Think I'll do some sutras

One of the things that I've noticed about the blogosphere of American Buddhists is that they don't seem enormously well-versed in Buddhist literature; particularly the sutras.

There's a lot of folks out there who quote and analyze Dogen; you'd think Dogen invented Zen Buddhism. But of course he didn't. Not that there's anything wrong with Dogen per se (though I think others have opinions which I do not share). And most people (including me) get these things second or third hand. I don't know Pali for squat (other than the interesting word-root Indo-European things I get from the Rinzai chants). And I certainly don't know any Chinese to be useful in deciphering any texts written in that language (and that would, if memory serves me, include Dogen, who wrote in Chinese for the same reason that Aquinas wrote in Latin.)

So I wonder if anyone out there's ever wondered: just how much is the stuff being practiced out there comport with the sutras?

I myself am no expert in this field either, but I can tell you what I do know. I have some familiarity with the Lotus Sutra, (as well as the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, and the Meditation on the Boddhisattva of Universal Virtue - get this book).

I have read the Lankavatara Sutra, thanks to that on-line translation from D.T. Suzuki. And the Sutra of Forty-Two Sections.

I've also got familiarity with the The Perfection of Wisdom Sutra (from which the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom chant is taken), and the Diamond Cutter Sutra. And I've passing familiarity with some of the sutras at the Access to Insight website.

And there is the Mindfulness of Breath sutra in at least one of Thich Nhat Hanh's books.

Finally, there's the Dhammapada, which I've read quite a few times.

I think it would be useful, for me at any rate, in my capacity as a layman with no authority of course, start to examine some of these on-line, from a critical perspective, and by critical I mean examining how they relate to our lives as we live them, how they relate to the state of Buddhist practice amongst westerners, and how they relate to themselves as scripture, as religious literature, and how we relate to them as such literature. But yeah I also mean critical as in what are we, as westerners to make of text like this?

Thus have I heard. Once upon a time the Lord was staying at Râgagriha, on the Gridhrakuta mountain, with a numerous assemblage of monks, twelve hundred monks, all of them Arhats, stainless, free from depravity, self-controlled, thoroughly emancipated in thought and knowledge, of noble breed, (like unto) great elephants, having done their task, done their duty, acquitted their charge, reached the goal; in whom the ties which bound them to existence were wholly destroyed, whose minds were thoroughly emancipated by perfect knowledge, who had reached the utmost perfection in subduing all their thoughts; who were possessed of the transcendent faculties; eminent disciples, such as the venerable Agñâta-Kaundinya, the venerable Asvagit, the venerable Vâshpa, the venerable Mahânâman, the venerable Bhadrikal, the venerable Mahâ-Kâsyapa, the venerable Kâsyapa of Uruvilvâ, the venerable Kâsyapa of Nadi, the venerable Kâsyapa of Gayâ, the venerable Sâriputra, the venerable Mahâ-Maudgalyâyana, the venerable Mahâ-Kâtyâyana, the venerable Aniruddha, the venerable Revata, the venerable Kapphina, the venerable Gavâmpati, the venerable Pilindavatsa, the venerable Vakula, the venerable Bhâradvâga, the venerable Mahâ-Kaushthila, the venerable Nanda (alias Mahânanda), the venerable Upananda, the venerable Sundara-Nanda, the venerable Pûrna Maitrâyanîputra, the venerable Subhûti, the venerable Râhula; with them yet other great disciples, as the venerable Ananda, still under training, and two thousand other monks, some of whom still under training, the others masters; with six thousand nuns having at their head Mahâpragâpatî, and the nun Yasodharâ, the mother of Râhula, along with her train; (further) with eighty thousand Bodhisattvas, all unable to slide back, endowed with the spells of supreme, perfect enlightenment, firmly standing in wisdom; who moved onward the never deviating wheel of the law; who had propitiated many hundred thousands of Buddhas; who under many hundred thousands of Buddhas had planted the roots of goodness, had been intimate with many hundred thousands of Buddhas, were in body and mind fully penetrated with the feeling of charity; able in communicating the wisdom of the Tathâgatas; very wise, having reached the perfection of wisdom; renowned in many hundred thousands of worlds; having saved many hundred thousand myriads of kotis of beings; such as the Bodhisattva Mahâsattva Mañgusrî, as prince royal; ...

Evidently the authors of the Mahayana texts were not well schooled in how not to write a run-on sentence...

I've not seen it done elsewhere, and as a Zen practitioner (I think I'm stealing this line from The Zennist/Zenmar) how can you know what's outside the Scriptures if you don't know what's in 'em?

And this isn't to go all fundamentalist on anyone, of course; we take the Pali translation of atta dipa as you are the light.

But we shouldn't be allergic to the Buddhist canon either, and I think it might be of use to examine how modern Buddhist practice (yeah, including those Asian folks) comports with what was taken as Buddhist literature for decades.

I hope the tens of readers who visit this blog each day will stick around, because this could get interesting, especially if folks who know more than I show up & comment on it.

And if they don't, well, ...atta dipa... as they chant.

More householder practice

Busy week it's been:

• My wife's been doing "Here's Chinese Culture" presentations to folks willing to pay for it.



• My wife's got a delegation of folks from China coming for something or other.



• And I've got to do some stuff left over from a former life, which fortunately should be rewarding.

And I have a whole bunch of stuff I'm doing at work; for some reason all of the sudden various kinds of management ideas have come to me.

Like being able carrying almost full cups of coffee from point A to point B, one's practice can help with this.

I've got a better life than lots of people...

Judging from their on-line/blogger lives.

I've the best wife & son ever.

I could name names but I won't.

Their lives balance against my obligations.

I'm the better for it, and they might enjoy more exciting lives, but I've got something...

Brief Reply to John Horgan

Noticed at Andrew Sullivan's blog.

He said:

...what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation. Buddha’s first step toward enlightenment was his abandonment of his wife and child, and Buddhism (like Catholicism) still exalts male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual.

From this perspective, the very concept of enlightenment begins to look anti-spiritual: It suggests that life is a problem that can be solved, a cul-de-sac that can be, and should be, escaped.

I won't go into a whole "nonattachment ≠ detachment" thing; but I did want to go into the "It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual" bit.

It was a great luxury and sacrifice for people way back when, without running water and electricity to actually be able to afford a clerical class, who more often than not failed to live up to their end of the deal. But the idea that that somehow the establishment of a clerical class was inherently exploitative is actually anachronistic; it assumes that people who had no free time to speak of also had no need of going metaphysical, and one should properly call BS on that.

However the idea that householders couldn't go beyond dukkha was not a Buddhist tradition, and that tradition would not have survived for centuries if there was not some succor achieved by lay adherents of Buddhism. And from this adherent I can say, yes indeed practicing Buddhism helps.

There's lots of other critiques that can be made. But that point had to be made, I think.

Might have an interesting photo in the next few days...

Because of tinnitus, I had an MRI, and hopefully I get the promised CD of the photos.


MRI's seem crude to me - very noisy, and they don't have to be.

But then again their noises are reminiscent of techno.

In case you wanted to know.

Big Vow...

This article is a must read for anyone that wants to do anything radical in business...and the Buddhist angle is that if you get stuff like this right, uh, you can feed more people.

...Douglas Bowman, a top visual designer, left Google.

Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.

“Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions,” Mr. Bowman wrote.

Google is unapologetic about its approach.

“We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel,” Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of search products and user experience, said in a recent television interview...

The approach may be the ultimate experiment in crowd-sourcing — letting users collectively design products. But experts in design and innovation say the approach has limitations and downsides.

“Getting virtually real-time feedback from users is incredibly powerful,” said Debra Dunn, an associate professor at the Stanford Institute of Design. “But the feedback is not very rich in terms of the flavor, the texture and the nuance, which I think is a legitimate gripe among many designers.”

