Friday, September 30, 2011
Change of Address
When you move it's only polite to inform people, so here is where I've gone: www.rewordingotherpeoplesdiscoveries.blogspot.com. I'll keep this one around for reference and maybe throw something up every now and again but you can expect most of my communications to be beamed onto the new one. I plan, ambitiously perhaps, to post two to three times a week thoughts on good books and science related stuff. To pilfer and reconstruct a phrase from Sam Harris, my brain has been in a state of constant firmware renewal over the past few months, and I'd like to see what it'll spit out if I turn it on. Who knows if it will come out intelligible, but I'll do my best anyway. Rock on.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Enlightenment, You Say?
I've been reading a fair amount about Buddhism recently, because as a white dude living in Japan and trying to feel out various cross-cultural ways of conceiving things, reading a fair amount about Buddhism is sort of an inevitability.
I confess to having grown up with a keen interest in the supernatural. Not really the sort of interest you'd get from reading some manifestation of scripture or sitting in some kind of pew, however. No, my fascination with the supernatural was largely informed by the vast stretches of time I spent playing video games, especially fantasy role playing games. Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Lufia II Rise of the Sinistrals, Golden Sun, Tales of Symphonia, Ogre Battle 64, Fire Emblem, the list goes on, composing a library of other titles that I can't remember yet still exist in my memory as flashing images of pixellated mages and dark-matter spewing dragons on the black screen of my mind. Like a lot of kids I was easily captivated by tales of magic, spirit realms, and sword-wielding, prophecy-confirming young heroes rising from obscurity to save the world from misguided middle aged dudes drawn in by the dark side. That's pretty much how they all go, because whatever the twists and turns the stories take, deep down their appeal is simple and the same: what budding young nerd wouldn't like to experience military triumph on the tip of the Flaming Sword of Argorath alongside a party of hot anime babes? If Nietzsche is right and one of the primary sources of human motivation is the will to power, there is no better (quicker, safer, more reliable) way to step into the shoes of the ubermensch than to turn on your PS3.
Of course, after you reach a certain point, you step out of your own adolescence and into an awareness of the outside world that poses an existential question: will you continue to seek moral perfection (for being unshakably and unquestionably right is a baseline function of many, though not all, RPGs) and self-actualization in the determinist matrix of medieval-themed computer programming, or will you look to level up in the infinitely more complicated and less-likely to bend-to-your-summoner-skills external world? I'm still nostalgic for video games, and every once in a while I pop one into my Nintendo DS, but I generally end up turning it off after fifteen or twenty minutes; I find myself increasingly unable to marshal my attention for something that just isn't real.
Which doesn't mean that the desire for vitality and electric transcendentalism video games used to satisfy in me has died. Like most people lucky enough to have been born into a culture that services your essential needs more-or-less with a smile, I've always been on the lookout for colorful lights to string in the sky and pulses of plasma to pump through my veins. For a long time, plugging into a world of digital angels and mythical weaponry was enough, but it's not anymore.
So where do you turn? I listen to a lot of Dragonforce, but that's pretty much like video games on tape, palatable because you can do something else at the same time and a song lasts six minutes instead of 60 hours. I tried painting but I sucked at it. I tried Japanese calligraphy but I didn't have the patience. I tried guitar theory but the best I could ever get was competence, which is cool but nobody ever beat the Final Boss with competency. You need your ultimate spell, the enchanted sword of a dead legend (who you may or may not be the reincarnation of), and probably some kick-ass magic resistant armor. A working knowledge of the pentatonic scale just doesn't cut it.
So where do you turn? Do you turn to God? Part of the reason that video games are fun is that they simulate a world in which god can actually exist, and you get all of the badass stuff without having to worry about the stuff that doesn't make any sense. I looked for God, but the only place in which He seems to fit is on a laser-disc. And yet, and yet, what about the Buddha? Eastern religion is pretty hip these days, and from what you hear the Buddha isn't quite like every other deity on the block. Turns out he's not really even a deity. What about Enlightenment? What the hell is that, exactly? From a boy who was always fascinated with the possibility of revelation, of spiritual sustenance, of being whisked off into a fantasy world where magic is real and legends tell the truth I have grown into something close to a man who sees through the improbability of such things. Nevertheless, I wanted to leave no legitimate stone unturned, so I started studying about Buddhism, and what I found, while not evidence for a spirit realm, was still pretty interesting. More to follow.
