mist

slightly less of a rant

2009-01-08T02:05:00.000-08:00

'All joy in the world', says Shantideva in his Entry into the Conduct of a Hero Vowed to Enlightenment (a literal translation of the Sanskrit title Bodhisattvacharyavatara), ' comes from wishing happiness for others. All suffering from wanting pleasure for oneself.'
It doesn't really matter 'who started' what, the point is how to stop.
Not 'we have every right to', but 'what can we do to change the situation from the ground up?'
Let's assume that everyone is ultimately mistaken and that everyone is maybe a little right in the little they can see through their projection, beliefs, hopes and fears.
The point - as the Zen master said - is: "When will this fellow who plays with mud ever have done?"
Samsara - 'running round in circles' - is notoriously endless. It's like a child's game, endlessly creating sequels and variations, endlessly segueing from one to another... Till mother calls.
Then it's dropped.
Just like that.

Things that are sure:

* you will not make friends by killing your enemies and/or their children - what you will do is create enemies who have nothing to lose and everything to gain in killing you
* enemies defeated will always regroup to come again another day, often with smiling faces to hide their knives
* it's trust that creates trust, peace that creates peace, brotherly sharing that creates recognition
* there is no 'them'; there is only 'us'

So... the 'solution' (if solution there is) seems to be in sharing, embracing, trusting, educating, ordinary human kindness, all of which - it seems to me - are within easy reach of ordinary human intelligence.

It's not Gaza and Israel that is the problem: they are a symptom of the problem.
The problem is us.
I've heard it said (by people I love and trust, even) that we are hard-wired for violence, hard-wired for fear. I totally refuse this.
What we are, at base, is sheer wonder... pure awareness... That we have fouled this over the millennia with 'clever ideas' and theories about this, that and the next thing (fear and violence not the least of them), is known to the Buddhists as 'simultaneously arising ignorance', an ignorance simultaneous with and even endemic to awareness as long as it remains 'me-centred' and thus unable to realise its own, multi-faceted (in that it is the same thing - the same 'seed' - in each and every being - each 'centre of awareness') infinity.

'Solutions', then, are not in trying to beat 'the dog' into submission. They are in showing respect and care, in sharing and opening one's heart and hand and mind to what, till now, one has considered 'other'.

The world, we know and Alice repeats, is as we see it. In fact what we see is not 'the world' but only what we believe the world to be. We say 'seeing is believing', but, in actual fact, believing is the very nub of what we permit ourselves to see.
Ad, since we are capable of apprehending only one tiniest fraction of the infinity of what it is possible to know - a few octaves of sound, a few grades of colour and light - even before we call into question attention, interest, projection and bias - to claim we know anything about anything is hubris indeed...
Everything we know is wrong - tainted, distorted, polluted by our blithe assumptions that we are the 'owners' of the situations in which we find ourselves, that we are somehow in control. I'm prepared to bet you can't even recall what you were thinking as you started to read this letter, and certainly not the details...

Somewhere in here is cause for a little thought, no? - a little humility?

Because otherwise you going to have to decide for sure that one side or the other in this conflict is right. They cannot both be right (although they can definitely both be wrong!). The questions are bigger - FAR bigger - than the questions being asked here (or anywhere else, for that matter)

Be part of the solution, not the problem.

israel - gaza... and who the hell do i send THIS to?

2008-12-28T11:15:00.000-08:00

230 dead and counting and many more injured... more than Mumbai yet not a word of censure from any important occidental government official or in the press (except Sarkozy, fer chrissakes!)... no criticism at all... no outrage at America's part in it; no immediate sanctions against Israel... we're the 'good guys', after all...

those dark-skinned nappy-heads with guns and rocks behind the wall there, THOSE are the bad guys... the only voices raised at all, after all, are those of other wogs just like them...

and how else to keep the peace and make friends with your neighbours than to kill them as they go about their daily business? everybody knows that.
they kill a few, you kill a few, they kill a few more, you kill a few more, you know?... eventually - VERY eventually - "they" wake up and beg your pardon... you have no pardon to beg... or to give...
you are the victim, not the perpetrator, you have god on your side and hold the moral high ground (laced, as it is, with American weapons)... how could you ever be wrong? you are the sinned against, not the sinner.

isn't that it? isn't that the argument? look what they have done to us. never look what we have done. how can we do wrong? we are the chosen.

i put it to you that where you were once David, you are now Goliath.
you are an apartheid state that is starting to make the South Africans and even the Nazis look like amateurs.
did you learn nothing from your persecutors except that their might was their right?

then you have the temerity to criminalise, persecute and imprison those who refuse to be part of your wars because they CAN see that the best way to make a friend is not to slap him in the face or kill his child or cut off his livelihood... because they know that there's another way?

what can i do except laugh at you and your claim to victimhood in blank disbelief?
victims don't create victims; they help them. victims don't imagine themselves apart from other victims and continually cite only the wrongs perpetrated against them as their excuse for all they do wrong around them... victims work to create a world free of victims, a world free of exclusive "peoples", "countries" and "beliefs" - the chief causes of victimhood... they do not perpetuate such outmoded and tribal superstitions.

as long as you believe in a "them", you will never look at the enemy within.
as long as you ignore the enemy within, there will always be enemies without.
but there IS no "them", there is only "us" - only all of us here together, you and me and he and she, as a single breath, a single world, a single gesture in space.
from the tiniest bacterium to the vastest bio-forms so huge we haven't begun to intuit their existence yet, we are all one... either we are a cancer on each other and wipe ourselves and everything else out or we help the entire encomium toward better functioning, better life, better conditions...
it is the oneness of our diversity that is our strength; where diversity takes precedence over oneness, illness of the system prevails.

together, as one being, one gesture, sharing our wealths and our knowledges, we can possibly survive, at least for a while. the sound of single hand clapping.
alone, we are less... fewer, less aware, less intelligent and consequently less well protected... less well supported... our survival is a more delicate affair.

we forget that peoples and whole species have come and gone on this little blue planet of ours... we see our couple of hundred years as races of this sort and that sort and our paltry achievements as great science and great civilisation, but - as in the image of Ozymandius - others will look upon our hubris a few years hence and smile sadly (at best, where they do not hate us for all we have destroyed for them)

so we can always be right and they can always be wrong, but this will always depend on who we are and who they are this week which is like a child's game.
or we can join hands and put an end to this now, which is like when mother calls us all home to dinner.

think about it. there is no other way.

karma

2008-09-08T02:02:00.000-07:00

Both selfness, i.e., the uncritical belief in one's 'self' as a more or less immortal, partless and independent ultimate basis of being (the classical definition of atman, in Tibetan = dag nyi, 'selfness per se') and the fleeting yet self-oriented thoughts, beliefs, moods and activities making up one's life as lived out (the classical definition of aham-kara, in Tibetan = dag 'dzin, 'grasping at a self')... the scenario of situation and owner of situation that is the stock in trade of our daily lives can be proved quite simply not to exist at all as we conceive of them.
When I say 'simply', perhaps I should qualify that. The arguments themselves are simple enough though often coming from angles one would never have dreamed of: The difficult bit is actually putting them into practice so as to test their validity... that's not easy at all! We do almost anything not to accept them, even when actually meditating on them.
It took me 40-some years to even get a more or less correct intellectual grasp on them... Fortunately I have a few left before me still to actually begin to stabilise this.

Put it it this way: Rather than a self or a Self, at the absolute basis of being there is simply awareness.
Not awareness of any particular this or that to begin with, but aware of itself and of its manifestations which are very much like the endless outpouring of the fountain of youth. It has no other nature than to be aware - conscious of what arises in it much like a mirror which will reflect anything that is placed before it - and is thus empty of being any thing. Out if it stream all infinite possibilities, much like mist forming out of and then dissolving back into the air. The awareness - this ultimate "space" out of which everything comes" - is neither improved by the good manifestations nor stained by the bad ones... they simply arise, all of them ultimately identical in nature inasmuch as they actually have no real nature at all ('real', here, meaning the above mentioned naïve belief that things and selfs are 'permanent, partless and independent)...
What does arise, however, creates its own logic in arising - the instant something comes into so-called 'existence', it becomes real on its own plane and has an energy field of cause and effect that surrounds it. Everything, in fact, is related to everything else, and it is this infinite web of cause and effect in which every single thing that exists is mutually conditioned by and conditioning of everything else that is the basis of what is called in Sanskrit karma.
Karma (from the root kr, whence our 'create' words via Latin creare, to bring into being' and crescere 'grow', whence others such as 'crescent' whose original meaning was something in the process of coming into being or growing) is doing.
Although there is the popular belief in karma as fate - what you did in your past life determines what, where and how you are in this - and although this aspect of karma is (to a degree) correct, what karma really means is what you do. What you are doing now.
Of course this is conditioned by what you assume to be the case - the state of affairs, real, true, just, what-have-you - but, depending upon how you act in this instant - whether your action and attitude tend more toward the encompassing and accepting or toward the exclusive and rejecting - will determine the quality of the next instant.
A. N. Whitehead called this process 'experientially initiated potentialities for experience'... Every door you open - every experience you have - conditions your experience of subsequent experience... It's not a question of this life and the next... it's right here, now, in this very breath you're breathing.
And what is extremely important (before you start imputing Eckhardt Tolle and Richard Moss on me) is that here - in this instant of being=doing - there is no one and nothing at all in any ultimate sense. There is no one who can grasp and put to work 'the power of now'.
All you have is the opportunity to be skilful or unskilful with your encounter as it manifests to you. There's not even a you to manipulate it.
Just the appearance.
Sure, the appearance always seems to play itself out as some sort of mandala with a me bit at this end of it and a that bit out there and all around me, but, in fact, this 'centre of the universe' one blithely imagines one is (witness how everything we say and do will generally tend to our own comfort first) is just one among countless quintillion of beings, each whom is a centre of a lived through world and each of whom assumes his/her/its self to be the be all and end all of experience.
The point is not that if you're a good boy or girl you'll get your reward in some future heaven. The point is that - here and now - you have that choice... what is your attitude? cleae and open and filled with joy, or dark and trammelled and filled with distrust?... The garden of forking paths.

So karma is not actually fate - Karma is the instant and what you do with it, either regardless of or because of what came before. The choice is yours. Of course, certain attitudes and beliefs "stick" and need a lot of work to dislodge, re-transparentise.
What we generally do is knit a universe of our beliefs and hopes and fears and inattentions and then dub it "reality" - It's like we almost wittingly dirty up our windows so we can't see outside and the light can't get in and then bitch about the filth and claustrophobia of the room we find ourselves in. But there's nothing keeping us from cleaning up those windows, throwing open the windows and doors and even - dare I say it? - stepping outside and opening ourselves to whatever breeze blows... Nothing except the terror of finding ourselves not ourselves, finding ourselves changed or - horror of horrors - non-existent... Finding our little cockle-shell boat so lost and adrift on the ocean of becoming that we know we'll never find shore again...

Yet, oddly enough, it's not like that - or so they tell me.
The less you attach to your you, the more you open to everyone else's "me", the easier life becomes. Instead of dissolving into nothingness, you find that openness is the eternal becoming, and that - as HH Dalai Lama says - 'ordinary human kindness; ordinary human intelligence' are the very wings of the bird of enlightenment... sometimes a thunderbird, sometimes a phoenix, sometimes a sparrow...

... and... some, very few times... the great raven who speaks.

thought i'd better say that.

excuses for prolixity.

Childish superstition: Einstein's letter makes view of religion relatively clear

2008-05-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

Scientist's reply to sell for up to £8,000, and stoke debate over his beliefs

The Guardian, Tuesday May 13 2008

Albert Einstein, pictured in 1953. Photograph: Ruth Orkin/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.

A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument - or at least provoke further controversy about his views.

Due to be auctioned this week in London after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, the document leaves no doubt that the theoretical physicist was no supporter of religious beliefs, which he regarded as "childish superstitions".

Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

The letter will go on sale at Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair on Thursday and is expected to fetch up to £8,000. The handwritten piece, in German, is not listed in the source material of the most authoritative academic text on the subject, Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion.

One of the country's leading experts on the scientist, John Brooke of Oxford University, admitted he had not heard of it.

