Monday, November 9, 2009
I posted this quote from Ernst Casserer, two posts ago:
"Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves, man is in a sense conversing with himself. He has so engulfed himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythic symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything without the interposition of an artificial medium"
David Abrams in The Spell of the Sensuous says that the big leap in man's symbolic activity occurred when man invented alphabetic language. Before the existence of alphabetic language, man would say a word and it would have a direct relation to the physical thing:
Word ---> Physical thing
After the invention of alphabetic language there was an artificial intermediary, the alphabetic word:
Word ---> The alphabetic word ---> Physical thing
At first this seems like a trivial difference, until you realize the profound consequences it has. Suddenly, the mind can stop short of the physical thing, and operate in a completely human realm -- it no longer needs the physical landscape from which all language sprang. Thus, "man is in a sense conversing with himself"
It is important at this point to note that the argument above isn't stating that once symbolic activity is invented, physical reality immediately disappears- but rather there is a proportional shift; as our use of symbols advances, physical reality recedes. The invention of alphabetic language is just one of the most notable historical occurrences of the advancement of symbolic activity.
When I recently took mushrooms, I noticed a causal (fractal) link between symbolic activities and deep feelings within me of stress and discomfort. When my mind strayed to things like advertisements, office jobs, fashion, pop-culture, or comedy bits, I would find myself in a deeply uncomfortable mindset; which, as I said previously, is just a heightened version of my normal reaction to these things. On our trip we walked to the lake; The walk there, along Belmont, was intense & stressful- but as soon as we arrived at the lake the stress and discomfort fell away from me. I was suddenly overcome with feelings of deep pleasure, comfort and belonging-- again, a heightened version of my normal reaction. While at the lake, my mind wasn't cluttered by any symbols and so I was able to clearly experience the moon appearing just above the horizon, I was able to smell the fallen leaves, to hear myself breathing, to feel the air on my skin, feel the ground beneath my feet-- i felt as if I was no longer chained by the world of symbols but free to be myself: a physical, sensuous being in a physical world.
At that moment it was abundantly clear to me that symbols have no real existence. When I give them power, they overwhelm me and pull me away from the world where I feel most at home. As such, I have lost all patience for people or institutions who force their symbols and subsequent stress & discomfort into my life. I just can't be a victim to a non-existence force-- so I'm taking the reigns to my life back. I'm going to be more forceful in the acquisition of the things I need to be happy and more discriminating in the activities I involve myself in.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
I'm a little embarrassed with how much I find myself believing what this guy is saying.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Ernst Cassirer
quoted in Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, p 272
David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, P 265
David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, p. 22
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Analytic Knowing v. Primary Knowing
By Contrast, "primary knowing" arises by means of "interconnected wholes, rather than isolated contingent parts and by means of timeless, direct, presentation" rather than through stored "re-presentation." "Such knowing is open rather than determinate, and a sense of unconditional value, rather than conditional usefulness, is an inherent part of the act of knowing itself," said Rosch. Acting from such awareness is "spontaneous, rather than the result of decision making," and it is "compassionate... since it is based on wholes larger than the self."
As Rosch told Otto, all these attributes--timeless, direct, spontaneous, open, unconditional value, and compassionate--go together as one thing. That one thing is what some in Tibetan Buddhism call "the natural state" and what Taoism calls "the Source."
From Presence by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworksi & Flowers - Quoting Eleanor Rosch - p 98-99
Monday, July 6, 2009
that I work very hard at it. Nor am I aware of any
conscious career decisions. I’ve always found that one
thing leads to another, and that I’ve moved from project to
project in a natural progression. Perhaps one thing
that has helped me in achieving my goals is that I
sincerely believe in what I do, and get great
pleasure from it. I feel very fortunate because I can do
what I love to do.”
-Jim Henson
Friday, May 22, 2009
"Giving in is so damn comforting
We know the truth but prefer lies
Lies are simple,
simple is bliss
Why go against tradition when we can admit defeat?
live in decline
Be the victim of our own design
The status quo, built on suspect
Why would anyone stick out their neck?"
The Decline by NOFX
This song really spoke to me as a 17 year old & the part above still hits home.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Lucky the Dog
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/04/02.html#a685
"We are all, in a real sense, like Lucky. Most of us, all over the world, struggle every day, and put up with a huge amount of stress and unhappiness in our lives. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who lived for millions of years before modern civilization, we work much harder and longer to make a living, we face much more physical and psychological violence (in our neighbourhoods, in our workplaces, in our war-torn world, and sometimes even in our homes), we suffer from many more physical and psychological diseases and illnesses, we live in crowded, polluted, mostly run-down communities, in constant fear (of an infinite number of things, most notably not having enough), and we are oppressed with hierarchies, laws, rules and restrictions that would have driven our ancient ancestors quite mad.
