@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

At the moment I am waiting for two huge and critical events in my life, the failure of either of which would kill me. My third major event has been a success but I also need these other two and I do not know how to achieve them. So I revisited an old discussion on a thread I posted elsewhere...with comments and reassembled here.

There are only three states of being. They are: 1) wrestling with problems that never end, 2) accepting the occurrence of miracles now and 3) doing as little as possible while you wait for something great to happen. Nothing else matters. There are no other realities.

(This precipitated some comment about other possible states of mind, to which I replied as follows…)

…..The normative mind always thinks reality is about itself and might typically ask which state it should choose but I’m not even trying to broach that question. My intention is Kantian: to describe which states of mind are actually possible. You cannot choose your mood.

I don’t claim to have it perfect yet. And I suspect that the most effective way to be is to cultivate the loosest grip possible on whatever reality passes your way.

(There followed some further interesting discussion about waiting if what you were waiting for never happened, if we were just waiting, without a purpose… There was a strong implication that we collectively did not differentiate clearly between action and waiting…)

….I think the state of being that I have so far called “waiting” is the most complex and subtle of the three and will take a very long time to penetrate with any real understanding. “Waiting” is merely a shorthand for now.

It is obvious what receiving miracles and trying to get things done mean but it is not obvious what constitutes right action when you cease from action.

One obvious thing that the “waiter” is not doing is that they are not planning. Nor are they worrying away at the outcome. Anxiety belongs in the trying state so if anyone is anxious they cannot be waiting.

Waiting may have a neutrality as to outcome, or perhaps it is tinged with the expectation of certainty by virtue of being about realism. Trying, by contrast is all about the unreality of wanting what you have not got.

(There were further interesting contributions about waiting and trying, then…)

I see receiving as the momentary thing when the miracle happens and waiting as a far longer process that occurs between times of receiving, which are, as it were, fulfillments of themes that were brewing.

For me waiting starts with a soft touch: deliberately leaving something alone, like having the willpower not to scratch an insect bite. Scratching is like doing and it inflames the bite.

(The discussion continued back and forth for some time before it became far more complicated, with people suggesting subdivisions of these three possible states of mind and even coming up with moods that appeared not to fit the model at all. I conceded that sleep, coma and unconsciousness did not fit the model… Then someone suggested giving as a fourth category, which I found convincing at first. I later asked this question…)

….I think we can include giving, then, but I accept that madness and coma may lay outside of the scope so far.

So we have

accepting/receiving
attempting/trying
attending/waiting
and
giving/saintliness

Do we also have these:

out of consciousness
deranged
comatose

which?

(Remember, that our game was to find a finite set that covered all possible states of mind. Someone suggested states of absence of mind and I agreed…)

(Someone suggested destructive states of mind, and I elaborated)

Automaticity is very common. It’s when the person speaking is literally mouthing words to release emotional and/or physical tension, so, yes, your destructive states definitely fit. I would extend it to include fixations and addictions that dominate behaviour and incongruent performances like people who have to turn everything into a joke, for example. Obsession also.

Clearly these things overlap with the domain of trying.

This is getting more complicated than I’d hoped.

Finally, we appeared to be agreeing on six states of being, summarised by another contributor like this, the six possible states of mind….)

accepting/receiving;
attempting/trying (useful)
destructive behaviour/thought (useless trying)
attending/waiting;
giving/saintliness;
absence/unconsciousness;

…and then someone else suggested a model with 13 states!!!! To which I instinctively replied:

Anything that is not simple can never be true. Complexity is always part of the cycle of trying.

(We gave up for a while and then I backtracked to this summary…)

My original 3 were:

the acceptance/receipt of gifts experienced as largely uncaused, or miracles
attempting or trying to mould life (the striving and scheming which most of the population does constantly,
attending/waiting (an antidote to trying, wiser and possibly requiring conscious choice or willpower)

to these people have added:

giving (which we have not yet discussed very much, but does superficially seem to be a 4th category)
absence or unconsciousness (which may be a subset of trying, a kind of negative trying, or may be a separate state as in medical coma)
and
destructive behaviour, also undiscussed, also possibly a subset of trying (who can tell me what distinguishes destructive behaviour into a separate class from trying, please)

I suppose what I am questioning most is the useful trying, which was entirely missing as even a possibility from my original three. Also, I am not sure that destructive behaviour deserves its own class.

Someone strongly opposed my pejorative remarks about trying, to which I eventually responded…

I meant “trying” to be a pejorative word right from the start. My original three possible states was meant to be extremely radical.

This was deeply opposed but I justified it thus, veering back to the beginning:

As always, I am looking for the Kantian essence. Just as you cannot have epistemology without space and time, so I am seeking an exclusive set of possible states of being, ultimately without making any judgement upon them.

