My Mother...

...is the latest on my hit list of idiots. Well she has always been but it's as far as it can go now. She is on the verge of a mental breakdown which is obvious when you see how her brain works. Worst of all she won't listen but instead uses her many years to talk infinitely (not allowing anything in). I don't know much myself but I can see she has made some massive errors in her mind. Not wishing to detail much of the insanity but for future reference here is an example very like the bike situation. She spends many hours a day turning off electric lights and berrating people in the house for leaving them on or having more than 1 swtitched on at a time. She is not wrong here in terms of enviornment - I try to use as much solar as I can. The problem tho is her argument is to do with money and I have suggested better ways of saving money. A 100W bulb uses 1kW every 10 hours which cost 10p - that is 24p a day and £88 to leave on all year. We have energy saving so that is £18 to power all day, every day for a year. Now she simply isn't interested in doing the maths she just wants to wander around the house being busy and lecturing. Maybe this is one origin of my campaign against busi(y)ness? Altho really I know it lies in the environment and Nature.

However at the same time as she wants money for the upkeep of the house she refused last weekend to let me take a tree down preferring to hire a tree feller at £200+. For a morning's work I consider that a lot of money but in my mother's head that is worth less than a 100W equivalent light bulb on every day for 11 years! What can one do? And I remember now the real problem is that no matter how much I go along happily with her idiotic requests she considers me unhelpful because I don't do what she wants when she wants it. It seems that executing her orders, giving her the sense of control is the point here: nothing practical at all. Arguing this now I see the problem :-) My bosses had the same attitude: regardless how idiotic, they simply want the sense of control. Famous example was my lab boss being ordered by the MD to clean out the bins a few hours before they were due to be emptied anyway and right at the critical point of the week where orders had to be completed. My bosses failure to agree with this was mentioned at every appraisal for quite a few years! I feel that the problem at the temple might have been the same. The Abbess said I was egotistical. This I interpreted after a lot of thought was not what it seemed but rather meant I was not respectful of her ego. So my mother, bosses and temple at least seem to have one root: the desire for control of people. Unfortunatly I'm not the sort of person who can be controlled - it feels like death to me, a prison, a dark hole where the sun doesn't shine. Who wants to be emprisoned by someone for no reason? So its not a part of any contract I sign "being controlled". That is always for the other person to negotiate with themselves - I hold the mirror up instinctively.

Maybe this explains the bike situation too. She did say that I would never buy the bike myself - so she spent the money she owed me on what she wanted me to buy. Basically she was controlling me.

Wow hallelulah. All this makes a bit more sense now. The "idiots" are people who are trying to control me. I'm not that fussed if my mother has a nervous break-down. She had it coming from day 1 the way she has been brought up and the things she believes. It is quite natural. The problem arises when she suddenly feels that she needs me. Then as she grasps for control in her world it follows that she grasps for control of me... or the sense at least that I am controllable... "reliable" I remember she called it. So my mistake is to think that she needs things being done - of which, I pointed out to her, I have never failed her. What she sees however is not that I execute her "orders" and always get the job done well, but that I do not execute "her" orders. Which is true. I always make a job my own. As argued before here if I can't make a job my own I don't do it. It was failure to think about what they were doing and take responsibility for it that led to the Nazi atrocities - you can't take orders and make it your own at the same time. This is where friction then occurs with bosses - I do what I am paid to do, but i don't do what I am told: they are different. I've always considered the latter unprofessional - but maybe this is the subtext most of the time.

OK so I understand now, and unfortunately realise that this is just the way it is. I don't take orders. Anyone who wants their orders followed needs to find someone else, or do it themselves as I have always maintained. Which is kind of where the argument ended with my mother anyway. I simply can't be the son she wants or even needs. Where do you go after that! Sadly her way of thinking looks like its heading for a brick wall which is going to he hard on everyone my sister most. Ironic since she is the one who can't accept my way of thinking and always says it will end in my ruin. What I see now is that my way of thinking doesn't give her the security and control that her way of thinking needs, my way of thinking will end in her ruin! No wonder human relationships gets so self destructive. I will have to think about how we can both survive when she is demanding of me my opposite and my way of simply living my life is actual perceived as a treat to hers! For now I'm on holiday and I said to her I wasn't coming back and she was no mother of mine anymore. That should gain her infinite distance from the troubles that she sees in me. What might have been a mis-calculation in retrospect was that this was all kicked off because she was off to the funeral of a friend of hers (about the 10th who has died of cancer). I've pointed out to her that at her age death is something she has to face - yet she persists in her quaint worldly thinking and just seems to dig herself deeper and deeper into depression. Why she is so beligerent and determined to keep up a show for the Jones (whoever they are) and not face the realities of life is beyond me. It is a lesson never to follow the crowd, the Jones or the hegemony because when you need them they aren't there for you - because they never existed! People like me who are there for my mother are considered demons because we don't follow the Jones and so can't offer the "support". While this is unpacked the critical issue is jobs - my mother considers it an embarrassment and a liability that I don't work while all my friends have top careers. There is certainly no talking to her about this when she won't even listen to simple things. Really at this point the road splits she must run with what she has got and me with what I have got. True she nurtured me as a child, but trying to keep the umbilical attached so that she can suck it all back out is not the way it works. Parents ultimately do die and she must face this.

===

Update on the above. It is highly ironic that I should be turning my back on her when she needs me most! How I get caught in these mirrors and reflections is as much a mystery as the irony itself. After cooling off I realised that I have no choice but to support her. There will be a pantomime of me feigning obsequiousness even where I know it will achieve nothing but her security. Why I can't graciously accept my position is that it makes a mockery of the belief that there is a "true" way. Obey my mother and accept her way of doing things when not only does it violate my own way, but I think her way is counter productive. By accepting her way I become an instrument to the very problem I am being asked to give assistance in. It is just something to avoid; yet I am her son and this binds me to the world in a way that I can't escape.

One thing I am learning through all this is that, particularly in human relationships: you never get a clear shot at the target. Like eons of folding, weathering and deposition, and intrusions the geology of human relationships is never the right way up (if you forgive the analogy). Sometimes layers of rock are turning upside down, folded and twisted so they point in almost any direction, and then faults cut through the mass and it is folded and twisted again... and again. It creates a Rubic cube of rock where without other clued it is impossible to find out where we started. So too with the affairs of people and the world, unweaving the mess is virtually impossible. Just look at how in just two centuries of involvement in the Middle-East and Afghanistan, of twisting allegiances and reversing political alignment, the West is so embedded that they can no longer even remember how it all started let alone how it is going to end.

So it is Peace with my mum in her frailty. Peace may not it turns out be based on Truth or hope of Resolution at all, but maybe just Peace itself and acceptance that the absurdity and counter-production of the ever-twisting-topsy-turvy-through-a-looking-glass world is just the way it will always be until death do us all part.

===

That said it occurred to me that this is already what I do in every situation. Faced with the "idiot" you cannot reason with them, they will not listen so you have no choice but to just accept things the way they are for the sake of peace. But this does not rest easy in my mind. If we are to just accept inaccuracy, idiocy, falsity without concern then how do we at the same time treat these things within ourself with concern? Once we are trained to just accept idiocy then what i find happening is that our mind has no choice but to become idiotic itself. Thus I find that the tolerance phase is short lived and very soon I have to exit the situation - that being temple, my muse, work, relationships, my mum? It is the problem that the computer HAL9000 had in the story of "2001" (odd now I think about it that my dad would have seen that film for decades and never known that it was to be the year he would die - I wonder how many times I've considered the year that will tun out to be my last). The machine has two competing rules: 1) not to harm people, and (2) not to jeopardise the mission. The conflict between these leads the "rational" machine into quite irrational behavior... a non-logical emergent property arising out of logic - maybe a suggestion of how emotions might occur in machines... which after Sartre makes sense as emotions are "magical" events which shift our mind from one state to another without any justification. Anyway the real world I'm discovering does seem to be multifaceted and people seem to revel in playing the many sides; not to harmonise and "mend" the whole but rather to lever the world apart so they can set the bits against one another for their own purposes. Trying to operate in such a fractured environment creates either apathy or mental illness... or if you are me you just walk away. This does seem my only strategy which works. Thing is I can't really walk away from my mother tho I can probably distance myself from her.

Mum will be sent mad by exactly the analysis above. She is programmed with love for me, but also programmed by her upbringing to be unable to handle my indifference to the social norms - in particular having a job. She will blow herself apart trying to marry two opposing instructions. Just writing here is it possible that she finds me an idiot then for sending two of her directives into contradiction? Shall have to consider this more.

