According to the great Buddha, we are one with the world. Our physicists now tell us that the most fundamental constituents of the universe, the building blocks which eventually develop into what we know of as our universe is energy and that such units of energy may manifest themselves either as so-called "particles" or as "waves" or as "wave/particles" depending on the focus of our methods of measurement. This view is almost exactly the same as that proposed by the great ancient Chinese philosopher LaoTze who said: "The Tao gives rise to one, one gives rise to two, two give rise to three and three give rise to everything else". Such primal units of energy may through randomness combine into different forms as what our chemists call "elements" in the periodical table which may further combine into more complex forms called "atoms" and "molecules" which in turn may further combine to form stars, planets, plants, animals, fishes, birds and man. All such combinations are subject to constant change as new particles or atoms, or quantum energy-waves are added or lost with the addition or loss of energy. Nothing is permanent. Change appears the only unchanging law of the universe. Thus what at one time was an atom in our body may be recycled as an atom in the earth, a pebble, a plant, a flower, a tree, a metal girder, part of a drop of water in a puddle, a pond, a lake, a sea or some rock on a high mountain, or a worm, an insect, a bird, a fish, or an animal and for all we know, the relevant atoms may have started life in the explosion of some distant star in the universe in the very distant past as a result of explosion occurring at the furthest point of its "implosion". Yet human beings are peculiarly attached to "stability", "permanence", "security". As far as possible, they want things and phenomena to remain as they are, "changeless" or "eternal". Hence they invent institutions, systems and even systems of deities and the deity of all deities, a so-called "King of Kings", which they call "God" . Having invented them, they forget that they are invented and proceed to worship them as if these did not originate in their own mind and their own imagination. How foolish! How pitiful! How understandable! How pitiable? !
Who wants uncertainty? Who hankers after the pain of having to make up their mind in conditions of uncertainty, when the future remains a dark mystery, a puzzling, open, subject to chance or random combination and thus menacing in unknown ways? Hence they prefer to turn themselves into the relative stability and permanence of "objects", which they hope will stay "unchanged" and appear to have a stubborn "permanence", totally lacking in "freedom". Contrary to what politicians tell us, there are many who actually "fear" freedom. There is nothing in this world which they dread more. Freedom implies having to make difficult choices, decisions, self-determination in conditions of uncertainty and the risk of having to take responsibility for their possibly unwise choices, taking a false step and stumbling. They prefer to be "slaves" of their leaders, their God/gods and in the modern world, when Nietzsche claims that "God is dead", their secular God-substitute viz. their "ideologies", their "isms" (philosophic rationalism, idealism, empiricism, pragmatism, psychological Freudianism, Adlerism, Jungianism, behaviorism and politico-economic capitalism, socialism, communism, nazism, fascism, liberalism, totalitarianism, racism, nationalism etc.) on offer on the market: money, power, fame, desire and all other kinds of addictions and superstitions and the corresponding symbols thereof . All they need and all that is required of them is that they believe whatever they are told to believe and to surrender their will to that of their leader, their hero, their authority, their guru, their gods. They worship them as their idols, or if they prefer a final arbiter, an exclusive mono-theistic Idol. It is difficult to be one's own master and take up the heavy burden of one's freedom as man, as an individual. But, as Jean Paul Sartre said a long time ago: man is "condemned" to be free.
In a way, we are all like Sisyphus in Albert Camus' rewrite of the ancient Greek myth, "The Myth of Sisyphus". Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to roll a heavy boulder up a steep hill every morning which would tumble down the slope once again each time he pushes it to the hilltop. Camus writes: " At the very end of his long effort measured by the skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to the stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock."
Camus compares our fate to that of Sisyphus thus: "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed." Camus explains: "If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Oedipus, like Dostoievski's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for this absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism."
To Camus, our happiness and our sorrow at realizing the absurdity or ultimate lack of any reason for our existence are like twin brothers. He says, "Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men. All Sisyphus's silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. "
We can find joy through being fully conscious of our externally given fate as man, and realize what Heidegger calls our "throwness" into this world, into which we are thrown without first asking for permission from us, to accept such fate bravely and thereby turn our fate into our personal project and through an act of our will, turn our defeat into our triumph. Camus writes: "At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eyes and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. he too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." That is our fate, our burden, our duty to ourselves and if we succeed, our glory.
Another path is proposed by the great Buddha: the radical dissolution of the conventional concept of our "self" i.e. we must become fully aware of the ultimate emptiness of our concept of "self": we are not our body, which is something very different from the state in which it was born, from its fully mature state and from its decrepit state shortly before death: we are not our mind, whose thoughts change from one moment to another and has as little stability as the dust flltting in the air and as David Hume says, just a series of unrelated sensations; we are not our personal biography, which is something which is past and must be "reconstructed" from our unreliable memory, something dead like shed leaves; we are not whatever "achievement" we attained, which in a few hundred years time, perhaps even in a few years, nobody will ever care or even know about; we are not our great "love", as some romantics would have us believe as the moods of love fluctuate from moment to moment, despite our best efforts to stay "constant" and "faithful", a victim of the passage of time which does its work in silence, like a thief at night. In short, we are not anything which we believe we are. We are nothing. From nothing we come, into nothingness we shall go.Everything between our birth and our death is a gift, a miracle, a miracle not of "God" which is little more than the "best and most noble man imaginable" writ large, an abstract projection of the dire needs of man for some kind of "ultimate" stability but a miracle of chance and of randomness of the causes which come together for a shorter or longer while and then separate. As ChuangTzu asks: are "we" dreaming butterflies or are butterflies dreaming "us"?
Some leaves at Kowloon Park taken a few days ago.
A human effort to render leaves "permanent" at the same park.
Leaves struggling to colonize and/or to bypass human obstacles.
A leaf enjoying its moment of glory under the sun.
Another leaf in the process of decaying and dying, like hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of other leaves.
The face of a monk in quiet contemplation of the human condition at the park?
Who wants uncertainty? Who hankers after the pain of having to make up their mind in conditions of uncertainty, when the future remains a dark mystery, a puzzling, open, subject to chance or random combination and thus menacing in unknown ways? Hence they prefer to turn themselves into the relative stability and permanence of "objects", which they hope will stay "unchanged" and appear to have a stubborn "permanence", totally lacking in "freedom". Contrary to what politicians tell us, there are many who actually "fear" freedom. There is nothing in this world which they dread more. Freedom implies having to make difficult choices, decisions, self-determination in conditions of uncertainty and the risk of having to take responsibility for their possibly unwise choices, taking a false step and stumbling. They prefer to be "slaves" of their leaders, their God/gods and in the modern world, when Nietzsche claims that "God is dead", their secular God-substitute viz. their "ideologies", their "isms" (philosophic rationalism, idealism, empiricism, pragmatism, psychological Freudianism, Adlerism, Jungianism, behaviorism and politico-economic capitalism, socialism, communism, nazism, fascism, liberalism, totalitarianism, racism, nationalism etc.) on offer on the market: money, power, fame, desire and all other kinds of addictions and superstitions and the corresponding symbols thereof . All they need and all that is required of them is that they believe whatever they are told to believe and to surrender their will to that of their leader, their hero, their authority, their guru, their gods. They worship them as their idols, or if they prefer a final arbiter, an exclusive mono-theistic Idol. It is difficult to be one's own master and take up the heavy burden of one's freedom as man, as an individual. But, as Jean Paul Sartre said a long time ago: man is "condemned" to be free.
In a way, we are all like Sisyphus in Albert Camus' rewrite of the ancient Greek myth, "The Myth of Sisyphus". Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to roll a heavy boulder up a steep hill every morning which would tumble down the slope once again each time he pushes it to the hilltop. Camus writes: " At the very end of his long effort measured by the skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to the stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock."
Camus compares our fate to that of Sisyphus thus: "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed." Camus explains: "If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Oedipus, like Dostoievski's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for this absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism."
To Camus, our happiness and our sorrow at realizing the absurdity or ultimate lack of any reason for our existence are like twin brothers. He says, "Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men. All Sisyphus's silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. "
We can find joy through being fully conscious of our externally given fate as man, and realize what Heidegger calls our "throwness" into this world, into which we are thrown without first asking for permission from us, to accept such fate bravely and thereby turn our fate into our personal project and through an act of our will, turn our defeat into our triumph. Camus writes: "At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eyes and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. he too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." That is our fate, our burden, our duty to ourselves and if we succeed, our glory.
Another path is proposed by the great Buddha: the radical dissolution of the conventional concept of our "self" i.e. we must become fully aware of the ultimate emptiness of our concept of "self": we are not our body, which is something very different from the state in which it was born, from its fully mature state and from its decrepit state shortly before death: we are not our mind, whose thoughts change from one moment to another and has as little stability as the dust flltting in the air and as David Hume says, just a series of unrelated sensations; we are not our personal biography, which is something which is past and must be "reconstructed" from our unreliable memory, something dead like shed leaves; we are not whatever "achievement" we attained, which in a few hundred years time, perhaps even in a few years, nobody will ever care or even know about; we are not our great "love", as some romantics would have us believe as the moods of love fluctuate from moment to moment, despite our best efforts to stay "constant" and "faithful", a victim of the passage of time which does its work in silence, like a thief at night. In short, we are not anything which we believe we are. We are nothing. From nothing we come, into nothingness we shall go.Everything between our birth and our death is a gift, a miracle, a miracle not of "God" which is little more than the "best and most noble man imaginable" writ large, an abstract projection of the dire needs of man for some kind of "ultimate" stability but a miracle of chance and of randomness of the causes which come together for a shorter or longer while and then separate. As ChuangTzu asks: are "we" dreaming butterflies or are butterflies dreaming "us"?
Some leaves at Kowloon Park taken a few days ago.
A human effort to render leaves "permanent" at the same park.
Leaves struggling to colonize and/or to bypass human obstacles.
A leaf enjoying its moment of glory under the sun.
Another leaf in the process of decaying and dying, like hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of other leaves.
The face of a monk in quiet contemplation of the human condition at the park?
Our life is short, but love, regret, longing, etc live on. It is a kind of immortality. One thing I don not agree with Chuang Tzu is he seem s to lack love, not like the Budda or Jesus. I don't know. My obsession with him may be wrong. I don't know. But I know nothing about the supernatural. I really don't know. 吾生也有涯、而知也無涯。
回覆刪除[版主回覆08/18/2012 14:13:49]Things of the mind and of the spirit last rather longer if others think they are worth preserving in the form of books and other forms for the preservation and conservation of one's thoughts and works of the creative imagination e.g books of science, philosophy, novels, poetry, drama, music, sculputres, paintings etc. How many of us are capable of doing that?
[pinkpanther501101回覆08/18/2012 09:05:48]Many worthy humans are remembered forever, like Chuang Tzu, even if he is someone else even if he is nameless his thoughts will last in the minds of us.
[pinkpanther501101回覆08/18/2012 08:11:31]I didn't see the film but it must be very moving.
[pinkpanther501101回覆08/18/2012 07:04:05]I only hope my family and friends will remember me for a short time and I am satisfied.
[版主回覆08/18/2012 05:51:55]We would dearly love to to think that love lasts. Did you see the film/novel "Hiroshima, mon amour" by Marguerite Duras? There the heroine tried to retain the memories of her lover and her great love for him after he died in an accident but no matter how hard she tried to keep them alive, she found to her horror that her memories of him were fading day by day, hour by hour eroded by the silent hands of that greatest eraser of human memory: time. In the end, nothing remains, not even memories of great love, nothing are left but mere traces, which lose in vivvidness and force by the minute.
It's a bit heavy... something is pressing the heart with weight. Daily life can be a bit light-hearted, I think.
回覆刪除[版主回覆08/18/2012 12:00:12]To be free also means automatically being free to love, to be kind to and to care for others unconditionally and spontaneously because we are no longer under the burden of the shackles of "self-centredness" and "egotism" as there will no longer be anything upon which our normal "selfishness" and "self-centredness" can "centre" or "focus" on!
[pinkpanther501101回覆08/18/2012 09:47:29]To break these prison bars we have grief from the heart. kindness. Benevolent. Righteousness. Not being selfish!
[版主回覆08/18/2012 06:05:11]Life will be heavy unless we don't think seriously about it or unless we abandon our "conventional" concept of our "self" as something permanent, something to be promoted, to be protected, to be defended at all costs. According to the great Buddha, our "normal" concept of our "self" is a self-constructed prison, not just a "fortress". A prison locks in our "self" as much as it locks out our enemies. Unless we break free from it by dismantling the prison bars, one by one, we shall never be truly free from ceaseless pain and suffering and be able to live as freely as a breeze, blowing whither it wills over the surface of the earth. The prison bars are greed, anger/ aggression, addiction/passion and ignorance.
Haven't visited your blog for long time , and now I find out you take more shots if close-up !
回覆刪除Beautiful leaves!
[版主回覆08/20/2012 07:38:56]Close ups are interesting because they present aspects of object different from the "normal" angles. Thanks for your compliments.
An interesting discourse on Being and Nothingness. And good photo shots too.
回覆刪除[版主回覆08/21/2012 09:50:46]Thanks. Photos are more like practice shots !