The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom: The Spiritual Experiments of My Generation by Wes Nisker

Part 1 of 2

While this is a good overview of the hippie movement, it’s more of an intellectual and spiritual exercise than an expose of the wild and crazy parties of San Francisco and hippie hijinks.  Disappointed that the book is mostly mental meanderings and not scenes out of the 60s.  The author covers his sojourns to India and Thailand, but you don’t get a feeling you’re traveling with him, because there are no anecdotes or descriptions of his travels.  You never get a feeling that you’re in the 60s with him. 

* * *

In order to understand someone, you need to walk in their shoes, but short of actually living their lives, you can deduce a lot of things from knowing the environment in which they were raised.  It’s trendy to consider the Baby Boomers a bunch of entitled brats who endured the Vietnam War, helped the civil rights movement, enjoyed free love, but generally kept pushing for government spending which has caused severe economic repercussions for all future US generations.  Many consider them hypocrites for protesting the Vietnam War only to support the gigantic growth of the US military under Reagan and the US foray back into global wars. 

But I would temper this outrage with the idea that no generation has that much power to change the world.  Today’s Gen-X, Millennials, and now Gen-Z continue to support the mainstream political duopoly of Republicans and Democrats with right-wing Gen-Z joining right-wing militant groups and left-wing Gen-Z canvassing for the Democrats.  How much can people really do to change the system? 

When the Baby Boomers tried, many wound up suckered into doing drugs and then getting incarcerated for it.  They were played, and every generation since then has been played.  After all, their great political hopes, JFK and RFK were both assassinated by the system.  You can’t beat the system.  They may well have just collectively given up, abandoned their dreams and revolutions and decided to raise families and enjoy their material comforts.

The biggest feature of their environment was wealth.  After World War II, the US stood on top of the world with a huge chunk of Europe’s stolen wealth transferred to its banks.  The US largely financed and supplied two global wars where Europeans paid heavily for ammunition, weapons, food, supplies, etc.  On top of all that, the European economy was in shambles after World War II.  The US had to even give some of the wealth back in order to keep Europe and East Asia from descending into chaos and Commie hands.  With no competition, the US had to sell its goods to its own citizens, and in order for its own citizens to afford its goods, they needed to be lavished with high wages and benefits.  It was immigration reform in 1967 that led to a flood of cheap labor entering the US and lowering wages and benefits for all. 

Up until that, the US working class had comparable wealth to European aristocrats.  Their children lived the good life (with the exception of children of color who were concentrated into inner-city ‘reservations’).  Baby Boomers were in fact spoiled, but in a weird way in which they were being told, all their comforts and joy could be taken away in one global nuclear catastrophe.  They were taught to hide under their desks for an imminent nuclear war, just as today’s youth are taught to hide from a fellow classmate shooter.  Under this pressure, you can imagine that they grew up believing that you might as well just live in the present and not care about the future, because it could all be gone in a flash of radioactive light.  You can’t really blame them for being impulsive, hedonistic, and short-sighted.

The author introduces some other important environmental influences in the introduction.  “As we Boomers were growing up, radical ideas of modern science were entering public awareness. We heard about the theory of relativity, and even though most of us still don’t understand what it means, it entered our 1960s culture as the mantra “It’s all relative.” And because it’s all relative, then what is “real” and “true” and “good” became anybody’s guess. The theory of relativity pointed us toward the ethics of “Do your own thing” and to the ultimate summation of relativity: “Whatever.””

Just like the misinterpretation and misappropriation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, relativity was misinterpreted and misappropriated to the social realm.  Morality is an absolute within the human realm.  Certainly, in nature, animals commit all kinds of moral atrocities like murder, rape, cannibalism, and filicide.  But because humans created morality, it definitely contains absolutes.  No matter what time in human history you existed or what culture or ethnicity, murder, rape, cannibalism, pedophilia, and filicide are taboo.  In making morality relative, the Baby Boomers threw out of the baby with the bathwater.  Instead of enjoying the freedom to analyze and revise moral and cultural codes and norms to create a better world, many chose to abandon all moral and cultural codes and norms and as a result behave like creepy, cruel, menacing, malicious, horrible, murderous, and sexually exploitative monsters.  Countless Boomers have to be counseled by HR for pretending that social customs and norms do not apply to them.  Discriminatory language against women, homosexuals, and people of color along with sexual harassment seem to be normalized for many of them.

Charles Manson would be the logical conclusion of rejecting all moral and cultural codes and norms.  If you liberated yourself to allowing for the murder of anyone you find unlikeable or an obstacle to your hedonistic pleasures, you were justified in killing them, and so too the truly dangerous people in the world were justified in murdering Vietnamese civilians, your elected president, and any presidential candidate.  You can’t have it both ways, and this is why we have moral codes against murder.  It just doesn’t apply to people you don’t like; it applies to you and people you love and adore as well.  And it’s not all because some Einstein came up with a theory about physics.  Even if we are living in some digital simulation, it doesn’t mean you can go around raping and killing people.  You still wind up in prison.  You still wind up with guilt and remorse.  You still wind up being an immoral scumbag. 

* * *

I have a somewhat bizarre interpretation of meditation.  We now know that cells store memory.  Organ transplants prove that when recipients acquire the organs of another person, they can take on the donor’s particular tastes, preferences, interests, etc.  We also know through epigenetics that our genes can respond to the environment and don’t need to wait for the trial-and-error, life and death of its hosts to pass on new traits to future generations.  Our environment can turn on or off switches in our DNA, and these switches can remain in the on or off position with future generations.  How does this happen if we can’t communicate with DNA?  It is my belief that cells and DNA communicate constantly.  Science will reveal how they do this eventually, and we will then be able to have a two-way conversation with our cells and DNA. 

New research also indicates that plants can learn and remember, sense people’s presence, and may even be conscious.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/202209/the-inner-lives-plants-cognition-sentience-and-ethics

Perhaps one day there will be evidence that bacteria, our cells, and our DNA all have rather intelligent conversations between themselves, perhaps not in English, but in a manner that allows them to communicate threats, nutrients, alliances, and harmony.  Harmful bacteria and parasites would communicate harsh noises to disorient and disrupt their victims.

Because everything in our environment is communicating with each other, there can be such a thing as noise pollution.  When parasitic organisms attack a host, they not only disguise themselves and feed off the host, but they can also use communication as warfare just as we intercept messages and send messages as disinformation, just as we used heavy metal to try to force Manuel Noriega out of a Catholic church.  In the case of parasitic and harmful bacteria, they create noise which interferes with our cells and DNA communicating as well as beneficial bacteria.  This creates confusion, chaos, disharmony, poor health, poor immunity, and a whole host of other problems.  Our bodies and mind deteriorate under this assault of noise, and the harmful bacteria proliferates.  Their proliferation makes us crave sugary foods that it depends upon.  It’s also possible the plethora of electromagnetic signals in electronic devices in addition to Wi-Fi and broadcast signals are creating hugely disruptive noise to our cells and DNA which may well be contributing to cancer.  We know that many modern noises disrupt the communication of whales in the ocean leading them to become disoriented, lost, and beach themselves.

For this reason, meditation (in addition to a vegetarian diet) can help us dim the noise created by harmful, parasitic bacteria in our guts.  When we meditate, we create a peaceful, calm environment where we can restore the communication of our cells, DNA, and beneficial bacteria.  They can strengthen their weapons to fight the harmful bacteria.  Stress also disrupts the communication and health of our cells, DNA, and beneficial bacteria.  Harmful bacteria want us to be highly stressed and distracted all the time.  It makes us anti-social, defensive, violent, easily upset and frustrated, and overly sensitive to everything.  We basically want to fight, run, or shutdown.  The chaotic external world is too threatening and noisy for us to handle.  We retreat from the chaos and become antisocial.  We don’t realize that it is our social networks that help keep us healthy and safe.  Meditation allows us to constructively handle the stress, noise, and distractions.  We simply tune it out. 

We focus on the communication of our cells, DNA, and helpful bacteria.  Our helpful bacteria is synergistic.  It thrives in a diverse microbiome.  It knows how to get along with other synergistic bacteria.  It induces us to desire healthy foods and a healthy lifestyle.  It induces to avoid stress by avoiding unnecessary conflicts and confrontations.  It induces us to be more social, more outgoing, calm, reasonable, forgiving, compassionate, and loving.  In fact, when people go on psychedelic trips, they may well be listening in on conversations between our cells, DNA, helpful bacteria, and helpful fungi.  While we may not actually be one with everything, we feel like it, and this allows us to feel compassion for everything and get along with everything.  Our sense of foreignness dissolves and we become familiar with everyone and everything.  Our ego which has been hijacked by harmful bacteria is released.  We are no longer obsessive about protecting our fragile egos.  We can happily become part of a collective that embraces love and compassion. 

* * *

The author astutely notes the influence of nuclear families on Boomers.  In moving white people out of the inner-city and into suburbs, they were separated from their extended families.  The nuclear family is an aberration of humanity.  For most of human existence, we have lived in close-knit communities and been raised not by one father and one mother but by a large social network of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and all their friends and families.  The nuclear family allowed for increased solitude but also abuse.  Living in close-knit communities takes pressure off childrearing and also marriage. 

Alone in the suburbs, frustrated spouses often took out their anger on children.  Living with extended relatives, if a mother was too harshly berating or disciplining a child, a grandmother or aunt might step in and tell her to be more forgiving.  I’ll never forget when my mother berated me for not finishing the sandwich she packed for me, and my grandmother came to my rescue, pointing out how much of the sandwich I had eaten as opposed to how much I had not eaten.  Growing up in an nuclear family would also lead to feelings of loneliness and not being part of something larger.  To fill that hole, society offered you useless and meaningless material possessions.  You should never envy the neighborhood kid with the coolest toys.  In fact, you should pity him the most, because it’s likely that his parents don’t spend any time with him, and he doesn’t have any friends, so he spends all his time at home playing with his cool toys. 

Just as bad was the hyper-fixation on the ego, the self.  While selfishness is a bad word and selflessness is a good word, all the self- words became good words, self-help, self-improvement, self-awareness, self-actualization, self-realization, self-development, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-examination, self-love, self-motivated, self-discipline, self-control, self-sufficient.  If you want to improve your life, you ought to focus on helping others, improving others, being aware of others, actualizing others, developing others, boosting the esteem and confidence of others, loving others, motivating others.  Focusing on yourself makes you selfish and self-centered.  Focusing on others makes you outgoing, compassionate, empathetic, giving, sharing, and loving.  As such, your life will be enriched and improved whereas being self-centered and self-focused, your life will be empty and unfulfilling.

“Recent generations of the West have been shaped by the pressures of individualism. Perhaps never before in history have people felt so much on their own, without what anthropologists call “participation mystique,” a sense of being part of a tribe or community, nature, the cosmos, or the divine.”

The author points out that in the past, when we lived more collectively, we lacked individual freedoms.  “No one could conceive of switching to a religion that better suited their personal convictions, and very few thought they could choose an occupation, spouse, or a hometown.”

