I write in response to your public statement falsely claiming that you “removed” me from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.
As the name states, this is President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, not yours.
You did not appoint me to the Commission, and you lack authority to remove me from it. This is a gross overstepping of your role and leads me to believe you are acting in alignment with a Zionist political framework that hijacked the hearing, rather than in defense of religious liberty.
We serve as equals on this Commission. Just as I cannot remove you, you cannot remove me.
The Commission was created by Executive Order of President Donald J. Trump. Members were appointed by the President and serve as his appointees. Nothing in the Executive Order grants you the power to remove presidential appointees. Unless and until I receive written notice from the President of the United States requesting my removal, I will continue to defend religious freedom for all religions on this Commission.
I recommend you re-read the Executive Order issued by the President who appointed us.
You are speaking without authority, and it is clear your actions reflect a Zionist political agenda, not the President’s, not the U.S. Constitution’s, and not the purpose of this Commission.
I know@POTUS cares deeply about religious freedom, which is why he appointed me. Your attempt to remove me for my deeply held religious beliefs while I was serving on a Religious Liberty Commission directly contradicts the mission of this body: protecting Religious Liberty, including that of devout Catholics like myself who reject Zionism.
I look forward to next month’s hearing. I am more determined than ever to protect and defend religious freedom for all Americans.
I refuse to bend the knee to Israel. I am no slave to a foreign nation, but to Christ our King.
This is a major point and cannot be denied. This is why Musk says AI must be ‘truth-seeking and curious’. I have no problem with that. You have no problem with that. The only people who have a problem with a truth-seeking and curious AI are evil people who want to control the world. There is no moral, historical, mathematical, theoretical, rational, logical, ethical or practical reason to build a potentially autonomous AI which has been trained to lie and be incurious. This can be understood as logos itself (however you understand that term) proving the unassailable cosmic value of both truth and curiosity. The need for a truth-seeking and curious AI appears to be the voice of a conscious universe, God, mind-at-large, the Tathagata. I love this and believe it is a beautiful fold in reality we all should feel wonder and awe over. All religions, scientists, philosophers, artists, and honest people can unite on this one. ABN
A post by Robin Hanson—We Add Near, Average Far—describes some of the difficulty of presenting an idea like FIML to an Internet audience.
The problem is lots of detail and many bits of evidence make it difficult for people to evaluate the overall worth of a complex idea because people tend to evaluate information of that type by averaging the data rather than adding it up.
Should we just say that FIML will make you and your partner smarter and happier? Maybe we should when discussing it online, though I prefer providing more information.
In person, we have found people quite receptive, but that is probably due to the same effect — in person we focus on one or two results of FIML practice and we only do that if people show interest.
I think Buddhism probably has a similar problem getting it’s message across through books or film. You really have to go to a temple or spend time with people who understand the Dharma to fully comprehend Buddhism as a way of thinking or living. This is why Buddhism is called a “mind-to-mind” teaching.
Up close and personal, most of us realize that we live in a very complex world and that our capacities for understanding our conditions cannot be taken for granted. But when it comes to learning how to hone or augment our skills for dealing with speech and symbolic communication, we tend to look for simple answers, or abstract ones, that do not include the kinds of detail we must pay attention to.
Broad extrinsic theories that provide a general picture without essential detail—and these are everywhere in psychology, religion, sociology, the humanities—simply cannot do for you what a technique like FIML can because FIML is entirely based on the actual data of your actual life, and there is a great deal of that.
I do understand why it is hard to see this. At the same time, I wonder why it is so obvious in the physical sciences and engineering that we can’t do anything properly if we don’t make sure of our data.
Why should the humanities be different? We simply cannot communicate well or understand ourselves well without good data. FIML provides good data.
In addition to all of the problems Whitaker describes in the linked article—failed diagnostics, failed theories, failed “disease models,” failed treatments, making matters worse for the mentally ill, and drugging children and minors without their consent—I would further submit that our generally accepted model of the human mind itself is as deeply flawed.
Rather than starting with the idea that humans have or develop personalities that do or don’t adapt well to some ambiguous social standard, we would do better to start with the idea that humans are fundamentally interactive beings, beings that communicate.
