Tag: Buddhist Practice

the fundamental underlying problem of problems is the chaos of interpersonal ambiguity

~ ABN ~ 2 Comments

320 words

race, racism, identity politics, the majority of psychological diagnoses and personality types, all culture, all religions, all sects, all regionalism, nationalism, styles, gangs, gender identities, fads, etc.; all of it grows out of the boiling cauldron of ineluctable interpersonal ambiguity
cast your eyes across the world and its histories, no matter how big or small, no matter which corner of the globe; all of it grows or has grown out of the boiling cauldron of ineluctable interpersonal ambiguity

individual humans, with rare exception, need the external signs and symbols of “culture” (semiologies) to provide the unifying markers and coordinates that (appear) to save them from the fear and angst and madness of being naked in the boiling cauldron of ineluctable interpersonal ambiguity
that’s just how it is. period. no exceptions


the only other option different from all of the above, the only option that will actually save you from the boiling cauldron is FIML practice. did you expect more signs and symbols at this point? more abstract ideas? political solutions? new identities? not gonna happen because none of that works
FIML is a dynamic method that must be used to bear fruit. if you are smart you probably can figure out how to do it from reading enough posts on this website


it does bother me that there is no other way out, no other real hope. yet I am also heartened to know that FIML is not very hard to do once you understand it. if enough people do it, more will follow because the results are extremely good. and from that the fundamental problem of problems will gradually clear up and go away

a note to Buddhists: FIML is perfectly compatible with all Buddhist teachings. you could think of FIML as an addon that catalyzes traditional methods and makes them work faster. FIML sharpens mindfulness and provides profound insight into the deep meaning of non-attachment, no-self, and karma

Abhaya Sutta: To Prince Abhaya (On Right Speech)

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….[1] In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial (or: not connected with the goal), unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them.

[2] In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, unendearing & disagreeable to others, he does not say them.

[3] In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, but unendearing & disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them.

[4] In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be unfactual, untrue, unbeneficial, but endearing & agreeable to others, he does not say them.

[5] In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, unbeneficial, but endearing & agreeable to others, he does not say them.

[6] In the case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, and endearing & agreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them. Why is that? Because the Tathagata has sympathy for living beings.”

Source translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Politically today, we are at Point 3. ABN

How to get a religious exemption for vaccines required by employers

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K.6. If an employer requires vaccinations when they are available, how should it respond to an employee who indicates that he or she is unable to receive a COVID-19 vaccination because of a sincerely held religious practice or belief? (12/16/20)

Once an employer is on notice that an employee’s sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance prevents the employee from receiving the vaccination, the employer must provide a reasonable accommodation for the religious belief, practice, or observance unless it would pose an undue hardship under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.  Courts have defined “undue hardship” under Title VII as having more than a de minimis cost or burden on the employer. EEOC guidance explains that because the definition of religion is broad and protects beliefs, practices, and observances with which the employer may be unfamiliar, the employer should ordinarily assume that an employee’s request for religious accommodation is based on a sincerely held religious belief.  If, however, an employee requests a religious accommodation, and an employer has an objective basis for questioning either the religious nature or the sincerity of a particular belief, practice, or observance, the employer would be justified in requesting additional supporting information.

Get ready for religious-based objections to employer vaccine mandates

Other resources:

In this video Dr. Cole provides a very fine basis for a Buddhist religious exception to any vaccine mandate. Listen to what he says and make note of the points that make the most sense to you or that apply to you best. May also be useful for other religions.

This link provides an Employer Letter Example: Vaccine Mandate Objection.

