2018.04.25 - Day 42

Storm reminds Zen of the first philosophy course he ever did entitled "Life and Death" which dealt with all sorts of interesting subjects like euthanasia and suicide. I was attracted to the course because there was a section about the meaning of life. I remember an article on Homo Ludens too, and Camus’s Absurdism though I remember little or nothing about it now. I thought, naïvely, that I would find some answers to the meaning of life in philosophy, but just found more and more questions. Oh, I'm becoming a Hedonist :)

Isn't it interesting how we seem to create little areas of meaning for ourselves in sports and games, for example, by creating a little virtual reality with its own made-up rules. I always think that aliens would be astonished at how much meaning we humans invest and add to football or golf tournaments. Or spending years training so that you can run a little faster than someone else in a race. But what do you do? If you question the meaning of these sacred institutions too much you won't be very popular. At bottom, life is just a great mystery, I think, so we might as well just enjoy what we can. edited 10:44, 25 Apr 2018

Oh my, Zen! Twenty years ago I used to teach a course on how to shape your life using the idea of Synchronicity. I'll not go into it now, except to mention two things. Firstly, I defined synchronicity as personally meaningful coincidences that can't be explained by cause and effect. Secondly there was the idea that if the frequency of synchronicities in your life increased, this was an indication that you were likely to be in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, on the right path as it were, though what "right" is - if it even exists - was open to debate.

What has that to do with our 99 day projects? Yesterday, as I was writing my entry for Day 41, I deleted my first paragraph because it was an initial thought out of keeping with the rest of the entry on meaning, Absurdism etc.. Instead I decided to note it down in today's entry. You will see below why I am almost shocked by your entry Zen! :)

I've noticed that my reading of Homo Ludens is progressing much more slowly that I'd anticipated. This is not because the material is dull, or difficult, or unengaging, in fact quite the reverse. What's happening is that I read a short section, and it inspires so many tangential thoughts that I'm off on a reverie (or a internet research spree). Then I return to the text and I have to resync by rereading the previous paragraph. (Of course this could all be explained by my increasing age... ;-)) Let me give some examples:

From yesterday (and this was the gist of the paragraph I deleted). I wondered at which point play became possible in a non-human animal - what kind of complexity it would have to have evolved, and whether it was strictly and peculiarly native to our particular pool of evolution on Earth. So I wondered whether play, though native to human and non-human animals alike, might also be a feature of non-terrestrial lifeforms we may one day encounter. Would an alien look in astonishment at what we called play, either because they had no such concept or that it took very different form? Or would we look askance at their notion of play or lack of it altogether? See! :))

Today I wondered whether one can play and knowingly do harm to others who are not playing. In other words, not in the sense of sports where injury is common, or pugilism where injury is intended to a willing opponent, but to an "innocent bystander". Taken to an extreme, whether it's play at all to knowingly and willfully impose harm on someone else without their consent and at their expense.

And I thought about how, perhaps 35 years ago (but to some extent also much more recently), there was something shameful as an adult in admitting that one wanted to engage in play outside culturally acceptable activities such as sports. For example, them-new-fangled home computers... you would never admit you bought one because you wanted to play games on them. It was perhaps for "accounting", "education" or "mostly for the kids". It was never to get involved in an albeit then crude implementation of, for example, a role-playing adventure game!

Related, too, to my musings this year. Something I've been building on elsewhere but haven't pulled together well yet, which I added to the wiki today:

https://wiki.playasbeing.org/index.php?title=Guardian_Pages/Guardians%27_Contributions/Eliza/Serendipity


( not my 99 Days entry, will come back tonight, groggy with cold :( )

Flowers arrive the day ahead of my birthday.
The colors are gorgeous.
I feel grateful.

Yesterday and today, I began my day by doing Gurdjieff's "morning exercise", as described by Charles Tart. It is a way of grounding oneself in immediate sensory experience (sensing, looking, listening) at the start of the day. After completing the exercise, I seem less distracted and more able to be present with what I am doing in each moment.

Such fun dreams today while napping with a cold. A wide field with lots of small gatherings, but just the children in each small goup are turned toward me and we're gesturing at each other and dancing from wide distances, yet totally connected and together.

Transcribing in a savoring way, smiling and feeling again, the sensations of such dreams. zzz

A dear friend who is finishing her PHD defense and teaches writing at a University and a College (ESL) has a magnet on her refrigerator. "Write Drunk, Edit Sober".
Will write tonight and publish tomorrow.

I find it difficult to sustain this habit. I have informed my RL Buddhist sangha that I'm doing this exercise but that doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Well, they're not there when I'm eating breakfast. Could I make this a family habit? Husband is quite allergic to things that look like religion or ritual, so I would have to change it a bit. The bowing would have to go, at least.

Took a moment for every part of my breakfast. The bowl and spoon. The creme fraiche, putting the remainder back in the fridge rightaway. The sweetener. The walnuts, breaking them up carefully. All this food needed sentient beings to produce it. All this food could be eaten by other sentient beings if I didn't eat it. Grateful.