Einstein is best known for his theories of relativity and for the famous E=mc2 equation that describes the equivalence of mass and energy, but his thoughts on religion have long attracted conjecture.

His parents were not religious but he attended a Catholic primary school and at the same time received private tuition in Judaism. This prompted what he later called, his "religious paradise of youth", during which he observed religious rules such as not eating pork. This did not last long though and by 12 he was questioning the truth of many biblical stories.

"The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression," he later wrote.

In his later years he referred to a "cosmic religious feeling" that permeated and sustained his scientific work. In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to "experience the universe as a single cosmic whole". He was also fond of using religious flourishes, in 1926 declaring that "He [God] does not throw dice" when referring to randomness thrown up by quantum theory.

His position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide but he always resisted easy stereotyping on the subject.

"Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him," said Brooke. "It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion."

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

“My wish is a change of consciousness in every human being as a pre-condition for a better world.”

Albert Hofmann

'Enjoy life while you can'

2008-03-06T01:28:00.000-08:00

Climate science maverick James Lovelock believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do?

By Decca Aitkenhead

The Guardian, Saturday March 1 2008

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.

"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.

For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.

As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."

Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.

"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."

Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.

But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality."

There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."

But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."

At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

to the end of the earth

2007-03-13T15:50:00.000-07:00

From The Sunday Times

March 11, 2007

To the end of the earth

This is our future - famous cities are submerged, a third of the world is desert, the rest struggling for food and fresh water. Richard Girling investigates the reality behind the science of climate change

Mark Lynas rummages through his filing cabinet like a badger raking out his bedstraw, much of the stuff so crumpled that he might have been sleeping on it for years. Eventually he finds what he is looking for - four sheets of printed paper, stapled with a page of notes.

It is an article, dated November 2000, which he has clipped from the scientific journal Nature: "Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model". Even when they are mapping a short cut to Armageddon, scientists do not go in for red-top words like "crisis". If you speak the language, however, you get the message - and the message, delivered by the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change, was cataclysmic.

"There should have been panic on the streets," says Lynas in his new book, Six Degrees, "people shouting from the rooftops, statements to parliament and 24-hour news coverage."

In layman's language, Hadley's message was that newly discovered "positive feedbacks" would make nonsense of accepted global-warming estimates. It would not be a gradual, linear increase with nature slowly succumbing to human attrition. Nature itself was about to turn nasty. Instead of absorbing and retaining greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, the figures suggested, it would suddenly spew them out again - billions of years' worth of carbon and methane, incontinently released in blazing surges that would drown or incinerate whole cities. Ice would melt in torrents, and the Earth's essential green lung, the Amazon rainforest, could be moribund as early as 2050. A vicious spiral would have begun which would threaten not just our way of life but the very existence of our own and every other species on Earth. Lynas's notes, still fixed to the report, have the dour humour of the gallows: "The end of the world is nigh, and it's already been published in Nature."

Next day's newspapers ignored the rescheduling of Armageddon - the headlines were all about faulty counts in the US presidential election, Gordon Brown's fiddling with National Insurance and Lord Falconer's refusal to resign over "the Dome fiasco". Lynas, however, was energised like the hero of a disaster movie. Inconveniently, he had a book to write, but as soon as he'd finished it he pedalled from his Oxford home to the nearby Radcliffe Science Library. He did it every working day for a year: arriving at 10am and sitting till five in the afternoon, being served sheaves of paper by librarians who - even though professionally attuned to world-class standards of eccentricity - must have wondered at the power of the man's obsession.

Lynas wanted to see every scrap of paper the library held on global warming. Scanning at speed, he worked his way through two or three hundred every day, tens of thousands in all. Then as now, new pieces of research were emerging almost weekly as computer models were improved, new data collected and analysed. Then as now, there was no single, provable prediction of the future. Without knowing how much more fossil fuel will be burnt, the best science can offer is a range of plausible "scenarios". These vary so widely that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its Third Assessment report in 2001, was able to suggest only that global average temperatures by the end of the 21st century will have risen between 1.4 and 5.8C above the average for 1990 - an estimate which last month it pushed up to a possible maximum of 6.4C. It doesn't look much, but it could measure the difference between survival and the near-extinction of human life.

On Lynas's laptop were six spreadsheets - one for each degree of warming from one to six. As he worked, he would slot each paper into the appropriate file. Many of them included predictions from climate models, but there was more: "Some of the most interesting came from palaeoclimate studies - investigations of how variations in temperature, calculated by analysis of soil strata and ancient ice-cores, affected the planet in prehistory." It was these that would give some of the most terrifying insights into what the future might be like. Which parts of the globe would be abandoned first? What was the precise mechanism that, eventually, would wipe us out?

The spreadsheets became the six core chapters of Lynas's book - a detailed, carefully annotated, degree-by-degree guide not just to our grandchildren's futures but to our own.

UP TO ONE DEGREE OF WARMING

Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight - of which there is about as much chance as Tony Blair holidaying in Skegness - the concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global rise of between 0.5 and 1C. A shift of a single degree is barely perceptible to human skin, but it's not human skin we're talking about. It's the planet; and an average increase of one degree across its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes.

Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great feat of imagination.

"The western United States once again could suffer perennial droughts, far worse than the 1930s. Deserts will reappear particularly in Nebraska, but also in eastern Montana, Wyoming and Arizona, northern Texas and Oklahoma. As dust and sandstorms turn day into night across thousands of miles of former prairie, farmsteads, roads and even entire towns will be engulfed by sand."

What's bad for America will be worse for poorer countries closer to the equator. The Hadley centre calculates that a one-degree increase would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world's land surface by 2100. Again we have seen what this means. Lynas describes an incident in the summer of 2005: "One tributary fell so low that miles of exposed riverbank dried out into sand dunes, with winds whipping up thick sandstorms. As desperate villagers looked out onto baking mud instead of flowing water, the army was drafted in to ferry precious drinking water up the river - by helicopter, since most of the river was too low to be navigable by boat." The river in question was not some small, insignificant trickle in Sussex. It was the Amazon.

While tropical lands teeter on the brink, the Arctic already may have passed the point of no return. Warming near the pole is much faster than the global average, with the result that Arctic icecaps and glaciers have lost 400 cubic kilometres of ice in 40 years. Permafrost - ground that has lain frozen for thousands of years - is dissolving into mud and lakes, "destabilising whole areas as the ground collapses beneath buildings, roads and pipelines". As polar bears and Inuits are being pushed off the top of the planet, previous predictions are starting to look optimistic. "Earlier snowmelt," says Lynas, "means more summer heat goes into the air and ground rather than into melting snow, raising temperatures in a positive feedback effect. More dark shrubs and forest on formerly bleak tundra means still more heat is absorbed by vegetation."

Out at sea the pace is even faster. "Whilst snow-covered ice reflects more than 80% of the sun's heat, the darker ocean absorbs up to 95% of solar radiation. Once sea ice begins to melt, in other words, the process becomes self-reinforcing. More ocean surface is revealed, absorbing solar heat, raising temperatures and making it unlikelier that ice will re-form next winter. The disappearance of 720,000 square kilometres of supposedly permanent ice in a single year testifies to the rapidity of planetary change. If you have ever wondered what it will feel like when the Earth crosses a tipping point, savour the moment."

Mountains, too, are starting to come apart. In the Alps, most ground above 3,000 metres is stabilised by permafrost. In the summer of 2003, however, the melt zone climbed right up to 4,600 metres, higher than the summit of the Matterhorn and nearly as high as Mont Blanc. With the glue of millennia melting away, rocks showered down and 50 climbers died. As temperatures go on edging upwards, it won't just be mountaineers who flee. "Whole towns and villages will be at risk," says Lynas. "Some towns, like Pontresina in eastern Switzerland, have already begun building bulwarks against landslides."

At the opposite end of the scale, low-lying atoll countries such as the Maldives will be preparing for extinction as sea levels rise, and mainland coasts - in particular the eastern US and Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean and Pacific islands and the Bay of Bengal - will be hit by stronger and stronger hurricanes as the water warms. Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 hit New Orleans with the combined impacts of earthquake and flood, was a nightmare precursor of what the future holds.

"Most striking of all," says Lynas, "was seeing how people behaved once the veneer of civilisation had been torn away. Most victims were poor and black, left to fend for themselves as the police either joined in the looting or deserted the area. Four days into the crisis, survivors were packed into the city's Superdome, living next to overflowing toilets and rotting bodies as gangs of young men with guns seized the only food and water available. Perhaps the most memorable scene was a single military helicopter landing for just a few minutes, its crew flinging food parcels and water bottles out onto the ground before hurriedly taking off again as if from a war zone. In scenes more like a Third World refugee camp than an American urban centre, young men fought for the water as pregnant women and the elderly looked on with nothing. Don't blame them for behaving like this, I thought. It's what happens when people are desperate."

Chance of avoiding one degree of global warming: zero.

BETWEEN ONE AND TWO DEGREES OF WARMING

At this level, expected within 40 years, the hot European summer of 2003 will be the annual norm. Anything that could be called a heatwave thereafter will be of Saharan intensity. Even in average years, people will die of heat stress.

"The first symptoms," says Lynas, "may be minor. A person will feel slightly nauseous, dizzy and irritable. It needn't be an emergency: an hour or so lying down in a cooler area, sipping water, will cure it. But in Paris, August 2003, there were no cooler areas, especially for elderly people.

"Once body temperature reaches 41C (104F) its thermoregulatory system begins to break down. Sweating ceases and breathing becomes shallow and rapid. The pulse quickens, and the victim may lapse into a coma. Unless drastic measures are taken to reduce the body's core temperature, the brain is starved of oxygen and vital organs begin to fail. Death will be only minutes away unless the emergency services can quickly get the victim into intensive care.

"These emergency services failed to save more than 10,000 French in the summer of 2003. Mortuaries ran out of space as hundreds of dead bodies were brought in each night." Across Europe as a whole, the heatwave is believed to have cost between 22,000 and 35,000 lives. Agriculture, too, was devastated. Farmers lost $12 billion worth of crops, and Portugal alone suffered $12 billion of forest-fire damage. The flows of the River Po in Italy, Rhine in Germany and Loire in France all shrank to historic lows. Barges ran aground, and there was not enough water for irrigation and hydroelectricity. Melt rates in the Alps, where some glaciers lost 10% of their mass, were not just a record - they doubled the previous record of 1998. According to the Hadley centre, more than half the European summers by 2040 will be hotter than this. Extreme summers will take a much heavier toll of human life, with body counts likely to reach hundreds of thousands. Crops will bake in the fields, and forests will die off and burn. Even so, the short-term effects may not be the worst:

"From the beech forests of northern Europe to the evergreen oaks of the Mediterranean, plant growth across the whole landmass in 2003 slowed and then stopped. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, the stressed plants began to emit it. Around half a billion tonnes of carbon was added to the atmosphere from European plants, equivalent to a twelfth of global emissions from fossil fuels. This is a positive feedback of critical importance, because it suggests that, as temperatures rise, carbon emissions from forests and soils will also rise. If these land-based emissions are sustained over long periods, global warming could spiral out of control."

In the two-degree world, nobody will think of taking Mediterranean holidays. "The movement of people from northern Europe to the Mediterranean is likely to reverse, switching eventually into a mass scramble as Saharan heatwaves sweep across the Med." People everywhere will think twice about moving to the coast. When temperatures were last between 1 and 2C higher than they are now, 125,000 years ago, sea levels were five or six metres higher too. All this "lost" water is in the polar ice that is now melting. Forecasters predict that the "tipping point" for Greenland won't arrive until average temperatures have risen by 2.7C. The snag is that Greenland is warming much faster than the rest of the world - 2.2 times the global average. "Divide one figure by the other," says Lynas, "and the result should ring alarm bells across the world. Greenland will tip into irreversible melt once global temperatures rise past a mere 1.2C." The ensuing sea-level ?rise will be far more than the half-metre that ?the IPCC has predicted for the end of the century. Scientists point out that sea levels at the end of the last ice age shot up by a metre every 20 years for four centuries, and that Greenland's ice, in the words of one glaciologist, is now "thinning like mad and flowing much faster ?than [it] ought to". Its biggest outflow glacier, Jakobshavn Isbrae, has thinned by 15 metres every year since 1997, and its speed of flow has doubled. "At this rate," says Lynas, "the whole Greenland ice sheet would vanish within 140 years. Miami would disappear, as would most of Manhattan. Central London would be flooded. Bangkok, Bombay and Shanghai would lose most of their area. In all, half of humanity would have to move to higher ground."

