Waking Up

Here’s one more passage from Walking Up by Sam Harris:

That which is aware of sadness  is not sad.  That which is aware of fear is not fearful.

Reason

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.)