Tag: semiotics

Signal intensity

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

An important part of FIML practice is understanding signal intensity. That is, how big or strong or important the signal in question is.

FIML practice was designed to work with small signals and works best when close attention is paid to small signals. These “small signals” can be ones you send to your partner, ones your partner sends to you, or the ways in which either one of you interprets any signal at all.

Small signals are of great importance because they can be signs or aspects of larger or habitual ways of interpreting signals. Small signals can also generate mistaken interpretations that have the potential to snowball.

An example of a habitual way of interpreting signals might be a person who grew up in a less wealthy environment than his or her partner. The less wealthy partner may tend to interpret spending or not spending money differently than the other partner. This could manifest as stinginess, being too generous, or as mild anxiety about money in general. Of course, both partners will be different in the ways they interpret signals dealing with money. Their semiotics about money will be different.

FIML partners would do well to deal with these differences by paying close attention to small signals of that type the moment they come up. This is where partners will come to see how this entire class (money) of signals is affecting them in the moments of the lives they are actually living. It’s good to also have long general discussions about money, but be sure to pay close attention to the appearances of small signals.

From this example, please extrapolate to the signaling areas that matter to you and your partner. These may include anything that causes mistakes in communication or anything that causes either partner to feel anxiety or discomfort.

A good way to gain access to this perspective is to also pay close attention to how often you and your partner miscommunicate about trivial material things. Notice how often—and it happens a lot—you misunderstand each other about even the simplest of concrete, material matters. For example, what kind of lettuce to buy, where you left the keys, is the oven off, etc.

All people everywhere make many communicative mistakes in matters as small as those. If we do that in the material realm, where mistakes are easy to see and correct, consider how much more often and how much more serious are signaling mistakes in the emotional, interpersonal realm.

When you do a FIML discussion with your partner, be sure to frequently include an analysis of how big or small the signals in question are—how intense they are. Remember that FIML practice strongly encourages discussing even the very smallest of signals. FIML does that because small signals are easier to isolate and analyze; clearly seeing a small signal often is sufficient to understanding a big habit. Small signals can snowball, so they should not be ignored.

Big mistake: We often own what we didn’t mean

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

A fascinating study from Sweden confirms something that FIML practice has shown us to be a fairly common occurrence and a potential source of serious interpersonal problems.

In FIML terms, the mistake is that we own something we didn’t mean. Or we take on an attitude, mood, or belief that we did not hold after we have been misheard or misunderstood.

In the study from Lund University in Sweden—How to confuse a moral compass—researchers found that:

People can be tricked into reversing their opinions on moral issues, even to the point of constructing good arguments to support the opposite of their original positions…

I was not surprised at all to read that because FIML practice has clearly shown my partner and me that it is really easy to fall into the trap of owning what your partner erroneously thinks you meant.

For example, you are tired, you ask your partner a question, their answer is slow in coming or unclear, you feel frustrated and that feeling enters your tone of voice or shows in your facial expression, your partner asks with some irritation “are you mad at me“—now here’s the mistake—in your fatigue and confusion you answer “yes,” then all hell beaks loose.

The problem is you were not mad at your partner; you were tired and frustrated and it showed, but when they asked you if you were mad at them, in the rush of the moment, you took it on; you said “yes” due to the sort of effect that the Swedish study has found.

Th example above is fairly crude. I chose it because something like that happened to me just yesterday and because I doubt there is anyone who has never made a mistake like that, so it’s easy to understand.

Other cases of this phenomenon can be more subtle—vague speaking or listening can lead to you taking on a position that is not what you actually think; so can convenience in the moment; being too polite; confusion, wanting to get-along or be agreeable, and so on.

This phenomenon usually happens subconsciously or semi-consciously. The big danger interpersonally is that your new not true position can become hardened into something significant to the other person. From there, it can snowball into becoming “what you believe,” “how you are,” or one of your “personality traits.”

What this phenomenon shows, especially in interpersonal contexts, is how much we are interconnected, how much our understanding of ourselves—even our own beliefs and feelings—is determined by what others attribute to us.

