nadaism: February 2008

Friday, February 15, 2008

2nd language: Liberation

This concept is a bit more difficult to me to translate.

Sloterdijk compares it to artistic liberation: it's the path to freedom for the inner self. It's the deep layers of one's mind talking aloud. Maybe that's a reason why some many people have a desire to develop themselves in some artistic aspect (any).

Others have a passion for order. They enjoy intellectual challenges, or even mathematical riddles; they feel good when they solve them. I'd dare to say it is a different kind of liberation: it's a sort of freedom for the rational side of the mind.

However, what would be the connection to the traditional meaning of the concept? Liberation sounds like a power of the gods to give freedom to humans. That freedom could mean feeling good with oneself, thus partially as enligtenment (in the second language), partially as freedom for the mind (as above).

It is related to redemption as well; just look at liberation in the context of the wheel of the soul transmigrations.

Anyhow, it is like a release of the weight on your shoulders, which makes you feel better and more focused. It's understanding you are small, you are nearly nothing, so that you can focus on your own life.

There's a new way to put the concept of liberation which I've heard from some friends and I find really courious. In the context of the theory of the "selfish gene" (R Dawkins, 1976), we humans are just vehicles for the duplication of our DNA chains. Thus we are small, we are nothing, we are only vehicles; our life has no sense, thus we can focus on the tiny everyday's problems.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

2nd language: Redemption

Nietzsche (yes, I'm sorry, the guy is not easy to understand and I don't mean to say I'm the one who got it right); Nietzsche puts is in two different ways, through the "Will to Power" and the "Eternal Return".

Zarathustra makes a full speech "on redemption", using his precise definition: when looking at anything that hapenned in the past, if one is able to say "that's just the way I wanted it to be", or simply "it was my will", and one feels it deeply (whatever it was) then there is redemption -it is impossible to feel hatred or despair, you don't want to forget or to get revenge anymore. That's a consequence of the concept of will of power. A person who truly believes it, lives in the present in an absolute manner.

There's another approach to understand the same attitude for living in the present: the eternal return. If time has no beginning and no end but is a cycle which repeats itself again and again, then every second of one's existence is going to happen in the future an infinite number of times, and it has happened already an infinite number of times. Thus the present second is the only important moment, has all the weight: the past has happened so many times anyway, and it's going to be repeated, and similarly for the future.

Those are metaphors but the meaning is clear: when you live in the present there is redemption and no action in the past is important anymore.

Catholics use redemption also, but they make it a kind of blackmailing. You are supposed to go to church regularly to confess your sins, and if you are sorry about it you get redeem and you may carry on with your life nearly as if nothing wrong had been done. However it is also a game based on the sense of guilt, on threatening you will go to hell, creating a dependency.

There's redemption in Hindu karma as well. Your situation now, your caste, your social status, your body, is a consequence of your past lifes, i.e. it is something given to you, something you cannot control. Your past is then explained to the detail; it's up to you to focus on the present moment.

There's many other materializations to the same concept, some of them religious, superstitious, esoteric, mystical. I have a very good friend who says "everything happens always for a reason".

I don't mind which one you use. Just make your choice and live in the present, it's the only thing that matters.

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