Inspiration – KNOMO CHOICIUS

I came from behind. Did you?

This is a “Ghost Pipe” plant! It seems unbelievably cool, and I am really amazed to have found several clumps on my property this past summer. That way, I did not have to feel bad about taking one back to the house, for science!

I come from behind. I imagine that many people might think that. David Levy quotes Barry Switzer having said “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” What proportion of our characteristics must be underdogs before we have a legitimate claim to having come from behind? For that matter, what scheme would be available to define the basic characteristics of any human?

I will try out my Thinking Skills to address this issue.

Hmm, would this ghost pipe be considered to have come from behind? As a plant, with no chlorophyll, that seems like it COULD be a disadvantage….

I found this “Ghost Pipe” or “Indian Pipe” while on a mushroom hunt. This is classified as a plant, but has no chlorophyll. It gets its nutrients from fungi in the soil.

A human is a certain type of animal that evolved on the planet, called Earth by its English speaking inhabitants. For the last 5,000 years at least, by the accounts of the social scientists, at least those finding themselves clinging to conventional wisdom, most humans live in fairly strongly hierarchical societies. I’m not talking a village chief, or even a multi-village “Big Man.” I’m talking multi-level with multi being definitely more than three. Three levels of society goes back to what some anthropologists consider the original human social hierarchy of Alpha and Shaman versus the men, women, and children. Of course it was always more complicated than that. But, we have to start somewhere. So does than mean that everyone but the Alpha and Shaman are coming from “behind”? Or are the men still in the top half? In matriarchal societies, would that mean the women were on top? So, thinking about it in this new way, I guess most people DO come from behind.

My ex always got very aggravated when someone would imply that he was part of “the people.” The people were uneducated, shallow, and boring. All characteristics that he most certainly did not apply to himself. Boring was definitely the biggest sin. at least in his book.

A week or so later, the white was staring to discolor to brown and black, and the open shape of the flower was starting to pinch into a seed pod. Eventually, it turned completely dark brown and black, and head dried and shrunk. I took the head back out to the swampy area where I found it, and sprinked the seeds on the ground.

So now we are moving from our place in the basic social hierarchy as the source of defining who we are / where we come from, to the realm of learned or/and chosen behavior. Behavior, as we all know, starts in the mind. I don’t think I have ever seen “entertaining and boring” as poles of a foundational system of categorizing people. But that brings us perhaps to something akin to either the Myers-Briggs personality typing program, or the Enneagram, or astrology of the Eastern or Western types.

The most promising on short reflection seems to be Myers-Briggs, where we could say that extroverts are ahead, or at least out front, and introverts are behind. Going on extroverted people being more likely to be regularly entertaining. Maybe I err, in using my exe’s system. But I will keep going on this premise for now. So going back to the main story line, most personality type statistics indicate that the extroverts are a bigger group than the introverts. So where’s the cut off for being behind? Do only the top 75% (or whatever the statistics say) of extroverts belong in “the ahead,” and the bottom 25% of extroverts have a legitimate claim to coming from behind?

Of course in today’s economy, a big chunk of what determines if you are coming from behind, or not, has to do with your financial resources. Sadly, the very few are on the very pinnacle, and the rest of us are not. So, by basic statistics, it seems that a lot of us might well have a legitimate claim to be coming from behind.

Do we get to combine the less “desirable” traits to claim greater disadvantage? Certainly this discussion is happening today.

Hmm. I am going to have to think about this….

Well, since I mentioned a mushroom hunt above, I will include this scanning electron microscope image of a spore from what I am quite confident was a Green Quilted Russula. They are edible, when fresh. Now t that I am confident I know how to identify them, the next time I find one, I will overcome my “Green Eggs and Ham” “yuck factor,” and cook some up. They are reputed to be very good eating!

What do YOU think???

Epistemologia

How do we know what we think we know? The first step is realize that we need to figure out how to evaluate the reliability of our thoughts. 30% of the USA has fallen into a massive, delusion, pulling everyone into the vortex of confusion. How do we start to climb out of it?

The First

In the Now, is the Known.
In the Now, is the Unknown.
In the Now, is the Knowable.
In the Now, is also the Unknowable.

