A Lonely, Angry American

A Lonely, Angry American 

I am lonely and angry. I harbor homicidal thoughts. I used to have thoughts of killing myself, but not anymore, not since 1972. But that does not mean I am free of self-destructive behavior. And I've read books on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and literature in order to understand my affliction. 

When I say I am lonely, that does not mean I am not popular with ladies. Far from it. I've been married eight times and romantically involved with twenty (or was it married three times and romantically entangled with twenty-five  ? Memory is failing me. I'm suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's. I took to writing to keep the demon at bay, as long as I could) women other than my wives, but I still feel lonely, maybe because I think out of those twenty-eight women who went through my life, only one and possible two others who really loved me, and they were all dead or are in the coma or suffering from dementia as I do. So you see, I am not a lucky guy, deep down. Not really. 

One woman who professes to have loved me for a long time gets on my nerves occasionally. She used to live a life of denial and inauthenticity. She is on a mend, but I think she's not right for me. Plus, the hurts she has caused me are too big and too much for me not to remember them. She questioned the values I placed on myself. She intimated that I was a fraud. She wanted to inflict pain, even though she is living in goddamned Russia, twenty thousand miles away from me. She is a Jew. Not all Jews are smart. Some Jews have delusions of grandeur about the beauty of their thoughts. Look at Karl Marx. 

All other women taught me that I was a fool. The lessons were so plentiful and painful that nowadays I have forgotten how to open my heart. One white woman in the Northwest professed to believe in God and to be a Christian. But she lied to her husband and to me. She was a supreme liar and manipulator. She was no Christian. I was dead sure about that. Yet she made me feel good at one time. Now I wonder how I could be that stupid. I am sure if there's Hell, she will go straight to it, first class. 

An Asian young thing of 28 is trying to seduce me in order to get at whatever money I still have left, after the debacle of stock trading addiction. She keeps inviting me for dinner at her house, and I keep smiling and saying nothing. She is pretty and a blatant, brazen gold-digger. She thinks I am stupid and senile. She keeps a constant refrain of how smart, handsome, and sexy I look, in spite of my being at the age immortalized in a Beatles song. I despise gold-diggers. I would rather fuck a leper than her.  She thinks her flattery will weaken my will-power and strengthen my dick, but she is wrong. 

Women are not the only ones who make me feel lonely. Certain male assholes do, too. They also make me mad enough to contemplate putting a bullet through their heads. I have been able to resist the impulse, but I don't know how long I will hold out. To keep that unwholesome thought under control, I am resorting to telling stories, mostly to myself in a language that I didn't grow up hearing. That way I would not feel really embarrassed if the stories were half-assed sensible. These stories came to me even before I had the words to articulate them, in any language; they came to me when I was in my mother's womb. That was why sixty-four years ago, when I emerged into the world in the fading sunlight of that Sunday late afternoon in the Mekong Delta, in a thatched hut by a canal full of floating vegetation and water palm trees and sampans laden with fruits, I was crying at the top of my lungs. My mother didn't know I was trying to tell my stories. I was born to make noise, to talk, to annoy, to make my presence felt, to write poetry, and to tell stories. Stories are all I have to remind me of my raison d'être, to assert myself. I tell stories without giving a fuck if there's an audience. What matter to me are the stories themselves. The stories are the thing itself,  the sui generis.

I have meditated on the issue of violence. I thought of my early exposure to it, my being victimized by it, and my reactions to it. I know one of these days I will be destroyed by it. Violence must not be gratuitous. Only cowards and sick people perform gratuitous violence in order to regain a semblance of self-respect. Brave and wise folks resort to violence as a last option. And they do so dispassionately, without rancor or joy. They recognize life at its core is violent and Death is a constant at every level of existence. I watched the movie "A History of Violence" the other evening and I understood. Life is all about predation. But the issues of violence and aggression are more than just involving predation. With social animals, they are also about domination and power. That's where I have problems with, even though I understand the dynamics. That's why I want to exterminate cowards who crave power and try to obtain it by surreptitious means. These cowards will never openly stand up and oppose tyranny. Instead, they kiss the asses of the power-holders while trying to assert whatever their fucking power they think they have over their family members and their peers. They make me want to throw up when I see them opine that they are not hungry for power. They are cowardly hypocrites. They love titles. They love empty fame. They get their rocks off on illusions of grandeur. So behind the scenes, they scheme and plot and kiss the asses and lick the dicks of power holders. Yes, I hate them and will destroy them when and if the opportunities present themselves. Who the fuck these assholes and scumbags think they are? I also want to destroy the other assholes who chimed in and praised these motherfucking cowards while shooting me down with their opportunistic, cheap comments. What the fuck did these assholes think they achieve by making me mad? Age has no statute limitations on stupidity. Speak only when you really have to. Silence is really golden. Except for trying to articulate something profound that has been percolating in your brain for years, normally you don't really think when you speak. Most humans just create noise pollution when they speak. I should know. I am speaking from experience. My garrulity has caused me harm. It has lowered respect in people's minds for me. They think I am shallow and childish and mentally ill. Maybe I should not be writing these words. But fuck, I don't know. I'm suffering from Alzheimer's or as the Ignoramus called it, Asperger's. What was their excuse? Was it arrogance or stupidity or just plain meanness? 

I read recently in Newsweek online that globally deaths by suicide exceed the combined casualties of war, murder, and natural disasters. Suicide is the twin brother of homicide. They are the two sides of the same coin of violence. That is what I have known all along. I didn't know the impulse to hurt oneself was stronger than the desire to hurt others in recent years. It just didn't make sense to me. What went wrong? Is life on this planet getting harder and lonelier and one way to deal with it is self-destruction? 

The funny thing is that after I finished the Newsweek cover story, I felt much stronger because I now know more than ever the dynamics of suicide. It is extremely unlikely I will destroy myself. Neither will I fall to pieces if those who are dear to me decided to do themselves harm. I am not going to suffer over the stupidity of others. Grief over suicide is stupid. The proper reaction is indifference. Memory should be for the positive. The reason why suicide fascinated me was that at one time at the stupid age of 23, I foolishly and gamely saved the life of somebody who was bent on harming herself. I did save her life, but she almost destroyed mine. How ironic and that was the second time I learned about human selfishness and cruelty (the first time was when I was 22). Thenceforth I realized that the life I save should be my own. But I have a foolish heart. I keep reaching out for lonely, misunderstood souls. Occasionally, my efforts are appreciated. Those rare moments are beautiful. And I feel connected with something basically human and yet "divine" and sublime in me. 

