The more you talk and think about it,
the further astray you wander from the truth.
Stop talking and thinking
and there is nothing you will not be able to know.
From Verses On the Faith Mind (Chien-chih Seng-tsan)
Category Archives: Philosophy
A Path
“Buddhism is not so much a belief system as a path. It is more something we do than something we believe.” — Unknown
Cease to cherish opinions
I first came across the following quote (from a poem by Seng-ts’an) back in 2009:
“Do not seek the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.”
I don’t think old Seng-ts’an was saying you shouldn’t have opinions. Just don’t love them too much. As for “do not seek the truth”… well, that’s harder for me. From the same blog post:
“Get comfortable with the emptiness of no beliefs, no ideas, no concepts, no knowing, no desires, no anticipation, no system, and no future.”
What does that leave? Direct experience. And about the only thing we can be certain of, based on direct experience is: I am. I exist. I find this ever so comforting (when I can remember it). The stress and anxiety of the last year is (for me) the result of beliefs and ideas and concepts and desires and anticipation and what’s gonna happen in the future.
Emptiness. It’s an important concept in most (all?) Eastern philosophies. It doesn’t mean the same thing it does in Western thought. Just saying the word makes me feel lighter. Calmer.
I’ll be on the deck if you need me
The Universe has told me to go sit down and shut the fuck up. So I think I will. For a while at least. Social media is a toxic brew and a break will do me good. When I find something I’d like to share I’ll do that here. Despite my best efforts, I became a little obsessed by the recent political shenanigans and yesterday’s events might just be the icy enema I needed.
TED: What reality are you creating for yourself?
“Awfulizing” – When your fears distort your reality
Tao is just a name for whatever happens
Reply
“The Tao is the pattern of things, but not the enforced law. […] The universe is a harmony or symbiosis of patterns which cannot exist without each other.”
“You can’t diverge from the Tao, for everything, anything, and nothing is Tao.”
“The vague, void-seeming, and indefinable Tao is the intelligence which shapes the world with a skill beyond our understanding.”
I’m at the point in my life when I occasionally stop, turn and look back down the path, marveling at how I got from there to here. I’ve pretty much decided it’s mostly random. Luck. Being at the right place at the right time (or wrong place/wrong time). You’ve seen all the same movies I have so I don’t have to explain what I’m talking about here but I made a short list of those moments that didn’t seem momentous at the time but, in retrospect, made a big difference. Perhaps a few personal examples?
Sometime during college I drove to Columbia, Missouri to take the Law School Admissions Test. I had no interest in law schools but it was a road trip and the girl I was dating knew some people and we wound up partying all night and sleeping on the floor. Next morning I took the test and forgot about it. A couple of years later I graduated and was about to lose my draft deferment. I had applied to a couple of law schools somewhere along the way and got accepted. That kept me out of Viet Nam until Richard Nixon stopped drafting people into that loser of a war and the next day I dropped out of law school. No planning here (at least not conscious planning), just luck.
Couple of years later I applied for a job with the Memphis Police Department. Didn’t get hired so I went to work at hometown radio station. That’s where I met the guy that later hired me and changed my life big time.
What if I hadn’t gone to that honky-tonk on the night that Barb was there with friends? Easy to imagine we would have never met.
I could go on but you get the idea. All these little forks in the road. Few of them seem important and most probably aren’t but I’m only here because I was there. The randomness of this horrifying. Unless things work out well, I guess. Some will argue we are the masters of our fate. Prepare, work hard, make good decisions, etc etc. And let’s not get into Free Will.
I cannot escape the memories of those (seemingly) meaningless decisions or events that changed the course of my life. Is this wisdom? A curse? A better question is: Will I be able to spot the next LCFITR (life changing fork in the road) and would I want to if I could?
Life gets real when the TV goes off
David Cain says things come into sharper focus when the TV is off:
“For some reason just having the TV on seemed to soften the reality of those mornings, and turning it off seemed to intensify my problems. It was like life finally had room to square up and confront me directly, whereas with the TV on it could only make glancing contact.”
Yes. Everything seems to come into sharper focus when the TV is off. I can go days without turning it on when Barb is out of town. As Mr. Cain points out, nothing wrong with watching something on TV, but it’s so often used as mindless background noise. (I confess I tend to use my smaller screens in a similar manner.)
“One of the least-acknowledged peculiarities about human beings is that we can scarcely bear being in the moment we’re already in. It’s rare for us to truly be at ease in an ordinary present moment, if we’re not being entertained, gratified or otherwise occupied by something. We’re always planning better moments than this current one, or at least trying to soften or improve it with entertainment or food, or anything else that delivers some predictability to our experience.”
Planning better moments. There you have it. How many moments have I missed because I was somewhere back in my head planning a better one?
Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
“From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on understanding time itself.”
Sleeping into the future is what we do every night.
“Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
“People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.” — Albert Einstein’s message in the time capsule buried at the 1939 New York World’s Fair
We know that complete certainty must always elude us. We know that for certain.
“Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.” — Albert Einstein
“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything.” — Richard Feynman
What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.
Schopenhauer asserted that life and dreams are pages from the same book. To read them in their proper order is to live, but to browse among them is to dream.
No one can really explain how memories are formed and retrieved. Nor can anyone explain away Proust’s paradoxical contention: that the past cannot truly be recovered by searching our memories, by interrogating them, by rewinding the film or reaching back into the drawer; rather, that the essence of the past, when it comes to us at all,comes unbidden.
If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run the other way as fast as you can. Nothing good can come from meeting yourself. — Charles Yu
We experience childhood one way when we’re living it and another way when we relive it in memory.
But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience?
Our conscious brains invent the concept of time over and over again, inferring it from memory and extrapolating from change. And time is indispensable to our awareness of self. […] You order the slices of your life. You edit the film even as it records.
“There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.” — The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster
Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.
“We know it all now, with our thoughts travelling at the speed of tweet. We are time travelers into our own future. We are Time Lords.” — Ali Smith
If we confuse the real world with our many virtual worlds, it’s because so much of the real world is virtual.
Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good. […] The past, in which we did not exist, is bearable, but the future, in which we will not exist, troubles us more.
“We perceive time only because we know we have to die.” — Heidegger
Time Travel: A History (review)
Maria Popova describes James Gleick’s new book Time Travel: A History, “a dizzying tour of science, philosophy, and their interaction with literature.” A few snippets from her lengthy review:
“Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.”
“Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.”
“The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing.”
“If we have only the one universe — if the universe is all there is — then time murders possibility. It erases the lives we might have had.”
One of my favorite topics by one of my favorite writers.
UPDATE: From a good piece in The Guardian: “Howard and his editors also manage a number of celebrity Beatle-fan coups, like the day when, to their astonishment, they spotted a 14-year-old Sigourney Weaver looming lankily over her fellow teenyboppers in footage of a 1964 show.”
You are where your attention is
Excerpts from an article in New York Magazine by Andrew Sullivan:
“Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating. […] The engagement never ends. Not long ago, surfing the web, however addictive, was a stationary activity. At your desk at work, or at home on your laptop, you disappeared down a rabbit hole of links and resurfaced minutes (or hours) later to reencounter the world. But the smartphone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing. Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives.”
“A small but detailed 2015 study of young adults found that participants were using their phones five hours a day, at 85 separate times.”
“You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.”