nadaism: 12/25/06

Monday, December 25, 2006

Christmas and all that

I'm in a tropical beach north of Goa. At midday is still too sunny so I usually have to hide, it's a good time to go in front of the cold one-eyed computer, and to update the blog maybe - it's been a couple of weeks since last time, but the simplicity of my days here leave me quite silent, not much to say then...

Yesterday it was christmas eve, you could say this is a good place to spend the holidays. Although I guess it's as good as any other. The best christmas in my life were probably last year, I was also in India and I went for a visit to a tibetan settlement in the south; but those days were for sure amongst the best in my life, I had just left everything and I was travelling with a very very good friend - christmas did not have much to do with it, neither against it, it was just a date in the calendar which was quite unrelated to what was happening to me.

Well yesterday I did not have many plans, did not feel like going into a party for sure, there's some friends around, mostly from yoga classes, and I was guessing I would meet them and have a quiet dinner with them. It's funny though that I had not seen them during the full day and I was getting a bit kind of anxious as dinner time was approaching: the perspective of spending christmas eve on my own did sound weird. I was surprised I had that feeling, (I have had lunch on my own yesterday and it was perfectly alright), but there it was.

Eventually I met them of course, and we went for dinner, it was not much different than usual, (we have food together pretty much daily), except for the fact that we decided to go to a good italian restaurant, supposed to be the best in town, for a change. Afterwards we were all tired and sleepy and went straight to bed.

If you believe that the external things are your problem, that you get disturbed and stressed because of the daily hassles, the job, the responsibilities, the family, or whatever else, then the solution should be easy, no?, then you would know what to do if you wanted to get out of that disturbance, of that stress.

But, whatever your reasons, if you actually do it and leave everything, maybe you find a lot of peace of mind, or even you find something huge you had not realised before, or you start feeling happiness, or I don't know which good things start happening to you. However, if you are lucky, you might also figure out what was the origin of that disturbances and the stress you felt in your "old life", because in your "new life" there's also annoyances, and you may get very angry about them, as much as you want...

It does not mean that you've learnt automatically to deal with all those problems, even worse, no matter how small they are they may go out of hand, probably you're even further away from solving them, and it is very frustrating since they are so tiny now that you are free and you have no reason to get disturbed. The good thing is that you've learnt something very very important, something you know it makes the difference!! - and it's so obvious you kind of wonder how it is that you've never known and you needed all these adventures to get to the point...

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

Monday, December 25, 2006

Christmas and all that

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the second language

differences

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The nadaist contract