WE ARE NOT – SO WHY KILL EACH OTHER?

The extraordinary topography of the human brain is exemplified in a new image of one cubic millimetre of the brain cortex of a 45 year old woman, created from electron microscope images of 5,000 slices. (Nature Research Report)

There is something important to be said about this image. It is one cubic mm of human cortex. Here is where and how we learn. This image represents the very similar image that can be drawn from any 45 year old woman or man on the planet. Yet there is no person in this image. There is no depiction of another person in this image. There is no culture or religion or race in this image. This image puts lie to any reason anyone might have that someone else is actually different, someone else is not human, someone else doesn’t deserve to be treated with the utmost care as a human. I put to lie the idea that one human can’t get along with another human, really. It does tell us that our cultures, religions, tribes etc, are made up. They are virtual representations designed from the firing of these plastic networks. And just as we can design a horror story, we can as easily design a romance. Some people make an argument for a horror story. And from that story they unleash real weapons on real life. I prefer a romance, a story of flourishing and abundance and love.

Indeed, what this image shows is that the image itself, while itself is not a made up virtual reality, is a rendering, a depiction, of the forms that the same neurology can create from its own capacity. The neurology doesn’t have direct access to thing-of-itself. It is not necessarily everything related to the ‘structure’ of the brain or mind. Even as it makes a rendering of a whole structure and then associates it with a completely virtual story called “I”, we can easily see that there is no “I” in the brain, just neurones. And we can only see, even in this marvelously detailed image these are only the neuronal structures those neuronal structures can make a representation.

We live in a circular virtual argument about who we are. And then we choose to kill each other over it.

Could it be that there are un-rendered aspects of reality that offer another story of who we are altogether. Could those aspects of reality show us that the things we call “I” are simply units of emergent consensus from an enormous topography of even more varied structures that can’t be replicated in the neurology we see here, i.e the neurology that makes up a certain awareness of its own output and only its own output. And in the more enormous topography from which the story of “I” emerges, all beings are represented, all humans, all creatures.

And could it further be that such topography is not limited to the 3 space and 1 time dimension, but flows into infinite dimensions of space and time.

“We” are most likely to be small renderings of an infinite being. And from our small rendering we form an attachment story so limited in scope, so impoverished, that we would kill over it. The flourishing story reaches out into the topography we don’t have access, right now. It reaches into worlds we don’t have access right now.

On Being Shown a Way to a Peaceful Global Civilisation

The great religious and philosophical influence in my life is the teachings and life of Baha’u’llah. Taking for himself the appellation, Manifestation of God, the fulfilment of the promise, Baha’u’llah’s life and teachings are of a consistent high-mindedness and ethic, that convinced me of the truth of the matter of His declaration and His mission.

His mission is expounded in over 100 volumes of letters, treatises and books, and include a book of laws (Kitab-i-Agdas), treatises on practical mysticism such as the Seven Valleys, and practical spirituality such as the Hidden Word, and a full exploration of His station in relation to the teachings and prophecies in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Kitab-i-Iqan).

As a number of hotspots of conflict around the world are uprooting millions of people, Baha’u’llah’s declared future and mission to the people might best be encapsulated by these exhortations:

“It is incumbent upon every man, in this Day, to hold fast unto whatsoever will promote the interests, and exalt the station, of all nations and just governments. Through each and every one of the verses which the Pen of the Most High hath revealed, the doors of love and unity have been unlocked and flung open to the face of men. We have erewhile declared — and Our Word is the truth — Consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship. Whatsoever hath led the children of men to shun one another, and hath caused dissensions and divisions amongst them, hath, through the revelation of these words, been nullified and abolished…

Of old it hath been revealed: “Love of one’s country is an element of the Faith of God.” The Tongue of Grandeur hath, however, in the day of His manifestation proclaimed: “It is not his to boast who loveth his country, but it is his who loveth the world.” Through the power released by these exalted words He hath lent a fresh impulse, and set a new direction, to the birds of men’s hearts, and hath obliterated every trace of restriction and limitation from God’s holy Book.

