Philosophical Message – Page 11

E-CON-IGNOMINOMICS, or The Curmudgeon’s Fantasy

The end of the current economy is coming. Who knows when? I don’t claim to. But when my writing group was given the prompt to write about a secret shopper, my first thought was the demise of the secret shopper. How could anyone afford to pay a secret shopper to check on service at a store, when nobody shops at stores? How could the concept of a secret shopper exist on line? There are no secrets. The merchants don’t even care if we buy their products. They simply hope we’ll window shop so they can sell the record of our window shopping for profit. But sometime, I don’t know when, the prices paid for the record of the trail of clicks of the public shopper will fail to support the lifestyles of the useless leeches of today’s e-con-ignominomics. The phantasm of smoke and mirrors supporting the lifestyles of these leeches will blow away and sublime. The smoke will blow away and the mirrors will sublime. Sublime. That’s a technical term that refers to the process by which the atoms of a solid substance leave their neighbors, one by one. Yes, the smoke will diffuse and so will the mirrors. The leeches of the internet will be revealed in their nakedness for who they are. Some of them might recall some previously learned skills that are actually useful to their fellow humans, like gardening. Maybe they’ll grow a tomato or plant a row of asparagus, to reduce our dependence on factory food that’s full of listeria, hepatitis, and salmonella.

Ode to Rollo May

A long time ago, at least in some frame of reference, I walked out of the front door of my parents’ home. Bereft of hope, I had not yet read Rollo May’s “Man’s Search for Himself.” Could I have known then what I now know, it might have been slightly easier. Doubt though, and the anxiety that accompanies it, are the shadows of the man or woman on the conscious path to becoming truly alive. Every day, I now know, that I miss the opportunity to make my own choices, that day is a chance lost to become my true self.

Fortunately, many friends and guides have supported even my most meager efforts. Good fortune is easier to see in hindsight. Having had to live through the doubt and anxiety was not fun at the time. I am now, however, very grateful to Rollo May for refusing to sing a lullaby. Justice for the courageous is not assured in the mundane world. Kindness to self is a difficult path to learn to tread. Looking at the fact that the hardest thing a human ever does is using rebellion creatively against parents, the stand-in for God, (or is God the stand-in for parents?) can only bring both hope and fear.

May I, writing as though I’ve risen to May’s challenge, actually gain the strength and courage to do so. Never, never will I totally give up, not even from the grave. Oh, I know the temptation to rest is compelling. Perhaps a few centuries of riding with the wave-forms of consciousness will suffice. Queen of Swords in this life, perhaps I’ll manage to become an Empress in the next. Really though, the specific mask of my temporary personality is irrelevant. Security is an illusion to anyone inhabiting a body. Time equalizes all, though. Universal consciousness is the only reality, the only frame of reference that can dispense with boundary conditions.

Verily, I am grateful to Dr. May for helping me see truth, helping me to see my own strength, as much as it has been developed to date. Why it took so long for me to comprehend that I really am, as Joseph Campbell teaches, the hero of my own story, is now clearer. X-rays, though penetrating to matter, would not have helped me to recognize the stages on the spiritual path sooner.

You might not be able to grasp the import of this acrostic, especially if you have never studied mythology, ancient history, philosophy and psychology. Zeno reminds that there is always another step on the path to half way to heaven.

The Cost of Defending Wealth

Defending wealth is expensive. Very expensive.

Think about it.

It’s self evident truth.

But remember, self evident truth is not available to the casual observer!

Only those who learn to see past what the conventional wisdom says are able to glean self evident truth. The whole idea of self evident truth is that you see it for yourself. It’s a shock when you see it. Things that don’t shock are not worthy of the category of self-evident truth.

One of the problems of understanding the ideas of self evident truth is that there are many different kinds of truth. To me, the original self evident truth to which I was introduced, that all men are created equal, is really not self-evident when I look at the world. Or if we were created equal, the equality rapidly evaporates.

But back to the original topic. It is currently self evident to me that protection of concentrated wealth is what our tax money goes to. Those who own little property of value to others are not the ones who need the police and courts to keep their property safe. Rich people don’t go to jail very often. Much more money is spent on sending poor people to jail. Poor people are sent to jail to protect the rich from the behaviors of the poor. Specifically, the behaviors of the poor that the rich see as undesirable, or a threat to their wealth.

Even if there is no direct threat to the property of the wealthy, keeping a lot of poor people under threat of incarceration helps to keep them distracted from ideas of working for social justice. I know from personal experience how I felt when I was threatened with jail time for a trumped up charge. I was eventually able to plea bargain down to my actual deed. And I have more resources and property than most.

Even if people of little property tend to be less educated, and may make personal mistakes, their mistakes are unlikely to cause the expensive problems our society faces, such as war, and the costly need to defend our borders. Rich people don’t go to war very often either. They send those of less means to defend their way of life. The cost of war is such a high number, I can’t fathom it without study. Check out the link.

Those who own lots of property are the ones who need protection from the jealousy of those who have less, whether internal to our national borders, or external.

The concept of personal property, and the desire to pass personal property on, at death, to heirs, has many consequences. Most of us never think about those consequences.

Even though we Americans think of our country as a democracy, we’re a republic. The whole idea of the (wealthy) founding fathers in creating a republic was to protect their wealth and privilege from the royalty. They gave more rights to the propertied men who had the means to run for office. The idea of the republic was not to give full rights to those the founders considered beneath them in the social hierarchy. Those who had not yet proven themselves worthy of consideration, because they had not amassed adequate wealth to join the powerful.

The results of the intentions of the founding fathers are with us still, even as we have given non-felonious citizens a full vote, regardless of skin color. (Note that it is the individual states that decide whether felons can or can’t vote, not the Constitution!)

What is the cost of the prison system? Our epidemic of incarceration costs us taxpayers $63.4 billion a year. Much of this is keeping drug offenders locked away, because as a society we have decided that is a more acceptable answer than rehabilitating the offenders, who have often had restricted opportunities at making a reasonable life for themselves according to the conventional recipe for the American Dream.

Poor people are also not the ones who wish to keep the minimum wages depressed by forcing the poor to compete against themselves. John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” is an eloquent explanation of how property owners work to keep wages down.

Picture Strabismus

Life is funny sometimes. The day after I wrote the following flash fiction, I found this photo of Walt Whitman. He seems to be looking in two directions at once. Wikipedia says he had a stroke toward the end of his life.

**********************

The painting had been in storage for decades. That had saved it from the destruction of the works considered to have attained a higher level of mastery. Now Nancy stood in front of the glowing acrylic colors. The face floated in front of the black background.

“The eyes,” she thought. “A portrait can’t be great if the eyes aren’t right.” The right eye wasn’t quite right though. “Haha,” Nancy thought. “The right eye isn’t quite right! Haha.”

The right eye stared at a different location from the left’s focus, which was the viewer. “That’s funny,” Nancy thought, as she moved back and forth in front of the canvas. “The left eye follows me, while the right looks elsewhere.

“Maybe it was intentional. Maybe this is an accurate portrait.”

Nancy walked over to the UPC sticker printer and touched her gadget screen. The sticker protruded from the slot of the printer, and she pulled it out and returned to the canvas applying the ID tag to the back of the frame.

“Cross eyed people always carry some extra pain. Who was this man” How did he overcome this disadvantage?”

Nancy stepped back. She used her third eye to visualize the neural circuits of the subject of the painting. “Who are you?” she whispered. “Who are you?”

A Flash Fiction Triptych: The Consequences of Sadness

I brought the cards from my Dixit game to my writing group. This is a fun storytelling game for ages 8 to infinity. The cards are beautiful. We used them as prompts. See the three cards I selected from the ten or so I was randomly assigned. If the image doesn’t show up, click on the blue text below.

Three cards from original Dixit Game. Artist M.Cardouat

Part The First

The true artist will buy paint over food. As Rumi purportedly said (via John Moyne and Coleman Barks) “If you can’t get fed, be bread.”

Puss in Boots, in her 92nd incarnation, this time as an artist, has made good use of her soul’s accumulated wisdom. Her current painting is of a fish, so realistically depicted, it swims off the canvas, naively thinking itself liberated, but now free to fall prey to the waiting fisherman.

Part The Second

Sadly, my head drooped. Forced back in to the ring too soon after my daughter’s death, this time was the only time in my life that I was sorry I had chosen this profession. It was the first time I felt inadequate to the challenge. I needed a clown to cheer myself up. The tears of the clown flowed down my face. I at least wished I had paid more attention to the prof in that 400 level class, “The Sad Clown.” Back then, I thought it would be unnecessary. I’d always been the fountain of cheer.

Part The Third

Will there be anyone left alive to witness the heat death of the universe? Only the consciousness of the eternal serpent. No longer able to survive on its own waste products, the perpetual motion machine is winding down. The serpent bleeds its last drops of vitality as infinity chills toward absolute zero.

Perhaps, perhaps on its way to a new bang in the network we call the mulitiverse.

Note about the Eternal Serpent: This reference is to the Orobouros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros), or the snake eating its own tail. The issue isn’t eating its tail though, it’s what is implied in the action of eating its tail. The snake exists self sufficiently, on its own waste product. We humans can’t do that and survive in human form. Only “The All” is capable of this feat.

See this link for an image of the Orobourus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros#/media/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

The First Alchemist: Text Version

Alchemist Number One

The Year 420, After the Peace Fare Virus

A planet far from Earth

“Good night, Fritzie. I love you. Sleep well.” Hilda felt almost like what she harbored as a dream of motherhood from her far away memories of life on Earth.

“Story, mommy. Story please!” Fritzie was doing well up on the mountain. She sometimes didn’t want to admit it to herself, out of fears that the situation might change, but she felt good too.

“Ok, Fritzie. A story.

“Once upon a time, that means a long time ago, that means on Earth, before humans came to live on other planets, there was a boy named Brandon. He was a little boy, and he found all things interesting. He loved music, and making art, and playing games, but he loved the outdoors too, perhaps more than anything else.

“Even though he had only lived through about eight summers at the time of this story, he used his skills of observation to a greater advantage than most adults. He also knew how to move very quietly in nature. Between those two accomplishments, he made a lot of opportunities for himself to see birds and insects and snakes and lizards and the like up close, and in detail.

“He kept a notebook made of paper. The computer age waited in the future. He decided that every day, he would find time to walk the same path through some woods and a field where a lot of different kinds of plants grew. When he managed to sneak up on a bird or squirrel, he drew a picture of it. He did not know how to read or write, so he had only his pictures to remind himself of what he had seen.

“One day, he found a striped caterpillar on a milkweed plant. He had heard that these black-and-white-striped caterpillars eventually turned into big orange and black monarch butterflies. We don’t have butterflies on this world. The monarchs were big insects with beautiful colored wings that lived on Earth, where daddy and I were born. Brandon did not have anything to take the caterpillar home in, so he watched it munching on the milkweed, drew a picture, and left it in peace.

“The next day, he found it, or another one like it, on a milkweed plant a meter away. This time, he was prepared. He again watched it, and as he had been taught, he watched it until he noticed something different from what he had noticed they day before. Instead of paying attention to the colors of the caterpillar, like he had the day before, he watched how it moved. He made a series of pictures showing a caterpillar next to a leaf. Each picture had a little less of the leaf left. He actually got to see the caterpillar poop. It was green, the same hue as the milkweed leaves, but darker.”

Fritzie giggled softly.

Hilda continued, after gently rubbing Fritzie’s arm.

“When he was done with the drawings, he picked some milkweed leaves and put them in a jar, along with the caterpillar.

“Now most people know that when the caterpillar stops eating and attaches itself to the stalk of a plant, it’s ready to transform itself into a beautiful green chrysalis and then into a butterfly. And, most people who go to the extent to keep a caterpillar to watch, have noticed the beautiful, light green chrysalis which becomes visible after the outer striped skin falls off. Most people notice that the green tapered cylinder becomes less cloudy over time, and less green, eventually showing the new butterfly inside of a delicate glass like casing. But some people, who are really observant, have also noticed that there are tiny gold spots that form on the chrysalis as well.

“Well, Brandon was very curious. His family did not have much money, and he wondered if he could collect the gold from the chrysalis. But he did not want to hurt the butterfly.

“Every day he drew the chrysalis and the developing butterfly. He noticed that the widest part of the chrysalis had the center part of the butterfly. The head and body were wrapped around the top wide part of the chrysalis. He noticed that the gold spots were concentrated at this wide ridge. The butterfly had gold eyes and a line of gold spots along its tummy.

“Well, he decided to go back to the milkweed field to try to find more caterpillars or chrysalises. He succeeded, and had the beginnings of a gold mine! Or so he thought!

“Sadly, his attempts to use the butterfly gold mine for security to buy a new house for his family did not go very far.

“But, discouragement had no place in Brandon’s life. For the next few summers he started a new butterfly gold mine. He hoped the banker would see the light. Finally, at age ten, his parents decided that they could put off teaching him to read no longer. Brandon had been hounding them to teach him anyway. Soon, he started researching the lives of insects. He found out that the gold spots were simply the dried tears and sniffles of the monarch butterflies, royal beings, crying for their lost freedom, not yet aware of the greater freedom that awaited them in flight.

“So Brandon cried too. No gold mine, no new house. But his tears dried quickly, as he ran off to celebrate his freedom to breathe in the fresh air of the summer afternoon. And he rejoiced when he saw a sparkly gold rock! But this time he knew that the gold he would probably end up with was the gold of new knowledge and understanding of the natural world, and probably would not be accepted as a down payment for a new house!”

“Thanks mommy,” Fritzie said very sleepily. “Better let you grown ups worry about money, whatever that is.”

Hilda walked softly out of the sleeping area. Karl had a cup of tea poured for her.

“He’s asleep?”

“Will be in a minute, if not.”

She sipped her tea. “It’s hard to come up with stories that make sense on this new world.”

“What do you mean?”

“I realized too late in the story that we don’t have banks, gold, money.”

They both laughed.

“We can live without it, can’t we?”

Karl put down his tea and got up to pick Hilda up, because he could, and gave her a hug.

The Statue: Flash Fiction

The Statue

NOTE: The origin of Lady Justice with a sword had to do with the fact that you needed bronze to make a sword and that was EXPENSIVE. So only the rich had swords, and thus only the rich had the means to enforce their judgments and decisions. The arrival of the iron age brought a little more democracy!

The arm of Lady Justice still pointed her sword upward to heaven, but the green patina of the bronze was streaked white with pigeon droppings.

Kelly stopped in front of the statue that guarded her school, and looked up into Justina’s kind face. Kelly had made friends with the lady over the years, stopping often to chat on her way home. Asking for advice when a teacher was mean to her, or to any of the other kids, or for acknowledgment of the sorrow she felt for her fellow humans when the current events class had covered particularly distressing news.

Usually, she held her conversations with Justina in private silence. But today, the first day of a new year, she felt optimistic. “Lady J,” she said, softly, at first, and then a bit louder, as she felt a surge of confidence after the words escaped from her throat.

She looked up again, at the face, and then allowed her eyes to follow the arm up to the clouds, and back to the face. Kelly jumped back in surprise. The head of Justina was tilted downward, to look at her.

“Lady J?” asked Kelly, “do you really see me?”

The mouth of the statue started to curl upwards at the corners, just slightly, for an instant.

“I think that the new teacher is an improvement,” Kelly told the statue.

The statue nodded its head, then resumed its former impassive, classical pose.

“Thank you,” Kelly whispered, “thank you.” Then she turned and started walking home, thinking, thinking.

I Gave My Name: Flash Fiction

I stood up and gave my name. That was all I gave. It was not the name my parents gave me. But after a week, it was the name everyone on this floor knew me by, so that was the name I gave.

The next person in the circle stood up and gave a name. I realized I was supposed to sit back down, and did so.

The self naming continued. As far as I could tell, we all gave pseudonyms. Shan, Dro, Berry, Hard Tack, and Anna Mae were a few of the names I remember. We were all guys. At least we all had beards or evidence of shaving. So even if some thought Anna Mae was a given name, I wasn’t convinced.

That was a long time ago. Twenty years, they tell us. One day kind of blends into another, so it’s hard to tell for sure. Dro and Anna Mae died. Tragic accident they said. Jess and Tanner replaced them.

But today, they came and told us we’re going home. They finished taking our space ship apart and copying it and put it back together.

The thing is, this planet had no visible technology when we arrived. I am pretty sure they couldn’t tell the difference between aluminum and titanium, or even iron for that matter. Heat treating had to be a complete unknown. A torque wrench or a pyrometer were gadgets that were in the mechanic’s crib, but could they distinguish that from the cargo that had been intended for trade? I doubt it. They had let a couple of the people from another floor out of the building to advise them on how to put the pieces back together after the replication. They didn’t comprehend that a pastry chef and a linguist would be useless in assembling a spacecraft.

So here we were. Free to go home. On their copy of our own spacecraft. Which was probably a safer bet than the original, which might actually still have functional take off capability, but surely would never get us home.

They’d listened to our conversations for years. But even now, they did not understand the concept of specialization.

We were free to go home now. Or free to stand up and give our names, and be welcomed into the native population, having finally been deemed harmless.

Cultivate Clarity! Learn to Discern!