The Concerns of a Generation

I have been writing the script for the documentary, and was thinking about what some of our modern concerns are.

Some are obvious – climate change, globalization, overpopulation, poverty, hunger.  The energy crisis. 

Some are psychological – detachment from nature, from experience and spirituality.

Others are more subtle – paranoia from being sardined into ever bulging cities, loss of individuality, loneliness, lack of kinship groups.  A rift between art and our modern concerns and the ”media.”  The constant changing economic landscape where the old ways continue to be squeezed.  

Of course there is the universal human question of  – why are we here?

I feel that somewhere at the bottom of this is something crucial, and that can be worded simply, and can’t quite put my finger on it.

Please anyone with any ideas please share!

Floating

We float with little sense of boundaries.

I feel like this doubt is not acknowledged or appreciated enough in day-to-day life. 

Convention dictates certainty in the most bizarre places…what we know is very confusing. 

Even in quantum mechanics – existence at its most atomic known level – uncertainty is a basic truth.

How science works is less interesting than that it works at all.

Be Yourself!

Don’t Worry!

Let anxiety pass through you like wind through the trees.

Painting by Skip Lee

Giving The Economist More Grief

Yesterday I left this comment on this article from The Economist: A “new normal” for the world economy: After the storm. 

I love how for years Economist decried any sort of government intervention as the macro-economy deteriorated, but as soon as the capitalist status-quo was threatened fell all over themselves to contradict their neo-liberal philosophy and all but demand intervention.

This once-haughty now-humbled publication Economist didn’t see the storm coming and have zero credibility, mirroring capitalism. The promises of growth through privatization and increasingly open flows of capital have not been realized. Marx however, called it:

“…these three necessary conditions [capitalism is growth oriented, growth in real values rests on exploitation of labor, and it is necessarily technologically and organizationally dynamic] of a capitalist mode of production were inconsistent and contradictory and that the dynamic of capitalism was necessarily, therefore, crises-prone. There was, in his analysis, no way in which the combination of these three necessary conditions could produce steady and unproblematic growth. In particular, the crisis tendencies of capitalism would produce periodic phases of overaccumulation, defined as a condition in which idle capital and idle labour supply could exist side by side with no apparent way to bring these idle resources together to accomplish socially useful tasks. A generalized condition of overaccumulation would be indicated by idle productive capacity, a glut of commodities and an excess of inventories, surplus money capital (perhaps held as hoards), and high unemployment. The conditions that prevailed in the 1930s and have emerged periodically since 1973 have to be regarded as typical manifestations of the tendency towards overaccumulation.

The Marxist argument is, then, that the tendency towards overaccumulation can never be eliminated under capitalism. It is a never-ending and eternal problem for any capitalist mode of production. The only question, therefore, is how the overaccumulation tendency can be expressed, contained, absorbed, or managed in ways that do not threaten the capitalist social order. We here encounter the heroic side of bourgeois life and politics, in which real choices have to be made if the social order is not to dissolve into chaos. [devaluation of commodities, of money value, of productive capacity perhaps coupled with outright destruction; Macro-economic control through institutionalization of some system of regulation - see today, absorption of overaccumulation through temporal and spacial displacement]“

- David Harvey, in 1990 in The Condition of Postmodernity, notes paraphrased by myself.

Not much has changed since Marx’s day, and never will, unless we change our economic philosophy.

Delayed Memory

 A strange thing…not being able to remember a word.

 You rack your brain for a few minutes, and then give up.

In the middle of the night you wake up and it hits you.

Somehow active thinking creates a passive process – like running a search on your desktop.

And then it returns to the forefront. 

“The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow.” – Wittgenstein.

Imagine the power of recall employed in other arenas of thought.  This is a subtle, everyday application of active philosophy.

This is illustrated in the following quote from James Allen in As A Man Thinketh  - one of my favorites.

“The aphorism, ‘As a man thinketh in his heart so is he,’ not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them. This applies equally to those acts called ’spontaneous’ and ‘unpremeditated’ as to those which are deliberately executed.

Act is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are its fruits; thus does a man garner in the sweet and bitter fruitage of his own husbandry.

Thought in the mind hath made us. What we are
By thought we wrought and built. If a man’s mind
Hath evil thoughts, pain comes on him as comes
The wheel the ox behind . . . If one endure in purity
of thought joy follows him as his own shadow – sure.”

