Don't Become Beholden to a Philosophy.

a longtime viewer of the channel wrote
in sent me an email saying he's been reading but his philosophy says how much buddhist philosophy means to him personally asks about how much buddhist philosophy meant to me brought about personal transformations for i myself in a separate paragraph the same email he mentions that he's been saving up money from his job for i guess several years and he's thinking about taking a lengthy vacation in thailand of one or two years i take these things seriously and when people tell me this sort of thing about their life i think very often i take what they're telling me much more seriously than they do themselves you're planning to spend a year or two in thailand not egypt why not egypt no seriously why not if your life is 100 years long two years really is much more than two percent of it because there are a whole lot of years in your life where you have no control over where you are and what you're doing with your time most of us the first 20 years of our life we didn't have that much control over our parents head control our school whatever their years of your life where your job as control or you're raising kids yourself or you're in the army and you're fighting in world war 4 whatever the situation be you don't know how many years you get to make that decision for so if you're going to take two years of your life let's go to thailand that's a big decision that i take i take very seriously i may take that much more seriously than you do yourself if it's not egypt you may not think of it this way you may be passing up now the opportunity to go to egypt live in egypt get to know you forever you may never get the opportunity to live in egypt again and you you probably didn't even think of it that way you probably didn't think of what it was you were sacrificing to make this time in thailand possible but you're sacrificing the whole world now of course it's a little bit surreal if what we're talking about is buddhist philosophy is it because buddhism doesn't come from thailand buddhist philosophy is not now and never was written in the thai language it's written in an indian language that only survives in sri lanka called pali so we get in some very interesting questions as to why it would be thailand if this is about buddhism but maybe it's not i'm not going to presume this about my reader who wrote in to tell me this and ask my opinion um i think on some deep level we appreciate that to have contact with what's ancient and profound and meaningful in egypt would be hard work i think all of us as western english-speaking modern people can also appreciate maybe without even realizing what the thoughts and assumptions of going to it that to have contact with the political and social reality of egypt today of modern egypt to understand what's happening in egypt now what happened in the last 20 years to make it this way and then to begin to really think about what's going to happen in the next 20 years we can appreciate that if that to have that kind of meaningful connection to egypt would be hard work why is it that people think they can have a really meaningful connection with ancient buddhism in thailand and with the reality of what thailand is today modern thailand and that's going to be easy that it's going to be a vacation it would be unbelievably hard work and and i'm in a position to know it would be a tremendous sacrifice that would change you for the rest your life maybe for the better and i think you can probably appreciate that if you just think through what if you decided to take two years to learn the egyptian dialect of arabic and i don't even know what your interest would be in egypt it could be modern politics it could be uh archaeology and egyptology or even just the tourism industry there connected ancient egypt i don't know but if you think about how that would change you two years in the desert shall we say in egypt i think it's very clear how high the stakes are and somehow somehow and i think youtube's been a huge part of it people have lulled themselves into thinking thailand is easy right and that there's nothing that you're gonna lose here and and what is it let's think really clearly what is it you think that you're gonna gain see this this guy in two separate paragraphs he just says to me there's some kind of meaningful connection to buddhism and then there's an interest in him he's saving up money and spending one year or two years in thailand if he doesn't make any specific claim about this being uh a spiritual journey or a search for a more meaningful life or self-transformation he doesn't say anything like that it may be it may be consciously that's what he's looking for it may be that he's not conscious of the extent of which that's what he's hoping for right very few people will tell you openly that they are seeking the kingdom of god on earth a lot of us are right a lot of us sign up for humanitarian work in a third world country and we're looking for something a lot more meaningful than just washing the feet of the poor or seeing a starving man eat a loaf of bread there's not a whole lot of spiritual depth to that there may be something else philosophically spiritually that he wants he may not have thought that all the way through either okay if you're talking to me about two years in thailand and it's it's somehow about philosophy and it's about who you are and who you're going to become let me ask you why is it thailand and not greece why is it not athens and delphi and what the hell we can throw in the outer islands too but whatever there are archaeological sites and ancient literature connect all parts of greece not just not just uh athens and delphi why why isn't it greece now i'll tell you something okay i was not raised poor i was raised by insane left-wingers i was raised by communists my parents were my parents idealized poverty and i got to see my parents go from being really poor to getting into the middle class and then kind of by the time it was too late toward the end of my time at university they had they had money to spare they were their financial fortune improved uh during my teenage years let's say all right i thought about doing ancient greek and latin when i was a young man i felt intimidated i felt that was something for people who were born wealthier than i am i thought that was for people who were more talented or more brilliant than i am that it