Is Death the problem OR am I the problem?

So we can discuss death. We can discuss what it is, how we should approach it, whether there is life after death and all sorts of things. But in doing this are we really approaching the problem of death?

So what is most noticeable about death? It is that all things die, including ourselves.

But there is something else most notable about death. It only really matters when it happens to us. We watch the news every day and find out that people have died and we have response, but the world goes on. Sometimes people very close to us die and it seems that our life cannot go on. But it does. We get over it eventually. But there is that person whose death is utterly catastrophic: when we die. Life does not go on after that. It is game over.

And yet this must be a lie because this is true for everyone. All those people in the news who die day after day, their death is utterly catastrophic for them but not for me. And likewise my death is utterly catastrophic for me but not them. How is this possible? How is my death so important to just me and no one else?

Well it must be because of self-consciousness. When I die, this also ends the self-reflection so I cannot see myself anymore. My death is actually the same as anyone else's death, what makes it unique to me is that I am turned in on myself to create a self-consciousness and an observer of myself. When I die what is unique to that death is the loss of that self-reflection. I lose my reflected self not my real self.

Imagine 2 mirrors reflecting each other. Each mirror can see itself reflected in the other mirror. To the outsider we break a mirror and it is just a broken mirror, but to this pair of self-reflecting mirrors they lose the world of reflections "inside" themselves. So it is with the self. But that world of reflections is not real: all there is is just 2 mirrors. This is how "my" death becomes a special problem for "me". But it is not a "real" problem. If SRG says one thing its that we cannot have a reflection of our actual self. The real self/mirror is a condition of the reflected self/mirror. It cannot be the same as it.   

Now another way to look at this is to ask how does "my life" or "my death" become filled with "me"? We know there are billions of people in the world, yet this one somehow is special, it is "me." How does this "meness" come about. If we look at the "facts" we see a world of bodies and minds and people getting old and dying and people getting born and the world going around in a giant circle but there is nothing special about a particular person: every one is special. If the Western World has stumbled upon anything its this gradual realisation that everyone is important equally. So again how do I become myself, and how is this more important that others? The answer is called "attachment" in Buddhism. The world is like a river, with bodies and minds flowing through time from birth to death and maybe beyond (it doesn't matter). The key thing we do is cast an anchor into this process so that we get dragged along with one of these bodies and minds. As life progresses and the body quite naturally ages this anchor appears to drag us ever closer to death. But if we stop and look the other way: what is being dragged along through our life? Our body and identity may be at one end of the anchor, but what is at the other? The answer is nothing. The anchor is there, but nothing is being anchored. There is no ship being dragged along. Nothing is being dragged through life with us, there is just the body and mind and its identity and the anchor and nothing else. If we dismantle the anchor then we just have a world and a life unfolding quite naturally and nothing is heading towards deaths or getting old or anything. Nothing is actually happening!

This is an identical realisation as above, where the "self" is just a reflection in a mirror but has no existence of itself. The mirror finds that reflection very precious as it believes it is "itself" but it is just a reflection it is not real. The "actual" mirror is the one doing the reflecting and it is like any other mirror. The anchor is what ties the mirror to its reflection, but there is nothing but a reflection doing the anchoring.

So actually death is the same for everyone and is as normal as hearing about a death on the news. What makes it a problem is the anchor that we have to a particular body or bodies and the belief that there is something casting that anchor.  When we realise that the death of our body does not drag anything down, cos there was nothing there anyway to drag down we are free of death. Yet our death still happens quite normally as if it were someone else's death.

Religion is just the search for the Unconditional

In Christianity Jesus shows unconditional love on the Cross. God's love is equal and infinite for all of us. The hindrance is that we don't recognise this and prefer the world of the conditional. In Buddhism the Middle-Path points at avoiding extremes. For the mind attached to the conditional, the world seems to always change. Whatever we have found that we like or don't like it never seems to last, we are left either missing it when it goes or wanting to change it because it won't go. Thus we live a life of struggle and suffering being tossed around on an ocean (often called Samsara). The Middle Path lies between these extremes of having and not having, between attachment and rejecting. That is where the unconditional lies in Buddhism.

Its fairly easy to arrive at the conclusion that all things are conditional or relative. If there was a continuous hum in our ears that never changed we would never become aware of it. If we made machine that could measure it we would calibrate them to that zero was this hum. It would be undetectable, unmeasurable. The conditional mind is like that of reptiles: we sense and are attracted to change--the excitement of finding something, the need to get rid of something. We live in the space between things. When we are thirsty we like to drink, but soon that thirst goes and we become quenched. Then we are bored again and onto something else. Always moving like a snake, sewing our lives between the opposing things of the world. This is actually suffering, we never go anywhere or become anything. Ultimately the journey is pointless.

Likewise in Christianity we are in a state of eternal Sin after we forbade God in the Garden of Eden and were banished from his protection to work and struggle for our living. We rejected the unconditional and were forced into the conditional. Sin is missing the mark, not thinking and behaving true in accordance with God. That is not behaving with insight of the unconditional and being swayed by the condition. As a simple example Greed is taking more than we need. Equally "Miserliness" is taking less. As Buddha discovered you cannot beat greed by starving yourself to death: that is incredibly naïve; that is still conditional thinking. To beat Greed you must beat Miserliness as well: these are the extremes and the conditional mind swings between them. Actually why don't we just take what ew need? That is the end of suffering, and the end of Sin.

So why don't we just take what we need? We are like that snake slithering between things, or the lizard only seeing movement. As conditional minds we only see the changes. We don't see the satisfaction of having taken what we need, we enjoy the process of satiation instead. And when we are satiated then we try to satiate a some more and eat some more when actually we don't need it. This is why all religions point at the same things: appreciation, gratitude, kindness, love, joy. When we eat just what we need we appreciate the gift of the food that nourishes our body; we have gratitude to the world and the people who have supplied this food; we are kind to our bodies that need the food and the world that must supply that food (non-meat eating is a natural progression); we love both ourselves, others and the beautiful world that has such a thing as eating and food in it; and we are joyful to abide in such a world. By contrast the Glutton and the Miser have no joy in what they gain, they seek only the momentary pleasure of eating or of denying themselves, they do harm to both themselves, others and the world. This is sinful and achieves nothing but a life of suffering.

So what is the Unconditional? This is a question best not asked. Whatever we say will be conditional. The conditional is characterised by birth and death, that is creation and destruction. Nothing lasts forever and nothing has been in existence forever. Take a feeling that we have: you will be able to say when it started and you can we 100% sure it will end (pretty soon in the case of feelings - they are very fleeting). Every part of our minds is changing very rapidly. This is the "burning house" that Buddha spoke of, every single part in flames and changing. Even the words I write here take me only a half hour to write, and less to read and will be out of mind in no time. Hopefully they say things about the world that have greater longevity but even these ideas come and go. Buddha said even Buddhism has a shelf life. This is why we must take urgent steps to escape the sea of Samsara while we have the chance, gain that crucial scrutiny of the conditional so that we can unhook leaving only the Uncondition or God.

But what is the Unconditional if we wish to push this. Note this is a dangerous path because suppose we did identify the unconditional while still having a conditional mind we would immediately attach to it: "Ah! Look I have found the Unconditional" we would feel to ourselves and immediately we would reject everything else. Yes the Unconditional is not relative to other things, it has nothing to reject and so it has nothing to attach or attract to. There is no "truth" in this sense. Its not like a argument over the colour of Morpheus Butterfly. The person who say Blue is correct, they can get a gold star and a point, and the person who say Green gets nothing. But this is conditional and relative truth. You can be right or wrong. Unconditional Truth just is: no right and wrong. God cannot be wrong cos he cannot be right. He just is. But as mentioned there are things that are characteristics of the Unconditional like Kindness, Love, Gratitude, Patience, Frugalness, Equanimity and Even-Mindedness. If we perfect these we find that we rise slowly out of the turbulent seas of the conditional and the snake instead of moving around things starts to move through things and we stop noticing the change so much as abide in the peace at the heart of things.

Now the one thing I am unclear about this this analogy. The conditional mind is like the weather. Some days it is rainy and some days it is sunny. In other words, crudely, some times good things happen and other times bad things happen. But while the weather is always changing the Sun always shines constantly in the sky. While the changing weather is the conditional, the unchanging Sun is the Unconditional. Now what I don't understand is whether the "happiness" we feel when things are going well is a window into the Unconditional, but we experience that core nature of the world through a conditional lens. In other words when we finally give up the conditional and stop looking at the weather and just accept the good days and the bad days as relative and unsubstantial are we then basking in the Sun. Or does letting go of the opposing good and bad days and being dragged this way and that enter us into a different world than we even got a glimpse of on happy days. Are "good times" in our ordinary worlds of suffering a glimpse of the Eternal or is all such worldly attached experience part of the conditional. In Yin-Yang terms whole the Black and White oppose each other, the Dao is neither Black nor White, nor Black and White, not etc etc. But this is irrelevant as the actual task is just to enter the middle path and make our arrow true and Sinless.

This is religion.

How Humans can become Squirrels

 

Been having some fruitful meditations on our squirrels and the bird feeders.

So the truth is captured by the camera. There are 3 squirrels: one is bigger and has used this to finally get to the feeders. There are 2 others who cannot do this and feed from the crumbs. What is very interesting to observe over several weeks is the skilful squirrel never once drops peanuts for his family. This squirrel does not see what the camera sees, but is biased towards itself. It has a small, local and conditional* perspective. For this small squirrel death will consume it entirely. Its a prefect demonstration of Capitalism in fact... but this is just squirrels; humans have the potential to escape death, though few develop it. So where does this potential lie? This is the subtle bit. No-one can become a dispassionate camera and have an "out of body experience". Ok arguably they can, but they don't need to. Much better than a literal camera perspective, is separating ones actual awareness into that which is small and conditional and that which is large and unconditional. When we awake and become aware we are awake we don't just see, we are aware that we see. Indeed we have the potential to observe everything in our minds, even our mind state. We can see whether we are happy or sad, we can see whether we know something or not--even before we recall it--, we can see what we are thinking--that is we don't just think, we can see ourselves think. We have the potential to observe everything about our small conditional minds. Now how is that possible? It is possible because we are not our small conditional minds. We are actually much bigger and unconditional. We actually look at the world from an unconditional perspective like a camera, and within that we see the conditional world that we habitually think is our self.

The tricky problem is that we seek to own that small conditional self that we see, and that anchors our unconditional free mind to the conditional prison world of death. In meditation people from Capitalist countries have a particular problem of trying to own their breath and trying to work on it. It is extremely difficult just to leave it alone to be what it is. In the same way its extremely difficult to give up our conditional existence and remain at the level of unconditional mind. In squirrel terms its very difficult--faced with hunger, tasty peanuts and the success of having got to the feeder--not to sink into that moment in a toxic way and lose touch with the bigger view that is freedom. We have hit the jackpot, we're prepared to give up freedom cos we have what we want. We don't realise that in giving up freedom there is now no escape. Our fellow squirrels go hungry, but right now that doesn't matter cos I have tasty food filling my senses. I am all that matters. This becomes in the extreme solipsism and madness but right now that is fine.

However soon I will be full and the food has no use to me, eating no longer has value. So I am satisfied, but now I am now trapped inside my own small perspective. I am unavoidably conditional Me now. OK maybe this time I can work to give this up, renounce the Devil etc but it becomes harder every time until I am just small minded, trapped in the mortal shell of me facing death eventually. But its actually not true. I just got tricked by sense and desire.

If George Orwell was to write a really profound story it would be the one where Humans become squirrels under the influence of Capitalism.

