TO BE A CHILD …

That first gasp of air … what did I feel? Was it the sudden chill on my damp naked body no longer sheltered by the womb? Was it a startled flash bulb consciousness of everything at once and therefore aware of no thing?

I have looked into the just-opened eyes of a newborn and recognized the ancient observer behind them calmly unwrapping this new instrument to begin sampling the experiment of life this time around.

With all functions set at default, sensitive components begin reporting changes registered as pixels in the hologram it forms of where it is. As reports accumulate, similarities adjust settings to better collate them to estimate the probability of permanence in this constantly changing time and space; the framework of reality upon which existence learns to gamble its future.

These are automatic, involuntarily unfolding functions evolved genetically into increasingly more varied, complex beings with no other detectible purpose than to continue, nor limit but infinity. This body, this instrument, in terms of the individual psyche, is what I think of as the Id: the genetic memory of instincts to eat and not be eaten for survival of the individual, instincts to mate and co-create for thrival of the species, intuition of the purest sense of right and wrong.

It’s all hunky-dory, suckling and pooping along, until it’s just not enough to satisfy the sated survival instinct; no lack of food or fear of predators, but … what’s that over there? The emergence of curiosity, the instinct to grow beyond the givens, discovers a difference between reports of changes within (hunger, heartbeat, breathing) and of finding limits to careless freedom without (bumping into crib, mother’s weaning and scolding for pooping off limits).

My most vivid recollection of self/other awareness was of the change the echoes of my crying returned from the walls when someone came to check on me. This primitive echolocation gave quality to my depth perception as my eyes learned to focus at different distances before it dawned on me they might be approached. Such preverbal understandings form the avatar, the ego, a hologram the instrument builds of itself in relationship to the now exterior reality within which it appears to act.

Early on I recall imagining a game being played between myself and the world where I had a cardboard replica of what I wanted to be perceived as being (the ego), which I held before me as I walked about. In turn the world erected cardboard facades like movie sets ahead of me and struck them when I passed, ala The Truman Show. This personal myth was reified whenever adults tested the validity of my mask with their questions and obviously invented most of their answers to mine when they couldn’t remember what they were told back when they still had questions. Observing my parents perpetuate the Santa Claus myth long after I’d observed the reality taught me to be a life long skeptic.

Ego develops when curiosity is called on to explain the avatar’s place in the causal myth of whatever culture is asking. There aren’t enough whys, wheres, whens, hows or whos to conclude a purpose to the living universe without first inventing a timeline whose direction is determined by assigning cause and effect to the constant change life always is, no matter what we think of it. As the child seeks to achieve validity within its sphere of activity, the responsibility for being able to account for itself to a perceived social environment often takes priority over the id by claiming and basking in praise it does receive, and denying by masking from scorn it might, from an audience that rarely cares as much as it does about itself.

In seeking validity from ones culture the ego can actually lose consciousness of the unique, natural gifts of the id leading to fear of being left alone bereft of anyone to obey and unable to entertain oneself with creative, original thinking since abandoning it somewhere in childhood in the process of converting curiosity’s question marks into culture’s periods.

In this Freudian drama, the superego would be the unifying curve between them attempting to maintain the yang of the ego-avatar’s artificial doing in beneficial, dynamic harmony with the id-body’s instinctual being throughout a life of cultural training to exploit the difference for advantage over others in a competitive ethic.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is usually understood to mean giving others treatment you want, precluding the reality that two unique beings rarely want the same treatment. The benefit of the dynamic the superego maintains depends on the ego’s symbiotic attitude towards perceived otherness by realizing that beneath the cultural, exterior doing lies the common guidance system of the id’s instinctual being.

It is impossible to come to a conclusion about an infinite, living universe without completely extinguishing curiosity — customarily associated with death or belief.

MESSAGE FROM THE FULCRUM

Silence.

Knock!

Awakening

“Was that a sound?”

Silence.

Knock!

The dream is over

“Is something happening?”

Silence.

Knock!

The dualities resume

“There it is again!”

The duality of silence and sound are the clothing with which the mind adorns experience as its best gesture to suggest one’s ineffable insights into an existence too everywhere to be pointed at. At the balance point of each and of all, that which can be dressed in expression fitting the fashion must neglect the rest of the ongoing reality to tell a snap shot story of the enormous variety of dualities contained in any instant, inspirational glimpse of the eternal present. Seeing the dynamic of dualities as a dance or a war seems to depend on the centeredness of one’s fulcrum.

If the essence of the living universe were not the fulcrum about which constant change occurs, we could not be aware of our existence in it. Duality, simultaneously recognized difference, is the trigger to our awareness and the limit to the range of our ability to describe the truth at the fulcrum upon which the instant of the present balances. Like a tight rope walker stabilizes herself by spreading her apparent physical presence over imaginary ground on either side of the rope with a balance bar, our memories and expectations stabilize our awareness of the reality of the only time or place we or anything else ever has or will walk, now.

My version of the yin yang symbol for duality above demonstrates how the variations produced by the living universe mix into the definitive duality of two complimentary, opposite colors which, rather than obscuring the polarity, show the dynamic mix of two elements whose existence depends on each other in the often ignored threshold between them, now.

Though I used a tight rope, now and the line dividing the yin yang as examples of this universal threshold just now, a deeper examination is needed of the ramifications of ignoring such a critical transition by allowing the distraction of the more stark contrast of stereotypical extremes by indolent minds insistent on viewing the world in black and white righteousness. For the civilized mind such examination is possible only by withdrawal from all cultural influence, found most purposefully in deep meditation or prayer and inadvertently in epiphanies called anything from religious to psychedelic experiences of the true connectedness of the living universe. During any such personal insight into the eternity of the present, one’s purpose for being there dissolves in significance when one realizes that the resolution of all dualities is this source from which we attempt to single out, follow and favor any number of its myriad variations over the rest.

Lao Tsu speaks of the threshold not as something to be limited by or crossed, but as a path to be wandered as the way of everything, the path of unattached balance. Upon such a path, habitual temptations and aversions acquired and indulged, in excess of the necessities of a healthy life, may be seen as so much baggage and examined for their push/pull connectedness across the threshold of pernicious preferences frustrating the already well off, like trying to use a long balance pole while walking along the flat ground in a row of a cornfield.

This turned out to be a bigger chunk of the constant ramble unwinding from this view from the fulcrum than I intended. Maybe.

CUTTING ALONG THE SEEMS

I love language.

A word is like a thermos bottle; with no moving parts or detectable brain it is able to accommodate either of two opposing tasks without having a more specific purpose than, “Keep this like it is!” No matter whether it contains chilled perfect martinis or the hottest Kenyan Java the thermos faithfully preserves them just so, so long as partakers appreciate them enough to remember to replace the cap.

