toevening blog

Moving to wordpress

2011-07-10T01:30:00.002-04:00

I seem to be switching from blogger to wordpress. Look for the same old blog at http://toevening.wordpress.com/

A tree in a heavy wind

2011-04-28T20:55:00.001-04:00

A late night and a stormy morning. Aborted 5:30 alarm in favor of sleep. In retrospect its not clear how wise this was.

The weather inside mirrors the weather outside. As waves of rain sweep through the city crowding radar maps with bright colors, I find my own sensitive instruments periodically overwhelmed.

Blood filled with adrenaline has a battery acid feel to it. Skin and heart and lungs charged to the sparking point like a 9-volt on the tongue.

Acute sense of impending doom but no clear sense of direction. There is something here; something wants to be heard, but the message is unfocused. Where does this ill wind blow from? From what depths has this unnamed animal passion bubbled up from to break noxiously at the surface?

Don’t know.

Fear? Longing? Injury? What is this?

Don’t know.

Roots reach out looking for ground.

Mind the Gap

2011-04-23T10:48:00.000-04:00

“Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Way out in the water, see it swimming.” – The Pixies

“You ask. That’s your mind. I answer. That’s my mind. If I had no mind, how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Through endless kalpas without beginning, whatever you do, wherever you are, that’s your real mind, that’s your real buddha.... To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible.... Your mind is nirvana.” – Bodhidharma

“And remember, no matter where you go, there you are” – Confucius

“Come as you are / as you were / as I want you to be / as a friend / as a friend / as an old enemy” – Nirvana

“I was basically trying to rip off The Pixies” – Kurt Cobain

My Dinner with Avalokitesvara

2011-04-13T10:35:00.006-04:00

All day trying to climb the ridge of an iceberg but sliding into sleep instead. Finding some purchase by stepping into the weave and weft of the tapestry, the grid of Albert’s spacetime. Breathe in and step up into the moment. Breathe out and reflect. A clean bowl ready to receive.

But then again asleep.

An ancient message from an old master:

"I beg to urge everyone:
Great is the matter of birth and death.
Time waits for no one.
Wake up, Wake up
Don’t waste a moment."

An ancient message from The Flaming Lips:

“Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”

The swordsman uses skillful means to rescue the family, but they do not see the gravity of the situation. Bathed in awe and gratitude they invite disaster. Is this me? Faith, doubt, and determination. Two out of three can perhaps be accounted for, but the other is in question.

A teacher in another time asks the question: “why do you practice?” I don’t know. A beloved metaphor of old: an immovable tree in a heavy wind. But rooted to what?
A gift:

“The root
of all things
is not far
or close
Above, sky
Below, ground
Between, Chris”

Why do I practice? What am I looking for? I have been here before and dropped it. Will this be different?

The first motive was curiosity. But then a skillful means sparked a taste and curiosity became desire. Practice was beautiful and I fell in love with the world like one falls in love with a pretty girl. But this was not enough to sustain when practice became inconvenient. Practice born of desire felt selfish and could not be tolerated. Bright spark faded, the tide came in, and the beach became just an echo of memory.

Now I’ve returned to the waters at this rocky shore and wade right in up to my neck. I do not think the same desire moves me. The time between brought storms both slow and sudden, and my roots could find no purchase. I could not bend enough to ride the wind and so I broke. And in that snap instinct or memory brought me back to this old practice. Perhaps it was to look for solace, but I suspect that even broken I knew that none was to be found on these shores. But arriving here and stepping back into the sea I find that I can hear the waves more clearly. I am a part of this world, and what I do has consequence. For good or ill there are many who are tied to me, and if I break and founder I may take them down with me. But now I can hear the message sent down through the millennia: This vehicle has a flawed design, but the recall notice has been sent and I can make repairs.

Silent tears in a darkened room. Speared through the chest by loving arms steeped in woe. In over my head off of unfamiliar shoreline I am moved by tides beyond my fathom. Sensitive instrument, open and unshielded, the faintest twinkle a blinding light. The sky is full of stars.

Desperately Seeking Oblique Strategies

2010-07-22T19:44:00.000-04:00

I think i grok Brian Eno. Or actually, I grok what I imagine is Brian Eno, which I guess is probably a much less profound statement. Anyway, the Brian Eno of my mind’s eye looks to me a bit like the landscape in my I’s mind. Weeviling around in circles thinking too much about the process of thinking. Trying to manufacture intellectual devices to spur on creativity.

Bus error. Core Dumped. Sick scream of grinding gears and the smell of burning transmission fluid.

“What would you give for your kid fears?”

Not actually certain really. I don’t think I can extrapolate back to my youthful self anymore. Even the blooming kidult of 19-20 seems pretty alien to me at the moment. I’ve no idea what my 20-year old self would make of my life at the moment. Too many sea changes have come and gone in the meantime. Looking at the archeological evidence I think he was something of a romantic wrapped under the security blanket of cynicism. Not sure how much of that is left. If I think about it there is probably still at least an echo there somewhere. A ghost in the machine, perhaps more obvious as absent from the places it used to hang. Forced out by various waves of emergency pragmatism probably. Like a massive HVAC unit installed in the corner of a victorian drawing room. Mechanical pump playing tricks with thermodynamics where a tortured poet’s heart might once have bled.

Interesting to look at the works of that poet that have traversed the changes and strike home still, albeit perhaps in unexpected ways. Denouement, arguably my first wholly successful piece of songwriting, strikes me now as remarkably post-romantic. A meditation not on heroic feats and hearts aflame, but on consequence and carrying on. An ode to echos. The strangely prescient Dark Matter, written back when the metaphor left the outcome in question, but which took on new meaning in December of 1998 when high-redshift supernovae shed new light on very old questions. It’s companion piece, the still unfinished sketch Caroline and the New Cosmology, started as a potential album title and developed to a tiny snippet of music and the final couplet of a chorus before stalling for well over a decade now. The image though still stings true, arguably more apt now than then. Sleeping there is something that wants to be said, but having poked at it the other evening I can say that, for now at least, it is not ready to stand up and be heard. I have not the words to build on it’s haiku perfection as a broken fragment.

Besides, post-romantic me has begun to wonder about the wisdom and generosity of “truth”. Part of me suspects that Bono is right that good artists tend to be dickheads. (Bono, being one, said it better).

Hmm... Robyn Hitchcock is going to end me here. “A happy bird is a filthy bird”.

End of line.

Flawed Bodhisattva Blues

2010-02-19T16:17:00.000-05:00

Life happens. Does seem to be a life happens sort of day today. So yes, life happens, even when I’m not looking for it and maybe not even ready for it. Life still happens and so it goes. A circumstance arose and somewhere I found a transcendent me to respond with kindness and make a leap of faith.

Well, sort of. Actually I don’t think the word faith is really that appropriate in this situation. Manifesting as I was, there was no faith necessary. I was infinite and inexhaustable. However, I was not without my faculties and I knew that there was risk involved and I knowingly made the leap anyway. It wasn’t a leap of faith however, because I recall no sense, either then or now, that there was any sort of safety net at all. There was surely a leap, but it was, I think, a leap of lovingkindness (to borrow the buddhist phrase) and not really one of faith. I felt the need for the action, not the sense that my kindness would be repaid or the comforting sense that it would all somehow work out just fine.

Sunshine asked me if I believe in fate, and I responded with a philosophical discussion about the nature of physical causality and the skepticism slowly creeping into the back of my head about the naive treatment of causality and the arrow of time in modern physics. (Not to mention the weird creepy stuff coming out of entangled quantum states which really is beginning to make me wonder if Danny’s time machine might not really work).. But all this aside, I think the truth is that I don’t really draw any faith from the notion of fate. I don’t think I’ve ever really felt that there was someone or something pulling strings for me or anyone else. Life happens, and other stuff happens too, and I don’t see any global sense of meaning to it all. I see lots of patterns and influence, but no intelligence or hand of kindness conducting the dance. I can recognize what seems like fantastic synchronicity, but I also recognize that there is a survival bonus in recognizing patterns and that, as an offspring of millions of generations of survivors, there is a tremendous anthropic selection effect at work which makes it very likely for me to be susceptible to seeing such patterns in the turbulence of life. The reason Zen Buddhism works for me where other western spiritual paths do not is that it does not require any faith in faith or fate. Surprisingly, despite it’s image of being about nonsensical paradox, I find Zen eminently sensible and logical, and while it can be wonderful and a source of great strength, it is also sometimes cold comfort precisely because of this lack of faith. There are no safety nets, only life and the transcendent which are not two.

So here I am, mid-leap, off the map and suspended in white vacuum. Launched from the platform of Big Heart incarnate, I find myself without landmarks or anything to guide me but my own internal compass. Keenly aware that I’m off the map I consciously work to banish dragons by act of will. I am open and things are fine not through the guiding kind hand of fate but rather by virtue of my own consciously maintained internal balance. Through continued effort I try to maintain the bodhisattva dance and continue to try and channel lovingkindness through a heart at least intermittently in touch with the transcendent.

When manifesting, of course, this is effortless. But I have not the depth of training to manifest continually, and I don’t think it is wise to try anyway. The transcendent is only half the story and one has to live in the world as well as being divine. Yesterday, I was in-the-zone. The dance continued and all was fine. Today, I’m still mostly fine, but awoke just slightly off and that’s where the concern comes in. Cause I’m not Kanzeon. I’m not a saint, and there are flaws in the gemstone through which the laser-light of lovingkindness flows. Thus far my heart has been able to weather the flow but the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. This is the top of the mountain and I’m not sure of the surrounding territory. I have half-formed picture postcard ideas of what the stable equilibrium would look like, but I’ve no map from here to there and I’ve no idea if there’s a great big mountain in the way. Somehow I need keep dancing on the head of this pin until I find a path or quantum tunnel to the stable point. I have more strength than I would have thought, and I’m not completely alone, but this high-wire act is not being performed with the safety net of faith, but rather over a mine-field of buried fear and despair (and perhaps non-existant dragons).

Ice-cube tray people

2010-02-16T14:42:00.002-05:00

Where did we get this notion that ones “private” life should not overlap with ones “professional” life? I mean, I can certainly understand the reasoning motivating such a principle. Employers want predictable, reliable employees, and personal lives, fraught as they are with emotions and other messy complications tend to make people act unpredictably. But the notion that such a compartmentalized ideal is actually achievable seems to me to forget that professionals are, in fact, still human beings. The only way to reliably keep your personal life from affecting your professional one is not to have a personal life at all. The fact that we are reminded of this in scandal after scandal after scandal, and still look at them as scandals is a sobering reminder of how dehumanized our society has become. (Our unforgivably failed social norms about the proper care of children is another). I’m beginning to think that the true citizens in our society are not human beings any more, but corporations and other similar collective entities, and this is a thought that is beginning to scare me.

How come everybody wanna keep it like the kaiser?

2010-02-11T03:35:00.000-05:00

Here’s an unusual perspective you don’t hear much about. It is possible to love someone you’ve never met, never even spoken a word to. It’s possible to love them completely and totally unreservedly, with no strings and no expectations. In fact, i daresay its quite common. I’ve loved my son since well before I met him. He never had to earn such affection. It was given freely and without hesitation without merit. With no guarantee for my own return I tied my heart to his and have never counted the (not inconsiderable) cost of doing so.

And yet it seems as a people we don’t apply such notions beyond the parent/child relationship. For love between peers we look for some sort of quid pro quo. There are probably many reasons for this and some of them may even be valid and true. To be sure you need to be secure in your own situation first. You must have faith your own needs will be met to be open. Indeed, the drunken idiocy of fresh romantic love might even be a biological adaptation which catalyzes pair-bonding. In our stupid twitterpated state we never ask the tough questions of quid pro quo which we worry so much about the rest of our lives. Buzzed and horny we just take a leap of faith and hope it all works out. Then, when the buzz wears off, we start keeping score again and start getting divorced.

But ponder for a moment how much it diminishes us. This planet is full of so many lonely Eleanor Rigby’s, so many broken hearted souls freezing in the cold indifference of the world. Fear and loneliness make us so terribly small. But imagine the bliss of opening our hearts to others without need of return. Imagine the limitless, meritless love of new-minted parenthood writ large on the canvas of life. Imagine being not small, but limitless and inexhaustible. Imagine being big heart. Or better yet, don’t imagine, manifest. You are big heart. We all are. We just tend to forget.

I did. I’d even found it again for a while, and amazingly forgot it anew. And then, out of nowhere, amid a most disorienting and chaotic emotional tempest, a crisis which threatened to plunge me deep into dark places forgotten for 20 years, it was there. Open. Like someone switched a light on in me. Big heart incarnate, flooding the world with life. Still blissing on it as I write. I’ve missed this.

Welcome home.
Namaste

The furniture in the child-mind's playroom

2009-03-09T16:00:00.000-04:00

In 1975, Carole King wrote songs for an animated musical movie with children’s writer Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, etc..). The album from Really Rosie is actually one of Carole Kings stronger releases and is one of those things thats literally been in my life longer than I can remember. I’d have been
2 or 3 when this music appeared in my house, earlier than my earliest long-term memories and so I literally cannot recall my initial reaction to it. It just one of those things that’s always been there.

Now I can remember listening to the album (rather a lot) as a child, and so it is strongly embedded in my permanent memory. Perhaps in a similar vein, I can’t really remember seeing Star Wars for the first time, but I’m so familiar with it that I can actually listen to the John Williams score and quote about 80% of the dialog in perfect timing. Useless and geeky, I know, but this is what’s embedded in the foundations of my brain.

Anyway, back to Really Rosie. It’s only really recently however that I’ve actually stopped to take notice of the contents. We bought a bunch of Scholastic DVDs for Laz, and one of these includes excerpts from Really Rosie. Now I grew up with the album, which came with a booklet of pictures, but I don’t think I’d ever actually seen the movie. (Of if I have, it’s lost in the mists of my pre-memory). Seeing this as an adult, I’m struck by the oddness of the content. There’s a song about a boy who gets eaten by a lion and then befriends him (in that order). There’s a song about a boy obsessed with Chicken Soup, (and dies eating it according to one of the songs on the album). There’s a counting song about a boy who want’s to be left alone and threatens to eat all his unwanted guests. There’s a lot about eating. Weird.

Anyway the thing that struck me this morning is not that it never occurred to me that these things were weird, but that I’d never even noticed them before. They were just there as part of the landscape of my existence from my haziest early memories. Just an example of a large class of things that I “knew” long before I’d “understood”. When and where did I learn the concept of mortality? Or the idea of “God”?

The latter is a particularly interesting question since my family was never particularly religious. They weren’t militant atheists raging against religion. Rather it was just largely absent. So in what context did I discover that people believed in a God or Gods or the like? I have no memory of learning this rather astonishing piece of information. To this day I have a significant discomfort engaging with deeply religious people. It’s not that I’m afraid they are going to despise me or attack me or whatever. Its a much more fundamental hind-brian feeling. It’s xenophobia pure and simple. It’s a version of the same chill up the spine you get when confronted with a snake or an insect or a spider. The recognition of being in the presence of the alien. Somehow the landscape of my child-mind included both the knowledge of religious belief and the understanding that it was not I, well before I was ever able to consciously discern and evaluate these things. I can only assume that the reverse must be true of many of those brought up in strong religious traditions.

Watching the interaction of this phobia with my burgeoning interest in zen has been interesting to say the least. It’s probably no accident that the kind of spirituality that speaks most directly to me is the kind that is least personified. Spirit in 3rd person is easy to accept: God is everything. Great. I can even just about get with Spirit in 1st person: God is me. But the concept of Spirit in 2nd person: a conscious personal God which is external and other stings like a 9-volt battery on the tongue. Creeps me out like a Ridley Scott movie, and yet that very surrender seems to provide great comfort to others.

All of which seems miles away from where this started.
Hmm...
End of line

Astronomy: not American enough for John McCain?

2009-03-04T15:51:00.000-05:00

So apparently John McCain doesn’t see my profession as a worthwhile occupation for good wholesome Americans. In one of his rabid rants about spending he views as wasteful came the following tweet:

#2. $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii - because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy
1:56 PM Feb 27th from web

Now, I don’t know anything about that particular appropriation, but if it’s anything like most astronomy grants it is probably money that would indeed mostly be spent employing people. Certainly the ~$300k grant that I submitted to the NSF last November to study exploding stars is exactly the kind of thing that he seems to be raving about in his top-10 lists on twitter. This sounds like a lot, but mostly it goes to pay for salary, etc, for graduate students. True a great big chunk gets siphoned off by the university, but even that pretty much ends up paying for salaries somewhere.

The implication here seems to be that investing in Astronomy isn’t investing in people. Apparently employing astronomers isn’t employing people. Granted, not many people make a living in astronomy, but I fail to see why it should be discounted as a profession. It certainly pays my bills and has for some dozen years or so. Indeed, many of the things he complains about sound like legitimate proposals for basic research, most of which will ultimately pay for salaries because that’s usually the cost of doing science. Even expensive equipment purchases ultimately boil down to paying someone down the line for their time. Either McCain doesn’t understand this, or he discounts this because research is the activity of “The Elite”. It takes training and education to be a researcher, and so perhaps this isn’t the work of “real Americans”? Are we seeing the classic Republican ploy of conflating elite (i.e. educated) with elitist (the belief that I’m better than all of you).

In either case, to borrow a phrase from a certain 31st century average American: John McCain can bite my shiny metal ass.

Heliotrope on the Beach (with Einstein)

2009-02-19T15:06:00.000-05:00

It is nice to feel the sun in February. It is good to feel the warmth and see the colors. I naturally want to turn and face it. To embrace the moment and be and celebrate the sensory now between the ticks of the clock. To stop and smell the roses and be, in that pause, the all that is both rose and nose, sensor and scent. To be the face on both sides of the Daddy-Laz nose-to-nose-to-nose-to-nose game.

This is perhaps one aspect of the meditative experience. Certainly it is suggested by phrases such as “being in the moment” which often get batted around in new-agey circles. But I think perhaps that this is also a bit of a trap, or at least it’s a pleasant truth might hide another one. A false minimum which is not a destination but only a philosophical rest stop and scenic vista. Snap a picture, breathe the air, stretch your legs, grab a snack and move on again.

The thing about being in the moment is that it puts a lot of emphasis on “the moment”. That delta-function pixel point, the little frame marker that ticks across the bottom of the You-Tube window. And the thing about moments is they are always fleeting. To be in the moment is to be alive, but always dying. The moment passes, the clouds roll in and you step on a small green wooden triangle left upright on the living-room floor. Ouch.

In my more lucid moments I can just about wrap my head around relativity and see time as space, force and movement as geometry. As Ford Prefect told Arthur Dent, “Time is an illusion and lunch time doubly so.” We experience time as a sequence of moments, irrevocably dripping from the past to the future but physics, (at least some physics) seems to suggest that this is at least partially a matter of perspective. The moment is the interaction of the stimulus and the sensor, but even that is not quite true. Like a general behind the lines my news is always late. I am never in the moment but always behind it, and the information is never pure. I experience not the warmth of the sun (or the son) but only the electrochemistry of the wetware connecting sensors to sentience. And who or what, pray tell, is the I-I that is receiving these messages transmitted through meat and cabling and imagining a world full of sunshine?

In my really lucid moments I can hold these ideas and get a sense of the path as a whole. Of life not as a series of discrete nows but as a 4D holism. A shape without hard edges, but which, while seeming coherent in the middle, is interwoven with the rest of creation like roots in soil. If I concentrate, method actor me can experience June sun in February and February sun in June. If I pay attention, I am not a creature falling through moments, but a me made of moments. The timeless thus of all the nows. This at least is a sort of description of the incomplete glimmer I get of Big Mind like a tesseract shadow projected down to flatland and uploaded to memeland and propagating now inside your own self dear reader.

Nice day for it.

Metaphysical Flywheel (A Clockwork Marmalade?)

2009-02-10T22:19:00.000-05:00

Inevitably, I find that my metaphorical imagery is full of physics. It is only natural, I suppose, given the amount of time that I inhabit that noospace. I suppose it might seem kinda nerdy, or perhaps even sterile depending on the context. Regardless, it is what comes naturally to me, and so there it is.

I suspect it’s not even that uncommon a phenomenon. I dimly recall discussing the dynamics (thermodynamics?) of the “dating” environment with Tara freshman year using a chemistry metaphor. (As I recall, increased environmental pressure and “the ratio” tended to lead to distorted equilibria. And there was something about electronegativity, though the specifics escape me now.) In any case, the point remains: we use the metaphorical structures that come readily to mind, and inevitably those structures are well populated by the language and ideas of our everyday experience.

Thus I tend to use physics metaphors to describe lots of things. Apologies.

Now, as a massive particle I have become keenly aware of inertia of late. Indeed, I seem to battle it on a daily basis. My own mostly. I’ve found it takes a lot of effort to get things rolling, particularly in my head. My headspace has been rather swampy lately: difficult to traverse, far too full of undergrowth and liable to be full of unpleasant smells, quicksand, or alligators. (Not all of my metaphors are physics, apparently.)

Getting things moving in this quagmire has been a difficult task of late, though once I build up some steam, then I can get some things accomplished. On the other hand, I usually get distracted and derailed pretty quickly. Indeed, my life is pretty much divided up into lots of little chunks most of the time. (Thank you academia). So this is perhaps something of a problem. What I need here is a sort of flywheel of the mind. A way to store momentum when I get distracted so that I can get a bit of a rolling start.

Unfortunately, this is where the momentum metaphor seems to break down. The cool flow of samadhi, the laser focus of being “in the zone,” it’s not really about movement. At least not in the Newtonian sense. It’s a gestalt. It’s an eigenstate, or perhaps even an ensemble. A clockwork jammed can sometimes be relieved by a short, sharp shock. But a frazzled self may need more than a boot to the head.

I am out of balance.

The feeling is all too familiar. The fear lurks below the surface of consciousness, a leviathan below mist covered waters. I react too much. I respond too little. I pinball from to to fro without a plan or a clue, and the razor cut of sorrow and regret comes all too easily.

I need centering.

I’ve been here before. There are methods, paths, a way perhaps. But I worry about the cost and second guess the diagnosis. Is this just a selfish desire? A homesick yearning to return to a soothing distraction? Is it selfish to take the time to find an anchor when the storm is raging in all directions and there is water on the deck and in the hold? Is this a luxury I can afford?

Entirely too much Synchronicity II. Time to change the tune I think.

The bridges that can't be burned

2009-01-06T21:52:00.000-05:00

It seems a somewhat forgotten thing in our society that there are some connections which cannot be severed; some relationships which cannot be ended; some lines of communion which cannot be eclipsed. Certainly we can throw up walls and create obstructions, but these do not cut the cord. We can shut people out and cut them off, but we can’t undo the connection.

We tend to look down on codependency as if it is somehow a poor lifestyle choice; as if it were possible to isolate oneself from the other. But here’s the thing: crazy can’t be isolated. It isn’t localized to one person, any more than any other aspect of personality. We do not end sharply at the surface of our skin. Selves are non Newtonian particles. We do not exist in isolation. We are inherently shaped by our environments: physical, biological, social. Like quantum reality we are the single selves that are not single, the localities that are not local. And we are not immune to phase mixing. Our chocolate mixes with our peanut butter and we cannot save our selves or others from ourselves or others.

We pretend that this is not true. We pretend that we can somehow walk away but the severed limb still aches, and entropy still wins in the end. The bridge cannot be burned because it is our self, and we burn our self in trying.

“Hand of kindness, come gather me in like a rainstorm” – Tift Merritt

Committing the Inevitable Educator Betrayal.

2008-12-09T17:48:00.000-05:00

My job has a conflict of interest with my job. Actually, if I think about it, there may be more than one. In any case there is at least one very clear pair roles which I’m supposed to simultaneously fill in the classroom, and I’m not sure these roles are easily reconciled with one another.

On the one hand, I’m supposed to be a facilitator. My role is that of a tour-guide, guru, translator and generally experienced dude. Ultimately the student needs to do the work to learn something, but I’m there to try and clear the weeds out of the path. In order to be effective in this role it is very helpful if I can gain the student’s trust. It’s a difficult thing to admit you’re clueless, but if a student isn’t able to be open with me about that then I can’t help. Failure is an important part of the learning process. If I can engender enough trust that the student’s feel free to try something difficult, fail at it, and try again, then I’m doing well in my job as a facilitator.

On the other hand, the system in which I teach is not set up in isolation. Students don’t, for the most part, go to school just for the joy of learning. We live in a world where knowledge and understanding is a commodity which is bought and sold on a daily basis. Indeed, the other role I’m supposed to fulfill is one of assessor. I’m supposed to assess the student’s understanding of the subject and, effectively, provide the student with the capital they have to play in the knowledge economy. (In reality, this capital is pretty short lived, usually only lasting as long as the next job/school application process, but it’s important to that extent.)

Now student’s aren’t stupid. They know that the grade they get out of a course has a tangible affect on their future and well-being. This tends to make them a bit touchy about their grades and leads to a distortion of the learning process. Students tend to view the grade as the result of taking a course and classes take on a kind of sports metaphor. You play the game until there’s a result, and then you forget about it and look to the next challenge. Educators tend to use a architectural metaphor, focussing on understanding as the desired result, and expecting students to build on that understanding in the next course. Thus the clash becomes visible.

