Frame Bold Conjectures! • 5 June 2008

I get some pretty weird email through the contact link on this blog. But one today was so alienated by my writing, and generally angry towards my strong positions, that it concerns me that others might feel the same.

If you do, I’m sorry.

If you have been reading this for a little while, and looking at the comments, hopefully you have an idea of my personality—that any strong position is usually taken with a wink. If I get in to it with R or DailyM or Carl or Cody or Patrick in the comments, that is us enjoying each other and learning a lot in the process.

I am sort of a child of the philosopher and research methodologist Karl Popper, who said Frame Bold Conjectures! And then do everything you possibly can to try to falsify them. 

I see ashtanga as a “science” of research on the self, and feel that Americans get in our own way by heaping unnecessary fantasy-world beliefs and hero-worship in the way of their own experience. So sometimes I toss out a bold conjecture in hopes of encouraging others to frame their own, different experiences in a clear way. The contrast challenges all of us to pare down useless beliefs, understand each other better through ribald epistemological compromise, and dig that much deeper in to our own intuitions and experiences.

I’m here to figure out what ashtanga is about. Collectively, culturally, individually, spiritually, whatever. This is just my way of investigating. 

My favorite people are those who are curious, brave, interested in everything, and have finely-tuned bullshit detectors. I guess I write the way I do to attract those excitable skeptics, expecting that a little non-PC boldness will be taken lightly.

Namaste and shit. And with all the love of my well-loved, wrung-out, blown-open, hardworking little heart.

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