No, this trick won’t work…How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

A central thesis of Sperm Wars so far is that behavior which we believe to be driven by conscious decisions are actually motivated by our animal subconscious, drawing on instinct and patterns predicted by evolutionary biology. The conscious aspect of it all is simply the subsequent rationalization of our own behavior, like a shadow following the real object – which is the hidden intelligence and agenda of our sexual bodies. Is it so? If so, is it frightening to think that we are so base, that civility is such a thin veneer over our primal selves?

Perhaps this is why Osho talks about three levels of love. The first is physical. It treats the other as an object, simply a means to a selfish end. It is flat and materialistic. He says that the vast majority of humanity never rises above this. It sounds hard to believe, too pessimistic – it can’t be that bad, can it? But Sperm Wars says it is that bad. It’s bad, it’s bad, you know it. A comment on who the self is at this level: the self is the unconscious motivator; the conscious mind does not comprehend that it is really not in the driver’s seat. Jealousy, possessiveness, heartbreak … are only the manifestation of our genes’ stratagems.

The second kind of love is more holistic; it treats the other as an equal. Osho says few attain to this reality. This is to rise beyond Sperm Wars. Yes, the sexual attraction is there. Physical and chemical processes move unabated in the veins and loins. Yet, they are observed and understood by the conscious mind, and embraced. Perhaps reading the book is one avenue to achieve greater awareness.

I’m at this level. Maybe. I think I’m seeking a kind of synchronicity. A free ride up. One that doesn’t crest early and cave back into itself. A resonating presence that says my path has not been a mistake. That, failing to find such pools of refreshment, my aloneness too is beautiful. That I should not feel abandoned when no one clings to me. That freedom in place of comforting routine is worthwhile. Thank god there Osho is there for me when there is nobody else.

Also remind me of the importance of the middle road.

The third kind of love simply is. The other disappears, with the experience that the other and the self are one. Then there is only loving; there is no separate object to love.

How do the sperm of an enlightened man behave? Do they kill the sperm of other men? Do they wait in the cervical “crypts” to ambush invading armies? Can they levitate and teleport?

Far from being amorphous, cervical mucus is structured. Who knew? When the woman is fertile, it contains channels that the sperm navigate up. Our bodies are shockingly intelligent.

The transmigration of the soul is a fine analogy for Aspect-Oriented Programming. Genetic transmission is a more or less linear process. Genes branch, and branches either branch or die. But from whence does your consciousness come? It is a cross-cutting concern. From the deathbed of one nodule, it traverses a different continuum to the womb that begins another.

I was once one cell. I was once only a potential. Half-formed in my mother when she was in her mother’s womb. I was once part of a blazing sun. A motley array of atoms strewn across the universe, finally to coalesce into a victorious sperm that was one of 300 million, on my lucky day. Was there a fight inside my mother that day? I can’t imagine so, not with some other man’s sperm. But who knows – who has verified it? Even without a fight, what if another comrade had gotten to the egg and through its protective junkyard first? Would it have mattered? How would “I” have been different? Would it have just been a matter of a few differing genes – a bit taller, less prominent cheekbones, being female instead? But still “me”? Or would my consciousness have lost its chance – given up to some other entity waiting in the wings? I was once one cell, but now I am 100 trillion. I was once only a potential. Yet I remain only a potential, completion has never been in sight.

In the unborn child, the heart begins beating before it forms a link to the developing brain. It functions in a completely coordinated way, without the brain. It has its own intelligence. The heart has its own network of neurons. Does it have its own thoughts? Perhaps it is the seat of intuition. It is the joining point of the 7 chakras, said to be the the ideal, most balanced point of focus. It is where love energy is nurtured.

What leaves one with an empty heart? Or full of emptiness, if such a thing can be said? If it can … is it characterized by fullness, or emptiness? The evaporation of desire, leaving behind an uncomprehending mind which moments before had identified with it. Now it has nothing to attach to; the rug has been pulled out from underneath. It was tricked; now it is in a pickle. Maybe it feels like a pickle.

When our bodies are trying to tell us something which goes against our conscious beliefs, which voice is right? What if our beliefs are the result of deep past experience – what if those too are controverted? When we feel the tugging in both directions, when the path is not clear but action must be taken right now, when in Murakami-speak we feel ourselves being “split in two”, then what? Half of me loves you from above, and half from below. Some other fraction of me understands this is all a bawdy game.