The problem then is not as simple as I have tried to make it over the past decade or so. Faced with a contradiction we do have a serious problem then which threatens to blow us apart unless we walk away... at least that is the only solution I have found yet. Run away, live to fight another day! It is certainly not good enough to naively ignore it and try to remain peaceful and undisturbed!

== Update in 2019

My mother got a dementia diagnosis a few years ago. Having learned about dementia I discovered that she was not deliberately being hostile to me, but that she was struggling with personality changes, anxieties and confusion. It was typical of myself then to (1) assume everything was directed to myself - that is my ego (2) to assume that everything was a matter of thinking correctly - this is also ego in fact. So both my mother and myself have been on a long journey since this post and now as she declines and slowly shuts down and goes to sleep we have a good relationship of support and mutual love, and it is a chance for me to return all her care and nurture that she gave to me over all those years when I was young. The cycle of life continues forever.

Discovery or Making?

This is one of the oldest topics I ever looked at and it still looks wooly. Just quickly tying in some of the posts already gone (from memory no time to reference)...

The issue of the ""If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall?" which I didn't know but according to Wikipedia is attributed to Berkley has a parallel in Zen "what is the sound of one hand clapping?". To me there are two meanings to this. One is rational - it is the point, essential to Buddhism, that nothing exists by itself but is instead the product of causes and conditions. A single hand cannot clap because neither can two hands. It is only in the relationship of the hands in a clap that we get a sound. Thus we see that nothing by itself ever did anything, and more importantly nothing by itself "is" anything! Apply that to ourself and we have the essence of liveration.
The other way I can see to look at this is identical. The answer is NULL. Heavily discussed already NULL is an entity from computer data processing and means "not relevant". An example would be in a questionnaire where some questions were not answered - you need a meta-language to mean that the value entered is not a response to the questionnaire. Even if you added an option to the questions "respondee didn't answer" what if the questioner missed the question all together? NULL means that "within the context there is no valid answer". NULL is treated as an irrelevant ghost but it was handled in previous posts as more valuable even that answers within the context!
The answer to Berkleys question is NULL because effectively he is asking what is the answer if no-one records it. Which is the same as realising that it requires "two to tango" - which is the more romantic version of the Zen koan and which I did once want to explore myself - but you find someone who is interested in relationships in a trans-egotistical way (women want babies completely different agenda!). Anyway there are friends and society instead :-) As Buddha reminded Ananda the spiritual path is all about spiritual relationships (when Ananda suggested it was half private and half public).

The crude answer then to the question about whether Godel discovered or made the Incompleteness Theorems is NULL. This is not a trivial or unsatisfactory answer but exact. The point is to understand that these types of questions are pushing outside the framework of Reality that we are habituated to. The idea that there is a meta level that informs even the most solid worldly constructs is a bit of a Matrix like revelation. This is what the SIH is trying to prove - the God or Horatio Principle as I think I monikered it once. By way of analogy there is Cantors infinite infinities... each infinity implying a greater infinity. So the SIH means that every self ()existing entity) implies an other.

Vague thoughts after the tennis

Watching Isnet and Mahut today complete 10 hours of tennis and still not find a resolution pushed me to think about the SRH. It was being discussed by McEnroe that tennis might have to change its rules... ah ha I thought...

It seems that in any system of rules there is always the white elephant which pushes the system beyond what was meaningful. Is this like a reverse Godel? He says that there are statements that are grammatical but can'tbe proved while here we have a situation that is proven in the sense that it has been arrived at by playing out the rules yet it no longer has any meaning. The logic is just to keep applying the rules (i.e. a new game until one of the players goes 2 ahead) but it has entered territory that no-one has ever seen before, or even ever thought about before, and terrtory that everyone is convinced will never be trod again.

On one hand nothing is happening at all - unless you accept the rules and the meaning and value that has been arrived at by accepting those rules.

On the other once rules are accepted the game has been pushed outside the envelope ever imagined in the 137 years since tennis was invented. This is almost a Turing Halting problem because conceivably there is a tennis game that never ends. This possibility means that tennis is flawed altho in reality this game is extremely unlikely to happen.

Now for the SRH it would be great if there was some kind of reason why all games will always have their achilles heel... some kind of paradox that means that all systems of rules are incomplete. Godel showed that some kind of Godel numbering was required before his paradox could be constructed. But aren't there an infinite number of possible isomorphism - most not so meaningful and anthropocentric as Godel's - which can play havoc with systems? What is the limit to isomorphism?

Just as few vague thoughts after the tennis.

On Value, freedom and SRH / SIH

This seems very easy today...

Value is exactly isomorphic with Meaning. Borrowing from Wittgensteins analysis of meaning:

Something gains value when someone finds a "game" to play with it. Thus a stone has no value until this particular type of stone becomes part of system of rules (or a game). It thus gains meaning at exactly the same time.

Previously value was given some intrinsic nature so that for example a piece of music by Mozart was actually valuable in itself. To a chameleon lizard the value might be something under which to hide, or as happens in lots of Buddhist stories, the manuscript might provide urgent tinder for a fire. The point is that there is no intrinsic "value" or "meaning" because there is no self-defined system of rules on how to play with it. The idea of intrinsic value equates then with the notion that objects come with instruction sheets on how they are to be extraneously interpreted. On one hand there must be a relationship between an object and its environment - a metal ball is going to end up in different games to a sheet of original Mozart score - but on the other hand the environment is not entirely dictated by the qualities of an object. The first hand leads to ideas of intrinsic worth, respect and obedience of objects while the other hand leads to freedom and liberation.

This last bit needs clarification. An individual who does not see intrinsic value in something like a sheet of original Mozart score may feel that they have complete entitlement to do whatever they want with it. The problem however is that, at the same time, they lose any appeal to intrinsic value they had and so must accept the environment treating them with alterity (as a complete outsider, stranger and other) also. This would be true origin of Durkheim's alienation rather than anything intrinsic to society - altho Membership itself (as analysed in depth before) arises from ego. This is the crisis of ego - where we demand some freedom over our environment and then find to our distress the environment taking liberties with us. Bentham and Mill famously resolved this by defining freedom as long as it didn't upset the freedom of others - but everything is interconnected so it doesn't work... and what of someone who buys the works of Mozart and then burns them all for firewood - isn't that affecting the freedom of others? It doesn't work. I lamented the neighbour who cut down the lovely cherry tree that I had admired throughout my childhood and had memories of falling in love under one peaceful halcyon summer - they sold the house again just as quickly for a trivial profit. There is no way of establishing value that doesn't have winners and losers. My personal solution is to appreciate everything the way it is and only change it only if you absolutely have to and can see it being broadly beneficial to others apart from oneself... but that is because I appreciate Nature of which there is still stuff to write I know...

So if we let go the idea of intrinsic value we must be careful not to use it as a reason for alterity (absolute otherness) because that is where Karma comes in and we end up suffering due to the freedom of the world that I will call libertas alius (the freedom of the other) as opposed to libertas mei (my freedom) - forgive my poor Latin I hated!! it at school. These two freedoms are sides of the same coin, which those bound within the paradigm of ego (like myself) can't see.

It is therefore a requirement of the world that we do not treat it with alterity, as a stranger or as a less being. But the achievement in this post is to derive this without postulating the existence of something material within an object that instructs us to behave with respect. Value then arises as an implication of a greater structure which is the identity of libertas alius and libertas mei - isomorphic with tat tvam asi (tho which is art) in Sanskrit. Which is all just another way of saying that we cannot take ourselves to be separate from the world - No man is an island entire of itself etc [John Donne, Meditation 17].

Turning to the SRH if we were to somehow to be separate from the world by what mechanism would that separation exist? Isomorphic with the example circle in the post on SRH, the rules that define the set of points in a circle are not themselves within the R^2 euclidean plane. An isomorphism between the R2 and set constructor logic - so that each point (x,y) represented a sentence in logic (would have to be modulus(R2) because R2 has more points than logic has sentences) - would enable a set to define points that fell within "itself"... ok I'm spinning off the point of "value" for a bit to explore down this SRH path... so actually there is always a way of getting things to fall within themselves via isomorphism... make tea...think about next bit... but as already commented in prev. posts the isomorphism can only be established inter alia (between others) one cannot establish an isomorphism between oneself and another - this might be the essence of the SRH! So maybe it isn't to do with reference but rather isomorphism the self-isomorphic hypothesis. So what is the reason for the SIH. Rather than deal with an isomorphism like Godel Numbering (which I don't fully understand yet) I'll deal with encoded thing for computer. Bit sequences have a strong long established isomorphism with numbers which makes bit sequences easier to think about. When something is put on computer it is essentially converted into a number. Now if the SIH was false and self-isomorphism was possible (particularly in the case of establishing isomorphism between oneself and another) then it would mean that there was a computer program (a number) which could decode itself to become the thing which was encoded. An example:

A temperature transducer and AD (analogue-digital converter) converts the temperature into a bit sequence which is sent to a computer serial bus. A computer program has been written to get that number and plot it on the screen for someone to monitor. Famously the computer is just a dummy agent - it has no idea what it is doing. It is John Searle's Chinese Room argument against A.I. Now the user and programmer are the ones who are establishing the isomorphism between the temperature and the plot on the screen and also the bit data and the transducer's voltage... OK I am correcting myself... no they are not establishing the isomorphism! It is already there: they are discovering it! The shifts in thermistor resistance have always followed the temperature it was discovering the correspondence which led to electronic thermometers which came to have the same "meaning" and "value" as mercury ones because they could take part in the same games. Interestingly I'm at the Constructivism cross-roads again...

OK here is an important recurring point. The MIT lecture raised this question: what if Godel had never "discovered" his numbering and shown the flaws in mathematical logic. Would maths have sailed on happily unawares of the deep cracks? Godel Numbering is thus like a telescope. Without it you cannot see the parallels between numbers and logic. Without it you cannot construct the Incompleteness theorems. It is instrumental. Without deep space telescopes there are things we know about that would have been forever hidden. Occam's Razor (highly unsatisfactory) is used to strip away that which we don't need. I was always puzzled by Popper's "falsification". The example given college was: which is the best hypothesis (i) "there are vultures in Hyde Park" or (ii) "There are no vultures in Hyde Park" - I was alone in getting it wrong, through stupidity I think, but on reflection I never fully understood why. We go in search of vultures. There is no result until we find a vulture which proves hypothesis i true and hypothesis ii false. So you can prove something true. I think the point was that on available evidence we form the hypothesis that there are no vultures, but then it can only be proven false. And, that is based upon Occam's Razor that we don't create hypotheses that are useless because that leads to an unmanageable number of hypotheses. However evolution works the other way but creating hypothesis and just seeing if it works - so I may indeed live as though there are vultures in Hyde Park and it might just work! Popper was far too logical and analytical! But back to the point "available evidence" points to a "reality" which is limited to what we know now rather than what "really exists". What is the sound of a tree falling in a deep forest? Do things exist when no-one is looking at them? I think I answered these but can't remember or find the post. It seems that actually both are inadequate. Isn't the answer going to be a dialectic? The incompleteness Theorems neither exists without Godel Numbering nor entirely because of it. Is it fair to say that Godel Numbering exists equally because of deep implications of the incompleteness theorems?

Turning back to the computer the computer doesn't know that the graph it mechanically plots corresponds to the temperature - it has only data coming in which could be from anywhere. The user makes the link between the graph and the temperature. But even if the user wasn't there the computer would still produce a graph which correlated with temperature, just as fossil tree rings recorded growth rates long before anyone linked them to climate.... blimey the going has got tough... I'm pulling out and will return to this point. What is interesting to note is that "my mind has changed" and I now see Godel and the SIH in terms of discovering already existing entities while before I was thinking in terms of Godel actually creating the Isomorphism with his numbering tool. My ideas have changed! Have I discovered something or have I made something ;-)

Back to Value. I now side here with the Structuralists and Capitalists now and no longer with Pirsig (and the Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle maintenance) etc.

This fits with the previous analysis which eliminated the distinction between "need" and "want". People, it was observed, will quite happily die for their country which places status and membership higher even that life itself. Quite extraordinary but true.

However exchange value isn't everything because there is never-the-less the perceived relative value that a human agent experiences in a particular situation. It is the existential quality of value (and meaning) that causes such discomfort with Capitalism. Being told that the market value of an ordinary house is £250,000 is stretching its price beyond its value ... but because we live in a society which has only one game here and that includes houses the value is going to be potentially infinite ... except you can live in garages and tents and even "rough" like a lot of people still chose so there are many other games to play and much value to find in things seemingly worthless.

It is this possibility that the absolutely worthless can become completely valuable which struck home today. Oil must have been worthless at some stage, as was uranium. One wonders what is worthless today that will find its game one day.

Now is it dangerous to relativise Nature? Can Nature become worthless? There is something still to say about Nature will return to this one day.

Bootstrapping

Plan to start holiday at Stonehenge last night ditched. Still fitting a bike rack, waiting for new bank cards after blitzing my identity last week, and some apathy. Still up at 4am this morning and watched the sun rise (just broke from clouds at 5am) from Knole Park. Nothing amazing, just peaceful. Am beginning to find peace and not strive so hard for what famously (as retold by Coello) is with us anyway. The greatest day is the day we can just sit with ourself. Maybe it is old age dawning slowly within me but I'm beginning to see this.

Just setting up dual booting on the replacement computer I discover that the term derives from the saying "pulling oneself up by the boot straps". That book "The Self-Writing Universe" by Phil Scanlan becomes relevant again - this is what he was talking about. A boot-strap it turns out works by running the smallest program possible which loads a second program and a cascade begins which eventually loads the OS, and the GUI these days, and then an application, managed by the OS, and you have the machine that we, the user, want to use (be that Word or Excel etc). Now the question arises for a universe what started that? And whatever that is what started that? This is the question Phil is persuing and something that has intrigued me also.

But this conundrum only works if you are outside the system looking in. One can only say "what started that?" from a stand-point apart from that. But how could anyone be outside the universe? We are thus necessarily "inside" and inseparable from to the very thing which we are enquiring about. This is the Anthropogenic Principle. It is also I see the Horatio Principle (see blog) and maybe the essence of the SRH. Thus inside the Universe there is no meaning to "start". Until we find a place to stand "outside" the universe then "starting" is not a meaningful term.

This is what arose in the meditation on Metamorphosis in Humans I was having when my computer was stolen... relevant? Death (loss) can strike at any time. It is thus parallel to the unfolding of immanent time which we notice in things like metamorphosis. Death comes like an interrupt on a chip process. I believe that interupts are a set of pre-wired instructions that force a chip to store its state and begin executing a different set of code. The process that is being executed will never know that it has been interrupted because like someone in a coma when it starts executing again it is just the next instruction with no reference to the time "in between". The relationship between steps in the code, like the relationship between points in the circle examples (previous blog), are not coded within the code - if they were then the relationship between those parts wouldn't be coded ad infinitum. So the argument went Death is not a part of the metamorphosis on a human. Now if stopping isn't then symettrically then starting isn't either. I don't remember my conception anymore than Physicists can find any evidence for the actual cause of the universe. "My Life", that things which unfolds from day to day, occurs in a different stream of meaning to my conception and my death. Death isn't at the end of the road, and my birth wasn't at the start. Science will try and extend life further and further, maybe we will be able to live forever. Death is thus being pushed away from this stream. Yet a car accident, cancer or heart attack will interrupt the stream and start executing a completely different stream. We all know that experience of being interrupted by something serious and what was so important yesterday suddenly is no longer relevant. The stream changes.

Now birth is the opposite of being interrupted. I can't think of a concept that conforms to this. Will make some tea now and have a think. Failing that I will make a word up... or did I already? What was that latin word for "in the beginning"... can't find it... it is related to the concept of ex nihilo however the sense as creation starts that it came from nothing. Like diving into the sea, the fish who know nothing about the land and the air must think that humans come ex nihilo, out of nothing. Where the analogy fails Buddhism picks up because in reality no pre-existing human (or soul) dives into birth, rather the diver only has the perspective of the fish. Just like birth then death is also in to nothing. This is the NULL I was speaking about in previous blogs. It seems that it is a "category" issue to borrow from Gilbert Ryle, but one that is written into the fabric of the universe... so maybe there is life in Russel and Whiteheads "theory of types" in that categories seem to exclude one another in reality. When one tries to access something that has jumped categories you get a NULL. I think about "my muse" who has died and it gives me a NULL. I trace my life back to before it started and I get a NULL. Now if I jump categories and speak of things materially then I have answers to both, but if we are honest knowing that I came from fusion of a cell in my mothers body with a cell from by fathers body really doesn't help me much beyond getting marks in exams. These facts are stratospheric compared with the ordinary things of my daily world. It is like thinking about the 60s and Englanding winning the world cup in 1966. I know it happened but when did it happen? The day before yesterday, and the day before that, and the year before that, and the decade before that... these all make sense, but continue back too far and it doesn't make sense any more - not to the stream of my life. It only makes sense talking to my mother or factually in a pub quiz. There are worlds outside myself that I access to make sense of time before I can remember, but what I can't do it link them all together in the single time line of the world I am brought up to believe in. Basically from my own perspective I did come ex nihilo.

