Reclusland

June 28, 2009

- Blues to Boston -

While on the 3 and a half hour train ride up to Boston, I got into a really productive work session.  Had some old blues records playing on the iTunes: John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, Blind John Davis, Son House.  Seems there’s lots of Johns in the blues tradition (although I think Son House has them all beat in the awesome name department).  Anyway, I do love the blues, the older and dirtier the better, and Ian’s the celtic form of John, so maybe I can take some small pride in (however vaguely) associating myself with these old bluesmen, and their ability to spin gold out of the straw (or it is lead?) that was their lives.

Anyway, 3 and half hours on the train and I not only got 2 sets of photos processed (the previous post and one yet to come), 2 fairly decent bits of rambling (again, the previous post, and an different “post yet to come”), but I also finally got back into my art work.  Here’s five new pieces, parented by, in equal parts, a speeding Amtrack train and a slow, dirty, blues rhythm.  Just goes to show how productive I can be when I’ve got a computer, but no internet…

art

June 22, 2009

- Boston Back Bay and the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens -

I’m currently in Boston (as you’d know if you followed me on twitter) on official office business.  Spent a little time earlier today exploring around the neighborhood hotel they’ve put me up in, since I can’t actually check in until my boss gets here (the reservation’s in his name, and his flight was delayed…).  I’d taken a taxi from the train station to the hotel, spent the ride talking with the driver about how badly his back and his knee were hurting, because he’d worked 25 hours the day before.  25 damn hours, in a car.

He talked about how hard it was for everyone right now, how a friend of his, who’d had a house and 3 kids in Catholic school, had had to sell the house when the mortgage went up, just to keep the kids in school.  Good choice, in my opinion; those kids’ll take care of him when he’s older if they get a good education.  Then again, maybe buy a cheaper house is you’re going to have three kids to put through Catholic school?  The cabby, Noel, kept hitting me with how bad it was for everyone, how everyone’s struggling just to get by, how a depression is coming.  How he prays everyday for God to help people.  Can’t say I disagreed with him at the time, can’t say I do now, either.

I mentioned maybe he could get a brace for his knee, maybe another for his back.  He just kind of shook his head, said he tries to exercise when he can.  I said yeah, that’s good for the body, gets everything kind of settled back into place.  I tell him family and friends are important, having people who can care about you when you need it.  He says I’m a good guy.  At the hotel he picks up another fare, waiting right at the hotel door as I step out the back door, so here’s hoping the guy gets a chance to rest tonight.  I haven’t pulled hours like that since college…

After I found out I couldn’t check in, I decided to hole up in the bar (free wifi? hey hey!) and get some dinner/ a few beers.  A few tables over a couple of women from the UK (judging by the accents) are having a conversation.  They’re upset that it’s raining, unsure what they’ll do on their vacation.  The waitress (who was kind enough to comp my beer when my diner took a little longer than usual, not at my request) is giving them some advice: “Put on a hat, go shopping, it really doesn’t get that bad around here.”  At the bar are a group who are clearly all business men, collored shirts and ties.  In the bathroom, washing my hands after diner, I hear them talking about their plans for the next day, all meetings and strategies.  Meanwhile the waitstaff at the bar are talking about The Hangover (apparently it’s very funny). I’m sitting here blogging in jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie, waiting for the VP of Sales to show up so we can grab a beer.  Then tomorrow, off to meetings with the clients and back to NYC tomorrow afternoon.

This trip looks to be putting me into a really weird head space, and to push that even further, I’m posting some pictures I took a few months back at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.  Time, space, and society have little inherent meaning to me at this point.  And yet here I am, same as I ever was…  Anyway, without any further ado, pictures (sans photoshop, at speedbird’s recommendation):

June 18, 2009

- Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille -

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.  You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU.  Keep the channel open… No artist is pleased…  There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

(thanks sheeperly…)

June 12, 2009

- Transactional Analysis, Freud, and the Death of the Ego -

(Quite) a while back, there was a small synchronicity here regarding Transactional Analysis, and, for a long time, TA sat in my pile of “important things to look into”.  I finally got around to it recently and it got my mind going in all kinds of directions.  I began with the wikipedia entry and found, as I often do, that it offered a great breakdown of the basics.  At it’s core, TA is a system that analyzes our interactions with the world, in order to help us to become aware of how our unconscious assumptions about reality (called scripts) are shaping are lives.  An analogous relationship would be between html code and a website as seen through a browser.  You examine how things looks at the browser level, and then go back into the code if something’s not appearing as you want it to.  It was developed by Eric Berne as a “Neo-Freudian” method of psychoanalysis, and as such, it has its own language and models for talking about the functioning (and dysfunctioning) of the psyche.  It was TA’s basic models of interaction, known as “ego states” that really drew my attention.

