Leaving Facebook

Not sure why, but it finally seemed like the right time to kill my Facebook account. Evidently it dawned on me that I was using Facebook for two primary reasons:

1. To put ideas out into the world that I think are worth sharing, discussing, contemplating, etc.
2. To connect with friends.

Neither of those reasons force me to use Facebook, though, and the latest blurb from Douglas Rushkoff, about how we are not Facebook's customers but its product, really hit home. I don't want to be Facebook's product. That sort of defeats the point of the things I post there. 

So back to the reasons I used Facebook.

Regarding the first point, I figured that I can just as easily share the sorts of articles and ideas here that I do on Facebook, and while fewer people may encounter them, those that do might be more included to contribute more than a "like" or a snide comment.

Regarding the second point, how many of my "friends" on FB are actually friends, how many are acquaintances, and how many were people I spoke to once in high school who remembered my name and tracked me down? Shutting down FB will mean more face to face conversations, more phone calls, more emails, and heck, maybe even a couple of hand-written letters. All of which are good things, especially if one of my goals is to build that elusive creature, community.

Anyhow, adios Facebook.

A system that leaves us helpless

Climate activist Tim DeChristopher talks about his guilty verdict:
"The big question for us at this point is how we as citizens are going to respond to [what those in power do to maintain the power, order, and security], what we as citizens are going to be willing to do to our fellow human beings in the name of just following the law. When the government tells us that it's not our job to question whether that law is right or wrong, as the judge did in this case to the jury, I think we need to be prepared for that moment, and make a more conscious decision of what we want our role to really be.... You could see it in [the jurors'] minds when they made that switch of accepting the fact that they weren't allowed to use their own conscience, and they had to make a certain choice, even if they thought it was immoral, and that's a really dehumanizing thing." [emphasis mine]




Under a Cloud in California, Charles Shaw:
"When the system we are told we must put our faith in and depend on leaves us helpless, and then mocks us for trying to help ourselves, it might be time to consider that perhaps its time to break from that system.... In an age of institutional failure, we--each other--are the solution to the problems we face, which are only, invariably, going to get worse, until we have finally shaken off the plague of the old world order and can proceed again with the business of living, this time, in the manner of our choosing."

My horoscopes for the week, courtesy of FWA

Props (and credits) go to Rob Brezsny at Free Will Astrology:

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22):

The History cable TV channel has a reality TV show called "Ice Road Truckers." It documents the exploits of drivers who haul heavy loads in their 18-wheelers for long distances across frozen rivers and lakes and swamps in Alaska and northwest Canada. They bring supplies to remote outposts where humans work exotic jobs like mining diamonds and drilling for natural gas. If you have any truck-driving skills, Leo, you'd be a good candidate to apply for a gig on the show. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, your levels of courage and adventurousness will be at an all-time high in 2011. May I suggest, though, that you try to make your romps in the frontier more purely pleasurable than what the ice road truckers have to endure?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):

Pop chanteuse Katy Perry is renowned not only for her singing ability but also for her physical appearance. Her preternatural ability to sell her musical products can be attributed in part to her sparkling good looks and charisma. That's why it was amusing when her husband, the trickster Russell Brand, Twittered a raw photo of her that he took as she lifted her head off the pillow, awakening from a night of sleep. (See it at tinyurl.com/RealKaty.) Without her make-up, Katy's visage was spectacularly ordinary. Not ugly, just plain. In accordance with the astrological omens, Virgo, I urge you to do what Russell Brand did: expose the reality that lies beneath and behind the glamorous illusion, either in yourself or anywhere else you find a need.

The Dude calmly abides

From an excellent Utne Reader interview with Jeff Bridges, discussing a range of meat-and-potatoes topics, from Buddhadharma and Jesus to acting and feeding hungry kids to just sitting as a key component of both the spiritual path and the taking of a shit:

I noticed I had a resistance [to committing to do something to help children suffering from hunger] because I wanted to do other things with my time besides help people. So I said, Well, maybe let both of those things exist at the same time.

It’s like this. Preparing for a role, sometimes I’ll have to get in shape fast, lose a lot of weight. But I don’t want to work out so hard the first couple days that I’m sore and I don’t like it. I thought I would apply the same thing to this hunger work. I would go toward the light, so to speak, but if it got too bright and too intense, ’cause basically what it’s asking you is Be Jesus, be Buddha—give. And I’m not there. I’m not light yet. [Changes to a higher voice.] So just because you’re not there yet, are you not going to do it? [Cocks his head.] So I go toward the light, and if my selfishness comes up too much I’ll stop for a second. And then I’ll take little baby steps toward it. I like to experiment with myself, to go against habitual self-gratification. And then you try it and you say [high voice], Oh, hey, I kind of got off when I did that. That kind of felt good! It’s like taking a shit. Sometimes it’s best to just pick up a magazine and get in there and sit, rather than aaaaargh [mock straining]. It’ll kink up that way.

