Archive for September, 2005
I walked into the Shala this morning exhausted. I had been up too late, and it had poured rain all through the early hours of the morning, waking me up over and over again. My teacher looked at me warmly (like she always does) and asked how I was feeling. I admitted I was tired and she, with earnest empathy, said something to the effect of, “Yea…rainy days will do that to you.” She leaned in then and said “You know what though? I find this is my sunshine. Once I’ve done my practice nothing can hold me back”.
My teachers (see the ‘bios’ section on the site) are unbelievable. I had read religious texts and books on philosophy as long as I could remember, and filled journals with what I thought it meant to be a living piece of God, and how to live consciously and with peace of mind…but I’d never been able to slow my own mind down enough to take any of what I’d read or written and put it into action.
I tried meditation and yoga in a few different contexts, thinking it would be a good route to take…without anything ever sticking. This Shala that they have built, though, is incredable…and after only a few months it has had profound effects, not only on how my body looks and feels, but on how I feel in relation to the world, and situations I find myself in. My ability to focus has increased 10-fold, and I’m finally finding that the things I think about the world around me are growing near to the philosophies I’ve always held to be true.
My teachers guide us through Ashtanga Yoga in the traditional Mysore fashion. Each of us is on our own learning curve, working gradually through the routine, achieving new poses at seperate paces. We practice everyday, all-together, with our teachers walking around us helping us individually, rather than leading us in-sync.
These days (at least where I live) there are more styles of yoga being taught in more ways than you could hope to count. …and each one has its own benefits. For me though, I’ve gotta say: the support of daily practice combined with the empowerment of having “your own” practice inherant in the Mysore style is something I really love. If you’re interested in yoga, and have tried out a few differant styles but not found something that fits yet, I definately recommend checking it out.
Ashtanga Yoga Shala (Toronto)
Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute (Mysore, India)
September 29th, 2005
I was accused of cop-ing out on my last entry on love. …and I know I did, but only because there were too many bloody angles to come from.
The one I’ve been thinking about these last couple of days is this:
Which should take precedence, hopes and dreams of our own, or the love we end up having for someone else? How much compromise (of your plans.. or even yourself) is implicit in the very act of being in a relationship with someone else?
I can’t wait to be a engaged in the world of academia. I have a number of ideas about cognitive science, religion, and education that I can’t wait to flesh out. I like to fantasize about traveling the world, learning languages and meeting fascinating people from whom to learn and write more.
This is my personal dream; and thinking about it makes me want to dance as I walk to class(even though I don’t know how, and all the people on the street around me would point and laugh).
These hopes are so close to the core of who I am, and light me up so completely when I think about them, that it always amazes me how quickly I can forget about them. …It’s always a boy. He gets into my head, and before I know it, I’ve lost track of myself to follow him. I’ve been on both ends of the stick too…and sometimes it can be just as painful and frustrating to watch someone else losing track of themselves…
…But what is it that makes people do it? Does love get used as a crutch–a scapegoat from having to pursue (and potentially fail to reach) personal goals? …or do people really just get distracted and forget?
…Or for those of us who tend resist the pull in the end: are we the ones missing the point? Is it that we are meant to give everything else up for that one person, and a life with them …and we’re just afraid of that leap?
I know I’m essentially cop-ing out again, but I’d like to think there’s a middle ground. That both our own dreams, and the potential for love are found equally deep in the core of who we are. I think at this stage I’m still clinging to the idea that I’ll come across someone with whom I can go through life, without either of us having to give up the thing that makes us want to dance in the street.
September 27th, 2005
Some thoughts from Paulo Freire on sectarianism vs. radicalization, and on the challenges the world proposes to those among us who hope to be radical…
“Sectarianism, fed by fanaticsm, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates.”
“The sectarian…blinded by irrationality does not (or cannot) perceive the dynamic of reality…[they consider] the future pre-established–a kind of inevitable fate, fortune or destiny. Starting from their false views of history they develop forms of action that negate freedom.
They suffer from an absence of doubt.”
“To admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labour, for the overcoming of alientation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny…”
“World and human beings do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction… If humankind produce social reality (which in the “inversion of the praxis” turns back upon them and conditions them), then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity. .. ”
“The more the people unveil the challenging reality which is to be the object of their transforming action, the more critically they enter that reality. In this way they are ‘conciously activating the subsequent development of their experiences.’ There would be no human action if there were no objective reality, no world to be the ‘not I’ of the person and to challenge them; just as there would be no human action if humankind were not a ‘project,’ if he or she were not able to transcend himself or herself, if one were not able to perceive reality and understand it in order to transform it.”
