Toby and I were talking a little while ago about ’Spore’ the game. I’ve seen it advertised and haven’t given it much thought. That’d be because I’m kind of selective about what I am mindful about, about what I retain in my consciousness. Well we all are aren’t we?

And this process of selectivity got me thinking of  ’self’ and ‘non-self’. The way I see it, I create, maintain and develop my self through that which I choose to be aware of. That which I choose to ignore (and by that I do not mean things I am aware of and disregard, but rather those things I am simply unaware of), these things DO NOT EXIST for me. These non-existent things make up my non-self.

Simple really.

These things that make up my non-self do not exist. They are nothing to me. Yet at anytime something can move from my non-self to my self, in fact things are constantly moving between the two.  When I was younger  stuff was mostly transferred from non-self to self.  My self grew and grew. And this did not cause any noticeable shrinking to my non-self - well it couldn’t could it, as I (my self) am totally unaware of what constitutes my non-self. Although I think of it as vast, infinite in it’s nothingness.  As I was growing I just kept drawing things from it (as we do).

And then a time came when I noticed I was giving stuff back. Stuff that had been part of me was jettisoning off. My self seemed to be shrinking. Things I could no longer remember, and things I simply chose to forget. There came a time when I consciously stopped growing, I had accumulated enough stuff, now it was time to let some go. And the edges between self and non-self became blurred. The border between what I was aware of and what I was unaware of swelled, like a limb asleep and numb. And it was this borderland between self and non-self that increasingly became my comfort zone. Albeit a very numb comfort zone!

And where does all this fit with Spore and the god delusion and genes? Hmmm who knows? Though I think it does some how, because it seems to me that Spore provides an opportunity for us all to play god, which of course we are. We are gods of our own universes. We are. We are the centre of our own universes. No one else is. No one else can be.  We see things, we create things as we want things to be seen and be created. Spore it seems to me just gives practical expression to this truth.

Spore lets us create our selves and create our non-selves, perhaps. Ha who knows, that’s the joy of it. So I hope someone is keeping track.  Because what we have here is one great social experiment. As far as I understand it, sometime in the not too distant future, we, us, you and me, are all going to take part in recreating the world. I mean, its not that far-fetched is it?

Some day soon a game will begin. There will be enough of us playing to make it meaningful, as meaningful as anything else.  And in this game we are god and do whatever we want, and as more and more people play, the characters they create, the traits they emphasise and de-emphasise will aggregate. And then a forgotten dream will come true.

There will come a time when the technology we have created will give all a voice. An identity free from judgement and discrimination. All will have the opportunity to be present. As individuals. As gods of their own worlds.

Represent

Righteous!

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

‘No one can tell you exactly what you have got to be,

You got to stand your ground and practice in your life’  - Jimmy Barnes

A couple of months ago I read ‘An Interpretation of Murder’ – a mystery thriller set in turn of the century New York, and featuring Freud and Jung. Fascinating and enthralling book, not the least due to the main protagonist’s obsession with Hamlet and the dilemma of  “to be or not to be”.  While the book is long gone, the obsession remains. After all it is one of those enduring questions, one of the most enigmatic lines Shakespeare ever wrote…

By the end of ‘An Interpretation of Murder’ the main character believes he has it – what Hamlet, what Shaky means in the classic soliloquy- to be or not to be – this is the dilemma that faces us all once we realise that we are acting out – once we get to know ourselves and the discourses that we embody.

To be or not to be – not so much about life and death. Not so much about choosing to live or die, but rather choosing either to be what we know ourselves to be or choosing to be that which we don’t know, choosing ‘not to be’.

To be or not to be. Or perhaps to be both - ’to be’ that which we are as a discursively constructed self, and ‘not to be’ that self – to ‘be’ something else at the same time. This is the path. This is the tightrope. This is the adventure, the excitement. It is on this path, this tightrope, this line between being and not-being that there is intensity of experience.