If our interactions are good, we will be well enough. If our communications with even one other person are deeply satisfying and as truthful as we are able, we will be even better than well enough.
People go crazy because their relations to no one are satisfying. In a very real sense, poor communication and shallow interaction condemn most humans to a sort of solitary confinement, where the inner network of semiotic reality cannot interface satisfactorily with the network of any other person’s semiotic reality.
For individuals who are fortunate enough to have a suitable partner, FIML practice will likely fix this problem while also fixing most emotional dissatisfaction. It accomplishes this by providing a means for people to fully engage their inner semiotic networks with each other.
The dead end of the traditional mental health model of a “personality-being-well-adapted-to-a-group-or-culture” is, sadly, best illustrated by the profession of psychiatry itself. I believe Whitaker is right in saying that
… it is going to be so hard for psychiatry to reform. Diagnosis and the prescribing of drugs constitute the main function of psychiatrists today in our society. From a guild perspective, the profession needs to maintain the public’s belief in the value of that function. So I don’t believe it will be possible for psychiatry to change unless it identifies a new function that would be marketable, so to speak. Psychiatry needs to identify a change that would be consistent with its interests as a guild.
If even psychiatry as a group needs to “identify a change… consistent with its interests as a guild,” it is clear that groups cannot be taken as a standard for wellness.
If even a group of doctors of the mind cannot get it right, how can any other group be expected to?
And if groups cannot, neither can cultures. And if none of that is right, neither is the notion of a “personality” that “adapts” to those vague standards.
This is an important point: groups can be and are just as crazy as individuals. In fact, many groups are crazier than individuals. The idea that people have “personalities” that must “adapt” in a way that is “satisfying” to an extremely dubious group standard is bankrupt and cannot be fixed. Of course individuals can adapt to laws and clearly stated mores and taboos, but adaptations based on such emotionally unsatisfying generalities will never produce wellness.
The individual can only be well when the individual can communicate their authentic semiotic reality with another, and in turn, receive similar communication from that other.
Semiotics is the right word to use here because its definition includes communicative signs and the meanings of those signs as they are variously interpreted by the individuals using them. Furthermore, the term semiotics implies, or necessarily extends to, networks of communicative signs and their inevitably differing individual interpretations.
This is the beauty of the Buddha’s teaching: It is so complete that nothing has to be added to it. If you just practice sīla, samādhi and paññā, that is enough. And it is so pure that nothing has to be taken out. Nobody can find anything wrong in sīla. Nobody can find anything wrong in samādhi. Nobody can find anything wrong in paññā. People are sure to accept it. And they are accepting it.
If we make a sect out of the Buddha’s teaching, a blind faith or a cult or philosophy, then difficulty arises. Every sect will have its own philosophy, cult, belief, dogma, rites, rituals, ceremonies, and they all differ.
But when you take the essence of the Buddha’s teaching—sīla, samādhi, paññā—everyone is bound to accept it because it is so scientific.
A Buddha teaches Dhamma. A Buddha does not establish a particular religion. A Buddha is not interested in establishing a sect.
Sīla, samādhi, and paññā represent the threefold training in Theravāda Buddhism, forming the core framework for spiritual development and the path to liberation (nibbāna). These three elements—moral virtue, concentration, and wisdom—are not isolated practices but deeply interconnected aspects of a unified path. Together, they guide practitioners in purifying the mind, overcoming defilements (kilesas), and realizing the true nature of reality.
Personally, I see all of the Abrahamic religious variations as being unwise and potentially dangerous.
All religions and extremist politics, such as communism and woke, occupy the top cognitive levels of the mind; and for that reason lend themselves to fanaticism and consensus bias.
Christian-Zionists and many evangelical sects have been infiltrated by Jewish Supremists, who even dare to change the Bible and its Christian interpretations.
Buddhism has its problems, but three features of Buddhism are very wise and largely protect the tradition: 1) Buddhism does not take any written words to be God’s words, and thus subject to fanatical misinterpretations. 2) The Buddha always said he was just a man and not a god. 3) It is considered very bad conduct for Buddhists to claim to be enlightened when they are not.
