I’m not sure I agree with my last post. I reserve the right to label myself an idiot. Please keep in mind that I am putting into a public realm what amount to open musings and ramblings, and that if I were driving a car, it would regularly be in the ditch, the other lane, 30′ above the ground, underwater, upside down, inside out, and rolling along on one wheel. Yes, there is a lane with my name on it, but what fun is that?
These are really the two emotions which consitute my sins. I really don’t feel jealousy, greed, lust which I satisfy by using people, pride beyond healthy self esteem, and I’m not lazy.
It seems to me, though, that there is a part of me which can sit behind my self, and watch how my emotions flow into the world. I watch, and somewhere in there my world, what I bring into the world, is polluted with these two emotions, which are sort of mixed in as the whole thing flows out.
I believe I have finally isolated the source of both. Now it is a task of understanding and dispelling them. Description is to cure roughly what a picture of aspirin is to ending a headache. As you might imagine, I’m no fan of talk therapy. I believe it encourages narcissism, abdication of personal responsibility, and moral weakness.
I had this dream last night, in which I was shown by a guide people sleeping, and malevolent spirits hovering over them, trying to scare them. When people awoke, they would shoot at them, but those around them thought they were mad, because they had not seen what they had seen.
What happens when we feel anger? Is it not an initiation of the mechanism by which we physically defend ourselves? Yet, normally there is no physical danger. The danger is to our self esteem, and our emotional independence.
The way I visualize this is that a ghost comes into being, one that is fighting us. We create another ghost, to counter it. We are never really seeing the person in front of us, who we would say has provoked this anger.
I’m thinking out loud, but let’s run through a concrete example, one in which anger is justified. You do some work for someone. They had promised you X per hour, but when the work is done, and it’s time to get paid, they offer you X-Y, and say that was the deal. You know they are lying, and they know that you know they are lying. But there it is.
Your task is to get paid what you are owed. Everything that furthers this aim is desirable, and everything which retards it is not desirable.
The first fact to be acknowledge is that you may not be able to accomplish this aim. If you had an oral contract that was witnessed by no one, you will have no enforceable claim in court.
You can get angry and threaten them. They may then threaten you back. A moral relationship may degenerate into a physical one, in which the stronger, more clever, more lucky man wins. Might will make right.
You can appeal to their sense of decency. Let us suppose, though, that they have none. Clearly, these people exist. You can threaten them with defamation. This may or may not work.
Let us say in the end you fail. You have been cheated. This sort of thing happens all the time. Now what?
You have created this ghost, ready for a fight, and he doesn’t go away. As I visualize it, we have many selves, and this man gets a room in your house. Whenever you open that door and go into his room, there he is, fists up, face clenched, and amped up. He is like this all the time. He is there when you sleep, and he is there when you are awake. He is always standing at your shoulder when you meet people, and perform the business of your life.
How do you make him go away? You can cement off that room. You can lock him in there, and refuse to acknowledge his existence, but every time somebody brings up that deal, he pops right through, fists up, ready for a fight.
This is a burden.
I think the only way to make him go away is to refuse to consider anger as a response to ANY circumstance. This is not to relinquish your right to demand your rights, but rather the mechanism of creating a proxy to do it. All problems have solutions. Sometimes the solution is forgetting the problem. You do this by being present in the moment, and not living in the past or the future. You let everything go, as you go. If you travel light, you will travel far.
I find I laugh a lot more when I can’t remember who I “am”. What sort of person am I? I don’t know. I’m standing here, though. Would you like to go have lunch somewhere?
Is this a way to live? I don’t know. I coined a term for this a while back, though, called “forgession”. This is the process of actively forgetting, forget plus progression. I suppose it should be forgression, but I like the other one better.
To live otherwise, it seems to me, is to live in a wax museum, filled with all the ghosts you have created over the years. Sooner or later, they crowd you out, and you are left walking a narrow path that is mapped out for you. You are unfree.
Some people live in the past. They remember the affronts with which their grandparents were afflicted. Such is the case, for example, with the grandchildren of those Arabs who chose to leave Israel during the war in 1948. They can’t forget, because they want to be prisoners. Their rage is their identity. That is not a very good identity.
