even if it is logical, it may not be true

Freakonomics- A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
- Steven D Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

1) Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.

There are basically three types: economic, social and moral. Understanding them allows us to know how the world work.

2) The conventional wisdom is often wrong

Even when it sound plausible with data doesn't make it true. Events in the past may only muscle in the effects some time much later in the future. take a step back and consider.

3) Information is valuable commodity but less so in modern world. Any expert use that as his/her advantage to serve their own agenda.

---it is hell of a book to read :)

忘了。。

若执着此生 则非修行者
若执着世间 则无出离心
若执己目的 则失菩提心
若执取生起 则失（无）正知见

Random :)

As seen in a dog's diary:
>
> 8am - Oh Boy! Dog food! My favorite!
> 9am - Oh Boy! A car ride! My favorite!
> 10am - Oh Boy! A walk! My favorite!
> 11am - Oh Boy! A car ride! My favorite!
> Noon - Oh Boy! The kids! My favorite!
> 1pm - Oh Boy! The yard! My favorite!
> 3pm - Oh Boy! The kids! My favorite!
> 4pm - Oh Boy! Dog food! My favorite!
> 5pm - Oh Boy! Mom! My favorite!
> 7pm - Oh Boy! Playing ball! My favorite!
> 9pm - Oh Boy! Sleeping in master's bed! My favorite!
>
>
> As seen in a cat's diary:
>
> Day 183 of my captivity... My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat,while I am forced to eat dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of escape, and the mild satisfaction I get from ruining the occasional piece of furniture.
> Tomorrow I may eat another house plant. Today my attempt to kill my captors by weaving around their feet while they were walking almost succeeded and must try this at the top of the stairs. In an attempt to disgust and repulse these vile oppressors, I once again induced myself to vomit on their favorite chair -- must try this on their bed.
>Decapitated a mouse and brought them the headless body, in an attempt to make them aware of what I am capable of, and to try to strike fear into their hearts. They only cooed and condescended about what a good little cat I was. Hmmm, not working according to plan.
> There was some sort of gathering of their accomplices. I was placed in solitary throughout the event. However, I could hear the noise and smell the food. More importantly I overheard that my confinement was due to MY power of "allergies." Must learn what this is and how to use it to my advantage.
> I am convinced the other captives are flunkies and maybe snitches. The dog is routinely released and seems more than happy to return.He is obviously a half-wit. The bird on the other hand has got to be an informant, and speaks with them regularly. I am certain he reports my every move. Due to his current placement in the metal room, his safety is assured.
> But I can wait; it is only a matter of time...

Work with Unpredictability

fr Speed of Dark
(Elizabeth Moon)

I remember being afraid of water, the unstable unpredictable shifts and wobbles in it as it touched me. I remember the explosive joy of finally swimming, the realization that even though it was unstable, even though I could not predict the changing pressure in the pool, I could still stay afloat, and move in the direction I chose to go. I remember being afraid of the bicycle, of its wobbly unpredictability, and the same joy when I figured out how to ride out that unpredictability, how to use my will to overcome its innate chaos. Again I am afraid, more afraid because I understand more - I could lose all the adaptations I have made and have nothing - but if I can ride this wave, this biological bicycle, then I will have incomparably more.

The Heart Suffers

The Alchemist
(Paulo Coelho)

During one of these conversation, the driver told of his own life.

"I used to live near El Cairum, " he said. "I had my orchard, my children and a life that would change not at all until I died. One year, when the crop was the best ever, we went to Mecca, and I satisfied the only unmet obligation of my life. I could die happily and that made me felt good.
"One day, the earth began to tremble, and the Nile overflowed its bank. I was something that I thought could only happen to others, never to me. My neighbors feared that they would lose all their olive trees in the flood, and my wife was afraid that we would lose our children. I thought that everything I owned would be destroyed.
"The land was ruined and I had to find some other way to earn a living. So now I'm a camel driver. But that disaster taught me to understand the word of Allah: people need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want.
"We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our lives or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand."

..one afternoon, his heart told him that it was happy. "Even though I complain sometimes," it said, "it's because I'm the heart of a person and people's heart are that way. People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasure that might been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because when these things happen, we suffer terribly."

"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless night.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse that the suffering itself. And that no heart had ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of that search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."

"Every second of the search is an encounter with God," the boy told his heart. "When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day had been luminous, because I've known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I've discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve."

..." Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him," his heart said. "We, people's heart, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, towards its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them - the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.
"So, we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. We never stop speaking out, but we begin to hope that our words won't be heard: we don't want people to suffer because they don't follow their hearts."

"Why don't people's hearts tell them to continue to follow their dreams?" the boy asked the alchemist.

"Because that's what makes a heart suffer most, and hearts don't like to suffer."

The Adventure Of The Married Couple

The Adventure Of The Married Couple
(1958) Italo Calvin


THE FACTORY-WORKER Arturo Massolari was on the night shift, the one that ends at six. To reach home he had to go along way, which he covered on his bicycle in fine weather, and on the tram during the rainy, winter months. He got home between six-forty-five and seven; in other words, sometimes before and sometimes after the alarm clock rang to wake Elide, his wife.

Often the two noises - the sound of the clock and his tread as he came in - merged in Elide's mind, reaching her in the depths of her sleep, the compact early-morning sleep that she tried to squeeze out for a few more seconds, her face buried in the pillow. Then she pulled herself from the bed with a yank and was already blindly slipping her arms into her robe, her hair over her eyes. She appeared to him like that, in the kitchen, where Arturo was taking the empty receptacles from the bag that he carried with him to work: the lunch box, the thermos. He set them in the sink. He had already lighted the stove and started the coffee. As soon as he looked at her, Elide instinctively ran one hand through her hair, forced her eyes wide open, as if every time she were ashamed of that first sight her husband had of her on coming home, always such a mess, her face half-asleep. When two people have slept together it's different, in the morning both are surfacing from the same sleep, and they're on a par.

Sometimes, on the other hand, it was he who came into the bedroom to wake her, with the little cup of coffee, a moment before the alarm rang; then everything was more natural, the grimace on emerging from sleep took on a kind of lazy sweetness, the arms that were lifted to stretch, naked, ended by clasping his neck. They embraced. Arturo was wearing his rainproof wind-cheater; feeling him close, she could understand what the weather was like: whether it was raining or foggy or if it had snowed, according to how damp and cold he was. But she would ask him anyway: "What's the weather like?", and he would start his usual grumbling, half-ironic, reviewing all the troubles he had encountered, beginning at the end: the trip on his bike, the weather he had found on coming out of the factory, different from when he had entered it the previous evening, and the problems on the job, the rumors going around his section, and so on.

At that hour, the house was always scantily heated, but Elide had completely undressed, and was washing in the little bathroom. Afterwards he came in, more calmly, and also undressed and washed, slowly, removing the dust and grease of the shop. And so, as both of them stood at the same basin, half-naked, a bit numbed, shoving each other now and then, taking the soap from each other, the toothpaste, and continuing to tell each other the things they had to tell, the moment of intimacy came, and at times, maybe when they were helpfully taking turns scrubbing each other's back, a caress slipped in, and they found themselves embracing.

But all of a sudden Elide would cry: "My God! Look at the time!" and she would run to pull on her garter-belt, skirt, all in haste', on her feet, still brushing her hair, and stretching her face to the mirror over the dresser, hairpins held between her lips. Arturo would come in after her; he had a cigarette going, and would look at her, standing, smoking, and every time he seemed a bit embarrassed, having to stay there 'unable to do anything. Elide was ready, she slipped her coat on in the corridor, they exchanged a kiss, she opened the door, and could already be heard running down the stairs.

Arturo remained alone. He followed the sound of Elide's heels down the steps, and when he couldn't hear her any more he still followed her in his thoughts, that quick little trot through the courtyard, out of the door of the building, the sidewalk, as far as the tram stop. The tram, on the contrary, could be heard clearly: shrieking, stopping, the slam of the step as each passenger boarded. There, she's caught it, he thought, and could see his wife clinging in the midst of the crowd of workers, men and women on the number eleven that took her to the factory as it did every day. He stubbed out the butt, closed the shutters at the window, darkening the room, and got into bed.

The bed was as Elide had left it on getting up, but on his side, Arturo's, it was almost intact, as if it had just been made. He lay on his own half, properly, but later he stretched a leg over there, where his wife's warmth had remained, then he also stretched out the other leg, and so little by little he moved entirely over to Elide's siGe,into that niche of warmth that still retained the form of her body, and he dug his face into her pillow, into her perfume, and he fell asleep.

