EGO, EMPTINESS, AND REBIRTH

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche:

To approach the finality of our bodies while paying no attention to the mini-deaths of daily life is like confusing diamonds with pebbles and throwing them away.

We do not need to get rid of the ego – this unchanging, solid, and unhealthy sense of self – because it has never existed in the first place. The key point is that there is no ego to kill. It is the belief in an enduring, nonchanging self that dies. The term ego can still provide a useful reference; but we need to be careful not to set ourselves up for battling something that is not there. Ironically, when we go into combat with the ego, we strengthen the illusions of self, making our efforts to awaken counterproductive.

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LOOKING FOR HOPE WHEREVER I MIGHT FIND IT

My wife regularly points out my tendency to expect the worst in any situation. In fact, she goes so far as to call me a catastrophizer (though I’m not sure just how she would spell that word). There are times when I have to admit she’s right, but there are also days when I see my take on things as realistic. Today is one of those days.

A friend asked in an email last week if I “think the fears about AI wiping out humans well-founded.” My reply was somewhat cynical and hyperbolic, but still honest. “I don’t know which will get us first – AI, climate change, financial collapse, infrastructure collapse, or the failure of democracy.” In short, I’m feeling rather uneasy about the fate of our culture. The world will survive – some creatures living now will even flourish – but I fear the world generally, and our culture in particular, of the next decade will be significantly different than what I’ve learned to appreciate as I’ve lived my life.

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ON THE VALIDITY OF THE BIBLICAL TEXT

Thomas Jefferson:

But the whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it: and such tricks have been plaid with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills. The matter of the first was such as would be preserved in the memory of the hearers, and handed on by tradition for a long time; the latter such stuff as might be gathered up, for imbedding it, any where, and at any time.

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WHITEHEAD ON READING KANT

Charles Hartshorne:

Whitehead once said that Kant’s Critiques should have been written in reverse order. This is because … Whitehead held that experiencing is primarily and primitively enjoying-suffering and only in special cases knowing; so that the theory of feeling, and hence aesthetics, not epistemology, is primary.

Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, p. 262. (Compare Arendt, Kant, and Judgment.)

HUMAN "PROGRESS" AND NATURE

Charles Hartshorne:

“Are we making progress?” should not reduce entirely to “Are we coming to own more things?” It should include “Are we learning to do without some material things?” … The clearest basis for respect for nature is to renounce two forms of dualism: an absolute difference between matter and mind, and a quasi-absolute difference between the human and other forms of mind.

Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, p. 225.

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RANDOM THOUGHTS WHILE READING ELISA GABBERT

Last fall my wife and I drove from Colorado into New Mexico. The direct route would have taken us over a high mountain pass; a predicted snow storm led us to drive a more circuitous route through Utah. The scenery was impressive.

We stopped at one look-out point to take in the view. My wife suggested we get a “selfie” – I don’t do that habitually; in fact, I think this might have been the first selfie that I attempted. My lack of experience was immediately clear to my wife. She didn’t look at the photo until we had walked back down the hill to our parked car. That’s when she learned that I had set the phone’s camera on portrait mode – after all, isn’t a selfie a sort of portrait? – which meant that the wonderful background was blurred. “The point of the selfie is to show whatever it is that’s behind the person or people!” I didn’t get it.

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IT LOOKS AS IF…

G.E.M. Anscombe:

[Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question, “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied, “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?” This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to “it looks as if” in “it looks as if the sun goes round the earth.”

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2023 BOOKS OF SUMMER

Cathy of 746books.com invites people to make a list of 20 (or 10 or 15) books that they plan to read during the summer months. This is not the first year she’s done this, but I just learned about it from my Mastodon feed. I’ve already admitted that I tend to bounce from book to book, finishing some but not others, and bumping a book down on the list if something else grabs my interest for the moment. But I’ve decided to accept Cathy’s challenges – not only the challenge to make such a list but also the challenge to post it publicly. I’m mostly at ease with this, primarily because Cathy says up front that she’s not all that strict about it: “It’s pretty common knowledge that I am the slackest challenge host and will bend the rules to help anyone reach their goal.”

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ON MANAGING ARISTOCRATS

John Adams:

Your ‘aristocrats’ are the most difficult Animals to manage, of anything in the whole Theory and practice of Government. They will not suffer themselves to be governed. They not only exert all their own Subtilty Industry and courage, but they employ the Commonality, to knock to pieces every Plan and Model that the most honest Architects in Legislation can invent to keep them within bounds.

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 9 July 1813. The Adams-Jefferson Letters, p. 352

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LEWIS THOMAS ON ALTRUISM

I find it very difficult to avoid used bookstores. In fact, it’s pretty rare for me to visit an unfamiliar city – or even a city I know well – and not find myself browsing the shelves of some such store. I rarely visit with the idea of finding a particular book, but instead browse the shelves, relying on the serendipity of happenstance.

I was visiting one such store last month and came across a collection of short essays by Lewis Thomas. I immediately recognized the book. In fact, a copy of it once sat in a bookshelf in my office. I had given it away in one of several book purges over the past decades. But I had such a rush of satisfaction upon seeing the book that I couldn’t resist purchasing it. And it’s a joy to read (or re-read) his work. (I have to admit that the 40 years or so since I last read Thomas melt away whatever distinction there is between reading and re-reading.)

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