Not only coastal communities will suffer. As mountains lose their glaciers, so people will lose their water supplies. The entire Indian subcontinent will be fighting for survival. "As the glaciers disappear from all but the highest peaks, their runoff will cease to power the massive rivers that deliver vital freshwater to hundreds of millions. Water shortages and famine will be the result, destabilising the entire region. And this time the epicentre of the disaster won't be India, Nepal or Bangladesh, but nuclear-armed Pakistan."

Everywhere, ecosystems will unravel as species either migrate or fall out of synch with each other. By the time global temperatures reach two degrees of warming in 2050, more than a third of all living species will face extinction.

Chance of avoiding two degrees of global warming: 93%, but only if emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced by 60% over the next 10 years.

BETWEEN TWO AND THREE DEGREES OF WARMING

Up to this point, assuming that governments have planned carefully and farmers have converted to more appropriate crops, not too many people outside subtropical Africa need have starved. Beyond two degrees, however, preventing mass starvation will be as easy as halting the cycles of the moon. "First millions, then billions, of people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive," says Lynas.

To find anything comparable we have to go back to the Pliocene - last epoch of the Tertiary period, 3m years ago. There were no continental glaciers in the northern hemisphere (trees grew in the Arctic), and sea levels were 25 metres higher than today's. In this kind of heat, the death of the Amazon is as inevitable as the melting of Greenland. The paper spelling it out is the very one whose apocalyptic ?message so shocked Lynas in 2000. Scientists at the Hadley centre feared that earlier climate models, which showed global warming as a straightforward linear progression, were too simplistic in their assumption that land and the oceans would remain inert as their temperatures rose. Correctly as it would turn out, they predicted positive feedback.

"Warmer seas," explains Lynas, "absorb carbon dioxide, leaving more to accumulate in the atmosphere and intensify global warming. On land, matters would be even worse. Huge amounts of carbon are stored in the soil, the half-rotted remains of dead vegetation. The generally accepted estimate is that the soil carbon reservoir contains some 1600 gigatonnes, more than double the entire carbon content of the atmosphere. As soil warms, bacteria accelerate the breakdown of this stored carbon, releasing it into the atmosphere."

The Hadley team factored this new feedback into their climate model, with results that fully explain Lynas's black-comic note to himself: The end of the world is nigh. A three-degree increase in global temperature - possible as early as 2050 - would throw the carbon cycle into reverse. "Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide," says Lynas, "vegetation and soils start to release it. So much carbon pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric concentrations by 250 parts per million by 2100, boosting global warming by another 1.5C. In other words, the Hadley team had discovered that carbon-cycle feedbacks could tip the planet into runaway global warming by the middle of this century - much earlier than anyone had expected."

Confirmation came from the land itself. Climate models are routinely tested against historical data. In this case, scientists checked 25 years' worth of soil samples from 6,000 sites across the UK. The result was another black joke. "As temperatures gradually rose," says Lynas, "the scientists found that huge amounts of carbon had been released naturally from the soils. They totted it all up and discovered - irony of ironies - that the 13m tonnes of carbon British soils were emitting annually was enough to wipe out all the country's efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol." All soils will be affected by the rising heat, but none as badly as the Amazon's. "Catastrophe" is almost too small a word for the loss of the rainforest. Its 7m square kilometres produce 10% of the world's entire photosynthetic output from plants. Drought and heat will cripple it; fire will finish it off. In human terms, the effect on the planet will be like cutting off oxygen during an asthma attack.

In the US and Australia, people will curse the climate-denying governments of Bush and Howard. No matter what later administrations may do, it will not be enough to keep the mercury down. With new "super-hurricanes" growing from the warming sea, Houston could be destroyed by 2045, and Australia will be a death trap. "Farming and food production will tip into irreversible decline. Salt water will creep up the stricken rivers, poisoning ground water. Higher temperatures mean greater evaporation, further drying out vegetation and soils, and causing huge losses from reservoirs." In state capitals, heat every year is likely to kill between 8,000 and 15,000 mainly elderly people.

It is all too easy to visualise what will happen in Africa. In Central America, too, tens of ?millions will have little to put on their tables. Even a moderate drought there in 2001 meant hundreds of thousands had to rely on food aid. This won't be an option when world supplies ?are stretched to breaking point (grain yields decline by 10% for every degree of heat above 30C, and at 40C they are zero). Nobody need look to the US, which will have problems of its own. As the mountains lose their snow, so cities and farms in the west will lose their water and dried-out forests and grasslands will perish at the first spark.

The Indian subcontinent meanwhile will be choking on dust. "All of human history," says Lynas, "shows that, given the choice between starving in situ and moving, people move. In the latter part of the century tens of millions of Pakistani citizens may be facing this choice. Pakistan may find itself joining the growing list of failed states, as civil administration collapses and armed gangs seize what little food is left."

As the land burns, so the sea will go on rising. Even by the most optimistic calculation, 80% of Arctic sea ice by now will be gone, and the rest will soon follow. New York will flood; the catastrophe that struck eastern England in 1953 will become an unremarkable regular event; and the map of the Netherlands will be torn up by the North Sea. Everywhere, starving people will be on the move - from Central America into Mexico and the US, and from Africa into Europe, where resurgent fascist parties will win votes by promising to keep them out.

Chance of avoiding three degrees of global warming: poor if the rise reaches two degrees and triggers carbon-cycle feedbacks from soils and plants.

BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR DEGREES OF WARMING

The stream of refugees will now include those fleeing from coasts to safer interiors - millions at a time when storms hit. Where they persist, coastal cities will become fortified islands. The world economy, too, will be threadbare. "As direct losses, social instability and insurance payouts cascade through the system, the funds to support displaced people will be increasingly scarce." Sea levels will be rampaging upwards - in this temperature range, both poles are certain to melt, causing an eventual rise of 50 metres. "I am not suggesting it would be instantaneous," says Lynas. "In fact it would take centuries, and probably millennia, to melt all of the Antarctic's ice. But it could yield sea-level rises of a metre or so every 20 years - far beyond our capacity to adapt." Oxford would sit on one of many coastlines in a UK reduced to an archipelago of tiny islands.

More immediately, China is on "a collision course with the planet". By 2030, if its people are consuming at the same rate as Americans, they will eat two-thirds of the entire global harvest and burn 100m barrels of oil a day, or 125% of current world output. That prospect alone contains all the ingredients of catastrophe. But it's worse than that: "By the latter third of the 21st century, if global temperatures are more than three degrees higher than now, China's agricultural production will crash. It will face the task of feeding 1.5bn much richer people - 200m more than now - on two thirds of current supplies." For people throughout much of the world, starvation will be a regular threat; but it will not be the only one.

"The summer will get longer still, as soaring temperatures reduce forests to tinderwood and cities to boiling morgues. Temperatures? in the Home Counties could reach 45C - the sort of climate experienced today in Marrakech. Droughts will put the south-east of England on the global list of water-stressed areas, with farmers competing against cities for dwindling supplies from rivers and reservoirs.

"Air-conditioning will be mandatory for anyone wanting to stay cool. This in turn will put ever more stress on energy systems, which could pour more greenhouse gases into the air if coal and gas-fired power stations ramp up their output, hydroelectric sources dwindle and renewables fail to take up the slack." The abandonment of the Mediterranean will send even more people north to "overcrowded refuges in the Baltic, Scandinavia and the British Isles".

Britain will have problems of its own. "As flood plains are more regularly inundated, a general retreat out of high risk areas is likely. Millions of people will lose their lifetime investments in houses that become uninsurable and therefore unsaleable? The Lancashire/Humber corridor is expected to be among the worst affected regions, as are the Thames Valley, eastern Devon and towns around the already flood-prone Severn estuary like Monmouth and Bristol. The entire English coast from the Isle of Wight to Middlesbrough is classified as at 'very high' or 'extreme' risk, as is the whole of Cardigan Bay in Wales."

One of the most dangerous of all feedbacks will now be kicking in - the runaway thaw of permafrost. Scientists believe at least 500 billion tonnes of carbon are waiting to be released from the Arctic ice, though none yet has put a figure on what it will add to global warming. One degree? Two? Three? The pointers are ominous.

"As with Amazon collapse and the carbon-cycle feedback in the three-degree world," says Lynas, "stabilising global temperatures at four degrees above current levels may not be possible. If we reach three degrees, therefore, that leads inexorably to four degrees, which leads inexorably to five?"

Chance of avoiding four degrees of global warming: poor if the rise reaches three degrees and triggers a runaway thaw of permafrost.

BETWEEN FOUR AND FIVE DEGREES OF WARMING

We are looking now at an entirely different planet. Ice sheets have vanished from both poles; rainforests have burnt up and turned to desert; the dry and lifeless Alps resemble the High Atlas; rising seas are scouring deep into continental interiors. One temptation may be to shift populations from dry areas to the newly thawed regions of the far north, in Canada and Siberia. Even here, though, summers may be too hot for crops to be grown away from the coasts; and there is no guarantee that northern governments will admit southern refugees. Lynas recalls James Lovelock's suspicion that Siberia and Canada would be invaded by China and the US, each hammering another nail into humanity's coffin. "Any armed conflict, particularly involving nuclear weapons, would of course further increase the planetary surface area uninhabitable for humans."

When temperatures were at a similar level 55m years ago, following a very sudden burst of global warming in the early Eocene, alligators and other subtropical species were living high in the Arctic. What had caused the climate to flip? Suspicion rests on methane hydrate - "an ice-like combination of methane and water that forms under the intense cold and pressure of the deep sea", and which escapes with explosive force when tapped. Evidence of a submarine landslide off Florida, and of huge volcanic eruptions under the North Atlantic, raises the possibility of trapped methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - being released in a giant belch that, as Lynas puts it, "pushed global temperatures through the roof".

"Summer heatwaves scorched the vegetation out of continental Spain, leaving a desert terrain which was heavily eroded by winter rainstorms. Palm mangroves grew as far north as England and Belgium, and the Arctic Ocean was so warm that Mediterranean algae thrived. In short, it was a world much like the one we are heading into this century." Although the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM, as scientists call it, was more than today's, the rate of increase in the 21st century may be 30 times faster. It may well be the fastest increase the world has ever seen - faster even than the episodes that caused catastrophic mass extinctions.

Globalism in the five-degree world will break down into something more like parochialism. Customers will have nothing to buy because producers will have nothing to sell. With no possibility of international aid, migrants will have to force their way into the few remaining habitable enclaves and fight for survival.

"Where no refuge is available," says Lynas, "civil war and a collapse into racial or communal conflict seems the likely outcome." Isolated survivalism, however, may be as impracticable as dialling for room service. "How many of us could really trap or kill enough game to feed a family? Even if large numbers of people did successfully manage to fan out into the countryside, wildlife populations would quickly dwindle under the pressure. Supporting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle takes 10 to 100 times the land per person that a settled agricultural community needs. A large-scale resort to survivalism would turn into a further disaster for biodiversity as hungry humans killed and ate anything that moved." Including, perhaps, each other. "Invaders," says Lynas, "do not take kindly to residents denying them food. History suggests that if a stockpile is discovered, the householder and his family may be tortured and killed. Look for comparison to the experience of present-day Somalia, Sudan or Burundi, where conflicts over scarce land and food are at the root of lingering tribal wars and state collapse."

Chance of avoiding five degrees of global warming: negligible if the rise reaches four degrees and releases trapped methane from the sea bed.

BETWEEN FIVE AND SIX DEGREES OF WARMING

Although warming on this scale lies within the IPCC's officially endorsed range of 21st-century possibilities, climate models have little to say about what Lynas, echoing Dante, describes as "the Sixth Circle of Hell". To see the most recent climatic lookalike, we have to turn the geological clock back between 144m and 65m years, to the Cretaceous, which ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs. There was an even closer fit at the end of the Permian, 251m years ago, when global temperatures rose by - yes - six degrees, and 95% of species were wiped out.

