To step away from the treadmill

When Socrates (according to Plato) was asked to define Justice, he began world-building to model a scenario. His first try was to describe a subsistence-based society.

His audience would not have it, demanding a model based on Athens. Socrates noted that such a model represents unsustainability, requiring the acquisition of resources already in use by someone else. The first model was just. The second was patently not, yet it is the one studied to this day for ways to achieve justice. Our society's authoritarian narratives tend to be threatened by the point Plato was making, so to avoid being the tall poppies, we carefully miss the point.

Siddhartha Gautama, a silver-spoon oligarch, being bored one day, ordered up his chariot to go for a spin, but encountered a sick person, an old person, and a dead person. He realized his palatial life ran on delusion, handed over his chariot and fancy duds to his charioteer, and absconded to try out various versions of subsistence-based living.

What had he seen? I'd say, entropy. As Dogen says, "firewood becomes ash. It does not turn into firewood again." ("he's dead, Jim.")

What was the delusion? I posit teleology. Those who seek power over others devise narratives of purpose to support their authority. But teleologies always eventually fail; the closest thing to "purpose" that can be detected in the universe is that it must run itself down; not a popular idea with authoritarians.

Buddha formed a free association of like-minded individuals and opposed the current teleology. His eight-points yoga consisted of clear-seeing, determination, clean and spare speech, refraining from abuse of others, refraining from working in an exploitive system, bringing one's all, staying mindful, concentrating. This yoga supports a low-energy-consuming lifestyle rather than the high-energy-consuming lifestyle buttressed by delusion (teleological narratives promulgated by authoritarians).

Over time Buddha clarified "right action" and "right livelihood" with what he perhaps had hoped would be self-evident rules: not killing, not stealing, not lying, not horndogging, not glue sniffing, not gossiping, etc. And added some "wisdoms" -- generosity, virtue, patience, diligence, concentration and insight.

Many such lists were devised. They overlapped, but that was fine; they were mnemonics for an oral culture. They could be summed up by the word "restraint." His followers were taught to restrain themselves from participating in the illusion of power. A subsistence-based lifestyle is a very direct, in-the-moment lifestyle, restrained from abusing, exploiting, profiteering, colonizing. A rich Buddhist is oxymoronic.

Gandhi had his issues, but his methods had some point. The aim was to throw off the oppressive colonizers. Sarvodaya and Satyagraha included equality, simplicity, nonviolence, truth-telling, not stealing, right livelihood, refraining from covetousness, gluttony, anger, or abusiveness. This aspect of the movement was the practice of being the opposite of a colonizer in every possible way. Resistance was grounded in the simple living that does not go shopping.

Not remembered now by many, Charles Gray, a sometime Quaker from the US Pacific Northwest, once a millionaire, gave away his money and possessions and built from scraps, with his partner, a tiny house that could be disassembled and relocated. Fearlessly shaving any costs they could think of from their lives, they aimed to live at or below the world average income and largely succeeded, despite being in the US.

I think the common thread between Socrates, Buddha, Gandhi and Gray, and many others such as Peace Pilgrim or Dorothy Day, is

1. Noticing the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
2. Noticing the link between entropy and suffering,
3. Noticing that those determined to have more than their share of energy occasion great suffering,
4. Not really wanting to be a part of that.

Religions in general are, to my mind, futile efforts to escape the Second Law: Heaven, the Pure Land, Taoist immortality. I think these are bogus; that law is immutable. I also think this notion of restraint looks kind of weak on the face of it. If all the universe, and every species in it, must perforce destroy heaps of energy wherever found, what's the virtue in trying not to do what must and will be done, let alone escape the consequences?

I do feel inclined to stay out of the rain, dress warm, eat enough, drink clean water and breathe clean air, and I want these things for those around me, as is natural. The two ways of going about this are

1. to destroy just enough heaps of energy to provide for me and mine as needed, within available cyclicity of solar energy replenishment.
2. to keep destroying more and more heaps of energy to provide a seemingly infinite cushion against the unforeseen, drawing down energy that has been banked in fossil fuels.

That's reductionist, of course; it leaves out discussion of, for example, nuclear power and its advantages (and significant real and potential drawbacks, such as political or state instability: see under Zaporizhia Power Plant).

But to the point: 1. enough, or 2. too much?

