Beginning sub-ascetics

Meditation and meditative practices have been around for several thousand years, and it is tempting to think that if they had any efficacy, everyone would be meditating. The reason this argument isn’t valid is because meditation, besides everything else it is, is hard work, and the benefits are subtle (at least at the lower levels of practice.)

Another problem with meditative practices is the fact that they have frequently been tied to doctrines of theology that were at odds with the prevailing norms, and with credulity.

My own doctrine being limited to accepting that which is, I would like to propose an eminently practical rationale for meditating; the vast majority of people alive today have more control over the muscles that control their toes than they have of their mind.

Here is a simple illustrative test you can take to see how much control you have of your mind.

Sit somewhere comfortable, in a place that has few distractions. Turn off the T.V, shut off the lights, and close the door.

For the next ten minutes resolve to think only about your breathing.

Breathe in fully but comfortably, and then breathe out slowly. As you breathe out, count in your mind ‘One.’

Breathe in fully but comfortably, and then breathe out slowly. As you breathe out, count in your mind ‘Two.’

Continue this sequence until you breathe out counting in your mind ‘Nine’, and then start over again at one. Do this for about 10 cycles.

The first time I did this, I remembered about a day later that I had started it, and was quite embarrassed to find that I couldn’t remember having gotten to four. When I tried it again later that day, I realized that it was because, as had just happened, I had never gotten to four. My mind had wandered off, as I was inhaling for the count of ‘Three.’

Go ahead and try it.

Your mind is not under your conscious control.

But it can be, and more importantly, it should be.

Let this breath-counting meditation be your introduction to Heaven Path sub-ascetics.

Make a New Years resolution to practice the breathe-counting meditation for 10 minutes-a-day until you can maintain the breath count for the whole 10 minutes.

At that point, you will be able to see whether your long-term fulfillment would be improved by adding meditative practices to your daily routine.

Some unoriginal thoughts on Christmas

Well, another Christmas has come and gone.

There seems to be a lot of controversy over Christmas these days, what with municipalities having to take down decorations, and businesses having to decide whether to say Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas.

A more important consideration in my view is how your friends react to you not being able to afford presents that match the value of their gifts the previous year.

Having been relatively well off for a season, followed by a season of being broke (at a couple of times in my life,) I can tell you that particular sequence of events can be an extremely valuable experience.

It tends to shake out the fair-weather friends from the true friends.

During one particular sequence of events of this variety, a friend who had been very poor while I had been well off, found himself in the reverse position, and despite my inability to reciprocate over an indefinitely long period of time, found it in his heart to ensure that I never went a week without being taken out for dining and entertainment.

It is easy to have friends when you have money, but a friend who comes around when coming around will definitely cost money, and continues to come around, is a friend who values you for non-material reasons. This is a true friend.

The problem with Christmas is not that there is a lot of gift-giving involved, it’s that so many people see it only in terms of gift-giving, and receiving.

I can count my true friends on one hand, with no fingers left over. Some people will say that is a reason for sadness. My own observations lead me to believe that is an astronomically large number of true friends, and I say that is a reason for sadness.

Gift-giving should be incidental to the season. If it isn’t, you may need to examine your friendship selection process.

What about Heaven

The principle philosophy is called the Heaven Path, but so far we haven’t made any mention of Heaven except in the name of the philosophy.

There seems to be a lot of strife in the world, today, the source of which seems to be the intractable question of whose book actually represents the Word of God.

Aside from the rather obvious problem of believing that a book could contain the actual Word of God in religions that purport to condemn idolatry, there is also the problem of presenting anything remotely resembling objective proof that any of these books are anything but ordinary, if supremely well-crafted, books.

In fact, the only proof of the existence of God that strikes me as even remotely objective is the statistical measure of the number of people that seem to have religious feelings, that is to say, an innate propensity to believe in some form of supreme being.

Needless to say, this strikes me as only quasi-objective proof.

However, an innate tendency to believe does strike me a solid justification for considering the ‘what ifs’ of the existence of God.

Having found the Heaven Path philosophy first, and only then considered the possibility of religious justification for such a philosophy, I discovered that the philosophy held together rather well if I simply took God at face-value.

To start, let’s look at the creation that we must attribute to God.

We have what appears to be a limitless universe of near infinite complexity, which is nevertheless absolutely consistent. No matter the mysteries we uncover, sooner or later, they fold in with our more mundane knowledge to form an uninterrupted tapestry of consistency.

And no matter how closely or broadly we look, each subsequent understanding creates a whole new level of complexity and a whole new class of questions for us to ask.

If we assume that God did all of this for a reason, that is to say with an objective in mind, I think it is safe to assume it was for a good reason.

