I just finished watching “A Scanner Darkly” for the first time. I downloaded the hi-def 720p HD-DVD rip off of bittorrent and enjoyed the amazing clarity and detail that only animation can provide through my Infocus projector projecting onto the living room wall of my apartment at 1024×768. I find it a bit ironic … A Scanner Darkly is a very paranoid movie, pretty much a rumination on the mental and emotional state of paranoia throughout. The main character is paranoid of every entity he interacts with, his friends, his girlfriend, his boss, himself, and most of all the very high-tech 3-D surveillance police state that he works for. In some ways it is true, we live in a police state. More than ever, surveillance cameras, federal wiretapping and internet snooping programs and efforts are moving forward and coming online. But back to the irony, here I am, publicly blogging about a movie I watched that was downloaded off of bittorrent. Perhaps this is folly (though, who’s to say I haven’t already bought the HD-DVD of Scanner Darkly and just downloaded a version because I don’t have an HD-DVD player to actually play the disc), but I think it says a lot about the state of law enforcement and its attempts at “total information awareness.”
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When I discovered my dad’s William Gibson books as a teenager, my view of reality and the possibilities to come in our technology-infused culture was forever changed. His vision of a net-connected world and the information black market it thus created spoke to me on a deep level. It has been interesting to see current culture catch up with his prophetic visions, while at the same time his books have moved backwards in time to the point where he now writes about the present. It seems a telling characteristic of our time that science fiction, once the harbinger of things to come, has now reached a point where it can only struggle to explain the character of the present, accelerating so rapidly that only the eyes of prescient futurists can make any attempt to take true stock of the changing world we now move through so rapidly. Such is the case with Gibson’s latest, “Spook Country,” an examination of America post-911 as only William Gibson could tell it.
A statement Gibson makes in the video below again reminds me that as unnatural and destructive a force humanity can appear to be, there is no escaping the fact that we are still, in fact, a force of nature. Or even, humanity is nothing more than another aspect of the force that is nature. From the viewpoint of an animal species moving through evolution, perhaps this point in human history is really not so strange. Read the rest of this entry »
Not a real haiku, but fridge haiku just sounds so much better than fridge poetry. This message from who knows where caught my attention from the bottom of the fridge just now. I have no recollection of how it got there.
The importance of overcoming resistance is a universal one, and it was brought into focus today on two separate occasions thus stirring in me synchronistic identifications, as is my wont when well-timed messages come in duplicate or triplicate.
I have recently embarked on a path of meditation and spiritual awakening resulting from a ten-day course in a meditation technique known as Vipassana, or insight meditation. A detailed description of the course and its affect on me is forthcoming in a series of posts to this blog.
But today has been about Resistance. I have been struggling with it since returning from the Vipassana course last week and truly, throughout my life. It manifests in many ways, particularly procrastination, but distilling it down to that one word, Resistance, has been the lesson of the day, and I am embracing that lesson.
The lesson began when the UPS man showed up at my door this morning with a delivery from Amazon, a book that when recommended by a friend, I knew I had to get immediately, and actually purchased it while on the phone with this friend, who found it sitting on the bar she worked at, a gift from a stranger. It is called ”The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. Reading through the first few pages, the focus of the book is immediately clear: overcoming resistance.
My current resistance is to practicing the admittedly demanding meditation regimen of sitting 2 hours per day, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. This sounds like a lot, but the process has already revealed its value to me and I am convinced of the benefit practicing such a regimen will have on my life. Yet I have not managed to complete the regimen on one day yet. Once a day is all I have been able to muster and sometimes not even that much and none of the sittings have been a full hour in length. This angers and depresses my spirit yet here I am, at the computer all day, setting up this blog. Which is a valuable endeavor, to be sure, yet it is still a giving in to resistance.
This kind of situation is familiar to many I am sure. Pressfield starts things off with a list of endeavors that will stir in oneself the specter of resistance without fail:
- The pursuit of any calling in writing, painting, music, film, dance, or any creative art, however marginal or unconventional.
- The launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise, for profit or otherwise.
- Any diet or health regimen.
- Any program of spiritual advancement.
- Any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals.
- Any course or program designed to overcome an unwholesome habit or addiction.
- Education of any kind.
- etc. etc. etc.
But it was a line on the very first page of the book that made me put the book down and know that I needed to get to work immediately and not at any point in the future or after this or after that: “Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice?” This book found me at the right time.
And then the synchronicity continued. Struggling to continue my meditation practice in solitude, I had just sat down in my room and had been meditating for about 5 minutes when I remembered that there was a group sitting conducted by a local Vipassana teacher, Noah Levine in Santa Monica every Monday evening. There was just enough time to get there, so I left immediately. It helped a lot to do the practice among others, and after the 30 minute guided meditation, it was almost no surprise that the subject of Noah’s teaching for that night was, you guessed it, Resistance.
It is a habit of the mind and it will never stop, but it will rob me of everything I seek on this path if I continue to give in to it. During the talk, when Noah was talking about the inherent difficulty of a spiritual path he mentioned Don Juan, the teacher from the Carlos Casteneda books and his name for those that walked this path: Spiritual Warriors. As a warrior it is important to know one’s enemy. I now know my enemy’s name. This blog will be one of many tools I employ to help fight this war on Resistance. I hope it can serve you as well.