Adhering too rigidly to a design philosophy guided by “Web analytics,” Ms. Dunn said, “makes it very difficult to take bold leaps.”

And as much as it may sound jarring, the customer is not always right.

“Customers sometimes do not know what they want,” said John Seely Brown, the co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, a research and consulting organization based in Silicon Valley. “It can be dangerous to just listen to what users say they need.”

Fact is there's lots of data that ends up in the trash bin, that hungry people in certain places could use to feed themselves.

I'm not kidding.

How To Acquire a Gohonzon Outside of SGI or Nichiren Buddhism...

From this link.

I like the Snoopy dancing in front of it.

What if...

I generally admire militant atheists such as P.Z. Meyers and often find much that is absurd in the religion world thanks to him, such as today's post on one religious apologist Terry Eagleton (and Stanley Fish) which points to this ribbing by Mat Taibbi.

Taibbi's right about Eagleton: the word he was looking for is phlegmatic. (Just try watching Eagleton not get to the point in these lectures at Yale!)

But both Myers and Taibbi as well as Eagleton could learn something from Buddhists, I think.

First of all, too many words are used by these folk.

Secondly, my religious experience sure as hell ain't Eagleton's and it sure as hell ain't the caricature of Myers' monotheists (but then again we Buddhists always get off lightly by the rational New Atheists, with the exception of Hitchens, who, in some ways, is justified in his critiques of the Dalai Lama).

But thirdly...both sides in this religion debate are largely irrelevant to me.

They're irrelevant because there are vows taken.

What if you could save all sentient beings?

Why do you think you can't? The laws of physics? Does the finitude of your lifetime get in the way of this vow?

You can't leap off tall buildings without horrible consequences and sooner or later you'll be dead, but does that mean all sentient beings are just shit out of luck?

I believe not.

I can directly observe consequences of my efforts, albeit on a minute scale. Who knows where these efforts will lead?

What if you had a moment of clarity? What if those moments of clarity piled up in frequency to become a continuum of seeing without delusion, despite delusions being unending?

Why do you think you can't? Because that starts to sound like New Age nonsense?

I dunno about that one; seems to me that anyone who's spent enough time doing the right practices would get some insight into their true nature "even if their feet fail to touch the ground in the morning," to paraphrase Hakuin.

Ditto for learning the Dharma and attaining it.

Oftentimes vows are made as promises but these 4 Great Vows contain within them not only statements of the vastness of the vow, but also of the dedication to their attainment.

A protest sign by workers in Poland in the latter days of Communism read, "Demand the impossible."

There's a place for from the gut faith, especially as reinforced by practice.

Just don't friggin' check your brain at the door. Don't forget about from the gut doubt, and dedication through the tears.

The Noble Truth about Suffering

My mother, the last of her generation, who had been diagnosed with small cell lung cancer, is past the median life expectancy for this illness. At this point there is little likelihood she will read this, but if she does, let it be known that I love her and my care for her is omnipresent, and this is one way of practice for all beings.

I had been with her a month or so after she'd been diagnosed and started treatment. She looked frail then.

But now I am thousands of miles away.

Truly I have left home physically, but the heart wrenches nonetheless.

I call her every day, and see how she is, and it's about what you'd expect.

She certainly is suffering in her path to death. The thing about a sickness like small cell lung cancer is that death takes time. It makes a mockery of "the sufferings of Jesus Christ." He had so many advantages, not the least of which is that his death, if he was a he, etc. etc., didn't take long. And it was no more noble or holy than the death in which I can only observe from thousands of miles away, unable to touch anything related to it.

And all I can do help us to realize none of this at that point beyond birth and death.

I had expected this sort of thing when I moved to the Pacific Northwest, and now it is happening.

The Buddha was asked to bring a girl back to life; he replied to his supplicant that the parent should bring something from 5 houses that had never known death.

If I were to say something as glib though, it would not reflect the very humanity of my own suffering in response to the situation. It goes with the territory to desire whole lots of things in this situation: that she goes peacefully, without much pain or that she recover but not stay in the in-between-but-declining state.

But those things are relatively unlikely for weeks-to-months. So I have to go beyond that attachment right freakin' now.

My sitting's for all beings whether they know it or like it or not.

Or they could become Buddhists...

Charles M. Blow at the NY Times op-ed opines:

[A] study entitled “Faith in Flux” issued this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life questioned nearly 3,000 people and found that most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one. Indoctrination be damned. By contrast, only 4 percent of those raised Catholic and 7 percent of those raised Protestant later became unaffiliated...

...Most said that they first joined a religion because their spiritual needs were not being met. And the most-cited reason for settling on their current religion was that they simply enjoyed the services and style of worship.

For these newly converted, the nonreligious shtick didn’t stick. There was still a void, and communities of the faithful helped fill it.

While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is irrefutable. Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions. Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind. Yes, yes, yes. But when is the choir going to sing? And when is the picnic? And is my child going to get a part in the holiday play?

As the nonreligious movement picks up steam, it needs do a better job of appealing to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism — that wondrous, precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign. It’s the part that fears loneliness, craves companionship and needs affirmation and fellowship.

I agree much with that last sentence, although (of course) as a Buddhist I suspect he takes "human exceptionalism" way too far. Humans are exceptional, no doubt about it, but we could learn a few tricks from bonobos should understand the exceptionalism of this whole ecosystem in which we inhabit.

I am awed by the arguments of many of the "new atheists," in the sense that they posit a world which is more precious and rare than perhaps even we Buddhists imagine, but I have to go with Blow here: you need a community; you need to step back even from scientfic wonder and need a matrix, a place from which to grow, at least insofar as our social evolution has taken place over the past few thousands of years.

Luckily you can do it without much of the trappings and baggage of many religions, including but not limited to monotheism.

But Blow's hyperlink to the brain stuff needs comment too: humans evidently find it beneficial to have the sense of self and other dissolved from time to time. Sure, it's possible or even likely it's all in the brain, but with the mind of Thusness I might be able to help you and others as well as myself (but if I call it Big Mind I might get sued).

The very weirdest stuff is on Youtube...

Paul Robeson singing the praises of Stalin's Soviet Union...





HT: M.J. Roesenberg, who has a good point w.r.t. Paul Robeson (who if you don't know who he was, well, it's worth a trip to Wikipedia).

Rosenberg's point is be very very careful of whom you have agreement and disagreement. They could be stark raving mad bloodthirsty butchers.

And that's today's nugget of wisdom.

Zen Craziness

I'd missed this bit in last week's magazine...

...Sometimes he was the Zen master Mitsunen (the name meant “Now Mind”), who got up before dawn each morning to sit selflessly for hours in meditation. Mitsunen received dharma transmission, by which teachings are passed from master to disciple, in the Soto school of Zen and was ordained a Zen monk in the Soto and the Rinzai schools. He served as head monk at the International Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji in upstate New York in the 1970s; for years he has led Zen retreats in Florida and North Carolina.


Other times he was Louis Nordstrom, a 63-year-old professor, poet and essayist with a round face, a shaved gray head and a shaky grip on whatever guise it was that people employed to navigate train stations and grocery stores. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia (his thesis was on Sartre’s theory of evil), and after giving up the monastic life he chose over tenure, he scraped by on teaching gigs at half a dozen schools, including Yale and N.Y.U. But the anxiety he was mired in in the summer of 2006 seemed deeper than what might be expected from financial or professional insecurity, or the infirmities of growing old, or even the aftermath of a busted marriage — his fourth. For two decades he lectured on the emergence of Western lay Zen, arguing against what he saw as the antiemotional bias of monastic Asian Zen in favor of an approach that integrated psychological experience into meditation practice. But as a pioneer of Zen in America, he had little success practicing what he preached. An antidepressant hadn’t helped much...

ith a wraithlike air, the Zen master accepted a seat on a black leather couch below the colored tumult of a de Kooning print and a photograph of a stone path vanishing around a bend in Kyoto. Lou Nordstrom later said he felt better almost the moment he met Jeffrey Rubin’s gaze. He had come as someone would to an emergency room for a therapeutic intervention.

