goldisheavy

I agree 100% mikaelz. You make great points. Also, if people are healthier, they tend to be happier, and it's good to be surrounded by happy neighbors for everyone, even for the well-to-do. The happiness is contagious. The unhappiness is also contagious. I don't argue for any kind of extremism. I argue against extremes. Trying to make everyone exactly the same is definitely an extreme undertaking. But the opposite extreme is just as dangerous for the reasons that have been plentifully outlined. Another thing is that Lenin, Stalin and Mao were quick to use any amount of violence to "instill" their desired culture into the population. To my mind, that is obviously wrong. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I think Marx thought that Capitalism would naturally, organically, over time evolve into Communism. Marx didn't think of violence and revolutions. Marx just saw the Capitalist regime as unsustainable in the long run. There is a gradual cultural change that is happening slowly as we move away from Capitalism. This change is not a result of violence but a result of wisdom, insight, and reflection. A lot of people want change, but who wants a bloody revolution? I would say very few or none. Violence is the last thing most people want, but at the same time, people do want a better life in a world that's not as "dog eat dog" as we have now. I think we all want to live among kinder and more generous people. We all want to work in a place that doesn't dehumanize us. None of us want to be treated as fungible commodities at work. We don't want to be treated as a resource, like copper or nickel or oil. We are people and we want just a little bit of human dignity in our lives. Nor do we want to be treated as soldiers who absolutely must obey all orders or be court-martialed, and yet this is precisely how people get treated every day in most places of employment. It's a cultural issue and it cannot be solved by putting a gun to someone's head. I think Marx could see that. I think people are learning that, yes, greed really is a destructive force. It's not a positive force. Sages have been saying this for years (or thousands of years) but humanity as a whole is just barely beginning to learn that.

Exactly. Remember this, I will come to this point later. There is one difference though. For example, if I want to become a number one weight lifter, there is nothing stopping me from exercising. I don't have to interact with convention to achieve that status. I can learn what I need without seeing another person. Another example. If I want to become a programmer, today we have so much excellent freely available material online (freely accessible at the library), that as long as I can afford a small $300 netbook, or buy a more powerful used computer for the same money, I can learn to program for free. Getting a job without a college degree is not easy, but it's not impossible. So here we do have a bit of social/systemic coercion going on. Why? Because you really don't need a college degree to learn everything that colleges teach (MIT has released all their teaching materials and video lectures for free, there are plenty of resources for anyone willing to learn, even without MIT's open courseware). But at the same time, there is a conventional road bump set up by arguably stupid HR departments and stupid corporate culture that wants to see some credentials. They don't have the knowledge to actually test the skill, and instead rely on a "shortcut" of credentials. The problem is that this "shortcut" is discriminatory against poor people who cannot afford college. And while some poor people can get a scholarship, again, this is not a solution as it doesn't cover everyone. So there is quite a bit of systemic coercion there, but not too much. So I think we would all agree that if someone is not the best programmer ever, it's mostly that person's fault and nothing else. Why is this? That's because learning programming and weight lifting are not skills that depend on social order and social status. I can be ugly and smell bad and be a great programmer or a great weight lifter. I can become great in the absence of or with little participation/approval of/from society. But business is fundamentally different from professional skills. Why? Because business depends on social graces, on prejudices, on luck, on connections, on how you smell, on how you look, and so on. Business is not fair and success in business is also not fair. People who are tall, look good, smell good, have advantage. People who wear good clothes have an advantage. Often people with the right skin color will have an advantage. Of course no one will admit to racism, but what are the chances that some business deals are not skewed by racial perceptions? So, it may be hard for a black guy to break into an all-white men club just like it can be hard for a white guy to become a rapper. And what about connections? In business, those are everything. Bill Gates had connections at IBM right from the start. Bill Gates comes from a rich family. Gates' family is by no means poor. Sergey Brin of Google fame comes from a relatively poorer family and might be a better example than Gates, especially considering that Gates was an antisocial asshole who has hurt computing industry with his antics as much as he helped. So there business is not like most other skills. Business is unfair in the same way that entertainment industry is unfair. Who becomes a star and who doesn't is not always based on your skill and talent. The problem is not the amount of money, but the wealth disparity. If everyone was a billionaire, none of us would have extra leverage to hire a lobby company to work on our behalf. What wealth disparity allows is enormous privileges that others cannot have. For example, a rich guy can have an army of lawyers, that getting a significantly better deal in the court system. And this is huge. Imagine this. You're a small businessman and someone slaps you with a patent infringement claim. As a small businessman you think the claim is unfair and wouldn't stand up in court, but you have no money to litigate. You lose without even getting a shot to play the game (to go to court to find out who is right). Hell, you don't have to use your imagination. What I am describing here is reality. What if you're a rich guy? You get a patent infringement claim, and you say, "What's this? It doesn't seem fair. Fuck this, I AM SUING!" You hire an army of the best lawyers, and if you're crooked, you butter up the judge and the opposing team's lawyers as well, and you get your way in court easily. If the claim really was unfair, there is no doubt you would get your way. But even if the claim was somewhat fair, if you sufficiently buttered up the right people, you might still get your way. And patents are essential in many areas of business. So lots of business is off-limits, depending on whether or not someone doesn't like your presence on the market and has some claim to slap you with. Now, if our wealth disparity did not reach into 1000x and well beyond, would this situation that I am describing happen? No, it wouldn't. Extremes are rarely natural. Absolute flatness is one extreme. And having someone's wealth be millions times your wealth is another extreme. There is a healthy middle somewhere in there. And here we come back to your original point. This entire discussion is not really about wealth but about how wealth serves as leverage on personal will. If everyone personal will was the same, we wouldn't have a perception of our own will being impinged. But if someone has 1 billion dollars leveraging their personal wishes, obviously this power has to manifest only as impinging on the wishes of others. After all, if other people want the same thing, why would you need to back up your wish with money? If you use money to push your wishes onto the world, it's only because others don't agree. Thus rich people are almost always big economic coercers. And don't bother trying to dissuade me vortex. I will continue in similar vein until I die. I doubt you can make an intelligent argument to defend extreme wealth disparity.

