Lucid Dreams and Saturn Skies The Life and Writing of Andrew Kincaid

Tag Archives: Self-help

My List. Bucket List, That Is!

December 4, 2012 6:15 am / 10 Comments /
This. But in list form.

This. But in list form.

This weekend, I turned twenty-five.  A few days before that, I was Freshly Pressed.  While one has no relation to the other, I find both fairly astonishing.   I never expected to be Freshly Pressed, while I fully expected to turn twenty-five barring something unfortunate.  As to why they are fairly astonishing, they are that way for different reasons.  Nobody expects to be Freshly Pressed: it just kind of happens.  It’s not something you can really make a goal of, because you can’t really control it–that’s up to the editors here on WordPress.  As for why turning twenty-five is fairly astonishing, well, think about it.  Being a male, my lifespan will be, on average, about seventy-four years.  So, I am about a third of the way through that now.

If that’s a bit of a gloomy way to look at things, well, it is.  That could partially explain the funk I’ve been in for awhile now, although the real reason behind that is not so much age but rather dissatisfaction.  I tend to hold myself to ridiculous standards, and according to those I’m a twenty-five year old screw up.  After all, I barely work part time, I’m single, and I live in my mom’s basement.  You have to understand that by now according to these expectati0ns for myself that I picked up from Lord knows where that I would have a Career (whatever it may be),  be married, and be living on my own by now.  However, the Universe does what it does and for a variety of reasons (including that giant economic meltdown four years ago) none of that has come to pass.

Despite all that, I’m happy.  I wasn’t for awhile, but now I am.  Sure I spent some time wallowing in self pity (I’ve done that a lot over the years, believe me), but one day last week it all just kinda clicked into place.  It was nothing I didn’t already know of course, but every now and then we need a reminder.  Mostly, I realized that continually beating myself up over expectations is silly.  They’re things in my own head, not based on any kind of reality.  I was drowning myself with shoulda, coulda, and woulda’s and thus neglecting the life I have right now. Are there a lot of things that I’d like to accomplish?  Yes.  Sitting around and whining about my life and being all woe is me about things I can’t control doesn’t help accomplish them though!

So, I’m in the process of making some rather large changes.  First, I am on a dating hiatus.  I have spent so much effort looking for that someone special that I am now quite literally burnt out and sick of the whole process.  It’s not like I’m completely bitter and hate women or anything; guys who are like that are just childish, and so are their counterparts among women.  Rather, I realized two things: what I was doing was making me unhappy, and that forming a romantic relationship is largely out of my hands.  If something is voluntary, making you unhappy, and not netting the desired results, why keep doing it?   Dating is quite literally a crap shoot, and although you can slightly weight the dice in your favor (by not being a complete slob, for one),  the results are still basically up to chance (i.e. whether you find a person in the right time in their life to date, whether they meet your needs/desires, whether you meet theirs, etc).

Instead, I am devoting myself to myself.  Now, this does not mean I’m not some completely self centered bastard who is out to screw people over every chance he gets. Rather the opposite, actually. This is a program of self improvement.  I have recommitted myself to the Way, and am practicing better, being more mindful of myself and others.  Second, I am doing everything I can to advance my career (and not griping nearly as much about it!) in the teaching field.  Currently, I’m  halfway through my course work to get my Alternative Resident Educator License.  Third, I am committing myself to my personal projects, such as this blog and my novels.  I have two novels in the works, although the fantasy novel has taken priority, and of course my blog.  To this end, I make a daily list of goals such as “outline two scenes for Calafel Cycle 1″. As for the blog, I’ve begun a new series called “Visions of Hell” about Hell in various mythologies from around the world.  So check out Visions of Hell #1–The Nine Circles of Dante’s Inferno this Thursday!

However, at the same time I am not killing myself for my hobbies.  If something doesn’t get done because the spirit is willing but the flesh is week, I’m no longer going to beat myself up for it.  That illustrates the fourth part, a part of my practice of the Way–being gentler with myself.  That isn’t to say that I don’t have high expectations, but rather it is to say that I’m becoming more mindful of my inner dialogue.  Too often we are way too hard on ourselves, and it is to our detriment.  I know that I personally wouldn’t speak to a dog the way that I sometimes talk to myself in my own head.  Being gentle with oneself is a process of recognizing these negative thought patterns, gently rebuking and refuting them, and replacing them with healthier ones.  Instead of “well that was stupid.  You’re a complete idiot for having done [insert thing here]“, think “No no, that wasn’t stupid.  People make mistakes.  That certainly was silly though, and I should be a bit more mindful in the future”.  And then, this is important, laugh at yourself.  It helps a lot to be able to laugh at yourself, so long as you know when to be serious and when not to be!

A journal--like a therapist, but cheaper!

A journal–like a therapist, but cheaper!

The final point gets us to the titular Bucket List.  This is in conjunction with my new habit of keeping a daily journal  I use the bucket list to mark my place in the journal, so I get a chance to look at it every day, review it, and add to it as I think of things   As for the Bucket List, I really have no idea if there are “rules” to making one and frankly don’t care if there are.  It is a grab bag of random goals, some huge and some tiny.  I have everything from “learn to swim” to “Visit Easter Island” and I am adding more almost every day.  My thought was to put in small, attainable goals alongside the huge, long term goals.  So I can potentially begin checking off some of the smaller stuff in the short term.  For example, I wrote “Read Moby Dick” in there, and as we speak I’m on page fifty in said book.

Finally, and on a related note, I decided that I’m going to start going on mini-adventures on the weekends.  Being a substitute teacher, I have guaranteed weekends off, so might as well make the most of them!  Even if all I do is go to some random town and walk around its downtown a bit, or visit some shop I’ve never been to,  I want to visit new places within about a two hour radius of where I live.  There’s a lot in this area, so that’s not a tall order.  A fun trip doesn’t have to be huge and expensive.  It’s mostly just a matter of getting out, seeing new things, and meeting new people (the latter of which I do all the time during my work week, but still).  Now I do have bigger trips in mind, as I said, starting with one to Gettysburg at some point this summer.  But for now I’m going to content myself with getting in the habit of going out more weekends than not to go run around having random miniature adventures.  The one I had planned for last weekend got cancelled because I forgot my own birthday was Sunday (whoops!) but this weekend, my brother and I are going to see to that one.  We are going to visit Warther Carving Museum…I might put up a post about it (haven’t decided yet).

Call it a pre-New Years resolution.  So far, it is working because I am much happier.  Having a list of awesome things to look forward to and goals to reach is very helpful.  That which was vague before seems more concrete.  While I was skeptical before, now I would recommend everyone at least try to make a Bucket List!

How about you?  Do you have a Bucket List?  Care to share some entries if you do?

Posted in: Life & Writing / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Last Day of Class EVER!!! (For Now)

April 25, 2012 8:52 pm / 4 Comments /

Today I attended my last day of class as an undergrad.  Or, as I like to call it, my last day of class ever, for now.  As in, I believe I will probably wind up in some sort of classroom setting in the next five years, be it my own classroom or my more accustomed position of “lecturee” rather than “lecturer”.

While this was my last day of class, I’m still not finished. I have to write an abstract for last weeks lab, and two finals.  Those are the only things standing between me and graduation.  It has been a long time in coming, and I’m not entirely sure I will know what to do with myself when it’s here and gone.  Look for a job of course.  It will be an adjustment when it comes time to work full time, because up until now I’ve always had a ‘future job’ as an out when I worked a job I disliked.  Now my ‘future’ job will be my ‘current’ job, and not having school as an out will take some getting use to.

That being said, I do have some reservations about my work prospects. I’m wanting to be certified to teach biology at the high school level (although I recently discovered that the certification I was looking at has changed, and I’ll be certified for grades 4-12, so I could wind up teaching elementary or middle school).  I’m not sure how much I’m going to like the field, given how much is expected of an instructor.  And the profound behavioral problems teachers find themselves confronting these days.

These are legitimate concerns.  I’m also beginning to believe that they’re at least partly moot.  Vocation is not a job or a career, but what a person brings to a job or a career.  It is not what you do, but rather how you frame it in your mind.  I think it is fine to pursue your passions, but at the same time the search for a passion can be maddening.  Some people know right off the bat, but as for the rest of us, we’re left floundering and anxious, wondering what we should do the rest of our lives and terrified that we’ll pick the wrong thing.

That is not only unproductive thinking, but also simply wrong thinking.  Most people change their career seven or more times in their lifetime.  Like it or not, the days were a person graduated school (college or otherwise) and stayed in the same job for their working life are long gone.  Instead of fretting over finding a job we are passionate about, we must instead find passion for what work we find.  In order to find contentment in the workplace, we must know ourselves well enough to identify our strengths and cultivate them, and then apply those things to our working life.

So, while I have certain preferences in what I’m looking for in a job or a career, I know the potential for contentedness is there in just about any workplace I find myself in.  It’s a matter of mindset.

…that is, until this whole author thing takes off.  Then my work place will be the old home office.  Pretty sure I can be content there =D


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Well, Today is a Pretty Bad Day to be a Triskaidekaphobic….

April 13, 2012 9:07 pm / 1 Comment /

Triskaidekaphobia is a phobia characterized by the fear of the number 13.Today is Friday the 13th, a bad day for busty coeds and triskadekaiphobics alike.  By way of explanation, triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13.  This goes well beyond our culture’s normal aversion to the number, to the point where the sufferer will actively avoid coming into contact with the number.  It may seem a bit silly that a number could have that much of an effect on someone, but I have seen it more than once in my own life.  I had a customer once who freaked out when I tried to give her $.13 in change.  She told me she couldn’t keep 13 of anything in her pocket because it caused her too much anxiety.  She was the only triskadekaiphobic I’ve ever encountered – the number that most often freaked out my customers was when $6.66 popped up on the register.

