dukkha

"The Pali word, dukkha, means 'incapable of satisfying' or 'not able
to bear or withstand anything'.

There's a lot of ground to cover there! How different to
say "Life is unsatisfying" and to say "Life is suffering"!

Maybe the word-choice was once meant to sum up the
whole spectrum. The first version sounds like something
a bored prince would say, and the second sounds like
something a starving mystic would say. If you were
someone who had experienced both life situations, and
you were given some time to think about it, you might
want to sum it all up with one word.

"Ugh."

In any case, it seems ridiculous for Buddhists to translate
'dukkha' as 'suffering'. For all I know, this goof-ball
translation has caused more suffering than it has
cured.

"In classic Sanskrit, the term duḥkha was often compared to a large
potter's wheel that would screech as it was spun around, and did not
turn smoothly. The opposite of dukkha was the term sukha, which
brought to mind a potter's wheel that turned smoothly and
noiselessly." -- Wikipedia

Alrighty then.

country song in reverse in reverse

"This is what you ought to practise from morning till evening. Begin
with the smallest, the most vulnerable things, like a pot, or a cup,
and then advance to a tunic, a paltry dog, a mere horse, a bit of
land; next yourself, your body and its limbs, your children, wife,
brothers. Look about on every side and cast these things away from
you. Purify your judgements, lest something not your own have become
fastened to you, or grown together with you, and cause you pain when
it is torn loose. -- Epictetus

Epictetus does not mean that one should literally cast away all these
externals from oneself. Rather, he is simply describing the ascetic
method which will prepare him to remain steadfast in the face of the
so-called 'inevitable misfortunes' of life. He simply means that one
should not acquire the disastrous habit of firmly fastening one's
desire to externals by judging that one needs them to be happy.
Epictetus' warning is that to judge that one needs some external in
order to be happy is effectively to make oneself dependent upon that
external for one's happiness."

-- http://puffin.creighton.edu/PHIL/Stephens/OSAP Epictetus on Stoic Love.htm

can't say no

From Psychology Today:

"It's difficult to learn from feedback that time will not be more
abundant in the future because of the irregular ways people spend
their time," the researchers write in the Journal of Experimental
Psychology. "Although many people may perceive themselves to be quite
busy almost every day of their lives, the specific activities vary
from day to day. Consequently, they do not learn from feedback that,
in aggregate, total demands are similar."

the internet is full of so many memories

Everyone who I had a crush on or who I tried to date
is there -- I know, this makes me sound so petty
and bourgeois (which I can hardly spell), like I haven't
really lived, but it's true -- they're somewhere -- hiding in
the crevices like mold in the cracks in between the
bathroom tiles. And here I am, reeling in my emotions,
which I've spent so long pushing and pulling, they
are practically like taffy now, all sticky and confused
in their basic nature, unknown, rejected (as it were).

pain+anger: the top hits

http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/reporter/index.html?ID=2374
: capsule summary - if you vent anger easily, you're unlikely to have
a high resistance to pain.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200311/anger-pain-and-depression
: capsule summary - (snark) you're not special so cool it bub.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Pain-+-Blame-=-Anger&id=168725
: capsule summary - pain is the gasoline, blame is the match.

Helpful or not helpful, what's interesting to me is my own history
of "putting up with pain". (Not quite the same as "bottling it up",
although I sometimes do that too.) It's like I accepted both
pain and happiness as random events that would "happen
to me", and when they arrived, I would just "experience them".

Well that's pretty silly. Pain (or its augmented form, anger)
can take over... OK, it's sending a good message, maybe,
like, "time to heal!", but if that message is ignored, then
the pain (and/or anger) increases, and eventually nothing
else is noticeable.... then it's really time to do something,
huh?

Pain can be distracted-away-from --

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4865324
: capsule summary: "when children are asked to imagine being
in their favorite place or to watch TV or a funny movie or to play
a video game, chemical activity in the pain perception area of their
brain is drained away, and the kids report feeling less painful
sensations."

but is that the best way to heal or support healing? I sort of
doubt it.

pain and anger

I'm realizing that it is sort of hard to tell the
difference between pain and anger; easy to feel pain and
get angry, for example. How closely associated are they
really?

