Freedom of Mind

I have one joy above all other joys. 

That joy is to be in the flow of artistic endeavour  that I know will be enjoyed by others. For me this great ecstasy has been found in drawing comic books, recoding podcasts, blogging, writing fiction, singing in bands, doing poetry readings, making videos, working on political campaigns. 

These things make me feel more alive. 

In addition to the sheer intoxication I achieve through these "hobbies," I am wholeheartedly convinced that these activities enrich the world for humanity and that they may be one of the key points to the meaning of life. 

My whole irritation with the current political system is that it seems to make very little priority for a person's right to pursue their own creative potential. 

To actualize, as the psychologist Abraham Maslow might have put it. 

It seems that our society expects you to do nothing but work and produce a family. It seems that this so called "protestant work ethic," has built us a life of low ceilings and dullness of experience. 

For me this is unacceptable. 

I recognize that my youth still has much to teach me. 

I was watching the popular drama "Sons of Anarchy" and reflecting on my own life. "The Sons of Anarchy" is a great show for me, because the group of friends I had in Lubbock while growing up might be thought of as a motorcycle free, powerless, impotent motorcycle gang. I mean we all wore leather jackets and did our best to defy the law. 

The main character Jacks, who is modeled after Hamlet, reflects on his dead father's writings throughout the show. This is supposed to parallel Hamlet being haunted by the ghost of his father. The elder biker's grimoire tells Jacks that old age does not bring wisdom.  

When I heard this I thought about what my worldview was like when I was younger, when I lived the days that I loved the most. 

I believed art was a hammer.  And that holding that hammer was everything to me. 

I always sought out the most extreme forms of expression. Of course I was doing this pre-internet to a great extent but I did find a great deal in the old days where catalogs and zines held the place given to websites now. 

Of course with the internet there are no limits now. 

But that does not remove a need for artistic inquiry. The fact that all the limits have been pushed leaves room for refinement. This would be like saying the discovery of the javanero pepper defeats all spicy cuisine. 

There is so much to be said. So much to be blended from so many minds. 

This is the true potential of the internet, to truly be a vehicle for human minds to find new synnergy, new synthesis of ideas, to be strong and radiant. To make this life count. 

This is my greatest yearning. 

To make art which makes more artists. 

I feel like I am missing this a little bit in my life right now as I chisel out my fledgling career as a school teacher. 

God knows I don't want to be poor. But for me a life without art is its own poverty. I will find a way. 

I know I will. 

Freedom of mind is everything to me. 

Valhalla

I am a great lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. The brilliant mind, seems to me, preached a live lived artfully in which a true love for the present moment was essential.  One is encouraged to look into the void of the Universe and know that life is really a flash in the pan. When you know that life is a flash in the pan, you want that spark to be like lightning. 

In fact, Niezsche  wrote of the great overman as one who was touched by lightning. 

To do this one has to have the discipline to drink deeply from the present moment. 

One must be able to calm the mind and perceive that life is happening, try to pay attention, try to savor the pleasant and unpleasant feelings of life as it transpires. Life in all of its glory and its ugliness, is precious, way too fucking short, and can easily pass you by!

For the last few days I have been basking the in light of friendship. 

I have been fed good food, I have enjoyed the best of company, I have shared in new ideas.

Life is good. 

Life is precious. 

Life is brutal. 

Life goes fast. 

Going Home

Today I am going home. 

What the fuck is home. I am from Santiago, Chile. I spent a year in Tallahassee Florida. 

I spent a year in Mendoza, Argentina. I have lived in DFW for almost 4 years. Three years in St. Louis, Mo. Three years in Houston, TX. Merry travels through Santa Cruz, CA and depressed travels in New York, New York. 

Lubbock is my home town. Forever!

I hated it when I lived there and fantasized about burning it to ashes. I still do sometimes. But all my closest friends live there. Most of the people who inspire me are either from Lubbock or still live there. 

I was able to glimpses the strangest most independent people burn through fast lives and do things that squares watch on T.V.

If it weren't for my political activism I would consider myself such a square. Too distant from my beloved redneck Sparta. 

Lubbock for me is blood and booze, like holy communion. For me Lubbock is seeing the cops like an outlaw in the company of outlaws. 

In Lubbock I saw the ugly side of religion the clearest, and as I wrestled with my own faith, it was in Lubbock that I made my mind what it is today. 

I worship the smashed Idol of Windy Man, a statue destroyed by fundamentalist Christians in Lubbock. I post this link on the story: Windy Man

This idol is smashed stone. A false god placed on bridges for no religious reason at all, mostly as a friendly joke about windy Lubbock is. 

