still
adj. still·er, still·est
1. Free of sound.
2. Low in sound; hushed or subdued.
3. Not moving or in motion.
4. Free from disturbance, agitation, or commotion.
5. Free from a noticeable current: a still pond; still waters.
6. Not carbonated; lacking effervescence: a still wine.
7. Of or relating to a single or static photograph as opposed to a movie.
n.
1. Silence; quiet: the still of the night.
2. A still photograph, especially one taken from a scene of a movie and used for promotional purposes.
3. A still-life picture.
adv.
1. Without movement; motionlessly: stand still.
2.
a. At the present time; for the present: We are still waiting.
b. Up to or at a specified time; yet: still had not made up her mind.
c. At a future time; eventually: may still see the error of his ways.
3. In increasing amount or degree; even: and still further complaints.
4. In addition; besides: had still another helping.
5. All the same; nevertheless.
v. stilled, still·ing, stills
v.tr.
1. To make still or tranquil.
2. To make quiet; silence.
3. To make motionless.
4. To allay; calm: The parents stilled their child's fears of the dark.
v.intr.
To become still.
Idiom:
still and all
Informal After taking everything into consideration; nevertheless; however: Still and all, our objective can be achieved.
“Thought refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual’s subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Simnon-human objects, and phenomena. The exact meaning of such usage varies as well. The attribution of thought or thought processes to non-human objects and phenomena (especially computers) could be considered anthropomorphism, though such categorizations have been contested by such computer scientists as Alan Turing (see Computing Machinery and Intelligence). As regards animals, to what extent different animals think depends on the exact definition of the word that is given, so it may be taken literally or regarded as anthropomorphic.” (wikipedia.com)
“
What is most thought-provoking in these thought-provoking times, is that we are still not thinking.[1] – Martin Heidegger
”
One possible explanation lies in the view of consciousness as a means of creating a mental model of reality. Any organism with such a model can do more than merely react to stimuli and pray the response is fast enough to escape predators. It can use the model to foresee threats and opportunities out there in the ‘real world’ – freeing it from the speed limitations of non-conscious reflexes. A conscious creature, in other words, need not stumble around blindly, hoping its reflexes will keep it safe. By binding together non-conscious responses to create even a simple model of reality, a creature possessing some degree of consciousness can avoid getting into tight spots in the first place – giving it a huge evolutionary advantage.via
STUDYIING CONSCIOUS THOUGHT – TIMELINE
528 BC
Indian philosopher Siddhartha Gautama – aka the Buddha – makes study and control of consciousness the basis of a movement now known as Buddhism.
401 AD
The philosopher and Catholic saint Augustine of Hippo identifies self-awareness as a key aspect of consciousness, declaring: “I understand that I understand”.
1690
In his ‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’, the English philosopher John Locke defines consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind”.
1874
German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt moves consciousness out of purely philosophical inquiry, and advocates its study via introspection.
1890
Pioneering Harvard University psychologist William James rejects Cartesian Dualism, concluding that consciousness is just a product of brain activity.
1979
American brain scientist Benjamin Libet discovers the half second delay between brain activity and the conscious sense of deciding to act. The brain edits out the delay to keep our conscious experiences in step with reality.
1988
Psychologist Bernard Baars puts forward his ‘global workspace’ theory, according to which consciousness is the process by which normally unconscious processes are said to be brought together on a mental ‘stage’.
1990s – present
Advent of brain-scanning methods such as fMRI prompts huge leap of interest in consciousness by revealing brain activity in unprecedented detail.
Thoughts
Believe in your heart that something wonderful is about to happen.
Love your life.
Believe in your own powers and your own potential and in your own innate goodness.
Wake every morning with the awe of just being alive.
Discover each day the magnificent awesome beauty in the world.
Explore and embrace life in yourself and in everyone you see each day.
Reach within to find your own specialness.
Amaze yourself and rouse those around you to the potential of each new day.
Don’t be afraid to admit that you are less than perfect.
This is the essence of your humanity.
Let those who love you help you.Trust enough to be able to take.
Look with hope to the horizon of today for today is all we truly have.
Live this day well.
Let a little sun out as well as in.
Create your own rainbows.
Be open to all your possibilities – All possibilities and Miracles.