Moreover, seeing that it is God doing the creating, I think it is safe to assume that the objective could not be achieved by any of the more God-like methods that are akin to waving the Magic Wand. For whatever reason, The Objective could only be achieved through the medium of an objective creation.

At first, it seems contradictory to assume that an omnipotent being could not create something directly, and so would have to resort to some creative medium. However, this contradiction evaporates if we assume that The Objective can only be achieved through a creation that is not directly created by God. The choice of a creative medium is not a sign of lack of omnipotence, but is instead a sign of a Godly desire to be at one remove from the creation.

In creating a medium of creation for achievement of The Objective, it seems likely that each component included in the medium would be both necessary and sufficient for achieving the objective. In other words, everything that must be included to achieve The Objective is included, and anything that is not necessary to achieve the objective is left out.

It is now a relatively short step to seeing why no proof of the existence of God is available. Proof is not necessary, and lack of proof with a propensity for religious feelings is sufficient.

This makes determining what constitutes God’s Laws quite a bit easier as well. If it is possible, it’s allowed.

But it is possible to see beyond the question of God’s Law to find God’s Principles for achieving The Objective.

Humanity, the first level of the creative medium that is able to create independently, is designed in such a way that each individual is unique both in fundamental encoding, and in precise temporal and spatial point of origin.

This tells us that the exact means and method of achieving The Objective is indeterminate. The conditions necessary for achieving The Objective are in place, but the mechanics of achieving The Objective are left to random selection.

And if God does not know, by His own choice, how the mechanics are to play out, there is no way for us to know.

Which brings us to God’s First Principle for achieving The Objective: Each Creative Being is Fundamentally Inviolate. That is to say, those who fancy themselves to be engaged in achieving The Objective must not obstruct the fulfillment potential of other creative beings beyond what is necessary to prevent them from obstructing your fulfillment potential.

Do not do unto others, that which would be obstructive if done unto you.

A Heaven Path Abstract

I guess now would be a good time to give an abstract of my Heaven Path philosophy.

The Heaven Path consists of two components, a philosophy and a practical methodology.

The philosophy is fairly easy to expound. For every human, there is a path that leads from their first moment of willful self-determination to their death that, if followed, will result in the maximum possible fulfillment for that person.

The path is different for each person, and is determined by every factor that affects the fundamental nature of that person. These factors include genetic inheritance, the time and space coordinates of birth, and complete environmental conditions experienced during development to the point of self-determination.

The Heaven Path is a philosophy of navigating, or more properly, wayfaring this path, and in so doing, achieving the maximum fulfillment in the time available.

This is not a complicated concept.

On the other hand, effectively finding and navigating ones Heaven Path is somewhat more involved.

One is at first tempted to think that merely following ones whims will accomplish the same thing.

The problem is that humans are easily obstructed, and are continually supplied with distractions that, if pursued, will waste time and resources and, ultimately, provide no fulfillment.

This brings us to the second component of the Heaven Path philosophy, which is the practical methodology.

The practical methodology is a minimal routine of activities that if practiced regularly and sincerely, will assist the Heaven Path traveler to overcome obstacles and ignore distractions along the way.

The practical methodology is called Sub-ascetics. I chose the name sub-ascetics to denote the fact that the practices were ascetic in nature, but did not actually require the ascetic’s renunciation of worldly life to practice effectively. There are two main categories of sub-ascetic practices, that of physical exercise, and that of meditation.

As we proceed, I will discuss both the philosophical implications and the sub-ascetics practices, and there effects, in more detail.

What's it all about?

In everyone’s life there comes a time when the various strings of our intentions become unmanageable, usually brought on by our first compelling confrontation with the fact of our own mortality, and a fundamental principle of life is sought to assist us in sorting out what is actually important for us to complete in our remaining time, from what should be set aside as ultimately unfulfilling.

A significant problem that we encounter in choosing a fundamental principle within which to operate is the question of whether a principle that appeals to us, and our predilections, is in fact, a ‘True’ principle.

If we spend a long time sincerely studying this question, and its possible answers, we eventually arrive at the conclusion that both the question and the answers are meaningless because, in every case, the True-ness of the answer will depend on which point of view that we approach it from. Whether this is a result of the nature of reality, or the nature of the language that our mind ultimately uses to perform such work, this is invariably the answer to the question.

In this work, I don’t propose to provide a ‘True’ principle that the average person can depend on for sorting out what is important from what isn’t, that is to say a principle that is universally true. Instead, I intend to propose a principle that, when understood, will strike the average, and well-above average, person as being capable of satisfying the requirements for a functional, fundamental principle that the adoption of which will result in a fulfilling and fulfilled life.

The principle that I will describe and illuminate is the principle that I arrived at in the course of my own search.

