Quote of the Week: From Ralph Waldo Emerson

The article below is a reprint from what I wrote on December 21, 2018. It features American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson's view on what constitutes a truly great accomplishment.  This goes out to all the people out there...primarily men in my experience...who are obsessed with their positions on imaginary social pecking orders, constantly trying to show how accomplished they are with their degrees and positions and wealth and businesses, and who get enraged because it's obvious that I don't give a damn about their delusions.  On the other hand, Mr. Self-Important Dude, if feeling superior to me is what makes you feel adequate enough to go on living, I'm not here to change your mind: believe whatever you want to believe...

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.                                        ---Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a famous nineteenth century American philosopher and poet who championed the ideal of individualism.  For someone as myself who generally conforms to society's standards for conduct without complaint, I nevertheless also find myself continually put under pressure by others to speak and make decisions that conform with their agendas for me and not how I would act according to my own values and purposes.  I recognize that with each of us there is necessarily a tug of war going on between how we want to individually live our lives and how others want us to live out our sole chance at life on Earth...unless of course they happen to believe in reincarnation.  My philosophy has always been to respect the personal decisions of people around me concerning their own lives as long as they do not trample on the rights of others or mine.  But there are some people in this world, sad to say, who are incapable of leaving well enough alone and who seem to regard me as some kind of project...or worse an object...that they are entitled to hound and pressure into conforming to what they deem to be "good enough".  They are incapable of processing my expressed respect of them as being anything other than a sign of my own weakness, which they are only to eager to exploit.  But that's the world for you...only problem is that some folks, especially the real religious ones, who claim to be not conforming to this world, are actually some of the most worldly in this regard.  To associate with them entails never quite being accepted for oneself...there's always something else I have to do to gain their "approval".  Only one problem: I couldn't care less...and never did...whether they approve of me or not, and I never will, seeing them for what they are...

Game(s) of the Week: Bombardment and Prisonball

To discuss my old elementary school recess games of bombardment and prison ball, both played on a full-court outdoor asphalt basketball court with those red inflatable bouncy balls and two bowling pins and involving the entire class at once, I read back on this blog and discovered I had already written an article covering it all...so with the author's (my) permission, I have copied that August, 2007 piece and pasted it below:

When I was going to elementary school from the fourth through sixth grades, we had our customary recess/physical education period. And one of the games we used to play was Bombardment. This game used the typical outside, asphalt-surfaced, full basketball court, but instead of using the baskets, a bowling pin was placed underneath each basket on opposite ends of the court. The class was divided into two sides, each side relegated to one half of the court. The object of the game was to knock down the opposing team’s pin using those red, lightweight basketball-sized balls (usually with about four or five used per game) that were commonly used in elementary schools. In the process of the game, if someone got hit by a ball thrown by the other side before it bounced, they’d be out of the game (until the next game started). Unless they caught the ball, in which the opponent who threw it would be out of the game. So, as a game of Bombardment went on, fewer and fewer players would be actively involved, while more and more would be off the court. While “out” of the game, students would often make up their own games, talk with each other, or play on the monkey bars nearby. Apparently, to the faculty involved in overseeing this, that meant too much student freedom and not enough control, so a new game was later devised and called Prisonball. It was exactly the same as Bombardment, except that when you were “out”, instead of leaving the game, you had to stand in a small square inset on the opponent’s end of the court and wait for a ball to come to you (which rarely happened). If you were lucky and got hold of a ball, you then had to hit one of the opposing players with it to be “redeemed” and go back to your end to play. Can you guess what happened? As the game wore on, more and more players became “prisoners” and were cramped together, sometimes resembling “Black Hole of Calcutta” conditions, in the respective “prison” squares (with the more aggressive students jostling with others for positions on the outside). But this misery for the students was joy for the faculty, who once again had the students all under their thumbs. And it got to be that, at the beginning of a game, a teacher would loudly proclaim that it was to be Prisonball, not Bombardment. So one of my favorite games at school quickly turned into my most hated game there. Those responsible for this could control my participation, but they couldn’t control the contempt I felt for them then. It just made me, in the long run, less trusting of any school authority and more likely to go down my own paths, for better or for worse.

