It's desire stupid

OK i'm convinced... was watching a doco on Merlin last night and was relishing the dreamy moonlit world of the pagan and mystic which I love ... but since a child have been disappointed to know is not real. "My muse" was my closest approach to that "reality" - and after she passed on to greater things I discover amazingly a lot closer than even I was prepared to dream! I find out today yet another coincidence that her birthday fell on the date of the Liberalia the festival of Liber ("the free one" a connection "my muse" would have relished) and an avatar of Dionysus. But for all this dreaming something becomes very obvious, something akin to Sartre's analysis of emotions in general...

It has been said that, we are not material bodies having a spiritual experience, but spirits having a material experience.

Knowing within my own soul the struggles to existence and the romantic dreams which never match their pale realities, I know full well the frustration that the alleged spirit feels within the apparent prison of its weak and mortal form. But isn't this just the dreams that arise in a mind whose desires is greater than their means? As Freud would have argued, it is repression of the sexual instinct which births our whole civilisation - seeded and nurtured within the furnace of frustrations and restraint which typify the civilised individual. Deep down I know that to be a great poet one needs to suffer, one needs the frustrations of unattainable desires to fuel the searching and ecstatic frenzy of creation ... an experience the doco called arwen in Gaelic (or something sounding like that). To be wise also one must suffer, and the two are always intertwined since even before the days when Plato wrote his Symposium. Evan our own Saviour follows this ancient pattern of suffering before he attains the Divine ascendancy. Woden, our Wednesday, who brought us poetry and the runes of writing suffered long hanging on the branches of the World Oak Tree. I'm sure the motif is familar throughout Asia.

But Buddha, teacher to the Asian peoples including the Europeans, teaches a very simple teach. If one has no legs, then only the fool seeks to run. It is in this that our frustrations and sufferings are born. It is in this that our dreams are born.

So it seems plainly simple to me once again until the fogs of desire cloud my eyes again, that really it is having passions beyond our means that is the source of all our unhappiness and suffering. I've known unfailingly since a child that given the choice between getting what you want, and not wanting it in the first place: there is no contest. How can anything go wrong, how can anything be less than perfect if we can forget the desire entirely. In contrast its a journey fraught with danger whenever we seek to satisfy a desire.

And look outward in the search for things, we unwittingly leave ourselves unguarded and inward become slaves to desire. The war, the Desire, is for a ridding of desire. The sweet ability to forget without residue any desire that should arise lest we find it demanding more than can be attained.

It is interesting as someone bound and ensnared hopelessly within the world or desires to watch why it is that attaining mastery over desire is so illusive. One profound complication is social expectation. I always feel the I need to be somebody, that unless I have attained something then I am not what I should be. I feel the need to seek external proof of my attainments like clothes, a house, a car. I am slightly different in that I haven't done any of these things, but the desires are still there like everyone else. I experience huge stress from this disparity between what I seek and the world of expectations outside - but wisdom is born of suffering is it not?

I wish sometimes I were born in India where it (at least once) was socially acceptable to seek spiritual liberation. But am I not just wishing freedom from the social isolation that is inevitable on this road? Another expression of desire and the suffering that comes from its non attainment. The wise begin as social outcastes - always.

I write this blog to furnish my mind with an outer proof that what I do makes sense, a mirror for a self that while educated in them, has ceased to take its cues from the rack of social expectations. There is still this desire for social conformity, if only that people are not frightened or overly challenged by me, and as an a-void-ance of that greatest exile that lies in the void of madness. Is there really such a thing as madness? "My muse" studied all this at university, would she have once answered that question? Is it just a convenient term for those who do not wish to accept that there are worlds beyond the safety of this fragile island state of historically established culture. I watch Bruce Parry engaging with various tribes and one constant between them all is the expression of some unity of custom and culture - people are drawn into syncrony and allignment even in practices that have no material function. We adopt as an automatic harmony rituals like bowing, or hand shaking which have absolutely no function at all except to say "we belong". I heard it said that we shake hands to prove we don't conceal a weapon, so why do the Japanese bow then? Well "belonging" is not a luxury it seems the road to wisdom offers, despite some interpretations of Mahayana teachings. Do the walls really belong to the house? Or does the house belong to the walls?

So I'm im-pressed once again toward this realisation that everything does derive from desires. Those desires we can satisfy bring relief from desire (what is erroneously called happiness) and those we can't bring suffering and from suffering comes dreaming and from dreaming comes false belief in cathartic super-characters who can solve our suffering for us. Really if we can believe it the solution lies in mastery of our desires, something I still find very little "motivation" to do. I mean what motivation can there be to master ones motivation. Maybe what I need is a period of plain hard self-discipline. Ascetic living to challenge and master the desires. Looks like I've no choice anyway. Mum kicks me out tomorrow and I'm back to the simple life I've been nurturing, but winter's coming now and even warmth and light will be rare pleasures! Shall see how I bear up. Certainly the ancestors survived the ice ages so this should be a breeze... but our desires are so much stronger these days and the challenge so much greater than 10,000 years ago.

We can't dodge the blame! And we shouldn't!

Its beginning to annoy me. Every single news carries stories of the economic collapse and pointing the finger of blame. In reality no single person can do anything. The cause of the problem was the buying of millions of things without any means of paying it back... and this was done by the majority of people not by a select few. But, of course the select few who try to fool us into believeing that they have this sort of power will now throw the ball of blame amongst themselves and in playing this childs game they will appear to actual have that sort of power.

I know that if I cannot afford something then I don't buy it. I've argued before in this blog the real laws of economics. I could not afford a mortgage so I've lived in a garage for the last few years. In doing this I've done my little bit to keep the price of houses down. This is the right thing to do I think. Other people have been less imaginative and have bought regardless of the reality of the situation. And as they take more risk they have forced others to do do the same.

There does seem to be a weakness in humans that we don't "think globally and act locally", but rather we often "think locally and act globally". This is what is to blame and be it economics, high food privces, or global warming it all stems from the same oxymoronic selfish-herding behaviour (with emphasis on moronic!).

What annoys me more however is that living in a garage is probably not allowed because of health and safety law - so this law which was created in one situation to protect tenants, now used in another case contributes to an economic crisis which risks the health of billions!

So we are to blame, each and every one of us. And we should be to blame, because otherwise we let the screen icons steal the originality and responsibility from our own existences.

I hear that the bail out has been rejected. I wonder. It is childsplay to explain how we got into this situation and everyone knew it was coming (I did several years ago). The only rational conclusion is that this has been planned. Knowing how stupid the average sheep-human is, you keep interest rates down and suprise suprise people start to borrow vast amounts without any thought for how they will pay it back. Then like a fish swallowing a hook, you got them and you haul the sheep-humans in and make trillions of pounds. That's what I thought was going to happen, it seems that in reality it wasbn't so cleanly executed and the top bankers needed direct bailing out by the tax payer... messy but what is anyone going to do about it?

Really we must claim our lives back from the gallery of illusions and not play into their hands with insurance, interest, debt, democracy and all these vehicles of exploitation.

X-Factor and personal attainment

There is no doubt that X-Factor is a superb picture because it gives us both a demonstration of one of the most sublime qualities of human beings which is music and inparticular our voice... and some of the voices and the control displayed are meditative in their depth and focus. It also gives us a direct insight into that human condition of desiring existentially... and by that I mean desiring to become something. Watching tonight I saw an aspect of myself in there. In exactly the same way as these people wish to express their music and become what they want to be, so I experienced this with "my muse". Exactly as they say that when singing nothing else mattres, and this is all they want; so I experienced with this girl. Nothing amazing there. But, its the knife on which my current decisions in life are based...

In my understanding of Buddha the source of suffering is this "trying to become" which is a futile process in a world that just as much is unbecoming. Never attaching to a moment in form is the only way to peace and freedom from suffering. So I've been on the road to try and undo this striving for existence, but it takes me in completely the opposite way to X-Factor and it seems wrong at the moment, but I continue to see where this goes. My disease is not singing but a strong desire for indian girls... a potent mental formation derived from my experience of satisfaction from food and philosophy from that region... which translated into what I thought would be satisfaction sexually... but deep down that enternal nagging thought that the philosophy actually teaches the complete opposite has been there and I have never found freedom from conflict between these two aspects.

I see recently more how our desires determine what we think. WE aim to be so impartial and noble in our thoughts, when really all along we are seeking self interest. These delusions driven by the desire of personal existence dominate the world of the ordinary folks. I guess I'm still there 100%.

p.s. I didn't die the other day, but had a sleepless night of heart palpitations! Put it down to too much tea.

Historisity... I was, I am

Just had an odd experience... I'm dying or so it seems... everything is falling apart... but this is where I want to go for whatever this is doesn't everything else depend upon it? Maybe that sounds mad, only one way to find out.

Was just sorting out music. Found Sister Sledge's - 'Lost in Music' where I used to be lost a lot! reminded me of times in the bar with 'My Muse'. Then N-Trance - 'Set You Free' from 1995 and it reminded me of the room I used to play it at college where my first and only child was conceived. And I was transported into the past and I realised that today I am a road only to be walked once and this road takes me here. And, I thought how I've been lost drifting down this road for ever.

It is the road that has taken up my walks. I often think can you really break a long distance walk and come back? How do you join two walks? Do you find the place, the same street, the same tree, the last set of footprints and try and make the join. Like the butterfly effect there will always be different starting conditions. The walk has been broken and that is an inescapable fact. Thus a broken long distance walk is different from doing it in one go.

As a friend once wisely said 'you've never had a break from life' (it wasn't a threat ;-). There is just one long stream with no break. We can make up a stoary to try and edit and join it all together in a nice way, but today we are where that road has taken us. And here I am. It is like having your life flash before your eyes as you see the whole road that brings you here. Standing on the Lizard in Cornwall this summer looking out over the cliffs at the sea, I am there now, in the bar speaking to 'my muse', I am ther now, in that room where I used to listen to N-Trance, I am there now.

Fantasy wealth. The dream ends?

You read the papers and listen to the news and it all sounds so complicated
about why this is happening. A friend alerted me to what was going to happen
many years ago based upon the fiat currency argument (that inflation was
being created by endless unbacked credit). It seems a bit simpler to me, the
cause is simply there is more debt now than actual things to buy.

Our economies are not that productive really, how much work do we really do,
and how many of us would really buy the products we create? I kust got
called today about health insurance. I said I'm not going to fall ill. How
do I know this? Because I live "carefully" and have risk factored into my
life already using "intelligence". I've spent years working in
Biointeractions which makes all its money from a coating for bypass
oxygenators. Thing is the massive rise in heart disease occurs as soon as
people start living in cities. That is as soon as they start sitting at
desks, driving cars and eating "too much" (intended tautology): all the
things they are earning money to afford. In the fields they never needed
oxygenator curcuits... so the value of what I was doing was almost entirely
created out of thin air by all the other industries (like food and
transport) which are manufacturing an imaginary market out of thin air by
getting us to eat more than we need. And the car industry does the same: if
we really need cars, how come I don't have one?

Its all imaginary wealth stoked up on imaginary needs and imaginary
products. Insurance! what a scam. Like all the gambling in the stock
markets. Clearly if it benefitted you then the insurance companies and
traders would all lose money. It is because they make money that we know
they are scamming us. They make money from nothing more than a "sense" of
risk, its not even a real product! So there is a probability that I will be
crippled today and be unable to work. You can be sure the actuaries have
done the maths and it works out that the cost of your insurance is greater
than the likelihood of that happening. So it is better to save that money
yourself! So the entire finance sector is just fake wealth, and fake
employment. And as if to prove it is unreal, the government just changes the
rule when it pleases.

The economy never really grew because humans haven't really changed. That is
a simple fact. The bubble and stuff are all imaginary, admittedly stoked by
easy credit, but that credit was only buying stuff that didn't really
exist... like "easy" transport. Its not the cars which are "easy" because in
a century with better technology car's will be a sad hassle for poor people,
its just that we think they are "easy". I still walk because I've got legs,
cars are an illusion of easiness and wealth. As copiously argued it is
actually status which gets people driving, and buying 4x4 as the latest
trend. So it is imaginary wealth. The "wealth" in a car's doesn't exist, you
are wasting your money to buy it.

This is why the system may collapse because people are now asking, what is
really "worth" anything? Well I've argued at length in the blog: love,
water, food, warmth, health in that order! these are what are "worth"
anything.

We can die happy if we have love (love meaning 'giving' freely to all, not
selfish what we 'take' from our partner). We can be strong for a long time
with water. We can keep moving and search for shelter with food. We can rest
and recover when we find warmth. There is nothing else in this whole
universe that has Real value. In the "depression" that comes we will relearn
this lesson. Cars, houses, electronic goods, this blog probably; all will be
lost. But that is good, because the "depression" is badly named, it is
actually the Homecoming out from the glittering world of illusions of the
economic fantasy in which we're been nurtured for the last few centuries.
And this will bring a smile once again to the face of our Mother, Nature,
for her children may finally be coming home again.

Roosevelt, 1930's

Pritchard-Evans quotes Roosevelt on the 30's crash,

"The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.

"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilisation. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths," he told the nation.

Rulers who apply the Law can't fail, because laws (by definition) cannot fail. The rulers are not therefore Rulers, and their seats are not High.

We are judged not by Man but by God the maker of all things. Its such a simple equation and it amazes me it has taken so many pages of blog to become clear to me.

It ran out of room.

Reading about the property bubble in Moneyweek, "This bubble stopped growing simply because it ran out of room. It just couldn't get any bigger. " I suddenly realised that apply this to Capitalism and this is the argument against economic growth. There is no reason for economic growth except for fluctuations in population. I've argued this at length before. The only possible reason for 'interest' in it is exactly that, so the Capitalists can get a second income from the money they already have. A ludicrous system but one that seems to get parsed without complaint by most people - I suppose because they get there pittance in bank interest. So the rich have every reason to expand the economy in any direction it can go: from deforestation, to obesity in children, to IT and housing booms.

The degregation of the planet has everything in common with the housing boom and the root lies in the ability to get returns on capital. Abrahamic religions outlaw this practice within their communities, yet we seem have to forgotten this.

We can blame Greenspan for keeping interest rates low and putting off the IT crash, we can blame food companies for unscrupulous exploitation of children, we can blame cigarette companies when at root it is just people trying to get rich, and worst the investors looking for any rising price to invest in.

The problems go to the heart of the modern world, and to the heart indeed of humanity and its history. Question are we closer to resolving, or closer to forgetting there is a problem... i think the latter. And when the boom that is human race runs out of room then what?

The rules of the game...

Got my mums TV on next door and catching stuff from the news on Wall Street about gambling strategies factoring in the uncertainties of government decisions.

What I have been focusing on in the last few months about the nature of Laws and Rules is so obvious. Peoples lives are made and broken on the financial rules. People say that life is tough, it is a dog eat dog world, the fittest survive etc etc yet all these things are not Laws but the rules of the game. When the establishment comes under threat suddenly the rules all change. It is what we always knew, it is a gigantic game.

This places economics in the same camp then as the IRB (International Rugby Board) discussing the benfits on the game of raising the try value to 5 points (from the original 4) or switching possession after a stalled ruck or maul. These were calculated rule changes that were seen to improve the game. Just as the laws of economics are. But unlike real Laws they are not Real, and they can be changed.

So all those people who make and break lives within the rules of the economy and employment are actually not Really making or breaking their lives! Their measure is artificial and can be changed over night. Imagine if gold was confiscated again by the government, or money was abolished! In a second the lives of many who were "made" would suddenly be broken. How fragile this world of illusions!

Yet the true realities of food and health, these Laws remain regardless what the "law" makers say. It is amazing how our eyes are so completely obliterated from Reality by this pantomine of status and social order.

Whatever happens in the economy, in politics, in national defence, in the law courts or in any such arenas none of this is real. The spring comes, and the grass grows all by itself.

Sadly however the not seeing of Reality has profound impact from Real poverty, sadness, selfishness, greed, and destruction. What solution can there be to this oldest of human illnesses?

Happiness IS within

Been home a couple of weeks now, and its the longest I think since I left college in 1996. Yesterday while walking and feeling less than perfect about things, I opened my eyes to the beauty which we have in the fields opposite our house in 7oaks and I though wow compared with London and where I am in Reading we are very lucky here. Then I realised better than ever before that of course our circumstance is NOT what defines our experience, but our mind, or more accurately our brain. It is the brain which experiences after all. It is a perfect world already, it is just that we can't see it because of the clouds of negativity.

Last night in that asleep but cogent state I am getting of late, I was able to see that thought right through. Reality has NO form. We don't say of something that it is "hot" until we experience a sudden "increase" in temperature. But increase from what? Normality doesn't look or feel like anything! we just don't think about it but it doesn't mean it isn't there. When we are absorbed into a world of thoughts we don't notice the formless world all around. When absorbed into our thoughts we even try to do mad things like "be normal" as though normal was something discrete and identifiable. Bad scientists are always trying to quantify the "normal".

Good scientists however simply quantify the abnormal, and the abnormal is quantified. The abnormal like negativity can be quantified and thought about. The abnormal like unenlightenment and suffereing can be thought about and analysed. The normal, the positive and the enlightened cannot be thought about, they are what remains when we have let go of the abnormal, the negative and the suffering. At least last night I understood the nature of enlightenment and why it cannot be found directly. It is found simply by ridding oneself of the "not-enlightened" aspects of ourself.

"Being Good" which is an important part of ridding oneself of negativity is not strictly meaningful. We can never be good, because what does good look like? Goodness is normal. It is rather as Buddha described it "doing no evil, ever!".

Likewise the bliss of enlightenment is not a state of mind to chase away the blues. Rather it is what remains when we have let go of the things which give us blues. It occurs behind us and it's light shines forth into the world we see ahead of us.

This is what I "understood" but its damn hard getting all this into reality! What I'm looking for I guess is that I do no evil, and that I seek the welfare of others. Jonny Wilkinson says it perfectly...this is the goal, what the light of enlightenment looks like when it falls on the thinking mind...