- You make a difference
- You are your life,your happyness, your sadness, your fears, your fortunes
- You can have, do, or be, ANYTHING
WILLING, create/control/balance your emotions
PULL yout thoughts
DO yourself good!
“If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There’s nothing left here to worry about
We’re on the ground
We’re in the clouds
The world is spinning around
There’s nothing left here worry about
We are on the ground
We float on the water
Or up in the clouds
Alone through the clouds
Alone on the ground
Alone on the water
Alone in the clouds
Alone through the clouds
Alone in the water
Alone on the ground
We were born to be alone
Everybody all alone
Born alone to be alone
We’ll stand alone forever
Standing on the world alone
Learning how to stand alone
And always to be alone
We’ll be alone forever
” Waves travel and the wave motion transfers energy from one point to another, often with no permanent displacement of the particles of the medium—that is, with little or no associated mass transport. They consist, instead, of oscillations or vibrations around almost fixed locations. For example, a cork on rippling water will bob up and down, staying in about the same place while the wave itself moves onwards.” (wikipedia.com)
Once again the powers of the herb open up the mindSeek deep inside, tell me what you find, come on
Who be the ones steppin? in the room
Everybody welcome to the temple of boom
Back, let me see ya fat indo sack
And get weeded, somebody, everybody need it
Mari-juana, mari-juana, don't ya wanna
Give me love when I put the flame on ya
Homie I'm the one with the shotgun in the closet
Next to the fat bags full of chronic
Puto, don't ya be steppin?, with ya hands open
Askin? me "Can I get a hit of what t?cha smokein"
I ain't got no kind of love for a brother
Who comes to the party, with no Bud
I be smokein? this, indo-blazin?, funk Buddah
Everybody, wanted it, now they talk about the hooter
Up until the summer of ?91
Wasn?t no muthafuckas talkin' 'bout smokein? blunts
From the west coast to the east coast
Everybody be braggin?
But , I'm the one who be puffin? most
First it started with the nickel, then the dime
Then the twenty, spendin? up all my money
Now, I roll with the nelco
With the pound in the pad smokein? up the indo
Just take a deep breath, hit it then pass it to the left
Keep the mutha fuckin? stress
Smoke it up, just puff it up, oh, yeah
Light it up, then put your spliff up in the air
Do you wanna spark another owl?
Do you wanna spark another owl?
Everybody spark another owl
Everybody spark another owl
I wanna spark another owl
I wanna spark another owl
Do you wanna spark another owl?
Do you wanna spark another owl?
Yea, stroll the ways of the Buddah mastas
Brings me to the temple of boom
I see people everywhere startin? to understand the point
When I'm talkin' about the joint
Talkin? 'bout that marijuana, talkin' 'bout the sense
Talkin? 'bout the kind mota boca loa-loa
Maui, lugers of work-ready
The Mexican greenba, cheeba, cheeba y?all
Yeska, humble pound weed, the crypt
The chocolate tide, the Afgani
The Meefrakan, the indo
The skonka, the bad breath sense
Hello everyone, I'm Kurt Loaded
We?re here at Hemp TV, with Cypress hill in Amsterdam
And we?re just here listenin' to their new album
I'm stoned, I'm outta here, goodbye folks
“ At the start, let me say I am not an animal rights activist. I’m not comfortable with absolutes. And I know that every time something eats, something else dies. I recognize the Earth is little more than a revolving buffet with weather. So, the idea of eating animals is fine with me, but is it really necessary to make things out of the parts we don’t eat? We’re the only species that does this. You never see a mongoose with snakeskin shoes. Or a lion walkin’ around in a wildebeest hat. And how often do you run into plankton that have phytoplankton luggage?
And I think people have a lot of nerve locking up a tiger and charging four dollars to let a few thousand worthless humans shuffle past him every day. What a shitty thing to do. Humans must easily be the meanest species on Earth. Probably the only reason there are any tigers left is because they don’t taste good.
I respect animals. I have more sympathy for an injured or dead animal than I have for an injured or dead human being, because human beings participate and cooperate in their own undoing. Animals are completely innocent. There are no innocent human beings.
Here is an anecdote from the writer Patricia Highsmith: “Not so long ago I said to a friend of mine: ‘If I saw a kitten and a little human baby sitting on the curb starving, I would feed the kitten first if nobody was looking.’ My friend said: ‘I would feed the kitten first if somebody was looking’.” I would too, Patricia.