“I left that first session with tears of joy on my face,” he told me one day last October as we sat with cups of coffee in the mica light of Bryant Park in Manhattan. “What Jeffrey did that first session saved my life. He listened empathetically and nonjudgmentally. He encouraged me to see my fears of acting out as symptoms of an unconscious desire to be seen.”

As the months went by, measured out in 50-minute sessions twice a week, the motifs of his history emerged. There was the surreal and horrific childhood of parental neglect, abuse and abandonment. There were those aspects of old trauma he was unwittingly reinflicting on himself, contriving to be abandoned by wives, disillusioned by mentors, seemingly incapable of taking basic care of himself. And there was the paradoxical role of Zen, which had enabled him to cope with the pain and alienation of his purgatorial youth but which he was now beginning to understand was implicated in his difficulties and may even have been making some of them worse...

Six months into therapy, the psychoanalyst and the Zen master had mapped the abandonment and neglect in Nordstrom’s past. They had explored how the themes were re-enacted in his professional and personal lives and how the same patterns began to surface even in the dynamics of the therapy itself. Nordstrom missed an appointment after a big snowstorm, then missed another because he wasn’t feeling well. Rubin held three sessions with his patient over the phone.

“Please don’t abandon me!” Nordstrom said during the third session.

“I’m staring at an empty couch,” the psychoanalyst said, trying to keep some velvet over the steel in his voice. “You are the one doing the abandoning. Are you abandoning yourself the way you have always been abandoned?”

Sitting on a cushion mindfully does not mean being absent. Studying a koan in a way that closes one off from human contact and experience isn't helping beings that well. You know, 80% of life is showing up, as Woody Allen said.

It is not surprising to me that someone can practice Zen for decades and not realize fundamental parts of one's life where they're stuck.

I myself experience a lot of stuckness, much of it the accretions of decades of mutual stupidity of myself and others.

But for some reason I don't experience not being without tools to become unstuck, because I have become unstuck in some ways.

But it is always time to get unstuck in as many ways as one can, using whatever means are available to do so that saves beings, including the one in your own skin bag, whether that means takes a shrink, a physician or whatever. And the justification of this as Buddhism makes sense if only because of the moral imperative of the famine rescue worker: if the rescue worker doesn't eat many more will starve.

Why we need a truth comission...

I haven't blogged much about politics here lately; it's better handled on Kos, and when I have something political to say, I usually do it there.

But Paul Krugman's right, and his point deserves wide dissemination:

[T]he only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible...

Still, you might argue — and many do — that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.

But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any...

Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward — because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.

We - and I mean Americans collectively - most certainly did not torture because of some twisted ticking time bomb "24" scenario, and we did not torture to prevent attacks on Americans. We did not torture because there was no other way to get the truth. In fact, the Bush regime tortured for the precise opposite reason - because they wanted detainees to say anything to make the suffering stop, including anything that might justify an invasion of Iraq.

We Buddhists generally don't bandy the "e" word about, but frankly, if anything's evil, this is evil. Not to the degree of Babi Yar and Oswiecm (Auschwitz), but it's certainly in the same direction.

If you still think there's no need, consider Liz Cheney's denial of torture:



She uses fill-in words which mean everything that torture means, but she will not say the Word, because admitting the Word admits guilt, and describing the act somehow does not bring the guilt that admitting the Word does.

And that's in a nut why we need a truth commission. Because we need to use the Word and its power and apply it where it ought to be applied.

We in America should not torture, not only because it's morally repugnant, but because it is not useful for gleaning information - we learned that in World War II.

And we need to make sure those who ordered such torture are imprisoned.

Real Estate Huckster, Spiritual Huckster...

Much of John T. Reed's real estate guru BS guide can be applied elsewhere.

Reincarnation

There's no good evidence for any kind of a literal reincarnation.

The kids who "remember" their "past lives" were likely led to believe such.

On the other hand...

There are unexplainable aspects of consciousness, which I've seen. They might be mass suggestion, they might be universal consciousness, but for now they're unexplained.

Awareness itself brings about "rebirth," in a sense.

But literal reincarnation?

I don't think it's necessary.

Divide and Conquer - Wise Words Fromt The Past

Still around...so here's a comment:

Warner's kinda right and kinda wrong.

He's right: Zen brings up lots of repressed crap. He's also right when he says, "It’s also true that zazen is different from other forms of meditation (if zazen is even a form of meditation) in that it is not directed at any ideal condition."

But he's slightly wrong when he says, "In zazen you allow whatever comes up to just come up as it will, rather than attempting to move the mind toward a specific desired state as most forms of meditation do."

Strictly speaking, the last thing is for those who do shikan taza only, and most of us have to be able to put the mind in a place where we can do that in the first place, at least in the Rinzai tradition.

Wow, David Schuster has quite a double-entendre potty mouth...

Synthesis of the last 2 posts:

I can't tell you that you need a cure if you don't think you're sick. And if you do feel like crap, I don't see much percentage in trying to make you feel worse. Your own sense of being stuck itself is, you know, a noble truth.

On the other hand, I do know what helps me. And I think it's horrible that there's folks who would deny that help to themselves and others in order to use religion to manipulate others for the sake of cultivation or conservation of power by a few. Which, if you didn't click through, is the business model of the "Institute of Religion and Democracy," whose folks have been criticizing folks who are Episcopalian Zen Buddhist Bishops.

I don't of course, see myself as a Christian Buddhist by any means.

Nor ultimately, would I kick some of the folks I think might be hucksters out of the temple.

When you see your own suffering as evidence of being fundamentally OK, (OK, much more than OK) and when you can use that suffering and its amelioration without shoving it in people's faces and telling them how good you are or they should be, then perhaps you're getting somewhere.

And therefore, since I'm not there yet, I could perhaps shut this blog down, but then again I've never claimed that this blog was about anyone who had a zip code in nirvana.

On the other hand, there are Episcopalians ....

to whom I might see eye to eye ...

“The lay ordination was a welcoming rite for me to commit myself to the path to discover why I suffer or why other people suffer,” Rev. Kevin Thew Forrester told the Times of London shortly after his election as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan on February 21. Forrester went on to explain that he took jukai—the lay ordination rite of Zen Buddhism—“[T]o use the practice of meditation to help that suffering.”

And evidently there are some Episcopalians that have a problem with helping one cultivate mindfulness to alleviate suffering...

“The bottom line is that Forrester has embraced something foreign and contradictory,” wrote Greg Griffith, a blogger at the conservative Anglican Web site Stand Firm in Faith. “Call it a faith, call it a philosophy, call it what you will but it is not Christianity. One simply cannot embrace the doctrines of Buddhism—Zen or any other flavor—and simultaneously embrace the doctrines of Christianity.”

“The reality is that this particular meditative practice is not in step with Christian doctrine,” concurred James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a think tank with ties to the neo-conservative movement and a history of exploiting wedge issues in order to widen rifts in mainline Protestant denominations. “The issue is not whether meditation is good,” Tonkowich said, “it is what is being meditated on.”

The issue, to me, at least is efficacy, and if the practice is effective, it is monstrous to use force or coercion to abjure one to abstain from the practice, save for the fact that such a coercer might be ignorant of the effects of what he might be doing.

