fact who have the least freedom and the greatest dependency on wealth. The world needs above all other things to learn the joy of poverty and the freedom that grants. This is the message of all the religions, told thousand of the years ago and long before the West's continual ignoring of wisdom began to cause irreparable damage and make this lesson ever more pertinent.

How to enjoy poverty in fact should be the name of this blog!

The Importance of Being Good

It's a rather hackneyed point that we should be good. Its a rather uncool point that we should be good.

You don't see gangsters or many of the heroes in films actually being that good.

The value of being good is also dressed in much mediaeval mythology about punishment in hells, or bad karma and general suffering one way or another being the cost of sin.

But the fundamental truth is that the cost of not being good is actually personal suffering. This is the definition of what is bad: that which causes personal suffering. How foolish all the "cool" gangsters seem down the track when their lives are full of suffering.

When we are suffering however being good seems impossible. It is painful and hard to correct ourselves and even peace seems like a suffering as it only exposes the extent of our pain and suffering. It is easier to be bad, to heap on the suffering in an attempt to block it all out. Self harm, harm of others becomes attractive as it briefly disguises our inner pain.

Even the mental illness that eventually arises is a mechanism to hide the pain, to distract us into other imaginary self made suffering that at least is our own creation.

Mental illness eventually become psychiatric as our brain adapts to these patterns in behaviour that have developed to escape our own suffering.

It is a self perpetuating cycle however, and the only way out is to start dropping in good drop by drop, painful step by painful step to dilute and eventually flush out all the bad. A journey of perhaps many days, months, years even potentially lifetimes. But it is the only way. Every step of goodness is a step toward genuine peace and happiness and freedom from suffering. Like a stream cutting through the rocks of a gorge it is a path best done in tiny steps. Trying to do an enormous good deed in the hope of clearing our suffering may do a lot, but if our expectations are too high we will end up disappointed. We do not know how deep our suffering goes and how far we must dig and wash to clear away the weeds and dirty from which pour suffering grows.

When we turn and become commited to the walk out of suffering our direction changes and that is the single most fundamental move. This is the difference between a mere mortal and a saint. A saint despite the suffering, despite the wrongs they have committed, and despite the challenges that await them is commited to keep walking through the storm. That is all there is to it. Don't give up being good, even when every bad things and harsh sufferings hit us; even when being good seems to only make us hurt more: head down keep walking. No storm lasts forever.

Now one immediate problem is that people around us will probably try to drag us down. If we have good friends they will support us, and this is a good measure of good friends. But chances are we will experience resistance from out peer group. No one not committed to goodness likes to be shown up. If you warn someone who enjoys smoking that it may cause cancer, chances are they really don't want to face this. If we wish to change people, like the effort to change our self it is gently and in small but determined steps. We certainly do not wear a badge and start criticising our neighbours. This will make our own journey much harder. However if we are strong and well supported, perhaps there is a role for us as an evangelist of goodness (not necessarily with doctrine attached like Christianity or Islam or Buddhism etc) but simply as a reminder and encourager of people that the path to a happy life is one of good steps.

Caveat: I said that the definition of badness was that which causes personal suffering. This is how it appears when we are (most likely) looking at the world from our own perspective. But obviously as our goodness grows we begin to look at the world more and more from outside ourselves. We begin to see the suffering that badness creates not just in us but in other people. Develop to become an agent whose goal is to just end suffering regardless whether it is ours or others. In Buddhism this a a powerful and advanced step called the Bodhissatva. But we don't need doctrine and names the path remains the same for all people from all cultures and backgrounds.

Knowledge and Being

Never been too sure about this but gave it some close observation while touching a windflower today.

So the problem is trying to experience something 100%. Windflowers are coming to the end of their season and I thought I may not see another this year as I do not plan to go out for a while. So I wanted to touch the windflower 100%, not being distracted so that I could at least have that. This is very OCD type thinking of course too, but illustrative.

When we think "I am not touching something", "now I am", "now I am not" it is very discrete and definite. I know when I am, and I know when I am not. Knowledge is very binary. You either are, or you are not, touching the flower and there is nothing in between.

