Listen to this Reading:

Kyle Tolle reading “Let’s Talk Workshops”

I’ve debated whether I should write on this topic, but I have finally decided to.  Lately, I’ve again taken advantage of the Counseling and Consultation Service (CCS) here at Ohio State.  I used CCS a few years back, and decided to return earlier this year after several major stressors tag-teamed on me.  My experience with the counselors there has been very positive.

The person I’m speaking to there recommended me to two workshops they have: ‘Mindfulness for Stress and Anxiety’ along with ‘Mental Skills for Stress Management and Performance Enhancement.’ I will refer to these from here on out as Mindfulness and Mental Skills, since I didn’t even know the longer names until I looked them up.  I’m interested in the workshops because I’ve struggled with managing school, personal life, stress, all sorts of things and want to learn what I can now because moving to Colorado Springs in a few months is going to be a huge change and there’s likely to be a lot of stress come at me before I even get out there.

This is my second week (of eight) for the Mindfulness class, and it’s very challenging.  We meet for 1.5 hours on Mondays, and for the other days of the week we have some homework.  The first week was to listen to the body scan track from the CD accompanying the book we use.  It’s a half-hour meditative track which focuses on breaking out of the “doing” mode and into the “being” mode.  You focus on different areas of your body (each area for a few minutes before moving on to the next; hence the scan) and see what you notice or don’t notice there.  It’s meant to help you slow down, focus on what you are feeling at this moment and look at your observations curiously and non-judgmentally.  In the track, Jon Kabat-Zinn says that this is a chance to step out of clock time. I find that interesting because I have noticed that when I do the body scan, it does feel that the time goes by rather quickly.  It feels like maybe 5-10 minutes instead of 30.

Last week there were a few days I just did not do the body scan.  One day I straight up did not feel like doing it. The second time it was a mixture of not really wanting to do it and it being really late.  For the most part, I do the scan pretty late at night (midnight or after), because it’s hard to get myself to do it any earlier.  This week is turning out to be even more difficult though.  I’m struggling with not seeing a real point to this practice.  Even though this is just supposed to be me stepping back and I shouldn’t feel like I need to accomplish something with this meditation, I want to feel that it’s doing something for me.  The past several times I have done the scan, my mind really wanders and I wonder what the point of me even doing this is.  That’s my judgmental self though.  I’m supposed to note what I think and then turn my attention back to the scan, but it’s hard to not have that thought creep up again, along with other random thoughts.

Along with the tracks, we’re supposed to also do a routine activity mindfully. That doesn’t mean we necessarily slow it down or anything; we’re just supposed to pay more attention while we do it.  You’d be surprised at the number of things you do without thinking about them.  This week, we’re also supposed to keep track of one thing per day that makes us smile.  I am not sure if someone making me laugh really counts. If so, I can think of a few times, but I haven’t really been aware of them at the time (which is the goal).  Other than that, I haven’t really noticed anything that I remember making me smile.  I’m probably just overlooking something.  Another thing we’re to do is the Mindfulness of the Breath track which is a 10-minute meditative track which focuses on breathing (as I’m sure you could guess from the title).  Needless to say, I’ve had trouble getting myself to do this one too.

It’s not necessarily that I don’t want to do the practice, but that I have no motivation or focus. I have zero motivation for classes this quarter and it is leaking out into other areas of my life.  It’s extremely difficult to get myself to eat or go to bed, let alone sit down for 30 minutes (now 40 with the breathing track) and do something.  This is another time I wonder whether I have some degree of ADD.

Mental Skills is a 3-event workshop that had the first meeting today. There seems to be an overlap between the two (Mindfulness and Mental Skills), so I’m hoping that the more pragmatic Mental Skills will help me see a practical use for the Mindfulness.  Jon Kabat-Zinn mentions that we’re not really trying for a goal other than to hopefully see the mindfulness we cultivate during the practices spill over to other parts of our life, but unless we learn what we can really do with the mindfulness to manage stress, anxiety, depression, whatever… what’s the point!? Maybe that’s something we’ll get to in the Mindfulness class.  I will write another post soon about the Mental Skills in more detail, since this one is already rather lengthy.

It’s been a while since I posted and I wanted to throw out what I’ve been up to recently.  I’m interested in hearing from you though. How do you manage stress, anxiety, depression, gloomy days, that sort of stuff? Do you have a method you turn to? Maybe you just wade through it? Maybe something I’m not even thinking of?  This is really an open-ended question, so be honest!