‘To be’ is to be the socially constructed be-ing.  We are all this, we all are this.  We have learnt a language, more then one, we understand a myriad of signs; words, symbols, looks, associations, movement, gesture. As we sense we interpret.  This is to be – to be that which we are, that which we have BE-COME between birth and now.

And what about being MORE than we have become? Or less? What about not-being.  Can we remember who we are? Find our original face before our parents were born?

What is not-to-be and how is this possible? How can we ‘not be’ who we are? How do we escape from the constructed self? And why would we want to? Perhaps just to discover what is there?  What exists when all that I have be-come is taken away?

nothing?

freedom?

the circle of life?

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

It seems as if a new day has broken – perhaps I am still on Aotearoa time - the first day of spring is just a few days away.  Change – the rotation of the wheel.  Whatever it is, I feel it now.

I feel once again as if I have been in exile,  self-absorbed perhaps – drenched in my self, my petty concerns and conceits.  Perhaps the bottom half of the wheel, as it turns, is submerged – sunken in the mire of self. And now for whatever reason, because spring calls on the other side of the world, now I am rising up, dragged by the wheel, out of the selfish bog.  Dripping and drying, feeling once again the cool air, the soft moonlight of everything else, of a world other.

It feels good to be here again.  To think wider, broader, bigger thoughts.  To feel free of the constraints, the straps and ties of self reflection and self assessment, self-pity and self-aggrandizement.

And I am back on broadband. Back, back, back.

There are things I want to get done now that I and broadband are back.  Right here, right now. Firstly I have a dozen drafts sitting in the workspace behind here – a dozen half-finished (or is it half-started) posts. They haunt me – unnecessarily so. So over the next few days they will be either discarded or posted.

I guess that means I’m not off to be part of the ‘Who Dares Wins’ studio audience this afternoon then…

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

we all suffer
the first rule of buddhism
the first noble truth

 
a liberating thought no?

 
we all suffer
we are all equal
in our suffering

 
such is life
to live is to suffer

 
to live is to breath

 
suffering is to enlightenment
as breathing is to life

 
do not be distracted by your suffering

do not compare yours with anothers

there is no more, no less, suffering

we all suffer
we are all equal
in our suffering

I wrote this sometime ago, and kept it in an email, which I came across again a little while ago.  I smiled as I read it, remembering that when I saved it, it was in the hope that one day I would have a website upon which to post it.  The smile today came because I also remembered that I didn’t fully believe that it would happen – luckily I believed it enough to have saved the poem – and that in itself displayed some trust, some intention on my part – and that trust and intention grew.  And as it grew, so did my courage, my self-belief and also my belief in all that is traditionally thought of a ‘not-my-self’, my trust in ‘the universe’ – all that exists supposedly outside of my ’self’.  Because when it comes to making things happen, when it comes to ‘being’, there is no difference between me and all that is not me – I can make things happen, I can make magic. And I can NOT do that by remaining separate from all that is.

Anyway I ramble – the poem came from a realisation that our suffering is something that makes us all alike, and that many people (myself included) when first coming across Buddhism and the first noble truth read this as ‘we all SUFFER’.  My emphasis was on the suffering -  how bloody gloomy I thought, how pessimistic - what is the point a philosophy based primarily upon a notion of suffering?  However the first noble truth can be understood also as ‘we ALL suffer’ – and in this way it is less about suffering, and more about commonality, more about recognising that we all DO have something in common, a shared reality.  A shared experience of suffering.

And there is no tariff of suffering – that is no one person’s suffering is greater or lesser than anothers.  A moment of suffering, regardless of that which is lost, is a moment of suffering. It is an unquantifiable feeling. The sensation of suffering is not necessarily or simply directly related that which is lost, be it a lover, a finger, a job, a child, a dream, a purse. We feel the loss according to the degree of our attachment. We all suffer – in that we are all equal.

Maybe that is one reason why I liked to go to the casino and gamble so often. I loved winning of course – I also liked losing, the losing was always more of a challenge than the winning, for when I lost there was a tendency to suffer…

x bhavatu sabba mangalam x