And yeah, the practices of Zen are effective. Cultivating mindfulness and acting from mindfulness is effective to help people.

Call it Christianity, call it anything you want, but if you're doing this practice, it's probably helping and if you're trying to get people to avoid or stop the practice you're probably not helping, but you might need some help.

Happy Easter...

You may not know or care who Ray Comfort is...and frankly, your life hasn't been all that different either way, most likely.

But this guy, who seems so earnest, does have, I think, the most cogent rebuttal to the "your defective" brand of Christianity I've seen in a while...

Some findings:

Pride is not an entirely bad thing...

A feeling of pride, when it’s convincing, acts something like an emotional magnet. In a recent study, Ms. Williams and Dr. DeSteno of Northeastern had a group of 62 undergraduates take tests supposedly measuring their spatial I.Q. The patterns flashed by too fast for anyone to truly know how well they did.

The researchers manipulated the amount of pride each participant felt in his or her score. They either said nothing about the score; remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone, that it was one of the best scores they had seen; or gushed that the person’s performance was wonderful, about as good as they had ever seen.

The participants then sat down in a group to solve similar puzzles. Sure enough, the students who had been warmly encouraged reported feeling more pride than the others. But they also struck their partners in the group exercise as being both more dominant and more likable than those who did not have the inner glow of self-approval. The participants, whether they had been buttered up or not, were completely unaware of this effect on the group dynamics.

“We wondered at the beginning whether these people were going to come across as arrogant jerks,” Dr. DeSteno said. “Well, no, just the opposite; they were seen as dominant but also likable. That’s not a combination we expected.”...

Therapists say that in time, people usually do better when they come clean...

But in the short term, projecting pride may do more than help manage others’ impressions. Psychologists have found that wearing a sad or happy face can have a top-down effect on how a person feels: Smile and you may feel fleetingly happier. The same most likely is true for an expression of pride. In a 2008 study, the Northeastern researchers found that inducing a feeling of pride in people solving spatial puzzles motivated them to try harder when they tackled the next round.

Pride, in short, begets perseverance. All of which may explain why, when the repo man is at the door, people so often remind themselves that they still have theirs, and that it’s worth something. Because they do, and because it is.

However much pride may go before a fall, it may be far more useful after one.

Pepto-bismol contains bismuth subsalicylate, and is therefore ...radioactive...OK, kinda sorta radioactive...

Although bismuth-209 is commonly thought to be the heaviest stable isotope that exists in nature, theory suggests that it should be metastable and decay via alpha-particle emission to thallium-205. This decay is not easy to measure because the alpha particles generated have very little energy, which means that the isotope decays at a very low rate.

The equipment used by the Orsay team consists of two “heat and light” detectors that are enclosed in a reflecting cavity and cooled to 20mk. The first detector- containing bismuth-209, germanium and oxygen – undergoes a slight temperature rise when it absorbs an alpha particle. This temperature change is measured in the form of a voltage pulse whose amplitude is directly proportional to the energy released. The second detector, made from a thin disk of germanium, registers the light flashes from alpha-particle events.

The team performed two measurements, one with 31 grams of bismuth in the detector and the other with 62 grams. The scientists registered 128 alpha-particle events over 5 days and found an unexpected line in the spectrum at 3.14 MeV - now attributed to bismuth-209 decay. The half-life was calculated to be (1.9 +/- 0.2 ) x 10¹⁹ years, which is in good agreement with the theoretical prediction of 4.6 x 10¹⁹ years.

Now, that 1/2 life is admittedly older than the age of the universe, but still!

(HT: Starts with a bang.)

This news about bismuth is apparently not new, but when I read the above post in Starts with a Bang, it said lead was the heaviest stable element, and I knew bismuth was heavier, therefore...

Fair and Balanced Picture Time...

Well, sort of...in addition to the outing at which I got to roam around Seoul for about 4 hours (at most), I did manage to get to Yasukuni Jina...which was quite a trip, to say the least.
Below are some shots from Jogyesa, one of 24 "head temples" for the Seon (Zen) sect in Korea.







Next came Yasukuni shrine; it was a pleasant day, and maybe it was the North Korean missles, or perhaps it was the cherry blossoms, but the place was packed.







That's about all the sightseeing one can do on the trips I take.

I'd recommend, though, if you're ever in Tokyo, to visit Yasukuni Shrine, and if you're in Seoul, to visit Jogyesa.

Regarding the latter, the reasons are obvious. Regarding the former, forget the propaganda (which alone is worth the visit). Look at the Heian era swords.

And if you ever get the chance, visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and look at the swords from Europe at about the same time.

It.
Is.
Unbelievable, the difference.

Too bad they don't let you take pictures of them, though, you wouldn't believe it.

More awareness then we had thought?

Still on travel, but I didn't want to let this story slip through the cracks:

After producing superlatives like the world’s biggest statue of a jackrabbit and the nation’s most unpopular modern-day president, Texas can now boast what may be its most bizarre and undoubtedly its slimiest topper yet: the world’s largest known colony of clonal amoebas.

Scientists found the vast and sticky empire stretching 40 feet across, consisting of billions of genetically identical single-celled individuals, oozing along in the muck of a cow pasture outside Houston...

Scientists say the discovery is much more than a mere curiosity, because the colony consists of what are known as social amoebas. Only an apparent oxymoron, social amoebas are able to gather in organized groups and behave cooperatively, some even committing suicide to help fellow amoebas reproduce. The discovery of such a huge colony of genetically identical amoebas provides insight into how such cooperation and sociality might have evolved and may help to explain why microbes are being found to show social behaviors more often than was expected...

Meanwhile, as impressive (or even threatening) as a colony of a couple billion amoebas might sound, it has turned out to be surprisingly fragile.

“Just one week later, it had rained a lot and then it basically was gone,” Mr. Gilbert said.

Apparently, such is the fleeting nature of grand amoebic phenomena, for the Texas clone is not the first to dwindle inexplicably into nothingness. Scientists say that the last traces of what at one point may have been the world’s largest individual amoeba — and the star of a highly productive research program — shriveled in their laboratory last summer until it disappeared.

So even though their existence is fleeting, is it the case these animals also exhibit to some extent altriustic behavior?

BTW, evidently these things can be up to 0.8mm in length, or about 0.031 inches.

Free Will, Behavioral Determinism and Buddhism

I used to be concerned about the Free Will versus Determinism issue. I'm not really that concerned anymore. Humans are not exactly controllable and observable in a systems theoretic with today's technology, and even if they were, the question still wouldn't be answered, because humans would still be doing the experiments.

Maybe we have to wait for the Robot Overlords to take over before we can get an answer.

Regardless, everything's densely interconnected.

Practicing mindfulness to achieve good behavior might not pay off every time like a slot machine, but it beats alternatives.

All that said, as long as you can make any kind of gesture purposefully, it appears that it is an absolute purposefulness, which can be forgiven as being taken as the appearance of freedom.

But it's not absolute in the sense that it can really stand apart from the 10,000 things.

But a lot of gestures equivalent to wiggling one's toe can add up after a while.

It's kind of like going to the gym: don't overdo it, but if you go regularly there will be results.

That probably didn't clear things up, so how about this: Whether or not we're purely meat machines or whether there's other metaphysics involved is outside the category of useful things that Buddhism discusses. (A useful thing that Buddhism might discuss is: I'm suffering! Must be an attachment somewhere! What's the way out? [Followed by a purposeful behavior.])

Seoul...

Made it to Seoul, and in a couple of days hopefully will post some nice pictures and all that. Made it to Jogyesa. Korea's not bad, actually, but there's certainly more corporate heaviness here (or if you like, vertical integration from the chaebol taken to absurdity) than probably anywhere else in the world. I mean, they have Samsuing Life Insurance and Hyundai Department Stores. But it's not all that bad. Or, as a Korean colleague working for me used to say, "It's stupid, but it's OK."

