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.

Authenticity

The only authority I respect lies within self-actualized beings representing themselves genuinely rather than through manipulative illusion or honorary delegation.

For many years I regarded paintings of dogs playing poker as cartoonish silliness until I caught on to a deeper humor ranking among the greatest surrealism of all time; there’s not one bone in the body of a dog that can bluff! Dogs are the epitome of self-actualized beings within the domestic scene. Every being in what we consider natural wilderness is authentic.

Such examples are fewer and further between domesticated human beings not already culled and locked away in burgeoning jails and mental institutions. In four years of college I had only one teacher whose authority I recognized because he taught Strength of Materials wearing the dusty clothes he wore while walking a cantilevered I-beam on a construction job he was working on just before class. He brought interest in tension and compression to life more by his body language than the desiccated text ever could.

Some claim acquired authority based on books they’ve read, degrees they've been awarded, marks they’ve made, gods they've worshipped, clubs they’ve joined, elections they’ve won, money they’ve got or plans they’ve hatched for our future. Western civilization is based on such claimers successfully awing the rest of us. Those remaining outside this bond of gullibility exude the authenticity that escapes those testimonies to elsewhere by genuinely representing themselves; self-actualizing before one’s very eyes without needing to claim anything.

Note: This is a republishing of my latest post on the new blog, "…kindness of strangers," in a blatant attempt to get old readers to follow this link back to the future of this page.

FULL CYCLE

The theory that the entire evolution of life on earth to the present is reenacted by all beings during their gestation from the first cell division after conception to the emergence of their modern form from womb or shell I’ve heard bandied about in many contexts. I have to admit such comparisons are quite plausible throughout the wide variety and scale of life forms covering the surface of this being of which we are all cells, Gaia, Pachamama, Mother Earth.

Like any theory that keeps kicking around in my ponderings it has given rise to tangential extensions into nearly as many contexts. The earliest of which concerns the idea that, given that extremely abbreviated experience of earthly evolution to the present in gestation, the period of a modern human’s life from the first perception of sunlight to the last appears to be a reenactment of the continuing social evolution of mankind from the first opposable thumbs to finding fulfillment living out their lives in cubic, air-conditioned isolation chambers viewing the natural world from which they arose as an enemy to be conquered and exploited by pushing buttons with stubby little fingers to make that now alien, civilized world better, more heedlessness of the harm done to the planetary health none can survive without.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Lest I get carried away into my old crackpot notions and forget the latest idea that made me abandon my sunrise vigil and drove my stubby little fingers here to the keyboard once more; it occurs to me that, having come to an understanding of the paragraph above, I have been slowly but surely returning to the preverbal existence of early man by my age alone. Over years of abuse, from screaming jet engines to southern sheriff’s saps, my ears now seem only to hear vowels and tunes, with consonants and lyrics quite indistinguishable. My eyes seem only to see landscapes and geometric shapes in the foreground, with leaves and letters on those shapes quite indistinguishable. I may not pick out your train of words, but through the dance of your body English and tune of your voice I can follow your train of thought as a metaphor with interchangeable variables. I may not be able to see your facial features at a hundred yards, but if I know you, I will recognize your walk and mood.

When I couldn’t read the blackboard from the back of the 6^th grade classroom my vision was suddenly made more particularly articulate by being fit for glasses. I slowly began to rely on the written signs all around me and ignore the reality going on all around them. The authority of the written word, from “Keep off the Grass” to “Top Secret”, became sacrosanct; immune to any experience in the contrary. I became an avid reader in search of ethical heroes and scientific discoveries to challenge and/or enlarge my own heroic theories and burgeoning desire for the reward of fame and fortune in those books or imagined of their authors.

When I moved out of the city to the Dawgranch, I stopped wearing my glasses because there seems to be nothing so specific needing to be seen as is found in the traffic of speeding cars and urgent signs of the city. At the pace of nature everything is as articulate as their proximity requires my attention without fear of damage or delay. The once hawkeyed sharp particulars in the distance have returned to being part of the natural landscape I‘d learned to ignore.

