46 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2024
    1. we do feel at least most of us, most of the time feel like some kind of unified, centralized inner perspective

      for - self - as unified, centralized inner perspective - Michael Levin - adjacency - self - as unified, centralized inner perspective - multi-scale competency architecture - Buddhism - spiritual practice - self actualization - illusory body - illusory self - enlightenment

      adjacency - between - self - as unified, centralized inner perspective - multi-scale competency architecture - self actualization - Buddhist practice - illusory body - illusory self - enlightenment - awakening - adjacency relationship - Indeed, from both the mundane and the spiritual, religious perspective, the unified self as a fundamental assumption - "self-development" and "self-actualization" are terms that are only meaningful if there is a unified self - Is the Buddhist ideas of - awakening - enlightenment and \ - penetrating the illusion of self - based on a kind of experiencing of the multi-scale competency architecture itself? - What does "spiritual awakening" mean in the context of multi-scale competency architecture? - For instance, WHO is it that actually awakens? - Is it consciousness from the SAME level, a lower level or ALL levels of the multi-scale competency architecture that a multi-cellular conscious, sentient being such as a human INTERbeCOMing? - If it includes consciousness from lower levels, then it may be billions or trillions of cellular consciousnesses that are awakening to the higher order consciousness it composes!

  2. Jan 2024
    1. the dzogchen contemplative system brings about extraordinary results that merit further research

      for - definition - Dzogchen - Great Perfection

      • definition - Dzogchen - The Great Perfection
      • Dzogchen is one of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism
        • The Great Perfection claims that everything is pure from the beginning
        • every moment is an emanation of a temporal origin
    1. I was raised Catholic, you know, very, very devoutly Catholic. My family was. I went to eight years of Catholic schooling. I had to step away from the church when I realized I couldn't say all the things 00:21:39 that we were being asked to say. I've, these days I've been studying Buddhism for many years
      • for: Marjorie Kelly - spiritual background in Christianity and Buddhism
  3. Sep 2023
    1. Husserl discovered Buddhism about, at about 1924. So he was given the book. A translation of the Sutta Pitaka in German. And the author of the translation asked him to give a command, a preface. 00:13:52 And in his preface, Husserl wrote the following sentence. Buddhism looks purely inward, in vision and deed. It is not transcendent but transcendental.
      • for: adjacency, adjacency - Husserl - Buddhism
      • adjacency between
        • Husserl's transcendental and phenomenology
        • Buddhist philosophy and practice
      • adjacency statement
        • Husserl was influenced by reading, then writing the preface to the German translation of the 1924 Sutt Pitaka
      • for: bio-buddhism, buddhism - AI, care as the driver of intelligence, Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, care drive, care light cone, multiscale competency architecture of life, nonduality, no-self, self - illusion, self - constructed, self - deconstruction, Bodhisattva vow
      • title: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
      • author: Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, AI - ethics
      • date: May 16, 2022
      • source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

      • summary

        • a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
        • very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
        • this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology
    1. Let us at this point simply note that the Māra drive seems reducible to a wish to maintain the status quo (“sentient beings suffer, and they shall keep doing so!”) whereas the Bodhisattva is committed to infinite transformation.
      • comment
        • this is definitely seeing evolution through a Buddhist lens!
        • mara - maintain status quo
        • bodhisattva - infinite transformation
    2. Defined in this way, “stress” turns out to be a compelling translation of the Sanskrit term duḥkha (otherwise often rendered as “suffering”), which describes a treacherous world inhabited by restlessly craving beings.
      • for: bio-buddhism - stress, bio-buddhism, duhkha, question, question - enlightenment and stress, bio-buddhism - suffering, bio-buddhism - enlightenment
      • question
        • If enlightenment is defined as the ultimate awareness that penetrates the self-illusion, and therefore subject / object dualism is what brings peace, and the cessation of suffering due to the cessation of seeking, then how does this relate to the idea of goal-seeking, homeostatic efforts to attain a specific setpoint?
          • Do we attain the setpoint by awareness that stops the suffering in a unique way?
    3. Another feature of this vision that aligns well with Buddhist ideas is the lack of a permanent, unique, unitary Self [68]. The picture given by the evolutionary cell-biological perspective is one where a cognitive agent is seen as a self-reinforcing process (the homeostatic loop), not a thing [69,70,71].
      • for: illusory self, non-self, lack of self, organism - as process, human INTERbeCOMing, bio-buddhism, biology - buddhism
    1. the bodhisattva vial which is which is huge 01:16:56 um it's this it's this commitment it's it's a medical it's the commitment to enlarge your cognitive apparatus to enable bigger goals to enable you to pursue bigger goals with more compassion
      • for: bio-buddhism, bodhisattva vow, compassion
      • comment
        • interesting adjacency between:
          • Buddhism and
          • biology:
        • Adjacency statement
          • The bodhisattva vow is a commitment to enlarge your cognitive apparatus, your cognitive light cone of compassion to enable the pursuit of bigger goals
    2. I've 01:04:30 been interested in these kinds of things for a really long time both from the perspective of uh kind of Eastern thought about philosophy of mind and and things like that and more broadly questions of uh of of uh concern and 01:04:44 compassion and and things like that
      • for: background, background - Michael Levin, Michael Levin - Buddhism
      • background
        • Michael Levin has been interested in Eastern thought, philosophy of mind and compassion for a long time
        • the idea of care seems to have been stimulated by his child's project to build a robotic cat. He wanted the cat to have the attribute of caring.
    3. biology Buddhism and AI
      • for: bioelectrical networks, cognitive glue, Charles Darwin's Agential materials, bio-buddhism, Michael Levin
      • annotate
  4. Jul 2023
    1. My overall objective in this paper is to
      • My overall objective in this paper is to
        • unite the sciences of ecology and evolution
        • with the spiritual practice of Zen
          • in order to inspire actions to address the extinction crisis that we are currently facing.
        • I do this by addressing the following three points:
          • Zen and science are both based upon empirical observations of the world.
          • Zen and science both tell us that there is no separation between humans and the world around us.
        • Ecology and evolution provide the scientific background needed to address the biodiversity crisis;
          • Zen provides the deeper knowing that will motivate our action to address this problem
  5. May 2023
  6. Apr 2023
  7. Feb 2023
    1. They get to see everything, and nothing

      This reminds me of esoteric transmission, in the sense that the ghost is only visible to those who are already prepared to see it.

      It's also fitting that tantra is often narrowly equated with tantric sex.

  8. Jul 2022
  9. Jun 2022
    1. Aristotle argues that virtue is achieved by maintaining the Mean, which is the balance between the two excesses. Aristotle’s doctrine of the Mean is reminiscent of Buddha’s Middle Path. Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue is “golden mean”. Courage, for example, is a mean regarding the feeling of fear, between the deficiency of rashness (too little fear) and the excess of cowardice (too much fear). Justice is a mean between getting or giving too much and getting or giving too little. Benevolence is a mean between giving to people who don’t deserve it and not giving to anyone at all. Similarly Buddhism aims not to eradicate all feelings but to liberate it from its attachment to false values. He gave the concept of the Middle Way, a path between the extremes of religious asceticism and worldly self-indulgence to move away from false values. Aristotle and the Buddha reached very similar conclusions as to how we should conduct our lives, if we wish to find happiness and fulfillment as human beings. However, for Aristotle the mean was a method of achieving virtue, but for Buddha the Middle Path referred to a peaceful way of life which negotiated the extremes of harsh asceticism and sensual pleasure seeking.

      Aristotle's theory of the golden mean is similar to Buddha's middle path

  10. May 2022
    1. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said that it’s wonderful that so many different religions exist in the world.
    2. Buddhism recognizes that all religions share the same aim of working for the well-being of mankind.
  11. Feb 2022
  12. Aug 2021
    1. the pain of avoiding the unavoidable, which so many of us do, can actually be worse than the fear of surrendering to the inevitable

      en pointe

  13. Jan 2021
  14. Dec 2020
    1. Zak Stein, who is a contributor to the aforementioned book Metatheory for the 21st Century, is one of the strongest proponents of post-Integral metamodernism in terms of ‘social justice’ (a term that the IDW has helped nullify). In the Integral conference debate in 2015, the “weak argument” Stein proposes is that Integral should at least become more informed about what capitalism is. The “strong argument” is that Integral should be, at the very least, post-capitalist. Given that Integral was doing neither, the way people used terms like “green meme” and “second tier” became, Stein says, substitutions for actual thought.

      This is also kind of true of e.g. Buddhism and many other spiritual traditions: they don't have a very thought out socio-political vision. Instead they have an advanced form of the "personal is political". I suspect this is part intentional, part accidental. Getting involved in critiques of capitalism, at least at a detailed level, tends to get political quickly and getting political in general a) risks obsolescence (and being wrong) b) risks alienating potential participants c) risks being wrong (and dangerously wrong, e.g. being misused to justify, say, authoritarianism).

      All that said, I think this is a major lacunae both of Integral and spiritual traditions.

  15. Nov 2019
    1. In effect Zhu Xi found a means of smuggling a needed element ofBuddhist transcendentalism into Confucianism. This new philosophy,both eminently rational and humane,

      neo-confucianism = confucius + buddhism (daoism?)

    2. Early China’s cosmology (her theory of the universe as an orderedwhole) shows striking points of difference with Western thought. Forexample, the early Chinese had no creation myth and no creator-lawgiver out of this world, no first cause, not even a Big Bang. As JosephNeedham says, they assumed “a philosophy of organism, an orderedharmony of wills without an ordainer.” This view contrasts with the in-veterate tendency elsewhere in the world to assume a supernatural deity.Westerners looking at China have continually imposed their own pre-conceptions on the Chinese scene, not least because the Chinese, thoughthey generally regarded Heaven as the supreme cosmic power, saw it asimmanent in nature, not as transcendent. Without wading further intothis deep water, let us note simply that Han thought as recorded in classi-cal writings built upon the concept of mankind as part of nature andupon the special relationship between the ruler and his ancestors, con-cepts that were already important in Shang thought over a millenniumearlier.

      Fascinating. Such a profound difference in thinking (and the Chinese is much more accurate in base intuiton, i think).

      Western thought got trapped in causation, in division, the law of the excluded middle, in agency.

      That quote: "a philosophy of organism, an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer."

      No wonder Buddhism found such fertile soil in China.

    Tags

    Annotators

    1. hindrances

      Five hindrances:

      • Sensual urge (sex, food, craving)
      • Anger (Rage, dissatisfaction, ...)
      • Sloth-torpor (sluggishness, mainly mental fatigue before physical fatigue)
      • Excitement (Overactivity, unable to stop, ...)
      • Doubt (Do not have confidence, no faith in the course of action, ...)
  16. Jul 2019
    1. dance

      Rathar than dice throwing? - a dance is not completely random but somehow predictable.

    2. I'll drive for 2 hours

      Brother, you gotta walk. A quote from, Chap. 11, Buddhism For Dummies:

      A woman named Kisa Gotami lived in the Buddha’s time. The death of her young son upset her so much that she went mad with grief. Clutching his lifeless form, she wandered from place to place looking for some medicine to cure her beloved child. Her friends felt sorry for her and said, “Gotami, why don’t you approach the Buddha? Perhaps he can help you.”

      With infinite compassion, the Buddha told Gotami, “Go to town and bring me one tiny mustard seed. However, make certain that this seed comes from a house where no one has ever died.”

      The distraught mother immediately began searching house to house for the seed. Although everyone was eager to help her, they all had the same story to tell. “Last year my husband died,” said one. “Three years ago, I lost my daughter,” said another. “My brother died here yesterday,” said a third. Everywhere she went, Gotami heard the same thing.

      At the end of the day, Gotami returned to the Buddha empty handed. “What have you found, Gotami?” he asked gently. “Where is your mustard seed? And where is your son? You’re not carrying him any longer.”

      “Oh, Buddha,” she answered, “today I have discovered that I’m not the only one who has lost a loved one. Everywhere people have died; all things must pass away. I realize how mistaken I was to think that I could have my son back. I’ve accepted his death, and this afternoon, I had his body cremated. Now I’ve returned to you.”

      It is said that the Buddha then accepted Kisa Gotami as his disciple and ordained her as a nun in his order. Her understanding of reality deepened with her practice of Dharma and she soon achieved nirvana — complete liberation from suffering.

  17. Jan 2019
    1. After that — well, of course, for him there just isn’t any After That....”

      In page 248 of Melford Spiro's book "Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes", he writes: "In normative Buddhism there is no soul; hence, nothing survives death of the body."

  18. Nov 2018
  19. Feb 2018
    1. Despite the Beats' use of B

      Why, though? Kerouac was a lifelong scholar of Buddhism, and so were other Beats like Ginsberg and Snyder. Indeed, Gary Snyder officially became a Buddhist and a disciple of Miura, and Ginsberg had a student-teacher relationship (together with a friendship) with the known Buddhist master Trungpa Rinpoche. This should be enough to consider them, at least at some points in their life, as Buddhists.

    2. authentically Buddhist. Though the Beats lack a center, a center is not necessary (or even desired) - there is no such thing as a "center" to Buddhism, and if Buddhists believed there were a center, they would be bad Buddhists, because Buddhists are supposed to avoid "essentializing" and realize the inherent emptiness of concepts

      Central point about Buddhism which strictly relates to Beat spirituality.

    3. ent as a literary phenomenon, the only book-length treatment of Beat Buddhism I w

      The book is called "Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation" (Carole Tonkinson). Consider finding or getting: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Sky-Mind-Buddhism-Generation/dp/1573225010. It contains essays, poems, photographs, and letters between different authors: seems very interesting and useful!

      How does this relate to my thesis? Spirituality would need to be an essential part of my thesis, since I wish to consider how the lifestyle of authors of the Beat Generation blurs the defines between what is usually considered "life" and what is usually considered "literature". If I aim to show that they were "practical artists", or "performative artists" in some way (need theoretical background here), their spirituality would be an essential part of this definition, as it was an essential part of their life.

      See how in the essay "Prose Contribution to the Cuban Revolution" he says "That's the karma I wanted, to be a saint" (The Essential Ginsberg). Being a saint comes before being a writer.

  20. Nov 2017
    1. we argue that “consciousness” contains no top-down control processes and that “consciousness” involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it.

      I think this ideas is somewhat similar to the mind as a "sixth" sense of Buddhism, that allows for perceptions of thoughts and awareness.

    1. This is more a ‘dark side’ of the secular mindfulness movement than of mindfulness per se (though there have been precursors of the issue in Zen).Most (all?) schools of Buddhism teach mindfulness in a broader ethical context which includes conscious cultivation of compassion & empathy as you write.But Buddhism also often claims that mindful insight reveals compassion to be intrinsic to the mind. Ethics then falls out of phenomenology, and its cultivation is therefore more like sharpening the senses than it is cultural indoctrination. This seems like its most interesting and important claim.
    2. It was shocking to hear, especially from a guy who has spent four decades doing mindfulness meditation in the foothills of the Himalayas. For Ricard, the Buddhist approach to mindfulness – unlike its secular counterpart – doesn’t have this problem of being ‘mindfulness without morals’, as it emphasises concepts such as compassion, caring, empathy and altruism.
    3. There are a lot of people speaking about mindfulness, but the risk is that it’s taken too literally – to just ‘be mindful’. Well, you could have a very mindful sniper and a mindful psychopath. It’s true! A sniper needs to be so focused, never distracted, very calm, always bringing back his attention to the present moment. And non-judgemental – just kill people and no judgement. That could happen!Ricard was only half-joking, because he knows that secular mindfulness courses have become popular in military training and amongst Wall Street bankers, who hope it will keep them calm and give them the edge when the financial stakes are high. He then told me about a study at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig showing that taking a mindfulness course can help you deal with stress but has no discernible impact on pro-social behaviour.
  21. Oct 2017
    1. Flanagan explains why Buddhism should be so appealing to philosophers. It offers a metaphysics anchored in such robust principles as impermanence, no-self, and the ubiquity of causation, an epistemology that is thoroughly empiricist, and an ethics that prizes compassion, while at the same time claiming "that there are logical connections between these three" (206). A philosopher working at the intersection of multiple "spaces of meaning" would find that these logical connections open up new possibilities for enhancing, refining, and expanding the range of philosophical arguments and possibilities.
    2. EudaimoniaBuddha and eudaimoniaAristotle are different, though perhaps complementary, experiments in living. By stressing the difference between these and many other ways of being-in-the-world, Flanagan is not championing the sort of ethical relativism one typically associates with Gilbert Harman or David B. Wong.
    3. It is primarily this synthesis of normativity and causal explanation that makes Buddhism special. If for Aristotelian flourishing comes from living a life of virtue (understood as human reason embodied), Buddhist moral concerns and aspirations for freedom are informed by such metaphysical principles as the no-self view (which Flanagan interprets in terms of psychological continuity and connectedness), the impermanence of all phenomena, and interdependent arising
    4. As a participant in the activities of the Mind and Life Institute, Flanagan is also privy to what those, like the Dalai Lama and his entourage (who both embody and represent one specific tradition of Buddhist theory and practice), say behind closed doors, so to speak. That is, he knows that even some of Buddhism's best known representatives are keenly aware that Buddhism might perhaps be an unfinished project and that some of its doctrines should in fact be revised to take into account the findings of cognitive science.
    5. The neuroscientific data, he argues, is inconclusive. Buddhism provides at best a modus vivendi that shares many features with the Aristotelian model of virtue ethics and, as such, is less special than some of its more ardent proponents would have it. It does not mean, however, that Buddhism does not offer something unique and special; it just isn't what those who champion the science of happiness think it is.
    1. I do think it is a philosophy for everyone, and I am convinced that the world would be a better place if more people prioritized their moral development over the acquisition of external goods. That said, there are clearly people for whom Stoicism immediately “clicks,” it comes natural, and others for whom it doesn’t. Then again, Stoicism isn’t the only positive philosophy of life. Buddhism is an excellent alternative, if it speaks more clearly to one’s personality or cultural background. What the world needs is more compassion (love in the broad sense, as you were saying earlier) and use of practical reason to solve human problems.
  22. Jul 2017
    1. Engaged Buddhism has to constantly invent “what the Buddha would have said” about them. Second, Engaged Buddhism inherits Mahayana’s weakness. Engaged Buddhism is all about having good intentions; it mainly fails to take effective action.

      What the Buddha would have said? Tantric attitude: I'm the Buddha!