Hello.

“Hello.”

Am I the only one that does this? I load up the instant messenger program, take a look at who is online, find someone at least slightly interesting, and send them a message. “Hello”, and that’s it. I wait until they reply. “Hello”. I expect a conversation to follow. I love conversation but I’ve never been particularly good at starting them. I did the same thing to my mom when I was much younger. I wanted to chat but I had no particular topic in mind. “Hello”. “Hi, Mike”, I’d get a bit of a response, but what next? I wish it was easier to start conversations.

I think I get away with this on instant messenger. “Hello”, I start in the usual manner but the recipient doesn’t actually feel like chatting. So they say they are busy, or they say nothing, and close their window, hopefully not too bothered by the whole ordeal. But when you phone someone, or when you walk over to someone’s house, there’s supposed to be a reason. Imagine calling up someone you find slightly interesting and saying “hello”. I don’t mean close friends and family that you would really call just to chat, think about distant acquaintances, people you know about but have never met or even talked to. You need a reason to call people like that. Or imagine going over to some slightly interesting person’s house and ringing the doorbell. You need a reason to be there… like “want to play cards?” or, “I found your cat…” but when you say “hello” and stare blankly people find it strange.

Hilarious Philistines

Philistine! I remember you now, though you were on the tip of my tongue for a while. Must be because I haven’t had my coffee yet today; apparently coffee makes top-of-the-tongue syndrome worse. Philistine, you’re not really a nice thing to be called, at least I don’t think. Dictionary says you mean “smugly commonplace or conventional”. And who wants to be conventional? Philistine, you’re a strange word and can be used, in that form, as a noun or an adjective. The philistines of Calgary will be the death of my grace! Philistine theatrics have no place in my show of skydiving penguins! Philistine, when you consider your biblical origins and usage throughout history, and the strange sound one makes in saying your name, I realize you yourself are not that conventional. But this is not irony, in fact … it is quite commonplace. For while silly is a silly word, hilarious might as well be a terminal illness.

moved from google’s blogspot

This blog has been moved from convergingonconfusion.blogspot.com to this location/service. While I felt blogspot provided a good service, I was unhappy with the lack of features (specifically, the ability to show only the first part of the post on the main page… with a ‘read more’ link). At least, I couldn’t figure that out on blogspot. I’m sure you don’t really care but I thought I’d mention it. ;-).

you write with your mind open only to a squint

you just write and write and write and eventually words will come, like in a plethora of digital photos, among them, something at least pleasing to view. and sleepily the words continue in the usual fashion, providing more of a quiet chaos than a constructed order. so,

blackened windows opaque the queerly lit horizon beyond the usual comprehension. unlucky summer haze distorts the usual conscious experience into something more or less memorable. but other than that, we’re all okay, just sitting around, making do, getting by with whatever we have. so be it.

edited after to build greater sense, what is revealed provides meaning, abstractly, ineffably, but meaning nonetheless…

and staring beyond gray-lit matter, black sheets, wooden built objects – to the bluebirds bathing under brilliant suns, in the clarity of a dry day and surrounded by sand, hot hills of sound and song.

it’s pretentious, it’s bullshit, it’s crass.. “an exercise in futility”. perhaps. but it’s had the desired effect on at least one mind everlasting and straining, here amongst the rest.

Nishida: Pure Experience and Awareness

This is a presentation I did a few years ago for an East-Asian philosophy class. I re-read it, and in light of the book I am reading now (mind, mysticism, consciousness by Robert Forman), it made a lot of sense. So here it is.

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Nishida’s philosophy was one continuously evolving, with some ideas always up for revision. This is quite evident in the progression from the idea of pure experience to the idea of awareness. Robert E. Carter’s book, The Nothingness Beyond God¹, introduces the topic of pure experience, while James W. Heisig’s Philosophers of Nothingness² continues with the idea of awareness. I will draw from these sources in exploring these topics, making connections to western philosophy and science, and illustrating the transformation from pure experience to awareness. We begin with pure experience.