Intelligence cannot be deterministic. Otherwise it would be inevitable. Computers would have been able to achieve it. Therefore, caprice and whimsy are the signposts of intelligence. Is it intelligent to play it safe, or to take a risk? The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward, so they say. Nothing risked, nothing gained. Be cat-like in your alertness.

Trust the Chinese to hit culinary home runs. I stumbled upon Xi’an Famous Foods (http://xianfoods.com/) after getting a haircut in Chinatown. The cumin lamb noodles were fantastically spicy, as the sweat beads condensing on and around my nose testified … of course, the soup was spicy too, but piping hot, which as you may know only magnifies the spice factor by, oh, 5x.

Space

Watching out the caboose of the subway tonight. Leaving 50th St. on the uptown C train, the glow of the platform slowly draws distant, and an envelope of darkness subsumes the view. I feel this is as close to casting off from the safety of a space station into black nothingness as I can get in terrestrial life.

Time

My introduction to Philip Glass was Satyagraha at the Met yesterday afternoon. I loved the visuals, especially the giant, tattered beasts doing battle, which to me represented the collective egoic structures in conflict. The music, though, was simply boring. There was essentially a single repeated motif for each scene, each of which lasted approximately 20 minutes. That’s a lot of repeating. It’s also not a lot of interest. The music lacked a critical dimension – variation – that the stunning imagery unfortunately could not compensate for.

I think that will be my last Glass.

Depth

It is possible to live more deeply while requiring less “clock time”. Osho calls this burning the candle from both ends, not in the sense of exhausting oneself through effort, but by bringing intensity and awareness into every moment. Every time I harmonize the rhythm of my body more with nature, I feel possibility of intensity begin to open. Each time it drifts, the opening begins to close, mostly without my awareness of it.

I look for those who create spaces. There are many who only know to fill them.

• I downloaded v1.0 of the Gaelyk template. Documentation suggests that you should be able to easily import this into Eclipse; however, no .project or .classpath files are to be found. Surprise surprise! They are present in the v0.7 template zip – just not in v1.0!
• Out of the box, I’m getting a compilation error. Apparently both the spock and gaelyk-spock jars are required for the samples to build. Of course, downloads of pre-built binaries are nearly impossible to track down. I guess I have to build my own spock (dumb). gaelyk-spock has a CI project with binaries available at http://hashcode.co:9001/job/gaelyk-spock/ .
• Now I’m trying out gradle. I was hoping to get started without having to learn yet-another-build-framework, but it appears impossible. Now I’m seeing that “gradlew eclipse” may generate the Eclipse files I need. However, before I even get there, gradle seems to want to download the entire internet. Reminds me of maven.
• Ok, that generated Eclipse project files … but now I get a dialog saying that the version of Spock that was downloaded for the project is incompatible with Groovy 1.7.x, which I have installed. Oh brother. And now … a different dialog is telling me to go to http://versioninfo.spockframework.org for more information.
• And now, “gradlew build” fails because an expected file “dataStoreGroovlet.groovy” is nowhere to be found. Great. Found a copy here: https://github.com/glaforge/gaelyk/blob/master/template-project/war/WEB-INF/groovy/dataStoreGroovlet.groovy
• Getting a bunch of spurious errors like under “Google App Engine Problems” in Eclipse. It claims that “sdk-1.5.5″ jars are missing from the lib directory. While true, nothing in my project should reference those stupid jars – “sdk-1.5.2″ jars are on my classpath. WTF? Ah, figured it out – the “App Engine SDK” is listed under the “Libraries” tab of my “Java Build Path”. But still have an error. Disabling the GAE plugin wholesale gets rid of this error. Works for me for now; I guess I can use gradlew to build and run. gradle is damn slow, though.
• What’s up with the Gaelyk documentation? When you drill down into a section of the tutorial (e.g. http://gaelyk.appspot.com/tutorial/template-project), you can’t proceed to the next section – you have to go back and click on another part of the index! Lame!
• Yep, when I try to start GAE from within Eclipse, I get: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to locate the App Engine agent. Please use dev_appserver, KickStart, or set the jvm flag: “-javaagent:/lib/agent/appengine-agent.jar”
• Seem to have gotten rid of the Spock version complaint by installing the Groovy Eclipse Plugin 1.8 Feature. Whew, that was really frustrating to deal with.
• Adding the -javaagent flag solved my inability to start up the server from Eclipse. Followed advice of this page: http://www.pakzilla.com/2009/12/07/upgrading-to-google-app-engine-java-sdk-1-2-8/ . Woohoo!
• Editing the build.gradle file seems quite wild-west. For example, I wanted to add a new Maven repository for Objectify. The documentation (http://gradle.org/current/docs/userguide/artifact_dependencies_tutorial.html#defineRemoteMavenRepo) says you can do something like this:

  repositories {
      maven {
          url "http://repo.mycompany.com/maven2"
      }
  }

