With renewed verve, I strike out on the path...

In the last few posts, and in the last few weeks, the need for making things explicit has taken over my world. Not in the creepy way that most people allow things to take over their lives, but I have realized a growing need in this era of spin and ambiguity. That need, my friends is the system of philosophy.

The field of philosophy, although laying claim to being the alpha of rational thought, is still one of the most poorly understood disclipines in academia. Even philosophers suffer from the problem of definition, as one man's philosophy is another man's opinion. One thing remains certain as we take a philosophical eye towards the world, and that is that there are in fact ways of reasoning and argument which are superior to others. Whether from Mars or Venus, there is a way in which we might all agree on what a valid option is and one that is not; a difference between conjecture and idea, in the sense that I really hope to be able to use it.

The fact is, the philosophical method is one that when done right, seems to come to an end of indubitability. It is through this method that the modern sciences arose, as well as the social sciences: even today, such fields as cognitive psychology rely heavily on philosophy, if for no other reason than the lack of empirical science to explain the problems being raised.This mehod seems to be in in decline, if the opinions and ideas that I see on the news, read in my favorite magazines are taken to be some sort of truth telling mechanism.

For in no small way it is the business of philosophy to make progress towards truth, towards clearing up false or unsound ideas and turning them into the fodder for intelectuals and reasonable layfolk alike. While philosophy is a difficult discipline, it is not impossible, especially when one pauses to consider the rewards to be found from the study of argument and clarification. Think for a second of a conversation in which double entendres are kept to minimum, when the words "and thus..." are backed not by opinion but by the finest tools that the human mind has to offer. To be honest we may never find perfect reason (a claim that holds more and more weight by the day) and thus we will never be able to address 'truth' in the way that most sentients wish too (we aren't computers, what is right and wrong is not intrinsically programmed into us and thus we are left with "true for now" and "as close as we can get to...", contestable I know, but we will fight about this sometime in December) but what is possible is the addition of complete thought to conversation. Think of how brilliant it would be to be able to say what you mean, rather than what you hope comes across.

So as a goal to refocus my mental efforts, in the coming weeks and months I hope and intend to spread the glory of philosophy and the philosophical method and turn it into a way of thought that all people can embrace. For philosophy is ideally not suited merely for old white men sitting their ivory tower, or abstractly minded intelligent people who can't put down the pipe: it is a way of thought that operates with cold-blooded efficiency. With philosophical tools we can cut larger swaths from troubling hidden implications to fallacies of reason that are engrained in us from a young age in almost all of our verbal interactions in an attempt to see that truth often cannot take a purely black and white form; for even the strongest of theories will have to defend against reasonable obections.

So look forward to no small change in format. Although these musings will be the same stream of conciousness postings as always, their focus will shift to the study of thought, and the ways that we might improve it - to take one of our most unconcious social activites and turn it into something that we might all be proud to participate in. There will of course be contradictions and grammatical mistakes and misinterpretations: in these cases I truly wish for comment and input: one mind isn't bad, but there could be no heartfelt acknowledgements if there weren't other brilliant minds to keep one slightly clever one from overstepping his (or her) bounds. If these little musings turn out to be fruitful, they might one day (sonner rather than later) be refined into something that will find binding and the printed page, so I must call intellectual property on these new ideas, if there are any, and note that ideas that are not mine will be properly accredited to the person or persons whose property they are. For one of the worst crimes one can intellectually commit is the sin of plagerism. While this seems like a mountain out of molehill, I must say that in the vein of responsibility, take credit for what you think and nothing more: we have enough to worry about people stealing that we should be able to at least keep our brain droppings in our own yard. This is in no way to say that these ideas should not be bandied about in conversation, in fact please do: let's raise the discussion level to collegate. If you see somone who you wish to impress at some drinking establishment or another, please do: if I can play wingman from a distance, you have my full support. But there is an arrogance that comes with the American life, and we all suffer from it to varying degrees, so let your plumage ruffling moments be yours and yours alone, through both glory and the gauntlet.

So here we go. While there will still be interjections which will remove us from this purpose, we will always return. Think of these digressions du jour as an opportunity to take a break from the world of the abstract and theoretical and take a moment or two in a similar yet slightly different genere: hey, cross training isn't just for the body. To all you philosophobes, I hope to be of some therapy. To the curious of mind: I hope I can give new fodder to you thought, and to all those who have no clue; it was Mustard in the Study with the Lead Pipe. I would like to thank in advance all those people who have inspired me in their own way just to sit down and waste a my life at a keyboard hoping to help someone else, at least one, yea? If there is one word of advice that I could give the world (hey I could hit by a bus tomorrow) it would be this: Life is like a horizontal escalator, if you stop moving you will start moving backwards, so do something that is challenging everyday; keep making some steps along the journey. I think that you will find that even when you could not see the progress, you will get the point in the long run. No thing is profoundly important in itself, yet any thing is potentailly crucially significant, so keep the gears turning. Hurrah!

