Luxuries that cloy and pleasures that bore

George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha’pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with—oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all!—the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man—all lumber!  Throw it overboard.  It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars.  It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness—no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o’er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man!  Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water.  You will have time to think as well as to work.

~ Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome

You must cease for reality to be

Is God to be found by seeking him out ? Can you search after the unknowable? To find, you must know what you are seeking. If you seek to find, what you find will be a self-projection; it will be what you desire, and the creation of desire is not truth. To seek truth is to deny it. Truth has no fixed abode; there is no path, no guide to it, and the word is not truth. 

Is truth to be found in a particular setting, in a special climate, among certain people? Is it here and not there? Is that one the guide to truth and not another ? Is there a guide at all? When truth is sought, what is found can only come out of ignorance, for the search itself is born of ignorance. 

You cannot search out reality: you must cease for reality to be. 

Source

Vast Emptiness, Nothing Sacred

Bodhidharma's reputation as a Dhyana master was said to have preceded his arrival in China, and so and the Chinese Emperor Wu, a devout Buddhist, called upon Bodhidharma to visit the Imperial Palace to teach. Having sponsored the construction of a great many Buddhist monasteries and temples and patronizing the teachers of the various Buddhist sects, Emperor Wu—in accordance with his understanding of their teachings—assumed that he would gain much 'merit' in the form of a happy and prosperous reign. And he assumed he was earning an auspicious rebirth in what some Buddhist schools called a 'Pure Land' where, unlike on earth, all the conditions of life would be conducive to his attainment of Enlightenment.

Emperor Wu: "I have built many temples, copied innumerable Sutras and ordained many monks since becoming Emperor. Therefore, I ask you, what is my merit?"


Bodhidharma: "None whatsoever!" 


Emperor Wu: "Why no merit?"


Bodhidharma: "Doing things for merit has an impure motive and will only bare the puny fruit of rebirth."


Emperor Wu: (a little put out) "What then is the most important principle of Buddhism?"


Bodhidharma: "Vast emptiness. Nothing sacred."


Emperor Wu: by now bewildered, and not a little indignant: "Who is this that stands before me?"


Bodhidharma: "I do not know."


Source

Omniscience and Omnipotence

Arguments for the existence of God have been codified for centuries by theologians, and supplemented by others, including purveyors of misconceived  'common sense'.

THOMAS  AQUINAS'  'PROOFS'

The  five  'proofs'  asserted  by  Thomas  Aquinas  in  the  thirteenth century don't prove anything,  and  are easily - though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence - exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways  of saying the same thing,  and they can be considered  together.  All  involve  an  infinite  regress  -  the  answer  to  a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum. 

1   The  Unmoved Mover: Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.
2   The Uncaused Cause: Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.
3   The Cosmological Argument: There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.

All  three  of these  arguments  rely  upon  the  idea  of  a  regress  and invoke  God  to  terminate  it.  They make  the  entirely  unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress.  Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an  infinite  regress  and  giving  it  a  name,  simply  because  we  need one,  there  is  absolutely  no  reason  to  endow that  terminator  with any  of  the  properties  normally  ascribed  to  God:  omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost  thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.  Karen  Owens has captured this witty  little  paradox  in equally engaging verse:

Can omniscient God, who

Knows the future, find

The omnipotence to

Change His future mind?

~Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (Copyright © Richard Dawkins 2006)

Light my candle

In early times in Japan, bamboo-and-paper lanterns were used with candles inside. A blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a lantern to carry home with him.

"I do not need a lantern," he said. "Darkness or light is all the same to me." "I know you do not need a lantern to find your way," his friend replied, "but if you don’t have one, someone else may run into you. So you must take it."

The blind man started off with the lantern and before he had walked very far someone ran squarely into him. "Look out where you are going!" he exclaimed to the stranger. "Can’t you see this lantern?"

"Your candle has burned out, brother," replied the stranger.

Source

Godel and the End of Physics - Stephen Hawking

......

Up to now, most people have implicitly assumed that there is an ultimate theory that we will eventually discover. Indeed, I myself have suggested we might find it quite soon. However, M-theory has made me wonder if this is true. Maybe it is not possible to formulate the theory of the universe in a finite number of statements. This is very reminiscent of Godel's theorem. This says that any finite system of axioms is not sufficient to prove every result in mathematics.

