Will Science and Religion ever be Reconciled?

I'm talking about your idea that indigenous culture gets raped. Not that one is better than the other although you do end up there in saying that damage occurs. You don't stand for women's rights although that's how it looks symbolically, you stand for your own sense of justice as women's rights are not the only violation you see needs attending. No grander order need be achieved if you do well you are rewarded in being. My being can never substitute for yours. Anxiety is caused by the misapprehension of what is so. Comprehending what is so sets us free to engage creatively instead of defensively. There is no right to anything in this world but we can have confidence in real things.

And yet you would struggle native missionary to advance women's rights. Evidently this external pressure on native culture is only bad if it is exerted by christian missionaries.

I would point out here where you seem to actually endorse this invasion;

I downplay nothing. By experience you mean to eat, coming into this world seeking some satisfaction. You personally enjoy. You also personally despise.
The values you are assigning the world however do not come from the world but are the effects of your own thinking. The war against injustice is no more effective than shadow boxing. The apparent local victories in advances toward "human rights", are just the flickering of changing alliances. I point to a current event in afghanistan where sharia statutes are returning as nato troops pull out.

The split mind I refer to is that there is a wrong way of being and a right way of being and we achieve this way of being by doing one thing or another. Because this is a funda mental split, there is no whole or tangible handle on either way or what either way will be. We are fundamentally endowed however with the compulsion to get it right or we are devoted by nature to our good. Further we are devoted to our own value system as we develop or are taught one. Where our treasure lies, there is our heart also. This is intense and unremitting devotion and no one is lacking in faith.

We are not doing or achieving incrementally, having and being, achievement and being are the same truth. Being is all doing.

There is that perspective but it is not mine. Karma shmarma, I had to deal with my own nervous temperament having nothing to do with any idea of perpetuity beyond death. Finding no substantial reward in the perception that the world is eventful in nature I walked out of my established life and perceived responsibilities because no one could live my life for me and my life wasn't worth living. I would find a better way for me to be in the world or die trying. I had nothing to offer friends or family or even my own pride. I took to investing my whole attention in understanding my own nervous system and my relationship to the world.

Our suffering is shared. There is a difference between empathy and blind passion or compassion.
You think non-attachment a practice, it is not in the sense I mean it. We enter the ark of condition two by two male and female each according to their kind. Simply if you cling it escapes you. I said my goodbyes to the world forever and found myself here now with you knowing I miss nothing ever. No need to take pictures and preserve in a vault to fade over time, we are living technicolor and we don't have to wait for the movie to come out. What does the world look like now that you know you are real and not some unfinished business or something yet to become. It looks like your playground instead of your battlefield.
It appears supersubstantial, ( give us this day our supersubstantiallis,) instead of forever in contention.

Peace exists where the conditions of peace are met. Your peace is part of the only peace that this world knows.

Clearly acts like a nut must be a nut. The suicidal are not well and this dichotomy of mind is mad making.
It occurs to me you might think this the effect of corrosive nihilistic tendencies in modern society? I think all hierarchical dispositions are wacky.

Hummm. You are the one that says there are elements of your experience that do not fit. Things in the world that you feel compelled to contend with.

Are you pointing out an academic perspective then, because mine is that subconscious is sublimated consciousness and unconsciousness is freakin knocked out.

Innate and born with you say, a priori. Memory is not of past things, it is of living tissue. What you call a priori is current unbroken memory. We are one face with many different expressions, we are one voice with many different inflections and we are one mind with many ideas.

Here is the thing in this vision. It seeks to bring power to illusion and make illusion real and therefor insures that illusion contends for attention. Temptation is the desire to have illusion be real, to have your complaint be justified. Withhold power from no instant bring illusion to truth and truth dispels the illusion. There is nothing to fear, reality cannot be harmed. The only presence missing is your own.

What I am saying that the dichotomy is superstition. We are not, nor have we ever been absent our superabundant state. The power of the mind and the promise of probability insure that a single moments doubt is enough to make the world appear chaotic. This single flicker of doubt is like loosing your mind in total however mind is our communion with things and we will not have it lost and so defend our doubt, throwing away our power as though we never had it. I haven't accused you of anything and I hope we don't find you sputtering sentimentally over any perceived slight. Be confident that you are loved.

