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too_many_milk — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 18:06:11 GMT

Perplex City needs your clicks... http://emergency.perplexcity.com/main/main.php What's all this? http://emergency.perplexcity.com/

Why Selfishness is Good

too_many_milk — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 00:37:45 GMT

Egotistical. Self-centred. Selfish. These words have negative connotations, and for good reason. But perhaps reason is confused - confused with pre-determined semantics, and hence inherently tied to the emotion of language [1]. This 'article' sets out to re-examine the idea of "selfishness", the role the ego plays, and the sheer importance that the self entails in relation to interacting with the world around us. To set the mood, I think a verse of the Tao T Ching is in order. Whenever something "profound and deeply insightful" is entered into, you can guarantee that the Tao Te Ching has beaten you to it. Hence: "Those who know others are intelligent; those who know themselves are truly wise." -- Tao Te Ching, 33. [2] This should immediately be followed up by some Chuang-Tzu [3]: "To have been cast in this human form is to us already a source of joy." The role of the self is a complicated, yet simple one. It is complicated because we see ourselves in one particular light - that of *expectation*. This expectation is the opposite of what many spiritualities and religions tell us to obtain - that is, "enlightenment" comes with the *sacrifice* of the self: in order to gain happiness, one must no longer think of oneself. But this *is* complicated. Why? Because it is also counter-intuitive, and intuition is correct 99% of the time. -- To reach a state of selflessness, one must first obtain a state of self*ish*ness.-- Let us recount the Chuang-Tzu: "To have been cast in this human form is to us already a source of joy." In other words, the form that we are in is the form that we are most happy in - this is a *truism* that brings with it realisation, and the achievement of the paradox that is selfish selflessness. I can put it no simpler than this: Being happy with oneself removes the barrier to understanding. To understand other people, we must first be happy with ourself. Consider anger. Anger is *merely* the smoke, whilst the flames are the pity one feels for oneself - a *lack* of selfishness. But this lack of selfishness is an ambiguous concept. For there are 2 leaders - firstly, the "self" which selfishness, in its "good" form, refers to, and the second kind of self - the self that is created in us and that we feel we must live up to. The *expected self*. Discerning between the two is easy. It is made "difficult" through various biological concerns that mean *who we know we are* is smartly outpaced by *who we think we should be*. In this sense, then, we pay far more attention to this *externally* decided image of the self, rather than to the *internal* "vision" of that which we know to be true. We are, in effect, not selfish enough. "Know Thyself". A short, but wise saying that carries more implications with it than its limited length would otherwise disclose. For if anger comes from the unhappiness within, then patience and the tolerance that is necessary for *understanding* rather than *blaming* are bred of the tolerance of the self that can only be achieved by the paying of attention that "selfishness" brings. Blame and anger are external projections of an internal affair. Understanding, on the other hand, is an internal processing set free through the alternative state of internal affairs. In order to look after the environment, one must first accept that any judgement of the environment is nothing to do with the environment. Acceptance of others comes through acceptance of the self, and with acceptance comes contentment. [1]: http://www.exmosis.net/node.LanguageIsCulture [2]: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/rel/tao/TaoTeChing.html [3]: http://www.religiousworlds.com/taoism/cz-text2.html

Grounded

too_many_milk — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 21:31:46 GMT

My girlfriend and I have noticed a) that there are many planes in the sky, b) that everyone wants to save the world, but that c) nobody wants to actually *do* something about it. So we pledged to not fly for a year starting this October, and we're looking for others to join in and spread the good word, etc. Here's the pledge: http://www.pledgebank.com/grounded It's not something we're taking lightly - we've both flown either short or long distance for the last few years running to see either friends or exciting places, but at some point you have to wonder what it'll take to get people to think about the effects of it all. Anyway, this is our contribution.

Who chooses the drugs?

too_many_milk — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:30:41 GMT

http://realityhackers.tribe.net/thread/cdb54bc7-d89b-425a-94b0-13e954484e53#9ef9dc5c-d5f3-4f64-af40-221932f1f641

Discussions on Sprituality

too_many_milk — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:55:39 GMT

Originally blogged this [0], but thought some might be interested on Tribe... See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4903424.stm Pleased to see some debate on spirituality make it onto the BBC News homepage. The (ok, "my") question is - how do get such debate honestly into the mainstream consciousness? Pure faith - in a God or Gods, or in scientific progress (or in anything else) - is simply a way of avoiding the questions that scare us most*. Pure faith is a way of removing responsibility for ourselves and our thoughts on to an external party - a deity in one case, or "progress" in the other... Coming to terms with a lack of spirituality means coming to terms with ourselves - the ability to look into our own psyche. This isn't easy. But nor do we do anything to make it easier - in fact, most of our activities make it much, much harder. The promotion of "Success" (with a capital S) to the highest good carries with it the fear of failure. Failure is nothing to be afraid of. Perhaps a "better" society would be one in which this is understood. But then, it's easy to criticise... * The scary questions are not those such as "why are we here?" either. The questions that scare us are the ones along the line of "what if I don't like me?" [0]: http://describe.blogspot.com/2006/04/sprituality-in-public-mind.html

Dislocation of the self

too_many_milk — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:57:43 GMT

Originally posted at http://describe.blogspot.com/2006/03/dislocation-of-self.html - go there for a version with HTML styling. This is almost a spiritual post. I'm not sure it can be counted truly as "spiritual" simply because it's more concerned with biology, as far as I can see. However, I'm sure that there's good ground for calling the two - spirituality and physicality - the same thing under certain conditions. I'm not sure, which is perhaps why I'm forcing myself to write this down - to get myself to think it through and work out what it means, if anything. For a little while, on and off, I've been doing a tiny bit of Tai Chi. This came out of getting into the Tao Te Ching and "philosophical" Taoism in general. This may explain my reluctance to disentangle the body from the spirit above - the link between the health of the body and of the mind in Taoism is, I would argue, much stronger than in any other religion or philosophy. In the Tao Te Ching (for starters - Chuang Tzu uses the idea a lot too) there is much talk of "nothingness", which leads to many statements which seems paradoxical and back to front on first reading. Here are a couple of examples that lend air to the idea much better than I could: The ordinary person who uses force, will find that they accomplish nothing. (38) and: All movement returns to the Tao. Weakness is how the Tao works. All of creation is born from substance. Substance is born of nothing-ness. (40) This idea that nothingness and weakness create strength and substance is a powerful one once you get your head round it. It's also the basis behind Tai Chi, a martial art that uses "weakness" to overcome an opponent - using their own strength against them rather than merely attempting a battle of pure power. In order to "flow" with your opponent, it's essential (but not necessarily easy) to clear out the "power" that your mind pushes into your own body first. In other words, the extraneous levels of "resistance" you put up against an opponent are also extraneous amounts of energy that we're used to exerting upon ourselves. You can train soldiers to march powerfully together, but are they flexible or reactive when doing so? When an attack comes, a good unit will act as one, but be fluid in avoiding damage and manoeuvring into position. Rigid resistance bows down to flexible dynamicism. So I've been doing Tai Chi, as I said. Getting the right amount of yin (weakness) vs yang (resistance) is key, and generally it's a lot less yang than you'd expect from a martial art. In this aspect, then, it becomes a form of meditation - one cannot calculate the right balance, nor can one work it out through protracted thought. The balance is one to be discovered, as if independent from learning. I cannot write it down here. I can only find it through observation. It is in this sense that I must reduce my capacity for thought to "nothingness" and, in true Jedi style, let my feelings take over. I think I finally had a real glimpse of this last week. A peek at that moment when the brain actually switches "off", becoming merely a spectator for what the body is doing. Note, though, that I haven't done any Tai Chi in a couple of weeks. It occurred, indeed, as I was washing the dishes - a routine, non-challenging activity, which helps immeasurably. As I was washing the dishes, I started to just observe what my hands were doing - I certainly wasn't instructing them as to how to clean the plates. At that point, I realised that my body was doing all this stuff by itself. My eyes were checking what parts needed to be concentrated on, my hands and arms were rotating and brushing as needed. The amazing reality of doing-without-thinking became amazingly clear in a moment. It was as if I had no need of a brain at all - that each part of my body knew what it was responsible for, and reacted to the information itself had, plus any information passed to it from another part elsewhere. Perhaps my brain was essential to the process, but only as a messenger, not as a controller. And there was certainly no need for my consciousness to be there. When people say that we only use 10% of our brains (which is, AFAIK, dimissed as a myth), I can see this may be true for some definitions of "use". If it's defined as that conscious part, the ability to run things through in our mind, analyse them and come to some kind of logical, "rational" conclusion based on the evidence we have, then perhaps the saying is fair. For 90% of the things we do are routine. We don't even get to decide what we want to do - we just have an urge that comes from somewhere, and our body acts on it. Logical control doesn't need to be a part of that 95% of the time (which plays havoc with the idea of rationality and freedom of choice). The 10% of the brain that is "rational" ("logical" is definitely the better word in this case) is still vital - we need to think in order to come to some conclusion about a new scenario, which encompasses the whole field of "learning". But learning is simply the process of moving things from thinking "analysis" into unthinking "response" - the more we learn, the less we have to think about it. Thinking is slow, which is why you can't pass your dirving test even though you might know everything about how a car works. Learning, and experience, are that "nothingness" side of how we react and respond, and are essential to getting things done in time. Dynamicism and flexibility. Quite what this means, I haven't found out yet. Certainly, it sheds a new light on my Tai Chi practice, and on my ideas of rationality. In a way, much of it just about faith - faith in your own ability to react, and not to spend too much time thinking about how to do things. Perhaps this translates up to a larger scale too - a reflection on the emphasis we place, as a society, on analysis vs experience, knowledge vs sprituality.

