Semantics

The limits of my language are the limits of my world
Wittgenstein

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao
Lao Tzu

When you say something is it isn't
A Korzybski

Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent
Wittgenstein — Tractatus conclusion

Language is essentially a construct, a falsehood that allures. And the meditation on language is using a false tool to a false end!
And yet, when we realize the falsehood its the only handle we have… to start with.

Other Links

Stub

GCF References

The List of GCF References

GCF Argument

The GCF 'argumentation' ie the matching between our proposal and the gcf criteria

GCF Model

1 Outline of doc

GCF has given the assessment criteria. The matching of our suggestions to these is at end of document. Below is our proposal first in our own words and order and later at end the mapping to the given assessment criteria.
[Reposting of main model submitted to GCF]

2 Introduction

2.1 Love

• All beings love themselves… at a level that can only be called infinite
• And the so-called 'sacrifices' that we see made — eg mothers for children, etc — are always because the sacrificer sees/feels herself in the other

And so if people can do so much for each other at the tiny microscopic level why the hate and havoc in the world?

2.2 Evil? or Error?

• ▣ Nobody by himself wants to kill other people. This is not a natural/instinctive need.
• ▣ This unnatural need is induced by the belief that the other guy is evil…. Eliminating him is the best thing
• ▣ If we can induce this in a million people, we have formula to make war
• ▶ Changing the education of children to unbelieve in objective evil and instead believe in the subjective conditions of error: confusion, misapprehension, ignorance etc is an important requisite for stopping war

GCF Abstract

Our existence on planet Earth

is characterised by three interacting components {Life, Values, Laws} which interact to produce a resultant fourth: Reason-ing.
[Posting of Abstract submitted to GCF]

◉ Life

The center and meaning of anything we do, including the attempt to order/structure our lives in harmony, is that we are alive! And we wish that this life continues for as long as it will. Our planet that supports lives of such a variety of creatures including us humans, is obviously moving…
[in ways well-known and surprising ]

Laws of War

Context

In order to talk properly of war we need to widen the context. World bank data says that ⅓ of the world live in countries affected by fragility, conflict, violence (FCV) and this is likely to reach nearly 50% within the next 1-2 decades

• Fragility → Conflict → War
• While Outright war affects 10% of world population, only 11 countries in the world at peace today

History by its nature can only talk of events in/of time, space, specific to cultures, nations, income-groups etc.
So what are the universal factors (ie not time/space/culture/nation dependent) that conduce to humanity's perennial propensity to war?

Basic Laws

We start by inquiring: How come something so universally acknowledged as horrible can be so prevalent?

Council of Elders

In Failure of UN we talked on why the UN is structurally constructed to be a failure to prevent war.
So if the UN must fail, can there be any kind of organization at the highest international level to oversee and guide the affairs of the world??

Yes we believe there is — a Council of Elders. Widely respected, revered elder beings for which there is widespread acceptance of their meritorious status. Below is a tentative list.

Principles

One theme running through this blog is that without religion  this planet is not saveable. See

• Humans as metaphysical animals
• Secularism and religion 1
• Secularism and religion 2

Some may prefer a different word to 'religion' such as 'spirituality'  'mysticism' and so on. Each has its own finesse and its own set of problems.

Some criteria for the below selections

• Religious leaders whose reach is far wider than their immediate sectarian reach — Dalai Lama, Pope Francis
• People whose wide and deep understanding encompasses science and religion (mysticism/spirituality/etc) — eg Sheldrade, Ravindra
• People — preferably with strong science/math background! — who are willling to take on the science establishment at its most oppressive, reactionary, totalitarian eg — Berlinski
• Go-getters with vision/capacity/position — Gabbard, Musk, DiCapricio
• Those who have opened the door of (clean!) joy to millions — JK Rowling
• Those willing to call out the bullshit in the international political establishment — Chomsky, Pilger, Galloway

Ideology Afflicted Planet

The twentieth century was dominated by a strange, ravaging…

Epidemic

It swept across the globe sparing no continent.
And from the 2nd decade of the century to the 2nd-last, like a whirring, well-oiled factory assembly-line…

K e p t    k i l l i n g    p e o p l e.