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Actually I have an understanding of what is the same and what is different.
You know of yourself if your mind is at peace.

You don't advocate violence but,

Euthanize what now! Don't use negatively interpreted impulses as a cause for action for it is reacting negatively. Reacting negatively is negated action. It is the improper use of denial as the proper use would be to deny what you don't want. What you do want is positive response. Having and being are the same. Food, water, and shelter are universally helpful. Ideas of propriety are always in contention.

My uses of pronoun are all inclusive. What is true for you is also true for me.
The measure of our complaint is the measure of the conflict in our mind.
You have my peace and my resolve finds resolution in it. Resolution is what I report. You seem to be involved in some cultural warfare and if this brings you rest, then why report complications?

Are you to measure then the value of everyone's life? Does that measurement come up equal every time, you seem conflicted about that. You fill the need to satisfy the authority you think your images represent.
I ask you if our essential purpose is to be right or be happy.

I do not judge you, I am familiar with our experience. I make no shadowy
allusions and am quite plain in saying anxiety is caused by the misapprehension of what is so, period. That seeing the truth dispels any sense of loss or appearance of opposing force. Which is the essential difference to this:

A mind without anxiety is kind, safe with it's own kind.
We share our thoughts.

 

I do stand up for women’s rights but that was only an example. Indigenous culture does get raped and damage does occur which has been well documented by many, many people on all sides of the issue. But again, I don’t think that it is an issue of these tribes shining brighter than the missionaries or the dominant culture. I am not saying that the white people should go home and leave North America to the Indians. That is done and that barbaric history is behind us. But that fact does not justify allowing such practices to continue. Today tribal peoples own very little land and there is no reason to really take it away from them, nor to convert them to an alien belief system, nor to force them to become wards of the state.

You assume that I feel anxiety over these things---misapprehending what is so. But that is not exactly right either. I’m a baby boomer hippy---I enjoy being able to stand up for others. If there was no such injustice----I would probably spend my time looking for something to stand up against. You have your purpose towards creativity, I have mine. If I saw everything as good and what is ‘so’ then what would I have to write my books about? Where would all that passion be that I have enjoyed, and been driven by, to write for hours on end over the past so many years?

If you point out an indigenous tribe that treats their women in the subservient manner that late-planter, post-planter, and many industrialized cultures treat their women then you have an argument. The indigenous Dravidian cultures, for example, had a lot of respect for their women and they were the source of the Tantric elements of Hinduism, which the Aryans initially tried to eliminate---violently as a matter of fact. In fact, when I pointed that out about fighting for women’s rights, I was referring to India, Bangladesh, and the other Hindu Nations---which are also very bad at protecting indigenous rights. Farmers and others have been killing off indigenous populations, and even bribe local police and soldiers to assist in their efforts. Rapes, murders, illegal removal from homes and lands, all go unprosecuted by local magistrates…

I do see your point----but you don’t have an argument in this case. (P.S. yes some indigenous people are part of those late planter cultures, but…)

If what you are saying is true, then women would not have the right to vote, we would still be lynching black people, and not allowing them to share swimming pools, beaches, and water fountains; we would be forcing what Indian children are left into boarding schools and forced adoptions to turn them into good Christian kids to work low-wage jobs; and tons more young American men would have died in the jungles of Vietnam for nothing.

Now are you suggesting that activists should never have fought any of these things---that the negative reality of such practices did not really exist---it was all in the minds of the people who stood up against them? Should activists in India give up fighting against the caste system and sati? Should the untouchables just accept their fate in life and practice non-attachment because in reality their suffering is illusion? How about the child prostitutes in India and throughout South East Asia? Is their suffering an illusion? Should women continue to be expected to throw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres?

