2018.05.06 - Day 53

Funny but I was reading this from Charles Tart yesterday (so grateful Alma mentioned this book!)' 'Narcoticization/distraction dulls you to the threatening aspects of your reality, not by taking away your mental energy per se to make things dull but by moving it around so much that you are distracted from events that might upset you. The world simulator is not lazy here. If anything, it's working overtime creating an interesting world, but the process is giving equal energy and attention to everything, thus failing to emphasize what's essential. When narcoticization is the dominant style of false personality, you lead a very busy life, but somehow the really important things are neglected in spite of all that activity. The busyness can further lead to being tired much of the time, and the tiredness dulls you so that you cannot see what is missing in your life. Narcoticization can be a primary defense against real growth. Going from one teacher to another, doing several different spiritual practices at once, all keep you too busy to hear your essential self. Questioning excessive busyness, looking for the quiet feeling being hidden by all the activity, can reveal that the narcoticization defense is operating.

Tart, Charles T.. Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (Kindle Locations 2914-2922). Fearless Books. Kindle Edition.

Yeah, very guilty of this also. But there are so many interesting things to do in life - how to prioritize has always been such a great difficulty for me. Wonder what 'the quiet feeling' that is being hidden is. It's probably a boring type of feeling anyway :) I went to a concert at Music Island SL last night but had to leave early cos careworkers were early. Spending nearly 12 hours in bed each night drastically reduces my opportunities.

“But there are so many interesting things to do in life - how to prioritize...” Zen, I sympathize! Charles Tart wrote that book in his 40s, when he was still a relatively young man with the luxury of time stretching before him. I wonder if he had written it a couple of decades later in life, when he was maybe more conscious of life’s shrinking horizon, he would also have been more sympathetic.

Last night, after saying goodbye to our only local friends, whom we may not now see again for a very long time, I started on the next passage on Attar’s Conference of the Birds. This morning, I’m waking early and reading Zen’s comment, and then contemplating that contracting horizon, I wonder why I am persisting with Attar. I don’t find it pleasant to do so. I believe I read it 45 years ago when I first started researching different spiritualities. It does not describe my path, and I have walked long on many, and none are now my path.

If I were to choose to read on Sufism, I would read Rumi, for his beautiful poetry transcends religion. By contrast, I find Attar’s hectoring scarcely better than Bunyan. At the risk of offending, I realized this morning that continuing to read Attar was like being forced to watch Fox News, with all its grace and subtlety.

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps...

Sticky Note on my computer:

We don’t have to and shouldn’t engage everything that seeks to engage us. Think high. Love deep. We have a critical work to do. Be wise with your energy. - B.A.King (twitter)

For me, reading Conference of the Birds is 90% about conversing with 'our birds', but perhaps because I've never encountered it until recently, I'm also finding value in some of the language and certainly in the images shared. I do relate to having followed several paths and also the sense of currently none (well, with qualifiers, since there is rooting I am keeping :) ), though perhaps I feel content with 'contemplative' or 'practice' path, in contrast to the more 'studious' path I've been enamored by for quite some time. Who knows. :)

Setting out on a small adventure, lots of ups and downs and sorting associated with that today. Practice to stay connected to spaciousness.

Another quote, this time from the well-being class, finished (the lessons anyway):

"The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. The best moments usually occur if a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi edited 15:13, 6 May 2018

Right Eliza! If you mean conversing with those birds on the other cushions around the pool, I’m with you.:)

(I’m thinking of providing a book discussion area as part of the library complex. Somewhere warmer and more comfortable and hopefully more conducive to ruminating and sharing ideas than the rather colder environment of the pavilion.)

Csikszentmihalyi Is both right and wrong! (And I don’t have the original work this quote is from, so can’t see whether he addressed this.) The very best moments ARE those relaxing times... those later in life, where are you are reflecting and perhaps mentally reliving the many times you stretched yourself to your limits in days long past!

The quote is from his book "Flow" which I read many years ago, way before I was in touch with 'later life' musings, as I certainly am now! :) I guess even being here means we are all on a play path.

I've enjoyed meeting away from the pavilion sometimes for dream sessions and guardian sessions, but the trouble is, the listener is only at the pavilion. So it is a lot more work for the host.

