a taoist cameo

words of Lao-tzu (as translated by Taoist Master John Bright-Fey)...



natural action without deeds is the equilibrium of mankind (3.20)


if you look upon yourself as an accident in space and time

then you will always be present in space and time

it is as simple as finding yourself by not looking (7.18-20)


contending causes contention (8.22)


creative spirit
vital soul
wonderous bodymind

can you combine these into one phase
and gently hold onto it

one phase one part one moment (10.1-6)



this first one rings in my mind over and over and over.... "fluid thinking rather than stagnant thought" (2.20).... it reminds me of my responsibility to allow myself to see what i truly can and can't control, what i truly can and can't do. it reminds me that thought is action and action is occurence and occurence is of the Greater Consciousness. may the bodymind be exercised and fit

updating

first semester finals are over -- posting will hopefully be easier and a bit more frequent. over time, i hope to illumine the project i have been working for some time on. at this point, i feel i have a pretty good grasp on the business of meme theory, and in a near future perhaps i'll be so opportuned as to get to join in the formal dialogues over it. now, though, my attention is expanding to really understanding where memetics fits in to the 'bigger picture' -- what does it mean for our thoughts (which are not merely objects we have and lose, but are part of what we are as human beings and thinkers) to be themselves evolving over time? what is the significance of a knowledge that 'is that which seeks itself'? on the epistemological level, we have to recognize that everything is far more complex maybe than philosophers ever fully realized. it means that what we think doesn't alone change, but what we think and how we think change over the course of time.

at this time, i'm looking into General System Theory by ludwig von bertalanffry (did i spell that correctly?) and an Introduction to Cybernetics by w. ross ashby. i'll try to keep whoever's reading this (small in number but hopefully sharing in interest) updated.

unreasonable happiness

i hope that eventually the coherence between these postings will come to light....


After a good week of 'self'-induced laughter and smiling (and ignoring the weight of the pressures to stop), my senses began to see gray again, and the forces of my immediate environment seemed to override my drive. In nearly every personally experienced context I can think of, people are founded in unreasonabe unhappiness and 'relieved' only by the occasional temporary pleasurable stimulus or emotional imbalance. In the course of our evolution, we have adopted (adapted) a psychophysical capacity to retain thoughts (for utility) and with it an endogenous affliction of emotional tention through the burden of painful memories. (Social conditioning is also an obvious factor in this, providing those events we painfully remember.) It affects our minds, bodies, and everything around us.

To our fortune, we still have the tools to heal this wound of an adaptation -- but the teachers and environments who provide the influences to realize this are few and far between. The character based in unreasonalbe happiness, tempered by disturbance for only the length of a single outcry or burst of uncensored laughter, is rare, perhaps as rare as the covert mystic.

May we each find that mentor at some point in our lives. I, too, will remember my breath, to begin again.

True love is painful awareness. And pain is the opportunity to be aware of love.




A man, who'd never seen a video camera recorder before, stops in front of a retail store window when he notices one poining at him and standing next to a television monitor. The photons that reflect off his body and into the recorder translate into pixels of the monitor screen, giving off light rays that filter through his eyeball lens and retina into another sort of translated electrical signals through a complex neural network in his brain. He points his finger at it in excitement. "What is that? Is that what my neck looks like? My face? Why, I can see all of my hair It's me!!" he says, his arm quivering. "It's me!" Out of nowhere, Hakuin appears and begins to hit him with a stick.

a thought on 'self' and agency

from susan blackmore's The Meme Machine...

"Everyday experience, ordinary speech and 'common sense' are all in favour of the 'real self,' while logic and evidence (and more disciplined experience) are on the side of the 'illusory self.' I prefer logic and evidence and therefore prefer to accept some version of the idea that the continuous, persistent and autonomous self is an illusion. I am just a story about a me who is writing a book. When the word 'I' appears in this book, it is a convention that both you and I understand, but it does not refer to a persistent, conscious, inner being behind the words.

...This does not mean that there is no body, nor that there is literally no self at all, but that the self is a temporary construction, an idea or story about a self."



daniel dennett later tempered my curiosity on agency, to which i felt i could only really identify three specific factors:
-- an internal/external dichotomy survival mechanism, inherent in the evolving animal;
-- a 'higher-level' cognitive subjectification of the thought-of-thought (that is, to think of a thought), further enforced by the process of judgement deemed in an extreme form to emanate particularly from an essential (and basically independent) 'judge' (which william james often enough addresses in his philosophy of psychology -- see for example his Pragmatism);
-- and the resulting and substantiating "center of narrative gravity" (dennett, Consciousness Explained), a phenomenon of language and cognitive efficiency.

