This is a short and sweet memoir which took about 7 hours to finish. I was drifted to pick up this book when I was in a situation where hard decisions need to be made, some I’m afraid they might influence my life trajectory. Some choices in life may be easy while others might be tough. It’s hard since people are afraid there is anything to lose, they’re afraid when they don’t live up to some established perfection.

But the question is, is there such a perfection?  Two years ago, I met a guy named Andy, who spent 8 years for his Ph.D. in one of the most prestigious University in the United States.  I appreciate his philosophy of living – enjoy each of your days as it had been given to you, do whatever that can make you happy. Happiness is the thing that matters. And he said there is one thing we’re very different: “Your feet direct at some goals, and worked right towards it. However, I would always like to give myself some random perturbation in my life, I came to a point before I’ve done so many detours.”  Then the randomness just gifted him the wonderful life I admire, a talented scientist who enjoy his research, a great artist enjoyed the beauty, and unique spirit influence everyone he met includes me.

Then the next question is,  can we really control our lives, and can we really “choose” the so-called best life based on our free will?

Here comes the book, the author Michael.A.Singer, who was rapt in the experience from deep meditation when he was a second-year graduate student. He decided to drop out of the program and began his journey in finding and staying with “the spiritual self”, lived in his RV in the woods. However, one decisive moment in his life made he realized the sharp line he’d drawn between spiritual and nonspiritual had begun to fade. Later he began his lifelong experiment in giving up the desire to control and just live with the simple formula:

Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard of personal resutls. Do the work as though it were given you bu the universe itself — because it is.

Then everything just come as perfect as it would be ever imagined: Start from building a house for meditation for himself to building a huge temple for more people in the town to a construction company earn millions of dollar every year. Start from an interest in the personalized computer to the biggest medical system software builder and then go IPO. What he did is simply: “Surrender”

The wonderful surrender experiment:

At the heart of the experiment is the simple question: am I better of making up and alter reality my mind and fighting with reality make it be my way. Or am I better of letting it go of what I want and serving the same forces of reality that manage to create the same perfection of the universe around me. This experiment is not about dropping out of life, will be about leaping into life, to live in a place where we no longer control our personal fears and desires. For lack of a better name, I have called this: The surrender experiment.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.  Once you are ready to let go of yourself, life becomes your friend, you teacher, you secret lover. When life’s way becomes your way, all the noise stops, and there is a great peace.

Do nothing is doing more 无为

The same philosophy of surrender to the universal power is also manifest in traditional Chinese philosophy -Lao Tze. If you follow the order (same idea as universal power described before), things get done. If you go against it, it takes extra efforts to get things done. In some case, nothing at all will get done, no matter how hard you try.

Ways and Rivers:

There are two kinds of ways in life. One is, as usual, you step on it, walk through it. Another is more like a river, it moves, and will carry you somewhere unknown or somewhere desired.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind of Yuval Noah Harari is a serious academic survey on Homo sapiens from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century. In contrast, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow focus on the future. The latest book 21 lessons for the 21st century step back to look at the age we’re currently being.

For me, either look back or look forward, our goal is always live a better way for now. 

70 thousand years ago, homo sapiens stand themselves out of all species and become the only storyteller on this planet. However, in the 21st century, we are encountering an unprecedented species “Life 3.0” – Artificial Intelligence.  What are the possible ways we could live along with them and ourselves – homo sapiens?21 topics under five themes outlined deep concern as well as hope underneath the prosperous data-driven era. By presenting the structure of the book, I want you to have a taste of worldwide view and then I’ll elaborate on a few of the topics in this post.

Table of Contents

Part I The Technological Challenge
1 Disillusionment: The End of History Has Been Postponed
2 Work: When You Grow Up, You Might Not Have a Job
3 Liberty: Big Data Is Watching You
4 Equality: Those Who Own the Data Own the Future

Part II The Political Challenge
5 Community: Humans Have Bodies
6 Civilization: There Is Just One Civilization in the World
7 Nationalism: Global Problems Need Global Answers
8 Religion: God Now Serves the Nation
9 Immigration: Some Cultures Might Be Better than Others

Part III Despair And Hope
10 Terrorism: Don’t Panic
11 War: Never Underestimate Human Stupidity
12 Humility: You Are Not the Center of the World
13 God: Don’t Take the Name of God in Vain
14 Secularism: Acknowledge Your Shadow

Part IV Truth
15 Ignorance: You Know Less than You Think
16 Justice: Our Sense o Justice Might Be Out of Date
17 Post-Truth: Some Fake News Lasts Forever
18 Science Fiction: The Future Is Not What You See in the Movies

Part V Resilience
19 Education: Change Is the Only Constant
20 Meaning: Life Is Not a Story
21 Meditation: Just Observe

Algorithm becomes the Clients we need to feed.

