Tag: Buddhist Practice

Listeners are different from speakers

~ ABN ~ 4 Comments

A listener’s state of mind is different from a speaker’s.

It is more dreamy, often more visual, and has a wider range of associations in play.

For this reason, listeners often react more to their own minds than to what the speaker meant.

An example of this occurred recently.

While my partner was speaking, she referred to someone as a “douche bag.” She meant to distinguish that person from someone else with the same name (who is not a douche bag).

As she said “douche bag,” a strong image rose in my mind of the person in question being pushed into a region of darkness.

In response to that image, I protested “he is not a douche bag”; not so much to recover his honor or reputation as to keep him from being pushed further into the darkness.

She changed her wording and the conversation went on. I completely forgot the incident and the image that had arisen in my mind.

The next morning my partner brought the subject up again and explained in FIML detail why she had used “douche bag” and that it had been meant as a minor distinction between the two people and not as a deep statement.

The memory came back to me of struggling to pull my friend out of the mistaken darkness I had imagined.

It’s a good example of how a speaker’s mind differs from a listener’s.

Face-blindness (memory) test

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This is an interactive version of the Exposure Based Face Memory Test.

Introduction: The human brain has a special module that is used to recognize faces. People with prosopagnosia, also known as “face blindness”, have difficulty remembering faces. Every time they see a face it looks to them like a face they have never seen before and such people have to use other information such as hair, voice, and body to recognize others. The Exposure Based Face Memory Test was developed as an open source measure of face memory and was designed with a procedure that is both closer to the demands on face memory experienced in every day life, and minimizes administration time.

Procedure: In this test you will be shown a long series of faces. For each face you must say if you have been shown that person before, or if this is a new face you have not been shown yet. It should take 2-5 minutes to complete. This test can only be taken once. It is spoiled if you have seen any of the faces before. So if want accurate results, make sure to take it seriously the first time.

Participation: You use of this assessment should be for educational or entertainment purposes only. This is not psychological advice of any kind. Additionally, your responses to this questionnaire will be anonymously saved and possibly used for research or otherwise distributed.

link to survey

This is a quick test which will give you some sense of whether you have or do not have face-blindness. I scored better than just 16.5% of people who have taken the test, which does not qualify as prosopagnosia, though I do have moderate-significant face-blindness. One aspect of this condition not yet studied, far as I know, is I sometimes see the faces of people I should recognize as distorted, sometimes rather weirdly so, sometimes just a bit weirdly; this happens just before I fully recognize them by voice or some other prompt. If you have face-blindness it is probably a good idea to tell people you meet about it. Some people react with surprise and confusion but many have heard of prosopagnosia and appreciate getting the information. Human faces form a semiotic ‘language’ which people with excellent face-recognition probably greatly enjoy. Easily recognizing/ remembering faces facilitates building social relationships. Not easily recognizing faces causes a delay in fully receiving into your mind the social presence of another person, thus making it more difficult to build social relationships. I have probably spent more time thinking about language and interpersonal communications than most people because I largely remember people initially or click with them through their speech idiosyncrasies more than by remembering their faces. ABN

Semiotics for Beginners

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This essay by Daniel Chandler is good introduction to semiotics and a good way to help readers better understand how we are using the term on this site. I highly recommend the essay for anyone interested in thought, culture, language, or psychology. But it will be especially useful for Buddhists because having some idea of what semiotics is all about can be a great help in understanding many of the teachings of the Buddha. The deep significance of fundamental Buddhist concepts like emptiness and dependent origination may become clearer and more useful when viewed from a semiotic point of view.

Buddhists might also take note that semiotics is difficult to define and/or get a grasp of and in this resembles some of the more abstract or philosophical teachings of the Buddhist tradition, particularly the work of Nagarjuna. Semiotics is the study of meaning, how we communicate it and what it is. Buddhism, one might say, is the study of how meaning pertains to the self, or the illusion of the self, and how our perceptions of the world around us are built out of a welter of ever-changing codependent meanings–semiotics.

We use the term semiotics on this site because it greatly facilitates our discussions of FIML practice. Terms like semiotics, emptiness, dependent origination, and so on were not created to make subjects obscure but rather to clarify them.

You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them

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Can you look at someone’s face and know what they’re feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway? For the past 25 years, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physiology studies to understand what emotions really are. She shares the results of her exhaustive research — and explains how we may have more control over our emotions than we think.