The Swedish study shows the phenomenon is all but automatic. In FIML terms, we could also say that this phenomenon shows the great power of what we have called “semiotic bundles.” One you get put into a semiotic category (or put yourself into one), there is a strong tendency to want to stay in that category, even to defend it, even if it had never been your original position at all. Anger often fuels it, but you don’t have to be angry to have it happen.

Watch for it when you interact with your partner. You both will be delighted to discover and quickly correct this mistake as soon as it happens.

(I bet a good deal of what we call “acculturation” depends on this phenomenon, as does conformity. In other posts on this site, we have discussed the power of “public semiotics” and our deep need for them to communicate. But powerful things can also be dangerous. With the help of your FIML partner, watch yourself closely and see if you can catch yourself doing a “mini-acculturation” to a mood or belief you did not hold and do not believe.)

Three kinds of knowing and how they have changed (us)

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

The three kinds of knowing I am going to discuss are:

  • Google
  • FIML
  • Social

Google: Most people with access to the Internet appreciate that there is no longer much to be proud about for displaying many kinds of factual knowledge. Not so long ago knowing the right way to sharpen a knife or the etymology of a strange word counted for something. People usually were impressed and this influenced how we thought of ourselves and others. Google, of course, has changed that.

FIML: Most people today still believe that they can with decent certitude know what other people mean when they speak, what their intentions are, and even what their real intentions are. A mature adult is generally expected to have a sophisticated “theory of mind.” Much else follows from this, for our understanding of who we think we are is based significantly on how we understand others. FIML partners will surely appreciate that we very often do not know what others’ intentions are or even what they mean, even at very basic levels.

Social: The third kind of knowledge that really matters in human life is social—who you know, who they know, what they think of you, etc. Internet social media is surely changing this area by widening social networks. Much more significant than Facebook, though, is the database held by the NSA. If the rumors are true, that database holds a record of all electronic communications for everyone in th USA (and probably the world) for the last ten years. That potentially changes for all time how we are able to understand social networks; how we are able to understand society itself. It will be a long time before a database like that is made available to the public, but it is available to someone right now.

Discussion

My guess is most people find the way that Google has changed our understanding of information refreshing. Feeling special because you know something is an easy conceit to give up. Similarly, feeling stupid because you don’t know something is a burden that is pleasant to put down. It’s also nice to have to do much less guessing about all kinds of things. If you aren’t sure, you can usually Google the answer. Many Wikipedia articles provide roughly what an expert in the field would be conversant with, or would say to a non-expert.

My reason for writing the above is to briefly raise the subject of how much our access to information has changed and how much that has changed us over the past 10-20 years. The common themes for the three areas discussed are access and reliability. We have better access to more reliable information.

For readers who have not yet tried FIML, I might encourage you by saying that FIML is sort of like a Google for the mind because it will give you better access to more reliable information about yourself and others than you ever had before.

Just as Google is not all that mysterious once you understand it, so neither is FIML. FIML is little else than a technique to access interpersonal information in a way that it has not been accessed traditionally. It takes some time to learn FIML—the full technique is not as simple as it may seem—but it is worth it. It took time to learn Google. Compare how Google has changed you to a grandparent, say, who has not bothered to learn to use a computer.

I don’t expect FIML to become a fad, but I do tend to believe that as brain science improves and accurate brain scans become more accessible, our moral and social sense of how we interact with each other will have to rely on something like FIML rules. When the day comes that anyone can purchase an accurate lie-detector/mood-detector for use at home, the new information will cause social norms to change even more quickly than Google did. We will not be able to continue to pretend that we understand (or can conceal) things about ourselves and each other that are simply not true. FIML helps greatly with this.