Sadness, it seems to me, is the consequence of that ghost feeling defeated. You have another room where someone sits, unvictorious, his head in his hands, moping. Often he drape himself on your back, and asks you to carry him everywhere, since he doesn’t have the energy. If you like, you can ask anger to kick his ass, reenergizing you, but you have just exchanged one problem for another. In neither case are you free. Your “home” is not your own. You have guests you invited in, but who now refuse to leave. Every time you want to go out for some fresh air, to enjoy the sun, they drag you back in. “Don’t leave us”, they tell you: we are afraid we might die.
And so we cling to outdated, unnecessary reactions to things that happened many years ago. We all do this, I think, to some greater or lesser extent, which in large measure depends on the extent of the affront, which becomes larger proportionately to who hurt you and how early.
We-I-carry burdens which are unnecessary.
I would add that bitterness is when the two get together, and decide to destroy your home, the place where you should be able to rest and seek shelter. The bitter person can never rest. They hate the world because they hate themselves. They hate who they have become, but refuse to see it.
When the early Buddhists set off across India, they did so as itinerant beggars, who rose early, and never ate after noon. This would seem a hard life, but it would seem to me what they were trying to build were palatial, airy, sunlit estates, completely free of permanent guests, and therefore open for companions whose company they found pleasurable, easy and free.
I don’t have all the answers. All I can say is that I trying to find them.
I was driving through the rural Midwest somewhere today. I always enjoy looking at the cars in the yards, the trailers, the lawn ornaments, the well manicured lawns, the tire shops, the little restaurants, the slaugherhouse signs, and those to the “boat”. People live and die in great numbers in such places. I love that some of them are a bit kooky, lazy, energetic in strange things, patriotic, church-going, gambling, drinking, and given to strange decoration. They have horses in their front yards, and a garden in the back, that they tend diligently in the summer, and eat a lot of tomatoes when they ripen, and watermelon too.
I was thinking: why do socialists hate this so much? Why do they want to turn everyone into grey robots, marching the same way, dressing the same, singing the same “happy” song in the happy tone they were taught?
What they want is the eradication of religion. They want no one to smoke. They want no one to eat foods they don’t approve of. They don’t like drinking. They don’t like guns. They don’t like cars in lawns and ugly litter. They don’t like dancing if it isn’t their kind, and they wonder why people would want to hold hands rather than do the nasty, just because they were taught otherwise by their parents and/or their church.
They don’t like bacon. They don’t like fertilizer. They don’t like people named Bubba who need to lose 100 pounds. They don’t like people sitting around in a cafe, discussing the weather and religion, politics (unless it is their politics) and local sports.
How goddamn DULL is socialism? It is the creed of the boring, compelled on the unwilling, in the name of no one.
I want flowers in the spring, genuine diversity of thought and behavior, and no damn rules governing people’s own damn right to kill themselves in any way they see fit, whether it be booze, smokes, or ATV’s.
I want to preserve the places where they cling to guns, religion, hard work, and biscuits and gravy. Those are my people.
Well, actually I’m a Berkeley graduate who drinks Oolong tea and knows what Tempeh is. Maybe I should limit myself to saying I enjoy their company, and appreciate their lifestyle.
It may not seem obvious, but in many respects cities are culturally homogeneous. We need all types.
I have a few more thoughts, but they will wait until tomorrow.
In my essay on Goodness, I did not define any acts, per se, that were right or wrong, in an abstract way. What I did is orient myself within the only skin I have, and look at the world, and figure out what seemed to make me happier, and what more disturbed.
Evil is evil not because some absolute code is embedded in the universe: it is evil because to want to do it, you have to kill the parts of your self that are able to make you happy. It is completely congruent with unhappiness, understood in a deep way.
I was watching my emotions today–mindfulness is a basic Buddhist practice–and noticing the flow. I did something, then immediately said “that was a fuckup”, and got mad at myself. It probably wasn’t, but let’s say it was. We are shooting figurative missiles out into the world every time we make a decision. You can’t undo the past, and you can’t make things that flowed from your actions disappear from the world. Shit happens, but there is always a proximate cause, and sometimes it is you.