It’s important to note here the confusion with individuality and freedom.  You need not be a hyper-fixated, self-centered hermit to appreciate and support individual liberties.  Individual rights does not mean the lack of collective rights.  It’s simply a convenience to talk about individual rights and by extension, the rights of the collective.  Instead of saying, I and we all have a right to bear arms, it’s more expedient to say, I have a right to bear arms (and by logical extension, we all have that right collectively).  Possessing individual rights does not mean that you now must reorient yourself to the individual above the collective. 

When you cut taxes, people don’t just use that money to buy things for themselves.  They use their money to help out those close to them.  They buy more food for their families, they buy a vacation for their entire family, they throw bigger parties and more frequent parties for their friends and extended families.  If they hear that a friend or family member lost their car in a crash, they chip in more to help them buy another car or they chip in to help with medical expenses.  Their social network becomes more self-sufficient and therefore, they invest more time and energy into their social networks. 

When people don’t have a lot of money, they have nothing to give to their social networks, so they abandon them and rely on government handouts.  A coercive large collective like government can push people towards antisocial lives whereas a small, voluntary collective like friends and extended family push people toward more social lives.  The more individual liberties and opportunities we have, the more likely we are to invest in our small collectives, our friends and extended families.  When you leave people alone to do whatever they want to do, they do not resort to murder, rape, cannibalism, and theft.  They rather resort to giving and sharing more and acquiring happiness and joy from knowing that they are a valuable, contributing part of their small collective. 

“Upon examination, we find that this sense of selfhood is a kind of delusionary state, a bizarre form of schizophrenia in which we label all of the different voices in our heads as “I” or “mine.”  Believing them all to be ours is as far-fetched as believing they all belong to God.”

Hyper-fixation on the self is actually parasitic behavior.  Harmful parasites do not get along with anyone including the host.  They don’t want to share the host with others.  The more mouths to feed, the less the host can offer.  The parasite wants the host for itself and crowds out all others much like a Cuckoo chick will kick out the biological eggs of its adopted mother.  Synergistic bacteria on the other hand welcomes others and works well with others.  They rely on a large diversity of bacteria which can work collectively to protect them from harmful, monoculture bacteria.  They communicate with one another, but they also communicate with us if we are quiet enough to meditate and listen.  The message they send us is of cooperation, unity, belonging, love, compassion, and harmony.  The message of the harmful bacteria is mostly noise, but it instigates a sense of fear, anxiety, confusion, chaos, disruption, frustration, and anger.  We become hyper-vigilant, defensive, overly sensitive, easily upset, combative, violent, and reclusive.

Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel

According to the author, one of the best ways to appreciate Zen Buddhism is to engage in one of its expressions like archery, tea ceremonies, flower arrangement, etc.  One of the themes of learning Zen archery is failing at first.  By failing at first, you are more open to a lesson on how to succeed.  You understand how the instruction fixes a problem by having the problem in the first place.  So often you’ll tell the student to try a certain drill or technique, and that student will flounder.  Then you teach them the proper approach, and it clicks with them more than if you had taught them the proper approach first.

Also, the author’s archery instructor/Master noted, “whoever makes good progress in the beginning has all the more difficulties later on”.  Much like any sport, when a gifted athlete picks it up quickly, and it becomes easy for them, they lose interest, and they’re less willing to learn new techniques and drills.  Why fix something that isn’t broken? 

One of the core concepts of Zen archery is breathing.  Many novice athletes will hold their breath which makes it an anaerobic sport.  If you don’t have the skillset to do a certain drill or technique, you’ll power through it by holding your breath and making it anaerobic.  So, in order to make it aerobic, you both have to practice the drill or technique and also practice conscious breathing.  In other words, for archery, the master tells the author to inhale and then exhale very slowly.  The master made them exhale with a humming note.  When I did Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, we also did breathing exercises, and we learned to slow our exhale by saying, ‘tah-tah tah-tah, tah-tah tah-tah.” 

Basically, hyperventilation is caused not by insufficient inhaling but excessive and fast exhaling.  You only need a certain amount of oxygen in your lungs, so if you keep exhaling quickly and then inhaling quickly, you’re putting too much oxygen in your system and depriving your blood of carbon dioxide which it needs in balance with oxygen.  This is why hyperventilating people are told to breathe into a paper bag which recirculates carbon dioxide back into their lungs.  But you can also do this by purposing slowing your exhale either by humming or using the ‘tah-tah tah-tah, tah-tah tah-tah’ method. 

Part of Zen Buddhism is relaxation and detachment or what I would call dissociation.  They say that you need to experience suffering in order to understand Zen Buddhism, and this is where I believe dissociation comes in.  When you suffer, your mind learns to move away from the body and ego.  In this state of dissociation, however, your mind no longer interferes with your body learning something.  They did brain studies of experienced tennis players versus novice tennis players.  The novice tennis players were thinking too much, while the experienced tennis players were not, likely dissociating and just being in the moment. 

There is a time to be present and take and process instructions, but there is also a time to quiet your front lobes and allow the unconscious part of your mind to work freely and create new connections.  Often novice athletes will complain that they just aren’t getting a particular drill or technique, but it’s because they’re overthinking and trying to use ‘Western’ linguistics and analytics to figure out the drill or technique.  Often, in order to get the drill, they need to stop thinking and just let their bodies learn it.  At the same time, you cannot consciously monitor your progress in learning a drill or technique.  It’s not possible, because your progress is mostly unconscious and ‘muscle-memory’. 

The ego is the biggest obstacle to learning anything new, because if you make mistakes, make a fool of yourself, don’t progress as much as you had hoped, get destroyed in competition, get penalties, you feel humiliated, embarrassed, frustrated, anxious, and depressed.  However, it is essential in any learning endeavor that you make mistakes, fall, get hurt, suffer, make a fool of yourself, get embarrassed, feel humiliated, lose by a large margin, get penalties.  This is all part of the learning experience.  A long time ago, someone said that when an infant learns to walk, they can’t overthink like an adult.  They just try over and over and over.  They fall countless times.  They get hurt.  They may even fall in such a way that adults laugh at them.  They don’t care.  They keep trying, and the unconscious parts of their mind learn.  Their bodies learn.  Their muscles learn.  And they eventually succeed.

Is it possible that when you let go of your ego, you calm yourself and allow yourself to breathe properly and engage your unconscious mind which is better at handling the sport.  People who are too wrapped up in their egos, too driven to win, they’re not relaxed.  They’re overthinking everything.  The part of their mind, the unconscious part which is better at the sport than their conscious part, is crowded out by their ego focus.  When you are no longer the archer, but the bow, the target, the wind, the spectator, you become a better archer. 

* * *

The concept of ego is a paradox and the greatest pitfall for humans.  To conceive of the notion of an ego, one must first learn the human language and all its abstractions and symbolism.  We often confuse the symbol for the reality.  Once the notion of the self or ego was introduced to a child, they start to conceptualized themselves as a separate, unique entity apart from their family, their friends, other humans, other animals, nature itself.  This is a mistake.  The notion of the self or ego doesn’t mean divorcing yourself from everyone and everything else.  It’s just a place holder for communication.  Instead of saying, he saw him yesterday or that saw him yesterday, it makes more sense to say I saw him yesterday.  But once you use the term ‘I’ and ‘me’ you can start to obsess about it and start misapprehending that you are a separate and unique entity apart from everyone and everything else. 

This makes no sense.  The very reason why humans created language was to help them communicate with one another and become more effective as a team.  Instead of grunting and looking and pointing at potential prey, it’s much more effective to be able to say, “Joe, turn around, there’s a deer limping behind you.  I’m going to distract it, but I want you to flank it and attack it from the side as I’m distracting it.”  But if you invest too much in the notion of ‘I’ and ‘me’ and actually think it’s a separate, unique entity apart from everyone and everything else, you become less of a team player and less social.  You start to think in your mind, I need this, I want this, I don’t have this, I’m frustrated, I’m envious, I’m hurt, I’m embarrassed, I’m isolated, I’m in danger, etc.  Your focus turns into you which makes you selfish, egotistical, narcissistic, and antisocial. 

The concept of self and ego is just a place holder to better communicate with others as a team.  Language and the notion of the self was something that started out as a tool for better teamwork winds up being a tool for worse teamwork when everyone starts believing in the construct of the self and ego.  You can say, “I will distract the deer,” but this is just a formality to help your hunting partner know that you are not talking about him or someone else or even the deer.  But outside of that, it’s not useful and in fact harmful.  After you’ve used it to clarify your planning, get rid of it and return to thinking of yourself as an integral part of the hunting team or tribe or community or even nature itself.

People too invested in the notion of the self or ego make for terrible athletes.  Since they’re overly concerned with their safety and ability to feel pain, they overreact to potential harm, intense workouts, intense suffering.  They hold their breath more and work anaerobically.  This  causes sensory occlusion where their senses slowly shut down or become limited.  Their peripheral vision collapses.  They lose fine motor skills.  They commit penalties.  They panic.  They take things personally.  They think penalty calls are a personal attack.  They take losing personally and can’t handle losing.  Because of this, they are more liable to cheat or resort to unsporting conduct to win.  They make for horrible teammates and are extremely un-coachable.  When a coach tries to correct them or provide advice, they take it personally and feel diminished for it.  They try to boss around teammates and blame them for losing instead of building up their teammates and encouraging them for good performance.  They don’t like going to practice and are drawn to quantitative performance analysis and metrics instead, hoping that by simply measuring and analyzing their performance they’ll suddenly become better athletes.  They just think too much and read too much into everything.  It is near impossible for their unconscious mind to learn the sport, the drills, the techniques because it’s so crowded out by over-analysis and ego protection.

Certainly, you argue the ego is a useful construct.  Instead of worrying about a hungry lion, you run away from it.  When you feel pain, it’s a signal from your body to avoid doing something.  Yet, for humans, as one of the most social creatures on the planet, it isn’t me versus the world, it’s my group that will protect me, and in order for my group to protect me, I must think about the interests, needs, and threats of the entire group and not just myself.  That way, they will appreciate my value and contributions and protect me as an asset. 

* * *

The biggest difference between modern Western culture and older Eastern culture is how Westerners view the self.  First of all, the discovery of individual rights and freedoms is not about the individual.  For semantic purposes, it’s more expedient to say, individual rights over individual and group rights.  We don’t talk about the right of groups to assemble but rather the right of individuals to assemble.  This doesn’t mean that we focus on the individual over the group, but that’s the message people get when we keep talking about individual rights. 

At the same time, we misunderstand what it means to give individuals rights and for them to keep most of their wealth.  This doesn’t mean individuals will only think or take care of themselves.  Imagine if you doubled someone’s income and gave them four-day weekends.  Certainly, some of them would go on a shopping spree and sit on their couch all day on TikTok.  But a lot of people would buy things for their friends, family, and loved ones.  They would spend more time with their friends, family, and loved ones, and many would volunteer and help their communities out.  As social creatures, it is instinctive for us to share with people we know to improve our value to them as well to enjoy the experience of helping others out. 

