Teams of Rooks

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7322113.stm

Seems when it comes to co-operating Rooks do as well as Chimps, but Chimps can plan which the researchers suggest is because Chimp also cheat each other, while Rook society is more stable. I guess if you don't know the value of co-operating then you can't be devious either. So what if a devious Rook evolved?

I don't have ego!

What a wonderful statement this is. First note it is self-referential.

Second note that the very belief that one does not have ego stops one seeing the truth that one does have ego.

This is the problem of ego, it blinds us to the truth... and most significantly the truth of itself.

If one does good then one does not do good...

This type of paradox which is present in Christianity and Buddhism I think I have a solution to.

Jesus says if you go to the altar to be seen by your fellow man praying then that is your reward. But, if you go in silence to pray before God then your reward is in heaven.

Likewise Buddha says in the Diamond sutra that if one thinks that one is helping others, then one is still attached to the form of self and others, and what one does is not truely good.

How then are we to do good, without knowing it?

If what we do, is deemed good in reflection then it was good. However if we need to think about what is good or not good before we act, then our actions are inauthentic! A performing monkey, a robot, can do what it is told, this is not the nature of goodness: and knowing intellectually and telling ourselves is not any better than being told.

True goodness is our true nature, we don't have to struggle or think about being good it comes naturally when we are pure... it IS the behaviour of a person free from delusions... they may comment to themselves that "I am being good", but not dwell upon this unremarkable observation because it is just what they naturally do.

If we find we are doing bad, then we must purify the causes of this ignorance. This is the struggle. For this an intellectual knowledge of good and evil is essential, but our true goodness comes spontaneously from within not from pre-programs or learned traits, and will shine all by itself when we are cleansed.

What is Law?

The words Logos in greek, Dharma in Sanskrit can be replaced with the english word Law. But Law is a confused term. Jesus is described by John as being the Logos - the word/law. The planets orbit according to laws of physics and the government votes on the countries laws.

In general a law would be that which determines a behaviour, or a way of being. Legal laws are in place however because people have in the past behaved otherwise, and authority is mobilised to "force" them into adherence. The planets on the other hand can never stray from the physical laws. The moral laws are different again. A wise person always behaves in accordance with the Law, only those who cannot see stray, and the cost of straying is suffering (this is the general religious code). People like Abraham who could "hear the will of God", are what we would call wise. The wise always obey the law.

So the physical law and the moral law are alike in that they refer to a Law intrinsic in nature that the wise or learned can discern. Physics is still advancing its tools and its description of the physical laws (I suspect an endless process because of the well documented issue in this blog of the Woozle problem of Self-Reference that eventually the descriptions will have to refer to oneself at some level). Both the physical laws and the moral laws can best be described as Reality. The scientist and those on a spiritual path are one and the same then, listening with ever growing quietness to the voice of reality. The good scientist and the good student of suffering are both humble servants to reality.

This leaves legality as the odd one out. Legality does not describe a reality, it is something like a social contract or a protocol that enables people to work together harmonously. It is like the rules of a game, that have no fixed nature, and are held temporarily for fun or for some purpose. However legal law can never replace Reality, and where they conflict people are the loser because suffering comes. So in fact better than Legality is just wisdom and adherence to Reality. If everyone did that we would have the perfect society and no need for Law.

Law can never be given that much significance because it is at best a bad copy of Reality, and at worst a recipe for suffering. So the adage, 'Rules are for the instruction of fools and the guidance of wise men' proves its worth.

Is not the lesson of King Knut this? He made the common mistake of believing that his authority was real, rather than simply an agreement with the people. So he sat before the sea and ordered the tide to recede. Of course the tide knows nothing of human "law" and obeys only reality and so King Knut got his feet wet.

Human authority is a fantasy as real as the significance attributed to that ball going on one side of a line rather than the other ... which they call a goal in football... but it never really happens ... balls often cross lines and mean nothing!

Fred Dibnah, techne & Auschwitz

Great TV program over the break on this great entertainer who has amazed me at making things i'd never looked at before like steam engines and pit lifts become fascinating bits of history.

In particular I wish to celebrate his appreciation for craftsmanship. A word that has lost its meaning in a capital/profit driven world. But, as I'm always reminded: what is the point of money if there is nothing to buy with it? What underpins an economy is not the capital, but the wealth of craft and skills in its culture and its people. Of course the rich don't hold this view, because they wish to be held as the pivots of society, but sadly everything around them is built not with their money but the hands of their fellow men.

I'm more familiar with logic than history, and through the sense of logic I would say that a great injustice has been done to the aristocracy. Whipped up by greed, the industrialists turned the crowds against the aristocracy, and supplanted their evolved and refined etiquette with their own cheap gutteral lifestyles and tastes. Now we have a new aristo-crass-y of people with money but no idea what to spend it upon. Combine this with a system that worships only profit and you have an unskilled, automated and pressured workforce manufacturing what amounts to only paper-wealth from the dark satanic mills. There is no place for skill or craft anymore.

Adding to the downfall of craft is the rise of bourgeois arts. Art became more and more isolated from its roots in craft to grace only the pompous stages and picture frames of Europe's monied classes. Where once art had been true to its greek origin as techne, true to the notion of anything that requires skill to make, now art was distilled from the mass produced profit infected produce of the factories. Money, money everywhere but nothing of value to buy.

Likewise a "qualification" these days, like the bank note, is paper-wealth it refers to nothing - a new type of fiat currency. Once 5 years experience would have been qualification, but now this immesurable skill is worthless against the artifice of hurdles and jumps that is a paper qualification. And, upon the subject of the immesurable nature of skill Plato for one has written copiously.

Not that I am in favour of vocational qualifications. Education is not about employment and profit! It is about the mind, it is about broadening horizons, giving the mental skills to master a world. Language, maths, history, religion amongst the most valuable things that exist. Without these there is no man. And, especially in a democratic society where each person is to take responsibility for the country's governance - are these not even the more important? A recent catalogue of naive and embarrassing government re-enactments (esp. the wars) easily foreseen by a public with even a slight knowledge of history and ethics (there is nothing new under the sun - know the past, know the future).

So our pockets are now lined in this age of machines and sweat shops, but alas we are the less wealthy because the quality of what we buy is poor. Once enjoying a single good purchase of something that would satisfy for many lifetimes, now we make do with weekly shopping trips to replace and feed the decaying insubstantial materials that fill our saturated houses.

But what has become worse in recent decades is that even that paper wealth has started to erode. The money that once we had in our pockets (a token recompence for the loss of worth in our labour and our shops) has been eroded by inflation, taxation, and gradual monopolisation of the markets. We are poorer today than ever before, the edifice of our once rich lives fossilised by nominal wealth, government regulation and edifice. The house of cards is held in place by glue now, much of the value leeched away as society turns upon its head and the fight for nominal value tokens tightens the noose ever further.

Economists like Thorstein Veblen argued long ago that the wealth of nations lay in the skill and labour of the people, not in the capital accumulation at the top of the pyramid. The powerful are becoming more and more naive of the most important feature of power, it only exist where people accept the authority. The moment that trust is gone, the power evaporates like darkness in the dawn. The darkness of global authority seems to think that it can exist all by itself, a hark back to that dismal mediaeval belief in Divine Right of Kings. Kings ancient and modern all know that power is a relationship with the people. If they chose to ignore you, then power is gone. Fascists have learnt that you don't need the support of all the people, just enough to provide an army to protect the status quo. Sad are those pigs caught between the authority they sold their souls to and the will of their fellow people! I think always of the pigs who worked in the concentration camps. Doing their days work, taking the money, lapping up the praise of their masters like dogs and driving their brothers and sisters to putrify and haunt their dreams. Pity on all those pigs who become mindless hounds trapped into the bidding of a master... and almost every news carries stories of the atrocities caused by the "police" and "armies" be they China, Iraq or America. People whose consciences are afraid to refuse orders are the bricks that built Auschwitz. This is the cost of the truth that society is built upon its people, and not upon its leaders. It is the people that must chose who to support and work for, and not allow any individual in their ranks to do this work for them.