When Elide came back, in the evening, Arturo had been stirring around the rooms for a while already: he had lighted the stove, put something on to cook. There were certain jobs he did in those hours before supper, like making the bed, sweeping a little, even soaking the dirty laundry. Elide criticized everything, but to tell the truth he didn't then go to greater pains: what he did was only a kind of ritual in order to wait for her, like meeting her halfway while still remaining within the walls of the house, as outside the lights were coming on and she was going past the shops in the midst of the belated bustle of those neighborhoods where many of the women have to do their shopping in the evening.

Finally he heard her footstep on the stairs, quite different from the morning, heavier now, because Elide was climbing up, tired from the day of work and loaded down with the shopping. Arturo went out on the landing, took the shopping bag from her hands, and they went inside, talking. She sank down on a chair in the kitchen, without taking off her coat, while he removed the things from the bag. Then she would say: "Well, let's pull ourselves together", and would stand up, take off her coat, put on her house-coat. They would begin to prepare the food: supper for both of them, plus the lunch he would take to the factory for his one a.m. break, and the snack to be left ready for when he would wake up the next day.

She would potter a bit, then sit for a bit on the straw chair and tell him what he should do. For him, on the contrary, this was the time when he was rested, he worked with a will, indeed he wanted to do everything, but always a bit absently, his mind already on other things. At those moments, there were occasions when they got on each other's nerves, said nasty things, because she would like him to pay more attention to what he was doing, take it more seriously, or else to be more attached to her, to be closer, comfort her more. But after the first enthusiasm when she came home, his mind was already out of the house, obsessed with the idea that he should hurry because he would soon have to be going.

When the table was set, when everything that had been prepared was placed within reach so they wouldn't have to get up afterwards, then came the moment of yearning that overwhelmed them both, the thought that they had so little time to be together, and they could hardly raise the spoon to their mouth, in their longing just to sit there and hold hands.

But even before the coffee had finished rising in the pot, he was already at his bike, to make sure everything was in order. They hugged. Arturo seemed only then to realize how soft and warm his wife was. But he hoisted the bike to his shoulder and carefully went down the stairs.

Elide washed the dishes, went over the house thoroughly, redoing the things her husband had done, shaking her head. Now he was speeding through the dark streets, among the sparse lamps, perhaps he had already passed the gasometer. Elide went to bed, turned off the light. From her own half, lying there, she would slide one foot towards her husband's place, looking for his warmth, but each time she realized it was warmer where she slept, a sign that Arturo had slept there too, and she would feel a great tenderness.

Joyful Wisdom

Joyful Wisdom
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche


Left to its own, the mind is like a resless bird, always flitting from branch to branch or sweeping down from a tree to the ground and then flitting up into another tree. In this analogy, the branches, the ground, and the other represent the demands we receive from our five senses, as well as thoughts asnd emotions. They all seem very interesting and powerfully attractive. And since there’s always something going on in and around us, it’s very hard for the poor restless bird to settle. N owonder so many of the people I meet complain of being stressed most of the time! This kind of flitting about while our senses are overloaded and our thoughts and emotions are demanding recognition makes it very hard to stay relaxed and rested.

Most of us, when we look at something, hear something, or watch a thought or emotion, have some sort of judgement about the experience. This judgement can be understood in terms of three basics “branches”: the “I like it” branch, the “I don’t like it” branch, or the “I don’t know” branch. Each of these branches spreads out into smaller branches : pleasant, not pleasant or I like it because…. Could be good or bad branch…..the possibilities represented by all these branches tempt the little bird to flutter between them, investigating each one.

Practice letting go of our judgements and opinions and just looking at, or paying attention to, what we see from whatever branch we’re sitting on. Attending to our experience this way allows us to distingusih our judgements and opionions from the simple experience of seeing.

In most cases, our experiences are conditioned by the branch we’re sitting on and the screen of branches before us. In that momemnt of pausing to just be aware, we open ourselve not only to the possibility of bypassing habitual ideas, emotions, and responses to physical sensation, but also to responding freshly to each experience as it occurs.

心灵寄语

心灵寄语 （刘济雨著）

1. 一有时候， 我们要［用智慧取舍时间］，［用速度换取时间］ 甚至 ［用技巧妙用时间］
   
   
2. 人只要心念一偏差， 业障就跟着来。
   
   
3. ［君子求诸己， 小人求诸人］: 先检讨自己，要求自己， 不要责怪别人， 抱怨别人。
   
   
4. 一个人不被人家了解， 甚至误解，被冤枉， 却还不急着解释， 也不怨天， 不尤人， 这种修养很难。 这就是修行的功夫了。
   
   
5. ［求于人者畏于人］ － 对别人有所要求， 就会常常受制于人， 会害怕别人。不求于人者， 则不畏于人。如此我们才不会受别人影响， 心灵保持宁静。
   
   
6. 我们不能要求别人不给我们创伤， 侮辱，痛苦，嫉妒， 批评等等， 但却能要求自己转个心念， 将这些困顿当作修养的教材。
   
   
7. ［人到无求品自高］－ 心中无欲或少欲的人， 面对误会或冤枉就比较能解怀与看开， 因为名利， 地位， 财富， 甚至是与自己不同之知见， 都一看开了。
   
   
8. ［心迷万物转， 心悟转万物］
   
   
9. ［转念快的人， 烦恼不会旧置心中； 转念慢的人， 烦恼如影随行。］－ ［逃避不一定躲地过， 面对不一定最难受］
   
   
10. 缘生时就提起， 缘灭时就放下， 心中常存无常观与因缘观， 这样面对悲欢离合时才会轻安自在。－ ［境缘看得开， 万缘才防得下。 心不贪恋， 意不颠倒］
    
    
11. 有时候问题能否解决，与我们的［能力］ 或［实力］ 无关， 而是我们的［业力］ 或［关系］。［关系］。属［广结善缘］

Lateral Thinking

Lateral Thinking
Edward DeBono

1. sequences of arrival of information matters
2. it is about creating alternatives, even ridiculous ones to stimulate
3. withhold judgement to allow the ideas to be substained and sprouted
4. dominant idea & crucial factor: for the liberation of details
5. challenging pre-set assumptions (kick them away)
6. purpose of fractionation/specialisation is to allow development within its scope but at a higher order, restructuring may still be needed
7. choice of entry matters and should be manipulated: can we work backwards?
8. attention area: can be altered for a better perspective and for better effective: Reverse the situation? Can we apply it elsewhere? Attention usually settles for the most obvious, all we need is to shift focus
9. labeling is such a limitation – is there a point?
10. NO versus PO : NO is an method emphasizing on exclusion while PO is non-judgemental
11. Blocked by adquecy and complacency

The Quantum and the Lotus

fr The Quantum and the Lotus - for the science students..
Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan


When we organize the remarkable harmony and precision of the universe, it is tempting to imagine that there is an all-knowing Creator, from the secular view, some sort of principle of creation that finely adjusted the evolution of the universe. The omnipotence of such a Creator would explain everything, and there would be no need for us to wonder about the origins of our astonishingly complex universe, or about how life arose, or how inanimate matter can be compatible with the animate matter of life. This question of whether of not there is a creating God is a key point of distinction between the world’s great spiritual traditions. For Buddhism, the notion of “first cause” does not stand up to analysis. Some scientists also dismiss the need for a God, arguing that the exceptional fine-tuning of the universe arose by chance. Others, however, believe that there is some kind of an organizing principle at work in our world. Can this notion of such a principle stand up to analysis? Is it necessary and logical?



T: Another scientific argument against the existence of God is that the very idea of cause and effect loses its meaning when applied to the universe. The notion presupposes the existence of time, so that cause reliably precedes effect. But according to the Big Bang, time and space appeared simultaneously with the universe. If time didn’t exist before this, then what does “and God created the universe” mean? The act of creating the universe is meaningful only in time. Is God in time, or outside of it? Time isn’t absolute, as Einstein said. It’s elastic and is stretched (or contracted) by accelerating motions or fields of intense gravity, such as those around black holes. A God contained in time would no longer be all-powerful, because he would be subject to the laws of time. A God outside time would be omnipotent, but unable to help us, since our actions happen in time. If God transcended time, then he would already know the future. If he knew everything in advance, why would he bother to become involved in the struggle of humankind against evil?


M: God must be either immutable, and thus unable to create, or else inside time and thus not immutable. This is one of the contradictions that the notion of a prime cause leads to. What are the justifications behind this argument?

First, if there is a prime cause, it should be immutable. Why? Because, by definition, it has no other cause than itself, so it has no reason to become different. Change would imply the intervention of another cause that wasn’t part of the prime cause.

