Month: September 2013

My previous post no doubt seemed arrogant. Perhaps at times I am. One thing I always do, though, is subject my opinions to critical scrutiny, and I am always willing to defend them in depth; something mediocrities like David Brin are unwilling–and apparently UNABLE– to do.

Kipling poem If stipulates ” if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” That poem is on my wall, and I try to live up to it.

It takes a special something to stick to your guns when you are being universally condemned. In my own case, my sanity depended on it. My family is crazy, but as is so often the case I, as the sanest one, was labelled crazy. That was a determined and long term assault which worked ultimately to strengthen my will considerably. I became quite comfortable being the only one saying something, and dont fear being an outlier in the slightest.

No one likes to be preached to, least of all the guilty.

In viewing people as basically vain, stupid, and gullible, Dale Carnegie spoke considerable truth. Sometimes people are simply a means to an end, and in those cases it probably is best to feed their vanity, share their delusions, and promise them what they want to hear.

I say this because I told the truth to two people today, and will likely regret it.

Posted the following here.

Phrase just popped in my head, two beers in.

We imagine brains as stationary.  Contemporary philosophers often use the metaphor of a “brain in a vat”, or something close to that.  Brains do not have arms.  They do not have legs.  Thus we assume they do not move.

But this is stupid.  Outside of purely instinctive, reactive physical behaviors, substantially everything we ever do begins as a thought–perhaps a thought following an emotion, but the thought is what leads to actual action.

Thoughts have patterns, just as our bodies have patterns.  Moshe Feldenkrais said that every person has their own unique dysfunction.  Only those who move perfectly all move alike. (And the Police State has of course seized on this–as they seized on the Killing Joke–to develop software that recognizes distinctive motor patterns in people, as an adjunct to facial recognition software.)

Minds, likewise, move well only when spontaneous, only when not jumping from box to box.  Minds constrained may as well be suffering from paralysis.  In an ironic twist, the legs and arms move just fine: only the mind is paralyzed.

Again, fatigue and bubbles involved.  Use these ideas at your own risk.

The movie referenced is “The World’s End”.  That is the name of the bar.

I make mistakes sometimes.  Always keep that in mind.  I am not a professional.

What I wanted to add were some further thoughts on that movie, which seemingly got to me on a mythic level.  Let me ask this question: what is superficiality?  What is a superficial bar?  What is a superficial person?  What is a superficial life? 

Logically, to answer this question, do you not need some sense of what is true, what is behind (for walls) or below (for water)  the surface?  You have emotions that are “on the surface”, and this implies the possibility of emotions that are below the surface, and somehow more true.

Take greed: is it inherently a superficial emotion?  If you have enough, and want more, more, more, do we call this superficial?  Well, what is below the surface?  Is it not a sense of emotional disconnection from people–or at least some people; you can be greedy for your family, but feel no compunction in taking from others–and a deep underlying fear of some sort?

Indeed: could we not speak of “greeds” in the plural?  Can we not even consider both all vices and virtues as utterly unique both to individuals and moments?  Can I not express greed differently in different contexts?

The Buddhists split everything up: there is no unitary self, no unitary space, and no unitary time.  Everything consists of little bits with infinitesimal spaces between them.  Space, perhaps, is the primary reality on their account, Mahakasha if memory serves.  Certainly this has been mentioned in my Kum Nye series.  I don’t even know if they consider the bits–dharmas–to be actually in motion, or only apparently in motion.  This, itself, may vary from school to school.

So, back to the “Blanks” (British humor is certainly quite dry), the automatons with seeming personalities of “The World’s End”.  Are they happy?  Do we not need a sense of what happy is to answer this question?

Is it really good sex?  This is an answer we are given implicitly constantly.  We chase chicks, or are chased by dicks, and somehow bliss is supposed to follow. 

But it doesn’t.  You get to a certain age, and if you are growing emotionally, you realize that most of life is not about evanescent pleasures, which we can call superficial because we realize deeper pleasures are possible.

But is pleasure the purpose of life?  In my view, yes, it is.  But pleasure of a qualitatively rich variety, which ultimately transcends the very need for pleasure.

As I think out loud, though, it increasingly seems obvious to me that if you lack a sense of life being about other than procreating and dying–which is more or less the Freudian/Materialistic account–then becoming deeper as a person is difficult. 

Richard Dawkins seemingly thrives on aesthetics, particularly intellectual aesthetics.  But how in his world does a deep sense of connection to other humans beings, of love, arise?  Love is just an illusion, a manifestation of some genetically determined social impulse, with likely a good amount of the procreative instinct dominating it.