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This talk is a very good background for FIML practice, which is based on acknowledging that interpersonal emotions and interpretations are fundamentally ambiguous and must be investigated often to achieve good communication. ABN

Deception (or truth elision) in communication

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To communicate, we often must ignore the truth or falsity of a statement, our own or someone else’s.

I believe it is an instinct to do this; that it is part of our instinct to communicate at all. Communication requires cooperation, an agreement to be agreeable enough to get the message through.

We might call ignoring truth or falsity in communication “truth elision” or “psychological elision.” Elision means to omit something. Psychological elision would mean omitting or not mentioning psychological truths.

We do a lot of truth elision to save time. In professional or group settings it is hard to communicate any other way because there is not enough time to be perfectly truthful and most people will not care. They just want to socialize and/or get the job done, not search for truth.

Most communication is like that. Most messages are not even superficially analyzed. Semiotics glide through our minds without any thought to their deep origins or interpretations. Truth and falsity are frequently elided.

Like all instincts, our instinct to cooperate by ignoring the truth or falsity of many statements can be misused to consciously deceive.

Indeed, we frequently deceive even ourselves by accepting our own statements as true when analysis would show they are not. One way we succeed in doing this to ourselves is by simply avoiding the analysis—analysis elision.

This is where a simple instinct starts to go bad. A basic need to cooperate on the signs and symbols of communication gets twisted into tricking people, deceiving them, even deceiving ourselves.

The way to see this most clearly and to stop doing it with at least one other person is FIML practice. One of my main goals for this website is to show how and why communication goes bad and how and why it harms us. At the same time, I present a practical way to fix the problem described—FIML.

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I think the above sheds light on false confessions and pretty much all self-abnegating lying on the spectrum trending down from a false confession with legal consequences.

Abusers work these ill-defined and difficult to grasp areas to dominate, entrap, and manipulate others. Narcissists and other “strong” or “clever” dark personality types use our fundamental willingness to cooperate against us.

Gas lighting greatly relies on people’s willingness to ignore truths and accept falsities about themselves. If there is more than one gas lighter at work, victims may even accept blame for things they know with certainty are not true.

As with so much in this world, immoral people put time and energy into fooling those who have not put time or energy into the dark arts.

Mass mind-control preys on our mass susceptibility to believe the story that first comes out; the story that is approved by the ‘authorities’ and mass media; the story that is embraced and recited by our friends and family. Mind-control relies on our need to conform and our fear of being ostracized and criticized for straying from the mass instinct to be the same as others.

Buddhists all know about wise compassion. We also need wise understanding of the world and wise cautiousness about the full scope of human motivations.

Our tendencies to go along with falsity can be seen in every part of life, from small corners of our own lives to the great expanses of entire societies.

A theory of FIML

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FIML is both a practice and a theory. The practice  is roughly described here and in other posts on this website.

The theory states (also roughly) that successful practice of FIML will:

  • Greatly improve communication between participating partners
  • Greatly reduce or eliminate mistaken interpretations (neuroses) between partners
  • Give partners insights into the dynamic structures of their personalities
  • Lead to much greater appreciation of the dynamic linguistic/communicative nature of the personality

These results are achieved because:

  • FIML practice is based on real data agreed upon by both partners
  • FIML practice stops neurotic responses before they get out of control
  • FIML practice allows both partners to understand each other’s neuroses while eliminating them
  • FIML practice establishes a shared objective standard between partners
  • This standard can be checked, confirmed, changed, or upgraded as often as is needed

FIML practice will also:

  • Show partners how their personalities function while alone and together
  • Lead to a much greater appreciation of how mistaken interpretations that occur at discreet times can and often do lead to (or reveal) ongoing mistaken interpretations (neuroses)

FIML practice eliminates neuroses because it shows individuals, through real data, that their (neurotic) interpretation(s) of their partner are mistaken. This reduction of neurosis between partners probably will be generalizable to other situations and people, thus resulting a less neurotic individual overall.

Neurosis is defined here to mean a mistaken interpretation or an ongoing mistaken interpretation.

The theory of FIML can be falsified or shown to be wrong by having a reasonably large number of suitable people learn FIML practice, do it and fail to gain the aforementioned results.

FIML practice will not be suitable for everyone. It requires that partners have a strong interest in each other; a strong sense of caring for each other; an interest in language and communication; the ability to see themselves objectively; the ability to view their use of language objectively; fairly good self-control; enough time to do the practice regularly.