Just a quick one...

The foray in academia is weird. At ever turn and connection of idea, we are threated by other seemingly more interesting ideas, fallacies and naysayers. Now the most important thing when attempting to hash out the questions that appeal to us, as I see it, is to always remeber the origional question asked. I wonder how much more interested and interesting we would be as a people if we stopped jumping from notion to notion and decided that we would rather take to its omega point any idea that we chose to actaully begrudge. Sort of a put up or shut up of ideas.

For the lifestyle that we lead does not allow for this type of endeavour. I would imagine that very few people perform the mental equivalent of stopping and smelling the roses, unless their fuel and inspriation were buds of beer and stems of salted pretzel sticks. I want to give a new notion of philosophy, one that I hope would appeal to any person who looks beneath the surface, and that is the idea of philosophy as a complete thought.

Now a complete thought does not take the form of "All x are y" or "If y then z", yet that seems to be the social minimum for a thought. Instead, like a good philosophical argument, we should endeavour to give, in any of our thoughts, the following: our assumptions (those things that we are holding as true, or at least indubitable for our purposes), our logical framework (these are the rules by which we manipulate our assumptions to create more assumtions, in a way tha would hold up to other points of view; thus it does not make sense to think "If I take a day off, then my manager will think less of me," only make moves with your assumtions which create more conclusions that sit on the same solid ground as your original assumptions), and then our conclusion(s) which will further follow from the prior two items, and will stand to all atacks except for "it's my opinion," or "just because."

While this is not a strict formula for a philosophical argument, what I hope it does is force you, my good readers, to actually think about the words coming out of your mouths and the ideas that run through your minds. It is in the ambiguity of words and ideas that our thought can become like a computer virus, spreading evil as a partciular dogma gathers force based not on rational opinion, but on emotional weight alone. Just think the next time you call someone worthless, or say you hate Dubya, or think that someone else is ruining their lives, really ponder the what and why and how of the idea, make sure it stands up to argument.

And when you can say that you have only ideas that stand up to all the views and all of the arguments that you can fathom, then you can fully appreciate what has been running around my head all day, a quote by my man Frederick Douglass, freed slave and one of the coolest dudes to rock the early United States: "The man who right is the majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe. If he does not represent the present state, he represents the future state. If he does not represent what we are, he represents what we ought to be." Enjoy.

Hold on Doc, I think I see something that makes no sense...

So I must apologize for the shameless delinquincy in getting back into the bloggersphere: my dissatisfaction with being a poor philosophy major hit a creshendo the other day and I have fervently been working to get some full time employ that will allow the IJB to take on the world on his own terms. I'll keep those who care abreast, but it must detract from the major point of today, and that is the stiffling of imagination. More to the point, I have begun to see that the level of imagination in those over the age of 15 drop to below zero. I say below zero for it seems that any hint of a possible idea that is not totally grounded in reality is quickly squelched by such following ideas of the vein 'grow up and get a job (or girlfriend, or grasp on reality).

Now this is a truly terrible thing to have happen, and I think that I began to stumble upon the reason the other day as I watched my little autistic friends at the pool (they happen to be there when I get to the YWCA, like clockwork) just imagine their time away. The water wasn't jsut water, and the noodles not just noodles. I'm not sure in exactly what order, but their world became successively a train track, outer space etc. Now I have observed this phenomenon in other youngsters, and I by youngster I mean anyone up to 18; basically anyone who is not totally obsessed with seeing what is actually going on. Thus, I have met some kids who are little adults, completely devoid of imaginative undertakings, and big adults who seem to think that the way to enlightenment is through a haze of bong smoke existentialism and the hope that one day they may just find a suitcase full of $$ instead of the bedsore they have been working on for the past week. But what is the common thread as I have seen it is that with the rise and cutivation of our rational faculties comes also a stiff decline in imagination, and as I would further, happiness.

