Category: Buddhism
Unscientific vaccine and mask mandates, banning early treatments, mandating harmful hospital treatments, and so on are good examples of the kinds of attachment or clinging that the Buddha warned against. Delusion is the result of clinging, followed by a cascade of bad karma and compounding delusion. This large societal example can be applied even to very small details of a single individual’s personal psychology or belief, and even to just an instant of that. ABN
When people lose touch with fundamental moral sensibilities, this happens
Karma is the direction and composition of your mind-stream. What you think or do today affects your mind-stream in everything thereafter. False excuses only despoil your mind-stream further. Only you can correct your mistakes. Only you can vow to never repeat them. Karma is not punishment or reward conferred by higher beings. Karma is what you do and think and 100% your responsibility. Properly understood, karma is a deeply liberating concept. ABN
“The bad decisions we made during this pandemic rank among the worst man-made death causes in the history of the US”
link to original graph and text
I for one do not believe these mistakes were entirely innocent. I can relate to doctors in fields not closely related to covid being unwilling or unable to speak up. And I can relate to bureaucrats and political functionaries being afraid to speak up. Same for low-level hospital administrators, academics, and scientists. But people at or near the top of the food chain who banned early treatments, mandated vaccines, restricted hospital treatments, denied religious and other exemptions, wrote garbage “news” stories about all of this, you behaved very badly.
The Buddhist way out of this terrible karma you have incurred is: 1) publicly admit your mistakes; 2) apologize for your mistakes; 3) make amends for your mistakes as you are able and as are proportionate to the harm caused; 4) vow never to do anything like that again. Take your lumps, suffer for having violated your own conscience. Then, when all of this has been completed and you have done your best and your vow is strong, put it behind you and dwell on it no more. For many for whom the above is necessary, this period of remorse and self-examination should last at least a year or more. ABN
These videos may contain valuable instruction or confirmation for some Buddhists and FIML practitioners
There are other articles with similar videos in today’s Daily Mail. I watched three of the vids at the link and found they confirm the First Noble Truth in ways we can relate to today. They also show the value of having a stable ethical practice like the Noble Eightfold Path.
FIML practice can be described as a modern pair-work take on Buddhist mindfulness and concentration. FIML provides an objective way to clearly see yourself in real life while also helping your partner to do the same.
This world is rife with delusion. Many people lose their lives to it. Others crack up very badly. I make no judgement of anyone. Contemplating our own mistakes and excesses as well as those of others can be a sort of Buddhist Contemplation of the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering. ABN
Borgund Stave church, Norway
Built around 1180 and is dedicated to the Apostle Andrew. The church is exceptionally well preserved and is one of the most distinctive stave churches in Norway. Some of the finest features are the lavishly carved portals and the roof carvings of dragons’s heads. The stavchurches are Norway’s most important contribution to world architecture and Norway’s oldest preserved timber buildings. ~link
Buryat Buddhists in the Russian army somewhere in Ukraine
KANSAS Affirms First Amendment Religious Right of Personal Conscience; Sen Mark Steffen explains
The crux of all religion and all morality is personal conscience. Our communities and traditions and educations affect our consciences but it is the conscience itself that lies at the core of all religious practice. ABN
Panpsychism, pansignaling, and Buddhism
Panpsychism means “all mind” or mind in all things, with an emphasis on cognition being a fundamental aspect or part of nature.
Pansignaling means “all signaling” or signaling in all things, with an emphasis on signaling being a fundamental aspect or part of nature.
I like the term pansignaling because it gets us to look at the signals, without which there is nothing.
Another word that is close to these two is panexperientialism, which connotes that “the fundamental elements of the universe are ‘occasions of experience’ which can together create something as complex as a human being.”
These ideas or similar can be found in the Huayan and Tiantai schools of Buddhism.
Highly recommend giving these ideas some thought and reading the links provided above.
I tend to favor thinking of this stuff from the signaling point of view. A signal can be found, defined, analyzed, and so on. A signal is a fairly objective thing. When we consider signals and consciousness, it is very natural to consider that signals are parts of networks and that networks can be parts of bigger networks.
