(DW News) About 2,000 young demonstrators gathered in the streets of Bangkok for a peaceful rally where they demanded democratic shake ups to Thai society. Pro-democracy protesters have again defied a government order aimed at preventing demonstrations. It comes as Thailand's powerful king returns to the country after months of unrest.(Richinbk, 5/2/16) Crazy girlfriend compilation, check out this Facebook.com/AnimationPar...
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| Zen Mountain Monastery (zmm.org) |
The word aparadha refers to the sense of responsibility that follows from a transgression or crime. Hiri connotes the inner experience of shame that follows from a moral transgression, and ottappa suggests the fear of blame for doing wrong.
Together, hiri-ottappa speaks to the inner and outer dimensions of moral dread or shame and describes the beneficial mechanisms that help prevent us from transgressing
From this perspective, the arising of hiri-ottappa is a mentally healthy response to unethical conduct, as this suffering due to misconduct informs our future behavior.
Ideally, once harmful conduct ceases, so should the corresponding moral shame. However, the concept of hiri-ottappa as a form of moral sensitivity does not account for the toxic experience of guilt, shame, and self-criticism that is detached from actual harmful conduct.
The latter constellation of emotions is not protective but destructive, egocentric, and often impervious to healing through wholesome conduct.
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| The Western tradition borrowed from the East. |
Among Western Buddhist practitioners, this experience is often unresponsive to healing through sila (virtue), or mindful awareness (sati), leading many to seek more targeted practices such as mindful self-compassion and psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy is a powerful tool for many issues, but it takes discernment to know what can and cannot be addressed in therapy. Analyzing problems innate to being born as a human may be akin to handing a shovel to someone caught in a pit, when what is really needed is a ladder.
To recognize insecurity as a fact of human existence — and not evidence of shameful shortcomings — helps relieve ourselves of the unrealistic expectation that it is a problem we should be expected to solve, and allows for a different way of encountering, holding, and opening to this as a reality.
This possibility is where our Dharma (the Buddha's Teachings) practice begins. Source
At the very least, we encourage you to pause before refreshing the homepage of your most frequented news website as the results roll in. To help you out, we’ve put together the following guide to keeping your head in the days before, during, and after the 2020 election.
Preparing for Election Day:
You might be feeling powerless lately. But one thing that is within our control is the ability to... More
The year 2020 has brought sharp focus to our collective struggles: a global pandemic, environmental destruction, threats to democracy, reckonings with racial inequality.
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| Hiri and Ottappa (illustration by Christian Dellavedova) |
People have always been interested in superheroes, and lately, as Hollywood blockbusters inundate us, a new wave of interest is swelling.
We like the idea of someone with special powers watching over us, ready to intervene in a crisis and keep us safe from dark forces.
The Buddha also spoke of two superheroes he called “the two bright qualities [that] protect the world” or dve sukka dhamma lokam palenti (AN 2.9). These are Hiri, or conscience, and Ottappa, respect for others.
Hiri and Ottappa do not flit around the universe in spaceships, shooting lasers. They are found patrolling the depths of the human psyche, where they swoop in to thwart the evil masterminds who concoct our suffering and plot to destroy our world.
Today, humans are no longer constantly threatened by the ferocious beasts of the wilderness, and science has dispelled many of our former superstitions.
The greatest dangers we face now erupt from within our own human hearts:
The first hero, Hiri, can be thought of as conscience or self-respect. She (the Pali language noun is feminine) flies into our mental world at the moment when we are considering doing something that we know deep down to be wrong. Hiri is our personal sense of ethical integrity, our moral compass, our intuitive understanding of what is right and wrong, what’s appropriate and what isn’t.
She is not a severe critic but a soft, caring voice whispering in our ear and guiding us through our lives with courage and compassion. She saves us from the demons lurking within and stands beside us when we say, “No, that is just not right. I will not do it (or say it or think it).”
Her intrepid ally Ottappa is the elemental force of caring for others and respecting their concerns. It (the Pali noun is neuter) appears on the scene when we’re tempted to do something that is against the laws of propriety, outside social norms, or would be condemned by the people we respect.
