Posts filed under 'jacks corner'
It is time to start this blog site moving again, after a long absence.
I have used the term “stepping out” in the title of this post, because it came up in a discussion with a friend. We need to be willing to put ourselves forward, to inhabit our lives fully, and this means making ourselves visible to others. Hence this post.
Years ago I heard a piece on the radio (This Amercian Life) in which the presenter suggested people could be divided into two groups by asking them this question: “If you could only have one magical power, and you had to choose between flying and being invisible, which would you choose?”
For me, being invisible is a clear winner. But it’s time to challenge that.
Jack
July 5th, 2009
People get very excited about lucid dreaming, but there is a simpler kind of lucidity I think it would be nice to cultivate (or manifest) in dreams.
In our waking lives, there are certain questions that deeply interest us. Some of them may have to do with looking at our experience in certain ways. For instance, right now I am involved with a TSK Online program, and in that program we are constantly being invited to explore our experience in various unexpected ways. Or in another dimension of my life, I have been looking at how emotions throw us off balance.
Now, when I dream, I almost never, that I can recall, ask myself similar questions during the dream. Is this because I am less myself? Because I have another set of concerns? Would there be a way to make this an active practice?
Here is an example that may be just a bit too cute. Buddhist teachings often suggest the value of looking at your life as though it were a dream. What if you looked at your dream as a dream, not because you knew it was a dream (that’s lucid dreaming), but because you simply carried your daytime practice over into your dreams? Of course, to do that, you would have to be doing the practice pretty actively during the day.
Jack
November 18th, 2006
I have always felt that I do my best thinking while I am writing. First comes the initial insight (and perhaps this is the best part of the thought, in one sense, but read on). Then, when it comes time to write that insight down, I discover that the insight is something more like an outsight, in the sense that when I try to frame it in words, I realize that in order to do so, something about my previous set of assumptions, my previous world, has to change. I have to go outside/beyond where I am when I start the writing process. And suddenly I find myself off and running, in an unexpected direction, in fact, a direction that I didn’t even know existed.
Does anyone else experience it like this?
October 27th, 2006
The quote above is from a radio show I heard this evening, driving home, and it’s from a neurologist who points out that sound does in fact arise from air waves touching the small bones of the ear, and eventually being translated into electrical current; according to current research, electrical currents that are rhythmic produce pleasant sensations, while those that are chaotic make us uncomfortable.
More at the level of meaning, the same neurologist noticed that when parents who have been holding their babies put them down, they tend to immediately start talking to them, using verbal melodies that for certain basic messages (“Good baby!” “Watch out!”) are universal across cultures. The implication was that sound can actually be a substitute for touch, or put differently, that sound is a form of touching.
I happen to be working with sound as a sense modality in some teaching I’m doing at the Nyingma Institute, so this was all quite interesting to me. I won’t go into details; let me just say that we do ourselves a disservice if we think we know what it is like to sense something. Our senses seem to be much more malleable than we imagine. And this is something to explore not only in specific exercises (TSK exercises, meditation practices, etc.), but in our walking-around daily activities.
October 11th, 2006
The United States government has revised its rules for allowing liquids on board airplanes: You can now bring on board 3 oz. plastic bottles, as long as they fit in a quart-sized sealable plastic pouch.
The emphasis on numbers and metrics shows that a certain kind of knowledge is in operation. Screening agents are not asked to exercise any expertise or insight; they simply take out their rulers and scales (not that this happens in practice, in my limited experience). Roughly the same reasoning applies to screening hand luggage: the idea is that every piece of luggage is screened, not just luggage attached to someone who arouses the suspicions of the security personnel.
There is also another kind of knowledge at work. Security personnel are trained to note suspicious behaviors (agitation, sweatiness, and so on). This checklist approach, however, is still meant to be mechanical: in theory a robot could apply it also.
Finally, there is a more intuitive kind of knowing. “Why did you shadow that woman?” the supervisor asks the officer on the beat. “I just had a hunch,” is the answer.
There are good reasons for choosing the more mechanistic approach. Hunches can easily cover over prejudices. But the point I want to make is that when we choose the mechanical approach, we are actually choosing against knowledge. We are acting on our doubt that someone can be impartial without being forced to be so through the mechanical application of rules.
The same holds true whenever we rely on rules, which choose the general over the particular, the manual over the situation “on the ground.” The democrat, wrote Plato, treats equal and unequal alike, which is a pretty good definition of what rules are all about. In our system of government, we say proudly that “justice is blind.” But we should also be acknowledging that blindness reduces the knowledge available to us.
Jack
September 30th, 2006
It’s a new moon, and the Jewish New Year, so it seems an auspicious occasion to get this little vehicle up and running and out on the road.
My idea in carving out a corner of the website for my own musings was to open up an informal gateway to creative inquiry. I write myself a lot of notes anyway, so it should be easy enough to share some of them.
For now, I will try focusing my entries on current events, or comments on the culture, more or less on the model of blogs. I’ll save more substantive comments for the discussion pages. I don’t expect to post every day, just when I have something to say.
I had a few observations saved up, but looking at them now, none of them seem interesting enough to include. So substance will have to wait a while.
Anyway, welcome to my corner of this virtual world.
September 28th, 2006
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