But if we look at the process as it "is", and we separate what is happening from what we are thinking and knowing we get a very different experience. There is no sudden change from not touching to touching and back again. The "present moment" as it is called in Buddhism, is like a stage on which the world unfolds. It doesn't change, we occupy the "present moment" continuously, but the events change within that present. It is not so discrete. There is looking at the flower, there is the intention to touch it, the motion of the fingers toward it, being close to it but not touching, being close and touching, looking at the flower, looking at the finger, thinking I am touching, thinking is this the actual moment now, is this it, I am definitely touching it, some intention to withdraw the hand, being close and touching, being close and not touching, being far away. But it is seemless. The flower is there all the time, the hand is there all the time, the contact is rather arbitrary in reality. It is only when we think "I am touching it" does some mental stone statue get erected to mark the event and it takes on special significance.

In this way "knowledge" and "being" are quite distinct. Without knowledge things are changing both in themselves but also our perspective on them. One second looking at the flower, the next looking at its petal, its stamen, perhaps it leaf, perhaps the ground, nothing is static and discrete in reality. It is a flowing stream. But when we start to think and hammer the sign posts and way markers in to measure and record the events then we have a completely different process of steps and thinking being something separate and discrete, thins start to be made of parts and these get assembled by thoughts into discrete things.

Some say we shouldn't think because it boxes and distorts the world so much. It forces it into a particular shape and perspective and limits our appreciation of it. But as Hui Neng said in the Platform Sutra, we think you can't stop that. What is to be done however is to watch the process of thinking and see that it is quite different from the world that it is involved with.

The New Economics: Peace, Desire and Goodness

So when we get what we want we feel peace.

But do we feel peace because we have what we want, or because for a while we no longer want.

Put another way is the goal of action to fulfil desire or make desire go away?

Summary:
The answer is to do with ecstasy and being outside "yourself." Selfless people are actually ecstatic because they are bigger than their desires, which means they can adopt a position outside their desires which places them between their desires and others. So being small minded and satisfying a big desire, clears the self and makes you ecstatic for a while. But desires soon fill you up and you become stuck inside again. So really the ascetic is just trying to make the desires smaller then themselves, and the consumerist is trying to keep keep emptying the self. But the real solution I realise is neither. Its trying to become bigger and more magnanimous and more generous.

As discussed a lot in this blog what we desire is conditional. We can't desire things we don't know about. It is the job of marketers to inform us of the existence of things and then make us desire them. But until the marketer has done their job we are blissfully unaware. Indeed the job of the marketer is to make us unhappy, and then we are motivated into action to try and resolve this desire that has been created.

In this cynical view desire is like a disease and a drug addiction, it is an illness to solve.

The traditional material view is like John Locke based on practical things like food and housing. One imagines the argument goes exactly like his argument that property is a fundamental thing because we take possession of things in order to consume them. Desire is a fundamental thing because we must desire things before we are motivated to take possession of them, and then consume them. We enter a state of unrest in order to achieve the goal of desire. Without this all animals would die, they would simply remain at rest until they died. And so because motivation toward a need like food is a natural thing then desire is a natural thing and the rest of economics develops.

In Buddhism they call motivation toward a desire selfishness. The desire is limited to the body, it is the smallest wish and the action that arises from it is the smallest and most trivial action. In Adam Smith's world the economy is the sum of this population of small wishes.

Yet Adam Smith is himself a contradiction. How did he benefit from slaving for 10 years to write Wealth of Nations? Was this just a small wish? Or did he have larger things in mind like the "Wealth of Nations". He was not thinking about himself, his desire was for all of humanity. His work did not enter the market place as a tradeable commodity along side candles and matches, he meant it to be part of the Enlightenment and illuminate people in a way far more widely than just a candle. Magnanimity,Generosity, Sacrifice, Wisdom are not accounted for anywhere in his book and yet he must have exhibited these to write his book. 10 years of his life were lost sitting in a room studying and composing it, 10 years he will never have again, and he gave them to the world in this book. A book which has no room anywhere in it for that act itself. Wealth of Nation is incomplete; Modern Economics is incomplete.

