Last night, I met with a meditation group called the stillwater mindfulness community. I had mixed feelings about it.
My doctor had recommended it to me, since I don't want to take medication. I don't want to take medication because I don't trust the government, drug companies, insurance companies, doctors, HMO's and employers to continually coordinate in my best interest to keep this thing, that will have become essential to my neural functioning, readily available to me. Taking medication equates handing the control of my mental health and well being over to powerful entities who haven't given me any reasons to trust them. It's also simply a matter of not wanting to pay for it -- co-payments and insurance premiums are expensive. It's also inconvenient to have to keep a supply with me on every trip I take. I guess the question is: are all of these consequences of taking medication worth the benefits? I don't think so -- at least not until I've ruled out meditation or other personal pursuits as viable alternatives.
Anyway, the meditation group was sort of interesting. I can see benefiting from it in a similar way that I benefited from art school: not from the instruction, but from the discipline and community structure that might encourage me to practice on my own. I'm sort of other-directed, and have problems doing anything without some kind of academic guidance. I've always done best in a class or camp -- I sometimes like to think that the solutions to life's problems all lie in some sort of 'camp,' like weight loss camp, assertiveness training camp, computer camp, etc. I feel that I would learn best in an environment of total-immersion. I'd like to attend a series of 'camps.' I suppose this is what the whole 'weekend retreat' community is based on: immersion learning. There are a few things I'd like to be able to do: exercise, eat healthily, program fluently in several computer languages, speak, read and think fluently in several human languages, read music fluently, be more assertive, meditate and live presently, be well-read, and properly manage my money. I'd like to attend a series of camps centered around these disciplines; I think that'd be great.
I'm lazy and rebellious, and always end up eating chinese food in front of the TV. I need to be in some kind of camp. I'm telling you -- the secret to life lies in camps.
I keep going off on tangents. The SMC group seemed to serve the purpose of providing some guidance for proper meditation (posture, breath, etc). But I don't think it was particularly philosophically helpful -- everything that was articulated there, I've already expounded on much more meaningfully in my own writing. But, it could serve some purpose in that it's a community of people with which to share ideas, if I can worm my way inside everyone's skull and actually comprehend what they're talking about when they give their own language-interpretations of what are basically indescribable concepts. When people were discussing after meditation and recitation, it seemed like they were trying to touch on the one true nature of reality, trying to see everything for what it really is. And I suppose they got little glimpses of it, but really I can do a better job furthering my own understanding if I can work within my own system of language to expound on ultimate reality. Having to translate someone else's muddled, inarticulate thoughts into something semi-meaningful isn't really helpful.
There were a few people who spoke to whom I could relate better than the rest, and who made a bit more sense to me. However, they tended to focus their points on peripheral issues -- sort of similar to the way someone might contribute to a discussion on the morality of abortion by quibbling about whether to spell 'foetus' with an 'o' or not.
Also, I was a bit turned off by the ritual. We all had to sit, cross-legged, in a square. When one person wanted to talk, he had to put his hands together, prayer-style, and make a little bow. When others in the square saw this, they would acknowledge his bow with seated bows of their own, and the original bower would then be granted the opportunity to speak. When the speaker was done, he'd signal this by bowing again. I guess it was a functional system for group discussion, but the east asian cultural associations sort of annoyed me. I don't think it's necessary to adopt buddhist cultural baggage in order to get something meaningful out of the core philosophy.
We also recited some things in unison that sounded very much like dogma, swearing not to have meaningless sex, not to kill, not to steal, etc. Even if I happen to agree with a morality at a given moment, I still take umbrage at it being laid in stone as applicable to everyone at all times, and especially if this morality is recited like the pledge of allegiance.
The group leader lost big points with me when he started talking about what sounded very much like fundamentalist buddhism -- 'coming back' as a fish, frog, horny toad, etc. A literal interpretation of reincarnation is, to me, just as laughable as interpreting the bible to deduce that the earth is 6,000 years old. Sure, when we die, the matter and energy that was part of 'us' else is recycled back into the whole of everything, and was never really 'ours' to begin with. 'we' don't exist as beings separate from all reality, and the concepts of 'self,' 'birth' and 'death' are part of the logical network of names and categories that we lay over reality as part of our western and anglo-saxon cultural tradition. There's a reason science, technology and computers have centered in the west -- the west is well-suited to such minutiae, and to conceptually dividing reality into discreet quanta. So, that's reincarnation: the interdependence and one-ness of all 'things' -- not coming back as a goldfish when you die. I'm not sure our group leader understands this, which is a little bit disturbing.
