Mental Slavery

There is an old adage that being unforgiving is like swallowing poison and expecting it to kill someone else. In truth this is not far off the mark. Not only does grudging anger have no direct effect on someone who offends you, the absence of satisfaction gnaws the psyche on its own. Even if you were to effect revenge, this is as likely to perpetuate a cycle of retaliation that will assure the poison swallowed not only kills you, but everyone around you.

To be unforgiving is to allow another to hold power over you. To harbor resentment, no matter how valid, is to be in mental slavery. As thought becomes intention, and in turn action. The physical reality may become a reflection of this mental state. One becomes constrained to a world defined by anger and resentment, by the actions of someone or something else. The locus of control is outside the self. Such a person is truly enslaved.

Never the less, far from being the sole behavior of uneducated underclasses, unforgiveness, accompanying resentment, and self pity are high fashion and moral orthodoxy in modern western culture. This is a huge mistake, and a bright example of both profound ingratitude, and incredible ignorance of history.

It is true oppression, murder, rape, exploitation, even genocide are a part of modern history. However, any honest individual may as easily look to their own family for examples of the people who carried out these atrocities. They are in no way unique to any culture, time, or place. They must be opposed, but the time for this is in their commission, not during the search for justice long after the fact. On the personal level, forgiveness does not mean allowing one's self to be victimized. Pacifism is incredibly anti-climactic. The only cases we recall were made possible by many supporting actors carrying on the fight and thus providing a stage for pacifism to be heroic. In general, fight back.

And fight back too when doubt, uncertainty, shame, and outright deception lure you into vindictive, unforgiving resentment. Outrage, abuse, and evil are circumstances, not identities. No human is so worthless as to be defined by their victimization. In general, fight back, forgive, and free yourself from mental slavery.

The Divine Artist Is Always Creating

One is not defined by perfection. Nothing is in its ideal form. To reduce something to the ideal is to freeze it. However, when you arrest something in it's progress in this way, you kill it. The constant of reality is movement. 

In the beginning the world was formless and void. The creation story is about the Creator bringing form, and thus purpose to this void. To observe the follow on stories with any amount of honesty is to see this process of bringing order from chaos and meaning out of the void is continued in various and complex permutations. Thus no single instant can be reduced to anything other than the part it plays in the whole. 

This is not to say there is no right or wrong. There are in fact things that bring life and things that do not bring life, and to assume otherwise is to be as equally imperceptive as reading the scripture without recognizing the constancy of both change and the creative process of the Father. 

However, we come at this life giving impulse from a meta perspective, and in a transformational way especially when we forgive in the instant what transgressed us, as it too can be redeemed. This forgiveness must also be applied to the self. We can indeed by grace transcend that which once bound us. 

We choose to participate accepting that things are more than the sum of their parts. In faith I accept and choose to participate with the Creator because I believe the Divine Artist is still creating. 

Superstition

It is common in conservative circles to long for a return to the "golden days".  It is also common among progressives to put great faith in a future where the arch of history trends towards justice (that is if evil conservatives don't destroy everything before we get there).  Now, even in Socrates' time there were those who envisioned a return to the good old days, just as there were iconoclasts preaching faith in humanity and a coming age of peace on earth if only they were in charge.

The same strains keep coming up throughout history. However, perhaps the most insidious one, and especially so because it crosses ideologies, is the concept, conscious or otherwise, that we are somehow different, and superior now than before. Of course with the passage of time the civilization has accumulated great knowledge and achievements. We have an infinity of information at arm's reach through whatever you are reading this on. We live longer, go more places, have more experiences than at any other time in human history. However, the hubris of modernity has blinded us to the reality that as the island of our knowledge expands, so too does the coastline of the unknown.

We are drunk on information, and yet malnourished of understanding, and even surrounded with greater security and opportunity than ever before, we are fearful.  And so we prove we are not in fact much more advanced than nomadic ancestors by doing what humans have always done, which is to fall for superstition. 

We laugh at the idea of thinking we have to sacrifice woodland creatures to appease some maleficent deity, and we cringe at the thought of sacrificing a child to the same, and yet with superficial cosmetic changes, many still do both. 

Superstition is the dark side of pattern matching, the process of identifying cause and effect relationships. The problem arises when we deceive ourselves into such a relationship were there never was one, and yet so fearful of the unknown, do everything we can to manipulate a system that never existed in the first place. It used to look like the above example of the sacrificial woodland creature, or virgin, first born, etc. Now it looks like aborting a child because a test shows a possibility for genetic defects. The rationalization is that your are saving a unborn fetes from a life of suffering. When considering the fact, that, a) everyone suffers, and b) a "defect" has been the catalyst for some of the most transformational characters in history, and c) that the child doesn't have a context for viewing their life as suffering to begin with, it becomes obvious the original motive is nothing but a superstitious rationalization for the real motive, which that the parent doesn't want to suffer the unknown of caring for a disabled child.