If I’m acting as an assessor, that tends to put me in an adversarial position, not an enabling one. It undermines the trust and safety of the classroom because futures are on the line. As an assessor I’m expected to punish failure while at the same time as a facilitator I’m trying to encourage risk taking. As an educator, I’d like to assign really challenging problems which really push students to make cognitive leaps. If I then turn around and coldly assess their failure, then I’ve undermined the very process I was trying to encourage.

In other words, I hate grades.

At the same time, I’m not certain what could be done about it. Ultimately, knowledge and understanding do have value, but it’s damned hard to assess. Proper assessment takes time and as the classroom instructor I’m probably most qualified to make that assessment. If we take grades out of the school system then it needs to be replaced by something else, because eventually the student needs to participate in the knowledge economy. If I’m not assessing, then potential employers or grad schools etc will be doing the same. But likely they will be doing it with less information then I have. Of course, I throw a lot of that information away when I just boil a student’s progress with a subject down to a single number.

So generally I practice the art of deception. I try my best to downplay grades, and then quietly betray them to the registrar at the end of the semester.

Self-Referential Webs of Interconnectedness

2008-11-28T23:43:00.000-05:00

So, if you look over to the right-hand side of this blog, there are a couple of new links, one pointing to my Twitter stream and the other pointing to my new Facebook profile. If you’re the kind of person who is interested in pursuing that sort of thing, feel free to chase down my ever thinning supply of worthwhile thoughts as they spread out in my increasingly deluded attempt to stay hip by belatedly jumping on long overworked netgen trends. (Yikes that’s a long sentence!)

Begging for Photons Part II: Finding the limit

2008-11-26T23:05:00.000-05:00

So some poking about on websites has yielded some results... First, getting information out of NASA is definitely a “wheat from the chaff” kinda operation. NASA documentation is a bewildering blizzard of information presented in a format that probably made sense to the instrument designers, but is not end-user friendly. Eventually I managed to random-walk my way to an exposure-time calculator.

And this is where I typically meet my second challenge. The late-time spectra of supernovae are weird. They are dominated by line emission, but the lines are actually quite wide, something like about 1/10th of the spectral width of broad band photometric filters in the NIR. (Roughly 600 Angstroms or so for a line near 1.64 microns for the gear-heads out there). Now for several years I’ve been estimating the strength of the late-time emission lines in SNe Ia by extrapolating Peter Meikle’s absolute IR light curves from 100 days post max to the epoch of observation at around 1 year. For the extrapolation I assume that the late-time light curve fades at a rate consistent with the 77 day half-life of Cobalt-56, which is the dominant energy source in the ejecta. This gives me a rough H-band magnitude for the late-time epoch, and has been OK at predicting the strength of the emission, though I haven’t rigorously tested how accurate this is. (Probably not that accurate, I’d guess, but I don’t really have any other method).

Since this method gives me a broad-band magnitude, I then have to convert this to a line flux. Now flux points for broadband magnitudes are actually tabulated as flux densities (ie flux per unit wavelength rather than the actual integrated flux in the band pass). Thus I first have to convert the flux point to a total integrated band flux. If the flux calculation requires a total line flux, then I’m home and dry, but if it wants a flux density, then I have to divide the integrated flux by the width of the line before trying to go on with the calculation. I’ve run into both situations for different instruments, but for the NICMOS calculator it’s just integrated line flux, which is easier.

Then its a matter of choosing settings, clicking on radio buttons and filling in web-forms and after a bit of tweaking it appears that a 900 second exposure would detect my emission line at a S/N of about 1 for a supernova with a broad-band H-magnitude of about 23. That’s pretty good actually. It means I can probably go about 2-3 magnitudes fainter than my ground-based observations and still have some hope of getting enough of a detection to measure a Doppler shift. Hooray.

Now the next question: are there enough targets to make this an interesting program to run in the spring?

Begging for Photons

2008-11-26T20:26:00.000-05:00

If you’re the type interested in peeking behind the curtains, read on:

In late September, the Hubble Space Telescope freaked out. The computer system responsible for transmitting data to the ground crashed. Thankfully, the telescope didn’t completely stop talking to the ground, but it took quite a while for the systems to come back on line. Now, thanks to NASA’s long held religious belief in redundancy, the telescope is once again taking data and transmitting the information back to hungry astronomers on the ground.

Now this failure happened just as NASA was making final preparations for the final servicing mission to HST. Since it wasn’t clear if they’d have to replace the communications electronics, NASA decided to delay the servicing mission again. (For reference, this servicing mission was originally scheduled to happen in 2003 and got sidelined in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster, so HST has been waiting for this visit for a *long* time!) Currently they’re guessing that the servicing mission will be sometime next spring.

Meanwhile, the last round of HST proposals for “Cycle 17” took place last winter and was explicitly expecting to use the new and refurbished instruments after the servicing mission. But that was assuming that the mission was going to be this last spring. It’s now been delayed at least a further year, and the observing queue for approved programs using the existing instruments is running dry. So they’ve put out an emergency call for proposals to fill in the time until the servicing mission. They are specifically looking for proposals which will either use a lot of time (>100 orbits) or “High risk/high gain” type proposals. So the gold rush is on to collect those photons which are about to “fall off the back of a truck,” and it’s time to dig up semi-crazy ideas for what to do with aging HST instruments.

Now one of the side effects of specializing in infrared observations of supernovae, is that while I’ve been able to come up with good uses for the large ground-based telescopes, it’s been much harder to come up with good HST programs. HST has an infrared instrument, but it’s frankly something of an underwhelming instrument. Its design was locked on the wrong side of the rapid development of infrared instrumentation in the 90s and by the time it was deployed, the detectors were well behind the standard for ground-based instrumentation. The field of view is pathetic, the detectors are tiny and noisy, and the sensitivity is nothing to write home about. It does have the advantage of being above the stupendous IR airglow, but even the image quality isn’t that much better than you can achieve with ground-based instruments and the new generation of laser-guide-star adaptive optics. Plus, my particular specialty has been largely spectroscopic science, and the spectroscopic capabilities of NICMOS are poor indeed. So, to date, I’ve largely dismissed NICMOS as useless, at least to me.

But now I’ve run into a different wall. It turns out that Type Ia supernovae have some very interesting behavior in the infrared at late times (roughly a year after the explosion). In particular, the late-time iron features show both a hollow (flat-topped) emission profile and are kinematically offset from the center of the explosion by several thousand kilometers per second. Unfortunately, observing these properties really pushes the sensitivity limits of the biggest telescopes on the planet. Even for supernovae in the nearest galaxies, I need to obtain spectra of objects which are several magnitudes fainter than the sky. These are observations so difficult it even impresses the guys trying to take spectra of type Ia supernovae halfway across the visible universe.

That’s all well and good, if it was easy it would already have been done, but now we’ve reached a point where it’s difficult to build on our successes. We have observed a small handful of objects using a fair bit of time on Subaru and Gemini. But now what we really need are observations of a couple of dozen objects to start looking at how these effects vary and broaden our results to the context of the general population of Type Ia supernovae. However, being limited to the nearest objects, we are stuck with asking for these observations an object or two at a time, and asking for a night or two of 8m time for each. And the TACs are understandably coming back with “what is one more spectrum going to do for you?.” So we’re trying to investigate other avenues. I’ve got a pilot proposal in with Rob Fesen & students to try and use optical data to get at the same science, which might help.

But while pondering these troubles at the SN meeting last week in Japan, I received the e-mail from SCScI announcing the new HST opportunity. So now the question is, can I use HST to learn something about more SNe Ia? My first crazy thought was to try and use the strange filter set on NICMOS to get “photometric redshifts”, using the flux ratios in neighboring filters to estimate the kinematic offsets of the iron lines. Fortunately, after a long night of sushi and sake (including the famously poisonous Fugu... it was a pretty fantastic meeting banquet), I came to my senses and remembered that NICMOS does have a rudimentary spectroscopic capability. The spectral resolution is pathetically low (about 1000 km/s) but in this case that’s actually a plus because it means I will be concentrating the faint emission into just a few pixels. So now it’s down to quantitative questions: (1) is NICMOS even sensitive enough to do this kind of observation, and (2) will I be able to push the observations out sufficiently far to measure an interesting number of supernovae?

To be continued....

Back in the Hurly Burly

2008-11-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

Well, I’m newly back from Japan and in less time than it takes to shake off 14 hours of jet lag I’m back in the thick of being faculty. This time of year is really kind of a mess. The triple-whammy of Veterans day, Thanksgiving and finals really makes the last month of the semester something of a jumbled affair. Add to this the chaos of extra end-of-the-semester things like student thesis proposals, teaching evaluation forms, last-minutes committee meetings, and a bonus HST proposal (or two?) and it begins to look like a tasty soup indeed.

Ah well, with all this going on it’s obviously the ideal time to try and discover new ways to spend non-existent free time on the ‘net right? So, just before leaving for Tokyo, I got tagged by a voice from the past (Hi Keith :) ) who’d hunted me down and, among other things, told me that there’s a whole bunch of people that I used to know lurking on Facebook. And indeed, some quick poking around does seem to bear this out. So it seems that I may be sticking my toes into those waters as well.

Meanwhile I need to grade the last month of cosmology homework, invent next weeks last cosmology homework, invent some test questions for the astro seminar quiz, and other sundry teacher stuff. And perhaps write an HST proposal for the Cycle 16 extension using everyones least favorite infrared detector NICMOS. Oh and Tom Maccarone wrote me an email this morning (well morning my time, not his) asking me if I’d like to join him on an HST proposal based on a conversation we had like 2 years ago in Southampton. Sure... why not. Tom’s on facebook too... It’s a funny old world...

Not so live from Kashiwa anymore

2008-11-18T08:06:00.000-05:00

So the great live blogging experiment hit a couple of predictable roadblocks this afternoon. First, of course, I had to give my own talk, and then I got distracted by a very interesting talk about the Cygnus Loop, and then another interesting discussion about Super-Chandrasekhar-mass Type Ia supernovae. Tomorrow morning I’m chairing the session, so that’s probably not a good time to be doing other things... Ah well. This is the way of experiments...

Had a lovely dinner with the overseas visitors at Ken’s apartment in Kashiwa with some lively conversation, and also had a nice chat earlier with Sergei Blinnikov. All in all a good day. Indeed, this trip has been a nice reminder that it would be nice to get back to being a scientist. I should try and make that happen somehow.

LiveBlogging the IPMU supernova workshop: Mamoru Doi

2008-11-17T21:35:00.000-05:00

Distant SN Observations with Subaru
Planning to build a 6.5 m IR/Optical telescope in Atacama.
12 IAU SNe in one image! Doi et al. 2002.
Subaru XMM/Newton Deep Survey. Suprime-Cam BVRi’z’ Plus Xrays and NIR (UKIRT). 540 AGN, 400 SNe, 170 Variables, in 1 sq deg.
Delay time distribution. Totani et al 2008 (astro-ph) t^-0.5=-0.2 ... inconclusive so far.
Coming up... Hyper Suprime: 1.5 deg FOV to chase Dark Energy with weak lensing. 2011?
Sullivan et al 2007. Difference between reddening line and BDR in type Ias?
Some discussion here of low Rv again...
30 micron imaging with a 1 m from the ground?
15 Band imaging with dichroics... That’s a kinda crazy instrument, but sorta cool.

LiveBlogging the IPMU supernova workshop: Giuliano Pignata

2008-11-17T20:41:00.000-05:00

Low Luminosity IIP SNe
99br... -13.5 mag?!
Low velocity too. Low Ni mass. Low MS mass...
SN 08bk. Very nice data set. A little bump in the LC just after drop off the plateau. 08bk and 99br very similar to one another.

LiveBlogging the IPMU supernova workshop: Mario Hamuy

2008-11-17T19:31:00.000-05:00

Millennium Center for Supernova Science
What are they doing?: Refining distance indicators. Understanding SN physics. Nearby Supernova Search using robotic telescopes. Carry out a follow-up program.
CHASE: the supernova search. 6 40cm telescopes (4 working). 10% time... Sample about 1000 nearby galaxies, sampled every ~4 nights.
Oh look, they found a SN last night. 2 in 2007, 24 in 2008. Roughly 2 per month.
Buying their own telescope... 50 cm... Increase discovery rate... and or follow-up.
Follow-up... teamed up with Carnegie Supernova Project.
Yikes. CSP is killing us at LT.
104 Type Ia’s. They are doing very well. Hubble diagram.... sigma = 0.13-10.17 Using optical. Adding J reduces to 0.12
Hmmm.... Must rethink LT.
Rv low for both type Ia and type II SNe.
A type II “hypernova”? SN 2003bg... SN 2002gh. What the hell is that?

LiveBlogging the IPMU supernova workshop: Itsuki Sakon

2008-11-17T01:24:00.000-05:00

“Near- to Mid-Infrared observation of supernovae with AKARI/IRC”

AKARI. New IR Satellite. 70 cm telescope. IRC, near to mid IR. FIS for far IR. Launched Feb 22, 2006. Warm mission: 2008 June. NIR 2-5 micron imag & Spec.

An all sky survey... Covered 94% of the sky. Ishihara 08.
Pointed observations: 10 min integration. (Short!) Accepting proposals for warm missions. Roughly 20 micro Jy for NIR, and 100 for MIR... Lower in warm mode...
Spectra! 1.8 micron to 5.5 micron at 0.06 Prisim
2.5-5 at 0.0097 for grism. 0.1,0.2 mJy sensitivity.

06jc results: Peculiar Ib. Continuum excess, fading of red side of lines and increase of extinction. Spectra... Yikes source confusion. Spectrum sits across galaxy.
Probably not silicates... (Too bright) Probably amorphous carbon. 2 component model gives better fit. Perhaps pre-existing dust. Mention of Mattila et al 2008.

NEWSY.... Spectral Templates for nearby galaxies for subtractions...

LiveBlogging the IPMU supernova workshop: Nozomu Tominaga

2008-11-17T00:45:00.000-05:00

Light curves of Type II Supernovae: Metallicity Dependencies.
“Discussion is Welcome... And conclusions may change after discussion”. Cute.
First talk by a member of the Subaru generation. Lots of young energetic Japanese astronomers here.
Light curves of Type IIs... characterized by the envelope mass and pre-sn radius... also metallicity. Type I: by Mej, M Ni, and E. LC Plateu, brighter and longer for larger Menv....
Difference btw SN Ibc and SN II? MS mass? Single vs Binary? Metallicity? Mass loss uncertain.. Can these be constrained just with MColor LCs? Stella, radn hydrocode from Blinnikov et al. Type IIs have weak metal lines and close to BB. Large PreSN radius so Rad Trans important...
Using code, explore effects of Energy, MS mass, and Metallicity. Progenitor models from Umeda & Nomoto 2005, Explosions 1,5,10,20 FOE. MS mass, 13,15, 18,20,25,30, Metallicity ... missed it...

Higher energy makes shorter and brighter plateaus.
Larger MS mass makes brighter and longer plateaus. Some discussion of the difference between input KE and actual result KE. Plateaus seem long... all are above 100 d which is near the long end of observations... Perhaps KE is too low?
Metallicity... Zero metallicity star is compact, but the rest have similar structures... Envelope mass has complicated relation to metallicity... some discussion between those responsible for the input models... Metallicity results: zero metallicity star has 87A-like light curve, Otherwise the trend is relativity weak for metallicities. However colors change significantly. Higher metallicity sne are redder. Higher metallicity means larger photospheric radii (larger opacity). Same structure, but larger radius so cooler.

Looking at shock breakout. For larger PreSN radius, longer shock breakout, higher total energy, but fainter and cooler.
Energy: Higher energies are brighter and bluer.
MS Mass: Larger mass makes the peak longer and color redder. Lifan asks where is Ly Alpha.. Its ionized. Very hot (300K +)
Metallicity: All similar except metal free, spectra very similar as well.. (not surprising if ionization is very high and opacity low.)

Sensitivity for seeing these things in S-Cam on Subaru. 30 Msun at z=2 possible in 1 hr? NIR on JWST, 10 ks observations, 10 sigma.... Discussion of how to find these things...

LiveBlogging the IPMU supernova workshop: Sergi Blinnikov

2008-11-16T23:29:00.000-05:00

Radiative Shocks vs Other Models of the Most Luminous SNe

        First messengers from core collapse: Neutrinos? Gravitational Waves, Radio Waves? (Early radio pulse?) (Bisnovati-Kogan et al, 1988 for SN 1987A) This speculation about a neutrino induced prompt radio pulse is kicking up a fair bit of discussion.
        Shocks inside SNe. Computation of shock breakout. Optical depth ~10. Termination of shock acceleration... missed that... Ah. a plot of optical depth near shock breakout...
        Formation of a thin shell at the outside. Chevalier and so on... shock interaction... Cold dense shell... Model for bright SNe: Chugai et al. 04, Woosley et al 07. Cold dense shell on the inside of large CS envelope. Shock cannot breakout completely for several years.... Dense shell is not adiabatic but nearly isothermal... 4 orders of magnitude in density jump...
Comparison to other models Radioactive needs very large Ni mass. 64FOE... Diffusion... Atmospheric....
        06gy... 1 FOE in light. 2 orders of mag more than normal SN II. If radioactive, need large energy. Why xray low if shock.... missed some more...Something went by about entropy. Yikes, he’s just blowing past lots of stuff.
        Back to the McCray diffusion model. Some referencing old Russian papers... Diffusion lengths are really much shorter... can’t make it fit.
        Back to shocks.... Chugai again... Oh dear, Dessart & Hillier, et al.... density profiles not self consistent. Missed limb brightening effect due to shell.... Photospheric radius wrong...
        Huge shells from PP instability producing large pulsations in ~100 Msun stars.
        Conclusions: He prefers radiating shocks for energy production... poo-poos pure diffusion and pure atmospheric models...
        Discussion... X-rays are self absorbed until later times.... Lifan complains about 1D vs 3D...

LiveBlogging the IPMU supernova workshop: Peter Nugent

2008-11-16T21:24:00.000-05:00

11:25 Now we have Peter Nugent: SNe 1999as & 2007bi. Twin Pair Production SNe?

Bias in SN Searches: You find the kinds of things you’re looking for. KAIT, Zwicky & Amateurs: Targeting big galaxies. High-z searches. SNf and SDSS: Rolling searches.

        SN 1999as: Search to find low z SNe using similar methods to high-z searches. ie. big fields not bright galaxies. SN 1999as found by NEAT. Something that showed up with nothing there.

        Spectrum looks like a type Ibc. Some narrow features. Redshift of .1 Mag at max =-21.
Almost no evolution in spectral features over 25-55 days. Narrow features 1000 km/s wide at 10,000 km/s: Detached shell. Fe II and Ti II.

        LC models: 5M Ni, Mtot = 50M, KE = 50 FOE.

        Host spectrum: Metallicity < 1/3 Solar. Mv = -17.8

        Other SNe like SN 1999as?: SN 2001bb Mabs = -17. Dropped like a rock. Similar spectrum with narrow Fe & Ti features.

        No event like 99as, until....

        SN factory: 10,000 images per night. 10% have 5sigma detections. Automated rejection tree knocks this down to 100 per night. Good at finding Type Ias.

        Finding lots of Type Ias in low luminosity and low metallicity galaxies.

        Deep Sky: 9 Years of data on the sky. Useful targeting aid. Allows the removal of distant AGN and variable stars.

        SN 2007bi. Host Mg=-16.4 @ z=.127 Mv = -20.5. Like 99as. Slow decay LC at early times (again like 99as).

        Prediscovery -50 d. (Would have been thrown out if known)

        Why PPSN? Large 56Ni. Too much for “standard” mechanism. Large total mass. Large KE. Low Metallicy environment. What else could it be: CSM, but no smooth continuum and no narrow hydrogen....

        Conclusions: What you find is what you get. These things have slow light curves and would get thrown out of Ia searches.

        Discussion: Lots of questions about CSM interaction. Way to use interaction to power these things? What about lack of He in the spectra. Decay rate for 07bi consistent with Co decay... For a year!

        Plug for the Palomar Transient Search. Coming in March.

        Also. Both super Chandra SNe are in low metallicy galaxies.

LiveBlogging the IMPU Supernova Workshop: What is this?

2008-11-16T21:18:00.000-05:00

So I’m attending a workshop on supernovae at IPMU in Kashiwa, Japan, and instead of just passively watching, I thought I’d try and take notes on the talks in real time. So what you’re seeing here are my notes (pretty sketchy, sorry) of the meeting. I may also drop in some commentary if I feel inspired. Or perhaps I’ll just get tired of it and stop at some point. Time will tell.

One note already. The Mac fraction seems suspiciously large in the astronomy world, at least as far as laptops are concerned. Well above the rate they are seen in the wild. Peter Nugent is up next.

Of course, you can feel free to ignore all of this cryptic astrophysics nonsense.

LiveBlogging the IPMU Supernova meeting: Ken Nomoto

2008-11-16T20:22:00.000-05:00

10:20
And we’re off. Ken Nomoto is going to tell us about the “Supernova-Progenitor Connection”.
        Supernova density profile is highly dependent on the progenitor: Low mass have steeper envelopes.
        8-10 Msun stars: Super AGB stars (Mcore > 1.07) ONeMg core collapse due to electron capture. At above 10.4 Msun, Ne burning is ignited (Ne flash) in degenerate core... leading to mass ejections? (Nomoto 1984) Origin of very bright type II supernovae (Woosley)?
        Below 10 Msun: no Ne burning. Degenerate ONeMg core. MONeMg=1.35 Msun. Steep density gradient outside degenerate core.
        Electron Capture on ONeMg core: (Miyaji et al. 1980) Electron capture reduces the degenerate electron gas support and leads to collapse. (Picture of Mg lizard eating the e-)
        Kitaura et al. (2006) 9Msun star. Neutrino heating causes weak explosion in spherical model (.1FOE). Mej=0.014 Msun. Overproduction of 90Zr (Hoffman et al 2008).
        Constraints on Ye (Wanajo et al 2008).
        Pastorello et al 2008: Ultra-Faint SNe IIn? M85 OT2006-1 2008S. Also 1997bs, 1999br, etc. (Botticella et al. 2008, Prieto et al. 2008).

        10-90 (60)Msun stars: Fe Core Collapse... Asphericity. Nomoto et al 06, Limongi et al 00: general agreement in heavy element production. Also Heger &Woosley 08, Umeda & Nomoto 02, Tominaga 08. Mixing and asymmetry. All differ significantly to observations of metal poor stars. (Cayrel et al 2004). Agreement improved by high energy (10 FOE) asymmetric (Mixed) explosion, Tominaga et al 2006). Jet induced nucleosynthesis (Tominaga et al again). Tominaga et al 2007

        Main sequence mass vs Kinetic Energy. Fork diagram. Hypernova branch and Faint SN branch. Also MS mass vs Ni Mass. Again a forked diagram. Ib’s at the branching point?
        Hamuy 2003: Trend in Mej & MNi vs E (FOE).

        Wolf-Rayet connetion? Ib,Ic. Mass loss vs Angular Momentum loss. ?

        SN 2008D. Ib’s bridging the gap between Hypernovae and normal SNe?

        90-140 Msun stars: Instability in the core. Oscillations leading to Fe Core collapse. (Umeda & Nomoto) (Near e+e- instability region). 30FOE, 5Msun 56Ni (!)

        140-300 Msun stars: Pair Production SNe. Don’t match metal poor stars? Interesting.
        SN 2006gy. (13 Msun Ni mass!?!) CSM Interaction? 64FOE, 15M Ni? Light curve not like Pair production supernovae (Fast, not slow).

Still Life With "Poba"

2008-10-25T15:46:00.001-04:00

It's a lovely cool fall Saturday afternoon, and I'm out in the front yard with Laz. It's been rainy and cold the last couple of days, so the clear skies, slight breeze and bright afternoon sunshine are a welcome change.

Lazarus is playing with a small elevated water table his mama bought him the other day. And a plastic lion. The boy is just carzy about animals right now. He's been particularly fond of playing with a polar bear in the front yard. In fact he's rather into "poba's" in general right now.

He's also started playing with phrases a lot recently, inventing a number of call and response games. "Whose house?" "mama's house" (or Laz's, or Daddy's or Zebra's etc.) "no (noun), nasty (noun). Nasty apple too, and she spilled her milk all over the table.". The latter picked up from a recently rediscovered favorite book.

Back inside now, hanging out on Laz's couch while he watches "Ice Worlds," the Planet Earth episode of choice at the moment. (Again with the "poba".)

"Noway" says the boy. I think I was commenting on the penguins ("pegins"). Sunshine inspires a "Oops," which for some reason is now usually followed with "Mama's in the house."

"There they go!"

"And now we sleeeep. (Darth Vader style snore)"

"Eyes... Eat eyes... Teeth... Eat teeth."

And so on.

Posted with LifeCast

Testing...

2008-10-11T17:54:00.001-04:00

This is a test. I'm trying to see if I can blog from my ipod. Why? Well that's a good question I suppose. It does seem painfully slow. On the other hand, why not?

Not an inspired entry to be sure, but it is only a test.

Posted with LifeCast

What rock have I been hiding under?

2008-10-03T17:29:00.002-04:00

How did I not notice that we are on the verge of full on commercial spaceflight?

Way too cool for words!

The skinny on Hubble.

