A middle-aged guy in Berkeley CA, interested in exploring the mind through formal Zen practice, entheogens, or any means necessary. I'll be blogging about meditation teachers, groups, techniques, and whatever relates to the Big Questions of Life. With maybe some politics, gambling, and pop culture thrown in.
My friend Michael just pointed me to a great article in the New York Review of Books. In The Chess Master and the Computer, former world chess champion Gary Kasparov discusses the battle for chess supremacy between humans and artificial intelligence. He writes:
It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players. Before 1994 and after 2004 these duels held little interest. The computers quickly went from too weak to too strong. But for a span of ten years these contests were fascinating clashes between the computational power of the machines (and, lest we forget, the human wisdom of their programmers) and the intuition and knowledge of the grandmaster.
I recommend the article to anyone interested in such things. Reading it inspired me to play some checkers against a computer for the first time in years. There's a fine Java checkers program online at thinks.com. It's amusing, then infuriating, how easily this little free program can crush a mere human each and every time.
I think it was in the 80s that my brother (the MIT prof) informed me that a computer had been programmed to beat the best checkers player in the world. But it wasn't until a couple years ago that computers completely solved the game:
... if black moves first, and both sides play perfectly, the game ends in a draw. To reach this conclusion, dozens of computers have been playing the game with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques almost continuously since 1989...
Checkers has about 500 billion possible positions and is the most challenging popular game that computers have solved to date.
Here's a quote from Transmission of Mind by Huang-Po (who lived in China, they say, in the 9th century). Thanks to Daily Zen for posting this, and the NDHighlights Yahoo Group for pointing to it.
Yeah, yeah, when Huang-Po says things like "full understanding can come to you only through an inexpressible mystery," the words are a bit too beautiful and unnecessary. Truth has already appeared in this moment; why make anything? That being said, I've got a soft spot for this stuff, at least as poetry.
"Buddha" and "sentient beings" are both your own false conceptions. It is because you do not know real Mind that you delude yourselves with such objective concepts. If you will conceive of a Buddha, you will be obstructed by that Buddha! And when you conceive of sentient beings, you will be obstructed by those beings. All such dualistic concepts as "ignorant" and "Enlightened," "pure" and "impure," are obstructions.
Question: If our own Mind is the Buddha, how did Bodhidharma transmit his doctrine when he came from India?
Answer: When he came from India, he transmitted only Mind-Buddha. He just pointed to the truth that the minds of all of you have from the very first been identical with the Buddha, and in no way separate from each other. That is why we call him our Patriarch. Whoever has an instant of understanding of this truth suddenly transcends the whole hierarchy of saints and adepts belonging to any of the Three Vehicles. You have always been one with the Buddha, so do not pretend you can attain to this oneness by various practices.
Discuss it as you may, how can you even hope to approach the truth through words? Nor can it be perceived either subjectively or objectively. So full understanding can come to you only through an inexpressible mystery. The approach to it is called the Gateway of the Stillness Beyond All Activity. If you wish to understand, know that a sudden comprehension comes when the mind has been purged of all the clutter of conceptual and discriminatory thought-activity. Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it.
Were you now to practice keeping your minds motionless at all times, whether walking, sitting, standing, or lying; concentrating entirely upon the goal of no thought-creation, no duality, no reliance on others and no attachments; just allowing all things to take their course the whole day long, as though you were too ill to bother; unknown to the world; innocent of any urge to be known or unknown to others; with your minds like blocks of stone that mend no holes-then all the Dharmas would penetrate your understanding through and through. In a little while you would find yourselves firmly unattached.
Thus, for the first time in your lives, you would discover your reactions to phenomena decreasing and, ultimately, you would pass beyond the Triple World; and people would say that a Buddha had appeared in the world. Pure and passionless knowledge implies putting an end to the ceaseless flow of thoughts and images, for in that way you stop creating karma that leads to rebirth-whether as gods or men or as sufferers in hell.
The Void is fundamentally without spatial dimensions, passions, activities, delusions or right understanding. You must clearly understand that in it there are no things, no people and no Buddhas; for this Void contains not the smallest hairsbreadth of anything that can be viewed spatially; it depends on nothing and is attached to nothing. It is all-pervading, spotless beauty; it is the self-existent and uncreated Absolute. A perception, sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one, will lead to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding; and by this understanding will you awake to the truth of Zen.
