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When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; and when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realise that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.
We like the idea of shaping stone knives, but we don’t like the idea of being stone knives ourselves.
Reading Brave New World
‘My dear young friend,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘civilization has absolutely
Though the adult brain is more flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less malleable than the teenage brain.
Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.
The god Krishna then explains to Arjuna that within the great cosmic cycle each being possesses a unique ‘dharma’,
A washerwoman who devotedly follows the way of the washerwoman is far superior to a prince who strays off the way of the prince.
Most successful stories remain open-ended. They never need to explain where meaning ultimately comes from, because they are so good at capturing people’s attention and keeping it inside a safe zone.
A crucial law of storytelling is that once a story manages to extend beyond the audience’s horizon, its ultimate scope matters little. People
No wonder that Hindu and Buddhist sages have both focused much of their efforts on finding a way to get off this merry-go-round rather than to perpetuate it.
‘leaving something behind’
While a good story must give me a role, and must extend beyond my horizons, it need not be true. A story can be pure fiction, and yet provide me with an identity and make me feel that my life has meaning.
‘filioque’
In history, the roof is sometimes more important than the foundations.
‘Hoc est corpus!’ got garbled into ‘Hocus pocus!’ and thus was born the powerful spell that can transform a frog into a prince, and a pumpkin into a carriage.
importance of rituals better than Confucius, who saw the strict observance of rites (li) as the key to social harmony and political stability. Confucian classics such as The Book of Rites, The Rites of Zhou and The Book of Etiquette and Rites recorded in the minutest details which rite should be performed at which state occasion,
Indeed, the very cost of the flag makes the ritual more effective. Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real.
Once you suffer for a story, it is usually enough to convince you that the story is real.
In fact, monotheists practised human sacrifice on a much larger scale than most polytheistic cults. Christianity and Islam killed far more people in the name of God than did the followers of Ba’al or Huitzilopochtli. At a time when the Spanish conquistadores stopped all human sacrifices to the Aztec and Inca gods, back home in Spain the Inquisition was burning heretics by the cartload.
(There has been some discussion of this among the most learned rabbis, and they concluded that tearing toilet paper will break the Sabbath taboo, and consequently devout Jews who want to wipe their bottoms on the Sabbath have to prepare a stash of pre-torn toilet paper in advance.14
Fascism is what happens when nationalism wants to make life too easy for itself by denying all other identities and obligations. There has been a lot of confusion lately about the exact meaning of fascism.
‘fascis’, meaning ‘a bundle of rods’.
Fascists therefore believe in privileging the interests of the collective over those of any individual, and demand that no single rod ever dare break the unity of the bundle.
‘the Seventh Crusade’.
With the rise of modern culture, however, the tables were turned. Faith looked increasingly like mental slavery, while doubt came to be seen as a precondition for freedom.
According to liberal mythology, if you stand long enough in that big supermarket, sooner or later you will experience the liberal epiphany, and you will realise the true meaning of life.
The universe does not give me meaning. I give meaning to the universe. This is my cosmic vocation. I have no fixed destiny or dharma. If I find myself in Simba’s or Arjuna’s shoes, I can choose to fight for the crown of a kingdom, but I don’t have to.
What then is the aim of my life? To create meaning by feeling, by thinking, by desiring, and by inventing.
Anything that limits the human liberty to feel, to think, to desire and to invent, limits the meaning of the universe. Hence liberty from such limitations is the supreme ideal.
If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire – then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire – then no, humans have no free will.
Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair.
Liberalism took a radical step in denying all cosmic dramas, but then recreated the drama within the human being – the universe has no plot, so it is up to us humans to create a plot, and this is our vocation and the meaning of our life.
The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying.
Today, the human rights record of Buddhist Myanmar is among the worst in the world, and a Buddhist monk, Ashin Wirathu, leads the anti-Muslim movement in the country.
There is very little chance that world peace and global harmony will come once 8 billion humans start meditating regularly. Observing the truth about yourself is just so difficult!
Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step towards ceasing to generate more suffering.
The brain is a material network of neurons, synapses and biochemicals. The mind is a flow of subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, anger and love.
And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us.
