A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time on a far distant planet there lived a band of omnivorous monkey-like creatures. Being omnivorous succeeding generations naturally selected a penchant for violent alpha males. Dependence upon violent alpha males, and the survival-enhancing trait of cooperation, naturally selected a penchant for obedience. The omnivorous monkey-like being was also on a systematic rising curve of intelligence.

They did very well for themselves and were soon not only able to defend themselves from larger dangerous animals, but also to exploit larger dangerous animals to whatever purpose. In some small millions of years they had established complete domination of their biosphere (no small achievement). The cumulative thought-forms of their technologies were quite impressive and the average member of their communities had not a care in the world.

Unfortunately the instinctual penchant for violence and the inclination to obedience inseminated their advancing technologies, and they ultimately destroyed not only themselves but also the natural system that produce them.

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Putting an End to Theological Speculation




There may not be a heaven


But most certainly there is a hell



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Food for Thought

It seems to go unnoticed that somehow the food we eat is transformed into conscious awareness.

Madness

How do we know if someone is mad (as in crazy)? They live in a dream world? Their thought is unhinged from organic reality? They value to obsession various products of the imagination?

It fits most human beings on planet earth, and is not a crime against human dignity. Most people are well intended and nice enough just as they are. The problem: soldiers everywhere think they are on the right side.

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At the Confederate Museum


The daughters of the Confederacy have a button from General Lee’s coat

And they have Stonewall Jackson’s canon
They have the bullet riddled battle flag of an overrun Ohio brigade
And a hipbone with a Minnie-ball lodged in it

And they have letters by the score
From the hands of men and boys swept up by war
To their women


On the street outside
The crowded Shenandoah Valley smelled of sulfur
(Dupont)

And there, so near
The gentle Blue Ridge


This purple mountain majesty
Was it any solace to the eyes of dying soldiers blue or grey
Whose blood now lives the flowers
Of Virginia fields



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"What is the Meaning of This"

Meaning is relative, and an element with no relationship to another has no meaning. The meaning of any act or object is determined by the content of relationship. The musical note G has a different meaning sounded in a void, or in a G chord, or in an E chord, or in a C chord. G is the identical vibration in each case, but it’s meaning is different. 

The categories of meaning sentient beings can form are like music: limited and infinite. In the music of being, it is normal to sound the chord life strikes, rather than sound a chord of one's choosing. We can not choose the meanings that occur in us for they are spontaneous elements of pattern recognition. Dogmas, convictions, and faiths, like tuning a musical instrument, predetermine the way any note of being will resonate in the soul. Objectivity amounts to a lack of intellectual investment in predetermined resonance, and an ear for harmony and discord.

The surface of a sphere is a limited infinite plane the center of which is everywhere.

Imagination Education

For all paeans to imagination, imagination is an under-rated and misunderstood faculty of mind. Here's how it looks to me. For those who imagine otherwise I suggest we define our terms. Imagination is a self-generated perception: no more, no less. 

We live in a universe that is as it is whether we have an idea about it or not, and our sensory perceptions enter the brain as electrical stimulations from physical contact with a co-existing universe. To understand the assembly of these stimulations into the mystery of experience would be to understand the nature of life itself. As yet no one has stepped forward with this information. Creative imagination is a subset of the primitive faculty of memory. A huge survival advantage is to that creature able to compare and contrast the shapes of previous experience. These “shapes of previous experience” exist only as thought-forms. As the ability to harbor these thought-forms grew with advances in the shape of the brain, imagination emerged as a faculty of Mind. It is quite a breakthrough when you think about it. It is all molecular action-reaction up to the emergence of experience. Experience is more than the sum of its parts, and is the only new thing in the universe; when experience assumes a thought-form something that never before existed has come into being. Thought-forms exist physically as shapes of electrical activity in the tissue of the brain, and I suspect that the same idea would occupy a similar shape in the tissue of any brain that entertained it. 

That we can control our thoughts is a clear demonstration of some small primacy that mind has over matter. The fact that we can not create an idea for which we do not posses the necessary thought-forms, lays bare the extraordinary importance of education. The less we know, the greater our freedom to pin the imaginary tail on the inconceivable donkey.

Self Love

The phrase “Self Love” is used usually in the context of an auto-eroticism that makes self an object of worship: always a sign of deep interior imbalance. But there is another kind of self-love the absence of which is the mark of imbalance. The love of mother for child, the love of nature, the love of art, these have elements of a true and appropriate regard for one's self. And just as in a mature erotic relationship one's self is dissolved in mystery, if one has not encountered self as mystery, one has not encountered the self.