- James Allen

Maya – “All Duality Is Falsely Imagined”

This post is in response to Delineation.

“Translated into conventional and – let it be repeated – mytho-poetic language, the knowledge of Brahman is represented as the discovery that this world which seemed to be Many is in truth One, that ‘all is Brahman’ and that ‘all duality is falsely imagined.’  Taken as statements of fact, such utterances are logically meaningless and convey no information.  Yet they seem to be the best possible expression of words of the experience itself, though it is as if in the moment of saying the ‘last word’ the tongue were paralyzed by its own revelation, and compelled to babble nonsense or be silent.

Moksha is also understood as liberation from maya – one of the most important words in Indian philosophy, both Hindu and Buddhist.  For the manifold world of facts and events is said to be maya, ordinarily understood as an illusion which veils the one underlying reality of Brahman.  This gives the impression that moksha is a state of consciousness in which the whole varied world of nature vanishes from sight, merged in a boundless ocean of vaguely luminous space.  Such an impression should be dismissed at once, for it implies a duality, an incompatibility, between Brahman and maya which is against the whole principle of Upanishadic philosophy.  For Brahman is not One as opposed to Many, not simple as opposed to complex.  Brahman is without duality (advaita), which is to say without any opposite since Brahman is not in any class, or for that matter, outside any class.

Now classification is precisely maya.  The word is derived from the Sanskrit root matr – ‘to measure, form, build, or lay out a plan,’ the root from which we obtain such Greco-Latin words as meter, matrix, material, and matter.  The fundamental process of measurement is division, whether by drawing a line with the finger, or marking off or by enclosing circles with the span of the hand or dividers, or by sorting grain or liquids in measures (cups).  Thus the Sanskrit root dva – from which we get the word ‘divide’ is also the root of the Latin duo (two) and the English ‘dual.’

To say, then, that the world of facts and events is maya is to say that facts and events are terms of measurement rather than realities of nature.  We must, however, expand the concept of measurement to include setting bounds of all kinds, whether by descriptive classification or selective screening.  It will thus be easy to see that facts and events are as abstract as lines of latitude or as feet and inches.  Consider for a moment that it is impossible to isolate a single fact, all by itself.  Facts come in pairs at the very least, for a single body is inconceivable apart from a place in which it hangs.  Definition, setting of bounds, delineation – these are always acts of division and thus of duality, for as soon as a boundary is defined it has two sides.”

-Alan Watts

Delineation

Does the number 1 exist?

What if, as my co-blogger once suggested – it is only an approximation?

For where can this number 1 be found?

We say, for example, “well, here is one zebra.”

But then we might say, “now it has joined with one pack of zebras.”

Well what has happened to the one?

And even one zebra, we should say, “is made up of organs and appendages, which in turn are made up of proteins and fats, which in turn are made of particles.”

This is hardly a revelation for us.  Despite the fact that the number 1 cannot be isolated, and truly said to exist, mathematics has proven its usefulness time and time again.  The approximations can help guide us through reality.

But more troubling, the abstract notion of 1 is developed further in our own character – we feel that we exist, we are a “one”, our consciousness is independent and monolithic.

Words are mere abstractions that cannot capture the wonder of a world where 1s seems to exist everywhere - isolated for moments and then lost when we refocus our attention.

Armed with fickle concepts, we fancy reality to follow in the same fashion; perhaps the flaw lies with our approach while interpreting the appearances.

Wittgenstein, who was familiar with Indian mysticism, said more or less this very thing.

Yet we still teach children that the number 1 exists, and gloss over the difficulties.  Perhaps we’re afraid to confront the brittleness of even our most rock-solid and fundamental building blocks?

Brain-Control

Sometimes the brain follows some pretty strange paths.

Some are outright dangerous.

You have to watch over your brain!

But who is doing the watching?!!

Concept Blocks & Chords

The little concepts build on top of the big ones.

The big ones are simplified.

For example, when strumming the guitar, the actual rhythm is better off felt, and the guitarist can simply say to himself…now A…now G7…now B minor…etc.

There are immense levels of understanding and phenomena distilled into simple symbols – A…G7…etc.

