23 August 2020
1247
Some thoughts:
– Your real friends are the set of people whose absolute well-being you celebrate, as opposed to their well-being relative to yours. In a sense, I think of Nirvana as the state of existence where you are no longer able to distinguish your well-being from anything else’s: a state of profound and fundamental connection to the world at large, a recognition that the boundaries we impose on our selfhood aren’t protecting us, they’re limiting us. To dissolve the self, is to expand the self. That’s why the notion of ego-death is so central to portrayals of enlightenment as conceived in mystical traditions both oriental and occidental. There is something deep here.
– The distinction between family and friendship is that you remain loyal to family even if you don’t like them. Your family is the set of people you are loyal to unconditionally. This defines family. Now, this is important because it makes apparent the transience and ephemerality of our natures, and maintains long-term standards of behaviour. Mundanity aside, it is this fundamental long-termism of family that often makes it so meaningful. It’s why family is the concept most invoked at deathbeds. Your friends are often prey to circumstance, but family never is (or never ought to be). Note here that the way I have defined things above has little to do with biological proximity other than that this is immutable and provides strong basic incentives to maintain ties and uphold loyalty. But this, ofcourse, isn’t the only set of incentives that could give rise to unconditional loyalty. The question then is: what other imperatives, norms, concerns (or shared missions) are deep enough to give rise to unconditional loyalty? How does one find a family (or families) to be a part of?
– Conjure up as many vivid and detailed pictures of good futures that you can. Preferably make them diverse. Fill in the blanks as you learn more and update them as your circumstances begin to cement and your Fate starts to reveal itself to you. Human Beings spot things by virtue of analogous pattern recognition or inductive reasoning. That is, we see a bunch of instantiations of things, we abstract away what we feel are the defining components and then if we see something else that shares the same abstract properties, we immediately recognise and classify it. The wider the range of instantiations you see the better your grasp of what the correct abstract properties are. So, in this particular case, if you are constantly toying with prospects of opportunity, then they are what you will constantly recognise in the world around you by virtue of practice. The Buddhists I hung out with at Samye Ling called this manifestation, but popular culture have the notion of the Law of Attraction or the Power of Positive Thinking or the idea that you need to project the image of success in order to have a chance of attaining it. The mechanisms generally offered to explain this is all ludicrous nonsense but that does not diminish their value as lifestyles or habits to maintain. What’s going on is very simply: pattern-recognition. The more you train yourself to spot opportunity, the more you’ll spot. The more you think about good experiences, the clearer an intuition you have for what they look like in the world, the more you’ll see in others and (more importantly) in yourself. The world, defined independently of you does not change, but you do see what you train yourself to see. Your world is what you’re always thinking about.
– Abstraction is the art of figuring out what doesn’t matter. Abstraction affords you leverage but costs you in control. That is why the Sage is able both to toy with abstractions but descend swiftly into the particulars. There’s a connection here with both Confucian thought and Jesuitical Casuistry that I intuit but am not yet erudite enough to demonstrate.
– Institutions pre-select for and esteem character traits that will perpetuate them. So, sad as it is, past a point, most of what education does is serve to signal capacity for compliance and conformity.