I’m philosophically motivated; the wisdom, just knowing it, gets my heart racing, and drives me to make it real.
Month: July 2018
Ping pong dream
In a dream, I played ping pong against a formidable opponent. I had played against this opponent many times before in practice and we were a good match. This game was for competition in an arena in front of many people.
When I stepped into the arena, I noticed immediately that one thing was different: the table was slanted at a forty-five degree angle. I played from the side of the table that was on higher ground. It was my serve to begin. I lost four of the first five points. Then it was my opponent’s serve. I lost the next two points. I threw up my hands in disgust. I shouted to the crowd. They were all children, sitting cross-legged and watching curiously like they were in school.
I shouted, “Why can I not beat this opponent? Who I have beaten before. Did he know ahead of time that the table would be slanted? And practiced beforehand.”
“No!” all the students said in unison.
“Because he is a more experienced player than me?” I shouted again.
“No!” all the students said in unison again.
“Why then?” I shouted back.
Then from the crowd, appeared an old sage, and he said to me, “It is because you are not a good leader.”
I was confused and silent.
“You must care for the bunny, before you get the bunny,” said the old sage [this is the only part of the dream I cannot remember word-for-word, it was something about a bunny, something that surprised me].
I had a feeling of deja-vu, like I had heard that before.
“What text does that come from?” I asked the children.
They all thought about it. One boy raised his hand and answered, “The Dhammapada.”
Ego death by travel
You strip away everything external about you—leave the town where you grew up, make new friends other than your classmates and workmates, sweat or freeze in a new climate, see new scenery, grow your hair out, wear different clothes, and speak another language.
All of a sudden, one night in some far-off country you’ll get back from the bars and look yourself in the mirror in your dingy hotel room with a roof that leaks and say, who am I? And after a brief period of panic, you’ll discover that there’s something buried deeper that’s been there all along but you had to sift through all the muck. And what you find there, deep inside, that’s you.
Mental god complex
I identified with my mental either because my body was not great enough to satisfy my god complex or because of the idea that my physical self was not my true being. Now I discover the spiritual and find that even my mental is probably not my true being. Still I persist in my mental identity, probably because of my god complex.
I wrote this book
I wrote this book because I’m afraid of dying.
Meditation on sight
In my meditation, sight continues to play a role. I enter the meditation by focusing on my breath. I do this until my other thoughts have become less frequent. When my breath has become my main focus, my sight catches my attention. The black behind my closed eyelids becomes interesting. I watch it and feel myself go deeper and higher into the black until I am fully wrapped up in the black and only aware of my body as if it were distant and down below.
Sober
Stay sober tonight. I have to remind myself.
Work
It’s a working world. You can pursue art, non-profits, love and anything else that doesn’t pay. But on the front lines someone is doing hard work on a farm, in a factory, or at a desk to pay for your essentials. If survival is human, then so is work. It is important to remember and be thankful for those who keep us alive.
Truth
Truth to me is what happens the same way more than a couple times.
Bad memory
I do not have a good memory so whenever I write I only have a short time to take it in and get it back out all at once.
Melting trip
My trip was starting to go bad and everything was melting. That was when you put your head on my shoulder and I thought it was melting. I reached back to grab it and yelled, “Dali was right!”
Body modification
Tattoos, piercings, and eccentric fashion are marks of free will. The most base body modification is none at all. Think of how a man would appear naturally, like an animal, with unkempt hair and long fingernails and naked. There is no choice at all in the natural appearance. Man appears as nature determines.
Next, think of man in society. He looks around him and sees how everyone else looks and for the most part dresses and grooms himself to not look any different, or at least not different enough to attract attention. Businessmen in suits, for example. In this case, man appears as society determines. In both these cases, natural and social, man does not himself necessarily choose how he appears.
It is only in the third case, that man chooses for himself how he will appear, makes his body like a painter’s canvas, and creates himself as art, such that his aesthetic appearance aligns with his metaphysical beliefs.
World eater
I eat taste and consider old worlds, then chew them up, mash the bits together with my tongue, and spit out new worlds.
Death night
I run away from death and into the night, not realizing they are the same thing. Drunk and high I forget and just focus on the present. When I get sober again I remember that time is limited and there are things I want to achieve.
Send it
You can’t constantly be doing utility calculations to figure out what you’ll enjoy most. Sometimes you just have to send it and you’ll find things that you never expected.