All in all, this group seems too rooted in buddhism, which I'm not particularly interested in, as it's primarily a cultural phenomenon.
However, the community of people, however insane and fundamentally stupid they might be, could be helpful as I become more comfortable with them and more able to understand what they're talking about, as could the discipline inherent in group activity. But really, I think I might get more out of continuing to explore these things on my own through reading and writing, and meditating.
I'll go back to SMC a few times, though, before I decide once and for all that these are just more humans going about things the wrong way.
Every once and a while, I like to turn on the fox news channel. I did so this morning, and noticed something interesting. They were broadcasting a story on violence in iraq, and at the bottom of the screen I saw the banner 'the war on terror.' I thought equating the 'war or terror' with iraq was passe, even in conservative circles. But I guess not on fox news.
All of these failed 'breaks from blogging' have completely ruined my credibility.
There is, next to the kitchen phone, a plastic cup that is full of pens and pencils. The problem is, they are, and have been as long as I can remember, 100% defective (save for one, as I found out this morning). However, years and years of hunting for something to write with in the cup of false-pens, when pressed to write down a phone number or some other telephone-conveyed information, have not yet sunk in. Literally every time I'm on the phone and need to write something down, I check the cup of false-pens, and find only false-pens.
Allow me to photo-document before delving into the underlying philosophy.
Above: here you see the cup of false-pens in its natural habitat. Perhaps some of the falseness of the pens and pencils is alluded to, but one might still think to check it for a working writing utensil.
Above: the contents of the cup of false-pens -- the false-pens themselves. From left-to-right, we see four broken pencils, a nail-file, an extremely light-turquoise colored pencil, a dried-up pen, another broken pencil, another dried-up pen, a highlighter marker, and a yellow colored pencil.
Now, the question is: what is going on here? The cup of false pens gives us a good opportunity to exam the phenomenon of something like entropy. When something is useful, like a pen that works, an unbroken pencil, or a colored pencil that doesn't produce writing that's too faint to see, one tends to use that thing. And, through that use, that thing is more likely, just as a matter of probability, to be misplaced, eventually, in the series of misplacements, ending up in one of the repositories of misplaced things (under the couch, under the bed, behind the desk, in someone else's pocket, etc). On the other hand, when something is broken or otherwise unuseful, it gets put back in the same place, after a brief examination to determine that it's not functional. This process, over years and years, leads to things like the cup of false-pens.
This seems to be a phenomenon analogous to entropy or signal-decay. Maybe the key to fighting entropy and-signal decay is preservation. If a proactive interest had been taken over the years in preserving a functional cup of pens next to the phone (including both resource-investment in acquiring new pens and care of the old pens), then the cup of false-pens might have been a cup of real-pens. In the hypothtical process of pen-preservation, one might endeavor to replace a functional pen in the cup when finished with it, so as to avoid the mad search for a writing utensil that takes place every time someone gives some information to write down over the telephone.
Neither i, nor my mom, are very good at preserving. Her strength is creating. My strength is creating and destroying. But neither of us are very good at preserving. Brahman, vishnu and shiva (creation, preservation, destruction) can be a useful (or at least interesting) tripartite model, as long as one doesn't get too obsessed with it.
I'm going to leave the cup of false-pens next to the phone, as a dada/fluxus performance piece. You can come see it Sunday through Tuesday (closed Mondays). Admission is $5. Restrooms, cafeteria, and gift shop are available during normal museum hours.
Above: an unbroken pencil, found among the false-pens. This represents the hope for the resolution of entropy and nihilism. Of course, I took it out of the jar of false-pens, because a useful unbroken pencil needs to be separated from the unuseful false-pens, so it will be easier to find and available for easy visibility and grabbing. It's anyone's guess what's going to happen to this unbroken pencil in 3-6 days (hint: it's not in the cup by the phone, and it will be heavily used).
I'm tired, and am going to take a break from blogging.
I'm sure there are many pages that you haven't read, or would like to read again. Some of it is discursive rambling, but there are a few interesting theories and stories on this server, if you're willing to wade through the i-don't-know-how-many words.
I'm not sure when I'll be back -- maybe tomorrow, maybe NEVER (admittedly, the latter possibility is fairly unlikely).
To help keep you busy, here's a form that searches google's cache of my blog (as of today, google has indexed my blog through the 30th of june).
Type your search in the text-field exactly as you would on google's main page (you can use quotes, OR, -, +, etc), and click the button to its right. Some suggestions: chicken, "want to kill", katy, "really ugly", christianity, "performance art", etc. Go wild -- the night is young.