Who says my poems are poems?
They aren't poems at all.
Only when you understand my poems aren't poems
Can we talk poetry.
This translation by Sam Hamill in The Poetry of Zen (2004) Boston: Shambhala, p. 159
“Truth,” said a traveller,
“Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
“Often have I been to it,
“Even to its highest tower,
“From whence the world looks black.”
“Truth,” said a traveller,
“Is a breath, a wind,
“A shadow, a phantom;
“Long have I pursued it,
“But never have I touched
“The hem of its garment.”
And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.
In short, I think we need to foster emotional intelligence and not just academic intelligence, and we need to rebuild social interaction in a super-tribal world (i.e. a world too big for everyone to know everyone else.) [But do the latter without the xenophobia.]
To elaborate:
First, I think we need some true coming-of-age experience that facilitates a sense of self-empowerment. This would not just be collecting envelopes of cash and dancing a dance or reciting a prayer, but something more akin to being dropped in the woods for a week. Of course, this would require engaged parenting and skill acquisition and not just leaving kids with video games and social media. It seems like a lot of our present problems result from people with no sense of empowerment or the emotional intelligence that comes therefrom. Such people may have passed all the tests but still have “imposter syndrome” and the like.
Second, we need some sort of way to build tribal-scale groups in which people interact with a small group of others repeatedly — in person and face-to-face. The challenge is that this needs to be done without increasing xenophobia, which is already trending the wrong way. I think there is a problematic tendency to be virtually engaged but not personally engaged with others in humanity. Even in I, who am intensely introverted, the social impulse remains, but we live in a world where people can successfully dropout.
Some people get one or both of these experiences in any number of ways, but it seems like an ever-increasing segment of the population lacks confidence (even if they had a 4.0 gpa the whole way through their formal education,) and lacks human interaction (even if they have 2000 social media “friends.”)
Ma: The Japanese Secret to Contemplation and Calm: An Invitation to Awareness by Ken Rodgers
Who knows this or that?
Hark in the wall to the rat:
Since the world was, he has gnawed;
Of his wisdom, of his fraud
What dost thou know?
In the wretched little beast
Is life and heart,
Child and parent,
Not without relation
To fruitful field and sun and moon.
What art thou? His wicked eye
Is cruel to thy cruelty.
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
1.) Nothing is permanent.
2.) The world is not what it seems.
3.) One’s subjective experience is not determined by the state of the world.
4.) Nobody grasps enough truth to be intolerant.
5.) Uncertainty is the root of all fear.
6.) Fear is the root of all hatred.
7.) Hatred is a subjective experience (See #3.) Also, uncertainty is the root of all hatred (by the transitive property,) hence the benefit of travel.
8.) Any who: a.) has suffered a string of hardships; b.) allows themselves to believe that some “other” is wholly responsible for said hardships; and c.) who lacks a sufficient sense of self-empowerment to avoid surrendering entirely to a group identity can (and likely will) become a Nazi (or the equivalent of their day.)
9.) No one can predict the future. [Regardless of how much we all love to try. (See #5.)]
10.) Entropy increases (ultimately, in a closed system.)
NOTE: I remain ready to abandon any certainty in the face of better information.
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone -
Man has created death.
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
I think humanity has a golden age coming. Unfortunately, a.) as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, “In the long run, we are all dead.” Accordingly, I don’t expect I’ll live to see that great age. And, b.) said great age is likely to come on the backend of a tragic period whose reach and devastation will make the Second World War seem like a puny and short-lived regional skirmish by comparison. [I also think there’s a good chance I’ll miss the worst of this, but there’s no accounting for the rapidity at which it might move (and the process has begun.)]
The root of this combination of relative near-term pessimism and long-run optimism is the observation that we are experiencing a technological revolution that there is no reason to believe won’t end in machines that are both smarter and more capable than we, and we have no plan for what to do in that scenario. We have no conception of what an economy looks like in which machines do everything faster, more cheaply, and more efficiently than human labor. I wouldn’t be so pessimistic if our institutions and legal frameworks were trending better and better, but — in fact — after years of spreading rule of law and democracy, we are starting to see global shrinkage and a rise of a strange populist authoritarianism that I can only imagine being catastrophic under the stress test that is to come.
Why the long-term optimism? Nothing lasts forever, and tough times breed tough and capable people. [Whereas comfort addiction is a major factor in our near-term predicament.] I think the Golden Age will be humans learning not to be defined by production / consumption but by developing the human body and mind to its utmost capacity.
A lot of people are worried about population collapse. I am not so worried about that. I think that: a.) humanity could use some thinning; b.) we do fine with long time scale threats. As pressures rise, the adjustments start and — perhaps with some growing pains — we’ll get where we need to be. The AI / Machine Learning revolution concerns me because I suspect it will happen too quickly to steer the ship (like being in an aircraft carrier as a tsunami comes, there’s no agility to navigate out of the way and no speed to outrun it, you just have to take the damage and try to recover.)
You were probably looking for an answer like flying cars, but I gave up on those long ago.
I’m not one for favorites; I think it’s a form of experiential laziness. That said, there is music that has particular emotional resonance for me because it’s what was playing where I was when I was when I was younger — mostly rock and indie rock.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 