Why do we put up with it? Because it's the only life we know." -Dave Pollard
Friday, May 1, 2009
Life Itself
http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80254/Nietzsche/W_P_2.html
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Jeff Vail - A Theory of Power
http://www.jeffvail.net/atheoryofpower.pdf
-- Free online book, 50 pages long, things everyone should understand about the world we live in
"With genes and memes manipulating us, using neurochemical releases and emotional states to ensure their survival, we find ourselves faced with difficult, penetrating questions about our identity. What does it mean to experience a feeling if we can rationally understand that the emotion stems from nothing more than a chemical response evolved to ensure that we act as efficient hosts and vectors to genes and memes? What of our hopes and goals? Do these hopes truly belong to us, or do they serve as nothing more than effective strategies to propagate bits of cultural code? Would we still love our children if the resulting nurturing didn’t increase the chance of our genes’ survival? What of our egos versus the reality of genetic and memetic power-relationships: do we exist as nothing more than vectors for power-complexes? Do we have free will and an individual identity, or should we see our individuality as merely a construct of how our genes and memes use us to propagate themselves through the unconscious mechanism of natural selection? These represent difficult questions. The scope of their impact on our lives serves as an indication that we stand to uncover fundamental relationships governing our existence. At this point the ego and rational understanding come into direct conflict—will we retreat back to a comfortable but now conscious delusion, or continue this exploration?7 Can our ego survive if it learns the form of its own inner workings? Inside the psychological maze of self-knowledge stands the unknown; the path out may lead to fulfillment or misery. We will come to appreciate the concept of blissful ignorance as we press our inquiry." p.14
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Mr. Furry Fur Fur and his friendly earth friends
buy their DVD:
http://www.friendlyearthfriends.com/
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
Authentic Leadership
-- from the Authentic Leadership in Action Institute website
http://www.aliainstitute.org/institute/about.html
Thanks to Elliott for pointing me to it
Monday, March 2, 2009
What if your work achieves nothing?
What if your work achieves nothing? Thomas Merton, a great writer and contemplative in the Catholic tradition, said, "Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not, perhaps, results opposite to what you expect.
"As you get used to this idea of your work achieving nothing, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as, gradually, you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Creatures of Circumstance
Sogyal Rinpoche from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, (27)
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
I am filled with impatience, with fury, with a sense that my own fears are holding me back from this journey, from what comes next, what is meant for me. What underlies that fear is all the gunk that I have acquired over the years, gunk telling me what is the correct and incorrect way to behave, and live.
That gunk has a name: Culture. The very word, with its agri-roots, implies control, tending, keeping in line. Culture tells us what others have a right to expect of us, and what we must do to live up to those expectations. Culture tells us that the punishment for not doing these things is social ostracism -- loneliness, unacceptability, unpopularity, reproachment, exclusion, abandonment, rejection and punishment. You must be obedient, says our culture, or there will be dire consequences. Without us, says our culture, you cannot survive -- you will starve, freeze, wither away. You will be left alone.
...
The answer does not lie in activism, in counter-culture, in revolution. Despite Heath and Potter's wishful thinking, solutions "compulsory for the entire population" will only be forthcoming in a totalitarian state, and then not in the interests of that population. And certainly the answer does not lie in technology -- as John Gray has argued so eloquently, every new technology creates many more problems than it solves.
The answer lies not in salvos from, or experiments on, The Edge, but beyond it, over the edge, the precipice. And, horror of horrors, we have to go over it, plunge into the abyss, alone. We have to walk away, and start over. Give up on everything we believe, everything we fear, scrape off all the gunk that is sticking to us, holding us back. Inviting those we love to walk away with us, knowing that they will probably decline, because they are still addicted to the culture, still believe that counter-culture, elections, revolutions, activism, collective consciousness, education, faith or technology will somehow work, transform the culture in time or allow some tiny new culture to survive in its nuclear shadow."
Dave Pollard
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/02/04.html#a2324
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Bonobo Monkeys
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh works with Bonobo monkeys. She calls them the happiest species.
Some interesting things about the Bonobo:
-- They are remarkably human & can even walk bipedally for long distances.
-- They are learning tasks from humans by watching and not by being taught/trained.
-- "Sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they set aside. It permeates their entire life, it's used for communication and for conflict resolution."