Second, how could an immutable entity create something? If there is an act of creation, is the creator involved or not? If he is not, why call him “creator”? If he is involved, then because creation inevitably occurs in stages, the something or someone involved in theses stages is not immutable. One could agree with Saint Augustine that God created time and the universe. But even so, creation remains a process, and any process, whether temporal or not, is incompatible with immutability. This point did not escape Saint Augustine himself, who said that the notion of beginning involves an act of faith. Buddhism contends, by contrast, that such an act of faith in unnecessary provided one doesn’t cling to the position that there must be a beginning.
________________________________________


The concept of interdependence lies at the heart of the Buddhist vision of the nature of reality, and has immense implications in Buddhism regarding how we should live our lives. This concept of interdependence is strikingly similar to the concept of nonseparability in quantum physics. Both concepts lead us to ask a question that is both simple and fundamental: Can a “thing” or a “phenomenon,” exist autonomously? If not, in what way and to what degree are the universe’s phenomena interconnected? If things do not exist per se, what conclusions must be drawn about life?

M: In Buddhism, the perception we have of distinct phenomena resulting from isolated causes and conditions is called “relative truth” or “delusion”. Our daily experience makes us think that things have a real objective independence, as though they existed all on their won and had intrinsic identities. But this way of seeing phenomena is just a mental construct. Even though this view of reality seems to be commonsense, it doesn’t stand up to analysis.
Buddhism instead adopts the notion that all things exist only in relationship to others, the idea of mutual causality. An event can happen only because it’s dependent on other factors. Buddhism sees the world as a vast flow of events that are linked together and participate in one another. The way we perceive this flow crystallizes certain aspects of the nonseparable universe, thus creating an illusion that there are autonomous entities completely separate from us.
In one of his sermons, the Buddha described reality as a display of pearls – each pearl reflects all of the others, as well as the palace whose façade they decorate, and the entirety of the universe. This comes down to saying that all of reality is present in each of its parts. This image is a good illustration of interdependence, which states that no entity independent of the whole can exist anywhere in the universe.


T: This “flow of events” idea is similar to the view of reality that derives from modern cosmology. From the smallest atom up to the universe in its entirety, including the galaxies, stars, and humankind, everything is moving and evolving. Nothing is immutable.


M: Not only do things move, but we see them as “things” only because we are viewing them from a particular angle. We mustn’t give the world properties that are merely appearances. Phenomena are simply events that happen in certain circumstances. Buddhism doesn’t deny conventional truth – the sort that ordinary people perceive of the scientist detects. It doesn’t contest the laws of cause and effect, or the laws of physics and mathematics. It quite simply affirms that, if we dig deep enough, there is a difference between the way we see the world and the way it really is, and the way it really is, we’ve discovered, is devoid of intrinsic existence.


T: So what has that true nature got to do with interdependence?


M: The word “interdependence” is a translation of the Sanskrit pratitya samutpada, which means “to be co-emergence” and is usually translated as “dependent origination.” The saying can be interpreted in two complementary ways. The first is “this arises because that I,” which comes down to saying that things do exist in some way , but nothing exists on its own. The second is “this, having been produced, produces that,” which means that nothing can be its own cause. Or we could say that everything is in some way interdependent with the world. We do not deny that phenomena really do occur, but we argue that they are “dependent,” that they don’t exist in an autonomous way. Any given thing in our world can appear only because it’s connected, conditioned and in turn conditioning, co-present and co-operating in constant transformation. Their way of “being” is simply in relation to one another, never in and of themselves. We tend to cling to the notion that “things” must precede relationships. This is not the case here. The characteristics of phenomena are defined only through relationships.
Interdependence explains what Buddhism sees as the impermanence and emptiness of phenomena and this emptiness is what we mean by the lack of “reality.” The seventh Dalai Lama summarized this idea in a verse:

Understanding interdependence, we understand emptiness
Understanding emptiness, we understand interdependence
This is the view that lies in the middle,
And which is beyond the terrifying cliffs of eternalism and nihilism.

Another way of defining the idea of interdependence is summarized by the term tantra, which stands for a notion of continuity and “the fact that everything is part of the whole, so that nothing can happen separately.”
Ironically, thought we might think that the idea of interdependence undermines the notion of reality, in the Buddhist way of thinking, it is interdependence that actually allows for reality to appear. Let’s think about an entity that exists independently from all others. As an immutable and autonomous entity, it couldn’t act on anything, or be acted on itself. For phenomena to happen, interdependence is required.
This argument refutes the idea of distinct particles that are supposed to constitute matter. What’s more, this interdependence naturally includes consciousness. The reality of any given object depends on a subject that is aware of that object. This is what the physicist Erwin Schrodinger meant when he wrote: “Without being aware of it, and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the subject of cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavor to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world which by this very procedure becomes an objective world.”

Finally, the most subtle aspect of interdependence, or “dependent origination,” concerns what we call a phenomenon’s “designation base” and its “designations.” A phenomenon’s position, form, dimension, color, or any other of its apparent characteristic is merely one of its “designation bases.” This designation is a mental construct that invests a phenomenon with a distinct reality. In our everyday experience, when we see an object, we aren’t struck by its nominal existence, but rather by its true existence. If we analyze this “object” more closely, however, we discover that it is produced by a large number of causes and conditions, and that we are incapable of pinpointing an autonomous identity. Since we have experienced it, we can’t say that the phenomenon doesn’t exist. But neither can we say that it corresponds to an intrinsic reality. So we conclude that the object exists (thus avoiding a nihilistic view), but that this existence is purely nominal, or conventional (thus also avoiding the opposite extreme of material realism, which is called “eternalism” in Buddhism). A phenomenon with no autonomous existence, but that is nevertheless not totally inexistent, can act and function according to causality and thus lead to positive or negative effects. This view of reality therefore allows us to anticipate the results of our actions and organize our relationship with the world. A Tibetan poem puts it this way:

To say a thing is empty does not mean
It cannot function – it means it lack an absolute reality
To say a thing arises “in dependence” does not mean
It had intrinsic being – it means it is illusion-like.
If thus one’s understanding is correct and certain
Of what is meant by voidness and dependent origin,
No need is there to add that voidn ess and appearance
Occur together without contradiction in a single thing.


T : I find everything you’ve told me about interdependence striking. Science, too, has discovered that reality is nonseparable, or interdependent, both at the subatomic level and in the macrocosmic world. The conclusion that subatomic phenomena are interdependent was derived from a famous thought experiment conducted by Einstein and two of his Princeton colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, in 1935. It’s called the EPR experiment, from the initials of their surnames.

To follow the experiment, you need to know that light (and matter, too) has a dual nature. The particles we call “photons” and “electrons”, as well as all the other particles of matter, are Janus-faced. Sometimes they appear as particles, but they can also appear as waves. This is one of the strangest and most counterintuitive findings of quantum theory. Even stranger is the finding that what makes the difference about whether a particle is in the wave or particle state is the role of the observer – if we try to observe the particle in its wave state, it becomes a particle. But if it is unobserved, it remains in the wave-state

Take the case of a photon. If it appears as a wave then quantum physics says that it spreads out in all directions through space, like the ripples made by a pebble thrown into a pond. The photon in this state has no fixed location or trajectory. We can then say that the photon is present everywhere at the same time. Quantum mechanics states that when a photon is in this wave state, we can never predict where the photon will be at any given position. The chances might be 75 percent or 90 percent, but never 100 percent. Since Einstein was a committed determinist, he couldn’t accept that the quantum world was ruled in this way by probability or chance. He argued famously that “God does not play dice,” and stubbornly set about trying to find the weak link in quantum mechanics and its probabilistic interpretation of reality. That’s why he came up with the EPR experiment.
The experiment goes like this: First imagine that you have constructed a measuring apparatus with which you can observe the behaviour of particles of light, called photons. Now imagine a particle that disintegrates spontaneously into two photons, a and b. The law of symmetry dictates that they will always travel in opposite directions. If a goes northward, then we will detect b to the south. So far, so good. But we’re forgetting the strangeness of quantum mechanics. Before being captured by the detector, if quantum mechanics is correct, a appeared as a wave, not a particle. This wave wasn’t localized, and there was a certain probability that a might be found in any given direction. It’s only when it has been captured that a changes into a particle and “learns” that it’s heading northward. But if a didn’t “know” before being captured which direction it had taken, how could b have “guessed” what a was doing and ordered its behavior accordingly so that it could be captured at the same moment in the opposite direction? This is impossible, unless we admit that a can inform b instantaneously of the direction it had taken. But Einstein’s cherished theory of relativity states that nothing can travel faster than light,. The information about a’s location would need to travel faster than the speed of light in order to get to b in time, because, after all, a and b are both particles of light and are therefore traveling themselves at the speed of light. “God does not send telepathic signals,” Einstein said, adding “There can be no spooky action at a distance.”

