Way Past Noon

I'm reading a book called Redirect by Timothy Wilson, given to me as a gift. The principal reason I'm writing about it is to help me integrate whatever useful ideas it offers into my own life and experience. Another is to share, perhaps, if there are any who wander this way, with others what I have distilled from my investment of time to read and think about it.

Two overriding questions for my life have been something like: "What is reality?" and "Who or what am I relative to this reality?" I have to confess I have not found too many people interested in those questions.

Some dismiss those questions with whatever beliefs the cultural or their personal history hands out to soothe the soul. In the case of America, Christianity would provide stock answers. In the Middle East, Islam would provide stock answers, except for Israel where Judaism would offer different explanations. And with those answers most people return to the normal life, happy to anethesize and lock away the unease that would otherwise bubble up. And then they get back to the "real" business of life: breathing, eating, excreting, sleeping, and procreating with their attention now fully bent to doing those things in ever more comfortable conditions.

I've put a past friendship on indefinite hold. I have attempted to be a reasonably steady friend to someone who suffers from depression, mental instability, and now an ever increasing array of physical problems.  My effort was partly motivated by a common past relationship and some understanding of the environment that shaped his life. He did have a few insights that clarified a few things that had puzzled me previously. And his mind, though now shot through with burned out circuits fried by chronic emotional overload, shows remnants of both significant intelligence and knowledge.

I just finished reading The 12-Step Buddhist by Darren Littlejohn. I'm not an addict, have never been to an AA or NA meeting, and haven't read the core material of either AA or NA.

So why am I interested in this? I have come into contact, over the last several years, with people in those programs who have also reached out to include Buddhism in their recovery practice. The Chrisitian terminology/religiousity of the AA and NA programs leaves many people cold and out in the cold. Indeed many AAs, though not so much NAs, claim that a belief in a Creator-God is so essential that the program crumbles without it.

The reality is that those programs are not successful for lots of people, whether or not the Creator-God element is included. AA members account for much less than 5% of those people who have addiction problems and hover at about 1 million despite growing population and increasing addiction. The recidivism in AA programs is hgh, but can't be calculated. Most members don't stay sober for a lifetime, though some return after failure. AA and NA are not the unmitigated successes claimed by program champions.

I'm going to work on this blog a bit more than I have in the past few months. I think it might help me clarify my own thinking about things.

I think what I'll do is use it as a log of sorts about what I'm reading or thinking. Occasionally, I'll just talk about whatever it is I'm feeling at the time. It's not that I'm timid about expressing feelings. It just that when they are sort of down, I don't have many people in my life who have enough "up" of their own to maintain even keel if they take aboard, even temporarily,  the burden of mine. I know there are such people with freeboard in the world. They mostly just don't sail my oceans.

I watched the movie, The Ledge, the other day, and have to sort of basically agree with this NYT Review of it. Despite its flaws, it had enough drama in it to keep me from walking out on it. Basically, the evangelicals were cardboard cutout characters, though their arguments were generally portrayed accurately, if not eloquently. If you are a freethinker, you might still enjoy the movie. If you are Christian, you probably won't because of its arguments against Christian theology,