For a minute there I thought I had to get off my couch, when all the while the fact is we don't have to do anything much but keep things afloat for just a few decades more! In fact, we'd best shut up about PO, because if our offspring finds out we knew about it all along, they'll turn and wring our necks come 2036!
Joined: Sep 24, 2007 Posts: 2584 Location: third from the sun
Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 8:43 am Post subject: Re: Peak Oil from a Buddhist perspective
AlwaysThere wrote:
BigTex has no standard of any kind, it is "whatever works". I accept the Bible as absolute truth which is what determines a persons reality and worldview.
You see AT, this attitude was entirely alien to Jesus himself. How can you call yourself his follower when your attitude is akin to that of a little dictator ?
Also you throw around words which are way bigger than yourself and than anything which any human being could possibly comprehend. "Absolute truth" ?
Btu _________________ only the paranoid survive
Last edited by btu2012 on Tue May 13, 2008 8:54 am; edited 1 time in total
Joined: May 18, 2006 Posts: 3953 Location: Minneapolis, MN
Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 8:54 am Post subject: Re: Peak Oil from a Buddhist perspective
btu2012 wrote:
AlwaysThere wrote:
BigTex has no standard of any kind, it is "whatever works". I accept the Bible as absolute truth which is what determines a persons reality and worldview.
You see AT, this attitude was entirely alien to Jesus himself. How can you call yourself his follower when your attitude is akin to that of a little dictator ?
Also you throw around words which are way bigger htan yourself and than anything which any human being could possibly comprehend. "Absolute truth" ?
Joined: Mar 04, 2007 Posts: 504 Location: Hong Kong
Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 1:27 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil from a Buddhist perspective
This is a long post based on a comment that is now ancient history, but I beg your indulgence ...
BigTex wrote:
Jack wrote:
mos6507 wrote:
You really should volunteer with the minutemen
Umm? What's in it for me?
zensui wrote:
Can we all agree that suffering must be diminished? ...Even with Jack's only-for-me aproach.
Why?
No - seriously - why?
Let us say we have an hypothetical individual (me, for example). I can consume more, perhaps depriving others. I make myself happy, and indirectly make others quite unhappy (they suffer more).
Or, I can consume less, perhaps leaving more for others. I do not make myself happy, but others' suffering is reduced.
I would like to see a response that does not appeal to moral or ethical constructs, since those represent indirect (and, arguably, unproven) benefits. Please tell me what, precisely, I gain by reducing the suffering of others.
Jack, you gain nothing from helping others only.
However, you quickly encounter the need to cooperate with others because they have things you need and you have things they need, so you bargain.
As you bargain, you become more cooperative because it helps you make better deals with people if you come to be known as a person who can be trusted and who isn't hard to deal with.
If you think you can make it on your own and don't need anything else from anyone, then you won't bargain.
But in either case, there is no reason for you to give an oink about anyone else, apart from the things they can do for you to make you happier.
But if you follow this logic a little farther, you find that some people are made happy by helping other people in some way. For these people, they get joy from doing things that appear "selfless", but they're not really selfless at all, it's just that their expression of selfishness is to help other people rather than take advantage of other people.
For you, I think the idea that your own happiness is your highest morality is fine. It doesn't lead to as bad a results as it sounds.
In many ways it's just an honest statement regarding what really motivates most people.
Think about it like this: if a person does something they think of as "selfless" and they say they do not do it out of self-interest, you have to ask them whether doing it made them happy. If doing the selfless act made them happy, then they did it out of their own self-interest and the act wasn't really selfless at all.
If they say doing it made them unhappy, then you would ask them why doing a good thing in the form of a selfless act would make a good person unhappy--shouldn't doing such a selfless act make a good person happy? The conclusion is that only a bad person would be unhappy as a result of doing a selfless act (and no one thinks of themselves as a bad person).
You're missing one vital element. All of this is happening at a subconscious level. You're not consciously deciding to do something good for somebody else to ultimately benefit yourself; you're just doing it.
Selfish or selfless? This is a false dichotomy in a primitive society, the type of society that we are fit to live in. We evolved to survive as small cooperative bands of hunters in which helping the other members meant helping yourself, thus the two were one and the same.
The only reason we're even having this discussion about what's selfless and what's selfish is because, put simply, we're overcrowded. We live in societies in which our primitive brains are forced to confront enormous amounts of people that are not members of our band.
We may perform a "selfless" act for one of these people, but it does not benefit us. We are driven to do such things because we are still instinctually making decisions using a brain that evolved to operate in small bands in which such an action would benefit us. But now it doesn't necessarily benefit us. It's an evolutionary snafu.
