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"Dare to Disagree"
genkaku
Northampton, Mass. U.S.A. Veteran
Comments
A good example was when (it was a middle school) we had a student who was going to publicly announce at school that he was gay. The principal was going to suspend him because, "He can't do that at school!" Well, I played devil's advocate and brought up such issues as freedom of speech and restricting the way in which he was going to do it (for example, he was initially going to stand up in the main hallway with a bullhorn and announce it). Ultimately, the principal realized the right to freedom of speech, but also the need not to create a general disturbance to the learning environment, and she worked with the student to come up with a more suitable way to accomplish his goals (not that I quite agreed with the way it came down, but we turned it into a controlled situation, not a crisis).
:rockon:
Wow. An excellent contribution. ^^; I totally relate to the doctor's character. Think different, and use others of whom you -know- will disagree with you as a method for gaining insight and clarity in your viewpoints.
"...it means that we have to seek out different people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, and different ways of thinking...and that requires a lot of patience."
Bravo.
every point raised is emphasised with a hand clap in the Tibetan version
You often refer to your own experiences as a school principal. Or the impact that spending time in Thailand has had on you. It is in your postings regularly.
For me, much of the way I see the world including the way I interact with people, or view nature, and my role in it, is through a lense shaped by 35 seasons of fishing as skipper of my boat.
The fact of my livelihood is in my thoughts a great deal, particularly with regard to my own understanding of Buddhist principals.
If someone asked me to describe myself, "fisherman" would have to be my first response.
Why wouldn't novaw0lf bring his past with him into his posts?
When dissident opinion is accepted the other person is like the opponent in sport, when it is not tolerated the other person is like the enemy in war and being a whistle-blower can ruin a person's career and personal life.
The working relationship between the doctor and the statistic (in the story) is not hostile; unfortunately in other working relationships disagreement often is a hostile, a personal thing.
Maybe the key is to have no ego attached to ones point of view. The best outcome is not that “I win” but that the best possible solution to the problem emerges.
If someone is being attacked or even if it is just us, if we let the attacker kill us or the other then we are actually spreading more violence because of future victimization.
I do call defence non-violence however. Revenge is a different matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa
It means we generate a field of equanimity and peace from our evolvement . . . :wave:
In this case, Americans tend to be only literal about violence as a last resort if we are among the reasonable ones. We seek out war on terror against our homeland, as would many of many countries. We reasonable Americans do not war except for debate/discussion formalized, with allies. Let us be allies on this site.
" we have to resist the neurobiological drive which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves ". Conventional wisdom only gets us so far.
I don't follow.
Too much well-trusted certainty and we miss the point.
Too much doubt and we become immobilized.
Just thinking a little.
"When we look straight at an emotion such as anger, no matter where or how we look, we cannot pinpoint anything that is solid or real. Our anger appears to us like the reflection of the moon on water - clearly apparent, yet utterly selfless. It is nothing more than the display of mind's luminous energy arising from empty awareness wisdom.
...
For a moment, pretend that it is tomorrow and you are looking back at today, at any moment of anger or strong emotion that you remember. What appears to us now as so real and compelling, such that we speak and act in certain ways, can appear from tomorrow's point of view as no more substantial and significant than a mirage.
When we truly look at our emotions, we find they are simply a display - the expression of self-existing, self-arising wisdom. They are the expression of the nature of mind, of ordinary mind, of rigpa. They are nothing but the manifestation of mind's inherent clarity."
"Mind beyond Death", Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Snow Lion Publications, 2006 (pp. 113/114)
relevent to this is mind training
http://www.unfetteredmind.org/mindtraining/fullindex.php
When I read: "When we look straight at an emotion such as anger, no matter where or how we look, we cannot pinpoint anything that is solid or real. Our anger appears to us like the reflection of the moon on water - clearly apparent, yet utterly selfless. It is nothing more than the display of mind's luminous energy arising from empty awareness wisdom."