(my intention is to expand these criteria to get at the 'inner workings' -- get at a more concrete sense of the cognitive evolution and development involved -- and, perhaps more importantly in terms of practicality, attempt to determine its direct relationship with conceptual evolution.



in japan, i awaited any different explanations for the self and agency during my studies, and found (among the first) joshu -- who felt more comfortable with this explanation of things:

"Mu."

god bless zen.

innovations and acceptances

until i get comfortable in some sort of schedule with blogging, i'm going to continue to post past pieces or excerpts of pieces that i've written. it should allow the reader to get to know me a bit until i have the time to share more recent developments.

today's reflects my return from my school-hosted study abroad experience in Osaka, Japan, where i studied japanese, buddhism, zen, and some cross-cultural psychology at Kansai Gaidai University.　（関西外大、大阪、日本。）

here's to breathing...

Innovations and Acceptances of my Study Abroad Experience

I think the best way for me to talk about my study abroad experience is through two mediums: philosophy (both of the Western tradition and the contemporary modern sense), and a girl. Both are integral parts of me, and so they are the things that, for me, changed through my experience.

About the time of midsummer before my leave to Japan, I was growing restless in my studies. I wasn’t very well read, but I knew (and felt I understood) Kant and his predecessors back to the time of the preSocratics well enough to give me a general layout of the business (despite its many reformations since Hegel, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and many others). I became upset over the absurdity of laws of contradiction and identity, convinced that every venue came to a dead-end and left no room for much needed critique. I can’t remember what I’d chosen first – to embark on the study abroad experience, or to simply go to Japan by whatever means the school could provide – but I know I ached for a different world where these rules didn’t so formidably limit my speculation. My thoughts begged for freedom.

Before that summer even, though, there stood something – someone – whose presence seemed my sanctuary, and with whom all my philosophy and theology was in constant struggling. It wouldn’t have been so much so, I suppose, if I hadn’t loved her. Myself a devoted humanist and her (M---) a fundamentalist Protestant, I’m not sure how attraction had brought us together since about January of our sophomore year; but it did, and I gave myself over to a new devotion to understand her. On the human level we related so intimately well; but in the more abstract realm, our views seemed cultures, even worlds, apart at times.

Within the second semester of the year I was gone, M--- also studied abroad. With long periods between contacts, we shared stories and emotions but on average kept to ourselves to allow the new environments to have their effects. I know I for one was experiencing a kaleidoscope of feelings, engaging in a new language to me, as well as in a new set of values that sooner than later brought me to the mysterious and enlightening world of Zen.

More than that, I was learning in both these categories very quickly, doing whatever it took to immerse myself into my surroundings, to participate in a wholly different sort of philosophy and lifestyle. In my host family situation, I fought to surpass a self-implemented sense of isolation from understanding, finding the things we had in common, talking extensively with my host mother (my okasan) over things I couldn’t quite grasp. I felt I was in such great care, even in the middle of this earthquake of a cognitive shift; it all taught me of the non-essentiality to everything, forcing me to let go of my predispositions, of both ‘myself’ and ‘people’, and discover the quiet reality that understanding was in no way a destination for me to reach – a realm of universals bridging the connection among nations – but an ever impending process, a passive activity that supports amidst the heterogeneity both nations and the affirmation of nations as “imagined communities.” Without really knowing its definition, I slowly became an advocate for pluralism and a student of meditation.

In the meantime, my love for M--- went through periods of intensifying and longing, and heartbreak. At sometime around the turn of the new year, once the cycle had become a little less agonizing, she wrote to affirm her own intense attachment to me. My world has been in many ways encapsulated in reaction and response with her since.

Today, I’ve recognized my growing intrigue with philosophy and the sciences again. Proposing for my senior seminar an encouragement for a basically new evolutionary science called meme theory, I’m including a fresh perspective in the form of a sort of meta-ethic for addressing our heterogeneity and epistemological transition. The coming years, backed by the immanent globalization movement, will undoubtedly be dedicated (at the very least by me) to a revitalizing pluralism, undermining things from the negatively assumptive characteristics of our current‘’human rights’ generalizations, to our everyday ‘blinder’ tendencies against regarding influences as moral proponents in themselves as processes (versus the more common implementation of intention directing intention via coercive principles of conduct). Things like meme theory and cybernetics (already having many Buddhist-like implications) will continue to guide my interest for a while, I imagine, and I also hope to continue my Japanese studies (language and all), if for nothing else its nostalgic yet enlivening qualities. I couldn’t have found my way to so much love of the spirit without my experience in Japan.

Finally, how my stay in Japan influenced the other (and no less significant) aspect of my life: M--- and I have enriched our relationship through our time apart and together again. Our views, different as they may be from where we started, haven't exactly come any closer, but I like to think that our respect for each other has expanded enough to give us hope for our special friendship. In an essentialist sense, I can still feel myself pulled towards her, enraptured by the idea of being with her in some timeless, context-less fashion – just the two of us in a world of change and confusion. But now I recognize the limits and stagnation of any part of a groundless, inconstant system closed to the rest, and know that in the journey of my understanding and forgetting I will always have what can’t be haved: the meaning of M--- is as much a part of me as I am of the world. Where cultures collide, there will always be with all of us the meanings that are a part of each of us, and in that sense, we can never lose.