Letting Go of God is a monologue by comic, cancer survivor, and Saturday Night Live alum Julia Sweeney. (imdb.com calls it a "one-person-monologue." Heh.) I'm a fan of one-person shows, and Sweeney is great at combining comedy with philosophical depth.
I'm watching it on Showtime cable TV as we speak. Sweeney talked about being visited by some fresh-faced Mormon missionaries. She was stunned by how stupid their lead story was: a tale about Jesus visiting America on his way up to Heaven, about Joseph Smith learning of this visitation when he dug up golden tablets conveniently buried in his neighborhood, how Smith conveniently found a magic rock that allowed him alone to decode the writings on the tablets, which for some reason were in ancient Egyptian. Etc.
Like most things in life, the story of Mormonism is explained most incisively by South Park. The half-hour episode All About the Mormons is available in full on several sites, including MySpace. If you haven't seen it, do so immediately.
Yes, reasonable men cannot deny that the story is stupid. Sweeney feels like telling the Mormon kids, "Even Scientologists know they shouldn't start out with stories about Xenu the alien volcano master!" But later, she realizes that she can hardly feel superior, as her own Catholic faith, if viewed through fresh ears, would sound equally preposterous.
I'm less than 1/3 through the show, but based on the title, I assume she's on a path towards some sort of Atheism. I love Atheists, at least the ones who challenge the dominant mindset in a clever way, like Sweeney and Richard Dawkins.
It's not that simple a matter for me, though. For some odd reason, the question of God is strong in my mind at this time of year. I blogged two Decembers ago about being asked, at a Christmas party, if I believed in God. At that time, I wrote
I ended up saying something like this: There aretimeswhen I get this sense that all of existence is already in perfect balance, harmony, and resolution. These experiences come only now and then, but they're strong enough to color my life at other times. I sense that there's truth in the perspective of perfect balance, whether or not I'm seeing it at the moment.
That was as honestly as I could communicate it. Though I rarely talk about "God," I realized that someone who says, "God is all-powerful and perfect, and He's taking care of everything," is pointing to a perspective that's not so different from what I had expressed.
I'll add now: lots of the time in ordinary life, I most definitely don't see a universe of perfect harmony. My thoughts are on the frustrations and difficulties and suffering of life, at least as much as the average Joe. It's also true that during the rare times I do see that perfect balance, it's a wider perspective. That is, from that elevated(?) viewpoint, I can see how the ordinary perception of imbalance is itself part of the whole. The balanced viewpoint encompasses its opposite, in a way the imbalanced viewpoint doesn't.
It's like camping in the wilderness, and marvelling at the trees and such. I know that something made the sun, the moon, and the stars, and it sure doesn't seem like that something is understandable by my ordinary mind. Some people would say the Source is randomness. To my mind, calling something random means precisely, "I don't know anything about it." I heartily agree with that sentiment, but I submit that calling the origin of existence randomness fails to explain anything at all.
When I gaze at a clear night sky long enough, I start to feel like I'm in no position to quibble with whatever made all that, as if I could do a better job. (I think the Book of Job reaches a similar conclusion. The Lord, in so many words, tells our hero, "Can you make a universe, buddy? Come back when you can make a universe, and then maybe you can question My actions.")
Anyway... particularly after some discussion about belief and doubt in the comments section of a recent post... I'm at the moment again attracted by that question. When I recall a viewpoint of perfect, complete balance, even in the midst of life's sufferings... is my mindset all that different from someone who believes that God is all-powerful, and takes care of everything? I don't even know if it matters, but that's my question of the moment.
Follow up... the day after posting this, I found a video of Sweeny discussing LGoG, in an audience Q&A from the time of the filming:
Even better... is Sweeney's speech to the Freedom From Religion Foundation a couple years ago. An audio download and transcript is available on the Friendly Atheist blog. She talks about ten things she's learned since the monologue, living as an atheist.
It's the time of year that we're told to cultivate gratitude, to look at our life as a gift. What does that mean?