Wolfram’s ‘computational irreducibility’ explains FIML perfectly

[In mathematics, a ‘computation’ is the process of performing mathematical operations on one or more inputs to produce a desired output. A problem in analyzing human psychology arises when we understand that human psychology cannot be reduced computationally. The ‘computational irreducibility’ of human psychology does not mean, however, that there is no way to probe it and understand it. In the following essay, I show how FIML practice can greatly enhance our understanding of our own psychologies and, by extension, the psychologies of others.

Rather than rely on tautological data extractions or vague theories about human psychology, FIML focuses on small interpersonal exchanges that can be objectively agreed upon by at least two people. These small exchanges correspond to what Wolfram calls ‘specific little pieces of computational reducibility’. When we repeatedly view our psychologies from the point of view of specific little pieces of computational reducibility, we begin amassing a profoundly telling collection of very good data that shows how we really think, speak, and act.]

FIML is a method of inquiry that deals with the computational irreducibility of humans. It does this by isolating small incidents and asking questions about them. These small incidents are the “little pieces of computational reducibility” that Stephan Wolfram remarks on at 45:34 in this video. Here is the full quote:

One of the necessary consequences of computational irreducibility is within a computationally irreducible system there will always be an infinite number of specific little pieces of computational reducibility that you can find.45:34 in this video

This is exactly what FIML practice does again and again—it finds “specific little pieces of computational reducibility” and learns all it can about them.

In FIML practice, two humans in real-time, real-world situations agree to isolate and focus on one “specific little piece of computational reducibility” and from that gain a deeper understanding of the whole “computationally irreducible system”, which is them.

When two humans do this hundreds of times, their grasp and appreciation of the “computationally irreducible system” which is them, both together and individually, increases dramatically. This growing grasp and understanding of their shared computationally irreducible system upgrades or replaces most previously learned cognitive categories about their lives, or psychologies, or how they think about themselves or other humans.

By focusing on many small bits of communicative information, FIML partners improve all aspects of their human minds.

I do not believe any computer will ever be able to do FIML. Robots and brain scans may help with it but they will not be able to replace it. In the not too distant future, FIML may be the only profound thing humans will both need to and be able to do on their own without the use of AI. To understand ourselves deeply and enjoy being human, we will have to do FIML. In this sense, FIML may be our most important human answer to the AI civilization growing around us. ABN

I don’t get why consciousness can’t be emergent

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A lot of the disagreement here comes from what kind of emergence people are talking about.

Most philosophers are perfectly fine with weak (scientific) emergence. Temperature, liquidity, elasticity, traffic jams, economies, etc. all emerge from lower-level interactions. They’re not properties of single particles, but once you understand the micro-story, there’s nothing mysterious left over. Crucially, all of these are structural or functional properties, describable entirely in third-person terms.

The worry about consciousness isn’t really about complexity. It’s about the fact that consciousness seems to involve an experiential aspect — there being something it is like — and critics argue that this doesn’t follow from structural or functional descriptions in the same way temperature or liquidity do.

Similarly, when people say “you can’t open the skull and point to consciousness,” they’re not making a naïve spatial claim. The point is that no amount of third-person description of neurons, firings, or networks seems to capture or entail first-person phenomenal qualities like pain or redness.

So you see, consciousness isn’t treated as special because it’s complex, but because it seems to introduce a different kind of property — phenomenal experience — that standard emergence stories were never designed to explain. Whether that really is a problem is exactly what the debate is about.

link to post, quoted is top comment

An Immortal Stream of Consciousness: The scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death — Dr. Nicolas Rouleau

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Introduction

The concept of a soul or vital force is consistent across scientific, medical, theological, and philosophical thought1 . The soul is often described as contained within specific organs but separate from the body, and it is unsurprising that its location has been a subject of great debate throughout history2 . Despite much contention, those historically in search of the soul have generally agreed that it is the essence of a person – their true and immortal self1,3 . Indeed, when confronted with the challenge of identifying themselves, most people point to their chest or, approximately, their heart. This cardiocentric model of who we are is described in humanity’s earliest writings from the third millennium BCE, indicating that Ancient Egyptians believed souls were immortal and located within the hearts of impermanent bodies4 . The related idea of the pneuma – ancient Greek for breath, spirit, or soul – represents one among many similar beliefs about the essence of human life5 . Consistent with the heart’s exalted status throughout history6 , and until very recently, irreversible cardiac arrest was considered the medical standard for death7-9 . Which is to say, when your heart stopped beating, you stopped being. However, the importance of other bodily organs did not go unnoticed by our ancestors. Notable philosophers such as Plato and Descartes championed the brain as the locus of the soul10-13 and modern definitions of death rest squarely on the structural and functional integrity of the brain, not the heart7,8 .

rouleau-immortal-consciousnessDownload

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

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

Culture and psychology, a way out

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That each human is unique is common knowledge.