How much good does self-flagellation do? The task is to get it right the next time. We learn to be mad at ourselves so that we are impressed enough with the severity of the wrong to not repeat it. Otherwise, since most of us are dumbasses, we risk repeating it. This is an adaptive reaction, but only to someone who is fundamentally asleep at the wheel. If you are alert, there is no need for anger.
Or take jealousy. Is it not attachment to something someone else has? Is it not in effect giving some part of your self to your conception of some other person?
I studied martial arts for a fair while, perhaps six years. The useful part of it was learning to deal with complex flowing situations without losing my physical, emotional, or mental balance. I have no idea if I can fight, but the practice was invaluable just for this sensation of relaxed reaction without fear.
Emotions attack us, in some ways, do they not? Are most tragedies not about someone attacked by some emotion, who in the end is overwhelmed? King Lear, vanity perhaps. Hamlet, paralysis. Othello, jealousy. MacBeth, ambition and pride.
The tighter you are, the more profound the effect. Ideas like “no self” help to loosen you up. I was having fun playing with this whole antipodal Buddhist thing this morning. There is no fuckup, and there is no not fuckup. There is no being smart, and no being not-smart. It seems to give you play, and room to maneuver.
When reading some Asian (and other) philosophical texts, it is easy to misunderstand them. Take the doctrine of Sukhaduhkasamo, which translates as He for whom pleasure and pain are the same. Who would want to live like that? Emotionally numb, unable to enjoy anything to gain the satisfaction of not suffering.
On my rendering, what an exceptionally well-organized person is feel both positive and negative feelings deeply and often, but buffer them in such a way that homeostasis is quickly regained. I visualize a sort of slow motion film, where you see the assault, the impact, and the adjustment, and renormalization. It’s not that you don’t feel, it’s that you are not attached to grief, or joy. You let the world live, and the dominant sensation of that is still pleasure and enjoyment.
You could almost use an example of interest income on investments. Do you make more money on 3% return annually for 50 years on a given amount, or on a return that varies constantly from -10% to positive 20%? It’s hard to say. It depends how often you wind up in each place.
A sunny disposition is much more to be wished for and cultivated than the great strains and victories of continual agonistic conflict.
That will do for now. I had a few nascent things to say, and think I roughly said them.
I have defined socialism as a moral system, which implies an economic system, which in turn REQUIRES a political system. Everyone should be equal, which means they have equal amounts of stuff, which–given manifest inequalities of talent and position-requires an authoritarian regime, to some greater or lesser degree. The State–which is to say a self appointed Socialist elite that is just a bit more equal than everyone else–has to have the power to take what it wants, and give it to whomever it wants.
Logically, though, it would follow that if egalitarianism as a moral doctrine fails, then so too do the economic and political doctrines which flow in its wake.
An intelligent person could go far with that basic insight.
I was thinking yesterday about chronic emotion. What is it? How can, for example, anger be an emotion that often emerges from your being? How do you stay angry? Expressed biologically, anger is presumably some raising of blood pressure, the release of certain hormones, and the tensing of muscles not needed for the activity at hand. This is tiring.
Perceptually, within the vortex of experiences we only contain by filtering most of them out, anger is an artifact of pain of some sort. Anger and sadness are quite clearly linked. Anger, in important respects, IS pain. It is a perceptual limitation.
I feel sometimes there is this light in us trying to get out, and that with inferior emotions we build stone walls that limit our worlds. When our light shines out, the light elsewhere in the world shines back at us, but instead we live like animals in cages. We live in darkness, when we have access to an infinite supply of illumination.
How does this process work, though, and how do you end it? This is a practical question.
As I have often viewed the matter, it seems to me that the essence of Buddhism is applied psychology, with the intent of building mental health. He starts with a problem–life is suffering, which can be construed both as actual pain, AND as less happiness than you are capable of–and comes up with a detailed plan of action, which works in his particular case.
