Early Morning Zen Buddhism Spirituality Inspiration - 1/29/2012
Early Morning Zen Buddhism Spirituality Inspiration - 1/29/2012 |
- Early Morning Zen Buddhism Spirituality Inspiration - 1/29/2012
- Quarter of a million awaits ‘Happiest Pinoy’
- Not so ordinary
- There's no free will, so you're unable to believe me
| Early Morning Zen Buddhism Spirituality Inspiration - 1/29/2012 Posted: 29 Jan 2012 09:00 AM PST  "Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment." ~The Buddha  Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma  Transit - I'm So Indie Official Video ft. Geeze 
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| Quarter of a million awaits ‘Happiest Pinoy’ Posted: 29 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST Pinoy is an informal demonym referring to the Filipino people in the Philippines and overseas Filipinos around the world. Filipinos usually refer to themselves as Pinoy or sometimes the feminine Pinay. The word is formed by taking the last four letters of Filipino and adding the diminutive suffix -y in the Tagalog language (the suffix is commonly used in Filipino nicknames: "Ninoy" or "Noynoy" for Benigno, "Totoy" for Augusto, etc.). Pinoy was used for self-identification by the first wave of Filipinos going to the continental United States before World War II and has been used both in a pejorative sense as well as a term of endearment similar to Chicano. Both Pinoy and Pinay are still regarded as derogatory by some Filipinos though they are widely used and gaining mainstream usage. Pinoy was created to differentiate the experiences of those emigrating to the United States but is now a slang term used to refer to all people of Filipino descent. Mainstream usages tend to center on entertainment (Pinoy Big Brother) and music (Pinoy Idol) which has played a significant role in developing national and cultural identity. Pinoy music impacted the socio-political climate of the 1970s and was employed by both Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and the People Power Revolution that overthrew his regime. OriginsPinoy was coined by expatriate Filipino Americans during the 1920s and was later adopted by Filipinos in the Philippines. According to historian Dawn Mabalon, the historical use has been to refer to Filipinos born or living in the United States and has been in constant use since the 1920s. She adds that it was reclaimed and politicized by "Filipino American activists and artists in the Fil-Am movements of the 1960s/1970s".MotivationsThe desire to self-identify can likely be attributed to the diverse and independent history of the archipelagic country - comprising 7,107 islands in the western Pacific Ocean - which trace back 30,000 years before becoming a Spanish colony in the 16th century and later occupied by the United States, which led to the outbreak of the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). The Commonwealth of the Philippines was established in 1935 with the country gaining its independence in 1946 after hostilities in the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War had ended. The Philippines have over 170 languages indigenous to the area most of which belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. In 1939, then president Manuel L. Quezon renamed the Tagalog language as the Wikang Pambansa ("national language"). The language was further renamed in 1959 as Filipino by Secretary of Education Jose Romero. The 1973 constitution declared the Filipino language to be co-official, along with English, and mandated the development of a national language to be known as Filipino. Since then, the two official languages are Filipino and English.As of 2003 there are more than eleven million overseas Filipinos worldwide, equivalent to about 11% of the total population of the Philippines. Earliest usagesThe earliest known usages of Pinoy/Pinay in magazines and newspapers date to the 1920s include taking on social issues facing Pinoy, casual mentions of Pinoys at events, while some are advertisements from Hawaii from Filipinos themselves. The following are the more notable earliest usages:United StatesIn the United States, the earliest published usage known is a Philippine Republic article written in January 1924 by Dr. J. Juliano, a member of the faculty of the Schurz school in Chicago - "Why does a Pinoy take it as an insult to be taken for a Shintoist or a Confucian?" and "What should a Pinoy do if he is addressed as a Chinese or a Jap?"PhilippinesIn the Philippines, the earliest published usage known is from December 1926, in History of the Philippine Press, which briefly mentions a weekly Spanish-Visayan-English publication called Pinoy based in Capiz and published by the Pinoy Publishing Company. In 1930, the Manila-based magazine Khaki and Red: The Official Organ of the Constabulary and Police printed an article about street gangs stating "another is the 'Kapatiran' gang of Intramuros, composed of patrons of pools rooms who banded together to 'protect pinoys' from the abusive American soldados."Notable literaturePinoy is first used by Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan, in his 1946 semi-autobiography, America Is in the Heart - "The Pinoys work every day in the fields but when the season is over their money is in the Chinese vaults." The book describes his childhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West. It has been used in American Ethnic courses to illustrate the racism experienced by thousands of Filipino laborers during the 1930s and 40s in the United States.Pinoy musicIn the early 1970s Pinoy music or Pinoy pop emerged, often sung in Tagalog - it was a mix of rock, folk, and ballads - marking a political use of music similar to early hip hop but transcending class. The music was a "conscious attempt to create a Filipino national and popular culture" and it often reflected social realities and problems. As early as 1973, the Juan De la Cruz Band was performing "Ang Himig Natin" ("Our Music"), which is widely regarded as the first example of Pinoy rock. Pinoy gained popular currency in the late 1970s in the Philippines when a surge in patriotism made a hit song of Filipino folk singer Heber Bartolome's "Tayo'y mga Pinoy" ("We are Pinoys"). This trend was followed by Filipino rapper Francis Magalona's "Mga Kababayan Ko" ("My Countrymen") in the 1990s and Filipino rock band Bamboo's "Noypi" (Pinoy in reversed syllables) in the 2000s. Nowadays, Pinoy is used as an adjective to some terms highlighting their relationship to the Philippines or Filipinos. Pinoy rock was soon followed by Pinoy folk and later, Pinoy jazz. Although the music was often used to express opposition to then Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and his use of martial law and the creating of the Batasang Bayan, many of the songs were more subversive and some just instilled national pride. Perhaps because of the cultural affirming nature and many of the songs seemingly being non-threatening, the Marcos administration ordered radio stations to play at least one - and later, three - Pinoy songs each hour. Pinoy music was greatly employed both by Marcos and political forces who sought to overthrow him.See also
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| Posted: 29 Jan 2012 07:00 AM PST Zen Master Mazu/Ma-tsu who most likely coined the term "ordinary mind" (平常心) had this to say about the ordinary mind which I hasten to add is anything but ordinary.
