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Something that I find a little mind-messing-with is something that my mom told me once. She has a few pictures of families on her desk: some of her relatives, one of a woman and her family who babysat for my siblings and me as a teenager, and one of a chinese couple with two little girls. She said that the man in the latter picture is someone she had an extended courtship with in college, and he had asked her to marry him. She said she almost accepted. So, she said, I was almost half Chinese.
"Of course not," I retorted as an adolescent (or however old I was), "if you'd married someone else, the kid you would have had wouldn't have been me!"
But why not?
I mean, identical twins are not identical people (as far as we know). So if my dad had had an identical twin and my mom had married *him* instead, and somehow the same genetic material had come together, would the kid they would have had have been me? It seems like this person would merely have been *similar* to the present me (though probably very similar). So my mom's half-Chinese child in an alternate universe might have been similar to me also, maybe a little less so but perhaps enough to be meaningful. Or is identity an all-or-nothing thing? That seems unlikely, other than as an assumption/convention that may be useful for social or legal reasons -- if it is, how much do I have to change before I become a different person? |
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Sep. 23rd, 2005 @ 06:11 pm
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For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. ... The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, -- his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, -- until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; -- that they drink his words because he fulfill for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar (via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) aaangyl) |
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Observation by troyworks:
Hanging with [person 1] helped me realize how much, people are anchors for identities and roles we play. She met me on the dance floor dressed exotically, and so far has only known that facet of me. She has told me that I dance beautifully and that dancing makes her feel alive. So she is motivated to connect with me in that way, which in turn makes me more prone to act that way around her as she has given me permission, and of course I am rewarded seeing her respond. It's a nice feeback loop.
This is to contrast with the gothy coworker [person 2] who only knows me loosely and rather conservatively through work, and once at a dance club. [Person 2] anchors my 'work identity' so I find I'm reluctant to talk to her, and certainly not to touch her., as it's still like we are at work. Actually I'm pretty sure the window of physical touch has closed for now, so it would be perceived as creepy.
I suppose it's important to choose ones friends to support your identity, I think we all do this naturally (most my friends support my goals and normal identity), but not so consciously forward thinking. I've heard the phrase "you need to get new friends" (say in avoiding bad influences) but not "you need friends of type X that can connect to you on Y to support the Z traits you are wanting to be", or "I want to be A, therefore I need friends of qualites B"
Like individuals' personalities, maybe relationships' "personalities" arise from a combination of nature and nurture -- a certain amount of intrinsic compatibility (energy level, interests, etc.) plus a certain amount of influence from the circumstances you have gotten to know a person in (work, clubs, family, etc.)
It's an interesting idea that you can work on your identity by selecting your friends. On one hand it seems like an elegant solution to a tricky problem, of when old behaviors that are anchored by certain people are hard to get rid of, but on the other hand you often don't have a choice about which people you interact with in certain contexts. |
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An interesting observation from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's entry in the 2005 "What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?" forum.But then I realized—after reading some of the early postings—that every one else has assumed implicitly that the "you" in: "even if you cannot prove it" referred not to the individual respondent, but to the community of knowledge—it actually stood for "one" rather than for "you". That everyone seems to have understood this seems to me a remarkable achievement, a merging of the self with the collective that only great religions and profound ideologies occasionally achieve. Actually, the first part of his response pointed out that we all know lots of things that we can't individually prove -- that the earth is round, for example. So it actually seems that the first "you" is understood to mean "you, the individual respondent," and the second "you" is understood to mean "the scientific community at large." That's interesting both in the sense of "why is this the case?" and also in Csikszentmihalyi's observation of ambiguity between the self and the community.
( Read more... )
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I also like Randolph Nesse's entry: "I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove."
