Alan Watts

Summer is gradually filling the air in Japan, and with that also the deadline for my master's dissertation. No time for love, no time for sleeping late, or taking pictures while aimlessly strawling around downtown Osaka. Time for study and academic bliss. In the meanwhile, Four Tet has been replaced by recorded lectures of Alan Watts. Japanese Buddhist history on my laptop, Eastern Philosophy in my ears. Time is an illusion.

alanwatts

Anti-Japanese sentiments in China

This is probably going to be my first political post since Thirsty came to life, but maybe this will help Thirsty to slowly become an adult. Any non-nihilist will agree with me that education is by far one of the most important factors in self-realization and that therefore it should be treated with the utmost caution and dedication.

Just like the Japanese were taught that their emperor was a god during the first half of the 20th century, Japanese kids are now supposed to be taught that that was a load of extremely dangerous bs. However, some apparently believe that this kind of domestic masochism is no longer needed for the economic empire that is Japan. New textbooks intended to be used in junior high schools have been published in an attempt to minimalize Japan's war atrocities. The Nanjing massacre, where thousands were brutally murdered, women received their Last Rites in the form of Japanese sperm and a bullet to finish it off and babies were caressed with spears through their bodies or received free swimming lessons in boiling water, is now called the 'Nanjing Incident'.

[Tip: type in the words 'Nanking' and 'massacre' @ google.jp and click on the first hit. ]

Ok, my words are quite tendencious, but so are theirs. It makes me sick when I see seventy year old politicians on television babbling about how "beautiful Japan is" and how they "don't understand why people don't realize this". Um, well, hello?

Of course, the agitation in China also has a domestic side to it, the fastest growing economy on the planet has left many people out and the gap between those on the high-speed train and those who have suffered to build it, is still widening. Some people even predict a civil war within the next ten years. That the current protests are a way of releasing some of this tension by ways of directing it at a common enemy, as some people say, could be quite true, but that is not for me to judge.

What I do know, is that conservative nationalism hasn't been wiped out yet, on the contrary, if the Japanese Ministry of Education gave its 'yay' to these new (old) views, I can only conclude that something is rotten in the state of Japan. And it's starting to smell. As BBC's William Horsley says: "But on this trip to Japan I could not avoid the conclusion that a new mood of nationalism has also begun to take hold in this country which has been publicly devoted to peace and economic prosperity for so long." Indeed, tis true.

Don't get me wrong, I really do love this country and I am grateful to be here. A lot can be learned from it, but maybe it should also learn from itself.

Physical silence = vibration ?

It was pointed out to me yesterday that the world (= reality?) might consist of 11 dimensions. This should be provable with a theory called M-theory, which is a refinement of a number of string-theories. Basically, these say that the smallest parts of reality aren't just dots, but strings. And as this website also explains: "The subatomic particles we see in nature are nothing more than different resonances of the vibrating superstrings, in the same way that different musical notes emanate from the different modes of vibration of a violin string."

For some reason, I have always thought of silence and absolute stagnation as invisible vibration. I have talked about these things before, but even the previous post can be seen from that light I guess. What is at rest, merely looks at rest, it bears greater vibrational energy (= its potential) than moving matter (= causality). The silence before the storm is more powerful than the storm itself.

m-theory, string-theory, energy, vibration

Potentiality in between A and B

While the cherry blossoms are in full bloom and anticyclonic tendencies slightly jazz up the national hormone level, beneath the trees are seated one-day-in-the-week nuclear families, consuming.

Everything we do in life is a form of consumption I guess. And in a sense, consumption is a form of recycling. Like burning petrol can make your car drive, watching a porn movie can make your hands move. Life, this world, is all about triggering, causing, connecting, relaying, executing, consecuting, expressing and consuming. (I realize this statement doesn't surpass the level of cheap hollywood philosophy, most likely to be uttered by some advertising agent through his nokia cell phone in a porsche convertible, but allow me to continue this monologue, most likely only to be read by a maximum of ten people.)

Cause-and-consequence is the basic formula for any fact and/or existence. I think this and therefore I think that. We have sex and therefore you are pregnant. Or at least, there is a possibility or -even better- potential for it.

It is because we have sex, you can get pregnant.

That is why we cannot speak of because A is the cause, therefore B is the consequence, with A being the cause and B being the consequence.

It is not because we have sex that you are pregnant. No, you are pregnant because we have sex.

Because B is the consequence, therefore A is the cause.

I know, I know, this sounds like extreme gibberish and linguistically I suppose there isn't any problem whatsoever. But what I would like to point out here is the following: we fear and/or dream of future consequences, we think of past causes. We have sex and fear aids (or dream of a baby), but we think of who might have infected us. We don't fear or dream of what has already been, and we don't really rationally think of what is to come, because it is unknown, although we of course try our very best to. The present is the frontline of both, swallowed by the future, smashed under the weight of the past.

Yesterday, when I was invited to join one of those cherry-blossom-consuming families, I cherished the potential. I dreamt of a happy consequence. And so did everyone else. We started consuming alchohol. They started consuming too much alcohol. Their children saw how their parents were turning into a drunken, loud bunch of impolite creatures. I didn't have a good time. And I know the cause. Just like when these kids will be traumatised adults, the cause will be thought of. But for now, we can only hope they haven't been traumatised. Although we fear they will be. For now, I can only hope for the best.

The neutrality of potential is both unbearable as well as thankful. It is up to us to either positivize*, negativize* or maintain the neutrality of this potential (by merely doing nothing). Either way, it is consumption of the potential. By consuming the potential, by acting upon it, we create the link between the past cause and the future consequence. Funny thing is: potential is not part of the past, and it is not part of the future. It is now. Only in the present there is potential.

*these terms imply a certain morality in all actions and facts, but the concrete content of this morality is solely depending on the consumer's reading of the potential