Apepch7, I want to congratulate you for a brilliant post. I agree with almost everything you say, but wanted to make a few comments. Except it didn't learn it well. It seems the capitalism of today is a C- student that is bordering on failure. It is constantly playing with fire and constantly tempting the revolutionary passions of people. The latest bailout was the biggest dick move that made people furious, conservatives and liberals, both. It's theft, pure and simple. The ruling political party in Soviet Union was the Communist Party, but the state itself was called Socialist and not Communist. In fact, that's what USSR means: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It's right there in the name of the country. You can't miss it. Exactly. I agree. I think if Tibetans were smarter, they would at least send observers into the world at large. There should have been a few observers in China, a few in India, a few in Europe and maybe even a few in the New World, reporting back to Tibet. This way Tibet would at least know which way the political winds are blowing and wouldn't be caught navel gazing.

Always go to the horse's mouth. Today we have plenty of people who will try to tell you what Taoism is really about. Instead why not read the works of the founders? Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) Lieh Tzu (Liezi) These are the biggies and are the real deal. No one can question their lineage or authenticity. Everything else, you can always find a lot of doubt in. It's especially true because much of the information pertaining to lineages is secret, so in this manner lineages have all shot themselves in the foot. Because they kept most information secret, now if they try to come out and share that information, it is absolutely impossible to verify anything and it's impossible to gain confidence in anything they say as a matter of convention. Of course you can still gain confidence in information through personal experience outside convention, but this can take a lot of time, and is not always cheap (and I don't mean money). There are a lot of blind alleys and crooked passageways. So I suggest you get as many different translations of the above three, and read them all. Somewhere between all the differing translations there will be some truth about the Daoist way of looking at things. Then you'll be in a good position to judge everything else. If it fits with the above three, it can possibly be Daoist, even if you can't prove it. If it doesn't fit, it's definitely not Daoist.

Here's what I actually said: Notice that I am not trying to promote absolute equality here? But when you reply to me, you make it sound as if I am. As long as people feel it's a free choice, they will enjoy it. I was participating in a discussion at one time and someone said that prisoners all agree that solitary confinement is the worst punishment. So being in prison is already a punishment, but being put in solitary confinement is even worse than merely being in prison for most prisoners. I said, "But many monks enjoy solitude in caves for years." Needless to say, people were not pleased with my point. And I can see why. It's one thing you choose that kind of life for yourself, after prolonged training designed to make such life palatable, and it's another thing when it is forced on you without any prior training. Lots of people feel coerced even though no one personally coerces them. For example, many people complain constantly about being coerced to pay taxes, even though no particular person actually does this type of coercion in person. It's our social order. In our social order you have to pay taxes to be a good citizen. This is an example of an impersonal, systemic coercion. So when you have a social order that makes it hard to become a billionaire, it's no longer a free choice when people end up non-billionaires. Most poor people agree that their condition is a result of impersonal and system coercion in exactly the same way that those who have to pay taxes feel coerced. I see it as a problem, yes. I won't even get into the dirty underhanded tactics that Bill Gates used to achieve his riches. Not just that. What if you become richer quite fairly, but later use the leverage of your riches to hoist an unfair political system on the rest of the population? That's a huge problem. In fact, this problem is much bigger and much worse than simply becoming rich due to unfair means. So if rich people simply restricted themselves to enjoyment of their mansions and yachts, it would be OK. Instead the rich people like to bribe politicians, they buy up media companies (Rupert Murdoch, GE, etc.) and they spew extremely biased and harmful propaganda and so on. So the rich people are not content to just enjoy riches. Nay. They like to use their riches to majorly stick their hands into the political pot and decide what's best for everyone. The rich very often use their money to subvert an honest and fair political process. For example, how was it fair when Ron Paul and Ralf Nader were banned from presidential debates? It wasn't fair at all. But the rich interests that owned the "property" on which the debate were to happen had this legal control, they could do it. It's legal and yet extremely immoral and harmful to our society. Another problem is dynastic wealth. Even if the originator of wealth can sometimes be said to have earned that wealth, obviously the same thing cannot be said of his/her sons and daughters. So the myth of fairness breaks down here. Another problem is that rich people can't help but keep their money invested in banks and other interest-gathering places. This means that rich people make money by virtue of simply having money. At the same time, poor people feel pressed to take out loans just to make the ends meet, and then they work back-breaking labor to pay insane interest, as much as 125% on some microloans today in Latin/Central America. Hell, even Mafia didn't charge that much interest! So while some people have to work for their money, other people make money just from having money. This is obviously unfair. Interests rates keep our society stratified and they keep poor people perpetually poor, and rich people above a certain level of wealth, perpetually rich. Of course not. I agree. This isn't true. Commies are a diverse bunch of people. Some people who called themselves "Communists" surely wanted to take advantage of the system just like many people enjoy taking advantage of Capitalism for nefarious purposes. Others, honestly wanted to improve living conditions and made an honest mistake. They had honestly good intentions, but were misguided in their suggested solutions.

What do you mean "lost"? You mean that a human being can actually be objective? Ever?

Wealth disparity is a bad thing. Of course there is always going to be some disparity. But the extremes are never good. So when the wealth disparity reaches the levels of a banana republic, that's an unhealthy extreme. A lot also depends on the cultural situation, and namely, what do people do with that disparity? A lot of times wealth is used negatively, as we are witnessing right now, with the latest market crash. Communists were correct to notice this problem. However, what was the solution that Communists offered? It was brutality. Brutality was the solution. Brute force. That's very bad. It's as if you had a doctor who correctly diagnosed skin cancer on top of the head as a malady, but then used a beheading as a "cure." The diagnosis is correct and helpful, but the cure is obviously very wrong. And that's what happened with Communism. Communists had valid complaints about life, but their solutions were all wrong. You must also keep in mind the formative times of Communism. In Russia it was forming during Czarism, which was truly an awful time. Arguably, as bad as the Soviet Socialism was, it was still better for most people than Czarism. I'm not saying this to defend any ideology. I'm just saying that things are not as black or white as you are brainwashed to believe in USA. People in USA have a thoughtless knee-jerk reaction to words like "Communism" and "Socialism." Well, not so much "Socialism" anymore, as most people associate that with Scandinavia, where life is good.

Tibetans felt free to ignore the world around them (this is why many modern developments caught them by surprise), and for the longest time were a closed society. It's hypocritical. If you believe that Buddha Dharma is life-saving, you should present it to the world. I'm not saying that Buddhists should proselytize and try to gain converts -- absolutely not. But Buddhists shouldn't have kept their treasures secret for so long -- that's selfish and unkind to the rest of humanity. Tibetans had a theocratic society. Tibetans are enamored of cultish secrecy (I believe in scientific openness). Generally I like Tibetans, but I don't think they are angelic. They are much better behaved people than many other people (I won't name names now), but not without flaws.

When Soviet style Socialism fell in exUSSR, there were no riots or hunger lines either. And people went to the stores as usual. Things can fall in different ways. Not every fall has to be cataclysmic.