The idea that today machine and algorithms are already beginning to function as clients in addition to be producers, has really mindblowing me. In the stock exchange, for instance, algorithms are becoming the most important bias of bonds shares and commodities. Similarly, in the advertising business, the most customer overall is an algorithm – The google search algorithm. When people design a webpage or write a book, they are educated to meet the Google search algorithms to be presented in the first place. Later we believe the top google results popped up is the truth. “so, what is the truth in our era? Could the algorithm be evil and biased? How could it become more equalism?”

Does hardwork work out anymore?

In the past cheap, unskilled labors served as a secure bridge across global economic decide and even if a country advances slowly if could expect to reach safely eventually, taking the right steps is more important than making speedy progress. Yet, the bridge is shaking and collapsed. What do you do when nobody needs your unskilled cheap labors and you don’t have the resources to build good education systems and teach them new skills.

Feelings are just calculation.

Scientific insights into the way our brains and bodies work suggest that our feeling are not human spirit and they don’t reflect any kind of human free will. Rather, feelings are the biochemical mechanism in order to quickly calculate the probabilities of survival and reproduction.

Bio+info evolotion.

Cancers or disease can be treated long before you notice or lead to any pain. People will enjoy the best health care in history, but for precisely this reason, they probably are sick all the time! There’s always something wrong in your body and something can be improved. You’re always on some medical condition and you can’t even refuse that, or your health insurance or your boss your family would say no. More times, you will be cured even before you noticed.

Biometric sensors

External data processing service and hack all your desires, decisions and opinions. they can know exactly who you are. It’s no longer we watch the television in the far, but with cameras on the TV, companies watch us from far. They might tell if you really enjoy or just fake laugh. Then who is watching?

Engineer will embody themselves into the AI machine

Would you buy Teslar altruism or Teslar egoism? In the future, the philosopher might add their personal idea into programming into the model, and what is your choice then? in front of the automatic world.

The mouth-watering food is heating up our planet?

At present, the meat industry not only inflects untold misery of beings but it also the chief cause on global warming. One of the customers of antibodies and poison, and one of the sources of pollute air land and water. It takes near 4000 gallons of fresh water to produce of little 2 pounds of beef, but of 75 gallons are needed to produce potatoes.

Technological disruption

Since the research and development is not the monopoly of any one country. Even if superpower can’t restrict them by itself. If the USA prevent scientist editing human embryo, it doesn’t prevent Chinese scientist from doing so. Particularly in a “Dog eats dog” world, if even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk high gain technological path, other countries are forth to follow the same, because nobody can afford to remain behind. In order to avoid such a race at the bottom, Humankind might need some global identity and loyalty**. Moreover, whereas nuclear war and climate change threatened only the physical survival of humankind, disruptive technologies might change the very nature of humanity and therefore entangled with human deepest beliefs.**

Four terms on immigration policy to make us think about immigration

1. Debate 1: The host country allows immigrants in. But should this be understood as duty or favor? Is the host country obliged to open its gate to everybody? Or does it have the right to pick and choose and even halt immigration?
2. Debate 2: If they are allowed in, the immigrants have the obligation to simulate to the local culture, but how far should this simulation go?
3. Debate 3: If the immigrants indeed make a sincere effort to a simulated and particular adopt the value of tolerance, the host country is duty bound to treat them as first class citizens, but how much time need to pass before the immigrants became a formal citizen (20 years?), how about second generation immigrants?
4. Debate 4: whether the deal is actually working?

