A life of novelty

The novelty of thrill 

The novelty of adventure 

The novelty of killing boredom

BRutal huh?

The lives one leads

Mhmm

Soon ... Soon

Mhmm

Conveniently placed across from the police station..... KUDOS

BAD MFFRRR

I MET JOHNNY WHEN I WAS MAYBE 15 AT AN ASPIRE PREMIERE AND HAVEN'T SEEN HIM IN YEARS BUD HEARD THRU THE GRAPE VINE THAT HE WAS KILLING ON AND OFF HIS BIKE.... STOKED TO FIND THIS!!!!

OUCH MY EARS

LONELINESS

The Innovation of Loneliness from Shimi Cohen on Vimeo.

It's been a min

Not to sure how I feel on this blog anymore so I've been slacking and I lost my phone so I have no contact device anymore .... But I have found more blogs worth a read thru
http://inthebellyofthebeast.noblogs.org/

To many damn words!

Intellectual Athleticism: by Mungbot 

The other night we had some dinner guests over. We ate with our new roommates, who are professors in social science, and some others that I had met once before. The evening was spent in heavy intellectual discussion about "the problems of the world" - social/political/environmental problems, and their possible solutions. It was extreme. I felt as if no one was saying anything real to each other at all. It felt more like everyone was just playing around with words, like a room full of kittens batting at a piece of yarn.

Obviously I find intellectual discussion useful in some way. I've written before about how I struggled for a long time to find ways to verbally express what I've always intuitively felt. I think that is an important process, not just to communicate, but also to validate those deep, vague, subconscious feelings. The ability to express those feelings may be the difference between the middle school "rebel" that is "acting out" in random ways and the more refined radical that has an awareness and has a better idea of where to focus their rebellion. So for the rest of this post, remember that I don't think that intellectual thought does not have it's critical uses.

But too much focus can be placed on the intellect. Frequently the intellect is used for more than just a way to communicate. On a deeper level, it's a craving for validation. It is a western cultural value that something is not valid unless it can be described, argued for, and laid bare through words, facts and figures. The high school rebel is denounced as a "rebel without a cause" - not because they don't have a cause, but because not being able to describe their cause, the dominant culture assumes that therefore the cause doesn't even exist. Yet the Truth is much larger than the nets and snares of words could ever capture.

Wisdom and true knowledge comes from a different, deeper, intuitive place. The thoughts of the mind are like the waves on the surface of the ocean, just small perturbations resulting from much deeper and mysterious - but very real - causes. To insist that truth is only True if validated by the western intellectual process is a real impediment to living life fully, as well as an indication of a lack of confidence in what we know deep down to be true. Just look at this blog to see the result of someone that believes the mind must validate everything that is felt.

There is a sense in our society that if we can't lay it all out in words that something is missing, that our armor is not being worn properly, that we're lacking artillery for the inevitable conflict that will come from holding a radical position. That's an important point: when one does not hold a radical position, when one does not listen to the internal voice, then there is no conflict, no need for argument or validation. Most people just do what the aristocracy tells them to do. The hard place is in accepting those radical, disjointed, something-is-profoundly-fucked-but-I-can't-quite-explain-it feelings, and fully owning them, even if we can't describe them or convince others of their truth through words. And certainly, when we cannot believe our own intuition until we get others to believe it too, something important is surely lost, slowed, deflected.

The tight rope line to walk is notnecessarily to stop thinking about life in this way, nor to insist on always being able to describe everything. Rather, I think it's to have confidence in these deeper truths without needing to find ways to describe or defend it all the time. The description is worthwhile, and can be fun for intellectuals, but it should be seen for what it is, just an extra thing, not the main thing. Ultimately words cannot ever touch what they are trying to get at anyways.