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What do I believe that cannot be proved? Well, here's one off the top of my head, lifted from my last post: Creativity operates like evolution. Creative works don't just spring into the world fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, though they might conform to a sort of punctuated equilibrium. Creators draw inspiration from an enormous number of places, though especially from their own past works. The basic, atomic creative act is incrementally improving something done before, by oneself or by someone else. If one does this multiple times on a single work without releasing the work, it ultimately looks like one has created something original, and one has, except that the process may be just as easily followed by improving on others' work as on one's own. As Thomas Edison put it: "Originality is the art of concealing your sources."
This is not to say, of course, that I think that all people are equally creative. Some may be better at this incremental improvement process than others, but I still think the process is the same. |
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Integrating Zen with individualism seems like it must be possible, at least on the basis that both appeal to me, so either I've got a dualistic split (which I'd like to hunt down and address), or the two somehow have something in common that could be highlighted and woven into a theme. I'm not thinking too hard about it yet; I'm just letting the reading I'm doing draw me more toward the Zen pole since it seems to be what I need to hear right now.
One observation that popped out of my reading was the idea that a person is a process and not a thing. The fact that a person (as process) is associated with a particular thing, i.e. a body, confuses the matter. Although it's true that most people don't necessarily think or behave as if "I am my body," at the same time they tend to apply the way they relate to their body to their relationship to their mind, metaphorically. As a consequence, they assume that their mind/self is also a thing, something that can have attributes and boundaries just like a physical object does. But the self isn't an object, it's a locus of awareness and activity that happens to manage a physical object. The thinking that applies to each of these two types of thing should be different.
( Read more... ) |
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Bias
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Oct. 19th, 2004 @ 07:32 pm
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I read an article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune today about internet addiction. It was full of speculations like whether IAD would make it into the next DSM and become "official". There was a quiz in a sidebar - questions like "Do you ever lie about how much time you spend online?" "Do you get irritable or anxious if you can't go online?" "Do your ever spend more time online than you intended to, causing your other responsibilities to suffer?"
I thought about how often I get absorbed in work or surfing and become hypnotized enough to forget about what else I could be doing that would be more productive. I thought about this while on errands with my dad today, and the thought was directly stimulated by being away from my desk, and thinking how the internet catch-up I'd been doing most of the day was not necessarily such a good use of my time. I thought, perhaps if I just took time to walk around and get into a different mindspace at regular intervals, I'd be in a better position to make that kind of evaluation, since when in the middle of a task, nothing else seems so important as that task.
And so it is with any bias. When you're looking at something a certain way, it seems impossible that it could be seen any other way, that any particular facts added or subtracted could change the fundamental meaning you currently perceive. |
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A while ago angelbob made a thoughtful post asking what people do to inhibit their own free expression of energy. What I do is to hesitate and second-guess myself. Idling is the specific thing I observe myself doing in these cases. Idling is behavior that is hypnotic and diverting but nonconstructive, like poring over a piece of writing and tweaking a few words repetitively. It's an evasive tactic which seems to come from aversion to dealing with a task or situation.
But hesitating and idling means time and energy lost. Idling prevents goal-directed action. Equal and opposite vectors may have a greater combined magnitude, but they total to zero. The problem is that although it's not goal-directed, idling isn't real rest, either. Even after a period of idling, rest is still required, because its very nature as agitation prevents the silt from settling out of the water to make it clear.
It would be much better to convert all idling into either forward progress or stillness. To do this should require only a little vigilance, but my problem is that I seem to find it to be so difficult to communicate with myself across the subconscious barrier that when I begin to have a psychological need that isn't met, I revert instinctively to idling behavior, kind of like the way someone who is injured will limp before they even notice they're feeling pain. So, forcing conformance to non-idling behavior is not going to solve the problem - the solution has to be systemic. Maybe my objective needs to be elimination of the drag. Hypothesis: I need to notice, explore, and remove my sources of psychological resistance.
Maybe I can pick out a trend like "idling occurs when I'm afraid of negative outcomes" or "idling occurs when I've been working too long." That would go a long way toward knowing what to do when I notice it.
