on 11-Sep-2016 (Sun)

Emotion as concept. Emotion words link personal (private?) experience to a conceptual network of context/culture/etc.

Link to note: emotion as concept. An emotion is not a name for something. It designated a relation. Contra (James?) bodily change.

The reduction and focusing of ritual attention heightens sensitivity to anomalies. Affects.

Otto wants to counter the reduction of experience.

The ‘hermeneutic of experience’ was soon adopted by a host of scholars interested in religion, the most influential being William James, and today many have a difficult time imagining what else religion might be about. Yet prior to Schleiermacher, insists Proudfoot, religion was simply not under- stood in such terms, and it is thus incumbent upon us to reject the perennialist hypothesis in so far as it anachronistically imposes the recent and ideologically laden notion of ‘religious experience’ on our interpretations of premodern phenomena

We procrastinate to defend our self-worth when we feel a threat to our sense of worth and independence. We procrastinate to temporarily relieve deep inner fears.

The fears are:

• The fear of failure
• The fear of being imperfect (perfectionism)
• The fear of being overwhelmed
• The fear of success (advancement vs. friends and acceptance)
• The fear of increased demands (as a result of your good work)

The “Have To’s” are messages of stress, and the “Shoulds” are messages of depression. These messages are negative because they do not clearly communicate what you choose to do, whenyou choose to do it, and where you choose to start it.

Replace the negative messages with positive ones. Give yourself the power of choice. Learn to say “no” – you do not have to doanything. You can say no. Always keep that in mind.

Replace ”I have to” with ”I choose to”.

Replace ”I must finish” with ”When can I start?” (and where?).

Replace ”This is so big” with ”I can take one small step”.

Replace ”I must be perfect” with ”I can be human”.

Replace ”I don’t have time to play” with ”I must take time to play”.

The statement of a producer with a powerful focus is:

I choose to start on one small imperfect step knowing I have plenty of time for play.

If you were to walk a board between two skyscrapers, you would be paralyzed by fear. But if there was a 100% reliable safety net, you would dance your way to the other side. You need to create that safety net in your life.

Develop indisputable sense of worth for yourself. Allow yourself to make mistakes. Make a safe place where you are free of judgment, in your mind and in your life. Make a commitment to yourself and your self-worth. Nothing must threaten you. Allow yourself to be human.

Guilt-Free Play, Quality Work

This chapter could be summarized like this: Play hard, work hard. Focus on playing hard first. Schedule your play, leisure and time for friends first, and start scheduling your work only after that.

This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but it works for multiple reasons:

• First, it is an excellent reverse-psychology trick. Before you know it, whenever some of your leisure activities gets cancelled for some reason, you will be relieved and thinkingGreat! I can work instead!
• Second, you need the extra stimulation, socialization, relaxation and exercise for high-quality output. No one can live in a bubble and come up with creative solutions. Additionally, exercising will give you more energy.
• Third, because the time when you can work will become limited, you will automatically have a tendency to make the most out of it. You will eliminate distractions. When you work, you really work.
• Fourth, you can achieve genuine and lasting motivation only through abundant rewards. Make the periods of work shorter, but make them count.

Procrastinators have many things common with workaholics. But both of them should realize that you do not need to put of living.

Overcoming Blocks to Action

The Now Habit offers three tools for overcoming blocks to action. The tools are:

Three-dimensional thinking and the reverse calendar

Any large task can easily overwhelm you without the proper perspective. You need to consider the size, length, and breadth of your task. You need to divide the work in time. Divide and conquer :-)

Reverse calendar helps you to schedule your work realistically. You start with an ultimate deadline, and then work your way with smaller deadlines up to the present moment. All these deadlines are within your control.

The work of worrying

You should respect your ability to worry as a means to alert you of a potential danger. Whenever you worry, figure out a plan for alleviating your worries. Establish a plan how to cope with any potential danger. This will give you a true peace of mind. Constant worrying can drain your energy quickly.

Persistent starting

Summary of this passage of The Now Habit is simply “Keep on starting.” Do not think about finishing. Think about starting. Always be starting. The finishing will take care of it itself. You can start many times every day. Always focus on what you can do next. One little step.

The Unschedule

The unschedule is a weekly calendar of your recreational and non-work related activities. Personal organizer software comes in handy for that. If you fill your weekly schedule with all your daily chores, committed activities, and a scheduled leisure time, you will see that you can’t realistically work 12, 8, or maybe even 6 hours a day on your task.

The unschedule uses reverse psychology to spring you into action. You can give yourself restraints like these:

• Do not work more than twenty hours a week on this project.
• Do not work more than five hours a day on this project.
• You must exercise, play, dance at least one hour a day.
• You must take at least one day a week off from any work.
• Aim for only thirty minutes of quality work.
• Work for an imperfect, perfectly human first effort.
• Start small.

With those restrains in place, you will have a strong unconscious desire to work more, play less, and resist the “authority” of your unschedule

Keep track of every uninterrupted 30-minute block of work that you’ve done during the day. Log how many hours you have worked every day and week.