And then there's that dinner party. I discovered that there are actually two different kinds of intellectualism. I realized that the way I've always approached thought is to sort of sit back, reflect, feel something, and then try to describe it. The other form - the university types - like to bat words around like kittens. For them, it seems that life is like one big giant scrabble game that never ends. And that was the disconnect I felt at the dinner party. Everything they said was sooooo intellectual. They all sounded like they were reciting one PhD thesis after another. When I chimed in, it was to say something that I knew was true, from experience, from travels, from things I've seen and felt, but they couldn't meet me at that level. What level? They didn't want to embrace a sense of wonder. Here we are, living in this ineffable universe, this crazy crazy life. "Enlightenment is the state of ambiguity itself". For me, life and intellect are to be approached with fire, full throttle, knowing full well that the winds will change and new experiences and truths will emerge. That is the place I come from. But to approach a university dinner table with such a perspective was an exercise in futility. Before I even finished a sentence they would be knit-picking every word I said from their vast "knowledge" of so many memorized text book facts. Each new idea would not be prefaced with "In my experience.." or "When I was traveling in..", but instead "A new study shows that.." Against this wall of words it is impossible to make progress. 

After such a conversation I always feel dirty, like how I'd imagine I'd feel if I slept with a hooker. It's the same dirty feeling that always accompanies the reluctantly-admitted knowledge that I got dragged into something because of some childish, base desires - in this case my ego. In the Society of the Intellect which defines the rules of the game - all games - to play the game and to try to "win" is already a kind of sacrilege. It's to lose the solid ground of a sense of wonder and get lost in an alienated mass of wordplay. Rather than embracing the magic ambiguity of life, the dull neutral knife of intellectualism cut through any sense of wonder that could have come from a comment about my past experiences. What could have been a table of people meeting each other on their journeys quickly devolved into what could only be called pure intellectual athleticism, as each person tried to one-up the next in the grey landscape of experience-less-ness.

Because our society reveres the intellect so much, the intellect gets a pass. While machoism is easily denounced in football or materialist pursuits, the "whose dick is bigger?" question may even be stronger in the university world. It's astounding that so many self-proclaimed radicals, particularly from very leftist universities in Portland, would be so quick to take on the cultural value of machoism, especially when they denounce it in every other aspect of modern life. In any case, to attend such an event is kind of sad and pathetic, like watching some reality show where people argue over any other triviality. But, since it's "intellectual" talk and everyone at the table has a graduate degree, it takes on a real fervor. We are the privileged. We have the knowledge. We'll solve the problems of humanity and then share them with the people. And my mind just keeps going back to that room full of kittens playing with a ball of yarn.. Personally, this experience was really meaningful. I learned a lot by being in such an extreme intellectual situation. I've found that the best way to learn is to experience what the extremes are like. That's how we learn better about how the middle looks. How we look. It gave me a little opening: I now feel a lot sillier when I look back and see how much effort I've wasted in trying to justify how I intuitively feel. Not that having some deep, quiet confidence comes easily or without long training and reflection, but it has clarified this as a good goal for any human to have. Feeling the need to intellectually justify everything now seems more like a prison than a real need. It's certainly at least a constraint. To find a balance between saying stuff, without needing to ever say anything, is the challenge. 

Lastly, a note about social situations in general. All that intellectual talk is certainly something, but there's even another level that's working there. All that intellectual talk definitely rang inauthentic, but why? It's as if all that idle chatter (as zen would call it) serves to block something. It's as if it's a defense against having a real, direct experience with one another (I think of Joseph Campbell: "Religion is a defense against religious experience"). But I don't claim to be above that feeling. While I'm not mortified of silence like others are, there is a discomfort that I've been conditioned to feel. But seriously, what is that all about? WHY do people feel so awkward? What truth is buried under all that intellectual blah blah blah? What are people afraid will be revealed in that long moment of silence everyone dreads? It's as if, in that moment of silence, people will touch the truth of the moment more fully, that they'll have to face the terrifying, magical awe of being alive and sharing that intimate mystery with others. However, if we just chatter-box all night, we can stay comfortably neutral. Whether we pass the time in a visual spectacle or an intellectual one, we've distracted ourselves. The evening will pass. Our lives will pass. And we won't have to think about it - think about what's important - let alone experience it.