” O people of Justice! Be as brilliant as the light, and as splendid as the fire that blazed in the Burning Bush. The brightness of the fire of your love will no doubt fuse and unify the contending peoples and kindreds of the earth, whilst the fierceness of the flame of enmity and hatred cannot but result in strife and ruin.” (Bahá’u’lláh, “Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh”, Passage XLIII)

An important aspect of Baha’u’llahs exhortation is in the realm of our Being. One of his tablets is dedicated to a list of how we are to be to realise the greater mission of the unity of humanity. He is a part of what He writes:

“Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men….” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, Passage CXXX)

On a personal note, I found over the course of a few decades of my adult life, that I seemed to have certain limitations to my development of the practical application of such virtues. I felt that I had, apart from the occasional outright failing, “hit a ceiling’. I felt that I had explorations in life and contributions that i could be making but which in some way I seemed lacking.

Nonetheless, in picking up the yoke of those contributions, especially in creativity, the arts, and theatre, I found an access, a gateway, to another world of human development – ontological coaching. This particular gateway lead me to the thinker, Werner Erhard and the offshoot of his work, the company now called Landmark Worldwide. The work I have participated in through Landmark including the Being a Leader Course in which I met and interacted with an ageing Werner, himself, has had a number of impacts:

i) a breakdown in regard to what i was unable to see regarding my own lack of integrity in the world;

ii) an simple, appreciative, caring acceptance of myself as cause in the matter of my lack of integrity and inauthenticity; and the real limitations of my mind that are a function of my genetical personality and a considerable number of physical and psychic assault events over the course of my upbringing; and

iii) An equally appreciative and exciting recognition of my capabilities and skills that were developed over many decades, including the lessons I learnt from what I failed or did not so well. From this recognition I could aspire to something bigger then who I wound up being that gave me a safer, more controlled, push through life, to participating more fully in the global landscape.

Werner Erhard’s most fabulous work since the 1970’s and the widespread impact of that work on millions of people, was influenced by his vast reading of philosophical and religious thought, a powerful epiphany, and conversations with other modern influencers of thought. In all that Erhard took on the philosopher of Martin Heidegger, a mid 20th century German existentialist, and member and sympathiser of the anti-jewish views of the Nazi Party during WWII and to the end of his life in 1976. Heidegger’s philosophical work and teaching at the University of Marburg in Germany in the 1920’s, inspired many students and fellow philosophers including Hannah Arendt, and the French existentialists such as Satre . By the 1960’s and 70’s Heidegger’s work was presented face value to the world without more than a nod to his Nazi history. The post mortem release of Heidegger’s diaries, showing his dedication to German National Socialism, has certainly un-nerved many who have come to appreciate his works on Being. As might be expected, the philosophical camp falls into those who reckon that Heideggers work can be separated from his Nazi attitudes, and those who reckon they must be entwined. One of the most recent explorations of Werner Erhards early mass coaching practice, “The Forum”, is Bruce Hyde and Steve Kopp’s book, “Speaking Being” ¹ that has an analysis of how Erhard’s work can be seen as a practice of the linguistic and existential philosophy of Heidegger,

I am personally of a kind who can sit with the work of another, regardless of their ideology, and see whether there is something I might find interesting, of wonder, or even true. For example could it be true that, as Heidegger says, there is a ‘throwness’ to human existence, a facticity, such that how existence show up to us is already informed (by ourselves) and is disclosed through our moods. In practice, from this type of view, it is only a short step to asking of anything we have an opinion and as such have an emotion or mood that comes along, “is (xxx) true”? However, developing my capacity for sitting with the diverse view has been also under Baha’u’llah’s encouragement, “Warn the beloved of the one true God, not to view with too critical an eye the sayings and writings of men. Let them rather approach such sayings and writings in a spirit of open-mindedness and loving sympathy.”² without which I may have maintained many of the cultural attitudes I was raised within, some of which are harmful in social practice to others.