We are essentially alienated from our optimal social environment. Our morals, ethics and laws compensate for this, keeping us from killing and robbing eachother out of selfish interest because there are two forces at work. We don't just perform selfless acts out of instinct derived from our evolving to survive in small bands in which selfless and selfish are one, we also recognize "others," people who don't belong in our band. Those people are essentially non-people; they don't fit into our "monkeysphere," so we can take from them what we want without hurting our band of fellow hunters and, hence, ourselves.
We're all mixed up. The only thing that definitely keeps us from committing horrible acts of selfishness, even though sometimes we're compelled to do the opposite, are laws and standards of conduct. We've defined selfless acts as "good" in order to maintain some sort of order in a society that is much larger than our primitive brains are fit to handle.
Sometimes we act "morally" according to our primitive instinct to be selfless, which is the same as selflish when we're in our band of hunters, and other times we do it out of compulsion. But in a primitive society, a band of hunters, there would be no compulsion because selfish and selfless would be one and the same.
People like Jack and Jesus are simply products of our alienation from the social environment in which we evolved in. Jack treats every person, even a potential member of his band of hunters, as an other, a non-person outside of his "monkeysphere." Jesus types perceive everyone as a member his band of hunters. Neither is right or wrong; they're both products of our alienation from our the social environment that we evolved to live in.
(Props to Ludi for a link that led me to this train of thought. I wish I could find the link.) _________________ "We shall live in interesting times, and we shall die in them too." - Heineken
I can hardly recommend Jason Godesky's writing highly enough. _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow..." - jboogy
I can hardly recommend Jason Godesky's writing highly enough.
Thanks Ludi. I couldn't find the thread that link was on. _________________ "We shall live in interesting times, and we shall die in them too." - Heineken
Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 8:51 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil from a Buddhist perspective
Thankyou zensui for starting this post. I would like to add my input to the thread. I have found buddhism to be very helpful to me, although I am not a buddhist.
Here is a quote that I like:
"Without love we could not survive. Human beings are social creatures, and a concern for each other is the very basis of our life together." - The Dalai Lama
Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 4:08 am Post subject: Re: Peak Oil from a Buddhist perspective
Here's one Buddhist perspective by Fukuoka, a natural farmer:
"FUKUOKA: Well, like many young people, I was having very large, ponderous thoughts about life... and my musings led to a lot of skepticism about the human condition. To add to my doubts, I became so ill during that period that there was, for a while, a question whether or not I would pull through.
Following my eventual recovery, I spent many sleepless nights wandering the streets. The morning after one such episode - when it seemed as though everything were about to explode in my brain � a flash of insight came to me. I suddenly felt that all human existence is meaningless and of no intrinsic value. Humanity knows nothing of real worth at all, I decided, and every action we take is just a futile, empty effort. I also saw that nature is ideally arranged and abundant just as it is... therefore, 1 was sure that we should work in cooperation with the natural processes, rather than try to "improve" on them by conquest."
http://fukuokafarmingol.info/faplow.html
Joined: May 18, 2006 Posts: 3953 Location: Minneapolis, MN
Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 7:39 am Post subject: Re: Peak Oil from a Buddhist perspective
MrBean wrote:
Here's one Buddhist perspective by Fukuoka, a natural farmer:
"FUKUOKA: Well, like many young people, I was having very large, ponderous thoughts about life... and my musings led to a lot of skepticism about the human condition. To add to my doubts, I became so ill during that period that there was, for a while, a question whether or not I would pull through.
Following my eventual recovery, I spent many sleepless nights wandering the streets. The morning after one such episode - when it seemed as though everything were about to explode in my brain � a flash of insight came to me. I suddenly felt that all human existence is meaningless and of no intrinsic value. Humanity knows nothing of real worth at all, I decided, and every action we take is just a futile, empty effort. I also saw that nature is ideally arranged and abundant just as it is... therefore, 1 was sure that we should work in cooperation with the natural processes, rather than try to "improve" on them by conquest."
http://fukuokafarmingol.info/faplow.html
So, is this the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western thought?
Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 8:42 am Post subject: Re: Peak Oil from a Buddhist perspective
vision-master wrote:
MrBean wrote:
Here's one Buddhist perspective by Fukuoka, a natural farmer:
"FUKUOKA: Well, like many young people, I was having very large, ponderous thoughts about life... and my musings led to a lot of skepticism about the human condition. To add to my doubts, I became so ill during that period that there was, for a while, a question whether or not I would pull through.
Following my eventual recovery, I spent many sleepless nights wandering the streets. The morning after one such episode - when it seemed as though everything were about to explode in my brain � a flash of insight came to me. I suddenly felt that all human existence is meaningless and of no intrinsic value. Humanity knows nothing of real worth at all, I decided, and every action we take is just a futile, empty effort. I also saw that nature is ideally arranged and abundant just as it is... therefore, 1 was sure that we should work in cooperation with the natural processes, rather than try to "improve" on them by conquest."
http://fukuokafarmingol.info/faplow.html
So, is this the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western thought?
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