Something About "Fate"

Like most people, I am a little confused about the concept of "free will". Actually, that's not true. I've come to the conclusion that it really doesn't exist---at least as most people understand the concept. Increasingly, I find the idea of "Fate" much more appealing. Let me illustrate one aspect of it using an idea that came to me the other day.

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Not an uncommon sight where I work.
Public Domain Image c/o Wiki Commons

I work in an academic library of a University that has a veterinary college. As a result, it is very common to see dogs in the building. Most of these are "service dogs in training"---ranging in size from quite small puppies, to larger, almost adult animals.

Until my dear sweet significant other got a dog, I had no idea why people brought these puppies into the building. But Misha explained to me that dogs have to be "socialized" to be able to function in situations where people and other dogs are present. This is only possible during a very short "window of opportunity" when they are quite young. If it doesn't happen, the dogs will never be comfortable around other dogs or people, and this will manifest itself either in extreme fear or aggression. Just by way of an example, her best friend---who is a professional dog trainer---has a German Shepherd ("Karbon") that was never socialized around other dogs and will basically kill any other dog on sight. (It's a wonderful dog---but in some ways it is sorta like a pygmy tyrannosaur.)  As I see it, being properly socialized as a puppy is an intrinsic element in the "fate" of a dog. If it is raised like Karbon, it will never be able to interact with other canines.

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What has this got to do with people? Well, I have a intuition that humans also have a limited opportunity to "socialize" when they are young. If a child doesn't get a chance to learn how to interact with others, it will struggle with those relationships for the rest of his life. Please note, I wrote "struggle with", not "will be incapable of ever". Human beings are not dogs. We have higher level reasoning than dogs, which means that we are capable of learning very complex social behaviours in later stages of life. Moreover, we have access to a very rich cultural inheritance, which allows us to learn from the experiences of others through art, literature, philosophy, social science, therapy, and, dialogue with other people.

What got me thinking about all of this was the recent sad incident where a young man was so angry about his frustration with women that he drove a rented van down a busy street in Toronto---killing and injuring 26 people, mostly women. After the event, people mentioned that he had made the following statement on social media before heading out for the attack:

Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!

Reading this short statement it's important to understand that the guy, is using a very rich set of coded language, which includes the following terms:

• 4chan
• Incel
• Chads
• Stacys
• Supreme Gentleman
• Elliot Rodger

Before the mass killing happened, I was only vaguely aware of a couple of these terms and had never really heard about the rest. Since then, I've been reading about and studying all of them. That too has got me thinking about the idea of "fate". 

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Not really all that awful an image, eh? 

4chan is an imageboard-style social media website that has evolved into a place where people can "misbehave" without being given a hard time. There is no attempt to force people to use their real names (like FaceBook), nor are there any community guidelines, or, moderators enforcing a code of conduct. The result is mostly a lot of interesting pictures with the sort of childish comments you'd expect from teenage boys who believe no adult is listening.  

And, as you might imagine---teenage boys et al---there are also naked pictures of women too. Most of this seems pretty harmless, but there is one "board" that is a little different: "Politically Incorrect". I pulled it up and in a very short time saw the words "kike", "faggot", and, "nigga" being thrown around. There's also an shout out for Siege magazine---proclaimed as being "proudly Judenfrei since 1933".

Yup, "politically incorrect" is right.

This doesn't really surprise me all that much. Young, very intelligent young men who feel somewhat alienated from society get enjoyment from shocking other people. I know that I did at one time. I still do once in a great while. This isn't just something that men do---women too. I know my significant other sometimes gets so angry about the way the world treats her (Dao knows she has a right to be pissed), that she goes on long rants about "the penis". I try to just listen patiently. She directs all this at me, which I've learned doesn't mean that she is angry with me---just that she feels safe and comfortable enough to say it in my presence. And I've repeatedly told her to vent away---that's part of being in a relationship.

In fact, I recently watched a really intense comedy show on Netflix by Ali Wong that bases a lot of its jokes on shocking audiences (using very crude language) about how awful it is to be a woman in a sexist world. (The trailer is quite mellow compared to most of the show.)

I'm enough of a "fuddy-duddy" to have been quite shocked by what this woman was talking about. One thing in particular took me a while to process. She was talking about men giving her "head". She mimed forcing them to "go down" on her in parks, public washrooms, etc. I was more than a little perplexed by why so many women in the audience thought that this was hilarious. Then I realized that what she was doing was taking many women's experience of being coerced and talked into unpleasant teenage experiences giving "blow jobs" to their boy friends and "inverting" them.

So it is possible to dismiss all this idiotic racist and misogynistic talk as just being "humour".

And indeed, a great deal of the time people dismiss this as not being much more than ironic. Indeed, when I was young I can remember reading National Lampoon---which was filled with what would today be considered incredibly sexist

This is far from the most offense thing
that I saw in National Lampoon, but
you get the idea. Fair use.

and racist stuff. But at the time, I considered all that as just being "ironic". For example, I remember one cartoon where a couple of grotesquely-caricatured black men in a pickup were pulled over by a sheriff and ordered to secure a load of trash. Lacking any tarp or ropes, he made one of them lay on top to stop things from blowing off. Driving down the road, an observer opined "People are getting so wasteful nowadays. There's someone who just threw out a perfectly good n*gg*r". My teenage mind said to itself "yup, that's the way those racist pigs think about Negros".

The problem with this, among other things, is that it creates camouflage for real racists and sexists. The thing about symbols and language is that the same image, word, or, story can mean very different things to different people. In the example of the old cartoon I described above there can be three different reactions.

First, it is going to act as a "barrier" towards the entry of people who would be critical of the culture that is on display in social media groups like 4Chan "politically incorrect". Anyone who has direct experience of racism and how awful it is in people's lives is not going to want to spend any time there. Nor are any people who have absorbed a superficial antagonism towards it through some sort of ideological standpoint (these are the SJW types that sometimes really do deserve ridicule for wearing their "grooviness" like a badge---which is known as "virtue signalling".) By using racist language and posting overtly racist images (or sexist, homophobic, etc), the site keeps out enough people who might find all this stuff juvenile and offensive that it creates a "safe space" where people can indulge in this talk without being reprimanded.

Secondly, it can serve as a way of "desensitizing" or "coarsening" people's reaction to racist images and ideas. This is probably the core reason why a whole type of humour that was very common in my childhood has disappeared. There were lots and lots of jokes about Poles, Jews, Newfies, etc, when I was young. Indeed, broadly drawn racial caricatures were part of some very famous, serious movies. Take a look at this clip from the otherwise excellent movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's".

The well-known actor Mickey Rooney put on some false teeth and played an embarrassingly awful racist stereotype of a Japanese man. The role has zero relationship to the plot and seems to have been tossed into the story simply to evoke "cheap laughs". The elimination of this type of "humour" that has happened in society in my short lifetime, IMHO, seems to have been pretty much only the result of "political correct" disapproval becoming more and more common in society. The "Politically Incorrect" space on places like 4chan is an attempt to create a "safe haven" where this sort of old-school stupidity is allowed to flourish.

Finally, this "desensitization zone" gives really nasty racists (sexists, homophobes, etc) a place where they can "fish" for the people who really are vulnerable to their propaganda. So among all the adolescents who are just trying to shock others with their outrageous language, established racist organizations put out links to their own Webpages---like the Daily Stormer. 