How terrorisim works

Terrorism kills very few people but manages to terrify billions of people, why? Terrorism spread fear rather than real damage. A beautiful metaphor: “A small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise.” This is why the theater of terrorism so successful. The nation has provided a huge space empty of political violence which now as a sounding border amplifying the impact of the attack. Terrorism is like a bad hand in gambling, they have nothing to lose, but have the chance to win everything.

The meaning of life, who tell the story about the meaning

The meaning of life isn’t a ready-made product. There is no divine script, and nothing outside me can give the meaning of my life. It is I who Imbue everything into meaning through my free choices and feelings.

It is our own human fingers who wrote the Bible, and it is our mind to give these story power. They are all known as beautiful stories, but their beauty is strictly within the eyes of the beholder. In itself, the universe is only a meaningless huge hotpot of items. Nothing is inherently beautiful, sacred or sexy, human feelings make it so. Take away human feelings, you are left with a bunch of molecules.

We hope to find some meaning by fitting ourselves into some already made universe. But according to the liberaty vision of the world, the truth is exactly the opposite, the universe does not give me meaning, I give the meaning to the universe. The creation is on every moment and I’m the creator. What then is the aim of my life? To create meaning by feeling by thinking, by desiring and by inventing. Anything that limits the liberal ability to feel, invent and desiring limits the meaning of the universe. Therefore liberties to create such invention is the supreme idea.

However, to the best of our scientific understanding. There is no magic behind our choice. They’re the product of billions of neurons exchanging biochemical signals.

People might have different choices and opinions but they’re never simply because of free will. Just think about the next thought that pops out, did you freely to choose it? Of course not. The process of self-exploration begins with simple things and becomes progressively harder. At first, we realize that we can’t control the world outside us, I don’t decide when it rains. Then we realize we don’t control the world inside our body, that we can’t control the blood pressure. Next, we understand we don’t even govern our brain, I don’t tell the neurons when to fire. Ultimately we should realize that we do not control our desires, or even our reactions to these desires. Realize this can help us less obsessive with our opinions, feelings and desires

People usually place so much importance on their desires, and they try to control and shape the world according to these desires. The self is a fictious story that intricately made by our minds. There is a story teller in my mind that tells me who I am, where I come from. But our inner narrator repeatedly get things wrong, but rarely of ever gets it. And just like the government, builds a national methy with flags and icons, so my inner machine creates a meth. It’s rare to create the truth.

In the Facebook age, 99% of our experiences, never becomes part of the stories of ourself. It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, where our actual self tends to be corporeal. if you really want to understand yourself, you should never define yourself through a Facebook account or with the inner story of the self, instead, you should observe the flow of actual body and mind, you will see thoughts emotions desires appear and disappear without much reasons, and without any command from you. Just as the wind blows from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just that you’re not control the winds. You experience all of them but you don’t control them you don’t own them and you are not them.

People asked, who am I and they expected to be told a story, but the first thing you need to know about yourself is that you’re not a story.

The only eternal topic is suffering, to tell whether a story is true is to see whether the main character is suffering.

This topic comes from a natural magic: fireflies tend to flash in unison.

A simple model for this spectacle can be a pulse-coupled oscillator. The same mathematical structure also cropped up in models of other interacting systems like

• the connection between neurons and earthquakes (John Hopfield) —— crustal plates building up stress and burst out after some threshold vs neuron’s voltage.
• forest fires or mass extinctions —— individual is subject to increasing pressure toward the threshold, sudden relief of stress cause domino effect.
• the booms and crashes of the stock market
• interplays of trillions of neurons in the brain.
• single cell connects, in organs.
• close-knit woman has menstrual synchrony —— chemical communication.

All science today have a intricate character:  complex, self-organizing system, millions of interactions occur simultaneously- when everyone changes the state of everyone else.

Unfortunately, our human minds are bad at grasping these kind of problems. There is a lack of centralized control nor chains of command. That straightforward logic that we like to accept is too feeble and myotic.