In particular, it seems that one might get angry when one
feels "stuck with" pain -- not for any good reason, but
just because pain is a pretty miserable thing and it would
be nice to be able to do something about it.

what's real?

I made the odd gesture of asking YouTube what it thought
was real, and it came up with a 2005 National Geographic
documentary on the supernatural. After watching all five
portions of the episode, I got to this comment:

"I thought it would be pretty cool to believe in something like that
but I guess their [sic] full of crap"

Nicely put. Lately I have been Jonesing for info by skeptics
and cultbusters... perhaps because I really want to cut to
the non-mystical chase in my own "philosophical" work.

After maybe half a decade being interested in e.g. "magick",
(but with zero interest or belief in in "the supernatural") I
feel that somehow the "push" should be coming to "shove".
Not quite sure what that means, but I certainly would
prefer it if I wasn't walking around disappointed in something
that never existed in the first place. It seems to me that,
for example, there is a huge difference between stuff like
"binding" of mind and body, and woo-woo stuff like prana...

FWIW

"monkey and woman at peace"

I stayed up very late reading a book by Dan Savage
(of Savage Love). Aside from the fact that my day is
starting equally "late", I enjoyed pondering and laughing out
loud at Dan Savage's advice about sex and relationships.
Even before looking at this book, I was thinking about the
topic

What do I want in my life?

And at this point, I suppose I'm a bit more informed
about all the different ways in which I've stopped short
in pursuing it, often in the form of a bitter compromise.
I think it's the bitterness that's the problem, more than
the compromise.

I also took a brief look at the book on Chrysippus. His
questions,

Is there really something bad or good going on?
Is it appropriate to react emotionally?

are perhaps useful to think about in the context of
"bitter compromise". Bitterness in any form seems
reminiscent of "taking poison and hoping
the other person dies". Recast in less overtly
interpersonal terms, it's like eating shit and calling
it Shinola. Gah, Dan Savage has colonized my
brain! But even before he got in there, my
friends were talking to me about "acceptance",
which is a more positive way of talking about
getting-rid-of-bitterness.

It seems even more "positive" to look at the
first question I mentioned above -- I mean, an
answer to that question would be positive. A
question by itself often seems like a gaping hole.
Presumably there are at least a few things I can
dump into that hole and set afire.

PS. Interesting to think about "krisis" (judgment)
and "crisis" (culturally constructed need for
things like expert intervention or the creation of
group identity). Are we not qualified to make
our on judgments? Well, in the case in which we
judge (a) emotional response to (b) bad things
to be appropriate, Chrysippus, I think, said "no".
We disqualify ourselves, at least temporarily,
from making rational judgments whenever we
make irrational ones.

Library Notice

I have gotten a lot of mileage out of the Cambridge
Public Libraries this past summer (and fall).  The
latest stack waiting for me there is comprised of:

Savage love : Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex
Columnist, by Dan Savage

Emotion and peace of mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian
Temptation, by Richard Sorabji

and

The Chemistry of Joy: A Three-Step Program for Overcoming Depression
Through Western Science and Eastern Wisdom, by Henry Emmons

These books have very different review profiles on Amazon...

17/33 gave 5 stars
1/2 gave 5 stars
13/14 gave 5 stars

But they all have the same or similar number of "average
stars", they all have subtitles, and they are all written by males.
Perhaps they have a little bit more in common with one another
too... we shall see ~~ it seemed like a nicely gathatoulie-ish stack...

using "it's all text" and Aquamacs Emacs

There is something to be said for incremental
improvements. This system provides me with an emacs that
sort of works. And there is a lot to be said for things
that sort of work. Indeed the main thing that doesn't
work are my x11 modifier keys, and there's probably no way
to get them to work for the purposes of editing emails in
Firefox. Maybe just go with this for the moment (since it
is going to be worlds better than editing things directly
in Gmail and probably better than copying and pasting
everything (though I'm not 100% sure about that).

scientific theories?

"Scientific theories seem to be a-causal chiefly only in so far as they are
formulated in explicit formal and mathematical terms." -- Gopnik and Glymour

Is that really true? It strikes me as odd that formalism and
math would pull us away from causal thinking.