The great thing for racists about using 4chan is that they can always "play" the naive and make them look foolish. This is because "insiders" constantly skate around by tossing around memes and images in ways that are designed to confuse anyone who hasn't invested effort into learning the "inside lingo". To cite one example, consider the phrase I quoted above about Seige Magazine being "Judenfrei since 1933". It's not an old Nazi publication but instead a new art design magazine. If I'd assumed it was the former instead of the latter---and hadn't bothered checking---I would have been identifiable as a silly old fart who doesn't know what he is talking about. That would have totally discredited anything I have to say in the eyes of the "young, hip guys" that are the mainstay of this site. (The problem, of course, is that the only way to be able to avoid these traps is to spend enormous amounts of time cruising these sites, which is more than any reasonable person will do.) 

To cite one famous defender of this idiocy,  

Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide. These caricatures are often spliced together with Millennial pop culture references, from old 4chan memes like pepe the frog, to anime and My Little Pony references.

Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents. Currently, the Grandfather-in-Chief is Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who attracted the attention of this group on Twitter after attacking them as “childless single men who jerk off to anime.”

Milo Yiannopoulos, in a Breitbart "op-ed" 

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The next question is "what is an "incel""? The word is a "portmanteau" of "involuntary celibate", and refers to people who---as we used to say---"don't get around a lot". It's true that young males have always had this insane sex drive that makes a lot of men somewhat nutty pretty well into their 40s. But the problem that I'm trying to identify is that social media technology has allowed a subset of these people to get together and create an "alternative society" with it's own ideas about what does or doesn't make any sense. And one of those ideas is that there is a definable group of people that society has decided are "failures" in some sort of sexual arms race.

The way they describe becoming aware of this "fact" is by "choosing the 'black pill'". The image comes from the movie "The Matrix" where the hero has to choose between two metaphors:  a "red pill" that means he understands that the world around him is a comfortable illusion masking a dark truth; or; the "blue pill" that would allow him to give in to the illusion and forget that the possibility that it could all be an illusion. For incels, the black pill is the personal realization that they are failures who have totally lost the genetic arms race for sex. 

To get an idea of how their reasoning works, consider the following "black pill" argument that I came across in the FAQ part of the Incels.me website. Basically, it brings economic analysis to the "Tinder economy". To understand this, however, you first have to know what "Tinder" is, which I have to assume at least some of my readers don't. At it's most basic, Tinder is a dating app for your smart phone that allows people to put up photos of themselves that a person can look at and instantly decide whether or not they are someone they would like to talk to. It's an instant, almost unconscious decision. If that person also decides that you are someone that they would like to talk to, then an opportunity arises to use a chat feature. If the conversation "clicks", then you can set up a date to connect in person. (No, I've never used this thing. I'm just working from the Wikipedia article.)

There is data out there that suggests that 80% of the women on Tinder are only interested in 20% of the men. This attraction is based on physical appearance---which is to be expected when all they have to go on is a photo on a cell phone app. The black pill argument then goes on to say that this means that sexual inequality is actually worse in modern American than economic inequality.

This image originally came off a Web page called
"Tinder Experiments II", used under fair use provision.

These successful men who have lots "hits" on Tinder (and presumably lots of sex too) are known as "Chads". The incels find themselves in the situation where the overwhelming majority of women that they might have sex with are chasing the 20% of the population that are Chads---which freezes them out of the market.

(Of course this is analysis is insane because it is based on the data that comes from a particularly skewed sample---people who date based exclusively on the basis of looks. In effect, this is how the very limited pool of very shallow, looks-obsessed people select a mate. It really says nothing at all about how the vast majority of couples end up together. I wouldn't be surprised if not a single person who reads this blog has ever used Tinder---and I suspect that lots haven't even heard of it.)

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But once someone has eaten the black pill, they can then go on to build a whole social world-view on that foundation. The next step is to find out where women fit into this, which leads to "Stacys". These are the "sexually-desirable, dominant women" who drive incels crazy with lust but are only interested in Chads. The "second-rate" females are "Beckys", but they only want to have sex with Chads too---which is the root of the problem for the incels. Since the sexual revolution women have managed to undermine and remove all the biological and social underpinnings of monogamy. Birth control means that sex is possible without creating a child. Legal changes no longer punish women for having sex with non-husbands. And, equality in the workplace and the welfare state mean that women no longer are financially dependent on a male "bread winner". Once the need for a specific, permanent relationship with a man went away, women were free to follow their "natural instinct" to find and have sex exclusively with Chads, which is where we have 80% of women chasing after 20% of men. The implication is that Chads are screwing almost all the women in the world, who are happily becoming parts of "virtual harems" for these guys.

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As for the "supreme gentleman Elliot Roger", that was a young man who went on a killing rampage in 2014 because of his frustration with women who wouldn't have sex with him. Before he set out, he recorded a monologue on YouTube that describes his sense of frustration and justifies his actions before the fact. (Warning, it's kinda disturbing to watch. Keep your children away from it---.)

Of course, strange people do strange things all the time. And moreover, some of them try to justify their behaviour. The unabomber had his manifesto, to cite one case. But usually subcommunities don't latch onto these folks and start making them into folk heroes to emulate.

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I started off this disturbing mess of a post by introducing the idea of "fate" and the need to expose puppies to crowds of people and other dogs in order to prevent vicious or terrified adult animals. What has this to do with incels? Well, as I suggested, I think that there are probably parallels between dogs and human beings. If a human child isn't socialized properly in his development, he is going to have a problem getting along with other people---which will include finding a mate. As someone who spent his early teen years totally isolated from others my own age except in school, I can relate. Girls and women were a totally mysterious quantity for much of my early adult life, which led to some extreme frustration. Luckily, there were no internet rabbit holes like "4chan" that I could disappear down and be exposed to crazy fever dreams like the incel movement. Instead, I had to work through my "issues" with the help of friends, therapists, and, the great thinkers of the ages---in the form of philosophy, and, Daoism.

We are not isolated, atomic individuals who get to pick and choose what ideas we live our lives around. To a very large extent we are instead created by the ideas we are exposed to. That's because we are eusocial animals---like termites, bees, and, ants. Only instead of being controlled by chemical signals that send us off in search of food for the colony, we exchange memes (self-replicating fragments of culture) that influence our behaviour. The fellow who drove the rented van down the sidewalk in Toronto wasn't some crazed Richard the Third character who "choose to make good his evil, and evil his good", instead he was an individual with "issues" who was influenced by a dysfunctional minority culture to the point of committing mass murder. In this, he was not any different from the guy who walked into a Quebec mosque with a gun and shot a bunch of people, or, the fellows who hi-jacked airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Centre. All of these people immersed themselves in a weird subculture that created a new way of looking at the world that convinced them that killing a lot of people "just made sense" and was actually "heroic". 

This is the point that needs to be emphasized. Our society labours under an idiotic macro-culture that says that each of us is an individual, atomic, Cartesian individual who has the ability to consciously and rationally choose their actions according to our "free will". I understand why it has yet to give up this absurd fantasy:  our criminal justice and dominant religious culture is built on this assumption. But if we really want to understand why crazy shit like this keeps happening, we need to give up this childish idea and start understanding the ancient idea of "fate". People are controlled by the experiences that mold and shape the way their minds operate---including the strange subcultures that are emerging from the Internet. And, if we want to really curb this sort of nutty behaviour, we need to encourage social science to look at these subcultures and develop mechanisms to vaccinate people against these crazy ideas. One suggestion I that comes to my mind would be to teach children critical thinking skills from an early age instead of teaching them to "shut up and do what they are told"---which was certainly the subtext of everything I learned in primary school, and, church. Another one would be to encourage our leaders to stop babbling on about "evil" whenever some outrage occurs, and instead encourage debate about how these things really do come about.

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Lest people think I'm reading too much into all of this. Consider the following quotes. There is this guy named Jordan Peterson, who is one of the highest paid YouTube personalities on the Web. He also has a best-selling book titled 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos. He was recently profiled by the New York Times, where he explained the problem that led to the recent mass killing in Toronto:

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.

“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”

I laugh, because it is absurd.

“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.”

Peterson has taken some criticism for this statement, which he explains by saying that he isn't talking about laws, "just" social pressure. You know, like employers refusing to hire women, doctors refusing to give women access to birth control, schools refusing to allow girls to take "men's courses"---stuff like that. The sort of things that people did when I was young, and which the nasty state has outlawed because of politically correct types having too much influence on society.

Jordan Peterson wants you ladies to marry someone---or else!
photo by Adam Jacobs, c/o Wiki Commons

Courage, Language and Daoist Literature

I've recently watched two movies for "old souls":  Logan, and, Arrival.

For those of you who haven't watched the films, here's a brief synopsis---spoilers follow, if you care about such things.

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A cosplayer representing the Wolverine,
photo c/o the Wiki Commons

Logan is set in the Marvel X-Men universe, and the Logan of the title is Logan Howlett:  the Wolverine. The twist is that this is a dystopian version of that universe, one in which private corporations have released a genetically engineered virus into the environment to stop any new "mutants" from occurring naturally. This allows them to use their stockpile of samples from the existing mutants to create their own altered human beings to use for experiments to create "super soldiers".

At the same time, Charles Xavier ("Professor X") has developed a debilitating form of brain disease that manifests itself in occasional seizures that affect the people around him because of his psychic abilities.  In the past one of these seizures killed off most of the remaining mutants.  This leaves only Wolverine and Caliban---who have to keep him doped-up on heavy meds to prevent future seizures---to take care of him in an isolated, abandoned metal recycling facility in Mexico.  Logan supports this crappy lifestyle by working as a limo driver for bored, rich teens in the USA.

For those of you who have never read Marvel comics (I suppose some of you still exist), the Wolverine has the ability to heal almost instantly from any wound. He is also very, very strong. The ability to heal has kept him from aging, which means that he is at least a couple of hundred years old. Through most of that time, he was used by the government in one way or another. During both world wars, for example, the Canadian government used him as a soldier. When the American government learned of his abilities, they performed experiments on him to learn how to control him, and replaced his bones (and claws) with a special super-metal called "adamantium" (which only exists in fiction.) This made him into a weapon that is impervious to almost anything. It was Charles, "Doctor X", who saved him from this life.

Unfortunately, the adamantium is also poisonous. And at the time of this movie, it is finally over-whelming Logan's innate healing ability. It is making him an old man, and, it is killing him. Logan is in constant pain, which he tries to deal with by almost constant drinking. He also limps.  And coughs, almost constantly.

A plot and drama ensued, but that's really not what I'm interested in.

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I said that this is a movie for "old souls".  What I meant was that I can really identify with Logan. I am in significant pain at times, which I do self-medicate with by alcohol. I also limp. And I also cough, a lot.

One other thing that matters in the movie is the relationship between Logan and Professor X. Charles Xavier (played the incomparable Patrick Stewart), is a paraplegic and confined to a wheel chair. Underneath the gruff, macho exterior it is very obvious that The Wolverine loves this man very deeply. He works at a job he loathes to provide for him. And no matter what happens in the movie, the first thing he does is look out for Xavier's needs. When Xavier is eventually murdered by one of the super-soldiers (who looks just like a young version of Logan), he collapses emotionally. At this point, he ends up being taken care of my a young girl who was also created to be a super soldier, but who managed to escape due to help by nurses at the research facility.

The old macho guy who's always had to fight turned into a nurse maid for a beloved father figure. And who also ends up being nurtured by a young girl. Like I said, a story for old souls.

Eventually, Logan dies. And in the process the girl he's the genetic father of, and who he's saved, is crying at his side---calling him "daddy". His last words are "so this is what it feels like".  When I heard the words I knew that on one level the script was referring to dying. But my immediate response was to think that this is what it feels like to be vulnerable, to care about others to the point of  making yourself vulnerable to extreme, horrible emotional pain, and, to accept that others can feel the same way about you.

As I said, a movie for old souls.

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For those of you who haven't seen Arrival, it deals with a linguistics professor who's been asked to help the government learn how to communicate with an alien species that has just arrived on the planet (called the "Heptapods"---for their seven tentacles.) Unlike most science fiction shows that gloss over the difficulty of learning the language of a totally different intelligent species, this movie bears down on that issue and comes up with an innovative answer.

Basically, the movie is based on two premises.

The first one is that learning a language involves changing the way our brains are "wired". To understand this idea, consider the fact that English only really has one word for "love", where as Greek has a great many ("eros", "agape", "philia", "storge", etc.) What this means is that when an ancient Greek philosopher was talking about "love", he could do it a lot more accurately than a modern English speaker. To understand the point, consider this sentence that an obnoxious child might make to another: "If you love pancakes so much, why don't you marry them!"  This wouldn't make any sense at all to Plato, because he wouldn't use the same word for "liking a lot in the sense of enjoying the taste" and "wanting to spend the rest of your life living with because of a deep interpersonal bond".

The argument is that the complexity and precision of your vocabulary has an impact on how we see the world around us. A better example beyond the word "love" comes from the history of chemistry. At one time people tried to explain the nature of material objects by referring to the four states of matter:  solid, liquid, gas, and, fire. This really doesn't work very well to explain a broad range of events, so we now accept that the atomic theory works much better and most folks would probably have a hard time trying to figure out how you could use the states system to understand much of anything.

The second idea that the movie is based upon is that it is possible to create a totally non-sequential language. Western languages like English are based on the sounds that our spoken language makes. We start out sounding out the letters that make up the words, and then connect a certain sequence with specific words. But some other written langues don't work like that. Chinese, for example, is not "sounded out" from letters. Instead individual characters represent specific ideas. It is true that some characters are composed of different simpler characters and added together, but these too are representative of ideas instead of sounds. Having said that, however, Chinese characters are written sequentially one after another.

But Arrival posits that the aliens don't have a sequential sentence structure, but a holistic one.

A heptapod "sentence"
taken under "fair use" copyright rules from the Internet

As you can see, the writing looks like a coffee ring stain. But the different "splotches" aren't random, but convey a specific meaning. The issue that the movie hinges on is that there is no beginning or end to a circle, so the only way to really understand it is to just grasp the meaning all at once.

