Old Guy Fight!
Posted on June 28, 2003funniest thing i’ve seen this week: driving down the street with adam and dan, we see two guys on the front lawn of a rundown old house… one man is clearly in his fifties, balding, with an enormous gut covered only by a pair of suspenders and a beard; no shirt. the other (fully clothed man) was of equal age, but skinny and clearly missing a few teeth. and as we pass these two men they are swinging at eachother, weakly, fighting over what, i’ll never know. watching from the porch of the house is a bemused old man in a wheel chair. it was comedy gold.
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On Belief
Posted on June 21, 2003Dogen Zenji, an 18th century Zen master, used to ask his students, “Who is the Master that make the grass green?” The answer to that question is as close as our own visual cortex. Energy, in the form of light soars from the sun, some is absorbed by the grass, some is reflected off into the human eyeball, in which nerves interpret the random energy into the bright green blades of grass. Most of what you perceive of the world is in your head. The human mind is constantly drinking in information; raw data is interpreted, filtered, and reinterpreted many times before entering our awareness, all without our being aware of the process.
Very often the mind will misinterpret the data because of prejudices; the data further degraded by confusion. In one example, cited by Robert Anton Wilson in his book Cosmictrigger, a pair of actors run into a psychology class, one makes a stabbing motion at the other, who subsequently falls down. Almost all of the students will “see” a knife in the stabber’s hand, although it turns out that the actual weapon was a banana. Apparently, the stabbing motion itself creates the knife. The nervous system “knows” that nobody stabs people with a knife, just as it “knows” that the sun “goes down” in the evening despite 300 years of science. In a similar study, an image flashed on a screen for one second depicts a white man struggling with a black man, the white man holding a razor. The majority of students, even those who will swear that they are not racist, will claim to have seen the razor in the black man’s hands, the result of 300 years of programming from a society of racism (Wilson, 1977). Two people who have witnessed a car accident, when later questioned separately, will have entirely different stories describing what they saw. The mind is inclined to see what it expects to see. This is what Freud called “projection”.
There is a theory, among quantum physicists, referred to as Schrdinger’s Cat. Imagine if Tyler Scheer were placed inside a box with a bottle of poison gas connected to a Geiger counter, which can detect radiation from a piece of uranium ore. If a single uranium nucleus disintegrates, it releases radiation, which in turn sets off the Geiger counter, which in turn breaks the bottle and kills Tyler. After an interval, t, is Tyler dead or alive? A theoretical physicist will sit down with a pen and paper and he will calculate, using quantum mechanics, what has happened after interval t. He finds that his equations yield a minimum of two solutions. In one possible universe, or eigenstate, Tyler is still alive; but in another equally possible universe, Tyler is dead. Until the mind is able to observe the cat after interval t, Tyler exists as two eigenstates. In a sense, Tyler is both dead and alive at the same time, a mixture of two states. Opening the box and peering inside, the mind determines whether Tyler Scheer is dead or alive. According to quantum mechanics, the act of the measurement process determines the state of Tyler. This also means that objects do not exist in a definite state (e.g., dead or alive) until they are observed by the visual cortex of the brain (Michio Kaku and Jennifer Trainer, 1987; Gribbin, 1984; Wilson, 1977).
In some religious systems, ranging from the more serious religions of the east to the much more bizarre Discordians of the west, it is thought that “reality” is not static or objective, but it is in fact wild and chaotic dancing energy, containing no organized patterns or states. The chaotic energy is organized into what we see by the brain. What I see wildly differs from what you see, or what a peasant farmer in China sees, or what a Middle Eastern sultan sees. We all have different perceptions of the universe, because we all have different models for perceiving the universe. These models may be shaped by upbringing, social class, surroundings, homeland, drugs, religion, and so on. The old aphorism “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” stems from the reality-model concept. The reality-model concept may also explain prejudices and racism. If a person were to view the president as a criminal, then their mind will only perceive the criminal or sinful acts that the president commits, and the president will have to do something exceptional to change this person’s mind. An radical feminist who views all men as the bane of existence will only notice the negative behavior of men, too caught up in the wrong that men are doing to notice the good things as well. Most religions seem to be stuck in this one-view rut. A truly holistic view of the world is the best way to live, as it allows one to gain insight into other people’s perceptions of reality. No one person has the “right” or correct perception of the world, it would be impossible. As Alan Watts put it, “The menu is not the meal” (Wilson, 1977).
It is the mind that creates Heaven and Hell by merely believing in it. In fact, “The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe in it. Further, the Lowest Ring in Hell is reserved for them that believe in it on the supposition that they’ll go there if they don’t.” (Lord Omar Khayaam Ravenhurst, Date unknown). By the same regard, North Dakota exists merely because the mind believes in it. Some would say that North Dakota is a hallucination of the government, that it is not really a defined space, because all that is defining the space are a four arbitrarily placed lines. Some people get caught up into believing that everything in their reality has to be a certain way, that everything has to follow certain rules, and when something challenges that system, they don’t know how to handle it.
The ultimate point of this paper is that reality is what you make of it, so make something useful of it to be happy. To send you off thinking, a young man came running to his Roshi (Zen master) shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! I understand.” He points to a nearby rock. “That rock is inside my head”, he says to his Roshi. “You,” the Roshi responds, “must have a pretty big head to hold that rock in it.”
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Make Him Wet, Take Him Down
Posted on June 11, 2003what i learned tonite…
cute japanese girls can compel me to inflict violence upon complete strangers
so the last few days sucked… i got three hours of sleep friday morning, worked 14 hours saturday, slept 3 hours saturday nite, and worked 12 hours today. but, because i’ve not been able to actually get out and have fun, i decided to go to chris’s dorm (some of you may notice, i’m spending the majority of my free time there… screw you, i like it… ehehe). dan, adam, and chris were there, playing cards, and being typically unexciting… i was going to leave, when we got hit with a huge fucking hurricane. torrential rainfall, fierce winds, possible hail, and quite literally nonstop lightning lighting up the sky. so we did what any normal, right thinking person would do: we went outside. well, adam and i stayed back under the awning. but that’s besides the point. before we got there, we were walking down to the doors, and we hear this bizzare scream coming from the hallway… it was three japanese exchange student guys, being chased by three very cute japanese exchange student girls. they went to the doors, where we were, and they were playing paper rock scissors. the loser had to run out into the monsoon, touch the tree, or the stop sign, or whatever, then run back. dan decided that it’d be a good idea if he and chris raced to the next hall and back…
they come back, we all go inside (us and the six japanese exchange students). bill shows up, as well as csar, and a girl named sara, and another girl who was a friend of the exchange students. csar shouts, “who wants to play volleyball?!” he looks at us. obviously, we’re in. he looks at the japanese girls. “volleyball.” “volleyball?” “volleyball.” they were in too… so we all went outside. here was the problem: the sand volleyball pit had seven inches of standing water. but we forged ahead… a couple of hints. don’t bellyflop in sand volleyball ponds. don’t try to greco-roman wrestle in sand volleyball ponds. don’t stand in place for too long in sand volleyball ponds. volleyball lasted a little while, before it went full contact… us guys started tackling each other. the cute japanese girls, seeing this, wanted me to take down the three japanese guys. they were asking me to “get them wet! throw him in water!” so i threw down a couple of asian guys 1/3 my weight, just ‘cuz they told me to.
we had a hell of a time in the sand volleyball lake… playing volleyball (and soccer, and dodgeball, and nudeball, and just wrestling…) we had attracted an enormous crowd, that was swelling in the door ways… it was a fantastic time. even though i’m covered from head to toe in sand and abrasion wounds… i highly recommend it.
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