The 3 ego states are as follows (from wikipedia):

  • Parent (”exteropsyche”)
  • Adult (”neopsyche”)
  • Child (”archaeopsyche”)

 

Some of TA’s language is a bit hippie-fied for my taste (it’s the origin of the term “the warm fuzzies”), but that’s just a product of the time in which this system was developed.  The underlying ideas are well worth looking into, regardless of the words used to describe them, and I highly recommend exploring further if you’re interested.

But it was these three ego states that really caught my attention.  I saw them as having a kind of yin/yang relationship with Freud’s id/ego/superego formations, and, while thinking about them in that context, I stumbled on a flaw in (what I think of as) some of the basic assumptions behind psychoanalysis.  Now, I may not be interpreting everything entirely correctly here, but my understanding of these things did point toward some interesting conclusions.  Before I get to those conclusions though, let me explain what I mean about the yin/yang relationship between TA and Freud.

On the one hand, Freud’s psychic formations (id, ego, and superego) simply are.  They exist as objective parts of the psyche, functioning almost as organs within the mind, so that one could say, “oh, my id wants this, but my superego doesn’t,” just as easily as saying, “oh, my stomach’s too full, no more pie!”.  They are forces that wield influence from within the self, while the self scrambles around trying to create an equilibrium of libido between their different needs.  By contrast, Transactional Analysis’ ego states are ones through which the self can interact with the external world.  The states are masks, forms that the self assumes in order to embody what it considers to be the best possible role in any given situation.   Basically, the difference here is that TA focuses on the inter-personal nature of the self, while Freud focuses on the intra-personal nature of the self.  Their concepts of “self” can be seen as inversions of each other, different sides of the same coin, the north and south face of the same mountain.  Because in the end, what is being described is the “self” in it’s passive and active states.

coin_flip

But if both systems are examining the”self” from within a different context, can a similar parallel be found between the individual formations and ego states? That is, can each be seen as an active/passive version of some aspect of the self?  It was in trying to fit these pieces fit together that the entire basis for both models fell apart for me in a really interesting way.

I’ll begin with the id/child state. In both cases, what’s described is the aspect of the self that wants, that desires, that craves instant gratification or the release of emotional energy.  It’s the creative part of the self but it’s also the unpredictable part of the self.  For Freud, the id “is regarded as the reservoir of the libido or ‘instinctive drive to create’“, while in TA, the child state is the source of emotions, creation, recreation, spontaneity and intimacy.   In both, what we have is the part of the self that reacts to reality before conscious decision making comes into play.  They come into consciousness already in motion and reach outward into the world.  Freud’s id is a drive within the self, while TA’s child state is the self acting spontaneously in the world, so we do find that same internal/external dichotomy at the individual formation/state level as well.  And this formation/state seems to be based mainly on creating a future state of being.  Although it’s a bit counter-intuitive at first, any emotional response is something created in anticipation of some future state.  I do not mean the experience of the emotion, I mean the source of the emotion.  According to this understanding of the child/id as the source of the emotion, the emotion is created by that source to be experienced by the consciousness in the future. The emotion comes into being before we are aware of it’s presence.  I think that this way of looking at it makes the “child” label particularly appropriate, because if children have an abundance of anything, it’s “future”.  This ties in with creativity quite well too, because creativity is all about “seeing” something that hasn’t yet come into being and making it real.

The obvious retort to this is that children are always so wonderfully present, but that, I would say, is confusing the “child” label with an actual child. In fact, I think children can often be a lot more in touch with their ego/adult state than most adults are, and I disagree with TA’s notion that the child state is merely a re-creation of childhood experiences.  As I hope I will be able to clarify here, I think that the id/child state might be better understood as something created during childhood, rather than as something inherent since birth.

Before we get to that though, I’d like to point to a similar pattern in the ego/adult state: that the base here is on the present moment. As TA puts it, the adult is “directed towards an objective appraisal of reality”, and for Freud, “the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.“  It is the seat of the conscious awareness, mainly because it is the part that is still in direct contact with both the circumstances of the exterior world and the drives of inner world.

And finally, in case you haven’t already figured it out, the superego/parent is the part of the self that seems most based in the past.  Without the past, the parent/superego has no basis upon which to make its pronouncements.  If there were no previous bad results to watch out for, on what grounds can we be scolded for our current actions?  TA’s parent state is one where we “behave, feel, and think in response to an unconscious mimicking of how (our) parents (or other parental figures) acted.“  That is, it is the part of the self that has internalized the actions of the parental figure in order to please that figure.   Freud pretty much agrees, saying “the super-ego retains the character of the father“, (of course, Freud’s word choice here, as with TA’s slightly hippy-fied sentimentality, is best understood as a product of its time, not as anything inherent to the argument here).  Again, the inner/outer dichotomy is obvious: TA has us “mimicking actions”, while Freud has us “retaining character”.