Does it seem odd that something so seemingly harmless as a number could make an otherwise rational adult shiver in terror?  Well, welcome to the weird world of the phobia.  Phobias are anxiety disorders characterized by a strong, irrational fear of an object, creature, or situation that poses little or no actual threat.  A person could literally be phobic of anything – I’ve heard of everything from spiders to mustard and anything in between.  How a phobia develops is anyone’s guess. In some instances people have a traumatic experience with the object of fear, but others seem to develop seemingly at random.

The severity of a phobia can be as diverse as its objects.  Some phobias can be comparatively mild, while others can be completely debilitating and require medication and therapy to overcome.  The worse among these (from what I’ve seen – I’m not a psychologist though) can be agoraphobia, which is a fear of public places.  Literally, fear can keep a person from leaving their home or experiencing a normal life.  Phobics in contact with their object of fear can have a panic attack.  Many times they will show trembling, shortness of breathe, rapid heartbeat, and a strong desire to escape from the situation.

Anxiety problems are very common, the most common psychological disorder in the world in fact.  This may come as a surprise to some of my readers, but yours truly has anxiety issues.  Also, I have something of a mild phobia myself.  My object of anxiety may seem…odd.  After all, I’m an adult male who is considered by most who know me to be a very rational person.  I write, read, and watch horror, which you think would make me immune to all but the most horrific stuff.

So what is it that makes this guy twitchy?  Possibly the cutest, cuddliest member of the insect family: the bumblebee.  That’s right.  Bumblebees get my anxiety pumping.  It used to be that I wouldn’t even go outside when the little bastards were out in force.  In recent years the anxiety has lessened extensively, but even now I hesitate when I see one of them hovering in the air like they do.  When I was little I firmly believed they chased me around the yard.  I called them “flying eyeballs” (after monsters you find in the Castlevania game series).

A bumble bee, a large bee native to the northern hemisphere

…okay bumble bees are objectively adorable. But still =P

Funny thing is I had an encounter with them earlier today.  It turns out, I think that I’m not entirely certain which insect I’m afraid of because the things I traditionally thought were bumblebees apparently are not.  The kind that continually hover around my shed (naturally when I have to mow of course!) are called wood-borers around here, and allegedly don’t sting.  Bumblebees apparently look like these things but are smaller in body size.  I don’t know – I haven’t done the research yet.  Not so much out of fear but out of laziness.  See, I can look at pictures of them, but when I hear them buzzing around and see them flying erratically like they do during their mating flights (well, that’s what I call them anyway) is when the old anxiety starts peaking.

Is it silly? Rationally, I know it is.  Most animals (and insects) will leave you alone if you leave them alone.  And even were I to get stung by one of them, likely it wouldn’t be that bad.  I’m so pumped full of allergy medications that bee stings don’t do much to me.  But the anxiety is still there despite all the rationalizations.  Luckily for me, the phobia isn’t so bad that I can’t function.  However, it does give me an insight into the lives of those who are not as fortunate as I am and find themselves crippled with anxiety.  It may seem funny that people are afraid of spiders, or bumblebees, or the number 13, but for those who have a phobia it is certainly less than humorous. Have a bit of compassion for folks with these kinds of disorders.  While the object might be silly, the fear it elicits is all too real.

What about you?  Any odd quirks or phobias that you are willing to share?


Posted in: Abnormal Psychology, Life & Writing, Our Weird World, Weird Science / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Brief History of My Academic Blunders…

March 21, 2012 9:53 pm / 4 Comments /

Wednesday is here, and almost gone.  I have no clear idea for a blog post tonight, so I decided I would stop in and let you all know what I’ve been up to lately.  Right now, I’m looking down the barrel of a huge change in my life – namely, graduation.  That’s right folks, yours truly is entering the “real world” (whatever that is) come May.  I’ve literally been in school since I was six years old, as I started college fresh out of high school.  It has taken me five years to complete my degree, something I’m told isn’t all that uncommon but still rankles a bit,  mostly because it’s my own doing.

But that is neither here nor there.  Come May, it’s done.  I’m not sure if I’ve gone into my course of study on here before.  I’m a Biology and Business double major.  That usually impresses people when I tell it, which I find funny.  Business is easy, and while Biology is not it is certainly easier than some of the mathier (I’m a writer so I can invent words =P) scientific disciplines out there.  All in all, at least to me, my courses of study are nothing to be impressed about.

As for how I came to major in both, well, that’s why I’ve been in school for five years.  I started in Business, found I disliked it because in my mind it meant I would graduate and be stuck for the rest of my life in a job similar to the retail job I held and hated at the time (I had a flare for the melodramatic pre-Buddhism, to put it mildly) and so I decided to try to find a subject I was passionate about.  That was teaching, especially teaching science.  That came out of my rekindled love of the sciences in the wake of my de-conversion from fundamentalist Christianity.  I settled on Biology as my focus, as it was less mathy and I’m not overly confident in my mathematical skills.  Mostly because I couldn’t get an A in a math class – it wasn’t so much that I was bad at math, but that I wasn’t as good as I thought I should be.  I came to major in Biology exclusively when I discovered it would be faster/cheaper to get a special sort of Master’s degree.  And then, when I transferred to my current school, I found that it was even easier to get an alternative certification.  The Business major came in when I needed more credits to fulfill Muskingum’s requirements for transfer students.

