Shall we politicize the holidays?

I cringe every time the subject of political correctness arises because I NEVER seem to hear an enlightened opinion. The general concept seems too vague to be relevant. I suggest it can only be realistically examined in particular examples.

In a perfect world people would think carefully before speaking or acting, and would demonstrate respect where it is due, and take responsibility for their words and actions. I realize that the human ego works against all of that, and for most people, any of that is a lot to ask.

Most people who I hear complaining about political correctness, seem to resent it as a cumbersome new code-system suddenly required to protect them from unjustified criticism. In other words, they come across as dingbats who don't know that they are dingbats and are mystified to be finally treated as such.

I personally don't give a flying care what kids look like at Halloween because they are just kids who are bribed by candy to look silly for us. Whether you dress up as Einstein or a skeleton I would happily surrender the tootsie roll without projecting arbitrary social interpretations onto the poor kid - concerning physics or flaying.

With Christmas just around the corner I shall grab hold of the nearest bolted-down object and steady myself for the coming onslaught of grating carol broadcasts and Greeting Debaters. I’m not aware that there is any intelligent debate to be had or ever was.

As a human being, you can either think about what you say before you say it, or you can be dull. You can either say what you mean, or be a dunderhead. You can mean to be respectful or you can be an asshole.

There are no inherently correct or incorrect seasonal greetings. It always depends on who you are and who you are communicating to: how wise, present, dull or dunderheaded you are being.

Let’s remember what Merry Christmas means. It is short for, “It is my wish that your Christmas will be merry!” Thus “merry Christmas” between Christians is perfectly appropriate obviously. And as a former Christian I do not manufacture imaginary harm by hearing it (Don’t get me wrong. I still like the dude but I’m allergic to some of his worshipers’ habits).

Example two: Wishing “Merry Christmas” to someone of a specific faith who does not celebrate Christmas but rather a specific winter ceremony of another name, is either presumptuous, dull or insincere, depending how well we know the person and their particular divine bents, or whether we give a damn.

And… example three: A government-sponsored billboard which wishes “Merry Christmas” to the public appears balefully ignorant of the fact that much of the taxation which pays for such trinkets comes from non-Christians or else was chosen to speak to a limited sector of its public and not to others, which is surely fiscally inefficient!

I won’t bother addressing those who claim that Canada is a Christian nation and “Merry Christmas” ought to rule unimpeded (if such dinosaurs still exist). I will flatter myself so much as to assume that no one of that intellectual quality would be reading this blog.

Frankly, I don’t care what anyone says to me, or around me, in between credit card transactions this jolly Productfest Season. Say what you want and let it reveal something about you!

To anyone who resents this concept and wishes to dribble arbitrary Merry Christmases everywhere you go, with clemency, as I have often done, it is surely no great crime. But it reveals we are lazy, insincere or both, and would be a far more honest person if we kept our mouth shut instead of issuing artificial sentiments from the tongue and not the heart.  

Or if we all agree instead that we like artificial sentiments from the tongue as a societal behavior model, then why should it matter what the hell the words are?

Happy Productfestia!

acme / ˈakmē/

All empires have been temporary and this one has shown no indication of permanence. Indeed the cracks are spreading like disease as corruption and greed erode the foundation.

acknowledge /əkˈnäləj/

By definition I suppose I am a Rush fan. For I cherish their immense beautiful body of work. But I feel in no way relevant to the term Rush fans when they who think of themselves as the intelligentsia of music use the term. They are not talking about me. They do not know me and I do not know them. And they are of no consequence in my mind, though of much consequence in the web of causality.

But they cannot speak for me. They say that I am vindicated because a cozy club in Cleveland has issued a stamp of approval. And I suppose I had thought I wanted this. But now I think I don’t. What morbid normalcy might they now inhabit where once they walked on clouds?

This may be the most important thing I ever say, in my whole life:

So I get an email from the JazzLion, dropping his phone number, asking me to call. His words are brief but intimate. I take notice.

I last saw him in December 2014, right before he split to BC for a series of adventures which attempted to bridge the natural world which he tries to hang on to, and the sleazy commercial world we humans have insisted on letting dominate ourselves. Early reports were promising. I began to think he would not be returning. Apparently so did he, at least for a while. I telephoned.

In his words, he hit rock bottom in Calgary, knocked out of employment by the third boss in a row to con him with false promises, at least according to his perception. With no home or money and a head full of destructive thoughts, aimed at himself and others, he called on Mom for a loan for a coach ticket back to Ontario where his greater support system lies.

His considerable intelligence never seems to match up to his emotions. His goals never seem to match up to both his perceived purpose and circumstances simultaneously. The gifts he offers never seem to match up to the wants of his neighbors.

We seem to meet up on a little better than annual basis. He will spend the next few days on a bus and then we’ll get together. I know he is feeling lost and hurting and questioning his purpose in life. I know where I want to start in terms of trying to help him find his way toward life pursuits that might work for him, and I shall write it here and now, for his benefit (review) and mine (reminder) and hopefully others (something to think about):

Purpose

If you want to get at the truth of anything you have to start by identifying the appropriate context which is always the largest relevant context. In this case, the universe.