How people are

~ ABN ~ 3 Comments

An interesting essay appeared online a couple days ago. The main thrust of the essay, Signaling bias in philosophical intuition by Katja Grace, is nicely stated in its first paragraph:

Intuitions are a major source of evidence in philosophy. Intuitions are also a significant source of evidence about the person having the intuitions. In most situations where onlookers are likely to read something into a person’s behavior, people adjust their behavior to look better. (Emphasis added)

The essay makes many good points about how we judge, or interpret, philosophers. For example, “…people treat philosophical intuitions as evidence about personality traits.” And “People are enthusiastic to show off their better looking intuitions. They identify with some intuitions and take pleasure in holding them.”

If this is true of professional philosophers who, we can assume, are more careful about their thoughts and their expression than most people, how much more is it true for non-philosophers?

Yesterday I wrote on this site:

Normal people live in vague worlds where they grope toward each other like ghosts in the fog. How can we understand each other or ourselves if we do not pay attention to the small signals that are, arguably, the most important units of interpersonal communication? (Source)

I felt a camaraderie with Grace for I believe that virtually all people, not just philosophers, “are enthusiastic to show off their better looking” sides. I also strongly believe that as I do that toward you and you toward me, our authentic beings are lost in the fluff.

FIML practice has been designed to allow partners to send signals to each other that are profoundly more authentic than the simplistic “better looking” ones we normally exchange. FIML does this by providing a method for partners to examine in real time the small signals that are the “psychological morphemes” of interpersonal communication.

Please take a moment to read Grace’s essay, which is far more nuanced than what I have suggested.

How to observe the semiotics that form the basis of your consciousness

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

A few days ago, I posted the essay, How semiotics can help us understand ourselves.

Today I want to discuss how you can grasp the semiotics that form the basis of your consciousness.

I am sure you already understand a good deal about yourself, but my guess is your understanding is probably in the form of a group of abstractions, such as—“my personality is thus-and-so”; “since I had this sort of childhood/education/etc., I am now outgoing/fearful/frugal/etc.”; “I believe in personal responsibility/behavior/etc.”; “my mom was a religious nut so I am an atheist, etc.”

In the post cited above, we used the terms signaling system and semiotics more or less interchangeably. A signaling system emphasizes what the message is and how it is sent, while semiotics emphasizes how the message is interpreted.

If we think of our minds as being signaling systems that are constantly referring to whatever semiotics we interpret as “true” or “real,” we can get a very good idea of how they function in the moment by observing what they are referring to in “the moment” (1-10 seconds, or so). By observing our minds closely, we can learn what semiotics cause us to have emotional responses or to interpret things in the ways we do. We can see how our mental/emotional signaling system builds up within us the appearance of a self with a biography, a personality, needs, fears, desires, goals, and so on.

If, for example, at some point in your life you learned and accepted as real a semiotic that you are stupid, you can spend hours, even decades, analyzing your feelings without getting any results. But if you can actually watch your mind as it signals to itself the semiotic “I am stupid,” and if you can see while that is happening that the signal is a mistake, then your mind will tend to stop sending you that signal.

If you can repeat that experience a few times—that is, catch that same mistake a few times—your mind will almost certainly stop wasting its resources thinking you are stupid. It will do this almost effortlessly because the mind is efficient and won’t waste time doing something it knows is a mistake.

So how do you do that, how do you catch the mistakes? You probably have already tried to catch them through introspection, reading, or discussing them with friends with less than satisfying results.

And what’s even harder to do is catch mistakes that you are not even aware of. How do you catch them?

I don’t think you can do it all by yourself. And I don’t think you can make satisfying progress by discussing these matters even with very wise friends. You can’t do it yourself because you can’t see yourself, and you can’t do it through long discussions because the signalling system works too quickly for that.

If you don’t cut in quickly and observe what it is doing, you won’t be able to change it easily.

Here is a way to look at that. Have you ever had a clock or mirror on the wall that was removed; maybe the mirror fell or the clock broke. At some point, the object that you had been used to seeing for years was gone. For some time after that, you probably turned unconsciously more than a few times to look at the now absent mirror or clock. That gives a strange feeling because at moments like that we see how deeply unconscious signs (the clock or mirror) affect our sense of who we are.