As I understand it, panexperientialism holds the view that atoms have experience, and that molecules have experience as do the atoms that make them up… and so on till we get to cells, organs, brains, human consciousness. Human consciousness, which is fundamentally experiential, is what humans mainly think of as experience. At all levels, the “parts” of human consciousness also are conscious or cognizant and thus capable of experience. Thus, there is no mind-body problem. Cognition or awareness is part of nature from the very bottom up. For example, a single bacterium can know to move toward something or away from it.
Life is “anti-entropic signaling networks” that organize, self-organize, combine, cooperate, compete, eat, and change constantly. From this, we can see where impermanence and delusion as described in Buddhism come from.
When matter breaks down into waves and laws, it becomes information, but similar processes are still at work. In Buddhist terms we find again dependent origination, no intrinsic self separate from other information, impermanence, rational structure, karma (the work of this producing that), the primary consciousness found in deep samadhi.
first posted FEBRUARY 25, 2017
81-year-old Tibet man dies after self-immolation protest at Kirti Monastery
An 81-year-old Tibetan man has died after a self-immolation protest over Chinese rule, setting himself on fire last week at a police station in front of a major monastery in the western Chinese province of Sichuan, a source from the monastery’s branch in India told RFA late Saturday.
The burning death on March 27 of a man identified as Taphun raises to 160 the number of Tibetans confirmed to have set themselves on fire since 2009, nearly all to protest Chinese rule in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, as well as historically Tibetan areas of Sichuan and Qinghai provinces.
link
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will” ~Romans 12:2
This is fundamental morality, the fundamental basis of the conscience. Call it God’s will, the Buddha mind, rational clarity, real science, a profound understanding of karma, humility, decency, pure mind, being a good person. It’s all the same. We all know it and sense it strongly. Beware of those who package it and use it to delude you. The human mind is weak and can be fooled, thus: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” ABN
The circle “what people actually understand” should be much larger and mostly outside the other circles
All you smart people, do FIML. ABN
Horror: el “arte” de John Podesta
There are higher powers and there are lower powers. The world we see manifest today reveals many lower powers. This page has more “artwork” of this nature. We do need to see representations of the slaughter of innocents from time to time to remind us that reason often does not rule. Nor that random chaos or glitches in the human system are the cause. There are higher powers and there are lower powers. ABN
Neural noise indicates our working memory may encode Bayesian probabilities of its contents
The uncertainty in working memory may be linked to a surprising way that the brain monitors and uses ambiguity, according to a recent paper in Neuron from neuroscience researchers at New York University. Using machine learning to analyze brain scans of people engaged in a memory task, they found that signals encoded an estimate of what people thought they saw — and the statistical distribution of the noise in the signals encoded the uncertainty of the memory. The uncertainty of your perceptions may be part of what your brain is representing in its recollections. And this sense of the uncertainties may help the brain make better decisions about how to use its memories.
…the idea that we are walking around with probability distributions in our heads all the time has a certain beauty to it. And it is probably not just vision and working memory that are structured like this, according to Pouget. “This Bayesian theory is extremely general,” he said. “There’s a general computational factor that’s at work here,” whether the brain is making a decision, assessing whether you’re hungry or navigating a route.
link
FIML practice works precisely with the probabilistics of working memory. If the range of doubt in a perception is stronger than normal, it may prompt a query. If the range is stronger than normal and may indicate danger, a query is more likely. It would make sense that our assessments of these factors would be Bayesian. When perceptions are psychologically important, any Bayesian analysis will require assessing the subjective context into which the perception enters, which implies further Bayesian analyses. It would be wonderful if we had machines that could do this for us, but they will only be invented years from now if ever. For now, we can use our own minds to accomplish this through FIML practice. If you can understand the linked article, you should be able to see the value of FIML which collapses a Bayesian probability curve into the certainty of a single point. Psychologically, when this is done hundreds of times, the results are extremely satisfying. ABN
President Trump on Ukraine
No one can say what will happen next but we all can see the stakes are high; KOBK rules but can be moderated by MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Which way of thinking prepares us better for this than the Frist Noble Truth of Buddhism? ABN
American Buddhist Net 