Comments about the "Alternative Story/ notes for thesis

i start3d by almost agreeing with Dr. Laura’s argument against Zoe that the idea of renuncation is just a cover to hide away= "an elitist appropriation of aloneness." BUT: So much of modern life revolves around abstract images. And it truly is amazing how our minds can represent subtly another’s image of self, and how we act in terms of the reflected images. Obviously a lot can be conveyed, just as people are communicating creatively over the internet --for example, the intimacy and honesty in anonymous online chats is refreshing and direct and fun. The kids are doing it in amazing ways. It is something new. Yet the complex and amazing capacity to live abstractly, in terms of images can shield us from experiencing our bodies and hearts very genuinely or deeply. In her book about men, Susan Faludi talks about our having a culture rather than a society. The old activites of "society building" in which men in the past gave meaning to life (and of course it was the men who did it, or at least who primarily were considered to be the ones giving meaning to life) have been displaced by a world economy and culture not located in any one region, by celebration of images that mask or distance death, illness, suffering. --How do we cope with this? Simply renounce the whole she-bang? Snuggle up into a coccoon?

But then I saw it: it is still possible to build society but we need new tools. We are not settling a geographical frontier, or building physical cities, and so on. And of course it definitely isn’t only men doing it now. The tools have to become more abstract, in a way, and that is where Zoe’s Alternative Story comes in--the alternative to Nietzsche’s myth of eternal recurrence or other religious rebirth myths. Instead of clinging to density of self and its imperative to contribute, to build society-- and thereby become a "successful self" --the Alternative Story abandons density of self and presents an alternative conception of what Society means= it meansthose whose lives are causally interconnected with mine. These are the neighbors one can love as oneself. Building that, first of all by doing what one needs to do to cultivate basic lovingkindess in one’s own mind, doing it simply and quietly without fanfare, including of course without the fanfare, I suppose somewhat inconsistently (given everything I wrote) of announcing either the theory or one’s practice in terms of the theory.

And put up front the point that one will never be able to estimate the contributions one makes. Just completely and totally stop doing that. Therefore the imperative is to observe the basic moral precepts scrupulously, so as not to harm, and then Have Some Fun!-- like Kid Rock rapping "its all good, its all in fun --so get in the pit and love someone!" -- without trying to calculate or measure continuously whether or not one is succeeding etc. And then --who knows?-- someday there might very well be a well-meaning even if somewhat clumsy extraterrestrial alien somewhere who is inclined to the use of bombs and is reading plagiarized poetry with a five year old human girl with an inborn passion for gluing things together for whom lights are coming on, and the wholly Unknown Instructor to whom they both feel some Gratitude --well, baby, that just might be you!! --But you’ll never know! --Maybe you died penniless, working as a maid, like Zora Neale Hurston did after writing her great books.Ok - You lived so that you really didn’t need to know! You were that brave! Your eyes were watching God & not vice-versa! --The brave parts of Nietzsche’s myth we keep.

--Or think about SuAnne Big Crow the girl who quieted the raucous bigotted crowd with her Lakota shawl-dance in center-court at a high school basketball game in Lead, South Dakota, in 1988: when Larry McMurtry retells this story, he says the following. Let me paste it in because I want to show you where he stumbles just a little bit when he retells it:

No Larry! Not quite! Precisely because of your own decision to write about it, indeed, to dwell on it, SuAnne’s transcendent action now lives in my memory!! I can definitely see her do it! And it inspires me! --Yet she’ll never know. She’s dead. She died at 18 in a car wreck. --Yet at this moment she does inspire me!--May I please be able to do my shawl-dance at center-court before a spiteful perhaps evil crowd, my eyes watching the Goddeess, dancing beyond good and evil, reversing no into yes, so far beyond ressentiment the crowd cannot help but clap and laugh and wonder!!

Of course I would have to agree with McMurtry that certainly the little white kids sitting at center court had a better seat than me, and some of them will remember it better too, and never forget it, and they’ll make fuckin’ damn sure their kids go to integrated shcools,-- but my point here is that the real causal nexus is just totally inscrutable, unpredictable, and way beyond measurement.

