nadaism: February 2006

Friday, February 24, 2006

Stop thinking!

Thinking is pretty pointless.

My mind spends most of the time making projections about the future and reviewing carefully the past and that's nonsense. You might say that thinking about the future could be good since it helps you to be prepared and to foresee what’s going to happen, but I have my doubts.

For example yesterday I was in a car going to the airport, I already started a bit late and I was in a hurry, and there was a traffic jam. Then I got worried because I might not make it in time, and then start thinking if the ticket was refundable or not, how urgent it was to get to London yesterday, if there would be a plane later, or today or tomorrow or whatever, also, to whom I should call when I miss it, the things that I won’t be able to do, where I was going to stay last night, etc, etc, etc. And it is not that I looked at it very rationally and looked at the different possibilities and the solutions and create a kind of scheme that will define the future action depending on what happens, a tree of decisions, no; I was basically looking at it with anxiety and getting worried. I was not getting prepared for the outcome of the traffic jam, I was not foreseeing, I was just worried. So it was useless.

Of course, I made it on time to the plane and at the end it was just a stupid episode. But, even if I was late and finally I had taken one of the actions I had been thinking about for so long, how long would have taken me to decide what is the right things to do after getting to the airport and being rejected at the check-in counter?, 1 or 2 minutes maximum to get to the same conclusion?. And it is not only the anxiety, it is that maybe in the car the radio was on and there was a song that I loved and I did not listen to it. Or there were beautiful birds flying around, or it was a nice sunny day and you could have opened the window and feel it, or there was a chance for a nice conversation.

I’m not saying that projecting to the future is always useless, but the way I do it most of the time is pretty clumsy and stupid.

Now in London I'll try to investigate meditation, the silence of the mind, a bit further.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Diary of the nadaist

In a regular day, I wake up early, although it takes me some time to get out of bed. Then I go for a shower, I shave slowly, get some light breakfast, solemnly I visit the toilet, and relax for a while. I go to the street to buy the newspaper, and for a walk, and when I'm back it's already time to start preparing a nice meal for lunch. Then I eat, I check there's nothing watchable on TV, and that's the moment for some mild activity: meeting a friend, going to the cinema, for a bicycle ride...

When I'm back, depending on how hungry I am, maybe I can open the newspaper, maybe not. After cooking and dinner it should be ok for sure, but perhaps I want to read a book instead, or write a little, I'd rather listen to some music, or play some chess or a computer game, or there's a good movie on TV. Sometimes I can only take a quick look to the paper drowsy before going to bed, or maybe the morning afterwards, having some coffee.

Probably it's not a good idea that I spend a while everyday in the writing routine for the nadaist blog. Most of the times it will look just as the text above. Besides it would add even more structure to my day, and there's already a framework too heavy by feeding myself and logistics and other physiological needs, (and not so much time for the paper). Thus I will only cover the nadaist exercises and some real activities.

So, next week I'll try to join a meditation course. I'm just back from a 2 months trip to India, over there I was thinking about the nadaist principles, and I found amazing the way some folks, (I mean common people, not gurus or mystic yoga touts), could describe thought and mind and obsessions and the subconscious having no background on western psychology. They told me that meditation is the silence of the mind, just like that, and there's no divine implications. So I guess I'll try to join a course, even if it is a bit of a contradiction to the principles, since it would be an achievement to learn to meditate; however I hope you excuse me - meditation seems to be the perfect nadaist activity. Anyway I assure you I will quit as soon as I can.

Friday, February 17, 2006

Nadaism

Definition of nadaism: the principles, exercises, the contract.

The text is moved to the head of the blog page. Still feel free to post your comments below.

the second language

The second language refers to a quite interesting proposal by Peter Sloterdijk: to try to translate more acuratelly some important words, e.g. enligtenment, in a way everybody (religious or not) could agree with.

There are new needs in the west, where everything has become so rationalistic, but there is an obvious source of misunderstanding when two people think about the same word in different ways. I'll try to find a writter or a phylosopher or a thinker that could have made a clarifying interpretation of 4 concepts: enlightenment, redemption, liberation and devotion.

differences

Is there any essential difference between a man and a woman?

Ok, there's obvious and visible differences. But let's look at it from another point of view.

If you try to live with somebody, and share most of your time, and be completely intimate, and shop furniture together, and even raise children...

do you expect it to be easy to understand and accept the human being you are sharing everything with?

are you not using the fact that your partner is a man or a women as an excuse because you don't understand anything about him/her?