I had no choice but to completely agree from personal experience. Anger (or really, any overwhelming emotion for that matter) is like a lens that we use to interpret a specific moment's truth. But no matter how you look through this lens, it is still a matter of completely distorted subjectivity that becomes less and less rational the more potent the emotion becomes. It is as if logic and emotions mix like oil and water, as if one existed on one side of a pendulum or the other. Love (or rather, infatuation) can be just as blinding as anger, as greed, or any one human emotion (or sin, in reference to Dante's Divine Comedy).
Through awareness training, one can cultivate the mental circuits necessary (like a mental alarm, so-to-speak) that alerts them when their emotions are overwhelming their logic. The only remedy? Resisting the urge to give in to your emotions long enough to separate oneself from the situation before any action is taken or decision is made, and to regain one's composure before venturing further.
Through intellectual conflict, it is as if two (or more) opposing powers meet in combat, a duel, the other trying to prove the other wrong. It matters not who is wrong or right, but instead the ideas that are born from the necessity for victory. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. And as @lobster said, there are parts of the brain that actually thrive and "perversely" desire conflict. If everyone agrees, then from an omniscient point-of-view, we attain a kind of stagnation, and stagnation is a kind of death.
I refer to and paraphrase Jack London's White Fang, when he philosophized that motion is life and stagnation is death.
A live example of this was my post (that Vinlyn keeps criticizing me about). It was posted with absolute respect to the rules of the forum, and a genuine intent to find a suitable answer to a proposed question and scenario. The conflict of my ideas versus everyone else's gave the forum "life". And even on a bigger scale, for those of us who understand e-marketing, the more we type on this forum, the more search engines have to use as keywords, which leads to more visitors to the site, which leads to more activity, which leads to the evolution of more ideas and the fruition of knowledge transferred and shared to all for free. Which in turn, can affect the entire world for the better on a massive scale.
"The journey is more important than the end or the start." -Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park).
Multiply the size of the scale. Following my quest for peace in action, I seek to engage in conflict that respects all living creatures on the planet, therein growing them, evolving them, pushing them forward.
NovawOlF's last posting (here exposing my lack of investigation of the entire thread) speaks in terms of the evolution of the human race whereas myself as a Buddhist meditator concern myself with the path for the cessation of suffering.
NovawOLF holds the survival of humanity or himself to be of paramount importance while I, perhaps like some others here, look to the cessation of suffering as the goal of goalessness.
It may be an apples and oranges discussion..
or an ego's view of egolessness and vise versa..
Perhaps I am different from every Buddhist when I say (as I have said in other threads) that Nirvana isn't something I want. I have personally reached an understanding in my meditations of what it takes to reach Nirvana, and I cannot support ascending to such a state whilst leaving everyone behind. Therein: my biggest attachment.
I am arbitrarily avoiding Nirvana because the world is my biggest attachment. In a post titled: What is your Buddhist Goal, I wrote to @zombiegirl:
Perhap your biggest attachment may not be that noble Bodhisattva ideal you espouse but is instead the concept that you are a actually an entity, separated from the rest of the world that is capable of performing such feats. It has certainly been a story co opted by many other spiritual ego's.
No particular insight on my part...Just a thought.
I am in some agreement with you in that
wanting Nirvana seems an oxymoron to me. Not for what is entailed to get there, but the act of wanting seems so much more ego bound than just simply doing what is good to do for it's own sake
I've never seen the using of greed positively to be of much worth in the long run..
I'm not striving to do anything other than what I believe to be the right thing for the sake of the right thing. I'm not striving for congratulations as @lobster and I have already spoke about in a different thread. I am merely who I am, on the path that I chose, -because- I chose it, and that is all. Until I am disproved, I will not change my course; even if one becomes enlightened, it does not mean that the process of learning ever actually stops. Even enlightened people, I believe, can make mistakes. After all, they are just people. I expect nothing for anything I do; in fact, I usually expect to be called derogatory names. Not congratulated. Such is what I'm used to.