Kyle Tolle Personal anxiety, CCS, counselor, depression, management, mental skills, mindfulness, stress, workshop

Listen to this Reading

Kyle Tolle reading ‘The Man and The Land’

A  hot and heavy sun shined down on cracked and curling mud.  A man walked along on this crumbly earth, and he could see nothing except the splits in the ground running all the way to the horizon in each direction.  No wind blew and the only sound made was that of the man’s feet crunching the dried dirt as he tiredly walked along.  He headed due north and he did not waver from that path. Wearily, yet continuously, his feet hit the earth and carried him forward.

For the entire day he continued along. He neither stopped nor sped up. Man simply walked north and north alone. The sun eventually sank and its heat dissipated as the dusk came on.  The night was a bit chill, but still no breeze traversed the land.  Utterly dark and desolate was the night as the sun’s last light finally disappeared and no moon rose. Man continued along for some time in the darkness but he eventually collapsed on the ground in exhaustion and slept.

Shortly after dawn the next morning, man jerked awake and stood up, brushing off the dirt that clung to his clothing.  He pulled a small ration of food from a haversack he wore and started off as he slowly ate it.  Northward still he walked.  Soon though the man saw a discontinuity in the land and he sped up to reach it.  He came upon an edge.  The land suddenly gave away and fell hundreds, or thousands or tens of thousands of feet; he could not very well tell just how long a drop it was.

This edge continued in both directions but the man decided to go east.  He followed the drop-off and soon saw he went along a gentle curve and not a straight line as he first thought.  The sun rose into the sky as the man walked along this periphery, beating down on the already deadened ground.  Some time after midday the man stopped walking.  The arc of the brink had slowly forced his path south.  He could now guess he was stuck on an island of land.  Even if he had quicker feet and many more hours of daylight, he would eventually return to where he started in the north.  He turned for a few minutes and looked out at the expanse of land so far below that ran off for ever and ever.  Aside from the plateau on which he stood, nothing disturbed the flatness of the area before him.

Turning around, man set his steps as best be could toward where he had fallen and slept the night before.  Eventually, he came across the trail he left while walking north earlier that morning and followed it now south.  Suddenly a small tremor shook the ground for a good span of seconds.  The man stopped and waited for the quaking to pass and listened.  A few minutes later a deep rumbling filled the air from all directions and went on for a few minutes.  As the last noises faded, the man continued on.

Reaching the area of scuffled mud, the man lied down on the ground and stared into the air.  Here he stayed the rest of the day; several times feeling the ground quake again and always a few minutes later hearing booming sounds from far off and all around him.  The sun sank beyond the horizon again and for all the darkness he could only make out one star very near the horizon – and very faint it was at that.  Soon he fell to slumbering with his head resting on his haversack.

Morning again came, as did wakefulness for man.  He once more ate a ration from his pack and stood up.  Looking around, the man could see what the rumbles and quakes had been about.  Since yesterday, and especially over the night, the island of land shrunk considerably.  He could see the cliff now from where he stood; maybe a hundred feet away on each side.  Chewing his ration thoughtfully, he left his pack and walked to the northern edge and again peered out.  Still a mighty far drop to an unbroken landscape below; he could see no mess of slump or fallen rock.

Starting toward the east, he walked along the perimeter.  This man spent the rest of the day in this fashion and watched the sun rise, peak and fall.  Each time he felt the earth tremble, the man backed away from the cliff and watched several feet of ground collapse and fall away; making his circle of land smaller and smaller.  The sound from this land slide was terrific, shook the air powerfully and seemed to echo for minutes on end.  The evening saw the man standing over his haversack with perhaps twenty feet of land on any side of him.  Standing he stayed, not looking at anything in particular… simply standing.  Night deepened and the single, faint star fell below the horizon so the darkness was unbroken.  The man lost his struggle with sleep hours later as he collapsed with fatigue.

Dawn broke and man woke with his face hanging over the cliff’s edge.  As he scrambled to his feet, the man found he had only two or three feet of encircling land.  He thought of a ration and frantically looked down but he had knocked his haversack over the edge during the night. Stomach grumbling, he sat back down and wrapped his arms around his knees.  Quaking and rumblings were sparse, which was good considering there was not much land left at all, but they did eventually force him to stand as land broke off and slid down and away.  The sun was cooler than previous days and there might have even been a faint stirring of air.

Then, the man noticed the tremors had disappeared all together but the land still eroded continuously though slowly.  What with the setting of the sun and attrition of the dried mud, man was forced to stand on one leg.  He hopped to his unwearied limb just before light failed completely.  No star even made it above the horizon this night.  Did he have his eyes open? He couldn’t be sure.  There he stood in the deep ink of night, shivering at the chill air and feeling a cramp in his leg; all on the last bits of ground that were not many yards, fathoms or leagues below.

The man awoke and saw first the pre-dawn sky, pink and pillow-y with clouds.  A stiff breeze ruffled his clothes but he did not move for another minute.  Carefully, he sat up and saw he was just a foot away from the small column of land on which he perched the night before.  He reached down and touched something rather cold – it was a sheet of glass.  He ran his hand all around and saw the glass stretched on for as far as he could tell.  Reflections lept from the glass in many far places as the sun finally crept over the horizon.  He turned back to the pillar of earth which ran all those many many feet down to the ground below.  At the very place where he had stood the night before, a small green stalk with a light blue bud now stood.  And with the light from the sun growing stronger, the little bud opened to capture the rays.  The man stood up and gently tested the glass around him with a foot.  He stepped over to the flower, bent down and gently plucked it from the ground.  This man set off toward the north with the little blossom held between his thumb and forefinger.

Kyle Tolle Short Stories land, man, story, tale

Listen to this Reading

Kyle Tolle reading ‘The Sin of Two Extremes’

The universe is a complex place and humans spend a great deal of time and energy trying to understand it. Removing “unnecessary” intricacy and abstraction are two methods that let us live without getting swamped in the details. If you thought of how many billions and billions of photons hit your retina every millisecond and how your brain processes all those signals, you’d be inundated with information and soon suffer paralysis as all your faculties focused on the minutia. Luckily, our bodies and brains have evolved to let us get the information we really want; whether or not a bear is about to maul our pack-mule Teddy.

College professors are particularly in favor of abstraction. Where do you think all the models of organizational behavior, object oriented analysis, physical systems and human thought come from? They come from taking something really complex, stripping it down to bare bones, and hoping we don’t lose a few bones on the way to the museum. I really am feeling these crummy analogies today!  A few quarters ago I took an organizational behavior class and the professor presented all sorts of models.  The sheer number of models for motivation alone show  there is considerable work to be done. One model did not contradict the others, instead it complemented them. If ever a single model can be had, it will be an amalgamation of all the current, distinct models.

One of the greatest sins of knowledge is boiling down a complex system too far.  The actions humans undertake are not simply good or evil. For the sake of some discussions, it is easier to idealize the world and say that there are only two sides, but once we move out of fairy-tale land, we hit hard times. “Well, that person stole food, but it was for his starving family.” Unless you’re some authoritarian bastard or some anarchistic half-wit, you’d probably agree there is a grey area. (If you are an authoritarian bastard or a anarchistic half-wit, please, keep reading; maybe you’ll learn why you’re dumb!)

Instead of breaking all ideas, problem domains or the universe into two and only two extremes, let’s consider things to be on a continuum.  The person earlier had good intentions but accomplished them in a not so good way. If you consider the person solely evil, you’re just being harsh; if you consider the person solely good, you’re being overly lenient. Even our judicial system (as woefully twisted as it may be) recognizes a gradient in crimes. Treating all convicted criminals like murderers wouldn’t accomplish much, nor would treating them all like juvenile delinquents.

Upon reflection, I noticed that in the carnivore post I said that we need to determine whether animals are like robots or humans.  I recognize this was a huge mistake. It is not fair to say that animals are either robotic or humanistic. Labeling animals one of two ways is really nice and convenient, but it’s a bad idea because, for the most part, it hinders our thinking. A cricket’s mental capacity is obviously different from a dolphin’s and would fall on the robot-human gradient in a different place.

Most humans operate under the assumption that we’re the only beings around that are, as we’d say, human. An interesting question is, “What makes humans intrinsically different from any other animal?” Can we definitively say? I need to look into this topic, because I’m sure greater minds have pondered this. Humans share some likenesses to robots, and vice-versa.  Can we comprehend a being which would surpass us on our end of the “human” scale? That’s doubtful. Is it possible that something could surpass us in reality? It’s possible. Is it probable? I can’t even hazard a guess.

There are cases when a dichotomy is the correct division.  There are either two pennies here, are there are not two pennies here. True or false.  But then again, maybe the answer is conditional or is semantically determined, in which case a continuum would more accurately express reality.  Even “The Sin of Two Extremes” is a case of two extremes. I call the division of domains into two extremes a sin, whereas the division of domains into other than two extremes is not a sin. Sin and not a sin. Perhaps I can escape the quandary by saying that on a sin ladder it would get a 9.5. See, I even accommodate other-than-integer numbers and all! Whew, crisis averted.

If, in the future, I mistakenly repeat this terrocious (combination of terrible and attrocious) thought-blunder, don’t hesitate to remind me (kindly; my ego is fragile) via comments at the bottom.  I am also interested in hearing your thoughts. In what way to do commonly commit the sin of two extremes?  Maybe you feel uggs are pure evil and the person wearing them is consequently pure evil? Perhaps you feel cyclists are by default retarded? I’ll stop here because I don’t want to take the fun of introspection away! I do want to hear what you have to say though; I thrive on discussion! Please post your comments on here as oppposed to twitter, facebook or email, because they’ll be better appreciated here in the context of all the other comments!

