This must be the ultimate provocation.

If meditation and other seemingly arbitrary spiritual processes as well as other highly symbolic customs that all religions have tend to prevent you in a lazy way from actual study and education then you will never find the true peace and introspection that science and math provide. There is no higher form of inner peace than the one provided by studying the world and understanding the character of natural law. From that you can derive true nirvana and virtue but also know when to stand up for important principles at the expense of peace (because a greater peace is now at risk for example by inactivity).

What principles are more important than peace and compassion? The rational understanding of peace and compassion.

What compassion comes in the form of peaceful existence that however comes with great population growth rates that ultimately lead to disaster and crisis? Science would be able to tell you to be both ethical and efficient and offer solutions that lead to greater peace and compassion.

Because of science one day we may not have to kill conscious animals to eat them for example (cultivate it differently instead and exceed the quality taste and nutritional experience) and offer all people of the world proper education that will lead to rational peace and compassion that is superior and more productive.

I do not have a problem with Buddhism or other eastern religions and philosophies (like i do with some intolerant and aggressive aspects of others). I only argued that there are better ways and that deluding yourself that traditional meditation is a lasting solution is wrong. You need to be restless instead and active but constantly examining yourself and becoming wiser to find true peace and virtue. You need to work for it the right way with personal mental effort. So if we can skip all the customs and go into the actual root of the solution with is a better understanding of the world then we can become better people and more efficiently support greater ideas of love friendship and compassion.

There is no higher form of meditation than what the woman in the video were doing when in the floor with a huge stack of papers. And the memory now goes to her daughter that can no longer see mom "paint" but wont forget. The baton passes to another "9 year old".

Would you kill another human being rather than being killed yourself?

Depending on circumstances and intentions, usually the answer is yes.

But I don't claim that peace and compassion are the most important principles.

If you're breathing you either haven't thought through the level of suffering your very existence causes, or you don't really believe that compassion is the most important principle, or you're a hypocrite. Take your pick.

If you're using a computer, you value minor creature comforts over compassion for the horrific suffering of other feeling entities.

As of now I am a hypocrite...
...But also, if my partner and I committed suicide, then our infant daughter would starve to death, which wouldn't be particularly compassionate either, I would say.
So, as I see it, if I live I cause suffering and death to others; if I commit suicide I also cause suffering and death to others.

But about you being willing to kill other human beings.. how far would you be willing to go in killing others in order to survive?
Would you kill 100 people? 1,000,000 people?
Women and children?
Is there no principle more important than your own survival?
If survival is not the most principle, what is?

What if you were single?

Regarding survival, if I was unjustly attacked I would have no problem killing a few thousand people who were trying to harm me.

On the other hand, if I had a mental compulsion to kill that I couldn't stop myself acting on, I'd kill myself once I knew, without hesitation. It's not even a question; it's just something I'd do.

Survival - including the survival of good ideas and good societies - is more important than peace and compassion in most circumstances. Beyond that it's all a jumble. That was my only point.

What about you? Would you kill another person to protect your daughter? No shame in being a hypocrite. It just means you aspire to ideals you can't practically reach.

In the face no present danger, survival is mostly autonomic. Which leaves conscious consideration available for other thoughts beyond survival.

I would most likely protect my daughter, yes.

What does it mean to be justly vs unjustly attacked?
If you were attacked by a few thousand angry people I'm pretty sure they would think/feel they are "justified" in attacking you.

I'm sure the guys who flew the planes into the WTC thought they were justified in doing so. They were just defending their "good ideas" and "good society"! They are the heroes!

I'm sure Hitler was convinced he was the "good guy" and the Jews were the "bad guys", while the Jews thought they were the good guys and Hitler was the bad guy. Who was right and why?
Was Hitler justly attacked by the Russians and the Americans?
Was America justly attacked by the Japanese?
Was Japan justly nuked by the Americans?

Of course its real.

What does physics have to say about the interconnectedness of everything? What does maths and geometry have to say about it? What does religion have to say about it?

The unified whole we divide by the focused and limited nature of concious attention. Concious attention or intentionality is necessarily focused, limited and thus must divide the whole to make any sense of it. Yet, no matter how we choose to divide it up, it remains a unified whole. Throw a net over the world and divide it up square by square, the world remains a whole.

Some divisions are more useful than others no doubt. Yet to forget that these divisions do not actually divide the whole, is a new kind of scientific dogmatism.

Nothing whatsoever
Nothing whatsoever
Everything.

The fact that there are simpler rules, that one item in a universe can effect another, that the same patterns will be repeated in more than one place, is expected in any universe. It says nothing whatsoever about connectedness. It would take the sloppiest of sloppy minds to see "oneness" in those things. It's a nonsense concept, like "God".

What does that even mean, it remains a unified whole? Sounds like a world salad to me.
Abstractions are not real, sure. What does that have to do with "the oneness"? Whether or not you can know all truth just by looking inward, which is what is claimed by these nutty Eastern philosophers who have all-knowing daddies inside them rather than all-knowing daddies in the sky. The idea is no less silly. Harder to shake than sky daddies, and probably requires a higher level of intelligence and introspection, but still something that any even partly learned man should realize sooner or later. I think you're just really young, and are doomed to realize where Watts is wrong.

