Archives for October 2014

An Exercise in Self-Losing

October 17, 2014 by costaricaguy 1 Comment

Most of us…wait, all of us…think too highly of ourselves.

Well, don’t we?

I’m currently on a cross country exploration (with “country” signifying the U.S.A.).

What am I exploring?

The idea of potential repatriation, but perhaps a better explanation is that it’s a journey, or an exercise in self-losing.

Not self-loathing, mind you…as I’ve already done more than my fair share of that.

Right now I’m in Portland.

I’ve heard a lot of nice things about Portland…that there are a slew of nut jobs, sort of like me, in Portland.

I just debarked from Amtrak yesterday afternoon, so the jury is definitely still out. Looks nice enough.

I haven’t even been to Voodoo Doughnut, yet. Oh, yea, I’m headed there today!

My stay in Portland will be partly in a hostel and partly couch surfing in homes of real people. I’ve never done anything like that.

One thing I quickly noticed here, in Portland, as well as the U.S. in general (also visited New York!), is that people really don’t care. Back in Costa Rica I was “the gringo.” Here I’m just another schmuck who’s arrived on the scene…not really welcome to anyone’s party.

And that’s OK. In fact, that’s good for me.

You see, I’m trying to figure out exactly who the fuck I am…

and where I belong.

But those very thoughts betray a psychological problem we all face.

We think we’re someone, when we’re not.

Our regularly thinking such colossal BS compels us to live guarded lives. We guard our egos as our most prized of possessions. In fact, a lot of the other shit that we guard is really just there to prop up that one highly valued (in our own mind) asset…the ego, or the self…the one we think is the sine quo non of our very existence.

Isn’t it true?

Bob Dylan once wrote that “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

Well, I’m almost there and it feels like a mixture of panic and bliss…with moments of each fading in and out.

I believe the ego, or the hallucinatory thought of a self worthy of guarding, gets in the way of our impacting the world in ways that, well, the world needs.

We need each other…not a bunch of selves running around, frantically trying to prove how worthy they are of the admiration of everyone else.

The “mine is bigger than yours” mentality that tends to pervade western, developed, cultural consciousness.

An exercise in self-losing, hopefully, will at least nudge me further along the path of letting go of these delusional ideas, which I still harbour to a lesser extent than in my past…

but that linger on nonetheless.

We’ll just have to see how much progress I can really make, as the self will only go kicking and screaming!

The moral of the post: if you have to think, think highly of others and stop thinking of self, or ego, because in reality, it doesn’t even exist…

Also, try not thinking at all from time to time…it’s actually quite refreshing.

I’ll be blogging a lot about my journey…

stay tuned!

Lives of Quiet Desperation

October 12, 2014 by costaricaguy Leave a Comment

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Henry David Thoreau

I took the train yesterday from Columbia, S.C. to New York City to visit my daughter.

It’s also the first leg of my crazy adventure in potential repatriation.

Next stop, Portland, Oregon…a destination I will also reach by train…a very long train.

All these train rides give a person like me a dangerously large amount of time to think.

Along the way I finished a book entitled Waking Up by Sam Harris, the best-selling author, atheist philosopher, and neuroscientist.

It’s one of those books that I’ll probably need to re-read in order to really understand.

But what I got from the initial reading is that there really isn’t a little man sitting inside my head and peering out at the world, whispering to me about what really is and isn’t.

He seems real enough…after all, I can hear him. He hardly ever shuts up.

In other words, we’re conditioned, or brain-washed, by that little fucker to the point where it’s virtually impossible to know, or to be consciously aware, of the fact that I am just thinking.

The little man is constantly telling me that I’m bored, or hot, or cold, or uncomfortable, or pissed off, or this, or that…

Harris, on the other hand, tells me that this is really all an allusion.

That what’s really real, that the ONLY THING that’s really real, is consciousness…

and all the rest of it, all those constant thoughts, are just transient incidents floating by on that stream.

As I was riding the train and reading, Harris suggested an analogistic exercise.

He told me to look out the window and see.

I did…it was quite nice as we were passing a beautiful forest somewhere in Virginia, I think.

Then he told me to look closer…I did and a faint image of me appeared.

Then he said, look beyond that image. I did and it disappeared.

The point?…

That upon closer examination, the separate or dualistic “I” really isn’t there at all.

What’s there is my consciousness…that’s it.

So what, you might be asking.

After I read that I looked around and saw that my fellow passengers were busily following the instructions of that little man.

Most of them frantically fingering the keyboards of their mobile devices (like I am right now)…

in the desperate attempt to fight off the boredom of a 15 hour train ride.