Darwin

In Buddhism the wise who begin to step beyond the daily turmoil of personal desires, begin to develop deeper motivations like compassion, love, generosity, patience, tolerance, acceptance. In the case of these "big minded" persons while they have their small desires they also begin to operate in a way that may not necessarily benefit them but will benefit someone. There is a naturalistic John Locke type argument that says that we must look after our own survival because no-one else is going to and after that there is nothing to do because everyone is looking after them self. There is a great Chinese story of Hell illustrating the problem with this:

Buddha shows the person Heaven and there is a circular table with 10 bowls around it and 10 pairs of 2 meter long chopsticks. The Buddha shows the person Hell and it is exactly the same. Then as they watch the people sit at the table. In Hell they are emaciated, and while the food in the bowl is good they cannot reach it with the long chop sticks. In Heaven they are healthy and instead of trying to feed themselves they feed the person across the table from them.

The point is that not everything (indeed nothing) can be achieved alone. We live and work in a community. Economics serves to study and guide our material interactions but it cannot escape that we work together by one means or another. Adam Smith, like the proponents of Democracy, seems to forget that even in a free-market or given a vote we can chose whether to do what suits us, or we can chose to have a wider perspective. Adam Smith advises us to work in our own interests as this will make the market more "efficient". That is it will lead to money flowing to the "best" producers and lead to right products flowing to the "neediest" of consumers.

Yet as has been the debate through logic to evolution to society to science what is the "unit" of the world. It was "the word" is logic for a while, it was the "species" then the "individual" and now the "gene" in evolution, it was the "nation" for Adam Smith but is now the individual in economics, it was the "atom" and now the "string "in physics. As argued recently in this blog there is no fundamental unit. The universe is not built from "things". Well it is in one sense, but unlike an Ikea flat pack there never was a time when it was flat packed, so we don't know what the "original" units that God built it from were. We keep taking it apart into smaller bits and this is endless (even with quantum limitations I believe we'll find a way to intellectually subdivide units of energy). Limits in general live in a relationship with Regions, and they are constantly changing.

So we don't say that the absolute unit of "action" is the selfish individual. You can look at it like this. You can say that everything someone does is preceded by a desire. I only gave you my last biscuit because I got a nice feeling of friendship from it, or because I thought it would strengthen our relationship, or because in some way "I" benefited. Or perhaps I just looked at the situation and thought well one of us is going to go without the biscuit, why not make it myself for a change. What cares, just take that on the chin and feel the loss and just accept that. The alternative is the other person feeling the same.

Now of course as is often the way deep down we feel cheated by life, we feel damaged, we harbour some hatred at having been abused at some level. Even if it just a stranger stepping in front of us in a queue without due consideration. We feel aggrieved at life. Such bitterness stored up through life means it is hard to be "big", and hard to be generous. When we "give" we feel we are losing out even more in a world where we already lost. And it is even worse when the people we give to don't seem to appreciate our sacrifice. It just goes further to deepen our sadness and bitterness. Well it's a fact that we do need to think about ourselves. And we do need to take for ourselves. If we keep punishing our self by giving then we are doing to our self what we wouldn't do to someone else. If I always give my biscuits away because I don't like seeing people without a biscuit then I am ensuring there is one person without a biscuit which is myself! The key to generosity is equanimity. If we feel we are losing every time we give, we have no developed equanimity. We still have a small mind that is based upon personal desire. This is not a bad thing, there is truth to the view that each person must look after themselves first. If you are miserable you can be of little help to others. You may wish others to help you in your misery, but they are probably miserable too, and so cannot help you. In a world of small people it is like Hell in the Chinese story above, no one is free to feed another, so we must try and feed our self. It takes a Jesus or Bodhisattva in Buddhism to take the first step of sacrifice. They must forgo feeding them self and risk feeding another. Now that other may not reciprocate and get fact while the Bodhisattva gets thin, and this is the problem of co-operation studied by Axelrod and others (and which I did a final year BSc project on) and which I'll need to return to in my economic models. But the Bodhisattva has one big gain if they do it right, and turn the pain in growth, and that is they begin to develop a larger mind. But warning! care is needed. A small mind, being sacrificed makes a smaller mind. Developing gentle kindness to oneself is the first and most important step to developing it towards others. But this is not selfish desire! This is learning to view your self from the same perspective you will in future view others. It is beginning the step outside oneself, what in Greek is called Ecstasy.