What is pure experience? Pure experience can be described as experience without any cognition, judgment, or thought whatsoever added³. ‘Pure’ in this case seems to mean, in a sense, without contamination, as if added material would actually take away some truth away from the experience, or make the experience somehow less representative of reality. Pure experience is a direct awareness of things, but even here the language gets tricky. I’m not aware of how, in English, to speak about an experience or an awareness without somehow implying that there is an experiencer and something being experienced. But Nishida takes pure experience to be even without this distinction. In A Study of Good⁴, Nishida states, “When one experiences directly one’s conscious state there is as yet neither subject nor object, and knowledge of its object are completely united. This is the purest form of experience… True, pure experience can exist only in present consciousness of events as they are without attaching any meaning to them at all”⁵.

yaqfc (yet another quirky fortune cookie)

because you value Truth, you de-construct
but what remains may be ineffable.

quirky fortune cookies

daydreams are confined to your mind
guard them with your sanity.

translating from japanese
turns lines into letters
letters to words
but meaning to mush.

there’s no cell phone reception here,
if you need to call someone, just yell.

flipping a coin may help you decide
but you’ll never like the way it lands.

diet drinks are now quite pop-ular
but ants don’t enjoy them much at picnics

electrical outlets will charge batteries
but not your mind
go have a coffee
or a nap.

the still frozen lake // silence before // the deep cracking of ice

The old pond;
A frog jumps in –
The sound of water.
– Bashō (translated by R.H Blyth)

Not necessarily an easy poem to translate — as the effect is perhaps more important than the meaning (or at least, synonymous with?).

I would like to get up quite early one morning, head down to the small lake, find the biggest rock I can lift, and throw it into the water.

Lightning:
Heron’s cry
Stabs the darkness
– Bashō (translation unknown)

materialism and trees

Materialism is like a tree. What a beautiful thing to compare materialism with! But I don’t think materialism is beautiful. I’m not sure it’s ugly either, because I suppose it can be.

Maybe what I mean to say is that materialism is like a tree, and the materialistic are obsessive tree climbers that feel compelled to (recklessly) get to the last possible branch. I have spurts of materialism and they usually work something like this:

I move to a new location so I feel the need to redefine myself a little. I’m working my way up the tree trunk. I want to get more exercise, I want to cook more and better things, I want to have more of a social life and be outgoing. You know what would be neat, new, and exciting? What other people would find really cool and make for some good dinner-social-time conversation? A GPS. With some maps and a GPS we could really do some exploring around here. That’s a branch. A GPS needs batteries… and while I’m being environmentally and socially oblivious in my materialism, I might as well purchase some rechargeable batteries to do my part to save the world (without the inconvenience of sharing batteries with my camera). I’ll need some maps for this GPS, but thankfully I can download those. Of course, that’s still materialism; I’m climbing out on a limb. If I’m going to get a GPS, I might as well get a good one that’ll last me a while… so that means scalability! Better not get something with a fixed amount of internal memory… I’ll opt for the one that uses memory cards instead. And upwards I climb. Memory card not included. There’s another thing. Topographical maps to put on the wall and plot out neat locations on — that’ll look really cool! Am I at the top of the tree yet? Add a GPS carrying case and a suction-cup window mount for the car, and I’m set! Of course from here I can see a bunch of other trees, tall and inviting, and an obsessive tree climber doesn’t know when to quit.

A few trees later I settle down and forget about tree climbing for a while. I sit down and read my new books about Buddhism — living in the moment, appreciating what we have, and being kind, compassionate human beings. I love that new book smell, don’t you?

There’s something about moving to a new location that makes me want to climb trees again. But I could quit if I wanted to… really.

converging on confusion

I just did something I never thought I’d do, create a blog. I often rebel against emerging fads that, in some cases, become almost mandatory. Cell phones (though we don’t get coverage here anyway), Facebook (something I’ve left a few times and always come crawling back), and until now, blogging.

A little about the title… it’s not entirely meaningless. I just find that sometimes, the more I study some issue (philosophical, social, whatever) the more confused I get about it. All the intricate details reveal themselves to me and then my intuition leaning towards some straightforward answer fades away. Sometimes, after a great deal more thought, a straightforward answer comes back. But more details take care of that. And so on. I usually understand what isn’t the correct answer, but can rarely settle on any correct answer definitely. As futile as it seems, I do believe this is a worthwhile activity. Sometimes I think we need a little less answering in this world, and a little more questioning. (Or, maybe, a lot.)