THIRD (IM)PERSON NATION

Being the being we were born to be

takes a far back seat to 

doing the being for others to see.  

The imbalance in the dynamic of nature’s dual cycle engine: eat or be eaten, is the result of having no awareness of the observer within who, from the first opening of each newborn’s eyes, silently watches civilization enacting a mythical script with antagonism towards the natural stage upon which it plays.

All beings display self-awareness by remaining alive. Remaining alive accumulates experience with kinds of food and kinds of predators. The consciousness of a being must make sense of this experience to supplement genetic memory with updates on the present to prolong its life. Making sense of it all could be seen as each being‘s personal narrative, the efficacy of which is attested to by its length.

Unlike their fellow beings, humans have managed to inject a mythical story into the experience of its progeny that transforms the organic eat/eaten dynamic into a mechanistic pass/fail exam with no predators but one’s betters. Being given no credit for the innate intelligence of the observer much less time to become aware of and develop natural curiosities and capabilities as even human parents allow in the wild, the modern human infant is drafted into becoming a civilized adult upon its first inappropriate defecation, having eaten its first meal, the first step in its journey of isolation from nature as it occurs within and without.

When rewards for obedience to others’ nonsense have greater value than remembering it is a game we have a choice in playing, we are civilized; habituated to the game of conquering nature — one we cannot win. That we cannot win is being shouted from minarets and state houses by outraged throngs of people, from poisoned seas and polluted air by the planet. We must cease our antagonistic story of human superiority and become more symbiotic with the body from which we arose lest she shed us, like the diseased narrative we carry by telling our children how we’re supposed to live.

Having western civilization’s myth piped in from every experience involving people since I was born, it seems a bit arrogant to me that I can claim to now see through it to the way things are, to see what the myth is about after its wishful thinking and “facts” are gone. Either I fell for it, or my way was paved so long as I chose to go along and fill in the proper blanks, because I found myself on my own for the first time in an earnest, trouble-free, thirty-four year life; no one left to fail or be failed by. The combination of new experiences and perspectives I’ve had off the leash since make me unfit for leashes evermore.

In the mechanics of story telling there is the trilogy of first; (I), second; (you) and third; (him) person narrative. In the mechanics of Freudian psychology there is the trilogy of id (instinct), ego (actor) and super ego (conscience). Both fields deal with strictly human interaction because nature reads no books or enacts no moral purpose for a conscience to attend. But they are useful to demonstrate the manipulation of human instincts wrought by adherence to the myth by one’s own personal story.

Let’s let “I” be the first person narrative of the “id”: the point of view from the primal observer, the instinctual, genetic memory with which each being is equipped at birth. Then we can let “you” be the second person narrative of the “ego”: the point of view of the seen, being an observable object out there in the mix of nature and society. And lastly, we might let “him” be the third person narrative of the “super ego” judging the effectiveness of the ego’s act in attaining from others it’s personal purpose. Notice the hierarchy of transition from natural, as born ability to live in nature alone at one end to purposeful dedication to the authority of others in the mold of the myth at the other end.

In nature the id serves as a perfect guide to the ego's actions putting it in the way of food and out of the path of predators to attain the longer, harmonious life desired by the super ego. In civilization the id is a dissident silenced by the ego lest it spoil the performance of licking the boots of whoever plays the super ego to be pleased in its story.

Currying approval of the public has such a priority over knowing oneself in the reality of nature that, for many, solitude seems a death trap and in nature, filling the trap with tigers. In these days of wall-to-wall communication solitude must be sought out by painstakingly turning off every device in the house, not that there are that many who would. In nature, approval amounts to not being eaten and having what we eat nourish us. Among men, gaining approval and, ideally, authority, motivates every activity indulged beyond the daily bread — and it’s an arbitrary game — in which eating alone is pitied and not playing makes one the enemy.

Even the games played within civilization reflect its myth of overarching administration by gods or governments and the possibility of sainthood, president or celebrity for the most dedicated to making their version mean something to the most people, as if truth could be created by man, just as he attributes such abilities to gods and their books. Like gods, the pantheon of mini-stars of excruciatingly varied forms of vicarious entertainment have idolizers in virtually every smelly locker room, reeking pit stop, perfumed crotch pit, Oscar walk, radio talk, podium and pulpit — thereby sustainting their reason for living around betting on what happens next on their version of the soaps because it has more meaning than what they do between shows; their own existence.

SHUN THE HAND

Storm against

The bars and stars

You pledged allegiance to

In the molding of your schooling

You are not

Fodder for the warring steel

If you can grow your own next meal

The unfolding of your schooling

Powerless

Against the razor steel

Peeling whiskers from your chin revealing

That Windsor tether to your schooling

Rise up

Dilate the cage of your crumpled form

When you face the truth you’ve long ignored

Since the scolding of your schooling

You are

The key to the cage

Not in rage but the will to disengage

From the emboldening of your schooling

Free

To walk away from your servers

Costing more than that tie could ever earn

No longer tethered to your schooling

This is what my asylum echoed while I was reading Bite the Hand, by my friend Pisces Iscariot at the Far Queue. We're saying the same thing from our own unique reality tunnel. Vive l'varietie

… from the asylum of my natural mind

Commenting on the end of Countdown a friend lamented, “I don’t trust CNN these days.”

I couldn’t help but reply, “Trust?”

“Any of them?”

“These days?”

“Read Peoples History of the United States, check out Democracy Now! But don't lay trust on anyone but yourself, and don't do anything until you can.