While this can seem like a vicious circle of questioning the answer and never coming to a conclusion, indeed my experience is that there is a capacity for humans to holding the inquiry while also standing in an immediate working conclusion. This does require some deft cognitive ability and is not a strength of many people. For those of us for whom it is a strength, there is also an ethical response to also sit with other’s less complex opinions for as long as it requires. Under the practice of ‘consorting’, we might think of the action as providing a clearing or space of listening for anyone to express themselves fully and being ‘gotten’. While consorting is a moral exhortation of Baha’u’llah, “being gotten’ is new language designed by Erhard to express being able to authentically reflect a person’s expression back to them so they can see that indeed you ‘get’ what they are saying. Yet in asking why we do that, the existentialist would say, “in order to (achieve, consequence, avoid)” while Baha’u’llah would also say “for God”. Rather than “God” Erhard simply states, that “to be a leader (consequence) you will need to be given being by something bigger than yourself”. And the placeholder “God” if defined as what is ever unknown and unknowable, the fundamental essence of pre-existence, is as big as it gets.

On the other hand, in the world of action, Baha’u’llah is emphatic about the role of justice both as a personal response and attitude and a social and political response. “Justice and equity”, He writes, “are twin Guardians that watch over men. From them are revealed such blessed and perspicuous words as are the cause of the well-being of the world and the protection of the nations.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, P23)

This brings me to Hannah Arendt, student and lover of Martin Heidegger, who fled to Paris in 1933 after arrest by the Ghestapo. Arendt was Heidegger’s friend to the end. In an interview about her book, “We can Change the World.”, Lyndsey Stonebridge, says Arendt understood that friendship was not transactional. Arendt laid out in a paper called “The Banality of Evil” that it takes a mass of a population to sign up to a progrom like the holocaust. And the people are not evil, they are just making ‘banal’ / ordinary choices given the sweep of a cultural message, and do not believe or see they are comitting a crime. She spoke of the holocaust as a crime against humanity on the body of the jewish people, not just one more anti-semitic progrom. Arendt was also influenced by Husserl who was fired by Heidegger because he was a jew. Yet fully from Husserl and Heiddeger we find a philosophy that can be a practical pathway to a greater human being, regardless that Heidegger himself fell into a narrow superstitious rut of it, perhaps in part to assuage himself of the existential nihilism he experienced as a lapsed catholic and an existentialist.

Werner Erhard, in noting this nihilistic quality in existentialism, discovered, and asks us all to discover, that nihilism is not to be battled, yet an inverse solution lies in moving through the nihilistic awareness of existensialism. To understand this, we must understand that nihilism is the idea that the world that humans understand is based in language, and particularly language that contextualised everything. If we take away the context, e.g. ‘a tree provides shade to humans’, we are left with ‘a tree’. It is the thing “tree” that exists, not any such meaning or context or purpose, we might apply. The existential provocation means that everything is meaningless. Werner Erhards, genius insight was that it is all empty and meaningless including empty and meaningless. Erhard in being able to express this, created a practice for building a ‘dasein’, a being as a clearing in which anything could show up, or could be created. In ‘getting’ that empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless, dasien (I-Me) can be a future that is really relationship(s) of my own choosing. Simultaneously, Erhard saw that all of our relationships were already of our own choosing. So instead of feeling we are choiceless or driven at times, of any of those choices we are driven by habit or upbringing, we can also move into the created future as our choices. In the clearing of empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless, all choices can be divested especially when they take on the complete attribute of meaninglessness. This is not to be mistaken with anything paranormal or super human. This is not about wishful thinking or fantasy. All invitations into a clearing can only be given as allowed by current states i.e relationships including those with ourselves e.g. our bodies and embodied states. In such clearing we can create a future for justice for the whole world, and see that future fully expressed in the world. Baha’u’llahs writings are replete with the created future of a global civilisation and the characteristics of humans and communities and governments required to see that future fully expressed.

In the life of Baha’u’llah and his son and successor, Abdu’l-Baha, certain religious and political authorities murdered many of their followers in Persia. While chastising these persons, they always invited said persons to correction of their moral behaviour. Indeed one such person, on accidentally meeting Abdul-Baha, did implore forgiveness and was accepted caringly and forgiven. This was an extraordinary act, overwhelming to witnesses who knew the suffering and who couldn’t quite grasp the response.

