Someone once said this (I think Rachel Maddow) but I think the worldviews of the extreme right and the extreme left sort of wrap around and meet each other again. My mother's boyfriend Armand is a socialist of the classical kind, and a lot of my internet friends are libertarians or anarchists, and a lot of their beliefs overlap.

For instance, Armand was watching Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel today, and was talking about how the things they talk about are politically motivated: for instance, they were talking about the Archimedes cannon (steam powered cannon), about how the Hindenburg blimp blew up, and so on, and he found there was political purpose all of that. For instance, showing that the Archimedes cannon didn't work was really saying 'modern times and technology are great, and creates things that work, old stuff in pre-capitalism is bad and does not work'; and the Hindenburg blimp thing he saw as saying that 'airships are unfeasible and it had to happen that way, aircraft is superior' when in fact airships are more efficient and the only reason everyone flies airplanes instead of airships is because airplane technology is more effective for fighting than airship technology (even though airship technology is better for transport and everything else).

So he sees that show, and every show, as a way to keep the working class down and prevent their revolt, by stupefying into a sound-bite mentality and feeding them a false worldview. Which I'm neither disputing or agreeing with, I'm just stating it.

This 'most everything on TV is propaganda, the people are under the full control and made to act against their nature' is also a characteristic of many libertarians and anarchists, except that instead of corporations-in-control-of-government as the enemy, government itself (and the corporations that work with it and use it) are the ones at fault. Instead of the system of capital (profits, wage slavery, etc.) as the enemy, the system of government (the initiation of use force, taxes, laws) etc. is the enemy. So they're basically the same worldviews, but with different enemies. There's a huge number of similarities: both see the police as oppressive and so on. Enumerating the things they have in common would take a long time. So it's kind of a pity that they see each other as enemies rather than allies. The far left and the far right have way more in common than either has with the middle.

As an aside, I've recently become disillusioned of worldviews, even normal ones. Maybe this is just temporary, but I no longer believe in any abstract idea or theory that isn't directly tied to concrete reality. Even everyday concepts are suspect. Everytime I come across someone talking about an overly abstract idea, I hate that idea, no matter how prosaic, simply because it's an abstract idea.

For instance, take the idea of the calorie. The calorie (or kilo-calorie) is a unit of heat. It's measured by burning food and seeing how much energy you get out of it. Fat is more calorie-dense than protein or carbohydrates are. The theory goes that if you eat more calories, you'll gain weight. But that's just a stupid theory, fairly abstract. The idea of the calorie itself is an abstraction, and to even say that there are calories "in" food is deceptive and an illusion. It just means x heat is produced when you burn the food in a fire. It doesn't mean the body can actually absorb all that energy or use it. A lot of food energy isn't absorbed at all. So simply knowing how many calories are in something still gives you no clue if you'd gain more weight by eating it than something with fewer (but more absorbable) heat calories. It's stupid and deceptive. Only an idiot would believe in a "calorie". I doubt there are any studies showing that eating more calories than you usually do causes you to gain weight, or eating calories causes you to lose weight. There isn't even much of a relationship between calories consumed and work output (for instance, "burning" calories while exercising). Yet the idea of the calorie is just taken as fact, when it's just an abstract idea.

I'm having this reaction to every single abstract idea I come across, lately. I'm thinking unless the connection to sensory reality is direct, it's not worth it. I wish people would stop using such ideas. It's really no different from religion -- religion is just a particular obviously misleading form of abstract ideology; all abstract ideology is "religion" in that sense.

I can't say that this process of weeding abstract ideology out of myself is very pleasant. I'm having to realize that most everything I believed is just rationalization, and I can't even replace it with anything, because that too would be rationalization. This isn't just about changing my thoughts, it's about smashing my thoughts, getting rid of systematic abstract thinking, and replacing it with nothing, nothing but realization of obvious concrete truths and appreciation of sensory beauty. It's not pleasant at all to realize not just that one's worldview is wrong, but that it isn't possible for a worldview to be right. It's fun though.

This is a pair of comments about religion and the possibility of technologically reviving everyone a la the book of revelation which I made in liveonearth's lj, I think they are worth saving in an entry here. The first part is regarding a Christopher Hitchens quote.

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Saying that all religions are versions of the same untruth isn't the same as saying that every religion is wrong about everything. I don't think he's dismissing religious-inspired art and writing.

I think he's right about most of them being versions of the same untruth: the idea that there is an afterlife or that the personality survives death. That's the basis of most religions -- the idea of a god isn't central to many religions, but the idea that you will survive your death and go somewhere else after you die instead of disappearing is central to pretty much all of them (e.g. Hinduism and Buddhism still have reincarnation, moksha, etc.).

You're right about religion not disappearing until we've found another way to fulfill that need, and that way is just physical immortality. I suspect organized religion will largely become irrelevant after people stop dying, because we'd have no need for fairy tales about where someone's grandparents who died are right now.

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People will still die from accidents. But yes, as long as people don't go extinct, eventually people will stop dying from cancer, heart disease, stroke, and old age. There's nothing technologically impossible about that. It could be done in a decade if there were Manhattan project type funding to do it (but there probably won't be, since there's a lot of fear built up around it).

I don't think all organized religion has a concept of God though. There's no real equivalent for God in Buddhism (at least in the Theraveda and Tibetan kind), nor Taoism. But they're still organized, and still believe in life after death.

I explore ancient religions (esp. Buddhism and Hinduism) mainly for meditation techniques, since I think meditation is a real skill that was first discovered in the context of religion but isn't necessarily only useful to the religious. And there are also a few ideas which first found expression in religion but which are true and useful, like Indra's Net (the idea that everything is interconnected and contains a reflection of everything else, and that reality is more those interconnections or relations than it is discrete objects). I don't believe in an afterlife or god(s) though.

I do think a god or a creator of the universe is at least metaphysically possible, but doubt it since any intelligence with any emotional preferences wouldn't have designed the universe as it is now (i.e. a completely arbitrary universe where good and bad actions matter much less than luck).

I also think an afterlife is metaphysically possible, but unlikely. I.e. it's possible everyone really could be revived one day through high-technology means by some benevolent future power. There's nothing stopping humanity itself or something humanity creates or even some alien intelligence from reviving and restoring every human who ever existed back to life one day. It'd be tricky technologically, and involve very precise molecular recreation along with virtually unforeseen ways of getting perfect data out of bodies that no longer exist, but it could be done; we theoretically could revive Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci or any random given person from the past, given sufficient technology. It'd probably take at least a few more thousands of years before we're capable of doing that, though. It could even be applied to the unborn / aborted, if someone wanted. It'd be something that would be worth working on once people are immortal, since it's unfair that those humans who lived in the past should have died while those who lived in its final mortal generation were saved from that.

There'd be definite moral problems with it regarding people who killed themselves, though -- should we respect their wishes or resurrect them anyway? But I imagine we'd also eventually have sufficient technology to know whether they really wanted to die or not, I guess.

A lot of people notice that it's terrible that people still believe in obviously wrong things which are obvious to them but believed because of being repeated or traditional. For instance, fundamentalists who believe the world is 6000 years old and so on. While those religious myths strike me as foolish, there are many things which are also repeated lies which I find as foolish even though I sometimes fall into believing in them. This is usually because these things, while obviously wrong and simplistic, cover up for something we still don't know yet. And these cover ups will be defended to the death on faith alone, too. Free will is one example: a lot of atheists still believe in free will in the sense of something, separate from the brain and not physical, which makes decisions. But other examples are pretty much every word. Reality and common language seem to have nothing in common, and the idea that common language truthfully describes reality, and most of the ways language uses to describe it, feel a lot like creationism.

