Junkie State of Mindlessness

I've noticed that all the lessons anyone claims to have learned from hurricane Sandy were about needs to reinforce and improve infrastructure against obviously worsening, hostile climate extremes now admitted to be due to global warming, with no mention of how it is just such attempts to isolate ourselves so antagonistically from nature that pollute and heat the planet upon whose health we all depend.  Seems to be an unwillingness to hold our own, individual addictions to artificial convenience responsible for our natural, karmic discomfort at the threat of having withdrawals that foster the destructive attitude of "going along to get along". Let's get them there gas guzzlin' generators and cars fueled up and running as soon as possible.

BROTHER DAVE, JUSTIN WILSON AND ME

A little boy walking down a dirt road dragging a chain encounters a cigar-smoking, Cadillac-diving, gold-toothed fat-man who growls, “Where’s the post office, boy?”

The little boy says, “I can’t understand you, Sir, because your car radio is making a noise too loud to hear your words.

The fat man mutes the radio and replies incredulously, “This song just won the Grammy’s for Theo, what kind of hick are you?”

The little boy says, “My Grammy’s back at the house and she wouldn’t call that a song, much less music.”

With the hurt tone of one insulted, fat-man whines, “I don’t suppose an atheoist like you would know where the court house is?”

Little-boy answers, “Never heard of the dude and don’t know where the court house is.”

Fat-man says, “You probably don’t know where the highway out of this God-forsaken place is either — and why you pulling that god-damned chain anyway?”

Little boy looks fat-man straight in the eye and says, “Did you ever try and push one of these things? … besides, I’m not the one who’s lost.”

IN THEIR OWN WORDS!!!

Well, well, well. Here it is folks. In their own words, the Xians interpreting their god to prefer people over the planet he supposedly created for them to be stewards of. I have made reference to the corruption the title of steward undergoes when manipulated by corporate commodification, but this video says it all.



Did you catch the twist they spin?

Humans, along with all other living beings that arose from the ongoing life of Pachamama, the earth mother, depend on a symbiotic relationship to the health of the planet that is our home and upon whom our own health depends as a simple fact of nature.

Being so exceptionally special in the eyes of the creator they imagine runs the show and who they believe gave them earth to do with as they please, this cult of reality deniers would have the entirety of nature dry up and blow away because their heavenly father wouldn't let anything bad happen to them, His Special children. Can you see that what they are saying was choreographed and scripted by corporate America to pave the way to further rape mother earth for the love she always gives willingly? They try to deflect this by saying that the threat is to Xianity not to their bank accounts. Anything as vulnerable to new ideas as they claim their belief system is only points out the total irrationality of their claims requiring the wishful thinking of staggering leaps of blind faith.

This may be my last post on religion. At least until some group of kooks out does this bunch.

WHO ARE YOU? Part II

In response to the curiosity expressed in her comment on the previous post, this post is for my maverick Grand-niece Racheal Kellie Cooley, the only of my kinfolk other than L'ilwave to respond to this blog. 

"Faith is being sure of what we hope for 

and certain of what we do not see."

I couldn’t agree more with the quote, it describes exactly what I take each of those words to mean and the meaning of their being next to one another as they are arranged.

But I sense there’s a world of difference between what you feel about those words and how I read them. The fulcrum of faith in each phrase: “sure of” and “certain of”, are like tombstones marking the death of curiosity, just like the quote several posts back about, “children begin school as question marks and graduate as periods”.

Using “question mark” for newborns is as close to spirituality as I ever get when I examine my own motivations, the rest is just logical metaphors as a way of making sense of all my curiosity has revealed to me for myself. When I say we are all eyes on the same potato, the potato is as close as I get to describing what I hear others refer to as god.

It all begins with the definition of THE universe as being all there is. Imagining an intelligent being made of all there is leads me to realize it has nothing to observe but itself — talk about self-aware! But who is the universe gonna ask, you might ask? What do I ask when I want to know what’s going on? My primary source of information is the perception of my individual cells keeping data about the physical world hologram I call my mind updated every instant. I can ask the world what’s going on if I want the opinion of others to supplement my perceptions, but by the time they begin to answer they are no longer talking about what’s going on, but what is no longer going on, and since now is the only time existence ever occurs it takes all my attention to my perceptions just to keep up observing reality.

My metaphor is that the entire universe is alive and every part of it is reporting what it sees just as my every cell reports to me, I pass it on to the silent observer I know sees through my eyes, the potato, god.

There’s a whole other part of my cosmology about scale & mobius loops and the evaporation cycle of ideas, but I want to get back to my view of faith, hope, and certainty just to narrow a conversation about the universe down to the unarguable truth that each religion in history has claimed it alone possesses access to (all lebentybillion of ‘em).

