Another dream took place. It had to do with economic insecurity. And you told yourself, strange, why now, it is so out of place, so out of time, thirty years ago, it would make sense, but not now. You take stock of the situation and you tell yourself not to be afraid, fear is born of dark imaginings and loneliness. Maybe the dream was your mind of telling you to focus your attention to making money, and not to comparing yourself with others. You should know who you are by now. There is only one question: are you really comfortable with who you are, if one day your family and all your material possessions disappear and you are left alone, penniless and no friends, do you still feel good about who you are. If the answer is yes, then you have nothing to worry about. So sleep tight, carry yourself with dignity. Don't feign affection. Don't surrender, but try to be on good terms with everybody for, no less than the stars or the trees in your backyard, you have the right to be here. Be just and fair. Don't kill any living things unless there is no choice.
Peace be with you. Salem. May the force be with you. May your wisdom stay with you and give you peace. Be independent, but don't turn down friendship or love.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Placid and Flaccid
I said, go placidly in the world, with peace on your mind and love in your heart, not flaccidly, you fool. You always have sex on your mind, no wonder your curly hair looks like pubic hair, you and your flaccid dick. Now look at you, look who's talking now, who's nagging and repeating himself, incapable of letting go, who's nursing on wounded pride and bruised ego. I must have struck a raw nerve in you. I guess Shakespeare was right, you doth protest too much. Why does the word "animals" bother you too much? You are making me wonder that perhaps it applies to you to a T. But that's all right to be an animal, most humans are animals anyway. It's not easy to be human, to be quite like me, you understand? You called the cease-fire and then you violated it. You set out new conditions, laid out new demands. Why can you just wait if he improves, if he is capable of being as he said he would? You had to put in the last world. You had to get things off your chest, early in the morning. Sleep was hard to get, huh? Come on, love a little, be nice to befit your reputataion. You are seriously making me wonder perhaps your reputation is not deserving, that perhaps you have been a phony all along and now your mask is falling off your face. Why all the anger, the heated words? If he obliquely and rhetorically talked about animals and that you never consider yourself as an animal, then you should not feel that disturbed. Don't tell me you are troubled because of the notion of fairness and justice. If you are, please consider about the situation of your home country. You're making me think you are my twin brother. Have you ever thought of that possibility?
Go placidly in the world, my friend, with love in your heart and peace on your mind. Forgive him. Really forgive him. Show him you are bigger than he is. Show him you have a real big heart. Show him love and understanding. Really apologize to him for intentionally hurting him. Say to him that you were acting small and now you are feeling bad about that. Embrace him as a real brother and cry. He probably, no, he will cry with you and he will say that all is well, all is forgiven, and that both you and he were fools, but you two have learned and grown and become much stronger because of the experience. As I said before, true love leads to actions, to forgiveness, to understanding and peace. Are you game for that?
Go placidly in the world, my friend, with love in your heart and peace on your mind. Forgive him. Really forgive him. Show him you are bigger than he is. Show him you have a real big heart. Show him love and understanding. Really apologize to him for intentionally hurting him. Say to him that you were acting small and now you are feeling bad about that. Embrace him as a real brother and cry. He probably, no, he will cry with you and he will say that all is well, all is forgiven, and that both you and he were fools, but you two have learned and grown and become much stronger because of the experience. As I said before, true love leads to actions, to forgiveness, to understanding and peace. Are you game for that?
Monday, March 1, 2010
Why am I an annoyance?
Unlike my brother who dared write in his autobiography with chapters graced with outrageous headings such as "Why Am I so clever?", "Why Am I so wise" (or something like that, I don't remember exactly anymore. It's still a miracle I am still able to command words to express my thoughts, despite the relentless march of Alzheimer), "Why did I write such good books", etc..., I am only comfortable with the above "Why Am I an Annoyance?"
I am a mind gadfly. I annoy people on purpose. I force them to confront their phoniness, cowardice, easy assumptions about God, religion, politics, and life. I make them to own up to their feelings of inadequacy. I urge them to grow and join me in the path I am travelling. I hate easy, polite conversations that skirt around issues and get nowhere. My time on this planet is precious. I don't wish to waste it in emptiness and avoidance. I don't want to live a life of quiet acceptance and surrender to circumstances. I want to get to know the real persons with whom I am holding a conversation. I want to compare myself with them. I want to learn from them to see if they have anything to offer other than superficial politeness and cheap, ready-made smiles.