2008-09-29T20:43:00.000-04:00

Ah... The times has the low down on Hubble. Serious, but not yet fatal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/science/space/W30hubb.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Free Fall!

2008-09-29T19:42:00.000-04:00

So Congress seems to have adopted the Ron Carey/Mel Brooks Strategy for dealing with the current credit crisis. “I got it! I got it! I ain’t got it!... I’ll get it... I got it! I got it! I ain’t got it.” What is the plural of doofus? Doofi? Whatever it is, it’s apt.

cf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4kcEuRgXwI

Meanwhile, buried in the news today: NASA has postponed the Hubble rescue mission *because the telescope has stopped sending data!* (I saw this on MSNBC, so I assume it’s true, although I haven’t heard anything about this from NASA trough the AAS, which is unusual.) Not clear from the MSNBC report if all communications have been lost or just the data downlink. In any case, it’s not good!

Ouroboros

2008-09-19T15:13:00.000-04:00

Bah! My brain is flummoxed by a familiar but long forgotten problem: The tendency of some of the fundamental equations of cosmology to wrap around and eat themselves in a bewildering and irritating manner. It doesn’t help that the notation and conventions in the literature are rather flexible as well. There must be 50 different ways of writing down the Friedmann equation in equivalent but subtly different manners. Blah... My head’s tired. It’s Friday and it doesn’t want to be wrestling with cosmology.

But there it is. It needs to get done. I have a class on Tuesday, and I need to have both a new problem set and a set of lecture notes ready. So I will return to trying to find a clean and clear way to show that the Friedmann equation predicts a universe that evolves away from flatness with time. This is a well known result, that seems to be addressed in a unique way in every textbook and set of lecture notes I have access to. Worse, it seems that they all seem to suffer from a bad case of handwaving or “then a miracle happens” syndrome in the math: making a leap that seems altogether reasonable on first glance, but which doesn’t seem to follow directly upon close examination.

Ah well, that’s why they pay me the big bucks right? To make sense of the self-eating-snake equations map out their curves for all to see? Boldly going where students would otherwise fear to tread? Which, in self-eating style brings us back to flags and snakes. Or Pretzels. Something topologically complex that wraps around itself endlessly. Like a closed universe. See, again I can’t seem to escape. I seem to have become trapped inside a semantic event horizon, with no way out but to hope I can quantum tunnel through the barrier and Hawking radiate myself to another topic.

Or maybe just give up and get back to work.

Shoe-horned

2008-09-16T16:38:00.000-04:00

Strange idiom that... Nobody even uses a shoe horn any more. It’s an idiom which has entirely shed it’s origins. Almost as mysterious as Cockney rhyming.

Anyway, shoe-horned it is, as it is being written under a hard time limit imposed by the fact that I have another class to teach in 19 minutes. However, as I missed my opportunity this morning, and I’m unlikely to do much new in that time period, I thought I’d use it this way.

Still rusty. That’s for certain.

Why do I have REO Speedwagon in my head? Why, why, why? Perhaps it was Sunshine’s doing, but I don’t have any recollection of it recently, and it seems a bit on an unlikely candidate for NPRs background music this morning.

Yikes, does that make me feel like my parents! The clock radio in our room is now set to the local NPR station, and it totally reminds me of mornings as a kid waking up to the strains of “All Things Considered” wafting out of my parents bedroom. Of course, the downside of listening to NPR in the morning is that it starts your day with the panic alarms going off. Who needs caffeine when you have the thought of Sarah Palin in the White House to start your day?

Nothing makes me miss England like American politics. Actually it’s not American politics per se, it’s really American culture which is generally depressing. I guess I am exactly the sort of leftist elite over-educated Eurocentric snob that Republican politicians tell people to hate.

Also, I seem to be nostalgic for trains now...

Now is the time

2008-09-15T11:04:00.000-04:00

And now... And now... And now. In fact it is always the time. That’s sorta the point isn’t it? In any case, I’ve been restarting some old routines this morning, and thought that perhaps I should restart this one as well. If I make it a time-limited activity it might even be possible to keep at it. In any case, here I am.

Rusty. Definitely rusty. The words don’t flow smoothly. The stream is awkward and the focus wandering, but practice is as practice does or something to that effect. Boy, not a good sign when I’m misquoting Forrest Gump. Perhaps its just another example of the infrantilization of this country. That’s a hard word to spell...
I was going to perhaps expand on that topic, but I really don’t feel like ranting, and it would degenerate into a rant. So back to the breath and let it go.

Geez, how new age do I sound there. Ick.

It’s ok. Zen doesn’t have to be the realm of soft-headed wishful thinking.

A little groggy this morning. Smoothie grit stuck in my teeth too.

If I’m going to make this a time limited activity, I should probably decide on what that time limit is. I should also probably keep track of when I start writing. These little details, you know. Does make it more difficult to place limits when the limits and the reference frame are undefined. Gotta work with something.

Oh, look at that. There’s a time stamp right at the top of the page. Thank you Mac Journal. Now I just need to define a time limit and hey presto, I’ve defined an invariant interval (a timelike one at that). 15 minutes is a nice round number to start, and doesn’t threaten to break the bank. And 15 minutes from 11:04 AM would be 11:19 AM. And the time is now.

        There’s a time and the time is now and it’s right for me,
        It’s right for me, and the time is now.
        There’s a word and the word is love and it’s right for me,
        It’s right for me, and the word is love.
                -Yes, “Time and a Word”

Life in 140 character packets

2008-09-03T17:36:00.000-04:00

I seem to remember there was a line in Fight Club about prepackaged single-serving lifestyles... or something to that effect. In any case, in case anyone is interested, I’ve started “microblogging” on twitter. Just little haiku-like snapshots of course, since there is a strict 140 character limit to the system. On the other hand, I can fit the time to finish an entry into my day.

Sigh, Someday it would be nice to get myself organized enough to actually keep to a schedule. Until then, however, I find that everything seems to take too long. A sort of gravitational time-dialtion effect. Or perhaps that’s just the way it seems right now, since I’m writing homework for my Cosmology course.

Anyway, if you’re interested, my twitterings can be found at http://twitter.com/flamingcarrot, or followed with various sorts of twitter or RSS friendly software.

Join the endless chatter and become a part of the future Douglas Adams warned us about. I’m going to shut up now so my brain can start working again.

Bad Juju

2008-07-03T16:19:00.000-04:00

Foggy, tired and sad today.

Relatively happy yesterday followed shortly by a tragic shipwreck of a night. Really pretty full-on wipe-out ugly. I can’t really even grasp it, let alone parse it or understand it. Just a cotton-fuzzy dull-grey hangover of an afternoon now. Not even sure I should be writing.

Strange perspective sitting in my little corner box, suspended in midair between slabs of concrete and walls of glass. Really not a natural view of the world, and the feeling of abstracted artifice is palpable. Staring at the arbitrary geometry of rooftops and spaces untouched except by the elements. Air vents, security lights, railings, fume vents and ladders, rain spouts and cryogen tanks. The eerie gestalt complemented by the ghost-town emptiness of a campus without students. Vacant walkways, quiet halls, and closed offices.

Haunted by the image of Laz, clearly troubled by the argument between his parents, clinging to me as I try to leave the room. Reflected in his face a distant half-memory of my own desperate moment holding on to a departing parent. There are things there in my past, half-remembered and only partly understood. Not that I need or want to. The meanings and what-ifs are irrelevant. The memory of fear and desperation is not.

Wave of sleepiness now.

Mind Killer Redux

2008-07-02T16:51:00.000-04:00

Fear is a poor motivating principle and yet it is all too often at the root of my action or lack thereof. This must change. I must change this. (aside: Bart at the blackboard: “I will use active voice”). Denial is corrosive.

Sitting for the first time in many months, I find I am unfamiliar with my own form. I no longer fit in myself. I have gown fuzzier and more diffuse in the last year. I have, perhaps inevitably, lost some focus. I must recenter. I have been sleeping and things have changed that must be remade. I must rediscover the way. This is not impossible. It must be done. I must do it.

Chris in Springfield

2008-07-02T14:03:00.001-04:00

Hopefully out from under whatever rock I've been hiding under

2008-04-22T10:56:00.000-04:00

Cough, cough..

Phew, it’s dusty in here...

Ok, so that was a long break. Been a while since I’ve done this. My blogging muscles are atrophied.

So, yeah, I seem to have fallen out of the habit of blogging regularly. Actually, I’ve fallen out of the habit of doing much of anything regularly. This teaching gig turns out to be rather time intensive. Still, I need to start being more efficient with my time, and what better way than by starting another time commitment?

Of course it is also true that my class is taking their 2 hour final exam, and I’m stuck here with very little to do on a slow news day. I’ve pretty much exhausted my usual web resources, at least the quiet ones. So this is perhaps just a brief flick while I wait for something more interesting. Still, I’d like to think it was a new beginning.

Yikes. This is pretty rough. I’m definitely out of practice. Brain is muggy and sluggish. I need to get back to zen too. The school thing pretty much knocked me out of all my other activities. I think I’m beginning to get on top of it now (now that the course is over!). It comes down to needing to be more efficient and decisive with my time. I need to spend less time dithering and more time doing. It’s an overhead thing. Not something that comes particularly natural to me though. I’m more of the steam locomotive type: slow to build momentum, slow to stop. It’s not a very 21st century metaphor, and indeed, not a very 21st century mode of doing. Needs must and so I must.

I wonder if my test is too long. It is certainly harder than the midterm I gave. But that was probably too easy. The students don’t seem to be complaining too much, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. Thirty-five minutes to go.

Brain gone.... awareness absent... not the absence of zazen but the absence of sleep, of oblivion. Sleepy brain. This must go. The sleeper must awaken. The spice must flow. The words must flow, but they are slow. They stop, they go... my mind blanks looking for more “oh” words. Screen full of snow, empty static. Although static isn’t. A snow filled screen is actually kinetic and stochastic. Anything but static, and yet that’s was we call it.

This stream of consciousness winds multi helix through the hills of questionable grammar and no particular direction. A random walk indeed. Stochastic me, like brownian tea, pinging my way through a Boltzmann sea. How now spherical cow?

Well that was fun, but the moment has passed. My concentration span is weak old man. (But apparently my random reference machine is overstimulated!)

Yawn yawn yawn (she loves you?)

Gorsh, I am feeling a bit goofy this morning. 17 minutes to go.

Blank. No verse. “Zeros. Zeros mean so much.”

Are you entertained? Spoken like a saturday morning TV presenter on the BBC in a tiny hotel room in the Kings Cross area of London.

Ping! “...and one of them means nothing at all (the number zero).”

Oh Dear...

2007-12-11T19:57:00.000-05:00

I’m grading the final for the intro-level physics course I’ve been associated with. This is actually the highest-level intro course offered here at FSU. Dear oh dear.... this is not encouraging. Apparently, we haven’t taught the students much in the course.

Well, I guess it’s a learning experience... I will *NOT* be structuring my course in the same manner as this one. I must do better.

Sigh.

Be the way

2007-09-20T10:05:00.000-04:00

And the days just slip on past. Welcome to the new faculty speedway. Yeah, it’s been a busy couple of weeks since my last entry, but there’s way too much that’s occurred to actually try and keep up with events. Probably best not to even try.

I had breakfast with the Dean of Arts and Sciences this morning. Apparently a thing that new faculty get to do. It was pleasant enough experience. I’m still new enough to this faculty gig that the novelty of being a grown up is fun. The Dean’s live on the other side of campus. The nice side of campus where all the old liberal arts buildings are. Quite lovely actually, particularly since the weather is cool today, so the walk was nice. I even got to keep the mug. Now I know why professors always have that coffee mug with college seals on their desks. They get it from having breakfast with the Dean, or some other such rites. Just one of the small rituals nobody ever talks about. But I’d guess here on campus, you’d be able to tell when the new faculty get their breakfast with the Dean by watching their desk for the appearance of a garnet colored coffee mug.

Garnet & Gold. The school colors of the FSU Seminoles, or ‘Noles’ as they are apparently referred to locally. It took us a while to figure out what noles meant. Just slow on the uptake I guess.

Anyway, finally settling into the swing of things. My office now has all it’s furniture, and even some books on the shelves. Getting into the rhythm of meetings and teaching and meetings. Still need to integrate some research into that somehow, but piece by piece it’s coming.

I’m actually quite enjoying my teaching duties. Thankfully, I’m relatively free of performance anxiety, which has always been a bit of a help. Talks and lectures are not a hurdle for me. Indeed, my current assignment is really quite pleasant, as I have almost no control over student grades, but work almost entirely as an enabler. I’m just there to help students learn the information, work their problems, pass exams, etc. I’m coordinating the labs, but the grad student TAs are running things there. Really I just have to herd the TAs and drop in to lab on Wednesdays and interact with the students a bit. Thankfully, I don’t have to grade the labs, or even stay for the entire lab session. Just enough to get a bit of interaction and then out again.

Ding... Time to wash my bowl.

Jumpy Little Black Dots What Bite the Boy!

2007-09-05T18:49:00.000-04:00

So for those of you following the great spot mystery, here’s the update... After waiting for the ‘pox’ to develop, we discovered they weren’t. No blisters, no scabs. So we thought it might be hives, perhaps a reaction to raspberry jam. However, by this last weekend, the spots were multiplying again. A trip to the clinic led to the official diagnosis that they were unexplained red spots, “maybe some kind of viral infection”. Sigh.

However we’ve since discovered that we have a flea infestation, and that Laz seems to be particularly tasty to the little bastards. Unfortunately for the bugs, mom and dad’s Buddhist leanings toward non-violence end when the cheeky little buggers attack the boy. So last night we brought in the heavy weapons, (a vacuum cleaner built like a Russian tank, and chemical warfare in the form of a powder made of, amongst other things, peppermint and cinnamon oil.) Initial prognosis looks like we substantially reduced the population of the bouncy little buggers, though I suspect there will need to be a second wave to truly clear them out.

A Pox on Our House?

2007-08-28T23:16:00.000-04:00

Egad! The boy’s got spots. Spots all over his legs and arms. Could it be the ‘pox? We’ll see... More news when we know... Meanwhile I’m off to bed, for I must away ere break of day to aid my students in their quest to conquer electrostatics.

My New Koan: Be the Fire Hose

2007-08-28T14:59:00.000-04:00

When I was an undergraduate student at Caltech, a popular metaphor for the student experience there was that it was like drinking from a fire hose. I don’t know whether this image is related to the scene from the Weird Al movie UHF, or if it was unrelated but it was certainly an apt metaphor for the overwhelming wall of stuff that came at us.

Now I’m beginning to find myself feeling a bit in that mode again. The commitments and expectations from this new job are coming on strong and I’m beginning to get that old fire hose feeling again. The difference now is that the commitments are a great deal more creative than reactive. As a student, you’re primarily responding to the stimulus that is thrown at you. Now, many of my commitments are wanting something from me rather that wanting me to do something. I’m not drinking from the fire hose, so much as being liposuctioned by one.

Ah... there’s a pretty image.

Slurpy Little Widget What Gives Laptop Go Juice

2007-08-27T22:01:00.000-04:00

The MacBook I ordered with my startup funds finally arrived today. Mostly it looks and acts just like the last one only a little lighter and quite a bit faster. But it’s got this weird power cord. It’s magnetic, so you just bring it in close and it sucks itself into place. Weird. I guess it’s supposed to reduce accidents from people tripping over power cords, or at least that’s what the mac commercials would have you believe.

Lot’s happening right now. Classes started this morning. I’ve moved into a new corner office. Sunshine and I are both attending new meditation groups, and Sunshine just joined a community choir tonight. Laz has developed a thing for fish. Actually, he’s probably had the fish thing for quite a while and we’ve only just noticed it. He also likes macaroni.

Much to cover but time is short, so tonight I will remain brief, and probably blunt. I must take up the quill again regularly though. My scribe is rusty.

The Other Side of the Desk

2007-07-26T14:39:00.000-04:00

So here I am, sitting once again in a faculty office in a physics department of some university. In a way, faculty offices pretty much all look the same, and this one is not much different. Mind you, it’s a lot emptier than the usual faculty office as most of the books and papers and stuff hasn’t arrived. But it’s got that feel to it, institutional lighting, some nice, (but not too nice) furniture, and the inevitable smell of academia (probably a mixture of outgassing carpet, aging paper, baking electronics and chalk dust).

The big difference now, of course, is that I’m on the other side of the desk, sitting in the big roller chair and looking across my newly arrived desk (still sporting styrofoam dust from the packaging) at the two empty guest chairs and two nearly empty bookcases. This is my office, 617 Keen, complete with florescent lighting, cinderblock walls, and moderately dysfunctional A/C vents. This will be my new home from home, where new secrets of the universe will be discovered and shared with the dozen or so other people around the world who might care about it.

At the moment, it’s a room filled with potential. The walls are blank, the drawers and shelves empty, the seats untouched. Now it’s up to me to convert the possible into the actual. These chairs will soon be holding students who will look to me to launch careers and explain test scores. The ethernet wire descending from my tiled false ceiling like some lone vine in a sparse industrial jungle will soon be filling my in-box with countless faculty e-mails and other distractions. Up that wire must travel numerous papers and proposals and requests for money and the other things that university professors are expected to provide to the world.

The room is a vessel and the vessel is nearly complete. It’s up to me now to provide the creative spark that fills the space with gold. A daunting task to be sure, but the people here have placed their trust in me. They must feel that I will be able to work some magic here. Now I guess we will have to wait and see if they are right.

Shoe Event Horizon?

2007-06-28T15:59:00.000-04:00

I don't know that it's a good thing when life reminds me of Douglas Adams. His worldview tends a bit toward the cynical. Unfortunately, he also seems to have been disturbingly prescient.

In this case, I was struck this morning by how bewildering I find so-called beauty products. I just don't really get it. Maybe it's a girl thing, but I just find the endless masses of bottles and tubes and tubs a bit on the far side of ridiculous. There's a strange fascination with foodstuffs as well. Everything is honey-oat this and cucumber-that. What about the combination of rose petals and yogurt says 'yes, I want to wash myself in that'? I can't imagine that those buying such flavored body wash would actually consider soaping themselves in foodstuffs as a way to get clean. Very odd.

Meanwhile, it is becoming really quite difficult to find just plain products without extra gratuitous extra stuff added. Try finding a hair conditioner that isn't heavily perfumed in the sea of fruit flavors. Or consider the reasoning behind vitamin fortified Coke. All of this, it seems to me, speaks of overactive product tinkering and marketing strategy, which has divorced the product makers from the needs of the product user. It smells of marketing for marketing sake. It seems to me that we have a lot more to buy, but a lot less that is useful. We seem to be heading toward a situation where we will only be able to buy what market analysis says will sell, but it will come in dozens of meaningless varieties.

Still Point

2007-06-27T02:16:00.001-04:00

It's been a bit of a hectic day. Laz woke up at 5 AM this morning. His teeth had been hurting him during the night. So we got up for about 3 hours in the early morning until he could get back to sleep. Even then he was pretty fragile for much of the rest of the day as well. Easily distressed and just generally having a rough time of it. Sigh.

It's very quiet now. Everyone has gone to sleep and I'm just sitting on the bed in relative silence. It's good to find a still point. My attempt to meditate today was aborted pretty quickly. I was just too tired, so instead of drifting in and out of sleep on my cushion, I just crawled into bed and napped with Laz. In this case it was probably more productive.

It's a bit weird here surrounded by 'inlaws', those people who are family and yet I don't really know them all that well. I know them a bit, but not that much. Slowly I get integrated, but the process is certainly not fast. It's not helped by the fact that for many years I've had job commitments which have kept me from visiting when Sunshine did. Now, with Laz, it's a bit harder. Often I need to support Laz so Sunshine can get things done here. (Particularly this time with all this wedding stuff going on as well!). Ah well, patience. Meanwhile, I can continue being the polite alien.

The moon is pretty out the window.
Laz is stirring.
I should sleep.

Life as a Spore

2007-06-25T16:10:00.000-04:00

Well here we are truly inside the nutshell now. No keys, no job, no home, no car. Living out of various suitcases in various locations as we make our way slowly to Tallahassee. We spent a bit over a week with my parents in Louisville, now we're in Casper with Sunshine's mom for Emily's wedding.

Lazarus loved my parents house, and particularly the outside. He spend many happy hours exploring the neighborhood and discovering all sorts of exciting things. He's particularly fascinated by mailboxes right now. We didn't really have mailboxes in London, usually just a slot in the door. But here in the US mailboxes are the norm. Plus they have numbers on them. Very, very exciting. When he woke up in the morning he'd go to the window and sing out the window to the parents mailbox. Up here in Casper he's done less exploring of the mailboxes, but he's made a game out of picking strawberries out of Grandma's garden. (At first real ones, and then quickly thereafter plastic ones, as they're considerably less messy!)

It's been very hot though, high 90's and 100's and we're all melting. At least up here in Casper there's some air conditioning, though even that hasn't been able to keep up with the triple digit temperatures. Ah well, just a part of the road to Tallahassee I suppose. Hopefully the gulf heat won't do us in.

My concentration's gone to hell in the past month or two though. It's difficult to maintain any sort of routine while traveling, particularly when we're staying with others and moving about quite a bit. So my sitting and my writing practices have been pretty neglected. Indeed, it's been just about all we can do to keep caught up on Doctor Who, the one weekly routine we seem to have managed to keep fairly regular. In any case, I've been missing these routines, so I think I'm going to try and make a bit more of an effort to keep at them. My contemplative brain has been a bit foggy of late, and I need to clear it out again. Time to try and be a bit more thoughtful.

It's interesting how easy it is to live without thinking. It's shockingly easy to just muddle along in a fog and not really notice life. I've been asleep, and it's very different to realize you're asleep. The sleep metaphor is a decent one too. Becoming aware really does feel rather like waking up. So I feel a bit groggy like waking up after snoozing in bed all morning.

Time to be aware.

Laz is awake.

Time to be a daddy. An awake daddy.

The sticky-wet wrenching end of the world.

2007-05-17T17:40:00.000-04:00

The end of the world looks just like any other day. Today is a lovely day. The sun is out, the sky is blue, the clouds are white. And yet, in a way, I'm situated in the midst of an apocalypse of sorts. My life here in London is ending. This world's days are numbered. To be sure the city itself will still go on. Indeed it will hardly notice I've left. But the construction in which I live my daily existence is ever so surely coming apart at the seams. Every day I am confronted by unexpected last times and irrevokable changes.

Still the world looks the same as it ever does. And indeed what else could I expect? As Buddha noticed all those years ago, impermanence is the nature of everything. Still, it's a strange thing that the Mahayana tradition points this out, shows you the way out of that suffering, and then entices you to step back into the fire. Here's the exit door, but gee, isn't that burning room lovely? Boddhisattvas chose to stay because they love the world. That choice causes suffering, but isn't that always the cost of love?

So yes, the world continues to drop away. Our world here in London is closing down, collapsing into smaller and smaller pieces. It's like a tree growing in reverse, reverting back to a seed to await a rebirth in new soil. A month ago, our cats suddenly left us to fly across the ocean and sit out the upheaval from the relative safety of my parents' house. This was the event that seems to have truly shifted our perspective to the move. Before that it was abstract. Now it's here.

Last week I attended my last Thursday night zazen sitting with Manu & Sarita. They are in Vancouver for 2 weeks, so last week was the last session I would attend. Actually I was having a pretty miserable day anyway and I probably wouldn't have gone, but I'd feel bad just leaving without saying a proper farewell. I don't really do goodbyes very well. It's awkward and messy and uncomfortable. Still, I've been trying to be more accepting of the sticky bits of life, and it would be callous and selfish just to disappear.

It's funny, I don't really know them all that well, but they provided me with an important refuge at an important time. Inevitably my path is going to be a lot different that theirs, but I picked up a subtle and important experience there somewhere. Something about being able to drop definitions and expectations and simply enjoy breathing in the presence of others. I don't necessarily know where this path is going, but there is something important there and I'm grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to discover it. Hopefully, this new creature that was born in that world will survive the transition.

That's where the fear comes in. As with any fear of death, the end of this world brings forth the fear for the continuation of the self. The self that lives in this world is facing that death right now. Will the core survive, and if so, what is preserved and what is lost? This is the existential dilemma of the condemned. Indeed, its only the illusion of longevity which allows us to forget this question in our daily lives. Still, what can we do with it when the fear does arrive? I'm sure there are lots of answers. At the moment, I alternate between ignorance and melancholy. Ignorance for pragmatism, and melancholy when there is nothing to be done. Still, it's not a desperate kind of melancholy, more just a rainy afternoon. I've become more accepting of discomfort. One more observation from a new perspective.

This is a bit of a weird perspective I've been trying to adopt here. Trying to be both a scientist and a mystic is not a well-trodden path. At one level I can see a very clear synergy between the practice of science and the practice of zen. However, while the metaphor is apt and powerful, it is also incomplete. These ideas do not sit comfortably together. Like nearly matched overlays they can create a chaos of Moire-pattern turbulence, for these practices bring with them a host of competing and contradictory perspectives, dogmas, and ideals. One side's truth is the other's delusion. It's a tribute to plastic thinking that one can hold these contradictory views, but it always leaves one sitting in doubt. And perhaps that's a good thing. Doubt, after all, is the boogie man that keeps me probing. Not as comfortable as blind faith I suspect though.