On the basis of these thought-experiment results, Einstein concluded that quantum mechanics didn’t provide a complete description of reality. In his opinion, the idea that a could instantaneously inform b of its position was absurd: a must know which direction it was going to take, and tell b before they split up; a must then have an objective reality, independent of actual observation. Thus the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, which states that a could be going in any direction, must be wrong. Quantum uncertainty must hide a deeper, intrinsic determinism. Einstein thought that a particle’s speed and position, which defined its trajectory, were localized on the particle without any observation being necessary. This is what was called “local realism.” Quantum mechanics couldn’t describe a particle’s trajectory because it didn’t take other “hidden variables” into account. And so it must be incomplete.

And yet Einstein was wrong. Eventually, physicists showed that exactly what Einstein thought couldn’t happen in the EPR experiment did happen. Since its invention, quantum mechanics – and its probabilistic interpretation of reality – has never slipped up. It has always been confirmed by experiments and it still remains today the best theory that we have to describe the atomic and subatomic world.


M: When was EPR effect confirmed experimentally?


T: EPR remained only a thought experiment for some time. No one knew how to carry it out physically. Then, in 1964, John Bell, an Irish physicist working at CERN, devised a mathematical theorem called “Bell’s inequality,” which would be capable of being verified experimentally if particles really did have hidden variables, as Einstein thought. This theorem at last allowed us to take the debate from the metaphysical plane to concrete experimentation. In 1982 the French physicist Alain Aspect, and his team at the University of Orsay, carried out a series of experiments on pairs of photons in order to test the EPR paradox. They found that Bell’s inequality was violated without exception. Einstein had it wrong, and quantum mechanics was right. In Aspect’s experiment, photons a and b were thirteen yards apart, yet b always “knew” instantaneously what a was doing and reacted accordingly.


M: How do we know that this happens instantaneously, and that a light bean hasn’t relayed the information from a to b?


T: Atomic clocks, connected to the detectors that capture a and b, allow us to gauge the moment of each photon’s arrival extremely accurately. The difference between the two arrival times is less than a few tenths of a billionth of a second – it is probably zero, in fact, but existing atomic clocks don’t allow us to measure periods of under 10-10 seconds. Now. In 10-10 seconds, light can travel only just over an inch – far less than the thirteen yards separating a from b. What is more, the result is the same if the distance between the two photons is increased. Even though lighe can dfinitely not have had the time to cross this distance and relay the necessary information, the behaviour of a is always exactly correlated with that of b.
The latest experiment was carried out in 1998 in Geneva by Nicolas Gisin and his colleagues. They began by producing a pair of photons, one of which was then sent through a fiber-optic cabel toward the noth of the city , and the other toward the south. The two pieces of measuring equipment were over six miles apart. Once they arrived at the end fo the cables, the two photons had to choose at random between two possible routes – one short, the other long. It was observed that they always made the same decision. On average, they chose the long route half the time, and the short route half the time, but the choices were always identical. The Swiss physicists were sure that the two photons couldn’t communicate by means of light, because the difference between their response time was under three-tenths of a billionth of a second, and in that time light could have crossed just three and half inches of the six miles separating the two photons. Classical physics states that because they can’t communicate, the choices of the two photons must be totally independent. But that is not what happens. They are always perfectly correlated. How can we explain why b immediately “knows” what a is doing? But this is paradoxical only if, like Einstein, we think that reality is cut up and localized in each photon. The problem goes away if we admit that a and b are part of a nonseparable reality, no matter how far apart they are. In that case, a doesn’t need to send a signal to b because these two light particles (or, rather, phenomena that the detector sees as light particles) stay constantly in touch through some mysterious interaction. Wherever it happens to be, particle b continues to share the reality of particle a.


T…Some physicists have had problems accepting the idea of a nonseparable reality and have tired to find a weak link in these experiments or in Bell’s theorem. So far, they’ve all failed. Quantum mechanics had never been found to be wrong. So phenomena do seem “interdependent” at a subatomic level, to use the Buddhist tem.

Another fascinating and famous experiment in physics shows that interdependence isn’t limited to the world of particles, but applies also to the entire universe, or in other words that interdependence is true of the macrocosm as well as the microcosm. This is the experiment often referred to in short as Foucault’s pendulum.
A French physicist, Leon Foucault, wanted to prove that the Earth rotates on its axis. In 1851 he carried out a famous experiment that is reproduced today in displays in many of the world’s science museums. He hung a pendulum form the roof of the Pantheon in Paris. Once in motion, this pendulum behaved in a strange way. AS time passed, it always gradually changed the direction in which it is swinging. If it was set swinging in a north-south direction, after a few hours, it was swinging east-west. From calculations, we know that if the pendulum were placed at either one of the poles, then it could turn completely around in 24 hours. But because of the latitude of Paris, Foucault’s pendulum performed only part of a complete rotation each day.
Why did the direction change? Foucault answered by saying that the movement was illusory. In fact, the pendulum always swung in the same direction and it was the Earth that turned. Once he’d proved that the Earth rotated, he let the matter drop. But Foucault’s answer was incomplete, because a movement can be described only in comparison with a fixed reference point; absolute movement doesn’t exist. Long before, Galileo said that “movement is as nothing.” He understood that it exists only relative to something else. The earth must “turn” in relation to something that doesn’t turn. But where to find this “something”? In order to test the immobility of a given reference point, a star for instance, we simply set the pendulum swinging in the star’s direction. If the star is motionless, then the pendulum will always swing toward it. If the star moves, then the star will slowly shift away from the pendulum’s swing. Let’s try the experiment with know celestial bodies, both near and far. If we point the pendulum toward the Sun, after a few weeks, there is a clear shift of the Sun away from the pendulum’s swing. After a couple of years, the same happens with the nearest stars, situated a few light-years away. The Andromeda galaxy, which is 2 million light-years away, moves away more slowly, but does shift. The time spent in line with the pendulum’s swing grows longer and the shift away tends toward zero the greater the distance is. Only the most distant galaxies, situated at the edge of the known universe, billions of light-years away, do not drift away from the initial plane of the pendulum’s swing.

The conclusion we must draw is extraordinary. Foucault’s pendulum doesn’t base its behavior on its local environment, but rather on the most distant galaxies, or, more accurately, on the entire universe, given that practically all visible matter is to be found in distant galaxies and not in nearby stars. Thus, what happens here on our Earth is decided by all the vast cosmos. What occurs on our tiny planet depends on all of the universe’s structures.
Why does Foucault’s pendulum behave like this? We don’t know. Ernst Mach, the Austrian philosopher and physicist who gave his name to the unit of supersonic speed, thought it could be explained by a sort of omnipresence of matter and of its influence. In his opinion, an object’s mass – that is to say, the amount of its inertia, or resistance to movement – comes from the influence of the entire universe. This is what is called Mach’s principle. When we have trouble pushing a car, its resistance to being moved has been created by the whole universe. Mach never explained this mysterious universal influence in detail, which is different from gravity, and no one has managed to do so since. Just as the EPR experiment forces us to accept that interactions exist in the microcosm that are different from those described by known physics, Foucault’s pendulum does the same for the macrocosm. Such interactions are not based on force or an exchange of energy, and they connect the entire universe, Each part contains the whole, and each part depends on all the other parts.


M: In Buddhist terms, that’s a good definition of interdependence. It’s not a question of proximity in time or space, or of the speed of communication and the physical forces whose influence wanes over great distances. Phenomena are interdependent because they coexist in a global reality, which functions according to mutual causality. Phenomena are naturally simultaneous because one implies the presence of the other. We are back with “this can only be if that also exists; this can change only if that also changes.” Thus we arrive at a n idea that everything must be connected to everything else. Relationships determine our reality, the conditions of our existence, particles and galaxies.


T: Such a vision of interdependence certainly agrees with the results of the experiments I’ve just mentioned. The EPR experiment, Foucault’s pendulum, and Mach’s inertia can’t be explained by the four fundamental physical forces. This is extremely disturbing for physicists.


M: I think that we have a good example here of the difference between the scientific approach and Buddhism. For most scientists, even if the global nature of phenomenon has been demonstrated in rather a disturbing way, this is merely another piece of information, and no matter how intellectually stimulating it may be, it has little effect o their daily lives. For Buddhists, on the other hand, the repercussions of the interdependence of phenomena are far greater.
The notion of interdependence makes us question our basic perception of the world and then use this new perception again and again to lessen our attachments, our fears, and our aversions. An understanding of interdependence should demolish the wall of illusions that our minds have built up between “me” and “the other”. It makes a nonsense of pride, jealousy, greed, and malice. If not only all inert thins but also all living things are connected, then we should feel deeply concerned about the happiness and suffering of others, The attempt to build our happiness on others’ misery is not just amoral, it sis also unrealistic. Feelings of universal love (which Buddhism defines as the desire for all beings to experience happiness and to know its cause) and of compassion (the desire for all beings to be freed of suffering and its causes) are the direct consequences of interdependence. Thus knowledge of interdependence leads to a process of inner transformation, which continues throughout the journey of spiritual enlightenment. For, it we don’t put our knowledge into practice, we are like a deaf musician, or a swimmer who dies of thirst for fear of drowning if he drinks.
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Why is Buddhism interested in the science of elementary particles, given that studying them does not apparently have any particular effect on our daily lives? Well, if we ask questions about whether the world around us has a solid existence, it is important to study the nature of what are supposed to be its basic “building blocks.” Buddhism is not alone in raising doubts about the “reality” of phenomena. The dominant explanation of quantum physics, known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, also suggests that atoms are not “things” but are “observable phenomena” This is a fascinating topic, because it places the human mind, or human perception, in the midst of what we call “matter” and “objective reality.” If doubts can be raised regarding their “solidity,” then many other conceptual barriers will fall down as a result.

