Archive for the ‘Buddhism’ Category

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Saturday, January 24th, 2009

No prescription tramadol online legally, In his blog series "A programmer's view of the universe", Google engineer Steve Yegge is exploring the ontological insights gained in his years writing software.  His first post told the sad story of a pet fish who died after discovering the nature and limits of its own captivity, its tank, while looking out through the glass walls to a world it could never reach.  His latest post uses the video game Mario Kart to explore the concept of embedded system, where the player controls drivers who race around a track inside a universe completely contained within the computer, but with the illusion of a landscape that stretches off into the horizon.  Here he introduces the concept of the one-way wall, which the players butt up against, for example, when attempting to drive too far off the track.  The rules of the game keep the players safely within prescribed boundaries; the game software itself can monitor and control all activity within the simulated game world, but the game cannot "see into" the containing world outside its confines.

Yegge is probably fully aware of the well-worn philosophical implications of this line of inquiry; he is, after all, a self-proclaimed fan of Douglas Hofstadter, whose almost mystical ruminations on the nature of recursion and embeddedness in Gödel, Escher, Bach are a metaphysical classic in the computer-geek canon.  Seeing oneself as a creature in an embedded system attempting to perceive the workings of the "outer system" - to look through the one-way-wall the other way - has forever been a preoccupation of intelligent and spiritually-inclined seekers.

Flammarion woodcut


I would submit, contra Baudrillard, that while we denizens of the internet may today experience an unprecedented degree of abstraction, humanity has never inhabited a space other than one populated by self-created simulacra, and that indeed, the simulacrum has always been the very nature of the worldview of every individual who has ever lived.  For the human brain is itself an embedded system, fed information through a one-way wall (our sensory input) and developing a model of the world outside to the best of our abilities and according to our internal propensities.

Human communities are also an embedded system, one in which individuals reside, and they share a pool of common assumptions about the world (myths) and the "rules" by which we participate in it, refining and elaborating on the individual's innate sense of right and wrong.  Much like cells organizing themselves in a human body, or ants in a colony, all of human civilization and culture -- indeed all human achievement -- is built up of thousands of individual decisions within a socially prescribed rule system.  Such self-emergent organization -- whereby progressively more complex, richly varied systems construct themselves from a few basic rules -- is very appealing to computer geeks, who can create such embedded systems on their computers with just a few lines of recursive code, like this 1-dimensional cellular automaton:

1d cellular automata


This ties into a conversation I was having the other day with a colleague who had just finished reading another computer-geek classic, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near.  Kurzweil's work of Utopian fantasy is popular among geeks, since it promises a future world (not too distant, either: according to his projections, within the next 50 years) in which technology will become sufficiently advanced that computer intelligence will outpace human intelligence.

What happens beyond this point is impossible to say, but according to Kurzweil's theory, machine intelligence will recursively create new machines with rapidly accelerating intelligence, Very Cheap Tramadol, which may (among other things) provide capabilities for human immortality, interstellar space travel, or perhaps even, one day, create nanobots that will transform the nature of matter and reality so that all matter will reach a point of "supersaturation" in which the entire universe becomes a gigantic supercomputer.  This event is called the singularity, also known as "nerd rapture".

To which I replied: What if the singularity has already happened?  How would you know, no prescription tramadol online legally.

Singularity speculation (in its modern form) began in 1965 with J. L. Good, but was eagerly adopted in the post-psychedelic era by early transhumanist and Harvard psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary in his eccentric 1979 book The Game of Life, in which he uses the Tarot, the I Ching, Kundalini Yoga, and various other esoteric traditions as metaphors for a projected evolution of life (and accompanying stages in the development of individual consciousness), beginning with single-celled organisms and progressing through fish, lizards, mammals, apes, primitive humans, early civilizations, monarchies, and monotheism, then stepping into increasingly liberated states of self-awareness, reality fabrication, DNA manipulation, and atomic, gravitational, and quantum manipulation, into the final payoff, Tramadol Caps 50mg, fusion into a black hole, which in turn creates a new universe.  (Paul Davies also alludes to this possibility, that new universes could be spawned by sufficiently advanced technology.)

The key insight that Leary brings to this fantasy is one of cyclical motion: once a new universe is spawned, the cycle begins anew, for new worlds and new civilizations to repeat this journey.  Indeed, for Leary, each stage of evolution goes through a three-stage cycle of birth, maturation, and decay before leading into the next stage.  This reflects the notion of a cyclical universe in Hindu cosmology, which however sees the course of civilization as one destined toward decay and destruction rather than a state of perfection.  In the Hindu view, it is the individual life that re-enters again and again in new forms to attempt to climb the ladder to liberation. No prescription tramadol online legally, In any event, the key ingredient to this timely yet ancient cosmology -- recursion -- leads us to the insight that no matter the ultimate direction of history or the universe, we exist only in a single moment, a point in motion, brought here by events outside our control and to be swept away by forces outside our control, in death and decay.  We act out our parts as best we can, knowing that we are subsumed in the eternal flux of creation and destruction that define all existence.