Also. these complications ratchet up the mathematical difficulties tremendously. It’s one thing to wish for a more realistic model and another to construct one that’s tractable. No insight is gained if the model is as perplexing as the phenomena it’s supposed to describable. This is what makes mathematical modeling an art as well as a science: An elegant model strikes just the right compromise between simplicity and verisimilitude。

Three models to explain Sync:

First: Wiener’s model:

There might be millions of specialized oscillators, all charging about N times a second. And like other biological population, these oscillators were bound to be diverse (like a norm distribution). These oscillators would spontaneously synchronize by pulling on another’s frequencies. The pulling force was influenced by the amount and extremist. To start with a bell curve, by pulling on one another’s frequencies, many of them collapsed into the absolute center, forming a powerful mainstream, their combined power was strong enough to recruit few moderates from either wing. However, the two tail extremists won’t change and will also attract some moderates.

Second: Art Winfree:

There are two things that all biological oscillators share: the ability to send and receive signals. In another word, two functions: “influence function” and “sensitivity function” are all the things we need to characterize an oscillator in a model.  To make sense of this idea, we can imagine an oscillator as being like a jogger running around a circular track. The different locations on the track represent different phases in the oscillators’ cycle of biological activity. Imagine if joggers could shout to other joggers ( in the basic scenario,  you could imagine there are only two of them.). Influence function would be how loud and the things they shout( quicker/slow down). The sensitivity function captures how they react to an incoming message, like when sensitivity happens to be high and positive, then the listener will follow whatever directions coming at him.

To make the model more general, we could suppose different oscillators have different influence and sensitivity function. Also, one oscillator could be influenced by many other on the phase track.

Three: Yoshiki Kuramoto:

Japanese physicist Kuramoto raised up a symmetric model which ignores the exact location for different runners (in running club content), there is only a relative gap between runners. For each runner receive the signal and the leading slow down, tailing speed up with the same amount. A distinguished finding of Kuramoto’s model is (Which Wiener had missed)

• There is a threshold of similarity between individuals that could possibly form a synchronization. In another word, in a population of fireflies or brain cells, the oscillators have to be similar enough or nobody will synchronize at all.

Interestingly, rather than trying to find some intuition from computer simulation, he insisted on going to solve a bunch of non-linear equations directly. He was guided by intuition alone which is risky.

————————————————

update in 01/9 2018….

Ray Dalio, the writer of the book is one of the few people who climb to the top of wall street but was born in a middle-class family.  He is the founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund firm, Bridgewater Associates, which manages $160 billion.

Dalio grew up in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood and started playing the markets at age 12, getting tips from golfers for whom he caddied. In 1975, after earning an MBA from Harvard Business School, he launched Bridgewater from his two-bedroom New York City apartment.

The secrets lead him to now is most people interested in,  and he mentioned that in the “third stage” (I’ll introduce it later) of his life, he wants to share these experience with others which he called “Principle”.

As far as I’m concerned, the core idea of the book is that: Treat human as a machine, with input,  self-awareness update,  feedback.  The underline core structure and system should be simply put into a few basic principles.

Why not treat ourselves as a machine

Sometimes you may think someone is really knowledgeable, sometimes you may feel another is so experienced, why they better than me in some ways, why old people are thought of wisdom?  Simply answer: They own more trained data. If you think a man as a machine with sensors receive data everywhere every time, then throughout a time, the data shape the model. Also, same as machine learning, to make sure it is a good model, we’d better make sure that the core algorithms are correct. The algorithms, that’s the principles, which will lead to every decision you’ll make.

Now we got the input, algorithms, output. To make this machine could evolve itself throughout time and more stable, we’d even add a feedback mechanism. That means with new input (life experience) we adjust not only the output but also the core algorithms.

Our life evolves in a circle, so does our cognition. (figure from Ray’s talk in google)

The Hero’s journey

Ray once talked about how he transformed from a relatively personal person to a guy willing to talk publically.  “There are three stages in life:”

• Learning from others, when you’re dependent eg, a kid.
• Others depend on you, and you’re trying to be successful. eg, you’re working.
• Others can successful without you, and you’re free to live and to die.

And he thinks he’s in stage three.  Joseph Campbell (Ray recommended) has a description of the so-called “the hero’s journey”  which explained the path one be a hero, and this logic and plot can be seen in most of the heroism movies, like Star Wars, The Matrix, Harry Potter and so on…. (figures from here)

Greater corporation: being radically truthfulness and transparentness

Ray says he thinks the most efficient way of communicating and decision is being radical transparency, let’s see his talk from TED, which is also a data-driven method.