"That episode," says Lynas, "was the worst ever endured by life on Earth, the closest the planet has come to ending up a dead and desolate rock in space." On land, the only winners were fungi that flourished on dying trees and shrubs. At sea there were only losers. "Warm water is a killer. Less oxygen can dissolve, so conditions become stagnant and anoxic. Oxygen-breathing water-dwellers - all the higher forms of life from plankton to sharks - face suffocation. Warm water also expands, and sea levels rose by 20 metres." The resulting "super-hurricanes" hitting the coasts would have "triggered flash floods that no living thing could have survived".

There are aspects of the so-called "end-Permian extinction" that are unlikely to recur - most importantly, the vast volcanic eruption in Siberia that spread magma hundreds of metres thick over an area bigger than western Europe and shot billions of tonnes of CO² into the atmosphere. That is small comfort, however, for beneath the oceans, another monster stirred - the same that would bring a devastating end to the Palaeocene nearly 200m years later, and that still lies in wait today. Methane hydrate.

Lynas describes what happens when warming water releases pent-up gas from the sea bed. "First, a small disturbance drives a gas-saturated parcel of water upwards. As it rises, bubbles begin to appear, as dissolved gas fizzles out with reducing pressure - just as a bottle of lemonade overflows if the top is taken off too quickly. These bubbles make the parcel of water still more buoyant, accelerating its rise through the water. As it surges upwards, reaching explosive force, it drags surrounding water ?up with it. At the surface, water is shot hundreds of metres into the air as the released gas blasts into the atmosphere. Shockwaves propagate outwards in all directions, triggering more eruptions nearby."

The eruption is more than just another positive feedback in the quickening process of global warming. Unlike CO², methane is flammable. "Even in air-methane concentrations as low as 5%," says Lynas, "the mixture could ignite from lightning or some other spark and send fireballs tearing across the sky." The effect would be much like that of the fuel-air explosives used by the US and Russian armies - so-called "vacuum bombs" that ignite fuel droplets above a target. According to the CIA, "Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringes are likely to suffer many internal injuries, including burst eardrums, severe concussion, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness." Such tactical weapons, however, are squibs when set against methane-air clouds from oceanic eruptions. Scientists calculate that they could "destroy terrestrial life almost entirely" (251m years ago, only one large land animal, the pig-like lystrosaurus, survived). It has been estimated that a large eruption in future could release energy equivalent to 108 megatonnes of TNT - 100,000 times more than the world's entire stockpile of nuclear weapons. Not even Lynas, for all his scientific propriety, can avoid the Hollywood ending. "It is not too difficult to imagine the ultimate nightmare, with oceanic methane eruptions near large population centres wiping out billions of people - perhaps in days. Imagine a 'fuel-air explosive' fireball racing towards a city - London, say, or Tokyo - the blast wave spreading out from the explosive centre with the speed and force of an atomic bomb. Buildings are flattened, people are incinerated where they stand, or left blind and deaf by the force of the explosion. Mix Hiroshima with post-Katrina New Orleans to get some idea of what such a catastrophe might look like: burnt survivors battling over food, wandering far and wide from empty cities."

Then would come hydrogen sulphide from the stagnant oceans. "It would be a silent killer: imagine the scene at Bhopal following the Union Carbide gas release in 1984, replayed first at coastal settlements, then continental interiors across the world. At the same time, as the ozone layer came under assault, we would feel the sun's rays burning into our skin, and the first cell mutations would be triggering outbreaks of cancer among anyone who survived. Dante's hell was a place of judgment, where humanity was for ever punished for its sins. With all the remaining forests burning, and the corpses of people, livestock and wildlife piling up in every continent, the six-degree world would be a harsh penalty indeed for the mundane crime of burning fossil energy."

RED ALERT

If global warming continues at the current rate, we could be facing extinction. So what exactly is going to happen as the Earth heats up? Here is a degree-by-degree guide

1c Increase

Ice-free sea absorbs ?more heat and accelerates global warming; fresh water lost from a third of the world's surface; low-lying coastlines flooded

2c Increase

Europeans dying of heatstroke; forests ravaged by fire; stressed plants beginning to emit carbon rather than absorbing it; a third of all species face extinction

3c Increase

Carbon release from vegetation and soils ?speeds global warming; death of the Amazon rainforest; super-hurricanes hit coastal cities; starvation in Africa

4c Increase

Runaway thaw of permafrost makes global warming unstoppable; much of Britain made uninhabitable by severe flooding; Mediterranean region abandoned

5c Increase

Methane from ocean floor accelerates global warming; ice gone from both poles; humans migrate in search of food and try vainly to live like animals off the land

6c Increase

Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive

Chance of avoiding six degrees of global warming: zero if the rise passes five degrees, by which time all feedbacks will be running out of control

the four noble truths

2006-07-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

The classic formulation (in italics) of the Four Noble Truths is given like a doctor's prognosis

(1) Suffering exists - in all realms of cyclic existence, from the most heavenly on down to the most hellish
(2) It has a cause - bewilderment, and its manifestation as clinging attachment, both positive (liking) and negative (dislike)
(3) Removal of this cause will bring about removal of the effect - effects are the effects of causes and conditions: these may be modified and purified in such a way that the "illness" - suffering for yourself and others - disappears
(4) There are techniques that do indeed lead to this end - there is a path - The so-called noble eight-fold path

The first point to note is that this does NOT mean that "all life is suffering" as is sometimes propounded as the basis of Buddhism, but that suffering - unsatisfactoriness - is the feeling-tone of everything that is confusion. If your gruntle has gone missing, you may be sure you are confused.

The classic formulation of the eightfold path (following Nagarjuna) is:

right view - what is realised on the path through intelligent investigation
right livelihood - clothing and feeding oneself in accord with the possibilities of reality rather than one's greed
right effort - to practice the path with close attention
right mindfulness - not to lose track of the view
right concentration - one-pointed concentration upon the object of meditation
right speech - to communicate to others the view and to speak in such a way as to be pleasantand helpful towards them
right conduct - comporting oneself in body and mind in such a way as to accord with the view
right thought - the motivation to use one's realisation only for the benefit of others

To be precise, then:

* The five psycho-physical aggregates that make up the idea of a self - that is to say one's form, feelings, perceptions, mental reactions and conscious awareness - and the suffering of change, of not getting what one wants, getting what one doesn't want and of pain and frustration them selves are what is meant by 'suffering'
* and craving and clinging attachment to the delights which seem to make one happy and to the negative experiences which make one uncomfortable or sad are the 'cause'

The whole point of the path is to come to see the reality of the Four Truths - to see why and how it is that they are true.
Once you have, there is something you can do about it. After all, as the Hevajra Tantra says, to the unconfused mind, "... the universe is bliss, and pervaded by bliss which is itself pervaded, and so on, ad infinitum"

This is the state beyond confusion!

dukha 2

2006-07-05T05:40:00.000-07:00

Recently a lama who had spent some 40 years in the Chinese camps in Tibet managed to make his way to India. This was someone who had experienced all the horrors of torture - being sewn up in a bag and then beaten with iron rods and left for days to lie in his own blood and shit, you name it - When the Dalai Lama asked him if he'd ever been scared, he said that yes, he had - He'd sometimes been terrified he might lose his compassion for his captors, that he might come to see them as his enemy.
I'm not talking about cause and effect as a "written" - some sort of "given" - Suzanne.
Of course that can be - and still is being - used to excuse anything... and not only in India.
I'm talking about the fact that we live in an ever-changing nexus of cause and condition which - like tides - becomes this and that as the day may determine but to which we are intimately related by its being our experience. It is not someone else's experience, and it is just this fact that shows this relationship.
Of course there's a difference between a hangnail and having your nails torn out with a pair of pliers, between hitting your thumb with a hammer, even, and having all your knuckles smashed for you with same, that's not the point.
The point is that - to the person who's suffering - suffering is all-consuming if they want it to be. Even a small splinter, even a five minute delay in traffic, even the fact that dinner is not to their liking...
That these things are just nonsense and easily curable whereas the others are anything but is not the point as far as suffering goes - They can become enough to ruin a day, start a war, destroy a people, if we like... And, in their time, they have too...
What I'm saying is not that anyone is "responsible for their suffering" because of some karmic decree. Karma means 'doing', anyway, not 'fate'... it means you can change things, modify things, not that they are ordained for you.
What makes a Tutsi child responsible for being bludgeoned to death is the entire situation surrounding it, including you and me, not anything the child itself has immediately done. The mere fact that it's been born the wrong colour, tribe, race, religion, class, caste, political persuasion, sex or language group is a karmic problem well beyond the individual.
Any "wisdom", however, that does not manifest forthwith as compassion is not 'wisdom' at all, it's just bullshit.
This has nothing to do with sitting on one's lotus throne and listening to the world weep. One the contrary, it's exactly what you are doing... Finding ways (albeit imaginary) to ease the pain (albeit delusional) of sentient beings (albeit symbolic)... They neither "exist' nor "don't exist", which may seem - to ordianry mind - a duality, but, in fact, is only one thing - one gesture, one hand clapping. In the same breath, they neither "exist' nor "don't exist", and that is the whole point - beyond all thinking, beyond all expression, beyond all ideas of compassion or knowing or of their opposites... Beyond all conception, the ultimate compassion - unsolicited - strives for the well-being of all sentient and even insentient (if such there be) beings.
This is not in the least to minimize pity, fellow-feeling and empathy, kindliness, gentleness and what is ordinarily referred to as 'compassion', but - as the Buddha said - 'I use your terms - your language - but what I am speaking of is far beyond what you generally understand by such terms'.
I don't mean to make you feel uncomfortable, my friend - Quite the contrary... I love you from the depths of my soul.

.-_-.

dukha — the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience

2006-07-04T07:23:00.001-07:00

This article came from a friend's comment that "atrocities need to be spoken and heard; the emotions acknowledged and integrated before people can get over it and move on with their lives".

This too, but without revelling in it... without 'out-suffering', so to speak, everyone else... Toothache hurts, but my toothache hurts much, much more than your toothache...
All suffering is suffering, Suzanne. On the level of sheer frustration if not on that of the actual pain experienced. Sure one must be open to listening to and allowing the expression of the suffering of those who have passed through extreme trauma, but ultimately what it boils down to is that all suffering is suffering - the suffering of not getting what one wants, of getting what one does not want, of change and upset, and of suffering itself, be that pain or frustration - these are the four basic facets of suffering which, as the Buddha said, 'should be experienced - in one's own body and one's own mind' so as to be understood.
But it's also taught that suffering stems from a cause: that the cause is not knowing how to comport oneself in the world as it is - not knowing how or what to want... in a word: bewilderment or ignorance - unawareness - witlessness (all these words are linked to the Sanskrit... vidya = awareness, wit in the ancient sense; avidya = iggerance, literally unwit)...
Interestingly, for causes to fructify the entire ensemble of the contributary causes and the supporting conditions have to fructify at the same time, and these, too, are intimately related to our total misunderstanding of what it is that's going on here - our total misreading of being.
However, it is true that if something is an effect it has to have a cause, and, if you remove the cause then the effect will, of itself, disappear.
Removing ignorance may seem impossible, or, at the very least, so daunting as to be utterly unapproachable, but it is said that if one examines reality carefully and thoroughly, one develops what is known as the correct view. If one then lives in accord with this, carefully keeping to it and not slipping back into unawareness, if one is mindful and concentrated, keeps one's speech, conduct and thought in line with it, then the path to the dissolution of suffering opens up of itself and one may follow it to its end.
In other words, it's not the situation you try to dissolve, but the positive-negative grasping to the situation that ignorance entails - i want this; i don't want this... When these dissolve, the situation itself is subtly transformed; it actually becomes an opportunity for learning. As long as you continue to project on others and on the situation itself - to cling to it positively or negatively - you are simply moving the chess pieces round on the board.
I don't know if you know the Buddhist diagram of the so-called Wheel of Life? A fearsome-looking red man holds in his hands and is devouring a disc containing illustrations of the six possible realms of becoming, surrounding which are twelve illustrations of the process of becoming and the centre of which is marked with a pig, a cock and a snake symbolising the cause: ignorance, desire and aversion? - To the left of this diagram, there is generally a picture of a buddha pointing across the diagram to the right, where the above-mentioned 'eightfold noble path' is listed as another way of going about things.
There's quite a good description of the details of this here , for all the fact that Yama - the Lord of Death or first person ever to die - is shown not as red but black and that the noble path is represented as the paradise of Buddha Amitabha which has more to do with other-power (the saving power of faith) than with self-power as explained above.
As long as we wallow in our suffering, we only compound it... NO-ONE else is responsible for it, ultimately. They may be the contributary cause or the condition, but the ultimate fact of suffering is ours alone to assume responsibility for. As long as we're blaming 'it' or 'them', we are definitely looking in the wrong direction.
This is the very root of the Buddhist teachings, this is what Siddhartha Gautama realised under the Bodhi Tree: It's our own mind that's playing tricks with us - our own hopes and fears - our own bewildered grasping at meaningfulness in and projection of meaning onto the fleeting and ill-recognised experiences of our minds - that is the cause of our suffering. Did he not say: 'I see you, O builder of houses. No longer shall you build your mansions here,' at which point all hell broke loose as his various yearnings tried to keep him within their pernicious hold... That's how the story goes...

He persisted, and asked the earth itself to bear witness. Symbolising the end of anger and grasping, mara's weapons (mara=the demon of limiting concepts: that the body-mind is the self, that death is the end, that one is too sinful and weak to ever understand and self-sufficient pride) turn to flowers as they touch him and his beautiful daughters turn to old women before his eyes (he could, of course, have turned them into flowers too, but saw a need - think - regarding the prevalence of carnal desire). He is unshakeable in his knowledge that the builder of houses has lost, and the goddess of the earth rears up out of it before him to bear witness that he has, indeed, woken up from his eternal dream.

To this end, one needs to assume responsibility. That's what I'm saying.
I'm not negating the horror people suffer because of what they believe is real; they do, indeed, suffer terribly, and it really is terrifying and scarring and debilitating... But it's also a waste of time - a waste of this precious human incarnation which is so brief and so subtle and so beautiful.
In the Lankavatara Sutra it says, Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise. What this means is that we have to understand where the fault lies. It lies here; not there.

This is NOT a path for everybody. For the most part, dinner should be served well before there's any talk of 'philosphy' let alone 'liberation', I know. I grew up in Africa and have seen India and Nepal.

Then again, anybody can enter it at any given instant...

Let me now shut my mouth before I choke on this foot.

--

somewhere to stand

2005-11-09T07:14:00.000-08:00

The safest place to 'come from' - to 'stand' - is enlightenment. Failing that, nowhere is safe. With it, everywhere is safe.
What do I mean by enlightenment? I mean the space where you can embrace whatever arises because it is simply the display of the great ocean of becoming.
As Niguma says: If you don't understand that whatever appears is meditation, what can you achieve by applying an antidote?
There is no safe level outside of the understanding that whatever arises to you and the way in which it arises are all only a more or less restricted 'focus-pull' on the infinity of possibility. Once we know this, we can let go our own, crabbed little versions of reality and wander with both hands free in the infinite openness of loving-kindness, compassion and freedom from grasping-attachment even to freedom and openness themselves.
How do we get there? Niguma says: Perceptions are not abandoned by discarding them but are spontaneously freed when recognized as illusory.
Illusory?
Certainly.
Everything we know through the tiny aperture of our pinhole-camera mind is - literally - wrong. Not wrong in the sense of completely mistaken, but more in the sense of imagining that if you have one apple and one screwdriver, since one and one are two, you should logically have either two apples or two screwdrivers.
Conceptuality is inherently dualistic: reality is a single, seamless web.
Concepts, although they are part (and sometimes even a useful part) of it cannot possibly encompass it... It is infinitely more vast, complex and simple than any conceptual mind can fully hold.
So we dwell in our ideas: our hopes, our fears, our extrapolations, wants, refusals... in a world that is totally hand-knitted in fact... And of a 'wool' handspun from our own woolly-mindedness.
When you know this for sure, you recognise thoughts for what they are and they dissolve, like a drawing on water or a snake unwinding itself from seemingly impossible knots...
If you approach the world gently as loving kindness and helpful compassion, oddly enough, the world manifests to you in just that way. If you see it as scary or odd or difficult it is scary or odd or difficult, or even all of these together!
If you can let go attachment to what you imagine is yourself, the universe itself opens up as a vast expanse of ever more beautiful possibility. Not in any 'mystical' sense, but real-ly - as plain as a mango-fruit lying in the palm of your hand... Unmissable.
The universe doesn't change at all and thoughts come and go just as they did before, but you are no longer held by anything except a commitment to being of use to other sentient beings

Ordinary human intelligence; ordinary human kindness... That's all that's needed here.

the 'enemy'

2005-10-08T02:47:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, the term 'enemy' comes up quite a lot in Tibetan Buddhist rituals [Tib.: dgra (pron. DRA)]... There, what it basically means is a "spirit" (read "attitude") that is opposed to and obstructing what is valuable...
Such texts - couched, very often, in exquisite poetry be it said - tend to seek to dissolve and liberate such "spirits" back into the "space" from which they came and reconstitute them as supportive, loving and helpful...
Very often the 'enemy' who is doing us harm is our own way of reading the situation and our own activities in consequence.
Obviously there is no single cause - no one-on-one cause and effect: the situation - for an infinity of 'reasons' recognised and unrecognised - *seems* thus-and-thus, so - for an infinity of reasons both recognised and not - we 'respond' in such-and-such a manner... ad infinitum and ad nauseam... That is the exact definition of samsara - 'running round in circles'.
Ultimately any happiness or peace we are going to gain will *not* be in trying to rearrange the pieces on the chess-board but only in rearranging the attitude of the chessplayer. Kawabata's 'The Master of Go' is a perfect illustration of just this.
As is the present international situation.
It is also true that the "reasons" someone may have for becoming an enemy - regarding you as an enemy, may not be clear to you.
They may not like your haircut or the way you smell; they may object to what they regard as your 'high-handedness' when you are simply trying to get something across or get on with things. They may hate your political or religious views, regard you as obstructive, greedy or even as a downright threat to their own continued existence...
This is not necessarily 'rational', but is certainly 'reasoned out' adequately enough in that person's mind for them to believe in the truth of what they perceive, no?
If, on top of this, that person's only information about you stems from others who have already decided upon your worthlessness and the fact that you are a danger to what they consider 'the public good', you are left with an 'enemy' who doesn't even know who or where or what you are.
They may not even 'know' why they don't like you - it's just something instinctual.

And it's what we do too.

It is certainly Christian (and definitely Buddhist or Taoist) to remember "Let peace begin with me...."
All that is really necessary, as HH Dalai Lama never tires of saying, is ordinary human intelligence and ordinary human kindness... the realisation of the fact that we are - all of us - from the very stones on up - in this together and will need to pull together if anything is ever going to work at all.
It's all very well to imagine that those who seek to temper your path are 'enemies', 'jeremiahs' or 'panic-mongers', but this is simply refusing the evidence of your own senses - these people and this information ARE trying to temper your approach... Of this you can be 99.9% sure because it IS actually happening to you, or so it would seem. What is happening to you, when tough seeming, is generally a "message" from yourself that you've gone awry.
To simply write them off as 'idiots' and 'wrong' is to miss the point entirely. It doesn't matter what they are at all; what matters is that they are calling you to look into you...
And - if they regard the very ground upon which you walk as defiled, then they are calling you to reexamine your weltanschauung to its very roots... Could it just be that certain details - even very tiny ones - might be... shall we say?... not quite up to scratch?...
Without our genuine self-reflection (which is the exact opposite of basking in one's own god-given rightness and actually entails perceiving oneself in the 'mirror of the other', albeit that this is sometimes a distorting mirror) there is not much hope of happiness or peace on this planet in our time, that's for sure.
What, for example, if the very bases - the very roots - of our philosphy were wrong?
What if we have glossed over the bits that require genuine commitment in favour of the short-term grab?
What if we really do have no idea what the hell is going here, what is good for us or what - if anything - the meaning/purpose/reason for life - for there being anything at all - might be?
What if - when we examine it - we find that ultimately everything is only part and parcel of everything else and that it cannot survive on its own for the simple reason that anything it is at any given instant is intimately enmeshed with whatever everything else is?
When we look in the mirror in the morning, who do we see? The brilliant, successful, happy, enlightened and always right 'me' of our imagination? And if not, why not? What is stopping us actually being that person?

Why is it that enemy number one is me? And - more to the point - what am I going to do about it?

permafrost and the permian

2005-09-29T08:44:00.000-07:00

If you're unaware of these, you should become aware of them as soon as possible:

... the following websites:

http://dieoff.org/page25.htm
http://www.clubofrome.org/docs/limits.rtf
http://dieoff.org/page175.htm
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC32/Meadows.htm

And here are some of the scientific facts:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4184110.stm

go on to http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223130549.htm

and follow links from:
http://www.google.co.za/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=
permian+extinction+global+warming+6+deg&btnG=Search&meta=

This is from my friend Mike Cope's latest book, Intricacy:

Long ago there occurred an event which had a profound effect on the continued presence of living things on the planet. Palaeontologists call this event the Permian extinction, and place it at the Permian/Triassic boundary, around the time that the long-lived bacterium was setting itself up for the extended wait.
It seems (and it is a matter of some dispute) that at around that time, two hundred and fifty one million years ago, conditions on the earth made a very sudden shift. Where there had been a biodiverse and complex society of living beings, suddenly ninety-five percent of species go missing, never to be seen again. The succession of rocks deposited then shows that above the complex fossil-bearing strata there is a layer of sand and rubble indicating erosion on the land-mass as the plants died, along with the animals that depended on them. Land animals were hard-hit, and only two species of four-legged animals are thought to have survived – one of them a reptile resembling a pig, our ancestor. The ocean did worse, with an almost total die-out. What happened? Competing theories have been ad-vanced: a meteor hit the planet, or a planetary body passed close by, the earth's crust shifted on its mantle as Einstein thought might be possible, or a nearby supernova emitted enough gamma radiation to kill most living things.
In recent years, as dating techniques have improved, one theory has taken the lead: The event was triggered by volcanic eruptions in the area now called Siberia, where the earth split along immense trenches, pumping vast amounts of lava, carbon dioxide and sulphur onto the surface and into the air. Fancy techniques to do with isotopes allow this rise in atmospheric carbon to be traced. The carbon dioxide caused global warming which, it is thought, was enough to release methane trapped in the circumpolar ice. Now methane is a much more efficient greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and when it gets into the mix, the temperature jumps suddenly. The jump is enough to dis-rupt weather and change all local conditions beyond the adaptive ranges of the vast majority of hapless animals and plants. The disruption of ocean currents prevents oxygen from reaching the ocean beds, killing the seas and the cor-als and hobbling the global oxygen economy. Planetary oxygen levels plummet. Meltdown. This model, while still in some dispute, is consistent with the fossil record.
Some scientists have proposed a number of degrees of warming, based on carbon isotope measurements: at the time of the Permian/Triassic boundary, there was six degrees centigrade of global warming, they claim. Other scientists are far more cautious: when things are that old, the accuracy of measurements is woolly at best. But the de-tailed model which factors methane in with carbon dioxide is now a matter of consensus science and not in dispute except by corporate toadies of the oil companies. Predic-tions for global warming caused by industrial civilisation by the end of this century range from three to twelve degrees. If the methane is released, the models strongly suggest, we can forget ourselves, individually and as a species. The world will no longer nurture the steady succession of generations, the repository of memory that we take for granted.
The great biologist E O Wilson reckons that if we come out of our current scrape with fifty percent of the species we have now, we'll be doing pretty well, and is am-biguous about the hope that humans will be among of the survivors. And yet, like gamblers, addicts, writers and artists, we carry on as before, hoping for the lucky break, the skewed odds that might bring us through. We know how special we are and how much we deserve to make it.

persona

2005-09-29T08:38:00.000-07:00

Old Greek word for the masks used in drama - you still see them, one laughing, one weeping, on much that has a theatrical connection...
Psychology, of course, uses the term to mean the 'person' one is under any given circumstance... What follows, then, is my take on my various "mes".