Godel's theorem is proved using statements that refer to themselves. Such statements can lead to paradoxes. An example is, this statement is false. If the statement is true, it is false. And if the statement is false, it is true. Another example is, the barber of Corfu shaves every man who does not shave himself. Who shaves the barber? If he shaves himself, then he doesn't, and if he doesn't, then he does. Godel went to great lengths to avoid such paradoxes by carefully distinguishing between mathematics, like 2+2 =4, and meta mathematics, or statements about mathematics, such as mathematics is cool, or mathematics is consistent. That is why his paper is so difficult to read. But the idea is quite simple. .... consider the self referring Godel statement, G. This is, the statement G can not be demonstrated from the axioms of mathematics. Suppose that G could be demonstrated. Then the axioms must be inconsistent because one could both demonstrate G and show that it can not be demonstrated. On the other hand, if G can't be demonstrated, then G is true. By the mapping into numbers, it corresponds to a true relation between numbers, but one which can not be deduced from the axioms. Thus mathematics is either inconsistent or incomplete. The smart money is on incomplete.

What is the relation between Godel’s theorem and whether we can formulate the theory of the universe in terms of a finite number of principles? One connection is obvious. According to the positivist philosophy of science, a physical theory is a mathematical model. So if there are mathematical results that can not be proved, there are physical problems that can not be predicted. One example might be the Goldbach conjecture. Given an even number of wood blocks, can you always divide them into two piles, each of which can not be arranged in a rectangle? That is, it contains a prime number of blocks.

Although this is incompleteness of sort, it is not the kind of unpredictability I mean. Given a specific number of blocks, one can determine with a finite number of trials whether they can be divided into two primes. But I think that quantum theory and gravity together, introduces a new element into the discussion that wasn't present with classical Newtonian theory. In the standard positivist approach to the philosophy of science, physical theories live rent free in a Platonic heaven of ideal mathematical models. That is, a model can be arbitrarily detailed and can contain an arbitrary amount of information without affecting the universes they describe. But we are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. Instead, we and our models are both part of the universe we are describing. Thus a physical theory is self referencing, like in Godel’s theorem. One might therefore expect it to be either inconsistent or incomplete. The theories we have so far are both inconsistent and incomplete.

 

.........

Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind. I'm now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end, and that we will always have the challenge of new discovery. Without it, we would stagnate. Godel’s theorem ensured there would always be a job for mathematicians. I think M theory will do the same for physicists. I'm sure Dirac would have approved.

Thank you for listening.  
 

Stephen Hawking

Source: http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/lectures/publiclectures/91 

A lesson for us from monkeys

How Bhagavan saved a Muslim Contractor

This happened in 1908 when Bhagavan was staying in the Pachaiamman Temple. There were many tamarind trees surrounding the temple. The Municipality gave to the highest bidder the monopoly to collect tamarinds from these trees every year.

That year a Muslim got the monopoly. As these trees gave an unusually rich yield, the contractor himself was guarding the trees from the monkeys, whom he drove away by pelting stones at them with a sling. As he wanted only to scare them away, he took care to see that they were not injured. But unfortunately, a stone from his sling hit a monkey on its head so hard that it died on the spot. Immediately a large number of monkeys surrounded the dead monkey and began to wail and lament the death of their dear one. Then, by way of complaint, they took the dead monkey to the Swami in the Pachaiamman temple.

These monkeys considered Bhagavan their friend and well wisher not only because he often satisfactorily settled their internal disputes but also because he made happy compromises between their rival groups and thus re-established peace and harmony among them. So, in this hour of grief, they resorted to him for consolation and redress, with the corpse as an irrefutable testimony.

As soon as they came near Bhagavan, they burst into bitter cries and tears. The Swami, whose heart melted with pity for all creatures, could not bear their soulful wailing. Tears trickled down his cheeks. Gradually his tender sympathy soothed the monkeys. Then consoling them Bhagavan said, "For everyone who is born death is inevitable. He at whose hands this monkey died will certainly also meet with death one day. So, you need not grieve."

The monkeys were fully pacified at these words and they went away carrying the corpse with them. It so happened that, within two or three days, the Muslim contractor was bedridden with a serious malady. The story of the consolation given by Brahmana Swami to the aggrieved monkeys spread from mouth to mouth, till it reached the home of the Muslim contractor. The members of his family were convinced that his sudden illness was due to the curse of the sage. They therefore went to Pachaiamman Temple and began to plead for the Swami's pardon for the ailing contractor. They prayed to the Swami as follows: "It is certain that your curse that your curse has hit him. We beseech you to be gracious enough to save him from death. Please deign to give us some vibhuti so that you can apply to his body. He will then surely recover."

With a benign smile the Swami replied, "You are mistaken. I never curse or bless anyone. I sent away the monkeys who came here, by telling them the simple truth that death inevitable comes to all who are born. Moreover, I never give vibhuti to anyone. So please go home and nurse the patient whom you have left alone."

But the Muslims were determined and they declared their resolve not to move without getting the vibhuti. So, just to free himself from them, the Swami gave them a pinch of from the burning fire. On receiving it, their faces beamed with joy. They returned home after expressing their deep gratitude to the sage. And it came to pass that after the vibhuti was applied to the contractor, he began to recover and in a few days he rose from his bed!