David Foster Wallace - "This Is Water"

[Chris]

Hi guys. Just wanted to share David Foster Wallace's essay titled "This Is Water" with you all. The essay was actually a commencement speech given by Wallace at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005 (Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Water). I came across an abridged video version of the speech today. Found it to be very practical and inspiring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmpYnxlEh0c

Many of the things he talks about will find resonance with the ideas of this forum and the Work, about our "default setting" of self-service and how any real education should give us freedom to make choices other than those based on this default setting. "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day." He talks about right thinking and a lot of what he says about being well-adjusted in the society is parallel to external considering. I'll just quote some of his words directly, since I see that I am not doing a good job of conveying his thoughts clearly:

(In fact, I'll recommend that you read one or two quotes and if your curiosity is piqued, then straight away go listen to the full speech instead of going through these quotes which will not sound as meaningful without proper context)

the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

For those who are interested, I'll encourage you to listen to the full speech here:
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vET9cvlGJQw

Part2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEjVnB7AeBQ

This is the transcript:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

 

[Menna]

I enjoyed the "This is water speach"

He was manly talking about how not to think and to pay attention to whats infront of you that you can turn a miserable situation into something meaningfull and sacred. In doing further research I found he killed himself three years later. Obviously I don't know the dynamic of his choice but what I gather from this is that it shows that it much easier to give out advice then take your own.

 

[Chris]

Yes, he did commit suicide by hanging himself. He even talks about people committing suicide to free themselves of a mind which has become their master, so to speak.

But his ideas were going in the right direction. That is when I think how much this forum could have really helped him. It also reminds me of Aaron Swartz's blog and how he also seems to have been searching for some light in the darkness of this world. People so often try to make get a grip on their lives and without a fuller knowledge of the world around us and our place in it, it just doesn't make sense most of the time. This forum basically just does that and moreover one finds many people here with co-linear objectives. In the end, I think, the feeling of utter loneliness and alienation with the people around you or the world at large sometimes becomes too much to bear.

It is really hard to think how extreme one's dissatisfaction with life must be to drive one to suicide. I was depressed for the better part of an year, till about seven months ago. It is a very helpless and morose state to be in because you just don't know if you'll ever get out of it. You lose interest in all things you once considered to be fun. But I was lurking on this forum during that time and had a constant input of knowledge and so did eventually got out of depression. There is also a thread here on depression/suffering as a stepping stone to soul growth. So in that context, with that particular state of mind, you really need to be mindful of your environment. It is also saddening that just maybe, these people who are going in the right direction are subject to greater "attacks" by the Control System. Without proper knowledge, guarding your mental state becomes too tall an order resulting in such a tragic end.

 

[trendsetter37]

After watching his commencement speech, I do agree that his line of thought seemed to be co-linear with some concepts found in this forum. Upon reflecting on his death, which is sad to say the least, I was reminded of some very sobering words:


Session: 4 March 2012

Q: (Ark) Well, once we are on this subject, I want to ask about these mathematicians. Yesterday I learned that from my mathematician friend in Poland about the death of - in our Kairos club - a young mathematician Branson. And apparently he was quite young and for no reason suddenly he died driving a car. (L) In an accident? (Ark) No, while he was driving. Now, he was a friend of the German mathematician who worked with Irving Segal, the young guy that drowned in Clausthal in the lake. There was a conference, and they went for a swim in the lake. People were on the shore watching, and he just sank in seconds and that was all. He was also like 20-some years old. Then we had this Pertti Lounesto, the same club, related to the same area of mathematics, who drowned in the sea a few months after we saw him at the conference {in Cookville, Tennessee}. Okay, and then we had the Russian mathematician who was doing also similar work, and he went to the Black sea for vacation and he drowned. All these young people died, and they are all mathematicians doing very abstract work. It's too many of them to have drowned just by accident. I mean, what kind of coincidence is it? Any comment?

A: It is not a coincidence. It is too bad that so many who are on the right track in so many ways do not have the advantage of knowing about those things that would shield them from frequency driven attacks; such things as diet changes that would protect them from direct manipulation; things such as awareness of other densities. But, of course this last item would have come to their notice.

ajseph 21: Because no 3D entity can stand up to 4D alone.

Edit: Context for ajseph 21's quote:

12) Network, Network, Network!

(ajseph 21: Because no 3D entity can stand up to 4D alone. All souled individuals are part of a fragmented 6th density being. By networking we are connecting on a soul level that extends far beyond the material plane and this work can literally change the world for the better so be persistent and let things happen naturally.)

 

[Julius]

I did not know who David Foster Wallace (1962 - 2008) was.

I have seen this This Is Water - Full version-David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech I think it is the same as the links above, but the first video on this thread as been removed from youtube.

Now I am very interested in his works.

I say this David Foster Wallace was a "very dangerous man" by the Jordan Peterson definition.

I would not be the least surprised that he got enormous pressure to do/be or get "suicided".