I just finished watching again an ultra violent but moral movie, "Pulp Fiction". It's also very funny and original. The screenplay is just sparkling with fresh, profane, intelligent dialogue. It is a classic and considered as one of the best 100 American movies of all times. The movie resonates deeply with me. It gives me peace and pleasure at the same time. I smiled  throughout the movie, except for those moments when the movie hits on its religious theme. The ending is just superb, full of religious redemption. Actually the whole movie is about redemption. In the movie, Those who believe in redemption are given a second chance, and thus potentially saved. Those who are cynical or evil meet their rightful fate. Deep down I am a very religious man, fully aware of right and wrong, and the path of righteousness. Whenever I encounter acts of true religiosity or genuine humanity, I am touched and transformed for the better. Meanwhile I must work on my anger and silence, one day at a time. 

(To be continued) 

Slouching towards Sanity and Reality

Slouching towards Sanity and Reality

Vengeance is a crazy way to deal with grief. Forgiveness is a sane way. I must find a way to love those whom I hate or for whom I have no respect or, at the very least, cultivate a supreme indifference to them so that the idea of hurting them no longer resides in my mind. 

This morning I came across a stupid comment by a Vietnamese woman on a web forum about an alleged wrong choice of word used by a Buddhist woman when the latter said that the mother monkey acted quite like a human in expressing her grief over the death of her infant. The choice of word was correct. It was the "critic" who showed her ignorance by trying to show off. I have come across creatures like her all the time. I used to correct them. Now I just walk away. Humans have a wide range of aptitude and behavior. Those who are below don't understand those above. Our behavior is the product of our understanding. 

Vengeance does have a lot to do with grief. Those who disagree with that assessment don't really know the finer points of grief and anger. Anger is very allied with grief. Grief is anger over loss.  No grief means the loss means nothing, thus indifference, thus no anger. Anyway, there's no point to elucidate further the nature of grief. Either you understand or you don't. Some things you must work out for yourself, but first, don't think too quickly. Then, don't disagree with me too readily. Everything I say now comes from blood, sweat, and tears, and a long struggle with homicidal impulses. The day I remain silent in the face of stupidity and ignorance is the day I have arrived. That does not necessarily mean I am referring to you. You are not the only one who possess stupidity and ignorance. I do, too, sometimes, but only sometimes. 

As I often pontificate ad nauseam, humans often use self-projection as a default mode of thinking in trying to understand other humans. We have universal needs and wants and aspirations. Buddha built up an edifice of ethics on human commonalities and yet he was astute enough to caution us of anomalies and to be ready to make up our own mind about them.

I am reading "The Bonobo and The Atheist", written by the primatologist Franz de Waal. It seems like the  book was written by a wise man at the end of an illustrious career. He is now crystallizing his thoughts about his subject of study: primates and how much closer they are to us than we are making allowance for. Real Reading is an act of creative participation. The following are notes and take-offs from notes. 

Primates have empathy and therefore manipulation and deception and group behavior. While in the "society"/group of humans, chimps, and gorillas, males are dominant, females are at the center of bonobo group dynamics .

Not only primates, but also lower forms of life like canines have  inequity aversion.

Morality is not the sole province of humans.

Morality in humans not imposed from above but evolved from within. 

Altruism and the subject of natural selection.:

Altruism in primates, even in lower mammals, is different from the perceived altruism in insects. Confusion and thus wild speculation and extrapolation about human nature comes from the failure to differentiate between the two. 

Reason is a slave of passions. Man is not first and foremost a rational being. He is ruled by passions which are restrained by  group behavior to ensure the well-being of the group. Morality comes from religion or science (eugenics was prevalent in 1930's in England, U.S., Switzerland, Germany, Russia, and Norway; the syphilis study at Tuskegee Institute) is both equally suspect. 

Proper thinking is hard work. Predation is not necessarily synonymous with aggression. Lorentz defined aggression as within-species behavior, and why herbivores are not considered any less aggressive than carnivores---as anyone who has witnessed a stallion fight or an elephant rampage can attest. Confusing predation with aggression is an old error. I bother trying to improve my mind even as I am dying because I am proud I can think and theorize, but theorizing without facts is vain and stupid.

God and Man: 

"Is Man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of Man?" 

                                                                                                             Nietzsche

God does not make Man in His own image. It's the other way around, stupid! Don't believe everything in a book put together by ignorant scribes. That is what I have been telling Christians. This was what I discovered all by myself at the age of 11. I am a retard in many fields, but I am quite good at metaphysics and languages (not in the number of languages I can master,  but of the connection between language and thought, the magic of sounds and words and meanings. I knew about this shit at an early age when I was a stutterer, when words flashed through my mind visually when I heard them spoken. I picture words when I  hear them, even to this day).

                                                                                                             Wissai

Neurosis is a consequence of unmet individual needs and passions, a failure of integrating one's own wants and group's needs. Neurosis does not exist in solitary animals. 

I know I am different from the human animals. Most of them fuck out of lust. I have a hard-on only when I am romantically involved. The human female genitalia is disgusting to me unless I am in love. I have a sense of aesthetics. That's why I am keeping my body in good shape. I want to look beautiful. 

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. 

                                                                                                              Jonathan Swift

Humans have both the gentle, sex-oriented traits from bonobos and aggressive characteristics from chimps. 

I used to be a militant atheist, but I soon felt ashamed of my militancy regarding theists. I was sick of sleeping furiously. People have a right to be stupid, though. Dogmatism is bad in any form, atheism included. 

Most people don't realize that in this world, resistance to the theory of evolution is almost restricted to evangelical Protestants in the  American South and Midwest. 

It is ignorant to ascribe near-death experiences to scientific evidence of the after-life:

"After a brush with death, some patients report having floated outside of their bodies or having entered a tunnel of light. (In the human brain there is) a small area called TPJ (temporal-parietal junction). This area gathers information from many senses (visual, tactile, and vestibular [of, relating to, or affecting the perception of body position and movement <the vestibular system of the inner ear>] to construct a single image of our body and its place in the environment. The body image is disturbed if the TPJ is damaged or stimulated with electrodes. Together with with the hallucinogenic qualities of anesthetic drugs and the effects of oxygen depletion on the brain, science is getting close to a materialist explanation of near-death experiences." (de Waal, pp 92-93)

Scientists are not always objective as they would like us to believe. They are after all human, and humans are driven by both confirmation and disconfirmation biases. A case in point is named Garcia effect, after the psychologist who successfully challenged a behaviorist dogma championed by B.F.Skinner who claims that all behavior is shaped by reward and punishment, which works better the shorter the time interval between the act and its consequences. But this dogma flies in the face of what we commonly experience as taste aversion. We remember food that has poisoned us so well that we gag at the thought of it, thus enhancing our survival. When John Garcia reported that rats avoided poisoned foods after just a single bad experience,  even if the nausea sets in only hours later, nobody believed him but they didn't bother to duplicate his experience. Leading scientists made sure his study didn't appear in any mainstream journal. 

Other examples include resistance to the wave theory of light, to Pasteur's discovery of fermentation, to continental drift, and to Röntgen 's announcement of X-rays. Resistance to change is also visible when science continues to cling to unsupported paradigms, such as the Rorschach's inkblot test, or keeps touting the selfishness of organisms despite contrary evidence. Science is not value free as widely believed. No less an authority than Einstein who denied that all scientists do is to observe and measure. He said that what we thinks exists is a product almost as much of theory as of observation. When theories change, observations follow suit. In other words, we don't look for observations that contradict our theory (confirmation bias) (de Waal p.93).

However, even if there the entire notion of unsentimental rationality is based on a misunderstanding that we can think without emotions, the difference between science and religion resides not in the individual practitioners but in the culture. Science is a collective enterprise with rules of engagement which allows the whole to make progress even if its parts drag their feet while religion is a practice of self-induced hypnosis which allows no room for disagreement. Religion's dogmas rarely change, if ever, and when they do, it's because the society culture changes, and rarely as a result of evidence. Science does best is to incite competition between ideas, a gladiatorial natural selection. The best ideas survive and reproduce. 

Realistically speaking, convictions often don't follow straight from evidence or logic. They arrive through the prism of interpretations. A French philosopher noted, "strictly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain" ( à proprement parler, il n'y a pas de certitude; il y a seule te des hommes certains) Charles Renouvier (1859) cited by de Waal, p. 250. 

Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, but it would be damn close, don't you think, when it comes to the thing called Love. When you show me you love me, that does not mean you do. But if you fail to show me, I am quite convinced, if not certain, you don't. Silent and undemonstrative love is very rare. But in the case of hate, it is prevalent. This has everything to do with deception. If I fail to show you I love you, this may mean I lack confidence, for I may fear you may not reciprocate my love or you may feel or think (but wait a minute, didn't I copy earlier that actually there is no difference between feeling and thinking?) I am not worthy enough of your love. Rejection is one of the saddest things a sensitive human can experience. Few humans are strong enough to give no shit about validation and affirmation.  Yesterday evening I had dinner with Danny, an old Korean friend, 14 years my junior, whom I had not seen for 13 years. I ran into him at a health club a few days earlier. Over the course of dinner, he gave me a rundown of his life of the past 13 years. His wife left him after he had lost a lot of money in the stock market. He went through hard times for quite a while. He thought of suicide, but didn't go through with the idea. He cried after five minutes of telling me the trials and tribulations of his marriage. I didn't press for details. I just inferred from his red eyes and tears flowing down his cheeks that he was in pain and yet still does believe in romance. My inference was correct because after reassuring me that he now holds a good job in the rebounding real este market and he is saving money to get back to the stock market, he asked me for help in locating a nice young woman, preferably Hispanic, because he wants to have children. When women left me for greener pastures, I didn't cry. I wrote stories and poetry instead, full of mawkish, maudlin sentimental shit to transcend my lousy judgements born of a foolish heart. I told Danny that he must not let a bad experience to color his perception of women. Yes, while it is true that 9 out of 10 women are cunning and unromantic, the rare, elusive 1 out of 10 is the one we must be on the hunt for. And in any non-food hunt, the pleasure lies more in the chasing process than in capturing the prey. We must not really care for the outcome. We must derive joy from the hunting game itself. Danny looked at me as if I were from Mars while listening to my dissertation on the art of hunting. He kept rolling his eyes and asking, "Are you serious?". And I kept replying, "Fuck yes!". When I was through, he said, "Whatever. Just help me locate that elusive, rare 1 out of 10". I gave him a winsome smile and a wink while nodding my head with emphasis, "No problema, mi amigo." When I reached for the check, he said, "It's on me. I"ll put it in on expense account." I was glad because the bill came close to $100 just for two, and we didn't even order booze. 

I walked out of the restaurant feeling sad and glad at the same time. I felt sorry for Danny because he was really a very nice man, much nicer than me. I was glad because now I know he is in town, I can call him up and ask him to hang out with me if loneliness hits me hard. Emotions (loneliness is classified as emotion, or at least a state of being or a vague, nebulous consciousness called "feeling) are often misunderstood as instincts, but any student of meditation or Buddhism would know that they are not necessarily the same. In addition, Buddhism is great in helping humans who suffer (such as Danny currently and myself in the past) in arriving at an understanding that the cause of suffering came from attachment and from placing too much emphasis on the self. The real value of Buddhism lies in fostering individual emancipation through understanding and self-reliance. At its heart, Buddhism is a way of thinking and not a religion per se, but the fact remains that all our mental products are ways of thinking, including religions, and have nothing to do with the so-called elusive God. That's why I find most of Buddhism's views attractive (except those about reincarnation) because they are rational and logical, without relying on a fiction called God as the foundation, as other stupid religions do. To rely on or believe in a Personal God as a crutch is a sign of stupidity and cowardice. That attitude at its core reflects a slavish, childish way of thinking. There is no Personal God who listens to human entreaties and has power over them. To invoke God even in the darkest hour of need is an act of self-hypnosis and self-deception. It is an utilitarian act, but not dignified. It is far better to accept reality as it is and deal with it rationally and logically. Utilitarianism is a piece of shit. So is behaviorism. 

Instinct refers to a genetic program that tells animals, humans included, to act in a specific way under specific circumstances. Emotions, on the other hand, produce internal changes along with an evaluation of the situation and a weighing of options. Right now cognitive scientists are debating if there should be a distinction between emotion and cognition. At any rate, they are intertwined, a fact that most unreflective and insensitive humans are not aware of. 

"Primates offer great insight into group life based on both emotions and emotional control. Tightly embedded in society, they respect the limits it pus on their behavior and are ready to rock the boat only if they can get away with it or if so much is at stake that it's worth the risk.....We (humans) invest moral rules with authority. Sometimes the authority is personal, like a super alpha male, as when we claim that God handled us the rules on a mountaintop. At other times, we fall for the authority of reasoning, claiming that certain rules are so logically compelling that it would be silly to disobey them." (de Waal, p.154) 

"Morality addresses the well-being of others and puts the community before the individual. It does not deny self-interest, but curbs its pursuit so far as to promote a cooperative society. This functional morality sets morality apart from customs and habits" (de Waal, p.156) 

Morality predates religion, especially the dominant religions of today. Humans were morally enough when we roamed the savanna in small bands. Only when society grew and the rules of reciprocity and reputation began to falter did a moralizing God become necessary. It wasn't the Abrahamic God who introduced us to morality  in the form of stone tablets in Mount Sinai, as a band of half-starved wandering Jews would like us to believe, but it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we ought to. The moral law of social beings is not imposed from above (God) or derived from well-reasoned principles (Philosophy). Rather, it likely arises from ingrained values that have been since the arrival of consciousness. The most fundamental value reflects the recognition of the survival enhancement of group life: the desire to belong, to get along, to love and be loved, prompts us to do everything in our power to stay on good terms with those on whom one's survival depends. I do know all this shit but why do I occasionally stubbornly cling to antisocial behavior, at great costs to myself? Alas, that's where Freud's genius comes into play: in some humans, the Death Wish is stronger than the Life Force. This is the only insight of Freud that I concurred. His views about sexuality are nonsensical. His other views (displacement, self-projection, no existence of Personal God) are commonplace and lacking originality. 

