Month: October 2019

1.  Most Americans are two thirds media.

2.  The story of Job would be interesting, told from a Buddhist perspective.

I was taking the long way somewhere yesterday–I often do this, to see what’s new, what’s changed, and to see things I’ve never noticed before–and drove past a graveyard.  A large one, with a large wall of stone names.  I don’t if they slid the bodies in like they do in New Orleans, or if their ashes were there.  It was a lot of names.

And I got to thinking about life.  Making it count.  Pretty typical stuff, really. 

But it hit me that whatever you think constitutes how to live life: climbing mountains, skydiving, meditating, lover deeper and talking sweeter (as Tim McGraw has it), meditating, pursuing your passions: there always has to be some room for doubt, and a residual, contemplative awareness.

I put the number at 25%.  Do what you think you should be doing, but keep 25% of your awareness unattached, so that you can see the metainformation outside of the system.

This was my thought.  I think it is what I instinctively do.  Looking at it written, I don’t know if this is wise, but I will often an analogy.  In Kum Nye meditation, you leave your mouth very slightly open and touch the top of your mouth with the tip of your tongue.  Supposedly it is to complete an energy circuit.  I believe the rest of the system so I suppose I believe this too.  Certainly, though, that is a passive way of preventing you from tightening your jaw and lips, as many of us do thoughtlessly throughout the day.

In my own world, it might in fact be a good idea to meditate three hours a day, or do yoga for three hours a day, or even both.  You are here to travel spiritually.  Make your time here count.

But I think whenever you get obsessed with the One Thing, you lose something.  There are always new things being blown from the future or the past or from distant lands into your life, and if you only focus on the One Thing–and that one thing could even be mindfulness, ironically enough, if you are dogmatic about it–you will miss them.

I don’t feel like I am expressing myself well here.  It was a sensation I had, something which fluttered in with the fall leaves, then fluttered out.  Perhaps I am describing Grace, what the Christians call grace, or at least what I understand the Christians to call grace (damn son: did you get them to twist your brain somewhere?)

There is a latent concept in meditation that “enlightenment”, so called (and I think in practice this refers to a large continuum of related but qualitatively different experiences by different individuals), is something you get at the line of long period of directed effort.  For example, I was reading yesterday about these meditation caves in Bhutan, where people aspiring to Buddhahood meditate first three days, then if they are good with that 3 months, then finally if they are good with that, 3 years.  At the end of the 3 years, presumably something good has happened, but not necessarily “enlightenment”.  That is a gift, and I guess this is  my point: that energy, that light, is always there.  It is not necessarily a product of effort and striving.  You can do the effort and get nothing, and be lazy and complacent and poof there it is.

Obviously, emotionally healthy people will organize their lives around effort of some sort.  You have to work.  Empirically, that and loving relationships count for most of the happiness in the world.  Not watching TV.  TV really doesn’t make anyone happy.  By and large, neither does most time spent on the internet.  Not even jacking off to beautiful women.

I think that’s closer to what I wanted to say.

I will add that it also occurred to me to comment that there are countless paths to enlightenment.  In some respects each of us has to invent our own.  This is another meaning of that saying I quote from time to time that “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Pure Buddhists are not Buddhists.

Rambling–I’m drinking coffee and warming up my brain for what will no doubt be a very tiring day–I was talking with a gal I know in a bar a few weeks ago.  She got religion, and it seems to have done her good.  And she thinks Buddhists worship the Buddha.  This is a common misconception.

But really, thinking about it, when you see monks chanting mantras directed at a picture or icon of the Buddha, or some other luminary, like Padmasambhava, and lighting candles and burning incense, is such a perception really completely wrong?  This is not killing the Buddha at all.  Quite the opposite.

And culturally, sociologically, of course, this makes a ton of sense.  We all seek grounding, tradition, the expected, a habitual rhythm to life.  But if the Buddha argued anything, it was that all those things were fragile, transitory, impermanent, and that relying on them was Duhkha, now or in the future. 

As I understand the doctrine, it would actually be now, in the sense that some part of you senses that you are held up by a network of fragile webs which can be taken from you at any moment.  This latent, unconscious sense holds you back from the joy and fulfillment you could attain if you released yourself from those webs.

Blech.  I need to stop procrastinating and go do something for that ugly beautiful money.  I will say, though: this is not a bad way to procrastinate.

