The Nature of our currency

Money is really just the spilled blood of mother earth, cloaked by human guile as a thing we need not wash off our hands to seem innocent.

Tell ye all? Oh gee!

A perspective exercise:

How would you speak to the people in your life if, whenever you spoke, you could keep in mind the possibility that these were the last words you would ever get to say to them?

A distinction with a difference

All spiritualities are created equal. But you may discriminate among religions by the body counts they have amassed.

Happiness

Obstacles to our happiness abound. The best work of our lives is in setting aside, going around or just seeing through these impediments. The abiding condition that seals happiness into a visible but unreachable dimension outside our plane of existence is our own character.

Anger

Our anger is the sword of justice that may glint menacingly when brandished but turns to dust when we finally start thrusting it at someone.

nothing is mine

measuring your security by your pile of possessions, feeling like you will have years in proportion to your wealth...that is the moral equivalent of our coccyx or our appendix. It is a holdover from an animal's life where generations were unimagined and the future extended seconds or minutes forward from the crawling minute hand of NOW.

The creatures that live more in imagined time than now [what a curse that forebrain is!] ought to shape their priorities around the welfare of their great grand children. And that would entail teaching those children the emptiness of possessions.

Pick-up Artists of the Patriarchs

Why are these sociopathic displays only found on pick-up trucks? Don't other vehicles have back windows? There is plenty of glass on the back of a Prius, for instance.

Patriarchy has its roots in insecurity. To me it seems to be a strain in our culture that revolves around countering its inner fears by projecting menace and the ability and willingness to degrade and instill fear in others.


How safe would you feel around a dirt ball who thinks this window decal is funny? Who wants to be this guy's girlfriend? Who is desperate enough to bear that clod's child and what chance is there that child would be raised with out absorbing the lesson, as children do when steeped in bluster about bravely cavalier treatment of others, that he too should feel unsafe? Its not a joke unless everyone can laugh about it.

I can not think of an easy way out of a self propagating miasma like that. A solution matched to our sick era would be to stimulate the economy by giving these clueless souls large sums of money that can only be spent on psychotherapy. Cheaper I suppose would be to look into my own heart until I found a way to only feel how lost they are and then address them directly without any of my own fear or even reproach.

We all have a long way to go.

how to tell if yer head aint on straight

When you ponder whom your actions might offend, you are looking toward and arranging your future.
When you ponder who has offended you, you are looking toward and arranging your past.

Some do both. Many get stuck on just one of those tracks. The future is all that remains of your life. As you move forward through life, which way are you looking?

not immortality, just sustainability

One of my very favorite bits of wisdom might be called trite based on how many can recite it:

“Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like its heaven on earth.”

And on how many think they can recite it.

I like Twain's original much better. I also adapt it for my own "live as if..." advice.

Since yesterday turned out not to be your last and tomorrow is just a theory that you will survive, receive today as a gift. But if you choose work that is worth carrying on and if you plan it and do it in community, then you may plan as if you will live for ever.

A dread of being trite is a hobgoblin of high school English teachers.

The truth about lies

How many lies have you told because YOU did not want to hear the truth [or the truth that would come back at you]?

The Nature of the Beast

They say you only use about ten percent of your mind.
I say the other ninety percent uses you.

spell in error

The recognized, and sometimes accepted, excuse for bad behavior: "I'm only human" is like a tarp. You can toss it over only so much junk before it ceases to disguise what it covers. If a person has simply lost their temper they will later have some regret. For such outbursts, apologies and forgiveness may be exchanged. But when someone blasts away in a fluent flurry of rage and later says they were provoked and the behavior calls for an apology not from them but from the object of their rage, then a very different game is being played. In the first case a person loses their temper, in the second, they loose it.

Greed is never a victimless crime

Whenever someone enabled by their wealth to do such things, buys more of the limited and exhaustible necessities than they need, be it land, water, food, fuel or whatever, they bid the price of those resources out of reach of someone else who was on the verge of not affording the bare minimum.  That power to diminish well being is not the advertised face of wealth.   Less altruistic behavior is a common reaction to a net scarcity of resources but we make it worse with an economics that artificially worsens the scarcity by enabling some of us to hoard.

