quotations from a wise woman:
"Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not hte work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope the birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back."
"So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened."
"Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficientyly difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.... A shoe saleseman ... is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. There are many manuscripts already—worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it? Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?"
"Where next? I knew where next. It was within my possibilities. If only I could concentrate. I must quit. I was too young to be living at a desk. Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever."
– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
2.25.2010
2.16.2010
here's something i took part in back in november. you'll find me by pseudonym max on these pages, and though the whole spectacle is worth a read (fascinating & horrifying at the same time), it's extremely long. certainly worth knowing if you or someone you know rides a two-wheeled vehicle in los angeles, because the folks who listen to larry mantle on kpcc tend to be rather progressive and intelligent. but after that jackass doctor assaulted those men on bikes with his car, the dark underbelly of kpcc's listenership showed up, both on the phone lines and the comments that followed the show. people feel actively hostile to two-wheeled vehicles. let's marvel, why don't we, at something revealing and embarrassing to us angelinos:
part I - originally aired 11/03/09; generated so much controversy and interest, everyone called for further coverage, thus...
part II - originally aired 11/11/09; as follow-up with new experts to set the record straight, generated just as much discussion on the comments page.
part I - originally aired 11/03/09; generated so much controversy and interest, everyone called for further coverage, thus...
part II - originally aired 11/11/09; as follow-up with new experts to set the record straight, generated just as much discussion on the comments page.
2.10.2010
ok, so, i will admit. at around the age of 14 or 15, i was sucked into the positive-thinking, manifest-your-thoughts, non-empirical, supposedly spiritual way of looking at the world. i read or skimmed more than a few of those hippie texts. today, i am not only as atheist as they come, but a proud cynic/skeptic, and prone to annoyance at the people who spout this hippie nonsense. if i could do a good impression of cartman, i'd be doing impersonations of him all day long! "damn hippies!" it's kind of mean, b/c in a lot of cases, they're just such an easy target.
that said, has anyone noticed that there's not much more academic rigor in a lot of the things that psychologists practice and are taught? has anyone ever visited a psychologist before and found they had someone who was mixing their ideas about the divine wisdom of the universe with their practical advice, to ill effect? i think it can be a big problem. but we're still in the dark ages about most of what the brain does, and how it responds to various behaviors and courses of treatment. a lot of widely used psych meds don't even have very high efficacy rates, despite unfavorable side effect profiles.
how can you definitively address subjective matters, of life and relationships, if you don't even trust the psych community to have come to any compelling conclusions? i don't think you can. and if that's the case, why is any one source better than another that at least doesn't contain contradiction or suggest hampering another's freedom? why should i feel so superior to these hippie-dippy texts just because i think they do bad science? perhaps they still have some good points of view, in terms of being compassionate and kind beings?
i recalled something i'd read in one of my old hippie texts once upon a time which, at the time, made an impression on me. i decided to re-read it today to see what i thought of it now. you know, i can't say that i think he's wrong or he's right. i don't know what he's basing these ideas on, so it still comes off as hocus-pocus because of how assertive he is with these ideas. but i still think it's an interesting point of view. then again, i'm socially retarded. more to follow.
You have nothing to learn about relationships. You have only to demonstrate what you already know.
There is a way to be happy in relationships, and that is to use relationships for their intended purpose, not the purpose you have designed.
Relationships are constantly challenging; constantly calling you to create, express, and experience higher and higher aspects of yourself, even more magnificent versions of yourself. Nowhere can you do this more immediately, impactfully, and immaculately than in relationships. In fact, without relationships, you cannot do it at all.
It is only through your relationship with other people, places, and events that you can even exist (as a knowable quantity, as an identifiable something) in [your surroundings]. Remember, absent everything else, you are not. You are only what you are relative to another thing [or person]...
Once you clearly understand this, once you deeply grasp it, then you intuitively bless each and every experience, all human encounter, and especially personal human relationships, for you see them as constructive, in the highest sense. You see that they can be used, must be used, are being used (whether you want them to be or not) to construct who you really are.
That construction can be a magnificent creation of your own conscious design, or a strictly happenstance configuration. You can choose to be a person who has resulted simply from what has happened, or from what you've chosen to be and do about what has happened. It is the latter form that creation of self becomes conscious. It is in the second experience that self becomes realized.