The Alternative Story sketches such a different picture, I believe, from Nietzsche’s image of a heroic self resolved to live every moment so as to be willing to do it again infinitely, no matter what anybody else thinks -- and it is different precisely in this respect: that his myth is preoccuppied with self and image of self. This preoccupation of course lurks in the culture because of the idea that there is An All-Seeing Eye Who is evaluating every thing we do and think and feel. This relentless observation and evaluation underlies the necessity constantly to be doing something, to be working, to be thinking, which is why so weirdly many westerners feel it is wrong even to stop for a few minutes and clear their minds. That is really weird but it is true, not only about fundamentalist christians who are afraid if they were to pray with no words the devil might sneak in, but it also is true generally: people feel guilty about unoccuppied mental space. So what do we do? To relax we seek entertainment, and we make sure we keep our minds occuppied.-- I realize I’m making some leaps here from God’s eye watching us to us watching tv, but I think they are linked.

Anyway, Nietzsche brought the Eye closer to home. To hell with the All-Seeing Eye of God or society! --Zarathustra kept yelling. But the point is that we don’t have to live in terms of any Observing Eye at all--not even our own private eyes over endless time (much less Mulder’s! :). We just don’t have to evaluate and measure ourselves so much as we tend to do --and which N heroically keeps infinite in his myth of eternal recurrence -- and which, by the way, must be the very supreme reductio ad absurdum of the centrality of self evaluation (though N did not seem to see it that way--there certainly is no evidence that he intended any trace of irony at that point.) And just as McMurtry stumbled when he said the girl’s dance will live only for those who saw it, for he forgot to calculate in first of all the fact that people would be reading his own article in the NY Review of Books! -- plus the fact that nobody reviewing the book would be able to resist re-telling the story about SuAnne Big Crow -- one invariably will miscalculate when one tries to figure out how well one is doing or how things are working out overall and so forth.

I think Krishnamurti realized that our tendencies to engage in futile evaluation and measurement are so deeply engrained within us that even in meditation, even in silence, these tendencies can dominate, which may be why he so enormously overstated his points the way (in my opinion) he did.

Zoe the nondual dancer saw it. About Zoe I would say first of all that the image of Zoe became a goddess for me, an ideal including how she handled her blind spots: alert and eager to see them yet not petrified to death. Since she’d become an artist not a professional philosopher she was able to just to cut right to the point whereas I always seem to beat around the bush. I’m sort of making sure I’ve not overlooked any points in the general region before actually getting to the main ones --but then, of course, I grant you, not necessarily getting there. Her most important idea was that the practical consequences of shifting from the commonsense Cartesian view of self as dense to Derek’s buddhist non-dense view are to be found in real life, not in arguments -- and if there are arguments to be made they should emerge from practices that are valuable in life. But the "two truths" idea in the buddhist intellectual traditions, as well as in contemporary thinkers like Steven Jay Gould,--this "two truths" idea also can function to hinder firsthand exploration of the consequences of non-density: ordinary phenomena that are on our minds including moral and political life too easily just get dismissed as irrelevant or secondary. This definitely is a region where renunciation gets mistaken for self-denial = a "no"-saying spirit against life. True, the mahayana buddhist traditions reject the radical distinction between ordinary phenomena and the ultimate, but they usually do it in terms of the assumption that all phenomena are merely appearances, and so they stay within the "no’-saying camp. Or so I would argue. I realize I am going too fast.

As for the damn thesis itself, I’m thinking about changing my topic to cover some of thisw stuff about development from (1) a robot-like stage not even having a concept of "me," not self-conscious, to (2) being self-conscious, self-centered, thinking and reasoning based on "me" to (3) the appreciation of non-density with the basic moral precepts emerging from the happiness of interconnectedness, bodhicitta. I wouldn’t necessarily say we go through these stages in some time-constrained order. In fact reversion seems more common. Children have conflicting impulses but there’s no reason to think they cannot experience the happiness from which the basic moral precepts emerge. In fact, like I said, reversion seems more common. Then I’d try to make the contrast about how N’s skeptical critique of morality was based on an understandable yet weird detour at level (2) grounded in the self-hatred associated with western morality, so he thought all of morality was based in fear. & even though he saw the idea of nondensity, his thinking still is stuck with it (the fear) whereas an alternative sees universal moral precepts emerging from basic happiness which itself gets expressed in all sorts of ways--terms like the buddha nature, the love of god, the tao, the form of the good, etc.

--please stop me if you see some problems here because Derek will kill me if I change my thesis topic again-- but it is partly his fault because whenever I give him three pages to read he replies with six.