From the desk of: MiniMoFo Re: volution Sitting on his cushion at 6:12AM, thoughts began flooding in. “Need to call Barry”. “Need to pay storage bill.” “Need to write post for IDP.” “Should start running again.” Don’t attach; don’t push away; observe. He started observing his thoughts; “Oh look at me thinking about how I should start running again.” Wait, that’s not it, he thought. Observe the thought; don’t attach to thoughts about observing the thought. For one brief moment he felt that he was observing the thinker, but then thought “Wait, am I Buddhist or schizophrenic?” Back to the breath, focus on the sensation. More than ten minutes go by. Bow, rise, coffee, laptop. Only way to write. Except for when there’s no electricity.
No All of this He sipped It is It is a It’s I sit on ““You could strike sparks And he thinks once again of momentum, and position, and how these
electricity. Hah. Except this Friday he knew he was leaving for a two week
period of exactly that. It was time for a two week retreat with his father,
rafting the entire length of the Grand Canyon, sleeping outside and existing
without electricity, phones or computers.
Like Thoreau on Walden, if Thoreau had guides and rapids. Except even Thoreau wasn’t Thoreau, he
thought, thinking back to breakfast yesterday with his friend Graham from
Treehugger.com, a man with a full-blown
case of environmentalism who’d remarked over a Soy Latte “I’ve never read
Thoreau. But I’m finally reading Walden.
On my Kindle.” And as those who really know Thoreau are aware, even Thoreau
wasn’t Thoreau – he was a loner living on the edge of town so he could spend
his days observing, rather than participating, in society. Observing without participating; now that
sounded familiar to this budding Boddhisatva.
Yet in the case of Thoreau, it sounds impossible; how can you observe
society and write about it, without participating in language, culture, and
commerce? Then he thought of Werner Heisenberg, and his principle of
uncertainty, stating that the more precisely you know the momentum of a
particle the less precisely you know its location, and vice-versa. Also known (and more easily understood) as
“the observer effect”, Werner was basically saying that the act of making an
observation of speed or momentum influences the position of a particle; and the
act of interfering to observe position effects momentum.
was feeling strangely relevant to him as he sipped his coffee, thinking about what to write for the One City
Blog on Beliefnet.com. Kindles, Thoreau,
and what about Supreme Court Justice Souter?
Perhaps the highest ranking public official who doesn’t have email or a
computer, Souter is known to write with a fountain pen, live in a cabin on the
edge of town and owns no mobile phone.
It is highly unlikely that Justice Souter would read Walden on a Kindle;
yet he is as much a part of society’s fabric as a Kindle toting eco-hipster.
his coffee, thought about how much work he had to do before he left on his
trip, and began to consider how he could observe his thoughts without
influencing them. That was after all the
core of the Buddhist teaching; not the “thought negating” that he had once
ignorantly assumed Buddhism was about (an idea that gets way too much ink: http://blog.beliefnet.com/onecity/2009/05/if-youre-going-to-slam-buddhism-get-your-facts-straight.html) but the ability to discern thought patterns
and habits so that you could begin to align your actions with a more accurate
view of reality, one in which you don’t think of yourself as an isolated unit
fending off the savagery of a hostile universe until you die. Ah – then there would be no observer to
influence position or momentum – that’s it, he thought, but then just as
quickly he thought about action, and changing the world.
possible to engage in “mindful activism”, moving the ball forward towards a
more compassionate world for everyone.
Revolutions come and go but the core meaning of mindfulness is ever the
same, he thought, lending credence to the abiding of Buddhist teachings throughout
history. The sixties were a myth -
nothing more than a handful of media images representing a tiny portion of the
population dropping out to take drugs to experience a few moments of fleeting
“other-consciousness”, a few of them embarking on exploring those inner states through
the more reliable method of meditation. Yet those fleeting moments, the tiny
percentage of the population that engaged in mind experiments and civil rights
struggles, though their efforts may have been co-opted just as quickly as today
into fashion statements, copycat behavior, and lip service – they DID move the
ball forward ever so slightly. The
emergence of contemporary Buddhism, integral activism, a black president – even
though the sixties generation may have themselves retreated into a more
materialistic society than the one they themselves rebelled against, the seeds
they planted have begun to blossom. Meditation
offers a far more profound, accessible, and lasting alteration from “straight
thinking” (thanks Dr. Weil – The Natural Mind) than do drugs, but drugs at best
can offer a fine first tantalizing glimpse of what might be possible. At worst they become an easy and superficial substitute
for the kind of truly mind/world altering work we learn about at the IDP. The sixties may have been more drug
revolution than consciousness revolution, the (in retrospect) inevitable period
at the end of the sentence begun by the Beats in the 50′s.
