26/10
At any given time, one can choose the Negative image (imago), or the Positive one. News apps/social media, etc.—all monetizing instruments—largely propound an aggrieved or self-confidence challenging Negative. These days, it’s to the extent that becoming ‘unworldly’ is quite easy. Just put down your phone. To further enhance that spirituality, become mindful of your body and its posture, what you’re feeling, the empty nature of your mind, and all arising phenomena. Rinse with confession of all your negative deeds, especially in the last twenty-four hours, purify with the Hundred Syllable Vajrasattva mantra, and repeat this regimen the next time your phone ‘calls’ you.
Pursuant to the above, one’s afflictions must be consciously reviewed and dispelled through steeled faith in a positive result. In truth, all negative behavior must be ‘willed away.’ “Cut off at their closest point,” as Kalu Rinpoche urged.
Keep in mind afflictions are both established and unestablished by being reviewed and dispelled. In this way they are both permanent and impermanent. This is the source of the suffering; they nag-on. This is why they come into review. Coming into review they must be confessed and purified. Once purified, it’s then as if they never really existed—as they really don’t. Realizing the Perfection of Wisdom, the ‘clear and empty’ (sal tun sung juk) nature of mind, is how one becomes truly liberated from one’s negative past deeds.
Proceeding in a series of the above awarenesses, confessions, and purifications of negative mind states, a progressive recognition of afflictive karmic behaviors and patterns gradually comes to mind. After then, having diligently applied oneself in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, proceed to a full embrace of the Buddha’s Eightfold Noble Path.
28/10
[Indeed] cell phones are a very shiny and distracting object. Because they call upon friends, social media, etc., it’s a devise both good and bad, and often neutral. Which is to say negative, because it wastes time for positive actions. From a larger point of view, I believe having ‘our own devises’ firmly in hand, inspires a whole array of bad, time wasting behaviors, like gossip, enmity, larceny, and machinations of violent means and results.
As the iPhone in particularly attractive, its particularly guilty of this. It was brought to us by Steve Jobs who once said he wanted to ‘put a dent in the universe.’ How prophetic. As it turns out, his particular hand device is an excellent tool for doing just that. What is this dent? The self-relatedness of humanistic endeavors: arts, science, ‘humanities’ studies and pursuits, politics, and so forth, all ready for D.I.Y. (‘do it yourself’). And while all this may seem very creative, as a key ingredient to creativity is collaboration, much of the outcomes are not.
With AI it’s even more the case in one direction, soullessness, and perhaps better in the other in that ‘garbage in garbage out’ still prevails in its computing. So, if one is capable of asking the right questions and giving one’s AI assistant genius level input, then this process, having thus been the result of a human to machine collaboration, can be highly creative, with the yield sometimes spectacular as witnessed in a few creators’ efforts online.
However, as it’s with so-called man-made, ‘artificial’ intelligence—with new models learning old maneuvers and mistakes from their progenitors—it may be doomed. In truth, much of our ‘intelligence,’ or mere mentation, is in fact ‘artificial’ in that it’s unreasonable and has no basis that can be established by a first cause and therefore has nothing ‘real’ to communicate, and only a relative—other dependent—authenticity. Uma (Middle Way Philosophy) and Pramana (epistemic logic), as core Tibet Buddhist shedras (colleges) studies, confirm this. A truly logical intelligence is one informed by direct perception, valid cognition, reasoning, or inference; or by the sage wisdom of others who’ve gone beyond ordinary human experience which eclipsed conventional intelligence and its inherent (baseless) artificiality.
What’s missing in AI is the agentive or volitional capacity that, through persistent effort employing the right method—that is, human ingenuity through a ‘tried and true’ method yoked to the empty and clear, nondual being-Buddha nature, is a purified volition informed by Shunyata, a primordial ‘emptiness’ wisdom. From this primordial, limitless resource springs the ‘Imagination’ (as William Blake capitalized it) yielding all its truly original, wholly vital, and completely ’fresh works.’
25/10
It the extraordinariness of Buddha Dharma propagations—in a gompa or even while on Zoom teachings—wherever there’s the authentic Buddha’s words engendering Right View, a purified perception obtains until one’s ordinary behaviors, like clinging to a phantom self and having ungenerous thoughts and actions toward others ‘wakes us and we drown’ in bewilderment and confusion.
So-called ‘waking life’ is convincing, up to a point. And then you begin to see the room you’re in takes on another dimension. It’s weighty familiarity, it’s very enclosed nature, and how it extends in different directions, all equally enclosed, resembles one of dream’s endless nonsensical rooms, appearing as if in an endless series of reflected mirrored images. It’s then you realize the life we awake to is still a dream from which we must also awake.
29/10
Sometimes it seems all us Vajrayana siblings are just little puppies squeezed together at the 84,000 teats of the Buddha’s doctrine. Rivalry arises when the teats go ‘dry’—or the lamas move on—and then there’s plenty of squirming for new positions at the pumps in the assembly of hopeful nursers. Whoever can please the guru-mommy most it’s thought wins the most milk of doggy kindness. This of course is not the real Bodhicitta, though its yummy white nurturing liquid might lead us to believe so. Within this three-tiered heap—high, middle, and low—each pup strives to be top dog. This is the rivalry’s function, cultivating future excellence. But what of the ‘runts,’ unpossessed of the ten favorable conditions: the opportunity to be born a human, to be born in a land where the Dharma is taught, to have perfect senses, not to commit the five extreme actions, and to have faith in the teachings. For now, they will not taste a single drop of the sweetness of aspiration’s struggle, let alone that certain single-taste of success. Outsiders, they watch on in everlasting hope, discouraged by their smallness. It’s these unfortunate ones we should pray for first, before, during, and after we sup our fill.
Comments
Post a Comment