Listen, Little Man

From a book of the same name by Wilhelm Reich, the “hero” of Century of the Self Part III; the psychoanalyst who showed us a way out of the Freudian embrace of the unconscious consuming mind, inspiration to millions of freaks and the New Left, champion of the masses:*

All three illustrations are by William Steig and come from the original book

…Having learned from a great man that machines operate in accordance with certain laws, you build machines for the purpose of killing and regard living things as machines.  In this you have gone astray, not for three decades but for three centuries.  You have imprinted false conceptions indelibly on the minds of many thousands of scientific workers, and moreover done direct and serious injury to life itself, because, on the basis of this fallacy, you have been led, for the sake of your dignity or your professorship or your religion or your pocketbook or your character armor, to persecute, slander, imprison, or otherwise damage anyone who was really on the track of the life function.

I know, I know, you want your “geniuses” and you’re ready to honor them.  But you want nice geniuses, well-behaved, moderate geniuses with no nonsense about them, and not the untamed variety who break through all barriers and limitations.  You want a limited, cropped and clipped genius you can parade through the streets of your cities without embarrassment.

That’s the way you are, little man.  You can spoon it in to the last drop, you can help yourself and gobble it up, but you can’t create.  And that’s why you’re where you are and what you are; why you spend your whole life in a dismal office, punching an adding machine or hunched over a drawing board, or in the straitjacket of marriage, or in a schoolroom teaching, though you hate children.  You’re incapable of developing, you’ll never get a new idea, because you’ve always taken freely but given nothing, because you’ve always helped yourself to what someone else has given you ready-made.

You don’t understand why this is so and must be so?  I can tell you, little man, because when you came to me with your inner emptiness or your impotence or your psychic disorder, I learned to recognize you as a rigid animal.  You can only gobble and take, you’re incapable of creating or giving, because your basic bodily attitude is one of holding back and of defiant mistrust; because you panic when the primordial impulse to love and to give stirs in you.  That’s why you’re afraid of giving.  And essentially your way of taking means only one thing: you have to stuff yourself full of money, food, happiness, and knowledge, because you feel empty, starved, and unhappy, devoid both of true knowledge and the desire for knowledge.  That’s why you go to such lengths to sidestep the truth, little man.  The truth might arouse a love reflex.  It might, in fact it would, show you what I’m trying, if only inadequately, to show you now.  And that, little man, you don’t want.  You want only to be a consumer and a patriot.

“Did you hear that?  He’s attacking patriotism, the mainstay of the state and of its germ cell, the family.  This must be stopped!”

That’s the way you yell, little man, when someone calls your attention to your psychic constipation.  You don’t want to know, you don’t want to listen.  You want to shout hurrah.  I let you shout hurrah, but you won’t let me tell you why you’re incapable of happiness.  I see fear in your eyes, because my question hits you deep down.  You’re in favor of “religious tolerance.”  You demand freedom to love your religion, whatever it may be.  So far so good.  But you want more than that: you want everybody to observe your religion.  You’re tolerant toward your religion but no other.  And it sends you into a rage that anyone should worship not a personal God but nature, that he should love nature and try to understand it.  When a married couple find that they can no longer live together, you want one member to hale the other into court with accusations of immorality or brutality.  And, oh, you puny descendant of great rebels, you refuse to countenance divorce by common consent.  You’re afraid of your own prurience.

You want the truth in a mirror, where you can’t take hold of it and it can’t take hold of you.  Your chauvinism, little man, springs from your bodily rigidity, from your mental constipation.  I don’t say this to scoff at you, I say it because I’m your friend, even if you tend to kill your friends when they tell you the truth.  Take a look at your patriots: they don’t walk, they march.  They don’t hate their true enemy: they have hereditary enemies, who change every ten years, from sworn enemy to lifelong friend and back again to sworn enemy.  They don’t sing songs, they bellow anthems.  They don’t embrace their girls; they fuck them and tot up their score for the night.  The worst you can do is kill me, just as you’ve liquidated so many of your true friends: Jesus, Ranthenau, the warmhearted Karl Liebknecht, Lincoln, and many more.  But patriotism has liquidated you, little man, trampled and crushed you by the millions.  And still you’re determined to go on being a patriot.

*The extreme anger does not reflect the wonderful attitude he harbored towards human potential – this came after he was completely discredited by the mainstream scientific community and imprisoned in the United States.