I came across thisparable told by Buddha the other day:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
I have been thinking alot about that parable in the past day or two to help ease some nervousness I’ve got. The nervousness springs from an immensely personal gift I gave to this girl. It’s the sort of thing where if it’s taken well some form of thanks or "how sweet" statement would normally be forthcoming... but it hasn’t. This doesn’t mean it was taken poorly, I hope, she does have a tendency to be distracted in the middle of things. I would say it is more like LIFO consciousness as opposed to ADHD, heh heh.
What I’ve been taking away from this parable is also in the light of my recent thoughts on fate and chance, but specifically in the corollary issue of choice. When confronted with the tiger, the man does what he can... he runs. When confronted with a dire situation he has no control over, the man does what he can... he enjoys what can be enjoyed. So I sit here, trapped between the tigers of unknowing, trying to ignore the mice of worry and self-doubt. I’m going to try, probably with only minimal success, to enjoy the strawberry of the weekend and new fallen snow.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
That’s Alot of Dishes
I stayed at a buddy's place this past Saturday night. This weekend I realized how I need more people like him in my life, and in the world in general. He is a very smart guy, but has managed to hide it behind a mild speech impediment and a complete and utter lack of guile. I'd like to relate a story of something that transpired this past Sunday.
He, his fiancee, and I were sitting around in the kitchen when she got up and drew some water in the sink to start doing the dishes. I believe there were approximately 3 clean dishes at the start of the endeavor, most of them having been dirtied when company came over the night before for an impromptu dinner party and drinks. In fact, they had done all the dishes just two days earlier. The only indication of his fiancee's intentions, aside from filling up the sink, was her instruction that "she will need some help drying when she gets to the glasses." And without another word she has begun submerging the first round of a stack of dirty dishes nearly as tall as her. It is about a half hour later and the first thing my friend says once he finds out that it's time grab a towel and help out is, "Wow, Babe. I thought that was going to take you all afternoon."
There are alot of things that one would expect that sentence to mean. It could mean that his opinion of her was low enough that she was able to surprise him with her merely by completing the dishes quickly. It could mean that he was disappointed that his time hanging out with his buddy (me) was cut short by annoying domestic work. It could mean any number of demeaning things... but it didn't. It meant that he was happy she was almost done and happy that he was now able to help get the chore out of the way sooner so they could both go back to doing what they would rather be doing.
It didn't even occur to me until afterwards that what he said could possibly be considered offensive. It is one of the most perfect examples I have encountered of the awesome power of utter guilelessness. The ability dismiss ill will by sheer lack of ill intention is definitely not a skill be underestimated.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Fate and Chance: of Movies and Life
Think about these things as you read this.
1) Fractals
2) Classical vs Quantum Mechanics
3) Psychological Priming
Recently I've been wondering at the subtle beauty of psychological priming and how I have little revelations from having something already on my mind and then exposing myself to some new unknown stimuli. It's the principle of sleeping on it, keep it in the back of your mind and the world around you will give you ways of interacting with other issues that you haven't tried applying to the current issue, often with great success. In retrospect it is an activity I use on alot of my issues. I am a big 'stew'-er in so far as when I am confronted with an important decision, even if I am already mostly sure of my response... I still want a day to stew on it. I want time to leave this framework and allow the universe to engage me in other frameworks that might shed new light on the situation. I prime myself with the issue... in fact I think it would be hard not to be primed when confronted with a big decision, and then just live my life normally and see what comes to me.
This relates to fate in a particular way that occurred to me after watching No Country For Old Men yesterday. Early in the movie one character is trying to describe the captive bolt pistol that the bad guy uses (as shown in the previews), to no avail. Somewhat later, Tommy Lee Jones is talking about something else entirely and comments about how the process of animal slaughter has changed since he was a young man and, in effect, describes how a captive bolt pistol is used to do so. Whether he makes the connection is not revealed. But this is an excellent example of priming, where there is a situational backdrop and the events in the foreground reveal new mysteries, that were before unseen.
There is another part of No Country that ties in and I find very interesting. It is best expressed in a scene where the bad guy tells someone, quite creepily, to call a coin toss. The implication being that if they get it wrong, he will kill them. He is having this scene play out with a man and tells the man the story of the quarter, made 20+ years prior and gone through a thousand hands to come here and decide if he will live or die. The paradox here is that it is the fate of this quarter to decide by chance whether this man shall live or die. That is a very interesting idea. I interpret it much along the lines of fate setting the board and placing the pieces, but still it being chance that determines the outcome. As per my intro thoughts, this reminds me of physics. Everything behaves according to Classical Mechanics, except where all the action is happening. If you throw a ball up, you can know it's path and the time it takes to complete that path... but that is the 10,000 foot view. What is really happening when you look at that ball and the air on an atomic level? Is the air actually going around the ball or through? Is the ball all it's own the whole time or is there some flux born entity made up of air and ball? Fate is the path that cannot be undone, but what the real story is the chance that all lines up to make it happen...or not happen.