I confess to having grown up with a keen interest in the supernatural. Not really the sort of interest you'd get from reading some manifestation of scripture or sitting in some kind of pew, however. No, my fascination with the supernatural was largely informed by the vast stretches of time I spent playing video games, especially fantasy role playing games. Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Lufia II Rise of the Sinistrals, Golden Sun, Tales of Symphonia, Ogre Battle 64, Fire Emblem, the list goes on, composing a library of other titles that I can't remember yet still exist in my memory as flashing images of pixellated mages and dark-matter spewing dragons on the black screen of my mind. Like a lot of kids I was easily captivated by tales of magic, spirit realms, and sword-wielding, prophecy-confirming young heroes rising from obscurity to save the world from misguided middle aged dudes drawn in by the dark side. That's pretty much how they all go, because whatever the twists and turns the stories take, deep down their appeal is simple and the same: what budding young nerd wouldn't like to experience military triumph on the tip of the Flaming Sword of Argorath alongside a party of hot anime babes? If Nietzsche is right and one of the primary sources of human motivation is the will to power, there is no better (quicker, safer, more reliable) way to step into the shoes of the ubermensch than to turn on your PS3.
Of course, after you reach a certain point, you step out of your own adolescence and into an awareness of the outside world that poses an existential question: will you continue to seek moral perfection (for being unshakably and unquestionably right is a baseline function of many, though not all, RPGs) and self-actualization in the determinist matrix of medieval-themed computer programming, or will you look to level up in the infinitely more complicated and less-likely to bend-to-your-summoner-skills external world? I'm still nostalgic for video games, and every once in a while I pop one into my Nintendo DS, but I generally end up turning it off after fifteen or twenty minutes; I find myself increasingly unable to marshal my attention for something that just isn't real.
Which doesn't mean that the desire for vitality and electric transcendentalism video games used to satisfy in me has died. Like most people lucky enough to have been born into a culture that services your essential needs more-or-less with a smile, I've always been on the lookout for colorful lights to string in the sky and pulses of plasma to pump through my veins. For a long time, plugging into a world of digital angels and mythical weaponry was enough, but it's not anymore.
So where do you turn? I listen to a lot of Dragonforce, but that's pretty much like video games on tape, palatable because you can do something else at the same time and a song lasts six minutes instead of 60 hours. I tried painting but I sucked at it. I tried Japanese calligraphy but I didn't have the patience. I tried guitar theory but the best I could ever get was competence, which is cool but nobody ever beat the Final Boss with competency. You need your ultimate spell, the enchanted sword of a dead legend (who you may or may not be the reincarnation of), and probably some kick-ass magic resistant armor. A working knowledge of the pentatonic scale just doesn't cut it.
So where do you turn? Do you turn to God? Part of the reason that video games are fun is that they simulate a world in which god can actually exist, and you get all of the badass stuff without having to worry about the stuff that doesn't make any sense. I looked for God, but the only place in which He seems to fit is on a laser-disc. And yet, and yet, what about the Buddha? Eastern religion is pretty hip these days, and from what you hear the Buddha isn't quite like every other deity on the block. Turns out he's not really even a deity. What about Enlightenment? What the hell is that, exactly? From a boy who was always fascinated with the possibility of revelation, of spiritual sustenance, of being whisked off into a fantasy world where magic is real and legends tell the truth I have grown into something close to a man who sees through the improbability of such things. Nevertheless, I wanted to leave no legitimate stone unturned, so I started studying about Buddhism, and what I found, while not evidence for a spirit realm, was still pretty interesting. More to follow.
What are books for?
Sometimes you read a book and it pisses you off. I read Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth when I was a Junior in college and threw it against the wall of my living room because it seemed to me like a four hundred page waste of my time. No doubt there was something in there of worth, but I read books hoping for a punch in the face and all I got from that one was a spiny powder-puff. Not to say that it was actually worthless; I'm sure from the right angle it was revolutionary, but I wasn't at that angle. A classic it's not you, it's my twenty-first century white male perspective sort of thing. At any rate it sucked.