After a while we get used to the bare wall, but the lesson in how deeply signs operate within us should be clear. The other lesson of how we can indeed change our reference or expectation from a wall with a clock or mirror to a wall without either should also be clear.

At first, the mind is surprised, but after a while, it accepts that there is no clock on the wall with little fuss.

When two people do FIML practice, they help each other remove broken clocks and mirrors from the walls of their minds. FIML strongly emphasizes catching the signal and the semiotic it is referring to as quickly as you can. If partners can isolate their signals quickly, they will find that they are dealing with very small and discrete signs that very, very often are not true.

Normal people live in vague worlds where they grope toward each other like ghosts in the fog. How can we understand each other or ourselves if we do not pay attention to the small signals that are, arguably, the most important units of interpersonal communication?

And how can you pay attention to them if you don’t catch them quickly in the moment? If you try to understand yourself through long explanations and stories, you will only be understanding the underlying semiotic library that your moment-by-moment signals are referring to. If you catch those small signals as they happen in the moment, though, you will come to understand how and why that library is being accessed and how that affects you.

When your partner shows you that one of your signals was wrong and that it was referring to a part of the library that had no proper bearing on that moment, and when they show you that again, and again, that particular signal will stop firing. And there is a very good chance your library will change as well. It will change you deeply to see that.

How semiotics can help us understand ourselves

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

Why are people greedy?

Besides the usual answers, a succinct and very useful answer to this question is that greed is part of a semiotic system, a signalling system. Having a lot of money lets people buy good things—houses, cars, clothes, memberships, etc.—and these things send a basic signal to other people that is easy to understand. If you have a nice house, car, and good clothes people will tend to see you as being reliable, “normal,” familiar, worth knowing.

Why do people hate?

People hate those who do not accept their semiotic system. If someone is sending most of the same signals as you are, there is no way you will hate them unless they make you jealous, in which case they are probably just signalling better than you. If someone harms you, thus earning your ire, if not hate, it is often due to their jealousy.

Why do people have egos?

We need to signal to others. To communicate we must send a coherent semiotic package to the people we know. This need to send a neat package forms the basis of our ego, our biographical-actorial “self.” Depending on conditions, we internalize those standards that we think exemplify what we want others to think of us. Of course, the ego always gets mixed up with greed, hate and/or pride to make the picture more complex. But if you look at the signalling systems—the semiotics—much of it can be teased apart.

Why do people have personalities?

Or do we? “Personality traits” can be described in much the same way as we described the ego above. Sometimes people’s personalities seem to me to be something they have imagined, a standard they have adopted like an astrological sign or a pumped-up allegiance to a fantasized ethnic or religious “identity.”

What is “identity”?

It’s a semiotic system, often a system we have consciously chosen for ourselves. Identity compliments ego and personality, allowing the individual to take on ready-made feelings, a history, customs, and behaviors that send powerful signals to other people. When many people identify with the same symbols, they often gain political power; this is “identity politics.” Identity signals to others and to ourselves that we belong to something, are part of something. Identities are powerful group signals and they often can become violent or aggressive.

What is suspicion?

Suspicion is fundamentally not being sure what someone means. Since we all know how hard it is to know what others mean, it is no wonder that there is so much suspicion in the world.

You can go one and on like this. Many human behaviors and ways of “understanding” ourselves and others can be neatly analyzed as semiotic systems, signalling systems, that have recognizable signs and symbols that are often surprisingly simple.

Look around you—everything is signalling. Insects in the trees, hormones in your blood, road signs, clothing, and on and on. The sun signals the earth with gravity.

Human beings are complex signalling systems. To communicate with each other, we streamline and make static most of our signals. This is good and necessary in many situations, but it is not you.

In many ways, we can say that delusion, as defined by the Buddha, means to believe that a signalling system is completely “real,” that it is all that there is. Liberation from delusion begins with understanding how semiotics—signs, symbols, signals, and their meanings—actually work in our minds.

Advanced FIML

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

It is of paramount importance that FIML partners learn to use the basic FIML technique described here: How to do FIML.