This is a script is a book review for When Breathe Becomes Air as well as a blog script.

It’s lucky that I could come across with Paul, the author of the touching memorial, through his gentle, beautiful and incisive words. It attracted me at the first sight since both of us, and like many other people, who are actively seeking the meaning of life.  For Paul, after learned medical, biology, English literature and philosophy, finally, he chose to be a doctor which he found the best way to experience life and death.

Paul is a neurologist at Stanford medical school,  the superstar in his area that once his advisor said to him: “you will be their number one choice for every place you’d like to go.”.  He is the kind of man has the brightest future and happiest family, all he needs to finish his residency and became an actual doctor. But fate always plays a miracle way on people, just one year before he can finish his decades of training, he was diagnosed with, 4th stage lung cancer.

But unluckily, after treated hundreds of patients, this time he is the one that has to traverse the line from doctor to patient.  Actually, Rather than a path,

Paul wrote, “I saw instead only a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert. As if a sandstorm had erased all familiarity. I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living, and I needed my oncologist’s help to do so.”

Perception of time changed

Every dream he had for his future disappeared you’re always thinking about five years down the line what are you going to be doing and that number has no meaning for me anymore. Each minute clocks used to rule everything are now kind of irrelevant to him when you having a terminal illness. That kind of thing forces you to think about your life and what matters to you most.

” The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. “

Now, many of us just thriving towards the future, we always have a plan for the future. We are likely to delay gratification since we know the delayed future would come. But, who knows? That’s the tricky part and also one of the reasons I started to write blogs. I feel like the best way to live a life is find a harmony among everything in your life (not a balance!), your work’s gonna fill a large part of your life as well as your family, I would try to live to fulfillment each day of my life, and determined to say no to anything that not follow my inner core.

Quality life and the identity of your patient

One of the most impressive ideas through this book is a word identity. Through Paul’s life, he experienced this word both from the angle of a patient and a doctor.

“The call to peotect life – and not merely life but another’s identity; it’s perhaps not too much to say another’s soul – was obvious in its sacredness.”

Each time before he operated on a patient’s brain, he would first understand the mind of the patient: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. In human’s brain, the Broca’s area is for understanding language and Wernicke’s area results in an inability to understand language. If a patient suffered a stroke and damaged both areas that often restrains the surgeon’s impulse to save a life. What kind of life exists without language?

To every people,  we should ensure our health care matches your values, and we have the right to check and say no! living means more than just staying alive. 1/4 people received unwanted or excessive medical treatment would you want to be on life support if it offered any chance of longer life, are you most worried about that quality of that time rather than quantity.

Suffering is another blessing

To have a baby at the end of life:

Another impressive sence is when Paul discussed with his wife whether to have a baby at the end of his life, this is a hard decision months to a few years meant Paul was not likely to see her grow up. But he had a good chance of being there for her birth and for the beginning of her life.

When his wife asking Paul if he thought having to say goodbye to a child would make dying even more painful. And his answer is:

“Wouldn’t it be great if it did?”

Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering,  we need to accept the sadness and joy of the time, to uncover beauty and purpose.

Pain Is Inevitable; Suffering Is Optional:

Famous Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote in his book “What Do You Think About When You’re Running?” that “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr Frankl also wrote that

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

He was once a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. His mother, father, brother, and pregnant wife were all killed in the camps. The only thing that the Nazis were unable to take away was his choice as to how to respond to the deprivation, degradation, and trauma to which he was subjected.

Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher who lived nearly 2,000 years ago, who said, people are not disturbed by things but by the view, they take of them. Pain and suffering come from the stories we tell ourselves about the consequence, we cannot choose our external circumstances but we can always choose how we respond to them.

An free soul in a blocked body:

Here is another very touching story from Kitra CAahana, a documentary photographer, whose father has a extreme beautiful and optimistic soul in face of death. I was so touched onced I watched the Ted talk from her, here I’ll post the link；

Finally, a vivid short footage of the book:

一八年、五月末始。Start reading this book at the end of May 2018.

The first time I heard of this book was from one presentation for Prof Shoucheng Zhang。The topic of his talk  is “In Math we trust”.

