A picture metaphor with misplaced parts

As in the paragraph with all the words misspelled, the key is to find the background for the parts to have meaning.

Tao

The way is the most obvious, it is the way of the universe
The way is the most disguised, behind the veil of its myriad variations
The way is the prime motive, with the gravity of its stillness

Tao te ching, is a collection of Chinese wisdom from the time of Confucius under the name Lao Tzu. While scholars may argue ‘til they’re blue in the face about whether there even was an individual with such a name much less whether he was the author of it all, part or none of it, they are demonstrating total ignorance of the essence of the teachings by insisting on catagorizing authorship of such universally enlightened and enlightening sayings. But that is a variation of the way called academia, with its specimen jars and bugs pinned to green velvet getting such samples of the way as far from their natural context as possible to examine the thingness, the individuality, the explainability, the knowing, and eventually, the fact of the thing. While the way, the context, the basis, the essence, that, without which there would be no examples or academics to examine them, gets lost in its wonderous myriad of various distractions for seekers of truth in definable facts.

Enlightenment of the way does not come to those who seek to define it, for definitions limit the defined to the least possible light. But on some far extreme from the academic we find its balancing variation in the heresies of the mystic, the spiritualist, the philosopher and the artist who seek to demonstrate the relationship of academia’s specific things back to larger, more sublime themes. The problem in freeing these specimens long trapped in definition is the tautological one-way door in the academic cage of language. The best metaphor I have ever imagined for this escape from the myth believed to be fact by defenders of truth is the mobius loop and its infinite connection of this to all it is not.

Don’t ask a fish about water except where they pierce its surface
Don’t ask a cat about air except the reflection where its paw gets wet
Neither need describe the way of everything in their world
Exceptions to its invisibility wake primal curiosity,
Demands closer examination of a variation
Of the way of another world.
A more distant consideration reveals the way of both,
And all other worlds.

Why these note? — to trap the invisible in poetic smoke outlining where it isn’t like the invisible man? — impossible when it is the way of the smoke too, leaving words to deal with variations of its constant theme. Descriptions are no more lies than they are truth.

Because it is the way of everything, it is invisible
Because it is invisible, the sage sees it with eyes closed
Because it is varied, the devotee glimpses it through Mayas veil
Because it is intangible, the fool collects its myriad manifestations

TO SERVE MAN

Rod Serling, like so many science fiction writers often used contact with aliens as metaphors for individuals’ relationships with civilization’s more bizarre aspects. I use the title of his most poignant episode of Twilight Zone for this post because I believe it to be a perfect metaphor for today’s population of the United States and its relationship to its “Representative Government.” According to the claims of the servants of the people, its citizens are either Bush loving Christian Warhawks or terrorists. The arrogance of this black and white picture soils the white portion to a shade darker than the black. Fellow sheep, the wolf wears the clothing of our shepherd! Somehow our servants and their terrorists seem to be lead by the same people — with us in a sandwich between the reality and the lies with nowhere to hide.
Just a brief synopsis of my coming to the heretical statements above:

1) Nothing explains the free fall speed of the three buildings that collapsed on 9/11/01 other than implosion by planned demolition. Even if each floor let go of the central shaft as they all fell, what happened to the 1100 foot tall central shaft column that should have remained standing if planted bombs didn’t cut them into thirty foot lengths for easy, quick loading on slow boats to China's steel mills for recycling which, taken alone is the crime of tampering with a crime scene.
2) Why would Bush chair and staff the 9/11 Commission with crones, who should have recused themselves for conflict of interest, except to produce such a rush to exonerate the administration in their swiss cheese report that would be inadmissible in any court in the land (as if the people could ever get it to court).
3) Since they were in Reagan’s administration until right before daddy bombed the hell out of Iraq the first time, George II’s staff were busy shipping massive loads of destruction to Saddam Hussein in the form of weapons, ammunition and substances of chemical and biological warfare. Long after the cease fire, once our ground forces identified the locations of these shipments, orders came down to blow them all up, exposing all US troops and Iraqi citizens within their greatly expanded range to their deadly effects, just to hide the US duplicity. Today, the administration still calls the illnesses, deaths and mutant births of the first Gulf War veterans and the Iraqi civilians a mystery and refuses responsibility for treatment based on the loss of all their military records. So, by our shepherds' impeccable logic, how can they tell the dying were ever in the military?
4) After the First Gulf War when the returning veterans were examined for radiation poisoning, it was found that the depleted uranium used in our weaponry is far more dangerous in its vaporized state after detonation to the general environment than previously believed, and a ban on its use was issued. Our troops are still using it in the war of the son! I wonder when their records will turn up missing too?

