The good life

"For Taoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skilfully. It has no particular purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realise any ideal. Everything we do can be done more or less well; but if we act well it is not because we translate our intentions into deeds. It is because we deal skilfully with whatever needs to be done. the good life means living according to our natures and circumstances. There is nothing that says that it is bound to be the same for everybody, or that it must conform with 'morality'. "

"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

Illusions

"The I is a thing of the moment, and yet our lives are ruled by it. We cannot rid ourselves of this inexistent thing. In our normal awareness of the present moment the sensation of selfhood is unshakeable. This is the primordial human error, in virtue of which we pass our lives as in a dream." pg 78

"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

Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jilltaylor

Art, poetry, religion

"I can see no other reason for the existence of art and poetry and religion except as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and a more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life. For as we grow older in life, our senses become gradually benumbed, our emotions become more callous to suffering and injustice and cruelty, and our vision of life is warped by too much preoccupation with cold, trivial realities. Fortunately, we have a few poets and artists who have not lost that sharpened sensibility, that fine emotional response and that freshness of vision, and whose duties are therefore to be our moral conscience, to hold up a mirror to our blunted vision, to tone up our withered nerves. Art should be a satire and a warning against our paralyzed emotions, our devitalized thinking and our denaturalized living. It teaches us unsophistication in a sophisticated world. It should restore to us health and sanity of living and enable us to recover from the fever and delirium caused by too much mental activity. It should sharpen our senses, re-establish the connection between our reason and our human nature, and assemble the ruined parts of a dislocated life again into a whole, by restoring our original nature. Miserable indeed is a world in which we have knowledge without understanding, criticism without appreciation, beauty without love, truth without passion, righteousness without mercy, and courtesy without a warm heart!"
The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang, p141

Sentimental nature

"Somewhere in our adult life, our sentimental nature is killed, strangled, chilled or atrophied by an unkind surrounding, largely through our own fault in neglecting to keep it alive, or our failure to keep clear of such surroundings. In the process of learning "work experience," there is many a violence done to our original nature, when we learn to harden ourselves, to be artificial , and often to be cold-hearted and cruel, so that as one prides oneself upon gaining more and more worldly experience, his nerves become more and more insensitive and benumbed--especially in the world of politics and commerce. As a result, we get the great "go-getter" pushing himself forward to the top and brushing everybody asid; we get the man of iron will and strong determination, with the last embers of sentiment, which he calls foolish idealism or sentimentality, gradually dying out in his breast. It is that sort of person who is beneath my contempt. The world has too many cold-hearted people. If steralization of the unfit should be carried out as a state policy, it should begin with sterilizing the morally insensible, the artistically stale, the heavy of heart, the ruthlessly successful, the cold-heartedly determined and all those people who have lost the sense of fun in life--rather than the insane and the victims of tuberculosis. For it seems to me that whiel a man with passion and sentiment may do many foolish and precipitate things, a man without passion or sentiment is a joke and a caricature."
The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang, p.99

Never regret what you've done

Believing in yourself makes you sexy. Don't judge your own choices. Never regret what you've done. It's OK to apologize for unfortunate outcomes... but remember you are doing the best you can. All you can ever do is learn from choices and outcomes & it doesn't make sense to obsess over missteps.


4-15-08

Comedy: an escape from illusions

"If comedy is an escape from anything, it is an escape from illusions. The comic, by using the Voice of Reason, reminds us of our True Reality, and in that moment of recognition, we laugh, and the reality of the daily grind is shown for what it really is - UNREAL... a JOKE. True comedy turns circles into spirals. What before seemed a tiresome, frightening, or frustrating wall, the comic deftly and fearlessly steps through, proving the absurdity of it all. The audience is relieved to know they're not alone in thinking, "This bullshit we see and hear all day MAKES NO SENSE. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks so. And surely there must be an answer..." Good comedy helps people know they're not alone. Great comedy provides an answer."
~Bill Hicks

Irony

"The historic avant-garde (but here I would also consider avant-garde a metahistorical category) tries to settle scores with the past. "Down with moonlight"--a futurist slogan--is a platform typical of every avant-garde; you have only to replace "moonlight" with whatever noun is suitable. The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a typical avant-garde act. Then the avant-garde goes further, destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract, the informal, the white canvas, the slashed canvas, the charred canvas. In architeture and the visual arts, it will be the curtain wall, the building as stele, pure parallelepiped, minimal art; in literature, the destruction of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white page; in music, the passage from atonality to noise to absolute silence (in this sense, the early Cage is modern).
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

The addiction

"Civilization is our Pusher. It's The Man who keeps us hooked on consumption and debt, The Man who holds the key to our prison and gives us our illusory rush of elation when we buy and use His addictive product. The Man who seduces us back even when we have decided that life in His prison is insane, self-abusive, worse than death. The monkey is our addiction, without which we cannot live. And we wander the streets of civilization's artificial world in a daze, never really home, wondering what is missing, why we feel so lost. Civilization is our ghetto, a whole world of six billion homeless people, setting fires on every corner for warmth, ganging up and stealing everything we can get our hands on to pawn for our fixes, breeding babies already drug-addicted at birth.

