Daydreaming: Where do we go? (audio)

Terrence McNally, Dec. 2, 2012 (aWorldThatJustMightWork.com); Wisdom Quarterly

The power of story -- even in Japanese (English below) -- transports us. Where do we go when we go off in our heads full of wonder, or bored, in search of the next story to learn from?

Story taught to monkey, Java (Mararie/flickr)

This week’s show is about story and narrative with Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal. Although this is not about Obama or politics, Barry  reveals the overwhelming importance of story in our lives:

In a July 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, Obama said that “the mistake” of the early years of his presidency was his failure to be a better storyteller:

 

The Buddha, master storyteller of Jataka Tales

“The mistake of my first couple of years was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.” If given a second term he says he will “spend more time with the American people, listening to them, but also being in a conversation with them about where do we go as a country?”

The late evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould called humans “the primate who tells stories…” And it’s not just Gould. Anthropologists have found societies that have existed for millennia without the wheel, but they’ve never found one that doesn’t tell stories.

 

Siddhartha daydreaming about what it would be like to be free (Nitin_Paul/flickr.com)

 

A World That Just Might Work, the website, leads with: “On the radio, I tell stories of a world that just might work. As a consultant, I help you tell yours.” Building on time as a teacher, two decades in the entertainment industry, and 15 years of radio interviews, I help non-profits, foundations, public agencies, and businesses tell better stories and build better narratives.

 

What does Gottschall have to say about the latest science on the subject? Why is narrative so powerful? What is its evolutionary value? And can what we’re learning help us get even better at tapping its power?

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Apes have "mid-life crises," humans too

Wisdom Quarterly

Balding, flabby, and testosterone-poisoned, that's the crisis at mid-life (WQ)

 
Yet again proving that we humans are simply the most spiritually and intellectually (albeit not necessarily the most socially or emotionally) evolved of the apes, we aren't the only ones to go through a mid-life crisis.

Everything we do, perhaps short of moral reasoning, exists in the animal world: tool-making, language (all animals communicate and some, without adequate voice boxes, manage to mimic our linguistic sounds, e.g. parrots, Mina birds, Beluga whales, howling dogs), promiscuity (bonobos), planned violence, murder, cannibalism, self-injury (most animals in captivity), anorexia (dolphins chuck), bipedalism (all birds walk on two legs in addition to a better way of traveling), smoke (monkey in Tobacco Company studies), drink (under fermenting fruit trees in desert oases), pleasure themselves... The great Noam Chomsky declared chimps could never use abstract language, until Nim Chimpsky proved him wrong.

(NewsyScience) Noc can talk. But marine biologists
discovered whales' human voices back in 1984.

 
Even apes have "midlife crises," study finds

Youth in a tube (cartoonstock.com)

(FOX News) Chimpanzees in a midlife crisis? It sounds like a setup for a joke. But there it is, in the title of a report published Monday in a scientific journal: "Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes."

  

So what do these apes do? Buy red Ferraris? Leave their mates for some cute young bonobos? Uh, no. "I believe no ape has ever purchased a sports car," said Andrew Oswald, an author of the study. But researchers report that captive chimps and orangutans do show the same low ebb in emotional well-being at midlife that some studies find in people.

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That suggests the human tendency toward midlife discontent may have been passed on through evolution, rather than resulting just from the hassles of modern life, said Oswald, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England who presented his work Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A second study in the journal looks at a younger age group and finds that happiness in youth can lead to higher income a few years down the road. More on that later. Let's get back to those apes. Several studies have concluded that... More

"This is one of the great patterns of human life.

We're all going to slide along this U for good or ill."

- Study author Andrew Oswald

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"The Monkey's Heart" (Rebirth Tale)

Stories of the Buddha's Former Births (The Jataka) edited by E.B. Cowell (Cambridge University Press, 1895), Book 2, No. 20; more at Pitt.edu; updated by Wisdom Quarterly

Mr. Monkey (John Downer/materialismisanaddiction/facebook.com)

   

Once upon a time, when Brahmadatta was king of Benares, the Bodhisatta [the "Buddha-to-be"] was reborn in the Himalayan foothills as a monkey. He grew strong and sturdy, with a healthy frame, living by a curve of the river Ganges in the forest.

  

Mr. Crocodile (Jon Sevcik/Naturephoto.cz)

Now at that time there was a crocodile dwelling in the Ganges. The crocodile's mate saw the great frame of the monkey, and she conceived a longing to eat his heart. So she said to her mate, "Sir, I desire to eat the heart of that great king of the monkeys!"

  

"Good wife," answered the crocodile, "I live in the water, and he lives on dry land. How can we catch him?"

  

"By hook or by crook," she replied, "he must be caught. If I don't get him, I shall die."

  

"All right," replied the crocodile, consoling her, "don't trouble yourself. I have a plan. I will give you his heart to eat."

  

Kind monkey kissing kitty (animalszooguru)

When the Bodhisatta was sitting on the bank of the Ganges, after taking a drink of water, the crocodile drew near and said to him, "Good monkey, why do you live on bad fruits in this old familiar place? On the other side of the Ganges there are many mango and labuja trees with fruit sweet as honey! Would it not be better to cross over and gain all kinds of wild fruit to eat?"

  

"Lord crocodile," the monkey answered, "the Ganges is deep and wide. How would I get across?"

  

"Well, if you want to go, I shall let you ride on my back, and I will carry you over."

   

The monkey trusted him and agreed. "Come here, then," beckoned the crocodile. "Up on my back with you!" Up the monkey climbed. But when the crocodile had swum a little way, he plunged the monkey under the water.

  

"Good friend, you are letting me sink!" cried the monkey. "What is that for?"

  

Nagas surround mammal in cage (wikipedia)

The crocodile roared, "You think I am carrying you out of pure good nature? Not a bit of it! My wife has a longing to eat your heart, and I intend to give it to her!"

   

"Friend," explained the monkey, "it is nice of you to tell me. But if our hearts were inside us, when we monkeys go swinging among the tree tops they would be all knocked to pieces!"

   

"Well, then, where do you keep it?" asked the crocodile.

  

The Bodhisatta pointed out a fig tree with clusters of ripe fruit standing close by. "See there," he said, "hanging on that fig tree? There are our hearts."

  

"If you will show me your heart," offered the crocodile, "then I won't kill you."

  

Monkey's kindness to pigeon (paleonym)

"Take me to the tree, and I will point it out to you."

  

The crocodile ferried him to the place. The monkey leaped off his back, and climbing up the fig tree sat high in it. "Oh, silly crocodile!" he yelled back. "You thought that there were creatures that kept their hearts in the treetops! You are silly, and now you are outwitted! You may keep your [karmic] fruit for yourself. Your body is great, but you have no sense!"

  

Then to explain this idea he uttered the following stanzas:
 

Roseapple, jackfruit, mangoes, too, across the water there I see;

Enough of them, I want them not; my fig is good enough for me!

Great your scaly body, verily, but how small your serpent wit!

Now go your own way, crocodile, for I have had the best of it.

   

The crocodile, feeling as silly and miserable as if he had lost a thousand pieces of money, went back sorrowing to the place where he lived. More

• Housewife raised by monkeys in Colombia
• The Buddha's "twin miracle" as Vaudeville act?
• The Buddha's "twin miracle"?
• Weinergate Part II: Justin Bieber to pay to keep nude photos of "Mr. Bieber" off the Web

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I was raised by wild monkeys!

Piper Weiss, Shine (Yahoo! "Women Who Shine"); Seven, Wisdom Quarterly

Cute monkeys are savages with base appetites -- but they also exhibit compassion and other emotions. Here they are seen in Bali molesting another mammal (odditieszone.com).

  

TRUE STORY: When Vanessa James was a little girl, her mother would tell her bedtime stories of growing up like Tarzan in the jungle raised by a colony of monkeys.

  

As James got older, she learned those accounts were not fantasy but part of her mother's unbelievable history.
 
Between the ages of four and ten, Marina Chapman's family consisted of 20 or so Capuchin monkeys, native to the jungles of South America. Her memory of how it all started is hazy: She remembers sorting peas in her village when in an instant a hand covered her mouth and she awoke in the jungle.
 
"All she can remember is being chloroformed with a hand over her mouth," James, told London's Sunday Times this past week. "It's assumed that the kidnap went wrong,"

Two days after fending for herself, she was approached by a colony of monkeys who taught her by example to forage, feed, and survive as one of their own [thereby saving the life of a fellow mammal].

  

"Acting entirely on instinct, she tried to do what they did: she ate what they ate and copied their actions, and, little by little, learned to fend for herself," according to a press release for the Marina's memoir, The Girl With No Name, to be released in 2013 by Pegasus Books.

• Buddhist Global Relief: compassion in action
• Why some people adopt monkeys, dolls as children
• What monkeys can teach us about our babies

As Chapman adapted to jungle life, she lost any language she had learned in her early years and instead developed an inhuman ability to scale trees and to communicate with creatures native to the forest. 

