Author: gnox

Content

The first step toward living honestly with the human predicament is recognizing that all conscious beliefs, all scientific theories and religious revelations, all thoughts and concepts as well as the words that express them, are symbols. This blog post is a symbol. And as C.S. Peirce wrote, “Symbols are particularly remote from the Truth itself.” They are a means of directing attention, but since they do not contain the reality they direct attention to, they can also misdirect it (intentionally or not).

Beyond this recognition, there are many ways of living honestly. A symbol expressing one way was written by Shohaku Okumura in his book Living by Vow (2012). Its immediate context is a chapter about this triad of vows taken by Buddhist practitioners:

I take refuge in the Buddha, vowing with all sentient beings, acquiring the Great Way, awakening the unsurpassable mind.
I take refuge in the Dharma, vowing with all sentient beings, deeply entering the teaching, wisdom like the sea.
I take refuge in the Sangha, vowing with all sentient beings, bringing harmony to all, completely, without hindrance.

(Okumura explains: “Shakyamuni Buddha, born in India about twenty-five hundred years ago, is our original teacher. He awakened to the reality of our life. Both his teachings about this reality and the reality itself are called Dharma. Sangha is the community of people who study the Buddha’s teaching and follow his way of life.”)

Here is the text:

We must wake up to the reality of the impermanence of our lives. Because of impermanence, our death is inevitable. We must find the best and most peaceful way of life. Success, wealth, and fame are not significant in the final stage of our lives. The important point is to return to the matter of life and death, to wake up to the reality of this body and mind, and on that basis create a way of life. This, I think, is the meaning of taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

You don’t have to become a Buddhist and take refuge. Buddhism is only one of many paths, one way to wake to the reality of our life. When we become a Buddhist due to various causes and conditions, we follow the path of the Buddha. We seek to manifest the universal life force which we have been given. We live on this earth with everything we need as a gift from nature. It seems that our society doesn’t live in accordance with nature. It acts like a cancer, independently, in its own way. When a cancer becomes too strong, the body dies. When the body dies, the cancer also must die. Cancer is paradoxical. Modern civilization is similar. We have no direction. We just try to live in an ever more convenient way. We chase after prosperity. We live separate from nature and build an artificial world around us. As we get stronger and stronger, we destroy more of the environment. When nature dies, we die.

How can we go back to nature, to the vital life force? This is the essential koan for us, the question we have to work on. In a sense this whole universe is like a hospital. We are all sick. How can we recover from this human sickness? The Buddha’s teaching and the Buddhist Way can be one of the paths to recovery. The Buddha is the doctor who guides the healing process; dharma practice is the medicine he prescribes; the sangha, and all living beings in this universe, are nurses to aid our recovery. This is what the text [an old Buddhist scripture titled Daijō-gi-shō] means by “These three treasures are the final place to return.” They release us from the suffering of a life based on egocentricity and return us to the original, wholesome way of life.

—Shohaku Okumura, Living by Vow (pp. 76-77).

context

The human predicament of our time is the context of everything humans do.

The soul of the situation is that ‘human society is part of a global biotic community in which excessive human dominance is self-destructive” (William R. Catton).

The core spiritual principles of this time belong to what Catton calls “the ecological paradigm”:

  • E1. Human beings are just one species among many species that are interdependently involved in biotic communities.
  • E2. Human social life is shaped by intricate linkages of cause and effect (and feedback) in the web of nature, and because of these, purposive human actions have many unintended consequences.
  • E3. The world we live in is finite, so there are potent physical and biological limits constraining economic growth, social progress, and other aspects of human living.
  • E4. However much the inventiveness of Homo sapiens or the power of Homo colossus may seem for a while to transcend carrying capacity limits, nature has the last word.

Homo colossus is the embodiment of excessive human dominance. Some call it “the Superorganism” or “Moloch.” Its behavior is responsible for the ecological overshoot resulting from ignorance or denial of the above spiritual principles and excessive concentrations of socioeconomic power among the dominator minority. The results include devastation of the planetary life support system, accelerating extinction of life forms, and increasing misery for the dominated human majority. Yet this behavior appears to be beyond human control. On November 5, 2024, citizens of the “United States” elected a leader who promises to speed up the overshoot along with its social consequences.

William Catton wrote his book Overshoot in 1980 to show that “400 years of exuberance,” including colonial expansion, had already produced ecological overshoot with all its social fallout, especially in the U.S. The global human population at the time was around 4 billion. It has doubled in the 45 years since then, and human dominance of the Earth has grown exponentially, as witnessed by the data in Peter Victor’s Escape from Overshoot (2023).

