Re: Wait, what's George's problem again?


"Déjà Fu" <chanfu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote
Mayura wrote:
"George Cherry" wrote
"Mayura" <grfarm@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
"George Cherry" wrote

I enjoy learning, solving puzzles, and making
discoveries. For example, I'm going to tackle
one or two of Jonathan's posts today--that
should keep me busy awhile. : o )
Curious George, it helps if you just "let go and let God" ;)

Anyway, it happens all the time - you're chucking a plank for Muttley,
when
up the beach walks the recently unsuspended atom-for-atom clone that
the
aliens made of you when you were 16. Compared with this entity, you
would
feel a sense of - in psychological terms - having 'progressed' (?) But
how
would you represent this 'progress'? What constitutes psychological
progress? What typifies the the 'unprogressed' and the 'progressed'
and
the
difference between the two? (Preferably in universal generalizable
human
terms rather than actualizing one's particular inner cherry or oak or
apple
tree or extravert or introvert or 'typical gemini' or whatever.)
I probably wouldn't recognize him. At any rate,
we'd have little or nothing to say to each other.

(If mine was going to live on from that point, I'd have loads to tell
him.
In one way, most of my posts are to some putative younger me.)

And what brings it about and how and why etc.? And if there are people
for
whom it doesn't seem to be happening, how not and why not etc.? And
are
various religious people and new age types right in their
representation
that only a relatively small proportion of people are on some 'path'
and
making any 'progress' and everyone else is just doing nothing much or
are
most or all people 'progressing'?
I was prepared to quote you on your next post:

"Well, I might not understand you here."

But I think that you're writing (dumb-ing?) down to me here.

Absolutely not, George. I was trying to kill at least two birds with one
stone. From my point of view, with regard to the representation of
psychological 'progress', for anyone who wants to have some kind of an
'examined' life, the whole 'field' seems to have been taken over by the
'against-dukkha-ish' misery-fixers. The Buddha is just the tip of the
iceberg. I wander around a bookshop's 'religion' section and so far,
it's
all just more of the same. I try the 'mind body spirit' section and it's
more of the same learn to 'control' this and 'overcome' that. The
'psychology' section is the same 'pathology'-based stuff. Psychiatry the
same. Relevant overlapping parts of 'philosophy' like stoicism,
neoplatonism, scepticism etc. the same.

You wrote <<I enjoy learning, solving puzzles, and making discoveries.>>
so
I thought you might be able to consider the questions and be able to
give me
some independent answers that weren't just more from the same hymn
***.
And also, I thought that if I could get you thinking about what is a
significant proportion of what I am thinking about, then the posts you
were
contemplating 'tackling' would make more sense as part of a pattern.
Because, to me, most bits won't make sense to anyone habituated by
default
or convenience or idleness to a misery-fixer based world-view. They
sometimes half-acknowledge that I might have a bit of a point somewhere
but
overall the world-view just chucks it out again as incompatible or too
much
trouble to integrate or whatever. Pick up a new 'bit', rinse and repeat
indefinitely.

Well, there's more than 'one' of us Forishers and WE certainly
seem to keep trying 'for' George. Though, when I come across people
who are beating their backs with spiked flails and ask, "Does
that feel good?" and they answer, "No." I'm a bit non-plussed
for a snappy comeback so I usually say, "Are you just trying to get
rid of the fleas?" and they usually say, "Yes!" and I don't dare
tell them to just go have a nice hot bath because that flail has
no direction of its own...

(I can't remember whether your e-mail address has been munged or not but I
sent a Bahiya post that wouldn't fly as far as my screen and a notification
of my e-mail address to it...)... My atypical question-barrage might have
inadvertently thrown George into mode/s... 1) I don't know what you mean...
or 2) I don't know what you want... or 3) I don't know what you're soon
going to try and sell me... or 4) please get away from me you wierdo... etc.

May I quote poetry for my reply? Please read it.

OK.

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go

-- E. E. Cummings

I forgot about your Grim Reaper Thursdays :)

Please. Lettuce examine this scenario with all the seriosity
WE can muster (camera pans across nodding parties).
With George, it's more like the occasional Hopeful Mayday
(with equal likelihood given to actually bringing him to
laugh at himself) which in itself is cause for celebration
before we hike back to wherever Calvary is at the moment.

Well, there is a certain consistency between a slight deficiency in the
'hopeful'ness department and 'allergic-to-supernaturalism'-ism. Other ways
in which said ism typically impact on my project include the following. The
Buddha and similar had it (approximately) that what we 'are' is a
superphysical and undifferentiated Buddha-nature, purusha, atman, brahman,
holy spirit, whatever and that what we're not is physical (and sometimes
also 'mental') and differentiated.

Some of the upshots of this being that e.g. you could have a 'convergent'
model of psychological progress. What is 'divergent' will progressively
'drop off' from what is convergent. You can have a model that purports to
have universal applicability to every sentient being. One way or another
with rebirth and survival of bodily death and/or something else, there is in
principle enough time for this psychological progress and any perceivable
pattern of progress in this short life appears as just a short section of a
longer pattern etc.