I am a mind gadfly. I annoy people on purpose. I force them to confront their phoniness, cowardice, easy assumptions about God, religion, politics, and life. I make them to own up to their feelings of inadequacy. I urge them to grow and join me in the path I am travelling. I hate easy, polite conversations that skirt around issues and get nowhere. My time on this planet is precious. I don't wish to waste it in emptiness and avoidance. I don't want to live a life of quiet acceptance and surrender to circumstances. I want to get to know the real persons with whom I am holding a conversation. I want to compare myself with them. I want to learn from them to see if they have anything to offer other than superficial politeness and cheap, ready-made smiles.
Existentialism
Didn't I tell you that Sartre influenced me? I am not ashamed to admit that. I am not that deep a thinker. I learned and borrowed from others who are smarter than me. The key thing is the digestion of ideas, the thorough examination of concepts that I understand and find useful in my effort to make sense of the world I live in. I told you I have only probably two ideas which I think are of my own. They may turn out they are influenced by other ideas that I have read. These two are the tools I employ, among many tools, in understanding what is going on around me:
The first one is the 90/10 rule theorem of Wissai which states that of the 100 people you happen to meet, 10 would be likely to be exceptional either in goodness or evil, in intelligence or stupidity, or left-handed or gay. In other words, 10% is the exception. To extrapolate this "theorem", we would have to ask ourselves a question if we are part of the 10% in goodness or in talent or in intelligence (the gay and the left-handed exceptions are not that interesting) or we are just part of the humdrum, run of the mill 90%. I regard myself as part of the 10% in sensitivity, artistic sensibilities, and philosophy and part of the 90% in intelligence.
The other idea I fancy that it is my own is that most people have a tendency to think that they are "better" than they actually are. In other words, most people are not objective in self-evaluation. This very second idea of mine could invalidate my own self-conception that I am part of the 10% in terms of sensitivity, artistic sensibilities, and philosophy. Do you see fucking see that I am capable of thinking to the ultimate, to the core, the marrow of the matter? Still, until new facts emerge that tell me I am wrong about these two ideas, they are the ones I claim that I arrived at by myself. It occurs to me each thinker only has one or two basic ideas that they bequeath to posterity. Here are the ideas of thinkers on top of my head as I understand them
Buddha: you are what you think. Four noble truths and eight-way path.
Socrates: question and answer method. An unexamined life is not worth living.
Plato: ideal form. Reality does not lie in appearances.
Democritus: matter made of atoms.
Heraclitus: everything changes
Descartes: mind and body dualism.
Spinoza: pantheism
Locke: blank slate of mind at birth
Voltaire: respect of the right of others to disagree with us
Rousseau: noble savage
Montesqieu: democracy
Hume: empiricism
Schopenhauer: will: life force
Nietzsche: will to power, transvaluation of values, God is dead. One must have chaos within oneself in order to be able to have a rendez-vous with a dancing star.
Hegel: dialectics
Marx: dialectical materialism
Darwin: evolution
Russell: mathematical logic
Freud: death wish, subsconscious, transference
Heidegger: Mean are thrown into the absurd. Being and Time
Sartre: existence precedes essence
Camus: absurdity of life. Myth of Sissyphus. Suicide is the only philosophical question. Rebellion.
Einstein: E=MC2. Space and Time are one.
Foucault: power in society.
Adler: power relationship, not sex.
Victor Frankel: meaning for existence
Jung: archetypes.
Saussure: deep structure, Signifier and Signified.
Levi-Strauss: primitive society is complex. Totemism is a language.
Derrida: deconstruction
Ba Ngo: 90/10 theorem. Human's self-deception: tendency to think we are better than we really are. Some humans will do anything to survive, even selling out their parents, their children, their country, let alone selling their own bodies and souls; to them, survival is everything, fuck honor, fuck dignity, fuck responsibility, fuck everything, just me and me and me.
Those are just the ones I can recall on top of my head. There may be others. I will add them on as time goes by and when I remember. Just as I said, I am racing against time before the lights go out.
Now let me focus on existentialism. The following is copied from an essay (Existentialism and Human Emotions) by Sartre. In fact, it is the only thing I read directly from him, apart from a few stories and plays and novels. I cannot tackle Being and Nothingness and other more serious books.