There is nowhere else.

As I think about it, many comic reinforce an American pattern of the One Guy versus the Mob.  Think Spider Man facing off dozens of enemies.  Nobody has his back.  Nobody asked him to step in: he just did it, because there was a problem and it needed fixing.

This is a version of High Noon.  Gary Cooper didn’t want to take on all the bad guys by himself.  He spent half the movie trying to solicit help.  But when he didn’t get it, he didn’t quit and he didn’t back down.  This is an American style hero.  I suppose we are not as unique as we like to think we are, but I think in most cultures you have a hero leading an army.  The Army of One is, I think, one of our particular ideosyncracies.

But One is always the unit of perception, is it not?  And does not all change, or growth, or innovation, or improvement in any way have to begin with one person?  Why are Americans so creative, at least entrepreneurially?  Well, our system encourages it.  We value it.  We don’t punish it with silly levels of taxation.  And we attract the best and brightest from around the world because of this, and because of our system of graduate education.

But there is something in the American character–at least, the traditional American character–which admired the solitary hold out, in a world of conformists.  Think Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men.  Would the Henry Fonda of that movie–which I think was intended to warn of the dangers of lynch mobs, as something which many people feared from the Right back then–be at home in today’s Democrats? 

LOL.  Not a fucking chance.  If show trials and kangaroo courts aren’t your thing, then you are probably a Russian spy.

Put another way, we don’t need art to tell us life can be shitty, that people can be shitty, and that most people are just making it up as they go along: we fucking KNOW this already.  Only the morally and emotionally numb need reminding of this.

What we need to see in art is what we DON’T see in ordinary life.  If you’re going to focus on the bad, take it all the way, as in tragedy.  Catharsis is a real thing.  I’ve felt it.

But the sorts of movies I like are those of a prolonged struggle, filled with mistakes and hidden vulnerabilities, but which finally emerge in a victory of sorts.  And there are many like me.  Such movies give us hope when things are not working out, courage when it is hard to see anything getting better.  Just hold on, they tell us.  Just hold on.

I have said this before, but comics in some respects are literally like modern myths, and as such arguably deeper than Robert de Niro getting a funny haircut, failing to kill a politician, then killing a bunch of pimps prior to trying unsuccessfully to kill himself.

I watched that movie, and thought WTF?  Not because I don’t do art movies, but because it had no point whatever that I could see.  I mainly wanted to see the context for the famous “You talking to ME?”  And needless to say, I was disappointed.  It’s really a stupid scene.  We all know people we can readily imagine doing that in the mirror, don’t we?  I know I do.  Where I live, they all have concealed carry permits, and they do pack everywhere they go.

Martin Scorsese dislikes Marvel movies because in them most of his protagonists would be villains. Complex villains, to be clear, but obvious malignant forces to be fought by brave, talented, sometimes vain and stupid, but ultimately self sacrificing heroes.

I would add that taking a long hard look at moral and emotional decay and disease, without redemption, has no intrinsic “artistic” value. Artists, to my mind, are those who help all of deal with the chaos, confusion and pain of life, by showing beauty, clarity, and worthy examples of healthy behavior, ideally after sustained unhealthy behavior.  They help us make sense of our lives. They help us find purpose. They awaken us to dormant potentials, remind us of what is wonderful. Perhaps the even point the way to the sacred, the numinous.

I would compare Scorsese to, say, Tarkovsky. He is like a petulant and impatient child compared to Tarkovsky. Scorsese CONSISTENTLY mistakes physical and emotional violence with profundity.

My hierarchy would have Tarkovsky at the top, Marvel movies in the middle, and Scorsese abusive assaults on our common bonds at the bottom.

It occurs to me–or seems to me–that a life in balance has a rhythm to it.  Our brains naturally seek rhythms.

And the “beat” of the rhythm is habit, is patterned behavior, is this is what I do on Monday and this is what I do on Saturday, and this is how we celebrate Christmas.

Seen negatively, this is how people “sleepwalk”, as among others Gurdjieff claims we do, through life.  It makes us resistant to change.

But seen positively, it is a tonic, something healthy, something beneficial and protective to our mental health.

I really think one of the primary drivers in increasing rates of depression and other dysphorias and deep confusions is simply the pace of change in our world.  AI is coming.  Robots are coming.  Hordes of people moving from here to there are changing cultures and making blurry what were once clear distinctions, and clear and generally accepted behavioral patterns.