Bless, therefore, every relationship, and hold each as special and formative of who you are—and now choose to be....
When human love relationships fail (relationships never truly fail, except in the strictly human sense that they did not produce what you want), they fail because they were entered into for the wrong reason....[but] it would be more accurate ... to say "relationships fail—change—most often when they are entered into for reasons not wholly beneficial or conducive to their survival."
Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them. The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part or yourself you'd like to see "show up," not what part of another you can capture and hold. There can be only one purpose for relationships—and for all of life: to be and to decide who you really are.
It is very romantic to say that you were "nothing" until that special other came along, but it is not true. Worse, it puts an incredible pressure on the other to be all sorts of things he or she is not. Not wanting to "let you down," they try very hard to be and do these things until they cannot anymore. They can no longer fill the roles to which they have been assigned. Resentment builds. Anger follows.
Finally, in order to save themselves (and the relationship), these special others begin to reclaim their real selves, acting more in accordance with who they really are. It is about this time that you say they've "really changed."
It is very romantic to say that now that your special other has entered your life, you feel complete. Yet the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.
Here is the paradox of all human relationships: You have no need for a particular other in order for you to experience, fully, who you are, and ... without another, you are nothing.
This is both the mystery and the wonder, the frustration and the joy of the human experience. It requires deep understanding and total willingness to live within this paradox in a way which makes sense. I observe very few people do.
Most of you enter your relationship-forming years ripe with anticipation, full of sexual energy, a wide-open heart, and a joyful, if eager, soul.
Somewhere between 40 and 60 (and for most it is sooner rather than later) you've given up on your grandest dream, set aside your highest hope, and settled for your lowest expectation—or nothing at all.
The problem is so basic, so simple and yet so tragically misunderstood: your grandest dream, your highest idea, and your fondest hope has had to do with your beloved other rather than your beloved self. The test of your relationships has had to do with how well the other lived up to your ideas, and how well you saw yourself living up to his or hers. Yet the only true test has to do with how well you live up to yours.
Relationships are sacred because they provide life's grandest opportunity—indeed, its only opportunity—to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of self. Relationships fail when you see them as life's grandest opportunity to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of another.
Let each person in relationship worry not about the other, but only, only, only about self. This seems a strange teaching, for you have been told that in the highest form of relationship, one worries only about the other. Yet I tell you this: your focus upon the other—your obsession with the other—is what causes relationships to fail.
What is the other being? What is the other doing? What is the other having? What is the other saying? Wanting? Demanding? What is the other thinking? Expecting? Planning?
The master understands that it doesn't matter what the other is being, doing, having, saying, wanting, demanding. It doesn't matter what the other is thinking, expecting, planning. In only matters what you are being in relationship to that.
so there's the excerpt from the book, more or less (i omitted some formatting—author goes a bit crazy with italics and phrases w/ overzealous clusters of capitalized words—and where you see "..." it is often because i skipped a passage or two that i found superfluous). and i won't bother to say which book, since i think the message should be judged above and beyond the source, and for the scope and purposes of including this text here, i think it mostly constitutes fair use.
this is a theory which is obviously rooted in a particular way of thinking about the world, one which believes in some sort of divine nature and purpose to human beings, which i don't believe in at all. i definitely think there is a universe (duh) but i don't think it has a consciousness of its own (individual entities have consciousness), and therefore must also lack a will, or any power to manifest any being's will or any of its supposed own will. but certainly if you could look at this advice from a purely secular point of view (i have attempted to make it slightly more secular by omitting references to god or a divine presence, since i didn't think they added to the text), you could see this sort of advice popping up as run-of-the-mill practical advice from all sorts of people who aren't religious/spiritual at all, not because they read it in some book, but perhaps because it's worked for them &/or others they know.
