Kyle's Files: Your Shadow, Meditation, Radiobread
(Pic is in Scoresbysunf, Ostrgronland, Greenland and taken by Joe Shutter)
1. Tweets'n'Things™
…in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance. David Foster Wallace, This is Water
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.
I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing. Richard Feynman
But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him
Bob Dylan, It's Alright, Ma
You are the average of the five stories you tell yourself the most. James Clear
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us. Robert Bly
So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness. Robert Bly
When you renounce something, you're tied to it. The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Anthony de Mello
I didn't remember that Primal Rage, the dinosaur fighting game, was stop-motion. That's awesome.
2. Fantastic Meditation Book
Culdadasa's The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide has been consistently surprising me with how comprehensive, subtle, entertaining, and helpful it has been. It's probably not the book to get somebody interested in meditation. It's been helpful in developing the faith, motivation, and understanding necessary for a continuing, developing meditation practice. The book provides a 10-stage view of meditation, which form the structure of the book.
The first 100 pages take you through the third stage and include anything most casual meditators will be able to use. The book is full of nuanced instructions that have been helpful for me. For instance, when you observe your breath, you're supposed to "let the breath breathe itself" or whatever, and it inevitably changes when I place my attention on it. This book offered up a helpful understanding: it's fine if your breath changes, you'll subconsciously change your breath as you observe it, the point is to not consciously change your breath.
Details like that aren't interesting to anyone who isn't dealing with a specific issue in their mediation. So this book doesn't lend itself to quoting. However, you might enjoy this definition of mindfulness:
"Mindfulness" is a somewhat unfortunate translation of the Pali word sati because it suggests being attentive, or remembering to pay attention. This doesn't really capture the full meaning and importance of sati. Even without sati, we're always paying attention to something. But with sati, we pay attention to the right things, and in a more skillful way. This is because having sati actually means that you're more fully conscious and alert than normal. As a result, our peripheral awareness is much stronger, and our attention is used with unprecedented precision and objectivity. A more accurate but clumsy-sounding phrase would be "powerfully effective conscious awareness," or "fully conscious awareness." I use the word "mindfulness" because people are familiar with it. However, by "mindfulness," I specifically mean the optimal interaction between attention and peripheral awareness, which requires increasing the overall conscious power of the mind.
Meditation, of course, is the suggested path to that increase.
3. Shadows
Robert Bly's A Little Book On The Human Shadow is a mix of poetry, essays, and interviews exploring the human shadow. I've mostly enjoyed this for the freewheeling explorations into the psyche. It's wild. I've come across a lot of definitions for the shadow and like, "the parts of ourselves we ignore or repress." This absence of attention or approval forces them into the "dark side" of our personalities. Another definition from Bly:
The shadow is “the long bag we drag behind us,” heavy with the parts of ourselves our parents or community didn’t approve of.
If we're lucky, our relationship to the bag changes over time:
We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
If we don't start getting our stuff out of the bag, Bly believes the stuff doesn't just wait there:
The story says then that when we put a part of ourselves in the bag it regresses. It de-evolves toward barbarism. Suppose a young man seals a bag at twenty and then waits fifteen or twenty years before he opens it again. What will he find? Sadly, the sexuality, the wildness, the impulsiveness, the anger, the freedom he put in have all regressed; they are not only primitive in mood, they are hostile to the person who opens the bag.
He goes on:
Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us. We could add that it may move to a distant place and begin a revolt against us as well.
The way to claim these parts back is to "eat" one's shadow:
So the person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness, and shows more grief than anger. If the ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent.
Another description of the result of eating one's shadow:
When the shadow becomes absorbed the human being loses much of his darkness and becomes light and playful in a new way. The unabsorbed shadow can darken the air all around a human being.
Bly suggests that writing can be a way of eating one's shadow:
Using language consciously seems to be the most fruitful method of retrieving shadow substance scattered out on the world. Energy we have sent out is floating around beyond the psyche; and one way to pull it back into the psyche is by the rope of language. Certain kinds of language are nets, and we need to use the net actively, throwing it out.
Journaling about our shadow may be a way of bringing it into the light. This next bit of advice is for locating our shadow, and you're probably familiar with a version of it:
our psyche in daily life tries to give us a hint of where our shadow lies by picking out people to hate in an irrational way. Suppose there is a woman in the town who seems to her too loose and too sexually active, and she finds herself thinking of this other woman a lot. In that case, the psyche is suggesting that part of her shadow, at least, lies in the sexual area. She has to notice precisely whom she hates. That is the path of attention.
Poets are generally bad at prescriptions, though, and so I try note to be demanding on that front. Instead I appreciate the wild assertions like:
The old tradition says that if a man loves God he can become holy in twenty years; but if he hates God he can do the same work in two years.
Or
Our shadow tends, because our parents urged unselfishness on us, to lie in being greedy or sneaky, wanting fame without deserving it, being an operator.
And of course the poems, like this bit from For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old:
So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness,
when you sit drawing, or making books, stapled, with messages to the world,
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
Or we sit at a table, with small tea carefully poured.
So we pass our time together, calm and delighted.
4. Quick Hits
Fantastic Fungi taught me all sorts of wild stuff. Apparently, trees used mycelium to share resources with one another. A good chunk of the movie is spent discussing the promises of psilocybin as medicine. There are few things I'm more hopeful about than the sane return of those types of treatments.
Uncut Gems was as anxiety-inducing as everyone said but in a different way than expected. Adam Sandler's character doesn't stop making bad decisions, but more turn out okay than you think. There's always more than one character talking. There's always a phone out.
A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood felt freaking good to watch, which was expected. I didn't expect the movie to be as interesting as it was. It was basically a Mr. Rogers episode for adults dealing with adult things.
This is a great primer+ on Facebook advertising.
The History Of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling was a lot of fun to listen to. What I find most interesting about books like these is how you can see how ideas lead into each other - either by building on or reacting against those who came before them. A more specific book like this is Trying Not To Try by Edward Slingerland which tracks the evolution of early Chinese philosophy between the poles of "achieve spontaneity through not trying at all" and "achieve spontaneity through rigorous training." The first part of The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising describes a history of thinking in advertising, which is immensely helpful in recognizing patterns in marketing trends. I'd love to hear about any similar books you've found.
5. Reddit Roundup
This unofficial Nutrigrain ad went viral 17 years ago.
Sperm whales are the loudest animals on earth. At 236 decibels, their click sounds can literally vibrate a human body to death. But when research divers approach them, the whales welcome them into their pod; while modulating their clicks so divers aren't hurt. (Fun that this links to Long Now Foundation video.)
Queen Elizabeth has met 12 US presidents during her reign, hich is over a quarter of all presidents since the United States' inception.
A Comcast customer who was dissatisfied with the internet speed set up a raspberry Pi to counter the problem. The Pi ran internet speed tests and if his internet speed dropped below 50 megabits per second, the Pi tweeted hourly to @Comcast about
This has been cracking me up all week: