georgia?
Well, I'm back in Waterloo. I did write up an entry when I was in Belleville, but I accidentally closed the browser instead of hitting the submit button, so that didn't amount to much. I didn't feel like retyping it.
I had a weird dream last night. For some reason, while I was sleeping, the entire city was sold off to Georgia (a new suburb for Atlanta, apparently). This sort of thing was going on all the time, apparently, and people seemed resigned to it. I considered it a tremedous injustice. I reasoned that I could just go back to Waterloo, but my parents would be stuck there, and I didn't know if I wanted to come back to Georgia all that much. I'd walk around the town pondering its fate, and everything seemed darker and gloomier. Strange people wandered around and made me apprehensive.
At some point, though, the idea struck me as incredibly silly and I figured I must be dreaming. I decided, then, to drag it out a bit... Explore, and see where things went. I had conversations with people and, while I don't remember much now, though they were terribly thought-provoking. Then my dad woke me up so he could get the keys to move my car.
I was listening to the CBC on the way in and caught the first bit of Ideas. The problem is a bit of a mish-mash—following this guy's "spiritual quest" of a walking pilgrimage from Scotland to Jerusalem, but with some sort of theme of man vs machine and machine intelligence. It's got bits of techology and philsophy from all over the place. The program's available on the website. One guy struck me as interesting, and I thought I'd get it down:
The first thing is an extremely strong demand for sincerity, for authenticity, a demand not to delude oneself, but to be honest instead - not to lie, neither to oneself, nor to others, but to be true. The second thing is to make a constant effort to be open to others, to think of others not as objects of our experience, but as sources, as centres of life, of autonomous existence. Look at the other person as an infinite universe in his or her own right. And that means having an enormous respect for other people. It is also ... faith or courage: not letting yourself be discouraged, despite suffering and difficulties and "this world is a vale of tears," etc. You can always see the bad side of things. But it doesn't really matter! Because along with this courage and this faith, comes a sense of responsibility - it is I who am responsible for the world, as it is. So I must give out a maximum amount of positive energy. I must make a constant effort to improve things not just materially, not just in concrete situations, but also in the way I interpret things. I must make an effort to interprest them in the post positive and sympathetic and generous and compassionate way possible. And that takes courage! It isn't easy at all! It is very easy to make fun of optimists, of people who have faith. I think this is what takes the most effort. It is far easier to be skeptical, spiteful, critical, to denounce things, first of all because that's what everybody around us is doing. It's what the media feed us on a daily basis. And it is our first impulse. So I think going against that impuse, truing to see the good sides of life, to really appreciate life, and to help other people appreciate life, takes a huge amount of courage. For me, spirituality includes all of that!
Pierre Lévy