Good morning!
We have a peaceful Sunday morning with our sesshin (摂心、接心), embracing and touching the heart. Last night I read the correspondence between Einstein and Freud, under the auspices of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation at Paris in 1932, on the “the most insistent of all the problems civilization has to face.” Einstein asked, “Is there any way to deliver mankind from the menace of war?” He suggested a judicial and legislative body to settle international conflicts with its effective power. Nations’ sovereignty has prevented this with a power (political, military, industrial) complex using schools, the press, churches, and mobilizing the masses. He suspected the existence of the lust (instinct) for hatred and destruction in man and asked Freud if this can be controlled in order to stop all armed conflicts.
Freud was rather pessimistic, given the two human instincts of love (to live, Eros) and hate (to harm, Thanatos), but he agreed with Einstein that the only sure way to avoid wars was the establishment of a supreme court and executive force for it, and he suggested that there may be the two ways to lead the interwoven instincts toward love (as an antidote to hate, for a community of bonds and peace) and the advance of culture (strengthening intellect and introverting aggression; decreasing savages and increasing pacifists). He thought that the human cultural disposition and a well-founded dread of future wars might serve to put an end to war in the near future. He thought cultural developments would eventually go against war (though he did not distinguish between culture and civilization, see below, which makes problems unclear and solutions unattainable).
I came across a practical idea of deconstruction – I thought about asking my nephew to send sweet rice (for rice cakes in the New Year’s days) in smaller bags, for the sake of the recipient who would carry them in after delivery, and then considered why the person could not divide a previously received heavy bag into smaller portions to carry in. Einstein and Freud could not deconstruct institutional and ideological fictions (nations, companies, education, media, religions, civilizations, individuals, instincts). An artificial, uni-directional, pyramidal civilization in sin (separated selfish sick suffering) with its fivefold calamities (delusion, bondage, discrimination, exploitation, and extermination) must be deconstructed to a natural, cyclical, Indra-net culture in holiness (wholly wholesome way world) with its fivefold blisses (awakening, freedom, equality, love, and peace).
Humans (even those believing in fictions or money-buying fictitious bodies) make war crimes, pollution devastation, nuclear (bomb/plant) holocaust, ecological destruction, global warming, species demise, mass extinction, etc., against nature and the natural order (Dharma) of Dependent Origination (interdependent system). The Awakened Way replaces the Triple Poisons of love, hate, and delusion (of separate, same, sovereign self) with the Triple Learning (of morality, concentration, and prognosis), the karma world with the Dharma world, the small-self blindness of more greed, dissatisfaction, agitation, mindlessness, idleness, looseness, foolishness, and speculations with the great-person awakening of less desire, satisfaction, abstinence, right mindfulness, right striving, right concentration, right prognosis, no speculations (view, dogma, chatter, etc.), and so forth.
11/27/16
Note: Einstein and Freud correspondence:
http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf
