Property is War (Republic of Minerva)

 

Found the Republic of Minerva whilst looking for stuff for the wedding speech. Interesting that it was claimed by the Republic of Tonga.

According to Glen Raphael, "The chief reason that the Minerva project failed was that the libertarians who were involved did not want to fight for their territory.” [Reference: http://www.impel.com/liblib/NNLFAQ.html#12]

So if ever proof was needed that property means war here it is. If we claim anything as our own we will need to fight for it. So if we have property we have war always. Hence the absurd oxymorons produced by Nations like fighting for freedom and fighting to bring peace.

A priori then and now it is clear in my mind “peace” can only exist when we have abandoned our claim on anything.

Anyone who speaks of possessions or nations at the same time speaks of war. It is these people who have blood on their hands using these very words.

Love & Loneliness & Unity

Just finishing off the wedding speech … found this quote

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.  ~John Bulwer

… I very rarely feel alone because I think I have learned at some level to love. It is astonishing how often people live in fear of being alone and I think this is a force that drives a lot of relationships. Yet I do question myself a lot.

In a night club yesterday I proved to myself that really I do not fit in. When dancing for example my greatest pleasure has always been to dance to the music. This forms a relationship between myself and the music. It is like when one goes walking one dances to the sound of nature – it is a relationship between oneself and nature. Yet in a night club I was watching that actually people tend to form couples and dance with each other. I try to do this and I confirm yesterday what I have always felt that it feels wrong for me – I try to dance with a girl and I now have two masters: the music and her! Which is more important? I watch her and I try to see how she is interpreting the music and then I try to understand her interpretation to copy that and I find it boring, so I do my own interpretation and that is different from hers because I always change – I don’t ever stay in one time or with one motion – I am impossible to follow and I find following someone else boring. It is the same as playing in a band – I cannot listen to my own heart and the other musicians as well. I either play what I feel should come next or I am left trying to stay with them which is boring. What I have never mastered is think “with” someone else so that she and I think the same dance, the band thinks and plays the same music. I know in jazz this is considered the special moment that every free-form jazz group seeks when there is synergy between all players and that higher unity and emergent property is created that enriches the participants. This is indeed my dream of relationship – yet I never find it, it always seems so hackneyed, trivial and robotic in practice. I see girls and guys “on heat” and they dance together obvious driven by need for sex and driven by fear of loneliness and the music I fear is just a tool to these other instincts. Is there really a higher unity, an emergent property something greater? I believe so, but don’t find it myself.

3am (eternal) this morning after leaving the night club and doing night shift at the Buddha Birthday celebration I speak to an elderly gentleman about his marriage. I described how after 4 years living very closely with a girl I met her again after the relationship had ended and realised that even after all this time together she was like “another” person – a stranger and I felt that I never really knew her. He confirms what I guess I am beginning to realise: he says that he likes sport and his wife likes shopping. There is give and take in their relationship. He goes shopping and just sitting on a chair outside the shops with a newspaper catching up on sports results and at home he watches the sport and she goes about her other interests. This way they work together but he doesn’t really know her at all. My dream of some kind of unity of mind and spirit so that partners both think and work as entities joined in some kind a higher emergent property is maybe a myth. He said there are maybe those few partnerships that work like this – but I am reminded of what another friend said that women and men think differently. Indeed I realise they do - they have completely different interests and roles in creation. We are different.

But it all makes me question where the fault lies. Do I seek a myth? Am I somehow at fault – I feel on a completely different level to other people. In metaphor I was thinking I get bored by simply flowing together with other people; I like angles and edges with which to push off from and gain momentum and direction. It seems other people are happy to just forget things and ooze together in an amorphous amalgam. Is that the dissolution of self that I sort in “my muse”? Is that the ecstacy of the Bacchic dance? Or am I right to continue in the Apolloine mould and seek distinction and definition from the crowd – remaining true to my own instincts, directions, knowledge and integrity?

Maybe this is just the great question that faces Man. Do we seek entry to Eden again and be like the animals (like they do it on the Discovery Channel) or shall we eat from the tree and seek Self and Knowledge? One of the first things I wrote my muse was an extended image of two eagles encircling together over Eden on the rising thermals of that original sin… (before crashing to earth together – I do not know what that symbolised)… certainly it seems that my thoughts then are as they are now and awareness of this problem is once again being awoken.