These points from mere observation of public record alone demand the attention of the sheep and answers from the shepherd, not to mention the myriad other questions, loopholes and lies uncovered by administration skeptics, or as the administration would have it, dreamt up by conspiracy theory terrorist moonbats. Well, they’re kind’o right in that perceiving the shepherd to be the wolf is a lot more ominous than thinking that fanatics from a land of shepherds were the perpetrators. To me, this accounts for the violent reactions of the Bush lovers to any heresy to the word of their shepherd when they pull their heads out of the gospel to defend their adamant indifference to other possibilities.
As the hero in Serling’s drama did at its end, I feel like I am running after the possibility of waking my friends in the process of boarding the alien ship to go to their planet, with the translation of their book, "To Serve Man," in my hand yelling, “Wait! It’s a cookbook!”

PETS

I share space with an eight legged cat I call Lovey-Dovey.
I live with with a set of siamese twins unseperated since birth.
I am owned by two members of a mutual admiration/cleaning/preening society.
I am pierced by fourty claws when eight paws knead me.
Weeks pass in solitary conversation with my cat;
Fish only want to eat, plants only want to drink.

Two tails wind around my shins.
Four eyes gaze at the spirit dancing on the line
To the two I used to call mine.
As siting lotus accompanies meditation for some,
Being flanked by the Love and the Dove works for me.

Taken from their mother before weaning,
Love craves affection and Dove sucks her tail.
Abandoned for the convenience of free rent,
I became the soil their roots grew in this past year.
Now Char wants to seperate the siamese
With no idea how the surgury wounds.
She wants us both to have half a cat.
If she persists, I insist she take the whole,
So only one will feel the post partum pain.

This is an unfinished adventure.

KNOW THYSELF

I have a friends who scour the web for curiosities and forward them to their curious friends, such as the following:

“cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!”

And this: (This small version of the picture doesn't work like the full sized one you may find at Ashioki’s illusion pages Please look at this picture to experience the impact of its perception.)

From the example of having chaos be perceived as coherent when the specific parts meld into the background of the context to the example of having still objects be perceived to move, a couple of hardly questioned “facts” are shattered. In the first, the initial perception of each word ase useless is overcome by our ability to sense context despite our perceptions prejudice. In the second example, perceptions are found to be no more reliable than rumors, but since both rumors and perceptions have origins in the universe, the information they carry is comprehensible if taken with a grain of salt.
When the agility of the ability to digitally insert oneself into a picture of people one never met became available to the general public I rejoiced for two reasons. Personally, I wanted the technology so I could do that too, but, considering the future of its use and the effect of lies on the public in the past, I thought, now that anyone can fake a picture, pictures will finally be realized for what they have only, always been: replicas of real or imaginary things — not the things themselves. Once again proving me to be naively optimistic about the ability of the culturally dependent faithful to behold possibilities and weighing of probabilities without certainties assumed.
The particular illusion I used above so shook my logic tree that all its reasons fell to the ground and rotted: my perceptions were not reliable! Now relegated to mere information along with news, blogs, books and hearsay, my perceptions are no longer in the company of what I had always considered my experience. Sure, I still experience listening to the radio, but everything I hear is mere information ripe for interpretation by my perceptions which I now realize is not necessarily experiencing the object perceived. Now comes the grain of salt: without insisting on the certainty of black and white facts to sense the truth behind what is perceived, ones intelligence can behold the flavor of perceptions against the infinite background of a value system formed quite organically of life experiences and genetic memory. Without the mistake of considering perceptions actual experience cluttering up the canvas, the value system takes on a much more coherent blend of flavors ready to be stretched to infinity by curiosity and imagination.
When I was tested for color blindness I failed 13 if the 15 tests and damn near wound up as a spotter in the infantry because camouflage doesn’t work on me. Other than that I couldn’t go to flight school it was no biggie for me. It explained why I could never find red tees in the green grass and that’s about it. Then one day I fantasized a hypothetical which slammed wide some doors of perception. Suppose that at birth three infants were implanted with different color filters; one red, one green and one blue. Being invisible from an observers viewpoint they were forgotten by everyone except the surgeon who implanted them. The infants grew to adulthood with no more problems than any other bundle of absolute potential has fitting culturally acceptable molds. When some one pointed to an object and said it was green, they each noted the color they were seeing and learned just as fast as anyone else to regurgitate the correct name for that color. If the object were, say, green, the person with green filters would see white, the blue filters would see aqua, and the red filters would see a kind of brown — but no matter what actually transmitted to their brain, they all answered green just as they had been taught and found agreement with throughout their lives. Still with me? Good.
Along comes the mystery doc who, under the guise of national cataract testing, puts these three guys to sleep and undetectibly removes the lenses. When our patients come out of the anesthesia’s effects they each think nothing is the same color anymore. For the first time their eyes are perceiving the true color of objects, and for the first time they disagree with each other and the rest of the world even though they are all seeing the world without filters. This little “what if” goes a long way for me in helping me understand how so many people from such a vast variety of origins can find anything in common. Moreover it explains a lot about how people from the increasingly uniform backgrounds found in definable cultures begin to insist those agreements are based on certainties, their being fewer and fewer willing to admit or to even realize their exceptions to the rules.
I still can’t find red tees but I know to swap them with my foursome for white ones. If we can’t admit and behave according to our uniquenesses and celebrate our differences as an enrichment of human potential and stability in a country that insists on the highly dubious premise “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” we better quit procreating and let that Creator make clones trained to pursue a happiness that will no longer come as an integral part. If this culture believes we were created equal, what is all that energy expended on making us uniform to insure equality? Just wondering?