When the rich pay for more than they need, 

the poor pay more for what they need.

I was put in mind of this by the Bill Maher video that Shokai brought to our attention.

The merit of having a plan for more sustained or broadly beneficial use of a resource is effectively nil under the reward schemes of our economy.  We put the good faces of Lincoln, Washington, Hamilton and Franklin on our money.  That almost seems like lying to me.  Money is a sweetener to hide the real flavor of the inhumane nature of our transactions.  Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Gordon Gekko, Phil Gramm and Ronald Reagan's faces are the ones we should see each time we trade.

like, duh,

Teens, an artificial grouping if you use it to categorize by maturity,  are reputed to have achieved nearly instant trend propagation.  That is not news and the four commentaries don't declare it to be.  The speed of propagation is generally attributed to whatever speed the available media supports...I agree.   But no one addresses the question of why, of what might make this pattern so universal.  

This is the sort of situation that invites a dork like me to trot out my theory.  It is much simpler than one might expect from the blurry junk pile of diverging trends that youth, in the memory of extant books and commenters, have picked up and soon enough tossed aside where cultural historians come along to force them into palateable rationales: The stronger that school-of-fish-turning-on-a-dime behavior, the less secure the creatures that are exhibiting it. 

 Herd behavior is an adaptation to the sense of vulnerability.

 

The confidence for genuine individuality generally comes to us much later than the urge to stake out an identity.   Being human is not easy.   Each style-as-badge a person adopts makes sense to them in the context of the moment of adoption.   Being somebody recognizable but not exposed for being too different is a compelling consideration at a certain point in your life.

only experience can blend idealism and realism

Idealism without strategy is a sure recipe for disappointment. Idealism and greed are the estranged children of hope.

Do you suppose they will mind the implied tasks?

If the world were perfect, I could leave it.  Alas!  There is so much to put right.  I will have to have progeny because I sure won't solve all the problems in my time or by myself.

well, that kinda eliminates the love of money

Any love that is not a dialogue is a delusion.

the maddest of crowds

Money is a shared delusion that some people should be more powerful than others, a mildly insane way to digitize exactly how much power you lack.

Madoff was so clever

but did he ever 

notice he never 

felt like he had enough?

But everyone else is doing it....

When asking for trouble, raising your voice is seldom necessary.

Not really the same thing as bliss

It is a blessed state to be so ignorant that you do not even know that you are poor...or it is a sublime achievement.  But if the latter, the IRS will do what it can to remind you of your attachments.

sometimes the by-line is the real story

From Lawrence KS, news of a celebration of Darwin's 200th birthday.

When the right idea comes along, all those investments in the wrong ideas become liabilities. Ultimately the motivations for denial will be found in fear of new authority. That might be because of your experience with old authority. Trust me Kansans, its not about authority. If you insist on seeing modernity, science and logic as forces inimical to your way of life, it is your life that sucks. You always lose a war that only you imagine is being waged, no matter how many lynchings you count as battles won.

what it is and was to be a writer.

John Updike has died.

Trying to make up meatier sentences about writing than Updike has already provided being presumptuous for most and stupid for me, I'll just pass along a few from his obituary:

"It's always a push to get up the stairs, to sit down and go to work,” he told Time magazine in 1982. “You'd rather do almost anything, read the paper again, write some letters, play with your old dust jackets, any number of things you'd rather do than tackle that empty page, because what you do on the page is you, your ticket to all the good luck you've enjoyed."

That Updike can calmly bare the mortal weaknesses many might have in common with him only accentuates the very uncommon talent that he flourished:

There's a kind of confessional impulse that not every literate, intelligent person has,” Mr. Updike said in his 1990 Globe interview. “A crazy belief that you have some exciting news about being alive, and I guess that, more than talent, is what separates those who do it from those who think they'd like to do it. That your witness to the universe can't be duplicated, that only you can provide it, and that it's worth providing.”

