Why Buddhism must change in the West

Here I offer you a very simple illustration of why Buddhism in the West will become its own school. Let your mind drop into low gear, then look at the following picture, that's been making the rounds on the web lately:



What's going on here? The internal dissonance you're feeling isn't due to any artifact of mind at all; it's purely a result of the established mechanisms by which your brain works. This is important, because it illustrates that while the West has a lot to learn about why what it knows is important*, it also directly shows how the philosophy of the East needs to learn to incorporate mechanisms beyond functional analysis. The functional analysis of the East is fantastic, yielding ideas such as the widely misunderstood term "chi", that the West could never have come up with. Sadly, though, it has its own inherent blinders. A Buddhist might tell you that fundamentally, "all [is] consciousness". The Tibetan Buddhists go so far as to make this an actual cosmological statement. But, "all consciousness" is only true from the perspective of consciousness. It's like trying to understand chemistry when your only instrument is a Geiger counter -- it doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell you the truth either. Nothing in Buddhism will tell you what's happening to you when you see this picture (although it can speak to what happens to you when you react to what happens when you see the picture), but works of modern cognitive science such as Dennett's "Multiple Drafts Hypothesis" (which I happen to think is correct) can do so.

East and West have much to learn from each other. For Western students of Buddhism, this means that while it's important to read the sutras, it's also important to read Western philosophy as well. Sure, it's full of dualisms and often misses the point; but it also speaks on subjects outside the purview of observation, and thus accesses wisdom that we can ill afford to do without.



* I had an interesting conversation with my brother on Christmas in which I stated my discovery of the general truth "the experience of mind is the same". His reaction, as a student of Western history & philosophy, was "duh, we've known that for centuries". There's a lot that the West knows, but that it may not realize is terribly important. In this example, this little truth may not be seen as widely important to Western audiences given the applications of the time, but to a Buddhist, it's one of the "Keys to the Kingdom", if you'll pardon the metaphor.

Strangling President Bush

Anyone remember the old sticker from the 1980's that said:

Stress: The confusion caused by your conscience overriding the urge to strangle the living daylights out of some jerk who desperately deserves it!

Wow, I feel that way about Bush, w.r.t. the wiretapping furor going on right now. We all know that the Puzzle Palace does SIGINT, and we all know it's supposed to only do its work abroad, not domestically. So, when Bush is criticized because of the wiretaps on international phone calls originating in the U.S., does he say "hey, once a call crosses national borders it's fair game"? No, because that would be sensible, and would shut down the whole controversy. Everyone would shrug & go on about their business. Instead of that, he has to come out with a justification out of a Vaclav Havel play: "that congress authorized me to use all necessary [military] force supersedes all other law and means I have carte-blanche to do whatever I think's needed".

Has he lost his mind?

Is he trying to put that hyena from New York in office in 2008?

Has he simply decided that he isn't accountable to anyone but himself?

Has he completely stopped listening to Cheney?

Does Rove think by playing into the hands of the "Bush is trying to eliminate democracy in America" camp that they'll be distracted from our massive trade & budget defecits in 2006?

Is he really a marionette being manipulated by space-aliens?

WTF ?!

From the 'nuff said department

Photon Strikes Back

... and gets pre-Raphaelite on her fanny. This time he's saving her from Boethius.

A modest proposal to rid the world of abortion

Politically, I'm mostly a conservative libertarian, and, generally speaking my "knee-jerk" opinion on something is more likely to align with those on the right of the traditional spectrum as with those on the left. In some others, though, I don't really fit anywhere. Specifically, as it matters for this post, I'm both Pro-Choice and Anti-Abortion. This's an odd position to be in, that I've been hoping that technology might remedy for me with the invention of the artificial womb. Alas, this hasn't happened. In light of the lack of invention of the artificial womb, with the desire to see no children who aren't wanted while at the same time seeing no fetuses knocked off, I hereby tender the following proposal:

1. All male children shall receive reversable vasectomies (at public expense)
2. Any mentally-competant male wishing to have the state of his vasectomy altered (either to reverse it or else to re-instate it) shall have the operation performed promptly and at public expense.
3. False testimony about one's "fertility status" shall be a felony.

Spendy, to be sure, but it would ensure that before a child is brought into the world, the would-be parents must take a positive affirmative step that having a child is really what they desire and intend. This is analogous to "opt in" versus "opt out" marketing terminology. I think that all would-be parents should have to "opt-in" instead of the other way around.

1. Undesired pre-infants won't be slain by the gazillion each year.
2. High-school girls who succumb to peer-pressure to have sex will still catch all the latest diseases, but they won't have their futures truncated by the need to care for a child while still laying the foundations for their own lives.
3. The ability to procreate will be tied to one's general societal fitness without regards for race, religion, money or (competant) intelligence, or, in otherwords, eugenics without all the evil.
4. The rearing of children, having become a marginal token of societal fitness, will become an incentive for the formation of more stable marriages.
5. The idea of being properly prepared for the advent of children being part of the general meme, the age at which people become parents will increase -- this may cause additional research expenditures for the prevention of Down's syndrome.
6. Non-marital sex will become even more common, necessitating the need for better immunization against STDs( but also lowering the number of divorces from marriages that never should have been ).
7. Given the larger proportion of children raised in conditions of relative surfeit rather than relative deficit, non "white-collar" crime (violent and property) will diminish.
8. Money spend on social services for single mothers & their children may be diverted into the education or health-care budgets, or eliminated from governmental budgets altogether.
9. Men will also get to feel a little pain bringing a kid into the world.

All for the cost of 2 to 5 outpatient surgeries per semi-capita, surgeries which by then will be so common and standardized as the be cheaper than most airfares.