interests, ideas, and experiences

My first week in Korea has come and gone. I’m not having terrible culture shock, but I am having quite a lot of fun. I’ve never met so many genuine, interesting people in so short a period of time. I think the process of leaving your home for the unknown weeds out a lot of fake people (there are douchebags here, I’m sure), and so far everything has been great. I know a surprising amount of Korean for the amount I’ve been exposed to it, I’m pretty pleased with how I’m adapting, blah blah blah.

So, I bought To Have or to Be by Erich Fromm the other night for an absolutely absurd amount of money.  When the woman told me how much, I dropped jaw and said “Chincha!?” which is loosely translated as “Nigga, are you serious?”  Nevertheless, I’m happy to have it and in the meantime I met a girl named Jen at the bar who told me about a foreign bookstore in Itaewon, so hopefully I can skirt around this issue.  I’d so much rather buy used books anyway.  More character…or something like that.

Another thing I’ve wanted to get down for awhile – on the way to the airport (this feels like a lifetime ago) I was looking at the stars out the window of my parents car and gradually seeing less and less of them as we got further from the Poconos and closer to Philly.  One of the questions people were asking me most often in the last few days I was in the States was, “Aren’t you scared!?”  I  wasn’t.  I’m not.  I’m not trying to be Johnny Bravo about it – I’ve been impressed for a long time with the idea that fear is such a waste.  Jesus asked us to consider why we worry – what does it do?  Can we influence our situation with negativity?  Well, yes, we can, but it’s certainly not a positive influence, so why bother?  After Jesus, there was Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor, who was also the author of Meditations which is one of the most life-changing things I’ve ever read.  One of my favorite quotes from that book is when he writes, “Never let the future disturb you.  You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”  Ahhhh.  In the same book he also wrote the following:

Above all, never struggle or strain; but be master of yourself, and view life as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, and as a mortal.  Among the truths you will do well to contemplate most frequently are these two: first, that things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within; and secondly, that all visible objects change in a moment, and will be no more.  Think of the countless changes in which you yourself have had a part.  The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.

Right.  Amazing.  So what he says is further echoed by Ouspensky in his commentary on Gurdjieff’s teaching, one of the very basic tenets of which is so Stoic it hurts.  No one is responsible for your negative emotions but you.  Everything wrong in your life is only something wrong in you.  Not exactly a new idea, but still revolutionary in that very few people are willing to accept it even on an intellectual level – and many fewer willing to absorb it into their lives.  When people would ask me if I were scared, though, the thing that would come to my head first (probably because I had read it the most recently…and it has the word ‘fear’ in it.  my neural connections aren’t complex) is something that Ouspensky says in The Fourth Way:

You must understand that many things you ascribe to things outside you are really in you.  Take for instance fear. Fear is independent of things.  If you are in a state of fear, you can be afraid of an ash-tray.  This often happens in pathological states, and a pathological state is only an intensified ordinary state.  You are afraid, and then you choose what to be afraid of.

Back to the stars – I’m watching them slowly fade out as the ambient light from the city begins to become more pronounced and I linked it, for whatever reason, to all of these ideas about fear and ‘disquiet arising only from fancies within,’ etc…  As a person is going through their life they’re usually projecting so much onto their environment and circumstances that they lose perspective of what’s really around them to the point that they become unable to see anything beyond their own perceptions – Plato’s cave style…is that sensible?  How about another Ouspensky quote?

…We must understand that we do not see things themselves at all.  We see like in Plato’s allegory of the cave only the reflections of things [that is, we see ourselves - the reflection of our projections], so that what we see has lost all reality.  We must realize how often we are governed and controlled not by the things themselves but by our ideas of things, our views of things, our pictures of things.

Hopefully that makes things a little clearer.  Back to the star analogy tho – the other side of that coin, of course, is that when you free yourself from the hold that mechanical projections can have over you, the ‘ambient light’ as it were is gone and you’re able to see what’s happening around you for what it really is – and it’s awe inspiring because it also makes you see your own place in the universe that much more clearly.

Okay, now that I feel like a Ziggy cartoon, I’m gonna call it quits.  I downloaded The Seventh Seal and I’m making pasta sauce, so I have a busy night ahead.