M:…Alan Wallace wrote,” Human beings define the objects and events of the world that we experience, Those things do not exist intrinsically, or absolutely, as we define or conceive of them. They do not exist intrinsically at all. But this is not to say that they do not exist. The entities that we identify exist in relation to us, and they perform the function that we attribute to them. But their very existence, as we define them, is dependent upon our verbal and conceptual designations.”


T: I agree with this view because quantum theory backs it up. The discovery of light’s dual nature was certainly a great surprise for the physicists. But what’s even stranger is that matter has exactly the same duality. What we call an electron, or any other of the elementary particles, can also appear as a wave. Thus the particle and wave aspects cannot be dissociated; rather they complement one another. This is what Niels Bohr called the “principle of complementarity.” He saw this complementarity as the inevitable result of the interaction between a phenomenon and the apparatus used to measure it. According to him, it isn’t so much reality that is dual, but the results of experimental interactions.

The act of observing also introduces quantum fuzziness. This is expressed in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which tells us that it is impossible to define precisely at the same time an electron’s position and its speed. To determine the position of an electron, we have to shed light on it. But the photons in the light relay their energy to the electron in this process, and the higher the energy, the more they disturb its movement. We are thus up against a dilemma; the more we decrease the uncertainty of the electron’s position by shining light on it, so that we can see it, the more we increase the uncertainty of its movement. On the other hand, if we use only low-energy light, we don’t disturb its movement much, but we increase the uncertainty of its position. The act of determining the one aspect of the electron eliminated the possibility of determining the other. Thus, talk of an “objective” reality without any observer is meaningless, because it can never be perceived. All we can do is to capture a subjective aspect of an electron, depending on the observer and the apparatus. The form that this reality then takes is inextricably bound up with our presence. We are no longer passive spectators faced with a tumult of atoms, but full participants.


M: But this still tells us nothing about the ultimate reality of this particle – if such a reality exists. Neither the particles nor the wave, nor, for that matter, any other entity, exists inherently. For example, I suppose that we can’t affirm that the particle existed before it was observed.


T: Before measurement, all we can talk about is a wave of probability.


M: If when we say “particle” we mean something with an intrinsic or even permanent reality, and if it didn’t exist before it was observed, nothing could bring it to life. How could an entity that contains all the qualities we usually attribute to a particle abruptly pass from nothingness to existence? When a particle appears, either it does not exist independently as an entity, or it has been created ex nihilo.


T: And yet before, there was a wave. There was something, not a complete vacuum!


M: Buddhism doesn’t talk about a complete vacuum- that would be nihilistic- but “lack of intrinsic existence.” It is for this reason that, depending on the circumstances and on the experimental technique, an unreal phenomenon can appear to be either particle or a wave.


T: Our debate here is precisely the one that went on between Einstein and the originators of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli. The interpretation is given this name because the institute run by Bohr, where Heisenberg and Pauli were frequent visitors, was in Copenhagen. In simpler terms, it says that “atoms form a world of potentials and possibilities, rather than of things and facts.” According to Heisenberg, “in quantum physics, the notion of a trajectory does not even exist.” This view could not be further from Einstein’s dogmatic realism.

This is how Heisenberg summed up Einstein’s counterargument: “This interpretation does not describe what actually happens independently or in between the observations. But something must happen, this we cannot doubt….The physicist must postulate in his science that he is studying a world which he himself has not made and which would be present, essentially unchanged, if he were not there.” We could cal this position of Einstein’s one of material realism.
Heisenberg’s response to this objection of Einstein’s is complex, but I think it is important to offer in his own words:

It is easily seen that what this criticism demands is again the old materialistic ontology. But what can the answer from the point of view of the Copenhagen interpretation be?...The demand to “describe” what “happens” in the quantum-theoretical process between two successive observations is a contradiction in adjecto, since the word “describe” refers to the use of classical concepts, while these concepts cannot be applied in the space between the observations…The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct “actuality” of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however.


M: A Buddhist philosopher would be in complete agreement with his answer.


T: Personally, I also agree with Heisenberg. As I’ve already said, quantum mechanics has always been confirmed by experimentation and has never been caught out. Einstein got it wrong, and his material realism cannot be defended, According to Bohr and Heisenberg, when we speak of atoms and electrons, we shouldn’t see them as real entities, with well-defined trajectories. The “atom” concept is simply an image that helps physicists put together diverse observations of the particle world into a coherent and logical scheme. Bohr also spoke of the impossibility of going beyond the results of experiments and measurements: “In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down, so as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experiences.

T:….macroscopic objects, such as table, or this book, are made up of particles governed by quantum uncertainty. So why can’t the book suddenly vanish and reappear outside in the garden? The laws of quantum mechanics state that such an event is possible in principle, but it is so improbable that it could happen only if we waited for all eternity. Why is it so unlikely? The reason is that macroscopic objects consists of such a huge number of atom that the effects of chance cancel each other out. The probability of finding this book in the garden is infinitely small, because a large number of atoms also implies a large mass and so high inertia. Ordinary objects are not really disturbed when observed under light, because the energy relayed by the light is negligible. Thus the speed of such objects can be accurately measured along with their position. Quantum uncertainty is eliminated. But where does the borderline lie between the microcosm, ruled by quantum uncertainty, and the macrocosm, where it fades away? Physicists are unable to define this frontier, even though they are daily rolling back the limits of the quantum world. A molecule of fullerene, made up of sixty carbon atoms, is the largest object that had so far been seen to behave in a wavelike manner.

T:….Before Rutherford’s experiment, physicists thought that atoms occupied almost all the space inside a solid object, like apples in a barrel, with only a tiny gap between them. If that was the case, then none of the particles Rutherford sent toward the gold leaf should have been knocked back. The explanation must be that atoms had a hard, dense nucleus capable of reflecting particles. This nucleus must occupy a tiny space in comparison with the total volume of the atom, since the majority of the projectile missed it and continued their journey unaffected. We now know that an atom’s nucleus occupies the same space as a grain of rice in a football stadium. Thus, all of the matter around us, that sofa, the chair, the walls and so on, is almost completely empty. The only reason we can’t walk through walls is that atoms are linked together by the electromagnetic force.


The entire book is interesting and there were many interesting experiments that were included. If you are interested after the excerpts above, do check out the book. There are just too much to type for me so I am only drawing some parts of it out.

The Path to Tranquility

fr Dalai Lama's Daily Wisdom: The Path to Tranquility

1. I love friends, I want more friends. I love smiles. This is a fact. How to develop smiles? There are a variety of smiles. Some smiles are sarcastic. Some smiles are artificial - diplomatic smiles. These smiles do not produce satisfaction, but rather fear or suspicion. But a genuine smile gives us hope, freshness. If we want a genuine smile, then first we must produce the basis for a smile to come.

2. To develop patience, you need someone who willfully hurts you. Such people give us real opportunities to practice tolerance. They test our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot. Basically, patience protects us from being discouraged.

3. Laziness will stop your progress in your spiritual practice. One can be deceived by three types of laziness: the laziness of indolence, which is the wish to procrastinate, the laziness of inferiority, which is doubting your capabilities; and the laziness that is attachment to negative actions, or putting great effort into nonvirtue.

4. Everything has its limits. Too much consumption or effort to make money is not good. Neither is too much contentment. In principle, contentment should be pursued, but pure contentment is almost suicidal.

5. A nagging sense of discontent, a feeling of being dissatisfied, or of something being not right, is the fuel that gives rise to anger and hatred. This discontent arises in us when we feel that either we ourselves, or someone we love, or our close friends are being treated unfairly or threatened and that people are being unjust.
Also when others somehow obstruct us in achieving something, we feel that we are being trodden upon, and then we feel angry. So the approach here is to get at the root, appreciating the causal nexus, the chain, which will ultimately explode in an emotional state like anger or hatred.