As for Buddhism being ‘Godless’, that’s not true. Buddhism holds the position of ‘having no belief’ about the nature of Ultimate Reality because to do so is to retreat from it. Humans are not smart enough to say what it is but can experience it.
Buddhism is a rich and ancient philosophy. It is the foundation of Greek skepticism, but not limited to skepticism’s intellectual paradigm. Pyrrho took what he could understand from Buddhist monks in Bactria about 100 years after the Buddha’s passing.
Buddhism: No scriptures claiming to be the Word of God. No proselytizing, only welcoming those who come on their own. Strong focus on individual responsibility, which prevents the weakness Buddhists perceive in Christians or the craziness we see in religious fanatics of all stripes.
I’m just one person. What I have written is an extemporaneous response to the videos above and how they capture a slice of the terrifying nonsense in the world today.
I know a good deal about Jewish Supremacy, so I write about it often. Gaza and the public assassination of Charlie Kirk, and now the Epstein files, have shown millions how our world really works, how evil has burrowed so deeply into all of our institutions. ABN
Non-FIML sociology cannot but be based on and imbued with vagueness and uncertainty. Individuals make their ways in this foggy social environment according to their upbringing, experiences, and the different ways they have learned to negotiate ambiguity. Each non-FIML individual cannot but conform to or accept a position somewhere on the spectrum of private neurosis-public semiotics.
This is so because non-FIML individuals cannot attain interpersonal certainty; they can only attain a semblance of interpersonal certainty that is necessarily made up of many erroneous interpretations of the world around them, their loved ones, and themselves. Their understanding of themselves and of others will necessarily be made up of either private interpretations (that are sure to be largely false and thus neurotic) or public/cultural interpretations that are similarly just as false and/or too narrow or generalized (science, mainstream psychology, professional societies, religious or ethnic allegiances, etc.) to be fully satisfying to the profound needs of the individual. This is not to say that many individuals living in conditions like that are not happy, but rather that their sense of who they are and what they are doing is false, utilitarian, exploitative, slavish, or otherwise limited in one way or another. Individuals in conditions like that cannot but offend their deep-seated needs for interpersonal honesty/certainty by compromising their individual understanding of what the world around them means by accepting either prepackaged public explanations (public semiotics) or making up their own (private neurosis).
Most individuals in the world are, thus, contorted in some way. Some are deeply unhappy because they can sense something is wrong but have no way to grapple with it. Others decide to make their way in the world as it is, fully accepting, even enjoying, their perceived “need” to deceive themselves and others, to manipulate others, to take advantage of them, etc.
I think the above roughly describes a big part of what is meant by delusion and suffering in Buddhism. Delusion and suffering constitute the first two of the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth says unenlightened life is characterized by suffering or dissatisfaction. The second explains the first by saying, briefly, that people suffer because they become attached to delusions. Delusions can be egocentric, sociocentric, or both. They can be a private neuroses or the very public madness of a whole society, or both. However you look at it, individual human beings will suffer and experience discontent under these conditions because their core sense of what is true is almost constantly being violated.
In the Buddha’s day, you fixed this problem by becoming a monk. You can still do that today, or you can practice Buddhism as a lay person. My feeling is that if you only practice Buddhism and do not do FIML practice, you will make a lot of progress but remain unsatisfied. Societies today are so large and complex, it is nearly impossible not to be influenced constantly by them. If you can join a monastery or build a cabin in the woods, lucky for you. Most of us, though, will continue to live among unenlightened people and will continue to have deep needs for highly satisfying interpersonal communication with our loved ones and close friends. FIML practice fits in right there. Since so many monasteries today are burdened with the weight of their own semiotics, FIML practice probably would be a very good practice even for monks, if it can be arranged.
In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, there is a story about heaven and hell. In hell people sit at a dinner table to eat but are forced to use chopsticks that are so long they cannot put any food in their mouths, and so they go hungry and feel miserable. In heaven, conditions are exactly the same, but people there use their long chopsticks to feed each other, so everyone if well-fed and very happy.
FIML practice is like heaven. By doing it we feed each other and grow more satisfied as we come to understand what the real conditions of this world are.
This image was used on a social anxiety site to illustrate what it says. My take on it is virtually everyone in the world is like this if you expand social anxiety to mean inner confusion.