Now it’s about time to cash in those chips.  You’d think I’d be excited for my impending graduation.  I can’t say that I am.  If I had to put a name to the emotion, it would be “resigned”.  I’m resigned to graduating.  Had I graduated ten years ago, or even two years ago (roughly when I would have graduated had I just finished the business degree), I might have been excited.  After all, back then there were opportunities, or so it seems looking back.  Memory is notoriously faulty.

Now? That degree I busted my hump for is little better than a high school diploma as far as the job market is concerned.  And while jobs are coming back, they don’t seem to be coming to my corner of the country.  Moving isn’t an acceptable option, as my entire family lives here.  This is my home.  There isn’t much to get excited about on the job front, and I’m not terribly optimistic as to my career prospects (although to be fair I never have been).

As for my book business.  It’s growing, but it is nowhere near the level it needs to be for me to make  a living.  If that happens at all, it won’t happen for another five or ten years at least, if I’m being pessimistic about it.

I’m not whining here.  Or at least I wasn’t intending to whine.  I didn’t plan this post – it leaped from my fingertips all on its own.  But these are my thoughts, and this is how I feel.  I hadn’t put a name to it before tonight – resignation – but the one I chose fits well. Needless to say, on commencement I will not be walking.  I want to get my degree, and get it over with.  I don’t stand much on ceremony.

All that being said, there is a lot to do between now and then.  I have to write two capstone papers (one about the Nintendo corporation and another about the genetics of schizophrenia) and successfully complete two other upper division classes.  There is no doubt in my mind that all four will be completed.  I will pass and I’ll certainly graduate.  It’s just a matter of time and a bunch of work.  Then, the job hunt begins…

How about you?  If you’re about to graduate college, how do you feel?  And for those who have done so already, how did you feel in the weeks leading up to the big day?


Posted in: Life & Writing / Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

What I’ve Learned a Year Into the Writer’s Life

March 17, 2012 10:31 am / 4 Comments /

As you can see, it is Saturday and I am writing a post (well….I hope you can’t see me writing this post…that’d be creepy).  Normally I post about creepy stuff on Friday’s but it slipped my mind this week.  Sure I fully intended to do a post, but I had neither the time nor the energy to do the research necessary to write what I’d intended.  So, my apologies for that.  Also, given how busy I’ll be in the next few weeks, don’t be surprised if my posts become infrequent – I have two 300 level courses and two senior seminars to do.  Put short, Andrew is g0ing to be a busy boy.

Now, to the Facebook post that became a blog article, where I talk turkey.  Er…sales.  I’ve been doing this whole self pubbed author thing for about a year now.  My monthly book sales are low…but they’re starting to become consistent.  Anywhere between 5 and 10 a month, with two books available.  I share this because I know a fair number of authors, many of them that are just as new to this or even newer than I am.

If you get discouraged by your numbers, look at it this way.  Writing is a business.  If you were to start a restaurant (the most common start up in the US) you would be looking at a huge investment of capital (from my perspective – I’m both poor and a cheapskate =P) to buy the land, building, equipment, to hire workers, and all the other costs associated with building a business.  On average, you wouldn’t make a profit for the first 5 years, if your business lasted that long (many don’t).

Now, let’s say that you self pub through Amazon.  Most will have a relatively low initial investment in their book, as compared to a brick-and-mortar business – an editor (yes you need one) and a cover artist, at the very least.  Depending on how you price the book and other marketing factors, you could potentially be turning a profit a lot sooner than if you, say, started a restaurant. Sure, you aren’t exactly going to be raking in the dough from the get go, but you could potentially be in the black a lot sooner than a conventional business.

Notice that I hedge a bit in most of the sentences in the last paragraph.  Some of that is because I’m a science guy and the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle and my general science training keep me from making absolute statements.  That and I can’t say for certain because I don’t know your individual circumstances – maybe you’re a graphic artist and you can make your cover art for free, or maybe you know someone who would be willing to edit your stories for free. It is best to try to find someone who is a qualified editor, and usually it’s better to try to find someone outside your sphere of friends.  The author/editor relationship is a business relationship – nothing the editor says should be taken personally (unless it really is a personal attack. In that case you need to find a more professional editor).  That is why it is best if you find someone who charges for their work – the exchange of money frames the relationship in different terms, and you avoid any messy complications that could arise from someone doing you favors.   If money is an issue, you may have to muddle through until you can afford someone, but you need an editor.

