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Buddha taught us that the source of human misery is attachment. In order to be free from sorrow, we must be free from attachment - and from striving.

Many people who meditate - and I suspect most Americans who meditate - do so because they hope to get something out of it, anything from relaxation, to relief from stress, enlightment or spiritual growth. But if you are striving to better yourself through meditation, you are missing the whole point. What you must free yourself from is that very striving.

The Shambhala monk Chyogyam Trungpa was instrumental in bringing Tibetan buddhism to the US and Canada in a form that could be appreciated by westerners. May I recommend a couple of his books:

• Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
• The Heart of the Buddha

I can teach anyone to meditate in about two minutes:

Sit comfortably but with your back straight. Focus just part of your attention on your breath. Clear your mind of thoughts. Don't beat yourself up if a though crosses your mind, just let it go. Then sit for a while. Try ten minutes to start with, then a little longer each day as you get used to it.

The most important thing is to just sit. How many Slashdotters ever allow themselves to just sit? To just clear your mind without thinking of anything?

Trungpa said there was no way out but to apply your bottom to the meditation cushion. I can promise you'll enjoy his books - he was quite a colorful character.

I think that the day that release from attachment can be sold to American business will come when Bill Gates gives his money to the poor, shaves his head, dons saffron robes, and takes The Vows of Refuge.

Buddha taught us that the source of human misery is attachment. In order to be free from sorrow, we must be free from attachment - and from striving.

Many people who meditate - and I suspect most Americans who meditate - do so because they hope to get something out of it, anything from relaxation, to relief from stress, enlightment or spiritual growth. But if you are striving to better yourself through meditation, you are missing the whole point. What you must free yourself from is that very striving.

The Shambhala monk Chyogyam Trungpa was instrumental in bringing Tibetan buddhism to the US and Canada in a form that could be appreciated by westerners. May I recommend a couple of his books:

• Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
• The Heart of the Buddha

I can teach anyone to meditate in about two minutes:

Sit comfortably but with your back straight. Focus just part of your attention on your breath. Clear your mind of thoughts. Don't beat yourself up if a though crosses your mind, just let it go. Then sit for a while. Try ten minutes to start with, then a little longer each day as you get used to it.

The most important thing is to just sit. How many Slashdotters ever allow themselves to just sit? To just clear your mind without thinking of anything?

Trungpa said there was no way out but to apply your bottom to the meditation cushion. I can promise you'll enjoy his books - he was quite a colorful character.

I think that the day that release from attachment can be sold to American business will come when Bill Gates gives his money to the poor, shaves his head, dons saffron robes, and takes The Vows of Refuge.

Buddha taught us that the source of human misery is attachment. In order to be free from sorrow, we must be free from attachment - and from striving.

Many people who meditate - and I suspect most Americans who meditate - do so because they hope to get something out of it, anything from relaxation, to relief from stress, enlightment or spiritual growth. But if you are striving to better yourself through meditation, you are missing the whole point. What you must free yourself from is that very striving.

The Shambhala monk Chyogyam Trungpa was instrumental in bringing Tibetan buddhism to the US and Canada in a form that could be appreciated by westerners. May I recommend a couple of his books:

• Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
• The Heart of the Buddha

I can teach anyone to meditate in about two minutes:

Sit comfortably but with your back straight. Focus just part of your attention on your breath. Clear your mind of thoughts. Don't beat yourself up if a though crosses your mind, just let it go. Then sit for a while. Try ten minutes to start with, then a little longer each day as you get used to it.

The most important thing is to just sit. How many Slashdotters ever allow themselves to just sit? To just clear your mind without thinking of anything?

Trungpa said there was no way out but to apply your bottom to the meditation cushion. I can promise you'll enjoy his books - he was quite a colorful character.

I think that the day that release from attachment can be sold to American business will come when Bill Gates gives his money to the poor, shaves his head, dons saffron robes, and takes The Vows of Refuge.

also talked about this in The Wizard of Earthsea, where the wizards had to deal with a certain "conservation of weather" -- bringing rain to one place would bring drought to another, and so on. A lot of the philosophy espoused in those books is related to the Tao De Ching, of which she did a translation.

