Before getting to the inspirations part, first, let me cover all the wrong predictions I made last month.
The trip photos did not take until the end of summer to be uploaded, because both blogs were retired recently. (일기 retired at the end of July; Ithaka’s Blog retired on August 8th. But I don’t think I’ll mention the Blog again in August’s digest, which is why I’m mentioning it here.)
I will probably write on the blogs occasionally. But they used to be on a daily schedule and now they are very far from daily; so I call them retired. That doesn’t mean they’re dead.
Another wrong prediction: Noir Urbanism’s KOR translation publication will not happen by November 2023. It will be delayed. Hyewon is participating in the publication of another book. And it’s best the resources of ORCABOOKS are focused on one book at a time. (Smol pub, ya know?)
Besides, it turns out, we don’t have to deliver the finished printed book to the gov. (Re: gov money, as mentioned in last month’s digest.) We can simply deliver the pdf file by Nov 2023. Printing will happen next year, probably. This is convenient, because EOY is usually the time when printers are preoccupied, due to how identical the time table for gov funding is. The funding tends to happen on a yearly schedule, which has something to do with how the bureaucrats calculate taxes and budgets, etc, etc. Everyone prints at the end of the year to meet the yearly gov deadline, if they got funding from the gov and must deliver the finished printed book. Since we can print early next year, we have more flexibility.
So. Wrong predictions. Does this mean that I shall cease predicting things? Not at all. It just means that it doesn’t matter if predictions are correct or incorrect. Nothing bad/good happens either way.
Now, to the inspirations.
The first one was the retirement of the blogs. It’s as if I started blogging precisely in order to trigger the sequence of events that resulted in my getting the inspiration to retire them. (!!!) Now that I spend most of my time away from the clock, a daily schedule feels weird. It reminds me too much of the passage of time, according to the logical rational reasonable society, which also happens to be the artificial society. 24-hours in a day? Are you sure about that? It’s such a random number. Yeah, yeah, the earth makes a circle around the sun while the earth itself rotates blah blah blah. I prefer the tempo at which my day naturally flows.
The second inspiration was to contact a Youtuber so I can spread her words. What this means and why I think her words are valuable is described in this BMAC post.
The third inspiration was to write the BMAC post above.
I decided to write about it on BMAC, because the pool of people who can access the posts there is so small right now. And forever, that pool will be way smaller than the pool of people who can access anything totally public I do. Even if I have 10 million readers/listeners, I predict (yes, another prediction) that less than 10% will be on the BMAC page. And 10% is a very generous prediction.
Btw, I don’t expect the BMAC posts to stay a “secret.” But I also don’t see a reason why anybody should try really hard to know the contents of the posts there, unless, well, they’re already there, cause they already want to know the contents of the posts I write. So, even if those who’re already there were to copy-paste the locked posts and spread them somewhere in the interwebs, who, who isn’t already on BMAC, would read it? The copy-pasting would be pointless.
At any rate, more and more, the experiences I have during meditation are influencing my life–as they should. I don’t see the point of any practice that exists separately from life; the practice should be life. It’s just like with writing.
The reason I hadn’t gotten into meditation until I had to (or thought I had to) was that I hadn’t seen good examples of people who actually made meditation practical–besides feeling temporary “relief” while they struggle to manipulate their breathing while on the meditation cushion. Then, Spring 2023 happened and suddenly I had great examples of practically-minded meditators. What they do probably doesn’t even count as meditation in some folks’ dictionaries. (FYI, I call “meditation” anything that has to do with inner work that is actually incorporated into one’s life. This means that pure theorizing doesn’t get dubbed meditation.) Those practically-minded meditators helped me get started, and now I have a whole worldview that works.
Some of that worldview, I share on Sponge and 아임 드리밍 because I cannot be compartmentalized to stop being me when I’m podcasting vs. when I’m talking semi-privately on BMAC. (Actually, such compartmentalization would be proof of how wrongly I am meditating, according to my worldview.)
But the most “out there” parts of that worldview, I don’t think I will share anywhere but on BMAC, at least until I have more “external proof to validate the practical value of this worldview,” so to speak. This is ironic. The whole point of the worldview is that for me (for you, for each individual) there is no need for external proof of anything. But external proof is very handy indeed when encountering people who don’t share the same worldview. (It’s like when you’re a rich person who encounters a person who says money is evil. Then you show that person that with money, you can pay for the hospital bills of your loved ones. Now try saying “money is evil” again.)
Also, BMAC has commenting & emailing features. The post itself can be sent as an email. This is very neat.
One thing that might potentially get confusing is that I’m trying the whole ENG + KOR thing once more. I’d done this about a year ago, and it got so complicated… which is why I stopped doing it… But really, I don’t know how else this is gonna be. Am I gonna artificially separate English speakers from Korean speakers? What if people speak both languages? Also, most Koreans speak some English.
There used to be a time when I thought I would mostly write fiction in English, and mostly do nonfiction things in Korean. That was a complete fail. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I keep waiting for this “translators will be obliterated” phenomenon to happen, and it’s just not happening. I wait for the machine overlords to PLEASE OH PLEASE REPLACE ME, MY LORD, MY LADY!!!! and they’re still not here. Kor-Eng is not a very popular pair, apparently, perhaps because, again, most Koreans speak some English. (And I guess English speakers aren’t interested in Korean stuff enough?)
REPLACE ME, MACHINE OVERLORDS! OVERLADIES! WHATEVER OVERS! It would be so very handy to have a decent auto-translation feature for comments on BMAC. Then folks could talk to each other freely. Like on Youtube. Sort of.
But, the good thing (?) is that there aren’t that many people on my BMAC page anyway, so it’s not like folks are clamoring to talk to each other. Hehehe. But who knows. One day. Who knows.
On the meditation front, specifically–I had a very intense week from 7.12.-7.18.. Since then, everything has been almost tooooooo stable. I am writing this on August 14. I shall talk more about the “too stable” aspect of life when August ends.