On Disruption, Setbacks, Etc. in Life...

Barbara writes about disruption and untoward things happening in life.  So does Dosho Port.   Barbara quotes Pema Chodron that things falling apart is a kind of "test."

If you don't already know I'm sort of dissatisfied with both this "test" idea and that there's a notion of "God" behind all of this anyway, so it's all OK.

No it's not.

That's almost condescending to those who are deeply in suffering. 

That is not to say that suffering isn't transcended, that there is not the manifestation of compassion that with our acute hearing of the cries of the world, that we can't see the inherent emptiness of all phenomena,

But,  saying that suffering isn't transcended through a practice of compassionate seeing into the true nature of things is not to say that this is yet another narrative to be taped onto the one we are mourning as our lives are disrupted.

There is no "god" that disturbs us to our destiny by hard events, to use the first line of Dosho Port's post.  Disturbance, pain, suffering, death, decay, trauma, withering, and calamity are our birthright.  "YOU WILL DIE!" was the teaching of Suzuki Shosan.  That teaching puts all other teachings in perspective. 

To see this in a slightly different aspect, I'd recommend studying this bit from Hakuin.  

A long time ago San-sheng had the head monk Hsiu go to the Zen Master Tsen of Ch'ang-sha and ask him: "What happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passes away?"
Ch'ang-sha replied: "When Shih-t'ou became a novice monk he was seen by the Sixth Patriarch."
Hsiu replied: "I didn't ask you about when Shih-t'ou became a novice monk; I asked you what happened to Nan-ch'uan after he passed away."
Ch'ang-sha replied: "If I were you I would let Nan-ch'uan worry about it himself."
Hsiu replied: "Even though you had a thousand-foot winter pine, there is no bamboo shoot to rise above its branches."
Ch'ang had nothing to say. Hsiu returned and told the story of his conversation to San-sheng. San-sheng unconsciously stuck out his tongue [in surprise] and said: "He has surpassed Lin-chi by seven paces."

The workings of the universe will be the workings of the universe regardless of your personal preferences.   To try to apply on some metaphysical ointment onto the reality of your suffering and disruption and this moment might be avoidance from the very medicine you might need to see to develop the heart of compassion with which to transcend the damned existence of that pain and disruption and loss. You hurt.  Live it. Feel it.  Maybe that's the medicine.

Maybe.

What could possibly go wrong from investigating the matter to exhaustion anyway?

This is also not to say that we should only engage in a self-pity that doesn't realize the fundamental nature of this suffering.  That fundamental nature of this suffering is that it is common to all sentient beings!   But it's difficult for me to see how that compassion - that empathy for all beings is developed and cultivated without first realizing what it is, and that I'd submit comes about from the very experience of suffering, setback and disruption - and death, ultimately, itself.

Springtime is almost upon us. 

Some days are pretty black...

I woke up feeling extremely inadequate...to put it mildly.  I'm too attached to many things, of course: not making enough progress in my outside of work activities, the state of business activities of my present position,  various things not currently in my control that put me in  a place where I don't want to be, etc. 

And of course it's a case of seeing the glass mostly empty when it's largely full, because, dammit, after all, it's not full!  And because I want to be the center of attention, THE Guy Who Can Do Anything. It's totally absurd and unrealistic.

But that doesn't de-legitimize the feelings. Those damned feelings, are of course universal - they are part of the hum of life itself.  All of us are born in tears and nakedness, and that's just when we're getting started out in life. 

And I'm writing this as I'm eating a wonderful breakfast of  barbecued pork, yogurt & fresh blueberries (no doubt harvested by people I could not be able to trade places with in my worst nightmare.)

The Great Way might not be difficult if one does not pick and choose, but that's not to say it's a walk in the park on a sunny summer's morning.  Some days I so want to pick and choose that it's difficult to choose not choosing.

And that too is practice - being satisfied in unsatisfaction.

C. 3000 Posts on: The Impermanence and Irrelevance of Authoritative Narratives

The Blogger thing tells me that this is the 3000th post - which, with a profile post written probably means it's the 2,999th post.  I'm not sure why that's particularly relevant, but quite a few bloggers do post such kind of milestones.  Very few celebrate their 567th blog post. But with millions of blogs out there, you can't rule it out entirely.

As I surveyed the info-sphere this morning to jog my memory into what I was going to write about, I came across a few articles, as I often do.  Two articles of the "authoritative business genre" really spoke to me this morning (here, and here).  Actually they didn't; they didn't speak to me metaphorically; neither did they speak to me literally.  In fact, they whelmed with with their evident irrelevance.  Woe is us - which I think is the right way to say it, but I'm not entirely sure.