A friend of mine said to me: "I didn't believe in God until I worked 1 year in AI. No matter how great an achievement we made, it STILL sucked in comparison"

There's a new book due out in a few months by Ken Wilber, a philosopher and "enlightnened" Zen practitioner (among other things), called "Boomeritis", about a clever geek who wants to work in A.I. He gets into the problem of what is consciousness, which leads him towards those who have traditionally studied this question, like Zen Buddhists etc.

I truly doubt there is an increase in autism, just an increase in the number of children they are diagnosing as autistic. I never believed or trusted in psychologist in the first place.

Well, when we study people, as Psychology does, we get into very tricky territory.

Basically there's this desire to be scientific. We know that science works because we put a man on the moon. So we want everything to be scientific. Like, if it science, then it's true.

But science can only answer certain questions. What is it's mass? Where is the brain activity? But then there's this whole other half of knowing, which is about meaning and context and interpretation. And this stuff cannot be known objectively. It can only be interpreted, and the trick is to find the best interpretation.

For example, you can objectively measure heart rate. But what is the meaning of the heart rate? Is it because the patient is angry? or excited? or aroused? Which word would the patient use to best describe what they are feeling? Or would you rather just look at their face, to see if they are angry? But now you're still having to interpret. Are they angry? Do they have bad indigestion?

Meaning exists in the mind, and not in the physical brain mass. You can measure chemicals in the brain, but if you want to know what the patient is experiencing, then you have to ask them. And their answer will have to be interpreted. (Well, he says he feels fine, but he didn't sound too sure)

So meethinks that here we have a thing called autism that can't be measured by a machine (unless they find a specific brain region that can be tied to it). And it affects how people interact socially. Now I challenge you to find an objective, performed automatically by machine, test that can measure social inteaction.

No way. The machine would have to not only register language, body posture, etc. but would have to know the meaning of all those things. It would have to practically be sentient, so that it could interpret what it's seeing. At which point it becomes just as subjective as anybody else.

Now until they find a way to measure the brain that is directly tied to autism... we have to interpret what the person is doing (is he just tired or is he antisocial?) which is frought with difficulty... but that doesn't mean that autism "doesn't exist".

So I think the trouble with that test, on the site which you linked, is that it tries to turn a subjective, interpretationally based test, into something which gives you a number for an answer.

Nope. Sorry. No numbers allowed. This is an interpretation, (and possibly a good one, depending on who's performing the evaluation). So the best that the test can be said to "result" in is a, "probably yes", "probably no", or "let's keep an eye on this".

So what we're doing is distinguishing between Objective Truth that can be measured, and Subjective Authenticity which must be interpreted. This is a distinction made by Ken Wilber, when he looked at many fields of human knowledge and asked himself how it could all possibly fit together. And he noticed that not only were there these two categories, but that our scientifically driven modern world thinks that science is the only kind of truth. Which is half right. The Objective can be studied scientifically. Man walked on the moon! But the subjective aspects, like what's really going on inside a person's experience, THAT can only be found out by talking to the person, interacting with them, interpreting their inner world.

Science won't reveal meaning. "Honey, I love you", "Don't be silly dear. There's no such thing as love in reality. Your brain is merely swishing around some chemicals. When you give me a present I know it's just your brain chemistry acting up. Oh, you want to have sex? But that's just your testosterone. Here's some pills I got from the doctor. The'll re-adjust your chemistry balance."

So we have to see that in addition to the noble truths of science, there's also the noble authenticity of interpretation.

Don't say, "It's not scientific! So it's a pile of crap!" But also, (and this maybe applies to those psychologists), don't pretend that something youve discovered via interpretation is actually something objective and scientific. Just be sure that your interpretation is a good one, and that you check it with other, suitably prepared people who also agree the same meaning. Just like English speakers can interpret English, and be fairly close in their meaning of the words.

Rather, given this phenomenon, "autism", can we study it objectively? Can we study it subjectively? Can we use both what the equiment tells us and what our interpretations tell us? What can we find out about autism, through studying it via both channels?

I think the whole human race has been going downhill ever since the beginning.