In this day of so many millions dispossessed by conflict, by so many who perform assault because they are provided political and even corporate approval, we must continue to chastise the bad players and the banal supporters, to step down, to reflect on their moral compromise, and to ask forgiveness. Some in the current conflict, like the Nazi leaders, will face war crimes tribunals. The rest like Heidegger will face a lifetime of tolerance. My hope is that the vast majority will face reconciliation and shame and be offered radical forgiveness. That is the only way to a peacful, just world. To those currently in authority I implore you take it.

1Speaking being, Bruce Hyde, Steve Kopp, Wiley 2019

2 Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, CLIV

EVERYONE is NON-BINARY

Professional intelligentsia are people whose work largely begins in words and ends in words. There is a major logical trap that anyone of the professional intelligentsia can fall into, as a tendency to get locked into a logical cycling related to unfounded premises, rather than explore external views, diverse sciences, or research via the question, “Is this true?”

There are two religious cases of how that can distort or stagnate the fundamental principles.

The first relates to the strange case of the Orthodox Jew who, on a sabbath, ran a few hundred metres to the house of a non-orthodox Jew to ask that man to come and put out a fire, but could not participate in putting out said fire themself. This non-orthodox Jew had the practice of leaving the front door open on the sabbath so an orthodox Jewish man could walk straight in because he couldn’t knock on the door. It was a simple practice of the non-orthodox Jew to contribute to these neighbours yet it could not be reciprocated on a sabbath. And that it is not held by an Orthodox Jew that the religious law, if designed for purification, is not equally relevant for non-orthodox jew, is also discordant although perhaps a function of believing that the non-orthodox Jew is impure already and can’t be made more impure. Of course Jesus tried to debunk this in his story of the Good Samaritan, but did not prevail with the Jewish teachers.

The second case relates to the fundamental Islamic schools of Iran and previously Persia. In such schools, the sciences are avoided, superstition prevails and the Koran, revealed in the pre-scientific era and which initially fostered the sciences well before the Europeans, now becomes bogged down in an anti-technological, extremely socially controlling structure. Eventually that bubble will burst as the desire of the people to extend their capabilities will add a pressure beyond the control of the Islamic Republican fascism.

Why is this related to the concept of a non-binary human being and the multiple genders theory of some of the western intelligentsia?

Firstly to show that possible serious even fascist-like or just stagnating impact of politically accepting the outcomes of intellectual work that begins and ends in words. Secondly to begin to unpack the absurdness of much of the argument for a multiple gender theory. Thirdly, to show that such multiple distinctions has only one real outcome, the distraction of people from realising their true selves and role in the world as given to service in the path of social unification and the advancement of civilisation as a whole. While the last requires a much more lengthy discussion, for purposes here, the importance of ‘given to service’ of humanity is the critical attribute through which active community engagement and conversation across diversity of thought, experience, and culture, without proselytising (demanding others align for fear of retribution), is essential.

I am using the term ‘non-binary’ as a focus of the discussion of absurdness of the multiple gender theory. Clarifying definitions, binary means requiring two different, opposing but synchronous elements that when operating together can create a novel outcome. Non-binary thereby means not having (all that). As individuals, human beings operate by internal binary systems that establish complex negative feedback loops that create everything from stabilising the sugar content in the blood to formulating theoretical mathematics. However, as individuals, human beings, themselves, are all non-binary. I am non-binary. There is just one of me, whole, complete and indivisible.

As non-binary, in gender terms I am male and masculine. When I get together with a procreation partner, we are binary and can and have created novel outcomes.

Now there are some pop psychologist types who have said to me, “but what about your feminine aspect?”. When I ask them what they mean, they have told me that things like nurturing, kindness, creativity, intuition, are feminine. And force, protection, labour and legal and technical thinking is masculine. This is just another absurdity avoiding that the reality is something more simple.