But if we ignore that little man, perhaps boredom doesn’t exist either.

If we ignore that little man, perhaps the reason for much of the pain and suffering that we experience in our world might disappear as well.

And ignoring him (or her…I don’t mean to appear sexist) makes perfectly good sense, owing to the fact…

that she’s not even there!

She’s a product of the brain’s unlimited capacity to imagine, or conjure up, all kinds of shit that isn’t really there.

Much of that due to the amygdala, the part of the brain that developed early on, in order to help us run away from saber-tooth tigers desiring to have our ancestors for lunch.

Harris suggests that quieting that little man, via some practice of meditation, is the key to a real experience of life…

of conscious life.

And to the disappearance of the stuff that makes us miserable…

and at times, dangerous.

The cure for Thoreau’s observation that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?

Stop obeying the often conflicting instructions of that non-existent little blabber-mouth living inside your head.

image credit: desermeaux.christy via Compfight cc

The Proverbial House of Cards

October 8, 2014 by costaricaguy Leave a Comment

My last post, as well as others, may have alluded to some hostility I feel towards religion. I don’t really feel “hostile” towards it…

just altogether fed up with it.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

In the video below, Bill O’Reilly tells Richard Dawkins that because science cannot yet explain “everything”, Bill’s “throwing in with Jesus.”

In what sense, Mr. O’Reilly?

In the sense of your boisterous and blustering American bravado and exceptionalism that raises the red, white and blue, along with its wars and capitalism run amok, as idols to be worshipped and praised as if they were stamped with the approval of the man, Jesus, himself?

Isn’t that what you, and the network that brings your brand of “religion” into millions of homes every evening, are all about?

Certainly seems so to me…

But the Jesus that I’m familiar with, the one that said “blessed are the meek”, I don’t believe that one would approve.

I don’t believe he would want to “throw in” with you at all.

He might even tell you to lower your arrogant voice and listen to what your guests have to say, for a change.

What Mr. Dawkins was trying to tell you is that your religion may rest on a foundation that is the proverbial house of cards.

Consider that the christian idea of Jesus as god incarnate, who came to rescue us from our sins via his atoning death…

that entire idea is based on the concept of original sin as presented by the book of Genesis in the Old Testament.

Now, I know that “thinking” christians like yourself, desire to pick and choose what parts of the bible you want to accept as fact and what parts you dismiss as allegory.

But it’s hard, no impossible, to dismiss the story of original sin as allegory.

After all, everything that comes after it, including the need for Jesus’ very existence, is based directly on it.

And if it is “allegory”, then allegory of what exactly?

That man (and I guess we should include woman as well) is borne sinful…i.e., sin is built into his genes, and therefore he deserves punishment and is in dire need of atonement?

That’s just the way god set it all up?

Well, that doesn’t paint a very pleasant portrait of god, now does it?

That he designed us in such a way that he would have to sacrifice his son (who was actually, ah, him) in order to avoid the need to punish us with eternal death?

Sort of a planned obsolescence?

That tends to portray god as less intelligent designer and more demented psychopath, doesn’t it?

The concept of original sin requires, by its very nature, some place from which that sin in fact originated…

Doesn’t it?

And the bible clearly tells us that place is with Adam…the first created human.

But the problem is that his very existence is refuted by everything we know from science.

In short, it simply never happened.

So, everything else that follows, including the story of Jesus’ atoning death, is really…unnecessary.

That’s not to say Jesus wasn’t a real person who walked the earth and was crucified for insurrection by the Romans over 2,000 years ago.

And that his reported words give rise to one of the greatest moral philosophies of our time…and one that Bill O’Reilly seems not to have a clue about.

No, that we’re pretty sure of based on historic fact.

But the rest of it, sort of folds under the weight of it’s own ridiculousness.

Dawkins is hostile towards religion because he believes it impedes intellectual growth.

In that sense, it is a barrier to the continued evolutionary progress that he quite “religiously” believes in.

I, on the other hand, just believe that it is a blinder…

an impact blinder.

That it too often serves as a mental barrier against taking action that will positively impact humanity on a scale wider than simply tithing to your local church, or trying to convince others to believe the craziness that you do.

And that’s even more the case with the warped sense of “patriotic religion” to which Bill O’Reilly obviously subscribes.

image credit: undereachsnare92 via Compfight cc

Higher Levels of Confusion

October 6, 2014 by costaricaguy Leave a Comment

I apologize for the paucity in prolificacy as of late.

I am currently in the U.S., engaged in the unimaginable…

investigating the potential for repatriation.

