[Technical footnote: Sound waves traveling 1,128 feet per second at sea level produce a standing wave of 83 Hz frequency when trapped in a room-sized space of 13.6 feet. This low pitch of 83 Hz is definitely audible in the normal human hearing range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. It is heard as the note G-natural two octaves below the lowest note of a violin.]
I have to admit honestly that years have gone by without my making any appreciable dent in achieving jhana levels of meditation. I think it is too late to become a Buddhist monk; it is reported that in Thailand ordination is not given to men over age 65 and the thought of having to learn a difficult foreign language like Thai at this time of my life is daunting. While every morning in Waianae starts with the fresh promise of a new day, by the end of the day I woefully acknowledge that I have not made much headway against the five hindrances, mostly laziness. I may be too much attached to an ideal of becoming the person I imagined that I would like to become early in adolescence, long long ago. It has been the dream of my life to follow the example of the Buddha but hard to stay centered on the path. Impatient or despondent today about lack of progress, knowing full well I have been over this ground again and again craving distraction or entertainment, against my better judgment but out of some curiosity, on an impulse I ordered another computer via amazon.com although I did not go so far as to contract for a WiFi connection at the apartment. WiFi Internet access is supposed to be available outside McDonald's or Starbucks (the library does not have WiFi yet). The computer is a ten inch Asus Transformer Prime tablet with a separate docking keyboard.
1/28 The Asus tablet arrived but I am sending it back. I had in mind using it as an offline word processor, however the Android 3.2 operating system designed for a new generation of mobile phone applications does not interface well with Windows 7. I probably should have gotten a netbook with a Windows 7 operating system such as the 10" Acer netbook at Wal Mart for only $248. The only word processor application bundled with the Asus tablet was a primitive note-taker. The Asus did not recognize a standard flash drive plugged into its single USB port as expected. I tried to access Internet via public WiFi connection at the local Mcdonald's. Disappointingly there was too much glare reflected off the screen outside the building whereas the Internet response inside the building was extremely slow. I will postpone further action on getting a computer for awhile, probably until after my return to the mainland (Flagstaff, Arizona?) after lease is up at the end of April.
2/5 I have decided to put my Kindle Reader on the shelf for a few weeks (or a month!?) to make a serious effort to practice meditation as originally intended when I came to spend a winter season here in Hawaii.
It was not really fair to the Asus netbook to order it without providing a WiFi connection for it although I am glad I drew the line. The fast little netbook would probably have been excellent for browsing Internet. In fact the library just announced that WiFi has just been installed but it is too late for the Asus. I have wondered about moving this blog to a site in the cloud to cut dependence on a local flash drive for the Kompozer html text editor.To investigate this will require Internet access, therefore have to be postponed until later, assuming there is anything more to say.
2/8 Four months ago when I flew out to Hawaii, I did not have the energy or the resolve to continue searching for a home over the winter season or risk jumping into an expatriate life in Thailand. Not finding any better stopping place after spending a few weeks exploring three islands, I decided to lease an apartment without prior inspection located in Waianae on the dry side of Oahu. Since then the site has turned out to be stressful in a few ways, especially regarding noise levels (already mentioned) and isolation, both geographic and social. The popular image of Hawaii as an attractive destination for tourists, welcoming them with aloha, does not necessarily apply to backcountry areas off the beaten path. In these economically distressed areas an undercurrent of resentment against foreign influence can surface at times. Crudely lettered signs of protest can be seen posted along highways, protesting the American invasion, occupation, commercial exploitation and annexation of the formerly independent kingdom. This zenophobic attitude was demonstrated to me personally. Recently I was walking along the beach near my apartment, a beach occupied usually by many locals but at that moment fairly empty. I like to watch the waves sometimes when the beach is not crowded. Suddenly I heard someone shouting in my direction. "Hey!" "Hey!" I turned to see a Hawaiian man standing with a group of other Hawaiian buddies in a drinking party over beyond the chain link fence of the U.S. Army recreation compound. By law all beaches in Hawaii are open to the public even if they front private or government property. Even the beaches in front of expensive resorts can be used by the public. The man seemed to be angry for no apparent reason. He shouted "Hey! You should go back to the mainland. You are taking up too much space here." His friends sort of laughed and playfully tried to restrain him. I thought about going over to the fence to reason with him but just kept on walking to avoid a hostile confrontation. Meanwhile I was asking myself if he could be right.
