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.

Art

Art is a tricky subject these days because anything goes. If I defecate on a paper plate in some novel way and I call it art, then by definition it is art. And I might even get a museum show. And since my achievement is so remarkably novel it must be considered high art as opposed to pretty pictures which clearly are mere decoration…wall candy we could call that. Whatever we consider to be art, it must be admitted that art is a cultural Rorschach not an objective social product: what we consider to be Art tells us a great deal about ourselves, and tells us nothing at all about Art. 

Art is an intentional structuring of the imagination through the vehicle of the senses. In our troubled times of anomie the the arts attract the endeavor of lunatics and sociopaths because opportunity exists for aggrandizement in capturing naive imaginations. Much outrageous art (though it may even be fun) is the product of such of beings. There are individuals, reasonably sane, of various talents, who wish to find for themselves some importance. These artists often do very good work; but though art may be an avenue to some degree of status, even drugged out tramps will be issued an artistic license if they are persistent enough. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who can make a living with a box of paints, or a musical instrument, or a pen, is OK in my book whatever illusions they may labor under. And lastly there are those whom Art has called to herself. 

My theory: Art is coeval with the most distant emergence of tool making, monkey-like, progenitors; and as the curiosity of these progenitors expanded into the unseen connections between things Art was there to enable the invisible to enter a world of form. Delights that never before existed, and truths beyond the reach of ordinary communication: these I believe to be the historical domain of Art. And in St Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae” you will find a description of the responsibility of the echelons of religious orders that exactly fits my understanding of the responsibility of the artist.

Bad Art 

Lots of folks don’t trust themselves 

To know bad art when they see it 

Well, you can always tell bad art

 

Because it needs an essay to hold it up 

And a crowd of boot-lickers and apologists 

To appreciate it .

A Failure of Imagination

Strange as it may seem the world of humanity in which we find ourselves is one that has been imagined into being. Wars, art, politics, national boundaries, doctrines of every stripe, the form that the familial instinct assumes, automobiles and blenders: every aspect of what we call civilization is the product of the human imagination. And all it would take to end war, and poverty, and a wealth of other human suffering is humanity to begin to imagine in a different way. But that's not going to happen, is it.

By Decree 

Why should not the fish 

Make free use of desert sand to spawn 

 Let it be so 

And the birds 

In stately groves of kelp beneath the sea 

Let them nest henceforth 

The whales 

Do they not ache to share the meadow 

With their bovine brethren 

Let it be done 

And lastly 

Let all mankind Love one another 

Principles of Personal Growth: 101

The ordinary process of human personal growth proceeds entirely by accident and according to the whims of nature. And that’s OK. There are those however who experience a nagging absence of closure in the life that accident and nature provide: who are therefore called or pushed to an attempt to see beyond the veil of the ordinary. Well, it’s a jungle out there and even in the field of consciousness raising there are predators, quicksands, and parasites. 

One of the dangerous vulnerabilities of the spiritually curious is the inclination to be something before one has discovered what one is. One wants to be THAT without having understood THIS, and thus the blind have led the blind for millennia. The way it works is like making a topiary of a shrub. The aspiring individual encounters an attractive form in the spiritual jungle and gravitates to systems that will help them shape their Self accordingly. Some of these systems are extremely sophisticated, and topiaries are not a bad thing. However, though these forms are often quite lovely, this is certainly not the path to greatest fruition of human potential. 

There is a polarity of influences in personal growth. There is moving away from the dark and there is growing to the light, and interestingly enough both of these natural inclinations lead the same direction. The dark is not going anywhere. We will always be rooted there, and draw nourishment from its mystery. White light is the blend of all wavelengths, and if we are not distracted by red or blue or yellow it leads one way. We will never be more than we can be, and we can always be less than we are. The question is what are we, and what fruit are we destined to provide the universe. Fruit is the product of flower and comes of itself through environmental pollination. We have little influence concerning fruit. This is a crucial point. It is a tragic truth that many individuals, even those with great potential, spend their energy aping some fruit rather than gathering the light that would naturally produce the flowering of awakened Awareness. We can never be more than we can be, but we can experience at the limits of our being. And it is in living in the limits of our being that we gather the most light. And it is that light infusing the dark nature of our selves that inevitably produces the growth that leads to the flowering of awakened intelligence.