"As above, so below" is a paraphrasing of part of the message on The Emerald Tablet", written by Hermes Trismegistus and considered the source of magic and alchemy. But it gets me thinking, and already primed by concepts of fate, lack of a unified physics, and a recent blog entry... just how deep is the rabbit hole? Is it the nature of all things that they can be understood at a macro level but at some point become unknowable? Maybe everyone does meet their soul-mate, and all you can hope to do is not be hung up on your last fling when it happens? Perhaps we have a system where right now there is fate and that is (to some omniscient being) knowable, but when the next fated encounter occurs all is thrown to chance and we zoom in one level on our Mandelbrot Set of Fate, where everything looks basically like it did before, but just so slightly different. Life will go on if you make a bad impression on your soul-mate and never end up dating, just like it has for everyone else that did the same, the only thing that will have changed is that you might not become a believer in soul-mates and the future now has very very slightly more green eyed people and less blue eyed people because of it.
1) Fractals
2) Classical vs Quantum Mechanics
3) Psychological Priming
Recently I've been wondering at the subtle beauty of psychological priming and how I have little revelations from having something already on my mind and then exposing myself to some new unknown stimuli. It's the principle of sleeping on it, keep it in the back of your mind and the world around you will give you ways of interacting with other issues that you haven't tried applying to the current issue, often with great success. In retrospect it is an activity I use on alot of my issues. I am a big 'stew'-er in so far as when I am confronted with an important decision, even if I am already mostly sure of my response... I still want a day to stew on it. I want time to leave this framework and allow the universe to engage me in other frameworks that might shed new light on the situation. I prime myself with the issue... in fact I think it would be hard not to be primed when confronted with a big decision, and then just live my life normally and see what comes to me.
This relates to fate in a particular way that occurred to me after watching No Country For Old Men yesterday. Early in the movie one character is trying to describe the captive bolt pistol that the bad guy uses (as shown in the previews), to no avail. Somewhat later, Tommy Lee Jones is talking about something else entirely and comments about how the process of animal slaughter has changed since he was a young man and, in effect, describes how a captive bolt pistol is used to do so. Whether he makes the connection is not revealed. But this is an excellent example of priming, where there is a situational backdrop and the events in the foreground reveal new mysteries, that were before unseen.
There is another part of No Country that ties in and I find very interesting. It is best expressed in a scene where the bad guy tells someone, quite creepily, to call a coin toss. The implication being that if they get it wrong, he will kill them. He is having this scene play out with a man and tells the man the story of the quarter, made 20+ years prior and gone through a thousand hands to come here and decide if he will live or die. The paradox here is that it is the fate of this quarter to decide by chance whether this man shall live or die. That is a very interesting idea. I interpret it much along the lines of fate setting the board and placing the pieces, but still it being chance that determines the outcome. As per my intro thoughts, this reminds me of physics. Everything behaves according to Classical Mechanics, except where all the action is happening. If you throw a ball up, you can know it's path and the time it takes to complete that path... but that is the 10,000 foot view. What is really happening when you look at that ball and the air on an atomic level? Is the air actually going around the ball or through? Is the ball all it's own the whole time or is there some flux born entity made up of air and ball? Fate is the path that cannot be undone, but what the real story is the chance that all lines up to make it happen...or not happen.
"As above, so below" is a paraphrasing of part of the message on The Emerald Tablet", written by Hermes Trismegistus and considered the source of magic and alchemy. But it gets me thinking, and already primed by concepts of fate, lack of a unified physics, and a recent blog entry... just how deep is the rabbit hole? Is it the nature of all things that they can be understood at a macro level but at some point become unknowable? Maybe everyone does meet their soul-mate, and all you can hope to do is not be hung up on your last fling when it happens? Perhaps we have a system where right now there is fate and that is (to some omniscient being) knowable, but when the next fated encounter occurs all is thrown to chance and we zoom in one level on our Mandelbrot Set of Fate, where everything looks basically like it did before, but just so slightly different. Life will go on if you make a bad impression on your soul-mate and never end up dating, just like it has for everyone else that did the same, the only thing that will have changed is that you might not become a believer in soul-mates and the future now has very very slightly more green eyed people and less blue eyed people because of it.
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