Why the Heart Sutra?

Christians have, at times, touted the Lord's Prayer as the "perfect" prayer; it contains evidently all the stuff that monotheists want in a prayer.

The Heart Sutra, in my view, is substantially more profound than the Lord's Prayer, and, at the same time, is not a prayer.  It's more-or-less a sutra.

"Sutra" as Wikipedia helpfully explains, is a Sanskrit word that means string or thread; yes, it is equivalent to the English word "suture," which is what surgeons put in you when they stitch you up after surgery.  Yeah, humanity is that close that a sring or thread in Sanskrit is a string or thread for surgery in English.   Did I mention that the words "Zen" and "thank" also have a common origin?

The Lord's Prayer is a prayer directed to the Christian deity written in the second person. The Heart Sutra on the other hand, is said to be the words of the Buddha to his disciple Sariputra; thus, it is not meant to be addressed to anyone,  rather, it is the quote of the Buddha taken as a statement of fact.

The main point of the short sutra - with is the main point of the "wisdom" sutras in general - is that experiential phenomena - our apprehensions of the five "aggregates" of  form, feeling, volition, conciousness have no inherent essence; thus all is but a temporary co-existence of these aggregates.

This statement of fact by the Buddha includes that when the Bodhisattva of Compassion deeply saw the reality of the emptiness of the five aggregates that they obtained complete awakening. 

How can this be, or why is this so?

Christian Apologetics and the need to turn it down a notch

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

On Disruption, Setbacks, Etc. in Life...

Barbara writes about disruption and untoward things happening in life.  So does Dosho Port.   Barbara quotes Pema Chodron that things falling apart is a kind of "test."

If you don't already know I'm sort of dissatisfied with both this "test" idea and that there's a notion of "God" behind all of this anyway, so it's all OK.

No it's not.

That's almost condescending to those who are deeply in suffering. 

That is not to say that suffering isn't transcended, that there is not the manifestation of compassion that with our acute hearing of the cries of the world, that we can't see the inherent emptiness of all phenomena,

But,  saying that suffering isn't transcended through a practice of compassionate seeing into the true nature of things is not to say that this is yet another narrative to be taped onto the one we are mourning as our lives are disrupted.

There is no "god" that disturbs us to our destiny by hard events, to use the first line of Dosho Port's post.  Disturbance, pain, suffering, death, decay, trauma, withering, and calamity are our birthright.  "YOU WILL DIE!" was the teaching of Suzuki Shosan.  That teaching puts all other teachings in perspective. 

To see this in a slightly different aspect, I'd recommend studying this bit from Hakuin.  

A long time ago San-sheng had the head monk Hsiu go to the Zen Master Tsen of Ch'ang-sha and ask him: "What happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passes away?"
Ch'ang-sha replied: "When Shih-t'ou became a novice monk he was seen by the Sixth Patriarch."
Hsiu replied: "I didn't ask you about when Shih-t'ou became a novice monk; I asked you what happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passed away."
Ch'ang-sha replied: "If I were you I would let Nan-ch'uan worry about it himself."
Hsiu replied: "Even though you had a thousand-foot winter pine, there is no bamboo shoot to rise above its branches."
Ch'ang had nothing to say. Hsiu returned and told the story of his conversation to San-sheng. San-sheng unconsciously stuck out his tongue [in surprise] and said: "He has surpassed Lin-chi by seven paces."

The workings of the universe will be the workings of the universe regardless of your personal preferences.   To try to apply on some metaphysical ointment onto the reality of your suffering and disruption and this moment might be avoidance from the very medicine you might need to see to develop the heart of compassion with which to transcend the damned existence of that pain and disruption and loss. You hurt.  Live it. Feel it.  Maybe that's the medicine.

Maybe.

What could possibly go wrong from investigating the matter to exhaustion anyway?

This is also not to say that we should only engage in a self-pity that doesn't realize the fundamental nature of this suffering.  That fundamental nature of this suffering is that it is common to all sentient beings!   But it's difficult for me to see how that compassion - that empathy for all beings is developed and cultivated without first realizing what it is, and that I'd submit comes about from the very experience of suffering, setback and disruption - and death, ultimately, itself.

Springtime is almost upon us. 

Acting according to someone else's "revelation" is violent and blasphemous

I am a Buddhist because, among other things, appeals to supernatural have never seemed particularly effective to me, nor have I seen any convincing evidence that it was effective for anyone else.   I don't claim to be a metaphysical naturalist (too idealistic in my view, especially with regard to the limitations of language, thought and perception).   However, I'm sure I seem damned close to one if the person doing the seeming is a monotheistic "believer" of some sort.  I put quote marks around "believer" because I think there is a whole entire question of whether or not a anyone can "believe" anything in the sense of what a writer in the bible said; that is faith is the "evidence of things not seen."  Is this "belief" delusion by another name?

It is a question I will not get to here, because for now I have a larger question in mind.  Some  people I know are perfectly content to attempt to convert others to Christianity, and otherwise talk as though it is natural and appropriate to presume the existence of Christian belief in polite conversation.  People with whom I am a little less familiar think there's no problem at all in attempting to convert others to Christianity, particularly children and adolescents.

