Saturday, August 21, 2010

TrackPads And Spelunking


In the end game, I'm resorting to learning to use this new TrackPad by playing computer games with it just like I did when I first learned how to use a mouse. It's much more sensitive than I first thought. At times I barely touch the surface of the TrackPad and it performs some unexpected task before I can stop it.

I have a MineSweeper game that was designed for the Mac to imitate the original game that comes with Windows. It took a couple of days trying to figure out how to flag a cube with the TrackPad I suspected of having a mine under it, but when I did figure it out it only took a light touch for the warning flag icon to pop up.

Since it's a timed game, and I know what sort of time using a regular mouse takes, I can tell how quickly I'm learning to use the TrackPad. It's getting mo' better. Much better than the first couple of days. It might take a month or so to really get using it without having to think about what I gotta do differently to make it work right. I might not go back to my $75 laser mouse.

The most consistent problem I'm having is when I try to highlight something to either copy or delete it. It's a two-finger maneuver that's a lot like the move used to right-click. I guess I'm having some trouble getting the right-click move to work the first time too.

I seem convinced it's not abstract thought that will finally do the job, but my instinctual mechanisms that will figure this out for me. If that happens I may not know consciously exactly how I do it, and that will have to be okay by me or I'm likely to get unnecessarily confused.

This seems to be a lot like reaching for "the great man" or "the Superior man" as it is used in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. It took forty years for me to understand these metaphors through my own being/persona. The abstract thought part the I-am-is initiates through denial of the me.

Stumbling across a Wikipedia article on karst land formations set me right back on looking for a cave, but this time I was more sensible in my search. I asked for links to caves for meditation. The Results page produced lots of places with caves for meditating, plus, practically the entire history of meditating in caves, and a lotta shit about hermits too. It was like finding gold in a murky swamp.

The connect between karst formations and caves is that the karst formations are where limestone and dolomite happen in nature. Caves are found in these areas because rainwater and acid create the caves and caverns because its soft stuff that goes into solution in plain water. Other types of rock and minerals are much tougher to penetrate, so they don't find many caves in quartz formations.

The Google Results page had a lot of links to caves where famous gurus meditated. Some of them had a lotta pictures of what the caves actually looked like. Many of them were not caves in the manner many think about caves, but a lot of them looked like the Pueblo indian ruins in Mesa Verde, Arizona. I bet that's what those buildings were for too.

Many Navajos and other pueblo indians still live in the eight-sided huts they've lived in as long as any of them can remember. The name of them escape me presently. Hogans? There are huge Indian artifacts at Chaco National Park and other places where it is said that the Indians didn't live in these buildings, they were used for ceremonial purposes.

The pictures I saw of the types of places the famous gurus of Asia used for meditating looks just like the places that can be found at this link:

http://www.traditionsofthesun.org/

This is not like a big deal unless you've followed these sorts of things for fifty or sixty years, then it all adds up. That's what having a universal database like the internet available that allows people to discover that an activity performed in separate countries or continents are doing the same thing and calling it something different.

Another point of sameness seems to be the remoteness of the locations of these edifices. I didn't think this up, but watched a documentary on cave paintings. These researchers pointed out the same thing I saw in the pictures of the meditation caves. Many of them are located under a ledge of rocks and then walls are erected around them to provide privacy .

The cave paintings were found in the same types of locations. There are cave paintings in real caves, but most of them are under rock ledges just like humans and other animals have sought refuge from the elements since the bejinning of ti-me. However, they are all remote and a long way from where tribes of people could locate near water and food.