Somehow it seems like this would be a lot easier to do with a spotter. |
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I've encountered a hard OkCupid question. The question is "Do you practice or believe in real magick, not to be confused with stage magic and parlor tricks?" I've dodged that question for years. Now I'm being asked in straight language to put it on the record, and I'm not sure how the waveform should collapse.
On the one hand, I think that at least as a metaphor, magic has real potential value. On the other hand, there definitely is a flavor of superstition and quackery that taints the usual notion of magic, which I feel strongly about avoiding. (And it's not just found in the new age world - my dad was telling me other day about a stock trading "expert" who hawks books about how the stock market is governed by Fibonacci patterns, like something out of Pi.) I think that we have done a good job disproving ideas like ectoplasmic manifestation and "remote viewing," so for me, that pushes the appropriate use of magic to a more specific domain. Perhaps limits it to something as simple as the transformation of a girl into a young woman with the ritual granting of a drivers' license; perhaps yet allows it to be a way to interface with one's world non-locally. My view is probably between the "psychological model" and the "informational model," where I understand the latter as the notion that there may be some form of extraphysical communication which we have yet to reproducibly isolate. So if there's such a thing as a non-ingenuous, pragmatic, self-developmental variety of magic, that's what I've been on the lookout for, although mostly have just ended up reading books on Eastern spirituality and hanging up godform artwork on my walls.
So, I'm mostly content with not having figured it out, but to answer this question I need to come down on one side of the line or another. Despite the fact that I don't use OkCupid for dating or any important purpose, I was recently contacted by an interesting-sounding person who almost certainly would have had a high rating on the negative answer for a potential match, and we might not have connected. But I can't bring myself to say "no," either.
Maybe I'll just stop answering OkCupid questions. ;) |
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I hadn't posted in so long that I forgot my password.
Today found:
QUATERNITYThe sacred "fourness," which is the magical obsession. There are four very
powerful things that all entities can do. They can:
- Come into existence.
- Know existence.
- Change the nature of existence.
- Cease to exist.
The secret of magic is nothing more nor less than the absolute understanding of the
meaning of the four elements. The sorcerer calls them "Ritual, Invocation, Chaos and
Contagion," the alchemist calls them Sulfur, Salt, Mercury and Azoth, the physicist calls them
Time, Space, Matter and Energy. But whatever we call the terms, every reality is divided into
the same four parts.
From The Magician's Dictionary.
Seems kind of strong to say that this is the secret of magic. But maybe I just don't understand.
The entry for Tetramorph is interesting too.
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I think fascination wth the elements stems from the fact that the quaternary is a fundamental binary division. Yin and Yang are pretty interesting, and their interactions subtle and complex, but two is pretty graspable. Even three basic categories are pretty work-withable, in my opinion: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit. Rajas, Tamas, Sattva. Pretty basic: conflict and resolution.
But four - seems like one of them always doesn't fit! Four is where the complexity sets in. It's the second stage of mitosis, and there's no obvious way to sub-group the cells. But it's just 2 x 2 - yin and yang applied to itself - should be simple, right?
I think the fact that it is frustrating is what can make study of the elements such an appealing endeavor. Understanding the elements looks like an exercise in simple filing but is actually like trying to make four unruly toddlers quiet down and stop hitting each other. Is Fire the wand or the sword? Is water blue or green? Etc.
Once you get beyond this point into full blown systems like Tarot or Qabalah or Astrology, it becomes pretty clearly a matter of convention and preference. But four is still such a basic number that it seems like there should be some manifest way to settle the correspondences.
Or is it only I who has this problem?Current Music: Bjork, Pagan Poetry |
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(04:15:32) papertygre: i think i am probably too eager to please
(04:15:42) papertygre: and it makes me agree to timelines that are unreasonable
(04:15:58) denshi: ooh, the bad trip associated with that realization hurts like hell
(04:16:08) denshi: i encourage you to solve that
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Once, on a trip, I had one of those dream-realizations, the kind where you come up with a deep-sounding cryptogram that has no relation to anything. It was: "the only sin is lack of clarity." Of course, it made perfect sense at the time, but afterward I actually managed to find a sensible interpretation as well.
