Depersonalization

"...The automobile was important to Los Angeles, a city more technology-dependent than any in the world. Los Angeles could not survive without the automobile, as it could not survive without water piped in from hundreds of miles away, and as it could not survive without certain building technologies. This was a fact of the city's existence, and had been true since early in the century.

But in recent years Ross had begun to recognize the subtle psychological effects of living your life inside an automobile. Los Angeles had no sidewalk cafes, because no one walked; the sidewalk café, where you could stare at passing people, was not stationary but mobile. It changed with each traffic light, where people stopped, stared briefly at each other, and then drove on. But there was something inhuman about living inside a cocoon of tinted glass and stainless steel, air-conditioned, carpeted, stereophonic tape-decked, power-optioned, isolated. It thwarted some deep human need to congregate, to be together, to see and be seen.

Local psychiatrists recognized an indigenous depersonalization syndrome. Los Angeles was a town of recent emigrants and therefore strangers; cars kept them strangers, and there were few institutions that served to bring them together. Practically no one went to church, and work groups were not entirely satisfactory. People became lonely; they complained of being cut off, without friends, far from families and old homes. Often they became suicidal – and a common method of suicide was the automobile. The police referred to it euphemistically as "single unit fatalities". You picked your overpass, and hit it at eighty or ninety, foot flat to the floor. Sometimes it took hours to cut the body out of the wreckage…"

Page 147. The Terminal Man
Michael Crichton

Island

The mind gets used to things. It expands to contain, and profit from, what it is made to endure. And what once wrenched your guts out with pain can later become a necessity.

Alexander Selkirk (on whom Robinson Crusoe was modeled) was stranded on the island of Juan Fernandez off the coast of Chile for 4 and a half years.

After his rescue, ...."Selkirk eventually returned to his home in Scotland, where he became quite a celebrity. Though he did get married, he never quite recovered from his stay on the island. Spending much of his time alone, he didn't feel comfortable living indoors and built a sort of cave or bower behind his father's house that he stayed in. He also trained two cats to perform little feats, like he did on the island.

Eventually he returned to the sea and he died of fever off the coast of Africa in 1721 at the age of 45."

Why isn't everyone creative?

From the chapter 'The Childlike Adult'. Page 148, 'The Human Zoo' by Desmond Morris:

"In any thriving super-tribal city all the citizens should be potential 'inventors'. Why, then, do so few of them indulge in active creativity, while the others are satisfied to enjoy their inventions second-hand, watching them on television or are content to play simple games and sports with strictly limited possibilities for inventiveness?

Part of the answer is that children are subordinate to adults. Inevitably, dominant animals try to control the behaviour of their subordinates. Much as adults may love their children, they cannot help seeing them as a growing threat to dominance. They know that with ultimate senility they will have to give way to them, bu they do everything they can to postpone the evil day. There is therefore a strong tendency to suppress inventiveness in members of the community younger than oneself. An appreciation of the value of their 'fresh eyes' and their new creativeness works against this, but it is an uphill struggle.

By the time the new generation has matured to the point where its members could be wildly inventive, childlike adults, they are already burdened with a heavy sense of conformity. Struggling against this as hard as they can, they in turn are then faced with the threat of another younger generation coming up beneath them, and the suppressive process repeats itself.

Only those rare individuals who experience an unusual childhood, from this point of view, will be able to achieve a level of great creativity in adult life. How unusual does such a childhood have to be? It either has to be so suppressive that the growing child revolts against the traditions of its elders in a big way (many of our greatest creative talents were so-called delinquent children), or it has to be so un-suppressive that the heavy hand of conformity rests lightly on its shoulder....

The vast majority of children will, of course, receive a more balanced mixture of punishment and reward for their inventiveness and will emerge into adult life with personalities that are both moderately creative and moderately conformist.Their attitude to the childlike adults will be ambivalent; on the one hand they will applaud them for providing the much-needed sources of novelty, but on the other they will envy them.

The creative talent will therefore find himself alternately praised and damned by society in a bewildering way, and will be constantly in doubt about his acceptance by the rest of the community. "

Nostlagia

".................for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigrés gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable.

But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena (character in the novel) or Odysseus, are inevitably struck with amnesia. The stronger the nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot.

For nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else."

'Ignorance' (page 33)
Milan Kundera

Burn, Burn, Burn

"...They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank.

But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like the fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes "Awww!'."

Page 11,
"On the Road", Jack Kerouac

Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication :)

It said: "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.

"For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?"

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

Frameless Reality

"..You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness. "

'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' Robert M Pirsig

Questions

As Bill Atterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, said in his speech to students at Kenyon College, his alma mater:

"...Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time....

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself."