This problem is present in all cosmologies (including the modern scientific one), and it's a crucial weakness for the monothestic/Judeo-Christian view, which sees an eternally static Creator God "zapping" the world and time into existence exactly as we see it today, then just as abruptly, destroying it all in a raging fire, whisking his faithful off to eternal, static bliss.  I find this view of the universe pitifully unimaginative and lacking a key ingredient: sacred union, from which we derive imbalance, from which comes change, repetition, recursion, and eternity.  The Judeo-Christian god is deeply flawed for lacking (or, more truthfully, denying) a creative feminine force, which drives this change and evolution.

In fact, to reconcile this problem, Kabbalistic thinkers have developed the idea of tzimtzum: that, in order to make room for creation, the omnipresent God had to withdraw from a part of himself, leaving himself imperfect.  Thus even Yahweh seeks a mystical union with his own creation.  In any event, Cheap Tramadol Fedex Overnight, we know from experience that the nature of reality is the paradox of eternal change, and yet in common Christian thought Yahweh immaturely seeks to deny this, asserting the immutability of his own personality and ego.  (Gary Snyder reports a Mahayana Buddhist commenting, "He needs to do more meditation.")

A frequent counter to the idea of an "unmoved mover" god is the question: well, where did God come from, then?  The answer, "I am that I am", is true yet unsatisfying; this is not the petty, adolescent, egotistical, tribal Yahweh-god but his Mother - the primordial Void, the backdrop in which the creator God appears - talking.  Here's Jesus, emerging from Mother-God's vagina, represented as a Mandorla:

Mandorla


That's more like it!  Every cause must have a cause, and this leads us into a state of "turtles-all-the-way-down", or infinite recursion, which may as well be an eternal cycle, represented as the self-devouring serpent ouroboros:

Ouroborous


The ultimate, all-encompassing religious expression of this concept is contained within this modern image of the Tibetan Buddhist Dharmapala (dharma-protector) Mahakala:

Mahakala


Here, the Great Time-Lord Mahakala advances through time in a blaze of activity, through all dimensions, in perpetual combat with himself as he generates adversaries (his own image) and slaughters and devours them, thereby regenerating himself.  His myriad arms, at once swords and wings, cradle in their clawed hands Bodhisattvas (saints and future Buddhas).  From this eternal recursive creation-destruction, all forms are generated (symbolized in the tiger skin, the leopard prints, the octopus tentacles, the various faces... well, What Is Tramadol Used For, keep looking, you'll see).  The two tracks of infinitely-receding adversary heads are joined in an earring which points to the empty heart of the beast, the Void.  Yet in his hands, amid the fires and the creation and the death and destruction, he protects in a delicate (vaginal/Mandorla-like) clamshell the central Mystery of the sacred union, Yabyum: the eternal, dark Buddha making love to his own ephemeral feminine nature, enraptured in the embrace of the beloved.

In the distance stand other Buddhas, Dharmapalas, and various demons: the Dharmapala replicated, again, across yet other dimensions (other universes, perhaps?).

The lesson that the Dharmapala brings to us is this: wherever you are, whatever you are doing, all things are in flux.  There is always change, there is no Utopian state of perfection, for creation and destruction are intertwined.  Fighting through the one-way wall, stepping out of the matrix, you find yourself in another matrix, and you cannot escape.  Concentrate therefore on the center, this fusion of opposites, from which all things flow, and you will inhabit at once all levels of existence; the nested shells of all matrices outward and inward come into focus, and you see them line up in eternal recursion in all dimensions for all time.  This is Moksha, liberation.

In the meantime, humanity will continue to attempt to construct a utopia out of machines.  It's what we do, worker bees that we are. Futile though it is, it's in our nature.  It is clear that while we may construct bigger and more fantastic fishtanks for ourselves, Ultram Overdose, we cannot escape fishtank existence.  But perhaps we don't really want to.

No matter.  Onward.  Upward.  Inward.  Outward.  Always.