Here in North America how should we deal with the Native epidemic of youth suicide? Shall we the youth that their sense of meaninglessness is an illusion, or that the suffering of the parents who have lost their children is an illusion? Why even help them if it is all an illusion anyway (after all we would just become tainted with their negative vibes and it would harm our own peacefulness---better to just be non-attached…)

Soooooooo---who decides which is right and which is wrong? Isn’t this being judgmental? Is your reductionist definition of the right way, the way I must follow? Sorry, my heart does not go that way. You said it yourself: “We are fundamentally endowed however with the compulsion to get it right or we are devoted by nature to our good. Further we are devoted to our own value system as we develop or are taught one. Where our treasure lies, there is our heart also. This is intense and unremitting devotion and no one is lacking in faith.”

This is why I push for a multiplistic zeitgeist because that respects everyone’s drive to pursue their own good.

You had your existential crisis---and you came out of it with your answer. I went through my own existential crisis---and was given a tail (you know the story). I found peace, satisfaction, a deep understanding of my relationship to the world. But my answer was a product of my own subjective reality. Though I never fell to the deeper depths of existential crisis---where my life wasn’t worth living, or I had nothing to offer to my family. In fact I have always been fairly altruistic, always doing for others.

Our suffering is shared---yes Hinduism taught that for centuries. I am sure that this will mean a lot to the children of the Wounded Knee School District in Manderson South Dakota. The non-profit organization I am on the board of is currently doing a toy and winter clothing drive for them. Perhaps we should stop, and instead let them know that we all share in their suffering. Some of the kids come to school in deep snow with no coats, or gloves, or shoes and socks. They like school because it is warmer than their homes. If you feel their suffering everyday they go to school and go home in the terribly cold South Dakota winter, why wouldn’t you do something about it?----they are only children. I am talking about just a little tiny corner of the world as an example.

But what reason would you have to do that? If you are non-attached then everything is fine in your world. All pain is an illusion.

Seriously, I respect that you have found that peace, and achieved a good that is important to you and gives you satisfaction. You have found the peace that Heidegger speaks of---that life is very valuable because of its temporality (death).

I have found peace, and I am not troubled by want and desire---and what I do desire, I understand that I enjoy the hunt, or the attaining, more than the desire itself. When my books are finished, for example, I will have to start again---because it is the writing I enjoy more than the completed book itself. (In the case of what we are talking about here, social injustice---I would be more happy to achieve those ends---but then I would have to find the next injustice---because yes, I enjoy that too).

I live a very aesthetic experience---I enjoy life, I enjoy the beauty of life, I enjoy experience---but like the bodhisattvas who return to help others, your path of non-attachment is not for me. Perhaps it is that I get bored on the playground and would rather be the one on the battlefield helping others to get to the playground---or a playground.

 

What to do about suffering? Feed the hungry, shelter the cold.

You say things get damaged and claim this is a well documented fact Mountain Valley Wolf and I say things change. You obviously have some luxury of living in order to devote yourself to your special causes but do you know the value of the temporal? Do you think someone must pay for the changes we see? Our mistakes do not alter reality as there are no events in a continuum. In the same order our seeming successes do not alter reality and both success and failure are irrelevant in real terms.
I ask again, what is the prize that is worth contending for?

All that you call advances of civilization are transient alliances. Right for women to vote? Are voting rights necessary for well being? Good relations with the person standing next to you helps.

I understand that everyone likes playing wheel of fortune and that's okay as it doesn't matter, it is a game of chance and nothing you do will not but be subsequently undone. Rome lasted how long and was subsequently overrun by the barbarian?

I actually traveled hundreds of miles to deliver just such goods as you describe to children of the Hoh nation and they fed me salmon and berries. Feed and shelter. Why would I have reason to do such a thing? I was asked.
The reason I was able to do as asked is because I can pick a thing up and lay it down at will and have no appointment with destiny to keep.
Pain is not an illusion. I do not claim to have a better way. I claim to know what is the same and what is different. War is not peace and contention is not fulfillment of intention.

Perhaps. The first obstacle that peace must pass is the desire to be rid of it

 

Here in North America how should we deal with the Native epidemic of youth suicide?

encourage imagination . honor this above science and religion . for the
native (natural mind) , the reality of the wild will acknowledge and
confirm this as goodness . bears will laugh and fish will smile ... oh ,
well actually they do .

and this is the peace
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