Why even consider too much? Well, we've had droughts and famines and such. Many families and tribes, even cities and nations, have been wiped out over time, and there's an impulse to avoid genetic dead ends, exigencies that endanger one's DNA's project. We like the endorphins, so we reproduce. The compulsion to do so, on average, is very strong.

We see this at maximum in today's futurist techbros. Noting risks that have burgeoned in our time, they seek a hail Mary that will throw their DNA forward with certainty, and willingly will sacrifice your DNA and that of their MAGA supporters to try to achieve it. I feel theirs is a fool's errand, though I'm not good at the math that would confirm this. Maybe Tom Murphy's textbook will convince.

You know when your checking account is about to be overdrawn that it is time to not write another check until after the next deposit. All of us having an overdrawn solar energy account together is the problem of our time, to which other aspects of the issue, such as hoarding of (the overdrawn) wealth by the rich, or pollution, or heat, or drought, or flooding, or crop failure, are but aspects.

Colonizers, religionists, dictators, enclosers of the commons, charlatans, grifters, marketers and rent-seekers repel most of us with their self-aggrandizing schemes. With Socrates, we feel that running a white-hot Athens with its marketplace of baubles is going to get our kids fed to some kind of Moloch made up of Tesla fenders, and we resent this. Yet we'll go on buying endless streams of plastic, saying "living well is the best revenge."

There has to be a better way.

I think there is.

Look closely at "time." There's nothing to what we call the past but memories and records in the present. Likewise, there's nothing to what we call the future but speculation, based on implicit or explicit statistical inferences from memory and records.

Zen folks say that a lot, then say there is only the present moment, but that falls a little short.

Take a tray, put about sixteen marbles on it, maybe with a little sand to hold the marbles still, and arrange them equidistantly as you are able.

Now give the tray a little shake.

The ordering of the marbles becomes a bit randomized.

We measure "time" by measuring movement. The marbles moved, but they did not "time," they "moved." As a side note for now, you can shake marbles into disorder but into order, not so much.

I posit "time" is "entropy."

You can manage chowing down on a small energy heap with less effort than on a large energy heap. This may entail accepting run-of-the-mill environmental risk, but the payoff is "life now" -- as opposed to "maybe rich later" and also "whoops, a few getting rich killed us all off" -- the disasters historically faced by villages are smaller in scale than the disasters brought on by multinational corporations. Restraint in production and consumption can stave off those preventable disasters.

Socrates, Buddha, Gandhi, Charles Gray and Robin Kimmerer (adding her in here for reasons, go read her book) are onto something: "Show a little restraint."

Good and evil are labels. What is, is. And from our point of view there's less of it all the "time," that is to say, the Sun will run down and long before it goes, we'll be gone. We can therefore decide nothing has intrinsic meaning (which it doesn't) and be cruel to one another by enclosing and hoarding the commons, or just not. The discovery that there is no intrinsic meaning to our surroundings doesn't mean we can't enjoy planting a potato.

At this point in my scrambled and repetitive thoughts about these things, I tend to want to wax prescriptive, and this tendency is being enhanced, if you will, by oncoming dementia. So, some speculation:

Most outcomes are short-term. Once you have been treated unjustly, the injustice may rankle with any descendants you may have, but when you die, you personally will feel no injustice.

Likewise, if you have treated someone with respect and generosity regardless of "rank," the effects of that too will dissipate and be forgotten, and you will die soon enough and so will the other person, both soon forgotten.

We try to fend off this natural process by investing in imagined futures. "Sin," whereby an unjust action is remembered by an invisible entity and held against you in the afterlife, and "merit," whereby a just action is counted by an invisible entity, giving you a ticket to a paradise, are simply concepts that we have.

That's fine. I never liked being corralled into my life choices by either the impossible stick or the impossible carrot, and I bet I'm not alone in this.

What we do have is this one life right here.

It's at this point in my musings that I remember Occam's Razor. The bishop noted that we tend to spin our intellectual wheels when we offer more causes for an observed reality than are necessary for that reality to exist.

It's a powerful tool for thought as it has been applied, to call out delusions. I'd like to try to stretch it a bit: we tend to spend our lives fruitlessly when we seek to pad our resources beyond what the general energy budget from the Sun will support. To look to fossil fuels, or the resources in lands inhabited by others, or the resources on which other families in our communities depend, for the maintenance of our own or our families' (or tribes') comfort, is like Occam's "multiplying entities needlessly."

