SGI is totally unlike other Buddhist sects. It does not have a priesthood. Nobody wears old-style robes and lives on alms. There are no temples. SGI was formed, initially, as a lay offshoot of NSA(Nichiren Shoshu Association), and split off in the 90’s to become something entirely new. It’s just all about people, ordinary people, who are SGI Buddhists. This means that the attitude of the religion is different. We have mentors and students, typically more experienced people helping less experienced ones learn about Nichiren Buddhism and its practices. But there is no top-down structure in which a hierarchy tells people what to do. Even the current president of SGI, Daisaku Ideda, refers to himself as a mentor. This means that the influence of individuals is about all there is to keep the religion going.
A single SGI member in a household has a more difficult situation than one where two spouses are both members. Spouses are the most important person for most marriages. With only one member, there is no mutual reinforcement of SGI theory and practice, and instead of the inspiration of practicing together, practice is exclusionary, making a difference between the two spouses. Of course, marriages are full of differences, i.e., reasons why the couples spend time apart, doing different things. In the single-Buddhist household, religion is yet another separate activity. This makes the practice harder, and it serves as yet another difference between the spouses. Often there are too few common areas, times when both can do something together, enjoying the activity as well as each other’s company. Having yet another non-common one, especially in an area as important as religion, is unfortunate.
SGI activities are another split-time problem. One spouse goes off to do an activity, leaving the other at home with separate time. Clearly the pressure builds to do less, so that there is more couple time. Couple-together time is very important to continue a marriage as a good value, yet activities detract from that. Rather than there being a common bond, there is a dividing line. It would be very nice if each of the spouses respected the other’s beliefs, and supported their activities, much like if two spouses enjoyed different sports, but were interested enough in the preferred sports of the other spouse to discuss them and appreciate the other spouse’s interests.
Religion isn’t like a sport, however. SGI tells us that our role is to seek our own happiness, and then to seek that of others, by helping them understand Buddhism and to use its beliefs for their own lives. In a marriage, this doesn’t translate to listening to the other spouse talk about his or her own religion and supporting it to the fullest. Virtually every religion has a façade of tolerance, hiding an evangelical goal. To put it bluntly, if a spouse believes that their own religion is the answer to life’s questions, and they invest their own beliefs in it, they would naturally want the person they care about the most, hopefully their spouse, to fully enjoy and appreciate it as well.
Does this mean the one-Buddhist household is doomed to problems and dissatisfaction? The key to avoiding this is to practice tolerance, of course, but even more than tolerance. Remember that Buddha explained about expedient teaching – which is what ordinary people need to appreciate and absorb his understandings. Other religions should be regarded as expedient learning, perhaps steps on the pathway to deeper understanding, or perhaps the furthest step that a particular person can take. When a person grows up embedded in an expedient religion, it may be completely impossible to disentangle their feelings and thoughts from it. Thus, the Buddhist spouse should simply wait and hope, and when appropriate, gently explain the similarities and differences between Buddhism and the religion of the spouse.
Shaka-buku is the Japanese term used for conversion, and is especially prominent in SGI writings. It is considered an important goal for all members. However, over this is personal happiness. Shaka-buku should never be a means of harming the marriage, or of upsetting the spouse. Shaka-buku must take its place behind the goals of maintaining the good atmosphere of the marriage and of aiding and promoting the happiness of the spouse. These priorities are not often spelled out in SGI writings, but they become obvious when thinking about the one-Buddhist household.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Happiness is not materialism
Everybody seems to agree, except for the sarcastic rich, that materialism doesn’t bring happiness. Is it true? If it is not, why are so many people racing for more material goods? When SGI counsels us to help everyone become happy, are they simply talking about money?
If you have been listening to and reading SGI experiences for years, you know that there are very few that talk about some particular material item, such as getting a new car. Those I have heard like that have treated the new item as a means to another, higher goal. The car might be desired so that the person could go to school or to a job.
Deprivation, on the other hand, is concomitant to unhappiness. If you cannot afford necessities, such as medical supplies, you are pretty sure to be unhappy, and to chant for some relief in this regard. To generalize, some money is of tremendous value, and then the utility of it declines. This is the same “utility saturation” that marks almost every material object. The first car you own is very valuable and useful, the second less so, the third even less so, and the fourth less than that, unless you are a specialist such as a car dealer, restorer, racer, or something similar. Because of the burden of caring for the vehicles, the actual usefulness of the Nth car might be less than the cost of ownership.
It’s the same for most items. Food is mandatory for survival, and more and more allows one to choose healthier items, but after a while, there is only so much time and attention and money one can usefully spend on food. Obesity is obviously the wall one runs into.
For non-food items, most have a maintenance cost, which is exacted in both money and time, and the more we have, the more nuisance it is to keep it all maintained, safe, up-to-date, clean, or whatever the particular vulnerabilities of the item is. The burden of maintenance builds up as we accumulate items. This is just another piece of the utility saturation problem. Having more than you can use of something might be no big deal, if you never have any contact with it. However, there are almost always costs.
What about money in the bank? Why not have more and more and more money? There are obviously large numbers of people who think that this is the metric for life. The more money you have, the happier you are. Many of them are still living on the low side of the wealth and income distribution curve, so they haven’t yet appreciated that the millionth dollar isn’t nearly as nice as the first.
Money and possessions do give a kind of cheap happiness, through status competition and attention. If you’ve got a lot of money, people pay more attention to you, for the purpose of getting some or just because you might give them some clues as to how to get it, or whatever. To the extent that having a lot of attention brings happiness, this might. The other side of this belongs to those people who don’t want the attention of others, but they want to feel superior. If they can exceed some record or level of somebody else, they feel better. It’s like a sibling rivalry situation, except you pick and choose who your siblings are. Often, once you achieve superiority, the bloom fades quickly, and you need to find someone else to beat. A continual fix of competition and success keeps them stoked up.
Buddha taught us about the futility of all this. Being better than someone else, or dominating them, doesn’t make us happy, it alleviates our unhappiness of desiring to be better. Buddha teaches us to stop desiring this goal, and to be happy because we do not have unfulfilled desires. The same holds for money. Buddha didn’t live in a money culture, but possessions took its place. By not trying to get more possessions than others, or to beat some imagined goal, we can be internally happy.
Our culture regards the Buddha’s thoughts as worse than heresy. This is one reason why kosen-rufu is not a piece of cake. We are opposing the social design of our culture.
Buddhism undermines the social contract we have with each other. When the nation was formed, the founding fathers inspired their contemporaries with some goals that resonated. They talked about setting new standards for justice, freedom, liberty, and more that were far beyond the standard of England, their mother country. These great ideas were embodied in our constitution and Bill of Rights, and have inspired generation after generation within the United States, and countless others throughout the world. However, they are fairly passé at this point. We have transformed our nation.
We have built our nation into one that is based on unhappiness. Our national success was formerly based on the ideals we espoused. For most of the history of the United States, we were not a very rich nation. We were a hard-working nation that built itself up and up.
This all changed with the invention of the consumer culture. Now we work very hard, with advertising, to increase everyone’s unhappiness. Our society functions by selling everyone consumer products, either imported or domestically manufactured. Corporate success depends on consumer unhappiness with what they have. We have entire, hugely paid, staffs in all large corporations, given the task of increasing the nation’s unhappiness by making them think they need some new goods, some new food, some new experience, some new spectacle, some new trip, and on and on. National advertising is solely concerned with making sure no one thinks they are happy, and the only way to be happy is to be a bigger consumer.
Buddha is the exact antithesis of this. He had everything there was to offer based on his birth as a prince. He dumped it all to live as a homeless teacher. For almost all of his life, he possessed nothing except a robe. He lived on charity. Yet his teachings have spread to hundreds of millions.
His understanding of materialism was not unique. There have been no rich religious teachers. In order to understand life well enough to become someone like this, you have to realize the futility of materialism. Yet the masses of consumers in America and around the world at blasted hundreds of times a day with the message of materialism.
How much endurance can an average person have when faced with the onslaught of advertising? Every mass media is stuffed to the brim with it. The more vulnerable of our society, those who do not have strong background training in resisting consumerism, fall prey to it for their entire lifetime.
Does SGI practice help or hurt this situation? There is no prohibition that seniors give to new members telling them not to chant for material things. It is even encouraged, as when some wish is fulfilled, it serves as a verification that the process of dai-moku (chanting) focuses the mind and help achieve goals, even material ones. We only need to remember that study is a critical component of SGI practice. Buddhist study is the key to breaking out of the consumer mentality.
If, as in our hopes, Buddhism and SGI became widespread in America, would that lead to some dire economic consequences? Just suppose that materialism began to be abandoned. How would our society function? It was Henry Ford who understood that workers and consumers were the same people. If we cease consuming, what work is needed? Or better stated, if we reduce our consuming to a low level, what will happen to all the employment that is solely based on stuffing consumer goods down our throats?
What would happen to our nation, if our GDP, the measure of goods produced, starts to drop because domestic consumption declines? Once again, we return to the question of Buddhism and stability. A highly Buddhist nation, where the population simply rejects materialism, would not have a great industrial base. This means, that if another nation sought to conquer and capture it, it would not have the ability to defend itself economically. In the modern world, weapons win wars. Weapons are built by a nation’s economic base, and if that base has shriveled, there will be no basis on which to establish a weapon industry, even if the Buddhist nation decided to defend itself.
So, once again, it appears that our hope of a world of Buddhist nations, living without conflict, is a pipedream, as the situation is unstable.
If you have been listening to and reading SGI experiences for years, you know that there are very few that talk about some particular material item, such as getting a new car. Those I have heard like that have treated the new item as a means to another, higher goal. The car might be desired so that the person could go to school or to a job.
Deprivation, on the other hand, is concomitant to unhappiness. If you cannot afford necessities, such as medical supplies, you are pretty sure to be unhappy, and to chant for some relief in this regard. To generalize, some money is of tremendous value, and then the utility of it declines. This is the same “utility saturation” that marks almost every material object. The first car you own is very valuable and useful, the second less so, the third even less so, and the fourth less than that, unless you are a specialist such as a car dealer, restorer, racer, or something similar. Because of the burden of caring for the vehicles, the actual usefulness of the Nth car might be less than the cost of ownership.
It’s the same for most items. Food is mandatory for survival, and more and more allows one to choose healthier items, but after a while, there is only so much time and attention and money one can usefully spend on food. Obesity is obviously the wall one runs into.
For non-food items, most have a maintenance cost, which is exacted in both money and time, and the more we have, the more nuisance it is to keep it all maintained, safe, up-to-date, clean, or whatever the particular vulnerabilities of the item is. The burden of maintenance builds up as we accumulate items. This is just another piece of the utility saturation problem. Having more than you can use of something might be no big deal, if you never have any contact with it. However, there are almost always costs.
What about money in the bank? Why not have more and more and more money? There are obviously large numbers of people who think that this is the metric for life. The more money you have, the happier you are. Many of them are still living on the low side of the wealth and income distribution curve, so they haven’t yet appreciated that the millionth dollar isn’t nearly as nice as the first.
Money and possessions do give a kind of cheap happiness, through status competition and attention. If you’ve got a lot of money, people pay more attention to you, for the purpose of getting some or just because you might give them some clues as to how to get it, or whatever. To the extent that having a lot of attention brings happiness, this might. The other side of this belongs to those people who don’t want the attention of others, but they want to feel superior. If they can exceed some record or level of somebody else, they feel better. It’s like a sibling rivalry situation, except you pick and choose who your siblings are. Often, once you achieve superiority, the bloom fades quickly, and you need to find someone else to beat. A continual fix of competition and success keeps them stoked up.
Buddha taught us about the futility of all this. Being better than someone else, or dominating them, doesn’t make us happy, it alleviates our unhappiness of desiring to be better. Buddha teaches us to stop desiring this goal, and to be happy because we do not have unfulfilled desires. The same holds for money. Buddha didn’t live in a money culture, but possessions took its place. By not trying to get more possessions than others, or to beat some imagined goal, we can be internally happy.
Our culture regards the Buddha’s thoughts as worse than heresy. This is one reason why kosen-rufu is not a piece of cake. We are opposing the social design of our culture.
Buddhism undermines the social contract we have with each other. When the nation was formed, the founding fathers inspired their contemporaries with some goals that resonated. They talked about setting new standards for justice, freedom, liberty, and more that were far beyond the standard of England, their mother country. These great ideas were embodied in our constitution and Bill of Rights, and have inspired generation after generation within the United States, and countless others throughout the world. However, they are fairly passé at this point. We have transformed our nation.
We have built our nation into one that is based on unhappiness. Our national success was formerly based on the ideals we espoused. For most of the history of the United States, we were not a very rich nation. We were a hard-working nation that built itself up and up.
This all changed with the invention of the consumer culture. Now we work very hard, with advertising, to increase everyone’s unhappiness. Our society functions by selling everyone consumer products, either imported or domestically manufactured. Corporate success depends on consumer unhappiness with what they have. We have entire, hugely paid, staffs in all large corporations, given the task of increasing the nation’s unhappiness by making them think they need some new goods, some new food, some new experience, some new spectacle, some new trip, and on and on. National advertising is solely concerned with making sure no one thinks they are happy, and the only way to be happy is to be a bigger consumer.
Buddha is the exact antithesis of this. He had everything there was to offer based on his birth as a prince. He dumped it all to live as a homeless teacher. For almost all of his life, he possessed nothing except a robe. He lived on charity. Yet his teachings have spread to hundreds of millions.