So Buddha seems to have been right that there is no start and no end to the universe - that we exist in a boundless and timeless here and now. We may step outside ourself and look in to see boundaries and starts and stops but within the system there are no limits. Origins and Terminations then are relative and cannot be constructed absolutely within the entity that is created or destroyed... intuitively but why? That is the annoying SRH that still won't reveal itself. Anyway seem to have knocked down one of the major questions I had about the universe and transformed it into an SRH question... why are origins and terminations relative? Which is basically trying to look under the bonnet of the Anthropogenic Principle (which I always found unsatisfying like evolution). Come on SRH everything is waiting on you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How can girls be a part of it?

Some clarity right now... probably because I had a good wank earlier and have eaten properly for the first time in three days. This goes to show that Buddha's middle path is absolutely correct... not too ascetic that we damage our health but not too indulgent that we become softened by luxuries.

In that clarity the problem I don't really want to face and have fought for many decades... is it really possible that my middle path does involve women? I have to face that possibility now. Almost as a matter of pride I can't accept this because a girl wrote on my shirt the day we left school that she hoped I found the meaning of life one day but that she was sure it would involve women. I think naive as I was she quite liked me so you could interpret that one way, but what if after all these years (21 years) she was right in a more general way! I did another calculation a few days ago to realise that half my life has passed again since I met "my muse". That is a lot of time to struggle with something. I am going on another mammoth solo journey out onto the road for the first time since 2003 and I remember on that walk struggling with exactly the same thing... how long will this be a problem? I can't concentrate on anything properly until it is solved...

So if I do "allez" to borrow from previous posts, and turn around back into maelstrom, what is the problem? It is quite clear that pride is the first hurdle. I have to accept that "my muse" does not represent a dead end, so to speak, but rather an hurdle that I failed to mount, so to speak. It means that I have to struggle back through all that, literally pick up the road exactly where I turned back 10years ago!

Alone this is a pleasurable process really so no great problem, after pride has been swallowed, but the greater problem which I have never turned toward, or even been tempted by, is that of the "world". Do I really need to start securing territory and possessions so that I can make a home; and with that literally the weight of the world; locking myself into a cage? This part has nothing to do with pride but pure horror. I have never understood or had any inkling toward worldly things; never felt envious or lacking in anything physical except my Achilles heel of women.

So I begin this bicycle (not walking any more) with exactly the same problem as before. The desire to dip into the world of women and pleasures but then the need to get right out again to pursue what I find really purposeful - the things that make up the mind. This seems like a bad compromise, dishonesty, lack of conviction, weakness. Women who are worldly minded get hurt, it is not a good way. If my middle path does indeed require women then I need to turn away from the level of asceticism current strived for and admit my weakness, my lowliness and my failure to transcend the flesh. Almost everyone else I know goes this way, the way of failure (for a monk it is the greatest defeating sin after murder), but if I have to admit failure then it has to be done. Have I the strength? I must make a decision!

All that said there is an obvious thread in this. I have clarity because I have had a good wank, eaten and actually slept and are going on holiday tomorrow are part of it as well. This "clarity" has arisen where it was not existing before. It is as though it has been created. BUT actually I need to see the difference between some thing which has been materially "created" and something that has been "revealed". This has been in my mind for many years - I wrote it, without knowing what I was doing, in a web page for the temple 7 years ago, but now mysteriously I know what I am doing. Good that I am ready to master this idea at last. And now this blog goes into something deep...

Has the "clarity" been "created"? What is clarity, the thing that Descartes spoke of at the inception of Modernism in his "clear and distinct ideas"? People are astounded at Buddha, brought to tears, because never have they heard such wonderful and distinct Dharmas (not dharmas). Buddha had the power to cut truth from falsehood and give people clarity which is like cool mountain water to the thirsty folks in the desert of worldly confusion. Jesus speaks with the same authority - altho the difference is none of his disciples understood him (makes you wonder how many understand him today!). Roger Penrose, or Paul Davis I remember seeing, have the same power in explaining Physics.

When distractions are silenced then what remains is clarity. Bringing the mind together is what meditation is about (samadhi), removing distractions is what morality is about (sila), Understanding this is what wisdom is about (prajna). These are the classic distinctions in the East; distinctions that have have been deemed heretical in the West for some crazy reason.

So clarity is one of those "things" which wasn't and then was without being created! So Kondanna's insight at Sarnath is more complex. Not everything that we become aware of we have become aware of through "creation" and therefore is not subject to uncreation (that is decay and vanishing - which I found out "my muse"'s name means - highly allegorical that will turn out to be). It is the analogy often cited of the dirty water being left to stand for the sediment to fall out - clarity comes when the distractions are calm and the water, which was always present, is now clear.

Now the cosmic battle between Good and Evil, between Light and Darkness, is actually this battle between different types of creation:

Maya the Arch-Demon, the trickster Loki, Satan is the creator of fallen things. These are the things which have boundaries, which we can put a fence around and protect, these we can hold close to our heart, these are the things which burn when they leave us, these are the things which the SRH wants to prove invalid (in both senses of the word), these are the things which cause their bearers to turn evil and away from truth and away from one another.

Om the Ultimate principle, the Principal, the bag of Higher entities called crudely God, Buddha, Transcendence in all its facets is boundless, it escapes all attempts by the mind to puts its ethereal arms around it, it runs around and through all the things of Satan's creation effortlessly, it leaves the mind which is intoxicated by the fallen things (dharmas) utterly astonished and perplexed. This is why some say that the Creator God is actually the Devil. Anyone who thinks that God created the "things" in the world is actually a follower of Maya! That is how much of a trickster she/he is. Mammon (god of money) and the creator of the "things" are bed fellow since it is through trade of things that we have exchange value and money. God didn't create this computer of that tree - the Devil did! that is why we are tempted to own it and fight for it and do evil for it. In Hinduism this idea is captured by the story of Brahma (in whom existence appears) coming to believe that he actually created the Universe. From this single flicker of ego came all the demons that have plagued creation ever since.

I hope if this is ever read by anyone of sceptical scientific attitude the liberal use of traditional allegories and metaphors to describe what is quite involved stuff is not a problem. On the other hand if this is ever read by someone of religious familiarity I hope the use of terms like Devil is not taken literally - if the Devil exists why have we not seen him? He is much more of a trickster than to ever show himself - that would give the game away - no he IS the viewing of the universe in terms of discrete possessable things that we can lust after! We know him extremely, extremely well!!! To start being Good we must recognise that we walk with the Devil as our closest friend and ally... not seeing this people who think they are good actually get tricked into doing a lot of evil. What a lot of junk has been spawned from mis-understanding the devil: from Satanism, to all the Gothic vampire fantasy that seems so popular these days. These people - like most of us! - are victims of the very thing we worship - how gloriously foolish and ironic!

Clarity then is made distinct by removing other things. It is created by removing things. What is left, that which becomes clear then, is what is called True Mind. So True Mind, like the water in the dirty jar, isn't created or destroyed but revealing it in "clarity" is something that comes and goes. A better analogy would be to liken confusion to a shadow. We can only be in the shadow of something (sin in the analogy) because the sun is shining. So while being in a shadow (being confused) is our state it points ironically to the state of Purity and Truth. If we were never supposed to live in Clarity how could we ever be confused? Feeling confused is a great thing! I said that once to a question from the floor in an interfaith meeting by someone confused by Anatta (I am confused also ;-)... maybe it wasn't such a bad answer. In the same way suffering reminds us that we are seeking Liberation. It is time to worry then when we stop suffering because it can only mean we have forgotten where our True Home is! This world like the shadows in Plato's cave, or like Heideggar's Being hiding in the beings, or like Derrida's margins is a reminder of the True Home that is hidden from us. Now this analogy has wandered right up to the historical analogies, put its arm on the bar and ordered a couple of pints - this is exactly what Bible, Buddha, Lao Tse you name it are talking so obliquely about.

So there are two levels of creation. What is in front of our eyes - the obvious creations that are those of the Devil (in the analogies). This type don't exist and the after creation do exist, and then eventually will stop working and will decay and vanish. Then there is the True Creation which is created when we remove the false creations. Altho it is not actually created because it is already there and we know this because the false creations create a state of confusion and suffering (lack of clarity, shadow) which reminds us they are false and that they exist by obscuring the True Reality. This all sounds great, but I am struggling not to give in to the false gods!