UPDATE: This provides more justification for religious exemption. PFIZER CENSORS RELIGIOUS EXEMPTION INFORMATION: ‘We Want to Avoid Having Info on Fetal Cells Out There’

UPDATE: This is a good approach: Vaccine – Conditional Acceptance letter if you are being threatened by your employer

Thought provoking video

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I do not totally agree with this video and at times it sounds like a boomer rant against young people, but he makes some good points. It’s worth viewing or I would not post it. In my view, the problems he addresses largely originate with boomer greed and mutual self-approval, which define the culture of that cohort: selfish, self-indulgent, intellectually lazy and often wrong. It is boomers who have bequeathed to the young the main causes of their problems: lefty shit education, shit news media, shit Big Tech censorship, shit demographics, shit politics, timid ideas and ideological indoctrination rather than robust training in how and why to think. All around us, the world of both young and old is a shrunken, angry, stupid version of itself because wherever we turn thought is banned, circumscribed, punished. Even on this small blog I have to be careful about what I say or some asshole, young or old, will cancel me. It’s not young people who conducted and allowed a fraudulent election to pass or who corrupted the FBI and DOJ or who ruined MSM, our schools, our nation. That fault lies much more with boomers, I am sorry to say.

Happy Easter to All

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

mind only, logos, God, moral imperative, logical imperative, God’s will, karma, shila, prajna, Tathagata, conscience (not mine but logos itself), logic, reason, truth, reality, sacred, enlightened, ultimate reality, dhyana, samadhi, satori, science, mathematics

what these words have in common is they all mean the same thing

is there moral imperative? yes, see above

Happy Easter to All

High-status selves

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231 words

A good thing about our times is we are able to observe many high status people in much more detail than ever before, especially in video interviews. Bill & Melinda Gates, Elon Musk, Prince Harry, Deborah Birx, politicians, academics, artists, and so on.

What I notice is virtually none of them are all that special. Gates has money, Harry has pedigree, academics have credentials, artists some sort of fame or briefly noted skill. In their narrow areas of expertise, each one usually has a few minutes of something interesting to say. Beyond that, listening to Bill Gates is less interesting than listening to one of my neighbors.

Musk runs around with actresses, as does Harry. That seems hollow and lonely, a grown man chasing a common image of desire. Birx is a self-promoting drone while Melinda is a self-satisfied one.

To their credit, by not hiding in their basements, they are revealing the emptiness of the human ego.

Another place you can see, or rather hear, that emptiness is on NPR where everybody talks like they are reading a children’s book to children. I admit being cynical about the news and public life. Rather than speak the truth most of it is a lie or a mask.

It’s basic Buddhism that our ego-selves are made of greed, anger, ignorance, pride, and doubt. So it’s good to see the above, how people really are.

The role of the ‘truth teller’ in a narcissistic family

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I was unfamiliar with the idea of the scapegoat also being a “truth teller” in a narcissistic family. The truth teller might also be called a witness; it’s the child that knows something is not right and thus threatens the vulnerable narcissist. Many if not most traditional cultures have very large narcissistic components. Their moral strictures, religions, duties, values, manners, etc. almost all contain elements of narcissism. So there is an important historical dimension to this diagnosis.

Aspects of Buddhism as it is traditionally practiced even today can also be seen as being narcissistic or fostering narcissism. Same for all the Abrahamic religions, Confucianism, Aztec beliefs and so on across the globe. Just as consciousness is fundamental to our human reality so are the many ways of interpreting it, almost all of which historically have tended toward narcissistic systems.

Truth tellers typically are most likely to escape the web of the narcissistic family even though their role in it was to be the most despised, the scapegoat. Sometimes I see the Buddha as a truth teller who freed himself from his father’s make-believe world despite the power and luxury it offered. In this vein, Jesus can be seen as an outcast black sheep who was tortured and grossly humiliated. Both embody the hardship of earning freedom from delusion.

A brief outline of the FIML method

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The most basic part of the FIML method is thinking about, talking about, and analyzing judgements as they form in the working memory or as they arise in the working memory from established memory structures already in the mind.

The most basic FIML skill is noticing judgements as they first appear in the working memory during real-life, real world situations. Then the paragraph above.