Maybe. I am on the fence about this statement. I didn't say that at all. Here's what I said: So what I was really talking about is a person who might claim to be religious, but upon closer examination, is not dogmatic. In that case, I would "deny" the right to use the label "religious" to that person. I think both dogmatic and non-dogmatic person can use some dogma. The difference is in how they relate to it. For a dogmatic person dogma is unquestionable, untouchable, holy even. For a non-dogmatic person dogma is subject to questioning, it is something that has to be examined under the light of reason from time to time, to see if anything better has come along. And this is a spectrum. So there are people who are more flexible and more readily willing to perform a re-examination. The more the person is willing to re-examine dogma, the less dogmatic that person is. In this way of understanding things, scientists can be seen as using dogmas, but relative to religious dogmatists, we wouldn't call them dogmatic. However, relative to a spiritual person who is about to reach a break through, who is actively examining every single belief, including all core beliefs, such a scientist would be very dogmatic. It is relative and there is a continuum of dogmatism just like there is a continuum of flexibility. Just like flexibility is not an either/or proposition, neither is dogmatism to my mind. This would be less confrontational though. It's a ticklish gamble: "Should I get more, but lower quality, supporters by using catchy slogans, or should I get fewer, but higher quality, supporters by using more honest slogans." I am not convinced that more people results in an automatic win. As an example, Republican party has catered to ultra-conservative racist homophobic Christians, and now their popularity and social acceptance is eroding. I don't have a crystal ball and I cannot see into the future, but it looks like right now the strategy of "more but lower quality" has not served Republicans well. So I don't have any reason to believe it will serve the atheist movement well either. No matter how you define God, atheism shouldn't be conflated with materialism. I do agree that 'God' concept can be used more skillfully than religious doctrines tend to use it, but no matter how skillfully you use that concept, it's better to avoid using it altogether. Non-materialist atheist is someone who reject the idea of deity, and also rejects the idea of substance. If we do some mental gymnastic and redefine God to mean mind, then I would have to call myself simply a non-materialist. I wouldn't be qualified for the "atheist" label, since believing in mind would make me a theist under such alternative definition of 'God'. If you want to embrace all possible definitions of God, then I would have to redefine what it means to be a non-materialist atheist to this: Someone who doesn't find the idea of substance to be an ultimately true idea, and also doesn't find the 'God' language to be spiritually most efficient. I hear you. Under the more flexible definition of 'God' I would have to lose the label of 'atheist'. I actually wouldn't have a problem with that if I was convinced the more flexible definition was the most commonly used one. I don't care to be called 'atheist' per se. I also agree with Harris that the label 'atheist' is philosophically problematic. Non-materialist is not the same thing as idealist.

This is only true by convention.

If you really believe you can fly, you will just take off straight from the ground and into the sky. If you have to climb on the roof, obviously you do not believe you can fly.

Demonizing Communism is a stupid move. Communists saw real problems in society, but unfortunately, their solutions in USSR and in China were not effective. For example, wealth disparity is a real problem. Countries with high wealth disparities are less happy than those with smaller wealth disparity. The problem with Soviet and Chinese style communists was that they didn't understand that the problem was caused by culture, and tried to use force to fix things. Of course cultures cannot be fixed by force. Also, we tend to lionize Tibetans, but Tibetans also were assholes in many ways. Even the monk admitted it when he said it is probably their own bad karma that was catching up to them.

That's one heck of a brilliant question, in my opinion. But I disagree with one thing though. I think religion absolutely implies dogmatism. If someone is not dogmatic, that same person cannot be said to be religious either. Pious maybe? Devout? I don't know, but not religious. Think what it means when we say things like "I check the pressure in my tires religiously." It means "without the slightest deviation, with total adherence to the rule, without question." That's precisely the quality of dogmatism. Religionism implies dogmatism, but it is more than just dogmatism. Other than that, I agree. I think Harris has good arguments against religions, but he would have a devil of a time arguing against a knowledgeable, Nagarjuna-reading non-materialist atheist. The way the word "atheist" is used these days, it seems to automatically imply materialism in addition to denying the deity. That's unfortunate. It seems to automatically exclude non-materialistic atheists from the spectrum of discussion.

I loved this talk. That was great. Thank you!