HOW SELFISHNESS GOT A BAD RAP

I suppose it might seem a bit contradictory of me to get into definitions of particular words when I also advocate probabilities over certitudes, but then I have never claimed to be definable. I have little problem on the various definitions of the word “self”:a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others; a person's particular nature or personality, one's own interests or pleasure or its synonyms:ego, I, oneself, persona, person, identity, character, personality, psyche, soul, spirit, mind, inner being I am pretty copacetic with this base definition. What rankles my collywobbles is the only definition of selfish to be found in either the Oxford or Webster Dictionary:lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure and its synonyms:egocentric, egotistic, egotistical, egomaniacal, self-centered, self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-seeking, self-serving, wrapped up in oneself; inconsiderate, thoughtless, unthinking, uncaring, uncharitable; mean, miserly, grasping, greedy, mercenary, acquisitive, opportunistic; informal looking after number one And the definition of its antonym, selfless: concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with one's own. Gag me with a spoon. Consulting with ones self prior to acting is none of those evil sounding connotations and concern with the lives of others to the neglect of ones own isn't exactly a virtue.
With sincere regrets I’m afraid I am going to further burden all those selfless souls out there who already carry the world on their shoulders while denying the existence of the being from whom their energy emanates. I have little wonder why people pointed out to me as being the epitome of selflessness look so haggard. They cannot be acting from the golden rule; one must have a self against which to measure the manner and degree to which they may do unto others before acting. It is all about honor.
Before inflicting my concerns or aid upon another I must first have a self I have relied on long enough to trust; *that self must have experienced such problems as seem to be involved and have worked out a solution with honor; I then test amicable approaches and presentations of my ideas on my self to be sure I do honor to the other’s and my self in discussion or aid; all before invoking the karma of my actions. I know, how egotistical of me to trust myself over others.
To my way of thinking this process shows far more concern for the welfare of others than too many of the so called selfless acts I have witnessed or attempted. The self is the repository and fountain for all ones resources: energy, happiness, love, imagination, curiosity, wisdom gained from life’s experience, the deep background of genetic memory, attitude toward the nature of life within and without the skin. To take on the burdens of another in denial of ones self is effectively no better than commiseration, sympathy or pity.
Without honor for ones self one must be tossed from pillar to post seeking something to trust, someone to lean on, a hereafter to believe in to compensate for the misery of a life believing oneself to be evil for being selfish. Yeah, they're in for treatment, and how. This seems to tie in with my previous post about the reliance on the cultural myth to be fact. Yes, brethren and cistern, spare me the hollow shell of the selfless person’s help and let me stride side by side with those self reliant, selfish souls who are able to both feed themselves and teach others to catch fish instead of feeding their helpless selflessness with another selfless plate of commiserly food.
The Austin Chronicle last week had an add for "Life Coach." There's a carpet bagger routine that only took a couple of years, after inventing its services to the absolutely selfless, usless-to-themselves requirers of 24/7 advice just to behave, to make it down here from New Yawk City. Ah, these improved communications. What a joy. So can selflessness, being considered the antonym to the evil of selfishness, explain choices people deny responsibility for in the name of the goodness of the puppet strings from above (god, wife, boss, the man, madison avenue, wall street) that guide their every move. The ultimate question for the devotedly faithful in their time of suffering is, "Why did you choose a god that treats you this way?" Not that they'll ever recall or own up to choosing, but they did, unless, I guess, they choose to call themselves among the chosen.
I know how selfishness got a bad name, by the way, I'm just objecting to the absolutely evil picture dictionary definitions paint of selfishness. Where is "self reliant" "self controlled" "self sustaining" "self starting" "self sufficient" as the positive side of the coin. Have I stumbled onto another conspiracy ice berg tip - who knew? No, but seriously folks, selfishness got a bad rep when imposters, people with honor only for their reflection in the public mirror (in total denial of the self that shows through anyway) got mistaken for having egomania, the swelling of the self. Rather than it being the result of too much self serving ego, it is the ignorance of the wellspring within and total dependence on feedback from without, like the swollen bellies of the always starving in villages without gardens.
*Wonderful anecdote about Ghandi: Mother brings her son before the Mahatma and asks him to tell her son to stop eating sugar. Ghandi says, "Come back in six weeks." In six weeks the boy is told, "Stop eating sugar." The mother questioned the delay and got his explaination, "Six weeks ago I was still eating sugar."

NOT IN FOR TREATMENT

In some piqued crest of my often placid ocean of distaste for the inanity of small talk, I began answering, “How’s it going?” with “Nonstop.” “Without my help,” or “I haven’t seen it all day.” To, “How’s the world treating you?’ I still reply, “I’m not in for treatment.” Every time that last exchange is repeated the implications of being in the world for treatment grow more numerous and profound. I have come to observe that it is a rare bird indeed that doesn’t consider itself at the mercy of the treatment they assume the world, or worse, its Creator dishes out to them. Even amongst a large group of people suffering or enjoying the same such imagined treatment, each is wondering, “Why me?” I don’t quite see how that works — unless of course your name is Truman. But if, instead of a hollow backed set in the studio of a reality show and actors reading scripts, the entire world really was designed to reward and punish just you and every one else is cooperating with the plan — yeah, I could see that — not!
I remember noticing when I was young, and much more intuitive than I’ve retuned since, that the demeanor of the adults would alter whenever I would enter a room and they would kind’o cater to me. This led me to spinning around quickly at unexpected times to see if I could catch the world changing the set or the actors brushing up on their scripts. The clincher was when I caught mother and dad cleaning up after guests had left around two in the morning of Christmas day. I never told them I’d found proof of Santa’s nonexistence, but watched as they perpetuated the lie for years. When I grew older and wiser about the world it became obvious that my first grade teacher was the only one in on the world-as-trick-or-treater plot and everyone else was victims of her judgments. After all, the hypocrisy of adulthood in reference to children has always made them go into an “adult around children watching” behavior whenever a toddler enters the room, so normal adults were off the hook. The next year I decided that all teachers were in on the teacher/god plot. When I had finally encountered enough “teachers” in school and out I realized that there is no conscious plot anywhere, there is just this perpetual reinforcement of treaters and treated, with a lot of pass the buck blurring the distinction. Like Roger Water’s teacher in “The Wall” punishing children with the frustration of his being punished by his wife. “Every body needs some body that they can look down on,” Kris Kristofferson sang, “If you ain’t got nobody, you can help yourself to me.”
Somewhere along the line this culture ingrained a hierarchical myth of knowing in which, if you could twist the words just right with more impeccable logic or utter them in a louder voice or field a bigger mob that agrees with you than the next guy, it made your certainty superior to his. So the all pervading idea that one is in the world for treatment is easy to understand so long as one considers the culture of his birth ultimately right and life as a process of trying to get it right too, like practicing a gymnastics performance to achieve a ten. To appeal to such a court or any clubby portion of it for approval, sets off alarms in those who are given to asserting their authority and the myth perpetuates, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. That way there be dragons.
Righteousness is mythical and truth is inexpressible. Intending to nail down truth reveals much more about the limits of the vision of the hammer. Expressions through art come closest when treading so obliquely light so as to polish with praise. There are shifting degrees of probability with no conclusions possible. There is no falling down if the bicycle of truth telling is not peddled, there’s very little real gravity in myths. As the coiner of the peace symbol once said, “The surest sign of a nervous breakdown is that everything you do is extremely important.” With only two weeks vacation every year the perpetuators of the cultural mainstream never relax enough to consider the back shelf of unspoken angst among its members; the frustrations of behaving according to unshared standards; the accumulation of debilitating prosthetics acquired for enhancement of appearances (they are, after all, little emperors themselves busy weaving their own invisible clothing too, just to keep up); promises gone to lifeless burdens long before term, the erosion of dreams by the reign of encroaching regulations, and the nagging notion that there's gotta be a better way if one only had time to think about it.
It is possible for humankind to evolve beyond this adulthood when individuals see that it is the terminal tautology of a myth desperately trying to wrap itself in the armor of fact. Possibilities are limitless beyond probabilities until they are explained away to the storage room of foregone conclusions, never to disturb the lawn again.
So, no, I’m not in for treatment, but if you are, be sure and hire a lot of people who will treat you well and work real hard because they’re expensive and never done with you.
I once heard karma expressed as teeing up a golf ball in a tile shower room and hitting it as hard in whatever direction as you like. Something akin to treatment occurs. It isn't doled out by the shower/world/god but as a natural result of the golfer's attitude toward and treatment of his environment. Who knew?