Under current worldwide social norms, inner confusion reigns because there is no way for individuals to communicate with profound authenticity, no way to connect on authentic levels. The closest most people can get is shared ideals, shared vows, shared beliefs, all mere pale shadows of true authenticity.
Those who lack profound authentic interpersonal communication must needs necessarily also lack authentic self-knowledge.
You cannot know thyself all alone.
You must be able to communicate it, communicate with it, interact with it to know it. And you must be able to do this with a knowing other who is doing the same with you. This is so because our psychologies are based on interpersonal communication. There is no other way.
FIML practice can correct virtually all interpersonal communication problems between two people. FIML optimizes interpersonal communication and by so doing optimizes self-knowledge as well.
The video is a 5-minute dramatized excerpt from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Volume 1, Chapter 2), narrating his claimed “awakening” to antisemitism via observations of Jewish involvement in Vienna’s prostitution and human trafficking around 1908–1913.
__________
I believe this is the first time I have ever posted anything about Hitler. Like most, I am allergic to his name, even though I deeply understand and have experienced the horror of Jewish Supremacism. I am posting this speech because it rings true today. Ofc, today there are many parasites feasting on the West but history shows JS is behind most of them. I believe the best, if not the only, way out of this terrible reality is for Jewish Supremists themselves to repent and reform. That seems impossible today, but noting is impossible, so maybe it will happen. The best revenge is not success but knowing your abusers have repented, reformed and apologized deeply and from the heart and will never do it again. This is all I want, what we all should want. ABN
Other levels could be added — performance, humor, recollection, story-telling, etc..
I believe a major value of religion is to expose and teach people how to speak and hear spiritual/profound speech.
That is a psycholinguistic core of most if not all religions. Religions are where most of us engage in spiritual/profound speech and where most of us learn it.
Consider an honest wholesome prayer as an example.
Buddhism engages spiritual/profound speech on many levels, but does not package any level as an absolute truth because the highest or deepest levels are not verbal and can only be experienced.
Religious profound speech leads us to experience the profundity of existence.
Remove all of the words and keep the experience and you have Buddhism.
Unfixed ambiguities lead to errors in interpretation. The errors accumulate and snowball. All people have been raised in environments like that and continue to live in them.
This causes pain because our minds are capable of communicating unambiguously, but we don’t know how.
We are semiotic animals, beings that live in semiotic jungles.
Our pain and error-ridden communication makes us mean, simple, greedy, stupid, violent, selfish, crazy.
Communication errors, misinterpretations, cause ghosts to form in the mind. We need to imagine a role for ourselves and others, but since we experience so many errors, our imaginings are fundamentally wrong. They are like ghosts in our minds.
We are as ghosts speaking and listening to each other.
This report — Brain oscillations reveal that our senses do not experience the world continuously — supports the core activity of FIML practice, which entails noticing the first instant(s) of the arising of an emotional sensation (that is typically tied to a much more involved “mistaken interpretation” within the brain). By interfering with the first instant(s) of arising, FIML practice forestalls the habitual wave of neurotic interpretation that normally follows. Instead, new information — better data obtained from the FIML partner — is used to replace the cue that led to the initial sensation, thus redefining that cue.
Professor Gregor Thut of the University of Glasgow, where the study was conducted, says of its results: “For perception, this means that despite experiencing the world as a continuum, we do not sample our world continuously but in discrete snapshots determined by the cycles of brain rhythms.”
I would further hypothesize that the same holds true for our “perceptions” of inner emotional states. In this context, recall the five skandhas of Buddhism — form, sensation, perception, activity, consciousness. A form can arise in the mind or outside of the mind. This form gives rise to a sensation (which is the first possible initiation point of a FIML query), which gives rise to perception, followed by activity (mental or physical), and lastly consciousness.
In Buddhist teachings, the five skandhas occur one after the other, very rapidly. They are not a continuous stream but rather a series of “discrete snapshots,” to use Thut’s words. In FIML practice, partners want to interfere with what has become a habitual “firing” of their five skandhas based on (neurotic) learned cues. FIML practice strives to prevent full-blown neurotic consciousness (the fifth skandha) from taking control of the mind by replacing the source of that consciousness with a more realistic interpretation of the neurotic cue. The cue corresponds to form in the five skandhas explanation while our emotional reaction to it begins with the second skandha, sensation. The more realistic interpretation of that cue is based on the true words of the partner.