Ottappa draws its strength from the fact that we are social creatures who belong to a family or community, and that our actions are rooted in and accountable to a larger collective order.
The Buddhist sangha or community is like a group of stars that helps us navigate a moral course. Ottappa points steadily at the inherent respect we possess for others as our north star, and helps us say, “I care about the opinion of the group and would not have my friends be ashamed of my actions [or my words or even my thoughts].”
Whenever these two superheroes are at our side, we are sure to make the right choices and to act, speak, and even think in ways that are helpful, healthy, and skillful. The Buddha said they guard the world, protecting it from getting broken by the onslaught of the worst parts of ourselves.
Without them people could act like beasts, ravaging even their own mothers. We all know what atrocities human beings are capable of. For so many victims, Hiri and Ottappa do not always show up in time, held at bay by their nemeses, Ahiri (lack of conscience) and Anottappa (lack of respect).
These two anti-heroes are present every time a harmful, cruel, or ignorant deed is done, blocking out the benevolent effects of conscience and respect.
Fortunately Hiri and Ottappa have other friends, including Sati, Mindfulness, who goes first into every fray and summons the team into action.
Sati is conscious awareness of what is happening right now, and Ahiri and Anottappa can only function when such awareness is absent. When people do harm to themselves and others, they are often not aware of what they are doing. They are conscious enough to act, but not conscious enough to be aware of the quality of their actions or of their consequences.
Whenever a person musters even a degree of mindfulness, conscience and respect arrive there too, helping them do, say, and think what is helpful rather than what is harmful.
The superheroes we need don’t come from faraway planets or live in secret hideouts on remote islands. Our heroes must be summoned from within. It’s up to us to put them to work and to learn how to save ourselves.
Ram Dass: Becoming Nobody
Becoming Nobody (2019) represents the core arc of Harvard professor Dr. Richard Alpert or Ram Dass’ teachings and life. His ability to entertain and his sense of humor are abundantly evident in a spiritual conversation that brings us around to address the vast question of ultimate freedom. Becoming Nobody is the quintessential portal to Ram Dass’ life and teachings.
(Here and Now) See the latest Ram Dass documentary Becoming Nobody on gaia.com/BeHereNow. The library supports transformational content and can be seen by going to gaia.com for a free trial.
This is the Making the Dark Side of the Moon in studio. The album was developed during live performances. An early version premiered several months before recording began. New material was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at Abbey Road studio in London. The group used advanced recording techniques for the time, including multitrack recording and tape loops, and analogue synthesizers were prominent on several tracks.
Pink Floyd's "Us and Them" - This studio footage is from 1972's Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (The Director's Cut). The members of the band show that one does not need to take a lot of drugs to be creative and play music. They do everything their way with a 1960's sensibility.
AWAKENING IS ABOUT LETTING GO
"So long as you are trying to make progress, you will go up. But up always implies down. So while you are trying to get better and better and better, that means when you get to the best, you can only go on to the worst. And so you go round and round and round, ever chasing the illusion that there is something outside yourself, outside your here and now, to be obtained that will make things better. And the thing is to recover from that illusion."
Find relief from depression and anxiety at liberationprotocol.com.
Depression relief is brought about using alpha and beta binaural beat meditation music with the sound of ocean waves and soothing chimes.
DESCRIPTION: Many depressed individuals have an overabundance of right frontal brain activity and insufficient left frontal activity. So the goal of this session is to stimulate beta activity in the left hemisphere, while soothing the right hemisphere with alpha rhythms. Beta is sent to the right ear to stimulate the left brain, and alpha is sent to the left ear to stimulate the right brain. This REQUIRES headphones.
INSTRUCTIONS: Before each session, make sure to be well hydrated. Then find a quiet, comfortable place in a chair or lying down, free of all distractions. After starting the session, close eyes and relax.
Those who like it can study the Abhidharma (Pali Abhidhamma) as a helpful addition to meditation. The prefix abhi means "higher" or "transcending." As used here the word dhamma has the meaning of "truth" or "teaching."
This is the third and most subtle form of misunderstanding. We could call it the "I" view -- a pernicious wrong view -- because in the most subtle ways we still think in terms of a "self," but no more than that.
The final step
Luckily we have a teacher in the Buddha who points out that even the feeling of perception by a "self" is an illusion.
And by striving further, there comes a moment when even this subtle form of ego-thinking is destroyed and every form of longing and attachment to a self is abandoned as a painful illusion.
That is the moment right-view of non-self is achieved. This is part of the enlightenment process, the goal of the Buddhist eightfold path.
Background information for the cognitive process
If reading up to here, it might be possible to imagine how stubborn the notion of an actually existing "I" is.
When the essence, the deep meaning of the Abhidharma, begins to penetrate, the first hairline crack in the "self" illusion or conceit can appear. The Abhidharma teaches that all things are composed conditioned transient moments. That is to say, there is actually no "me," no "self," no "mine."
It is a beautiful addition and deepening of one’s meditative experience to realize it and be free of the oppression of personalizing everything.
Let's look at the cognitive process. Since the cognitive process consists of a sequence of cittas, it is useful to repeat what we have learned about cittas so far:
The term citta being defined, let's start looking at the cognitive process. But first a comment and clarification of expectations.
Ahba has sometimes indicated that one should not concern oneself too much with individual cittas. He indicates that otherwise it remains too abstract. Perhaps it is better not to be too busy with things that are very far from the world of experience while there is still so much to learn about things we experience.
Exactly how many steps the mental process has and which citta performs which function and how they relate to each other is of secondary importance.
The essence or conclusion to be drawn from explanations in the Abhidharma about consciousness is more important. For details, refer to Bhikkhu Bodhi’s A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, Ven. Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, or to the Dutch Abhidhamma page.
There are a few principles that are useful as background information. One cognitive process consists, according to the commentaries, of 17 cittas. Which 17 and what function they fulfill in the process is, as already stated, not that important right now. What is important is that these 17 rise and fall one after the other. The first citta rises and falls, then the second, then the third, and so on.
So a cognitive process consists of all separate moments of consciousness that follow each other in rapid succession.
It is also useful to know that Buddhism always speaks of six senses. In addition to the usual five (eye, ear, nose, tongue, touch) known in the West, and "consciousness" also finds a place here. (Mental) consciousness as a sense base perceives mental objects, just as eyes perceive visible things and ears perceive sounds as their objects.
The cognitive process
There are, roughly speaking, two types of processes. The first is sensory. One
of the five bodily senses (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, or touch) is
brought into contact with its corresponding sense object and, if all conditions
are met, a sensory-cognitive process based on that sense is
automatically created.
Take eye consciousness as an example. If there is a working eye (i.e., eye-sensitivity), a visible object, light, and attention then all conditions are present for an eye cognitive process. At that moment this process takes place anyway, completely automatically, purely on the basis of conditions without an "I" being involved.
Every sense has its own process in this way. We know that cittas always rise and fall one after the other, it follows that only one kind of cognitive process can take place at a time.
This is the first essence of the consciousness process. Although we think we see, hear, smell, taste and feel at the same time, this is not so! It happens in rapid succession.
It's the same whether we see, whether we hear, whether we smell, whether we taste or feel or cognize.
Just as a movie actually consists of all separate still images played at least 24 frames per second to give the illusion of unbroken/flowing movement, cittas, and by extension cognitive processes, present themselves as a continuous flow.
Only through very high concentration can this process be analyzed down to the smallest parts via personal experience. This was a brief description of the first kind of process, the sensory cognitive process.
The alert reader has probably already noticed that the sixth sense, the (mental) consciousness, has not yet been mentioned. The mental cognitive process is the second kind of cognitive process.
This process can be divided into two parts. First, the pure mental cognitive process, which is used for example during abstract thinking about things.
This process, like the sensory cognitive process, is activated by the presence of conditions. In this case they are the heart-base, the mental object, life continuum, and attention. If these conditions are present then the mental object is known.
Second, mental cognitive processes (plural) also occur after a sensory consciousness process.
After contact takes place between object and sense and all conditions are met, a sensory cognitive process starts. Like the above mentioned eye cognitive process. This is known to the sensory object.
In principle this is a very pure perception of the object to which no concepts have yet been added. Immediately after this sensory cognitive process some mental cognitive processes take place one after the other to give meaning to what has been observed by the senses.