The other thing I hope to get though is a post, of all things, on the death of the mall, and implications of malls you probably haven't considered.

On edit: Actually, no I'm not going to post on this, because to do so would be kind of an anti-mitzvah, if there were such a word.

New diary on Daily Kos

Here.

I'll be in transit to Seoul in the next couple of days.

More to come...

The last word on miracles from spirituality...

I'll credit Douglas Adams, from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with the basic line of reasoning:

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy recieved not from its own carrier but from those around it, It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. the practical upshot of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any language.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so
mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some
thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove
that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument isn't worth a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid from making a fortune when he used it as the central argument in his book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

The point is: if you hail from a religious tradition in which faith is paramount, in which it is required, indeed any "miracles" will render faith redundant, which undermines the religious tradition itself. The minute you point to some special transcendent activity of a supernatural being, that is the very minute you have declared that faith in things unseen is not required, and that is the very moment you betray your allegiance to the faith-based religious tradition.

If, however, you plead that one must have faith in the miracle, then you're back to square one, and you must admit that there is doubt that the transcendent has left a calling card.

And so, if for a moment you accept that what you have observed is not a miracle, admitting the doubt that it is not the transcendent activity of said supernatural being, then the possibility of alternative explanations presents itself. And the ethic of sincerity would demand, I would think, that these alternative explanations be examined. And if there is more support for the alternative explanations than for a miracle, what then? Do you become like Nietzche's madman in Thus Spake Zarathustra and proclaim the death of god from rooftops? Really? Is your faith that weak? Allow me to present some middle ground that is accessible, I think, to all.

"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists," I think (the Christian) Wittgenstein said. You exist. You live and breathe and have various senses. You are aware. Why would you want something more? Why is that not sufficient to help beings?

To Buddhists, greed, hatred, and ignorance are the three poisons, the source of all suffering; and the strongest poison in this regard is greed. (Christians could translate that to pride, itself a form of greed.) Trungpa Rinpoche, his character flaws and extreme alchoholic behavior aside, rightly pointed out that spiritual materialism is a form of greed. Spiritual materialism and spiritual hucksterism intersect at the point where the transcendent is entreated to make a show of itself, when the very breath being breathed makes anything else look like the existential equivalent of a McDonald's Happy Meal compared to the fare at a Michelin-rated eatery.

Why would you want anything more?

So you think you know heaven and hell...

Hakuin in one of his writings mentions the existence of heaven and hell, and asserts their reality. His reasons are not quite logical, and with the writings, at least as translated, there's more than a bit of defensiveness.

What to do with that?

Accept him at his word?

I do tend to subscribe to the ideas, as expounded by other Buddhists, that heaven and hell are what you make your life here and now. To be fair to Hakuin, he could be read that way, but that could just as well be a clever way around some statements that are hard to defend. It could be historical revisionism.

Generally, I tend to take a nontheist view of things; it is not important to the work of transcending suffering, curing the 3 poisons and so forth to speculate deeply about metaphysics. This comports with Buddhist viewpoints going back millenia, going back to the Buddha himself, who when asked about such things is said to have responded with a noble silence.

Hakuin couldn't have been totally ignorant of this, he was very learned to say the least, but his writing though could as well be informed by the Lotus Sutra, in particular where doctrines of upaya are presented. Quan-Yin/Kannon/Avolkitesvara will assume any form needed to accomplish compassion, if compassion is sought. Hakuin understood that there was a "popular" Buddhism that lay people followed because they could not afford the learning and leisure to practice zazen of the clerical class.

Hakuin was not above criticizing some of the abuses and decadence he saw in Buddhism of his time and place however.

I guess the difference is that between "thought leaders" - people who decide where to take culture by their unique position and leadership, and the masses, who don't have the time and leisure to consider deeply the spiritual, religious, political, psychological and otherwise "technical" (medical, scientific, legal...) aspects of the life they must live now.

So I want to make myself a bit clearer: I have nothing against any individual who decides to practice a 12 Step program, for whatever reason, if they think they need it. I even have nothing against those who, for want of a better solution, recommend a solution to a problem known to be suboptimal. But for those who are peddling known suboptimal solutions, based on snake-oil as some kind of universal optimum I modestly dissent, to use the words of the Scottish Calvinists in response to the Jacobites. When adherents of a sect claim some kind of metaphysical reality being breached uniquely to that sect, I have to respond: what is my experience, chopped liver? And when someone claims that their sect and its supporting structures has science behind hit, when there is none, I am compelled morally, I am acting ex cathedra, so to speak, from my vows to bring up what science is, why there is no science in the organization. And if there's a dodgy history behind the sect I will have to mention it. There's dodgy history in my sect, and I bring it up, should hucksters get a pass because they claim they "help people?"

The answer to my questions above, by the way, is to respectfully disagree with Hakuin's positions on heaven and hell, at least insofar as a noble silence on such subjects is disagreement.

The awe and fun of engineering...

One of the more amusing aspects of something I read about this Ken Wilber guy is that, from what I've read, he regards much of science and scientists as "flatland" or "flatlanders," or whatever, as if he wants to relegate scientists to a "less-than full number of dimensions" of existence.

It's amusing because Wilber clearly is displaying his lack of knowledge of a vast variety of fields; I have looked for a definition of the opposite of polymath, but haven't been able to find one.

Why?


Well, here's why:

• The term "flatland" goes back to this book, developed by a guy with a mathematics background, to say the least. Ken Wilber did not choose to express concepts claiming us tech types were limited without using terms tech types invented to broaden expression!



• Wilber evidently has never had any experience in science or engineering, because if he did, he might understand the appeal, which comes from knowing something is true to a metaphysical certainty, with no chance of there being disagreement. My recent work is based on a fundamental theorem of information theory. The main theorem was proved by someone else; I am simply not that bright or don't have the time. However much of the ancillary design was based on "little theorems" or through brute force experimentation that was developed by myself, some of which was not obvious to my main collaborator. The feeling one gets when one designs something based on a theorem being true (especially that you yourself have engineered and proven) is awe and humility. It enables one to imagine the feelings going with being the first person to see the sights from Mount Everest. It is "one taste" that no one has tasted before, but thanks to efforts by one's self and others, all can taste now. It is a big responsibility and serious business, too.

There's a lot of electrical and mechanical energy spent in the Buddhist blogosphere (and elsewhere) on spiritual and religious issues; elsewhere many want for something or someone beyond what is here now, and what pervades the whole universe. But when you can take the facticity of "A," (whatever "A" is, though I could go off on a nice Buddhist tangent here) and exploit it so that time, energy or bandwidth is conserved, you know you are reading the mind of god, as an atheist professor of mine mentioned in a similar context. There simply is no way to critique such a spirituality if you haven't been there and done that or something similar. And it fills a practical need. People all want to make sense of why they are existing in this time and place, in ill-fitting finitude to all appearances. But nobody wants to do that while paying through the nose for energy or for their cell phone bill.

I have mentioned elsewhere that my intellectual property is or will soon be on track to be more widely disseminated than Michael Jackson or Madonna. It's the economics of it all that are the reason of course as to why a) my IP is more widely disseminated and b) why pop music intellectual property is more widely known. But that's somewhat of a pity, because there's a certain elegance in extensions of Shannon's work that just can't be appreciated without a technical background. And unlike certain other forms of intellectual property, it will work as advertised.

So, I'm very grateful to be doing work that gives great fun and great awe. And when folks give advice as to how "limited" my work/outlook/philosophy/etc. is, my advice is, get a doctorate in a field like systems engineering, patent a few things and get back to me. Or do something similar, even if it's in Sculpey-Clay. Or at least try.