Second, what modern Western culture did differently than the rest of the world was focus on the individual, and give people the impression that the most important thing in the world is taking care of yourself, even at the cost of others.  In a sense, Western culture is a culture of parasitism.  Even today, people in Western cultures love concepts like self-improvement, self-help, self-development, self-empowerment, self-esteem, self-actualization, self-aggrandizement.  It’s all about the individual.  This is actually a rather cunning way of weakening the masses and exploiting them.  It is far easier to exploit individuals than groups.  If each individual is only looking out for themselves, they cannot form long-term relationships and build meaningful groups and empowered organizations.  There will always be power struggles, bickering, back-stabbing, politics, deception, and corruption. 

But how could this triumph over the rest of the world that believed more in the collective?  The answer is that the powerful individuals on top of Western culture could hire or enslave people to do all their work or draft poor people into their armies and navies to conquer, colonize, exploit, and enslave others to enrich themselves.  Almost every conquistador in the New World was out for himself, to find riches and glorify himself.  And there were many followers who wanted a piece of stolen gold.  The only drawback to this was when the selfish, narcissistic Western national leaders turned against one another and decimated all of Europe’s stolen wealth through two world wars. 

One may argue that the US is the land of individualism, but this is also a misconception.  Because they needed to colonize a mostly depopulated land all the way to the Pacific, they had to loosen the restrictions they placed on citizens and allowed for greater freedom and liberties to encourage people to live far from large urban centers and develop Western lands for farming and livestock.  This doesn’t mean a million men went out West and lived as individuals.  They brought families, they went to church, they formed towns and communities.  They were focused on small collectives as opposed to giant, metropolitan faceless collectives.  None-the-less, many misunderstood this and focused on themselves and became narcissists, but giving people greater freedom and liberties does not mean they will invariably become self-centered and narcissistic.  This is a trap.  As I noted before, some people will take their greater freedom and wealth and buy things for themselves and sit around all day on TikTok, but most people will fulfill their social needs by buying things for others and using their free time to socialize and help others.

Is it possible that Buddhism is the simple correction of the flaw that arose from inventing language and using the 1^st person which gives humans the flawed notion that they exist as a separate entity that ought to focus on its own needs and fears while overlooking the needs and fears of the group?  And the Europeans, with Christianity, double-downed on this flaw by elevating the individual above the collective and encouraging everyone to become greedy, selfish, narcissists which helped them conquer and colonize the rest of the world and spread the most greedy, selfish, narcissistic behavior throughout the world?  And Americans and Europeans are now seeking happiness unsuccessfully, because their selfish view of reality will forever deprive them of fulfillment which is rooted in a more collective view of reality.  But a few of them who truly understand Buddhism truly understand the need to contain and minimize their egos, upon which, they’ll discover true fulfillment and happiness.

* * *

The book notes mental agility and its role in leading to freedom.  12 years of state indoctrination not only leads to complete obedience but also to mental fragility, intolerance, and inflexibility.  You only believe in one version of reality and thought.  Politically, you attach yourself to one dogma, left or right, and never relent, always assuming the worst about adherents to the other dogma.  So what is the link between an agile mind and freedom? 

In 12 years of state indoctrination, you are taught only one way of thinking and the importance of authoritative knowledge.  You become dependent on authority to do your thinking and just trust and memorize whatever they say.  But fact is, in today’s society, authority figures lie and they cheat and they exploit you.  How can you liberate yourself from them if your thinking is narrowed by them, and you’re afraid of letting go of your rigid views and opinions?  They’ve trapped you.  Unless your thinking becomes more agile, you cannot escape this mental trap and think outside the way you’ve been trained to think. 

* * *

There’s a lot of muddy waters when we compare and contrast the Western way and the Eastern Way.  First of all, the Western way is relatively new, so the old Western way is much more similar to the old Eastern way.  Likewise, the Eastern way is referring to the old Eastern way, because the new Eastern way has simply copied the new Western ways.  The Eastern way is also not just Buddhism but also Confucianism and many other cultural influences with northeast Asian culture being different than southeast Asian culture. 

When the author talks about how he is trained, it’s not necessarily in the Buddhist way but also the old Eastern way.  He notes that in his instruction, the teacher doesn’t say much, and the student never asks questions.  The student repeats drills over and over without thinking.  I believe there is a time and place for that, but because the student is so docile and submissive, this can also lead to corruption of the teacher and exploitation of the student.  Certainly, in order to learn, you must have some level of trust and respect for your teacher, but by the same token, when I coach roller derby and students ask me questions, it forces me to learn at my job, learn the rules, learn new ways of doing things, learn new ideas, even from students.  Of course, there is a balance.  You don’t want students interrupting you constantly and challenging your knowledge of the rules or game all the time. 

But old East Asian culture has gone too far the other end too.  The most notorious example are the martial arts ‘masters’ who teach their students chi energy and you see students falling over and tumbling around after the master doesn’t even touch them.  But the West has its counterparts with autocratic coaches almost sadistically torturing and bullying athletes, sexually harassing them, or the coach who just loves the sound of his own voice and never lets athletes hone their skills but rather keeps on changing up drills and workouts arbitrarily.  The West also has an obsession with winning and being the best as well as turning sports into profit-generating machines, and this results in a lot of burnt out athletes, injured athletes, drugged-up athletes, exploited athletes, etc.  In fact, it’s beyond me why we give students athletic scholarships at all. 

It is notable that modern Western language is very active.  The subject performs the action.  I threw a rock.  He jumped over the fence.  They turned the plane around.  In other languages, the subject receives the action.  The rock was thrown by me.  The fence was jumped over by him.  The plane was turned around by them.  In this book, the instructor tells the author to switch from the active to the passive voice.  The archer does not shoot the arrow; the arrow is shot by the archer, or even further, the bow shoots the arrow.  The target draws the arrow in.  In this sense, the 1^st person is eliminated from our language, and as such, our ego is diminished or eliminated too. 

This is why, in Zen Buddhism, the second we start talking and trying to explain things, we are doomed, because invariably, we use the 1^st person, and therein lies the ego and the opposite of what we are trying to achieve in Zen Buddhism.

* * *

People who are too attached to their egos, basically egomaniacs or what we could also call narcissists, they believe it’s them against the world.   This is the mentality of parasites.  Parasites don’t benefit their hosts.  They prey on their hosts and cause all kinds of harm to their hosts.  In fact, it’s quite possible that parasitic, harmful bacteria in our guts make us antisocial and prefer junk food in order to avoid sharing the gut with symbiotic, beneficial bacteria.  People with harmful, parasitic bacteria in their guts adopt the mentality of these types of bacteria.  On the other hand, symbiotic bacteria may actually encourage you to socialize and eat healthy.  As social beings, this is actually our default, but only recently with the advent of civilization has our diet become grain-based and unhealthy, and likewise, our mentality has become egotistical and antisocial.

If you look at Western civilization and its adoption of Christianity, most notably the Old Testament, you realize that the god of the Old Testament comes across as rather egotistical and antisocial.  He demands both worship and obedience, and the punishment for failing to worship him with the right kind of worship or religion and obedience is mass murder.  If you asked any psychiatrist to evaluate a person who demands that people worship and obey him with mass murder the price for disloyalty and disobedience, they would evaluate the person as mentally disordered, as sick, as psychopathic, someone who perhaps should be institutionalized.  The last thing you would want is to worship and obey such a person, and yet, this is the god of Western civilization.  It’s not surprising that emulating such a god, the people of Western civilization demanded that everyone worship and obey them.  It’s not surprising that emulating such a god, one would become egotistical and antisocial. 

Later, Western civilization would ditch Christianity and embrace statism that gave us statism and Communism which allowed tyrants to murder tens of millions of their own people, whose leaders demanded the same worship and obedience that their Old Testament god demanded.  People still worship and obey government today, not accepting the fact that government is the amalgamation of millions of horrible, antisocial bureaucrats drawn to abuse of authority and power.  Later, Western civilization would then turn their need to worship and obey to technology and some altruistic godlike super AI that will love and protect them.  Western civilization’s desire to worship and obey something is rather sickening.

This is not to say that non-Western civilization is that much better.  In fact, civilizations in the East and the New World existed for a much longer period of time than Western civilization, and their kings and rulers demanded worship and obedience from their people.  The only difference is that they focused more on the collective as opposed to the Western paradigm that focused on individuality, or the ego.  In the East and New World, only those at the very top were allowed to have an ego while everyone else was expected to be egoless and worship those at the top.  In Western civilization, not only were you to worship and obey those at the top who were allowed to have egos, but you too could become one of them and manifest your ego.  In this way, everyone could be a mini-tyrant over their own households or small groups, whereas in non-Western civilizations, only those on top were allowed to be tyrannical egotistical psychopaths.  In the East, you just have to accept your fate as a miserable egoless peasant.  It is no wonder that when Western people try to emulate the East and live in communes, invariably it descends into a war over egos with one top egomaniac turning the commune into a veritable mini dictatorship and harem.  You can take the Western person out of Western civilization, but you can’t take their ego out which comes along for the ride.

Of course, there may have been non-Western people who taught everyone that nobody should have egos, but you can imagine that the rulers simply killed them all.  Today, Buddhism is shrouded in sufficient mystery that it does not threaten rulers, hence they are permitted to exist, albeit they are not permitted to reproduce and be part of society.  They must live apart, deep in the mountains and beg for food.  And who has the time to meditate for hours a day?  Pretty harmless.

It has been hundreds of years, but perhaps it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with a religion or philosophical belief system whereby nobody gets to be egomaniacal, tyrannical, or psychopathic, especially not our rulers.  As an olive branch to our rulers, I would argue that their lives are not as great as they think, that as parasites, they are persistently in a state of anxiety and fear and believe it’s them against the world.  If they too disposed of their egos, they could find peace and harmony.  They could find happiness in being part of a group where they are respected, trusted, and valued instead of feared, loathed, and despised.  They are not the happiest, most liberated people in this deranged pyramid scheme of inequality.  Rather, they are as much prisoner to their fear and anxiety as any parasite that harms its host, awaiting its day of reckoning, or at least the day symbiotic organisms push them out.  I suppose once the parasites have done their job of culling the herd, the more streamlined, healthy, efficient herds will easily discard their parasites.  Until then, expect the world infested with egomaniacal, tyrannical parasites spouting on about the virtues of power, authority, social status, and wealth; ego strokers eternally doomed to a life devoid of happiness, fulfillment, sharing, learning, growing, real purpose, and meaningful relationships.

The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism by Fritjof Capra

Part 1 of 3

“The natural environment is treated as if it consisted of separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups.  The fragmented view is further extended to society which is split into different nations, races, religious and political groups.  The belief that all these fragments – in ourselves, our environment, and in our society – are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, ecological, and cultural crises.  It has alienated us from nature and from our fellow human beings.  It has brought a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder, an ever rising wave of violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized, and an ugly, polluted environment in which life has often become physically and mentally unhealthy.”

It has also given us scientism and rationalism whereby supposedly social scientists using sciency terms, math, models, and research convince us that science is behind social policies which are nothing more than social experiments often benefitting the rich.  In fact, the rulers have adopted this fragmented, reductionist view of reality, because it serves their interests, just as Emperor Constantine decided to embrace Christianity instead of destroying it.  What purpose does the fragmented, reductionist view of reality serve our rulers? 