“My motivation today has nothing to do with status, money or ego. Before, I wanted to be the best in the world and I would watch other players to see how I measured up. Now, when I do something great on the rugby pitch, it is not about being better than others but about exploring my talent.
“My fulfilment is no longer about self-gratification. It is about seeing the happiness of others.”

Just change the rules

I'm not sure where I stand on economy anymore, I seem to have taken an opt out for all human activity at the moment especially since the realisation that it is primarily (at least 50%) to do with status and nothing else. Call me materialistic but in the realm of ideas it doesn't really matter does it? They are just ideas. When we talk of reality we speak only of material reality. So how do the ideas of economics impact on material reality? They don't decide when the sun rises, the seasons, the rain, the growth of plants, the time we have to plant seeds and harvest, to engineering behind buildings, the workforce to build... in fact they don't seem to have anything to do with reality at alll... except that when there is an economic downturn everyone "thinks" the world has changed when really its just a change in mood. And what do they do to prove this? They change the rules of the game. It raises the question then, why do we have the rules we've got? and who gets to chose them? Well we can be sure at least 50% is a feature of maintaining the status of the rule setters. How vapid and pointless.

We talk about employment in the same manner as we talk about economy. If we can have a large percentage of the population out of work in an economic downturn then why do they need to work at other times? We speak of the downturn as though it was abnormal and undesirable? Its just rules of a game, why don't we plan around the features of the "downturn" rather than the features of the "up turn". Now I'm home for a bit I've argued with my mother on this subject. She seems convinced that "unemployment" is bad for you, physically and mentally. I point out to her its just a word. I am far more active mentally and physically than I was in that battery farm of employment. Just look at animals in a farm... that is employment and compare that with their "natural" circumstance. What is the natural circumstance of man? Humans work all the time, it just gets different names depending upon whether the establishment endorses it. Yesterday I baked break, went for a walk and collected blackberries to make jam for the winter, wrote an essay for a friend, read more about the economy and a book on weather, wrote some music, up dated devices on my computer. Compare that with a monotonous day at work doing really very little in reality (since I've noticed "positions" in a company contract to make use of the available work and appear useful - Parkinsons Law - and reading that recently I feel a strong solidarity with Mr Parkinson for I feel we criticise the same thing - that business and employment is about finding people "positions" not about the actual labour they will achieve once there.) Is a "position" in the establishment really worth the atrophy? Yet I realising that a "position" is one of the psychological "needs of man". Between the devil and the deep blue sea we are, am working on a solution to this within myself, after all can't we just change the rules?

Derren Brown on Desire

How brilliant this guy is, and the point? He says in a nut shell that we select evidence to support those ideas that we desire. Buddha would "agree".

So what is his desire? His desire for "truth"? My friend the Ouroboros is back in town. If truth is simply another desire like all the others then it cannot be separated from falsehood and so dies.

Are we trapped by desire then, automata whose minds cannot escape the wishes. Machines programmed to fulfill our wants. All things become good because all things have the same origin, that of desire. Is this what I desire? To subsume into desire myself? Well for all Dionysus' temptation we know that there is non-desire also. What of this? A desire to be liberated from desire? A desire which seeks non-desire. And, the void which seeks desire to fill itself?

This is as far as I've gotten and I have nothing to say beyond this. I realised today in quite irrational discussions with my mother that at root the rationalist like myself has to accept that a large section of society, and a large section of even rational minds, operates without any wish to make sense. My mother openly rejects all attempts to rationalise and correct herself. The issue of the plug at the wall remains and she positively rejects any channel toward being educated about electrcity. Her "thought" is hers and she will protect it. But of course so do I. And my wish stems from not wanting to contort myself around the dressing table. (See a recent post for the laborious details of this ultra-mundanity). But it is my wish to move beyond the mundane and the boring which is my desire in this dispute. Quite what my mother's desire is remains a mystery.

So we have a world of people with desires and simply force as a means of resolution? Except this is not true. But there is nothing else I can say beyond this, until I can speak without desire! otherwise I will simply promote those ideas which I wish... and even here is tis what I wish. Well actually I'm just speaking into space without much analysis ... just a wish that oneday I may write something that looks like truth since no-one else seems to be writing it...

Nesting genes are in women

This is not the best quote about the point but it will do today "81% of
women questioned said that they would 'consider buying a house in the
current environment' whereas a mere 30% of men would do the same". I noticed
a discussion board llast year in which the male writership were unanimous in
identifying their (non gay) partners as the driving force behind buying a
house against their reasoned thought that they were over priced. Long before
this I noticed the behaviour of my friends and their partners. I've set the
date at 25 years after which the "nesting gene" kicks in for the human
female (its part of the "baby gene" which they may not be directly aware of
at this stage). It involves finding a man with an income, and then some
property and then its DIY and renovations and just when you think its all
over, the baby. Nothing wrong with this gene, but its the unilateral and
apparently unconscious way that women operate which alarmed me. In a world
without women I think men would continue in quire relaxed bachelor type
lifestyles, quiet drinks in the pub on week days, trips away at the weekend
fishing or other sports. Buy the odd gadget or car, spend the weekend in the
garage with it, do reading the usual stuff. For women it seems totally
different - there is a powerful drive, against their control to procreate
and provide an enviornment for this. Its completely overwhelming for
females, something men will never experience I think. All nature had to do
for the male was to make them suckers for sex and provide a cocktail of love
drugs to get them attached to a girl and she would do the rest. Or so it
seems this way to this unmarried, unpartnered, heterosexual male. I've sort
of sensitively asked people how it all works, they say it is mutual but I
still get the sense its very much the woman thing still. So is the "nesting
gene" responsible for the subprime crisis?

In the last quote remember the Jewish story - it certainly makes the point
that because man ate the apple offered by the woman he is punished by a life
toiling in the fields... or so it might have felt for our ancestors as they
struggled to provide a living for his family.

Just an interpretation the above, but its an idea I've toyed with for a very
long idea.

Sex in Africa

Promiscuity seems to have had a large effect on life in Africa. Firstly I
bought a pocket book of Arican wisdom a few years ago and unlike all the
other wisdoms I know it is flavoured by hard worldly facts, for example: 'if
you mend a man's bollocks, he'll use them on your wife'. That is very much
the tone.

My walking partner on holiday confirmed something else about the inequality
between men and women. Women always know who their children are, men never
do. In Africa this is expressed by the great attention given to nephews. A
nephew born of ones sister is a more reliable male link, than one born of
your own wife! (Assuming of course that your mother didn't lie to you and
adopted either of you - evidently not a feature of African society).

The Bible on Employment

Some famous lines from the Jewish version of the story of employment + some others

Genesis 3:17
17 ...Because thou... hast eaten from the tree...; cursed is the ground...; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of they life.

Matthew 6:25-34
25Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
26Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
27Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
28And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
29And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
30Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
31Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
32(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
33But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
34Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Another interesting quote...

Matthew 7:1-2
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

Note: That is exactly what is expressed in the idea of Karma.

Matthew 6:19-21
19Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
20But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
21For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Note: This same point is identified in the East as the law of impermanence.

Matthew 6:24
24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Note: this is where I don't understand the East but do Jesus, mammon being worldly wealth (and greed etc). You can't pursue capital (business) and pursue goodness at the same time. (As we are seeing in the financial markets at the moment). If agreed it follows that anyone who preaches both is a false prophet, especially when they proclaim to be a Christian!

Everytime I read the Sermon on the Mount which isn't often it becomes all the more remarkable. It took many years study of Buddhism to begin to understand what Jesus was really saying. It is not as I thought as a child that this stuff is easy to understand, but that it is the most profound stuff we will ever be fortunate enough to read! Sorry it is that arrogant folks, like myself, once thought we could make worthy comment upon it!

Status, Truth, God and Self-Reference (summary point)

A simple situation seems to bring a lot of this blog together.

My mother is trying to save electricity. We had the TV plugged into an adapter with a light on it. She would switch the adapter off at the mains, and therefore the light, each night. Since the switch was behind a dressing table it was tricky. So when I came home I switched to an adapter without a light and turned the TV off instead. But, she persists in turning it off t the mains. I explained to her that no electricity was travelling through the wire when the TV was off so there was no need to contort around the dressing table. She does not listen.

Now what is interesting is the way the discussion has progressed and karmically I am well familiar with this one because it is identical with arguments at Biointeractions and untimately identical with arguments held over Iraq.

I explain what I see as my mothers own desires and the reality of the situation. The solution to me is simple.

My mother however dislikes not having her own way. So her argument procedes that this house belongs to her and therefore we should do things her way.

I return the argument that what she wishes for doesn't change the reality.

She then gets tired and stops discussion.

I return on this point of silence that it is this attitude of ignoring reality which is where the problem is arising. And she will respond that I am insolent and should respect her elders.

So there it is: the two positions that I have argued at length in this blog laid bare. How can a world succeed where there are two opposing attitudes: the truth and status. They are not exclusive since one would hope that people with status would speak the truth, but if this were true then we would only have truth. It is precisiely because they are not identical that gives us the two worlds.

