WTF?

It has occurred to me that civilization’s dependence on trade to feed an awakening appetite for more expedient acquisition as a sign of high position on the status tier to the stratosphere of influence in the social sphere goes far deeper than honest prostitution and servitude into how sex has become as ubiquitous a component of today’s thingathon as plastic.

I have always looked askance at the term, “make love,” seeming less harsh than the word, “fuck,” but no less a blatant mock of the mutual affection expressed by the more apropos prose phrase, “sharing love,” for those occasions when both are sharing love beyond the mutually masturbatory fuck of it. The confusion between the instant gratification of itchy genitals and love fills psychiatrists couches, romance novels, pornography collections, fashionable closets, plastic surgeons’ schedules, weight rooms, prescriptions and wedding aisles with folks searching for just the right thing to do to finally feel loved instead of fucked. All the while, if not hating, at least ignoring the only one who’s love is required to feel love from the rest: — themselves, buried so far back beneath primary education / indoctrination / orientation, blanket shame for selfishness and therapeutic remedies to more complacently swallow and willingly contribute to the myth that love, like happiness and peace must first be gained from without to be felt within.

So, this may be a third possibility for why I have discovered celibacy without religious vows by merely taking myself out of the marketplace, having no will to sell, trade or buy, may be an indication of the lack of sex occurring anywhere for any other reason. I have gotten to know and love some wonderful women in ways never before possible for either of us when sex was a major framework of the relationship. I must admit the mythical winding down of the urge at my age and my decision to await spontaneous mutual desire to have sex with a loved one seem to be excuses for each other if you assume the urge actally winds down rather than refines. Without persuasion from proposals to propositions, guarantees to gratuities, whining to dining, there would be much less sex being had and much fewer accidental new customers being byproducts as a result of the industry making the junk that makes making love confused with sex make a fortune for them.

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Another thing I noticed was that the word fuck appears in many memes as a favorite curse word mayhap precisely for its connotation of sex as devoid of love as possible without being downright rape.

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Came across the idea that love, too, is used in more exploitative ways than as a mere commodity. There is the evangelistic love of those taught to love their enemies like a chubby girl loves her chocolates, with a desire to consume the loved ones and thereby render them indistinguishable from ones own prejudices. I’m reminded of the three words the ambitious newlywed bride remembers from the ceremony:

AISLE
ALTAR
HYMN

FIRST THINGS FIRST

This is why I back this guy. You can turn it off after he finishes unless you want to hear a Bush sychophant express his shock and awe to legitimize congress' request that he modify the wording for the record.

KEEPING THE FAITH

A few posts back I referred to the Celestine Prophecy and its elucidation of nine insights about the possible evolution of mankind towards conscious symbiosis with the rest of the body of which we have always been a natural part. Running back into its message at this point in my life seems to resonate more completely through my experience than my original reading of it fifteen years ago. So much so that I decided to examine the idea of prophecy in light of being aware of so many potential crises seeming to be peaking at the not too far future. Everyone is being forced into the role of prophet in sizing up how much things beyond their control are in control of their fate. The big, out of your comfort zone picture.

The skill of projecting the actions taken in the past and contemplated in the present to be the cause of specific results in the future is as essential to the continuance of individual life as food and water. The definition of sanity in nature is the ability to adapt to its constant change, for which predicting the inevitability of results accumulating in ones present is primary tool. This skill grows with experience of history repeating itself until one gets the nature of the story no matter what it is about. Such wisdom may be gained at any critical mass of seeing the patterns, the weave, the way, the theme behind the way things happen. I would venture to say that such epiphanies occur to everyone by the age of thirty-five. What individuals perceive those times to mean and what they do in their lives as a result is as varied as they are unique.

We call people expressing their predictions from sandwich boards, soap boxes and scripture pages, prophets. The wisest, bravest most experienced in primitive tribal life was the seer, the shaman, the priest — all based on their skill at prophecy and their followers’ reliance on its truth. In consulting the dictionary I found that prophecy is a noun, and since 1700, different than the ability to speak prophecy by the spelling of the verb as prophesy. So the prophet sees then he sighs. But nowhere did I come across the sense of prophecy I got from the Celestine Prophecy. Thesaurus came up with forecast, divination, fortune telling, crystal-gazing, prediction, second sight, prognostication, augury, soothsaying —— all either drug or trance induced or revelatory observations of things natural or caused by but beyond control of mankind —— and I still hadn’t gotten the sense of the prophet being a wise planner, recruiting adherents and shaping a way of life by which the community members kept faith in the original plan by sticking to its original fire, its inspiring ethos, through generations of social and technological change. I know wonderfully skilled artists and scholars who match my joy in seeing one another and sharing our time together catching up on the state of our old hippie values and resettling the world’s problems and who, upon parting, say to one another some version of, “Keep the faith” or "may the circle be unbroken," with our own separate, unique ways to do our part for our planet. We are earthlings before being human, sex, race or nationality and the unspoken prophecy of nature seems to be a long lost plan for such a primary reconnection.

