I watched a TED talk (so many inspiring speakers that make me extremely happy to be alive today) concerning the moral roots of liberals and conservatives. At the end, the presenter, Jonathan Haidt, drove home the concept of moral humility and the act of removing oneself from being for or against anything.

He referenced Seng-Ts’an, a zen master who died in 609 AD. Here are some transcriptions of his work Hsin Hsin Ming. I’ve copied a piece of it below to make it easier to read, but the words in total are worth reading.

Hsin Hsin Ming (The Mind of Absolute Trust)

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meaning of things is not understood
the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

It is a fascinating concept to be able to remove yourself from all the concepts you hold dear and have a true open mind.

There is NO LOITERING ALLOWED on this planet, move along please!

Wake-up, brush teeth, get in car, listen to NPR, arrive at work, attend meetings, go to lunch at corner cafe, have an afternoon cup of coffee, watch the clock, walk by the same folks on the way to the car, sit in traffic, listen to NPR, pull in the driveway, put your briefcase on the ottoman, hope someone made dinner, decline other activities because work wore you out, stay up too late fooling around on the web, crawl into bed wondering were the last three years went.

I have goals and dreams; I have to make them happen…but instead I am a functioning cog and it seems like I am encouraged to be just that —> have a good job, nice things, great credit, kept appearance —> an all-around non-loitering, functioning member of society… and I do not know how to break free to follow my dreams.

The problem is, I have to loiter if I’m going to make my very worthwhile dreams come true. I have to sit and think, I have to have time to sit and think, and I have to have my necessities taken care of so I can think and perform the tasks that it takes to achieve my dreams.  As a thirty-year-old, I can move into my parent’s shed for the next six months and actually make my dreams come true… but my parents would not understand the value in their child living in the shed and most everyone else wouldn’t see it either. But it doesn’t matter, even if I had a place to exist without having to pay for basics, I have to pay back loans for an education and I have to insure everything I own in case of accident or malfunction… got to make the cold, hard cash.

So, I can save up so that I can handle my “idling” expenses while I pursue my dreams, I can double up on work so that I  can make progress on my dreams at night (which would make 16 hours of computer staring), I can loose everything I own and go into default and bum off of soon-to-be-ex-friends, I could find a higher paying job and pay someone to make my dreams materialize, or I could just give up and go to work, come home, have a beer, sleep and do it again, all the while feeling like all I really need to do is be more productive than I already am.

Dear person, you are the only one who will make your dreams come true; here is some happiness advice.

You are held captive in a cave, and the only things you can see are shadows cast on the wall.
It’s that way for as long as you can remember: the shadows are all that you know.
One day, you escape from the cave. This forces you to re-think everything you’ve ever known to be true.
As you get over the trauma of being outside, you learn that there’s a fuller and more expansive truth, outside the cave.
If you go back to the cave and try to describe “real life” to people who are still captive… they don’t understand.
They’ll never understand until they experience it for themselves.
I’m fascinated by how this simple story has so many immediate analogies:

More on this last one, “our eyes are the cave”: In the eye, light rays are projected through a dark space onto a surface. We can only see waves in the “visible spectrum.” We can only see such a limited version of what’s going on around us. We’re missing out on x-rays and gamma rays and radio waves!

In a way, the story is like the story of your birth:

For a long time you were trapped in a cave. You felt restricted there, but you were totally taken care of.
Then one day you had to get out. You just couldn’t take it anymore. That day was the day you were born.
Coming out of the womb was the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to you. You’ve basically blocked it out of your memory.
But afterward, you learned that there’s a lot more to life. You could never go back into that cave.

So you were literally born with the story of Plato’s cave… that fascinates me!

(read more by Spozbo Moswell)

Ramble Ramble Ramble:

Seems like time is free, seems like it doesn’t really exist, seems like it’s worth what you are willing to trade for it or what will get you something that you could trade for what you really want. Seems like we invest a lot of time trying to make our time valuable and still it is only as valuable as someone is willing to pay for it given the circumstances. How much is happiness worth and is happiness worth time? Is what we want from our time really happiness and we are giving our time to others to get money to get happiness? Maybe we could bypass the money middle man and go straight to the time in happiness payment. Does happiness buy food? Time buys food? What we receive in exchange for our time buys food. What if we exchange our time for food directly and bypass the money middle man? Will my time ever be worth anything if I keep giving it away for free? What is helping others worth? It seems there are a lot of potential payoffs of time. Sometimes my time is worth happiness, sometimes my time is an investment in happiness, sometimes my time is worth money, and sometimes my time is worth life. My time is worth my life or my life is worth my time. My life is worth money, but really my life is worth happiness.

Have you ever seen stars trying to walk through a crowd and not get noticed? It’s funny. You are fascinated with them even though they are complete strangers, you know the reputation that precedes them, there is a weight to your gaze, … and they handle it in one way or another.

I’ve been in situations were I have been so fascinated by a person that it has compelled me to take a picture! Imagine that.

I’ve also not taken a picture because for some reason I felt their awareness… they would be affected in the manner that I feared most, they would die a little inside. It’s like still having hope after the millionth let down; another person couldn’t give me the decency of normality.