The Faith of a Heretic

Kyle Maynard. Dude doesn’t have arms.

With my recent thread on Reddit i’ve felt an urge to return to writing my little guide on weight loss. Here’s the ending section, may it motivate you to turn some stuff around.

Inspiration and character building

I know most of this will be fairly contentious which is why I left it for last.

I firmly believe that in order to succeed in life, and especially in weight loss or a consistent workout plan, you need to become indifferent to all the negative influences surrounding you and introduce positive influences. This does not necessarily entail a hiding or removal from the world, but training in becoming indifferent to it, and developing a love of what is good; you must love and cultivate what is beautiful in yourself and reject what can degrade or destroy you. For the former, I would recommend studying the philosophy of Stoicism. It’s a practical virtue philosophy for life which focuses on developing indifference to factors outside of your control and developing a joyful life of service to those around you. It’ll help you not get angry when you have setbacks in your quest to lose weight and improve your health, to see those setbacks as what they are and to focus on what is within your power to change. Stoic wisdom will help you confront feelings of inequity, inadequacy, betrayal, attack and misfortune. Your desires for irrational things and for things not in your best interest will evaporate and be replaced by a love of what is good. Start with Epictetus (the Enchiridion) and then check out his discourses, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Shakespeare also serves this purpose.

I also think it would benefit you to commonly think on the greats who have come before and try to imitate them. Our societies overwhelmingly pay worship to whores, weaklings, criminals, addicts, and charlatans in two thousand dollar suits. Instead of doting on those who drag us down look to the bad asses whose sacrifices and virtue allowed for this system of abundance and waste we now squander.

No one is more bad ass than James Stockdale. Dude was shot down over Vietnam and tortured in Hoa Lo prison for seven years. When they tried to use him on Vietnamese state TV as a propaganda piece he scalped himself. They broke his legs a ton of times, and he refused to betray his country. When they tried to force him to give a confession he slit his wrists. All the while he upheld the military chain of command amongst his fellow prisoners, instilled in them hope to continue fighting in their own way and served as president of the Naval War College following his release. Whenever you bitch about “but I want to eat that pizza everyone else is” think of Stockdale in a puddle of his own shit and piss, alone in the dark, with broken legs. Is your life really that hard?

Warriors like that should be your inspiration and your role models. The classics are a good place to start. You will find powerful role models in stuff like the Iliad, the Bhagavad Gita, Odyssey, and Aeneid, and historical heroes in accounts such as Plutarch and Livy. Cato the Younger and Cincinnatus, such god damn bad asses. Think on the historical founders and mythic heroes of your civilization, and strive to imitate their action, persistence, service, love and good. Find some dudes who you can look up to, and who make you swell with feelings of admiration. Men have been blown up before, crawled on their bellies until they could drag themselves on their knees, until they could walk for a few moments, falling and cursing, until some bloody years later they could lift cars and run without end. Be proud of being like them, and of living with no apologies for your own manliness. Surround yourself with others who appreciate the good life, health, restraint and other virtues which are important for the heroic, self-realized man. You should be proud of your friends, not have to apologize for or rationalize their selfish, destructive behavior. Banish the negative, destructive and unhealthy where possible, and where not possible, become indifferent to it.

Begin a regiment of meditation. Meditation doesn’t imply merely thinking about random things in a dark room – rather it instructs a deliberate process to examine and transform our thoughts. Two suggestions: Stoic and Theravada Buddhist techniques. The former involves an action on waking. Think of all the things that could go wrong today. Maybe you could crash your car. Maybe someone will make fun of you. Maybe they will bring cake into work. How will you deal with this? How will you NOT deal with this? This allows you to prepare and anticipate the worst things that could happen, and then develop a plan to confront those things. If someone brings a cake into work and all your weak, pale co-workers are ingesting it, you should be prepared not to. Do not allow events like this to suddenly ambush you, otherwise your instincts, rather than wisdom, may prevail. And while instincts help us survive, they do not often help us flourish. In this way we can prepare effective strategies to confront our problems rather than confront them recklessly, and we also are less shocked when misfortune befalls us, allowing us to deal with setbacks in a more sober and less hysterical way. You will see the scale go up some days, and for seemingly no reason, maybe even after a huge effort in the gym. What is the response? Not shoving cake in your mouth, but instead thinking about things rationally. Buddhist meditation is a bit more technical, but do look up Mindfulness and Loving Kindness meditation, as they are immensely rewarding.