Sorry Steve, those weren't really orders from me to you, just a brain fart about how trusting externals is the source of all misery and the company it keeps. It was the things that helped me realize why love is a source of pain when gratitude for feeling it at all is not enough reward and requital is demanded, like a whore taking payment — burdening loved ones with trust breaks better bonds.

I’ll go blog now.”

I guess I get a bit worked up around words like trust, faith, hope, prayer, wishes because I have seen through Maya’s veil to behold her natural beauty and realize it was all a vale of tears over such illusions woven so finely the world appears against us when we don’t get our way, as if it’s supposed to care because we wish it. The veil covers up the beauty of the present with the clothing of the past tailored to ellicit obedience from the future. What a fine tuned grinder the innocence of now is put through to accomplish tomorrow’s menu. We never see life as it is as we focus on the parts that fit our purpose and get blindsided by hopes become wishes become faith become trust become assumption become expectation become fact until — wham, a contradiction become powerful on the momentum of a life of denial.

All these ephemeral illusions to the power of just wanting something, from a dolly to a place in heaven when one’s done with making Hell of Eden, weave the world within which civilization believes nature is chaos to be conquered and put to work. Being warm and dry with food on the table is never enough for people believing in gods who create worlds by merely willing it so.

I am learning to love life more by freeing it from the fragmenting duality of expectation and let the story unfold as it will, despite my running narrative. I’ve learned the truth about trust is that the external object of our faith is not the determiner of our satisfaction, but the scapegoat for our own judgment of how reality can be made to work for us as opposed to learning how it behaves with or without us to better work with it.

The confusion introduced by my education delayed a realization of how the idea that existence has a master plan, a preexisting purpose, limits the comprehension of the universe and behavior by a far larger population than merely the creationists who swear by it, as mankind destroys the only specimen we’ll ever have on the assumption of knowing why it exists before having a clue as to how it exists. Getting clues from purposeless observation seems to lead me into endless fascination. Purpose observes through a pinhole in a cell wall gleaning anything that might be construed to be fact in the ongoing fairytale of mankind’s godlike “conquering” of nature.

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.

FOUND

“… children guessed, but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew”.
——e. e. cummings

This morning my friend, Nikki, posted just the right thought to trigger my return to this blog after a month of Scrooge-like stinginess in expressing the wealth of inspiration I’ve experienced.

The people and property adjacent to my stomping grounds within the Dawgranch have changed, and with these changes a more communal atmosphere seems to be brewing among folks who had seemed to be content minding their own business over the six years I’ve thrived here.

I had to comment on Nikki’s post, …”adulthood is a phase of forgetfulness, enhancing our appreciation of nature when we re-emerge into children’s guesses with such wisdom.”

Fences were torn down, abandoned gardens were weeded, the sounds of hammers’ banging home nails on Homer’s recording studio remodel of Donna’s bedroom and back porch rang out in random overlay of the bird song and dog bark spontaneous symphony of nature, all the dogs and cats and chickens and people mixing like never before. My inner child sees the realization of utopian dreams more possible in the offing than any time since the games I’d played with other pre-school children living along the deep, verdant ravine we made our world - away from adults and world war two. We’re back to gentle guessing, with the acquired wisdom of experiencing the fallacy in the certainty required to make of this same nature a soulless commodity for the machine that shaped us to be eager cogs from the first day of public education.

Who Knows? Time will tell and there’s more of that than anyone here seems to need to know what to do with. Maybe (RIP RAW).

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.

NO THEFT

Thank you for reminding me, dear thief

If I have, it’s only to share — you knew that

Of things, there’s always too many

As I learn to own up to my self

JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO…

Me and Mabe and Homer were sitting around Mabe’s front porch enjoying the changing angle of the shadows of the early morning Earth turn, sipping coffee and passing the pipe.

The dogs were either lying around calmly soaking up rays, scratching their back with their feet up in the air or sparring with each other in celebration of such a beautiful dawning day.

A hen announces her proud accomplishment from her nest while her sisters devour some crumbled corn tortillas at our feet gossiping in quiet purring clucks only they understand.

Small birds nervously drop down to the chicken feed cast in the yard, relying on their fellows in the trees to warn them of the cat. The cat, in his new, improved, tail-down stealth stalk, approaches from the direction with the tallest grass, still unaware of the lookouts above. Although I keep his bowl full and he has yet to even get close to catching a bird, his instincts demand he try just for the sport of it all. A grackle joins the game by flying directly at him a mere three inches higher than the crouching cat’s vertical, claw extended paws outstretched explosion a good six feet straight up.

The chickens, cat and small dogs run for cover when the giant red hawk’s shadow stains their open play ground while the big dogs chase the dark spot in hopes the hawk will come down close enough to pluck out of the air as they have several panicked chickens and a peacock.

Sparky, the bass player in his and Homer's band, the Cramdens, let’s himself in through the gate across the road to here and is greeted by all the dogs. As he strolls through the dappled light beneath the trees, a thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle’s mentioning paradise whenever he recognizes he’s in it let’s itself into my consciousness of now and is greeted by Homer, saying, “You know? There’s a lotta people in this world that would commit suicide if they had to live like we've learned to.”

It was the first time I ever laughed at one of Homer’s jokes.

I still am

•

Addendum: There seems to be some question as to this description of a day on the porch having any application to reaching the summit. Other than actually climbing a mountain, all summits to be reached are ideals in metaphor. Pisces Iscariot got it so well he suggested using "un-learned" for the striving to reach the summit I speak of, since he knows, as I do, that it is our introductory education into the spectacle and faith in the authority of its mythology that must be questioned to reach a life more symbiotic with the nature of the planet whose dependent cells we all are by realizing how belief in man's ownership of it all increases our destructive usury every day. The invisible prison is insidious.

