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    hardie karges 2:20 am on December 14, 2025 Permalink | Reply
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    Buddhism and Language, With and Without… 

    Language is a tool, not a weapon. It is a gift, not a curse. It all depends on the circumstances, time and place and details of the chase. To be honest, it is almost impossible to imagine life without language, since not only do we habitually think in a language, but for many people the two are inseparable. And that is why meditation is practiced, is it not? Yes, I think it is, because we can think without it, using what I often call ‘mental maps’.   

    Now, meditators and fellow travelers can gleam and bliss out about ‘insight’ and ‘calm abiding’, but the modus operandi is to cut off the language, or at least slow it down, if not exactly swatting thoughts away like flies on our windshields. The fruit of this activity is not something we can control, but only comment upon, for better or worse. Meditation may or may not provide ‘calm abiding’, much less insight, though those are worthy goals, I feel, but it can reduce the dependency on language, and that helps. It’s interesting that in some languages, to think and to feel are interchangeable concepts, but not so much in English. 

    The important point to remember is that not only are thought and language not synonymous, but the one is not even necessary for the other. Because, not only do animals think without language, but so do computers, i.e. they use machine language. Machine language is binary, 0’s and 1’s, and its (Boolean) logic corresponds to that, more than, less than, equal to, etc., i.e. ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’. This can just as (or more) easily correspond to all the phenomena of existence as the more familiar Aristotelian logic that we are familiar with, variations on if/then syllogisms. Your dog and cat have little need for that, and you could probably do with less. All you really need is mindfulness. 

     
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    hardie karges 2:56 pm on September 22, 2024 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , binary, , , , , , , , , , ,   

    Buddhism 101: There are no Winners or Losers…  

    There are no winners or losers. There are only players and non-players. Either one is fine, but if you play, then play well. The concept of winning and losing is obviously a binary circumstance, as are players vs. non-players or even East vs. West. But sometimes binary terms are effective in conveying a message, even if they are often ineffective in organizing your life. Because, we Buddhists have long been of the opinion that the Middle Path is the best guide to living your life with or without any scientific proof. 

    But the concept of winning vs losing is especially offensive, as it suggests that some people are simply better than others, regardless of any merit displayed or accrued in the process of playing the game, which suggests racism, if not just arrogance or hubris. None of that has ever been proven, of course, and my gut hunch is exactly the opposite: the more mixed the race the more superior, but again that’s hard to prove or disprove. 

    The issue of players vs non-players is more well-defined, though, in that participation is an act of will and not an accident of birth. So, when comparing the aggressive Abrahamic traditions vs the renunciative dharma traditions, it is possible to draw some conclusions, even if they are still subject to interpretations and circumstances. Because, while India and China long ago embraced renunciative dharma and taoist traditions, their cultures are anything but. And while the abrahamic West is known for its aggressive colonialism, some of the world’s finest most peaceful cities and cultures are to be found there today. 

    So, it’s a mixed bag at best, and I myself qualify as a proponent of renunciation only in the sense that too much wrong action has already been done, and so its opposite is now often preferable. But I don’t think that humans should be passive and that’s not how I live my life. So, my conception of Buddhism is somewhat like Marx’s communism, something appropriate after the previous partial phases have occurred, i.e. its time has come. At an earlier time, something else was possibly more appropriate, but not now. So, when someone insults you or feeds bait your ego, do nothing–quickly.

     
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    hardie karges 2:44 pm on August 25, 2019 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: binary, , digital, , , , , ,   

    The Golden Mean is an Irrational Number–and so are our lives… 

    Growth is easy–more more bigger bigger. Loss is even easier–zip zero nada. Holding steady is the hard part, avoiding all extremes. And this applies at all levels, from the steady state of the universe to the steady state of our psyches, most of which is a fleeting illusion, but still applicable nevertheless, for this is more than a simple survival strategy, but a metaphysical principle, that there is a somewhat meandering middle path that is always capable of yielding more benefits than the extremist positions that promise deliverance or salvation of some kind or other, whether political, social or religious. Buddhism is famous for this, of course, without which its major tenets can sometimes resemble those of the Jains if not Hindus themselves, ‘real’ Indians, born of high caste, Sanskrit, and spicy food. But the principle applies in almost all cases, notwithstanding the modern digital paradigm of zeros and ones that underlie computing in which a binary number system’s on-off capability approximates that of electric switching, resulting in a new electronic digital dimension that powers our modern daily lives. That only accentuates the point I want to make, because there’s more to life than math, and a digital dimension is artificial. Because between every two polar extremes there is a whole rainbow of possibilities, one of which will offer the optimal solution in any given set of circumstances. So there is a myriad of possible realities, but one is usually best, neither poverty nor luxury, neither the non-existence of nihilism nor the infinite existence of a permanent enduring soul traveling in both time and space. But these are points that can be parsed to the limits of our patience and imaginations. Belief is not required. That is one of the benefits of philosophy over religion. You can pick and choose, to see what works best. The difference between religion and philosophy is that religions have members…

     

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