Now the problem is that my clarity won't last, I am going the wrong way about creating it, by believing still that "my muse" would have been the door through which clarity might have been achieved. It is not that I shouldn't eat or have sex or anything, but that these are not the path to lasting clarity. A good wank may relieve one of distractions for a while, but like any drug it will only come back worse. This is why Buddha taught the 8 Fold Noble path, yet still I haven't seen exactly how my current path and the 8 Fold Path relate. Do I abandon women? The logic says yes, but I still can't see it clearly yet. At least this blog has firmly put me back on the track that I know is right, I hope like a horse being led back and back again to water one day I will drink.

Performance

Just watching Jonathon Ross show on BBC1 starting with Reverend Al Green and the energy and enthusiasm of the stars this week left old Wossy eclipsed. Not that he is the star of the show but he often has to work to get entertainment out of people... but when it comes to musical stars the energy is infectious... what is it about music that joins people and allows energy to flow from one to the many like a gift from above... truly remarkable experience that we take for granted... leaving this door open for investigation too... music always my great joy :-)

Laptop Stolen

Had the laptop stolen few hours after the last update. I left the window open which the builder didn't close so easy take for who ever it was. Realised almost immediately what had happened. Made a few phone calls to confirm and then went into auto pilot to cancel all my internet banking and cards, change all my passwords (thanks to my sister on the phone) and call the police. Had forensics in the next day but only a foot print remained... altho there was a finger print on the ethernet cable... need to work out whether its worth giving that in. Thankfully I have a backup of my documents and most music ideas but a lot of photos and other things are gone.

I switched on my usual "theft" thinking which is that I have given the laptop to someone. It makes sense since me and whoever now possesses it, taken as a group of people, remain unchanged after the theft. There are still two people and one laptop, it is just in his hands and not mine. He is a good friend of mine altho I have never met him. It is not positive to think about him as self centred and unthoughtful of other people, much better that he is a person in need of help and I was there to help him. That said the £100 he will get for a second hand laptop I could have given him if he had asked and that would have saved me all the work of having to reconstruct my work environment on another computer and lose a lot of stuff in the process. It did force home something I blogged a few weeks ago about how trust is essential for meaning. If everything kept getting stolen there would be no time to construct anything really worthwhile.

I saw a flower the next day, and looked at the wide blue sky and realised deep down that actually I have lost nothing because like that blog on Continuity nothing has really changed and everything that was beautiful and worthwhile is still with me. This really hammers home the importance of Nature. I need to get that written out definatively because it is something I have sort since a child.

This experience has reinforced my loathing of material things. How insecure and useless they are. I pity the people who spend their lives trying to accumulate such tiny and insignificant things. Rather than turn toward the value that is lost this has turned me further the other way. I suppose, as my sister said to me, "this is typical of you" because anyone else would have taken more care to make sure the computer wasn't left in the open on a building site!! This is true and lesson learned. But at the same time the hassle involved in protecting things of "value" feels like grit in the eye to me, or sand under my shirt or in my bed, it simply gets in the way of appreciating things. Better to appreciate what is free and unhindered like the sky, the sun, the clouds, the insects. I'm off on holiday in a few days: this has forced me to reorient to what I love most - freedom.

Something else comes of this. I have complained about the practicality of not getting paid: that I won't have money to eat. Actually food is very easy to find. In return however I have been given that bike and now I was given an old laptop to continue with - which is what I write upon now. What a better world it is when we don't have to protect what is "ours" because when someone takes what is "ours" someone else will give u something else to be "ours". This is the true spirit of sharing and if one believes the religious writers the return to us from sharing is 10 fold. Thus the time and work that I freely shared with that family to tutor their son, "for the record" is worth 10 times that in value. I say "for the record" because no-one who is freely giving would ever keep an account. My faith was weak, the fear of starvation is very great - a sign that in this "advanced" economy, after all the alleged Progress, we are still hounded by the same old primitive fears of our ancestors 10,000 years ago and more.

Just doing the Citizenship revision there was a passage on public and private ownership. It said that private owned companies seek profit, while public owned seek to supply services. Almost a joke the way they wrote it - interesting that the people who design the education curriculum seem to think more along my lines.

There are endless things on all scales that could change for the better. That said liaising with the police and the forensics has been an interesting process. It is a great job that they all do, a million miles away from the fascist enforcers of the "status quo" that I accused them of being in blogs a year ago. I guess they are indeed just people doing their job - altho they are probably unaware the magnitude of the structure that collectively they maintain. Arguing Devils Advocate with my tutee after he suggested we could do without money, I see there is a very strong argument for these things (money, police, status quo) and arguments against these really do have to absorb and account for a vast great deal. I hope I am developing a view here that can progress beyond the status quo and doesn't just trivially reject it and all the things that it does achieve.

Anyway losing the laptop has (rather cliched) been a moment of freedom. I hope that it doesn't turn out to be to much o a set back in the future. Thanks to this blog, more than anything, I still have most of my ideas intact anyway (except music ones).

(Had some thought about Kropotkin over the last few days - somehow this has made me realise how we don't really own anything. Something to do with the unimaginable amount of human learning and effort that goes into making a computer that is a group effort that all the human race past, present and future shares like how I am now, altho unplanned, sharing my old computer.

Human Metamorphosis

I concentrated in insects recently and then realised of course that we humans metamorphose a fair bit as well.

The biggest changes occur early on then it seems to slow down. The first 3 pictures cover only a year of time the last three 50 or 60 years.

If they were all of the same person would they really be all of the same person? Look how different that person is at each stage.

Suppose I ought to have a picture of a dead body too… except just looking it is firstly more difficult to put up a picture of a dead person somehow than of a live person even though the live person is the only one who might care about being put on this blog… and also Googling “dead body” the first picture is of a dead Palestinian girl being used politically. This I think is wrong in the first place and secondly it shows that death intersects life at any point so it is not part of the metamorphosing process… so I leave death out.

So many questions are coming as I look at this simple presentation above. Is the first picture of a person? is perhaps the most interesting… no opinion…. fascinating.

Also think it fascinating that these pictures unlike any other pictures I have ever put on the blog require complete respect. There are 7 people in the pictures. I do not know who they are and I thank them for their images and hope they don’t mind.

There is a sense in which the insects I have pictured require great respect also, but there is no sense that they are looking out of the pictures, they are just extraordinary, beautiful and irreplaceable.

Life? It is right to question, it brings me closer, but I feel I will never understand.

p.s. should have put a picture of myself in the timeline now I think but it, will mess up the structure now. Also must get on the with the SRH which I can use to clear up a lot of questions if it works.

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Its obvious why a picture of a dead person is so potent … it is because, as John Donne realised, isomorphically that is us! A dead body illicits more profundity from us than a living person because we see in their lack of soul the insecurity of our own soul within our body. It shakes us into mortality, and at the same time it shakes us in our belief that our body is the secure rock on which to base our Life. There are other concerns as well in the complex mix such as the issues surrounding their death; pity and empathy for a stranger and loss and grief for someone we knew. An odd one which David Baddiel raised in a column in Playboy is how to treat people we have had sex with who are dead. Do we remember them as sexual or not? Turning it around we would like to be remembered sexually so he decided it was the right thing to do so in return. Odd mix though, which sits awkwardly, the acceptance of attraction for the “physical body” alone (that which can be photographed), but the realisation that the physical body alone is not a person (I am not my picture) – isn’t this mess up the origin of so much of the sexual murder and stuff which makes it way into CSI etc. This is why pornography is frowned upon and why the media age is creating a population of people who can remain unmoved by physical violence. This is a door into the whole question of identity and mind/body which I really ought to have sorted out … I’ll leave it open.

“Isomorphically” was interesting also. Up until now I have spoken of dialectic and how “what is here” can be the same as “what is there”. Yet I have been pushing the boundaries of my own thought. For example I was trying to argue with someone ages ago that because other people feel suffering then our suffering and their suffering can’t be seen as different, ergo we shouldn’t be selfish. He didn’t accept the point arguing that my suffering and someone else’s are different and I don’t need to care about them. He is right in the sense that you can’t feel someone else’s pain. But instinctively we do empathise with that pain and feel their suffering… like seeing someone walk into something and we flinch also. It is instinctive. It is interesting then that what is happening is that, not in physical terms but in isomorphic terms, we are existing in parallel with someone else, and that parallelism actual exists in Reality! Yet there is no physical phenomenon or causation connecting the two. Materialists would say that light was entering the eye and we were interpreting the data and our flinch is just a reflex response to the light… except that it is not the light that makes us flinch but the information in the light and that has no causative power by itself at all. The parallelism has no material basis any more than Peano’s axioms actually are represented by Godel Numbers, but that very lack of connection is what allows them to be connected… it is exactly because they aren’t connected materially (that is by laws and derivation rules) that they are free to be isomorphic. Now that is the foundation of the SRH actually because it implies two different levels that can’t be connected [sad that Russell and Whitehead have been here before with the Theory of Types… what am I about to learn to destroy the SRH?]…. anyway hmmmm interesting…. ok there are problems in this blog need to think … off for a cycle.

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On subject of whether 1st picture is a human I was thinking (while the laptop was being stolen) that the question might be should it even be in the metamorphosis panel?

If Death can strike at anytime and so enter the panel obliquely it makes Death effectively a meta phenomenon that cannot be understood within the conception of metamorphosis. Doesn't this also mean that Birth or Conception is a meta phenomenon! The Switch that sets the process going, i.e. the fertilisation shown in picture 1, is thus not a picture in the metamorphosis! This is a very good example of the SRH is action. The first picture should therefore be a "zygote" which is the human being in its 1st incarnation. A sperm and an egg require fertilisation which is a condition and outside the stream of human existence. Shall consider this point on holiday.

Sources of Action & Invasion

Off on holiday at the weekend. First stop Stonehenge for the solstice and then cycling to Skye via Yorkshire to meet up with college mates. 1300 miles in total… will see how this bike fares (tho I still need to sort out a carrier rack for it which isn’t easy on a racer!)… the old wisdom does seem true: if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it;  which becomes more generally – don’t try and change things, let them change themselves. Applied to the bike situation really the old bike would have done. Still I must live with other people and their decisions.

Now on the other point that I have been fighting most evidently recently that of marriage etc. Almost everyone I know who speaks of these things says one thing and then does another. There is no-one in history, that I know of, who has really “lived” what they say… or for that matter says how they lived. We look for justification from people like the Bird bloke who shot people in Cumbria a few weeks ago. If we ever found it wouldn’t that mean (1) under the right circumstances we are all Bird and (2) he had no choice but to do it. Both are absurd. There can be no justification or reason why he did it.

There was an article in the paper yesterday about the psychological make up of Darth Vader which argued that the character was mentally ill rather than bad. This is a distinction I don’t actually get. If someone is mentally ill then I presume they don’t see things the right way which makes them behave in good faith on wrong assumptions and so they commit a crime. Isn’t this everyone? Buddhism argues that we are all mentally ill because we try to perceive things in terms of fixed identities (you only  need to look at metamorphosing insects to see that our mental apparatus don’t fit reality). The idea that someone is “bad” suggests that they actually want to cause harm without being mentally ill – this is impossible isn’t it? If we saw things clearly then we would care for other people. There is a vast rift in the law here as far as I can see – I will take the opportunity to speak to a criminal lawyer or psychologist about this when it arises.

Anyway the point is that do we ever understand why we do what we do? I have this force inside which drives me in many ways. One direction is toward “my muse” (even against all possible logic, reason and apparent facts). She was chosen by me (not by destiny I am fairly sure) but what was it in me in the first place that got me looking for her? That search began as far back as I can remember when all I knew was that girls were pretty and interesting. This type of force we accept because it is “normal” and harmonious with the society. But what of forces that are not. Homosexuals have fought with society on this. Then there are forces that could never be accepted in society like violence, hatred and the one that I have struggled with as long as I have like girls which is the awareness of sadistic pleasure. This is a force which apparently gravitates toward a situation of power over someone especially where that person is hurt. Call that a demon, but the question, like with all the others, is how does our rational Apolline self understand the forces that lie within. What are they – I have never seen anyone ever (in experience and in the books) even try and tackle this question. People who I think examine these things in depth then succumb to the forces of property, self-preservation, sex, etc without seeming to master them. How are our enquiring minds so weak? It is almost as though all the words in the world and history have been spoken just to drown out the silent un-reconcilable force of our own existence and being.

Now this way lies madness and I have struggled with this question all my life - but recently I see it coming out of the blog writing very clearly (probably because I have just been writing recently without too much of a clear plan). Lots of words but no real direction – a bore to read, I will edit one day when the point is clear

To dispel one direction of thought let me consider the idea that I have a genetic make up which leads me in a certain direction, a propensity say to heterosexual desire. Now in one sense this does provide some insight. If I was to destroy that part of my brain or endocrine system then I could change that desire. I believe castration weakens the strength of the effect. I would then not be so concerned about “my muse”. What this doesn’t explain however is how “I” have got involved in all this. Why does this chemical in this place affect “me”? Why does it impinge on my thoughts and my life? Put another way, why of all the things I could be, a woman for example, do I find myself in this particular circumstance in life? I will live my whole life as a man, this makes my life a very particular way – but why is this this way for “me”? Science can change one question for another which is maybe easier to answer, but it can’t ever answer anything itself. Who would have thought 300 years ago when they wondered how to speak to people far away that it would questions like how to amplify the signal from a transducer. (Just writing this it is clear that science works – like I’m realising all creativity works - by first discovering the pool of building blocks and then playing with various arrangements until the solution is found – this is how I worked out the speech. It is not so tidy as well formed question and answer.) But anyway science turns out to be like symbol manipulation in logic – it doesn’t actually solve anything by itself. We must do that. In a way doesn’t that get close to what I didn’t understand as a child that Life cannot be written down; there are no rules; it is not computable; it must be Lived.

Master Hsing Yun (Chinese Buddhist master) wrote very wisely and I’ll start here in answering the vague question posed in this post: perfect awareness is wisdom, perfect intention is compassion. Thus through training not only the Apolline awareness can be purified, but so also the mysterious force that drives us. The goal then is compassionate intention. However this isn’t an easy path. The road to perfection is made up of countless momentary corrections to our behaviour and thoughts. This then feeds back over a lifetime to become purified intention – the evil/demons that disrupt our motivations and force us toward bad actions become weaker. Thus what we experience as an un-reconcilable force to be angry or to sexual desire for someone are actually completely reconcilable except that the work was done over a very long period of time in the past. These impulses and intentions are the fruit of a tree planted a very long time ago. Pointless complaining that the fruit on this tree are apples when you wanted oranges if you planted apple seeds 5 years ago. OK this writing thread is going much better :-) So we want to know why Bird shot all those people: he planted the wrong seeds a long time ago. And why were they wrong? Because he didn’t understand much about gardening. So the Apolline could have had its say… but it didn’t do so in time.

So there is a totality within the Self… it is just that what we take to be Ourself right here, right now is just a snap shot of something that exists in time and we need to have controlled things in the past to have a good present. Now that doesn’t rest easy with the idea that there is no past and no future only a present moment. Well that doesn’t make sense on this level (I suspect it is the transcendent level). As a living being we have impulses and these are the result of past seeds we have planted. That much is clear. So by acting on them we simply plant more seeds an get more entangled. This is the policy I’m following. So no matter how strong the impulse to marriage or “my muse” it is something I do not what to strengthen. OK that is clear too.

For the record the True Self that governs all these little decisions and which is our moral compass, the thing which judges absolutely what is right and wrong, that is called (in Chinese Buddhism) our Buddha Nature and is the same for all beings. It is improving the brightness with which that shines through us which is the best goal. We do this by “Trying” to be good – that “Trying” is actually drawing upon the Buddha Nature within us, and as we draw on it we dust it off and it shines brighter. What is a surprise though is just how difficult all this is and what we think is the right thing to do, so often turns out to be the wrong because the dust is just so thick, and when things are that dusty, you can’t see at all. The builders here told me that the best plan is to sprinkle water on the floor before doing any dusting I wonder if that is meditation in the analogy. Funny how dustiness actually makes us want to stop meditating too.

So concluding this: we don’t have to be slave to our impulses, and we don’t have to suffer alien impulses like anger etc because our impulses are really ourselves but a part of ourself that takes time to mature. So like putting bags on to a carousel, the bag we have in front of us at each moment isn’t the one we put down… until our bag comes back. That is why impulses don’t seem to belong to us (I’ll call this experience of powerlessness in the face of alien impulses like Love: Invasion). Reacting to present impulses then leads us off into chaos, we need to see where that impulse came from and why we have it now… what reason did we put this bag that has turned up on the carousel in the first place. We probably can’t remember so best to treat with caution – the sense of “Invasion” arises simply because we have forgotten.

Abraham in the Bible discovers that his daughter-in-law-to-be has been unfaithful. He orders her stoning to death. But then she produces the staff which he left behind and he remembers it was he who deflowered her. She is forgiven because the sense of invasion upon himself has gone. I shouldn’t use Abraham as an example like this, but really he opens himself up to criticism rather! especially after trying to kill his second son earlier… and then sending his first son - which he had with the Egyptian maid - away from the encampment. Where was his faith then?… it is not a good track record. Don’t know why I chose now to pick on him but anyway.

Idealist or Realist

“My muse” and I had one big disagreement in our short liaison… she was a self proclaimed Realist and I was the Idealist. I am beginning to realise that I must be a bit careful, the mind is not of infinite strength and I can see in myself that pushed too far it can have a mental breakdown. There is Buddha’s story (which is the first thing I was ever told by a monk) of the sitar player who wanted to leave the sangha because it was too hard. Buddha asks him about tuning a string and the man understands that too loose and it won’t play but too tight and it will snap. Middle path evidently applies to Idealism and Realism also.

There has been a lot to do including and since the wedding. The concerns over doing that well. The two weeks of exams with my students who have not done that well. I guess there are limits but I expected better and I can’t believe the school lost their coursework in two subjects and asked for it to be redone in the last month before exams (unless the student is lying and he never did it! But still why wait till the exams). The English teacher had a melt down too and has only submitted half his coursework. None of it is “Ideal”. Then there is the complete reassessing of what I must do next in life, which is tied up with the thoughts of “my muse” highlighted by the marriage and also the Realist concern of money. Now my cousin has left me in charge of the building work on her new home which is sorted in my head, but I hate being managed which means I hate managing even more, and I still don’t understand why people need to be led – are the builders sheep in need of a stick or are they intelligent people who just need to be communicated with (if you judge this wrong you completely break the system) – so I have all that to work out as well. Plus I simply want to take a break to think about the SRH, perhaps get back to working on one of those books and finally have a good night sleep (the simplest and most rewarding thing in my list to do!). At least I can concentrate on the stock markets properly now and try to recoup the 2k loss I’ve incurred pursue a falling stock down in the hope of pursue it back up again – that stock being gas and FTSE short the only things going down during the bull market! Though I see that Japan is teetering on the brink and while stealth-bull is the new attitude maybe as economies tighten we’re about to see the final end of Capitalism! What next? Well obviously, there is the Real answer and the Ideal answer!

For some reason I feel a pressure on me – as though turning 40 next year means that I should conform. It is as though being young we can indulge in flights of fancy and explore possibilities, while being old we need to take up the gauntlet of “The World” and make things happen. Well I would do the latter if I agreed with it. It is like an anti-Nazi youth in Germany feeling as he comes to 40 that it is time to finally join the SS. It is true however that I am half way through my official working life, at the end really of my breeding life, and I must be absolutely reconciled with the path taken because there is no turning back the clock. It is what I hated about leaving college, the fact that finally we must make choices that will set a trajectory that will affect the rest of our life. In reality I think people just muddle through taking opportunities as they arise without a clear game plan. But remember the point of this blog (and my life) is to discover a game plan! I remember talking to the father of a friend of mine about this while still at school. He was recalling how many “possibilities” there had been and how many careers he could have had and couldn’t really explain the path that he took. I guess in particular this is true of ones partner. I have toyed all along with the concept of “destiny” and “the one” which apply directly to “my muse” – if I abandon her then I abandon those concepts and have to accept that “the path” we take in life is ad hoc and has no inherent meaning… in which case it doesn’t matter which path we take. It can only matter if we feel that some other path was more “true”, some other partner was “better” or more “true”. Maybe we measure with the yard stick of happiness, maybe like me we measure with the yard stick of truth. Either way to be peaceful we have to accept the level that we measure in our actual life.

So to the difference between the Ideal and the Real. I’ve been very Ideal of late. Watching “Meet the Fockers” yesterday – a film I have to admit I love – there is that wonderful contrast between De Nero and Hoffman. In me I have both sides (we all do) but the De Nero is the side that I gravitate to. The Fockers for all their carefreeness are obnoxiously self indulgent and self righteous. I know they are supposed to be the family we gravitate to, but its over played. That said I need a lot of Focker right now to balance the De Nero. After a good night sleep last night I can feel it coming out. However it challenges my Idealist side and its pursuit of Glory and Truth. Winning certainly isn’t everything, but being second in the game just isn’t the end because you can always do better (we always can even if we win).

Living a life of carefree abandon as a “bum”, or fighting for ones own corner of the world where we can live in self-indulgence are both non Ideal. What idealism asks for is the Truth. Imagine a world in which we all pursued Truth. It is straight back to the Plato in ancient Greece. Where people really felt remorse for their wrong doing, where they always strived to eliminate their faults and correct errors, where it was important to be Good and Virtuous, Straight-forward and True. We watch a media channel these days and it isn’t like this… and it isn’t that people make mistakes, it is that they either don’t know they are making mistakes or they don’t care. We have Tony Blair still trying to justify the Iraq War at one end of the spectrum and some murderer trying to appeal against the court decision at the other. It is not what they have done but that they don’t care which is the problem. But this is the Real world. “My Muse” was a psychologist on a Grade A prison dealing with murderers, rapists and paedophiles - “her guys” she called them. She knew Reality tho I suspect she actually enjoyed it too. I can’t even watch Eastenders it is too boring how trivial and wasteful life is portrayed there – that is how different we were. On that subject how do people get drawn into Eastenders – there is no plot or even creative skill just people going from one trivial drama to another. I’d love to write “Weststarters” about a group of people from Eastenders who break away to start up a colony in which all the problems and narrative devices of Eastenders where solved once and for all – which would be a very short story indeed! For starters “shut up you cow” would be replaced with a chat to clear up misunderstandings. As I found out with the bike, problems -  maybe always - arise from understanding.

The question to resolve is this do we snake through life or do we try and play it straight. England are not going to win the world cup in style or with glory. They never do. It will be like the 2007 Rugby World Cup where they sneaked into the final like rats. It is never with flair or with style charging into the stadium drenched in blood after a solid battle. With England (historically as well) it is always done through shady deals, compromises and by the skin of their teeth. They never look like the side who should win even when they do (well they did in the final in 2003 but it’s a rarity). Looking at the world map would anyone have thought this tiny Island could fool half the world into allowing it to rule them. India could have physically eaten us for breakfast. It certainly wasn’t done up front through physical might and truth. It was simply a lie that people bought: the British Empire was like rats over running countries. Watching sports there are always two winners. Those who won the game, and those who played best and they are statistically unrelated. The Realist follows the winner of the game, the Idealist the one who played best. Now my mind and my body are beginning to feel the need to “win” for their own sanity, while the De Niro in me still wants to continue playing “the best” even if it gives me no results (although the analogy doesn’t quite work because De Niro would want to win – but certainly Hoffman would be happy just playing). There are arguments for both sides. But maybe for a while I will take my foot off the peddle and be more Realistic, allowing things to take their course… this isn’t going to solve the questions of which direction I take in life tho, it will only allow me to make them! And writing that I realise how lives are made and why mine isn’t made… but to up anchor and cast off into the maelstrom of the world or not to up anchor and cast off into the maelstrom of the world: that is the question – I believe Buddha advised against it. Do I really want to end up as another compromised individual caught in a shady world (like the Bike) between competing claims on one’s industry? In a world where the winning move (by the rules) is often the wrong thing to do (ideally)… like most US over seas policy (and that is where their current problems have come from)… am I not wiser to play it straight? OK enough writing let’s see what happens… off for final bout of tuition.

Some Insecta for Contemplation

Following from the last blog on animal/human a beautiful male Oedemera nobilis resting in a flower after presumably a good meal of pollen (isn’t this a species of geranium… will check?). I love the fact that it evidently thinks it is camouflaged. Striking colour co-ordination tho I’ll give it that – metallic green and purple against the ultra-violet of the flower – striking!

Now that form is entirely derived from the needs for securing a mate and nothing else (beetle and flower)! Why stop being the larva? The females have a good taste then given how much beauty they demand from the males! Yet these creatures have brains far smaller than even a spinal ganglion let alone my visual cortex how can we share the same tastes? There seems to be something objective to beauty!!!Females lack the swollen legs which means they must be something to do with either display or fighting (what males like best in most species).

I only saw this because I was walking as my bike was in for repairs. This reminded me why I must never forget the primary value of walking over other transport.

Also came across this battle zone. Unidentified ichneumon wasps were swarming around these wood worm holes. Maybe this is another reason for beetles not to stay only as larvae! (which is true because by existing in two niches they increase their food supply).

The wasps utterly decimated the population as females mated with waiting males and then search

ed hole by hole for prey, entering head first and very quickly backing out if the hole had already been exploited – I presume they leave some chemical signature.

Once found they reversed out of the hole, turned around and went back in abdomen first to sting the prey and lay the time bomb of an egg. The swarm took about 20 minutes to complete the attack. But it was not all one sided. A huge jumping spider (9mm body) with perfect camouflage was stalking the parasites too. But he was not travelling far from that crevice presumably watching out for bird strikes. Of course me being present probably altered some of the behaviours too.

For people with wood worm in their houses I wonder if releasing a vial of these wasps every so often would curtail the problem rather more efficiently and safely than the wood worm killer chemicals. Tough on the old wood worms however being thrown into a very real Aliens type scenario. Having their insides eaten out can’t be the nicest way to end one’s life – tho the parasites are clever and do their work surgically and probably painlessly – they don’t want the wood worm to curl up with stomach pains and stop eating

wood straight away! Beautiful? Striking and extraordinary at least. Parasitoids are already used for this.

P.S. who needs the Serengeti when we have this on our doorstep? I’m happy that Spring Watch on BBC is diversifying away from birds (which are wonderful creatures yes) to include other classes of animal – Insecta has to be a must for the show given the sheer diversity and

beauty of them (butterflies and moths being only the obvious example). After reptiles they have always been my favourite - interesting to see how universal the appeal of snakes is to naturalists (I’m not alone) Chris Packam saying that he had 20 grass snakes in his room once. That’s more than I have ever seen – I’m impressed and its not like I haven’t looked for them.

On another occasion a sexual lady bird and the discarded case of its previous pupal stage. I wonder as it dries its wings whether the red pigment is created later of is this a yellow 7 spot!? But the real question is what does a ladybird actually look like? It’s the same question as what shape is water, and its interesting that humans chose the sexual form to represent the creature. We have the same eyes evidently as the mates.

Below another of the vast array of parasitoid hymenoptera…Amblyteles armatorius on the prowl to infect noctuid caterpillars (under-wings and the like).

Big parasitoids have little parasitoids inside their bellies to blight them, and little parasitoids have smaller parasitoids and so ad infinitum.

This itself raises the whole issue of inside and outside. If you ever have parasitic worms or a fluke, or even a virus yourself… is that really inside “you”.

And obviously the infinite regress is because a parasite cannot prey upon itself… altho actually it could. This is what a child is!!! tho children are a bit smarter than to kill their host (most of the time). Now that is a very odd ouroboros!! and an example where the SRH doesn’t quite work. Obviously this is what the film Aliens was about. Just reading into this I find it is documented. “Occasionally, accidents can happen and the ichneumonid may miss the target host and the egg may stick on her own body, when the larva hatches it at once attacks its own parent.”

btw the ultimate field guide to Insecta of Britain and Western Europe is the Domino Field Guide. The late Sir Dick Southwood who used to be at Imperial College and I remember my tutor telling me that it was while watching the pond outside the conservatory at Silwood Park that he did a thought experiment with frogs hopping into available spaces on the edge. I forget what the resulting theory was … oops. He says of this book “…an extraordinarily fine work.” couldn’t agree more.

Sex, Beauty, Animal and Human

… excerpt from previous blog…

I also realised that the common form of the stag beetle which flew past (with the hard shell, antlers and legs etc) is only the sexual form and so if beetles didn’t have sex we would know them only as rather ugly wood maggots.

Now examine the rest of the metamorphosing arthropods and it is evident that to be “sexual” is a very big deal. One of the dominant features is colour and flying… to find and attract mates obviously… and it seems some very general level of aesthetics that Nature shares from beetles to flowers to humans.

Suddenly it becomes apparent that the very property of being “sexual” imbues any creature with dynamism and beauty because it must find (hunt) and attract a mate. It is no surprise then that insect books spend so long painting the sexual form and only a page or two is dedicated to the larvae and even less to the eggs… we even think of the sexual form as the “adult” and the “true” form. It is adult in that it is the last stage and adult mammals are sexually reproductive but it is only by analogy.

Sex (as Darwin himself realised) is responsible for a very very great great deal of the natural “form” that we observe and enjoy in the natural world (in all species not just our own!!!). Sexual beauty is thus definitely archaeological (can be spoken about through historical narratives) and transcends the specific function of causing mating in humans. It is something that we can appreciate in other species that we have no intention of mating! It is even more obvious when you look at flowers … but it was beetles that did it for me.

I always suspected this - there is beauty in a girl that is far, far beyond what is required for physical sex, possession and marriage; a beauty that satisfies the mind also, the same beauty that the mind finds peace with in nature. This would link to a general conception of human beauty as a part of natural beauty – the Mother Earth maybe (who was a beautiful serene fecund middle aged woman when I met her – next decade or two older than the Virgin Mother).

Now the problem! Experiencing beauty in a female is a profound experience that transcends the common world. However beauty in a female within the common world becomes part of the status games that indirectly are linked to breeding. This was what I wrestled with in the Northern England stage of my Land’s End to John o’Groats walk. There was I trying to live as simply and “close” to nature as possible. Reducing the reliance on man made things as much as possible. I have even developed my knowledge of wild plants so that I can eat to a limited extent from nature also. But it was the joy riders from Manchester that disturbed my thoughts. Simply walking is not a very “Natural” thing to do. It is much more natural to be pumping with testosterone in big displays of viability to secure social status and attract high ranking mates – like buying a big car and burning up the rubber in the Yorkshire dales. I had to realise that being “in” nature like an animal and being outside nature like a “human” were distinct. We are actually man-animals. The animal sees a landscape as a source of resources like water, food, territory and building land, minerals, agricultural land etc. The human sees the landscape as a place to exist and Be within – appreciating primarily its beauty and watching its character and changes. In industry this is classified as a resource but in its nature it is more. It is not for the purpose of sustenance. If we didn’t enjoy the countryside we wouldn’t die (physically) indeed governments and industry don’t actually have to care about the environment at all. There is a weak argument these days that if we don’t care for the environment then we will be physically damaged as the Earth ecosystem breaks down. It is weak because the real reason for “care” for the environment doesn’t actually matter in physical terms at all. If people are so much like animals that they can’t see that they are animals to be honest it doesn’t matter if the human race goes extinct we just join the dinosaurs etc.

The reason why the environment matters is precisely because of what doesn’t matter. The human race doesn’t actually matter in physical terms. Like the Dodo we can go extinct. There is no reason in Heaven or Earth why it should matter… if we only think in purely practical animal material terms that is.

The reason the human race matters is because of things like “beauty” and “existence” and “Being”. The reasons that some people go walking. It really doesn’t matter if they do or they don’t, but when you do it you discover its “value” and that “value” is the value of the human race and the world as a whole. It is the Earth Mother if that metaphor works for you.

Where politics, economics, and technology and science are so lacking, and why they fill me with profound boredom, is because they deal with what seems to matter. Yet you look from a big enough perspective and what seems so important on the low level, like the interest rate for example, turns out to have no real importance. So the economy collapses and the human race descends into a dark age and nuclear war and goes extinct, as already mentioned there is no reason in politics, economics or technology and science why this should matter. One has to reach beyond these things to the True Being to find out why it Really matters. If we can’t see that then we have lost our “soul” and have truly been lost to the base gods of politics, economics and technology and science.

In this lies the SRH again that the system in which things matter can’t matter itself. Now this sounds a lot like the proposal in a book “The Self Writing Universe” which is a private publication and has small circulation but is the only thing that deals with this issue of theories of everything having ultimately to be theories about themselves… or universes writing themselves to use the bootstrap analogy he uses in the book. I skimmed the book in a few hours at 3am for the “key” and got the gist that the only thing that can explain the order and wonder of the universe must itself be absurd and paradoxical. Its time to return to that book maybe – annoying book though since he fleshes it out with a post hoc analysis of existing ideas which he only read up to write the book. They can’t by his own analysis be critical to understanding the book so why include them? I don’t need a history lesson in philosophy. Maybe he is following Pirsig’s example in “Zen and the art…” but I felt his analysis was autobiographical (deliberate or device it doesn’t matter) of the process he had actually been through.

So returning to “my muse” (as if I ever leave!)… there is the real reason for female beauty which is the same reason for the world and for everything. Then there is the proximal reason for female beauty which becomes economic and political. One only needs to watch music videos to see how female beauty is used primarily to define status. The sad thing then is to understand that to appreciate female beauty one must engage with the world of territory, property and “status”. This put another way is the problem I original recognised – that a relationship really means, no matter how spiritual it begins, the practical biology of child birth and that involves switching from our spiritual human side to the resource allocation attitude of an animal.

I can’t become an animal because it destroys the awareness of the very thing that I recognise in female beauty, in flowers and in adult beetles. There is no way down from here, one MUST ascend to the gods and leave worldly concerns of childbirth, family, status and resources behind… like it or not! To be Human is to sacrifice our own Animal. Thus I should appreciate the beauty in that bike and cast my concerns for food aside like I used to. Why is that manoeuvre becoming harder as I get older and closer to death… I should be finding it easier!!!