Solipsism

The narrator of Robert Heinlein's "- All You Zombies -" is:

a time traveler;
her own parents;
a solipsist.

She calls other people "zombies" and says that they do not exist.

Horse manure. She does interact with other people, not just with herself. Although her body is generated by a causal circle, it is sustained by a physical environment that is external to it, must have preexisted it and can be expected to continue existing after it, the body, has died.

Solipsism is scarcely sustainable. To tell another person that you are a solipsist is to assume that that person exists. To eat is to acknowledge dependence on an external environment.

Heinlein referred somewhere to "multi-person solipsism," which is a contradiction. Someone in Stranger In A Strange Land says that each of us is like a worm talking to its other end. I agree with that. The single reality is conscious of itself through each psychophysical organism. However, each discrete organism, with its distinctive memories and sense of identity, exists as part of the single reality.

In the following story in The Unpleasant Profession..., "They," the narrator is deceived about the nature of reality but is deceived by other conscious beings. He is not alone. "They" exist and so do "zombies."

He thinks:

"'Self-awareness is not relational; it is absolute, and cannot be reached to be destroyed or created." (p. 146)

Self-awareness ends every time we become unconscious. Self exists only in relation to other.

Energy And Inertia

Energy is change.
Inertia is resistance to change.
Every object and event is an interaction between energy and inertia.
If nothing changed, then nothing would happen.

If everything changed at every moment, then nothing would exist.
The apparently static is in fact dynamic.
Mass resists change but also is energy.
One stationary object is many moving particles.

Many objects are stationary on the surface of a planet which however moves through space.
Organisms resist change by changing what is not themselves into themselves and vice versa.
Natural selection preserves but changes species.
The Red Queen runs as fast as she can to stay where she is.

We stand still by walking up a down escalator.
Human beings changed their environment and themselves in the process.
Changing the means of production changes social relationships.
In zazen, we do not change what is but see and accept it.

However, someone who did not see and accept but now does has changed.

See Change And Resistance.

The Real Temple

The present is the transient and the eternal.
Consciousness is constant during waking life but not before or after life.
Everyone alive now is always a member of the universal self.
The past divides; the present unites.

People leaving different places of worship see one sun.
The real temple is heaven and earth.
The true scripture is a blank wall.
Scriptures are signposts.

They point to what we see when we face a wall.
Meaning is focused in words.
Some philosophers called manifested reality the Word. 
We should stand, not kneel, because the One is within, then sit to meditate.

One Sun Now.

Here And Now And The Past

We live here and now but must practice living here and now by "just sitting."

In my experience, contemplative Zen monks are here and now whereas dogmatic Jesuit priests are past.

It is necessary to sit with and let go of disagreeable memories.

Some individuals, still alive, might also practice living here and now by this or other means.

However, their attitudes remain in my past which unfortunately still makes itself present.

It might be possible to meet here and now but the past is an obstacle that we would have been better without.

"My intention is, beloved Mother, to thank the almighty giver of all goods for the superabundant graces with which he has enriched thy noble heart."

It is not. And you cannot answer for the beliefs of the man.

(Imagine reading that out to hundreds of teenagers every morning.)

Marx And Engels

Marx and Engels were encyclopedic writers on every subject, learning from historical events during their life-times. They learned that something they had written in the Manifesto was wrong but it had become a historical document that they had no right to change. However, they added multiple prefaces to later editions.

Marx studied the classical political economists and explained the declining rate of profit. He clarifies exploitation and alienation whereas conventional economists mystify labor-capital interactions.

Engels funded Marx's research and wrote The Dialectics Of Nature, "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man" and The Origins Of The Family, Private Property And The State.

They did not reduce consciousness to mechanical interactions but explained it as arising from qualitative transformations. They did not dismiss religion as a hoax or mistake but explained it as expressing the deepest contradictions in human experience.