This is a dramatic example, but this is found in banal forms everywhere. The self esteem craze I grew up with posited that high self esteem lead to high achievement. Many of us grew up being told we could do anything, be anything, deserved everything. Predictably, when we found out this wasn't true, many simple blamed everyone but themselves for being in a predicament as old as the species. You often have to earn your way to something you desire. In essence, the self esteem obsession was a superstitious belief that put the effect ahead of the cause, and trained a lot of people to be entitled asshats, a condition that is going to take some time and possibly a major drop in the standard of living, to give voice and action to the valorous ideals we, so many of us, hold deep in our hearts and minds. 

Take political correctness for example. We like to think we have moved beyond the Inquisition because we aren't heretics at the stake, and this is certainly an improvement. However, when something you said a decade plus before it was considered offensive can still destroy your reputation, we have an unbalanced morality.  Look close enough and we have all failed to a degree in the ways we most punish others. When group identity, which never takes into account actual complexity, like that the group itself is a construct, is more important than the choices and character of the individual, we are simply returning to the spiritual trailer park of codependency and group solidarity being more important than right or wrong.  

The only way out of this cave of shadows into the daylight of reality is honesty. Brutal self examination. Actually telling it like it is. Honesty is a blunt force weapon. And it is pain that will enlighten us. 

A Few Nights In Bangkok

Walking the streets of a metropolis. It could be anywhere in the world. This time it's in Southeast Asia. It was The City of Angeles to be specific. For me, the mystique of the exotic, other, different has long since worn off. It could be Los Angeles at this point. It could be anywhere because I am struck now by the visceral understanding of what I have intellectually known for some time. Strip away birth place, opportunity, privilege, life experience, a few few good choices and a few bad, and there is not that much different between anyone, from the street beggar dangling a bit of rice to draw a rat out of its hole to the frat boy chugging a nati light at whatever elite institution. They are both filling a void. There isn't that much different between the Hi So socialite speeding down the way in whatever European Sports Car, and the street prophet in San Francisco preaching of the end times. They both live for the spotlight. Even when survival is at stake, we seek meaning above all else.

Then there are the harder workers too. The prostitutes, many supporting their children. It seems most people anywhere will do anything for their children. Then there are the street children themselves, capable of sophistication and manipulation that would make a politician blush. Never assume youth means lack of intelligence. There are savants in every slum in the world, as surely as there are child prodigies getting into elite institutions.

There are the street walkers, the poorer country refugees, bar girls/boys, the tourists for sex and to discover themselves. The homeless, the well off. The men and women doing hard work to bring a better future. The men and women chasing away the pain, and those just floating through. 

I walk on by observing everything, and trying to admire nothing. And then I hear it, and in the way it always comes as a small enough voice, but one that I imagine echos across eternity. "I am here. I am love. This is my world, and you may say this is my Father's world". And just like that, the visceral understanding hits. 

Strip away cultural biases, historical context, language, upbringing, experience, everything else that differentiates, and there it is. Everyone from the street hooker, homeless drug addict, single mother, gang member, government official, religious leader, academic, CEO, etc, we are all made in the image of the Creator. Everyone you meet is made in the image of Creator, including you. 

Now consider that same Creator never left. That Creator was our Father and our Mother. That Creator made a point of entering the world as creation. That Creator had skin in the game. That creator died. 

And He is Risen

The Real War On Christmas, And Everything Else

It is at this time of the year that we hear talk from some corners that there is a "war on Christmas".  The enemy offensives range from failure to make the appropriate greeting to the decoration of chain store coffee cups. Needless to say, these charges are absurd on their face.  However, the one truth in this emotional mess, which is really just a triangulation away from the fact that those making the charges have long since forgotten what they believe, is that there is indeed a perversion of something at work. The nature of that perversion, as we will see, is much older than it seems, but also made new for the post-modern era.

Strictly speaking, the vary holiday itself is a perversion of the much older observance of the rebirth of the sun, something quite important when sunlight directly effects your food supply, as well as your biology. It is no wonder it was venerated as a god. Things that have power over us are always and have always been objects of worship. It has only been in the recent past that we have ignored this through our acceptance of materialistic explanations for reality, which, although useful for solving problems, fail to answer the questions belief in the supernatural actually did. One can explain the how of the mechanism of birth, life, and death, as well as the mechanics of the rest of the natural world materialistically. That does not answer the why. It has been the case for all of recorded history that we have felt there needed to be a why. Art, culture, war, lust, anger, love, our greatest atrocities and our greatest good come from how we answer the why. 