Regarding these issues, I do not blame Hawaii. I do not blame anyone. I consider these trials to be pop tests of spiritual maturity, such as when Swamiji used to describe the cockroaches in the IYI West End apartment as little "divine inspectors" (we still had to get rid of them but without malicious intent). When someone yells at me, or crazy Howard across the hallway curses at no one in particular but still disturbs the peace, I stay mindful of my emotional reaction and try to restrain myself from acting on any negative feelings. Only once did I lose patience with Howard, get up, walk over to his door, knock respectfully and say through the closed door which he would not open, "Howard, please do not shout so much. You are disturbing the peace." (It did not do much good). The Buddhist approach to pain or discomfort is not to react to it unmindfully but instead to examine it attentively for the lessons it can teach, one lesson being that nothing lasts forever, not even pain. Another lesson being that no place in this world is entirely under "my" exclusive control, including one's own body. This is just the way life is, take it or leave it. These trials remind me to get on with my respective program in spite of relatively minor obstacles.
2.11 Some premonitory headaches centered in the left temple have resumed in the past weeks. The cause of these episodes is still an unsolved mystery. I am wondering what conditions might have changed lately. The headaches could be due to a general decline in physical and metabolic activity over the past several months, except that the first episode occurred at the end of my 1999 CDT hike when physical condition was excellent, apart from lack of water. Some doubts about kidney function were suggested by a recent metabolic panel exam at Waianae Comprehensive Health Care. The report listed some parameters hovering on the edge of normal. I will try drinking more water or tea, in fact may buy a large thermos to keep an ample supply of liquid on hand, or else make a point to drink more plain Culligan-purified water. The headaches might be due to a slow but cumulative allergic reaction to wheat in the diet which manifests only after several weeks or months of exposure. I will try to eliminate all wheat, once again, after experimenting recently with whole wheat breads. To implicate androgen deficiency as a possible cause would not explain why the episodes have been intermittent instead of chronic. There does seem to be a vague correlation between headaches and periods of anxiety or depression (except, again, for the CDT hike). I doubt if the cause could be some nutritional deficiency because of numerous vitamin and mineral supplements in my current daily regimen.
My bet is on wheat allergy as the most likely cause of headaches because it correlates with every episode. On my CDT hike I lived on practically nothing but peanut butter and ramen noodles (wheat) for six and a half months. The daily headaches began five months into the hike until the end when I finally changed my diet to rice and beans. On my Vermont hike the initial headaches faded away on a low-carb high-protein Neanderthal all-meat diet (unfortunately all that cholesterol is bad for the heart, a mortal threat worse than mere headaches). Fortunately I am very satisfied with my present diet, a vegan fat-free oil-free cholesterol-free Ornish-Esselstyn cardiac-disease-reversal diet, even if bread may have to be excluded.
Conditions are not very conducive for physical exercise in Waianae; walking beside roads bearing heavy traffic is disagreeable as well as swimming in the ocean, especially after a recent incident on the beach when my foreign presence was challenged by a hostile native. Walking along neighborhood streets is discouraged by many aggressive barking dogs, some of them roaming unleashed, unfriendly to the rare pedestrian where vehicular traffic is the norm. Some streets are signed "Private Property No Entry". These signs of distrust may be due in part to a pervasive homeless population. There are no public trails to hike in solitude like the grand forests of northern Arizona which stand silently waiting for my return.
My Recipe for Congee Oats
* 1 handful Quaker Oats, Old Fashioned
* 1 handful Quaker Yellow Corn Meal
* 1/2 handful Sun Maid California Raisins
* 1/2 handful Hodgson Mill Flax Seed
* 1 tsp cumin
* 1 liberal sprinkle cinnamon
* 2 capfuls vinegar
* 1 squirt soy sauce
* 1 squirt Sriracha Hot Chile Sauce
Mix ingredients in a non-stick saucepan with purified water, bring to a boil and stir about thirty seconds until the corn meal congeals into a paste. Pour into a lightweight melamine bowl. Let the saucepan soak in water for a few minutes before cleaning. Enjoy congee at dawn or mixed with lunch leftovers for a light supper
2.15 About the definition of "substantial" food. Another possible cause of headaches could be eating too much food. At one time, that is. When trying to limit mealtimes to the traditional monastic interval between dawn and midday according to a strict interpretation of the sixth Theravada precept, I get a powerful urge to eat more than necessary at the midday meal in anticipation of the hunger pangs that will follow that night. Years of practice don't seem to make it easier. A kind of panic reaction takes over when the meal is in progress. The inevitable result of overeating is discomfort due to sluggish drowsiness which can last for hours wasting most of the afternoon. The suttas relate that when a bhikkhu returns from his alms round after finishing his midday meal, he sits down under a tree to practice concentration. This is an unrealistic ideal far beyond my powers. I have not even seen it practiced in yogic retreats where a main meal is usually followed by a rest period. Drowsiness can be more uncomfortable than hunger. It is one of the five major hindrances to spiritual practice (lust, ill will, drowsiness, restlessness and doubt). Considering that drowsiness has been a problem for me for a long time, I am coming to the conclusion that eating a light supper in the evening would be a fair tradeoff for limiting the quantity of food consumed at lunch. It would be better than lurching from one extreme to another. In my case, a reasonable limit for lunch on a typical day of light physical activity would be a volume of about one pint. One pint is the volume of a small Rubbermaid Twist-N-Lock food container, the same volume that worked for me during my retreat at Boonkanjanaram in Thailand in 2004. It is also the volume of food mentioned in the suttas [Samyutta Nikaya, Book I Ch III 13] which King Pasenadi found to be the right amount to overcome his obesity (see a Bucket Measure of Food).
When I took the sixth precept among the full set of eight Theravada precepts at Wat Metta in 1996, my vows had to be taken in the canonical Pali language at the insistence of Ven. Thanissaro who administered them to me. I had to memorize and recite the lines without fully understanding all the nuances of their meaning. Of course many contracts or commitments are entered this way without fully understanding the terms at first. In Pali, the word describing the kind of foods prohibited outside of the allotted time is "bhojana" meaning "staple" or "substantial". Ven. Thanissaro goes into a lot of detail about the allowed foods at accesstoinsight.org. The subject of food is especially interesting to bhikkhus, long distance hikers, mariners adrift in an open boat and anyone with a keen appetite. There are foods which are permitted as snacks and there are others considered as medicines (salt, tea, cocoa, oil?). Fruit is a recommended snack at any time. Note that fruit juice and sugary sodas are not allowed in my personal list because of concerns about obesity and heart health. I used to think that snacks should be discouraged because nibbling or munching often gets out of hand. However now I concede that they may serve a useful purpose as a safety valve.
In fact, I would accept a snack of a rice cake or a similar vegan food with an afternoon cup of tea, even if rice is considered one of the "staple" foods according to the traditional rules. Likewise a light supper could be justified for a lay person observing a modified sixth precept if it helps sustain energy and motivation overall. The English translation of "bhojana" as "substantial" can be interpreted in this case in a quantitative caloric sense. For Theravada monks, however, the problem with eating an evening meal or snack is more complicated than the issue of allowable foods. Even if some foods could be construed as allowable snacks, Theravada monks can not freely help themselves to anything at all, not even snacks, unless given to them that day and saved for consumption later. They cannot hoard food overnight and they cannot eat anything not given, not even an orphan fruit fallen from a tree and picked up off the ground. The problem with supper is there might not be any lay person around to give them food at a late hour if they might not have been able to save any allowable snacks to tide them over. This happened to me. One evening as I happened to be walking past a wash up area behind the main hall of Wat Metta, a young monk visiting from Thailand standing there noticed my approach, brightened up and motioned at me to come over. Then he asked me to hand him a jar of instant coffee sitting there on a shelf in plain view. Feeling pleased to be of service in a humble way but also amused to be caught up in a role-playing scenario, my role being "layman" and his being "monk", I willingly picked up the jar and handed it to him. Actually it may not have been technically "mine" to give, but if my giving it was all right with him, then it was all right with me. I just assumed that the jar was for everyone to use but this visiting monk, perhaps not sure of all the local protocols, correctly did not make any assumptions. While handing him the jar I asked him if he needed coffee to stay awake all night, as monks sometimes do. "No," he replied truthfully, "I just like coffee."
Important note:
Having said the above in defense of a modified definition of "substantial" food, I have to backpedal a bit to reaffirm that mild nocturnal hunger is healthy and can produce some interesting dreams, provided it can be tolerated without panic attacks. The main object is to avoid drowsiness from eating too much at midday but not at the expense of throwing out the baby (caloric restriction) with the bathwater (the sixth precept). Caloric restriction is still necessary for health and vitality even if the sixth precept is relaxed from a hard and fast rule. The right amount for my aging metabolism seems to be about one-half pint of a light and early supper around five pm. After that, the kitchen is closed until the following dawn.
A blind adherence to rules and regulations may not be wholesome. The suttas state that a belief in external observances is one of the first fetters to drop away on the path to enlightenment. At stream-entry the first three of the ten fetters to drop away are identity view, doubt and wrong grasp of rules and observances.
2.21 I have just read Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor and rated it five stars. I think he (or his publisher) may have chosen to use the word Atheist in the title instead of Agnostic for dramatic effect because within the text he takes pains to qualify the meaning as "not-theist", not "anti-theist", which is still an agnostic stance. I read his earlier book Buddhism Without Beliefs two years ago and reviewed it in my blog essay Agnostic Buddhism Without Karma or Rebirth. . I hope to review CBA in more detail later. It interests me both for Batchelor's autobiographical history as a former monk and for his fresh insights into the life and politics surrounding Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha. For example, Batchelor suggests that the reason that Gotama did not father a child until the late age of 29 was that he may have been away from his homeland studying at Taxila, the preeminent center of learning at the time and the capital of the Persian empire, located seven hundred miles to the northwest (two months travel) on the main North Road passing through Gotama's home town. At least five other contemporaries of Gotama are known to have gone there to study, including King Pasenadi of Kosala with whom the Buddha had many dialogs later. A long stay in a non-Hindu culture would have exposed young Gotama to revolutionary ideas about democratizing the Hindu caste system which he did in his community of monks.
2.22 Letter to Stephen Batchelor (see his home page). Dear Mr. Batchelor, we seem to share similar views about agnostic Buddhism as set forth in Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. We have not personally corresponded before but I have followed your writings for some time. My background is a Buddhist layman age 69, a retired single American man living in isolation far from contact with any Buddhist community. I appreciate your fresh insights in your book about the political intrigues surrounding the Buddha in his time and your goal to separate his unique teachings from their Hindu matrix as well as from other cultures overlayed on them later. Your hypothesis about a possible sojourn in Taxila is a brilliant solution to the puzzling question of why the birth of his son was delayed until so late an age as twenty-nine. I have a question related not directly to your recent book but to the issue of rebirth. I wonder if you have addressed somewhere in your writings the detailed research of Ian Stevenson MD as presented in his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Stevenson admitted that he could not come up with a modus operandi to explain reincarnation but the depth and quality of his research is persuasive, even provocative. Do you just accept that some phenomena cannot be explained and leave it at that, like a forest of simsapa leaves hanging out of reach?
3.05 Some dialog with Steven Batchelor is in progress by email. Meanwhile, I finished doing my income taxes, both federal and part-time resident Hawaii. I have reserved a flight to San Diego with ongoing connection to Phoenix for when my lease expires end of April. Yesterday I took a bus down to the Ala Moana Wal Mart in Honolulu to buy a large travel bag on wheels to carry my household possessions with me when I depart, to save the trouble of acquiring them all over again in Flagstaff, Arizona, my next rebirth destination.
3.09 Batchelor confirms by email that his use of the word "Atheist" in the title of his recent book was his own choice, not that of his publisher. He says he wanted to take a bold stand against Buddhist agnostics who are "closet theists". Regarding my question about the case histories suggestive of reincarnation investigated by Ian Stevenson , he says that he read them but was not convinced. He goes on to add that even if reincarnation could be proved to be true, it would not necessarily prove the truth of the related but separate doctrine of karma, "the one which really matters". I wonder if what really matters, actually, is the belief in a doctrine. A doctrine is valid for someone who believes it. The Buddha rightly rejected clinging to philosophical views which causes bitter disputes between narrow-minded believers. He taught the confused villagers at Kosambi that a doctrine should be adopted if it has wholesome consequences, even if it cannot be proved. Therefore regarding the doctrines of karma and rebirth, my personal inclination is to accept the possibility that they may be true but not give them undue importance for living this present life. They are cultural accretions from the Buddha's era less important than the Four Noble Truths, the very core of the Buddha's teaching which originated with him. A life can be lived without reviving the past or building hopes on the future. Courage and intellectual honesty are required to face the Great Unknown without a safety net. This is the agnostic position. Meanwhile this vast universe with its multiple realms of existence and multiple dimensions of folded and unfolded space extends far beyond the limits of human vision like the Burj Khalifa tower soars above a one-eye peephole in a board fence at ground level.
3.13 Majjhima Nikaya 131:
Let not a man revive the past
Or on the future build his hopes;
For the past has been left behind
And the future has not been reached.
Instead with insight let him see
Each presently arisen state;
Let him know that and be sure of it,
Invincibly, unshakably.
Today the effort must be made;
Tomorrow Death may come, who knows?
No bargain with Mortality
Can keep him and his hordes away,
But one who dwells thus ardently,
Relentlessly, by day, by night--
It is he, the Peaceful Sage has said,
Who has had a single excellent night.
This poem is found in several of the Majjhima Nikaya suttas. "Revive" means to remember with delight, with attachment. "Insight" means to see phenomena as they truly are: impermanent, painful or unsatisfactory, and not mine, not me, not myself.
3.14 Another one of my Costa Rican godsons of secondary education (Daniel) has followed the example of others by dropping out of school. Not even one of my eight or so former high school candidate students in Costa Rica has managed to complete their program. Almost eighteen, Daniel was just starting tenth grade after taking two years to complete the ninth grade. He says he has to get a job now but will attend night school. He did not notify me before burning his bridges. An attitude of indifference about education is prevalent in Latin America. Part of the reason may be poverty and part may be boring, irrelevant classes taught by unskilled teachers, but part is also lack of vision about what can be done with knowledge. People tend to lose interest in a goal if they do not see how it will benefit them or if their friends drop out (and maybe the same can be said of meditation practice with the distant goal of reaching enlightenment). Hopefully attitudes will improve with increasing internet penetration making interesting, well-taught classes available to anyone in the world having internet access and a desire to learn. For example all of the undergraduate courses at MIT are freely available at MIT OpenCourseWare.
3.16 A month ago following the onset of some premonitory headaches I stopped eating all wheat, suspecting a possible allergic reaction. After a few days the headaches faded away. Then yesterday, as further confirmation, after I munched a whole bag of pretzels, I got a dull headache lasting through the night. I mention this in case someone else might be suffering headaches; they should examine what they are eating. I munched a whole bag of pretzels out of boredom with my vegan fat-free oil-free diet. While on the whole I am very satisfied with it and enjoy the taste of every meal, sometimes I crave a change from rice and beans. Sometimes I will try unusual foods found in the supermarket such as burdock root, lotus root, Korean pears, mung beans, crystallized ginger, licorice candy, lychees in syrup or fresh limes. Almost all packaged foods, however, are excluded without a second thought because of containing saturated fat. My diagnosis of heart disease two years ago identified "moderate to severe" blockages in the left anterior descending artery. This is a difficult location to insert a stent. To prevent the pain and distress of a sudden heart attack, the only option left in my control is to follow a heart-disease-reversal diet. This kind of diet prohibits not only consumption of cholesterol but also all oils. All oils without exception contain percentages of saturated fat which the liver converts directly into cholesterol. Eating saturated fat is the same as eating cholesterol.
The main drawback to an oil-free cholesterol-free heart-disease-reversal diet is hunger returning a few hours after a meal. An early supper at five pm does not prevent hunger pains later that night, strong enough to wake a light sleeper up around three am. This may not necessarily be a bad thing for meditation practice and maybe I could get used to it, but usually I take a precautionary snack of oatmeal congee around eight or nine o'clock before turning out the lights.
3.17 One of the most important discourses by the Buddha is Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipatthana Sutta, Middle Length Discourses, Number 10 of 152). He surveys a comprehensive range of subjects suitable for meditation practice. There are four main categories: the body, feelings, the mind and core teachings:
1. Body:
1.1 Mindfulness of breathing
1.2 The four postures (walking, standing, sitting, lying down)
1.3 Full awareness of bodily movements
1.4 Foulness - the thirty-two parts of the body
1.5 The body as composed of the four elements (earth, water, fire, air)
1.6 The nine charnel ground contemplations of a corpse
2. Feelings: pleasant, painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant
3. Mind: if lustful, hateful or deluded by self-identity
4. Core teachings:
4.1 The Five Hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, drowsiness, restlessness and doubt
4.2 The Five Aggregates: form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness
4.3 The Six Sense Bases: eye-forms, ear-sounds, nose-odors, tongue-flavors, body-touch, mind-mind objects
4.4 The Seven Enlightenment Factors: mindfulness, investigation of states, energy, rapture, tranquility, concentration and equanimity
4.5 The Four Noble Truths: understand suffering, abandon the origin of suffering, realize the cessation of suffering, develop the way leading to the cessation of suffering.
The Buddha concludes this discourse by encouraging diligent practice. He says that if anyone should develop these four foundations of mindfulness for seven years ... or even for only seven days, one of two fruits could be expected for him: either final knowledge here and now, or if there is a trace of clinging left, non-return. What if I give this an honest try? Starting today I will make a diligent effort to practice mindfulness of breathing for seven days, meanwhile carefully avoiding the distractions of playing over chess games, browsing internet and reading to pass the time.
3.19 Maintaining unbroken concentration for more than a few hours is extremely difficult. Even seven minutes can be difficult. It can take seven years of practice to learn how to do seven days right.
3.21 Received mail delivery of a little red Acer Aspire One 11.6" PC netbook. It is a bit heaver than the Transformer Prime and does not have a decent camera, but I like it because it comes with Windows 7 Home Premium which does not conceal the file system like Android.. Still no WiFi in the apartment though, not worth the trouble with only one month left on the lease. WiFi works at the Waianae Public Library except that wireless FTP file transfers are blocked by the budget-sensitive library server when trying to use Kompozer or Filezilla to update my website. Fortunately, FTP access is provided at the library terminals themselves via flash drive as well as at McDonald's or Starbucks. My former participation in the World Community Grid donating spare computer cycles to medical research has been reactivated under the same name as before, jwleaf4 (because once there were four of us) and with all accumulated credits. My graph of progress has been flat for one year.
3.26 My little red Acer netbook comes with a barely adequate low resolution webcam which has at least obtained some snapshots of my Waianae apartment with beach view, uploaded today to this Picasaweb album. After the local Waianae public library finally got around to installing WiFi, I bought a small netbook to take there. Now with access to photos preserved unseen in my old archives over the past year, I have been reviewing them not for the purpose of "reviving the past with delight" which has been left behind, but to understand patterns of activity and thought persisting over a long time. I am reminded of the desperate android outlaws in Blade Runner who were implanted with artificial memories necessary to keep them from going haywire (which they did anyway). Since memories feed the delusion of self identity, it may seem counter productive from a Buddhist perspective to dwell on them if the goal is to let selfhood drop away. However I am not overly attached to any view of life, not even a Buddhist view. The Buddhist perspective just happens to be the one I have developed the most over time. I have gotten used to it. It is like my preference for the Windows 7 operating system over Android or Apple. I know where to find things in Windows 7. The preservation of my precious cargo of memories and self identity requires a lot of maintenance, however, like one of the androids felt compelled to return to his lodgings at great risk in order to recover his valuable photos left behind. I wonder if all this effort to preserve memories of the past is worth the trouble.
Here is a snapshot of the icons on my Acer desktop screen showing the main installed applications:
4.02 During the past week I restored all of the applications that were formerly on my Pullman laptop when I gave it away after setting out on the Appalachian Trail last June, 2011. With renewed access to the Picasa photo editor which was never available at public libraries on my travels, I have updated the Jwleaf PAO Mnemonic System with two new images: #59-lip-Nataraja-dance and #83-foam-Osel-Hita-Torres-laugh. Two directories containing one-hundred images each were formatted as square crops and as 8x10 crops so that the collages assembled from them can be downloaded from Picasaweb Albums by anyone who wants to order them as glossies (from Snapfish for example). There is more public interest in my jwleaf.org website about the Jwleaf PAO Mnemonic System than about the Buddhist or autobiographical material, according to reports by Google Webmaster Tools.
Osel, now age 27, is an interesting guy who was officially declared by the Dalai Lama to be the reincarnation of a famous Tibetan lama. Tibetan devotees arranged for the young boy to be separated from his Spanish family (with their consent) and educated at the Sera Monastery in South India. However on reaching maturity Osel distanced himself from the Tibetan establishment because he did not feel that he fit in there as something imposed from outside. Instead, he obtained a degree in cinematography in Spain and started an independent career as a film director. I admire him as someone who laughs at the foam-like vanity of fame and glory and goes on his own way.
4.05 Following up on the issue of agnosticism versus atheism, I have just read Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion (by library loan, not by Kindle). Dawkins defines a spectrum of human judgments about the existence of God, from 1 (strong theist) to 7 (strong atheist). He counts himself in category 6 (very low probability but short of zero: "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there."). I would count myself in category 5 (probability of existence lower than 50 per cent, technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism: "I don't know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be skeptical.") He relates how Carl Sagan adopted an agnostic position once when asked about whether he believed there was life elsewhere in the universe. When Sagan refused to commit himself, his questioner pressed him for his 'gut feeling' and he replied: "But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it is okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in."
Elsewhere in his book, Dawkins criticizes a plausible argument advanced for believing in God called Pascal's Wager (p. 103) which reminds me of very similar advice which the Buddha gave to the confused villagers at Kosambi when they asked him how to choose between competing views about karma, reincarnation and life after death. Pascal could not have known about the Buddha's discourse at Kosambi but they both came up with the same idea here. Pascal reckoned that, however long the odds against God's existence might be, there is an even larger penalty for guessing wrong. If you believe in God, you win if you are right and if you are wrong it will not make any difference. If you don't believe in God and you are wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. The Buddha gave a similar argument for believing in karma and reincarnation. He said that in choosing between competing beliefs (and in his day and time there was a wide range of available choices), then the most important consideration should be the wholesome or unwholesome effect which a belief would have on the quality of one's life. Dawkins scoffs at Pascal's Wager by saying that "believing is not something you can do as a matter of policy". However it is not that difficult to develop faith over time with the understanding that all unproven beliefs are provisional by nature. A belief should be cultivated if it gives some wholesome benefit and does not conflict with the evidence of personal experience. If some evidence arises later which contradicts the belief, then the belief may have to be modified, because beliefs can be considered innocent until proven guilty, like a scientific hypothesis. Napoleon once asked the famous mathematician Laplace how he could write a book without mentioning God in it. Laplace replied, "Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis." Now in my own case, I would like to believe in the grand Buddhist cosmology of thirty-one realms of the universe. This view does no harm and it adds an element of beauty and mystery to an otherwise grim cosmology predicted by modern science to expand to nothing when all the stars burn out. It makes the pain of life a little more bearable, like taking a couple of aspirin. It is like having a backup plan B for when all else fails, as in Hemingway's story The Three-Day Blow where a disappointed suitor consoles himself with the thought that "nothing was finished" and he might still have a chance: "Still he could always go into town Saturday night. It was a good thing to have in reserve."
I wish that Dawkins could have elaborated more about the utility of religious belief from a Darwinian perspective, not only with regard to competition between religions but also how religious belief might confer survival value (to the genes manifesting through their extended phenotypes). Religious belief is so deeply rooted in human culture that it surely must have some important social utility. Understanding why belief has been so important would shed light on the possible consequences of doing without it. Dawkins documents examples of harm caused by religious belief but does not discuss the corresponding benefits. Consider, for example, the cost/benefit analysis for the gene causing sickle cell anemia. The gene is recessive, meaning that both parents have to give it to their offspring for the disease to manifest. But if the gene is given by only one parent, then it confers the benefit of resistance to malaria. Therefore the gene has been conserved in African populations exposed to endemic malaria even though it has harmful effects on occasion.