Dramatis personae... the cast of the endless saga...each one a cobbled attempt at response to a series of "situations"...
I play the long-haired, dopey hippie as my basic role... Keeps people from trying to out me... I've lost already... This is quite a useful stance to take - lets you get on with what's important without too much interference from testosteroned-up nutters...
Then there's the Boodhist/Taoist feller and all his parephernalia... endless boox and a glib tongue...
Then the scholar... Kabbalist, Gnostic, Pagan, magic(k), you name it... The alchemist, of course...
Also husband, father, mentor, friend... lover, cook, mr. fixit, the loving father, the irate father, catfriend, dreamer, poet, musician, reader...

Hats.
Sometimes you put them on yourself; sometimes they put themselves on for you before you've noticed... more particularly the less 'nice' ones...
Often based on aeons of karma - of belief that such-and-such is like this, and so-and-so is like that, or OTHER peoples' beliefs ditto (you're the guy with the beard: you must be cool/you must be some kind of dork/what're you hiding? etc.)...
Also (generally unconscious) family and peer-group transmissions and traditions, sometimes exquisitely cruel, sometimes just beautiful...

So (when I remember!) I try to see beyond these - beyond the need to "be" any one (or even any group of several) of these.
After all, they are all 'response' and therefore only a concatenation of cause and effect. Anything that is simply mutually defining cause and effect must naturally be devoid of an ultimate "reality" in itself. The faces in the mirror are just that: appearances in the mirror dependingt on what its reflecting...'guest' rather than 'host', to use the terminology of Ch'an Buddhism.

... And the 'host' seems ultimately unknowable...

as the crow barks

2005-08-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

Theravadin or 'The School of the Elders' Buddhists are naive realists much like oursleves, but reject the idea of an ultimate particle of either space or time as logically untenable (which it is)...
The basic idea within Mahayana or 'Universalist' Buddhism is that the universe in its entirety is simply the projection of awareness...
I say 'simply', but certainly don't mean - and nor do they - that the universe and its appearance to us is anything vaguely resembling "simple"...
The contention (if — after my brief study of it — I have any understanding of it at all) is more or less the following: The only thing we can be utterly sure of is that there seems to be a world of experience. It appears to have extention as regards what we conceive of and experience as direction and as what we conceive of and experience as duration. Both of these are infinitely divisible on the one hand - are made up of, in other words, less and less tangible elements ad infinitessimum - and, on the other, form parts of larger wholes ad infinitum. There is no part of either that is its essence and both are given to constant and thoroughgoing change. It is, in fact, simply the interplay of an infinity of mutually defining and shaping 'causes' and 'conditions'.
This is technically termed 'emptiness', which is to say that things are empty of being what they appear to be *in any essential way*.
This does not mean that they are empty of their seeming reality — water is water, and fire is fire — to each and all of us, but that they are empty of *ultimately* being what they seem — of an ultimate, demonstrable *essence*... When one pushes the logic to its ultimate, it is discovered that they cannot exist in any way other than as our own assumptions about them.
An often used analogy is the experience of a drop of water, which, to a being tormented in some self-created hell may very well be perceived as yet another source of excruciating agony and to a so-called 'famished spirit' would be either something forbidden or foul. To an animal it could be home — even an entire universe! — the difference between life and death, and to a human anything from a nuisance to a lifesaver too. To a titanic spirit it would be a weapon and to someone in the divine realms, the elixir of life.None of has has the same experience of anything but the general outlines of the world of appearances. My comfortable little office may be your untidy boxroom, and what my wife regards as music, may please on some days and irritate on others. If things were what they were, pleasing things would always please and unpleasant things would always be unpleasant, but we know this is not the case.
Ultimately our experiences of "reality" have no more substance to them than our experiences in dreams. The only substantiality they have is the fact that we know we are experiencing them, and experiencing them in such and such a manner... beyond that, anything we claim is mere wishful thinking.
Things neither exist in the way we think they do, nor don't exist in the manner of a total void... They are simply the coming together of causes and conditions, themselves the manifestations of other causes and conditions ad infinitum. The eternal dragondance of space dancing space into space.
As regards the idea that consciousness arises from matter (the 'ghost in the machine' idea that is the currentscientific and medical paradigm), if this were the case, we should be able to experience this, if not in ourselves, then at least in others, but it has never been proven to be the case... It certainly seems to be true that certain areas of the central nervous system are excited by various types of sensory and other experience and input, but this may simply be the way we read it to ourselves because ultimately all we know is that we know this.
The second teaching given by Gautama, the sage of the Shakyas, was on what is variously translated as 'interdependent origination', 'conditioned coproduction', 'mutually conditioning causation/origination/causality' and a bunch of other tooth-busters...

Basically the idea is as follows (think in terms of namo- or even femto-seconds):

Any situation consciousness enters (for example a life) is entered in a state of bewilderment. We don't know - Even when the situation seems almost identical with the just previous ituation, we don't actually know what is going to happen next and much of what is actually going is being ignored by us anyway as not important to our ends-in-view, which are, themselves, another way of skewing and obscuring what s actually present. This is the first link, technically called avidya in Sanskrit, ma rig pa in Tibetan, both of which basically mean non-awareness and bewildered ignorance.
Consciousness immediately brings to the situation all previous thought-patterning and is learning literal billions of new ways of knowing in each instant as it enters. These patterns, which include ways of knowing and interpreting, tend to further shape the situation, leading us to believe that it is such-and-such a situation and not some other. Beliefs of all sorts are at full play here and it is here that we link out the present situation to all that has gone before it. This link is known as the link of the samskaras or 'du je kyi le, which means the activity of linking and of connectivity.
With the establishment of continuity comes the type of awareness consciousness will be using. Assuming we *are* talking about entering a life - a new embodiment - the awareness now assumed will be in harmony with the type of embodiment being entered in terms of the connectivity established in the previous insant, and...
this awareness will conceive of itself in terms of certain ideas as to what it is and what forms it has. These two links, vijñana (nam she ) and nama rupa (ming zug), 'consciousness' and 'name and form' respectively, determine
the ayatana (kyem che), which is to say the sense organs and their corresponding consciousnesses.
These in turn condition senory contact (some spiders, for example, actually see in infra red - we see only seven grades of light). This is the link of sparsha (reg pa) - literally 'contact/touch'
Depending upon the contact comes feeling (vedana or ts'or wa) which is then interpreted as pleasant, unpleasant or indeterminate,
feeling conditions hankering and attachment (trishna or se pa) - to the best of one's ability seeking out what is pleasant, avoiding what is unpleasant and ignoring what seems to be of no interest.
Hankering establishes what one will grasp at as being the positive, negative and indeterminate poles of one's 'reality'. This is upadana (len pa) - 'grasping'.
Reality establish is bhava (si pa), variously translated as 'existence' or 'becoming',
into which one takes birth/enters (jati or kye wa, depending on whether you're following the Sanskrit or Tibetan terminology at this point) ;),
in which you mature and then age, and out of which you then die (jaramarana/ga shi)

... entering the next situation still bewildered as to what consciousness actually is but filled with new imprints which then set about skewing this new one.

Gautama's suggestion was that one work backwards through these links and undo the knots involved. Easier said than done!

However, the point here is that the various worlds or realms of becoming are a certain level of ‘readout’ - a certain ‘focus-pull’ on what consciousness (which is far more vast than any given readout) actually is. Universes are the playful manifestation of awareness; not the other way round.
The existentialist Noel Jacquin considers conception to be the instant where - with the blending of the male and female generative energies which form the basis of 'body' - a "third element" is as it were "called in" and merges itself with them. This "third element" is, in his opinion, consciousness...
Somewhere along the line, this is not too far from Jungs idea of the centre of the circle being the Self and the circumference the self, of the famed "dewdrop slipping into the shining sea", except that its more like the sea restricting itself to being this and that and that other over there dewdrop. Consciousness - because it has no essential nature - is infinite.
The Dzogchenpas (who represent, as it were, the pinnacle of Tibetan thought on the matter) would say something like: consciousness is empty of essence, radiant by nature and all-encompassing in its compassionate energy.
Since I am a card-carrying ‘Boodhist’ and a Dzogchen hopeful (read 'wannabee') myself, this is, of course, the point of view to which I subscribe and which I have slowly been trying to clarifyfor myself over the 45-odd years since I first discovered it...

poison (1)

2005-07-22T01:13:00.000-07:00

Anger and violence seem to stem from a powerful but frustrated desire to communicate, don't they? I mean as opposed to just downright cruelty whose agenda is simply gratification in seeing someone else suffer. That's another thing.
I find my own anger always stems from frustrated communication; so does Vera's and my kids' anger seems to boil out of the same source - frustration at one's own lack of communication or at the so obviously foolish (to you) lack of communication of others...The Tibetans have several words for anger: khro (pron.: TR'O) = rage and a belligerent, wrathful attitude; zhe (pron.: SHE) = hatred; sdangs (pron.: DANG) = dislike, aversion, hatred, anger, aggression, hostility, irritation, be hateful, dislike, be hostile toward, opposed to, angry at; and zhe sdang is the translation of the 'hatred-aversion' that is one of the three poisons (desire and hatred as manifestations of ignorance) and this can be very subtle, as in simply having a preference for or prefering to avoid, and - as we doubtless all know - the frustration of even this can lead to an undertow of feeling badly done by and resentment...

peace in dark times

2005-07-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

'DZAM LING CHI DANG YÜL K'AM 'DI DAG TU

In the world at large and in this region in particular,

NE MUG TS'ÖN SOG DUG NGÄL MING MI DRAG

May the names of suffering such as ‘sickness’, ‘famine’ and ‘war’ not be heard.

CHÖ DEN SÖ NAM PÄL 'JOR GONG DU 'PEL

May the meritorious qualities, honour and prosperity of all who act in accord with Dharma greatly increase,

TAG TU TRA SHI DE LEG P'ÜN TS'OG SHOG

And may there always be an absolute perfection of good fortune, happiness and auspicious circumstances.

This is by Jñana — HH Düd'jom Rinpoche

selfs

2005-06-24T01:06:00.000-07:00

I was asked recently by someone to explain the Buddhist idea of no-self. The problem with this, of course, is that Buddhism was (and still is, today) taught on several different levels, depending upon the audience.
What I finally decided to do was to summarise some of the ideas in the first chapter of Nagarjuna's (c150-250CE) Fundamental Insight into the Middle Way (cf. this link), where he demonstrates that the idea that things exist as such cannot be upheld logically.

If any particular is to be itself, says he, it can only come into existence in one of several ways: either it is produced from itself, or from another, of from both, or from neither. There are no other options.

If it arises from itself, it would have to exist as itself before producing itself, in which case there would be no reason at all for it to re–produce itself since it would already exist.
Furthermore, why would there then be aby end to such production? Things could be and then produce themselves and then be and produce themselves, over and over again, ad infinitum.
Brief examination of the world around us shows that neither of these is the case. Something that comes into being does NOT prexist itself, in the first place, and nor is it the case that, once it does exist it then continues to produce itself without let or stay, therefore the logical position that things arise of themselves is untenable.

Perhaps they arise from something else — something ‘other’ — then?
Firstly, for two things to be different, they have to exist simultaneously. One does not generally say that light is different from itself or from nothing else.
In general parlance, when we seek to establish the uniqueness of light we do so by contrasting it with other things that already exist so as to highlight the difference. Light is not the same as a shoe sole, for example, or a plate of scrambled eggs. It is also not the same as darkness, but the word ‘light’ only has real meaning within such distinctions. The notion 'light' — as is the case with all other notions — is inherently dualistic.
Firstly, if what arises can arise from something totally different from itself, then fire will arise from barley seeds and cows from ducks, seeds will be born of shoots and the past from the present.
As will be noticed, this is not actually the case.
It seems fairly established, for example, that a child is born of its parents. However, if one pushes the logic of the thing, its parents are not its parents until the very instant it is born: the mother is not a mother, though she may be what is called an expectant mother, and the father is by no means a father (to the particular child concerned — it may, of course, be the fact that the parents have had several other children beforehand, but what we are talking about here is the logical possibility of one particular arising from another that is different from it) until the child makes them so.

Let us assume, then, that things arise from both themselves and from something else.
But all this does is combine and compound the logical errors of both the above. It is a logical dead-end.