**The present-day western world was founded on ideals of freedom, but many today are confusing “freedom with the maintenance of the status quo”. Paulo Friere wrote about education as a tool for liberation, specifically to those in his own country of Brazil, and other South American countries. He challenged the oppressed to rise up, and acknowledge their own humanity, as well as the humanity of their oppressors. Although his works are deeply rooted in a particular historical context, they are relevant all around the world, where leaders construct societies in which citizens are encouraged to succumb to the “logic of the system”.
September 25th, 2005
Only when engrossed in a stats textbook does scrubbing one’s bathtub seem like the most exciting thing in the world.
When I woke up this morning I intended on getting all sort of readings done for next week’s classes. My list of accomplished tasks, however, looks more like this:
-cleaned room
-did 4 loads of laundry (yes I know I have too many clothes)
-did dishes
-swept kitchen
-cleaned bathroom
-solidified dates with my brother for our upcoming trip to Ireland
It’s now almost 6pm, I have just about finished a blog entry, am about to make dinner for my roommate and I, and then head to the climbing gym for endless hours of tendonitis-inducing bouldering and routes.
For someone who loves school, my ability to avoid school work amazes me…ah well it’s only Saturday, I still have one day of weekend left.
While on the topic of school (and on a more positive note), I started volunteering for Discovery Private School on Friday. I had the most amaaaazing time working with the children, and can’t wait until next week. If you know me, you probably know I feel very passionately about the way we educate our children, and do not agree with how the public school system in Canada works. I don’t, by any means, think that the people running DPS have built a perfect school, …but they are doing an amazing job at building a practical, successful school, with empowered children. ….I’m very proud to be a part of it.
September 24th, 2005
I was reminded last night, of a paranormal claim I like to pretend I’ve never heard of.
In November of 2004 (recently following the election), George Bush came Ottawa to speak with our esteemed Prime Minister about a number of issues, most specifically: space defence. I was pretty sure it was part of my duty as a University student to attend at least one protest, and I figured the one protesting Bush’s presence in my country was as good a one as any. So I loaded on a bus with a bunch of other UofT students and headed up to the nation’s capital to be a tiny little voice among the thousands that would be ignored by nearly all broadcasts that reported on Bush’s visit.
…anyway, that’s not really the point of the story. On the way back to Toronto, I was talking to a friend’s roommate about America as a whole, and he was telling me about this guy, John Titor who showed up online in 2000 predicting the end of Western Civilization (and the world for that matter) as we know it by between 2008 and 2015. He claimed (this is where it gets good ;)) to be a time traveller from the year 2036, and reported that the election in 2004 would be followed by steadily increasing civil unrest. America was to gradually turn into a police state, and as people became aware of their decreasing civil rights a civil war was to begin by 2005, with everyone in the West knowing by 2008 that America would never return to how it had been.
I’m embarrassed to admit that having read a bit about all of this, I’m actually sitting on the fence. Rationally, the whole thing is ridiculous, of course. The part that gets me though is this: Imagine it’s 2000 and you read some guy’s online posts claiming that there will be civil war in America by 2005. Ridiculous, no? I mean, America a police state? …preposterous. But by the time I heard about it in 2004–the whole thing didn’t seem that unbelievable anymore. The series of events during Bush’s first term in office, with the war on terror, and the Patriot act were certainly headed away from civil rights, and toward a police state at a frightening rate.
Anyway, last night, I was watching the Daily Show, and the focus was on the current state of things in New Orleans. My friend Mike (who’d also been told about John Titor at some stage–and with whom I’d talked about it some months before) said with a laugh, “Well it’s almost the end of 2005, I guess we’ll find out soon enough whether there was any truth to what that Titor guy was saying…” …and as both of us turned back to the show we realized that the city of New Orleans is basically in lockdown, with more automatic weapons out on the street than in a couple occupied nations right now, and with media not allowed to take pictures or turn on cameras in many of the key areas. Between that and the wonderful developments with the surpreme court….well, at the end of the day, you can only laugh…but how shocking would it really be if some serious civil unrest began in America by the end of the year? …(wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest…)
September 20th, 2005
There is a homeless man who walks up and down my street every single day. He caught my eye a few months ago, and since then I see him most mornings on my way home from yoga, and usually a few more times throughout the day. This morning I noticed a scab on his forehead, and it reminded me of the terrible sunburn he had in August.
Toronto had an unbearable (record-breaking) summer. I could barely handle it and I live in a house with airconditioning. I remember in May when he stopped wearing his coat…but I don’t know how he managed his daily routine in mid-July during the peak of the heat.
A girl I work with knows him. She volunteeres at a soup kitchen up at bloor and avenue. She knows most of the homeless people we walk by, actually. Often she remembers their names, greets them, and tells me their stories as we walk away.
I live less than a block North of the Scott Mission, one of the relief centres in the city, and I walk by it every day on my way to work. I haven’t worked up the courage to go in and volunteer yet, though. I’m very embarrassed about that.