Almost every point of his talk was once I was very interested in, then I came to the book without hesitation. Before I start reading the book, I went throug some of the book reviews, just like people can’t help swearing when they got shocked, most people can only use magic book these short description for this book。This are even lectures for this book in MIT. For interest, I start to read the book and will write something interesting periodicity to strengthen my understanding. If possible, also help others to appreciate this book :D.

Fugue

This book is well known by it’s articulate structure, it is well designed, and tricks could be appreciated at multiple scales of the content. From coherence between each chapter to conversation inside one chapter, even, within a sentence!

leaves fall season fall leaves. (When we consider the leaves can represent both the plants as well as the action of leaving ) you could also get another: leaves fall season fall leaves. In Chinese, we call this structure 回文，”落叶天叶落”. In genomics, we also have Palindrome sequence。

They are symmetric and echo back and forth.

There is a special word called Fugue to describe a condition contains repeat and symmetry, it comes from a Latin word “Fuga” which means fly. We could see Fugue showed many areas, and sometimes I feel like hard to define it.

• Geology：This particular crystal has a fugue-like structure to it.
• Painting:  Artist Franz kupka 、Henry Valensi 、Josef Albers has fugue style’s work.
• Book: The whole book of GEB is like fugue.
• Music: that’s where it originates from.  The most famous one may be written by J.S.Bach “The Well-Tempered Clavier”. Why this name? Sounds odd. Clavier just means keyboard, but in Bach’s age, there is no tunning system that can guarantee all of the pitches were exactly a half step apart.

Why not appreciate Musikalisches Opfer, Bach BWV 1079 first?

Do you see any specialty in this song?  So in a fugue, what you get is one voice going ahead, leading ahead, and another voice following and imitating it exactly.  Voice can be either actual voice or written for instruments. If the follower is exactly the same as the previous one, then it becomes Canon or round.  But fugue is, after the main part (Subject) is stated, then other parts go their independent ways, generating counterpoint.

If we look at the music tabs of BWV 1079, we could see some basic pattern repeat themselves with shift and flip! Actually, the tune is ascending and at some point flipped and congruent without consciousness. We call this infinite ascending which could also be seen in Escher and Godel.

Infinite ascending also presented in Escher’s picture:

In Echer’s picture, he’s mastered in this kind of style: Infinity, symmetry, repeats and one more import: self-indicate. Self-indicate is also something connects which another hero of the book —— Godel. Before we have time to know what Godel is famous for and what’s the deeper relation among them three. There is more examples of this finite ascending we could play with:

GNU’s Not Unix! —— GNU is an operating system which coorporates with linux system and now we get used to call them linux. GNU itself  is a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix.

This kind of infinite is very interesting! It reminds me of quite a lot of ideas, what about this? – Hilbert Curve:

Here is another brain mystery, from https://xkcd.com/1163/.

Okay, I’ll stop here at present. If you’re interested go and get one to read :]

Figures all come from google, might subject to copyright.

Chap1  Not having a self

Harness it to become a happier person and even a better person: to feela new sense of connection with your fellow creatures and a new sense of generosity toward them.

Walpola Rahula 1959
According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can the tranced all the evil in the world.”

The Buddha’s strategy in this discourse is to shake the monks’ confidence in their traditional ideas about the self by asking them where exactly, in a human being, we would find anything that warrants the label self. He conducts this research systematically; he goes through what is known as the five “aggregates” that, according to Buddhist philosophy, constitute a human being and that human’s experience:

(1) the physical body (called “form” in this discourse), including such sense organs as eyes and ears; (2) basic feelings; (3) perceptions (of, say, identifiable sights or sounds); (4) “mental formations” (a big category that includes complex emotions, thoughts, inclinations, habits, decisions); and (5) “consciousness,” or awareness—notably, awareness of the contents of the other four aggregates. The Buddha runs down this list and asks which, if any, of these five aggregates, seem to qualify as self. In other words, which of the aggregates evince the qualities you’d expect self to possess?

For starters, the Buddha links the idea of self to the idea of control.  For example, if  feeling were self, then the feeling would not lead to affliction. And you’d be able to change your feelings by saying “May my feelings be thus, may my feeling not be thus.” But, of course, we don’t ordinarily have this kind of control over our feelings. So the feeling is not self. So too with other aggregates.