This is an important issue, because it talks about the limits of ordinary human consciousness. As this was explained to me when I was at university, Professor Amstutz (my old teacher) explained that studies have shown that there appears to be a limit to how much a person can grasp holistically. He explained this using an example from English common law. A pub used to have a cup with a bunch of wooden matches in it that people could use to light their pipes or cigars. They added a sign that said "take some home with you, if you like". An individual---what we would now call a "street person"---took advantage of this to take a lot of matches that he then used to sell for a half-penny a piece on the street to people who wanted to light a pipe or cigar, but didn't have any matches on them at the time. The pub owner called a bobby to stop this person from doing this, but the individual in question told the magistrate that the sign said he could do it.

The judge did some research in the literature and found out that when people look at a random pile of objects, on average, the most a person can count at a glance (ie:  without having to consciously mentally separate into different groupings and add together) are seven. So the judge ruled that under English Common Law "some" (as in "take some home with you") means seven or less.

This is important to the movie Arrival because it suggests that this isn't an intrinsic property of the human brain, but instead the result of how our language has "wired" it. In other words, the judge identified an issue of "software" instead of "hardware". If our brains simply have to work sequentially for more than seven items, then we will never be able to learn the heptapod language. But if this is instead an artifact of our language, it might be possible to learn the language---but in doing so it might radically change the way we perceive the world around us.

The people who made the movie didn't stop at the circle sentences. Towards the end, the heroine says that she understands their language and asks them to tell her more. So they present her with what I can only surmise is their equivalent of a book. (Actually, this image is only the same sentence repeated over an over again---but assume that the coffee rings are all different and you get the notion.)

Heptapod Book,
Fair Use Copyright, blah, blah, blah.

The important thing to understand is that the sentences aren't in any order---they are thrown all over and the reader has to understand them all holistically---just like the sentences.

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The movie is filled with flashbacks, but ones that aren't identified or labeled. At some point, the linguist (Louise) had a child, who died of an incurable illness. She also had a husband that she dearly loved, but left her. At first, I assumed that she had had all of this heart-break before the arrival of the aliens. But as the movie progresses and she learns the language, you begin to realize that this is the future. The man she falls in love with and marries is her colleague working with the aliens, and, the child is their soon-to-be conceived daughter. Learning the alien language has rewired her brain to the point where she no longer experiences her life sequentially, but rather as a holistic unity. (Presumably she started having dreams and memories before she met the aliens because the process reveals that causality works backwards in time as well as forward---how about that for an alien concept?)

This would be a really, really scary prospect for most people. Would you marry someone and have a child with them if you really knew in your guts---from direct experience---that both would end in extreme heart-break? Louise believes that she has the choice of not choosing to marry and conceive, but she does anyway because she doesn't want to lose the experience of having a man and child that she loves dearly. And you also see in the flashbacks that knowing how it will all end means that she never misses an opportunity to be as "real" and "there" as she possibly can for these two people. She really does savour every sweet drop from the cup of life---even though she knows that at the end there will be nothing but bitter dregs.

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How does any of this fit into Daoism?

What is it we do when we read books of wisdom and meditate? We are trying to deepen and expand our theoretical understanding of the world around us. We are fighting against the illusions that bind us to the here and now. We start out in life like the Wolverine---believing that we can live forever and if we get hurt, healing will come fast. But learning from others teaches us that this isn't the case, we do get old and die. Not only this, but the people we love die too. And that hurts, a lot.

Daoism offers to help people with this problem through many different mechanisms.

For one thing, it offers us stories that help us understand the most practical, best way to navigate life. Consider the story from both Zhuangzi and Liezi where Confucius meets an elderly man who has learned to swim across raging cataracts by only swimming a few strokes when the river is pushing him where he wants to go and not fighting when it pulls him away. This is how one survives in a chaotic, violent world according to Daoist wisdom.

It also helps us by offering us practices like "holding onto the One" that teach us to not get too caught up in the moment-by-moment activity around us. Instead, we learn to remind ourselves that we need to always try to understand the Dao (or "One") and how it is operating both in the processes that govern our mental activity and the world around us. If we are able to do this, for example, sometimes we are able to remember that the other person we are dealing with may be being grumpy towards us not because they hate us, but rather because they may be sick, be worried about a loved one, etc. We might also remember that giving that person a smile, or asking a personal question that shows you care, etc, may totally transform their interaction towards you into something more useful and pleasant.

It also helps us by reminding us to remember "the big picture" when we feel especially sad, angry, or, perplexed. When Zhangzi's wife dies, for example, he is very sad. But when he realizes that she herself has ceased to feel any pain at all, and has instead merely returned to the undifferentiated Dao that she emerged from when she was born, he can realize that he is really sad for himself because he knows he will miss her. And at that point, he realizes that he can choose to dwell on missing her, or, simply move on in life and find something or someone else to love. Much pain is caused by delusion, and the cure for delusion is a better understanding of how things really are.

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In a very real sense, studying Daoism is like when Louise starts having those memories of her child. I am not the old man swimming in the cataract or Zhuangzi banging on a pot and singing after the death of his wife. But those events are the memories of men who have died long, long, ago in a distant land. And by integrating their insights and experiences into my life, I am just like Louise having memories of the death of a child she hasn't had yet. I know that I too will find myself beset by awful, painful problems---just like swimming the cataract. And I too will find myself deeply hurt by the pain or even death of a loved one.

We aren't heptapods who experience our personal lives holistically. But we are eusocial animals who live our lives mediated by culture. And culture does exist holistically, and we can experience it as such. Zhuangzi and Confucius are long dead---and yet they are still alive every time we wrestle with the ideas that they have passed onto us through their writings and the traditions that they founded.

I got thinking about this because I was worried about whether my wife was entering into a psychotic episode. She is going through a stressful time right now as she has decided to sell her house and apply to be an immigrant to Canada. But in the interim, she is in St. Louis and I am living and working a thousand miles away. There is almost nothing I can do to make her life better right other than offer some words of encouragement. And when she enters into an episode, she simply disappears off my radar. She has no support network (she does live in the USA, of course), so all I can do is accept that she's "gone away" for a month or two, and just wait for her to come back.

At times like this all I can do is remember how much I love her and remember that I wouldn't trade the good times in exchange for not having the bad. I also try to remember that, like Zhuangzi and his wife, we are all part of a larger process and that ultimately we come from and end up in the same place. I also try to hold onto the One and do what helps me cope with my feelings of helplessness and sadness. Writing this blog is one of those things. 

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I put out my begging bowl and ask for support from people not just because I want money. I'm also trying to remind people that nothing comes for free in life, and we need to support others when they do something of value for the community. Many of us don't have enough money to be able to shoot off a few bucks to people writing obscure blogs on the Internet---no matter how much they enjoy them. I get that. But I also understand that lots of people who do have money would rather spend it on things like trips overseas, video games, eating out, etc.

For them I'd offer this piece of my life history. I used to do a lot of free lance writing for newspapers. There came a time when papers just got cheaper and cheaper towards people like me. That was because they knew that we see writing as a vocation and more than anything else just want to see our ideas in print. The result was no one wanted to pay me anything for what I wrote.

I accepted this as something that was happening and couldn't be avoided. Then I realized that reporters---with families to support and mortgages to pay---were being replaced by the free copy that people like me were giving the papers. And at the same time, purveyors of "junk bonds" were looting the newspapers that I was getting published in. The money was there, but I was just helping guys like Ken Thomson and Conrad Black get rich. At that point I stopped writing for the paper press.

