Reclusland

It’s a cold and it’s a broken: “Hallelujah”

But its a “Hallelujah” none the less.

Don’t forget that.

Found via a link (again on tumblr) to one of my old posts…

No word uttered by a god could be less than the universe, or briefer than the sum of time.

“…the words were unexpected drops of blood tainting this lovely scenery underneath so brilliant a November sky.”

(from “Spring Snow“)

Just finished reading an amazing article on Virgina Woolf, where it mentioned a book called “The Illusion of Conscious Will” by Daniel M. Wegner.  It intrigued my enough that I ordered a used copy right away, but while doing a little research, I found this short summary (PDF) of the book that includes this:

Wegner sometimes describes this as the thesis that the will is epiphenomenal; but that it misleading since on his account acts of will can have causal consequences. The central point is rather that they never directly cause actions, but can do so only indirectly, via other effects on the agent. He compares them to a compass. The compass doesn’t directly steer the ship. Instead it indicates the direction that the ship is taking, and may thus indirectly affect its direction via its effects on the pilot.

This excites me.  Plus the idea that it’s not so easy to consciously choose to do something fits in with my Gurdjieff studies as well.

Just thought this was awesome.

Drawing of a magnetic field by René Descartes, from his Principia Philosophiae, 1644.
This was one of the first drawings of the concept of a magnetic field.

The inner “I” is in touch with reality but cannot see outside of it.

The outer “I” is aware of possibilities, but loses touch with the real.

Oh, this forth dimensional existence!

What can we do but partake in the active while keeping within the passive?

From this then, perhaps the fruit will come forth,

and then can the fattened calf be killed for the feast.

“You sit around waiting for pearls when what you should actually be doing is not to be swine.”

(from here)

There is an entire dimension of Gurdjieff’s own life and words that is generally left untouched or unspoken in the presentation of the Teaching. For instance, Gurdjieff said: “You must pray with your whole presence and with all three centers concentrated on the same thing……From realizing the significance of your neighbor when your attention rests on him, that he will die, pity for him and compassion toward him will arise in you, and finally you will love him; also, by doing this constantly, real faith, conscious faith, will arise in some part of you and spread to other parts, and you will have the possibility of knowing real happiness.”

These words take us beyond the diagrams, the cosmology, the ribald behavior, to a man of authentic and deep spirituality. There are anecdotes from persons close to him, such as J.G. Bennett, that further confirm this fact: there was a side of Gurdjieff that was not known or shared with his students. This man took care of Russian refugees, assisted the local addicts and prostitutes in his Paris neighborhood, was related to the Russian Orthodox Church to such an extent that a priest was at his side when he died.

This was a man who valued real faith so greatly that he had no tolerance for superficial piety or social club religion. Therefore, he took an entirely different approach to share the Teaching, one especially suited to early twentieth century agnostics who were in search of something that could not be identified with external religion. In this way, he was able to reach people who would never have made their way into a transforming spirituality. He bypassed old associations made with the ideas of Christ which automatically cut the seeker off from the life-giving teaching behind the words.

Gurdjieff seems to have been a teacher who was (and still is) often thought of as either just crazy or more a scoundrel than a wise-man.  But as Theodore Nottingham points out in the above interview, there was quite a compassionate side to him, hidden under the masks he chose (for whatever reason) to wear.  This is the sense I get of him and his teachings, the more and more of them I read.

Its worth sticking through to the end of the second.  “All and Everything and No Thing”.  So easily said…

Found these can’t-remember-where, but they are awesome.  All these and more available at this site.

Imagine that’s your consciousness,
raditating outwards
from the top of your head
to the bottom of your spine.

Putting aside my previous (and to be honest, ongoing)
obsession with magnetic fields as a metaphor,
I still feel there’s something important
about the two relationships depicted here.

And this is probably the more beautiful images I’ve seen recently.
It’s a depiction of a photon sphere,
which is essentially light from a star orbiting a black hole.

