COLOR BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

As we filed into our bleacher seats I could see them all. A Howitzer among the grove of pines, a Patton tank draped to look like a hillock, the machine-gun emplacement beneath a log — they all stood out like shadow puppets on a blank wall.

“Out there before you, we have hidden several points of enemy attack behind camouflage,” announced today’s combat training instructor over his bullhorn.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the moment I crossed the threshold from avidly attempting to become a “normal person” in western civilization to preferring to remain who and what I find my nature to be, despite the arbitrary cultural meritocracy imposed on the entire field of unique variations we individuals are at birth.

That experience in the woods of Camp Lejeune, N. C. occurred when I was seventeen and here, fifty-four years later, I am still discovering ancient embedded warps blended in to make me seem normal to parents, teachers, drill instructors, professors, bosses, policemen, general acquaintances and strangers on the street — in so far as they care that their sense of normal is not violated.

Imagine three infants having colored lenses implanted at the time of birth, one red, one yellow and the third blue. None of them would see the colors of reality as it is. When anyone points to an object and tells them it is green, whatever color their filter causes each one to see they will call green — and every other object with that color they will call green. They will grow up agreeing on the colors of everything until the day doctors remove the implanted lenses. They will be viewing reality as it is for the first time, but, because of their conditioning, they can no longer agree on the names of the colors.

This scenario was initially dreamt up as a metaphor for three newborns from three disparate birthplaces absorbing the local mytho-cultural norm as a requirement to satisfy their longing for belonging to wherever it is they find themselves. The removal of the lenses occurs when the three separately acculturated grown-ups meet in a mutually alien location and must describe reality as it is to one another — they must first discover the existence of their filters before they may be used to triangulate the entire spectrum of reality as it is. I use three subjects for the possibility of a resolution to the direct conflict likely between any two, such as exploitation or war.

This post is inspired by the emerging realization of a second layer to the lens metaphor going back to the already absolute uniqueness within the range of the human genome of each of the three individuals at birth, the field for which each culture acts as the normalizing filter compensating for the natural differences, the color blindness of each.

Although it is quite natural for denizens of a habitat to form a familiarity with the ways of one another to not only find food but to avoid becoming a meal themselves by recognizing dissonance in the normal passage of the day, human cultures have, through language, created mythical, institutionalized norms by which each newborn is thoroughly indoctrinated before being allowed to experience nature as it is in the normal passage of the day. If we are not aware of the myth of the culture within which we live, we have no chance of seeing nature as it is, much less understand how another culture could see it so differently.

Humans are animals able to convince themselves nature has the purpose intended by a creator as a gift of property for their exploitation as its superiors. Cancer is a disease convincing the body’s cells to join them in making the whole rest of the body something to convert. If western civilization’s myth could possibly play out, the biomass of Earth, Gaia, will become nothing but humans and their genetically modified crops, period. The body dies before cancer can eat it all.

FOOD FOR THINKERS, POISON TO THE FAITH FILLED

Here are a few of the ponders I’ve gleaned from my journal that, once I condensed them to their essential kernels, may, taken with a swig of ganjava, result in an expanded mind…

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The Golden Rule, a simple statement of the symbiosis required for man’s relationship with all of nature, including one another, is obviously either misunderstood or is being purposely undermined considering the booming business of incessantly passing laws to patch up flaws in civilization’s premise of human exceptional superiority over all other life forms.

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“Majority Rules’ either strips individuals of their autonomy in the minority or protects those surrendering autonomy in preference to sycophantic anonymity in the majority.

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Death is like sex in high school; if you knew how many times you just missed it, you’d be paralyzed.” — Dead Like Me

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Language ignores the violence fomented by verbal misunderstandings while usurping the credit for understandings made possible only by the reasoning of the participants whose genetic memory is basically identical, regardless of the words transmitted.

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Liberal advocates of government responsibility for individual welfare must ignore the debilitating effect on personally evolved integrity to the point that the government appears necessary.

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Karma: looking over one’s shoulder in fear of retribution for hopefully hidden malice makes going forward more liable to injury in innocent situations.

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Our institutionalized tradition of abusing our natural environment contaminates the internal systems in a cycle civilization is loath to cease, preferring instead to grow a pathological pharmaceutical industry to further nullify our body’s natural preventative and curative systems. This half-assed promulgation of pathology over prevention is also seen in the disposition of the disposable culture’s preference for land fills rather than stop the production of packaging and products destined for the midden.

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Can we ever recognize what we learn from life without it being an answer to a question or has our education obliterated our ability to translate preverbal thought?

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Certainty, like faith, seeks nothing but converts, while fresh ideas are dismissed for lack of footnotes.

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Twelve step programs validate the parking of one’s pain in the sympathy of fellows equally unable to live alone.

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The rules of war are suspended when it is waged against an enemy declared to be “illegal” combatants by the wagers. WTF?

