Thirty years ago a Chinese Buddhist nun who is a close friend was appalled at the laxity of American immigration policy. Thirty years ago she said, ‘You are just giving everything to them. You are giving your country away!’ She could not comprehend it or respect it. To her it was immoral to give so unwisely while also failing to protect your own people. Buddhism emphasizes wisdom in all things. ABN
Tag: Buddhist Practice
MASSACHUSETTES: Ballot Question 4 on ‘natural psychedelic therapy’
Question 4 is a citizen-led ballot question supported by military veterans, doctors, caregivers, and others who are affected by our mental health crisis. The measure will create a carefully regulated therapeutic program for adults to access natural psychedelic medicines that show promise for treating serious mental health conditions.
Under Question 4, natural psychedelic medicine therapy will be administered under the supervision and guidance of a trained, licensed professional at regulated therapy centers. Retail sales of psychedelic medicines will not be permitted.
Voting Yes on Question 4 will give veterans, patients with end-of-life distress, and people who are suffering access to this life-saving mental health tool.
I support this and do not believe it violates the Fifth Precept. Moreover, psychedelics can valuably be used for more than just ‘serious mental health conditions’. They can also be life-enhancing for people who may not be aware there is more to the mind than the drudgery of being ‘normal’. It is not the job of government to tell citizens which plants they can grow and use. Laws against them are counterproductive due to denying citizens valuable experiences while also exposing them to dangerous substances fraudulently sold as natural psychedelics. For Buddhists, soma and psychedelics were widely available in the Buddha’s day and he never said a word against them. ABN
Your Consciousness Can Connect With the Whole Universe, Groundbreaking New Research Suggests
A RECENT GROUNDBREAKING EXPERIMENT in which anesthesia was administered to rats has convinced scientists that tiny structures in the rodents’ brains are responsible for the experience of consciousness. To pull it off, these microscopic hollow tube structures, called “microtubules,” don’t rely on our everyday flavor of classical physics. Instead, experts believe, microtubules perform incredible operations in the quantum realm. Citing the work of earlier researchers, the study infers that the same kind of quantum operations are likely happening in human brains.
During their rat brain experiments, scientists at Wellesley College in Massachusetts gave the rodents isoflurane, a type of inhaled general anesthetic used to induce and maintain unconsciousness for medical procedures. One group of drugged rats also received microtubule-stabilizing drugs, while the other did not. The researchers discovered that the microtubule-stabilizing molecules kept the rats conscious for longer than the non-stabilized rats, which more quickly lost their “righting reflex,” or the ability to restore normal posture, according to their findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal eNeuro in August 2024.
The Wellesley study is significant because the physical source of consciousness has been a mystery for decades. It’s a major step toward verifying a theory that our brains perform quantum operations, and that this ability generates our consciousness—an idea that’s been gaining traction over the past three decades.
The notion that quantum physics must be the underlying mechanism for consciousness first emerged in the 1990s, when Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., popularized the idea that neural microtubules enable quantum processes in our brain, giving rise to consciousness. Specifically, they postulated in a 1996 paper that consciousness may operate as a quantum wave passing through the brain’s microtubules. This is known as Orch OR theory, referring to the ability of microtubules to perform quantum computations through a mathematical process Penrose calls “objective reduction.”
In quantum physics, a particle does not exist in the way classical physics observes it, with a definite physical location. Instead, it exists as a cloud of probabilities. If it comes into contact with its environment, as when a measuring apparatus observes it, then the particle loses its “superposition” of multiple states. It collapses into a definite, measurable state, the state in which it was observed. Penrose hypothesized that “each time a quantum wave function collapses in this way in the brain, it gives rise to a moment of conscious experience.”
Philosophical psychology
Are your thought patterns valid? Are your premises true? Is your mind sound?
Buddhism further asks are your mental states wholesome? Are they conducive to enlightenment, wisdom, freedom from delusion?
There are many things we can do while alone to clean up our thought processes. And there are some things we can only do with the help of another person.
Only another person can tell us if our premises, thoughts, and conclusions (however tentative) about them are true, valid, and sound.
Buddhism has a concept of a “spiritual friend,” a “good friend,” a noble friend,” or an “admirable friend.” All of these terms are translations of the Pali Kalyāṇa-mittatā, which is well-explained at that link. (Chinese 善知識). That link is well-worth reading in full.
From the link above and from many years of working with Buddhist literature and people, my sense is that a Buddhist “good friend” is someone who is to be admired and emulated. They are similar to what we mean today by mentors or “good role models.”