Consider the Heart Sutra.
form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. Form itself is emptiness, and emptiness itself is form. Sensation, conception, synthesis, and discrimination are also such as this. Śāriputra, all phenomena are empty: they are neither created nor destroyed, neither defiled nor pure, and they neither increase nor diminish. This is because in emptiness there is no form, sensation, conception, synthesis, or discrimination. There are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or thoughts. There are no forms, sounds, scents, tastes, sensations, or phenomena. There is no field of vision and there is no realm of thoughts. There is no ignorance nor elimination of ignorance, even up to and including no old age and death, nor elimination of old age and death. There is no suffering, its accumulation, its elimination, or a path. There is no understanding and no attaining.
What is he saying? How can form equal emptiness? Why are there no eyes, ears, etc? Why is there no ignorance and elimination of ignorance? What have you accomplished if you claim nothing exists? Why is this text revered, and not rejected as the rambling of some opium-addled fool?
Logically, several points can be made. First, that when he equates form with emptiness, that is his whole argument. The rest of it is just clarification. He (the author, who may not have been the Buddha) is simply being thorough.
Secondly, the universe works the way it works. Water flows downhill in a gravitational field. When we think, we use mental structures that are partly mechanical, and partly free. Since we have to live in bodies which come with some programming, we are all more or less already cyborgs.
The task of a spiritual teacher is to free people. It is not to tell them how he does it. It would be perfectly consistent to tell people something that was not true, if the end result was that they finally saw for themselves what IS true. You cannot ever see through someone else’s eyes. You cannot inhabit their worlds for them.
One of the features of our mind is dichotomous thinking. We are programmed to process things, in many ways, as binary. O’s and 1’s. Good and evil. Friend and foe. Group member and outsider. Acceptable and unacceptable.
Logically, how would a clever teacher prevent his teaching from being corrupted? By calling his teaching a non-teaching. By refuting his own first premises.
Why would he do that? Because to him the essence of thing is always beyond words. Your words therefore MUST be contradictory in some ways, lest this point be missed. This is the point of the Zen koan, although I would question how many people that process has actually enlightened.
Further, think of any form. To take an obvious example, let’s imagine a tree. This tree is in constant movement. It is constantly taking water and nutrients from the ground, absorbing sunlight to create food for itself, and growing. When it sleeps in the winter, it is simply breathing more slowly.
Take a rock. It is composed of trillions of atoms, each of which is in constant flux. Most of matter is in fact empty. If you imagine a football field, the nucleus of an atom would be roughly the size of a golf ball at center field, and that might even be exaggerating. The rest of the field: emptiness, surrounded by electrons the size of grains of sand, in constant motion. Actually, we are not even sure if visualizing electrons as things which “exist”, per se, is even accurate. I think most physicists think not. It is simply a useful heuristic in teaching chemistry. The “electron” more or less “exists” simultaneously throughout its valence shell.
So does a tree or a rock “exist” as a form? Yes and no.
Can I see? Can I hear? It would appear so, but can I see X-rays? Can I hear what dogs hear? Do I see when I sleep? Do I actually possess the mental processing power to see everything in front of me? Am I not forced by the limitations the mechanical structure I call my brain places on me to choose the objects of my attention, more or less consciously?
Do I feel what I feel? Does not the same problem arise? Can any of us say we operate our bodies without ever exerting unnecessary tension, that we are perfectly efficient? Do we not have many selves, competing for attention, as hypotic researchers seem to have shown? Who are we, in the end? This question is at the root of the Buddhist doctrine of No Self.
And if you do not exist, can you be ignorant? Can you grow old? Can you die? Can you be a Buddhist, following the 4-fold Path? Can you read the Heart Sutra? No.
Is he not saying “Not THIS: THAT, dummy!!!!”?
We do not exist in our minds. Our minds work on words, and words are needed for communication, but clever words lead to their own cessation. They extinguish themselves. The Buddha was trying to put out fires, and confronted with a herd of cattle who would not have needed him if they could see for themselves. His only possible way forward was facilitating a way of living and perceiving that made that more likely.
Here is what I believe: I believe that we are all eternal beings, all of whom are capable of reaching God–who I visualize as the root of the possibility of form, and a source of endless light–and of travelling anywhere in the universe. Yet, we forget that here on Earth. In an endless existence, this doesn’t really matter, but you have to do something, and teaching is one of those things. It doesn’t really help anything. Souls always get rescued. Nothing, really, can be done. But the process of moving is endlessly delightful.