We might now ask what constitutes a fulfilled life, and what is the virtue of fulfillment over, say, success?

This question becomes somewhat easier to answer if we first ask when this answer will be important to us?

Whether one is successful or not in any particular endeavor is far less important when a person is young, because when you are still young it is no major problem to simply start over, what with having lots of time left to obtain success.

However, as we get closer to the end of the road, each failure represents a greater chunk of the time remaining to us being spent without obtaining the sought-after rewards of that chunk of time spent. In other words, the time spent was wasted, at least as far as achieving our goals.

This leads us to believe that success or fulfillment will be progressively more important as we get older, and more specifically, as we run out of time.

So, what is success?

Success is fulfillment of ones objectives, whatever those objectives happen to be.

Then, what is fulfillment?

Fulfillment is success in the objectives that one should have pursued if they knew what successes would result in one being able to pass from this life knowing that one’s time was well spent.

At this time, a cartoon panel comes to mind, which regrettably, I am unable to find a citation for. A very old man lays on his deathbed, surrounded by a large crowd of obviously tearful and loving family and friends. As the old man breathes his last, he has a final thought, which is memorialized in a thought bubble over his head. In his final moment, he thinks to himself “Damn, I should have bought more crap!”

The first ingredient

The first ingredient I put in any meal served at the Heaven Path Diner is the answer to the problem of ambiguity in the language and perception of our shared reality.

Modern science has brought to light a rather interesting phenomenon that should be kept in mind by the searcher for fulfillment, that being the phenomenon of complimentarity.

If you were a scientist studying the fundamental phenomenon of light, you might desire to set up an experiment that you can use to prove once and for all that light is made up of particles. There are a variety of ways that you might do this, and if the method you choose adheres to all the accepted scientific principles for conducting such experiments, you would no doubt end up with absolutely inescapable proof that light is, in fact, particulate in its nature.

Unfortunately, your scientific neighbor had the same idea, but decided to prove that light was wave-like in nature. Having adhered to the aforementioned scientific principles, his results are equally conclusive that light is wave-like.

So, which result is correct?

This particular scientific battle has been fought out for most of a century, and the only conclusion that holds together across time is that both results are correct within the perspective each was derived in.

This is complimentarity. That at the most basic level, scientific results may be antithetical and still be correct. The correctness will, however, be limited to the fundamental perspective of the research.

We find complimentarity in a wide variety of non-scientific pursuits such as religion and politics. In religion we see it in theism vs. atheism, gnosticism vs. agnosticism, works vs. faith, etc. In politics we find it in liberalism vs. conservatism, authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and so forth.

Anyone who has ever tried to argue any of the above subjects with someone of the opposing bent has probably arrived at the conclusion that the opposing party is speaking a language where the words they are using have a different meaning than that of the same words when used by you.

This is essentially the case.

This is not to say that there aren’t some blind, ignorant debaters out there, but if we always start with the assumption that the other party is as sincere and intellectually honest as we are, and why would you bother to debate with someone who you believed to be otherwise, then a failure to adequately communicate should first be considered as being a result of arguing from complimentaritous perspectives.

That is to say, if you want to change the mind of a liberal, your argument will have to be conducted within the liberal perspective. If you want to change the mind of a conservative, then your argument will have to be conducted within the conservative perspective.

The reason for this is found in the principle of complimentarity. Just because a liberal position is untenable in the conservative perspective doesn’t make it wrong. It does however make the argument itself fail because one side is arguing apples, and the other side is arguing oranges.

The above discussion might be seen as just another defense of ‘relativism,’ and it is, but it also describes the way things ultimately are in our shared reality.

So, to feed the spirit, we must frequently dine on complimentarity.

Of course, the concept of complimentarity existed a long time before that particular term was used to describe it.

We find it in a very old book from China called the Dao De Ching, in such sayings as “The path that can be spoken of is not the true path.” and “He that thinks he knows, doesn’t know, but he that doesn’t know, knows.”

In your quest for eternal fulfillment you should seek to incorporate complimentarity into your understanding.

Welcome to the Heaven Path Diner

Today, and everyday, we feel our religious feelings, and quest for answers to the big and little questions that plague our lives. Some believe that they have found the answers, but deep inside suffer great doubt. Some believe that there are no answers, but deep inside continue to ask the questions. And some yearn for fulfillment, but experience only hunger and thirst of the spirit.

I have tasted of the living water, and supped on the meat of eternal fulfillment, and with this joining of the very old and the very new, I wish to create a rest-stop for the unfulfilled traveler, that you also may stop in along your path and have your fill.

Please, join us, when you hunger and thirst for spiritual nourishments, here, at the Heaven Path Diner.