Some people seem shocked and say, “You care more about animals than you do about humans!” Fuckin’-A well told!
I do not torture animals, and I do not support the torture of animals, such as that which goes on at rodeos: cowardly men in big hats abusing simple beasts in a fruitless search for manhood. In fact, I regularly pray for serious, life-threatening rodeo injuries. I wish for a cowboy to walk crooked, and with great pain, for the rest of his life.
I cheer when a bull at Pamplona sinks one of his horns deep into the lower intestines of some drunked European macho swine. And my cheers grow louder when the victim is a young American macho-jock tourist asshole. Especially if the bull is able to swing that second horn around and catch the guy right in the nuts.
But although I don’t go out of my way to bother living things, I am not without personal standards. A mosquito on my arm, an ant or a cockroach in my kitchen, a moth approaching my lapel; these animals will die. Other insects in my home, however, the ones who merely wish to rest awhile, will be left alone. Or, if noisy and rowdy, lifted gently and returned to the great outdoors.
I am also perfectly willing to share the room with a fly, as long as he is patrolling that portion of the room I don’t occupy. But if he starts that smart-ass fly shit, buzzing my head and repeatedly landing on my arm, he is engaging in high-risk behavior. That’s when I roll up the sports section and become Bwana, the great white fly hunter!
Sometimes there’s an older fly in the room, one who flies slowly and can’t travel too far in one hop- or it might be a female, heavy with eggs. In this case, even if the fly is bothering me, I don’t kill it; instead, adopt it as a short-term pet. I might even give it a name. Probably something based on mythology.
Generally, I like flies, but they’d be far more welcome if they would make a choice- and stick to it- between my bean burrito and that nice, hot, steaming dog turd out in the front yard.
Also, in keeping with my insect death policy based on the intentions of the insect, any bacterium or virus entering my body that does not wish me well will be slain. Normally, my immune system would accomplish this without notifying me, but if the old T-cells aren’t up to the task, I am prepared to ingest huge amounts of antibiotics, even if they are bad for me.
And yet, in spite of all these examples of creature mayhem, I will not strike a dog, I will not chase and taunt a bull around a ring, and I will not squeeze an animal’s testicles just to give the yokels a better show.
I’m also uneasy about the sheer number of scientific experiments performed on animals. First of all, animals are not always good models for medical experimentation: penicillin kills guinea pigs; an owl is not bothered by cyanide; monkeys can survive strychnine, etc., etc. Couldn’t these scientific tests just as easily be performed on humans? Comdemned prisoners, old people, the feeble, the terminally ill? I’m sure there are plenty of ignorant, desperate Americans who would be willing to volunteer in exchange for some small electrical appliance.
What makes me happy in the midst of all this is that ultimately animals get even. The major killers of humanity throughout recent history- smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, bubonic plague, measles, cholera, and AIDS- are all infectious diseases that arose from diseases of animals. I pray that mad cow disease will come to this country and completely wipe out the hamburger criminals. Eating meat is one thing, but this whole beef-rancher-manure-cattle-hamburger side show is a different skillet of shit altogether.
Each year, Americans eat 38 billion hamburgers. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of red meat. Cattle consume one half of all the fresh water consumed on earth. The sixty million people who will starve this year could be adequately fed if Americans reduced their meat intake by just ten percent. But if I were one of those sixty million people, I wouldn’t be reachin’ for the salt and pepper too quickly. It ain’t gonna happen.
Ranchers raise pathetic, worthless cattle and sheep, animals who cannot live off the land without human supervision, and the same ranchers kill wolves, magnificent, individualistic animals fully capable of caring for themselves without assistance. Individualism gives way to sheep behavior. Sound familiar?
I root for a wolf to someday take a rancher’s kid. Yes I do. And you know something? The wolf would probably take the kid home and raise him, in the manner of Romulus and Remus; and probably do a better job than the rancher.
Remember, wolves mate for life, and they care for their sick and infirm; they don’t run them off, or kill them, or abandon them. Give me a wolf over some fuckin’ jackoff rancher any day of the week.
One last item to demonstrate the depth of human perversity: Some zoos now sell surplus animals to private hunting ranches where rich white men hunt them down and kill them for amusement.