As I begin to climb a ladder out of my hole, my cell, I realize that any life lived without the cultivation of love as its primary purpose is largely wasted.  This is where we go when we want to get below the surface, or behind our own walls, and those we erect to defend from others.

To be deeper is to expand.  Perhaps, then, a better word than superficiality is “emotionally small”, or constricted, or dense–or, to put it properly, afraid.

Watched “The End of the World” tonight.  Very odd movie, which included a significant stab at the globalists, and their arrogant claim to know what is best for all of us.  Drunk and stupid, many of us are their moral superiors, precisely because we are not claiming to know all the answers.

It got me to thinking about the “Starbucksification” of the world, about plastic people, about superficiality, about not being real.  Here are a few thoughts.

Do we not drift in and out of being “real”?  Do we not drift in and out of emotional presence?  Are we not at times more plastic than others?

If I live less than I could have, if a given day has less purposive engagement than was possible, is that a partial suicide?  Did I not sacrifice part of my life to convenience, or laziness, or emotional or intellectual rigidity.

Flip side: if I spend my life obsessed with living well, obsessed with not missing a moment, not missing one opportunity to learn or grow, or feel joy and connection, does not this mindset ITSELF lead to rigidity and the loss of “moments” of various sorts?

I am using a good form of self growth, a good form of meditation.  But it is my strong belief–and this has been echoed by the head teacher–that it is quite possible to be diligent in sitting, diligent in following directions, and yet to spend DECADES substantially as you were.

I like this concept of Tao, of a way which is a bit foggy, which is imprecise, but quite real, and quite useful none the less.

It seems to me at times that the fetishization of efficiency in the industrial and business worlds has trickled down to interpersonal relations, in which other people’s use is our personal satisfaction, and we expect them to be efficient in that.  As a physical act, sex is somewhat efficient, but no amount of skill can substitute for true emotional openness, intimacy, and tenderness.

Ah, few attempts to record vaporous perceptual threads that flit into and out of my life.  Lines are inefficient.  So is time.

I saw today in my Kum Nye practice that religion, just like Leftism, can be both a way of disengaging from the real problems of the world–in which it is analogous to what I call Sybaritic Leftism–and a means of expressing cruelty in the name of love and goodness, in which case it is analogous to what I call Cultural Sadeism.

There can never be a substitute for open perception.  As I grow, I see that I have never in my life felt the possibility of spontaneous goodness.  Somewhere in a time I can’t remember, I adopted a mindset of “another day, another beating”.  I adopted a mindset of endurance, and put aside any tender feelings, any possible optimism, any sensitive, open engagement with the world.

Yet this is precisely not just where happiness happens, but Goodness.  I have defined Goodness as in part being able to be happy on your own.  Logically, this means that if you cannot be happy on your own, your capacity for Goodness is greatly diminished, and the likelihood you will periodically turn to cloaked cruelty to salve your own pain greatly increased.

Islam is more or less the direct analogue in the moral realm of Leftism, in the sense that it is in a very great many cases openly cruel, violent, insensitive, inflexible, and rooted somewhere other than the present moment.  It is a monstrous abstraction, in which cutting the arms off of children and decapitating women can somehow be made to seem good, just as it was made to seem good by Robespierre and Lenin and Hitler.

I was walking in with the groceries just now and it hit me that the moment you complete a work of art it is dead.  All the glow disappears.

Any new work has manifold possibilities when it is still taking form.  It can go anywhere as long as you are still working on it, shaping matter–sound–to reflect something intangible.  But once you are done, it only has one possibility: what it is. It can be interpreted many ways, but can no longer add anything to the discussion.

In my understanding, this was why Socrates refused to write anything down.  In his view dialogues were living things, and once complete, they were dead and gone.  They were also all completely unique.

Specifically, I was thinking about my own ideas, and my own critical engagement with them.  Perhaps with a bit of vanity, I view them as my own “art”, in the sense that I am constantly endeavoring to perceive (and no doubt sometimes create) patterns which were hitherto unmanifest, latent.

And I was thinking that once they are out there, once I hit Publish, I have no more emotional attachment to them than if they were someone else’s.

The magic of art–any creative form which involves in part spontaneity and creative engagement with something or someone–is in ELICITATION.  You are trying to bring out inchoate patterns, and necessarily such patterns can only be those which can find a home within you.  Thus, you are eliciting some higher form of awareness.