So what is truth then and how do we know when people with status are wrong? A doctor for example has a medical status because of their training. We would be foolish to offer our own medical opinion as correct in contradiction of a doctor.

Firstly however both the doctor and the layman know that their judgements will be tested by God. It is not the doctor's status that makes him correct, but his knowledge of reality which is not of mans creation but of God's. A doctor gains his status because of accordance with Reality. The status a doctor has is bestowed upon them by God because they have taken a great deal of time out to listen to God and find out how the body is. But the lay person can listen to God also and they may know things the doctor doesn't know. The commonest is the case where a doctor fails to diagnose something and the patient persists in seeking treatment. Eventually if illness is found then indeed the doctor is shown to be wrong. If the continue to be wrong then their status will be questioned.

So status in this sense is short hand for truth. I am the first the respect expertise and practice and humility in the face of a discipline develop expert people. But what I question is the ontological notion of status - that there really is such a thing as status which exists by itself. All people with status only have this status by virtue of their qualities. If they do not possess these qualities then there is no longer status.

In aristocratic circles one does not gain aristocratic status arbitrarily. One is educated and refined so as to fit into such circles. The aristocracy will identify a phoney instantly but as Pygmalion illustrates to fake it would require intensive training. (Shaw is testing exactly the same conceit I am questioning, but to do so illustrates never-the-less that there are skills and qualities involved). And the qualities extend far beyond superficia like accent, they involve the profound notion of Gentleman which is the British version of the originary notion of Noble (Arya in Sanskrit). Primarily Buddha teaches both Europeans, the Indians and the Asians in between, how to be Gentlemen; this is why he teaches Noble (Arya, Gentlemanly) Truths.

However one would hope that the aristocracy would protect themselves from pollution by rejecting even the highest figures who proved of lower quality. And, it is here where the world has over the centuries has run aground. For actually people think that status runs in the blood and once it has been acquired it cannot be lost. And they believe this because, especially with American values, capital has become the measure of status. It follows in American circles that a murdering child rapist of no respect or decency who wins the lottery suddenly has the same status bestowed upon them as a good person of equal capital - as has happened. This absurdity alone dispells the myth of money and status. Yet that very myth is the foundation of the new world (brave it has too be).

When we respect someone of status we are admiring the qualities which we take on faith they have been acknowledged to possess. We may not have the skill or judgement to determine this for ourselves, so we take on faith their status. But and enormously important this status has no standing outside God - the Reality whose rule and measure will judge those who pronounce truth as correct or incorrect, and those who claim status as worthy or unworthy.

In the Olympics recently it is easy to see. God is the distance of the 100m, the time of the clock, that which puts limits on human strength and endurance. When the athetes train they are obeying God, they are undertanding the nature of the bodies and the world in which they live so that they can master them. When they win it is the measure of God which enables them to win and claim their status as champions. If God did not measure each person with the same rulers then maybe I could win and then what meaning is fastest person! We have put names upon the rules (meters, seconds) but we have not made the rules. And the winners can claim status today, but if they wish to remain the fastest they must continue to train. Fastest does not last forever, God makes sure of that.

So we return to my mother and myself. My mothers claim that this house belongs to her and therefore gives her the right to have her way is a claim to status. My claim that this is not "my" way but "the" way is maybe also a claim to status. Her way I note here is what I call "fascism" because it operates in an impersonal way without regard for reality. So what is the foundation of her fascism? My approach is fascist also if I impose it upon her, but the significance of truth is that she can be correct also. Doing things her way only she has authority, it is antisocial and egotistical and individualistic. Not enough said unfortunately to complete this so I must say some more.

Now many people claim to know God and fantically believeing that they are right and in accordance with the one true reality they feel justified in persecuting the infidels. This is identical to the status approach that I am questioning. However this is where the as yet incomplete anti-self-reference argument steps in because there is one thing you cannot do and that is determine your own correctness! Correctness is bestowed upon you by God. If you are a scientist you research by looking very carefully and patiently at phenomena to see how they work. Indeed you will fashion an idea of how they work from your research, but that idea only has value if you have listened hard enough to what Reality was telling you. You are a prophet of God. And it is the Reality which determines the value of your idea, not you or the idea itself. Now people gain status when God bestows correctness upon them - this is one of the appeals of research and of listening to God. It is interesting in reflection why some scientists argue against God since it will be God who determines if they are correct or not! Scientists do however have a problem in explaining their theories to those who are unwilling to listen either to them or nature. Global warming would be an example. Evidence has mounted in favour of scientific theory. God has bestowed the listeners with correctness. Amazing however that non-listeners ever thought that they might be correct! Now are the religious fanatics listeners of non-listeners to God? They have learned lots of stories, and listened to people who talk a lot about God - but have they listened to God themselves? Have they actually been silent and looked at the world and listened to God's creation? I suspect that the answer to that is "no", and this is the failure of fanaticism. And what of the status their teachers have? The very fact that the West so easily rejects the status of Jihadist clerics goes to show how shallow status is without Real qualities. This is why they reject the status of secular leaders so easily for what qualities do our leaders really have in the eyes of God and Truth? Give me a chancellor who is an expert in economics seems to be an obvious start!

So maybe my mother misunderstands my claim of truth as a claim to status, and there lies the problem - maybe there really are people who don't understand the different between reality and illusion, between truth and falsehood. I always say to my mother that if she says that the sky is green it makes no difference who she is, it remains blue (on a cloudless day obviously) - the lesson of King Knut. And, she must realise that to put her hand in fire is foolish not because she disobeys authority but because the fire is hot. Maybe, and I'll experiment with her to find out, she really doesn't understand. On the other hand my alleged boss who calls himself an "eminent scientist" has no excuse to be making this error!

Quickly on self-reference. in Pygmalion he says:

Eyes, and their objects, never must unite;
Some distance is requir'd to help the sight.

It is for this reason that we cannot be both object and subject. We cannot examine or know ourselves. The imposibility of this loop is how we know that God exists. And let Mr Dawkins get off his seat because whatever he says I will ask him why he did not say the opposite. And he will say because what he said is true, and the opposite is false. And I will say, and what made the difference? That we find ourselves up against a measure, a gigantic ruler which enables things to be true and false, correct and incorrect is itself beyond our own enquiry because our enquiry cannot examine itself. And why cannot it examine itself? because of God. Its not satisfying though, I want a solid argument... I want that up against a ruler... and where is such a ruler going to be found? That is why God can't be tied down, he is the rule we are using to straighten things out in this world out. I guess Dawkins has been standing so close to God for so long he can't see the spectacles on his own nose!

Right off the see if there is a way to resolve this otherwise quite trivial issue of the TV switch :-)

Funeral

It is a sad day too for a friend who holds his fathers funeral today. I was so exhausted and feeling ill today that I decided not to go. I am really falling apart. It was a beautiful day today, a wonderful day for him to be happily remembered and laid to rest, and I hope his family can look back fondly and move on peacefully from this day. Omitofo to him and to everyone who remembers a loved one today.

Capital protects itself

Have you ever wondered how odd it is that we have to take time off work and pay phone bills to speak to customer services to correct errors in the performance of companies, when the people we are speaking to are being paid with money we gave the company? This is clearly so absurd yet we are expected to accept it... I tell you my patience with the world has really reached rock bottom we are so stupid - generation after generation we just accept madness.

Amazon charged me for 3 books I never oreder. Some £60. I've already spend many hours waiting in phone queues, speaking to people, and sending faxes and emails to find that they have done nothing. One girl even said when I expained the situation "so what do you expect us to do about it?". No recognition of the fact that her fellow collegues had made a mistake which amounts to theft. No recognition of the fact that this very theft was paying her salary to sit on the phone and tell me that she couldn't see a problem with it. Do you laugh or cry. At least she lives in the same madness soup as me.

But the reason is occurs to me watching the VW dealership this week (see last post) is simple. We live in a Capitalist society. Capital is used to set up companies and becomes what they are imagined to be worth. People gather around capital exactly like flies around shit. What this means however is that the flies form heirachies and then fascism and inequality breaks out around the shit. This means that flies who imagine they are at the top behave like fascist to the ones below and the force of fascism means that some flies get abused because they are sees as being at the bottom. The problem with this is that most of us are on the outside of the heirachy and so while we are the ones who do all the work and buy most of the products we don't actually have any say in the process. Thus we end up spending more money hanging around on phones trying to get what we actually paid for while the company uses our money to try and sort out their mistake. Capital looks after itself, not the worker nor the customer.

As an aside I remembered today that when I was very young I used to think companies very kind to go to all the trouble to advertise their products and let us know what was in the shops. Then someone pointed out that actually it was not kindness but simply business. If people buy your product (because you are charging too much for it and not paying the staff enough) you can make a profit (and even pay for adverts.) When that sunk in my rose tinted view of the world was shattered. But actually my child-mind was right, this is why we have adverts and business should remember this.

btw the stock market is set up wrong. Shares should not change in value, just the quantity of them. As a company grows more shares become available. As it shrinks we are forced to sell. This would be the correct distribution of wealth. Also we should not get paid dividends because they are not interest. A bank loan is eventually paid back. Dividends on the other hand are an eternal yoke around the neck of the work force meaning that the rich can tax forever a slice of the wages. We buy shares because we wish to invest in the future of the economy and that is the reward. We invest ethically and in the products that we wish to see. This is the service done by the rich. If we do not wish to do this then don't invest. You can see why the world is in such a bad state. Big dividend returns and speculation lead people to invest in companies they would never support simply because of greed. We know that military companies make money from killing people which has become big business because of its links to government, we invest in the companies cos we are greedy and try to turn a blind eye to the blood... until the guns and bombs go off in our own back yard that is.

Heirachies, fascism and inequality

One of the reasons for visiting "my muse"'s family was to have a look at a situation with the car. At root it is identical to what I saw at Biointeractions. There is a central fascist in charge surrounded by much more decent individuals who are trapped. The fascist instructs them to do fascist things and the cost of being decent is to lose their status. What is interesting it seems is that either fascists elect other fascists to take their place, or decent people become fascists when they are put in the kind of roles that are held by fascists.

Well I suspect it might both because only people with fascist tendancies would ever allow their decency to be compromised by status. And, so when they get to the top position they behave like fascists. It's an interesting transition to watch. So I referred to the head lab manager as decent compared with the company manager, but would he just become a fascist control freak if he took the top position? And I myself would never be in such a position because I can't stand bullshit and fascism and bullshit seem to go hand in hand.

So anyway "my muse"'s sister faces an identical tirade of fascist bullshit from the Volkswagen dealer and his hench men seem quite decent.

Its not a good analysis this, but the pattern is now clear in my mind. Little groups like this composing fascist top-dogs and sycophants supporting them, and these groups are stacked together. I remember the fascist manager of a supermarket that i worked at and how she would roll on her back and flutter her eye lashes when the regional manager came in store. Entirely fake behaviour - you should see have seen the sour faced creature normally - but she would take orders from him like a child being handed sweets. Then he was gone and the nazi regalia were out again.

So maybe the Nazis were not so extraordinary afterall. Their only mistake maybe was to wage war on the victors and get caught up with unspeakable acts of ethnic cleansing (the extent of which has certainly been exagerated and biased toward the Jews). But they weren't the first and they haven't been the last so there is something faulty in humans - which means me and you. And from what I realising the structures that cause inequalities and disregard for fellow human beings are all about us, we are totally submerged in a society that tolerates and totally supports inequality.

It is normally shown from the attractive side that people hold status because they are good at what they do and they have "earned" the right. But this is transparent when you look again and there is never a reason to view two people as unequal. Yes a doctor knows more than a toilet attendant about disease but that doesn't make them unequal, and their salary differences are usually excused by economics. But actually being a doctor means joining a cartel which keeps wages high and we accept all this because secretly we think that doctors are better than toilet attendants. We are in a nazi camp and we are forced to shoot either a doctor or a toilet attendant we know who we would shoot... but do we know why? But given a toilet with an attendant and one without, I wonder which the doctor would visit?

Anal Retention and sex

Sometime between being awake and asleep last night I analysed in great detail something about the relationship with "my muse". She was a psychologist maybe she aided me here. A critical part of it revolved around the moment of satisfaction. This was missed because as analysed before it was morally murky as she had a boyfriend and the complete unity that I was seeking would be impossible. So the issue of "when" and the moment became reflected upon. Now if I understand anal retention right the experience of a jolly good shit can be improved by holding back until a future occasion. This I certainly do with water where I realise that not drinking now when I'm sort of thirsty will give me greater quenching of thirst in the future. And this same structure I came to see in the relationship with "my muse". The whole thing was held in statis as the eternal waiting for satisfaction, in my mind anyway. She on the other hand went off and did her own thing.

Now at the time this was analysed completely differently. I was seeking the sexual experience to obliterate all others, no longer wishing to be tied to the usual cycle of most satisfying but still wanting more, or at least wanting more in the future. I wanted escape from this thirst. Desire was analysed as need for something we didn't have, and sexual desire then naurally desire for the female as I am male. This is why I considered homosexuality to be a negation of heterosexuality and not a thing-in-itself. It follows also that love is desire for the other and I am me. And in consummation of both sexual and spiritual beings one satisfies both the sexual and the existential incompletness. I was hoping to transcend my ego and balance my sexuality all in one go and once and for all. This is why it became and has remained such a massive issue. The term I learned from greek was ecstasis. She certainly didn't mind me talking about ecstacy, but I wonder whether she really followed what I meant. She would rather I showed her and that was the problem. To show her required a quite remarkable moment of unity, it never happened and I was never able to abandon myself to it.

That abandoning myself to "it" was the issue. Was I supposed to initiate this in which case it was a product of my ego and so really I was just getting what I wanted, or was she supposed to initiate it in which case I was the willing object or was it suppoed to come from outside. Well I did nothing, and outside did nothing. This incidentally is what I find so beautiful about marriage that an outside entity is called to witness the bond between two people something that they cannot make by themselves - marriage is the submitting of ones ego to an outside force! Its the ouroboros again: how can one person possess the bond with another person within themselves? It must be extrinsic.

Now in my slow deliberate analysis last night I saw it differently, that I was simply delaying an experience so that it would be better when it came. This control I see as anal retention. And it is also maybe masochistic in that one is getting pleasure from denying oneself something, and in that it was sadistic in that I was denying someone else of what they wanted.

Now this feeds heavily into the analysis of celebacy and my understanding of monasticism. I have made enormous progress in celebacy. There is pleasure from celebacy. I had analysed it as the preserving of energy and the purity in not viewing women as objects of desire. Certainly as I child I had realised that spiritual clarity and academic performance was associated with celebacy. Sex makes me lazy and sluggish mentally... so does depression and so depression from not having sex or a wank can look like the same - but celebacy that stems naturally from that light feeling of being spiritually bright and pure inside is different. It is energy and I was generating it on my walk and people were influenced by it. Since coming home all that has collapsed, I am exhausted, iritable and unwell! The demons are winning, but I think this is how it seems when you finally start swimming against a tide.

However let me view celebacy with anal retention glasses. Does not sex become an issue of control and we gain a masochistic pleasure from denying ourselves it, and we gain a superiority from having mastered it?

Tie all that in with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and it sort of fits together. The obsessiveness, the tidyness, the need to organise things, to master things, to understand things, to control things stems then maybe from a fundamental behaviour pattern of seeking control over ones satisfactions by delaying the moment. Or does the OCD make me behave like this to my desires?

Also, regarding the blog, the search for a view of life that is true, could this be viewed as a need to control? People have said to me before that I shouldn't think, I should just experience life. Plato has the most famous response to that. But my experience of life leads me to think because what people say and what I experience are totally different. Do control issues lead one to master their world, or is it a natural response to dissatisfaction and the wish to find satisfaction?

Maybe it is easier at this stage then to simply give up seeking satisfaction. Well that is very close to where I am and being celebate in that view is part of that.

So I go around in circles. But, at least that musings in my sleep are recorded.

Universal v Particular

I have been staying around the family of "my muse" this week, this is her old computer, her pictures on the wall and at last I have some objectivity about the situation. She was an extraordinary person by any rating, but her specialness to me no longer obscures her reality - my mind is in balance again.

This is the risk then of so much of our living that we let our own existence and our own particular view of things become more important than the universal sharable view. It is not to say that we all have to think the same thing but just to make sure that our view does not centre about that which Buddha calls "individual existence". This is where desires become so dangerous because clearly our desires are manifest in a single body, the extinction of that body is the extinction of those desires - this is their only locus, they are that insignificant. Yet upon these desires so much in the world is influenced and for what? a single body.

Compare these desires with social living, with compassion, care, respect, love they are not physically tangible desires with the goal of oneself. Strictly also they do not have the goal of "others" either since this is simply the painful rejection of oneself and no-one likes that. It is a completely shift of driving force away from that which originates within this frail extinguishable body to live in the regions beyond.

I come to this not through an understanding of love but most easily in seeing the error of being so obsessed with things which only really interested myself. Of course we need to nourish ourselves, keep ourselves out of harms way, find warmth - but these are so easily realised. If people could manage it 100,000 years ago without machines and complex socities how much more easily should it be done today! Managing our personal needs should be a trivial part of our lives, just a hour or so a day, and becoming more trivial with each generation.

Instead our lives should be lived in the universal, focused instead upon the well being of the world and the humanity and life in which we live. A transition I hope might be occuring to myself.

I have watch some American films this week: "The Stranger" - in the cinema and "Death Sentence" and "American Beauty" on cable. It is sickenly apparent in these films that our whole existences revolve around our own needs with almost hyperbolic rejection of other people. These are just films but it is disturbing that the writers think that the audience will accept this view of the world. Of course there is the animal within us which wants self-protection, revenge, death and destruction. But it is a very small animal. American's shoot animals with impunity, even human's with some justification, how easy it should be to shoot their own animal? Yet in these films there are endless examples of total disregard for everyone but oneself.

Protecting ones family and friends does not count as selflessness. It is better than screwing them and protecting oneself, but it is still particular interest. As Jesus would have reminded us, "Love your enemy". American call themselves Christian yet I believe they love their enemy less than any other people. It is all about protecting oneself and destroying the enemy. Its great when you are winning, its very scary when you are someone's enemy and you are losing.

Buddha declares "there is no longer survival" on his enlightenment. Reading this a few months ago lit a very strong beacon in the direction of travel. To transcend the petty existence, the existence prone to buffeting by the oceans of local changes, to step toward true security, and ultimately to diminish the significance of death is the same path as to step over our obsession with our "own existence".

Yes I may have won "my muse", yes I may have lost "my muse", yes she may have died, yes I might have died - really do these things concern anyone but ourselves? Only in that everyone faces the same problems. We see the story written in a story or a blog and we think, that's not happened to me, or yes I can feel that, but that "particular" instance is not mine, that is someone else. Yet the beauty of the story in not in the actual events, but in the ability to share it, to experience that rising of the universal - that shared world which takes us beyond the worries of our own particular existence into a many-person world. And, I stress it is not the events of the story which counts but the story telling, having our eyes openeing to possibility of being beyond oneself - extasis as the ancient greeks once called it.

I realise as I write this Riswey, my alterego in stories I wrote "My muse" was a story teller and his great story was this book of 7 stories, the 7th having been lost (it represented the blank page of the future, which I always hoped was us), but since they were sent on consecutive days of the week upto Valentines day on Sunday it would never arrive (no post) so it was written into the other 6 stories as the lost story. The super-text of those stories was how 7 completely different stories could be connected. The protagonists were reincarnations of one another, yet they had completely different stories, the only link was the binding of the book of 7 stories. A question I was posed by "my muse", how can we be together yet be completely different people? And if we can't answer that then how can we be apart and completekly different people!? But the answer was written into the stories because Riswey defeated Death the Great separator. How ironic I was thinking at that time that death is commemorated in individual graves lined up separately side by side (just wrote that as the anagram: 'dies'!) when it is the same possibility of separation which is Death itself. Death is the cause of individuality! And so Riswey defeats death by resisting particular desire, so that he and the Goddess might be together in eternity. This profectically I'm realising today is maybe (I hope) what is happening. There is no way I admit I understood this fully at the time opf writing, and am only just beginning maybe to grasp its meaning now. That "my muse" (who to me always was a vidyadharas) actually did die just as the goddess died in the stories seems strangely irrelevant. The real meaning of this is beyond individual existences of her and myself.

A feeling of guilt now, should I be writing all this on her old machine? am I writing about myself again? That I live and she had passed away, can I really call this equal? I have a voice and she does not? It is like when George Bush appropraited the 911 disaster to his own political aims, speaking on behalf of the dead as though they would all have backed the wars. What would "my muse" who has her own name but I don't feel I have the right to use it, tell if she could speak her story? Even this speak of universal and particular is particular because it is my narrative. Maybe silence speaks of the universal better than what "I" have said... so I won't invade the silence that follows...

Jim Dreaver

Just caught this guy on a cable channel http://www.jimdreaver.com/... particularly liked the way they were referring to the difference between Stories and reality. That Being is characterised by living in reality, rather than attaching to our stories about themselves and the world. This made much sense of where I've been exploring recently. Apparently he's a student of Jean Klein's Advaita teachings... whatever that is.

Society, Status, Progress & 3rd World

Why did we climb out of the trees? Why did we leave the caves? Why did we leave the wattle and daub houses? Why did we stop walking? Why did we leave the land-line? Why did we leave the 4x2?

One force is evolution. One force is practicality. But I suspect now that the biggest force was status. A study in rabbits found that rabbits spend half their time watching out for preditors and half their time watching out for each other. In rabbit society you are in a battle of life and death for social status. I am noticing that is true for humans also. Thus we worry about the size of our car not because a 4x4 is better but because it has become a status symbol.

Ask anyone why they got a mobile or a 4x4 and you will not get that answer however. It is odd that people don't recognise this primary driving force in our lives. At root arguments go on the lines that the next generation of gadgets and must-haves are qualitatively better than the last - that there has been actual progress and our lives will be "better" for getting them.

My simple counter-argument to that it means our lives were worse before and they will be even better in the future: so what is so good about now then? The truth of course is that we must stay ahead of the game to maintain our status.

If only this was just a game played out in isolation. The problem is that our status seeking leads automatically to judgements being made about other people. People who are not "up with it" must be a lower status. Naturally we deem the rest of the world as lower status then, we even place in them in a status order 1st(us/U.S.), 2nd and 3rd worlds. Then our conscience decides to get involved and wishes that their ststus be improved... which means that they get judged alongside our own status games.

Of course in the 2nd and 3rd worlds they have their own status measures. Things like ownership of sea shells, cows or feathers, ability to jump, obesity, number of wives etc. Just as in our societies status is metered out and people vie for the symbols of status.

To our eyes their status symbols are idiotic. Equally are not our own? Mobile phones, big houses, 4x4 cars etc? or if you are a teenager: the amount you can drink, the amount of sex you get, the drugs you've done?

There are rules that determine what makes a good status symbol, primarily scarcity and ability to control its distribution. Thus OBE and MBE becomes a status symbol because the establishment controls the distribution. Alva Gosson OBE. If that were possible then it would be meaningless.

Behind all this we try and justify the "value" of these things just as try to justify Forms, Species, Boundaries and Property. The 3rd world is poor and this is characterised by the poverty and starvation - surely that is Real and not just arbitrary status.

The problem with psychoses and misunderstandings is that they have an odd way of self fulfillment. What I had only suspected before was confirmed for me by someone I met on holiday. It is indeed the case that the industrialisation of the 3rd world agriculture: the closure of farms, de-education of traditional farming, the shifting to non-native cash crops and the refocusing of farming to export leaves countries very vulnerable to famine. Obviously you have a single non-native species dominating the argiculture so that land-owners can make money. A drought and the entire country is thrown into famine. People have forgotten how to get native food off the land and the infrastructure to do this has been replaced by the failed cash crops. International food prices go up and the country cannot appord to buy back its own produce. Thus starvation is caused in the source country, and all we the consumers notice is a shift in the place of origin of our cheap imports.

Pseudo-valiantoly the WHO has a meeting and plans the creation of better crops which encourage more industrialisation of the 3rd world, and a greater cost to the seeds, and we hand back a fraction of the crops as charitable AID. Local people then become expectant and dependent upon AID which fuels the deterioration in traditional skills and independence. People in Ethiopia now not only don't remember that they once could live off the land even during drought, they don't even know any more how to make cash crops for export!

When infact all it took was the removal of outside investment, slightly higher prices in our shops, and the support of traditional farming and ways of life: which we mistakenly deemed lower status.

So our misunderstandings about status are deeply involved in the creation of the very famines and poverty that our misguided consciences tried to deal with. This is the problem with misunderstanding, ignorance and what is virtually a mass-psychosis: and one that the West has had for over a thousand years and which it propagates through education both in the home countries and around the world.

Now it is a huge thing for 1 person to be saying this about such a vast system with so many great people. And, I do say this with respect and humility because it is a preposterous thing to say. And, I'm not saying that all the people have got it wrong all the time, it is just the putty with which we try to stick the world together with, to make a tidy whole that we might call Western Civilisation and Society doesn't actually exist and it is the trying to stick it together which leads great men into battle and nation building and usually ends up with them and thousands if not millions of other people dying. I speak not of Tony Blair or Henry the Eighth but Hitler and Stalin but it doesn't matter they are all the putty in a world that doesn't stick that way cos it isn't that shape.

So what shape is it? That is the question and would be a happy conclusion to the question in this blog : what is life about?

No Limits, 3rd man falacy, Just Do It, self-reference

Edges are interesting things. Do they exist? Take the edge of a chair. Does it exist? If so then where is it? Is it the last row of atoms on the chair or the first row of atoms in the air - or is it between these? If it's between these and between the electrons clouds that compose the atoms, infact we are saying it is an invisible line drawn in empty space... hmmm sounds like an illusion to me. And of course given an arbitrary photo of an atomic boundary between gas and solid phased substances like a chair and the air one would need to zoom out an awful lot before seeing the chair and then zooming in to declare the nature of the boundary. Yup it does exist! Same conclusion that Buddha came to 2600 years ago. Agregate forms do not exist in reality, only in the mind.

We know this from painting. Naive painters draw the lines around things before filling in the colours and covering up the lines again. The lines don't exist they are artefacts of human vision and human understanding of the world - a map so to speak of the mental processes involved in worldliness.