Gene and Behavior:

There are many layers between genes and behavior, from the encoding of proteins (which is what genes do) to neural processes and psychology. We are driven by inborn values and emotions, which guide rather than dictate behavior. They nudge us in a given direction, but leave plenty of leeway. As a result, we have the capacity to care for those unable to return the favor, adopt unrelated young, cooperate with strangers, and empathize with members of a different species. Those who are unable to do any of the above are not quite human. That's why I keep referring them as animals. Being stupid and yet wrongly insensitive, they get upset at my characterization when they fail to exhibit the basic behavior of a social animal: protecting the group/tribalism/patriotism. They are too stupid or too stubborn to acknowledge that I am right, to admit that they are too selfish to be considered human. Yet what really has angered me is to see these fucking, despicable cowards love power and try to lord over their friends and peers. 

Conclusion about Morality:

Morality has much more humble beginnings, which are recognizable in the behavior of other animals. Everything science has learned in the last few decades argues against the pessimistic view that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature. On the contrary, our evolutionary background lends a massive helping hand without which we would never have gotten this far. 

Wissai

May 27, 2013

LOVE AND THE OTHER KIND OF LOVE

TÌNH YÊU, TÌNH TRI KỶ.

    ( Viết tặng Cẩm.)

Anh ơi, tình yêu và tình tri kỷ,

Là hai nẻo đường mơ hồ giống nhau,

Bước chân mình đã có lúc lao đao,

Hai nẻo đường hai tâm hồn mộng mị.

                     Thôi, em chỉ muốn là tình tri kỷ,

                     Đi bên đời nhau những lúc vui buồn,

                     Những nghĩ suy sâu lắng hay bình thường,

                     Không thể chia sẻ với chồng, với vợ.

 Nhưng anh là người để em tâm sự, 

Lúc đùa vui, lúc đứng đắn trang nghiêm,

Vỗ về em khi tâm hồn phân vân,

Em hụt hẫng giữa đời thường, ảo mộng.             

                     Anh hiểu em khi em cười, em khóc,

                     Không cầm tay mà vẫn thấy tình thân,

                     Không đối diện mà vẫn thấy rất gần,

                     Hai chúng mình là hai vì sao lạc.

Sao anh sao em giữa bầu trời rộng,                  

Dù xa nhau nhưng vẫn hướng về nhau,

Hai vì sao le lói suốt đêm thâu,

Thế gian kia chắc gì ai hiểu được.

                     Tình tri kỷ chỉ có hai người biết,

                     Anh là mây tụ lại, em là mưa,                   

                     Những đắng cay đời anh kể em nghe,

                     Sẽ vơi buồn như cơn mưa vơi, tạnh.

Em hiểu anh dù không đi bên cạnh,

Không nghe tiếng giày anh bước đường khuya,

Không ngồi cùng anh quán rượu đầy ly,

Nhưng say với anh khi lòng thất vọng.

                     Không thấy nhau nhưng thần giao cách cảm,

                     Không chạm nhau nhưng tưởng vẫn kề vai,

                     Em bao dung nghe tiếng anh thở dài,

                     Em thao thức những đêm anh không ngủ.

 Anh ơi, tình yêu và tình tri kỷ,                    

 Biên giới mong manh xin chớ bước lầm,

 Xin đừng yêu nhau, đừng là vợ chồng,                    

 Tình yêu ấy chắc gì là vĩnh cửu.

                       Là tri kỷ có chút tình yêu dấu,

                       Chia sẻ nhau những giây phút chạnh lòng,

                       Một phần đời em, một phần đời anh,

                       Hai phần đời ấy cần nhau mãi mãi.

          Nguyễn Thị Thanh Dương.

             ( May 21, 2013 )

LOVE AND THE OTHER KIND OF LOVE

 Oh Honey, love and love of the other kind,

At first glance the two paths may look the same.

We have set foot on both of them,

 Travelled on two pathways, two souls dreamy, unconfined

Love of the other kind, I now think is neat.

Together we share moments of ups and downs,

Of worries, times of peace,

And of the things we can't talk with our own spouse.

Thou art the one to whom I opened my heart the most,

Whom I tell jokes or when I am serious;

Thou art the one who comforts me when I feel lost

Of  life's illusions and when people are treacherous 

Thou  understand me when I laugh and cry

We feel love even though there's no holding hands

We feel close even though we live far apart

We are the two stars lost in the sky 

In the vast open sky hang thy star and mine.

Though separate but we reflect each other's light.

We shine on throughout the night.

Probably no one understands who we  are.

Only we know about love of the other kind.

Thou art the gathering clouds and I am the rain.

Thou tell me about joys and sorrows intertwined

And how they disperse with the falling rain.

I understand thee though I don't stand by thy side, 

And don't hear thy footsteps in the still of the night.

Thou and I can't let the drinking glasses touch.

But I can taste your disappointments when they become too much

Oh Honey, love and love of the other kind,

Please don't step over the boundary even if it's fine;

Please don't make love, don't insist on being husband and wife.

Such kind of love may not even last

Love of the other kind is still love.

We share of each other's touching moments. 

One part of my life, one part of thine

Such parts of life need each other forever

Quick Translation by 

Wissai

May 23, 2013

Tue Sy and Pham Cong Thien

 I have read only several poems written by TS and PCT. PCT, especially in comparison with TS. I have read only several poems written by both. And I think TS is a bigger man and has more artistic sensibilities. It's hard to lie through real poetry. Not only PCT was much less prolific, his poetry, though not entirely lacking merit in both idea and music, sounds forced and like an extension of his philosophical idea which he already had had put into prose. 

Regarding Buddhism, I am just a dilettante in that area, but I think if one is not careful, one's ego can get in the way to achieve liberation, no matter how talented and brilliant one thinks one is. I don't know if PCT was ever active in fighting against the VC's oppressive regime as TS was. But  between the two well-known Buddhist scholars and poets, I got an impression that TS had quiet strength and equanimity in dealing with the justified anger caused by the VC while PCT had anger on top of arrogance, but none of the quiet strength and dignity. Note that TS has remained a monk while PCT could not keep his monastic vows. He was married several times and had children. With PCT we had the issue of inspirational excess, like Nietzsche. However, one cannot remain indifferent when exposed to individuals like Nietzsche and PCT (or myself for that matter ). One either loves or hates them. . 

A Demolitionist and Philosopher

A Demolitionist and "Philosopher"

A. Demolitionist

A certain pitiful dude called you a cursing artist. He unwittingly conferred and accorded accolades on your rarefied ability to elevate denunciation to an art form. He didn't know you had always regarded yourself endowed with artistic sensibilities. Picasso once said that Art is a Lie that makes us realize the Truth. What follows in this piece is a journey to Truth through the occasional hyperbolic, not artistic, use of words. So fasten your seat belt, take anti-motion sickness pill, close your nose, open wide your eyes and mind, and brace yourself for a ride of your life. 