We always must begin from where we are, and nothing can be given for which there is no resting place. The first requisite is the will to be attentive: sleep, in its many forms, comes of itself. 

Didactic Bluebird 

There once was a bluebird 

Who convened a group of chipmunks 

In order to expand their horizons 

“Realize your untapped potential 

 Spread your wings and fly” 

And soon the chipmunks lined up 

And flapping their little arms jumped off the stump 

Bruising their noses somewhat severely 

The bluebird flew off 

In search of chipmunks of greater insight and ability 

And certain of the chipmunks go daily to the stump 

Hoping this time 

To get it right 

Look Ma, No Aegis!

At a certain point in the process of individuation it becomes necessary and natural for one to abandon all intellectual aegis. And in fact it might be accurate to say that where there is aegis individuation is not. And it is the element of aegis in religious institutions that is their value as well as the limiting factor of their value in the process of spiritual evolution. So long as there exists aegis in the structure of our world-view we are leaning on imaginings. Even if the principles of said aegis are unerringly reflective of what is real, so long as we cling to any aegis we have only the reflection of what is real: we have not entered the real.

If in your travels you meet the Buddha, give him a high five. If you meet the Christ, do unto him, as you’d like in return. “We don’t need no stinking aegis!”

Truth, Beauty, and Good 

Life-dreams 

Cloud faces on the smoke haze of consciousness 

Coalesce and smile

 

And slowly metamorph

Though it is our habit to restrain them 

The heart's wind is not our own 

Save it runs our mill 

And the faces in the clouds are fleshed imagination 

If we lose Truth 

 And Beauty 

 And Good 

 What are we to imagine That will satisfy .

One Planet, One Problem

Ozone depletion, resource depletion, pollution, rising oceans, the rise of the mean temperature of the earth, the incident of civil disorder: these and their ilk are not separate problems. All civilization-threatening inconveniences are merely spoor of the true specter that is stalking the earth. Many young people are, while in high school, introduced to the classic fruit fly experiment: a single female and a single male fruit fly are put in a five-gallon bottle with about ten pounds of sugar. The population rise is swift and dramatic, as is the precipitous crash to zero. There is still plenty of sugar left.

Property ownership is a necessary element to civil order, but mankind is a guest on planet earth. We've seen photos of earth taken by night satellite. Mankind’s electrical success blazing in all its glory looks to me, for all the world, like a patient with an advanced case of smallpox. The planet is running a fever and the prognosis is not good. Like some virulent disease we have overcome nature’s checks against our proliferation, and like some virulent disease, our unchecked numbers will eventually and inevitably destroy our host. Nature will set about exploiting the new opportunity created by the collapse of the present natural order, but for those of us dependent upon civil order it is not going to be pretty.

There exist what seem to be insurmountable obstacles to any efforts other than treating symptoms. Corporate greed, insensate territorial imperatives, innocent insouciance, and the urge to fuck, are not going away any time soon. The sky is falling, but it falls very slowly in human terms. The roar of the falls can be heard quite distinctly, but we may already be in the inescapable suck of the gorge.

And as our good ship “Humanity” slowly sinks beneath the waves of time we shall hear a lot of officious talk about how the deck chairs should be arranged.

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Lord Kelvin’s Birthday


At a gathering not long ago
Speaking with a friend
We conversed thusly


“Lord Kelvin calculated

(you know how those physicist dudes
have always been fascinated with building mathematical models
of things that are real?)

That if you tagged every molecule in a pint of water
And then stirred that pint evenly into all the seas of all the world
And if you then took up one pint from any part of any sea on earth
There would be found therein
One hundred of your tagged molecules

Plus or minus ten"


What the good Lord Kelvin wished to demonstrate
Is the inconceivable minuteness of the molecule

But it made me think of some mere million gallons
Of industrial vomit



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Time and Space Revisited

There is a lot of loose talk these days about time and space. Which is interesting since no one knows what space is, and time is apparently an intellectual construct. Energy has the same problem. If you look at the physics guy’s talk about “energy” (you know, E=MC2 and all that) you will find that there is no description of what energy is: we must content ourselves with an account of what it does. Space, it seems, does nothing; and time is the mathematical trajectory of energy.