I wear a ‘make poverty history’ pin on my backpack, and one of the white bands most days I’m on campus. I volunteer for Oxfam, and am the first to talk about the economic injustice imposed on developing countries (by mal-developed ones). Poverty and hunger are really easy issues to talk about fixing when they’re not on your doorstep…but why do we do so little for the people that are hungry and in need right in front of us?
Where I grew up there weren’t any homeless people. In the next city over there were two, and everyone knew their names. People coming from where I do tend to have the most arrogant view toward the homeless. We like to think they are in their situation because they made poorer choices than we did, and that there are lots of oppurtunites for them to better their lives if they ‘weren’t so lazy’. When people from where I live come to the city they can be downright mean to homeless people.
I can’t decide if that hurts more or less than the apathy of the city people. Once you’ve lived in Toronto for a while you just stop looking. You perfect the delivery of a quick, curt “sorry I don’t have any cash” without even having to look up (I find it really hard to look people that helpless and hungry in the eye, knowing that there’s nothing I can do for them…..and yet how can you deny someone the humanity of looking them in the eye?).
I don’t know how to fix the problem of homelessness, but I know that in a country like Canada we have the resources to do it. Cathy Crowe is one woman who does seem to have some good ideas, and her speech to the Princess Margaret Hospital last Febuary, outlines, in much more detail than I could presume to, the level of the problem that we’re dealing with.
We’re talking about disease, starvation, suicide, murder….4 deaths every month (more in the winter months)…on the streets of Toronto.
That girl I work with… she hands out sealed water bottles to people from her car when she’s driving by. She does it with a smile and says “…I dunno, but I like to think every little bit helps.” And the thing is that she’s right. …it does. If we all did that…if we all cared a little bit…knew the names of some of the people…saw the name of someone we’d met written at the Church by the Eaton Centre, and knew they had died in a winter cold snap…it would change…
September 19th, 2005
Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth. It is out after him [or her]. It is something he [or she] suffers from.- Soren Kierkegaard
When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. Neverthess, noone doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.
- Albert Einstein
“Alderson Hale was not a philosopher or a religious type. He was an artist with a passion for the things he could see in this world. Although he did beleive that every object had an inner nature, he rarely thought of those things he could not touch or see. As a result, he had no opinion about whether or not there were intelligent powers hidden in the realms above. And yet Alderson did have a human heart (which had a will of its own), and when he finished bouncing off the stone floor where the soldiers had tossed him, he looked up and cried, ‘Help!’”
~from Answer my Prayer by Sid Hite
“Every culture that has ever existed has contained some element of spiritual teaching near, or at the core of, the belief systems that define the culture. The urge to understand the hidden world is universal to all people. Religion, for the most part, is an attempt first to gain such an understanding, then to express and integrate that knowledge back into the culture from which it has sprung. Ideally, the religion of a place reflects the moral and philosophical beliefs of the people it serves. Occasionally there are multiple religions serving a variety of seperate groups within a culture. Sometimes religion leads and the people follow; other times the relationship is reversed.
Compared to other cultures Korasan is rather unsual. A strong spiritual influence prevades the land, yet there exists no organized religion to interpret and perpetuate this influence. Korasanians (for the most part) simply know that it is the individual’s responsibility to behave with moral integrity and good will to others. As a people, they do not require ecumenical leaders to remind them of this duty. Generally, they accept that there is much about life that is, and will always remain, a mystery. If asked about their beleifs, typical Korasanians might say that they beleive there is a God in heaven attended by a hierarchy of angels, and a few might mention the existance of a celestial orchestra; but this is all proper Korasanians will say about the matter. If pressed for further details they are apt to recommend you go figure it out for yourself.”
~from Answer my Prayer by Sid Hite
September 16th, 2005
A series of very traumatic things happened to me today:
1.) I was coerced into beginning a real-live blogger blog
2.) I attended a university-level class on how to put together lego robots and make them move around on desktops.
3.) It was explained to me that it was quite simple to forward emails from my utoronto email account into my gmail account, and that they could easily be filtered into their very own file.
4.) I went to work and got trained on video-editing, programming, and web design.
Some background may be necessary here: I am not a techy. …and for all intents and purposes I would like to keep it that way.
It’s not that I don’t use, or haven’t benefited from computers. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t make it through highschool during 1999-2003 without being a hardcore ICQ and msn addict. And having spent a year away on an exchange program I have certainly benefited from the ease and speed of email communication. Somehow though, I have repeatedly evaded chances to learn more about how computers work. On some very deep level I’m opposed to the whole thing.
When it comes to the blogs, and websites, I know I’m just being silly. I think, with time, I will learn to use, and enjoy all the wonderful things you can do with computers these days. …it’s the lego class that really gets to me…
We were playing with robots to introduce us all to the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence because in Cognitive Science (my area of study) the leading school of thought propogates that A.I. is going to help us determine, once and for all, how the human mind works. The basic argument is that “we will create it, and then because we created it we will understand it”. I’ve been doing my duty as a good little cog sci student. I took an introductory programming course, and now I’m doing all this A.I, but I have to admit: to me, the whole thing just seems preposterous.