Folding in the blog on houses and separateness and togetherness – there is allegory in the words that I write. Each word is very lonely being utterly separated from every other word. Yet “reading” creates an emergent property which provides a structure in which they are unified. Inancientgreeceandprobablymanyancientlanguagesspaceswerenotputbetweenwords. Separate the words from the continuous text then depended upon understand the meanings. There is a dialectic (more evident in the ancient from) that separateness is only possible when we look from the higher emergent level back at the “components” and vice versa unity is only comprehended when we see that the components really do compose the higher form. The true structure is actually both unity and separateness together.

So I say that in a night club I see people paired off in couples. I say that I see them dancing to the music and together. I say that I feel more together with the music than the partner I dance with. (I should add when I imagine dancing with a partner it is a much more formal arrangement of learned steps and agreed protocols). Really if I look more closely all this is only possible because of a very high level unity that is already present that determines which components I identity and also how they fit together. What I can’t figure out however is how “I” fit into that high level unity? I dance there on the dance floor watching and musing upon what I see unfolding around me – how am I related to unfolding events? In Vipassana meditation they would be just unfolding events with no witness (or maybe the unfolding philosophical thoughts about the witness and the nature of that witness). But can one really participate in a dance floor as a fully meditative monastic? What is dancing like when we meditate! What does our partner think! Needless to say my “partner” got as bored as I was and went back to her friend.

Watching Peter Owen-Jones (POJ) on Friday who I think suffers from my problem but even worse. His shows are unmistakably about “himself”. This blog maybe is just about “me” not the search for some great truth in life at all. [Writing structure being abandoned]: I advised someone that he was a coward at the night shift as well – in him i saw myself – he was suffering in a relationship that he had agreed too out of convenience and hoped that he would end up loving his partner – of course he never has and now is trapped. He is a coward and maybe I am too because to be happy in a relationship one must first risk everything. The more one risks the greater the reward. If one risks ones life one receives Life back (that is the message of Christ). I think I risked everything for my muse – she has been the only girl I’ve said yes to and pursued, yet I held back because I didn’t want to risk hurting her through my own weakness (lack of money, career etc). Writing now I see that to say yes to her is really to say yes to “the world” as well. This is why I hold back. Something in the “world” is distasteful – that is what I need to resolve before any talk of relationships. Anyway he needs to meet a girl his feeling for who frightens him, and then to use that fear to risk everything. That is the way to growth and happiness. Maybe advice I should take one day … again. So Owen-Jones is following the life of Saint Francis and goes a step further than my own walking. When I walked my logic was to minimise my needs so that I could travel as far and as easily as possible. I carry a logic from my father not to burden those around me. Yet Saint Francis had it different. It is by placing oneself at the mercy of others and needing their charity that ones finds the mercy and charity in others! So he lived in a way that required the support of others entirely. Buddha did the same and by chance the husband of an ex-girlfriend at the Buddha’s Birthday event was explaining that UNESCO published a book on Barlaam and Josaphat which explains that early links between Christianity and Indian Buddhism probably gave the Christians their monastic traditions (as they did the Chinese). POJ said that he found it hard to live this way in UK today because of what he described as “fear”. I guess that “fear” comes from the attachment to property and possessions – we are unwilling to be charitable because we are scared of our possessions and security being damaged. Result being that we don’t see the good in others our self but rather the bad – see the nations consciousness i.e. the newspapers for more on that! POJ also saw a simple problem that I don’t understand yet. It is true that there is little difference between a “scrounger” and a “saint” in appearance. How do we know that our charity won’t breed a population of people who have no interest in seeing the good but are just lazy and undisciplined. This is the right wing argument. India is seeing this happening and the very old traditions of supporting travellers are being lost – monasticism in its original form is dying there. So it breeds by argument a culture where people cannot “connect as deeply” as POJ says living like that creates. Being self-sufficient it seems creates disregard for others rather than love. That I fear then is one of my great weaknesses. My walks were to some extent wasted because I never threw myself at the mercy of people. Instead I threw myself at the mercy of “Mother Earth” and I guess this is why I have strengthened my relationship with her (to the point of actually spiritually speaking to her once) – it is her I try to love. That is why my loneliness has gone, that I guess is my relationship – yet it is not as fulfilling as a relationship with a physical girl I fear. I need to throw myself at the mercy of a girl one day for that it seems – I never did that to “my muse” I thought it cruel for her as how do you respond to someone who seeks your mercy in love if you do not love them in return? Horrible. If you are weak and cowardly you will pretend to love them and that is evil. Can we really do this out of love for someone? The saints seem to… hmmmm

So no real conclusions yet but an exploration this weekend of unity,love and loneliness… back to the wedding speech (I’m sure all this thinking about marriage I’m being forced to do is for some kind of reason – or punishment ;-)

…

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love.  It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.  ~W. Somerset Maugham

Just read this quote too. It is fascinating and I am rethinking all this like I used to with “my muse” that all the problems of existence are no better perceived that at the junction where two people meet. I wonder why my chance to explore all this was never available with “my muse”. I also think that my opportunity will never arise because also out of my musings this weekend is the thought that I am truly different from other people. People it seems are mostly quite lowly creatures – more akin to dogs and cats than saints and gods. It is a horrible thought but I must entertain it that the common state of mankind is actually virtually on a level of unconsciousness… this is too depressing a thought to be worth saying… anyway the place I wish to be not this but in the full brightness of an alert consciousness, fully aware and sensitive to things as they are. Any partner will simply have to be seeking the same to even show up on a radar… and there is never anyone on the radar because women seek material wealth and material child birth rather than the wealth of insight and brightness. Twice this week men have also expressed the importance of children – but ironically it is that strength of devotion to ones child that I understand blocks ones path to liberation. Buddha legendarily called his son Rahula (राहुल which looking up on Pitarau.com means able/efficient… I’m corrected from thinking it meant of “burden”.. in the west apparently it takes the form Ralph which is a middle name of myself by chance). But the legend does so that Buddha saw his love for his child as a hindrance to liberation simply because it makes one want to stay in the world of imperfection. If our child dies suddenly we see with unimaginable shock and misery the depth of Buddha’s realisation about our ignorance of impermanent forms. We can only pray that our child lives so that we are spared learning the truth of our ignorance, and can continue to maintain that love which is ignorant. I understand this is what he meant. Anyway S.Maugham sees in his relationship that most extraordinary feature of emergent properties that they can remain unchanged while their components are changed – viz the long discussions on the Argo before in this blog).

…

I feel like I’m living in an Earnest Hemmingway novel now… I just looked up the name of “my muse” and it’s the Sanskrit for "melted, dissolved, vanished"… how odd and allegorical is that … how can that be :-(

SRH – is this it?

I know I’m not supposed to be thinking about this till after the wedding but the speak is in its 1st draft and I still have 2 weeks to go… hmm not convincing… anyway SRH seems to be based upon this distinction present in the literature to do ith Impredicativity…

If we encode things with the intention of simply describing what already is then indeed this description can represent “all things” and it need only be self-supporting and not self-contradictory to include itself. The coding is really just a grouping of the things like sets.

However if we seek to “construct” something through our encoding – as a Constructivist would – then we have the chicken and egg problem whenever we try to construct our self.

It seems it is the Constructivist problem which lies at the heart of the SRH. Scientists are not simply describing the world as it appears but are seeking a way to construct it. Construction of the world was the role taken previously by God. We may ask who made God, and as a child I wondered whether God was powerful enough to make himself – I figured at least he could step forward in time to when we was made and then like Bill and Ted he only needed to go back in time at some stage to make sure he really had been made. Absurd thinking really – this is God creator of Time and Space! Why does he need to prove anything! Anyway pointless discussion. The point is that Science strays into the SRH whenever it tries to take on the role of creator.

So we will always be left with “descriptions” of the world and our minds remain powerless to tackle (in a constructivist way) the more fascinating question of how it all got here… that is always a religious point.

On Dawkins … again

 

Been toying with these ideas for years. It occurs to me yesterday that there is this potential problem in Evolutionary theory. Evolution is usually considered one dimensional. It is about the gene frequency in successive generations. But actually it can be considered as binary i.e. survival or not. The common garden worm is a form that has survived as is the human species. In terms of evolutionary success there is nothing between them. They each occupy their niche stably. People might argue that humans were superior because we command control of so much of nature. The problem for us is becoming ourselves – can we command ourselves? I personally fear not – there is a contradiction in commanding oneself (SRH). So the human race may indeed be out lived by the worms. This makes the worms more successful than humans. Yet we know in another sense that humans are “superior” to worms. Humans for example can codify and discuss this issue… can even gain liberation from material entanglement. It is blatant then that against the yard stick of evolutionary success most of what humans are about does not get measured. Even those individuals/species that go extinct have qualities and values that evolution does not respect.

The argument can be put this more interesting way. Dawkins has an idea that gene frequency explains everything – call it Selfish Gene. He even extends this idea to the spread of ideas themselves. Suppose there was a gene which corresponded to an interest in the idea of Selfish-Gene and another gene that lead to bearers rejecting the idea. It may sound absurd to say a gene exists for such a specific trait – that is exactly one of the weaknesses of this thinking!

For the gene to spread there has to be selection in favour of the Selfish-Gene gene, in other words those who bear the gene that stops them from believing in the Selfish-Gene suffer some increased mortality as a result. How can this occur? It can’t. There is just as much chance of the people with the anti-self-gene gene winning and those with the selfish-gene gene. This is the problem noted before that there is no selective advantage to Evolution Theory. It is not the product of evolution itself! Which would run foul of the SRH anyway.

Both these points taken together point to things that are fundamental to human experience which transcend survival and existence – things which transcend evolution, chess and game theory. Death as is oft noted in religious circles is not the end, not even a concern of true mankind who see that survival and existence are just a diversion of reality and not its basis. The problem with Dawkins is that he is so blinded by his own dogma that he will never see “the light” it seems.

p.s. I need to look up the official game-theory/computability approach to chess. Is chess a formal system?

On Peace and Security

I sit on King Henry’s Mound in Richmond park. I first came here three days ago and as I walked into the poets corner was impressed by the energy. The mound is built on an old burial mound which I then concluded was the source of the energy. So I come here to meditate. It is a lovely spot though a shame it is such a tourist spot. The Vista Line runs from here to St Paul’s Cathedral which can be seen through the eye hole shown in the picture to the right. My feeling about all the history here when I first visited was a bit like being shown around a kids bedroom – there is an amateurish and unbalanced seeking to find more worth here than is actually present. The poem at the entrance to the gardens with its worthy theme of celebrating nature and the poet who used to come here, is not a good poem. Amazing that it has survived for almost 3 hundred years. There is just this clawing feel in the vistas to Windsor Castle and Runnymead etc that the area is seeking too hard to connect itself to the ”heart” of England and its royalty. This blog doesn’t believe those things are more than mytholo gy like King Arthur but what reason has Richmond to have some central place even if it were real? I compare the area to poorer areas which are necessarily marginalised if Richmond gains some central status. It is such a shame that humans are so stupid. Richmond is no better that Whitely in Reading yet the atmosphere here is peaceful while in Whitely the locals turn it into a dump. It is because they believe it is marginalised and the Richmonder’s believe that here is important and central. Actually there is no difference – ask the squirrels running around the tree in front of me!

Now the point. This morning I woke up considering this issue of “middle path” and comfort. I am tired. I have been working till 10.30pm the last 2 days with a student, followed by the 1h20m journey back to London. I am getting no pay now from either students due to money troubles – though I expect money from at least one when their father returns in a month from visiting his poorly mother. I am due to visit the doctor on Monday with a acute bowel pain – though I realise this is just a development on something I’ve not paid attention to for over a year. Probably an ulcer with the stress I feel and the amount of chillies I consume, though worst case cancer – at least I’ll have an early chance to face that most fascinating of things called death (mean that sincerely). I have this best man speech to give in 2 weeks and the stock markets have gone chaotic (as expected) and I’m busily trying to keep up with the crazy stock trends. The builders wake me at 7.45am each morning so no chance to make errors with sleep. Not much really but enough to make me consider “well being”. My cousin is moving into this 5 bedroom house. It will be an amazing place when the builders finish and it makes me think about “middle path”. Certainly I do not need or even desire such an extravagant place but there is no doubt that living in Richmond and having a house and place to stay peacefully is a good thing for body and mind. I feel better for sleeping in this house and visiting the park each day which I have not been able to find in the garage where I have to sneak around like a criminal avoiding unwelcome attention that could lead to having to move out. Even on my long walks sleeping rough carries some stress because there is the worry of rain, of mosquitoes, and being woken by a disgruntled local. I used to argue with a friend at the temple the exactly placing of the “middle path”. It seems that I am not quite there, I am a little too ascetic for the middle path. Not completely certain but my feeling now is that I would be better with just a bit more security. So this morning I consider this: how can Buddha and his monks have had security living entirely off alms and sleeping (initially) rough in the forest? They could be attacked, they could starve if people didn’t give them food. There is risk of illness, snake bite, tigers, mosquitoes carrying disease – very many things that it seems upset the mind/body system enough to diminish its power to peace and clarity (or so it seems to me now). So how to find a bit more security without owning, or paying someone to own, a property?

Of course the worry is that too much security and one forgets and becomes complacent and lazy. Certainly all those people who find like a bit flat have simply forgotten how much they have. Ideally I believed that non-self would give security but it seems that security is needed to get the peace and clarity to find non-self… maybe.

While writing this what I imagine is a robber fly has just crashed out of the sky with its prey of black fly and is doing battle to contain its breakfast. Shocking how brutal but equally amazing.

On Butterflies

 

Just sitting here in a field at the university and I see my favourite butterflies: first a female orange tip and then about 5 minutes later a male. Some 30 minutes after that they are fluttering aro und together. To my left there is a long-tailed tit with food in its beak just resting and scanning the area before heading to its nest to feed the young. The male orange tip just lands on a flower right next to me. It is so like clockwork this breeding thing; it is ubiquitous. The long tailed tit flies back from the nest over my head. I think for a moment as I see that pair of butterflies together of my muse and myself. I wonder whether they experience the extraordinary quality of it, as I did or is it as I see now just plain and simple. I tried at breeding I say to myself and it didn’t work. So I imagine a conversation with an adversary who says that I should just try again, it will happen. I reply that making it happen isn’t the interest for me. I look at the birds here who will fledge their young in a few weeks and I look at the human responsibilities. I suppose we invest equal amounts – birds produce broods every year that take a month to fledge but only live a couple of years, we on the other hand produce just one brood which take 2 decades to fledge but live for 80 years. It is not the making it happen that is the point I think again, it is the cost. An advert in the paper I was reading says get paid to do the thing you something you enjoy most. Two thoughts enter my mind. My first ever realisation about the nature of “work” was that you didn’t enjoy doing it. True this isn’t universal but the most important jobs like cleaning and manual labour are not the things we chose to do for enjoyment. My mother calls them chores – this means they are not things we chose to do. Fact is work is mostly that assignment of things that have to be done but no-one wants to do them so they get a salary attached. Another way to see that is if doing something is so enjoyable then why would anyone pay you to do it, wouldn’t they just do it themselves? Labour and reward this is at root why I am reluctant to make it work. In a Malthusian, Efficiency-of-the-markets way if something has great rewards then the cost will go up (either in price, or in population) until the cost balances the rewards. Fact is having a family is extremely costly and the cost just keeps going up. My cousin is renovating a new home at the moment and I am utterly bewildered at the sheer complexity of planning regulations and the like. With each generation the amount of work required to provide an environment of nurture for children increases. Time was like the animals that you simply grew what you needed from the ground. Now with increasing population pressures and the ratchet of capitalism (increasing efficiency requiring greater complexity to create jobs) the environment is becoming chocked and there is simply no space for anyone. I made a half resolution today never to own any property: it is abhorrent I have decided, not because of what I shuts in but because of the principal of shutting people off land which I consider an act of violence against my fellow man. We go to all this trouble to ensure safety and security for the next generation at the cost it seems of the current generation. Space and Land quite evidently precedes the act of partitioning spaces – enjoying that primary Space and Land cannot be affected by the trivial creation of spaces. Of course people are welcome to divide the world up into little properties but it is a petty and trivial activity. Looking at the butterflies again the overwhelming sense is that breeding and property are actually petty and trivial activities. Not that this perspective is easy to reach. I have realised with great humility recently that the path I think I’m treading is difficult, at least as difficult as a good marriage – it is not the easy way at all. Up here in the cold mountains there is great perspective (occasionally when the clouds shift) but the going is most certainly harder than for the folks in the valleys. This must be accepted. So the sense grasped today is that there is clear space beyond the confines of the concepts of sexual relationship, marriage and breeding.

I forgot to add a central point to the discussion on work. There is an assumption in this society that “doing” is a given and we simply need to decide what flavour of doing we will be employed in. My genuine question since the outset has always been “why?”. Maybe a childish question but I don’t see the source of the premise that we need to do. Doing is always in response to something: a need or desire in ourselves or in someone else. Without need or desire what doing is there to do? Folding that into the question of breeding produces the other flavour I missed out.

Resource Allocation

The idea was first put in my mind by a girl I lived with at college who commented on the regimented rows of houses that make up suburbia. I could see what she meant but didn’t understand. That thought has grown.

Here is the view from my window this morning as I stay with my cousin. Beautiful in one sense but completely absurd in another. Mathematically exact delineations of space everywhere. This is the beautiful part until you realise what it means – every single identical patch of land is a single human being (or genetic line i.e. family) marking out its territory. As though we were barnacles on a floating stump of wood in the ocean, is this only as far as the human race has got?

I don’t understand it yet but what has got into us that we who share a language, a conception of the world, a culture, a knowledge, we even look the same; that we can’t even work out how to live together and default to rigid absolute cut boundaries that mark out the influence of neighbours. I saw myself and my family as dysfunctional and unable to resolve conflicts and reach agreements – it seems it is a pathology that is assumed in the fabric of our very culture!

Maybe I ask too much but I' don’t accept second best. We want the best mp3 player, car, house, wife and kids, why not start with the best way of life?

Have been arguing further on the “culture of violence” on facebook. Logically it follows that man needs to put Peace before all other delineations. Thus at its limit Peace requires that we put people before even family. It makes sense intellectually: what reason have we to put our wife and children, mother and father “before” another person who is also a mother, father, wife or child. True we owe the debt to our parents – but everything is interconnected and we owe that debt really to everyone. If a friend were to repay some of my debt to my parents on my behalf and me to his on his behalf is anything the less? Maybe some egos are dented because “my” son didn’t respect “me” – my mother might think – but this is exactly the thinking that founds the culture of violence. So my mother gets resentful at a friend helping instead of me and doesn’t see the human value of that person. And so it propagates throughout the culture right up to the Nations. The hidden violence that comes from affiliations and organisations. I commented in Facebook on the absurd situation we have internationally where US senators have a mandate only to their own people and yet whose actions affect the whole world. Precisely because we are all inter- connected it is meaningless to delineate so absolutely as we do. Above all must come the value of Peace that lays over all delineations. Like the churches of old: if a man is thirsty and needs water then give him a drink before you ask who he is, what money he has, why he is there, has he a passport, is he a criminal etc. If you believe in God isn’t it Him who does the judging and we who are reminded not to judge lest we be judged ourself?

Argument went towards “Ubuntu” – that African concept of friendliness and the observation that there is a pathology in being “sociable”. I mean that in the sense that famous, popular, high profile people have something wrong with them if they seek objective measures of their sociability – like being members of groups etc. A sociable person is just friendly to the “people” they meet irrespective of what societies they have joined or belong to. In this sense, exactly, societies are actually antisocial because they exclude as well and include people (been argued before). Social delineation is actually an antisocial structure that puts a barrier between men and women that doesn’t need to exist. Looked at like this our organised modern “society” is actually the most pathological and unnatural structure of mankind. When you meet someone there are so many layers to get through before you see “them”. The job, class, sex, race, family, politics etc. All these are trivial compared with “them”.

And so returning to the picture; altho there is no easy alternative, to comprehend there is a pathology also in this exact replication of unit of living one for each person as though we saw ourselves as replicates of each other with boundaries around each other rather than the more realistic view of us all living together in an inter-connected world where we share everything from the sky above us to the air we breathe and the language we think and write about all this in.

I should use the words on this page as a metaphor for the notion of individuality, separatedness and interconnectedness. True the page can only become a page of meaning because each word is separate and occupies its own place in each sentence and on the page. It is that separatedness that enables the words to come together as a whole… and I need join the others down stairs for breakfast rather than be separated up here with these words… shall think about that more.