Richard Dawkins in the Lions' Den

The guy's got courage...and here's an example of what he's up against. It's pretty appalling actually.

More on 12 Step Groups...

At the tail end of an unusually successful week which I hope to allude to more here, I had an e-mail exchange with a relative that was odd, to say the least. This particular relative of mine, a woman, had long had behaviors that most of the rest of my family had considered, ah, unusual, which I won't go into here, but suffice it to say that while her son was growing up, other members of my family, along with myself, concluded that, "He's going to have problems growing up."

He did, exhibited some substance abuse behaviors over a prolonged period of time, got put in rehab, and has been in a 12 Step group for a number of years, and to my knowledge has not re-engaged in those behaviors. Good for him. I hope that he never experiences the downsides of 12 Step programs, which have been well-documented.

Anyway, the other day this relative - the son's mother - sent around to family members an article from Nature, (sorry, no free linky) in which she claimed "studies discussed add new insight into AA and similar programs."

Within this article, despite my relative's claims, no studies' results were actually discussed through the entire article. That I could find. While some papers were listed as footnotes, clearly the publication requirements for Nature do not match the peer review requirements for any of journals in which I've been published.

Now 12 Step programs have never been shown safe and effective for anything (which, when pointed out to my relative she replied that safety and effectiveness for treatments applied only to "drugs and devices," as though things that insurance companies pay for for heath purposes - like 12 Step meeting attendance in rehabs- don't all need to work and it's OK if they hurt you or make you suicidal!) As someone committed to helping all beings transcend suffering, this is appalling, to say the least.

Now I had never read Nature, but as it turns out, it's somewhat less sophisticated than Scientific American, if this article is any judge (the author of the article is a freelance writer, with no scientific, medical, or public health policy background listed in the article). Anyhow, the telltale signs that this was not an article about any of the aforementioned disciplines was here:

Spiritual control
And then there is religion, which has been shown to have a strong inverse association
with drug addiction. Psychologist Michael McCullough, who studies religion and behavior at the University of Miami in Florida, calls this inverse association “one of the most unsung findings in the entire literature on drug and alcohol abuse”. Both adults and children deemed religious by various measures “drink, smoke and do drugs less often”, McCullough says. “If they get into trouble with drinking
and drugs and smoking, they’re more likely to be able to get away from those problems.” McCullough suggests that when a person commits to any cultural system that regulates behavior, the psychological effort to conform strengthens the brain systems that mediate self-monitoring and self-control. “What makes religion unique, I think, is that the code of conduct isn’t just laid down by your parents
or your friends or your principal at school, but ostensibly by the individual who is superintending the Universe, so it has an extra moral
force.”

Now, this would make any scientist's alarms go off, because here is an empirically testable claim; it is falsifiable: does religion, specifically a monotheistic religion make one less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol?. We can look at studies of religious people and behaviors.

And the answer is no, it does not. While there is less alcohol consumption amongst sects that prohibit it, we certainly have the experience as a nation with Prohibition (both of alcohol and drugs like marijuana) that shows that prohibiting consumption of substances tends to produce more harmful behaviors than the act itself. The history of alcohol prohibition, for example, was that prohibition produced substantially higher consumption of alcohol (and more unsafe alcohol) than prior to Prohibition. That, plus the explosion in crime, was why it was repealed. This situation has also been observed in teaching sexual abstinence only to youths.

And 12 Step Groups ( links here)?

After several months of indoctrination with A.A. 12-Step dogma, the alcoholics in A.A. were doing five times as much binge drinking as a control group that got no treatment at all, and nine times as much binge drinking as another group that got Rational Behavior Therapy.

It would be unethical to recommend such things, and so it's not surprising that the author of the Nature article is not a member in a profession where such ethical concerns are paramount. We know, at any rate, why these "findings" are "unsung."

It's because they've been found to be false.

Why do people push stuff that's obviously false?

Why did the Bushies push abstinence education? Why does the Catholic Church dissuade people from using condoms for the prevention of many sexually transmitted diseases?

Religious belief. Evidence contrary to one's belief is often discounted.


Let's continue a bit:

Some religious rituals, he says, have been shown to provoke enhanced activity in prefrontal regions. “It’s as if certain forms of prayer and
meditation are pinpointing precisely those [prefrontal] areas of the brain that people rely on to control attention, to control negative emotion and resolve mental conflict.”

There's been studies done on meditation, and it's kind of telling that the author refers to certain forms of prayer and meditation. Which ones? Which ones should someone avoid? I could probably look up studies, but the fact that this is all blurred by the author suggests that this is a point he probably does not want to make.

This blogger became a Zen Buddhist because of the personal efficacy of practicing mindfulness throughout the day. I make no claims regarding the efficacy of my practice on a worldwide scale; and think there was wisdom in dissuading just anyone from joining the temple. While I desire to help all beings transcend suffering, part of the process of skillful means of that is not to proselytize.

However the twelve-step strategies actually work on the brain, “there is now excellent documentation that those who attend AA-type programmes regularly do very well by anyone’s standard”, says Thomas McLellan, director of the Treatment Research
Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The problem, McLellan says, is that the
vast majority of people who enter such programmes do not go regularly — they
drop out after a few days or weeks — and are more than likely to relapse.

As long as "anyone's standard" isn't a correlation of attendance with the program and not engaging in abusive behaviors, one might conclude that AA type programs "do very well by anyone's standard."

I could go on. Later on in the article there's a quote about a researcher linking substance abuse issues to "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder." These two disorders may well be social constructs combined with a great deal of suggestion.

Finally, on this point, it's useful to remember the words of William Blake about 200 years ago: "Prisons are built with the Stones of Law, Brothels with the Bricks of Religion." Prohibition in the form of religion coerced by a monotheistic deity was caught out by the Romantics. No amount of brain jargon will remove that, and such things have the added difficulty that they lack concision and elegance.

How then to deal with substance abuse?

Pay attention. Teach others to pay attention.

And, speaking of Chinese Youtube Videos

If you haven't seen this, you haven't lived:

More on the Saga of the Grass Mud Horse

Someone helpfully translated the sounds-like naughty bits from Chinese



The things you can't do with English...

And if you wonder why I post this rather than inveigh against the horrors done against Tibetan culture, well...well...

• I'm sorry, but this is funnier. As Jon Stewart showed by doing, don't underestimate the power of humor to move the world.



• It shows the Chinese are not monolithic on things



• It probably does more to create peace and harmony than a dozen "Free Tibet" protests at the White House.



• Besides, I do hail from a tradition where the answer in a dharma confrontation to the question of "What is Buddha?" was "a dry shit-stick."
  
  

Stuff I want to do...

• Write the Dalai Lama and ask him questions based on the issues which I've recently raised. I think the responses would go a long way in mutual understanding of Tibet relations.



• Write the Chinese to ask their views on Tibet. There is almost "naturally" a cheerleading section of the American Buddhist blogosphere.



• Post comments on "Norman Einstein," which is quite a hatchet job on "Ken Wilber," and much of which is likely true. However, it is also clear from my skimming of the book that a critique of the author's point of view is in order as well.



• Say a bit more about 12 Step believers who practice Buddhism. There's things that needs to be said about the confluence of science, public policy, and religion.

I hope to get to the above items soon, but having made a pretty useful discovery in my work, with the help of colleagues, I simply lack the time today, or perhaps until, I dunno, until a couple of weeks from now? Not that there'll be no postings until then, there will, but I wanted to write about what I want to write about.

And just to keep things fair and balanced all around...

Link

BEIJING — Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon.

A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

I have to ask my wife what the dirty word is supposed to be, because, uh, it's been censored from the NY Times story. But it appears that it has something to do with sexual intercourse and one's mother. Which is not surprising because within every mother (妈) there's a bit of horse (馬). Don't blame me; I didn't invent the language.