This in my view is the proper purpose of art.  I have made this rough point many ways, many times.  The UTILITY of art is as a tool for personal growth by offering up a means, a pathway, for bringing up latent awareness, and for processing it–mourning it, accepting it, playing with it.

Van Gogh is dead.  So is his art EXCEPT to the extent that he offers other artists a chance to see their own worlds in a new way.  His work should not be fetishized in a manner quite similar to the tribal cults from which we get that word.

I have always liked, and spoken often of, the Tibetan practice of creating temporary art, art they invest an ENORMOUS amount of care and time in creating, which they value for a time, then destroy.  This is not just a lesson in impermanence and the rejection of attachment, but also in my view a wise understanding that what is dead should be buried–ceremoniously, of course–but buried.

If I extend this metaphor slightly farther, are the works of art in museums zombies?  Are they reflections of life past, but denuded of the creative spark which animated the PEOPLE whose lives were shaped by their creative output?

Frankly, I don’t know if the previous paragraph makes sense.  I don’t understand it.  I am operating symbolically in a fishing trip for something interesting.  If you can pull it out of the water, have at it.  Then throw it back.

If one recalls the parable of the talents, it seems to me that Tibet was given 5 talents, and dug them into the ground.  What I mean by this is that they have exquisite, highly developed spiritual technologies, which facilitate a sense of well-being, true spiritual growth, and social harmony.  But they remained for many centuries the Hermit Kingdom, and the only reason we see any diffusion of their science today is because the Chinese invaded them.  I think Tarthang Tulku is the best of them–at least that have published–and it seems a virtual certainty that had the Chinese not decided to subjugate the Tibetans in the name of freeing them, he would have lived his life anonymously (to us), and eventually died without leaving a trace.

Technologies like Kum Nye, knowledge like Kum Nye, once in the public domain, can spread.  The speed with which good ideas can propagate in our modern world is astonishing, and this technology or one like it may well save all of us.  Our would-be saviors–which is to say the ones who want to enslave the whole world to make it “free”–presumably retain some sense that they are doing good.  They have a moral sense.  No one who truly opens up their emotional worlds, though, can retain a fundamentally false understanding of themselves or their true purposes.  One can hope that somewhere one of these people steps into something truly useful, and comes out truly useful.

In Tibet, as I have mentioned, they spin prayer wheels.  They hang prayer flags, and burn prayers in fires (unless that is the Japanese).  Mostly, they pray for universal salvation, that all come to a knowledge of how to be truly happy, and how to be truly free of all the psychic constraints that bedevil the ignorant.

But is the spread of knowledge not a LOGISTICAL problem?  And is that problem best solved by wishful thinking, even if we do grant some ability to send energy out into the world, and some concreteness to thoughts, which can be transmitted?  I think not.  The most fervent wish is scarcely a match for a well constructed sales pitch delivered in a tone that is right for the audience.  It is direct transmission.

Compassion might in some sense be a feeling–it STARTS as a feeling–but if it is sincere it is interested in abstraction, because it is interested in EFFECTIVENESS.  It is interested in treating the problem of enlightening humanity with the same seriousness with which battlefield generals approach an aggressive campaign against their enemies.  The tone is different, of course–love can and should be a “weapon”–but surveying the terrain, assessing logistical requirements, taking the tone of situation and place, putting the right people in the right places, and trusting intuition are not that different than the problems Sun Tzu sought to solve several thousand years ago.

In our modern world we have made the manufacture of objects easy.  If the banking system had not diluted our wealth twentyfold or more, we would have no material wants of any sort in this or most other countries.

What we have not even come CLOSE to achieving is consistency with regard to spiritual growth.  We are not even CLOSE to having methods we can say with relative certainty will always lead down a long road, and carry people where they want to go. 

Hell, even asking the QUESTION “what makes people happy” has only been tolerated within the broader field of psychology perhaps a decade, and has only become popular in the last 5 years or so (or so I assume, based on the books I see on the shelves.)

It is much cheaper and easier to seek the ability to easily achieve satisfaction, contentment, satiety, peace first, then work backwards and figure out what you actually NEED materially.  You want to help the environment?  Let’s not institute a Fascist regime and get Al Gore the uniform and whip he has always wanted.  Let’s figure out how to end our obsession with consumption.  Let’s figure out how to earn time more easily, and with that time work on being happier and happier with less and less.

Here is a link to a discussion about Scientism.  Steven Pinker writes a piece, which I read. Leon Wieseltier writes a piece I really enjoyed.  Daniel Dennett sets himself the task of refuting Wieseltier.