Even very advanced partners should be using the basic technique most of the time.

This is because most mix-ups are fundamentally simple and/or are based on something quite simple. And this happens because of how humans use and process language. Basically, our limbic system is too closely connected to our neocortex. Our emotional reactions have a strong tendency to overwhelm our capacities for good listening and rational analysis.

Mix-ups are 100% completely guaranteed for all people because all of us have learned to speak non-FIML languages. And even after we are able to do FIML, we will still readily slip back into non-FIML reactions.

It’s no one’s fault. We are primitive beings with poor control of both language and our emotional reactions to it.

That said, advanced FIML partners will find themselves regularly engaging in FIML discussions that may be continued for days and that will refer to factors that lie outside of the basic data described in the basic technique.

As partners progress, they will come to better understand the complexity of their interactions while noticing that some dynamic features between them tend to repeat. It’s good to keep a record in your minds of those features or routines that tend to recur. These are the idiosyncratic dynamics of your Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistic reality.

Yes, some of these dynamic features can and will be generalizable to other couples, but the mixture of all of them together will largely be unique to the two of you.

FIML is not about telling you what to think or believe. It is, rather, a technique that will help you and your partner achieve optimum communication and mutual understanding with each other.

FIML partners must learn the basic technique and they must use it frequently because all other discussions will require it. That said, advanced FIML partners should also expect to engage in FIML discussions that go well beyond the basic technique in length, complexity, and the factors considered.

Consciousness, Big Data, and FIML

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

Modern neuroscience does not see humans as having a discrete consciousness located in a specific part of the brain. Rather, as Michael S. Gazzaniga says:

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. (Source)

Computer and Big Data-driven sociology sees something similar. According to Alex Pentland:

While it may be useful to reason about the averages, social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. There are patterns in those individual transactions that are not just averages, they’re the things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don’t just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We’re entering a new era of social physics, where it’s the details of all the particles—the you and me—that actually determine the outcome.  (Source)

Buddhists may recognize in these insights close similarities to core teachings of the Buddha—that we do not have a self; that all things arise out of complex conditions that are impermanent and changeable; that the lion’s share of “reality” for any individual lies in being attentive to the moment.

Notice how similar Pentland’s insights are to Gazzaniga’s—the whole, or the common generalities (of society), can be far better understood if we can account for the details that comprise them. Is an individual mind a fractal of society? Do these complex systems—societies and minds—both use similar organizational processes?

I am not completely sure how to answer those questions, but I am certain that most people are using similar sorts of “average” or general semiotics to communicate and think about both minds and societies. If we stick with general averages, we won’t see very much. Class, self, markets, personalities don’t give us information as sophisticated as the detailed analyses proposed by Gazzaniga and Pentland.

Well then, how can individuals cognize Gazzaniga’s “multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes” in their minds? And how can they understand how “the products” of those processes are actually “integrated” into a functional “interpreter module”?

And if individuals can cognize the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter,” how will they understand traditional psychological analyses of the self, personality, identity, biography, behavior?

I would maintain that our understanding of what it is to be a human will change deeply if we can learn to observe with reliable clarity the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter.” That is, we will arrive at a completely new understanding of being that will replace the “self” that truly does not exist in the ways most societies (and people) understand it.

FIML practice shows partners how to observe with great clarity the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter.” Once these process are observed in detail and for a long enough period of time, partners will realize that it is no longer necessary to understand themselves in the “average” terms of self, personality, identity, biography, behavior, and so on.

Partners will come to understand that these terms denote only a more detailed version of a naive, static view of what a person is. Most psychology is largely a more detailed version of a naive, static view of what a person is.

We see this in Gazzaniga and Pentland’s findings that are derived from complex analyses of what is actually happening in the brain or in the multitude of real transactions that actually comprise a society. We can also see very similar insights in the Buddha’s teachings.

It is my contention that FIML practice will show partners the same things—that their actual minds and actual interactions are much more complex (and interesting) than the general semiotic averages we normally use to understand them.