* Conditional here means subject to conditions. That means it changes in different situations, and it depends upon situations. This is our experience of constantly changing senses, emotions and desires. Our world is constantly changing. One minute we are hungry, the next full, the next we are bored, the next we are sad, the next enthusiastic and positive, the next negative. It's forever changing. A bad thing happens and we are immediately plunged into emotions, a good thing happens and its the same. Obviously in this world eventually the very bad thing will happen and we will die. Things are always balanced in this world however. We can only die because at some stage we were born. It is a "relative" world too. We are only happy because before we were unhappy. We are only full because before we were hungry. If we were always full we would forget about food and eating all together. Its the constant moving between opposites that keeps our lives forever moving and stops us finding peace. Often we like this constant moving because peace is initially quite a struggle. We find it boring, or even frightening as the clouds of our busyness settle we start to see ourselves as we are. That can be a moment of honesty we are not ready for, and something we avoid through habitual activity. The Unconditional is quite something else. It is always with us, it is the perspective inside which everything happens. Regardless whether we are happy or sad, excited or bored the unconditional just watches unjudging. We can block the unconditional out however. This is what is called The Unconscious in psychology. We can be unaware of things, even actively avoid them in our lives. Some time in the future we see them and can't believe we didn't see them before. Well actually our unconditional self did see them, but we hid from it. That line reminds me of Adam and Eve hiding from God in Eden. Perhaps Nietzsche has a point that the Genesis story is actually a good analysis of consciousness.

Just War?

One of the great problems in the world is the idea of Just War. This single handedly has caused more deaths than any other idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory

The problem obviously is that each party in any war thinks they are Just. So its just a justification for bloodshed.

Given an "enemy" people try various devices to escape this obvious conclusion that really they should listen to the enemy rather than silence and destroy them. A common one is that the army they face is brainwashed and fighting under duress. And that given the option they would rather defect.

Many people given the choice between defecting or dying have chosen to defect. That decision is in fact made under duress so doesn't count. The idea that the enemy is brainwashed is a two edged weapon, because how do soldiers know that it is not them who have been brainwashed? Indeed I would argue that all soldiers by definition are brainwashed. Brainwashed to hear their leaders and not the leaders of their "enemy." I put enemy in quotes because it is a universal experience for soldiers to realise that they do not actually have a quarrel with the people they fight, it is just their ruling elites who do.

So there is actually no ground for "just war." And if there is no ground for "just war" there is no ground for war. And this is the inevitable result of all discussions on war. Why should the strongest win for any other reason than they are the strongest?

So you could argue that the "truthful" are the strongest cos they band together more successfully. "There is no honour amongst thieves" goes to saying and this is why thieves don't rule the world. If they did they would just have their stolen earning stolen in return. The Good are always stronger than the Bad because the Good are Good to themselves while the Bad are Bad to themselves. Indeed you can argue that War is pointless cos the Bad will destroy themselves through their own Badness. But the problem with the stronger are better argument is that the winners of conflicts write the history and define themselves as "good". No winner of a conflict has ever declared that they were not the deserved winner and they are "bad". So by definition the winner of any conflict is "good" so its meaningless to attribute anything to this "goodness." The US for example is a genocidal, enslaving, mass murdering nation exactly like the Nazis in every way. Yet the US won the war so is good and the Nazis lost the war and so are bad. For the Jewish Holocaust the US has the Indian Genocide. For concentration camps the US has slavery. And for mass murder and global supremacy the US has Vietnam to name one of many. There is literally no difference between the two regimes: except that the Nazis were stopped while the US hasn't been (yet).

So how do you defeat Evil if not by War? Its simple you learn to be good. Its a long struggle that takes each of us a lifetime, and we can inspire and teach others. This is how it is done. The battle with the Devil is quiet, earnest and indefinite. You never give up, and you don't expect to have it finished soon.

Inside/Outside

 The Truth is known but people struggle to put a name to it. Recently found value in the ideas of inside/outside again.

In spirituality people often say things like "go inside" and "find yourself." The answer and the truth is "within" you. What does this mean? Where is the inside that you can go to?

Chances are the "inside" people identify initially is wrong, which rather makes such statements useless.

This issue is handled amazingly in the Shurangama Sutra Volume 1. While the Sutra does not come directly from Buddha it is still excellent. In Chapter 5 when asked the location of the Mind, Ananda answers what many still believe today at least 1500 years later: 

Ananda said to the Buddha, “World Honored One, all the ten kinds of living beings in the world alike maintain that the conscious mind dwells within the body; ..." [p172]

Then Buddha shows Ananda problems with this view:

“Your mind is capable of understanding everything thoroughly. Now if your present mind, which thoroughly understands everything, were in your body, then you should be aware first of what is inside your body. Can there be living beings who first see inside their bodies before they observe things outside? [p177]

So Ananda is forced to say the Mind is outside the body in order to account for seeing the world but not the inner organs of the body. But he only makes it worse and is ultimately left realising that the Mind is without location. It is the same issue that the characters in a painting might have if asked where the canvas is. In if mind has location where is the "inside" that spirituality speaks of.