It took me nearly four months to gain the courage to post Gateway, my first poem, on this website. Those who may remember the video, made over a year ago, the very opening words were something along the lines of: "I'm trying to overcome my fear of public audiences." I'm the furthest thing from thinking that I am or could be someone great, this separate entity that you speak of, in reality. I'm happy that someone sees at least a modicum of what I see. Thanks.
This is the heart of conflict. Too much and we have a fight. Too little and we have endless jawing. Like an instrument, just the right amount of tension in the strings to make music. So conflict is a kind of music or dance. Engage with it skilfully - and harmony. Unskillful . . . a painful cacophony . . .
We do not have 'greed' for the cessation of suffering. We have skilful right view. I have no greedy desire to be enlightened. I am just here dancing to the beat . . . :clap:
Most Buddhist vow to become enlightened in order to be able to help others, and the Boddhisatva vow speaks for itself.
Is it also a slight worry, although consistent with your view of enlightement, that you condone all US wars on the grounds that your leaders are acting in everybody's best interest. On this side of the pond we tend to be less susceptible to such crazy propogandised ideas. It always astonishes me how much trust you guys put in your leaders.
As to your point that sometimes violence is necesssary, I don't think any Buddhist would disagree with this. They might disgaree with the idea that you know when it is necessary.
Sorry if this is seems too critical. I feel your view is quite dangerous to yourself and to the people you want to help.
But it's just an opinion.
You are me, and I am you.
Isn't it obvious that we "inter-are"?
You cultivate the flower in yourself,
so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself,
so that you will not have to suffer.
I support you;
you support me.
I am in this world to offer you peace;
you are in this world to bring me joy.
You think I have faith in my leaders? pfft. You think I condone all war? pfft. I don't mean to offend you, but I stopped reading your post the moment my eyes got to this point. If I had such faith in American leadership and politics...why would I be living in China?
...you think I condone -all- war???
No, I'll tell you what's "worrying" is that I feel as if I'm speaking another language to the majority of you 99% of the time. -That's- what's worrying. You think the person who writes these things condones all war?
....really? That's whats saddens me the most, that I see something that many of you clearly do not.
I'm sorry, but I nearly flipped my lid when I read that line. To hell with the American military.
I'm not angry with or offended by you; I'm angry with myself for lacking the proper linguistic skill to convey my thoughts in a way for everyone to understand, without me seeming like a damn nutcase.
I feel like there's a serious language barrier that goes beyond words.
Definitely, dude. Definitely.
I too was a little surprised when @Florian suggested that you had claimed to support all American wars since I could not recall you having said that. After all, does anyone really support all American wars?
You aren't that hard to understand.
The people who misunderstand me seem to think that I “like” war, for what it is. The people who misunderstand me think that because of what they've read about me having a violent past, that my perception of what enlightenment is may be skewed, distorted, or that I have a masochistic urge to be suspended in violence because that's all I know, or that I have some warped interpretation of Buddhism because I served in the military, surrounded by sycophantic and staunch supporters of right-wing American nationalist ideology.
This is completely wrong. All of it.
The fact is: it's extremely, extremely rare for a person with my military background to take the eastern approach toward nonviolence; it's almost unheard of. Because of my melodramatic past, a person's psychology usually -is- distorted by lots of bad mental virii that pollutes his way of thinking into leading him down a path of self-destruction—and it was. But the thing is, I'm one of the rare individuals who've been there, done that, and have recovered himself and gained the wisdom years before the prime of his youth has passed.
I'm one of the rare individuals who've been privileged enough, fortunate enough to have been given a nomad's education, the benefit of having been raised outside of my biological family by wonderful mentors who led me out of the downward spiral of self-destruction very early in life, and gave me the ability to recognize negative stimuli and circumvent it from poisoning my mind before I grew into a full-fledged adult, before my ego was solidified. I am older than my age.