Working in the Flow State

You are most productive when you can fully focus. Distractions, intensive emotions and concerns undermine your focus and pr

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Procrastination is a habit you develop to cope with anxiety about starting or completing a task. It is your attempted solution to cope with tasks that are boring or overwhelming. When you use the Now Habit strategies to lower your anxiety, fears, and self-doubts, you can stop using procrastination as an escape and can double your productivity and, often, double your income. When you learn to work efficiently – in the Flow State or Zone, using more of your brain-cell power – you have less reason to avoid important, top-priority tasks.

The example from the book indicated that many people often take an hour or so to “settle in” at work before getting started, so his recommendation is to immediately start on a high priority task as soon as you get there and see where the day leads you from there. I can basically use that same philosophy by taking on the most pressing household tasks for a period of time as soon as I get home. Why do this? It creates an immediate sense of good accomplishment within you, a positive feeling to combat the negative feelings that swirl around procrastination.

Chapter 3: How To Talk To Yourself
Most of the language of procrastination is inherently negative: “I have to” do this, “I must finish” this, “This project is too big,” and so on. Thinking of tasks from that perspective makes them seem more difficult and insurmountable than they really are. The idea here is that when you are facing a task you don’t want to do, break it down into small chunks that you can get started on immediately so that you can quickly feel some sort of forward progress on the task.

Another major roadblock towards eliminating procrastination from your life is eliminating the idea that it has to be absolutely perfect – and using that as an excuse not to start yet. By breaking these tasks down into smaller pieces, you can find pieces that you feel much better about in terms of success, and thus you can do those first, much like putting the border pieces together first when doing a jigsaw puzzle. Then, when you’ve started putting the pieces together, you’ll either find the smaller elements you find hard (which you can ask for help on) or they might just end up being easier than you expect.

Chapter 4: Guilt-Free Play, Quality Work
Here, the focus is on the need for play, particularly guilt-free play. When you procrastinate, you’re trading true free time (that which doesn’t have an uncompleted task hanging over it) for false, guilty “free time” (procrastination). One major way to open yourself up to true guilt-free fun is by simply getting started on that task that hangs over you by breaking it down into littler pieces.

I know this from experience. If there’s a household task to do and I sit down and read instead, I usually feel worse about it than if I had just done the household task and then read. This phenomenon is true in pretty much any avenue of life, from the workplace to personal life.

Chapter 5: Overcoming Blocks To Action
The three major fears that procrastination is based on are the fear of being overwhelmed, the fear of failure and imperfection, and the fear of not finishing. Each one of these fears has a particular trick that can dislodge the fear.

The fear of being overwhelmed can be defeated by three-dimensional thinking and the reverse calendar. If you have a monstrous goal and a deadline, you can whittle it down by making up a timeline for it. Start by going in reverse and defining the smaller and smaller sections of it that need to be complete by a certain date. So, if you need a report by June 30, have a near-final draft done by June 25, a rough draft done by June 20, a structured outline by June 18, primary research done by June 13, and so on until you’ve got a short-term task that you can wrap your arms around.

The fear of failure and imperfection can be defeated by the work of worrying. Define what exactly is the worst case scenario if you take a good stab at the problem. Do you turn in a poor report? Well, couldn’t you just have peers review it with you before you turn it in? So then what’s the worst scenario excluding that one? If you really look at the nightmares you have and look at what you can do to stop them, you can often eliminate all or most of the bad outcomes, leaving you with nothing but success if you take an earnest stab at the problem and follow your contingencies that you just defined.

The fear of not finishing can be defeated by persistent starting.Whenever you come up with an excuse not to get started on a task, close your eyes and just dive in. This section is pretty useful because it deals with excuses that people use not to get started and completely dissects them.

Chapter 6: The Unschedule
An “unschedule” is basically a schedule that encourages you to get started on tasks by defining small, focused, and clearly defined periods to get stuff done. As a reward for these periods of work focus, you also schedule in defined periods of uninterrupted leisure that are yours as

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The FVP algorithm uses the question “What do I want to do more than x?” to preselect a chain of tasks from the list.

We have to do the things we have no option about so often that they have become part of the landscape. Whether we feel like doing them or not, because we have no option we get on with them. We get on with them rain or sun, regardless of our feelings, regardless of how tired we are. They have to be done – we have no option.

Select one thing and tell yourself that you have no option about doing it. Every time your mind finds an excuse for not doing it, tell yourself firmly that there is no option. If circumstances conspire to throw your day completely out, tell yourself again that there is no option about this one particular thing. There are no exceptions. No excuses.

Whatever you do, don’t start adding a huge list of things about which you “have no option”. Stick to one. You will find that the mindset will affect other things as well, but it’s best only to have the one thing which is formally “No Option”.

Schleiermacher’s strategy proved fruitful: the notion of religious experience provided new grounds upon which to defend religion against secular and scientific critique.