Reconsidering Twitter

The social media website known as Twitter has of late been closely identified with politics...particularly those of our current president as he has made much use of it during his campaign and even now.  But unlike Facebook, which people in general use to see what's going on with each other, Twitter seems to have been relegated to "following" celebrities, news, and politics.  I have my own Twitter account and never post on it...although a couple of years ago I tried linking my mostly daily blog articles on it.  But since nobody's going to reach my blog that way unless they already "follow" me, Twitter just didn't seem like a viable way to publicize my blog.  And I'm pretty dissatisfied with the "news feed" I'm getting on it right now.  So I'm reconsidering how to use this free Internet communications site to my best advantage...both in expressing myself and receiving information on it from others.  I may have to be a bit creative as I try to figure out ways to get around some of the obstacles I see from Twitter...

I heard a few weeks ago to my surprise that Twitter, unlike other social media companies, was losing money bigtime and faced bankruptcy.  I'd hate to see that happen, but then again Twitter needs to make itself somehow easier and more attractive for people in general to use and network with each other...not just as a publicity tool for the rich and powerful...

Blackberry, Road Travel

I got a Blackberry the other day. It is fun to be able to have access to the Internet wherever I go. I'm thinking of trying out a little experiment with it over the next few days: submit all of my blog articles through Blackberry instead of my home computer. The reason is simple: I will be doing some road travelling into the middle of next week, so my daily "homebody" routine will be temporarily interrupted. Should be a little tedious typing on the little Blackberry keyboard, but otherwise this should be an interesting experience.

Blog Reprint from April 29, 2007

From time to time, I may reprint a blog article of mine from the past. This one is from nearly two years ago. I hope you enjoy it.

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EXISTENCE, SKEPTICS, AND SUBJECTIVITY

I have heard and read from many who refuse to subscribe to any belief pertaining to the ultimate nature of our existence except in terms of what the accepted current cumulative body of science has proven. When talk comes up about a person's sense of self, inevitably the response, with some possible variations, is that all that a person thinks or feels is determined by biochemical processes in their own body, particularly in their nervous system, and acted on by the other systems as well. Perhaps works are sited that show a person's spiritual experiences to correspond to heightened neural activity in specific parts of the brain.

Another objection these skeptics have to any nonmaterialistic view of existence, such as religion or spiritualism, is that they cannot accept knowledge of something that transcends our studied physical plane, especially when it concerns our mortality, by relying on the words of people who have claimed, whether it be from the ancient past or in the present, that they were closer to God (or, in the words of Desiderata, whatever they conceive him to be) then other people. For they see prophets, priests, shamans, imams, gurus, lamas, and all of the others who play this type of role as ordinary human beings tied to this material life and who are no further removed than anyone else from its restrictions, most importantly the restriction of eventual death. But the same skeptics should understand that this conclusion about religions and their leaders neither proves nor disproves the content of what the religions espouse. Subjective religious experience is valid and real for those who experience it. Which brings me to the problem I have with the first conjecture.

The problem I have with the explanation that all subjective experiences that an individual may have can ultimately be explained through biology and chemistry is that it is incomplete. Woefully incomplete, for there is a fundamental question that underlies the spiritual quest for meaning that I have not heard being asked. That question is not "Who am I?" or "What is my purpose in life?" (both obviously very important questions), but rather "What is the here and now?". This question can only be answered accurately by the person asking it and cannot be generalized or explained away. The answer is spiritual and real and it inspires a second question, "Why am I here and now, instead of there (another place, body) or then (another time)?" Science cannot answer the first question, and since the second follows directly from the first, it cannot answer either. For within the tenants of the philosophy of scientific investigation, the "here and now" is imbedded within the axiomatic role of the observer, a separate role on which depends the entire body of observed, empirical results of experiments that the totality of scientific expression rests. It also lies unanalyzed within the scientific process, not only as designer of the hypothesis and writer of the report, but also as the creative dreamer who conceives of which topic to investigate according to its relevance to science and society.

A doubter to this proposition may respond that any person's sense of here and now is due to their body's biochemistry, but this doesn't begin to address either the question of "what does here and now mean", or the corollary question of "why am I here at this time in this body and not someone else at another time?" I can address these questions by giving an honest answer: "I don't know! ---But I'm working on it."

One final point: when I earlier chose "skeptic" as a depiction, I used it not disparagingly, but rather to describe a generic belief system that many people abide by that discounts anything unproven by established science. However, there is a more precise usage of this term, whereby a skeptic does not necessarily believe something is untrue if scientifically unproven but rather objects to the unproven being portrayed as scientific. In this narrower definition I am a skeptic, too, acknowledging at the same time that reality cannot in its entirety be explained by science.
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I still hold to what I wrote in the above article. The bottom line to all of this is that, for me, life contains a big element of uncertainty, or mystery if you will. And I think that it always will. Perhaps others see it differently.