That’s all well and good, but to me, there’s something profoundly wrong about all of this.  Because really (and here’s where the bottom fell out of the bucket for me) the past of the future don’t exist experientially. As the Sensei at my zen temple has said, “we can experience a sense of the past or future, but that sense is still in the present moment”. We are always in the present, and it’s only in the present that we can have any influence on the unfolding of things. From that perspective, focusing on either the future or the past at the expense of the present is a waste of time.  But then, from what we looked at above, being “in the present moment” only leaves us with the ego/adult, the “rational observer”, with the emotions and creativity of the child/id completely cut off from reality.  And that, I think, points a problem inherent in psychoanalysis since Freud.

For Freud, “the id stands in direct opposition to the super-ego”, but I know that, for me, the ideal state of being is not one where the internal parts of my psyche are in direct opposition to each other.  Why carry around a description of the self that has such an insolvable conflict within it? For Transactional Analysis, “learning to strengthen the Adult is a goal of TA“, yet the adult state is described as “most like a computer processing information and making predictions absent of major emotions that cloud its operation.” Is that the goal we should be striving for?  A telling quote from Joseph Campbell sheds some light on the matter.  It comes from his journals from his trip to Japan“Christianity and Freud, by the way, have something in common, inasmuch as for both, man’s rational consciousness is absolutely sealed away from the unknown root of his soul.”

terminator-salvation-christian-bale

And I say fuck that.  Why should my ideal consciousness be purely rational, and why should that rational consciousness be absolutely sealed away from the “root of my soul?”  What causes someone to create a system of “mind” like that, and how might these models look if they sprang from a different understanding of the mind-in-reality?  I don’t doubt that there are many analysts who make good use of the tools offered by TA (as well as those offered by Freud) to achieve excellent results with their clients, but I think a re-examination of some of the key assumptions is in order if we ever want to use these tools to their full extent.  The conclusion I came to through my understanding of the id/child as future-based and superego/parent as past-based is that both these aspects are created out of the self at the precise moment when the ‘root of the soul’ is mistakenly thought to be separated from the present moment.  That is, the id/child can only be seen as the source of emotions and creativity if these things are seen as not already belonging to the fully present adult/ego.  Once that happens, the superego/parent is needed to balance out the time lag of the no-longer-present-source.  The parental figure needs to become internalized as the superego because the inner source is no longer trusted to touch reality directly; a mediator is needed.  What is being described in both systems is a fundamentally damaged understanding of what the “self” actually is, and it is being described as if this were the normal way to be.  What we’re left with is a case of double vision.  Take a look at this handy little visual metaphor:

double-vision

eyes-brain

To the left there is clearly part of a face.  And the same is true to the right.  But they both have an extremely unreal quality about them.  You can see through them, as if they weren’t really there, and neither side is complete in itself.  Both fade into a middle part that is clearly there.  The middle part seems real and concrete, but it is a chaotic mess of features.  Clearly it’s real, but what is it?  No conclusions about the real face can be drawn until the blurred vision is cleared.  You have to sit and stare at the part that feels real, and wait for the true face to come into focus.

So too, focusing only on the child/id, as something separate from the present moment, is to be caught in the illusory future.  To focus only on the parent/superego, as something separate from the present moment, is to be caught in the past.  Only when the two are seen as existing both together at the same time, naturally balanced in the present moment, can reality be fully experienced.  Check out this quote from Douglas Harding (and the accompanying exercise)

You know, six hundred years before Christ they were saying in India that there is one Seer in all beings. One Seer. The Sufis said it, the Buddhists said it. Hui Hai, a great Buddhist Zen master, said, ‘Do we see with our eyes? No we see with our Buddha Nature.’ We see with a Single Eye say the Sufi masters, later. One Seer. This is the Eye you’re looking out of. I find this absolutely extraordinary. See what you’re looking out of! And this is a strange thing—this agrees with modern science. Eyes do not see. Eyes condition, are part of the conditioning apparatus of what we see. They help to determine what we see, but the seeing doesn’t go on at the eye level. It really has to go back, via the optic nerves and so on, to a region of the brain where the story is taken up. It starts off there with the sun, the light comes down, is filtered through the atmosphere of the Earth, strikes the object and hits your eye, and is then conveyed to a region of the visual cortex in the brain, where the story is taken up by atoms, particles and so on. It’s not until that terminus is reached that you say, ‘Hi! I see you.’ The thing that starts with the galaxy, with the light of the sun out there, ends with the agitation or whatever of particles here. And it’s only where the All is reduced to No-thing here that seeing takes place.