On holiday I realised that this is all a version of the 3rd man falacy - which lies behind a lot of the illusions and mysteries of this blog. This is the classic critique of Plato's theory of forms. In that theory Plato decides that things are alike in type because they share resemblance to an archetype. What makes a table a "table"? For Plato it bears enough resemblance to the exemplary Table in the realm of forms. In creationalism all members of a species are members of that species because they have resemblance (with variation) to a hypothetical exemplary example of that species envisaged by God. (In Neo-Darwinism there is no exemplary example and it is interesting why species are discontinuous. The familar zoo forms are just temporary islands in the soup of Life. 2 oppositing theories... hmmm something interesting gonna happen here). Anyway Plato's criticism of Forms is that if two real tables are tables because they bear resemblance to an ideal Table, then do not all three tables bear resemblance to a Fourth ideal and so on ad infinitum.

And, so walking around the coast and into river esturies I wondered at what point the sea became the river? There are obvious answers to this but they aren't very realistic because there is no discontinuity to see, just arbitrary definitions. In reality we are definitely walking along the coast and then there is a transition and then we are definitely walking along a river bank. Now the problem with putting a limit to the river and the sea is that we wonder as above what the boundary belongs to. Is it river or is it sea? And if this boundary really exists then doesn't it have to have a boundary between itself and the sea on one side and the river on the other... and so on ad infinitum. The hypothesis that there are boundaries between things is like Plato's theory of Forms ... just as he projected a phantasmogorical entity to support our belief in forms, so we project phantoms to support our belief in boundaries and edges.

Now seeing that boundaries don't really exist the foundations of property as a natural law get shaken. But if it is no a natural law then what is it? Just an illusion? Interesting however that just as people with psychosis can make awful misjudgements and do great harm, so people under the misconception of property can do the same thing. In a world which over produces food people can go hungry... and I assume it's not just the logistics of transport which makes them go hungry, its because it doesn't "belong" to them: a non-existent barrier makes them die!

A similar example has confused me for years also: that of thought and action. Especially if you have OCD you can contemplate the origin of Action and Will quite obsessively and be like a dog chasing its tail. How do I know what I am going to do? If I don't know then how do I know I will agree with what I do? If I don't know then how is it me that is doing it? Especially so if i don't agree with what I am about to do? If I do know that I am about to do then what decides when I am going to do it? We can contemplate doing something without actually doing it, so where does that impulse for action come from? If I don't know etc etc is that impulse me... and if I do know then is thinking the impulse enough to make you do something? Can you think yourself into action? If so then can you decide what you think, which will make you do something? If you don't know what your thoughts are going to be then are they yours... etc etc

I don't know if you followed that (maybe it's just as OCD thing). But behind it all one realises that actually like Nike says "Just Do It". That is the bottom line. As a writer once said when questioned on his new play, "you either talk about it or you write it". I've noticed that people often discuss the opposite of what they end up doing. A girl will discuss leaving a guy, only to find later that she got engaged. This is immediacy, spontaneity and freedom - acting in the moment. It is not that we don't think, but we only think about what is present at hand, we don't enter the reflective pre-planning of events because I realise its Third Man Falacy. I explain...

Searching for a material existing object to support our belief in ourselves and our choices and our plans requires Us to make choices and plans and then don't we need to search for another self to have found the first self .. ad infinitum. This is the core of the self-reference criticism. Self is fleeting and temporary, it doesn't actually exist, it can't be an entity which it can then relate to in a fixed way. Now quite whether that can be formalised I still don't know, but it applies to more than just philosophy like here.

Total Nature

Scriabin I understand had a concept of the Total Art Work - the combination of all art forms as a way of expressing the underlying Art. Identically isn't there a concept of Total Nature?

Nature from the urban perspective is a fringe peripheral entity. It is contained and entertained in a defined and limited form but we can escape it into the Human realities of literature, politics, economics essential society.

I've been developing a skeptical approach to the real significance of Society in the past few months and on the walk this enabled me to view with greater clarity a notion of Nature as an all encompassing framework upon which Mankind performs his works. Intellectually I've known this must be true, but it is hard to see when we are so brain washed by the hegemonic position of Mankind being the originator and foundation of Reality.

On this walking holiday for the first time I experimented with eating wild foods. This as Richard Mabey argues in the introduction is a great way to participate in nature. I also had binoculars to engage with the bird life properly for the first time. I've developed an old interest with insects to engage at that level also, I can add a deeper understanding of geology to that, and a growing understanding of weather.

Combine all this with my current developments in understanding Man's place in the world and the light of a "Total Nature" conception begins to shine.

Importantly this is not a "back to the trees" concept. It is simply an awareness of Truth, what Really exists in our Life. Understanding our place in the world is surely the most important thing for a Man before even he thinks about his own life. Failure to understand one's place and one fails to understand what one is.

Nature I maintain is something that we are intimately involved with on both the huge scale in terms of our planet, but also on the micro-scale in terms of the bacteria and chemistry of our own bodies. It is there in the weather, in the air, in the water, in the food, in the light, in every place. In thsi way the Truth manifests itself in so many forms that one cannot comprehend the Truth by looking at only one aspect. You cannot just be interested in ecology, or biology, geology, physics, chemistry, meteorology, agriculture etc and think that this is Nature - rather they are all required to glimpse what is a much deeper and fundamental conception.

A walk in the countryside is not a trivial pass time dictated by rights-of-way and the time allocated by an economic view it is an opportunity to involve oneself on all levels with the profound Reality that has been termed Nature.

By no means have I made any real transformation in my life, and by no means resolved a complete argument yet, but I've new confidenec in this approach that it really is better than the Hegemony.

Economy is rather in the news these days. It is interesting to note that there is no discontinuity in Nature at this time which I am aware of, and that the economic shift is entirely artificial and illusory! The fundamentals are still there: Crops are still growing and mouths still need feeding, yet the Human distribution system seems to have collapsed. Do we really need this distribution system? Many attempts have been made to re-engineer it, and with disasterous consequences. But they all fail it seems to me because they are not expressions of Total Nature, which is the only Reality.

The proof of this concept would I imagine be a fix of the economic distribution rules. But, I already know that the solution is going to be too radical for people to accept in my life time, if ever. Concepts like property and labour will be shown to be misunderstandings!

Charles Handy is the only person working in this direction that I know of. I should familiarise myself with his works. In particular an interesting statistic he produced was a trend in working hours. He placed agrarian working hours at around 20hours/week I remember. In my own life time we have seen working hours increasing. This seems counter-intuitive given techynological progress but it is a direct product not of Nature but of the economic system. We can only afford all the things we make if we work - so the loop is set up and a growing economy means endless more work. "Growing economy" is, I suspect, another error, but there is a vast wealth of doctrin behind (or more accurately generated by) this. I've discussed much already in the blog primarily that growing economy and consumerism is foolish in a world already facing limiting resources and ecological crisis.

Property is the most shakey but the hardest concept to investigate because it is so fundamental to our world view. Clearly it is illusory (taking the notion of illusion developed in this blog: that an illusion is something we believe without any evidence). If I purchase an apple then it becomes mine. Yet I would challenge anyone to show me the difference between an apple that is mine and one that is not mine. They are the same. Property does not exist in the world, it is a rule of the game, it could be otherwise, it is not Truth and it is not Real. So we are in game theory - this is where is gets complex and I've not been able to get through the maze yet. Astonishing however that John Locke's work is still (I believe) taken seriously when to my mind it falls apart so readily.

So "Total Nature" is the combined works and motives of Man that generate from and aim towards an understanding and appreciation of this most vast and profound Truth which underlies all extant things.

Back from Holiday...

Returned from an excellent holiday walking the South West Coastal Path which takes around the coasts of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall to Land's End and then back again. (Finished in Exeter so not the complete walk). Excellent because for the first time since 2003 I had been alone for 3 weeks just walking and taking the world in without any distraction or "habits" or commitments forming apart from the simple action of walking. This has been amazing for straightening out my thoughts. Have made great progress in a number of places. There is a notebook from which I will expand but just a few important results and notes...

Smiling & Talking
A great thing I discovered was the importance of smiling and talking. Meeting people with a smile, being positive to everyone, ignoring negative thoughts has a profound impact on people. People who are unhappy will become happy, people who lack motivation will be motivated and oneself? we get what we want from people - but that is not the cynical selfish purpose of smiling - that is the result of removing hindrances - everyone gains and it is a glimpse of what heaven is like. Also I realise that people are not happy to be in silence with strangers. A quick word of greeting, a joke, an observation break the ice and allow people to see ones personality - which if it comes with a smile reinforces the energy and positivity. Dressed like a tramp, holes in my walking clothes, dirty, unwashed and unshaved I was worried that people might shy from me, but with a smile and casual communication I saw people naturally see right through my exterior. We mostly don't see the exterior of people, only the inside - what a fool I've been to believe in external appearance. (We are conditioned differently to uniform may be.) These are such simple things that I have seen others master, but I have failed to understand what the secret and reason is until now.

Positive thinking is not actually positive
It is common knowledge these days that to succeed one must learn to be positive. To see the positive in one's failures or in what seems bad, so that it becomes the corner stone of the better kingdom. I was cynical of this because understood like that it seems artificial. It became clear that positivity is actually simply the removal of negativity. A true person has no negativity and no need for artificial learned positive thinking. It is only when we harbour negativity that we must take the medicine of what has been called a "positive approach" to counter the negativity and restore our true self. Put this way it makes sense to me and the apparent positive gains then have a true and "real" value.