That the uniqueness of each human scales down to even their smallest reactions to words, pictures, signs, symbols is also well-known.

Experimental support for this position can be found here: Researchers can identify you by your brain waves with 100 percent accuracy. The study this article is based on is here: A Novel Method for Very High Accuracy Event-Related Potential Biometric Identification.

By averaging individual EEG responses to 500 images, researchers were later able to identify individual people with 100% accuracy. The main expected use for this research is biometric identification of people wanting to enter secure spaces.

That this research also has implications for social-psychology is what I am interested in today.

If each of us is unique with unique responses to pretty much everything, how are we able to communicate?

We communicate with each other in cultural terms. That is, we use unifying cultural concepts to provide a sense of agreement. Some might say to manufacture an illusion of agreement.

Culture is a hierarchical group of unifying principles that organizes the minds of its members.

Similarly, what we call the “self” or the “ego” is nothing more than a unifying principle that organizes the mind of the individual.

It should not take too much effort to see that what people think of as their “self” is usually an imported hierarchy that comes from the individual’s understanding of the culture to which they belong.

Individuals tailor their imported “selves” in much the same ways that we decorate our rooms or choose our clothes. There is a good deal of leeway in how you construct yourself, but there are also serious limitations.

This why individuals in one culture differ from individuals in another. If they have commonalities, those are often shared cultural roots or instinctive human behaviors that find expression in all societies.

I believe the above view of culture and the individual’s role in it describes a dangerous trap.

This is so because the resonance between “self” and “culture” is a powerful tautology, based on illusions.

No matter how you change culture, the trap remains the same.

Change in culture means little more than a rearrangement of limited parts that will never come together as an enlightened whole because cultures are always lowest common denominators.

Make culture more “tolerant” and it will gradually be undermined and replaced by those who come into the tent under the new rules.

We see exactly this happening with SJWs whose demands for tolerance have morphed into totalitarian demands for tolerance as they define it.

Do as we say or be fired, ostracized, demonstrated against, beaten-up.

I do not see any way to get out of this problem except the Buddhist way. Renounce culture in most of its guises and as an individual withdraw from its worst bs as much as possible.

Culture, as much as the ego or self, is a fundamental delusion. It is the stuff of the first noble truth and it causes suffering.

As a Buddhist, I understand that culture is necessary for our educations up to a point. And I understand that the self is necessary for healthy individual development up to a point.

But once that point has been reached, I  renounce the totalitarianism of culture, the totalitarianism of the self, the totalitarianism of any lowest common denominator anything.

Notice I said totalitarianism of.

I can accept and function in a culture that allows great freedom of thought with few rules. I always gladly obey all the rules in national parks and adore the Bill of Rights, though sadly it is slipping away.

Similarly, I am good with a healthy persona restrained by the five precepts and used as a basis for social intercourse and freedom of thought.

first posted April 19, 2016

Lies and self-deception

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Most Buddhist practitioners will immediately understand and agree with the results of a study that shows that people feel better when they tell fewer lies. The study (Telling fewer lies linked to better health and relationships) is modest but worth considering.

Notice that the improvements found in the study come from refraining from lying.

“We found that the participants could purposefully and dramatically reduce their everyday lies, and that in turn was associated with significantly improved health,” says lead author Anita Kelly. (Same link as above.)

A good deal of Buddhist practice involves refraining from unwholesome thoughts and behaviors and ultimately eliminating them. Refraining from lying, or “false speech,” is the fourth of the Five Precepts, which are the basis of Buddhist morality. Lies cloud the mind and hinder clear thinking.

Buddhist mindfulness gets us to slow down and question how sure we are of our thoughts, feelings, and judgements. It helps us refrain from willfully lying, and it  can help us refrain from unconsciously lying if we have the help of a trusted partner.

Another term for unconscious lying is self-deception. Self-deception may make us feel good for awhile in some circumstances, but in the long-run it is much the same as any other kind of lying. It’s not true. It constitutes inner false speech and causes serious intellectual and emotional contradictions that will almost certainly lead to wrong thoughts, behaviors, and interpretations.