This is the key to the whole thing.  At some point in our childhood, we push away that root of the soul, our honest emotional involvement with the world, in favor of a more removed, rational approach.  This is what all the “get in touch with your emotions” and “increase the amount of ‘play’ in your life” kinds of therapies are attempting to overcome.  Even “be here now” and “be one with everything” point to the same way out.  What is needed is a resurrection of that emotional source into the present moment, so that there is a flowing back and forth of energy and information between the inner and outer experiences.  The sense of any barrier between the two is the “self” that needs to be gotten rid of, the gateless gate through which we must pass.  We create this boundary at some point in our childhood, in response to some external circumstances that teach us that our inner drives are not to be trusted, and then we take this self-created boundary as real.  We wall off our drives, instead of allowing them to interact with and learn from reality.  This is not in and of itself a bad thing, but we seem to forget that we’ve done it to ourselves.  We hold onto that barrier as a part of our true self, when it’s actually only a mental tool we’ve created.  The true self is simply the space within which this flow of energy/information takes place between our inner and outer aspects.

This is why I said earlier that I think children are more in touch with there adult/ego self, because the true self-in-the-present moment understands that is no separation between the “root of the soul” and the rational consciousness.  They are like two ends of a magnet that can never touch, but which meet quite easily in the middle.

magnetism2Recently, there have been some studies pointing to a major shift in our understanding of what’s going on in a child’s mind.  Conveniently enough, a few articles on these were published while I was trying to put this piece together, and they greatly contributed to my understanding of just what it was that I was trying to say:

The finding that infants can distinguish between solids and liquids at such an early age builds upon a growing body of research that strongly suggests that babies are not blank slates who primarily depend on others for acquiring knowledge. That’s a common assumption of researchers in the not too distant past.

“Rather, our research shows that babies are amazing little experimenters with innate knowledge,” Susan Hespos said. “They’re collecting data all the time.”

The infants who in their first trials observed the blue water in the glass looked significantly longer at the blue solid, compared to the liquid test trials. The longer stares indicated the babies were having an “Aha!” moment, noticing the solid substance’s difference from the liquid. The infants who in their first trials observed the blue solid in the glass showed the opposite pattern. They looked longer at the liquid, compared to the solid test trials.

“As capricious as it may sound, how long a baby looks at something is a strong indicator of what they know,” Hespos said. “They are looking longer because they detect a change and want to know what is going on.”

“Our research on babies strongly suggests that right from the beginning babies are active learners,” Hespos said. “It shows that we perceive the world in pretty much the same way from infancy throughout life, making fine adjustments along the way.”

—————————————————————————

Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults. A lot of their characteristic traits, like their pretend play, are signs of how powerful their imaginative abilities are.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds already recognize the difference between moral principles and conventional principles. You can ask them if it would be okay to hit someone at daycare if everyone said it would be okay, versus asking them whether it would be okay to not hang up your coat in the cubby if everyone said it would be okay. These children say it’s never okay to hit someone, but whether or not you have to put your clothes in the cubby could change from daycare to daycare. They already seem to appreciate the difference between the kinds of morality that comes from empathy and the kind that comes from our conventional rules. From the time they are two, they recognize both are important but in different ways.

So then, what’s the solution to all this?  Should we just let loose, do whatever we want?  Let our emotions run rampant?  No, of course not.  On the one hand, our emotions don’t naturally run rampant.  They are communications from our unconscious, and our unconscious is designed to make the best decision possible based on the information available to it.  Telling ourselves that they’re unmanagable is often just a way to maintain that false boundary that we think of as an inherent part of our self.  Argue for your limitations and they’re yours, as they say.

On the other hand, yes, there are people with really violent emotions and urges, but think of it this way.  If you take a hose, and block the end of it, when you move your finger away there is a sudden spray of water.  And if you only move your finger partially, there is a contant stream of water under pressure.  What we have to learn is how to remove the blocks that create emotional pressure, but without the sudden outpouring of what was blocked.  People can be damaged, perhaps permanently, by such emotional blockages, but we, as a society, would be best served by having as many people as possible making attempts to integrate these parts of themselves without the need to lash out with these blocked emotions.  We have to retrain our mind and our emotions to better exist together again, because right now, they have forgotten how to.  The more people who can learn to safely let the inner fountain bubble up, the less we, as a society, will have to worry about violent emotions.  “What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?  What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.”