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

The human mind: knowing where not to look

"In the 1960s, Lestor Luborsky conducted an experiment in which he used a special camera to track the eye movements of people whom he'd asked to look at a set of pictures. This tracking allowed him to tell precisely where they looked. What he discovered was that if a photograph contained images that the people found morally objectionable, or that threatened their worldview, their eyes oftentimes wouldn't stray even once to those images. For example, one of the photos showed, in the background, an image of someone reading a newspaper, while the foreground contained the outline of a woman's breast. Many of those who found nudity morally objectionable did not look even once at the breast, and when asked about it later, could not remember that there had been a breast in the photograph. It seems reasonable to suppose that some part of their minds must have known--they must have seen out of the corners of their eyes--that something there would disturb them, and so, like Shem and Japheth, they chose not to look. I cannot say whether the decision not to look was made consciously or unconsciously by Shem and Japheth, but it seems pretty clear from the reactions of those who did not--could not--look at all the parts of the photograph that their decision to not see were made on an entirely pre- or unconscious level. The point is that in nearly all circumstances we each know precisely where not to look in order to have our worldview remained unthreatened and intact."

-Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

Objectivity in America

"There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.

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]

Non-human neighbors

"From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former. While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved. Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth--our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."

David Abram The Spell of The Sensuous (p. 22)

Mystery of life

"As humans, we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body--we live our own bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. And yet we do know how it feels to sip from a fresh pool of water or to bask and stretch in the sun. Our experience may indeed be a variant of these other modes of sensitivity; nevertheless, we cannot, as humans, precisely experience the living sensations of another form. We do not know, with full clarity, their desires or motivations; we cannot know, or can never be sure that what we know, they know. That the deer does experience sensations, that it carries knowledge of how to orient in the land, of where to find food and how to protect its young, that it knows well how to survive in the forest without the tools upon which we depend, is readily evident to our human senses. That the mango tree has the ability to create fruit, or the yarrow plant the power to reduce a child's fever, is also evident. To human kind, these Others are purveyors of secrets, carriers of intelligence that we ourselves often need: it is these Others who can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn of us of imminent eruptions and earthquakes, who show us, when foraging, where we may find the ripest berries or the best route to follow back home. By watching them build their nests and shelters, we glean clues regarding how to strengthen our own dwellings, and their deaths teach us of our own. We receive from them countless gifts of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. Yet still they remain Other to us, inhabiting their own cultures and displaying their own rituals, never wholly fathomable."

-David Abram The Spell of the Sensuous

Racism & benefiting from exploitation

"I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) of white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse housecleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are women's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes [at a prison] where I can feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes." [The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen Pg. 69]

Pain, Learning a Lesson

"Is it not manifest that there must exist in our midst an immense amount of misery which is a normal result of misconduct, and ought not to be dissociated from it? There is a notion, always more or less prevalent and just now vociferously expressed, that all social suffering is removable, and that it is the duty of somebody or other to remove it. Both these beliefs are false. To separate pain from ill-doing is to fight against the constitution of things, and will be followed by far more pain. Saving men from the natural penalties of dissolute living, eventually necessitates the infliction of artifical penalties in solitary cells, on tread-wheels, and by the lash.
...
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]

Community+Coversation+Love

"Life's meaning emerges from conversation in community with people you 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)

Life of human invention

"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghost and more ghost. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living." [Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]

Learning from the Past?

"While it is true that certain historical examples of goodness may be brought to bear for the moral education of children and the elevation of their minds in order to impress them with what is morally admirable, it is also true that the destinies of nations and states--with their interests, situations, and complexities--are a different field of knowledge. Rulers, statesmen, and nations are told that they ought to learn from the experience of history. Yet what experience and history teaches us is this, that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted in accordance with the lessons to be derived from it. Each era has such particular circumstances, such individual situations, that decisions can only be made from within the era itself. In the press of world events, there is no help to be had from general principles, nor from the memory of similar conditions in former times--for a pale memory has no force against the vitality and freedom of the present." [GWF Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Pg. 7-8]

Deviation from our Instincts

"Every animate creature stands in a specific relation to the external world in which it lives. From the meanest zoophyte, up to the most highly organised of the vertebrata, one and all have certain fixed principles of existence. Each has its varied bodily wants to be satisfied - food to be provided for its proper nourishment - a habitation to be constructed for shelter from the cold, or for defence against enemies - now arrangements to be made for bringing up a brood of young, nests to be built, little ones to be fed and fostered - then a store of provisions to be laid in against winter, and so on, with a variety of other natural desires to be gratified. For the performance of all these operations, every creature has its appropriate organs and instincts - external apparatus and internal faculties; and the health and happiness of each being, are bound up with the perfection and activity of these powers. They, in their turn, are dependent upon the position in which the creature is placed. Surround it with circumstances which preclude the necessity or any one of its faculties, and that faculty will become gradually impaired. Nature provides nothing in vain. Instincts and organs are only preserved so long as they are required. Place a tribe of animals in a situation where one of their attributes is unnecessary - take away its natural exercies - diminish its activity, and you will gradually destroy its power. Successive enerations will see the faculty, or instinct, or whatever it may be, become gradually weaker, and an ultimate deneracy of the race will inevitably ensue." [Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government, pg.49]

Absence of independent existence

"Look still deeper into impermanence, and you will find it has another message, another face, one of great hope, one that opens your eyes to the fundamental nature of the universe, and our extraordinary relationship to it.

"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.]