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Essays prompted by December's "wild ride"
Buddy, I'm glad you're here. I admire your honesty and fearlessness in posting what you want to post, and I know the Abbotts are happy you are here. They told me about you and suggested I try the message board just because of you.
Comments
"How can I brainwash my children?"
Intolerance and Judgement
Oh, and a thought on tolerance vs acceptance. If I were actually the perfect person I'm able to imagine, I'd be able to truly accept all that is, and is not. However, being a simple animal with biologically based instinct, the best I can do is tolerate what is unpleasant and wait for the grace of acceptance to reach my heart.
On the other hand, for all I know, maybe butterflies do practice free will. Perhaps it?s part of broad conspiracy on their part to all do the same exact thing and they?re just having one on us. I recall a classic anecdote of a Taoist arhat (could?ve been Buddhist, which the title arhat implies, but I seem to remember it as a Taoist) who fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke he found himself pondering that perhaps he was actually the butterfly who was now dreaming that he was the arhat. Perhaps everything is an illusion. Is everything an illusion? Quick, tell me, I want to know now.
P.S. I would like to explain that my stint as an entomologist was of a strictly amateur nature. Between the ages of 8 and 12, I was a rather serious collector of insects, but did in fact retire at the age of 13 on some vaguely Buddhist grounds. So in essence, the statement is true. That said, however, the only reason I began this post in such an unforgivably pompous manner was to provoke the ire of everyone just for laughs.
Now to those questions...
(1) They haven't reach their dead end yet.
(2) Yes, everyone desperately does.
(3) The same. But, just like the words 'love' and 'desire', the word contentment can be 'misused', or rather confused with, ironically, its opposite.
(4) Ignorance
(5) No one chooses to be ignorant. It comes naturally, thus we all are simply doing the best we can given our biology and the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
(6) Pity, a version of compassion, when felt is more connective than tolerance. Tolerance is more connective than censure. Censure is more connective than beheading.
(7) Yes! if we are capable of that most connective of views. Because this view feels so good, why don't more people embrace it?
An easiest way to make sense of the human predicament is to think of us as animals with a big brain who have over millennia pursued as much comfort and security as possible. With each success, through our use of tools, we've removed ourselves from nature's 'back push' on instinct. A simple example is our natural pull to rich food, which in the wild would be self limiting - there are no grocery stores in the wild. Human 'civilization' makes the growing, refining, cooking and access to rich food possible. Our instinct to eat it ends up making us fat. Those potato chips are so hard to put down, eh?
The cause of our predicament is simply the capability which civilization affords us combined with an instinctive nature evolved to live in the wild... not in civilization. That is the key. We are like fish out of water. We've unwittingly inched out way to where we are and are bewildered by the unintended consequences we are saddled with. And now for a most appropriate quote... [chref=16]Woe to him who wilfully innovates, While ignorant of the constant,[/chref]
Fear.
Oh, yes, and now to fear. Why fear? Well, I would imagine that as life is supposedly a great mystery, the answer that it?s no mystery at all frightens us out of our wits. Even in China, long a hotbed for Taoist teaching, the Taoists were always revered, but at the same time also feared as sorcerers for their profound knowledge of the laws of nature and the universe. Professional Taoists (and I use the term ?professional? in the pejorative sense) throughout the ages have recognized fear as a can of worms that is easily opened and rather useful for fishing. The sage Zhiang Zi-ya maintained, however, that the best fish need not be caught, but will arrive on their own.
Hey Wen-zhong, are you trying to wake me from my comfortable place at the bottom of the [chref=61]lower position[/chref]?
I've also long viewed everyone as Taoist, whether they 'know' it or not. Actually, not only everyone, but everything, living and 'non-living'. This 'oneness' perspective helps burst my lonely illusions of difference. Seeing similarities are ?milestones? on the way to reality, while seeing differences just deceive and mislead me. Differences are only a chamaeleon's skin deep.
Adding up over the years, the similarities are swallowing me up in [chref=56]mysterious sameness.[/chref]. I am less alone.