It is linked to Relativity and Measurement.

To measure something we take a "standard" and we compare with the unknown in a defined way. For length we put the ruler end to end, for weight we add to scales etc. We then get a count of how many times the standard fits into the unknown. Note that we are talking about standards fitting into an unknown. This is the sense of inside used in spirituality. A 10kg weight can be thought about has having 10x 1Kg weights "inside" it.

Now consider a much more poignant measure: how many years does someone's life have in it? So recently Prince Philip died. Everyone did the measurement and said he had 99 years inside his life. Soon afterwards actress Helen McCrory died and she only had 52 years inside. When we compare these measurement we say that the inside of Helen's life was smaller than the inside of Prince Philip's life.

But this only works from the outside. Lets go inside a year itself? How big is a year? Interesting isn't it: no answer. The inside has no size. we must go outside the year and find something else like the number of days. we answer 365 days. Now a year has an inside. But then how big is a day? we must answer with another outside. By itself a day has no size, or for that matter any measurement or quantity.

While there is no inherent quantity inside our lives there is Quality. Robert Pirsig has a lot to say about this. The key point is that quality without measurement has no boundaries. This is very very hard to see clearly. Wittgenstein notes in 'Philosophical Investigations' how odd it is to consider the word "Red" while looking at a red thing and try to understand how these two things have any connection at all. The perceived colour is a quality that if we don't measure and name, is just what it is, infinite and present. It exists as it is quite apart from the rest of the world. In meditation we can just sit with it as it is. However when we name it, it gets a package and that package distinguishes it from its surrounding and other colours. Perhaps it is a red apple on a brown table. When we let our brains go all the way and process it with a name the red then exists in relation to other colours especially the brown of the table. This named red is solid, graspable and gives us a mental satisfaction. But we lose the quality when we bottle it like this. It is a very delicate mental process that is easily missed until we spend time in meditation looking closely at it. The distinction is also called Nama and Rupa in the Indian literature. Rupa is just the form or phenomenon as it is and Nama is the mental process of giving it a measured box with a name on it. They are quite separate just as Wittgenstein noted looking at a red thing (rupa) and thinking that it is red (nama). 

So we see that for things to have a "measure" we must compare them with something "outside". The "inside" actually has no measure by itself. This leads to a fundamental spiritual discovery: things depends upon other things to be what they are! Inside things are just themselves.

This means that we can change what the inside looks like just by comparing with something else. Helen McCrory only looks young compared with Prince Philip. James Dean had only 24 years inside him making Helen now look quite big. The other thing is what we make of big and small. Its assumed that a big life is good. But if we measure illness then we want small. Going into the outside world in order to get a measure on things is a messy thing. But inside things just are and that makes all things the same. Helen McCrory lived a life and from the inside it looked exactly the same as Prince Philip's. When we go inside there is Equanimity and there is no Suffering. This quality of the inside of being without measure is called Emptiness in Buddhism (originally Sunyata).

So how do we get inside? Its about not measuring things. The tool of measurement is the discerning mind and the key method to getting this distinction is to meditate. That means to get the discerning mind to focus on something. Commonly its the breath. We can discern and measure just in breath and out breath to start with. We go inside when that discernment falls away and there is just breathing.

=, equals, contradiction, dynamic, society

 = symbol has 3 meanings in computers. Often languages express these with 3 syntax: =,==,:=

(a) 1+2=3 is the Mathematical "scales". This originated from market place scales and it says the left and right balance. Algebra works on the basis that if you do the same thing to both sides of a scale you know the scale will still balance. If you have 1Kg of rice and 1Kg or gold and you do the same material action to the rice and the gold the mass will remain the same on each side. The scale will balance. This is the origin of all mathematics. Indeed Greeks could only think in terms of ratios like this, the idea of abstract numbers by themselves began later with the Arabs after the Roman Empire.