These makes me feel like those pictures of saints and angels must have made people feel in the “dark” ages…

Now, perhaps his definition of “meditation” is not all that exact (WTF Bill Gates?), but it’s his take on Zazen that I like here: the mind quiets down and we come into contact with reality as it is.

“The perceptual thresholds are levels where subtle or fast processes can be observed. Below the threshold the process is not observed, and above the threshold the process is observed. A tachistoscope or T-scope is an instrument that can present visual displays at rates of thousandths of a second. The T-scope has been used to determine what humans are capable of becoming aware of at the level prior to conscious attention. Brown’s experiments involved determining how slow objects needed to be flashed, before the subjects were able to perceive them as two separate events. The smallest gap of time between the two events an individual is capable of perceiving the change is that individual’s threshold. Just as IQ will vary among different people, perceptual thresholds vary. Scientists had concluded in 40 years of research before Brown’s work that a threshold for any particular person did not change in a lifetime.

However, Brown’s research produced a startling new finding. After 3-months of vipassana meditation his subjects had significantly lower perceptual thresholds. They were able to perceive much faster and subtler events than before the retreat. The changes were not small changes but big changes. Changes were frequently 100%,200%,500%. One friend of mine had an increase of 1,500%. The results of Brown’s researh give a scientific basis for understanding the results of meditation practice. By focusing the mind in a profound examination of the present moment, processes of the mind which were not accessible to normal consciousness become conscious. These processes are beyond the perceptual threshold of the normal person.”

From Bill Hamilton’s book “Saints and Psychopaths” (pgs 58~59)

(which is pretty much what I was trying to get at here)

“All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing.”

(via Ann Seeker)

We are told in our tradition that the Enlightened One taught his disciples using this word “zero,” and he said the zero condition is this perfect complete condition in which plus and minus are unifying with one another and then facing one another over and over again. Plus and minus unify and face, unify and face, but there is no will—it’s a totally will-less activity. Of course human beings have will, but this activity of plus and minus is will-less. The Enlightened One taught his disciples that the activity which forms the universe is always acting will-lessly, and even though it makes many universes and then contracts all of those universes down to the smallest point, there is always simply one singular, unique cosmos.

->

There are Four Changing Lines.
Read the Upper NON-changing Line
Hexagram Thirty-Six/Line Six:

Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration.

(via I Ching Online, emphasis mine)

“Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really Void, but the realm of the real dharma.”

“It is said that someone who tries to meditate without a conceptual understanding of what he or she is doing is like a blind person trying to find the way in open country; such a person can only wander about, with no idea how to choose one direction over another.”

(from a, as far as I’m concerned, literally mindblowing article on Buddhism, psychology, and no-self)

“You know the best thing about Aeroplanes?  Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean.  It’s looking out the windows at the clouds and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there.  Maybe its a special place where everything’s okay.  Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds, but it’s just cold and wet and empty, but when you look out of a plane it’s a special world…  and I like that.

- Delirium, from Sandman Volume VII (Chapter 3)

There’s some humbling news from the chemical world for anyone who has ever found themselves lost in a garden maze. A simple droplet of organic solvent can find its way through a complicated labyrinth with nothing more to go on than a slight pH difference.

Makes we wonder how much of our decision making is really just a more advanced form of chemistry and logic…

“The highest that a man can attain is to be able to do.” - Gurdjieff

“Bhikkhus, form is impermanent; that which is impermanent is suffering; that which is suffering is insubstantial (anatta); that which is insubstantial is not mine, I am not that, that is not my substance. Thus must this be viewed with perfect insight as it really is” (S. iii. 45).

(via Alex at OE)

Been in California visiting family for the long weekend, didn’t have time to think, let alone get any writing done.  But I did find this video, which is awesome.  It’s done mostly (if not entirely) by hand.  Enjoy:

PRESS + from benjamin ducroz on Vimeo.

I recently expressed an opinion in the comments on Avatar (which, as the post title implies, I haven’t seen yet) saying I wasn’t too excited about it, other than to see the special effects (I hear they’re groundbreaking, yes?).  After all, I saw Pocahontas when I was younger, so I wasn’t expecting anything all that new from the story line.