For the Now is what’s known.
And of the Unknown, it may be Knowable or Unknowable.

Today’s Known may be tomorrow’s Unknown, just as
yesterday’s Unknown has sometimes become today’s Known
and other times, been recognized as the Unknowable.

The Known, the Unknown, and the Knowable, are Children of Time.
But the Unknowable is eternal.

The Second

Even as the Unknowable is eternal, it changes,
One day, we may meet some other who knows,
or figure it out for ourselves,
thereby changing ourselves.

Yet even at that meeting, the Unknowable will laugh,
as one who knows itself eternal, always sowing
a new crop of questions.

For there will always be a mystery, and it’s name is the Unknowable.
In the past, we hid the mystery, as we were the babes of eternity.

But now we are bold enough to hold the truest mystery up
as our lamp, whether it attract the demons or repel them.

We have walked enough roads to renounce the pseudo mysteries,
in favor of the real ones.

The Third

If we look with quick eyes, we will find the revealed truths of another.
A steadier gaze is required to find our own self evident truths.
All sons and daughters of the Known,
we must remember that even if
the revealed truth seems to walk with a steadier gait,
our own truth may be more reliable.

In either case, for good results, we must properly define
the conditions in which we found our truth.
That’s the hard part. Harder than finding the truth in the first place.

An always imperfect process, always leaving a piece of the
Unknown for someone else to study.

Because self evident truth is not available to the casual observer.
And no truth worth the name is everywhere eternal.

A Little Dose of Wisdom

The days with the pall of CoVid19 hanging over us Americans are stretching on far longer than most of us hoped or expected back in April, when we saw the Chinese beat back the spread of the dangerous disease in Wuhan in less than two months.

I certainly do not agree with our president’s approach to managing (mis-managing) the situation, but he is correct to point to China for the source of the disease. China has long been the outstanding source of communicable diseases in the modern world, due to the intimate mixing of human waste in the human food production network, aided and abetted by migrating birds who stop in the fish farm ponds, etc. It’s time that China stop these practices, as well as the live wild animal meat markets that appear to have been the direct source of this particular disease. That said, as David Levy implies (in his book Tools for Critical Thinking: Meta-thougths for Psychology), when we are discussing human affairs, it is incumbent to consider the effects of our actions, rather than trying to fit ideas into boxes labeled true or false. So just because almost all new infectious diseases (not Ebola) start in China, it’s not a reason to call it the Chinese Virus. Because the consequences of doing that are, on American soil anyway, increases in discrimination and violence and hate crimes toward Chinese people, or people who look Chinese.

How do we gain the discernment, the wisdom, to know how to sort out the shit from the Shinola, as the old saying went. The spin from the facts. The lies from the reality. How do we gain that discernment?

We start out by acknowledging that we, as humans, take a lot of short cuts when we fill our brains with knowledge, and that some of what we think we know must have been incorporated into our beliefs before it was properly understood.

Then, we move on to take action to correct the false information.

Tom Lombardo, who is now running the Center for Future Consciousness, has written a very clearly articulated and concise description of why and how we need to embrace the wisdom of looking to the future. Tom’s prescription for a better world calls for rejection (to my happiness) of the New Age concept of what he calls “Presentism.”

As a person with a very low level of cheerfulness hormones (my pen name, Shona Moonbeam, is tongue-in-cheek) I really don’t care for advice that tells me to focus on the present. The present is mostly boring and tedious, if not outright painful. But by making an effort to remember my whole life, past up to now, and hopes and dreams for the future, I feel more significant. Maybe I shouldn’t care about that, but so much of life feels dreary and difficult, that I do care to make my own edited version of my life for frequent playback. And I do hope that my struggles will ease those of some future people down the road.

What’s Wrong about the Concept of Make American Great Again?

Check out Tom’s new essay, entitled Make America Great Again? Yes, that is a question mark. The article hits home on a lot of relevant and important topics.

The Yin and Yang of Anxiety and Longing

Waiting. I am always waiting. Blame Pandora, if you have a need to blame. As the Buddha taught, humans in our inherently socialized condition always have to live with an undercurrent of anxiety and it’s mirror image, longing. So I wait. Waiting is what gives direction to my life.

Waiting is the arrow of time. The length of the shaft may be visualized as the strength of the longing. The arrow’s mirror image? The desire to avoid the anxiety associated with the lack of the object of longing.

Writing this way, in an impersonalized manner, allows any reader to fill in their own blanks. Seeing the arrow of longing speeding towards a desire, or, perhaps by its own heaviness, losing speed and falling to the earth, allows us the opportunity to see ourselves as one of the entities caught up in the human condition.

Once we can see that we are so caught up, and that our desires and fears make arrows, maybe we will be more careful about the type of arrows we craft. Are we making an arrow that will pierce someone else? Is this desirable or undesirable?

Why Yin and Yang? See how one defines the other, even if you don’t realize it at first.

Here’s another version that my writing group said sounded like a professor, less lively. BUT it provides some actionable information on ways to try to escape the pain of longing and anxiety.

The process of waiting draws the arrow of time. Time is inherent in waiting. Do tigers wait for their next meal? I am not sure. Probably they are focused on doing what it takes to get the next meal when hunger tells them it’s time to do so. Humans wait. And our domesticated animals.

Back to the arrow of time crafted by waiting. The length of the shaft may be visualized as the strength of the longing. The arrow’s mirror image? The desire to avoid the anxiety associated with the lack of the object of longing.

Or, once we can see that we are fashioning arrows with our waiting for certain things, we’ll take the Buddha’s advice, and start to learn to wait, rather than waiting for a particular thing. Once we see that waiting for a particular thing inherently brings anxiety, we might be open to seeing the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha in a new way. Suffering is universal. The cause of suffering is craving. Letting go of attachments to specific outcomes leads toward liberation from suffering. There is a path that can end suffering.

Here is what I wrote from a different prompt, having to do with stars.

The stars. All the stars? No. A particular set of stars draws her attention. She had waited for years for this moment. The training to sit patiently. The training to direct the arrow of attention with the flashlight of consciousness. Illuminating just what was important. Cygnus, the Great Swan, slowly approached the position that would allow the leap from earth to heaven.

The Great Swan was merely the skeleton that marked the more important subject, the Mother Goddess herself. That was the true tens of thousands of years ago and it was true on the day that Zinnia waited. Cygnus no longer had to work as the pole star, doing the hard labor of turning the universe. That was the task of the Little Bear these days. Zinnia’s heart pointed her eyes toward Cygus.

This little piece refers to the emerging modern understanding that humans way back 30,000 years ago had an advanced religion based on finding our place in the universe. One of the major stars of the constellation of Cygnus marks the exit of the birth canal of the great female figure that is formed by our sideways view of the Milky Way. This star was pole star way back when, not our currently named Polaris. So the mythology of the day had our spirits longing to return to the Great Mother through the star portal. It had to be at a particular time of year. See the writings of Andrew Collins and others.

Well, I might be shocked if someone actually reads this far and shares the results of their subsequent researches!

Thanksgiving

Molars at the bottom of a jar — Have all my teeth fallen out????

Being somewhat of a grouch, even though recently I had several dreams about my teeth falling out, which I finally decided were not a warning to go to the dentist, but rather a message from my subconscious that I was losing my bite, and maybe some of my perceived bark, gratitude is something that I have to cultivate. I am truly filled with gratitude for being able to live a very comfortable life compared to most of the people in the world. We middle class Americans, as much as we disappear, still have it pretty good. I am really grateful that I have managed to work for my own company for 25 years. I really am grateful for not having to be in at 8 or even 7 am, as most working people do. It’s not that I am a shirker. I rarely leave before 7 pm when the work-load is normal. But I like the flexibility to pamper my night-personhood.

But grateful as I am for the privilege of living in the good old USA, it is truly depressing to watch so many people apparently veering off into a mindset so divorced from reality. What do Americans still agree on?

Well, traveling years ago in Europe, getting to know pit toilets for the first time at a fairly tender age, and then getting to study in Switzerland for a year in college, I had the opportunity to know what Europeans thought of Americans…

Americans are the people who have nice plumbing.

A Western Style toilet — Wasteful and comfortable. I am grateful for my toilet.

So here we go. Whether Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, or Alt Right of some type, we all (well almost all) wake up in the morning, pee in a nice porcelain toilet, on which we can sit comfortably if desired. We can then take a nice hot shower, brush our teeth with water that is mostly not contaminated with deadly bacteria (even if it is increasingly contaminated with harmful industrial and agricultural chemicals, and heavy metals), dry ourselves off with a nice fluffy towel, and get dressed.

So, to all of my fellow Americans, let’s remember to be grateful for the plumbing we have. We live in a country where almost everyone has a toilet in their living space. India has recently almost completed a national campaign to reach that goal, and apparently Nigeria is just starting to do something about the 4.7 million people without toilets.

Let’s be grateful, this Thanksgiving, for the basic things. Not just the food we all commonly say we are thankful for, but a place to put it when we’re done digesting it. And the fact that we don’t have to watch anyone else getting rid of theirs. And that it rarely ends back up in our drinking water.

Tarot Koans

THE MAJOR ARCANA

You may see the classical images for the Rider Waite deck at Wikipedia. Scroll down to Major Arcana. Arcana means secrets. The major arcana are meant to represent the entire human experience in an abbreviated, symbolic way.

Story Number 1: The Magician
After the thought, manifestation.

Story Number 2: The High Priestess
Before the thought, knowledge.

Story Number 3: The Empress
She glowed.
The fields flowered wherever she walked.
Bringing fruit out of season.

Story Number 4: The Emperor
His authority radiated from every pore.
He no longer required the uniform.

Story Number 5: The Heirophant
The attention rejuvenated his soul.
His sister had claimed it was his ego, but he knew better.
The eyes had followed his every move.
But now, he was tired of it all.
Performing the same rituals day after day.
Only the thoughtless cared.

Story Number 6: The Lovers
Loving lovers loved lengthily.
Do you remember?
Always remember.
Remember.

Story Number 7: The Chariot
Your chariot awaits.
The work you have done has its own reward.
Enjoy the ride.

Story Number 8: Strength
The Goddess radiated light.
The lion lay down in submission.
Truth and goodness flood the thought field.
Justice has become mercy.

Story Number 9: The Hermit
The old woman closed the door of her house behind her, and latched it.
Her cloak fastened at the neck, she headed up the mountain, holding nothing but a lantern.
She would go up as far as she could. She knew how to put one foot in front of the other. She knew how to struggle toward the heavens. She had done it all of her life.
There, she would breathe her last. Her knees would never let her return to lower earth, and that was just fine with her.

Story Number 10: The Wheel of Fortune
The monkey raced around the mulberry bush.
So did the weasel.
Which was chasing which?

Story Number 11: Justice
Jane bowed her head. Justice was slow in coming. Very slow.
A thousand times now, the sun had risen and set.
Jane lifted her head. Now she understood.

Story Number 12: The Hanged Man
Everything is upside down now.
The hummingbird has consumed the eagle. Ganesh rides a mouse.
Mist obscures the ground,
above the hard black bowl of the sky.

Story Number 13: Death
Ring around the rosie,
pocket full of posie.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Story Number 14: Temperance
Silver wings fluttering in the breeze,
the angel plodded on,
toward the approaching dawn.

Story Number 15: The Devil
The image stared back at him
from the depths of the blackness.
The sin looked out at the sinner.

Story Number 16: The Tower
Ground shaking, tower leaning.
Maybe this was not such a good idea.
We’d better jump now.

Story Number 17: The Star
She dipped her big right toe in
the river of time, while chewing
a blade of grass.

Story Number 18: The Moon
Over and over and over again, they had endured the
reign of terror.
Once, the wings of mercy had shielded them.
What goes around comes around.
The moon waxes and wanes.

Story Number 19: The Sun
Bright shining as the sun, the child’s smile.
Crickets start to chirp in the heat.

Story Number 20: Judgement
Dem bones gonna rise again, Ezekiel eventually proclaimed.
But is that really what you want?
The streets of heaven are paved with gold.
The alchemists’ stuff, not the end result of
two neutron stars colliding in
far away galaxies.

