“The key to living during this environmental crisis is to STAY PUT. Focus on living and existing in your corner of the Earth, protect it. Travel and moving around all the time is so overrated. A lot of it is a waste of time. Create your own bliss where you are right now. Stop searching the world for it!”
Category Archives: Philosophy
“Truth exists; only lies are invented”
“Few people can say: I am here. They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future.” — Georges Braque (1882–1963)
The Philosophy of Solipsism
“Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.” (Wikipedia)
The Other Side of Nothing
(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”
We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.
Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.
In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.
In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.
“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi
Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.
When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.
The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”
The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.
“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki
Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you. Continue reading
Bangkok Haunts
“(You) think the Western mind is some Frankensteinian product of a botched religion and a bunch of ancient Greek pedophiles, the same unholy combination of schoolboy logic, lust for blood and glory, we-know-best, and destroy-to-save that slaughtered three million in Vietnam, most of them women and children, all in the name of freedom and democracy, before we ran away because it got too expensive.”
“Modernism is largely a form of entertainment, and a superficial one at that. It doesn’t survive environmental disasters or oil shortages. It doesn’t even survive terrorist attacks. It certainly doesn’t survive poverty, which is the lot of most of us. One flick of a switch, and the images fade from the screen. […] Confusion seeks relief in bigotry, which leads to conflict. One high-tech war, and we’re back to the Stone Age.”
— Bangkok Haunts (2007) by John Burdett
Good to be alive!
Don’t recall where I found this or who said/wrote it, but it goes something like this:
You died ten years ago and –somehow, miraculously– were brought back to life ten minutes ago. You’re fully aware of having missed the last ten years but have all of your memories and sense of who you are (or were).
Before digging into what you missed in the last decade, you begin getting a sense of what’s going on now. A deadly virus killing millions; a climate crises that might be too big and too late to fix; fascism on the rise; the flame of American democracy flickering.
And your response to this horrible state of affairs?
“Man, it’s good to be alive!”
And stack rocks
Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. — Zen proverb.
It is the Tao
“He, like everyone else, […] is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao.”
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties but that line didn’t hit me until I came across it today. Timing, right? American democracy on the ropes. Millions dead/dying from a global pandemic. The planet gasping for breath. And here I am, exactly where/what/when I was meant to be. Seriously, this is the most peaceful I’ve felt in months.
Memories
To some extent we are the sum of our memories. Or it feels that way. But neuroscience tells us that every time a memory is recalled, it is recreated by the brain, slightly different each time it’s retrieved. So, a memory of a memory. Of a memory. Imagine each memory as a photo in a shoebox. Everytime you pull one out, it’s just a little bit different. We’re not bothered by this because we are unaware of the change. We have no memory of the previous version. Neuroscience also tells us we are able to recall only a fraction of our experiences.
My conclusion: We are not our memories.
So who/what am I? Perhaps the most important question one can ask, and that few ever do. Are we our thoughts and feelings? If so, what are we in those rare moments when we are not thinking or feeling? I like Sam Harris’ description of such mental objects as “temporary patterns of energy.”
Nothing Really Has A Name
“Your life began with a kind of singularity. A personal Big Bang. Without warning, you emerged from unconsciousness into a sea of light, color, smell, faces, feelings, and other completely unexpected phenomena, and there was nothing to do but attempt to navigate it. It was the ultimate “cold open” – no context, no explanation, just things happening.”
“You can learn to see that mysteriousness in the world again, on purpose. You can practice looking at what’s in front of you as an infant might see it. It’s all just textures and feelings, that have no real names and carry no explanation. Looking at the world like that comes with a certain kind of relief to the compulsive mapper, because what’s right in front of you is never as busy as the map. […] It comes down to just looking — seeing what’s there, and nothing else, as you once did.”