“The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.
Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.
Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.
Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science,
and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception,” fr. “The Wisdom Of Insecurity.”
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes.
Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
We try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.
The relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible
without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I.
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
The trouble is, that we have one-sided minds, and we notice the wave of life when it is at its peak or crest.
And the more you become aware of the unknown self – if you become aware of it -
the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.
Well actually, when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around,
that’s how it feels inside your head.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
The Bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered,
they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.
So then, in Buddhism, change is emphasized.
You must understand as one of the fundamental points of Buddhism, the idea of the world as being in flux.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination.
There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money…
they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.
“The more we try to catch hold of the present moment the more elusive it
becomes. It is like trying to clutch water in ones hands. The harder we
grip, the more it slips through our fingers.”
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize
that they are one and the same process as the universe.
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America.
And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
What I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system
in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of nature,
and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union.
A person who is fanatic in matters of religion,
and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe,
becomes a person who has no faith at all.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water.
When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.
Instead you relax, and float.
the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Faith is a state of openness or trust.
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.
Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by some kind of cosmic lawgiver.
Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.
My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there the central self,
you can call it God, you can call it anything you like, and it’s all of us.
Buddhism is not saying that the Self, the great Atman, or whatnot,
it isn’t denying that the experience which corresponds to these words is realizable.
Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it’s just doing it.
If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other,
life implies death – or shall I say, death implies life – you can conceive yourself.
reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.
“The only Zen you’ll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you.”
~ Krishna from The Bhagavad Gita:
It is better to strive in one’s own dharma than to succeed in the dharma of another.
Nothing is ever lost in following one’s own dharma. But competition in another’s dharma breeds fear and insecurity.
He alone sees truly who sees the Lord the same in every creature…seeing the same Lord everywhere,
he does not harm himself or others.
As long as you have attachment to the body and attachment to objects, fear and suffering will be with you.
Therefore, Krishna told Arjuna to develop his discrimination and rid himself of body consciousness.
He told him that once he was free of body consciousness he would be able to develop integral vision.
The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results.
Abandon all attachment to the results of action and attain supreme peace.
~ J.C. :
I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.
–
If we follow these principles, there is now to be found a short path available to technical mastery of mortality and mortal sufferings for earthlings, a reunification with our environs.
The principles have a simple base:
Do not confuse the map with reality – mind is a powerful map, but it is just a map.
Treat Others as though they were self, for we are all waves in one ocean.
Do not believe, see.
Do not hope, have faith in ourselves and The Allness.
17 February 2010
In my lifetime, the precarity, or desperateness, of people’s lives,
has grown, enormously, continuously, and alarmingly!
While the educated, information society, is ever more rewarded,
efficient, and luxurious, the vast majority are left out.
As of the late 1980′s, more than half of all people ever alive are living now.
That the vast majority of us are living on the edge of desperation,
or in deep desperation, as of mid first decade of the third millennium,
means we are faced with a world, where advancing technology has enabled anyone to live like royalty,
while enforcing a society where the majority, of all humans ever having lived,
are currently either starving to death, in grave danger of doing so, or worse.
Yet this technologia could engender an economy that could support most of us
in a style, that, still, very few have ever experienced.
We collectively have graver and graver impacts on our environments’
capacity to sustain us.
as a result of our individual desperate behaviors, we endanger all,
especially those who are not economically, and/or informationally, well endowed.
We must endeavor to reduce the general level of desperation among the masses,
else, even the rich will not be sustained.
The economic and information resources must not only no longer be
used against the interests of individuals, be put at the uses of the masses.
All individuals must learn to act less desperate,to spare what they can spare,
without suffering for loss, like info, pleasant labor, attention, and love.
None should not be well enough off to spare these things, for indeed,
not sharing these things is itself loss, one we all share,
not just the individuals denied.
All should be given their share of what our forbearers have handed down to us all.
the artistry, and knowledge of our predecessors should be available to all to mix,
and remix, and re-envision.
This is the only way back to an expanding economy,
over the hump of earths population limits and our increasing disparity.
Corporations are just the most powerful of such individual actors, not the best organized;
governments and other organizations are routinely,
like corporations, programmed to act desperately,
and to produce more desperation among others in so doing.
Wither goes our party on this path? How desperate are we?
Better, more human, communication, information, education,
and knowledge management,
allow us to fully share the most powerful resources
we have ever had, information, and the knowledge to use it with wisdom.
Humanity, and many other species, are badly losing the class war,
to the point of threatened, virtual, or real, extinction!
to our cultural toolage?
Our technology has been used to create an Earth,
where the majority of humans, who ever lived,
can only wish they had the freedoms and luxuries
of the tribal hunter gatherer life.
From most, the land, resources on and in it, tribal political power,
the heritage of passed down human imagination and experience,
even the control, use, and benefit, of their own labor and information,
have all essentially been removed.
For most, a hunter/gatherer life seems palatial for it is,
compared to squatting in a land”fill”;
more control, sustainability, nutrition, resource redundancy, other securities,
more luxuries, time, and space, and freedom.
The limitations of neighboring tribes seem like a small cost, the dangers,
even of tribal war, are a small price when compared to modern war’s costs,
or to working in a sweat shop to poison yourself and your land,
to work yourself to the bone to create a useless luxury product,
for wages that could never cover the cost of the useful thing,
the luxury good is a bad imitation of.
To poison the air? or to be?
a more desperate choice,even, than kill or be killed,
more stressful, less rewarding if successful, more lethal if not.
makes tribal warfare look like fun!
Tell someone feeling that desperate to preserve our environment,
there is only one answer, it is simple a question.
how do I survive?
This question more of us should be ready for a good answer to.
Even among those who fare better, many are so stressed out,
they spend many resources and much time, trying to get hurt with panache,
in desperate sporting extremes.
The threat of our own extinction becomes the most likely prospect
of our superior ability to adapt to, and master, threats?
i don’t think so…
What kind of human nature, or rationale, is that?
none at all!
Once the people seize the festival/party leadership,
first the lobbyists, then the politicians,
then the lawyers, cops, and soldiers,
may all be replaced,
then we will automate management and ownership out of their jobs
(they’ll beat us to it, you know they will;
then it’s just a legal change of ownership away).
At which point it will be time to sit the engineers down,
and retrain them to engineer for user usability and user desires.
Then sit the users down, retrain them for co-design of their own lives,
and resource management, the fun, easy,
joomla way.
The dTao be much more earnestly sought,
and the way to being fully human well shown,
in a world of animal, eventually vegetale, peoples.
Gia’s new brain will wake up,
within years heaven on earth, lamb lies down with lion.
the new religion, respect your place, and all others, in the Allness.
the new technologies will enable same.
to get there, we will automate management,
ownership, even visionaries, out of work.
no longer a job, the shared joy of striving to better our collective individual lives.
to preserve and embody the Earth’s behavioral and genetic information,
creating the beauty of her lifeways, expanding and diversifying them, protecting life,
the duty and pleasure of all.
but more than before, faster, more beautifully, more safely.
not ever less so.
every life will be secure, soon after, eternal.
the record will preserve you,
you will be completely, and the record will record it completely,
the record will be you, you will be the record,
the record will be backed up, copied, distributed.
immortal
virtual immortality for some imaginary social construct machinery
will transform into real immortality for all Her creatures.
we all know the technical side of immortality is almost worked out.
even now, we have much farther than that to go to build a less vicious,
paranoid, precarious, and desperate world.
A world that can learn to share,
as our technology now demands,
of us all.
You cannot stop it, you may only assist,
something we can all agree on:
automate management and ownership out of a job!