If the contents happen to remind the imbiber of a distraction from returning the top, they begin to change from their well-preserved conditions to whatever the ambiance happens to be wherever they’re left exposed. You might still call them martinis but, hot as the Sahara, they’ren’t the same thing at all.

My favorite words are universal metaphors that can hold their own within any context: threshold, culture, duality, consciousness … and like a thermos’ contents, the intended context must be appreciated for the flavor of its meaning to be tasted throughout the repast.

The word that inspired the forgoing distraction is “love.” Love is one of those words whose intended meaning is most protectively misinterpreted by the receiver’s past. My purpose in exploring it here is to praise its most profound, primary function as a plowshare cultivating fallow fields drained of the vitality to transcend the habitual complacency of solitary stoicism hanging on to those lives of quiet desperation.

Love is the cultivator across the scale of the concept of culture, from the onset of embryogenesis in a petri dish, pond scum or a womb, to the sympathy required to begin a culture as small as a mating pair and as large as a civilization … or a planetary body. As a cultivator, love surpasses the initial attraction that results in such new entities, which can be anything from sex to usery to security in numbers. It is the will to abandon the relative security of your status quo for the chance you haven’t “seen everything” just yet evoked by another who promises to reveal more if you will. It is recalling the vitality in the fresh air of unbridled curiosity wakened by one's first breath in a world it felt free to explore.

I have recognized this function of love acting as the great cultivator in the aftermath of certain friendly discussions over the years that grew too contentious to bear perceived proximity, resulting in either yelling because we felt too far away or stomping out because we felt too close. The painful disappointment of such heated impasses is like a plowshare tilling along what had seemed to be the seam of the pair’s indivisible unison, exposing the stuff of wishful thinking sugar coating bridges over unbrookable intolerances. Only love can make one willing die for another, or at least plow up the rocks of uncompromising, unconscious, structural assumptions that enclose our mind’s freedom to love another actual being unconditionally — and live with it happily ever after.

MEAT SPACE

It’s my favorite new term. I found it in a chat between programmers speaking about the effects of virtual reality’s influence on “meat space”. I like it for a number of reasons, the primary of which is its delineation of the threshold between being absorbed in ideating the potential of infinite possibilities in the mental, meditative, cyber space of the mind, and the singular, final realization resulting from action taken in material, “real” reality, meat space. You need only type “threshold” or “golden rule” into the blog search text block at the top of the page to find my previous posts to see how many times the concept comes up for me and what I feel about the existence of such a separation between thought and action; the interim where golden rule contemplation of ethical intent is required for harmony among humans.

This new slant on the threshold also suggests another pair of halves in my oft returned to theme of a species split. This time it’s between the entertained and the entertainers. Our culture is becoming defined by the amount of energy exerted by a service industry to supplant the energy required for the direct experience of nature so shunned by the served. There was a level of cultural depth not delved by the sifi blockbuster, Matrix: all the humans being milked for their energy were supposedly entrapped into such an existence. The tangent it suggested to me was the quite possible result of humans existing within western culture readily volunteering for the milking in return for being permanently entertained by electronic feed from only the most adrenalin soaked experiences continually being culled from wired sensory systems of humans (entertainers) being rewarded most for experiencing the most sensually entertaining activities in meat space. What a deal all around; meat space life as manna of porn heating cyber space up to room temperature.

The humans not wired at either end in such a future will be those who aren’t now — the indigenous cultures, to which many may repair by merely getting real about life on earth.

Jose Phillip Farmer’s series, Dayworld, described a world whose artificially boosted rate of reproduction was solved just as artificially as western culture seems destined always to try, by keeping dormant 6/7ths of the population 6/7ths of the time so that 1/7th of the population enjoys the world and its facilities one day per week in rotating occupation of meat space with, one supposes, no consciousness of the other six except how the day before left your house, did your job, etc. I imagine such people living seven times longer in a cultural world changing seven times faster would eventually dissolve like anything held too close to the heat.

No matter how we stack ‘em, the planet cannot sustain the population resulting from our insisting on artificially increasing food production and refusing to artificially limit the birth rate with contraception and incentives for smaller families. These are those interesting times the ancients supposedly cursed us with by telling fairy tales we had to close our eyes to believe. Meat space has more going on than any tale can nail. Just trimming off the fat is a lifetime activity.

FREEDOM IS NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE

Watching an old fave, Kris Kristoffersen, on Colbert Nation this morning I was struck once again by the Zen beauty of his simple truth, “Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.”

The assumption of ownership is reliance on permanence in defiance of the natural changes constantly occurring within and without us. It is the most debilitating element in the myth of any population to reach a level that is called civilized. Whether granted by god, government or promises from friends, the added vigilance against betrayal or theft by others is only the tip of the ill effect that poisons our world view.

We are owned by our possessions through our growing addictive fears of being inadequate to return to a projection of a tomorrow without them. The less we clutch, the more we become aware the essentials remain, always within us, enabling us to caress the variety of the phenomenal world as they pass through our life, or linger because some find it comfortable there. Free, you might say.

A wisdom emergent through aging
Finally grokking what was intuitive at birth
Now etched clearly by the acid lessons
Culture’s artificial contradictory restrictions are
On the daily evidence of nature's constant change
Getting down to the ancient grain of DNA.
Does the worm Ouroboros recognize his tail
So twisted have learned definitions made his tale?

LIKE PULLING TEETH IT WAS

I only hope this post isn’t as hard to write as the book was to read. It was so good in parts that the parts that wrankled me did doubly that which the same crock coming from a less well intended motive may have. But I promised Green Bean Dreams a review of The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow, by Michael P. Byron and that's what this is.

Seeing a possibility for humanity to not only survive the culmination of crises looming before us but to recognize our true, loving relationship to the mother we’ve been fucking like a whore since the advent of totalitarian agriculture is a fine and admirable goal. This is the possibility that is the center of my life's attention as I relearn to listen to my genetic memory and tune in to the nature of my environment and the symbiosis of my garden and actions. This is what Mike Byron intends to show us in his sequel to Infinity’s Rainbow, an earlier enumeration of the heads of the perfect hydra storm approaching.

I will now proceed to prove why I believe language was invented to bitch. If there weren’t these few major flaws in logic and self-contradictions the appeal of this book might actually serve its ostensible purpose and I would write a very short praise of the entire book, recommend it to everyone and sit back happy knowing things are getting better, people are able to make these changes. But no, I’m gonna have to dig up each bone of contention with the way I have come to see things and drag them over the coals just because language was designed to bitch.

