More Ortho

A few notes about the Ortho post. I think it is great that we can discuss this. This would be impossible on Social Media where everyone immediately flies off the handle. :–)

I think doing without believing is fine but believing without doing is quite useless. We can believe that technology will find a solution to climate change or we can each do something now.

Steve comments:

If I don’t believe that compassion is important, then I will not have the facility of acting compassionately. If I don’t believe that not doing harm to the environment is important then I will act out of selfishness and expediency.

Maybe this is just the way my brain works, but I learned as kid that practice improves whatever I do. I don’t need to believe that practice improves everything. I have the evidence. I don’t need to believe that compassion is important, because I know that it is essential. I don’t need to believe that not doing harm to the environment is important because I can see what has been happening because of our actions. Loss of species, loss of wilderness, flesh-eating bacteria that feeds on plastic, plastic we have put in the ocean (that’s something I learned about this week…)

The bottom line is, if a belief helps to motivates us to be a better human, a better musician, a kinder anything, then by all means we should use that motor. 100%!

I don’t profess to be an authority on Buddhism, but isn’t there the idea or concept of The Noble Eightfold Path one item of which is “Right Intention”?

and

And intention flows from principle or belief.

I don’t see what Right Intention has to do with Belief. I really don’t see the connection and perhaps you can explain it to me. When I practice the flow of certain chords, or a tremolo, my intention is to be a better player. I don’t see how belief is going to help me with that. I set the intention and then I get  to work. I don’t need to believe that the work will improve my ability. I know that already. 

Right intention is simply the beginning of an action, of doing.

Similarly I don’t believe that meditation is good for me. I know it. I know it from practice, from doing it for thousands of hours. I accept that perhaps I am being obtuse and I am not getting the point you are making. 

James comments:

Although Rome was not built in a day, would it have ever been built without belief?

Did Romans need to believe? When Hadrian required that the Pantheon have a giant oculus at the top, where normally the key stone sits and takes the weight… did belief help engineers find the solution? I don’t know. Is it necessary to motivate ourselves with belief? If anything there has been too much belief in our history: the belief that one’s faith or skin color or tribe is better than anyone else. That hasn’t gotten us very far, has it? 

Ortho

In the book Hopeland a character declares “orthopraxy not orthodoxy” and, later, “doing not believing”.

Orthodox is the combination of two Greek words. Ortho means correct or upright. Dox means belief or opinion. The correct belief. Orthopraxy combines ortho with the word praxy, which means action, doing, or practice. The right deed, the right practice. 

There is much orthodoxy on this planet and not enough orthopraxy. 

I will not become a good guitar player by believing that I am good, but through practice. I would go so far as to say it doesn’t really matter what I believe because it is only what I do that matters. Nobody should care what I believe. My actions (or practice), on the other hand, matter. Believing is easy, doing is hard, which is why we would rather believe than do. 

I think this applies to everything in life.

Balance

During my morning walk I ruminated about our general weighting towards negativity. Why is it so easy to imagine an awful future? Why are most sci-fi novels dystopian? When I reached this point, my mind decided to imagine a future where people have free Google stoves in their kitchens. The stove only functions AFTER one has watched a thirty second ad. And one needs to stay near the stove because for every ten minutes of usage there is another ad one needs to watch or the stove turns itself off. No eye balls–no cooking! Why do people choose ad-supported stoves? Well, they have been trained for this by using YouTube for decades and watching ads in return. Plus they have all lost their jobs to AI. 

Eating Disorder Helpline Fires Staff, Transitions to Chatbot After Unionization–LINK

And once people have been replaced and the investment into AI has been paid off, there is only pure profit. At that point corporations will demand that the government pay a Universal Basic Income so that people can survive to continue to buy things…

See how easy that is. Dystopia basically writes itself!