So what does this all mean? It means stop worrying so much about what is actually going on and take a minute to imagine. No, not think about it, just imagine. Imagine yourself anywhere: the beach, in space (minus the instant death), in the bed of your favorite trashy celebrity I don't care. Unless you are of a special mind, I imagine you are having no small amount of trouble conjuring a "real" world behind closed eyes. Now I don't know about you, but as a child I remember conjuring a world proper, and while I could see the tree over there, it was more than a tree: it actually was an outpost, or the enemy (basically, Don Quixote, eat your heart out.) There was just enough trappings of reality to let us hear mom yelling for dinner, but the general idea was that when we as children wanted to, we could go to a dreamlike state, and stay there as long as we wanted.

Think about now. The trips of imagination that we go on are mere shadows of those alternate worlds that we used to hold so dear (I mean, there was spell when I couldn't fall asleep unless I went some type of adventure). In their place are shreds of a dream, and always with a point to something that would be nice: a promotion, a particular member of the opposite sex, a big screen television and so on.

Now what kind of sorry cop out is that? We do need that kind of imagination: it is what provides us with goals and the motivation to achieve those goals. "I have a dream" for example. This is just how positive worldly progress is achieved. But what we need also is some amount of time spent in fancy, just playing in a world that cannot in any way be real.

Why? Well, because time spent in the surreal is time spent mulling over real life. Let me explain. I believe that there are more processes going on in our brain at any one time than we can even fathom: most important of which is the part of the brain which decerns patterns and conclusions, of norms and implication. Now I think that this is a process which happends subconciously. For example, how many of you folks have really decided to try something out and fail miserably, only to have the change in lifestyle happen almost naturally a month later? This is because you stopped thinking about it long enough for your subconcious to figure out what is actually going on, v. what we think is going on (see earlier posts). Time spent in imagination goes even further: by completely removing reality as we know it, we give ourselves a chance to really process a holistic perspective. When the concious mind is occupied with flying the WWII figter jet against the fleet of Amazon females the unconcious mind is working on processing the bombardment of imformation that we are inundated with every day.

The function of this is actually very similar to it's polar opposite yet bedfellow: meditiation. In a meditative state, a mantra is used or the mind is totally cleared of all thought. The purpose of this is the same, to allow the mind to stop and think about what it has been doing. The fun part about imagination is that the focus is in no way doctrinal and even better has absolutely no rules. In facts the only rules that apply are the same as those that govern lucid dreaming, I would like to think.

Now how 'bout drug induced imagination sessions? How bout 'em! Those who know me know the penchant for expanding the world as we know it, but I would have to say that the time of imagination that I speak of has nothing to do with drugs. For in drug use, we are still perceiving the world, just through a colored lens that allows us to make our conclusions based upon this slanted view which spill over into the real world. Which is great when you are tripping with a buddy, not so smooth when you are trying to convince a perspective employer. In fact, the best and worst thing about drug use is its ability to change waking perception (and semi concious perception, for those with the tendencies). This does not amount to the break from reality that I speak of, but it does amount to creating a new world, one in which we attempt to operate according to the rules that we create when we are lifted by our substance (and when reality cannot match up to this drugged ontology, well the only answer is more drugs right? Well depends upon where you are in life. Drugs have brought me to both great and terrible places, so I would say use the discresion that drugs were origionally brough about for. Much of drug use up until the mid 1900's was mostly ceremonial, and should still be today. Thus the time to try that pill of X, if you are ever going to, is at a DJ or some such like where the drug you take will enhance your experience, and nothing more. This means that I truly believe that any hard drug done sitting in your living room or the like is disturbingly escapist, but I'll leave that one for another day).

So, after that nasty digression, I return to the point at hand. The pace of our lives has become dangerously fast: we are all called upon to constantly be think about what is going on, when I fact what we are doing is driving ourselves ever close to a nervous breakdown. Let your flawed rationality rest for a minute and take a serious vacation to the imagination of your youth. This will be tough at first, for I think that we are trained to forget how to imagine/truly daydream, but with time we can get that back. I would argue that the happiness felt from coming back to reality with a "I just slayed the mighty dragon" less attached and thus less conditional and more fullfilling than "I saw myself with money, and a good job and someone who cares, and a paper that I wrote without the help of an all-night, and the absence of this driving pain and without work to go to tomorrow and a clear schedule and..."

See the difference? The former are unabashed and silly joy. We do not feel crushed, unhappy or otherwise when we don't actually slay the dragon as we walk to our car, but we do lose a little something when we don't get that job, that good grade, that whatever. So throw a little fantasy back into your life (only when and where appropriate: don't fly to Mars on the interstate, and if you do I take no responsibility), and let me know if the time spent not perceiving anything that is not of your own wonderful creation does not affect for the better the time hopefully spent taking everthing in, like a f%*&#$ lightening rod (guess the movie win a prize). Seriously, I truly believe that taking a flight of unadulterated, unrestrained fancy every now and again doesn't make your return to and subsequent moments in reality more productive, appealing and much less overwhelming. Carry on good people, I hope to talk to you all soon.