What Susan Savage-Rumbaugh has learned from these monkeys:
"I think that as we look at culture we kind of come to understand how we got to where we (humans) are and I don't really think it's in our biology. I think we've attributed it to our biology but I don't really think it's there." -- We are not inherently flawed creatures.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The Neutral State Between Pleasure & Pain
I think the opposite, more pessimistic, view -- "The neutral state between pleasure & pain is pain"-- is more prevalent; especially in western culture.
If we view our neutral state as a pain, we must continually strive to achieve happiness. This leads to the striving -- the need for continual improvement -- that is so ingrained & revered in our culture. (This way of thinking leads to sustainability issues & relates to Straw Dogs' myth-of-progress thesis.)
"Living The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness." - From the Tolle quote, previous post.
If we can achieve a baseline of pleasure, there's nothing else we need to do.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Living in the moment
"The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody’s life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness. The present moment is always small in the sense that it is always simple, but concealed within it lies the greatest power. Like the atom, it is one of the smallest things yet contains enormous power. Only when you align yourself with the present moment do you have access to that power. Or it may be more true to say that it then has access to you and through you to this world."
– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s PurposeQuote pulled from "Living in the Moment" by Brad Bollenbach
http://30sleeps.com/blog/2007/12/31/living-in-the-moment/
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Empathy
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Pg 175
"We are all in the same cart, going to execution; how can I hate anyone or wish anyone harm?"
Sir Thomas More
Thursday, July 24, 2008
"You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence." - Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
"The art of living in this 'predicament' is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past and the known on the other . It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive." - The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
All pulled from http://www.43folders.com/2006/04/07/mindfulness
found through Elliott http://del.icio.us/trent_napier
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Flow & Improv Comedy
The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt, pg 95-96
I was trying to figure out a common characteristic that great improvisational comedians have and I came up with the term 'angelic precision'. In my opinion great improvisers' choices appear angelic in that they are pure -- honest, not contrived, conceived spontaneously, in the moment. Their choices are also precise -- they have honed a craft and are able to consistently present something purposeful. It's the harmony between elephant and rider. If the rider tries too hard, choices seem contrived. If the rider is unaware of the implications of his choices then his performance will lack purpose and seem sloppy. When an improviser can make a pointed yet natural choice, it reveals our robotic nature; our elephant. And we have a neat mechanism for dealing with that revelation: laughter.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)
Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)
Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism
Dreams + Humor = Fantasy
Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
Lin Yutang's self-labeled "psuedo-scientific" formulas: from The Importance of Living, pg 4.
I finished re-reading Straw Dogs and I've been noticing the prevalence of idealism in our culture -- People really are drawn to the idea that striving to be better is a virtue. Conversely, they see acceptance of imperfection to be laziness and a lack of strong distaste for imperfection to be apathy. I tend to side with John Grey & Lin Yutang who seem to hold living in the moment without large romantic ideals of progress as being better than constantly striving to make life as ideal as possible.
So I'm brought back to John Grey's description of the Taoist idea of the good life in Straw Dogs.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Rider on an elephant's back
In sum, the rider is an advisor or servant; not a king, president, or charioteer with a firm grip on the reins. The rider is Gazzaniga's interpreter module; it is conscious, controlled thought. The elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system. The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings."
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, pg. 16-17
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The good life
"Seeing Clearly means not projecting our goals into the world; acting spontaneously means acting according to the needs of the situation. Western moralists will ask what is the purpose of such action, but for Taoists the good life has no purpose. It is like swimming in a whirlpool, responding to the currents as they come and go. 'I enter with the inflow, and emerge with the outflow, follow the Way of the water, and do not impose my selfishness upon it. This is how I stay afloat in it,' says the Chuang-Tzu. "
"For people in thrall to 'morality', the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonising over alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. Such a human being has the perfect freedom of a wild animal -- or a machine. As the Lieh-Tzu says: 'The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement is like a machine. He knows neither why he is at rest nor why he is not, why he is in movement nor why he is not.'"
John Gray's, Straw Dogs, p.112-115
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Illusions
"If what is at issue is not truth but happiness and freedom, why must philosophy have the last word? Why should not faith and myth have equal rights?
Formerly philosophers sought peace of mind while pretending to seek the truth. Perhaps we should set ourselves a different aim: to discover which illusions we can give up, and which we will never shake off. We will still be seekers after truth, more so than in the past; but we will renounce the hope of a life without illusion. Henceforth our aim will be to identify our invincible illusions. Which untruths might we be rid of, and which can we not do without? -- that is the question, that is the experiment."pg 83
John Gray, Straw Dogs
Monday, May 19, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Art, poetry, religion
The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang, p141
Sentimental nature
The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang, p.99
Monday, May 12, 2008
Never regret what you've done
4-15-08
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Comedy: an escape from illusions
~Bill Hicks
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Irony
But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further; because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently."