I deeply respect the concept of a Buddhist good friend, but find it lacks what I consider the preeminent virtue of philosophical psychology—real-time honesty based on a teachable technique.
Indeed, I cannot find anything anywhere in world philosophy, religion, or literature that provides a teachable technique for attaining real-time honesty with another person.
I also do not quite understand how this could be.
For many centuries human beings have thought about life but no one has come up with a technique like FIML?
How can that be?
I do not see a technique like FIML anywhere in the history of human philosophy nor anywhere in modern psychology.
The importance of a “good friend” who does FIML with you cannot be overemphasized because it is only through such a friend that you can discover where your premises about them are right or wrong, where your thoughts about them are valid or not, and through those discoveries where your mind itself is arranged soundly or not.
first posted MAY 30, 2017
UPDATE 12/14/23: Buddhists can and should make Buddhist practice their own, update or improve the practice with new ideas that are sound, valid, and true. This is a very positive and excellent side of Buddhism, which itself is not written in stone. Buddhism is preeminently a mind-to-mind teaching. It does not depend on ancient texts or the absolute interpretation of words. It depends on fulsome understanding of the deep truths at the core of all Buddhist thinking—impermanence, emptiness, and nirvana. Anything that is consonant with those three truths and conforms to Buddhist morals is good Buddhism. Anything that contradicts those three truths and/or Buddhist morals is not Buddhism.
The Buddha encouraged teaching the Dharma in people’s native languages. He discouraged writing his teachings down because he did not want them to become sacred texts that people worship rather than understand. FIML practice is an efficient, detailed, sound, and accurate way for “good friends” to deeply share mind-to-mind communion/communication with each other. In this sense, it is excellent Buddhist practice. FIML has no other teaching than how to communicate really well with a good friend. FIML does not tell you what to think or believe. Anyone can do it. ABN
What is the Problem of the Criterion? The Buddhist origin of Skepticism
The problem of the criterion is a fundamental issue in epistemology, which is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. It is a problem that arises when trying to determine the extent of knowledge and formulate the criteria for epistemic values, such as truth, justification, and evidence.
The problem can be phrased as a pair of questions: “What do we know?” and “What is the extent of our knowledge?” However, these questions seem to be circular, as it appears that we cannot answer the first question without already having an answer to the second, and vice versa.
This problem has been discussed by philosophers for centuries, with ancient roots dating back to the works of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus.
The problem of the criterion is closely related to the issue of justification, as it is difficult to determine what criteria should be used to justify our beliefs and knowledge claims. This problem has been addressed in various ways, including the development of different epistemological theories and the exploration of the nature of truth and evidence.
In essence, the problem of the criterion highlights the difficulty of determining the starting point of knowledge and the criteria for evaluating knowledge claims. It is a problem that has puzzled philosophers for centuries and continues to be a topic of ongoing debate and inquiry.
the above was AI generated in Brave browser
Pyrrho’s tripartite statement is completely unprecedented and unparalleled in Greek thought. Yet it is not merely similar to Buddhism, it corresponds closely to a famous statement of the Buddha preserved in canonical texts. The statement is known as the Trilakṣaṇa, the ‘Three Characteristics’ of all dharmas ‘ethical distinctions, factors, constituents, etc.’ Greek pragmata ‘(ethical) things’ corresponds closely to Indic dharma ∼ dhamma ‘(ethical) things’ and seems to be Pyrrho’s equivalent of it. The Buddha says, “All dharmas are anitya ‘impermanent’…. All dharmas are duḥkha ‘unsatisfactory, imperfect, unstable’…. All dharmas are anātman ‘without an innate self-identity’.”
~Beckwith, Christopher I.. Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia
The quote from Beckwith just above highlights how Beckwith has very convincingly connected Pyrrho’s skepticism with early Buddhism. The Trilaksana or Three Characteristics are the foundation of the Four Dharma Seals, belonging to the very earliest (attested) teachings of the Buddha. They are the heart of virtually all Buddhist philosophy and practice. They also define the Problem of the Criterion in Buddhist terms. The Fourth Seal is nirvana or freedom from the anxiety and suffering of not fully understanding the the first Three Dharma Seals.
I am making this point to encourage Buddhists, Skeptics and Stoics to read Beckwith’s Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia.
I am also making this point because the Problem of the Criterion, or the Four Dharma Seals, are very real and impact our daily lives at every level all the time. And this is not just an abstract philosophical problem. It affects all of our relationships and everything we say and hear. In this vein I want to say that FIML (without my specifically knowing it at the time) is designed to address the Problem of the Criterion as it arises between two people in a close relationship.