In my cosmology, certainty is like what civilization does to our awareness of nature. It puts on shades, sticks in earplugs, turns up the air conditioner, steps on the gas and in every way possible makes the natural occurrences of the day helpless to update the mind of the hopefully, faithfully certain that certainty lets us be sure that whatever we want we’ll get no matter what shitstorms such hopeful certainty plows up in the natural world it contradicts at every turn.

The reason peace on earth exist at all is that from the core of every being the observer looks out, curious about itself. Although the world it observes is the immensity of itself it has become so absorbed in the observing, it must be reminded that the world is not out there by pairs of pairs of eyes recognizing who it is that’s looking out of both — cosmic love and the reason we are conscious of and curious about existence, if there must be a reason.

Yeah, I don’t have a certain bone in my body but I have accumulated enough experience to understand I have been up to any now in which I find myself without steeling myself against contradiction, in fact I welcome it. New varieties of contradiction only tend to broaden my cosmological theory. I don’t consider religion to be a part of or a contradiction to my theory because it is based on the very non-existence of wishful thinking that requires faith in the unarguable certainty “about what we do not know” for hopeful wannbes to declare the only permissible truth is theirs, end of story, period. Signed, sealed, delivered zombie ant.

That’s why I loved your exchange recognizing how mankind could be as our heavenly father intended, curious about the world they still consider to be themselves and are not yet aware of the otherness civilization makes of nature.

Nature reminds civilization of the stage upon which it plays at being God.

UP IN YER FACEBOOK, BUDDY

On a thread that asked what can be done about nuts with guns I began”Each person lives in a different world, their version of reality if you will…” when I realized I had the makings of a blog post to express, so here we are.

Thirty years ago I was friends with a group of folks occupying three adjacent houses communally in a South Austin neighborhood. Two marriages, graduations and other things to do split us up until a 25^th anniversary gathering brought many of us back together for the first time. I realized then how extreme our different directions actually were despite our copacetic coexistence in the eighties.

I had dropped out of a nine year yuppie track at IBM and most of them, ten to fifteen years younger, were preparing to climb into it. There was only one out of forty among them who even wanted to share a joint. It was the starkest example of subverting individual potential into service of the American dream I’d ever experienced … a veritable who’s who of international nuvo riche…I was a fish out of water.

A year later I was searching for traces of the woman I never quite got over and tried Facebook out of last-ditch desperation. I haven’t found her, but I did find a plethora of people I’d known in the past who friended me when they saw I’d joined. One of them was part of that communal group who it appears has gone yet another route to the American dream. After several months of increasingly volatile Glenn Beck informed posts, my friend, “Codger”, peaked out by making his profile picture a gunsight and defying anyone to show evidence that Palin/Beck/Fox had anything to do with the Tucson massacre way before anyone had, just as Palin herself had removed gunsights from her web site.

By pointing out how inflammatory he was being, his cadre of tea party crones came down on me with personal attacks as incoherent as Loughner’s web postings. I unfriended Dodger this morning and will hopefully remain out of the line of their fire. This confrontation also found saner heads who’d known Codger from childhood and were worried about his sanity … thus the thread this post is an attempt to address.

The only solutions to gun violence is to cease manufacturing them … as clear and impossible as outlawing war in a civilization believing in ownership. Although I detest all reasons for guns with exception of subsistence hunting, I cannot help but share the sentiments of citizens who cannot trust a government who clearly does not trust its people, as demonstrated by the furor over wikileaks exposure of government duplicity.

The best fix I have heard of for gun violence is, like all law enforcement and medicine in western civilization, pathological, not preventative. It is to digitally code every bullet so that the anonymity of the shooter disappears. The effectiveness of such a change is bound to have a preventative aspect for crimes where detection is inevitable.

But if you’re around the bend enough to spray a group of anonymous people with automatic gunfire, getting caught is no consideration … in most cases the nuts have offed themselves … unless, of course, they are in the employ of a crime boss or a warring nation. These aberrations have plenty examples of killing being a justifiable solution to problems, no matter how loose the connection between three office buildings being imploded justifying two national wars of annihilation and being fired from your office job justifying going back to the office and putting everyone out of their miserable jobs with a machine gun.

I can imagine no solution to mass domestic murderers except better friends unafraid to intervene, a partial fix is coded ammo and less available firearm capacity.

BIPARTISAN MY ASS

Crows seem to feel invulnerable to their natural predators when they are stalking each other, The electricity between all parties is amazing.

I FINALLY FIND A REASON FOR THE ACCORDION

After spending my lifetime considering the accordion somewhere between the bagpipe (officially declared an instrument of war) and the banjo (officially played in Defiance) for the title of least amusing musical instruments, I am delighted to have witnessed its use in this most amusing way. The downside is that all the other uses of the accordion, with the exception of cahunto music, seem that much less than before.