Suffering and Philosophy...What?

So I know that the last couple of posts have been of an almost spiritual nature, and if that actually is the case, my apologies. What has become very interesting to me as of late would probably be called philosophy of suffering, if you will. Now there is a grey area here, for there really is not a philosophy of pain, although I believe that it is a topic of primary importance, especially when we consider that with all of the technological advances we have created in the past 100 years with the sole purpose of increasing leisure and efficiencieny. This rise of technology seems to be couterproductive however.

I was surfing the JAMA website and stumbled across this little beauty of an abstract: Several recent, large epidemiologic and family studies suggest important temporal changes in the rates of major depression: an increase in the rates in the cohorts born after World War II; a decrease in the age of onset with an increase in the late teenaged and early adult years; an increase between 1960 and 1975 in the rates of depression for all ages; a persistent gender effect, with the risk of depression consistently two to three times higher among women than men across all adult ages; a persistent family effect, with the risk about two to three times higher in first-degree relatives as compared with controls; and the suggestion of a narrowing of the differential risk to men and women due to a greater increase in risk of depression among young men (http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/261/15/2229).

What the f&*$%? So in an era of purported freedom and prosperity what we have instead is an era where people are more depressed? This is why we need a philosophy of suffering: I believe that the time has come to clarify the nature of suffering? Is it perhaps essential, a component of the human psyche which provides a check on unfettered joy? Might this be a sign of the hidden implications in a leisure era? What is suffering defined, and is there a way to escape it?

This is not an issue that I will even attempt to settle in this post. This is a very interesting topic, and actually I intend to write an academic paper on it soon. But what I will do is attempt to give some insight into the philosophical process so that folks might one day stop thinking that what I know & love is mere wordplay, or opinion, or not relevant (Sorry for that misleading intro, I realized that the blog post needed to hash out the questions I raised would take far too long and be far too dry to read today and here).

First we need a focus. Now suffering has many facets, and there are more potentially relevant topics than one might think. We might attempt to define what suffering is: that is, under what particular circumstances is one said to rightly suffering? This leads to other questions such as the depression/suffering disctinction, the agony/suffering distinction, discomfort/suffering: essentialy this is the facet of philosophy that deals with concept clarification. People bandy about the word suffering, but when does one cross the line of say, dolor and is to said to suffer. Might none of those words capture what it is to suffer? Or are all of the aforementioned words necessarry to figure out what suffering means?

Another related topic. We might try to say what is necessarry and sufficient for one said to be grieving. Now the necessary/sufficient distinction is one that has book written about it, so I will try to do in a couple sentences what authors do in 400 pages. Given two statements something is necessary when the second statement cannot be true while the first is false. So I have a guinea pig is a necessarry condition of the further statement My guinea pig is sick. A condition is sufficient when the first claim cannot be true while the second is false, for example The levees broke when Hurricane Katrina came through is a sufficient condition for New Orleans is under water.

Macabre example aside, I could understand if there is still confusion, and never be afraid to ask: it took me 4 years to have clue, I'm not sure that a paragraph will all that enlightening. But back to the program.

Another option might be to conclude that suffering is an essential component of life and attempt to determine what place a proper amount of suffering has in the day to day life of humans. Thus, are those that do not suffer lacking an essential component of humanity? Would suffering be essential as the yang to joys ying so that we do not grow complacent? Or, as the Buddhists and many other sprititualities claim is suffering nothing more than a pox on humanity, a pernicious agent of perhaps society which is used as a control? And so on.

Another way to look at what is going on is to ask about the origins of suffering? If you are Catholic than you say that Eve ate the apple and gave it Adam. Those with a slightly more curious nature might peg it to the rise of rationality. For example, back when we were simian, would we claim that we suffered? Was it only when we became rational and began having self awareness. Is suffering today the same as suffering 1000 years ago, or mightthe rise of technology put a new aspect to suffering that our ancestors could have never dreamed?