Of course, self  may be associated with other properties like persistence.  However, we can also argue that all five aggregates are impermanent.  And above is the core of the argument the Buddha makes in this first and most famous discourse on not-self.

第一小节          无我

2017年相当盛行的一本《为什么佛学是真实的》，作者罗伯特莱特，美国新闻人，尤其擅宗教题材的写作。本书是作者亲身参与有关佛教的retreat，冥想训练，在与日常与老师对话结合自己的体验悟道而作。以上关于“无我”的讨论是令我印象非常深刻的一节，以至于当我准备对这样一本书写review时第一小节选择了这个话题。

书中论述“无我”的观念是从佛陀与五位僧人的对话开始。首先，佛陀列举了佛教中关于人的五大组成要素（有《五蕴皆空经》一作，因而有人也把这五种要素称之为“五蕴”，我本人并不知道这种翻译，出于形式文雅性，我们不妨也来看一下对应翻译），那么是哪五蕴呢？

• 色蕴- form：人的身体、形态
• 受蕴-basic feelings：人的基本情感，喜怒哀乐
• 想蕴-perceptions：基本感知，视觉嗅觉听觉味觉
• 行蕴-mental formations：精神形态，喜好
• 识蕴-consciousness：认知

佛陀依次检视五蕴，并提问：“请告诉我这五蕴中，谁被“自我”所拥有？”。 对于初步理解这个问题的朋友，书中给了一个简单的思考方法：

自我具有两大基本属性：控制（control）+ 持续存在（persistence）

如果说我们认为我们的“感觉” 是 “自我” 所拥有的话，那么感觉应该是可以被“我们”掌控的，然而我们都知道我们是无法掌控我们的“感觉”的，并且它也并不会是“持续存在”的，因此我们得出“感觉”不是自我，也不被“自我”所拥有。佛陀接着论证，所有的五种组成人的要素都不能具备这两种属性，因而没有自我这个概念。

读到这里，希望你已经一头雾水。不用我细细分析，你也能看出以上的论据有太多太多的逻辑漏洞。但我希望你看到的不仅仅是漏洞，而能品味到哪怕一点点的“无我”的思想。我们回到问题的本质：

为什么佛家要论证无我，为什么佛学要摒弃“自我”这个概念？

Chapter 1.1   自我为中心，即是痛苦源头

谈到这个话题，脑子里蹦出太多的概念和论据，听我讲话可能没啥逻辑，看我写字可能更没逻辑。但我还是要尝试着整理出来，希望还能有一些层次。

1. 首先，佛学认为人类一切的痛苦来源于“三毒”：“贪、嗔、痴”。 贪是无限的欲求，嗔是愤怒是排斥，贪和嗔都是痴（愚昧）的表现。所谓涅槃即是能够摈弃，远离贪嗔痴。那么如何远离呢？
2. 远离的方法最直接的即是理解我们上述的论证，即“五蕴”无我的论证。一切痛苦来源于贪嗔痴（人的本性啦），而贪嗔痴又是根植于“我”这个概念。无我即是“我并不比谁更特殊”。
3. 在斯多葛学派中一个很重要的有关痛苦来源的论证在于（我自己的理解）：“痛苦多是来自于以自我中心的，不切实际的，过高的期望”。所谓期望越大失望越大，幸福感某种程度上来来自“超期望的事实”。
4. 小乘佛教强调个人的开化，涅槃。我想即是达到个人的“无我”境界。大乘佛教强调通达之后还要帮助更多人开化，获得智慧。
5. 以上仅仅是一些碎片化的观点，那么什么是我认为的实线无我的方法呢？实际一点：
   • 分辨并有选择地克制自己的欲望。（自控力，延迟享受的能力，自我认知的程度，对世界的认知程度，回归本心）即远离贪。
   • 降低期望，培养同理心，推己及人，感化他人 即远离嗔。
   • 不断学习吸收负熵，一步步建立人生观 世界观 价值观 远离痴。不断体验，感受世界，观察人，理解人，了解自我，理解社会。

有一句话叫：“听了那么多道理，仍然过不好这一生”。为啥，因为我们太多人根本不理解“听”到底是啥。知行合一，看再多也需要自己去体验。

Chapter 1.2 痛苦来源，什么决定了我们的意识?