(b) 1+2 == 3 is the Logical equality. We accept the statement 1+2 == 3 because indeed 2 and 1 on the left of the scales is the same weight as 3 on the right. Unlike with mathematics symbol there is the super powerful negation logical operator so we can produce statements like 1+2 != 4 (that is 1+2 == not(4) ). Indeed "1+2 is not the same size as 4" is a true statement.

(c) X := 1+2 this simply gives a new name to 1+2. In this case X. Its says that X can now be replaced with 1+2. Using (a) above to equate 1+2 = 3, and expressing in the logical form of (b) we can say X==3

Now in Logic the obsession is with contradictions. Using the above 3 distinctions. If we define X := 4 then 1+2 == X is false. If however we now define '4' to mean 4 := 1+2 then 1+2 == 4 is true. But this now means 2 + 2 == 4 is false because we've redefined what '4' means.

So in fact a "contradiction" is impossible if we just accept the contradiction as a definition.

We are talking to a witness of a murder. The witness says they heard a scream and then a tall man ran out of the building and got into the red car. Then they say a short man got out of the car. Now this means either its the same man how was tall but is now short or there was another man in the car. We ask the witness was there another man in the car. They say no. So lets define the tall man as "John". So John is tall. John got into the car. John now gets out of the car. But John is short. John cannot be tall and short so we have a contradiction. However what if the witness' has bad eye sight. So we can quite happily say that John appeared tall and then John appeared short and no contradiction. But lets get crazy. There is no explanation. The story starts with Tall John and end with Short John. Don't we then just make 2 separate witness statements. They must be separate because they contradict, but within their own world's they are fine.

Now this is the actual problem with contradiction. Every time we contradict we fracture reality. I forget the Analytic Philosophers involved but every text defines (3 above) an "ontology." And if it starts redefining this like John is now defined as short we have a different ontology and a different narrative.

In the end it may turn out that the witness' first statement about a Tall man leaving the building fits in with other statements. Perhaps another witness says they say a Tall Man running around the corner. The story of a Tall man getting into a car, and a short man getting out may never be useful or explained and never fits in with anything else from the investigation. A different world that the investigation can just discard.

I once called this idea "harmonic structuralism." A narrative could be judged simply by its size and usefulness. There was no "truth" but rather usefulness. Most people can see and most people on a rotating globe can see the sun at some point in their lives. There must be unfortunate Eskimo babies who are born and die within a few months during the Arctic winter who never see the Sun. But for most people the story of the Sun fits in well with their lives without contradicting too much. So its a popular "truth".

Now "dynamic systems." A dynamic system is not like X:= 1+2 because it is recursive. A very famous example is X:= k X (1-X) studied by Prof Robert May in relation to population growth constrained by resources.

Unless X is the "fixed point" it is a contradiction. So if k := 2 then X:= 0.5 means that X == k X (1-X) is true. Indeed with X := 0.5 the equation gives the result 0.5.

However for X := 0.75 then the equation gives the result 3/8. Now if we ignore the contradiction like above and redefine X:=3/8 we can do the calculation again and keep going.

Perhaps we need a 4th definition of equal to mean "keep redefining"

X =: k X (1-X) means ignore any contradiction and keep redefining.

Now for X =: 2 X (1-X) where X := 0.75 after 5 interations X == 0.5 is true. The result is the fixed point. Indeed in stable dynamic systems the result of either the fixed point or infinity. Mandelbrot Set most famously plotted the stability of the dynamic system X =: X^2 + C in the complex domain to get this picture.

the speed of convergence should be a second result of such statements. So the full statement for dynamic systems should be:

X =: 2 X (1-X) == (0.5,5) where X := 0.75 and

X =: X^2 + C == (inf,inf) where X := 0, C := 3+4i

But what of:

X =: 3X (1-X) where X := 0.75

This ends up cycling between two values of X := {0.673..,0.659..}

And

X =: 3.6 X (1-X) where X := 0.75

This definition never settles down. It keeps changing forever. It is what is called Chaotic.