Thus one cannot receive whilst one is trying, but one can wait to receive. The addition of other states by you and others makes me question whether my original three is a large enough group but nothing is so far determined in my mind.

I have not made this distinction between good trying and bad trying and I am not yet convinced of its virtue. Nor am I convinced yet that things like unconsciousness or dreaming are anything other than trying in another form. And coma? It’s not really a state of being, is it?

When the tryer eventually receives whatever it is she thought she wants she will in that moment have ceased trying and allowed the miraculous outcome to happen, after which she will probably generate new goals almost immediately and start trying again. Perhaps she would have been far better off just generating her goals and then waiting for the miracle of them coming to pass.

Being willing (for something specific to happen) was how Werner Erhard used to put it, but the rest of this idea cluster is new territory that he did not cover.

This was not popular, but someone cleverly implied that my real, covert subject was: How do you get miracles to happen? This has a hint of truth in it…

After this the discussion rambled a little and more or less broke up in flurries of mutual misunderstanding. I strongly felt that I had not and could not get my Kantian purpose across. This is a more or less continuous experience of my life because metaphysical reality is just as real to me as practical things like cooking a meal. Others seem to feel differently.

My three major events were and are:

1) a new love and partner in life after the death of my wife; this has happened, convincingly, without me doing anything at all; it was the event I expected least and the one I might have lived without

2) the recovery of my health after serious heart problems following the death of my wife; this is the event I need most and though progress is being made I cannot say that I feel whole again or ever will because I cannot complete even small tasks without breathlessness

3) a change of scene and a new home, to distance myself from years of grief; I did not know that I needed this until it came upon me and I have done everything possible to locate a house and make my own fit for sale; the wait on this is electrifying

(Copied from my post on Ecademy – this was a set of statements and questions to them, not to you; please comment – I think it’s a serious insight.)

I’m being burned by the brilliance of so many brightly perfect radiating stars. That’s what online networking has done: it has polished, sharpened, brightened and rendered more abrasive what used to be called the “personality” so that now one seems to be locked into a dream-world with entities who are more than human, more than brands even – so clever, so organised, so wise, so “solutions driven”, so planned, so witty, so neat looking – that it hurts to be around them.

That’s what has happened in the last 3-4 years. We are changing what it means to be a person as we transmit our carefully fashioned words and images across cyberspace and have them picked up, redoubled, dumped on the screens of imaginary “contacts” who are all doing the same thing. Can you remember a time when your ego didn’t have the tools to feed a vast imaginary audience, when a few jokes and and a slight nervous tick was all you had in social situations, before you became a superhero…

Such a contrast when you actually meet people in “real life”.

It is altogether possible that you didn’t even know Dvorak wrote some very moving works for solo piano that rival those of Grieg for poetic intensity.

Well now you do; these:

http://www.amazon.com/Dvorák-Complete-Piano-Music-Box/dp/B0009OALJM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1248635439&sr=1-1

Reviewed here:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classRev/2005/Sep05/Dvorak_Poroshina_92606.htm

Somf it, like Grieg’s famous Lyric Pieces, is repetitive. But much of it will stir the nature in your soul.

Today I hit the kind of mood that would drive most people to drink or drugs or some kind of diversion like going out to eat a disappointing meal or even hiking in the rain to the point of exhaustion. And I’m lousy company, but what’s worst of all for me is the loss of the core feeling of my very life, which is inspiration.

Normally, for most of the time, I am thrilled by my impressions, fascinated by everything my attention latches on to, stupefied by my own ability to express my thoughts, buoyant in mood and fairly fascinating to be with. That’s how I spend my life, except on days like today, following weeks like this, which in turn followed a dull week. I haven’t felt like this since I was deeply depressed after the death of my wife, in fact, and I have absolutely no reason not to feel as cheerful as I was three weeks ago.

Because I have a new love in my life, a new plan for where and how to live, plenty of projects to keep me occupied – and my health is gradually recovering.

What most people do at this stage, as I said, is attempt to divert themselves. When that fails they may take it out on those around them. Or they may want to talk about it to solve their “depression”. Or they may start looking for causes in the hope of finding a remedy while secretly cursing themselves for not having grown out of feeling this way.

I happen to know that none of those things works even to the slightest degree. “Fun” is never fun for me unless it occurs spontaneously. I do not inflict my emotions on other people. I do not believe in the concept of a personality that can be worked on. I never expect to unravel the nature of myself for the better because I know for certain that much of what I am is genetic and beyond my control.

On days like this my only pleasures are bitter ones: it’s a perfect time to work on tax returns, filing systems, catalogues of stuff you can’t find, a weeding project in the garden, ironing the pile of shirts that’s been waiting for almost a month… It’s a rotten day with rotten feelings attached so I might as well do something I hate instead of spoiling a great day with it.

Normally I refuse to tell anyone about having a grey day because people start to offer patronising advice, positive thoughts, banal diversions, reassuring platitudes, all the stuff you really don’t need to drown you deeper in hopelessness. But today I thought I’d write it here, to make a record of it, to remind myself later of what a blessed life I normally enjoy.

Some people feel like I do today for much of the time. How do I know that? I know that from the way the waste their lives on diversions, from the way they can’t stop talking about being happier, from the way they can’t share a conversation but insist on acting out their own world, from the misery and hostility in their eyes and the resignation in their slouches, from the hysterical tone of the behaviour they generate to cover over the fact that they aren’t ever feeling that good about life, which is tragic, and stems in my view from not letting yourself feel lousy when you do feel lousy.

Some day soon I’ll be inspired again, for no reason that I can control in future, so until then I’m just going to have a decent lunch, try not to depress Cora, take a long evening nap and continue sorting out the Mozart section of my music collection.

Have a nice day out there.

For sheer ecstasy and ultimate aliveness, nothing else on earth beats the wonderful feeling that you personally originate your own world. You are not a wage slave; you are not behaving yourself to please the inner parent; you are not watching your back for criticism; you are not trotting out stale memes. You are the source of your own living.

The reason we look at life with the open, feeling intellect is to see ourselves more deeply and begin to have some power to originate the existence we live. But it doesn’t work if you already know the answers, having ingested the successful memes of your culture, because then all you can do is try to fit your experience into a framework. Naturally, you will also attempt to fit the feelings of everyone else into that framework, not noticing that your framework evolves to the point of transformation as your life moves on.

Hands up everyone for whom everything that passes through their mind is fresh and new as if it comes from themselves and no one else? I guess there won’t be many takers, but it is possible, and it’s not the same as that feeling of triumph when you pounce on the right answer and start blabbing it all around you. If you’ve never felt ecstasy when you’re confused and stuck in the question then you don’t know what I’m talking about yet and you have no understanding of what creativity really means.

Creativity is when your very first reached-for assumption is not that you are right or good or popular or successful or clever, artistic or sexy, but when your very first feeling is that you are unremittingly, whatever is happening, however you feel, the huge and powerful dynamo of light that is being alive.

Nobody can hold that state every second of every day in such a stressful world as this but it can be your default living experience and it’s a whole lot better than living in a head full of other people’s opinions.

Forgive me, but I always intend anyone to see some of themselves in it when I write stuff like that, because it’s in all of us and the more we get that the faster we evolve towards the joy that would be there if we were the origin of our own extences and not the victims of dominant memes.

For the last sex yarrons I’ve been studying online networking styles of thought and expression, the same way you probably have only different I expect because you have a right to your opinion too…
Anyway, sod that, now that I couldn’t care less it’s starting to become clear to me that there are all sorts of infantile and idiotic styles through which people strive to be right all the time and top of the class, leader of the pack, part of the incrowd, or just “liked” or whatever.
I may comment on these more extensively as time goes by but the first type I want to talk about is the helpful teacher’s pet, the one who whenever you say something that could possibly be a question immediately bombards you with the most obvious answer as if you’re so damn stupid you can’t use Google yourself. This person is obviously still back in school and trying to impress everyone that they’ve remembered how to thunk and read the stupid books or whatever. I hate them. They never take any risks. They should be mocked, mercilously, especially the ones who give unasked for business and personal development advice at the same time as being obvious.
A close relative of this teacher’s pet is teacher’s snitch, the one who comes pounding in whenever you criticise the Germans or say anything remotely sexist, ageist, anti-anything they hold dear or inadvertently not environmental enough. This version of the thought police seems to be especially strong on the internet, I don’t know why. I never meet them in real life, or if I do they go straight in to shock and I don’t notice because I feel no empathy for the human mind whatsoever, only for the soul and the poor old body, those good bits that are constantly being bullied by the kids who want to impress teacher that we all carry within us and some people can’t help wearing on their sleeve.
I never give advice unless I am asked for it and I never give information except about myself if I think it might entertain or enrich someone else. They usually ignore me in any case, because they’re all so busy scoring points.

I would very much appreciate any feedback from regular and new users on the way this website works and the content so far. Please comment freely with a view to further developments. Thank you.

We saw this last night and although it was heartless and brutal in places it is very well crafted and in some strange way carries quite profound human values precisely because they are notably missing in the behaviour of most of the main protagonists. It isn’t just a shoot ‘em up Iraq espionage caper.

The technology is breathtaking, ditto the visual impact and the plot lines work on you because just when you think someone on any side of the vested and personal interests in play is about to do something decent or honest, they don’t. The American spooks with their technology are show as both omnipotent and powerless without the old-fashioned cunning displayed by the head of the Jordanian secret service, who is an unforgettable character.