Bennett’s stages from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism (from Towards Ethnorelativism):

Denial
-- Isolation
-- Separation

Defense
-- Denigration
-- Superiority
-- Reversal

Minimization
-- Physical Universalism
-- Transcendent Universalism

Acceptance
-- Respect for Behavioral Difference
-- Respect for Value Difference

Adaptation
-- Empathy
-- Pluralism

Integration
-- Contextual Evaluation
-- Constructive Marginality

freedom and meaning

this is an excerpt i stole from a paper i wrote on the 29th last month (november). there's a lot of semantic description that i left out, and i further stressed the necessity of freedom too often without corresponding it most appropriately to our culture; i don't believe that this is the nature of an existential freedom in all cases, but that varying degrees can at least be recognized elsewhere by members of our culture (by our natural bias).

and so, here goes my first blog post...

Freedom and Meaning

The ontology of freedom is within the mores of an experiential nominalism which is embedded (and I say this without derogation) in the heart of our preconditions as well as our care to act. It is a necessary freedom. In our lives, we wrestle with the bleak uncontrollability of events, over the determining factors that are the preconditions to our thoughts and behavior. In the history of philosophy, this has been an age-old argument, with thinkers contemplating the borderline between human freedom and universal determinism, even going so far as to take sides absolutely on only one or the other. My argument, however, focuses on the significance of freedom as it concerns meaning in action and what would consequently become of its absence. The freedom of our experience, regardless of the degree of controllability we each recognize in our unique experiences, has colossal social impact as well as great semantic value in one’s personal efficacy. I recall clearly having dreams where I would realize how light I felt and, with a running start usually, how I could take off from the ground and soar across the landscape of my fantasy. These were often in the form of lucid dreaming, entailing my almost complete awareness throughout the dream that it wasn’t ‘real’ and that I was in perhaps the only place (of mind) where this sort of thing was possible. After a few months of being exhilarated by it, I began to wake up irritably, acknowledging from the moment that I awoke that it was all over for at least another day and that any thoughts of being able to fly like that had no place among the boundaries of the ‘real world’ here. I became frustrated, until finally my mother took me aside one day to ask me what was the matter. After enduring some of her prying, I burst out in tears and told her of my experiences of freedom only within the realms of sleep and how limited and oppressive the world seemed not being able to fly like I could when I was least cognizant. I don’t know if my mother understood my anxiety to the point of my desiring a physical freedom from the ground, but she’d certainly experienced her own woes against the oppression my father and even her own mother (to name only a couple) had burdened onto her, and I think it is from that association that she was stirred with compassion to comfort me and let me know that I would fly someday, even if it didn’t seem in the way I was used to experiencing it in my dreams.

The human spirit is a lofty thing, and very many of us have had this same sort of dreaming, where neither gravity nor outlying authority had any say on what we choose to do at the next moment. From that, I think that we have spent a great number of centuries debating for the sake of projecting the object of that desire onto our metaphysical existence through concepts of fundamental freedoms of action, going as far as pure transcendentalism and individualism in the United States. The function of freedom undeniably includes the degree of controllability by which we feel we can manipulate the rudiments of our lives, i.e., love, relationships, power, security, our death, etc. Some of these rudiments are more directly controllable than others – a homeless man may not get to decide on the time and manner of his next meal, compared to the middle class, steady-income saleslady who not only chooses when she will eat but where and how. And yet, each of these will surely claim to have some degree of allotted freedom (if not now, once before) by which they manage, even in the smallest ways, their day-to-day activities and engagements.

This is the experiential nominalism of freedom, the truth of freedom insofar as it effects one’s next stage of action and experience of it. For, never, in philosophy, would we attribute an existent effect to a nonexistent cause.

If by ‘freedom’ we mean a complete liberation and separation from the consequences of the past, than we must recognize it as a metaphysical and, in fact, experiential impossibility: we no more experience a situation of absolute spontaneous generation, as if from nothing, than we expect something or someone to be born by spontaneous generation, to suddenly just appear without any prior cause, completely from nothing. Instead, we speak of the freedom of experience, and this interpretation has a far more reasonable, and meaningful, significance. Perhaps due to my steadfastly philosophical viewpoint, or my indulgences in the metaphysical implications of the Buddhism I have studied (in a dilettante fashion), I have had no problem at all reconciling the seemingly unending determinism of things with the reality of the freedom I experience. (I feel no more obligated to experience determinism than to directly witness, under microscope, the development and propagation of my genes within the family, as though its process, being as fundamental to life as it is, had to be experienced in my daily lifestyle to be true.) The issue of the possibility of this experience being an illusion, under which lies a reality of such determinism that we must more formally address, does not figure emphatically into my philosophy, however, as it might in some other cultures (where a traditional sort of Buddhism is prominent). I have, at this point of my life, granted a pluralism of experience as a far better explanation for how things work than a strictly universalized metaphysical system on which we are all expected to rest. Maybe this is why I find the sensations of freedom to be, at least for now, incomprehensible without, and this (along with the nature of a more tentative epistemology) constitutes its necessity and realism within the context (the preconditions) of our culture.