"Lack of clarity" means failure to fully confront something, failure to admit to yourself or others the same degree of sharpness of focus in identifying a certain thing as you would use in identifying other things. Equivocation, denial, cheating, carelessness, prejudice, superstition - those are all forms of it, because they all require obfuscation to work. And by "sin," is meant the agnostic-friendly definition I was taught in religion class when I was young: "failure to love." In other words, any kind of apathy, division, or conflict.
So what the statement means is that failure to be as precise and honest with oneself as possible is the source of misunderstanding, alienation, and fear.
But I think it's not just failure to accept the way things are that results in lack of clarity, but also failure to express the way things are. So to hesitate doing what is yours to do, and to be afraid to show your personality, is another form of obfuscation that causes blockage.
So I've almost always been particularly caught up in the first kind of clarity, the kind where you attempt to understand and accept the world as it really is, to always doubt and question your assumptions in order to gain a potentially more accurate picture. But in doing this I've neglected the second kind of clarity. I've censored myself to the point of paralysis for fear of being "wrong" or out of accord with those immutable conditions of reality that honesty seemed to require one recognize. And it was a vicious cycle, because the fear that this generated reinforced the hesitation to act freely.
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The phrase, when it popped into my head, I remember was accompanied with a semi-visual impression. The impression was very distinct at the time, but abstract (a bit like how I sometimes have ideas before I have words for them). It was of a person somehow adding intensity to their reality, and actually building it up, through the sharpness and clarity of their dealings with it. Like the difference between someone who shuffles from point A to point B versus someone who walks energetically, stepping carefully around objects in their path. The idea being that mindfulness can actually be a generative activity. As an analogy, the difference between a blurry painting with only impressionistic blobs vs. a detailed painting with distinctly drawn elements. The second painting contains more crystallized attention. The second painting is more actualized; it's not just cosmetic; it exists more. |
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from alleged (here)
Goal Outcome
Significator Challenge
Current Environment
Past Obstacle Immediate Influence of
Future Society
Foundation of
Current Environment Future Environment
Don't know in what order the cards should be placed, if it matters. |
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(01:13:24) AiasOilius: what is best in life?
(01:14:06) papertygre: love
(01:14:11) papertygre: at risk of triteness
(01:14:33) AiasOilius: hmm
(01:14:59) AiasOilius: not necessarily trite
(01:16:56) AiasOilius: any luck yet?
(01:17:34) papertygre: yes :D |
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via bluegreen17 - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/feldsparandrubies/message/115
Seeker
If both dream and escape from dream are imaginings, what is the way out?
Maharaj
There is no need of a way out! Don't you see that a way out is also part
of the dream? All you have to do is to see the dream as dream.
Seeker
If I start the practice of dismissing everything as a dream, where will
it lead me?
Maharaj
Wherever it leads you, it will be a dream. The very idea of going beyond
the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realize that you are
dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The
dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of the
dream and not another. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have
done all that needs be done. �
Copyright (c) 1999 Advaita Fellowship
http://www.advaita.org/ |
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If I get into the habit of eating the same foods all time, always buy the same corn chips or something, I start to treat them callously and even start to eat too much, possibly as a thrillseeking behavior. I wonder if there's a way to counter this? To keep the sense of variety just through some kind of mental yoga technique? It seems like the ability to do that would be very useful. Because this kind of habituation occurs not just with everyday things like food, but with routines, and rituals, and even with friendships. And with routines and friendships, you can't solve it by just buying potato chips instead of corn chips next time you go to the store.
Novelty is a strange need. Perhaps not all people need it in the same degree. dales suggested that the artistic temperament (i.e., someone who creates artifacts, as opposed to one who performs actions) might inherently crave novelty, change, as a way to keep the blood flowing. (By contrast, in Dale's current job as a security guard, he said that nothing ever changes.)