fact, he thought, that by the time you read about a revolution in the New York
Times, it’s already over. But who the
hell reads the New York Times? Witness
the hipsters, rejecting “Disney movies and malls” as Namenorg put it so well
the other night, escaping to New York to be with like-minded others in a total
rejection of the McDonald’s culture they were forcefed in Akron. The sixties begat the backlash that begat
disco. Mudd Club (punk + disco) begat
New Wave. New Wave begat grunge. Grunge
begat the rebirth of electro and guitar bands.
The “scene” moved from the Lower East Side to Midtown to the East
Village to Williamsburg and now Bushwick?
Maybe Berlin? Maybe a million sock-strewn poster-laden teenage bedrooms
all over the world? Who is redefining the edge of how we tell stories and
express ourselves? Who is living on the edge of town, observing without participating, asking questions about who we are and who we
want to become? Who is just totally
batshit crazy? A few come to mind (thanks Namenorg for some of these resources) http://maximumsorrow.com/ http://www.hawksandsparrows.org/
http://www.lucidcommunication.com/
impossible to criticize the culture you are in without criticizing yourself;
that’s like looking in a mirror and asking your own reflection to go away. But
there’s nothing wrong with that. Likewise it’s impossible to observe the
effects of the momentum of your
revolution while you are positioned in the middle of it – Werner said so. Put
more simply, Anderson Cooper cannot simultaneously report on a developing story
and participate in it. Even more to the
point, his reporting on the story has an effect on how the participants
experience the story.
the meditation cushion each day, trying to observe my thoughts without
reporting on them. I try to take this
experience off the cushion into my world, trying not to fall out of the present
moment and into the baggage of every familiar emotion and canned response I lug
around with me. I try not to lapse out
of “he-centered”stories into “I-centered” stories, a project which apparently
is as doomed to failure as my attempts to maintain an observational eye on my
own mental activity. But like all
projects worth doing, growth happens from failure; practice won’t necessarily
make perfect but it will make well-practiced. And then he/I remembers Walden,
and Souter, and how personal revolutions are old news by the time you realize
them just like societal revolutions are. And he thinks about movement,
momentum, and position, and how we practice on our cushion in stillness,
sacrificing observing position in favor of observing mental momentum. And he thinks about the irony of reading
Walden on a Kindle, and wonders if that’s only ironic because he wants it to be
so? And he thinks of Hunter S. writing
in 1971 in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was
right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of
inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military
sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point
in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding
the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up
on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you
can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke
and rolled back.”
affect particles and people and thoughts equally, and how disruption by
observation is not a bad or good thing, it just IS - and he thinks of the power that comes from
not needing to know that you are right, only that you are doing good.
posted May 6, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Whoa. This is a pretty dense post. I think I understand what you are getting at but need to think about it.never really thought about heisenberg and meditation before but that’s a really challenging point.
posted May 6, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Jerry I love your writing but the hipster on the brink of creating change is getting old. it’s no longer the edge. please find another.
posted May 7, 2009 at 5:46 am
I’m sorry Jerry if my first comment seemed harsh but the hipster thing is reaching saturation. There is so much hype to it.
posted May 7, 2009 at 6:58 am
Damaris,
As you are the only comment of weight on the piece; and you’re understanding of the piece is the 180-degree inverse of what it means; Minimofo has clearly lost his touch with this one.
The hipster thing was over-hyped and done as a mass-edge by about mid-2001 and since then has been used as nothing more than a neighborhood, fashion line, and album cover. It’s corny and cliche and devoid of even the little meaning it had for the 2 or 3 years it meant something. Just as the wave of “publicity” about hipsterdom came about 12 to 18 months after anything interesting about it was done, so too is all the publicity about how it’s “over” about 4 years too late. Same as the “Sixties” when it got big; same as “Grunge” when it got big; same as “hiphop” just before corporate white America turned the mass market version of “hiphop” into something puerile and not dangerous or philosophical; most people want to be part of the “cool thing” but devoid of the scary edges that made it cool in the first place.
But why hasn’t there been any bubbling up of something new to be the vanguard since 2001? Why is all the music/art/writing of most people in their 20′s and 30′s so mind-numbingly ironic, obvious, derivative, and mellow? Did the terrorists hate us because they hate our artistic freedoms? (that’s a joke kind of)
There’s plenty to still get angry about. Women’s rights – all over the world. Minority rights. Rise of HIV not seen since 1988 particularly in minority communities. Destruction of our natural environment. Fags and dykes treated as second class citizens by the federal gvt (separate but unequal). Healthcare! Job security for LGBT people who don’t live on a coast. Useless wars.