was some kind of tremendous challenge that only people with special privileges could possibly take on all right and i was wrong and i'll regret that for the rest of my life from my perspective today ancient greek and modern greek these are punk languages they're incredibly easy languages incredibly easy work to do latin are you kidding me compared to working on cambodian thai the ocean pali burmese the languages i've worked on currently chinese in the past japanese also worked on incredibly difficult languages incredibly difficult political history social history okay all that stuff from my perspective now as an old man is easy but when i was young i felt that intimidation i felt that chill of institutional elitism like somehow the philosophy of greece and athens and rome and italy and whatever the philosophy of ancient europe let's put it that way ancient mediterranean that somehow that was something unapproachable so some would take tremendous sacrifice tremendous resources to approach all right maybe i was wrong and maybe there's a reason to be intimidated there's a reason to be afraid because we all of us can sense that it would be hard work yes you can go on vacation in greece and if all you do is go on vacation in greece what you will have access to are beaches alcohol dance clubs games football to those of you who are in europe right the culture of modern greece is visual of against you and of course only in as much as you can communicate in the greek language or in broken english or however you get by but you're going to have an incredibly shallow vacuous experience unless you make some extraordinary effort again either to connect with the philosophy with the ancient history with the modern history with what happened the last 20 years of greece what's going to happen the next 20 years what it is that really makes greece what it is in some meaningful and profound sense and we all feel that that would be tremendously hard work and you know funniest thing is i don't know what it is about thailand even when you contrast what people think of when you say you're going to take a year off to live in thailand what if you told them you're going to take a year off to live in cambodia what if it was a year off to live in myanmar also known as bra that sounds different does that starts to sound like hard work so why why is it that you would think that in thailand you could have an intellectual vacation and and sort of get the the benefits sort of get the rewards that in some other place in some other cultural location like egypt or greece we can so easily see in our minds that would take extraordinary effort extraordinary self-discipline an extraordinary amount of work and you know of course above all else which you're what you're dealing with is the language barrier but sure you're also just struggling to to overcome your own ignorance all of these things are finite in terms of the philosophy of ancient greece the more you know the less there is to know there are not that many books to read from ancient greece the pali canon the the true philosophy of ancient buddhism it's finite i could walk you through it if you pay me to teach you a course in one year i could probably teach you everything you want to know about buddhist philosophy i got better things to do but you know it's finite the literature is finite the culture is finite the politics the philosophy it's finite you can do it you can learn it but to think of that and recognize that as work and to recognize that even if you live a hundred years how many years do you have where you're able bodied and energetic and able you know not just financially but every other way to either go to egypt or to go to thailand and why really are you talking to me about going to thailand for two years right i i don't presume to know i take what you say to me seriously do you send me this email i take this really seriously and when i look back at my own life i mean nobody took it seriously when i told him i was gonna i told people yeah i'm gonna go to cambodia and do humanitarian work and people just rumbled up their faces and snarled and laughed and this is the most ridiculous thing what was meaningful to me okay i did not go to cambodia to find the kingdom of heaven on earth i did not go there as a christian missionary and i didn't go there as a buddhist missionary i went for a combination of reasons that were really meaningful to me you know when i was there in canada i can't tell the whole story in this video i went to cambodia to do a combination of humanitarian work and research that meant a lot to me and my own brothers and sisters and parents all they could do was snarl and be snarky i think none of those people would even admit today what [ __ ] they were to me about it they didn't get it and they didn't want to know and you know what none of us are on speaking terms today none of us are none of us get along i mean these things have long-term consequences um for for everyone involved all right so you know now again someone else might have presumed i wanted to go to cambodia for stereotypical hippie reasons for stereotypical spiritual reasons or even stereotypical buddhist reasons and i'm not such a stereotypical guy so i don't presume about you the dude who sent me this email i don't presume that i know your reasons but i'm saying probably whatever your reasons are they probably mean a hell of a lot to you the same way my reasons meant a hell of a lot to me and if you've been telling yourself this is just something fun this is just something cool it's just a vacation i think you might be lying to yourself not lying to me but lying to yourself about how much this means to you now sir i'm just going to get the exact wording here um he says how did your study of buddhism benefit you mentally he says there are a few important lessons he has adapted sorry adopted from his from his his understanding all right um what i got at a buddhism was nothing was absolutely nothing and there are very few people on earth who knew me before i was involved in buddhism to contrast to during and after all right i had already cultivated a level of philosophical sophistication before i got involved with buddhism that meant that the impact of buddhism in my life or in terms of so-called mental benefits would basically be nil all right the type of benefit you can get from buddhism let me be clear i don't just mean the books the type of benefit you can get by going to thailand learning the thai language studying the ancient history that connects india to thailand that you know brings that philosophy so imperfectly across a history of more than 2 000 years and studying the reality of the modern political history as it's unfolded over the last 500 years say and what the what's unfolding today and what you can gain by doing humanitarian work at the same time and seeing how rice has grown and seeing how mango farms work and all those wonderful things the benefit you could possibly get from buddhism with this incredibly expansive definition that includes the rice farms and even let's say the analysis of prostitution and drug addiction and all things that are connected to the culture of buddhism right inelectably all right the benefit you can get from that is absolutely no different from the benefit you could get from going to egypt and doing the same thing it's no different from the benefit you get going to greece and doing the same thing all right what i learned from buddhist philosophy were things i already knew from ancient greek to some extent ancient roman sources i could teach you the same philosophy from ancient greek and jerusalem and you know ultimately what's really worthwhile is learning to articulate your own philosophy on your own terms for yourself and your encounter with philosophy really [Laughter] i have to studiously avoid using terms that hippies have spoke have so totally perverted the meaning of that the audience will misunderstand i can't talk about self-knowledge i can't do that i can't do that so look if you've been watching this youtube channel for five years you've never seen me wear a pair of glasses even once you have also never once heard me attribute the improvement in my vision to the miraculous effects of a vegan diet the fact is right around the same time i started eating vegan diet i stopped wearing glasses i could probably sell a diet book i could probably come out here with a bunch of wild speculation about how the anti-inflammatory effects of the vegan diet or eliminating the last traces of dairy from my diet somehow connected to my sinus cavities and my vision i could probably put together a plausible case that somehow there's a cause-and-effect relationship between a vegan diet and the fact that i don't wear glass anymore right i don't believe that myself it's very easy for people to become beholden to the particular philosophy that comes into their life that challenges them to develop the vocabulary to articulate their own philosophical thoughts to ask themselves and ask others philosophical questions and to challenge assumptions that may be completely unexamined in their lives that may have come into their lives right from their parents and grandparents okay nothing could be more pathetic than to meet an angry young man who feels that the heavens opened up to him because he discovered the philosophy of anne rand so-called objectivism all right i digress to say very briefly it's possible that ann rand is the worst author ever to be officially categorized as a philosopher to be admitted into the philosophy section terrible writer terrible philosopher nevertheless it's philosophy and you don't have to look for the internet to meet young men who feel beholden to this book for the positive effect oh this book came into their eyes and for the first time they thought through the difference between objective reality and subjective reality and you know what's real and what's opinion and what's their personal value and what does it mean to be an individual in a society these questions right and it doesn't occur to them to challenge the authority or the miraculous benefits they've gotten from this particular author but thinking through hey wait a minute i could have developed myself in the same way by going to egypt i could have developed by going to athens actually actually the kind of benefit i've had the kind of transformation i've i've been through here i could have worked that out for myself using other very different materials right maybe this isn't something special about the book maybe there's something special about me this is something special i've accomplished even if the particular book that was in your life at that time provided you with the vocabulary provided with the occasion to you know engage in those in those reflections all right what are the reflections that you know the buddhist corpus of philosophical text provides you with a lot of reflections on desire the relationship between desire and happiness the extent to which you know pursuing a desire and then fulfilling a desire and then maybe feeling exhausted afterwards might be worse than if you had just really examined the nature of the desire at the beginning of that process and had overcome it without indulging yourself i can't call that deep man i can't there's nothing deep about it nothing at all okay there's nothing deep about ayn rand there isn't all right but there are going to be some people who become beholden to this book this book it happened to be the right book the right that brought this vocabulary into your life that gave you the occasion to question and challenge these ideas to question and challenge your own assumptions most likely most likely to question and challenge the assumptions that were inculcated into you by your parents by your grandparents by your school teacher possibly by the christian church if you grew up in a christian family possibly and i know with ann rand and specific that's also a lot of these right-wing guys had christian parents and rand liberates them they become atheists they overthrow christian christian time i understand the psychological significance of that in their lives all right um all right equal this ligno from any block of wood an idol can be carved from any block of wood human beings can create a god something they idolize idealize something they cling to all right imagine you're in a room alone and you're cold you pick up a heavy stone and you walk back and forth in the room and miraculously this heats up your body your body heats up the air around you right before you know it seems like there's warmth all around and yet the stone itself remains cold that's buddhist philosophy there's nothing there you're attributing meaning to something when the meaning is in the work that you do and you can do that work in egypt you can do that work in greece you can do that work anywhere at all