Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
From Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham. (full text)
When I was first thinking about moving to New York, I walked around some neighborhoods in Brooklyn trying to figure out where I wanted to live. After walking through north Williamsburg, I called a friend and told her 'I think I'm not cool enough to live here. Or rich enough.' After years of living in Baltimore and DC, the vibe here was very easy to feel, because it was such a huge change from what I was used to. But after a while, and I think especially after working on Wall Street for over a year, it fades into the background (which is another way to say, it percolates into your consciousness).
If only Boston were not so miserably cold...
Posted 2008/05/28 in philosophy; no comments
One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"
"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."
And the student was enlightened.
From Broken Koans via Overcoming Bias
Posted 2008/05/27 in philosophy; no comments