I thought about the first stories, the fairytales we hear. They are generally not about the happy life of a farmer or craftsman or teacher… they are about walking too deep into the forest and getting imprisoned by a witch. Then there is the language. FIRE is a word one can scream well. LOVE starts with an L and that letter is a soft, almost intimate sound. ABOVE you can scream and be understood. LOVE… not so much. HATE can be screamed well, although there is the possibility that it is heard as EIGHT, if one doesn’t put enough angry spitle into it.

Two elements come together, one social and the other genetic, learned and inherited. We are predisposed towards negativity and we learn to deepen that notion. This is exploited by politicians and amplified by social media. A bad cocktail. A heart attack waiting to happen. 

What to do? I suppose we can train ourselves to balance out the negativity. Reading Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, was helpful. There is no danger of me believing that tech will solve all of our problems. I won’t become a tech believer. Our human problems haven’t really changed in millennia. When I read the Tao Te Ching I find it just as relevant today. The exterior has changed but the interior hasn’t.

Each meeting is unique

(repost from a year ago)

Today in 2006 I posted this:

Ichi-go ichi-e – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ichi-go ichi-e, literally ‘one time, one meeting’, is a Japanese term that describes a cultural concept often linked with famed tea master Sen no Rikyu. The term is often translated as ‘for this time only,’ ‘never again,’ or ‘one chance in a lifetime.’

Ichi-go ichi-e is linked with Zen Buddhism and concepts of transience. The term is particularly associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, and is often brushed onto scrolls which are hung in the tea room. In the context of tea ceremony, ichi-go ichi-e reminds participants that each tea meeting is unique.

No two meetings are the same. Each person is a world that is ever changing. Enjoy this meeting, because we won’t be the same next year, next month, next week, even tomorrow or this afternoon…

Photo of a poster in front of a school in Lisbon that says Cada Pessoa è um Mundo – Each Person is a World

Life is Soupy

Every moment is a new beginning
– T. S. Elliot

Life is one continuous mistake
– Dogen

Everything is equally evolved
– Lynn Margoulis

Life is soupy, mixed up and tumultuous. Muddying the waters is precisely the point, because it’s from such nutritious streams that life grows.
– James Bridle, Ways of Being

Every moment is a new beginning. That’s the saving grace… we can make changes, sometimes, usually, hopefully. The second quote sounds more depressing than it is. For me Life is one continuous mistake means that we might as well be prepared to keep getting up, because we will continue to fall down. I like to remember all of the lucky accidents in art, in music, accidents that became the defining element of a work. The stupid mistake I just made may lead to a helpful insight later. We move forward, we fall, we get up, we get used to the fact that it’s all a continuous mistake.

A couple of days ago, while walking through Santa Fe, a sentence bloomed in my head: We are all broken.
This sentence appeared out of nowhere, like birdshit hitting me square on the bald head. The deaths of loved ones, accidents, medical emergencies, diseases, depression, sadness. We may pretend on Instagram that our lives are perfect, but no life is. It’s not perfection that makes a life beautiful, it’s the Kintsugi… putting the pieces back together as best we can. As Ram Dass said, We’re all just walking each other home. Hopefully we can be mended like this bowl, and wear our brokenness in beauty.*

That brings me to the quote by Lynn Margoulis, Everything is equally evolved. Everything on this planet evolved together. Humans aren’t separate. In fact we carry several pounds of non-human critters in our gut and share DNA with many plants and animals. We didn’t rise out of nature, and we are not separate or above nature, we rose in nature. We rose in the soup, together with everything else.


*These words would make a great t-shirt: We Are Kintsugi…
or This Planet is Kintsugi… or Kintsugi is Life

Left-Handed Commencement

I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.
Ursula K. Le Guin — A Left-Handed Commencement Address

I came across this 1983 Mills College Commencement address by the great Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a lovely address that is earthy and timeless and sounds just as relevant forty years later. I have read a number of books by Le Guin and her translation of the Tao Te Ching is a cherished part of my library.