I say this is a kind of violence, in the sense of an unjust or unwarranted exercise of force or power.  This view, I'll admit, owes a bit to R. D. Laing's brilliant case for how much of what we call "love" in Western "civilization" is really a form of violence as found in The Politics of Experience.

It is not enough to destroy one's own and other people's experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.  

Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence. Persecution preferably should not need to be invalidated as the figment of a paranoid imagination; it should be experienced as kindness. Marx described mystification and showed its function in his day. Orwell's time is already with us. The colonists not only mystify the natives, in the wasy that Fanon so clearly shows, they have to mystify themselves. We in Europe and North America are the colonists, and in order to sustain our amazing images of ourselves as God's gift to the vast majority of the starving human species, we have to interiorize our violence upon ourselves and our children and to employ the rhetoric of morality to describe this process. 

In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s, if possible. 

From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age. 

Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny. 

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. 

It is an obscenity and blasphemous to say that one person has been deigned lucky enough or good enough or sacred enough or holy enough to have had the Great Holy Truth Revealed to Him and Those Who Say the Same Things He Does And No One Else Does.

It's not "love" or "compassion" talking when one wants to "share the good news," but rather it is pride and narcissism. 

And it should be pointed out to be such.  Look, if you want to talk about such things, and "believe" such things, fine, good for you.  But do not be so rude and arrogant as to assume that people who don't "believe" such things should be "brought around to your way of thinking."  You are just as existentially unlucky as anyone else.  You cannot escape.  You can only try to help others without the religiosity, and if you have another way and it's not empirically demonstrable, don't waste anyone's time most of all your own.

I was recently on a flight to Washington D.C., and I was sitting next a wonderful woman who worked for World Vision, a Christian charity. We discussed quite a few things related to charity (such as why the heck a lawyer was needed for that charity and why they needed government grants - I never actually got an answer to those questions).   But the issue of charity came up.  She said people helped others in World Vision "because they wanted to recognize that God loved them." (Actually I think at first she said, "Because we want to show God's love in the world" - that really is the kind of  issue I'm talking about.)

This struck me as odd, and out of reasons of sparing the woman's feelings, I did not  tell the woman that if you're not helping people because people are hurting or will hurt, and for those reasons alone - that is, to alleviate suffering now and in the future - then you're not helping them as effectively as you could. 

It is a kind of narcissistic blasphemy to think you're "showing God's love in the world" by thinking you're "doing unto others as you would have others do unto you."  You may be helping fellow human beings.   But if somebody's dying of cancer maybe the last thing they need is someone to preach to them with an affect of religiosity and instead they need someone to care for them without a first or second or third or n-th thought as to the "goodness" of this in the eyes of any real or imagined deities.   Maybe if they're religious,  and dying of cancer they may want some religious comfort.  Good for them, and for you if you both want to pray together.


In some cases, even a dying person can be attempting to manipulate others in religion talk, even to the point of attempting to get people to say things they don't believe in just to make the dying person "feel better."  Again, nobody's "revelation," even a dying person's, is of any greater value than anyone else's and regardless of who does it, it is violence to act otherwise, and should be stated as such.  And I don't really think many dying people are actually any more comforted (and perhaps less - there's that whole damnation thing)  by appeal to a monotheist deity than anyone else.  In the cases where I've seen this type of manipulation of the family by the dying, it certainly wasn't the case.

So hopefully that sets a few things straight here.

One more thing: you're still responsible.  You can't blame "faith" for hate and narcissistic arrogance disguised as care and love.  This is partly my Buddhist/existentialist answer to the question of where morality comes from. But it is, here, ultimately my entire point: we're responsible. I'm responsible for what I do, and for what I do in response to whatever behavior I encounter.  If you're going to act "in God's name" to me, you better damn well do it as though God doesn't exist  (in which case why are you saying you're doing it in God's name?)  You better damn well do it as though God doesn't exist, because whether or not a monotheistic deity exists, you're still responsible.

OK, that's it for today.

Quick quotes for the day...

I came across this; I think it's from Tropic of Capricorn, because I remember reading it before.  Henry Miller's writing might seem very politically incorrect today, but these words are just so what's good about being human:

 Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.

Then I came across this; a quote from Jack London, and it's really quite an expression of non-separation, and, uh, why I'm politically left of center.:

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. 

That's it for today.

"Class Warfare" and the Rectification of Names

To an electrical engineer, a rectifier is a device that permits current to flow in only one direction; a.k.a., a big diode.  It's used to convert AC to DC in what (even more inexplicably) is called an "inverter."  The dictionary defines "rectify" as to put or set right.  It was because of my familiarity with the electrical definition and my recent visit to Qufu, the hometown of Confucius, that I was drawn to the Wikipedia entry on "The Rectification of Names."

Wikipedia quotes a translation of the Analects:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

Now as Buddhists we might be able to  take issue with the details of the philosophy behind the rectification of names,  but in both traditions right speech is important.

So it is with some interest - and the fact that I like reading about history - that I have seen that any proposal for getting the wealthier to actually contribute a fair share to the cultivation of American society is described as "class war" or "class warfare."