You no longer know anything for sure. Go on YouTube and watch some TED talks, every fucking week. Open your heart to positive change and new directions. The same old doesn’t work. Throw out the past. That girl/guy who broke your heart isn’t going to fall into your arms one day. They are fucking someone else, loving it, and think you are disgusting. Hard truth: you might be. But not for long; now you’re in training, like a Spartan, like Batman in the Dark Knight Returns after a period of painful exile. Don’t ever look back. Charge forward. Force yourself to smile and buy some new clothes. The future is open now, not closed to darkness and hopeless. Keep watching those TED talks. Don’t buy anything from any “gurus” but listen to them all, and what appeals to your reason, experiment with. Some won’t work, but some will. Hey, your life just substantially improved because you’re now thinking about things in a novel way. Plan. Schedule. Act.

There is a cult of failure in western culture. A cult of excuses and of emasculation. You’re leaving this cult behind and it’s going to be scary. It’s scary, but you’re about to take control and feel good for the first time in so many years. Imagine waking up and feeling amazing, and knowing exactly what’s going on and where you are. This isn’t a fantasy, it’s now. And you’re now a force for good in this world. No one can stop you but you. All those laughing, stupid motherfuckers are dead wrong. And all those like you want to see the light at the end of the tunnel just as badly and NEED YOUR SUPPORT. Find them online, at school and on the street, cling to them, and move mountains together. Believe in them and by doing so, believe in yourself.

Go out in the world, grab it by the neck, shoot your gun into the mouth of doubt and do what you want.

A quick post – writing during my lunch hour at work.

In mid June 2011 I began a weight loss journey at around 440 lbs. I have to admit that during that time I was filled with hopelessness and expected nothing to work. At the beginning of my journey I began a diet log at Sherdog to track my progress and keep myself publicly accountable, as well as hopefully receive some guidance from warriors.

The original title of the log was “437 to 250.” The latter weight I thought would be impossible to achieve given my history and yet I aimed for a lofty goal to underscore my conviction.

This past week I achieved that goal and am now down to 245 – having shed about five pounds in a single week. That’s 192 lbs (lost) in about 619 days – not bad. But I’m not done yet. Onward and upward (or downward?) to 220. I am confident I can accomplish this, plus complete my body recomposition, greatly improving my functional strength, flexibility and aerobic health by the end of the 2nd year of action. In order to challenge myself today I signed up to train in thai boxing under some demanding and elite coaches once a week, which will supplement my regular, weekly powerlifting sessions. Hail iron!

Here’s to all who reach their goals -but more importantly: strive to reach them and value the path. To the odyssey from uncertainty, to sacrifice, to redemption! You can accomplish anything if you reject the negative and irrational and cling to the virtuous.

A conversation between Thom and I on Google – thought it may be interesting to some. Previously wrote on these topics here.

Chris: I’m butt hurt about Sam Harris because he tricked a huge audience into doing Buddhist meditation and never identified it while talking about how useful it is.

Thomas: Didn’t he make a joke about it during the speech?

Chris: I don’t like militant atheism.

Thomas: About how that’s what he was doing?

Chris: No he never IDed it, probably so people would do it. I don’t like atheists who reject everything to do with religion.

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Found a really potent passage while revisiting Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life which more or less sums up my philosophy of life. The passage, from Philo Judaeus, a first century Jew writing in On the Special Laws, is also arguably the most pithy portrait of not only Stoicism but also the spirit of Hadot’s title.

Note: Paragraphs added – the original text, like all Greek, was one block.

Every person – whether Greek or Barbarian – who is in training for wisdom, leading a blameless, irreproachable life, chooses neither to commit injustice nor return it unto others, but to avoid the company of busybodies, and hold in contempt the places where they spend their time – courts, councils, marketplaces, assemblies – in short, every kind of meeting or reunion of thoughtless people.

As their goal is a life of peace and serenity, they contemplate nature and everything found within her: they attentively explore the earth, the sea, the air, the sky, and every nature found therein. In thought, they accompany the moon, the sun, and the rotations of the other stars, whether fixed or wandering. Their bodies remain on earth, but they give wings to their souls, so that, rising into the ether, they may observe the powers which dwell there, as is fitting for those who have truly become citizens of the world.