A sort of Romantic notion. But it's also been going uphill--it's called the "Dialectic of Progress", or, "Good news, bad news". Every evolutionary advancement becomes itself a new problem that has to be solved.

We could still be apes, and the planet wouldn't suffer, but then what's the point of a planet if it can't breed minds? The biosphere creates an environment where a noosphere can emerge.

Somewhere right now a highly skilled person is writing a song. Somewhere right now a highly skilled person is targetting a bomb. Good news, bad news.

Offtopic (not really): I'm curious whether in the grander evolutionary pattern, it's necessary that corporations aquire all this power, (such as permanent control of IP), and become bigger than countries, thus making it necessary that an organisation bigger than countries be formed to put them back in line. ie. a World Government. A world government may be the only body big enough to tackle the environmental crisis (irrespective of whether it's warming or cooling, and exactly when oil will run out).

PS. I must try that drink...

Read A Brief History of Everything

There's a deep-seated strain of virulent fascism in Europe that's been intermittently expressed in politics and popular culture for most of the 20th century. Hitler and Mussolini didn't come out nowhere

Yes, you're highlighting something often overlooked in our talk about "freedom" -- namely, we can afford to let people be free to have their say only once they have reached a certain level of moral/social/cognitive development.

Just like you don't let your two year old kid do whatever it wants, we also have to keep in check the more 'primitive' aspects of our society.

Now who's to say what's primitive? Well, we can generally agree that we want to be rid of murder, violence etc., and work from there. Yes, people have different opinion, and yes, no-one should "dictate", but on the whole, there are certain "levels", where we say that one thing is better than another.

It's like, a James Bond villain ("I want to blow up the world and rule it") is like a highly intelligent and sophisticated man but with the moral development of a 2 year old ("Me! ME! I want! I want! Me! Me!!")

Society's job is to educate people past the lower, but developmentally unavoidable, parts of our human-ness, so that we can become people who are free because we have a good enough idea about what's right and wrong, and are hence free to do the right thing.

Banning hate literature may help to reduce the degree to which people who are morally under-developed are further damaged and mis-lead. Society has to find ways to educate them beyond their archic racial divisions, and integrate them into a healthy nation centric or even world centric identity. Then and only then, once you've adjusted to the system, can you start to go beyond the system.

But my own understanding is on the whole very limited. Here's what a master philosopher has to say:

The brilliance of the Founding Fathers was that they found a way to take this rare, elite stance--demanding equality and freedom for all--and force it on an entire population as the backbone of a series of legal and behavioral codes that demanded that, even if individuals are not at moral-stage 5 in their own interiors, they must conform their exterior behavior to rules consistent with a moral-stage-5 act (e.g., you do not have to love me, but if you shoot me they will lock you up). Thus, at their best, the laws of America embodied an attempt to encode higher, postconventional, worldcentric responses--regardless of race, sex, color, or creed--implemented with the consent of the governed (the moral-stage-5 social contract), even if those laws were developmentally ahead of most of the governed. The legal, judicial, and political structures of the United States thus acted, in their best instances, as both a higher elitist stance imposed on the population at large and a magnet of psychological and cultural development for its peoples, who could grow into the worldcentric values of freedom and equality embedded in and informing the codes.
-- Ken Wilber

There are 4 aspects to Art

The philosopher Ken Wilber theorises that there are two basically irreducible axes to the Kosmos. These are "In/Out" and "One/Many" -- and basically "everything" can be mapped onto a diagram formed of these four quadrants.

Upper left quadrant [Inside/One] : Subjective Individual. Here art is self expression. Art is the way an individual mind expresses it's own meanings. I as Artist place meaning in my work, and so long as I live and view my work, that meaning exists for me. It's art to me, for this is how I choose to express myself.

Lower right quadrant [Inside/Many] : Intersubjective Culture. We as a society of members who share meanings, who talk to each other, who communicate, must all understand and agree upon the meaning of the words and ideas we use. Memes jump from mind to mind, travelling through the network of shared brain power. Collectively, art is what we can agree to put in an art gallery, championed by academia, and the movement of History.

