Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious.
They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just
gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective
about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully
aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage
you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men
and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and
contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own
present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded
extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be
lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all
creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course
there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most
precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world
of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of
freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort,
and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for
them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That
is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the
default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had
and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or
grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth
with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can
think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some
finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or
religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The
capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making
it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the
head. It is about simple awareness-awareness of what is so real and
essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep
reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Section 5: Manuscript Reading
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that
I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects
you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and
mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do
it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware
enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at
this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little
child in the checkout line-maybe she's not usually like this; maybe
she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband
who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage
clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your
spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of
bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also
not impossible-it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're
automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is
really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then
you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and
annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay
attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually
be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer
hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the
same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of
all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only
thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how
you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has
meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Section 4: Manuscript Reading
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my
default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-theday traffic jam being
angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and
Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish,
forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the
patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest,
most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most
inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell
phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet
ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's
children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably
screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we
all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I who am in his way. And so on.
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I who am in his way. And so on.
Section 3: Manuscript Reading
Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for
your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a
machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the
absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy
flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded,
bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such
a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in
the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home
through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et
cetera.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Section 2: Manuscript Reading
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in
the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or
ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed
out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe
unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you
have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there's no food at home-you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
But then you remember there's no food at home-you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Section 1: Manuscript Reading
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to
meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
"Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes,
"What the hell is water?"
If at this moment you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete...
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
If at this moment you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete...
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
Monday, October 10, 2016
COMM 3 TF 10301200 Schedule
|
Month
|
Date
|
Day
|
Topic
|
|
October
|
11
|
Tues
|
Workshop Visual aid
|
|
14
|
Fri
|
Midterm Exam
|
|
|
18
|
Tues
|
Forms of Communication:
Inter, Intra, Ethical
|
|
|
21
|
Fri
|
||
|
25
|
Tues
|
Reading a Manuscript
Activity
|
|
|
28
|
Fri
|
Reading a Manuscript
Activity
|
|
|
31*
|
Tues
|
Holiday
|
|
|
November
|
4
|
Fri
|
Listening
|
|
8
|
Tues
|
Listening Activity
|
|
|
11
|
Fri
|
Prepared Speeches
|
|
|
15
|
Tues
|
Impromptu Activity
|
|
|
18
|
Fri
|
Impromptu Activity
|
|
|
22
|
Tues
|
No Class
|
|
|
25
|
Fri
|
No Claass
|
|
|
26
|
Sat
|
Prepared Speech
09:00-4:00
|
|
|
29
|
Tues
|
Interviews: Answering
and Asking Questions
|
|
|
December
|
2
|
Fri
|
Interview Activity
|
|
6
|
Tues
|
Interview Activity
|
|
|
9
|
Fri
|
Interview Activity
|
COMM 3 MTH 10301200 Schedule
|
Month
|
Date
|
Day
|
Topic
|
|
October
|
10
|
Mon
|
Forms of Communication: Inter, Intra, and Ethical
|
|
13
|
Thurs
|
||
|
17
|
Mon
|
Workshop Visual Aids
|
|
|
20
|
Thurs
|
Midterm Exam
|
|
|
24
|
Mon
|
Reading a Manuscript Activity
|
|
|
27
|
Thur
|
Reading a Manuscript Activity
|
|
|
31*
|
Mon
|
Holiday
|
|
|
November
|
3
|
Thurs
|
Listening
|
|
7
|
Mon
|
Listening Activity
|
|
|
10
|
Thur
|
Prepared Speeches
|
|
|
14
|
Mon
|
Impromptu Activity
|
|
|
17
|
Thur
|
Impromptu Activity
|
|
|
21
|
Mon
|
No Class
|
|
|
24
|
Thur
|
No Class
|
|
|
26
|
Sat
|
Prepared Speech 09:00-4:00
|
|
|
28
|
Mon
|
Interview: Answering and Asking Questions
|
|
|
December
|
1
|
Thur
|
Interview Activity
|
|
5
|
Mon
|
Interview Activity
|
|
|
8
|
Thur
|
Interview Activity
|
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