There are "turning words" and there is "chatter." The ancestral teacher "overspent himself" by getting involved in a dualistic argument. In reality, everything is moving and nothing is moving. To say, "mind is moving" is dualistic, thus  "chatter." Movement is relative and implies duality.

   "Only know how to open their mouths" refers to opinion, as opposed to truth, which is revealed in silence. 

Hmm... how was this mic-ed? It sounds too good for the room?  vibrato at 1:18 doesn't feel right....


ugh, this universe, so many questions...

Called "chicken skin" in hawaii.

​​​​​​​

a bitter tale...more better go from civilization to the deep woods...



from
FROM THE DEEP WOODS TO CIVILIZATION
Charles Eastman

To be sure, I had been bitterly disappointed in the character of the United States army and the honor of Government officials. Still, I had seen the better side of civilization, and I determined that the good men and women who had helped me should not be betrayed. The Christ ideal might be radical, visionary, even impractical, as judged in the light of my later experiences; it still seemed to me logical, and in line with most of my Indian training. My heart was still strong, and I had the continual inspiration of a brave comrade at my side.

With all the rest, I was deeply regretful of the work that I had left behind. I could not help thinking that if the President knew, if the good people of this country knew, of the wrong, it would yet be righted. I had not seen half of the savagery of civilization!

yes indeed
been meaning to mention that this is an important book

lots of you tube interviews and reviews

You guys are pointing out that things change. They are unreliable. That is good to point out because there is the most room for goodwill and happiness, and the most room to be helpful, in acknowledging change and acting from that knowledge. 

The essential technology is language, and from language comes the destruction of truth. As harari points out, truth is expensive, takes effort and research, while lies are cheap and easy. The easier and cheaper you make communication, the more lies. Value the truthtellers who are paying the price.

Ai is by nature autonomous, by definition it is an intelligent entity capable of decision and action. The dictators so adept in its misuse can't control it and will equally be victimized by it.

The technology is the fastest ever developed and is far beyond comprehension already. Programmable humanoid robots are already available for the price of a luxury car. And far less recognizable ai applications infest our homes, offices and vehicles. We live in little ai cocoons like in the matrix. 

Some schools these days experimentally take the students phones away before class, like taking firearms away before you enter the saloon. The children open like morning glories.

nate hagens, tom murphy, d j white
reality roundtable

truthtellers conversation


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22fc66Q2hP4

imho, george carlin and dave chapelle are great artists, the odysseus and chuang tzu of our modern era, raising crude and humble entertainment to art, and then once again their art to philosophy, or wisdom


anytime they talk about the art itself it is a treasure

from the charlie rose george carlin interview:


"People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what they think."
~george carlin


"Fuck the people! Fuck hope!"
~george carlin


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9OhMZYTS4E

   What was the buddha getting at with his notion of impermanence? The nature of existence, of being, was a central concern of early buddhism.

  The little trick of enlightenment involves a little trick of perspective. 

  This is what dogen tried to convey, and heidegger, and with their help I’ll take a crack at it.


   We have a certain perspective on being, generally speaking, that we take for granted. This perspective implies an ontological status which is deeply deluded. And we are further confused by the remnants of defunct religious fantasies designed to promote social order, that is, domination by elites.

   We look upon birth-and-death from the outside, as beginning and end. We have a being, or we are a being, who is born, who lives, and then this being is terminated in death. Yet this entity, this being, is completely empty of any self nature, any being-nature, that is to say, there is no being at all. No “thing” as such, static and definable, seemingly “real.”

   R buckminster fuller once said, “I seem to be a verb.” This in a nutshell is the phenomenology of being.

   Try think of being as a verb, and imagine it can never be used as a noun, never thought of as a thing. Then all beings are happenings, which begin and end only relatively, only in relation to another similarly ephemeral “being.”

   There are no static beings, that is a trick of false perspective, of withdrawing from the world to look at it from an unreal outside which can never be real, as we are always inside. The void itself is our inside and beings are clouds in an empty sky, flowers of air. The void is endless, beginingless.

   So time itself is being, being is time. Being-time. Time, like space, cannot be looked at from outside. Endless space, endless time. Whorled without aimed. Dust in the wind.