Imagine a ball that is punctured by a needle millions of times, spanning every inch of the ball. Now imagine that each of those holes in the ball is a perceiver (someone looking out into the world). These perceivers are us. Outside the ball is everything that is perceived.

In this conception, we are the universe experiencing itself - each and every one of us. The universe experiences itself on many more levels however, than just through us. Every species of life on earth, for example, experiences a different aspect of that universe and as such, they're all in the same ball with us. Our experiences may differ greatly, but we're one; we're the universe experiencing itself on multiple levels. What is outside the ball depends on what is inside and what is inside depends on what is outside, just as perceiver and perceived are mutually necessary. This dependency is oneness.

ITT, we learned that VeeDDzz` shares a oneness with Trump, tapeworms, and all the world's pedophiles.

Does it not extend back in time? Do creatures have to be living in the same time period to be part of the same oneness?

Now that I think about it, why exclude time? Or hydrogen molecules? It's all just a big ball of oneness. I am now complete, I have found omniscience,and will lie in my bed until I die of dehydration. The typing of this post was just a courtesy to end my earthly affairs. I bid you adieu.

While the concept of oneness may seem meaningless to you, the results of its contemplation, on our daily fears, struggles and priorities are very real. Much like the contemplation of death and the contemplation of yourself/introspection.

Beliefs about such big picture concepts spill into every aspect of your life's priorities and values. Refusal to contemplate on them or to dismiss them as trivial is what many will teach you to do. Whether that's beneficial to you, I would argue not.

Consider for example, on the contemplation of infinity.

In the infinitude of space-time, the specific arrangement of matter at this very moment will recur, infinitely. Not only will it recur, and will I be posting about oneness again, but it will recur in all the subtly different kinds of arrangements as well. This includes an arrangement where I'm you and you're me.

The implications of this on something like our view of suffering for example, are significant. We would view suffering inflicted by me and the sufferer of that infliction as the same person - merely separated by space-time. In the infinitude, the suffering I have inflicted, I will eventually be the victim of - when the arrangement comes about where I am the sufferer.

This is Schopenhauer's 'eternal justice'. All the suffering and joy of existence will be felt by everyone; for we are one.

Being one with everything is what the universe provides as an opportunity to directly think about.

No you wont repeat again its a promise. A great deal of a promise that all the bs in modern talk pseudo physics (but also from famous people in documentaries, shame on them they never give you numbers) you have heard that it repeats are moronic. We have absolutely no evidence the universe is infinite and in order for you to repeat so many coincidences need to happen in other similar systems that you wont even believe the number. Its beyond beyond beyond to beyond astronomical to the astronomical power. It is that impossibly rare.

For you to be like you you need all kinds of others to be like all that you ever met. Even if you go almost close to the real human being proprieties and not exactly the same its still beyond astronomical powers of huge numbers. You cant be you to close to you without the rest of the world being close to the kind of world you have today. That is beyond insane small probability if you run the system again.

If in infinite time:
an arrangement has occured...
It can occur.
If it can occur...
it can occur again.

Add whatever huge amount of time - it has occured again.

Interestingly, death allows you to skip all that time inbetween since it doesn't register when unconcious.

You have to give evidence of infinity first to talk about it in these terms. Plus there are levels of infinity. You can wait infinite amount of time and the random walk in 3d wont return to origin a 100% of the time.

There is probably no point in the infinite sequence of digits of Pi that the number repeats itself (the digits) up to that point before resuming in another direction.

You cant have suddenly an infinite universe defacto at birth. Even if you have it indefinitely open to develop forever you still will run into problems that make it impossible to repeat as you imagine.

Only if the universe is strictly a deterministic problem solving sequence you may be able to repeat it by rerunning the problem.

Why wouldnt it recur?

Btw, you're not doing any waiting. Upon death, the infinity of time that passes between death and recurrence is a millisecond from perspective of experience. That time isn't registered when unconcious. You'll obviously have no evidence that so much time had passed since the last time the matter was in that arrangement either.

But there is no scientific evidence that the universe is infinite or that it has repeated infinite times. If we start talking in arbitrary untestable yet directions its very hard to have faith in the process or its conclusions.

All hail the process.

Speaking of process...
If maths describes reality and maths is riddled with infinities, what does that suggest about reality?

It suggests that reality can conceive of infinity and its properties and still fail to realize it. You didnt need infinite number of human neurons or even protons to develop math that use infinity. But we have absolutely no process in physics that something is infinite and is realized that way without any alternative claim that this is only an approximation of convenience in our... integrals.

Does it make you feel uncomfortable to contemplate on the possibility of living in an infinity?

Where else, but in an infinity, could we have the sheer number of combinations that are necessary to generate something as absurd as a big rock spinning around a giant fireball that's hurtling into a black void at 483, 000 miles per hour? Ohh, and we're living on that rock.

This is an utterly absurd state of affairs.

There is nothing absurd with our existence.

I couldn't imagine something more absurd.