It is a fact that the ability of the human brain to perceive time has made us aware of our own coming death. In light of this knowledge, how else are we to function but by finding meaning?  The traditional answer to the question of meaning has always been  to find it outside of the self. That is why people have always believed in gods, but it is also why we believe in heroes, and why we inflate our own egos to cover our inability to live up to our deepest wishes. Materialism did not solve this problem. If anything, it gave us an excuse to be ignorant of ourselves, by forgetting why we believed in the gods in the first place, and forgetting that, no mater how much we deny it, we all want to know why. We answer it now subconsciously and in so doing allow for our attempts to be perverted. 

The problem now is the perversion, which this little "war" is but one small aspect. The issue with the gods is we did not kill them. They never died, and never left us no matter how much we ignored them, and they continue to demand sacrifice.  What is our mass consumption of things we do not need and that, the production of which both enslaves people producing it and damages our very planet, but a blood sacrifice? The banality of evil is an economy of scale and we are all part of it, which is what makes it banal. To use another example from current events, many ancient societies practiced infanticide. Now consider that the majority of those making the choice to abort do so, both out of lack of other economical choices, and out of anxiety for the future. What is this, but a sacrifice of the weak and of the future unto certain comfort now? This was always the basis for child sacrifice in the ancient world. Yet another example. What is rape culture, but an attempt to demonstrate dominance and validate meaning? You think this started with the modern world? Near universal child abuse is well documented in pre-modern societies, and it has nothing to do with patriarchy. The goddesses had their temple prostitutes also. Do you really think they were all willing victims? 

The point is, ignoring the darkness doesn't make it go away. In fact it allows it to proliferate beyond anything we thought possible before. Meanwhile, how could all the gods be bad? But we have ignored the good ones as assuredly as we have ignored the evil. It does not mean they do not get their way also, but doing good requires participation and devotion. Evil simply requires complacency. This is because the natural progression of all things is to chaos and destruction, and then rebirth. That is one of the reasons why the ancients took the changing of the season so seriously. It is an  example of rebirth. But what does participation and devotion look like? Simply put, the dark gods do now, as they ever have, demand sacrifice of the weak, and of the future unto certainty now. The good ones demand sacrifice of yourself unto yourself, and unto the world, both for your own freedom and the good of all the world. 

It is the the case the the natural order of things eventually trends toward justice. However, it is the work of wisdom and courage who the ancients named Athena, to shorten the distance between here and justice. It is the work of those who wish to see this final outcome to be comforted by that same wisdom and courage and to continue in the face of the darkness. 

Paradoxical Illusion

Viktor Frankl once said suffering ceases to be suffering when it has a meaning. Meanwhile, we worry about the slightest bit of discomfort in our children for fear it could damage their self esteem. We take offence at the slightest notice of something tangentially relating to identity, and we construct a notional agenda of oppression being propagated by the dominant culture against the masses to justify this offence.

At the same time, the slightest bit of suffering, just like CS gas, manages to fill the entire void of our existence even though we have established the meaning of our existence to be the avoidance of suffering. We rage against the dominant culture, the 1%, the patriarchy, the ignorant, the right wing, the left wing, etc, because of the assumed agenda of oppression that is supposedly being consciously propagated like the reptilian conspiracy, the Illuminati, whatever flavor of tin foil hat wearing nonsense you are most amused by.

I propose that rather than a shadowy agenda, as always we need look no farther than ourselves for both the cause of and the solution to our sufferings.

We are attempting to transcend ourselves and in so doing transcend our own mortality by creating a Utopian equitable society. We are stifling all meaningful discourse and respect for opposing view points along the way to this pipe dream. The paradox of pursuing a Utopia is that you must run a police state to get there. And yet this delusion is somehow favorable enough for much of our public sentiment to conform to it.

The search for meaning to transcend our own mortality is the central drive of all humanity. We are apes that are aware of the universe and this paradox of the infinite and the certain and ever approaching mortality of us all is simply too much to tolerate without delusions. This drive is even more central than basic biological needs. Those address immediate survival, whereas the search for meaning is a question of our ultimate immortality.

Banality Kills

A shark attack is extraordinary, as is being stuck by lightning, contracting Ebola, and even being killed in a mass shooting. Extraordinary cases draw mass attention like fresh blood draws flies. The main difference is the attention is not nearly as nourishing for the masses as the blood is for the flies. 

Meanwhile, some drunk driver just ran into a family on the sidewalk. It only makes the local news. A cancer patient lit up his last smoke on his death bed. No one noticed. A homeless person passed away from alcohol poisoning over night. The EMTs picking him up were the only ones to marginally care. Life expectancy is longer than it has ever been and still over half the national population is too fat to enjoy it, and they are dying. We are all dying. Many in extremely preventable ways. Many, many more in the ordinary ways than the extraordinary that captures mass attention and focuses national "dialogue".