First off — lets get this straight. Until artificially large populations began multiplying around monocultural agri-surplus distribution centers, the advent of famine was never a possibility among hunter-gathers whose diet followed the seasons as full blown omnivores. Agriculture is not the cure for famine, it is the cause. Yet we read, ”To offer an example of the process of adapting to an existential challenge through fundamental transformation, consider the first existential crisis that humanity faced as the last ice age was ending about ten thousand years ago. A rapidly warming climate led to a dramatic expansion in both the range and the population of our species. Climate change and rapid population increase made hunting and gathering, the previous methods for survival, no longer viable. Famine and widespread death were impending as a consequence. This altered set of circumstances compelled a new behavioral adaptation: agriculture. Hunter-gatherers became farmers.”

It is a fact of biology that any population will rise and fall according to its supply of food, so what did those “industrious” hunter-gatherers hunt and gather so much of that caused the population to not only rise but surpass the amount they could any longer kill or glean — requiring agriculture to come to the rescue?!?. I don’t think warmer climate has ever caused a population explosion.

He writes further, “So far, the rapid advance of agricultural technology (Monsanto, anyone?), coupled with the exploitation of previously unknown, or unused, lands has kept us one short step ahead of calamity." These advances only insure the calamity is greater when it inevitably does occur. In his epilogue Byron belies himself, “Any intelligent species that discovered their equivalent of agriculture would grow in numbers …”

Secondly, like too many born into a culture whose mythology is so inextricably interwoven with the Christian religion Byron quite scientifically speaks of the billions of years of galactic evolution but cannot credit agriculture as having origins further in the past than Cain and Able.

Ones beliefs are revealed in ones description of heresy as shown in these tidbits, “We are about to blow Life’s one and only chance to spread from this most statistically unlikely of worlds — a garden planet — across the cosmos and transform it into a living web of interacting matter, energy and mind.” As if the universe weren’t already alive and it is God’s purpose that we make it so. Give me a break.

And this, “If we are not successful in this, we shall perish in cosmic ignominy as a failed species that just could not quite manage to go the final distance and transcend its original nature.” Original sin?

Yet more, “Although if we do fail, one can only hope that some future species might evolve someday and pick up humanity’s eternally fallen banner.” … “and take a second shot at things on behalf of our planet’s biosphere.” And lastly, “If life is to accomplish anything in our cosmos…” Mission accomplished. WTF

In a typically religious gesture Byron defends his particular version of Intelligent Design against the Rapturists, or what he coins Dominionists, who relish the apocalypse as God’s recycle program by calling them a pseudo religion, as if any were more real than a fairy tale. “As a matter of personal belief, I have come to believe that the universe is not without purpose.” Yea, verily, it is his purpose, imagine that. “We are supposed to be and to become the agents of life and of consciousness in the universe.” Like calling animals dumb because we don’t understand them.

In a telling statement later, Byron seems to nail Christianity with responsibility for the whole thing, “We can only speculate as to whether this would also have occurred if, say, Chinese, Indian, or Arabic civilizations had been the ones to initiate the Industrial Revolution.”

Thirdly, Byron’s attempt to cure all problems while we’re at it has him taking on feminism for the purpose of getting women to contribute more to human productivity in this time of crisis, as if the mindless expediency of overproduction to keep up with overproduction of humans weren't already too much and proves he has learned little about the contribution of the great American thingathon to our predicament.

I do have to say he is a man after my own heart when he says, ”So here we are, our global civilization hijacked by these run-amok avatars of our own desires for wealth, set on a trajectory for certain disaster. And if we try to wrest the controls from them, the police powers of the state are now set to brand us as traitors and dispense with us without trial.” Very few have the balls to call bullshit on folks claiming helplessness before the giant when it is the individual’s responsibility for the dependence on corporations that supplies the hot air keeping that money balloon afloat. We don’t have to wrest power from anything that lives off our money, we can spend it differently and watch them either change or wither away. How much can you quit consuming corporate crap? When?

I agree that, “This process of quiet defections — of quiet secession — from the dying, planetary-death-inducing, global corporatist-fascist system would serve to further empower our Renewal movement while simultaneously hastening and reinforcing the death spiral of the old system as we withdraw from it.”

Other than his confusion about overpopulation/agriculture and the implicit grant to exploit natures bounty given Christians and Western Civilization that excuses and justifies our overpopulation/planetary rape, I recommend it to everyone and sit back happy knowing things are getting better. This post was as hard as I thought it would be.

KEEPING THE FAITH

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

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

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

WHO ARE YOU?

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

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

click pic to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY AYN RAND

A few posts ago I began with the metaphor of choosing appropriate stones to match the look of the wall one is building as an example of cherry picking life experiences and literary inspirations out of a plethora of influences. I got a bit side tracked by the beauty of Andy Goldsworthy’s wall and South America’s rejection of the IMF, but I just got reminded of my original inspiration for beginning that metaphor by reading yet another socialist rant against followers of Ayn Rand’s philosophy over at Driftglass.

The chaos of nature insures a variety in individuals that genetic memory is powerless to prevent with its subliminal guidance. The sequence of life experiences is the new thread being woven into the growing tapestry of conscious memories by ones vision of the world and place in it. I find no example more apt than the bible of any religion to show such universal variety of interpretation, except in the area where threats of retribution for nonconformity influences those given to belief. I didn’t chose bibles for their religious aspects, but for their saturated dissemination within the culture from which they arose. From ultra orthodoxy to vehement heresy accounts only for the spectrum dealing with the idea that the books must be believed over all contradictions by ones own experience.

If I may (if I can), I’d like to leave the religious, belief, faith, trust aspects out of the rest of the discussion and get to life as an endless experiment based on the state of ones experiment at any given time. I have mentioned how I can glean pearls of wisdom from fiction and non fiction without a concern for which. Although the source deserves my gratitude for the expression that inspired me, likely as not, what I got isn’t exactly what the author meant. As Japanese golfers have shown me, everyone puts a signature twist to their lives as well as to their picture perfect strokes. And the proliferation of variety in ideas continues as inevitably and as coincidentally as the rest of nature.

When I turned on to Ayn Rand I had just left four years of the Marines and was a freshman mechanical engineer at Mississippi State University and was so inspired by Howard Roark’s courtroom defense of the rights of the creative individual in Fountainhead that it became the pet theory against which all other ideas had to compete in the formulation of a proto-yuppie philosophy that was to stand me in good stead through my first five or six years of realizing the ideal of that theory as an engineer at IBM. Silly me, I had interpreted her opposition to the collectivists to be a description of ruthless capitalists who profit from efforts not their own always out to buy up creations that would put them out of business. When the product I helped design passed all the performance tests and was formally announced, rather than being assigned a new product to bring into reality the next step for the team was to redesign the product to break down as soon after warranty as physically possible to achieve the ultimate bottom line, because a penny saved on five million machines is fifty thousand dollars.