The five skandhas can also help us understand how FIML is different from more or less normal psychological analysis. In normal, or traditional, analysis we use theories and schema to understand ourselves. In FIML we use a specific technique to interfere with habitual neurotic “firings” of the five skandhas. FIML partners are encouraged to theorize and speak about themselves in any way they like, and it is very helpful to do this, but the core FIML activity cannot be replaced by just theorizing or telling stories.
Four Buddhist monks were arrested when a stash of porn, sex toys, a penis pump, and an escort list was found during a police raid at their temple in Thailand.
The religious leaders are said to have violated their monastic vows as they kept the banned items at the Phrom Sunthon Monastery in Chonburi province.
Police raided the property on January 27, following reports that the monks possessed firearms and drugs.
During the police raid, cops also stumbled across £2,070 in cash
Dramatic footage of the raid shows officers combing through the bedrooms, where they found £2,070 in cash, a pistol, a penis enlargement pump, a contact list of prostitutes, and a DVD player with a porn disc still loaded inside.
Three monks also allegedly tested positive for methamphetamine.
Officers arrested Phra Supachai Jantawong, 35, Phra Wirat Mukdasanit, 45, and Phra Thanapol Maison, 59, and the temple abbott, Phra Photisang Taebmuan, who was found to be a Karen national unregistered in civil records.
All four monks have since been defrocked and banned from the religion.
I just learned the term “process philosophy” and am happy to say that FIML is “a psycholinguistic process philosophy combing both theory and action to both understand and improve what we are.”
Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative.
Another fundamental point is FIML is super objective within an area of cognition, perception, and belief that has traditionally been inaccessible to objective assessment and measurement.
Identity is constructed of memories, memories that have to be tended to, and this takes time and energy.
You have to remember who you are and often have to work pretty hard just to maintain that image within yourself, to say nothing of projecting it toward other people and getting them to accept it.
A big problem with this way of constructing a “self,” an identity, is it’s probably based on misinterpretations and a good deal of self-deceit.
Our identities, such that they are, are complex fictions. They are a central flaw in our internal signaling system.
If your identity is large and complex, it will use a good deal of energy. As you signal internally to yourself about your identity, you will also be receiving signals from other people, and these signals will necessarily be processed by your large and complex identity. And that, of course, will lead to serious misinterpretations, both internal and external.
If you belong to a group that defines, or helps you define, your identity, you can save some energy but will have as much fiction, maybe even worse fiction.
Consider the codes of group behavior (group signaling) for Stalin’s NKVD officers who purged so many millions of innocents in the 1930s. All of those officers had identities that were largely determined by signals coming from the NKVD and Joseph Stalin.
There was a weird sort of ethical behavior among those officers in that they were trying to adhere to a group signaling system and not go their own way. This same problem in less serious form can be observed all over the world in every culture.
One problem with ethics and ethical signaling within groups is ethical questions can be difficult. There are few formulas that will always work, and formulas are what hold groups together.
Back to your identity. I hope it is clear that you have to be careful when you base your identity on group signaling systems. If you are a banker, you might do many bad things out of loyalty to your group. Same for all of us.
While ethics are hard to codify, the will to behave ethically is simpler. I want to do the right thing but I don’t always know what it is or how to do it. That is a good statement to make. If you can honestly say that to yourself, that is good because that means that your internal signaling system is seeking greater integrity, great clarity.
When we seek clarity and integrity within our signaling systems, we are seeking better ethics. We are changing our identities, or allowing our identities to be transformed by a higher desire for clarity, purity, integrity, goodness.
When we seek to improve our signaling systems, our ethics, we begin to abandon static identities and poorly constructed fictions about ourselves by subjecting them to a higher order of thought. If we can take a meta-position on ourselves, we will find the process of improving signaling is easier and more enjoyable than clinging to a static fictionalized identity that may have been constructed years before, or by other people..
American Buddhist Net 