Where do you grab a naked man? — Awestun, Tejas circa 1978, UT Campus

I sometimes feel like this fellow who lost it in public trying to get through the walls to let the civilized world know what beauty is being destroyed outside by it. Added 6/8/10

THE PLOT (PROPHESY) THICKENS (SICKENS)

Somewhere between learning from experience that the government lies about cannabis and UFOs and witnessing multiple videos of the free fall speed collapse of the only three steel buildings to ever do so, all on the same day, I have been sure of the government’s duplicity and have theorized on a long range ultimate agenda hidden behind the distractions of its public corruption and ineptitude. I have read extensively into the same material Dan Brown has completely bastardized for his popular novels, Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States drew from and the dearly departed Robert Anton Wilson so deftly skewered with hilariously scrambled conspiracies in his Illuminatti Trilogy. I guess you could call me a conspiracy theorist. It’s okay, I don’t mind. I prefer not being so dependent I fear to doubt.

Such suspicions were rather idle speculation until I began questioning the ultimate reason mankind finds itself at the threshold of self-extermination through the insane intentional refusal to adapt to the nature of its place of birth. Daniel Quinn showed me the historical transition from hunter-gatherer to totalitarian agriculture as the turning point, but I still failed to grok a reason for it. I suppose I have my daughter to thank for discovering what I have come to propose is the justification that converted relatively symbiotic humans into the scourge of the Earth — the mythology of mankind’s inheritance of Earth’s stewardship from its creator as our special gift is the backbone belief of every monotheistic religion since it permitted man’s slaughter of great swaths of nature to establish his food supply in greedy exclusivity over sixteen thousand years ago. Concentration around the new food depots in cities further cut off man from his natural environment until we come to the war on everything period in which we now exist suspended by our own petard.

That seems to cover how mankind began operating as master of all it surveyed, and I can kind of see how believing man superior to his environment could surface as the genocidal behavior exhibited by small pockets and huge armies of terrorists against their fellow man, but I’d yet found no ingrained mythos in my admittedly shallow research into Xianity and its roots in mythology back to the forcing underground of Paganism.

And then one day on Facebook during heated comment banter with my old buddy Roger about the difference between racism and anti-Semitism someone comes up with,

I see the United States as being an Israelite nation. Being that the US is a ruminate of the Tribe of Manasseh. Both Ephraim (England) and Manasseh (the United States) were son's of Israels son Joseph. We are God's chosen people...however, we have been allowed to go our own way, until we are at the point of blowing ourselves off the planet...then ... and only then, will God intervene. That Is the only way man will learn that his way will not work, and thru that learn to accept God and his Word. So yes, we need to protect the country of Israel because the United States was born from her.

Who knew? Am I the only one who missed this detail? Ah those crazy myths. There’s a set for the masses surveyed and a set for the masters of all they survey. If that tidbit didn't match current events in the unreasonable leniency being shown the genocidal Israeli treatment of Palestinians I wouldn't have even noticed that quote, much less posted on it.

TIME MASTER

His people called him Cronot, the time master. Little did they know he had nothing to do with time — absolutely nothing. His vocabulary contained no temporal terms of either the chronological or spiritual variety, which he considered the same thing. Nor did he refer to the material world in terms less lively than event or being; there existed no mere things.

Off the track of time, that clothesline from which the spectacle airs its latest developed film, he became like the camera left in a field throughout spring whose film when played back at an accelerated rate reveals the interrelated lives of its plant and animal denizens. Knowing he was the accumulation of all the events of his life experience he could observe the any period in the same way by enveloping the succession of events in the event of recollection at any time he chose.

So too could he serve as a fair witness to the minutest changes in what those distracted by time’s impatience would consider a rigid thing. Knowing that the eternal present is the only instant of existence he maintains stability unachievable within the spectacle.

While all around him his people pursued promises of a carrot just like they eat in the penthouse in the tallest building in the world through a maze of multiple multiple choices and tricks to be performed, he reached down and pulled a fresh one from the fertile loam in his garden.

As his people schemed on capturing the golden goose for the perpetual something-for-nothing golden eggs promised to be out there somewhere he collected his breakfast daily from his hens.

Knowing all too well the race as intimately as any of his people still nipping at each other’s heels on the stairway to the penthouse, he laughed heartily at his dogs frolicking in the open field while he massaged his healing heels.

Having worked from dark to dark to earn a brighter future that never came, as most of his people yet feel compelled to do, he took profound delight in watching the Earth expose and hide the sun any now it was a good idea.

Once the willing maker of better traps for gawking mice along the spectacle midway, he sympathizes from the distance afforded by the internet and the wisdom to realize it is still the midway, gaining more variations and seeming more real every day.

To his people it seemed like he could disappear — at times.

Ceci n'est pas une maison*

This is a PICTURE of Donna's home

The following paragraph is what I was typing when the ensuing paragraphs ensued, er, ah, events occurred (gotta keep the reality and its story distinguishable from one another or I’ll be back in the invisible prison).

Guy DeBord’s spectacle is what I call the tautology of the invisible prison. “When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle.”

Oh, the irony of it all. In the midst of discovering Guy DeBord, often referred to by Troutsky, and reading his Society of the Spectacle, the Dawgranch dawgs break my concentration with their raucous greeting at the gate of perhaps forty members of a TV entourage here to scope out an upcoming scene for an episode of Friday Night Lights in my neighbor’s uniquely styled home evolved as an outgrowth of her life in the bus she parked under a giant pecan eleven years ago.