Disgust with the ethics and the assignment combined to cause me to seriously reexamine how I had become part of an elite collective living in an IBM ghetto, confining all social interaction to the company compound and the company of company cronies in ventures to the local bowling alley, links and bars. Only the dichotomy seemed to be that that life was also John Galt’s solution to separating himself from the collective in Atlas Shrugged: secretly form alliances with other creative individuals to establish a community separate from the clueless, needy rabble of the collective!! WTF! You must understand, I had never even had a conversation with a "socialist" to this point in my life and really only knew about communism through American propaganda. Such are the fruits of US American, white, male privilege I have since learned. The blinders of certainty about the unknown.

After my family life moved away, my last justification for making more money than I knew what to do with departed as well. The part of Ayn Rand’s philosophy concerning the idea that the individual must become of use to, responsible for and an honor to ones own self before any action can fully realize the meaning of treating others as one would be treated is still the pertest of pet theories, though I have become bereft of my confusion about which collective collects the money and which collectives want the money and which collectives want never to see money again and how many tribes there are amongst communities who don’t even think about collectives or tribes or money. We ARE in it together, no matter what our attitude toward that little truism is or how little or much we discuss it.

I moved to a communal house, an honest to goddess, grass roots, cooperative collection of kindred souls lasting until gentrification scattered we roaches to our individual parts of the larger tribes of artisans, musicians, writers, surveyors, carpenters, dancers, and gardeners whose contributions to the gestalt are always gifts because none are so needy as to expect or demand them. The levitation trick with five friends comes to mind. Still, that remained my only experience of socialism until I began blogging.

It was like sticking my finger in a light socket. Within my first ten posts I received an invite to be a contributor to the Further Left Forum for reasons I have yet to understand, they sure didn’t want my light in their den of America haters. But the short while I was there I ran into blog friends with which my slant does not clash destructively, while we all hone our ability to express our outrage at the present state of world affairs in ways to better jostle, cajole, persuade, alert the sleepers to the dream, the collective myth of representative government from which we are awakening.

So when I hear otherwise reasonable socialists go off on Ayn for the conscienceless excesses of the collective elite, neocon, fascist, capitalistic illuminati I feel the urge to write this post.

And now I have, and I feel a lot better. Obviously, from where I show up in the political compass map below, her left/right politics didn’t influence me at all, while her championing of the responsible individual, especially in her shortest work, Anthem, definitely influenced my tendency toward anarchy.

Okay, folks, have at her once again.

A BRIDGE OVER NO DIVIDE

Back to man’s need to believe.

A modest premise I offer, belief not required or recommended, but certainly not prohibited — you can’t curb nature without distorting experience

The cosmology of the universe
Is a continuum in flux
Within and without ones skin
Whose change we perceive
As evidence of its and our existence.

Nothing too outrageous there, none but the most rigid toes trod upon so far.

Let’s call the nature of existence the tao
The path, the way of all things
The megametaphor for the Big Mamu of Nature
The truth, the reality, the essence of all conceivable and inconceivable entities that exist.
What freely remains existent in plain sight after the best words,
the best theories, the capture of which fall short .

Okay, I’m feeling the rumblings of rebuke from the no-objective-reality crowd with that one. As you may gather, I think various viewpoints are healthy, so long as they are not trying to enforce uniform allegiance. So far there’s no call for believing anything — its just a theory.

The teflon nature of the tao
Is the nature too of glue
The wisest, well lit line of words
Aimed nighest to be true
Yet enlightens only kindred ears
While enraging those who kindle fears
That truth is changed by sayings
Wearing out their knees with prayings
On the off chance they are right.
They might spread their fright
Recruit you to their might
If you survive their night.

Now we’re into it — I have crossed into the territory of belief, wherein I tromp on all believer’s toes — not because I want to, but because the mere existence of people happy without belief upsets those whose belief is so tenuously fragile that everyone else’s agreement, nay, tacit conversion is required for its maintenance. Like so many aspects of western civilization, I find the parallel between church and state so fitting I have to remind myself of the supposed difference, as blurred as that between the two parties in this neocon merger of military/industrial complexification beyond the ken of lay or latin.

The process of belief, as I gather from those who profess to be unable to live without it, involves a kind of leap into the unknown tethered by faith in the trust in the belief in the perfect hope or perfect fear that the promises of righteous authority from pulpit or podium are true!?! Okay, fine, whatever floats your boat. I’m just kinda wondering what is the reason and where lies the responsibility for either choosing to weave for oneself such a web of dependence or to move into one ready made in the "Easier Than Thinking" mental retirement village, Nailed to the Cross Arms, complete with an owner’s manual for all morality and appliance questions.

If the answer is a version of, “god spoke to me,” we’re done here. I can’t converse with one who cannot recognize one’s own voices. Shoo!

If the answer is a version of, “I fell in love with the _______,” I can only ask if the belief is required to make _______ real or to distance oneself from ones own love by creating a bridge that separates by conditional dependency?

If the answer is a version of “I am afraid not to, Santa and God are watching everything I do,” I can only say, get over yourself. Any higher consciousness you may imagine is informed by a body of which you are a part the same as you are informed by each of your cells in the gestalt of your wisdom. Such belief could be a sop against indifference found in searching the stars for someone who cares.

Then there is that far too common, less holy or legally binding, negotiable type belief system where wedding vows and handshakes are backed by prenuptials and contracts necessitated by the simple fact that none see that no one can promise anything about the future, even the continuation of their most ardently held beliefs in the present. In fact, it would seem that the most rash of such promises, if kept to the letter of the promise made in the past through time, warp what might have been a natural, healthy lifetime friendship into one both parties resent for their own faithfulness and loyalty to the other's trust, too stubborn to admit what both know about belief.

I am a complete entity informed by the genetic memory inherited and sensations instantly reported by the cells of a body responsible for its own continued existence. With such equipment and the good sense to see the far reaching compassion in the golden rule there is no unknown I fear, for I know only that I know nothing conclusively. Belief in anything more remote or supreme than my own responsibility for my own existence is like driving a wedge between consciousness and conscientiousness, splitting mind from morality, blasting a rift betwixt intelligence and integrity through some mythical flaw of original sin, that price everyone is supposed to have where they pimp themselves to a savior, be it a supreme being or just a sugar daddy. Bah, humbug. Humans begin life much better than any price they may be persuaded to settle for, but ——— everybody’s doin’ it, doin' it, takin' their life and screwin' it, screwin' it.

It feels perfectly natural to have more than one soul mate.

BELIEF IT OR NOT

Yesterday, amidst setting up my porch for a spring party I’d invited a handful of folks over for, my daughter initiated a series of e-mails the gist of which I understood to have the purpose of saving my soul with new found zeal in response to my last post. When folks started showing up I let the thread run thin on the internet. In the wee hours after they left, I reread the entire series and sent off the following before going to bed.