Kyle Tolle Personal extremes, humanity, knowledge, life, mistakes, robots, sin, thought

The Quest

Today I met my friend Nick at Cazuela’s (Mexican Grill) to eat. I had only woken up an hour previously, so this was going to be my breakfast. We sat down in the booth and looked over the menus (which had become real-looking menus from the time I had been there before).  The first thing he pointed out was the Mucho Macho Burrito. A 12″ burrito made with your choice of chicken or beef for $9.75. But this was no ordinary burrito. There was a challenge attached. This thing was filled and covered with Habaneros (some really freaking hot chilies) and if you could eat all of it within 30 minutes, without leaving the table to go to the bathroom, you got the meal for free.

Even though I am not a big fan of food, I am not afraid to admit that I can put it away when the time is right.  This challenge seemed right up my alley since I hadn’t eaten anything yet that day and I am a fan of spicy foods.  I went ahead and ordered the Mucho Macho Burrito.  Soon enough the behemoth was delivered, and I took a picture of it.

The Mucho Macho Burrito - seen as it was served.

The Battle

As you can see, it’s a weird orange/yellow/brownish color. Appetizing, right? It may be from the chilies it’s concocted from. I started to eat the burrito from the right hand side (yours and my right!). The first bite wasn’t bad. It was hot but not terribly so. Oh! how little did I know of the pain to come. The second bite kicked me in the tongue. This thing was not just hot; it was fiery! My eyes immediately watered until tears ran from them.

I ate half the burrito in 5 minutes. At that point, I decided to pace myself a bit. I had 25 more minutes, so there was no rush. The waitress had kindly delivered an entire pitcher of water to the table, to help me cope with the fire. I drank 2-3 glasses of water to douse the flames licking my mouth… to little avail.  The burrito didn’t even taste good, just really hot. After some time, I set back to it. Eating small bites so I could take a sip of water shortly thereafter. Around this time I asked the waitress for a glass of milk, because I’ve heard milk has something in it to counteract the whatever in chilies. I just don’t feel like looking it up.  The milk was delivered but provided little respite. Curses!

The last 3 bites were the hardest. My stomach felt a little weird and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to keep the burrito down.  After taking a bit more time, I was able to eat the last pieces of the burrito. I set the plate aside in victory.

The Much Macho Burrito when I finished it; nearly a half hour after I started.

The waitress soon saw the cleared plate and took it away. She then came back with a pen and paper. There was a little process to go through, it seems! I wrote down my name and phone number for them to tell me when I can pick up a shirt. I then had a picture taken for them to put on a wall of people who have eaten the burrito. Finally, I wrote my name in large black letters on a sign near the front door. So if you ever go there, look for my picture and name; I’m pretty much famous, not to mention how Mucho Macho a man I am!

The Healing

Nick paid his check and we took a little more time.  My stomach wasn’t very happy with me, but my mouth was cooling down.  We finally set out though. As soon as I made it out of the doors, I puked on the street. Interestingly, it was mainly the water I drank. My stomach was not very happy. We walked a little further down Northwood Ave and I puked again. And again. In the end, I puked something like 5 or 6 times – all in broad daylight, right on the street.  Very little of the burrito came back up. It was mostly the tons of water I drank to help cool my mouth, which was good because I can’t imagine what the burn of the burrito would be coming back up.

Whew! I felt a lot better after puking. Took it slow getting home, because my stomach was still a bit funny. Got back in my apartment, shaved (since I didn’t have time to before I left to meet Nick), and then laid down on my bed. Ended up watching a few episodes of 30 Rock. Lying down was really the only way to keep my stomach from feeling really weird. After watching two episodes I fell asleep. I mean, I had done a lot in the 4 hours I was up. >_>

I slept for a good 4-5 hours and here I am writing this blog post about the day. The only other thing I have eaten day has been Lifesaver mints. Update: I have eaten a few crackers which went down nicely. Not sure if my stomach will tolerate anything else. But the good thing is I haven’t vomited any more! I hope you have enjoyed this account of the defeat of the Mucho Macho Burrito and my subsequent public vomiting. I have conquered the beast and will never have to face him again.

Listen to these Readings

Kyle Tolle reading ‘Mucho Macho Burrito’

Kyle Tolle Personal burrito, food, man, manliness, mexican, puke, vomit

Oh, how easy it is to get absorbed in our lives and not see anything else. It is far too easy to get caught up and only just look for a solution to our particular, one-time problem, say meeting a person we find difficult to tolerate.  We come up with a throw-away fix that works for us this time.  But what about when we encounter a similar problem again later, say meeting another annoying person? We probably stumble through the situation again, because we haven’t formed any general-purpose plan of attack.

