The artist writes:

The white flag, white in which all colors of the flags of the different nations are at the same time united and cancelled. It is the sign against an absurdly conflicting society. It is a symbolic act, but at the same time totalizing in its essential purity.

It means more than rewriting some textbooks. It means thinking afresh about the relationship between people and their world and acting accordingly.

Without due attention to the process of thinking itself, it is bound to remain just words.

[O]ur habitual identification with the flow of thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as transient appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering and confusion.

He is clearly on the right track.

Our brains are the product of the environment in which we are nurtured through the first two decades of life. […] Our experience during childhood and adolescence determines the wiring of our brain so powerfully that even processing of sensory information is determined by our childhood environment.

Dr. Douglas Fields is right, and that is precisely why it can be so hard to communicate with an adult. In the absence of proper education, experience, especially negative, is limiting and coarsening the mind.

Every year, researchers from the British Social Attitudes survey ask a representative sample of British people whether they regard themselves as belonging to any particular religion and, if so, to which one? […] In the latest 2010 BSA report, published earlier this month, only 42% said they were Christians while 51% now say they have no religion. […] This Christmas, for perhaps the first time ever, Britain is a majority non-religious nation.

We will see even more pronounced decline of sectarianism in the world in future. It is absolutely inescapable. And after true religious quality will become immanent in culture, the very word “religion” in the plural will sound anachronistic.

[W]e have some decades, at best, […] to build a viable global civilization which is compatible with human well-being.

Exactly.

One should look after one’s mind. It is indispensable to preserve that sense of immediacy, which is really what religion is.

For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind. Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing.

Then David proposes the term “asoulism,” which makes me wonder if he has ever heard of anattā. (Evidently he has. —March 9, 2011)