Green Oasis

It has been a month since I swore off Mormon-themed blogs for a month, so I guess I can go back if I want. I don’t want.

It has been a positive change in my life for at least two reasons. The first is that I have a lot more time to do other, more important things. I avoided reading at least 367 blog posts. I’m positive that I would have enjoyed many of those posts. Still, I enjoyed the free time that I had instead of reading them. A lot of my blog-reading is pure procrastination. Avoiding reading these blogs gave me less opportunity to put off things I would like to do. (It’s ironic that I would put off things I would like to do, n’est-ce pas?)

The second reason is that I’ve found greater peace of mind. The less often I’m reminded of how annoying and dangerous Mormonism is, the more I’m able to change things that are more within my control. Being constantly outraged wears me down over time like water torture. It threatens to make me see Mormons and other religious folk as flat, two-dimensional characters in a farce. That’s far from the truth. I owe my first loyalty to the truth.

So I’ll be releasing a select one or two blogs from quarantine, but I am hereby reclaiming a little more of my time and head-space from Mormonism.

Merlin Mann is a smart guy who spends a lot of time thinking about how to accomplish the important things in life (as opposed to checking your email inbox every five minutes). Here’s his presentation called Who Moved My Brain? Revaluing Time & Attention.

Our consciousness vanishes in dreamless sleep every night. It’s such a familiar experience that we pay no attention to the annihilation of our sentience. I imagine we experience death as the dreamless sleep from which we never awake to notice that time has passed and the world has gone on without our awareness.

All the earth is a grave and nothing escapes it,
nothing is so perfect that it does not descend to its tomb.
Rivers, rivulets, fountains and waters flow,
but never return to their joyful beginnings;
anxiously they hasten on the vast realms of the rain god.
As they widen their banks, they also fashion the sad urn of their burial.

Filled are the bowels of the earth
with pestilential dust once flesh and bone,
once animate bodies of man who sat upon thrones,
decided cases, presided in council, commanded armies,
conquered provinces, possessed treasure, destroyed temples,
exulted in their pride, majesty, fortune, praise and power.

Vanished are these glories, just as the fearful smoke vanishes
that belches forth from the infernal fires of Popocatepetl.
Nothing recalls them but the written pate.

(A poem purportedly written by Nezahualcoyotl, King of Texcoco)

I was recently reminded of the Tetris effect whereby a person who plays Tetris a lot starts to imagine how real world objects would fit together or imagine tetrominoes falling from the sky. In other words, the rules of the game become a mental habit.

I’ve recently started to notice the same effect with Go. I’ve begun to evaluate the tactical strength of any series of dots. I’ve also started to dream about Go positions. Odd.

Atul Gawande wrote a fascinating article for the New Yorker. It’s premise is that most of our perceptions come not from direct experience of the world but from memory. In other words, very little information is coming to us from the world outside our skull. Our minds are fudging the rest based on past experience. Using case studies of amputees who still perceive sensations in their missing limb and a woman who itched so persistently that she scratched… well I won’t spoil the story.

(via kottke.org)

Update: Dr. Ramachandran explains some of these same phenomena.