However, a mental cognitive process does not do this with the real "external" phenomenon as object, but rather with a mental copy!
For example, if an eye cognitive process has taken place because conditions for it have been met, the visible object has been observed. However, a visible object is just color, not form, material, name, and so on.
Why? Take shape for example. We cannot see shape. We can only feel shape. Think of all the visual illusions that can be made with pen and paper. Suddenly a two-dimensional sheet of paper with a drawing on it seems to have depth as we look at it. But that's not true at all. If we feel the sheet of paper, we know that depth is not true. Shape is something we feel.
What we see is color and contrast and, based on previous experience and other things, consciousness links to a certain form. Observing a shape on the basis of seeing with the eyes is a derivative act.
That's why optical illusions go wrong. Mental cognitive processes link something to the contrast and color we see when in reality there is none.
The same goes for a name, of course. We don’t see an orange. What we see is orange. Consciousness tells us it has the shape of a sphere. Further analysis attaches the name "orange." If we’ve never seen an orange before, we can’t label it that name, so the process stops at "an orange sphere."
The bizarre thing about this whole thing is that only the first sensory cognitive process actually perceives the object (e.g., the color orange). Then a mental copy is made of that object which is then used as a mental object for further analysis during the mental cognitive processes.
All (mental) analysis is therefore performed on a concept and not on the actual object.
For example, if we look at a beautiful rose, we do not experience the rose as beautiful. We experience the mental concept of "rose." This is because what we see is only color (such as red). The shape "flower" and the name "rose" are concepts added to the mental copy (and not to the actual external object). So the word "beautiful" is being applied to a concept not to a reality.
Why is this important? It's important because we are totally engrossed in it, because we merrily run along with it, because we delight in it.
Suddenly we have an opinion on everything. We think it’s a nice, ripe, good looking orange we’d really like to eat. Or we may think it’s a tart, ugly, fused orange that we definitely do not want to eat.
Desire rises. Wanting something is just as much a desire as not wanting something. As soon as desire is involved, problems arise.
If we do not get the nice orange we are sad, if we have to eat the ugly orange we are sad. And the pleasure we experience by satisfying our desires, by eating the orange, is transient, only of short duration, and therefore actually sad.
Immediately after that pleasure of satisfying our desire, there are many other things we may or may not want.
It's just like a child in a toy store. The child wants one toy. That’s why it whines. But when the child gets it, s/he is playing happily for a few days or weeks. But before we know it, the toy is forgotten somewhere in a corner and there is another "one toy" the child wants and whines about.
And this digressing, this absorbing, this desire is all purely based on concepts, mental copies. Not based on reality.
Only if our concentration is very high can we intervene quickly enough to prevent ourselves from being unjustly absorbed in the illusions of consciousness and prevent desire and thus problems from arising.
In this way we penetrate the true nature of things.
"How boring," we might think. But thinking this is nonsense. We will then have no more desire and therefore no more misery -- no misery, but pleasure instead. We can still eat an orange and enjoy it, and if it were different, it wouldn’t matter.
This is the second important essence of the cognitive process. After the pure sensory cognitive process, a mental copy is made that we can get rid of. All we think of things is no more than subjective mental additions. And because of this we desire to have something or not and that because of this we cause all the problems in our lives all by ourselves.
We can read the previous paragraphs and take them for granted, but that would be a pity. The information only makes sense if we think about it from time to time. What are the consequences of it? What does it mean? If I want something or not? If I find something? If I’m happy, angry, or sad?
Knowledge about the cognitive process can contribute to the insight that everything is conditioned, transient, and impersonal (without self). And in this way we can make room for the previously mentioned fractures in our wrong views, our habitual way of looking at things, allowing room for liberating right view.
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| Mohenjo Daro, or "Mound of the Dead," is an ancient proto-India Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) city that was abandoned in the 19th century BCE as the IVC declined. It was not rediscovered until the 1920s. Built around 2500 BCE, it was one of the largest IVC settlements and one of the world's earliest major urban settlements (SM Rafiq Photography/Getty Images). |
During the last few millennia B.C.E., beginning roughly 5,000 years ago, great civilizations prospered across Eurasia and North Africa. The ancient societies of Mesopotamia and Sumer [of the Sumerians] in the Middle East were among the first to introduce written history; the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms of Egypt established complex religious and social structures; and the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties ruled over ever advancing communities and technologies in China.