A raving fan lovingly thinks you are a writer of fiction, even when you pen political essays and pieces about your angst-laden, moronic life. You certainly like the appellation, especially the fiction part. It gives you an escape hatch when you want to deny the resemblance of any character in your writings to that in real life. The other day Ms. Dynamite, a new reader, dropped you a delightful note to the effect that she would like to know if Angie Sanchez, the character in your story "Be careful of where you are going" was real or a figment of your imagination. You hemmed and hawed and finally disclosed that the story was "semi-autobiographical", whatever that meant. 

You prefer to regard yourself, not as a fiction writer but a demolitionist, a verbal demolitionist that is. You demolish myths, rank stupidity, abysmal ignorance, and rampant hypocrisy of certain two-legged animals called humans. These animals have no sense of shame. Their hide is thicker than that of a pachyderm. They are stupid and ignorant and devoid of dignity. Yet, because of the deficiency in their "thinking", called the self-projection bias, they think others are the same as them. It is your life's mission to set them on the right path, to drill and drum awareness and enlightenment into their thick skulls, to save their pathetic souls, to rescue them from damnation. They need to know that "humans" like them need stories like yours in order to understand what sort of creature they are. And you are glad to be of help. You are the tongue that was set free. You are a story teller. 

The dude keeps farting through his mouth that you cannot put two English words together.  And you keep laughing every time you see him struggle mightily to express himself in the language spoken in the British Isles, North America, and everywhere else in the world. He was also so stupid and dumb that he had an audacity to advance an "opinion" that you are not really a translator of poetry while you think and those who know something about the English language think that probably there are only a few (no more than five) individuals who are better than you on this entire planet when it comes to the task to render into English the poems of Bùi Giáng, Tản Đà, and Nguyên Sa. People have lined up and asked you to translate their Vietnamese poems into English. You often declined, saying translating Vietnamese poetry into English  is at least five times harder than writing poetry in either Vietnamese or English from scratch. Poetry translation has to be a labor of love and inspiration and magic. First, one has to be a poet and loves the target poem on hand. Then, he has to know English inside and out and has a feel for the language, especially its cadence and rhythm (rhyme is the least worry because poetry is more than rhyme; poetry is magic when right words are placed next to one another). Finally, he must be able to tap into his mind the parallel thinking required of bilingualism. (The first line of "Áo Lụa Hà Đông" resists translation. You were not pleased with the way you rendered it into English, but until you or someone comes up with a better alternative, it should do for now. The original poem has been echoing and an English version has been percolating in your mind for over forty years. The original's rhyme and rhythm are freshly modernist; the lyrics touching but not maudlin, light but lasting and memorable, exquisite but not fanciful and self-conscious. In short the poem is a masterpiece and immortal. There are two or maybe three stanzas in your translation that managed to capture the magic of the poem. You are daring anybody that could come up with a better English version. You are a decidedly mediocre writer of poetry, but when it comes to translating English, your mind is in touch with magic as if the magic of the original jumped off the printed words and bored and crept into your being. And your mind cannot be at rest until you deal with haunting imagery and music  brought about by the delightful placement of the exact, right words next to one another in the original). 

Unless one is a poet and himself has tried his hand at poetry translation, one does not have a clue of what you are talking about. And of course, the dude who farts through his mouth is no poet. He has not written a poem in any language in his entire life. He is just a loud-mouthed, shameless, wanton liar and pontificator. 

The dude is not the only one that you want to demolish. There are also ignorant scumbags like TQD, NAG, TMT, NQL, NH, TD, and so many others that are really vain and stupid creatures. They should all be sent to the demolition dumps or incineration sites where the evening, curled smoke caries the tartly sweet, earthy,  unmistakable barbecue scent slowly upwards to the sky and tells the land of the not so dark, not so secret beatings of the human heart. For years now, after reading the story "The Hour When the Ship Comes In", you have wondered about the true nature of the human heart and the seeming lack of logic of human behavior. You have been afraid, because of your penchant for sentimentality, you would be like the story's protagonist who performed an inexplicable good deed and paid the ultimate price for it. You have mused on the moral distillation of the story: it is the little kindness that would kill us; it is the one-second hesitation to be resolute, to follow the survival instinct that would cause us irreparable harm. And maybe it is you who have been wrong to insist on high-minded principles while the creatures have been on the right side of thinking because life, according to its most basic definition, is nothing but survival and passing on genes. With survival, you have redemption, starting over, second chances, so on and so forth whereas conscience and ethics would buy you an illusion of nobility and a guarantee of death and nothingness. With cynicism and nihilism, you have flexibility and freedom. It's not so much self-preoccupation as you see it but hard-boiled realism and survival. In plain English: " you'd better keep your big mouth shut and start thinking." This world is peopled by beasts and animals, not by saints and angels. You'd better remember that every time you step out of your  house. 

B. "Philosopher"

You are not only a demolitionist; you are also a "philosopher" or so you claim although you  had no formal training in the discipline. You want to know who you are, where you are going, and what will happen to you when you die. Already you strongly and definitely think that it is stupid to believe in a Personal God who has power and control over the affairs of earthlings. You think there's consciousness, but no soul, and the consciousness is short-lived and completely dependent on the existence of a body. Since the body is finite, so is consciousness. You don't subscribe to all the bullshit associated with reincarnation, heaven, and hell. You have a passion for verifiable facts and logic. You also have an audacity of "thinking" (for instance, that most humans are no more than cowardly, greedy, lying, dishonorable, and fearful animals) and a swagger for bold claims. You have two claims, neither is original and earth-shaking. 

The first claim involves identity. You have maintained that an ordinary human usually does not really know who and what he is , and of course who and what other humans are either, unless and until he and others are put to some trying tests that involve money, honor, justice, courage, power, and fame---all the trappings that determine and define a man's worth because "ordinary" and "normal" humans have a tendency to inflate their worth. The tests would bring them down to earth if they are honest enough to conduct an objective analysis of the tests' results. Succinctly put, we are what we do, not what we think we are. A man's nature is revealed by what he does, not what he thinks he is because we cannot really trust what and how he thinks of himself due to Man's inherent biases in thinking, not counting the fact that most humans don't know how to think in a rigorous manner which requires, at the most basic and elementary level, full use of facts and logic. Those pathetic bastards, on the contrary, utilize whatever their meager resources of reasoning to be at the service of their hearts which are filled with insecurity, vanity, and envy. In other words, Truth scares them. They cannot handle it. They prefer to live their life in ignorance and darkness. It is no secret you hold them in contempt and you refer to them in terms such as ignoramuses and simpletons. The two scumbags you label as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are perfect specimens of such sorry "humans". They have human forms but their hearts are those of beasts and barnyard animals. Here an observation of Machiavelli (1469-1527) would be relevant: "One can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit."

