Passing it on

[_mercygirl_]

I've been trying to figure out whether it's ethical to excerpt this passage that a friend of mine wrote--with or without any more information about him.  I'm stumped though, so I'm just prefacing it here with the declaration that I quote him with the best of intentions.  I like how it's written, and I identify with it quite a lot

Comments

How can this person meditate without an attention span?

[talentedmrraber]

Sorry, for some reason this passage provoked me to write a fairly harsh critique. I don't mean to offend, although you say you identify with it. I also identify with it, which is probably why I felt compelled to subject it to some unflattering scrutiny. You know, inner demons.

Maybe we can read this person's sense of humor---based on "silly word associations"---as a symptom of his general personality. The joke about serving tea at a mediation works by massaging the most obvious surface level of a word---its spelling---until something different pops out, here the word "meditation." It says nothing in particular about mediations, meditations, or tea. Which is fine, for a joke.

This same attention to the surface of a medium without an attempt to plumb into the depths of actual content describes this person's overall attitude as I see it. This person has obviously been spending a lot of time thinking about the surface phenomena of his own mind: we get a record of his mental "impulses" (and his efforts to fight them), a discussion of his attention span, his interests, the kinds of thinking he is good at (mediation) or bad at (arguments), his sense of humor, his sexual urges. He worries that his life lacks direction, but it seems to me that this directionlessness is an inevitable consequence of the very method he's using to try to find direction: namely, attending to the heterogeneous surface of his mind's activity without any plan for placing this surface in some broader, more meaningful context.

But wait!, I hear you say. Shouldn't a careful attention to this surface eventually yield up some pattern that tells its meaning from within? Shouldn't we be able to dialectically trace a path from any of our own mental phenomena all the way out to the most important matters in this world, following some kind of reflexive golden thread that will ultimately reveal what our true nature has been all along?

By analogy back to the joke, mightn't we, if we thought REALLY REALLY hard, find the unconscious logic linking mediation, meditation, and tea at some significant level? Well, my sense is that we won't find any such thing. You can use an outside body of knowledge, etymology, to demonstrate that the relationship among the words in the joke is in fact not semantically significant (which of course we already knew).

Similarly, if you want to understand what the significant relationships are among the various aspects of your mental activity, you've got to turn to outside bodies of knowledge: psychology, intellectual history, biology, philosophy, linguistics, et cetera. Compared with developing a broader and deeper understanding of your own mind within a variety of intellectual contexts, "finding the right balance" among its surface phenomena is a pretty poor solution.

All this boils down, I suppose, to the conventional wisdom that the best way to find yourself is to immerse yourself in something larger than yourself.

Re: How can this person meditate without an attention span?

[_mercygirl_]

Don't be concerned that I'd be offended! I'm delighted, rather, to have a thoughtful (and may I say, also tastefully written) response.

My quibbles are few, but they are: While I imagine the person he describes as, yes, probably guilty of a little more introspection or self-involvement than is generally suitable, I think that person is obsessed with immersion...it's just a serial immersion, or a multiple immersion, rather than a singular one. I think anyone who would argue that such a kind of immersion is inattentive risks missing much him/herself as a result of a scope too narrow.

But, indeed, as to superficiality, I'll provide some context my tact (my what?!) formerly prevented me from sharing, as it now seems warranted: the passage comes from a dating website profile. And aren't those, of some necessity, always superficial? They're aimed at an ADD audience, some might say, anyway...but there's also the don't-spill-everything-all-at-once-and-scare-him/her-away-or-thwart-all-sense-of-mystery thing. And most importantly of all, the context demands this kind of self-assessment; it need not be chalked up to gross self-involvement, therefore, just because it shows an instance of the same. Circumstances required it.

Okay. I've said my piece, however scatteredly. :) Piece said, now to bed. (Hey, did I just say no to depth, there, by rhyming? Well, I'll be. Sleeping. Ha! Wait...!)

Re: How can this person meditate without an attention span?

[talentedmrraber]

You're right that multiple or serial immersion is a valid course of action... in fact, in our crazy mixed-up modern world, it is the necessary course, what with our standing obligation to bring all institutions and philosophies before the bar of individual conscience. (i.e., we can't take any larger projects for granted, the way you could take the Catholic Church for granted in ye olden dayes). Naturally in these circumstances we will be somewhat fixated on the workings of the individual mind. So, we're thrown into a vertiginous mise-en-abyme: our mental activity can only be understood by reference to larger structures which can only be understood via our own mental activity. Waah! OH NOES!!!!

I'm not sure I agree with your diagnosis of this particular iCasanova, but that's kind of trivial.