Ack. The very tentacle of the spectacle has come to annex my everyday direct experience of nature here in my retreat from the grid to integrate it into the spectacle lived by the never-left-the-couch dolts plugged into “Reality TV” 24/7 even when they believe they are out in the “world” discussing the latest episode of Office at the office around the old water cooler bottled water machine.

And wouldn’t you know it, if I sign their disturbance agreement paper, my premeditated tolerance of whatever the hell they decide to do in the course of their production for the spectacle will earn me a hundred dollar share of the big bucks lavished on the preservation of the invisible prison. If they don’t run off or over the hens or tromp through my gardens it’ll be a breeze to do my share, with the first hand direct experience of witnessing the creation of the latest spectacle to be decoupaged onto the ever denser walls of the invisible prison thrown in as education. Yahoo.

*After Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" he lettered beneath a realistic painting of a pipe just to keep the invisible prison visible, and not a prison when one is conscious of tne myth.

NUMBERS NATURE TAUGHT US

In the midst of writing my next post, The Real War, My dear friend Amber emailed me this beautiful video. It is particularly poignant right now because of a confrontation I've had with an earnest socialist who reminds me of the adage, "The surest sign of an impending nervous breakdown is believing what you are doing is supremely important."

In answer to my visits to his blog I have gotten replies like, "There are a million blogs out there all about butterflies and silky clouds. This one is about what needs to get done but isn't.” and "Maybe you should write a poem about it and send it to the Universe." And on a visit to this blog commented, " opting out. SELF sufficient, the privilege of distance, so that one may critique free from risk or consequence. Unless the very radiance of ones enlightenment somehow enters the universal stream and bestows a bit of glow on everyone?"

Well Troutsky, here's one of the million blogs who appreciate nature for what it has always been without needing to get anything done about it.

REFLECTIONS ON "THE FAR QUEUE"

I have long been a fan of Pisces Iscariot's Far Queue and now find myself in somewhat more than agreement with his perspective of the human condition in that my evolving approach to expressing my thoughts has taken on a preference for the cushion of fiction, or better yet, the expressions of others' perceptions to illustrate my own, as my last couple of posts have.

This time he has simply posted a Matt Groening "Life in Hell" cartoon that evoked this comment,

No one escapes childhood unbroken, either by being made part of the culture or by becoming obsessed with the system by revolting against it — never examining the myth which makes it appear necessary. It takes a rediscovery of our preexisting connectedness as parts of one nature at birth to discover the myth behind our cultural filter on reality, "family" values and assumed ownership granted by a creator.

As stated earlier, this blog will be devoted to fiction and quotes. For more direct discussions of the human condition I have begun a new blog, Dualitytilaud, for those who can discuss the myth curiously rather than in offended defense and the threshold without choosing sides for winning.

SOLITARY REFINEMENT

It was just a way to kill time ‘til the next thing whisked her off on missions she felt honor bound to perform for others or dreamed up for herself. So why does she find herself in front of her computer playing the latest version of an eleven hundred year old game of solitaire whenever she can think of nothing better to do?

When she’d played “Klondike” with the thin meat space symbols for the sorting game, she’d gotten bored quite easily, but this cyberspace version was different for several obvious reasons and a couple she felt she was detecting behind a curtain growing thinner for every hand she let it deal her. She couldn’t tell whether she was penetrating a hidden agenda or following bread crumbs in an occult initiation.

She couldn’t cheat on the computer like with the deck in meat space, but then she couldn’t re-deal hands to learn from amended mistakes or investigate alternative choices during play like the computer could. This was the edge of the curtain that made her realize that whoever programmed it to be able to reproduce the last hand could also have it produce any hand it wanted … for whatever reason. She began to notice that the successive hands seemed to fluctuate in patterns more than a random generator doing the shuffling would allow.

A dead give away was the fact that, although she’d played far fewer games with real cards, she was sure she’d never run the deck twice in a row more than once or twice before but on the computer it happened with regularity. The internet postings of weekly and all-time highs appearing at the end of every game she won (by getting over fifty-two points in a game awarding nine points for cards on Aces) indicated that some players had run through as many as twenty-five successive hands successfully! Over five years of playing an average of seventy games a day, she managed to run as many as five decks successively, with twos and threes occurring with increasing frequency.

Not only did she suspect a discoverable key to increasing her correct choices at seemingly equal forks in the road, she began to suspect that, being hooked up to the internet, her play could be under surveillance and thwarted or rewarded by the design of the program or the whim of the programmer. She recognized the resemblance to her suspicion of Vatican, North Pole and Washington agendas with their angels, Santa’s helpers and illegal wire taps to protect the faith in the pope, rewards for good behavior and the NSA.

The game had always served as a sort of roundhouse where trains of thought took new tangents in the dearth of purpose to be taken up in meat space. The cards themselves often took on character roles in scenarios written by the fancy of her mood. Noticing this business of characterization and dramatization of perfectly neutral objects became a valuable metaphor for the human tendency to bury awareness of present as it is under the baggage of the past purposes for intention inventions. Was this the lesson intended or was she inventing her own?

Out of the corner of her mind’s eye she glimpsed it. Having lost sight of such phenomena before by turning to fully focus on it, she left it on the fringe with the million other ideas in the wings awaiting the correct timing for their appearance to be fully appreciated. Not being zapped to the back of the line made it feel wanted and it reentered the stage right where she’d seen it. Yes — yes it was the same layout requiring the same moves — with all the cards in different places. A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed her and she felt she had recognized the same maze despite the variety of plants and flowers that formed the hedges between the paths — or deeper yet, learned the same lesson being taught despite the variety of mazes leading her to it.

