Ender's Game and the End of 2012

I'll be the first to admit I don't want the year to end on the tone of my last post. But I also feel the post was necessary for me to write.

As I've said recently, I've been ignorant of living within the cloud of feminism, and I also have become aware of another cloud that I have been living within and yet been ignorant of, namely the Internet.

It was good to write my last post to correct views that I've allowed to arise, primarily due to the fact that I was blind to my own role in the "Internet cloud."

Some of the questions I've spent a good portion of 2012 thinking about and sitting with are:
- How much a part of reality are the internet and interactions on the internet?
- How much can (or should) life on the internet substitute for real life in three dimensions?

When I started this blog, my intention was to increase interactions with friends that I'd made on Twitter, which were taking the place of a Sangha that I'd lost due to a move. I viewed my blog, etc as semi-private. Recently, I've begun to see that in switching from a passive to active role on the Internet, I was taking on more social responsibility than I was aware of. (My blindness of the effect of taking an active role on the internet can be explained, if not excused, by the many years I'd used it passively for information gathering as a scientist.)

What has made me see the social responsibility attached to an active role on the Internet, as opposed to the semi-private diary of thoughts exchanged among friends? In part, by analogy, the science fiction novel Ender's Game. To quote Wikipedia:

Set in Earth's future, the novel presents an imperiled humankind who have barely survived two conflicts with the Formics (an insectoid alien species; normally called "Buggers" by most of the population). These aliens show an ant-like group behavior, and are very protective of their leader, much like Earth ants protecting their queen. In preparation for an anticipated third invasion, an international fleet maintains a school to find and train future fleet commanders. The world's most talented children, including the novel's protagonist, Ender Wiggin, are taken at a very young age to a training center known as the Battle School. There, teachers train them in the arts of war through increasingly difficult games including ones undertaken in zero gravity in the Battle Room, where Ender's tactical genius is revealed.

As the first series ended, it was revealed that when Ender and his friends were practicing their tactic maneuvers on computers they were actually fighting the real war against the Buggers. Ender and his friends just didn't know. (Apologies for the spoiler if you haven't read the series.) 

With Ender's Game in mind, I think that our blogs and interactions on the internet play a much bigger role in reality than we might initially think. (And that's not even considering Facebook, where preferences and conversations are fodder used for commercial profit.) As far as I can tell, the reason relates to the idea of six-degrees of separation, which, if you think about it, isn't that different from Indra's net. The basic idea is that the maximum distance between people of the world, in terms of interconnection, is six steps:

Although I admit I don't know that much about the theory (I'm definitely going to read up on it), if you consider the rapidity and world-wide nature of interactions on the internet, the six steps may reduce to even fewer as the internet grows in influence. Any person with an active role on the Internet has a very real opportunity to influence collective thought. And our minds are not only what we use to process information on the Internet, but also what we use to live our lives, so while the internet is no substitute for life in three dimensions, it has a powerful effect on life for each of us here.

The Internet contrasts very favorably with television and even movies, where we are force fed information about how we should live, what our definition of success should be, and heavily biased information about world events that we use to guide our thinking about world issues. The Internet allows us to question. I get the very real sense that our independent presences on the Internet are a potentially powerful influence that can be used both directly and indirectly in debates of social issues, against main stream media, which is powered by conglomerate interests, and on a more even playing field against those with money and power: the Buggers. I don't want to be a political blogger (I very much like posting my Shobogenzo notes and the occasional poem and tracking my journey), but it's a mistake to think I can entirely avoid the social responsibility that I was unaware of when starting this blog. In battles for our individuality it's a good idea to try not to develop buggers of our own, though I admit it's easy to say and much harder to do. I think it's important for each of us to recognize that it's a responsibility that extends beyond the mahasangha on-line, since each of us lives within overlapping clouds, i.e. have multiple roles in our lives.

