So I was reading an article in National Geographic magazine. Something about the Silk Road. Something about China developing a modern "Silk Road". Something about the reporter/writer traveling it on foot. It was a casual read, killing time, being lazy not reading things of real interest. The Silk Road is of casual interest to me for what it represents and has to say about human development; anthropology and archaeology. Basically I'm saying I have no concrete context for writing this.
But I came across this passage:
In "The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows", central Asian polymath Al-Biruni observed that jinn were "the impure parts of the erring souls, after they have been separated from their bodies, who [the souls] are prevented from reaching their primal origin, because they did not find the knowledge of the truth, but were living in confusion and stupefaction."
and a little later this:
What to do if approached by jinn on the Silk Road: "No matter what it does, no matter how frightening it is, don't panic or show emotion. Just sit down on a rock and wait. It will lose interest. It will go away".
Jinn is the origin of the word "genie", so can be broadly understood to be supernatural in nature. Even superstitious, fine. Possible phenomena beyond normal human perception, I would put it.
The author projected some of his ideas of jinn in his writing, noting certain circumstances and wondering if they were jinn at work. In another encounter mentioning that he was likely the jinn in that situation. He was interpreting jinn in his own way that he could understand, and he was open-minded about them.
"Impure parts of erring souls" I don't read as judgments but descriptions. The parts that are impure aren't necessarily good or bad, the souls that have erred aren't necessarily good or bad. They are just descriptively impure or erring, as well as possibly actually being either.
"Primal origin" is from whence we came and . . . whernce we go (the word I believe you're looking for is "whither", you idiot. -ed.). I think the more sophisticated understanding is that they are the same place or state. The more ridiculous understanding is that we come from our parents bumping uglies and go to places called heaven or hell based on external judgment of our behavior.
The Buddhist-based description that I'm familiar with suggests the primal origin is a primordial energy state that's part of the cycle of reincarnation. A well-defined and self-identified drop of water falls into the sea and disappears until natural process create another drop of water out of the same molecules. A different drop of water made of the same stuff. Reincarnation is literally the recycling of souls. It's very green.
"Knowledge of the truth" a Buddhist might interpret is the truth of impermanence, an extension perhaps of one of its four noble truths of suffering. It's an easy lesson because we all ultimately experience it in death. When we die there is no greater expression that nothing stays the same, everything changes. But there are people whose attachments are so strong that they try to defy death and cling to some aspect of their life so much that they miss the lesson, even as they die.
"Living in confusion and stupefaction" is the way they lived their lives or their karma that preconditioned them to not be able to come to terms with death and the impermanence it reveals. That aspect of them gets stuck here as jinn. Basically ghosts.
"No matter how frightening it is, don't panic or show emotion" can be cut and pasted into parts of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and no one would even notice. In fact that's exactly what it says about the death bardos. I extend that to the living bardos. Except where large spiders are involved.
"Just sit down on a rock", well that's just meditation. "It will lose interest. It will go away".
That's great advice, I'm gonna start doing that. When negativity starts to overwhelm and I let myself get annoyed and aggravated by other people, I'm just gonna stop, get out of anyone's way and wait until my bad attitude loses interest and goes away. Jinn, ghosts, in us, out of us, as us. Discuss.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Monday, January 22, 2018
The book I mentioned before about the Armenian genocide is The Hundred Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey (2016). I peeked at it at the library because of the Armenia mention, still fresh in my mind from reading about World War I. Turns out it was exactly kind of what I would be looking for in wanting to know more about the Armenian genocide, often treated as a side note.
The book is written by the granddaughter of a survivor of the genocide who had committed his experience to writing in hopes that the story would not be forgotten. The book also tells her own story of discovering her family history and re-tracing her grandfather's path during the genocide, which started in 1915 and continued even after the war's end and her grandfather's escape.
The book goes back and forth between the past and present, not unlike how Godfather 2 went back and forth from Michael's main story and Vito Corleone's past story. It's a narrative gimmick which may not be for everyone but I was sympathetic to it. People telling personal stories delving into their past can be stories unto themselves, and there is a lot to be taken from the author's own odyssey. The hundred years in the title connects her with her grandfather, and the odyssey applies to both as well.
