2018.05.25 - Day 72

Interesting debate Bleu posted on Humanism. You can see how hard it is even to define exactly what Humanism is. Both were defining it from different perspectives, Harari being more interested in how it has affected history through many centuries rather than what exactly it is at present. The term might be useful to identify a broad set of beliefs but I wonder why people seem to need a set of beliefs to subscribe to when they usually become outdated. Humanism itself seems to have become a kind of non-theistic religion.

unlearning isolation

Several phone calls - a few quite draining. People can steep in anxiety, then project that out as advice and care, but the listening is missing. Although I prepare before 'touching base', tempering expectations, I often hang up the phone, as I did this morning, a little sad. If I'm not mindful I will brush it off, and the next day or a few days later, a dreadful feeling will pop up. So today I will just note the feeling as there, and part of the 'whole experience' of life and people and relationships that, in wider perspective, should be informing but not defining.

I should also note that I explicitly went through phone calls I hadn't returned over the last 3-4 months, as part of this exploration. It might have been a mistake to do so much at once.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's equanimity video from yesterday (on FB - one of the reasons I continue FB), seemed timely. I love one way he asked a familiar koan, "Who is saying I?"

https://www.facebook.com/tenzinwangyalrinpoche/videos/10156955016072437/ edited 18:12, 25 May 2018

Two playful points struck me after finishing the Home Ludens chapter on Play-Forms in Philosophy:

* I learned a new word: "Pietistic". Naturally I wondered whether it had anything to do with someone called Piet! ;) Sadly it does not, but rather derives from piety.

* Huizinga declares, "Partisanship is inseparable from cultural growth." He states, "Epochs in which great new treasures of the mind come to light are generally epochs of violent controversy. ... Everything is taking up new positions; camps and factions fill the scene. You have to be for Descartes or against him, for or against Newton ..."

This second point sounds implausible and far-fetched, but perhaps he is sounding a note of optimism here that we can apply when we look at the massive polarizations in American society. However, when I look at the daily news, I do sometimes have a hard time divining where these future "great treasures of the mind" are going to come from!

Back to the old project of Imagined Future Self for a moment... I realize I have been pleasantly indulging in art and poetry of late, consuming one and creating the other. This has been an oft-repeated pattern over the years. And rarely mainstream; more often unconventional in some ways.

I'm comfortable with this, whether past, present or future, but I realized I'd simply failed to encapsulate it in a single word before. Then suddenly it seemed obvious: "bohemian." I altered profiles according. And if I finish Homo Ludens ahead of the 99 days, as seems likely, I will give myself a literary creation project. edited 06:59, 26 May 2018

:) Pietistic! I want to find all sorts of uses for the wrong interpretation of the word. :))

This is a wonderful section, Storm. I do hope he is on to something there, but also that we won't need to go any further in these violent directions to find that treasure.