I could go on like this for awhile, but I will spare you pages of questions. Suffice to say that I hope that I could give a little overview of what a philosophical problem is and is not, but if you have been zoning out, a recap. A quick and dirty definition of a philosophical problem is one which involves questions of meaning, truth and logical connections of fundamental ideas that resist solution by the empirical sciences. Although this little expansion glosses over much of what is going on (essentaily, there is alway smore to learn in philosophy), but a philosophical problem would not be that suffering exists (look at anyone crying, unless they are a good actor), or what parts of the brain light up during suffering (leave that to the psychologists) or whether or not any given agent or group is suffering (it depends on sociological factors). I hope that I shed a little bit of light on the method and purpose of philosophy with regards to suffering, and feel free as always to post questions comments and concerns, for when dealing with philosophy and philosophers, intial confusion leads to fundamental misunderstanding to outright chaos very quickly, which would lead to unnecessary suffering, and no one wants that right?

What a difference a suffix makes

In my travels around the abstract realm of humanity I have found that for every happy, fullfilled individual I meet I find 3 or more people that just wander with a glazed look in their eye and conversation which screams "I am so lonely!" Now I wondered at this, for most of this folk fall under the catergory of those with acceptable limits of neurosies, reasonable life interests and passions, and a vocabulary suitable for fullfilling communication with other humanoids. So then, what is this mystical thing that separates these lonely individuals from those who have all the human interaction they need/desire? I would say that the reasons fall under two headings: the desire for sociability and the difference between connection and connecting.

So, sociability. Here defined as the desire and need a particular sentient agent has to be in the company of other people (hopefully also sentient, but some people have very low standards: to them I say get a dog a talk to it). Some people honestly just have no desire to communicate much with others: Kant & many philosophers, J.D Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, the list goes on and on. Although I would imagine that every now again they wished to be in company, I would be more ready to believe that they prefered the santity of their thoughts over dealing with other. Thus I am led to believe that they were perfectly happy doing what it is they did best. Said another way, they never had the dead gleam which I am taking a look at, for there was just no need.

On the other face of the sociability coin lay the true social butterflies. These are the folk who just want to be friends with everybody. That is, if there is a person out there worth knowing, for any reason at all, then they must be known to. Although the motives of the social butterflies are fairly opaque, often to the butterfly his/herself (in the future called the hypersocial), the idea is there that they are the true opposite of the truly solitary (we will henceforth call them hyposocial: they just don't need the interaction).

Both of these extremes are unbalanced, and I would say fairly unhealthy, but the hyposocial may get away with their neurosy if they truly don't require other people to balance their thoughts and interactions & the hypersocial may truly be ok if and only if they are truly and thoroughly selfless, altruistic in every action.

Both of these folk exist only in theory to my knowledge, but the point to be taken away is that in attempting to escape being lonely I merely wish to note that some people require more atttention than others. Requireing attention here is not a bad thing, per se; in the best case I mean to say that these are just people who are not operating at their peak without the inspriation to be drawn from the company of others. Most of us even oscillate from day to day, and I will be my own social guinea pig here: as anyone who knows me probably also knows I am a fairly gregarious individual, but in a particularly introverted mood you are just as likely to get a miserable remark than any hint of charisma. On the days when outgoing reigns my day just isn't complete without a "rewarding" conversation/interaction with another person (sometimes people). However, when my pizzazz about equals that of a chair, most likely I am just as happy spending the day alone.

Now the trouble comes when I get too much or too little depending upon my day. Too much social interaction and I get frustrated and can come away with the conclusion that people just don't know when to quit, which will lead to a further withdrawl from others. This is a big deal when I get back to my outgoing self but find contemporaries which want nothing to do with such a (formerly) hyposocial person such as myself. The converse is also true. Now if I am felling kinda hypersocial and just don't find enough like minded folk, the easy answer would be to believe that I jsut don't have enough friends, no one understands me etc. So when our sociability desire and our actual social interaction are out of whack, we get the lack of joy that I attempt to impart so heavily in this little blog (aka, the emptyness sadness, and listlessness that we all feel in varying degress and with varying frequencies).

And that's just one horn of the dilema. The other problem comes from another issue, the connection/connecting distinction. Connection I'll define as a "soul to soul moment." These are those moments in which the worries of the world just seem to fall away in the company of another person: when we feel healthy and fullfilled merely being with another. It is in these moments when we fall in love with others, become inspired by them, have those profound times that create the people and experiences that we will remember in our final moments when our life flashes before our eyes. Connecting is the ways in which we connect with others. These avenues of connection are more difficult to define, for they differ from person to person , but basically they are the actions and means by which we feel understood by another, which lead to the connection that lead to our actualization as people.