Taking the premise that there are human virtues or characteristics that make humans, human, such as loving kindness, courage, nurturing, protection, high-mindedness, patience, creativity, intuition, problem-solving, and empathy, then the simple reality is that both male and female genders, and masculine and feminine affects have all of the characteristics. Once we acknowledge that all of the human characteristics are present as both masculine and feminine affects then when we look we can see that the only difference is the manner and degree of expression of those characteristics. Most obviously, a female will mostly bond strongly with the growing foetus and neonatal child because of the upwelling of hormones such as oxytocin. Men often report a more significant bonding at the moment they first held their child. However, when we look at the issue of protection we see that the female is highly protective both through direct force, indirect force and negotiation just as males are with the variation relating to a stronger empathy on the part of females which causes a more defensive posture, and a stronger capability of males bringing personal force into negotiations which causes a proactive attacking posture but is a capability steadily loosing value.

The problem that many people have in relation to masculinity is in contextualising the male as controlling, aggressive, even murderous. It is difficult to come to terms with the naturality of masculinity through this contextual lense and so some have imagined that more feminine nature is required to dilute the masculine to make a peaceful world. While that is an applaudable goal, it is unnecessary and even further obscures the potential of the unmitigated masculine and feminine affects in the advancement of civilisation.

The problem with men, if there is one, is the cultural mode that has developed over the past 10,000 years of the male as soldier, fighter, and war fodder for alpha males, kings, emperors. Recontextualising ‘who men are’, we can view cultural history since homo-sapiens stepped out, as a slowly distorted system, boosted (as per the story of Cane and Able) with the development of agriculture and excess wealth over the last 10,000 years, and through the amplification of primate tribalism based on the command of the Alpha male. However there is historical evidence to suspect that this form of socio-political orientation was destructive both intra and inter tribally, preventing the stability of social groups necessary to develop technologies, and intellectual and spiritual pursuits, all necessary for an advanced civilisation.

It is religion that mitigated that amplification of the impact of the Alpha male and allowed stability for the development of civilisation and improving technologies. Nonetheless such masculinity continues to assert itself and we now know that these males have a particular brain structure that heightens control and manipulation and diminishes empathetic responses that we now call psychopathy. On the female side there is also a hierarchy with controlling matriarchs but these operate in a less forceful manner than the Alpha males. In general, subordinate males and females, the vast majority of the human population, are empathetic beings desiring belonging in family, community and a general social cohesion. These are they who are attracted to the notions of religion and spirituality, create new technologies and sciences, and master artisanships, and are the real heart and body and impetus of the advancement of civilisation.

The issue of masculinity and femininity lies only with the affect of the genderisation of male and female and not with any human characteristic as specific as either mascuiline and feminine.

Genderisation is the foetal developmental process of forming a male or female. This process relies on a sequence of biochemical developments with each phase of embryological development. And such biochemistry is formulated by the genetic combination that foetus has been given by the mother and father in.e the binary procreators. This cascade of biochemistry influences both the physical characteristics of the embryo, the phenotype, and the minute and generic structure of the brain. Both the brain and physical characteristics of each embryo is idiosyncratic to that individual. Evolutionary processes have, in the most minor animals, founded a contiguous neural to body sense, what can be called the embodiment of the individual. This embodiment that includes odours, sense of smell, visual range and colours, and physical format etc, has the value of even the most simple animals being able to distinguish between their own kind and others. For example some snakes are snake eaters. However snake eaters usually don’t eat their own kind of snake. Males of the salt water crocodiles that are 240 million years on the planet, will eat their own young that are protected by the female, suggesting that such primordial distinctions weren’t as consistent in the earlier phases of evolution. And perhaps indeed, these brain structures that offer protection and nurture for the juvenile, are primordial structures for empathy.

What we can see from evolution of animals is that there are only two successful ways to procreate: the most widespread is binary sex, and the other way is asexual and in animals like snails this means that they have both binary, male and female, reproductive organs and can engage in binary sex and asexual reproduction.

The embryological development of the brain and body is a synchronicity that creates, for the individual, an obvious sense, an embodiment, of gender. In language it is simple to term the individual with a penis, male; and the individual with a vagina, female. Such nomenclature is simple as it is accurate to the embodied state of the vast portion of the population. In a small number of cases, the brain development is out of affective synchrony with the reproductive organs such that the person grows feeling ‘wrong bodied’ rather than embodied. Indeed these cases prove the issue of the relevant brain structural development. When a male with dysmorphia say they are female, they are noting that there are two genders, the one defined by their body parts and the one defined by their brain structure but which there is a failure of the brain to embody the physical nature of the person. Brain structure wins over physicality in all cases as the brain, expecting to find for example, a female physicality and external sex characteristics will be forever discombobulated when finding these physical traits missing and even other traits not expected, insitu. Indeed, the only resolution for dysmorphia is to surgically correct the physicality as, while the female sense of the brain structure could, theoretically, be ablated, a male sense cannot be in any way transposed into a brain. The brain, itself, only has a structural qualia model for either male or female and never, so far as can be ascertained, both.

The case of homosexuality is quite different. Homosexuality is when the embodied brain appreciates its maleness or femaleness yet the erotic orientation of the brain has developed for the non binary rather than the binary procreator. This tells us only that the brain has structures and processes for distinct aspects of gender and erotic desire. So in the vast majority of people the structures and processes are contiguous and synchronous, creating an embodied effect that begins with admiration for the specific gendered self and later attraction from the binary procreator as an erotic orientation.

Within the human population, the expression of gender and sexual orientation is essentially idiosyncratic to each person. In otherwords, I am a specific male unlike all other males and my sexual proclivity is specific to me and none other. Even an effete male will be unlike all other males and females and not at all like any females. Likewise transgender women are unlike all embodied females and often evince an uncanniness of masculine affect. Similarly, eunuchs are unlike all mature males and females, yet are proclaimed males. In practice the expression of gender is either male or female. In sexual orientation the expression for humans is limited by erogenous organs (physical attribute), and erotic desire (brain attribute). Erotic desire is impacted by libido with a consistent variation between genetical males and females. Erotic desire is also impacted by the desire for novelty, also an idiosyncratic aspect of brain structure. Libido can also be quite low in otherwise physically robust, sexually intake people, creating a non-sexual affect.

Sexual expression is also mediated by social moral education and this is a necessary education in the cohesion of society, albeit in the past often imparted with little finesse. Nonetheless this cultural modeling about sexual expression should not be confused with anything to do with modeling gender. The inverse is actually true, that embodied gender is one of the most significant drivers of cultural formation. In the main, how culture deals with asynchronous behaviours to the vast consistency of men and women, such as homosexuality, transgender and any number of erotic variations, is a distinguishing feature between cultures as determined by the story of successful social life that each culutre formulates. In any case, gender itself remains consistently male or female, each individual non-binary and each procreator couple, binary. Homoerotic sexual partners are also technically binary just as a binary computer code might have two zeros or two ones adjacent. But as such, this sexual connection is non-procreative.

Some intelligentsia assert that gender is a cultural expression. Although there is vague hypothesis for this, there is no scientific evidence for this. Gender is, perhaps, the primary embodied aspect of a human life as founded in embryological development. There are only two genders. While gender predicts sexual desire, and drives reproduction and the survival of the species, it is by no means an absolute control, and this can also be seen in other animals. These variations are part of the nature of evolution itself and do not need to be particularly successful, and, so long as they are not particularly unsuccessful, the variations will continue to be expressed from generation to generation. Culture is mainly an expression of the embodied genderisation of human beings and how we come to deal with our binary procreating nature.

Justice Accountability and Forgiveness

It is the season of Christian Lent and the Baha’i Fast. The wonderfulness of the teachings of Jesus Christ has lead to one signal cultural message down through the ages: no one is taboo by culture, love and care for everyone you come across, and who abides by that forms a brotherhood and sisterhood, a community, a church.

Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith, pulled justice, the expression of true brotherhood through the larger socio-political lense, into the centre of a religious framing that includes the acknolwedgement that we are a global civilisation that requires integrative tools beyond that of the individual or the community.

Two qualities lie at the interface of the moral individual and the moral society: accountability and forgiveness.

Accountability is the voluntary open and honest exploration of one’s personal life. Given that the culture of accountability by which a society can go about its business in a secure and confident manner requires formal processes social process of accountability, all issues regarding the conquest and subjugation of another people, the takeover of lands, and the expression of this the enlightenment colonial powers performed on many generations after the first conquest, layers embodied trauma (psychic and physical) on those generation until the epigenetic qualities are ingrained in the lives of people living in a more supportive social environment.

Accountability and justice cannot be performed without recognising the true nature of the impact to the conquered people. Indeed I would argue that it is so difficult to outlive this trauma over generations, it is the one thing that has taken generation after generation to war for the past several thousand years. Only the very hard work of accountability can give the conqueror ease even as their descendants carry the trauma of their murders down through many generation afterwards, also living tortuously in our epigentics. Only a full and willing accountability provides a pathway out of our social traumatised behaviours.

When a full and willing accountability has been formally established, what some call a truth-telling, then two redemptive actions can be motivated: a recompense for the losses caused by conquerors (true justice); and, because the recompense can never be fully made for genocidal policies or slavery, the victims across time might resort to radical forgiveness for the shortfall. I would encourage the victims to forgive or at least play with forgiveness even if for the rest of life, for in that lies a path out of the malaise of victimhood to a true empowerment. However we need to be honest with ourselves that forgetfulness is forgiveness (not the other way around) and forgetfulness is only induced by being offered a full accounting of wrongs done against us and a full recompense where it is needed both individually and socially. Such social acts of social integration allows the perseverating mind to rest and turn to other more developmental, transformative and productive living.

What Are You Going To Give Up?

An idea doing the rounds in religious circles over the past few millennia is that the things of the world are bad, God doesn’t really like them, they’re just there to test our allegiance to God, or, as as a challenge through which become spiritual developed, awake or enlightened. This often takes on the obvious logical follow-up of ‘and we should do everything we can to be without them’.

The teachings of the various hindu traditions go back over 4,000 years. These various traditions have an idea of spirituality versus the world, at their core. Ascetism is common through the Indian regions as an extension of the “world is bad’ idea in a view that sheer poverty even being without clothes and food is the pathway to spirituality. Based on the idea of karma and reincarnation, asceticism is the way to minimise one’s karmic impact. Ultimately, the person without karmic responsibilities has become one with the divine and is not reincarnated.

Some of the old biblical prophets took themselves off to live as ascetics from which discipline they received visions or messages from God. Through those messages they were able to warn the people, and chastise the leaders, about the correct way to approach life and politics. Mostly they were impotent to change the larger historical course of the people. Likewise, Jesus tried to get the point across by offering that, “it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’ Some prophets and Jesus had potent visions of the future, periods of great redemption for the people and today we can read in the very time we live as proof of the prophetic vision. It is also possible they have created an effect of what we now call, moral hazard. Moral hazard is the other side of the coin of fatalism. Fatalism rides on an idea that what will happened has already happened so I can be resigned to whatever I am resigned to – it makes no differences. Moral hazard rides off any message that ‘we are going to be alright, in the end, anyhow’ as a reason not to limit one’s desires for power and amassing wealth, after all. I want to draw attention to this tendency of us to become resigned to life as we perceive it. Rather than take that the world is bad, perhaps what the spiritual teachers are really telling us is that ‘what is bad is our perception of the world that shows up as our resignation to that perception’. How would it be if we gave up our resignation, rather than anything specific of the world.

The Buddha, living in a Hindu society bogged down in extremes of sovereign wealth, castes, and ascetic views of poverty tried to get the point across by showing people that they should have at least the basic nourishment to learn the spiritual pathway. Buddha, like Jesus, led an austere life of a wandering teacher. Nonetheless, Buddha didn’t deny wealth, proposing a set of teachings based on the idea of a middle path. Buddhists retained the concept of reincarnation with some divergence from Hinduism in a recognition that the weaving of our thoughts of the world maintains our being in the world in suffering, and that, once we are fully divested of our thoughts we will reach a state of nirvana, or the ‘blowing off’ of desires, leading, finally to non-existence.