One of the articles deals with the "Yin-Yang of Corporate Innovation" or something like that.  The other deals with Wired UK's "smart list" of "people who will change the world."  Let me present additional data to make your day.

Ever hear of the "magazine cover indicator?"  It's what investment market players call a "contrary indicator." That is, in a mainstream (not specialized) business publication, there's a concept well understood by "those in the know" that's being propagated to a mass market of information consumers, that's made people money. Like the famous cab-driver that gave the millionaire stock tips on the eve of the Crash of '29, that's an indicator to cash out, because the "last buyers" in the market are being told of what the Big Play is, and after the last buyers, there are no more buyers.  As you can see from that last link, sometimes the cover's pretty uncanny in its ability to predict the future by reversing the "plaintext narrative" of the cover.

Now considering the Wired UK's article...did you ever notice that the very name of Wired is a magazine cover indicator? I did, a bit more than 12 years ago. The name of the magazine first arose in connection with the wired internet. And if you regularly read this blog you can well understand why I view that as a contrary indicator come true, but even if you don't, the term "Dot Com Bubble" should remind you.  I do read Wired from time to time; it does tell me of things and people I might not normally be aware of.  But whether it's an issue of Wired or Fast Company (is that still around?) or the various industry fora I attend from time to time, my first instinct is to deconstruct the main narrative because that's exactly what the smarter minds than that possessed by me in the industry tend to do.   I've also had the benefit of knowing people who swore by those stories in mainstream publications, only to be found woefully overtaken by events.

Regarding the Times article on the "innovation" while the author of the article throws around a lot of buzzwords ("Open innovation" is a recent current favorite, now fading), the author - and his sources, in particular, it seems, John Kao - fail to express what that might actually mean in today's world, because it sure doesn't mean what's stated in the "plaintext meaning" of the article.

Many companies these days are thinking how to challenge Google or Apple.  And some of them are asking the wrong questions, because in part they don't "get" what how these companies got where they are and they don't at all see how to actually succeed in their endeavors despite what these companies are doing now.  Rather instead they - like the authors of that Times article - are taking away models of innovation from them as though somehow they were fixed narratives.  Well you heard it here first: Google and Apple will each stumble big, and in different ways.    And so will you and I if we continue a cookie-cutter prescription for the way things will be.

There's that exchange from the movie The Matrix whose "capping phrase" has entered our discourse:

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

There are no hard and fast formulas to the way one lives one's life, carries out one's endeavors and enterprises, etc. There's only what we can do with ourselves.  You can get a good view of this through a mindfulness practice - after a while you realize that your preconceived notions are just in your head, and sooner or later, what you thought was "impossible" is in fact possible.

I'll (almost)  finish this post with something I did yesterday - a 書道 of "cloud."   I started doing this a while back with no talent, no knowledge of innate ability and no experience, like everyone who starts anything for the first time.  This one is not my worst ...hopefully I'll get better.   But if I had clung to the thought that I'd never be able to do this at all, I wouldn't have been able to do even this at all.  So there it is...

Now let me finish this post with a final thought for you: Does the narrative of "there is no narrative" apply to this blog post or not?

The degree that it does or does not I don't think can be known at this time.

Re-thinking our positions

(In honor of the SOPA blackout, this blog post won't contain any hyperlinks. While I'm confident what  I put here will stand on its own merits without hyperlinking, I think hyperlinking really does enhance the internet's "pinball effect," to use a term I encountered in one of James Burke's books. On the other hand,  I could, of course be telling you any ol' kind of crap, and you'd just have to take my word just as right wing extremists  take Ron Paul's word that he authored every word of his Survival Report because it said so at the time,  and everyone should just wink and nod about that stuff when Ron Paul's trying to get elected president.  Or something like that. Do your homework.  If you want to know what SOPA and PIPA  is - besides the latter being a naughty word in Greek -then look up SOPA & PIPA on the Google and  also please vent on the Facebook page of "Remove Jaime Herrera Beutler,"  or on her own Facebook page because the latter Congressperson is falling way behind in her job performance.  And that's it for today's PSA.)

I recently finally decided to try out Pandora radio's "comedians" feature, possibly as a result of seeing a recent PBS episode of "Make 'em Laugh."  I have been listening, in particular, to Lenny Bruce (described, delicately, by Pandora's "artist info" as having a "Northeastern" sensibility or such.)  I think Mr. Bruce would have demurred: He was a Jew, I think he would have pointed out more accurately.

Mr. Bruce is widely respected by today's comedians, because he was such an artist with his voice; his style was heavily influenced by jazz.  That much you can get from the old Dustin Hoffman movie "Lenny," and from that movie you also get he died of a heroin overdose and that he was hounded by the government for saying naughty words.  The last bit wasn't quite true. He was hounded by the government because he was such an acute critic of their authoritarianism.  One bit left out of the movie was a bit where Bruce is doing a dead-on caricature of a Southern/Southwestern used car salesman, who was selling a WWII era German car that was only used "to drive to the furnace."