What I've often tried to do as a way to solve the scourge of habituation is to simplify. I'd try to throw out distracting minor influences so that I would be forced to fully value the fewer things that were left. Of course, if overdone, this could only actually make the problem worse, make things even more boring. Still, this seems to be also the technique of Zen, and of meditation in general. You try to confront yourself with your life so that you are finally forced to notice it.
Sometimes when I am running I think about the way I can start to feel like I am "running." Moving in a stylized and homogenous way. As opposed to taking a series of individual steps where each one an independent decision. ... It is a natural tendency to blur it into the sense of undergoing a continuous, undifferentiated movement, but this also means becoming less aware, less responsive to the changes in the course being followed. On the other hand, to pay attention to each separate step, and stay cognizant that I could stop at any time, that I don't have to take the next step - and to be aware that I can make the next step stronger, that I can plant my foot more carefully and pull harder and move forward that much more quickly - that approach is very different.
If I have something that I am truly afraid of, it is probably the possibility of fading into non-awareness. Of things growing dim and flat, and of being unable to recover the intensity that once was. Like in Flowers for Algernon, when Charlie knew he was becoming stupid again.
It seems like there's no silver bullet for this, though. It seems like all you can do is pinch yourself every once in a while and try to wake yourself up from whatever you've most recently habituated to. And just try not to forget. |
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Because the world is round, it turns me on...
Because the wind is high, it blows my mind
Oh, because the sky is blue, it makes me cry. |
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Litany
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Jan. 16th, 2004 @ 12:42 pm
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Can't go back. Can't drop out. Must go forward. The only way out is forward.
Keep your eyes on the horizon.
The only way out is forward.Current Mood:  drained |
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( say what? )
Air: NT (Rational)
Water: NF (Idealist)
Earth: SJ (Guardian) - or IS (see note below)
Fire: SP (Artisan) - or ES (see note below)
Note: I would divide up the S types differently. I would make Earth IS
(not SJ) and Fire ES (not SP). This is because the N/S axis corresponds
to the line in the chart - divides abstract from immediate. So
for the two N types, driven by the mind, the most important secondary
characteristic is what that mental environment is like - rational or
emotional, T or F. But for the two immediate types, driven by the concrete, the
important secondary characteristic is how they relate to the world - as
introverts or as extroverts, I or E.
( Interesting application ) |
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This is a little bit nonstandard, but at this point I feel pretty comfortable with it.
Abstract Air /
White /
Mental /
NT (Rational) /
/
Water | / Fire
Blue/Purple | / Red/Yellow
Yin/Passive --------------+------------- Yang/Active
Emotional / | Energetic
NF (Idealist) / | SP[ES] (Artisan)
/
/ Earth
/ Black
/ Physical
/ SJ[IS] (Guardian) Immediate
( exegesis ) |
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water
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Jan. 13th, 2004 @ 12:51 am
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where did all this water come from?
i'm sure it wasn't here before.Current Mood:  annoyed |
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While I was walking today, I passed someone on the sidewalk. He was slightly taller, slightly older, and gave a kind of gentle impression. As I passed him I glanced up and smiled hello. When I did, his eyes locked onto mine and he increased his pace and began to ask eager questions.
"Do you go to school here?" he asked. It struck me again that I was not the only one that for some reason intuitively assumed that there was this line between "student" and "grownup," which I was still on the student side of. But I think we were probably almost the same age.
By answering questions I told him that I graduated from CMU, what I had studied, what I was doing now, and the fact that I was on my way to the Oakland post office. He seemed to have something in his right eye. It looked like it might be a tear, but that seemed incongruous and I figured it could also be eczema or something. He asked my name and gave me his.
"So would you be free to go out sometime?" he asked. I said that was very flattering and looked away. He asked again. I said, "I'm pretty busy," looking him in the eye this time. He stopped walking and I did too. "Hey," he said, and held out his mittened fist. I held mine out and he bounced the bottom of his hand against the top of mine. "Talk to you later," he said, and the tear in his eye fell and coursed down his cheek. He walked on. I did too. |
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