EVER WONDER…

Did you ever wonder, when you find something unique in your experience, whether it is something unique in the universe or that you are just the most recent observer of something that practically everyone else has known forever and takes for granted so never mentions — intrepid explorer on the curious forefront of inquiry or the slowest wit on the planet? Here’s one of those pragmatic moments of western thought when inadvertently stumbling into a zen understanding.

The theory of universal Darwinism allows as how, despite the exactitude with which genes copy themselves, the endless variation of life forms we perceive is a result and proof of the effect of their earthly environment’s inability to kill the survivors before they could replicate their information. What appears as design to imaginers of some master designer/creator is the natural result of information (DNA) being copied most by those variations that work. What works best produces copies that are that much more able to survive the dangers of living that kill all less able copies. Changes in the environment are always new challenges to and determiners of increasing hereditary complexity.

There can be little doubt whether whatever natural event one observes is unique in its occurrence. Even if it was the same event, the uniqueness of the observers’ reality tunnels at the moment of observation make the chances two people have ever been conscious of the same experience something like ∞ X ∞.

In this way it also leaves little doubt that what is never mentioned is either so indescribable as to be unconsciously filtered out of one’s reality tunnel or, if noticed, so extraordinary as to evoke fear of appearing insane to a culture whose existence defines sanity … or comfortably, civilly pigeonholed into the language of the myth with the facile subconscious mental collator creating reasons to increase the complexity of the language to more precisely separate events into things for expert specialization — denying annoying contradictions rather than expanding the inclusiveness of the categories.

ARE WE THE DROIDS WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR?

Ever since sitting in the hot sun outside the theater in the middle of the Highland Mall parking lot waiting to get into see the movie that coined the term blockbuster, I have been confused about whether I should let the farce be with me or go over to the dork side. Since we ate a lot of popcorn and I sat next to my buddy, Doug Cugini, his farts were with me although we’d gone over to the dark inside to see and be inspired for the theme to the Hole in the Wall’s Halloween party that year, Bar Wars. Even golf was never the same; when shooting par the fours was with us and when hitting a wild shot it was on the duck side.

I am still referred to as Yoda by a few who were around in those days. In fact, it wasn’t ‘til I reread that last sentence just now that I realized where I came up with Yodood as my replacement for the more forgettable blog name of gregraetgar (Green Graphics and (et) Gardens). Troutsky still calls me Greg, he’s so yesterday.

I never made it beyond the introduction of Jar Jar Binks before Lucas’ farce became too much and my DVD player went over to the dark side for that franchise. I have younger friends who revile George Lucas for so reneging on the promise of the series beginngs. We were all influenced.

Whether it was Sir Alec’s suave dismissal of the storm troopers searching for R2D2 and 3PO or Yoda’s convoluted language wisdom, there were sensations much more sublime than mere ears pricked up in this society already aware of the alternate meanings of the counter culture’s lyrics and their startling gestures like putting flowers in riot police gun barrels.

If language evolved in the same way species do, and records since language was first translated into stone and metal symbols testify to that being the case, observing the changing meaning of words to certain groups in the same culture in reaction to oppressive authority and relating that to a match in the variation of race to language, probable religion and national turf we can see that the expansion of the human race from one set of parents involved the oppression of crowding at least as much as much as from the natural curiosity of the individual being followed by the flock if the new ground works out for her.

Observing day old chicks evolve to egg bearing matrons, expanding from a cardboard box to a six by twelve foot coop for their first seven months to tentatively separating further while roaming this eight acre area in the woods by the Colorado River free range for the past three months, I feel like I am observing the expansion of humanity without the trappings of civilization establishing marks of permanent ownership though proximity sometimes raises squabbles with the other species and the years older hens whereever they occur. Squabble is a perfect word for confrontation with a chicken by the way, just like gobble is for turkeys.

These girls of mine, with no training other than copying each other, evolved a language that both sounds identical in words and personal in inflection when they are announcing the arrival of the latest egg or voicing their desire for a corn tortilla treat at the porch door. The egg announcement happens to be identical to every other chicken I’ve heard upon such an event.

So, are our words similar to the words in disparate languages through genetics or through evolving from one language. Are there phrases whose utterance in the right volume and frequency will be recognized by the genetic memory of the primitive brain triggering an override to anything learned since birth? Who is the hypnotist talking to?

I dabbled in hypnotism in my teens and decided it was one of those extremely powerful realizations that lead to my just-because-you-can/should-you choice to leave it as background evidence for my curiosity’s other tangential interests as a more oblique approach to this vast unknown. Justin, over at Memetika has just posted on the Millennium in the Shadow of Freud with links to the excellent videos aired on the BBC several years ago about the use of mass hypnosis through propaganda (bad mind control by our enemies) and public relations (good mind control by our leaders).

If we have buttons that have been programmed and someone knows how to push them, are we not the droids we are inventing?

CREATIVITY: THE COSMIC WHODUNIT

The one thing common to all forms of creativity is the assumption of intention aforethought. From world creating gods to tide creating gravity, a purpose to manifestation of artifacts and effects is assigned as a tag with which to most expediently catalogue our ongoing experience of the present framed in concern for the cumulative sense of comfort about coming events. Believing that everything has a purpose is rarely tested beyond its ability to find a niche within one’s faith in a world and life as something being done by some super geek accomplishing a goal with us as the means.