A tenuous and fickle grip

I think of our "conscience", our tendency to feel bad about trespassing our personal boundaries between good and evil as an evolved characteristic. It is a great shame that those boundaries are more learned artifacts than universal and derivable limits. The schooling that would enable us to derive the limits is formal and exacting while the schooling by which we commonly absorb our notions of ethics, from taboo to altruism, are the informal, unquestioned ever-present daily lives from infancy onward. That means that new learning or even forgetting can cause us to cease the self-censoring which keeps us from harming our neighbors in gross or subtle ways. The notion of the neighbors or of the community in which we live is a key element in understanding the purpose or benefit that would have selected for the trait of conscientious self-control behavior. It is our undeniable dependence on our tribe or city or fellow workers or whatever community we live within that makes a reflex for fairness, as that community defines it, such a valuable and stabilizing social force. Like any other trait or strength that evolution has given us, its general and necessary effect is, to phrase sustainability and survival as Deuteronomy 6:18 puts it:

Do what is right and good in the Lord 's sight, so that it may go well with you and you may go in and take over the good land that the Lord promised on oath to your forefathers,

That particular phrasing has been used with a parochial vengeance to divide the world into waring communities but that is not its best use. The community we live in is the whole world and all other lines we draw are drawn to our own detriment in the long run.

I like to think the most progressive among us have the most inclusive sense of who is a member of their community. Conversely, my perception of the social outlook of those who label themselves "conservative" is that they live in a world of "others", competitors, moochers, enemies, strangers presumed hostile until they prove allegiance. Given what I believe about the nature of our facility for conscience, I have to conclude that there is some difference in the learning and generally in the influences present in our upbringing that leave us each at some point along the spectrum of inclusiveness and set the scope and strength of our conscience. I admit these differences must be quite subtle and may interact with individual variations of innate personality because even siblings will arrive at different states of tolerance and political belief.

So a conscience is a weaker and more slippery thing than it flatters us to believe. That is the nature of the beast. Deal with it if you are serious about the longevity of our species on this planet. Conscience was meant to be a guide but it is not fully evolved or else we simply have too tenuous and fickle a grip upon its compass.

Today marks our nation's exit from an eight year period in which we acquiesced to a gang of "leaders" who seemed largely devoid of conscience. Even in their humiliated departing interviews, no apologies, not one admission that their mistakes were moral failings or involved selfishly dividing us and acting to harm others without reasonable cause. I should be grateful that our voting has cast these losers aside but I think we voted our pocket books more than our sense of decency toward other humans. Impeaching them would have been beneficial and prosecution for their actions should be kept as an instructive option for the American conscience. The stirring hopes arising with Obama's inauguration are not just the emotions of an economically scarred and scared nation. I hear from many and I feel within me that we have finally lived up to our claims to have the most inclusive boundary that history has ever seen drawn around those who may be given the reins of power. The tendency to hope too much and to blame too much should not be so focused on our leaders. Obama is already pointing to you and me. He will say to us today that it is we who will make the difference. And so it is. And so may it always be.

I suppose I seem to write my little essays with an air brush rather than a fine point pen. I actually share some of the reservations about evolutionary psychology that Amanda Marcotte describes. It is a fuzzy "science" at best and it is easily appropriated as a form into which to pour one's biases and thus free oneself from questioning a belief that is in fact highly questionable. But a conscience is so inconvenient personally that I have a hard time understanding mine as a bias.

"All sentient beings". Try that for a sense of community that your conscience should encompas.

The joke is on us

In intimate conversations, the more heated or discordant the discussion, the harder to be certain in any of the sentences who is the subject and who is the object...loves joke on us.

Riding the Dharma Waves

A hopeful author and professional journalist, Jaimal Yogis, asked me if I would review his forthcoming book: Saltwater Buddha. I have to qualify any such reviewing. If you have read many of my posts, you may know better than I the quirks of my writing and ideas about religion. It turns out I am the one being done the favor because I thoroughly enjoyed the book and devoured it in one sitting.