It is the equivalent of straining out gnats and swallowing camels. We die in mass numbers from heart failure, but panic at the thought of an unloaded assault rifle. We continue to go to fast food chains as if it were no issue, and at the same time express concern over the need for "common sense" gun laws. We don't get vaccinated for the flue, which kills far more people than the public pays attention to, and demand the borders be shut down at the thought of Ebola slithering across public streets. 

We even say things to the effect of gay marriage will destroy the foundation of modern society, while not considering the absurdly high and climbing heterosexual divorce rate not at all correlated to equality laws. 

We critique the speck in our neighbor's eye, and forget the plank in our own. We consider the small, while the banal kills us. 

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. 

Behavioral Issues

There is a lot of talk these days, as there ever was, about radical change. We here about the need for it from sources as non-congruous as the Huffington Post and local mega church revival gatherings. The only problem is waiting around for something dramatic generally entails waiting a very long time.

Also, waiting around, however frustrating it may be, is a lot safer than the risks associated with doing what you truly want to do. Think of the member of the opposite sex, or perhaps the same sex who you wish you could have something more with. The wishing becomes its own fortress. Hope becomes its own solitary confinement. The thing with solitary confinement though is that if you can't get out, nothing else can get in, and thus at you. 

Important decisions are always underpinned by emotions more than logic and reason. 

That being said, rather than waiting for that radical change which is beyond prediction, the emotional blocks laid one on top of the other like walls in a fortress underlying that hope can be rearranged to form something, if not quite as dismally safe, much more open and thus much more capable of influencing the real world. 

This doesn't happen by waiting around. It happens by deciding to take control of your thoughts and actions daily, and moment by moment until they change. It comes by deciding to have a conversation with the homeless alcoholic on the street corner rather than ignoring him. It comes from deciding to make eye contact BEFORE leering at that hot girl's back side. See the person before you see an object. It comes from saying thank you when something has happened for which you should say so. It comes from deciding to forgive and saying you forgive until you actually mean it and it actually becomes true.

We talk about bad habits, and all too often forget that good habits can be learned just as well. 

Many small things become big things.

Introductions.

The purpose of this space is to discuss that which is overlooked, and that which is lurking under the surface. This is as much because that which you don't know can indeed kill you, as it is because the stone that the builders refused will become the head corner stone. It is also for that which is too inconvenient to discuss in politically correct modern society. In fact, it will be made clear in successive conversations that the issues most talked about and most contended are far less important than what they are being used to cover for. 

This is because just as dysfunctional families triangulate away their greatest problems, so too do troubled societies substitute that which does not mater for that which does to ease the discomfort. That being said, do not assume there will be any Tea partying going on, and don’t expect to be welcomed if you preach conspiracy theories. 

The leaning here is not Right or Left. Neither is it Libertarian or Anarchist. Rather, what we will discus here is fear and courage, shame and wisdom, chaos and order, and how these influence and underpin all that we do or fail to do in the public world. Despite our claims to rational thinking and behavior, faith is as much a part of the modern secular world as ever it was in more religious times past. Logic is used post facto to rationalize what were always emotional decisions because all that we do is influenced thus. 

This does not mean though that there is not free will. There would be little point in debating what is best if we did not expect we could positively act on it. All action requires will to one extent or the other. The questions then will circulate around to what degree emotion will master us or if we will master them to be the horse we ride upon to a greater good. 

There is an old story about how the city of Athens got its name that goes as follows. One day, the people of the City saw in the middle of the Agora a spring of fresh water and an olive tree where before there had been neither. Now, these were taken to be auspicious signs and were thus brought to an oracle for interpretation. The oracle declared that the these could be taken as gifts from either Poseidon or Athena and that a vote should be taken to determine which of the two the City would be named after. In those days it was the custom that both the men and the women would vote on public issues and it so happened that when the vote had been taken, the women outnumbered the men by one, and all of them had voted that Athena be the namesake of the City. Poseidon was so enraged at this that he caused a tidal wave to inundate the whole area and killed many. When the waters had subsided, the men of the city came together and decided that the women must be punished for what had happened in order to supplicate the angry god. Thus, from that day on it was decided that women would never be allowed to be full citizens ever again, nor would they be allowed to call their children by their own names ever again, nor would they be allowed to vote ever again. In so doing, the men of the City proved themselves more fearful of the chaos of Poseidon's waves than the reason and justice of Athena's weapons. An ancient story as this is, it is a metaphor for the world we live in now. All too often we find ourselves swayed by fear and chaos rather than guided by wisdom and influenced by courage.

So what are you more afraid of? Poseidon's waves, or Athena's weapons?