blog (category: philosophy)
conscious decisions
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. [...] you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.
But the insidious thing about these forms of worship [(body, beauty, allure, power, intellect,...)] is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, [...] The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
[...] The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
— David Foster Wallace, Commencement Speech at Kenyon College, 2005-05-21
The whole speech is an inspiring read, (thanks to Maree,) — more inspiring than the commencement speech I heard last weekend.
I would only argue with Wallace in his labelling of societal norms as “our defaults.” Our real defaults are prior to and deeper than our ego-centric urges.
Our real defaults can be re-discovered by disconnecting from societal influences (a la various flavors and degrees of asceticism. (Don’t forget to recycle your television.))
Can they also be discovered by remaining immersed in society? Does it only demand watchful attention? Who that’s interested in cultivating awareness really wants to remain a part of pop culture?
self-arranging, explodable echo chambers
A jarring reminder to diversify social connections and information sources, Adam's quote from The Polarization of Extremes relates how the internet aids in the "the creation of enclaves of like-minded people," making groups more homogeneous, and "squelching diversity."
But that function is only part of the story, and, really, a feature, [not a bug,] if viewed in context of longer and larger processes. The web is the frameworks for -- and accelerator of -- constant connection, explosion and re-arranging of minds and ideas.
Individual talents and perspectives don't have to shrivel within a retribalized society; they merely interact within a group consciousness that has the potential for releasing far more creativity than the old atomized culture. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalized man can lead a far richer and more fulfilling life--not the life of a mindless drone but of the participant in a seamless web of interdependence and harmony. The implosion of electric technology is transmogrifying literate, fragmented man into a complex and depth-structured human being with a deep emotional awareness of his complete interdependence with all of humanity. The old "individualistic" print society was one where the individual was "free" only to be alienated and dissociated, a rootless outsider bereft of tribal dreams; our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfills man's psychic and social needs at profound levels.
[...]
the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable.
-- Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (March 1969)
(emphasis mine)
I'll split hairs and suggest that McLuhan was wrong when he said seamless. Separations exist, and are essential for growth within: polarization/contraction provides focus, cooperative motivation; pressure-cook. But the seams are more porous and flexible than in meatspace, due to the web's openness and allowed dynamism in personal identification.
(Build a highly-adaptable, low-bandwidth medium, and all sorts of social norms are discarded because of ease of anonymity. As bandwidth has increased and patterns have been been formalized, anonymity is somewhat less available, but adaptability and fluidity of interaction remain.)
Not that competition ever goes away because everything happens at once all the time. It's a rich situation. But we are learning global harmony.
[...]
Our social models, including our corporate world, were designed as mechanical models. But organism and mechanism are very different [...]
At present we're moving away from inventor-created, allopoietic systems to autopoietic systems -- literally self-created systems, living systems in holarchy instead of hierarchy, with negotiations instead of top-down command; systems that negotiate cooperation and thus design themselves from within instead of being engineered and repaired and redesigned by inventors or designers.
-- Elisabet Sahtouris, Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future (May, 2000)
Paul Hawken gave examples and a very nice metaphor for this phenom in his Blessed Unrest SALT talk, (mp3 | summary.) ... Don't sweat global: think local and act local, and more appropriate large-scale results will emerge as aggregate.
(Last-quoted) Sahtouris is speaking on March 1st at River's Edge in Rocky River. Jenita calls her my new guru secret crush but got me a ticket for the workshop anyway.
The last time we were at River's Edge the audience was largely composed of the Sisters of St. Joseph from the congregation next door... I'm happily certain this won't just be an echo chamber for my pre-conceptions.
eating the finger that points at the moon
... to point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon.
-- D. T. Suzuki
That is why a theology of the Church has to begin with a consideration of the Church as the sign or sacrament of Christ and the kingdom he inaugurated, rather than the Church as an institution, but fidelity to Christ and to the kingdom of God that he embodies.
-- William Shannon, Seeking the Face of God
'[I]nstitutions create the needs and control their satisfaction, and, by so doing, turn the human being and her or his creativity into objects'.
Modern societies appear to create more and more institutions - and great swathes of the way we live our lives become institutionalized. 'This process undermines people - it diminishes their confidence in themselves, and in their capacity to solve problems... It kills convivial relationships. Finally it colonizes life like a parasite or a cancer that kills creativity.'
-- Mark K. Smith, ivan illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning
with quotes from Adult Education at the Crossroads, Matthias Finger and Jose Manuel Asun
I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume - a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
-- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
three link thurs: 2007-08-02
- Stuff (Paul Graham)
- Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.
- Time as Chimera (How to Save the World)
- When we measure our accomplishments, the progress of our lives, in terms of clock time, what happens when we find that that measure is a chimera (="a fanciful mental illusion")?
- An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (Bruce Mau Design)
- 4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
27. Read only left-hand pages.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
treading watts, milling about
A culture that invents escalators and stairmasters is a culture that needs to assess what it's actually talking about. [...]
And that's fine to have projects: to lose weight or to exercise; if you like it, do it. But to actually go to a hall of mirrors -- in the middle of an energy crisis, -- to have all the healthy people in the culture go to a hall of mirrors and run on an actual metaphor for effort going nowhere, and then plug that thing in so it's an electric treadmill that actually draws power! -- that is a culture that needs to step back and look at itself.
[...]
If you look at a testimony of love from two thousand years ago it can still exactly speak to you, whereas medical advice from only 100 years ago was ridiculous. How does that happen? [...] I don't put science really as the way I get to any of my answers. It's just helpful. It's poetry that I look to -- it's the clatter of recognition. You know it's fine -- everybody has different ways, but I attest that poetry works pretty well. It's... it's got a good heart.
-- Jennifer Michael Hecht, interview on Point of Inquiry
Point of Inquiry is the podcast from the Center for Inquiry, (A Global Federation Committed to Science, Reason, Free Inquiry, Secularism, and Planetary Ethics.) I had found their anti-religion slant overly religious, but I gave the podcast another try at Ilya's recommendation of this episode.
the whole story in one line
Here’s the whole story in one line. This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans.
-- Brian Swimme, Awakening to the Universe Story: Interview with Brian Swimme (What is Enlightenment? Magazine)
Truth and common sense
There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
-- Niels Bohr
Common sense is what tells you that the world is flat.
social contraction
My continuing philosophy is predicated on the assumption that in dynamic counterbalance to the expanding universe of entropically increasing random disorderliness there must be a universal pattern of omni-contracting, convergent, progressive orderliness and that man is that anti-entropic reordering function.
-- Albert Szent-Gyoergyi, "Drive in Living Matter to Perfect Itself"
Buddha's Zen
I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the geatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as a golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminatd ones as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of a right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons.
-- The Buddha
read Zen Flesh Zen Bones or check out 101 Zen Koans
corridors unto his perfection
staggering under heavy weightless hindrance
chugging through trainyards
bucketloads
cramped social quarters
trampled dime times
pack the kids into the station wagon we'regone and when'll it be wheel westward on?
But the excerpt shows clearly a charming quality of youth: to begin with optimism; and once the inadequacy of optimism is borne in on him by an inevitably hostile world, to retreat into abstractions.
-- Thomas Pynchon, V.
You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters.
-- Plato
look'y here, hear; somewhat delighted and somewhat de-lighted; drop out and drop off