Problem is, most people are acutely aware of the moments of connection, but are completely lost when it comes to learning how to follow and become aware of the patterns of connecting. Thus in most people we end up in a stuck between two very unhappy extremes: the moments of sheer joy in connection and the misery of not being able to attain those moments frequently enough, not be able to recreate the ways of connecting (the amount of sadness and misery is a function of not only sociability but of the priority and position that connection has in our ontology).

The problem of connecting is furthered by the troubling fact life keeps rolling on: the patterns that we create to achieve connection will and must change over time, or else we will inevitably end up cloying our favorite activities (look up the definition of cloying, it is a fascinating word). Thus the things that made us happy in the past will not necessarilly make us happy at any point in the future.

So what is the solution? How are we to keep up with an ever evolving creature that is the root of our social happiness that will not sit still long enough to provide a blueprint for this fullfilled life that we have all (hopefully) felt and look to stay in permanantly? Well, this is where my analysis must end, for we are all traveling a different path, but perhaps a thought or two to bide the time until of of us becomes enlightened, I'd imagine then there would at least be a helpful parable or two.

In fact, as a starting point, I'm going to share the 4 Agreements, which will not solve the problem, but will render it moot enough until there is one amoung us who can spread the good word. I would recommend picking up the 4 Agreements even if you aren't the spiritual sort: the perscriptions for behavior were created by ancient South American scientists, and they are just a good way to bop about the earthly sphere.

1. Be impeccable with Your Word: Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others (the Buddhists would call this spreading compassion). Use the power of your word in the direction of truth & love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally: Nothing others do is because of you (This is actually quite intuitive. The last friend/parent/whatever you got into a scuffle with, was it totally something they did, or was their action more the last straw in your already bad day, or something that would be called "the last thing you nedded to happen"). What others say & do is a projection of their own reality. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, (When combined with Agreement 1, we can find the real meaning of this Agreement & avoid shutting out the helpful opinions and actions of others, assuming we are sure they are acting in good faith and in our best interests) you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions: (This one is huge, probably the most important and profound of the 4 if taken to heart. Most people are actually kind-hearted, and we can avoid some of the problems I listed above by seeing what is actually going on v. what we think is going on. See the last couple posts). Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness & drama.

4. Always do your Best: (This is the realist clause. We will not be perfect, for we are human and will all make mistakes, but setting perfectionist goals is the most diret route to feeling like a failure) Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgement, self-abuse, and regret.

So give them a go, let me know what you think. I gotta go, I have a date with music. Good luck.

Reflections before moving on

This post must remain brief, for I am just exhausted after another weekend in the life of, but I just had to drop a quick line about feelings. Specifically, it is jut about this hour of night when the magic of self reflection escapes the cerebral realm and resides fully in the emotions, you know, those things that manage to short circuit rationality and truly allow us to be more than just badly reasoning machines. If this seems like a departure from the norm of postings here, in a major way it is. It is tough trying to find a way to semi-intellectually discuss ideas which require as their root emotive feeling, especially at 3 in the AM. Thus if this meanders too much into the personal I apologize in advance, and pledge to all who dare read these extended brain droppings that I hope to improve in this capacity ASAP. As far as I can tell there is an interesting topic in here somewhere and I will refuse all those who will attempt to call me New Age or things of that offenseive nature. Good luck, and here we go.

I have noticed a disturbing trend as I wander the streets of an extremely liberal, soon to be extremely cold neck of the woods, and that is, at least in my limited perceptions, that there seems to be a lack of actually feeling the experiences that we all have. From regret of things both said and not, to moving beyond the recognition of crisp cool early winters day to feeling how alive and aware the crisp air makes the spirit feel: it all falls under a lack of awareness, but I have to make a call of just how pernicious this lack of awareness actually is.

For example. As I was perusing my usual series of sites on the web to visit I was struck by a particular page I came across. Now, these late night trips around the cyber space are generally focused on keeping up with old friends, be they via blogs or the facebook or whatever, and I stumbled across an old and brief flame of summers past. As I saw her picture I was struck by everything associated with our brief relationship, from the joy of finding a new and inspiring interest to the many ways that I mistreated what our relationship could possibly have been. Now I am not one to condone in any way sitting in the past or projecting about the future, but for the first time since we physically parted ways I actually felt the impact that these feelings had and have upon me. Now this was a brief "fling" in the grand scheme of things, but in fully taking responsibility for our interaction I realized that my actions while we were something were tied more deeply to my frame of mind and how I felt then and now. More specifically, in my actions, or lack thereof, I not only furthered the spiral I was going down but (and this only conjecture) I also threw mistrust and misperception of me and 'us' into another person who did nothing to deserve any feelings of ill will, confusion or whatever, especially on account of me that were aroused by the sum of the situation. This left me feeling strange, and for the first time I saw a kink in the armor of a statement that I still hold dear, that being that it is better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done.

