Month: April 2018

I attended a meeting at TNS on the Anthropocene on Friday and time was a concept that was played with a lot during it. Of course, the way humans experience time and the way our planet (and by extension, our solar system) experiences time are much different. Within the panel someone brought up that if Earth’s life were a 24 hour clock, modern humans had been here for about 1 second. The panel then debated on the nature of the rapidly changing climate in past years and how our ecological “Goldilocks” stage was an anomaly, not the norm. This made me wonder if any sustainability efforts are fruitless, as the Earth is already guaranteed to change it’s temperaments once more. I just wanted to take some time to look at the facets of time in relation to humans in the mean time, as well as some time-based concepts I find interesting.

Time is a human construct, made to gives us comfort and practicality. Much like Elizabeth Loftus’ false memories studies, we too can change the way we view time and the experiences that take place within it. Stephen King shows off this shift in perspective very well through a device in his books called “ka,” a spiritual element in a large number of King’s book. It can be guessed that his inspiration for ka can be loosely attributed to some Egyptian and Indian religions who believe that ka is a multi-part essence of the soul. King’s ka is a bit different as it represents fate and life-force. It’s actually described by Stephen King as “a wheel whose only purpose is to turn.” In this way, ka is fate, and in his books ka also works as time, and though it’s moving continuously, it isn’t always in the same way. A small example can be seen in his book 11/22/63, when a time traveler goes back and prevents President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, destroying the ka of the world and incurring several retaliations from fate. King actually incorporates ka and its importance in over fifteen of his books. Ka has the largest presence in his Dark Tower series where universes, worlds, and humans are continuously destroyed and created in a never-ending loop.

Ouroboros is another useful symbol for understanding time, as well as the inevitable creation and destruction it hosts. It first originated in the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld in 14th century BC, though it’s unknown who exactly created the text. In the book it shows the powerful god Ra in the underworld uniting with the Nether God Osiris while both hold a snake which is in the process of eating itself (aka Ouroboros). The depiction represents the beginning and end of time as conscious beings know it. Plato critiqued the Egyptian development later in his writing, Timaeus, “the universe moved… this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created with no legs and without feet.” Despite having no limbs with which to defend itself, and no real way to walk, destiny rolled on and on. It is through Plato’s building of the character Timaeus that we see Plato’s convictions around time arise, that each being’s existence and destruction within time coalesce into a holistic completeness (or ka is maintained, in King’s words).

To see things through a more human lens, we can look to the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his work regarding the Ouroboros. He saw the Oroborus as one of his own Jungian archetypes or an “innate, universal prototype for ideas.” In his book Man and His Symbols he addresses the Ouroboros as a primordial image, and one of great importance. “The Ouroboros,” Jung writes, “it has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process… a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which unquestionably stems from man’s unconscious. Prima materia was very important to Jung as he believed it to be the matter that made up the original material of the multiverse, an idea formed by Aristotle. Though the matter is formless, it is omniscient, omnipresent, and unconscious. Jung makes it clear that the Ouroboros is merely a figurehead for the never-ending nature of existence. In essence, the Ouroboros and ka are the same thing, both circular symbols that never stop and always continue moving while holding the fate of the universe and those who inhabit it within their grasp. Ka and Ouroboros help us to see how this has been a mortal concern since 1400 BC, when in fact the nature in which we measure those years wasn’t created until nineteen hundred years later. We will always struggle with the magnitude and size of time, but the cyclical and repetitive nature of life can bring us comfort.

So I feel like all of my posts will have some angle of capitalism in it, so I’m just going to embrace it.

After the discussion we had today about the four noble truths of Buddhism and the focus on the first truth, it dawned on me that the central ideology of Buddhism can be used as a telescope into why capitalism has been as ubiquitous and as insidious as it is. It all comes from the following flow chart:

Suffering <—— Attachment <—— Desire <—— Emptiness <——- Suffering <—— And so on…

If we come to the enlightenment that human beings are empty and we’re in a constant state of filling that emptiness, then I think the easiest was to fill that void (or the way in which we’re conditioned to fill it) is by material gain or material wealth. Also, if we’ve been led into this belief of duality, that you have and I do not and therefore I must have,  the “goal setting” model of success can also be the easiest way to fill that emptiness.

Advertisements pinpoint this everlasting emptiness and our desire to attach ourselves to something and barrage us with ways in which we can be better, or have more, or not feel lonely. We only need to look at Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook for examples of this. On the consumerism side of things, more money, better cars, bigger houses, more material gain gives us a feeling of success and (fleeting) satisfaction that corporations can abuse. I think this is at the core of the ecological crisis. The fact that we can abuse the human condition of emptiness and turnover a profit from it.  We can ordain trees, but at some point, someone is going to want that lumber to make houses or bridges, and at some point someone else is going to want that and so the person who cut down the tree is going to find a lucrative business out of it, unless we re-engineer humanity to find satisfaction in something outside the material realm.

Strong viewpoint. I think it’s radical. And I’m not sure people want to be that radical.

With our discussion with Dogen, and the meditative nature of walking. It reminded me of this film from the Film Board of Canada, done by the late Quebec artist Ryan Larkin. This film uses many different forms of animation all for just walking and I find it very lucid with the background score and the many different ways he uses to illustrate walking, from crude to beautiful paintings. Thought I shared this for the blog.

So there’s this thing called amphibious housing, and it’s very neat. Basically, they’re made to work with the water levels. Similar to floating houses, their designed to float as water rises. They are most usually connected to mooring posts to limit the motion of the water as well as make sure the house doesn’t sail away. Obviously, they’re ideal for floods and are being constructed more and more in places like the Netherlands, New Orleans, and the UK. They weren’t designed by wild smart architects either, just a few people who sat down and did some calculations and then modified their homes. They’re so cheap and simplistic to make that the scale can range anywhere from a single domicile to, in theory, a whole floating city. This really reminded me of the situation with Kiribati and how a development like this might be able to help.

I was skimming the website Brain Pickings for my literature class and the most recent article entitled, “Trailblazing Scottish Mountaineer and Poet Nan Shepherd on the Transcendent Rewards of Walking and What Makes for an Ideal Walking Companion” reminded me of the Dogen, “Mountains and Rivers Sutra’” that we read for class! (I know it’s not a Buddhist text but the similarities are pretty cool.)

The article is about the Scottish poet, Nan Sheperd, her book, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, and the importance of human interconnectedness with nature. Sheperd makes an inquiry into why the relationship between human and nature has disintegrated, thus endangering wildlife. In her book, Sheperd writes on the importance of walking to connect with nature. 

Here’s a quote from the book included in the article!

“… Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body. It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan.”

“This teaching says: enough. Screaming at the archer is a sure way to remain attached to your suffering rather than easing or eliminating it. A better way is to learn, through meditation, through study and practice, a way to free yourself from the pain of being shot, no matter who the archer might be.” (Alice Walker 5)

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Alice Walker’s stunning and contemplative article on the use of Buddhism as a method of coping with the internalized racism of the real world is incredibly insightful. With the western definition of “religion” in mind, many would disregard Buddhism as a religion, Walker herself claims that she is not a Buddhist. On the other hand, Walker writes that the teachings and ways of life encouraged through Buddhism has helped her reconcile with her loss of love. It has also helped her open her heart and focus on bettering herself and her community rather than waste time under the unapologetic eyes of the white man. As a prominent POC figure with her novel The Color Purple, Alice Walker understands the daily troubles of both internalized and external racism and the ways of the Buddha have helped her reconcile with this turmoil. Though the minds of others cannot always be changed, there is benefit and grace in bettering oneself.

One does not need to be silent to also be working on bettering the self.

 

I’m enchanted by what Vijay Kumar Thakur tells us from the Vinaya, the Buddha’s disciple Ananda speaking to one King Udena:

When new robes are received the old robes are used as coverlets, the old coverlets as mattress covers, the old mattress covers as rugs, the old rugs as dusters, and the old tattered dusters are kneaded with clay and used to repair cracked floors and walls. (Narayan and Kumar, 60)

This goes beyond recycling or handing down clothes (in themselves good things), and even beyond the “circular model of production” commended as an alternative to “throwaway culture” in Laudato Si’ (§22). In a way I hope we’ll have a chance to discuss on Tuesday, it speaks to me of the ecological and ethical vision of belief in rebirth. Just as what is now a rug was once a robe and what is now a robe will one day be a wall, so what is now not a person once was, and what is now a person might one day not be.