Fear

"...For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat - hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone).
I have always wanted to write novels in which my heroes would say:" What would I do without the office?" or again: "My wife has died, but fortunately I have all these orders to fill for tomorrow." '

Love of Life
'from' Lyrical and Critical Essays' by Albert Camus
Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy

Pace

"Dheere Dheere Re Mana, Dheere Sub Kutch Hoye
Mali Seenche So Ghara, Ritu Aaye Phal Hoye."

Slowly slowly O mind, everything happens in its own pace
The gardener may pour a hundred buckets,
the fruit arrives only in its season.

Kabir 1398-1518

Certes, aujourdh’hui

Certes, aujourdh’hui mes soirées
Ne se passent plus en réunions

J’aime mieux rester dans le silence de mon bureau
Même si sans doute je me sens un peu coupable

De ne passer mon temps qu’à cultiver des états d’âme
Vaguement à l’écoute des rares bruits de la nuit

D’une corne de brume par exemple
Lorsqu’un bateau quitte l’estuaire

Et le refrain de son moteur lent
Saluant de sourdes vibrations
Les fondations de la maison
Semble ausculter les profondeurs nocturnes…..

'J’habite ici' , Jean-Claude Pinson

Karma

"...But in Buddhist science, karma has nothing to do with fate - it is an impersonal, natural process of cause and effect. Our karma at a given moment of life or death or the between is the overall pattern of causal impulses resulting from former actions connected with our life-continuum. These form a complex that impresses its effects on our bodies, actions, and thoughts. In turn, our ongoing actions of body, speech and mind form new causal impulses, which determine the nature and quality of our lives in the future. This complex can be called our evolutionary momentum.

There is an old Tibetan saying, "Don't wonder about your former lives; just look carefully at your present body! Don't wonder about your future lives; just look at your mind in the present!" This expresses the sense that our present body has evolved from a long evolution driven by former actions, and our future embodiments will be shaped by how we think and what we decide to do in our present actions."

Page 28. The Tibetan Book of the Dead [The Bardo Thodol]
Translated & Introduced by Robert A.F. Thurman

Liberation

"...Growing detachment from the world is of course the experience of many writers as they grow older, grow cooler or colder. The texture of their prose becomes thinner, their treatment of character and action more schematic. The syndrome is usually ascribed to a waning of creative power; it is not doubt connected with the attenuation of physical powers, above all the power of desire.

Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation: as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks.

The classic case is that of Tolstoy. No one is more alive to the real world than the young Leo Tolstoy, the Tolstoy of War and Peace. After War and Peace, if we follow the standard account, Tolstoy entered upon a long decline into didacticism that culminated in the aridity of the late short fiction.

Yet to the older Tolstoy the evolution must have seemed quite different. Far from declining, he must have felt, he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to appearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engaged his soul: how to live."

Page 193. 'Diary of a Bad Year' by J.M.Coetzee [Nobel Prize, 2003]

Mystic

"You will not be a mystic until you are like the earth - both the righteous and the sinner tread upon it - and until you are like the clouds - they shade all things - and until you are like the rain - it waters all things, whether it loves them or not."

Bayazid Bistami

What's logic got to do with it?

"But all of these old conceptions of morality are based on a fundamental mistake. Neuroscience can now see the substrate of moral decisions, and there's nothing rational about it. 'Moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment,' writes Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. 'When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate ... Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other.'
"Kant and his followers thought the rational brain acted like a scientist: we used reason to arrive at an accurate view of the world. This meant that morality was based on objective values; moral judgments described moral facts. But the mind doesn't work this way. When you are confronted with an ethical dilemma, the unconscious automatically generates an emotional reaction. (This is what psychopaths can't do.) Within a few milliseconds, the brain has made up its mind; you know what is right and what is wrong. These moral instincts aren't rational. ...
"It's only after the emotions have already made the moral decision that those rational circuits in the prefrontal cortex are activated. People come up with persuasive reasons to justify their moral intuition. When it comes to making ethical decisions, human rationality isn't a scientist, it's a lawyer. This inner attorney gathers bits of evidence, post hoc justifications, and pithy rhetoric in order to make the automatic reaction seem reasonable. But this reasonableness is just a facade, an elaborate self- delusion. Benjamin Franklin said it best in his autobiography: 'So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.'
"In other words, our standard view of morality - the philosophical consensus for thousands of years - has been exactly backward. We've assumed that our moral decisions are the byproducts of rational thought, that humanity's moral rules are founded in such things as the Ten Commandments and Kant's categorical imperative. Philosophers and theologians have spilled lots of ink arguing about the precise logic of certain ethical dilemmas. But these arguments miss the central reality of moral decisions, which is that logic and legality have little to do with anything."
Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide (excerpt from delancey.com)