I really think it is possible both to accept in the abstract the importance of tolerance and generosity, while recognizing in the concrete most of us are happy with our own.  This is, OBVIOUSLY–but this still needs saying–not just a white thing.  Pakistanis have recreated Pakistan in large areas in Britain.  This is because they are happier that way.

Human needs and political ideology can and frequently are at odds with one another.  And it is worth pointing out as well that most people who embrace utopian ideologies are emotionally disconnected in important ways from their own cultures, their own people, their historical ways, which in itself breeds an unhealthy obsession with their politics, since their ideologies and the people who share them have become their new home.  And if their new home turns out to be a shithole–as I would argue it is, necessary, and for reasons which can be shown both historically, and as the necessary consequence of the logic going into the system–then they react pretty much the way the Left reacted when Trump was elected.

Leftism is a shitty home.  It is a cultural wasteland, even if many cultural creators lack the vision to see it.  The Left “progresses” through subtracting all the cultural habits, all the knowns, all the places and names and faces of our group, shared history, and has nothing to replace it with.

This is a recipe for fear, confusion and misery.  This is very, very obvious to me.

I sometimes wish my blog were more consistent.  That I was focused solely on something.  Politics.  Physics.  Biology.  Personal growth.  Sharing my journey.

My sense, though, is that it is always good to share what comes through, or at least, which emerges, from the murky recesses of whatever my or anyone else’s mind may actually be.

I remember a saying that “The Sufi begs to give you himself”, which I have probably commented on.  When you give, you are not taking a thing from you, and giving it to someone else.  You are not even sharing it, so that you both have it.  You are creating a flow of energy, from somewhere deep, through you, to the external world.  It is this flow which a wise person seeks.  They are seeking connection to that energy.

And the way you connect to this energy, and protect this connection, is by giving everything freely which you can.

I remember Hayek commenting way back when that he saw many mediocre minds stumble onto one good idea, and horde and milk it like it was their sole source of nourishment, their solitary cow.  Indeed, one sees people make careers off of extended riffs on one idea, itself usually not their own, but rather its unique exposition their personal coin, combined with their concerted and diligent marketing. 

Me, I had some mild notion of making my way with my ideas.  But this is much more fun.  I don’t know if anyone reads this, but as far as my unconscious is concerned, as far as the flow of energy, it doesn’t matter.  I continue to see more and more vistas the more I write.  THIS is the point.

And I see how insipid must be the life dedicated to recognition.  I think of all the writers of Hemingway’s generation, and most of those who have come after, who wanted not particularly to write great novels, but to be KNOWN as having written great novels.  Hemingway himself committed suicide when the ideas stopped flowing, ideas about stories, about phrases, about skillful fabrication.  His focus was on the wrong thing, in the wrong place.  His focus was on himself, and not on giving but on taking.  He snatched his ideas from the air and brutalized them onto the page.  They belonged to him, goddammit.  Nobody else.  HE was the auteur, the genius, the admirable madman.

Perhaps I misstate the case.  I don’t know. I know a bit about Hemingway, but not a lot.  I often exaggerate the extent of my knowledge.  This is my imagining, to be taken as such.  I think I am done with being quite as certain as I used to be.

But this is my story for today.  Give, and ye shall receive.  It is not a complicated principle.

I think loneliness and shame have to be connected somehow.  Loneliness–feeling pain and fear when alone–would have served evolutionarily (and by the way I don’t reject “evolution”: I simply believe some sort of biological field theories will be needed in order to explain how information is conveyed to the genetic code, and preserved.  In my view, nothing else will suffice to explain observable changes.  There has to be an informational place holder external to the physical code) to facilitate survival, since the alone would always be at a disadvantage relative to the tribe, and banishment a de facto sentence of at least a shortened life.

I would like to publicly thank Hillary Clinton for reclaiming the paranoid style for the political left.

It’s ironic: when the Russians actually WERE a threat they didn’t want to hear it.  Now that they are a  small fraction of what they once were, and China the new emerging superpower (hard to say if they will make it, the weight of their internal conflicts and contradictions weighing heavy on them), they want to talk about nothing else.

But Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian asset: priceless.  Thank you, Hillary. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.