Ogyen wrote:Wesley1982 wrote:Just wondering, have you ever "looked inside" the mind a Billionaire?..
If self-made - I've heard the make-up is similar to that of the 'psychopath' brain... I can't comment on inherited wealth, which from what I was looking at recently, composes the majority of billionaires.
Yep; I'm sure we're often talking about [honorary] members of the asura realm with human-realm bodies, such being the vagaries of karmic conditioning. On the other hand, it's amazing how one's ways of being can shape one's mind, as much as the reverse may be more usual.
Sometimes I fantasize that the hardcore dukkha associated with 'the human condition' were erased (in this world atleast) via a mass extermination of all Humanity by a sociopathic elite of former bankers, stockbrokers, and corporate chiefs {And let's not deceive ourselves by denying the fact that the above scenario is obviously highly likely to play out within a generation, given the current economic situation}. But then I remind myself how excruciatingly
boring life must be without human emotions and sensitivities, and -for those billionaires especially-
with nothing further to aim for in life, however much positive karma may have been needed to overcome the vulnerabilities of mind through the course of one's previous lives. I imagine all of this is why the relative position of the asura realm varies within different presentations of the six-realms model of samsara.
Imagining how things must appear to the mind of a billionaire, ordinary human beings appear to be, sorry to say, pretty pathetic little cockroaches whose destruction by oneself would be -even if deliberate- barely noticeable, even as the act of mercy it might appear to be on reflection. It's self-evidently the case that acquiring and dealing with wealth increases one's mental complexity and sophistication -the size of one's functioning self if you will- exponentially. Ofcourse, one's genetic makeup at birth influences the capacity of one's mind to develop and integrate complex structures of understanding, and thereby one's ability to do those things, hence (I imagine) the prophecy at Gautama's birth that the child would become either a Buddha
or the sole ruler of the world. I think there's a distinction to be drawn here between higher beings, whose minds are almost infinitely subdivided into the various functions that pull their activities together (imagine each neuron of your brain being wired to various points in the outside world), and lower beings whose minds are somewhat mushier, among humans as well as among sentient beings in general. {Since all human beings (apart from certain results of Pakistani inbreeding customs) have the same outsize brains, I imagine the overall 'switched-on' capacity of mind to be roughly the same amongst them, however; 'blotting out' of sentience by instinct (and simpler brains) would then appear to be a characteristic of the animal realm.}
As for enlightened beings, I believe Padmasambhava said 'My view may be as high as the sky, but my attention to phenomena is as fine as flour' - Sort of combines the spacey, mushy quality of a lower human mind (like my own btw) with the penetrating precision of a higher one _ _