|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| As I was driving around listening to this CD on my way home from the store the other day I found these parts to be, in a way, sending some of my precise feelings back to me through the speakers of the car. Enjoy.
"i have to speculate that God himself did make us into corresponding shapes like puzzle pieces from the clay and true, it may seem like a stretch, but it's thoughts like this that catch my troubled head when you're away when i am missing you to death..."
" ...so tell me am i right to think that there could be nothing better than making you my bride and slowly growing old together?"
"i want to take you far from the cynics in this town and kiss you on the mouth. we'll cut our bodies free from the tethers of this scene, start a brand new colony where everything will change, we'll give ourselves new names, identities erased, the sun will heat the ground under our bare feet in this brand new colony, everything will change." | | |
| Memoires from my week at the Sanitarium:
Dec 22 '04
I can affect the way in which I interperet the ever passing fluxating and fast bundles of perception that hit me as I experience them and decide to take positive action, negative action, or no action at all (which will ultimately lead to the negative). Finding the motivation to do the positive will come from the first positive action and from that more positive action will result. Laziness and negativity have immense power if they are allowed to continue. Stopping that by forcing positive action - one after another - will allow me to defeat the feelings of worthlessness. The problem is getting up for that first positive action after being knocked down.
Dec. 24 '04
I need to learn how to stop fighting fire with fire. I need to be able to not only react positively to those things that I enjoy - but also to those things that may offend me or that seem like complete stupidity. I need to realize who my enemies are - and who they are not - and love them both equally.
Don't let the day in day out daily grind discourage you. Consider every passing moment an opportunity to use Whatever is in your power to make a *positive* impact on any given situation.
This center is not the answer - it is not the end of the road. It is only the starting line...the starting line of my opportunity to begin again in a 180 degree direction. All I can do while waiting for release is to prepare myself to run as fast as possible in that direction.
"What you do makes a difference. It makes a difference first of all in material terms, it makes a difference to other people, and it sets an example. Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life."
"Your life is yours to create."
Dec. 25 '04
What if every time you closed your eyes you imagined you lived in a liquid world and it was all changing shapes and moving by and you were floating still in it. - Nothing in it could touch you or harm you in any way and you were safe from all the world's cares, worries, and hassles. You wouldn't need to feel sad about anything in the world because the things out there in that world have no power over the feelings in your mind.
Dec 26 '04
Honesty and openness with others can make you vulnerable to criticism and/or ridicule but is worth the risk to take.
"The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure - while always arriving. The vehicle needs no explanation, just occupants. It's like we come into the world with a Crayon box. You may get the eight you may get the sixteen.. but it's all a matter of what you do with the Crayons - the colors - that you're given. Don't worry about coloring inside the lines, coloring outside the lines, I say color outside the lines - color right off the page. Don't box me in, we're in motion to the ocean, we are not land-locked I'll tell you that."
Dec 27 '04
"Picture a scene where whatever you thought would in the blink of an eye manifest and become illustrated. You can be sure man that every line drawn reflected a life that you loved, not an existence that you hated. Must we demonstrate that we can get straight? We've painted a picture now we're drowning in paint. Figure out what the fuck it's about before the picture we painted chews us up and spits us out."
Today I've learned that despite feeling ill because of whatever is in my body making me feel this way I can be corjial and kind to others because my mind is stronger than my body. I am also beginning to learn the ways I can treat my body to keep myself from feeling even less healthy. All of this also leads me to the conclusion that my own cognitive way of helping myself is stronger than any amount of pills I can swallow.
Dec 28 '04
I've learned that being honest and being thoroughly honest (especially with one's doctor for example) are very different things, and that one's requests/needs will be far better recieved when being thoroughly honest to another person. I also learned that I can draw animals pretty well given only a scribble on a piece of paper to start from. Oh yes and I have learned to accept appreciation a little better and am on my way to conquering my instinct to Disqualify the Positive. | | |
|
In a way, in our contemporary world-view, it's easy to think that science has come to take the place of God, but some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will; This problem has been around for a long time, since before Aristotle and 350 B.C. Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas - these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything you're gonna do. Nowadays, we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now, these laws, because they're so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We're just physical systems too, right? We're just complex arrangements of carbon molecules; We're mostly water. Our behavior isn't going to be an exception to these basic physical laws, so it starts to look like whether it's God setting things up in advance and knowing everything you're gonna do, or whether it's these basic physical laws governing everything, there's not a lot of room left for freedom. So, now you might be tempted to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will and say, "Oh, well it's just a historical anecdote; It's sophomoric; It's a question with no answer," you know, just forget about it. But, the question keeps staring you right in the face. If you think about individuality, for example: who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make or take responsibility [for]. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty, you can only be admired or respected, for things you did of your own free will. So the question keeps coming back and we don't really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all your decisions are really just a charade. Think about how it happens; There's some electrical activity in your brain, your neurons fire, they send a signal down into your nervous system, it passes along down into your muscle fibers, they twitch, and you might, say, reach out your arm. It looks like it's a free action on your part, but every one of those, every part of that process, is actually governed by physical law: chemical laws, electrical laws, and so on. So, now it starts to looks like the Big Bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of our history, the whole rest of human history and even before, is really just sort of the playing out of sub-atomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we're special; We think we have some kind of special dignity. But, that now comes under threat, I mean, that's really challenged by this picture.
So, you might be saying, "Well wait a minute, what about quantum mechanics? I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it's not really like that. It's really a probabilistic theory; There's room; It's loose; It's not deterministic, and that's going to enable us to understand free will." But, if you look at the details, it's not really going to help because, what happens is, you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is, apparently, a bit random; They sort of swerve. Their behavior is absurd, in the sense that it's unpredictable and we can't understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue according to a probabilistic framework. But, is that going to help with freedom? I mean, should our freedom just be a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That starts to seem like it's worse. I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving.
So, we can't just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world-view for persons, with all that that entails. Not just bodies, but persons. And, that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuality.
| | |
|
"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd." - Alexander Pope
The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fasion, or historical curiosity, is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately, in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of dispair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he never really felt a day of dispair in his life. The one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life, so much as a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of it. It's like, your life is yours to create.
I've read the post-modernists with some interest, even admiration. But, when I read them I always have this awful, nagging feeling like something absolutely essential is being left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction, or as a confluence of forces, or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. When Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It's something very concrete; It's you and me talking, making decisions, doing things and taking the consequences.
It might be true that there are 6 billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference first of all in material terms; It makes a difference to other people; And, it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as a victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are.
| | |
| haha that's sick I can post as many pictures as I want as long as I just copy and paste them in from MySpace...haha | | |
|
