Buddhism is Kinda Out There, Man

morning comes and you wake your first awareness is of boundless misery you long for some kind of caffeinated beverage so you can be miserable faster you exit your place of dwelling and enter the beverage establishment a few streets down coffee please you say to the barista milk or no milk they ask ah milk please you say colombian or brazilian beans colombian you say it really doesn't matter northern or southern colombia really i i don't mind i don't mind good choice now beans that grow at three thousand or four thousand feet what difference does i don't

care i don't care well there are at least fifteen thousand growers in that region i really don't mind would you prefer your grower likes or dislikes rappers whose names begin with the prefix lil what little pump for example what i don't give a lil yachty little uzi vert little chair little table little dachshund little harpsichord little tokamak nuclear fusion reactor well buddhists believe that is the human condition sort of a perpetual cycle of chasing after contentment and ultimately receiving only dissatisfaction this dissatisfaction is called dukkha and this game of rebirthing over and over into dissatisfaction

happens in samsara which is where we live apparently and the idea is we stay in samsara living learning dying being reborn until we hopefully attain enlightenment but what's enlightenment how is wisdom achieved what in the sweet bejesus is going on with giraffes tongues no but look at that and that and just it's been a weird year well for all of that we'll need to talk about the big man himself siddhartha gautama who you will surely recognize from his stage name the buddha we begin in nepal about two and a half thousand years ago siddhartha gautama

is born into a cushy royal family and trying to be nice siddhartha's dad shields him from the nasty things in life and keeps him in a massive palace until at 29 years old on a red jaunt outside the palace siddhartha notices people who are like way sick and like way old and like way dead and realizes as my climber friends insist on informing me the universe is a pretty gnarly place bro so soon after he leaves his kingdom and sets off in search of a way to rid the world of suffering it's a long story

but finally siddhartha sits under a tree determining that he will not get up again until he has realized the true nature of mind the demon mara approaches him and tries to lure siddhartha away from enlightenment with distraction and lust but siddhartha is like i'm busy cheers and indeed becomes enlightened and attains nirvana nirvana literally meaning to blow out to extinguish we'll get to it in a bit but it was then that siddhartha became the buddha or literally the awakened one because he was now free of the three great poisons delusion greed and hate so one

would imagine he was as my climber friends like to say pretty stoked bro and on your marks get set buddhism a world religion is born oh yeah the slightly tubby smiling guy you might have seen little statuettes of yeah that's probably not the buddha but budai a 10th century monk he's also thought by some to be maitreya who's maitreya okay this gets wiggly so buddhist philosophy is kinda out there man and while buddhists don't really have a creation myth the universe wasn't spoken or sneezed into being they do have some fairly trippy ideas about time

often in buddhism and hinduism cosmic duration is divided into eras called kalpas when asked how long one type of kalpa was the buddha allegedly said the length of time it would take to reduce a mountain 16 by 16 by 60 miles to the size of a seed if you rubbed it with a silk cloth once a century so a while now in some interpretations siddhartha gautama wasn't the first buddha to turn up there have apparently been a bunch before and will apparently be a bunch after and the next buddha to turn up in our current

era in our current calper ages from now is supposed to be maitreya represented here and possibly represented here also by this gentleman and that's who the little tubby man is so yeah yeah yeah [Music] after about 45 years of teaching the buddha died in 483 bce we'll just jump ahead a bit because i'm bored and two millennia later and buddhism has fractured into a bunch of different schools one is tibetan buddhism and this next cheerful gentleman is of course the current dalai lama it's tempting to think of the dalai lama as the pope of buddhism

and kinder but the real pope isn't the head of christianity just the catholic church and the dalai lama isn't the head of buddhism he's the spiritual leader of tibetan buddhism dalai lamas aren't elected they're found when a dalai lama dies the high lamas leave it a while then go looking for the child and the deceased dalai lama has apparently reincarnated as then once confirmed the child is taken off to lhasa the capital of tibet to begin the process of learning to become the dalai lama again the first dalai lama was born about 700 years ago

and rose from a poor child born in a cattle pen to become one of the most respected teachers in central asia and is rumored to have attained buddhahood then did a spot of the old dying then came dalai lama ii electric buddhalu at the age of four a child in the tsang region of tibet declares mom dad i am in fact the dalai lama and i'd like to see my monks again and is confirmed as the first reincarnation of the dalai lama he has a good run and dies in meditation at the age of 67.