What we have to do is learn to sit with our emotions, become aware of them as they areReconnect our conscioussness with the root of our soul.  As a species, we had the chance to explore both extremes, the emotional and the rational, and now it’s time to head back toward the center, to level things out so to speak.  It is definitely not an easy road, but the end result is one worth traveling to.  And what is that result? Love.  A consciously aware participation mystique.  And the realization that this state has been completely available within our being all along.

fountain

writing

June 9, 2009

- Water That Floats the Boat Can Also Sink It -

artwork_images_117082_218438_yun-fei-ji

June 8, 2009

- Who Creates Your Own Reality? -

Just read a great essay by Stuart Davis on “The Secret”.  Since that topic’s come up here a few times, I thought it worthwhile to link to it.  I agree wholeheartedly with what he puts right at the start:

“The Secret takes a truth like The Self is one with the Universe, and then immediately inserts the wrong self: The Ego.”

And although I don’t necessarily agree with Stuart’s take on the inherent goodness of egoic desires (personally, I take the whole “lilies of the field”, “following a more total aim type of approach), I do readily admit that he’s probably a little further ahead of me when it comes to these things*.  Maybe one day I’ll get to a point where I can see the value in such a perspective.

white-stu

(* “little” being sarcatsic, in case that wasn’t obvious…)

ramblings

June 8, 2009

- Machina Ex Deo -

Some more college collages, this time centering around a theme of technology and eastern spirituality.

bonsaiBonsai

chakrafinalKundalini

coldmountainCold Mountain

ichingIChing

mandalaMandala

rockgardenRock Garden Zen

art

June 3, 2009

- On Having Always Been Enlightened All Along -

Imagine a mouth constantly full of food.  So much so that it becomes difficult to swallow.  Bits of food get stuck between teeth, behind molars, in the cheeks, beginning to rot.  Every once in a while, a little food slips down the throat.  “It worked!” we think, and shovel more food in, trying to assuage our hunger.  Perhaps our teeth begin to decay.

Now imagine spitting all that food out.  Emptying the mouth, allowing the air to pass freely, existing in a state of no-food.  Much better than starving while stuffed full, right?  But does that mean we should never eat?

The natural order of the mouth is emptiness, that’s what lets us swallow the food we need.  Each piece must be thoroughly tasted and chewed before it is swallowed, and each bite must be swallowed before the next is taken.  But at all times, the mouth is inherently empty, and keeping that in mind allows us to use it properly.

Does it then follow that we are the same when choking on the food as when we are when mindfully chewing it?  In both cases, the mouth is inherently empty, after all.

Before and after, no change, but everything is different…

ramblings

June 3, 2009

- Joseph Campbell on Koans -

Mrs. Sasaki spoke about the koans of Zen.  They are not odd (as the writings of Suzuki and Alan Watts would seem to suggest).  Each, on the level of consciousness from which it comes, makes good sense, and receives it’s only possible answer in the traditional response.  You have to stand on the level from which the koan comes to appreciate it’s logic, however.  The main road of Zen is not the koan, but meditation; the koan is public evidence of the level of consciousness obtained.

- From “Sake & Satori“, page 221

img001mumon

May 27, 2009

- Erik Drexler on How To Learn About Everything -

I recommend that intellectually ambitious students invest considerable time in a mode of study may set off subconscious alarm signals that conflicts with almost instinctive impulses imparted by classroom experience:

  1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. . Include Science and Nature.
  2. Seldom stop to study a single subject with a student’s intensity, as if you had to pass a test on it.
  3. Don’t drop a subject because you know you’d fail a test — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to accumulate vocabulary, perspective, and context.
  4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic, and note which topics provide keys to many others.
  5. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.

You learned your native language by immersion, not by swallowing and regurgitating spoonfuls of grammar and vocabulary. With comprehension of words and the unstructured curriculum of life came what we call “common sense”.

The aim of what I’ve described is to learn an expanded language and to develop what amounts to common sense, but about an uncommonly broad slice of the world. Immersion and gradual comprehension work, and I don’t know of any other way.

From here.  Again, something I’d normally put on the The Links, but its too good not to share here. This is the only way I’ve ever felt like I actually learned anything:  as close to full immersion as possible.