Growing up, if my mother gave me a shirt for my birthday, I'd of course thank her. It was never a big deal; it didn't seem to matter so much to her when I said "thank you." But if she later saw me wearing the shirt, that seemed to make her very happy.
So on Thanksgiving, I don't try to feel thankful, or look for ways to express appreciation to some higher power. Instead, I look at whatever it is I've got right now, and think about the best way to use it.
Every week I get a paycheck, the direct deposit into my checking account from the MS Excel design contracts I do. A certain amount goes for my rent, or to food and utilities and insurance, or into savings towards retirement or the next vacation or Vegas poker jag I want to take. Since the paycheck is regular and expected, it's practically automatic, how it gets directed into well-establish channels.
But what if I hit say a video poker jackpot? I didn't expect to get it, and have no assurance that it will happen regularly. That makes it different than a paycheck; it's more like a gift. With a gift, I've got no pre-determined plans or habits to guide what to do with it. I must take a moment to stop and ponder: how am I going to use this thing that unexpectedly dropped in my lap?
Life is a gift; we sure as hell never planned to get born in this world. I wouldn't know who or what to thank for this gift... and if I did, I'm not so sure that I'd want to thank them or curse them. But forget about that; the important thing about a gift isn't where it came from, and it isn't even whether I like it or not. The one vital point is: how am I going to use it?
An hour-long documentary of Zen Master Seung Sahn has made its way around the net. Released in 1992, the 54-minute video Wake Up! On the Road with a Zen Master follows ZMSS as he travels and teaches in Europe. It's on YouTube in 6 parts; here's Part 1:
(I've written of my personal experience with ZM Seung Sahn here.)
One Giant Leap for Kind! AP reports: "The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday."
If we formulate lofty goals and impose them on our neighbors with force (governmental or otherwise), we increase conflict in society. We reduce conflict by defining and increasing those situations in which we disapprove of what our neighbor is doing, and respond with persuasion at most, taking force off the table.
Part of the genius of the founders of America was the goal of limiting the extreme power of government from intruding on individual freedom. That's why it's argued that this is a country founded on a great idea.
Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in Notes on Virginia (1782): "... it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." The same spirit can be applied to any private or consensual behavior. Those who itch to forcefully impose their superior morality in such situations, ought not to be surprised when it ultimately results in coercion directed against themselves.
Dr. Kevin Nelson, a neurologist in Louisville, Kentucky, studies near-death experiences and says they're not imagined. The explanation, he says, lies in the brain itself. "These are real experiences. And they're experiences that happen at a time of medical crisis and danger," Nelson said.
Huh? The doctor suggests that an experience explained by brain activity is real and not imagined. There must be other experiences that he'd call unreal and imagined. Where would these imagined experiences come from? Somewhere else, somewhere other than the brain?
We're always faced with big, imponderable questions. What caused the universe? In philosophical discussions, some may say the cause is God, others may say The Big Bang. Neither response resolves anything, as it just pushes the question a bit further down the road. What caused The Big Bang? Who made God?
In the early days of chess-playing computer programs, an interesting problem arose. Say the program could analyze a chess position six moves ahead (a very impressive accomplishment). If the computer was threatened with check-mate, but could make a move that pushed that disaster beyond six moves in the future, it would treat that variation as if the check-mate didn't exist.
Our brain-computers seem to operate the same way. We're faced with a great question of original cause. It can initially be disturbing to realize that we don't know where we came from (and indeed don't know who we are). If we throw in some ideas about Gods or Big Bangs, it pushes the questions a little further away, to a more abstracted level... so we can comfortably pretend that the mystery doesn't exist.
Likewise with claims that "everything is in the brain." If we assume that it all resides in the brain, what have we accomplished? We're left with the slightly more abstracted mystery: in what does the brain exist? Don't know...
We commonly posit two distinct types of phenomena: the unreal ones that exist in the mind, and the real ones that exist outside the mind. Is that true?
Our bodies have skins, so it's easy to distinguish what's inside them from what's outside. Kidneys are inside the body, trees are outside of it. But where is the mind's skin? If we can't locate the mind's skin, how can we say that one thing is inside the mind, while something else is outside it?
