Charles Rykken
Forum Replies Created
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I just ran across a 1987 interview of Hubert Dreyfus who exposes (unknowingly) Heidegger as a totally spineless worm of a coward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqZBtVIX3Rk
Husserl, Heidegger & Existentialism – Hubert Dreyfus & Bryan Magee (1987)
At 23:27 question of zombie groups but go to 22:30 to see the lead in
at 28:00 to see how Heidegger exposes his coward’s ass with ANXIETY!!!!!
Existential Angst???? Give me a FUCKING BREAK!!! Heidegger is a
cowardly hyper-asshole who has constructed an entire philosophy to cover up
that basic fact!!!!!!!!!
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I can see I am posting too much but there is one last thing for today. I just finished watching a YouTube video for the second time and have decided that I do not need to support nor hold back mentioning it. I will let it speak for itself. The fact that Heidegger went to his grave with no apology nor explanation about his relationship with the Nazis was always troubling for me. My relationship with Buddhism has been going through a chill period as well. I sense a gross lack of honesty in both Heidegger and the Buddhists. I even am beginning to wonder if Dr. McGilchrist himself is a crypto-nazi. I have repeatedly attempted to get him to talk about Brian Victoria and the response has been zilch. This video is a full frontal attack on the character of Heidegger and if they are correct in what they say it is a well deserved attack. The reason I despise armchair philosophers so much is their willful ignorance of science. This cockamamy idea that philosophy is about pure thought is such an obvious crock of shit, I am amazed anyone takes that claim seriously. The manner in how a sense of self develops is intertwined with the subjective and objective(measurable). Again, screamingly obvious. To think you can jettison the objective and carry on with the subjective alone is laughably stupid, in my personal estimation. Family and friends as well as the larger culture as well as the physical substrate or stage on which the drama of life unfolds are so complexly intertwined that to ignore any of those contributions is just stupid. There is a basic question of whether holism or reductionism should be preferred as the proper framing of epistemological questions is something that one can decide on in the early stages. I made a commitment to holism when I was 18. I understood systems of ordinary differential equations and the use of the Laplace transform in solving the equations derived from the two rules of Kirchoff in solving for RLC electrical circuits, or more generally linear circuits. I wrote the overhead transparencies that the senior physics teacher used in his high school physics classes as well as helping him grade the homework. He trusted me implicitly to be able to do that job as well as he could. I understood very well what it was I was rejecting(mechanistic materialism). But beyond that, the question of what is reality and does a self exist etc, hoary chestnuts of philosophy going back millennia, I still don’t have an answer that I feel comfortable with. But I still reject mechanistic materialism and reductionism. Here is the url for the documentary on Heidegger
“Only a God Can Save Us” | Martin Heidegger & Nazism | A Film by Jeffrey Van Davis
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One more small thing that I wrote someone in an email a few years ago about journalism. I see myself as a philosophical journalist.
“it seems to me that a deep sense of intuition would be of great importance in finding important stories hidden beneath a jumble of disinformation or near total lack of information. That same deep intuition could, with not that great an effort be expanded in time to make likely predictions not a major leap. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union the CIA , well known for its relationship to truth telling, said no one saw it coming. This wiki article says differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_collapse_of_the_Soviet_Union
I did not see any prominent journalists on the list of early predictors of that collapse. One of the reasons I am interested in this is because I have been told I have the personality of a journalist and I predicted the collapse of not only the Soviet Union but all communist states within about twenty years. I made that prediction in 1967 when I was nineteen years old. It was my primary argument against George Kennan’s policy of containment (the domino theory being associated with the idea of containment). At the time no communist state had collapsed. My reasoning was that the ideas of human engineering and the blank slate were pure bullshit and that the resulting internal corruption that would result from refusing to accept that basic reality would eventually make communist governments unable to function. The black market economy would become a de facto shadow government that would make collapse inevitable. Andrei Amalrik published his prediction in 1970 choosing 1984 as the year of collapse. My prediction was 1987.”
This is not a coincidence. I predicted in 1994 that the Republicans would choose a total lunatic for president in about twenty years. Here is what I said about that in the same email.
