My New Age Side and My Intellectual Side: Reiki and Yoga and Quantum Physics, So Lost

So, this is going to be an incredibly difficult post to write. It will be mostly reflection. Then lots of talking about some ideas that help me think about my life a little better.

Anyways, that was in April, now it is the end of May. So it might be time to tackle this bad boy.

The major thing I need to grapple with is how my experiences with alternative medicine and new age stuff has been pretty compelling. My first hand experiences with yoga, reiki, and acupuncture have been very interesting, like I said, very compelling. There is something going on with these things. It isn't some sham. It isn't bs.

And so here is the problem: I can't tell you what the heck is goin' on with these things. I really like explaining things. I think I have always been exposed to an articulable world view. Faith has never really been a thing for me. I usually like to be able to explain why I think what I think. Reiki especially really pushes me to just believe that something is true or is working or is real just cause I feel it.

I think in college my penchant for articulation and clear thinking became even much more of a thing. So I think I sorta lost touch with thinking about things like yoga and reiki because I was too busy thinking about military history and other history/philosophy related things. Ummm, but recently I read some stuff that seems like it may provide a realistic explanation for something like reiki. That something is quantum physics in the context of self-directed neuroplasticity. Which has led me to read about things like quantum transfers of consciousness. Long ago I saw that movie 'what the bleep do we know?' and I realize now I should see it again. I was in high school at the time, and my understanding of quantum physics, and lots of other things, is much better now than it was then.

So this is precisely the order of things I will explore. 1. My high school experiences with reiki and yoga. 2. My college experiences with very academic thinking about history and philosophy. 3. My latest academic reading that has been on quantum physics that may somehow explain reiki, but at any rate has me interested again.

High School Yoga and Reiki
So in high school my good friend Dave Cannon happened to have a sister who was trained as a reiki master. I was raised in a house that thrived on agnosticism/atheism, and I was enticed by the idea of some kind of mystical Japanese healing technique. One night I went over to Dave's house and I had a very long conversation with his sister and hey boyfriend. They were both reiki trained, and had a lot of other interests in many new age things loosely associated with reiki. For example, reincarnation, aliens, astral projection, Atlantis, so on. I feel like this conversation really opened me up to quite a lot of thigns I had never been exposed to before. Naturally, I guess. Most people don't talk about reiki or ascension or anything of the sort, and I was young.

But the main thing is that this sent me on a pretty bizarre personal research/experience quest. I think I was a sophomore in high school when I first had that conversation. So my junior year I signed up for an independent study project. My project was very generally on alternative medicines. I talked about reiki in the paper I believe, but I also looked into acupuncture, yoga, and other sorts of alternative medicine that involved laying on of hands, etc..

The independent study was pretty rewarding I think. I feel like I didn't know how to do research very well in those days, so I got my feet wet and it expanded my interest in it quite a bit.

At least enough that I chose to do a mentorship my senior year at University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Medicine at Kernan Hospital in Baltimore. I had a great mentor named Bonnie Tarantino. She was a super nice woman who was trained in Prana Yoga, as well as Usui and Karuna reiki.

Prior to my getting involved with Bonnie during the 2004-2005 academic year, I had received two reiki attunements from David Gleekel at the reiki center of greater Washington. Reiki courses are pretty fascinating things. It is really strange and uncomfortable to be a 17 year old kid and be able to take a course where someone tells you that now you can channel some kind of universal energy through yourself into others.

After my first two levels of reiki training with David Gleekel, I had started my mentorship program with Bonnie Tarantino. I did about 8 months worth of yoga classes with her, and towards the end of my time with her I took a reiki class with her and a friend of hers who also taught reiki. That was in May or June of 2005 I think. But anyways, that final reiki course was quite intense. Quite strange. Some very bizarre experiences with psychic surgery etc.

After that Bonnie bought me a psychic reading from her friend Michael as my graduation gift. That was also a strange experience. He told me some strange things about my cousin. And about how well I would be able to astrally project. Something about matching the speed of the planet.

Regardless of their rationality or articulability, it is near impossible for me to discount the experiences that I have had with reiki, yoga, and other related new age/spiritual whatevers. I have cried because of some of the things that happened to me during yoga or reiki sessions. There has been such intensity to what 'energy' feels like. It is like a wave that moves in and out of or over my body. I know what it feels like for my hands to move themselves, to get really hot, to feel like I am transmitting energy to someone and like my head is light. Reiki feels too real to be fake. The role of prana in Yoga feels too real to be fake.

Could astral projection possibly be real? I was always a very young person doing all of these things with much older people. They always talked about it too.

But anyways, I took a break from writing this and now I don't think I can say too much more about my experiences with these alternative medicines and other new age ways of thinking.

S0 now I'll just talk about the stuff I did in college and how it clashed a bit with all this new age stuff.

College Academic Time
So I ended up being a history major. I suppose I was pretty fresh off the bulk of this reiki and yoga stuff. I took two classes with a guy named Mason at UMBC. Ancient Greece and ancient Egypt. Great classes. He was an interesting guy, liked to make jokes, all around a good teacher. I don't know what his credentials were. I wasn't really a history major then. I was declared psychology my first year at UMBC. Then I met Mason and when I transferred to UMDCP I chose history. It felt right. Then I met Jon Sumida in the Spring semester of 2007. He was quite a challenge at first. I actually talked with him recently. He basically set my heavy thinking into motion. A lot of my ideas come back to things he introduced me to.

