Ikigai: The Reward Beyond Recognition

“Once you achieve a state of blissful concentration, an audience is not necessary. You enjoy the here and now, and simply go on.

“In life, we sometimes misplace priorities and significance. Too often, we do something for the sake of rewards. If the rewards are not forthcoming, we are disappointed, and lose interest and zeal in the work. That is simply the wrong approach. In general, there are delays between actions and rewards. Even if you finish a good work, rewards are not necessarily forthcoming.

“Reception and recognition occur in a stochastic way, depending on many parameters our of your control. If you can make the process of making an effort your primary source of happiness, then you have succeeded in the most important challenge of your life.”

— Ken Mogi, Awakening Your Ikigai — How the Japanese Wake Up to Joy and Purpose Every Day

 

Bang! Bang! Your Country's Dead

 

People did not wander around the streets with guns when I was growing up in the Midwest, nor did they feel deprived of any rights. This gun madness is the result of a relentless, 40-year fascist propaganda campaign, and it can be curtailed with the sensible gun safety laws we once had. Remember, Wyatt Earp enforced a law against carrying guns on the streets of Tombstone. There's no excuse for our being any less sane than the inhabitants of the wild, wild West.

Many Minds in Mine

“Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it is ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather there seem to be a series of selves that takes turns running the show — and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. In the way they seize controls is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role that feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.”

“…to see that your mind is wandering is to see part of what the Buddha meant when he challenged conventional conceptions of the self; if a CEO-self existed, then presumably the mind would obey its commands and focus on the breath when told to. Now we’re in a position to go further and see that observing your mind in this unruly stage — trying to watch it as the default mode network rages on — can do more than suggest that the conscious ‘you’ isn’t running the show; it can shed light on what is running the show, revealing a picture of the mind strikingly consistent with the modular model.”

— Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True

America, Land of the Selfish

Americans have been taught to be selfish by many decades of capitalistic propaganda, reinforced by TV shows like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," "Keeping Up with the Kardiashians" and "Survivor."

 

Meet the Republican Rat Lickers

Interesting to observe how the GOP has been aiming at abject stupidity all along. Their moment really arrived with Trumpolini. Abject stupidity is necessary if your political goal is to cut the throats of the people voting for you.

 

That Dear Beast Ian Fleming

Ian Flmeing and Nole Coward

“Dear Beastie —

“This is just to inform you that I have read ‘Dr. No’ from cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed every moment. But as the gentleman in ‘Oklahoma!’ sings about Kansas City: ‘You’ve gone about as fur as you ken go.’

“I am willing to accept the centipede, the tarantulas, the land crabs, the giant squid. I am even willing to forgive your reckless use of invented verbs — I inch, Thou inch, He snakes, I snake, We palp, They palp, etc. But what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 6 a.m. in dear old England.

“This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 4 p.m. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue. I was also slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile’s bottom was like a boy’s! I know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays, but really old chap, what could you have been thinking of?

“I am snaking off to New York on Thursday where I shall be for two weeks, and then I inch to Cannes.”

— That was a 1958 letter from author and performer Noel Coward to his friend and Jamaican neighbor Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming and Noel Coward had an odd but strong friendship. Coward once extricated Fleming from a particularly awkward sexual entanglement, demanding and getting Fleming’s new camera and tripod as payment. Coward scolded Fleming over the bedroom farce, saying, “You, my dear, are just on old cunt teaser.”

The actor and director Roy Marsden, who starred as a British spy in TV’s ‘The Sandbaggers,’ observed, “Coward, of course, fancied Fleming like mad. Coward himself never admitted to being homosexual — he always said there were still one or two widows left in Worthing who didn’t know.”

Biographer Peter Quennell said Coward “…treated Ian as he might have treated a difficult social beauty or a wayward prima donna, and often criticized the extremely unfeeling use to which he put his great attractions.”

The Artistic License Renewed website not that Coward “…was famously offered the part of Dr. No in the eponymous film and remarked, ‘No, no, no!’ Nevertheless, he still enjoyed being around production, naturally taking a shine to Sean Connery.”

For his part, Fleming was one of the few people permitted to talk back to Coward, and at one point told him, “Don’t be a silly old bugger.”

Coward replied, “We don’t talk shop here, dear boy.”

Sean Connery and Noel Coward

 

CNN Rolls Over for the Police State

As my friend Philip Martin says, "So anyone in cosplay Camo can stick on a patch that says 'Police' and kidnap people at will?"