I have said more than a few times over the years that it is hard for me to understand why ancient philosophers, including the Buddha, did not discover FIML or teach it. I believe it is possible Buddhist monks in the Buddha’s day were given instructions that amounted to some form of FIML, but there exists no evidence of this.
Whatever the case, FIML is designed to deal with interpersonal conundrums that arise out of the Problem of the Criterion, our inability to solidly nail what we know to the wall. FIML cannot completely fix the problem. It does not solve the Problem of the Criterion but it does make everything much clearer and better by at least an order of magnitude and probably more. By fully recognizing this inherent problem within all communication FIML partners can cooperatively work to solve it for the most part between themselves. ABN
A useful guide to understanding what FIML is
The Ethical Skeptic (TES) has written a very good essay: The Distinction Between Comprehension and Understanding. I want to use a schema presented in his essay to describe what FIML is, how to see it and understand it. Comprehending it requires doing it and reaping its benefits.
TES provides this illustration of the layers of thought and psychology that culminate in comprehension:
I might not use a hammer to represent comprehension but since we have a hammer, it would represent FIML’s ability to smash through the dogma of psychology, our ordinary understanding of psycholinguistics, the simplicity with which we view real-time speech, and our ignorance that there exists anything profound in being able to analyze real-time, real-world speech as it is happening.
FIML is a method, a technique. It has no content save what you bring to it. FIML works with and reveals the profound subjectivity of the individual. Since basic FIML cannot be done alone but only with a partner, it also reveals the profound subjectivity of your partner. In doing this, it smashes the dogmas of psychology and virtually all public/common notions about what the human mind even is.
The difficulties of FIML are fundamentally two: 1) seeing it at all and 2) doing it. FIML is not something people normally ever do. I have been writing, reading, and thinking about FIML for many years and have never seen any reference to anything like it anywhere in the history of the world. If you know of one, please tell me. I will be delighted.
FIML is probably hard to see because all languages everywhere contain a very strong proscription against questioning anyone in the moment in order to begin a sober analysis. People just don’t do that. Getting that close and personal about something someone has just said (or did) is instinctively perceived as disrespect, argumentativeness, stupidity, rocking-the-boat, etc. FIML 100% is not that, but since no one has cultivated the habit or acquired the training to do it, no one can even see it let alone do it.
Most of us can see moments of speech and change our minds quickly if we are ordered, instructed, or want to curry favor. I guess that is a starting point, but none of that is FIML. FIML begins with a subjectively felt (or comprehended) need to find out if you have interpreted something correctly. Very ordinary, right? Yes, it is in “slow-time,” but not in real-time.
When done in real-time, the emphasis is on the one asking the question because this one has noticed an interpretation arising in their mind that may be wrong. The interpretation could be completely new or more likely habitual. By frequently noticing these interpretations and then asking your FIML partner about them (using FIML rules) and listening to their reply, you will gradually begin to see a true picture of your actual profound and marvelous subjective mind as it moves through and responds to its living existence.
FIML is no more difficult to learn than playing a musical instrument, riding a motorcycle, or cooking. Once both you and your partner understand what FIML basically is and why it is so necessary, you will progress quickly and gain many insights into your behaviors and thinking processes. At some point, you will achieve a kind of mutual comprehension of each other that is very clear and beautiful and cannot be gained in any other way.
I died on a operating table and entered third state between life and death – what I saw was VERY different to what I’d been taught by the Catholic Church
…’While deeper inside the Source phenomenon’s Energy field, I watched Creation of our universe as the meaning and purpose of life were explained to me by Source itself.’
Danison realized that she was part of the Source, along with every other human being, all interconnected.
She said: ‘You and I are actually Source, simply playing a role similar to how we currently play roles in our dreams.
‘I was shown that I had never been separated from Source and was in fact an integrated part of its consciousness and self-awareness that had merely temporarily inhabited a human animal.
‘The purpose of life is to allow Source to experience the feelings and sensations of the universe it created comparable to how we experience our dreams through the dream-character version of ourselves.
She said: ‘When our bodies die, we simply wake up from the dream of human life and resume living spiritual life in what we call the afterlife.’
