Philosophical Message – Page 6

Ask Linda When She’s Ten Feet Tall

Part A

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_and_blue_pill.jpg

Linda often harbored thoughts of conforming to society. Of wearing society’s clothes. But she knew she’d have to take the blue pill every morning, and highly preferred the red. She knew that the red pill was for reality, while the blue pill was for fantasy. It was obvious. Blue pie in the sky. Red was solid flesh, earth and life’s blood.

She finally tossed the blue pills in the trash.

Part B

Now Linda could think more clearly. Now her true thoughts came to the surface.

Linda’s nascent understanding of who she was started to grow.

She started to catch some of her perceptions on their way to being modified; on the way to becoming thoughts, feelings and knowledge.

Part C

Linda started to experience awe more often. She devoured the literature on consciousness. She learned that chimpanzees can covet their neighbor’s sexual partner. Chimpanzees can covet their neighbor’s social status. But chimpanzees can’t ask “Is there another I, besides the one in this body, limited to these sexual partners and this place in the social structure?”

Part D
Linda started seeing her limitations dissolve. Linda knew that she was no longer a toddler, a kid, a teen, a college student, an independent head of household, with all of those incumbent burdens.

Part E

Linda no longer saw the fields of green, the flowers of red. Instead she saw the blades of ancient grasses. She saw her far ancestors harvesting the few golden wheat seeds which clung to their stalks. She saw the flowers with the eyes of the bee, so much closer to their real glorious colors.

She saw, through the eyes of the mole, the worms wriggling under the dark earth.

She experienced the jubilation of Hypatia, at the knowledge stored in the modern library of Alexandria.

She experienced liberation from care, after sitting at the feet of Patanjali.

She saw the sunlight. She no longer needed artifice from a venerable human to create interest in the world.

Part F
Linda walked to the fridge. She still needed to eat. She saw that old magnet declaring Hare Krishna! This time she understood. This time she knew what awaited her, the next time she chanted the name.

Part G

This time she knew that she didn’t need to chant the name. She was home.

Part H

Scott’s Daily Prompt: Bang!

I hope this story makes a bit of a BANG!

Direction: Zero to Sixty

Scott’s Daily Prompt: Direction

Direction is from ZERO TO SIXTY!!!!!

Dave at Sozo’s made this special design for me this morning.

Mid-Michigan Word Gatherer’s Prompt: Phony!

Our group facilitator said I should call the original version (lost in cyber-space) SIXTY. So I did.

Sixty

Phony. Phony-ness. A wide-spread modern art-form.

Most humans project a protective image of themselves that reflects, as closely as their sub-conscious minds can, the idealized person of the culture in which they are embedded. The real person hides from the world, hides even from its own ego.

This is a distortion of our essence.

An ancient person was smart enough to keep their given name secret, to protect from the possibility of its use by antagonistic forces. This is legitimate camouflage, not phony-ness.

Early humans even learned to deceive by using the whites of their eyes to point others away from the tree with the ripe fruits, the precursor to the outright lie. But again, there is deception and there is deception. This type of deception was a natural outgrowth of our participation in the food-chain.

Development of complex language allowed humans to flourish numerically, multiplying varieties of adaptation and culture. Words power, and magic forms, the foundation of our high level ability to deceive and confuse, when we choose not to inform. Words, and the tones we use to utter them, underpin the modern phenomenon of phony-ness.

Ancient and pre-historic people couldn’t be phony. They could hide. As already noted, they needed to use camouflage and deception like most of their fellow complex animal life forms. But they weren’t phony. It never occurred to them to try to appear as something they weren’t to their tribal fellows, even as they were trapped in their roles within their community.

What’s the bottom line here? We serve ourselves when discerning between necessary deceit of the outsider, and trying to fool our nearest neighbors and kin.

Only modern people have the opportunity to be phony in this damaging way. It’s one of the curses of the modern world, stemming from the multiple groups which claim the allegiance of any modern person.

Phony people hide their true selves under layers of mirage. Or at least they try to. Programmed, from the day we are born, to take on the values of our cultural milieu, whether it fits with our particular karmic baggage, genetic predispositions, and family history, or not, we mostly do not even know our own true selves.