Money
If you wanted the money you could have the money, as much as you want. But you don’t want it.
Investing your time
There is always a trade-off between spending time in the present and investing time in the future, just like spending money now or saving it for later. If you only spent your time in the present, then you would ignore needs of the future. You might still find food and shelter in the present but it likely would not be as good as if you spent time planning and growing to find better food and shelter in the future. On the other hand, if you spend all your time investing in the future, you’ll likely have no joy in the present. And there’s great risk, in the case of unexpected death, of losing all your investments all at once.
My metaphysics inform my ethics: an argument for aesthetics
My metaphysics inform my ethics and aesthetics. “What is” informs “what can be.” I’m an artist and a writer because of my beliefs about what is. I treat life like a film or a story or a game. I’m relaxed because I don’t think there’s much we can do. And further, I don’t think much matters.
Defining “matters” becomes interesting philosophy. As most philosophy seems to regress to nomenclature, defining terms is paramount. By “matters,” I do not mean that nothing seems important. Of course, love and hope and friendship seem very important to the human experience.
For a while, I thought it was truth that mattered. If I could only know the truth then everything would take on meaning. Then for another while, I thought it was self-actualization that mattered. In some pseudo-material way, we have a place to fill in existence, and meaning is filling that space by actualizing or making real each of our individual full potentials, so I thought. Truth and self-actualization, these two seemed to “matter.” The only way that I can think to explain why it is they do not matter is with a crude economic example, or rather, a question: how do they spend? In other words, in what market do they have any value?
In our real-world economy, currency is valuable because it can be exchanged for goods and services, which are then used almost exclusively to satisfy our animal need for survival. So we get to a value at the end of economic motivations: survival. But I ask the same question in the same way that continually asking “why” serves the same purpose: how does it spend?
Once we’ve spent enough currency to achieve survival, then how can we spend survival? How can we spend the time we have to live? And there again we uncover another value like we are digging in a mine and finding diamonds. Time is a value. But how does it spend? It spends in terms of changes in space. What else signifies time? If the whole world were to freeze and not a single physical change were to take place, wouldn’t we say that time has stopped? So if we spend time by changing space, how does changing space spend? Maybe the physical world is connected to mental and spiritual planes—then the metaphysical possibilities explode. But the point remains the same: nothing seems to matter. And it doesn’t matter because nothing really spends.
I remain alive because the phenomenology of the human experience is beautiful and artistic and I like to watch and continue experiencing it just like I enjoy films and books. I’m also alive because the universe has order. There are rules to the game. I enjoy the game of life like I enjoy a game of chess or a soccer match.
Overall, I remain alive because I enjoy life. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would remain alive for the possibility of enjoying it in the future. Even if only for one moment of joy, that would be worth a whole life of suffering. And even if all of life were suffering, I think I would still find a way to enjoy it by some sort of detached curiosity. I believe in my experience, and I am so deeply grateful for it, even if it doesn’t matter.
Weekends
The workweek became like a fast before each weekend binge. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I went to the gym. Tuesdays and Thursdays I ran. I ate healthy, mostly fruits and vegetables, oats for breakfast, fish for protein, and no red meats.
I meditated in the mornings and said prayers of gratitude at night. I breathed through my nose and slept on my back. In the office, I sat at my desk looking at my computer screen, thinking of the weekend. I wrote notes to myself as I pretended to work.
I didn’t think about Hannah anymore. I considered maybe I had only wanted her out of boredom in the office. Now with my new life, her and everyone else in the office seemed inconsequential. I thought of quitting, of course. But I realized I needed it. I needed the structure and the time to decompress.
The weekends bursted at the seams. We lived until we almost lost control. Monday morning was when I pieced it all together. I could lose myself completely on the weekends, like an astronaut in outer space. As long as I had my tether and oxygen line connecting me back to the space station. I could float off without worry and explore because I knew I could return to the sober, structured and healthy week.
Selfish hedonist
I am a selfish hedonist. I do what feels good and what’s best for me. Justice, religion, even charity—I’ll do whatever as long as it feels good. But most of the times it ends up being the obvious things: sex, drugs, wealth, and fame.
