Category Archives: Philosophy

Tao is just a name for whatever happens

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“The Tao is the pattern of things, but not the enforced law. […] The universe is a harmony or symbiosis of patterns which cannot exist without each other.”

“You can’t diverge from the Tao, for everything, anything, and nothing is Tao.”

“The vague, void-seeming, and indefinable Tao is the intelligence which shapes the world with a skill beyond our understanding.”

I’m at the point in my life when I occasionally stop, turn and look back down the path, marveling at how I got from there to here. I’ve pretty much decided it’s mostly random. Luck. Being at the right place at the right time (or wrong place/wrong time). You’ve seen all the same movies I have so I don’t have to explain what I’m talking about here but I made a short list of those moments that didn’t seem momentous at the time but, in retrospect, made a big difference. Perhaps a few personal examples?

Sometime during college I drove to Columbia, Missouri to take the Law School Admissions Test. I had no interest in law schools but it was a road trip and the girl I was dating knew some people and we wound up partying all night and sleeping on the floor. Next morning I took the test and forgot about it. A couple of years later I graduated and was about to lose my draft deferment. I had applied to a couple of law schools somewhere along the way and got accepted. That kept me out of Viet Nam until Richard Nixon stopped drafting people into that loser of a war and the next day I dropped out of law school. No planning here (at least not conscious planning), just luck.

Couple of years later I applied for a job with the Memphis Police Department. Didn’t get hired so I went to work at hometown radio station. That’s where I met the guy that later hired me and changed my life big time.

What if I hadn’t gone to that honky-tonk on the night that Barb was there with friends? Easy to imagine we would have never met.

I could go on but you get the idea. All these little forks in the road. Few of them seem important and most probably aren’t but I’m only here because I was there. The randomness of this horrifying. Unless things work out well, I guess. Some will argue we are the masters of our fate. Prepare, work hard, make good decisions, etc etc. And let’s not get into Free Will.

I cannot escape the memories of those (seemingly) meaningless decisions or events that changed the course of my life. Is this wisdom? A curse? A better question is: Will I be able to spot the next LCFITR (life changing fork in the road) and would I want to if I could?

Life gets real when the TV goes off

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David Cain says things come into sharper focus when the TV is off:

“For some reason just having the TV on seemed to soften the reality of those mornings, and turning it off seemed to intensify my problems. It was like life finally had room to square up and confront me directly, whereas with the TV on it could only make glancing contact.”

Yes. Everything seems to come into sharper focus when the TV is off. I can go days without turning it on when Barb is out of town. As Mr. Cain points out, nothing wrong with watching something on TV, but it’s so often used as mindless background noise. (I confess I tend to use my smaller screens in a similar manner.)

“One of the least-acknowledged peculiarities about human beings is that we can scarcely bear being in the moment we’re already in. It’s rare for us to truly be at ease in an ordinary present moment, if we’re not being entertained, gratified or otherwise occupied by something. We’re always planning better moments than this current one, or at least trying to soften or improve it with entertainment or food, or anything else that delivers some predictability to our experience.”

Planning better moments. There you have it. How many moments have I missed because I was somewhere back in my head planning a better one?

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

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screen-shot-2016-10-05-at-12-01-53-pm“From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on understanding time itself.”

Sleeping into the future is what we do every night.

“Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.” — Albert Einstein’s message in the time capsule buried at the 1939 New York World’s Fair

We know that complete certainty must always elude us. We know that for certain.

“Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.” — Albert Einstein

“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything.” — Richard Feynman

What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.

Schopenhauer asserted that life and dreams are pages from the same book. To read them in their proper order is to live, but to browse among them is to dream.

No one can really explain how memories are formed and retrieved. Nor can anyone explain away Proust’s paradoxical contention: that the past cannot truly be recovered by searching our memories, by interrogating them, by rewinding the film or reaching back into the drawer; rather, that the essence of the past, when it comes to us at all,comes unbidden.

If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run the other way as fast as you can. Nothing good can come from meeting yourself. — Charles Yu

We experience childhood one way when we’re living it and another way when we relive it in memory.

But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience?

Our conscious brains invent the concept of time over and over again, inferring it from memory and extrapolating from change. And time is indispensable to our awareness of self. […] You order the slices of your life. You edit the film even as it records.

“There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.” — The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster

Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.

“We know it all now, with our thoughts travelling at the speed of tweet. We are time travelers into our own future. We are Time Lords.” — Ali Smith

If we confuse the real world with our many virtual worlds, it’s because so much of the real world is virtual.

Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good. […] The past, in which we did not exist, is bearable, but the future, in which we will not exist, troubles us more.

“We perceive time only because we know we have to die.” — Heidegger

Time Travel: A History (review)

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Maria Popova describes James Gleick’s new book Time Travel: A History, “a dizzying tour of science, philosophy, and their interaction with literature.” A few snippets from her lengthy review:

“Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.”

“Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.”

“The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing.”