Since then, I've been blogging. But you know what? The same problem exists on the Internet. People have gotten used to paying nothing for content, and writers everywhere are expected to work for nothing at all. As a result, the content being provided is being twisted into "click bait" and "dumbed down" so writers can pump out quantity instead of quality. This is because that's what the advertisers want. The only mechanism I can think of to push back against this problem is through getting people to pay for what they like to read through "tip jars" and Patreon subscriptions. That's why I always put these ads in my blog posts---it's so I don't go back to the bad old days of taking the food out of the mouths of people with families and mortgages.

In effect, I'm trying to help people realize that if you want to have a better Internet---free from fake news, alt-right propaganda, and other crap---you are going to have to get used to paying for it. If you refuse to pay for anything that isn't behind a paywall, you are "doing your bit" to ensure that the Internet becomes a plaything for wealthy corporations and not a meeting place for intellectuals and artists.

So, the question becomes "what do you want?"

Feelings, Politics, Social Conflict, and, Confucian Ritual

In my last post I mentioned the importance of way modern society no longer gives many people any emotional feeling of "connection" and how neo-Fascists have exploited this to build support for noxious agendas. I thought I'd expand a bit on this issue in this post.

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To understand this issue, I think it's important to understand that people reading this post are going to come to it from different perspectives and it's important for all of us to understand this point. All people are not "created equal", and every individual person's particular life experience simply cannot be used to extrapolate to how every other person experiences the world. And this lack of a universal experience is absolutely key to what I want to talk about in this post.

In my own case, I have what is called an "anxiety disorder".  This came about as a result of a chaotic, violent, childhood in a dysfunctional family. What this means is that during the time when my brain was growing, outside stresses caused it to develop in one of the several potential ways the genes I inherited from my parents allowed. In other words, I might have been an "out-going", adventurous, trusting person, but because of the environment I was raised in, I instead developed into a person who is always looking for potential danger.

The way to think about this issue is to think of each person at birth being dealt a set of playing cards for a "turn-based" game like Eucre or Bridge. Those are the genes that they are given by their parents. But when it's time for your body to physically develop (or "express" those genes), it's as if your body has to decide which particular card it wants to play. Friendly, out-going, and, adventurous could be the ten of diamonds, whereas, stand-offish, introverted, and, cautious could be the ace of spades. Each of these behaviours have pluses and minuses in different given contexts. For example, in a time of prosperity where there are lots of opportunities---out-going, risk-takers have an advantage. In a time of chaos and declining prospects, in contrast---people who are cautious and avoid risks are better off.

Consider these two rabbits. Each of them has the same genetic inheritance for colouration. But because each was raised in different circumstances---namely average temperature---they developed different coloured fur. I don't know anything at all about Himalayan rabbits, but one could think of an environment where a totally white coat would be better camouflage than one with black high lites---and vice-versa. It's the same thing when we talk about people's disposition. And the average temperature would affect how much snow there in on the ground where one is hiding from things like eagles and weasels. In exactly the same way, children reared in warm, loving homes by supportive parents have brain wiring that is substantively different from those that were raised in homes where they spent a great deal of time legitimately scared for their safety.

Two Himilayan rabbits, raised at different temperatures.
Original photo from Genetics: A Conceptual Approach
from an article in Nature
Used under copy-rite "fair dealing" provision

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These different ways of experiencing the world can manifest themselves in different ways of living. For example, when most of my friends were heading out and taking risks like going overseas on development projects, starting up small NGOs, applying for grants, etc, I was looking for a secure job with benefits and a pension. That's why I got my job at the University---which is just about the only place in my town that has never laid anyone off and still has a gold-plated, defined-benefit pension with a built-in cost-of-living adjustment. As I approach retirement age, most of my friends have expressed some degree of envy to the retirement benefits that I will enjoy as compared to their situations. (To be fair to myself---many of them have received very large inheritances when their middle-class parents died---I don't expect to inherit a dime.) 

How I experience the world has a huge impact on the political worldview that I find appealing. I suspect that this is why I am increasingly attracted to Confucianism. It specifically posits a world that consists of paternalistic, reciprocal relationships between different parts of society. It says that people should look out for one another instead of competing. Bosses should keep people on, even if there really isn't enough work to justify their retention---because it's the benevolent thing to do.  Workers

Robert Frost,
photo by Walter Albertin
Library of Congress,
c/o Wiki Commons

should be diligent and not expect too much pay because they need to take into account the interests of the owners and managers of the company. The government should assume that it needs to intervene in the lives of ordinary people, because it has a similar obligation towards its citizens that a parent has to each of its children. A perfectly Confucian world would give everyone of its citizens the feeling that they are home, as in the sense of Robert Frost's statement "‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."  (If you haven't read Frost's poem The Death of the Hired Hand, I would recommend you do. It perfectly encapsulates many of the emotions that I am discussing in this post.)

In contrast to my anxiety-disorder fueled neo-Confucianism, I recently was listening to someone espousing a form of Libertarianism that suggested that we should rely upon competition to solve major social problems---such as racism. In effect, he suggested that there should be no laws against discrimination against people based on race or gender because this interferes with the constitutional right of "freedom of assembly".  How this works, according to him, is that any business that doesn't hire blacks or women would be out-competed by other companies that do, either because the first one would be artificially limiting its talent pool, or, because consumers would organize boycotts against it. I won't go into why I think that this is a naive suggestion, other than by suggesting that there are historical reasons why social change has never arrived by these means, which is why governments have intervened in situations like this.

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What I'm interested in is what sort of psychology is involved in a person espousing Libertarianism versus Confucianism.  Who's it going to be, Ayn Rand?  Or Confucius?

Ayn Rand, the apostle
of Libertarianism
photo c/o Wiki Commons

Confucius, the original
proponent of the "Nanny
State", c/o Wiki Commons 

I suppose I'm suggesting an expansion of the saying by Tom Wolfe that "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested". That is to say, our politics is informed by our life experience. Moreover, I'm going one step further and suggesting that our early childhood---to some extent---"hardwires" us to have a tendency towards one type of politics versus another.

This isn't to say that people are doomed to either be timid Confucians or adventurous Libertarians. I've done some very risky things---suing Walmart comes to mind---but in those instances I was pursuing social goals instead of personal ones. I was willing to risk losing my house, my pension, and, my entire life savings in order to help preserve my community. This is Confucian risk taking, not Libertarian. It is very different from, for example, someone who hops into an airplane and goes up to the far North in search of employment and ends up making big bucks in the tar sands. Or, who borrows a lot of money to start a business.

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Up until this point, I've made it sound like I'm something of a damaged individual because I support Confucianism. Actually, I don't think that this is fair, but rather an artifact of our society's language. (Another big issue for Confucius was the "rectification of language", but that's a topic for another post.) I identified myself as having an "anxiety disorder", which is quite true. I have had all the classic symptoms of PTSD---reoccurring nightmares, disassociation, flashbacks, etc---but I'm also high-functioning and it has never really caused major problems in my day-to-day life. But in this post I'm trying to work through how this issue may have affected my political worldview.