Upper right [Outer/One] : Objective Individual. Art, regardless of it's meaning, each art artefact has a physical presence, and objective materiality, be it canvas, oils, faeces, or a VDU. Whatever the idea looked like in the artist's mind, this is how it's physically manifested.

Lower right [Outer/Many] : This is similar to the previous, except it's about the physical structures that house the art, like galleries and computer networks. Libraries and books. Again, it all has to have physical presence, or the only way I'd get to see your art is through a Vulcan mind-meld.

Ken Wilber emphasises that ALL FOUR QUADRANTS are necessary, and equally valuable. This means that it's ok for an artist to call his work art, because that is true for the artist. But for anyone else to call it art, the society has to recognise it as art--but this does not contradict the artist. Your art may be unrecognised for years. But for you it's still art. And lastly, whatever the meaning of the art, it has to have physical form, like a collage of newspaper cuttings, or via a computer and projection screen. Note that there's no meaning in the object itself. Only the minds of the viewers or the artist can "hold" the meaning.

Some people think art is "paintings" or "landscapes" or "what's in art galleries". Each of these definitions unconsciously priviledges one quadrant. But Wilber's point is that every quadrant is important, because none of the quadrants can be reduced or collapsed into the others.

Disclaimer: please check out the essays on Wilber's site, and don't rely on my bastard presentation of his ideas.

There are 4 aspects to Art

The philosopher Ken Wilber theorises that there are two basically irreducible axes to the Kosmos. These are "In/Out" and "One/Many" -- and basically "everything" can be mapped onto a diagram formed of these four quadrants.

Upper left quadrant [Inside/One] : Subjective Individual. Here art is self expression. Art is the way an individual mind expresses it's own meanings. I as Artist place meaning in my work, and so long as I live and view my work, that meaning exists for me. It's art to me, for this is how I choose to express myself.

Lower right quadrant [Inside/Many] : Intersubjective Culture. We as a society of members who share meanings, who talk to each other, who communicate, must all understand and agree upon the meaning of the words and ideas we use. Memes jump from mind to mind, travelling through the network of shared brain power. Collectively, art is what we can agree to put in an art gallery, championed by academia, and the movement of History.

Upper right [Outer/One] : Objective Individual. Art, regardless of it's meaning, each art artefact has a physical presence, and objective materiality, be it canvas, oils, faeces, or a VDU. Whatever the idea looked like in the artist's mind, this is how it's physically manifested.

Lower right [Outer/Many] : This is similar to the previous, except it's about the physical structures that house the art, like galleries and computer networks. Libraries and books. Again, it all has to have physical presence, or the only way I'd get to see your art is through a Vulcan mind-meld.

Ken Wilber emphasises that ALL FOUR QUADRANTS are necessary, and equally valuable. This means that it's ok for an artist to call his work art, because that is true for the artist. But for anyone else to call it art, the society has to recognise it as art--but this does not contradict the artist. Your art may be unrecognised for years. But for you it's still art. And lastly, whatever the meaning of the art, it has to have physical form, like a collage of newspaper cuttings, or via a computer and projection screen. Note that there's no meaning in the object itself. Only the minds of the viewers or the artist can "hold" the meaning.

Some people think art is "paintings" or "landscapes" or "what's in art galleries". Each of these definitions unconsciously priviledges one quadrant. But Wilber's point is that every quadrant is important, because none of the quadrants can be reduced or collapsed into the others.

Disclaimer: please check out the essays on Wilber's site, and don't rely on my bastard presentation of his ideas.

And this was the point of my message: where one accepts the presuppositions of modern Western psychology -- a certain reductionist view of human nature, a hyper-scientific understanding of the human psyche, a denigration or outright scorn of spirituality -- their insights make sense. Where one's presuppositions differ, their value is reduced. And, it would appear, even large segments of your own society do not share those presuppositions -- at least where it comes to human sexuality.

I have the impression now that while we started out arguing these points, our worldviews and interests in general are more similar. Have you read any Ken Wilber? He tries to show how all knowledge can be integrated (and annoys a lot of people who think their own fields are the only answer).

From the preface to Integral Psychology:

The word "psychology" means the study of the psyche, and the word "psyche" means mind or soul. In the Microsoft Thesaurus, for psyche we find: "self: atman, soul, spirit; subjectivity: higher self, spiritual self, spirit." One is reminded, yet again, that the roots of psychology lie deep within the human soul and spirit.

....

I once started taking notes for a history of psychology and philosophy that I was planning on writing. I had decided to do so because, in looking at most of the available history of psychology textbooks, I was struck by a strange and curious fact, that they all told the story of psychology--and the psyche--as if it abruptly came into being around 1879 in a laboratory in the University of Leipzig, headed by Wilhelm Wundt, who indeed was the father of a certain type of psychology anchored in introspection and structuralism. Still, did the psyche itself just jump into existence in 1879?

...

That is all I heard of Gustav Fechner, until several years later, when I was rummaging through a store filled with wonderfully old philosophy books, and there, rather shockingly, was a book with a striking title-- On Life after Death --written in 1835, and by none other than Gustav Fechner. It had the most arresting opening lines: "Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever."

...

From body to mind to spirit, the three stages of the growth of consciousness; and it is only as men and women die to the separate self, that they awaken to the expansiveness of universal Spirit. There was Fechner's real philosophy of life, mind, soul, and consciousness; and why did the textbooks not bother to tell us that? That's when I decided I wanted to write a history of psychology, simply because "Somebody has got to tell."

The full preface is available online. And I was reminded of it by your point that modern psychology is at best a poor repackaging of the ancient insights.

Generally, Wilber is in full agreement with the Great Chain of Being. And if I understand him, he does make a point that each system focusses on a particular level of the Great Chain. So the Eastern systems generally emphasise the higher levels, while the West pretty much ignores their existance.

But in the East's emphasis on the higher, they perhaps pay less attention to the lower levels, which is where western psychology has focussed it's efforts. But the lower levels are also important, for they influence and distort the potential higher levels -- for example, trying to teach meditation to a child with autism is rather futile -- for the child's development has been arrested at a very early/low level -- so we need to find something that works at the level of the problem.

Wilber emphasises that we need to acknowledge and include all levels of the Great Chain, from the pre-personal, to the personal/egoic, to the trans-personal. He "plugs" the various therapies into their respective levels:

Physical
DIET - Atkins, Eades, Ornish, vitamins...
STRUCTURAL - weightlifting, aerobics, hicking, Rolfing...

Emotional
BREATH - t'ai chi, yoga, bioenergetics, circulation of prana..
SEX - tantric sexual communion, self-transcending whole-bodied sexuality...

Mental
THERAPY - psychotherapy, cognitive therepy...
VISION - visualisation, affirmation...

Spiritual
PSYCHIC - shamanic, nature mysticism...
SUBTLE - deity mysticism, yidam, contemplative prayer...
CAUSAL - vipassana, self-inquiry, bare attention, centering prayer, Witnessing...
NONDUAL - Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Shaivism, Zen, Eckhart ...

quoted from Integral Psychology.

Sorry about the long post... I thought you might find it interesting.

And this was the point of my message: where one accepts the presuppositions of modern Western psychology -- a certain reductionist view of human nature, a hyper-scientific understanding of the human psyche, a denigration or outright scorn of spirituality -- their insights make sense. Where one's presuppositions differ, their value is reduced. And, it would appear, even large segments of your own society do not share those presuppositions -- at least where it comes to human sexuality.

I have the impression now that while we started out arguing these points, our worldviews and interests in general are more similar. Have you read any Ken Wilber? He tries to show how all knowledge can be integrated (and annoys a lot of people who think their own fields are the only answer).

From the preface to Integral Psychology:

The word "psychology" means the study of the psyche, and the word "psyche" means mind or soul. In the Microsoft Thesaurus, for psyche we find: "self: atman, soul, spirit; subjectivity: higher self, spiritual self, spirit." One is reminded, yet again, that the roots of psychology lie deep within the human soul and spirit.

....

