I was thinking about writing a little about Christmas and Buddhism, but found that others have already done the job and done it better than I could have. In true geek tradition, I won’t waste time reinventing the wheel, but I’ll simply link to them.

First up is the Precious Metal blog, I enjoyed this post and like the way he points out the common ground between our two paths.

Secondly I’d like to share this article from the About Ulverston website. I especially liked the use of a parallel with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, very nicely done.

Finally, I’d just like to take this chance to wish everyone everywhere a happy Christmas and a great New Year.

I was thinking a little about dualism the other day, carrying on from my previous post a little. Dualistic thought is covered early on in the Tao Te Ching, and from what I’ve seen around the internet and in my own writings and views, can be given negative connotations.

I’m coming to another viewpoint now, put simply, that dualism in neither good nor bad in itself; it simply is. We can’t get by without it, and it is vital to our existence that it’s there. We make value judgments every day in order to function and survive, for these judgments we need dualistic thought. The problem, as I see it, is when we get so caught up in our world of dualism that we forget that it’s only a set of arbitrary concepts.

Consider light/dark, it’s a great dualistic metaphor for things, not least good or evil. In the Taiji symbol it gets used to point out the mutual dependence of things, night and day, etc. But it’s a bit lost on a person who was born blind, similarly, a dualism based on silence and noise is lost on a person who was born deaf. As soon as you start factoring in people who don’t experience the world quite the same way we do, it all starts to get a bit more iffy.

Our dualisms can be biased by our subjective viewpoints; hot/cold is another dualism, but the exact definition varies from person to person. It seems to me that each time we “define” a dualism, we simply rope of a chunk of grey area and hope for the best.

I used to think dualistic thought was a negative thing, then realised that this was itself dualistic thought. I have to admit, I found that quite amusing for a while.  So this leads me to my current contention; Dualistic thought is necessary, not particularly desirable or undesirable, just there. The most important thing is to see it for what it is, necessary, but ultimately an illusion.

A thread on the Teahouse started me thinking again about something that I’ve been working up towards for a long time , it’s probably not the most popular position I’ve ever taken, but I do think it’s accurate.

We seem to define natural as being Earth, our biosphere, by which I mean plants, animals and things arising and related to them, and anything arising there without mans contrivance. Now that’s a slightly vague definition, I readily admit that, but that seems to me to be the closest I can get without spending more time than I’m willing to.

As we’re talking dualities, ‘unnatural’ is, therefore everything that is not covered by the definition of natural. Which I take to be industry, technology and the artifacts and effects associated with them. Again, vague, but the best I can do without being here all day. The supernatural and occult I will, for the sake of completeness, consider as well; leaving aside all judgements as to the existence or not of these things.

So my question is very simple; What if we’re wrong? What if natural/unnatural and supernatural are rather arbitrary definitions, maybe even only held by Western culture? My charge is that we are guilty of not thinking outside the box, the box in this case being Earth.

We know that the first element in the universe was hydrogen, this was enormously abundant and formed the first giant stars. These star were incredibly unstable as they were so big and exploded, showering the cosmos with all the other matter including the matter that makes up the Earth and everything on it That’s right we are starstuff, along with everything else here. That by the way, includes your car, your microwave, the monitor you’re using to read this and everything else we define as “unnatural”.

So how then do we justify this line drawing? It’s seems odd taking matter that was created along with everything else in the cosmos and that, on that scale can certainly be considered to be naturally occurring things and then dividing it out like that.

I think the whole thing seems to be based on superficial form, after all nature as we seem to mean it is something built on top of the basic building blocks of the universe but not intrinsic to them. Or to put it another way, we know something of atoms, but atoms know nothing of us.

Does anyone else avoid watching the mainstream news outlets these days? There’s very rarely any good news to be seen, I’ve been looking at some of the more positive news outlets and the smaller services and they seem to be covering a lot of things that the mainstream media don’t touch.

This is something I’d noticed a while ago, but I wasn’t blogging at the time. It’s amazing the stuff that gets ignored by the mainstream media. At the camp for climate change that happened near Heathrow a month or two back, there were incidents of the police using some fairly heavy handed tactics against unarmed protesters, yet this was not even touched on in the mainstream media.  I remember seeing coverage of the event in the press that was in fact hostile to the camp and it’s aims.

That started me thinking, it’s as if the media, at least in some parts, seems to be promoting (or spinning) a particular view of the world. They have a small area of interest, which doesn’t seem to include anything that might challenge the status quo world view, or force people to stop and think.

I think we have to consider the last teaching of The Buddha:

“Therefore, be islands unto yourselves. Be your own refuge. Have recourse to none else for refuge. Hold fast to the Dharma as an island. Hold fast to the Dharma as a refuge. Resort to no other refuge. Whosoever, either now or after I am gone, shall be islands unto themselves, refuges unto themselves, shall seek no external refuge,it is they, among my disciples who shall reach the very topmost height! But they must be keen to progress.”

Essentially we have to judge for ourselves and remember that we, and only we, are the final authority, we decide what is newsworthy. To allow mainstream media to do this for us is to abdicate that responsibility to others, but that in no way absolves us of the responsibility, we chose to give it away. Personally, I find that my RSS feed aggregator is my trusty ally in keeping informed.

I’ve placed a couple of links to positive news sites on my links page, and I’ll update it with links to alternate news sources as soon as I get the time.