A modern explication of Buddhism by Bernardo Kastrup and Nathan Hawkins

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Part One

Part Two

I highly recommend these two videos. They provide an excellent explanation of Buddhist philosophy or world view without ever mentioning Buddhism.

The ‘small self’ of Buddhism is Kastrup’s ‘dissociated entity inside a Markov Blanket’. Kastrup’s ‘mind at large’ is Buddhist ‘ultimate reality’, ‘the Tathagata’, the ‘Buddha mind’, ‘enlightenment’, etc. The ‘doings’ of the entity inside the Markov blanket are karma. In this sense, those doings, or that karma (work), perpetuate a series of ‘rebirths’ rather than reincarnations. The Noble Eightfold Path is a concise way of describing the behaviors that lead to full realization of ‘mind at large’ or enlightenment.

Two of the (falsely understood) most ‘negative’ things in Buddhism are nicely cleared up in Kastrup’s description. The first is the mistaken notion that ‘nirvana’ or the ‘cessation of suffering’ is the cessation of being itself. Nirvana is ‘merely’ the return of the small self to ‘mind at large’, or the enlightenment of the small self to Buddha nature or ultimate reality. The second is karma is some kind of punishment administered by some kind of god thing. Karma is much more what Kastrup calls ‘doings’ and is simply a way to describe how what we do affects what we become.

I want to add that Nathan Hawkins does a wonderful job of interviewing Kastrup. He contributes a great deal to this conversation, which overall is not only a good description of Buddhism (without ever mentioning Buddhism) but also an excellent example of how people should talk. At one point, Hawkins says he wants to create a something like a ‘proto-religion’ that does not rely on ‘sacred texts’. He also says he wants philosophy to be more in touch with people’s lives as they are really lived. I like that a lot. It’s basically what basic Buddhism already is.

The Buddha said he was just a man; that he should not be worshiped; that his words are not sacred; that his teachings should be conveyed mind-to-mind (as in the videos above) and not turned into scared texts; and that each of us should make the teachings our own; learn them in our own languages and convey them to others generously when and if they want to hear them. I bet the Buddha would thoroughly enjoy and approve of the discussion above.

In a deeply Buddhist sense, there is no need for a Buddhist tradition. The whole thing could be thrown away and recreated. But why bother? Buddhism today is not a clinging to some sacred past or god-like figure, but a present iteration of a long tradition (which is largely philosophical) that dates back 2,500 years to the Sage of the Scythians, Shakyamuni Buddha. Watch the videos above and see what you think. ABN

UPDATE: I do not want to detract at all from Kastrup’s vision, but would like to say that, imo, Mind at Large or Ultimate Reality is much more like Mahayana on steroids than the philosophically guarded position Kastrup holds. He himself says he is conservative and sticks to ordinary interpretations like time and space and probably the existence of other civilizations and realms. I appreciate that he does that and why. Another point worth mentioning is the Markov Blanket each of us is ensconced in is surely semi-permeable. In that sense, a great deal of religious practice, including especially the samadhi states in Buddhism, can be understood as ways to make the Markov Blanket more permeable, to invite Mind at Large into our little cocoons. Prayer and religious ritual do that as well as does calling on God or practicing the presence of God. Moral actions, no matter how they are understood, that make us receptive to powers much greater than us are fundamental to human being and our comprehension of who and where we are. If we can comprehend Mind at Large viewing our lives through our eyes and senses, we can also comprehend having a very rich relationship with Mind at Large. In Buddhist terms, that might be described as us being drawn to the Tathagata to the point of never wanting to turn back. ABN

Etymology of symbol

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The actual purpose of a creed is to provide a doctrinal statement of correct belief or orthodoxy. The creeds of Christianity have been drawn up at times of conflict about doctrine: acceptance or rejection of a creed served to distinguish believers and deniers of particular doctrines. For that reason, a creed was called in Greek a σύμβολον (symbolon), which originally meant half of a broken object which, when fitted to the other half, verified the bearer’s identity.[9] The Greek word passed through Latin symbolum into English “symbol”, which only later took on the meaning of an outward sign of something. (link)

Someone sent this to me, believing I might find it interesting which I do.

Our word symbol started out as a very concrete concept. It makes sense that it would come from something more basic than itself and with a much narrower meaning.

