I used to be lost in the shuffle. Now I just shuffle along with the lost.
Anonymous (but quoted by somebody in my high school yearbook)
I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.
Bob Dylan
Carolyn, the legendary laughing yogini, was kind enough to give this humble blog an award, referring to it as a "reality” yoga blog, and praising it for being honest and funny....to plagiarize my own comment on her blog, which I hope she’ll forgive me for (nobody said anything about being original)...I think reality, honesty, and humor go hand in hand...humorlessness pretty much requires you to impose a strict and all encompassing order on reality, denying absurdity...while humor is about looking at absurdity and saying if ya can't beat it, join it....
...of course one thing about absurdity is it’s hard to identify...I mean, just because something doesn’t make sense to me, that doesn’t necessarily make it absurd...though it might make me a bit absurd if it’s something everybody else seems to understand...which seems to be the case an awful lot of the time...
...I’m not really into the transmigration of souls thing...generally far more interested in finding out if there’s really life before death...nonetheless, I’ve read the Tibetan Book of the Dead...and suspect that if there really is a bardo...a place in between lives...there’s gotta be some kinda Bardo State College where they offer courses like How to Be a Functioning Human Being 101...and, if so, I must’ve been sitting in the back of the classroom drawing pictures in the margins of my notebook when I should've been paying attention, particularly during lectures like How to Make Sense of Other Human Beings...then, looking around, it appears at least I wasn’t alone back there...
...the things I do understand that a lot of people don’t tend to be unanswerable questions...or questions with so many conflicting answers that you certainly can’t come to anything like a definite conclusion ...except to say that there isn’t one...and that’s where I tend to be good...I get that both a and b are kind of true and kind of false and kind of neither...confusion is kinda like the air that I breathe...which might actually be a good thing...and a bad thing...and neither...
11 comments:
The reason it is so difficult for Human Beings to understand each other is that each of us live in our own self inflicted illusions.
The sense of absurdity is sometimes the act of graciously accepting the existence of all of those illusions without the expectation of correctitude.
When you laugh at being incorrect, you deprive the state of incorrectness of its power, and the same is true with correctness--whether its yours or someone elses.
Anyhow Congrats--Cool Award!
Congrats. I'm new hear but I get why there are fans to your blog. Meta can be so serious and if you aren't willing to give up your life to pursue it then you will never attain enlightenment.
Is it so wrong to drink bear while you are on a food fast. If I can meditate listening to heavy metal doesn't that make me awesome. You help me to feel comfortable with my unconventional choice and be true to myself and not to a philosophy.
Well deserved.
mmm Pollock
Congrats on your award, drjay.
I like your comment there that you heisted from yourself and those unanswerable questions...I want answers, dammit!
It's good to take a light-hearted poke at others. As I get older I don't like to take life too seriously anyway. To anyone who does, I say, well death's gonna get you in the end anyway.
Maybe a book recommendation for you...
Reality, Humor, Truth. The necessary interconnectivity of those three concepts was first introduced in the 1930s by Chinese Philosopher Lin Yutang and an apt analysis can be found in the first section of his book "The Importance of Living." But if you read any further, you will get to the part where he says a woman's purpose on earth is to bear children, and if you're like me, you'll hurl the book across the room and be done with it.
We all know you deserve lots of awards, even if you refuse to acknowledge that fact!
Absurdity is honestly, one of the things I like most about you. Or, was it your propensity for [best not to say]?
Congrats on the award! Sorry for the recent absence...been insanely busy...still.
I used to consider the "hard" questions in life & chased spiritual truths all over the place. These days I just strive to be happy.
Have fun on your trip, btw!
Interesting! Love the shuffle quote :-)
But then, everyone else understanding something that you don't wouldn't make you absurd if the actual case is that everyone misunderstands and you're the only one that sees that that particular thing doesn't make sense. You must never discount your own opinion or rational views on the basis of everyone else being in agreement with the contrary.
And also, it could be that if a particular question has many valid but conflicting answers, the true answer to it is in a much bigger picture than we can comprehend or a much smaller picture that will always escape us.
That's one of my favorite Bob Dylan quotes.
I think we might have all been flaking out in that class. The best we can do is muddle along and wait for those moments where we do find peace in what we've come to understand. Aside from that, confusion abounds and chaos is where we all live.
Post a Comment