Still, I've found that this path leaves me a bit uncomfortable in all camps. Chatting with more mainstream folks in both camps I've found that trying to forge this middle way is not terribly appreciated. Perhaps I'll expand on this topic more later, but I've found that both sides tend to have an overly reductionist view of the other. Both sides are quite attached to the literalist notions of fact, and truth. I've become aware that there is a pretty severe gap between the way science is taught and distributed to the masses and the way it is actually practiced. All of this is bubbling away while the world ends, but I don't think the subject is quite ripe yet. For the moment, suffice it to say that this path I'm on does look like it may be a bit lonely and rocky.

Still, it may be a path where I can do something important. Perhaps this discomfort is not for nothing. I was touched by a comment Manu made last Thursday in the discussion after the sitting. The subject of science had come up, and Manu said that he didn't understand what it was and used to dismiss it. But that through me, he had glimpsed that there is a sense of mystery to it. And perhaps that is the personal legacy I will leave behind here in London: to have given one fellow human being a glimpse that a scientific perspective is not necessarily a soulless one. A small victory I know, but it was well timed and provides some solace here at the end of things. Not meaning so much, for I think I'm tipping quite strongly toward nihilism these days. I'm not big on purpose or meaning, but this human connection does provide a comfort, and that too has value.

On Not Being a Dalek

2007-04-30T05:20:00.000-04:00

It is a mistake to think that you can control people. Realize this, and you will have seen the fallacy underlying neo-conservative politics and countless unwise parenting and relationship choices.

It's not just a matter of having insufficient force, though that is the idea that baits the Dalek trap. The problem is that people are chaotic systems. They react non-linearly to stimulus. A small nudge here might produce a gigantic reaction there while a massive clampdown might produce a stubborn lack of any reaction at all. This is easiest to see in children but is true, I think, for all. It's just that as adults we grow used to the patterns of our embedded culture and we stop noticing because we too are reacting in similar strange patterns. Embed yourself in someone else's culture, however, and the chaos will become more obvious.

Still even chaotic systems can contain patterns. The best that we can hope for as parents or lovers or artists or diplomats is to act as a sort of attractor, providing little nudges toward the desired still point and applying tremendous patience. The art of parenting and the art of politics is the art of the soft touch. It is the art of nodding subtly to the door and waiting for the other to take a step in that direction.

It is usually impatience that drives us to control others directly. Efficiency and the dangerous idea that sufficient force (and/or the power of our obviously 'right' view) can eradicate free will leads us to try and cut corners, to enact a hard limit when a soft one would be wiser. The problem with taking the hard line and backing someone into a corner is that they may chose to hurt themselves just to spite you. In toddlers we call this a tantrum. In Iraq we call it an "insurgency". In Israel we call it a suicide bomb. The effect is the same. Give someone no options but to obey you and they may decide just to lash out insensibly instead. When we feel we have no choice, we get desperate, and desperate people are angry and have nothing to lose. Faith in this philosophy leads inevitably to frustration, violence, paranoia, and ultimately, if not checked, to the xenophobic need to exterminate all that is other.

While it may seem wasteful, patience and generosity generally seem to be more efficient in the long-term than direct blunt action, no matter how well intentioned. "Softly, softly" should be out motto. Borrowing from the Hippocratic Oath we should remember to "first do no harm" for that is the danger of rash action. This is the lesson I've been struggling to learn for the last year and I still don't always get it, but at least I can now articulate it.

Life as a Top

2007-04-29T18:32:00.001-04:00

There is a zen metaphor that says that the mind is like a spinning top. When it is perfectly vertical there is no movement and all is still, but the slightest tilt and everything begins to wobble and wander. The thing is that the vertical position of a spinning top is an unstable equilibrium. It is only able to hold that position if it's perfectly aligned. Just the slightest misalignment and the whole thing starts to fall apart. If you want to keep that top spinning vertically, you have to continually adjust it and push it back to that still point. Sooner or later you spin out and have to start again.

I think the zen guys knew that.

Now not all tops are made equal. Some have quite a large area near the still point which will hold a nearly stable spin, and some are quite tricky to keep going. Some are more susceptible to passing air currents or ground vibrations.

Sometimes I think I'm a bit of a wobbly top and I just keep spinning out. Not so much in my sitting, but in my life in general distraction has been an issue for quite a while. Really probably most of my life, though it didn't start to really become an issue until I went to college. Before that I could get away with being a bit of a dilettante because school was pretty easy. Now though it can be a bit of a struggle to stay afloat.

Still as in zazen, so in life... I guess I just need to keep making adjustments and patiently set my self upright again. The past is insubstantial. Momentum is just the memory of action. It is action NOW! in the present that is the agent of creation. Drop it all and assume correct form.

...and again.

Eyes Peeled for Weather Balloons

2007-04-19T09:01:00.001-04:00

Well, it's official now. I've signed my acceptance letter at FSU and I've resigned my post here at Imperial College. No lightening flashes or goovy 60's music involved, but I did have to walk down a long dark corridor to the HR department. True to form there is a bunch of paperwork to sign. Ahh, you have to just smile at the Brittish infatuation with bureaucracy. Somewhere, I'm sure, my picture will be covered with a bunch of X's and dropped in someone's filing cabinet.

Meanwhile things are certainly 'hotting up' as they say here. Sunshine is making preparations to ship our cats back to Colorado. Sunshine's brothers will be here in a bit under 3 weeks and in a bit less than a month we will probably be leaving this jolly little island nation and returning to the states.

On the home front, it's a bit more like Logopolis than The Prisoner. Entropy is certainly having its way with us and there is a palatable sense of just trying to muddle through the great change which will (hopefully) be "prepared for". Certainly things are resting on critical electronic transmissions to keep our finances from collapsing. Heck, we're even about to acquire 3 new companions, though hopefully they will be a bit more useful than Adric, Tegan and Nyssa.

Speaking of entropy, our iPods have both suffered fatal disk crashes. I suppose a 3 year lifetime isn't unheard of for a laptop-style disk drive, particularly one that gets a fair bit of abuse. Still, always a bummer when a well-used tool dies. RIP Eardrum and Q.... Oh and welcome to Laz's toybox (and his mouth).

In other utterly random news, I managed to sleep through my tube stop for the first time in nearly 3 years today. Sigh, I really should make sleep I higher priority I suppose. I can't blame last night on Laz's schedule though. He went to bed on time, but I got distracted by the internet. Specifically, reading webpages supposedly from 15 years in the future. A so-called 'Alternate Reality Game'... Interesting, if disturbing stuff. Check it out if you're interested. (http://iamtryingtobelieve.com/, http://anotherversionofthetruth.com/ or http://www.ninwiki.com if you want to try and understand what's going on.)

Transcendental Gestalt Switches

2007-03-29T18:56:00.001-04:00

Blogging on the met line back from Hampstead again. Tonight's revelation came in the BS session after the sitting. The topic of Big Mind came up and someone mentioned that the voice of "The Way" was a great embodiment of the entire teaching for him. The idea being that the phrase "I am the Way" is none other than full zen embodiment. Which was interesting, because I heard that phrase differently. In the Big Mind DVD Genpo Roshi leads the group through the dualistic Desire, The Seeking Mind, The Mind that Seeks the Way, and The Follower of the Way, and then to The Way. So to me, The Way was my entry to nondual, and the exit was the "Integrated Free-Functioning Human Being." But his point is just as valid, and indeed the phrase "I am the Way" can be heard as "I am nothing but the Way", but it can also be heard as "The Way is just me." It's like one of those Gestalt images where the faces turn into a vase or the other way round.

So then I mentioned that I had a disturbing reaction to The Master, and someone pointed out that it was intended to have the connotation of Zen Master. ie, Obi Wan Kenobi, not the guy with a whip, or the owner of the plantation, or some sort of supreme being, which is how I heard it. (Can we say shadow projection? Very good boys and girls.) Still... It's interesting to me that you can hear these things in different ways and they trigger entirely different experiences. Thus art to me is transcendent, but it could also be heard as the voice of delusion or deception. Hmmm....

Not really sure where this is going...

Do You Realize? by the Flaming Lips sounds very Zen to me tonight.

The Art of Observation

2007-03-28T18:36:00.001-04:00

It’s a cool midsummer evening in my back yard in Colorado. I’m 12 years old, staring into the telescope that my parents gave me for my birthday. I’m still scared of the dark and the fear hangs in the background adding a slightly acid tang to the night. The air has made my face and hands cold. I can smell the dew on the grass and the pages of the star atlas in my hands have become soft with the damp.

Through the eyepiece of my telescope I am looking at a faint fuzzy smudge called M13, a globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules. The books say that this object is a dense nest of tens of thousands of stars, but it is so far away that to me it’s just a faint patch of light. I wait and I stare. I can still hear the night around me and feel the cold and smell the air. I wait, and gradually the pupil in my eye relaxes and opens wide. The faint smudge becomes brighter and then, click! There it is! I can see them! The cloud resolves into thousands of tiny suns sprinkled like the finest salt on a black silk tablecloth. Mesmerized, I continue to stare, and after a while the yard and the cold and the damp are not there, I don’t really notice them any more. The telescope is not there, it’s just an extension of my eye. I am not there. There is just the majesty of ten-thousand suns hanging silently in space.

This is my opening.

I am 20 years old, an undergraduate at Caltech in Pasadena California. I came to school filled with (over)confidence and excitement, but physics has swiftly dealt with that. My ego is crushed by the weight of trying to take in 400 years of astonishing brilliance; the fruit of a great many minds, each of whom have walked this path with much greater clarity than I. I am learning humility and it hurts, but I have stepped onto the path.

It’s not a path that I really understand though. Not at the time. In retrospect, I can look back at this path and understand the where and the why, but at the time, it was lost in the flow. I had long since forgotten my 12-year-old self in the back yard with the Hercules cluster. On the path I was just driven by instinct and momentum. Such is the way I have lived this life and travelled this path.

Further along the path I have met my teacher. It’s a hot summer in New Hampshire and I am now a graduate student at Dartmouth College. I’ve come here to study cosmology. The big ideas and grand mystery of studying the evolution of the universe as a whole appeal to me, but this is not my fate. Instead, I fall into the study of exploding stars. I have come here intending to study the origins and beginnings of all things, and instead I find myself looking at endings. But of course in those endings, spectacular and terrible, are the seeds of new beginnings. Indeed the origin of our own flesh is in the ashes of these dying stars. We are the fruit of impermanence.

My teacher does not, primarily, fill my head with knowledge. Such book-learning is triviality. Instead, he instructs me in the practice of our art. There are the simple practices at first, learning to use our instruments. But there are other teachings too; the subtle skills of effort and patience; the art of coaxing insight from the chaos of noise balanced with the discerning wisdom to recognize delusion.

On a mountain top in Arizona he shows me the quiet art of observing. We live a strange monk-like existence, sleeping in the daylight and coming out at night to watch the sky. In a way we are cut off from the world. At night we listen to the radio broadcasts from the cities down below, but we don’t see or interact with that world. We are on an island between the world of man and the heavens. It is quiet and time is slow.

The universe is an enigma and our telescope the eye which we use to probe it. Our practice is a passive one: we cannot poke the universe with a stick and watch it move. It is out of our reach. Instead, we can only listen and watch. Every moment light from countless grand structures, which has travelled the depths of time and space for untold eons rains down upon our lives unnoticed. The grandeur that is our universe goes largely unmarked. M13 rains its majesty on my life every day, but I haven’t seen it for years. When we open our telescopes we record a tiny piece of that grandeur; a tiny fraction of that beauty is captured. It is transformed, of course. It is no longer the beautiful and weary light that crossed the void. That has been lost forever. But its journey has been noticed and lives frozen like a fly in the amber of our data.

We descend from the mountain to tell the story, but we are not the authors of this story. Our practice is not to tell the tale of our own desire. Rather our practice is to try and sweep all that away and simply to listen carefully. Our art is not the creative spark, but the way to make a space, an opening, where the quiet story of nature can be heard. Our earthly life is too loud and noisy to hear this story. We must leave that behind and travel to a distant mountain, or send our proxies out of the world entirely in order to find a quiet place to listen. And because the stories nature has to tell are alien to our human experience, we must be prepared to leave our expectation behind as well. We must also show patience. Often it is cloudy and we feel we are wasting our time, but we stay for those moments when the clouds break and the way is clear. This is the practice my teacher shows me.

Sometimes at night he tells me stories. Our practice, it seems, has an oral tradition as well. I listen to tales of the old masters, of their mistakes and their insights, of their human failings and their transcending wisdom. He tells me of his own teacher, and I discover that I am a part of a noble lineage. I begin to sense that the practice is alive, passed directly from teacher to student, and that I am becoming a part of that process. I am the latest vessel for the practice, and I’m being trained to be the embodiment of this art. Although I do not realize it at the time, my fate has led me to a good teacher, and he teaches me in that most effective of ways: by being the manifestation of his own teaching.

One day he shows a different kind of wisdom. No longer on our mountain, but back again in the noise of life on the ground he hands me a nugget of truth from outside our practice. Not a truth of the path of listening to the heavens, but a human truth about that path and how it lives in our world.

He tells me that this practice, this art, is rare. It is not practical. We serve no material goal, we further no political agenda, we make no patentable discoveries. We work solely to satisfy the whim of human curiosity. Our art exists only because human beings have a fascination with the universe they live in, but that fascination can only pay so many bills. The cold truth is that most of us who start on this path will leave it at some point, and often not out of a desire to do so, but because of the blunt hammer of pragmatism. To practice this art is a privilege, so we need to be grateful for it while it lasts, and let it go if it should leave us.

This has not been an easy lesson to embody, but it has been one I’ve tried to carry with me, bouncing from place to place as is the custom of young researchers in our practice. Walking this path does require its sacrifices, and not all of those are borne by me. Those costs are hard to count. How do you weigh the burden your path has placed on others? But these costs linger and it is not wise to ignore them. Blown by the winds of whim, luck, and fate it is not hard to see why one steps off of this path.

Now it seems that I may have found root. Soon I will be moving to Florida to join a colleague and build up a new community of practitioners. I have moved along the path and will soon become a teacher. I will have naive and brilliant and eager students and I will have to find the wisdom to show them our way. Hopefully I will have the wisdom to be grateful and enjoy it.

On the verge of this change, I find myself stepping onto another path. My karma has led me to a new practice, one which is at once wholly alien and yet also familiar. On the cusp of becoming a master, I find myself compelled to take up a new art. One that challenges me to drop it all and begin again; to find another way to clear away my expectations and make a space to listen quietly. I have only just set my foot on this path, my eye is just beginning to open. I am in the back yard again. The cold and fear are still present but this returning home has reminded me of the fascination that I forgot somewhere along the way. This new path will be hard, but this time I’m seeing it through two eyes. If all paths are one path then I have been here before and I remember it this time. The sense of return is palpable and the poetry of this moment is hard to ignore. I have some maps. I will find a teacher. I will be unmade and remade again and I will always be returning to that moment in the back yard again. That moment when the cold and the night and my self dropped away leaving just the glittering light of ten-thousand suns.

A Path to a Revelation

2007-03-28T18:34:00.001-04:00

More catchup...
Two weeks ago at my Thursday night zazen sitting I was suddenly overcome with a dramatic sense of not knowing why I was there. What was I doing? Why? I've never really shown much interest in this sort of thing. I'm not really facing any deep existential crisis. What the heck is driving me to sitting on a cushion in someone else's living room?

But the interesting thing was that there was a sense of something compelling me to do it. I just didn't know what. I could come up with all sorts of reasons why meditation was a good thing, but they all seemed like justifications for something I already wanted to do, not the compelling reason in itself. And then it occurred to me that I didn't really know why I was compelled to do a lot of what I do. Particularly when it came to my job. What was it about my job that really drives me to drag my family all over the world spending resources I don't really have?

Interesting questions, but no real answers.

Then, last Thursday, the reading at the start of the second sitting started something like "How do you answer people when they ask you why you sit on a cushion?", which certainly got my attention. I don't really remember much about the rest of the reading though because I was distracted by a newly triggered idea. The reading kept touching on the idea of the importance of the 'practice' itself, something which was heavily discussed in the book I had also just finished (On Zen Practice by Taizan Maizumi Roshi).

The reason this set me off is that I had been interviewing students all day long as part of the grading process for lab. And these being typical undergraduates, they had terrible lab books. So I ended up trying to explain to them that what we were really trying to teach them in lab was not physics, but rather the much more subtle art of good experimental practice. I was stressing the art of good lab practice.

During the reading, this idea crashed headlong into the question from the previous week and sparks flew. First, there suddenly seemed like there was a strong similarity between Zen practice and my own scientific practice, and so maybe the mysterious reason behind those two compulsions were one and the same. Second, science is an art, and so is Zen. Third, I suddenly realized that I was strongly attracted to Zen as an art form, both Zen inspired art and just the beauty and simplicity of the practice itself. Zen is art. Science is art. Was that it?

So I tried an experiment. Using the Big Mind technique I've been playing with, I asked to speak to the voice of Art. Low and behold, Art answered, and wouldn't you know it, it answered in a way that is rather similar to Big Heart, or The Way, or Non-Seeking-Non-Grasping Mind. Holy crap! Art is, to me at least, a transcendent voice. And one that speaks strongly to me! I sit because it is beautiful to do so.

I talked about this in the 'open sharing' and when the discussion came around again, the guy to my right made the comment that he too felt a kinship between the practice of Zen and his practice as an artist. But the interesting thing was that he felt like in both cases the practice was a method of making an opening and clearing a space for inspiration to happen, but not a method for making the inspiration, which comes forth spontaneously. More sparks went off, because that is a brilliant way of describing the practice of observational astronomy (and at some level, experimental science in general).

All in all, a very interesting session, and at the end, Manu suggested that I should write something about Zen and Astronomy for their Zen magazine Hazy Moon. I thought about this all the way home on the train, and the result bubbled up spontaneously almost whole when I got home. It took a few days for me to get back to it and finish it, but the resulting essay will be my next post.

Sundry Catchup

2007-03-28T18:03:00.001-04:00

To begin with, some catch up: First, it appears that we are headed to Tallahassee. They are making me an offer for the assistant professorship, and I am going to take it. Whoo hoo! I have joined the landed gentry. Hooray! And that reminds me, Doctor Who starts on Saturday. Hooray! And spring is here! The light is back! Hooray! Celebrations all round.

I've also (perhaps foolishly), waded into the bizarre waters of the Integral Institute forums. You may or may not be able to find my posts here and here. The article referred to in the first forum is in the second issue of AQAL Journal, which you may or may not be able to access here. Mostly, I think I've discovered that Wilberites irritate my shadow. This may or may not be interesting to watch.

Back to Ground

2007-03-09T08:10:00.000-05:00

The coin turns and the other face comes forward.

Started this entry on the Met line back to Harrow after an interesting sitting, but I left it overnight to simmer a bit. Much to ponder. I think I've learned something. Perhaps I already knew it, but the penny dropped last night. Manu and Sarita are not supposed to be teachers, and indeed they are not acting as mentors, but I do find their company very instructive. They are teachers simply by virtue of being living examples of what this practice looks like, and for that I am indeed grateful.

It's been an up and down week. After the second round of 'fireworks' last week, I think I let go of the surrender issue that was my early sticking point. What I found this week however, was the next sticking point, which (perhaps obviously) was expectation. Last week I was in the zone and everything was easy. Meditation was play and it was fun. However, over the weekend I took a break, (life stepped in) and come Monday I discovered there's a Monday Morning Effect in meditation as well. My skills were rusty. Worse, I discovered myself 'trying' for the first time. Arrgh! That's not good... stop it! etc...

So it's been fits and starts most of the week, though I was in the zone wednesday night for class with the crazy Kadampas. Tonight's sitting was hard though. Uncomfortable and constant adjustment. Just not clicking for the most part.

Except right at the beginning... Interesting bit that. When I started the first session, I was struck almost immediately with a strong resurrection of the emotional storm during that first week after Lazarus was born; one of the rawest times I can remember. Where this has been hiding for the last 14 months I have no idea, nor why it suddenly decided to surface last night, but there it was. Now perhaps the distance has helped to fade it, or perhaps it was the sitting, but I was able to, for the most part, just sit and observe this feeling. In a way, the stark openness and rawness of these emotions are quite beautiful, traumatic as they were to experience the first time around. In any event, it was an interesting experience to just sit with these feelings and not have to identify with them.

Manu says he is not interested in the nondual. Where he is at in his life, he just isn't interested in the absolute. He sits purely for the relative at the moment. hmmm.

This makes me wonder, what am I after? Why am I attracted to this practice? What am I trying to do this for? Is it the pure sensory experience? Probably not. That was perhaps the first hook that slipped it past my skeptic and suggested to me that there was something going on, but the weird sensory effects aren't that interesting.

Is it some sort of latent search for "spirituality?" (For lack of a better term.) I don't know. Perhaps. I've not really explored such issues much in the past, and indeed at certain points I've been somewhat antagonistic to the idea. Certainly there is (was?) some sort of shadow issue lurking given my rather asymmetric reaction to any sort of religious fundamentalism and to Christianity in particular. Perhaps the self doth protest too much? Is there, hidden in that shadow, a secret desire to surrender to such a belief? If so, then Zen is an interesting choice, seeing as it is a practice almost completely stripped of the trappings of religion. The surrender in Zen is not to a god, not to any particular metaphysical notion of reality (though these aspects can float about a bit in the background at times.) Really it's a surrender to the practice and a surrender of the need for notions. If you're looking for meaning, it seems to me that Zen is the last place you'll find it. To really sit zazen I think you need to leave that need for a reason at the door. The fact that Zen resonates with me leads me to suspect I'm not looking for The Meaning of Life.

I might be looking for a refuge from rationality. That idea does have some ring of truth to it. Why do I resonate so much more with Big Heart than with Big Mind? Perhaps I spend too much in mind already. There is certainly an aspect of my heart that yearns to break loose from the bonds of rationalism and pragmatism, and indulge in a sense of magic and wonder.

On the other hand, this is the aspect that most worries my skeptic, and that fear was the first sticking point that I had to navigate to even engage in the process in the first place. This is the still persistent, nagging kernel of doubt which digs at me. It's taken the better part of three years of reading the likes of Ken Wilber, and struggling with these ideas to get me to the point where I am now.

And I'm still not fully convinced. Far from it. Indeed, I waffle all over the map, but the arguments have been subtle and convincing enough that I can't dismiss them. The criticism that my 'rational' worldview is also based on metaphysical assumptions is troubling. Science doesn't do absolutes very well because, well frankly, you can't extrapolate. Any time you try to make a statement of ultimate truth, you are inherently extrapolating beyond the limits of your observations and nothing is really constrained. You can't just continue the curve off the edge of the page. If you do then you're so-called truth becomes a bridge that's only supported on one side. It will hold for a while, but it will never get you to the ultimate. The span is too large. (It's infinite after all).

So perhaps the Zen idea that ultimate truth is ungraspable is an appealing notion. It certainly ends lots of unpleasant arguments. Of course there is also the notion in Zen that one can actually be that ungraspable truth; in fact, one cannot NOT be that ungrapsable truth. Well... for the moment we will just file that under "food for the mind that seeks the way" and leave it at that. The nondual is an idea that teases my rational skeptic, but pleases my inner mage. Détente?

So, there is probably an element of seeking the nondual in my attraction to Zen. Still, if this was the only attraction I think my skeptic would be significantly more concerned. However, there is another reason which even my skeptic will pass whole-heartedly, and this is the reason that really came through last night. I'm finding that sitting is increasing my stability and emotional balance.

The Zen koan "be the immovable tree in a heavy wind" is speaking quite loudly to me now. This is an image that my heart leaps at like a desperate starved monkey. I've been an emotional tumbleweed for a long time. Perhaps a heavy tumbleweed at times, but a tumbleweed nontheless. Fifteen years ago I rooted myself to another tumbleweed, which has provided both some increased stability, but also some increased sensitivity to the wind. Now we are both tied to the lightest, most wayward of tumbleweeds. And for the last year and a half or so, the winds have been mighty gusty.

Sitting makes me heavy. It gives me a sense of balance and inertia. I'm still blown by the winds, but I feel like I'm rising less to the bait. It's as if, when I sit zazen, I'm literally rooting my ass to the ground. I'm beginning to feel a little bit more like a willow. Sarita read a short passage from a book by Taizan Maezumi Roshi last night which spoke of having faith in oneself. This is something I have difficulty with, but perhaps finding balance and ground will help.

In the Garden of Mystic Lovers

2007-03-02T08:25:00.001-05:00

Manifesting a bit of bliss-mind again on the way to work this morning (well afternoon technically). Still at it even. Not really sure what to make of that. I'm not sure I should try. If the zen advice is "when sitting just sit", etc., should I just go with the flow? When Blissing Just Bliss? Perhaps. There is a question that floats around in the background which wonders if there is a danger of nondual joy slipping into a more dangerous dualistic phenomenon, and how to tell the difference. But I'm just aware of this thought. I'm not really doing much about it. Part of me wonders if I'm being a bit reckless. I really don't know what I'm doing here. But then I'm also aware of the idea that that lack of training and lack of seeking is the key to why this is working for me in the first place. This seems awfully easy, and came on remarkably suddenly. It's not always there of course, but it has never been the titanic struggle that some texts suggest it should be. Then again, zen is the school of sudden realization isn't it?