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.

WHO ARE YOU?

There seems to be two basic categories of attitude about one’s life held by my fellow humans. We are either organs integral to the living organism of the planet from which we arose and without whose health we wouldn’t exist or voracious tenants in a supermarket shopping carte blanche as granted us by the big spooky propiator in the sky.

The undeniable reality of our arising from and decaying back to the earth defines and qualifies our belonging here as earthlings. Belonging to the obviously artificial creations of civilization, nation, religion, corporation, et al ad nauseum has obscured the undeniable truth of our primarily being cells of Gaia, exceptional only to ourselves and the creatures we’ve domesticated to think like we do.

I experienced this difference in full force when I dropped out of my yuppie career with IBM and left their compound to integrate into the beautiful village of ’72 Austin. It was like a military base’s relationship with the townies, temporary and disinterested, another stop along the way. We as members of wastern civilization have a industrial/military complex about our existence on earth resulting in its commodification and destruction.

The global warming debate is a distraction from the undeniable poison and pollution our way of life injects into the circulation of the planet allowing oil profiteers time to suck the last drops from the most remote location, environment be damned.

You can either drink from the stream or a plastic bottle, still your choice.

HOW DARE I?

How dare I not only desire to maintain my life but to enjoy it? Maintaining life entails protecting it against predators, diseases, competitors and fatal acts of nature; those things that would end it. Enjoying life entails consciously evolving the experiential wisdom to better assess events as they exist, irrelevant to any purpose with which one might intend to access them.

When I first began my graphics business I gave it the slogan “dare to be happy” when I realized what a challenge it was to remain happy in the public face of gloom painted in pixels of individual faces drained of brighter possibilities as they wrestled with the daily demands of a past traded in for a promise.

This “happy” I dare to be can be thought of as the intrinsic energy of the being I always am, from birth to my inevitable death. Daring the happy being to manifest itself in events is a matter of realizing benefit results only from the generosity of a happy being — all else entails new debt.

The challenge is in remaining aware of this ample energy while daily dealing within a society constantly being conditioned to atone for multiple inadequacies from original sin to acne by authorities damning the naturally happy individual variation of the human genome we cannot help but be at our deepest core, no matter how buried under guilt and almost forgotten our own energy may be.

The belief that happiness is a carrot on a stick, to be earned to be deserved, is the western civilization version of the middle-eastern, “Man is riding a camel in search of a camel.”

Photos by Heather Knight, my daughter

IN A GARDEN OR A VASE?

“Lived here all your life?”

“Not, yet.”

As open to sharing my love now as I have been at any time in my life so far, I feel fairly certain I shall never meet another person for whom I could feel such a complete love as I shared with Mary Gardner.

She was a bartender and I was a drinker. She was twenty and I was forty. She was the wisest person I'd ever met and I was an eager disciple. When it became apparent that we couldn’t get enough of each other in the bloom of new love’s discoveries about each other and the oneness we formed she gave me a book by Jorge Amado, Gabriella: Cinnamon and Cloves. The message of her gift I took from the situation wherein our heroine, Gabriella, is the best thing to ever happen to the cash register at Nacib’s bar.

Her beauty and lively warmth kept the seats and standing room full of his jealous and admiring friends, business was good. Nacib and Gabriella were in love and their mood had much to do with the respect with which his friends flirted with her and how safe that made her feel to flirt freely in return. It was win-win for everyone.

Beautiful story short: they got married, mood changes, business fell off, acrimony, misery —— Nacib consults his oldest friend who asks him to consider, “Which is more beautiful, a flower in a garden or a vase?” The simple metaphor was so powerful it may have had the effect of a self fulfilling prophecy on me in that, when Mary left to attend art school in Atlanta, I cried over the broken vase in a shameful display of attachment rather than be glad for her return to the garden of her natural habitat.

This post is inspired by the realization that this metaphor also applies to the threshold between the beauty of humans and the effect of putting their blooming evolution in the terminal isolation of the vase of civilization like some sort of Petri dish purpose cooked up by people who did not bother to understand that with which they fucked. Public education is a self-replicating pottery shed with no garden in sight.

I’ve missed Mary for thirty years now, glimpses of human beauty come and go with the vapors from the vase.

Like the tide follows the moon,
My spirits rose and fell
With the corners of your mouth.

Tearing the hook from my heart
I threw you back to the sea
To see you better reflect the sun.

You’re so unique —
Nothing reminds me of you
But what you've touched.

You've touched me
And my eyes see everything.

There is nowhere you aren’t.
You’re inside me
And I sail everywhere.

•

This is a reprint from my otherblog, dualiytilaud, as I bring it to a close

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.

•

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.