   Phenomenologically, the experience of true being is within time and space, within the constraints of birth-and-death at all moments. Life is at all times living and dying, sap rises, leaves fall, spring follows winter and winter follows fall. Change is constant. Being is change. But the constancy of being transcends thingness, quiddity. Beings are not things, they are beings, like rainbows, or dust devils. Eddies and currents. Transient movements of ultimately insubstantial universal substance.

   All beings, all being is like this. Anything we name simply puts us at one remove from a transient and ongoing phenomenon. It’s like we take snapshots of verbeings and proceed to navigate on the basis of the images rather than looking where we are going. If you are thinking, you’re not paying attention. As yogi berra said, “you can’t think and hit at the same time.”

   We encounter our fellow beings, we don’t see them as things, use them as tools or make them slaves. Not people, not animals, not plants, not sand water or sky, not “objects.” We interact, “inter-be.” We simply "are." Language, justly, fails.


   So, life-and-death are constant, ever-present, the nature of impermanence, like time, like being. Death, like life, is in the nature of things, the conditioning to which all life submits, as death submits to life.

   Being is a verb, not a noun. And being is itself time, the living being.







from a study of dogen, masao abe


To understand Dogen's view of life and death properly, we
must clearly notice the following four points. First, for Dogen,
as for Buddhism in general, life and death or birth and death
are not two different entities, but are inseparably interconnected in human reality. This is why, in the "Shoji" ("Birth and death") fascicle of his Shobogenzo, Dogen emphasizes that "it is a mistake to think you pass from birth to death."

 To view life as passing from birth to death is nothing but an outsider's view In which we observe our own life and death objectively and
conceptually from without. If we grasp our life and death not
from the outside but nonobjectively from within, we realize
that life and death are not two different things, but rather that
we are living and dying at one and the same time. In this nonconceptual, existential understanding, there is no living apart
from dying and there is no dying apart from living. Living and 
dying are like two sides of one sheet of paper, and are two different verbal expressions of one and the same reality. Usually,
however, people are not clearly aware of this human reality and
think that they pass from birth to death. Since such an unreal
understanding of human reality is the cause of suffering, Buddhism strongly admonishes us to be aware of this human reality of living-dying transmigration as samsara, the realization of which is essential to attain nirvana.

Not only in Dogen in particular, but also in Buddhism in
general, samsara is understood to be without beginning and
without end. At the same time, in samsara, living-dying is taking
place at each and every moment. In fact, at each and every
moment, we are fully living and fully dying. Since samsara is the
beginningless and endless process of living-dying at each
moment, it itself is realized as Death in the absolute sense. If one
existentially realizes the beginningless and endless process of
samsara itself as real Death at this moment, this realization of
samsara as real Death turns into the realization of nirvana as real
Life. This is why Dogen says, "You must realize birth-and-death
is in and of itself nirvana. Buddhism has never spoken of nirvana apart from birth-and-death."
 The beginningless and endless living-dying transmigration (samsara) constitutes the basic problem innate in human existence. In and through the clear existential realization of the beginninglessness and endlessness of transmigration at this moment, the emancipation from transmigration (nirvana) is attained. Accordingly, the realization of
the beginninglessness and endlessness of transmigration is a
turning point from samsara (problem) to nirvana (its solution).
Second, however, in Dogen the above-quoted statement
from "Shoji," "It is a mistake to think you pass from birth to
death," is emphasized also because life (or birth) is absolute life
(or birth) and death is absolute death. There is utterly no passage between them, as can be seen from the statements immediately following the quotation cited above:

Being a situation of [timeless-] time (hitotoki no kurai), birth is
already possessed of before and after. For this reason, in the
Buddha Dharma it is said that birth itself is no-birth. Being
a situation of [timeless-] time as well, cessation of life also is
possessed of before and after. Thus it is said, extinction
itself is nonextinction. When one speaks of birth, there is
nothing at all apart from birth. When one speaks of death,
there is nothing at all apart from death. Therefore, when 
birth comes, you should just give yourself to birth; when
death comes, you should give yourself to death. Do not
hate them. Do not desire them.

