The Eternal Questions

I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:

• love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
• humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
• knowledge, and wisdom
• what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
• faith as something reassuring
• free will and determinism
• redemption and salvation
• suffering and misunderstanding
• epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
• desire
• can we overcome confirmation bias?
• what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
• interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
• do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
• morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
• the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
• evolution
• the brain and consciousness
• government and anarchy
• originality and newness
• naivete and optimism
• sincerity
• do people change? what causes people to change?

The Tiger and The Goats

My former Asian Philosophies professor, John Koller, has written an excellent arrangement of an old Indian story that describes the bondage incurred when one confuses visible reality with ultimate reality:

The tiger's mother had died, and the poor little tiger was left all alone in the world. Fortunately, the goats were compassionate and adopted the little tiger, teaching him how to eat grass with his pointed teeth and how to bleat like they did. Time passed and the little tiger assumed that he was just a little goat.

But one day an old tiger came upon this little band of goats. They all fled in terror, except for the tiger-goat, now about half-grown, who for some unknown reason felt no fear. As the savage jungle beast approached, the cub began to feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. To cover his self-consciousness, he began to bleat and nibble some grass. The old tiger roared at the little tiger in amazement and anger, asking him what he was doing eating grass and bleating like a goat. But the little tiger was too embarrassed by all this to answer and continued to nibble grass. Thoroughly outraged by this behavior, the jungle tiger grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and carried him to a nearby pond. Holding him over the water he told him to look at himself. 'Is that the pot face of a tiger or the long face of a goat?' he roared.

The cub was still too frightened to answer, so the old tiger carried him to his cave and thrust a huge chunk of juicy, red, raw meat between his jaws. As the juices trickled into his stomach the cub began to feel a new strength and a new power. No longer mistaking himself for a goat, the little tiger lashed his tail from side to side and roared like the tiger he was. Having achieved Tiger-realization, he no longer took himself to be a goat.