Indeed.

Three poems by José

In this weekend's CounterPunch, the Poet's Basement section published three poems by my good friend and dharma-brother José. The first poem, my favorite, is re-published below.

Wisdom is Not Half-Baked
by JOSÉ TIRADO


We can ask the seasoned
How to identify the Great Silence-
That moist-warm womb at the heart of things.
A prayer book might get passed,
The hands waved over heads,
A tender look, a bleating lamb given.
Monuments have been raised trying to pass that torch.
Lamps were lit. In the algid flat air of knowledge
An idea or two might resonate. Aphorisms sometimes worked, too.
Still the noble walk secure,
The Good, with nary a p.r. man
Along the trails, where trees grow proper.
Some sit, inviting the shade to teach.
It does. Illimitably lacking science or spires,
Sprouting from that center, settled
Beneath the branches,
Atop the roasting, fecund earth.

"Do we have a soul? What do you base your answer on?"

I just posted this response to the titular conversation on FB:

It seems that there is something about being alive, and more particularly, being human, that allows us to have experience and to be aware of our conscious experience. There also seems to be a real distinction between "my" conscious experience and "your" conscious experience. So to that extent, I think that we have "souls."

If we take that experience, and extrapolate to the broader conclusion that "my" experience means that there is an essential, unchanging "me" that moves from experience to experience, then I start to have intellectual and existential problems with that conclusion. How much of "me" can I lose before I am no longer "me"? If I lose a finger, or even all my limbs, most people would say I am still me. If I lost my entire body and was merely a brain in a jar enjoying a virtual life, would I still be "me"? If I am not my body, but am my mind, then how much of my mind can I lose before I am no longer me? My memories, my preferences, my habits, my use of languages, which of these parts is "me"? Am I the same "me" that I was before I became a parent, before I went to graduate school, before I had sex the first time, before I learned to drive, before I learned to speak, before I was born? If we believe that "I" will survive death, which "me" will live on? Me at 18? Me at 28? Me at 38?

I would add that this does not necessarily mean that I DON'T have a "soul" or some "essence" that won't live on after death. The universe is far stranger than we CAN suppose, to paraphrase Terence McKenna, and so I can't categorically deny that some Other may have the power or ability to restore "me" (like software, if you must) in the future. As some Christian apologists have pointed out, most of us have no problem accepting the theoretical possibility of the transporter on Star Trek. ("Beam me up, Jesus!") If the flickering, flowing nature of my current experience doesn't deny my felt experience of being an individual with consistent, if not unchanging, characteristics, then the restoration of this felt "me" in the future isn't impossible.

And even if I insist that it WERE impossible, by my own admission, I'm a talking monkey. So just who am I to insist to that hypothetical Other? As the aforementioned Terence McKenna adroitly pointed out, "For monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking-monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a raccoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception."

Ah the mystery of being human.

Please weigh in with your own thoughts on this question.

2010 Reboot - The Voyage Continues

Still walking the path, pondering a fuller commitment to Jesus and the "Body of Christ" via becoming a member of the local Mennonite church, wondering what this means about "seeing other people" spiritually. In light of this sort of commitment, is it possible to be a Buddhist-Christian, a Mennonite Freemason, and a rock-and-roll, shamanistic weirdo? Conversely, is it even possible for me to be something other than what I feel myself to be? Is my fear of commitment to one faith tradition a sign of legitimate fears of religious intolerance and exclusivity, a symptom of a larger cultural spiritual consumer mentality, or something else entirely? (I know members of this same Mennonite family who are comparative religion scholars, biology professors, and devotees of Sai Baba, so it is also quite obvious that "committed discipleship" is more complicated than it sounds and that I'm not the only one who must sort out these sorts of issues.)

I also wonder what G-d is all about. If there is an all-powerful, all-loving God in the sense that my parents and most other Christians understand there to be, then how do you explain stuff like this without being glib? Why does an impersonal Godhead seem more acceptable in the contemporary intellectual world than a personal, theistic God? Perhaps more importantly, what is it about a personal G-d that is less acceptable to me than an impersonal, panentheistic Godhead? What would it mean for G-d to be more than personal, rather than less?

For the time being, here are things for me to read for the journey:

Buddhism and Christianity

Through the Eastern Gate: From Tibetan Buddhism to Orthodoxy

Please weigh in with thoughts and suggestions.