Buncha work updating this journal now that I've learned how to upload photographs and there are people reading it. I may write about this model of the human mind I where I compare it to a sock in the process of continuously being woven, or I could just throw in the pictures of the walk I took today. I love the green of new leaves in the spring and I went out photographing it. I also took out an old folding 120 camera that I've had for a couple of years and never shot with owing to the shutter being rather slowish and the holes in the bellows. Shot just a couple of pics with that one. Anyway this is what the world of trailer parks and rivers look like in early may.
Interesting thing about this tree that I noticed is that it's alive. How so? well, the bark is completely stripped off but the new leaves have still sprouted. Meaning that the upper branches are still alive, maybe because it's a very recent deadfall or the branches are getting enough moisture from water being absorbed in the wood from the spring rains or the river.
This here is a closeup of the patterns in a beaver-chewed stump that I noticed while sitting and thinking on the tree above.
This here is an unrelated image of a certain odd cat of mine demostrating her taste for dirty bathwater. I put the plug back in so she could have as much as she wanted and to give myself time to fetch my camera.
I think tomorrow when I'm more awake I'll treat you to some thoughts about faith and the self. Got'm in my head but too lazy to organize them just now.
I wonder if these pictures demonstrate my life or lack thereof. I like green leaves and the swirls of grey and color and patten and texture of rotting wood, all these pics were taken no more than a quarter mile from my residence. Riverbank on a drizzly day.
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Well, last night I said I'd add on some more stuff about faith and the self. It's a bunch of reflections and brooditations and I don't know how coherent it will come out till it's typed, at which time the deed will be done, so proceed at your own risk.
Last spring I was at a high school awards ceremony down in connecticut where every spring I meet up with a former girlfriend's parents when they give out a scholarship in their daughter's memory, ever since she pulled out in front of a tow truck, which hit us, killing her and getting me some screws and metal plates in my arm. This year's ceremony should be pretty soon I think.
So anyway, last year I'm sitting there with my former prospective in-laws watching the goings on, kids from the french club who spent a semester or so in France getting little certificates and things, it struck me what a tremendous amount of faith builders have, builders in this case teachers who work with trememdous dedication and sincerity to build up their charges' belief in themselves, their abilities and their futures. Jaded cynics like me never bother with such silly things as the french club or editing the school newspaper and such things as that. But my old girlfriend, who had been and academic and athletic and professional superstar, had done all sorts of stuff like that. It hit me that those things which I had regarded as lame were the kinds of things that people who are for real build their for realness out of.
There was another time I was reading some stuff on the internet trying to figure out whether anyone else had ever devised a theory of human motivation comparable to mine. I came across some stuff about self-determination theory, and its view of the operations of motivation. Self-determination theory is some good stuff, but it doesn't get to the heart of what moves people, what it does is to describe the characteristics of how human motivations function when they function successfully. So instead of describing fundamental impulses of communcation, competition, and so forth, SD theory describes the functional interface between these fundamental impulses and the world, describing autonomy, interrelatedness, and one other thing that I forget. Thing about it is that there was one little sentence in the article which offhandedly referred to how some students will reject the values of their schools. It struck me that this sentence was written with the assumption that for a student to accept the values of their schools is something as normal as the sun rising in the east, and there was no concession made to people rejecting their schools' values out of independence of mind.
The point here is that Self-Detemination theory does not describe it as something that is inborn, it is something that is developed and/or taught. Meaning that you don't create your own values and disciplines, you internalize them, make them your own, identify with them, promulgate them. Something starts out being given to you and then it IS you.
So you can run into this paradox. You might start out with some independence of mind sufficient that you don't assimilate and make your own the values that are handed to you. If you are very very strong, you can stand on your own two feet with your very own considered values, or you can be like me, and have your own thoughts, but insufficient personal strength, and thrash around looking for someone to agree with you about them so you'll have some sense of community and the faith that one develops from shared values in a community; and end up effectively much less self-determined than someone who never originally had any independence of mind but was able to assimilate what they were told to, and base their functionality on that.
Even in Buddhism, if you're a monk, you are admonished to have faith in the Sangha, the community of buddhist practitioners. For while you are dedicated to unravelling the delusion of self, that very self that would lay itself aside is bolstered in its efforts to so by the community of others working at the same task.
Which is what I saw going on at that high school awards ceremony, with the silly little certificates and ribbons. In a certain way, faith has a definition differing from the usually understood religious one; faith is the functional self of a sentient being. It is the belief that one can make enough things work in life to make life workable, the penalties for insufficiently developed faith/self-determination tend to be depression and anxiety, the latter being my pleasure to fight with on a daily basis.
Any number of ways you can look at it. When you're a kid the force of your being is to learn and to do. A healthy process of growing up cultivates this drive with a reasonable chance of success, the faith that something endeavored will be succeeded at.
Before you're born, you're scattered molecules, as so after you die. In the between there are things that hold you together as something, otherwise you're just a heap of stuff, a sandcastle that's too dry to hold together, and your faith is your ability to believe that you can orchestrate the sum of your parts that can survive today and the next day and the next year in the face of the challenging things that want to grind you back into dust.
The other day the front brake felt a little weird on my bike, and the hair on my neck stood up, my body was afire with cold pins and needles and sweat. Partly because of the safety issue, but primarily because of the money issue, and the lack thereof in my life, an the interrelated factor of my having no career, no faith in myself. I have a stack of abilities, but noone told me how to use them in a way that I could make good when I was young enough to learn how. so now I improvise my life, trying to get by on all mind and no heart, with fear my strongest emotion.