the problem, i think, is that no one conducts clinical trials to come up with empirical data on how to succeed in relationships, make the most out of them, be healthy for ourselves and each other, etc... there are some collective observations we all share, and suspicions we lend credibility to (like the myriad ways the psych community claims that past trauma manifests itself in one's life when not properly dealt with), and for us skeptics, we keep it all in mind with the teensiest grain of salt. but without any basis to discredit any particular recipe for succeeding in relationships, we just keep moving forward, adjusting our actions to our own experiences. and our own experiences are as anecdotal as anything else we might hear in the words of advice from a friend. so i think it's good to be able to step back and look at what theories people have come up with that they believe can lead to desired outcomes. and regardless of how they arrived at that line of thought, analyze it for what it is. so that's what i'm doing.
i suppose i do this all the time, but the somewhat comical spin on this is that i've recently re-adopted a happy brand of cynicism, and this text in a lot of ways is the antithesis to that mindset i've been in lately. so the fact that my brain remembered this particular passage and wanted to review it, seems funny, at least to me.
that said, has anyone noticed that there's not much more academic rigor in a lot of the things that psychologists practice and are taught? has anyone ever visited a psychologist before and found they had someone who was mixing their ideas about the divine wisdom of the universe with their practical advice, to ill effect? i think it can be a big problem. but we're still in the dark ages about most of what the brain does, and how it responds to various behaviors and courses of treatment. a lot of widely used psych meds don't even have very high efficacy rates, despite unfavorable side effect profiles.
how can you definitively address subjective matters, of life and relationships, if you don't even trust the psych community to have come to any compelling conclusions? i don't think you can. and if that's the case, why is any one source better than another that at least doesn't contain contradiction or suggest hampering another's freedom? why should i feel so superior to these hippie-dippy texts just because i think they do bad science? perhaps they still have some good points of view, in terms of being compassionate and kind beings?
i recalled something i'd read in one of my old hippie texts once upon a time which, at the time, made an impression on me. i decided to re-read it today to see what i thought of it now. you know, i can't say that i think he's wrong or he's right. i don't know what he's basing these ideas on, so it still comes off as hocus-pocus because of how assertive he is with these ideas. but i still think it's an interesting point of view. then again, i'm socially retarded. more to follow.
You have nothing to learn about relationships. You have only to demonstrate what you already know.
There is a way to be happy in relationships, and that is to use relationships for their intended purpose, not the purpose you have designed.
Relationships are constantly challenging; constantly calling you to create, express, and experience higher and higher aspects of yourself, even more magnificent versions of yourself. Nowhere can you do this more immediately, impactfully, and immaculately than in relationships. In fact, without relationships, you cannot do it at all.
It is only through your relationship with other people, places, and events that you can even exist (as a knowable quantity, as an identifiable something) in [your surroundings]. Remember, absent everything else, you are not. You are only what you are relative to another thing [or person]...
Once you clearly understand this, once you deeply grasp it, then you intuitively bless each and every experience, all human encounter, and especially personal human relationships, for you see them as constructive, in the highest sense. You see that they can be used, must be used, are being used (whether you want them to be or not) to construct who you really are.
That construction can be a magnificent creation of your own conscious design, or a strictly happenstance configuration. You can choose to be a person who has resulted simply from what has happened, or from what you've chosen to be and do about what has happened. It is the latter form that creation of self becomes conscious. It is in the second experience that self becomes realized.
Bless, therefore, every relationship, and hold each as special and formative of who you are—and now choose to be....
When human love relationships fail (relationships never truly fail, except in the strictly human sense that they did not produce what you want), they fail because they were entered into for the wrong reason....[but] it would be more accurate ... to say "relationships fail—change—most often when they are entered into for reasons not wholly beneficial or conducive to their survival."
Most people enter into relationships with an eye toward what they can get out of them, rather than what they can put into them. The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part or yourself you'd like to see "show up," not what part of another you can capture and hold. There can be only one purpose for relationships—and for all of life: to be and to decide who you really are.
It is very romantic to say that you were "nothing" until that special other came along, but it is not true. Worse, it puts an incredible pressure on the other to be all sorts of things he or she is not. Not wanting to "let you down," they try very hard to be and do these things until they cannot anymore. They can no longer fill the roles to which they have been assigned. Resentment builds. Anger follows.
Finally, in order to save themselves (and the relationship), these special others begin to reclaim their real selves, acting more in accordance with who they really are. It is about this time that you say they've "really changed."
It is very romantic to say that now that your special other has entered your life, you feel complete. Yet the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.
