Voice Note — 9:54 AM
Okay let’s experiment. So yesterday I rigged up my journals to be to be able to accept audio files. There’s a little sequence that would do the transcribe and put it straight into the journals. So we’ll see if that gets around my issue with typing and that issue being that I’m pretty crap at it, fast but inaccurate. So we’ll see how this works. Okay what do I want to talk about? So last night we did our foot soaking procedure, something spiritual for Zee, I’m still trying to figure it out myself, but I’ve been experimenting lately to do more meditation while it happens. So we have this very precise ceremony, certain salts in the dark, we’re putting our feet in this warm water, setting a timer for 20 minutes, and just being. So last night I tried to do more classical meditation on this, so I picked a topic, just traditional, and ran with that and I did Beauty, something that I’ve obviously read about loads, poetry and all the rest of it, but I started to see it as something above and beyond what we normally think about on left brain. Richard Dawkins has come up lately a lot because of something he was saying about AI, but I started to think well okay in a selfish gene context, what uses beauty, what uses awe, what uses looking out in this gorgeous sunset or this amazing sequence of clouds first thing in the morning before the sun rises, is there an evolutionary reason for it? And I couldn’t think of one, so it’ll be one of the things I do today, I’ll research that and see what the world’s talking about, because I’m sure it’s been considered many times. But it was oddly slightly jarring because I’ve always been something of a selfish gene sort of guy, it makes sense in so many ways, there is you’re sure, but it’s a pretty damn good theory. Anyway, so I’ll consider that today. Yeah, especially in the context of love and all the angles of it. Zura rang us this morning coming out of the cafe talking about her issues with Bruno and their difference in the way they see the world and the way they see relationships and so on. I thought my gosh, yeah, all right, you can reduce a fair bit of this down to selfish gene, but a lot of it you can’t, a lot of it’s higher than that. And then just to top it up, once I dropped Z on the station on the train actually and walked back from Pascoe Bar, I started listening to this book, The Meaning of Life, pretentious title, but here it is. And it’s by a guy who’s a well known scientist and a professor at Harvard blah, blah, blah. But he is dealing with stuff that’s not traditionally left brain, like meaning of life, of course, he started to talk about transcendence, this idea of moving above and beyond things of everyday stuff can be dealt with in the left brain as a practical problem to be solved, all this stuff, and ways to move yourself out of that and into some meaning based thought processes. So that’s been fun. It’s early days, but I’m enjoying reading it and it’s getting me moving to different places. I came home and what I do, I’ve been trying to create order, a lot of order around here so that I’m more likely to get to creative stuff. Degrees of success, didn’t do anything yesterday much. So I tried different approach. So I’ve got the place clean. So there’s nothing much to do, just the ironing. So I dived into the ironing. I remembered something else that I read the other day, which is that meditation and what else is the term? I can’t remember the other, but similar sort of ideas of just stopping and considering stuff all comes down to one thing, which is whatever you’re doing, you do. If you’re doing the washing up, you just do the washing up. You don’t do anything else. That is your meditation. So I applied it to my ironing, something I’ve not really ever enjoyed. Now some people do, I don’t, it’s just a chore to be done. But I did it. It wasn’t much, half a dozen things. But again, I just concentrated on it only. What came out, nothing particularly profound, but like there were things there that just needed a quick iron because they’re sleeping stuff or workout stuff and things that needed to be done well because they’re for C’s work. So this idea of applying yourself to the degree that’s appropriate for the job in hand. That was fun. What else was there? There was something else there too. Yeah, this is the trouble with doing this recording thing. Half an hour, an hour later, whatever, I’ve forgotten all the deep meaningful stuff I was trying to get across. But that’s good for now. Let’s run it with that, see if this works. And stop.
Not bad. Might have to figure out paragraphs today…