His understanding of materialism was not unique. There have been no rich religious teachers. In order to understand life well enough to become someone like this, you have to realize the futility of materialism. Yet the masses of consumers in America and around the world at blasted hundreds of times a day with the message of materialism.
How much endurance can an average person have when faced with the onslaught of advertising? Every mass media is stuffed to the brim with it. The more vulnerable of our society, those who do not have strong background training in resisting consumerism, fall prey to it for their entire lifetime.
Does SGI practice help or hurt this situation? There is no prohibition that seniors give to new members telling them not to chant for material things. It is even encouraged, as when some wish is fulfilled, it serves as a verification that the process of dai-moku (chanting) focuses the mind and help achieve goals, even material ones. We only need to remember that study is a critical component of SGI practice. Buddhist study is the key to breaking out of the consumer mentality.
If, as in our hopes, Buddhism and SGI became widespread in America, would that lead to some dire economic consequences? Just suppose that materialism began to be abandoned. How would our society function? It was Henry Ford who understood that workers and consumers were the same people. If we cease consuming, what work is needed? Or better stated, if we reduce our consuming to a low level, what will happen to all the employment that is solely based on stuffing consumer goods down our throats?
What would happen to our nation, if our GDP, the measure of goods produced, starts to drop because domestic consumption declines? Once again, we return to the question of Buddhism and stability. A highly Buddhist nation, where the population simply rejects materialism, would not have a great industrial base. This means, that if another nation sought to conquer and capture it, it would not have the ability to defend itself economically. In the modern world, weapons win wars. Weapons are built by a nation’s economic base, and if that base has shriveled, there will be no basis on which to establish a weapon industry, even if the Buddhist nation decided to defend itself.
So, once again, it appears that our hope of a world of Buddhist nations, living without conflict, is a pipedream, as the situation is unstable.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Existentialism and Buddhism
Existentialism questions the reasons for living, or for accomplishing things. Buddhism attempts to answer these questions, as do many other religions. Therefore, existentialism and Buddhism have an incredible amount in common. However, this connection doesn’t seem to have engaged anyone’s attention.
Existentialism became a named philosophy with the advent of the French philosophers, Sartre and Camus, of the previous century, and, of course there were many precedents for their thinking, stretching a bit further back, Nietzsche, Heidigger,…. None of them were particularly succinct. Perhaps it takes a tremendous number of words to convey some simple concepts if the concepts are particularly jarring or particularly out-of-resonance with the reader’s contexts and background.
To try to be succinct for those whose background already has this material embedded in it (and didn’t we all have to read these books in college?):
What’s the point of living if there is no eternity?
What’s the point of doing anything if nothing makes any difference in the long run?
Now, 99.9999+% of humanity could care less, as they have dogmatic answers to these questions, and it is certainly wonderful that they do, for that keeps the world running (unless, of course, the existence of the world doesn’t matter to you.) This expedient learning, about various forms of nirvana, gives people a goal to try for. When you have a goal, you can determine your actions and proceed toward it. It happens to be that these dogmas fit into a scheme that underlies society. It’s obvious why that came about.
Consider two city-states around the dawn of civilization. One has a theology that tells the folks, who are not thinkers as thinking about anything but the harvest and similar daily activities hadn’t been invented yet, that they will come back as a more well-off person if they work hard while alive. Another has a theology that tells the folks that life is life and death is death, and there isn’t any bridge. People in the first city-state will be much more likely to survive starvation, war, natural disasters, droughts, and what ever else nature throws at them. The second city-state has people who will give up earlier. Come back a couple of centuries later, and ask which city-state still exists, and which city-state has let to the foundation of other ones. It is simply trivial social evolution, not based on genes, but based on memes – little bits of dogmatic thought, that has led to the concept of nirvana and its competitors and variants.
So, it is obvious and trivial how the various supernatural answers to existentialism’s questions were answered in the many millennia before the French philosophy was invented. It doesn’t matter what the details are, just that there is a dogma that keeps people working on survival and growth. That’s why there are so many various belief-systems around. They all meet the sufficiency needs for continued social existence.
Finally, along comes the French school, and asks these questions explicitly, or in terms of novels with obvious philosophical content. SGI answers the questions in terms of individual happiness, and the spread of happiness through support and assistance. The answer is, of course, not on point, but it is a sufficient answer, and it doesn’t have to call on supernatural existences. The SGI answer is that people want to be happy, and practicing SGI and promoting it through kosen-rufu (conversion of others), and assisting others in achieving their own happiness leads to more individual happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Rather than take on the French with their own deep thoughts, SGI has adopted the very Japanese philosophy that hard work is an end in itself, and directed it toward a non-national goal (unlike Japanese in history), individual happiness. It is almost as if Japan has absorbed the American consumer culture, abstracted it away from materialism, and fed it back to the world.
American consumer culture is all about exploiting natural resources to produce commercial products, and the acquisition of these products is supposed to translate into happiness for the recipient. Japanese thought seems to have, culminating in SGI’s philosophy, turned this into a non-material thing, that intangibles are the thing to go after, and if one does, one will be happy.
The existential question of what about eternity and the absolute lack of utility for an individual of anything in the long term (as there are no individuals in the long term), is buried. Don’t be thoughtful, be happy. Why waste time contemplating the future when there are things to be done right now. If you are unhappy about death, chant.
Sakyamuni faced the problem of death, along with the other three miseries of life. I think that he solved the problem in a way that was completely not appreciated for the last two and a half centuries. Sakyamuni may have been the most brilliant person ever. He used the concept of humility in a very interesting way. Because no one person is important, we should not attach any importance to our own life. This seemingly violates the natural survival instinct, but only seemingly.
We keep on trying to survive, but when our time comes, we pass on gently. Socrates was one of the wisest men of history, and he was quite calm, at least as recorded by his students, about being put to death. He had no philosophy about a soul that was going to outlast his body. When there is no chance for survival, the survival instinct may simply fade away.
Sakyamuni’s idea is that there are countless other beings as important as we are, and why should any person attach any special significance to his own life, as it is simply not much different than any others? The essence of life is that life goes on, with or without us, and because we are not very special, it makes no difference to anything whether we go on or not. This is almost an existentialist answer to the first question, about why live. If we care sufficiently about life, or about others, our own existence is not too consequential.
The second question, about why strive, is more a tad more difficult. Sakyamuni venerated life, global life, not individual life. Our individual lives should make global life better, and therefore we should strive. SGI talks about the same thing. We can make great causes such as universal peace by striving for individual peace in our own lives and in those lives of those we contact. The grand Buddhist concept of the venerability of life itself, maybe DNA life to be specific but they didn’t understand genetics 2500 years ago, overwhelms the existential questions.
This is, of course, Buddhist dogma, not scientific deduction, and it remains to be connected to more deep thinking of the scientific community. The evolution of dogmas is not highly competitive, so Buddhist dogma may not displace others through the same course of events over centuries that led to the development of so many different ones. It remains to be seen how science will treat Buddhist dogma, and whether it must transform itself further as more is learned about the universe, about genetics, about society, and anything else related.
Existentialism became a named philosophy with the advent of the French philosophers, Sartre and Camus, of the previous century, and, of course there were many precedents for their thinking, stretching a bit further back, Nietzsche, Heidigger,…. None of them were particularly succinct. Perhaps it takes a tremendous number of words to convey some simple concepts if the concepts are particularly jarring or particularly out-of-resonance with the reader’s contexts and background.
To try to be succinct for those whose background already has this material embedded in it (and didn’t we all have to read these books in college?):
What’s the point of living if there is no eternity?
What’s the point of doing anything if nothing makes any difference in the long run?
Now, 99.9999+% of humanity could care less, as they have dogmatic answers to these questions, and it is certainly wonderful that they do, for that keeps the world running (unless, of course, the existence of the world doesn’t matter to you.) This expedient learning, about various forms of nirvana, gives people a goal to try for. When you have a goal, you can determine your actions and proceed toward it. It happens to be that these dogmas fit into a scheme that underlies society. It’s obvious why that came about.
Consider two city-states around the dawn of civilization. One has a theology that tells the folks, who are not thinkers as thinking about anything but the harvest and similar daily activities hadn’t been invented yet, that they will come back as a more well-off person if they work hard while alive. Another has a theology that tells the folks that life is life and death is death, and there isn’t any bridge. People in the first city-state will be much more likely to survive starvation, war, natural disasters, droughts, and what ever else nature throws at them. The second city-state has people who will give up earlier. Come back a couple of centuries later, and ask which city-state still exists, and which city-state has let to the foundation of other ones. It is simply trivial social evolution, not based on genes, but based on memes – little bits of dogmatic thought, that has led to the concept of nirvana and its competitors and variants.
So, it is obvious and trivial how the various supernatural answers to existentialism’s questions were answered in the many millennia before the French philosophy was invented. It doesn’t matter what the details are, just that there is a dogma that keeps people working on survival and growth. That’s why there are so many various belief-systems around. They all meet the sufficiency needs for continued social existence.
Finally, along comes the French school, and asks these questions explicitly, or in terms of novels with obvious philosophical content. SGI answers the questions in terms of individual happiness, and the spread of happiness through support and assistance. The answer is, of course, not on point, but it is a sufficient answer, and it doesn’t have to call on supernatural existences. The SGI answer is that people want to be happy, and practicing SGI and promoting it through kosen-rufu (conversion of others), and assisting others in achieving their own happiness leads to more individual happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Rather than take on the French with their own deep thoughts, SGI has adopted the very Japanese philosophy that hard work is an end in itself, and directed it toward a non-national goal (unlike Japanese in history), individual happiness. It is almost as if Japan has absorbed the American consumer culture, abstracted it away from materialism, and fed it back to the world.
American consumer culture is all about exploiting natural resources to produce commercial products, and the acquisition of these products is supposed to translate into happiness for the recipient. Japanese thought seems to have, culminating in SGI’s philosophy, turned this into a non-material thing, that intangibles are the thing to go after, and if one does, one will be happy.
The existential question of what about eternity and the absolute lack of utility for an individual of anything in the long term (as there are no individuals in the long term), is buried. Don’t be thoughtful, be happy. Why waste time contemplating the future when there are things to be done right now. If you are unhappy about death, chant.
Sakyamuni faced the problem of death, along with the other three miseries of life. I think that he solved the problem in a way that was completely not appreciated for the last two and a half centuries. Sakyamuni may have been the most brilliant person ever. He used the concept of humility in a very interesting way. Because no one person is important, we should not attach any importance to our own life. This seemingly violates the natural survival instinct, but only seemingly.
We keep on trying to survive, but when our time comes, we pass on gently. Socrates was one of the wisest men of history, and he was quite calm, at least as recorded by his students, about being put to death. He had no philosophy about a soul that was going to outlast his body. When there is no chance for survival, the survival instinct may simply fade away.
Sakyamuni’s idea is that there are countless other beings as important as we are, and why should any person attach any special significance to his own life, as it is simply not much different than any others? The essence of life is that life goes on, with or without us, and because we are not very special, it makes no difference to anything whether we go on or not. This is almost an existentialist answer to the first question, about why live. If we care sufficiently about life, or about others, our own existence is not too consequential.
The second question, about why strive, is more a tad more difficult. Sakyamuni venerated life, global life, not individual life. Our individual lives should make global life better, and therefore we should strive. SGI talks about the same thing. We can make great causes such as universal peace by striving for individual peace in our own lives and in those lives of those we contact. The grand Buddhist concept of the venerability of life itself, maybe DNA life to be specific but they didn’t understand genetics 2500 years ago, overwhelms the existential questions.
This is, of course, Buddhist dogma, not scientific deduction, and it remains to be connected to more deep thinking of the scientific community. The evolution of dogmas is not highly competitive, so Buddhist dogma may not displace others through the same course of events over centuries that led to the development of so many different ones. It remains to be seen how science will treat Buddhist dogma, and whether it must transform itself further as more is learned about the universe, about genetics, about society, and anything else related.
The Saharan Ant
We grow up, most of us, with somebody to make a fuss about us. Babies need to be cared for, and our first experiences are those of the mother or a substitute taking care of our needs. If we were lucky, there was lots of bonding and tender loving care. These experiences are locked down in the deepest recesses of our minds. We form our first picture of what the world is like from these experiences. They tell us “People care about me” – although not expressed verbally, but totally in terms of emotions and expectations. Babies learn how to interact with their caregivers to get their needs fulfilled, both physical ones and emotional ones.
As we get older, these experiences are buried, but never lose their impact. It seems natural to almost all humans that something, somewhere, loves us and wants to give us TLC. Possibly a sociologist could look at baby care patterns in different cultures and see if it correlates with how the society behaves and with their religious beliefs. For the purpose of this article, I just want to say that what we experience as a baby is a function of the way we have evolved, away from those creatures that deposit eggs somewhere and the young simply start off unnoticed by the genetic parents.
This fact of evolution comes from the need to provide cross-individual information about the local world environment. It’s not possible to code into DNA the details about how to gather food, avoid predators, and interact socially the way mammals, and maybe some lower creatures, do. Thus, if there is social interaction and local environmental habits to be learned, there is a necessity to build in, probably genetically, some care for the young of the species. Likely also, as we go up the evolutionary chain, care for young becomes socially transmitted as well.
The needs of the evolutionary process don’t have anything at all to do with supernatural stuff, but there is obviously an analogy here. In the early days of Buddhism, people expected that there were all manner of supernatural creatures, and put the Buddha among them, who were somehow interested in their lives and going to help them get their needs satisfied. People would make offerings to the statues of Buddha, and still do in great numbers, as they think they will get some magical assistance from outer space or wherever they think the Buddha lives. They beseech the Buddha the same way a baby beseeches his caregiver. It’s simply an irremovable early experience, coming to the surface in an adult in a slightly transformed way.