I worship the 1970 Lubbock Tornado sang about by country music genius Terry Allen. 

I worship all the things that shake the Lubbock establishment, especially my friends who are still there. 

So it is with great reverence that I organize my affairs in DFW to be among these god's of the West. These saints of the dust storm.

These boll weevil Samurai. 

Bring on the Lone Stars, the cheapest beers at Bash's. 

I truly love my friends, like the legions of Caesar loved their swords. 

Meditation

Its 8:35 pm the Friday before Thanksgiving break. I have a week off from work. I am so fucking tired.  

Working as a professional teacher has been the hardest I have ever worked in my life. I could write  a whole tome on the details. All in all, your first year as a professional teacher consists of more work than anyone could possibly do, more scrutiny of your work than any human of healthy self-esteem is built to handle, and a few expensive tests that could derail your whole career to boot. 

I am doing everything in my power not to think about any of that for at least a couple of days. 

I need a few days to breathe. 

In spite of my militant atheism, or perhaps because of it I have taken an interest in mindfulness meditation and Zen. 

I am not a Buddhist. 

Mostly because I think the precepts of Buddhism are silly.

These are the five precepts of Buddhism according to wikipedia

1. Don't take life ( I do this one every day, like most healthy organisms).  

2. Don't take what is not given. 

3. Don't indulge in sexual misconduct (what the fuck is sexual misconduct? does oral count?)

4. Don't lie. 

5. (My favorite) Don't drink fermented drinks. (I am drinking a beer as a write this, oops!)

To me these kinds of ethical codes are generally primitive.  I think ethics has to be about priorities, like try to minimize the amount of harm you do. Or try to get the most out of your life.  Things that are broad and general. 

But I do think Buddhism has made great contribution in the practice of meditation and mindfulness. 

I have basically two sources that I have studied at length about this topic.  Jon Kabat Zinn and Brad Warner, author of Hardcore Zen.

The gist of the meditative practice that I have come to admire so deeply is that you chill the fuck out, you recognize that your thoughts are ultimately just artifact, and you try to focus on he experience of existence itself. 

Research done by Richie Davidson has revealed that there are relatively predictable effects of meditation on the immune system and on an individual's stress.  One of my favorite skeptics, Dr. Steven Novella once dismissed this research as saying, "Yeah, meditation has basically been shown that it can help you calm down."

I think thats one of the biggest understatements I have ever heard. 

Ask heroin addicts, potheads, drunks, how much its worth it to them to calm down. Ask every person who has ever been prescribed Xanex, effexor, or any other clinical anxiolitic.

Calming down is hard. It is valuable, and most of us are very very bad at it. 

I have had very limited personal experience with meditation, but most of it has been personally transformative. 

Again, my description of a meditative state is to chill the fuck out, recognize that your thoughts are just artifact, and focus on the experience of existing. 

You can get practical techniques from Zinn or Warner on how to do this. I like these guys. But if you practice the second part, recognize that your thoughts are just artifact, it seems you have the gist of it. 

Your thoughts are deterministic afterbirth. They are just what your brain has evolved to do so that you are more likely to make more babies. At least if you accept evolutionary psychology as a good guide to explaining the psyche. 

Don't get me wrong, thoughts are all we have. 

But thoughts come in many shapes and sizes. Some thoughts can imprison our minds, thoughts can be self destructive, limiting, obsessive, distracting, and harmful in other ways. 

Being able to step back and see the forest in spite of the trees can give you a great deal of power and self control. 

Being able to take a little perspective can free you to dismiss harmful thoughts more easily. 

Or at least thats my gamble. 

I plan to do a lot of meditating over the next few days. 

Status Report

I have not posted on this blog in 6 months. 

Wow.  I have a cousin who once told me that blogs are exhibitionistic. It is precisely this kind of thing that makes me occasionally feel weird about blogging. But, then again, all art is a little exhibitionistic. 

I have been teaching for about 3 months now and these are my brief reflections. 

1.) It is a good job, it pays well, its better in all regards to all my prior jobs. 

2.) It is extremely stressful and time consuming. 

3.) I desperately need to have some kind of life outside of teaching.

The last year has been a crazy year in my personal life. Definitely something to save for the memoir. I have persevered to a great extent through much chaos and displacement and continue to persevere. This is how I feel about my job right now and all the things in my personal life. 

I have not yet hit a point where I feel like I am cruising. Like my life is in gear and can continue forward, but I don't think that I can wait to try to reconnect with the world. 

I have made some observations recently. 

My closest friends are all far from me, either geographically or far from me due to shortages of time. The people who share my causes are also far from me. I feel too isolated.  I need to reconnect. 

