Month: March 2023

Yellow Millet Dream

I’ve been researching some Daoist (I will be referring to The Dao as that not The Tao as I have done so before) stories, specifically allegories. I came across the story titled The Yellow Millet Dream about the scholar and poet Lu Dongbin who lived in China around thirteen-hundred years ago – for how long, who knows as it is said that he lived for centuries. Lu, like Seneca of the Stoics, didn’t seem to fit the stereotypical mould of being the straight-faced, emotionless zen character. Instead, he was a partying ladies man whose wisdom was so fantastic that he was elevated to immortality, being declared one of the Eight Immortals. Whether or not this is literal immortality, spiritual in some astral form, or metaphorical through his works depends on belief.

What I find to be quite comforting is that every one of the Eight Immortals in Daoism have their own flaws and quirks, making them ultimately as organic and imperfect as the rest of us. It makes sense doesn’t it? Instead of being perfect, we work towards it but sometimes we cannot escape our nature and if a thing is in our nature then it is something to accept and nurture humanely that benefits the common good. Obviously if your imperfection is a hankering for human flesh and genocide then I’m sure you can find a better outlet in perfecting beef tartare or acting where at least you can bring joy through method acting, I suppose. We are, ultimately, the universe experiencing itself following The Dao and therefore, all is as it should be, or rather in it’s nature to work towards harmony and balance within its own ability and self.

However I’m digressing. Lu Dongbin, before he was warding off the dark with a sword of protection or mastering his internal alchemy, he was simply Lu Yan, a travelling poet.

He met an older man, a Daoist, at an inn. He dozed off while the dinner – millet -was cooking on the fire.

When he awoke, he left the village and went to town where he took and passed the imperial exam. He worked hard and was promoted again and again, soon becoming a minister in the government and marrying a rich wife, then becoming prime minister. His success attracted enemies, and he was betrayed, lost his friends, lost his office, his wife, his fortune and his children. Dying of poverty he awoke to discover that although he thought 18 years had passed, it was just a dream, and the millet was just coming to a boil.

The elderly Daoist caused him to have this dream so that he could learn an important lesson about life.

The lesson, of course, is that the material is immaterial. Success as defined by society does not grant any meaningful happiness based on itself alone. While recently a study came out to say that money can indeed buy happiness, if your unhappiness is caused by a lack of meaningful human connection, throwing money at the problem may not be the best way to go about it. Sure you can get yourself a ticket on a singles cruise to the Bahamas but if you do not look within first for help, you may end up staying in your cabin watching Too Hot To Handle crying into your silk monogrammed hankies.

Success is like beauty and exists within the eye of the beholder but sometimes – if not all the time – the world around us tries to gaslight us into thinking otherwise. Perhaps it happens to us all without even realising it, so then, I suppose, the real trick is to take the time and ask the question:

Am I dreaming?

Z3N0

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Great Teaching

Today I was entertained by no end by a little saga going on over on Twitter. Yes, you can say this whole segment that I’m about to write is in direct contradiction to the post that I’ve made previously criticising the human need to find entertainment from other’s suffering. But, and it’s a big butt: I’m also a fan of justice and not just any kind, specifically poetic justice with comedy that Armando Iannucci would struggle to come up with on his own.

I’m not a fan of social media at the best of times but there seems to be such delicious irony that one of the world’s richest and most identifiable individuals who uses Twitter as a staging ground for open ideological warfare has suddenly come to the realisation that people have been telling him and others like him for years. Perhaps that’s the lesson, no? We cannot ultimately teach someone anything effectively until they face the greatest teacher of all: a mistake.

For those who are not aware of this drama, Elon Musk engaged in a public dispute with an employee about job performance, during which the employee was notified by HR that he had been fired. As it turned out, the employee in question was hired as part of a contract in the purchasing of a company that was originally owned by that employee. Mr Musk then changed his mind about the firing as shown above in the linked tweet. I’m not going to speculate on what kind of legal and financial ramifications were happening behind the scenes but I think it’s worth pointing out how this situation could have been avoided entirely.

