"A Confucian has stolen my hairbrush! Down with Confucianism!"
- GK Chesterton (on ad hominems)
- GK Chesterton (on ad hominems)
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Facing Those Inner Storms During Meditation...
The formal structure for intense practice is a silent retreat, which can last anywhere from one morning to three years. No talking, no reading, no writing, no eye contact. You’re stranded on the island of your mind. You’re sitting peacefully, or impatiently, or hungrily, when a thought suddenly jerks through your head and your inner world breaks into a riot—heart racing, muscles gripping, adrenaline pouring, breath speeding.
You bring your attention to the explosion: what is this? Ah, this time it’s anger…and it feels lousy. You notice that it’s causing you pain—you, not X, the object of your anger. Focusing on the sensations of the emotion, you stop telling yourself the story of how X did you wrong. Without the story, the anger runs out of fuel. Relief. Non-anger feels so good. You come to be less and less afraid of your own interior storms.
These treks through the mind became my idea of adventure travel, and I’d take off for a week a few times a year. But after a while, my return to “all this” no longer felt satisfying. In fact, it was dissatisfying. “All this” whips up your appetites. As much as you have, others have more…or less. That one-down feeling is a bitch, but so is that one-up feeling—you just don’t see how it isolates you, leaves you constantly, if subliminally, threatened.
- More Here
You bring your attention to the explosion: what is this? Ah, this time it’s anger…and it feels lousy. You notice that it’s causing you pain—you, not X, the object of your anger. Focusing on the sensations of the emotion, you stop telling yourself the story of how X did you wrong. Without the story, the anger runs out of fuel. Relief. Non-anger feels so good. You come to be less and less afraid of your own interior storms.
These treks through the mind became my idea of adventure travel, and I’d take off for a week a few times a year. But after a while, my return to “all this” no longer felt satisfying. In fact, it was dissatisfying. “All this” whips up your appetites. As much as you have, others have more…or less. That one-down feeling is a bitch, but so is that one-up feeling—you just don’t see how it isolates you, leaves you constantly, if subliminally, threatened.
- More Here
Wisdom Of The Week
A high school student applying to MIT is struggling with these feelings. Here's one reply on this Reddit thread via Ben:
"The people who fail to graduate from MIT, fail because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out.
"The people who fail to graduate from MIT, fail because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out.
The students who are successful, by contrast, look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and then begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation.
During my freshman year, I almost failed out of differential equations. I was able to recover and go on to be very successful in my studies. When I was a senior, I would sit down with the freshmen in my dorm and show them the same things that had been shown to me, and I would watch them struggle with the same feelings, and overcome them. By the time I graduated MIT, I had become the person I looked up to when I first got in.
You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out. It’s scary to acknowledge that it’s a decision because it puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it’s empowering because it means there is something you can do about it.
So do it."
Quote of the Day
"It is critical to know what to look for in the search for life in the solar system. The search so far has focused on Earth-like life because that's all we know, but life that may have originated elsewhere could be unrecognizable compared with life here. Advances throughout the last decade in biology and biochemistry show that the basic requirements for life might not be as concrete as we thought."
- via Carl Zimmer
- via Carl Zimmer
Friday, January 13, 2012
Quote of the Day
"Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike."
- Theodore Roosevelt
- Theodore Roosevelt
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Joseph Heller On The Comedy Of Politics
"American politics is ludicrously funny!! There are many illusions incorporated in the democratic philosophy. They tend to be very pleasing and satisfying but they are misleading and fantasies. One of them was the democratic idea was even possible that there is such a thing as participatory democracy. I think one of the illusions is that we have that is this confident view that by voting we are participating in government. I maintain that is a delusion and it is a ritualistic routine. The right to vote, I think is indispensable to our contentment but in application it is absolutely useless."
- Joseph Heller
- Joseph Heller
15 Common Cognitive Distortions
Control Fallacies:
If we feel externally controlled, we see ourselves as helpless a victim of fate. For example, “I can’t help it if the quality of the work is poor, my boss demanded I work overtime on it.” The fallacy of internal control has us assuming responsibility for the pain and happiness of everyone around us. For example, “Why aren’t you happy? Is it because of something I did?”
Jumping to Conclusions:
Without individuals saying so, we know what they are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, we are able to determine how people are feeling toward us.
For example, a person may conclude that someone is reacting negatively toward them but doesn’t actually bother to find out if they are correct. Another example is a person may anticipate that things will turn out badly, and will feel convinced that their prediction is already an established fact.
- Read the rest here
If we feel externally controlled, we see ourselves as helpless a victim of fate. For example, “I can’t help it if the quality of the work is poor, my boss demanded I work overtime on it.” The fallacy of internal control has us assuming responsibility for the pain and happiness of everyone around us. For example, “Why aren’t you happy? Is it because of something I did?”
Jumping to Conclusions:
Without individuals saying so, we know what they are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, we are able to determine how people are feeling toward us.
For example, a person may conclude that someone is reacting negatively toward them but doesn’t actually bother to find out if they are correct. Another example is a person may anticipate that things will turn out badly, and will feel convinced that their prediction is already an established fact.
- Read the rest here
Quote of the Day
America hasn’t been able to create jobs in any sector that’s subject to global and technological pressures. As a result, there is a huge sense of disillusionment, disappointment and pessimism among Americans.
None of the Republicans are addressing this problem centrally. They’re simply talking about cutting government spending as if that is going to solve the problem of creating new industries, opportunities and jobs. Simply cutting government strikes me as a very inadequate response to a massive challenge.
- Fareed Zakaria
None of the Republicans are addressing this problem centrally. They’re simply talking about cutting government spending as if that is going to solve the problem of creating new industries, opportunities and jobs. Simply cutting government strikes me as a very inadequate response to a massive challenge.
- Fareed Zakaria
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