6. Human potential is the same for all. Your feeling, "I am of no value," is wrong. Absolutely wrong. You are deceiving yourself. We all have the power of thought - so what are you lacking? If you have will power, then you can do anything. It is usually said that you are your own master.

7. At the moment when strong feelings of anger arise, no matter how hard one tries to adopt a dignified pose, one's face looks rather ugly. The vibration that person sends is very hostile. People can sense it and it is almost as if one can feel steam coming out of that person's body.
Indeed, not only are human beings capable of sensing it, but pets and other animals also try to avoid that person at that instant.

8. Happiness is a state of mind. With physical comforts if your mind is still in a state of confusion and agitation, it is not happiness. Happiness means calmness of mind.

9.The image we have of ourselves readily tends to be complacent. We look at ourselves with indulgence. When something unpleasant happens to us, we always have the tendency to cast the blame on others, or on fate, a demon, or a god. We shrink from descending into ourselves, as the Buddha recommended.

10.If an individual has a sufficient spiritual base, he won't not let himself be overwhelmed by the lure of technology and by the madness of possession. He or she will know how to find the right balance, without asking for too much, and know how to say" I have a camera, that's enough, I don't want another. The constant danger is to open the door to greed, one of our most relentless enemies. It is here that the real work of the mind is put into practice.

11.If in a competitive society you are sincere and honest, in some circumstances people may take advantage of you. If you let someone do so, he or she will be engaging in an unsuitable action and accumulate bad karma that will harm the person in the future. Thus it is permissible, with an altruistic motivation, to take counteraction in order to prevent the other person from having to undergo the effects of this wrong action.

12.People who fight with other human beings out of anger, hatred and strong emotion, even if they gain victory over their enemies in battle, are not in reality heroes. What they are doing is slaying corpses, because human beings, being transient, will die. Whether or not these enemies die in the battle is another question, but they will die at some point. So, in reality, they are slaying those already destined to die. The true hero is the one who gains victory over hatred and anger.

13.Ideals are very important in one's life. Without ideals, you cannot move - whether you achieve them of not is immaterial. But one must try and approximate them.

14.I myself still occasionally become irritated and angry and use harsh words toward others. Then, a few moments later, when the anger has subsided, I feel embarrassed; the negative words are already spoken, and there is no way to take them back. Although the words have been uttered and the sound of the voice has ceased to exist, their impact still lives on. Hence, the only thing I can do is to go to the person and apologize, isn't that right?

15.While you are engaging in the practice of giving, you should do so with great happiness and radiance on your face. One should practice giving with a smile and with mental uprightness.

16.Compassion can be roughly defined in terms of a state of mind that in nonviolent and nonharming, or nonaggressive. Because of this there is a danger of confusing compassion with attachment and intimacy.

17.In one sense, we can say it is delusion itself - in the form of the wisdom derived from delusion - that actually destroys the delusions. Similarly it is the blissful experience of emptiness induced by sexual desire that dissolves the force of sexual impulses. This is analogous to the life of wood-born insects: they consume the very wood from which they are born. Such utilization of the path to enlightenment is a unique feature of tantra.

18. I am sometimes asked whether this vow of celibacy is really desirable and indeed whether it is really possible. Suffice to say that its practice is not simply a matter of suppressing sexual desires. On the contrary, it is necessary to fully accept the existence of these desires and to transcend them by the power of reasoning. When successful, the result on the mind can be very beneficial. The trouble with sexual desire is that it is a blind desire and can only give temporary satisfaction. Thus as Nagarjuna said:" When you have an itch, you scratch. But not to itch at all is better than any amount of scratching."

19. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions done in one's past, we strengthen ourselves and can solve problems of the present constructively.

20. The main cause of depression is not a lack of material necessities but a deprivation of the affection of others.

21. A very poor, underprivileged person might think that it would be wonderful to have an automobile or a television set, and should he acquire them, at the beginning he would feel very happy. Now if such happiness were something permanent, it would remain forever. But it does not; it goes. After a few months, he wants to change the models. The old ones, the same objects, now cause dissatisfaction. This is the nature of change.

22. Guilt. as experienced in Western culture, is connected with hopelessness and discouragement and is past-oriented. Genuine remorse, however, is a healthy state of mind - it is future-oriented, connected with hope, and causes us to act, to change.

23. As far as your personal requirements are concerned, the ideal is to have fewer involvements, fewer obligations and fewer affairs, business or whatever. However, so far as the interest of the larger community is concerned, you must have as many involvements as possible and as many activities as possible.

24. Rather than being unhappy and hateful, we should rejoice in the success of others.

25. When others insult, rebuke, and speak unpleasant words to us, although an intolerance pain arises like a thorn at the heart, if we comprehend the teachings then we can recognize the essenceless nature of these words which resemble an echo. So just as when an inanimate object is scolded, we will experience not the slightest mental turmoil.

26. When things are not going well for someone we dislike, what is the point of rejoicing? It does not make his present suffering any worse and even if it did, how sad it would be that we should wish such a thing.

27. Regarding intergender relationship, I see two principal types of relationships based on sexual attraction. One form is pure sexual desire in which the motive or impetus is temporary satisfaction, a sort of immediate gratification. But it is not very reliable or stable because the individuals are relating to each other not as people, but rather as objects. In the second type, attraction is not predominantly physical. Rather, there is an underlying respect and appreciation of the value of the other person, based on one's feeling that the other person is kind, nice and gentle. One can therefore accord respect and dignity to that other individual.

28. Since we have a natural compassion in us, and that compassion has to manifest itself, it might be good to awaken it. Violence done to an innocent person, for example, can make us indignant, scandalize us, and in so doing help us to discover our compassion. By its very violence, television might keep us in a state of alert. However, it is very dangerous if violence leads to indifference. Thus, a central point of our teachings is how to reach nonattachment without falling into indifference.

29. Longing for eternity exists because we cherish ourselves, provided our daily life is happy. But if it is miserable, then you want to shorten life.

30. The mind can and must transform itself. It can get rid of the impurities that contaminate it, and rise to the highest level. We all start off with the same capacities, but some people develop them, and others don't. We get very easily used to the mind's laziness, all the more easily because laziness hides beneath the appearance of activity: we run right and left, we make calculations and phone calls. But these activities engage only the most elementary and coarse levels of the mind. They hide the essential from us.

31. Ordinary compassion and love give rise to a very close feeling, but it is essentially attachment. As long as the other person appears to you as beautiful or good, love remains, but as soon as he or she appears to you as less beautiful or good, your love completely changes. Even though your dear friend is the same person, he feels more like an enemy. Instead of love, you now feel hostility. With genuine love and compassion, another person' appearance or behaviour has no effect on your attitude. Real compassion comes from seeing other's suffering. You feel a sense of responsibility, and you want to do something for him or her.

32. If you help others with sincere motivation and sincere concern, that will bring you more fortune, more friends, more smiles and more success. If you forget about others' rights and neglect others' welfare, ultimately you will be very lonely.

33. If one feels very profound compassion, this already implies an intimate connection with another person. It is said in our scriptures that we are to cultivate love just like that of a mother toward her only child. This is very intimate. The Buddhist notion of attachment is not what people in the West assume. We say that the love of a mother for her only child is free of attachment.

34. No matter who are are with, we often think things like "I am stronger than he," " I am more beautiful than she," " I am more intelligent," "I am wealthier," "I am much better qualified." and so forth - we generate much pride. This is not good. Instead, we should always remain humble. Even when we are helping others and are engaged in charity work, we should not regard ourselves in a haughty way as great protectors benefiting the weak.

35. To be angry at hearing other people speaking highly of one's enemies is totally inappropriate, because at least in the mind of the person who is praising this enemy, there is some sense of fulfillment, some satisfaction. That person is doing so because he or she feels joyous and happy, and one should rejoice in that because one's enemy has caused someone to be satisfied. If possible one should also join in the praise rather than trying to obstruct it.

36. Overall I found much that is impressive about the Western society. In particular, I admire its energy and creativity and hunger for knowledge. On the other hand, a number of things about the Western way of life cause me concern. People there have an inclination to think in terms of "black and white" and "either, or," which ignores the facts of interdependence and relatively. Between two points of view they tend to lose sight of the gray areas. Also, with thousands of brothers and sisters for neighbours, so many people appear to be able to show their true feelings only to their cats and dogs.

Art of Happiness

Fr: The Art of Happiness: a Handbook for Living
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler. MD

Happiness vs Pleasure

DL :'Now sometimes people confuses happiness with pleasure. For example, not long ago, I was speaking to an Indian audience at Rajpur. I mentioned that the purpose of life was happiness, so one member of the audience said that Rajneesh teaches that our happiest moment comes during sexual activity, so through sex one can become the happiest.' I thought of that idea. I answered that from my point of view, the highest happiness is when one reaches the stage of Liberation, at which there is no more suffering., That's genuine, lasting happiness. True happiness relates more to the mind and heart. Happiness that depends mainly on physical pleasure is unstable; one day it's there, the next day it may not be.

