Cruelty in bread making (some small lifeforms were harmed in the making of this loaf)
I was making a batch of bread over this past weekend, and it occurred to me how cruel bread making seems if you anthropomorphize your yeast at all.
So. You have this organism, indeed a whole culture (heh), frozen in a kind of metabolic stasis. And you want to harvest the product of this culture's work. So, you bring it out of stasis, not only by suddenly changing its environment to jolt it out of stasis, but also by providing it with a seeming miracle of useable materials. Then, you add more and more material, and give it everything it would need to develop just the way you want. And just as it's reached a point of static equilibrium, you throw it into an oven and kill every last member of this culture.
The observation mostly amused me.
But, it served as a sudden startling reminder of the Fire Sermon delivered by the Buddha. I hadn't thought about it in years, but suddenly there it was.
I find I go through cycles like this, I move away from the more spiritual aspects of my personal existence, and at some point, I naturally begin to swing back in the other direction towards much more consistent spiritual practice.
Interestingly, I don't really subscribe to Buddhism, as much as many people seem to think that I am Buddhist. Here, I have a tendency to step lightly, because religion, philosophy, and mysticism are rather complicated topics for most people. I suppose that I am a student of everything, because I have a passing interest in all things religious. But, I am naturally drawn to aspects of Buddhist philosophy, as well as the inherent simplicity of early Taoist writings, though not so much the later stuff, especially once it became a religion proper.
I find though, and this is particularly troubling to me, that I am in a constant struggle against allowing my views to calcify too much. I cannot always be right, or even really some of the time. Neither are others necessarily wrong, and I find I am constantly working, and as time goes on harder and harder, to find good and reasonable parts of the beliefs of others. More importantly, to overcome biases I've built up about what constitutes a "reasonable" belief, or even a belief at all.
For help with that, I keep coming back to that idea that I asserted a couple of posts back, that everyone is doing the best they know how to. Because few really know what it all means, or what one needs to do to get by, and they tend not to be so willing to talk. I like to think it's because the path to figuring it out is more important than the knowledge itself.
So. You have this organism, indeed a whole culture (heh), frozen in a kind of metabolic stasis. And you want to harvest the product of this culture's work. So, you bring it out of stasis, not only by suddenly changing its environment to jolt it out of stasis, but also by providing it with a seeming miracle of useable materials. Then, you add more and more material, and give it everything it would need to develop just the way you want. And just as it's reached a point of static equilibrium, you throw it into an oven and kill every last member of this culture.
The observation mostly amused me.
But, it served as a sudden startling reminder of the Fire Sermon delivered by the Buddha. I hadn't thought about it in years, but suddenly there it was.
I find I go through cycles like this, I move away from the more spiritual aspects of my personal existence, and at some point, I naturally begin to swing back in the other direction towards much more consistent spiritual practice.
Interestingly, I don't really subscribe to Buddhism, as much as many people seem to think that I am Buddhist. Here, I have a tendency to step lightly, because religion, philosophy, and mysticism are rather complicated topics for most people. I suppose that I am a student of everything, because I have a passing interest in all things religious. But, I am naturally drawn to aspects of Buddhist philosophy, as well as the inherent simplicity of early Taoist writings, though not so much the later stuff, especially once it became a religion proper.
I find though, and this is particularly troubling to me, that I am in a constant struggle against allowing my views to calcify too much. I cannot always be right, or even really some of the time. Neither are others necessarily wrong, and I find I am constantly working, and as time goes on harder and harder, to find good and reasonable parts of the beliefs of others. More importantly, to overcome biases I've built up about what constitutes a "reasonable" belief, or even a belief at all.
For help with that, I keep coming back to that idea that I asserted a couple of posts back, that everyone is doing the best they know how to. Because few really know what it all means, or what one needs to do to get by, and they tend not to be so willing to talk. I like to think it's because the path to figuring it out is more important than the knowledge itself.