Having admitted this, I want to suggest that our society "loads the language" against the Confucianist worldview. In the language I used above, I described a person from a non-dysfunction family as being "friendly, out-going, and, adventurous". These are all positive attributes. But all of them can be part of a personality that is shallow, self-centred, and, egotistical. Being friendly and out-going can be shallow and insincere---nothing more than the old "would you like a cherry pie with your Big Mac?" script. And being "adventurous" can be nothing more than running away from the obligations that would hold someone in a specific place.

Years ago I lived in an old townhouse with a student from Shanghai. We had a neighbour named Lena, who was in her eighties and had (as near as we could tell) no friends or family. Her flat stank like sewage, and was over-run with cockroaches (I looked at her recycling container once---it was literally covered with the things.) The only time we ever saw her was twice a day when she went out to buy a local and national newspaper. The last we saw of her was a police officer breaking in her door in order to get her into an ambulance and off to the hospital. My student boarder was with me when this happened. He said to me "this would never happen in China". You could tell he was absolutely disgusted with Canadian society. (I suspect that this sort of scenario is much more common in China now than it was back then---progress?)

Would someone from a future era or different society identify Libertarians as suffering from "freedom poisoning", or, being a "borderline psycho-path", because of their indifference to the problems of the people around them?  How would people who really, really, really care about their communities or the natural environment feel about people who set out on "adventures" without considering the consequences for the community or natural environment? Would they be disgusted by people who unleash huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere for unnecessary jet airplane trips? Would they think anyone who put the ideal of "freedom" ahead of the real, concrete problems facing other people as being somewhat sick in the head?

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One last point. Confucianism is more than just a philosophic theory, it is a practical way of living your life. To this end, it prescribes a practice that helps you integrate it's insights into your day-to-day living. It puts forward benevolence as an ideal, but the way it suggests that a person can really learn to manifest this behaviour is through study and ritual. As for study, I'd suggest that the sort of self-analysis I've done in this blog post would fit that framework. But as for ritual, I'm a little hard-pressed to come up with an example. I recently listened to a podcast that helped explain why this is. It comes from a Western apologist for Confucianism by the name of Michael Puett. In it, he argues that what Confucian ritual does is train a person to understand the importance of inter-personal habits and patterns of interaction, and sculpt them to be able to create harmonious interactions. Unfortunately, translations of Confucian texts---like the Analects---have tended to edit out the descriptions of ritual because Western scholars have tended to think of them as irrelevant. As a result, I've never had much chance (as a non-Chinese reader) to expose myself to Confucian ritual.

As a result, it's hard to come up with an example that I can put on a blog post, but one example does come to me from a delightful Japanese television show that I recently binge-watched on Netflix:  the Samurai Gourmet.

This is a strange show to describe to others, so I'm going to let the YouTube clip above at least introduce readers to it's bizarre quality. One particular episode involved a flashback to when the retired "salary-man" (who is the hero of this show) was starting out. As a young man, he had wanted to quit his job and go do something else---which would have been career suicide for him. He hands in his letter of resignation to his boss, who instead of accepting it takes him out to his favourite restaurant. 

When they are there, the boss suggests that the young man take a good, careful look at the people working there. He points out the tremendous attention to detail that everyone is manifesting in every aspect of their work---from the chef to the busboys. Indeed, the owner spends some time training a young person in how to carefully clear and clean a table so not a spot of dirt is left from one customer to the other. The boss then tells the young man something to the effect that it isn't important what a person does to make a living, it's the attitude that they bring to the job that makes her a success or a failure. Moreover, the implication is that a "success" or "failure" comes from within---a person can be a tremendous success in a failing business, or, a complete failure even if they are making a ton of money.

The point I want to raise isn't the wisdom of the specific message, but rather how it is conveyed. The boss took his underling out for a special meal to make the point. This is actually a very common thing in both Japanese and Chinese society, where meals are an integral part of the relationship between managers and employees. In effect, this is a ritual that is used to get people to stop and reassess exactly what they are doing in their work culture and to build a sense of "community" that transcends a mere economic activity. Moreover, it is important to realize that the boss wasn't just trying to convince his young employee about how he should approach the job---he was also illustrating how much the boss considered it his duty to do everything he could to help the new guy adapt to the "salary-man" culture that he had just been accepted into. This is the two-way sense of social obligation and community that is the essence of Confucianism.

If this sounds a bit far-fetched, consider how common communal meals are in other cultures to build a sense of solidarity. In the early Christian church communion literally was a real meal---the body and blood of Christ were not just a sip of wine or a cracker, they were literally a big meal where even the poorest person could get a full belly. Sikhs still do something like this at their temples. They have a communal meal, called "langar" where absolutely anyone---regardless of race, religion, or, anything else---can have a free, vegetarian meal. The Sikhs in my town---even in far away Canada---serve it even here. And many were the times I ate together with the other members of the taijiquan school where I was initiated into Daoism.

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OK. Time for the begging bowl. If you like what I write, consider supporting me through either a regular "dollar a month" contribution through Patreon or a one-time donation. Just to let you know I practice what I preach, here's list of the people I regularly support:  "the C-Realm Vault Podcast", "Canadaland", and, "Guelph Politico". I've also given one-time donations to "The Professional Left Podcast", "The C-Realm", and, "The Number One Janitor". I've also bought podcast downloads from "Hardcore History". I've spent far, far more money supporting other creative people on the Internet than I've ever made. I just wanted to suggest that this is what needs to be the new normal. If you can afford to help people create content, you really should consider it "just part of the gig". I do.   

What is a Hermit?

KMO from C-Realm Podcast

I've been thinking a lot about politics and society lately. I did an interview with a Vermont radio station as part of my feeble attempts to promote my recent book, and in the conversation the idea of success came up. In terms of radio shows and podcasts, as well as blogging and book publishing, the important issue is how many "subscribers" or "readers" you have. By that metric, both my interviewer (KMO fromthe C-Realm Podcast) and myself are abject failures. He has spent long periods of his life interviewing people for his podcasts and only has a relatively small number of subscribers (including myself.)  And I have spent many years writing---first for newspapers, then blogs, and, now books and have a very small number of followers too.

Bodhidharma, by Yoshitoshi, 1887.
c/o Wiki Commons

I answered this question by suggesting that this obscurity is why I call myself a "hermit". People often get hung up on the idea that I am a hermit by pointing out that I have a job, friends, a wife, live in the city, etc. To their way of thinking, to be a hermit exclusively means living in a cave on some remote mountain top. Well, most people only see the surface of things and not the core, so I generally ignore this opinion when it gets raised.

What a word, phrase, or, idea "means" is a very slippery thing---especially if it has any sort of depth to it. The famous book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones gets it's title from a story told about Bodhidharma (the supposed first "patriarch" who "brought" Zen from India to China.) According to the story, after nine years of teaching, he wanted to go home. So he tested his disciples to find out about their understanding of the "Void".

Dofuku said :  "In my opinion, truth is beyond affirmation or negation, for this is the way it moves."
Bodhidharma replied:  "You have my skin."
The nun Soji said:  "In my view, it is like Ananda's sight of the Buddha-land---seen once and for ever."
Bodhidharma answered:  "You have my flesh."
Doiku said:  "The four elements of light, airiness, fluidity, and solidity are empty [i.e. inclusive] and the five skandhas are no-things. In my opinion, no-thing [i.e., spirit] is reality."
Bodhidharma commented:  "You have my bones."
Finally, Eka bowed before the master---and remained silent.
Bodhidharma said:  "You have my marrow". 