What this all amounts to is the idea of getting out of our minds. To make more clear, it is only because I refused to be aware of what she did (and potentially could have) meant to me that I ended being the catalyst of drama that only a theatre major could truly appreciate. If I had only taken a moment to take stock of how I felt instead of how I thought I felt, or how I thought I should have felt, or how I though she felt: I might now be spending this moment reveling in the rosy glow that memory often loves, the polished memory of a wonderfully simple time when all we had was our day job and our evenings to spend on the beach by a wonderful (albeit polluted) lake. Instead I am forced to take a moment for a late night study in the consequences of our actions, which while in the end cathartic, leaves me a little sad that I set myself up to be in this position in the first place.

So this is the topic of discussion, if there is one which can arise out of such early morning (and thus barely coherent and linguistically and narratively poor) thoughts is the idea of moving from what you think you know is going on to moving to what is actually going on. There are subtle differences to these two thoughts. In what we think we know, we judge, attempting to sort the world into neat little packets that we can pull out on a whim to apply to new situation to either 'not get burned again' or know the right course of action, or whatever. Moving to what is going on requires the recognition of how precious each moment we have actually is; that each action we perform moves us one step close to our inevitable demise and so to have a moment that even in retrospect will be considered 'wasted' (that is, a moment that attaches any sort of regret) is quite possibly the most damning thing a human can do. Thus we may very well may make the wrong decision most of the time, but in doing so I really believe that the reward we get for those rare 'soul to soul moments' (more on them in another post soon) even in the midst of a what hindsight would call a mistake, are what make worth living. So the question to ask oneself may take the form of "Is this rewarding enough to make me proud to have done it?" while we lay on our deathbeds, and if the answer is "yes" that I would argue that is the only answer needed and the only analysis necessary.

So to that gal who slipped thorough my grasp, I will say this to you. I truly enjoyed the all too brief time we spent together, and I wanted to honor you and us as best as I could have. Understand that my priorities were focused on consumable substance rather than the substance that makes up a person, and all of the times that I didn't call, or gave an excuse, I was really just suffering from a lack of personal awareness. Although cliché, it was not you, it was me, and I hope that you can sympathize with the idea that we all have to walk our own crooked mile to get to a place where we can be good to ourselves and others and I just wasn't quite there yet. So as the days roll on, I look forward to seeing how you are doing, and I hope that as we converse again you might see where I am v. where I was.

By the way, if anyone wants a homework assignment, I would say it to be this. Stop thinking and realize where you stand right now and the actions and thoughts that got you there. Chances are you see some things that you like and some that you don't. Now store those good qualities, and stop being passive aggressive and start to work on those qualities that makes you take pause when you pause. When done right, the feeling is akin to realizing you are carrying a watermelon: once you realize you are holding it you can put it down, walk on knowing that you have lightened the burden of the soul just a little bit more.

Well, is it easy or not?

The lifeguard's existance is action packed. Unless you work at the YWCA, in which case your existance entails watching people swim back and forth, 25 maddening yards at a time. It does however, afford interesting opportunities to watch just how frequently and perniciously the silly people of the world make things so much harder than they actually are. I mean, I watch swimmers every day emerge from the pool visibly flushed and exhausted after swimming a distance that I could easily have done while smoking a pack of cigarettes (suspend this disbelief at how one smokes underwater, but the point is there). And it is not as though these people are hopeless, or amputees, or [insert your own thing that would hinder swimming here], they merely have leapt before they looked, and now battle against the water when they could soon be sliding through it, like a child down a waterslide.

The issue does not end there. Sports aside, I watch people struggle at many various tasks, be it making a pass at the opposite gender, cooking dinner or even smoking a cigarette. I mean, we must be in need of a pretty good overhaul when I can walk past a smoker and worry if they are going to hurt themselves actually smoking it. This post isn't about cancer though, so I'll leave that aside: it is about effort, more importantly the misplacement of our mental and physical energies such that at the end of the day we would rather throw our loved ones out of the nearest window than give them some welcome home affection.

I'll take as the beginning of our need for simplicity from the universe itself. Think of our seasons, the cycle of the moon, even watching the leaves fall. Although I cannot actually ask a tree, I'm pretty sure it does not stress about losing its leaves until spring, or attempt in vain to continue providing nutrients for leaves that no longer want/are able to get it. Yet take a look at humanity: anyone who has dated has put in a nights worth of effort without the reward we seek only to find a better option when we have given up hope, or suffered through a difficult problem (I always enjoyed advanced logic suffering personally) only to solve it in your sleep, in the bathroom, suing David Copperfield (I'll explain later) whatever. The path of least resistance often turns out to be the quick route between problem and solution.