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Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Buy tramadol online, I grew up in a small Kentucky town in the mid-90's, where we didn't yet have modern amenities like the Internet or a public library.  I was thus confined to drawing inspiration from whatever I could get my hands on at my high school library:  Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, Robert Pirsig and yes, a bit of Ayn Rand (hey, every teenager has a phase).  But perhaps no reading had as much impact on my development, as a teenage conservative Christian, as archconservative evangelical theologian C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, written as an imagined correspondence from an high-ranking demon (Screwtape) to his junior-ranking nephew, Wormwood, on assignment on the terrestrial plane attempting to seduce a human "patient" away from following "the Enemy" (God).  (Funny how in hell there are apparently "junior" demons who just joined the ranks, you know, recently....) In this passage, near the end of Chapter 4, Screwtape instructs his charge on how to lead people astray during the act of prayer:

...But even if [the Enemy] defeats your first attempts at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon.  The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, paypal tramadol online cheap, cannot avoid.  They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain in our lives.  If you look into your patient's mind when he is praying, you will not find that.  If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients.  There will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation; there will be vaguer -- perhaps quite savage and puerile -- images associated with the other two Persons.  There will even be some of his own reverence (and of bodily sensations accompanying it) objectified and attributed to the object revered.  I have known cases where what the patient called his "God" was actually located -- up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall.  But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it -- to the thing that he has made, not the Person who has made him.  You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of this composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer.  For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if he ever consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be," our situation is, for the moment, Does Ultram Cause Weight Gain, desperate.  Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and if the man trusts himself to the completely real, eternal, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it -- why, then it is that the incalculable may occur.  In avoiding this situation -- this real nakedness of the soul in prayer -- you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose.  There's such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!

To which the Tibetan Book of the Dead (only discovered, alas, years later) has the answer:

Alas. when the Uncertain Experiencing of Reality is dawning upon me here,
With every thought of fear or terror or awe for all [apparitional appearances] set aside,
May I recognize whatever [visions] appear, as the reflections of mine own consciousness;
May I know them to be of the nature of apparitions in the Bardo:
When at this all-important moment [of opportunity] of achieving a great end,
May I not fear the bands of Peaceful and Wrathful [Deities], mine own thought-forms.

Repeat thou these [verses] clearly, and remembering their significance as thou repeatest them, go forwards, [O nobly-born], buy tramadol online. Thereby, whatever visions of awe or terror appear, recognition is certain; and forget not this vital secret art lying therein.

O nobly-born, Buy Hydrochloride Tramadol, when thy body and mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. Generic tramadol online without prescription, That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Buy tramadol online, Recognize it.

From the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come. That is the natural sound of thine own real self. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed.


Whatever I think God is, can be nothing other than my own creation.  This goes for you too, Christianity.  Like all religions, you are an apparition of human creation.  Like everything that is, you are a figure on the unknowable ground of Reality, and by the mere fact of your existence, What Drug Class Is Tramadol, you carry the germ of the Divine.

But I'm sorry, I have to tell you this: Just about everything you do, Buddhism does as well or better.  Just sayin'.

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Friday, January 2nd, 2009

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has given a TED talk Overnight tramadol online, where he discusses the difference in moral perception between liberals and conservatives, and ties political inclinations into religious symbols and psychology, concluding that both liberals and conservatives ultimately should work together (as in the Vishnu-conserver, Shiva-destroyer dichotomy), citing a quote from Buddhist monk Sent-t'san:

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.
The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease.

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Monday, December 15th, 2008

Buddhist tantric union: time and eternity

Overnight tramadol overnight delivery, Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, Drugs Similar To Ultram, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Paypal tramadol online without prescription, Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes, Tramadol Overdose.

Behold, thou art fair, Tramadol Used To Treat, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.


-- Song of Solomon 1:2, 5, 50 Dose Mg Tramadol, 15-16

The above image, from the Buddhist tantric tradition, is allegorical in exactly the same way that Song of Solomon is allegorical: while superficially erotic, the image illustrates the yearning of the temporal and finite (female) for the eternal and infinite (male).  The Christian tradition views mankind as the Bride of Christ; the Buddhist tradition views the seeker as the temporal incarnation of an eternal force.  Each one expresses the same root tension inherent in our condition.

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Thursday, May 15th, 2008

No prescription tramadol overnight delivery, In his own characteristically simplistic manner, David Brooks picks up on a cultural current that seems to be gaining steam.  He writes in this week's NYT about "Neural Buddhism", a new mentality among scientists fueled by new thinking in neuroscience.  It's worth a read:

... My guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. Free tramadol no prescription, The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.

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In unexpected ways, Buy Cheap Tramadol, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation, no prescription tramadol overnight delivery. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, App Tramadol, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. Generic tramadol generic delivery, I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.


When science offers more spiritual insight than orthodox religious fundamentalism, the days of fundamentalism are numbered.

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