After a few weeks or months of doing FIML, your mind will operate differently and better than before. Your understanding of what your mind is will be much more realistic, based on real data gathered with the help of your partner.

A major extra benefit of FIML practice is you and your partner will develop deep trust with each other; a trust deeper than vows or emotion alone because it is grounded in an ongoing process that is existentially as factual and objective as you can make it.

This is an extra benefit that also is fundamental to FIML practice. It is “extra” because its development does not depend on anything but doing FIML regularly. The practice itself will reveal the importance of trusting each other and provide you with the means to do that very well.

FIML is one hundred percent win-win. Everybody happy.

The Diamond Sutra and modern thought

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Modern thought is characterized by physicalism and atheism.

The forerunner of physicalism was materialism. Basing everything on matter doesn’t make good sense so materialism became physicalism. Physicalism, very simply, means that everything obeys the laws of physics, and thus physicalism has an open-ended definition because the laws we understand today will surely be different in the future.

Criticisms of physicalism claim it is vague since, as of today, we can’t say what the ultimate laws are and we are unlikely to ever be able to for how do you know when you know all there is to know?

I have no problem with physicalism and would be happy to call myself a physicalist. I think physicalism fits well with Buddhism and if you push at it a bit it can easily include many aspects of religion and the “supernatural,” which just means that which has not yet been explained by the laws of physics. See The invented God argument for more on this angle.

Another interesting way to connect modern thought with Buddhism is to look more closely and with different eyes at the Diamond Sutra or any other major wisdom teaching within the Buddhist tradition.

The Diamond Sutra is a long answer to a single question: “…when good men and good women commit themselves to complete, unsurpassed enlightenment, on what should they base themselves, and how should they subdue their minds?”

The Buddha’s answer is that they should be generous and not base their generosity on anything. That is, no phenomenal thing, nothing material, nothing conditioned. To say it another way, they should be generous but not base their generosity on any transient thing or material calculation.

Doesn’t that sound like the Buddha is indicating a higher level of understanding not unlike the laws of physics? Consider some questions: Where are the laws of physics? What holds them together? Do the inhere in matter, do they spring from matter, or do they “reside” at some other level?

I don’t know what it would mean for them to inhere in matter or spring from matter. Are the laws “out there?” Are they  more fundamental than matter? Higher than matter? We don’t have the answers to these questions yet, but there is nothing wrong with the questions.

The Buddha’s answer to Subhuti also contains this: “This means that he should not base his generosity on form, and he should not base his generosity on sound, smell, taste, touch, or thought.”

In Buddhist thought, our senses are sight (form), sound, smell, taste, touch, and thought. These, of course, can be expanded to include proprioception, balance, and much more. The important point here is that the Buddha uses the six senses mentioned to categorically exclude all phenomenal input including thought.

It takes time if you are coming from a modern language to see thought as being a sense. But look at how materialism has transformed into physicalism and how we can’t be sure even today which of our thoughts is really good and will be viable in a hundred years and which of them will look outdated in ten years. Psychoanalysis and materialism, to name just two thoughts, have suffered complete falls from grace over very short time-spans.

Consider again the six senses of Buddhism. Sight depends on light, something outside the body system. And so does sound, smell, taste, and touch. We see and perceive via our senses because those things are “out there.” Birds fly because air supports them. Fish swim because the water allows this. The fish are adapted to water and have evolved within it.

But what about thought? Is thought material? An epiphenomenon of matter? Since materialism is a weak philosophy, we should ask instead is thought physical? Does it obey the laws of physics?

One answer is reductionism, which goes down deeply into matter to find what we may already know. But another answer is that thought is “out there.” It exists independent of our bodies and brains. Just as the laws of physics do not inhere in matter, so also does thought not inhere in the body. As a bird’s wings are supported by the air, so our thoughts are supported by a reality that is different than the material world and probably superior to it.