Kansas in the Summer
The sound of sprinklers The smell of fresh-cut grass The feel of humid air Seeing the distant horizon over flat plains Remembering what it was like to grow up here And how much has changed Listening to the priest’s homily and not believing a word of it So different from a liberal San Francisco The bedrooms are dark and quiet My sister is so young and excited My parents are getting old My brother can beat my dad in a wrestling match now My mom wants me to get married
Recent words
I don’t have all my words. I have the most recent ones. So my recent reading and conversing greatly affect my writing.
Each day
Live each day as if it’s the only one.
Young adult
All of childhood we collect data without standard, then we grow up and experience these things for ourselves and form our opinions and retroactively say of those adults we remember, they were foolish or brave or smart or arrogant.
Determinism
In a hotel in Farmington, Missouri, after swimming in the pool outside and having a breath-holding competition with my brothers, we come inside and see a small statue of a Catholic saint. I recognized it because I’d seen statues like it growing up. I recognized the woolen brown robes with the ropes at the waist and the bald head on top with hair on the sides. Only as I describe it now do I recall that the statue must have been a saint of the Franciscan order. But more than that, I write this because I am continually shocked by how people are inevitably products of their time and place.
First, I think of where I grew up. People are conservative and Catholic mostly because they were born in northeastern Kansas in the late twentieth century. I couldn’t have had this thought early in my life, because I myself was a product of the only time and place I’d ever known. When I traveled, I saw different places and cultures and read their histories to imagine different times. And those places have statues too, but instead of Franciscan monks, they are Buddhas or political leaders or animal idols.
The people I met while traveling were, almost without exception, consistent with the presumed effects of their respective times and places. This makes me wonder: who are the people that resist their time and place? And what are they determined by? These people who look for influence outside of what they are born into. Maybe they are born into the wrong environment, so they rebel against it and travel and explore until they find the right time and place. For the people who cannot access the time and place their heart desires, do they travel and search to no avail and then die feeling lost?
Are there some who exist who do not feel comfortable in any time and place, because it is so human, so physical and base? Are these demigods and prophets, or maybe even real and actual gods, or small slices of actual gods. I know I shouldn’t, but I am inclined to think less of people who are determined by their time and place. I think they are lazy and lack agency in their own lives. I think they float along like a piece of driftwood in the river and never really do anything but get pushed along by the current in whatever way. I think some very successful and famous people have even existed this way. And they were applauded and respected for doing nothing but floating along, just the same as other unsuccessful and poor and wretched people who have been punished and thrown out for the same exact spatiotemporal forces that aided the more fortunate.
The great irony is that, as you might have already assumed from my writing, I consider myself to be one who lives free of determinism, or at least rages against it the best I can, when in reality I am mostly likely determined just like everyone else. Even all my raging for freedom is likely determined. So that all my raging that I find so romantic and noble is no different from the determined lazy bum that never does anything in life and always takes the easy way out and even steals and kills. If he is determined by the same forces, he and I are the same, no matter what I achieve.
No different than a tree will grow tall when planted in good soil and watered, and a plant without will not. But is this any fault of the plant without? That it has not grown tall. And a star shooting in dark space at the edge of the galaxy will not light any planet. While our sun brings life and activity to so many creatures. But is this any fault of the distant shooting star? This starts to raise the question: how are we valuing these beings?
How are we determining that one is successful, right, and good while the other is failed, wrong, and bad. For the stars, for example, I’ve arbitrarily valued them based on the light they give to living beings, but is this an objectively true way to value a star? And for the trees, we value them by how tall they’ve grown, but is this an objectively true way to value a tree? And humans, we value based on wealth and fame, but is this an objectively true way to value humans?
This is another argument for why the study of aesthetics is more interesting to me than the study of ethics, because all value judgments reduce to non-truth claims. So not only are living creatures seemingly not responsible for the their choices and values that result from their determined conditions (except for those godlike humans who seem to have gained control of their own will), but even the values that do result from determined conditions, if we were to judge them and ascribe their good or evil to an agent, we have no standards for what is good or evil.
So this is my argument for art, for aesthetics over ethics. Because life is like a film or a game, where we can experience and appreciate and express gratitude and enjoy, but as far as responsibility and justice and morality—these all arise artificially, mostly via social controls, from our base needs for survival.
Hope’s definition of happiness
Being with who you love and doing what you love, getting to a goal, enjoying the good times and getting through the hard times.
Just as easily
I think of just how easily it could have been this or that other way.
Q&A
The question, asked more and more accurately, becomes the answer.
