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Attempting experiment 1 put me in the mood to try something closer to conventional nāda yoga.

At night, when it is dark and quiet, I turn out the lights and try to halt my internal monologue. This isn’t fully successful: there are short bursts of internal mental audio chatter between the silences. Although it is completely dark, occasional visual imagery flashes like magnesium flares. At one point, I see meaningless cursive calligraphy in black on a dark red background, like old linoleum (dakini script :-)) In between the bursts of mental audio chatter, I listen to see if I can hear anything else through the silence, And there it is: a musical note like B3 on the piano, amplitude modulated at about 1hz. It’s not a real sound, and it’s not internal monologue either.

I find the exercises have the same issue as most Buddhist teaching, they fail to define “thought”. Which then becomes something like “god”, everyone has their own definition.

This isn’t necessarily bad, mind you, might even be useful.

I usually arbitrarily choose to define “thought” as “something that’s verbal or in some other way trying to clearly divide or predict the world”

In so far as this definition goes, I find the exercise “fail” for me, it’s mainly when my attention slips (from the goal, i.e. I forget my intention) or disolves itself (sleepiness)

I feel like having the meta-intention of thinking non-stop brings you into the mode of awareness of your thoughts. This awareness to a certain degree precludes thought.

When I read Shantaraksita, I thought: some diacritics missing there: Śāntarakṣita

Hi,

I got your newsletter for Halloween. Just thought I’d let you know how things are going. I picked up this book and read almost all of it (just not all the Q/A at the end) and of course did all the exercises, well, “religiously”, since about 2 years ago. I was doing shi-ne for about 1 and a half years before moving on to the next naljor with the visualization exercise. A few days ago, I would guess that nye’mid happened to me as part of the 3rd naljor. Like, everything became a lot clearer. I don’t shy away from what is, and feel like I’m “going into” each moment. Of course, I can’t be sure that’s what it is! I don’t have a lama to work with after all. But it seems our society is heading for a state of isolation and loneliness, so you have to learn to get these things from books rather than interaction with actual people (and just hope you’re doing it right lol).

I liked the addition of that chapter to The Vetali’s Gift. It was entertaining to read, but doesn’t have much use for me as I have already done those exercises. I would love to share it with people, but I don’t think much benefit would come of it as our society is generally leery of religion and superstition. That’s not to say I think this is religious superstition. I think this is wonderfully useful strategies for dealing with pain and the existential quandary of life. But that’s what it looks like when you try to show it to other people, I would imagine. It doesn’t help that I’m terrible at communicating orally.

Assuming I got through the 3rd naljor, I remember the 4th one is attaining a perfectedness in one’s action. I’m definitely not there yet, but I guess after that would come the actual practice of Dzogchen. Is it secret or something? You mentioned your spouse published a book about these practices, which at first I read to be the main Dzogchen practice, but I guess it may be just be the naljors. I don’t know, I haven’t seen it yet. Anyway, that’s not to say I wouldn’t be happy with just the naljors, because that’s more than enough to make a huge difference in your life. I’m not sure I’d want to practice the main Dzogchen even if I got there.

Disclaimer: I am not usually a meditator, since meditation tends to be great while I’m doing it and then make me a little nuts. Like spending the evening wanting to bite and claw things and feeling like I’m a tiger after an afternoon of intermittent meditating. This effect could be fun maybe, but it does not feel very civilized, and it can be a bit alarming as it’s not exactly a controlled state. (I think this could be an obsessiveness side effect ??)

I tried the first exercise. I can easily focus on something like breathing, but it feels like that’s a thought. Thoughts follow each other like the knots in a khipu. There always seems to be an active connection to the next one. I banished breathing focus and switched (accidentally) to noticing sounds. Then I managed to not notice the sounds of the fridge and the cars passing and the kids thumping around upstairs and moved on to involuntary visuals. After getting rid of the images, I tried to imagine myself as dead, which led to the unfortunate urge, a thought, to be actually dead so I could win this game and achieve nonthinking. Not great! As you have pointed out elsewhere, it might not be advisable for some people such as an obsessive person-tiger to do much meditating! (Don’t worry, I’m fine.)

So after a bit of self recrimination about the unexpected urge, “Cheap Thrills” by Sia popped into my head, and it was game over. About 20 minutes. Fun exploration. ;)

So, as I read the first experiment, my thought was “I know this one, and the point is that it’s impossible. Still, I can probably do it if I cheat just a little.”

So, I held my inner voice at a constant 1kHz (ish) tone for the duration of the experiment - no mental imagery, no inner speech (apart from the internal 1kHZ tone), no thoughts at all apart from hearing the tone. And held like that until the timer went off for the end of the meditation.

I worked my way through the exercises. First one: couldn’t manage it, but to the extent I could I felt light and peaceful, and that lingered afterward.