I believe the person who, toward the beginning of this thread, said that with power comes responsibility, hit the nail on the head. You would be a fool to think that I am hubristically proud of having been trained by SEALs. I know that anywhere else in the world, this would be a badge of badassery, a reason to think that I'm cool or something, but I don't view it that way; I view it as having had an experience that gave me a kind of education and power. And I don't mean “power” in the superhero sense; I mean power in the sense of the actual literary definition.
For example: If I were to roll a map of a battlefield out before most of you on a table, and ask you that Team A is assaulting Team B, you are outnumbered and on Team B, what could you do to get Team A to back off and bring this situation to close? Most of you of wouldn't be able to answer, because you don't have the experience that I do. But in hypothetical reciprocation, if you were to roll the same map out upon before -me-, I'd be able to say: “Okay, what I'll need is a radio comms guy with access to a MIL STAR satellite via wireless uplink...*here* [marks the map]. I'll need three gunners on the rooftop over...*here* in this corner [marks the map]; equip them with .50 cal rifles so that they they don't need to be as accurate with their shots in the heat of the moment. I need two men here...and one man here....blah blah blah blah blah....and this is how we can win, with minimal losses on both sides.”
Now if I could have it -my- way, there wouldn't be any fighting -at all-, with NO losses on either side. In fact, there would only be ONE side, not two sides, for we all share this earth together.
Therein, we are two -very- different breeds of people; this is why I feel like I'm speaking a different language to the majority of you. Very few of you are what Carl Jung would classify as the “warrior” archetype. So if -you- were to say, “Sure! Let's fly into Burma!”
...yes....you would indeed be treading along the lines of insanity and recklessness.
If -I- were to say “Sure! Let's fly into Burma!” I am one of the rare individuals who knows in his heart and can say with assured confidence that if I had a team of the right men and/or women, I actually -would- be able to make a serious difference, or at least, have a much, much higher chance of doing so than the average person.
This is neither insanity, nor recklessness. Why? Because I am informed, educated, and experienced on the issue and task at hand. Danger is inconsequential, because I am not so attached to this physical body, nor am I obsessed with self-preservation. Yes, I've lived a very hard life, but I am life's conqueror, not it's victim. All of my sad previous experiences have been “...nothing more than a very preparation for this final hour.” -Winston Churchill. My life, my readings, have only conditioned me, not weakened me. Not distorted my vision, but made it clearer, and it becomes ever so clear the more and more I become a master of myself.
If you were walking down the street and you encounter a woman being sexually assaulted in an alley...and it was -:::::in your power:::::- to save her, would you?
If you were reading the news and you encounter a civilization of people being assaulted...and it was -::::in your power:::::- to save them, would you?
I am not a warmonger. I hate war. I abhor war. I am an American, and I say that my own damn country is probably the most corrupted in the world. This is why I left. However, even being the peaceful Buddhist that I am, I cannot deny (no matter HOW much I hate the military) that I was given knowledge and a power from my experiences.
...and with power, comes responsibility.
I love the world, and I don't like seeing people die and get hurt, but I think that we would be naïve and selfish in our pursuits of personal happiness when there are so many out there who don't even know the word “happiness”. What kind of a person would I be if I ascended to nirvana, KNOWING that I had this power to make a difference? It's not like I'm some high school kid who's thinks he knows something about war just because he played Call of Duty a couple times. Am I geek? Hell yeah, but that has nothing to do with actual talent or ability.
I think that we would be naïve to think that war isn't a natural part of the unenlightened human mind. War is a terrible, ugly, wretched thing. There is nothing to be proud of in being a killer, or one so willing to kill. But we would be as naïve as maiden children if we were to think that war's going anywhere.