Permit me to dissent from the Dalai Lama Hoopla

Here's a bit of corrective to some of the recent hoopla over the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama leaving Tibet, for example, here.


Link

No mere spiritual leader, he was the head of Tibet's government when he went into exile in 1959. It was a state apparatus run by aristocratic, nepotistic monks that collected taxes, jailed and tortured dissenters and engaged in all the usual political intrigues. (The Dalai Lama's own father was almost certainly murdered in 1946, the consequence of a coup plot.)

The government set up in exile in India and, at least until the 1970s, received $US1.7 million a year from the CIA.

The money was to pay for guerilla operations against the Chinese, notwithstanding the Dalai Lama's public stance in support of non-violence, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

The Dalai Lama himself was on the CIA's payroll from the late 1950s until 1974, reportedly receiving $US15,000 a month ($US180,000 a year).

The funds were paid to him personally, but he used all or most of them for Tibetan government-in-exile activities, principally to fund offices in New York and Geneva, and to lobby internationally.

Details of the government-in-exile's funding today are far from clear. Structurally, it comprises seven departments and several other special offices. There have also been charitable trusts, a publishing company, hotels in India and Nepal, and a handicrafts distribution company in the US and in Australia, all grouped under the government-in-exile's Department of Finance...

It is not clear how donations enter [the exile government in Tibet's] budgeting. These are likely to run to many millions annually, but the Dalai Lama's Department of Finance provided no explicit acknowledgment of them or of their sources.

Certainly, there are plenty of rumours among expatriate Tibetans of endemic corruption and misuse of monies collected in the name of the Dalai Lama.

Many donations are channelled through the New York-based Tibet Fund, set up in 1981 by Tibetan refugees and US citizens. It has grown into a multimillion-dollar organisation that disburses $US3 million each year to its various programs.

Part of its funding comes from the US State Department's Bureau for Refugee Programs.

Like many Asian politicians, the Dalai Lama has been remarkably nepotistic, appointing members of his family to many positions of prominence. In recent years, three of the six members of the Kashag, or cabinet, the highest executive branch of the Tibetan government-in-exile, have been close relatives of the Dalai Lama.

An older brother served as chairman of the Kashag and as the minister of security. He also headed the CIA-backed Tibetan contra movement in the 1960s.

A sister-in-law served as head of the government-in-exile's planning council and its Department of Health.

A younger sister served as health and education minister and her husband served as head of the government-in-exile's Department of Information and International Relations.

Oh, here's something the Dalai Lama doesn't exactly talk much about...

BEIJING -- Chinese geologists have discovered more than 600 new sites of copper, iron, lead and zinc ore deposits on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau since 1999, according to the results of the latest geological survey.

Preliminary estimates show the plateau has reserves of 30 million to 40 million tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead and zinc and billions of tons of iron, said Zhang Hongtao, vice director of the China Geological Survey Bureau.

Zhang said geologists have also compiled the country's first Qinghai-Tibet plateau geological map on the scale of 1:250,000 and the plateau's first map of metal and nonmetal deposits on the scale of 1:1.5 million.

Currently 90 percent of China's iron ore deposits are of low grade but geologists have discovered three large high-grade iron ore deposits on the plateau, including the one in Nyixung with reserves of 300 million to 500 million tons.

Large quantities of oil shale resources, which could be turned into oil, were also found on the plateau.

The plateau may have "large or super-large" deposits of hydrocarbon resources, said Zhang, adding that geologists had detected promising reserves of oil and gas in northern Tibet.

"These deposits will fundamentally ease China's shortages of mineral resources", said Zhang.

Oh, one more thing:

Here's some context as to how the Chinese no doubt think of the whole Dalai Lama thing. Admittedly, it's an American history source, but still...

Call it the Shangri-La factor. In the popular imagination, pre-Communist Tibet was a fabled theocracy in which a beatific Dalai Lama smiled over a kingdom where no man raised a hand in violence as he spun his prayer wheel in search of nirvana. Then along came the Communist Chinese, who made short work of these placid people. Fifty years after the Chinese takeover of Tibet, the myth still persists and has even grown, thanks to the media and the increased interest of Westerners in Buddhism.

But contrary to the pop history version, the Tibetans did not simply let the Chinese roll over their country in 1951. For almost 20 years afterward they fought a long, bloody war of resistance that struck serious blows to Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s expansionist plans. Invisible to outsiders as it raged, this largely unknown struggle that no novelist could have dreamed up got support from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which sponsored secret training camps and made arms and equipment drops to aid horse-mounted herdsmen against the bombers and artillery of the largest standing army on the planet.

By way of background, the story begins in the fall of 1951, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) marched into the ancient Tibetan capital at Lhasa, after forcing the Dalai Lama’s religious government to sign a ‘Plan for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.’ This thin fiction of an agreement was somewhat maintained in Lhasa, but in the outlying regions the Chinese occupation involved forced collectivization and the killing of tribal chiefs and lamas.

At that time influential Tibetan traders began to mobilize in a resistance movement that would later become Chushi Gandrug (Four Rivers, Six Mountains). Chushi Gandrug’s organizer was a hard-fighting, hard-drinking 51-year-old trader named Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang. Uncoordinated and poorly armed as they were, Tibetans conducted a series of surprisingly successful raids and battles.

A widespread popular revolt finally broke out in February 1956, after the Chinese bombed ancient monasteries at Chatreng and Litang, killing thousands of monks and civilians massed there for protection. Given the growing military might of Tibet’s occupiers, Gompo Tashi and the meagerly equipped Chushi Gandrug knew they were going to need outside support. Consequently, the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, Gyalo Thondup, who had already been approached by the CIA, contacted the Americans. The Americans, he found, were quite intrigued with the prospect of supporting the Tibetans as part of a global anti-Communist campaign. If nothing else, their resistance would be one more way to create a ‘running sore for the reds,’ as one CIA man put it, even though at the top levels of the U.S. administration there was no pretense of commitment to Tibetan independence. Gompo Tashi’s guerrillas were excited at the prospect of American support. They knew little about the United States, but judging from the Communist propaganda they received, this faraway country was China’s greatest enemy.

The Chinese no doubt saw this movement headed by the Dalai Lama as an attempt to destabilize their government.

I could go on, but there's clearly more than what some folks think is going on.

I'm all for nonviolence as is the next guy, but there simply is no parallel for this in the US, unless maybe you think Leonard Peltier qualifies, and there ain't no way he's being let out of prison anytime soon, I'd guess. Maybe at the end of Obama's second term.

But I would invite other Buddhists, especially bloggers, to consider that the Dalai Lama's image, like any other political figure, is crafted and packaged, and does not necessarily conform to the historical reality. The Dalai Lama was, and no doubt in the in eyes of the Chinese, still is a leader of a violent rebellion, one which goes to attack very heart of the official dogma on which the legitimacy of the People's Republic of China rests: i.e., that all the people are the source of the legitimacy off the government regardless of their nationality.

As with the prevalence of racism in the US, the situation in China in this regard has historically been problematic, no doubt. But the Dalai Lama as democrat, advocate of freedom, truth, justice, etc. is not the historical truth, it's historical revisionism. And his cause, certainly to the Chinese, has less to do with this or "preservation of Tibetan culture" (even with the baggage on race that goes with that) than other aims which might have more material concerns behind them.

Mormons in the news...

I'm not talking about Proposition 8 do-overs or anything like that. Evidently they got sensitive about the fact that polygamy's in their history, or more to the point that "secret temple ceremonies" are depicted in a premium cable show on polygamy.