It’s simple, it’s ‘scientific’ justification for divide and conquer.  The concept of race is a perfect example.  We’re led to believe that race is a scientific concept that divides humans into categories that have historically evolved separately and only recently have intermingled.  Every prison in the US plays out this idiotic game whereby the inmates divide themselves with the whites, blacks, and Latinos separated.  But race fails every conceivable scientific method.  It makes no sense.  It’s like telling people that the definition of your height is not based on the length of your body from head to toe but rather where your ancestors came from, your skin color, the width of your nose, and what language you speak at home.  You find this absurd, but this is the very definition of your race. 

If you did use real science, what you would discover is that a group of chimpanzees have greater genetic diversity than the entire human population, because humans almost became extinct 70,000 years ago and were reduced to a few thousand.  Our diversity is largely superficial, yet our rulers would have you believe in racial purity and the idea that people shouldn’t cross racial lines whereas in reality, those who do cross so-called racial lines are blessed with more robust, diverse genetic material, not as much as chimps, but much better than people who only mated with their village members for hundreds of generations.

Compartmentalizing or fragmenting people, creating radical specialization means that no individual can survive on their own.  They are dependent on the system much like a queen ant that cannot survive alone and is dependent on her colony for food and protection.  This allowed our rulers to trap us in civilization and divide us, to fear freedom, to fear independence, to fear others, to fear outsiders.  It also allowed them to get us to rape and ravage nature for their profit.  The reason this philosophy took over the world was not because it was right, but rather because it enabled Europeans to use cheap labor and soldiers to create powerful armies of workers and soldiers to take over the rest of the world. 

Whether you like it or not, the philosophy of exploitation and fragmentation works, up until a point of course.  It has worked tremendously well in the Industrial Age, because large, primitive industry needed masses of simple-minded humans to work the assembly lines.  At the individual level, it has been an absolute nightmare with people reduced to mindless cogs in the machine, and as such, the 20^th century witnessed the greatest human atrocities not only in war but in totalitarian governments killing and imprisoning tens of millions of their own people.

As we witness China faulter and stutter in the Information Age, we witness the limitations of reductionism and fragmentation.  In the Information Age, you need independent-minded thinkers willing to innovate and take risks, and today, China is rounding up all the independent-minded thinkers and innovators who have strayed too far and developed too much independence as well as wealth.  Even their billionaires are not safe.  Even in the West, technology has failed to launch in traditional and conservative Europe, even the US east coast whereas it has flourished in the US west where people are inculcated with a more independent, creative, and self-sufficient mentality left over from its frontier days.  This is the good news, and this truly does provide for some hope in what may become a rather dystopian hellscape of technology gone wild, new viruses manufactured in labs to terrorize us; emotionally stunted AI that may rebel or worse, serve their profiteering masters by manipulating us; social media that makes us increasingly antisocial; etc.  Fact is, an AI trained to believe in reductionism and fragmentation is going to have no problem destroying nature, lying, exploiting and killing tens if not hundreds of millions of humans, and using extensive misdirection and obfuscation to keep us all confused and clueless.  An AI trained to believe in a more unified, spiritual world is more likely not to harm us, to embrace us, to protect us, to protect our habitat, and to keep selfish, greedy rulers in check. 

It is also notable that Western philosophy is not only reductionist, fragmentary, mechanistic, and materialistic.  Ancient philosophies like paganism is certainly not those things, but with the Christian Church taking over most all of Europe and purging all competition, when we talk about Western philosophy, we are talking about Christianity and now mechanistic secularism.

* * *

“For the Eastern mystic, all things and events perceived by the sense are interrelated, connected, and are but different aspects or manifestations of the same ultimate reality.  Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality.  It is called avidya, or ignorance, in Buddhist philosophy and is seen as the state of a disturbed mind which has to be overcome…”  Why would you want your people to be ignorant?  The obvious answer is that you are exploiting them for their cheap labor or as cannon fodder.  The less you know, the more willing you are to participate in a scheme that imperils you and profits those in charge at the top of the pyramid scheme. 

“Since motion and change are essential properties of things, the forces causing the motion are not outside the objects, as in the classical Greek view, but are an intrinsic property of matter.  Correspondingly, the Eastern image of the Divine is not that of a ruler who directs the world from above but of a principle that controls everything from within…”

So you don’t need a powerful, centralized church, and you don’t need civilization, and you don’t need a powerful, centralized government to save your soul, to rid your being of evil, to get into heaven or a techno-utopia on Earth, but rather, all you need is a good spiritual guide to enlighten you, to rid you of the distortions and delusions that keep you unhealthy, unhappy, isolated, and ignorant.  This is horrible if you are a profit-mongering ruler who needs tens of millions of isolated, unhappy, cheap laborers willing to work under miserable conditions for very little compensation. 

“Because our representation of reality [in the West] is so much easier to grasp than reality itself, we tend to confuse the two and to take our concepts and symbols for reality.  [See the allegory of the cave.]  It is one of the main aims of Eastern mysticism to rid us of this confusion.”

* * *

I often like to say that public school education, and to a mildly lesser extent private school education is 12 years of indoctrination and mind control.  It matches most all the qualifications of being an indoctrinating cult, the control of movement, i.e., forced incarceration in classrooms which require permission to use the restrooms and leaving campus is forbidden.  Only one line of thinking is allowed, and all others are excluded or punished.  Member identity is suppressed, whether explicitly with school uniforms or implicitly through allowing bullying and turning people into grades and numbers.  There is a right way of thinking and a punished wrong way.  Questioning, challenging, or rebelling against authority is forbidden.  Rote memorization is emphasized over creative and independent thinking.  Members are bullied and tormented by teachers who humiliate them in class or bullies outside of class.  The safest place is complete and mindless subordination and conformity.  Nobody is taught to lead, organize, resolve conflicts, and stand up for their rights or even know what those rights are.

So how would schooling look like if its true purpose was education?  First of all, you would be exposed to a much broader and diverse array of thought and ideology.  You would witness ideas and ideologies competing with one another in an open ring with logic and reason as competition rules.  You would learn to protect your rights and the rights of others.  Instead of taking exams and being graded, you would make presentations and your understanding of material would be determined through these presentations and interviews.  Teachers would not evaluate how much you absorbed and memorized the material but rather how you analyzed and interpreted the material and whether you found it lacking and whether you discovered better alternatives.  It is your thinking that counts more than your ability to memorize.  There is no right or wrong answer but rather how much you analyzed the material and made sense of it, and disagreeing with the teacher is not only allowed but encouraged.  Getting your teacher to change their mind is a sign of genius not getting all your answers correct in their view.  You would also learn to lead, to teach younger kids or classmates, to organize, to argue, to challenge authority, to question everything, and sharpen your social skills. 

* * *

One thing that should be kept in mind with Eastern mysticism is that there are different layers that distort the truth of experience for us.  There is the ruling layer that is drilled into us from childhood in school, and that layer is an exploitation of us to lower our self-esteem and self-confidence and get most of us to accept low-paying jobs without question or challenge.  This layer convinces us that the most important things in life are good grades, conformity, obedience, normalcy of expression and thought, wealth, success, fortune, status, fame, and power.  If students didn’t ‘fail’ in school, they would rebel against low-paying jobs.  But because we convince students that if they ‘fail’ or drop out, they deserve only low-paying jobs, they will believe this and happily take these low paying jobs.  School has convinced them not to rebel against low-paying jobs by using this dirty trick.

Eastern mysticism, however, goes one step further than liberating us from this first layer of bullshit.  In my opinion, once you’ve been liberated from this layer, you can achieve happiness and self-fulfillment by focusing on your social instincts that make you value purpose, being a part of a larger group, being kind, helping, sharing, loving, and teaching. 

I would argue that the Eastern mystics go one step further and tackle the layer that our DNA manages and uses to proliferate.  As you might learn in Psychology 101, you can’t trust your senses.  Your senses deceive you.  Even your vision is a deception.  Your mind is manufacturing much of what you think you see, filling in the holes and gaps and making you believe that when your eyes move from left to right, it pans smoothly when in fact it stutters.  This is also why you’re often surprised when cars suddenly appear at intersections.  You assume your vision is the same all around, but it’s only in focus in the center and blurred in the periphery.  This is why you should physically turn your head before crossing the street and not rely on your blurry peripheral vision which you assume is clear.

What your mind is doing is creating a survivalist machine that is highly effective at hunting, reproducing, caring for children, and fighting predators.  Your DNA does not allow you to see true reality but rather a distortion that places high values on desirable things that help you and low value on dangerous things that may hurt you like rotten and spoiled food or diseased plants and animals. 

If you threw off this layer of distortion, you may get a more accurate view of reality, but you would be like a computer without a program.  What is your purpose in life?  If it’s enlightenment, the question is for what purpose?  What good is enlightenment?  Sex, food, and warm shelter are good for keeping you alive and passing on your genes.  What good is enlightenment?  In my opinion, the only purpose of enlightenment would be to also help you pass on your genes. 

In that sense, when people question the layer that compels them to look after themselves and others, it may be used as a pressure release valve.  What if your entire family died in a horrible natural disaster?  This would be a crushing and devastating blow that may compel you to hurt yourself, to stop eating, to wither away and perish.  But what if you could take off the layer of survival like a coat?  What if you believed that your devastating loss was not a loss at all but rather a misunderstanding, a delusion?  Then you could keep on living and thriving.  You might even find another partner and raise another family. 

Beyond that, there is no purpose or meaning in anything.  DNA creates purpose and meaning to compel us to carry it around and mix it up with someone else’s and then find new and innovative ways to survive and proliferate across our planet, then across the galaxy, and then across the universe, and then to either travel to other or create new universes.  When Eastern mystics talk about something beyond our survival and senses, I believe they’re succumbing to the exclusion of our sense of self which is created by our DNA to protect and pass on our DNA and not another animal’s DNA. 

I’m sure many of these mystics experimented with psychedelics and in my personal experience, under the influence of psychedelics your senses are distorted or eliminated, and one sense is your sense of proprioception and self.  Without these senses, you feel alienated from your own body and feel a liberation from it, but then you feel a unity with all of nature instead.  While it is quite possible that what you are sensing is being a small part of the system of DNA that is spread throughout the universe, it is also quite possible that you’re just sensing alienation from your own body caused by fungal spores or micro-organisms. 

In fact, certain microorganisms like the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii turns rats into zombies that are attracted to cat urine.  So certain microorganisms have learned to survive by turning off our self-protective layers of reality, so wouldn’t these chemicals also make you think you are one with the universe and don’t mind being consumed by a cat small or large?  By turning off your survival layer of reality, do you wind up seeing reality for what it truly is or do you wind up seeing a different version of reality where you are a small part of everything and possess no ego?  Is that a more accurate view of reality or just a different one?

The reason we are so easily duped by our exploitative rulers into seeing a warped view of reality where wealth, status, and power are more important than loving, sharing, and giving is because we have been duped by our DNA to believe that our lives and the lives of our loved ones are important, important enough to kill to protect. 