How many?
By conservative estimates 50 million. Could be as much as 100 million.

Unlike the black death of the 14th century which spread by rats, this red death of the 20th was spread by memes…
An ideology called…

Marxism/Communism

Secularism

Secularism

1.1 Solves the problem

Also called

• Separating Church and State
• Emancipation
• DoubleSpeak Shariah vs Israel
• …

1.2 Secularism — Sequence

• Saeculum — world — is reality
• Saeculum is The reality
• secular = real
• sacred = unreal
• profane is fine (norm)

Slavery

We are taught that slavery is bad and that free(ing) men and women is the minimum good that a human being should aspire to.
A hardly arguable notion?¿…
Yet history shows that slavery-or-freedom is an unreal choice

Whereas de jure slavery or de facto slavery is the real one 

(analogy: prostitution, prohibition) 
We think our time is more civilized because unlike America a century ago or Rome two millenium ago we dont find people with chains on their legs.
Yet all of us are slaves to enormous faceless organizations

• at its most visible armies but usually more peaceful (and faceless)…
• corporations
• media
• governments

In short "slavery-or-freedom" is the ruse-question that keeps us in slavery
Chattel slaves vs Living under the Matrix is the real question
…
Note that this system has been in force for the last hundreds of years first with de jure slavery
Then for the last 100 years or so after abolition of slavery, decolonization of colonies like India etc, the de jure slavery has been replaced by de facto

Liberal Democracy : Highway to Hell

Today, the famous "9-11".
Everyone knows of the famous New York pentagon one
Not so many know the other Chilean one
And is therefore a good day to reflect on the ideals that make the one universally known and important and the other utterly neglectable.
Ideals variously called secularism, liberalism or just plain-ol democracy

Credo of Democracy: Slavery and Freedom

A single religion holds sway today… At a sweep unprecedented in the history of humanity… Across races, sexes, peoples, continents, incomes, ages… Everyone believes the same grandiloquent Credo
The Credo of FREEDOM
And it is this credo enshrined at the centre of the UN-charter that defines our current World-Order

Lies we live by

There’s lies, damned lies, statistics Well known Mark Twain quote

Which we extend:

There’s lies, damned lies, statistics, political correctness and liberalism

Interpretation

1. Lies are… well… lies, with the millennial history of their harmful consequences
2. Damned lies reflect the fact that not all lies are equal; some have more damning consequences
3. Statistics — used thus pejoratively — reflects the use of data without conscience
4. Political correctness — the dignification of certain lies into desirable respectability
5. Liberalism (also called democracy, secularism etc) — Way of life based on PC

1 Religion is the Cause of our Problems

Quakers opposed slavery, while Democratic party supported it
Corollaries

From Science OR Spirituality to Science AND Spirituality

Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West and then seek.
George Gurdjieff

At the risk of a somewhat over-simplified equation, lets say West=Science; East=Spirituality

hvs

Reposted from my Facebook post on my teacher Hari V. Sahasrabuddhe (hvs)

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5th Sept, birthday of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, is celebrated as teacher's day.
As it happened I received a post quoting Ramana on the power of the Guru.
I cannot pretend to really understand the quote, yet it has a mysterious emotional appeal. Since it was teacher's day and everyone was posting around/about that I shared the quote [1]

Racism Sexism OtherIsm

Nowadays its fashionable to claim that racism, sexism etc are improper… even criminal. In the interest of simplicity and clarity I will club together all these burgeoning dozens and hundreds of isms into ‘tribalism’ — considering one's own higher, better more lovable than ‘the other.’
And show that it is dishonest and nonsensical to try to free humans from this instinct.
But first…

History

The history of our species is replete (hi)stories of evil. And of these some of the worst are those done with the best intentions, eg

Puritanism

which enforced an asexual life. Now that enforcement gets maximum press, neglecting the puritans' belief in it as a reasonable/natural goal. [Sure they may use other language such as Will-of-God… Doesnt change the fact that they believed this was possible.]
What if today's shrill cries against tribalism — usually in its more specific forms such as racism, sexism etc — are as nonsensical as the puritans wish and intent to exist asexually?