The basic stance most reviewers seem to have taken on it is that this a story about  “civilized” man reconnecting with the natural world.  The corporation/marines attempts at rape and pillage are foiled by one of their own who “went native”.  And yes, there is a racial/colonial subtext going on here as well, but really, just a more divisive take on the same idea.  Ran Prieur wrote up a pretty thorough debunking of the whole “White Messiah” aspect of the movie, which I suggest reading if you’re interested in exploring that aspect of it.  For the sake of the argument I’m making here though, I just want to focus on the soldiers representing a technological, rationalistic society and the Na’vi representing the natural world (or perhaps “representing being in touch with the natural world” is more precise).

This seems to be the main dichotomy of the movie, the core conflict with which Cameron engages the audience and attempts to get his message across.  Not a very complex message, it seems, and certainly one we’ve all come across before elsewhere.  After Titanic (and despite its success), Cameron was not a director I expected to really break any new mythological or memetic ground (whatever it we want to call the nourishment that a good story provides).

But then I remembered an article on a movie blog I read regularly, where Cameron was quoted as saying (in regards to Sigourney Weaver’s character):
“Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”

Here, Cameron seems to be exploring a dichotomy that’s the exact opposite of the first.  If this is the metaphor being explored here, then the Na’vi become characters in a video game, and, supported by the massive special effects, their world becomes one of those virtual reality playgrounds we were all promised way back in the 90’s.  The marines are only downloading themselves into the Na’vi bodies and exploring the digital world, which makes their rather obvious callousness toward the Na’vi people more easily understood.

(plus, where have I heard the phrase “NAVI” before…?)

Granted, this metaphor does seem to break down when we consider that mining a virtual world for resources seems at first rather unreasonable.  However, there is one thing that such a highly developed model of reality could offer that would make this virtual reality metaphor more believable:  What they have is information, the information created by an entire virtual world made to run as a model of our own, and the need to go into that world in order to collect it while the program is running.

The more I thought about these two opposing metaphors, the more I realized that though each seems to explain the movie well enough, it does so to an unsatisfying degree.  It’s already in the top 5 films ever made (or whatever, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) and neither really seems to validate its popularity.  Movies don’t have this kind of effect on people unless there’s something really new at the heart of the story, a message that people didn’t know they needed to hear.

It wasn’t until I started overlapping these two metaphors that I really began to understand what I’ve come to think this movie is about (and why I want to go see it).  It is the equating of nature with a programmable environment.  And it is done in a metaphorical/mythological way that people can grasp on a subconscious level without needing to understand the specifics.  To be there to watch those two memes combine into one is something I do not want to miss.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying this is some sort of conspiracy enacted by Cameron (and/or some group of shadowy figures), rather that this could be seen as an important part of our global cultural story, something we had  a desperate need to to develop and digest at this point in our history.  Maybe if we can learn to stop seeing nature as an enemy, to befriend it, and to understand that we can control it and program it, we’ll stop needing to destroy it so much.  Cameron does much here to combat our instinctive pre-historic need to see nature as always “red of tooth and claw”, and I would guess that this is why the movie has proven to be so popular.  This, to my mind, makes it a story we all very much want and need to hear right now.

After all, as Marshall McLuhan said way back in 1970, the invention of the satellite “ends ‘Nature’ and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.” We’re just finally catching up to this now, and I want to be there to watch as it happens.  Who knows where this is going to lead to as it unfolds; I just hope we still have a chance to make use of what learn here.

We must learn how to “thing” without becoming “a thing” ourselves.

I am all of these things, yet they are not me…

Identification is a state. You must understand that many things you ascribe to things outside you are really in you. Take for instance fear. Fear is independent of things. If you are in a state of fear, you can be afraid of an ash-try….You are afraid, and then you choose what to be afraid of. This fact makes it possible to struggle with these things, because they are in you.

(via Ann Seeker)