What Zen?

holy fuck-me-running shit on a toothpick.

I had so many words typed here... and then I thought I remembered how to make umlauts on the Mac... but I didn't... and it killed the page and good-bye post. Dammit.

I suppose I'll try again in a much much abbreviated form.

(FUCK!)

I believe I was just rolling on and on about gumption and gumption traps... And how these ideas, as presented, just aren't that exciting. I suppose the originality and importance of this is the way in which the ideas are presented. It's just not sitting well with me tho. I find myself reading about "Gumption" in this new important way but just thinking how that's little more than focus and... some word that I had earlier but have now lost. Just keep trying, I guess. So that was all fine tho... and then we get into "gumption traps." (gumption traps??) I'm certainly more than familiar with the whole idea of I-have-to-take-the-whole-thing-apart-AGAIN?! I can't count how many times I've spent hours running wires through ceilings and down walls only to finish - only to be faced with a whole new problem... You want the TV where? Now?? All motivation is completely drained. That's a trap that I feel like most people would discover quite quickly and easily throughout the course of their life. And, in so doing, the idea of that trap becomes very real... much more so than having read it in a book... (I think the narrator would agree with me.)

There was a bit about Egoism as well... and yeah, I certainly suffer from that, but I think that I know I suffer from it. While I usually give into it at the first pass of solving a problem, if I fail, it's not very difficult to step back and wipe away what I thought I knew about the problem and come at it from a different angle. And boredom... well, he finally came to it... this is certainly the gumption trap that's getting me in regards to finishing the book. And I've got coffee! Boredom, he says, often springs from Egoism... and maybe that's true with me in this case as well. But, while I see the value in reviewing the familiar, I feel like I'm reviewing the familiar in an overly complicated way. I'm not necessarily picking up lots of new ideas... just different ways of coming to conclusions at which I have, often, already arrived. But whatever. I'll stick it out.

Oh. I think I'm chronologically out of line now, but there was also the exposition about "value rigidity." I full heartedly agree with the narrator about the value (hah... ) of losing (or, at least, loosening) ones value rigidity when facing a problem or a new idea. (Are you listening politicians and you religious nuts who already know it all??)

Before I destroyed my words, I was trying to figure out something about the third yes-no option... "mu." The narrator describes it as both not yes and not no. While what I'm about to say may very well be a notion the author is trying to smash, it's pretty classically logic that ~x = x. Is it just a language thing that makes me want to say that ~yes must then also equal yes? Perhaps, but I'm going to run with it anyway. When thinking about the "mu" state, I couldn't help but wonder, every time, if the state (as described as "not yes and not no") would look the same if it was "yes and no" instead. Or "as well." I find it more interesting and satisfying to imagine something in being in two opposing states at the same time than in the inverse of those two states at the same time. I was going to talk about Schrödinger here, which is when I mashed the wrong open-apple button. Now I got smart and just copied it off Google. (See? I don't mind approaching a problem from a different angle!) Anyway... I suppose that's all I wanted to say. Just make the comparison. I want to toss Heisenberg in there somewhere too, but I can't really force it to fit. Maybe I'll remember that later and someone else can make it fit.

Just flipped back through... there was one point that I really wanted to hear about... the "funeral procession" mentality. That's something that I know quite well, and I was looking forward to hearing the narrator's take on that... Then, of course, the chapter ended, and I got nothing. *sigh*

I suppose I'm done writing now. And about 50 pages from the end. Hopefully one more post and I'll be done. It's been interesting and entertaining and helpful and frustrating to write my thoughts down daily. It is certainly helping with both retention and actually thinking through fleeting ideas I had while reading. I tried doing this a bit with Karamazov, but I failed to see it through to the end. Sucks. But I gave Austin an earful about it, so that will have to suffice.

My $4 block of two hours on the Net in the coffee shop is now expiring. The more I read this book and the more I write, the more pretentious I think I start to sound. Dammit!

Fini.