The same idea is clearly stated in another important fascicle, "Genjokoan":

Once firewood turns to ash, the ash cannot turn back to
being firewood. Still one should not take the view that it is
ash afterward and firewood before. You should realize that
although firewood is at the dharma-situation of firewood, and
that this is possessed of before and after, the firewood is
beyond before and after. Ashes are at the dharma-situation of
ashes, and possess before and after. Just as firewood does not
revert to firewood once it has turned to ash, man does not
return to life after his death. In light of this, it being an
established teaching in Buddhism not to speak of life
becoming death, Buddhism speaks of the unborn. It being a
confirmed Buddhist teaching that death does not become
life, it speaks of nonextinction. Life is a situation of [timeless-]
time and death is a situation of [timeless-] time, like, for example, winter and spring. We do not suppose that winter
becomes spring, or say that spring becomes summer.

immigration man
(graham nash)


There I was at the immigration scene
Shining and feeling clean
Could it be a sin?
I got stopped by the immigration man
He says he doesn't know if he can
Let me in - let me in - immigration man
Can I cross the line and pray
I can stay another day
Let me in immigration man
I won't toe your line today
I can't see it anyway

There he was with his immigration face
Giving me a paper chase
But the sun was coming
Cos all at once he looked into my space
And stamped a number over my face
And it sent me running
Let me in - let me in - immigration man
Can I cross the line and pray
I can stay another day
Let me in immigration man
I won't toe your line today
I can't see it anyway

Here I am with my immigration form
It's big enough to keep me warm
When a cold wind's coming
So go where you will
As long as you think you can
You'd better watch out - watch out for the man
Anywhere you're going

Won't you let me in immigration man
Can I cross the line and pray
Take your fingers from the tray
Let me in - irritation man
I won't toe your line today
I can't see it anyway



​​​​​​​graham nash, david crosby, 1972

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKrhCNmBvC8

Both free-will and determinism are just concepts, neither is 'correct'. Not worth contemplating either imo. Same with mind and reality, they are both just conceptual ideas, both arise and subside. The ineffable phenomena from which they arise and to which they subside is the source of truth. Straight up or? Beter to contemplate the source.

better let the source contemplate you

latest paper by top climate scinetists

if you are not alarmed you are not awake


https://oeco.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Ripple-et-al.-2024.pdf

since this is out of order, I'll post the link again
song for shargrol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6SZB3_qHVg

the whole vanishing treasures album by hawaiian style band maps mappo





hawaiians even look like indians
I have friends who visit alaska as tourists
and are taken for squaws
they get along great with the indigenous people
​​​​​​​who also take them for squaws



even the translation of the lyric poem makes me cry...
​​​​​​​

He Makana No Na Mamo
Na Mo'olelo O Na Pua O Nehinei
E Pili Mau I Na Kupuna
Na Lei 'A'ala
I Ohu Mau I Ku'u Lei
I Ke Aloha Pili Mau


English Translation:

A Gift For The Decendants
The Stories of Yesterday's Flowers
Let's Always Hold Close
Our Ancestors, Who Are
A Sweet Smelling Lei For Us
Like A Misty Cloud Around The Mountain
Their Love Surrounds Us Forever​​​​​​​

Dogen taught his monks to meditate while not thinking. This practice, he said, was itself enlightenment. When monks would complain about this discipline and ask what about when continued thoughts arise? He told them to “think ‘no thought’.”

Iain mcgilchrist’s research on brain lateralization implies that we have two different views of the world, depending on which hemisphere is dominant at a given time.

We know from stroke patients that the left brain hemisphere controls the right side of the body, including sense organs, while the right controls the left. The brains of animals are similarly divided. Clearly there is evolutionary advantage in bilateral mental processing as it has been virtually universally selected for.

While both hemispheres are active in nearly all bod[ly functions, there are significant differences, even in the shape, size and orientation of the hemispheres.

Speech, for example, is essentially a function of the left brain. If we accept mcgilchrist’s view, this has tremendous implications. One of which is to validate soto zen practice.

Mcgilchrist deduces from his research that the ‘divided brain’ has two different worldviews, that are separate but not equal. He calls them ‘the master’ (right, nonverbal) and ‘his emissary’ (left, verbal). He concludes that these two halves can readily come into conflict, and that in fact our society and culture is so divided and at odds with itself.

yi jing:

Dragons fight in the field
their blood is black and yellow

The left brain is tightly focused, task oriented and basically bull-headed, not to be deterred. Considerations of consequences to the environment are irrelevant to ‘success.’ The right brain takes a global view, cares for life itself and the environment which nurtures and protects it. The right brain will walk into a supermarket, stoned, and read all the labels and think about what might be best for human nutrition and planetary health. The left brain will grab a power bar and an energy drink at the checkout stand. Right brained people will sneer at left brained people and vice versa.

Internally, this appears to map well onto the old freudian terms, ego, superego, and id, where ego is left, superego is right, and id is the basic evolutionary drive, the perceived needs of the organism. And it explains the nature of the conflict each person has with themselves, the clash of self interest and doing what is right. It also smells a bit of old fashioned scottish protestantism, the garden, the fall. Abel and cain.

Mcgilchrist’s thesis is that the left should naturally be subservient to the right, that the right should serve in the role of master, the left the emissary. (Emissary, emission,  emitted; careful not to say slave or puppet.)


What can a buddhist think of this? Clearly empathy, compassion, is associated with the nonverbal side. Deodorizing the implied moralism, lets focus on the effects of shikantaza, just sitting, in light of this research.

There is a personality associated with the left, aggressive, self-aggrandizing (yang). And one with the right, peaceful, accommodating (yin). By the continuous practice of simply sitting and practicing being in nonverbal mind, one perceives the world as a whole in harmony and absolute grandeur, wonderful, ecstatically encountered…words inexpressible, ineffable. After meditation nonessential tasks are blown off and essential ones filled with the wordless knowledge of their cosmic global significance.

Grateful dead:

See here how everything
lead up to this day
and its just like any other day
that’s ever been

omar hayyam

LIII.

 With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead,
 And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
   Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
 What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

The one round pearl is the right brain view, no time or space orientation needed for no tasks. A magical realm where everyone is a friend and we all work together. The magic monastery. Living the ideal, the dream of effortless, seamless integration. The thing is, this is the reality of the right brain. Nirvana. A legitimate point of view.

While the left brain’s goal directed behavior leads it into constant conflict. Things are always going wrong, down on the farm, the pests, the weather, hard to tell if anything is going to sell.

It’s easy to see that nature wants the two hemispheres to coexist peaceably and harmonize their bipolarity. Mcgilchrist suggests that the two hemispheres are way out of whack, the ego side far too dominant, and that the conditions are pathological for both the individual’s mental health and perceived well being and that of the species. Not to mention the ecosphere.

David graeber’s work suggests that in prehistory people generally were far more balanced and healthy and happy. Mappo again.

Perhaps the entire pathology of the euro-dominated world could be attributed to vitamin d deficiency. For the want of a nail…the kingdom is lost.


So, soto zen meditation may be a salubrious whack upside the head for those westerners addicted to dopamine and other fleeting and ultimately unrewarding satisfactions. Goal directed behavior at best accomplishes goals. This is inherently unsatisfactory as the goals are too narrow to provide any real happiness to anyone. We are happiest when we can live on little and substantially add to the quality of life of other sentient beings. Right.

Graeber first wrote a book about the origins of debt. And while his new prehistory focuses on the political animal and how they choose to live in freedom, much of his focus is still on private property.

Private property in prehistory mainly focused on sacred objects. Who got to possess heirloom objects and express their mana was hotly contested. Think of hui neng’s bowl and robe. Often the objects conferred the right to sing certain songs or do particular dances at the festivals which established and renewed their significance. We have many remnants of these ritual honors today, with awards, status and rewards attached. We compete for trophies and perquisites.

Even where money existed it was expected to be dispensed on public works, bread and circuses.

Where Graeber breaks new ground is in giving many examples of where pre-agriculture peoples would oscillate between highly structured, ritualized and hierarchical mass meetings for up to half a year, and then dispersion into small egalitarian groups the rest of the time.

Comparing this with mcgilchrist’s view of the divided brain and its effects on society may help us understand our own culture wars and political polarization.

Graeber speaks of two different views of freedom. One in which any interference with one’s rights to dispose of one’s property, even to destroy it, is a violation. And another where the ability to go wherever one wants and not to be told what to do by anyone else is seen as natural right.

The one fiercely defends their rights to the stuff they spend all their time and energy acquiring. The other insists on their individual rights to do and say anything they please.