These below are the differences I will accept. For the rest, I'd like to try to prove that men and women think the same way.

Body shapes. Some internal organs. Hormones. "Those days of the month". And only women get pregnant. There are some phisological differences everybody could agree with.

There's cultural differences: men and women are not educated the same way, i.e. they are repressed in different ways. For instance, men should not cry, women should always look beautiful.

There's the common vague understanding that men are somewhat more rational, (in their behaviour and decisions), while women are somehow more connected to their emotions, (i.e. women manage their emotions in a better way, and use them).

And there's the mysterious way in which women know exactly how much more they feel like eating or drinking, and in consecuense at the end of the meal they just sip your glass or cut a portion of a precise weight from your plate - it's exactly the piece they're missing.

The nadaist contract

Do you want to know if a person who passes all the time doing nothing would be able to live a normal and happy life?

The principles

- We humans continually pursue our minor objectives; when achieved, we only realise that they were not satisfactory, and then we look for a new target. A nadaist breaks the circle by not having any objective at all.

- The mind needs to be occupied, the process of thought is endless: either it may be killed (e.g. tv, music, a novel, alcohol, drugs), or given a focus (sometimes the same tv, music, a novel, also studying, investigating, playing an instrument, or other activities that require discipline). Both mechanisms are the same in essence. A perfect nadaist despises any objective, and would rather stop thinking. However thought is difficult to stop and also is sometimes useful (only sometimes; most of the time our thoughts wander aimlessly). A human nadaist is simply aware of how pointless it is either to kill or to focus thought, but uses all methods at hand when thought cannot be stopped.

- A perfect nadaist would kill thought and spend all the time alone and doing nothing. A human nadaist would amaze him/herself choicelessly with many things, would cultivate friendship, and even have a family, why not. Any nadaist knows that thought cannot kill itself by thinking, just tries to listen to his/her thinking, with no resistance.

- Nadaism requires discipline, so that there is no discipline. A nadaist is very careful with randomness, since a perfect chaos would become a pattern, which is the thing to fight against.

- A careless reader may associate nadaism with total uncertainty. But if uncertanty was to be total, then it would become a certainty. There's always room in a nadaist for a few safe places to shelter when thought is pressing up.

- The nadaist is not looking for unhappiness or misery. A nadaist just wants to live in the present, with no concerns about the past or the future, and with no patterns.

Exercises

These are practices that may help to budding nadaists, but they cannot be taken literally since they would become patterns.

- Go to bed and wake up as irregularly as possible. Go for naps at unexpected moments.

- Join courses in different subjects that you may or may not be interested in, and never finish them.

- Hire somebody to go to your home and rearrange your stuff, so that you don't know anymore where anything is.

All hobbies are allowed (reading, sports, games, whatever), but only as a pastime, carefully handled, so that there is no sense of achievement. e.g. a nadaist may go to the cinema, but will remember the least technical details, just the ones to select other movies that are not too boring, and pursuing no targets like following up a full career or a cinema current. A nadaist may also go travelling, just for the amusement. He/she will need to plan the trip to some extent, to try to get to the places that are not pointless, to avoid those in which there is not really much to do. Anyway the nadaist will for sure feel pretty much at ease wherever, will be an independent traveller, flexible, and will move around according to moods.

The contract

I'm committing to follow the nadaist principles. I will not work, I will not engage into any activity at all in the long term, not even in the medium term. I will amaze myself with methods that only try to kill or focus thought in the moment, in a short sight. In order to become a nadaist, I need YOUR MONEY for MY LIVING. If not, I would not be able to follow the principles.

- I will use the money strictly for living and for selfish purposes.

- I will carefully track all the money of each of the contributors.

- If I ever refute nadaism, I will pay 50% of any future income to the nadaist fund, which will give the money back to the contributors proportionally, adding a 100% interest plus inflation. When the total amount has been repayed, I, the failed nadaist, will go back to live a normal life.

- In case of death, my belongings will go 100% to the nadaist fund.

- I will log my daily activity, and if anything is considered to be against the principles, any contributor may issue a complaint. I'll have the right to defend myself, to prove that I was pursuing no objectives. At the end there will be a weighted votation for all the contributors. If I'm declared a failed nadaist, I will give 50% of any future income to the nadaist fund, which will return the money to the contributors, adding 10% interest plus inflation.

- The contributors decide when and what amounts, when to stop paying, but they cannot disengage. They can only expect their money back, with interest, in the cases above.

nadaism

Nadaism is not dead