one who is without discrimination and constructual thought is always proper

‘proper’ is the english translation used by robert thurman in his 1976 rendering of the vimalakirti nirdesa sutra, commonly called the householder sutra.

it may be difficult to imagine going through the world without categorical discrimination and its extension through relational or associational thought. what would your experience of your own mind be like, without those two seemingly inherent processes ongoing?

i trained in zen meditation and studied texts for many years before i encountered the phrase, the primary truth is to be unconditioned.

this assertion is readily graspable. we understand, without practice or study, what it means to be conditioned. in fact, we understand all too well.

the estimate of ‘all the people who have ever lived’ is about 100 billion. it refers to all humans of the last hundred thousand years, or more generally, the total number of humans who have lived anywhere on the earth since people migrated out of africa in two waves starting roughly seventy thousand years ago. before the migrations started, our population had been reduced from about one million to about 25,000, very close to the minimum number needed to ensure genetic diversity and viability as a species.

the people in this set of ‘all humans who have ever lived’ are identical to us physiologically, every single one, they have the same bodies, and their brains all contain 86 billion neurons. their connectomes, or the set of all connections between those 86 billion neurons, is, in every case, essentially infinite.

of the 100 billion people who have ever lived, 99% have only known the landscape of the modern world, the world since 1600. infrastructure is less than ten thousand years old. the first walled city in china, for example, taosi, was built five thousand years ago after huang di defeated the hmong ancestor in the first war in chinese history. there is an expression, before huang di was primitive society; after huang di was chinese civilization.

demographically, just before that war, there were a million people living on the floodplain of the yellow river.

from the archeological record, it is clear that, before infrastructure, there was no torture.

with infrastructure, you get torture.

that is what it means to be conditioned.