A central narrative
It seems the problem I face and the reason for this blog is not so much the discovery of anything - this has mostly been done and if the great sages haven't done it then it doesn't need to be done! But rather the looking for a way to organise the vast amount of imformation and advice that exists about life. It is not the case that everything one thinks is correct, but it is proving extremely difficult to find a way to organise and express the opposite!

Politics & Society
It is hard to discuss contemporary society without being negative. This is a trick I must discover. I've heard many religious people speak about modernity and post-modernity and almost always despite their greatest efforts it becomes negative. An example I thought of yesterday regards that issue of the Law. Politicians need to be making laws else we have no need for them - it follows naturally then that as more and more laws are created the legal system is going to get more and more complex. Doesn't this process have to have an end? In which case we'll have to lose laws as new ones are made... and does this process have an end? Are there a general set of laws? If so then we don't need politicians just philosophers and wise people to discover the timeless laws.

General/Specific Desire
I saw a couple that gave me an opportunity to meditate upon what life with "my muse" would have been like. In that meditation I finally put to rest that issue to rest. The mistake I had made was not to make this distinction above. We can say of a species that they have general desires - like food and shelter. But for an individual particular objects must be found to meet these desires - and these desires have particular instances also. Thus one must realise - especially in the case of finding a sexual partner or soul mate of which we envisage only one desire and one object - that the desire is particular to us, and it almost impossible for the the object to perfectly match. Now "my muse" was so perfect in my eyes but I wanted to believe that she was "so perfect" in reality so that my desire might have real true satisfaction. I imagined that she was "so perfect" to everyone and so didn't make a play of my desire thinking it was her choice that counted. In reality however she was nothing and it was the strength of my desire that made her so special, and where I failed was to prove that. However in proving that I also prove that she is nothing outside the walls of myself and that the object of my hearts desire is no more than a self delusion of no true substance. Realising this deeply at last the phantom evaporated and I was free from the lure of my muse and women! Now I see that if one wished to express the general desire of our species one must face the dukkha of particular existence - nothing wrong in that - but only if we see that there is no salvation from imperfection of illusion in marriage or any such personal-desire relationship.

The World is Mad
Without criticism I can say that were world sanity and insanity to be put on the scales they would tip far toward insanity. Returning to the city from the walk and the simplicity of the sky, the land, the animals and the people who work the country you notice how shut down everyone is. I guess because we see so many people in such a confined space all communication stops to ensure that we actually get around! But it leads to an odd unnatural environment of neutral interactions. Its ok when you get thrown into it because you can see that it is odd and unnatural - but when its all you know (as it becomes after months of habituations) - then you normalise odd and unnatural. And, this is just regarding conduct in the open spaces. How much else is unnatural? We'll almost all our existences in dense cities has taken on a life of its own with no guide and no root and it can't just be me who is bewildered about what is true anymore. The Iraq war was definitely a total shift to insanity and that was what finally taught me that pursuing the other direction was right. I'm beginning to see that this was right, but it involves undoing centuries of normalising what is odd and unnatural. Milk comes from cows not supermarket tetrapacks. Cows make it from the grass they eat which grows from the sun and the rain - all are free if you can find them. There is no economics, politics, property, buisiness, labour to be done here - only God. We are in an age where this has been almost forgotten, even while the books tell us vastly more than ever about the process! Insanity is the norm these days, so it shouldn't be a worry that things don't make sense. The only thing to decide then is whether we're gonna try and get sane again? Sadly I made that decision when I was a kid before I realised what a huge job it was.

OCD, Depression & Demons
Speaking of insanity I finally got to grips with this mental illness that I realise I've had my whole life. I guess the moment to realise you need help is moment you are cured. Well this might have been quicker with a map, but I realise that I would still have to walk the distance of curing it regardless. It begins with depression (which in my case always begins with failed love, or is the love because of the depression?). Depression removes one's motivation. Then we are weak if there are any other problems (demons). I say demons because problems are not passive, they will try and get you (even without a paranoia demon ;-) and we must work against them wisely and critically. I see the same action now in personal issue demons as in quitting cigarettes. Cigarette demons try's all the tricks - a favourite is "you've done really well in resisiting cigarettes this week, why not celebrate now by having a cigarette" - stupid when you see it, but this thought will be sugar coated and make real sense when the demon strikes. A real problem I have is OCD - that is Obsessive, Compulsive Disorder. It was trivial as a kid making me tidy up my room too much! But when depression strikes then suddenly it becomes powerful. Combine this with a misunderstanding I have. I did a few bad things as a kid and then thought I must be a bad person deep down so therefore I must cover up this badness by learning to be good - the fear then being that one day that deep down badness will break through the repression again and make me do something bad - the worst being to kill somone. Reading the papers I explained other peoples horrible behaviour in the same way and so became fearful that repression was all that lay between me and being a murderer! Then you discover the compulsive part of OCD and think that it is the repressed evil side and the obsessive side can have a field day. Throw on the petrol of depression and the fire gets out of control. So the mind goes around and around in circles and you have no idea what is going on. Oh and I did some drugs which really helps too :-) Well over a very long time I've unravelled this, but not without finding a very useful webpage a few years ago which explained in perfect detail what is impossible to see for oneself : that the compulsion cannot become real. It is not actually going to end up in physical action. This is a brilliant way to intercept the OCD cycle, because it is that fear that we are just about to do something which fuels the obsession.
Listening to the Russell Brand show on Radio 2 they joked about meeting the queen and strangling her and how when you are faced with really important moments the reality can make you freak a bit. This is OCD. Its obviously a common thing, just gets out of hand in some people (maybe during depression). (Infact aren't all mental illnesses just extreme versions of normal abberations? Its not like the mind is rock solid all the time!). I put a lot of OCD and ADH etc down to reduced Omega 3 in our diets these days! This really does take the edge of these mental events.
Anyway, what evolves from OCD worries is a host of misunderstandings, fears and behaviour patterns which in my case I'm only just beginning to shake off. The main one is the fear that an OCD attack will occur on a plane or busy train and I obsess about punching or hurting someone or shouting. This I don't actually want to do (that's a clue as to what is happening if we think about it). The fear that it will happen then becomes much more crippling than the OCD and creates almost continual anxiety and fear, which leads especially when depression has weakened us to agoraphobia when we are afraid of it happening almost all the time in public and even sometimes in private! Its a real maze of issues all stemming from misunderstandings at the outset. A good way I found to face anxiety on the holiday was to understand that we must do something really frightening every day! So that when fear is happening, rather than try to get away from it like a depressive who can't be bothered, we take it as an opportunity to do our days frightening thing.
OCD has it's good side though because it makes us very perfectionist and aware of being good. By the time I throw this off I should have almost perfect morality (will have to see if that lasts; demons are very cunning!). But it is important to throw away Freud and realise that the human brain is always changing and with persistent training we can evolve our brains in favourable directions - just as with carelessness we can let our brains get clogged up and go bad. It is also important to realise that the true-self is neither a thought, nor even our brains themselves and that with wisdom we have the power to completely mastery of that organ. The true self is pure-goodness which we must work to reveal with wisdom and attention to positive thinking and living a good life. This is not negotiable, this is the only way to happiness. Important to understand if we are to escape the confines of bad habits, brain weaknesses and demons. Demons won yesterday, but on the score card I'm still well up for the holiday :-)

Work and Fascism
Finally got this old problem under the spot light. The issue is that people have basic needs and so they need to work and most do so quite freely and with good attitude. Sadly however (people being what they are) doing an honest days work is not as simple as that. To do an honest days work we have to accept a system of control and in so doing we hand power to the establishment. Thus the establishment exploits the needs of people to gain control over them. This has riled me ever since I faced the job market but I could not see clearly where the problems lay. Looking deeply into the system then "property" is one of the central lynch pins of this explotation. Now this sounds like standard left wing criticism but when I get through this (this is the one part that didn't get far on the walk) it will be not anti the hegemony but hopefully supportive of it - not wishing to be negative that is. There that novel out of this too - Anura (in progress).

Wise words
These words got me through a lot on the walk. "The difference between one route and another when walking is oneself". Often there were many routes to the same place around the coast and one day I realised that the only difference between them was myself. The hard one is only hard when we are weak and negative. Thus when I was tired and exhausted or the day had gone badly I saw that it was just myself that had changed not the world around me. Despite this the demon often raised its head of criticising the terrain, the weather or the world when things got hard - but through this process I got quite good at seeing that really it was just me I was criticising. My positivity failed hugely at a critical moment when I bit a wasp and got stung on the tongue - so much anger was generated by the pain that I had to camp early that day. These demons are strong and we need to work very hard with clarity of mind (which we must get by walking or whatever) to retrain them.

Calories+Sun dials
Realised that all my dietary considerations need to be updated from 2003, I just don't get 5Mcal (5000Kcal) a day. Also my sundial information on the webpage is slightly wrong. The shadow cast from a sundial is only correct when the arm is parallel to the axis of the Earth. Need to update my webpage on both counts.