Hello world!

Published: May 27, 2009 by Joe Larabell

Welcome to my personal social experiment. Isn’t that what all blogs start out as (and what most of them still are)? This evening I stumbled across a forum on a relatively arcane subject (which, for now, shall be unnamed, for it’s not relevant to the message). I found a number of things I thought were interesting, some I thought were misleading, and a few on which I thought would benefit from an injection of my wit and wisdom. However… I realized that not only was the forum site itself relatively obscure, there were so many topic, each filled with a haystack of useless banter interspersed with a few real needles of wisdom, that I could have spent all night posting replies to the existing topics with no overall exposure or effect.

In addition, a so-called “friend” was riding me for being a “technological luddite” because I didn’t have an account on Facebook. Talk about a loon. But there are times that I feel I have something worthwhile to say but no fixed place from which I can say it. I said quite a lot on my static web page (http://larabell.org) and it was always my intention to get back to writing full-length articles for publication on that site. Somewhere between the overly-formal requirements of a static web site and what I believe to be the overly-frivolous environment of Facebook and Twitter lies the realm of the blog.

So… not knowing whether I will have the discipline to keep a blog up-to-date, I decided to start a free account here, on wordpress.org. If things work out, I can always migrate the better posts to my own server and step up my involvement. For now, this is simply a place where I can vent and maybe post a gem from time-to-time. But, for now, it’s 4am where I am and I really need to get some sleep.

This post was originally published as: https://larabell.org/wordpress/hello-world-2/

It’s funny how, every once in a while, if you listen to the subtle messages unfolding around you on a constant basis, you pick up on a pattern of small bits of information that seem to build into something substantial. That happened to me recently on the general topic of effortlessness. Like many would-be adepts, I have a number of daily practices that I fit into various parts of the day. Sometimes they pay off with feelings of increased awareness or energy but, if I were being totally honest, most of the time they feel like drudge-work… a part of the day that occurs more out of habit than anything else… with the basic idea being one of consistency rather than joy.

I was listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast today and ran across an interesting take on something that should be familiar to most Western Ceremonial Magicians. Eric Weinstein was talking about finding meaning in license plate numbers as he drives around (don’t we all do that when we first start on the Path?) and the way he explained it was:

"...it's important to notice what it feels like to discern meaning where there is no meaning... it's important to get in touch with the "as if madness" experience in order to guard against madness; so I'm hoping to suspend my insistence on Truth for periods of time..."

I’m not sure about the connection with madness, per-se… and I’m wondering if that wasn’t just a ploy designed to wrap up the thought before getting interrupted. I realized when he said that that another good reason for discerning meaning where there is none is to prevent intellectual ossification (my term… it didn’t appear in the podcast, as far as I know). The belief that one particular way of looking at things must serve as the filter through which we see everything else from that point forward seems to be common in most philosophies and pretty much all religions. Adherence to a strict theology makes us less able to evaluate contrary ideas on their own merit. On the other hand, by constantly playing fast and loose with one’s synaptic network, so to speak, one might stand a chance of maintaining enough mental flexibility to recognize a true Epiphany when it finally does come.

It’s ironic that avoiding intellectual ossification was one of the main points that Sam was trying to convey just moments earlier… that there’s no logical reason to use one or more points-of-view which happen to have been elaborated thousands of years ago over new points-of-view developed by one’s own reason in the present time. Of course, that’s easier said than done and when most people start on any sort of Philosophical or Spiritual Path, they’re usually not capable of the kind of deep reasoning that would discern the “true meaning” of the Universe at first glance… so we may need to use ancient philosophy and religion as a crutch for a while… in order to bootstrap our thinking to the point where we can reason with some depth on the Universe and our purpose within it. But I expect that we all have to eventually drop the rhetoric and design our own systems based on First Principles.

I was listening to an interview with the authors of the new book The Distracted Mind on NPR this morning and they touched on a favorite pet peeve of mine that centers on a basic misunderstanding of the term multitasking. According to Wikipedia, the first published use of the term “multitask” appeared in an IBM paper describing the capabilities of the IBM System/360 in 1965. Is is only recently that the term has been used in the common vernacular to refer to the apparent ability of humans to “concentrate” on more than one task at a time.