(Oh, and the TA article is still in the works.  I’ve come down with a bit of a cold, or at least am trying to avoid doing so completely, and as such have been sleeping a lot more than usual…)

May 21, 2009

- The View From Earth -

This video has been making the rounds, but it is totally worth posting again.  If you’ve seen it already, watch it again!  This is the view of space passing, just like a view of clouds passing as an airplane makes a turn and banks to land.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

May 21, 2009

- Persea Flower Diagram -

  • This flower from an avocado tree (Persea americana) shows the characteristics of ancient flowering-plant lineages. Its petals (colorful in most flowers) and sepals (usually a green outer layer) are combined into one organ.
  • The flower is one of the key innovations of evolution, responsible for a massive burst of evolution that has resulted in perhaps as many as 400,000 angiosperm species. Before flowering plants emerged, the seed-bearing plant world was dominated by gymnosperms, which have cone-like structures instead of flowers and include pine trees, sago palms and ginkgos.
  • “What we found is that the flower of Persea is a genetic fossil, still carrying genetic instructions that would have allowed for the transformation of cones into flowers,”
  • “Although the organs are developing to ultimately become different things, from a genetic developmental perspective, they share much more than you would expect,” Chanderbali said. “As you go back in time, the borders fade to a blur.”
  • Researchers don’t know exactly which gymnosperms gave rise to flowering plants, but previous research suggests some genetic program in the gymnosperms was modified to make the first flower, Soltis said. A pine tree produces pine cones that are either male or female, unlike flowers, which contain both male and female parts. But a male pine cone has almost everything that a flower has in terms of its genetic wiring.
ramblings

May 20, 2009

- Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends -

Normally I’d post something like this over at The Links, but it seems to tie in with what I’ve been exploring lately, so I figured I might as well put it here:

Achieving Fame, Wealth And Beauty Are Psychological Dead Ends, Study Says

Some key points:

  • “People understand that it’s important to pursue goals in their lives and they believe that attaining these goals will have positive consequences. (But) this study shows that this is not true for all goals,”
  • The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community
  • As with earlier research, the study confirmed that the more committed an individual is to a goal, the greater the likelihood of success. But unlike previous findings, this analysis showed that getting what one wants is not always salubrious. “There is a strong tradition in psychology that says if you value goals and attain them, wellness will follow,” says Niemiec. “But these earlier studies did not consider the content of the goals.”
  • What’s “striking and paradoxical” about this research, he says, is that it shows that reaching materialistic and image-related milestones actually contributes to ill-being; despite their accomplishments, individuals experience more negative emotions like shame and anger and more physical symptoms of anxiety such as headaches, stomachaches, and loss of energy. By contrast, individuals who value personal growth, close relationships, community involvement, and physical health are more satisfied as they meet success in those areas.
  • The theory holds that well-being depends in large part on meeting one’s basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
  • Striving for wealth and adulation, on the other hand, does little to satisfy these deep human requirements, at least within this early career stage of life.

So yeah, I am hoping I’m in the midst of a process of removing those non-productive goals “by the root of the weed”, and freeing up energy for more worthwhile, happiness-producing pursuits.

Also, I’m still at work on a large post on Transactional Analysis.  I was planning on having it up Monday, but it turned into a bigger exploration than I had been anticipating.  Need to let it ferment a little bit before attempting to wrap it up.

ramblings

May 18, 2009

- The Light That Reveals -

An amazing talk given by Christopher Titmuss (found via Duncan from The Baptist’s Head, I believe)

May 18, 2009

- Death to the Innocent Bystander -

Well, the Qi Gong retreat was amazing.  It was lead by Sifu Pragata, who is one of the most gifted teachers that I’ve ever worked with, and I feel incredibly lucky to have had this opportunity to learn from him.  Unfortunately, it seems he’s taking a sabbatical from teaching, and is retiring to the countryside somewhere in Europe for a while, so I can’t really give any advice on how to train with him yourself (other than to check his website).  But any student of Sifu Wong’s (Pragata’s current Chi Kung master) should be good to learn from as well.  Check out Sifu Wong’s site for a list of certified Shaolin Wahnam instructors.

The Qi Gong has helped me settle into my meditation practice as well, and I am begining to think that part of the difficulties I’ve been having with meditation may have something to do with my trying to keep a record of everything here.  If meditation is something that I am making happen, some kind of button I press and report on the results, then I am the-one-who-is-instigating, instead of becoming the-process-that-is-already-underway. I am the scientist and not the experiment, and that is not at all what it is about, in my opinion.  Also tied up in there is a lust for recognition as something mistakenly equated with spiritual growth, as if I could progress in my practice by merely getting enough people to think that I have.

So I’m looking to kill the innocent bystander.  Especially since he doesn’t exist anyway…

But I don’t want you to think I’m going to avoid talking about it all of that, as I still definitely believe that records of people’s journeys into these kinds of things can be helpful in many different ways.  Plus I’ve already promised to keep you all informed on my progress with the yoga classes.  I just want to make sure that I do it to do it, and not just so I can talk about it later.

