our mind is all sense data , thoughts ! but not in one of those thoughts and sensation will one find an i or me! something is doing the experiencing but it does not have a grasp.
if somebody asked to see a plane and you show them the rudder , the engine and the wings and they replied with where is the plane? you would have thought that they were a few chicken wings short of a happy meal because a plane is a sum of it’s parts , it’s the same way with humans!
our consciousness doesn’t have a center not in time not in mental space our mental selves are constantly in flux ever-changing ever impermanent there is a bit of a similar sentiment in the science-y cosmological tradition that we are star stuff that underneath the complex recursive storytelling machinery of our brains i am x years old i am x feet high in x century i am i beneath those stories there is biology and beneath that is chemistry and beneath that is a unity of physics and deep time that everything is made from we were once cells then a baby, in a while we will be dead but we were always a part of the universe and will always be this the idea is that our identities are incidental and clinging to them over the majesty of the universe is wicked silly there is no magical line between baby and us now that we can point to and say and then i became me it isn’t so much that we can’t step in the same river twice but with the entire world in flux with us in flux it’s that we can’t even step in the same river once in the dharmapata the sayings of the buddha there’s the line though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself or herself obviously mastery of the self it’s ane at idea and boy do we seem a long way off from that one just daily life is weird enough bound without security lost without adventure wandering quietly confused for years through the strange cityscapes of the 21st century trying to find yourself in it in any of it trying to find the naive happiness of childhood once again and is this what life is now you think little bursts of euphoria a few times a year drug induced or chance induced then back to the uniform grey of a day you won’t remember and if you should ever stick your head up above the parapet to ask excuse me is this all there is? then only to be told to shut upand just get on with it all the while knowing that a star died to make you and you no longer find romance in that all the while being surrounded by miraculous technology and you no longer find romance in that the absurd ever drama of just trying to be okay and the game gets faster and the game gets harder more gadgets more screens more patches and non-stick frying pans and fiber broadband and ultrasonic toothbrushes and thank you for your application but and sorry to hear you’re feeling sad but and we did everything we could but please god make me a stone I promised myself i’d be more than this I promised others i’d be more than this alive and not quite living deathly not quite dead and all the while rages the inner battle the great quiet attempt to fix oneself and knowing no one else can do it for you and that battle is hardly limited to the individual our entire civilization is engaged in it too on the 28th of january 1986 an o-ring failureled to the space shuttle challenge rexploding about 72 seconds into launch ,killing all seven aboard it was horrific! later news anchor tom brackel would say of the accident the american public will be demanding some difficult answers andof course we’ll all have to examine whatit is that we want from this era of high technology those words were said almost 40 years ago now but they couldn’t betruer still today because it’s a fairly weird age to live in at the moment watching the human race attempting to protect itself from itself like a teenager or mood swings or experimenting with new ideologies all smashing up mum’s car and refusing to apologize inthe last 30 years about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty which is incredible obviously not to mention the 800 million people who currently don’t have access to safe drinking water plus the about 14,000 kids under five who are dying preventable deaths every day all of which we will all no doubt agree is and on top of that about 800 000 people or one Copenhagen take their own lives every year and if there was a day ,just one day every century when we all got together to hash out what our goals actually are as a species like top five to do’s for homo sapiens in the next hundred years. 1.cheeky trip to nearest star system ,it’s on there for sure making it a un human rights violation to start a tinder conversation with a single smiley face on the list definitely but try to make sure everyone’s doing cool and like eating and stuff no one in their right mind would put that below number one follow closely behind by number two when everyone’s eating and stuff let’s all work out how to be happy or at least not living on the edge of existential despair yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself or rather if we make it to the distant future where we have warped drives and free energy or whatever and at the very same timehundreds of millions of us are still living in extreme poverty that isn’t star trek !that’s blade runner and except for the flying cars and cool clothes we really don’t want bladerunner the upside of all of this ofcourse is that it is a choice and human problems can be solved by human beings in the words of the much missed david graber the ultimate hidden truth of theworld is that it is something that we make and could just as easily makedifferentlythings could be a whole lot worsethings could be a whole lot better anyway this has not been an attempt to convert anyone to buddhism i’m not a buddhist i’m barely a person but as an ideology buddhism has in part probably persisted for over two millennia now because it points directly to questions that are just as relevant today as they were two millennia ago namely how can we overcome suffering why are we always fighting our own stupid nature and what actually are we and the answer to a lot of that buddhism says rather uniquely is not up into the big transcendent but down into the acceptance of the impermanence of the world and into the murk of our messy nature that liberation salvation whatever we call it is waiting inside the way out is down and as we head deeper into potentially the most dangerous century in human history this battle of trying to regulate our bizarre prehistoric tendencies might determine whether we come out the other side of this century because we’re getting wicked technological advancements but like are we much wiser for it you probably know the kardashev scale !already it’s basically a litmus test for categorizing how advanced civilizations could become so atype 1 civilization could utilize allthe energy available on its home planet a type 2 civilization all the energyavailable in its solar system and a type 3 civilization all the energy available in its galaxy and that’s all well and ood but the kardashev scale measures a civilization’s success by its energy consumption though we could use another metric wisdom a type 1 wisdom civilization could have progressed to astate where no one goes hungry where no one needlessly dies of easily curable diseases and everyone has at least the same starting conditions universally onwhich to try and build a life type 2 might be a civilization where no one has to involuntarily suffer from physical or mental maladies from chronic pain from anxiety etc maybe where we stop inflicting industrial scale harm on our animal mates and keeping them inhorrific conditions but rant over iwon’t go on about it and type 3 acivilization where human ,animal ,sentient toaster whatever doesn’t have to suffer at all with disease dead with humankind finally liberated from the evolutionary genetic shackles that have been tied around our legs for millennia and if we finally arrive at that party at the end of time as actual adults at last as technological bodhisattvas as masters ofour own destiny we’ll hopefully spend at least a little while marveling at just how miraculous it was that we managed to live through an era in which we couldland robots on other planets and simultaneously still didn’t quite know how to be happy or properly take care of all the human family yet and if we make it to that party together as a species that would be way cool .
ephemeralchemex 