Art and Myth

"Starry night over the Rhone" is one of my favourite paintings. Originally I bought a copy prospectively as a present for "my muse" but while it stood upon my shelf awaiting some day when I might satisfy her with it, it looking back at me every day, I began to fall in love with it, began to be drawn into its intense dreamy world; and then it hit me. Contemplating in the stillness of the image one day the stars, the river side lights, the reflections and the couple walking arm in arm looking out from the scene. All of a sudden I noticed in a flash the alignment between the stars, the street lights and the reflections. Are the reflections of the worldly lights, or the cosmic lights; or are they the same?

The alignment of world and celestial! This is what is so magical about this picture.

And, the couple arm in arm are they simply reflections of a world in flesh and bone, or arm in arm are they reflections of heavenly realms of love: or both? And the painting; is this not a reflection of that scene or one similar all those years ago, a reflection of unity and love itself? It is an image of profound symmetry and alluring depth.

But, and the reason for this blog... it is an array of colours only! How can there be so much to say of an array of colours? There is no river here, no lights, and most absurd no people. Try and talk to them? They are dumb and souless, and yet I speak of love!

Yup, it's yet another illusion, yet like the growing world of illusions in the blog, there seems nothing wrong in entering the illusion even while we know it is not real. This is what needs to be watched more closely... it is not the entering of illusion that is wrong, but just how easy it is to forget we have entered it.

Art is an accepted illusion with clear boundaries that we have learned to accept. We watch a film and while probably totally engrossed in it, we have learned how to escape its hold: it is "just" a film. Although we may feel a bit jittery for a while longer after watching a horror movie alone late at night: or we may feel the warm glow from a romance or positive movie for many days... even weeks after. I wonder what effect the use of guns and weapons in American films has. In "reality" I have and will never need access to a weapon. We have some air guns at home for target practice, for sport. This is not however how guns are portrayed in American films! Personally whenever an American picks up a gun in a film, I switch off - it is a culture so alien to me that I cannot relate to it - it is purely fiction. I wonder tho whether all children switch off so readily! If you walk away continuing the illusion that a gun really can achieve anything then problems are starting. Even the governments seem to believe this illusion: War is an ancient myth which people still haven't escaped from: sadly the movie still goes on.

Adverts are even less defined. There is no car in a car advert, and what is displayed is complete illusion from start to finish, but do we really switch it off after the illusion ends? Clearly not since car companies consider it money well spent to continue making this "art".

Education contains a plethora of myth, and it is very hard to see the start and end. When we read history while we might say "this 'really' happened" the question we might be pushed on is "what" really happened? In recent history no one questions the missing World Trade Centre or did such a building ever exist - maybe World Trade Cent-er (anyway that big building that isn't in New York any more). However if someone says in the history books "a central American office building" and someone else says "an icon of American global imperialism" clearly we have vastly different political views of the same event. And if someone else says "life has been difficult I lost my mother in that tragedy" and someone else says "God be praised against the odds my mother was saved" we have two completely different stories. There are as many views as can be thought of an event which seems to be just just one thing! And of course there is the governments "use" of the event which is another view.

So one truth, but a million stories. And the problem for humans it seems is to find which story "is" the truth. But as this phase of this blog unfolds it appears: no story is ever the truth. The truth is actually quite profound and while we may tell stories about the world (as indeed I am doing here) which are all very illuminating and informative: when we turn to Truth we need to switch off ALL the illusions: forget all the stories, close the book, turn off the radio, the TV, the phone, put down the newspaper, burn our qualifications, forget our name, and where we were born, forget what people think of us: get out of bed, end the slumbers of day dreaming, open the curtains, indeed open the window and look again at the stars that shine upon high, and the street lights that shine upon low, and the painting that reflects the light betwixt the two.

=== added 27th June

On second thoughts maybe the river is the key ingredient of the picture. The steady flow of the Rhone symbolic for the steady flow of process in Van Gogh that gave arise to this picture and which continues in my own mind giving rise even to this blog addition. It is the river which refelects the river side lights and the stars: it is in the river of the world that all things become manifested and reflected, a great river which is both the canvas upon which the world is set apart and which at once is brought together : the universal cosmic love?

Switching back to paper

In time honoured style and because I won't have ready access to the internet this blog will continue on paper, but with updates when I get to the internet...

100 UK Soldiers Dead in Afghanistan

We are supposed to respect the sacrifice made by these soldiers. This of course I do.

Our soldiers have mothers and family who grieve their loss. They have a vicious enemy which they have to fight in unforgiving terrain. They have limited supplies. They have dreams of a long and successful life, not of perishing in a bleak desert.

But then I'm a Taliban. I suppose the same must be true of the British soldiers.

If we respect the sacrifice made my British soldiers, there is no reason I can see why we do not in the same act respect the sacrifice made by the Taliban.

In 1997 I sent an article to the papers asking for wreaths to be laid at the Cenotaph (in London) in honour of German, Italian and Japanese war dead. They made exactly the same sacrifice, they are equally the heroic victims of war, why are they not remembered?

So it is simple. Either we remember all the war dead, and remember the tragedy that is war; or we remember none.

And, in this it is plain the futility of war, and the profound error that is made by all humans to grasp at that which they can call "theirs" and that which they will dismiss as "not theirs". It is the foundation of all the world's evils as I can see it. It is why my bosses think I don't work for them any more (it is why they thought I ever did work for them). When they buy something in the future which I have made, am I not still working for them? Are we not always working for everyone always? The rest as argued is simply the dressings of vanity and fetishised role playing. People love to dress up and act (suits, robes, gowns, coats, uniforms: see; business men, barristers, judges, graduates, doctors, police) it is just part of the fantasy that obscures life for many people. The red carpets, the entourage of sycophants, the titles, the meetings etc all designed to avoid this mysterious "void" which governs all. I certainly don't fight with bosses to be part of this (or not part of it - I must remember that would only work to suck me in) it is just to get a break from the myths which powerfully perv-ert/ade our world.

Irrelevance of Darwinism to Mankind...

big p.s. to the "why I won't have children post"...

Now the problem that has stuck in my head since a kid was that from a Darwinist perspective I should have kids to pass on my genes. If I don't have kids then my genes are lost and this seems to violate the basis of biological life.

Spot the error? Well, how are these "my" genes?

Famously we know we have like 95% of our DNA in common with chimpanzees (used to be 98%). Well these are not my genes obviously. And when you look at the remaining 5% the vast majority are not unique either. It is the combination of genes which is unique however. Is the combination "mine"? Well this is the same point as most of this blog is moving toward very slowly...

What if I decided to buy a gene combination... would that be mine too? What is the difference between my own sequence and the one that I have bought?

When we have kids these are not "our" gene combination. Of the tiny fraction of unique genes we have, 50% are replaced by those of our partner. How are they our kids? It is quite possible for someone elses' kids (by chance) to have DNA more similar to us than our own kids!

Evolution occurs over hundreds of thousands of years, with selection amassing its impact across whole populations. An individual by itself makes almost no impact on the movement of genes. And even if it does... what significance is there in occupying one niche rather than another?

If I bring up a chimpanzee as my child I can be happy that I am supporting 95% of my genes, and if I bring up a tree I can be happy that I am protecting maybe 70%.

Or I can just do away with the notion of "mine" and "not mine" and just treat all life with the respect I'd give my own children... we are all cousins afterall.

The new layout of life btw looks like this (see http://www.bork.embl.de/tree-of-life/). Here Eucharyotes belong together in terms of genetic similarity which makes us close cousins to trees compared with the differences between bacteria!

the few against the many?

Just a note...

A central issue in ethics is this matter of the many and the few. If you have some money, do you spend it saving 1 person with an expensive to treat condition or on 10 people with cheaper treatments?

We can begin with a generally accepted principle that all people are equal (I accept this myself).

There is a disasterous democratic logic that each person is quantifiable. So 10 people are 10 times 1 person: iff all people are equal.

But then democracy also protects the few against the many... what chance for minorities in a democractic world!

The correct view seems to be based upon a slight development of the opening principle...

"All people are equal, with the exception of oneself who cannot be judged."

Thus when in a situation where someone needs help, then we only judge what needs to be done based upon them. We cannot argue from the position that "I" have equal value so should save myself as well.

Will need to work on this..

Processes, The Argonauts, my muse, things don't exist...and energy vampires

Bear with me while I explain the really boring issues we get at work... but a very interesting problem...

A question has got us stuck at work. We have a process that produces a product in two stages. Each process makes a batch which has a unique number today it is 1698. Data is recorded on two separate forms which are headed with this batch number 1698.

Stage 1 is made and added to stage 2. A query was raised that the second form makes no reference of the addition of the first stage. If the two stages were completed and never combined it would never show up on the accompanying documentation.

A tick box was added to the second form asking whether the first stage had been added. The problem was what to call the first stage. The first form is headed by the batch number, and the document has a name, "F0020", but how to refer to the product that arises from this process which is added to stage 2?

Maybe we call it 1698.1 but does that make the result of the second stage 1698.2? So actually we ship 1698.2 not 1698.

What if we added 1697.1 to 1698.2? This has accidentally happened. In the past the documents were amended so that 1697.1 and 1698.2 had the same batch number. The "batch number" names a process, or a stream of manufacture, which ties the stages together. Where the batch numbers are the same the stream has flowed. This was how the system was supposed to work. But regarding naming the stages in the stream there is this problem.

Let us take the manufacture of a chair. There are established names for the parts. The back-rest, seat, four legs and various supporting slats. Each has to be manufactured separately and then assembled. Now if we take a chair and trace it back through the factory we can see where the bits and pieces came from. However working forward it would be silly to make legs for
a particular chair. I imagine there this just a pile of legs which are fitted together as needed into final chairs. Any front pair of legs will fit any chair.

However run out of front-pairs and there are no more chairs! All of a sudden, because of only one missing part, there are no more chairs. That is how fragile the existence of a chair is! Remove one part and the whole thing fails. Take a part from another chair and suddenly we have a chair. It can be switched on and off this easy.

The parts don't really "belong" to the whole. They are inter-changeable, fickle creatures that do have a role in the process of being a chair, but drop out at a moments notice and leave the whole chair project floundering.

Back to the manufacture process at work. So what name for the products first component? That is easy. "Stage 1" and this is what we call it. So we have Stage 1 "of" batch 1698. And we have documentation "for" 1698. And when it is bottled into 10 identical 1Litre bottles we have bottles "of" batch 1698. But if someone wanted to actually see batch 1698 we would gesture at the 10 bottles on the table and say there is it. And we would collect the 10 bottles and maybe put them in a box for shipping. But look again. There is nothing there called batch 1698! There are 10 bottles "of" batch 1698. Each bottle has the plastic container and 1Litre of a polymer in aqueous dilution. But the batch is 10L not 1L. It is a part "of" batch 1698.

Suppose we get all 10L together in a big beaker. "OK this is batch 1698" we say. The contents of this beaker. But we are still not pointing at batch 1698 only the beaker and saying obliquely the contents "of" this beaker are it.

If we can point at a beaker why not point at batch 1698?

The problem is that 1698 is not a real thing. It is a process. It never really begins and it never really ends. We don't call the raw materials 1698 when they come into the building, but we do document them so that if anything happens in the 1698 stream it can be traced backwards.

The problem is most famously, and more romantically, found in the story of Jason and the Argonauts - so named because they sailed in a boat called the Argo. During its decade long journey into the Bosphorous every part of the boat was repaired and replaced many times. The question that then faced the Thessalians when the boat returned was were the people aboard still Argonauts? The boat was different from the one they set sail in, so they can't still be Argonauts!

The Argo was built by a man named Argus. He simply took part in a process that gained the name of Argo. Thus when the process involved the replacing of timbers it regained that same name. So of course the sailors that returned were still Argonauts.

Argo is derived from its makers name Argus. This is the name that came to be given to a process that has a stage of birth from his mother and took up a life which involved ship building. We ourselves are processes. Streams of manufacture. Names refer not to the momentary things, these do not exist, but to the stream which flows through them. Things, as Heraclitus would have said in Ephesus over the sea from Thessaly many centuries later, are in a state of flux or becoming, forever changing.

And so we come to "my muse". Tomorrow is 6/6/2008. It is 10 years since "early June" where "I took my place upon a chequer floor" and she gave "her World and Eternity". If only she had, but such things are just processes I am coming to see. It seems very harsh to end all this, this ten years of heart ache, longing and musings with so dismissive a conclusion. How can the softness, the romance and beauty of all that come to this? But I think this is the truth, and seems my only means of escape. Maybe I won't stay here for her forever. Maybe I should stop haunting the places where we one met, the memories of what once was. Maybe the process that I have called "my muse" is taken a turn. It is hard to do, but the evidence is over whelming, that the girl the world once called "Reena" was a process. A beating heart, a smile, a skip in the step, a bounce of voluminous hair, a giggle, a flash of excitement in the eye, a letter, a poem: these were the parts that manufactured "Reena". But she was never there. I never spoke to her, I never touched her, I never wrote to her, I never met with her, I never had her: I have only missed her, cried for her, longed for her, lost her. Had any part failed then the whole illusion would have failed, but I never longed for any part of her: I longed for "her", for "Reena". How foolish the heart! how ignorant! how destined for sorrow and torture! Why do we give hearts a moments thought! It was my heart that believed in her, and it was her heart that shattered the illusion! Where is the process we once called Reena now? Do I still long for that? I regret those last words, "see you in another life" i said before I turned away from that form forever. What! see that "form"? the dark hair, the slight body? More accurately I have wished to be part of her process again. But this is a lie! My heart wishes to be with that form. That "person" who stood before me, who I never had, who I wished for, who has been lost.

So really I never knew her. I never even met with her. She is an illusion which has haunted my mind every day for a decade and which has driven my pen and hand endlessly. But she never existed and she never lived, and she never died. And me? "I" too do not exist. I have never written a word of this blog. But you may call the stream from which these words are issuing Alva.

But while I came to the belief last night that may be I might be nearing a turning point in this situation, another thing happened. My lab partners daughter went into "shock". There is a good chance that I drained her of energy. It has been a suspicion, a fear, for a while but maybe the energy that I found with Reena - the love as I thought it was - the spiritual connection which persisted until she died - was fuelled from her rather than anything happening between us.

Last night I resolved an issue regarding the closure of all this. I need to know whether what happened was really the thing I have been searching for. I have been convinced that it was, but doubtful also because other guys seemed - on the surface of it - to get very much more! And its not exactly a "loving relationship" in the usual sense. So I have doubted the depth and significance of it. But it seems to have held a place in her heart, but I can't believe a scratch on the place that her fiance held. And so the mystery. If for me it is everything I have ever wanted, to the point on walking away that I had taken part in my only reason to live. If for her it is just a casual friendship then to anyones thinking this cannot have been "it". Yet it persists for me as "it" and so the problem of how to move on remains. If it is "it" - then I have aretez. If it is not "it" then I am mistaken and must search more - and I have allez.

But the twist is that maybe I have a hand in her death afterall. That connection was a drain of her youthful energy and I am a vampire. I am not going mad, maybe this happens. Suddenly everything is different. What for me is bliss and happiness and the goal of my life, is to other people a path of destruction. If this is so then my whole life must be re-written. My whole existence is based upon a false premise, that to live others must die.

Well its very sad if its true. There really goes any dreams of happiness. But it might come at a good time. Now that I really suspect this is true I need to restructure myself to find energy with harming people. I have no idea how to do this, but I must switch off the "heart" which seems to be the antenna which picks this stuff up. Its the same antenna that linked to the "earth goddess" in that experience at Mere if you read my webpage.

It also means that I'd better move quickly into the next stage of my Buddhist process. Recently I've become convinced that the main goal of Buddhism is to "extinguish desires". This has become plainly simple to me. It means to resist the lure of "thirsts". In other words that "force" that generates within us when we want something. Which drives our thinking, our analysis of how to get it, and drives our actions toward getting it: that force must be mastered. Let us call that force : "empulsion" which is the root of all movements both outside and inside: movement and emotion.

The arising of empulsion is of no consequence when we are master of it. But when it directs us then karma becomes our enemy. Karma means almost the same as empulsion - I think. It is the process by which things happen when we act, and especially whether those consequences are considered good or bad when we experience them again. A simplistic example might be: you throw a rock in the air in a fit of rage and it falls down to hit you on the head. That thud on the head is the karmic repercussion of that empulsion. You want to know why your head hurts? it lies in that very moment of empulsion. Of course processes in the world are very much more complex and have been going on for a very long time! There is a lot of karma waiting to hit us on the head, but also make us very happy too - delayed results of ancient empulsions we have had. It all depends upon what we have done in the past.

Back to the point. When empulsion arises it strikes me as very simple. If we can achieve the goal of that empulsion we are happy and if we can not then we are unhappy. If we are master of empulsion and we cannot achieve the goal it is a very simple matter to simply let the empulsion die away (nothing lasts forever). But if the empulsion is directing us, then we experience loss and suffering. Pain is not suffering. We have a dental operation without anaesthetic it is a simple matter to ignore the empulsion which pushes us away from the dentist drill and which would try to stop the operation or take pain killer. If we are controlled by empulsion then the pain is "too much" and we must take action to avoid it.

"Be seated it will pass" is a most wise line I picked up from the excellent film "Withnail and I". Indeed if you can remain seated then all things will pass. The problem is when we cannot remain seated. In these situations we are generating karma which will create the unpleasantness of the situation again. The situation itself is not so much the issue, as the empulsion that it causes within us. Some people might like to sit with a person, while others cannot sit in the same room as them. Same person - two different empulsions: wanting to sit and wanting to walk away.

So in the last 24 hours a lot has happened in this stream, a lot of karmas, but I'm hoping to master the empulsions particularly that one which previously I have thought was love.

What is wrong with laziness? (9/11/97)

Just been looking through an old archive of stuff... an article written on 9/11/1997 and rather self importantly sent to a newspaper! Obviously didn't get published. But it seems I have gone full circle because I'm coming back to this view of strong self-reliance being the basis of life.

What is wrong with laziness?
Laziness as a taboo subject I consider has confused the place of work in our lives. The opposite of laziness is busyness or rather business, and yet action for its own sake is not worth while whether it be working or buying, it requires meaning and therefore ethics. By ethics I do not mean universal truths for such impartial clubs as humanity, history or the Good but rather the personal questioning that ensures that we are an integral part of what we do, and can justify this to ourselves for ourselves. Only in this way can our actions become meaningful and we live our life: it's absurd to allow someone to live your life for you, as well as live theirs, for who then are they?
Laziness is then not just a deficiency of busyness but rather a deficiency in meaning. If this deficiency is measured at all - itself a sign of lazy attitudes - it is done so better by high crime statistics and lottery ticket or alcohol sales than by low ‘profitable’ productivity. For this reason it is irresponsible and lazy two fold, for politics and business to have its eyes on such irrelevant issues as the unemployment figures, profit or the value of the pound. In their stead a stimulation of not legal, financial or group, but personal responsibility and therefore meaning was all that was ever required. A change in very basic attitudes to life is required if individually and collectively we are to make any progress in the next millennium.

Where have I been all these years? to find stuff from before the time of "my muse" so in accordance with where I am today?