2018.05.07 - Day 54

Storm, I also wonder what Huizinga would make of the way vast injections of capital from TV rights and advertising have changed sport. Soccer is a much more cutthroat affair nowadays. Teams are run more like business ventures with under performing managers being removed very quickly.

I think our best moments occur just after accomplishing something we found really difficult but it doesn't last long, does it?

Tart now talks about Gurdjieff’s claim, that we are a Three-Brained species. The Three Brains are: Body/Instinctive, Emotional, Intellectual. ‘Any given person is liable to have one of the three brains developed fairly strongly while the other two are weak and/or badly distorted in their functioning.’ A balanced person has all three working harmoniously together. He sees a lot of his colleagues who are superb academically but whose personal lives are a mess. He gives an interesting example… When he answered his wife’s description of losing a child in her neonatal ward with an intellectual response, he afterwards noticed a headache appear - a bodily response to his poor emotional intelligence. I have a friend who used to go to meetings with a spiritual teacher called Brandon Bays. She had people standing up front on a platform crying their eyes out and he thought that was wonderful… Cringes… But maybe I do need to work on emotional intelligence…

He is a bit hard on people not taking enough exercise. He thinks depressed people should exercise first before consulting a therapist. Fine if you have the capacity for it, but I don’t. He looks pretty fit and trim himself in recent videos on YouTube. Wonder if vipassana practice, body scans, would help but will see what he comes up with later in the book.

Tart, Charles T.. Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (Kindle Locations 3111-3112). Fearless Books. Kindle Edition.

:) Enjoying these sketches, Stevie!

I didn't realize until yesterday, how long it had been since my son and I had talked while not doing anything else. Usually we talk while we're taking walks or driving or cooking, etc., but I asked him to just spend some time with me for a bit... thought he might want to watch a film (we do that a lot too). Then we sat down and just talked. It turned out to be a quite profound and important conversation, because I didn't know he had read Tuesdays with Morrie recently - a book I remember Riddle sharing about, a book I meant to read but let other things get in the way of. I'm glad I didn't read it yet though, because I got to hear what it meant to my son (a great deal actually), without projecting my experience of the book into our time together. I'm in a hotel in Las Vegas, where it is 101* and I've been traveling all day (might be craving isolation soon, in such an overstimulating place), but what I'm thinking about just before I rest my eyes a bit in hopes of getting out a little later, is how extraordinary and non-contrived that was, how sacred.

In Homo Ludens, Huizinga entwines several phenomena: sacred ritual, play and gaming, the latter especially with dice, pointing out that dice-playing forms parts of many religious practices around the world. He also touches on luck and prognostication.

And so it seems that oracular divination of all sorts, the kinds I have researched and studied and practiced for 45 years, are strongly linked to play! This is especially the case when the randomizing process necessary to divination employs a device used in that play, like dice. No surprise that, 250 years ago, one form of divination (still popular today) developed from cards used in the 600 year old game of Tarot. (The game is still wildly popular, but really only nowadays in France rather than its original home of Italy.)

Huizinga then embarks on a long section describing many forms of "potlatch" and equivalent ceremonies around the world. Once again, ritual and play are analyzed. He finishes with a simple but provocative statement: "At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play." edited 02:53, 8 May 2018