Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
E go, forever the ego. The video of the Virginia Tech shooter vividly illustrates the curse of selfishness, of the folly of always thinking about yourself. As the cognitive therapists and Buddhists and indeed everybody wise say, the way to feel good yourself is, paradoxically, to be concerned about others. We all know this. Many admirable people practice it. To a point. As this week’s South Park episode on being overrun by the homeless points out, being overly selfless is not desirable either. It’s trite to say, but obviously a balance is needed, and we can presume that given we are animals, our tendency is towards selfishness.
How does one eradicate or tamp down the engrossment with me me me? Just being plain busy so that there’s no time for the funk of dwelling on one’s own shortcomings and misfortunes: this does work, but can feel like you’re just escaping yourself. We gotta look into this abyss in order I think to discover it’s not such a terrible abyss at all. Buddhists and cognitive therapists dictate meditation, thinking of things and getting into a more correct perspective. When I was homeless and jobless in Rome, the dogs up in the country, me paying for accommodation for myself and for them nightly by increasing my overdraft, I was very distressed. It’s kind of pathetic but I clung to the internet for uplift, though I guess looking back it was escape more than anything else. I realized, belatedly, how much of a deskbound homebody I am. (And yet, I love travel, so how to reconcile that?) But one friend, Andrea, sent me a link to a text about the unreality of the self: Nonduality.info. This really did help me during those times that felt so dreadful that I never really did recover from them during my time in Rome, even as circumstances improved.
How did it help? Similar to cognitive therapy, it’s an attempt to get you to rein in your thoughts, thoughts which are generally distressing to you. It does this by arguing to you that the seat of the self is not the emotions nor even the thoughts, but that these are merely things paraded in front of the true self, which illuminates them. I hope I’m not messing up the idea by comparing it to a movie theatre, and that whereas we think we are what’s happening onscreen, in fact we are the projection lamp.
At the very least, understanding the self this way, even if that understanding only comes periodically, allows the anguished person to separate a little from the anguish. That said, I don’t think it applies during times of grief. In looking back at the times in Rome at the beginning when I was unsettled, and comparing it with the grief over Maddie’s death, the grief was unquestionably much deeper and more husking, yet somehow it seems more appropriate and acceptable to me. I’m not ashamed of my feelings of loss. There is surely no feeling worse than bereavement, and yet we seem programmed to deal with it; nature seems to have been merciful and provided us with that similar to how endorphins flood our bodies when we are caught by hunters and are eaten alive. I did not seek out the Nonduality essay to distance me from my grief. We feel that since the loss is real it deserves our terrible sadness.
In contrast to that, I’m ashamed at how crappy I felt being unsettled in a new place. It was a dream come true for me, living in Italy, but because I was unsettled I could not enjoy it. I’d look out at the Tevere, the Tiber, and the gorgeous bridges, and it felt like chewing food with a cold — I could not taste it. Just homesickness, plain and simple? Later on, once I had a moped, I really enjoyed whizzing past the same places, feeling privileged and zesty, even though this was after Maddie’s passing.
I keep mentioning my dog. I’m sorry. Today on Hugh Hewitt he had a pastor on, Mark D. Roberts, who kept emphasizing how important it is to just listen to people in bereavement, who just need to say it a thousand times, and all you have to do is just listen, and then perhaps you can suggest going to get a bite to eat. I welled up and smiled at that, how true it is. And how comforting it is as well that even though he says bereavement takes on different forms for people, nonetheless there’s more underlying commonality in the experience of grief that he knows in his bones than he perhaps knows he knows. What I mean is, the loss of a loved one sears us all in a similar way and we can mitigate the loss somehow with that knowledge. If death is a constant, and the terrible one to we who are currently the living, then at least so is bereavement, which is a brother and sisterhood.
But it was the I that I wanted to discuss. This Nonduality essay tells us we should “abide as source”, that is, “stop misidentifying ourselves with the projections (thoughts, emotions, actions, reactions)”. This rather abtruse philosophy leads down to the more practical question asked by ‘Sailor’ Bob Adamson: What’s Wrong with right now, unless you think about it? This mantra helped me a lot. There I was, walking down the street, not being tortured, all my limbs intact, the sky up, the ground down, and at that moment, despite my worries, there was absolutely nothing wrong with right now. Unless I thought about it, that is. I missed my dogs, I had no home. But right at that moment, walking down the street, there was nothing wrong.
A recipe for disaster and bumhood? What happens at night when you’ve spent the day thinking I’m alright Jack and then you’ve got nowhere but a park bench to lay your head? I can’t answer that really, and it was a fear I had in Rome, that I was on a path towards homelessness (this is also a fear my mother had for me when I decided to hark out for unknown countries — coincidence?). Again, one has to achieve a balance. It’s fine to plan for the evening, but generally that can be taken care of one way or the other, and the problems that one dwells on are things further in the future. Looking back, I’d say there are only two times I can remember since leaving Israel where I could have stepped back and asked myself What’s Wrong with Right Now Unless You Think About It and replied I’ll Tell You What’s Wrong and have something to say. Both involved being caught out in the rain while hiking in Turkey, one during the night on the beach, and the following night getting lost. And in retrospect, neither was the end of the world. Getting wet would be very uncomfortable but we’d all get over it.
For quite a while I have not asked myself WWWRNUYTAI? I’ve felt I haven’t needed to, which is a pity, because addressing the question is a real nice quick effective way of returning to one’s immediate situation and stopping worrying about this or that (I’m a failure, I’m not fulfilling this commitment, that ambition) and indeed being grateful and thankful. It’s like the Jewish “Shehigianu” prayer but I believe it’s more suitable for the afflictions of the soul today.
So I’ve started doing so again — I feel I need the help. I am in Britain and I’m enjoying the lay of the land, but as I wrote yesterday about bookshops, I’m not enjoying things that I thought I would, or at least, not as much as I think I should, or would have were I younger. I believe that I can’t ask myself WWWRNUYTAI often enough, because each time I do it I’m reprogramming myself into relaxation and gratitude.
A lot of “I“s in that parrie for a parries that’s supposed to be about eschewing selfishiness. Which brings me to my question about the underlying truth of this eschewment of I. They say the thoughts are not the true self, but what is this agent that is reminding itself to ask itself WWWRNUYTAI? What is writing words and sentences if it is not me? There is a me. That sentence is being played to me. I am the audience of it. I am the actor saying it. Though of course, when I get drowsy and the hypnogogic state kicks in, I don’t feel I’m the actor saying it, I’m hearing someone else say it. But since the universe is obviously not changing when I doze off, there really is actually no difference between the square waking mind saying the sentence without moving its lips, and the bizarre dozing mind hearing the sentence in other people’s voices. I feel this is a clue for us all that there is truth in the nonduality “advaita” teaching, but I’m not sure how exactly.
But saying there is no self seems bogus. Each of us is different, has a personality, will react to something in a slightly different way, each complex enough to have our own style as well as our principles. Doesn’t that make it a monstrously ludicrous thought to say there is no I?
Of course, another way to try to think about it is to remember that we are languaged while other animals are not, and yet they all have senses of self as well. For them, the self is manifested in a drive. I’m hungry. I’m horny. I’m hot. I’m cold. But they are in fact none of these, even though these conditions flit across their essential seagull or foxhood, and until these drives are sated, the animal in question does define himself I think in terms of the current strongest drive. Sailor Bob puts it more bluntly, forcefully and clearly:
Believing in the thought ‘I am’ gives seeming reality to the objective world which is constantly changing, yet everything in essence is that changeless natural knowing — nothing else”.
Actually, I thought I understood what he’s saying but I don’t. I’m sleepy, but apart from that there’s nothing wrong with right now, and since it’s late there’s nothing wrong with that either, so even if I try to think about it I can’t. Buona notte!
PS – It’s too radical and it seems nonsensical, this business. Of course there’s a me, just as there’s a you. It seems sophistry to say otherwise. I do really value the WWWRNUYTAI mantra though.
Previously
The Dharma Tits
Nextly
Franklin or Jonah?