Tamerlane Phillips is the son of John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, and half-brother of One Day At A Time's Mackenzie Phillips (who recently promoted her book High on Arrival on Oprah, complete with incest revelations). A few weeks ago, Tamerlane was quoted in the New York Post thusly:
Tamerlane, 38, told Page Six: "My family is and always will be a decrepit bowl of dog urine compared to Nityananda of Ganeshpuri. That is how great Nityananda is." The Indian yogi died in 1961. "Worship Nityananda, not the Phillips family. Nityananda can protect you," said Tamerlane.
Nityananda was the iconic yogi worshipped by Swami Muktananda, my own erstwhile guru. It's a mark of Nityananda's greatness that, nearly 50 years after his death in India, he's still inspiring an American quasi-celebrity to consider his family to be like dog urine.
Though this is an unusually big splash for Nityananda to make in the popular press, he's long had great influence in the Spiritual subculture. Among the successful gurus claiming Nityanada as a Master are the aforementioned Muktananda, his elusive successor Gurumayi, and graphomaniacAdi Da Samraj (aka Da Free John, Bubba Free John, etc). The lineage is well-detailed on the Nityananda Tradition site (created by my friend and former chess rival Swamiji Shankarananda of Australia).
Maybe we can't hold Nityananda responsible for his post-mortem devotees (and good luck trying to hold a dead man responsible for anything, anyway). Yet I do think there's some insight to be drawn from Tamerlane's eloquence.
If you teach that some things are hot, it by necessity implies that other things are cold. You can't have Good without Evil, or Spiritual without Mundane. To the extent that devotees shower Nityananda etc with extreme praise, it follows with mathematical precision that they'll balance the equation by cultivating derisive attitudes towards someone else. If we make one person out to be existentially holy, spiritual, perfected, and God-like... then we'll surely make someone else out to be dog urine.
Follow-up: Tamerlane made similar comments on YouTube, so I've added a brief clip here. On video and in context, he comes off more sympathetic than in the NY Post quote. His beliefs may have been useful in his situation. The benefits of holding his belief-system come wrapped in many other effects, and the helpfulness may have a limited shelf-life. Still, Tamerlane gets points in my book for having some awareness that he's flirting with fanaticism.
I hadn't read/heard much of Sam Harris before watching this interview on Bill Maher's Real Time. Harris' book The End of Faith helped launch "New Atheism" movement... without even using the word "atheism." I enjoyed this Real Time segment and was impressed with Harris.
At the beginning of the interview, Harris says that atheism "has no content." I like how Harris is using the word to mean simply not embracing beliefs based on faith without evidence. He explains that we no more need to learn atheism than we need to learn how to be a non-astrologer.
I've watched a number of videos by fellow New Atheist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is more like a bomb-throwing evangelist for The Cause. This is less in tune with my own attitude. Theists make "God" and then believe in him, while Atheists (using the non-Harris definition) make God and then dis-believe in him. I'm more interested in the option of not making God.
That being said, Dawkins is insightful and entertaining. (A British accent adds fun to just about any lecture.) His site includes fine clips from his talk and Q&A at UC Berkeley. Here's a shorter clip of Dawkins from a Q&A at a college in Virginia:
(My two previous blog postings about Dawkins and Atheism, from last year, are here and here.)
A few years back I watched a typically brilliant HBO documentary about heroin users. One addict was interviewed who said that she intended to kick the habit someday, and really thought she was capable of doing so. She had one great worry and fear, though, and expressed it something like this: "If I didn't have to go out and find my fix... what would I do every day?"
Zen Master SeungSahn would always ask, "Why do you eat every day?" The underlying meaning is, "Why do you live in this world?" Bringing up the question is a way to clarify life-direction. The Zen Master would say that a clear direction is one that's not just "for me."
Traditionally, Buddhism was practiced by monks. They separated themselves from society, and practiced non-attachment to I/my/me-thinking. When there isn't clinging to "I," then life is moment-to-moment; whatever you're doing, just do it.
For lay Buddhists in the modern age, the teaching adds more emphasis on compassion. We don't separate from society; we're constantly dealing with one relationship or another. A not-only-for-myself direction arises from wondering how to help others, whatever beings I'm connected to, whoever appears in front of me just now.