What she describes is consistent with what many Buddhists and others sense or believe. Faith can be defined as tropism facing ‘the Source’, which in Buddhism corresponds to ‘original enlightenment’, the Tathagata, or Buddha mind. This is also one way of understanding what is meant in Buddhism by saying everything is conscious or ‘mind only’. ABN
Psychedelics Can Awaken Your Consciousness to the ‘Ultimate Reality,’ Scientists Say
Psychedelic compounds can create feelings of euphoria, a loss of your sense of self, and as various treatment studies demonstrate, cause a transcendent experience so deeply moving that it helps people kick heavy burdens like depression and alcoholism—at least temporarily. And after ingesting a psychedelic, your brain might even feel like it’s connecting to the “Ultimate Reality,” according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Compounds like psilocybin attach to serotonin receptors in your central nervous system. However, neuroscientists still don’t understand what links the resulting hallucinations and reality altering sensations to the broader sense of spiritual connection that some users have reported experiencing, such as “seeing God.” But combining therapy, brain scans, and controlled doses of psychedelics could provide a firm roadmap for the scientists trying to unravel the mystery.
A 2019 research survey, centered on a detailed questionnaire from Johns Hopkins’ Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, probed 4,285 healthy people about their out-of-body experiences of God, or a higher “Ultimate Reality.” The volunteers included both users and non-users of classic psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, and DMT. The psychedelics users were most likely to choose what they felt to be “Ultimate Reality,” out of a choice between “God,” “Higher Power,” “Ultimate Reality,” or an “Aspect or Emissary of God (e.g., an angel),” according to the results, published in the journal PLOS One. Users said they felt a presence that could affect their reality, and that they had a decreased fear of death. The survey noted that related studies had shown similar experiences in people who had taken the same psychedelic compounds.
As far back as 2006, researchers at Johns Hopkins found that a dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic compound from certain species of fungi, caused about 60 percent of healthy volunteers to have a “complete” spiritual trip. Participants having a spiritual experience said they felt a kind of unity of everything, without a physical form. They called it “pure consciousness.”
For Buddhists who may wonder if using psychedelics violates the Fifth Precept of Buddhism, please see: Are We Misunderstanding the Fifth Precept? wherein it is argued that the Fifth Precept clearly refers to alcohol and not psychedelics. I do not mean to encourage the use of psychedelics, but research on psychedelics has shown they confer many benefits on users. I support legalizing, while also guaranteeing the purity of, beneficial psychedelics for adults. ABN
‘All animals are conscious’: Shifting the null hypothesis in consciousness science
Abstract
The marker approach is taken as best practice for answering the distribution question: Which animals are conscious? However, the methodology can be used to increase confidence in animals many presume to be unconscious, including C. elegans, leading to a trilemma: accept the worms as conscious; reject the specific markers; or reject the marker methodology for answering the distribution question. I defend the third option and argue that answering the distribution question requires a secure theory of consciousness. Accepting the hypothesis all animals are conscious will promote research leading to secure theory, which is needed to create reliable consciousness tests for animals and AIs. Rather than asking the distribution question, we should shift to the dimensions question: How are animals conscious?
That is the Buddhist position. All animals are sentient and sentience extends beyond earthly animals and beyond the human realm. I personally think and act as if everything is sentient or conscious. If you treat all things with respect and even talk to them or commune with them, life is richer and provides more feedback and deeper meaning in wondrous ways. Besides, it’s not possible to separate our sentience from everything else that is. Just because that’s a lot to take in doesn’t mean it’s not that way. ABN
IRELAND: Teacher Enoch Burke arrested at Wilson’s Hospital School after refusing to endorse and affirm transgender ideology
Judge Barry O’Donnell, who made almost €400,000 from 2016-2018 representing TUSLA as a barrister, ordered his arrest.
TUSLA is the Irish State ‘Child Protection’ agency, an organisation saturated with LGBT ideology, urging staff recently to learn about cross-dressers and drag performers, and making acceptance of LGBT and transgender ideology a condition for fostering children.
What a mockery to expect Enoch Burke, a Christian teacher, to sit before this man and expect justice.
The Astral Plane
The astral plane, also called the astral realm or the astral world, is a plane of existence postulated by classical, medieval, oriental, esoteric, and new age philosophies and mystery religions.[1] It is the world of the celestial spheres, crossed by the soul in its astral body on the way to being born and after death, and is generally believed to be populated by angels, spirits or other immaterial beings.[2] In the late 19th and early 20th century the term was popularised by Theosophy and neo-Rosicrucianism.