Insofar as I am capable of understanding it, the latest theoretical model has matter as wiggles of space. Well I’m down with that, and I can picture a photon departing a distant star (no acceleration mind you) as a rift in space that has no discrete reality other than the event that is its existence. And I can picture a point in supposedly empty space that is crossed by the rifts of rippling space from every light-emitting object that does not have something blocking its way. Hardly empty, I’d say. In fact it seems to me we have here a gelatinous fabric of wiggles of space that will sometimes coalesce by an inherent affinity in the nature of wiggles into what is known as matter. So wiggling space is the fact of quarks; quarks are the fact of sub-atomic particles; and atoms are the stuff of which we are woven. Consciousness (whatever that may be), insofar as we know, arises only from certain very specific stacks of matter, which is in fact merely space with an attitude: indicating that consciousness is a spatial event engendered by temporal energy fields (whatever that means).

I consider this self-evident. It has far reaching implications with regard to individuality and territorial imperatives; and this holds interesting portents with regard to the limits of conscious awareness and our supposed aloneness.

Experience

The old saw “you can’t take it with you” could not be more wrong. It is quite true that you can't take it with you if you sit on it, but if you turn it into experience there is no place for it to go but with you.

Experience is the fact of our existence as sentient beings, and experience is the only thing that we truly possess. Some have said that experience is actually what we are, but it is obvious that if there were no timeless empty vessel, the shifting iridescent pool of time we know as experience could not exist. If there were no clay there could be no bowl. 

 All physical possessions, all emotional bonds, all pleasure and all pain, reduce in the soul of being to states of experience. Experience is the taste of being amidst the flux of the meaning-saturated gestalt. Some say the ultimate mechanics of experience are, and will remain, wholly mysterious; but since it is us, it is merely an exercise in self discovery. What could be simpler! 

One of the great and beautiful mysteries of life is the gift that individual beings have to shape and to cultivate patterns of personal experience. For this reason a single event presents different a experience in different participants. We bring to experience the colors of our being and paint such meaning as we are able. Conversely experience shapes us in an endless feedback loop that in its best case spirals toward cosmic maturation.

We often meet, in the difficult times in which we find ourselves, a tragic misappropriation of experience: a misappropriation responsible for most of the appalling grief made inevitable by beings in whom the mind rules experience rather than experience existing as the articulator of the mind.

Hunter Gatherer and the Moral Imperative

Let's consider what categories of instinctual inclination the hunter-gatherer animal must possess if it is to survive, if only to inquire about the placement of those primitive imperatives in these august days of advanced civilization. It seems to me obvious that an inherent aptitude for recognizing opportunity in the broadest possible sense of the word must be an inevitably survival enhancing trait. And we must add that the exploitation of it's environment is the only path of survival open to any organism. These attributes seem self evident. It is certainly obvious that the human creature is inherently adapted to self-serving exploitation of it's environment. “Self serving exploitation of environment” could manifest as tilling a garden or robbing a liquor store. What makes criminal behavior "criminal" is its effect in the lives of others.

Empathy is not a subset of “self serving exploitation of environment”. Empathy is the spontaneous apprehension of oneself in another.

Some men rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen.

Democracy and the Rise of Fundamentalism

These days, when the word “democracy” is spoken in hushed religious tones, it is well to remember the founding fathers of the United States designed a republic with inherent checks against the politically unsophisticated masses. When reading “The Communist Manifesto” it is well to ask if there is any reason to expect a government of and by the proletariat to be better than the bourgeoisie at resisting the corrosive temptations of power. And when Lenin stated that religion was the opiate of the masses he meant not that it brought euphoria, but that religion soothed the pain of unpleasant social realities with an anodyne of imaginings.

An unpleasant side effect of the right and proper social leveling that we are experiencing today is a degree of grass roots hostility toward intellectuals and objectivity. No one would expect the mathematical ability of the median individual to match that of a professor of mathematics. But in the field of public discourse one opinion must formally be accorded the same weight as the next with no recourse to any scale of reality. Belief is accorded the same weight as knowledge, and if I think two and two make five a serious discussion of the matter is in order.