I once started taking notes for a history of psychology and philosophy that I was planning on writing. I had decided to do so because, in looking at most of the available history of psychology textbooks, I was struck by a strange and curious fact, that they all told the story of psychology--and the psyche--as if it abruptly came into being around 1879 in a laboratory in the University of Leipzig, headed by Wilhelm Wundt, who indeed was the father of a certain type of psychology anchored in introspection and structuralism. Still, did the psyche itself just jump into existence in 1879?

...

That is all I heard of Gustav Fechner, until several years later, when I was rummaging through a store filled with wonderfully old philosophy books, and there, rather shockingly, was a book with a striking title-- On Life after Death --written in 1835, and by none other than Gustav Fechner. It had the most arresting opening lines: "Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever."

...

From body to mind to spirit, the three stages of the growth of consciousness; and it is only as men and women die to the separate self, that they awaken to the expansiveness of universal Spirit. There was Fechner's real philosophy of life, mind, soul, and consciousness; and why did the textbooks not bother to tell us that? That's when I decided I wanted to write a history of psychology, simply because "Somebody has got to tell."

The full preface is available online. And I was reminded of it by your point that modern psychology is at best a poor repackaging of the ancient insights.

Generally, Wilber is in full agreement with the Great Chain of Being. And if I understand him, he does make a point that each system focusses on a particular level of the Great Chain. So the Eastern systems generally emphasise the higher levels, while the West pretty much ignores their existance.

But in the East's emphasis on the higher, they perhaps pay less attention to the lower levels, which is where western psychology has focussed it's efforts. But the lower levels are also important, for they influence and distort the potential higher levels -- for example, trying to teach meditation to a child with autism is rather futile -- for the child's development has been arrested at a very early/low level -- so we need to find something that works at the level of the problem.

Wilber emphasises that we need to acknowledge and include all levels of the Great Chain, from the pre-personal, to the personal/egoic, to the trans-personal. He "plugs" the various therapies into their respective levels:

Physical
DIET - Atkins, Eades, Ornish, vitamins...
STRUCTURAL - weightlifting, aerobics, hicking, Rolfing...

Emotional
BREATH - t'ai chi, yoga, bioenergetics, circulation of prana..
SEX - tantric sexual communion, self-transcending whole-bodied sexuality...

Mental
THERAPY - psychotherapy, cognitive therepy...
VISION - visualisation, affirmation...

Spiritual
PSYCHIC - shamanic, nature mysticism...
SUBTLE - deity mysticism, yidam, contemplative prayer...
CAUSAL - vipassana, self-inquiry, bare attention, centering prayer, Witnessing...
NONDUAL - Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Shaivism, Zen, Eckhart ...

quoted from Integral Psychology.

Sorry about the long post... I thought you might find it interesting.

Somehow, nature forgave us for introducing things like horses to North America and tobacco to Europe, even though these things were -clearly- never intended to happen through any 'natural' means.

Like Nature is now forgiving us for feeding animal products to sheep by gifting us with BSE? There are examples either way. But what I'd like to add to the discussion of "luddite crackpots, weepy Sally-Fieldsesque mothers and pseudo-scientists stoping us" is that we need to separate the argument into one argument about Science and another one about Morals.

The philosopher Ken Wilber has put forward the idea of three major knowledge spheres, namely Art, Morals and Science. They correspond to The Beautiful, The Good, and The True. And they refer to I, We and It respectively. So Science is a study of "Its" (objective Truth), Art the study of the "I" (subjective Beauty), and Morals the study of "We" (intersubjective Good).

One of Wilbers' key points (if I'm representing his ideas right), is that none of these areas can be "reduced" to any of the others. For example, when a person feels hate, certain chemicals flood their brain. When they feel love, a different set of chemicals are released. Scietifically we can measure the chemicals, but science cannot tell us that one chemical is "better" than another chemical. Objectively Its are all just "stuff". But intersubjectively, We can agree that love is better than hate. And We can develop social systems that promote the Good.

So the luddite-crackpots are not really "anti-science" (although they may misguidedly aim their action in that direction). It's not a scientific problem. Its a problem of Values, social systems and social needs. Is it Better to develop new technologies, with their risks and benefits for our world, or to try to solve these problems of famine with other means?