Making a facebook page and a cool website is sweet. So is putting up a picture of Johnny in your locker and passing around a slambook and meeting for a couple of milkshakes at the drive-in before the Sock Hop.
Jer
posted May 7, 2009 at 8:51 am
i knew some one who once said
the 60′s washed out because they
had no real focus. the 70′s washed into
cocaine use, which turned into the greed of the
80′s and 90′s.
then one day in 2001 we woke up to a so called new
world, the world had changed? or was it we that had
changed. for i it started to put life into a perspective
that i am still struggling with.
i know that WE are not alone out there, trying to balance
that facebook page with getting out and seeing the great
redwoods of california.
at best this made me think.
at least i CAN think.
we need to stay open and positive
rid ourselves of as much negativity as we can.
love
posted May 7, 2009 at 11:12 am
what a lot of posturing and preconceptions.
posted May 7, 2009 at 11:23 am
Dear Jerry,
Given your androgynous name, I am unsure if I’m addressing a male or a female, although the writing strongly suggests the latter. That’s not a dis, just an observation. Regarding your meandering stream of consciousness post, it appears that you have been more than a bit intellectually lazy in reductively characterizing the sixties, a period whose temporal boundaries are unclear and whose ideologies are rich and various. To ignore the complexity of history is surely one of the hallmarks of delusion.
posted May 7, 2009 at 2:17 pm
wow, that’s a lot of thoughts streaming by on the cushion. thanks for letting us watch too.
I am fond of Heisenberg, too, although I don’t have the math chops to read any of his equations. I would agree with wikipedia, however, that the observer effect is not the same as his uncertainty principle. (And I would disagree that the observer principle must always be illustrated with Schroedinger’s predilection for that poor dead/undead cat, tho’ here I am doing it myself.)
In any case, observer effect seems to translate really well to the media commentary: That bit about how “Anderson Cooper cannot simultaneously report on a developing story and participate in it” suggests to me that BY reporting on it he is participating, if not in it then in our perception of it. And the event itself ceases to exist as soon as it ends and ALL that is left is perception of it. Which is always deluded or ignorant in some way.
As for all movements/attitudes/etc that start out as counterculture, don’t they all get recuperated and detoured, eventually? I have enjoyed looking at what Guy DeBord, Naomi Klein, and Slavoj Zizek wrote on those topics.
As for why hasn’t there seemed to be anything new bubbling up since 2001, now time for MY theory, which is MINE, (as Anne E. Elk said about her theory, in Monty Python, which comparison goes to show you exactly how very seriously I take my own thought) Well MY theory is that we are approaching the time when the present bites the past’s tail so hard that it consumes itself and blows up entirely. As the 60s are revived in the 80s, and again in the 90s, and the 00s, then the 70s, the 90s, and soon yesterday will be revived today, and we are approaching cultural implosion. There will be nothing left to revive and reapropriate except everything that’s going on right now. Pop! Maybe we’ll get something new and maybe that’s all there ever was, anyway.
posted May 7, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I think the term hipster is way over-applied today. I think it is a far more specific phenomenon, but now it just means young, urban, alt-culture person, and I actually think it’s quite a vague designation.
posted May 7, 2009 at 8:42 pm
phatboibuddha. note that the post is deliberately a reference to my meandering stream of consciousness, which can also be described as a snapshot of my mind over a thirty minute period, which, if you choose to read it as cultural analysis, could also be seen as intellectually lazy. Trust me, that is hardly my only hallmark of delusion. I am full of Hallmarks of Delusion. I’m going to leave the male/female thing to speculation ; I think it is quite odd to decide a person’s gender by their writing.
ellen -totally agree on the snake eating the tail – but I think every time we say that (every five or seven years) something awesome and new comes into being.
ethan – wish it were so; but the look/music/thinking of urban alt-culture people in the past was far more varied and cross-cultural; clubs contained multitudes, while now they contain mostly people who look and act the same. or maybe my eyes are just going bad.
posted May 7, 2009 at 9:00 pm
@familiar stranger, sorry missed your comment before. Yes it is nothing but posturing and preconceptions. exactly right. so is your comment. all writing by definition is freezing a moment or thought; i.e posturing. and if you are writing it, it is inevitably based on preconceptions. it is impossible to conceive of a thought after writing it. you must preconceive, then write.