TODO

Links

Tribalism while not always inevitable
Obviously the opposite cannot be the norm!

East vs West : Conscience vs Karma

Take the Knowledge of the West and the Understanding of the East and seek — G I Gurdjieff

The eastern religions are consciousness-oriented; the middle-eastern religions are conscience-oriented — Ravi Ravindra

Our Times

• Britain … is Brexiting
• Germany, France, Sweden … are Immigrant-ing
• US … is Trump-eting
• Japan … is dying
• Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Burma … are burning
• Korea … um… preparing?
• Africa … is exploding

On the less political front:

• Catastrophic climate change looms ominously
• While thousands of species are already mass-extinct

In short we are looking at End-Times
Why?
In my understanding, one of the principal factors behind the collapse is the

Divergence of Conscience and Reason

Below I try to expand on this
The Western world, especially in the periods it has functioned somewhat harmoniously for the last couple of hundreds of years, is fundamentally based on the separation of our sacred and secular lives. It behoves us, to study both these sides in isolation and in union and why and how and where they work. Maybe then we may understand the breakdown we see unfolding before us today And to see why the fabric of our social existence, viz ordinary mutual relations based on a universal sense of goodness, has fallen between these sacred-secular stools.
Christianity sees and presents itself around the person (even Person — logos) of Jesus Christ. With no deficit of respect for the divine being Jesus Christ, for me (admittedly an oriental) this is excessively personalized. The real question is what are the fundamental principles of Christianity Equivalently can we shift the teachings of Christ from the person of Jesus Christ?
We may take encouragement from the fact that Jesus himself seems to have approved of this line — “Those who say father-father and do not do the will of father build a house on sand”
So what is…??

The DNA of the Christian ideal

Lets look at the original words.

• Agape, Philos in Greek
• Caritas, Amor in Latin

Unfortunately all these 6 kinds of love only get translated to ‘love’ which has very unfortunate connotation in our society. At best it signifies a wishy washy sentimentality. Mostly it has implicit or explicit sexual associations.
I would suggest that the original intent of the the Christian teaching is translated with more fidelity if instead of “love” we regard “conscience” as the central teaching of Jesus Christ
Turning now to the context and precursor to Jesus Christ…

Judaism

The first commandment I am the Lord is clearly more important than all the rest. But it begs the question: Who/what is the God being described?
So lets ask the question a little more carefully: How do we recognize those Jewish actions that are true to the spirit of Judaism?
Two words stand out in the tradition : Law and Obligation

• A jew is one who abides by the Law
• A jew is one who fulfils his/her Obligations

And now when we put these two traditions together we get one of the basic tenets of Christianity:

• From Moses to Christ was the age of Law
• From Christ onwards is the age of Grace

And here already we have a big problem: A lawless grace and an ungracious law conduce to a hell of a world.
In fact if we would allow the personalization we have

• Adam — Sin
• Noah — Favour
• Abraham — Covenant (Agreement… To grace? Or to racism?)
• Moses — Law
• Jesus — Grace
• Muhammad — Hope

And today we have no grace, no law, not even (a sense of) sin Only endless disorderly favor

• favor between individuals eg nepotism
• favor between corporations ie systematized monopolies
• favor between nations eg EU NATO and ultimately UN SC

Clearly a different integration is needed. Where shall it be found?
As at the birth the 3 wise men came from the east once again it is the wish and need ot the time to look to the East…
To us orientals, the question is naive and the answer obvious…