It’s not that I don’t think we’ve begun creating machines to which ‘thought’ could be attributed. I’ll even buy that we could some day succeed in creating machines conciously aware of their ability to think…what I don’t understand is why on God’s green earth we would want to do something like that before we’ve even figured out what our own conciousness means?
A sidestep into evolution might be helpful here:
Birds fly. Bees fly. Birds and bees do not fly in the same way.
I can see. The fly on my wall can see. The fly on my wall and I cannot see in the same way.
….with me? …O.K. Our ability to think, is a fluke of evolution just like our ability to see. Over time, processes developed (sight, hearing, memory…etc), and we were left with amazing brains in our heads that eventually allowed us not only to navigate and survive in our environment, but to be aware of our own existance. Really it’s a really fascinating, neat gift. ….And I definately beleive (especially given all the funding that goes into A.I.) that we will be able to create electronic beings capable of the same level of awareness…
….but that doesn’t mean their awareness, even if it accomplished the same things, would actually be the same as ours…it could be as disimilar as how birds and bees fly…couldn’t it?
Anyway, the head of the cog. sci. department at UofT promised me he could convince me that A.I. was worth studying if I gave him a chance …so I’ll stick it out through this course and see if anything comes of it.
September 15th, 2005
So my cousin Frank has suggested I begin blogging. It’s something I’d planned on doing for a while, but never seemed to be able to start, mostly because I couldn’t figure out what to write about. It’s just been pointed out to me, however, that I can write about anything..so that’s going to be the plan…
I’ve just returned home (to Toronto) after a three week vacation to visit family of mine in Ireland. On one hand I’m happy to be home. It feels great getting back into my yoga, climbing and academic routines. On the other hand, my travel bug has been reawakened (it got pretty exhausted after my year in Japan and nodded off there for a while) and I want out of here as soon as possible…(Why is it that some people seem to have such innate desires to travel the world, while others are perfectly content to spend their entire lives where they were born? ) so …the new plan is graduate school in Ireland ASAP.
I can’t seem to decide what it is about Ireland that attracts me so much. I’m beginning to think it’s like an identity thing for me. Growing up the process of introducing myself went something like this:
“My name is Padraigin”
“Sorry…?”
“Padraigin”
“…”
“Pod-ra-geen”
“Oh!…How do you spell that?”
“p-a-d-r-a-i-g-i-n”
“Interesting. What background is that?”
…everytime.
I think if my name was Katie or Jenn it never would have come up, but as it was I was always reminded of my Irish background. …reminded of it, but unaware of what it meant.
Anyway, for whatever reason, there is something about the country, and the lifestyle, that I love more than I can explain.
It seems to me, whenever I travel outside of North America, that we lack a very essential part of ‘culture’ here. It’s like we’re a fascinating introduction to any culture in the world, but if you want to experiance any one culture fully you’ve gotta look somewhere else.
I’m not one to advocate the preservation of cultures (I can’t figure out, for example, why the people in Quebec talk about wanting to preserve their culture…they’re no more French than the rest of the country is British English, Scottish or Irish at this point…?) because I beleive very strongly that cultures are meant to develop and change over time. But it does frighten me to think that in Canada and the US ancient cultures seem to have given way to a ‘culture’ of advertising, media and materialism. Cultures used to bring people together and help them enjoy life. Today our culture seems determined to isolate us, and leave us unaware of what it even means to enjoy life. The internet gives us the illusion of being closer to people without making us actually leave the solitude of our own computer; while our consumer culture tells us we only need more stuff to happy(something I think we’re all rapidly determining is preposterous).
The reason I bring all this up also has to do with my vacation in Ireland. The country has changed so much in the two years since I was there last I couldn’t beleive it. As a member of the EU, Ireland has received all sorts of funding for new highways and bypasses past all the tiny towns you used to pass through driving across the country. More incredably, as more money flows into the economy more and more North American style supermarkets, and neon lighted gas stations are going up. I know this phenomenon is taking place all over the world, so I’m certainly not pointing any fingers at the Emerald Isle…but it blows my mind…and I’m left with two questions:
1. When did the North American culture take such a bizarre turn for the useless?
2. Why does the rest of the world seem so eager to follow us?
The good news, I guess, is that all around the world oppositions to this useless consumerism seem to be sprouting up (my cousin recently introduced me to http://www.authenticbusiness.co.uk/ ..very interesting site). Maybe we’re all waking up and there will finally be some changes. When the time comes, however, I hope I’ve already moved to Europe. At least there the ties to how life used to be are still strong…I don’t even think those of us in North America have any idea how else we could live…
September 15th, 2005