Some other observations.

I have apparently become the kind of person who finds Live celebratory. Now why do I hesitate to use the word "inspirational?" Hello my Shadow. There you are. I see you. But I'm not going to do anything about it because you're fine just the way you are. When blissing just bliss.

The clouds outside my window look just like the opening of The Simpsons.

The life of my Self is very much in flux at the moment. It's been a rather eventful week. As Ferris Beuller said: "Life moves pretty fast". Well indeed that is the case at the moment. It's very much a present-in-flow and a future of possibilities rather than likelihoods, with all the thrilling anticipation and fear and buzz that goes along with it. Definitely surfing the rapids here. It's been a long year of samsaric bliss and terror and perhaps I'm primed for the detonations which have been coming with increasing regularity since December, and are now piling on top of one another. How many gestalt switches and plot twists can you pile on the head of a pin?

Back a bit more in this world now, but in a gentle way with a tendril still floating back to the nondual like an umbilical tether. Perhaps that the metaphor. This body is the space suit the nondual uses to walk in the dualistic world. The weird thing is that it comes back in waves. I can pull myself back into it sill if I try. The beginning of states turning into stages? Perhaps... I don't know, and it doesn't really matter does it? (Or does it? Hmm...)

Anyway, back to the flow. I've been here before, but it's been a while. A long while. Long enough for me to forget the feeling. No that's not right. I still remember the feeling because I know it now, but I had forgotten that I remembered it. There was a moment many years ago when the world was in flux and there was the thrill of being on the verge of something. The world was abundant and I was in love for the first time. Perhaps I can call this Toevening Mind. It's a voice I forgot I had. There is a thing I forgot about falling in love. We don't just fall in love with someone. When we truly fall for someone, we fall in love with the world as well. Everything is bliss. Even things that suck are wonderful, at least for a while.

Perhaps I'm falling for the world once again.

She says I, We, You, She,
In the garden of mystic lovers these are not true distinctions.
-Francis Dunnery

A Rhapsanghady of Zensations

2007-03-01T19:24:00.001-05:00

I was pondering on that title all the way home, which entailed taking a bus, then the tube, then another bus! I'm sure there's an even better title to be had, but that will do I guess.

So I joined a zen sitting group tonight. Very small affair, run by a couple of students of the Kanzeon tradition out of their flat in North London. I had to be a little brave to actually go, but I stuck my neck out of my shell and took the plunge. This lovely couple invite people into their home every Thursday night for group sittings, and an "open sharing" after. No hiding here, this is intimate (5 people tonight... I guess sometimes it might be only three, or even just the two of them!)

Still, I was brave and showed up. There was a little awkwardness at the beginning, particularly as these people have had some proper Zen training and I'm sorta making it up as I go along with some guidance from whatever sources I can find. The kindest description of my practice is probably "freestyle". Though it's beginning to get a bit "enthusiastic" as well. At some point I would need to get some real teaching though, and indeed, I may try to seek it out when I get somewhere. Actually, there's a Sesshin in Liverpool at the end of the month which would probably be a lovely experience, but it's probably just not practical. Still... sigh. No. Really not practical.

Still, I do seem to find this Kanzeon tradition rather attractive. If we lived in Salt Lake City I could totally see myself jumping in with both feet.

Yikes... lot's of thoughts. Not much organization. They all want to bubble out at once and they've been bubbling under for hours now. Practice in a group is different. Hard to really describe, but the experience is more communal. I found the Big Heart voice was much stronger in the communal sitting than it is alone.

We did two 30 minute sittings with a short break in between. When we started I found myself a but nervous, which then blossomed into a brief flash of full on fear. Can I really do this? Will I embarrass myself? What if...? Thankfully, it was brief and I was able to quickly settle into the breath. Then I shifted to The Controller and asked for Non-Seeking-Non-Grasping Mind. This is probably the quietest of the nondual voices I've found so far. It's a bit hard to tell it's there sometimes actually, but it's probably the best for Shikantaza (as Genpo Roshi says, "Just Sit"). So since I'm just sitting and not judging (or trying not to) it's a little hard to tell if I'm there at the beginning, but the shift back to The Controller if VERY obvious. The contraction literally feels like a clamp or metal band closes around my head.

So back to just sitting, and this works quite well. Indeed I was actually quite on during the first sitting. I just sat for quite a while, noticing thoughts, sounds (bodies are loud!). The other people in the room start to fade in my peripheral vision, taking on a semi-transparent look. I have a spontaneous memory of sitting in the back yard alone when I was 12 and looking through my telescope at the Hercules globular cluster on a cool summer night and just staring at it for ages. I was still a bit afraid of the dark, but the sky was so quiet and peaceful. That combination of thrill and peace back again. The carpet starts to get a wobbly look like a piece of paper in a breeze. (My eyes aren't moving much, so these may be effects of retinal nerves getting bored.) Then I notice the body feels stiff like stone. Hey cool, I'm a Stone Buddha!

Then I tried some other voices. The Way. Big Mind. Big Heart.... Woah! There's the buzz! It's an electric feeling like putting your tongue on a 9-volt battery. Suddenly I love these 5 complete strangers in the room with me. 5 strangers? Yes: who is this person who's eyes I'm using to see? Doesn't matter, he's lovely, as are all these other people just sitting here in the room, with their tummy burbles and transparent bodies. Oh and the carpet is lovely. And that car driving by outside is nice too. I notice my mouth is moving of its own accord. It's turning into that mysterious little smile that you see on Buddha statues. You know, the one that sits on Mona Lisa's face. Wow. That is unexpected. I am Mona Lisa's Enigmatic Smile!

etc... etc... etc...

The sharing was again scary, I now have to talk and share... So I express gratitude and joyousness. And I also explain that I am beginning to see the benefits of surrender, which does not come easy to me. I don't usually let go.

I did once though. Again, like tonight, under the influence of too little sleep I let go and took that backward step into surrender. Early one morning, really early... about 4AM or so... in an open field on another cool summer night nearly 15 years ago I uncharacteristically let go of reason and Stepped Off. And my heart sings with gratitude that I did.

And I'm Free.... Free Fallin'

Integral Asymmetry

2007-02-28T16:47:00.000-05:00

One of the interesting things I'm discovering about trying to "think integral" is that it requires a certain acceptance of intellectual patience, for lack of a better word. The whole point is to try and look for and acknowledge and integrate the truth of as many different philosophies and disciplines as possible; to be as progressive and as inclusive and open-minded as possible. But the fact is that many (probably most) of the disciplines you try to integrate are unlikely to return the favor. More than likely you have to filter out a lot of intellectual snobbery, conservative exclusivity, xenophobic prejudice and the like to gather the nuggets of truth.

So case in point, the teacher of my meditation class has been a practicing Buddhist for 20+ years, but says he has essentially no knowledge of the teachings of any other tradition than his own. No other religions, no other flavours of Buddhism, not even any other Tibetan sects other than the Kadampa sect in which he studies. To me this seems like an astonishing lack of intellectual curiosity to say the least. As a side effect, while he sees his own tradition as very pure and "very white," (ouch! my inner green sure winced at that choice of wording!) he implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) casts dispersions on other practices. This tradition has worked for thousands of years, and it works for him. Great, but I'm amazed that its never occurred to him to wonder if there is any Dharma with a different pedigree. Plus there is a serious retro-romantic flavour to this sect as well. He started the class by discouraging the use of some of the 'new' meditative practices. (As I quietly ask The Controller to grant me access to Non-Seeking-Non-Grasping Mind. (: 0 ).

Anyway, it was an interesting class. We actually learned a meditation this week. Its a strange breathing exercise which, among other things, reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about the "man with a tape recorder up his nose." It's supposed to be useful for settling the mind when it's addled, which I can believe, as it's relatively complicated and requires a bit of concentration just to keep track of which nostril you're supposed to breathe through at which time and breaking your exhalation into three equal parts and visualizing three channels going over your head and down your back, etc...

Just plunk that down in the tool chest and roll on to zazen tomorrow night.

Tar Baby

2007-02-27T11:22:00.000-05:00

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it is gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

–"The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear" from Dune, by Frank Herbert

Sigh.

The waiting continues and the tension thickens. Avoiding the sticky tar baby in the briar patch is becoming progressively more difficult and more and more effort is required to maintain focus. Thin envelopes have, not unexpectedly, started to trickle into my inbox. It's a measure of the relative situations of the astronomy job market in the UK and the US that I was shortlisted for three of the six UK positions I applied for, but so far only one of the 17 or so US positions.

Part of the problem is that I'm aware of the fact that much bigger tar creatures are potentially looming ahead, and indeed not necessarily avoidable. This is of course nothing new really. Suffering is always looming isn't it? Certainly without Right Thought and Right View and Right Action, etc... The Crunch is always lurking somewhere.

Meditation does help some. Indeed I've taken to using it quite a bit to try and maintain focus and stay productive. Still it doesn't always work, particularly when I get tired. (And of course tired doesn't always imply sleepiness. If only! Ah well, perhaps this would be easier if I was more practiced. Or perhaps not. I guess the "right view" would be who cares?

Anyway, I'm looking at trying to join a weekly Zazen group as well as the meditation classes Sunshine & I have been taking (which, among other things, are surprisingly light on the actual meditation). Supplement, supplement, supplement. Sunshine went to the evening mass at the local baptist church this weekend. She seemed to sorta enjoy it. My aren't we becoming quite the dabblers? All in the name of "getting integral" right? Plus, neither of us can manage to put together much of a "body module" at the moment, so we might as well push on "contemplation." I'm sure some shadow work would be in order too, but resources are tight at the moment in just about every way imaginable. So we take it a bit at a time.

Man, this is a rambling entry. I didn't have much of a focus in mind. It's really just an activity to keep my brain occupied on the train home. I'm not nearly good enough that I can meditate on the Tube yet, and I'm a little concerned about what my 'self' might get up to if I just let it wander aimlessly at the moment.

I think I may be developing a taste for dub reggae. I downloaded a reggae collection from iTunes the other day called Jonny Greenwood is the Controller, which is a collection of music from the Trojan music label compiled by Radiohead's creative "multi-instrumentalist" Jonny Greenwood, who has turned himself into a sort of musical jack-of-all-trades. Anyway, he seems to have pretty good musical tastes.

Rather rainy day today, Of course it's February in England, what do I expect?

Random, random, random....

My stop is approaching...

It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion.

Karma at Pooh Corner

2007-02-21T17:21:00.000-05:00

Blogging on the train again.
Class was moved at the last minute tonight to a venue around the corner: Pooh Corner Kindergarten. The room is actually quite surprisingly large for central London; it's a converted church basement. (The ground floor seems to have been converted to some sort of NHS clinic. Anyway, the whole session was running about a half hour late due to the switch.

A smaller group than last week, but including the more interesting regulars. There's a guy with a voice that sounds rather like Russel Crowe. He has a bit of that air of barely civilized violence that comes across with him as well. Then there is the quiet Peruvian lady with the Borders bag. And, most entertainingly, the two ladies who remind me of a somewhat more wholesome version of the Ab Fab women; with yoga and meditation replacing the booze and fashion.

Tonight was about Karma, and I'm afraid I have to agree with Sunshine that this is probably not a perfect fit for us. Certainly I'm beginning to see that they are a little too heavy on the metaphysical literalism for my taste. I don't know if it's just these teachers, or their Kadmpa order, or maybe Tibetan Buddhism in general. Still, it's an interesting experience, and I'm perhaps becoming a little more forgiving of the overtly religious, at least in certain settings. I'm a bit skeptical of "karmic action at a distance" which is certainly how they were discussing it tonight, but I can perhaps see how to integrate much of the idea of karma without having to invoke anything too magic. Something running more along the lines of unkind practice leaving you susceptible to suffering. I think I could see that, but sickness now caused by bad deeds in the past seems harder for me to accept.

Brian May

2007-02-21T10:08:00.001-05:00

So apparently Brian May, better known as the guitarist for Queen, is back at Imperial College as a grad student to finish his PhD in Astrophysics. I'd heard this rumor a while ago, but now he's on the face board next to the staff mailboxes on the 10th floor. However I notice he's not listed in on department website nor do I think he's been assigned office space, and I somehow doubt he'll be doing much TA work. Still there are not many astrophysics groups/departments who get do count a genuine rock god amongst their number. I have no idea who he's working with as Peter says his old faculty advisor left years ago.

Dharma Train

2007-02-14T16:52:00.000-05:00

Blogging on the tube again. Taking a late train back to Harrow after attending my second Buddhist meditation class. After each class there is a short informal chat over tea. Tonight, one of the topics of discussion was how to maintain these ideas in the harsh reality of the workplace, where people are much more likely to be harsh, angry, etc. Certainly I've had some experiences with this and hard as it is, I do think mindfulness helps. It's just not always easy to be mindful when the world is digging at you and goading you to contract.

My own source of contraction at the moment is fear. It continues to crop up as 'job season' moves from ripe to rot and I haven't yet been harvested. I really hate the process of applying for jobs. It really is exactly the sort of thing that is almost perfectly designed to shred the soul. First, there is the unavoidable statistical fact: most of the people in my position who have trained and worked for years to get a position in astronomy, don't. Most of us will run out at some point and run aground. There just aren't enough chairs and someone gets left behind. That leaving behind stings. It's hard not to take it personally. After all you are the product you were trying to sell and you were what they didn't want.

So you spend your time writing these applications, and spend your money to send them out, knowing that 90% won't even result in an interview. Then when you get shortlisted, it just ups the stakes. Now you feel like you have a shot, but you have to apply even harder. To succeed, you really have to see yourself in that position because if you don't, they won't either. But in that visualization attachment is so easy, which just makes it sting all the worse when they turn you down. It's the job that you thought you really might get that hurts the most when you don't.

Meanwhile the pressure is still there from all the other sources, and it's ever so easy to get lost in the craziness. It's so easy to contract into the fear, and the juggling act, and the rejection. And in that contraction come all the shadows projected from your fear into the world. You can see enemies and competition and missed opportunities everywhere. Staying positive and mindful in the midst of this is not easy.

I keep having to try and come back to probably the wisest thing that my thesis advisor Rob Fesen ever taught me (and he taught me quite a lot of really important things that I've only really come to appreciate many years later). Quite early in my career as a grad student at Dartmouth he told me that what we do is a privilege. It is a truly remarkable thing that we get supported to just look at the universe and think about it and tell people what we think we see. We don't produce anything pictures and the stories that go with those pictures. And that fascination with the cosmos is what pays my rent. But it's a privilege that doesn't come with any guarantees. So enjoy it while it lasts.

That's good advice. It's just hard to hold on to that wisdom when faced with the potential death of a lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. It hurts to lose something cherished. But focusing on the joy while it lasts for however long it lasts is really the only sensible answer. Anything else is just going to make you unhappy and won't change the outcome anyway. So keep the faith, where the faith is not hope for the future, but joy in the now. Enjoy it now, the future will come regardless. Enjoy that when it's the present.

Tallahassee Dreaming on Such a Winter's Day

2007-01-30T23:26:00.001-05:00

So I've been interviewing for a faculty job here in Tallahassee, and the weather has been rather chilly. Apparently this is unusual as all the locals are complaining about it as well. It's not any warmer here than it was in London. But at least the day is longer. It's nice to at least get a little sunlight.

The interview seems to be going reasonably well. At least I don't think I've said anything too stupid, and my talk seemed to come off OK. Its nice to interview at a place where someone is actively pulling for me. In principle they were pulling for me at Liverpool, but I don't know how committed any of the Liverpool folks really were to the idea of getting me up there. Peter certainly seems to be actively gunning for me and its nice to feel like I might be a bit of a front runner. Time will tell I guess, and time is going to be a bit slow. I probably won't hear anything until the end of Feb at the earliest.

The department is interesting. It's a huge physics department here with several interdisciplinary splinters. They all seem quite upbeat about building an Astrophysics group. I've also had about 6 different people tell me that the department is very 'collegiate'. Apparently it has become a part of the group mythology and is probably therefore a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. Even Peter has become a bit of an optimist. He'd probably be really happy if his wife wasn't making quite a bit of misery in his non-professional life.

Snow, Mist, Streams, Spirit and Shadow

2007-01-24T15:37:00.000-05:00

It snowed in London last night! Or at least that's my perspective. Actually, looking out the window right now a bit after noon you can't really tell anymore, but when I left home at 7 AM this morning there was about an inch of slushy snow on the ground. Riding in on the tube this morning all the buildings had a lovely coat of snow. It snarled up the trains this morning though. I didn't get caught in it, but it's never a good sign when five or six lines are showing delays and partial closures!

Meanwhile, I finished reading Traleg Kyabgon's book The Essence of Buddhism last night. Yikes! I can't say that I'm all that much clearer on what the "essence" of Buddhism is. The book claims to be trying to present a historical overview of the various schools of (primarily Tibetan) Buddhism and it's practice and philosophy. I guess I got some sense of this, but an awful lot of the book seems like endless lists of various types or levels or stages of things, all labeled in sanskrit or tibetan (or both).

The book gives the impression that Buddhism is obsessed with counting things. We start, predictably enough with the "Four Noble Truths" and the "Eightfold Noble Path", but then we quickly get mired in lists of the 6 practices of this, and the seven limbs of that and the 10 stages of the other thing. Often these lists even break down into sublists. And very often there is no notion of meaning to any of this. It's just geography and place-names if you will.

The book is also very slippery on the distinction between 'reality' and 'metaphor', although it seems to make the point that there is a lot of disagreement about that in the various Buddhist schools. Apparently they all agree that 'Emptiness' is 'real'... whatever that means, but the rest seems to be a matter of discussion. Anyway, generally this book seems more confusing than helpful. My understanding of Buddhism is as misty as it was before I read the book... perhaps even more so.

I had a discussion with Sunshine last night about what sort of meaning, if any, I should be gleaning from this meditation business. It's quite a squishy question actually, particularly if you're trying to work from a post-metaphysical perspective.

It seems to me a rather dicy business to try and attach meaning to things in general, now that I think about it. In the physical sciences, we perform experiments (injunctions) and then try to fit the resulting data (experiences) into some sort of model for what is actually happening in "the real world." But "the real world" seems to be a somewhat naive and outdated concept, which is subject to some of the same kinds of metaphysical assertions that fill old-world religion, albeit working from a tenet of 'verification' rather than faith. The verification aspect is indeed an improvement on the truths of simple blind faith, but the metaphysical assertion slips in when we make a materialist claim about what it is that we've verified.

But from a post-metaphysical perspective, what we are doing in the physical sciences is not building models that explain what is happening in the real world. Rather, we are building models which describe the results of experiments and provide a framework for understanding the relationship between those experiments. But we're not actually describing the real world, because we have no access to it. Furthermore, quarks, (if they exist) no nothing of quantum field theory. Physics doesn't exist in the real world, it exists in our heads and in our textbooks, and in our culture. Newton and Einstein didn't change the way apples fell out of trees, they just invented new ways to think about apples and how they like to fall out of trees. The apple and the tree couldn't care less.

In fact, we can't even know for sure that they exist, or if they do what their 'true nature' is. We can take a group of physicists to an orchard and show them apples and trees, and then bring them together and have them discuss things. They will all likely agree that apples are red, or maybe green (depending on the orchard), that they grow on trees, that they can fall off the trees, etc. But what this means is that the experiment is repeatable. That the scientists are working from a sufficiently similar perspectives and that these injunctions do bring forth experiences that when coupled with the similar perspectives are coherent enough to build a common framework or story. But they might not all be able to agree that apples are tasty. If one is colorblind then he won't be able to say if the apples are red or green. And if you bring a bunch of zen monks and ask them what the true nature of the apples is they will agree that it's 'mu', or 'emptiness' or somesuch.

And thus we arrive at Wilber's Integral Post-Metaphysics. What is true are the perspective/injuction/experience combinations. That's what where we can have fruitful discussions. That's what is repeatable and testable. The 'reality' is that there are these injunctions that humans can perform to bring forth experiences and if these humans have sufficiently similar perspectives (in the full AQAL sense) then they can have a meaningful conversation.. They can build a framework in that shared perspective which places the injunction/experience in context with other such experiments, and they can even make predictions based on that framework. If the predictions prove true, (new injunctions performed, new experiences brought forth and found to be consistent with the framework of that perspective), then the framework (theory) is a good one (at least until a contradiction is found). He has integrated the postmodern observation that meaning or reality or perception is always context based. The meditators tell us that even the nature of our own true mind is hidden from us. "I think, I am" is still true, but "what I am" is a very different question and appears to be context dependent.

However, where we can get into trouble is trying to apply the framework outside the parameters that define it's existence. The framework is a creation of both the AQAL address of the injunction and those of it's creators. Where we cross the line is by using the framework to make assertions about the truth value of concepts which aren't subject to the same perspectives. Thus, Newtonian gravity predicts false things when applied to strong gravity fields, but that's just the simple case. Biology won't tell you anything about whether a dog has an eternal soul, and can't. The idea of a 'soul' doesn't exist in the worldspace of modern biology. It is entirely an entity of the mind, or at least it is as far as anyone can tell.

So if we get our sense of meaning for things and events from a complicated mess of culture, society, individual preference, developmental history, etc., this necessarily means that life on the leading edge of human development is going to be a fairly 'meaningless' existence. Or, at least, if you are going to study parts of the Kosmos from a sparsely populated perspective/subject combination, then you are going to have to do a lot of the hard work of supplying the meaning for yourself.

Frank Visser, in his "take on Wilber-5" complains that he liked the old ladder metaphor for transcendent evolution rather than the waves and streams metaphor what Wilber has adopted in his more recent writings. The reason is that he says that climbing a ladder is work and transcendence is hard work as well, and that the stream metaphor implies that you can just coast along and get to where you are. I think that maybe both metaphors are right, because I don't think transcendent growth is always hard. Lazarus is growing and developing by great leaps and bounds, and while it is physically hard, he isn't trying to grow up, he just is. I think at the beginning we really do get carried along in much of our transcendent evolution, at first by our physical body, by our genetic programming, and then by our culture and our environment.

For example, you have to be pretty divorced from society to grow up in a western culture and not at least have a partial cognitive understanding of the idea of biological evolution or Big Bang cosmology. Your religious beliefs may keep you from believing that these things are 'true', but you pretty much need to have been living under a rock not to have heard of them. Why do creationists want to abolish these ideas from schools? Because these ideas act to drag their children up the ladder of cognitive evolution into post-mythic regions, and then that sets up a potential internal conflict between their worldview and their religion.

To take a fundamentalist mythic-literal view on the Bible as God's absolute literal truth and still live in the modern world requires a sort of mental shell game. You have to rely on a carefully honed selective ignorance to ignore the fact that the same science that gives us evolution also gives us naval oranges and locust resistant corn. The same science that tells us the Earth is 4.6 billion years old also keeps our clocks running in sync. If you want to believe in a flat Earth, how do you explain jet-lag other than by pretending it doesn't exist? But this is just another example of misapplying frameworks isn't it? Christianity gets into trouble when in makes assertions about the reality of the physical universe, and particularly where those assertions are in conflict with right hand empirical science. And the reason is that verification is a fundamentally better methodology than pure faith and metaphysical assertion. You just have to be careful about what you are verifying.

So in that sense, Wilber's later metaphors of streams, and most recently a conveyer belt, seem fairly apt. However, once you reach the bulk-average level of your culture it stops pulling you up. In fact, then your cultural environment and background probably pull you down. Now transcendence is hard, because you have to start breaking ties with the very things that helped you up in the first place. Now your cultural truths become cultural baggage. You need to cut ties with your old culture and reach out to the new one at the next level. Worse, if you are relatively advanced, up at green or in the lower second-tier, then when you reach up to the next level, you find there's not much there to grab on to. As Wilber says, back at red and amber, the stream is like the grand canyon, but up at turquoise it's a trickle and not very far ahead people are drawing lines in the sand with sticks.

So, back to the conversation with Sunshine. Here I am, trying to operate on a second-tier turquoise-ish level, and understand what I'm doing with this meditation business. I'm trying to integrate it into my own framework. I have Ken Wilber's AQAL map, but as he himself would likely admit, it's a pretty empty map in itself. So where can I look for meaning? The ILP starter kit has lots of discussion of practice, but really not all that much of meaning. They tell me how to meditate, and indeed, it seems to work, or at least it's had interesting effects so far. But what am I to make of these effects, and where should I enquire?

(An observation: If nothing else, this meditation stuff seems to have kicked off a epistemological storm in my brain! Good grief these entries are getting long! And now back to our program... )

So, Sunshine told me last night that maybe I was asking the wrong person (her), and maybe I should be asking Big Mind, since I was so chummy with him. Well, there's a thought. Maybe some of the "meaning" comes from the experiences themselves. Certainly, at least in many of the so-called wisdom traditions Spirit is thought to have a consciousness that is Other and can be communed with. Maybe I'm confused because I haven't asked God what it's all about. But here I may run into difficulty, as I'm not really sure that I believe that God exists. In fact, I probably don't, and that tends to put a bit of a damper on the conversation.

When I wrote in my last entry that I asked questions of Big Mind and got the chatty answer "Nope", the answer was chatty because I was supplying both sides of the conversation. I had a first-person apprehension of Big Mind, emptiness, etc, but that was the point. It was first person. Spirit in the first person. I am Big Mind and so I just looked around, felt what Big Mind felt like, and decided that Big Mind didn't need anything. This was subjective, not intersubjective. It was a monologue with spirit.