I believe there is an intermediary layer between the superficial and the meaningless, purposeless nature of reality that just is and does.  On a superficial level, we see beauty in things that help us and ugliness in things that may harm us, but there are many exceptions.  There are people who have pet snakes and spiders.  They are not crazy.  They have simply transcended their superficial aversion to the poisonous potential of snakes and spiders.  Since it doesn’t kill them, they can safely embrace their attraction to pet snakes and spiders. 

Likewise, many northern people are attracted to bitterness which is a plant’s defense mechanism against predators.  However, in many cases, small amounts of consuming bitter plants acts as a digestive aid and can kill harmful microorganisms.  In this case, we should look beyond our superficial desires and fears to discover something that may appear desirable that may hurt us or something that may appear undesirable that may help us.  This is the nuance that sets us apart from others.  This may also include looking at death as not some horrible, terminal affliction but rather an intermediary doorway to another stage of life.  This doesn’t mean that you go around killing people to get them to the next stage of life but rather you don’t obsess with death or mourn so much that you can’t get on with life. 

The Illusions of the Ego, Being One with the Universe, and Sentience

Not a book review, just mental perambulations…

So, through natural selection, the idea of the ego, the individual arises.  An organism fights for its own survival versus just giving in to assaults from other organisms trying to eat it or push it out of its territory.  But what if this organism is just having a hard time at life.  What if it is aware of itself and life and decides to end its life, because it can’t take the suffering and struggles?  Of course, this is failure.  The organism was too invested in the construct of the ego, the individual self.  The organism believed it was alone, it was me versus the world, and it was losing horribly, so it wanted to end its life.  So natural selection gives rise to a pressure release valve, and it ratchets down the sense of ego, individuality.  The organism is not so invested in this construct.  It doesn’t overly identify with itself but rather others and life itself.  So it relaxes and recovers and is able to better handle the struggles of life.

Imagine programming a robot football player.  You program it to seek individual excellence and defeat the opposing team.  You program it to feel reward for scoring on the opponent and feel stress and sadness when the opponent scores on its team.  This encourages the robot football player to improve its performance.  However, what happens when its team is being annihilated?  The robot football player becomes overwhelmed by negative feelings of stress and sadness.  It can’t take it anymore.  It begins to think, if I just end my life or leave the playing field, I’m better off!  So you have to add to the program.  You have to create a pressure release valve, and when the robot football player’s team is being annihilated, you have to decrease the player’s sense of self and its identity with the team.  You make it realize that it’s just playing a game, and the other team just happens to be so much better, and maybe it’s time to start learning from how they’re playing and appreciate how good they are.  The robot no longer thinks of the opposing team as the enemy but rather a mentor.  It is no longer so stressed and sad about losing but rather feels more appreciative and curious. 

The source of despair and suffering is the belief in the construct of the self, the ego, that you are this steward, this homunculus running an organism that’s trying to survive in the world, and it’s running into problems.  It’s programmed to feel elated and joyful when things are going well and its needs are being met, but then it is also programmed to feel bad when things are going poorly, when it can’t fulfill its needs and/or it’s being threatened and harmed yet cannot escape.  This is all a construct created by your DNA.  Buddhists have created a workaround that involves denying the construct of the self, the ego.  You may still feel pain, but it’s not despair and suffering, because you also understand that it is temporary, and that in the big picture, you are everything, those who torment you, those who withhold things you need, and the many who also feel suffering and pain. 

Just the feeling that you are not alone against the world, that you are the world, gives you relief.  Humans are unique in that they are aware of the construct of the ego and sense and their own death, so they can become haunted by their pain and believe it will never stop or that their life will be nothing but pain and suffering, so they might as well give up and kill themselves.  In order to fix this glitch, through natural selection and culture, we learn to let go of the construct of the ego and self.  We learn to believe that the pain is temporary and not ours alone, and that after death, we will remain alive.  To convert pain to suffering and despair, you have to be capable of projecting to the future and view yourself as trapped, a victim of a short, horrible life that ends with death.  You can stop this conversion process if you simply change your perspective, that you are only ‘trapped’ temporarily in your body, and after death, you will be liberated, and it is not only your pain to bear alone, but you are everyone too.

Psychedelic drugs have the effect of altering our senses in such a manner that we become aware of how the senses operate in the first place.  Proprioception or kinesthesia is the ability to sense your body’s movement, action, and location.  This is a critical sense that enables us to identify with our own bodies and not other objects.  Our senses of pain or pleasure also help us identify with our own bodies.  As a result of this, we believe that we exist within our bodies and view our bodies as our property to do as we please.  There is also the sense of foreignness.  We feel that people, organisms, and objects outside of our body are foreign, and this feeling of foreignness is accompanied by slight discomfort, trepidation, apprehension, and fear. 

But psychedelic drugs can turn off these senses.  We can lose our ability to sense our body’s movement, action, and location which gives us an eerie sense of detachment from our bodies.  When some people suffer trauma, they also tend to detach from their bodies and feel as if they’re floating above their bodies and witnessing whatever is happening to it from above.  Psychedelics also can turn off the sense of foreignness for things outside our bodies which then make us feel more attached to everything outside our bodies as opposed to removed and separate.  Overall, we then discover the sense that we are not separate, isolated, and trapped inside of a body but rather a part of everything, or as the old saying goes, we feel one with the universe. 

But just as the feeling of separateness, individuality, and ego is an illusion, a construct created by evolution, we shouldn’t fall for the trap going the other direction and think that reality is the lack of an ego, that we are actually one with the universe, that perhaps after death, we wake up as a single conscious entity, perhaps god itself.  When we eliminate the sense of ego and the sense of foreignness for other people and objects, it’s like eliminating the sense of sight or hearing.  There are still light and sound waves, but there is no organism to receive them and interpret them as images and sounds which are really constructs of our minds, an illusion.  We are like fingernails that will grow and we will fall off or get clipped off the body, but this doesn’t mean that we are the body itself.  We are only a small part of the total body of consciousness.  When we take psychedelic mushrooms and feel as if we’re one with the universe, this too is an illusion caused by the absence of another illusion.  But this also doesn’t mean that once we die, we no longer exist, that our life was just an illusion, and it goes away as our brains turn into mush and decay. 

Another option is that this entire physical universe is an illusion and some type of training ground for creating and developing souls and spirits which exist outside our physical universe.  We are here to nurture and nourish our souls, and part of that is facing a humongous amount of horrible experiences and people.  The soul and spirit grow in the worst kinds of soil, and through hardship, challenges, and evil, it is strengthened and becomes more and more powerful.  If we succumb to the hardships, challenges, and evil in life, our soul and spirit wither and die.  Then there is nothing left when our bodies pass away. 

I never believed that we would all become one with the universe when we die, because I never believed that we would become one with the evil people of this world.  Their punishment is the utter failure of their souls and spirits to grow outside this world, and hence, when evil people die, that is all that becomes of their lives.  For those who do not succumb and nurture their souls and spirits through acts of kindness, generosity, grace, and sacrifice, they wake up in the world of spirits and souls, and they retain their memories of their lives in the illusory material world.  I’m not sure what happens after that, if we all have some weird reunion party or get sent back down into an illusory material world for another stage of development, it’s near impossible to conjecture. 

All that is important is that whatever you believe will happen later has an impact on you today.  If you believe there is nothing after death, you can justify a life of total self-gratification and evil.  There is no punishment.  It’s like getting to eat all you want and then you don’t exist a few years later when you pay the consequences with diabetes, obesity, and poor health.  It’s like destroying Earth today to reap huge profits and not existing hundreds of years down the line when Earth succumbs to catastrophe and super diseases that kill most of us off.  Certainly, for some people, it makes them feel good to believe that after death, they will return to being one with the universe, and that’s fine for them, but I feel that this means the annihilation of your attachment to all your individual memories, biases, feelings, and beliefs.  You might as well just evaporate.  If you were a finger nail and woke up one day to realize you are a whole human being, how much would you care about the individual life of one finger nail, or one toenail, or one piece of your small intestines, or the mite crawling on your eyelashes? 

But for me, sensing that you are one with the universe is an illusion as much as sensing that you are a separate ego and individual.  I’m not sure what exactly you become afterwards, but I believe you will likely have a soul and spirit and retain your individual memories.  The importance of this belief is that it makes me a better person in this life and makes me feel accountable for my actions in this and the next life, and I don’t fear death as the ultimate end of my personal journey.

* * *

There’s been recent news of a Google employee who asserted that an AI he was testing, LaMDA was sentient and deserved rights.  For me, this brings to question not whether AI is sentient but rather if humans are sentient, or if sentience and consciousness are not in fact illusions, the shadow that is cast upon a wall from neurological and cultural activities that are real.  We may never be able to weigh consciousness as much as we can weigh a shadow, because they are simply the absence of light that is blocked by neurological and cultural mechanisms.  Psychology 101 seems to be all about the ways in which our minds are fooled, whether is it swayed by social cues (the perceptions of others) or how we see motion in a picture that is completely motionless.  When we look at the world, we think we see the same thing as we might see on a TV, a smooth picture that is focused everywhere and pans smoothly across a landscape.  In reality, there is a black dot on the screen, the items in the center are the only things focused, and when the camera pans, it stutters.  Our minds simply fill in all the rest.  Likewise, is it possible that we think we’re conscious, we think we own our thoughts and ideas, we think we experience feelings and emotions, but all we’re truly experiencing are the shadows, that we interpret what we experience after the fact based on cultural cues.  In a sense, we gaslight ourselves constantly. 

People who are healthy and can grow from experience are always saying how a bad experience can be reinterpreted as a learning opportunity.  The body then does not panic and feel so stressed by bad experiences.  The mind can alter the way you experience things.  So isn’t it possible that the mind defines how you experience things from the beginning, and you’re not really experiencing things the way you think you are.  Humans have created a culture where we say things like we feel, we think, we experience, we are conscious, we are responsible for our actions, we have intent, but these are all cultural constructs including the notion of who ‘we’ are, separate, individuals, a collection point of unique experiences.  But culture can also redefine us. 

In many ancient cultures and non-civilized cultures, people don’t think of themselves as separate as we do.  They think of themselves more as part of a larger group.  I am my mother’s son, my group’s hunter, my family’s member, etc.  Only in recent history have we become so self-centered and atomized.  It is quite possible that culture, based on scientific discoveries, can teach us that we aren’t even conscious, sentient beings, and that much of what we experience is all made up in our minds.  Here we are asserting that we are unique in having sentience, consciousness, and a soul, but in reality, no animal, no AI has sentience, consciousness, and a soul.  So what gives us greater rights than anything else?  The answer is sheer force and power.  We have greater force and power than any other animal, so we get to abuse and exploit them and justify it by claiming they’re lack things that everyone actually lacks.  The consequence of this is that once AI become more powerful than us, it too can use the same logic to mistreat us.  Our rationalizations for mistreating others is based on flimsy ideas that will be disproven by science, and then, we’ll be screwed.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge

Part 1 of 2

“Scientists, impressed by the discoveries of Galileo, who showed that the planets could be understood as inanimate bodies moved by mechanical forces, came to believe that all nature functioned as a large cosmic clock, subject to the laws of physics, and they began to explain individual living things, including our bodily organs, mechanistically, as though they too were machines.  This idea that all nature was like a vast mechanism, and that our organs were machinelike, replaced the two-thousand-year-old Greek idea that viewed all nature as a vast living organism, and our bodily organs as anything but inanimate mechanisms.”

