Category: philosophy

DME Filing System

I visited the Department of Minerals and Energy (DME). I needed to
locate certain Environmental Management Programmes (EMPs) and extract
information from them. None of the EMPs are digitised.

They have a static self-organising filing system.
The “self-organising” bit means that the files are placed on the
shelves in random order, and one then waits for organisation to evolve
by itself. The “static” bit means that nothing changes.
Yes, a static self-organising system is oxymoronic.

I’m actually being unfair. The files aren’t on the shelf in random
order. Each file is actually numbered. It’s just that no-one working at
the DME could tell us how the file numbers linked up with any other
information regarding the mines we were interested in. Needless to say,
the newer files were not given any numbers.

Fun times!

Johnny Karma and the Fundamentalist Buddhists

I’ve never considered myself a particularly spiritual person, so I have surprised myself in the last week by finding something deep within myself that was previously unexposed.
I’ve changed my diet.
I’ve changed my attitude to what makes me happy.
I’ve changed my approach to how I deal with other people.
I’ve changed my approach to life.
I’ve changed my underwear.

I think it came about from my obsession with having enough money. I’ve been struggling with this since I can remember. I’ve never wanted to be outrageously wealthy, but I’ve always been concerned about running out of money or losing the things that I possess.
I stumbled upon this thread about Buddhism on the forum of The Ornery American. Adam Masterman is clearly a practising Buddhist, and his posts made a lot of sense. In particular he says that the Buddhist attitude towards wealth is: “If it comes, that’s fine. If it goes, that’s fine.”
My problem is that I’ve never believed that before. My perception has always been, “If it comes, that’s fine. If it goes, that sucks.” But the Adam explained things so well that I was inspired to do a little more digging. I found an introductory course on Buddhism and eagerly devoured the information.

There’s a lot of gobbledy-gook. A whole bunch of the stuff just doesn’t make much sense to me at the moment. What I like about the philosophy is that it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it all or don’t want to buy into the teachings. A skeptical and critical attitude is actively encouraged. Buddhists don’t want you to take anything on faith and just believe that what they say goes. Instead they say, this is how it is — experiment using logic and see whether or not you agree. Even if you don’t agree, keep experimenting.

If only I’d realised how scientific Buddhism was, I’d have been more spiritual a long time ago. It’s a pseudo-scientific philosophy! Kind of like Intelligent Design (ID) is pseudo-scientific. Uh…
ID is certainly not logical though. If an intelligent designer designed everything, then who designed the intelligent designer? (I much prefered the word “god,” because that’s only three letters to type when debating online).

Ok, so there are unresolved problems. Still, Buddhism really is one kick-ass way to live because you don’t kick-ass, and that’s kick-ass.
Ask Johnny Karma if you don’t believe me.