When the cubical dwellers visit me I know when to celebrate, sympathize with or object to anything they say by how they dance and sing, no matter what the song and dance may be about.

HOW HIGH THE SKY?

Do my cells Know what I make of them? 

Each one painting its canvas, a pixel in the hologram I call existence.

 Do they know their lives are my sensations?

Brain meet Nebula, or is it the other way round

The aches and ecstasies passing through now like weather

inspire my will to look beyond my cells with an awareness,

Double Helix Nebula at the heart of the Milky Way

a being of which I have always been a cell

whose health suffers and celebrates as do I —

in response to its cells, 

we Earthlings, 

we Solarians, 

we Milky Wayans …

CHECKING IN

Just watched Stephen Colbert interview Al Gore, who stressed that it was our wars over keeping oil that kept us from affording a technological replacement for the internal combustion devce that causes climate change. Good reasoning, Al.

The other night I watched an msnbc special, on the changes in America in the ten years since the excuse for the longest of those wars, during which intrepid war correspondent Richard Engle remarked, “Lovely New York water, heh, heh, heh,” as he was being decontaminated after exposing himself to the poisonous Hudson river in which he’d joined the “new” NYPD searching for terrorist’s bombs along the banks. Good priorities, Richard.

Here’s my point. Al Gore has stressed climate change as his focus for action to return to a more symbiotic way to exist within the natural curve of the planet by citing temperature trends and more drastic weather patterns. It’s not that I deny climate change is one of the symptoms of the industrial-age human alienation of themselves from the planet which birthed them, I don’t. But of all the symptoms it remains the most debatable and debated boondoggle in any effort to lessen our footprint. Climate change is evident in geological and biological records occurring in natural cyclic patterns throughout the history of Earth, which tends to be deniers strongest argument. The strongest argument for climate change is measuring how extreme the weather has gotten in the recent past based on the ignorant hubris of civilized humans to continue to build “permanent” cities on the coasts (the land left after the last chunk quaked into the ocean) and rivers (the trickles left since the last “no ice anywhere” period) because, miracle of miracles, earthquakes and hurricanes cost more in lives huddled in more high rises every year.

Just like Richard Engle laughed off the admittedly deadly pollution of the Hudson river while demonstrating the efficiency of the NYPD to keep the homeland free of theoretically possible terrorism, Al Gore pushes the theoretically most debatable of the many arguments for getting off of fossil fuels while the horror of our pollution of water, land and air remains undeniable and undiscussed, — from the Hudson river to the burning kitchen faucets near fraking operations.

What the frack.

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?

I love the rain! ptl for the sweet sound. on way back from dropping kids @school I see a little boy in front of my house walking IN the street and not on the sidewalk high-stepping it in his rain boots thru the puddles unaware of much else. made me smile. Finally.

Its amazing how the down to earth, simple little things warms our hearts and brings us back to a reality check of our lives. How care free a child's life is when they don't have the weight of the world on their little shoulders. That's what our heavenly father wants us to be like, if we could just let him carry our worries and our cares. Easily say than done sometimes. Love you little sis......Have a Blessed day.

Pretty much all my relatives back in Mississippi, and places of refuge therefrom, sprinkle their Facebook communications with little “ptl”s and bible quotes. It is the only direct exposure to Xianity in my life. Realizing they are no different than the overwhelming majority of people who primarily identify themselves as non-hyphenated-Americans, I have been searching for the crossover between who I have come to know as an inner observer reporting the gestalt of my sensory perceptions to a consciousness for whom we all serve as eyes on the material manifestations of nature, just as our cells report to us, and the omniscience projected upon an external being that created the universe and is in control of every instant. My problem has always been with the established religions externalizing the genius with which individuals are born and on which they rely when selecting the particular character of their version of some god out there.

Being unaware of or ignoring the ultimate responsibility for what one chooses has allowed individuals to commit atrocities by merely going along in the anonymity of the dominant mob with only their inner observer to weigh the difference between reality and one’s version. The sweet exchange I quoted above between my  grand-niece and her friend seems almost like the crossover I seek when little children are said to be “what our heavenly father wants us to be like” as if aware that, having taken the entire culture based on gaining permission from others upon their little shoulders, people have unnecessarily complicated their lives with smoke and mirrors.

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.

CHOICE

The most obvious trait of the natural world is the eating. From atoms swapping electrons to black holes swallowing galaxies there is a constant transformation occurring throughout the known physical world. Once you’re born, you’re game to be eaten upon until you no longer exist. Being food for itself, it would seem the prime purpose of the universe is to perpetuate its life. One may extrapolate that the universe is expanding, another that it’s only inhaling in the prime cycle of respiration and yet another that what we observe is merely the growing body of one of the many beings of its size.

One thing for sure is that down here at human metabolism staying alive requires adaptation to the area in which we must eat so long as we can avoid being eaten. Being eaten can be resisted only when the entity is aware of and able to avoid or defend against other life forms, from saber-toothed tigers to cancer cells, munching on its vitality. Realizing how many eggs a woman is capable of hatching, it would seem we have a lot to learn about adapting to our habitat in order to live up to our genetic potential.

So here we are, smack in the middle of a good/bad for us world feeling like we must perpetually choose to either eat, befriend, avoid, defend against, attack, or surrender to events in our conscious life. At birth our motivation is to respond to and learn from the enormous physical growth still going on by stoking those fires with food and our consciousness with experience to better adapt to obtaining the next meal.

The genetic mini-factories pumping out replications of their Dna imbue each with what has been biologically called, epigenesis, and in my lexicon referred to as genetic memory, intuition, instinct, or the inner voice with which newborns are equipped to operate as individuals as soon as physically capable. This evolved memory is of primal truths such as eat or be eaten, fight/flight, fear of falling or caution around fire, like an organic I Ching into which the daily events of one’s life may be inserted like variables plugged into infallible, evolutionary time tested formulas. Human cultures attempting to part from nature have all been too fleeting to register in such a timeless, cyclic history of evolution.

As the infant is introduced to the culture within which is born, its adaptive behavior in obtaining food is influenced by a louder, more insistent memory in the form of tradition. Some cultures traditionally consider nature to be an evil to be conquered and begin educating their young as soon as the results of their eating makes a mess on the traditional couch. In such cultures the young quickly adapt, not to their habitat, but to the rules for conquering nature within themselves by ignoring those “Satan’s whispers” from our genetic memory and without by helping harvest and sell the entirety of our habitat to one another in a race to own the most at the inevitable finish line of planetary poisoning and starvation.

Being so buried beneath the immediate demands of one’s culture so early, individuals rarely get to experience themselves beyond their skills at eliciting favorable response from others, first for food, then for favors. Any reference to self-reliance is in terms of having money to pay others to provide all the necessities of life, which are far in excess of mere food in most cultures considering themselves civilizations. Indigenous cultures still send their youth on walkabouts and vision quests to ensure they are aware of their prime reliance on and responsibility to their habitat in a most symbiotic way. Western civilization’s version of a walkabout is joining the Marine Corps to travel to remote corners of the world and threaten to blow up that porcelain toilet (that another vision quest, the Peace Corps, convinced once indigenous peoples they couldn’t live without) if they didn’t quit fighting the leash and biting the hand that now feeds them.

With no experience of living symbiotically with nature since the presumption of totalitarian agriculture, western civilization relies on faith in authority over the inherent potential of that unbound curiosity with which we are all born:

“I’m hungry.”

“That’ll be five dollars.”

The instincts that could not be sublimated in the civilizing of newborns have been bent to the service of authority. Competitiveness among beings for food in the wild improves the survival abilities of both prey and predator and doesn’t include incapacitating the competition except among civilized people in search of authority. With no natural prey but their own egoistic shortsightedness, civilized humans confuse fellow competitors with the prey — still hungry after all these eons. Herding instinct, once for safety among prey and efficacy among predators, has been warped into might makes right and the inability to live alone in the wild … or the city. Which brings us to the biggest, most painful warp of all. This post was generated by a quote my dear, Lilwave, posted in Facebook the other day,

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." ~Mother Teresa

I hardly know where to begin. The inarguability of such a metaphor mixed between physical reality and presumed spiritual necessity leaves me only the “hunger for love” part to address my response to the quote. Part of becoming acquainted with oneself prior to and beyond being the stylist adapting to one’s culture is discovering the being who exists when one is alone with the natural world so that one cannot be swayed by condemnation or flattery in representing one’s self honestly.

Now here’s where I make the humangoose assumption that I am not alone in experiencing the following — if I am, I’d like to hear from you.  There is a term, agape, which I take to mean the feeling of love for the entire universe, including the misdirected malice of western civilization toward the womb that births it and horrible individual injustices wreaked upon one another trying to make the system work against our nature. This feeling resembles total harmony of every part of my body and it with all other entities in a dynamic generated by learning to choose to be symbiotic with nature by learning from our mistakes if we survive them. Humans are learning by trial and error what their genetic memory could tell them if they could hear it over the traditional memory’s public address speakers.

It may be evoked by solitary meditation, seeing events harmonize all the entities involved such as what just occurred in Tahrir Square, at an outdoor rock concert on a psychedelic, turning the compost and seeing microbes make plant food out of plants, in the fearless eyes of another looking from the same place, or in watching the world turn green at spring sunrise after every miserable winter of my life.

To hunger for love means to me that one has never discovered that fountain within them selves and are convinced love must be acquired from externals like food. Relationships are cannibalistic without agape, to further mismix the metaphor.

“Hey, boy! Whachu doin’ pullin’ that there chain?”

“You ever tried to push one?”

            AGAPE

… 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.

NO THING IN NATURE

If I knew I should die tomorrow,

I would plant a tree today.

~Stephen Girard

Photo: A H Palma

There are no things in nature. Things are the lifeless labels we attempt to attach to elusive events. We seek shelter from hurricanes as they occur and become experts at talking about the remnants of its event, the things we can pick up, name and pass judgment upon long after the event is being hidden from elsewhere. To the western civilized, educated mind nature no longer exists; trees aren’t beings, they’re things called trees, just sitting there; can make things out of ‘em, can burn ‘em.

Most of the very natural processes the human body experiences during a lifetime occur without the awareness, therefore without willful control, of the educated mind. Hunger and nausea, those bodily messages strong enough to get through the distractions of things being pursued in the artificial world to let its driven driver know the tank is either empty or overfilled with bad fuel.

Nature is one continuous, omnidirectional, purposeless chain reaction occurring to every scale of individual cell throughout the universe. Man has made of the endless event a thing labeled life, which he believes his god granted to those things that move without his pushing on them.

Lest I be suspected of picking on western civilization in respect to the marketplace thingathon attitude with which it treats the earth, histories older than any western medicine speak of the east considering health a matter of deep understanding of these bodily process through self contemplation; surgery and doctor’s fees were forbidden.

A Google earth scan of the island of Bali revealed that wherever the volcanic terrain was level enough there were tiered rice paddies and villages, right down to the shores of the island, along narrow ridges and in the craters. I knew this of eastern civilization’s respect for integrating their lives into the natural landscape symbiotically and of the age of the tradition judging from the complete coverage of the landscapes including pagoda temples on the peaks of the most precarious promontories. What I just recently grokked was how long the Balinese have been aware of the benefit of forests when, scanning the mountainsides too steep for paddies, I noticed the patterns in some of the most mature forests indicating that these rice farmers have been replanting their lumber supply for centuries. How enlightened these “primitive” people are.

If Bali is considered a third world, nature must be cooking up some sort of layer inversion to turn things back into events for everyone.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

The next best time is now.

~ Chinese Proverb

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.

LAST RESORT

Posting this video represents my last blatant attempt to influence others' thinking about the prediction of global warming and their responsibility for the health of the nature from which we arose and to which we will return.



I will, however, continue to post personal experiences and the ideas they spawn about our responsibility to become less antagonistic to the rest of life over which we have, by some disastrously perpetuated mistake, assumed mythicaly granted dominion and to become more symbiotic with the health of the planet of who's body we are merely a dependent part.

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

GETTING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

When I stated there was nothing left for me “to do” in my last post it was in reference to action resulting in my gaining better symbiosis with my environment and personal relationship with loved ones. Its not that I couldn’t improve my responsibility further, but that having learned to see nature as it is needs no doing of maintenance beyond remaining aware of the glaring difference between such direct experience of my life and second hand information becoming more virtually realistic every day as every conversation seems to be an exchange of memes received from the electronic “real world” of western civilization.

The connection re-realized between my daughter and I last week has let me feel confident that we are one person in two places to the degree that information from her is as pure as my own sensory system supplies me. She is my eyes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as she tells me of her son’s work captaining a boat for BP every day and the experience of the filth and fumes on his clothing now that globs of crude oil have reached the barrier islands off shore. I no longer have to wonder what is the truth about the reported disaster, the results have gotten beyond my mistrust of the media and are affecting my grandson’s health, no speculation to it.

My hip requires me to stop and regenerate if I walk as far as a quarter mile at a good clip. I would be no better than a glob of oil on the beach if I were to go there to try to help in a job that may require every able-bodied person in the country to actively participate in remedying the situation far more directly than holding hands and praying. Although I always thought it an ironic obviator of faith to the faithful, I’ve gotta agree that their “god helps them who help them selves.”

The Gulf of Mexico is the spawning ground for a giant portion of sea and shore life and the food supply for walking, hopping and flying life all over the planet. This blossoming vortex continuously unwinds its contents out into the larger Atlantic and the rest of the world; a slow motion version of Ice Nine, enough crude oil could kill us all. Whether you go alone or with a club, if you are able-bodied and care about planetary life I recommend an integrity check on your ability to respond in a directly effective way.

As indirect as it is, this blog is my best idea for calling for individuals to get their priorities straight about life on Earth. If you can find something more useful for me to do, don’t hesitate to let me know.

BUSTED

Printing was to the bible what the internet is to politics. When the infallible word of the creator was made manifest, to be devoured by candlelight in the hovels of the more common folk, the patchwork quilt of a story, originally told to keep the clergy on the same page as they paraphrased purity from the pulpits, became shredded like a pig in piranhas. And the miracle was that each variety of bite taken remained infallible when digested and shat, despite the contradictory odors of the piles. Ah, certainty, such a relief from thinking. Don’t like the infallible, fine. Make up your own version and call that the truth, “… so help you god”. Ever notice that, no matter how personally individual one’s variety of belief in the same brand may be, faith requires all others to be wrong and on the road to hell. Such an outlook has made hell of living on the natural heaven this Eden of a planet is within the environs of the Gomorrah of western civilization, just to put it in biblical terms.

There also occurred across the land a falling away from the entire guilt trip the church had been laying on the faithful for the past fifteen hundred years as the more perceptive recognized the book to be a sales guide/brochure cobbled together from selected legends and myths five hundred years after the “fact” of the hero’s existence. Among them there formed two camps, the atheists who rejected the existence of a controlling spirit in a curious, chaotic world and the exploiters who began using the mechanisms of faith in the myth to pose as earthly authority over the material portion of humans no matter what they believed about god. Along with being unable to enter heaven without god we’re now unable to enter life without papers from earthly authority.

The internet fact checked John McCain out of contention. The internet is fact checking Barack Obama’s campaign promises into lies, just like every other shill for the shadowy shilling that’s come down the pike.