Nichiren was well past this elementary practice. He was a philosopher as well as a practical theologian. It existed at his time, the thirteenth century, as it does now, but only among those still wrapped up in the earliest versions of Buddhism. He was, as we are now, able to think beyond the repetition of infant experiences transformed into adult modes.
The idea of a monotheism belief, or a small pantheon, is very reminiscent of the infant experiences. Some Buddhist sects believe that the Buddha is the only power around. Others have uncountable minor figures. Nichiren wrote that one of the most important things to do for a good Buddhist was to clean up the religion, in other words, to help those mired in non-consistent and illogical beliefs, no matter how deeply they resonate with the person’s brain from infant experiences, to get to a higher philosophical level. Why that’s important is left for another place and time.
In order to use Sakyamuni’s revelation of the countless worlds beyond our own as a device to help people understand the true framework of the universe, it might be useful to present an example.
There are a trillion worlds out there with life forms, give or take a few zeroes. We have no contact with any of them. The effect of any one of us, no matter what we do, is infinitesimal. To picture that, consider an ant in the middle of the Sahara desert. On the leg of the ant is a virus, one of billions there. That virus is as important to you as you are to the rest of the universe.
The rest of the universe cares about you as much as you do about that virus.
As we get older, these experiences are buried, but never lose their impact. It seems natural to almost all humans that something, somewhere, loves us and wants to give us TLC. Possibly a sociologist could look at baby care patterns in different cultures and see if it correlates with how the society behaves and with their religious beliefs. For the purpose of this article, I just want to say that what we experience as a baby is a function of the way we have evolved, away from those creatures that deposit eggs somewhere and the young simply start off unnoticed by the genetic parents.
This fact of evolution comes from the need to provide cross-individual information about the local world environment. It’s not possible to code into DNA the details about how to gather food, avoid predators, and interact socially the way mammals, and maybe some lower creatures, do. Thus, if there is social interaction and local environmental habits to be learned, there is a necessity to build in, probably genetically, some care for the young of the species. Likely also, as we go up the evolutionary chain, care for young becomes socially transmitted as well.
The needs of the evolutionary process don’t have anything at all to do with supernatural stuff, but there is obviously an analogy here. In the early days of Buddhism, people expected that there were all manner of supernatural creatures, and put the Buddha among them, who were somehow interested in their lives and going to help them get their needs satisfied. People would make offerings to the statues of Buddha, and still do in great numbers, as they think they will get some magical assistance from outer space or wherever they think the Buddha lives. They beseech the Buddha the same way a baby beseeches his caregiver. It’s simply an irremovable early experience, coming to the surface in an adult in a slightly transformed way.
Nichiren was well past this elementary practice. He was a philosopher as well as a practical theologian. It existed at his time, the thirteenth century, as it does now, but only among those still wrapped up in the earliest versions of Buddhism. He was, as we are now, able to think beyond the repetition of infant experiences transformed into adult modes.
The idea of a monotheism belief, or a small pantheon, is very reminiscent of the infant experiences. Some Buddhist sects believe that the Buddha is the only power around. Others have uncountable minor figures. Nichiren wrote that one of the most important things to do for a good Buddhist was to clean up the religion, in other words, to help those mired in non-consistent and illogical beliefs, no matter how deeply they resonate with the person’s brain from infant experiences, to get to a higher philosophical level. Why that’s important is left for another place and time.
In order to use Sakyamuni’s revelation of the countless worlds beyond our own as a device to help people understand the true framework of the universe, it might be useful to present an example.
There are a trillion worlds out there with life forms, give or take a few zeroes. We have no contact with any of them. The effect of any one of us, no matter what we do, is infinitesimal. To picture that, consider an ant in the middle of the Sahara desert. On the leg of the ant is a virus, one of billions there. That virus is as important to you as you are to the rest of the universe.
The rest of the universe cares about you as much as you do about that virus.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Why we pray for the dearly departed
Part of the SGI prayers include some for those who have left us. These are to be said twice daily. As a scientist, I can think through what this is all about. Since it’s interesting, I’m presenting my thoughts here.
When we pray for someone alive, we may have hopes for them. Perhaps some change in their life condition, some improvement, some progress on something important to them. Alternatively, the prayer could be for them to have a better relationship with us, or with someone close to us. In Buddhism, we feel that the way to a better future is to help everyone be happy. That’s the enlightened self-interest thing discussed elsewhere.
But what about dead people? Happiness is a matter of brain chemistry being proper. Dead people’s brain chemistry is completely out of whack within a few seconds of being dead, and even if they did have the right chemistry, it wouldn’t do them any good.
Long ago, and nowadays still in places where expedient beliefs are prominent, there might be some hope that the dead person’s identity is going to be improved somehow. As discussed previously, this “bar-coding” doesn’t have a self-consistent explanation, i.e., it can’t exist. So, praying for dead people has to mean something else.
It does. It is all about the “essence of life”, which is a top concept in modern Buddhist thought. “Essence of life” means that life is a complex continuum, tied together through society and ecology. How do dead people relate to the “essence of life”? They are the ones who built your brain programming. What you think comes from your parents, teachers, friends, mentors, examples, and others that influenced you. These influences do not go away when the people die. They remain just as strong. They are written in your neurons forever.
When you are young, your mind is a huge empty storehouse, just waiting to be filled up by those who influence us. Even writers and composers who have died long ago can fill up our minds. The brain works by building little bundles of neural connections that translate our perceptions into memory.
But the brain is huge, and the storehouse is not organized coherently. When we pray for the deceased, we remember them and we pull together the good things they taught us. Maybe occasionally we remember the bad examples they sometimes gave, but this is good education as well. Our prayers for the dead is just like other chanting – it strengthens our minds. It focuses our goals. It makes clear how to accomplish what it is that we have chosen to do. It explains experiences that might otherwise be cloudy. All this happens by pulling together the almost innumerable experiences and insights we have picked up.
Thus, the SGI prayer for the deceased is a perfect complement to our other beliefs. It is consistent in that it is strongly connected with how our minds work. It is absolutely not reminiscent of the “ancestor worship” that previous religions have had, and it absolutely does not have anything to do with the dead people anymore. It has to do with those influences the dead people left inside us.
When we pray for someone alive, we may have hopes for them. Perhaps some change in their life condition, some improvement, some progress on something important to them. Alternatively, the prayer could be for them to have a better relationship with us, or with someone close to us. In Buddhism, we feel that the way to a better future is to help everyone be happy. That’s the enlightened self-interest thing discussed elsewhere.
But what about dead people? Happiness is a matter of brain chemistry being proper. Dead people’s brain chemistry is completely out of whack within a few seconds of being dead, and even if they did have the right chemistry, it wouldn’t do them any good.
Long ago, and nowadays still in places where expedient beliefs are prominent, there might be some hope that the dead person’s identity is going to be improved somehow. As discussed previously, this “bar-coding” doesn’t have a self-consistent explanation, i.e., it can’t exist. So, praying for dead people has to mean something else.
It does. It is all about the “essence of life”, which is a top concept in modern Buddhist thought. “Essence of life” means that life is a complex continuum, tied together through society and ecology. How do dead people relate to the “essence of life”? They are the ones who built your brain programming. What you think comes from your parents, teachers, friends, mentors, examples, and others that influenced you. These influences do not go away when the people die. They remain just as strong. They are written in your neurons forever.
When you are young, your mind is a huge empty storehouse, just waiting to be filled up by those who influence us. Even writers and composers who have died long ago can fill up our minds. The brain works by building little bundles of neural connections that translate our perceptions into memory.
But the brain is huge, and the storehouse is not organized coherently. When we pray for the deceased, we remember them and we pull together the good things they taught us. Maybe occasionally we remember the bad examples they sometimes gave, but this is good education as well. Our prayers for the dead is just like other chanting – it strengthens our minds. It focuses our goals. It makes clear how to accomplish what it is that we have chosen to do. It explains experiences that might otherwise be cloudy. All this happens by pulling together the almost innumerable experiences and insights we have picked up.
Thus, the SGI prayer for the deceased is a perfect complement to our other beliefs. It is consistent in that it is strongly connected with how our minds work. It is absolutely not reminiscent of the “ancestor worship” that previous religions have had, and it absolutely does not have anything to do with the dead people anymore. It has to do with those influences the dead people left inside us.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Is Chanting the Advil of Unhappinesss?
SGI teaches us to chant for happiness. In other words, if we don’t have happiness, we should focus our chanting on getting it. Of course, if we are happy, we chant for the happiness of others, but that’s not what I’m writing about.
As anybody with any significant years knows, unhappiness is everywhere. It springs out of nowhere and grabs us when we don’t expect it. We run into it constantly. It is a part of life.
It is impossible to avoid, and so we need something to help ourselves when we meet it. Unhappiness, in its various forms of death and grief, suffering, want, and the rest, were what motivated the Buddha to devise his belief system, Buddhism, which led through a two and a half thousand year history to the founding of SGI last century. So unhappiness and chanting are intertwined. Buddha didn’t chant Nam MyoHo RenGe Kyo, as that got started with Nichiren in thirteen century Japan, but he probably chanted some mantra, as this was the Hindu tradition he grew up in. We would be chanting something else if Nichiren had been Mongolian, for example, so it likely does not make any difference what we chant, as long as it means the same thing in some language, and has the same physiological effect. Maybe someday somebody will study this and let us all know.
The point is, when we are unhappy, what should we do? Should we seek some chemical assistance, like alcohol or an illegal hallucinogen? Should we seek therapy from a licenced or unlicensed professional, or a friend? Should we seek amusement, like a comedy? Should we join a group and get our minds off it? Should we just get more rest and hope for the best? Should we just tough it out and wait for it to pass? Obviously, the unhappy person has a lot of options. Chanting Nam MyoHo RenGe Kyo is only one.
Let’s compare them. Some are distractions: drugs, alcohol, amusement, group interaction on non-related topics, rest and ignoring it. Clearly, they help pass the time, and since most unhappiness is a passing thing, they can provide a mitigation. Maybe distractions will work, and the huge number of people who use them probably means they have found some success, some relief, in doing so. This doesn’t work very well when the unhappiness is caused by a material lack, but likely better when it is caused by a life event.
Others involve reaching out to understand the cause. We can help ourselves by understanding the nature of the unhappiness and then dealing with it. We can seek counseling for this, from a bartender, a psychologist, a close friend, an intelligent advisor, a co-worker, or a SGI colleague. This is one step closer to resolving the unhappiness. This helps us figure out a course of action. Sometimes it is not needed, as the cause is obvious. You have no job. You need a job in order to pay for necessities or to provide mental satisfaction. You need to find a job. You don’t need a counselor to tell you that you need a job. The same also goes with life situations, like a death in the family. More complicated things might need some advice, like in dealing with other people.
Besides distraction and reaching out, there is doing something about it. If it is a life event, you have to do something to your own mind to improve the situation. If it is a material want, you have to do something externally, and to do that effectively, you need to make some internal decisions in your mind, resolve to follow them through, and then do it. This is where chanting excels.
Chanting focuses the mind. It clarifies thinking. It improves introspection. It quiets the noise that interferes with our thinking. It helps us put aside the internal mental obstacles that block our moving forward. It helps make connection between things we know and didn’t connect. It helps us remember things we may have forgotten or deliberately obscured. In dealing with unhappiness, it is hard to imagine a better antidote.
Thus, chanting is like an Advil for unhappiness, but not in the sense that you can take a pill and your unhappiness goes away. It is analogous in that it attacks the problem. Advil is a chemical that interferes with the pain network of neurons, and blocks them from the pain center in the brain. It allows the brain some peace and quiet, so that we can do something useful, like curing the cause of the physical pain. Chanting helps us with a more subtle kind of pain, the kind caused within our mind, by what we perceive about the world and about ourselves. It blocks the noise created by the pain of unhappiness, and helps our minds find ways to resolve the causes. So in that sense, it is much like Advil for non-physical causes of unhappiness.
As anybody with any significant years knows, unhappiness is everywhere. It springs out of nowhere and grabs us when we don’t expect it. We run into it constantly. It is a part of life.
It is impossible to avoid, and so we need something to help ourselves when we meet it. Unhappiness, in its various forms of death and grief, suffering, want, and the rest, were what motivated the Buddha to devise his belief system, Buddhism, which led through a two and a half thousand year history to the founding of SGI last century. So unhappiness and chanting are intertwined. Buddha didn’t chant Nam MyoHo RenGe Kyo, as that got started with Nichiren in thirteen century Japan, but he probably chanted some mantra, as this was the Hindu tradition he grew up in. We would be chanting something else if Nichiren had been Mongolian, for example, so it likely does not make any difference what we chant, as long as it means the same thing in some language, and has the same physiological effect. Maybe someday somebody will study this and let us all know.
The point is, when we are unhappy, what should we do? Should we seek some chemical assistance, like alcohol or an illegal hallucinogen? Should we seek therapy from a licenced or unlicensed professional, or a friend? Should we seek amusement, like a comedy? Should we join a group and get our minds off it? Should we just get more rest and hope for the best? Should we just tough it out and wait for it to pass? Obviously, the unhappy person has a lot of options. Chanting Nam MyoHo RenGe Kyo is only one.