But anyways I became very academic. I thrived in Sumida's military history courses, and met some really good sociology professors. David Segal was a really good military sociologist and I learned a lot from his classes. Emily Mann was a smart graduate student and taught sociology of sexuality, introduced me to Foucault, pretty engaging courses, pretty important stuff for me for sure. Meyer Kestnbaum's sociology of war class was really good. Very smart guy who did a great job uniting my work in military history with sociology of gender/sexuality/inequality.

The world of academics didn't really leave me much time for reflecting on yoga or reiki. I'm not sure how I've felt about them for these last 5 years. I guess for 2 to 3 years I was pretty occupied by them. But yeah, college academia overtook that. Definitely.

Some of my reading lately, however, has been compelling me to reevaluate my disinterest in yoga and reiki.

Quantum Physical Spirituality and the Quantum Self

My renewed interest in reiki and yoga happened accidentally, and it was actually a book that substantiates quite a lot of my other academic thinking. The book was Jeffrey Schwartz's The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. Schwartz is a neuroscientist who works with OCD patients. He claims that he has created a therapy that lets OCD patients rewire their brains using Buddhist mindfulness techniques. With OCD there is a neurological circuit that is clearly pathological. The parts of the brain responsible for warning, danger, etc., are overactive. Drugs can work on those neural circuits, but Schwartz claims that Buddhist mindfulness techniques can also reconfigure neural circuits.

More importantly, Schwartz thinks that these physical effects of Buddhist mindfulness can be explained by quantum physics. In both mindfulness and quantum physics attention is the key factor. I discussed all this quite extensively in my post of 4/25/10, so this is rough.

Mindfulness techniques are about paying attention to your thoughts. Acknowledging them, focusing on breathing, checking off your thoughts, letting them pass, focusing on breathing. Pay attention pay attention pay attention.

Schwartz claims that when OCD patients are trained to pay attention to their compulsive thoughts, they can reconceptualize the meaning associated with them, and then redirect thoughts to a more positive outlet. For example, if I feel like washing my hands, I'll work in the garden instead. If they exercise this mindfulness consistently, their brains compulsive circuit can disappear.

So why does paying attention transform the brain?

Well, what is the role of attention in the quantum world in general? Basically, in quantum physics a sub-atomic particle does not have a definite existence until it is observed. Before someone pays attention to something it exists as a superposition of possibilities. Attention is the key thing in bringing one reality into existence over another. Another relevant quantum law is the quantum zeno effect. This is when rapid and repeated observation of a subatomic system prevents it from transforming into another state. Certain molecules are made up of certain molecules, and have multiples forms that they can take. By repeatedly observing these molecules, however, they are forced out of the quantum superposition of possibilities and into a concrete observed reality more often. By repeatedly forcing a molecule to become an observed phenomenon you freeze it in that state and make it more likely to be that way in the future.

This applies to the brain, Schwartz claims. If we repeatedly pay attention to and redirect our thoughts we can make our brains more likely to behave in a certain way. While we aren't paying attention our brain can exist as a superposition of different possibilities, and it may be random which one comes into play. So we get the urge to wash our hands, but we pay attention and redirect our thoughts we can make our brains more likely to make us go to the garden. We do this over and over again and we can make our brains stay this way. We force ourselves to go to the garden instead of going to the sink over and over and the brain will rest itself and avoid the pathological OCD circuit.

So, interesting stuff, this generally introduced me to quantum physics. It also got me thinking about how quantum physics, and specifically non-locality, might be related to my experiences with reiki and yoga.

In both reiki and yoga intention and attention are the most important things. How do you direct reiki energy at someone? You do it with your intention, I was always told. Same thing with Buddhist mindfulness. It all seems to operate through intention.

Then I started looking at some interviews with a University of Oregon physicist named Amit Goswami. Now Mr. Goswami is very explicit about the possible connections between quantum physics and spirituality. He essentially claims that quantum physics is 'rediscovering the existence of god.' He describes something called downward causation, as opposed to upward causation. In upward causation it is when simple subatomic particles are the base cause of everything and it gradually unfolds from atoms to molecules to cells to brains etc..Downward causation, on the other hand, is when consciousness itself causes things to happen, and there is no material explanation.

Two examples of top-down causation. One is a basic non-locality experiment I read about in Schwartz, the other is Goswami's example. So basic non-locality: when two quantum particles are collided they become 'entangled.' Meaning that they now share certain properties of orbit and speed etc.. When one of these molecules is observed (making a quantum superposition become a reality) the other one behaves the same way. They both become actualities at the same time and give the same measurement. Entangled particles have been separated up to 11 km and will still behave identically. So there is no physical cause. Particles do not need to be near each other to act on one another. This matters in terms of reiki and its claim to be able to heal from long distances, which is supposedly done with intention.