Second one I kept up a buzzing confusion in my head for about five minutes, but by the end I was so cognitively fatigued I was barely able to recite the alphabet. There was lingering fatigue afterward for a bit.

The last one started out well – well, except I had this idea to will/imagine myself detaching from my thoughts, which left me euphoric and just generally seemed unwise after a bit – and with time the thoughts faded. But it left me deeply sad for some reason I can’t quite identify. Besides the sadness is a numbness. Maybe some existential despair in the mix? (I also have this admittedly-excessive fear of turning myself into a zombie through meditation, ever since I read your article on the dangers. I wonder if that fear got amplified by the practice, somehow?)

It’s fading now as I move and bring myself back into the world. Maybe I just overdid it doing all the exercises back to back late in the evening.

Monks live a life of extremes, mainly because attaining enlightenment is extremely difficult. Monks live a life where defensive killing is so incredibly unlikely to ever come up as a part of their lives the just right off all killing as wrong. This is a problem because we all learn Buddhism from Monks. This is where a lot of corruptions of the Buddha’s teachings come, monks making things easier on themselves and then pushing it as the ethics for all Buddhist. The Buddha was the most progressive religious leader for thousands of years on the issue of women, monks undid almost all of it because they blame women for their lust.

Pacifist are protected by other people carrying shields and weapons and then shit talk the people protecting them.

Monks present the Sutras as black and white on the subject of killing, ignoring all of the counter arguments. A big one for me is the story of the mother and father stuck in a desert who kill their child for nourishment in order to be able to survive. Why would someone who thought killing was an absolute wrong use such an analogy?

The question about killing isn’t whether or not you go to hell, heaven and hell are not the goal of Buddhism. The question is whether or not you can attain enlightenment while being willing to kill defensively. I don’t know the answer to this, I’ve never read anything from anyone who did know the answer, except the original Sutras and the are ambiguous.

What I believe is that every moral situation has a morally correct solution. You are never forced to choose a lesser of two evils or a mix of dark and light Karma. I also believe if you can find one exception to a rule it’s more of a guideline. If someone made a virus that could kill all life on earth and you need to kill someone worse than Hitler to keep it from being released, would it be correct to let this evil person kill everyone? Of course not, hence killing is sometimes correct.

A couple of points, the overwhelming majority of people will never have to kill someone, even the vast majority of cops in high crime neighborhoods never kill anyone. The issues involving eating meat and dairy products are far more relevant to people lives than defensive killing. If you are in the military it is your moral duty to refuse to fight if your country has started an unjust war or your commander is giving an unjust order, even if it means your death. Don’t volunteer for the US military.

I really liked your article.

A side not to a couple of the commenters. Judge Buddhism based off of what the Buddha taught not off of the failings of ordinary people. The Path is hard, very few of us live upto it. When reading about Buddha remember not everything was actually said by him, many people have used his name to push their own agenda
You have to judge each sutra based on the overall message of the sutras, listen to what the scholars say is mostly likely authentic and mainly listen to the love in your heart, if you can find it.

Buddha taught that the value of life is a progression plants as the least valuable, still valuable, then insects, thongs get more morally significant as they get bigger. Now we would say the ratio of brain size to body mass determines the level of moral value. Insects probably are not sentient, you shouldn’t try to kill them but there is little moral harm if they are.

One last comment. Many people get very defensive about their own religions and moral systems compared to Buddhism. The Buddha taught a perfect moral system that none of the other religions come close to and few people live upto. Instead of acknowledging this some people feel compelled to make extreme and nonsense accusations against Buddhism to defend their own ego. Reducing your ego is something Buddhism teaches you to do. Instead of telling lies to attack Buddhism, become a Buddhist.

Of the various types of zombie you have identified, only the zombie doppelgänger has much metaphysical clout, as all the others are compatible with materialism, and it is as an anti-materialist argument that that p-zombies are best known.

As you say, zombie doppelgängers are undetectable by physical means. Few, if any, philosophers think they could exist in the actual world (not even Dennett - see below.) It is certainly convenient to have an argument in which a philosopher’s conception of what is merely logically possible (a very weak claim which only requires a premise to be not obviously contradictory) counts for more than any amount of scientific evidence to the contrary, but, as Marvin Minsky pointed out, Chalmers’ zombie argument begs the question by presupposing the separability of mind and matter.

As far a I know, Dennett is speaking with his tongue in his cheek when he says “We’re all zombies” - in “Consciousness Explained”, he appends this footnote: “It would be an act of desperate intellectual
dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!” He is pointing out, I think, the inconsistency of believing in zombies while claiming to know that we are not zombies (introspection cannot be trusted as infallible, even just about oneself, given Cotard’s syndrome and other delusions.)

In “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies” Dennett gives examples of philosophers equivocating over what it means to be a true zombie doppelgänger: “when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition.” His position on qualia seems somewhat similar - that the term has been so loaded with metaphysical assumptions that it has no meaning.

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Hey David
I love all of your websites, but this one in particular. Willing to do anything it takes to get more of this from you. Evidently your tantra is too powerful for death threats to be effective so I can only hope praise and pleading work. Humor and horror are in the exact right mix here.

A couple of days ago, I had an “undone by recursion” moment, thinking about this story. It went roughly like this:

So, you have some (formal) grammar that includes recursive definitions, and you use proof by induction to prove some theorem about all gramatically correct expressions.

But wait, thinks I. If you’re really trying to prove this sort of theorem rigorously, surely you’ld need something like Peano’s 9th axiom, only for grammars rather than integers. Some axiom that says it’s ok to do induction on grammars, because the recursion always terminates in a finite number of steps. That guarantees you no sentence in the grammar is - for example - a circularly linked list that causes the parser to run forever. You could probably write that sentence in a finite number of symbols, around the circumference of a bracelet, for example…

Certain institutions other than my own appear to have gone even further down the Lich King route: “Hey, students, we need you to be here in person so we change charge you rent for your rooms. But we’re going to put you under house arrest so you can’t go outside.”

The pandemic handling is merely a symptom … there also the question of research grants…

I have just realised that the zombie apocalypse can be read as a commentary on the present-day state of our universities. Though, if that is the allegory, the Lich King would be the vice-chancellor.

At a nameless institution, towards the start of our current pandemic.
Vice-chancellor to faculty: you’re going to be doing in person teaching, because that’s what the government wants.
Faculty (and students) to vice-chancellor: nope, that is not happening.

I have a question about the following part. Are we supposed to recognise the costume from somewhere:

“Her dress was silk, the blue-black of the center of the sky as night falls. Two silver bats clasped shoulder straps, gathering folds of cloth that held her breasts high. “

Thank you about updating these series. I drank them as needingly as I did it a couple of years ago before the update.

I feel your blockage on nobility might be connected to the change of context required to explain and experience nobility. Thus far you’ve focused very much on the individual person and just a little bit on interpersonal relationships in the form of recognizing your shadow elements in the actions of others. Nobility on the other hand can only be explained and experienced in a social context while recognized by others.

e.g. You cannot claim to be noble while sitting on a mountain top, doing nothing, interacting with no-one. You can be recognized as noble when you eat your shadow and drink the sun and the result of these efforts and psychospiritual growth becomes apparent in the way you show up in you personal, professional and social life and relationships.

Reading this again, what came to my mind was the history of mathematics question of who first used recursive definitions and who first gave a name to that style of definition.

Used in the nineteenth century for sure, especially in German language texts. This is way later than the period the story is set in, of course.

Before that … it’s a good question of what counts as a recursive, as opposed to iterative, definition. Fibonnaci’s famous problem about reproducing rabbits is a recurrence relation.

I haven’t checked, but presumably Panini’s Sanskrit grammar doesn’t have explicitly recursive grammar rules.

After reading this series (particularly the emphasis on childlike behaviour) and Meaningness (particularly the stances) I found many similarities with Transactional Analysis (in the concepts resp. of Free Child and the Ego States). Is this intentional/known?

In Malmo:

https://disgustingfoodmuseum.com/

So, vaguely inspired by this, I decided to ask some questions of the GPT2 machine learning algorithm. For those who don’t know, the algorithm uses a huge amount of data trawled off the web to guess which word comes next after an initial string.

In the following, Sukhi’s dialog is typed by me and the Venerable Udayin’s dialog is entirely machine-generated by the GPT algorithm as a response . The only initial hint I gave it was two paragraphs from the vinaya.

=====

You ask, “And the Fourth Noble Truth, Venerable Udayin?”

He says, “That this craving, this attachment to the idea of escape, causes more suffering.”

“Yes,” you say, “it is as you say, Venerable Udayin. Dukkha, anicca, anatta, and nirodha.”

“Yes.”

He stands and touches your head again. “Yes. You are wise, my dear Sukhi.”

He says, “Have you come to ask me for something?”

You ask, “Venerable Udayin, what are amrita and rakta?”

He says, “Amrita is the elixir of life. It is made from the tears of the gods. It can prolong life and grant immortality.”
He says, “Rakta is the blood of the blessed. It has the power of magic, and can turn those who drink it into vampires.”

=======

I am astonished what GPT has learned from the web (some of it possibly of doubtful accuracy), Note: I did not prime the algorithm with anything about what these words might mean, or tell it what the fourth noble truth was. (I did tell it I was called Sukhi).

Yes, thanks. Surya did get bitten in the previous installment. I’d forgotten it was explicitly described, rather than just implied. The young monk does look like he’s being lined up to be next, though.