WORKIN' IN DC WITH A TWO HEADED SAW

The new world order version of democracy needs two parties for the same reason the guy on the corner needs two hands to maneuver three shells over one pea, while we piss away our paychecks betting on which hand is the least evil. Democracy doesn't work when the aim of the government is to obey the majority of the money. Lobbying against corporation money seems futile until one realizes they're bribing our representatives with money collected from the addicts for their product — our money — from us. Localize our economy and international corporations have to move to the end of the line with hardly a shell to pea in.

IT'S THE THRESHOLD YOU KNOW

The Great Spirit can no more be influenced by prayer
Than truth can be expressed in words
Or the individual by generalizations about the mob
It's the threshold, ya know.

When your skin can't feel the air
And your belly doesn't growl that it's there
And that person on the street could be you
It's the threshold, ya know.

Feeling without touching
Smiling at yourself in another's eyes
Sharing without speaking, nodding without knowing
It's the threshold, ya know

The center from which all extremities vary
The curved line between yin and yang
The nexus for the exchange of energy and inspiration
It's the threshold, ya know

Still, but far from stagnant
Empty, but far from void
Invisible, but for lack of lack
Silent, but for lack of sound
You are the threshold, it knows.

GOT ALLERGIES?

Disclaimer Alert: of the first two comments these entries have received, the first was an agreement and encouragement, the second attacked from the other end of the reality tunnel with criticism of my certainty when it opposed his. As I should have done earlier, I am now doing … paraphrasing Bokkonon in the first page of his Book, “Nothing in this blog is the truth” or Magritte on his painting of a pipe, “This is not a pipe.” The closest I expect any words to come to expressing truth occurs in sublime, poetic metaphors that waft across it like the sheerest of the layers of Maya’s silk veils. If any such caressing goes on around here it will be a blessing on this free wheeling blog. If I am mistaken for one who is certain it can only be that one of my metaphors has gored someone’s sacred cow which their objection to its use confirms.
The comments to which I refer were synchronistically both addressed to the only political blog in the bunch … go figure.

————
And now I’d like to show how, like too many of mankind’s experiments with and attempts to improve on nature, they come around and bite him in the ass. In this instance I am talking about a disease medicine didn’t identify until 1906 when an Australian pediatrician coined the word, allergy. It is now responsible for a multibillion dollar industry that only relieves the symptoms and wouldn’t dare kill the guilded goose. There’s a reason allergies got a name at the turn of the last century other than science’s penchant for confusing naming with knowledge and that was because they’d never existed before. When the industrial age gave a boost to long distance transportation our food began to become a product of locations other than our own local ecosystem. City dwellers were the first victims as sprawl moved agriculture further and further away and people got so busy and so crowded a garden was out of the question in time and space. To this day nursing mothers are shooed from the public eye. If, as is happening in some nature conscientious schools of thought about child rearing, the mother knows that from the beginning of development of the egg to the weaning of the child its defense against allergies is as strong as the portion of her diet derived from locally grown foods. Sadly, parents have less rigorous principles of nutrition in the face of whining for junk food. Gerber may give your baby bananas — grown in Hawaii! So, what’s my big deal about eating home grown besides the activity of growing and the unmatchable flavor? Simple. Allergies are your reaction to the environment you live in. If you nourish yourself with food undergoing the same biological conditions in its life as you are in your life it tends to be more symbiotic and less antagonistic to your system. Of course the pharmaceutical companies can’t cure this problem, but they sure depend on their addicts not starting a garden.
After being granted, “Do as thou wilt, that is the whole of the law,” we must still ask ourselves “Because I can, should I?” Not because some boogieman vengeful wrath dispensing lawyer examiner god will get you if you guess wrong but because something as subtly connected to our well being as eating home grown can be overlooked in the rush to haute cuisine, or something as subtly connected to our respiratory dysfunctions as fossil fuel emissions can be overlooked in mindless habit of using auto-prosthetics to expedite the rush.
And on and on. Subtle but very real connections.