This afternoon there were just Friedrich and me.
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i picked the minute of the hour i am aiming for, and yesterday managed to tax most hours, though not ussually on time
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i have an issue w/ quarterly pauses…
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i don’t normally wear a watch, and I am blessed with a job that leaves me in conversation and/or flow most of the time
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: being shackled to time is actually a burden for me
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: so, i am sticking with the hourly tax, for now. anyway, its working well for me so far
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i chose :09 past the hour. i didn’t want to break at the top of the our, or even on an ordinary increment
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i wanted to disrupt my flow a little bit
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: and top of the hour is an ordinary transition point anyway, for me (meetings, etc)
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: but, this has been sufficient for the mantra to pervade my expeirence, so it picks up as a default now, even without the increased rigorous frequency
Pema Pera: mantra?
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: play as being?
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: catchphrase? jingle?
Pema Pera: ah!
Pema Pera: ;>)
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: heh.
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i’ll also say that yesterday and today i have been a good mood. spring is dawning, so that’s good
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: and, im jotting down some notes
Pema Pera: Sure, once an hour is interesting too
Pema Pera: a good place to start and work with
Pema Pera: but perhaps it might also be fun
Pema Pera: to just try once or so the quaterly ones
Pema Pera: even though it may seem hard or strange or unnatural
Pema Pera: it might be an intersting experiment to see how you react to something hard or strange or unnatural
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: well, i wont knock it till ive tried it
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: but, i hate being that conscious of the passage of time
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: even hourly throws me
Pema Pera: ah!
Pema Pera: hate!
Pema Pera: then you definitely have to try
Pema Pera: to get to know yourself even better ;>)
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i’ll try it. my past experiences with things like that have been negative
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: say, taking pills, or whatever
Pema Pera: sure
Pema Pera: just for the sake of phenomenology
Pema Pera: seeing what phenomena appear
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: well, wehn i am that conscious of time, its ussually when i am exteremelyt bored
Pema Pera: sometimes we are correct in our expectations and guesses of what will happen
Pema Pera: sometimes we are a bit off
Pema Pera: and sometimes we are totally wrong
Pema Pera: never know in advance!
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: well, as is, it is very hard to avoid knowing the time
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i remember taking my watch off, and noticing how often i needlessly glanced at my writst
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: consider, i live in nyc, and time is ussually a matter of stress
Pema Pera: when feeling bored, how about looking at boredom and trying to describe it phenomenologically?
Pema Pera: same with fear and hope and all that
Pema Pera: anything
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: so, why watch time if you can’t make the train go any faster
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: hmm…. not sure i have the right vocab/framework to express that
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: not that long ago i rediscovered some of my high school coping techniques for dealing with boredome
Pema Pera: you can learn to see more/better
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: that was interesting
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i was on jury duty
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: it was brutal ;-)
Pema Pera: and perhaps you cannot change time but perhaps time can do the favor of changing itself . . . you’d be surprised
Pema Pera: I’ve been surprised
Pema Pera: very
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: well, i’m familiar with that wild penjulum book, and theories of subjective time
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: so, yeah, im open to being surprised ;-)
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: benkman? anyway
Pema Pera: don’t know that book
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: itzhak bentov - stalking the wild pendulum
Having entered Second Life only very recently, Friedrich mused about his experiences.
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: ok. so also a few more reflections on SL….
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i hung around a bit more after the chat the other night, and crossed the threshold of forming SL memories
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i’m recognizing this overt cognitive hack of my perceptual system, tuned for millenium to recognize people and places
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: its quite different than seeing tetris blocks falling or even seeing melon patches after doing something all day
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i got a little of that “wheel” over people around me, and people as avatars.
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: but, i have to say, i am now cautious of some of the metaphors this experience suggests
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: people as avatars rings of dualism, with the operator as a homunculus
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: so, i don’t like that analogy
Pema Pera: “wheel”?
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: the right-click, pie wheel. profile, sit,
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: Go To, Mute, Play
Pema Pera: Aha!