“Accept humbly, let go easily.” – Meditations 8.33

Perhaps then we can argue that the negative public perception of Elon Musk outside of his core fan base is wrong in itself. Of course, we can find things detestable about a person’s character based on the simple dynamics of virtue and vices but what are vices but demonstrations of lessons to be learned? I for one, think that a lesson was learned here – or rather I hope it was. I’m not above harbouring negative feelings towards people, it’s human nature to react instinctively to all kinds of threats whether they are physical or philosophical. In 2023, billions of us across the globe have access to social media platforms where we can respond immediately on instinct to such threats without much thought. We would hope that the new CEO of one of the world’s biggest would take a little more care about giving into those instincts but why would we hold anyone to a higher standard of self-control or moral responsibility due to the size of the bank account? History tells us that morality and judgement rarely go hand-in-hand with extreme wealth so why would we expect otherwise now?

Ultimately, the mistake and reflection of the mistake will be the only way forward for everyone. Anyone who’s ever made a silly post on Facebook that they regret or written a poorly thought out, two-hundred character rant about Love Island that has the slight flavour of implied sexism, will eventually have to deal with and learn from the consequences of impulse. This, of course, extends far beyond the digital confines of social media, just ask Cain after he bashed in Abel’s skull. Never before in human history has one badly thought out response or opinion been able to reach and be seen by so many, and in turn, effect so many. I suppose that’s why we have age-restrictions on social media (as useless as they are) to at least keep up the appearance that young people will have a chance to develop some sense of self-control before being bestowed the power of connecting with the world.

In the end, I’m not sure if Mr Musk will learn from this situation and excise a little more self-control or at least develop that faculty before engaging in high level business in such a potentially destructive way. I like to think that maybe there will be but it was my favourite Roman emperor who said: teach or tolerate. If consequences won’t do, I suppose I’ll have to be contented to watch – like the passive media consumer that I am from the sidelines -, tolerating and having a giggle at the comedy.

I’m not unhappy with that outcome, popcorn is my favourite snack.

Z3N0

In the Ring

I was scrolling through TikTok as I tend to on the bus home and came across some kind of strange social media star drama. Much like the KSI versus Logan Paul situation, this one was two OnlyFans content creators shouting at each other and leading to organizing a boxing match. My question is – as it was with the Youtuber boxing – why?

I may have spoken about this before, yet is this what we are as a species? In schools, children are taught to use words not fists yet it’s becoming culturally acceptable for celebrities to beef it out in the boxing ring to settle their scores. It’s the hypocrisy of our time, violence is both loved and hated. Or perhaps it’s only loved when corporations are sponsoring. Of course, with that statement, we could talk just as easily about the war in Ukraine: violence to defend a nation from invaders; yet are we looking at that with glorification or a dutiful necessity (depending on whose side you are on, of course) compared to rich socialites knocking seven-shades of shit out of each other over a spat on Twitter.

That comparison disappoints me. Not for making it but for the implications of what it means for our attention. Celebrities slapping each other at award shows, comedians tackled for edgy laughs, and dancers on TikTok throwing sponsored punches to cheers – are we so bored? Is the world of those who are privileged so without violence that we celebrate it while schools are mined to Europe’s east, famine continues in Yemen, and jihadists pillage their way across Burkina Faso carrying a very strange definition of divinity.

It’s a fundamentally first world problem that we’ve seen before. Even Seneca questioned the point of the gladiator pits, much preferring a good romp or dinner party to solve his problems. I read somewhere that humans, by their nature as the apex predators of Earth are naturally violent and territorial but surely over the last several thousand years of human history we can see that the blooming of art, culture and science happens best in peacetime. Sure you can make the argument that we wouldn’t have nuclear power if it wasn’t for the Manhattan Project but did we need the bomb to land on Hiroshima to get to that conclusion? Marie Curie’s work would have been continued into radioactivity and energy regardless of the production of weapons of mass destruction or not.

