mentalblog.com comments:
read certeau
who is certeau?
i think it happens tons.. you can break out of it .. and break your conversant out of it, but you may have to give up the topic you wanted to talk about in the first place in order to do it.
to engage someone in conversation you have to come from unexpected directions and force them to think about things, and don't fall into your own "automated responses". .
I've noticed two things about myself that probably apply to others:
1. my positions in a discussion usually don't *really* change until i've had like 30 minutes of time to fully digest the discussion.
2. there's plenty of canned thoughts/responses in my head that are stale. (things i haven't questioned or thought about in years) When they come up, I find myself saying things that don't even resonate with what i think anymore before i've had time to process what it is I was about to say.
There is another aspect of this, constant interruptions. The second you touch the trigger you are being interrupted by a story out of the memory bank. I often find myself cut in mid sentence, frequently several time during a short talk. I can’t describe how frustrating this is. This a terrible plague.
I think this is the ailment of bloggers.
I am not tlaking about bloggers.
Dear Tzemach,
Thank you for a lovely and perceptive post. You have hit an important nail squarely on the head.
Of course, this has nothing to do with bloggers, or blogging, or computers, or code.
But these technologies may have sensitized us to understand this phenomenon in a new way.
These automatic responses are very much like embedded bits of code that are very powerfully although unconsciously and automatically activated when the triggers are clicked.
The phenomenon illustrates the fact that many of us are not really awake and not really conscious at all.
The reference to the French Jesuit historian Certeau is interesting, although he was a neo-Freudian, and I distrust neo-Freudians. I will have to take a deeper look at his perceptions.
Another figure who worked on waking us out of the false-awareness or slumber of our daily lives was G.I. Gurdjieff, who developed techniques for substituting real consciousness for the false robotic consciousness of everyday life.
I think that Rene Daumal's "A Night of Serious Drinking" (i.e. La Grande Beuverie) also touches on this theme.
The clinical psychologist Robert Godwin has written on his nice blog "One Cosmos" about the parasitical "thoughts" that infest and take over many minds.
The hinayana (theravadan) Buddhist technology of awareness meditation (vipassana) also comes to (false?) mind as an approach to dealing with this problem.
To my chagrin, I regret that I can not think of a Jewish source for the sort of technology I am trying to describe. I wish someone else could.
Gandalin
Gandalin, I am not talking about higher consciences. I am talking about the compulsive desire of people to interrupt you with thematically similar subject. I am talking about situation where people are friends with nothing left to prove. This must be a rapidly spreading virus where people are uncomfortable merely listening. And of course if you can’t listen you can’t talk.
Hey, that reminds me of a story!
.....(silence).....(silence)....(listening)
....(listening)....(silence).....(comfortably listening).....
Sorry, that last silent post was my joke....somehow the name was missing. I am sorry if my previous reaction was just another example of the same thing you are really talking about.
"It gotten to the point so that I can induce a story from this man by merely vocalizing the trigger name or a theme."
that reminds me of the story (truthfully:))about the guy who is sent to prison. The first night he is there, soemone yells out "47" and all the inmates laugh. Then someone yells "56". Again, hysterical laughter fills the cellblock. The prisoner is startled. He asks his cellmate "what's going on?" His cellmate explained that they've all been in jail for so long that they know each other's jokes and have assigned them a number to save time. Amazed the new inmate asks "mind if I try it?" "sure, go ahead" replies his cellmate. The novice yells out "34". Dead silence. "What happened" he cried to this cellmate. His cellmate responded "some peolpe just don't knoe how to tell a joke"
Gandalin,
Of course, this has nothing to do with bloggers, or blogging, or computers, or code. But these technologies may have sensitized us to understand this phenomenon in a new way.
Please elaborate. How and why are we "sensitized"?
I think that many people have a fundamental barrier against stretching their minds to fit new ideas. Subconsciously, the barriers spring up whenever they near what they consider "uncharted territory," and they react by staying within the circles of the familar. They feel more comfortable running along the well-worn groove.
I suspect that with some people it's simply laziness. After all, as Thomas Edison used to say, "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."
With other people, it may be just that they believe they already understand how the entire world works, and therefore everything they encounter must fit into their weltenschauung, or else it can't possibly be true or real. This might be born of hubris, perhaps.
However, what you're describing sounds like people are turning into automatons, which makes the problem deeper still. And a bit scary.
I have noticed, for example, how difficult it is to get someone to learn something new and different, or to change what he or she has understood about something. I struggle with it myself. But I am at least willing to undergo that struggle, whether or not I succeed! Many others won't even consider the effort, so they refuse to recognize the need or even the possibility.
This is where prejudices often come from. Or at least the refusal to rise above them. And I don't mean just racial prejudices. I'm talking about the tendency to consider everything different to be crazy or just plain wrong. People are not broadminded, and they won't leave the borders around which their minds have erected invulnerable fences.
gandalin,
i think that this is one of the general goals of chasidut, waking one up to the interactions of the moment. The awareness that God is present in all our experiences. That's a theme that comes up a lot in almost all chassidut (it's there in every lesson of the baal shem tov of which I'm aware (admittedly few)), particularly the Notzer Hesed (which I happen to be learning now) .. also i think a more studied approach to thought and consciousness is touched on in a condensed form in the beginning of the shaar hayichud of the mitler rebbe.
(sorry to all the lubavitch here for whom these things may bear all kinds of conotations, to me (someone who's just happened to have learned a lil chabad chasidut) these things seem novel and don't carry any baggage.)
but i think even 'turning on' your consciousness can be mistaken as an end in itself.. just like everything else it's really only a means to the same end.
Dear Tzemach,
"Of course, this has nothing to do with bloggers, or blogging, or computers, or code. But these technologies may have sensitized us to understand this phenomenon in a new way.
Please elaborate. How and why are we "sensitized"?"
What I mean to say is that because we have the everyday experience of clicking a hotlink on the screen and seeing something pop up "automatically," we are better able to recognize an analogous phenomenon when it occurs in another sphere of interactive life, i.e. in a conversation.
Yitz,
Thanks for pointing out the emphasis in chassidus on being in the moment and being aware of His presence at every moment. That is very close indeed to what I was thinking about, and to what we need.
This is known as associative logic and is the basis for the Talmud. Authors like Faulkner played upon this phenomenon to write their "stream of consciousness" novels. It is part of what makes conversations interesting.
First a humorous observation made by someone at NASA to the question about why NASA employed astronauts on its missions instead of computers. The answer: Because human beings are the only non-linear computation systems massed produced by unskilled labor.
The operative concept is non-linear. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the language of modern theoretical physics is aware of the struggle to find words to describe ideas that have outstripped the terminology that is common to linear, i.e., inductive-deductive logic. As mystics have always known and modern physicists have begun to discover, rationality provides a very limitted view of the totality of the universe. That which is merely tangential in a two, three or even four dimensional linear world is, in fact, just as valid as the line it bisects (interupts) or the impossible objects that simultaneously occupy the same space. The duality or rather the multiplicity of reality that so confounds our rational conceptions is not some fatal flaw in our nature, as most religio-mystical systems would have it. Rather, as delineated in Chassidus, it is the vehicle by which we are m'varair the universe. Chassidus is not the just the arcane concepts it presents. It is also the manner and style in which they are communicated. The struggle to comprehend correctly (and whether or not we have succeeded can only be determined by the ma'aseh it produces) forces one along a dynamic path of endless intersections rather than seeking an illusory static perfection. In the end the rational mind has been infinitely expanded to a point where the supra-rational becomes rational. In short, a dira b'tachtonim has been achieved.
Tangentle, there is no room for a verbal diarrhea on my blog.
this strange little man calls this the reactive self in his new-age book 'the power of now'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A...h?
v=AugWiDv17Yg
It's only associative logic when it involves LOGIC! Just automatically parotting the first thought that comes to mind, be it ever so relevant, is NOT logic. It's not even interesting, much less so if one is spouting the same associated memory for the millionth time to the same person. Even more to the point -- when doing so one is not responding to the actual discussion at hand, and thus it is not really a dialogue. I think you missed the entire point here. Which, oddly, makes the point.
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