The book apparently took a long time to write, about 10 years of research and travel. Her own journey was likely the easier part as it is a first-hand account. For her grandfather's story, she needed his memoir to be translated for her, and then further research and historical corroboration to put it in context and flesh it out into a broader context and experience.
She doesn't include a translation of the memoir as a primary source even in appendix. Her presentation of his story is an interpretation and possibly enhancement, even embellishment, using whatever artistic or narrative license that was her prerogative. It's enough that her mother was a catalyst and involved in the endeavor to accept that the final product is a reasonably accurate representation of what happened.
I was riveted by the book. I even thought that maybe it might be worthy of being made into a movie. Lord knows people should know about the Armenian genocide, especially since the Turks continue to deny or try to justify it. As the book points out, you can't even mention it in Turkey under the current administration without great personal risk. In a relatively recent episode of Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" in Turkey, he asks questions of people he knows from past visits, and whereas they talked freely before, this time they politely plainly stated that they preferred not to respond to particular questions. The official Turkish denial of the genocide is ostensibly among the reasons the EU won't even consider admitting Turkey as a member.
Personally, it was a meditation on suffering and the human capacity to endure. Not me, mind you, any upset to my world and I'd be among the first to die; natural selection. Unless we're talking about my capacity to endure the pointless banality of my life. As to suffering it made me very grateful for my circumstances and how much I don't have to complain about. Like I'm not going to complain about the cold, look at what he went through! Cold? Bring it on, I'm not even going to wear a jacket.
(One last aside on the Armenian genocide. People have linked the genocide as having inspired Hitler's final solution with his quote on the lines of, "Who, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?" It's possible that when he decided to eradicate the Jewish population from Europe, his inspiration was the Turks, but a little internet fact-checking, because the internet never lies, shows that quote was made in regard to Poland at the start of WWII.
Still, though, while reading the book, there are many mentions of Germans observing the genocide occurring and being disturbed, but unwilling to interfere since the Ottomans were their allies. I kept imagining the Germans thinking, "How inefficient, ve Germans can surely do a better job".)
The book is written by the granddaughter of a survivor of the genocide who had committed his experience to writing in hopes that the story would not be forgotten. The book also tells her own story of discovering her family history and re-tracing her grandfather's path during the genocide, which started in 1915 and continued even after the war's end and her grandfather's escape.
The book goes back and forth between the past and present, not unlike how Godfather 2 went back and forth from Michael's main story and Vito Corleone's past story. It's a narrative gimmick which may not be for everyone but I was sympathetic to it. People telling personal stories delving into their past can be stories unto themselves, and there is a lot to be taken from the author's own odyssey. The hundred years in the title connects her with her grandfather, and the odyssey applies to both as well.
The book apparently took a long time to write, about 10 years of research and travel. Her own journey was likely the easier part as it is a first-hand account. For her grandfather's story, she needed his memoir to be translated for her, and then further research and historical corroboration to put it in context and flesh it out into a broader context and experience.
She doesn't include a translation of the memoir as a primary source even in appendix. Her presentation of his story is an interpretation and possibly enhancement, even embellishment, using whatever artistic or narrative license that was her prerogative. It's enough that her mother was a catalyst and involved in the endeavor to accept that the final product is a reasonably accurate representation of what happened.
I was riveted by the book. I even thought that maybe it might be worthy of being made into a movie. Lord knows people should know about the Armenian genocide, especially since the Turks continue to deny or try to justify it. As the book points out, you can't even mention it in Turkey under the current administration without great personal risk. In a relatively recent episode of Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" in Turkey, he asks questions of people he knows from past visits, and whereas they talked freely before, this time they politely plainly stated that they preferred not to respond to particular questions. The official Turkish denial of the genocide is ostensibly among the reasons the EU won't even consider admitting Turkey as a member.
Personally, it was a meditation on suffering and the human capacity to endure. Not me, mind you, any upset to my world and I'd be among the first to die; natural selection. Unless we're talking about my capacity to endure the pointless banality of my life. As to suffering it made me very grateful for my circumstances and how much I don't have to complain about. Like I'm not going to complain about the cold, look at what he went through! Cold? Bring it on, I'm not even going to wear a jacket.
(One last aside on the Armenian genocide. People have linked the genocide as having inspired Hitler's final solution with his quote on the lines of, "Who, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?" It's possible that when he decided to eradicate the Jewish population from Europe, his inspiration was the Turks, but a little internet fact-checking, because the internet never lies, shows that quote was made in regard to Poland at the start of WWII.
Still, though, while reading the book, there are many mentions of Germans observing the genocide occurring and being disturbed, but unwilling to interfere since the Ottomans were their allies. I kept imagining the Germans thinking, "How inefficient, ve Germans can surely do a better job".)
Friday, January 12, 2018
Future life resonance. I've been eating Korean food almost every day since about the beginning of December. I have just about every Korean restaurant within a two miles radius mapped out in my head and continue to note and target the few that I've missed.
Truth to tell, I've never been this way about Korean food. Not like I am with Mexican or Italian. Two of the Korean restaurants were around when I first moved to this neighborhood almost 10 years ago and quite honestly I went years without going to either.
Now, I inexplicably melt at how good they all are. My knowledge and palette for Korean food isn't that sophisticated and I end up ordering the same things, but it demonstrates what I've heard from Korean food shows about local cuisines all around Korea being different. It's reflected in restaurants in Taiwan. You can order bibimbap at 12 different restaurants, and they'll all be different.
There are Korean restaurants who now recognize me as a loyal regular, coming in reliably at least every week or other, but they don't know they're just one of a veritable revolving door of Korean restaurants who all recognize me as a loyal regular. I feel like a cheap whore. Well, the opposite. I'm a cheap Korean restaurant John.
It confounds me. You eat so much of any cuisine, you're gonna get tired of it. And it's not happening with a cuisine towards which I've never shown any particular affinity. That's why I attribute it to a future life resonance. It's like "where is this coming from?".
Also since the beginning of December have been winter weather patterns; this year they've fluctuated quite a lot. When it got really cold right from the start, I feared it was going to be a long winter. Previous years' temperatures were mild until late January. But so far this season there have been very nice short stretches of warm temperatures in the 70s. Short stretches of rain, some hard, but not constant rain like in previous years. And stretches of low to mid-50s, brittle cold in a country where homes don't have heating. Very variable, not at all brutal. Yet.
Oh, you know, there may have been a trigger for the Korean food frenzy. Several months ago I watched a "behind the scenes" video of a rookie K-pop girl group and they were eating throughout it. At the very end, Lucy lifts the yellow box and I could see the name on it, Bobby Box. Just for shits and giggles, I searched it on google maps because I'm a google maps geek. I expected locations in Korea, but was surprised to get a hit in Taipei! I went there the very next day and have been going there once or twice a week since.
There's this thing in Korea called 'mukbang' (Japan too, I think, but I don't know what they call it) which are videos of people eating. They're popular because apparently it's very pleasing to watch people enjoying good food. I can't argue with that. This video qualifies as mukbang.
Truth to tell, I've never been this way about Korean food. Not like I am with Mexican or Italian. Two of the Korean restaurants were around when I first moved to this neighborhood almost 10 years ago and quite honestly I went years without going to either.
Now, I inexplicably melt at how good they all are. My knowledge and palette for Korean food isn't that sophisticated and I end up ordering the same things, but it demonstrates what I've heard from Korean food shows about local cuisines all around Korea being different. It's reflected in restaurants in Taiwan. You can order bibimbap at 12 different restaurants, and they'll all be different.
There are Korean restaurants who now recognize me as a loyal regular, coming in reliably at least every week or other, but they don't know they're just one of a veritable revolving door of Korean restaurants who all recognize me as a loyal regular. I feel like a cheap whore. Well, the opposite. I'm a cheap Korean restaurant John.
It confounds me. You eat so much of any cuisine, you're gonna get tired of it. And it's not happening with a cuisine towards which I've never shown any particular affinity. That's why I attribute it to a future life resonance. It's like "where is this coming from?".
Also since the beginning of December have been winter weather patterns; this year they've fluctuated quite a lot. When it got really cold right from the start, I feared it was going to be a long winter. Previous years' temperatures were mild until late January. But so far this season there have been very nice short stretches of warm temperatures in the 70s. Short stretches of rain, some hard, but not constant rain like in previous years. And stretches of low to mid-50s, brittle cold in a country where homes don't have heating. Very variable, not at all brutal. Yet.