Howard: Heather was a young single professional working as a counselor in the Phoenix area. Although she enjoyed her job working with troubled youth, for some time she had become increasingly dissatisfied with living in the Phoenix area. She often complained about the growing population, the traffic, and the oppressive heat in the summer, She had been offered a job in a beautiful town in the mountains. In fact, she had visited that town many times and had always dreamed of moving there. It was perfect. The only problem was the fact that the job she was offered involved an adult clientele. For weeks, she had been struggling with the decision of whether to accept the new job, She just couldn't make up her mind. She tried making a list of pros and cons, but the list was annoyingly even.
She explained," I know I wouldn't enjoy the work as much as my job here, but there would be more than compensated for by the pure pleasure of living in that town! I really love it there. Just being there makes me feel good. and I'm so sick of the heat here. I just don't know what to do."
Her mention of the term 'pleasure' reminded me of the Dalai Lama's words, and probing a bit, I asked, ' Do you think that moving there would bring you greater happiness or greater pleasure?'
She paused for a moment, uncertain what to make of the question. ......She decided to remain in Phoenix. Of course, she still complained about the summer heat. But, having made the conscious decision to remain there on the basis of what she felt would ultimately make her happier somehow made the heat more bearable.

The purpose of our life is happiness.

When life becomes too complicated and we feel overwhelmed, it's often useful just to stand back and remind ourselves of our overall purpose, our overall goal. When faced with a feeling of stagnation and confusion, it may be helpful to take an hour, an afternoon , or even several days to simply reflect on what it is that will truly bring us happiness, and then reset our priorities on the basis of that, This can put our life back in proper context, allow a fresh perspective, and enable us to see which direction to take.

' Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we've utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While we have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be there. But still we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time. I believe that the proper utilization of time is this: if you can , serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least, refrain from harming them. I think that is the whole basis of my philosophy.

So, let reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren't born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities - warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful, and more peaceful - happier."

Are you ever lonely?
No.

DL: 'I think one factor is that I look at any human being from a more positive angle; I try to look for their positive aspects. This attitude immediately creates a feeling of affinity, a kind of connectedness. And it may partly be because on my part there is less apprehension, less fear that if I act in a certain way, maybe the person will lose respect or think that I am strange. So because of that kind of fear and apprehension is normally absent, there is a kind of openness. I think it's the main factor.'

'....if you approach others with the thought of compassion, that will automatically reduce fear and allow an openness with other people. It creates a positive, friendly atmosphere. With that attitude, you can approach a relationship in which you, yourself, initially create the possibility of receiving affection or a positive response from the other person. And with that attitude, even if the other person is unfriendly or doesn't respond to you in a positive way, then at least you've approached the person with a feeling of openness that gives a certain flexibility and the freedom to change your approach as needed. That kind of openness at least allows the possibility of having a meaningful conversation with them. But without the attitude of compassion, if you are feeling closed, irritated, or indifferent, then you can even be approached by your best friend and you just feel uncomfortable.

'I think that in many cases people tend to expect the other person to respond to them in a positive way first, rather than taking the initiative themselves to create that possibility. I feel that's wrong; it leads to problems and can act as a barrier that just serves to promote a feeling of isolation from others. So, if you wish to overcome that feeling of isolation and loneliness, I think that our underlying attitude makes a tremendous difference. And approaching others with the thought of compassion in your mind is the best way to do this.'

If there is a solution to a problem, there is no need to worry. If there is no solution, there is no sense in worrying either.

'I think that generally, being honest with oneself and others about what you are or are not capable of doing can counteract that feeling of lack of self-confidence.'

"The more honest you are, the more open, the less fear you will have because there's no anxiety about being exposed or revealed to others. So, I think that the more honest you are, the more self-confident you will be..."

..As long as we know and maintain an awareness that we have this marvelous gift of human intelligence, and a capacity to develop determination and use it in positive ways, in some sense we have this underlying mental health. An underlying strength, that comes from realizing we have this great human potential.

This realization can act as a sort of built-in mechanism that allows us to deal with any difficulty, no matter what situation we are facing, without losing hope or sinking into self-hatred.
Reminding ourselves of the great qualities we share with all human beings acts to neutralize the impulse to think we're bad or undeserving. Many Tibetans do this as a daily mediation practice. Perhaps that's the reason why in Tibetan culture self-hatred never took hold.

The Monk and the Philosopher

fr The Monk & The Philosopher

Matthieu – My scientific career was the result of a passion for discovery. Whatever I was able to do afterward was in no way a rejection of scientific research, which is in many respects a fascinating pursuit, but arose rather from the realization that such research was unable to solve the fundamental questions of life – and wasn’t even meant to do so. In short, science, however, interesting, wasn’t enough to give meaning to my life. I came to see research, as I experienced it myself, as an endless dispersion into detail, and dedicating my whole life to it was something I could no longer envisage. At the same time I was becoming more and more interested in the spiritual life in terms of a ‘contemplative science’.

Jean Francois – But research in molecular biology over the last thirty years has been the field of some of the most important discoveries ever in scientific history. You could have taken part, but you didn’t.

M - Biology seems to have been doing fine without me! There’s no shortage of researchers in the world. The real question for me was to establish an order of priorities in my life. Increasingly, I have the feeling that I wasn’t using the potential of human life as well as I could, but that day by day, I was letting my life slip away. For me, the mass of scientific knowledge had become ‘a major contribution to minor needs’.

M - The goal of the sciences of what is reproducible, the hard sciences, is actually not to solve metaphysical problems, nor to give meaning to life, but to describe the material world as exactly as possible. To say that reality can be reduced simply to matter and that consciousness is just a property of the nervous system is no more a definition o f the context in which science operates. Contemplative life, too, has its own rules, and the deep conviction that comes from practicing it has, on the mind, as much impact as any experiment whatsoever that can be carried out in the material world.

M - true patience isn’t a sign of weakness, but of strength. It doesn’t mean to let everything happen completely passively. Patience gives you the strength to act correctly without being blinded by hatred and a thirst for revenge, which deprive you of any capacity of judgment. As Dalai Lama often said, true tolerance isn’t a question of saying. ‘ Come on, do me some harm!’ It’s neither submission nor resignation – it’s accompanied by courage, strength of mind and intelligence that keeps us from needless mental suffering and hold us back from falling into ill will.

M - ..it’s not at all a matter of cutting ourselves off from all human feelings, but of attaining a vast and serene mind which is no longer the plaything of our emotions, which no longer shaken by adversity or intoxicated by success. If a handful of salt falls into a glass of water, it makes that water undrinkable; but if a handful of salt falls into a lake, it makes hardly any detectable difference. Because of the narrowness of their minds, most people suffer pointlessly all the time from not getting what they want and having to face what they don’t want. Another source of suffering is self-centeredness. If you’re completely centered on yourself, the difficulties you encounter and the disquiet they cause you work directly against your well-being. You feel depressed and can’t accept such problems. On the other hand, if your main concern is others’ good, you’ll cheerfully accept whatever personal difficulties might be entailed in bringing about their good, because you know that others’ well-being counts for more than your own.

M - If we investigate our perceptions through contemplation and analysis, we’ll eventually stop believing in and being so attached to their substantiality. We’ll understand, for example, the ephemeral relatively of notions such as ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. Someone we see as enemy today might be greatly liked by other people, and in several months’ time may become the best of friends for us, too. Somehow, we have to train our minds in such a way that the solidity of our judgments, of our perception of both other people and inanimate objects, melts away like a block of ice melting into water. Ice and water are the same element, but whereas one is hard and brittle and you can break your bones on it, the other is soft and fluid. We can perceive the world as potentially hostile and divide it into what’s desirable and what’s undesirable, or else we can see it as a continuous process of transformation, ceaselessly changing and devoid of any true existence. We could even recognize in phenomena an infinite purity, synonymous with emptiness. These different ways of perceiving things make an enormous difference.

M - Attraction to novelty has one good side, and that’s the legitimate desire to discover fundamental truths, to explore the depths of mind and the beauty of the world. But in absolute terms, the novelty that’s always ‘new’ is the freshness of the present moment, of nowness, of clear awareness that’s not reliving any past or imagining any future.

The negative side of the taste for novelty is the vain and frustrating quest for change at any price. Very often, fascination with things that are new and different is a reflection of inner impoverishment. Unable to find happiness within ourselves, we desperately look for it outside, in objects, in experiences, in ever stranger ways of thinking and acting. In short, we get further away from happiness by looking for it when it simply isn’t to be found. The risk with that is that we may completely lost any trace of it. At the most ordinary level, the longing for novelty arises from an attraction to superfluity, which erodes the mind and disturbs its serenity. We multiply our needs instead of learning not to have any.