It’s also quite beautiful that a symbol only works as intended when it connects more or less as intended with the mind of its receiver(s). As with a symbolon, all symbols that work must have at least two functioning halves, a sender and a receiver.

This is a basic part of the definition of semiotics; that a message always has a sender and receiver, though in semiotics it is well-recognized that the receiver often receives the message differently than the sender intended.

If a symbol falls in the woods and no one perceives it is it still a symbol?

A Chinese Hillbilly’s 30-Year Perspective on China — 中国生活 | Life in China

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I’m a chinese from a rural village in Southern China. I stumbled upon this Sub and found that lot of people here never actual been to China, less likely they have been to rural China, which still take up most part of china. so I want to share what I’ve seen and heard over the last thirty years to show you a slice of the rural China—in real life. Not very good in English, please excuse the grammar mistakes.

I grew up in a small village in Southern China. a bit isolated. The population merely past 1,000. Everyone in the village have the same surname. As a kid, I thought the whole world had the same surname until like 7 or 8 years old, when a girl with a different surname  move to our village, this thing reshaped my worldview, like, “there is actual other people outside our village?”

Beside being isolated, the village was dirt-Poor.

How poor? We had no Flush Toilet, no, no Flush Toilet, no underground pipe system. Every household had two big buckets. one for the liquid human waste, one for the solid waste, Aka fecal. when the liquid waste bucket was full, we took it out to the fields to water the crops. When the poop bucket was full, well, some with morality will carry it to a public pit. some would just dump it onto the street. one thing I learn about poverty, if you can’t afford food, you can’t afford morality. so, most go to the street.

so as a school child, commuting to school took extreme caution, you never knew what you may step on. the worse thing is, when it rain, the alley would became a small river of fecal and piss, you had to walk like a ballet dancer to avoid them.

The hygiene was bad, the education was worse. We had one class, one teacher. The teacher was short, we nickname him Mr shorttie,  Mr shorttie only finished middle school, that already crown him the most educated person in the village. He taught writing, Math, and sport, basically everything. Mr shorttie  had like six daughters, he beated his wife a lot because she can’t gave him a son to carry his blood line.

When I was in 6th grade, the government said we had to learn English. But Mr shorttie only knew the 26 letters of the alphabet. So, He only teach the alphabet.

Mr shorttie had three teaching skills: the Belt whip, the Face slap, and the knee Kick. personally, I think the last one hurt the most.

Our school was just a brick house with a tile roof. When it rained, it leaked. Once, a typhoon took down a tree onto the roof, tiles rained down and smashed two kids. the school had no money to hire cleaners, so they hire us intead, zero pay, of course. We spent like a week to clean up the rubble.

Continue reading “A Chinese Hillbilly’s 30-Year Perspective on China — 中国生活 | Life in China” →

Mormon ‘mafia’ connections behind the scenes in Utah and how they may be implicated in the Kirk assassination

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First, the defense conflict: Michael Burt (high-profile SF attorney) is directly related to Terryl Farnsworth (the TPUSA AV guy who yanked SD cards post-hit and contaminated the scene). Michael is on Tyler Robinson’s legal team—despite family loyalty to the very insiders with access to Charlie’s stage setup. This is a blatant conflict of interest.  How can Tyler get a fair trial when his own lawyer is tied to suspects who controlled audio, cameras, and evidence? It’s screaming setup—Tyler’s being railroaded as the patsy while real players skate.

Next, the aviation link: Terryl’s father-in-law Duane Burt held top executive roles at Duncan Aviation (Utah facility)—where those Egyptian-registered planes (flagged in Charlie’s threats and pre-attack searches) were located the day of the execution. Duane’s expertise and connections in elite aviation circles put this family smack in the middle of the “Egyptian planes” mystery. Coincidence? Or direct access to the tools needed for a sophisticated hit?

The bigger picture: The Farnsworth-Burt clan is embedded in Utah’s powerful “Mormon Mafia”—intermarried elite families (often sharing polygamous pioneer roots) who dominate politics, business, and institutions in Mormon-heavy states. Known for insider networks, loyalty to establishment figures like the Romneys, and quiet control over key sectors—these aren’t random players; they’re connected old-guard protecting their own.

This web—TPUSA insiders, defense sabotage, aviation anomalies, Mormon power ties—proves the fix is in. No way it’s all coincidence.

link

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The above link provides an informative video and a great deal of apparently relevant information to Tyler Robinson’s defense team and the kinds of military-grade weapons and communication devices that may have been used in Kirk’s murder.