“Reason, Husserl says, is the logos which is produced in history. It traverses Being with itself in sight, in order to appear to itself, that is, to state itself and hear itself as logos .... It emerges from itself in order to take hold of itself within itself, in the ‘living present’ of its self- presence. In emerging from itself, [logos as] hearing oneself speak con- stitutes itself as the history of reason through the detour of writing. Thus it differs from itself in order to reappropriate itself. The Origin of Geometry describes the necessity of this exposition of reason in a worldly inscription.

a reading which always pushes toward a moment of irreducible difference conceived not only as the danger to the doctrines of truth and meaning which are governed by presence, but also as an inevitable danger in the form of writing which allows truth and meaning to present themselves;

The translation is impossible without commentary, which will be placed in brackets: “By means of the dates of these texts, we would like to indicate [marquer: to mark] that in order to bind them together [relier: to put between covers the pages forming a work, originally by sewing], in rereading them [relire: relier and relire are anagrams], we cannot maintain an equal distance from each of them. What remains here the displacement of a question certainly forms a system. With some interpretive sewing [couture] we could have sketched this system after- ward [après-coup; in German nachträglich. Cf. “Freud and the Scene of Writing” for the analysis of this notion.] We have only permitted isolated points [le pointillé: originally a means of engraving by points] of the system to appear, deploying or abandoning in it those blank spaces [blancs: Derrida’s analysis of Mallarmé, which was to be written in 1969, focuses on the role of the blanc in the text; see also the epigraph to this volume which refers to Mallarmé’s notion of espacement: “the whole without novelty except a spacing of reading.”

For the analysis of the blanc and espacement see “La double séance” in La dissémination, Paris: Seuil, 1972] without which no text is proposed as such. If text [texte] means cloth (tissu), the word texte, is derived from the Latin textus, mean- ing cloth (tissu), and from texere, to weave (tisser); in English we have text and textile. Derrida comments on this derivation at the outset of La pharmacie de Platon also in La dissémination.], all these essays have obstinately defined sewing [couture] as basting [faufilure: the f aux, “false,” in fau-filure, or “false stringing,” is actually an alteration of the earlier form of the word, farfiler or fourfiler, from the Latin fors, meaning outside. Thus basting is sewing on the outside which does not bind the textile tightly.] (December 1966.)

To repeat Derrida’s terms, these essays always affirm that the “texture” of texts makes any assemblage of them a “basted” one, i.e., permits only the kind of fore-sewing that emphasizes the necessary spaces between even the finest stitching. In practical terms, I would suggest a “basted,” well-spaced reading of Writing and Difference. Instead of reading through the book as a unified, well-sewn volume, one could follow both its arguments and its design in a way that would make them more comprehensible by choosing any of the essays to start with, and by reading the major works it refers to. (

Derrida states: “That this opposition or difference cannot be radical and absolute does not pre- vent it from functioning, and even from being indispensable within certain limits—very wide limits. For example, no translation would be possible without it. And in fact the theme of a transcendental signified was constituted within the horizon of an absolutely pure, transparent

We will never have, and in fact have never had, any ‘transfer’ of pure signifieds—from one language to another, or within one language—which would be left virgin and intact by the signifying instrument or ‘vehicle’ ” (Positions, p. 31). The translator, then, must be sure that he has understood the syntax and lexicon of the original text in order to let his own language carry out the work of transformation.

He sees structuralism as a form of philo- sophical totalitarianism, i.e., as an attempt to account for the totality of a phenomenon by reduction of it to a formula that governs it totally. Derrida submits the violent, totalitarian structural project to the coun- terviolence of solicitation, which derives from the Latin sollicitare, mean- ing to shake the totality (from sollus, “all,” and ciere, “to move, to shake”), Every totality, he shows, can be totally shaken, that is, can be shown to be founded on that which it excludes, that which would be in excess for a reductive analysis of any kind.

his etymo- logical metaphor covering a philosophical-political violence is also implied in the notion of archia (archie in French; also a neologism). Archia derives from the Greek arche¯, which combines the senses of a founding, original principle and of a government by one controlling principle. (Hence, for example, the etymological link between arche- ology and monarchy.) Philosophy is founded on the principle of the archia, on regulation by true, original principles; the deconstruction of philosophy reveals the differential excess which makes the archia pos- sible. This excess is often posed as an aporia, the Greek word for a

Ousia and parousia are the Greek words for being governed by pres- ence; parousia also contains the sense of reappropriation of presence in a second coming of Christ.

Epekeina tes ousias is the Platonic term for the beyond of being; Derrida has often used this concept as a stepping- stone in his deconstructions. Signified and signifier have been explained

1 FORCE AND SIGNIFICATION It might be that we are all tattooed savages since Sophocles. But there is more to Art than the straightness of lines and the perfection of surfaces. Plasticity of style is not as large as the entire idea.... We have too many things and not enough forms. (Flaubert, Préface à la d’écrivain)