I hear scientists in the media talk about the need for their work -- ie. famine etc. but they seldom talk about the possible abuses of their technology. I think perhaps they are getting Science and Morals mixed up also. The point of splitting Science, Morals and Art is to allow each to proceed unencumbered by the others. Science can say what can be done. Morals say whether it should be done.

GM food is indeed quite ready now.

Scientifically, GM food is indeed ready. We literally have the scientific technology. What we haven't worked out is whether we Morally, intersubjectively, socially, can make good use of it. Remember that it's the scientists themselves who say that their work is about finding Better ways to feed the world.

So the debate is a Moral-social-intersubjective one: is this technology really the way to feed the world, or is the problem not about technology at all, but rather social systems? And if it is about social systems, are not both the scientists and the anti-scientists missing the point?

But. . .how? I'm just me, inside this body, composed of my thoughts.

Oops, I didn't see the replies, so this is probably a little late...

If "you" are composed of thoughts, how can "you" be aware of the thought? To illustrate this, bring to mind a "picture" of the the room you are sitting in. See yourself sitting in the room. See that the you in the room is currently seeing a picture of the room, which contains another you that is seeing a picture of the room that contains another you... forever till absurdity.

Similarly, if you feel like "you" are "inside" your head, like there's a little person inside your head, then who is the little person inside the head of the little person? How many "you's" are there?

To get out of this problem, it could simply be that anything that is in your awareness is not you. If it was you, or a part of you, then you'd have to include you in you in you in you etc. Just like the eye cannot see itself, so anything that is in awareness, being experienced, cannot be you. This includes the table, "your" body, "your" feelings, "your" thoughts... they are all phenomena passing before you like clouds passing across the sky.

Everything is "in" awareness. There's no real inside/outside split. If there is no split, then that would mean that to harm another would be like harming "yourself". Sound familiar? --- There is a famous Albert Einstein quote, that illustrates this beautifully,

A Human Being is part of the Whole, called by us the 'Universe', a part limited in Time and Space. He experiences himself, his Thoughts and Feelings, as something separate from the rest- a kind of Optical Delusion of His Consciousness. This Delusion is a kind of Prison for us, restricting us to our personal Desires and to affection for a few Persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this Prison by widening our circle of Compassion to embrace all living Creatures and the Whole of Nature in its Beauty.

But rather than have my second hand version, check out a professionally written piece, So Who Are You?

I don't think she would have understood if I told her I'd been featured on Slashdot and had to take breaks from her to go post...

I did read through some of the comments here earlier this evening and I must say that this has been an excellent discussion. The sheer number of comments posted shows I must have struck a chord with the community - and my experience with other programmers shows that this is a common problem with others.

I'll post tomorrow what the folks on comp.lang.c++ and comp.sys.mac.programmer.misc had to say but they were in general along the same lines as what was posted here:

• Take a break
• Get a life
• Do something fun that doesn't involve computers
• Engage in vigorous physical exercise
• associate with the attractive sex
• Step back from low-level coding and do other software-oriented things like design, discussions with a coworker or documentation

I did in particular step back to think about software from a different level than coding, but I didn't actually do design work. Instead, I just cracked open some good programming texts. If you haven't read much lately there's probably a lot of good stuff that will stimulate you and improve the effectiveness of your work - check the book reviews online at The Association of C and C++ Users (and consider joining it - I did, a couple months ago).

One thing I consider important in the reading I did was that I wasn't looking for solutions to the problem at hand. Rather, I was trying to get back to something I'd been missing for a long time and wanted to indulge in - the sheer joy of learning for its own sake.

It was the case that the books I was reading were pertinent to my work but I wasn't searching them for solutions. I was just reading and flipping through them as my curiousity led me. And when solutions to my problem would occur to me, I'd put them out of my mind until the time I'd decided ahead of time would be my time to resume work.

What actually got me going again was that I had such a flood of ideas and they had crystallized so clearly I was able to sit down and implement my solution in a day and it worked just fine - still does.

Something else that helped stimulate me was the website on Extreme Programming.