Keep also in mind that Zen master Hui-hai, The Great Pearl said: "the man who seeks for the Buddha outside of the human mind is a heretic; and he who clings to the view that the human mind is the Buddha is a devil" (trans. Sohaku Ogata, The Transmission of the Lamp, p. 199).
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| There's no free will, so you're unable to believe me Posted: 28 Jan 2012 08:00 PM PST I gave it my best try last night -- arguing that we humans don't have free will, though it seems ever so obvious that we do. (Of course, it also seems obvious that the sun goes around the Earth, which demolishes the "obviousness" argument for anything.) My wife and I belong to a three-couple book/article discussion group. Yesterday the subject was the justice system. When it came time for me to share my thoughts, I started off by quoting from Jerry Coyne's column in USA Today, "Why you don't really have free will." The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons. But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will." I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation. A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently. Well, it was a good choice to lead off my part of the discussion in this fashion. Because it stimulated some passionate exchanges between me and several free-will believers. I said that if the goals of the U.S. justice system basically are deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation, and restitution, one of these -- punishment -- should be taken off the table, since people don't have free will. Punishment (retribution) doesn't make sense if someone wasn't able to freely choose between committing a crime or not committing a crime. Deter further crimes by putting them in jail, and serving as a warning to other potential criminals. Rehabilitate them through education, counseling, training, and such while in prison. Force them to pay back people they've harmed. But don't believe that someone deserves to be punished out of a sense that he or she freely willed to commit a crime. As Coyne implied above, this belief requires a supernatural, immaterial, non-physical source of our actions, a soul or free-floating consciousness unaffected by genetics, prior experiences, environmental factors, memories, unconscious influences, hormones, and so on. At every moment, I argued, all we know is that what happened, did. A belief in free will assumes that something other than what did happen, could have. That's an interesting philosophical notion which has inspired lots of fictional works. What if Hitler won the Second World War? What if John Kennedy hadn't been assassinated? However, we never see those "what if's" in reality. There's only one path through time and space that we follow. Coyne says: Now there's no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances. But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion. The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics. True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program. And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. That word, "predetermined," came up often last night. Some of my fellow discussants were strongly opposed to the notion that everything we do, think, and feel was determined at the moment at the big bang, with events simply unfolding according to the laws of physics. I understand. Again, almost everybody feels like they have free will. I certainly do. But feeling so doesn't make it so. Also, I pointed out that the "pre" part of predetermined usually is an abstraction when we're talking about people. Practically speaking, it's more accurate to say that our behavior is determined. Meaning, the human brain is so complex, as are the environmental influences acting upon us, there's no way to precisely predict what someone is going to do. It's like chaos theory. Chaotic systems, such as a turbulent river, are deterministic yet unpredictable. Throw a cork into the water above some rapids. You won't be able to predict where it will end up, but it will end up somewhere after innumerable causes and effects act upon it. The cork doesn't use its free will to decide "I'm going to head this way rather that way for no reason, just because I want to." Yet us humans imagine that we can, the imagining being determined, of course, just as everything else is. Last night I was told that without free will, there can't be any morality. I don't get this argument. Other primates act in ways we'd call "moral." Apes demonstrate empathy, concern, sharing. Why is free will required for getting along with our fellow humans? We respond to other people; we communicate with other people; we learn about their needs, and tell them our own; we do our best to act kindly, compassionately, honestly, generously. Why? Because we're drawn to. This is our nature. We aren't isolated individuals. We're connected with, and influenced by, everything and everyone we come in contact with. To me, a belief in free will is horribly confining. It implies that I'm a tiny island rather than a vast continent, a free-standing part rather than an integrated whole, a fallen leaf rather than living foliage on the branches of a tree that, ultimately, is the entire cosmos. Actions are determined. So justice should be determinate. Within reasonable guidelines, judges should be able to determine sentences which fit with determining factors of the criminal and the crime. Since there's no such thing as a Free Will Fairy which floats above people's heads and makes decisions out of the blue, completely independent of brain functioning, heredity, environmental influences, or whatever, condemning a troubled 14 year old to a life sentence without parole after he shot his grandfather is absurd. When we give up belief in free will, genuine morality is possible. Otherwise we're trapped in cruel Old Testament "eye for an eye" vengeance, assuming that we can be as free to punish as a criminal was free to commit a crime. Jerry Coyne responds to comments on his free will essay here. Interesting give and take. I feel like I understand his position, which makes a lot of sense, but other people are so invested in their free will'ness, they misinterpret Coyne's arguments and fuzzy-up the whole notion of free will. LIke Massimo Pigliucci does. Indeed, it is not surprising at all that we make all sorts of unconscious decisions before we become aware of them... Incidentally, I find it strange when some people argue that "we" are not making decisions if our subconscious is operating, since presumably we all agree that our subconscious is just as defining of "us" as conscious thinking is. Hmmmm. So an intuition pops into awareness from my subconscious, and when I follow it, that's "free will"? Even though I wasn't free to will it? That's a strange view of free will, not at all as Coyne describes it. Nishat Khan & Zakir Hussain in Calcutta - Part 1 
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