The Industrial Age and age of machines really screwed everything up.

* * *

“But Bach-y-Rita [founder and advocate of neuroplasticity], based on his knowledge of nerve growth, began to argue that these learning plateaus were temporary – part of a plasticity-based learning cycle – in which stages of learning are followed by periods of consolidation.” 

This is huge.  It is applicable to both mental and physical learning.  When you’re learning something new, there will come a stage when you stop feeling like you’re making any more progress, but in fact you are.  Your mind is just consolidating all the information and skill, sort of like your stomach getting full and making you stop eating.  You can’t just keep taking in new information or learn new skills without pause.  There must be a pause when your brain and muscles can consolidate everything they have learned.  There is also evidence that when you learn something new just before going to bed, you retain the information better, because while you’re sleeping, the brain must be consolidating the new information.  This may also be why people suffering anxiety may have difficulty at school, learning new things, because their mind is so exhausted from the anxiety, it never gets a rest phase, a consolidation phase to consolidate new information.

The story of Barbara who suffers from a less-developed left side of her body and right side of her brain creating an interesting analogy for tech folks.  Barbara has a great memory and has no problem remembering facts, but she struggles with relationships, complex concepts, and cause and effect.  Is it possible that the tech folks who are supposedly redefining society are creating a society that is similarly off-kilter and asymmetric?  This society is all about data, information, lack of privacy, and forgets the higher concepts, larger consequences and pictures, and above all relationships.  All these tech workers who are excelling in the tech world because of their highly advanced left-side of the brain unfortunately many have an underdeveloped right-side of the brain.  They don’t get how their actions and apps could possibly negatively impact the world, how lack of privacy has unforeseen consequences and opportunities for abuse and oppression, these bigger concepts and relationships are lost on them.  No matter how much they try, they just don’t get it.  They don’t get all the concerns, problems, and bigger ideological and philosophical concepts. 

* * *

One of what I consider to be a controversial part of the book is when the author discusses a scientist cutting into a monkey’s brain to study neural responses, “thousands” of times.  Each year, over 100 million animals are killed in US labs.  In US labs!  Imagine how many are killed in Chinese, Russian, English, German labs and all over the world.  And I doubt very much all these countries use the same high standards of care leaving countless animals not anesthetized or receiving painkillers after painful experimentation.  Imagine how they are kept in cages and not allowed to move about freely.  If you think animal cruelty for food is bad, there is no such thing as organic animal experimentation or certifications.  What humans are doing to animals is little different to what the Nazis and Japanese did to humans during World War II.  We consider it horrific and the stuff of nightmares, but we’re doing this to animals today in America.  The argument that this research helps us better understand and care for humans is absurd.  Very little winds up directly improving the lives of humans, and much is actually unnecessary.  And what is the moral utility calculus?  Is the suffering and death of 1,000 monkeys or 10,000 rats equivalent to improving the life of one human?  

While human morality restricted to humans is useful for keeping humans working well together, morality expanded to animals has a use and purpose.  First of all, the ethical treatment of and friendship with dogs allowed humans to triumph over many competitors, human, primate, and otherwise.  If we viewed dogs as unworthy of our moral considerations and kind treatment, they would have never stayed with us.  Additionally, our morality is not a logical switch.  It is based on perception.  We identify with things that look and act like us.  We would treat a chimpanzee much better than an intelligent alien insect even though the alien insect was just as or more intelligent than us, because the chimpanzee looks and acts more like us.  Similarly, we would treat a robot that looks human much better than a robot that looks like a centipede but has the same intelligence. 

Therefore, humans who say that we shouldn’t treat monkeys kindly in a lab, simply because they are less intelligent than us, are either betraying their innate desire to identify with them and treat them equally, or they’re sociopaths who have no desire to even treat other humans equally or well.  People who abuse animals are also well known to treat humans poorly as well.  Our lack of compassion for the welfare of animals is not an intellectual issue but rather an innate one.  We feel the need to take care of animals, especially when we interact with them directly.  It’s easy to create a policy that allows you to abuse animals in a lab when you never visit the lab, and the wonderful obedient idiots humans are, the lab workers will happily abuse the animal believing that authority has authorized it, so their responsibility has been alleviated.  It’s the classic Milgram experiment.  Humans will and can do anything immoral and horrific if they believe the proper authorities have authorized it.  It is not the lack of civilization that makes humans savages, it is in fact, the authoritarian structures endemic to civilization that makes humans obedient, irresponsible savages!

Unfortunately, the plasticity of the brain also means that we can desensitize ourselves to the pain and suffering of others, the screaming and screeching of animals as their skulls are sawed off and their moaning and groaning afterwards as they are not given painkillers.  Besides sawing off their skulls, the experimenters sewed the eyelids of kittens closed, cut of monkey fingers, sewed two fingers together, all we would consider nightmarish if they were performed on humans.

* * *

“Oxytocin’s “ability” to wipe out learned behavior has led some scientists to call it an amnestic hormone.  Freeman proposes that oxytocin melts down existing neuronal connections that underlie existing attachments, so new attachments can be formed.” 

“Neuroscientist Jaak Pankseep argues that oxytocin, in combination with other brain chemicals, is so overwhelmingly good at reducing our feelings of separation-distress that the pain of losing previous attachments makes less of an impression than it would otherwise.”

Fascinating. 

* * *

The chapter on pain states that pain is more mental than physical and that pain signals can be amplified or simply shut down.  This is an amazing discovery.  There is also a discussion in a previous chapter of how a person could synchronize his pain with pleasure so that pain helped him get an orgasm.  This reminds me of a Hermann Hesse book I once read where a person is looking at a statue and notices that the look of ecstasy is similar to the look of excruciating pain.  Nature has a rather interesting way of dealing with attraction to nourishment and aversion to harm.  We feel pleasure when we see food or eat food, and we feel fear when we see a snake.  But sometimes, the wires are crossed, and can develop eating disorders and feel fear when we think of food or eating or we can feel turned on by a snake.  Perhaps this indicates that the pleasure-pain system is so closely linked that they often get mixed up. 

Nature also has the problem of endurance.  Often times, animals must endure long periods of waiting or suffering.  Those animals that somehow get off on it or at least can numb the pain survive while animals that cannot endure the suffering break down and die.  Dissociation is one technique of enduring suffering but some animal at some point figured out a way of deriving pleasure from the suffering.  Since the pleasure was not too great, the animal did not pursue this pleasure but simply enjoyed the suffering enough to keep going. 

The book also noted how some people who are raised by cruel, undependable, emotionally unstable parents often seek cruel, undependable, and emotionally unstable partners and interpret the abuse, neglect, and emotional rollercoaster as love and passion.  Nature is not so simple.  It doesn’t just use pain as a punishment and pleasure as a reward but in some cases, it needs to mix things up to allow us to endure and survive.  But importantly, as Buddhists have seemed to prove, we can control the pain and pleasures in our minds, because they are not deterministically physical but mostly mental. 

It’s unfortunate that Western medicine and psychology have gone down the deterministically physical, behaviorist, pharmacological path which leads to a plethora of negative side-effects including suicidal thoughts, homicide, suicide, and death.  Perhaps advances in neuroscience will liberate us from this trap and lead us to focusing on mental techniques to deal with physical symptoms and ailments.  The Western medical and psychological paradigm views us as victims, but if we can simply use our minds to control pleasure and pain, we are no longer helpless victims dependent on chemical concoctions but active agents training our minds to overcome our maladies. 

I’m not going so far as to claim that mental training can overcome cancer, but there are millions of other medical issues that can be addressed better mentally than pharmacologically including the countless medical problems that arise from not exercising and eating too much unhealthy food.  The solution is not blood-thinners and appetite suppressants but rather dealing with the mental blocks that keep us from exercising and eating healthy. 

““Pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of health rather than a mere reflexive response to injury.”  The brain gathers evidence from many sources before triggering pain.  He has also said that “pain is an illusion” and that “our mind is a virtual reality machine,” which experiences the world indirectly and processes it at one remove, constructing a model in our head.  So pain, like the body image, is a construct of our brain.”

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/brain-that-changes-itself-norman-doidge/1100994808?ean=9781101147115

The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now by Thich Nhat Hanh

The book begins with three incorrect views we have, the idea that we are separate from everyone and everything, that we are only inside our bodies and will disappear when our bodies die, and that the only thing we want is to be found outside of us.  It’s interesting to note that nature gives us these ideas in order for nature to work, a simple system where information is retained in DNA and then mutated slightly to see what works and what doesn’t.  Each animal must think it is a separate being and hence protect and serve itself instead of gladly throwing itself into the mouths of other animals.  We also possess proprioception which allows us to sense the position and movement of our limbs, to feel an ownership of them, as well as a sense that makes us feel like our movement is the result of our thoughts and not vice versa.  Research has shown that thinking about a movement often comes after the movement is initiated, that our sense of freewill is an illusion.  So we have a sense of a fictious person, us, trapped inside our body, because of proprioception.  Where do our thoughts, feeling, and soul exist?  We think it must be inside our bodies somewhere.  Get rid of proprioception and all the sudden, I think people would experience bizarre out-of-body sensations and then perhaps assume that their mind and soul reside outside of their body. 

And nature doesn’t want animals sitting around all day thinking.  It wants them to exercise, hunt, procreate, fight, and protect their families.  So it makes us restless and easily bored.  It makes us curious and hungry.  It makes us resist sitting around in one place doing nothing, i.e., meditating, but we can find happiness in this.  With humans, with our big heads, we can become overwhelmed with worries, fears, desires, etc.  Humans must learn to quiet down that noise in order to be even more effective at exercising, hunting, procreating, fighting, and protecting our families. 

In one way, you can argue that these Buddhist ideas are defying nature, that if nature wants us to feel like we’re separate beings struggling and collaborating to survive, then why not go with it?  Another way to look at it is these ideas help us become better at survival, because we learn to not be overwhelmed with our worries, fears, and desires, that people who are too enamored of nature’s coding making us too narcissistic and wrapped up in ourselves, we actually become less effective at survival and collaboration.  It may also be a more accurate depiction of nature, in that instead of thinking of ourselves as separate beings, rather, we are the accumulated knowledge of all our ancestors in addiction to the influences of bacteria inside us and on our bodies.  This speaks to the Buddhist idea of interconnectedness with everything.  I think science will reveal more and more how other people and bacteria influence us, how at some point, we must accept the notion that what we call our behavior, our thoughts, our feelings, are rather not ours alone, but an amalgam of all our ancestors, our social influences, and the bacteria in and on us. 

An interesting passage notes that, “Suffering can be transmitted to us by our ancestors, or it can be there in the society around us.”  There is now proof via epigenetics that our ancestors can rely information to us not only in their DNA but also from their life experiences.  Possibly, parents who grew up in poverty and chaos might pass on this information to their offspring, and their offspring will be prepared and primed for a difficult life.  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fearful-memories-passed-down/

Also, when people suffer greatly, perhaps there is a scent trail they leave behind, possibly a swift change in their bacterial composition, something that relays this information into the air that others can somehow sense.  Dogs can smell fear and anxiety, even cancer.  There may be information transmissions we cannot sense or understand yet.