All this because we accept an authority that has forgotten that it is the skill of each and every one of us upon which the society is built and which Fred Dibnah once rejoiced in so infectiously.

Funisia dorothea first to have sex 570 mya

http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5iM1K6j8MFFoFtSy8HErhsXs_VaKA

Tibet & the issue of Violence

It is remarkable to see the attitude of the Chinese people following the unrest in Tibet (for example in http://news.xinhuanet.com/) because it so closely mirrors recent Western prejudice regarding anyone who challenges the West. People in the West think they are educated and well informed, and yet the Chinese who we have argued are ill informed and naive are arguing exactly the same as we have done!

Something is wrong. Either the Chinese people are well informed and it is not the Communist government which is spreading anti-Tibetan propaganda but our own spreading pro-Tibetan; or the Communist government has been successful in spreading anti-Tibetan propaganda as have our own governments in spreading anti-Taliban and anti-Hussein propaganda. You can't have it both ways!! This is a bad catch-22 for the West because either way they lose tremendously.

The general rule, plain and simple, is that whoever disagrees with us is wrong.

For this reason I would say that the Chinese are wrong, because they have a vested interest in keeping Tibet, and so are bias against the Tibetan's and anyone more powerful than the Chinese government. But that makes the West wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan because we have a clear vested interest in these areas (and have had for over a hundred years).

So I suppose the only thing the Chinese people must learn, exactly as the West needs to learn it: is never listen to anyone who has anything to gain from their point of view... because it is inevitable that this point of view will be biased in their favour.

Of course in the rare occasion you find someone saying anything that is against their interests then you know for sure you have found truth.

China has learned well from America tho. Ever since its inception and before America has excelled in this type of argument. I stamp on your foot, scratch your car, spit in your food and mount a prolonged and irritating offensive against the intended foe... until the point where the foe retaliates. All you need do is make sure that everyone sees the retaliation and then they look like the bad guys and you can then attack with impunity.

The sad think is the naive public fall for it every time... but maybe because the public have their vested interests also.

This is the way of the world I have noticed for a long time now, and at the moment I have no solution to what can best be described as the devil amongst us.

The path of non-violence (ahimsa) takes a "long time" so the Dalai-Lama says in Kundun. I have thought about that a lot. A "long-time" I have assumed means as long as it takes, in other words until the conditions that have caused something dissipate of their own accord. Fundamentally those conditions can be traced back to actions of our selves, it is karma that we must bear.

Last week however he admitted that "his" had got no results. This is something I have noticed also. If we show a weakl face to the devil then he will exploit that weakness. However if we express a strong face to the devil, we can be guarenteed that he will only fight the harder. How do you passify an agressive and ignorant agent?

Firstly one must act not from self-interest (after all that is part of the ignorance of the agent themselves), we must instead act with the interests of the agent at heart. If we can only raise hatred against the agent then there can be no resolution. But, at the same time not against our own interests where possible. This is often impossible where interests fundamentally conflict as in Tibet.

I have found that compassionate strength is the right way. That is we are powerful enough to be fearful, but we do not aim to harm. On an individual level that is fairly easy, on a national level it seems impossible. How can the Tibetan people form a Gandhi like resolve that would be prepared to be entirely massacred without any act of violence, and then simply not-cooperate with the authorities.

The other way of course is simply to become Chinese and give them what they want. The Dalai-Lama becomes a spirirtual leader out-side Chine like the many that already exist (including the master I have followed), and the Tibetans who wish to remain Tibetan must leave Tibet. The rest just become Chinese under the Communists. Big deal! "Communism" is a temporary formation, "Chinese" is a temporary formation that I would argue has already disintegrated (ask any Chinese what it means to be Chinese and they have no clue - its meaningless already), so what arethe Tibetans fighting for? A temporary formation called Tibetan? or spiritual enlightenment. If they want the latter they can do that anywhere under any name.