In an attempt to answer the questions I posed above, I think the Internet is a bigger part of reality than I previously might have guessed. And I also think the Internet can be used to influence and affect change in our real three dimensional lives. Nonetheless, the Internet is not a substitute for real life. Our experiences on the Internet are more direct and interactive than what we experience watching a movie, but from a practical perspective, reality is based on space and time. The Internet, although interactive, omits two-and-a-half of the five skandhas (form, sensation, and to some extent perception, of the five skandhas which are: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness). The power of the Internet lies in that it affects our consciousness and the way we live our lives, but it's not reality any more than emptiness is form.



As I'm writing this post I realize that the end of 2012 is rapidly moving towards me and that even if I started walking, running, driving, or flying west I couldn't escape the transition. In fact, due to the sometimes confusing nature of time and space, as well as the way we keep track of time, if I were to try and run away from the transition into the new year, I'd run into the new year! And that's basically what happens to each of us if we try to avoid reality.


***

All my past harmful karma, 
born from beginningless greed, hate and delusion, 
through my body, speech and mind, 
I now fully avow.

***

One of my favorite songs I found this year:

Wishing all a very HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Reflections: My Music Selection for Tonight and an exercise in Awareness

I said in an earlier post on the clear mirror that during zazen:

- We learn that mind percieves and processes experience. We learn that mind functions not only to generate thoughts and emotions but also is the source of awareness that is our experience of emptiness and all things.
- We learn to watch our own minds and discover that mind contains the seeds for everything that is expressed in the universe.
- We realize that everything in existence is from the same universal source.
- We learn to accept the things we can't change with equanimity.

Besides sitting another way I've realized that everything in in existence is from the same universal source is through my love for almost any type of music -- although I admit some forms have taken me awhile to develop a taste for. Tonight I'm listening to the following selection from Fila Brazillia. I particularly like the YouTube clip that goes along with it which is kind of reminiscent of Koyaanisqatsi with images from the Guardian website. Clips like these remind me of the greater beauty in the Universe we all take part in -- usually without being aware of it:



A little mind trip people might enjoy taking themselves on is to watch the clip and try to place yourself into each of the scenes. What I realize when I do this is that in each place I am the same awareness. And in each scene each person is busy with whatever they're doing, but the overarching awareness is the same for each person, including myself...

And you.

Shobogenzo Ch20 (I) Kokyo - The Eternal Mirror

I'm starting this one with a joke...

How many buddhas does it take to change a lightbulb?



Here's at least one possible answer:

All the buddhas in the three times and ten directions aren't enough. That's why the void is typically thought of as dark.

 ...And some Zen masters might consider it a good lesson to just keep shooting out the lights.

 ...I also could've said all the buddhas in the three times and ten directions are too contented with things as they are.

Typically that's not how life works though. And I don't think life worked that way for Śākymuni Buddha or Dogen either. When we're not on the zafu we're confronted by the ten thousand things and we react to them with aversion and attachment depending on some yet to be discovered and published mathematical function of our dharma and karma.

Our reactions as we encounter the ten thousand things are the eternal mirror and are a reflection of self. Our minds react to the ten thousand things because we think of ourselves as separate from them. As long as mind defines itself in terms of self and separation, our mind reacts rather than responds creating unnecessary psychological suffering and stress for ourselves and those around us.

It's obvious that we can't always change the aspects of reality that we're unhappy with. But most of us spend a lot of energy worrying about and getting stressed out by the big things we'd like to change. A lot of us react by substituting consumer placebos to help us feel better about ourselves. And a lot of us procrastinate on the smaller things that can make reality a nicer place to be. Things like changing a lightbulb.

Luckily it's usually pretty straightforward to change a lightbulb. Admittedly training our minds to allow us to change lightbulbs without a fuss might be more difficult.

An extra offering in the spirit of Zen tradition:

Reflections: Not A Kyosaku

Yep... I've been reading Kesa-Kodoku (Chapter 12 of the Shobogenzo). I know there are several folks out there eagerly await my next installment. It's a longer-ish Chapter though.

So here's an example of my whacky sense of humor. Who knows, maybe someone else will get a laugh out of it too:

Reflections: Antaiji - The Song in My Head

I have a few half-written posts on my desktop, but somehow I haven’t been able to motivate myself to finish them or don’t quite know how. One of the few things I have been working on is trying to get the ‘Antaiji song’ that’s been playing in my head ‘onto paper’. Its still going strong, still coming up with new variations in instrumentation, styles, and timing. To get the song ‘on paper’ I’ve been using the laptop’s software, which is something I’ve never used before. So its been an experience. I probably should invest in some ‘real’ software to get the niceties in, e.g. grace notes, crescendos, more precision in the timing, more realistic sounding instruments. I could work on improving my editing skills too. But I start work tomorrow. So here are two really simple stripped-down versions of the basic melodic fragment. The longer one (Antaiji1) is the ‘sitting and working in the fields’ version and the shorter one (Antaiji3) is the ‘going-into-town’ version. Maybe your head can have fun with it too…

Reflections: All that Jazz

There was a time during high school when I discovered Billy Holiday and the edginess of jazz music. Musicians, the good ones anyway, understand the rules of music so well that they are able to venture beyond the rules of their form and create something even more true and beautiful and reflective of the true condition of human life. I learned this when learning about jazz, though I actually hardly listen to jazz anymore. And, of course, jazz, now that I know it, is just another form like rock, country, punk, ethnic, and electronic music. But if there's a common factor in the music I enjoy deeply these days its that the musician's soul is shining through and that, typically, the music isn't so overproduced that the raw, improvisational edges are missing.

Anyhow, I was remembering how when I first heard Billy Holiday I wanted to be just like her. What a romanticized notion of life that was! Her life was really tough, and, if only for the fact that I'm not stuck in a tour bus all day and singing in smoke-filled bars at night, I'm glad that dream didn't come true. But there was more suffering to her life than that and, no doubt, it contributed to her creative legacy in music.

We all have our disappointments, but on the whole, as an only child and a daughter to boot, I've led a pretty sheltered life. On the other hand, there is tragedy all around me, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world’s economic crisis, Aids, particularly in Africa, and the recent earthquake in Haiti. Cancer, other illnesses, deaths of friends and family. Many of my relatives were in Europe during World War II. Just to toss these examples out there really does their suffering a disservice. I'm sure the suffering was or is on a grander scale than anything I can imagine. On the other hand, the suffering is played out in individual lives, lives just like mine.

I think a normal response many of us have when not directly confronted by events like these is to push them into the backs of our minds, either out of avoidance or fear or some weird notion that we’ve worked hard enough or been ‘good’ enough in our lives so these things won't happen to us. Life isn’t fair though. Just because these things haven’t happened yet, doesn’t mean they won’t. Most of us go on with our lives and avoid thinking about the possibility. I am not saying that we should live our lives in fear and paranoia of the worst possible scenarios. I’m also not saying that we should purposefully put ourselves in harm’s way.

If there’s a point to what I’m saying, its that by avoiding the possibility that life may not be as good (or even there) tomorrow, we deprive ourselves of the ability to see the real beauty that is present all around us. And that’s a tragedy too. The ability to see and be compassionate towards the suffering around us hopefully allows us to not get quite so caught up in our own individual day-to-day dramas, but also allows us to be more appreciative of life.

On a personal level, what I’m feeling is that I can be there for or at least be with these tragedies and suffering a bit more than before, because just like in the music that I enjoy, recognition of this part of life makes me see and appreciate the overall beauty and textures of life all the more. The suffering and pain are a part of life’s song and it’s creation.

What does this have to do with Zen, Buddhism, or any religion for that matter? Maybe its in the realization that being too dogmatic, ritual, or ruled-based, can result in a sense of entitlement due to ‘following the rules’ that really isn’t something we can earn, if life is, at least in part, due to our luck of the draw. I think its best to put judgment aside and focus on the hearts and souls of the people we encounter, because those hearts and souls are just like ours, regardless of the particular circumstances. We need to learn the rules and rituals, and understand them well enough to go beyond them to the meaning behind them, a meaning that is central to all religions, namely that love and compassion should be our main operating principle. Acting out of love and compassion requires a certain amount of flexibility, an ability to improvise, which you can’t get by just memorizing the rules. The rules and rituals are just the beginning, they guide us to the right starting place.

Has somebody said this before? Sure. This is just one of my riffs.