his reincarnation is found just a few years later and so on and so on up until the sixth dalai lama so this is a weird one due to events to finickity to go into the sixth incarnation was recognized as the dalai lama a bit late around the age of 15. a few years later though when it got time to take his full vows he refused and it was not uncommon to see him staggering drunk around larsa and visiting brothels for some scripture and chill maybe he also wrote some romantic and like kind of sometimes kinky

poetry if i could meditate as deeply on the sacred texts as i do on you i would clearly be enlightened in this lifetime as in school is cool but baby for you i got it bad as we discussed tibetan buddhism is just one branch of many but across all the various schools of buddhism mahayana theravada and so on there are some pillars that are just universally agreed upon to begin with there are the four noble truths which are one existing is a bit crap namely full of dukkha dissatisfaction to be is to want to want

is to eventually be dissatisfied we grasp the things monies funnies feline tummies sometimes we get them then we just keep grasping for more two the cause of suffering is craving wanting is the problem buddhist claim nothing not mansions not games that aren't buggy on release can ever be so satisfying they kill desire desire is the problem because it never ends three the end of suffering comes with the end of desire the end of grasping the end of craving the way out of the forest of suffering is not to pound down cheeseburgers and goldly vodka until

every desire is gone but to extinguish the flame of desire itself to quote a famous line let go or be dragged and finally four everything will apparently be alright if you follow the eightfold path which is basically crossfit for buddhists and if i can think of any theologically appropriate jokes maybe we'll get to it but time is short and i'm an alcoholic not an educator and while we're at it how about we do the three marks of existence the three constants of being alive the first mark of existence is ducker dissatisfaction but we've done this

one already and i hope you're listening because there will be a test at the end the second is anicha or anika basically impermanence reality according to buddhism is a transient ever-changing thing oh you might reply such a revelation much deep what next fire is hot blob fish are gross well actually blobfish aren't gross incidentally thank you if you keep seeing this image around that's a blobfish when it's pulled out of the water normally blobfish prefer to stay at between two thousand and four thousand feet in the ocean where they look like reasonable fish they look

like that because we yank them out of the water and it's one thing that we have the audacity to troll them out of the ocean in the first place but it's quite another to malign their appearance by pretending that's what they actually look like because they don't much like if a huge hook came down and pulled one of us into space and aliens just sat around chuckling at our vacuum frozen nitrogen swollen corpses going well humans aren't very pretty after all anyway chaps how about nanty mata brewski stop it leave blobfish alone excuse me reality

to our buddhist friends is a formless swirling dance of his from the entropic decaying galaxies to the tide eroded rocks of the beach all is flux all is changed and you will die but so will i so it's all right our inability to accept a nietzsche to accept that everything is impermanent is apparently a large source of our dukkha of our suffering and because we refuse to accept change we cling to illusions of permanence we cling to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and to the fleeting forms of the world and on that note

let me tell you what a pleasure it is to live in one's third decade of life when you can still enjoy not just the persistent facial acne you thought would go away over a decade ago but at the very same time begin to notice gray hairs popping up and say hi while you stare at yourself helplessly in the bathroom mirror feeling 19 again and simultaneously 90 nine the third mark of existence is called anata and it's well you know months ago i came down with the cheeky spot of the old you-know-what virus i'm fine thanks

for not asking and trapped indoors for weeks and almost terminally bored i became quite massively addicted to a game called town of salem which no one is paying me to tell you about i just kind of liked it so very briefly you're assigned a random role at the beginning of the game you might be a member of the town as in the goodies or the baddies the witch for example basically the card game mafia anyway you don't have to play long before you start noticing that whenever you're assigned as a goodie you sort of automatically

hate the evil players for being so deceptive and then again when you're evil you can't stand all those life-affirming do-gooder morons and you start to have this creeping suspicion that quite a lot of what goes on in our gelatinous meat computers is kind of context dependent because just as in the game in life we're assigned roles we have to play of course student employee spouse scripted pretentious know it all online etc and like in the game sometimes it's hard to tell where the roles stop and our genuine personalities begin and the buddhist answer to this

is that it's not just the world that's impermanent but ourselves in it our outer identities are shifting all the time of course and that's just the external stuff on the inside of our minds it's even more mental in watching the interior of one's own mind it's all sense data and thoughts irate happy bored excited whatever but in not one of those sensations or thoughts will one find an i a me obviously something is doing the experiencing but it doesn't appear to have a middle we can grasp or catch sight of to bastardize a famous buddhist

story if someone asked you to show them a plane and you did the ailerons and the rudder and the engines and they said yes yes but where's the plane though you'd think that person was a few fries short of a happy meal because a plane is just the sum of its parts it's a bit like that with us our buddhist friends say there is no amount of clinging to our names to our careers to the constant white noise of nonsense thoughts inside by which we will catch sight of a tangible me of an eye and

that in a very botched way is the third mark of existence anata we're clearly conscious but our consciousness in buddhism doesn't have a center not in time not in mental space our mental selves are constantly in flux ever-changing ever impermanent there is a bit of a similar sentiment in the science-y cosmological tradition that we are star stuff that underneath the complex recursive storytelling machinery of our brains i am x years old i am x feet high in x century i am i beneath those stories there is biology and beneath that is chemistry and beneath that

is a unity of physics and deep time that everything is made from we were once these then these in a while we will be these but we were always this and will always be this the idea is that our identities are incidental and clinging to them over the majesty of the universe is wicked silly there is no magical line between baby and us now that we can point to and say and then i became me it isn't so much that we can't step in the same river twice but with the entire world in flux with