It seems that I actually have a fair distrust of the idea of manifest second-person spirit. This idea of Deity is uncomfortable and even irritating and on many levels and for a variety of reasons. It is a much more difficult thing to accept than the idea of 3rd-person spirit. 3rd-person spirit is easy to accept, because it doesn't intrude on the ego. It's non-threatening. It's like The Force. "It surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the universe together" but it doesn't seem to mean much. It just becomes a name you give to acknowledge the beauty of the world.

And what about this notion of spirit in the first-person. Well, OK, now we are beginning to intrude on something potentially more alien. If you are going to start having apprehensions of 1st-person spirit then it is going to impinge on your reality more that 3rd-person spirit. If it's first-person then it must be directly accessible. But even that can be subsumed again by calling it metaphor mixed with altered states. Second-person spirit is the hardest to place into a materialist worldview, because it requires the sense of a conscious other. Still, one can potentially imagine psychological conditions that would produce such an illusion.

But see here where my thoughts habitually like to take me? Right to flatland. Straight to scientific materialism. My mind does not like to abide in the notion of Deity because it smacks too much of the amber level Christian mythos. Wilber's psychological model includes a spiritual developmental stream, and mine seems to be very orange, with perhaps a bit of green manifesting as poetic appreciation for spirit as an abstract idea. Worse, it seems like it's a somewhat pathological orange. The idea of spirituality is even embarrassing. It feels like gullibility.

Again and again the ego crops up as afraid of spirituality. I dislike the notion of 2nd-person Deity and the inevitable surrender that must come with it. I distrust religion, particularly dogmatic religion for both it's conservative negation of the individual, and it's ceding of moral authority to the collective. My ego fears rejection from my peers should I admit to an interest in spirit. This smacks rather of a developmental line disorder. My response to the concept of Deity seems out of proportion to the stimulus, and suggests that there is shadow at work here.

The orange "pressure cooker" that Wilber describes in Integral Spirituality certainly seems to have stuck me well and truly with an orange spirituality, i.e. a scientific materialist atheism which seems to be valiantly trying to struggle to a pluralistic green agnosticism. I can see a way up to green spirit at least, in the notion of the perpetually sliding contexts of postmodernism. The fact that reality is context driven means that God could quite effectively hide from sight simply because I have no context for seeing him. Thus the question of whether spirit 'exists' becomes unanswerable in any universal sense because the meaning of 'exist' and 'spirit' are context driven. The thing is I don't see the path out of that deeply agnostic perspective, at least not yet.

Hmm... and maybe that is the context I've been searching for right there. I can bring forth the experiences, but the meaning thereof seems to elude me. But how is it that zen describes emptiness? It is ungraspable. In the foreword to The Eye of Spirit, which I was reading today, when Jack Crittenden is describing Wilber's methodology of integrating via orienting generalizations, he says:

In working with any field, Wilber simply backs up to a level of abstraction at which the various conflicting approaches actually agree with one another. Take, for example, the world's great religious traditions: Do they agree that Jesus is God? No. So we must jettison that. Do they all agree that there is a God? That depends on the meaning of "God." Do they all agree on God, if by "God" we mean a Spirit that is in many ways unqualifiable...
Yes, that works as a generalization.

So by this definition, the integral version of spirit is that mysterious something which we can get a hint of but can't really describe or know. Spirit is the mystery itself? Hmm... well... it is at least food for thought. The stuff of contemplation. Something to try.

And what is the harm? If I am to truly seek an integral version of spirituality, it must, by that very definition fit into framework that respects the rest of my worldview. Why worry so much about whether the experience is grounded in 'reality' or is simply a 'mental exercise'. Is meaning any less if it is metaphor? Why do I feed the fear of the ego? Am I afraid of being naive? What is that but simply egotism and vanity? Why cling desperately to the rational? What is this attachment to a 'reality' that is demonstrably illusory and contextual. What is this fear of faith and surrender? Let go Luke! Jump! Jump! Take the leap because it doesn't matter either way anyway! If the world is without spirit then all I have to lose is pride, and that is nothing worth clinging to.

And so, I guess I will try. I will try to abandon this attachment to what is 'real'. I will let go of logic in this respect and let meaning find it's own path. Jeez... it's so very Zen, but there you are. Time to step off.

New Adventures in Big Mind

2007-01-22T18:17:00.000-05:00

Whoa!
(or however that is supposed to be spelled).

OK. Typing pretty fast as well... it seems I'm a bit inspired.

Just finished a highly successful meditation session, and I'm still a bit buzzed. I actually feel quite good, and seriously awake and aware. Anyway, I feel like I need to be journaling these meditative experiences, at least while I'm still discovering. It really does seem to make the experiences more solid, otherwise I think they would tend to fade.

After Sunshine & Laz went to sleep tonight, I read a bit and looked at the FSU physics department website. I really do hope the interview goes well this weekend and next week. Technically my interview is next week, but I'm meeting people for dinner on Sunday, so really the process starts soon after I get there. It's a huge physics department at FSU, and it's a little bit daunting. Still, I need to be brave and have confidence in myself. And not say anything too stupid and then just hope for the best. Confidence, clear minded-ness, openness, joyful, insightful... these are the things that people look for right...

Anyway, that wound me up a bit. I read a bit of this Buddhism book I've been reading, (very dense and confusing book, but more on that some other time). About 9:30 I decided to head toward bed, but before sleeping I decided to try and do a bit of breathing meditation.

Now I have been searching for a good position to meditate in. At work I can just use my chair, which is OK, but not great. Finding a good position at home has been less easy. (We don't have the most comfortable home). Last night I came across the technique of sitting at the edge of the bed and putting pillows on the floor and then sitting cross-legged with my butt on the bed and my knees on the pillow in a vaguely lotus-esque position (but a lazy one without the leg contortions which my knees aren't up too.) So that worked reasonably well last nifht, but I was too tired to meditate much without falling asleep.

Tonight worked better. I started counting breaths to 10. As I settled in there were lots of thoughts and sensations cropping up, but I just tried to keep at it. I lost count a few times, but just restarted. I couldn't tell if it was doing much, but at the very least it's a pretty relaxing exercise, and a decent way to settle the mind before going to sleep. I started to get distracted by bodily discomforts, mostly muscle pain in my back and chest and neck from sitting in this weird position, but I just kept on counting through them or starting over if I got distracted. Then after a while my concentration slipped down just slightly as if I was starting to nod off. Indeed, that may have been just what happened. (Jeez, I over use parentheses! I've taken about 4 or 5 sentences out of parentheses already in this post!)

Anyway, as I slipped, I caught myself and restarted my counting, pushing up on my awareness to try and counter the sleepiness. But then I noticed that the counting suddenly seemed very easy. In fact, the thoughts and sensations that my 'monkey-mind' usually tried to hold on to had gone quiet. Perhaps the monkeymind thought I was already asleep. In any case, the counting exercise was now trivial. Even the slightly sore sensations of the sitting position seemed faint and distant, and I felt like I could just sit there counting for hours and hours and not exert any effort.

Well, something in my mind intuited that I'd arrived at a pretty centered and open state and that it might be an opportune time to try something more adventurous than simply counting. So, as I remembered most of the bits of the simpler version of Big Mind meditation I gave it a shot.

I first asked for the Controller, which is a voice I have had a bit of difficulty resonating with at times. That probably means something, and sitting here now, I wonder if it might be related to some classic issues I have with focus and decision making, and impulse control. Hmm... food for thought. Anyway, I tried to find the Controller and then having decided I was there, I thought I should investigate my Desire voice which, not surprisingly, was chattering away about the Florida job. So, i sat listening to that voice for a bit, just absorbing the story and listening compassionately and patiently and starting to feel things settle. Then I decided to go back to the Controller, and then (though I hadn't been planning on going to the non-dual side) I followed an impulse to ask for the Master.

Whoa!

Damn if it didn't work again!

I asked for the Master, and all of a sudden, a tingling sensation runs down my spine and my forearms and I suddenly feel very confident and powerful, as if my hands were charged with Earth-shaking energy. I was the Master and I could do anything. I was the über-controller. Whoa! Now, I'm not terribly comfortable with the Master (though I felt quite comfortable with myself at the time), so I decided to ask for Big Mind instead, which is a non-dual voice I am less wary of. So I asked for Big Mind and Big Mind showed up.

Well.... What can you say about Big Mind. Well it's big. And it's Empty. Yep. There you go. It's a big open black space. A gigantic silent space. I can only assume that this is the Emptiness that Buddhism is always banging on about. There it is.

The thing about Big Mind, is there's not a lot to say about it. I asked it a couple of questions because I suddenly remembered I was supposed to do so. So: "Is there any limit to You?" (Nope.) "Do you need anything?" (Nope.) "Is there anything you lack?" (Nope). Not very chatty Big Mind, but a pleasant enough place to visit I suppose.

I then asked for Big Heart and shifted. Now the tingles came back big time. Now I was floating in that big empty space that was Big Mind, but I was now a buzzing body of energy in that space. There wasn't the sense of gushing that burst from my chest the first time, but instead it was as if my body were a perfectly equilateral tetrahedron and buzzing inside with tingly energy. A really really quite lovely sensation.

I found I didn't really have any questions for Big Heart, so I just sat with it at glowed for a while. Indeed, I think I probably quite like Big Heart and could spend rather a long time hanging out there. Perhaps this is a taste of what the Traleg Kyabgon book I'm reading (The Essence of Buddhism) calls sambhogakaya, a state of blissfulness which manifests in a place called Akanistha, which is apparently not anywhere. Hard to say for sure, as Buddhism seems awfully vague sometimes, but it could be a description that fits.

So I sat with Big Heart for a while, and then decided I should head for home. I probably could have stayed longer if I'd tried, but I did feel my concentration start to waver slightly toward the end with Big Heart. So I packed it in and asked for the Integrated Free-Functioning Human Being. Quite a mouthful I know, but the Big Mind folks are big on winding up that way and I can see why. The IFFHB feels like a bridge back to the samsaric world. It's a voice that is connected to that non-dual world, but exists in our world. It's centered and compassionate and confident... etc... Probably it's something like the idealized Bodhisattva of traditional Buddhism. Anyway, it feels like it lives with a foot in both 'realities' and that's probably why it's a good exit from the Big Mind ride.

After being the IFFHB for a while, I returned to the breath and counted (Noting that my breath was loud... as if it had become quiet and shallow during my non-dual journey). After a couple of repetitions, I ended the session, feeling buzzed and with a strong inclination to write the experience down. And so here I am.

Actually, the process of describing sort of cerebral-izes the experience. It fixes it in the mind as a sort of abstract memory, but the sense of excitement has died down. I must say the excitement is a little distracting during the meditation. When first starts to work, there is a part of my brain freaking out, going "Holy shit! It's really working! Wow! Check it out." This voice is of course terribly non-dual, indeed, it's even a bit of a distraction from the breath. It takes a bit of effort to focus past it. Perhaps as the experience becomes more 'normal' this voice (lets call it Enthusiastic Incredulity) will calm down. 'Till then, I guess I'll just have to try and be mindful and pay it no mind.

Looking with a Different Eye (An AQAL Exercise)

2007-01-18T15:52:00.000-05:00

The last couple of posts have been pretty out there, so lets step back and give some equal time to my inner skeptic. Putting my undoubtedly naive newbie zen eye away for a minute lets look at things from a hard-assed materialist right-hand point of view for a moment and see what we can see.

OK, well... In an open-minded mood I sat down to try a form of guided meditation with very little expectation of seeing much action without a fair bit of practice. I was rather surprised to find that I felt something my "first time out", as it were. Now one hears that such things happen, indeed they can even supposedly happen spontaneously, but I certainly wasn't expecting it. Indeed, as I said, I approached it with relatively little expectation, and maybe that very openness was why it worked. I am now fairly convinced that I did have a genuine peak experience of some sort, and indeed perhaps even an 'aftershock' the next morning.

Now of course the question becomes what did it mean? What exactly was it that I experienced? Buddhism seems to have one answer, but as I suggested in my last post, I suspect that Theism would have a somewhat different answer. Furthermore, I can also think of at least a third perspective which would be a Materialist/Athiest perspective. So lets sit with that one for a bit and examine it. (As I borrow phraseology from Genpo Roshi... Good grief, I am a bit of a slang sponge...)

The materialist perspective would probably go something like this: the Brain is a biological information processing system. My mind is running a sort of operating system, and as such it is capable of being hacked. Meditation, like psychotherapy, is a set of methods for doing just that. Some meditation might be the biological equivalent of "clock chipping", making your conscious mind just a bit sharper and more efficient. Other techniques might be the equivalent of a virus. (Go read Snow Crash). So transcendental meditation is a set of techniques for hacking into the human operating system and triggering interesting effects. Like cheat codes or easter eggs embedded in software. If you know the trick, exciting and fun things can happen.

But the theist would say that it's a direct apprehension of God and the Buddhist might say something about the formless unmanifest which what my own self before I was born, or some such. The hard-assed materialist would come back quoting Occam's razor and suggest that his answer is the simplest, because it doesn't rely on invoking something from outside the real known world of "stuffs and things and things and stuffs." (Darn it, now I have a hankering for Parliament, and I'm pretty sure our ripped Parliament got lost when our disk crashed this summer.)

And now here is where I start to get into squishy territory. There was a time when I would have fully bought the materialist argument, but now I'm not so sure. As alien as Wilber's "Integral Post-Metaphysics" is, I can't really think of a reason why it's wrong, nor can I think of a satisfactory way to avoid something very much like it. The problem with the materialist argument is that it is steeped in what postmodernism calls "the myth of the given." It is based on the assumption that the 'everyday world' has some sort of absolute reality. But the problem is that Descartes demolished this quite effectively ages ago, and never succeeded in putting the world back together, at least not that I'd ever heard. The first half of his Meditation on First Philosophy really quite exquisitely establishes the postmodern idea that you really can't trust most of what your senses tell you. Indeed, he demolishes God and the entire universe all the way down to his own consciousness, where he gets stopped by that ever so important truth, "I think therefore I am", which is fundamentally the only thing that we can really ever know with any certainty. Something must be thinking about this problem in the first place. I might be a brain in a jar or plugged into "The Matrix", but I must exist in some form or other to think about it in the first place.

Now, Descartes didn't stop there and through some daft-ass verbal trickery he tries to patch it all back together, but I've never really bought it. Usually I just sorta shrugged and moved on. It's all well and good to say that I don't really know the real world exists, but it's not a very practical or useful philosophy is it? And so I fall back on a less robust but more practical philosophy of generally believing what I see unless I have some reason to be suspicious. There has always been that nagging annoyance that Descartes destroyed the world 400 years before I was born, but I mostly just shrugged and decided that the only practical answer was to go ahead and be naive for lack of a better solution.

Wilber's answer is that there is no real world, or at least if there is then we have no access to it anyway, so we might as well just forget about it. What there are are perspectives. We experience the world through injunctions which bring forth experiences which depend, at least in part, on what viewpoint we have while performing the injunction.

When I look at the world with my eyes, I see the sorts of things that eyes can see. But if I look at the world with an electron microscope, or my theoretical eye of quantum physics, it looks very different. Why do we not yet have a grand unified theory? Because we don't yet have a perspective that can merge the 'truths' of quantum field theory and general relativity. But even if we did, it wouldn't necessarily tell us everything. Relativity tells us that matter and energy are the same stuff. Matter is somehow colossally compacted frozen energy. But what does that mean? We have no direct human experience of that, just like we have no direct human experience of quantum uncertainty, so we have difficulty saying what it 'means'. We can make predictions from it and these are borne out with experimental tests to high accuracy, but what does it mean? Fundamentally, despite our ability to predict it's behavior, we still have no idea what the universe actually is, and indeed an 'absolute' answer to that question is very probably out of our grasp.

So where does this leave us? We can predict the behavior of the physical universe, but we don't know what it is. But what about the interior universe? What about what goes on in the mind. The extreme materialist viewpoint is that it doesn't exist, but of course it does. In fact, after Descartes, it's the only thing that we really know does, in fact, exist. And indeed, given that we don't know what the exterior universe means or is, either, why should we bias toward it being somehow more real at all? Why should it be more real to probe with my eyes than to probe with my mind? The answer is, I think, that it probably isn't. So what does my peak experience mean? Well, absolutely? Nothing. It has no absolute meaning whatsoever, or at least none that I'm ever likely to have access to. Just as with the exterior universe, all I am left with is perspective, and there are many available. And somehow, it is up to me to try and stitch together what ever sort of integrated truth I can glean from the available perspectives. This is where Wilber's "Integral Methodological Pluralism" comes in, and the trick is, that most of the quadrant's haven't weighed in yet with their perspectives, because the transpersonal is generally not welcome in academia.

So here I am, left at the cutting edge of human understanding, with a mind full of materialist skepticism, a healthy respect for postmodern plurality, and a heart that seems to resonate in interesting and unexpected ways when the mind is probed with the right hacks. I've started performing the injunctions, and I've started bringing forth the experiences, but the meaning has still to materialize. I've got lots of perspectives to explore, but many, perhaps most, are steeped in the ugly rhetoric of the ancient world, as I have bemoaned before. As Wilber points out in Integral Spirituality, spirituality has tended to get stuck at the blue/amber level and so here I am looking for something like a turquoise meaning and finding that it's pretty sketchy out here on the bleeding edge. I seem to be beta-testing spirituality. Actually, it's more like alpha testing. I'm pretty sure the functionality could still change.

And with that, dear reader, I leave you reassured that my inner geek is still alive and well.

Mahayana Buzzkill?

2007-01-18T06:59:00.001-05:00

Maybe it was an after effect from my Big Mind experience the day before (see here)... Yesterday morning as I rode the Piccadilly line into work, I noticed that I was enormously pleased with people. I was just sitting there on the train and everyone in the carriage with me just seemed simply marvelous to me. So I just sat there with a sort of bemused half smile looking at each person and finding them all beautiful. There was no sense of preference either. Each person was clearly individual, some were obviously more fashionable (as many Londoners tend to be) or conventionally beautiful, but all of them, even the frumpy, grumpy and ugly seemed somehow equally lovely yesterday morning. It was really quite a pleasant feeling, though I had to exert some mental discipline and not just stare at people smiling, as I'm sure it would probably feel creepy to them.

So, arriving at South Kensington I found that the feeling persisted as I rode the escalators up to the surface and walked along the pedestrian subway toward the museums and Imperial College. I was floating along in a pleasantly warm perspective, enjoying everything I saw. It wasn't the sort of emotionally intense experience I'd had the day before, but more just a pleasingly satisfied feeling. Everything seemed just really nice, even the damp grey drippy English morning.

Then, near the exit to the Natural History museum, I passed the gentleman sitting on a produce crate selling The Big Issue in his usual spot. I've probably passed this man hundreds of times on my way to work and never bought a copy of the magazine from him, and yesterday was no different, but almost as soon as I passed him the bubble burst. The glow faded, the cold rainy morning air replaced it, and suddenly people were just people, the world was just the world, and the day was just another morning on the way to work. And I knew instantly, in my own mind, that the reason was that I had noticed this guy on his crate and just passed him by. Somewhere inside me I had felt an urge to give this man a couple of quid for his magazine, and I hadn't acted on it.

This makes me wonder a bit now about the Bodhisattva vow. If this episode yesterday is a typical byproduct of transcendentalism, then is the Bodhisattva phenomenon actually a compulsion? I think perhaps it is. Indeed, I've thought this intellectually in the past, but now perhaps I have a more direct apprehension of how this works. Perhaps the sort of meditative exercise I subjected myself to on Tuesday acts to condition our brains to notice and act on these generous impulses by making us aware of our emotional need to belong in the world as a part of the whole. Perhaps when we feel plugged into a loving universe and then fail to act on a generous impulse, it separates us from that feeling of goodwill. The discontinuity between the impulse and the action breaks the spell and the gestalt is broken. The stereogram collapses into its random dot components and the vision is lost. Since the vision was tied into an emotional need, or sense of well-being, or tickling the pleasure centers of the brain, or however you want to view it, the bubble bursting is a come-down.

Is this the origin of the idea of sin? There is a school of thought that says that Sin is separation or distance from God. If I was someone who had been brought up and lived in the context of a heavily mythic theological system with a strong second-person sense of deity, then I might indeed have interpreted the last couple of days as direct apprehensions of God in the second person reaching into my 'soul.' Then the sudden removal of that feeling might indeed have felt very much like a rejection. Like the rebuke of an angry parent or lover. I might have been very likely to feel that I had sinned and needed to seek redemption. As it is, it felt more like a gestalt switch to me.

I bought a copy of the Big Issue from this gentleman this morning. I wasn't feeling the same bubble this morning, but the sense of karmic cause and effect had already been instilled. Actually, I have a stronger impulse to buy him a cup of tea, but that is a rather more complicated intersubjective transaction, and I am still a bit of a coward in that respect. Still, perhaps the impulse will act as an agent of growth. We will see.

Altered States and other Revelations

2007-01-16T10:21:00.000-05:00

It's been a bit of strange day. Actually, it's been a weird week.

To begin with, phase shifting is very much harder with a baby. When we left Colorado last Tuesday, Laz was on a schedule where he woke up shortly before noon, which corresponds to about 7 PM here in London. In other words, he was nearly 180 degrees out of phase when we got back to our flat in Harrow. Add to that the fact that neither Sunshine nor I managed to get much sleep on the flight while Laz did and we have a rocky beginning already.

Now normally I try and get some sleep on the long haul and then stay up as long as I can, probably going to bed in the early evening. But you can't really explain this to a 1-year old, so instead we've been trying to wrap him forward by keeping him up as long as possible and then keeping him asleep as long as possible. This sorta works, but he's also got a bit of sleep intertia. Anyway, he's pushed over enough now that he's waking up a bit after midnight, which is at least a schedule that allows me to go to work during the day. But it is decidedly weird, since it effectively means that our days are backwards. We get the evening and then the sun comes up and I go to work. My inner clock is quite confused.

Meanwhile I'm applying for jobs... again. It's a bit weird though, as some of these positions I'm applying for are connected to people I already have working relationships with. So I'm writing weird impersonal cover letters to people I'd usually e-mail and call by their first names. It's ever so slightly twilight zone. Or maybe it's just the sleep schedule.

Or maybe its something else. Just before leaving Colorado I bought a bunch of Buddhism books, and so I've been slowly soaking in Zen for the past week or two as well. I started with The Eye Never Sleeps by Dennis Genpo Merzel, which is really quite lovely. It's a discussion of the Hsin Hsin Ming, an ancient Zen poem. Genpo Roshi's (his current title) discussion is really quite refreshingly modern. It's still inscrutably Zen, but what would you expect?

Anyway the Zen seems to be seeping in a bit. On the plane flight home we watched Hou Yuan Jia, (known to the western world as Jet Li's Fearless). Actually not a bad movie. "Kung Fu movies" have come a long way, and many of them are really quite beautiful now. Anyway, I found my brain getting snagged on the Buddhist undercurrent in the film, so the brain is definitely digesting some of this.

I've also been slowing sampling the ILP starter kit. The "Out of the Box ILP" is not terribly helpful, and their "body" modules seem a bit hokey to me. (At least the "1-minute modules" versions of them.) But the meditation CD seems like it might be more useful. Today I watched the first of the DVDs: Big Mind Meditation (again with Genpo Roshi). This was actually quite good. In fact, it might even have worked which kind of surprised me. Maybe it was the weird sleep schedule, or the 5th cup of tea today, or maybe it was an actual kensho experience, but much to my surprise, I actually felt something. Indeed, it even seemed to be the 'right' sort of something. It was a particularly strong resonance during the 'Big Heart' section, and corresponded very closely to the descriptions on the DVD, but (and this is the part that is hard to dismiss) I felt it prior to hearing the description. So its not just a simple implanted suggestion. Perhaps it was a more subtle effect, or perhaps it was an actual Subtle effect.

Sort of hard to describe actually. It was a gradually growing tingle... sort of similar to an orgasmic sensation but centered primarily in the upper chest. There was also a sensation of dizziness and a disconnection with the senses rather akin to the buzz of drunkenness. During the "Big Mind" portion of the meditation there was indeed a sense of free-flowing motion and boundlessness in my head. But with the transition to "Big Heart" this shifted to a much stronger sensation of gushing forth from my chest and a desire to (for lack of a better description) hug the world. (Yes, Ick, I know. It's like a Coke commercial!) Anyway, skeptical as I tend to be about these sort of things, I was surprised to find it actually seemed to be doing something. Certainly gives me something to ponder.

His Big Mind technique is kind of interesting. Instead of engaging the sort of typical breaking down the ego methodology, he actually employs the conscious intellect using a Voice Dialogue technique borrowed from psychotherapy. Maybe this is the Buddhism for Gearheads I was looking for. Certainly psychobabble is a lot easier for a modern to swallow than magical energy.

Finally, returning to more mundane reality, I got some weird mail in my slot. A manila envelope addressed to Dr. C L Gerardy, and with a strange return address from Jerusalem, but postmarked from Phoenix. Inside, a mad bunch of bible quotes and other strangeness, mostly from Revelations. Presumably just harmless madness from someone (though if I do suddenly come down with anthrax have someone check the envelope), but I do wonder what I did to rise to their attention. Ah well, it goes with the territory I suppose, but usually I get the crazy messages through e-mail. Here, someone actually spent a few bucks to post something to England. No explanation of course, just madness. Perhaps nutters should learn the art of the cover letter?