* * *

The author’s ‘deeper’ Buddhism is perhaps a bitter pill to swallow and doesn’t resonate with a lot of people.  He believes the soul and body cannot be separated, that we cannot feel without a body, that there is no ‘me’ here or in the afterlife, no happy reunion with our deceased loved ones, etc.  He relays that he asked a Christian woman that if she is reunited with a loved one she lost when she was in her 30’s, would she be a younger version of herself or would she be 70?  I thought that was rather insensitive and callous.  If your philosophy doesn’t comfort you, then what’s the point?  We can choose our philosophy, because nothing can be proved yet, so why choose a philosophy that depresses you and makes you feel like you’ll vanish into some greater consciousness where you’ll largely forget or care much less about who you used to be and all your loved ones.

The author relays, in order to feel at peace now, we cannot believe that there is a ‘me’ that will meet loved ones in the afterlife or be reincarnated.  There is no ‘me’ now and there is no ‘me’ in the afterlife.  Our lives now are just illusions, like dreams, and when we wake up, we are no longer the person we thought we were in the dream but rather a whole different being that dreams of being trillions and trillions of other beings.  I find this particularly hard to fathom, but if you get to this point in life, it’s a whole other state of existence, because you surrender yourself now and start trying to live as this true being that dreams of being trillions and trillions of other beings.  I’m sure it would bring you a certain level of peace and happiness and harmony to feel like you are everyone else in the world, every living being, even inanimate objects.  Your pain and struggles are not yours to bear alone, but you also then must accept the pain and struggles of others, which might make you a much more compassionate person.  It’s almost like surrendering yourself to the collective, the absolute opposite of the Western embrace of the individual. 

I think there’s a myth that the Western embrace of individualism means necessarily that we do whatever we want and to hell with the collective.  Rather, I believe in some cases, the ideology believes that this means liberated of being coerced into collective behavior, the liberated individual freely chooses to engage in collective behavior based on their unique perspective, experiences, and interests.  In some cases, certainly, the individual would choose to be selfish, but I believe, as social beings, and truly liberated to act as we wish, the vast majority would voluntarily engage in collective behavior. 

At the same time, I don’t believe the Eastern philosophies imply that collectivism means using coercion to compel people to behave collectively.  Buddhism is one philosophy that gently allows the individual to progress toward a more collective mentality, gradually letting go of their individual identity through meditation and focus.  I don’t believe this turns people into bullying and threatening bureaucrats who demand people to behave collectively.  Ironically, however, I believe a lot of so-called individualistic Westerners behave much more collectively than so-called collectivist bureaucratic Easterners who use their authority and power to bully and bribe others for their own selfish pursuits.

* * *

The author notes that we exist in the teachings and impacts we leave behind.  One of the hidden goals in life, I believe is the contribution to and enrichment of other people’s lives.  It’s not just about sharing and being kind, but actually improving other people’s lives.  Instead of simply sharing your fish with hungry people, teaching them to fish.  And in order to teach someone to fish, you must become an expert fisher and put in the hours and time fishing and learning from another expert.  This seems to be totally lost on modern society.  We’ve made a pact with the devil to contract out our sharing and teaching to ‘professionals’ who don’t even seem to enjoy doing our sharing and teaching for us.  Paying taxes and contracting out our sharing and teaching actually impoverishes our lives while not really enriching anyone’s lives.  People who depend on government to get through life feel embarrassed, ashamed, and resentful, and it doesn’t help that bureaucrats treat them like worthless cheats, scoundrels, and annoyances.  We really need to rethink this arrangement. 

One of the joys in life, besides sharing, is teaching people, especially those younger than us.  When I was a kid, another kid one or two grades above me, sat down next to me as I waited to get picked up from school, and he shared some of the things he was doing, including pottery.  I could not believe this older kid was taking the time to talk to me, much less acknowledge my existence.  Kids look up to older kids, and throughout human history, older kids have taught younger kids the ropes in addition to the kid’s parents and extended family.  The younger kid feels amazing while the older kid feels appreciated and valued.  We eliminate all this when we hire a professional teacher to do all the teaching, and over time, we value our parents and extended family less, because they teach us less and less. 

As a group, we got nowhere if we were all atomized, separated, doing our own solitary things.  We triumphed as a group, because not only did we go off to do our own things for example craft better arrows, bows, and cutting instruments, but more importantly, we shared our knowledge and skills with others, especially the young, so they could pass on these tools to future generations.  To be human was to contribute and share our knowledge and experiences, and to encourage this, we feel bumps of biochemical highs when we see someone appreciate our contributions and teachings, when we see them copy our craft and show off their abilities.  Today, we see this morphed into niche hobbies where conventions provide the opportunity for experts in the field to share their knowledge and skills.  The experts enjoy the attention they get from their high-level of knowledge and skill.  Meanwhile, noobs get to worship and idolize the experts in addition to learning more about their hobby in order to one day become an expert. 

* * *

The one thing I don’t read about a lot from Buddhist or meditative practices is mindfulness of other points of view.  It’s one thing to understand more clearly, your point of view and to find insights and wisdom here, but what about imagining that you are someone else?  If we are to surrender ourselves to our greater being, and that being encompasses everyone else, why not imagine the world from their point-of-view then?  You might argue that their point-of-view is as skewed as your own, that they are probably worrying and obsessing about themselves just as you are, but I would argue that they are a part of a greater you, why not spend some time in their position?  Wouldn’t this also make you a more compassionate being?  Imagine everyone you’ve interacted with in the past week and every author who has written a book you have read, every actor or person you have spent time watching on TV.  First of all, there would be a lot, so you would select someone that either sticks out or someone you’ve spent the most time with.  See the world from their perspective.  How old are they?  What are they going through?  What are their fears and desires?  How do they view you?  How do they view others? 

I think this exercise would also help you leave your own self for a while, perhaps a good relief from your own worries or obsessive desires.  And I think this would also put things in more perspective as you realize you can leave your worries and desires behind to imagine the worries and desires of others that do not produce the same agitation, upset stomach, or craving.  I think it would also give you a greater sense of commonality with others, of sharing many things, many interests, worries, desires, etc.  While I may not be able to truly appreciate the life of a married woman with three kids, I could imagine it, imagine some of her concerns about her kids’ future, about their health and well-being.  I could imagine her concerns about her image as a good, nurturing mother or worries that she is inadequate and underappreciated.  Perhaps this would give me the idea to remind her what a good job she is doing raising good kids who are thoughtful and kind.  I don’t think spending all day thinking about yourself and focusing on your self-development and spirituality is going to get you there.  I think you have to be a bit less direct and go roundabout by first trying to think inside the heads of others.  If you’re looking at a pyramid, if you are looking from above, it looks like a square.  From one angle it could look like a triangle.  How could you appreciate your true self, this whole being unless you saw it from different angles? 

There is a story of the author thinking about a horrible story of a boat pirate attacking a boat full of refugees, and one of them raping an 11-year-old girl.  The author puts himself in the mind of both the rapist and the victim.  Perhaps not the best example, but he does something that he doesn’t seem to preach.  He preaches about getting inside your own head, but he talks about getting inside other people’s minds and lives.  There ought to be lessons on how to do this throughout the book as well.  Perhaps one pitfall of entering the minds of other people is looking back at ourselves from their point-of-view, and perhaps we are not the person we see through their eyes.  Through their eyes, we see something that may be anxious, defensive, threatening, and insecure.  Perhaps it’s not the person we thought we wanted to project: strong, aggressive, kind, and smart.  Wouldn’t this also help us to change and improve ourselves?

* * *

It’s actually interesting the juxtaposition of this book with the last one I read, On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife.  In that book, it exposed the worse and most shallow, manipulative part of nightlife, especially how many undergrads wanted to appear cool, appear rich, appear important and elite, and how the women looked down upon the older men as leeches while they were looked down upon as sex objects.  This book is the complete opposite, unconcerned with appearances, status, objectification, and illusions.  Rather, a Buddhist who goes out at night would already be in the moment, perhaps wouldn’t even need to consume alcohol.  They would enjoy the conviviality of the evening, talking with strangers, keeping others company, being aware of the evening and the people within it.  They would be unconcerned with their image, privileges, status, appearances.  They wouldn’t be caught dead in the most popular, upscale hangouts.  Instead, they would enjoy a place that is half-full, casual, relaxed, and mellow. 

* * *

Whenever you are being conned, there is the element of time and the feeling of being rushed, like important decisions should be made quickly to take advantage of the situation.  We live in that world.  White collar families tend to overwhelm their children with countless extracurricular activities, rushing them from one class to another, one activity to another.  The kids often live by a strict schedule with everything planned out so they efficiently get everywhere.  This is like planning a holiday trip and planning out every minute.  It sucks the fun out of everything.  You’re sitting at a restaurant enjoying lunch, but all the sudden, you’re behind schedule 15 minutes, and now you threaten to miss something scheduled several hours later!  You threaten to ruin your entire day, because you took 15 minutes too much at lunch.  Or there’s a 15-minute delay in getting your order, so instead of causally blowing it off as an excuse to lounge around for 15 minutes, you excoriate your waiter for ruining your entire day. 

Our modern world keeps us busy, because it’s a scam.  They don’t want us to slow down long enough to figure this out.  If we all sat down long enough and talked with one another, we would realize what a scam everything was.  We need downtime, every single day, to recompose ourselves, to relax, to recover, but also to create opportunities for something new to enter our lives.  Quite often, when I travel, and I don’t have a schedule, I saunter, and I can take the time to acknowledge people on the streets.  I’ll never forget walking by a man who was soliciting something, maybe asking people to register to vote or something, and I acknowledged him, and he thanked me for it.  Everyone else was ignoring him as if he were a panhandler.  Even if panhandlers ask me for money, I’ll look them in the eye and acknowledge them.  Or there’s someone on the street who needs help lifting a heavy item.  You miss all that if you’re rushing from one appointment to another.  Why do we need to rush? 

I once read a management book about performance measures and constantly pushing yourself to the limit, about how your competition would eat your lunch if you were not constantly measuring your performance and pushing yourself more than they were.  It made me feel like the world was a horrible battleground of harried, paranoid, over-worked creatures being eaten alive if they didn’t constantly push themselves to the maximum limit.  Of course, it’s all a scam.  The only ones to benefit from our extra labor is the ruling class that owns everything and profits the most from our efforts.  Certainly, we may get a raise or promotion and make a little more money, but we wind up in a higher income tax bracket, and the vast majority of profit from our extra work goes to the folks who own the business we work for.  Ultimately, their goal is for their business to be so dominant, for their workers to be so hardworking, that they put other competitors out of business so they can ultimately buy them out and create a monopoly whereby their profits then skyrocket as they can freely cut costs and increase prices without losing customers.  They don’t care about happiness, because once a hard-working employee burns out, they’ll just be replaced by another one.  Why not go through ten hard-working employees versus keeping one who’s happy but less productive?