A lot of the approaches there really appeal to me. Particularly I like the ideas they have that could be generally expressed as "design by coding" and are mentioned I think by Stroustrup in the intro to More C++ Gems as "expressing designs in the code".

That is, rather than doing a bunch of up-front modeling using diagrams like OMT or UML or what have you, you just write code - but you are designing in the code, so they emphasize in extreme programming that you constantly rewrite the code as designs gel.

One thing that saddnes me though is that Extreme Programming also suggests programming in pairs. This is something I used to do with Dave Johnson when we were at Working Software together. We'd help each other through hard spots and just rap about politics and stuff and go have coffee or a beer and get a lot of work done.

Now I live at the End of the Internet and I'm working for myself as a one-man consultant shop. It has its advantages (I can work at home and set my own hours) but one big disadvantage is that I work very much alone and there's no one around to bounce ideas off of.

I have other programmer friends and I do call them up but they all have their own gigs - it's not the same.

On another important note, several people both here, privately via email and in the newsgroups raised the possibility of this being clinical depression.

Well that is something I was well aware of and had been considering. Depression is something I have been dealing with all my life, as you will see in another slashdot article I posted:

Manic Depressive Geeks

I didn't used to be (woefully so) but now I'm very introspective about my mental and emotional state. I have to be. I didn't used to be but now I just won't tolerate the depths of misery that I just thought were part of the normal human condition.

But I don't think that what was happening to me was the sort of depression that I usually consider. There are "endogenous" and "reactive" depressions. Endogenous depression just happens to you and is usually caused by chemical imbalances in the brain (shortages of serotonin or norepinephrine) and is what's usually experienced with Manic Depression, while reactive depression is (naturally) a reaction to external events, like a personal tragedy.

Life has been really hectic for me for a long time, with the turbulence of my consulting business, falling in love with a woman from another country, planning a wedding, moving to Canada, and just trying to keep it all together. Maybe if all that hadn't been going on, I wouldn't have gotten stuck. But basically, I just got stuck.

Robert Pirsig talks about stuckness and ways to overcome it extensively in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I recommend highly (and probably ought to reread). And I really was suffering the kind of stuckness he described, the stuckness that occurs when you just want to get your bike fixed and you break the head off a crucial screw...

(Robert Pirsig went nuts while a grad student in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He had shock treatment back when it wasn't very carefully administered and lost nearly all his memories. The book is about his motorcycle trip across to some of the places he used to live to visit old friends he hardly remembered, along with an amazingly enlightening discussion of what he'd been so obsessed about that it drove him crazy - what is Quality?)

Someone mentioned meditation in the discussion. I had found reading about Zen and doing meditation on my own was of profound help in overcoming my mental illness back in the really dark days. But as things got better and my career got in shape and I stopped seeking so much and concentrated on learning to program and making a place in the world for myself I drifted away from that, something that I think is really wrong.

During my time off my then-fiance lent me her copy of Chogram Trungpa's The Path is the Goal, A basic handbook of buddhist meditation. It is published by Shambhala Publications

I'm afraid I read a little bit of it then when my time off came to an end I set it aside and started thinking again.

One of the little traps our mind has for us is thinking. I like to think, and I'm particularly well-developed at it. But my wife tell me that we are not our thoughts, and actually our thoughts can lead us astray. And when I was getting so stuck on my programming problem I was thinking really hard and trying to solve my problem by thinking harder.

One thing you do in meditation is to stop thinking. Hardened programmers might find that a frightening concept. And you can't really try to stop thinking - you just sit, and look, but not too hard, and experience

You cannot experience your world as it really is and be thinking.

One thing that Pirsig discusses in his book is how to bring the wisdom attained at the rarified mountain peaks of meditation down to practical value in everyday experience. He uses fixing a motorcycle as an illustrative example but when I read the book I found that I was able to program better because I could "become one with the machine".

My wife doesn't really believe this is possible but I think it is, that one can meditate while carrying out an intellectual activity like computer programming. That's something that I seem to have lost long ago, that I had years ago when I was not nearly so knowledgeable but I did have the ability to really lose myself in the machine all day long without distraction - and without getting tired or worn out.

Don't forget:

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow