The Allure of Anger

 I believe that if anything, the 21st Century might eventually be coined "The Age of Anger" in much the same way that the 19th century was characterizes as an age of "Sexual Repression". When I say, "Age of Anger", I am talking about how political discourses (in social media and so on) are becoming more and more mired in bitterness, resentment, cynicism or lashing out. Some people might (and do, in fact) suggest that this is an expression of the loss of manners and mores in Western societies. I have a different hypothesis, and that is that anger is becoming an industry that actually makes people money, from advocates who sue for the rights of their angry clients, to filmmakers who milk human resentment in the form of violent blockbusters. Anger sells in the same way that "sex"' is said to sell so many decades ago. The industry of anger, like the industry of love or romance, serves something. Whether it's the reinforcement of boundaries between one nation and another, or the emboldening of a military complex, anger narratives establish strong boundaries between one place and another, setting up lines of transgression.
   I even reflect on this: of all human emotions that might bring a person toward a spiritual practice, which is the most common? Is it sadness? Jealousy? Lust? Anger? I believe that anger must contend for one of the highest places in this ranking, simply because anger threatens to destroy so much more than the other emotions. Even "jealousy" might be less destructive if we see it as something like "protecting" the things we care about the most by wanting to covet those things to ourselves (or something similar).Stories of craving and attachment may point to equally destructive outcomes, but somehow many are lead to feel that attractions are not as destructive as anger, or might redeem themselves through the object of attraction. As Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us in his own book about Anger, the face of the angry person is one of the most unappealing sights imaginable, and looking at one's own contorted angry face can be enough to scare everyone away from anger itself. The threat of anger necessitates remedies (and quick ones) more than other emotions.
  This entry is not designed to say, "anger is bad" so don't feel angry. What I am driving at is the way anger is thought to draw a person towards, say, meditation, more so than feelings like sadness.

The Good Sides of Poststructuralism

 I have not been writing a lot in my blog recently because I did get caught up in my recent course work, which relates to Poststructural Research Methods in education. To be honest, I am still getting the hang of Poststructuralism. I have often (falsely, I think), equated poststructural thinking with nihilism or even a kind of suspicious doubt that attacks every foundation of what a person believes about the self. Hey, doesn't Chan Buddhist practice try to do the same? However, I notice that while practicing Chan makes me feel relaxed and uplifted, Poststructural thinking often makes me feel a little heavy, as though I were trying to master an entirely new vocabulary with so much subtlety and nuance. It is often like filling "big shoes".
   I think the value of thinking and learning poststructurally is that it allows a person to question "foundations" and "essence" which are always tricky and suspect. But at the same time, I can't help but warn myself, not to go too far with this kind of thing, because it can end up pretty much eating  and eroding everything. It's almost like one of those cleaners that is so powerful that it dissolves the hand that is using it to scrub the tiles. At the end of the day, people do need to occupy narratives, and these narratives (however tentative) are the projects that are needed to connect people together, to nourish people and to help people.
    Why would poststructuralism lead me to feel heavy (depressed) whereas the exact same philosophy coming from, say, Nagarjuna (a famous Buddhist monk) does not make me feel this way? That's a good question, and I would love to do a study on that. I suspect it's because Buddhist practices are not designed for people to construct complex, nuanced field texts, the way Poststructuralists do, so there is much less pressure among Buddhists to try to impress each other or prove each other "wrong". Buddhism never attempts to be obscure or deliberately sophisticated, whereas I do find at times that Poststructuralism proliferates a kind of elitism using complex ways of expressing things. What it does is that it makes a person continually anxious to find enlightenment (o sorts) through choosing the right expression. Poetic, yes, but not always entirely "clear", and there is even a phobia amongst Poststructural thinking toward "clarity" especially if it is clear because it's a dominant familiar narrative.
   I could go on, but I do think that too much thinking in Poststructural jargon can be a rather depressing act of striving to impress fellow intellectuals, striving to step out of the familiar discourses of self and society, yet having no place to roost at the end of it.

The Opposite of Success

 It's scary to reflect that most of the stories that I internalize are "success" stories--stories about triumph, winning, doing everything perfectly, and never achieving less than A scores. I have come to realize that this game of success is addictive, but it also constitutes an entirely new self over time.
    I recall when I was in 7th or 8th grade, swinging on a big swing in a cottage in a rural area on a family vacation--and thinking about how this time I would do the things I always dreamed about doing: being a scientist (that was my one big dream at 10 years old) and, excelling in math (a subject I truly dreaded). That fateful day began a series of what I like to call "success stories": stories about the young boy who kept a notebook in his front shirt pocket, and wrote down all his "to do's" including upcoming homework assignments, tests, you name it. When that boy finally did succeed in achieving fairly decent scores in both math and science (maybe not fantastic scores but surprisingly decent scores), he inducted a new series of performances into his life. And what heralded all of this was the realization that indeed, there is a reciprocal relationship between diligence and success. Indeed, if I concentrate in class and do everything I am told to do, I stand a pretty good chance of having some degree of control over my future. Sounds easy, don't it?
    But with those repeated experiences of meeting fairly predictable, measurable expectations comes the unpredictable: being invited to math competitions where the answers to the questions could not be derived from neat sets of formulae; taking courses that don't accord with a felt sense of what success means; being derailed by my self-image of a person who can succeed at anything, in theory, by these moments when there is no success on the horizon. How the narrative of success is then maintained is by sometimes introducing complex arguments for the relationship between successful outcomes and emotional management. After all, isn't it my own despair at not succeeding that derails the smooth path of determination to succeed? So here again comes the insidious narrative of being able to do whatever one likes to do, veiled behind the discourses of managing emotions, minding emotions, mindfulness, and so on. Embedded in meditative and mindful moments is the possibility of being awake through difficult emotions..but always with the promise that being mindful will allow the process to go by quicker and in a more integrated way than suppressing those hard emotions.
   I realize that my style tonight is different from before, but I am challenging myself to ask: how did this determination to succeed arise in the first place? What did the dreams of becoming eventually become over time, and where am I at in terms of my current views of success? How the self moves through these discursive moments is something I would like to view in more detail.