Such people consider the whole world as their city, and its citizens are the companions of wisdom; they have received their civic rights from virtue, which has been entrusted with presiding over the universal commonwealth. Thus, filled with every excellence, they are accustomed no longer to take account of physical discomforts or exterior evils, and they train themselves to be indifferent to indifferent things; they are armed against both pleasures and desires, and, in short, they always strive to keep themselves above passions … they do not give in under the blows of fate, because they have calculated its attacks in advance (for foresight makes easier to bear even the most difficult of the things that happen against our will; since then the mind no longer supposes what happens to be strange and novel, but its perception of them is dulled, as if it had to do with old and worn-out things).

It is obvious that people such as these, who find their joy in virtue, celebrate a festival their whole life long. To be sure, there is only a small number of such people; they are like embers of wisdom kept smouldering in our cities, so that virtue may not be altogether snuffed out and disappear from our race. But if only people everywhere felt the same way as this small number, and became as nature meant for them to be: blameless, irreproachable, and lovers of wisdom, rejoicing in the beautiful just because it is beautiful, and considering that there is no other good besides it … then our cities would be brimful of happiness. They would know nothing of the things that cause grief and fear, but would be so filled with the causes of joy and well-being that there would be no single moment in which they would not lead a life full of joyful laughter; indeed, the whole cycle of the year would be a festival for them.

Running across little gems like this is why I am a scholar and student in the classics. You will not find such nourishment in our contemporary tracts, which rather fixate on base psychology, suspicion, and nihilism. Still these old words are as true now as then. To echo Marcus Aurelius: everything is as it always was, a familiar procession of the soon to be dead, forever replaced and refreshed in common forms by cyclical nature. Value this fragile but precious existence as the festival it is.

The perception of gaming in the popular culture has seen great variance in my short lifetime. In the early 90s when I was not older than five or six I was introduced to computing by my “uncle” Steve, a close family friend who worked on electronics. During that time to have a computer meant you were either a nerd or a hacker in the public eye. Being a nerd didn’t get you laid, and folks often would react to computer users with fear or disgust; the only group excepted from this treatment were dry businessmen in suits, who used computers to do boring business stuff like balance spreadsheets and embezzle funds. Everyone else was not verified to use a computer, or so the pop culture decided, and sensations like Kevin Mitnick and the widespread phreaking of public phones during the decade didn’t help matters either. Following “Y2k” the public opinion shifted rapidly. In this period every home made efforts to acquire a computer, and computing was the new exciting thing to devote leisure to. Fast forward to today: it’s now even acceptable for “hot girls” to use computers, and being savvy with a computer and information technology ensures your place in the job market. On the contrary: to be inept in using such technology nowadays ensures your irrelevance, both socially and economically.

Strangely while your parents and the parents of your parents probably use Facebook more than their children do and sing praise to their glorious idol Netflix amidst the corpse-like glamor of LCD light, gaming has remained a maligned topic. Not amongst the young: no, in that demographic gaming has become widespread and nearly normalized. However in the popular media and amongst the formal and businesslike, gaming is demonized as not only a waste of resources, but is also blamed for inciting domestic violence and mass shootings and for providing a wayward path to squander precious opportunities. As a young person it’s all too common to be chastised by elders for “doing nothing all day” as they spend hour after hour on their smart phones stalking lost loves on social media websites. I am here to refute the notion that gaming is toxic and to defend it as an institution. I credit a great deal of what I know with that hobby, and it also recently landed me an excellent job. Please forgive the meandering nature of this post; it’s as much a memoir as it is an essay.

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This is the preface to a work-in-progress guide I am writing on weight loss for the morbidly obese. It is entitled “my hopeless struggle” which is a play on the working title of the guide, “A Guide for The Hopeless: Weight Loss and Rebirth for the 300+ Pounders“

Before we dive into the guide proper you might be interested in my path to lose weight. It’s pretty simple: I was born fat, have always been fat and if my weight were mapped throughout my life it would be an ever increasing plot. My mother is obese and obesity or at least pudginess runs in the family (it’s how our ancestors survived famines and the Black Death in old Europe I guess). Continue reading →

This post is in some regards a continuation of my prior Atheists and Religion, in which I examine the culture of contemporary, popular atheism and justify the existence of religion as a social and civilizing convention. I feel like I should expand upon this premise as an easy misreading might suggest I am somehow in full support of traditional religion as a convention while this is not the case.