One virtue of the Buddhist goal of "saving all beings from suffering"... is that it takes infinite time to achieve. We thus won't have to deal with the horrifying possibility of actually getting what we want most. The following video clip brings up this issue in all its profundity:
Resident monk Kwan Sahn Su Nim has been keeping the Empty Gate Zen CenterYouTube Channel updated with short clips from our weekly public programs. Here's the latest:
Also from YouTube, video of our founder, Zen Master Seung Sahn (aka Dae Soen Sa Nim). It's a collection of clips from teaching talks, interviews, etc, put together for his 3-year memorial in 2007.
With all the stories and quotes I've included in this blog about ZM Seung Sahn, I don't know if I've ever posted any actual video of him before. Perhaps these clips are worthwhile in expressing the spirit behind the words of his teaching:
Finally, in today's web surfing I discovered a couple blogs maintained by Barry Briggs, a brother in both Dharma and Computer Geekdom. I've added them to my links list to the right of this page: Go Drink Tea (Koans for Everyday Use) and Ox Herding (Practice and Daily Life).
Traffic to my own blog (this one) mysteriously up-ticked, doubling the usual number of visitors for a couple days last week. It seems that more people are arriving through simply Googling "Random Thoughts," particularly in Canada. Go figure. I offer the above videos and links in the hope that these extra passers-by will find something useful herein.
Zen Master Soeng Hyang (Barbara Rhodes, head Zen Master of the Kwan Um School of Zen) just sent an email to the members of the School, quoting this poem from Ryokan (1758-1831):
The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind; The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind. The flower opens, the butterfly comes; The butterfly comes, the flower opens. I don't know others, Others don't know me. By not-knowing we follow nature's course.
ZM Soeng Hyang wrote, "What is 'nature's course'? Understanding can not help you."
My Buddhist name is Kwan Soeng, meaning Perceive Nature. A friend I've gone camping with gets upset whenever there are voices in the wilderness: "Screw those humanoids... I came here for nature!" But every wave in the ocean is water; isn't everything nature? What is there that's not nature?
Two facinating, totally unrelated things I came across today.
On Showtime, watched the documentary "Forbidden Lies." This wonderful movie explores a literary hoax, and touches on big issues of truth and deception.
I happened upon a site today that allowed me to see the top 20 seach-engine phrases that had resulted in visits to my blog (this one) in the last year. Hey, maybe if I use all 20 of them in a single post, it'll boost readership. Ya gotta give the people what they want. Here goes, these are the top 20, for real:
adi da dies, adi da death, trippy+patterns, adi da dead, trippy+shrooms, death of adi da, baba muktananda, trippy+mushrooms, trippy+swirls, trippy+visuals, trippy+marijuana, trippy+animated+gif, trippy+mushroom, mushroom+trip, death of Adi Da, adi da is dead, adi da blog, mushroom trip video, Death of Adi Da, Adi Da death
The 2009 World Series of Poker (WSOP) is complete... except for the final table of the main event, which is delayed till November to build suspense and marketing opportunities. It should be an exciting finish, with super-star Phil Ivey among the remaining nine contenders.
Recorded coverage of the action so far begins tonight on ESPN. The WSOP was over a month long, with different tournaments played every day, culminating with the "main event" (no-limit hold-em with a $10K entry fee). The winner of this final event is informally consider the world champion of poker for the year. Top prize is over $8 million. Ivey is rumored to have severalsidebets and promotional deals worth tens of millions more if he wins.
At Empty Gate Zen Center, new resident monk Kwan Sahn Su Nim is getting a few more videos onto our YouTube channel. Below is an excerpt from the weekly Q&A with Zen Master Bon Soeng (Jeff Kitzes):
KSSN is also maintaining our active presence on Facebook and Twitter. Here's a recent tweet, quoting from old Chinese Zen Master Nam Cheon:
Understanding is illusion, not understanding is blankness. If you understand the way of not thinking, it is like space, clear and void.
To get some context on this quote, here's a right-to-the-point Dharma Talk from Zen Master Dae Kwang (Abbott of the Kwan Um School of Zen, friend and frequent visitor to Empty Gate).