The disaster of this oil spill exposes nature to a blow the entire world will suffer for generations. While helping set booms in the gulf individual volunteers were searched in a cull for illegal immigrants by ICE; such meticulous attention to irrelevant detail. While leaving the inevitable overreach of greedy technology being operated by bean counters to gush billions of gallons of suffocating, poisonous crude oil into the heart of a planetary life blossom endlessly cycling her contents out among the continents, the responsible, real criminals, their overseers and the government elected to oversee the overseers have all been found to be one not-so-clandestine corporation. The shock and dismay. Bad oil companies. Bad government. They made us spend half our income on prosthetics only aliens to earth would consider necessities for life — within the Borg ship as it rapes and shits on the planet.

My previous video post, If Cursing Makes You Feel Better …, featured the lack of any real concern about the cleanup of the oil spill, even with the antiquated inadequate boom technology to harness surface slicks. Rachel Maddow either saw the video or picked up on the same glaring lack of concern on her investigative journey to the barrier islands off Louisiana and has taken it national.

Without waiting for Obama or any other blameworthy irresponsibility to give the orders, responsible, fit individuals should charter buses, catch trains, head for the most imperiled part of the gulf coast, don hazmat gear and begin proper booming and skimming. Full disclosure: I am not going to the coast-my lack of strength and stamina would only be in the way. There are technologies of absorption (aerogel) and separation (Costner’s Centrifuge) finally being given the green light, but the oil is reaching the wetlands now. BP get out of our way, there’s a revolution going on.

Or ought to be.

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

REMEMBERING

What It's All About

Don't let nostalgia cause short term memory loss

•

Protecting
the
United States of America
from
ever
having
to
walk
anywhere.

THE CAVE

It was inspired by the wisdom of the I Ching’s ability to phrase sixty-four examples of the natural curve of events throughout evolution in such open ended metaphors that any particular variation of daily vicissitudes brought to the collection as a meditation can find wise council by the chance of casting yarrows to choose which particular example to consult in each case. This symbolic tying of timeless wisdom to the immediacy of the moment serves to intensify greater consequences in a bigger picture than the meaner, more personal concerns brought to the ceremony for solution.

Prote noted that the written word was disappearing from public culture as the biggest show on earth made every expressible thought so realistic no one knew where or when they actually were in the reality of the natural universe. Only conscious purveyors of the spectacle’s endless memes used the written word to communicate preshat ideas for scripts, business agendae and subliminally recognizable symbols for ads. It became like a programming language that only geeks who loved to lie knew how to use even though everyone perpetuated its purpose by speaking. Government documents no longer required redacting no matter how damning the words. The Bible wasn’t read but from the pulpit. Like General Motors, Standard Oil and Goodyear bought up all the trolleys to kill competition for their industries, the spectacle bought up all the books as material to no longer be read but to be more artfully reified. Libraries became as abandoned as auto plants in Detroit eighty years after the trolleys were destroyed. Scripts for the spectacle became the only form of literature, like Latin for priests, lawyers and doctors. The last person outside the spectacle industry that still knew how to read succumbed to Shakespeare, Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski on audiobooks played on her maxi-pad before she died.

He knew that if people were ever to recover their direct contact with the living body of which they, in the reality of the nature of the living universe, are dependent symbiotic cells, it must occur as individual realizations rather than yet another following the latest leader or copying the guy next over as they learned to herd within the spectacle.

His idea began with noticing the variations of pitch in the speaking voice that could be generalized into categories of emotional states. He collected data on individual’s normal speaking voice to establish a baseline for the variations in vibration frequency recorded when stating various problems being posed and when speaking of the understanding gained by the consultation.

With much cross referencing and codification he managed to devise a large chamber, the interior walls of which were composed of areas of varying reflection and absorption of sound waves such that anyone, asking any question within the blackened cave it appeared to be, would hear an echo in their own voice replying with words they were genetically predisposed to interpret as “Follow your own light, just as you did when you first chose to follow another.”

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.