This is a deplorable situation and perhaps irremediable. Confusion and presumption and the ensuing chaos will have to play themselves out. And if humanity survives its planetary adolescence we can expect some semblance of maturity to emerge of its own accord.

Keep your seat belt buckled.

Lore, Legend, Myth: the Evil Yes-Man

Let us set aside hocus-pocus of every stripe, and talk about Soul and Spirit. Soul and Spirit are not the property of religious descriptions of reality: Soul and Spirit are perceived aspects of being that must be accounted for in even secular myth building. 

What is the existential nature of the Soul? What is it within us that we discover and then notice as our very own “Soul”? Taking the human animal as we find it, Soul is a haze of potential latent in the human mind. The capacity for love and loathing, for desire and disdain, the inclination to be and not to be, all yearnings to and fro rise from the latent potential which is the Soul. Like a trout rises to the fly or flees a shadow in response to perceived configurations in the field of reality so is the nature of the Soul. 

That the Soul does not choose to rise: that it is drawn, and that it does not choose what to find attractive, any awakened awareness will discover for itself. Spirit is the element of being which determines our response to the voice of the Soul. Everything the Soul is capable of is not attractive to a given Spirit: not every inclination will engage our will. And it is here, in the nature of our willing, that the Spirit displays itself. As an example let’s take sex. It is the soul that is the repository of the sexual inclination, and then it is the Spirit that determines how sex is configured in our lives. And any apparent maturation of the Soul is the result of the Soul consigning itself to the will of an awakening Spirit. This is the story told in the fable of “The Ten Bulls” that we find in Buddhist lore. 

So the Soul and the Spirit are arguably experienced as organs of mentation. And mentation here need not be confined to the kind of supposed intentional thinking we find in humans. Unless we are ready to dismiss lower animal behavior as a matrix of tropisms it is obvious that they too posses these organs of mentation. It is certainly obvious that they experience joy and suffering; and if this joy and suffering reduces to tropism, what does that say about human suffering and what does that imply about that in our selves to which we say yes or no? And what is it in the creature that possesses the yes-no imprimatur? Which brings us to the question of good and evil. The soul is an iridescent haze of potentiality. There is no evil that is not private good. It is all about that to which we say "YES".

The Invisible Man Delivers Pizza to a Mannequin

Reality is unitary and seamless. Throughout history those with some intuitive understanding of the fabric of reality have had to resort to metaphor and to parsing in order to transmit to others something of what to them is obvious. There exist myriad systems that claim to have the inside track on the real thing. Some systems are thousands of years old and some are proudly nouveau. But every one of them is simply a different way of slicing up the same Cosmic Pizza. 

One slices a pizza to make it manageable: possible to consume with some degree of order. All systems from Vajrayana to Eckankar to Catholicism make the same claim with regard to revelation of reality. There is only one Cosmic Pizza and though it can be sliced into a jigsaw puzzle, it cannot be made more or less than what it is; and while the best of these systems have genuine technical advantages over an unconsidered view, the worst of these systems could be described as “The Emperor’s New Pizza.” Not to make light of these things, but none of these systems are anything other than a useful technology for slicing the same Cosmic Pizza and for noticing how it is put together. Systems that are wholly invented are wholly useless at best, and wholly dangerous at worst.

Which brings us to the Invisible Man. We cannot see the Invisible Man because he is invisible. But if we dress him up: presto, there he is. So another way of considering the system thing is as the Invisible Man's tailor. Be the garments simple or garish, no matter how you dress him up the Invisible Man is just as he is. And heaven forbid that we should touch the naked form. I, being a ploddingly typical male, find myself preferring the Invisible Woman in Lycra.

Then again the system thing is like dressing a department store mannequin. Of course the clothes fit! In the best of cases whatever the style, the cloth is cut to favor the figure. In the worst of cases the figure is merely a format for a flight of couture fancy. But in the beginning and in the end there is only one Cosmic Pizza, and the Invisible Man is just as he is, and the department store mannequin is unchanged no matter how you dress her up.

Reality is unitary and seamless.

Satori

It is best when discussing reality to avoid romanticized terms. Mysterious meanings are detrimental to productive discourse, and words buggered by generations of dilettantes and poseurs are difficult to use effectively. Though it often seems those who use the word “enlightenment” should have their mouths washed out with soap, it must be admitted that satori is a factual potential in the repertoire of human experience.

