Buddhism 499: Finding Strength in our Mutual Weaknesses…

To know your weaknesses is to know your heart, and from there derives your strength. But it may be a tough sell in this day and age of winners and losers with little in between, still the Buddha’s truth holds true. We are but accidents of fate and creatures of chaos, the ‘good genes’ largely wasted on pretentious and presumptuous pretenders to power, while the rest of us use our mindfulness not as a weapon, but as a tool of deep introspection, probably a better term than ‘self-knowledge’ and the next best thing to hard science, which requires group effort.

But much can be accomplished with deep introspection, and the best part is that the proof is in the perception, rather than the dictates of science, which will likely always fall short of the requisite proofs which can only be attained at the Hadron Collider. And still, that is not enough, because our brains gnaw at the edges of the known universe like rats with a ball of cheese that is self-expanding. But, at some point we have to take a rest and live our lives and create a society that responds to human needs, not the scientific ones.

Because we live in a simulation, neural not digital, and this is my great revelation of the modern age, where Buddhism meets science and Virtual Reality is an apt metaphor. So, this life and this world are not an illusion, as often cited, but a simulation, which is a very bit different, without the ring of falseness which haunts the other term. This neural simulation, a twin of the ‘real’ world, is as it should be, but far from the quarks and tachyons which clamor for recognition in the collider. But our neural simulation requires no Collider, but only mindfulness, patient recognition that this is exactly how it should be, no matter how short it may fall from ultimate reality. Don’t think too much…