Let’s compare them. Some are distractions: drugs, alcohol, amusement, group interaction on non-related topics, rest and ignoring it. Clearly, they help pass the time, and since most unhappiness is a passing thing, they can provide a mitigation. Maybe distractions will work, and the huge number of people who use them probably means they have found some success, some relief, in doing so. This doesn’t work very well when the unhappiness is caused by a material lack, but likely better when it is caused by a life event.
Others involve reaching out to understand the cause. We can help ourselves by understanding the nature of the unhappiness and then dealing with it. We can seek counseling for this, from a bartender, a psychologist, a close friend, an intelligent advisor, a co-worker, or a SGI colleague. This is one step closer to resolving the unhappiness. This helps us figure out a course of action. Sometimes it is not needed, as the cause is obvious. You have no job. You need a job in order to pay for necessities or to provide mental satisfaction. You need to find a job. You don’t need a counselor to tell you that you need a job. The same also goes with life situations, like a death in the family. More complicated things might need some advice, like in dealing with other people.
Besides distraction and reaching out, there is doing something about it. If it is a life event, you have to do something to your own mind to improve the situation. If it is a material want, you have to do something externally, and to do that effectively, you need to make some internal decisions in your mind, resolve to follow them through, and then do it. This is where chanting excels.
Chanting focuses the mind. It clarifies thinking. It improves introspection. It quiets the noise that interferes with our thinking. It helps us put aside the internal mental obstacles that block our moving forward. It helps make connection between things we know and didn’t connect. It helps us remember things we may have forgotten or deliberately obscured. In dealing with unhappiness, it is hard to imagine a better antidote.
Thus, chanting is like an Advil for unhappiness, but not in the sense that you can take a pill and your unhappiness goes away. It is analogous in that it attacks the problem. Advil is a chemical that interferes with the pain network of neurons, and blocks them from the pain center in the brain. It allows the brain some peace and quiet, so that we can do something useful, like curing the cause of the physical pain. Chanting helps us with a more subtle kind of pain, the kind caused within our mind, by what we perceive about the world and about ourselves. It blocks the noise created by the pain of unhappiness, and helps our minds find ways to resolve the causes. So in that sense, it is much like Advil for non-physical causes of unhappiness.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Jesus is wonderful, and a route to Buddha
SGI seems to have a policy of reaching out to other religions. President Ikeda has had uncountable meetings with religious leaders of other faiths. Many other religions do not have this great level of tolerance. What is behind the position of SGI?
I can not speak for SGI; I can only try to figure it out by logic and investigation. I think the key is the invention by Buddha of expedient teaching. If someone already has beliefs that encompass part of the Buddhist thought, then why not build on that part? The beliefs that the various Christian sects have many aspects that agree with Buddha’s teaching. Buddha’s eightfold way and the tremendous organization of ideas within Buddhism are certainly clearer and more logical than any Christian teaching, but that only means that the step to Buddhism should be easy for more logical people.
On the other hand, there are aspects to some Christian sects that clash with Buddha’s teachings. For example, lack of tolerance for other sects is common. SGI has had its share of disagreements with the Nichiren temple sect, so it is familiar with such things. SGI has put this schism behind it and struck off to build a lay religion, quite successfully. For some Christian sects, the conflicts have gone on for centuries. Instead of pointing out differences like this one, SGI ignores them. SGI writers and speakers do not attack Christian sects for any of their beliefs, as that would undermine the willingness of believers in these sects to listen to what SGI speakers have to say. Instead, SGI members doing kosen-rufu (conversion) stress the building blocks of common beliefs.
The idea of expedient teaching is to understand the context of belief that the listener has, and then frame Buddhist ideas in that context. If the Christian believes in supernatural creatures like angels and devils, the ancient Buddhist sutras involving various supernatural creatures might fit right in. If the Christian believes in repeatedly praying on rosary beads, chanting with our beads might be a natural and small switch. If the Christian sincerely believes that Jesus was opposed to killing people and therefore opposes war, SGI’s work toward world piece should be a natural bridge. These are just three linkages between various Christian beliefs and SGI’s and Buddha’s ideas.
Thus, a sincere belief in Jesus and Christian teachings makes a person more likely to be receptive to kosen-rufu than someone who is simply giving his life over to materialism. Materialism has little in common with either Buddhism or Christian beliefs. Thus, the statement that Jesus is the best way to Buddha means that, for Americans in that religion, their sincerity will help them understand what Buddha has to say. As we all know, many people claiming to be religious are not sincere. These people may be disguised materialists, and pose a bigger challenge to kosen-rufu than sincere believers in a Christian sect, or in any other religion for that matter.
I can not speak for SGI; I can only try to figure it out by logic and investigation. I think the key is the invention by Buddha of expedient teaching. If someone already has beliefs that encompass part of the Buddhist thought, then why not build on that part? The beliefs that the various Christian sects have many aspects that agree with Buddha’s teaching. Buddha’s eightfold way and the tremendous organization of ideas within Buddhism are certainly clearer and more logical than any Christian teaching, but that only means that the step to Buddhism should be easy for more logical people.
On the other hand, there are aspects to some Christian sects that clash with Buddha’s teachings. For example, lack of tolerance for other sects is common. SGI has had its share of disagreements with the Nichiren temple sect, so it is familiar with such things. SGI has put this schism behind it and struck off to build a lay religion, quite successfully. For some Christian sects, the conflicts have gone on for centuries. Instead of pointing out differences like this one, SGI ignores them. SGI writers and speakers do not attack Christian sects for any of their beliefs, as that would undermine the willingness of believers in these sects to listen to what SGI speakers have to say. Instead, SGI members doing kosen-rufu (conversion) stress the building blocks of common beliefs.
The idea of expedient teaching is to understand the context of belief that the listener has, and then frame Buddhist ideas in that context. If the Christian believes in supernatural creatures like angels and devils, the ancient Buddhist sutras involving various supernatural creatures might fit right in. If the Christian believes in repeatedly praying on rosary beads, chanting with our beads might be a natural and small switch. If the Christian sincerely believes that Jesus was opposed to killing people and therefore opposes war, SGI’s work toward world piece should be a natural bridge. These are just three linkages between various Christian beliefs and SGI’s and Buddha’s ideas.
Thus, a sincere belief in Jesus and Christian teachings makes a person more likely to be receptive to kosen-rufu than someone who is simply giving his life over to materialism. Materialism has little in common with either Buddhism or Christian beliefs. Thus, the statement that Jesus is the best way to Buddha means that, for Americans in that religion, their sincerity will help them understand what Buddha has to say. As we all know, many people claiming to be religious are not sincere. These people may be disguised materialists, and pose a bigger challenge to kosen-rufu than sincere believers in a Christian sect, or in any other religion for that matter.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Reincarnation reincarnated
When Buddha lived, 2500 years ago more or less, there was so little science that any kind of idea could be promulgated. Just like now, except that it’s possible to unravel weird ideas now.
Reincarnation was the common belief in India at Buddha’s time. He continued to use it as expedient teaching. As we know, expedient teaching is using the cultural context of the time and place of the teaching to make new ideas understandable. Speaking about scientific concepts to uneducated people just leaves them unhappy and uninformed. Buddha was a superb teacher, and knew exactly how to convey his theories to different groups. His legacy is proof of his genius.
Nowadays it is very easy to analyze concepts like reincarnation. The elementary concept fails at the very definition stage, but advanced concepts do not. What is reincarnation? It was the ancient Hindu belief that there is something about a person that persists beyond their death. Clearly it is not material. Everything that belongs to a person’s body disperses at death. Let’s call the immaterial thing, soul or essence or identity. Hindu belief is that a person after death, depending on his position and behavior during this life (and past lives), transfers his identity into some other creature born soon after. If you followed the rules of Hindu theology, you could move up in status. There were human castes, and one could possibly rise. Falling could leave you as an animal or an insect, and supposedly being a good insect could get you to be a better one, or maybe an arthropod or a small mammal…
There are obvious problems with the transmission of the identity, but there's no need to quibble with the concept on these grounds. It fails even earlier that that.
Seriously, what could this identity be? Could it be like a bar code? Somewhere, something was recording the bar code of every living creature, and assigning used ones to new creatures at or before birth. Nobody knows the bar codes, and nobody can find them out. Guessing could happen, but so what? What difference could it make for anyone’s life? Maybe there is a piece of Hindu theology that says your bar code can make a difference in your life. That would mean it interacts with the world, and therefore it somehow becomes partially material. Some type of connection with the real world has to be made, and if it is made, it can be measured. However, there has never been the slightest claim by anyone that your identity, transferred through multiple creatures, could be detected and tracked. We understand how material things interact in great detail, and there isn’t any room in the theories of interaction for any supernatural bar codes. Everything measured to date has checked out.
What would the material piece of the identity hook on to? Is it a pattern in the brain? If you turn into a cockroach and later make it back to a human, all your pattern was encoded into the few cells that serves for a cockroach's brain. The cockroach's brain has so few cells that the barcode must be very low in information content. However, if one counts all the insects in the world presently living, there are trillions, maybe quadrillions. More data than can be encoded into the cockroach’s brain, or the ant’s either. To say nothing about protozoa, which might be the temporary resting place of the worst behaving individuals, which have no brains and therefore no bar code area. So brains are out.
What’s left that’s in common between the entire animal kingdom? Nothing but DNA. However, there is no way human DNA can be encoded into the simple DNA of a much lower creature. There is hardly any “junk genes” (ones which are never expressed in any fashion – just leftover from previous steps in the evolution process) in the simplest of creatures, which is where one could write some bar code information. Exactly what difference could it make anyway, even if there was a way to encode a bar code into some “junk genes” because they do not interact with the organism. They simply are carried forward in the replication and reproduction processes. So we must conclude that there is no bar code for individuals which is transferred after death to a new creature.
However, the modern terminology for reincarnation, as seen in SGI’s newspaper, for example, is that the “essence of life” goes on. This is a little vague, but in general it means that when you are dead you are dead, but you are part of the whole complex of DNA-based life-forms, and what you did while alive has had some effect on it, and that effect will go on and on, mixing and melding with what every other life-form does. Basically, becoming a cockroach is not an option, but making an improvement in the world is an option for humans. Improving the lives of others, who carry on that to improve the life of others, is the essence of “good life”. This, in my humble opinion, is what reincarnation would have meant to the Buddha, if he had any context to express it in, and anyone able to comprehend it.
We can affect both other human beings, through social change and individual interaction, and we can affect the rest of the life-forms, mostly by how we change their habitat. The scientific field working to comprehend how this works is ecology, and it is not a mature field, like physics or chemistry. Some norms are known, but there are no clear guidelines for what to do and what not to do; there are no metrics as to what is good and what is bad, and how to measure them in situations that have potentially multiple effects. So, how to be a good SGI member with respect to the rest of life remains to be determined. We are left with being good to other humans. That is certainly complicated enough as is.
Reincarnation was the common belief in India at Buddha’s time. He continued to use it as expedient teaching. As we know, expedient teaching is using the cultural context of the time and place of the teaching to make new ideas understandable. Speaking about scientific concepts to uneducated people just leaves them unhappy and uninformed. Buddha was a superb teacher, and knew exactly how to convey his theories to different groups. His legacy is proof of his genius.
Nowadays it is very easy to analyze concepts like reincarnation. The elementary concept fails at the very definition stage, but advanced concepts do not. What is reincarnation? It was the ancient Hindu belief that there is something about a person that persists beyond their death. Clearly it is not material. Everything that belongs to a person’s body disperses at death. Let’s call the immaterial thing, soul or essence or identity. Hindu belief is that a person after death, depending on his position and behavior during this life (and past lives), transfers his identity into some other creature born soon after. If you followed the rules of Hindu theology, you could move up in status. There were human castes, and one could possibly rise. Falling could leave you as an animal or an insect, and supposedly being a good insect could get you to be a better one, or maybe an arthropod or a small mammal…
There are obvious problems with the transmission of the identity, but there's no need to quibble with the concept on these grounds. It fails even earlier that that.
Seriously, what could this identity be? Could it be like a bar code? Somewhere, something was recording the bar code of every living creature, and assigning used ones to new creatures at or before birth. Nobody knows the bar codes, and nobody can find them out. Guessing could happen, but so what? What difference could it make for anyone’s life? Maybe there is a piece of Hindu theology that says your bar code can make a difference in your life. That would mean it interacts with the world, and therefore it somehow becomes partially material. Some type of connection with the real world has to be made, and if it is made, it can be measured. However, there has never been the slightest claim by anyone that your identity, transferred through multiple creatures, could be detected and tracked. We understand how material things interact in great detail, and there isn’t any room in the theories of interaction for any supernatural bar codes. Everything measured to date has checked out.
What would the material piece of the identity hook on to? Is it a pattern in the brain? If you turn into a cockroach and later make it back to a human, all your pattern was encoded into the few cells that serves for a cockroach's brain. The cockroach's brain has so few cells that the barcode must be very low in information content. However, if one counts all the insects in the world presently living, there are trillions, maybe quadrillions. More data than can be encoded into the cockroach’s brain, or the ant’s either. To say nothing about protozoa, which might be the temporary resting place of the worst behaving individuals, which have no brains and therefore no bar code area. So brains are out.
What’s left that’s in common between the entire animal kingdom? Nothing but DNA. However, there is no way human DNA can be encoded into the simple DNA of a much lower creature. There is hardly any “junk genes” (ones which are never expressed in any fashion – just leftover from previous steps in the evolution process) in the simplest of creatures, which is where one could write some bar code information. Exactly what difference could it make anyway, even if there was a way to encode a bar code into some “junk genes” because they do not interact with the organism. They simply are carried forward in the replication and reproduction processes. So we must conclude that there is no bar code for individuals which is transferred after death to a new creature.