Take this a step further and we consequently see so much of life is re-living, re-hashing and re-doing everything so many billions of people have done before us. People have struggled with morality, weak economies, and cross-country moves before.  Not only have others struggled with it, some have found good ways of thinking about these things.  What I want to do instead of reasoning through life focused on personal, specific problems is to take issues, abstract and generalize them enough to apply to humanity as a whole.

Lately, I have found it helpful to step back a bit from my emotions, look at why I am feeling so, and getting a handle on patterns.  Sounds a bit robotic but getting to know why and how you think isn’t a bad thing. I’ m also taking steps to think more generally when I encounter a problem. Not only do I think of how I can handle the situation, but how people in general might.  I want to harness knowledge, make some sort of core, so people of today and the future can use others’ experiences to get through things and spend their time wrestling all the new issues they will face.

Knowledge does come in two forms though: Explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge is that which can be stored and transferred easily, like historical facts.  Tacit knowledge is the sort you have to pick up by experience, like how to ride a bike. And even though you have to actually ride a bike to pick up that muscle memory, that’s not to say there isn’t a way to transfer some knowledge on how to go about it. So even for things like dealing with your short temper, there could be a how-to or some guidelines to follow.

I think of physics as a good example. Physics students have to spend some time reinventing the wheel, in order to see how the basics work. But they don’t dwell deeply on the proofs or just how long a time it took for others to come to these conclusions. They learn these things, and quickly move on to more challenging ideas.  Soon enough, they stand on the shoulders of giants and come face-to-face with unsolved problems. Even though they have not built the foundation themselves, they can surely expand upon it.  And this is exactly what I want to do with more general life-knowledge: generalize, codify and retain it. There will be some bit of re-inventing the wheel, but it should be a small amount.

This does beg the question of whether absolute truth exists. I’m sure we could argue semantics all night and day for the rest of all ever, so I will punt and say that regardless of whether “absolute” truth exists, there are some things people should do in certain situations. There is a lot of personality that goes in to how a person thinks, copes and reasons, but the personality sits on top of a base. This base human is what I want to get at.

This essentially highlights the perspective I will hold as I write future posts. I plan to explore my personality, thoughts and life and see how I can generalize the things I come across. I hope to gain some insight and also hear what others have to say about their introspection. One of my life’s goals is to understand another person, but I must have a good grasp on myself first. I really welcome everyone to try this approach. Let’s put these basic, mundane pieces of human life down so others don’t have to slog through them like so many people before.

Listen to these Readings

Kyle Tolle reading ‘Lens Through Which I Look’

Kyle Tolle reading ‘Lens Through Which I Look’ in one take

Kyle Tolle reading ‘Lens Through Which I Look’ in monotone

Kyle Tolle Personal humanity, knowledge, thinking

One of the most useful pieces of functionality on any website is to be notified of updates via email. Facebook has this for wall-posts and messages; Twitter has device updates for people you follow; forums have these for replies to threads you’ve posted on. It’s a helpful way of having notification of the update pushed to the user, which is a big win, because the alternative is the user sits around refreshing the page to see if anything has happened. (That might have been a run-on sentence… I am not sure.) Users/readers/followers have lots better things to do with their time. They should really only have to come back to something they’ve visited if something has changed. This is where push notification is useful. Email is a great way of pushing updates, because it is so prevalent. RSS feeds are a form of pushing, but RSS readers aren’t adopted as widely.

Interestingly, the capability for email notification of comments following one you’ve posted is not built in to Wordpress (the blogging platform I use). There is an option to subscribe to the RSS feed for the comments, though. John Colvin pointed out this recently and I was a bit disgusted I had not noticed. Granted, I do get an email every time a new comment is posted, so I’ll say that’s the reason why I didn’t notice the lack for other people.

Today, I installed a plugin that adds this feature to my blog posts.  I actually saw it a while back but when I clicked to install it, I got a notification that it hasn’t been tested with this version of Wordpress.  Even so, I am hopeful that the plugin will work. When commenting, make sure to tick the checkbox and you should be notified of new comments. There should even be a page to manage your notifications. Feel free to use this post as a test-bed and make sure things work.  If something doesn’t work, please let me know! You still have the option to subscribe to the comments feed.

If any of you readers have an idea for some functionality which would allow you to better use this blog, go ahead and tell me. I’m interested in making your ‘Thoughts of an Eaten Sun’ experience as enjoyable as possible!