Second, you think the universe is nothing but the myriad, hierarchical, and cyclical phases/manifestations of energy.

It was these two claims that set you off on a search for validation and confirmation or refutation and rejection of your claims. The search led you to a path that involved some reading about, and sometimes of, philosophers and thinkers. The following are some notes taken from your reading that have a bearing on your search, and your occasional wondering aloud/reactions to ideas presented. No matter how sharp and cutting your words are, in your heart of hearts lies a recognition that all humans on this planet need to listen to one another and know how to engage in dialogue. 

Philosophy begins in wonder, said Plato. The day you regarded yourself as a"philosopher" was the day you wondered and wrestled with the idea of suicide when you were a lad of fifteen. You wondered if that was a smart or stupid idea. So you started reading here and there, haphazardly, while listening to the beatings of your heart and wondering who you are. You now have a concern that you may be a garrulous old man and your thinking is off base, overconceptualized and not bloody enough, and feverishly second hand. That's why you read and write. Reading is meeting strangers whom you have an affection for and from whom you learn something, especially something about yourself (like as you were reading the "Tell-Tale Brain" by V.S. Ramachandran  the other day, an idea, by no means original, came to you that we are mostly what our brain registers from external stimuli and tells us, but there exists a loop where we can tell what and how our brain to behave via meditation). Writing is nothing but meeting yourself and then telling others who you are and if you are vain, issuing a challenge to them and at the same time telling yourself: "to your self, be true; you have only one life to live. Let others lie and be self-righteous. Don't be like them for thou art made of better stuff."

_____________________________________________________

Traditionally, philosophy has many branches: metaphysics, ontology, logic, ethics, and epistemology. Unsurprisingly, philosophy has expanded into other fields of inquiry which allegedly concern with realities, not fantasies, but sometimes you really wonder: language, politics, art, science, law, religion, and the mind itself. 

With such broad parameters, there are different schools of philosophical thoughts. 

Historically, there were the skeptics who doubted if it was possible to know anything at all for certain; the rationalists who placed faith on reason as a vehicle to truth; the empiricists who asserted that knowledge came from external experience; and the utilitarians who tied happiness or lack of it to basic moral principles, such as concepts of "right" and "wrong", in other words, to values.

In more recent times there have been the logical positivists (Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer) who sought to clarify the meanings of concepts and ideas, the existentialists, and the analytical philosophers (Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein) whose analysis of the roots of language had a profound effect on subsequent philosophical developments in the English-speaking world. 

Despite their differences, philosophers---in fact, all genuine human thinkers (not stupid, ignorant pontificators) want to examine the real boundaries of human knowledge and understanding and to bring to light  what has hitherto been hidden from the human mind. 

There are philosophers/thinkers whose ideas are relevant to your search of who you are and to the meaning of your life whose end is in sight. They are presented in chronological order.

1. Confucius (c. 551 BCE---c.479 BCE)

If you would ask the midget ignoramus who loves to pontificate and drop names (as he did recently with regard to Confucius and Socrates) and stick his ugly face out in public in order to "impress" the stupid and the gullible and to gain recognition and fame that he so desperately hankers after and hungers for, about Confucius and his contribution to the human thought, he would be tongue-tied and reveal his dismal and pathetic ignorance. The midget really has no shame and possesses no true pride. 

Confucius was an utilitarian and concerned with ethics. The best source to understand C is the "Analects". One should note, however, it was compiled long after C's death and not even by his disciples, but by disciples of those disciples. 

C taught two things: 

First, practice the virtues of wisdom, self-knowledge, courage, understanding, and benevolence.

Second, everybody in the society must master "Li", ritual forms of behavior and respect and responsibility, regardless of rank and station, so that a stable and harmonious social order could be achieved for the benefit of all. 

2. Heraclitus (c. 600 BCE--- c.540 BCE)

H asserted that the universe is eternal and it is in a constant state of change

3. Parmenides (c.510 BCE ---c.450 BCE)

P believed that appearances are deceptive, change impossible, and reality is singular, undivided, and homogenous. P is important because he made the first known attempt at logical deduction and probed into such enduring major philosophical problems as the nature of existence and the relationship among thought, language, and reality.

4. Lao-Tsu (c. 6th century BCE)

Whether or not he actually lived is a matter of debate, and the thoughts attributed to him may in fact be the work of a later individual or group. Unlike Confucianism, a pragmatic philosophy to address the problems facing Chinese society, Taoism offers mysticism as a solution . It counsels people to turn away from the folly of human pursuits. Rather than battle against the natural order of things, they should go with the flow. 

A true Taoist renounces materialism and seeks to understand the laws of nature, to work towards developing one's intuitive inner self, and to be prepared to lead a peaceful, virtuous life. 

To search and to strive for anything is counter-productive. However, the principle of "wu-wie" is not to be taken literally. Rather, it is an approach to master circumstances by understanding their nature and then shaping consequent actions in accordance with them. 

5. Zeno of Elea, Italy, but of Greek ethnicity (c. 490 CBE---c. 425  BCE)

A friend and student of Parmenides, Z is best known for the paradoxes he devised, in which he argued that time and space are infinitely divisible and so became the first thinker to demonstrate the concept of infinity is problematic. 

6. Socrates (c. 470 BCE---c. 399 BCE)

So, ladies and gentlemen, the vast, pathetic ignorance of the midget pontificator is once again being revealed and publicly exposed. He once put down in writing (as he often was stupidly wont to do) that Socrates was different from Confucius in thinking, hence confirming the proverbial difference between "East" and "West". You promptly denounced him for his usual ignorance and stupidity, and pointed out he didn't have a  clue about the concepts of "East" and "West" and neither did he know anything about Confucius and Socrates, except their names. The midget was an intellectual fraud. The fact was that Socrates , like Confucius and Buddha, was an utilitarian and concerned with ethics. 

What makes S a key figure in the story of Western philosophy is that S broke with the concerns of his contemporaries and of the philosophers of the past. Unlike them, he was not concerned about the answers to abstract metaphysical speculations about the nature of the universe, what the world consisted of and how it had been made. He believed that the philosopher's task was much more practical: to teach people how they ought to live and show them what a good life might be. 

S revolutionized Greek philosophy by trying to get at truth by persistent questioning, discussion and debate. 

7. Democritus (c.460 BCE---c.370 BCE)

D asserted that countless indivisible atoms, which are constantly in motion and traveling in an infinite void, are basic stuff of the universe, and that all material objects are simply temporary concentrations of atoms which are destroyed when the atoms dispersed.

D argued that despite what P and his disciple Z had previously postulated---that motion and hence the void cannot exist---movement must exist because it is an observable fact. Therefore there must be a void. It could not be thought of the same way as material matter,  rather it was merely the absence of matter. It was materially independent and had nothing to do with the existence of atoms. 

