Changing Seasons

It is nearing the end of the year. The season has shifted, and with it, life has made itself more scarce. Whether it be the trees barren of leaves, the grass dead in the frost, animals in hibernation, the birds flying over the horizon, or simply the sun lower in the sky in the interludes between long cold nights. The whole world dies to one degree or another and each element in it's own way. And then, it comes back to life more forcefully than before.

Eons of experience points to the seasons eventually changing, life returning, and the cycle continuing. It is the natural order of things, and a process we have long come to expect and take for granted. Those who went before from the majority of cultures found spiritual significance in the changing patterns. Some spoke of thin spaces as the seasons changed. The natural and the super natural getting closer as we were driven closer to each other to avoid the cold. Death always brings near the other. Some saw the need to placate the gods with blood sacrifices when they sensed them approaching in these times of shifts to darkness. 

Newer faiths capitalized on the older customs and adapted them to convey new messages. Whether Christianity, Islam, or consumerism, the innate urge to commune with the other is a powerful force, and one for which we still sacrifice greatly for the chance to turn what is into what be wish it could be. 

Some would see the rampant consumption and mass placating of social anxieties to be noise confusing us from the signal  for the "reason for the season". I see it as something coming from our deepest being. We wish more than anything else to be connected, and most of all to the Divine Other. Whether we recognize it or not, it is as fundamental as breath. Nearly as fundamental is our notion that to get something, you must give something. Thus the sacrifice.

As with everything though, there is a deeper pattern. Something over the horizon. A longer trajectory. 

All things die. However when death passes, life reemerges more forcefully than before, as surely as the grass after the thaw, and cherry blossoms in spring. It is such on more than the obvious level. We sense the thin spaces. Our traditions originated from fundamental ideas about the world. Even if the original meanings have long since been covered in noise, we still sense it. 

I commemorates this time in memory of when the Divine stepped through the thin space into the physical, soon to die, and then, to rise. And with this resurrection, the whole world will follow. The ultimate winter, and the ultimate spring to follow. Such is the sacrifice all our attempts only pointed to. Carried on the winds of ultimate compassion, there is a ship large enough to hold all the world. 

Death is still among us and overtakes all things. Belief in that not yet seen requires faith. We are creatures of faith regardless of its object. 

I chose to have faith in the notion that the true height of mastery is not to bring good from good, but to turn that which is broken and dying to even greater good. This is what I see as the nights are long and cold and life retreats. This is what I look forward to when spring comes again. 

Remember The Past. It Dictates The Future

Etched into flesh as if on stone walls are the memories that inform our present and dictate our future.

Some break us down, and some lift us up. Some we will never escape and some we wish had never ended. Regardless of the nature of our past, its marks we will never remove. It is a matter of choice and training to ensure that these marks inform our present and dictate our future in a positive direction. 

Examples of sacrifice and suffering endured in the cause of something outside of ourselves. Given enough time, these are the memories we hold most dear because they are the times we were tested, rose to the occasion and overcame. Facing the reality of our own mortality, we faced the darkness, did not hide, and became something more. 

Then there are other memories that no amount of reason will ever make right. They are the manifestations of the evil endemic to the world that no one really escapes and some are demanded to experience the full measure of. One does not make it right. They experience and survive, or they do not. 

However, on the other side of the past, regardless of the characterization of that past, here we still are. Remember the good and and the bad, and take pride where it is due. To sacrifice is an honor not readily experienced by most. 

To serve with those doing the same and more is a greater honor still. 

Blurred Lines

It is human to think in terms of things we deserve and things we do not. It is what has become natural to think in terms of what we are owed and what we are not, and it is in keeping with modern society to ask who is to blame.

However, it is divine to forgo all of this and instead ask who is to forgive. This is not because it is a a matter of being reasonable and congenial, but because forgiveness is something far stronger and from a place of greater nobility. 

The Divine stance on reality is always from a place of nobility, and not the mockery of nobility made in modern society. 

The Divine calls us to a higher purpose and a higher way of thinking. The playing field of normal life is transcended by this view and its very existence is called into question. 

Thus, in the face of all we face, ask, what is it you must forgive? What is it you must in forgiving release, and in releasing transcend to a higher purpose? 

On a night much forgotten from its original meaning as a time for a blurring of the lines between the worlds, ask, to what higher purpose are you being called? 

Making a Difference

I find it important to repeat myself at times. Repetition builds familiarity. Familiarity breads mastery. And it is mastery over specific things we seek to accomplish here. In specific, we seek mastery over the winds and high seas of chaos that threaten ever to detour us all, from mass society, to the single individual, from the light of reason and justice.

The world we currently live in is not getting more peaceful. The looming threat of a localized disease epidemic turning into a generalized pandemic, the rise of an extremist movement that hearkens back to several millennia of human history we would happily forget, and the continuation of inter state politics by other means we now see in our old adversarial area of influence. We have options as to how to deal with this. Succumbing to low grade panic with minimal commitment may be the most readily available method to respond.

On the Other hand, and this is where I repeat myself, forgo debates about policy and the need to blame elected officials for the current conditions we face. Take responsibility as the single individual for the world you live in.

The winds of chaos beat upon us all, but it is ever easy to ignore them via a low grade mass panic when they are far off.

This only masks the banal evils close by. It is not by the might of some overarching government policy that that homeless man on the street corner is going to get someone to treat him like a human being, and it is not by government power (because that has hence to for failed) that that street walker who is probably under the age of 18 is going to get anyone to treat her like anything more than a sex toy at worst and criminal at best.

Rather, as I have said before, do not be a slave to fashion. Do not go along with the popular anxiety of the hour. These only annul us to awareness of what is going on around us all the time.

Lift up modern society and there you will see the underbelly. The real world is not clean, from a distance, or from close by. But what is is is an opportunity for the single individual to change reality for someone more a victim of the world we live in than that individual.

It is for things like this that, if we would allow ourselves to delve into, more meaning and power would be found than 10,000,000 hours spent fearing whatever is the fashion of the day to fear.

Defend the weak. Insist on justice for the downcast, and do not allow fear of the distant to distract you from the work at hand. These are the precepts by which the single individual becomes the agent of change in his/her world. Isn't that what we all wanted to do anyway, make a difference?

Don't Hide

What you don't know will indeed kill you. But it is the emotional response we substitute for what we do know, but refuse to trust that leads to insanity.

In the face of the exotic and other and terrifying, it seems that no amount of rational evaluating can overcome the visceral terror that seems to naturally ensue, shortly to prevent all rational evaluation, and to infect the human thought process more surly than a physical contagion ever would. 

Nothing travels faster than bad news, and at the same time nothing seems to be harder to cure than irrational fear.  

We try hard to ascribe meaning and derive something of substance from everything that causes us panic. However, the majority of the time, it all comes down to not being able to distinguish the signal from the noise. 

There are many ways to deal with irrational fear, but the surest way to not cure it is to hide. As with nearly everything else, playing the victim is the quickest path to perceptions becoming realities. 

In the face of that which causes you panic, take the initiative. Charge strait in. Turn the tables and determine your own course. You will be amazed at what you can do when you have to. 

The Original Sin

It is common, and perhaps even an ingrained habit of the human condition to confuse symptoms with underlying causes. The real issues arises when you start exclusively treating/avoiding the symptoms and ignore the causes. Who ever heard of the black mold infestation in your shower going away because you just didn't go in there, or the check engine light fixing itself just because you stopped paying attention to it?

However, we do the same thing with much more serious issues all the time. We stay in jobs we hate because we lack courage to know what we truly want, and so we medicate the symptoms of our depression with all manner diversions. We stay in bad relationships, or avoid them all together because the status quo is less fear inducing than dealing with why we cannot love ourselves in the first place. We triangulate the pain and trauma of lingering emotional and spiritual injury away into surface conflicts with family, friends and the general public, or we medicate the pain away with whatever addiction so suits our fancy, preferably something that shadows the deepest longings of our hearts and deepest wishes of our psyches, which was what was injured in the first place.

The deepest human fear is not death. It is not being known. And yet to avoid the pain of disappointment at taking the risk to be known and possibly failing, we do all we can to avoid it in the first place, and instead substitute a shadowy approximation of who we think we are. We pose.

Because posing is ultimately an outgrowth of insecurities our deepest psyches cannot shake, the pain never really goes away and the need to medicate the symptoms continues. Apart from those who are simply and truly evil in that, due to brain damage, they have no moral compass, the vast majority of deviant behavior is nothing more than a symptom of the great divide between who we really are and our fear and shame of the same. 

The original sin is not the horde of external symptoms, and lascivious fleshly desires, whatever those are. The original sin is allowing false dichotomies to divide and fragment our living souls. It wasn't in black and white called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for nothing. Of course there is good and evil in the world. I would not be writing if it were not so. However, the embrace of the same in favor of embracing life causes a fragmentation of our hearts and minds, which is only satisfied by either further fragmenting and  compartmentalizing the vast majority of reality to protect that which is seen as good, while that which is seen as evil seems never to fully disappear, kind of like the black mold infestation in your shower, or one can embrace life and thus address the underlying root cause of the issue. This however, requires courage and acceptance of who one truly is. It is only after this step is taken that whatever perversions have posed in your place can be corrected to their original form, which was is not perverse. 

We are ever presented with the option to stay backstage posing as players in some shadow of existence, or step out from behind the curtain and go live. 