Some words are of course just words, they describe some category of thing. "Apple" is like that. So is "Shoe". But when you leave that sort of concrete language and get into abstract language (the majority of language is abstract) most of the stuff said doesn't refer to anything in reality, but to a theory of reality or a way of looking at reality. I don't mind that such stuff exists, it's necessary and has to, but it's weird that we don't distinguish between that kind of stuff and the true stuff like apple and shoe. We treat words like "medicine" or "fashion" as if they were the same types of things as apple and shoe. I don't think the language itself has to be changed, using language more precisely may be sufficient (such as how it's used in a lot of philosophy), but I think it's a big inherent problem with language and belief in most abstract words is just as bad (probably worse, since it affects thought and action more directly) than beliefs like creationism.

I think the root of the problem might be the design (I don't really mean design but you know what I mean) of the brain. It seems to emphasize concepts at the expense of the concrete. Its very structure does that: a huge portion of it is the frontal / linguistic / conceptual cortex: the other parts of the cortex -- the part dealing with vision, sound, touch and all that -- are much smaller. That strikes me as an odd ratio, although we don't have much to compare it to. But the part of the brain that deals with and handles sensory reality is literally smaller than the part that deals with ideas or theories about reality, worldviews and belief systems (i.e. philosophy). You'd think that you wouldn't have a larger area devoted to organizing sense data than you have to processing sense data itself, but you do. I suspect this necessarily leads to a lot of theories about theories and a lot of theories becoming disconnected with sensory reality, since it's hungry for data to process but its raw data processing ability can't keep up with its organization and conceptualization.

This is Zeitgeist 2. It's a "conspiracy theory" video, but like the first one very entertaining, and I don't disagree with all of it :)

It is 2 hours long, but I liked it, and you will too if you like things like this. Its central premise is fairly original to me: that corruption is not a side effect of the the monetary/economic system we live under, but that it itself is the cause of the monetary system, and that money, religion, politics, and war without their essential root cause of corruption is impossible, and that to change the world you have to get at the root cause of the problem, corruption (which broadly speaking is acting in an unfair way, a way which harms or cheat someone, in order to get personal gain or gain for one's friends or family).

If you haven't yet seen the first one, I actually think this one is superior (even though it's called "addendum"), because it's more optimistic and offers a plan for change.

Random funny image I came across -- though I think it's foolish to blame Christianity on Jesus (who probably didn't exist in any case), organized religion is a natural result of the state. No state, no religion. Though that guy has a lot of courage holding a sign like that in public, haha.

I've been re-reading Michio Kaku's book Visions. Most accounts of futurism focus on changes in technology: computers, robots, AI, genetic engineering, medicine, nanotechnology, immortality, space travel, etc. -- but as I think I've written before, there are more important aspects to futurology: political, cultural, and economic changes will be more important and interesting than mere technological changes. And trying to predict the future by focusing merely on technological progress is a bad idea, which is what the book is mostly about.

I think that's why I liked the game Alpha Centauri -- although it too focused too much on technological changes, it also dealt with a lot of social, political, and cultural changes. For instance there's a part in the game where you can "develop" intellectual integrity in your people, which is a cultural development which reduces the rationalization: confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and the like. (I do hope that occurs because it's one of the major problems and drawbacks of our brains, even if it's a necessary side effect of how they work.)

Of course you could say that the social/political/cultural changes follow and are made necessary by scientific/technological changes, and that's true in part, but a lot of the time scientific/technological changes follow and are allowed by social/political/cultural changes. For instance, it was the social, political, and cultural conditions of the dark ages which kept science and technology from progressing very much -- technology in Europe in the Middle Ages wasn't that much more advanced than under the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier, and in many cases conditions were worse. Yet when culture changed during the Renaissance, improvements in technology, politics, and economics soon followed.

Quick thoughts on what I think will change. ( Read more... )

These are some comments I wrote in liveonearth's LJ regarding belief in reincarnation.

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I think whether reincarnation is true or not is irrelevant to me. Because we lose most/all of our memories in it anyway, it wouldn't matter to me if it were true.

I don't think it's true because I'm not a dualist -- i.e. I believe you can't separate the material realm from the experiential realm: every thought, feeling, memory, etc. has a corresponding physical element, so I can't imagine a mechanism which would transfer a person between bodies without also transferring something physical to hold the information.

It's possible the transfer works through some unknown physical method of course -- such as electromagnetism or something undetectable to the senses. But I doubt there's a hidden physical mechanism for another reason: unless we assume the "souls" are reproducible, i.e. that anyone born must have a soul and that it must have come from some previous life -- that would mean that the number of souls in existence would have to remain constant, which is contrary to what we know about the human population (which has increased over our history) or the earth's population if we allow transfer between species (which has also increased over the earth's history).

We could also allow interplanetary reincarnation, as the Scientologists believe, but that still requires either a steady-state universe where the number of lives living in the universe is constant, with no increase or decrease in that number (which is contrary to what cosmology we know) -- or a nearly limitless number of free souls with sometimes long delays between incarnations, or soul generation and destruction of some sort (perhaps souls could be converted into matter or energy under extreme conditions, the way matter and energy are interconvertable under extreme conditions).

One problem with interplanetary reincarnation too is that souls would have to travel long distances instantly, faster than the speed of light, which is in violation of what we have observed about the universe. Or else the souls would need to know ahead of time where they're going to be reborn (where there's going to be an increase in the total need for souls on a planet) and travel there at or below the speed of light to arrive there on time.

Another reason I doubt it is that I can't imagine any use for it. Why would the universe or life require a reincarnative mechanism? What's the benefit of it? If we imagine two alternate universes, one with reincarnation and one without, would life in the one with it have any type of advantage that would allow them to evolve it? If not, then it's something that didn't evolve from life, but was either introduced by some external agent outside of the universe, or arose from the nature of the laws of the universe. I find the idea that reincarnation could evolve with life as an advantageous trait interesting, and more conceivable than the idea that consciousness or experience is somehow special or built-in to the laws of the universe.

But as I said, if it's true, I don't really think it matters. It'd be interesting in the abstract sense, but not something that matter one way or the other -- i.e. it won't change the way I live or think or how I act.

I think a lot of people believe in reincarnation because they use it as a rationalization to explain why they have problems in life, believing it's their karma left over from their last life. Or they just believe in it because they don't like the idea that they or others will be gone forever -- which would be true even if reincarnation is true in any case, because most of their memories and personality are gone forever either way.

Or they sometimes use it like the Christians use hell, as a belief that they'll be rewarded in the next life and the others who don't act the way they like will be punished by being born as a lesser animal (this is a common belief among Hindus for example, and oddly mirrors how Christians use the idea of heaven and hell).

I think this study kind of is a good example of the absurdity of a lot of studies.

