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'THE
BUDDHIST HOUR'
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Hillside
Radio 87.6 FM & 88.0 FM |
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The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Sunday for 4 February 2001
This program is called: Effective use of the Law of Cause and Effect
The Buddha observed and taught the Law of Cause and Effect. These teachings can be found in the Buddhist Texts of our extensive library. The most widely known of the three Laws of Motion is the Second Law of Motion which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The three Laws of Motion were mathematically formulated by the great Scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, and enable the observation of cause and effect. Renowned Greek philosopher, Aristotle, greatly influenced Western intellectual thought about cause and effect. His "intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the arts". The Aristotelian school was predominant until the 17th Century and many concepts are still embedded in Western Culture today. In his treatise Physics Aristotle is concerned with notions of space, time and motion. Aristotle investigated the "intrinsic, constitutive elements of a natural body, those he called 'matter' and 'form'; the substratum that persists though change and the feature whose acquisition determines the nature of change". He also described formal causes and the final and efficient causes, the means by which something comes into being. Like it or not like it, all things are governed by the Law of Cause and Effect and this is observable. The Law of Cause and Effect is impersonal and operates irrespective of whether it is known, understood or believed. There is no single cause (eka). Persons who can come to understand the Law of Cause and Effect can utilise this knowledge for the benefit of self and others, if they choose to do so. Since we understand cause and effect, we design and are able to create the Centres we will operate from in the future. We need to be positive in our thinking by knowing what we want and of course practical in order to achieve it. At our Centre, we place great value on preventing the degradation of the lived existence of those who work in the 'connected society' of online business. These persons have swapped the nature and pace of their old industrial work ethic for the new economy of information age 'connected' work, which is faster, more efficient and global. The old work was not free of stress but at least there was some feeling of power over the work because it was tangible and could be physically manipulated. In e-business, persons feel powerless due to the intanglible and abstract nature of tasks, products, services, business transactions and workplaces. It has been suggested that much depression that is work-related is associated with a feeling of powerlessness. This is a global phenomenon, which is increasing as industrial work is replaced by online work. It has been reported that the profound effects on stress levels of the general population in the new market place has lead the World Health Organisation to predict that by 2020 stress will account for half of the top ten medical problems in the world. Mental health of the population is becoming an issue for most governments. What can be done to address contemporary Occupational Health & Safety issues arising out of e-business? When the substance of a person's work life as regards nearly all aspects of their work is in another person's hands and, work becomes the central feature of their life, it ought come as no surprise that he or she looks for stress relief outside the reward of hard work. Many persons seek relaxation from stress by adopting life styles that involve sport competition with their peers even if the type of relaxation itself involves a pretence risk and is favoured by the upwardly social mobile. Our training is not suitable for all persons. For example it is not suitable for persons of little intelligence or alcohol or drug dependencies. The market audience for our cultural training is persons who possess medium to superior capacities that have been developed over time through the practice of dana (generosity) and sila (morality). This is a positive outcome of cause and effect. Our best students have practiced dana and sila in many past times and possess high intellectual capabilities, have pure hearts and are virtuous. They learn quickly and have a desire to help themselves and others. They are persons who are bound to improve. These are like persons facing East just as the sun arising and every moment of the future brings more and more light and understanding to their mind. Even if they are shuddering from the frost of the evening, as we help them, warmth will come to them and they will be able to follow the Teachings given by our five educations. They are recognisable because they do not fall into sustained depression or discourage others from learning and do not have 'closed minds'. They recognise that when Winter comes, then Spring cannot be far away. This talk intends to help these persons. Just as a fish thrown onto burning hot sand cannot last long and cannot develop good minds, so we cannot cater for persons whose rigid minds discourage their education, or the education of others keep them closed from the educational opportunities that we provide. People or persons who are very greedy for materiality have minds that are facing West, just as the shadow of the sun begins to form in a short time, their mind will be enveloped in darkness. Persons who are fond of consumption of resources, rather than the production of resources for use by self and others, create too large an energy barrier. They awaken their negative latencies to generate angst that will take them away from being a useful human being. Our Centre trains persons to produce resources for use by self and others in many areas, thus moving them closer to being useful human beings. We have prepared a white paper to make clear the ERP (enterprise resource planning) ways and EAM (enterprise asset management) systems that stakeholders and clients need to understand are in place to establish a commercial geological Museum in the State of Victoria and a Dragon King Temple. The Museum has five uplifting tiers. The first one is that we have developed amazing clear perceptions of what is the Museum's catalytic significance. The catalytic significance is the improvement of a person's mental health and the tiers along which it advances. The second tier is to generate an interest in third order