Can we really tolerate a life of looks, food and shelter and nothing more, for very long?
No, it loses meaning. There is simply that.
And that was what happened to the Buddha. Oh yes, he had a down right posh life, finest wines, women and song, and grew quite sick of it all. He was even isolated from the realities of his cast. His father was a warrior and everything going normally his son would come to assume that role, but his father determined to shelter him from that, treat him as a special treasure, take his pleasure from his special son.
Well, objects don’t tell you about their day or invite you to parties or art galleries… or listen to music with you.
He had friends. Indeed, who did everything they could to keep him as distracted as possible, under his fathers orders, non stop party and fun.
He never saw anyone suffering. He would eventually come to swing to the polar opposite, deny himself everything he possibly could short of actual death by deprivation. He gave that up as well seeing it as ultimately no different than the life he had before. What do you think of that?
Either extreme can potentially be narcissistic? Yes, and he would come to say as much. The Buddha and Buddhists were originally not received warmly in the Indian spiritual community. Their criticism of long standing traditional spiritual practice, and the difficulty their gurus had in debating those criticisms, made them few friends early on. The people of India were similar to the Jewish people in that sense, which would be the reason Christians would find fault with them when they came to have extensive contact. They had a tradition of debate, even the Jews believed that anything seen as being the word of god could be proven so in debate, that no amount of solid reasoning should be able to find fault with it. This flew in the face of the Roman Catholic doctrine of faith and obedience to the entitled set.
This is why it was the warriors that governed in India. Although the priest caste were officially held in higher regard because of their practices and standards and what was required of them, they could never form an over arching doctrine to lord over the masses, so those who had the means and resources to protect territory would be the ones who governed it.
We have a similar situation in the states now. The high priesthood, that is the scientific community, is officially held in higher regard than the leadership caste, the politicians. But in the end it’s those who are prepared to work the economic machine that govern things rather than those with the so highly vaunted knowledge.
Is the class in high regard narcissists? Yes, even those who had strong technical backgrounds to start with eventually assume roles that give them little or no time to actually practice or pursue their field. Their intellectual gifts taking a sideline to their “vision” and they themselves.
What is life without vision? And does it matter who the author of the vision is? Let’s do a bit of mental math then. Add vision to the three elements, as a fourth, and what sort of world do you have? Looks, food, shelter, and imagination?
With vision I would think you would want to change things? We already change things, even without conscious effort, but yes it plugs into that tendency.
Ok, to better things? From a specific point of view, yes. Even without any concrete sense of what bettering things might actually involve. Of this set of now four elements, which is the most powerful?
Yes, vision can be good or bad. World equality vs eugenics, for example. Eugenic thinking would eliminate people like me. I would be seen as innately inferior, defective, a burden on the gene pool, and according to them the reason would be all very rational, logical, even moral, but that is off topic.
Of the four elements, food, shelter, looks, and imagination, which is the most powerful? Shall I just say?
Vision.
Food is pretty powerful.
Food is the most basic.
You can get man to do anything for a cinnamon roll.
Imagination. Imagination rules everything. There is even science to back this up, and peoples taste in food and sex actually varies widely.
We can survive on salad but the cinnamon roll wins even if we don’t really need them to survive. A cinnamon roll, as widely popular as it might be, will fail to woo everyone.
There is a process, called by neuroscientists, confabulation, which just means the tendency to make things up. It comes up almost universally in cases of head injury to the point where someone will be unable to perceive the fact that one or more of their limbs is paralyzed, or that anything on their right field of view is actually there. They literally tested that, presenting something as simple as a coffee cup to their left field of vision and having them notice it, and then moving it into their right field of vision and them losing track of it even to the point of not being able to notice anything happened at all. It can even be their most favourite item, something very important and sentimental to them, and it can still cease to exist with a subtle shift in perception.
As a general rule, we don’t even know why we like what we like, or why we dislike the things we dislike, the ratio is about 80/20. 80 percent of our reactions to things are “just because”, the product of fantasy. Only twenty percent of our reasons for things are grounded in objective reality. ‘Don’t hit me, that causes pain.’ Ever notice how narrow the concrete range of your reasons are? Your real reasons for doing things? The things you really, factually must do?
The brain is not simple that is for sure.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~