No wonder they call it the descent of man. ”
Brain Droppings (1997)
“ I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium, digital and smoke-free. A diversified multicultural postmodern deconstructionist. Politically, anatomically, and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been uplinked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech lowlife. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond. I’m new wave, but I’m old school, and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat-seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice-activated and biodegradable. I interface with my database, and my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive, and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, riding the wave, dodging a bullet, pushing the envelope. I’m on point, on task, on message, and off drugs. I got no need for coke and speed, I got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in the moment, on the edge, over the top, but under the radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb, a top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps, I run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing bigfoot slam dunk rainmaker with a proactive outreach. A raging workaholic; a working rageaholic. Out of rehab, and in denial. I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant, and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up, you can’t dumb me down. ‘Cause I’m tireless, and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion forward. Up front, down home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-size, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready, and built to last. I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk, headcase. Prematurely post-traumatic, and I have a love child who sends me hate mail. But I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing, a supportive bonding nurturing primary caregiver. My output is down, but my income is up. I take a short position on the long bond, and my revenue stream has its own cash flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds, I watch trash sports. I’m gender-specific, capital-intensive, user-friendly, and lactose-intolerant. I like rough sex, I like tough love, I use the F-word in my E-Mail, and the software on my hard drive is hardcore, no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini mall;I bought a mini van in a mega store. I eat fast food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear, and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-washed, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed, and I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal, lean and mean. Cocked, locked and ready to rock. Rough tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide, I got glide in my stride. Drivin’ and movin’, sailin’ and spinnin’, jivin’ and groovin’, wailin’ and winnin.’ I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty, and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hanging in, there ain’t no doubt. And I’m hanging tough, over and out. “
The idea of using contact microphones comes from the desire to turn ordinary objects into percussive instruments. The goal is to allow musicians and performers to take full advantage of electronic music without losing the feeling of touching a real surface.
In this video we show how it is possible to perform gesture recognition just with contact microphones and transform every surface into an interactive board.
Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds.
In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques:
1- physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws;
2- concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database.
The system can recognise both fingers-touches and objects that emit a sound, such as the coin shown in the video.
The far future is surprisingly simple and yet very interesting from a scientific perspective. In due time, all the matter and radiation of the universe will be absorbed by the cosmological horizon, which grows in response. Nothing will be left other than slowly evaporating supermassive black holes. Black holes are believed to be the densest and most lasting objects in the universe. We study the thermodynamics of our local universe in this future. The local group is expected to collapse to a supermassive black hole that will slowly evaporate in an empty universe dominated by a cosmological constant. In our paper we look at the dynamics between the extremely cold cosmological horizon and the hotter black hole horizon. We discuss how heat and entropy produced by black hole are absorbed by the cosmological horizon and find that even though the presence of the black hole initially depressed the total entropy, the total entropy increases as the black hole evaporates and, of course, heat flows from the hotter black hole horizon to the colder cosmological horizon.
So, what is the end state of the universe? If the cosmological constant is a true constant, then the universe will reach its final thermodynamics equilibrium state in empty deSitter, i.e., empty space that expands forever. However, if a slow rolling scalar field mimics the cosmological constant, this scalar field could eventually reach the bottom of its potential and then the universe would stop expanding becoming flat. Stephen Hawking states that since flat space has no horizon, it also has zero entropy. We argue that it has divergent entropy because it could be indistinguishable from a space with a very small cosmological constant; the entropy of deSitter depends on the inverse of the cosmological constant. With this assumption, flat space would have a infinitely large entropy, which would be consistent with the second law of thermodynamics; if flat space could be the final state of our universe at the end of the slow roll period, it should have higher entropy than deSitter.
We also discuss the Weyl curvature hypothesis of Roger Penrose who states that the difference in entropy between the initial and final state of the universe is related to the growth of the Weyl curvature. The Weyl curvature is small at the beginning of the universe, but grows with the production of singularities. However, empty deSitter has zero Weyl curvature. Empty deSitter is the thermodynamics equilibrium (final state) of our universe for a true cosmological constant. We modify the conjecture by stating that the entropy does not come directly from the Weyl tensor, but from a coarse-graining over the states of the Weyl tensor. The cosmological constant limits the wavelength of the gravitational wave modes. When a black hole evaporates, the cosmological horizon grows allowing more gravitational wave modes. This increases the number of available microstates in the Weyl tensor and hence the entropy of the space. We emphasize that the cosmological constant is not just an energy scale, but an entropy scale as well. It plays a very important role in black hole thermodynamics that still has to be understood.
- Weird at this time , somehow ” here”(*) is the only constant .(noticeable)
*”here”/ like looking through a telescope or somethig/binoculars , experiencing “situations of life” /Maya (the great Illusion)
**wherfrom? from the nothing/ONE/0/ the whole
time doesen exist. Or not as “we”perceive it…***
Few people find fault with the proposition that life is natural – that having a body and a mind is an aspect of nature – that all the vast number of working parts of oneself do work according to nature; that everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, think and feel are also natural phenomena and that they work according to natural conditions.Also we can’t actually find fault with the realization that things do go wrong and they too are natural – things like sickness, aches and pains, the bites of insects, extreme changes of weather and so on and all the endless ways the body can be assailed.Whether we like it or not or how much we struggle to overcome them, these natural events will always be with us because we don’t live in a perfect world. We have to acknowledge that both our internal and external environment is constantly changing – alternating between periods of peace and calm and sometimes violent turbulence. And the margins of tolerance our bodies have to internal and external environmental change are extremely narrow. In cosmic terms the difference between life and death teeters for us on a band of tolerance narrower than a razors edge.So it could well be said that this natural state of affairs is simply the way things are and that if we didn’t find fault with any of it then our lives would be contented and peaceful no matter whatever is happening to us.But we all know life is not at all like that, and although every single aspect of our minds and bodies are as natural a part of of our world and the infinite universe beyond, there remains, for us all, something seriously wrong and deeply troubling.Every atom and cell of our being arises and passes away just like every particle and form in the universe. That is the way of nature, yet what we experience as a central feature of our lives is that we suffer on account of it.There is no more certain a starting point worthy of consideration that there always has been and always will be suffering. It is a primary condition of being alive. And no matter how we may wriggle and squirm to escape the realization, I guess all of us really know it to be true.The foregoing is a simple review of some experiential facts no one can rightly dismiss as being untrue. But what suffering really involves; its myriad forms and all the astonishing ways it is manifest from the most mild to the the most extreme and horrific, only the entire history of humankind together with present everyday worldwide news can reveal.But at the heart of it all are a few deep-laid conditions which lurk within us all – conditions we are born with – conditions which shape everything we think and do.Simply put these are the emotions, moods and inclination to “liking” and “disliking” coupled with an ignorant misreading of what is really going on in our lives.Liking and disliking are conditions, moods, inclinations, emotions, tendencies – call them what you will – each of which has a wide spectrum of possibility of expression ranging in intensity from mild attraction and revulsion to lust and hate; to lust so all-consuming it can lead to excesses beyond imagining; to hate so fierce and sustained it can, in some minds, attain the status of actually having having a holyimperative.The permutations of possibilities leading to taking verbal and physical action on account of liking and disliking are limitless. Yet it cannot be said that they originate from any other source than nature itself. Such tendencies are, like everything else in nature, simply part of the experiential reality of being alive.In other words they are not what they are on account of the creative intervention or stimulus of any other source than nature itself. Only in their effects upon our world, upon others, can they be deemed either good or bad.In themselves, not responded to or acted upon, our tendencies toward liking and disliking are entirely neutral phenomena. Left alone, allowed to rise and pass away without interference, they hurt neither ourselves nor anyone else.So what then is the true cause of our suffering?As I remarked earlier: “Simply put these are the emotions, moods and inclination to “liking” and “disliking” coupled with an ignorant misreading of what is reallygoing on in our lives”And it is that coupling of an ignorant misreading and misunderstanding and the desire to take mental, verbal and physical action on account of liking or disliking which is the cause of all the trouble.In short, the trouble arises from the difference between a right view and a wrong view of what is really happening in our lives.Now if that simply-stated proposition were really simple to understand then the Buddha would not have spent forty years of his life explaining its meaning in 84,000 different ways which now fill some 34 books published by the Pali Text Society.