Kyle Tolle Blog

All the grounds are dead.

The hills are naught but

markers of a thousand doom-craven men.

Bury their flesh and watch the headstones

rot… and crash… and surge.

The flotsam of decay eating through

the hulls of our ships.

Morose spray flits into my eyes;

sloughing skin peels from my heels.

Wailing, “Load the harpoon gun,”

as the bone-whales breach and beach.

We can ride a carcass ashore

and strip his blubber there.

Growing grains may be failed fodder, but

we’ll fire them all the same.

Those men were always so;

the dead were never living.

Telling myself my fate is different.

Kiss me, then…

Before we’re drug under.

Listen to these Readings

Kyle Tolle reciting ‘The Cost of Capital’

This is the first poem I have written in a long time.  Felt really good to write it.  I enjoy mixing metaphors of land and sea. Please comment below with your feedback!

This is also my first foray into providing mp3 versions of my posts. I like the idea, so will probably continue doing so.

Kyle Tolle Poetry, Writing

Chinchillas are cute. Mushroom clouds are awesome. Hats are silly. It was only a matter of time before we found an example in nature where all these worlds combine!

Chinchilla with a Mushroom Cloud Hat

View the TwitPic’d version

Kyle Tolle Mushroom Cloud Hats chinchilla, hat, mushroom cloud

Before we begin, let me explain what follows:

This quarter I took Classics H222 – Greek Myth – which was taught by Fritz Graf.  For our essay final, we were given three prompts to chose from. I picked the third prompt, which was to write my own etiological essay. Now that I set it up a bit, here it is!  Please leave comments below to let me know what you think.

The Etiological Myth Concerning the Origins of Black Holes, Humanity and Computers

Truthfully, Graflink, the mightiest Forbearer and God of Gods, has commissioned me to tell this account of Graflink’s creations, Havelmark’s fall, Fiehmel’s insight, and Humanity’s outsourcing of work. I, Kyle Tolle, can neither pass the chance to relate a story of such significance, nor bear to lose the special spot in history given to those few who act in accordance of the wishes of the lordly Graflink.  A specific time cannot be given for the start of these events because they transpired before the beginning age of the Earth, by which we Humans measure the passing of time.  The events I shall relate, though, did happen shortly after Graflink, the fairest Right, broke the siege of His awful Brothers, routed their shocktroops, and sent His Brothers’ splendid corpses and stale souls to the bleak Static, where they are now bound, for truth.

Then, the Githeons, those Gods who had fought on the side of the most honest Truth Graflink, bowed in subservience, faithfully pledged devotion, and raised loud acclaim to Him who justly deserved their attention.  Thereafter, Graflink lamented for many Earth-Ages the treason of His now-lost Brothers.  His grief eventually gave way to a desire to create.  It was then that Graflink, our boundless Instantiator, conceived a spherical mass on which many things could live and thrive, along with many surrounding masses.  And soon did He begin to assemble the masses, as well as create the complex rules which would govern the system.  So intricately did Graflink weave the threads of this scheme that, even with His staggering mind and power, Graflink, the Craftsman of all Order, spent much time performing the mathematical calculations necessary to support this far-reaching infrastructure.  I have heard rumors from the Lesser that Graflink indeed spent many eons calculating these fine details.

The sounds of Graflink’s workings did reach the ears of Havelmark, the God of Having and Hoarding, one of the Apathetic (those Gods who fought neither with Graflink nor the Brothers), and so drew the original Collector’s attention.  Within Havelmark did stir the desire to have Graflink’s creations, and this shift away from Apathy proved significant.  On the outer stretches of the system, Havelmark lurked; watching and observing, thinking and longing.  Not long did he idly crave these awesome things which Graflink produced.  Havelmark, that great Assembler, silently skirted the outlying places – gathering and heaping all he could reach without arousing suspicion from the chief Architect or those loyal to Him.  The more Havelmark took on, the slower he moved and the larger he grew.  It eventually happened that Havelmark took one too many things and, with a blinding flash of light and terrific boom, turned into a gaping Void; Havelmark became the first Black Hole.

Graflink diligently and precisely calculated the formulae and numbers necessary to bring our world to fruition, until His concentration was rent by Havelmark’s transformation. His surprise turned into confusion as He saw nothing where He looked.  So He questioned the Githeons, “What fiendish disruption is this? Who stalls my progress?”  After receiving no response, He turned His question to the Apathetic.  One sluggish god came forward and said, “Havelmark is he. The Having now has but still gathers more.”  Graflink had His answer and went to confront Havelmark at the outskirts. As He approached, Graflink felt Himself pulled strongly toward the black disc which encased Havelmark.  Graflink situated Himself so as to not be pulled toward Havelmark’s mass and looked around.  All manners of matter were moving from the very universe Graflink was creating toward the Black Hole.  As the pieces of matter drew closer, they sped faster and faster, until they disappeared beyond the desolate horizon of Havelmark’s greed.

