Insomnia, Procrastination, Star Wars, Buddhism

[dr_tectonic]

It's 4 in the morning and I can't sleep because my throat hurts. Can't get at the owie spots with lidocaine; can't take more ibuprofen yet -- it hasn't been 4 hours yet, and I've got heartburn, which might be first signs of overdoing it with the advil.

Today I filed away a huge number of emails from my inbox. Go me! One thing I noticed, going through them, is that there were a whole bunch of LJ threads that I meant to comment on that I never got to. My apologies to everyone (especially drdeleto) that I never responded to; at a certain point, I just... run out of steam for debate.

We had a lovely running landspeeder battle in Jeff's Star Wars game this evening. Lots of fun, but I overdid it a little and was just wrung out by the end. The problem with not eating anything for several days is that I'm functioning just fine, but I don't have any reserves. I had a coughing fit in the car on the way home and almost burst into tears about it, because I just couldn't cope. But everything was much, much better once I came home and snuggled with Jerry for a few minutes.

Buddhism holds that desire is the root of all suffering. This is a dumb idea. It's the root of some suffering, sure, but I'm not currently awake with a sore throat because of an unfulfilled desire. It's because things aren't working the way they're supposed to. My body is using pain as a signal that something is wrong. Likewise, hunger pangs aren't the signs of an unseemly desire to feast, it's because you don't have enough goddam food. Pining for a Lexus? Suffering caused by desire. Miserable because it's too cold, even though you're sleeping on a steam grate? Suffering caused by not having adequate shelter. The former can be alleviated by letting go of the desire; the latter cannot.

And I think that I have run out of coherency now.

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shorter version

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

The point of Buddhism is to remove distractions from the fundamental duty of human existence. Desires, habits, and anything taken to the level of obsession become distractions. Buddhism teaches that these distractions can be identified and removed through the gentle discipline of contemplative practice, which is various techniques for observing how your mind works, the most important (but not only) technique being meditation in all its forms (other forms including phyisical discipline like Kung Fu and artistic disciplines like calligraphy or music).

I say gentle not because these practices are necessarily easy, but because they guide the mind to better practice by simply pointing out what it is doing and the implication being a review of whether the mind wants to be doing that. Suppression and restriction of unwanted mental habits only reinforces and amplifies the behavior--the correction is simply to take note of the behavior.

As to the fundamental duty of human existence:

"While I am here, I will do the work. What is the work? To ease the pain of human suffering. All else is drunken dumbshow."
--A. Ginsberg