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: heh. if i knew the wheel better, i’ll bet I would like mute
Pema Pera: yes, people are not avatars, they really are people here, for all intents and purposes
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: right. and people in RL aren’t avatars either!
Pema Pera: nor bodies
Pema Pera: nor minds
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: fine. the emergent pattern that concentrates around will, or intension, or something, perhaps
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: but i was finding myself slipping into lousy metaphors from the way this game is built
Pema Pera: such as?
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: well, matrix style ways of imagining the way the bodies around me are controlled
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: real dualism. minds controlling bodies.
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: but, seperate and distinct, not integral or unified
Pema Pera: but normally you don’t think about that
Pema Pera: like watching a movie
Pema Pera: normally you don’t think about the projector
Pema Pera: although you can if you want to
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: it’s undoubtably a good thing that the experience raises these quesitons
Pema Pera: yes, it is fun to explore degrees of freedom of experience, including every-day experience
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: but, as we discussed a few days ago, mindfulness of the presppositions and even ideologies of this world are important to work out
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: and, i guess, lastly, i have been thinking about returning to some of Merleau-Ponty’s writings.
Pema Pera: yes, theory and practice, like in physics, theory and experiment, both, they complement and inform each other.
Pema Pera: yes?
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: well, i remember some of what he tried with inverting the world
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: and, i am most interested now in the fact that he too, still dealing with sense data that was very similar to “normal”
Pema Pera: inverting?
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: say, in contrast to the afterimage of an experience that doesn’t deal with faces and places
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: he wore a device for a few weeks that turned his whole world upside down
Pema Pera: ah!
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: wondering if he would be able to learn how to percieve it normally. iirc, after a while, he did
Pema Pera: yes, I heard of that
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: anyway, just a historical connection to phenomenological experiments
Friedrich then asked about my experience with the playing as Being exploration.
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: how has your practice been treating you?
Pema Pera: various aspects
Pema Pera: first of all, overall, this has been very gratifying, just to see a number of people seriously engaging with what I had suggested
Pema Pera: not only for themselves, but as a budding community
Pema Pera: secondly, I learned a lot already from the different angles that various people have brought in, including you, looking at the 9-sec practice in different ways than I did.
Pema Pera: Third, it has been a real challenge for me to stick to the 9-sec routine, simply because my life seems more hectic this week that it has been in a very long time
Pema Pera: the reason being that I simultaneously am starting, as of April 1, also an astrophysics organization, MICA in SL.
Pema Pera: So I feel a bit like a candle burning on two ends ;>)
Pema Pera: in practice this means
Pema Pera: that I see myself dropping the ball for a few quarters of an hour
Pema Pera: being completely absorbed in multitasking of too many emails and phone calls and people walking into my office and what not
Pema Pera: and then I remember
Pema Pera: and then I see that 9 seconds is really doable
Pema Pera: no matter how busy I am ;>)
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: ;-)
Pema Pera: humbling experience ……..
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: i guess i am also wondering about the experimental side of the question. I trust you, but are you here in the role of researcher? should we be signing those crazy human subject experiment waivers?
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: heh.
Pema Pera: No, this is not an experiment with human subjects in any technical or academic sense
Pema Pera: it is something I like doing myself, in a “life as a lab” mode
Pema Pera: I am not evaluating anyone
Pema Pera: in any way
Pema Pera: ;>)
Pema Pera: nor getting paid for doing so either ;>)
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: heh. it seems like the detail you are gathering could head towards a serious study somehow
Pema Pera: sure
Pema Pera: anyone can read the blog that I am writing now
Pema Pera: and do with it what they like
Pema Pera: it is all public — open source like
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: reminds me of the “joke” about social science research nowadays
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: you need all sorts of waivers to do it at a university, but get some commercial sponsors and put it on camera and you can do anything
Friedrich Ochsenhorn: many of those reality show situations are prime social science experiments
Pema Pera: ;>)
Pema Pera: in some sense all of SL is one big experiment