How Abusive Relationships, Growing Up, Easter, And Red Dragons Are All Connected.

We in the modern world tend to have a hard time establishing boundaries. This manifests itself in several gradients of deviant behavior, ranging from not being able to take the keys away from your friend who is about to get a DUI, to staying in an abusive relationship way past the time when the significant other stopped caring whether it was your fault, or not, and just started taking advantage to no end.

Learning to make the distinction of where you end and another person begins is the foundation of all life giving human relationships. It's what happens when we can go our own ways from our parents. It's what happens when we don't give in to peer pressure and instead pursue what we want in life. It's what happens when we experience the best in committed relationships, both romantic and otherwise when we love people for who they are rather than what they do for us, and it's what happens when we are able to watch our descendants grow into their own independent selves.

The reason this is such a hard thing to determine and that it is such a source of friction in our lives is because it brings into question issues of core identity and insecurity that the modern social order does not at all help. Because we have been raised with a wholly western idea of moral relativism, we do not know what is up or down, what is right or left, or what is good or bad. We do not question that which we deeply want to, and only challenge those who do not conform to this ideal. Tolerance is only good to the degree that it makes people safe. Beyond this, it has resulted in a deep fear of questioning and conflicting over anything more substantial than those who are seen to be intolerant. Thus, in the absence of challenge, which, in this case, is the same thing as boundaries, we are left defenseless against the more malignants elements of, not only society, but our own personalities. 

One of these malignant elements is the need to belong. Like all perversions, it is nothing more than something that was, it its proper state, good. Finding your place in the world, and finding your place with other humans is good. However, doing so at the expense of your own humanity, and making sacrifices of your own identity to conform is not, and as has been mentioned before is the source of a vast spectrum of deviant behaviors. 

However, as with many things, there are second and third order effects to this deviant behavior. Deep within ourselves, we try to compensate for the violation of our spiritual immune systems because of our lack of boundaries by setting them up in other places. In essence, we triangulate our brokenness away because we cannot confront the root cause. 

The most profound and yet least obvious place we place boundaries is with any notion of something greater than ourselves, anything.......Divine. Believe or don't believe. The existence of God is something that cannot be proven, no matter how much the right wing types try, and cannot be disprove, no matter how ignorant the the Richard Dawkens followers' arguments get. It is not something that is debated intellect to intellect. It is something that bypasses the red dragons guarding our minds and snatches the perches right out from under their claws as it goes strait to the heart. Of course their is a God, and of course we all know this at some level of our psyches. And yet it is with the Divine that we establish the strongest boundaries, whether we believe or do not believe. We assume there is no God, or that we have killed God, or that we have to be good enough to be accepted by God, or that some are destined to Paradise and others to eternal damnation, whatever that is. 

If indeed there is a God, would the Divine not be anything other than the height of perfection beyond all that we heretofore see and the ultimate embodiment of all our deepest suspicions of what true love and beauty and good in fact are? Would God not in fact be the height of our greatest human ideals of good and compassion and acceptance and love and the ultimate expression of what we only grasp at when we admire great acts of selflessness? Would God not also be the ultimate expression of even the most natural love of a mother for her child or a father slaving to support his family? Could the truth in fact be better than we have ever imagined, even though our deepest psyches have supposed it for so long and driven us in search of it for as long as we have been who we are? At the same time, does not the suspicion of this at the same time cause apprehension, almost as if you don't want to look because you don't want to be disappointed? 

Today, many throughout the world remembered the destruction of the boundary between the Divine and the rest of reality, not that any such barrier ever existed, but the point had to be made clear. This is the essence of the Resurrection. The deepest longing of us all are there for a reason. They are there to be satisfied. Come into the great house where street dwellers, prostitutes, politicians, even pop stars, end even you and me become equals. This is the essence of salvation. 

Come home. The door is always open. 

The War On Poverty 50 Years Later

Today marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson declaring war on poverty. Over those 50 years the percentage of people living in poverty in the US has declined from 19 to 15 percent. At the same time the actual population of people living in poverty has risen from 36 million to 47 million today because of the population increase over the last 50 years.

Now, it is a simple thing to declare this something of a success with the perennial qualification of "but there is still much work to be done". At the same time, those on the other side of the political spectrum can just as easily claim it to be a Pyrrhic victory  because, for all the financial, political and emotional resources that have been expended in this "war", a 4 percent decrease is indicative of a waste of time.

It has already been shown from all that has gone before that neither side will win an argument as to the validity or even the existence of victory in the eyes of the other. However, this has as much to do with how the problem of poverty has been framed and it's supposed solutions derived as it does with partisan opinions. 