“If we have only the one universe — if the universe is all there is — then time murders possibility. It erases the lives we might have had.”

One of my favorite topics by one of my favorite writers.

UPDATE: From a good piece in The Guardian: “Howard and his editors also manage a number of celebrity Beatle-fan coups, like the day when, to their astonishment, they spotted a 14-year-old Sigourney Weaver looming lankily over her fellow teenyboppers in footage of a 1964 show.”

A new mind for an old species

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“Technology and life must share some fundamental essence. … However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information.” (What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly)

“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.” (God’s Debris, Scott Adams, 2004)

“All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body— even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual— an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. […] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!” (The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts,1989)

“This very large thing (the net) provides a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall, planetary scope) and a new mind for an old species. It is the Beginning. […] At its core 7 billion humans, soon to be 9 billion, are quickly cloaking themselves with an always-on layer of connectivity that comes close to directly linking their brains to each other. […] By the year 2025 every person alive — that is, 100 percent of the planet’s inhabitants — will have access to this platform via some almost-free device. Everyone will be on it. Or in it. Or, simply, everyone will be it.” (The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly)

Truths About Life

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David Cain has 88 of these on his list. These are just my favorites.

“If you go home with someone, and they don’t have any books, don’t fuck them.” — John Waters

The main reason we argue online is because it feels good, but we like to imagine it’s also somehow noble or helpful.

The news doesn’t show you how the world is. It shows you whatever will make you watch more news.

Every generation thinks the one that came before them and the one that came after them are the worst.

We evolved to go days without food. Missing a meal shouldn’t be a big deal, but if you skip the odd lunch people will assume you have an eating disorder.

We are all atheists, in a sense. Every person denies the existence of either most or all of the gods that have been proposed.

When a party has degenerated into people showing each other their favorite YouTube videos, it’s time to call a cab.

The Ruthless War on Stuff

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I have a mental list of topics I try to avoid because — in my experience — they seem to make people a little (or a lot) crazy. Politics and Religion, of course. Apple products. And Marie Kondo, the best-selling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I read her little book and did exactly what it said I should do to “change my life.” But I try to keep what I learned to myself (like religion and politics and Steve Jobs). But this New York Times piece is too good not to share. A few excerpts:

“By the time her book arrived, America had entered a time of peak stuff, when we had accumulated a mountain of disposable goods — from Costco toilet paper to Isaac Mizrahi swimwear by Target — but hadn’t (and still haven’t) learned how to dispose of them. We were caught between an older generation that bought a princess phone in 1970 for $25 that was still working and a generation that bought $600 iPhones, knowing they would have to replace them within two years. We had the princess phone and the iPhone, and we couldn’t dispose of either. We were burdened by our stuff; we were drowning in it.”

The success of Ms. Kondo’s book (and system) gets a big dollop of derision and smirking: “A parody book called “The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a [expletive],” and another one called “The Joy of Leaving Your [expletive] All Over the Place.”

But the lady seems to walk the walk: “The only visible possessions in her hotel room for a two-week trip from Tokyo were her husband’s laptop and a small silver suitcase the size of a typical man’s briefcase.”

The “organizing industry” is big in the U.S. and some of the old hands are quick to dismiss Kondo’s approach. Okay, a little more than just “dismiss”:

“Somehow the extra step of thanking the object or folding it a little differently enrages them. This rage hides behind the notion that things are different here in America, that our lives are more complicated and our stuff is more burdensome and our decisions are harder to make.”

A well-written article, whatever your thoughts on, or approach to, tidying up.

Reading List: Tao, Zen & Buddhism

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  • What Is Tao? – Alan Watts [notes]
  • Tao: The Watercourse Way – Alan Watts [notes]
  • The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing – Marie Kondo [notes]
  • Freedom from the Known – Jiddu Kirshnamurti
  • This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience – Alan Watts [notes]
  • The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East [notes]
  • The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are – Alan Watts [notes]
  • Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening – Stephen Batchelor [notes]
  • The Sound of Silence: Selected Teachings of Ajahn Sumedho
  • Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi [notes]
  • Ten Zen Questions – Susan Blackmore [notes]
  • Wherever You Go, There You Are – Jon Kabat-Zinn [notes]
  • Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice – Kosho Uchiyama Roshi
  • I Am That – Nisargadatta Maharaj [notes]
  • Rebel Buddha: A Guide to a Revolution of Mind – Dzogchen Ponlop
  • Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World – Lama Surya Das
  • Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind – Shunryu Suzuki
  • Living As A River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change – Bodhipaksa [notes]
  • The Tao of Zen – Ray Grigg [notes]
  • Buddhism Plain and Simple – Steve Hagen [notes]
  • The Way of Zen – Alan Watts [notes]
  • Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom – Rick Hanson [notes]
  • Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation – Alan Watts [notes]
  • Meditation Now or Never – Steve Hagen [notes]
  • The Tao of Meditation: Way to Enlightenment – Jou Tsung Hwa