A commenter writes on my seemingly quite rapid blogging style:
i wonder, can all this stuff hurtling so rapidly into space time, so quickly, so as to disorientate, to impress anxiousness, as normative, be ecological?
My Buddhist teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche indentifies a pervasive Western problem when he talks about emotional speed. But unlike some forms of anti-Western primitivism, he lays the blame on the subtle body. (Psyche, mood, psychosomatic body, take your pick.) Not on the mind. Mind, he argues, is supposed to go very fast—without aggression. The feeling of speeding in your head, he argues, is a result of the psychic pressure we put on ourselves. Liberated from this, your mind can go lightning fast. Why not? In Tibetan Buddhism it's called vajra energy.
You can be just as aggressive if you're slow. If you talk to some of the mindfulness addicts out there you'll see what I mean. Anti-intellectualism is rife, especially among intellectuals. You can very very mindfully make someone feel bad about their speed, for instance—smart kids get scapegoated like that at school all the time.
You can also kill animals very mindfully, very carefully. Lovingly and slowly I insert the knife into the chicken, carefully, lovingly opening its stomach with my sharp sharp knife. Ever so gently and mindfully I slit the pig's throat.
In brief. Sure speed can be ecological. Just ask a photon hitting a chloroplast. It goes into quantum superposition in nanoseconds, thank goodness, because then we can breathe oxygen.
2 comments:
“in short, the two opponents in a dialogue struggle together, on the same side, against the noise that could jam their voices and their arguments. listen to them raise their voices, concertedly, when the brouhaha begins. debate, once again, presupposes this agreement. the quarrel, or noise in the sense of battle, supposes a common battle against the jamming, or noise in the sense of sound” (serres, 1995)
Nice defense Tim. "Anti intellectualism is indeed rife" and in the strangest of places as you suggest. All attempts to purify and classify intellects are yet another example of the hegemony of hierarchy. The very idea of the expert, the balanced intellectual, the pure mind etc are totally incompatible with the mesh. One speed will never fit all.
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