Existence precedes essence: man is indefinable because he is at first nothing. There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
When we speak of forlornness, a term Heidegger was fond of, we mean only that God does not exist and that we have to face all the consequences of it. We cannot start making excuses for ourselves. We are alone, with no excuses.
Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsbile for everything he does. The existentialist deos not believe in th power of passion. He will neveer agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging rorret which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.
Forlornness implies that we ourselves choose our being. Forlornness and aguish go together.
There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan. He exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself. He is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.
There can be no other truth than cogito, ergo sum. While materialism treats all men, including the one philosophizing, as objects, as an ensemble of determined reactions in no way different distinguished from the ensemble of qualities which constitute a table or a chair or a stone, the man who becomes aware of himself throught the cogito also perceives all others, and he perceives them as the condition of his own existence. He realizes that he cannot be anything (in the sense tha we say that someone is witty or nasty) unless ohers recognize it as such. In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. We discovers that we inhabit a world of intersubjectivity where man decides what he is and what others are.
Man makes himself. In choosing his ethics, he makes himself, and force of circumstances is such that he cannot abstain from choosing one. We define man only in relationship to involvement.
It is often said we are unable to pass judgment on others. In a way it is true, and in another false.
It is true in the sense that whenever a man sincerely involves himself and chooses his configuration, it is impossible for him to prefer another configuration, regardless of what his own may be in other respects. So, we don't believe in progress since progress implies betterment. Man is always the same. Choice always remains a choice in a situation. The problem has not changed since the time one could choose between those for and those againsgt slavery and the present time when we can side with the Democrats or the Republicans.
But one can still pass judgment for one makes a choie in relationship to others. First, one can jude (and this is not a judgment of value, but a logical judgment) that certain choices are based on errorand others on truth. If we have defined man's situation as a free choice, with no excuses and no recourse, every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, every man who sets up a determinism, is a dishonest man.
The objection may be raised, "but why may he not choose himself dishonestly?" I reply taht I am not obliged to pass moral judgment on him , but that I do define his dishonesty as an error. Dishonesty is a falsehood because it belies th complete freedom of involvement. On the same frounds, I maintain that there is also dishonesty if I choose to state that certain values exist prior to me, it is self-contradictory for me to want them and at the same state that they are imposed on me. Suppose someone says to me. "What if I want to be dishonest?" I'll answer, " There's no reason for you not to be, but I'm saying that what's you are, and that the strictly coherent attitude is that of honesty."
Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. We declare that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.
(cont.)
The first one is the 90/10 rule theorem of Wissai which states that of the 100 people you happen to meet, 10 would be likely to be exceptional either in goodness or evil, in intelligence or stupidity, or left-handed or gay. In other words, 10% is the exception. To extrapolate this "theorem", we would have to ask ourselves a question if we are part of the 10% in goodness or in talent or in intelligence (the gay and the left-handed exceptions are not that interesting) or we are just part of the humdrum, run of the mill 90%. I regard myself as part of the 10% in sensitivity, artistic sensibilities, and philosophy and part of the 90% in intelligence.
The other idea I fancy that it is my own is that most people have a tendency to think that they are "better" than they actually are. In other words, most people are not objective in self-evaluation. This very second idea of mine could invalidate my own self-conception that I am part of the 10% in terms of sensitivity, artistic sensibilities, and philosophy. Do you see fucking see that I am capable of thinking to the ultimate, to the core, the marrow of the matter? Still, until new facts emerge that tell me I am wrong about these two ideas, they are the ones I claim that I arrived at by myself. It occurs to me each thinker only has one or two basic ideas that they bequeath to posterity. Here are the ideas of thinkers on top of my head as I understand them
Buddha: you are what you think. Four noble truths and eight-way path.
Socrates: question and answer method. An unexamined life is not worth living.
Plato: ideal form. Reality does not lie in appearances.
Democritus: matter made of atoms.
Heraclitus: everything changes
Descartes: mind and body dualism.
Spinoza: pantheism
Locke: blank slate of mind at birth
Voltaire: respect of the right of others to disagree with us
Rousseau: noble savage
Montesqieu: democracy
Hume: empiricism
Schopenhauer: will: life force
Nietzsche: will to power, transvaluation of values, God is dead. One must have chaos within oneself in order to be able to have a rendez-vous with a dancing star.
Hegel: dialectics
Marx: dialectical materialism
Darwin: evolution
Russell: mathematical logic
Freud: death wish, subsconscious, transference
Heidegger: Mean are thrown into the absurd. Being and Time
Sartre: existence precedes essence
Camus: absurdity of life. Myth of Sissyphus. Suicide is the only philosophical question. Rebellion.
