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.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
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.
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