This constant motion or "struggling" of some dynamic systems to find a stable equilibrium is analogous to the struggling in other systems to deal with contradictions. X =: f(X) is not happy constantly changing in the hope of  finding a value which solves the equality and balances the scales. But sometimes like a Greek Tragedy the trajectory conspires against the system to ensure it never gets to that value (even if that value is finite).

Can we define Infinity as the solution to some dynamic systems.

X =: 1 + X only has a solution at X := infinity. That famous conundrum of the infinite hotel with infinite guests staying there. Nevertheless if everyone moved to the next room then Room 1 would become available. In fact isn't this analogous to what Cantor did with his Diagonalisation argument?

Dynamic systems however are constrained and you can't split the ontology in order to relieve the problem of contradiction. It is this problem that provides them their "energy." I wonder if we could define some quantity E for dynamic systems to measure the "movement" in values as they seek resolution.

On the subject of resolving contradictions Hegelian dialectics utilises exactly this "energy" to trigger Aufhebung and context changes that provide new perspectives that resolve apparent contradictions. It is this energy that motivates History itself. The resulting perspective is one where the contradictions between individual and group are satisfied, captured in the maxim "the I that is we, and the We that is I". Marx famously took up this idea to argue that the resolution to the contradictions in society was the state of Communism where individuals and society becomes stable. Its a sad reflection on Post Modernity that rather than solve these contradictions it seems the energy has just been bled out.

 

Speculations on Göbekli Tepe through to Buddhism

So while most of the country was complaining about HRH Prince Philip's RIP effect on the schedules I chanced upon an amazing CH5 offering "Ancient Mysteries: Eden Revealed." It steals a chapter out of a book I want to write, but nice to know someone thinking along the same lines... and added considerably more... so established wisdom is these Megalithic monuments (like above) were erected at the START of farming. They represent the first work done by human beings that had become settled and had the spare calories and local investment to do such things. But an 11k yo megalithic site at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is pre-farming!!!! Hunter-gatherers built this. So it was not built to set-in-stone productive farm land, but to mark something more ancient. So why does it coincide so close with farming (the original barley genes come from this area)? Researchers interviewed for this program suggest that it was a ritual site, and farming developed to meet the food requirements of the pilgrims/revellers. Quite reasonably given how grain was used ever since, it was added to water to sterilise it and make beer. So essentially you would have had something akin to a modern music festival with feasting. 11k yo the people were identical to us, so would they be any different. This is likely pre-class too (so no warriors/priests imposing fascist control either.. after all if you piss of hunter-gatherers they just leave and hunter-gather somewhere else - no concept of investment or capitalism). It is pretty apparent to me Garden of Eden is a record of the start of human work and what a difficult life it was when hunter-gathering stopped. You can find interviews with Amazonian and African hunter-gatherers post-contact trying out Capitalisms and just not-understanding why anyone would live like this: why do I need money or work when I can just go into the forest and find everything I need they universally complain. The switch to work and capitalism was hard, and led to laborious days harvesting and grinding of seeds, nutrient deficiency, arthritis, and crowded living conditions. But calories were higher and populations grew and slowly expanded to displace the hunter-gatherers (as happened with mass slaughter in the New World and is still happening in Amazon). The CH5 program added Capitalism as another reason we never returned to hunter-gathering. Once investments had been made in the lifestyle they acted to weigh us down.. which is the traditional understanding of Megaliths also... more a fascist control mechanism like Castles of a rising elite. And that is pretty much the modern Western world already in place. So I've speculated why in middle ironage C5th BC people around the world were saying the same thing Logos(pre-Socratics), Dao(Lao-Tze) or Dharma(Buddha) which are all anathema to Capitalism and being weighed down by worldly attachments*. Was this a final memory of the wisdom of hunter-gathering before mankind got sucked into the swamp of material attachment? There's a lot to consider in Megaliths anyway.

*subtle point: non-attachment is not rejecting worldly things (they are here whether we like it or not) but its remaining hunter-gatherer amongst them.

Just as a bee in a flower

harming neither hue nor scent

gathers nectar, flies away,

so in towns a Wise One fares.

[Dhammapada, vs 49]