Einstein: E=MC2. Space and Time are one.
Foucault: power in society.
Adler: power relationship, not sex.
Victor Frankel: meaning for existence
Jung: archetypes.
Saussure: deep structure, Signifier and Signified.
Levi-Strauss: primitive society is complex. Totemism is a language.
Derrida: deconstruction
Ba Ngo: 90/10 theorem. Human's self-deception: tendency to think we are better than we really are. Some humans will do anything to survive, even selling out their parents, their children, their country, let alone selling their own bodies and souls; to them, survival is everything, fuck honor, fuck dignity, fuck responsibility, fuck everything, just me and me and me.
Those are just the ones I can recall on top of my head. There may be others. I will add them on as time goes by and when I remember. Just as I said, I am racing against time before the lights go out.
Now let me focus on existentialism. The following is copied from an essay (Existentialism and Human Emotions) by Sartre. In fact, it is the only thing I read directly from him, apart from a few stories and plays and novels. I cannot tackle Being and Nothingness and other more serious books.
Existence precedes essence: man is indefinable because he is at first nothing. There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
When we speak of forlornness, a term Heidegger was fond of, we mean only that God does not exist and that we have to face all the consequences of it. We cannot start making excuses for ourselves. We are alone, with no excuses.
Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsbile for everything he does. The existentialist deos not believe in th power of passion. He will neveer agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging rorret which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.
Forlornness implies that we ourselves choose our being. Forlornness and aguish go together.
There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan. He exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself. He is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.
There can be no other truth than cogito, ergo sum. While materialism treats all men, including the one philosophizing, as objects, as an ensemble of determined reactions in no way different distinguished from the ensemble of qualities which constitute a table or a chair or a stone, the man who becomes aware of himself throught the cogito also perceives all others, and he perceives them as the condition of his own existence. He realizes that he cannot be anything (in the sense tha we say that someone is witty or nasty) unless ohers recognize it as such. In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. We discovers that we inhabit a world of intersubjectivity where man decides what he is and what others are.
Man makes himself. In choosing his ethics, he makes himself, and force of circumstances is such that he cannot abstain from choosing one. We define man only in relationship to involvement.
It is often said we are unable to pass judgment on others. In a way it is true, and in another false.
It is true in the sense that whenever a man sincerely involves himself and chooses his configuration, it is impossible for him to prefer another configuration, regardless of what his own may be in other respects. So, we don't believe in progress since progress implies betterment. Man is always the same. Choice always remains a choice in a situation. The problem has not changed since the time one could choose between those for and those againsgt slavery and the present time when we can side with the Democrats or the Republicans.
But one can still pass judgment for one makes a choie in relationship to others. First, one can jude (and this is not a judgment of value, but a logical judgment) that certain choices are based on errorand others on truth. If we have defined man's situation as a free choice, with no excuses and no recourse, every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, every man who sets up a determinism, is a dishonest man.
The objection may be raised, "but why may he not choose himself dishonestly?" I reply taht I am not obliged to pass moral judgment on him , but that I do define his dishonesty as an error. Dishonesty is a falsehood because it belies th complete freedom of involvement. On the same frounds, I maintain that there is also dishonesty if I choose to state that certain values exist prior to me, it is self-contradictory for me to want them and at the same state that they are imposed on me. Suppose someone says to me. "What if I want to be dishonest?" I'll answer, " There's no reason for you not to be, but I'm saying that what's you are, and that the strictly coherent attitude is that of honesty."
Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. We declare that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.
(cont.)
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Moderation
I read long time ago when I was a kid that it is admirable for a man to stop speaking or eating in mid-stream, just because he does not wish to continue indulging in the pleasures of hearing his voice or tasting food. In other words, such a man commands our admiration because he shows self-control and moderation.
For the record, I am a stranger to moderation. In some areas, I have self-control, but I am a slave to my emotions. I am pitiful sometimes. I have tried to work on mastering my emotions, but I have not had much success. I guess maybe it stems from having an ego which can be both good and bad. One thing I have learned that most humans are despicable, cowardly, cunning, and phony. And I am not like that at all. So, overall I have reasons to feel good about myself. I may be not that keen cultivating qualities that are necessary for survival, but I do have qualities that speak of honor and dignity. Humans who are all about survival at any costs and at any price are nothing but animals, yet the motherfuckers would jump up and down, foaming and frothing at the mouths if they are accused of living a life no different from that of animals. They fucking insist that they want to be treated with courtesy which they piously intone that it is "de rigueur" in polite society. De rigueur, my ass! All phonies and cowards. Good for nothing. Don't fucking lift a finger to help their home country and their fellow countrymen in this hour of need.