The Buddhists have this idea of Bodhisattva’s, enlightened beings who have no need to return to Earth, but continue to do so. And why not? Once you realize that all pain is illusory because temporary, in and endless expanse of time and motion, then it doesn’t really matter where you are, or what you do. Any time and any life anywhere is acceptable. Love–what we call love, I should say, since if you are following me you realize that “love” doesn’t exist either–is the primary reality, and it is omnipresent.
Which brings me to the grain of sand and a metaphor I have used before. The task of oysters is to be useless. It is to exist at the bottom of a body of water, reproduce and die. Most oysters everywhere are able to accomplish this.
Within some, however, an accident happens. A grain of sand is introduced, causing them pain. Everywhere it moves it scratches. Every day, all day, the pain is there, and it won’t stop until they are able to create a barrier between their soft inner parts and this chafing intruder. So they build a wall around it, and day by day their burden lightens. They still have an intruder, but now it hurts less. Then one day they are harvested, killed, and their intruder taken and sold at a jewelry store.
This grain of sand, for us, is the desire to impose our wills on the world. It is grasping and clinging to one form and not another. It is clinging to an identity, to a place, to a way of living, to social standing, to success (or as far as that goes, to failure). If we consider things properly, within the manifest truth of impermanence, this is foolishness.
This is not to say we should not have a place and a time and a way of living. It is simply to accept that shit happens and that there is no use worrying about it. It is to view life with humor and good taste, regardless of what it holds in store.
This is the way to live. I sure as hell have not achieved it, but these musings help me better calibrate, I think, in that direction.
I hope somebody reads this, after all that work, or I will be mad as hell.
I have made this point before, but feel the need to make it again, slightly differently. Science is not a discipline which separates plausible–“ordinary”–claims from implausible, extraordinary claims. There quite simply is no room, formally, for deciding in advance what is possible and impossible. There can be no extraordinary truth claim. There can only be claims for which evidence exists, and claims for which no evidence exists. Empirical/non-empirical. This is the only divide.
That pictures, as an example, can be communicated from one mind to another is an empirical claim. It can and has been done, repeatedly, and in scientifically quantifiable ways. This is not an extraordinary claim. This is simply a fact.
To say, therefore, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is to betray a FUNDAMENTAL misunderstanding of the NATURE of science. That this is possible is not extraordinary to me at all: I have experienced it. And whether or not this is the case, the only reason to ever try and sift one from the other is practical: finite amounts of funding exist, and it is not irrational to want to study things which are generally agreed to exist.
As I have said, though (I am sensitive to repeating myself, but find that I rarely if ever frame things exactly the same way twice, making some repetition useful, since new insights sometimes emerge), the most useful approach to increasing useful human knowledge is not investigating what is known, but rather finding and investigating all known outliers which have the potential to falsify general paradigms.
For example, evolution plainly cannot be explained by reference to Natural Selection, if we posit that mutations are random. The fossil record simply doesn’t support it. Nor do Gould’s contributions become scientific simply because he has layered a theory onto what we actually found.
Who, anywhere, has tried to measure evolution in response to environmental challenges? What I believe will be shown, if and when this happens, is that living organisms react as WHOLES, as conscious entities. This fact, when eventually shown as I believe it will be, will enable a useful understanding of the nature of life to emerge.
This is a small thought, but I figured I’d pass it along. The toughest Cold Warriors, as a group, were the Catholics. Catholics were the only group overrepresented in Vietnam demographically. Contrary to a popular myth which was presumably created to get votes for post-radicalization Democrats, blacks died there in the same ratios as they lived in America.
Kennedy was a social liberal, but he was Catholic. I have to wonder if he got elected by appealing to the Catholics, who otherwise would have put Nixon in office. As some will recall, the race was in any event roughly as close as that between Al Gore and George Bush, with the notable difference that Nixon wasn’t a crybaby, and who promptly conceded.
Kennedy, like FDR, was not very bright, but he had a talent for speeches. The damage he did this nation was largely as a result of enabling LBJ to get into the White House, and begin a “war” we are waging to this very day, and losing: the “War on Poverty”.