If that is so, our capacity for thought is shaped by the laws of physics as much as our bodies are shaped by matter. Birds crash, make mistakes and die due to their mistakes. So also, we humans make mistakes in our thoughts and crash and die due to those mistakes. To glimpse a higher source for thought and being is not to say that our thoughts cannot be horribly mistaken.

Glimpsing a level of reality, profound physicalism, that is “superior” to the reality apprehended by our senses is not to say that we are enlightened or that we have reached the end of the road. We have, rather, caught sight of a way of understanding our lives that is fuller and probably truer than anything on the current spectrum that lies between materialism and spiritualism.

Is this what the Diamond Sutra is indicating when the Buddha adds generosity to the emptiness of the self? As sentient beings, we are capable of being generous. But we also tend to want to have our actions confirmed by our lower senses, our material senses, thus reducing them in much the same way that materialism can reduce higher sensibilities by binding them to a lower calculus.

Is this why the Buddha makes his point so explicitly? He says, “This means that he should not base his generosity on form, and he should not base his generosity on sound, smell, taste, touch, or thought.”

Profound wisdom (prajna) means being generous without basing that consciousness on anything material or any understanding we have (so far) of physicalism. Now, does this mean that generosity is itself an element of the deepest laws of physics? Do we perceive unconditional generosity because it is already “out there?” Is the universe as we know it generous or is it cold, as so many materialists claim?

The Buddhist answer is that the universe is generous. We know it is vast, abundant, and creative. We k now it “obeys” the laws of physics such as we know them. We know birds fly due to there being air. Is the Buddha saying we can grok profound, unconditioned generosity because it is already “out there?” It’s part of what an enlightened being knows?

In this respect, can we say we have made some progress in analyzing whether maths are “out there” or are mere constructs of our minds? The answer would be both, with an emphasis on maths being “out there.” Surely some of them are wrong, and some are not deep enough, but like the laws of physics or the generosity of a Buddha, maths are also very importantly “out there” and that is why we can find them.

Similar things can be said about other uses of the mind that rise above materialism—music, in this respect, is far more than mere “pleasing sounds,” art more than pretty pictures, poetry more than good sounding words.

Another way to look at this is consider what you mean by your “self,” your “personality,” “ego,” “autobiography,” etc. Can your personality, such that it is, handle detailed analysis of active communication as in FIML practice? I am all but certain it can’t. So what good is it if it cannot even analyze its own listening and speaking while they are happening?

In Buddhism, the self, the personality, the ego are fictions. They obscure reality rather than reveal it. If your personality or self is a touchy little thing inside your head that loses control of its emotions every time it hears anything out of the ordinary, how can it be true? Why would you want it? Why do we organize our senses and beings around such bankrupt concepts as self or personality?

The small answer is we don’t know any better and everyone else does it so we can’t be different. The big answer is the Buddha’s answer. The self is a narrow organizing principle that relies on base sensory calculations to maintain itself and as such is subject to the selfish delusions of greed, pride, anger, and ignorance, to name just a few.

The answer the Buddha gives in the Diamond Sutra to Subhuti’s question is a supreme “physicalist” answer which indicates that just as birds can fly humans can soar.

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first posted SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

An overview of the philosophy of Frank Ramsey

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…Ramsey’s idea was that a given belief is to be understood in terms of its causes and effects, the ways in which it’s formed and the role it plays in behaviour, in conjunction with other beliefs, desires and mental states. This idea, now called functionalism in the philosophy of mind, is considered by many the most promising way to make sense of mental representation.

The Ramsey Effect

A philosophy of psychology must contend with similar problems as a philosophy of mind, and vice versa.

So how to understand any given belief pertaining to any psychological matter having to do with self or other? All psychological belief is based on this.

In addition to what is stated in the quotation above, psychological “belief” (or, better, analysis) must contend with real-world, real-time events as they happen. Understanding must be based on real-world, real-time events. That is precisely what FIML does or what FIML allows us to do. That is what FIML is for.