The first is exclusive, a zero sum game in which the possessors must use force to preserve their rights. (Harris has a glock which she claims she will use to shoot anyone who attempts to enter her dwelling uninvited. Trump as a felon is not allowed access to firearms.)

The second extends rights not only to gays, lesbians, trannies and bisexuals, but also to queers. (I wore a tee shirt to wednesday’s farmers market which read, “no one is illegal on stolen land.”)

Political parties are skewed, corrupted. They don’t line up directly with the hemispheres, at least not any more. Main stream media has been so corrupted by the blatant lying of the right that they now engage in the same tactics, saying whatever serves the political interests of their owners. The american election comes down to the red corporate party vs the blue corporate party, silicon valley vs wall street, where the winners, the corporate parties, then divide up the spoils equally, hey, there is plenty to go around. 

This leaves us, the public, bitterly divided. Mostly along left brain and right brain lines. These fundamental divisions have been identified by modern technology and are being exploited by ai algorithms.

The right (left-brained) has rediscovered “the big lie,” which, once swallowed, allows the influencer to tell any sort of lie and have it accepted without question. A new lie every day. Indeed a new lie every minute, so many one can’t challenge them all and fact checking becomes a continuous rebuttal, leaving one no time to make a point.

The left (right-brained) desires reconciliation, which often renders them complicit in their own destruction, when fighting an enemy who seeks only to win. One loses most when one becomes what one hates. (Like cnn, et al, former journalists and now supporters of genocide and the murder of real journalists and first responders, and babies.)


What I am really interested in here is still reconciliation, or “saving beings” in the buddhist formulation. Save the environment, the whales, the bees. Stop fracking and war and overconsumption.


The left brain attachment to detailed task oriented behavior is like a squirrel stashing nuts. Like the proto squirrel and his acorn in the ice age movies. From a more global view it appears as self destructive single minded obsession.

Sentient beings tend to have divided brains, one side dualistic, the other forced to be dualistic because the first side is. One side polarizing, the other depolarizing. Like neurons and neurotransmitters. 

Self-preservation vs social cohesion. The irony here is that self-preservation focuses on denying actual freedom to be and do without restraint, while social cohesion requires an emphasis on equality and individual freedom; self sacrifice and leading by example. Free and equal societies required their members to adhere to a code of hospitality toward strangers, their absolute rights to food and drink and shelter. This allowed anyone to travel freely and go wherever they liked.


Another aspect of graeber’s research is the idea that humans tend to deliberately differentiate themselves into exclusive groups. (“My two favorite teams are detroit and whoever is playing the bears this week.”) These groups and their competitions can become violent; mesoamerica has a long history of violence involved with ball games. In nature most intra species conflicts are ritualistic and involve a lot of display. Once our two party system espoused similar values most of the time vs now where the stark choice is between endlesslly increasing global violence on the one side or the end of democracy and freedom throughout the world on the other. Could be our last significant election. Haven’t had one in hawaii in a long time.


Many people I know and some dear to me personally are doubtful that truth exists, or that it is real. They repeat obvious lies and say, but how do you know it isn’t true? as though plausibility was all that mattered. One finds oneself pointing out that the lie is not in fact plausible but then you find you no longer speak of truth but of how plausible something is, as though that was what mattered, how believable the lie. People then look for what they think believable and repeat it as though the little universe of collective lies will shield them from the truth. “The truth” being the increasingly unpalatable trajectory of human civilization. And their own lives and those of their offspring.

Are we going to wake up? We have to try. A lot of people see what is going on.

What does an awakened one look like? How should they act?

​​​​​Isn't ​​seeing others as separate from their 'awakened' selves (when in fact there is no self to become 'awakened') one of the ways we define unawakened? 

Aren't those that are here at this time exactly how they are in their fully 'awakened' states?

​​​​​​Are we going to wake up? Who said we are asleep? Are we not all but dream actors. To ask 'are we going to wake up?' is to claim that we are asleep. To claim that WE are asleep is to claim that YOU too are sleeping, or do you see yourself as separate from all the others?


There is also no nothing but t​​hen also 'sine quo nulla disputatio est'.

There is no self but there is also no no-self.

Camdizzle, please know that some people maintain a personal thread, like Terry's thread here, and aren't necessarily here for debating their posts/observations. It may be appropriate to start your own posts on topics/issues that you want to discuss.