Poetic intensity of the prologue is a promise mostly kept. It is the knack of the surfers, teetering on a plank in a constant state of falling down a slope of water, to gracefully make it look easy. Jaimal Yogis also makes vivid his struggles and emerging with sure and effortless sounding prose. It would be a disservice if the work were cataloged as merely an autobiography.

The reason, to resort to my own limited understanding, why zen eludes the typical American is that saying things like "it is so much less than you think" confuse a western mind, and confront the analytical habit, grown out of Greek philosophy, of penetrating reality by taking it into pieces. Jaimal manages to depict in the anecdotes that comprise his adolescence and young adulthood, how we westerners put our own minds in our way so thoroughly that we miss what is there. Jaimal's formal study and practice of Buddhism show up as a respectful knowledge of the sages of Zen traditions coloring many of the passages. But the merit of the book is very much how life outside the temple can be connected to and illuminated by practice.

Jaimal explores his hunch that the affinity for water is a primal human impulse with enough conviction to bring Elaine Morgan's works to mind. His rhapsodic exploration of water as metaphor for life affects me. I pick up the vibes easily as I read and his mode echoes in me as if these were my own thoughts: If it were not for the ripples, water would become a mirror and we would see exactly what it reflects. Instead we see only our own turbulence at the surface, image distorted, and the water itself lent a character it does not own but can transmit. But zen is knowing there is water.... Well, you would have to read yourself to see what you pick up.

A gentle protest against the trite co-opting of zen as a motif in media and marketing, runs through the book. The "Inner Tennis " for surfers this book most definitely is not. I would hope readers would not stop at the title just because such unfortunate and uninformed associations are so common.

The siren song of the surf seeps into his dreams. Jaimal's impulses to shed his conflicts by dropping out to go surfing, as if maya could be run away from, reminded me of Karen Armstrong's descriptions of the ascetic option in the early Hindu religion. This going off to the woods or begging has deep roots older than Buddhist tradition.

Jaimal does not say his life is more significant than any other. Rather, in an unassuming self awareness, he laughs at himself throughout the book:

"I figured I was destined, like Siddhartha, for spiritual greatness."

But it is the soul of good writing to transform the personal into the universal...why else read? The mundane, carefully observed, mounts into a praise of existing.

Chapter six gives a good example of how the quiet of the zen mind is not the quiet of a cloister or of the orderly life...it is on another, handier plane.

On page 76 he is bemused at himself trying to pass for a Buddhist monk at an age when his peers had gone off to college. But of all the things fanciful and unattainable on his wannabe list, there is one he has managed to do after a fashion in this book: "Write poems with wandering Taoists."

Surfing gets the upper hand. He sets us up to appreciate his own fall by observing others warped to hostility by confusing well being with possession of waves. He reaches page 156 with surfing morphed into an attachment more than the Zen practice he had earlier envisioned. But by page 229 the lust for wisdom with which Jaimal began his journey has ripened into a freedom from lust. The thrill of wisdom settles down into well adjusted living words:

"But it seems like the idea of paradise is just on the horizon, always, while life is here, under my feet, now."

As a worked example of how one can grow through Buddhist insights, this little book is bound to help at least a few sentient beings. Each person would have their own particular pathway into Zen Buddhism so anyone else's path must seem like an abstraction. But in that sense, abstractions from others are all we can exchange and so this sharing of Jaimal's path is for the rest of us an amble in the vicinity, an inviting introduction to its effects and appeal. The author has a mind born with spiritual habits and a brain able to write prose pictorially vivid and spiritually telling. I found it a pleasure to go along on this man's adventure.

Not reputation but ...

Excellence is the greatest rebellion.

"Religion evolved"

I like the sound of it. PZ is gonna love the title of this report in Science Daily:

Religion May Have Evolved Because Of Its Ability To Help People Exercise Self-control
The article is not quite as emphatic that religion is just another kind of behavior as the title would lead you to expect. But still, it definitely puts religion back in the box where science would have it.

A dangerous new years resolution

I have come, seeing parts of my life where it has slipped away and mysteriously taken joy with it, to fiercely prize honesty.