For my part, I am not going to defend the current guardians of the humanities.  They are stupid and have been for some time.  I am going to say the two ways in which they ACTUALLY move forward.  If you read Wieseltier’s piece carefully, it is defensive, not offensive.  He is telling others to stay away, not where to go.

1. In  my view, the humanities should recognize the subjective element of the human experience–our subjectivity, our non-object-ness, but it should be as objective as possible in its measurement of outcomes.  For example, what is the effect of reading Herman Hesse when one is 15?  What lasting effects, if any, are achieved from exposure to art, and are they positive or negative?

Or to use my own proposal in my essay on Goodness, why not search for models of the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and a blossoming perceptual capacity, and see how, particularly in ritual, religious traditions, they are cultivated.  What is essential in ritual for actual, measurable outcomes useful to the modern Western world?  If I was still in Religious Studies, that is the direction I would likely try to take, and be denied. (which is why I am no longer at a university.)

Put another way, and I hate to say this, but I agree with Pinker that particularly psychology–current psychology, and particularly the psychology of optimal well being–should be incorporated into the academy.

Ultimately, we pay teachers to be USEFUL.  If they teach history, they need to teach the lessons of history.  If they teach English, or Philosophy, we need to teach people to THINK and to express themselves with felicity.  There is surely some means of measuring this.

To the extent literature or art is consumed for pleasure, it HAS NO BUSINESS in the university.  It can be consumed outside the university, and no pretence need be made that the activity is other than autotelic (to use Czikszertmily’s (sp definitely off) word from “Flow”).  Reading or other ways of the pursuing the arts are quite useful as recreation and for the processing of experience.

Studying HOW literature is good for the soul WOULD be the proper domain of academics.  One of my many projects is getting certified in the Tomatis method, which involves listening to a lot of Mozart and Bach through specialized headphones that as I understand it periodically block certain frequencies, so as to resensitize your ear to them.  The effects are supposedly salutary on many levels.

How much have you read about Tomatis?  Likely little.

2. In important ways, though, I side with Wieseltier’s root project, which is making our consciousness PRIMARY, our subjectivity PRIMARY, and recognizing that any effort to make of humans objects necessarily deducts from what is most important in our lives, which is our sense of self.  If Dennett truly acted daily like the machine he thinks he is, he would kill himself.  He enjoys things, such as what he is pleased to call science.  He probably likes walking his dog, and drinking good tea, even though within his own system his life is completely meaningless, and he is not different in principle from a cockroach scuttling along the sidewalk.

Again, to be clear, we are told that “consciousness” and “free will” are illusions with the same dogmatism and shitty thinking Dennett accuses Wieseltier of, but the simple fact is that AMPLE evidence exists showing that mind and brain are severable, and that the mind is not confined in its potential consciousness to its immediate domain. 

When we get to the level of what is “really real”, our best model for the root reality is that it doesn’t exist.  Everything we see and touch is the product of consciousness, it is CONTINGENT on consciousness.  This means that at the very heart, the soul of their project, proselytizing materialistic atheists stand not on shaky ground, but NONEXISTENT ground, at least according to “science” as it exists today.

General Relativity–which IS a materialistic model–was falsified by the Alain Aspect’s measurement of non-locality.  It is not true.  God DOES play dice with the universe.  Physicists have been trying without success to avoid this truth for 50 years.

People like Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker have done an excellent job of explaining human consciousness from  B to C, but the universe goes from A to G.  They do well within their domain, and thus never leave it.

This needs to be pointed out, as it is a terrible flaw.  Whatever merits they see in telling the “truth”–which leaves out mountains of available but contradictory empirical data–the sociological fact is that the notion that we are machines made out of meat, devoid of “mind” in a higher sense, and that our freedom is illusory, have pernicious effects.  No, it doesn’t floor people immediately.  They wear nice sweaters, and drink good coffee, and become ardent socialists or Objectivists.

But as Malcolm Gladwell noted in “Outliers”, over long periods of time small differences can have enormous effects.  All the problems we have in solving social issues, of finding meaning, devolve in my personal view into varying accounts of the nature of life.

My beef with these people is that they are failing to avail themselves of the very good data, as one example, in support of the theory that souls survive death.  Science CAN and SHOULD meet religion.  Christianity may be empirically untenable–that is my own view–but large segments of its core tenets may be salvageable.

Why argue about what sort of God would commit capricious acts?  Why not have the balls to look at ALL the data with an open–scientific, not scientistic–mind?