The Mind Just Googles

2007-01-08T19:37:00.001-05:00

"Sex, Money and Power: The Bible Shows You How" (Michael H. Brown)

So Sunshine's brother Jeremy recommended another Christian book to her last night, but he didn't quite have all the relevant information. He gave us the author "Sean Claiborne", except that he didn't know how it was spelled, and both names have multiple spellings. The title he thought was something like "The Infectious Revolutionary". Searching on the latter in Amazon digs up lots of books about 18th century medicine, but not the book in question. We tried searching Amazon with all sorts of different subsets of these words. One of them turned up the above book, which as far as I can tell is mean in all earnestness. As with the Jesus Visa (see this previous blog entry), this is just one of those things that seems like a bit of a disconnect. Weird

P.S. The actual book he wanted to recommend is "The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical" by Shane Claiborne

New Old Blog

2007-01-08T19:20:00.000-05:00

Well, Blogger has updated their blogging engine with new stuff, so now I've "upgraded," though it remains to be seen if it is truly an improvement. First thing I had to do of course was get it working with the my local blogging client (ecto). The transition was not too bad, but one never knows with these things. Anyway, this is mostly just a quick post to make sure that things are still working.

Absolutely Alien

2007-01-03T23:27:00.000-05:00

OK... So I've decided that Mere Christianity is so deeply flawed it doesn't really make any sense to continue this blow-by-blow. This first half of this book, which is supposed to be his intellectual argument for belief is just riddled with appallingly poor logic. At virtually every step he tends to make one of three fatal mistakes: (a) artificially narrowing the available options to just 2 or 3 possibilities, (b) proof by fiat, or (c) just introducing a new conclusion without any explanation at all.

Basically, his argument boils down to something like this: human beings have a notion of ethical behavior, therefore there must be a perfect moral force outside the universe which acts on us, and this is the Christian God who created all things. The bible tells us that there was this man called Jesus, who died to that God could forgive us for being human. Because the Bible says he claimed to be both humble and the son of God, he was either (a) the son of God, (b) he was crazy or (c) he was Satan. (Apparently (d) he never existed in the first place or (e) he was an earthly opportunist and con artist or (f) he was misquoted and appropriated by the organized church who was afraid of the message the God and Man are one, are not viable options). Lewis' solution to determining between these options?

Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

A classic proof by "It's bloody obvious! What are you, some sort of moron?"

Oh well...

There are a few sort of interesting ideas in the book here and there, but mostly this book is reinforcing my notion that Christianity is a bizarre cult full of people whose thought processes are utterly alien.

Chapter 2: Still not doing well

2007-01-02T04:44:00.000-05:00

Just a quick follow up. Having read chapter 2, Lewis is not doing much better. This chapter discusses "Some Objections" to his previous chapter. (I guess I'm not the only one then.) First, he tries to distinguish morality from 'instinct', which is all well and good. But then he confuses the issue by calling things like 'patriotism' and instinct. Interestingly, he then states that following these sort of drives as absolutes would lead to disaster, which again I'd agree with. But his argument that (pseudo)universal values systems (i.e. morals) are somehow other than these instincts (such as patriotism) are weak indeed, and effectively boil down to just a simple axiomatic statement, disguised underneath some frankly ill-advised metaphors.

We then get an argument that these universal morals are akin to mathematics, which he sees as an example of a taught human practice that is somehow more than a human creation. "But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something that human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked." Well, actually... yes... it is in a way. Math is precisely a construction of the human mind, and in fact has no reality outside of the human mind. Search the entire physical universe and you will nowhere find the square root of minus one. It is a construct that we have invented and only exists in our internal worldspaces (though both in the monological and dialogical cases.) Even simple things like "1" or "0" don't exist in the external physical world. The fact that we can talk about 1 something has to do with the fact that we translate our experiences into an internal model of the outside world, and back. But rocks and penguins don't know about integral calculus. By comparing morality with mathematics, Lewis actually undercuts his own argument.

Next we get the idea that since we can rank various moral systems against one another, then there must be some real absolute against which we compare. But again here he falls victim to his own assumptions. Yes, certainly I can rank different value systems, but the standard against which I compare will likely be my own beliefs. Thus the ranking is likely going to be different for depending on who does the ranking. There doesn't have to be a 'Real Morality', a moral absolute for ranking, just a local subjective one. Indeed postmodernism claims that that's just what we have: universal moral relativism.

What he's really feeling is that there is a moral progress, but its evolutionary, and I'm afraid that Christianity is not the end of evolution, but merely a step along the way. It was on the cutting edge of moral development 2000 years ago, but is, at the very least, 400 years out of date. That's why reading the Bible makes me uncomfortable; because it is described by much of the world as the source of moral absolutes, but the morality I find within is as barbaric to my 21st century sensibilities as say the Aztecs would be to most Christians. I must adamantly disagree with Lewis that I would happily sanction the murder of witches if I thought that they existed.

Mere Metaphysics

2007-01-01T21:36:00.000-05:00

I finally finished Ken Wilber's latest book Integral Spirituality last night. This was a very interesting and challenging book. Challenging both in terms of just trying to understand it, (it has some very subtle and tricky ideas and I'm certain that I didn't follow all of it), but also in terms of forcing me to think hard and perhaps a bit differently about quite a few things. His integral post-metaphysics idea is pretty challenging stuff, though I think that he may be ultimately right about it. It did seem at least a potential way forward from the death-blow to reality that postmodernism seemed to deal out. His view of reality is actually quite tricky and subtle, and I don't know how easy it would be to use in real life... but it may be the way forward anyway.

Anyway, so I've moved on to the book Jeremy gave me for christmas: C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Oh, dear. Well, let me just say that old Clive has his work cut out for him. Now, he is not helped by my natural reticence to believe in such things anyway, but I'm actually trying quite hard to keep an open viewpoint. After all, he must certainly have some 'truth' to impart. Besides I've managed to keep an open mind through Wilber's very alien ideas, (including the idea that I probably need to look a bit more closely at the spiritual dimension of things), so I think I'm up to the task here. The problem is that Wilber's is a tough act to follow, and furthermore, Integral Spirituality was in many ways pretty convincing about what a modern 21st century spirituality must contend with; what cognitive ideas a post post-modern philosophy must contend with, and lots of examples of how many fail.

So, with this setup I wade into Lewis' book, and, oh my, what a mess! I've only read the first chapter, but in those half-dozen pages he's already made a number of fatal mis-steps! This does not bode well. Still, I'll press on. I found my discussion with Jeremy quite an invigorating experience, and I am eager to continue to engage with him about his beliefs. In many ways we are, well not exactly opposites, as that implies a certain opposition, but certainly we are complements. He is developing a fairly deep spiritual practice, but of a very mythic-literal flavor, which contrasts with my trained skeptic. Perhaps there is something that we both can learn.

Now, what's wrong so far. Well... He starts by pointing out, in a fairly humorous manner, that there is a "law of human nature" which acts as a set of universal moral values. Further he claims that these are unchanged from culture to culture. In a post-postmodern world, however, such a statement just doesn't hold water. Our moral systems very much are shaped, at least in part by our cultural background. Furthermore, they are also shaped by our developmental level.

My morals, for example, are fostered very much by (amongst other things) my western, secular, a fairly 'green' background, a fair bit of cognitive development, a long time steeped in an academic scientific workplace, and a recent exposure to integral philosophy. As a result, I have some strong moral objections to the actions of George W. Bush and his administration, but I also believe that they are honestly doing what they see as the morally right thing. Of course morality a relative thing, (just like the rest of reality, or so Wilber would claim). You don't have to look very far to see that. Just watch Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and the BBC back-to-back. The moment you step outside your own culture and into somebody else's you are faced with alien values. Some may differ more than other's, but there are certainly different values. Furthermore, the limits of moral behavior depend on how far away your horizon of "us' vs "them". After all, you only need to behave 'humanely' to those you consider human. (Or from a more advanced viewpoint, your moral obligations to others depends on the extent to which you view them as deserving of your moral respect. Even pretty green values don't typically worry too much about insulting rocks.) So when when Lewis claims that "What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced?" Well, but the Nazis did believe they were doing the right thing! As objectionable as the holocaust is, those most responsible for it really did believe they were doing the right thing. Go read Mein Kampf if you don't think so. Now give him some slack from writing in the context of the Blitz, but in hindsight, he's just wrong here.

So, moral absolutes, at least as practiced by Human cultures are certainly not in evidence on this planet.

Of course Lewis also tends to argue from a viewpoint heavily steeped in "The Myth of the Given" and thus heavily metaphysical. The real world is just assumed to exist and to correspond to his beliefs: "unless Right is a real thing". Postmodernism would eat him alive for such a statement.

So, at the end of chapter 1, Lewis is 0 for 2.

A Christmas of Chaos and Ideas

2006-12-25T15:38:00.000-05:00

So,
Lazarus slept in for Christmas morning, not getting up until about 10AM. Probably the last time that will happen for a while! Generally, I think he did really about as well as could've been expected. He quite liked going through his stocking and getting his present from Santa (a set of Doctor Who action figures). The opening of christmas presents proper, however, soon overwhelmed him. The chaos of that many excited people in one room is quite a bit to take for a guy who usually only sees his mom and dad in any given day. He still enjoyed things, but we had to periodically escape to the quiet upstairs and take a break. Still a couple of presents left to open for him. He just got beyond it after a while.

The sharing of ideas seemed to be a theme, perhaps mostly instigated by Sunshine and I who asked for bunches of technical books for christmas. We gave David a copy of SES which was well timed, as he asked me just last night were he should start with Wilber. Jeremy, prompted by our conversation last week gave me a copy of Mere Christianity which should prove interesting. It certainly seems as if a conversation of sorts may be starting.

Post intersubjective fireworks

2006-12-22T03:06:00.000-05:00

It's late, about 20 minutes after midnight. Sunshine is awake because she's feeling ill. Dinner isn't going down so well with her or something. Meanwhile, I'm still up for a somewhat different reason, but in a way perhaps I too am trying to digest a spicy meal. (The process seems more pleasant for me. At least I'm not certain I want to know what the intellectual equivalent of hurling is.)

I had a very interesting discussion with my brother in law Jeremy about religion this evening. He is on a spiritual journey into deep Christian territory and it sounds as if he's been having some success. So we had a discussion about reality and scripture and (at least implicitly) about some integral ideas as well. All in all, it was quite a stimulating discussion, which I think left both participants with some new ideas to ponder. I'm not really sure that I can detail what those are. I could try, but I don't know that I've digested it fully. It certainly feels like I'm still digesting. My brain is sparking all over the place. I've been having some sparks already from my reading of the latest Wilber book, but the setting is certainly having an effect as well.

I do think I have a bit of a shadow regarding religion, and Christian religion in particular. I probably need to look into that. I've been keeping it mostly in check though, focusing past my xenophobia and attempting some embracing. Certainly have lots of opportunity this fortnight. Definitely in alien territory now. Not only am I surrounded by several seriously christian folks, but I'm hanging out in that oh-so-red state of Wyoming, which coming from liberal progressive London seems a bit like the far side of the moon. Living in the UK has definitely given me a new perspective on the US and Americanism.

Anyway, it will be interesting, and I think I am slowly evolving out of my fear of being different enough to engage with the alien and perhaps expand my rolodex of perspective. Certainly this is a pretty decent opportunity to do so as the in-laws are not only Christian (at least some of them) but are also intellectuals, which certainly does aid the conversation.

Meanwhile I'm becoming ever more curious about this Integral Life Practice thingy that Sunshine has gotten us. It will be interesting to discover if it is substance or pure product. It seems a hard thing to bottle, but maybe they've got some useful stuff in. (I love that particular bit of UK slang grammar.) I suspect I am going to end up sampling some of the on-line discussion and wander over to I-I sometime and see what's what.

Spark Spark Spark...

I do think that I should probably investigate Christian mythology a bit. Disturbing as it is, it is a dominant force in my culture and I probably need to understand that better. It might also be integral to addressing any shadow issues I have in there. Besides, it gives me a path to interesting conversations with the in-laws. All quadrant after all.

I don't think that I'm likely to find it a path to spiritual development. I suspect that I'm more likely to find mesh with something a little less literal and a little less deity centric. My gut feeling is to look at Zen or some such, but I don't know all that much directly about it. Most of my Buddhist knowledge is filtered through Sunshine or Ken Wilber. I haven't made much of a search along that horizontal path yet, though I'm beginning to get the first inkling that maybe I should.

Well... perhaps it is time to see if I can get the machine that goes ping out of my head and get some sleep before I wake Lazarus.

Longslit Spectrum of Consciousness

2006-12-20T13:11:00.000-05:00

Ken Wilber's Integral Spirituality is turning out to be quite an interesting read. There is a big gap between this book and his previous ones (about five years or so) and that gap really shows. This new stuff has definitely stepped up a notch. It's a bit of a slow read, but is turning out to be quite an exciting and thought provoking one.

He's also made a fairly radical change to his spectrum model. Previously, his upper left evolved much along the lines of his original spectrum of consciousness model, and basically grafted meditative involution onto the top of the procession of waves from developmental psychology and the like. Thus one evolved up to the integrated 'centaur' and then started evolving into the transpersonal 'psychic', 'subtle', 'nondual', etc.

Now he's literally tipped this over on its side. Instead of grafting involution onto the top of developmental evolution, he's made them effectively orthogonal. Instead of a one-dimensional spectrum, we now have a two-dimensional lattice with evolutionary developmental structures as one dimension, and meditative state development as the other. Now he can explain how you can have highly developed 'spiritual' practice which is still stuck in a low level evolutionary state. No wonder I find spiritual text difficult to get into. Much of it is written from a lower evolutionary state. The Bible may be a glorious source of rich involutionary inspiration, but it is grounded in a 2000 year old worldspace and morality which seems barbaric, cruel, and totally incompatible with a modern global society.

It also helps to clarify to myself where I am in this AQAL setting, and why I was seemingly on the doorstep of the transpersonal but didn't seem to be aware of it at all. No wonder I've been looking for Buddhism for Gearheads. Perhaps this I-I "Integral Life Practice" kit that Sunshine is getting for Christmas will be something of that ilk. (Assuming that it isn't now too out of date with respect to this multi-dimensionality). Still, I guess the advantage of being at 'tier 2' is that I can reach down and pick out some of the wisdom from below. I can try and reinterpret Zen into a teal/turquoise worldspace, even if it's more work.

MY VISION IS IMPAIRED! I CANNOT SEE! (but perhaps a spark of enlightenment?)

2006-12-18T16:09:00.000-05:00

Here's a new experience: blogging in bed with the sleeping baby. We're in Casper Wyoming, having arrived late last night after a long set of flights from London, and a long car ride up from Denver on icy roads. Wow. I'd forgotten how cold it gets here. I mean, I remember it intellectually, but he body forgets that feeling. It's cold here!

Anyway, in general the trip went pretty well considering. Laz slept for a lot of the trip, and didn't really seem to mind plane travel much at all. He was much less pleased with the car seat because Sunshine couldn't let him out of his seat and feed him without stopping the car.

This was of course a pretty large source of stress for her too. It really cuts her when he cries, especially if she feels like she could be doing something about it. This can also then strike the nerve in that deep wound of hers and trigger her lockdown reflex. That in turn, triggers her guilt spiral, and in general, it turns into a pretty ugly scene. She is making progress though, and at least now I feel like we are getting some understanding of what's going on and developing some methods for coping, at least with parts of it. I don't know about this deep wound. That anger/lockdown reflex seems pretty low-level and I think we may need to look elsewhere for very specific kind of help for that. Meanwhile, we can work on defusing some of the other interrelated issues ourselves.

Laz broke the eyestalk off the dalek this morning. (Actually, I'm not sure where that piece ended up... I need to find it before it causes more trouble). Anyway, now he has a fine example of that classic genre of children's toys, the slightly broken toy. (Actually he's got a few others, but this is a true classic. I guess I used to have a slew of legless R2D2 figures when I was a kid.) Actually I guess technically it was my toy, but Laz loves it so it's his too now. Besides, it much more fun to be played with (and to watch toys being played with). I'm not really much of a 'keep it in the box' sorta guy.

Laz has really taken pretty well to traveling. He seemed to enjoy his stay at the hotel in Amsterdam, and he has really taken to Kathy (Sunshine's mom). Usually, he has a bit of stranger fear around new people. It took him a while to warm up to Loren (my brother) and David (Sunshine's brother) when they visited, and Jeremy (Sunshine's other brother) is still a bit scary. But Laz is all over Kathy, climbing and laughing and even playing a bit of the chase game. Maybe he senses enough of Sunshine in her, or maybe she's just got "it" (whatever that is), but he has no stranger thing at all with her. (I can't imagine it is a memory from her visit when he was a week old, but maybe the internet chatting helped.) Who knows.

He's napping quite peacefully now, and I'm keeping watch so Sunshine can get some downtime with family. (She desperately needs the downtime too!) While we were putting him to sleep, I was again reminded of my technique for encouraging his sleep. It was one of my intuitive parenting discoveries from quite early on. Basically, while holding or touching him, I close my eyes and breathe slowly and deeply, trying to put myself as close to sleep as possible. (Indeed, the closer I am to nodding off the better.) Then its sort of a matter of just projecting that zone of calm at him. I know this sounds rather new-age goofy. It actually feels rather Buddhist to me, particularly this notion of generating 'sleep energy' (if you will) and embracing or channelling it to him. I suppose, objectively, that it is probably that he is picking up on a million non-verbal body language cues from me. Seeing as he isn't fully emotionally differentiated from Sunshine and I, and because he's still got that infant instinct to imitate, that he ends up adopting my calm to some extent.

Now what strikes me as really interesting this time, is that in Wilber's integral philosophy, both views are valid and useful. The hard-nosed objective view would be the processes as viewed from the 'right hand' (probably lower right?) viewpoint, and the goofy Buddhist version is the view from the 'left hand' inside. But the point is that both views are correct, and this may be the first time I actually 'get' where he's going with the post metaphysics, and how to relate 'science' and 'religion'. I might intellectually understand the objective view, but the Buddhist version is just as useful here in practice, and might even be more so for certain practices.

When I discovered this practice, it wasn't through the external objective view. I don't think about sending out non-verbal cues. I really do tend to focus on sending my 'loving sleep energy' at him. Similarly, when I'm trying to calm myself, I don't tend to think about flooding my brain with Serotonin or whatever the appropriate brain chemical is. I focus on finding center, mindful breathing, etc. But here's the really exciting bit. I don't have to abandon my 'hard-nosed' scientific training. I don't have to abandon my objectivity. In fact, I'm better off with both.

This is very interesting indeed, because it effectively dismisses one the biggest issues I've had with 'religion', which is that it seems to require me to turn of by brain. Faith without evidence is the goal. Indeed evidence may only hurt you. This often seems to me to be the voice of religion, at least much of I've met that calls itself religion. And I have serious moral objections to that sort of dogmatic approach. What's so attractive about Wilber's approach is that it is one of injunction and response. Effectively it is something like a spiritual scientific method. Integral spiritual training should sound like 'try this: it works!'. And indeed, I've tried something and it does seem effective.

What's more, the objective understanding I have of it doesn't reduce its efficacy! This has been one of my stumbling blocks in the past, probably a leftover of flatland philosophy. If spirituality is all in the mind, then what is the point? If Buddhist lovingkindness doesn't exist in the 'real' world, then how does it help? I seemed to have a hang up on reality. But of course, 'cyberspace' doesn't really exist either, but it is an eminently useful thing in it's own realm. Lovingkindness probably does have external correlates, and they may be quite complicated, but internally, in the human mind, they manifest in a fairly intuitive way.

And here's the truly shocking bit: the external 'real' world may NOT be the primary motive causation! There are indeed correlations between internal and external worldspaces. I have tended, in the past, to assume that the external factors were the causal reality, and the internal factors were mere side effects. But the truth is, that I don't really have much of a basis for that bias. It is a well known scientific trap to equate correlation with causation. Perhaps the flow of causality flows both ways. And if so, then that opens the door to a great many possibilities.

Waiting for the Sirens' Call

2006-12-14T16:02:00.000-05:00

So, a late night at work, followed, apparently, by a slow train ride home. They just reported "severe delays" into Acton Town, my halfway point. So, since the carriage is relatively empty, I'll blog a bit on the laptop.

That's not the topic though, it's just a relatively pointless bit of background. The topic is more what I was musing on while walking to the tube station... touched off, in part, by the New Order song playing on my iPod. New Order often gets a bit of stick from music critics for their "adolescent" lyrics. Sometimes though even the simple can strike a nerve. I've always had a thing for "Regret" from their Republic© album, and in this case it's the title song from their latest album that lends the title to this entry which hits a little close to home.

The reason, however, will probably be left as subtext to whatever reader might eventually read this. I suspect that there are few enough of those anyway. Some might be able to put together a plausible hypothesis for the relevance, some might even jump to the wrong conclusion. In any event, I have not (at least yet) progressed to the point where I am blogging my innermost self to cyberspace. Does anyone actually? Certainly some people seem to get surprisingly intimate with the internet. Even so, something must always get left out. It's inevitable. Still, is such a universal intimacy even desirable? Is it an ideal to strive for, or just a very bad idea?

Why do we hide things from our fellows? Is it for defense? Perhaps. Certainly others can use your innermost thoughts in a way that might be hurtful to you. But is that just because we are insecure in ourselves? If we are really comfortable with our own selves, can our secrets still hurt us? Our current society is built around the principle that everyone is hiding something, so as a practical point, being completely honest is probably a potential detriment. But if this weren't the case, is that all that should hold us back? Assuming I'm not going to run for political office, then it's reasonably unlikely that anyone other than family or friends are ever going to read this. Surely I shouldn't want to hide things from them?

Or should I? Is intimacy always a gift? Is it always appreciated, or would some prefer not to know too much. Intimacy is, after all, not merely a sharing of "good stuff." What if a loved one discovers something ugly, that while 'true' is also hurtful. Is it always a good idea to strive for intimacy? I'm not sure that I know.

I am not a natural in this respect. It is not my instinctual nature to open up and share myself. At least some of that is self esteem, or the lack thereof. Some is probably socialization. For whatever reasons, I tend to play things pretty close to my chest.

Still, I have at least one extremely intimate relationship, and we work really quite hard to keep it that way. Still, this intimacy comes with a price, and the toll can sometimes be brutally high. Even with two people as modest, empathic and well meshed as Sunshine and I, the truth can be incredibly painful at times. It doesn't deter me from chasing that ideal in this one case, but it does give me great pause when considering revealing personal issues. Intimate secrets seem to me to be dangerous things and potentially heavy burdens that shouldn't be settled on those around you without serious consideration. I still don't know if it should be that way, but there it is.

Still, perhaps something is being lost. This self censorship certainly narrows experience. Perhaps great TBNNI lyrics were lost to embarrassment. Perhaps I had a brilliant thesis about a New Order song which has been left on the slag heap of other choices. I have been told that there are people, perhaps even potential readers, who would like to know me better. Perhaps they do. Perhaps they will. Perhaps even this blog will provide some of that knowing. If so, I wish them godspeed and hope that they do not regret the knowledge. I might, after all dear reader, be secretly evil.

TIMMY!

2006-12-14T09:51:00.000-05:00

So, not only have the residents produced at least 2 major works this year, and a bunch of archival stuff as well, but they've started releasing a regular series of short videos on YouTube starring Timmy from Bad Day on the Midway. It's a bit like Jim's Journal and Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy, except of course from that disturbed Residents worldview. Give it a look:

Link to YouTube

Three Body Problem

2006-12-12T20:13:00.000-05:00

Thich Naht Hahn's Anger is a fine book, as far as it goes. It does just fine at proscribing a technique for dealing with two-body toxic relationships, (feuding couples, warring nations, angry parents, etc). What it doesn't address, however, is the much nastier three body problem. What do you do when there is a third person involved? When there is not 1 bidirectional communication but three? Just to make it more complicated, lets make the three people span an enormous range in development both as wholes and even internally. Things get complicated. It's all well and good not to require mindfulness in your 2-body partner, but how do you balance the compassionate listener with the compassionate warrior in the 3-body case?

Wilber's Basic Moral Intuition: act to preserve the greatest depth for the greatest span. Yeah, fair enough, but what do you do in the real world when you are faced with incomplete knowledge. You know, that tricky little complication that gives political science, game theory and economics majors things to write theses about. What do you do when you need to balance the simultaneous needs of loved ones when hampered by incomplete knowledge about all three participants and when your own skills are, at best, untrained.

The answer, inevitably, seems to be that you make it up as you go. You can try and think as broad as you wish, but inevitably, it will boil down to flying by the seat of your pants in a fog without a map. And even previous experience is only so much help, because as Newton pointed out hundreds of years ago, the three body problem is unstable. Even the closed orbits are balanced on a knife edge and the slightest misstep sends things crashing into chaos.

People get hurt. And therein lies the tragedy. That's what leaves you sitting in the dark, listening to sorrow, and haunted by the ghostly echos of footsteps you might have taken.

