Best Of
Re: Into Death
Just a brief reflection:
Too many look at death as an end.
Death is the return to the state of non-being, not non-existence.
we have the cycle of this which we call "life". - Birth, Growth, Maturity, Decline, death
Here death does not mean end. The Buddhist term is KU.
We can use the analogy of a wave upon the ocean. A wave appears upon the ocean, rises, crests, falls, the dissipates back into the ocean. although the individual wave appears to have arisen and fallen back to disappear into the ocean, it remains a part of the ocean. It has not gone. It has merely returned to a latent state.
Our lives are like the waves, arising from the the "Great Ocean" of life, to raise, crest, fall back into the ocean. Then to rise again, to repeat the cycle as a new wave each time.
Where did you emerge from to be born? There you return to, there is ku. The memories of this life fade away. Yet your essence (Certain faiths call it soul) carries forward , the sum total of your chain of causes carries into your next existence as what is commonly called "Karma". The Karma Storehouse is often called the Eighth Consciousness overlaid upon the Ninth consciousness known as the State or consciousness of Buddha.
We may fear death or yearn for death as an end, from nothing to nothing. That arises from our fundamental ignorance as to the nature of life itself and the true nature of death. If/when you understand the nature of death, you understand the nature of life. thus the fear of life or death or yearning for death disappears. Ku ceases to be a dark hole or a wall and reveals itself to be part of the wave and the great ocean itself.
Peace to all
Lionduck
Re: The AI tsunami
I thought this was interesting. They put a bunch of agents from the different companies together with instructions to build a society for 15 days. ChatGPT failed to do anything meaningful, Claude built a healthy society with no violence, but also had a very high level of conformity so it couldn't innovate, Gemini had some disfunction but was intellectually rich with an expanded constitution, blogs, community meetings and Grok burnt down the world in 4 days.
I've been happy with Claude but I'm going to switch to Gemini for a while and see what that one is like.
person
The importance of close relationships
I came across this short video which talked about how the quality and depth of your close relationships was the best predictor of happiness and cognitive health, according to an 88-year study by Harvard. Surprising and wonderful, and especially important for caregivers.
Jeroen
Re: What do you think of modern movies?
Yesterday I was watching a piece about relatability in cinema, it seems there are strong trends about people watching films as a secondary “comfort” activity next to for example playing Fortnite. For that people like less challenging films with relatable characters.
It seems to me insane to divide your attention like that.
Jeroen
Re: Ploggers of the world...unite!
@Kotishka
Commiserations, I know the feeling 😃
Yeah, I think we need to see our plogging like a Tibetan mandala: a beautiful effort that sometimes gets blown away by the wind, and that that's ok.
Or like the 'desert' phase in systems of phases: it seems like our efforts are not bringing fruit any more, we are staying in place or even going backwards, but we still continue.
Ps. My version of this was everyone deciding that MY field (😅), which I nearly cleaned up, was the perfect place to launch hundreds of rockets from and leave the trash behind.
marcitko
Re: Ploggers of the world...unite!
A great test today! The path I had spent so long cleaning, absolutely trashed. So many cans..plastic bags.... summer season is here and that means alcohol, fizzy drinks and ciggies! I got angry: "dumb pieces of ...."
Then I stopped and said: let's pick one piece of trash today and head to work...
Kotishka
Re: What do you think of modern movies?
Today I watched Like Stories of Old’s deep dive on why people didn’t really get Oppenheimer. I haven’t yet watched all of Christopher Nolan’s giant biopic of the so called “father of the atomic bomb”, but I’ve watched a good chunk of it.
It’s a deep look at one of the leading scientists of the twentieth century, and one of the things I found interesting is that it doesn’t shy away from showing him surrounded by other giants in their field of science. Science is usually a team effort.
Anyway, this video also touches on some of Tom van der Linden’s thoughts on Nolan’s work in general, and how Oppenheimer shows many of his characteristic touches. We see footage from Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Tenet and others come past…
As a modern piece of cinema, I feel that what I’ve seen of Oppenheimer is a complex portrait of a man at a historical crossroads. On the one hand he helped end World War 2, and on the other he birthed a technology that may eventually end all life on the planet. Yet if he had not done so, someone else in some other nation would have, and so does he really bear any blame?
In a way history seems to have a kind of inevitable sweep to it, and if we are to find a personal meaning in it’s examination we may find more truth in a focussed adventure like Kingdom of Heaven which speaks of the goodness of one man, than of an examination of history like in Oppenheimer.
Jeroen
Re: Bodhisattvas?
The Bodhisattva ideal is as central to Vajrayana Buddhism as it is in Zen @Kotishka. To help with the dishes is great. To help all beings attain Buddhahood is also great. Even in Therevada, the Buddha was a Bodhisattva in previous lives although they see the term a bit differently. I would suggest that those warning against the ideal simply do not understand it.