Not only ecological principles but even the facts of the human predicament continue to be ignored or denied by Homo colossus. For instance, the corporations profiting from fossil fuel extraction knew 50 years ago that increasing use of their product would heat up the planet to the point of ecological collapse, but they have lied to the public about it ever since. Nearly all of the world’s political leaders have continued to preach the gospel of perpetual “progress” through economic “growth,” drowning out the voices of those who recognize the realities of ecological limits and collective human behavior. Now the American division of Homo colossus have elected the Liar-in-Chief to dominate them. The prospect of escaping from overshoot has never seemed so remote.

How does a human live honestly in this predicament? I’ll offer some suggestions in the next post.

Laws

The first law of energy is that through all transformations,
it is not created or destroyed, but conserved.
Sometimes it is embodied, sometimes it matters, sometimes it dissipates.

The second law is that any actual use makes some of it useless for other purposes.

The first law of life is that once begun, it must continue
according to the form of its embodiment
to consume, organize and dissipate the transforms of energy
according to its propensities.

Life is usually unusual. But
life is a zero-sum game.
Two dangers never cease threatening the world:
order and disorder.
Every local gain is a loss on the other side.
Vaulting ambition o’erleaps itself,
And falls on th’other.

Only time is eternal.
Embodiments of energy are temporary.

Are you sure?

a short essay in Content and Context (TS ·15) – it includes plenty of links you can use for more context or disambiguation.

As a companion piece, i recommend a podcast (‘Frankly’ #60) by Nate Hagens, where he asks the question “What (if anything) are you absolutely certain of?” – and lists 17 answers of his own. On Youtube it’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPv0wa5U0WA.

If you’d like to participate in a small-group discussion of this excerpt from Turning Signs, send Gary an email proposing a date and time that’s good for you, and we’ll see who else is available at that time, and i’ll send everyone a Zoom link for it.

For a while we had a series of regular sessions to confer about the chapters of Turning Signs in order, and we might revive that if enough people can make a long-term commitment to a regular time slot for this purpose. Let me know if you’re interested. Meanwhile we can try having single sessions on stand-alone points from the book at any time you choose.

How to read

The reading situation is always changing. In the 21st Century, changes in media (such as the ascendancy of the internet) have deeply affected our modes of reading. Here’s a short list of the main modes:

  • Searching – looking for something very specific in a text or a network of potential information – has been vastly speeded up and extended by access to search engines, as compared to the searching one can do in printed texts.
  • Browsing – meandering casually from text to text (site to site, page to page) on the chance of finding something interesting – is almost the opposite of searching, but has also been facilitated by the internet. It’s no accident that the software used for reading webpages is called a “browser”; it’s optimized for dealing with the miscellaneous. But if you have actually read this far into this page, you’ve entered a different reading mode, either skimming or scanning.
  • Skimming is the speed-reading mode you use for a newspaper or novel or “social media” page, when you just want to get the gist of the information or story without getting deeply involved in the text or expecting every word to be carefully chosen.
  • Scanning is a much more intense and concentrated mode in which you study the text closely without skipping over any of the details. However, even scanning does not necessarily involve the kind of deep immersion in a text that i call
  • Whole-body reading or the experiencing of a turning sign. In order to do that, you have to focus on the dynamic object of the sign through the text, to fully inhabit that universe of discourse.

Using the internet for this last and deepest kind of reading is certainly possible, but the practice seems to get swept aside by the habits of skimming and browsing encouraged by this medium. When we do get immersed in an e-text, it’s often something we found by searching, or something we’ve been directed to by some algorithm based on some database of our browsing habits, and this makes it all too likely that it will confirm our prejudices (the “blinkers of habit”) instead of challenging them. This will discourage critical thinking – which is an important part of experiential or deep reading – unless we make a conscious effort to choose with care what we read and how we read it.

The explosion of claims on our attention, and the resulting frustration, was noted even back in the 20th Century by Stanislaw Lem, in his 1985 review of a 1988 book (published on the moon) called One Human Minute:

Because advertising, with monstrous effectiveness, attributes perfection to everything—and so to books, to every book—a person is beguiled by twenty thousand Miss Universes at once and, unable to decide, lingers unfulfilled in amorous readiness like a sheep in a stupor. So it is with everything. Cable television, broadcasting forty programs at once, produces in the viewer the feeling that, since there are so many, others must be better than the one he has on, so he jumps from program to program like a flea on a hot stove, proof that technological progress produces new heights of frustration.… There had to be a book, then, about what Everybody Else was doing, so that we would be tormented no longer by the doubt that we were reading nonsense while the Important Things were taking place Elsewhere.

That book is imaginary, but in Lem’s review of it, ‘the microscopic capacity of human consciousness is revealed’ (p. 7) to every deep reader who acknowledges his own limitations.

But deep reading also requires ‘the spirit of freedom,’ as Virginia Woolf observed in a Common Reader piece called “How Should One Read a Book?”:

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions – there we have none.

But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.

Ideally, reading (including viewing, hearing and touching) ought to be a balancing loop in the guidance system – a way of trying out a less familiar perspective on the world, to find out whether it might make a difference to working or playing with it from then on.