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When genetically generated instincts are declared destructive to civilized behavior individuals are persuaded to turn against themselves by fashioning an acceptable façade to fake self-esteem based on a favorable reputation. These traitors to themselves make mighty manipulable mendicants. Isolate them from others and they cease to exist and will do anything to escape solitary confinement.

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Like the big bucket on strip mining behemoths mindlessly cutting through tree roots, water passages and animal dens searching for fossil fuel, purpose leaves destruction of everything ignored by its myopically intended goal.

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What kind of culture is characterized by allowable questions?

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Good ideas cannot be owned or patented since anyone is capable of independent recognition of truth wherever it occurs.

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Gibbon’s observed that paganism’s multitude of nature gods were for the common folk equally true, for the philosophers equally false and for the magistrates equally useful.

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Salesmen know that if they don’t take no for an answer people will say yes to get rid of them.

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Nature weaves a silk noose as culture’s reward for its abuse.

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Candidates political hypocrisy reinforces the opinions of voters from both sides and swing voters already know they lie and vote for the lesser of two evils, so their mendacity never hurts them at the polls.

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Mistaking civilization for nature is like passing laws to make wishes come true.

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The hairlessness of humans destined them alone to find fire useful.

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Pride in accomplishment is the heretics next victim.

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That’s enough for a while. The number and variety should evoke many comments from those who think for them selves and bewilderment from those who don’t

A DIFFERENT DOING

Oh to lie back and let myself be amused by ideas and thoughts drifting by like the clouds forming, dissolving and passing overhead on a warm, sunny day. Ugh, to have those clouds obscured by dense, grey clouds of particulate results of petroleum combustion suggesting that the natural happenings of the clouds need something done about the blight in between.

We have a tremendous capacity to normalize change as part of the genetic sanity of adapting to the environment for survival. This capacity has evolved over millennia prior to the introduction of human innovation and has developed a healthy immune system with a broad range of tolerable climatic conditions. We cannot survive outside a range of temperature and humidity that desiccate, burn, freeze or drown us. We cannot survive instances when the dynamic forces of our living planet peak and locally release poisonous gases, molten lava, tsunamis and cause mountains to either collapse or rise to loose sudden havoc in the area.

We have learned to survive in increasingly vaster areas of our planet by means ranging from the evolutionary advantage gained by hairless apes being able to handle and eventually exploit fire to our thus encouraged curiosity creating prosthetics enabling survival anywhere.

So, yeah, humans are, by our evolved genetic memory and innovative curiosity, well able to deal with all but the most catastrophic natural conditions. Within the conditions of human civilization our genetic capacity to adapt is used against us by forces of authority threatening survival to manipulate behavior of the obedient. The warp that enables such exploitation is the simultaneous demonizing of the instinctual survivor we are at birth as the gremlin in culture’s machine, and praising and rewarding the conformity of our public image to artificial standards in an endless pursuit and maintenance of an approved reputation.

When one’s self esteem is dependent on one’s reputation, insanity occurs.

I finally grok that there are fellow humans out there who cannot be alone because they cease to exist without a reflection, so buried and hated who they actually are has become to the external suit of reputation they were taught and learned to prefer thinking of themselves as being.

In a civilization whose citizens vary from fully self-realized to externally controlled automatons we find the dysfunctional heart of the devolution machine lies in the codependence of the sheep and the shepherds. Like any dynamic, one cannot exist without the other. The shepherds’ concern for their reputation is so obsessive they seek competition, podiums and audiences to surpass mere approval on the way to supreme reverence, none of which can be done without dependent worshipers. The sheep’s concern for their reputation is so frightened that political correctness seems like a plateau below which they live in the abject servitude to the authority of the shepherds with “right away, what color and how high?” Even the flocks in which they gather to fend off deadly solitude, from social clubs to religions, armies and governments, take on the sheep-shepherd dynamic at all levels

As economics would have it, this dysfunctional clot in the stream of human evolution takes on the form of a pyramid from the top of which the bottom looks less considerable than ants. This is what the belief in human superiority over the rest of the body of the planet within which we are a dependent part creates out of every newborn, so well equipped to survive in nature but never ready to live on lies.

So, to the different doing I mentioned in the title: it is not an action per se, but more of a mental doing. It is a purposeful de-hypnotizing ourselves from the propaganda we’ve had lied to us from such a saturated cultural environment all our lives that we live in fear of nature as a threat, like cotton plantation owners feared their slaves. Should we be able to recover our appreciation of the intuitive observer we have always been, watching our hocking original thinking for the illusion of reputation, we might see our way clear to following a desire to become more symbiotic with a former threat in our personal lives by becoming self actualized rather than going along to get along waiting for the shepherd to steer us right.

The only humans who taught me well were living examples of being self actualized.

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My fickle anarchism has now decided that separating serious debate about the fiction of the myth from the fiction about the truth of the effects of the myth were both about fiction and the separation was intellectual masturbation — thus this post and several others to come will be republishings from that shortlived diversion of my other blog, Dualitytilaud, the palindrome of duality and a key to unlocking one's too taut knots we're not taught to think beyond.