  

Marina Chapman (thesundaytimes.co.uk)

After more than five years, she was discovered by hunters who sold her into slavery in exchange for a parrot. (Help victims of child sex trafficking; here's how.)
 
A year later she escaped, narrowly avoiding a life of prostitution. She then lived off the streets in Colombia, relying on her stealth knowledge gleaned, in part, from her education in the jungle.

   

In her 20's while working as a household staff for a Colombian family, she was brought on a trip to Bradford, England. There she met her future husband at a church, a bacteriologist named John Chapman, and she never left. [Karma works in mysterious ways, unimaginable to our logic-bound, linear minds.]

   

Together they raised two children. She worked as a cook and later in social services she helped at-risk youth.

  

Over the past five years, her daughter Vanessa, now a 23-year-old film composer, has been devoted to transcribing her mother's memory -- matching the nuts and berries and wildlife in Chapman's jungle recollections with those native to the area she was abandoned in.

  

Recently, mother and daughter traveled back to Colombia to find Chapman's long-lost family, reconnecting with some surrogates who took her in in her teens. She even tried re-entering the jungle before being stopped by military officials.

 

After Vanessa was convinced she'd pieced together her mother's journey, the next challenge was convincing a co-writer, literary agent, and publisher that Marina's unbelievable accounts were true.
 

Humans return the favor (imprint.printmag.com)

Lynne Barrett-Lee came on board as the ghostwriter after poring over Vanessa's mounds of research and meeting face-to-face with Marina, whom she immediately understood to be a woman with no ordinary past. Publishers at Pegasus Books, too, claim to have gone through an exhaustive verification process before claiming the title.

There have only been a handful of modern-day accounts of feral children surviving this unique upbringing and ultimately assimilating back into human life. In 1999, a young boy was rescued in the Uganda jungle after being raised by monkeys. It took him eight years to learn to speak again. More

• Monkey-woman Marina Chapman's memoir, The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys, compiled with her daughter, ghostwritten by Lynne Barrett-Lee, will be released in April 2013 (Pegasus Books)
• Me Tarzana, Queen of the Jungle (Sunday Times)

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The Honey Full Moon Offering (sutra)

Ven. Dr. Karunananda, Abbot (Bodhi Mission) Originally posted 5:00 am

Bangladeshi Buddhist devotees light candles at Nandakanon temple, Chittagong, on the occasion of Madhu Purnima, the biggest festival behind Vesak, which commemorates the Buddha spreading the message of peace (The Star Daily).

  

The full moon observance day of the Indian month of Bhaadra (August September) commemorates a time when Buddhist monastics in ancient India were disputing. Even the Buddha could not calm their quarrels -- until he took the drastic action of withdrawing into the forest alone.

People and supporters heard of this and neglected to make offerings to the quarrelsome recluses, who eventually settled their differences.

While the Buddha was alone into Parileyya forest, an elephant and monkey tended to his needs, making an offering of fruit and honey.

This event -- Madhu Purnima -- is commemorated in Buddhist Bangladesh (particularly in Chittagong and the Hill Tract regions of a now predominantly Muslim country, which the British separated from India in a divide and conquer move as they departed after decades of colonial occupation).

It also led to a penetrating speech on profound aspects of the Dharma that leads to enlightenment:

• Honey Full Moon Observance and meditation, Bodhi Mission, Long Beach, Sept. 29th, 2012

In the Forest

Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly translation (Parileyya Sutra,  SN 22.81)

Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Buddha was staying near Kosambi, at Ghosita's monastery. Early in the morning, having dressed and taken his bowl and outer robe, he went into Kosambi on alms round. Returning after his meal he set his lodging in order and -- without calling on his attendant or informing the community of monks -- he set out wandering alone.

Not long after he left, a monk went to Ananda and said, "Just now, friend Ananda, the Blessed One set his lodging in order and without informing anyone set out wandering alone."

"Whenever he does this he wants to live alone," Ananda explained. "He is not to be followed by anyone at such times."

After wandering by stages the Buddha came to Parileyya forest and chose the root of an auspicious sal tree as his lodging.

Then a large number of monastics went to Ananda, exchanged courteous greetings, sat to one side, and said: "It has been a long time since we heard a Dharma talk in the Blessed One's presence. We want to hear a Dharma talk in the Blessed One's presence."

"All things are dependently originated."

