Confucius and Laundry

04 Mar 2020 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Blog Tags: , , , , , , , ,

While my clothes were in the dryer at the laundromat I continued reading the Analects of Confucius.  I have been reading Confucius over the past few weeks.  Much of his sayings I can’t understand.  But I do understand a portion of them.  However, pondering each saying–or should I say wrestling with each saying–puts my mind in a sacred space.  Confucius is emphatically about virtue.  His sayings make a person think about virtue.  Reading Confucius and wrestling with the meaning of his sayings disposes a person’s heart toward virtue.  I didn’t expect my psyche, my mood, to enter a sacred space when I read Confucius.  I was surprised when I put the book down.  I looked at the dryers, and I felt good about doing my laundry.  “This is a pleasant way to spend my time.  It is a useful and good activity for me to do,” I thought.  This feeling was remarkable.  Previously, laundry had been a drudgery.  So, I was surprised to find myself feeling good about doing my laundry today.  Reading Confucius elevated my spirit.

Generally, I find that sacred scriptures of world religions have that effect on me.  My Swedenborgian background taught me to pay attention to my psyche when I read the Bible.  Swedenborg writes that reading the Bible, “Enlightens the mind and warms the heart.”  He’s right.  The Bible also makes me feel spiritual and spiritual peace.  Other sacred scriptures have an analogous effect on me.  When I read the Koran, which I have to ponder deeply at times, I am uplifted.  Also,  the Tao Te Ching transports me, difficult as it is.  Even the Rig Veda, with the catalog of Gods and Goddesses it lists, and its vocative verses seems to lift me.

Sacred scriptures are records of humanity’s interactions with the Divine.  My interactions with sacred scriptures give me a personal experience of spirituality.  I feel different when I read sacred scriptures.  This is a kind of evidence for me.  I am not a Muslim, a Taoist, a Hindu, or a Confucian.  So why would I respond to their sacred texts?  But I do.  These texts point toward the Divine.  And I think that there is something there.  Why else would they affect me as they do?

I don’t live in the spiritual world now.  Or at least I’m not conscious of it.  So I also read literature from this world.  We are given birth without an instruction manual.  We make our way through this world as best we can figure out.  I think that great literati are sages with suggestions about how to negotiate our way through this world.  We certainly get enough of this world.  Everywhere we turn, we get this world–making a buck, hustling, doing our job, raising a family, watching reality TV.  But part of life in this world is interaction with the Divine.  And though I love to read Hemingway and Thoreau, they don’t do for me what the Analects of Confucius does for me.  I will continue my reading and wrestling with sacred texts and my hustling for virtue.  My contact with the Divine.  That feeling of serenity, peace, and love that spiritual texts give me suggest that they’re onto something.  Someone once told me that he didn’t see enough evidence to make him believe.  I wonder if he’s looking.  I’ll fully admit that there’s no proof I can put before him.  But my personal experience has encountered evidence that makes me believe.

SOME WORDS I GREW UP WITH

07 Aug 2019 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Blog Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Vietnam, establishment, protest, revolution, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., assassination, J. Edgar Hoover, Twiggy,

Woodstock, Buffalo Springfield, Richie Havens, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Crosby, stills, Nash, and Young, Janis Joplin, Cream, Ravi Shankar, Jefferson Airplane, Melanie, Ten Years After, Mountain, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer

mind expansion, weed, LSD, hash, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau

The Man, tear gas, mod, freaks, hippies, bikers, jocks, counter-culture, mini-skirt, long hair, crew-cut, bell-bottoms, Spock, freedom, riots, tie-dye, Motown

peace, Nature, love

While the Eternal Clock Ticks

11 Sep 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Blog Tags: , , , , , , ,

There’s that song by REM, an ’80’s band, that tells us to “Think about Direction.”  I think for a lot of us, our aims–our direction–are rather short-term.  When I was younger, I had an aim to get into a good school.  That was a goal of several years.  Then, when I got in, it was to get a good grade.  That was a goal of several months.  Then it was get a Ph.D., which was a goal of several years.  Some people, mostly business-oriented people, talk about having a five-year plan.  “Where do you want to be in 5-years?”  I think mostly this is about material things–being an executive, having a 3-bedroom house, making a 6-figure income, a family (which isn’t a material goal), etc.

But all the while I was pursuing my academic goals, I recall having an overarching goal, which I still have today.  Wisdom and virtue.  In my schoolwork, I took interdisciplinary programs to broaden my knowing.  I didn’t specialize in one discipline in order to fit into a job mold.  And as I was going about my life, I continued personal inventory to measure my life against what I understood to be good.  My conception of what the good is grew and developed as I learned more through my education and my life experiences.

On one end of the spectrum of goals are people who intentionally choose a lifestyle.  There aren’t many of these, I think.  Henry David Thoreau was maybe the classic example.  He intentionally set about a life in harmony with nature, moved out of the city, left capitalism behind, and communed with nature at Walden Pond.  On the other side of the spectrum are people whose main goal is to get through the day, get paid, pay their bills, hit the bar, and do the same thing tomorrow.

There are short-range aims and long-range goals.  Everyone needs to get up and go to work and get through the day.  But while we are doing this, there is room for farther-reaching goals.  Why are we going to work?  What are we intending to do with our money?  Who are we as we go about our quotidian lives?  Midway among these are like people who hit the gym before they hit the bar, having an intentional goal of being fit.  Some longer-ranged goals are creative accomplishments such as my interest in music–learning to play and writing songs.  This avocation is almost as important to me as is my career.  In school, one of my roommates was a body-builder.  Another roommate told me that bodybuilding was as important to him as was my music to me.  I had trouble thinking of bodybuilding as an equal kind of avocation as music.  But he was a dedicated bodybuilder.

Work, pastimes, longer-range goals, and the ultimate goal are all part of the virtuous life, I think.  I want to make beautiful and heartfelt music.  I like having an appreciative audience.  I have enough money and a small, comfortable condo.  But those two aims I had when I was younger are still with me.  Wisdom and virtue.

I know that I’m only a pilgrim on this material plane.  What really matters to me is the kind of soul I am cultivating.  In my thinking, that is what is of eternal value.  Money comes and goes.  Children grow up and live their own lives.  Our bodies deteriorate.  Fame passes, over time.  (Where is Jethro Tull, now?)  But what I’ve made of myself, with the One who has all power, lasts.  Rather, the process of spiritual growth lasts forever.  Because the One who has all power is infinite, and I am finite.  Because this is true, I have all eternity to approach nearer and nearer to the Perfect All Powerful One.  And all the wisdom, virtue, and joy that that means.  That’s the ultimate direction in my life.  And everything else either contributes to it, or keeps time while the eternal clock ticks.

How Much Is Enough?

27 Dec 2016 1 Comment

by davidfekete123 in Blog Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

This Christmas, we had a very good turnout at church.  By our standards.  Which is to say that it looked like a full church.  I was happy with the turnout.  But all this is relative.  It is a small church.  Even if it were packed, attendance would have been few by standards of mainline churches. But compared to other Christmases, and compared to regular Sunday attendance, it was a good turnout.

This kind of thinking can be translated to other areas.  I think of the music business.  I know of a band in Canada which I like very much.  They fill smaller concert halls, and play festivals, but not stadiums.  They even have a Juno award, which is Canada’s equivalent to the US Grammy. They could play to packed bars every night if they wanted to, an opportunity which many good bands would envy.  I don’t think they have a gold record.  Most likely not a platinum record.  If you are a musician, how would you measure success. How much is enough?  Stadiums?  Platinum records?  Airplay?  Filling concert halls?  Playing to packed bars.  Playing enough venues to pay the bills?  Then there is the issue of how long your popularity would last.  Some immensely popular rappers, with platinum records, are gone in a year or two.  There is a new guitar player in town who is having a hard time breaking into the music scene.  But he plays better than anyone else in town.  It’s just that he’s new.

Then there are likes, follows, visits, and views for bloggers.  How many are enough?  25?  50?  150?  1,000?  4,500?  Do you write with an eye to posts that will attract views, visits, likes, and follows?

These issues arise in still more areas–money, possessions, status, friends, prestige, education, popularity.  How much is enough?

I think that the only way to maintain sanity, is to do what Emerson, Thoreau, and Frost, among others, have advocated for.  Follow your own music, march to the beat of your own drummer.  The new guitar player in town plays incredibly well to nearly empty bars.  I know of a preacher who conducted a service for one person, and of some synagogues that can’t open the Torah, because they don’t have a quorum present.  This does not indicate the quality of the performance, message, or belief system.  We write, preach, or play best when we do our best, and not worry too much about how much or many fans, congregants, or follows we have.

The Decay of a Dream

10 Aug 2015 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Blog Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

It wasn’t just sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  It was more importantly do your own thing, peace, and love.  We read Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau who taught us to be our own person regardless of status, style, or what other people said we should be or do.  We weren’t concerned much with making money.  Jethro Tull, “I didn’t care if they groomed me for success, or if they said that I was just a fool.”  So with a love for music, with an ethic of doing your own thing, and little concern for money, the late ’60’s and early ’70’s generated a bewildering diversity of music.  Who ever heard the kind of music that Led Zeppelin came up with.  Their music is now engraved on our brains by repetition, but when it came out it was original.  “Stairway to Heaven” struck a nerve with everyone which is why we make jokes about it now–everyone was enthralled with it when it first came out.  Who would have thought that a man standing on one foot playing rock and roll flute would fill stadiums, as did Jethro Tull?

I still do my own thing.  For my birthday I had an artist make me an earring with a lapis Lazuli stone and a feather dangling on short chains.  People always comment on it–for good or ill.  I have Tibetan pants that I wear with a Nepalese shirt on the streets of the city.  At home I have statuettes of the Buddha, Guru Rimpoche, a Mayan god, Saint Francis, and Egyptian falcon deity, and Eastern Orthodox icons.  I self-identify as Christian.  I majored in Religion and Literature because I like poetry and religion.  It wasn’t a wise career choice if I was after money.

In the late ’60’s, early ’70’s, we bought good stereo systems because we wanted to hear our music clearly.  Then people started bragging about their systems.  What started out as technology for good quality music reproduction became a status symbol.  Then people started bragging about which concerts they had been to.  What started out as a live version of music we loved to listen to became status symbols.  We used drugs to give us alternative states of mind and raise consciousness.  Drugs degenerated into amusement alone, and bragging about using drugs became a status symbol.  Witness Cheech and Chong’s “Up in Smoke.”

The final blow came in the ’80’s.  Then, earning a 6-digit income became people’s ideal.  The Yuppies were born.  People made excuses for Nixon, saying that he only did what everyone else was doing–he just got caught.  Cocaine became the drug of choice, and something to brag about.  David Byrne said that being a musician was, “A good job.”   The dream of the late ’60’s early ’70’s was successfully, and I think deliberately, ruined.