Look, if the revolutions in Russia or China are the basis for rhetoric, we should at least know what the rhetoric actually means.  In this case, "class war" waged from the left is where the workers seize the means of production, and tell the indolent wealthy they have a choice of working for a wage more representative of what the rest of society is making or consider being treated as enemies of the people.

Now I'm not suggesting such things, really, though where I live over a quarter of the children in my county are deemed food insecure. But I would encourage the right wing to be more careful in their speech; some of these hungry people might actually think - and be encouraged to engage in - the kind of class warfare that hurts those who are waging such quiet violence upon the poor.  And make no mistake, under such class war jobs would be created.  Somebody would have to oversee Rush Limbaugh & David Koch's work in the rice fields.  But it'd be a hell of a lot easier and a hell of a lot more harmonious to get them simply to pay their fair share to contribute to society.  As Thers over at Eschaton quotes Elizabeth Warren, whose words need no rectification:

I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No!
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear.
You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.
You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.
You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

 Seems pretty sensible to me.

Right Speech: A Case Study Thanks to Bob Dylan, Time Magazine and D. A. Pennebaker

The video above is a clip from "Don't Look Back," D. A. Pennebaker's documentary on Bob Dylan. I found this clip when I was looking for a clip of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," but found this instead. The "Subterranean Homesick Blues" bit is one of the most iconic scenes ever filmed in a documentary; it's probably the only scene from a documentary ever to be parodied by Weird Al Yankovic (replacing Dylan's lyrics with nonsense palindromes).

But the above scene is far more compelling, and says volumes about human behavior, the American media, and the limits of human communication when deep mistrust is present.  Not to mention it well encapsulates the so-called "generaton gap" that was prevalent at the time.

Notice that neither the reporter from Time, nor Dylan actually is talking to each other.  Instead, they're talking at each other - they are talking to what each thinks the other is, based on their preconceived notions.  They're speaking without consideration that the other is another human being, in a similar but different situation.  Now it may be true that each person in this conversation really has no interest in speaking with the other, or with coming to an understanding with the other person, and the fact is, they don't.  Both of them do not - despite, if you watch closely, numerous opportunities to be able to sympathize and affirm where the other person is in life.  Maybe that was part of the times.  But it clearly is an object lesson for us.

What could each have said to have spoken beyond the position they were in, to actually meet  another person? 

Sanity, 見性, responsibility

On travel I usually bring as many back issues of Harper's that I haven't yet read.  And so I was fascinated to read in the December issue an article on the possible prevention of psychosis (subscription required).  This article bears upon not only whatever responsibility we may have for the recent violence in Tuscon Arizona, and yet another reason why "he was insane, and there was nothing we could have done" was an inadequate response, but also the nature of mind and consciousness  and sanity, and its relation to kensho (見性 ), satori (悟り ) and other meditative states.

If you can get a copy of this article, I strongly suggest you read the whole thing, because I'm touching on only a tiny part of this article:

It is impossible to predict the precise moment when a person has embarked on a path toward madness, since there is no quantifiable point at which healthy thoughts become insane. It is only in retrospect that the prelude to psychosis can be diagnosed with certainty. Yet in the past decade, doctors have begun to trace the illness back to its earliest signs. [T]he First Episode Psychosis Clinic at the University of Illinois Medical Center ... is one of about sixty clinics in the United States that work to help people experiencing early psychotic symptoms maintain a grasp on reality. About a third of these programs focus exclusively on patients who appear to be in what is known as the prodrome, the aura that precedes a psychotic break by up to two or three years. During this phase, people often have mild hallucinations—they might spot a nonexistent cat out of the corner of their eye or hear their name in the sound of the wind—yet they doubt that these sensations are real. They still have “insight”—a pivotal word in psychiatric literature, indicating that a patient can recognize an altered worldview as a sign of illness, not a revelation. 

By working with people when they are still skeptical of their own delusions, doctors hope to stop the disease before it has really begun. Three years ago, the results of a study of nearly 300 patients who sought treatment because of “recurring unusual thoughts,” “unusual sensory experiences,” or “increased suspiciousness” were published by the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study, a collaboration of eight prodromal outpatient clinics. The researchers found that 35 percent of patients had a psychotic break within two and a half years of enrolling at a clinic...

Although the DSM [(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders )] is written by the country’s leading psychiatrists, the neurological mechanisms behind mental disorders are too poorly understood to have much bearing on the way the manual separates health from pathology. Instead, the fifty-eight-year-old book guides psychiatrists toward diagnoses with checklists of behavioral signs that require a “minimal amount of inference on the part of the observer” (according to the 1987 edition). The outer limits of normality are decided by committee, with definitions of illness deferring to consensus opinion. A “delusion,” one of the five key symptoms listed for schizophrenia, is a “false belief . . . firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes.” A “bizarre delusion,” a more severe symptom, has gone through numerous revisions. In one edition of the manual, it had to have “patently absurd” content with “no possible basis in fact”; in the next, it involved “a phenomenon that the person’s culture would regard as totally implausible.” After the revision, 10 percent of patients who were previously deemed schizophrenic were given a new diagnosis, the majority of them because their delusions were no longer bizarre.