Just this morning, being the last to know about these things, I hear that a former Love Island/boxer, Tommy Fury, has beaten YouTuber, Jake Paul, in the ring. The commentators were going wild and I felt a little left out as I had no idea what the appeal was. Yet, perhaps, I’m a hypocrite. I grew up on the hyper-violence of films like Kill Bill, Silence of the Lambs, and even kids shows that glorified punching like The Batman. I loved them all and still do. Ultimately, then, is it entirely pointless to question our violent nature? Seneca himself committed violence with words with intent to harm within his politics and praised shrewd statesmen who would make Machiavelli blush.

Where’s the line then, I wonder. As a collective, where do we think the line should be for enjoying the spectacle of violence? Should it stop just after the next episode of The Last of Us and before watching first hand someone get sucker punched on the train when travelling through Doncaster? Or should we commit to a world where we exist entirely in the land of Stardew Valley where everyone is nice and we grow plants and give each other conch shells.

It’s such a shame that I’m boring myself just thinking about it.

Z3N0

Observing a “New” World

Work, for the most part, has kept me busy – or at least needing deep escapism via means of Xbox when I arrive home. When we become wrapped up in the happenings of life – or the attempts to pretend otherwise – it becomes easy to lose track of the most important job that we all have: growth. It’s one of those things that comes to us whether we like it or not but the actual act of reflecting on that growth and study of one’s own spirit becomes one of those forgotten maintenance chores like adding salt to the dishwasher. Much like that example, ignored long enough, that job can become an enormous pain in the arse.

“To what use, then, am I now putting my soul? Ask yourself this question on every occasion. Examine yourself. ‘What do I now have in this part of me called the directing mind? What sort of soul do I have after all? Is it that of a child? A boy? A woman? A despot? A best of the field? A wild animal?” – Meditations 5.11

It has been so long, I think, that when I look at myself beyond the mirror, I’m not sure if the landscape that I see is at all familiar. It has the same formations: the insecurities, the unaddressed prejudices, the old traumas, the little victories, the currents of inspiration, and the hard-fought virtues. Yet, when I look (not unlike Sauron gazing his eye over Mordor), the old worn paths have become overgrown to a point where they may well have never have existed; the once maintained walls have crumbled from neglect and mossy hills have formed from the rubble. I, like Gandalf, have no memory of this place.

The question is then, did we need such things? In myself, I feel fine: my sails have wind behind them and I’m moving in unison with purpose herself on the equally metaphorical waters of destiny. In feeling fine, I ask why I bothered spending so much time working on self-evaluation and reflection and philosophies at all? Perhaps that’s a realisation for anyone who has spent time pouring over pages of long dead thinkers and theologians and it’s awfully depressing. Or rather, the impression of that realisation is depressing as it all seems rather wasteful now. So, you have spent hours in meditation, weeks reading and months saving for that soul-searching trip to Bali to find yourself realising, two or three years down the line, that you’ve gone months not giving a second thought to philosophy and you’re doing just fine on your own. What now?

I’d say, as someone who has been thinking about this for a while (not that it makes me an expert by any stretch), go digging. Not literally, of course, because who can afford to have a garden these days? Digression aside, dig within that view of the look beyond the mirror. Those landscapes, as overgrown as they are, are built on the foundations of the philosophies that are now part of you as if they always were from the beginning. It’s like a psychological muscle memory where our strategies for resilience, empathy and compassion, harmony and serenity that we have learned from our philosophies and put into practice by experience have become a part of who we are.

To satisfy the nerd in me, I’d compare these mechanisms to the Forerunner worlds from the Halo franchise: lush paradises growing atop of almost arcane, chrome-plated engineering with eternal fire at core – the I Am presence.

I say these places within us are strange new worlds but in reality, these ever-evolving spheres are just us. These gardens are as messy as you can imagine at times but the truth of a person is in their philosophies. Of course, if you keep digging and find nothing but ooze and shit, then it’s time to put on your hard-hat and get to work. That goes for the self and others, of course, but to shoe-horn in a quote from RuPaul Charles:

“If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”

… or begin to repair or build those SciFi analogy foundations.

Z3N0