Those things are going to have an effect on your initial investment.  Now, that’s only looking at one book.  If you owned a restaurant but only served one dish, unless that dish is absolutely mind blowing (or you’re really lucky), you aren’t going to be in business for long.  You have to diversify your offering to appeal to many palates.  It is the same with writing – you have to have a lot of “dishes” (i.e. books) to appeal to your customer.  In other words, you are going to need to write more than one book, probably several, before you see a decent amount of money from sales.  That will mean more investment of capital for editing, cover art, etc, which will put you in the red for longer.

This isn’t a get rich quick scheme, my friends.  It takes a lot of work and dedication. Which gets me to the most important point of this post, and from there to a problem I struggled with up until recently.  As I said, you need to have several books out before you will see a decent amount of money coming in.  But that doesn’t mean you just pump out a bunch of books and upload them to Amazon as fast as you can write them.

You have to write, and you have to write well.  If you don’t have a quality product, your customers aren’t going to come back.  Back to my restaurant analogy – if your establishment is shoddy and run down with restrooms that look like Cthulu’s bathroom after taco night, it isn’t likely that you’ll be able to convert a “customer” to a “repeat customer”.  The same goes for your books – if they’re train wrecks, you aren’t going to entice people to read anything else you put out.

Now, for another problem authors face (or at least a problem this author faced).  Pricing.  You can find myriad guides to pricing for the self-pubber crowd.  They’re all wrong.  And they’re all right. There is no set guide to pricing.  Price is one part of the marketing mix, but it is the one that gets all the undue attention.  For good reason of course – price determines how much you’ll get paid in royalties for each transaction.  On Amazon, the royalties break down is from $.99 up to $2.99 and from $9.99 to $200 is in the 35% royalty range.  From $2.99 to $9.99 is the 70% royalty range.

If you were to look at my books on Amazon, both are available for $2.99.  Now it took me a year of fiddling with prices to get to the point where I was comfortable with leaving my books at this higher price point.  I rationalized that $.99 or $1.99 were better price points because the books are anthologies and, in my mind at least, relatively short.  Plus, I thought they would sell better at a lower price.  Really, though, I didn’t think my writing was worth $2.99.  Hell I was even uncomfortable selling it at $.99 – there were times I considered just stopping the whole shebang because I felt my writing wasn’t good enough and I was a sham.  It wasn’t a business issue – it was a confidence issue.

Then it occurred to me that if I were browsing a used book store or a yard sale, and I saw an approximately 300 page paperback (what my books would be if I put them in paperback), I would probably buy it for about $3.  That realization coupled with being kinder to myself about my writing and my abilities, led me to pricing my books at their current levels.  And you know what?  My sales remained steady.  If anything, I’m selling books more consistently now than I was when the book was $.99.

Don’t be afraid to ask what you’re worth in the price.  You put a lot of time and effort into your book, and you deserve to be compensated for it.

That’s all I have for now.  I’ve learned a lot about the business in this past year, so I thought I’d share it with you all.  And to any prospective authors out there (or established ones for that matter):  you can do it.  I know it may seem intimidating to put yourself out there, and the myriad problems and responsibilities of the writing life can be overwhelming.  Even so, you can do it :).


Posted in: Life & Writing / Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Getting in Touch With Your Inner Slacker

March 7, 2012 5:40 pm / 4 Comments /

Burnout is a problem not only limited to writers – it’s something that everyone faces from time to time.  That’s what I’ve been dealing with for about two weeks now, give or take.  Worse than burnout itself is the guilt that comes with – it gnaws at your brain while you sit engulfed in the acrid fumes of grinding mental gears, wiling away at what is left of your sense of well being as all the momentum you’d built up until that point sputters and dies.

Lucky enough for me, I had a chance to take some downtime from both school and writerly things.  I’m currently on Spring Break, and for the first time in a good while I’m actually taking an honest to God break.  Of course, I’ve been doing a bit of writing and I’ve been working on the blog, but only when I feel like it – there is no guilt, and there is no forcing myself to do something I don’t want to do.  In short, I’ve given myself permission to be a slacker.

I think the voice of the inner slacker that resides within all of us is too often ignored in this culture that worships work.  There is nothing wrong with taking downtime.  In fact, injecting  a bit of the slacker mentality into your daily routine can improve your productivity.  That is to say, give yourself permission to have a little fun during your daily routine.  Take a break if you need one, or get lost for an hour or so clicking through stupid links you find on Youtube or Twitter.  You’ll often find that when you get back to your project, you are more focused and able to derive a bit more joy from the work.

After all people, even writers despite our odd ways, aren’t robots.  We can’t work, work, work without recharging our mental batteries with some downtime now and then.  So be kind to yourself, and listen to that inner guy on the couch.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve interrupted my play with enough work for the time being.  If you need me, I’ll be on the couch…


Posted in: Life & Writing / Tagged: , , , ,

The Birth of Ego

February 1, 2012 8:07 pm / 1 Comment /
The symbol of the objectivist movement - Atlas holding up the world. Needless to say, these folks are full of themselves.