I'm not directly interested in what the "Void" is in this post. Instead, I'm concerned about what it society makes of someone who is interested in it in the first place. This is important to Daoists, because the things that make Zen Buddhism "Zen" are elements that it has borrowed from Daoism.

The "skin" of the Void is the idea that there are truths that step outside of conventional dichotomies such as "Left" and "Right", or, "Moral" and "Immoral". The "flesh" of the Void is the idea that once you get a glimpse of this different way of looking at the world, it changes how you see everything. The "bones" is the idea that once you understand that the unconventional truths exist, and, having seen them use them to reassess how you view everything, your evaluation of what is or is not important changes. And the "marrow" suggests that when this re-evaluation takes place, your behaviour changes profoundly---especially how you interact with the rest of society.

Understanding this point, a hermit isn't just someone who lives in remote physical locations. It can also mean someone who lives in a remote ethical, spiritual, or, metaphysical space. If someone lives in the middle of a bustling city, there is still the question of how much she is engaged with the world that surrounds her. Doe she see it as being inherently valueless? Irrelevant to her life project? Does she think that there is any future to it? If not, then I would say that she is a hermit.

Confucius has a saying that has a one-dimensional take on this issue. But since that one dimension was crucial to him, I think it is apropos of the same point that Bodhidharma and I are making.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

Confucius, Anonymous, 1770,
c/o Wiki Commons

So I would suggest that being "not successful" is not something to be ashamed about. It may be caused by many things, but in some cases it is simply the result of having a deeper insight into how our society---if not the very universe---operates. In those cases I would suggest that it means that someone has a "hermit's soul".

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Having said the above. I still have bills to pay and a family to support. I've added a Patreon button and a tip jar. Both of which remain very empty. OK. If that is too much to ask, there is another thing that would help. Turn off your "ad-blocker" for my site and click on the adverts---even if you instantly close the window. This has a significant impact on how much money I make from my "Ad Sense" account, which helps me support my family---even while it costs you nothing at all.

Sculpting Our Own Consciousness

The other day I was teaching a neighbour how to make her own wine. A year ago, I got her into making wine at one of the "you brew" places, which made her realize that wine can be incredibly cheap if you go about it the right way. It was now time to show her how it can be even cheaper still if you do it in your kitchen. (We are trying a kit right now that cuts the cost of white wine to about $1.65/bottle.)

While the primary fermenter and fermentation lock were sanitizing, I made her some green tea and we had a visit. I mentioned an acquaintance from my youth who was recently hospitalized for malnutrition after decades of reclusive behaviour, which culminated in being found starving in an apartment so dirty it was declared a hazard. My friend commented that someone had once told her that he thought that people could "think themselves into mental illness", if they weren't careful.

This is a complex issue. First of all "mental illness" is a very broad range of things. It's like the word "cancer", which is more like a symptom (unregulated cell reproduction) than a specific disease. Lung cancer, which is usually created by inhaling a pollutant---like cigarette smoke---is different from cervical cancer which is usually caused by infection with a virus. In the same way, depression is different from PTSD, which is different from Schizophrenia, and so on. I seems obvious to me that these different types of problems arise from different causes---just like in the case of cancer.

Having said that, I suspect that there is some truth, in some cases, in what my neighbour said. One widely-used psychiatric treatment known as "cognitive behaviour therapy" (CBT) is based on the idea that one aspect of several forms of mental illness come down to people having faulty thinking

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy,
Urstadt, From Wiki Commons

processes that shape their way of experiencing the world around them. The therapy is to have people examine the key elements of their thinking, and get them into the habit of changing them to another, more functional way of doing so.

When I was trying to give up smoking I found that I would often relapse and begin again. This was frustrating, but after a while I noticed something. When I felt optimistic about the future it was easy to stop smoking. But when I was pessimistic, I would inevitably say to myself "oh, screw it---what's the point?" and relapse. My addictive behaviour was related to my mood. And I was "blue" or slightly depressed a lot of the time. When I figured this out, I tried to remind myself when "blue" that this was a time when I would be tempted to start smoking again, but which I would regret later on. This helped me avoid restarting.

A related issue came from a period of time when I went to a Roman Catholic hermit for spiritual direction. One of the things he did to support himself was teach the Ignation spiritual exercises at a local retreat centre. One the practical suggestions that come from this system is the idea that people often oscillate between periods of "desolation" and "consolation". Desolation is what modern people would recognize as "depression", and the exercises teach that this is a natural part of human self-transformation. When things are working well in our lives, we come out of this desolation and enter into consolation, which is a greater understanding and insight into how our psyche and the world around us operates.

Ignatius Loyola, From the Jesuit Institute, via Google Images

This was a tremendously important insight for me, as it changed the way I viewed my periods of feeling "blue". I stopped feeling that they were this horrible, totally worthless state of mind and instead saw them as part of a process who's end result was a growth in wisdom. This isn't to say that they were any better (knowing that the doctor is breaking your legs to straighten them out doesn't mean that it hurts any less), but the pain is bearable now because I often remind myself that I will probably come out of this experience with a better understanding of life.

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I've pretty much built my life around this process of paying attention to my awareness and how what I do impacts it. For example, if I don't write a little bit every day I start getting progressively more and more "scattered" in my consciousness. This, in turn, stops me from being even-keeled in my emotions, which leads me to doing and saying things that I don't want to---and being more fearful of potential reactions from others. (To be perfectly honest, this is why I am writing this blog post. I've been doing a lot of research lately, which means that I haven't been writing and it has been catching up with me.)

This activity of "paying attention" to how your mind operates, and what it is in your life that affects it is actually part of the very earliest Daoist spiritual practice: "Holding onto the One". This is a practice referred to in the Taiping Jing and the Nei-Yeh, which involves paying attention to the world around you---both outside and inside of ourselves---and looking for the subtle rules (or "Daos") that govern it. In a way, this is very similar to cognitive behaviour therapy---which is hardly surprising, as I read somewhere that the people who developed this school were inspired by reading from ancient schools of Greek practical philosophy such as Stoicism and Cyncism.

Using the "Ring of Control" and Bodily Awareness to Control the Mind

If you've read Journey to the West one of the things you should remember is the way Xuanzang (the Monk) controls Sun Wukong (Monkey) is through the use of a golden band that Guanyin gives him. He gets tricked into placing the band over his head, where it shrinks, and, actually binds itself to his skull. Guanyin teaches Xuanzang a mantra that he can recite that makes the band shrink, squeezing Sun Wukong's skull and causing excruciating pain. This is the only way that Xuanzang can control his "chief disciple".

A Japanese painting of Sun Wukong 

Journey to the West is a collection of folk tales that people have been reciting as entertainment for a long time. But most people don't realize that that the most popular version of the text is considered by some to be a Daoist teaching story. It's taken me a lifetime of learning, but reading the W.J.F. Jenner translation for the third or fourth time, I can now see this is obviously true.