You have a crutch for life, you'll never have to think again, I guess I'm supposed to be happy for you. Sorry, I failed your test — I'm just an irretrievable guy, hardly worth saving. I will never attempt to intrude myself upon you again.
Lady Astor: If you were my husband, I would poison your tea.
Winston Churchill: If you were my wife, I'd drink it.
Okay, okay … I'm drinking.

This morning i got this reply,

Entering your front door with my white flag clutched tightly in hand looking for the corpse on the floor clinching the tea cup.......helloooo!

You have a crutch for life, you'll never have to think again
Okay fine, lets take a different approach. So do you want proof that I'm not just walking through life as a zombie looking to devour souls? Lets discuss creationism vs. whatever you believe. We both might learn something new. I know I will. Hopefully we can discuss it without anger or the quick sarcasm that we both have. Do you believe in evolution or what exactly? Why do you believe that way and what is your proof that convinced you?

, I guess I'm supposed to be happy for you. Sorry, I failed your test
I was only hoping for your "open-mindedness" to accept me for who I am. Why is it so easy to believe that any other faith has a possibility of truth other than Christianity?

— I'm just an irretrievable guy, hardly worth saving. I will never attempt to intrude myself upon you again.
Your my Dad. Your worth it to me. You weren't intruding. I was the intruder in this case. If you want to end our relationship based off of my Christianity, then I shall not bother you again, other than in prayer.
Love always

I spent the rest of the day thinking this answer out for her.
I am very sad to realize that you have either not read my blogs or never understood them or anything else I have ever expressed to you. One more time for the sake of the old family/genetic bond and because I love you beyond, what I can only perceive as, your suit of Joan of Arc armor all too ready to take on the heathens and make the world safe for only your idea of truth.

Item one: "Do you believe in evolution or what exactly? Why do you believe that way and what is your proof that convinced you?"
I believe only in consciousness that I exist. Everything you perceive because you are also a conscious part of existence is the only proof of that I can offer. Everything anyone has or can express about existence is only that — about existence — not existence itself. As earnestly as different groups coagulate to create belief systems as shelter against the always unknown with agreements that evolve into facts and laws, to guide those who may still have questions, to keep their imaginations in line, so to speak, they are never more or less than theories about existence. I feel no need to believe in creationism, Darwin, the big bang or the end times, the quickening, or the rapture — but I do find them quite enlightening about human perception and culture. If I was being tortured I may admit to favoring the idea of an eternal, ever changing continuum. It is all very wonderful to contemplate and I am very glad that I exist to partake in material life with perceptions and genetics and life experiences that make my version of life as unique as a snowflake with no need or desire to collect the other snowflakes into a ball for some kind of authority or mob mentality. Until this latest spate of sermons from you, I could have sworn I could see that spark of heresy in you too. You damned near snuffed out that candle until I heard you call, "helloooo!"

Item two: "Why is it so easy to believe that any other faith has a possibility of truth other than Christianity?"
First, let me point out that your believing I am especially doubtful of Christianity amongst all the other snowballs has got to be a reflection of your believing it is the only true snowball and the only one worth defending by being offended. I am an equal opportunity religion distruster. This does not mean I have not resonated to the core of my being by contemplating the lives of the inspirational beings that cause such a gigantic paradigm shift in the local population of their time and whose words have become perverted into laws of conformity in the land of their homes centuries later by uncomprehending followers. I just doubt that exploitative religion was ever their intent. If I appear to favor Buddhism it may be because among all the teachings in history, it has no god and, to my eyes, therefore not a religion. It finds the source of happiness to be within the perceiver , not the perceived. No matter what religion one professes, whether it is accepting of other religions or claims exclusivity to the truth, it is either a deeply personal choice, just as you feel you have made, or one made by the culture into which they were born so long ago they have no choice because only one is considered fact to the elimination of all else.

Second, as I said in Item one, my belief in my existence is based on the only truth I feel qualified to attest to — that I do exist. Everything anyone has or will ever express is more or less close to the truth, but the attempt to be specific denies the all inclusiveness of truth, so I don't think anyone or institution can even speak the truth or claim to be right. What culture calls truth is no more or less an agreement among the dependents on that culture, and I do not limit this illusion about being able to speak truth to religion. Governments and sciences and educators all suffer it. Actually I love the stability the chaos of nature seems to have. That its infinite variety is the dynamic of life and attempts to enforce conformity are reaches for the dust of death. But like someone trying to hold their breath 'til they die, the spark of life remains after they pass out and the dust coheres into new life forms after the suffocating dogma passes out of the present and into history.

None of this is to say one cannot know the truth, but the overwhelming vastness of truth defies language, the tool with which to dissect the immensity of reality into more and more specific instances and for which it is doomed to failure unless wielded by the most sublime poets who stitch specifics back together with webs of transcendent descriptions of the big potato upon which we are all eyes, none quite seeing in the same direction but all seeing from the same center, the center of universal life, so large all is within.

If you think I am closed minded as indicated by your quotes around "open minded" it must be a reflection of my reaction to your mirror-like, polished, clad iron claim to the one, the only, exclusive truth that will send me to hell if I don't swallow it. Give me a break.

Of course I don't want to end our relationship, not only do I love you like a daughter, but as someone I have learned to admire no matter who she is. But I gotta point out again, that although you corrected me about who the intruder was, you didn't bother to deny that you have been trying to save me, to retrieve me from other than your path to qualify for your filter. I do not admire such intrusions because they speak so clearly about your submission to an external authority that has somehow crawled up inside you and seems to be driving you like a self-righteous tank against this heathen test case. Imagining that I might be your final exam for your PhD. in missionary evangelism just now brought a bittersweet chuckle bubbling to the surface. Acid reflux of the emotions.

My ego got a bit offended too. Having my daughter condemn me to hell, no matter how indirect you thought you were being by stating our inability to be in heaven together if I didn't eat your brand new shiny apple, it was saying to me, "although I obviously have no idea what you believe, I wanna correct it to my blueprint for heaven." If you want to continue this discussion in that vein I would just as soon give it a rest for a while. Not that it hasn't been painfully enlightening, I just don't like you like this, so I'll wait till your hair grows back. That was a metaphor, as is everything I say that comes comes anywhere close to the truth.

Oh by the way, halfway through this reply I realized that it was going to be my next post. It is a good example of digging a bit deeper to examine the sense of my deepest, longest held ideas when conflict with a loved one is the catalyst. I know you didn't want to comment because it was too personal, but this is more about my observations of religion and the mechanism of belief. Besides no one who reads it will ever know you because you are safe behind the facade of my misunderstanding you to be a snowflake instead of just a flake.
Love —

DARE TO BE HAPPY!