Building on this, D also held that there were two ways of knowing---one through the senses and the other through the power of the intellect. 

He also postulated that every event that occurs in the universe is causally determined by preceding events.

8. Plato (c. 427 BCE---c.347 BCE)

Theory of Forms: in the material world, everything without exception is a copy of an ideal, unchanging Form, which has a permanent, indestructive existence outside the confines of time and space. Forms are blueprints. Although there are countless cats, dogs, and trees in the worked, they are all made in the single universal Form of "the cat", "the dog", "the tree". Even men are made in the image of the universal Form of man. The key was the soul, which is immortal, existing even before birth. When the time comes to die, the soul is reincarnated into a new life form. As a result, so P postulates, all knowledge is recollected from a previous existence. He also believed that there were ideal Forms of universal, abstract concepts such as beauty, truth, and justice, and of such mathematical concepts such as number and class.

You don't share P's views which, you think, run counter to the theory of evolution, and which lends support to the later vacuous Christian thought on God, Man, soul, reincarnation, Judgment Day, and all other nonsense. What Plato ascribes to unchanging Forms (and thus Realities) are nothing but Man's constructs to map his understanding of the universe. As his understanding progresses, the so-called Forms will change. There are no static, unchanging Forms, in your opinion. What P calls  Forms are just temporary constructs and categories set up by Man for his slouching towards to an understanding of realities around him. 

P's views colored his view of human existence. In "The Republic", P sets out his vision of a Utopian society, ruled by an elite trained from birth for the sole task of ruling over two lower orders---soldiers and the common people. In P's Utopia there is no personal freedom or individual rights. Everything is rigidly controlled by the guardians (elites) for the good of the state. Apparently P didn't think of concepts such as abuses (greed and corruption) of power, the fallibility of humans even if they are considered as "elites". P was an elitist. Indeed, he  openly condemned democracy as a source of bad government. 

9. Aristotle (384 BCE---322 BCE)

Advocate of empiricism

A disagreed with Plato and other pre-Socratic philosophers who had argued before him that there is a single, universal philosophical principle. Thus, he denied that there could be laws of nature, although he maintained that certain metaphysical categories---quantity, quality, substance and relation, for example---could be used in devising descriptions of all natural phenomena.

The Four Causes

To understand anything, A asserted that it was essential to analyze it empirically by asking four logical questions, termed the Four Causes: 

The Material C: what is made of

The Formal C: what it is

The Efficient C: how it came to be

The Final C: what it is for

Teleological Argument and the Golden Mean

He tried to develop a universal system of reasoning through which it would be possible to discover all that there is to be known about reality. Everything, he maintained, whether animate or inanimate, has a natural function, which is naturally strives to fulfill. This is its telos--its final purpose, or goal.

As far as humanity is concerned, its natural function is not simply to reason but to reason well. Tailoring human actions with what reason dictates involves following what A famously termed the Golden Mean. Truthfulness consists of finding the mean between boasting and undue modesty.

10. Montaigne (1533-1592)

A humanist and a skeptic. M relied on his own judgments. He argued that the only sure way of gaining knowledge was through experience and the ability to reflect on one own's thoughts and actions.

You wonder, however, if care must be exercised in choosing the kind of experiences to ensure that the experiences we have are of universal applicability, and not of rare, isolated, aberrational occurrences. In addition, how do we know that we are the type that can reflect objectively and dispassionately on our experiences?

11. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

He fathered an empirical form of inductive reasoning, based solely on observation and experiment. 

12. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

P believed that scientific knowledge grew from generation to generation, but believing in the existence of God, though rational, would always remain a matter of faith. 

You think faith is just an euphemism for irrationality and cowardice.

13. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

A pantheist whose central tenet of philosophy is that the universe and everything in it is one substance, which can be  conceived of as either Nature or God.

14. John Locke (1632-1704)

Regarded by many as the founding father of empiricism, L held that all knowledge is derived from experience, acquired from  the five senses.

15. Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)

L was a rationalist, believing, as did Descartes and Spinoza, that substantial truths about the nature of reality could be established only through the use of reason.

16. Voltaire (1694-1778)

Philosophically, V's thinking revolved around a master theme: the right of everyone to enjoy personal liberty. 

He embraced Locke's  belief that knowledge, rather than being innate, comes from experience.  

The above two features of his thinking led to become a fierce opponent of dogmatism and its resulting pernicious authority.

You have witnessed dogmatism displayed not only  in religious and political matters, but also in daily social interactions. There are so many stupid individuals who think they are right, and given a little "power" they stupidly think they have, they readily speak and act in a bossy and authoritarian manner. Those individuals deserve to be burned and exterminated as vermin. Power is a two-edged sword. Only the wise and enlightened power-holders know how to use it and live to ripe old age. All the stupid, but vain dudes would end up being killed by the sword. Remember a normal human does not like to have obnoxious and vain dudes exert power over him. Power, like Respect, has to be earned and agreed to, not assumed, not grabbed in a willy-nilly manner. Look at Hussein, Gaddafi, and NDDiem. They died like stray dogs. 

17. David Hume (1711-1776)

A precursor of modern cognitive thinking, H said that to be justified in claiming that anything exists, we have to be able to provide evidence for its existence through observational experience. If there is none---as H famously argued when debating the existence of God---then the thing cannot exist.  He used the same argument when dealing with the issue of causality . H pointed out that causal connection cannot be usually observed as commonly thought, and thus must be regarded with much skepticism.

What a great majority of humans believe is causation---one thing happens as a result of the other---is simply a form of what philosophers called "inductive reasoning". It is making an assumption based on to serving a number of similar instances. So if, for example, a person observed many white swans but no black swans, they might conclude that all swans are white. 

 18. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

In "Critique of Pure Reason", K synthesized rationalism and empiricism. He maintained that, rather than being a blank slate or piece of paper, the mind plays an active part on shaping the world of experience. It imposes principles on experience, organizing and categorizing the sense data with which it is bombarded to generate knowledge.

Besides space and time, there were 12 fundamental categories according to K: substance, cause and effect, reciprocity, necessity, possibility, existence, totality, unity, plurality, limitation, reality, and negation.

In "Critique of Practical Reason", K tackled the issue of ethics, starting with the argument that it was reason alone that determined what was morally right and wrong. Moral law could not be categorical; it must not be imperative.

Comment: 

K did not hear of moral relativism? 

Shakespeare once said, "There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Morality is not black or white. It is circumstantial. It is culturally and environmentally determined. It is as much a product of an individual's thinking as it is a social construct. 

19. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

Like Schelling, H believed that reality was an organic unity in an ongoing process of development. It was the philosopher's task to chart this development, analyzing it, demonstrating how it manifested itself in nature and in human history, and showing the purpose to which it was directed. 

