Am I Crazy?

I’m reading Walking Up by Sam Harris, subtitle, “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.”  With Harris, you can expect some hostility toward religion.  Those comments seem minimal here.  Instead, most of the time, he really does focus on spirituality. For him that means, trying to explain consciousness and “the riddle of the self.”  At times, I find myself merely trudging along.  At other times, I delighted or fascinated at how he sees things.  Here’s a passage that has me observing my self a little differently.

When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill (provided he is not wearing a headset of some kind).  But we all talk to ourselves constantly—most of us merely have the good sense to keep our mouths shut.  We rehearse past conversations—thinking about what we said, what we didn’t say, what we should have said.  We anticipate the future, producing a ceaseless string of words and images that fill us with hope or fear.  We tell ourselves the story of the present, as though some blind person were inside our head who required continuous narration to know what is happening; “Wow, nice disk.  I wonder what kind of wood that is.  Oh, but it has no drawers.  They didn’t put drawers in this thing?  How can you have a desk without at least one drawer?”  Who are we talking to?  No one else is there.  And we seem to image that if we just keep this inner monologue to ourselves, it is perfectly compatible with mental health.  Perhaps it isn’t. (93-94)

Democracy

I usually take for granted the representation strategy for Senate and House of Representatives.  Occasionally, I’m reminded of how weird Senate presentation is.  A few years ago, Hendrick Hertzberg addressed this in his blog.  When the founders worked out this system, a compromise (hated by some of them) giving two senators to every state meant that some of the small states were getting twelve times as much representation as states of larger population.  Now, says Hertzberg, “Two hundred and twenty years later, the absurdity is five and a half times worse: a Wyoming voter gets sixty-eight times more representation in the Senate than a Californian.”  It’s now something that is often mentioned, but I don’t think I like it. (Hat tip also to Jonathan Chait.)

From The New Yorker, daily cartoon archives.

A Book Book

The Dish calls this a "Cool Ad."  That to me is an oxymoron, and yet, here it is. I like it.  Clever.

Last Stop

This is the site where a nine-year-old girl accidentally shot the instructor who was helping her fire an Uzi.  The rule was, you must be an least eight to partake of this experience.  I have an eight-year-old grandson.  I can't think of any reason he would need to fire an Uzi.  It seems it is considered entertainment at Last Stop.  As Leonard Pitts says below, it's an example of our country's "stubborn stupidity" about guns.  It's time for another letter to your representatives.

Guns Again

After a nine-year-old girl shot her instructor with an Uzi at a shooting range Leonard Pitts wrote a thoughtful rant, and here is some of it:

God bless America. We legislate against Sharia law in places where there are no Muslims, much less an inclination toward Sharia. We pass laws to curtail election fraud despite the fact that election fraud, as a practical matter, does not exist. Yet we endure a yearly toll of gun carnage that makes civilized people in civilized places shake their heads in wonder and our only action is inaction.

Why We Travel

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. (Pico Iyer)

I have posted the above passage before.  But I’ve just returned from two weeks in Ireland, and I don’t know what else to say.  The picture above was taken by my brother-in-law, and he has captured some of the magic.

Thoughts

Good and  bad, happy and sad, thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.  (Trungpa Rinpoche quoted by Pema Chӧdrӧn in Start Where You Are)