However, the modern terminology for reincarnation, as seen in SGI’s newspaper, for example, is that the “essence of life” goes on. This is a little vague, but in general it means that when you are dead you are dead, but you are part of the whole complex of DNA-based life-forms, and what you did while alive has had some effect on it, and that effect will go on and on, mixing and melding with what every other life-form does. Basically, becoming a cockroach is not an option, but making an improvement in the world is an option for humans. Improving the lives of others, who carry on that to improve the life of others, is the essence of “good life”. This, in my humble opinion, is what reincarnation would have meant to the Buddha, if he had any context to express it in, and anyone able to comprehend it.
We can affect both other human beings, through social change and individual interaction, and we can affect the rest of the life-forms, mostly by how we change their habitat. The scientific field working to comprehend how this works is ecology, and it is not a mature field, like physics or chemistry. Some norms are known, but there are no clear guidelines for what to do and what not to do; there are no metrics as to what is good and what is bad, and how to measure them in situations that have potentially multiple effects. So, how to be a good SGI member with respect to the rest of life remains to be determined. We are left with being good to other humans. That is certainly complicated enough as is.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Chanting is by you, of you and for you. It stays there.
Think about a certain situation: chanting while you are alone. You are not affecting anything but yourself.
Some people who are new to SGI or do not have any understanding of the world think that chanting affects other things directly. They could chant for a sunny day on the fourth of July, so their family reunion would go over well. If the sunny day happens, they feel they had an effect, and if it doesn’t, that they didn’t chant long enough or sincerely enough.
This example, of course, is ridiculous, but the idea that chanting somehow has a direct effect on something else seeps into discussions at SGI meetings. Someone might chant to get rich, and if they do so by working hard for the next ten years, it’s pretty obvious that chanting made them strong enough, and focused enough, to accomplish the goal. However, if they win the lottery, a few people are inclined to laud chanting for their result. Actually, it was Lady Luck who gave them the winning ticket, and the iron laws of probability do not change for anyone.
When you chant, there are things going on in your head, and sound comes out. Your mind is being slightly reprogrammed. The sound has little physical effect on surroundings. You could detect it with a telephone microphone or other devices, but as far as something distant goes, the sound just doesn’t get there. And that’s the only thing. Science has understood for decades the means by which forces and information are communicated from one location to another. The means are particles, electromagnetics, material vibrations, gravity. That’s the whole list.
You can ask if any of those means can bring something out of your brain to affect some other thing in the real world. The first problem is the source. Brains have been examined over and over and over, and more and more is being learned about them. But what is being learned is not new ways in which they can generate forces or influence external objects. That particular part of science wrapped up decades ago. What’s being investigated are the internal details of the brain, for example the microbiology of brain cells, or the allocation of neural masses to different types of processing (verbal vs. visual, for example). Someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on in brain science might think there is still some chance that a new center of influence will be found – not so. So, the first problem for someone who wants to hold out that the brain can communicate either information or influence is that there is nothing in the brain to create it.
The second problem is the media. Remember, there are four. There are particles being emitted by the brain that impact other items, but they are randomly emitted. There are radioactive elements in all matter. They amount to very, very small amounts, but non-zero. However, radioactive decay, that leads to particle emissions, is a random event, except in nuclear chain reactions, which do not happen in our brains. No information is carried by random events, nor can any desires we have alter what these particles do when they pass through the skull into the exterior world. So, particles are no use.
The next media is electormagnetics. The brain does emit low-frequency radio waves, and they can be picked up by sensitive equipment. However, the power levels are so low that they can have no effect by themselves, and there is no coding that they use reflecting the detailed thought we have. The bandwidths are too low. The waves are simply like the waves emitted by our house wiring. They are the result of electrical currents circulating in the brain. There are more or less of them depending on whether we are asleep or awake, or on what kind and amount of thinking we are doing. They are not even detectable by another person, nor by any distant electromagnetic receiver, except perhaps inside an EM anechoic chamber (Faraday cage).
The vibrations that come out of the brain are about zero, (blood pulsing), but those that come from speech certainly contain content. This means that normal means of observing the effect of what we say can tell us what total effect happens. Everybody from age 1 knows this. But no one should figure that the sound we make can affect anything directly. The power is too weak, and there is no receiver that is sensitive to it. Lastly, gravity needs a huge mass to have an effect. Thus, there not only is no source, there is no means. We could talk about receivers, but that is a waste of time as there is nothing to receive.
So, we need to conclude, what we doing in our heads, stays in our heads. We chant of, for (if we want to), and by ourselves (if we want to). It goes nowhere unless we do something ourselves, i.e., communicate to someone else something. Chanting is an internal mental process, and there is no way that it can get out into the rest of the world to make any change unless we take some physical action, like speaking or writing. It’s like the rest of our internal processes. Our heart beats, but that only affects ourselves. It produces a tiny bit of electromagnetic energy, and is the source of an infinitestimal amount of random radioactive decay particles, and it vibrates inside the chest cavity, but none of this has any effect on the rest of the world. We can detect these things with sensitive instruments, but these instruments only tell experts about the state of health of the heart. Sensitive instruments applied to the brain only tell experts about the state of health of the brain. There is nothing in the heart or the brain to send signals to the external world.
Let's not forget that Buddha was a human, now long dead. We do not chant to the Buddha. We study his recorded teaching. Some earlier sects of Buddhism amalgated his person with some earlier supernatural religious beliefs, making him into some sort of immortal being. This was expedient teaching, for people whose minds were not sufficient prepared by science to understand that supernatural things do not exist. There was nothing the matter with this; in fact, it was a wonderful thing as it communicated a great deal of learning to people in that state. There are still huge numbers of people in that state, who still have these beliefs, and it is still a wonderful thing that they do. The world would be a much worse place without expedient teaching. Buddha understood this, and his principal followers also did. We must never do anything to disparage expedient teaching. It keeps the world going, and it paves the road for more advanced and clear teaching. But we must not allow ourselves, who have the benefit of good education, to fall back to expedient teaching's ideas and think of the Buddha as a supernatural person. We chant to the Gohonzon, which is correctly referred to as a mirror. We do not chant to the Buddha.
That being said, it should be easier to choose goals for chanting. No more physical effects. No more mystical communication. Only ways to improve ourselves mentally so we can improve our situation in the world. Fortunately, that is a huge task that can take a lifetime to accomplish.
Some people who are new to SGI or do not have any understanding of the world think that chanting affects other things directly. They could chant for a sunny day on the fourth of July, so their family reunion would go over well. If the sunny day happens, they feel they had an effect, and if it doesn’t, that they didn’t chant long enough or sincerely enough.
This example, of course, is ridiculous, but the idea that chanting somehow has a direct effect on something else seeps into discussions at SGI meetings. Someone might chant to get rich, and if they do so by working hard for the next ten years, it’s pretty obvious that chanting made them strong enough, and focused enough, to accomplish the goal. However, if they win the lottery, a few people are inclined to laud chanting for their result. Actually, it was Lady Luck who gave them the winning ticket, and the iron laws of probability do not change for anyone.
When you chant, there are things going on in your head, and sound comes out. Your mind is being slightly reprogrammed. The sound has little physical effect on surroundings. You could detect it with a telephone microphone or other devices, but as far as something distant goes, the sound just doesn’t get there. And that’s the only thing. Science has understood for decades the means by which forces and information are communicated from one location to another. The means are particles, electromagnetics, material vibrations, gravity. That’s the whole list.
You can ask if any of those means can bring something out of your brain to affect some other thing in the real world. The first problem is the source. Brains have been examined over and over and over, and more and more is being learned about them. But what is being learned is not new ways in which they can generate forces or influence external objects. That particular part of science wrapped up decades ago. What’s being investigated are the internal details of the brain, for example the microbiology of brain cells, or the allocation of neural masses to different types of processing (verbal vs. visual, for example). Someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on in brain science might think there is still some chance that a new center of influence will be found – not so. So, the first problem for someone who wants to hold out that the brain can communicate either information or influence is that there is nothing in the brain to create it.
The second problem is the media. Remember, there are four. There are particles being emitted by the brain that impact other items, but they are randomly emitted. There are radioactive elements in all matter. They amount to very, very small amounts, but non-zero. However, radioactive decay, that leads to particle emissions, is a random event, except in nuclear chain reactions, which do not happen in our brains. No information is carried by random events, nor can any desires we have alter what these particles do when they pass through the skull into the exterior world. So, particles are no use.
The next media is electormagnetics. The brain does emit low-frequency radio waves, and they can be picked up by sensitive equipment. However, the power levels are so low that they can have no effect by themselves, and there is no coding that they use reflecting the detailed thought we have. The bandwidths are too low. The waves are simply like the waves emitted by our house wiring. They are the result of electrical currents circulating in the brain. There are more or less of them depending on whether we are asleep or awake, or on what kind and amount of thinking we are doing. They are not even detectable by another person, nor by any distant electromagnetic receiver, except perhaps inside an EM anechoic chamber (Faraday cage).
The vibrations that come out of the brain are about zero, (blood pulsing), but those that come from speech certainly contain content. This means that normal means of observing the effect of what we say can tell us what total effect happens. Everybody from age 1 knows this. But no one should figure that the sound we make can affect anything directly. The power is too weak, and there is no receiver that is sensitive to it. Lastly, gravity needs a huge mass to have an effect. Thus, there not only is no source, there is no means. We could talk about receivers, but that is a waste of time as there is nothing to receive.
So, we need to conclude, what we doing in our heads, stays in our heads. We chant of, for (if we want to), and by ourselves (if we want to). It goes nowhere unless we do something ourselves, i.e., communicate to someone else something. Chanting is an internal mental process, and there is no way that it can get out into the rest of the world to make any change unless we take some physical action, like speaking or writing. It’s like the rest of our internal processes. Our heart beats, but that only affects ourselves. It produces a tiny bit of electromagnetic energy, and is the source of an infinitestimal amount of random radioactive decay particles, and it vibrates inside the chest cavity, but none of this has any effect on the rest of the world. We can detect these things with sensitive instruments, but these instruments only tell experts about the state of health of the heart. Sensitive instruments applied to the brain only tell experts about the state of health of the brain. There is nothing in the heart or the brain to send signals to the external world.
Let's not forget that Buddha was a human, now long dead. We do not chant to the Buddha. We study his recorded teaching. Some earlier sects of Buddhism amalgated his person with some earlier supernatural religious beliefs, making him into some sort of immortal being. This was expedient teaching, for people whose minds were not sufficient prepared by science to understand that supernatural things do not exist. There was nothing the matter with this; in fact, it was a wonderful thing as it communicated a great deal of learning to people in that state. There are still huge numbers of people in that state, who still have these beliefs, and it is still a wonderful thing that they do. The world would be a much worse place without expedient teaching. Buddha understood this, and his principal followers also did. We must never do anything to disparage expedient teaching. It keeps the world going, and it paves the road for more advanced and clear teaching. But we must not allow ourselves, who have the benefit of good education, to fall back to expedient teaching's ideas and think of the Buddha as a supernatural person. We chant to the Gohonzon, which is correctly referred to as a mirror. We do not chant to the Buddha.
That being said, it should be easier to choose goals for chanting. No more physical effects. No more mystical communication. Only ways to improve ourselves mentally so we can improve our situation in the world. Fortunately, that is a huge task that can take a lifetime to accomplish.
Sympathy, Compassion, and Possibly Enlightened Self-Interest
Buddhist thought is all about compassion for other living beings. What is the root of this, and does it make sense when we bring as much scientific and logical analysis to the issue as possible? Before beginning, let’s define some terms.
What is the difference between sympathy and compassion? Both cause one person to want to mitigate the problems of another. But they work in different ways. Sympathy means that we sympathize with the other person, we share his feelings. This is the key point. A person’s brain may have in it memories of similar occurrences to what the second person is enduring, whether it be pain, loss, anxiety or grief. The sight, sound or learning about the second person’s phenomena causes a flood of emotional feeling to occur – we sympathize, we feel his/her feeling. This emotion causes us to want to stop it, and to do so, we help the second person.
Cynically, we could flee the situation, but memory being what it is, that may not clear up the problem.
Sympathy, then, is an emotional hook caused by pattern matching of bad experiences.
Compassion, on the other hand, is the feeling of wanting to help, not because the person is feeling the unhappiness of the second person, but because of a transference of responsibility. It is an adoption of the second person as a brother/sister or close friend. Human brains are designed by evolution to help their children and relatives out of problem situations. Some stranger doesn’t qualify, but the connection that we feel that drives us to want to help our kin slips a gear, and causes us to want to help some other person. It is an evocation of the paternal/maternal feelings that lie at the bottom of our brains (the part we have left over from other species that rear their young).
So, compassion and sympathy are both pattern-matching errors in the brain, but that certainly doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be encouraged.
The third reason we often have that makes us want to help others is self-interest, which may be “enlightened” or not. Exactly what enlightened means is not clear, but I think it means the quid pro quo isn’t obvious. Self-interest in the lowest form means that we help someone because we’ll get something for it. Enlightened self-interest means we go around helping people because through the diffuse processes of social interaction, someone will help us, or something beneficial will happen, if lots of people go around helping others.