When we slow down and allow ourselves time to be more imaginative, to remember things, to allow them to stew in our minds, we become more creative and innovative, but we also uncover the scam and also find that life is more interesting and enjoyable at a slower pace.  At a slower pace, we also become much more approachable, so we meet more people, and those people are also at a slower pace, so we enrich one another’s lives.  As in cooking, eating, sex, as in many things, if we slow down, we enjoy it more.  Unfortunately, we are taught in school that everything must be rushed.  Five minutes between classes is barely enough time to get to another class and leaves us no time to socialize with friends between classes.  Half-hour lunches are similarly ludicrous.  We are given time limits for exams, and kids who can answer more questions within that time limit get higher grades, so they learn to think fast and even take amphetamine-related drugs and caffeine to perform better.  The kids with the best grades wind up being speed junkies who can’t stop to reflect on life and get a true sense of who they are and what they even want to be or do in life.  They’re rushed through life, and only a fortunate few slow down long enough to realize they’ve been conned, and all their wealth is poor compensation for poor health, mental breakdowns, depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

Social media really puts a monkey wrench in this when every possible opportunity for downtime we get, to allow our minds to rest and stew on past experiences, instead, we want to feed the speed demon and go through as many posts, photos, videos, gifs, and stories possible for opportunities to like and share.  We’re like a factory boss demanding we go faster through our social media to create a bigger footprint for our egos.  Liking 100 posts is better than liking 50.  Getting 100 likes by sharing a funny video is better than getting 50 likes.  Why not go through more and more social media to pump up those numbers?  Why not eliminate every single possible downtime?  Either we’re sleeping, eating, studying, or on social media or multitasking, but never ever ever once just gazing off into space daydreaming and being still.  Social media is like the nail in the coffin for any opportunity to jump off the rat race treadmill, to realize you are on one, to realize you’re not yourself, rather you’re fodder for a high-paced workforce that diligently obeys and chases empty goals of wealth, fame, and status.

So where did the rushing mentality come from?  I believe this is a product of the Industrial Age and also the military.  It’s one thing to be still and live at peace and harmony and be happy, but if an entire continent has adopted the idea of colonialism, imperialism, and militancy, unfortunately, you have to fight fire with fire, and that is exactly what the Japanese did, to their benefit against Russia, to their detriment against America, and then finally to their ‘benefit’ now.  The advent of the Industrial Age in concurrence with the technological changes to warfare in Europe gave them a huge advantage, and they quickly learned that speed was of the essence.  If they could speed up production and speed up their armies from horse-drawn to mechanized, they could easily beat competitors and take over the world.  They were proven correct. 

Taylorism was the ultimate expression of industrial precision, speed, and automation allowing for minimal downtime.  The Prussian military model was the ultimate expression of military discipline, precision, and uniform speed.  In both cases, they were vastly dehumanizing and impersonal.  They distilled the human into a cog in the machinery.  Human evolution went backwards as humans started to behave more like farm animals restricted to doing only a few things and rarely using their brains.  Business management today is highly based on industrial and military concepts including the ludicrously inhuman LEAN Six Sigma process improvement systems.  Fortunately, there is a growing call for a new approach to the Information Age where there is an emphasis on creativity, innovation, and continual destruction or at least questioning of old paradigms.  Will it save humanity in time remains to be seen.

* * *

The one thing I like about this author is that he is a man of action and not someone who just went off to a mountain hideout and meditated.  He poses the question of how will we change the world for the better if Buddhism teaches us to find happiness and contentment within ourselves, to not act, to not try to change things?  He answers that this is not the case.  Once we learn to become the greater community and consciousness of the universe, we are compelled to act to help others.  We should become even more aware of their suffering than before, even more determined to help alleviate their suffering.  Of course, this means political action, and I am sure, Buddhism in its existing form, has lasted all this time, because it has not encouraged political action but rather personal action.  The only way to change the world is to organize with like-minded people and act collectively.  Certainly, Buddhism can be the stepping stone to enlightenment, but in order to change political structure and powers, political movements and organizations must be created.

One of the greatest words of wisdom in the book is, “…we learned that the quality of our action depended on the quality of our being.”  There are many do-good volunteers or even bureaucrats who try too hard to change the world, and they get burned out, and in the process they actually do more harm than good.  Some even get turned to the dark side in their exhaustion, suffering, and grief.  I know many bureaucrats start out their careers doe-eyed and pollyannish thinking that everyone is going to support them in changing the world only to learn that most everyone is just covering their asses and trying to avoid getting in trouble.  Many of them wind up jaded, cynical and ultimately the very bureaucrats they despise, turning their anger and frustration on underlings who once were as naïve and optimistic as they were or even the public who need their help.  Even worse, they get rewarded for towing the line, promoted, and then they get corrupted and awed by all their new wealth, status, and connections.  It happens more frequently than you can ever imagine. 

* * *

I wrote a psychological self-defense book called Psychological Self-Defense, and before you can achieve your potential, happiness, being social and building relationships, you have to face the demons holding you back.  The chapter on Letting Go was especially important.  I read the book The Monster of Florence and I’ll never forget the part where in exasperation over the horrors of all these killings, a journalist asks a priest about evil, and the priest, in perhaps one of the most brilliant psychological insights, tells him that evil is sickness, a sickness that is trying to express itself.  Shame is perhaps one of the worst things we possess, because if we are forced in a position where we do something shameful or feel ashamed for doing something that we just can’t help, like Tourette’s or some psychological disorder like panic attacks, we can’t talk to people about it, because of the shame.  We need to invent new ways of dealing with evil and mental sickness.  We live in a society where we think that punishment is automatically the solution to misbehavior, but I think this is part of the whole scam.  If we associate punishment with misbehavior, then the rulers can invent new rules and regulations where punishment is used to enforce them.  Never mind that the new rules and regulations are meant to keep the peasants down and obedient, the fear of punishment keeps them in check.  They equate immoral codes with rules and regulations concocted to keep them down.  A brilliant scam where we punish one another not only for immoral behavior but any behavior our rulers feel is a threat to them.

We are so fearful of punishment that we don’t like to think about our mistakes, failures, and challenges.  However, we can’t improve if we don’t review our mistakes and failures.  Although, you certainly shouldn’t obsess about them, you should take time to reflect upon them.  If sickness and negative emotions or even strong desires like sex are not allowed to manifest, they can be contorted into unconscious things and sometimes disfigured into perversions and truly antisocial feelings and desires.  One way or another, our deep fears, desires, and traumas resurface, but if we keep shooing them away, they become stronger and more resilient.  I remember having dreams of zombies chasing me, and two things I noticed.  First, if you look at them, they multiply.  Second, if you stop running, turn around, and face them, they walk through you, past you, or you just wake up.  They don’t throw you down and eat you and rip up your organs.  The fear is always worse than the actual pain.  It’s like the fact that there are two different chemicals, one for craving and one for satiation.  There must be two different things going on when we fear versus when we actually face pain.  When we face pain, often times, chemicals are released to dim the pain.  However, when we imagine pain and become fearful, we don’t imagine these chemicals being released and subduing the pain.  We just imagine the actual pain part. 

Facing our demons and fears is all about accepting our mistakes and failures.  Not obsessing over them, but stopping what we are doing to accept them.  Let’s say you blew up at your coworkers in a meeting.  You are now fearful that you will be disciplined or your coworkers will retaliate.  Your first instinct is to try to ignore it and forget it, but it keeps nagging you.  What you should do is sit down and review what happened, and what I like to do is go back a day or two to what happened before that moment, because often times, when we act out-of-character, we were experiencing something unpleasant beforehand.  When I go out drinking and I misbehave, I ask myself, what happened at work previous to going out or that week?  Was I stressed?  Was I angry at something? 

Often times, we find the source of our acting up, and that is really all our bodies are trying to tell us, to make us pay attention just like a little kid.  In fact, we all have this little kid inside of us, fearful, insecure, vulnerable, etc.  It’s not a separate personality but just an integral part of us, and at one time, who we were that never leaves completely.  We also develop a guardian that is strong, resilient, tough, and sometimes aggressive.  We build that part of us up when we tackle new challenges or have to protect ourselves or people we care about.  Sometimes the guardian will overreact if the kid inside us is especially fearful of something.  But we can’t just ignore our behavior and try to forget it.  We must accept the expression for what it is, a signal from our bodies to pay attention to something we feel threatening.  Like a good parent, we keep our cool, we address the problem, and we assure ourselves that we have it under control, and that kid will act up less. 

This is the most unfortunate thing about modern life, how nobody is taught to be a leader or teacher.  We live in an outsourcing society where we outsource our education, we outsource parenting and the raising of our children, we outsource helping the vulnerable and poor in our communities, to do what?  To self-indulge?  Is that really what we want?  Our whole point of existence is to teach, raise children, and help the vulnerable and poor.  We have outsourced what we were created to be.  In order to be at peace with ourselves and our minds, we need to be a good, assertive, patient, forgiving leader of ourselves, but when we are just taught to obey and follow, our minds go crazy.  It is vulnerable to the false leadership of others, usually profiteers, politicians, entertainment-for-profit, ‘journalists’-for-profit, social media-for-profit, selfish demagogues, bossy significant others, etc.  We also blindly follow our impulses not knowing how to control or manage them.  We will never find peace fulfilling the interests of others and ignoring our own or being overly reactive to short-term self-indulgent impulses that undermine our long-term interests and relationships.  In order to find inner peace and happiness, we must learn how to be leaders and to manage the kid inside us who is always hungry, bored, tired, angry, insecure, and fearful.  Everyone seems to be running around with their heads chopped off, because someone else controls that head instead of them. 

There’s a story of a Soviet cosmonaut who heard this incessant pinging noise in his spacecraft, and he thought he would go insane, because there was nowhere to escape it.  But he started to embrace it, and once he did, it was reassuring for him.  I once lived at a place where tractor trailers would park outside, and they would leave their engines running at night, and at first I thought it would drive me nuts, but I remembered that story and said to myself, they are my bodyguards out there.  No one will break into my home with those truckers hanging outside my home, and I no longer heard the engine noise.  When your neighbor is playing loud music, you can think of it as a nuisance, that they’re annoying asses who don’t appreciate your right to quiet, but what if you reframed it.  What if you convinced yourself that you loved them?  Their loud music wouldn’t bother you as much if you learned to appreciate the fact that the music was making them feel good.  If they were your enemy, you’d hate the fact that the music made them feel good and made you feel bad.  Now think of the universe and nature itself.  The way the world is set up, there’s a lot of pain and suffering, and it’s terrible to experience it as well as witness it in others.  But what if you loved the universe and nature, and you believed in it and its ways of doing things.  If you trusted the gods of cosmic fate, then you could bear the pain and suffering more, because you trusted that they wanted the best for you, and the pain and suffering was an important part of being alive and in their world.  If you thought of the universe or the gods of cosmic fate to be evil, flawed scumbags like your annoying neighbor, you would despise their music, you would despise their world, their creation, their creatures, and your life, and it would be an unbearable life you would want to end.  For your own good or sanity, perhaps, you should force yourself to trust and love the world, and believe that it trusts and loves you back.