Meditation and trees

During the meditation practice tonight, I reflected on the way that mediation is always an effort. It is a beautiful effort and often simultaneously a futile one, because there are so many scattered thoughts that come to mind, and one is not in control a lot of the time. But what I shared in tonight's session was about a time when I had visited an art gallery and had seen a painting of trees which are blown around by violent winds. On that day, I reflected on how the tree looked so strong in spite of being buffeted this way and that by the harshest natural forces. I sometimes think this is how meditation is; the tree represents a kind of stability in one's method that one can turn back to many times. But with stability comes fragility, and vice versa: without the ability to "bend" with the breezes around it, the tree would not have an easy time contending with the natural forces. In fact, the tree's strength is a combination of "being" and "non being", "resilience" and "surrender", which allow it to continue to stand in one place while contending with the natural elements.

Random Thoughts on Education as an Expansive Verb

  Tonight, I finished an application for a scholarship. I started to reflect on this privilege of having an education: how the chance does not come to everyone, and how it actually is fortunate that I have a chance to be educated. Education is priceless in the sense that it allows people to be in company with life-changing ideas. Yet, with that education comes the responsibility to always be ready to include those who are not part of that system, or to change the system itself to open up to differences in how people learn and thrive.
   Education is constructed out of discourses. It's not a fixed entity but is composed of activities that define what is "right" to teach. The politics of education is also subject to changes, but what remains the same is the need to continually adapt to different lives and needs. If people get too caught up in the specific books that make them educated, they lose sight of how education itself means something different to different people. One "mark" of education may not actually apply to others. I believe that for this reason, education needs to problematize its own definitions and be open to continuous growth and change.

Deep Impermanence

 Many scholars have talked about "deep ecology" in recent years, which was explored by Arne Naess in his philosophies. What it refers to is not beholding nature as an object but as something that is part of us. I would like to extend this notion of "deep ecology" to the term "deep impermanence": an expression that entails a refusal to take anything for granted. Unlike "shallow" forms of impermanence which might pay tribute to the way some things change, "deep" impermanence suggests that even the ground that "I" stand upon is an iceberg that could just as easily melt. There is nothing so solid that it cannot disappear in the next moment.
    If I think this way about impermanence, somehow,I am less 'calculating'. After all, the very notion of calculation means that there is always something at the end of the day that I can claim as "my own", and this "my own" becomes the bedrock of my experience. I then start to "pool" my resources (money, persuasion, words, thoughts) to keep that bedrock intact, only to find myself getting anxious and flustered, knowing deep down that even this precious sense of "I" is not resting on a firm foundation at all. Have you ever had those dreams where you felt that your teeth are going to fall out, and then wake up to feel your teeth---to know that they are intact after all? Deep impermanence is the realization that one's teeth are not one's true self, any more than any other part of the body.
   Far from making a person detached, I think that deep impermanence can allow a person to take more risks, and realize that what they have right now are the colors to paint tomorrow's canvas. That paint is meant to be used to make art, and this too will pass. So make art while you still can.

The Upside of Down

 Watching the movie The Upside tonight, a question lingered in my mind. At the beginning of the movie, Phillip is rejecting all the "outstanding" and very creative candidates to be his auxiliary support person, only to find that he accepts the one man who is most reluctant to take on this job, an ex convict named Dell. Why does he take this man over the others? What is it about Dell, with his crude humor and street smarts, that appeals to Phillip? Is it indeed because unconsciously, Phillip wants the man who is more likely not to resuscitate him. I think it's deeper than this, however.
  People are not entirely governed by reason or even by something that is planned. Sometimes it's the unplanned that is needed to wake someone out of a depression or another state of being that is akin to dying or a deep sleep. I think that when people have reached a low point in their lives, they are deep down inside looking for a way to wake up from it, even though they might not be aware of it. For this reason, one sympathizes: this kind of relationship between the two men thrives precisely because it is highly "unlikely".
    It also makes me believe that we are never alone in terms of the things that happen to us. Every living being has these fields of energy, and those fields naturally seek each other in ways that serve to heal imbalances. This is not a fully articulated theory, but I have been thinking about that uncanny sense in which things do fit together and there is a symbiotic relationship of events that is not planned.