The Conscience of the King

2006-12-12T10:56:00.000-05:00

The Hamlet reference is deliberate and specific here. Reading more of Wilber's latest. I think I now have some understanding of what his Integral Methodological Pluralism is, and in particular what those zones are. The idea seems to be that holons tetra-exist in all 4 quadrants, and can also be examined from the 4 quadrants, and hence 8 zones, each describing a perspective. 4 internal perspectives of holons thinking about themselves in a given quadrant, and 4 external perspectives of considering other holons through a given quadrant.

Things get a little more interesting when he starts talking about Integral Post-Metaphysics. He first makes the point that these perspectives are active. They are injunctions, methodologies, not passive. You do something in each of these zones and that doing results in some sort of response, a sort a generalized datum. The perspectives are injunctions which bring forth experiences. Now here's the daring bit. He's proposing that reality is made up of these perspectives:

This Integral Post-Metaphysics replaces perceptions with perspectives, and thus re-defines the manifest realm as the realm of perspectives, not things, nor events, nor structures, nor processes, nor systems, nor vasanas, nor archetypes, nor dharmas, because all of those are perspectives before they are anything else, and cannot be adopted or even stated without first assuming a perspective.

Very interesting. So the experiment itself is the real thing, not our theory explaining the experiment, and not the 'object' itself (which may or may not exist in and of itself, but is forever out of our reach anyway.) It's actually got a bit of a quantum mechanics feel that. The experiment is what creates the reality. The injunction of measurement truly is bringing forth reality, collapsing the cloud of the possible into the data of the actual. Like Hamlet, our reality isn't known until the play is performed and the reaction drawn forth.

Furthermore, he goes on the say that you don't really know what's going on until you've poked at things from lots of different perspectives. This is where he obliterates the NOMA shield that much of mythic religion would like to hide behind. To really have a basis in truth religion has to take what wisdom it can and weave it into the 'reality' from other methodologies. Unfortunately this is going to require things like leaving behind the notion of the Bible as a literal historical document. Seems eminently reasonable to me, but I suspect that it would be a rather bitter pill to swallow for some of my in-laws and untold billions like them. This I gather was where his previous book on the subject The Marriage of Sense and Soul largely failed. I wonder how he hopes to address that in his new book.

Tentacles

2006-12-11T10:35:00.000-05:00

So we're getting down to it now! We leave for the states on Saturday evening. Off on a great adventure which hopefully will turn out to be more pleasant than traumatic. We will have to see. Traveling at Christmastime is always a bit of a mess, and this time we have the little one in tow. Plus we're right in the heat of the US job market so I'm going to be sending out oodles of job apps while I'm away as well. Somewhere in there I need to get some work done too.

Meanwhile I'm trying to figure out if there is a way for me to squirm my way back into my G5 while we're away, and I think I may have come up with something. It's a bit of a kludge and involves cron jobs, a bit of python scripting and using my desktop workstation as a waystation. Still, with any luck I'll be able to worm my way in and perhaps even slurp some tasty bits out! I'll have to try it out this evening and see if it works.

I started reading Wilber's latest book Integral Spirituality last night. Oh boy... The 5 year gap sure shows. A whole new level of complexity has descended on the integral thing, probably having much to do with the founding of I-I. This is not going to be a simple read. Plus, I get the feeling it depends somewhat on the as yet unpublished Kosmos, Vol. 2. (Though to be fair he at least put some excepts out). Still, I think this one is probably going to be a bit of work. I am somewhat encouraged by his notion of 'integral post-metaphysics', depending on what that turns out to mean.

Still, I have to get my head around what he means by his "Integral Methodological Pluralism," and why his 4 quadrants now seem to have turned into 8 "zones". We now have an inside and an outside to each quadrant, (in addition to the left='interior', right='exterior' bifurcation of the original 4 quadrants.) So far, his one example is meditative study being upper left 'inside' and Spiral Dynamics being upper left 'outside'. So it seems like he's hidden the subjective inside yet another layer and in the process perhaps eaten a bit of the NOMA idea. ("Here's the point: you can sit on your meditation mat for decades, and you will NEVER see anything resembling the stages of Spiral Dynamics. And you can study Spiral Dynamics till the cows come home, and you will NEVER have a satori.") Although unlike NOMA, he seems to argue that you should do both instead of hiding behind which ever side of the invisible wall you would like to work on and ignoring the other side. I suspect that the eventual payoff will be the nondual realization which will of course illuminate all as the ground of spirit, or some such...

I found his 'Wilber-4' writing a bit mysterious until I managed to plow through SES. And as meandering and sprawling as that book is, it does have the ingredients needed to understand the rest of his contemporary books. Indeed, to really get "Wilber-4" I had to read SES, and let it percolate for a while, and then read A Theory of Everything which then put the bits in context. (Helped quite a bit by the excellent 'color' shorthand of Spiral Dynamics which does simplify the discussion.) SES was the fuel, TOE was the spark. But now he's gone and made things a bit more complicated and we need the new SES lay the ground work. Anyway, a little light reading for Christmas.

Integral Institute and the "Integral Movement" are quite interesting... Maybe even compelling. I just wish I didn't have the 'creepy cult alarm' going off in the back of my head. Is this what Scientology looked like in the 50's? Hmm... there's a thought to keep one behind the sofa.

Meanwhile, one can ponder this image and think Christmasy thoughts.

"There's no mystical energy field controlling my destiny"

2006-12-08T13:50:00.000-05:00

Buried in the subtext of Star Wars is a vaguely buddhist philosophy which for better or worse then gets mixed up with a bit of good old wizard-style magic. In the quiet bit in the middle we get a brief exchange between Han Solo and Ben Kenobi which nicely encapsulates the standard interaction between "eastern" mysticism and "western" modernism.

I'm not going to indulge the inner fanboy any further, but just steal the quote which occurred to me as I am reading Anger by Thich Naht Hanh. Buried in this rather meandering and repetitive text is what I believe is some very sensible advice for dealing with anger, (and probably other 'negative' emotions as well.) However the presentation, like many of these sort of books, sometimes indulges in the rhetoric of 'new-age' mysticism (which is really just old-world magic tarted up to pull in post Aquarian punters). There is much that I find compelling in buddhist philosophy, but I wish I could engage with it without having to translate it into the 21st century. What I need is the philosophical opposite of "buddhism for dummies"; Maybe something more like "buddhism for gearheads."

Even Mr. Wilber falls into this quite a lot, and it's one of my biggest stumbling blocks with his integral philosophy as well. Occasionally I get the feeling that he could couch his philosophy in such a world view, but he hasn't. Perhaps this is because he feels he has to write for the public rather than for academics or the like. So still I pine for a discussion of buddhism that doesn't betray its iron-age origins.

Systems of the World

2006-12-05T16:05:00.000-05:00

So, I finally finished Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion. In the end it seems to me that it's a bit of a mixed bag. Some parts of the book are very good, some not so good.

As might be expected, his deconstruction of Intelligent Design is devastatingly convincing, and proceeds essentially along two lines. First, that natural selection provides a mechanism for explaining the massively improbable state of the biosphere as the end result of lots of not so improbable changes and asymmetric selection effects over really long periods of time. (Although he doesn't mention it, a much simpler example of asymmetry creating order can be seen by simply shaking up a can of mixed nuts. The big ones rise to the top and the small ones sort to the bottom because of small random diffusive motions in the presence of an asymmetrically applied force, in this case gravity. You can shake a little nut into a small space under two bigger nuts, but you can't shake a bigger nut in the the smaller space under two little nuts.) He dismisses as simply wrong the notion that there are serious road blocks, such as a wing or an eye or even the axle of the bacterial flagellum, (favorite targets of Intelligent Design) and points to the intermediate building blocks of each. Second, he points out that Intelligent Design only regresses the improbability back to God, who is necessarily much more improbable than the biosphere He is supposed to explain.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of other stuff in this book, and not all of it is terribly good. To begin with, his strongest argument, pro-natural selection and against intelligent design, doesn't show up until nearly 100 pages into the book. What's worse, he spends most of that first 100 pages alienating his supposed target audience by filling it with some fairly sanctimonious (oh the irony) and arrogant ridiculing of religion, and indulgent personal asides (how many times does he have to name check his buddy Douglas Adams and his wife Lalla Ward, or mention all the TV shows he's been on?!?) Then once he's dispensed with Intelligent Design, he freely admits that the main point of his thesis is done, but the book is only half over. He then spends the rest of the book wandering through various side issues and philosophical ideas with progressively less conviction and progressively more speculation. Some of this is interesting, (are the universals of human thought structures, morals etc, in some way byproducts of natural selection), some is not (are gods the same effect as imaginary friends) and some is just poorly thought out all together (his call to ban the indoctrination of children in religious ideas... I understand why he would like to do so, but this is a fundamentally unworkable philosophy in practice.)

As an invitation to the masses of blue-meme religious folk to step up to orange, I suspect that this book is not such a success. As a manifesto for orange-meme folk to combat the increasingly popular Intelligent Design idea, it is much better. As motivational fearmongering against the increasingly dangerous radical blue-memeies in a complacent multi-culti green-meme political environment it is suitably terrifying. As evidence that Dawkins is writing from an intellectually balanced and honest point of view, this book is not so great. Frankly it might give as much ammunition to his critics as it does to his would be supporters.

It has reinforced my discomfort with certain aspects of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy, at least as it pertains to his vision of evolution. Wilber's writings are intriguing and beguiling and to some extent a little slippery. Inevitably, I need to do more reading to see if what he says holds up. In particular, the next step is probably to read some of the people he quotes as supporting his ideas.

When I was a freshman at Caltech, I found philosophy of science a bit of a boring and pointless topic. Among other issues, I was particularly frustrated by philosophers who seem to insist on invoking quantum physics and the like, while clearly not understanding it. Now, a decade and a half later, I seem to be finding philosophy calling like a siren out of the fog. But the fog is still there, and as disturbing and frustrating as ever. The same problems I found as a frosh are still there: the lack of a sensible ground to work from; the reliance on such slippery things as language as a tool (unavoidable of course); the lack of a clear set of rules for even determining what sort of logical operations are allowed (logic is perfectly clear in a mathematical sense, but does not lift cleanly out of the mind into reality.) Worse, it seems that some of this has now broken out on the internet! Cripes! Dueling blogs!

The difference is, that now I also have the suspicion that the subject might be important. The nature of consciousness, "reality" and the like are leaking into policy. The so-called culture wars are getting serious and bodies are beginning to pile up. I mean, (to take just one blatantly obvious example) who would have thought that a George W presidency could have been that bad! But there it is. The neo-cons really thought they had the answer to all the world's problems. Or maybe not. A significant number seem to thing the end is neigh. Maybe they are just trying to help it along a bit. In either case, current US foreign and scientific policy is the end result of soft-headed philosophy gone amok.

(Asynchronous) Diamonds in the Sky with Lucy

2006-12-01T10:32:00.000-05:00

Ahhh...

Now that's better. After nearly three months, we finally have an internet connection in our home again! It amazes me how much connectivity has become integrated into our everyday existence. I'm sure it's going to reach saturation at some point, but I'm not at all sure I've seen it yet. It seems to me that I just use the computer for more and more. Right now it's our TV, our Phone, our DVD, our stereo, our reference section, our yellow pages, our home-studio... Not to mention a virtual workstation, a baby teasing device, and a rubbish bridge partner.

In any case it is nice to have it back in the home. Living an hour away from your e-mail is a bit of a pain.

In getting things set up this morning, I found (thank you google) the answer to why our airport suddenly stopped working with our ADSL modem. Apparently the answer is to load up an older version of the firmware. Sigh... I feel like Apple is beginning to let the quality control slip on their software a bit. That at least twice now that I've been bitten by one of their software updates which introduces a bug and then never gets fixed. I wish they'd introduce fewer new features and concentrate a little more on stability. I mean I guess the bar has been set pretty low by the industry leader, but still, we don't have to aspire to Microsoft's standards do we?

Flotsam & Jetsam

2006-11-28T10:17:00.000-05:00

So I'll borrow the working title of the first episode of Torchwood. (Eventually called "Everything Changes" upon broadcast)...

Went to Lunar House in Croydon yesterday to get Lazarus' visa status sorted out. £500 for a small yellow piece of paper and some peace of mind. Now we can go back to the states for Christmas and not have to worry about any unpleasant surprises upon our return. We could probably have gotten away with something cheaper, but with the potential downsides being pretty unpleasant, this seemed the most prudent option.

In other news, it appears that our proposal to upgrade the infrared camera on the Liverpool Telescope has been suddenly and unexpectedly triaged and killed. We were on the schedule for the PPRP meeting next week, but apparently there was a late change to the rules and we got killed by a committee which wasn't even originally supposed to have seen the proposal. Ah well... It looks progressively less and less likely that we will be staying in the UK after this summer. As it stands I currently only have an Advanced Fellowship proposal and a lectureship application at Keele still pending. Roll on the US job market... (Which is hitting full steam right now).

Meanwhile, I've been getting *looks* for my choice of Tube reading the last couple of days. Even here in what must be one of the most secular cities in the world, reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion seems to draw disapproving looks. I can't imagine how it must go down in the states. The raving blue meme-ies really do scare the hell out of me sometimes. (Usually just about anytime I think about them...) Oh well, that's enough for the moment. I must now meditate on a teaching philosophy.

XYZZY

2006-11-22T08:55:00.000-05:00

Here's something interesting. http://www.inform-fiction.org. It appears to be a bit of software for writing interactive fiction. Anyone remember Zork? Back when I was a kid these were vaguely popular computer games where you wander around inside a story. Infocom was by far the highest profile creators of these games, and they had built a moderately clever interpreter which would let you control the game by simply typing in english.

The clever thing about Inform seems to be that you can use it to write interactive fiction by typing in english. In other words, this thing interprets both directions. The author writes in english, the computer interprets this and builds a model world based on this composition. Then the 'reader' explores this world interactively by writing in english, which is also interpreted by the computer in the context of the model world. I haven't played with it yet, but does look quite interesting, particularly since it seems to be extendable with lots of pre-made widgets. There's even an academic paper about it on the website. If nothing else, its an interesting concept.

The Sun Did Not Shine

2006-11-16T06:51:00.000-05:00

It's raining today. It's raining quite steadily in a rather sedate and understated way that often does here in London. It's as if the weather is trying to conform to that ever so proper image of British culture which is the typical American expectation of Britain.

This is the first really rainy day we've had in a while so, perhaps predictably, I had to be out in it running errands this morning. Still the walk over from High Street Kensington to my office was fairly pleasant, albeit wet. The rain made the pavement (that's a sidewalk for my American readers) quite reflective, and the lighting was actually rather lovely. The sky reflecting off the pavement lighting the street from below, and the fall leaves adding some vibrant yellow, gold, and orange colour which contrasted nicely with the rather neutral gray of the reflected sky. All in all, it was a surprisingly pleasing walk, and the mellow sounds of traffic and splashing water mixed well with the earthy music of Neil Young's Everybody Knows This is Nowhere album.

Neil Young typically sounds rather too American (yes, I know he's Canadian), and usually jars a bit with the surroundings here in urban London, but he worked well today. The Cure would have fit too I guess, but they didn't survive the hard-disk crash that wiped out much of our iTunes library, leaving us with mostly just the end of the alphabet to work with at the moment. I doubt whether listening to The Cure would have inspired quite such an appreciative opinion of the weather though. Beautiful, yes, but a bit maudlin.

Play: It's the Real Thing

2006-11-16T06:02:00.000-05:00

Now there's a mangled title phrase for you.

So what is this play business all about anyway. What is it about certain activities, objects, and stimuli that we humans find so pleasing? This question occurred to me watching Laz play tonight, and seeing him totally fascinated by a clear plastic box of wood screws, and squeal in delight at the sight of a plastic Coke bottle. Not exactly standard issue baby toys. Makes one wonder what sort of subliminal programming Coke is putting into their logo that stimulates the pleasure center of a ten month old child!

What Lazarus finds really exciting does seem sorta random. We discovered he gets super-exicted when he sees pictures of David Tennant in Doctor Who Magazine. He can't really be bothered with the rest of the magazine though. Pictures of Billie Piper do nothing for him, though he does show a mild interest in Cybermen. (Apparently he found them incredibly funny this spring while watching The Age of Steel with his Mama. Not that he should have been watching TV, but Daddy was in China at the time, and Mama was feeling a bit overwhelmed and needed a break.)

Anyway, I'm sure that what adults find interesting and exciting is probably just as random, it's just not so obviously so. Although, having said that, there are some pretty bizarre adult hobbies too. Trainspotting; what's that about?!

Speaking of Trainspotting, I love that Brits use the word "anorak" as a synonym for "nerd." Apparently an anorak is what Americans would typically call a rain poncho. It is part of the traditional attire of trainspotters who spend lots of time standing in the rain next to train tracks. This is almost as fun as rhyming slang, which is really bizarre and a bit harder to explain. Plus it tends to lose something in the translation.

Ah well... time to move on...

The magic numbers are: 45, 39, 51.

Yuppieitis

2006-11-14T17:18:00.000-05:00

Ah sleep... not always the easiest commodity to come by, and unfortunately not always something that you can make flexible. We've been on a slightly later schedule the last couple of days, but Laz went to bed quite early tonight. I actually need to get up early tomorrow to go in for lab, but my own brain isn't willing to slow down enough yet.

I'm not helped by the fact that I'm physically not terribly comfortable either. I seem to have developed a number of random aches and pains, and what is probably a Repetitive Stress Injury (maybe plural) on my right arm. Been bugging me on and off for months now. I've finally decided to see a doctor about it, so I have another early day on Thursday to see our old GP for my 10 min NHS appointment. (Whoo Hoo!) Make it fast but at least it's free.

Of course typing like this probably isn't going to help my arm feel any better.

Frankly carpal tunnel seems like a bit of a pathetic complaint. I mean really! A medical condition from typing too much? Seems rather reminiscent of George Jetson's sore button-pushing finger. Even so, it is rather surprisingly painful.

Enough moaning. It could be worse. I could actually have to make a living at a real job.

Quantity vs Quality

2006-11-05T17:19:00.000-05:00

What is it about our culture that seems to make us tend to value quantity of quality?

It seems to me that virtually everyone I know is overcommitted. We all have our fingers in too many pies and as a result, we quite often don't have the time to really do things right. For example, my job is primarily a research position, but there is a teaching component. In my case, I'm one of the demonstrators in the second-year physics lab. Now if I had the time to spare, I would have gone through the entire lab in an ordered and organized way, filling out a lab book as I went along and really doing a nice work-up. However, other fires need to be tended, and so I went through the entire lab in an afternoon, and took some data, but not always high quality. i've worked through the analysis a bit, but my "lab book" is not at all useful as a demonstration of what a good lab book should be.

This is just a single example, but there are many. Consider what is newsworthy about movies, & music. We hear about the number of albums sold, and the TV ratings. The number one movie is determined merely from the weekend box-office takings. Even awards, which should be some measure of quality, are now enumerated. "Winner of 7 Academy Awards".

Perhaps Ken Wilber is right about the modern world reducing the universe to a flatland of numbers. Are we attracted to quantity simply because we can count, and that gives us some sort of measure? There are metrics of quality, and some even get used on occasion, but we seem to be more and more a people driven by our own lowest common denominators. More often than not the things that get done are the things that aren't risky.

Perhaps therein lies a bit of an answer. Striving for quality requires imagination and innovation. It means taking longer to accomplish less so that the less that is done is done "better". But "better" is necessarily a somewhat subjective judgement, and what if others don't see the quality? You can always justify quantity. 14 is always more than 7, even if its 7 Mona Lisas. (Of course, the 7 Mona Lisas are only valuable if everyone thinks there's only one, and you'd better be sure that nobody discovers the words "This Is a Fake" written in felt-tip pen under the paint.

Little Green Man

2006-11-05T15:35:00.000-05:00

He was once a little green ball of clay... GUMBY
But you should see what Gumby can do today... GUMBY
He can walk into any book,
With his pony pal Pokey too.
If you've got a heart, then Gumby's a part of you.

For some reason, the songs that we end up singing to Lazarus have mostly turned out to be the theme songs to old TV shows. The latest addition is Gumby, which bubbled up from my subconscious the other day when a sudden need for a new song came up. Other favorites include The Flintstones, Mr. Ed, and something called Skinamarink. The Doctor Who theme gets sung quite a lot as well.

Occasionally a few other songs will show up, but usually not much less bizarre. For example, Waltzing Matilda, even though I know almost none of the words. Lots of Christmas carols. Bits of songs from The Music Man. Occasionally, Sunshine will dig up an old Beatles tune. Very little in the way of "proper" lullabies. Of course, some of those are rather creepy. Just what is supposed to be soothing about Rock-a-bye Baby? Of course, I'm not sure that humming the baby to sleep to The Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back is exactly sending the right message either. At least we have for the most part steered clear of ad jingles.

I'm sure it says something about our culture, or at least our upbringing that these are the 'folk melodies' that come easily to mind.

Mr. Brown Can Mu, Can You?

2006-11-03T19:20:00.000-05:00

It is a curious thing this drive to create. Why is it that we Humans feel compelled to bring order and structure and meaning into the universe? Why do we rage against entropy? What is the source?

Ken Wilber would probably say that it is the pull of Spirit (capital S) acting on the universe of spirit (small s) pulling creativity into the world. I'm not really sure if that's an answer or just giving a name to something. Of course Ken Wilber would probably also explain that I'm not really evolved enough to understand this force of Spirit (capital S) and so of course it doesn't make any sense to me. I can't see it. He might even be right. Such is the unanswerable nature of such a statement.

Why all the questions? Does it really matter? Perhaps not. But sitting in the dark of our living room with the lights out and staring at the light cast on the walls by the street lamps outside, I was struck by an urge to write something, to be creative in some form, but I didn't really have much inspiration for what to write about. As a result I've yet again returned to the subject of writing as a subject.

Such self-reflexive text seems rather postmodern. Perhaps postmodernism was just a massive case of collective writers block. (Probably not, but it makes a for a briefly amusing idea. Very brief.)

Of course, it is possible to look at this urge in a much less flattering light. Perhaps it's just the blind pathetic panic reaction to an utterly heartless and slowly disintegrating universe that is completely and utterly indifferent to our lives. Perhaps this drive to create (and indeed procreate) is just our way of fighting off the madness of the
Total Perspective Vortex. (Brilliant man Douglas Adams. Marvelous observations buried in absurd humor and Sci-Fi so you don't notice how stinging they really are. Still, there is a rather distinctive flavor of the broken-hearted romantic in his writing.)

That's the second time today my blogging has led me back to Douglas Adams. I was going to comment in my last post that we really were rather like those telepathic aliens described in the Hitchhiker's Guide, but I couldn't remember their names. (Still can't for that matter.) I did a little Googling for it, but while everyone loves the quote that humans need to talk or their brains start working, nobody seemed to be interested in continuing the quote to the follow-up discussion. I could figure it out by digging out the DVD from the TV series that I recorded off of BBC2 last year, but that would require turning on the lights and I don't want to risk waking Laz up.

Anyway, back to philosophy... I seem to be at the crossroads of Existentialism and Zen. Is God dead? or just waiting inside for me to wake up and notice I am He. (It... She... sigh... pronouns.) Unfortunately, the sages seem to agree that the only answers come from deep contemplation of mu or some such, and frankly such contemplation doesn't seem to be compatible with my lifestyle at the moment. Certainly I can't see listing the contemplation of mu on my CV as likely to land me a job. And the family is pretty needy at the moment as well. Plus Torchwood is showing. Who can contemplate mu when John Barrowman is on the tele? (OK, well that last one does seem a little on the trivial side.)

Waiting for Godot to Download

2006-11-03T12:07:00.000-05:00

Sigh... I spend far too much of my time waiting for information to move from one location to another, or perhaps getting modified from one format to another. Bigger computers aren't getting things done faster, they're just convincing us to move more and more bits around.

I wonder if anyone has estimated the bandwidth of the Earth. Or the total data storage capacity. Probably.

Do Sneetches Saunter or Hike?

2006-11-03T06:33:00.000-05:00

Lazarus loves reading. How he loves to be read to. It has been one of his favorite activities since he was really quite young (somewhere around three months or so I think.) He's quite fond of Dr. Seuss books in particular, and so Sunshine and I have gotten to know quite a few of these books rather well.

Now since we had to move at the end of the summer, there were a couple of months when many of his books were packed away, and during this time, Laz began to get a bit tired of his unpacked books. As a result, we actually ended up buying a new copy of "The Sneetches and Other Stories" even though my Mother had sent him the old version I had as a child. Anyway, as began to unpack the books in the new flat, we uncovered the old book, and I was quite surprised to discover that the text of "The Sneetches" is slightly different between the two versions.

The change is on the second page in the last sentence, which reads "And whenever they met some when they were out walking, they'd saunter right past them without even talking" in the new version. However in my old version, the Star-bellies don't "saunter". Instead, they "...hike on right past...".

Frankly, I prefer the 'new' version, but it seems like a strange thing that there was a change at all. Is this wording that was changed for a British audience? (I kind of doubt it, since many other Americanisms have been left intact in the other UK versions of Dr. Seuss stories.) Perhaps someone decided that children won't know the word "saunter," and at some point it was changed. I don't know. Perhaps I will do a bit of internet searching and see if I can discover when and why this was changed. There must be some obsessive Dr. Seuss fansite somewhere, right?