Archives for posts with tag: wishes

Wishing for the best.

August 6, 2024 //
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Expect nothing.
You’ll never be disappointed.
Buddhism 101

Language, one the tools we use for thinking, is an interesting subject.
For study!

Whenever there are two different words referring to something not exactly different, there’s a huge opportunity. For us to understand how our minds work.

Buddha said nothing about wishing. As far as I know, and I’m not an expert in Buddhism…
But since all those who bother themselves to help us becoming the better – read happier – version of us quote Buddha as speaking exclusively about ‘expecting’ and nothing about ‘wishing’ … I’ll just consider it yet another fact of life.

When speaking about expectations, Buddha starts by saying that “attachment to desire causes suffering“.
Which brings us back to the minute differences between words!
Wishes, desires… expectations…

Buddha’s first Noble Truth is stated as “Life is Suffering“. Very interesting formulation but today’s subject is somewhat different.
Life, as we experience it, needs a living organism.
Which living organism, in order to remain alive, has to meet some of its own ‘needs’. Subsistence, shelter…
For us to experience something – including life – we need to become and remain conscious. We need to build and preserve self-esteem…
For our living organism to inform our conscience about its needs, the body sends sensations to the higher echelons of the mind. Where sensation is transformed into perception. And becomes desire.

‘Pangs’ become perceptions of hunger. And our mind discovers that it – or ‘we’, as in ‘body and mind’?!? – desires to eat.
Is there any reasonable way in which we – any of us – may give up trying to fulfill this desire? This need, actually…

‘I wish I had eggs for breakfast!’
Nothing unreasonable about that, right? Nothing likely to make us suffer…

Well, maybe for us.
For me, writing this on a computer, and for you reading my thoughts over the internet. Highly unlikely for any of us to be unable to fulfill such a ‘dream’. Those allergic to eggs are excepted, of course.

This being the moment when I draw your attention to what other people may think. Feel…
Parents who can feed their children nothing but stale bread. If at all. And not for lack of trying!
Hungry teenagers who expect their parents to be able to feed them. Decently…

“Fifteen-year-old Cyril Jose was a tin-miner’s son from Cornwall. With the region suffering from heavy unemployment, the boy with a strong sense of adventure joined up.”https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29934965

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game

Seeing

April 21, 2023 //
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People act as if the world is as each of them sees it.

The world is as it is.
Only nobody knows how…
And, probably, never will.

What we act upon, and interfere with, is the world as we see it.
Here being the interesting part.

All other living things mostly react to the world.
Even our brain uses much – some say ‘most – of its processing power to react rather than act.
Our body is able to survive even when our frontal cortex – the portion of the brain where thinking takes place, has been knocked out of action. When we’re fast asleep, drunk, ‘high’, low, in a coma…
In fact, an organism doesn’t need to ‘see’, in order to react. To breathe, to eat, to perform bodily functions, to reproduce…

Things become more and more complicated, indeed, as we climb the evolutionary ladder.
Complicated for us… who attempt to understand what’s going… not for those living on each of the steps… Things are complicated only for those trying to ‘see’!

It’s easy, for us, to consider that a dung beetle which carries food for its future offspring is acting instinctively.
It’s a little bit more complicated when we observe a troop of chimpanzee and notice how deliberately the alpha male leads his ‘subjects’ and the complex social life of the community …

But the difference between how the chimpanzee and the humans interact with reality is wide enough for us, humans, to consider ourselves as having risen ‘above the fray’. As being special enough to deserve a special status!

And what is it which makes us so special?
Our ability to speak? To walk on two legs? To write?
None of the above!

It’s our ability to ‘see’ the difference between us and the rest of the world!

All other living organisms behave as if they belong to nature. To the reality surrounding them.
We humans, behave as if we own reality.

While the rest of the living things react to what’s happening to them – even when they plan ahead – we, humans, deliberately – and presumably in a conscious manner – transform the reality according to what we consider to be our needs.

According to what we ‘see’ as being our needs…

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game