For H, this was all bound up with the existence of the Absolute (or Absolute Spirit) and his notion of the Geist. The former is pure thought; the latter is the stuff of existence, the ultimate essence of being. History was the search of the Geist for absolute knowledge: it is to never static, and individuals have no power to direct or control it---they are enveloped in the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. Driven by the Geist, history is always moving forward. H used the logic of dialectic to present his argument. The dialectic process ends when the Geist recognizes itself as the ultimate reality.

Comment:

Maybe H's Absolute Spirit is what you called Energy. Geist is the manifestation, including Man.

20. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

N came up with the notion of "the will to power", the end result of the evolutionary process. He believed that humans needed to sublimate and control their natural passions and turn "the will to power" into a creative force, making them into a new species, the Supermen, the masters of their destinies.

Comment:

N was a poet, a dreamer, an idealist, a musician, who was trained in philology and took up philosophy as an all-consuming pursuit. He expressed his ideas in metaphors and aphorisms. He was a weakling in body who sublimated his weak physical condition and dreamed of strength and supermen. He was son and grandson of Christian preachers, who rebelled against nonsensical beliefs. He had a lot of emotional courage and vanities, yet his claims were not off the mark. He said that he and Heine would be considered the master stylists of the German language. He also opined that one day he would be famous and people would welcome his ideas. Some humans are born posthumously, he wrote. Many writers and artists and thinkers (including Freud, himself a superb writer in German, who admitted that he learned much from N.) are influenced by him. 

21. Edmund Husserl (1858-1938)

Jewish by birth, Catholic by conversion, and still a victim of Nazi persecution. Father of phenomenology by borrowing the concept of of intentionality (all conscious states relate to a content regardless of whether or not that content actually exists) from Franz Brentano. 

H argued that regardless of whether anything of which we are aware actually exists independently, it is an object of consciousness as far as we are concerned. Objects are appearances. They don't have to be things in themselves. H called his approach "transcendental idealism".

Comment:

Buddhism and various strands of "idealism" have something similar to offer. Reality is more than appearances. Appearance is not necessarily reality. Reality is what we say it is, as long as we think we don't have hallucinations. So a Buddhist would insist "deep down" there is no difference between the Self and the Other, and sufferings would ensue if we think there are differences. The insistence sounds fine "on paper" and on the exercise of "reasoning", using some premise and arriving at a conclusion consistent with the premise. But "normal" folks would insist that they know and have experiences to prove that they are different from pathological midget pontificators and their ugly, ass-kissing, self-appointed slaves and disciples in some profound ways.

Man is an interesting and yet screwed-up (sometimes willingly and by himself) animal. Just talk with any messed-up dude who believes in a Personal God, heaven and hell, the existence and immortality of the soul, reincarnation, and all other nonsense, he would tell you all what he believes are really true and real, or real and true, or whatever his deluded mind tells him.

 

22. Sartre (1905-1980)

Existence precedes essence. Who we are is a construct, built out of experience and behavior. 

Bad faith (mauvaise foi): deluding ourselves into a state in which we can avoid responsibility for what we do.

Comment:

We are what we do. A man is determined by his actions, not what he thinks he is because thought is not necessarily the mother of action. Until you act on your thought, your thought does not mean anything. To do is to be.  Dobedo. Don't tell me you love me or the country in which you were born. Show it, otherwise you are just a shameless liar and a cheap pontificator. 

A man is the sum of his experiences.

C. Conclusions

1. All things that rise will converge. Knowledge  is indivisible, just like Reality, but for the sake of learning and comprehension, different disciplines are established. To know who we are (we must know who we before we can know others. All knowledge begins with the self. We constantly measure ourselves against others. We look at the world and wonder how the environment and all the living organisms---the fauna and the flora--- in it affects us) requires an awareness in the preceding sentence, and to have some basic understanding of, and then an ability to synthesize what we know, especially in the fields of history, cosmology, philosophy, and cognitive science. Meanwhile, we need to have an open mind and keep on reading and learning. Theorizing without a basis of facts is plainly vain and stupid. That's what exactly the pontificating midget ignoramus has been doing. He has tried to come across as a polymath, but he has shown to the world that he is a pathetic, pathological, ignorant liar who does not know what he is talking about. He confuses nonsensical noise with informed opinion. You think he's getting senile and thus progressively more stupid by the day, as evidenced by the nonsense coming out of his foul mouth. He is a man having no shame, no self-respect, and no pride. A human without shame , without self-respect, without true pride is not much of a man. 

You have displayed a palpable contempt for him and for other emotional cowards , intellectual scumbags, and moral midgets  because they have no courage in admitting that they are ignorant and fearful of truths, especially unpleasant facts about themselves. They are into denial to avoid emotional pain. They are full of insecurity, envy, and inflated sense of self. 

You are convinced that we all must be grounded on facts and logic and have emotional fortitude to face Reality when it bites us on the ass. So essentially your search is epistemological in nature. 

You have challenged--- like all true modern thinkers, through your writings---your readers to prove to you that what you have written is nothing but trash and garbage, devoid of factuality and empty of aesthetics, like their own verbal diarrhea. So far you have received no feedback about your arguments  except---from the midget pontificator and his ignorant, stupid, and ugly self-appointed disciple---cheap lies and made-up stories about your alleged mental "illness". 

2. A real, mentally healthy, and social (as opposed to pseudo, sick, and reclusive/anti-social) human must come to terms with many issues:

a.  who and what he is, and who and what the others are.

b. so whether or not he would be able to deal with certain changing states  of consciousnes and realities such as love and hate (emotion),  power and obedience/ leader and follower/master and slave  (naked survival), and knowledge and falsehood (philosophy, all other disciplines, and religion), in all of their myriad manifestations

You look around you, constantly observing the behavior and the mental process (via what they verbalize of what they feel and think) of the so-called humans , and you form a rough idea of what kind of developmental stage they are in as humans. 

On one hand, if a dude (or gal) who believes in a Personal God, lusts after money and power but not knowledge, thinks that because chronologically he is older or because he fancies that he is more socially and emotionally "mature" than others,  he can go around  calling others as "kids" while he is in fact a stupid, ignorant, pontificating, shameless liar, then he is not much of a human. Ditto for an ass-kissing, fame-seeking, vain, ugly, linguistically-deficient dude. Same thing for certain untalented fellows who ironically think they are "leaders" and lust after "power" and  love to issue "rules" and "regulations", "notices" and "directives", in a grand, public manner, instead of privately to the affected individuals. Shame on them!

On the other hand, if a certain chronologically senior individual, like PHT for example,  who addresses you in a formal appellation, disregards past differences, acknowledges your merits, and is generally correct socially, then that is an individual you have to fear and respect because he is emotionally strong,  intellectually secure, and well on his path to become a real human. Humans are made, not born. Such an individual ironically hurts your pride and unwittingly makes you feel quite ashamed of yourself because he is more developed than you are as a human, at least emotionally and socially. 

Wissai

May 11, 2013.