us in flux it's that we can't even step in the same river once in the dharmapata the sayings of the buddha there's the line though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself or herself obviously mastery of the self it's a neat idea and boy do we seem a long way off from that one just daily life is weird enough bound without security lost without adventure wandering quietly confused for years through the strange cityscapes of the 21st century trying to find yourself in

it in any of it trying to find the naive happiness of childhood once again and is this what life is now you think little bursts of euphoria a few times a year drug induced or chance induced then back to the uniform grey of a day you won't remember and if you should ever stick your head up above the parapet to ask excuse me is this all there is then only to be told to shut up and just get on with it all the while knowing that a star died to make you and you no longer

find romance in that all the while being surrounded by miraculous technology and you no longer find romance in that the absurd ever drama of just trying to be okay and the game gets faster and the game gets harder more gadgets more screens more patches and non-stick frying pans and fiber broadband and ultrasonic toothbrushes and thank you for your application but and sorry to hear you're feeling sad but and we did everything we could but please god make me a stone i promised myself i'd be more than this i promised others i'd be more than this

alive and not quite living deathly not quite dead and all the while rages the inner battle the great quiet attempt to fix oneself and knowing no one else can do it for you and that battle is hardly limited to the individual our entire civilization is engaged in it too on the 28th of january 1986 an o-ring failure led to the space shuttle challenger exploding about 72 seconds into launch killing all seven aboard it was horrific later news anchor tom brackel would say of the accident the american public will be demanding some difficult answers and of

course we'll all have to examine what it is that we want from this era of high technology those words were said almost 40 years ago now but they couldn't be truer still today because it's a fairly weird age to live in at the moment watching the human race attempting to protect itself from itself like a teenager or mood swings or experimenting with new ideologies all smashing up mum's car and refusing to apologize in the last 30 years about a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty which is incredible obviously but as it stands

in 2021 currently two in three humans still live on below ten dollars a day and one in ten on less than two dollars a day not to mention the 800 million people who currently don't have access to safe drinking water plus the about 14 000 kids under five who are dying preventable deaths every day all of which we will all no doubt agree is and on top of that about 800 000 people or one copenhagen take their own lives every year and it's the 10th leading cause of death in the u.s alone if there was

a day just one day every century when we all got together to hash out what our goals actually are as a species like top five to do's for homo sapiens in the next hundred years cheeky trip to nearest star system it's on there for sure making it a un human rights violation to start a tinder conversation with a single smiley face on the list definitely but try to make sure everyone's doing cool and like eating and stuff no one in their right mind would put that below number one follow closely behind by number two when

everyone's eating and stuff let's all work out how to be happy or at least not living on the edge of existential despair yet he indeed is the noblest victor who conquers himself or rather if we make it to the distant future where we have warped drives and free energy or whatever and at the very same time hundreds of millions of us are still living in extreme poverty that isn't star trek that's blade runner and except for the flying cars and cool clothes we really don't want blade runner the upside of all of this of course

is that it is a choice and human problems can be solved by human beings in the words of the much missed david graber the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently things could be a whole lot worse things could be a whole lot better anyway this has not been an attempt to convert anyone to buddhism i'm not a buddhist i'm barely a person but as an ideology buddhism has in part probably persisted for over two millennia now because it points directly to

questions that are just as relevant today as they were two millennia ago namely how can we overcome suffering why are we always fighting our own stupid nature and what actually are we and the answer to a lot of that buddhism says rather uniquely is not up into the big transcendent but down into the acceptance of the impermanence of the world and into the murk of our messy nature that liberation salvation whatever we call it is waiting inside the way out is down and as we head deeper into potentially the most dangerous century in human history

this battle of trying to regulate our bizarre prehistoric tendencies might determine whether we come out the other side of this century because we're getting wicked technological but like are we much wiser for it you probably know the kardashev scale already it's basically a litmus test for categorizing how advanced civilizations could become so a type 1 civilization could utilize all the energy available on its home planet a type 2 civilization all the energy available in its solar system and a type 3 civilization all the energy available in its galaxy and that's all well and good but

the kardashev scale measures a civilization's success by its energy consumption though we could use another metric wisdom a type 1 wisdom civilization could have progressed to a state where no one goes hungry where no one needlessly dies of easily curable diseases and everyone has at least the same starting conditions universally on which to try and build a life type 2 might be a civilization where no one has to involuntarily suffer from physical or mental maladies from chronic pain from anxiety etc maybe where we stop inflicting industrial scale harm on our animal mates and keeping them

in horrific conditions but rant over i won't go on about it and type 3 a civilization where human animal sentient toaster whatever doesn't have to suffer at all with disease dead with humankind finally liberated from the evolutionary genetic shackles that have been tied around our legs for millennia and if we finally arrive at that party at the end of time as actual adults at last as technological bodhisattvas as masters of our own destiny we'll hopefully spend at least a little while marveling at just how miraculous it was that we managed to live through an era

in which we could land robots on other planets and simultaneously still didn't quite know how to be happy or properly take care of all the human family yet and if we make it to that party together as a species that would be way cool yo i'm hella stoked for that yo i trust you are too yo but until then well until then so until then and until then and until [Music] until then