“Another example is of people who predicted that the Republican Party would choose a clear lunatic as their nominee for president. Dan Greaney of “The Simpsons” predicted a Trump presidency in 2000 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/simpsons-writer-who-predicted-trump-876295/. In 1994, the House of Representatives chose Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey as the public face of the Republican Party in the U. S. House. I had seen an increasing number of lunatics rise to positions of high power in Republican administrations. James Watt, the Interior Secretary under Reagan, is a case in point of a total looney toons holding a cabinet level office.
I saw the progressively greater presence of lunatics in the Republican Party as very dark news for the U. S. When Gingrich and Armey were elected by a majority of Republicans in the people’s house it was clear as day to me that within twenty or so years, any Republicans who had a shred of sanity would be thrown out of the party. The lunatics had taken over the asylum and they would eventually choose one of their own as the standard bearer. Do you know of anyone in the ranks of journalism who reacted to the election of Gingrich and Armey with a prediction of a lunatic Republican President? I can already hear the purview argument in reply. When a building uses shoddy materials and design in constructing a building, that is often seen as a newsworthy piece of information. Why isn’t the construction of a lunatic ideology with the potentially disastrous consequences for the entire planet even more newsworthy?”
My intuition has been a steady and reliable guide. Unfortunately, it tells me very unpleasant truths.
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There is at least one idea that came from Karl Marx that I agree with. That is the statement that religion is the opiate of the masses. Let me clarify. There are a group of psychologists who work in an area called terror management theory. It is based on the book “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker. The denial is what I mean by opiate. Pure land Buddhism is an example of opiate based religion. There are two character flaws that are very widespread, namely cowardice and laziness. The masses want to live a simple life where they can pursue what Buddhists call the eight mundane concerns
“These eight worldly concerns are: gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, and fame and disgrace.
These are the concerns that pervade most people’s daily lives. They are pervasive precisely because they are mistaken for effective means to attain happiness and to avoid suffering. “
https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/Eight_worldly_concerns
Doing abstract philosophy is appealing to only a very small minority of people and those who can do that competently are probably less than 1 in 1000. China and India have had their own versions of philosophy that are clearly holistic but if you look into the history of Hinduism or Buddhism, neither have been able to stop the gangster class from ruling their countries. Democracy began in the United States as an open confrontation with gangster government but with the robber barons and the McKinley administration the U. S. government has been wholly owned and operated by the gangster class. The 2014 article by Gilens and Page at Princeton University
showed very well that the U. S. is a de facto fascist oligarchy.
Recently, I discovered that the cost of sequencing a full genome has come down in cost to $100 to $300 and that very large gwas studies are popping up like mushrooms. Because it is screamingly obvious that people are different, the question for me is how much comes from heritable traits and how much comes from the environment. Epigenetics make this question extremely complicated but that doesn’t mean people should give up. My impression is that like most social scientists, Dr. McGilchrist comes down on the side that heritable traits are of no consequence. My impression may be mistaken. there is a very interesting article in pnas this year
Multilevel cultural evolution: From new theory to practical applications
https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2218222120
My desire is to find where these two lines of research, the evolution of social structure and the evolution of heritable traits overlap.
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I am going to attempt to explain why my intuition is so unusual. When I was eight years old I got into a discussion with my father about honesty. He favored the idea that honesty is the best policy but he also said that there was one person that I must never tell lies to and that was myself. He used the following analogy. When you are honest with yourself, your mind is like an open plain (I grew up in ND so this choice of metaphors was excellent) where you can see unobstructed from horizon to horizon in all directions. When you tell yourself a lie it is like planting a tree. The tree blocks out everything behind it. If you tell yourself enough lies you are lost in a forest of lies and you will never be able to see the truth. That idea scared the living shit out of me and that resulted in my first sacred promise to myself that I would never lie to myself. Not terribly surprising is the fact that such a promise was equivalent to a commitment to authenticity which is basically being honest with yourself. I was a substitute teacher during the 90s. I had ten years of access to children aged 5 to 18. Only the children from 5 to about 8 were authentic. Beginning about 8 or 9 they began to cave in to the pressure of socialization and became phonies. By the age of ten most of them were like Stasi informers tattling on their classmates. Basically, everyone has that point in their life where they choose to be true to themselves(authentic) of to cave in to social pressure to just fit in. This is another example of courage. The vast majority of humans who cave in in order to fit in. My IQ is 3.6z or about 1 in 6,300. I was already singled out for pariahdom by the age of eight. Going from being a class leader in second and third grade (7 and 8 years old) and having many girlfriends to being an outcast and almost no girlfriends in a one year period when the frame “you make me feel stupid” was the common epithet cast my way to explain my being a social reject. I tried to hide my intellect by never raising my hand in class and when the teacher insisted on calling on me anyway, I gave the wrong answer. I went way out of my way to not “make anyone feel stupid”. At age 11 I realized that no one gave a shit about the sacrifice I was making by being the class cipher. They were only interested in taking care of number one. That was when I decided to say say fuck ’em and I would speak out my truth and if anyone had trouble with that, it was their problem, not mine. I do try to be considerate of people’s limitations and I have many friends of average intelligence. In fact, it is easier with them than with the top ten percenters(IQ=>125) who work very hard to get into college and graduate so they can get the good paying jobs and be in the managerial/professional class. Forrest Gump was written to have an IQ of 75. That is the tenth percentile. His coworkers(if you’ve seen the movie with Tom Hanks) in I believe it was a cafe treated him like shit. The top ten percenters with IQs greater than 125 see themselves as God’s gift to humanity to lord it all over everyone else. What is really happening is that they have been groomed by the fascist over class to dominate the unwashed masses in the corporations where they are employed to be comfortable with their lowest level employees academically being treated like animals. This all happens by age ten. I have NEVER been tempted to give up my authenticity to fit in. I saw this whole system in a flash of insight when I was 13(1961). When I was in my senior year of high school(1965-66) I was toting around my personal copy of the communist Manifesto while at the same time I had read every novel written by Ayn rand and was, in fact, a subscriber to “The Objectivist Newsletter”. This has been typical of me as far back as I can remember(at least to the “age of reason” or 7 years old). I investigate ANY idea that looks interesting with no consideration as to whether it contradicts my collection of other “interesting ideas”. A year after I graduated, 1967, I was protesting against the Vietnam War and my main argument against George Kennan’s policy of containment (domino theory) was that communism was stupid and that the communist governments should be left alone because they would collapse from the corruption from within when they learned the hard way(the stupid way) that the idea of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was an idea only an idiot would endorse. I predicted that a black market economy would develop that would eventually become the real government. I predicted it would take about twenty years. Everyone scoffed at my idea and said show me one country that went communist and then turned back. At the time no such country existed. But communism did collapse in 1989 only two years later than my prediction of 1987! There were other who predicted the collapse but none of them really understood why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_collapse_of_the_Soviet_Union
https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/07/predicting-soviet-collapse-paul-kengor/
The above shows not only that my prediction was the most accurate but also earlier than anyone else’s My approach is to understand people and in doing so it is not all that hard to see large patterns of behavior. Another example was when Newt Gingrich was elected the Speaker of the House in 1994 along with Dick Armey as the majority leader. It was obvious to me that only an insane person would choose a pair of shitheads like that as their leader. For me that meant that a majority of the Republicans in the U. S. House of Representatives were totally nutso. From that fact I predicted that within twenty years the Republicans would nominate a lunatic to be President. Twenty two years later they chose Donald Trump.
Here are some thoughts and predictions for the UK. First the term UK(United Kingdom) is terminally stupid. Hail Britannia… give me a break you don’t rule any waves and great Britain is about to break up over the idiocy of Brexit. I did a Google search of “Edmund Burke” + “Charles Dickens” and found this
http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2009/11/1859-Books-Charles-Dickens-A-Tale-of-Two-Cities.html
When I did a search with the exact same search term on Google Scholar I got only one hit namely
“edmund burke” alone gets 123,000 hits
“charles dickens” alone gets 236,000 hits
Like I said earlier, The Brits have been thoroughly mind fucked by the royalists like Edmund Burke and like minded cowards. This has been set in stone in the minds of children by the age of ten except for a few brave souls like John Lennon. The present is now witnessing the debacle of the British public getting their national pastime of molesting the children of the Royal family being dragged out for public view by Harry. I see anyone who supports this behavior(molesting children in the Royal family) as little more than moral scum.
Finally, I promised some predictions. Not being a longtime resident my “database” is thin so I will go for the easy ones that many people there are already predicting. The Royal family will be formally dismissed and the House of lords will suffer the same fate. All aristocratic titles will be illegal. Finally, the Church of England will be a minority church with less than ten percent of the general population being members. The class system will be jettisoned and the country will move towards the protestant countries in their politics and economics. I predict that will all happen in the next twenty years, probably much sooner.
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I believe I am drawing very plausible inferences, not engaging in flame wars. There is solid research (which I can easily quote) that says that one of the solid early childhood indicators that someone will become a political conservative as an adult is being very fearful as a child. Look at Ian’s presentation at the AI convention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgbUCKWCMPA
and you tell me he doesn’t look like he is about to shit his pants in fear. After calling artificial intelligence artificial stupidity he did have reason to think someone might pop out of the audience and clean his clock. Another early childhood indicator of adult political orientation, this time liberal, is being a leader in grade school. Note, it MUST be in grade school, the later years do not correlate with later political orientation. The boy second to right is(was, he died last month) Howard Ives. He and I put on the first drag queen parade in Tioga, ND in 1955 when I was seven. We both dressed up in his mothers dresses and shoes etc(it was Howard’s idea but I thought, what the hey, why not). He later came out as a flaming gay while in high school. Yay, Howard!!!! The photo below is of my eighth birthday party. I am second from the left. The boy seated to my left is Larry Sandberg. He was a Sioux Indian and his father was the high school janitor. To my right is Duane Larson, a boy’s boy. I was not only the smartest boy in my class, I was the toughest. No one picked a fight with me because they knew it was a losing proposition. However, I NEVER, took the first punch or shove. John Wayne was my model. He would only fight after someone hit him first. At age ten I realized that fighting was stupid and that violence only caused more violence and the only thing that was proven was who was the better fighter. I took a sacred vow that I would no longer practice violence. In the sixth grade, there were about three boys who wanted revenge and forced me into a fight where I basically let them beat me up. Since the age of ten I have not so much as laid a rough hand on anyone (with three exceptions, one at age 13 and two at age 16, those are separate stories of some interest). Fear is not something that has had much of an influence on my life. I have many stories about my near total lack of fear like the time I went to Chicago to attend Illinois Institute of Technology. I started a conversation with a black women who was a ticket taker at a movie theater. I recognized the book she was reading. She was interested in this white bread from North Dakota and when I told her I loved jazz, she invited me to her apartment where she introduced me to her boyfriend and we set up a few dates where we went to some southside bars(black neighborhood) and I got to hear some jazz greats like Muddy Waters perform live. I was in a bar with about 100 patrons and I was the only non-black person. The bartender did not want me in the bar as legal drinking age was 21 and I was 18. The six to eight people who shared the table with me all vouched that I was cool and they would watch me to be sure I didn’t so much as take a tiny sip of any alcoholic drink. People can sniff out prejudice mostly by seeing fear in the eyes of a person. All the black people(and a whole host of prejudiced minorities where I am very welcome) saw immediately that I had zero fear. So…. I know a panty waist coward when I see one. And I am not trying to flame someone because I am not sure of my masculinity. In fact, I utterly despise patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Remember, a life long practitioner of non-violence. But like Mahatma Gandhi, if the situation calls for it I could kill someone in a heart beat. So far the situation has never called for it.
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I realized that you are taking what I said in a personal way. First, a government can be a gangster government where not everyone is a gangster (in the metaphoric sense detailed in my other response to this posting). BTW my copy of Graeber and Wengrow is supposed to arrive by June 21! A very important paper published by Gilens and Page in 2014 from Princeton University Press
is instructive. Dictators, oligarchs, plutocrats, gangsters etc are just words to point to the same mindset. This is the idea of might makes right. The golden rule is he who has the most gold rules. Joseph Conrad, a scion of a wealthy polish aristocratic family called capitalism “piracy with good PR”. The gangster class has been savvy to the idea of mind fucking the plebeians. This is where noblesse oblige, the old fashioned version of treacle dong economics, comes from. There is a huge amount of scholarship on this aspect of history. Most people are clueless about what the gangster class is doing right under their ignorant noses. They have had thousands of years fucking the heads of the lower classes. The divine right of kings is another example of mind fuck. Thomas Jefferson and most of the founders of American democracy were VERY WELL AWARE of what I am saying. Benjamin Franklin is famous for this interchange where his reply was “A republic, if you can keep it”
Too many Americans have been so indoctrinated by the fascist gangster class over the last 120+ years that few can see through all the bullshit. I am not going to bore you with the very many well written books and articles that show what has been happening beginning when the robber barons(gangsters) decided it was easier to buy the U. S. government than to fight it in court. Edward L. Bernays published a little book titled “Propaganda”
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.275553
that put mind fucking on an entirely new level. The advertising industry has made it into a science with neuromarketing
I am sorry if you see what I say as a personal attack on your family or personal acquaintances. I go by hard data and couldn’t give a fuck who I insult in the process. If that turns out to be someone you know personally, just know that my barbs are aimed at behavior that is subtle and deliberately so. Monsters from hell don’t want to scream out loud to the public that they are fascist filth. As far as Joe Biden goes his debt ceiling compromise included a two year holiday from IRS audits for his fascist filth puppet masters. I despise Joe Biden.
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Thank you very much for pointing out this book!!! I just ordered a copy of the hardcover edition which should arrive before the end of June. As a philosophical journalist, I am not a scholar of early history. I have read quite a lot and at the time all of what I read said that the early forms of government were little more than gangster (hierarchical and warlike) operations. Before I respond to what you said, I will read the book mentioned. My wife graduated from National Taiwan University(Tai da) with a degree in Chinese history. We have had numerous discussions and she agrees that Confucianism was grossly sexist and demeaning of women as was Buddhism. It was collectivist and the emperor’s palace was rife with power politics with murder a commonplace. This is what such power organizations look like, whether they are Asian or European. It seems amazing that I would miss so much of what is claimed in Graeber’s and Wengrows’ book but from the wiki article it appears that the examples come from the pre-Columbian Americas. I am expecting to find that the egalitarian societies were wiped out by the gangster cultures. BTW, I use the expression “gangster culture” to refer to patriarchal, extremely warlike, hierarchical cultures where any challenge to the capo de capos (the big dick, the big dude with a tude, etc) was a recipe for instant death. It was intended to be a metaphor. I would be inordinately pleased if you would read the Anne Harrington book “Reenchanted Science” and we could discuss the relationship between religio-philosophical beliefs and the character of the culture that embraces those beliefs and MOST importantly whether the culture was or was not preliterate.. I believe that the invention of writing is crucial in understanding how this issue manifests in a culture. Preliterate cultures are obviously different from cultures with a written mythology. I still stand by my characterization of Western cultures with a written mythology. In preliterate cultures the relationships between the political, shamanic, and story telling communities was much more fluid where the idea of written law did not exist. There was NO issue with the spirit and the letter of the law.
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I just realized that some of what I was sending to you actually went to Whit Blauvelt. Rather than repeat what I said, I suggest you check out those postings.
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I share a view with William James and Friedrich Nietzsche that a person’s character will draw them to a philosophy/weltanschauung that is resonant with their character. Self justification runs deep in the human psyche. This is NOT to say that the philosophy they are drawn can only be attractive to people of a certain restricted character. Any particular philosophy islike a work of art. How the artist understands her work and how the people who view her art are two separate subjects. However, there is recent research that suggests that humans “character flock”(humans of a character flock together)
https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating-glitches/friends_are_genetically_similar/
so there may well be a philosophy/weltanschauung flocking as well. This is a hypothesis that I am pursuing. I am particularly interested in the split within holism over monism vs pluralism. William James was an advocate of pluralism and I am seeing that split as the most important. Here is a link to his lectures on this topic
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I have been away since a few days ago. I am really emotionally exhausted by what I have been through for the last month or so but I will try to be coherent. It is standard in debate to be able to take both sides of a question. This is something that Dr. McGilchrist extols frequently. So far I not heard one peep from him regarding an in depth criticism of the Catholic Church nor the actions by Zen Buddhists in Japan during WWII. There are many other examples of Buddhism gone bad just as there are many examples when the Catholic Church and for that matter virtually all “schools” of Christianity. I would like to hear from him making those points. So far, he seems to be a coward to me. He has ample criticism of protestants (much of which I share) but no such critique of the Catholic Church(it stinks of hypocrisy). I would like to see him in a discussion with Elaine Pagels, Brian Victoria and Chris Hedges. Fat chance of that happening.
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I have just very recently discovered a book by Anne Harrington which was published in 1996 while she was on the faculty of Harvard as a historian of science.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691050508/reenchanted-science
I purchased a copy at their 50% off sale at PUP. I am eagerly anticipating the arrival of this book. It goes into issues that might be counterintuitive for most people. I have struggled for many years how to reconcile material science with various forms of consciousness being the ground of all being as well as why people like Martin Heidegger is a full blown Nazi and the Zen priests in Japan were murderous whores for the militarist government of Japan up to and including all of WWII. My fervent hope is that Anne Harrington’s book will help me understand this strange situation. I personally believe that gangster government began about 7 to 8 thousand years ago. The beginning of agriculture is commonly estimated to have begun about 10 to 12 thousand years ago. A need to protect their crops from people who had chosen to remain hunter-gatherers would raid the farms in times of need. Over time the agriculture based communities developed a caste of professional warriors to protect their farms. I believe that this phase was very short as the best warriors were likely to be psychopaths and having the power to take over the government and institute authoritarian rule is just what psychopaths love to do. Thousands of years of rule by gangsters ensued. More recently, a Canadian social psychologist wrote a book about authoritarian personalities, His website is
https://theauthoritarians.org/
and his book is available as a free download at
https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/
The question about polytheism and pluralism is interesting. William James was visited by Sigmund Freud and his young apprentice, Carl G. Jung. James was much more interested in Jung than Freud. Jung eventually developed his ideas about archetypes, he thought it was his most important contribution to analytical psychology. Hinduism is essentially pluralistic but it is also panentheistic. Atman = Brahman and Brahman is beyond all duality. The lesser gods are very similar to the archetypes. Bottom line, I do not know if many people have made that connection. I did a Google Scholar search on the two search terms below and the number of hits was low but interesting. I intend to look into it myself but you might like to take a look yourself.
polytheism + archetypes + jung + pluralism (2,060 hits)
hinduism + polytheism + archetypes + jung (2,370 hits)
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Less than 72 hours ago (It is now 12:11 PM HST 5/26/2023) I found the following reference that I hope will go a long way to answer my question about holism and authoritarian government. It was written in 1996 by Anne Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard at the time.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691050508/reenchanted-science
I can’t add much here as I am very busily tracking down reactions to this book. I ordered the book from PUP yesterday and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. There is a response from Roderick Main who appeared with Dr. McGilchrist at
https://paricenter.com/event/what-is-consciousness/
his article related to Harrington is at
https://repository.essex.ac.uk/31580/11/Main–The%20ethical%20ambivalence%20of%20holism.pdf
His argument regarding panentheism is not very convincing to me. I hope to have a useful bibliography of responses to Harrington’s thesis in the next month or so.
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Sorry about the delay in my reply. I have been up in Maine helping my older brother out of an existential crisis I can’t go into detail on a public forum as I may lay myself open to a slander lawsuit but I can say my brother nearly died during the whole mess. My younger brother and I (along with one of my younger brother’s sons) spent some time helping him get matters straightened out.
But getting to your point. The way it works for me is best analogized by a lifting fog. In the early stages I can only see myself clearly but as the fog lifts the sunlight picks out the more reflective parts of the scene, but there comes a point where it all snaps into place even though the fog still covers up most of the scene. This is a common occurrence while learning a new subject. In real life where there is no script, it comes suddenly like bolt out of the blue. An example is when I was nine years old and was studying world history. When I looked at Cortez and Pizarro I saw in a flash that the government of Ferdinand and Isabella was nothing more than a gangster operation. A year later at age ten, I saw that violence was stupid and only proved who was stronger, it created hatred and a desire for revenge. Violence begets violence. With nuclear weapons proliferating across the globe, I had another epiphany. I took a sacred vow to non-violence. That was in 1958. These major epiphanies have been few but when they come it is like a thunderclap when a crack in the clouds opens up to let the light shine in.
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I see the framing of Zen for the “elite” as problematic. Here is a book I highly recommend written by Hakunin one of the foremost exponents of Rinzai Zen. The first chapter about false teachings is especially illuminating. There is no such thing as hierarchy in Buddhism but many have a thirst to obey authority and many who occupy authority are not shy about using the most extreme forms of violence against any who challenge their authority.