So perhaps things arise from nothing all?
If this were the case, there would be no reason to assume that - for example - striking a match would result in a small burst of fire, or to assume that earth should be solid and the other four elements more or less insubstantial... Any thing could arise at any time for any and even no reason. Therer would be no sense to anything at all.
This too is demonstrably not the case (try belting your thumb hard with a hammer, for example, and see).

What we do notice, however, is that what we call particulars are in fact simply‘appearances’ — simply a certain level readout of an infinite concatenation of causes and conditions. Far from being permanent, partless, and independent ‘entities’, they are fleeting modulations in a field of experienced ‘energy’ that has no ultimate existence as such...

The word I'm translating as 'appearance’ — nangwa (snang ba) in Tibetan, abhasa in Sanskrit — actually has a multitude of meanings to do with appearance, perception, lucidity, radiance and sensation, but for our purposes three will suffice: sensory appearances in general, one's individual perception of sense objects, and what may probably best be termed ‘experience’. It has three modes: pure, impure and degenerate and obviously refers to the forms, sounds, tastes, smells, touch and concepts concerning these that make up our daily experience.
The problem here being that — for all its vividness — the only aspect of these experiences we can truly vouch for is the conceptual one. What we are sure of is that there seems to be an endless array of sensory experiences related to the five sense organs, but — in fact — all we really know of these expereiences is what appears to our minds.
Add to this the fact that, in a universe of infinite possibility, we see only seven grades of light, hear only between about15 or 20 and 20,000 hertz (which are waves or sound cycles per second) and generally tend to experience smell, taste and touch in a highly inarticulate and hence largely generalised way, and these often in an extremely distorted (where not entirely projected) manner...
Appearance is almost inevitably ‘good’ in that it agrees with, ‘bad’ in that it upsets or ‘indifferent’ in that it is of no interest to the ends–in–view and intentions of the experiencer.
Not only that, but it also is invariably caught up in the causal networks of karma (as ‘experientially initiated potentialities for experience’) and of the mechanics of becoming (whereby every thing depends entirely upon everything else for its least aspect of being)... Everything is subject to the moods and vagaries of everything and therefore cannot be a 'self' which is, by definition, independent, indivisible and permanent...

There is no ‘ultimate particle’, because any particle that has location at all will always be divisible into a front, a back, a left and right hand side, a top and a bottom, intermediate directions and a core — at least nine (if not seventeen) parts, in fact.
There is no ‘ultimate instant’ because even quadrillionths of femto seconds are divisible into a beginning, middle and end.
There is no ‘ultimate thing’ because things are just conglmerations of ever smaller things, ad infinitessimum, and also - in fact - simply parts of ever larger wholes, ad infinitum, to the extent that one Dzogchen cosmology perceives our entire universe and all that's in it as merely a single atom on one petal on the fourteenth level of petals of lotus in the begging bowl of one of an infinite network of buddhas called Vairochana ('In Form Making Visible')...
Who knows if they may be right, but the point is that we actually have no way of knowing...

So 'self' seems to be an idea... Quite a useful idea in some contexts (just prior to stepping off a pavement, for example) and an absolute blind in others. But as to any 'reality' to it, there is none that is immediately observable. It has no form, sound, taste, colour, palpable sense of presence and cannot be located anywhere inside or outside the body. If you contest this, then you will surely be able to point to where it is, what it is, and allow anyone at all to weigh it in there hands, is this not so?
But we cannot.
And why not?
Because it is just that... an idea... And nothing else.

Nor is there any "ultimate self" or "Ur-self" - no "Atman" or "Maha-atman" - and for the same reasons given above. Certainly there are areas of the idea of self that are hidden from conscious awareness, some that ore more profound than necessary for day-to-day activities, some that ore more or less consciously pushed into the background for one reason and another, but - to use a very Buddhist analogy - this is also exactly the case in the state of dream... the horns of a rabbit and hair of a tortoise... Utterly convincing within the context of the dream itself, but soon seen to be mere figments of the imagination once one is awake.

That's it, more or less, and the best I can do for the moment.

Anyone interested in this vast and somewhat convoluted study (not becuase IT is convoluted in itself, but because the attitudes and presumption it tries to correct are) might look into the following possible reading list which might help to clarify some if it.

My recommendation is the 'Time, Space and Knowledge' series by Tarthang Tulku [DHARMA PUBLISHING], a tounguetip taste of which is available as an interactive website here

http://tsk.designwest.com/

the texts Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness and Sun of Wisdom, both by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, the former available here

http://www.snowlionpub.com/search.php?cart_id=3150902.28559&item_no=PRSTME

and the latter here

http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/1-57062-999-4.cfm

Thrangu Rinpoche's Pointing Out the Dharmakaya, which can be found here

http://www.snowlionpub.com/search.php?in_item_id=6606

and Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche's 'It's Up to You', available here.

http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/1-59030-148-X.cfm

Also, while on the subject, there is, available on the web now, a series of talks by HH XIVth Dalai Lama on a text written in VIIIth. c. Tibet by Guru Padmasambhava (at http://www.lamrim.com/hhdl/garlandofviews.html).
The full series (which also includes a talk in English on world peace as the outcome of inner pacification) lasts a good 10 hours, but - if you want to know what the Buddhist point of view is and is not - this is the best of all possible places to start.

energy–field pattern–shifts

2005-05-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

Far out! I got comment or two. Thank you.

Since it seems to be more or less how it's done, I wanted to add the following, a letter spurred by comments in a letter by a friend of mine (whose website http://www.jungcircle. com/ is well worth the time, by the way) to another (whose site http://www.jungcircle.com/muse and blog http://themoonsfavors.blogspot.com/, ditto)...
I'm not sure it answers her so much as just simply vehicling some musings of my own, but so it goes...

since I'm doing zilch.

What does doing zilch entail? Today - for the first time in years - I sat out on the balcony in the sun doing my daily practice, had a salad and a kip (got up at sparrows after crashing late) and in between pottered around a bit on some texts I'm busy translating myself.
Does this qualify?

The older we get the more we're steered away from chosen paths.

By 'chosen', here, I assume you mean paths you chose yourself, rather than those that chose you?
I gave up those when I first dropped doing music as my only visible (and mainly IN-visible) means of support... Some time around '73... Since then - since I have no other 'plan', no other 'end in view' (aside, perhaps, from aligning myself with the Way) - I've been pretty much content to follow. Far from losing all knowledge of who "i" am, I now feel that I am beginning at last to have the vaguest glimmer of what Buddhism and Taoism are actually on about... Who "I" am, except insofar as that blocks this, is of no interest to me at all and I am certainly happiest when "i" is not there.

In the end, life lives us, not the other way around.

Certainly the karma of one's life - where it plays itself out, the circumstances surrounding it and one's predisposition to one or other way of reading it - are difficult to take control of. Karma as - in Whitehead's terms - 'experientially initiated potentialities for experience' means, basically, that you see only what you believe and then go on to interpret it only in those terms you yourself will allow... Stepping beyond the box - outside of knowing/understanding/conceiving and into the ineffable and inconceivable - is possible in little scurrying forays occasionally, possibly, but to take up residence there takes another kind of courage.

The Diamond Sutra says that the Bodhisattva is one who gives rise to a mind that is unsupported anywhere, and that idea - the idea of stepping off the top of our hundred-foot pole to turn a somersault throughout the universe, to walk with both hands free as the Zen Masters put it - is both intriguing and terrifying.
To be able to conceive of it is one thing, and already marvellous, but... to actually engage in it really does require a no-one not doing no-thing in no-where, the dragon-dance of space dancing space into space...
It's unfortunately also very easy to imagine or wishful think yourself into a trumped-up version of this, and a lot of the history of this planet is the unfortunate result of just such misplaced magisteries because the moment a "truth" becomes established, it is immediately no longer true.
Truths - like everything else - are in the instant, disappearing like the foam on the wave even as they come into being... With other forms appearing to replace them in the very instant of their conception...
That's what 'impermanence' is all about.
Couple this to the fact that every instance of being through the four times and ten directions is merely a momentary facet of the endless interweave of on-offs that is the whole... the least molecule of dust on the last crow's wing requires the entirety of the universe, manifest and unmanifest, to even come into, let alone persist in and then pass out of being. Everything is related to everything else and intimately dependent upon it for everything that it is. Nothing is its independent self.
We take things to be themselves because we have come to expect them to be that, but this is simply projecting what we expect onto what we think we perceive. In fact what we perceive is only the mental impressions we imagine stem from some other reality, 'out there' - the ob iactus - but we have no proof of that 'out there' at all, and any proof we can come up with is always 'in here' - sub iactus... Even the 'beings' and 'things' that people our animate and inanimate universes are simply certain chosen names - certain chosen cut-off reading points - for conglomerations of ever smaller partts and particles - right down to the utterly impalpable - and form in their own turn part and particle of greater wholes...
One buddhist cosmology contends that the universe we know and all that's in it is nothing but a single, sub-atomic particle of a petal among the fourteenth level of petals of a lotus sitting in the begging bowl of the Buddha Vairochana (which means 'Making Manifest as Form'), who is, himself, but one of an infinity of Buddha Vairochanas stretching throughout all of space and time...

So the various mikes perceived by both himself and others, for example, are not even mikes anymore very soon after you start looking into his component parts - This bit here is an eye, that hair, over here is a hand and there's a foot over there... Ah! but mike's hand you will tell me but the hand itself is palm and back, fingers and thumb, and these are skin and flesh, sinew, blood and bone which are, themselves, configurations of cells made up of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles, themselves divisible ad infinitum in that, as long as they have spatial position, they will have a front, back, sides, intermediate directions and a centre and as long as they persist, there always be a coming into, persisting and passing out of existence, and every instant, no matter how fleeting, will be divisible into a begiining, middle and end.
Ultimately where is the essential mike?
He is simply a reading on a certain level of these various conglomerates - this small, sweaty, bearded person with short pants and no shirt, his hair tied in a long plait and a goofy expression on his face over here on this chair near the window, for example.
This even before we try to fit him into the society of his family and friends or (with somewhat less success) the community, city, country, civilisation as a whole, the planet, solar system, galaxy or universe...
Nothing at all, in essence, and yet he mikes.
Just as you do whatever you are.

On one level it is quite true that you can't lose the Way - you ARE the Way - but the point here is that we also tend to chop the universe up into 'bite-size' blocks and chunks and then assume those blocks as 'reality' rather than stepping beyond into the forever unknown and unknowable, which is actually where we live.
I don't think life lives us anymore than we live life; life just IS us, and it manifests as it will, sometimes according with what we think and want of it, sometimes not.
I still find it odd (if not downright scary!) that life will as happily suffer as it will rejoice, and as easily manifest as fundamentalist hatred and suspicion as it will open-hearted kindliness and compassion...
I find it difficult not to polarise in a universe where so many are suffering, and where so many others seem to be profiting by their pain...
And I find it terrifying that I am still so much a prey to the negative emotions - particularly anger and irritation - myself!

But I does me best, dunn I?

By the way - don't you think it's time the personal pronoun for the first person singular was cut down to size?
Surely if he, she, it, you, we, they and even me are all lower case, i (perhaps sans the dot?) would serve very well to refer to the grand panjandrum?

... And maybe also even help to get him into proportion vis–à–vis the rest of the universe of which he somehow fondly imagines himself the owner...

negative capability

2005-05-27T01:13:00.000-07:00

My friend Alice Howell says:

Edinger once said to me, "When you speak, if one single person 'hears' you, you have not spoken in vain". And my Teacher said, "You have no way of knowing how many on the other side crowd around to share." I do my damndest... Think more of contributing than the feedback - that's what it's really about.'