From a Buddhist point of view, when we “liberate” ourselves from “attachment” to “delusive” semiotic generalities and averages and are truly “mindful” of the “thusness” of the ways our minds actually work, we will free ourselves from “suffering,” from the “ignorance” that characterizes the First Noble Truth.

What conversation are we in?

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

In a large sense—macrocosmically—are we engaged in a Buddhist conversation? In a semiotic one? A psychological one? An anthropological one? An uncategorizable, open, Internet one?

In a small sense—microcosmically—we would do well to ask ourselves this question every time we interact with anyone. Points to consider in these cases are: how much time do we have; what factors are we considering and how are we weighing them; are we understanding each other well; why are we talking at all, and so on?

The URL of this site is americanbuddhist.net, so I suppose we are engaging in a Buddhist conversation. With American characteristics, whatever that means.

We’ve had this site for a few years, and in the early days got so many comments about how there is no such thing as “American Buddhism” that I felt the need to define it as a largely geographical term.

Most “modern Buddhists” living outside of traditional Buddhist areas would probably agree that Buddhism itself is really a conversation, an ongoing research project, a way of actively thinking, a participatory tradition that is not written in stone and never has been written in stone.

This is surely the position of American Buddhist Net and I am all but certain the Buddha himself would agree with us. Maybe he would not agree with the specifics of everything we say, but he would surely support our wish to think for ourselves and apply the Dharma to the world and lives we are now living.

So, I suppose this is largely a Buddhist-oriented, open Internet conversation that often brings up semiotics and, to a lesser degree, psychology and anthropology. The more I think about semiotics, the more I see it as a very valuable modern angle on Buddhism. More on that in a moment.

The more I think about Buddhism and semiotics, the less I seem to think about psychology. For example, I hardly use the term personality anymore because it just doesn’t say much from either a Buddhist or a semiotic point of view. In the first place, from a Buddhist point of view, anything we might call personality is always changing; it’s impermanent, empty, transformable. True, Buddhism does recognize “persistent traits,” but this term is not used often and it is rarely, if ever, used to define someone in the way our current sense of personality defines people.

FIML practice will show partners fairly quickly how much of their thinking about each other is based on unsupportable notions concerning personalities and what they are and how they function.

From a semiotic point of view, especially one informed by Buddhism, we can see much the same thing—as soon as you try to say what someone’s personality is, you will generate a new sign that needs further analysis, and so on ad infinitum. The fact that we will be faced with an “infinite interpretation,” an “infinite continuum,” where we will never be able to find an “absolute individual” very much recalls Buddhist thinking on emptiness.

I first encountered the idea that semiotics shows us that there are no “absolute individuals” in Umberto Eco’s excellent The Limits of Interpretation, which I recommend.

In place of personality, I now see individuals as more or less manifesting cultural or anthropological characteristics which they communicate as semiotic signs, symbols, and “meanings.”

When you talk to close friends or partners, you have to do a good job at microcosmic, real-time, semiotic analysis. If you don’t, you will make many mistakes and soon come to feel estranged from your friends and/or be forced to relate to them in static ways. If you don’t do FIML or something very much like it, you will be all but forced to cling to static semiotics. FIML could be defined as “microcosmic, real-time, semiotic analysis” between friends.

So far, in my readings on semiotics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, or Buddhism, I have not seen anything that asks people to engage in “microcosmic, real-time, semiotic analyses” with each other. Nothing like FIML.

Maybe there is something, but I haven’t seen it. That’s the reason I started this post the way I did. What kind of conversation are we having? Is it possible for one person to read that widely in so many subjects? I don’t think it is. I probably know more about Buddhism, or have read more widely and thought more about it, than the other subjects. So, for me, this conversation is centered in Buddhism more than the other subjects. I like the way Buddhism is grounded in morality, so that’s another reason.

Semioticians tend to talk a lot about philosophy and literature, while Buddhism centers us more in the lives we are living as we perceive them, however fallibly.

Here are a few terms from semiotics that will be helpful to Buddhists: fallibilism, synechism, vaugeness or indeterminacy.