Goswami also talks about an experiment he knows of that has supposedly been replicated four times in different labs around the world. I haven't done enough research to really verify this. But he says a guy named Greenberg at the University of Mexico first did this experiment in which he tried to create a non-local transfer of consciousness between two people. So he has two ordinary people meditate together in a room with the intention of making non-local communication. After 20 minutes he splits them up and puts them in electromagnetically sealed rooms and hooks them up to an EEG to monitor their brain activity. One of them is then shown a series of light flashes. They monitor the activity of their occipital lobe so they can tell when the brain responds to the light. Supposedly, at the same moment that the one person is shown the light the other patient experiences very similar brain activity. He said this is a quantum transfer of consciousness. Sounds very strange, and I'd like to do research in the future. But the basic idea being that consciousness, and not matter, is the most fundamental thing in the universe, and it can act non-locally etc..

The last thing I would like to talk about is something Goswami called the 'quantum self.' He said it was essentially the state of being that the Buddhist's call nirvana, or enlightenment, basically he said most of the major religions have their own name for this state of consciousness. Goswami said that because consciousness is the most fundamental thing in the universe, our consciousness is part of a great 'non-ordinary form' of our consciousness. So basically we are all one, we are all the same. We are all a part of the same unified consciousness. Goswami and this other guy are saying that we perceive our experience as continuous, but in reality their is a discontinuity and our consciousness sort of flickers, or something. But anyways, we are all part of the same fundamental consciousness and we only have a perceived separateness from others and the world.

The quantum self is when you are able to transcend the perceived separateness between individuals and recognize yourself as part of the same universal consciousness. Ummm. Rough stuff to lay out there, Goswami. I just find it intense. The first thing that comes to mind is the word 'namaste.' An Indian phrase I learned through yoga people. It means 'I bow to you' or just 'to you.' But there are more complex interpretations, and this one I have seen in the past and think is reminiscent of what Goswami says of the quantum self: "I honor the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells, I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Integrity, of Wisdom and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One."

I like that I think.

But it gets better. Goswami says that the ego, the 'I' as a perceived subjective individual, has a role to play in the quantum self. The ego has to first prepare to attain the state of the quantum self, and the ego then has to actualize the being of the quantum self.

I'm sorry, what? Ha no I find it really fascinating to hear someone say these things. But it really is a bit much for me to handle.

But Goswami says that he really likes to recognize himself as part of a greater universal consciousness and attempting to attain the quantum self (or perhaps Goswami thinks he has attained the quantum self, I'm not sure). But he says it allows him to live a much happier life, a life more focused on love.

Concludingggg

Well then. It seems my experiences with reiki and yoga are indeed something I want to think about. Something I want to explore more. I should meditate more often. Could do it pretty easily. Should start doing more reiki. Strange stuff.

But I find the stuff on quantum physics to be lending some weight to the efficacy, or at least the possible existence, of something like reiki.

With yoga their is no doubt it is good exercise and a very relaxing experience. But my yoga instructor was also a reiki instructor, and the focus was on energy, on prana. We were told to ride it like a wave. It was pretty great, pretty intense. So I dunno, I think the quantum stuff might be relevant to a lot of this stuff.

But it really is just too much for me to wrap my head around intellectually at the moment. I think that I'll continue to read about quantum physics, perhaps in relation to brain functioning and consciousness. I read somewhere that quantum explanations of consciousness seemed unlikely. So there certainly doesn't seem to be agreement among the professional community.

I need more experience with all of this new age stuff. All this stuff. I should do more reiki and yoga, maybe get some acupuncture, maybe try to astrally project. Now that is wacky stuff.

Anyways, that is enough of that. This post isn't about answers cause it is all just so confusing. But I did want to catalog my experience and thoughts on these strange things, especially in light of my recent reading on quantum physics.

Oh here is something realllllly strange that happened to me that is related. Totally weird.

My parents are moving from their house in Columbia to Farmville, Va. And so my dad is getting rid of some books. I saw one called Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century. Published in 1999, seems like something that would be good for me to look at. Seems especially interesting because the other gives a fair amount of pages to the role of the world wars in accelerating physics research.

But now the strange thing. When I was outside saying goodbye to my dad a card in a plastic wrapper fell out of the middle of the book. I hadn't notice it up till then so I looked at it. It is a card with a photo of a Buddha state. On the back it says 'Peacefulness ~ Emptiness.' Synchronicity is also something that is hard for me to think about. But it is a fun coincidence to have that card fall out of that book based on my recently renewed interests in this spiritual stuff. I don't know what to call it. But I definitely have an interest in thinking peacefully, and also have a big interest in zen and Buddhism.

But anyways, experience will have to be the thing that helps me with this question. Hmmm. I wonder where I'll get this experience.

Some Notes/Meaning and Anger.

I literally intend this to be a note of sorts. I am currently working on three different posts.

One is on my thoughts on my experience with reiki/yoga and how I sorta deal with it today after reading about quantum physics and neuroscience and other stuff. One is on Foucault's Discipline and Punish and how I see it being similar to Clausewitz's On War. Unfortunately I haven't been reading a lot the last two days cause I have been busy. But I'll be moving forward in D&P soon. The last post is on the 'everyday a priori imagination.' I explored the possible role of Collingwood's notion of the a priori imagination in a compassionate world view in my post of 3/30/10. At the time, however, I was just exploring some experiences that I had with road rage and thinking about the imagination, so I was surprised to make the connection. But now I think it seems pretty worthwhile, and I would like to pursue that idea more explicitly and more in depth.

Lastly, the note that initially spawned this post. In my post of 5/25 I think I made some statements that don't really pay attention to the effects of stress. I am very curious about the imagination and how we can craft it. I talked about becoming the crafter of your own world of meaning. It is about meaning. Many things in society feel good or bad because of the meaning that is associated with it. Anger, however, I'm not sure. We certainly assign meaning to anger after the fact. But in the actual moment of anger, are we capable of overcoming it through exercising power over meaning? Umm, my sense is that anger on some level must be essential. It must just happen. It doesn't need society's world of meaning to be a thing. Sometimes I have been pretty mad an it didn't feel like there were many words between me and that anger. But I don't think meaning operates entirely in the world of words. Definitely not. So I'm not sure. But at the same times, the 'essential' expression of anger can often be triggered by meaning in the social world. I want to explore this at some point. Right now it feels hard to think about and I'm going to eat.

Ethical Behavior, the Internalization and Simulation of Perspectives, and the Idea of God

So, I am kinda curious about how it is that people are able to act ethically, how people have certain moral understandings, and how it is that people engage with those ideas to transform it into behavior. I am interested in pursuing this idea along the lines of simulating and internalizing certain perspectives. I can think of certain instances where behaving ethically involves internalizing a certain perspective, and being able to simulate thoughts about yourself from that other perspective. For example, God. An always present, judgmental observer that helps us imagine our own thoughts and actions in a different light.

Anyways, I think that internalization and simulation of a moral perspective may have something to do with a lot of ethical behavior.

I started this post quite a while ago, 4/11/10. But now maybe I'll just explore it and write a little bit.

So, when someone is alone in a room and they are thinking about doing something considered immoral (drugs, killing animals, anything at all), how do they gauge themselves? How do you understand the meaning of your own behavior even when you are alone?

Cause I guess that is one of the main things that seems strange to me. That people can be alone yet still feel critical of themselves. Still maintain some sense of moral perspective despite their aloneness.

I think simulation theory of mind can at least help account for this.

Simulation theory of mind basically argues that people understand other people and themselves by internally simulating the thoughts and feelings that other people have expressed through words, body language, etc.. Simulation has a lot to do with self-recognition. As a child we learn to understand our own facial expressions because of interactions with others. We smile as babies, mothers and others smile back and we thus learn what smiling is. Mirror neurons are also a way in which we learn to gauge our own behavior. Mirror neurons are pretty fascinating. But onward. How could simulation theory of mind account for ethical behavior?

Let me just run with the example of God, cause it is the easiest to think about. So, if I am alone in a room, or I am in a crowd, how do I think of myself as behaving ethically? How do I make myself behave ethically? Well, the idea of God provides a constant perspective that I can inhabit at anytime and think of myself in relation to. God supposedly has a strict moral code, he is always watching, and he is always judging. So, if I ever need to gauge my own behavior I can think, 'well God is watching, what would he do?' or 'what would Jesus do?'

Religion offers a moral perspective that we can always imagine in order to understand our own behavior better. It is about having a perspective simulate/imagine. God is a straightforward case, that is probably why it was so popular for so very long. It offers the quickest moral fix.

But prisons and other forms of social justice (similar to religion) also enable their own forms of internalization and simulation. Prisons for example, give us an understanding of what it would be like to go to jail, or to experience being arrested or punished. So, when we are about to commit a crime or do something illegal, we can imagine/simulate what it would be like to go to jail. Clearly it would be bad, so our ability to imagine/simulate possible consequences can deter us from acting immorally.

I'm really not doing a very good job explaining this.

In order to do this well I would need a full blown discussion of simulation theory of mind, and I would need to do research into religious and legal practices. But I don't want to do that right now. If you want to understand this (my invisible/non-existent audience) then go and read some of my other posts (there are many) on simulation theory of mind, and these fragments might make sense.

Summing up.

I think that ethical behavior has something to do with internalization and simulation. I bet that moral codes allow us to imagine and simulate certain perspectives, and create an outside perspective on ourselves that allows us to gauge our own behavior. God is supposedly an all present and moral observer, and therefore we can imagine a moral being who is watching us at all times. It lets us see ourselves in different ways when we can imagine/simulate a certain perspective. Prisons and other modern institutions of morality also give us a certain perspective on ourselves.

It is about simulating perspectives beyond the self. I think that is what moral codes allow us to do. They give us a way of imagining a view beyond our own. It lets us shape our own behavior by having an outside view. Anyways, bad post. Not very clear.

