I’d just like to start by wishing everyone reading this a happy Christmas and a great New Year.
Well, I’ve had another time of being distracted and quiet it seems, I’m hoping to return to a regular posting sachedule in the new year.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
I got involved in a debate with a work colleague a week or so ago about the death penalty, he was for it and I was against. It was interesting to notice the faith in Science to give the right answers in such a case, almost unquestioning, though I’ll ponder the question of Science as a religion at a later date.
What was interesting, was that his position seemed to be emotionally chosen, and this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this. I’m very sure everyone reading this has come across people making decisions emotionally or holding positions on issues emotionally. For example, the debate on climate change seems to be such an issue, with much shrillness and name calling, and that does the subject no justice given the massive importance of what they’re discussing. I also recall Richard Dawkins telling us in his book “The God Delusion”, of some very senior scientists who, while holding no religious faith themselves, go to church or synagogue out of a feeling of “supporting the team”[1].
So why do we have emotions? The study of the evolution of emotions began with Charles Darwin in his book “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals”, which was published in 1872. Darwin noticed that even in people who are born blind, many facial emotional expressions remain the same as in sighted people, research since has shown that many emotional expressions (joy, anger, etc) are common across even isolated cultures.
So why use them in decision making? The answer, in my opinion, lies in the value of fast decision making. Dr Dawkins covers this in great detail in the God Delusion, and I highly recommend that book to everyone. In short, we often need to make quick fairly reliable decisions, if we take time to consider our actions thoroughly, then the odds are we’d be dead long before we made a decision. Sometimes, you need to act very quickly indeed, and our emotions cut in before our thoughts [2], how often have you acted first and then stopped to think? This is the nub of it, emotions hit first and then we override our emotions with complex thought.
So coming back to where I started, is it so surprising that we take emotional stances? How often do we hear the question “How do you feel about that?” not “What do you think of that?”, so I did an informal experiment. I put the phrase “How do you feel about that issue?” into our Google overlord. Interesting results, both with and without the quotes, showing a range of subjects in both searches that should not be left to feelings to decide. I’m not saying we should abandon empathy and emotion, far from it, but my searches turned up health care reform, abortion, stem cell research, choosing the gender of children, these things need more careful consideration.
I think we as a species need to engage in a little consciousness raising here, stop letting our emotions control us and start thinking with our heads. Not only the use of Science, but the Buddhist emphasis on mindfulness and the Taoist emphasis on awareness all serve to lead us in this direction, I suppose that there’s hope for us yet, eh?
[1] The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. 2007 Black Swan edition. ISBN 978-0-552-77331-7.
[2] Ethics as Emotions – An Evolutionary Approach. Chris Lucas (date unknown)
Here’s a fun experiment, my friend Peter over at The Buddha Diaries has started a meme on the above subject and is asking his blogger friends to carry it on. I’m going to very interested to see how far this spreads.
The rules are really quite simple:
1. Answer the questions
2. Link back to the original meme
3. Tag others to participate
So without further ado, let’s get stuck in!
1) How do you sleep at night? Is your sleep affected by the national angst? Do you drop off easily, as you always did? Or does it take a while to get to sleep?
Generally, I sleep soundly, when I eventually get to sleep. I’m a bit of a martyr to lying awake tossing and turning, depending on what I’ve been doing before I turn in. I tend to wake quite early as well, then lie there listening for the alarm.
2) What strategies, if needed, do you use to get to sleep? Pills? Sheep? Late night television shows? And/or…?
I’ve used a few over the years, one was a relaxation technique in which you begin at the feet and imagine each part of your body (feet, shins, knees, thighs, etc) to be warm and heavy. Another is to mentally release my grip on whatever is keeping me awake, then imagine it floating away. Sometimes, it’s just a quick bathroom trip.
3) Do you wake up in the middle of the night, plagued by obsessive thoughts?
No, once I’m asleep, I rarely wake. But, lying awake plagued by obsessive thoughts, guilty as charged I’m afraid!
4) What strategies do you have to get back to sleep?
In all honesty, I’d just use the ones from question 2.
5) Are your dreams affected? Are they more anxious than before? Do they wake you up in a sweat? Or are they peaceful, innocent, undisturbed by the general malaise?
Here’s an interesting one. I rarely remember my dreams, those that I do recall are either terrfiying or just plain surreal. I’ve often wondered why I only rarely recall them, and at one point in my life, I genuinely believed I didn’t dream at all.
So, in the spirit of the original post, I’d like to impose on the following people:
I really must start posting a bit more often, but I seem to have a serious dose of writers block at the moment.
This is an interesting (if old) blog post that caught my eye and made me stop and think. It’s amazing how the things we build / ideas we put forward can be reapplied outside of their intended fields with unforeseen consequences. For example, the ideas of the free software / open source (delete as applicable) have been adopted by terrorist networks.
You can find more details here: “Bazaar Dynamics“, but this is the first I’d heard of this. It’s fascinating and shows how a small network of people can take on a large well equipped force and stand a reasonable chance against them, though admittedly, this isn’t the example I like to give. The actual progress of the Free Software community itself is a far better and more peaceful demonstration of this principle.
I was thinking a little about dualism the other day, carrying on from my previous post a little. Dualistic thought is covered early on in the Tao Te Ching, and from what I’ve seen around the internet and in my own writings and views, can be given negative connotations.
I’m coming to another viewpoint now, put simply, that dualism in neither good nor bad in itself; it simply is. We can’t get by without it, and it is vital to our existence that it’s there. We make value judgments every day in order to function and survive, for these judgments we need dualistic thought. The problem, as I see it, is when we get so caught up in our world of dualism that we forget that it’s only a set of arbitrary concepts.