But another, little
understood civilization prevailed along the basins of the Indus River,
stretching across much of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan and into the
northwestern regions of India. [This is the area where the Buddha was born, Scythia or Shakya Land.]
This Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), also called the Harappan civilization after an archaeological site in modern Pakistan, which is only 50 years old as a separate country, has remained veiled in mystery largely due to the fact that scholars have yet to make sense of the Harappan language, comprised of fragmented symbols, drawings, and other writings.
Archaeological evidence gives researchers some sense of the daily lives of the Harappan people, but scientists have struggled to piece together evidence from ancient DNA in the IVC due to the deterioration of genetic material in the hot and humid region—until now.
For the first time, scientists have sequenced the genome of a person from Harappa/the IVC, which peaked in today’s India-Pakistan border region around 2600 to 1900 B.C. A trace amount of DNA from a woman in a 4,500-year-old burial site, painstakingly recovered from ancient skeletal remains, gives researchers a window into one of the oldest civilizations in the world.
The work, along with a comprehensive analysis of ancient DNA across the Eurasian continent, also raises new questions about the origins of agriculture in South Asia.
The ancient Harappan genome, sequenced and described in the journal Cell, was compared to the DNA of modern South Asians, revealing that the people of the IVC were the primary ancestors of most living Indians. Both modern South Asian DNA and the Harappan genome have a telltale mixture of ancient Iranian DNA and a smattering of Southeast Asian hunter-gatherer lineages.
"Ancestry like that in the IVC individuals is the primary ancestry source in South Asia today,” co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement. “This finding ties people in South Asia today directly to the Indus Valley Civilization.”
The genome also holds some surprises. Genetic relationships to Steppe pastoralists, who ranged across the vast Eurasian grasslands from contemporary Eastern Europe to Mongolia, are ubiquitous among living South Asians as well as Europeans and other people across the continent.
But Steppe pastoralist DNA is absent in the ancient Indus Valley individual, suggesting similarities between these nomadic herders and modern populations arose from migrations after the IVC’s decline.
These findings influence theories about how and when Indo-European languages spread widely across the ancient world. And while shared ancestry between modern South Asians and early Iranian farmers has fueled ideas that agriculture arrived in the Indo-Pakistani region via migration from the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, the ancient Harappan genes show little contribution from that lineage, suggesting that farming spread through an exchange of ideas rather than a mass migration, or perhaps even arose independently in South Asia.
“The archaeology and linguistic work that had been carried out for decades was really at the forefront of our process,” says Vagheesh Narasimhan, a Harvard University genomicist and co-author of the study. “These projects bring a new line of genetic evidence to the process, to try to show the impact that the movement of people may have had as part of these two great cultural transformations of agriculture and language.”
The large, well-planned cities of the IVC included sewer and water systems, as well as long-distance trade networks that stretched as far as Mesopotamia. But despite its former glory, the civilization was unknown to modern researchers until 1921, when excavations at Harappa began to uncover an ancient city.
The Harappans have remained something of a mystery ever since, leaving behind extensive urban ruins and a mysterious language of symbols and drawings, but few additional clues to their identity. What ultimately befell the Harappan civilization is also unclear, though a changing climate has been posited as part of its downfall.
Scientists have a notoriously difficult time recovering ancient DNA in South Asia, where the subtropical climate typically makes genetic preservation impossible. It took a massive, time-consuming effort to produce the genome from remains found in the cemetery at Rakhigarhi, the Harappans’ largest city, located in the modern Indian state of Haryana.
Scientists collected powder from 61 skeletal samples, but just one contained a minute amount of ancient DNA. That sample was sequenced as much as possible, generating 100 different collections of DNA fragments, called libraries, each of which were too incomplete to yield their own analysis.
“We had to pool 100 libraries together and sort of hold our breath, but we were fortunate that that yielded enough DNA to then do high resolution population genetics analysis,” Narasimhan says. “I think if anything, this paper is a technical success story,” he adds, noting that the approach holds promise for sourcing DNA in other challenging locales.