Corrected - I think I didn't read Flow, but Creativity. edited 17:06, 6 May 2018

The Eckart Tolle study group I am in (RL) has begun a new chapter in "A New Earth". At the same time, I started reading William James' chapter on Attention today. It's interesting how the different sources I am reading all converge on the practice I have set for myself here.

I tried to practice self-remembering while grocery shopping today, and pretty much failed. It's much easier to do this practice when engaged in tasks that don't involve any thinking, planning, or decision making.

No doubt we can have another listener installed in a second location, Eliza. I would guess it's a fairly straightforward task to do that. I think it's unlikely to be an obstacle, and it would probably be a slightly simpler system as it only need have manual activation and need no bell. I guess it would be more a case of whether there was a collective will to have the opportunity of that space.


In reading Homo Ludens, I am at last finding that Huizinga is not necessarily always right. Either that, or the translation is lacking. For example:
>>>
* "Objectively speaking, the result of the game is unimportant and a matter of indifference. On a visit to England the Shah of Persia is supposed to have declined the pleasure of attending a race meeting, saying that he knew very well that one horse runs faster than another. From his point of view he was perfectly right: he refused to take part in a play-sphere that was alien to him, preferring to remain outside. The outcome of a game or a contest-except, of course, one played for pecuniary profit-is only interesting to those who enter into it as players or spectators, either personally and locally, or else as listeners by radio or viewers by television, etc., and accept its rules. They have become play-fellows and choose to be so. For them it is immaterial whether Oxford wins, or Cambridge." [The latter refers to the annual boat race of the River Thames.]

There is surely something wrong there! Someone not involved might see the result as immaterial. A spectator with a vested interest will definitely want one side or the other to win. I've started watching football games before as a disinterested spectator, but something during the game has caused me to root for one side or the other.

* "But the following feature is still more important : the competitive "instinct" is not in the first place a desire for power or a will to dominate. The primary thing is the desire to excel others, to be the first and to be honoured for that. The question whether, in the result, the power of the individual or the group will be increased, takes only a second place. The main thing is to have won. The purest example of a victory which has nothing visible or enjoyable about it save the mere fact of winning, is afforded by a game of chess."

I don't think Huizinga knew chess players very well! Which is odd, because fellow Dutchman Max Euwe became World Chess Champion three years before the publication of Homo Ludens.

So, for example, I wonder what he would have made of Bobby Fisher, the American who became World Chess Champion in 1972. Yes, winning seemed everything to Fischer, but it is arguable that it was a means to an end. He is quoted as saying, "I like to make them squirm." and "I like the moment when I break a man's ego." It seems after all that it was Fischer's own ego that was everything, as was his need for power and his will to dominate. So much so that when he had proved himself best in the world, he preferred to forfeit his World Title rather than submit to the collective ego of chess bureaucracy.

By contrast, Max Euwe was a thoroughly logical rather than psychological player. Had it been otherwise, perhaps Huizinga's ideas might have been altered.

In a wonderful twist of irony, Max Euwe presided over that same chess bureaucracy (FIDE = Fédération Internationale des Échecs) during the period covering both Fischer's winning the crown and forfeiting it!
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Other points Huizinga raises may be controversial but I believe he's right. For example, he distinguishes between cheating at a game and being a spoilsport, The cheat still acknowledges the rules and the sacred space of the game, or at least appears to, but in some way fraudulently outwits their opponent. The spoilsport however breaks the space for everyone and robs the game of its illusion, thus threatening the existence of the play-community itself.

Early in the book, Huizinga opines "It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport." And later in the book he cites many examples from folk tales and myth where the hero actively cheats to win. I wonder whether he would revise that opinion at all - or at least redraw his boundary between cheat and spoilsport - in the light of modern performance enhancing drug usage in sports, or whether he would see a change, possibly a temporary one, in cultural values.

Whoops, far too long an entry. But it's a fascinating subject.

I really like meeting in different spaces, but have very little familiarity with the listener script and set up to know what would be involved/if chats could go to the same database, etc. For that matter it would be great to have listeners in a few other places like the GM spot too! :)