In a particular way, Buddhism doesn’t teach that there is a goal to life, but that reality is a state of mind built on nothing, and that to divest of the way the mind constructs the world is to not exist, in any way, and that is reality. This view is close to the western philosophical view of existentialism which logical path leads to a nihilistic view. Indeed, the Buddhist practice towards nirvana appears to be a practice towards resignation to the existentialist state that our human situation is contingent and ephemeral, as an simple acceptance that such a state has no meaning so we should not give it one, certainly not that is is something to be sad about, putting aside that depression and suicide that can be evoked by unresolved nihilism.

However, what if most of us have really just gotten the great teachers wrong, or rather, what if the great teachers were simply doing their best to get an idea across to our muddled minds, a completely simple but more inaccessible idea. In otherwords, what if their somewhat different teachings, are all correct, and in some way, also wrong or less full in their teaching than is the truth of us.

What if the great teachers were trying to find a way to teach people who were already mind-set on that everything about them – the way their society worked, the way they worked, and what everything was all about – is like an object. What if the great teachers were actually trying to get us to a point in human development whereby we could just see that, at any moment, our human world is largely a sliver of perception, even a distortion, of the whole human world.

We are also attached to a way our mind renders the world. And so whether we are of the people of the book or of the eastern traditions, we will be attached by our mind to those things of that religious tradition. We will be attached to things of the social traditions, political traditions, cultural traditions. Some of these will create the way we see the physical things of the world such as wealth. We will carry both our attachments to our religious or philosophical views and our cultural and political views, together, even where they do not align.

This is not to say that we can be without our attachments.

What then, for human development? If the human mind attaches to non-existent reality, then the affairs of the world have no meaning and can evoke no response. Religious thought of this kind, correlate / allow / even fosters an opening for socio-political mind-sets to power, domination and hoarding. Even the attachment to a religious idea of nirvana or philosophical idea of existentialism and nihilism, requires that the mind is equally attached to an idea of existence. It is this attachment to existence in the face of non-existence that creates the nihilistic dissonance that, for some, result in depression and suicide. As it is of an individual, so it is of the social organism.

Given that we are fated to be attached to the dualisms of our ideas, then to be detached, rather than being attached to the idea of detachment, might best be approached in the acceptance of the dualism, that we are equal parts detached and attached. Maybe there is a state in which the attachment-detachment duality of some particular aspect is so very small it might even be thought to be gone, disappeared. However, even then, providing much attention to this state as a goal, is more likely to amplify both dualities than to dissipate them. And, indeed, dissipate to what ends anyhow? To be proud of the spiritual station achieved?

I suggest that, rather than being overall attracted to becoming a more detached person, accept that the ultimate spiritual achievement, let’s call it achieving our optimal human, is rather gained by being in a dance with our dualities and an additional completely novel idea, an essential unity, a non-dual idea. Here I need to change tack in language. As you can see, the language directing this commentary, while it is trying to raise a novel idea, simply slips into dualism, forbidding the mind any truly novel idea.

All things spoken are set apart from each other in distinction. Current practices in meditation seem aimed at disappearing the following of (attention to) language (thought). This reduces the strength of thought habits and leaves an availability of mental resource, what ontological philosophers in the aftermath of Heidegger, have come to call ‘a clearing’. On it’s own, meditation doesn’t create anything novel for that clearing, and for many modern practitioners, life continues the same while meditation becomes a tool for coping with life’s lack of validity.

We might consider, then, that the task might be to allow that there is a higher mental state that rises above language. This suggests some novel mental ‘tooling-up’ that is novel to language. In the dance with our dominant world creating tool – linguistic distinctions and dualities – and the possibility of an emergent viewing above word, we might just find the diminution of dualities and a state of being (relatively) detached becomes evident.

The question remains, in entering a possibility of an access to reality above or outside of linguistic distinctions, what would you or I give up that already exists as an attached ideation such that the diminution of the dualities creates the clearing for access to a level of reality that is, til now, non-existent to us.