The DSM is designed to avoid the slippery spaces between disorders, the complaints not easily named or seen. Perhaps more than any other disorder, the psychosis risk syndrome puts pressure on the logic of the entire enterprise, as it forces doctors to break down the process of losing one’s mind. They have to identify delusions before the patient really believes in them. When does a strong idea take on a pathological flavor? How does a metaphysical crisis morph into a medical one? At what point does our interpretation of the world become so fixed that it no longer matters “what almost everyone else believes”? Even William James admitted that he struggled to distinguish a schizophrenic break from a mystical experience.

 There are, as I've said, many "take-aways" in this artcle, among them:

• There is, evidently, some kind of a continuum between total full-fledged psychotic break from reality and "normal" behavior and...
• Those that experience it often, if not inevitably are aware that their beliefs aren't necessarily normal
• And they are often suffering from the delusions they are having
• And we have a responsibility, I think, to try to understand this process, 
• But since we stigmatize the ill and the mentally ill, that's problematic.

More to the point of what I want to say, is I was somewhat struck by what the sufferers of prodrome (pre-psychotic break syndrome) were expressing and my own Zen practice as well as tiny tiny bit I know about neurology; you can't help but be.

Our "self" is something our brain creates for us, and there isn't "one" place in the brain this "self" can be said to reside.  And yet it is just this "self" that apparently suffers in a psychotic break.  The questions that one clinic asks possible prodrome patients include:

Do you daydream a lot or find yourself preoccupied with stories, fantasies, or ideas?
Do you think others ever say that your interests are unusual or that you are eccentric?
Do familiar people or surroundings ever seem strange? Confusing? Unreal? Not a part of the living world? Alien? Inhuman?
Have you ever felt that you might not actually exist? Do you ever think that the world might not exist?

 There are, it seems to me, a number of koans embedded in each of those questions.  Do you daydream a lot? What is a lot? What is a daydream? What is the living world? What is alien? What is inhuman? What does it mean to exist?  How do we know the world exists?

The other question, "Do you think others ever say that your interests are unusual or that you are eccentric?" is even more interesting: I suppose (I hope) the answer to this question doesn't allow the imaginative to be swept into a psychotic diagnosis.

The fact that in  kensho (見性 ), "seeing into one's nature,"  one sees that one's nature is sunyata, is clearly not to say that one's nature is one rock solid unchanging essence. (Or not.)  Is this the same as a psychotic break? Different? 

I think the difference between a Zen practice, including 見性 and a psychotic break is several:

• We generally aren't suffering because we are questioning everything.
• We aren't usually existentially disturbed at the consideration, and acting within, the premise that the self is a construct of the mind; rather, we are for whatever reason, reassured by it, because we understand this is the nature of all beings.
• We try  not to be attached to beliefs and delusions, including the belief in non-attachment.

Also, there is a strong link between the incidences of psychosis and deprivation - whether it's a deprivation caused by being a minority, or by being economically disadvantaged, the incidence of psychosis seems to increase.

We have a responsibility to find out these issues to their core, and to try to help those who need it.  I would also venture - again as a rank nonspecialist who is clearly writing from the most his most ignorant parts - I would venture that the use of mindfulness based methods might be applied to these prodrome people with interesting results.  It's a study that begs to be done, if it's not already being done, simply because the links between the mystical states and the psychotic break are striking.

色不異空：How to speak with extremists. And you must.

Shinzen Young, who I normally don't follow, has some profound things to say here (HT: C4Chaos).  And I think they kind of relate to the whole issue of right speech and the recent violence in Tuscon.

Of course everything's interrelated, and - to reiterate - to pretend that they are all isolated is to oppose reality.

So when Barbara says, "So, from a Buddhist perspective, we are all responsible. There is no one on the planet who is not responsible"  that does indeed mean all - it doesn't mean we're all guilty of murder, but we might be guilty of being overly dogmatic in our speech to the point where the speech becomes incendiary.

The process that Shinzen describes in the video link above I think applies to the issue of right speech and dealing with incendiary speech: if our speech is at first divisive exclusionary we will create more division and exclusion; if we accept an other person's divisive and exclusionary speech as though the division exists, then we further that division.

These divisions transcend left/right politics; "a pox on both your houses" is still missing the mark by a light year.

There's a way to speak past the division.

This is what it means to "practice Zen off the cushion." It means to speak with a fundamentalist extremist from a place where the ideological gulf may be transcended.  And no, this is not airy-fairy crap.  This is how we're going to survive as a species until the sun starts to give out, if we have any chance at all.

Let's play...

I respectfully say to those who wish to be enlightened: Do not waste your time being stuck in the past

Yesterday I read a post by P.Z. Myers, who was reposting a video with a message inspired by the suicide of a gay teenager who had been bullied.

Dan Savage has started a new project, prompted by the suicide of a bullied gay teenager, Billy Lucas, in Indiana. So they're trying to get the word out: It gets better. Don't despair. And they're collecting other people's stories, too.