So, when SGI Buddhist leaders tell us to chant for the benefit of others, which of these four motivations is being summoned? My instinct is that it is the last of the four, enlightened self-interest. SGI concentrates on the happiness of individuals during their lifetime. To be happy, we need an environment where happiness is both possible and reasonably easily achievable. This means that the social feedback loops that make helping others lead to others helping us have to be strong. Many times, as evidenced by the experiences cited in World Tribune and at discussion meetings, individuals report that they took it on themselves or were counseled by senior leaders to chant for the happiness of someone who was causing them difficulties, such as an irritating boss. The idea, and often the outcome, is that the boss would get happier and stop being so irritating. Alternately, the idea might be that the behavior that the person was doing that was annoying the boss would get reduced, and the irritation would subside following that. Either way, the feedback loop only has one other person in it.
The most gigantic feedback loop is the SGI goal of world peace. We work for individual happiness in the hope and expectation that world peace will result. Exactly how this will work is never made clear, but the intuition is that if everybody is happy no one will be willing to go to war. I think this is a beautiful idea, and I hope it works.
What is the difference between sympathy and compassion? Both cause one person to want to mitigate the problems of another. But they work in different ways. Sympathy means that we sympathize with the other person, we share his feelings. This is the key point. A person’s brain may have in it memories of similar occurrences to what the second person is enduring, whether it be pain, loss, anxiety or grief. The sight, sound or learning about the second person’s phenomena causes a flood of emotional feeling to occur – we sympathize, we feel his/her feeling. This emotion causes us to want to stop it, and to do so, we help the second person.
Cynically, we could flee the situation, but memory being what it is, that may not clear up the problem.
Sympathy, then, is an emotional hook caused by pattern matching of bad experiences.
Compassion, on the other hand, is the feeling of wanting to help, not because the person is feeling the unhappiness of the second person, but because of a transference of responsibility. It is an adoption of the second person as a brother/sister or close friend. Human brains are designed by evolution to help their children and relatives out of problem situations. Some stranger doesn’t qualify, but the connection that we feel that drives us to want to help our kin slips a gear, and causes us to want to help some other person. It is an evocation of the paternal/maternal feelings that lie at the bottom of our brains (the part we have left over from other species that rear their young).
So, compassion and sympathy are both pattern-matching errors in the brain, but that certainly doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be encouraged.
The third reason we often have that makes us want to help others is self-interest, which may be “enlightened” or not. Exactly what enlightened means is not clear, but I think it means the quid pro quo isn’t obvious. Self-interest in the lowest form means that we help someone because we’ll get something for it. Enlightened self-interest means we go around helping people because through the diffuse processes of social interaction, someone will help us, or something beneficial will happen, if lots of people go around helping others.
So, when SGI Buddhist leaders tell us to chant for the benefit of others, which of these four motivations is being summoned? My instinct is that it is the last of the four, enlightened self-interest. SGI concentrates on the happiness of individuals during their lifetime. To be happy, we need an environment where happiness is both possible and reasonably easily achievable. This means that the social feedback loops that make helping others lead to others helping us have to be strong. Many times, as evidenced by the experiences cited in World Tribune and at discussion meetings, individuals report that they took it on themselves or were counseled by senior leaders to chant for the happiness of someone who was causing them difficulties, such as an irritating boss. The idea, and often the outcome, is that the boss would get happier and stop being so irritating. Alternately, the idea might be that the behavior that the person was doing that was annoying the boss would get reduced, and the irritation would subside following that. Either way, the feedback loop only has one other person in it.
The most gigantic feedback loop is the SGI goal of world peace. We work for individual happiness in the hope and expectation that world peace will result. Exactly how this will work is never made clear, but the intuition is that if everybody is happy no one will be willing to go to war. I think this is a beautiful idea, and I hope it works.
Astrophysical Humility
Sakyamuni understood somehow that the universe was full of other worlds, and thought there were many with life on them. In recent years, astronomers have caught up with the Buddha, and have begun to find that many stars have planets circling them. As of 2006, mostly large planets have been discovered around near stars, finding others like Earth still beyond existing technology. It is simply quite difficult to see something as small as an Earth-type planet at interstellar distances, but there is nothing to indicate that there are not a huge number of them in the universe, just as research has indicated for larger ones.
To give an idea of the magnitude of the universe, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is called the Milky Way galaxy. Maybe the number of planets is about the same, as some stars might have ten or so, as ours does, and other might have none. There are about 10 billion galaxies in the universe. So, a guess to astrophysical accuracy (plus or minus a few zeroes) is a trillion billion planets. It’s hard to feel that the Earth is really special, isn’t it?
Maybe only one in a million of them develops life like ours. To be more conservative, maybe only one in a billion has creatures with the intelligence to, say, count planets like we do. So, only a trillion planets with life like ours. It will be some more decades before we figure out if this number is ten trillion or only a tenth of a trillion. Maybe we are so astonishingly special there are only one thousandth of a trillion, or a billion planets with people (somewhat different than us, but thinking beings) like us.
The distances are so immense in the universe that we will probably never establish communication with even a single other life-form, but who really knows what science will bring. If we used light, it might take a million years to get a ring-tone, and another million to leave something on their answering machine. This doesn’t matter too much to the article here, which is about humility, but it explains why we haven’t heard from anybody.
It’s already pretty hard to feel you are something at all unique on a planet with billions of people. It’s even harder, much harder, to feel unique if there are billions of other planets with other life-forms on them. Somebody might feel uniquely brilliant if he discovers something, like an element or a supernova. However, if the same element has been discovered on all the other planets, how uniquely brilliant is it? In fact, discovery of almost everything is inevitable and somebody would have stumbled onto it anyway. There are a certain number of elements (and this holds for almost everything), and somebody is going to discover them. Whether it’s you or somebody else depends on a lot of things, thousands, like where you were born and who your influences were in your early life. The dice are thrown and someone is the winner.
Composition might be thought to be unique, but only slightly. Niches in art and music get filled one way or another, and if a particular individual didn’t do something that gets a lot of public praise, someone else would. The selection function cannot be stopped, and the details of the work of the person selected might be less of a motivator than the process that selected them for some measure of fame.
The same holds for getting rich. If one person didn’t discover that gold ore deposit, someone else would. If one person didn’t come up with that invention, someone else would. If one person didn’t start that company, someone else would. Gold just keeps waiting for a discoverer, and so do inventions and niches within society where companies can fit. Yes, there is some uniqueness that the person adds, but the social processes and natural dynamics that put people into unique roles in society are often ignored or downplayed. There is an adulation function in society, encapsulated in the press, which takes a person who accomplishes something and pretends no one else could ever have done it.
Adulation has a legitimate social function, in that it motivates individuals to attempt things, which leads to a faster rate of finding gold, writing music, starting companies and so on. This is very interesting from an astrophysical perspective. Earth has existed about four billion years, life for a billion, mammals for twenty million, and primates for a million. Humans (homo sapiens) have existed for about ten thousand. So, the tremendous adulation function might have that gold mine discovered ten years earlier than otherwise. Instead of happening 1,000,000,000 years after life started, it would have happened 1,000,000,010 years after life started, which clearly has a great import for the rest of the universe.
All humor aside, what we do on this planet has, as far as is known now, no effect on any of the other billions of civilizations throughout the universe. We are here for a period of time, then we disappear through evolution of something that replaces us, or we simply die out for one reason or another. Individual species last for periods of tens or hundreds of thousands of years. They then become extinct or evolve into something different. Larger branches of life, as for example dinosaurs, last for of the order of tens of millions of years. Mammals are probably of that scale in time. Whether intelligent life, if we define ourselves as that, lasts of the order of mammals or an individual species, i.e. tens of millions or tens of thousands of years, or something in between, remains to be seen. Either way, there is a little bubble of time during which we can do civilization, and then it’s all over on this planet, and probably just getting started on others, and long disappeared on still others.
Thus, the realization of Sakyamuni that Earth is not a unique place, as buttressed by recent science, brings us to the point of wondering why we should rush around trying to discover that gold mine ten years earlier. If we understand the true scope of the universe, and our place in it, we have a different perspective on ourselves than if we believed we were the center of the universe and all the rest of everything revolved around us.
To give an idea of the magnitude of the universe, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is called the Milky Way galaxy. Maybe the number of planets is about the same, as some stars might have ten or so, as ours does, and other might have none. There are about 10 billion galaxies in the universe. So, a guess to astrophysical accuracy (plus or minus a few zeroes) is a trillion billion planets. It’s hard to feel that the Earth is really special, isn’t it?
Maybe only one in a million of them develops life like ours. To be more conservative, maybe only one in a billion has creatures with the intelligence to, say, count planets like we do. So, only a trillion planets with life like ours. It will be some more decades before we figure out if this number is ten trillion or only a tenth of a trillion. Maybe we are so astonishingly special there are only one thousandth of a trillion, or a billion planets with people (somewhat different than us, but thinking beings) like us.
The distances are so immense in the universe that we will probably never establish communication with even a single other life-form, but who really knows what science will bring. If we used light, it might take a million years to get a ring-tone, and another million to leave something on their answering machine. This doesn’t matter too much to the article here, which is about humility, but it explains why we haven’t heard from anybody.
It’s already pretty hard to feel you are something at all unique on a planet with billions of people. It’s even harder, much harder, to feel unique if there are billions of other planets with other life-forms on them. Somebody might feel uniquely brilliant if he discovers something, like an element or a supernova. However, if the same element has been discovered on all the other planets, how uniquely brilliant is it? In fact, discovery of almost everything is inevitable and somebody would have stumbled onto it anyway. There are a certain number of elements (and this holds for almost everything), and somebody is going to discover them. Whether it’s you or somebody else depends on a lot of things, thousands, like where you were born and who your influences were in your early life. The dice are thrown and someone is the winner.
Composition might be thought to be unique, but only slightly. Niches in art and music get filled one way or another, and if a particular individual didn’t do something that gets a lot of public praise, someone else would. The selection function cannot be stopped, and the details of the work of the person selected might be less of a motivator than the process that selected them for some measure of fame.
The same holds for getting rich. If one person didn’t discover that gold ore deposit, someone else would. If one person didn’t come up with that invention, someone else would. If one person didn’t start that company, someone else would. Gold just keeps waiting for a discoverer, and so do inventions and niches within society where companies can fit. Yes, there is some uniqueness that the person adds, but the social processes and natural dynamics that put people into unique roles in society are often ignored or downplayed. There is an adulation function in society, encapsulated in the press, which takes a person who accomplishes something and pretends no one else could ever have done it.
Adulation has a legitimate social function, in that it motivates individuals to attempt things, which leads to a faster rate of finding gold, writing music, starting companies and so on. This is very interesting from an astrophysical perspective. Earth has existed about four billion years, life for a billion, mammals for twenty million, and primates for a million. Humans (homo sapiens) have existed for about ten thousand. So, the tremendous adulation function might have that gold mine discovered ten years earlier than otherwise. Instead of happening 1,000,000,000 years after life started, it would have happened 1,000,000,010 years after life started, which clearly has a great import for the rest of the universe.
All humor aside, what we do on this planet has, as far as is known now, no effect on any of the other billions of civilizations throughout the universe. We are here for a period of time, then we disappear through evolution of something that replaces us, or we simply die out for one reason or another. Individual species last for periods of tens or hundreds of thousands of years. They then become extinct or evolve into something different. Larger branches of life, as for example dinosaurs, last for of the order of tens of millions of years. Mammals are probably of that scale in time. Whether intelligent life, if we define ourselves as that, lasts of the order of mammals or an individual species, i.e. tens of millions or tens of thousands of years, or something in between, remains to be seen. Either way, there is a little bubble of time during which we can do civilization, and then it’s all over on this planet, and probably just getting started on others, and long disappeared on still others.
Thus, the realization of Sakyamuni that Earth is not a unique place, as buttressed by recent science, brings us to the point of wondering why we should rush around trying to discover that gold mine ten years earlier. If we understand the true scope of the universe, and our place in it, we have a different perspective on ourselves than if we believed we were the center of the universe and all the rest of everything revolved around us.
When the book stood up
Some of my environment is crowded. I have a row of books about Buddhism near my Gohonzon, and they are tipped over a little bit to keep them from falling over. One day, recently, when chanting, I watched as the end book, a paperback on Sakyamuni, tipped up vertically, from about 10° angle to perfectly vertical. Nothing near it moved, nothing in the room had moved, nothing was going on in the house, and nothing was happening at all except my chanting.
If I was a believer in supernatural things instead of a scientist, I might have assumed this was a sign from something to me. However, it was probably that the book was simply spreading pages out, expanding a tiny bit, and it was on the verge of tipping upwards for a long time. Then, either a coincidence happened, and it stood up while I could see it, or the sound vibrations of my chanting provided the tiny bit of energy it needed to move over the energy barrier keeping it at a slant. There’s no need, and I have no interest in, figuring out the physics of the tipping, but it reminded me of something.
I had long ago decided to investigate Sakyamuni’s life and thought more deeply. The tipping of the book on his life reminded me of it. I’ve started writing a bit about what I know already, and will likely keep digging deeper.
It also reminded me of what fortune telling is all about. It is about taking little signs and using them to investigate things already in our mind. Tarot card reading is an example of that. If the deck is shuffled, the cards that are displayed are random, and therefore there is nothing there to predict the future. However, they can remind the reader of something in one part of the subject’s mind and help connect it with something in another part of the subject’s mind. They can suggest considering the opposite of some fixed assumptions. Thus, tarot reading sometimes makes us come up with some unique ideas; they are formed of what we already knew but had not put together yet. The same probably holds for other forms of fortune telling. To figure out a personal puzzle, some random process that links up various previously-unlinked thoughts may provide insight, and that insight, based on our own knowledge, might lead to the solution to the puzzle.