People sometimes get hung up on this interpretation because they believe that these sorts of teaching allegories have to be totally universal, or else they aren't real. They point at the characters of the Dragon horse and Sandy and ask what they are supposed to "represent". But the fact is that Journey to the West is primarily an piece of entertaining fiction, not a book of Daoist theory. It needn't be completely allegorical, all the time---it just needs to be so once in a while.

Another complaint is that since Xuanzang is a Buddhist monk and the journey is to the Western Buddhist heaven to get Buddhist scriptures, it "obviously" cannot have anything to do with Daoism. Well, this misses the constant refrain in the book that "all religions are one", the way Daoist teachers are often referenced, and, the many, many allusions to arcane aspects of Daoist teachings---all of which would be missed by the casual reader of a bad translation.

One of the ways to see this is to understand the group travelling to the Western heaven as one entity with each character representing one particular part of the human psyche. Pigsy represents the instinctual drives of the human beings. Xuanzang is the higher intellect that attempts to control the other elements of the human being. And Monkey is the "mind ape" that is the well-spring of mental activity that gives human beings their ability to think their way through the problems of life.

The part of human beings that Monkey represents is that bubbling well-spring of creativity that goes on in our mind and allows us to think of solutions to the endless problems that life throws our way. As such, it is essential to life. That is why Sun Wukong is the protector of Xuanzang in Journey to the West---because our "monkey mind" is what has allowed human beings to survive and prosper. But the problem with this bubbling well is that if we don't exert some control over it, it creates havoc in our lives. The well can create ungrounded fears that eat us alive. Or it can develop weird prejudices that alienate us from the community we need to survive. Or it can create strange obsessions that cause us to waste away our lives pursuing absurd delusions. All these problems are represented in the start of the book by the crazy havoc that Monkey creates in Heaven.

10th century Northern Chinese wooden Guanyin

The Buddha traps Sun Wukong under a mountain for five hundred years until Guanyin releases him to become Xuanzang's protector. But she realizes that without some way for the higher intellect to control the "monkey mind", there is no way that anyone can become realized or enlightened. So she tricks monkey into wearing her band and teaches the monk how to recite a mantra to control it. This is the important point.  The band is a literary device, but a mantra literally is a way of controlling our run-away creative thought process. It is like a "clamp" that blocks up the bubbling, crazily over-flowing ability to create ideas that can overwhelm our minds.

The problem is that most of us live our lives with a constant internal voice burning through out minds that says all sorts of destructive things like "you're too fat", "what's wrong with you?", "what if I run out of money?", "what if I lose my job?", "who the Hell do they think they are to tell me what to do?", etc. This voice can get louder and louder until they take over our life entirely. Repeating some phrase over and over again---which is what saying a mantra really is all about---literally drowns this voice out and allows our intellect to regain control of  our thought processes. Contrary to what some people may tell you, it doesn't really matter what the mantra is. You can repeat "om mani padme hum", "da do run run, da do run run", or, whatever. My first meditation teacher said if I wanted, I could repeat "cocksucker, cocksucker cocksucker" over and over again if it made sense to me. But the point is to be able to "clamp down" on that monkey mind and stop it from becoming so loud that it overwhelms your consciousness.

People often go into great detail about the various and sundry ways there are to meditate. But ultimately, meditation is a very simple process. It is looking at the way your mind operates, deciding what is the ideal way for it to be, and, finding out ways that you can learn to control it. In the case that I've mentioned from Journey to the West, I've identified one of the easiest---using a mantra. But there are other mechanisms too.

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The traditional Daoist
map of the body

One that I use a lot lately involves bodily awareness. I suppose that to explain it in Daoist terms I could say that by practicing neidan (qigong---in this case taijiquan), I have learned to move my qi around the body from my lower Dantian up through the mysterious gateway, along my twelve-story pagoda up to the mud pill. At least that's the language that comes from traditional Daoist teaching, and what is used in Journey to the West.

Being a modern Westerner, I would much rather say that through a process of dissecting my body with my consciousness, I've learned to identify different elements of my bodily awareness. This allows me to loosen my lower abdomen and chest region. This has allowed me to dramatically improve my bodily posture. It also allows me to become aware of the subtle ways in which my visual, auditory, and, bodily awareness interact with my consciousness to influence my thought processes. Frankly, I find this sort of language a lot more useful than saying that "my qi moves" from one place to another. But I do think that I am describing the same thing as the old Daoists.

And the upshot is that I can control my "monkey mind" by focusing my consciousness on the subtle feelings in my body. One part of this is feeling my feet come into contact with the floor beneath my feet when I walk. The experience is somewhat like what I expect walking on my hands would feel like. The heel makes contact, I can feel my weight rippling through my (pitifully collapsed) arch, and then each of my individual toes engages with the floor and then rolls off. At the same time, I consciously "drop" my shoulders and chest, counter-acting my genetic predisposition to "hunch" my shoulders into a "scholar's hump". At the same time, I consciously try to look through both of my eyes, giving each equal weight of attention instead of allowing one or the other to dominate. Together with these and other conscious activities, I create a calm and peace of mind that results in a feeling of something coming up my spine and manifesting itself in between my brows and on the top of my head. (At the same time, I am acutely aware of the almost constant throbbing of my chronically infected sinus cavities and ear canals---I get a lot of virus infections at work, plus I am very allergic to dust.)

This "hyper awareness" has the same effect as repeating a mantra constantly. It overwhelms the chattering monkey mind and allows the intellect to assert control over the random creative impulses that the mind spews at us like a fire hose. As a side effect, for me the hyper awareness technique has added benefits lacking from the mantra method. For one thing, it helps improve my physical health. I suffer from many complaints:  arthritis, tendonitis, tennis elbow, chronic sinusitis, etc. (Most are the result of a hard life doing physical labour, inheriting some bad genes---such as very, very flat feet--- and being exposed to thousands of teenagers from all over the world every day at work. Without taijiquan and other neidan practices, I'd be a mess.)

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I was asked recently why it is that I write about this stuff and do all the things I do. After all, I walk a very narrow path. Traditional religious Daoists have sometimes attacked me very angrily for being a Western "innovator" who they feel "spits on the tradition". At the same time, I often meet Westerners who can barely hide their contempt for me because they think that I am an apologist for "New Age super-naturalism". But the point is that we all suffer greatly from the delusions that our monkey minds create for us. In fact, I don't think that there could be a greater gift that a man could give another than to help them tame the dumb notions that befog their minds.

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Zen Buddhism is the "first cousin" of Daoism and there is a story about a Japanese Zen hermit named Ryōkan.

One evening a thief visited Ryōkan's hut at the base of the mountain only to discover there was nothing to steal. Ryōkan returned and caught him. "You have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift." The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away. Ryōkan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, "I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon." (From Wikipedia.)

The point is that Ryōkan had something that was absolutely priceless:  insight into how his mind operated and the ability to unify his consciousness. Ryōkan would have dearly loved to be able to give this insight to everyone, including the thief. Yet the thief not only didn't want it, he didn't even know the value of this gift or that Ryōkan could give it to him. That is the point of Ryōkan wishing he could give the thief the moon. That is the dilemma that anyone who has gained any realisation faces---almost no one knows enough to even want it.  Yet, we have to keep on trying.  That's because once in a while someone actually does want the moon---.

Sculpture of Ryōkan
by Dready at Wiki Commons