Given this is a vampire novel, genre convention would suggest that somebody is going to get bitten in the neck (or equivalent) at some point.

The only suspense is in who gets bitten, and who by. Vampire novels are fairly diverse, so gay vampire, lesbian vampire, heterosexual vampire are all possibilities. (Indeed, bi vampire is probably the default for the genre),

The other thing we can guess from this scene is that it’s the young monk who is at some point going to be bitten in the neck.

Genre convention would suggest that some Twilight-like agonizing over “I really want to have sex with the vampire, but I’m a monk (or a respectable Mormon girl like Bella)” is needed. Perhaps not as overdone as in Stephanie Meyer.

I think you were right to just go ahead and write that last chapter!

The one bit I ‘stumbled’ on was this:

when it was all the way in it needed to come back out, and when it was out it needed to go all the way in

And by ‘stumbled’ I mean that I noticed that as something I was reading (instead of just continuing to read the text), and that it seemed ‘off’.

After re-reading it, it seems fine. I don’t remember clearly, but I might have had the same kinds of ‘stumbles’ reading other romance novels (or ‘romance’ writing in other works), and I’ve actually enjoyed a few. (I’m intimidated by the idea of trying to find other good ones. I mostly just enjoy them in not-romance-novels when I happen upon them.)

But I think it was mostly great and that you’re, in fact, perfectly capable of writing this kind of stuff!

I’m (re-?)reading the whole story now and loving it!

The recursion joke(s) are particularly funny!

The “infinity unrolled” ‘being undone by recursion’ bit reminds me of something I remember experiencing as a kid – a feeling of flying or ‘zooming’, but “infinity unrolled before him” is an even better description. Thinking back on it now, I think it would happen when I was in a ‘trance’ or similar kind of ‘meditative’ state. I only remember it happening at night, after I was supposed to be asleep, and I remember it most vividly as happening when I was looking out the window of my bedroom and rubbing a part of a soft blanket folder over onto itself. Something about the sensation felt ‘infinite’. Weird!

“It is no shame to be undone by recursion” – truly! I tell my own ‘pupils’ that, and don’t qualify it with “the first time”. Indeed, even with the most careful spells (unit tests), a failure to properly tame recursion can be fatal (require killing the test job)!

In case anyone else is interested (as I was), this seems to be the image shown: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/a-flayed-man-holding-his-own-skin

As I puzzle more over the various ways in which a monk could possibly receive a Higher Yoga Tantra empowerment without violating the vinaya, it occurs to me: as far as I can see, there is nothing in the vinaya prohibiting a monk from consuming what is known is Sanskrit as rakta (i.e. red stuff, blood, menstrual blood, vaginal lubrication). A monk would need to be careful, of course. Actually touching a woman in order to bite her neck looks to be forbidden. Having a woman who is not the monk’s relative do his laundry is also right out, because that might lead to them having sex. But actually consuming rakta, e.g. from her previously worn garments, appears to be an omission in the vinaya.

Of course, now, you can buy substitute rakta that’s basically just a red herbal drink, which is obviously OK. A fictional vampire might scorn such synthetic substitutions.

Have I missed something in the vinaya here?

Thanks for the reply, David!

Her breasts swelled like recursive stupas

I was falling about laughing at this point. If this meant to be a serious erotic sex scene, a nomination for The Bad Sex Awards would be in order. As the whole thing is a comedy, it works.

A serious question about the scene: My understanding of the third empowerment, in present day real vajrayana as opposed to the fictional alternate reality vajrayana of the novel, is that it gives you permission to perform karmamudra but doesn’t require you to actually do it with a real partner to receive the empowerment. (Consorts can be imagined etc,) I take it the fictional/historical tantra of the novel has a stronger requirement to actually do karmamudra than our present, ethically-acceptable-to-feminists, version? (I can think of some actual historical texts that strongly imply that karmamudra with a partner is optional … e.g. for monks who aren’t allowed to have sex, people with intersex conditions who physically can’t etc.)

P.S. I was hoping for some actual Sanskrit.

Slightly more seriously....

Negative Theology -> Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite -> Nicholas of Cusa -> Mauruce de Gandillac -> (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze)

On my bookshelves at home I have Pseudo-Dionysius in the same section as Derrida’s Of Grammatology.

“I mean, when the old guard at Nalanda dies, the younger faculty can teach new doctrines and practises”.

As I read that, I’m thinking: Surya has been (anachronistically) reading Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.. A day or two passes, and I see your twitter again: yep, gratuitous Thomas Kuhn.

I wonder if this is actually an improvement over all those “how to write a sex scene” books, or even worse.

P.S. From the conventional hagiographies of the postmodernists, I had gathered that Georges Canguilhem, rather than de Gandillac, was the principal intellectual influence. (Or should that be from a namthar of Derrida…)