I need to make my voice heard and I cannot wait for vacation to do this. 

I cannot wait for my life to feel like its in cruise control to do this. 

I cannot stay in limbo, where I fight like hell to do a good job at work and nothing is shared. 

I miss my friends and comrades. 

The internet has always been there for me, as strange as that may sound. 

I am in strange days as I start my career in education and begin my so-called adult life. Perhaps I'm a little old, having just recently turned 30.  I wonder when adulthood was supposed to have begun 18, 25, 10, what is adulthood in these days anyways? Is it just another word for a prison of wage slavery? Or is it supposed to represent some kind of elevation of wisdom? Sometimes I fear I may have been wiser in my youth. 

I still relate to the punk rock ethic. Even though now I have sophisticated academic philosophies like naturalism, humanism, and existentialism to support my views. 

I have not shaken the outrage of my youth, and my greatest fear is that I will grow impotent in maturity. 

I feel as much as I ever have that the world is gripped with ignorance and that it is only by expanding the influence of inquiry and creativity that humanity has any hope. 

I still feel like politics must be employed to try to make the world a little less hostile to letting human minds reach their potential. 

I hate the present capitalist system as much as ever. 

I feel like technology and good education are the only way the electorate can have a fighting chance against their own oppression. 

I feel like the status quo is half assed and repressive at best, and totally unjust and self-destructive at worst. 

I feel these things as much as I ever have. 

I need to connect. 

I feel lost in the so called real world. Where everyone I know struggles to make ends meet and this struggle keeps us apart. 

I come back to cyberspace, to my humble blog. 

I hit my keys, and swear to myself that I will come back tomorrow. 

That I will not neglect my impulse to be a town crier. 

I  have no one to pray too, but I try to find fuel in my own hunger for greater things, my own passion to keep calling out. 

I seek to connect. 

Is anyone still out there?

Essays on Love 1

I have in my life loved a few people. I have wanted to have sex with a whole lot more.

I like to think everyone has lived this dilemma.

I am a big fan of evolutionary psychology, which if you are reading this on my blog pages you can just read the last entry to learn more about it.

Evolutionary psychology basically teaches us that if human beings are animals with instincts and that these instincts overwhelmingly work toward making more human beings.

Inside your infinitely complex mind, you tic toc in an ancient genetic rhythm to make more humans with your DNA.

Even if you are gay, the evolutionary psychologists tell us. There is no escape. They theorize that a certain percentage of gay people in a pack of humans will benefit the spread of the DNA of the gay people. Even if they don't make babies themselves, they would have found themselves strengthening the reproductive potential of their siblings and other genetic relatives.

In the end we are all slaves to our genes. At least within a certain range.

And never forget that we are all the children of savage animals.

Ancient humans hunted by chasing their prey until they collapsed from exhaustion. Then they would descend upon the animals when they were too tired to run anymore and ate them.

We come from this.

In fact humans are the animal who can run the longest without collapse to this present day. This is a byproduct of our evolutionary history as terrifying hunters who would run you to death.

From this ancestry emerges love.

What is love?

I have come up with a basic definition of love. This definition is up for grabs, I am still working on it. My main inspiration is personal experience.

I believe love is the hyperactivity of the nucleus accumbens deep in the limbic system of your brain. This is the same part of the brain employed by heroin, and other delightful addictions.

What I propose this feels like is a great joy and fascination with the other person.

The immediate critique this meets is that I am not describing love but infatuation.

I believe, as a die hard naturalist, this is a false dichotomy.

What people call infatuation is love unsustained.

I believe that the great challenge we all face is to make this last. To remember.

The great secret to love everlasting- Or at least lasting as long as you want it to- is memory.

Understand memory as the neuroscientist. Memory is when the brain repeats something it has done before.

Daunting in its very simplicity.

Remember what it felt like when that person knocked your socks of, feel it rise within you again, and make a new memory.

So precious.

Each memory becomes like a tiny ember with which you ignite a great torch.

Life assaults us constantly with the depletion of resources, the drama of one's family, the turmoil of the mundane.

One cannot be in a perpetual dream state, thinking constantly of their partner. No we must all allocate our neural resources to dealing with the bullshit that we must each wade through every day of our lives.

Then when we meet our partner the bruises we have endured from the day, or the week, or whatever, can make us forget what initially made us chose them in the first place. We begin to notice, and indeed, look for problems.

We become like a self mutilator who feels power by destroying themselves.

Now I am not talking about relationships which have genuine problems. Things like violence, infidelity (for those who are monogamous), deceit, theft, and emotional abuse are red flags that we must all commit to having no tolerance for.