Graflink asked Havelmark, the fell Hoarder, “What reason for such interruption can you give?” The clearest Wisdom waited for some time, expecting Havelmark’s answer, but no reply did return.  Graflink put forward the question again, and again heard naught but silence. Then the fairest Right rephrased His inquiry, in hopes of resolving the issue by other means than force.  A battle would certainly be lengthy and delay His efforts toward completing His cosmos.  Still no reply was ever made and after substantial postponement, Graflink could no longer bear to see His universe slowly consumed.  Graflink again enlisted the ranks of the Githeons, who number too many to enumerate here, to battle the rogue Havelmark.

Graflink and the Githeons launched a brutal assault on Havelmark’s Void; first with volleys of power, force and dread. These missiles only disappeared beyond the horizon, like the matter the Black Hole ate at an alarming rate, and fed the strength of the yawning Oblivion.  A second attack of fearsome brute strength came shortly thereafter, only to quickly end in disaster.  Any God who attempted to wrestle, grasp or move Havelmark stepped past the horizon, which was not a tangible barrier as first believed, and was never seen again.  Graflink ordered the Githeons fall back, and pondered what next to do.  Despairing, Graflink broke from His worry and created a tool to assist Him with His now-delayed calculations and formulae.  On the face of the half-completed Earth, He placed us Humans and gave us instructions to reckon, gauge, and determine the variables, constants and identities which support the great infrastructure.  A vast number of Humans were created so that, even though our individual contributions are small, a large group might supply some meaningful data.  As Graflink turned His will back to the chasm of Havelmark, our ancestors toiled and wrestled with thought and numbers.  And so the beginnings of science were early laid.

With work on the universe resumed by the early Humans, Graflink felt a brief bit of hope.  He next summoned the craftiest, most devious and trickiest of the Githeons and picked their wily minds for any idea of how to deal with the immovable Havelmark.  None of these proved fruitful; much energy was spent with nothing to show.  Graflink sighed and the Githeons’ morale sank as yet more pieces of the universe disappeared into Ruin.  But then, from seemingly nowhere, the meek, slender-throated Lesser Goddess Fiehmel appeared beside Graflink and said, “You cannot move Havelmark, but can You not move Your system from his reach?”  For all the craft and wisdom of the Githeons and Graflink, this side of the solution had never occurred to them.   Graflink quickly roused the Githeons and tasked them with the relocation of His universe.  Pieces which had already been pulled too close to Havelmark were reluctantly accepted as lost, but the rest they laboriously moved out the Void’s deep gravitational pull.  Without a source to feed the Oblivion’s insatiable hunger, Havelmark consumed what he had gathered up to that point, until it was eventually gone. Left with no choice, Havelmark devoured himself; after which the Black Hole finally shuddered and collapsed – the Having had and lost.

Relieved, though weary, Graflink turned His attention back to His system; something He had not done for many an Earthly eon.  The mightiest Forbearer was surprised to see Humans not calculating as He had originally set our course. Rather, He saw us relaxing or farming or some even sleeping.  Curious about our disregard for His divine appointment, He questioned many of the throngs of Humans.  A single reply was heard: “Computational Engines.”  Our ancestors told the boundless Instantiator of Fiehmel’s visit to earth, before she appeared to Graflink with the Havelmark solution.  Empathetic for the toils of the Humans after watching the labors of her kin, she worked so that an engine might calculate and Humans relax.  How much more appropriate for an inanimate machine to suffer such computational drudgery than the creative minds of our kind.  Graflink argued not with Fiehmel’s insights and so she is the reason why today machines do toil: so that we might enjoy the universe created by the honest Truth Graflink and saved from the hoarding Havelmark and his Black Hole by the slender-throated Fiehmal.

Kyle Tolle School, Writing etiology, Greek myth, Mythology

Note: This is largely a reply to John Colvin’s My Formerly Vegan Cat.

Veganism

Now, I am not very sure of Vegan beliefs. I am under the impression there are two main schools of thought:

1. Any use of animals for human consumption is immoral. This includes animal flesh, byproducts, etc.
2. Animal products are not necessarily immoral, rather the way animals are raised today for said use is.

From what I’ve heard, Freegans are more generally proponents of #2, because some will eat meat if it will otherwise go to waste.

Where did these thoughts come from? Who knows. What’s important are the assumptions that go into these statements and the implications that arise from their use.

