Burton on soul

Richard Burton, Victorian explorer and Sufi, wrote that he didn't believe in "an I within the I". Nor did he have much truck with conventional notions of the soul. "Soul is not a thing, it is a state of things" he said. Which is perhaps worth pondering.

Are unlucky people simply stupid?

Though it must be granted that there is a fairly rare selection of individuals who seem endowed with more luck than average we can, given their scarcity, disregard them for now. The far broader spectrum of ‘lucky people’ are, on closer analysis, simply in  ‘the right place at the right time’ ie. they make the most of their circumstances. They do not reject their circumstances because they aren’t perfect, they make the best of them. It is not uncommon to find someone who says that an illness or disability was ‘the luckiest thing that happened to them’ as it opened a previously closed door. Such people are, really, imbued with flexible and, just as importantly, open minds. This openness and flexibility means early opportunities are spotted and taken advantage of before the crowd, with its inevitable slug like slowness happens upon them and creates a trend. Perceptive and aware- these ‘lucky people’ are simply…not stupid. So are the unlucky stupid? Bar those who are the polar and necessary (perhaps) opposite of the supernaturally lucky, I think we can say in the main the unlucky are either stupid or conduits of the stupidity of others. They have, perhaps through no fault of their own (being born in such and such a country for example) found themselves bound to the bad luck/stupidity of their leaders and superiors.

are there stupid cultures?

A culture is set of behaviours which naturally mimetic humans copy in order to belong and enjoy the advantages of that culture. The higher up you go in status in that culture the more you will have to adhere to the values of that culture. Cultures, therefore, like any big group, act to leverage stupidity.

Any culture that encourages appearance of cleverness over real intelligence will create stupidity.

Any culture that encourages ignorance will create stupidity.

Any culture in which communication is poor and convoluted will create stupidity.

Any culture in which stupidity- when exposed- is the cause of demotion and ridicule will generate stupidity. Bizarrely, a culture that celebrates (without actively rewarding by rebranding it as something else) stupidity is one in which it probably won’t occur that much, as celebration heightens non-judgemental awareness- and being aware of stupidity and its prevalence is the first step to reducing it.

Any culture which force entanglement in big bureaucracies, big events, big groups of any kind will foster stupidity.

we ritualise the wrong things

Though we mock Tundra dwellers for their bizarre taboos we may have something to learn. People who ritualise work and play free up the serious stuff for serious attention. In the developed world we take our work seriously and any ritualisation is frowned on as 'inefficient'. However our unspent playfulness and need for ritual gets dumped into the religious arena. No wonder the Tundra dwellers think our priests are 'playing' at religion...People need ritual and play- so put it up front in life- just as many indigenous people's did- till we taught them 'better.'

a few sayings

The best remedy for anger is delay- Seneca.

Not what we have, but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance- Epicurus.

Take more time, cover less ground- Thomas Merton.

Travels with Epicurus

I read a lot of books. Most of them I don't recommend- but this one I do- Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein. It is a meditation on many things, but mainly old age. It doesn't aim to provide all the answers, but it offers a fascinating way into many different subjects. Well worth reading.

boxing versus denial

One of my Grandfathers was in WW1. He fought on the western front, was captured towards the end of the war in the big German push of 1918, spent several months in a POW camp and then came home.

He very rarely spoke about the war, and almost never about his experiences at the front, and if he did it was in some humorous and non-personal way. He never bought German cars and never went abroad and lived a very happy life until he died aged 87. He had successfuly BOXED OFF the nasty experiences of the war. He essentially followed a technique that neuro-plasticity studies commend: the less you think about something the fewer connections are grown in the brain linking to that thing and the less important it becomes.

This may look like denial but it is different. Denial is when you focus on something by denying it. The man who tells the world he hates money but spends all his time talking about how bad money is. What we give our attention to we love, in the sense we are actively building connections to it in our ever changing and growing brains.

But boxing off, compartmentalising, is simply telling yourself not to think about a thing. As soon as you catch yourself you change the mental subject so to speak. And you don't encourage that thinking. You don't go abroad, you don't drive around in a car made in the country whose soldiers killed your best mate.

Oh yes, confront the past we are told, forgive, come to terms with it. Well, a better approach is to preserve one's ability to keep learning by not diverting our learning capability into learning how to be continually distressed by a past event. The brain is always learning, even if it is learning how not to learn- which is cognitive decay.

We are not here to be victimised by our memories. Choose the ones you want to preserve and shove the others in the box room and never go there. The belief that we cannot control our own thinking is one of the most pervasive myths of the present age. It has come about because 'control' is seen to be 'opposition'. Yet one can control thoughts as Buddhists have known for centuries by simply observing them and letting them pass. And when they have passed, not deliberately revisiting them.