Poverty is and has always been a serious problem and a stain on the honor and conduct of any nation that has willfully allowed practices that dispose people to it. Although it is also true that poverty in much of the rest of the world is relatively and actually far worse, it is none the less the case that to the degree to which it exists here, it is unacceptable.  These are high ideals and high ideals are required if a society wishes to aspire to something greater than it is now. However, as always, what goes unseen is more important than what lies on the surface. 

Poverty, and the so called war on it has become nothing more than a convenient rallying point for differing political positions to gain legitimacy by seeming to do something without doing anything at all. This is not an indictment of any politician or political position in specific, but simply a description of what has been the case as long as people have appealed to mass society in order to gain favor. A four percent decrease over 50 years is not indicative of a dysfunctional government hampered by partisanship, but rather that the programs in place have maintained the status quo at best and kept people in poverty at worst. 

It is far easier to appear to be doing something when the measures of success are unclear or non-existent than it is to actually do something meaningful that lasts. As has been said before though, even those with the best intentions in the current system are and will be restricted by the nature of the system itself. In a world of finite resources in which a zero sum game is the regime, zero will always be the sum. No amount of policy and legislation will solve something as deep as human suffering. Thus it is better to stop waiting for such to come about and campaigning for it as if it were a life and death struggle. It is better to actually act on supposed personal ideals and do something. 

Doing something does not require quitting your day job. It does not so much even require going out of one's way. What it does require is putting words to action. The poor are closer than you think. Many of us avoid their neighborhoods on our way home every day. Many of us ignore them when we pass them on the street corner. Many of us claim we are too busy to pay attention, or too broke to contribute to legitimate organizations dedicated to providing for those in need. 

Until we start fighting the war on poverty one individual at a time, why should we expect something as systematic and machine like as the government to do a human's job? Some may complain about freedoms being limited. The freedom to have compassion is not, and it benefits all who take advantage of it.  

LBJ did because he experienced it first hand

Too Big Not To Fail

It has been said a few times before how what goes unseen often matters far more than what is on the surface, and how what you don't know can actually kill you. This becomes increasingly the case the larger a system becomes. The larger as system is, the more difficult it becomes to track what is going on in it. Regardless of our many abilities, the human mind is only able to process so many things at once. It's why we have a parasympathetic nervous system. There is too much going on to be conscious of it all at all times. This does not seem to stop us from deluding ourselves into thinking we are though, and in that fantasy, much risk goes unseen.

The real trouble comes when that risk is hidden in the form of things that seem externally to be good. For example social programs to alleviate poverty that leave poor people more dependent and more poor than they were to begin with. On the other side of the political spectrum, strong pro-life positions that leave the movement looking like a group of bigoted, and completely out of touch hate mongers. the road to collapse and irrelevance is paved with good intentions poorly thought out and atrociously executed. 

At the same time, we continue to make the same mistakes. The reason is, with so much going on beyond the scope of human ability to accurately track, we substitute good feelings about a course of action for measured and accurate judgements. In the current modern world in which it is possible to aggregate so much noise and distraction, emotion speaks the loudest. It always does. However, in times passed, Babylon was a quitter place. One in which thoughts could be collected and judgements more thoroughly measured. None the less, hoping for a return to some passed golden age is as futile as predicting the next one. 

The long range trend of a complex system, which our political/social system is, is to grow more inwardly focused and thus more chaotic in the same way a feedback loop builds to ear piercing shrillness before you move the mike away. Counter intuitively, the larger the system is, the more assured you are of this entropy building. The reason is because large systems become stable and do not need to compete in the same way smaller ones do thus quickening the trend to inward focus and ultimately chaos.

The system becomes too big not to fail. Then again, chaos leads to destruction and recreation. To use the modern term, it breeds innovation.  It is incumbent upon the individual to recognize this and take advantage in such a way that leads to the betterment of that outside him or her self. We cannot keep track of everything, but we can recognize that which is close to us and we can influence it. This is a far more balanced approach than being swayed by the wind of whatever is trending right now, and influencing that close to you is simpler than it may seem. 

NEW YEAR

We in the modern world liked  to take advantage of the New Year, not only to drink ourselves to making choices soon to be regretted, but also as a boundary of sorts. The end of something before and a chance for new beginnings. As with everything though, it is not so much what is apparent on the surface, but what goes unseen.

Resolutions, grand plans, any decisions for that matter are not as important as what happen after you make up you mind. the best intentions mean nothing if they are not sustained and closed on. These follow on actions are what we do not now see. However, they make all the difference in the ultimate outcomes. 

Thus who can say what lies ahead for we do not live in the future? The one thing that is within our reach though is our own will, if we so decide to take charge of it. 

At the same time, opportunity is opportunity. And so take charge and make that which you only dream of that which you live. Though the ultimate destinations of the paths we travel are never the same as what was first expected, commitment and follow through has a way of paying off in unexpected ways as well.

Happy New Year.