Vegan Assumptions for Humans:

• Humans are omnivores and can live without eating meat.
• The lives of many animals are more important than the pleasure of a single human.
• Humans do not need to use animal products.
• Animals of all sorts are moral agents. (I’m guessing here.)

Now, if we generalize a bit and instead of “humans” said “animals”:

Vegan Assumptions for Animals:

• Animals are omnivores and can live without eating meat.
• The lives of many animals are more important than the pleasure of a single animal.
• Animals do not need to use animal products.
• Animals of all sorts are moral agents. (Again, I’m guessing here.)

Vegan assumptions for animals break down though. Specifically, the first statement. “Animals … can live without eating meat.” I would have to disagree with this statement. There are three classes of animal diets: carnivores, omnivores, herbivores. Animals fall in to one of these three distinctions.

On Carnivores

Carnivores are animals that eat meat. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that cats are indeed carnivorous. Maybe more surprisingly, they are obligate carnivores, meaning they have to eat meat to survive. Their bodies have evolved to specialize in processing meat. Cats cannot properly digest plant matter or even get all the nutrients they need to survive from plants, no matter how how many plants they eat. Some vegan cat foods claim to add these nutrients so that cats need not eat meat. John’s recent experience shows that this is not the case for all cats.

This brings up a very important question. If an animal must eat meat to survive, is killing an animal for that reason immoral? I argue certainly not. Animals have evolved to this obligate carnivorous state.  Evolution precludes personal preference. This evolution was species wide, because it helped them survive some way. Cats did not evolve to be meat-eaters only because they liked it.

It is silly to say that obligate carnivores are immoral . Morality implies a choice. Cats do not have a choice whether they eat meat or not. They either eat meat or die. If anything, it would be immoral for a cat to not eat meat, or their owner not feed them meat, because it would lead to the ultimate suffering and death of the cat.

This is similar to a mentally ill person killing another person. Is this mentally ill person a moral agent? Can we hold them accountable for their actions, when they do not understand their actions (ie. their actions are not a conscious choice)? No. Again, morality implies a choice.

Are Animals Moral Agents?

Going further – can we even consider animals moral agents? Can we hold animals responsible for their actions? Do they understand their actions? This may depend on the animal, really. In general, I would say that animals are not moral agents. If a bull gores a human, I would not consider that bull to be legally liable. Now, legality is a far cry from morality, but still. I don’t think any human would say that bull was morally responsible for his actions and should be punished. If anything, animal rights activists would cry out that punishing the bull would be wrong.

Pain and Suffering

Do animals feel pain? Yes. Can animals suffer? That’s tougher.

What is pain? It is the awareness of some stimulus which causes physical harm. Suffering, on the other hand, is similar to pain, but has a mental aspect to it. The two seem identical, no? Pain is a physical sensation, which would cause some thing to try to avoid it, because it would hurt them physically. But suffering is something only a sentient being can feel, because the mental component adversely affects the being. It is hard for me to really comprehend the difference, because when I feel pain, I suffer. A good analogy would be a robot. A robot could use pressure sensors to feel pain, meaning the robot could sense pressures and when it became “painful” or physically dangerous, the robot could try to avoid this source of pressure. So even though this robot tries to avoid physical injury, we would say it neither suffers from the pain nor would suffer if it were physically injured.

So now we have to decide whether animals are more like humans or robots. That sounds sort of weird, and some may want to lean toward the human-side, simply because they are living. But again, plants are living. Plants are not sentient. The fact that they do not have a brain makes that pretty easy (or maybe not… Remember the Pequeninos?). Are animals sentient? This question is very important when it comes to looking into whether it is moral for humans (an omnivore) to use/eat animals. This is now a bit out of scope and fortunately will be for another time. I have to make you want to come back somehow, right?

Coming to an End

Now, for something I should have thought of earlier. Is it even necessary to consider the morality of carnivores or their food if neither are not moral agents? What if only one is a moral agent? Does it matter which end the moral agent is on? What about when the owner of a cat is a moral agent, specifically one who is vegan? Is it immoral for a vegan to feed another animal to his pet? Are pets even morally justifiable?

If I refused to feed a cat meat, which causes the cat’s death, is it only a problem if that cat is a moral agent? This actually seems to be decide the validity of this entire argument, does it not? Let me know if I have fallen into some quandary by assumptions I didn’t even realize I was making.

Whew, I just came up with enough ideas to last me several posts. I want to hear your feedback though, so I can incorporate them into my posts in the future. Also, this Wordpress blog supports pingbacks and trackbacks, so take advantage of that, if your blog supports it!

Interesting note: This post is longer than the requirement for the final essay for my Greek Myth class. Can I just turn this in?!

Kyle Tolle Personal animals, carnivores, ethics, morality, vegan