I think that this idea could be very worthwhile to explore in the future. I have an incomplete grasp of what is up with this idea. I will say two things, I know two authors who are skirting these issues, Alvin Goldman and Michel Foucault. Goldman, in Simulating Minds, concludes with a section on moral philosophy as it is relevant to simulation, so I know there is more to say. Foucault, in Discipline & Punish, is spending a fair amount of time talking about the people are how they witness public torture and execution. He mentions how it gives them a way to imagine the power exercised by the state, and how they may experience pain if they choose to subvert the state. It seems like it could involve the internalization of someone else's experience to attain a sense of their experience, which would allow you to behave in a different way. It sounds like internalization and intuitive simulation.

In conclusion, I think that these ideas are legitimate and are grounded in my reading, but I can't really explain them very well yet.

Customer Service: What the Heck is Goin' on Here?

So I'd like to spend a little time reflecting on my experiences with customer service jobs. Mainly how much I enjoy them. What is that all about?

My first thought is of small talk. I've had quite a number of people tell me that they are anti-small talk. Totally anti-small talk. They really dislike it.

I often enjoy small talk. More importantly, though, I think it is essential. Literally indispensable for social life. We need it. We need a way to engage with people. Perhaps people thing small talk should lead to big talk. More so, people associate small talk with superficial talk, and think that they should get to real talk ('big talk'). Whatever. I am going to leave this questions on the nature of 'small talk' for the end of this post. I just wanna talk about some of my past experiences in customer service and try to clarify why it is that I seem to gain so much pleasure from them.

So first things first, the most obvious thing that I find satisfying about customer service: I am in a social situation in which it is acceptable for me to say hello to anyone at any moment. I can start talking to literally anyone I want. Old people, peers, couples, cute girls, watch out, cause if I feel like I will totally say hello to you. And I suppose in the real world, at any moment, this is the case. Social situations, however, often compel to not say hello to someone because it feels inappropriate. I can't very well say hello to some couple or some girl on the street and feel comfortable just starting a conversation. Perhaps I should work on that. But in any case, working a customer service job it is expected that I will say hello to people, so I do, and I enjoy it.

I used to enjoy being a cashier when I worked at the UBC. I used to tell people that I like it because I would get an instant glimpse at a face, and then I would immediately find out what that person was like (on some level). I see someone, I say hey how are you, etc., and then we are interacting. As soon as I perceive their face, demeanor, etc., I am interacting with them. Conceptions based on appearance are immediately entangled with real live speech and interaction. Sure, sometimes it is superficial interaction with customer service/cashiering, but whatever, sometime it isn't.

I often find myself torn between the worlds of appearances and reality, though. I think that I've always like to watch people and think about people. I would like to think I like to pay attention. But for a long time I think I was a lot shyer. So it was easy for me to see someone randomly for a long time, and to completely mentalize that person. They exist in my mind only as this appearance and all these random and uninformed conceptions I have about them. It seems hard to avoid thinking things about people, or speculating about people. Basically, I think my mind likes to think about people a lot even when I haven't met them, and that can be a very strange experience to know someone only as an appearance.

A college campus is a pretty ideal environment to have a lot of this. You see certain people on a very regular basis (class, food, etc.) and you may never talk to them. It is easy to see all kinds of people and to have thoughts about them even though you know nothing of them at all. Perhaps your like the way they dress and think they are probably cool. Or you like the way they walk, you think they carry themselves well and that makes you curious.

Well, I will say, I have had many instances in which I have seen a person on the regular, and managed to remember them and have an imagined sense of them. I have also, however, had instances in which I met those people. Not too many, but definitely there have been some occasions where I had seen someone for a long time and then ended up meeting them in person.

It can be really fascinating.

Sometimes they are totally cooler than you could have anticipated. Sometimes they are just whatever. I mean. It is fascinating how appearances totally don't line up with personality all the time. I mean, it seems obvious. But I just find people to be very unique. It is always fun to meet new people. It's true.

But anyways, customer service. With these jobs the amount of time between the first sight of a person and the moment of first interaction is really short. You see someone and then you are saying hello to them. That is cool. That doesn't happen all the time.

When it comes to meeting new people, I prefer my imagination to have as little time as possible. I'd prefer to spend a fair amount of time with someone and get to know them. It is really difficult to meet people only vaguely or in passing, and then have my imagination create some wild and complex picture of them.

I like my imagination a lot, but when it comes to people, I don't trust it to work super well unless I have some evidence of what a person is like.

Anyways, I like customer service because I like talking to people.

Especially where I am working now, I am a little bit less knowledgeable on what I am dealing with, so it is really dynamic and interesting. I just talk to people. They want to know what the deal is with these products. What is the difference. What is better. Sometimes I just straight up don't know. I ask if it seems like I should. But you just gotta go from person to person. Every customer is a different experience. Sometimes it just breaks down into long conversations. That only happens sometimes. But I enjoy it.

Also, I read something the other day. Religious leaders were asked to give their thoughts on how to be happy. It was a hindu, or a Buddhist, I forget, but he said the best way to be happy was to make other people feel happy. When you help someone it feels pretty good. Someone needs something and you can totally help them out. It feel good.

Plus, I am a huge fan of simulation theory of mind. Thinking about other minds is like being that mind for yourself. So making other people happy, you bring happiness to your own mind. It is cool.