Sometimes you read a book and it melts your face. I read John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and almost threw up at times, partly out of sheer unfamiliarity but partly because I just didn't know what the hell was going on and the last resort of incomprehension seems to be ameliorative vomiting. "Nothing lasts longer than a mood," one of Barth's broken-down, unidentifiable narrators once said, and if I've written it before I would write it again: no line I've ever read has stuck with me like that one. For whatever reason it got below my skin and said something my bones could get down to. Bummer that the rest of the book was deconstructionist bullshit.
Sometimes you read a book that changes your life. Sometimes you read a series of books that change your life, and you find yourself in a slipstream that leads logically and inexorably from one thing to the next like falling out of an airplane. You're in free-fall and download one title after the next like flailing your arms at a rapidly diminishing Cessna. Is that a parachute on your back? Are you eventually going to go smack on the ground? Or do you just fall forever, pulling volume after volume from the ether in an attempt to know everything you need to know to qualify for a safe landing.
It is in just such a free-fall that I find myself at the moment, having discovered a trail into terminal velocity that starts at the physical sciences and ends in a graveyard of dead gods. Passes through the graveyard, I should more properly say, because the point of the whole thing is to find out what lies beyond the demon haunted cemetery, to makes one's peace with the universe so that one might better utilize the rapidly dwindling time in it which one has left. As I fall through degrees of things taken for granted, what are the names cut into the plastic straps of my potential parachute? They are many and perhaps they are well-known to most smart people, but for me they are new. Though others who have fallen from similar heights might put the names in different order, for me the most recent come first: Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, followed by their predecessors who I have since started to dig up. Spinoza, Hume, Bertrand Russel, Einstein, Hobbes, Mill, etc etc, the list goes on but ultimately the point is the same. What are books for ? They should be for helping you think better, and if over the past four or five months the only thing I've done is read, well, I hope that my brain is the better for it. Only time and continued writings will tell.
Sometimes you read a book and it melts your face. I read John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and almost threw up at times, partly out of sheer unfamiliarity but partly because I just didn't know what the hell was going on and the last resort of incomprehension seems to be ameliorative vomiting. "Nothing lasts longer than a mood," one of Barth's broken-down, unidentifiable narrators once said, and if I've written it before I would write it again: no line I've ever read has stuck with me like that one. For whatever reason it got below my skin and said something my bones could get down to. Bummer that the rest of the book was deconstructionist bullshit.
Sometimes you read a book that changes your life. Sometimes you read a series of books that change your life, and you find yourself in a slipstream that leads logically and inexorably from one thing to the next like falling out of an airplane. You're in free-fall and download one title after the next like flailing your arms at a rapidly diminishing Cessna. Is that a parachute on your back? Are you eventually going to go smack on the ground? Or do you just fall forever, pulling volume after volume from the ether in an attempt to know everything you need to know to qualify for a safe landing.
It is in just such a free-fall that I find myself at the moment, having discovered a trail into terminal velocity that starts at the physical sciences and ends in a graveyard of dead gods. Passes through the graveyard, I should more properly say, because the point of the whole thing is to find out what lies beyond the demon haunted cemetery, to makes one's peace with the universe so that one might better utilize the rapidly dwindling time in it which one has left. As I fall through degrees of things taken for granted, what are the names cut into the plastic straps of my potential parachute? They are many and perhaps they are well-known to most smart people, but for me they are new. Though others who have fallen from similar heights might put the names in different order, for me the most recent come first: Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, followed by their predecessors who I have since started to dig up. Spinoza, Hume, Bertrand Russel, Einstein, Hobbes, Mill, etc etc, the list goes on but ultimately the point is the same. What are books for ? They should be for helping you think better, and if over the past four or five months the only thing I've done is read, well, I hope that my brain is the better for it. Only time and continued writings will tell.
Friday, May 27, 2011
他不是吾
他不是吾。 Ta wa kore ware ni arazu. Simply stated, people do different things.
There are impulses that ought to be ignored, let's call these your automatics, and then there are others that are generated in a different place and should be heeded. "Ah, that hamburger looks delicious, I want it!" "I'm tired of these shoes, I want new ones!" "I need an iPhone." These are your automatics, unintentional, conditioned responses to an environment for which they weren't forged. They're just your body engaging evolutionary survival instincts or reacting to culturally implanted social norms.