I refer to the book, Cloud Atlas, when I say that though many of us on this forum may be enlightened, we are but a handful, a few drops in an ocean compared to all of those who are not. And though my actions may equate to nothing more than a few drops in this ocean, what is the ocean if but a series of drops? I may go overseas and get shot before I even step off of my plane. I may blow up from a terrorist bombing before I even get a chance to do anything. But that's not the point: the point is, that someone said: Hey, I'm not leaving the world as it is in my own selfish pursuit of happiness, or nirvana. Someone said: There's more to life than procreation; there's something worth fighting for other than money and to quote Alexander the Great “...the things that destroy men.” Someone said: I know that the road I'm choosing to take is going to be a hard one, one that seems to have no end, and when it does end, will probably not have a happy ending. But I'm not afraid of that, because karma is inescapable so long as we are living.
"Rectitude is the power of deciding upon a certain course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering;—to die when it is right to die, to strike when to strike is right." -Nitobe, Inazo (Bushido: the Soul of Japan)
I think that to pursue nirvana is to run away from what makes us human, at least, before the world is one. To be violent all the time is an unhealthy extreme; to be nonviolent all the time is an unhealthy extreme.
“He is best of all who of himself conceiveth all things...” -Aristotle
It is one of the four noble truths in Buddhism that no matter what: we are going to suffer. Yes happiness would be nice...but I would suffer even more inside if I knew that I was the only one enjoying it. Who am I to turn my back on those in need, when it is in my power to help them? If you're nothing more than one of those “fuzzy bunny” Buddhists that @lobster jokes about, then it is not in your power to do the things that I or other enlightened warrior-archetypes can; therefore, it is not your responsibility, and I can't blame you for that. However, if it -is- in your power to help, if you -do- the personality archetype of the warrior or king, then I call anyone who has the power yet would ascend without them: a traitor to all living beings everywhere.
I'm aware that I can relinquish this attachment, this “purpose” at any time; I can detach, live a peaceful life, and ascend to nirvana. But I'm choosing not to, because there is something within me that will not allow it, a part of my conscience, a whisper from my soul that is willing to fight until -everyone- can live peaceful lives and ascend to nirvana. I know that I will walk a lonely path; this is already apparent in how I'm already misunderstood by the majority of you on this very forum. I am alone in many ways in this, I've always felt so, and that's fine. It hurts, but it's fine.
There's nothing anyone has said that I haven't already thought about. No derogatory name that you could call me that I haven't already been called. Until I am disproved, I will continue on this path in this life and the next. I may come up with ideas that are disprovable, but my purpose so far remains unchallenged. Criticized, maybe...but unchallenged.
My only mistake in posting was in forgetting that out of all the psychological archetypes, warriors are very rare in Buddhism. But they exist. I know they exist because I exist. Some people are just built for war and things war-like, but that doesn't mean that we support it blindly.
Think of me what you will. So sorry if I “Dare to Disagree” with mainstream Buddhist thought.
Oh, absolutely. This is why I blame myself, not you guys.
Most Buddhist are at war with the self, their fellows or their teachers guidance. Once we gain a peaceful acceptance of the 3 jewels and the middle way, in essence we give up our unique experiences and persona. Our unique expression shines through us but is not conflicted or constrained by attachment to its being . . .
....most, not all. I have no quarrel with my teachings, or teachers, and the only inner conflict I have is the yearning for a better love life, for it suffers. It's very hard for a man like me who thinks like I do to maintain a healthy stable relationship with a woman for very long. This, I attribute to being a part of the price that I arbitrarily choose to pay as a karmic consequence. The inner pain I feel is often in extreme loneliness, even though I am aware that loneliness is more so a state of mind; my name itself suggests "lone wolf", and "nova" (or rather a supernova) is a star that burns its brightest....right before it burns out.
(Not that I'm saying I'm a star...please don't take that too literally.)
Ah, but I have not gained peace. And I know that I have not. I know how, but I choose not to. I think you're having a hard time digesting that.
"Suffering" so-to-speak, is merely relative, for as long as we live, there will be suffering. At least I'm aware and am taking control of -why- I suffer.