And I'm not as pathologically negative as I used to be, It's milder now but I'm still me and, well, I guess there's really to point in thinking you can ever finish writing about this sort of thing so I'll just
Interesting thing about this tree that I noticed is that it's alive. How so? well, the bark is completely stripped off but the new leaves have still sprouted. Meaning that the upper branches are still alive, maybe because it's a very recent deadfall or the branches are getting enough moisture from water being absorbed in the wood from the spring rains or the river.
This here is a closeup of the patterns in a beaver-chewed stump that I noticed while sitting and thinking on the tree above.
This here is an unrelated image of a certain odd cat of mine demostrating her taste for dirty bathwater. I put the plug back in so she could have as much as she wanted and to give myself time to fetch my camera.
I think tomorrow when I'm more awake I'll treat you to some thoughts about faith and the self. Got'm in my head but too lazy to organize them just now.
I wonder if these pictures demonstrate my life or lack thereof. I like green leaves and the swirls of grey and color and patten and texture of rotting wood, all these pics were taken no more than a quarter mile from my residence. Riverbank on a drizzly day.
______________________________________
Well, last night I said I'd add on some more stuff about faith and the self. It's a bunch of reflections and brooditations and I don't know how coherent it will come out till it's typed, at which time the deed will be done, so proceed at your own risk.
Last spring I was at a high school awards ceremony down in connecticut where every spring I meet up with a former girlfriend's parents when they give out a scholarship in their daughter's memory, ever since she pulled out in front of a tow truck, which hit us, killing her and getting me some screws and metal plates in my arm. This year's ceremony should be pretty soon I think.
So anyway, last year I'm sitting there with my former prospective in-laws watching the goings on, kids from the french club who spent a semester or so in France getting little certificates and things, it struck me what a tremendous amount of faith builders have, builders in this case teachers who work with trememdous dedication and sincerity to build up their charges' belief in themselves, their abilities and their futures. Jaded cynics like me never bother with such silly things as the french club or editing the school newspaper and such things as that. But my old girlfriend, who had been and academic and athletic and professional superstar, had done all sorts of stuff like that. It hit me that those things which I had regarded as lame were the kinds of things that people who are for real build their for realness out of.
There was another time I was reading some stuff on the internet trying to figure out whether anyone else had ever devised a theory of human motivation comparable to mine. I came across some stuff about self-determination theory, and its view of the operations of motivation. Self-determination theory is some good stuff, but it doesn't get to the heart of what moves people, what it does is to describe the characteristics of how human motivations function when they function successfully. So instead of describing fundamental impulses of communcation, competition, and so forth, SD theory describes the functional interface between these fundamental impulses and the world, describing autonomy, interrelatedness, and one other thing that I forget. Thing about it is that there was one little sentence in the article which offhandedly referred to how some students will reject the values of their schools. It struck me that this sentence was written with the assumption that for a student to accept the values of their schools is something as normal as the sun rising in the east, and there was no concession made to people rejecting their schools' values out of independence of mind.
The point here is that Self-Detemination theory does not describe it as something that is inborn, it is something that is developed and/or taught. Meaning that you don't create your own values and disciplines, you internalize them, make them your own, identify with them, promulgate them. Something starts out being given to you and then it IS you.
So you can run into this paradox. You might start out with some independence of mind sufficient that you don't assimilate and make your own the values that are handed to you. If you are very very strong, you can stand on your own two feet with your very own considered values, or you can be like me, and have your own thoughts, but insufficient personal strength, and thrash around looking for someone to agree with you about them so you'll have some sense of community and the faith that one develops from shared values in a community; and end up effectively much less self-determined than someone who never originally had any independence of mind but was able to assimilate what they were told to, and base their functionality on that.
Even in Buddhism, if you're a monk, you are admonished to have faith in the Sangha, the community of buddhist practitioners. For while you are dedicated to unravelling the delusion of self, that very self that would lay itself aside is bolstered in its efforts to so by the community of others working at the same task.
Which is what I saw going on at that high school awards ceremony, with the silly little certificates and ribbons. In a certain way, faith has a definition differing from the usually understood religious one; faith is the functional self of a sentient being. It is the belief that one can make enough things work in life to make life workable, the penalties for insufficiently developed faith/self-determination tend to be depression and anxiety, the latter being my pleasure to fight with on a daily basis.
Any number of ways you can look at it. When you're a kid the force of your being is to learn and to do. A healthy process of growing up cultivates this drive with a reasonable chance of success, the faith that something endeavored will be succeeded at.
Before you're born, you're scattered molecules, as so after you die. In the between there are things that hold you together as something, otherwise you're just a heap of stuff, a sandcastle that's too dry to hold together, and your faith is your ability to believe that you can orchestrate the sum of your parts that can survive today and the next day and the next year in the face of the challenging things that want to grind you back into dust.
The other day the front brake felt a little weird on my bike, and the hair on my neck stood up, my body was afire with cold pins and needles and sweat. Partly because of the safety issue, but primarily because of the money issue, and the lack thereof in my life, an the interrelated factor of my having no career, no faith in myself. I have a stack of abilities, but noone told me how to use them in a way that I could make good when I was young enough to learn how. so now I improvise my life, trying to get by on all mind and no heart, with fear my strongest emotion.
And I'm not as pathologically negative as I used to be, It's milder now but I'm still me and, well, I guess there's really to point in thinking you can ever finish writing about this sort of thing so I'll just
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Your cat is adorable