Consider light/dark, it’s a great dualistic metaphor for things, not least good or evil. In the Taiji symbol it gets used to point out the mutual dependence of things, night and day, etc. But it’s a bit lost on a person who was born blind, similarly, a dualism based on silence and noise is lost on a person who was born deaf. As soon as you start factoring in people who don’t experience the world quite the same way we do, it all starts to get a bit more iffy.
Our dualisms can be biased by our subjective viewpoints; hot/cold is another dualism, but the exact definition varies from person to person. It seems to me that each time we “define” a dualism, we simply rope of a chunk of grey area and hope for the best.
I used to think dualistic thought was a negative thing, then realised that this was itself dualistic thought. I have to admit, I found that quite amusing for a while. So this leads me to my current contention; Dualistic thought is necessary, not particularly desirable or undesirable, just there. The most important thing is to see it for what it is, necessary, but ultimately an illusion.
I wrote previously about going easy on yourself, I’m going to wander off in a different direction with this, and let off a little steam about something I’ve been thinking about recently: past and future roles.
We tend to straitjacket ourselves into roles, which when you get down to it are just concepts and conventions, roles which are really defined by our past. As long as we recognise this and don’t fall into the trap of reifying them, I can’t see anything wrong with this, we need to do this to a degree to operate in society.
But when considering our future, should we go with the roles again? Again, to a degree this is necessary to operate, subject to the same caveat as above, see the trap and avoid it.
I think it’s more important to be you performing the role, rather than the role performing you. Let me try and explain it better by example. I wrote SitQuietly not because of some idea about being a so called “great programmer”, I wrote it because of my interest in both meditation and programming. I was looking idly for a project and also couldn’t find the software I wanted, which led to a “That looks like a fun project” moment. My point is it should be a passion, an enjoyment, not an ego trip.
Which comes back to some thing I wrote previously about, not trying to exert ego. If your focus is on being the big “I am”, rather than doing a good job at something you enjoy doing, then you’re not bringing your full potential to bear and you also need to touch base as the role is starting to play you. I remember something Bono mentioned in the book “Bono on Bono”, when he came to particularly difficult record company exec, he worked with them by getting them to remind themselves why they got into the industry in the first place.
OK, let’s bring this one home, as well as going easy on ourselves, I think we need to go easy on the future. Are we doing our thing to be a certain something, because of some imaginary glorious future, like a restless cowboy always riding into the sunset? If that’s how we’re operating, how can we ever be happy, when we place our happiness constantly out of reach then shoot ourselves in the foot trying to get there?
Dogma
- A doctrine or a corpus of doctrines relating to matters such as morality and faith, set forth in an authoritative manner by a church.
- a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof
Most organised religions are dogmatic to one degree or another, I personally consider dogma to be a fairly bad thing. From my perspective dogma gets in the way when trying to follow The Watercourse Way, what happens when your dogma tries to take you against the flow? It breaks. The problem is that dogma is inflexible, the eventual effects of flowing water on inflexible things in it’s path are well documented, eventually they have to give.
For me, part of the flow of Taoism is accurate correspondance with reality, if a doctrine or dogma contradicts reality, which is most likely to be in error? There are numerous examples of religious doctrine contradicting what science has revealed about the world, how then can anyone be expected to believe in a doctrine that is full of holes? Such doctrine does have wisdom in it, but that wisdom is not in the literal interpretation. Something religious dogmatists would do well to consider in my view.
This is the reason I stopped putting my faith in religious doctrine and one of the major reasons I find Taoism such a good fit.
Wait, aren’t they the same? In my opinion no, spirituality provides a basis on which all religion is built. Spirituality is the cake, religion is simply the icing. To continue the analogy, you can change the icing on the cake, even take the icing away, the cake remains fine. But if you take away the cake, the icing is left in a mess, with nothing to hold it up.
Coming from an Anglican background, I’m no stranger to organised religion. As I’m due to marry into a Greek family, I’m going to have at least a passing acquaintance with the Greek Orthodox Church, but I can see the commonalities on the spiritual side.
One thing I can see is that spirituality can be done without religion, eastern philosophies tend to be a good way of starting on that path, also this tends to give a more understanding approach to other beliefs. Religion without spirituality however, is just a shell. People will attend church mainly to keep up appearances, it becomes a very ornate social club. The other very real danger of the spiritual disconnection is that the dogma becomes more important than spiritual growth. That’s when the real trouble starts….
Well, I’m going to stay off on my Sci-Fi tangent for a little longer.
I’ve come across a fan written Battlestar Galactica game, it’s based on the new series, not the old one and they’re making a lot of progress, the gameplay videos are awesome!
Here’s the link: Battlestar Galactica: Beyond The Red Line. Well worth a visit!
I’ve been a bit on the serious side lately, so it’s time for a bit of light relief! This one is courtesy of my fellow traveller on the watercourse A.V. Michaels, you can find his blog at Surfing The Tao.
 If I were a Star Wars character, I would be: Qui-Gon Jinn. You’re very in touch with nature and greatly value living things, even the more inferior creatures. Your calm demeanor is admired by many and you don’t sweat the small stuff and things you can’t change. You’re kind, quiet, and strong.
Take the
” Which Star Wars Character Am I?” Quiz by Always Two There Are |
This is quite cool, as Qui-Gon Jinn is one of the Star Wars characters I admire.
