Well, thus far I have survived three evenings of my wonderful new job. Thing about it though, even though my arms are only just now ceasing to shake from all that lifting, is that night I was having difficulty suppressing a smile while I was working. I had been to a job interview yesterday morning and I have maybe a small chance of getting this other job in a jewelry store that's probably a pretty crappy job as well, but less strenuous. When I left the interview I was not optimistic about getting that Jewelry store job but I was still happy because my plan to do substitute teaching this fall to gain experience to get into grad school was still intact. Now that I have some purpose I find that I can stick to it.
So last night I'm standing there heaving bags of ice, trying not to smile unaccountably, just seeing that all around me was transient, I was just watching part of the river of phenomena flow along. I was at times working on autopilot, thinking about whether or not consciousness was something that could change, such as when a person becomes enlightened. Does this imply that consciousness can somehow change when it resides in a living body? Or is it merely that enlightenment is just a feat of changeless consciousness pulling off the feat of understanding what it is while resident in a body? do these questions have any relevance or meaning? and so on and so forth. I find it a bit tricky to sort out certain questions of essence vs essencelessness. What is blue?
Because I am a truly colossal dork, I have been reading Plutarch's Fall of the Roman Republic in addition to the stuff I actually have to read for my Cicero class. You other dorks may remember that Rome's first triumvirate consisted of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. Crassus, after Pompey, was the richest man in rome. By all accounts the most avaricious man in the world. He had been the general who defeated Spartacus, though Pompey stole a lot of the Glory from him by finishing off the last few thousand survivors who had escaped death when Crassus had defeated Spartacus. So Crassus was deeply vexed at not having the tremendous record of conquest that Caesar and Pompey had. So he gets himself a command to take an army out to Parthia, the general area of Iraq and Iran, to do some conquering out there. He had been a competent commander, but he was no Caesar, and he marched out into the middle of the desert, and the Parthian cavalry wiped out his army in a storm of arrows and dust kicked up by the horses. Crassus himself was killed a couple of days after that defeat, trying to flee.
Thing about it though, if you're dork enough to have read this far, is that Plutarch observes that Crassus, the third most powerful man in Rome, and pretty much the world as was know in that time, observing that two men surpassed him, felt that he had nothing. So he marched to his destruction, not being content with being the third most powerful man in the world.
I find that I am just like Crassus. Around me in the world or even here on SG I find people who surpass me in innumerable ways, and I think that I am nothing. I tend to feel very badly when I read poems or see drawings or paitings by people much younger than myself that far surpass anyting I have ever done. But my life has not been composed of nothing. I have boxes and boxes of photgraphs that i've taken. I can read latin and Greek. I worked out a whole new theory of human motivation, I looked straight at the human mind and saw it in a way that noone has ever seen it before. I guess maybe my life is kind of the existential paradox of the liberal arts education. I got a broad overview of the human condition, and worked out a new way of seeing it, but it's never earned me a dime. I think if you're going to be broke you at least have to be a poet for it to be reasonably fashionable, but what are you gonna do? I spose i could write some embarassingly crappy poetry, but in my case that would merely be the act of a poseur.
Anyway, the point I had had in mind to make is that if you can let your competitiveness and self esteem issues go, and accept yourself as having some merit in an infinite continuum of possibilities of merit, you can accept the talents of others and admire them and learn from them without neurotically feeling diminished by vain self-comparison. You can see yourself as being part of an expanse of light and color and knowledge; complex, edgeless, and in motion.
At least in your lucid moments. Stress can still make you collapse into a shell or worry, I see other people struggling with worry just like me, with negative self-judgement, and I hope they can learn to fight it too.
So last night I'm standing there heaving bags of ice, trying not to smile unaccountably, just seeing that all around me was transient, I was just watching part of the river of phenomena flow along. I was at times working on autopilot, thinking about whether or not consciousness was something that could change, such as when a person becomes enlightened. Does this imply that consciousness can somehow change when it resides in a living body? Or is it merely that enlightenment is just a feat of changeless consciousness pulling off the feat of understanding what it is while resident in a body? do these questions have any relevance or meaning? and so on and so forth. I find it a bit tricky to sort out certain questions of essence vs essencelessness. What is blue?
Because I am a truly colossal dork, I have been reading Plutarch's Fall of the Roman Republic in addition to the stuff I actually have to read for my Cicero class. You other dorks may remember that Rome's first triumvirate consisted of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. Crassus, after Pompey, was the richest man in rome. By all accounts the most avaricious man in the world. He had been the general who defeated Spartacus, though Pompey stole a lot of the Glory from him by finishing off the last few thousand survivors who had escaped death when Crassus had defeated Spartacus. So Crassus was deeply vexed at not having the tremendous record of conquest that Caesar and Pompey had. So he gets himself a command to take an army out to Parthia, the general area of Iraq and Iran, to do some conquering out there. He had been a competent commander, but he was no Caesar, and he marched out into the middle of the desert, and the Parthian cavalry wiped out his army in a storm of arrows and dust kicked up by the horses. Crassus himself was killed a couple of days after that defeat, trying to flee.
Thing about it though, if you're dork enough to have read this far, is that Plutarch observes that Crassus, the third most powerful man in Rome, and pretty much the world as was know in that time, observing that two men surpassed him, felt that he had nothing. So he marched to his destruction, not being content with being the third most powerful man in the world.
I find that I am just like Crassus. Around me in the world or even here on SG I find people who surpass me in innumerable ways, and I think that I am nothing. I tend to feel very badly when I read poems or see drawings or paitings by people much younger than myself that far surpass anyting I have ever done. But my life has not been composed of nothing. I have boxes and boxes of photgraphs that i've taken. I can read latin and Greek. I worked out a whole new theory of human motivation, I looked straight at the human mind and saw it in a way that noone has ever seen it before. I guess maybe my life is kind of the existential paradox of the liberal arts education. I got a broad overview of the human condition, and worked out a new way of seeing it, but it's never earned me a dime. I think if you're going to be broke you at least have to be a poet for it to be reasonably fashionable, but what are you gonna do? I spose i could write some embarassingly crappy poetry, but in my case that would merely be the act of a poseur.
Anyway, the point I had had in mind to make is that if you can let your competitiveness and self esteem issues go, and accept yourself as having some merit in an infinite continuum of possibilities of merit, you can accept the talents of others and admire them and learn from them without neurotically feeling diminished by vain self-comparison. You can see yourself as being part of an expanse of light and color and knowledge; complex, edgeless, and in motion.
At least in your lucid moments. Stress can still make you collapse into a shell or worry, I see other people struggling with worry just like me, with negative self-judgement, and I hope they can learn to fight it too.
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Also, putting self-esteem issues and competitiveness aside just lets you focus on the main things, and not waste your time trying to prove a point where there is none to be proven. *shrugs*