What Am I Doing?

A hairy experiment

The idea that ‘… one who speaks does not know’ should logically include writing and thinking as well. After all, speaking, thinking and writing are all interconnected activities. So what am I doing here yapping away? It is partly social; I see curious connections, and feel the urge (an instinct to be helpful or gossip… or both?) to shine light ‘outside the box’, or at least broaden focus ‘inside the box’. (Of course, even ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are iffy from a Taoist point of view, i.e., they produce each other).

For this quixotic quest, I rely heavily on science generally, and biology in particular, to provide a point for reference, a kind of baseline. Sure, science has its problems, but science offers as impartial a view as I’ve found anywhere out there.

Key words I constantly use are need, fear, emotion and instinct, often in a broader sense than the meaning for which they are typically associated. Allow me to briefly address this:

Need and fear: I’m use the terms need and fear to convey, in the broadest possible sense, the primal biological driving forces of life. Meaning: Feeling need attracts us to what ostensibly facilitates survival; feeling fear repels us from what ostensibly impedes survival. Such need and fear are often below the threshold of thought, or ’sub-thought’. They only evoke conscious thoughts once they pass some threshold.

Emotion: I’m using the term ‘emotion’ as broadly as possible to differentiate feeling from thinking. This includes all that indistinct and shadowy junk we feel consciously or otherwise that lies outside our ability to adequately describe (via words or names), or portray artistically (via color, notes, taste, etc.).

Instinct: Instinct is commonly thought to be limited to animals. It is their means of making choices in life. We, on the other hand, believe we have free will, and thus are able to operate outside the bounds of instinct. In my view this is more wishful thinking than actuality. In any case, I think of instinct as something innate, and along the lines of need, fear, and emotion. Instinct is a biological bedrock upon which all we perceive originates.

Writing this blog helps me flesh out views that fall outside mainstream paradigm/s. Sure, this feels a little unsettling at times. On balance though, seeing life from other angles is healthful, not heretical. I imagine most people would agree, at least until a particular view begins to threaten their own sacred cow. At that point need, fear, emotion and instinct carry the day.

As for the hairy experiment…

Ah, relief at last

I finally cut the hair. It got to be irritating trapping myself in hair while sleeping, dropping my beard in my food. It usually never goes that far though; when it gets uncomfortably hot I cut it all off. For some reason that never seems to happen over summer, so it just kept growing. It became a hair experiment.

The major advantages of moderately long hair and beard in winter; the extra fur is warming. It may help filter out virus coughed out by others nearby, though my family disputes that somewhat.

I didn’t find any advantages of really long hair and beard. Although that’s not taking tribal dynamics into account, i.e., fiddling with self image through clothes and hair style in order to win approval and fit in, or conversely, to go against the mainstream.