If you shake a tray with six equidistant marbles on it, it's easier to put the marbles back in order than if you shake a tray with sixteen, or sixty, or sixteen hundred, marbles on it.

Buddha reacted to the discovery of suffering by reducing complexity. He also taught the reduction of complexity. That he taught it is suggestive. He considered all beings his family.

Gandhi reacted to colonialism by recommending reduction of complexity. By living simply, truthfully, and cleanly, with practically no shopping, satyagrahis could concentrate on resistance. The colonizers had fewer handles of manufactured needs by which to get a grip on them.

Charles Gray was able to pay rent on a room or a spot for his hut without rejoining the rat race, because his other costs were relatively low -- foraging, a meatless diet, sweater instead of a heater, healthy exercise (without paying a gym), conversation in the place of costly entertainments. Restraint is energy descent, if you will.

Although I fall into the "this is good, that is evil" mindtrap as much as anybody, I have set myself the task of looking for ways to reduce complexity and then examining the apparently entrained circumstances. How do I feel? Am I ... happier?

Who even knows what the hell that is? But it seems like I am. I let a thing go, give it away, reduce, repurpose, recycle, make, mend, forage, sit watching clouds and rainbows, visit a crow, garden, make weed tea for the things gardened.

To reduce gratuitous complexity, to "draw down," feels to me as something like decolonization. It doesn't take away the crunching sound of the Turtle Island bones I'm walking on, but it may lead away from unconscionably adding yet more bones to the pile. 

The very fact that those in charge of complexity were willing to destroy the institutions of public health, and the lives of millions, to keep us shopping, suggests there's a lot at stake here.

Not to prescribe for y'all, but me, I'm kinda ready to step away from their treadmill as able. I regard subsistence as the sustainable lifestyle, therefore the most ethical.

Appendix 1: Stuart McMillen's comix. See, in particular, St. Matthew Island, Peak Oil, and Energy Slaves. 

Appendix 2: Most of my non-Buddhist bookmarks.

One head!

I've brought a head of red cabbage into the tiny hut kitchen to blanch, pickle and water bath can, using the few narrowmouth lids I have on hand (small jars). About half of this will go in the freezer. All will be small batches, to have with rice, spuds or noodles.

Red cabbage being cut up for steaming in the little old Aroma rice cooker
with onion greens, carrots, sweet peppers, water, vinegar, sea salt, maple
syrup, spices to taste.

[later] All done; it made about six pints of canned "imitation kimchi" in jars and five pints in bags in the hut freezer. That's enough for about thirty-three meals for me, in combination with other ingredients.

Two heads, they say, are better than one, but thirty-three meals' worth of cabbage is a lot for me in one year. So it's as well that only one of my cabbages made a head! I'm fine with that; the collards did much better and will likely be the main winter veg this year.

We are a two-headed species. One head witnesses a singing bird. The other talks to itself: "Oh, there's a singing bird." This monologue appears to be a step away from the world, or what could be called nature, even though of course the monologue occurs within nature -- it can't be anywhere else! But we fool ourselves.

The epitome of such fooling is when we try, sometimes with horrible success, to fool one another. As a civilization we're approaching fully automated 24/7 fooling, with a corresponding massive leap in gratuitous suffering.

Zen folks have a project to let go of that second head, for as much of the time as is practicable. Releasing the past as regret, releasing the future as expectation, hear the bird, see the garden, inhale, exhale, cut the cabbage.

The Woman Lets It Be

Hidden Lamp, p.62

 

Master Langye Huijue had a woman disciple who came to him for instruction.  The master told her to examine the saying “Let it be.”  He said that if she faithfully used this sentence as a scythe, she would cut down illusions and reap enlightenment.

 

The woman followed his instructions faithfully.  One day her house burned down and she said, “Let it be.”  ....

One day she started to make fried cakes for dinner as her husband lit the fire.  She prepared the batter and heated the oil, then poured a spoonful of batter into the hot oil.

 

When she heard the sizzling sound, she was immediately enlightened.  She threw the pan to the ground and jumped up and down, clapping her hands and laughing.

 

Her husband shouted at her, “What are you doing?  Have you gone mad?”  She answered, “Let it be.”

 

Then she went to Huijue and he confirmed that she had indeed harvested the holy fruit.

 

 

Question:

If we ignore the details of daily life, things fall apart.  But if we don’t ignore them, we may lose ourselves in those very details.  What is the middle way?