Fallibilism is the philosophical principle that human beings could be wrong about their beliefs, expectations, or their understanding of the world.

Synechism holds that the essential feature in philosophic speculation is continuity. It denies that all is merely ideas, likewise that all is merely matter, and mind-matter dualism. To my understanding, synechism denies in principle the “absolute individual,” or in Buddhist terms the “own being” of anything, which is another way of saying all things are empty.

Vagueness or indeterminacy, especially with regard to speech acts, mean that we can never be completely certain of what others mean or what we are hearing.

Semiotics is at the center of some other modern major innovations in how we think, such a deconstructionism, relative frames theory, and the vague, propositional indeterminacy that underlies multiculturalism. I often wonder how much semioticians and modern philosophers have been influenced by Buddhist ideas.

Taken together, the study of semiotics and Buddhism deeply changes the way we see the world and live our lives. They affect how we understand what it is to be human, how we communicate, and what we communicate. Buddhism is an excellent foundation for semiotics, while semiotics can extend Buddhist concepts into a more detailed, modern idiom.

How social rejection can help those who think independently

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

This article is interesting: Social Rejection Can Inhibit Cognitive Ability Or Fuel Imaginative Thinking.

Lead author of the paper, Sharon Kim says:

“For people who already feel separate from the crowd, social rejection can be a form of validation.Rejection confirms for independent people what they already feel about themselves, that they’re not like others. For such people, that distinction is a positive one leading them to greater creativity.” (Source in above link)

The actual paper can be found here: Outside Advantage: Can Social Rejection Fuel Creative Thought?

In the Buddhist tradition, there is the idea that “negative conditions” can inspire us to move forward. For people who tend to think independently, having  a few doors slam can be a good thing.

Roger Williams

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Roger Williams (c. 1603—1683) was an English Protestant theologian who was an early proponent of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. In 1636, he began the colony of Providence Plantation, which provided a refuge for religious minorities. Williams started the first Baptist church in America, the First Baptist Church of Providence. He was a student of Native American languages and an advocate for fair dealings with Native Americans. Williams was arguably the very first abolitionist in North America, having organized the first attempt to ban slavery in any of the original thirteen colonies. (Source)

This Wikipedia article is worth reading. Williams was a strong and early advocate of freedom of religion and separation of church and state. His ideas probably influenced the principals expressed in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Buddhists, and others, would do well to reflect on the great importance of the First Amendment, which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

“Religion” means something different today than it did during Williams’ life, but Williams’ underlying belief that each individual must be free to follow their own religious convictions is as fundamentally important today as was back then.

American Buddhists obviously benefit from these protections, but even hard atheists and those who dislike all religions should ponder the profound importance of the individual right to believe what you want and to profess your beliefs without interference from the state.

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

…the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates. (Source)

This declaration was made on July 7, 2012.

Here is a report on the declaration: Scientists Finally Conclude Nonhuman Animals Are Conscious Beings.

Suñña Sutta: Empty

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Then Ven. Ananda went to the Blessed One and on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As he was sitting there he said to the Blessed One, “It is said that the world is empty, the world is empty, lord. In what respect is it said that the world is empty?”

“Insofar as it is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self: Thus it is said, Ananda, that the world is empty. And what is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self? The eye is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. Forms… Eye-consciousness… Eye-contact is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self.

“The ear is empty…

“The nose is empty…

“The tongue is empty…

“The body is empty…

“The intellect is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. Ideas… Intellect-consciousness… Intellect-contact is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self. Thus it is said that the world is empty.”
________________________

Provenance:
©1997 Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
Transcribed from a file provided by the translator.
This Access to Insight edition is ©1997–2012.
Terms of use: You may copy, reformat, reprint, republish, and redistribute this work in any medium whatsoever, provided that: (1) you only make such copies, etc. available free of charge; (2) you clearly indicate that any derivatives of this work (including translations) are derived from this source document; and (3) you include the full text of this license in any copies or derivatives of this work. Otherwise, all rights reserved. (Source)