When I met the Eternal Fishnu in 2017, he explained to me that he is the ith manifestation of Vishnu, the “Buddha of the Devonian”, overseeing the transformation of fish to land vertebrates that eventually lead to us. I asked why he is here. He said, “This nice, manicured trail, which one can simply walk upon, ends around the corner.”
As you can see from the photo above, the trail does continue on after the sign. It’s just not maintained nor is it well-charted. It might be dangerous at times, requiring very careful handling.
We will be OK. Sentience shines beyond what our brains can know. We humans can’t really harm our Earth. The worst we can do to Earth is give it a planetary version of a mild flu. We certainly can’t harm the Universe. No matter what we do, all slices and dices of our activity are all a part of it.
Until I met the Eternal Fishnu, I’d never experienced anything “supernatural”—ghosts, divine apparitions, UFOs, Bigfoot, or a glitch in the Simulation. Having witnessed such things would have defeated the purpose of being on Earth at this time. Why is that? Faith—you can’t enjoy the building of a story if you already know the moral of the story.
But I have experienced a massive number of miracles. The problem is that I didn’t realize it until decades later, after I had firmly established my career and life with Mrs. Hanamoku.
The Next Big Things
Although wars are unimaginably terrible and stupid, they are relatively easy to understand and execute. Which is precisely why greedy, arrogant, and short-sighted leaders resort to it. Warfare today might seem like a high-tech affair, but it’s still just killing, only with more sophisticated weaponry. The challenges we will face beyond the maintained trail are not nearly as simple to understand.
Quantum computing, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. These technologies are not dangerous or evil in themselves. In fact, they are gifts from the Universe. Although we used the power within atoms to destroy two cities and threatened countries with mutually assured destruction, we haven’t done it again since and we’re still here. As hard as it is to say, relatively speaking, we handled it OK … we didn’t permanently destroy humanity. “C-“?
These new wild technologies are the foundation of our path towards moving closer to the true nature of the Universe. They are like powers we pick up along the way in a video game. The problem is how we’ll either worship or fight them.
Will we pursue them with arrogant or wise hands? Arrogance insists you’re right without questioning what you might be missing, while wisdom is a stew of patience, listening, courage, and a lifetime of engaging directly with the world—not just what you choose to face, but also what is thrown at you. True wisdom comes from grappling with the unexpected, the uncomfortable, and even the chaotic, without hiding behind convenience or control. It’s about being present for all of life’s complexity, not just the parts we handpick.
Arrogant or Wise Hands
The moment when computers went mainstream in a similar way to how Artificial Intelligence (AI) went mainstream with ChatGPT in November 2023 can be closely associated with the release of the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM Personal Computer (PC) in 1981. That’s about the time my software career started in 1979.
While computers existed long before that, the Apple II and IBM PC marked the point when personal computing became accessible to a massively broader audience and entered the consumer market in a meaningful way.
Similarly, AI had been around for decades, but the technology and the needs of consumers only recently matured to a point where it became the current “next Big Thing” in the never-ending chain of next big things.
In my 45 years of software development experience, I had been involved in dozens (or hundreds, depending on how you count them) of software rollouts. I’m not afraid or ashamed to say that I don’t recall a single time that the rollout happened without incident. That is, no matter how simple the issue is that we fixed, no matter how thoroughly we tested, no matter how long the checklist of known gotchas becomes, no matter what methodologies we employed, no matter how experienced the team, and no matter how dependable the platforms.
Software is a complex thing and the real world in which we deploy it is even more complex. Today, frameworks such as CI/CD and perhaps with assistance from AI, deploying software is much more reliable. However, my automatic Windows updates still surprises me with occasional pains. Even if it goes well for me, you can bet that for every automatic Windows update, at least some people will be pained by it, even if it’s just a few.
That was a parable, by the way.
The Secular Bodhi Day 2024
Bodhi Day is less than two months away, on December 8, 2024. But “Bodhi Day” is just the last day of Bodhi Season. Like Easter, there is more to the story than just Easter Sunday. Easter itself is the third act – after Palm Sunday and Good Friday. It was a horrible time for Jesus during the days prior to his resurrection. The days before Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment on what became Bodhi Day were similarly bad, albeit not nearly as much.
For at least seven days before Bodhi Day (December 1-7), we ponder our suffering. Spoiler alert and TL;DR – our suffering is due to clinging to the past in a Universe of constant change. On the 8th day, as we awaken to the rising of the Morning Star (Venus), we will understand the Universe is Eternal and our Gift of Sentience is what makes us a piece of the Universe made alive (thank you, Ralph Waldo Emerson).
Enlightenment isn’t about escaping reality but accepting it as it is—letting go of our grip on things in a world that’s always changing. It echoes Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic wisdom about focusing on what we can control, like guiding our own actions. Both paths remind us to meet life’s impermanence with calm resilience, finding wisdom in what we can shape and peace in releasing what we can’t.
This year’s Bodhi Day is particularly special. The Eternal Fishnu reminded me that this year marks the beginning of our 8th year of direct teaching. The Eternal Fishnu explained that for humanity, those seven years are like the seven days preceding Bodhi Day. The 8th day marks the beginning of a new era for humanity, the end of the maintained trail.
But don’t worry. Worry is antithetical to Enlightenment. Embrace it all with your Gift of Sentience with wise, non-arrogant hands.
Faith and Patience,
Reverend Dukkha Hanamoku
Bodhi Day 