Well, the customer service thing seems pretty straight forward. I like talking to people, it lets me talk to lots of new and different people, and its about helping people. Also, I think that the simulation theory of mind explanation could be quite strong. I feel like that is something I should explore at length, but this isn't the time.

But I suppose I'll return briefly to small talk vs. big talk. I want to say first that I don't even know what I mean by these terms really. It is hard to say. I think the distinction of superficial talk vs. personal talk might be better. But personal talk. I dunno. I don't know how to define this stuff exactly.

But here is what I'll say for now. I really like making small talk. It feels really nice to just be able to interact with someone on any level. You can just react and be with that person. Talk to them. See them react. Then react again. It's just dynamism. Reaction.

Ah, an example. Is it enjoyable to talk to people about the weather? Isn't that like the barest small talk? But I still think their can be satisfaction in that.

Talking is about sharing experience with people. And I can do that with the weather. You and me both feel this heat. It sucks. Right on, bro.

So why does it bother some people to engage in small exchanges of experience (small talk)? I will pose a wild and not thought of sort of thought.

Basically, I think that some people find small talk frustrating because of the current social/cultural/historical situation. Again, this is bs speculation. But, what if living in America gives us a hyper awareness of how it is that people are 'supposed' to interact. I think I am generalizing based on my own experience. I felt a weird social awareness in college. Like, I already had an understanding of what typical college social interactions were like. The kinds of things people talked about, the kinds of things they did or said, the way people were. I already 'knew' what people were supposed to be like. So acting in an organic way felt strange. I couldn't make my mind lose its awareness.

But these days I think I feel a lot more organic. A lot more intuitive.

I put it all on history. Or I think about it in historical terms. I think of the student culture of the university's in the last 70 years. I think about what American social life is like for young people. I think about the media that has been producing images. I think about my exposure to these images.

I think about the historical contingencies of my own thinking.

The idea is to realize that I am only thinking I should be certain ways because of the particular standards that have emerged in this unique cultural moment. Once I can see the historicity of my thought then I can start approaching the frontiers of my thought.

It's about thinking differently. And so I think at some point I started thinking differently about social interactions. I started thinking about dynamism and intuition and reaction. About flow and people.

Who knows, this post took some strange turns. But the bottom line is that I like interacting with people. Customer service jobs let me do that. I really like doing it in general too, but sometimes find myself averse to it. But as usual I would like to think historically about the way I am thinking about socializing. Ultimately because I don't want to think about socializing so much. I wan't to do it.

Expressing Surprise and Being Surprised by Expression: Words and Identity

I feel disconnected from my blog posts. Rob feels like he sees where his music goes, I feel like I am bearing my core. Maybe he does too.

Either way me and Rob were having a conversation about how it is that we relate to the things that we produce creatively. Rob is a musician, I would like to be a writer/philosopher.

I told rob that with my writing I was often trying to capture some sort of surprising thought that I had. I often have very strange moments where all of a sudden I'm thinking something I've never thought before. My post of 4/6/10 'Planning and Remembering' was me trying to understand why I was so surprised by Efron's false memory. My post of 4/8/10 'Anticipating Moments, Anticipating Memories' tried to explore the surprise and shock I felt at my graduation dinner with my parents where I was thinking about memory in brand new ways.

Even my longer posts, my post of 4/30/10, my post of 3/19/10, are all me trying to deal with the surprising way in which my thoughts present themselves to me. My thought surprises me all the time.

Rob, I think, said he was trying to express emotional surprise with his music. But I don't know if I understand. He isn't here.

But I will say a bit more about feeling disconnected from posts.

That is why my post of 4/30/10 feels so strange to me in hindsight. I'm not sure how I relate to it. I'm not sure what part of me produced it. Is that what I think? Where did that come from? How did I think that? Do I still think that? These outputs come so sporadically to me. They escape my sense of identity in a way, though. I often feel like they have come from somewhere other than myself.

So much of my thought has a sort of disconnect between parts of the mind. I definitely am not in favor of seeing myself in a unified identity. I am not some singular coherent being. My anger takes me different places. Maybe that is why I identified so much with my paper on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I posted on 5/21/2010. That book is pretty incredible in terms of what types of challenges it is posing, what types of questions it is asking about science, evolution, language, and identity. Suchhh a tight book.

Claxton and emotions as personalities. If an identity/personality is all about goals, perspectives, etc., then don't emotions give us different personalities? Emotions are there to help us achieve a wide variety of goals. They change what we want. My emotions change me into a different thing.

But I'm about to give up on this post. All I know is that I like the way I think. I think that it pops differently all the time. I think I change. I think I am often surprised by how I think. If I surprise myself, how can I have a coherent sense of intellectual identity? Any type of identity?

I think I do identify with myself, and with my writing. But the process of expressing my thoughts feels so different from living with them. My emotions feel very different than my analytical writing does. But they are the same thing. They come from the same place. They are all part of my general brain/mind.

Luckily, I kinda like Buddhism and stuff, so I don't have too much of a stake in a coherent identity.

Me and rob talked about this a bit later. A few hours later. Came to a few more clear conclusions.

Basically, creative output, whether its music or writing, can happen very fast and very unexpectedly. It can be jarring. When I first write something fast it is so strange to see it in front of me that I don't know how I relate to it.