It seems to me that the notion of novelty, the desire to keep on inventing things through a fear of copying the past, is an exaggeration of the importance given to the ‘personality’ to the individuality that’s supposed to express itself in an original way at any price.

M - I’m not really so convinced that you have to try out everything before you can understand something’s value. Take the example of pure, fresh, thirst-quenching water. Someone drinking it can appreciate how good it is without having to taste all the other different sources of water to be found in the locality. It’s just the same with the joys of spiritual practice and its values – those who’ve tasted them don’t need ay other confirmation than their own personal experience. The happiness that flows from them has a strength and inner coherence that can’t be a lie.

M - I’m also not so sure that the freedom of choice in modern society is as wide as you’re assuming. This didn’t escape Dalai Lama, who said, ‘when you look closely at life in a city, you have the impression that all the facets of individual’s lives must be defined with great precision, like a screw that had to fit exactly in its hole. In one sense, you have no control over you own life. To survive, you have to follow that model and the rhythm you’re provided with’.

Fast Food

fr FAST FOOD NATION (the book)

1.Regardless of the billions spent on marketing and promotion, all the ads on radio and TV, all the efforts to create brand loyalty, the major chains must live with the unsettling fact that more than 70 percent of fast food visits are "impulsive" The decision to step for fast food is made on the spur of the moment, without much thought. The vast majority of customers do not set out to eat at a Burger King, a Wendy's or a McDonald's. Often, they're not even planning to stop for food- until they see a sign, a familiar building, a set of golden arches. Fast food, like the tabloids at a supermarket checkout, is an impulsive buy. In order to succeed, fast food restaurants must be seen.

Maybe next time you can think about the impulse before you enter the doors. There are many other cheaper and better alternative in our food paradise.

2. The 1960s were the heyday of artificial flavors. The synthetic versions of flavor compounds were not subtle, but they did not need to be, given the nature of most processed food. For the past twenty years food processors have tried hard to use only "natural flavors" in their products. According to the FDA, these must be derived entirely from natural sources - from herbs, spices, fruits, vegetables, beef, chicken, yeast, bark, roots, etc. Consumers prefer to see natural flavors on the label, out of belief that they are healthier. The distinction between artificial and natural flavors can be somewhat arbitrary and absurd based more on how the flavor had been made than on what it actually contains..... Amyl acetate, for example, provides the dominant note of banana flavor. When you distil if from bananas with a solvent, amyl acetate is a natural flavor. When you produce it by mixing vinegar with amyl alcohol, adding sulfuric acid as a catalyst, amyl acetate is an artificial flavor.

3. Chicken McNuggets were introduced nationwide in 1983. Within one month of their launch, the MacDonald's Corporation had become the second largest purchaser of chicken in the United States, surpassed only by KFC. McNuggets tasted good, they were easy to chew, and they appeared to be healthier than other items on the menu at MacDonald's. After all, they were made of chicken. But their health benefits were illusionary. A chemical analysis of McNuggets by a researcher at Harvard Medical School found that their 'fatty acid profile' more closely resembled beef than poultry. They were cooked in beef tallow, like MacDonald's fries. The chain soon switched to vegetable oil, adding 'beef extract' to McNuggets during the manufacturing process in order to retain their familiar taste. Chicken McNuggets, which became wildly popular among young children, still derive much of their flavor from beef additives - and contain twice as much fat per ounce as a hamburger.

4. I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him; a stainless rack of tongues; Whizzards peeling meat off decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O'Keeffe. We wade through blood that's ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us. As we approach the start of the line, for the first time I hear the steady pop, pop, pop of live animals being stunned.

Now the cattle suspended above me look just like the cattle I've seen on ranches for years, but these ones are upside down swinging on hooks. For a moment, the sight seems unreal; there are so many of them, a herd of them, lifeless. And then I see a few hind legs still kicking, a final reflex action, and the reality comes hard and clear.

For eight and a half hours, a worker called a "sticker" does nothing but stand in a river of blood, slitting the neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing its carotid artery. He uses a long knife and must hit exactly the right spot to kill the animal humanely. He hits that spot again and again. We walk up a slippery metal stairway and reach a small platform, where the production line begins. A man turns and smiles at me. He wears safety goggles and a hardhat. His face is splattered with gray matter and blood. He is the "knocker", the man who welcomes cattle to the building. Cattle walk down a narrow chute and pause in front of him, blocked by a gate, and then he shoots them in the head with a captive bolt stunner - a compressed-air gun attached to the ceiling by a long hose - which fires a steel bolt that knocks the cattle unconscious. The animals keep strolling up, oblivious to what comes next, and he stands over them and shoots. For eight and a half hours, he just shoots. As I stand there, he misses a few times and shoots the same animal twice. As soon as the steer falls, a worker grabs one of its hind legs, shackles it to a chain, and the chain lifts the huge animal into the air.

I watch the knocker knock cattle for a couple of minutes. The animals are powerful and imposing one moment and then gone in an instant, suspended from a rail, ready for carving. A steer slips from its chain, falls to the ground, and gets its head caught in one end of a conveyor belt. The production line stops as workers struggle to free the steer, stunned but alive, from the machinery. I've seen enough.

I step out of the building into the cool night air and follow the path that leads cattle into the slaughterhouse. They pass me, driven toward the building by workers with long white sticks that seem to glow in the dark. One steer, perhaps sensing instinctively with the other don't, turns and tries to run. But workers drive him back to join the rest. The cattle lazily walk single-file toward the muffled sounds, pop, pop,pop, coming from the open door.

The path has hairpin turns that prevent cattle form seeing what's in store and keep them relaxed. As the ramp gently slopes upward, the animals may think they're headed for another truck, another road trip - and they are, in unexpected ways. The ramp widens as it reaches ground level and then leads to a large cattle pen with wooden fences, a corral that belongs in a meadow, not here. As I walked along the fence, a group of cattle approach me, looking me straight in the eye, like dogs hoping for a treat, and follow me out of some mysterious impulse. I strop and try to absorb the whole scene: the cool breeze, the cattle and their gentle lowing, a cloudless sky, steam rising from the plant in the moonlight. And then I notice that the building does have one window, a small square of light on the second floor. It offers a glimpse of what's hidden behind this huge blank facade. Through the little window you can see bright red carcasses on hooks, going round and round.

My heart went out to the cattle. Felt like retching.

5. "This is no fairy story and no joke," Upton Sinclair wrote in 1906; "the mean would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one - there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit." Sinclair described a long list of practices in the meatpacking industry that threatened the health of consumers: the routine slaughter of diseased animals, the use of chemicals such as borax and glycerine to disguise the small of spoiled beef, the deliberate mislabeling of canned meat, the tendency of workers to urinate and defecate on the kill floor. After reading The Jungle President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an independent investigation of Sinclair's charges. When it confirmed the accuracy of the book, Roosevelt called for legislation requiring mandatory federal inspection of all meat sold through interstate commerce, accurate labeling and dating of canned mean products, and a fee-based regulatory system that made meatpackers pay the cost of cleaning up their own industry.

6. There is nothing inevitable about the fast food nation that surrounds us - about its marketing strategies. labor policies, and agricultural techniques, about its relentless drive for conformity and cheapness. The triumph of McDonald's and its imitators was by no means preordained. During the past two decades, rhetoric about the "free market" has cloaked changes in the nation's economy that bear little relation to real competition or freedom of choice. From the airline industry to the publishing business, from the railroads to telecommunications, American corporations have worked hard to avoid the rigors of the market by eliminating and absorbing their rivals..

The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it. Many of America's greatest accomplishments stand in complete defiance of the free market: the prohibition of child labour, the establishment of minimum wage, the creation of wilderness areas and national parks, the construction of dams, bridges, roads, churches, schools, and universities. If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to elementary schools and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two), paying them with meals instead of money.

7. In 1995m the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that "advertising directed at children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under eight years of age." The academy did not recommend a ban on such advertising because it seemed impractical and would infringe upon advertisers' freedom of speech. Today the health risks faced by the nation's children far outweigh the needs of its mass marketers. Congress should immediately ban all advertisements aimed at children that promote food high in fats and sugar. Thirty years ago Congress banned cigarette ads from radio and television as a public health measure - and those ads were directed at adults. Smoking had declined ever since. A ban on advertising unhealthy foods to children would discourage eating habits that are not only hard to break, but potentially life-threatening.

8. Nobody in the United States is forced to buy fast food. The first step toward meaningful change is by far the easiest: stop buying it. The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad man. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit. The usefulness of the market, its effectiveness as a tool, cuts both ways.....Sometimes the most irresistible force is the most mundane.