Danny Fisher posted in passing here, too, but it was Myers' heartfelt commentary that struck me:

This particular project is specifically about giving gay kids the strength to carry on, but it's not just gays who are made miserable by schools and religion and other agents of the enforcement of artificial norms. I suspect that the readership of Pharyngula, all you geeks and nerds and oddballs, is enriched for people who were outliers in their youth…and still are, but most of us have reconciled ourselves to our status. It gets better for all of us.

Another good essay to read is The disease called "Perfection". We all face ridiculous expectations from our culture, and we all face these pressures to conform with the boring mundanes with their distressingly unrealistic and uninteresting ideals. I didn't have the stigma of being gay, but I was the homely, unathletic, four-eyed weirdo no girl would look at twice…and I can say that it got better for me, and it can also get better for everyone.

 I too recommend that essay on the disease of "Perfection." I can tell you that this "disease" infected my family, and to a certain extent it still pervades thoughts, expectations, and reactions in a manner that is hard to be aware of one's reactions; one has to train one's self for that, or at least I do.  

It does indeed get better. I too, was unathletic, short, and no girl would look at me twice.  It got better for me.  Every now and then I have the strong assurance that this is exactly the way it is, and it is simply astounding.  Holy crap! This is my life!

But I think not everyone realizes it and not everyone commits suicide, at least not physiologically, or not all at once.  In two weeks from today it will have been one year ago that my mother passed away; she would have benefited well from the message that "imperfection" pervades the universe.   Yet, in some ways she also exploited this "imperfection;" I think in some ways it kept her alive longer than she might have otherwise.  But then again, had she been free of the shame of "imperfection" she would likely have lived a longer, happier life.

I hope all find release from  internal and external bullies.

Buddhism, Mystery and Evidence

There's an article by one Tim Crane on the "Opinionator" blog section of the NY Times on "Mystery and Evidence," in which Mr. Crane (an atheist) tries to "make sense" of a religious position.  I have a couple of comments about a couple of sections about it...

To begin with, scientific explanation is a very specific and technical kind of knowledge. It requires patience, pedantry, a narrowing of focus and (in the case of the most profound scientific theories) considerable mathematical knowledge and ability. No-one can understand quantum theory — by any account, the most successful physical theory there has ever been — unless they grasp the underlying mathematics. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves.

Religious belief is a very different kind of thing. It is not restricted only to those with a certain education or knowledge, it does not require years of training, it is not specialized and it is not technical. (I’m talking here about the content of what people who regularly attend church, mosque or synagogue take themselves to be thinking; I’m not talking about how theologians interpret this content.)

What is more, while religious belief is widespread, scientific knowledge is not. I would guess that very few people in the world are actually interested in the details of contemporary scientific theories. Why? One obvious reason is that many lack access to this knowledge. Another reason is that even when they have access, these theories require sophisticated knowledge and abilities, which not everyone is capable of getting.

Yet another reason — and the one I am interested in here — is that most people aren’t deeply interested in science, even when they have the opportunity and the basic intellectual capacity to learn about it. Of course, educated people who know about science know roughly what Einstein, Newton and Darwin said. Many educated people accept the modern scientific view of the world and understand its main outlines. But this is not the same as being interested in the details of science, or being immersed in scientific thinking.

 I do not believe this is necessarily the case; many behaviors are learned, and one thing that Mr. Crane seems to discount is that science and math takes time and effort.   This has been true even for geniuses such as Edison and Einstein.   It is true that the overwhelming majority of people do not have the time, or opportunity or energy to pursue scientific endeavors, but that doesn't mean that the scientifically trained are a magical elite. 

We have been known to have all the foibles and ignorance of anyone else.

Some philosophers have said that religion is so unlike science that it has its own “grammar” or “logic” and should not be held accountable to the same standards as scientific or ordinary empirical belief. When Christians express their belief that “Christ has risen,” for example, they should not be taken as making a factual claim, but as expressing their commitment to what Wittgenstein called a certain “form of life,” a way of seeing significance in the world, a moral and practical outlook which is worlds away from scientific explanation.
This view has some merits, as we shall see, but it grossly misrepresents some central phenomena of religion. It is absolutely essential to religions that they make certain factual or historical claims. When Saint Paul says “if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain” he is saying that the point of his faith depends on a certain historical occurrence.

As any Zen Buddhist or Stephen Batchelor can tell you, the facticity of the Buddha's enlightenment is not really an issue for Buddhists, nor is the various hells mentioned in the sutras, nor is the plethora of Boddhisattvas and their dialogs in the sutras, nor are any of the dozens of other stories of Buddhas and Buddhists.  True, the Tibetans have a separate thing or three going on this end, and there are many people who are Buddhists among the masses that look upon the personalities of Boddhisattvas, Buddhas, et al. as separate beings who can do things for one.

But those aside, Buddhism doesn't really need all that. It doesn't really need a facticity of the panentheist proto-theology mentioned by Shaku Soen, which, even by itself stands apart from theistic interpretations of deities and what-not.

The "truth" of Buddhism lies in our ability to successfully practice being kind and compassionate and wise to other beings when we feel a strong desire to do rage anger instead.