Sunday I celebrated, with extended family, some of whom I hadn’t seen in well over a decade, the 100th birthday of my dear Grandma Essie.

Someone remarked during the festivities that Grandma was borne the same year Mother’s Day was declared a national holiday…

Grandma Essie wittily retorted, as has been her style over the last 10 decades, that she’d taken full advantage of President Wilson’s decree.

Back to today’s post theme, I remember Anthony Robbins once telling seminar participants that the more confused they felt, the closer to a breakthrough they were.

Well, I’m currently reading The God Delusion by evolutionary biologist and unabashed atheist, Richard Dawkins. The book, while fascinating, is most definitely leading me to higher levels of confusion.

I was already relatively relaxed with the idea that christianity holds no more truth in it than any of the other religions that man has conceived, contrived and contorted over the ages.

Just consider for a moment the question of whether life exists on other planets.

Science estimates that there are probably a billion planets located in so-called goldilocks zones, where it’s not too hot, nor cold, but just right to support life.

That’s only about 1% of all the planets they estimate that the entire universe contains.

Now, could any of those planets actually support biological life forms?

Well, I guess the fact that we’re currently riding on exactly that type of a planet indicates a resounding YES!

In other words, there’s an extremely high probability that life does in fact exist out there, since we do in fact exist…right here.

We may never know for sure simply due to the unimaginable distances that lie between us and them.

On the other hand, is there any probability whatsoever that “they” are reading from the same religiously inspired books in the futile attempt to explain the perplexities of their existence…

not a chance in heaven, or hell.

So, I’ve pretty much had it with the idea that this book, or that book, this dogma, or that dogma, holds any degree of truth about the meaning of our existence.

That notion just doesn’t cut the mustard with me anymore.

Which is a slightly difficult thing for me to write in light of the fact that the same extended family I introduced above will unanimously declare me nuts for the thoughts I just expressed!

Nevertheless, one thing is for sure, and I believe Dawkins himself would readily agree…

There’s this lingering mystery behind it all. As much as science has advanced, and continues to do so, it still can’t explain…

the unexplainable.

Now, Dawkins would say that just because that’s the case, doesn’t mean we automatically resort to the intellectual sloth of conjuring up some Intelligent Designer to fill in the gaps.

After all, who, or what, designed the designer?

But as much sense as Dawkins makes, and he makes a lot, there still lingers in my far inferior mind this notion that there must be a purpose behind it all.

And that maybe this amorphous sense of purpose has some connection in those gaps.

That the purpose for my existence lies somewhere in there.

In this blog I take the bold leap of suggesting A purpose.

Now, do I know it to be THE purpose?

No, I would never presume such knowledge.

The most confusing chapter in Dawkin’s book, so far, has been the one that deals with this very question of purpose. The one in which he refutes the idea (repeatedly suggested in this blog) that the human capacity for good emanates from that same Intelligent Designer that Dawkins rather effectively poopoos.

Dawkins alternatively suggests that our tendency to engage in altruistic acts, or good, is built into our genes (and/or memes) via natural selection…

the engine that drives evolution.

Now, such a built-in altruism would have to be by nature focused intently on self or species propagation. But much of the altruism we actually witness in our world is certainly less focused and more broad based.

Why is that?

Well, Dawkins says that it’s just a case of misfiring of the survival urge.

For example, a mother bird has the natural urge to feed the chirping mouths that share her nest. But if a cuckoo appears (a brood parasite that sometimes shows up in the nest of other species) she will work just as hard to feed that one as well…

a misfiring of her altruistic urge.

So, Mr. Dawkins, am I to be led to believe that Ghandi, MLK, Mother Teresa, Mandela, and others of their ilk were simply engaged in acts of altruistic misfiring when they sacrificed their own lives for the lives of others?

That they did so purely by means of an evolutionary accident?

I find it easier to believe that they were led to do so by that mysterious sense of purpose that perplexes me and to which this blog is directly addressed…

The idea that life is so beautiful and so grand, and yes I agree that it has been made so by the “miracle” of natural selection, that we share a common purpose of trying to sustain it in that state.

Not just for ourselves to enjoy, but for future generations to have that same privilege.

We humans are impact-full creatures. We tend to leave a larger footprint than any of the other complex life forms that have evolved along with us on our planetary ship.

Maybe that’s why it’s most important for us to be impact mindful.

That idea admittedly offers little solution to the as of yet unsolved mysteries of material existence…

But it does lead me to a more inspired purpose for my being than the notion that any positive impact I might be able to make is simply the result of…

evolutionary misfiring.

Archives for October 2014

Connect with RM