However it turns out, I’m hoping this will free up my meditation (”we must arrange our lives to support good practice”, I’ve heard it said) as well as give me a reason to turn back to some of the other things I’ve explored here in the past, the more psychological/scientific type stuff.   But before I end this little rant telling you how I am no longer going to be doing exactly what it is that I am doing…here’s a great little piece of synchronicity that was waiting for me on my kitchen counter when I got home:

qi_power

ramblings

May 15, 2009

- Qi Gong -

Heading back up to the monastery this weekend for a qi gong retreat.  I’ve been telling people I’m going to learn how to levitate and walk through walls.  But I’ve been doing a little research this morning, and it looks like that’s not really what it’s about.

How embarassing…

0aee_1

bg_qigong

qigongfranceweb

qigong-bamboo

liao_fo_hai_qi_gong_large

May 13, 2009

- Saul Williams on the mind and time -

Saul Williams is one of the only people I follow on twitter whom I’ve never met or exchanged emails with, cause he’s that damn awesome.  He had a series of posts today that said something I’ve been struggling to put into words here for a long time, and I wanted to copy them over to share with you all (and also to have a record of these ideas here for easy future reference!):

And he got all that across in posts of 140 characters or less.  That’s poetry!  Twitter, the modern day haiku…


May 12, 2009

- Yoga -

Took my first yoga class yesterday, at least the first since I signed up for a Yoga class back in college (it counted for 1 credit under the “other” section of my graduation requirements).  This time it was Kripalu yoga, which seemingly has more of a focus on mindfulness and connection of mind, body and breath, rather than focusing on getting postures absolutely correct.

I had an amazing time, and I can really see why both Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson were such big proponents of yoga in general. It really clears a way a lot of crap, both mentally and physically, like night changing into day.  You can’t tell exactly when it happens, but the difference is immediately obvious.  I’d been in a really bad mood all weekend, and this cleared it right up, leaving me feeling lighter and more focused than I had in a long time.

Apparently it got me a focused back on the blog again as well.  I’ve noticed that everything moves a lot more easily, that there are less hindrances and withholdings.  Things are seeming to flow better on their own with no effort on my part, as if all the connections had been cleaned a little bit.  And the classes are only $15.00!

Can’t wait to go back next week.

ramblings

May 12, 2009

- Mind-body connections -

The weirdest thing happened to me at lunch last week.  I was just sitting there, having a conversation about something I can’t even remember at this point, when all of a sudden it popped into my head that part of the psychological baggage I have been carrying around with me includes the belief that whatever I think or feel must be tweaked or altered before it can be shared.  There was a sense of rejection as something somehow inherent within my self, an inborn sense of incompatibility between the world and my desires.  Which I guess might makes another in the series of similar realizations that started before I left on that meditation retreat a few weeks back.

This time I realized that I was carrying around, at a really low level, a profound distrust of the world and my place in it.  It all ties in, I think, to some early formative stuff from when I was a kid, but that’s really all I feel needs to be said on that aspect of the experience.  Although I’m trying to be as open as possible about these experiences, I think those kinds of details might be the airing of too much dirty laundry in public.   I’m interested in exploring and documenting the subjective feelings and experiences as they arise during these “ahah!” experiences, in the interest of shedding some light on whatever it is that these experiences are (and what it is that they’re trying to point me towards, in an attempt at a sort of spiritual triangulation), but I don’t think that such details from my personal history are necessarily relevant.  Unless you had the exact same childhood I did, I don’t think those kinds of details would be as helpful as a close examination of the dynamics of the situation (a study of changes).

Anyway, once I became aware of it, I realized that this distrust of the world was a foolish thing for me to be carrying around, because distrust is by definition a conditioned thing (that is, there has to be some thing in the real world which is distrusted), and therefore the distrust itself cannot be permanent.  It is something that is dictated by circumstances, and although distrust always could be a warranted response, it was not something that I had to continually keep in place.  To have choosen continual defense over paying attention and defending when appropriate was just plain lazy…

That is to say, the realization was that such defensiveness comes third. First is the presentness of my being aware.  Second is the reality to which I turn that awareness.  And only third does that awareness respond to that reality.  There is no response that must always be in place, prior to awareness of reality.

Of course, all three are constantly going on all the time; there’s no “reset” button that allows us to start the game over again.  But it is a question of where you rest, where your awareness and identity begin.  If your identity rests in the world, well, that’s always changing, how can there be anything permanent to identify with?  And if your identity is in a certain learned reaction to the world, well, you’re trying to make a permanent house on sand that’s always shifting.  The question is, what is it that knows the sand is shifting?  What is it that reality is always shifting around and through?  Find that and you have found a place a rest, the refreshing fountain that bubbles up inside every one of us.

Upon having that realization, I felt a twinge from my lower right ribs, an area that has been causing me some pain recently, followed by a sense of opening up and release.  (I have gone to see my doctor about the pain, but he’s not sure what it could be. He put me on daily Alleve for muscle inflammation…)  There was a feeling of being more present, of having let go of something physically, of a chronic tension having left the body.  I’m a big fan of the ideas behind Willhelm Reich’s work and always believed that mind and body are two expressions of one underlying whole, but this was an instance where I felt a particularly strong awareness of the connection between the two, when a shift in one happened almost immediately following a shift in the other.  It felt like a call-and-response or an echo…

That’s the end of the story, but I still have to wonder: where does this stuff come from?  Why all of a sudden like that?  The quick and easy answer is “the grace of god”, or as the abbot at my zen temple put it last week, “the spring doesn’t happen and the sun doesn’t shine because we think about them.”

However, while I don’t disagree with those answers, I think it’s also more than just a one way street.  That is, I think we are sometimes (and not as often as we would like) lucky enough to be able to put ourselves into places, situations, and states of mind where we are more likely to receive that grace.  For me, I think the meditation practice has had something to do with it.  There are times that nothing much happens during meditation itself, but then insights / changes of view / moments of bliss, will pop-up throughout the day.  Does this happen to anyone else?  Most of what I’ve read seems to take for granted that such experiences usually happen during the meditation itself.  For me though, they sometimes seem to catch up afterwords, away from the cushion.

Who knows?  Maybe it’s a reminder that nothing needs to be done, that simply being in and of that awareness is enough, and that the spring will come on it’s own, in it’s own time…

cherry_blossoms

ramblings

May 8, 2009

- 85 spam comments? -

Since 5:30 yesterday evening, 85? What the hell?

I haven’t even been posting all that much…  (aplogies for that)  Nothing artistic , but still, is this usual?  It’s not something that I’ve seen before.

Anyway, just wanted to vent a little bit.  A couple new posts in the works, one on meditation and the other on transaction analysis + some related thoughts on that.

May 5, 2009

- Filling in the blanks -

Don’t know how this is going to work for any of you reading my RSS feed, but I’ve just gone back and published a bunch of posts that I hadn’t been able to decide whether or not to put up here.  A lot of little things, going back to early March.  Those of you without RSS subscriptions can check them out of you would like, just check under the “ramblings category” (which this post conveniently belongs to) and go back from April 9th to March 16th, if you really want to be privy to all my little insights.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post these cause they’re kind of personal (not that they’re private, just that they might not mean anything to anybody else).  But today I thought, fuck it, just put them up anyway.

The plan is still to continue working on some longer posts, but again, I am trying not to let this thing take over my life.  It seems my muse is stuck in feast or famine mode, and I’m trying to teach her to calm down and relax a little… I have 7 or 8 longer posts in the works, and I’m hoping that this little deluge of mini-posts can both clear the way for some more small things and also help fertilize some of the larger ones.

Until next time, be well…

ramblings

April 30, 2009

- Acropolis – Lawrence Durrell -

The soft quem quam will be Scops the Owl
conjugation of nouns, a line of enquiry,
powdery stubble of the socratic prison
laurels crack like parchments in the wind.
who walks here in the violet dust at night
by the tower of the winds and water-clocks?
tapers smoke upon open coffins
surely the shattered pitchers must one day
revive in the gush of marble breathing up?
call again softly, and again.
the fresh spring empties like a vein
no children spit on their reflected faces
but from the blazing souk below the passive smells
bread urine cooking printing-ink
will tell you what the sullen races think
and among the tombs gnawing of mandolines
confounding sleep with carnage where
strangers arrive like sleepy gods
dismount at nightfall at desolate inns.

April 29, 2009

- New York Botanic Gardens Ochid Show 2009 -

Some more recent pics from late last month. I went to the New York Botanic Gardens way up in the Bronx to check out the 2009 Orchid show for my girlfriend’s birthday.  No lie, it was put together by someone named Raymond Jungles.  Raymond Jungles. Hilarious.

For these, I decided to take the opposite approach to those DC Museum shots and didn’t touch these up at all.  If you have any preferences as far as “a lot of PS” or “no PS”, let me know.

April 29, 2009

- The (tripped out) Museums of DC -

I took a bunch of pictures in the museums when I was down in DC last November, but I only recently got around to cleaning up the best of them.  I decided to take a different direction with these and modify them more than usual, cause some of them looked damn cool when I did.

No cut-and-paste or brush effects were used; I just played with the levels, curves, saturation, and various color mixtures already inherent each photo.  Organic photoshopping…




April 27, 2009

- Gravity Never Fails -

Saw this today (via here) and it made me think of this.  And it made me really happy.

ramblings

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