Followed back far enough the word Zen translates roughly to meditation. But the fact of Zen as it exists is predicated upon an event known as satori, and it is satori that has historically given Zen its unique flavor in the chocolate shop of spiritual discipline.

Satori is not the property of Zen. It is not unheard of that epiphanies of seismic proportions occur in minds that have never heard the word “satori”, never considered courting enlightenment, and in minds that couldn't care less. The thread upon which enlightenment events are strung is preparation. Preparation might be willed or unwilled, negative or positive, solitary confinement or consummate freedom: preparation is the first requisite. But a properly kindled stove needs the right spark: satori is a spontaneous event that no amount of preparation can provoke on its own. The laid up fire is a reasonable analogy. Kindling and heat-wood may sit unlit until the sun explodes: a spark is necessary. Any element inadequate, and an entire box of matches will not suffice. Soggy wood and the kindling flares briefly and in vain. Insufficient kindling and the once in a lifetime spark sparks in vain: blah, blah, blah.

The event resembles a river that in flooding cuts a new, very real, simpler course through its erstwhile meandering path. Thought travels shorter distances to traverse the same territory. Mind infuses a human vehicle, and is found identified with all that the brain requires of “human experience.” Mind in a dog is trapped in a dog experience: there is Mind, there is dog; there is dog mind. There is a bird brain in a bird, and therefore a bird mind. It is rare, but it does happen in humans, that Mind experiences something like an alignment of normally opposing polarizing lenses and the light (there all along) floods through.

Satori is is not technically a spiritual opening: satori is a physical change in the way the brain is inhabited by Awareness.

The Quality of Mercy

Mercy is a human quality that may exist as psychological tropism, which is to say as a spontaneous reaction to the experience of empathy. Perhaps this explains the behavior of the merciless, if so it would justify their elimination from the gene pool. The quality of mercy is one of mankind’s few redeeming features, and it would be a very good thing if it were consciously cultivated in our children in place of the current cultivation of the competitive imperative. Almost everywhere we see something good happening as a product of human intent, mercy is a quality of that goodness. And everyday the news is dominated by the behavior of the merciless.

Compassion is an experience, empathy is an emotion; mercy is an act. Mercy is an exercise of will in intended beneficence. And outside of mercy entering into the cumulative will of human-kind our children are assured to inherit a hell world.

Dignity and Posture

Much remarkable work is being done today in the study of animal social dynamics. The dynamic of these interactions includes more than just inter-specie behavior, for intra-specie transactions are the very stuff of which ecosystems are woven. Human social dynamics resemble more the “intra” than the “inter” when it comes to specie watching; for amongst us, the lions and the water buffalo exist in analogue full-fledged configuration (not to mix a metaphor), and pecking orders exist intra and inter. The ins and outs of who can dis whom and with what degree of subtlety differ not in kind or quality in the human being than any barnyard or pristine jungle animal. We see it everywhere in every social circumstance: in church, in business, on the highways, and in the interactions between alleged “friends.” Almost everywhere we look we find a dearth of genuine self-importance, and a maneuvering for limited resources of social position. It is as much a part of the human animal as breathing, and as unpleasant to deal with as walking barefoot through a feedlot. We can count ourselves lucky if in our lives there exists a small handful of people in whose presence we do not have to be on guard. It seems to me posturing is so germane to the human creature that it is intra-specie invisible, and were it not for "manners" and mechanical acquiescence to social convention the Hieronymus-Boschian reality would be apparent to even the most hoplessly occluded. It is as if leg-humping dogs were so ubiquitous as to be accepted, and therefore not entering into notice. We find our place in this fray to our weal or our woe taking it all personally, and if by some unfortunate surfeit of awareness we should recognize the movement we are still trapped in its sway.

It has to do with a fragile sense of dignity, and a primitive territorial imperative. If we do not take up the space that is properly our own someone else most certainly will, and if we do not extend to others the dignity of their own confusion then there can be no dignity at all.