One more thing I need to cultivate is the emotional independence. It could even be more important than the financial independence which is an obvious necessity in order to go through life with dignity.
I once read a novel in which the main character said, eerily like sombody I used to know: "Vietnam changed people. It sure as hell changed me. I used to be a nice guy." What the main character said has stayed with me ever I came across it. Many people I met over the years have changed for the worse. They started out, not evil nor very selfish, but life has changed them. A bad love relationship, a bad marriage, or a bad boss turned them into bitter, uncaring monsters.
But not me, I can assure you that. Care to know why? Because I have a sense of justice. I never hurt innocent parties. I have a list in red ink. I've postponed my trip. Maybe it's time to make a trip. But first, I have to stay healthy and wealthy. I must.
For the record, I am a stranger to moderation. In some areas, I have self-control, but I am a slave to my emotions. I am pitiful sometimes. I have tried to work on mastering my emotions, but I have not had much success. I guess maybe it stems from having an ego which can be both good and bad. One thing I have learned that most humans are despicable, cowardly, cunning, and phony. And I am not like that at all. So, overall I have reasons to feel good about myself. I may be not that keen cultivating qualities that are necessary for survival, but I do have qualities that speak of honor and dignity. Humans who are all about survival at any costs and at any price are nothing but animals, yet the motherfuckers would jump up and down, foaming and frothing at the mouths if they are accused of living a life no different from that of animals. They fucking insist that they want to be treated with courtesy which they piously intone that it is "de rigueur" in polite society. De rigueur, my ass! All phonies and cowards. Good for nothing. Don't fucking lift a finger to help their home country and their fellow countrymen in this hour of need.
One more thing I need to cultivate is the emotional independence. It could even be more important than the financial independence which is an obvious necessity in order to go through life with dignity.
I once read a novel in which the main character said, eerily like sombody I used to know: "Vietnam changed people. It sure as hell changed me. I used to be a nice guy." What the main character said has stayed with me ever I came across it. Many people I met over the years have changed for the worse. They started out, not evil nor very selfish, but life has changed them. A bad love relationship, a bad marriage, or a bad boss turned them into bitter, uncaring monsters.
But not me, I can assure you that. Care to know why? Because I have a sense of justice. I never hurt innocent parties. I have a list in red ink. I've postponed my trip. Maybe it's time to make a trip. But first, I have to stay healthy and wealthy. I must.
Power and Acting Officious
Recently I got into an accident. I rear-ended a vehicle. I could not stop in time due to my carelessness. I was distracted. What interested me was the putting on air by the cop who arrived at the scene to write an accident report. The manner he got out of his car and his way of asking me questions triggered a lot of suppressed anger inside me when I see humans act on an officious manner and authoritarian fashion when a situation gives them the opportunity to put on those airs. Instead of being unassuming and polite and pleasant, those assholes can't resist the temptation of "power". They would puff and inflate their chests and start talking in the voice of "authority". And do you know what when that happens? I have an instant desire to put them in their place, but I wouldn't because it is not the smart thing to do. I would hurt myself further. So, I have to suppress my desire. I would then have to remind myself not to act like them should similar situations arise in the future and I find myself in the driver's seat.
Wisdom
Wisdom comes from experience and patience. Patience means self-control. It means the ability to delay instant gratification of our wishes. We learn to wait because haste makes waste. We know if we act now, our actions are not well thought out. Patience means careful choice of words. It means we employ empathy, not egotism. It also means to learn to love those who annoy or even hurt us, not because we are afraid, but because we care, because we understand the uselessness of inflicing pain on others. Sooner or later, that pain will come back to us in some form. Patience means to work for harmony and integration and understanding, not to satisfy our ego's need to look good and smart. A person who constantly tries to prove he is smart is insecure about his own intelligence. A truly intelligent man is not anxious to prove himself. He simply knows he is smart. He is comfortable with that. He accepts that. He does not gloat. He does not make noises.
(cont.)
(cont.)
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