Then there are the other ones that surface in your mind from time to time. "Ah, I have to mail that letter." "I haven't spoken with him in a long time, I should write him an email." "this bathroom is pretty dirty, I should clean it." These are impulses that push you towards the things you know deep down you have to do, and if yhou jump on them you will feel great. If you push them away because someone else tells you to do them later, or because you think right now isn't the appropriate time, or just because you're lazy, you will create gap between what your subconscious mind knows you have to do and what your conscious mind will let you do. In those gaps there is a lot of pain and stress. Follow those little blips of inspiration wherever you can, though, and you'll find yourself falling into fewer ravines.
There are impulses that ought to be ignored, let's call these your automatics, and then there are others that are generated in a different place and should be heeded. "Ah, that hamburger looks delicious, I want it!" "I'm tired of these shoes, I want new ones!" "I need an iPhone." These are your automatics, unintentional, conditioned responses to an environment for which they weren't forged. They're just your body engaging evolutionary survival instincts or reacting to culturally implanted social norms.
Then there are the other ones that surface in your mind from time to time. "Ah, I have to mail that letter." "I haven't spoken with him in a long time, I should write him an email." "this bathroom is pretty dirty, I should clean it." These are impulses that push you towards the things you know deep down you have to do, and if yhou jump on them you will feel great. If you push them away because someone else tells you to do them later, or because you think right now isn't the appropriate time, or just because you're lazy, you will create gap between what your subconscious mind knows you have to do and what your conscious mind will let you do. In those gaps there is a lot of pain and stress. Follow those little blips of inspiration wherever you can, though, and you'll find yourself falling into fewer ravines.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
人人悉道器
Nin-nin kotogotoku, doki-nari. Everyone has a soul to forge, so forge it.
I've been really into some Japanese proverbs recently so I thought I would introduce a few that I found in a book.
Everyone has within them the innate capacity to turn themselves into something amazing. ”人人悉” "Nin-nin kotogotoku," all people with no exceptions. Regardless of who you think you are, where you're from, whatever limitations or disadvantages you think you have, these words are for you because when you clear away all the webs we have culturally, socially, or intellectually strung ourselves up in you find that underneath it all you're still fresh and clean and capable of nearly anything.
”道器” "doki-nari." This is both the thing you can become and the way in which you become it. 道. "Do." this is the way. Everyday we're walking a path towards something, but if you don't know where you're headed you're bound to end up somewhere you don't want to be. If you are aware of the stones beneath your feet and you continue to put one foot in front of the other, no matter how difficult it may seem, slowly, painfully, in fits and starts but eventually you will find yourself somewhere, holding a cup filled to the brim with all of your labor. 器. "Ki." You find yourself at the end of all the steps you've taken, and the form of your vessel is the result of the work you have put into shaping it, nothing more, nothing less.
I've been really into some Japanese proverbs recently so I thought I would introduce a few that I found in a book.
Everyone has within them the innate capacity to turn themselves into something amazing. ”人人悉” "Nin-nin kotogotoku," all people with no exceptions. Regardless of who you think you are, where you're from, whatever limitations or disadvantages you think you have, these words are for you because when you clear away all the webs we have culturally, socially, or intellectually strung ourselves up in you find that underneath it all you're still fresh and clean and capable of nearly anything.
”道器” "doki-nari." This is both the thing you can become and the way in which you become it. 道. "Do." this is the way. Everyday we're walking a path towards something, but if you don't know where you're headed you're bound to end up somewhere you don't want to be. If you are aware of the stones beneath your feet and you continue to put one foot in front of the other, no matter how difficult it may seem, slowly, painfully, in fits and starts but eventually you will find yourself somewhere, holding a cup filled to the brim with all of your labor. 器. "Ki." You find yourself at the end of all the steps you've taken, and the form of your vessel is the result of the work you have put into shaping it, nothing more, nothing less.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
本来無一物; a Proverb
Honrai Mu-Ichi Motsu
Deep down, you are nothing.
It's all in your head.
Everything you know, everything someone's told you, is telling you, all of your evaluations, all of the expectations of and rules you have for your everyday life are learned scaffolding built up over whatever it is deep down that you started with. Those parts are all interchangable; none of them are essential to your existence, no matter how much you've convinced yourself otherwise.
As such, whenever you feel yourself suffocating under the weight of various stresses, if you just remember that it is all removable and what's underneath is still clean and fresh, can't really ever be dirtied, actually, then you can just tear it all down and go back to where you started; having nothing and needing nothing.
Deep down, you are nothing.
It's all in your head.