Here is the paradox of all human relationships: You have no need for a particular other in order for you to experience, fully, who you are, and ... without another, you are nothing.
This is both the mystery and the wonder, the frustration and the joy of the human experience. It requires deep understanding and total willingness to live within this paradox in a way which makes sense. I observe very few people do.
Most of you enter your relationship-forming years ripe with anticipation, full of sexual energy, a wide-open heart, and a joyful, if eager, soul.
Somewhere between 40 and 60 (and for most it is sooner rather than later) you've given up on your grandest dream, set aside your highest hope, and settled for your lowest expectation—or nothing at all.
The problem is so basic, so simple and yet so tragically misunderstood: your grandest dream, your highest idea, and your fondest hope has had to do with your beloved other rather than your beloved self. The test of your relationships has had to do with how well the other lived up to your ideas, and how well you saw yourself living up to his or hers. Yet the only true test has to do with how well you live up to yours.
Relationships are sacred because they provide life's grandest opportunity—indeed, its only opportunity—to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of self. Relationships fail when you see them as life's grandest opportunity to create and produce the experience of your highest conceptualization of another.
Let each person in relationship worry not about the other, but only, only, only about self. This seems a strange teaching, for you have been told that in the highest form of relationship, one worries only about the other. Yet I tell you this: your focus upon the other—your obsession with the other—is what causes relationships to fail.
What is the other being? What is the other doing? What is the other having? What is the other saying? Wanting? Demanding? What is the other thinking? Expecting? Planning?
The master understands that it doesn't matter what the other is being, doing, having, saying, wanting, demanding. It doesn't matter what the other is thinking, expecting, planning. In only matters what you are being in relationship to that.
so there's the excerpt from the book, more or less (i omitted some formatting—author goes a bit crazy with italics and phrases w/ overzealous clusters of capitalized words—and where you see "..." it is often because i skipped a passage or two that i found superfluous). and i won't bother to say which book, since i think the message should be judged above and beyond the source, and for the scope and purposes of including this text here, i think it mostly constitutes fair use.
this is a theory which is obviously rooted in a particular way of thinking about the world, one which believes in some sort of divine nature and purpose to human beings, which i don't believe in at all. i definitely think there is a universe (duh) but i don't think it has a consciousness of its own (individual entities have consciousness), and therefore must also lack a will, or any power to manifest any being's will or any of its supposed own will. but certainly if you could look at this advice from a purely secular point of view (i have attempted to make it slightly more secular by omitting references to god or a divine presence, since i didn't think they added to the text), you could see this sort of advice popping up as run-of-the-mill practical advice from all sorts of people who aren't religious/spiritual at all, not because they read it in some book, but perhaps because it's worked for them &/or others they know.
the problem, i think, is that no one conducts clinical trials to come up with empirical data on how to succeed in relationships, make the most out of them, be healthy for ourselves and each other, etc... there are some collective observations we all share, and suspicions we lend credibility to (like the myriad ways the psych community claims that past trauma manifests itself in one's life when not properly dealt with), and for us skeptics, we keep it all in mind with the teensiest grain of salt. but without any basis to discredit any particular recipe for succeeding in relationships, we just keep moving forward, adjusting our actions to our own experiences. and our own experiences are as anecdotal as anything else we might hear in the words of advice from a friend. so i think it's good to be able to step back and look at what theories people have come up with that they believe can lead to desired outcomes. and regardless of how they arrived at that line of thought, analyze it for what it is. so that's what i'm doing.
i suppose i do this all the time, but the somewhat comical spin on this is that i've recently re-adopted a happy brand of cynicism, and this text in a lot of ways is the antithesis to that mindset i've been in lately. so the fact that my brain remembered this particular passage and wanted to review it, seems funny, at least to me.
2.05.2010
a little bored, i suppose, but also very annoyed by some people's apparent lack of critical thinking skills, i got caught up in the discussion that follows the geoff kors (of EQCA) "debate" with andrew pugno (whoever that is) CNN video clip. i use the pseudonym max:
http://ca-ripple-effect.blogspot.com/2010/01/geoff-kors-on-cnn.html
http://ca-ripple-effect.blogspot.com/2010/01/geoff-kors-on-cnn.html
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