Mmmm...

too_many_milk — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:58:52 GMT

Lunchtime.

Trans-Knowledge

too_many_milk — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:54:28 GMT

Alvin Weinberg introduced the phrase "trans-science", referring to those questions and issues that can be raised in a scientific manner, but not answered in the same way. There is, therefore, a intractable link between science and non-science. In the same way, there are things that we can know and things that we cannot know. Our understanding of the things we can know allows us to ask questions about those things which we cannot know, but does not give us the ability to answer them. We can conjure up the concept of a god, for instance, and we can *know* that concept, but we cannot answer the question "does this god exist?" Similarly, even if I know all information about a choice, does that help me to make a decision? Or are there factors involved that don't rely on information? I have been trying to come to terms with two seemingly-conflicted goals for a long time. On the one hand, I am curious about the world and about how it works. But on the other hand, it is good to simply accept things and not worry about how things work or planning the future. Perhaps, then, this idea of "Trans-Knowledge" helps. The things we can know, can be known. Acquiring this kind of knowledge is not a problem. We learn, we understand. We do not fret if we either know or we don't know this knowledge. We cannot avoid learning. The things we cannot know, we accept as unknowable and we continue as we feel we need to. We do not fret that we do know or we don't know this knowledge either. We cannot learn. I will work on this.

Hitting the fan

too_many_milk — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 12:05:24 GMT

Repost from [Blunkett is an Arse] [http://blunkettisanarse.blogspot.com/2005/07/hitting-fan.html]: A morning of [bomb blasts] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659093.stm] paralyses London, and with it much of the network and travel infrastructures of the South East. Already the obvious middle-Eastern terrorist links are suspected - but not confirmed. The timing coincides with many things - the 2012 Olympic announcement, G8, and Bush's birthday (yesterday), but for me none of these make much sense. I'd be heartly surprised to learn that the chaos _didn't_ arise out of our foreign policy and our perceived chumminess with said Bush. When local politics is so internationalised, other people's problems become our own. But what to expect in the aftermath - or indeed right now, for that matter? America used terrorist attacks to authorise increasingly dictatorial laws. Spain used attacks to vote in a more left-wing policy. I suspect, in my sceptical state, that we can expect Blair and Clarke to follow the former on this, alas. I suspect the headlines will be full of mournful (naturally) cabinet ministers. This is fair. But what I also expect to see is resumed rhetoric on the nature of the beast we're "at war with", about the "British resolve" and about not "succumbing to murderers". Well bollocks to that. Over the next few days, we need pressure on the MPs to remind them that all this shit comes out of _their_ decisions, and _their_ pulling strings on the world arena. And we need to question these decisions, constantly. We need to remember that we already _have_ full-on security processes, and yet stuff like this still happens because the _causes_ are still being created on a day-to-day basis. When Blair presses for increased surveillance, ubiquitous tracking systems and the renewed urge for an ID system, don't ever forget that there are much, much larger problems that lead to such unrest, and that if we're to get to the bottom of them, we need much, much better action than simply watching over us all and pretending the problem will go away. Fear is here, and the politicians will be very willing to capitalise on it.