I am posting this under ‘information’ and ‘speculation’ for readers who know more about Utah than I do. This material comes from Project Constitution who has previously uncovered reliable information on the Kirk murder. ABN

Trump Designates Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

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DEFENDING AMERICA FROM A CHEMICAL WEAPON: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order designating illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemical as weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

  • The Order directs the Attorney General to immediately pursue criminal charges, sentencing enhancements, and sentencing variances in fentanyl trafficking cases.
  • The Order directs the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury to pursue appropriate actions against relevant assets and financial institutions for those involved in or supporting the manufacture, distribution, and sale of illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals.
  • The Order directs the Secretary of War and Attorney General to determine whether the Department of War should provide enhanced national security resources to the Department of Justice as necessary during an emergency situation involving a weapon of mass destruction.
  • The Order directs the Secretary of War, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, to update their chemical incident response-related directives to include the fentanyl threat.
  • The Order directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to identify fentanyl smuggling networks using WMD and nonproliferation related threat intelligence.

STOPPING FENTANYL FROM POISONING OUR PEOPLE: President Trump is unleashing every available tool against the cartels and foreign networks that have turned fentanyl into the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-45.

  • Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
  • Just two milligrams of fentanyl—equivalent to 10-15 grains of table salt—is considered a lethal dose.
  • Cartels and Foreign Terrorist Organizations use fentanyl profits to fund assassinations, terrorism, and insurgencies while waging armed conflict over trafficking routes and other facets of their operations.
  • The potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States.
  • By designating illicit fentanyl as a WMD, President Trump is ensuring the full weight of the Federal government is focused, coordinated, and mobilized to confront fentanyl as the deadly chemical weapon it is.

link

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Everyone can see the logic behind this.

If you can see this, can you also see that clandestine terrorists have been poisoning our young people for many decades?

They have.

Military strategy is unbounded.

Why young people?

Because it is easy to do and get away with.

And it can incapacitate them for life, thus degrading and demoralizing their communities.

This is the largely unknown story of the West since the end of WW2.

Fentanyl strikes whole populations, largely indiscriminatingly.

Droves of clandestine military operatives, choose their victims and attack them singly or in small groups.

Their victims are first placed on ‘lists’; then they are attacked by an operative unrelated to the person who put the victim on the list.

It is difficult to even notice a poisoning or lobotomy has occurred.

And close to impossible to catch the perpetrator(s).

You cannot understand military strategy or history or the world we live in today without understanding how savage and secretive military strategies can be.

There are numerous intellectuals who decry the fall of the West based on ‘pathological altruism’ (true enough), the ‘nepotism’ of our enemies (true enough), ‘infiltration’ into Western societal high-ground (true enough).

But none of them, so far, has the street-smarts to see the highly consequential and lethal battle being waged covertly against our most promising young people, including our children. ABN

The illusion of culture

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Cultures have illusory “grammars” that outline what can and cannot be said.

Culture wars, essentially, are battles over what can and cannot be said, done, signaled, thought, believed, valued, etc.

Some time ago in You can’t say what they don’t already know, I said:

Cultures demand constant authorization and reauthorization from their members. To stray from established norms is to weaken group authorizations.

That’s how it works for all cultures with more than a few members. Cultural bonding and affirmation involves nothing more than authorizing and reauthorizing the basics of the culture.

It even works that way in groups as small as two people. This is because two people speaking together typically do so in a larger cultural context that is defined and accepted by both of them.

Just as most people do not make up their own words or jokes, most people do not make up the bases of their culture(s).

Even committed couples speaking in private typically do not leave their shared cultural script(s). This happens because they do not know any other way to speak to each other.

A profound and rich world of subjective insight and perception eludes them because they are afraid they might stray too far from the established script.

Culture becomes deeply illusory at this point. Its tenets are held not due to thought and insight but only to stabilize or maintain a rote communication pattern.

You can change this by using a functional communication pattern instead of rote cultural grammar that has been imported into your mind from outside.

As an experiment, try not feeling anything about the basics of your culture. Do FIML from this point of view and see what happens.

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Edit: BTW, the above roughly explains how mass mind-control works.

The controllers insert material into the public’s metacognitive vocabulary/ semiology, and sure enough, their minds shift.