Another view holds that the astral plane or world, rather than being some kind of boundary area crossed by the soul, is the entirety of spirit existence or spirit worlds to which those who die on Earth go, and where they live out their non-physical lives. It is understood that all consciousness resides in the astral plane.[3] Some writers conflate this realm with heaven or paradise or union with God itself, and others do not. Paramahansa Yogananda wrote in Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), “The astral universe … is hundreds of times larger than the material universe … [with] many astral planets, teeming with astral beings.”
My sense is the term astral plane has fallen a bit out of favor. In some cases it is replaced by ethereal plane. In Buddhism, it is traditionally referred to as ultimate reality or vaguely as nirvana, or what comes after nirvana. More recently among scientists and philosophers, we are seeing the concept of a conscious universe or a thinking universe, a universe in which consciousness is a primary force, feature or dimension. However we refer to it, we need a term that evokes dimensions or planes of awareness beyond earthly or mundane awareness or ‘relative reality’, as it is put in Buddhism.
The concept of an astral plane dates back to Plato if not before. The Buddha was referring to something like that without using any term when he spoke about nirvana. The Buddha was a Scythian who argued against the strong Scythian belief in an absolute distinction between right and wrong and a single, great God (Ahura Mazda) who created the world and could be known only through doing good.
It’s a good development that scientists and philosophers today are increasingly seeing what the Buddha and many others have seen throughout the ages. I believe deep meditative states and a moral life afford us frequent opportunities to commune with or glimpse dimensions or realms beyond our normal default cultural behavioral realms.
Buddhism is a profoundly ethical teaching but it also rejects absolutes. We humans are characterized by emptiness, impermanence, and the suffering wrought by clinging to any concept, belief or idea, and yet are capable of freeing ourselves from ‘relative reality’ through ethical practice and experiential samadhi states.
The Buddha remained silent on matters related to anything like the astral plane because he knew that focusing on ethereal aims (especially in his day?) tends to reify them, which then leads to ossification, doctrine, worship without reason. I wonder if in our day, the Buddha would reason differently as many reasonable thinkers now accept that consciousness may be inexplicable by rank materialism or particle physics or biology based on those; and thus may/must be a primary aspect of all that we know of.
My current understanding of Buddhism and ancient history has been recently influenced by Christopher Beckwith’s The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China, which I highly recommend to Buddhists and everyone else. ABN
‘Dear Americans, please pay attention to what’s happening in Europe. The globalist takeover is happening at an incredibly fast pace’ — Eva Vlaardingerbroek
Dear Americans, please pay attention to what’s happening in Europe right now. The globalist takeover is happening at an incredibly fast pace over here.
France just arrested Pavel Durov, founder & CEO of Telegram.
The UK is locking up its own citizens for years and years for the ‘crime’ of standing up against mass migration and writing posts about it online.
In the meantime Europeans keep getting randomly stabbed by immigrants on a daily basis and since the legacy media does nothing but protect the establishment and hide the truth from us, their next main goal is to ban @X
. The only platform where we can find and speak the truth.
It’s so clear what they’re doing and frankly it’s not looking good for us – especially because we don’t have a Second Amendment that could protect us against tyranny.
So please, vote wisely in November. For your sake and ours: Vote for
Readers of this site have seen this coming for years. There are several obvious fronts that may soon climax in violence and ruthless totalitarian takeover: Regional war in the ME possibly escalating to WW3; war in Ukraine spreading into Russia and leading to wider war in Europe and WW3; assassination of Trump; another stolen election; crackdown on speech à la Europe; asymmetric war in USA incited by illegal immigrant military operatives; economic crash; digital internet crash; another plandemic, a mixture of any or all of the above. Beyond these, there are many other plans to seize totalitarian control. We are on the edge of an extremely dangerous precipice. Yes, human history has ever been thus. Except this time the powers of the totalitarians are many orders of magnitude greater than ever before.
We are right now living through the culmination of a KOBK battle at the top of the global power structure. Some readers have wondered why I have written about KOBK. The reason is KOBK describes the ‘game theory’ and ‘morality’ forced on people at the summits of political power. Those people have no choice but to seize all the power they can get. If they back away, someone else will do it. If they are not strong enough, they will be killed and they know it. KOBK is the ultimate zero sum game. There will be only one winner and their win will always be only temporary no matter how ruthless they are. The world has ever been thus but the power and means to attain power have never been as extreme as today. The odds of the world descending into an abyss of savage totalitarianism have never been greater. ABN
‘This is unjust’ — Angela Carini
This ludicrous perversion of the Olympics is a testament to the power of the human imagination, which, as the Buddha taught, can dream of beautiful things while also overwhelming the mind with delusion. ABN
American Buddhist Net 