Atlas holding a globe – the symbol of the Objectivist movement. They’re slightly full of themselves :P

Many folks who know me know my distaste for Ayn Rand’s so-called philosophy,  Objectivism.  Ms. Rand wasn’t a very kind person by anyone’s estimation (a statement she would have agreed with and probably taken as a complement) and her philosophy and her novels seem to reflect it.  I also find her a very sad person, as she was basically a broken woman who built an entire worldview around her pain, and who died alone with few if any friends.

With all of that said, I have to begrudgingly admit that Rand made a good point with at least part of her philosophy, although I doubt very much that she would endorse or that she even saw the idea I’m about to illustrate. You see, Objectivism is, at its heart, a philosophy of the Ego.  Rand celebrated the Ego, putting the Self on a pedestal above all others.  It was individualism taken to an extreme.

You can see this element of the philosophy written bold in one of Objectivism’s central tenets.  Ayn Rand held that the perceptual equipment saw reality as it truly existed, because they were physiological.  The problems with perception occurred when the sensory data was sent to the brain and distorted.  To put the idea in blunter words: “Perception is reality.”

I think it’s pretty obvious why that idea is little more than bunk.  Take, for example, the fact that we have evidence that shows beyond reasonable doubt that there are galaxies that are billions of years old.  Now, up until the 2oth century people didn’t know there were other galaxies.  It was only in the early 20th century that technology became powerful enough to let us see those far off galaxies.  That doesn’t mean that those galaxies didn’t exist before we saw them – it means that they existed but we couldn’t see them.  Perception, therefore, isn’t reality.  It is, however, one way we understand the world around us.

The most important image ever taken

You’d have to have a HUGE “inherent I’ to think you created THIS awesomeness just by looking at it :P

“Perception is reality” may be bunk, but that doesn’t stop people from thinking that way.  In fact, I tend to believe that Ayn Rand touched on something profound when she penned that particular section of her egoist philosophy – namely, she put into words the way that people generally conceive of their relation to the world around them.  And from that basic assumption, the rest of her philosophy followed.  In a word, Rand hit on the origins of the Ego.

The Ego is the “I” or the “Self”.  In general use, the word means pride.  It’s also generally not used as a complement.  When I use the word Ego, I use it in a slightly different way.  I use the word as a substitute for the concept of the “inherent ‘I’”.  This is the notion of a self that comes from a lack of insight into the nature of reality.  If something or someone exists inherently, it would exist independently from its own side, apart from all else.  It would not be subject to cause and effect, nor would it be subject to the passage of time.

This is the Ego.  It is how the majority of people see themselves, even if they do not realize or admit it.  Even if it sounds silly when it is put in those terms, it is operating deep under the surface of a person’s life.

How could such a strange idea arise?  “Perception equals reality.”  Look at it this way.  Most often when people look at an object – lets say a table – we see just that, a table.  You’re probably thinking of a table right now – four legs and a flat surface, probably made of wood.  That is how the table seems to exist.  It is a whole concept in its own right.  We see the table, and see it as concrete in and of itself.

In reality though, the table is made up of parts of decreasing size and increasing numbers – legs, screws, wood, and ultimately atoms.  The table’s concrete nature is an illusion – in all reality, because atoms are mostly empty space, the table is mostly space.

This is how we see ourselves and everyone else – as overly concrete, existing in their own right.  If we look at a person, we don’t see the continuum of moments that lead to where they are now; we only see how they exist at this moment.  So, we aren’t seeing the full picture – we see only in part.

This is how the Ego is born – by turning the faulty perception of the world to the Self.  Once the self is perceived in this way, it becomes difficult for someone to arrive at self knowledge and peace.  Only by cultivating insight can we work around this illusory notion of the Ego and realize a true and lasting happiness. 



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Unconditional Happiness

January 25, 2012 6:18 pm / 5 Comments /

Happiness is something everyone wants, but something that few people seem to find.  I tend to believe that often the trouble comes in how we define what it means to be happy.  It seems to me that we often put conditions on our happiness.  We do no realize we are doing it, which makes the problem all the more pernicious.

If that really is the case though, how do we condition happiness? And then what is happiness really, if this so-called “conditioned” happiness isn’t the real deal? We do it by making happiness an “if/then” statement.  We say (unconsciously, mind you) things like: “if I can get this job, then I’ll be happy,” or “If I can find a boyfriend/girlfriend, then I will be happy.”  The ifs and thens go on and on.  They may not even be big things – it could be “if I could get this [insert electronic doodad here]” or “if I could get [insert fancy sports car]“.  Or maybe the conditions relate to an achievement – getting the promotion, winning the race, or acing the big test.

These things do not give lasting happiness.  Sure, there is that initial shot of euphoria, but once that passes that desire we’d thought was sated returns and we find ourselves back at square one.  This is the cycle of suffering most people find themselves caught in.  It comes from a lack of insight into the true nature of things.  It works like this – we see something (or someone), exaggerate its good or bad qualities, and that exaggeration results in negative emotions which leads to suffering.