In order to have a snowball's chance in hell you must already have a decent foundation of ethical treatment. You cannot be partners with someone who is trying to hurt you or themselves.

S&M is a different category, just for a disclaimer. I believe that people who enjoy S&M are not hurting each other.

But even relationships between those who are responsible and kind sadly collapse. They fall as the two people cannot find the long lost yearning they once felt for each other. They search their dendritic forest inside their head and can find nothing that lights the torch.

Think of the beacon torches in the Tolkien story where Aragorn must scale the mountain to announce the assembly of a mighty army.

The great beacon torch is the state of being in love with the other person.

It assembles all the wonderful ecstasy you have known with this person who you have at one time enjoyed so much that they aroused all of your greatest instincts from antiquity. Your very genes sang their name inside your body.

This assembly is greater than any army in any war. It is the only thing we could dare wane mystical about. The secret code written inside our cells which tells us to act like the long dead of eons which we come from.

Genetics is no mere science, it is a symphony.

To make love last with a precious being who beckons you you must understand that the fuel for great intimacy in joy is a stored within your memories.

Memories posses the mind when properly aroused.

They are stored in some way linked to the emotional systems of the brain. We call this the limbic system, which contains the hippocampus (the machinery of memory storage).

The memories must awaken emotion to do this, and emotion awakens the whole body.

Selah.

Evolutionary Psychology

I was honored to be able to be give the April presentation at the North Texas Skeptics.

I wanted to discuss something that was a legitimately debated topic in science, so I covered evolutionary psychology.

Darwin's theory of evolution is not considered controversial in science. But its implications on the development of the human mind over time are considered controversial by many legitimate critics.

To recap, evolution by natural selection is essentially the process by which organisms change over many generations. In principle, when a trait allows an organism to maximize its offspring it gets passed down.

Evolutionary psychologists say that this process has to have built significant aspects of the current human mind.

There a lot of claims made in the name of evolutionary psychology. Some more controversial than others.

In the article Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature (Miller & Kanazawa, 2007) the claim is made that evolutionary psychology explains why most suicide bombers are Muslim. I, personally, consider this claim to be absurd.

The beautiful thing about studying a field like evolutionary psychology is that one can remain skeptical and yet still be surprised by the truth revealed in this burgeoning field.

I discussed The Evolution of Desire (2003) by David M. Buss. David Buss is a well respected evolutionary psychologist who has shown through cross cultural surveying that men and women's mating strategies follow a pattern which was initially predicted according to evolutionary psychology. The finding, at the risk of oversimplifying, is that women like resources and men like the appearance of fertility.

I also discussed Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate (2002) which is not so much about evolutionary psychology per se as a discussion of the implications of genetics to psychology, and beyond that to its implications for society. Pinker discussed evidence for all matter of controversial findings for the power of genetics in making both the mind and human society. I tend to think of Stephen Pinker as the Carl Sagan of evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology is generally considered controversial because of a sordid past of science making claims about the heredity of mental phenomena. Most notable is the ideas behind eugenics, and its disastrous consequences in Nazi germany.

Yet the critiques go beyond merely saying that evolutionary psychology is a slippery slope.

There a good reasons to tread carefully with any scientific debate, including this one.

The most famous critic of evolutionary psychology is probably the famous paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. I discussed his book The Mismeasure of Man (1981). This book does not attack evolutionary psychology per se, but it does discuss its implications and the specific notion of the hereditability of intellect.

The idea that intellect is genetic is a proposition of deep political consequence. It has implications for human potential, and the American Dream itself. I would argue: how can people rise beyond their status in life if their status is the by product of genetic inheritance.

Gould's critique does not attack the basic premise of evolutionary psychology. Essentially both sides agree that evolution has to have shaped our minds over time. But Gould, and those who share his opposition, say that we should be cautios and that we over step the predictive power of evolutionary psychology.

Gould begins the book with a long and extensive study of racist ideas in behavioral science. He provides many examples of how well meaning scientists had misguided assumptions about race that were prominent in their time in history. The research is wrought with confirmation bias, and in some cases basic statistical error.

Gould also discusses I.Q. at great length, which could easily be the topic of its own presentation. The take home message for our discussion here is that to think of I.Q. trends as evidence for hereditary intellect would be a stretch at best. Gould shows this by discussing the history of the I.Q. test itself and its limitations, in conjunction with weaknesses in trying to study the hereditability of mental traits.

Good evolutionary psychologists are aware of these limitations and critiques and take them into consideration for their own research.

Personally I find evolutionary psychology to be an exciting field which has already produced compelling findings with a bright future. It is also a hot new science with plenty of good opportunities for even the seasoned skeptic to practice their critical thinking skills.