Back last August my friend, Ichiban Kaboom, observed that, “your final point gets back to the same point your last blog got me on: the possibility for the individual to engineer significant and lasting social change, and the relationship between that and personal growth." He was the first and only person to even hint that I have a primary subject to explore or that every post is an attempt to get to the essence of a truth that seems self-evident to me. Just as sensitivity to environmental health begins at home with personal low impact living, a healthy social life is made of individuals who are concerned with learning and being happy with who they have always been since before conformity set in.

I’ve gone back to that post to explain why I bring a comment from a regular visitor, Troutsky, that furthers the point I intended two posts ago. He said, "… opens a million more questions. Such as: Can the idea of 'blundering' really then exist? It seems contradictory to the project of exposing the facade of an observer/observed duality. Perhaps you disturbing the web was as much a perfect expression of being as the spiders making it? In which case how do we judge right action or right speech?”

My answer was, The only blunder I intended to express was my willful ignorance of the threshold altogether through the blinders of my purpose. The propriety of other’s personal choices made within this threshold of the golden rule conscienseness is not my business — I just don't want it to be treated like a metal detector … to be got around. That consideration of the effect of our actions in a broader scope than our own purpose is my only concern and reason for the post. As to the spider web, it was back up, bigger and better the next day. The only blunder was to my purpose because of the expediency of my purpose.

Like all human faculties we are free to misuse them in this great experiment life is. Memory seems to be one of the least understood of such faculties as evidenced by the extremes to which it has been exploited in perversion of its evolutionary advantage. Memory of our living experience is one half of the metaphor completed by our genetic memory, we may be guided by recognizing patterns woven by comparing the timeless way of all against the way of the momentary observation. The best English word I have heard used to refer to that natural connectedness of the observed moment to internal eternity is wisdom. In direct opposition to such an idea I find the monkey wrench of education shouting down these more subtle signals, insisting on inspecting the efficacy of its cultural indoctrinations in the snotty voice of authority evoking memory to purge chunks of arbitrary answers on cue to qualify for existence in mixed company, while genetic memory quietly reminds us of other wrong paths taken, but never quite this far, believing we own all we survey.

With minds honed to fine lines between question and answer, action gallops along side with spurts of energy, occasionally bursting ahead of thought altogether… damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and all that. The perception of observer/observed duality is the birthing ground of questions more specific and purposeful than the amazing wordless wonder oneness with the universe seems to be.

Born of dualistic perception, purpose needs a foe to be avoided, converted or slain, — yin-yang becomes trikaya. We are presented with the question, “… how do we judge right action or right speech?” Should we be silent, lest we be misunderstood and attacked for our well intended contribution? Should we persuade the world to change so we can be happy in it? Should we kill that which makes us not want to live? Between the rightness of our intentions and the rightness of the results of our actions lies a large enough ocean of golden rule contemplation to grind this mindlessly insatiable imperialism of western culture’s frenzied, acquisitive expedience to a molasses creep in midwinter.

Of course, that’ll never happen, but any individual finding value in a threshold wherein pure thought undergoes inspection by the light of the golden rule before stepping onto the shore of action brings a gift to the world by being happy in it — and that’s gotta relax things a bit. At least locally. Maybe.

THRESHOLD

Sometimes words all take on the character of inert desert sand, good only for pouring through the neck of an hourglass, no coherence of meaning’s attraction bridging even the narrowest of gaps to coagulate a fertile field of food for thought where ideas sprout in gardens off the track of time. So often I approach this keyboard with THE key to expressing the essence of my grandest ideas and most loving of visions in mind only to feel the drain of vitality begin as I approach the threshold between thought and action. In trying to make that crossing in composing this post I lost the magnetic metaphor, that living backbone standing for the message contained by the chord within, and so the crumble of form back to dessiccated sand. But my insistence on writing on a regular basis, if I am to be a writer worthy of my best ideas, persisted with this attempt to describe even those times when words go on strike — and I found the metaphor again, or one like it, it doesn’t matter. It is about that threshold I see between thought and action.

Thought is like swimming in the ocean delighting in the varieties and schools of ideas within which one treads with no particular elsewhere or otherwhen to be. If I stay in the liquid too long I become gray, pruney pudding like my brain while my bones loose their will to support me, so I must regularly climb aboard my boat, “Home Port,” to maintain the health of my body while remaining on open water, the realm of thought.

Action is like dancing on land where I may step on plants, ants and people’s tender toes. The slightest gesture is as liable to slam into immovable objections as find kindred hoofers.

The threshold between the two worlds is contemplation of the golden rule represented by the rope I use to tie up to whatever dock I choose. Conscious consideration of my intent upon landing and understanding the possible results of the dance from experience of the harbor is like going through my own personal customs where entry is denied if it’s purpose is found to be less beneficial than benign.

Between finishing the last line and the posting of it I had an extreme experience of the instant karma involved in taking the threshold too lightly for purposes of ego preservation. While knowing that my life long, chronic bronchitis had reached its congestion limit I still justified a chilly two mile, rain soaked treck to the nearest cat food supplier to maintain my self-image as good provider. As the earth covered the sun that evening I began having panicky, asthma-like breathing which lasted until my visiting friend, and now guardian angel, Erica, arranged for me to get an inhaler by noon the next day. The attack has left me quite puny without strength, energy or stamina. While I am recovering slowly, I have realized that I have revoked my own visa to cross from thought to action, and am held in thrall by the threshold I ill considered when deciding to risk my health for the momentary appetite and imagined appreciation of my cats. When considering action now, not only the morality of the act but the energy requirements become of prime importance as I languish in the customs detention of threshold limbo. It was the worst, scariest night of my life but chocked full of lessons I will be learning for a long time to come. The threshold is real and ignorance or exploitation of it leaves one with no choice but to react to results of our ill considered blunders upon shore.

INSPIRATION

That big bright thing we swing by every day has been visible for two days now. After three weeks occluded by frozen rain clouds, it has invited me once again to the wonderful, warm, brilliant out of doors. Upon finishing an overdue turning of the compost I revisited my little meditation spot in the greenhouse shed. After straightening out the mess made by being eight inches under water since I last visited, I resumed my seat on a partial bag of spaghnum moss compressed into the shape of my seat and gazed out into the miniature infinity of my garden and the wilderness beyond. While seeing all the vegetables thriving from the treatment of the season I could feel the static electricity I had stored up while cooped up in the heated stagnancy of my sheltering RV cave transform into part of the hum of bodily harmony, and once again my mind drifted into the realm of inspiration. The last three posts were either pictures of drenched or frozen gardens or old news because I had no inspiration relevant to other than my own life, but this garden visit brought me to the keyboard like a magnet with something you might like to read. Who knows? I like the idea of putting it out there.