It seems to be harder to conceive of a 'convergent' model of psychological
progress for a bunch of different contents of skin-bags. You could have the
experience 'nibbana' or some meditative way-stage or the general effect of
it on one's general life or whatever as some kind of slightly more
convergent than most days item but that's about as far as it can go. What is
'divergent' has barely anywhere to 'drop off' to. And partly because of
that, it's difficult to conceive of a model of psychological progress with
universal applicability. One is always going to be stuck with one's british
male down's syndromeness or black lesbian bronx dwarfness or whatever and
attempting to 'grow' some inherently different cherry stone or apple pip or
acorn. And there isn't time to do much more than grab and adapt a few
passing psychotherapeutic odds and sods (from e.g. the Buddha) according to
ones taste and temperament.

It turns out that the chief "I wish I were a Jesuit Nun"
painter plays bass in a band here. He loaned me a CD of his
band's music and, after listening to it, I could understand why
he spends so much time in church. I think Brit bands could
do 'lesson' tours here in the summer and make more $$$ than
the lesser-than-big-league footies do with the same gig.
I mean, at least some #7th's or slides might show up in some
of this play-doh music...

:) You could tell them you were guided by God to chuck my symmetry system at
them.

I need 'ball preservative' or something - my collection of
WC balls since '82 are flat as roadkill {Remember that weird
greenish-yellow Adidas "night ball" - WC, Mexico, 1986? Well,
I have one! ;}

I don't remember that but I'm impressed by your whole ball afficionadodom :)
I recalled after mentioning my childhood hope of acheiving invisibility in
football, that I used to kick a ball against a wall for hours on end as a
kid with or without cousins and give myself various challenges and stuff so
I think it might have been the presence of all these ultra-competitive
urchins on my pitch that put me off. The same seemed to happen with communal
guitar playing as I recall.

My memory of football and related facts and suchlike is diabolical. I
remember my cousin wanting to discuss what I thought of a film and my having
real trouble saying anything about it because from my point of view, it's
like entering some colourful tunnel or rollercoaster where I submit myself
to 'the journey' or somesuch - to the extent that there is one - and if I'm
enjoying the journey, I can't simultaneously be standing back from it and
thinking that that y point in the plot didn't tie in with z culmination or
whatever or that x didn't acheive a very realistic portrayal of a human
being.

When I first went down a mine-shaft during my 'going underground' phase, I
was very struck by the disparity between that experience and the standard
Scooby-Doo portrayal where you view them all careering down the slope in a
wooden cart or whatever from a remote side-on vantage point. Inside it,
you're just in this four foot wide by barely six feet high dripping tunnel
with doors every so often and no 'vantage point' to stand back and see much
of much. That's how I view football near enough.

I can't imagine what George "needs" that anyone could "give"
him, but that's pretty much like it always is.

I work on the narcissistic basis that the extent to which he approves of me
is exactly equal to the extent to which he must be excellent and so if he
approves of a certain kind of content or post, I'll just try and do more of
it and pretend that's what he "needs" that I can "give".

Oh, I was also wondering whether 'english teachers' in the UK
actually taught "comma prevention" in these days of
'dash'ingness?

Not as far as I know. I think they might be more of an American thing. I
think how things are supposed to work is that each sentence is supposed to
represent an idea. Then a paragraph is supposed to represent a bunch of
related ideas before you go off to a different bunch within a chapter and so
on. But I think that I suffer from quite complex ideas with subclauses which
would tend to lead to long and complex sentences. Then I think that there
are bound to be protests. So then I try to break them up a bit to avert the
protests. And a dash sometimes makes more of a break - visually - than a
comma, but it's all a bit haphazard.

And having got about that far, I make a 'new paragraph' in the middle of
nowhere for no good reason at all except to avert protests again. And since
I regard the people I'm writing to as capable of reading to themselves
without having to read aloud, the punctuation isn't geared to facilitate
'breathing' in the way it might be in 'to be read aloud' kind of stuff.

Erm... well, I was actually wondering where I
might get a reasonable haircut without learning Korean, but
much of the same wonderment goes for a decent pizza, etc...
"You Know How It Is." (TM) and that turned into wondering about
how What Used To Be English (TM) is being taught in What Used
To Be Englishland...

I saw a program the other night where they were trying to reintroduce the
teaching of puntuation by having a bunch of kids given an unpunctuated tract
and letting them discuss among themselves how best to punctuate it. Most of
what I ever learned about that (which wasn't much) has fallen off. I don't
know what I am doing most of the time, so I just copy other people and hope
to get away with it. For instance, when ending a sentence with a
parenthesized item, I don't know whether the full stop should fall after or
before the final bracket or both in some cases. To me, it looks better
falling after it so that's what I usually do, but then sometimes put it
before just for the hell of it and to be right a proportion of the time. And
I don't know if there's an officially correct way of writing dialogue like,

"Sod off, ***-munch." said Gerald, politely, "We have no need of your kind
here."

I don't know what is supposed to fall inside the apostrophes and outside and
why and so forth. And we never did 'parts of speech' transitive indicative
past participipple stuff.

But I did once find a pub where I could get
both. The pizza wasn't bad, either, and there's also the story
about the fish...

How did that go?

Jonathan



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