They asked people of different religions whether they believed in God. Some of the results:

Mormons: 100% believe in God
Catholics: 97% believe in God
Muslims: 92% believe in God
Hindus: 92% believe in God
Jews: 83% believe in God
Buddhists: 75% believe in God
Agnostics: 55% believe in God
Atheists: 21% believe in God

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

I've been trying to watch Jesus Camp, but it's just too weird, I keep having to pause it in embarrassment for humanity. I mean, I don't even think it's Christianity's fault, but the behavior of some Evangelicals / Born again Christians has nothing to do with religion, it has more to do with political powers taking advantage of people. See for yourselves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD2Hyiitpys

Although according to Wikipedia editing made it seem worse than the reality. E.g. " In another scene, Tracy directly addresses the camera and we hear her say, "There are two kinds of people in the world, those who love Jesus and those who don't." However, rest of her statement was edited out: "...and they are both worthy of dignity and respect, by virtue of the fact that Jesus died for them." " Although even editing can't explain most of this.

Lately I've been losing whatever inclination I had to express thoughts in words. The very idea of writing something has become detestable. EDIT: Let alone writing something as long as this entry.

This might be due to an increasing distrust of the abstract (and all words are abstract, some more than others, but all of them.) I think a good response is to instead only write in a storytelling, pointing way. Truths that exist which cannot be conveyed in that way aren't usually worth conveying.

China will replace the US as a superpower solely on the basis that they eat more omega-3 fats than we do, and because the lack of them is associated with most forms of mental illness and all kinds of neurological troubles. They also don't have HFCS and so on (which is not to say that their diet doesn't have some problems, but it's far better than here). Also, although both the US and China are fascisms (in the sense of an unholy alliance between business and government), but at least theirs is more corrupt, and corruption is usually good for the people of a country because it keeps fascisms weak and ineffectual. Their economy also grows at around 10% a year and ours actually shrinks at around 1.5% a year if you account for standard of living and inflation. I suggest a good time to immigrate there is around 2035, 27 years from now; the relevant stars align around then. By 2050, definitely. To bad I have to wait so long to see how this turns out, but there are interesting things to do in the mean time.

There are all kinds of things happening in the world and it's hard to decide which is the most interesting to follow and work within. Just through proximity and other accidents the ones I follow the most are independent game development, nutrition / scientific alternative medicine, and the ridiculously ineffectual minarchist movement. But they could just as easily have been any of a thousand other things that people are interested in and work within, and although it seems to me that these three may be more important than most of those, anyone with a familiar knowledge of any of those thousand other movements would likely believe likewise. I do think that some may be more important than others, but just that with the bias of knowing some in more intimate detail than others, it's easy to be mistaken. For all I know, the so-called Mexican illegal immigrant invasion or the so-called Jewish banking conspiracies or the people who talk about drunk driving or the war on terrorism or the problems caused by not banning (or banning too many) guns or global warming or abortion or class warfare could be more important than the things I'm interested in are.

There are thousands of things that seem important to a lot of people which are irrelevant, stupid, or only mild curiousities to many other people. I wouldn't even dismiss the possible importance of celebrity culture and the people who intensely follow the activities of movie stars (even those who do so while admitting it's not important), even that kind of stuff could be more important in its possible effects on the world than I or even they realize: it sounds ridiculous, but maybe Clay Aiken really is more important than the torture camps in North Korea, or something (and I don't mean that just humorously, it's possible).

Okay, that sounds ridiculous, but here is how it's possible: people are largely controlled either through pleasure or pain. The more cruder nations tend to use pain to control, the more sophisticated countries tend to use pleasure to control; that goes not only for nations but also for just individual control of one person over another, parents over their children, cult leaders over their cult: the greater and more subtle control is obtained by pleasure rather than pain. Threating to cause someone pain is actually less effective than threatening to cut off their pleasure; psychology has shown this in studies as well. The Victorians as an example prevented people from having too much sexual pleasure, whereas other societies did the opposite and tried to overwhelm with too much of it. So while North Korea uses torture camps and force to keep its people chained, other governments have celebrities -- and many other things, such as pornography or various customs and holidays and economic products like drugs (illegal, prescription, or legal) -- to keep its people not chained but in a way enraptured.

And I'm not saying it's preferable to live under the former than the latter, or that NK does not use pleasure (think of those perfect birthday dances they have) or that we do not use pain (look at all the brutality in our prisons), just that one should recognize the essential similarity between the two methods to reduce the extent to which one is controlled, either by pain or pleasure, at least when you don't think it's a good idea to be controlled in a certain way (and it's usually not). Left to their own devices people in nature do not naturally seek out to maximize their pleasure to the extent that people do in many industrial democracies, and when they occasionally do they don't feel as guilty about it as the civilized do, but above all they don't drastically change their principles or their lifestyle or what or who is important to them just to maximize pleasure the way that's routinely done here. Pleasure is a mechanism and when it's working correctly most every-day things are pleasurable, just staring at the snow fall or doing a good day's work or just waking up or going to sleep. Requiring specific objects or activities or substances, at cost, in order to have pleasure is strange and inhuman when you think about it, it's kind of the inverse of torture, where there's pain for the sake of pain rather than pain for the sake of avoiding every-day things that are harmful.

So! What I think is good: ever-constant pleasure from every day life rather than its rise and fall, avoiding exterior behavior controls most of the time which limit you, being interested in a few domains while recognizing that they probably are no more important than the domains others are interested in, and moving to China around 2035.

I've heard about Scientology before, ubermensch told me all about it in instant message conversations over the years, but watching these videos was really eye-opening nonetheless. (And yes I know that other religions are just as weird and this only seems weirder because it's more modern, but still.)

http://www.molleindustria.org/faith-fighter

Possibly the best idea for a fighting game ever, reminds me of Harlock's idea here: http://kingludic.blogspot.com/2007/03/designers-challenge-philosopher-throw.html

It has six characters, plus a secret one (I don't want to ruin the surprise, so find out who that is yourself). Needs more characters though; maybe a championship edition. But a lot of the detailed touches are great: one level has the Flying Spaghetti Monster flying in the background for instance.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/23/1-out-of-56-is-not-most/

During the last debate Huckabee claimed that most of the 56 people who signed the constitution were clergy. I thought 'that can't be true, can it?' when I heard him say it. It turns out he was lying, or at least ignorant. Only one of the 56 men who signed it was a clergyman, and only three were ex-clergymen. Four out of 56 is "most"?

I've heard the people who believe America was founded as a Christian country say some pretty odd things, but that most of the people who signed the constitution were clergy is a first. Where do they get ideas like that? Huckabee, as an aside, is also a creationist, along with Chuck Norris, who endorsed him recently.

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/64873/?type=blog



Interesting article but I doubt this part:

"The long-term trend toward a less Christian nation is probably good news for liberalism in general. If there are comparatively fewer Christians, there will be more people of other faiths -- though other Barna studies have found that the biggest gains of all are being made among atheist and agnostic free-thinkers, who are also the most likely to be political liberals."

Does being an atheist really make you more likely to lean left rather than right politically? I'm not sure about that -- I know a lot of atheist Republicans (to name a few, Charbile, Fyrewulff, Deltaproximus). I wouldn't think it's that much more proportionately.

I'm sick again, sore throat and I can feel the beginnings of a flu or a cold. This isn't really worth mentioning. These never last, I've recovered from every sickness I've ever had -- so I have to empirically conclude that I'll never die, because there's no previous case where I didn't recover from a sickness.