Oh, you know, there may have been a trigger for the Korean food frenzy. Several months ago I watched a "behind the scenes" video of a rookie K-pop girl group and they were eating throughout it. At the very end, Lucy lifts the yellow box and I could see the name on it, Bobby Box. Just for shits and giggles, I searched it on google maps because I'm a google maps geek. I expected locations in Korea, but was surprised to get a hit in Taipei! I went there the very next day and have been going there once or twice a week since.
There's this thing in Korea called 'mukbang' (Japan too, I think, but I don't know what they call it) which are videos of people eating. They're popular because apparently it's very pleasing to watch people enjoying good food. I can't argue with that. This video qualifies as mukbang.
Labels:
future life resonances,
geeking out,
Taipei daily life,
video
Tuesday, January 09, 2018
My initial reaction to Jonghyun's suicide may have been typical and normative, but those weren't the first thoughts I had about it. He died in the evening. Taiwan is an hour behind Korea, so I read the news after I got home for the evening, very soon after it broke in Korea. My first independent thought was a sadness-tinged, "He won't be going to sleep in his own bed tonight".
As news broke and sent shockwaves through the K-pop world in Korea and beyond, he was probably already lying in a hospital morgue covered with a sheet, not yet cold, rigor mortis yet to set in. No, he wouldn't be climbing into his own bed tonight with whatever he did and accomplished that day, with whatever demons he carried, with tomorrow's schedules and responsibilities still a night's sleep away.
He won't be going to sleep in his own bed tonight, like I will.
There's this word that has a common meaning, but my exposure to it is in the psychiatric field as, I think, a term of art. Ideation. All it means is the creation of an idea, really just a fancy, fairly useless word for thinking, but in regard to suicide it signifies a whole envisioning and fulfillment of the act. Ideation is a necessary step towards suicide.
A fundamental flaw in my ideation is that there isn't any not crawling into bed at night. Getting to bed every night has been an unconscious existential ordeal in its own way for I don't know how long. It only appears as such when I look hard at it. Every day the conveyor belt of getting from day to day culminates in going to sleep in my own bed every night.
The conveyor belt is a list of useless things I'll plan to do any day, blocks of time when I'll uselessly go where to uselessly do what, rinse and repeat, ultimately with the ideation of my bed at the end of the day. It doesn't serve committing suicide very well, does it? It just perpetuates uselessness.
I need to get rid of the idea of the conveyor belt even as I'm carried along on it. No idea how, that was reasonably zen. I have to get it out of my mind that crawling into my own bed as an ideated goal is necessarily desirable. At the root of the problem is being a creature of habit as long as things aren't going wrong. Doing the same things day after day because they're tried, true and safe. That's complacency. There is no value in that. I'm stuck in it.
As news broke and sent shockwaves through the K-pop world in Korea and beyond, he was probably already lying in a hospital morgue covered with a sheet, not yet cold, rigor mortis yet to set in. No, he wouldn't be climbing into his own bed tonight with whatever he did and accomplished that day, with whatever demons he carried, with tomorrow's schedules and responsibilities still a night's sleep away.
He won't be going to sleep in his own bed tonight, like I will.
There's this word that has a common meaning, but my exposure to it is in the psychiatric field as, I think, a term of art. Ideation. All it means is the creation of an idea, really just a fancy, fairly useless word for thinking, but in regard to suicide it signifies a whole envisioning and fulfillment of the act. Ideation is a necessary step towards suicide.
A fundamental flaw in my ideation is that there isn't any not crawling into bed at night. Getting to bed every night has been an unconscious existential ordeal in its own way for I don't know how long. It only appears as such when I look hard at it. Every day the conveyor belt of getting from day to day culminates in going to sleep in my own bed every night.
The conveyor belt is a list of useless things I'll plan to do any day, blocks of time when I'll uselessly go where to uselessly do what, rinse and repeat, ultimately with the ideation of my bed at the end of the day. It doesn't serve committing suicide very well, does it? It just perpetuates uselessness.
I need to get rid of the idea of the conveyor belt even as I'm carried along on it. No idea how, that was reasonably zen. I have to get it out of my mind that crawling into my own bed as an ideated goal is necessarily desirable. At the root of the problem is being a creature of habit as long as things aren't going wrong. Doing the same things day after day because they're tried, true and safe. That's complacency. There is no value in that. I'm stuck in it.
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