Just a little haiku

I found boundless joy
Hidden in my spirit deep
So I need not be

The difference between hypnosis and meditation

In hypnosis, you try and get the chattering monkeys to talk the way you want. You stand as monkey general before the monkey army and make them shout the order of the day.

In meditation, you let the monkeys chatter as much as they like. You just train yourself to not take them too seriously.

Noticing a change in my emotional reactions

Let's start with a somewhat strange story.

I have a history of intermittent meditation. I had a fling with buddhism about 10 years ago, broke away from it all, got into tantra, studied NLP, discovered that it's bullshit...

Several weeks ago, I was in a pub with a very close friend of mine. Late at night, we started challenging each other with NLP bullshit, by way of "I can talk you into a trance. See how you're getting tired and relaxed?"... That kind of stuff. We do that. We both have that background. It's fun to us.

Then I switched gears. "How about some meditation. Right now, right here, in the presence of 18year old boozers and lovely young girls?" Of course, ourselves had had a few Guinnesses and Jamesons and were fairly pissed by that time.

"Sure", he says. He couldn't step down from that challenge of course.

And we both went into a session of vipassana.

It was an odd, but strangely liberating thing. It felt good. It felt like breaking a taboo. Very empowering, that. I never thought that one could meditate on booze!

That whole ordeal sent me into a journey of rediscovering meditation, once more.

And I am seeing some changes.

As I'm *) breaking away from some automatic emotional reactions through mindfulness and some tantric breathing, I have a very weird feeling.

I look at reddit threads and other internet content and go: Huh. This would have had me all up in rage only a week ago. I would have HAD to comment on that. It would have been completely impossible to let that go.

Right now (and, fingers crossed, for a little longer! :-) ), a lot of things just don't get me upset so much. I laugh a bit more. I don't take it all as serious as I used to.

It is just that little bit easier to not get upset.

This is very, very liberating.

Don't get me wrong. I am very, very aware that this is nothing final or permanent at all, and I will have my share in a lot of useless drama still. But right now, this is utterly enjoyable.

I was at a somewhat similar place like this, back during my fling with buddhism. There's a huge difference though (mainly due to being 10 years older, I guess). This time, there is less pretension. Less need for some extraordinary experiences. Less urge to repress my thoughts (in order to appear holier to myself). I don't need all the metaphysical woo-woo just to be able to sit down and practice.

There is simply more joy now.

The main point, though, is that I now have more experience, and so I can trust my own practice better. I know what to expect, and more importantly: what NOT to. No superpowers. No transcendence. No loss of control. No weird becoming-other-than-human. I know that I can go back to normal, just by not practicing for a while.

This is good. This is very good.

I think, for the very first time in my life, I can say without cheese or irony: May all sentient beings find peace of mind!

(Also, don't worry, I still don't claim enlightenment for myself, and in most likelihood, I never will. After all, I do not believe that enlightenment actually EXISTS, remember?)


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*) slowly, temporarily, just a little bit... 

Re-Framing Enlightenment

I have been thinking for a while that the concept of enlightenment is a trap. If I may quote from my own reddit comment,

Personally, I think enlightenment is a trap and should be avoided at all costs. It sets an unachievable goal, it creates division between people, and it makes them talk for hours. Oh boy, does it make them talk! On and on about all the silence and calm. Babble babble babble. Monkey mind and monkey talk, from dusk till dawn about nonduality and enlightenment.

On the other hand, I am a lot into tantra and meditation and all that fancy "spiritual" stuff. I even have some vegan yearnings, sometimes, for crying out loud!

So what to do.

I think maybe we should replace the word enlightenment with something simple, "western", that people actually know: How about the word consciousness?

One consequence of that is that things become tremendously easy to explain.

The idea is that you are not truly conscious of your thoughts as long as you identify with them. It's more like they colonize your thoughtspace, rather than you grant them their space, graciously and with joy. A mind under occupation is not a free mind.

You can only be concious of that screen in front of you because you are in some way separate from it. You can observe it.

You can do the same thing with your thoughts.

The only difference is that you can hardly identify with the screen (or so I hope), but you will naturally tend to identify with your own thoughts.

But you don't have to.

If you choose to give your mind something to focus on, to train yourself to focus. You do that by focusing on your breath, simply because it is there, it is cheap, and it has a rhythm. Nothing more to it. It takes time and dedication, but that's really it.

Of course, total consiousness, 24/7/365, is still a complete and utter illusion. You just cannot have it. But you can have a fair share, and it's gonna be legen.... wait for it.... dary!

But it might be easier to not fall for the metaphysical trap, if you use terms that actually have meaning in the real world, rather than religious mumbo-jumbo.

An Example Of The Detrimental Effects Of Religion

There is a lady. Let's call her Carina.

Carina is 75 years old. Raised an atheist by socialist parents, she converted to catholicism at 30.