If god doesn't exist then I'll create him with my own hands! <--- best line from Xenogears. I know it's derived from Voltaire but it's an original variation.

Somehow I think elections are fake. I don't mean in the usual "the media rigs them!!!" way. I mean it seems weird that the most powerful position in the world only "costs" some popularity and about a billion dollars. Either it costs more than that or it isn't really the most powerful position. Someone pointed this out on the news: that the amount of money spent on Easter candy during the week prior to Easter exceeds the amount of money spent on the presidential elections by all candidates combined. That's how paltry the sum is relative to industry. Look at another example; some corporations spend about a billion per year advertising; car companies and drug companies especially. And the presidency will cost someone less than the advertising budget of Ford? Really? Something wrong here. You'd think more people would want the job and be willing to pay a higher price for it than that.

The world's going to change a lot over the rest of my lifetime, even if I only live around the average lifespan. It's going to be great to watch, even if a lot of the changes are bad. The panopticon is coming, the only option is its nature, whether the mirrors are two-way or one-way, they'll no longer be zero-way.

The following was part of an atheist's convention but is not about atheism but rather more like the psychology of spirituality. One thing I find odd in this description is that it claims people are constantly talking to themselves and thinking in words. This just may be like autism or something, but I don't. I don't have an internal dialogue at all. It makes me wonder how different all of our internal lives are. Regardless, there's a lot to this passage and it's worth saving.

In this context, certain people have traditionally wondered whether a deeper form of well-being exists. Is there, in other words, a form of happiness that is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our pleasures and successes and avoiding our pains. Is there a form of happiness that is not dependent upon having one’s favorite food always available to be placed on one’s tongue or having all one’s friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or having good books to read, or having something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be utterly happy before anything happens, before one’s desires get gratified, in spite of life’s inevitable difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

This question, I think, lies at the periphery of everyone’s consciousness. We are all, in some sense, living our answer to it—and many of us are living as though the answer is “no.” No, there is nothing more profound that repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding one’s pains; there is nothing more profound that seeking satisfaction, both sensory and intellectual. Many of us seem think that all we can do is just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.

But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of people like the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called “meditation” or “contemplation”—as a means of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.

Such a person might even hole himself up in a cave, or in a monastery, for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would somebody do this? Well, it amounts to a very simple experiment. Here’s the logic of it: if there is a form of psychological well-being that isn’t contingent upon merely repeating one’s pleasures, then this happiness should be available even when all the obvious sources of pleasure and satisfaction have been removed. If it exists at all, this happiness should be available to a person who has renounced all her material possessions, and declined to marry her high school sweetheart, and gone off to a cave or to some other spot that would seem profoundly uncongenial to the satisfaction of ordinary desires and aspirations.

One clue as to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment even inside a prison. Even when cooped up with homicidal maniacs and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a box.

And yet, for thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves “atheists” or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of “spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia.

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.

Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other people—he’s probably mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day long silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This is perfectly compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.

Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.

From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57586

Good up until the "this is my god now" part.

http://www.thebricktestament.com

The Bible enacted with Legos. Very detailed, and highlights some of the strange things that are in there.

For those who don't know what this topic is about, I suggest this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

I was talking about this over the past weeks or so on and off with Patrick Dugan and I want to summarize my thoughts on this. This is not addressed to him or anyone else, it's just a record of my arguments against this theory.

The basic idea is that the rate of change (in complexity, technology, population growth, etc.), because it's increasing at an exponential rate, will eventually reach a point (the singularity) where change is infinitely fast. Millions of people now believe this, with many devoting their lives to reaching that point as fast as possible (I've called it a religion in the past).

I've some problems with this idea:

First, "technology", "change" and so on aren't measurable, they're abstract qualities rather than quantitative phenomena. Technology isn't a thing, it's a category of things, a thought about things. So to say that "technology" or "change" are accelerating is to say nothing at all, it's no different than if you said "virtue" or "goodness" was accelerating, or if you said "love" or "spirituality" was accelerating -- it sounds nice, and it even has some truth to it, but it's still too vague to mean much, it's not something you can or should predict the future with.

Most objections to the accelerating change theory I've read still allow in that basic premise, there are arguments that the "rate of change" has slowed down, but no arguments that I know of (except mine) that the very concept of a "rate of change" is an empty concept, something which sounds like it means something but actually means nothing.

One particularly strange claim is that humanity's knowledge of the universe doubles every year. How Kurzweil arrives at that is unknown. Information isn't knowledge, so even if it were true that the amount of written or other information doubles every year (which it does not, but let's grant that) it wouldn't be true that our knowledge of the universe doubles each year, just the amount of stuff we've written down about it.

Second, while true that if you look at any given field, inventions and technological improvements seem to be speeding up. Between the years 0 AD and 1000 AD, the amount of change in technology, at least on the surface level, seems less significant than the change between 1000 AD and 2000 AD. Even the change between 1000 AD and 1800 AD seems less than the change between 1800 AD and 2000 AD. Subjectively, anyway. It can't be measured, but it sure seems like more has changed in the last 200 years than in the 800 years before that.

There's two simple explanations for that observation: that the amount of people has similarly increased drastically during that time (and more people means more inventors), but more importantly, that because we are stationed at this moment in time, recent changes have been recorded in more detail than changes thousands of years ago, and seem more spectacular.

The computer seems like a more spectacular achievement to us than the printing press or the invention of written language. Electricity seems more amazing to us than steam power or burning wood. But that's just because such things are more recent, more recent things seem unduly brighter and more significant than things that people did a thousand years ago.

He also mentions that the speed of computers doubles every 18 months. That's actually not accurate, computers have stopped doing that for a couple of years now, since about 2000 or so. The fastest CPU you can buy today on an average income is about 3.4ghz. And 18 months ago, it was about 3.0ghz. I know clock speed means little and there are other factors, but nobody in or knowledgeable about the computer industry believes that the speed of computers is doubling every 18 months anymore.

Similarly, with population. Our population isn't accelerating that fast anymore, it's slowed down and it's predicted to stabilize around 10 billion sometime around 2050, at which it'll reach replacement level. I personally don't think it'll remain at 10 billion forever, after we begin colonizing other planets it may start increasing again, but the idea that our population will increase exponentially forever is clearly wrong.

Another thing is that it's easy to fudge charts like this. All you have to do is be selective about what you consider significant, and you can make anything fit in a line to anything.

Anyway, there's a lot about Kurzweil I like. I like his dedication to extending human lifespan. And I do think that eventually we'll create something that'll be intelligent, and in some ways more intelligent than us. But he's a sloppy thinker, most of his ideas aren't rigorous, and most are hyperbolic to the point of being poetry (I'm thinking of that "rend a tear in the fabric of human history" quote), yet the man has millions of followers and is almost a cult leader in how uncritically what he says is accepted.

He's more like a prophet than a scientist -- and most prophets have been wrong, and those that haven't weren't because they kept their predictions vague. And many of his prophecies are religious in nature, that they predict events which have never happened before on earth and predict them fairly soon. Of course, that doesn't mean they won't happen, but when his arguments for those predictions are so fudged and so many people believe in them so wholeheartedly it's disturbing how easy people fall for things like this, these pseudoscientific people give religious people justification in saying that science is a religion rather than a method.

Like 100 conspiracy theories all in one movie! I agree with about a third, a third I'm unsure of, and I don't think the other third are true.

http://zeitgeistmovie.com

If you watch it, I recommend you skip the first 8 minutes, because there's nothing but a montage of explosions and visuals which I don't think add much to it.

I was watching the Republican presidential primaries debate on MSNBC, and they asked "is there anyone here who does not believe in evolution?" and three of the guys (out of about 10) raised their hand! Incredible.

On the other hand, Ron Paul was really impressive. He was like "after I eliminate the IRS..." haha, it's good to see someone say things like that on national TV.

Question: do you think it would offend some players / potential buyers (Christians) to portray the hate point with a cross? Harlock wants it that way, I don't particularly want to because I want to provide the maximum value to players that I can and I think that symbolizing hate with a red cross would decrease the game experience for Christians. I just told him to "use some symbol for hate" and he chose the cross. Which admittedly fits slightly because Aa (the person who places the hate points down -- the player doesn't have access to them) believes himself to be a god and wants people to worship him.

Screenshot of the hate point in-game: http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000db64a

On the other hand, Harlock's mother (a Christian) thinks the game would sell better if it included this, because "people like to be offended and buy things that offend them" ???

Komera, what do you think, you're Christian!

One possible alternative/compromise that I had was to turn the cross upside down or on its side. That'd be relatively easy to do with almost no work, and might offend people less. Another alternative is simply renaming the hate point to the "sacrifice point" which gets the same idea across but isn't as easy to misinterpret.

http://chineseinvancouver.blogspot.com/2007/01/china-bans-year-of-pig-ads-to-show.html

China bans "Year of the Pig" because it might upset its country's Muslims (I should point out that there may be more Muslims in China than in any other country, with the possible exception of Indonesia, but counts vary, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_china).

I'm not sure what China is thinking. Are they really that scared? That'd be like American banning Porky Pig cartoons.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=AC3F4052YJL13QFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2007/01/21/wburma21.xml

I guess every major religion has done this now.

http://www.donmeh-west.com/2torahs.shtml

"Torah D'Atziluth. The "first" Torah, (the "Torah of the Emanations") was written directly by the "finger of God" and is described in the passage of Scripture"

"Torah D'Beriah. The "second" Torah (the "Torah of Re-Making") was given as a replacement for the first, which God deemed Israel not fully prepared for"

"The principle difference (as one can find from a study of the scriptures attendant on each) between the first and second Torahs is that sexual prohibitions (including those against incest, male homosexuality, etc.) were not included in the first, but added to the second -- this, of course, because the Sin of the Golden Calf was sexual as well as idolatrous. Some scholars, such as Columbia University's Morton Smith, speculate indirectly that this was the reason Jesus, according to the early "Libertine" (or "Liberated") Christians, not only permitted but actually mandated the performance of those sexual activities (including male homosexuality) that had been forbidden in the Old Testament."

Etc., interesting article.

http://www.whistleblowers.org/Can_You_Tell_a_Sunni_From_a_Shiite_-_New_York_Times.htm

Important article that shows how many top people in the FBI and congress don't know the difference between Sunni and Shiite. A top guy in the FBI didn't know which Iran was. A congressman didn't even know that there was a difference or that that difference defined the sides in the Iraq fighting.

Just what are the following two images??

http://www.ninapaley.com/Sitayana/SitaJpegs/01.FlyingDemons.jpg
http://www.ninapaley.com/Sitayana/SitaJpegs/01.SitaRamaFlowers.jpg

Intrigued? It's a retelling of the Ramayana, created by a lone cartoonist in flash, done to the wonderful music of Annette Hanshaw. It's the greatest thing I've seen all month, and sent chills down me. Go watch it, even if you've never heard of the Ramayana.

[The Ramayana: "The poem is not a mere literary monument, it is a part of Hinduism, and is held in such reverence that the mere reading or hearing of it, or certain passages of it, is believed by the Hindus to free them from sin and grant every desire to the reader or hearer." -Wikipedia. It's a love story involves demons, a man with 10 heads, and a monkey that can jump from Sri Lanka to the Indian subcontinent in a single bound. I haven't read it yet but am looking forward to it very much after seeing this.]

http://www.ninapaley.com/Sitayana/

Here's a short summary of what I've learned so far. These should not be taken as what most Hindus believe about Karma Yoga, or even what any believe.

1. Karma Yoga literally means "doing work(s) as a way toward integration", and it is the best path toward ultimate integration (enlightenment).

2. Karma Yoga is dedication to work because of the love of it, the love both of its means and its ends in equal measure, since the means and the ends psychologically bleed into eachother and become inseperable. The carpenter placing each brick as just as happiness-inducing as seeing the house used and loved.

3. It is passionless, without much fluctuation of feeling. The happiness doesn't come and go in waves, but is always there persistant, unlike in passion-fueled work where there are highs and lows, it's always an emotional plateau.

4. It is done without duty in the usual sense of "being worked", but with duty in the higher sense of "working being".

5. There is no sense of forcing yourself to work, no resistance of procrastination, only its complete absense. There is no psychological barrier to overcome when you begin work each day, no white tennis shoes that you forgot to clean, no diversions of any sort that pop into your mind that have to be resisted.

6. The effort is effortless, but exacting. Not taxing, but challenging, as with an opponent who is skilled but accepts defeat with grace when you win.

7. It is done along one's own plan, there is no one who maps the way for you, there is the freedom to do the work in your individual fashion. This doesn't rule out employee type work, though optimally Karma Yoga works best in freelancers, crafters, and the self-employed, rather than in hierarchies.

8. Once a work is done, it's let go like an animal released into the wild. If it does well, fine, if it bombs, fine, neither really matters if the work was done well, as the results of your cause are not under your full control.

9. The works constantly improve and constantly are greater than the last, but there is no pressing responsibility to do so, it's just its natural progression from lesser to greater achievements.

10. The work is natural, and is nurturing, there is no mental tiredness from it, its lack is what causes the stress and distress, not its presense.

11. It doesn't result in feeling busy, even though there are no spare moments and breaks are infrequent or neither desired nor needed. But it doesn't result in feeling busy because there is no sense that the person doesn't have time to do the things they want to do, they're doing exactly what they want to be doing, all the time.

This is the ideal which is forever approached as a person practises Karma Yoga. I'll re-write this and do it better in a few weeks.

I read through Swami Vivekananda's book on Karma Yoga, and though there is a lot of bad ideas in it and even some bad scholarship, and I don't like many of its conclusions, it's still a very valuable book. It does an excellent job of portraying the nobility of works which to my knowledge only Ayn Rand's novels have done as powerfully. Here are some more quotes from it:

"If you really want to judge of the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Every fool may become a hero at one time or another. Watch a man do his most comon actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be."

"With regard to Karma-Yoga, the Gita says that it is doing work with cleverness and as a science [which leads to enlightenment]; by knowing how to work, one can obtain the greatest results."

"I know sects among whom, as soon as a child is born, a tomb is prepared for it; that is among them the most important work a man has to do, and the bigger and the finer the tomb, the better off the man is supposed to be."

"There is a sage in India, a great Yogi, one of the most wonderful men I have ever seen in my life. He is a peculiar man, he will not teach any one; if you ask him a question he will not answer. It is too much for him to take up the position of a teacher, he will not do it. If you ask a question, and wait for some days, in the course of conversation he will bring up a subject, and wonderful light will he throw on it. He told me once the secret of work, "Let the end and the means be joined into one." When you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond. Do it as worship, as the highest worship, and devote your whole life to it for the time being."

"Ritual is in fact concretised philosophy."

"Let us give up all this foolish talk of doing good to the world. It is not waiting for your or my help; yet we must work and constantly do good, because it is a blessing to ourselves. That is the only way we can become perfect."

"The greatest men in the world have passed away unknown. The Buddhas and the Christs that we know are but second-rate heroes in comparison with the greatest men of whom the world knows nothing. Hundreds of these unknown heroes have lived in every country, working silently. Silently they live and silently they pass away; and in their time their thoughts find expression in Buddhas or Christs, and it is these latter that become known to us. [...] They are the pure Sattvikas, who can never make any stir, but only melt down in love."

"This world's wheel within wheel is a terrible mechanism; if we put our hands in it, as soon as we are caught we are gone. We all think that when we have done a certain duty, we shall be at rest; but before we have done a part of that duty, another is already in waiting. We are all being dragged along by this mighty, complex world-machine. There are only two ways out of it; one is to give up all concern with the machine, to let it go and stand aside, to give up our desires. That is very easy to say, but is almost impossible to do. I do not know whether in twenty millions of men one can do that. The other way is to plunge into the world and learn the secret of work, and that is the way of Karma-Yoga. Do not fly away from the wheels of the world-machine, but stand inside it and learn the secret of work. Through proper work done inside, it is also possible to come out. Through this machinery itself is the way out."

He has written on Karma Yoga in other places in his works besides his book on Karma Yoga, so I now proceed to read those.

This is perhaps the best aphorism that was not written by Nietzsche and not a Zen koan that I've ever read; it combines the best of both in fact.

*

There was a poor man who wanted some money; and somehow he had heard that if he could get hold of a ghost, he might command him to bring money or anything else he liked; so he was very anxious to get hold of a ghost. He went about searching for a man who would give him a ghost, and at last he found a sage with great powers, and besought his help. The sage asked him what he would do with a ghost. "I want a ghost to work for me; teach me how to get hold of one, sir; I desire it very much," replied the man. But the sage said, "Don't disturb yourself, go home." The next day the man went again to the sage and began to weep and pray, "Give me a ghost; I must have a ghost, sir, to help me." At last the sage was disgusted, and said, "Take this charm, repeat this magic word, and a ghost will come, and whatever you say to him he will do. But beware; they are terrible beings, and must be kept continually busy. If you fail to give him work, he will take your life." The man replied, "That is easy; I can give him work for all his life." Then he went to a forest, and after long repetition of the magic word, a huge ghost appeared before him, and said, "I am a ghost. I have been conquered by your magic; but you must keep me constantly employed. The moment you fail to give me work I will kill you." The man said, "Build me a palace,", and the ghost said, "It is done; the palace is built." "Bring me money," said the man. "Here is your money," said the ghost. "Cut this forest down, and build a city in its place." "That is done," said the ghost, "anything more?" Now the man began to be frightened and thought he could give him nothing more to do; he did everything in a trice. The ghost said, "Give me something to do or I will eat you up." The poor man could find no further occupation for him, and was frightened. So he ran and ran and at last reached the sage, and said, "Oh, sir, protect my life!" The sage asked him what the matter was, and the man replied, "I have nothing to give the ghost to do. Everything I tell him to do he does in a moment, and he threatens to eat me up if I do not give him work." Just then the ghost arrived, saying, "I'll eat you up," and he would have swallowed the man. The man began to shake, and begged the sage to save his life. The sage said, "I will find you a way out. Look at that dog with a curly tail. Draw your sword quickly and cut the tail off and give it to the ghost to straighten out." The man cut off the dog's tail and gave it to the ghost, saying, "Straighten that out for me." The ghost took it and slowly and carefully straightened it out, but as soon as he let it go, it instantly curled up again. Once more he laboriously straightened it out, only to find it again curled up as soon as he attempted to let go of it. Again he patiently straightened it out, but as soon as he let it go, it curled up again. So he went on for days and days, until he was exhausted and said, "I was never in such trouble before in my life. I am an old veteran ghost, but never before was I in such trouble." "I will make a compromise with you;" he said to the man, "you let me off and I will let you keep all I have given you and will promise not to harm you." The man was much pleased, and accepted the offer gladly.

This world is like a dog's curly tail.

*

( The meaning, in case it isn't clear. Try to figure it out first. )

"The Vedanta recognizes no sin, it only recognizes error. And the greatest error, says the Vedanta, is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner, a miserable creature, and that you have no power and you cannot do this and that. [...] Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin: to say that you are weak, or others are weak."

"A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century."

"Anything that is secret and mysterious in these systems of yoga should be at once rejected. The best guide in life is strength. In religion, as in all other matters, discard everything that weakens you, have nothing to do with it."

"Astrology and all these mystical things are generally signs of a weak mind; therefore as soon as they are becoming prominent in our minds, we should see a physician, take good food, and rest."

"Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste."

"Great work requires great and persistent effort for a long time. [...] Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles."

"Stand as a rock; you are indestructible. You are the Self (atman), the God of the universe."

"Strength is the sign of vigor, the sign of life, the sign of hope, the sign of health, and the sign of everything that is good. As long as the body lives, there must be strength in the body, strength in the mind, strength in the hand."

"The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves!"

"The less passion there is, the better we work. The calmer we are, the better for us and the more the amount of work we can do. When we let loose our feelings, we waste so much energy, shatter our nerves, disturb our minds, and accomplish very little work."

"The power of purity—it is a definite power."

"This is no world. It is God Himself. In delusion we call it world."

"We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life."

"When I asked god for courage he gave me difficult situations. When I asked god for intelligence he gave me puzzles to solve."

"If you really want to judge of the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Every fool may become a hero at one time or another. Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be."

"With regard to Karma-Yoga, the Gita says that it is doing work with cleverness and as a science [which leads to enlightenment]; by knowing how to work, one can obtain the greatest results."

"There is a sage in India, a great Yogi, one of the most wonderful men I have ever seen in my life. He is a peculiar man, he will not teach any one; if you ask him a question he will not answer. It is too much for him to take up the position of a teacher, he will not do it. If you ask a question, and wait for some days, in the course of conversation he will bring up a subject, and wonderful light will he throw on it. He told me once the secret of work, "Let the end and the means be joined into one." When you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond. Do it as worship, as the highest worship, and devote your whole life to it for the time being."

"Ritual is in fact concretised philosophy."

"Let us give up all this foolish talk of doing good to the world. It is not waiting for your or my help; yet we must work and constantly do good, because it is a blessing to ourselves. That is the only way we can become perfect."

"The greatest men in the world have passed away unknown. The Buddhas and the Christs that we know are but second-rate heroes in comparison with the greatest men of whom the world knows nothing. Hundreds of these unknown heroes have lived in every country, working silently. Silently they live and silently they pass away; and in their time their thoughts find expression in Buddhas or Christs, and it is these latter that become known to us. [...] They are the pure Sattvikas, who can never make any stir, but only melt down in love."