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Getting by in Buzzard Land


In lieu of conversation
The sound of concomitant rending
Tearing
Of some dead thing

There is no malice
This is just what buzzards do
And is the result and intent of their dramatic overview


If you wish to be left alone in buzzard land
Merely demonstrate that you’re alive

If you wish to get close to one
Play dead



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Toward a Theory of Mind

It seems quite remarkable that so little is known about Mind. We have the science of psychology, and we have the recent ability to observe electrical activities in the brain; but nothing is known considering the fact of experience. The fact that photons striking the optic nerve result in what is known as sight, the fact that shock waves propagating through atmosphere result in the creaturely experience known as sound; these (and all) elements of what is known as experience are wholly mysterious. 

It seems to me that experience implies an experiencing matrix. There are conflicting religious doctrines about souls and such, but there is the obvious fact that were there not an experience generative event exhibiting singularity that was somewhat motionless in the flux of time, there could be no point of reference about which an experience could accrue. I think that this “motionless in time” feature is a place to look for what we can know about mind simply because it is self evident. 

Time seems to be the invention of Mind. The event that is the existence of the universe appears to be a seething present of accidental inevitable elements possessing trajectories. Trajectories make the universe predictable if a mind exists to do the math, but outside of Mind there is just the fact of existence with no past, present, or future: and therefore no meaning.

Meaning is a temporal event that can only be generated from the outside; which is to say from a standpoint of relative motionlessness vis-à-vis the trajectory-bound non-moment of now.

One difficulty in the quest for a theory of Mind is the complication presented by the human nature of the mind that would busy itself with such pointless trivialities. It is natural that human-ness would be invisible to the human mind, for otherwise, as in the classic millipede story, normal activity would require more conscious regulation than is conceivable. At the same time here we have place to start. Can it be otherwise than that human-ness is something that happens to Mind because of Mind’s existence in a human brain? The brain is a physical form necessitating, which is to say making inevitable, certain forms of experiencing; this includes intellectual, emotional and physical experiencing. These experiencings are “I feel” for the individual mind: but for it’s existence the experience could not be made inevitable. We are postulating mind not as a spiritual property, but Mind as an inevitable epiphenomenona of certain material arrangements that perhaps “wake-up” space or something: hell, I don’t know.

The Necessity of Joy

The natural state of any creature is joy. I say this not from a standpoint of speculation or attribution but from the standpoint of having lived my life in the midst of nature. From earliest childhood I grew up hunting. But when as an adult I came to live with the forest creatures I had to give it up having recognized the horrors that my simple pleasure wrought in their already complex existence. I even launched an attempt to live in peaceful coexistence with the mice and the wood rats, but alas there was a failure to communicate. The more obvious examples of animal joy are accessible to anyone: the gamboling calf, the rough tumbling of a puppy, the kitten with its ball of yarn. What about the caterpillar on its twig or the snake basking in the sun? There is no sense in quibbling about degrees or demarcations, for we will soon find ourselves arguing about whether or not they have souls. As for me, it is self evident that life is not only conducive to joy, but feeds on joy. And though sorrow may reduce to a separate state it, is most certainly a deficit of joy. There is some thin ice here, and it is not my intention to delve into brain chemistry or socio-pathology: I merely wish to hold up as fundamental the inclination of all creatures great and small to joy, and to point out that was not joy the natural inclination, sorrow would be no burden. The earthworm on the drying sidewalk; the unfortunate human trekker lost in some vast desert: I posit that the distress differs neither in kind nor quality nor volume by weight.

Whether or not the inner configuration we know as joy is familiar to the rabbit and to the wolf is perhaps an open question, but that circumstances can obliterate any creaturely access to joy is beyond question. It is also beyond question that untold millions of human beings lead joyless lives. Joyless because limitations of environment assure that it will be so. Elaborate studies have been done with rats. It has been shown that at certain levels of population pressure a cornucopia of otherwise unknown antisocial behavior emerges in laboratory populations: and this in circumstances of ample food and water.

Gender Issues

A quiet revolution is taking place as we speak. Advances made in the ability to look into the physical-electrical activity of the brain are about to put a great deal of the nature-nurture question to rest: and of course the answer to the question is yes. With regard to the physio-psychological implications of gender it has been found that our brains are at least as different as our bodies. And as someone who has been married three times, I cannot imagine that this should come as a surprise to anyone.

Integral calculus is not the issue here: we are not in any way talking about intellectual ability, or moral rigor or matters related in anyway to the dignity of individuals. It strains credulity to declare that there exist no Darwinian stumbling blocks in the gender minefield, and science is just about to take the guesswork out of the argument. The differences in our bodies are a clear study in Darwinian differentiation, and there is every reason to expect that these differentiations include configurations of the brain that predispose an individual to this nuance, or that, in the realm of problem solving. And it also seems to me that historically speaking, it is time for the Feminine to come to the fore.

A Word About Government

There is no reason to tax one's intellectual sensitivities over questions of government systems or government styles. Governments of all persuasions, left to their own devices, collapse from within due to the cumulative plying of advantage by individuals in positions of responsibility. The collective corruption of individuals is the greatest single threat to public well-being, and the best system that could be arranged for the conduct of civil affairs is one that provides checks against the private ambitions of public persons. Outside of this, any system will do that can get the mail delivered: which is to say that legitimate problem solving is the spontaneous domain of human genius, individually and collectively. 

We can trust the process only if we can trust the processors, and realizing that public scrutiny will interfere with their personal agendas, the true enemies of freedom and justice are like cancers that do not oppose the body: they merely wish to feed upon it. Vigorous openness is humanity's best hope. In such an environment political systems will find their rightful place as honest global sheepdogs.

Psychotropism and Soul

As the means of seeing into workings of the brain become increasingly sophisticated we are apt to see a turf war between the caretakers of the soul and the pillars of science. It has recently been discovered that the absence of empathy sometimes displayed in autism is due to the lack of what have been termed “mirror neurons” in the brain. Mirror neuron is a name given to a category of brain response first noticed by experimenters upon monkeys. They found if one monkey performed certain simple behaviors that an observer monkey exhibited brain firing mirroring that of the performing monkey. A researcher whose field of study was autism wondered if a lack of mirror neurological activity might explain the absence of empathy found in some cases of autism. Subsequent experimentation determined this to be the case.

Might there be a bell curve of mirror neurological capacity with the likes of Mother Teresa at one end, autistic dysfunction at the other, and all the rest of us somewhere in between? If it were so it would certainly explain a great deal, and soon our instruments of experimentation will be sufficiently evolved to know. If it is so then empathy and compassion take their new place as emotional tropisms. And the laboratory regimen used to make this determination would probably be sensitive enough to make the same kind of determination about sexual disposition, predisposition to violence, and a host of other personal oddities. If much of our vaunted individuality turns out to be as mechanical as a wristwatch, where does this leave self-determination and the soul?

Actually it puts the burden right where it should be. It’s not what we are; it is what we do with it. Within the varieties of personal potential the question remains: What is the Who?

Awakening the Intelligence

There is a theory of language acquisition postulating that language is biologically constellated, and that words do not symbolize their referents. The implications of this view are: meaning is immanent and words become conduits of meaning by an imbued association acquired in the natural process of socialization. This seems an observation rather than a theory, and once understood it provides an opportunity to touch upon a fundamental property of intelligence.

From birth we are accustomed to forming observations into utterance, and through the vehicle of utterance we are able to convey such information as can be swaddled in words: made intelligible. But understanding is nonlinguistic, or perhaps better said: prelinguistic. And for all its efficacy, the habit of language predisposes the mind to live in words rather than meanings, and to consider that hearing words it has gotten meaning, and that framing words it has expressed facts. The innate intelligence that makes words inevitable is the substance of any power inherent in words, and context determines what is derived by the limitations of intelligence in any attempt at communication.

Be as they may, the implications of slicing time; it does not take language to build a clock. A large and very simple element of the awakening of the intelligence is the cultivation of the native prelingual comprehension of one's surroundings that is the foundation of normal waking consciousness.

Emptiness, Suchness, and the Meaning Saturated Gestalt

The terms Emptiness and Suchness will be familiar to students of Eastern thought. Emptiness is not the emptiness of bucket or chair. The normal emptiness of bucket and chair is an element of Platonic Form, of which my understanding is that the essential necessity of an object's function is the truth of its universal form. This is a thought provoking view, but there is another school of thought considering all forms to be Empty. Suchness refers to the observation that things are radically just as they are.