I'm with you here. This I cannot concede. There is no evidence that there is anything outside "my own" mind. Furthermore, I object to owning mind. In a spiritual conversation I like to say "look to your own mind" because it's encouraging and easy to take the first step. A more definitive statement though is that mind doesn't belong to any appearances that show up inside of it. Therefore, depending on what I mean by "me", I am either my own mind (so I don't own or have mind, I am it), or I belong to mind the same way Mickey Mouse belongs to a cartoon. You wouldn't necessarily say "Mickey Mouses cartoon" would you? So you wouldn't necessarily want to say "goldisheavy's mind." Although you could say that too, it's not entirely wrong, but it would be a poetic license more than the absolute truth. Cartoon is a very partial and inaccurate example though because the mind is not like a cartoon. Cartoons have creators, minds do not. I always worry that some comparison or metaphor I present will be taken too far. All that you experience is a product of your own mind. It's especially easy to convince a materialist of this, since materialists limit the mind to the brain. Thus, for example, if I cut your brain in little pieces, this world-appearance will be gone. In fact, this world appearance might be fed into your brain by wires. It may not actually exist in its own right. If you think this world exists independently of "your own" mind, you must take that on blind faith. That's rather modest and I have no problem with this. Partial scientific phenomenology is even useful in dreams and hallucinations. So why not here? I see no problem with this at all. Not really. I don't think Dalai Lama admits what you think. Dalai Lama appreciates science because scentists promote disciplined and careful thinking, which is similar to Buddhism because Buddhism also promotes disciplined and careful thinking, but that's where the similarity ends.

Usually all positive changes in religious attitudes and behaviors come from external pressure. Religions themselves, rarely, if ever, change for the better on their own initiative, without getting a kick in the ass from the outside. If you reinterpret the Bible in a more spiritual light, it's just as easy to switch back, to once again reinterpret the Bible in a more dogmatic light. The Bible is a terrible text because it's vague and not explicit when it comes to spirituality. It's pretty explicit when it comes to punishments and barbarity, and you have to do all kinds of mental gymnastics to spiritualize it. Compare this with Buddhist sutras, which are spiritual, and to interpret Buddhist sutras in a dogmatic manner, you'd have to make a big effort. Humans, unlike other species, are far more diverse. Some humans are religious animals. Some aren't. Some are moral animals and some are not. The difference between the strongest human and the weakest is huge. The difference between the smartest human and the stupidest is huge. The difference between the fastest horse and the slowest is small. And the difference between the smartest horse and the stupidest is also small. Humans span the broadest range of any species. Humans are one species that can change the most through concerted training and contemplation. Sure, other animals can change through training too, but not as dramatically as a human.

But how far does this go? Is it just changing a few paragraphs in one or two books, or is it rewriting every book that we currently have? And how many book-altering Wims are still left out there, undiscovered, running in the wild? Can we be confident that there is an upper bound to these Wims? Can we be confident that most of what we know about reality is true, and that we just need to keep polishing and/or refining our mostly true knowledge? It's a remarkable achievement considering he didn't have to lose his human identity to attain cold endurance. Power is easy for those who don't mind dying to the world as we know it. But if you want to live on in this game as you know it, and if you want to continue to be called "human" and to feel human, then power is very hard. So depending on your perspective Wim is pretty commendable or not commendable at all. This is an interesting observation. It's quite possible that Wim has indeed lost himself in a pointless goose chase. It's also possible that in the process of pushing himself further, he'll come to better understand fundamental truths about his own reality as he knows it. He might understand things he wouldn't have otherwise been able to understand. Whether or not something is stupid or wasteful depends on your aims. We are all free to set our own aims, whether we like that fact or not. So before you judge someone, you have to really understand that someone's aims. If you judge another person's actions against your own aims, then you are stupid, because you're not using a matching set of aims for those actions. Now if you want to discuss aims, that's a different story. It remains to be proven that people who are engaged in physicality and mundanity have worthy aims.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-play-farmville This is a very interesting article about a very popular Facebook game called "Farmville." I think the article should be understandable even to people who don't know what "Farmville" is. As I read this article I kept comparing this game to real life. I found it very enlightening and spiritually relevant, even though the article doesn't overtly claim to be spiritually related. This is how I find many gems in sometimes unrelated or unlikely places.

Ain't that the truth? If we accept the premise that beliefs and intent create reality, people who don't believe in magic must have equally powerful beliefs and intent. It all runs on the same set of batteries.

How do you discern 'I' from not-'I'?

Are you polarizing respect and disrespect? Are you polarizing the attitude of oneness from the attitude of separateness? Are you splitting those who can rest in the present moment and those who cannot? I'm not saying any of this as a criticism or as a moral hint of any kind. I am saying this to hopefully reflect back on you some of what you are projecting outward.

You do realize that you didn't answer the question, right?

How can you discern true perception from false?