In Sam Harris’ recent The Moral Landscape the author argues that there exists an empirical science of well being in it’s infancy that will one day replace the “provincial” moralities of religion. Harris draws by force of metaphor the image of a landscape with various peaks and valleys conveying the heights and lows of potential human wisdom regarding well being, suggesting that some cultures like those imposed by the Taliban are rife in misunderstanding what benefits a people while others are more aware of the case. For those interested in this topic there is an excellent talk on YouTube which was given by Harris at Oxford in May of last year. It must be noted that I am primarily reproaching Sam Harris the activist/philosopher/speaker rather than Sam Harris the scientist as I am ignorant in his field of study.

While Harris’ premise may very well be true, and I tend to agree with it, it has two notable faults.

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Jump me to the good part, where I can see veteran Archivists giving good advice!

Recently I have become concerned about my economic survival.

At age 24, and having finished grad school in the end of December, I took two months off before seriously starting a job search. In this time off I cleared my head from the intense schedule I had gamed in the two  years before. Not only had I taken a full time courseload (something I actually regret now, not due to the difficulty but because it meant less time to get practicum experience) but I also was involved in a number of internships, and it was time for a break. I also wanted to try to establish a revenue stream by other means, namely by starting a new business.

I applied to a few jobs here and there during that time, but mostly just relaxed and tried to reflect on my vocation to be. A bit over two months ago I began a focused search and began to apply to dozens of jobs, mostly informed by the immensely invaluable  I Need a Library Job. The result of the search thus far has been fruitless. Not only did I recently realize that the dozens of federal jobs I had been applying to were being rejected because I was not following an unrequested Federal Resume Format, but I also encountered a complete wall of silence from other private and academic listings I applied to. What came to mind after over a month of this perpetual failure was: I am obviously going up against hundreds of over-qualified applicants per job and I am probably doing something horribly wrong. Perhaps, just as I had made a major misstep in using the wrong resume format for Federal jobs, I was also failing in some other unknown capacity in my application process to other types of listings.

This quest takes a lot out of you and is extremely stressful. The worst part is writing the actual cover letters. If you write a good one, it takes at least a half hour, and many listings have redundant, proprietary application forms which take at least as long to fill out. I applied to all sorts of jobs: librarian positions, archivists, technicians, assistants, analysts, researchers, museum techs, museum curators, directors, writers, copy-editors etc etc while keeping in mind I would really prefer to work with special collections or history. Not hearing back from any of these people, I began to look into teaching English overseas. For those who might be interested, I recommend it: there is an insane abundance of jobs and you will have a job within a week. It’s still my backup plan if my business or library career doesn’t take off.

With my failure in mind, my first student loan payments coming due, seeing my savings dwindle, the threat of being kicked out of my house looming overhead – and in a state of desperation/despondency I decided to email the Society of American Archivists “Archives” listserv for guidance. What follows is that correspondence.

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People often ask me how I lost and continue to lose weight so effectively. I decided to compile my methods into a guide I am developing slowly but consistently – it’s also intended as a general resource for obese people who want to lose weight and have been unable to in the past.

In a prior post on this blog I linked an early version of this work, but it’s come a long way since then. While the first version was written mainly on a whim after I had a sudden burst of inspiration while taking a shower, and was little over ten pages, the new guide is approaching 40 pages, as I approach nearly 160 lbs lost in less than a year.

You should read it if:

• You are curious how I am losing weight
• You are obese yourself, feel hopeless and want to lose weight

If you do read it and are one of those who is looking to lose weight, please provide feedback. I have privately distributed to a few individuals on forums I am part of, they followed my plan and all lost weight significantly, but I am still eager for wider feedback. I hope to continue to develop it to well over 100 pages, as fate allows.

Here is the download link:

http://www.krauselabs.net/dump/bookwip.pdf

Bill Maher does a bit called “Dispatches from the Bubble” in which he criticizes the republicans for fostering an insulated, delusional mental culture based around willful ignorance and groupthink. I recently went on a vacation and ran into my own bubble of sorts, amongst those who are oblivious to basic concepts of health and nutrition and are unaware of the simple fact that they are killing themselves.

I thought I would write on my experiences in the form of perceived major missteps in nutrition and the development of well being. I come from a somewhat privileged perspective: I became unhealthy and obese due to a metabolic sensitivity to carbohydrate and not gluttony, ignorance to science or basic tenets of health. When I discovered I was sensitive to carbohydrate I changed my diet (For good) and have been rapidly losing weight since. The mistakes I have encountered in my travels and lodging with family are not of this sort, that is to say: they are not medical in a clinical sense. Rather these mistakes represent a lack of wisdom, reason and knowledge regarding the most basic principles of health.

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