Umberto Eco, "'I Love You Madly,' He Said Self-consciously", The Truth About the Truth, Pg. 32
Monday, April 7, 2008
The addiction
So the next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don't be frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the mirror. It is we who are homeless, and addicted. What will it take before we break the habit, walk away from The Man, and find our way home?
How can we break the habit when all of us are addicts, even The Man? When we have all forgotten what it's like to live without the monkey? When we have all become the hollow, empty, desperate shadows of men that the monkey leaves behind?
When I become too theoretical, when I ask with too much vehemence why people work jobs they hate, why so many earn their living by deforesting, or mining, or working other destructive jobs, my friend reminds me: "Sixty days", he says. "That’s how long it takes before people in the civilized world begin to die of starvation. Dave can’t quit his job because in sixty days his children will die. That's the primary reason most of us do not rebel. We have too much to lose". Ours is a politics, economics and religion of occupation, not of inhabitation, and as such the methods by which we are formed and governed have no legitimacy save that sprouting from the end of a cannon, from a can of pepper spray, from the rapist's penis, from the travesty of modern education, from the instilled dread of a distant hell and the false promise of a future techtopia, from the chains that bind children to beds and looms and from the everyday fear of starvation -- as well as an internalized notion of what constitutes social success or failure -- that binds us to wage slavery. The responsibility for holding destructive institutions, systems and culture accountable falls on each of us. We are the governors of this prison as well as the governed...
- Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words
There's no methadone for the stuff we're hooked on. And no one left to administer it even if there were."
Dave Pollard, How to Save The World, "He Can't Hear You Anymore"
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/12/20.html#a990
Saturday, April 5, 2008
The human mind: knowing where not to look
-Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Objectivity in America
But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true.
Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices...TV, jets, freeways and so on...but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. That's why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles...with Quality...is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn't. And they aren't going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time." [Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Part 4, Chapter 29, Paragraph 20-22]
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Non-human neighbors
David Abram The Spell of The Sensuous (p. 22)
Mystery of life
-David Abram The Spell of the Sensuous
Monday, January 14, 2008
Racism & benefiting from exploitation
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Pain, Learning a Lesson
...
The current assumption is that there should be no suffering, and that society is to blame for that which exists" [Herbert Spencer, The Coming Slavery, Pg. 81]
"the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives), but their theory was wrong--half fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry. The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray." [Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers, Pg. 117]
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Community+Coversation+Love
"When there is love, conversation has purpose, context, engagement, trust (while, without love, conversation is sterile and selfish)."
"The best conversations are a form of 'making love' -- empathetic, collaborative, even erotic."
"The best conversations are also polyamorous (all participants love and trust each other) -- this provides safety from hurt and cruelty, and this safety encourages openness, honesty, courage, and true innovation." (1)
"In a completely generous and genuine natural community that is emotionally healthy, where everyone loves everyone else and love is abundant not scarce, love pervades everything and is demonstrated in cooperative work, in conversation, in art and science endeavours, in discovery and imagination, and in sensory and sexual exploration of others in the community. There are no exclusive pairings, because there is no need for them. Physical and sexual caresses may be frequent, but they are also fun, casual and pleasurable, and never possessive. They are just another way of saying 'I love you'." (2)
"I think the difference between a polyamorous community and a group of promiscuous people is an important one. Commitment to community should be a deep commitment, and if a member is unable to fulfill their desires for love within the community, that suggests either the member lacks commitment or the community lacks members with certain needed qualities that would allow the member to find what s/he loves within it." (3)
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Life of human invention
Monday, November 19, 2007
Learning from the Past?
Friday, November 9, 2007
Deviation from our Instincts
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Absence of independent existence
"If everything is impermanent, then everything is what we call 'empty,' which means lacking in any lasting, stable, and inherent existence; and all things, when seen and understood in their true relation, are not independent but interdependent with all other things. The Buddha compared the universe to a vast net woven of a countless variety of brilliant jewels, each with a countless number of facets. Each jewel reflects in itself every other jewel in the net and is, in fact, one with every other jewel."
"Nothing has any inherent existence of its own when you really look at it, and this absence of independent existence is what we call 'emptiness.' Think of a tree. When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level, like the wave, it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see ultimately it has no independent existence. When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across the universe. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight and starlight and sunlight--all form part of this tree. As you begin to think about the tree more and more, you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is; that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else; and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing." [The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Soygal Rinpoche, pg. 37.]