"This world's wheel within wheel is a terrible mechanism; if we put our hands in it, as soon as we are caught we are gone. We all think that when we have done a certain duty, we shall be at rest; but before we have done a part of that duty, another is already in waiting. We are all being dragged along by this mighty, complex world-machine. There are only two ways out of it; one is to give up all concern with the machine, to let it go and stand aside, to give up our desires. That is very easy to say, but is almost impossible to do. I do not know whether in twenty millions of men one can do that. The other way is to plunge into the world and learn the secret of work, and that is the way of Karma-Yoga. Do not fly away from the wheels of the world-machine, but stand inside it and learn the secret of work. Through proper work done inside, it is also possible to come out. Through this machinery itself is the way out."

-Swami Vivekananda

And now we come to my favorite part of the Gita: Karma Yoga. It's presented in chapter 3.

Karma originally, and here, means works. It secondarily came to mean cause and effect (because works have consequences), and tertiarily came to mean a supernatural law which returns good for good works and evil for evil works.

Yoga originally meant integration or wholeness. It secondarily, and here, came to mean the practise of achieving this integration and wholeness, and tertiarily came to mean the various exercises of Yoga (this meaning is actually Western, in India Yoga still means simply any practise intended to achieve personal integration).

Karma Yoga is thus the practise of using one's work to achieve personal integration and wholeness.

There's some confusion (as with all ancient texts) over exactly what type of work is meant; often the type of work is presented as "dutiful" and "unselfish", but I'm suspicious of that interpretation, for a number of reasons I won't get into (the primary one is that there is a memetic and political impetus to interpret holy works as commanding altruism toward others and service to the state).

So let's for the sake of argument pretend that all that is meant by karma yoga is what I just discussed before, the Goodness way of working, the distinctly human way of working. I don't know Sanskrit, so I don't know if that's what it really means, but neither do most Hindus.

If this is taken as its recommendation, then it's an extremely useful recommendation, and it's a pity it's been misinterpreted. I think I'll study it more before coming to any decisive thoughts (The Compete works of Swami Vivekananda are famed for their discussion of Karma Yoga, among other things, and there are many other commentaries on the Gita which go into it, all of which I haven't looked at yet).

There are actually four Yogas presented in the Gita, each a seperate path toward enlightenment, but the only one I found any value in at all is Karma Yoga, the others I view with disdain.

Bhakti yoga is enlightenment through the love of god (the Hare Krishna cult is one of these). This is just plain deity worship, and no more to be trusted than the worship of any other diety. Perhaps the diety doesn't matter, but even then, I don't see how worshipping an imaginary being can lead to enlightenment. The most that can be said of it is that a person imagines an imaginary perfect being, and holds it in mind always, it can operate as a guiding compass in life. In that way it can be useful, but it usually doesn't work out like that. But I'm willing to admit it might be beneficial for some people.

Jnana Yoga is better, but still silly, it's enlightenment through self-knowledge and detachment, the recognition that everything is an illusion, and that the real world is invisible to the senses. It's vaguely postmodernistic and dualistic, so because I'm a nondualistic materialist I don't like this. The real world *is* the world of the senses, or rather, it's our primary connection to the world, and thus the most real aspect of the world to us. Universals are important, but shouldn't be taken to be primary, as in idealists like Plato. So there might be some value in focusing on the senses as ephemeral and univerals as persistant, but it can easily be taken too far and is a dangerous recommendation.

Raja Yoga is enlightenment through meditation, which has some value but is often used the way that illegal drugs are used, and is psychologically and perhaps chemically addictive, so it's an even more dangerous recommendation, because it can easily lead to a person spending one fourth or more of their life sitting down thinking of nothing. Its value comes from a psychological benefit of increased focus, but even that is achievable far more easily through more advanced techniques, such as self-hypnotism and biofeedback. I'd venture to say that what you can do in 10 years with traditional Yoga or Zen style meditation, you can do in one year with self-hypnotism.

Another major reason I don't like those three is that the *form* of enlightenment one reaches after a lifetime of doing these differs. The enlightenment through Karma Yoga -- dedication and love of one's work -- is entirely different than the enlightenment you get from diety-worship, which in turn is different from the enlightenment you get from Platonic idealism, which in turn is different from the enlightenment you get from meditation. The four types of enlightenment might appear on the surface to be similar, but if you've met people who have achieved each, and provided you've achieved one of these yourself (though it's not a yes-no thing, more of a scale), then you'll easily notice the difference between these different forms of enlightenment, and the enlightenment of Karma Yoga far, far more impresses me than the enlightenment of the other forms, not only in its grandness of scale and worldly achievement (though those are important), but also in its lasting happiness and sense of a life well spent.

I won't go so far as to say that the other forms of enlightenment are a waste of life, but I wouldn't recommend them, they each seem a false ultimate happiness, and I believe that if it were possible for a person to live long enough to achieve mastery in each of the four forms of enlightenment, he would at the end favor Karma Yoga as the most fulfilling type.

"The agent who is free from attachment, who never speaketh of himself, who is endued with constancy and energy, and is unmoved by success and defeat, is said to be of the quality of goodness. The agent who is full of affections, who wisheth for the fruit of actions, who is covetous, endued with cruelty, and impure, and who feeleth joy and sorrow, is declared to be of the quality of passion. The agent who is void of application, without discernment, obstinate, deceitful, malicious, slothful, desponding, and procrastinating, is said to be of the quality of darkness."

In chapter 16 of the Gita the three gunas are described thus (translation taken from Kisari Mohan Ganguly), this is how they reveal themselves in a person's works. There's something to this. These are recognizably three distinct ways of working: working out of dedication to and love of the work itself with no expectation of reward, working out of a short-term desire for the fruits of the work (such as recognition or payment), and working only when forced to by others. I'm sure you all know co-workers who work in each of these three fashions.

There is also a passage that relates the gunas to different forms of happiness. For this I'll use a translation by Professor R. C. Zaechner:

Threefold too is pleasure:
Arjuna, hear this now from Me.
That pleasure which a man enjoys after much effort spent,
Making an end thereby of suffering,

Which at first seems more like poison
But in time transmutes into what seems to be
Ambrosia,--is called pleasure in Goodness' way,
For it springs from that serenity which comes from apperception of the self.

That pleasure which at first seems like ambrosia,
Arising when the senses meet the things of sense,
But in time transmutes itself into what seems to be
Poison, that pleasure, so it's sead, is in Passion's way.

That pleasure which at first
And in the sequel leads the self astray,
Which derives from sleep and sloth and fecklessness,
Has been condemned as pleasure in Darkness' way.

There is no existant thing in heaven or on earth
Nor yet among the gods,
Which is or ever could be free
From these three constituents from Nature sprung.

I can see this. But let me reword these gunas. "Goodness" is a combined term, for it has aspects both of rationality and of morality in the purity sense -- which do overlap often, and more often than is usually known, but are usually cognitively distinct today. "Passion" is a word for the state not of desire by itself, but desire without rationality and purity. "Darkness" is a word for the lower appetites, of so-called creature comforts, such as rest and relaxation.

Another way to think of it is: Darkness is what plants have (slow, static, immovable tissue growth), Passion is what animals have in addition to darkness (roving and wandering in search of objects of its desire, basic emotions such as fear and anger and lust), and Goodness is what humans have in addition to darkness and passion (conceptuality and higher thought, higher emotions such as awe and love). So what the gunas are actually portraying has biological counterpoint.

Going back to the first section, the three types of working, we can say that the first type works like a human, the second type works like an animal, and the third type works like a plant.

Chapter 14 of the Bhagavad Gita discusses the gunas -- these gunas similar to Plato's tripartite soul, as both are early systems of psychology. This translation is taken from the hilarious Hare Krishna translation.

Material nature consists of three modes — goodness, passion and ignorance. When the eternal living entity comes in contact with nature, O mighty-armed Arjuna, he becomes conditioned by these modes.

O sinless one, the mode of goodness, being purer than the others, is illuminating, and it frees one from all sinful reactions. Those situated in that mode become conditioned by a sense of happiness and knowledge.

The mode of passion is born of unlimited desires and longings, O son of Kuntī, and because of this the embodied living entity is bound to material fruitive actions.

O son of Bharata, know that the mode of darkness, born of ignorance, is the delusion of all embodied living entities. The results of this mode are madness, indolence and sleep, which bind the conditioned soul.

O son of Bharata, the mode of goodness conditions one to happiness; passion conditions one to fruitive action; and ignorance, covering one's knowledge, binds one to madness.

Sometimes the mode of goodness becomes prominent, defeating the modes of passion and ignorance, O son of Bharata. Sometimes the mode of passion defeats goodness and ignorance, and at other times ignorance defeats goodness and passion. In this way there is always competition for supremacy.

An interesting thing to note is that today's models of personality take no evaluative stance on the different personality types. For example, in the Myers-Briggs, you won't catch many people saying that, say, ENTJ is *better* than ISFP, even though there was a study that showed that ENTJ's are the most mentally healthy and make the most money of the 16 types (I believe so anyway, it's been awhile since I was into that personality system).

"I shall grasp the soul's skirt with my hand
and stamp on the world's head with my foot.
I shall trample Matter and Space with my horse,
beyond all Being I shall utter a great shout,
and in that moment when I shall be alone with Him"

-Attar

"Integrity is skill in works." [Alternative translation of "Yoga is skill in action." -- in this translation, "karma" is translated as "works"]

"Not by leaving works undone does a man win freedom from the bond of work, nor by asceticism and renunciation can he win the prize of moral perfection."

"Let a man take pleasure in self alone, in self his satisfaction find, in self alone content."

"Better to do one's own thing poorly, than to do another's well. Better to die within the sphere of your own desire: perilous are the desires of other men."

"As fire is swatched in smoke, as mirror fouled by dust, as embryo all covered up by the membrane-envelope, so is this world obscured by evil." [On why evil exists.]

"All works, without exception, in wisdom find their consummation."

"As a kindled fire consumes its fuel to ashes, so does the fire of wisdom consume all works to ashes."

-Bhagavad Gita

You know how in some forms of medication "om" is chanted? It seems that that word literally means "lead me". Just when I was getting to like Hinduism!

Now there is this description of [Brahman]: 'Ah!' -- what people say when the lightning flashes, -- 'Ah!' as they blink their eyes, so much for the sphere of the gods.

-Kena Upanishad

Wow, the Bible Belt is totally in the wrong place.

This question was inspired by a conversation with abi_dierecte.

Here's a question to the Christians on my friends list, like miyu_sakura, komera, kesil, moogle1 etc.: If a time machine was invented, or a machine that let you look at the past but not interact with it, and you went back in time and saw Christianity being started, and Jesus did not revive, or alternatively he never existed, would it effect your belief in Christianity?

I argued that it would, that they are not totally immune to reason, but she felt it would not cause any Christian to become an atheist, even if they saw something like that.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8f/Worldreligion.png

A map of the world by religion.

EDIT: A better one found by god_of_atheism:
Eastern Hemisphere
Western Hemisphere

Falun Gong has to be the fastest growing religion in the world. It was founded in 1992 by a guy who started a cult in China (and only taught for three years before leaving the country), and now, fourteen years later, it has an estimated hundred million adherants -- which is seven times more than Judaism, and eight times more than Mormonism. The religion became famous in the West in 1999, when it was learned that China jails the followers of Falun Gong if they're found out -- there are 2,840 known deaths of Falun Gong practitioners while in Chinese police "custody".

What do they believe? The basic ideas are in the tradition Buddhism, but it's quite distinct. In some respects it's similar to Scientology: they believe that aliens influenced human evolution and have embedded their technology in us, and they believe that all disease is caused by bad thinking. They also practise a special dance of power, which takes careful study to learn. Among the "10 great evil" types of people are listed homosexuals, scientists, gamblers, gang-members, politicians, those who act on their own decisions, those who publicise or write about violence, and those belonging to other religions.

Wacky though that is, there are all kinds of wacky religions. What most impresses me about this particular religion is the sheer speed at which it is growing, especially considering it's growing in a country politically opposed to its growth. I wonder if, perhaps, the very fact that China is so restrictive of this religion actually helps it spread faster? The forbidden fruit effect. If that is why it's spreading, then it's actually quite a hopeful thing, as it shows that people naturally desire freedom.

Gautama, the sky is a fire: the sun is its fuel; the sun's rays its smoke; the day its flame; the moon its coal; the stars its sparks. In this very fire the gods offer faith; from this oblation Soma comes to be.

Gautama, the rain-cloud is a fire: the wind is its fuel; cloud its smoke; lightning its flame; the thunderbolt its coal; hailstones its sparks. In this very fire the gods offer Soma; from this oblation rain comes to be.

Gautama, the earth is a fire: the year is its fuel; space its smoke; night its flame; the points of the compass its coal; the intermedia points of the compass its sparks. In this very fire the gods offer rain; from this oblation food comes to be.

Gautama, man is a fire: the voice is his fuel; breath his smoke; the tongue his flame; the eyes his coal; the ears his sparks. In this very fire the gods offer food; from this oblation semen comes to be.

Woman is a fire, Gautama: the phallus is her fuel; the hairs are her smoke; the vulva is her flame; when a man penetrates her, that is her coal; the ecstasy is her sparks. In this very fire the gods offer semen; from this oblation the embryo comes to be.

The embryo lives out its allotted span. And when he dies he is carried off to the pyre. His fire is real fire, his fuel real fuel, his smoke real smoke, his flame real flame, his coal real coal, his sparks real sparks. In this very fire the gods offer up man. From this oblation a new man arises bright in color.

*

Two paths there are for mortal man, I've heard --
The path of the ancestors and the path of the gods:
On these all things that move converge,
All things that between the father and the mother dwell.

*

The Upanishads are both more interesting and less interesting than I'd thought they'd be; I'm reading them so that I can get some sort of background for the ancient Indian epic poems before I read those. Note that the Gautama mentioned here is of course not Gautama Buddha, Gautama seems to be a common name in India. Soma is of course some ancient spiritual intoxicant, now lost, but popularized in the West through Brave New World.

http://www.ur.umn.edu/FMPro?-db=releases&-lay=web&-format=umnnewsreleases/releasesdetail.html&ID=2816&-Find
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=726

Atheists are America's most distrusted minority. We're even considerably more distrusted than Muslims.

"As has been true in previous years, Muslims are less popular than people of other religious faiths but more popular than atheists."

"Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public."

I would have liked to see inclusion of smaller religions -- I should hope atheists are more tolerable than scientologists, at least.

10,000 Ministers agree: Evolution is the foundation of truth. Quite interesting, it seems there is now a movement among Christians and churches to defend evolution from the creationist scourge. Link via blue_kamehame.