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| Albion Inn, Oregon. Fruit salad lit by morning sun. |
The Meme chapter is in process, but emerging more slowly than I had expected. No worries, though. It will be written when it gets written. No rush.
Time to return to the kitchen. Later.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Process Note: Slow Going
It's been exactly one month since the last post. I feel as though I must post something, even if only to say 'hello.' As I mentioned in a previous Process Note, our bed and breakfast is doing surprisingly well, and I have been too busy making breakfasts and doing laundry to post to this blog. Right now, it is almost 8 AM and I've been in the kitchen since 6:30. Things are under control in there, so I am squeezing in this short post, written on the computer in the inn's living room.
The Meme chapter is in process, but emerging more slowly than I had expected. No worries, though. It will be written when it gets written. No rush.
Time to return to the kitchen. Later.
The Meme chapter is in process, but emerging more slowly than I had expected. No worries, though. It will be written when it gets written. No rush.
Time to return to the kitchen. Later.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Meme Share: 3 Quotes by Kennedy
These three quotes by the late President John F. Kennedy have to do with memes and meme sharing--
“As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.
“For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
– John F. Kennedy in his Yale University commencement address (New Haven, Connecticut: June 11, 1962), 5:10-6:08
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
― John F. Kennedy
“What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.”
― John F. Kennedy
“As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.
“For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
– John F. Kennedy in his Yale University commencement address (New Haven, Connecticut: June 11, 1962), 5:10-6:08
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
― John F. Kennedy
“What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.”
― John F. Kennedy
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Memes and Problem-Solving
A huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we hold dear, as well as the memes we hate. We enjoy memes we approve of and we are disgusted by memes we disapprove of. The Sanskrit word for these provocative memes is samskara.
The memes we each cling to, both the ones we like and ones we don't like, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now. When one unthinkingly locks onto a meme or set of memes, it is our belief in the memes that determines how we will interpret our surroundings and consequently how we respond. Our response may or may not be the best response to a situation, but it is the only one the meme bundle allows.
During problem-solving, the more tightly held one's memes are, the fewer solutions will present themselves. If you think only a hammer will drive a nail, you will not even consider the flat side of the heavy wrench lying nearby. The ability to consider solutions "outside the box" and to engage in "lateral thinking" comes about through nonattachment to the "shoulds" and "oughts" of how things work. One must be willing to set aside treasured beliefs in order to perceive memes outside one's own bundle and thereby discover fresh solutions.
The memes we each cling to, both the ones we like and ones we don't like, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now. When one unthinkingly locks onto a meme or set of memes, it is our belief in the memes that determines how we will interpret our surroundings and consequently how we respond. Our response may or may not be the best response to a situation, but it is the only one the meme bundle allows.
During problem-solving, the more tightly held one's memes are, the fewer solutions will present themselves. If you think only a hammer will drive a nail, you will not even consider the flat side of the heavy wrench lying nearby. The ability to consider solutions "outside the box" and to engage in "lateral thinking" comes about through nonattachment to the "shoulds" and "oughts" of how things work. One must be willing to set aside treasured beliefs in order to perceive memes outside one's own bundle and thereby discover fresh solutions.
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| "Thinking outside the box" requires one to let go of treasured memes so that a fresh solution may present itself from the wider world of memes |