Karma

Colloquially we may say, a bad (unlawful) action gives us bad karma. More rigorously, the bad (or otherwise) action is itself bad or otherwise karma. This notion is so central to oriental ideology and so far from Abrahamic that it is best to leave the word karma untranslated. And remember this constellation of ideas orbiting around this word — results, consequences, cause, causality. And behind all these the fundamental scientific idea of law and lawfulness — mysteriously returning to the Judaic essence via a different route.
Karma can be obviously scientific and yet deeply metaphysical.
A man who smokes 6-packs-a-day dies of cancer — the karma is of the obvious variety. But the man (or child) who did no such thing also dies!
How to explain??
For the Oriental the answer is axiomatic: There is a reason, even if we don’t understand it.
(Then getting greatly expanded into “… because of past lives” etc)
Let us for now leave aside these elaborations and stay with the basic:
There is a reason even if this reason is not patent
How does the Christian (or Jew) answer these same riddles: It is the will of God!
Now a skeptical/secular type of person would find both these explanations similar and unsatisfactory enough to club them together as one: The typical religious crap and nonsense
[Parenthetically noting that the skeptic too has no better explanation(!!), we return to a more careful view of the choices]

• The idea of karma as a cause is at least in principle understandable even if not understandable with my current level of knowledge.
• The idea of “The will of God” is in principle beyond human understanding.

And so we reach the junction:

• The essence of Judeo Christianity is Conscience
• The essence of Hinduism and oriental philosophies is Karma

And each of these sides needs to appreciate the other
What this section I will stick with one direction: Why Judeo Christians need to understand karma? In [other section] I will also address Why orientals need to awaken conscience So we turn to actions like Angela Merkel killing Germany — too much good feeling Not enough wise-dom

Karma

is the wisdom of conscience

Conscience

is the feeling of karma

Towards Law

Judeo Christians — and the more well-intentioned the more so — need to retract for a bit from actions and even from their good intentions (if only for a bit) and to study the invisible but not too deeply hidden laws of the matrix that bind us humans together… And as far as we can see are hurtling us towards the edge

Unclassified

Rheostat of laws: Conscience

• Karma is unstranslatable into English; conscience is untranslatable into most Indian languages!
• technology growth ↑↓ loss of sensitivity
• consumerism ↑↓ reponsibility
• freedom ↑↓ protective structures
• συνείδησις in Greek used for conscience actually means self-judging consciousness. A good mid-point between conscience and karma. 
• Analogous to Greece being west of the East and east of the West

Gurdjieff's elucidations on Our One World

Beelzebub's tales by G.I. Gurdjieff has a number of detailed suggestions and cautions on how to go about making something like UN more of a success
[STUB as of now]

From figures of speech to speech of lies

1 Introduction

When studying English we are taught about figures of speech (nowadays called tropes) such as metaphor
Ultimately all languag(ing) is metaphorizing in the sense that what is being spoken (written, typed, facebooked, whatsapped, …) ABOUT is never the same as the content.
«A PhD on the mango-fruit cannot convey the taste of mango »
Therefore since truth is What is and not Whataboutery around what is, languaging is invariably lying
And yet as we get more and more hooked onto languaging, we lie more and more and notice this less and less. [Sure we notice in others we dont like… Ourselves? Exempt??]
And so if we want to backtrack from a lie-ridden life we would do well to get more conscious about the figures of speech that we think we are exploiting but are actually slave to… Starting with the master-trope…

3 Metaphors

Money

Properties of Money

Money's a matter of functions four,
A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store.

An entity to be called money is to have these 4 properties:

Medium of Exchange

For better efficiency than barter, a universal medium

Unit of Account

A universal unit that widely different things (eg fish vs a massage) can be reduced to

Store of Value

Should hold its value for a reasonable time

Standard of deferred payment

From Commodity Currency to Fiat Currency

• ◉ fiat, n.: An authoritative but arbitrary order
• ◉ fiat money, : Money without intrinsic value

• The word fiat is by definition arbitrary.
• When applied to politics it is considered the antithesis of democracy Yet most countries use fiat currency today, the more 'democratic' the more arbitrary, ie less intrinsic value… Backed by elaborate systems of duping such as fractional reserves
  And ultimately guns and nukes
• Most of the high offices of most of today's governments are staffed by criminals

▣ Today's money systems are the result of systematized criminality; With banks, governments, media being the colluding parties

Causes of Failure

• Cannot be universal when everyone does not accept issuing authority
• A standardized base unit makes sense if the conversions make sense to transacting parties, if there is any common ground between the parties.
  What will a sub-saharan African with 10 children, most of whom will not live beyond infancy, transact with an European who gets free education, with an American who's biggest grouse with the government is the raising of medicare rates?