Michael S. Gazzaniga in an online essay has this to say:

The view in neuroscience today is that consciousness does not constitute a single, generalized process. It involves a multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes, the products of which are integrated by the interpreter module….Our conscious experience is assembled on the fly as our brains respond to constantly changing inputs, calculate potential courses of action, and execute responses like a streetwise kid. (source)

It is our “interpreter module,” to use Gazzaniga’s words, that can and does unconsciously lie to us or allow us to engage in self-deception.

In the same essay, Gazzaniga also says:

In truth, when we set out to explain our actions, they are all post hoc explanations using post hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing….The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time. (Source: same as above)

FIML practice may not be capable of giving us access to “nonconscious processing,” but it will give us access to what is/was in our working memories while showing us that what we said or heard may have been vague, ambiguous, muddled, or wrong.

With the aid of a trusted partner, FIML helps us catch our minds on the fly. Partners are encouraged to refrain from long explanations and just stick to what they remember having been in their minds during the few seconds in question. This forestalls long, self-deceiving explanations.

Beginning FIML partners will likely be amazed at how often their interpretation of what their partner said is completely wrong.

FIML emphasizes using trivial incidents because partners will be much less likely to self-deceive when the incident is minor. A minor mistake is easier to change than a major one. If partners keep working with minor mistakes and clear them up as soon as they arise, how can major misunderstandings even develop?

In the future, we may have brain scans that can help us separate fact from fiction in our minds, but for now, I know of no better way to do it than with a trusted partner in FIML practice. Your partner will help you see the minutiae of your mind as it actually works and impacts them. This leads to a large reduction in lying and self-deception and an increase in feelings of well-being and mutual understanding.

How envy causes conflict

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…The most cursory look at the sort of thinking now dominant in the West shows that it is doing the reverse. Anti-racism never concerns itself with the spiritual self-improvement of its beneficiaries. It is concerned with worldly goods, but does nothing to help people improve their lot through effective means such as learning skills or deferring gratification and planning for the future. Its constant message is: You have less because the white man has more, and he has more because he has rigged the game in his favor.

Critical race theory inculcates resentment among children to whom it might otherwise not have occurred to compare themselves invidiously with their white neighbors, and directs their attention away from practical ways to improve their own lives. As we have seen, many societies have been dominated by envy, but I cannot think of another case of a regime systematically trying to maximize envy in the rising generation. It is genuinely cruel to the non-white children who are supposedly its intended beneficiaries, but as we would expect from envy-inspired behavior, the aim appears to be to harm us rather than to help them.

link

While you may not agree with all of this article, it is worth reading just for having raised the issue of envy and focusing on it.

Personally, I can truthfully say that not understanding the power of envy has caused me many problems. If you do not feel envy or do not feel it much or often, it may not occur to you how often it distorts the thinking of others.

A Buddhist nun, who is a good friend, often used to tell me that “jealousy” or “envy” were the root causes of much of what we were seeing around us.

For years, I always countered her statements with some anodyne explanation but no longer do.

Envy over talent or status and sexual jealousy are among the strongest negative emotions we humans have.

If you are blessed with decent looks and brains and some ability to work productively, you may not realize how much others may be seething with envy.

If you feel envy, practice Buddhism. It will cure that malady well.

If you do not feel envy or do not feel it much, Buddhist contemplations on others—intellectual empathy—may help in understanding that the karma or conditions endured by others can be very difficult for them to bear.

Buddhist monks live simply and have “left home” (the world) both to keep themselves from feeling envy and to keep others from envying them, among other reasons.

If you are blessed (or have earned) a mind rarely sullied by envy, be careful not to be oblivious of it in others. ABN

The four unignorable, non-materialist features of near-death experiences

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__________

The out of body part of this story is reasonable evidence that consciousness resides outside of the body and in some circumstances can be accessed as such.

Nowadays, philosophers and some physicists call that greater consciousness ‘mind at large’ or the ‘field of consciousness’ that underlies or inheres in all things.

Buddhists sometimes claim to have achieved awareness of that field of consciousness.

The Buddha is known as the Thus Come One and the Thus Gone One, meaning he came from that deep field of universal consciousness and went back into it when he achieved nirvana.

It’s a wonderful thing that medical science is seeing this side of sentient life and that the evidence for it has grown significantly in recent years. ABN