Sadly we understand ecstasy today in terms of selfish desire, when we are indulged and fully fulfilled on sex or drugs, happiness brought on by pleasurable feelings. But in the ecstatic orgy we should be letting go of self control not so much as to indulge our fleeting whims and repressed fantasies but rather to let go of our self as we might in a masked ball, to experience being someone else, to experience being free from the restrictions of our identity. Presumably after Christian repression of pre-Christian ecstatic cults such stuff is now associated with the devil, with human sacrifice and general victimisation and sadism of unfortunate individuals. But utterly ironically the best way to ecstasy is not through superiority and putting up barriers between victim and self, but by the complete opposite of dropping barriers between victim and self. The devil is a deceiver who gets what he wants through trickery. We are in Lent at the moment a good time to discuss this. The devil will offer you the world, and you think your every desire is fulfilled, you believe you have gained. But the Devil never loses and never gives, it is you that is giving. After you have taken the Devil will enslave you like a fish on a hook, like a drug addict seeking their next fix. How ironic that those who seek ecstasy the quick way end up giving far more than those who seek it the slow way. If we reject the devil, and instead seek to gradually remove barriers between ourselves and others, with no obvious gain, taking the pain of loss and generosity very gradually and developing kindness to our self eventually when we are a big person we will benefit from seeing the world from a perspective outside our self. We will be in ecstasy. When we have pain or have desires they will not be centre of the world. We will see them in proper perspective alongside other people from a position of equanimity. "Equanimity" is not some intellectual idea. Through meditation we can experience it directly as a core feature of our minds. Ecstasy is the true nature of our minds. Being magnanimous and generous is the natural state. It is there all the time, but we become small minded and lose sight of it.

So in conclusion. It is not that the traditional view of desire is wrong exactly. As far as I can see now it is not quite like John Locke making the mistake of not distinguishing possession and property. It is that "desire" becomes a problem when we are small minded and we cannot see beyond it. When we are small minded having a desire is an unpleasant experience and it can consume us and take us over. When we have a mind bigger than the desire we have freedom. We can chose. Right now I have a few desires one is to sleep as I am tired, one is to finish some work, one is to go for a walk, I'm not actually hungry which is a rarity, and a desire to finish this! But none are huge, and I can pick them up and put them down and am actually very free. The problem happens with desires bigger than us. They fill us up and we lose perspective. We have no room to move and they take over. The smaller our mind the smaller a desire can do this.

Only when we have a mind bigger than a desire can we experience freedom. And what does this mean? It means that our self is bigger than desire. It means that we are not identical with desire. A human being with a big mind has a relationship with desire very similar in fact to their relationship with things. We can pick things up when we need them, and we can put them down. Likewise we can attend to that desire to go sky diving, or we can focus on the work we have to do. Nothing is so desired that we can't think of anything else. This is equanimity. It also means that when we have a desire and someone else has a desire we can take up a position of freedom between our desire and theirs. Wow think about that! we can occupy a space between our self and another! This is ecstasy. It is the basis of what is cheesily called "goodness." But it is so much deeper and more profound than what is commonly associated with goodness.

So in final conclusion. When we have a desire that is near the size of our mind then it is a relief to get rid of it, because it can totally absorb us. Now this can be a pleasurable experience, because while we are absorbed with a desire we can think of nothing else and this can actually distract us from other sufferings and desires. Perhaps I have a deep desire to be famous and I am still a nobody. However if I develop a big desire to climb Mount Everest this will distract me from my pain at being no-one. Unfortunately there is a test for this: once we have climbed Mount Everest and the desire is satisfied we no longer have the distraction and we must return to the pain of not having achieved fame. I believe this has always troubled me. It is far better to be honest about our desires to some degree and seek to address them directly rather than try to distract from them. Some desires like fame are incredibly hard to achieve and we need a conversation with Simon Cowell to tell us to just forget about it. It is painful, but pain like desire is something that is much easier when we have a big mind. If our mind is too small and the pain too big, then like a huge mouthful it will take a lot of chewing before we can swallow it. This is text book suffering, and it is what having a small mind is like. It also underlines the importance of growing our mind, and developing a perspective that is bigger and beyond our self. But suffering is good, because this is the number one way of growing.