The Wholesome and the Unwholesome
-. “When, friends, a noble disciple understands the unwholesome, the root of the unwholesome, the wholesome, and the root of the wholesome, in that way he is one of right view, whose view is straight, who has perfect confidence in the Dhamma, and has arrived at this true Dhamma.
-. “And what, friends, is the unwholesome, what is the root of the unwholesome, what is the wholesome, what is the root of the wholesome? Killing living beings is unwholesome; taking what is not given is unwholesome; misconduct in sensual pleasures is unwholesome; false speech is unwholesome; malicious speech is unwholesome; harsh speech is unwholesome; gossip is unwholesome; covetousness is unwholesome; ill will is unwholesome; wrong view is unwholesome. This is called the unwholesome.
-. “And what is the root of the unwholesome? Greed is a root of the unwholesome; hate is a root of the unwholesome; delusion is a root of the unwholesome. This is called the root of the unwholesome.
-. “And what is the wholesome? Abstention from killing living beings is wholesome; abstention from taking what is not given is wholesome; abstention from misconduct in sensual pleasures is wholesome; abstention from false speech is wholesome; abstention from malicious speech is wholesome; abstention from harsh speech is wholesome; abstention from gossip is wholesome; non-covetousness is wholesome; non-ill will is wholesome; right view is wholesome. This is called the wholesome.
-. “And what is the root of the wholesome? Non-greed is a root of the wholesome; non-hate is a root of the wholesome; non-delusion is a root of the wholesome. This is called the root of the wholesome.
-. “When a noble disciple has thus understood the unwholesome, the root of the unwholesome, the wholesome, and the root of the wholesome, he entirely abandons the underlying tendency to lust, he abolishes the underlying tendency to aversion, he extirpates the underlying tendency to the view and conceit ‘I am,’ and by abandoning ignorance and arousing true knowledge he here and now makes an end of suffering. In that way too a noble disciple is one of right view, whose view is straight, who has perfect confidence in the Dhamma and has arrived at this true Dhamma.”
……..
“When a noble disciple has thus understood the taints, the origin of the taints, the cessation of the taints, and the way leading to the cessation of the taints, he entirely abandons the underlying tendency to lust, he abolishes the underlying tendency to aversion, he extirpates the underlying tendency to the view and conceit ‘I am,’ and by abandoning ignorance and arousing true knowledge he here and now makes an end of suffering. In that way too a noble disciple is one of right view, whose view is straight, who has perfect confidence in the Dhamma and has arrived at this true Dhamma.”
The reality is that we are born ignorant of the truth of our existence and, to that extent, ignorance itself is a natural phenomenon. (It’s as if, in the primordial year dot, an ‘error automatic’ somehow got inserted into our operating system and humankind has had to live with it ever since).On the other hand it could better be said that there could be no birth withoutignorance of our condition for it is clearly an intrinsic part of existence.However that isn’t to say that our natural ignorance cannot be changed and, by work and practice, can become a personal knowing and seeing of the way things truly are. We can with persistent effort transform wrong view into right view.( I add the above link to an explanation of what is right view because it is the best I have ever found. It is by Sariputta, the Buddha’s principle disciple. It is a translation made from ancient text and is not exactly effortless to read).Where I’m heading with this blog is to try to show, from the standpoint of right view, that every aspect of our existence is not other than the arising and passing away of natural empty phenomena just like every other impermanent event in this universe.In truth there is nobody here. Nobody who lives a life. Nobody is needed to direct and control our progress from being born to dying. It all takes place whether we think there is a ‘self’ or not.So far as the universe is concerned our conviction that there is a ‘self’ who is somehow in charge of our lives is a mere vain irrelevance which only serves to cause us suffering.The gradual supplanting of wrong view with right view is the work of mindfulness and meditation leading to the a moment when ignorance ceases and insight – knowing and seeing - arises to reveal the path to the ending of suffering.That such a possibility exists is both a wonder and mystery. It is so subtle and difficult to comprehend it is a marvel that anyone can come to personally experience what the Buddha is talking about. Yet here it is on offer to all who wish to put it to the test.
“There is an unborn, an unmade, an unconditioned, an uncreated. If there were not, no escape would be possible from the world of the born” Buddha
So it might well be said that it’s not death we should be afraid of. Instead, it might be better to be scared of being born.