The most rational among western civilization’s more curious minds are just lately beginning to question the demythologized, essential requirement of the concept of creativity: cause and effect — and how the admission of any form of simultaneity belies the necessity for assigning a direction to causality for change to occur. We impose restrictions on our possibilities of realization by our inability to describe our experience to ourselves in terms that can do no other than imprison our minds. Part of thinking outside the box is our willingness to understand our fluid, preverbal thoughts, unhampered by concern for whether or how they may be manifested, arising from the nowhere sea of the invisibly, infinitesimally small, instantaneous, spontaneous eternity of the present as they do.

The requirements of cause and effect take effect when preverbal inspiration sparks a desire to manifest itself in relation to a consensus reality, even if it is only an ironic smile crossing one’s face at realizing the twist such an admission may put on one’s own ongoing reality tunnel. Like those atomic physicists’ probes into the enigma of where, when and how who did what to whom in the otherworldly world of quarks, I have come to suspect there is an entire, underlying behavior pattern to my life which never consults consensus reality or my own reality tunnel as my body bops along relaying to me the world as it is and whether it cares to respond to any assumption of purpose that may evoke in me. This could mean that all I manifest, from language to action, is essentially a happening; an event my body was only too happy to be part of being. This way, the only doing involved would be to modify the synchronistic spontaneity of being in the moment to plan to serve some expectation, some purpose for mañana; just not now. It is very interesting that the finer science is able to slice time the less obvious the assumption of causality becomes.

It’s been a long, strange trip to get wherever it is I am, but now that I’m here I’m beginning to think nothing I could have done would have prevented arriving, no alternate reality tunnel could avoid including this empirical realization of the difference between being and doing. One of my dad’s aphorisms about the creativity of painting was to, “leave in the happy mistakes.” I’m beginning to wonder if my entire life isn’t just one big happy off-color daub of paint left on a world canvass painted by a soulless civilization with unlimited assumptions about correctness of its purpose.

All I know is that I can stand up from my seat in the shed with no purpose in mind, gaze around the garden, chicken coop, pond, compost pile, state of fall leaves in the yard and feel either an attraction to action or the consideration of procrastination in response to my avowed primary directive to maintain some sense of symbiotic benefit with my environment. I either go with it or sit back down. Most of the pleasure my life is to me is the realization that, while this environment of “my place” may not appear to be what it is if I hadn’t moved here, I have never actually “done” any of the changes; I just agreed with a good idea amidst whatever now simultaneously happened to be.

Without having been bombarded everyday of my life with culture’s idea that the world was created and is still controlled for the unquestionably holy purpose of having we humans to love and/or punish by the great transformer in the sky, I doubt it would ever have occurred to me. Without having to deal with a culture whose assumption of ownership and superior righteousness of purpose granted by their creator, my dedication to understanding it in a more profound way than can be expressed, and through such inadequate expressions as I may manifest perhaps resonate within still muddled minds, might not have needed to become an avowed a purpose for my life.

Maybe.

THE “BANE” OF SELF-RELIANCE?

A post over at Thoughtstreaming was in its usual process of describing what I must assume is the “opposition”, which any blog espousing a political ideology authored by names like Troutsky and Che Bob must, of necessity, have, when along comes this sentence, “Individual as opposed to collective rights and a fetishized discourse on the Founding Fathers and Christianity and self-reliance.” Something clicked into place in an ever present puzzle presented to me early on in my naïve delve into the political blog scene with a comment to this same blog and receiving a most hostile reception for suggesting that I got any value for my life from reading Ayn Rand, obviously one of their code words loaded with ammunition of instant opinions for the combat life seems to be for them.

For me the entirety of Ayn Rand’s works were another version of the theme that inspired Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, singing the beauty of the of human potential and railing against the enslavement of it. That she made super heroes of those who realized their potential by becoming the most ethical architect in all of literature in Fountainhead and were the rare few honest captains of industry in Atlas Shrugged, got her branded by socialists of Trout/Che’s brand as a champion of the real, living, union busting, greedy, Gordon Gecko CEOs who milk their country dry. That she learned her fierce self-reliance in escaping from the collective nightmare of her life in the worst incarnation of socialism to date that was the Soviet Union, only emphasized their reasons to oppose her. That Howard Roark and John Gault had stirling ethics with no room for usury, the bane of civilization against which they and all men rail, just doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a brand easy to singe into the hide of anyone who would rather make it on their own. Methinks they throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

In western society, human potential exists in various kinds and quantities, less by genetic inheritance than by early wiring by the highly variable environment into which an individual is born. The belief system of the parents is either the first oppression or the first inspiration a growing curiosity deals with. Socializing outside the family is the first challenge to the inspiration or light on the oppression in a life full of contradictions to every assumption we make. It is at this stage that all the advice points to making irretrievable conclusions about what is right as a keel to remain steady through whatever experience the future may hold. Some, myself included, were never so sure of the concept of righteousness as to adopt it in any form other than than their own autonomy. I remember instances of great passion in love and war in my life, but none were my attempts to convert another to my ideas as a matter of faith in their intrinsic righteousness – merely food for thought in varying potencies from out side the box.

Although I have mentioned it several times previously, the Hindu concept of Minahana and Mahayana is particularly relevant to this socialist/capitalist argument in that Minahana is the individual, “little boat”, which must be mastered before one is capable of taking an oar in the “big boat”, Mahayana. This has always meant to me the same sort of self-understsanding that must precede indoctrination into the requirements of any culture, whether it is the solitary vision quest of native American adolescents or the walkabout of Aborigine lads, without which their communities held them lacking the virtue of responsibility and unworthy of assuming a role of tribal responsibility. Had either culture met a Marx or a Trotsky they would have laughed at the folly of their rejection of self-reliance in favor of group righteousness.

One person’s passionate belief in their responsibility for the care, feeding and behavior of themselves is another person’s fetishized self-reliance. It seems to me that the socialist abhorrence of self reliance is its lack of needing the group they cannot imagine living without. There are no self-reliant mobs out to take over the government that they want control of, there are no anarchist clubs anywhere. The gun toting, John Birchers against whom they rail are not self-reliant — they want to control the same government the socialists do — smaller government just means they want the orders to come from their own living room.

Well, this is as clearly as I can state my thoughts regarding the methods of painting the opposition with such a broad brush it leaves no room for anyone to qualify as an ally.

ANONYMOUS: Mental Concrete Pt. 2

The most beneficial effect I can see the internet having on the civilization it is saturating is the growing realization that truth needs no authority. The first installment of this series, Mental Concrete, dealt with the strategic misuse of stereotypes as demon paint to rally opposition to straw men as sole bearers of a particular all-consuming characteristic that the propagandist opposes that, in reality, is found in everyone to some degree. This time I want to home in on the mentally lazy habit of needing footnotes and degree initials to recognize obvious truth or of being persuaded by them to swallow propaganda.

My strongest experiential connections to other humans (beyond realizing that we are all made of the same cosmic stuff in extremely complex variations as cells in the tissue of the living body of earth) are our love of music, the occasional display of our deep-seated instinct to know right and wrong in the unrehearsed spontaneity of the moment it is required, and the rarer examples of our ability to capture and communicate that instinctual sense alive with a series of symbols as abstract as words or paint. The truth shines through the page whether it is a venerable old acolyte’s hand drawn parchment by candlelight in a musty cloister or the soiled brown paper bag the MD 20/20 came in scrawled by the shaky claw of a junkie by barrel firelight in an alley or the canvas of a saintly artist deliriously daubing every photon of light striking his dilated pupils from that starry night sky. Hell, I’ve been inspired by things I misread – and was no less inspired for finding my mistake. That’s what this post is about. The authority required to be genuinely inspired!

We seem to be so conditioned by our education to respect authority that we are paralyzed without its approval of our behavior and beliefs, religious or not. The internet is instant access to virtually anything anyone has ever wanted the world to see, and much of what they didn’t, for an entire spectrum of reasons. It is possible with very little effort to assemble every word, song or videotape relative to any subject, except those redacted by the government’s black ops authority over anything too amazing for the common man they swore to serve.

With such a plethora of information one may surmise the popularity and profundity of any subject by the quantity and range of the variety of views from every reality tunnel and camera ever applied, with scattered attempts to establish “facts” about the subject denoted by the particular acronymic symbol following the names of that particular specialty of authorityhood who’s word dare not be questioned. A comparison of the great, unwashed, unlettered, anonymous’ synthesis against the officially accepted facts always yields interesting, often intriguing insight into the agenda of such official versions; especially when the difference is great.

The idea of authority in both audacity of assumption and specter of surveillance makes of any system based on it fraught with little Caesars polishing their act, to expand their sphere of influence among the lowly gullible, and their apples for those whose rules school those fools who would achieve their stool with lickspittle obedience. Some shit.

It seems to me that western civilization is brewing a situation where the authority resides in a collective tower of mental masturbation at some floor or other. Authority requires levels; what else is left to achieve when you know it all? Outside that tower is the chaos of independent reality tunnels based on the individual life experiences of people who don’t assume they know anything about how or why civilization exists, much less perpetuates the establishment of edifices and new rules. Nor do they care except when intruded upon in their daily, relatively symbiotic lives in local nature, so far as authority permits.

It appears axiomatic that the strength of influence one assumes for one’s authority will proportionally disable the possibility of experiencing life as it actually is. Authority distorts perception whether the observed even knows authority is there or not. When authority asserts itself, the subject must as well, whether it wants to or not.

Authority is officially recognized and rewarded for accomplishments in furthering religious, political and scientific snow jobs that keep the people praying, obeying and paying. The most ubiquitous source of recognized authority is the initial “$”; able to buy the obedience of political whores betraying their constituents, the forked tongues of Madison Avenue snake oil salesmen on infotainment mainstream media and the guns of mercenary mobs to force fear on the unpersuadable priceless that remain. This collection of stereotypes I just used is marbleized throughout civilization; no one is absolutely evil or without a price.

Ah, well, they litter the internet, those authorities. I try to stay away from them, but I guess it doesn’t even pay to talk to it without “doing” something that qualifies, much less question it any more – to its face that is. I guess I’m as guilty of stereotyping as anyone; I question all authority but that which I perceive self-evidently shining through another’s unqualified behavior like truth on a page. Is it me, or does that sort of authority seem to be most likely found in people who prefer remaining anonymous?

NO OTHER GODS

They came with their book and their fire sticks that could strike beings dead from many strides away for food or disobeying the rules they read from the book. The shock and awe that struck beings wherever such magic arrogance intruded its violent version of Gaia into their lives left them fearfully supposing secrets of her great spirit had been confided to these pale possessive people. As the trauma healed, the survivors among my people either became emulators of Gaia’s enforcers by pretending they too owned the part of her body wherever they lived or they moved further from such a dangerous rupture in the rapture of their symbiotic relationship as integral parts of that body.

Easter Island

Within the first new generation a few of those who remained in awe of and proximity to the strangers found one of the books they carried and quoted from as proof of their authority, and began to decipher the markings in it. They learned something more amazing than these visitors’ ability to uncover some of the infinite complexity of Gaia’s body; something more atrocious than how, instead of further revering the whole life of which she has offered them mere hints, they indifferently turn right around and begin using them against her as if only her matter matters and she didn’t exist.