I think these are the only reasons I left my blog up... or that I do anything at all, actually. Because it needs to be done - needs to be said... Because I ultimately believe that it will help... Somewhere.
I remember, some forty-odd years ago, once formulating the wish that I would one day be so enlightened that - without anyone ever necessarily connecting the fact back to whoever I was at that time - all problems throughout the universe would simply be solved without further ado...
Folk would find peace and love, patience and kindliness in their hearts, problems would simply dissolve and turn into opportunities, conflict would be recognised as a useless waste of energy and simply dropped to be replaced with open-heartedness and understanding...
I was probably (VERY probably!) stoned at the time...
... However - as things developed, my prayer matured somewhat and became: Whether they regard me with like or dislike, respect or contempt, as a model or even as a cautionary tale, may just that become one of the causes leading to the certain enlightenement of all sentient beings who come into contact with me.
Doesn't mean to say I particularly LIKE being regarded as a naive fool, sixties retard or short-sighted old fart and wouldn't far rather be taken for a sage, but it doesn't matter WHAT people think of you, actually, as long as that's useful to them - *ultimately* useful to them.
Otherwise we're all just wasting our time, running around inside the circles of the five poisons (bewilderment, craving, rejection, pride and jealousy) with no end in sight.

Thank you, Alice, for reminding me of this.

There are some extraordinary Buddhist books on this, but they all take their root in Shantideva's "Entering the Path of Enlightenement' to which HH Dalai Lama has taught a very accessible commentary now published as "A Flash of Lightning in the Night".

As regards the first:
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-1590300572-0

Publisher Comments:
One of the great classics of Mahayana Buddhism, The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicharyavatara) is a guide to cultivating the mind of enlightenment, and to generating the qualities of love, compassion, generosity, and patience. Presented in the form of a personal
meditation in verse, it outlines the path of the bodhisattvas–those beings who renounce the peace of an individual salvation and vow to work for the deliverance of all beings, and to attain enlightenment for their sake. The text is beloved by Buddhists of all traditions. Originally written in India in Sanskrit, the text first appeared in Tibetan translation in the eighth century. The fact that it has been expounded, studied, and practiced in Tibet in an unbroken tradition
lends the Tibetan version of the Bodhicharyavatara a particular authority. The present version has therefore been translated from the Tibetan, following a commentary by the Nyingma master Kunzang Pelden, renowned for its thoroughness, clarity, and accessibility.

Synopsis:
The Bodhicharyavatara (literally, "An Entry into the Activities of Enlightenment") is one of the masterworks of Buddhist thought. Written in eighth-century India, it outlines the path of the bodhisattvas, those spiritual aspirants who vow to cultivate wisdom and forgo complete enlightenment in order to help others. This work quickly became a major text of Tibetan Buddhism and is offered here in a highly accessible and poetic translation from the Tibetan.

Synopsis:
The Bodhicharyavatara (literally, "An entry into the activities of enlightenment"), is one of the masterworks of Buddhist thought.
Written in 8th-century India, it outlines the path of the bodhisattvas, those spiritual aspirants who vow to cultivate wisdom and forgo complete enlightenment.

And, for the second:
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=18-0877739714-3

Publisher Comments:
Compassion is the guiding principle of the bodhisattvas, those who vow to attain enlightenment in order to liberate all sentient beings from the suffering and confusion of imperfect existence. To this end, they must renounce all self-centered goals and consider only the well-being of others. The bodhisattvas' enemies are the ego, passion, and hatred; their weapons are generosity, patience, perseverance, and wisdom. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is considered to be a living embodiment of this spiritual ideal. His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai
Lama presents here a detailed manual of practical philosophy, based on The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicharyavatara) , a well-known text of Mahayana Buddhism written by Shantideva. The Dalai Lama explains and amplifies the text, alluding throughout to the experience of daily life and showing how anyone can develop bodhichitta, the wish for perfect enlightenment for the sake of others. This book will surely become a standard manual for all those who wish to make the bodhisattva ideal a living experience.

Synopsis:
Describes the path to enlightenment as followed by the Bodhisattva.

Description:
Includes bibliographical references (p. [137]) and index.

I was cook while HH gave this - or a similar - explanation of the first eight chapters to a vast crowd in the Dordogne about 15 years ago. The ninth chapter - which he taught a few years later and which deals exclusively with emptiness and how come to at least an intellectual understanding of it - has a book all to itself which i can't find on either the Powell's or Amazon list
- Hang on while I check Snow Lion... Yup! Here it is...

http://www.snowlionpub.com/search.php

How do we generate wisdom within? This exploration, focused around an explication of the 9th chapter of Shantideva's Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life leads the reader through the stages of insight up to the highest view of emptiness. Based on teachings given in France in 1993--this book completes the commentary begun in A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of the Night.. Thupten Jinpa is the Dalai Lama's principal English translator, and has edited many books.

Sorry to go on a bit, but I really think this particular "mind-change" is at the very root of all and everything.

a thought in passing

2005-05-18T01:16:00.000-07:00

It suddenly occurs to me that I can actually use this spot to mention that my new book is finally out, available from all the usual suspects — Amazon, B&N (who don't seem to be aware that it's actually up and running yet), Snow Lion, Wisdom Publications, etc. - of course... (I tried putting in lynx, but (a) they don't appear as lynx, and (b) they were just so bloody untidy!)...
The book is called A Treasure-Trove of Blessing and Protection: The Seven Chapter Prayer of the Great Teacher Padmasambhava and has been some twelve-odd years in the preparation.
For anyone who's interested, I also have one or two other publications out: The Sayings of Old Ch'eng on the Nature of Original Mind, my "little red book", published by the same publisher (Cool Grove press) and available as above, and two alchemical translations, one, The Intellectual Cantilenae in Nine Triads upon the Resurrection of the Phoenix, a text by the famed Michael Maier, and the other, Alchemical Compendium 1, a selection of texts from 15th-18th century French, both of them available from

http://www.alchemy.dial.pipex.com/

the extraordinary website of my friend Adam McLean
I hope you have as much fun examining these as i did working on them.

Assuming there's anybody out there, of course!

red shift?

2005-05-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

Oh well! Since things seem to be moving at the speed of light here, perhaps I might as well toss this one onto the fire, too, and see what comes of it. This is by one of my teachers called Künzang Dechen Lingpa.
The (m05) whossname at the end is simply to indicate that I did the translation, and that I did it this year. Sort of copyright, so to speak.

For the sublime Künzang Lhadrön

It's like this: All phenomena of the world of appearances and possibilities, be they of cyclic existence or of ultimate peace,
Utterly transcend the extremes of either having or not having substantial existence.
No matter what manifests or how you perceive it, its inherent nature is that of a magical illusion
And clinging to it as actually possessing material characteristics is simply the error of wishful thinking.
Beyond acceptance or rejection, just remain in an uncontrived and effortless state of total relaxation.
Even if the waves that are the self–expression of the vast and swirling expanse of the ocean of ultimate reality
Should rise up to stream through the very heavens,
They never depart from being the nature of the great ocean itself.

SAMAYA —Commitment

Künde wrote this. May virtue abound.

(m05)

going through the emotions

2005-03-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

In the Buddhist tantric teachings, the emotions are the five aspects
of ‘primordial wisdom’, but somehow blocked...
Mental darkness, though the manifestation of its blocked aspect, is the primordial awareness of ultimate spaciousness and radiant lucidity.
Anger and hatred are the mirror-like aspect of primordial awareness, arrogance and self-sufficient pride are the primordial awareness of essential sameness, and grasping desire and greedy clinging are the aspect that knows and appreciates each thing in all its detail.
Envy-jealousy is said to be that aspect of primordial awareness that is the recognition of accompished activity and that which brings activity to final accomplishment...

It's also contended that the only ‘real’ existence these negative emotions actually have is the fact that they can be purified...

religious thought?

2005-02-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

A religious truth is essentially an experience; it is not an opinion.

C. G. JUNG CW18 par.692

The problem with 'religious truths' is that they are not truths in the same sense that, if you step off the pavement without looking, say, you may very well not enjoy the outcome. Religious truths are, indeed, experience; however experience is (a) NEVER shared but always individual, and (b) is inevitably mitigated by previous experience. Experience itself is (to quote A. N. Whitehead) simply "experientially initiated potentiality for further experience", which is to say that - rather than 'seeing is believing' - what actually happens is that you see only what you already believe or can already understand based on an accretion of previous instants of experiences you deem similar or dissimilar.
Thirdly, there is also the distinction between intellectual understanding (which, according to the Tibetans, is like a patch: it tends to fall off when you most need it), experience (which fades like clouds, leaving little but opinion in its wake) and genuine realisation (which is as vast and all-encompassing as space).
My own yardstick for judging 'truths' is precisely this idea of vastness and all-encompassingness. Any ideological "truth", religious or other, which excludes more than it contains is of a lesser nature... Not necessarily untrue, but merely a step toward that greater truth that includes it.
At the age of 12, the great teacher Sachen Kunga Nyingpo had a visionof Mañjushri, bodhisattva of penetrating insight, who said to him:

If you're attached to the concerns of just this life, you are not a practitioner;
If you're attached to cyclic existence and its confusions, you are no renunciate;
If you're attached to your own goals and personal well–being, this is not the enlightened attitude of compassion;
If you cling to anything at all, that is not the ultimate view.

These four lines are considered by Tibetan Buddhists of all schools to be one of several such brief expositions by great masters that actually essentialise the entire path.
The concerns of just this life are the domain of those who have not yet entered any spiritual path. Their concerns are - at base - survival of the individual in turms of nourishment, shelter and safety, and survival of the species in terms of procreation and the safety and stability of the group.
As we all know, these 'truths' are a 24/7 job.
As long as the fluctuations of fortune affect you profoundly, and you are blown hither and yon by the eight worldly winds of praise and blame, good fortune and bad fortune, renown and lack of recognition, happiness and sorrow, you will actually continue to be pushed around by them. And as long as you are being pushed around by hopes and fears concerning what's outside of you, there is no time for learning the actual nature of the mind.
This is not to say that the actual nature of the mind does not HAVE these concerns, but rather, that the mind itself is so vast and profound, that these become no more than the tiniest ripples on the least wavelet on one infinitessimal section of its surface.
As the Niguma quote that starts this blog says:

If you don't understand that whatever appears is meditation,
What can you achieve by applying an antidote?
Perceptions are not abandoned by discarding them
But are spontaneously freed when recognized as illusory.

Until you reach a point where the well-being of others becomes more important than your own, your attitude is still pretty cramped - goldfish bowl - everything relates to you... MY happiness, MY progress, MY discomfort, MY likes and dislikes, etc., etc., ad infinitum nauseamque.
Compassion - karuna in Sanskrit, nying-je or t'ug-je ('lordly heart'or 'lordly enlightened mind') in Tibetan - is simply the attitude that others are obviously suffering quite as much as you are and that therefore you should find out the correct way to help in such a way that first their immediate needs are met, and then their profounder doubts and insecurities are calmed...
As HH Dalai Lama says, all this really needs to get it going is ordinary human intelligence and ordinary human kindness. A mere step in this direction of itself opens up the pathway to further refinement of your own attitude, to futher purification of your obscurations of conflicting emotion and primitive beliefs about reality.
Finally you reach a point where you may walk with both hands free, where your kindliness and concern know no bounds, where you genuinely rejoice in the good fortune of those around you and are immediate in responding to their suffering, and where you have no attachment to what you consider near and dear or distant and alien, no point of view to thump, no truths to drive home... You just help... In the knowledge that "truths" are useful as markers, direction-pointers and goads along a path, perhaps, but that the path itself - the REAL path - is ultimately ineffable, inconceivable and totally beyond all 'effort' or 'truth' or 'realisation'...

If this is what Jung means by a 'religious truth', then yes, I agree.

As a postscript to this, I'd like to point out the existence of an extraordinary book by HH Chogye Trichen Rinpoche concerning the abovementioned quatrain by Mañjushri. Presented in the form of a detailed commentary upon the 'song of experience' composed by Sachen Kunga Nyingpo's son, Jetsün Dragpa Gyälts'en, concerning the application of this text, it examines the practical meaning and application of each line in detail, and should come as a timely caveat to anyone who considers him or herself a 'Buddhist', or - even more so! - 'practitioner'.

Available from Snow Lion Publications, it's called:

Parting from the Four Attachments: Jetsun Drakpa Gyaltsen's Song of Experience on Mind Training and the View by Chogye Trichen Rinpoche
[SNOW LION PUBLICATIONS 2003]
ISBN - 1-55939-193-6

this

2004-10-18T03:19:00.000-07:00

If you don't understand that whatever appears is meditation,
What can you hope to achieve by applying an antidote?
Perceptions are not abandoned by discarding them
But are spontaneously freed when recognised as illusory.

Niguma