A single sample is not representative of a widespread population that once included a million or more people, but a related study published today in Science lends some wider regional context. Several of the same authors, including Narasimhan and Reich, and dozens of international collaborators, authored the largest ancient DNA study published to date.
Among the genetic sequences from 523 ancient humans are individuals from sites as far flung as the Eurasian Steppe, eastern Iran, and Iron Age Swat Valley in modern Pakistan.
The team found that among many genetically similar individuals, a handful of outliers existed who had ancestry types completely different from those found around them.
Eleven such individuals found at sites in Iran and Turkmenistan were likely involved in interchange with the Harappan civilization. In fact, some of these outlier individuals were buried with artifacts culturally affiliated with South Asia, strengthening the case that they were connected to the IVC.
“This made us hypothesize that these samples were migrants, possibly even first-generation migrants from South Asia,” Narasimhan says. The IVC genome from Rakhigarhi shows strong genetic similarities to the 11 genetic outliers in the large study of ancient humans, supporting the idea that these individuals ventured from the Harappan civilization to the Middle East. “Now we believe that these 12 samples, taken together, broadly represent the ancestry that was present in [South Asia] at that time.”
The first evidence of agriculture comes from the Fertile Crescent, dating to as early as 9,500 B.C., and many archaeologists have long believed that the practice of growing crops was brought to South Asia from the Middle East by migrants. Earlier DNA studies seemed to bear out this idea, since South Asians today have significant Iranian ancestry.
“I really found their analysis to be very exciting, where they look at ancient DNA samples from different time scales in Iran and try to correlate how the Iranian ancestry in South Asians is related to those different groups,” says Priya Moorjani, a population geneticist at UC Berkeley not involved in the Cell study of the IVC genome.
However, the new analysis shows that the first farmers of the Fertile Crescent appear to have contributed little, genetically, to South Asian populations. “Yet similar practices of farming are present in South Asia by about 8,000 B.C. or so,” says Moorjani, a co-author on the wider population study of South and Central Asia.
“As we are getting more ancient DNA, we can start to build a more detailed picture of how farming spread across the world. We’re learning, as with everything else, that things are very complex.”
If farming did spread from the Fertile Crescent to modern India, it likely spread via the exchange of ideas and knowledge—a cultural transfer rather than a significant migration of western Iranian farmers themselves. Alternatively, farming could have arisen independently in South Asia, as agricultural practices started to sprout up in many places across Eurasia during this time.
Ancient IVC ancestry holds other mysteries as well. This civilization was the largest source population for modern South Asians, and for Iron Age South Asians as well, but it lacks the Steppe pastoralist lineages common in later eras. “Just like in Europe, where Steppe pastoralist ancestry doesn’t arrive until the Bronze Age, this is also the case in South Asia,” Narasimhan says.
“So this evidence provides information about the timing of arrival of this ancestry type, and their movement parallels the linguistic phylogeny of Indo-European languages, which today are spoken in places as far away as Ireland to New Delhi.”
The authors suggest Indo-European languages may have reached South Asia via Central Asia [where the Buddha was from] and Eastern Europe during the first half of the 1000s B.C., a theory evidenced by some genetic studies and similarities between Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages.
Narasimhan hopes that more genetic data can help clear up this ancient puzzle—especially by exploring where DNA dovetails or differs with findings from other lines of evidence.
“We’re trying to look at when and how archaeological cultures are associated with a particular genetic ancestry, and whether there’s any linguistic connections,” he says. “To understand human history, you really need to integrate these three lines.”
Brian Handwerk is a freelance writer based in Amherst, New Hampshire.
LIVE: Judge Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Day 4
(PBS NewsHour) The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday (Oct. 15, 2020) holds its fourth and final day of the hearing on Judge Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court. Barrett’s testimony has concluded, and the committee will now hear witness statements from four Republicans and four Democrats. Republicans control the Senate majority and thus the majority in the committee, and they have the votes to send Barrett’s nomination out of committee to a full floor vote. Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., opened the hearing by setting a committee vote for Oct. 22, but Democrats are expected to try to delay it.
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