Chanting doesn’t affect the world, it affects people. Mostly, it affects the person who chants, and that person can affect other people, or even some aspects of the world. So that means to chant to have a sunny day for a summer picnic is frivolous; but chanting to be prepared for the contingency of a rainy day is completely logical and sensible. No one seems to bother to say this in SGI, possibly out of compassion for those who have not yet formed clear ideas of what to chant for.
If I was a believer in supernatural things instead of a scientist, I might have assumed this was a sign from something to me. However, it was probably that the book was simply spreading pages out, expanding a tiny bit, and it was on the verge of tipping upwards for a long time. Then, either a coincidence happened, and it stood up while I could see it, or the sound vibrations of my chanting provided the tiny bit of energy it needed to move over the energy barrier keeping it at a slant. There’s no need, and I have no interest in, figuring out the physics of the tipping, but it reminded me of something.
I had long ago decided to investigate Sakyamuni’s life and thought more deeply. The tipping of the book on his life reminded me of it. I’ve started writing a bit about what I know already, and will likely keep digging deeper.
It also reminded me of what fortune telling is all about. It is about taking little signs and using them to investigate things already in our mind. Tarot card reading is an example of that. If the deck is shuffled, the cards that are displayed are random, and therefore there is nothing there to predict the future. However, they can remind the reader of something in one part of the subject’s mind and help connect it with something in another part of the subject’s mind. They can suggest considering the opposite of some fixed assumptions. Thus, tarot reading sometimes makes us come up with some unique ideas; they are formed of what we already knew but had not put together yet. The same probably holds for other forms of fortune telling. To figure out a personal puzzle, some random process that links up various previously-unlinked thoughts may provide insight, and that insight, based on our own knowledge, might lead to the solution to the puzzle.
Chanting doesn’t affect the world, it affects people. Mostly, it affects the person who chants, and that person can affect other people, or even some aspects of the world. So that means to chant to have a sunny day for a summer picnic is frivolous; but chanting to be prepared for the contingency of a rainy day is completely logical and sensible. No one seems to bother to say this in SGI, possibly out of compassion for those who have not yet formed clear ideas of what to chant for.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Sakyamuni, the Astronomer
The Lotus Sutra has a surprise for anyone who has looked up in the sky. Unlike every other religion on Earth, Buddhism does not have astronomical errors in it. We all know how every other religious leader failed to understand that the points of light in the sky were simply other suns, like ours. Sakyamuni did understand this, and the importance of this should not be underestimated. It is huge.
The Lotus Sutra talks about the millions of millions of worlds besides our, inhabited with millions of life-forms. This is one reason Buddhism is a religion of humility, not of arrogance. Other religions talk about the Earth as the center of the universe, a scientifically ridiculous concept. Sociologically, believing in this planet-centrism makes the believer think he is something special. On the scale of the universe, we have a very ordinary star, surrounded by some ordinary planets, upon which some ordinary evolution has taken place. We are nothing special. Other religions state we, or some subset of humans, are special.
If you grow up hearing you are special, you become concerned that this belief be recognized, so your good feelings, that arise from the self-congratulations, don’t stop. You are vehemently opposed to the concept of equality, and most regrettably, this probably carries over to everything from the individual scale (I’m a special person) to the subset you belong to (we’re special). The Buddhist alternative is that we’re all pretty ordinary, but all pretty special too, just like the trillions of life forms on the other planets mentioned in the Lotus Sutra. It is an egalitarian religion. If you feel special, you don’t mind trashing other people as much as if you identified with them as your approximate equals. This explains the Buddhism aversion to war. It is a much deeper-seated aversion than those of other religions, where a we-them dichotomy can be maintained.
The Lotus Sutra talks about the millions of millions of worlds besides our, inhabited with millions of life-forms. This is one reason Buddhism is a religion of humility, not of arrogance. Other religions talk about the Earth as the center of the universe, a scientifically ridiculous concept. Sociologically, believing in this planet-centrism makes the believer think he is something special. On the scale of the universe, we have a very ordinary star, surrounded by some ordinary planets, upon which some ordinary evolution has taken place. We are nothing special. Other religions state we, or some subset of humans, are special.
If you grow up hearing you are special, you become concerned that this belief be recognized, so your good feelings, that arise from the self-congratulations, don’t stop. You are vehemently opposed to the concept of equality, and most regrettably, this probably carries over to everything from the individual scale (I’m a special person) to the subset you belong to (we’re special). The Buddhist alternative is that we’re all pretty ordinary, but all pretty special too, just like the trillions of life forms on the other planets mentioned in the Lotus Sutra. It is an egalitarian religion. If you feel special, you don’t mind trashing other people as much as if you identified with them as your approximate equals. This explains the Buddhism aversion to war. It is a much deeper-seated aversion than those of other religions, where a we-them dichotomy can be maintained.
Why we don’t always do what we think we want to do and how chanting helps
This happens because doing and thinking about wanting occur in different parts of the brain, and they don’t always communicate in the ways we’d like (the ways the “Thinking about Wanting” part of the brain would like).
The question I am dealing with relates to why people, like myself, don’t do “the smart thing”, or why plans fail due to our own actions, or why addiction happens, and probably a lot of other interesting questions. A lot of people put a great deal of stock in education, which relates to the “Thinking about Wanting” part of the brain. Let’s abbreviate it by TW. Education builds areas around the TW part, so that the person can recite some lessons when asked. For example, an overweight person can say, “I am unhealthy and am going to eat less.” Then they continue to eat as usual. The trainer or doctor has managed to put some information into the person’s brain in the TW center, and, while that’s a good thing, it doesn’t solve this person’s problem.
The part of the brain that controls activity, in other words, the bundles of neurons that connect to the nerves that move the arms and legs, hands and feet, and so on, is separate from the TW center. Let’s call it the CA center, for control of activity. Actually, there are a lot of neuron bundles between the CA center and the feet, for example, as all the coordination circuitry, that enables us to hop, skip, run and walk had to be laid down somewhere, and that’s between the CA center and the nerves running out of the brain to the feet. But that makes no difference to the points made here.
What matters in a person’s life is the CA center. Let’s recall that neurons fire because of the weighted input from other neurons, and we can think of an aggregate of neurons firing in a similar fashion. The CA center decides to do something based on the input of other portions of the brain. There are certainly connections between the TW center and the CA center, and when we are doing simple things, like saying, “I’m going to leave now”, and then we walk out the door, the TW center has communicated with the CA center, or alternatively, some other decision-making neural bundle has communicated to the TW center and to the CA center, so we knew what we were going to do simultaneously with doing it. For the time being, let’s deal with the case where there is no decision-making center (or DC), that controls both the CA center and the TW center, and just examine the implications of the TW center sending messages to the CA center.
The two distinct cases are clear. The person, properly educated, says, either aloud or inside the verbal neural center (TW) of his brain, “I’m going to eat less.” Then, either that decision comes over to the CA center from the TW center with enough weight to make it stick, and he eats less, or some alternative center (let’s call it AC for now), has a stronger effect on the CA center and overrules the TW input, and he eats the same.
Thus, educating a person isn’t enough, as everybody who has dealt with problems like overweight knows. Other centers that communicate to the CA center have an effect, sometimes an overriding one. So, diet groups are formed, so that the socialization center (SC) that responds to friends and acquaintances effects, might get involved, and together with the TW center, make the change the TW center and these friends want to see happen. Alternately, some really tasty food without calories is developed, and the taste center (TC) gets to play a role, and the person eats the no-calorie food, which accomplishes the same effect as eating less. The TW center gets its goal accomplished by a back door. By buying no-calorie food, which the TW center can get the CA center to do, it outflanks the AC neural bundles by using the TC center. The TW center, maybe with the SC center helping, can get the CA center to take the actions necessary for stomach surgery, which also outflanks the AC bundles.
The neuron bundle that controls the decision in the CA center may actually be tightly coupled to some body sensors (BS), for example, a body sugar monitor, and when that monitor goes into its red zone, its influence on the CA center multiplies. Thus, the TW center could be the dominant one some of the time, but when the BS go red, it is not.
Alternatively, the person could get ill or have an accident related to being overweight, and the trauma avoidance (TA) steps in and adds its weight to making the CA center do what is necessary. Or a romantic relationship might have an effect, with the sexual relationship (SR) center playing a role.
These various neural bundles, SR, TA, SC, TC, and others yet unlabelled, all feed neural input into the CA center, and the combined weights determine what output comes out of the CA center. The same kind of breakdown can be described for any other behavior that eludes the control of the TW center. Examples are addictions to things other than excess food, such as rage, violence, drugs and alcohol, physically based thrills, excess money, control of other people or power, indolence, failure in some arenas such as education, collections of items of little practical use, and others. The TW center may actually not be opposed to these things, but if it is, the AC bundles might override its influence. Programming of the TW center is another topic to be discussed elsewhere. Generally speaking, addictions to non-practical things come from either misprogramming in the TW and TW control of the CA, or AC effects on the CA.
Chanting changes the influence of different parts of the brain. In general, it increases the effect of the TW center, and also helps to organize thoughts in the TW center. We are talking about real science here, not myth or dogma, so if this is true, there must be a way that happens. Chanting is, first, repetitious, second, vocal and aural, third, exclusionary, and fourth, sometimes done in groups.
What does repetition do? In chanting, repetition is really repetition. People talk of chanting the same mantra thousands upon thousands of times. The chanter has to force himself to do this. There is no pain involved, no defeat of body sensors or much else, as no other part of the brain probably cares much about chanting except for the time used up. It is something that can be done that accustoms the TW center to dominate the CA center. It accustoms the CA center to respond to the TW center. The weights that the brain has between different centers depend on use. Heavily used routes grow greater in weight. Thus, after time, the person who chants a great amount assists himself in doing what he decides to do.
What are the vocal and aural effects? You have to do something if its going to be repetitious, you can’t simply sit there and stare. It’s easy to repeat a mantra, and it doesn’t take up any space, doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t use up any resource except a person’s time, and doesn’t cause any bad effects, except possibly from neighbors who have a thin wall. It’s an ideal thing to repeat, and so Sakyamuni and his predecessors who invented chanting really had a brilliant idea. However, there is much more. We think using much the same parts of the brain that speak and listen. These get involved in the chanting, and so external ideas don’t have as much opportunity to get in. There are other bundles that are involved with thinking, but these represent a large part, and occupying them helps the brain be quiescent. This is again good programming for the brain. The habit of chanting induces a capability to have a quiet brain. This interesting phenomenon has been measured by one or two research groups who took monks and measured their brain activity while chanting and otherwise. Their brains were less randomly active.
Third, it is exclusionary, as you can’t be reading a book or watching TV or doing Sudoku while you chant. You learn to concentrate. What that means is the brain lays down nerve weight along paths that support concentration. Concentration is good. It helps in doing all kinds of activities.
Lastly, it can be done in groups. This pulls in the group support weights and reinforces the desire to chant. Repetition doesn’t have to be done in group all the time, but when it does, it reinforces the chanter’s ability to continue.
Thus, all four aspects, and probably some I haven’t thought of, affect the relationship between the TW center and the CA center. They strengthen the connection between the two. This means that when the experienced chanter sets off to do something, he/she are more likely to carry through with it, rather than getting bored and quitting.
The question I am dealing with relates to why people, like myself, don’t do “the smart thing”, or why plans fail due to our own actions, or why addiction happens, and probably a lot of other interesting questions. A lot of people put a great deal of stock in education, which relates to the “Thinking about Wanting” part of the brain. Let’s abbreviate it by TW. Education builds areas around the TW part, so that the person can recite some lessons when asked. For example, an overweight person can say, “I am unhealthy and am going to eat less.” Then they continue to eat as usual. The trainer or doctor has managed to put some information into the person’s brain in the TW center, and, while that’s a good thing, it doesn’t solve this person’s problem.
The part of the brain that controls activity, in other words, the bundles of neurons that connect to the nerves that move the arms and legs, hands and feet, and so on, is separate from the TW center. Let’s call it the CA center, for control of activity. Actually, there are a lot of neuron bundles between the CA center and the feet, for example, as all the coordination circuitry, that enables us to hop, skip, run and walk had to be laid down somewhere, and that’s between the CA center and the nerves running out of the brain to the feet. But that makes no difference to the points made here.
What matters in a person’s life is the CA center. Let’s recall that neurons fire because of the weighted input from other neurons, and we can think of an aggregate of neurons firing in a similar fashion. The CA center decides to do something based on the input of other portions of the brain. There are certainly connections between the TW center and the CA center, and when we are doing simple things, like saying, “I’m going to leave now”, and then we walk out the door, the TW center has communicated with the CA center, or alternatively, some other decision-making neural bundle has communicated to the TW center and to the CA center, so we knew what we were going to do simultaneously with doing it. For the time being, let’s deal with the case where there is no decision-making center (or DC), that controls both the CA center and the TW center, and just examine the implications of the TW center sending messages to the CA center.
The two distinct cases are clear. The person, properly educated, says, either aloud or inside the verbal neural center (TW) of his brain, “I’m going to eat less.” Then, either that decision comes over to the CA center from the TW center with enough weight to make it stick, and he eats less, or some alternative center (let’s call it AC for now), has a stronger effect on the CA center and overrules the TW input, and he eats the same.