It is so sad to see the news about Keith Flint. He did achieve fame, and was front man to one of the defining music phenomenon of our generation. He did climb Everest. A true legend. Very deeply missed. And he gave so much to so many people. In that sense he was a bodhisattva. A blinding light in the darkness for many who wanted to party hard in the 90s and 00s. Yet after all this he was left profoundly wanting himself, and a desire that ultimately was too great for him that it consumed him. He lost control and unable to meet the demands of that devil he killed himself. His mind was too small for this whatever it was. Johnny Rotten puts it down to loneliness and lack of love. But there are many who are heart broken, and unloved who soldier on through the valley of darkness and loneliness taking each miserable day as it comes, and eking out what meagre joy their life affords them. Perhaps they have hope, or perhaps they are just big enough to just accept it. Life isn't always amazing, sometime life is just rubbish, some times a whole lifetime from birth to death can be horrendous. But it's always life, and within that some days are better than others. And from what I've written in this blog underneath the overloaded small mind, there is the big mind that lies in equanimity to the world sufferings. As discussed in the blog before this does not mean the big mind is dull the world's suffering, it means that it is big enough to see the suffering as it is without feeling overwhelmed. A baby may burst our crying if you take away their ice cream. Their whole world just collapsed. When we are older it still hurts exactly the same, but when we are bigger we can contain that sadness and just see it and let if dissipate without becoming too distressed. Something that starts, will end. This is the basic law of the world (Konadattas insight). Not everyone has teh same desires and emotions. A spider may fill one person with huge fear that they cannot bear it is not because they are small minded but because their fear is very great. Perhaps Keith Flint was not small minded, but the desire he had was too great for him. I don't suppose he ever meditated, or did any mental practice to develop that mind of his. As a result when Mayumi Kai refused to come home, whatever part she played in his mental life, it left him with a mouthful too big to chew. My only advise if I had known him would have been to start chewing on that, whatever it was, a long time before it became unbearable. You "Gotta face your fears in the wild frontier." Just gotta face your desires.

Final conclusion: ecstasy is our true nature. Free from the boundaries of self. This is not self annihilation, it is just stepping outside not always being dragged back inside the selfish perspective by desires and fears we can't manage. The way outside is what is generally called "goodness", but which is essentially trying to occupy the space between our self and others. It can hurt to give and not be recognised or receive in return, it hurts to love and not be loved in return. But when we step outside our self, outside that pain, when we are big enough and big hearted enough, big minded enough (same word in some languages) we can see it for what it is we can get freedom from it. It doesn't go away, we just sit outside it. This is ecstasy, this is true mind and heart. So when we get what we want, the desire goes away, and this returns us to freedom, but with a big heart and mind there is room in us to be free and have the desires, pains and loves all at once.

Just celebrate this post with the latest Carly Rae Jepsen offering. So we find what we want, there's "nothing like this feeling". That feeling is ecstasy it is true peace because for a while we are free, there is room in us for two. But when desires start to develop again that "you" don't satisfy then we fill up and there becomes  room for only me again. And if you are Keith Flint there stops being room even for you if the desires are too big. When we are in love, and free and have room for two we must work extra hard to grow and make room for more. I think my mistake is I get lazy and actually my mind shrinks when I'm in love and that means I become even less able to weather hardship. Well done Carly some musical love again.

Now this is the real nature of the problem we face in life. This is not just a economics post, its a religious, ethics, spiritual, psychological, existential, ontological post. "New Economics" must have limits. Perhaps the goal is not unify the whole of spirituality, science, ethics and economics. It is just to define the correct boundaries of economics to avoid people justifying the indefensible with economic theory.