The mafia never complained about the Sopranos. Desparados never complained about Deadwood. Didn't the Mormons get the message that any publicity is good publicity?

Anyway, if that's such an issue don't you think they'd go after the Salt Lake Tribune for having a polygamy blog?

I mean, the NY Times has a Freakonomics blog by the behavioral economics authors, they have a Stanley Fish postmodern philosophy blog, they even have a science blog written by a a non-scientist who pretends to talk about science.

But alas, they lack a polygamy blog.

Why I never got a job on Wall Street:

From a so-so primer about "quants" in today's NY Times:

One of the most outspoken critics is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former trader and now a professor at New York University. He got a rock-star reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos this winter. In his best-selling book “The Black Swan” (Random House, 2007), Dr. Taleb, who made a fortune trading currency on Black Monday, argues that finance and history are dominated by rare and unpredictable events.

“Every trader will tell you that every risk manager is a fraud,” he said, and options traders used to get along fine before Black-Scholes. “We neverhad any respect for nerds.”

Dr. Taleb has waged war against one element of modern economics in particular: the assumption that price fluctuations follow the familiar bell curve that describes, say, IQ scores or heights in a population, with a mean change and increasingly rare chances of larger or smaller ones, according to so-called Gaussian statistics named for the German mathematician Friedrich Gauss.

But many systems in nature, and finance, appear to be better described by the fractal statistics popularized by Benoit Mandelbrot of IBM, which look the same at every scale. An example is the 80-20 rule that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work, or have 80 percent of the money. Within the blessed 20 percent the same rule applies, and so on. As a result the odds of game-changing outliers like Bill Gates’s fortune or a Black Monday are actually much greater than the quant models predict, rendering quants useless or even dangerous, Dr. Taleb said.

I suspect if you go over the books of these places, you'll find that very little pure R&D was done.

Dr. Taleb is right (to a point) though I would have used (and still do, in fact in other contexts) different models.

My thesis was in the area of nonlinear detection and estimation in dependent non-Gaussian noise.

I guess I was over-educated for Wall Street.

A Confluence of Ken Wilber & Reality...

I've had a breakthrough in the work I've been doing, sort of (a real breakthrough would be to transfer my problem-solving methodology to someone else so I can solve more problems, but that hasn't happened yet).

However, I have had a breakthrough in the work I've been doing, that basically is predicted by a theorem of information theory. What wasn't predicted though is how the particular realization of what I'm working on is realized. Because of the complexity of the systems involved, it's quite a bit easier to assign the problem of how to choose the best design to be solved by a computer, more or less (less than you might think from this description however). But it requires the old Edison trick of trying 99 things before the 100th. So while it wasn't a sure thing that the 100th thing I tried would be da bomb, as it was once said, it was a certainty that something would be "it."

In an interesting coincidence, I've also been involved in a discussion on methodological naturalism versus (I guess) metaphysics here, where this Ken Wilber stuff came in again.

Now I've taken various kinds of personality tests, and I have found - perhaps it's a result of my zen practice, or perhaps the fact that I'm a low level manager - that I'm the type of person that wants a summary, I want you to tell me the concise story and key points in 5 words or less.

Ken Wilber doesn't do that for me, to say the least, and the fact that it appears that he's trying to construct intellectual edifices with a verbosity and jargon that makes his writings hard to penetrate engenders skepticism in me. Seriously, I've found Sartre, Derrida and Kierkegaard much easier to read, and Mr. Wilber cannot tie their shoelaces intellectually. The fact that he appears to opine on science and methodological naturalism is embarrassing, or ought to be to him.

Anyway, from the link above, one link lead to another and finally to here. Quoting Mr. Wilber:

Why can't evolutionary science seem to bring us any closer to understanding our own interior experiences, as scientific materialists attempt to explain consciousness by explaining it away?

This is kind of like asking "Why doesn't Galois Theory bring us any closer to an understanding of Differential Geometry?" except for the fact that evolutionary biology does seem to have a great deal to say about observations of other species, which in turn do have implications about the nature of our own awareness. I'd refer to the interested reader to folks like Richard Dawkins or other biologists, but I'd just note in passing that elephants and other mammals appear to get death on some level.

That last link's writer kind of gets it:

If Wilber still has doubts about the possibility of "chance" evolution of eyes and wings, he would do well to consult Ernst Mayr, who writes in What Evolution Is (2001, Appendix A: "What Criticisms Have Been Made Of Evolutionary Theory?", p. 269):

The story of evolution as it was worked out during the past fifty years continues to be attacked and criticized. The critics either hold an entirely different ideology, as do the creationists, or they simply misunderstand the Darwinian paradigm. An author [such as Wilber] who says: "I can not believe that the eye evolved through a series of accidents," documents that he or she simply does not understand the two-step nature of natural selection [i.e. random variation and [quasi-]non-random survival and reproduction, see p. 119-120]."

I had to add the [quasi] in above as there is something elegantly random about death and reproduction (i.e., the famed "birth death process") which are actually hardly "accidents"; this brings us to another point about these topics: most people who are critics of evolution (or for that matter, derivative securities) who talk about random events and such also don't know what they're talking about.

There is also a non-random element to survival and reproduction as well, which the author rightly notes.

Also read Mr. Visser here.

Ken Wilber really does not seem to understand evolutionary biology or science at all, which would imply of course that his understanding of philosophy is lacking in the basics (science didn't spring from somebody who wanted to come up with an alternative pastime to Scrabble), and in particular, his shtick, "Integral Theory" has in fact a huge gaping hole.

Wilber doesn't seem to get that science indeed has predictive uses, and can predict things that have not been previously observed. Lucky for me though, I've been able to show a very interesting preliminary result. And the feeling I get is...awe.

Ken Wilber is present in his words, and geez, I'm present in mine. I'm very grateful that I can make a living, especially in these times, observing things and predicting things and doing the science of engineering.

I had more profound stuff to say, but...

Yeah, I would like my health care delivered to me as efficiently as the Post Office delivers mail, even considering the vast amounts of junk mail which I reliably receive.

Seriously, I'm seriously swamped with work. The "Edison thing," trying 99 things that don't work because the 100th thing will sing. I won't go into detailst, but if you google "Degraded Broadcast Channels," you can get a flavor.

Yay!

Link

Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft’s mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places — that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot, Goldilocks zones around stars where liquid water can exist.

Kepler’s strategy is, in effect, to search for the shadows of planets. The core of the spacecraft, which carries a 55-inch-diameter telescope, is a 95-million-pixel digital camera. For three and a half years, the telescope will stare at the same patch of sky about 10 degrees, or 20 full moons, wide, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It will read out the brightnesses of 100,000 stars every half-hour, looking for the telltale blips when a planet crosses in front of its star, a phenomenon known as a transit.

To detect something as small as the Earth, the measurements need to be done with a precision available only in space, away from the atmospheric turbulence that makes stars twinkle, and far from Earth so that our home world does not intrude on the view of shadow worlds in that patch of sky. It will take three or more years — until the end of Barack Obama’s current term in office — before astronomers know whether Kepler has found any distant Earths.

If Kepler finds the planets, Dr. Borucki explained, life could be common in the universe. The results will point the way for future missions aimed at getting pictures of what Carl Sagan, the late Cornell astronomer and science popularizer, called “pale blue dots” out in the universe, and the search for life and perhaps intelligence.

But the results will be profound either way. If Kepler doesn’t come through, that means Earth is really rare and we might be the only extant life in the universe and our loneliness is just beginning. “It would mean there might not be ‘Star Trek,’ ” Dr. Borucki said during a recent news conference.

We might answer the question "Are there other worlds like ours?" relatively soon.

To appreciate life is as rare as soil on top of one's fingernails.

And that makes Prof. Dawkins sort of a Buddhist, actually.