Here is the best quote on the topic I have seen, by Supreme Court Justice McReynolds:
I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. . . Can it be controverted that the great mass of the business of Government–that involved in social relations, the internal arrangements of the body politic, tne mental and moral culture of men, the development of local resources of wealth, the punishment of crimes in general, the preservation of order, the relief of the needy or otherwise unfortunate members of society–did in practice remain with the States; that none of these objects of local concern are by the Constitution expressly or impliedly prohibited to the States, and that none of them are by any express language of the Constitution transferred to the United States? Can it be claimed that any of these functions of local administration and legislation are vested in the Federal Government by any implication? I have never found anything in the Constitution which is susceptible of such a construction. No one of the enumerated powers touches the subject, or has even a remote analogy to it.
It is very literally the truth that we are not a Fascist nation because of the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the Supreme Court, who overturned FDR’s National Recovery Act, and Agricultural Adjustment Act, which combined gave Franklin Roosevelt the power to control substantially every aspect of our economy, and by extension our lives. He had the power to control production, dictate wages, and determine profit margins, as I understand the issue.
He lied when he claimed Social Security would be self funding. That possibility ended less than a decade after it was signed into law.
I have said before and will say again that our Constitution is the most brilliant political document ever devised by the mind of man. We are free today only because our Founding Fathers foresaw aspiring tyrants like FDR, who was a stupid, ignorant, unprincipled man whose only talents were his ability to convince people he cared about them, and his ability to perform political calculations and generate accurate results.
People ask about Jim Crow. Well, we got rid of Jim Crow, didn’t we? How are black people faring in this nation? You can’t put lipstick on a pig and call it beautiful, and you cannot call the interferences of the Federal Government in issues of State governance successful. If you fail to empower people because you want to empower government, you get a powerful government, and weak people.
[Edit: I want to be clear here. 60 years ago African Americans were in this nation a proud, hard working people who valued family, church, and civic responsibility. And they were shut out of the flow of much of our economic life. As one example, FDR’s pro-Union policies had the effect of making many of them unemployed, since most Unions were openly racist, and the closed shops they created meant that black people could not approach companies directly.
FDR nominated a former KKK member, Hugo Black, for his Supreme Court. Reason: Black was a reliable Democrat.
I want African Americans integrated into our cultural life. They have been fed vicious lies for 50-60 years, and taught to revere only the State, and the money that the Democrats can get for them. Their families are gone, church is largely irrelevant, and their models are killers, drug pushers, and men who abuse women. This needs to change.
I am doing nothing but speaking the truth here. I see no reason to posit innate differences, but that a cultural divide exists between inner city ghettoes and the suburban/exurban neighborhoods that white flight has created to avoid them, is to me self evident beyond the need for further comment. We don’t legislate this away: we negotiate it away, over as much time as we need to do the thing right.]
We have a mountain of debt we cannot hope to pay, which will saddle future generations with a burden that will make their lives darker, sadder, and harder.
Private pensions were working fine in the 1930’s. There were State social safety net programs as well, for those States that wanted them. Social Security did not write its first check until the Depression’s effects were masked by our mobilization for war, and associated IOU’s issued on behalf of Americans not yet born.
The extent of the fraud and idiocy FDR and his cronies visited on this nation are only now coming into general awareness, after 70 yearsor more. Let us hope We the People are able to wake up from the sopophorics leftists have so diligently planted in our milk, and that of our children, for all these many years.
I was thinking about the meaning of good food, and the hedonic pleasure associated with it. As you might imagine, I was contemplating the food culture of France.
It seems to me that food has no meaning, except to the extent that it is a communication between one human and another as to what is possible. It is possible to put a lot of love and qualitative information into a well prepared meal. To the extent it is affirmed, it represents a bond, a shared committment to elevation. It represents the triumph of work, and perception, and diligence over the commonplace, the easy, and the insipid.
To the extent, though, that it is valued for novelty or variety, it is decadent. There is no pattern or template, no qualitative richness in the movement. Meaning is about transcending self pity and difficulty, and if you are just sitting there as a figurative fat child waiting to be entertained, then the best meals in the world are wasted on you.