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Be at ease. But no, I don't really think I did. My mindset is very much one of seeing each and every person as a stance in an endless flow of influences and inheritances.
Now don't you believe that the culmination of those influences for every person are different in one form or another? For instance if you took all of my influences out and put them in a bucket and all of yours out and put them in a bucket, would we see two buckets of the same thing? Now this is regardless of what influenced my influences because when you get to that point you have already dismissed the individual.
My thoughts are what circunstances make of them. And while my decisions and choices are part of those circunstances, they are never truly separated from them.
Yes but are those circumstances not your circumstances? For instance say my current circumstance is me sitting on a bus. Now of course you are correct, me sitting on a bus thinks differently then me parachuting out of an airplane at 20k feet but there still remains one problem. If I am sitting on a bus and you are on the same bus and I am sitting on the right side and you the left and it just so happens that the right side gets hit by a train and I die but you live. I have died because of my circumstances and you have lived because of your circumstances. Your circumstances are, just as your thoughts, exclusive to you. There is no single person with the same thoughts or circumstances at you at any given time.
That I believe we have too many people and too little support structure for them, I guess. I wish people had less children and that families were looser and more caring. And I am at least a bit sad that demographic levels and economic disparities just keep rising.
Actually, It's interesting that people are having less children now than ever before. The only problem is that the descendents of the people who had a bunch of children a long time ago are those people. So we have a BUNCH of people having less children.
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That could come a bit clearer, for sure.
What I mean is that I don't much like to realize that while people are born much the same, their circunstances are often wildly different and leave them marks that have no true relation to their individual merits or efforts. People aren't born in poor or unloving families out of personal fault, yet they pay for it all the same. I see the conscious decision to change that reality as a major part of our duties, both social and religious.
More often than not the most successful are the people who have come from the worst. My grandfather grew up in a family of 8 brothers and sisters and a single mom. He was the oldest of all of his siblings. It was a poor family, in a poor farming town and a place without much worth. My grandfather decided he was going to get out of there, he graduated highschool the top of his class while holding a job so that he could bring home food for his family and he then went to college and studies Nuclear Physics. After college he joined the Navy and made ships for them. After that he consulted the people who made ships for them. It is overcoming our limitations which gives birth to our brilliance.
I have only one problem with the Buddha's philosophy, and it has nothing to do with him, but rather the interpretation of his philosophy. The Buddha never said that suffering was bad. He never said that. Much rather he said that life is suffering. And he said further that the cause of suffering is attachment. The sad thing about life is that no matter how bad things are people can remain attached to those bad things, and they often do. Instead of changing their situation they would rather sit and remain attached to it.
To put it in another way, I live in a country where many people have a belief that we somehow "earned" whichever birth circunstances we had. I make a point of denying support to such a view.
I could see how you would deny that. On the cover it seems a terrible philosophy. But in the end it is correct. My mind, my body, my disorders and the problems that I have are all a result of the people I have come from. Also my standing in life. My social status. My geographical location. They are all based on actions made by my ancestors and I accept that. And that is what people have to recognize is that what they do now, decides for generations how their descendants will live.
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And you are quite correct. It is indeed scary, and defining the criteria and taking responsibility for them is IMO a major, permanent challenge.
I see that as a personal responsibility, an important component of moral character: the sincere attempt of developing moral awareness and wisdom.
My only problem is that all of the societies and countries which have done things similar to this have at the same time killed a lot of people.
To a point. Our situations and circunstances are so deeply inter-related that it is not really all that hard to notice patterns and opportunities and realize which choices are ultimately more socially and ethically sound. Choosing one's goals is not very arbitrary. Or at least, it doesn't have to be. All it takes is daring to notice what one's social environment demands.
It is certainly possible to select subject matters that are not of clear moral relevance. But the point is that it is fairly easy to select others that have such relevance, and to dedicate as much of our time and effort to them as we wish. In a practical sense, that is quite enough.