That is why putting conditions on happiness keeps us from realizing true happiness – we are constantly running after the next thing our faulty perception tells us will make us happy.  Notice that word – “make”.  “This [thing/person] makes me happy,”  or “I want someone who will make me happy.”  These are also conditional happiness statements – the results of faulty perception and a lack of insight into the true nature of the self and the world.

This isn’t to say that any of the things I’ve mentioned are somehow “bad” and can’t be a part of a happy life.  There is nothing wrong with wanting a significant other, or wanting a fancy new electronic toy, or anything like that.  But those things do not bring lasting happiness – they only add to happiness if it is already present.

Unconditional happiness, on the other hand, is a realization.  It comes from being at peace within oneself.  It is not dependent upon external factors, like conditional happiness.  It is a mindset, a quality of the heart that stems from insight and from daily spiritual practice.  When the mind and the body are in sync – that is, when you are living in the present moment rather than the past or the future – inner peace can be realized.

In short, happiness is there.  One only has to see it :)


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Emptiness

January 4, 2012 12:03 pm / 6 Comments /

The symbol for Zen Buddhism.Everything is empty.  You, me, this table, this laptop, the cat snoozing on the back of my couch.  Everything.  Now, before everyone gets all depressed and starts slugging down shots of whiskey (the most popular way to handle depression in these parts), I want to clarify what I mean when I say all things are “empty”.

Emptiness is a recognition of what something lacks.  If a trashcan is empty, it is empty of trash.  If a water bottle is empty, it is empty of water (or if you’re like some people I’ve encountered, it’s empty of vodka, but I digress).  So when I say that you and me and everything else is empty, I’m saying that we all lack something.  The question is, what is it we lack?

We “lack” inherent existence.  Inherent existence refers to something that exists independently, in and of itself, separate and apart from anything and everything else in the universe.

I can hear you all groaning “Huh? What the heck is this wacko talking about?”  Believe me…I understand.  This one took me a good while to wrap my head around, and I still can’t claim a full understanding of emptiness just because the concept is so far beyond our (apparent) everyday experience.

However, if it helps, look at inherent existence this way.  Imagine that something springs to life, all on its own. It wasn’t born and it won’t die.  It also can’t move.  It isn’t influenced by cause and effect, so it cannot grow nor can it change.  It exists complete and whole in and of itself, with no outside inputs.

Know anything like that?  I certainly don’t! But let’s investigate the concept a little further shall we?  Let’s take a look at me, for example.  I was born a little more than twenty-four years ago, and I came from the union of a sperm and an egg cell.  As did my parents before me, and so on and so forth back into the ancient past.  When I was born, I needed to take in sustenance to live.  I grew up as time passed – my body took in the nutrients from my food and used them for energy to fuel said growth.

And now that I am grown, I still need inputs to stay alive – food, water, air, etc.   There’s no inherent existence here – I grow, I change, and I didn’t magically poof into existence. And I am subject to karma (cause and effect).

Braaaaaains…

Look deeper.  I can live because of my lungs, and without them I could not.  So, my existence is dependent on my lungs.  My lungs require blood to live, and so my lungs are dependent upon the heart that pumps the blood.  And the heart needs energy to pump and oxygen to keep its cells alive, so it is dependent on the lungs AND the digestive system.  All of this is controlled by my brain, which depends on all the other organs of the body – directly or indirectly – to function.

My thoughts arise from my brain, from which they become speech.  Thoughts and speech come together eventually in the form of actions (ever notice how some people will talk about things forever before they do something? That’s what I mean here – speech solidifies thought.)  These actions become my habits–good, bad, and ugly.  Finally, these habits become my character.  And all of it leads to the stuff that spews out of my fingertips for your reading pleasure.

This is Earth. The picture was taken from 4 billion miles away. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I am empty.  So are you, and so is everyone else on this blue marble spinning through the void of space.  And so is everything else on or in this marble and the universe of which it is but one part.

“…so what does any of this mean? And how does it apply to me?” You might be asking yourself (and you probably are now that you read it! You’re also visualizing a pink elephant :P)

The mistaken belief in inherent existence causes all sorts of suffering.  In fact, I’d argue that it is responsible for most if not all psychological pain.  Believing that the self, others, and objects exist inherently leads a person to exaggerate the good or bad aspects of whatever they are looking at, which leads to negative emotions and ultimately emotional pain.

The fundamental misperception leads to samsara–the cycle of suffering.  Desires spring from these exaggerated perceptions –desires to harm, to have, to consume.  The desires can never be fully satisfied though, because the exaggeration masks the true suchness of the object of desire.  Once the suchness of an object is understood, it can never fully satisfy the desire because the desire is chasing an illusion rather than something real.  The lack of fulfillment leads to dissatisfaction, which leads to more searching for something to fulfill the desire.  And so the cycle begins anew.

GAH!

…whew!  That was a lot.  Let me break it down a bit more.  Remember math class?  I can hear the groans from here (man…you guys are loud!).  For most of us, it wasn’t a pleasant experience.  Especially those huge multiple step problems from algebra class.  Remember those? Man…those things where the bane of my existence!  If you screwed up in step one, the error would cascade through the entire problem resulting in a lot of spilled red ink and a lot of disappointment all around.

It is the same with the exaggerated notions that come from the mistaken perception that objects and people exist inherently.  You’ve screwed up step one, and everything that follows is also erroneous.  The nifty thing thought is that if you come to understand how step one works – an understanding of emptiness–the other steps will be a whole lot less likely to be in error.  And, like math, emptiness takes a lot of practice to understand but it is doable.

Alrighty…enough of the abstract stuff.  Let’s find a real world example of the process I just described above.  It has happened to all of us at one time or another, usually without us noticing.

Stupid question: have you ever bought something?  Okay…now have you ever bought something you REALLY wanted, used it for a few days, and then uncovered it months later during spring cleaning, stuffed into the back of the closet with that Snuggie your uncle picked up on a last minute stop to Walgreen’s on Christmas Eve and that stainless steel spork set you just couldn’t live without?

Yeah…we’ve all been there (although who would stuff a spork set in the back of their closet? Sporks are awesome!)  That might be a mildly amusing situation, but the same kind of thinking goes into all kinds of nasty stuff, from drug addiction to dysfunctional relationships to murder.  All of it stems ultimately from the fundamental misperception, from seeing the self and the rest of the world as existing inherently, when in fact it truly exists in a state of Emptiness.


Posted in: Life & Writing, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , ,

A Flash of Insight

November 30, 2011 7:08 pm / Leave a Comment /

For once, I’m at a loss for words.

People who know me in person will probably find this an unusual occurrence.  So too will my fellow writers, who know that us writerly folks ALWAYS have something to say.  Even if we don’t quite know how to say it.

This time though, there isn’t much to say.  Or maybe there is too much.

But then maybe I should go into a bit of background.  I’ve been down lately.  Lonely, depressed, frustrated, angry; you know, all that good stuff.  I thought going into Thanksgiving break would help, and the time off did for awhile, but then when the break was over it was right back to feeling miserable.  And worse, it came back, well, worse.

I was at a loss.  All of the usual mental tricks I’d acquired in my year plus walking the Middle Way didn’t seem to be working.  Heck, even meditation wasn’t much of a relief.  It wasn’t the worst bout of depression I’d ever had – not by a long shot – but it could certainly have shaped up to be a downright unpleasant experience.

You’ll notice a lot of past tense verbs in the previous couple of paragraphs.  As of six hours ago give or take the down feeling disappeared.  It came to me in a flash of insight that occurred somewhere beyond the realm of conscious thought.  I had been going about my usual course of things, which was to look deeply at the emotion and figure out where it was coming from in order to dispel it.  This time it took me back into a lot of unpleasant things from my past.  To clarify, I’m not talking any deep, dark secrets here.  I’m just a relatively normal (if slightly weird) guy and I’ve had similar problems to most people in my age group: frustration with romance, problems with body image, depression, anxiety (lots of that), not knowing what to do with my future, general angst, and loneliness.  Similar to others but different in some ways. Not everyone was a Fundamentalist, after all (I’ll tell you guys all about that one of these days…it’s kind of weird stuff but I want to do some posts about it for others who were in the same boat I was in.)

Anyway, I’d taken all those thoughts pertaining to what I’d just outlined above and shoved them into the back of my mind to let the old subconscious do its work.  They formed a kind of thought bubble in the back of my head – I could tell that a bunch of stuff was roiling around in there, but I wasn’t going to poke at it until I could get home and hit the meditation mat (metaphorically speaking – I don’t have a mat).

All at once the bubble popped in one big flash of insight. It was like a dam breaking. A feeling of peace flooded through me that I don’t normally feel outside of a meditation session, and all the tension I’d been carrying in my skeletal muscles (most of it unnoticed) melted away.

The rub of it was that I wasn’t quite sure what had happened! I mean, I knew on some level, but I didn’t know how to articulate it.  Hence the “at a loss for words” business I started the post with. What I can tell you is that I was mistaken in my thinking, and my flash of insight was a big old wallop to the cranium that said: “Hey dummy! You know better! Do this!”

I thought I had the words I wanted, but an hour or so later and after completely deleting what I’d written, I don’t think so. I think the problem is that it would take too many words to describe where I am coming from. I’d pretty much have to describe the Buddhist philosophy as I understand it in it’s entirety to get across the point.

Or maybe not, come to think of it. I think I can sum it up in three words.  Three little words that have been stuck in my head all day.  Three words that, if uttered to a Zen Master would, I think, earn a pleased smile and a bow.  The three words compose the title a wonderful song by the Beatles you’ve probably heard of, and if you haven’t you should go listen.

They are: “Let it be.”

…

…Yeah. I think those’ll do :)


Posted in: Life & Writing / Tagged: , , , , , , ,
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