A few weeks ago, she told her children about how St. Anthony, the saint in charge of lost items, helped her find her lost wedding ring. Not only that, but her minister found the keys to the sacristy, which he had misplaced during some repair work on the building, after he had prayed to St. Anthony for help.

She was absolutely serious about that story. She really thought that the saint had helped her.

Now, Carina is highly intelligent, well educated, and had a pretty straight career going as long as she was still in the work force.

Ten years ago, she might have told the same story, but in a different tone. There would have been some irony, some winking, some tongue-in-cheekness. All that is gone.

It would not be that tragic. In fact, it might be amusing. Except that, due to the family situation, Carina has a certain amount of power over her ex husband. She drags him to church and practically forces that host down his throat. Her ex husband, of course, has left the church a million years ago and never wanted anything to do with that organisation after he left it. He used to be a very strong-willed individual, stubborn even, a successful businessman. Now he's in a wheelchair after a stroke, has trouble communicating and just lacks the willpower to assert himself. His current wife plays along because she won't risk to be the troublemaker.

Would Carina do stuff like that to anyone, if it were not for religious reasons? I highly doubt it. All her life, she was in favour of tolerance, a liberal within her community, an organizer of shared services between christians, jews, hindus and buddhists, all without any attempt to proselytize.

Of course, this development is probably due to old age, at least in part. But I maintain that a lifetime of training yourself to believe in idiotic, inconsistent, counterfactual doctrines comes at a cost. I maintain that religion is the huge destroyer of empathy, the enemy of compassion.

One cannot save another's soul without harming their personality.

Marketing Fluff

I am firmly convinced that religion is pretty bad for the world.

I am radically opposed to ideological extremism.

I think discrimination is an evil that we need to eradicate.

However, all of that is trumped by marketing fluff. Marketing fluff is so poisonous it should not be touched, felt, smelt, heard, looked at by any human being. Not through a looking glass, not with 100 feet poles, not with protective clothing. It slowly seeps into your brain and disintegrates it until it becomes a pus infested mush of nonsense and idiocy.

Marketing fluff is the true motherload of truly, utterly terrible ideas.

Ghost In The Shell (2017) Movie Review

*spoilers ahead*. You have been warned. Overall, I have almost nothing good to say. It's a decent popcorn flick if you possess the ability to shut down your ghost for 90 minutes.

Let's start with the good:

The visuals are stunning, and Scarlett Johansson is, of course, a very beautiful woman.

Now for the rest:

They played it so safe that the result is a stillbirth.

The acting is abysmal. Johansson never was a lot more than a pretty face, in this flick she has one facial expression, and one only. I could live with that if it did make sense in-universe, but Major Kusanagi is most emphatically *not* a robot.

The melancholia of the 1996 anime has been replaced with melodrama in this one, caused by shitty dialog and severe overacting -- most painfully, on part of Juliette Binoche, whom I still remember as a real first-class actress with a lot of bandwidth.

The story is just a stereotypical origin story.

They lost the humanity of it.

Heck, they even lost the humor. As an example, one of the four scenes that are almost straight copies from the anime is the one on the boat, where Kusanagi and Batou bond over some beer, and banter a bit. In the anime, when the Major chnanges out of her swimsuit, Batou sneaks in a peek, then looks away, but peeks once more. It's obvious that he likes what he sees, but his relationship with Kusanagi is a mixture of friendship, comraderie and professionalism, and he's rather protective of her, so he cannot go there. It's humane, it has a touch of humor, it's something to watch again.

In the update, they play all that in complete and utter seriousness. Major: "I can't trust anyone anymore." - Batou: "You do trust me, don't you?" - Major: "Yes I do." Gnarf.

I could probably live with the above -- I'm perfectly happy just watching Scarlett Johannson be pretty.

What I cannot live with is lack of character motivation, nonsensical plot points and actions that are out of place for a character.

Aramaki would not shoot Cutter like that, vendetta style, thus exposing himself to legal action. Why would the Yakuza host a hacker? Why would it be dangerous to just be in the same room with a ghost-hacked human? Why did the trash collector have to stand during the interrogation? How could Kuse get away after being shot by four machine guns on short range? Why did Cutter remote control the spider tank in the boss battle, when it was clearly established in the anime that those machines possess AI? How on earth did Kuse even get away, after they killed 97 predecessors? How was he able to sneak back into the building? Why would Cutter allow Section 9 to go after Kuse, risking exposure for his murders, when he has all his mooks and could easily just kill him with that spider tank all the time? Why would Cutter, when he monitors his disloyal employee, monitor her in a way that would easily allow her to give the Major an antidote instead of a poison? Why would they rely on their victims taking their "medicine", so their memories remain hidden, when those victims have to come in for regular inspections anyway? And, finally, why is the Major so incredibly valuable to Section 9? She might be powerful physically, but she's basically a borderline psychotic, ticking timebomb. She completely ignores a direct order in the first scene, for crying out loud, without any consequences from a boss who is supposed to be super strict.

Duh.