Together with them Ananda went to the Blessed One, bowed, sat to one side, and the Buddha instructed, urged, roused, and encouraged them with a talk on Dharma.

On that occasion this train of thought occurred to one of the monks: "I wonder, knowing in what way, seeing in what way, does one without delay put an end to the corruptions?"

The Buddha, perceiving with his mind this train of thought as it occurred to that monk, said: "I have analyzed and taught you the Dharma. I have analyzed and taught you the [37 Requisites of Enlightenment, which run as follows:]

1. Four Noble Truths
2. Four Right Efforts
3. Four Bases of Power
4. Five Controlling Faculties
5. Five Powers
6. Seven Factors of Enlightenment
7. Noble Eightfold Path. 

"Yet, in spite of having analyzed and taught you the Dharma, still there occurs this thought: 'I wonder, knowing in what way, seeing in what way, does one without delay put an end to the corruptions?'

"[Here is how.] An ordinary, uninstructed worldling -- with no regard for noble ones [those who have attained various stages of enlightenment], who is not well-versed or disciplined in their Dharma, who has no regard for people of integrity, who is not well-versed or disciplined in their Dharma -- assumes form to be self. This assumption is a [compounded] formation.

  

"What is the cause, what is the origin, what is the rearising (birth), what is the coming-into-being of this formation? To an ordinary uninstructed worldling, touched by that which is felt born of contact with ignorance, craving arises. Such is that formation born. And it is unstable (radically impermanent, in constant flux), compounded (not independent but utterly dependent on conditions, not a self but an aggregate, a heap), dependently co-arisen [with and based on the factors that constitute it].

  

"That craving... That feeling... That contact... That ignorance is unstable, compounded, dependently originated/co-arisen. It is by knowing-and-seeing in this way that one without delay puts an end to the corruptions.

1. "Perhaps one does not assume form to be self but assumes that a self possesses form... form as in self... self as in form...
2. or feeling (sensation) to be self... self as possessing feeling... feeling as in self... self as in feeling...
3. or perception to be self... self as possessing perception... perception as in self... self as in perception...
4. or formations to be self... self as possessing formations... formations as in self... self as in formations... 
5. or consciousness to be self... self as possessing consciousness... consciousness as in self... self as in consciousness. [These are the Five Aggregates of Clinging clung to as a self, soul, or ego, but it is wrong view to consider them such.]

Wild animals were calmed around the Buddha.

"This assumption is a formation. What is the cause, what is the origin, what is the rearising, what is the coming-into-being of this formation? 

  

"To an ordinary, uninstructed worldling touched by feeling born of contact with ignorance, craving arises. Such is that formation born. And that formation is unstable, compounded, dependently co-arisen. That craving... That feeling... That contact... That ignorance is unstable, compounded, dependently co-arisen. It is by knowing-and-seeing in this way that one without delay puts an end to the corruptions.

"Or one does not assume form to be self... but may have a view such as this: 'This self is the same as the cosmos. This I will be after death, stable, lasting, eternal, not subject to change.' This eternalist view is a formation... 

"Or... one may have a view such as this: 'I would not be, neither would there be what is mine. I will not be, neither will there be what is mine.' This annihilationist view is a formation...

"Or... one may be doubtful and uncertain, having come to no conclusion with regard to the true Dhamma. That doubt, uncertainty, and coming-to-no-conclusion is a formation.

"What is the cause, what is the origin, what is the rearising, what is the coming-into-being of that formation? To an ordinary, uninstructed worldling touched by what is felt born of contact with ignorance, craving arises. Such is that formation born.

  

And that formation is unstable, compounded, dependently co-arisen. That craving... That feeling... That contact... That ignorance is unstable, compounded, dependently co-arisen. It is by knowing-and-seeing in this way that one without delay puts an end to the corruptions."

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Introducing Whiplash The Cowboy Monkey.

I'm shutting this post down, erasing the comments, locking it and throwing away the key. I deleted the video.

I'm done with it.

I was just trying to brighten people's day and instead I apparently insulted some who watched the video. I shed many tears over some of the things that were said about me here and on other posts by Christian. So I give up but I still feel like it's o.k. to defend myself when I'm being attacked by a bully like Christian. I'm hurt but I'll get over it. So for the sake of keeping this blog free from bitter arguments I'm moving on.

Thank-you to the others for constructive criticism that didn't involve insults or the judging of my value as a Buddhist practitioner. Just remember that none of us are perfect Buddhists or perfect at anything. And obviously that includes me.

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