My ego is stretched
I start to get anxious as my identity expands. My ego is stretched and afraid for its survival. My recent metaphysical view has eased this anxiety. I believe in a Will or a Self that is universal. Something that we all partake in. A driving life force that animates our bodies and minds. What we know as the individual ego or self (lowercase ‘e’ and ‘s’) is merely a manifestation in time and space of the One Self-at-large (uppercase ‘O’ and ‘S’). So that when I feel my self stretching beyond its limits, I first remind my physical and mental self that I am only what I have experienced in time and space, then second focus on my breathing and remember that my true nature that shares in the Self-at-large as well. In this way, I am still comfortable to expand my self and try new things and assume new identities while also committing to the spatiotemporal reality of my experience and existence.
Writing’s mind of its own
I let my writing go where it wants. And then build the structure around it after the fact. I throw the words in my mind onto paper like a drip painter throws paint onto canvas. Then after that I see what I’ve got in my head and how it looks rendered in the real world and if it makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t need to make sense and comes out beautiful and I leave it. Maybe it needs a little adjustment at the edges to make it digestible by a general audience, if that’s my goal. Maybe it’s garbage and I leave it alone and move on.
Orange drugs
With the same experience over and over we become entrenched in the same pathways. Drugs open new mental pathways and unblock old ones. Last night I smoked and this morning as I’m peeling an orange I pay attention to the small bursts of citrus that erupt from each slice as I pull the orange apart. I can see the small droplets from a fly’s-eye-view in micro-detail. I can smell the citrus so crisp and clear. Such a pleasant small experience that I think I would have missed if I had not smoked last night and reset the way I look at things.
Lately I just pay attention
I question myself less. I am flying home tonight to see my family. It’s been six months since I’ve seen them last Christmas. I am happy and excited and hopeful. I know it is base and emotional. Normally I try to rationalize or remain stoic and avoid future expectations. Lately I just pay attention. I appreciate the feeling for whatever it is, with child-like curiosity and gratitude. If it is what we call “good” or “bad,” either way I pay attention and express gratitude.
Dynamic body and mind
I am 23 and just now realizing how dynamic my body is. I can completely destroy it and return to health in just a few days of good habits. Or I can build it up and make it strong and destroy it in a short time. Same with my mind. I can be so stupid and forgetful in a moment and then so brilliant and creative in the next. The effects of drugs have influenced these thoughts I think.
I’m scared to die
The sickest thing would be to try and pass the time, in order to avoid the bad, rather than use the time chasing after the good. Worse would be to give it away all at once via suicide. In moments I understand it. When I’m completely satisfied and want nothing. All other times I’m scared as hell to die.
Desires
Thank god for desires. There are always new ones to satisfy so I have another chance at happiness and something to look forward to.
There is a quote, I believe from Camus, that goes something like this: I have not yet tasted the fruits that will keep me alive.
Themes and characters
Part of me wants you to just come right out and say it. But then I don’t believe you unless you’ve given me some context. So a story needs themes and characters. Just themes is too cerebral to a point of being non-humanist. Just characters is catering to emotion to a point of being base.
Game
You got yourself born into a game. Just follow the rules and relax. You aren’t the game master.
Outside my comfort zone
Coaxing the whole truth to reveal itself, going past where my ego is comfortable, breaking myself apart to see what remains, if anything.
Life without death
I’m not sure how I’d live if I didn’t think I’d die. It’s like a timed race, you’ve got to run fast. Time matters. If the race weren’t timed, I’d go off track and wander around. Maybe I’d meander back and finish eventually. Maybe not though, maybe I’d never finish, if the time really didn’t matter.
Liza’s reasons for living
1. Human connection
2. Living for more than myself
3. Living for a meaning, not just to live
Work
Money turns play into work. Truth turns life into work.
Like a child
I can recreate a child-like enamoredness by pretending that I know nothing and treating all sensory inputs as novelties. I remember nostalgic moments and ask myself, why am I so fond of them? They were new in the moment. I knew less about the world. So I try to go into experiences saying wow and ahhh and asking everyone, why? And saying ohhh when they answer. Like a child.
Life is a game
The rules and values are arbitrary, yes. Maybe they are conditioned, or socially imposed, or even just an illusion. How we got them does not matter. It only matters that we do, in fact, have them. And that “fact” need not even be true in the material sense. So long as it is true phenomenologically. For our philosophies need only be humanist. Because when we say “our” we are referring, of course to ourselves. Here is where I make my first assumption, and it is a metaphysical one: assuming that “we” are what we experience, or at least this is what we our concerned with during our lifetimes.