Everything you know, everything someone's told you, is telling you, all of your evaluations, all of the expectations of and rules you have for your everyday life are learned scaffolding built up over whatever it is deep down that you started with. Those parts are all interchangable; none of them are essential to your existence, no matter how much you've convinced yourself otherwise.
As such, whenever you feel yourself suffocating under the weight of various stresses, if you just remember that it is all removable and what's underneath is still clean and fresh, can't really ever be dirtied, actually, then you can just tear it all down and go back to where you started; having nothing and needing nothing.
Friday, March 25, 2011
After the Earthquake
There are many things I could say, some that I might, others that I probably won't, but for the moment here is something I penned out at my desk in one of the days following the big Tohoku earthquake when it seemed that the world was coming apart, the plates were quivering in the anticipation of another big one, radiation was in the air, the waves were crashing down and carrying people out to sea and in general things seemed pretty fragile. Life seems real precious when it's fragile, and that was a feeling that I didn't want to lose even after things went back to normal.
So, what am I going to take from this? If this isn't a life-changing event then what is?
We love people whose lives are in danger, we care for people who have lost big, our hearts go out to those in crisis, and we should, right? We rise above everything when we do, but if we had seen those same people a day earlier, of course, we wouldn't have felt a thing. Just, you know... people you don't know.
Why?
We think we've got issues, go problems, go all sorts of challenges we've got to face but when a massive earthquake hits and a tidal wave washes our homes away we realize that all the other stuff was real little after all.
Why?
When we rebuild our homes will our insignificant problems crop back up? When things go back to normal will we go back to passing those people up North as if they're just random people on the street? Sure, they probably will, and we probably will. It's the way we're are.
But does it have to be?
Tragedies can bring out the absolute best in humans beings, if human beings caring and selflessly helping other human beings is the best they can do. I just wish it didn't have to take a tragedy. When some natural disaster levels cities our boundaries go down with them and we feel free to love and give and fear and worry and pray and care and express the simple, natural, in-born compassion of one person to another person at full blast. In these scenarios, you can't help it. Because someone else has a real need, then I feel it's ok for me to get down to them on the realest of levels.
When someone is stripped of all the labels of everyday society they go back to just being a simple, human being like you, like me, and that fundamentally exposed identity is one we can interact with on such a meaningful level. Just that simple connection is enough to make you feel so good, to give without wanting something back, to be an agent of positivity in the world. To be real.
Why can't we strip away all the bullshit by ourselves? This earthquake has shown me that it's there, so why can't I strip it away by myself? I want to create a world where you can get down on somebody's level just like that, stay there, and make something special happen? How? Where there's a will, there's a way. It's time to lose the bullshit and keep it off.
So, what am I going to take from this? If this isn't a life-changing event then what is?
We love people whose lives are in danger, we care for people who have lost big, our hearts go out to those in crisis, and we should, right? We rise above everything when we do, but if we had seen those same people a day earlier, of course, we wouldn't have felt a thing. Just, you know... people you don't know.
Why?
We think we've got issues, go problems, go all sorts of challenges we've got to face but when a massive earthquake hits and a tidal wave washes our homes away we realize that all the other stuff was real little after all.
Why?
When we rebuild our homes will our insignificant problems crop back up? When things go back to normal will we go back to passing those people up North as if they're just random people on the street? Sure, they probably will, and we probably will. It's the way we're are.
But does it have to be?
Tragedies can bring out the absolute best in humans beings, if human beings caring and selflessly helping other human beings is the best they can do. I just wish it didn't have to take a tragedy. When some natural disaster levels cities our boundaries go down with them and we feel free to love and give and fear and worry and pray and care and express the simple, natural, in-born compassion of one person to another person at full blast. In these scenarios, you can't help it. Because someone else has a real need, then I feel it's ok for me to get down to them on the realest of levels.
When someone is stripped of all the labels of everyday society they go back to just being a simple, human being like you, like me, and that fundamentally exposed identity is one we can interact with on such a meaningful level. Just that simple connection is enough to make you feel so good, to give without wanting something back, to be an agent of positivity in the world. To be real.
Why can't we strip away all the bullshit by ourselves? This earthquake has shown me that it's there, so why can't I strip it away by myself? I want to create a world where you can get down on somebody's level just like that, stay there, and make something special happen? How? Where there's a will, there's a way. It's time to lose the bullshit and keep it off.
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