Thus, educating a person isn’t enough, as everybody who has dealt with problems like overweight knows. Other centers that communicate to the CA center have an effect, sometimes an overriding one. So, diet groups are formed, so that the socialization center (SC) that responds to friends and acquaintances effects, might get involved, and together with the TW center, make the change the TW center and these friends want to see happen. Alternately, some really tasty food without calories is developed, and the taste center (TC) gets to play a role, and the person eats the no-calorie food, which accomplishes the same effect as eating less. The TW center gets its goal accomplished by a back door. By buying no-calorie food, which the TW center can get the CA center to do, it outflanks the AC neural bundles by using the TC center. The TW center, maybe with the SC center helping, can get the CA center to take the actions necessary for stomach surgery, which also outflanks the AC bundles.
The neuron bundle that controls the decision in the CA center may actually be tightly coupled to some body sensors (BS), for example, a body sugar monitor, and when that monitor goes into its red zone, its influence on the CA center multiplies. Thus, the TW center could be the dominant one some of the time, but when the BS go red, it is not.
Alternatively, the person could get ill or have an accident related to being overweight, and the trauma avoidance (TA) steps in and adds its weight to making the CA center do what is necessary. Or a romantic relationship might have an effect, with the sexual relationship (SR) center playing a role.
These various neural bundles, SR, TA, SC, TC, and others yet unlabelled, all feed neural input into the CA center, and the combined weights determine what output comes out of the CA center. The same kind of breakdown can be described for any other behavior that eludes the control of the TW center. Examples are addictions to things other than excess food, such as rage, violence, drugs and alcohol, physically based thrills, excess money, control of other people or power, indolence, failure in some arenas such as education, collections of items of little practical use, and others. The TW center may actually not be opposed to these things, but if it is, the AC bundles might override its influence. Programming of the TW center is another topic to be discussed elsewhere. Generally speaking, addictions to non-practical things come from either misprogramming in the TW and TW control of the CA, or AC effects on the CA.
Chanting changes the influence of different parts of the brain. In general, it increases the effect of the TW center, and also helps to organize thoughts in the TW center. We are talking about real science here, not myth or dogma, so if this is true, there must be a way that happens. Chanting is, first, repetitious, second, vocal and aural, third, exclusionary, and fourth, sometimes done in groups.
What does repetition do? In chanting, repetition is really repetition. People talk of chanting the same mantra thousands upon thousands of times. The chanter has to force himself to do this. There is no pain involved, no defeat of body sensors or much else, as no other part of the brain probably cares much about chanting except for the time used up. It is something that can be done that accustoms the TW center to dominate the CA center. It accustoms the CA center to respond to the TW center. The weights that the brain has between different centers depend on use. Heavily used routes grow greater in weight. Thus, after time, the person who chants a great amount assists himself in doing what he decides to do.
What are the vocal and aural effects? You have to do something if its going to be repetitious, you can’t simply sit there and stare. It’s easy to repeat a mantra, and it doesn’t take up any space, doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t use up any resource except a person’s time, and doesn’t cause any bad effects, except possibly from neighbors who have a thin wall. It’s an ideal thing to repeat, and so Sakyamuni and his predecessors who invented chanting really had a brilliant idea. However, there is much more. We think using much the same parts of the brain that speak and listen. These get involved in the chanting, and so external ideas don’t have as much opportunity to get in. There are other bundles that are involved with thinking, but these represent a large part, and occupying them helps the brain be quiescent. This is again good programming for the brain. The habit of chanting induces a capability to have a quiet brain. This interesting phenomenon has been measured by one or two research groups who took monks and measured their brain activity while chanting and otherwise. Their brains were less randomly active.
Third, it is exclusionary, as you can’t be reading a book or watching TV or doing Sudoku while you chant. You learn to concentrate. What that means is the brain lays down nerve weight along paths that support concentration. Concentration is good. It helps in doing all kinds of activities.
Lastly, it can be done in groups. This pulls in the group support weights and reinforces the desire to chant. Repetition doesn’t have to be done in group all the time, but when it does, it reinforces the chanter’s ability to continue.
Thus, all four aspects, and probably some I haven’t thought of, affect the relationship between the TW center and the CA center. They strengthen the connection between the two. This means that when the experienced chanter sets off to do something, he/she are more likely to carry through with it, rather than getting bored and quitting.
Buddhism, pacifism and instability
It is pretty obvious that pacifism is an unstable condition. If one imagines a world full of different government units, all pacifist, one sees a peaceful world.
However, it is unstable. Let’s define stability and its opposite. Stability means that a small change will disappear with time. Instability means a small change grows and creates a major change over time. A stick balanced on its end is unstable, as a small change in its angle will cause it to fall over. A stick laying on its side is stable, as a small change in its orientation doesn’t lead to any further large changes, except perhaps a roll back so the maximum weight is lowest.
When one pacifist state become non-pacifist, and prepares for war and then attacks a neighbor, and conquers it, it becomes stronger by absorbing the resources of the conquered state. Now we have a state which is non-pacifist, stronger than before, and ready to conquer another. So the series on conquests grows until some other factors intervene, such as another non-pacifist state grows strong enough to deter it. Thus, pacifism, if it involves non-preparation for serious war, is unstable.
If the system of nations were capable of rapid response, and every one of them would notice when one of them had become non-pacifist and was arming itself for war, and they could respond just as fast, the system would be much more stable. But there is inertia and delay involved. That means the non-pacifist state can get to a war state before others are ready for it, and accomplish its conquest. If there is no agreement to overturn this by using the combined resources of the system of nations, the instability can grow. Thus, to have a pacifist world, it is almost inevitable to have some automated response system to conquest. Since this is costly, it may be difficult to maintain over a long time of peace.
This means that mankind is condemned to a future of continual war and conquest. It also means that Buddhism, a pacifist religion, cannot be maintained as a state religion. Since it is such a well-designed and well-intentioned religion, someone might ask, why isn’t it universal? The answer is clearly that the process of instability will wipe out any Buddhist states through conquest by nations which do not adhere to Buddhism or another equally pacifist religion. Perhaps if Buddhists thought more about stability, they could come up with a more practical plan for peace than converting everyone to Buddhism.
However, it is unstable. Let’s define stability and its opposite. Stability means that a small change will disappear with time. Instability means a small change grows and creates a major change over time. A stick balanced on its end is unstable, as a small change in its angle will cause it to fall over. A stick laying on its side is stable, as a small change in its orientation doesn’t lead to any further large changes, except perhaps a roll back so the maximum weight is lowest.
When one pacifist state become non-pacifist, and prepares for war and then attacks a neighbor, and conquers it, it becomes stronger by absorbing the resources of the conquered state. Now we have a state which is non-pacifist, stronger than before, and ready to conquer another. So the series on conquests grows until some other factors intervene, such as another non-pacifist state grows strong enough to deter it. Thus, pacifism, if it involves non-preparation for serious war, is unstable.
If the system of nations were capable of rapid response, and every one of them would notice when one of them had become non-pacifist and was arming itself for war, and they could respond just as fast, the system would be much more stable. But there is inertia and delay involved. That means the non-pacifist state can get to a war state before others are ready for it, and accomplish its conquest. If there is no agreement to overturn this by using the combined resources of the system of nations, the instability can grow. Thus, to have a pacifist world, it is almost inevitable to have some automated response system to conquest. Since this is costly, it may be difficult to maintain over a long time of peace.
This means that mankind is condemned to a future of continual war and conquest. It also means that Buddhism, a pacifist religion, cannot be maintained as a state religion. Since it is such a well-designed and well-intentioned religion, someone might ask, why isn’t it universal? The answer is clearly that the process of instability will wipe out any Buddhist states through conquest by nations which do not adhere to Buddhism or another equally pacifist religion. Perhaps if Buddhists thought more about stability, they could come up with a more practical plan for peace than converting everyone to Buddhism.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Buddha was bored
Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, and the original Buddha, was born into a royal family in one of the city-states on the Indian subcontinent, around 2600 years ago. A lot is recorded about him, as he became one of the most famous of Indians in history. Oral tradition says that he was the son of a king who wanted his children to never know unhappiness, and so the king used his resources to ensure the children never saw suffering or death, poverty or distress. But there were unintended consequences. Sakayamuni apparently got bored with a constant cycle of royal food and entertainment. There is no need here to discuss the next phases of his life, but it led to the foundation of what many believe is the greatest religion ever devised - Buddhism.
The bottom line is that it's OK to get bored, as long as you are driven by it to do good works. It's fine to be unsatisfied with what would satisfy most people. It's great to be discontented with what countless others hope for and seek. Let's be more specific.
Discontent because you are insecure is probably not the best feeling to have. If you see someone else with more than you, and you want to get more to have more, just because you feel bad inside if you have less, that's bad. It's called envy. If you want to get more because you want to use it for good purposes, that's good. It's called altruism. Almost all religions teach this distinction. Discontent is not the same as boredom.
Boredom is like discontent in that it drives you to do something different, but it is motivated by the unknown. You get bored with what you have, or what you know, or where you are, or who you're with, or any other aspect, because you feel there is something else that you don't know about. Discontent is when you know really well that someone else has something and you don't. Boredom generates an exploration. Discontent may generate an exploration for the purpose of finding our how to get what you think you're lacking. Boredom drives you to explore things you don't know for the purpose of knowing more. Buddha was bored, not discontented. The world is a tremendously better place because of Buddha's boredom.
The bottom line is that it's OK to get bored, as long as you are driven by it to do good works. It's fine to be unsatisfied with what would satisfy most people. It's great to be discontented with what countless others hope for and seek. Let's be more specific.
Discontent because you are insecure is probably not the best feeling to have. If you see someone else with more than you, and you want to get more to have more, just because you feel bad inside if you have less, that's bad. It's called envy. If you want to get more because you want to use it for good purposes, that's good. It's called altruism. Almost all religions teach this distinction. Discontent is not the same as boredom.
Boredom is like discontent in that it drives you to do something different, but it is motivated by the unknown. You get bored with what you have, or what you know, or where you are, or who you're with, or any other aspect, because you feel there is something else that you don't know about. Discontent is when you know really well that someone else has something and you don't. Boredom generates an exploration. Discontent may generate an exploration for the purpose of finding our how to get what you think you're lacking. Boredom drives you to explore things you don't know for the purpose of knowing more. Buddha was bored, not discontented. The world is a tremendously better place because of Buddha's boredom.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Down Chanting
Chanting, SGI meditation, provides some psychological effects. For me, really short periods, like a minute or less, serve to remind me of things I know but conveniently forget. For example, I often forget to have confidence in starting things, and a quick burst of chant is enough to remind me to remind myself that I have had many, many successes and should expect another. So I get over the hurdle.
Otherwise, I experience two states in which I chant: one in which I haven't chanted seriously for a long time, and it's something fresh to get back to. This state can last months. The other is when I am down, depressed, facing some unsolved problem with major uncertainties and worries, and need strength to get through it. It is a relief from the anxiety, for the first portion, then after a while, it is a focusing of the mind on how to resolve the problem.
During the first state, chanting is blissful. Why then, does this state come to an end after some months, six or ten or fifteen? Chanting gets boring -- that doesn't explain much to anyone but myself. I get bored with repetition, no matter how pleasant or rewarding it is. Also, outside forces attrit my resolve, as when I am feeling good, I start new things, which take up time, and eventually squeeze down my chanting time, and finally make it disappear. New things aren't boring, and somehow get priority over chanting.
During the second state, chanting is responsive. When the problem is resolved, the pressure is off to chant. It really is a psychological pressure, to seek a solution to a problem. There may be a short tail to my chanting, a few days after the problem melts away, but in this state, chanting also comes to an end - until some other problem rears up.
This is a feeble explanation of why I cannot maintain perfection in chanting, like so many of my SGI compatriots claim to. What do others experience?
Otherwise, I experience two states in which I chant: one in which I haven't chanted seriously for a long time, and it's something fresh to get back to. This state can last months. The other is when I am down, depressed, facing some unsolved problem with major uncertainties and worries, and need strength to get through it. It is a relief from the anxiety, for the first portion, then after a while, it is a focusing of the mind on how to resolve the problem.
During the first state, chanting is blissful. Why then, does this state come to an end after some months, six or ten or fifteen? Chanting gets boring -- that doesn't explain much to anyone but myself. I get bored with repetition, no matter how pleasant or rewarding it is. Also, outside forces attrit my resolve, as when I am feeling good, I start new things, which take up time, and eventually squeeze down my chanting time, and finally make it disappear. New things aren't boring, and somehow get priority over chanting.
During the second state, chanting is responsive. When the problem is resolved, the pressure is off to chant. It really is a psychological pressure, to seek a solution to a problem. There may be a short tail to my chanting, a few days after the problem melts away, but in this state, chanting also comes to an end - until some other problem rears up.
This is a feeble explanation of why I cannot maintain perfection in chanting, like so many of my SGI compatriots claim to. What do others experience?
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Why and who
I'm far from being an expert on SGI, but I think I see a need for online discussion of practice. That means chanting. The basic practice of SGI is chanting to achieve focus, which leads to figuring out what to do, which leads to happiness, whatever that is for you. However, as anyone who's tried it knows, it's hard to set aside time everyday for the same thing. I guess it's like exercising -- a lot of people get bored after a while and quit.
And then there's all those internal demons who don't want to let us succeed. They can be pretty ferocious at times. Mine eat me alive.
I'd be really interested in hearing about how other SGI members overcome this problem. I'm sure there are some who just do it with no difficulty, but many fail.
So ------ what's your story?
And then there's all those internal demons who don't want to let us succeed. They can be pretty ferocious at times. Mine eat me alive.
I'd be really interested in hearing about how other SGI members overcome this problem. I'm sure there are some who just do it with no difficulty, but many fail.
So ------ what's your story?
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