did you mean that you disagree with something I wrote? if you think that the 60s was a movement that continued into the 70s I would love hear the evidence for that. Likewise, if there was some amazing concentration of nonreductive and original creative work in America during the 2000 to 2009 period (like there has been in every single other decade that I have walked the earth) please point me to it.
in the 90s many people predicted that making the tools of art widely and cheaply available (like digital video , digital photography ) along with making the means of mass publication widely available (internet,duh) would lead to a sort of deadening of the edges, making it harder to seperate signal (good, orginal, provocative work) from the noise (earnest but reductive copycat work, work devoid of meaning, work that would have been considered practice before but is now presented as finished).
Ellen, what do you think: you deal with this stuff as much as anyone. plus you understand heisenberg much better than me.
i am very excited for the immediate future. there is starting to be some great art bubbling up.
posted May 7, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Jerry–the evidence that the sixties is longer than a decade is generally accepted by cultural historians (e.g., Gitlin, Marwick, Dickstein) and they point to the end of the sixties in 1974, with the Whip Inflation Now campaign officially announcing the end of prosperity. (Other scholars define the sixties as roughly coextensive with the so-called Golden Age of Modernity, 1947-1973. I am inclined toward this position myself and have lectured and written a bit on this subject.) As for the beginning of the sixties, I think of the work of the Americanists Jamison & Eyerman, who locate it roughly in the mid-fifties, commencing with the work and activism of dissident intellectuals such as Marcuse, Mumford, Alinsky, & Szilard.
So, when one talks, as you do about the sixties as a myth, we should bear in mind that that myth was one constructed by the student movement of the sixties, specifically as it is tied to the claim by the New Left for historical uniqueness. This ahistorical attitude was indeed a myth, but one that conceals the many and disparate voices that constituted “the Sixties.” I would submit there is no monolith called the Sixties.
Lastly, Ellen raises a point about the cooptation of countercultural movements and suggests that this “recuperat[ion] and detour[ing]” is de rigueur. I should probably make a substantial post on this subject in the future for it is, it seems to me, crucial to sort out if Buddhist activism is to have any productive relation with postmodernism. Ellen cites some postmodernists (Debord and Zizek) who both have repudiated Buddhism (Zizek slams what he calls “western Buddhism”; see his “Revenge of Global Finance” [2005] and his On Belief [2001]). The larger point is this (and here I think of the work of Zen activist Ken Jones): we have to be very careful if we are tempted to jump on the postmodern bandwagon with its belief that emancipatory movements, including those of the countercultural variety, are mere fodder for the capitalist legions. Buddhist activism, if it is to have any chance of becoming a “radical culture of awakening,” must converge with the great emancipatory movements that are an indelible part of our history and contemporary world culture, despite what you might be told by some postmodernists. Liberative social currents, gathering strength over the last 200 years, have resulted in the establishment of universal suffrage, civil rights, adequate livelihood, and representative government in many parts of the world. The Dalai Lama has written on several occasions about the necessity of Buddhism’s project of inner revolution coming to terms with modernity’s outer liberation. Listen to this passage from Universal Responsibility and the Good Heart:
“It is quite obvious that without material progress we will lack many material comforts. In the meantime, without inner peace material things alone are not sufficient. There are many signs which indicate that material progress alone is not sufficient for men. There is something lacking. Therefore, the only way is to combine the two.”
A far cry from Zizek, indeed.
posted May 8, 2009 at 11:06 am
The Hipster Revolution is in the Matrix except we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s in the Real.
And as we document everything waiting for it to appear. It never comes. Why because like enlightenment it cannot be intellectually conceived.
Our art is stale because we have not given ourselves time to unplug. We have done the opposite. We’re plugged in so deeply. We’re turned on even as we sleep.
Our diverisity is riddled with political correctness because we lost heart and have no courage. We do not really believe we can love each other all though we desparately want to.
We are looking down this narrow tunnel overabundent with brillance and beauty and very ignorantly forgotten that sometimes good things arise out of a pile of shit.
And we are so sophistacated that we convince each other that were open. We are. We are. We are. But the proof is in the puddin. We are not.
posted May 8, 2009 at 11:11 am
sorry about the typos.
posted May 8, 2009 at 9:48 pm
thanks Mu and Damaris. Both full of really though-provoking ideas. I know that Buddhism is going to play pivotal role in truly conscious and life altering activism. I guess that’s a big reason I am interested.
posted August 22, 2010 at 2:00 pm
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