RDG: RED DONE GONE

In this crazy world of the blogosphere I find myself forming intellectual and emotional kinship never experienced to such a degree from such a lack of physical familiarity, with the exception of musicians and authors who spoke to my inner being. This virtual world can become quite literal in its being where one spends ones time, which can be a big disruption in concentrating on maintaining the life of the body. Someone somewhere near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico has departed from the cyber highway, stepped right out of her pointy toed shoes and her scribblin' ways to become a better mentor to the younger generation down a red dirt road of her own. My gladness for her dedication far outweighs my fond habit of visiting her for heart to heart searches for love and truth. I leave her link pressed between the pages of my blog buds as a reminder and a place to return if ever.

MICHAEL REYNOLDS — SHOWIN' US HOW

On weekends, my house mate, Jim Fakey and I would go out to his little chunk of land with his back seat full of scrap lumber found laying around any building sight of the required three foot length he'd collected over the week. On his table saw we would cut the same angle on 360 separate pieces, then cut another angle on them the next, and new pieces the next weekend until, mid summer of ‘73, we’d refined enough scrap lumber to assemble a stack of triangles which we then bolted together for the framework of his thirty foot diameter dome home. The giant oven/fireplace was a native stone spiral reaching to the peak and stretching into a spiral enclosure for the bathroom, the outer portion of which was made of mortar and multicolored bottles on their sides for quite ethereal lighting in the shower whose water was heated by the sun in 75 feet of folded black hose in a glass box on the roof. It was the most enjoyable home I have ever taken part in the construction of and definitely my most direct experience of becoming self sustaining to that point in my life.

At the same time we were doing that a fellow named Michael Reynolds, upon becoming an architect, began showing the world what they could do with all the garbage they were complaining about in a much more thorough endeavor than ours. Without further ado …



Go here for more on this wonderful avatar for a sustainable future.

Absolute Vanilla asked why call these buildings Earthships, my reply I repeat here:
Without reading their reasons I can think of several off the top of my head:
1) Being symbiotic with the Earth and realizing it is your natural self sustaining spAce ship.
2) Being in the same boat we have the same common cause like a crew, with our unique contributions to offer.
3) The buildings leave a zero footprint on the earth like the wake of a clean ship through water.
4) The buildings themselves are made of what would normally end up in land fill and the natural materials of the location on which they are built.

I STOLE THE TOLL OF THE POLL TROLL

Having admitted to thinking it was necessary to get personally involved in politics to support and vote for Dennis Kucinich I began examining the entire campaign-to-inauguration trip from a new perspective which, being about politics at all, seems to be so full of corruptible flaws it ought to be outlawed. The whole business about the rigging of the two Bush elections, stories of Republican strategies to disenfranchise entire demographics and the massive incompetence of Bush hired computer corporations to make foolproof voting machines in the seven years of his misguidance all serve to make me search for something better.

Being new at the game, I should be allowed at least one “What If” to run up the ole flag pole, just to see where the Bronx cheers come from. The idea of a secret ballot comes from a desire to limit the influences of a show of hands on folks who might just go with the crowd or of coercion by the candidates at the polls. I say, do away with polling places altogether. The internet is here to stay. So long as we have energy to power anything, the internet should be maintained and grown. One of the best uses I can imagine for it must be implemented within the next ten months just to restore any confidence in the system to represent the people enough to deserve to be voted on. This is my plan for the November elections.

Without any gps tracking implant in our butts we all already have a unique code openly known, recorded and maintained by the US government — our social security number, one per person. One could use the same type system banks rely on for security of billions of corporate dollars to vote. By using ones social security to gain admittance to an anonymous cyber booth where one might vote for one candidate or write-in for any race of interest on a ballot identified by a unique randomly generated number for each ballot (untraceable to SSN) by which one may anonymously check the open voting records for verification. Computers are ubiquitous enough to provide entrée to anyone with a social security card. Any misrepresentation by using deceased, underaged or otherwise ineligible numbers is dependent on the records of the social security department and, although likely shoddy, is perhaps negligible when compared to now. With a central collection point, oversight by interested candidates and the justice department should be quite an expedient and thorough checks and balances system. The set up would be so cheap and easy once the initial system is designed that votes of entire populations of cities, states or nations can be cast in spontaneous response to many events we all feel powerless to affect. If we can do it every week for American Idol what can we do for America? If democracy isn’t pop government, what is it?