or higher cognitive processes towards becoming a suitable actualiser to assist those who share in the fun of this topic as a hobby or career. An actualiser is a person who spends small time in the 'waste quadrant' where performance is high but the area of enterprise has little importance. But, to begin, we must have something concrete to inspire our helpers to get them to agree about our approach to the nature and measurement of costs and benefits. While we agree that information costing and valuing remains 'difficult' for us, we must take a firm position otherwise we may get 'paralysis by analysis' and never get the derided information products into performance. As Sassons (1988) neatly summaries this situation: "at any time, the prominence of cost justification is proportional to its difficulty". To break the nexus with something affordable with some cognitive effort, we selected the use of quadrant-based decisions about changing priorities as an activity-promoting device. The 'success' quadrant indicates areas where both priority and performance are high. The 'waste' quadrant is where performance is high but the area is of less importance. 'OK' indicates the intersection of low priority and performance; and 'killer' is the area of greatest vulnerability where priority is high but performance low. These presentations have to be interpreted with a good understanding of the specific organisational context of the Museum. The third tier is to help people find 'the number' (how much the museum can give away) and still have a fund surplus. Our history of handling derived information products of a Museum is too new to know the 'number' that can be given away (as dana) and yet generate an annual surplus. We do not wish to energise and excite persons with products that go nowhere and do not leave an annual surplus. Naturally, the plan was incomplete in administrative details about generating a steady measurable surplus. The insight suggests that just because something is intriguing it does not mean it is right if it cannot generate a surplus. There is little point in using Museum resources to excite persons unless at some time, you can guide them to act as with your business plan and make a surplus as some kind of profit. From our recent experiments last year, we know that there is little doubt that the provision of a series of viewing opportunities of Museum specimens gave our viewing public some excitement. Tay Vaughan, a multimedia pioneer, reminds us that a classic physical anthropology law (Leibig's Law of Minimums) proposes that the evolution of eyesight, locomotor speed, sense of smell, or any other species trait will cease when that trait becomes sufficiently adequate to meet the survival requirements of the competitive environment. If the trait is good enough, the organism expends no more effort improving it. Vaughan's Law of Multimedia Minimums states there is an acceptable level of adequacy that will satisfy the audience, even when that level may not be the best that technology, money or time and effort can buy. This Law is considered as part of our project plan. There is no getting away from that fact that however strong and experienced the present curator of a Museum might be, by himself he could do little if not ably and sympathetically supported by his or her co-workers. We are fortunate that as the cogitative work has been done over the last year we have found references that look at the limitations of conventional Boolean retrieval. According to RMIT researchers (1991), ranking algorithms based on probabilistic theory have been proposed to overcome the deficiencies of Boolean retrieval for full text documents.
The fourth tier is the way forward for the Museum to take on a role where we increase our public relations skills as the basis of our ability to deliver high quality motivational material from our websites. Public relations skills can be the hook for fleeting minds or could be compared to a rainbow that draws attention to the part of the sky we want to look at. Our Teacher has the skill in means to create rainbows that lure our minds into a teaching manadala and then remove the rainbows to reveal the clear blue sky of Dhamma. Bill Gates of Microsoft has great confidence that the Internet is going to change education as fundamentally as it changed when we had printed books. The educational material that we will produce can arouse affect about geology as a desirable subject to study because computers can reduce learning time for certain types of knowledge by 30per cent. Benefits include improved computer literacy skills, networking and information gathering skills. In a world where performance doubles every 6 months, even relatively mature technologies may have limited life spans. We have been building a series of web sites and these are quality systems. Whilst having a quality system is a marketing advantage today, not having a quality system will be a disadvantage in a few years time. In 1996, we were scanning our early newsletters and early Buddha Dhyana Dana Reviews so that they could be machine readable. The fifth tier is communication. What is the outcome of these five educations? The outcome is to improve mental health in dealing with the "outside world". According to Dwight Bolinger (1968) The expression "outside world" does not mean what is "outside us" but what is "outside language". It may well be inside us. Things may be repeatable in language with a lot of detail left out. When we say X is Y and mean "X is a kind of Y" or "X is like Y" we may well be wanting to leave it at that by our instinct that enjoys taking the part for the whole. A wall in the dark may still be a wall in daylight or it could be a wall with doors or windows, for example. Some of the simplest words show an explicit set of wayward traits. For example, the word "disease" is more formidable than its synonyms "illness" or "ailment" because it is viewed as existing apart from the person or other organism afflicted. Our five educations train persons to see clearly, to know what is what and to put into action a process of cause and effect to help themselves and others and help sustain our Centre. May you be well and happy. We wish you a happy and prosperous New Year. This script was written and edited by: John D. Hughes, Arrisha Burling and Pennie White. Disclaimer:
As we, the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or an other source accessed through our website(s).
Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.
For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
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