FIML can be understood as a philosophical process or method of thinking that is constant, continuous, and never stops. FIML situates the mind’s understanding of itself and other in an ongoing psycho-philosophical inquiry that is stabilized by being an agreed upon method that partners can use and refer to whenever they want.

In this, FIML reflects, embraces, and participates in the conscious development or evolution of thought, mind, spirit, belief, awareness. FIML is actively in the world while also providing a psychologically stable place from which to observe the world, self, and other.

UPDATE: In many respects for humans, there is nothing more basic or important than consciousness. Since FIML consciously works with consciousness as it shifts and adapts to another consciousness in real-time, it is arguably the most basic and objective thing there is.

Language cannot be divorced from communication with other. Theories of language and mind must account for this. Since communication with other is an activity (that always affects each), a philosophy of mind/belief/language must be based on an active method of ongoing communication analysis.

Just as you cannot learn to swim without getting into the water, you cannot have a philosophy of mind that does not actively analyze and influence communication in real-time.

A moral argument against veganism

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This post argues against veganism and in favor of the consumption of meat and dairy products.

The moral argument for eating meat and dairy products is simple. If we eat them, we contribute to the economy that gives these animals life. Since their lives have value to them, it is better for them to exist than to not exist. And also, if their lives have no value to humans (for food or other uses), then these animals will cease to be so numerous and will probably become extinct.

The moral argument for veganism is generally based on not killing. But if we don’t slaughter cattle for food, soon there will be no cattle. Veganism, to put it strongly, is arguing in favor of cattle genocide.

The vegan argument is based on the belief that the animals’ lives have value to the animals. If the animals themselves did not want to live, the vegan argument would not be strong. But if we accept that the animals’ lives have value to them, then raising them for meat or other uses benefits the animals as well as humans.

The strongest argument for meat eating asks that the animals be treated humanely while alive and slaughtered humanely when the time comes. But even if the treatment and slaughtering of these animals is not perfect, it can still be reasonably argued that it is better for them to have existed than to not have existed.

An argument for limited humaneness—that is, “just humane enough to make their lives worth living to them”—does not appeal to me but is probably sound, though clearly it is morally weaker than an argument for greater humaneness.

An objection to this overall argument might be that it is somehow wrong to raise a sentient being knowing that you intend to kill it. But when we take a pet into our home, we all know that the chances are we will kill it when it becomes too infirm to continue. Many people, myself included, argue in favor of euthanasia and even suicide for people who have reasonably concluded that their lives are no longer worth living.

When and if we have widely available lab-produced fake meat that involves no killing, would it still be morally right to raise animals for slaughter? My answer is yes and for the same reasons—those animals are being given a chance to exist and it is better for them, from their point of view, to exist than to not exist.

To some extent, the above arguments appear to support the Buddhist Theravada position that lay Buddhists can eat meat. And that monastics can also eat meat if the animal was not killed for them, if they did not see the animal being killed, and if they did not kill the animal themselves.

The Buddha ate meat and made these rules for monastics and himself. Mahayana Buddhism developed a vegetarian tradition because mendicancy was not feasible in China and other northern areas. Indeed, Mahayana Buddhists who consume dairy products and/or eggs are actually participating in industries that slaughter animals, for dairy cows and chickens are slaughtered as soon as they cease to be productive.

Based on the argument presented in this post, Mahayana Buddhists are right to consume dairy and eggs and wrong to eschew meat if there are not other factors (health, personal  taste, environment) being considered.

I have not covered environmental factors in this post because they bring in many other considerations that distract from the basic moral argument.

As for fish, it seems to me as of this morning that eating “wild caught” fish is not morally well-supported because our eating them does not support their existing. Wild fish would be better off without us eating them. Farm raised fish and hatchery fish, of course, would be better off existing before being slaughtered in the same way that beef cattle are.

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first posted OCTOBER 1, 2015