The fact that there won’t be any pollsters hanging around the polls will serve to return peoples judgment to concern with what is being represented rather than the chances of winning. Okay, I’m a dreamer, I’m not the only one ~~~ lets hear it folks, poke holes, ask someone who should know, tell someone who should know, get back to me. I don’t know nuthin’. Got no clout.

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Since I decided to back him, Kucinich has been shut out of debates before all the primaries, as the rankest show of the evils of conglomerate media. Where other candidates are paying for Ads, Dennis must pay for lawyers.

LIFE OR THE STORIES OF LIFE?

In literature we are taught that a good story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Everyone gets passed through an exposure to this idea which resurfaces in all the other fields of education as if they too, must satisfy the requirements of a good story if they are to be considered valid observations. Eternity is broken into minutes, days, years, millennia, aeons and light years all in an attempt to find the beginning and predict the end of time. Infinity is broken into angstroms, microns, frequencies, photons, atoms, inches, cells, sones, pounds, hectares, planets, light years, galaxies and black holes all in an attempt to find the beginning and predict the end of the range of the story behind any variety of inquiry isolated from the theme of all themes, eternal infinity. What is it about beginnings and endings that all ring of arbitrary conclusions based on the requirements of the story for specialization to isolate the part from the whole to the point of irrelevance. As our “intelligence” accumulates pats on the back for getting mankind this far ahead of all the other varieties of planetary parts, I see varieties of specialized smart being mistaken for the theme of natural wisdom to the point of relevance only to the story of civilization and antithetical to the gestalt, the theme, the very nature of the whole altogether, such as believing some god created earth exclusively for the exploitation of man — with the same know-it-all, disastrous results.




I have never considered the US old enough to have its own culture. If it weren’t for Australia, we’d be the newest punks on the planetary block. There has developed a new naming system wherein all but the whitest of ancestries have become hyphenated Americans, no matter how many generations have been born here. Indigenous Tejanos have been declared Illegal Aliens. I posted Adapting about the unification of the indigenous people of the world to gain a voice on the planetary stage.

In September of this year, the United Nations passed a non-binding Resolution on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A couple of weeks ago Russell Means delivered the Lakota declaration of secession from the United States of America and invited all who wanted to live in a free state to move to their vast territory. Not that I want to move north, or at all, but I have long nurtured the idea that all it would take to break the corporate hold the US seems to be taking on the planet would be for there to arise a third party comprised of people whose prime self-identification is as indigenous earthlings in symbiosis with the nature of the planet. Such sentiments and priorities must surely represent a majority of the population in light of corporate ownership of the other two parties.

WHO ARE YOU?

I just watched a movie version of a book I read fifteen years ago that rekindled such a kinship to its message that I now realize how I must have already so completely experienced the truth of its insights when I read it that I let it pass as a “been there, done that” occurrence. The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield is a story of one man’s discovery of his connection to the life energy of the universe by opening himself to share it rather than his former life of hoarding and competing for it. A sort of Don Juan talking to Carlos Castaneda for Christians. In light of my recent difficulty in easing my daughter’s anxiety about my hell bound soul I felt this movie could explain how one can have an experience as profound as Christians thank their exclusive god for, without him. In fact it goes on to show that Christianity has been responsible for making man a supplicant to the church for what lies within him all along, needing only his freely opening his gates of isolation to see and share the evolutionary energy of the universe. This is my recommendation to anyone who needs to lighten the load of facing the future alone.

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I’d like to take a tangential glance at an experience I may have related from some other angle in a different metaphor. The experience itself was my first vision of the tao. While wandering in and wondering at the environment of the Big Bend desert, while stooping to more closely examine a particularly brilliant rock, my eye was diverted by a flower whose radiant purple was second only to its minute size poking on a threadlike stem a half inch above the level of the parched rocks from which it had emerged. As I bent closer I looked around for another. When I reached the point that my ear brushed against the wee wand to turn my head to look parallel to the desert floor, I watched the aura of the desert appear along the silhouette of a nearby hill like peach fuzz backlit by the sun. As my focus returned to my more immediate surroundings the desert returned to the much less purple hue than the brow of the rise. As far apart as these lilliputian lilies were they were virtually invisible from an erect stance except when…the aura was still on the curves of the land. I’d been out there for several days and never noticed. And now I couldn’t not see them, or at least sense the shade their particular pixel added to the overall color of the desert in the more vertical view.