When I began this blog last June I intended it to be a place where I could communicate those inspirations when they were about subjects relevant to what seems to be the common theme upon which humankind is a myriad variations. From cosmology to biology to genetics to metaphysics. Being a relative loner my ponderings never dwelt long on sociology until accepting membership in a leftist blog. Zap! In order to participate I had to seriously consider the problems perpetuated by people who can’t mind their own business, little imperialists every one. Since that was just the thing that formulated my preference for solitude, facing it head on as if there were something about the procrastinating babbledebate society seems to me to be that I could seriously believe was a beneficial contribution to it, seems also to be impossible. There seems to be a log jam in the river of evolution and only the self reliant may skip over the logs to the flow beyond. Governments cannot solve what reliance on them is the cause of. All this is to say that my adventure in the sea of political debate found it so salty I couldn’t dive below the surface and I will probably not revisit very often in future. So saying, I return to my original intent for this blog:

Inspiration occurs in those eureka moments when the tao is envisioned and ones reality tunnel expands to find manifestations, heretofore considered anomalies, as necessary variations in the dance of life. Such glimpses dissolve the constant argument of duality through realization that neither could be perceived without the contrast of the other and that the tao lies on the threshold between them. I have no idea if inspiration occurs like rain drops throughout everyones life or whether there is a practice with which one may turn on the shower, but I tend to go with the idea that inspiration occurs any moment one fully realizes themselves to be here now. The frequency or duration of inspiration would then depend on ones ability and willingness to recognize such a state for what it is and the desirability of lingering in it long enough to learn what lies within.

Inspiration is the essence of creativity as the artist manifests the here now visions to communicate it to others who may have had such moments or to tip the balance for those who haven’t. One such moment was communicated to me so thoroughly that it has become the basis from which my cosmological, metaphysical ideas flow. The capsule of inspiration that began this trip was an article on child development, which I have been unable to relocate since and would appreciate a reference if you have heard of this experiment, talking of allowing children young enough to consider inexperienced in eating much beyond the nursing stage but old enough to get to and eat anything they find. With at least one observer for each child the entire group spent their days in a daycare setting with play objects and the widest range of choices of edible foods they could arrange, available from morning to night. With careful monitoring, without supervision, of each child for its particular intake and examination of the composition of its stool over a period considered valid, the unanimous inference of the study was that, left to themselves, each child had settled on a fairly regular, 15 item, diet which was the best choice they could have made considering their particular metabolism and physical requirements. The variations in the diets for the children matched their biological variation.

The upshot of reading that article has been my strict attention and adherence to the internal messages my consciousness receives from whatever the cells of my body are reporting as my prime directive. Their is no higher authority in my life and only the golden rule supersedes it when dealing with my environment. Such messages come in different forms, depending on my attention to my thoughts. If I am full of intent in the material world the messages have to accost me gently with urges, hunches, intuitions and instincts strong enough to interrupt thinking about my purpose. If I’m not involved in action, the thinking of my imagination about discoveries of my curiosity is much easier to interrupt and usually with messages quite tangent to whatever I was pondering at the time. These messages seem to be from the elders, from my genetic memory which knows the ways of nature on earth over billions of years of experience and is the source of those urges when I am busier. At those times I stop thinking to meditate the messages are most clear to me and least expressible except as learning new and broader ways of thinking about it all. One may go deeper into meditation until the one all the variations are on the theme of dissolves to the nothingness it is. There is nothing here but the one that knows it. And as the butterfly dreams it is a chinaman drinking tea I awake to the variations of my reflection.

GOLDEN RULE HAS A SHARP EDGE

The Golden Rule has far reaching effects beneficial to social intercourse that I have never seen elaborated, but then I have only heard it referred to in the perfunctory manner with which schoolchildren recite the pledge of allegiance or the scout oath.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

That’s the usual way I hear it repeated whenever it comes up. One of the beauties of the golden rule is that no matter how it is expressed: as treatment one would prefer or as trespasses one would forgive, full coverage of human interaction is addressed in the most naturally fair way, karmically one might say. Not only is its proper interpretation all that is required to harmoniously guide human interactions, its misapplication is the cause of most personal grief within relationships, intimate or broadly social.

One of the greatest sources of human misery is the self inflicted martyrdom one chooses to experience by misusing the Golden Rule to amass unpaid debt owed them by people who don’t care. Having devoted ones life to treating the world as one would be treated it occurs to one that the world is not reciprocating in kind and turn against the world for its indifference to ones petulant pains.

In the same way The Golden rule is misused as an excuse for the trespasses for which the trespasser should then ask forgiveness but never does. Part of treating someone as you would be treated is the inherent requirement to understand those one would treat at least well enough to know whether any treatment would be received as given, rather than as the intrusion of ones standards upon another “for their own good” no matter what they think. To automatically assume everyone would be treated as one prefers for oneself is to invite such intrusions upon oneself, when obviously we are all different by natural variation and deserve to be regarded as such.

Between the antisocial unrequited martyrs and the people who can’t be content to mind their own business I think we’ve covered a large part of the ills of human civilization. The economic exploitation of native cultures for their labor and land with priests and peace corps volunteers as the front line assault “for their own good” is still going on at an increasingly insidious rate despite the dwindling wilderness and native markets. Western civilization has never considered whether the people living in the lands it deems fair game actually want to be treated in the manner it has in mind for them. In fact, such considerations are purposely circumvented by the elite leaders of western world by setting up an elite government in these lands by convincing hand picked puppet leaders of what a gold mine for them lies in the land and labor of their subjects once they come up to code and can begin to pay off the debt owed for such malignant advice and all too willing covert aid.

I know I made a giant leap from the individual’s self inflicted grief over personal violations of the golden rule to the imperial wave of the western culture over the past fifteen hundred years, but it is no different than watching an individual ant in fascinated admiration struggling bravely over mountainous terrain with a giant piece of leaf on his trek to his stash and then backing away a little and observing thousands doing the same thing with the last transportable traces of your entire garden. Within western culture live little nanoemperors caring more for the acquisition of their kids’ new sneakers than for the kids making them in sweat shops somewhere in the outlands. Except as “must see” suggestion in tourism brochures about great monetary exchange rates, exotic, natural settings at low overnight fares and the last place on earth left to see the endangered whosawhatsits monkey, lizard, bird … the poverty thrust upon the indigenous indigent indicated by the exchange rate and the assault on the wilderness indicated by civilization’s chain-logging threshold never seem to come through. The leaders of a country wonderful enough for its citizens to afford to visit and sneer at these far flung frontiers of capitalism surely couldn’t have malevolent purposes for its quaint natives … riiiight!

The inherent guide to knowing when to mind ones own business in the golden rule has benefit in dealing with the crowded conditions of urban centers as a place to merely observe the vibrant variation of humanity rather than feel compelled to enforce conformity to ones own standards “for their own good.” Internationally this intrusiveness is reflected in the nation building agenda the US follows in its campaign to spread neocon capitalistic covert colonialism under the pseudonym of democratic freedom for its own national security and the insurance that “Visa is everywhere you want to be” across the entire planet for their citizens to conveniently share in the exploitation.

I don’t know if there is any way to calculate the portion of earth’s population that has either yet to swallow the hook of western civilization, the indigenous people, or have coughed up the cultural hook with which they were educated and ill nourished from infancy, but I would tend to believe that it would come to an overwhelming majority of the people in the world. That majority grows in the US as the elite purposefully distance themselves economically from the source of their wealth by demoting the middle class to the lower class by shipping college graduate employment to third world countries. Seen on another scale this ratio of elite to lower class might be approaching the ratio and attitude of SS guards to concentration camp interns.

This is an elaboration of question number four in my post about “Six Questions” to ponder in hopes to clarify and emphasize the importance and the applicable simplicity of the Golden Rule to just about anything that ails you. Whether its application is a cure for or the source of problems depends on whether you want to pull that chain, or push it. One way you get to live life. The other way you have to live life. What a difference. Who knew?

One of my favorite ways to state the Golden Rule is,
“Don’t just do something, sit there.”

OM

SIX SIMPLE QUESTIONS

I once thought to write a story about what the United Stated might have become had Columbus waded ashore in Hispanola and asked the natives what they called their home and to teach him and his men to learn to live as they did in their land. I was halted by imagining the backstory of western civilization that would have enabled such a radical departure from reality. Rather than that story…

Interviewer: Sir, what do you think about western civilization.
Ghandi: Sounds like a good idea.

I've got some questions I’d like to throw out into the blogosphere since no research I have done has found any information on the various cultural assumptions I have never heard questioned.

1. Has there ever been a record of any of western culture’s great voyages during the much touted age of discovery, exploration, exploitation and missionary evangelism the world over of finding starving, disease ridden, overpopulated indigenous native cultures when meeting white men for the first time?

If you can refer me to such answers I would be disappointedly surprised but grudgingly grateful because you may have made the rest of this post incompletely informed drivel. If you have never heard of such records, you are still in the same boat I expect to be in for however long it takes to produce a positively genuine such record, as we navigate this exercise in free thinking — and we are off to the next question.

2. Barring western civilization’s unwarranted hubris in assuming the entirety of the rest of earth is its god given resource to do with as it might, is their any reason to believe any of these first contact cultures were impoverished or so inept at life that they would have become extinct without white man’s help just in the nick of time?

I must further qualify the unlikely yes answers by requiring that passionate native curiosity about new things from beads to navigation sextants to whiskey does not qualify as a sign of impoverishment or inability to enjoy their own life. Neither does the nomadic lifestyle choice of following seasonal food supplies like plains animals indicate more than a culture severely different than western.

If you can link me to such information I would feel somewhat disgruntled appreciation for the likely discontinuance of this line of thinking I am on. If you have never noted records of the existence of poverty prior to meeting western culture and the automatic comparison of cultural values, then we are off to the next question.

3. Were any of these brave, curious, adventurous, noble explorations not financed by wealthy speculators in planetary sprawl and naive new native markets for anything from faithful followers to laborers to land to be occupied by the lie of manifest destiny, imminent domain and extermination?


I must disqualify evidence that Scandinavians came and went because they have hardly ever typified western culture, and I do appreciate them leaving it as they found it with the slightest of foot prints. My little pet side theory on them is that they have yet to thaw out from the last ice age — if they move, it’s to Minnesota for Christ’s sake. I also question the direction popularly assumed to be taken by the migration across the Aleutian Straits between Asia and the Americas during the same ice age. I guess, if one holds to the theory of dispersal of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the Fertile Crescent, the only possible direction for that diaspora would be from Asia to America, since the Ra never quite proved they came from Africa across the Atlantic. We’ll have to leave that one stand the test of future findings, but I can’t assume it’s proven any more than the Sherwin-Williams hypothesis.

What, you’ve never heard of the observation made at the early part of the 20th century that all peninsulas extend to the south of its mainland; Florida,Korea, the tapering ends of India, Africa, South America, etc. It’s called the Continental Drip Theory … anyway … back to my other hair brained theory.

If you have information about totally benevolent, altruistic voyages to undiscovered lands, I must say, you are the only one and I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t want to share it. If you do want to offer it in evidence against this slowly developing logical progression I am on, and it proves credible I thank you from the bottom of my most gratefully enlightened attitude toward Western Civilization. Barring the unlikely case of our having met with refutation of the greedy motive behind each exploration of the world during this Age of discovery, if you are still with me, we move on. If not, the rest of us move on. If not, I move on, alone as I began.

4. Is there any phase of an individual’s relationship to the rest of individuals in the body of which it is a part, the environment, that is not dealt with fully by the Golden Rule?

Despite the plethora of rules and laws in place and enacted by legislators world over every day to the contrary, I cannot but come to the notion that the answer is no. If there is any interrelationship not more than covered by the Golden Rule, please surprise me. All other laws are to more specifically enumerate the ways in which it can be violated by the enactor, the ignorer and the enforcer, as if it alone were not enough of a guide for all. There is also the case of assuming, without looking at the interaction from the standpoint of the other's culture, that what is done for them is what one would want done for themselves if ever found in such (fill in the xenophobic adjective) conditions, which is in complete ignorance of the Golden Rule and an obvious excuse for intrusive meddling for ones own purposes down through history.

5. Is there any country discovered by the exploratory voyages from Europe whose indigenous population was not subject to conversion to Christianity as an exemption from being considered worthless, enslaved, partitioned in their own land and/or exterminated? I must disqualify lands whose populations had a nationwide religion prior to their discovery, although many of them too became servants to the colonizers.

I guess there may be enough no’s to all the foregoing questions to still have a readership or maybe the yeses are sticking around just to see what I’m up to. Just one more.

6. Has Western Civilization, from circa 600 ad, the approximate time of the arrival of the final first edition of the “Unalterable Word of God,” the Bible and Mohammed's twenty-three year dictation of the Qur'an, to the present day ever been satisfied to live within its own borders, to no matter what expanse they have assumed the right to fight to draw them?


Okay. My point. I just wanted people interested enough to read this far to experience a serious consideration of the questions I am asking in more or less the order I asked them to begin a discussion of them. To elicit serious attempts to say yes to any of them. Despite my feeling that there are no valid ones, I genuinely would appreciate learning of evidence to the positive side of any or all. Whether the serious consideration you experienced was mine alone or both of us I appreciate being able to get these questions out there. There may be a second part to this, depending on the reception of this part.


My mother died of lung cancer in 1968, I have since learned what its cells can do to the healthy cells in the rest of the body of which it is a part. Go in peace and heal the world, hand in spiritual hand with Sonshine.