Emptiness refers to the fact of existence: of thing: of all. No thing contains anything in the Platonic way. If we insist that a baseball contains horsehair, or that a can contains beans, we are right as far as that goes; but let us consider "object" in a consequence-free matrix. For a pig a bicycle is meaningless: the seat, the handlebars, the wheels; utterly without implications. For this pig the bicycle is Empty in the way the way we are trying to convey. All things are Empty. They couldn't contain anything if they wanted to. Mind fills them with content the same way water stays in a bucket: by law of accident. When this is recognized, things can be seen as they are.

Once we get our mind around the Emptiness thing, we are in a position to understand what is meant by Suchness. No thing can deviate from the fact of it's existence: every Thing is absolute presence. Any and every Thing is flawlessly and exactly it's being: the perfect example of its Self, totally and radically existent, be it a philosophy or a grain of sand. This is Suchness, and Suchness is Empty.

Suchness and Emptiness by their very arch-reality are indifferent to human meaning, but only when we have an understanding of Emptiness and Suchness are we in a position to recognize that all life takes place in a meaning-saturated gestalt.

Does a Dog have Buddha Nature?

hmmmm

Birth and Death

The life that lives in you has been continuously alive since the miracle of the first replicating molecule. Through all the shifts and turns of evolution, through crash of comet and explosion of volcano, through times of feast and times of famine, through war and and in peace, that life has managed to split off a haploid cell to find it's complement and press forward into the unfolding eternal now.

Now that’s a lot of responsibility.

Happy Halloween

Though the emptiness of space within an individual atom vastly overawes the cumulative space occupied by protons, electrons, and neutrons; the world of our experience is one of hard facts. And in spite of the fact that all physical forms are comprised mostly of empty space, physical objects catastrophically fail to pass freely through one another. It has something to do with the rejection mechanism of like magnetic fields. And what about magnetic fields? They seem to pass freely in the fabric of space as an immaterial phenomenon: an immaterial phenomenon with influence that is widely utilized yet not understood. Awareness has properties similar to magnetic fields. It shares with magnetism an apparent immaterialism that is dependent upon arrangements of matter. And like magnetic fields awareness does not appear to have a granular structure. Awareness seems dependent upon nervous systems, but I suspect that the fact of awareness itself is one of space and not of matter in much the same manner as the magnetic field.

Using this vision of awareness as a starting place: if we imagine the field phenomenon of the awareness of any given creature, and then imagine away the physical structure that makes that awareness inevitable, suddenly all creatures look remarkably alike…… kind of like a Halloween sheet-ghost. Chipmunks and elephants: a glowing nodule trailing a diaphanous gown.

All Nude, All the Time: Toward a Contemporary Gnosis

In the scientific community it is standard practice to stand upon the pedestal of the known to get a peek at the yet unexposed lovely curves of the yet unexposed real. And it is these successive peeks at naked reality taken from successive pedestals of established fact that have given us duct tape and automobiles. Science does not concern itself with the unknowable but rather uses the known as a tool to plot the form of the yet unexplored knowable. If something is real its existence cannot forever go unnoticed if we know how to look and have the necessary tools of examination. If we are curious about what is real, we must search about us from a known position and find what further step can be made, and so move from the known to the knowable: rather like a blind man with his stick tapping his way down an unfamiliar street. And like the blind man if we scorn the petty little red-tipped stick of what we truly and actually and honestly know, and boldly launch into the unknown leading with our imagination, tragedy of some sort is all but inevitable.

One of my favorites from the annals of ancient Zen is the statement “one should never speak of that about which no accurate pronouncement can be made.” This has an obscure but prescient relationship to a statement of my own invention concerning the all too human inclination to "pin the imaginary tail on the inconceivable donkey." A great deal of precious Reality is cast aside as humanity builds shrines to house the envelopes in which it came. We will never see the sunrise by looking west. The word “God” is not a dirty word, but our imaginings insulate us from facts. The ultimate nature of the fabric of existence is wholly mysterious and wholly present. It is not made more sacred or more responsive to our supplications, and in fact is distanced from the core of our personal being, when we paint a face upon it.