There are so many examples of this, I trust readers can discover their own.

The thing to see is how easily something new can be inserted and become ‘reality’ for many because it’s the latest way to talk and think.

The other thing to see is the old and ancient metacognitive vocabularies/semiotics/ memes which have been in whatever culture for decades or centuries.

Seeing what those are and where they came from and what they do is a fundamental part of Buddhist practice, which sees all of them as empty, impermanent, delusive.

Hence the notion of ‘Buddhism without beliefs’.

Cling to none of them, including Buddhism.

The Buddha was the world’s first, still famous skeptic. ABN

The Chinese Social Credit System and how it works

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We are now at this villager’s home, installing this household plaque for them.This household plaque has a QR code on it. By scanning it, you can see the basic information of this family, including family members, income situation, and credit points

Transcript of the Video (Approximate, Based on Audio and On-Screen Text)The video is in Mandarin Chinese and features a narrator (likely a local official or reporter) explaining the installation and use of household QR code plaques in a rural Chinese village. Original Chinese Transcript (Characters)Narrator (male voice):

我们现在来到这个村民家里，给他们安装这个户牌。 这个户牌上面有一个二维码，扫一扫就可以看到这个家庭的基本信息，包括家庭成员、收入情况，还有信用积分等等。 比如这个家庭，信用积分是6402.4分。 这有助于村民互相监督，促进文明乡风。 现在农村振兴战略下，很多地方都在推广这个数字户牌系统，便于管理和服务。

(On-screen text during scans includes household details like names, income levels, and the “credit points” or “integrity points” score.)

English TranslationNarrator:

We are now at this villager’s home, installing this household plaque for them.This household plaque has a QR code on it. By scanning it, you can see the basic information of this family, including family members, income situation, and credit points, etc.For example, this family has a credit score of 6402.4 points.This helps villagers supervise each other and promote civilized rural customs.Under the current Rural Revitalization strategy, many places are promoting this digital household plaque system to facilitate management and services.Notes:

  • The “credit points” (信用积分) refer to local integrity or compliance ratings in pilot programs, often tied to rural governance, poverty alleviation tracking, or community behavior incentives—not a unified national “social credit score” as sometimes portrayed.
  • The video shows officials attaching plaques to doors/walls and demonstrating scans on a phone, revealing household data.
  • This appears to be from a local government promotional or instructional video, recirculated in the X post to highlight privacy concerns.

link

USS Gerald Ford and Strike Group Repositions to Within Rapid Strike Range of Venezuela

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The U.S. Navy supercarrier USS Gerald Ford and its strike group have repositioned to approximately around 600 kilometres south-southwest of Puerto Rico, placing them within much closer proximity to Venezuela, amid speculation that Washington could initiate attacks on its southern neighbour.

Hours after the ships were repositioned, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the initiation of U.S. ground operations targeting transnational drug cartels operating from within Venezuelan territory.

U.S. Navy Supercarrier USS Gerald Ford

Venezuela and much of the international community have dismissed reports of drug cartels operating from within the country as a fabricated pretext intended to justify military action, with the intention of either overthrowing the resource rich country’s socialist government by force, or crippling its economy by destroying key infrastructure to complement the effects of escalated economic sanctions.

These developments have occurred shortly after U.S. forces on December 10 boarded and commandeered a Venezuelan oil tanker in international waters, which marked a major escalation in the conflict between the two states. 

link

China Can Send 300 Thousand Troops to Taiwan Within 10 Days

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China’s landing ships can land 21,000 troops in the first wave of an attack, and 300,000 in 10 days if civilian vessels are mobilized.

This is according to an analytical report by the Center for Transportation Strategies.

The confrontation around Taiwan could become the next hot spot on the current unstable geopolitical map of the world. Taiwan’s defense ministry has identified 2027 as the likely time for China’s invasion of the island.

Beijing’s main military power in the conquest of the island should be the navy, which China is actively building up. For example, China puts into operation 20-25 times more warships per year than the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom.

Chinese main battle tanks are loaded aboard the commercial ferry Zhong Hua Fu Jing. Photo credits: China Military Online

Chinese main battle tanks are loaded aboard the commercial ferry Zhong Hua Fu Jing. Photo credits: China Military Online

On December 4, 2025, China conducted its largest naval operation in the East China and South China Seas. The operation involved a hundred ships of the navy and coast guard.

link