Story Number 21: The World
No longer at my fingertips.
Where are my fingertips?
Who am I?
What is I?
Boundaries dissolve.
The world is.
Is.
Isness.
Isness is.

A Story: The Master
I watch the lord comb the lady’s hair.
The rest is untold.

Story Number Zero: The Fool
Innocence and isness
make no claims.

I hope you liked these little poetic reflections. If you have an artistic bent, and would like to collaborate on illustrations, please let me know by the comment feature.

Dancing to an Unheard Melody

This is a past life regression I did in 1988. The title above is from my friend Mel, who heard me read the piece in the writing group…

To my surprise, I actually find myself embodied. My arms around my partner, I look into his eyes. He is black. He wears an army uniform. He is taller than I am. He leads me around the dancing floor. Bright spots of light move as the glitter ball rotates above us. The vision is a vision, and I don’t hear the music. I look down at my shoulder, and find I am white. I don’t think this is a surprise. The inner self I was channeling must have known this as soon as I noted the dark tones of my partner’s skin. The question of my gender was never articulated.

As the unheard tune ends, I step back to smile at my partner, and looking down, I see the upper line of my yellow sleeveless dress against my skin. I am pretty. I know this, even as I can’t see my face. They say that beauty is perceived in the face designed from the average of all common features in a population. I fill in my face with this subconscious information. I am slim. The pretty and the slim are different from my current incarnation.

The skirt of my dress is yellow, like the top, but covered with black polka dots, the size of quarters. I sense this is happening in the 1930’s. Maybe one of those dance contests they had with cash prizes to supposedly alleviate the misery of the depression. Like in the movie They Shoot Horses.

Now, thirty years after this past life regression experience, I wonder why an enlisted soldier, presumably with a paycheck, would subject himself to this. Hmmm. Maybe he was attracted to me? Still, this is hard for me to imagine, having been stuck in my current body for all of this lifetime.

The essence that I took from the extremely foggy vision of a past life, that felt extremely forced at the time, was that my unwillingness to conform to society’s expectations goes back to a time before my birth into this current heavy, plain looking carcass. But she must have died young, if she was in her twenties in the 1930’s or 40’s, and died in time to provide a soul to one born in the late 1950’s. I wonder what happened to my dancing partner. Was he a partner for an evening only? A weekend of a dance contest? Years?

Yesterday, I joined the Theosophical Society. They’d already been around for 100 years when I graduated from high school. Their purpose is to promote Universal Brotherhood. The founders believed in the benefits of reincarnation. If you know you have many lives, you don’t have to feel pressured to “get this life perfect.” All the major religions teach that we are more than our bodies. Most teach that we are more than our minds. Or that we are neither our bodies, nor our minds. Nor our feelings for that matter. I can intellectually grasp that there is evidence that we are more than our bodies and thoughts and feelings. The idea of reincarnation helps to explain a lot of things. It’s not the only possible explanation for the experiences of deja vu, or strong connections to other people. It’s not the only possible explanation for my wondering from the age of four why I was born.

To my mother’s credit, she never gave me a fake answer. For some reason, it never occurred to me to ask my dad. Perhaps this persistent question, which implies that I did have a choice in being born, or at least that I thought I did, is even better evidence for reincarnation. Or at least for the existence of the individual’s soul or spirit as an entity separate from the body.

When I took the past life regression workshop, I had little hope that I was actually going to be able to get any information about my past lives. I’m an intellectual, and that generally interferes with the ability to perform self-hypnosis. As noted at the top of the post, I was surprised to even get a glimpse of a past life.

My friends at the Spiritualist church assure me that I have had many past lives. Who knows? My “karmic astrology report” from Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment says that my planets give a tendency to get carried away by my imagination. Yet some type of undiagnosed brain damage has left me with extremely poor visualization skills. I get lost really easily, even as I have developed skills to get to where I need to go in my daily life. Maybe this brain damage is what has kept me centered in the physical world. When I do have a clear inner vision, it always feels like a gift. I can never conjure it at will.

The First

The Second

The Third

Then, we move on to take action to correct the false information.

What’s Wrong about the Concept of Make American Great Again?

Seriously folks, click on the underlined Charity Navigator link above in the yellow box. Thank you.