There is a kind of resolution of the main plot theme at the end but several backstories you have been building in your heart are left unresolved or tainted with potential tragedy and in this sense it feels oddly accurate to what life must be like on the front line between Western Imperialism and Muslim terrorism.

Innocent people on both sides get dragged in and badly harmed, which is another even-handed strength of the moral compass of the film. But you’ll need a strong stomach for the torture scenes and a strong spirit for the wasted and scattered lives. Alas, it is also the kind of movie that may set your female companion to wondering whether men actually enjoy violence for its own sake.

This continues from here

Touch 4

Out there is the world. It isn’t different for you than it is for me. It’s just what it is and each of us sees the parts that we see in the mood that we see it. The rich diversity is in us, not in the world, which is just how it is. A person in love might be embracing the world where once (s)he loathed it because (s)he felt unloved. That person in love might be someone who habitually grabs everything within reach and will therefore love the world in a greedy way. Or it could be a person who lives in anxiety and will love with caution that may extend to a fear of loss to come which sours the whole experience. Or both, or any of many further permutations of loving, appreciating, fearing, hating, letting go and trying to control, each of them further shaded by the vocabularies available to that person: their language, their talents, their gifts, their yearnings for what they were deprived of…

This year I see the world in a very different way to when I was a young man or when I was an infant, and though I can still remember the more dramatic aspects of all my earlier impressions, much of what has passed might as well be lost to me, so infinite has been the sense data in just my little life, all of it channelled through the broken operating system that is me; all of it tinged with regrets or coloured with hopes; all of it still in the process of making sense of itself.

But the world is still the world and there is an objective reality out there which no one can even begin to know fully but from which we attempt to derive a stab at understanding some of the rules as we go along, allotting our discoveries a huge diversity of names and filing them under art and science, spirituality, wisdom, poetry, logic, metaphysics, ethics, psychology, economics, whatever. They are only badly-written manuals to devices so complex we should pray every time we switch them on. We cannot know for certain, anything, nor even understand, for certain, the tiniest part of anything. We are not “at one” with it, though it is possible to feel that way when you close down your mind sufficiently and open your senses and your heart. Which is a miraculous gift that really should be the centrepiece of any life.

How far that is away from the world we have actually been creating for several thousand years, where the touch of one single human being can cause the deaths of thirty million others, where the touch of one voice singing one beautiful song that touches our hearts can touch thirty million people with joy from time to time. Such impact we have, even you and I, upon all the people around us while we are busy noticing mostly just what happens to ourselves and blithely assuming that what we see is what others see. This is not so.

You may not have a giant reach through politics or the arts but from moment to moment the mood of the people around you hangs in the balance, dependent to a great extent on your mood, your touch, whether you are snatching life into your private hoard or giving out life to them, generously, sharing the energy that is life and objectively present all of the time, noticed or not…

At this moment we only have a wordy word, a thinky word for this possibility. We call it empathy and though some people have come to worship it there are others who exploit it – and all of us treat as being “about me” rather than “about us”. What I dream of, what my imagination has devised, does not yet exist. It is a life in which what we now call empathy is merely a banal part of a sharing of our common aliveness in every detail, from the simple energetic transactions within a small group to the huge scale organisation of life’s resources so that every being may enjoy a share of the richness that so many are now denied. As yet, no one has been this conscious, this evolved.

and comments are welcome here

This 2004 thread relates to time I spent in the waiting room of an oncology outpatients’ clinic. There were many sad faces in there, including a young mum with her baby, surely too vulnerable to withstand whatever cancer she has? Some were clearly hanging on by a thread, unlike a friend of mine who has come through five cancers and is still fighting. We saw very little optimism, despite the busy NHS service being given.

Many of the patients (presumably all on radiotherapy and chemotherapy and therefore going through living hell) – many of them had their partners with them and in every case it was easy to tell which one was sick and which was just plain terrified.

One couple I could lip-read and overhear. She was the patient and she looked very pale. She was trying to talk to her husband about the options facing her, them, their family, her job, more chemo, etc. – and she was also trying to dig deeper into matters of the soul that were coming up for her, matters of destiny and making life count and being precious because it might soon be over… In her vocabulary, she had lost her inhibitions and was digging deep because she was in contact with layers beneath the trivial.

Her husband, in his business shirt and tie, was reading nature and motoring magazines, showing her pictures of rare birds, fending off everything important she tried to say and generally doing anything but show empathy or be with her.

That day I saw such pain on this woman’s face because her deepest need to be heard was being blocked out…

Can we help each other in times of hardship? Does “being there” for someone mean anything. Or am I just deluding myself with the thought that if that man entered into the illness with his wife and shared some of her burden she would have a far better chance of survival?