Tab Dump

As always, interesting articles and posts that i've read but haven't had the time to intelligently comment on.

• Yogasm? Really? For women only, alas.
• How to best deal with the inevitable fact that we're going to die someday? Denial! Or, more specifically Courageous Denial:
  "If all our character is a lie, created to keep us from recognizing the circumstances of our existence, then we can choose our own course.  We can choose to love, live, work, and play because those things matter to us.  We need not be bound to scorn, or to roll the Sisyphean rock at all.  We can altogether forget about the absurdity and live happy, well-adjusted lives.  And what’s more courageous than that?"
• Why it's important to log out of facebook, and clear your cookies, to avoid the social media monster tracking your movements elsewhere on the web.
• I, too, dig female voices with my indie rock. And Metric kicks it for me every time.
• The first step towards "reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories"
• Is love an Art? Yes, methinks.
• Amanda Alinehan points us to the Joy of Desire. Money quote:
• "If you’ve ever been in a power struggle with a 5 year old, you know the lengths that kids will go to in order to get what they want.  Children are much more closely connected with their desires than adults are, and have no shame in trying to fulfill them.
  What if you could connect with your desires that way?  To know what you wanted and to have no shame in wanting to fulfill it.  That would make you a powerful force in the world – for yourself and for others."
• An overview of the Transcendental Meditation resurgence, as led by the David Lynch Foundation. Yes, that David Lynch. Never tried it myself, but i'm intrigued.

Last but not least, we visit the tired "9/11 changed everything" department, where we find John Freeman pronouncing the death of the "'Systems Novel' - a novel [that] bulges and hums with a theory of how the world is run: the market economy and the economy of language - the twin broadcast networks of global power." He writes that these types of books from Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo and DFW "create what Fredric Jameson described as ''the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs.'' Freeman claims that "In one hour, Osama bin Laden proved that a spectacle could be more powerful than any narrative, especially in a world in which signs and symbols traveled much faster than words and stories."

It's an interesting claim, I guess, and might explain why there's been a dearth of "big novels" recently, but I do need to point out that DeLillo himself explicitly made this same point in Mao II where he claims that the novelist is being supplanted by the terrorist. To me, this type of hair splitting is meaningless: people will always continue to write in order to make sense of the world, terrorists or not. Whether or not people read them or not is another matter. People may for the moment be paying attention to the terrorist, but i'd be shocked if narrative didn't make a mainstream comeback in the future.

How to Focus in the Age of Distraction

Source: Learning Fundamentals via The Big Picture

Meditating and the "I"

The Dish points out that: "Mark Vernon questions the merits of Buddhism as interpreted by the West:

[I]n meditation, Buddhism offers a therapy that tackles the hyper-individualism of today by stressing the instability and dissolution of the self. Only, it seems to me that is not true. Whilst it may be very hard to say what an ‘I’ is – and it is surely multiple and porous – it is foolish to rush to concluding there’s no ‘I’ at all. It is less reactionary, surely, to rest with the notion that we are something of a mystery to ourselves – a mystery deepened in meditative analysis, not dissolved in it."

As a novice meditator, this rings true to me. I haven't been able to wrap my mind around many Buddhist concepts, and the idea that the self doesn't exist is top among them. I like and appreciate that everyone is simply a mystery to themselves, with lots of unquestioned assumptions and cultural conditionings that meditation can help point out to you, but as soon as you accept this, the mystery deepens as you start to question what comes after you strip away your assumptions. There's no easy answer and I suspect that what answer there is is different for each one of us.

Meditation: Recognizing the Capricious Mind

I've been meditating lately. It's extremely hard to do, because the brain simply just won't stop wandering away from what it's "supposed" to be doing during meditation - that is, concentrating on the breath as a conduit for focusing on the present moment. When I meditate, I found myself getting more and more frustrated with my inability to focus on my breath for more than 20-30 seconds at a time before realizing that my mind had moved onto other things; frustrated, that is, until I read this great meditation primer by Sam Harris. Specifically, I liked this:

...falling, from the point of view of vipassana, occurs ceaselessly, every moment that one becomes lost in thought. The problem is not thoughts per se but the state of thinking without knowing that one is thinking.

As every meditator soon discovers, such distraction is the normal condition of our minds: Most of us fall from the wire every second, toppling headlong—whether gliding happily in reverie, or plunging into fear, anger, self-hatred and other negative states of mind. Meditation is a technique for breaking this spell, if only for a few moments. The goal is to awaken from our trance of discursive thinking—and from the habit of ceaselessly grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant—so that we can enjoy a mind that is undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present.

For some reason, I had always thought that the idea of meditation was to clear the mind of all thoughts, but Harris not only says that this is impossible, but that "every meditator" experiences this problem. This may seem obvious to you, but to me it was a real relevation. I read this passage as saying that the real goal of meditation is to accept the constant failure of your mind to focus on the here and now. Recognizing this constraint - and being aware of it constantly - will help to realize when the mind wanders away from the present. If nothing else, Harris' passage has helped me get past my feeling of meditation inferiority in favor of trying to internalize this fact.