003 - Journal Excerpts - 2026/05/07

A few small passages I encountered on my look back through some past journals of mine.

Eating Without a Table

To eat, with forks and knives and all, at a table is well enough for company, and oneself among them.

But when soleness returns to the form, to eat with bowl and implement of choice returns with it to pride of place. Chopsticks, spoon, or fork, it matters not. A nearby surface saves one's lap from scalding should the need arise. Let the sight be spared from all but one's selfsame eyes. For to eat but not to dine is a personal pastime. Let the form commune with utility, let grace flow from nature and desire entwined. Be at peace, with external thoughts or without, lacking or maintaining some activity while the self is sustained and expressed as one.

On Process, date marked "Today"

I'm tired. I've a weariness that knows no sleep or rest. To sit, stand, or walk with fulfillment, either grounded or with certainty from with that all passes, none matters, and to drift and act as nature dictates. To be comfortable, in motion or at rest. It seems not such a great ask, but we lack even this. I balk at treating the symptoms; take medicine, be social, listen when others instruct you on how to be happy. To sit and pray until I find that I have come to believe. It strikes me as a macabre play. To reach the truth by telling lies? To liken some passing phantom to the divine and claim that process when at the pearly gates and instructed to show your work? I want neither some structuralist paradigm not instructions to meditate when brushing my teeth and putting my shoes away.

It should need no process, nor an explanation (whether one exists or not). I don't need to know why I am happy, not have some trite ritual to banish the daemons of dread should they approach. I don't want to report success at not feeling bad when bad things happen, like some wretched scarecrow afraid of the dark.

The way of heaven is innate. To practice it would be only serve to disorient oneself. I find it hard to believe that life is suffering and the way is misery. Those I know that think the least are the happiest. But to think of how to think less, learn not to learn, adapt not to compensate, and let the challenges (both those that spring from life and from one's own actions) be not challenges, but The Way Things Are has proven difficult.

-- Your tired friend, Thomas Ulmer

On Mind Body Duality, paraphrased

It seems natural to divide the experience of being human along a few lines, particularly when steeped in ambiently post-enlightenment thought. Often this is a Mind vs Body distinction, sometimes a Soul vs Flesh, or Mind vs Matter, or Ego/Super Ego/Id, or a less pithy but personal favorite of Markovian autonomous machinery fused with semi-coherent thinking engine.

It is well trodden ground that a major through-line of Western thought, visible in Greek philosophy, Roman Christianity, the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution era Rationalism, etc. that somehow the true Self is or should be more associated with the thinking part of being alive. That one should be Rational as opposed to driven by passions or moved by physical or chemical processes. These arguments appear in the form of exhalations of the Good Life and the Proper Way to Be along with various images of Ascended Man. Critically, even aside from the claim that it's better to be Rational, this trend has led to an over association of the Self with the Ego (or the Mind) in Western thought.

This is visible everywhere, from referring to the brain as separate from the Self, to discomfort at the idea that being hungry should affect how and what you think. Few people are comfortable sitting with the knowledge that your trial after lunch is much more likely to go well than one before.

Beyond discomfort at the lack of control over the intangible self and thoughts (surely the most tempting aspect of our experience to assume one would be able to change on a whim), I claim it stems partially from the grain of truth. One cannot decide to be happy or to concentrate as much as one cannot decide to be physically healthy, and expect it to occur. However one has indirect control, insofar as one can alter the surrounding environment which in turn effects the state of mind which can't be tuned directly. You can decide what and when to eat, but not that eating or not eating will effect you.

These influences, the symptoms of the infrastructure of the brain are extremely frustrating, particularly in combination with the indirect control over them. Beyond that, both inherently and for the above-mentioned cultural reasons, the effects of said infrastructure can be very hard to detect. They tend to slide into the periphery; since they are definitional not the part of the brain that does the directed spotlight thinking, it can be extremely hard to shine said spotlight on them. Thinking about what happens when you aren't thinking tends to make them retreat further. Hesitation, impinged spirituality, and habitual association of the Self with the Ego makes it hard for me (Self) to step out of myself (Ego) long enough for it to be silent and have the rest speak up.

It seems to me that some practices, like Zen Buddhism aim to stamp out the Ego entirely (and some capacity for abstraction/pattern recognition with it). This seems tempting, as it puts you in direct correspondence with experiences that have innate joy in them, while eliminating the feeling of frustrated responsibility for things which may or may not be alterable about your life. This is of course a hyperbolic interpretation of the doctrine, "the grace to accept that which I cannot change" is morally the same idea. Despite that, I find this approach unappealing. It eliminates the possibility of innate joy in the purely abstract, which any design discipline or pure mathematical activity seems indicative of. It seems dual to a Hegelian view of the world as a combination of purely abstract categories, undermining the immediate sensuality of phenomenons, at least in the human experience.

Insofar as my existence will always be comprised of both an phenomenological experience over which I have at most indirect control and a semi directed abstract understanding of the world through (hopefully) coherent thought, I think attempts to define one in terms of the other is fairly uninteresting. A pure materialist view of life and an exclusively spiritual one seem to me to miss the point. Surely the interesting part of being human is in the combination? Maybe the Soul persists into a life we can't know about, and maybe the universe is describable in total certainly with some axiomatic set of laws, but either way if those descriptions are unhelpful for describing and predicting the experience of being alive then they aren't very compelling to me, even if they are correct. Not to mention an understanding of complexity theory and logical incompleteness has thoroughly killed my interested in any "theory of everything".

In short, it seems to me that one must have both, and I have some work cut out for me to return to a more balanced conception of my self from the cultural one I have inherited. Many thanks to Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter for deeply reshaping the language I use to understand these topics and providing a tremendous amount of clarity even when exact knowledge is hard or impossible to achieve.