click pic to enlarge

No matter how many times I’d heard it I would never have caught on to the wisdom in the “grass is greener in the other guy’s yard” until that experience in the desert. We have perfect, firsthand experience of the ups and downs in our sense of well being and responsible social interaction throughout our lives whether we choose to acknowledge all of it or not. The surest motivation behind our frantic consumerism in our compulsion to keep up with the Jonses is generated by the illusion that his lawn must be more plush because standing in our own we look down at our own yard and see much more dirt, he must be more prosperous with that new car and we look at our own wallet and see more debt. The competitive approach to human relations ingrained in the morality of the publicly educated feeds a never-ending pursuit of the status of the very ones who prosper by selling knockoff status symbols to their pursuers. What a treadmill.

In a previous post I spoke of the corporate side of the high cost of working. Just think of the savings the individual employee might enjoy if one could work at home rather than gather daily at a company location. If one didn’t get rid of their car all together, the savings over daily commuting must do more for ones well being than merely financially. Office attire has got to be the most lucrative of the status based scams going. Interpersonal relationships would all be of ones own choice rather than tolerating the intolerable just to keep a job. Granted, after the driving and the clothing are considered, most of the savings are peace of mind and freedom to reflect on ones role in the larger machine from which one gets fed and what it must be like to feed oneself.

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A confusion about selfishness makes life a constant, debilitating judgment call it need never be. For something as physically locatable as the individual corporeal being is, the self it represents can be as remote as governments are from the people they claim to represent. The confusion finds its source in the alignment of attitude one has towards who they think they are and, like governments, too many have little respect for, much less knowledge of, who they actually are, what with the priority expedience of representing ones public image, that needy, greedy ego scanning and scamming for wealth and fame at the expense of love and happiness, that gives the self such a bad reputation.

A handy dictionary defines self as “a person’s essential being distinguished from others considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.” There is a word in there that may be the key to the confusion: reflexive. It’s primary use is to define thoughtless, knee jerk, habitual, prejudicial reactions while another definition turns it around on itself, “(of a method or theory in the social sciences) taking account of itself or the effect of the personality or presence of the researcher on what is being investigated.” I would like to coin a word, preflexive, to adopt and separate it from its boorish cousin. Preflection is the introspective consideration with which one applies the golden rule in crossing the threshold from thought to action. The most important part of the process is having sufficient knowledge of and respect for our own essential, unique selves to apply the same to others in considering the results of our actions.

The “essential being distinguished from others” part of self would seem to indicate that the self exists as a unique individual by the very act of being born of unique ancestry, prior to any experience with the external other in nature or civilization. The value of individual members’ unique contributions to the culture into which one is born compared to the conformity required for acceptance by and welfare of the group seems to determine the value the individual has for this natural self culture wants to tame.

The self I speak of is the essential connection each unique being has to the wisdom of a common genetic memory of evolution in symbiosis with nature of our environment. Realization of and respect for this wisdom is the essential source of ones happiness and love, without which the world seems sad and repulsive. Happiness is realized when the curiosity of the life spark is unafraid. Love is realized when we acknowledge our unique journey trods the tao no matter where we go and visualize the theme to our myriad variations. As I have expressed to my daughter many times in other ways, this is as close to a belief system as I admit to and I feel basically happy and in love all the time, some times it’s with someone or two or …

Okay, for the sake of my point I will assume that such a self may be and has been realized in other sentient beings. Obviously such a self exists from the first independent breath and motivates nursing and other infant life sustaining instincts. The more civilized ones culture, the sooner the demands for behavior for which the natural self has only the empty library of the modern brain to begin naming, storing and resorting the ever changing artificial rules of society which can never evolve as instincts for their sheerly arbitrary enactment and enforcement through history. With the demands of culture keeping us occupied, the quiet voice of instinctual wisdom finds little ear or relevance until sufficient experience begins to resonate a pattern in civilized behavior that shows through the manufactured, public self of style, status and stereotypes and reveals the natural instincts of man being turned against himself such that the drive to improve oneself is channeled into settling for status in society, the fountain of love for the entire universe is channeled into a wedded life mate and the happiness humming at our center must await our realization of the futility in searching for it everywhere else.

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The opening spoken of in the Celestine Prophecy I see as the breakthrough of understanding the wisdom of our genetic memory as a way to understand the nature of the power of the myth of western civilization to misguide us and, thereby free ourselves from the authority of all but nature.

STICK YOUR YELLOW RIBBON UP YOUR ASSUV

Check out the rest of this collection for some classic satire!