This is not going to end well? Or, Chaos or Community

Barbara at her about.com Buddhism blog, commented on a  post Nella Lou at Smiling Buddha Cabaret published on the recent events by the atavist right.


Barbara says:

NellaLou's post is about identity politics in contemporary America, and I don't want to wade too deeply into politics on this blog. But it seems to me that American politics has gone beyond mere "identity" and slid all the way into "tribal." And loyalty to one's tribal talking points displaces all facts and reason. This is not going to end well.

NellaLou's post is quite a bit longer, and I for one thought the situation with Glenn Beck et al. was so obviously what it was that I did not give the matter much thought on my blog.   

However,  as I've noted, this thing of dividing into "us and them"  goes well beyond the right-wing fringe; if I mention that a significant part of the Tibetan Independence movement, as well as Zionism, as well as the Palestinian cause has strains of racism in it, I will get some verbal lashings, even if the proof is irrefutable 9 ways 'til Sunday.  And that's due to an issue I have talked about already.  But I want to go a tiny bit further in this post.

For those  who have not read Richard Dawkins' latest two books, I would wholeheartedly  recommend them.  Of relevance to this post is a passage in The God Delusion where Dawkins alludes to the fact that it is to a group of organisms's genes benefit to collaborate.   This is also mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on Game Theory:

It is because of this that there is coopeation between groups of animals, including those who are non-human (and, as Dawkins mentions, lack any kind of overt religious practices or beliefs that we can discern.)  From Wikipedia:

Additionally, biologists have used evolutionary game theory and the ESS to explain the emergence of animal communication (Harper & Maynard Smith 2003). The analysis of signaling games and other communication games has provided some insight into the evolution of communication among animals. For example, the mobbing behavior of many species, in which a large number of prey animals attack a larger predator, seems to be an example of spontaneous emergent organization. Ants have also been shown to exhibit feed-forward behavior akin to fashion, see Butterfly Economics.

Biologists have used the game of chicken to analyze fighting behavior and territoriality.^{[citation needed]}

Maynard Smith, in the preface to Evolution and the Theory of Games, writes, "[p]aradoxically, it has turned out that game theory is more readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behaviour for which it was originally designed". Evolutionary game theory has been used to explain many seemingly incongruous phenomena in nature.^[5]

One such phenomenon is known as biological altruism. This is a situation in which an organism appears to act in a way that benefits other organisms and is detrimental to itself. This is distinct from traditional notions of altruism because such actions are not conscious, but appear to be evolutionary adaptations to increase overall fitness. Examples can be found in species ranging from vampire bats that regurgitate blood they have obtained from a night's hunting and give it to group members who have failed to feed, to worker bees that care for the queen bee for their entire lives and never mate, to Vervet monkeys that warn group members of a predator's approach, even when it endangers that individual's chance of survival.^[6] All of these actions increase the overall fitness of a group, but occur at a cost to the individual.

Evolutionary game theory explains this altruism with the idea of kin selection. Altruists discriminate between the individuals they help and favor relatives. Hamilton's rule explains the evolutionary reasoning behind this selection with the equation c^[6] The coefficient values depend heavily on the scope of the playing field; for example if the choice of whom to favor includes all genetic living things, not just all relatives, we assume the discrepancy between all humans only accounts for approximately 1% of the diversity in the playing field, a co-efficient that was ½ in the smaller field becomes 0.995. Similarly if it is considered that information other than that of a genetic nature (e.g. epigenetics, religion, science, etc.) persisted through time the playing field becomes larger still, and the discrepancies smaller.

 From a cold Game Theoretic perspective both conflict and altruism are stable, providing  a critical mass buys into either alternative, according to Dawkins, and it seems intuitively correct to posit that.

 The fact is, it is to some few folks advantage to have people fight amongst themselves if they can maintain control of the game (which involves fostering the odd kind of belief amongst the masses of people that they are in the "few.")

But we are all nothing special.  We can have community prevail over chaos if we accept each other unreservedly, no matter what their beliefs or level of hostility (though that does not mean being completely helpless or that one should not defend one's self and others when needed).

Enlightenment? And, I can have sympathy for the Dalai Lama

In looking at the variety of responses to Barbara O'Brien's question, "What would you ask the Dalai Lama?" I'm struck by the basic, uh, lack of familiarity with Buddhism of some of the responses.

That may or may not be due to the fact that like Deepak Chopra, the Dalai Lama does make for image media...

Anyway...some of the more interesting responses to Barbara's question asking for questions to ask the Dalai Lama...

Why some people reincarnate as homosexuals or transexuals?

Is he a Buddha?

What in his words is enlightenment ?

What the practices we should do if we want to meet and learn more from Dalai Lama in every single life?

It's clear to me that there's people out there that pretty darn near deify this man. There's others that think he's a good man (nothing wrong with that, my remarks about the two-hand clap of himself and the Chinese notwithstanding), but would benefit from more understanding of Buddhism.

That's OK.

I hope though that all those folks who may be hoping, consciously or not, to get a grasp of enlightenment from the Dalai Lama, or who might be a Buddha, or whether or not they're reincarnated, can at least live where they are, finding themselves where they are.  That's the main thing, to paraphrase Dogen, that Soto  and non-Rinzai guy.

I also feel for the Dalai Lama. I think he has to deal with many people confused about the whole situation about their existence here, and they're asking him to give them "the" answer. So he's in kind of a predicament; and it's not an easy one for him. He's got the political situation to deal with, a subset of the Tibetan population (maybe a large one) that is very opposed to the current political system in Tibet, and he's got the Tibetan Buddhist mandate as Avolokitesvara to maintain. They expect him to be the living, talking, joking, avuncular, happy Buddha and a "good" political leader. It's difficult. Especially the latter part, although he needs to improve on this very much, to say the least. But the followers do remind me of this (obligatory Monty Python reference):

Scary...

Every now and then it's good to look around and see the social aspects of how we live. And in regard to that, the recession hasn't been good to us or the younger generation...

Over the past two generations, particularly among many college grads, the 20s have become a sort of netherworld between adolescence and adulthood. Job-switching is common, and with it, periods of voluntary, transitional unemployment. And as marriage and parenthood have receded farther into the future, the first years after college have become, arguably, more carefree. In this recession, the term funemployment has gained some currency among single 20-somethings, prompting a small raft of youth-culture stories in the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Weekly, on Gawker, and in other venues.

Most of the people interviewed in these stories seem merely to be trying to stay positive and make the best of a bad situation. They note that it’s a good time to reevaluate career choices; that since joblessness is now so common among their peers, it has lost much of its stigma; and that since they don’t have mortgages or kids, they have flexibility, and in this respect, they are lucky. All of this sounds sensible enough—it is intuitive to think that youth will be spared the worst of the recession’s scars.

But in fact a whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale, has studied the impact of recessions on the lifetime earnings of young workers. In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.

But what’s truly remarkable is the persistence of the earnings gap. Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.

When Kahn looked more closely at the unlucky graduates at mid-career, she found some surprising characteristics. They were significantly less likely to work in professional occupations or other prestigious spheres. And they clung more tightly to their jobs: average job tenure was unusually long. People who entered the workforce during the recession “didn’t switch jobs as much, and particularly for young workers, that’s how you increase wages,” Kahn told me. This behavior may have resulted from a lingering risk aversion, born of a tough start. But a lack of opportunities may have played a larger role, she said: when you’re forced to start work in a particularly low-level job or unsexy career, it’s easy for other employers to dismiss you as having low potential. Moving up, or moving on to something different and better, becomes more difficult...

Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different—and damaged—people. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. “Some people say, ‘Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,’” Mossakowski told me. “But that isn’t true.”

Examining national longitudinal data, Mossakowski has found that people who were unemployed for long periods in their teens or early 20s are far more likely to develop a habit of heavy drinking (five or more drinks in one sitting) by the time they approach middle age. They are also more likely to develop depressive symptoms. Prior drinking behavior and psychological history do not explain these problems—they result from unemployment itself. And the problems are not limited to those who never find steady work; they show up quite strongly as well in people who are later working regularly.

"IGMFU" is a horrendous social policy, and clearly creates more suffering than a bit of all around social compassion.

And, reading further into the article, the culture of "everybody gets a prize" seems to have made many in American culture particularly resistant to being able to go it on their own.

That's frustrating to those who have to manage them, especially those of us who were "thrown into the pool to see if we could swim."

There's cruelty out of deep kindness and there's cruelty out of ignorant greed and hatred.

Haiti's Earthquake: one of "All Things Dull and Ugly"

According to Richard Dawkins and Wikipedia, "All Things Bright and Beautiful" was the inspiration for "All Things Dull and Ugly":




The words:

All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot

Each little snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings

All things sick and cancerous
All evil great and small
All things foul and dangerous
The Lord God made them all

Each nasty little hornet
Each beastly little squid
Who made the spikey urchin
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous
All pox both great and small
Putrid, foul and gangrenous
The Lord God made them all

AMEN.

And so it is with the Haiti earthquake...or, uh, you know what I mean: the problem of why there are nasty things in the world isn't a problem of "theodicy" (why a "deity" "allows" "evil" in the world) or a simplistic "karmic" "their previous lives made them ask for it" or some such nonsense.

We know full well why the Haiti earthquake happened and why there was tremendous loss of life, and for all of that we should act out of great compassion. True, purposeful action and dumb luck saved and killed many, but the only thing karma's got to do with this is the inevitability of birth and death. So we don't need a "conversation about religion" in this matter, we need to make sure Haiti is healed.


And Ms. Jennifer Butler: I realize it is a strong stance you take to side with a good deity rather than an evil deity, and I applaud you for that.

But consider the possibility that your non-coreligionists might also "intervene" in the same way as the "faithful," and you'll be well on your way to being a more moral person.

Darren Littlejohn Replies, and my Rejoinder

Darren Littlejohn replied to my earlier post here with a comment here:

The act of judging judgment is in itself judgment - even if hiding behind a label of compassion. Some may disagree with the choice of words or interpretation of the Dharma. That's OK. No one has to believe a word of it. We all have issues. It's Samsara. How's that for an issue?