  But it doesn’t work. This DOES work:

  repositories {
      mavenRepo urls: 'http://repo.mycompany.com/maven2'
  }

  I hate not being able to trust documentation. And as it appears these repository handlers are pluggable, there is no mention of any specific implementations in the reference ( http://gradle.org/current/docs/dsl/org.gradle.api.Project.html#org.gradle.api.Project:repositories(groovy.lang.Closure) ) … grrr!!!

A memory suddenly flashed in my mind – one of those indelible instants. Walking down some street in Cuenca, I saw a beggar sitting quietly by the side of the road. I can’t recall exactly, but he had some disabling deformity. Quietly is important – he seemed almost contented, completely at ease. He said nothing.

I had two dimes and a quarter in my pocket. I took the two dimes and pressed them into his hand.

That was the crucial moment. The way he received the coins from me was so special – it was so gentle and innocent, like an infant curling its fingers around your pinky, not knowing why – just something to grasp softly. It was as if the money melted away, and all that was left was the intention to give, just the idea of giving floating there in the air between us. Not even gratitude in his response – not even the seeking that is inherent in gratitude. Simply the acceptance of a flow. I have never had someone receive something from me like this.

Immediately I felt vexed. Why had I only given him the dimes, and not the quarter? What was the use of that lousy quarter to me anyway? Just what sort of miser was I? And then …

Just how do we decide who we give to, and how much? Why is it we give our friends much, those who typically are not lacking in material things, yet begrudge the needy of little? And a stranger can become a friend in an instant – one moment we feel we would never give him anything, and the next we are ready to invite him into our home! How can this change of heart be reconciled? Is there rhyme or reason to how these lines are drawn?

In Quito, I was walking down the street, and a lady was passing by. She had a scowl on her face, and was looking at nothing in particular. I thought, my, what a distasteful person! Yet for some reason I decided to smile at her. This was a little unusual in the sense that it is always easier to smile at someone who is already smiling, or who at least appears receptive.

Seeing my smile directed at her, suddenly, her expression completely changed! The scowl erased, her expression transformed with a broad, beaming smile! No trace of anything but joy?!

I was shocked! – I couldn’t believe it! – how utterly total the change was. I could not believe this was the same person who had just conveyed the essence of a dark thundercloud. Are we all like this – we teleport from this state of mind to that, this emotion to the other, this understanding of the world to that? Like a toad that jumps away every time you reach out to grab it – there is no pattern, all is changeable and uncertainty? The mysterious woman who calls Mr. Wind-Up Bird … her voice would change without warning …

An article in Harper’s a while back proposed an idea which I instantly saw truth in – Americans – and all people really – have an honest desire to do good, to enact philanthropy. But something in the fabric of society, in the confluence of expectations or whatever, is blocking us from being able to carry out our altruistic intent. It’s a double whammy – we feel crappy because our desire to be good is never fulfilled, only frustrated – and the good deeds themselves never get done, to the detriment of others and the environment.

Indeed, you can’t do anything right when you do good. It’s never good enough. When you do something nice, the feeling immediately gets diluted with the realization that you didn’t go as far as you could have – you could have been nicer, more generous of your time / energy / resources. The devilish seed has somehow been planted – you always second-guess anything that might be construed as good. Was it enough? Was it truly selfless? (It only has value if it was?) Doing good is a logical workout, and an exhausting one … to the point that it seems less tiresome to not even bother …

I would like to see things from the vantage point of a beggar. Not the angsty, unsettled beggar who is grasping and conniving, a “striving beggar”. Not that contradiction – how ridiculous it sounds! although we have all met them. But the beggar who has seen and accepted and merged with the vicissitudes of people, their moods, their motives, their emotions. Who has through this interactive experience come to understand changeability in the core of his being. Who completely accepts that sometimes people are, and sometimes people are not.

A beggar like this has seen many things, and can impart wisdom with a single, guileless brush of the hand. A beggar like this, in reality, is rich.