Friday, March 28, 2008

Nice to find that somebody's said so!

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
- G. K. Chesterton

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A passing revelation

I have a thought on how to describe, at least in part, what happened two years ago. Suddenly I began experiencing what I was experiencing, and not some mind-mediated mixture of what I was experiencing and what I was expecting to experience. Suddenly divorced from any grasp of expectation, the whole world becomes as new, and I found that things aren't at all as they had seemed, as I had expected them to be.

Not that I can remember the train of thought that led me to finding those words, only that I was walking to the train.

A related post at Isaiah Knows [Nothing]

A related post at Frimmin.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

And yet life goes on.

I am the universe? I accept it at a working hypothesis. Lots of people whom I respect have ended up there, each taking his own route; and it seems to make sense of more of the facts on the ground better than other theories and metanarratives I've encountered: those of exoteric religion, materialism, &c. For me, the question has shifted to what you do with that information once you've had enough of reading Ken Wilber waxing rhapsodic about it, and Alan Watts making incisively clever observations about it, and Zen Buddhists coming up with striking metaphors about it. To notice what actually seems to be going on, and how life is, and is experienced. I mean, at the end of it all, I still live my life, Tuesday follows Monday, and Wednesday Tuesday, as Woolf writes in "The Waves," and I have no interest in simply shouldering a belief for its own sake, or in replacing one dogma with another. What do I actually experience when I drop all givens and preconceived notions, and simply experience whatever I happen to be doing in the moment, whether cutting the skin off a piece of slimy raw chicken or sitting at the computer or running on the treadmill? That's what I'm interested in, and then, by extension, in what conceptual framework makes the best sense of it; and in what enhances it (the preference for beauty over ugliness, for creativity over stagnation, for intelligence over stupidity, etc.). One still has to get up every morning, work, interact with people, etc. Make decisions about how to invest, what to be when one grows up.


Somebody else's words, title mine, emphasis mine. Mind the important part: the rest can flesh out the thought, or may distract from it.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

My $.02 on the tax system

The tax system needs an overhaul.

Instead of blaming the wealthy for taking advantage of every legal method of paying less tax, perhaps the blame should go to the lawmakers who created such a convoluted system.

Earn more money, pay a greater percent: from each according to his earnings? Sounds a little socialist, no?

I can think of nothing just in the government being entitled to more of my hard-earned money just because I earn more than somebody else.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Macro View


Everything is beautiful and silly and passing. What's left after the passing of our insignificance? I had hoped for so much more; I had hoped that something matters.