And by least resistance I mean most efficient. Solving the Theory of Everything requires a little more than a bubble bath and the new issue of Scientific American. But what it does require is the realization we only have so much energy to use in thought before other thoughts drift in (like how the days of the week got their names). Thus worrying about whether or not you will get that job interview while you are still writing the cover letter is severly counterproductive: not only are you distracted from writing the cover, but you actually are distracted from worrying, if that is actually what you want to do with your life.

I don't quite know where this need for complification comes from. It could come from society, where we are taught by TV commercials that we are not good enough (at least without that new terrible looking bottled mixed drink -- with that hot women will have sex with us, regardless of gender and whether we knew we wanted it or not), movies an other media. Or perhaps it is the education system, with the unintended consequence of teaching certain children things their minds just can't handle (remember the kids that failed math, or were held back a grade in Kindergarten and so on) which teach children that the way to progress is paved with obstacles. Or perhaps we learn it from our parents and the various unconcious ways that they let us know that we are destined for a future of unfullfilling employment. Even the popular conception of marriage, which should be the most rewarding option two people can choose, get lambasted in such terrible programs as the War at Home (f*%^ you Michael Rappaport), letting us know that even when we are 'happy', we will inevitably have to deal with trauma. Or it could even be as simple as boredom: as my roomate says 'People without enough to do do it to make their lives have meaning'.

I'm not sure what the actual answer is, potentially it is the conjuction of all of the things I mentioned earlier. I do think now that it is another negative function of the domestication that we all go through. From early childhood most of us receive the notion that we have to scratch tooth and nail for everything that we have, and if you really want something you may have to leave a trail of destruction in you wake to get it. To all you folks I bite my thumb. If no one has noticed (and I think I have mentioned this before) is that the things that happen just do: they do not come assigned with value; we create the value. Thus the idea of look out for #1 is one reason (I am almost positive) why we can now turn on the Weather Channel to watch news as terrifying as anything on the major networks at 5 but that is a question for another day.

I will admit that our rationality seems to also provide us the feelings that complicate our lives: it is hard to be rational when one is love, or broken hearted, or just depressed. Not even rational, it is hard to believe that the world isn't in black and white. To this I would suggest that the only real way out of this is to see one's self as another member of the world. That is, the way we feel is just another thing that happends in the world, and it is up to us to choose how we feel about it. Thus, the next time you feel down, admit you feel down: accepting your feelings as opposed to feeling bad about it, or fighting it: it is that underlying current of desperation, the feeling of resolution now, that saps the mental strength just like living in inefficient life does.

My apologies if this ever smacked of a self help seminar, but the point is that keeping it as simple as possible is not only refreshing, but it will make you a much more pleasant person to be around. I mean seriously, if I have to look at more people with slightly downturned mouths as permamant expressions I will not hesitate to start kicking ass.

If there is anything to try today, it is what is called the Alexander Technique. This technique teaches the use of the appropriate amount of force for a particular activity, giving you more energy for all your other activities. This is a 100 year old method which helps a person discover a new balance in the body by releasing unnecessary tension (For more info, check out http://www.alexandertechnique.com/). Even if you think the technique is claptrap, the point of the concept is one that we can all use.

Before I go, close the plothole in today's post about suing Dacid Copperfield. Christopher Roller, a Burnsville MN man (it just makes such sense that he is Minnesotan) has decided that both Davids Copperfield and Blaine perform ungodly tricks. So in true American style his answer: the lawsuit. Roller says that if Blaine and Copperfield show him their tricks "with scientific principals [sic] that don't defy laws of physics" -- and allow him to "imitate/copy in slow motion" as they do it -- and, if in his judgement there is a "worldly" explanation for their tricks, he will drop the suits. But he's fairly confident that they cannot do the tricks with mere worldly power, because they are surely using "godly" powers to do their tricks. And that, he says, is the basis for his suits, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota this summer. I won't blow the whole story, but if you have some free time, please visit http://www.mytrumanshow.com/. It makes me fully aware that the world is coming to an end, but if it is at the hands of this man, I at least will go out laughing pretty hard. Be sure to check out his thoughts on fathering 1,000,000 children, with two of the parents being Katie Couric and Celene Dion. Enjoy.