Now, why it matters that we do, in fact, have rules and values, even if they are arbitrary. Like the rules of any game are arbitrary, but there is still a way to win and lose. Chess, for example, has rules. The knight moves in an L-shape, the game is over when the king is “checkmated,” and so on. Now, arguments about why the rules of chess are as they are would be fruitless. In practice, it would be ridiculous for a player to spend mental energy thinking of “why” the rules are as they are. Instead, he must devote all his psychic powers to his next moves and defenses, if he hopes to defeat a formidable opponent.
Samely, there are rules to life generally. You must drink water to survive, sex creates new life, and so on. This may seem obvious, but consider that it just as easily could be otherwise. Our material (or what appears to be material) universe is mostly predictable and only slowly dynamic. This is what Hume discusses about being thankful for the order of the universe. So my philosophy is this: remain thankful for the order and the phenomenological nature of the universe, and play by the rules to win the game.
Big words
The long and pedantic words are not really the big ones. It is the words that are short and simple and well-known that are big, swollen with the meaning of a thousand tongues that have touched them. I read a word “pulviscular” recently. When i looked it up online, the only evidence of the word being used was from the original text where I found it. How is this supposed to mean anything to a reader? Other than what she finds when she opens up the dictionary to seek out the word and then defines it in terms of the other smaller, simpler words that she has known from mnemonic context. It is these short and stubby words most often used that have swollen fat and convey the most meaning. It is the complex and haughty words that are rarely used which must draw their meaning from the short and stubby words that are truly the big ones.
Space that time couldn’t contain
We tried to break each moment. We tried to do so much in space that time couldn’t contain it. Just as we were about to have it full, the next moment would begin and all the air would let out and escape into the previous moment that we had almost already forgotten. So we set about like Sisyphus, filling up the next moment, and the next, until sleep.
Tell me now
Tell me now before we get too tired, are you with me to the end?
I
I am what I was and will be what I will, always.
Send it
We gotta send it deep into the dark Bohemian night.
Passing time
The sickest thing would be to try and pass the time, in order to avoid the bad, rather than use the time chasing after the good. Worse would be to give it away all at once via suicide. In moments I understand it. All other times I’m scared as hell to die.
Desires
Thank god for desires. There are always new ones to satisfy so I have another chance at happiness and something to look forward to. The high of work and creativity ends just in time to remember that I have relaxation next up.
Characters
It’s therapeutic, too. Because I forget so much, and sometimes feel guilty about it. Growing up going to school and studying for exams it was always so important that I remembered what I had learned. It was often the students that could remember the most that did the best on exams. I wanted to be a good student so I would take my study guides everywhere with me, reading them over and over, not paying attention at all to where I was or who I was with. It can become the same way with maintaining your identity. If you are constantly worried about who you are, and making it seem like you are this person, then all the new inputs from your present cannot get in and flow through and affect you.
Like Borges said, “One publishes a book to forget it.” I write my characters to forget them. I used to think so utilitarian about my experiences and worry about how they were adding to I-at-large, the holistic concept I had of myself. I worried when I got so deeply involved in something and “forgot who I was.” Like a Western-colonial-capitalist, I was trying to swell, get bigger, have more. I wanted each book, memory, skill, experience to be an addition to my sum. But my natural capacities for memory were slightly-above-average at best and worsening all the while due to my drug habits. So I was working so hard to add what I would shortly lose anyway as it would simply be forgotten or else displaced by whatever else I would add. The things I remember best are whatever I’m presently experiencing.
Writing my characters allowed me to deposit my memories somewhere outside of myself. I could forget them and not feel guilty about losing them forever. So now I am more comfortable as just a conduit of the present. I put it down on paper and send it wherever it needs to go, which is sometimes the waste basket, but even then I don’t have to carry it with me, weighing me down. I’m lighter and empty for new and full experiences.
Context
Part of me wants you to just come right out and say it. But then I don’t believe you unless you’ve given me some context. So a story needs themes and characters. Just themes is non-humanist. Just characters is base.
Life is a game
You got yourself born into a game. Just follow the rules and relax. You aren’t the game master.
Outside of your comfort zone
Coaxing the whole truth to reveal itself, going past where my ego is comfortable, breaking myself apart to see what remains, if anything.