"Buyer Beware" would fit if someone were selling the ideas. I share freely what's worked for me. Sure you can argue that we're selling books. But they don't print themselves. Perhaps you'll read the book before being so non-judging and compassionate. But if you hate the 12 Steps please don't use them. They too are free and for people who want them, not people who need them. The "guided meditation" podcasts are also free.. Please don't listen if you don't like them. Thousands of people do like them and continue to ask for more.

Just in case my reply doesn't get past the Huffington Post moderator (been known to happen when folks have been highly critical of Deepak Chopra and other folks; it's nothing on Mr. Littlejohn) here's my reply (with a couple of typos fixed):

Darren:

To each their own, of course. I'm just reporting what I see. Of course, your book aside, let's be honest here: you anticipate, based on your belief in 12 Step programs, that indeed there is a quid pro quo for "sharing freely" what's "worked for you" because the 12 Steps imply precisely that - "Spiritual Awakening."

BTW, I don't "hate" the 12 Steps; that's kind of odd, if you think about it; kind of like a "War on Drugs." I also don't "hate" the use of mummies for medicinal purposes, supply side economics, or Calvinism.

As far as guided meditations are concerned, they likely have their place in therapeutic settings, but I stand by my words, and you shouldn't take offense. Ever hear of Roy Masters?

So, I really do mean it, please be at peace, but, as with any proselytizers, please don't be shocked if people actually consider what you say.

I think your practice of Buddhism is right for you, and might be right for other people, but if you take umbrage at people scrutinizing your words, how open minded is that?

I really do wish him peace and, uh, serenity.

Perhaps, though, he doesn't like the "Spiritual Hucksterism" label on that post and this one. However, I must confess, I do find 12 Step groups in that category, simply because they make the fundamental mistake of creationists and Scientologists: as part of their dogma, they make claims that are testable via the scientific method, and when such claims are tested, they are found to be false, and the adherents persist in upholding the false claims. [On Edit]: However, on further reflection it does seem that there are other aspects that fit the bill:

• They tend to encourage thinking resistant to questioning and criticism; I think the proof is given in this post.
• They tend to use fear ... as in "You'll die if you don't continue to be in a 12 Step progam." Needless to say, this particular claim is not borne out in the data.
• And, in particular, they don't seem to like caveat emptor - a healthy skepticism when it comes to their religious practices and beliefs.

Sorry 'bout that. But the world of phenomena is not going to not behave as the world of phenomena simply because you wish that your spiritual path were true.

But otherwise I think his response speaks for itself.

If one finds comfort and help in a 12 Step program, good for them, just as if one finds contact with god in a church or in a coven, good for them. But if we can't have a policy of "Let's talk about everything" (a calligraphy in the Zendo I attend) then something's not quite right.

Compassion

I think Darren Littlejohn has issues, and wouldn't rely on him for any kind of accurate representation of the Dharma, and think there are serious concerns with what he's saying and how he's saying it, (caveat emptor especially when it comes to "guided meditations") but I cannot but have empathy for him as well: clearly he's a guy who started from a point where he knew not for the life of him what he was doing, and tried to make sense of it all as best he could.

If AA is right and pain is the touchstone of all spiritual growth then the Buddha was right when he pointed out that all actions in samsara (endless cycle of of rebirth) lead to suffering.

I think it's the other way around. Some discredited stockbroker, as a result of contact with a group founded by a closeted evangelist, mixed in with some strong hallucinogens, comes upon the realization that there is suffering in life (but not that this is a core principle of the noble truth of emptiness).

We can meditate until our pursed lips are purple with exertion to transcend the pain of being or we can learn to be, being-as the ache inside our souls pulses on.

There are many ways in Buddhism of dealing with thoughts and sensations of pain and suffering, but (maybe it's Littlejohn's bad phrasing?) in at least some of these ways, being the pain is transcending the pain.

Another view might be that Awakened Ones have given us the teachings, methods and advice for how we can come to our own place of self-love and stop hurting ourselves and others. They're different beings than us but share the same Awake nature. Please don't confuse this with the infantile notion that we're all one being. (That thinking is a kind of sickness in my view.)

Well, I think Mr. Littlejohn might want to read more of the Buddhist canon before he starts trying to crow-bar 12 Step theology into Buddhism or vice versa. To call us separate beings is as "infantile" a notion as it is of calling us "one being."

The way I'm talking about enlightenment here is more analogous to all of the infinite molecules, elements and matter and consciousnesses that make up everything sharing the same basic space. This cup and that cup are two different cups in that yours was made then and of different colored material and mine another time and this color but the same in that they're not as separate or independently arising as they appear. Yet yours holds wine and mine sparkling cider. Please don't mix them up!

Please don't think they're not the same. Please don't think that enlightenment depends on wine and sparkling cider being the same or different, or neither. If it is time not to drink just don't drink.

Everything has its place and disharmony ensues when things are not in their place, to be sure.

We don't need religious fusion so much as we need people present and engaged at this very moment, without ego.

May peace and harmony prevail within Darren Littlejohn.