Tipi, Turtle Island

The book turned out to be a fable by the protagonist and His holy ghost writer about the six thousand year history since His creation of Gaia, and the firmament in which she whirls, especially for a pair of little living action figures of Himself to whom He bequeathed it all as stewards of their playground, so long as they never became curious about the endless supply of food that was growing all around them in the garden or the infinite variety of fellow creatures by which they were surrounded. Apparently the creator left His inheritors unable to heed His only prohibition, this one commandment against becoming aware of their connection to their food and endless fun naming everything they saw. The first time they met up with another of the creator’s special creations, the shape shifting avatar of His antithesis, in the form that day of a serpent bearing the answers in the back of the book they couldn’t resist peeking. His wrath has been unbound ever since.

Talk about getting your insurance dropped for the pre-existing condition of having once inhaled in Los Angeles the day before the doctor finally decides to tell you you have a rare disease that can only be cured with an infusion of a billion dollars as empirical proof that there’s no loving creator that gives a shit about anyone —— much less one who thinks we’re all that special; except maybe as the afterbirth of impudent curiosity upon which to further avenge the sin of man’s original awakening. That's small potatoes. These early interpreters learned that the entire six thousand years, ever since that first question, has been saturated with examples of the creator causing disease, destroying entire cities with fire and drowning all life on earth but one mating pair of a trillion species on a boat he told a man to make for his family only. He even tried issuing ten more commandments, just to have more to punish them for violating. Talk about yer exploitive indifference of the elite.

Palenque, Mexico

They found the entire book to be filled with a history of a jealous creator exacting punishment against the punching bags He keeps within arms reach by occasional appeals to their egos promising for their faith rewards of a condo made of clouds and harp playing neighbors — no virgins to deflower, it’s not like that —after he finally grinds them to cringing meal; that they are His special, His most beloved creation and that what was for their own good somehow hurt Him worse than it did them. Ever hear that one before?

When that gospel of fear wore as threadbare as the NSA’s claim their secrets are for national security, some two thousand years ago, the creator wrote a whole new sequel, supposedly non-fiction this time, in which He created an extra super special action figure of Himself who He supernaturally snuck into the human dimension through a virgin wormhole to go out among the not all that special action figures to preach a gospel of love and perform miracles of sharing and acts of compassion right up in the grill of that ageless serpent the creator set out so long ago.

Machu Pichu, Peru

After reaping the karma that kind of peaceful action gets at protest rallies until this day, the creator's latest, greatest got himsaelf crucified, for which He also holds us all guilty, the fable became what is to still too recent a history to deny — The only historical record relative to the the second book’s protagonist's actually existing is the 500 year history of politics over its even being written and the formation of an establishment to enforce its letter: —— a yawning void admittedly filled by religious ad men devotedly putting together the greatest’s hits and pieces from undisclosed sources to smooth transitions between often contradictory essays by his fans and disciples in a brochure targeted at the compassionate guilt market which miraculously seems to appear wherever their search for unwashed heathens to convert chooses to be guided by the hand of the creator. Imagine that!

After due contemplation weighing their own ancestral tradition of Gaia being a consciousness of whose body my people found themselves to obviously be a part, balanced against this cruel myth from which these pale players take the part of their creator when reenacting His good god/bad god routine every day everywhere whether their symbol is a cross or a dollar sign, my people decided that those who could stomach rubbing elbows with the intruders would live amongst them as an exeample of respect for Gaia, just as they always had and still remain undetected as someone needing conversion. It was easy, their lifestyle was too gentle to be noticed by these warriors. The rest would retreat from owned lands to live in full relationship to mother, Gaia. This decision was based on the idea that these pale people are no more than another kind of human being whose ancestors thought survival training must include the nature of Gaia a danger to be conquered rather than revered and respected as fellow elements of her body, as we always have.

Ankor Wat, Cambodia

Now my people are many more, and paler than the old ones of whom I tell today. Our plan is slowly working. For the past six hundred years or so most of our people have gone deeper into the wilderness wherever those symbols start making speeches while the more curious of us integrate invisibly into the wound their culture makes, living as we always have amongst them.

Igloo, Frozen Turtle Island

Over this time we have found an interesting connection to a possible reason for their antagonism toward nature and their penchant for making permanent, dead things out of great portions of Gaia’s living tissue. Believing nature was the enemy who must be outsmarted with clever devices would come much more readily to a portion of humanity trying to survive a sunless ice age for many generations than to the rest basking on tropical shores eating the fruits of the Garden of Eden, living in temporary homes in respectful recognition of Gaia’s hurricanes, eruptions and heavy seas. Not long after they invented totalitarian agriculture, their suddenly exploding population had expanded out of the cold and was building high-rise hotels like walls around every shoreline as a private beach. Oh, yeah.

New York, Turtle Island ($64)

As the invader’s progeny of today notice the color of the people they bother to notice at all seeming to be getting darker, we notice the skin of all the people headed for caramellow as our number grows less from babies than from we who get it and become my people as surely as I have. It is never too late to become indigenous in the community of the mind.

We are where we are naturally, so all we need do is be natural where we are by not acting as if we could possibly own wherever that is — it’s all Gaia admiring herself through myriad eyes seeing their various versions like a good yawn and stretch feels to my body.

Have a good day and love your mother.

•

Addendum: As an unsolicited testimony to the effectiveness of the subliminal influence my people may exert upon the collective consciousness that is Gaia, I swear I did not know until just now, 7:53 PM, that today is Columbus Day. I felt a small sense of anxious urgency to finishing it, but that is pretty common when a post is bound to gore a few oxen.