This Time I Did Not Eat of the Fruit

Last Daily Post from WordPress: Retrospective or After Thought

I clambered up the trunk of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil,
but this time
I did not eat of its fruit.
This time, I was
looking for something else.

Some other way
to filter the incoming deluge
of data.

I scanned the horizon, and finally
seeing the light, I tilted my head
downward, to see
what might be closer to me.

A different fruit. I sought a different fruit.
Tired of judging, and being judged.
Plants must seek light, and animals food.
Light good, dark undesirable.
Food good, enemy bad.

Humans were born in a garden.
We had no enemies in the myth.
What is the lesson?
The lesson to be learned?
The snake never sought to harm us.

In the absence of enemies, we can seek beauty.
We have time to contemplate our environment.
We can learn to see how beauty emerges from
the background. See how the background gives
birth to beauty.

Homo Sapiens birthed themselves thanks to Eve.
But the early stages of our reign were Homo Confusus.
Womo Charmiens yet awaits birth.

I clambered back down to earth.
I scrambled past the edge of the forest.
I rambled around in the clearing.

Down. Down under. Under the earth.
In the beginning, we never
had to look under the earth,
with all the fruit hanging at eye level.

After expulsion, God told us to work the earth.
Why didn’t we see that as the hint it was?
It was obvious that God’s ultimate purpose
was to make us work for understanding.
Not to wear us out to the point
that we couldn’t think straight.

Knowledge can be given, but understanding
has to be created by the individual.

Happiness Schmappiness

WordPress Daily Post: Premature

My reward for telling the coffee guy that I had gotten thrown out of my interfaith place. He says his favorite stories are of people getting thrown out of Bible study groups and churches. 🙂

Happiness is a false goddess, unworthy of worship of any kind. The wise ancient Hindu teachers knew this, and warned that “The wise man hankers not after happiness.” Our American founding fathers were not as astute.

The middle name of Happiness is Fortune, and that reveals a truer aspect of her gift. If we are among the lucky, or rather WHEN we are among the lucky, we can experience happiness.

The very word HAPPINESS (note the similarity to HAPPEN???) expresses her fickle, random and uncontrollable nature. Maybe you randomly received good blood chemistry, but you probably believe you are happy because you “make the choice” to be happy, and “work to be happy,” or you have “good mental and emotional hygiene.”

That’s BS. It rings very hollow to anyone who either doesn’t have the blessings of cheerfulness hormones in their bloodstream, or is a thoughtful person. We all like to take credit when things go our way, and blame others for their personal ineptitude when they experience failures. We rarely give credit to our environment when things go well, and take personal responsibility for our failures. This is because most people are unaware of their susceptibility to “The Fundamental Attribution Error,” or as David Levy says we are prone to “Underestimating the Impact of External Influences.”

Some of the quotes he picked to illustrate this hardwired error in the human thought processes include:

“No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.” (unknown)

“Don’t call a man honest just because he never had the chance to steal.” (Yiddish Proverb)

“Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”

This last quote, attributed to Barry Switzer, gets at my point above.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for meditation and stopping the negative self-talk. Peace has now surrounded me, despite often severe or profound “reasons” to feel shaken and anxious. No, I have not escaped the human condition, and still feel anxious much of the time, especially when I am alone and slip into ruminating on my past, and the potential consequences on the future. I am at peace because I know that “I” am not the body, or even my mind or my history or memories. “I” am the one who watches the one who gets manipulated, by events and circumstances, into doing what has to be done to play the role “I” have been assigned to play in society.

Even if I have not been able to completely control my mind, and completely and permanently identify with “the witness,” (the one who watches my “self” go through life), I am not going to conflate peace of mind with happiness.

True happiness can only come when all are happy. Someone asked me “Don’t you want her to be happy?” My first (grouchy) thought was “I don’t give a rat’s ass.” (I said nothing.) My second (wiser) thought was “Of course I want her to be happy. I want everyone to be happy”

And so, like the Buddhists, I pray: May all beings be happy.

Furthermore, and much more importantly, like the Buddhists, I pray: May all beings have the causes of happiness.

As Lynn Sparrow Christie noted in a seminar I attended a few weeks ago, there’s the “problem of the food chain.”

When God, Mother Nature, The-Forces-Of-The-Universe see fit to have us all evolve past the food chain, all beings may have the foundation for the causes of happiness. We will no longer have to worry about maintaining the physical aspects of the carcass that carries the nucleus of the spiritual being within. We’ll have time and leisure to enjoy true happiness, not simple gratitude for what we have.

I’m not holding my breath.

PS Why does substituting SHM for H at the beginning of Happiness change it from the most desirable of emotions to a worthless mirage?

Maybe it’s the SHM sound at the beginning of the Yiddish “Schmutz,” or dirt.

That’s the dirt on happiness!

May all beings have the causes of happiness!

Partake of Life!

Partake of Life!

Don’t be too timid!

That’s the problem with raising kids.

In order to keep the most boisterous, least thoughtful, greatest risk takers, and those with no depth of character, from destroying their own lives, and those of others in their environment, kids are conditioned to think of others first, not be selfish, etc.

But then the mild, shy, timid, thoughtful, risk adverse, end up being afraid to speak up for themselves, afraid to love and appreciate themselves, and can’t understand that if you are not loving and kind toward yourself, all attempts to be truly kind to others will fail.

This is a sad fact of life.

So remember, all of us have been conditioned by society to prevent the worst acts from the most barbarous 10%, and now that we’re adults, we should do our best to throw off the disguise and become ourselves. As Nietzsche/ Zarathushtra/ Osho /Merwegon said:

The lion must throw off the sheep skin.

Partake, partake of all the flavors of life.

WordPress Daily Prompt: Partake

Parallel Stanzas

Daily Prompt: Parallel

Reach, reach, reach. Reach for the stars!
No. I’m tired. Why should I?
It’s what we do.
It’s what you do.

Look, look, look. Look around you!
No. That’s boring. Why should I?
It’s what we are born to do.
It’s what you were born to do.

See, see, see. See what’s there, in front of you.
No. I can’t. I’m blind. I like it that way.
No, you’re not. Take off the dark glasses.
No. I live by my own inner light.

Wait, wait, wait. Patience is rewarded!
No. I inhabit the now.
We are creatures of our history and our future.
I am the creation of my own time zone.

Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt: Reach

Nothing is wasted

Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt

Nothing is wasted. How could it be? We must realize how much effort is required to make the simplest of objects. To manufacture a paper towel for example, requires at least ten, and up to 25 times its weight in water. And that’s supposedly for a modern, efficient paper towel plant. To some, that might seem like waste. The five gallons of water used to make that paper towel. But another way to look at it could be that we are taking humanity that much faster down the path of crisis point. That much sooner to our doom and redemption. That much sooner to the moment when we have no clean water to sustain the vast majority of currently existing communities. That much sooner to the moment when humanity is forced to evolve into a new being. If everyone could visit a paper towel factory, and see the tons of water used, they might have a better understanding of reality. But that’s one thing our current society is doing everything to avoid.

We see CG images on TV and fail to remind ourselves that it’s a layer away from reality. We hide death, and anything that might be related to death. We don’t want to know. And without death, life can’t be complete. Can’t be three dimensional. Can’t be four dimensional. Can’t be real.

It’s the background noise, waste, if you will, that allows the portion of reality that we think is the whole thing, to emerge. It’s the background waste that is the fabric from which the reality we inhabit is formed.

Explore

Bee Head (Scanning Electron Microscope)

There is always more to explore.

You can look out.

You can go out.

You can look in.

You can go in.

Look up, or down.

But if it’s exploring, you have to see things in a new light, even if the things you are seeing are not new, or even new to you.

Every day, our experience reinforces some characteristics of who we think we are, and also offers us the chance to change.

I like to explore insects that I find lying around dead, using my microscopes.

Insects have fascinating structures. Here is a series of scanning electron microscope photos of a bee head, zoomed in to see the ball joint that lets the bee control the position of its antenna.