You can't say that on TV today.

I bring up this incident - my exposure to Lenny Bruce via Pandora, that is - because it is re-thinking my view of Lenny Bruce, most of whose recorded material I still probably haven't heard, and because it will (eventually) get to a point about Buddhism and everyday life. My "original opinions" about Bruce were largely formed by the aforementioned movie and a Simon and Garfunkel song ("A Simple Desultory Philippic, or How I was Robert McNamara'd into Submission") which contained the line "I learned the truth from Lenny Bruce" sung in sarcasm. My original opinions were formed this way because throught the 60s and early 70s Mr. Bruce's material was effectively blacklisted from mass media, except for whatever LPs were in print at the time.

Simon should repent of that song.  History has shown that he couldn't hold a candle to Bob Dylan, despite Mr. Simon's own considerable talents. 

Lenny Bruce, despite his personal failings, was a craftsman with his voice, and influenced the following generations of comics.  If you go to Sarah Silverman's Youtube website, there's a video of her giving a "confession" which is both hilarious and G-rated. If you think her thing is easy to do, try it; it's not.

Barbara on her Buddhism blog mentioned the fact that the brain "source codes" its information when it stores it, to bring up the fact that we should constantly question what we experience (and memory is an experience).  I thought of this when I was hearing Lenny Bruce and the used car salesman bit. It's amazing how our preconceiving notions and biases seep into everything we do and think and experience.

Paul Simon probably won't read this blog, but it's interesting how I used to have a higher opinion of him than I do now, and for "the other two Jewish folksingers of the era," namely Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, well, the latter two have eclipsed him.

History and perception are funny that way.

間 (ma), Parent Practice, Mac Arthur Park, the iPhone

In helping my son with a project for school I have oddly enough had to teach my son the value of leaving something out.  Clearly every engineer knows that this discipline does not come second nature to most engineers, and we have a term for the opposite ingrained tendency: creeping featurism.  The opposite tendency is an aesthetic that has been referred to by some as  "間  (ma)" - which translates as interval, space, etc. 　A Japanese word which expresses this in the opposite sense is 間も無く (mamonaku), which means basically in a very short time - "no interval," from the kanji.  You hear the word on the shinkansen when they announce in Japanese that the train is about to arrive in a station.

I haven't been that much aware that this is a strategy Apple builds into its products until I read about it recently, but in helping my son with his project I noticed that this principle is all around.  It is why overall horrid song MacArthur Park sold phenomenally well: it has a hook.  It is why Rush Limbaugh is still there after all these years: the Oxycontin addled demagogue repeats right-wing talking points well to the masses so they get the "hook."   (And Glenn Beck, since he's been  going off the metaphorical  reservation, is the natural target for other right-wingers now.)  It is also a good explanation of Suzuki-Roshi's idea of the Worst Horse.

We in the West like to hold up the "Renaissance man" as some kind of ideal, but clearly we prefer  that with a more carefully chosen set of features than "everything."  If you can do one thing well, or make something that is so incredibly excellent in one or two features, you can leave out something, and people seem to like it better; you can include your version of "Someone left the cake out in the rain..." it seems, and it seems to make the whole thing better as far as we humans can tell.  Very strange.  But that allows me too to embed a really otherwise sucky song in this blog post.  Enjoy!

Doubtful that will enlighten you today, but it's just a Note in Samsara, you know.

And that physicist has a point...

In the exchange I posted below, the theoretical physicist says something to the effect of "I have never heard a good definition of conciousness."

 He has never heard a good definition of the the state of being conscious.  Of course language is like this - all definitions are ultimately circular until referenced outside of the language - "That thing over there is a rock!"

But consciousness itself has no external referents - when the Buddha said "I am awake" we could not, in and of itself, tell that apart from other mental states externally.  True enough, there are externally measurable phenomena coincident with reports of consciousness or awareness, but we're not able to externally, purely objectively replicate awareness - only phenomena associated with it. Maybe the robot is sentient.  Maybe you are - you probably seem to be in person, I'd wager.  The subjective and objective spheres are interdependent, as the Identity of the Relative and the Absolute.

The goal of Zen practice is not to go too deeply into what awareness or consciousness is, and that's not a useful  awareness philosophy in the original, Socratic sense of the meaning of philosophy - Socrates himself had always said he had no learning himself. to impart (reminds me of Lin-Chi).  It's very largely about showing up and acting skillfully in the world, rather than prattling about "superpositions of possibilities."