And yet today the African can consider escaping to Europe/US

Who is Free?

Re-posting an old 'thought-dialogue' with Ramana (also called Ramana Maharshi) for 15th August, Indian Independence day
 It has been constructed by taking different parts of his writings/talks and stringing them together.  The continuity of the ideas in this form is my (invention). The individual ideas are his… hopefully!

Politician:

Today is the birthday of Sri Ramana Maharshi. The tallest sons of India ranging from Jamnalal Bajaj, Rajendra Prasad, Rajaji and Mahatma Gandhi revered him so we may consider him one amongst the great freedom fighters of India...

Veteran Freedom Fighter (an old man):

Enough! Enough! You people keep on harping on freedom only to cover up your mal-performance and misdeeds. Fighting for freedom was our big mistake. All the evils of the British have continued and increased with you people, the modern Indian politicians. I know for certain that if Mahatma Gandhi had been left alive he would have said the same. Already in his last days he was saying that power was going into the hands of people that could not be trusted. O Woe! Woe to our motherland!

UN is and must be a failure

Today 6th August, Hiroshima day, is a good day to reflect on the UN, and the yawning gap between its lofty intentions and its actual achievements.

History

The UN was created in 1945 in the closing of WWII.
In its creation it put together on equal footing countries (so-called) such as:

Area

• Maldives 300 sq-km
• Russia 17,000,000 sq-km

Population

• Tuvalu < 10,000
• China, India both > 1,300,000,000 (ie > a billion)

Age

• India, Egypt, China, Greece whose history goes back many millennia
• USA — a few hundred years old
• Pakistan, Iraq and many others that had just been cobbled together a couple of decades previously

Aggression Forces (usually euphemized as defence)

• Costa Rica, Iceland : No armies
• Antigua, Barbuda population of 100,000, has an army of 170 (ie 0.1% of population)
• China 1,250,000 troops (ie 10% population)

Murder Expenditure (also called defence budget)

• US > $600 billion pa
• Global expenditure about $1500 billion
• ie US spends between ⅓ and ½ as the whole world

And the UN effectively ratified and made equal these unimaginably disparate entities such as the above by putting them on the General Assembly (UNGA) on equal footing!!! 

And so if the UNGA is the formalization of bullshit, the 

UNSC 

is the systematization of murder.  It was formed thus:

Homo Sapiens — Physical and Metaphysical

From an evolutionary viewpoint, the human species is just a mammal, a primate evolved further than other primates.  Ok, that evolution has produced a burgeoning of intelligence, unprecedented in earlier species. But this misses the point: another function somewhat removed from intelligence.  Consider the single phenomenon of sex/mating. In itself this is common to a wide swathe of animals and even plants.

Now view it in decreasingly wide concentric circles:

UN — Whats right and whats Wrong

If there is one factor about the homo sapien species that over-shadows all others, it is war.

War we must understand in the wider sense and not just the classical ones (with bayonets!) that are quite unfashionable today but civil wars, insurgencies, terrorism and all sorts of large scale violence, oppression, occupation etc

And if it is true that war is an unwarranted and unmitigated terror, then the UN which was constituted to  ensure that the likes of WWII would not ever repeat should be considered the pinnacle of human goodness and vision.

But has it even remotely succeeded in its laudable objective? Or have the goal posts (and bunkers) just shifted?

Trying to stop wars without trying to see why they occur is to confuse symptoms with disease.

War is a symptom not the disease

Our One Earth — Introduction

The Global Challenges Foundation has put out a request for a vision for the shape of a new world — also called UN 2.0!

It asked on its Facebook Page why individuals are participating.
This is what we posted

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Aeons of time have come and gone on this planet
And in that time billions of individual humans have flourished and vanished
And the one factor common in all these ages to all these billions:
The supreme Love for oneself
Combined with the fear of ultimately inevitably non-existing