But, when I take the time to really get to know an idea, or really refine a paper, I suppose then I feel like I know it a little better. My Jekyll and Hyde paper I feel like I can identify with. I feel like I know it pretty well and it says a lot of things that I want to say.

So its all about getting to know the things that I have created very quickly and spontaneously. It seems interesting that I would have to get to know myself by reading something I wrote. Lots of famous quotations come to mind. Flannery O'Connor, ahem.

But it is true. Writing comes fast and it feels like it has come from somewhere other than myself, or at least somewhere that I don't understand or have access to. So, I get to know myself through my own writing? Sure.

Academics and Connecting with Other People: Empathy in Life and the Humanities

Me and Rob were sitting outside and I saw two hispanic men and started thinking about all the culture and language that separated us. And the academic world and how it simultaneously brings me closer to people and distances me from them. It brings me closer to them when I am alone in my room. Articulation and people and pain. Can I get closer to their experiences? yes no?

The bulk of the academic work that I am interested in has to do with experience. With living. With feeling and breathing without a choice. I really like getting close to other people. I like feeling other people's pain and love. I'd like to think of myself as being pretty sensitive. I try to embrace it and make it into a good thing rather than something that overwhelms me or troubles me. But I'll be honest, my sensitivity can overwhelm me and sometimes it troubles me. But more so, much more so, I think of it as a way to feel closer to other people.

I think it has to do with the imagination. Last night my friend Efron asked me if my imagination was running away with me, or something like that. I said typically.

I like my imagination. I like thinking about it. I like writing about it.

I'm now gonna transition to my major discussion here, but basically what I have said is that I think I am really sensitive and have a really strong imagination, and that this leaves me open to feeling a lot of other things. It makes me very empathetic. Further! all of my favorite disciplines (history, philosophy, literature, sociology), are all about getting closer to other people's experiences with the imagination. My favorite disciplines all involve a more complex form of empathy. Empathy is what I'm all about.

So this question (does academics enable me to connect with more people or does it alienate me from them) feels like a very serious question to me. I will state my (very preliminary) answer in plain language now then I'll discuss it.

I believe that my academic work ultimately lets me connect with other people more. But it does it in a counter-intuitive way. By engaging in really serious academic work, thinking about taking it to the PhD level, you are in many ways separating yourself from the bulk of people. You are learning to read and think things that most people have no interest in doing. There is no denying that it separates you. But, at the same time I think that some academic work can enhance your ability to connect with other people. It gives you an awareness of the limited scope of your own perspective. It can strengthen your imagination to let you empathize with people in a wide range of situations despite your lack of personal experience. You can become the crafter of your own world of meaning once you've realized somethings about yourself and about your imagination.

So, turns out I don't really feel like exploring this question at too much length right now because I believe so much of my other writing has it covered.

The humanities can indeed give you the ability to empathize with lots of other people who are very far removed from our situation. The key is synthetic experience. You read other things and you can feel for other people. You can get a sense of other things even if you don't go through them yourself.

But at the same time it can feel alienating. Expending mental effort to get in touch with people who are out of touch with me. That sounds arrogant and silly. But I think it can be a thing. Sometimes people don't care. And if I push myself to understand why they don't care, it hurts. Because I am expending lots of effort to be like a mind that is expending no effort, and it feels bad to make my mind be that way.

But hey my post from April 30th totally covers so much of this stuff in depth and more technically. How do you like your pain? is a section of that post. Do you like it as the absence of understanding or do you like it as a process of painful understanding? The latter. Always the latter. maybe not sometimes though.

Feeling and Not Feeling: I Don't Know What to Think, but Here is a Summary of my Current Reading and my Thoughts on Violence and Social Order

I'm not quite sure how to make sense of my inconsistent thinking and behavior.

This statement is really broad and can apply to a lot of different things. But the one thing that I feel the most curious about is my tendency to flip between lots of reading and writing, and not quite so much reading and writing.

I think these days I am feeling more things than I am thinking things. I mean, I'm thinking lots of things. But I have more curiosity about the social world. About other people.

Ummmm.

I still just feel like since I finished my essay of April 30th I don't quite know how to gauge my thinking.

But the 30th post was a beast. An absolute beast. Just in terms of how it felt for me to produce it. It felt beastly. Confusing. Exciting.

Lol also I am eagerly anticipating The-Dream's new cd. All 4 songs he has released so far are tighttt. So good. Can't wait. Very excited.

But I am reading slowly.

I am reading W.G. Sebald's Vertigo. A novel that is written like it is a memoir. It is just one guy reflecting on himself and other people he knows. He has been traveling over Europe. Spent some time talking about a guy in the Napoleonic wars. I read Sebald's Austerlitz, which my dad loved, and I thought was pretty good. Sebald's style is meandering and reflective. He takes his time. A paragraph, or even a single sentence, might go on for a couple pages. It just toddles. Plus, I like to read in bed when I'm tired, and I find it really hard to follow when I'm tired.

I am also reading Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault is always a challenge, so I have been taking it slow. I finished the first chapter. So I am done the intro and getting ready to go into the rest of it.

After the first 30 pages, it seems like Foucault's major questions are, why did social discipline change from public torture to confinement in an elaborate prison system? What elements of torture remain in modern prison systems? If the body is no longer involved, then what is it that prisons torture? Is it the soul? How is the exercise of power (prisons as the specific example) related to forms of knowledge?

The last one, the power/knowledge question, is something Foucault is quite well known for, and a part of his work that I am pretty familiar with from other books, essays, and interviews. But, I would like to say a few things about the way Foucault describes power within society.

There are two things that I'm not quite sure how to reconcile right now. First, Foucault's claim (which I know he believed and makes sense) that every use of power comes along with a certain form of knowledge that enables that power. Further, the exercise of power creates knowledge. This is a complicated idea and I don't feel like explicating it heavily right now. I just don't. Also, I think reading D&P I feel a bit like I am in the process of coming to a fuller understanding of the idea of power/knowledge, so I'll write about it later.

In addition to the idea of power/knowledge, I want to understand how Foucault believes war plays into the exercising of power. I know he took Clausewitz's phrase (war is the continuation of politics by other means), and said the inverse: 'Politics is the continuation of war by other means.' Foucault said in an interview from the volume "Power/Knowledge" that he was trying to figure out how fundamental war was. Did it stand at the center of everything? Is it really the basis of all other power relations? Does violence, or the idea of it, the implication of it, stand at the heart of all power relations? I sorta like this idea.

Reading the intro of D&P I wrote something in the margins that I have been thinking about for a long time. I was a military history major, so I have read a lot about war and I tend to think about it in relation to a lot of things. But anyways, Foucault said that with the decline of torture and the rise of government juridical institutions the idea of punishment changes. "it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice." I italicized that line. I want to reflect on this.

In the margins I wrote, 'society's implicit war.' For a while I have been thinking about how the rise of stable governments corresponds with the rise of stable military institutions (Jon Sumida, you changed the way I think). Why do these things correspond? What is the link between society at large and the government's ability to monopolize armed force?

Well, I have thought for a while that society rests on violence far more than people are aware. Police carry guns. The government gets very worried when anyone tries to buy a lot of guns. So much of the American budget is spent on the military. Historically, governments have spent so much money on their military. Often over 50% sometimes over 75%, I have 85%? But that was like 18th century. Anyways, I think that society is the way it is because we have people with guns that will hurt anybody that breaks the social order.

The idea of the social contract I guess I have a problem with. I don't think that people are just engaged in an agreement with a government where they sacrifice and exchange or whatever. I don't understand the idea very well, so forgive me if I am misrepresenting it. But, I think it is about violence. It's about being able to hurt people if they don't do what you want.

Once I had a conversation with a friend about how we could find a more peaceful way to help the Middle East. They went so far as to say that we shouldn't even have people on the ground with guns. That we should be able to find a way to help them without all that. She admitted it was probably a pipe dream. I think it is a full blown pipe dream.

If you don't have guys there with guns, other guys with guns are gonna take your shit. Why were so many tons of U.N. aid diverted by warlords? Why did people with guns manage to take so much stuff from an international institution that was trying to help? People with guns take things, and you need people with guns to stop them. Sounds kinda terrible. But it seems hard for me to think otherwise.

The first step to creating social order is to have guys with weapons that can kill anyone who tries to break your idea of social order. You can't have a society unless you have a stable means of killing or hurting.

In March I was sitting in a hotel lobby reading The Order of Things and I started daydreaming about something. I was thinking, what if someone took this book from me and refused to give it back. What if I asked them and they refused? How would I get it back? I would perhaps tell the front desk staff, and they would tell him to give it back. And if he refused they may call security, then they may call the police.

The bottom line is someone has to get physical.

If someone really refuses to give you something that is yours you have to take it. This seems like what the use of power is. Forcing another person to do something. It is a relationship with another.

Now, I think that this last example I gave of myself to hotel staff to security to police. A hierarchy of power. The hotel and legal rights, security and legal rights, the police. Power is very much facilitated through modern institutions these days. But I think at its most basic element it still comes back to physicality and violence.

If someone refuses to give me my property then someone has to make him. How do you make other people do things? Power? Sure, but what type? Well, at its most basic it is physical, but again, modern power is facilitated by these institutions. I can make someone do something by calling security or police, both whole hold the implicit threat of violence.

I have gone astray. Let me try to just wrap up.

I think all society rests on the implicit threat of violence. The government has a monopoly on armed force for a reason. Their police need to be able to hurt us if we step out of line, and the military needs to be able to hurt people if nations step out of line.

Interestingly, in America, the line of what is appropriate behavior seems to be so broad and flashy that we don't notice the armed guards standing on either side of us. We have lost touch with society's implicit violence in America, I think.

Anyways, a closing thought that I find somewhat interesting.

If the maintenance of the social order is contingent upon violence, then how should political leaders think or talk about violence? Well, I think they should embrace it. They need to recognize the centrality of violence and war. If politicians are reflective and intelligent individuals, then they need to handle the issue of violence straight up.

In other words, society's most brutal and violent decisions should be made by the most thoughtful and sensitive people.