The universe is mind-bogglingly huge and relatively empty of life; to what degree we are not sure, but we can be almost certain of one thing: There is no species in existence in the universe quite like us. That is a logical near-certainty. Because in order to be wrong about that, the other humanoids would have had to come into existence at right about the same time we did, so close to the same time that this would represent a wildly unlikely coincidence when mapped on the scale of the universe’s immense duration. We can observe enough of the universe and of earth to know that life occurs in the universe in extremely unlikely circumstances and intelligent conscious life in staggeringly unlikely circumstances; a staggeringly rare event. But given the immensity of opportunities in the universe: trillions of trillions of trillions of worlds (we can predict); such unlikelihood may happen more than once. But given the humanoid passion (and rate) for exploration and expansion (no doubt a primary factor in what we’ve become; what we are), any similar humanoid species not of Minerva (or Earth as you might say) has to either have killed itself off by now (as we have proven to be fully capable of and are currently forecasted to do) or else has simply not yet evolved anywhere else in the universe. We know this is a mathematical near-certainty because otherwise we could not have avoided this race because to be anything like us and thus with a similar rate of expansion capacity, it would have flooded the universe by now. And we have not run into them.

So trusting we occupy a rare supervisory role in the universe, what does that mean for us?

It means that something brand spanking new is happening in the universe which is well beyond its previously normal scope: that of swirling matter snowballing according to gravity and densities and explosiveness with one or more isolated oases of death-life where cellular organization takes rapidly altering compositions as different forms rapidly consume the prior forms and are rapidly consumed in turn: evolution as we know it. The brand-spanking new thing is consciousness and it has the ability to utterly transform the nature of the universe but might tragically decline to. Consciousness is subject to evolution of an intentional form without need of countless generations and has proven to me, and (I interpret) to others, to be capable of very rapid evolution.

Consciousness enables a web of intelligence, love, empathy (much more love and empathy than most people even begin to realize), communication and cooperation; the kind of cooperation which can put a man on the moon, set its sites on Mars, and soon beyond, with startling growth of reach (technological advancement).

Consciousness, though infantile at this early stage, in the care of humankind, has the capacity to perhaps sadly disappear, or else evolve and flood the universe with harmony and benign intent instead of this cold physical circular causality with rare blips of death-life.

This is a drama of utterly epic proportions which affects the entire universe and makes all other dramas, especially the contrived human societal ones, completely irrelevant, as much as we pretend otherwise. And we are at the centre of it. We are the universe’s witnesses to this event, as well as in the starring role. And the thrilling thing is that we participate in that role at every moment, no matter what we do, and we are able to witness this drama at every waking moment (and arguably when dreaming, perhaps) if we choose to! Because everything we do, if you break down the components fine enough (not a lot of work in most cases) either propagates our normal beastliness or else propagates the evolution. Everything.

At every moment we can be slave to our instincts or else be mindful. (Speaking from a variety of established perspectives:) We can be spiritually asleep or spiritually awake. We can be animal or truly human; a grown child or a true adult. We can experience living death or be poetically alive, serve our internal devil or internal godliness. And every choice, every moment, is huge! Every one of our actions, in adherence with the laws of causality, are potentially eternal – or awfully damn close to eternal; eternal for all intents and purposes.

Eckhart Tolle, who has earned my immense trust, would tell JazzLion that being this witness is his internal purpose, with an outer purpose being his duty to design. I would add that choosing a side in this cosmic fork in the road, must form a basis for his purpose, whether you call it inner or outer.

Tolle says that some people who recognize the human purpose will involve this spiritual reality as a core component of their outer purpose. I know that that has to be true of me; that I must make it true, and given JazzLion’s capacity for intelligence and empathy and wakefulness, I would suggest the same of him.

Frankly, I would say this of quite a few of the special people I know. And I know that some of you read this blog. I really hope you are listening!

Love you.

Achromatic /ˌakrəˈmatik,/

We see the trees but not the forest; the sky but not the biosphere. We see the stars but not the worlds; the person but not the angel. We see the child but not the miracle.

Achilles /ə-kĭl′ēz/

How staggering to contemplate the forces against us. Though it seems that only two instinctive forces have any significant hold on me on my best of days. But together, outnumbered, they still drag me down. One shortens my time. The other distracts me and uses it up.

Me, you, your kids and dinosaurs

Well… here’s another blast of pessimism sure to scare away more readers! Good luck!

I am sometimes a little saddened by the eternal optimism of dear friends who are smarter than they allow themselves to be. Optimism that is ultimately disastrous as it results in hope, inaction and capitulation in the face of looming disaster. It is so painfully rare to meet someone who comes across as mentally unfettered, capable of perfectly clear thinking (a lot to ask, I know!) But people do not realize what impenetrable walls are built from everything we invest in (and I don’t pretend to have escaped that entirely). Career, reputation, wealth, property, marriage. Even children. Your children are a detriment to your rationality! The walls that are built in the process of parenthood will not allow you certain vantages; to fully entertain certain possibilities, because they are too threatening to that most dear. No matter the circumstances, no matter the evidence, the all-powerful ego that is a stranger to you but yet is the master you and tied ferociously to your children, will simply not allow the conscious you to open up to the possibility, for instance, that your children might have no future. It will cherry-pick arbitrary favorable evidence that suggests, for instance: that people are basically decent, so how wrong can we actually go?

My courageous period – and the only such period of my life (so far), culminated when I was sitting all evening in front of my desktop computer with a blank MS word document staring back at me and for the second night in a row, trying to understand the question that I was trying to ask myself. “How decent am I really? Am I evil?”

I finally came to understand the question and I strongly suspected that if I took one step further, that there would be no going back (I still get the piss-shivers every time I watch The Matrix blue pill-red pill scene). And there it occurred: my singular moment of triumph in this life:

“Yes. I am evil.”

I viciously turned myself inside out and counted the ways.

I cannot fully recall what the next few days were like. I recall I was deeply withdrawn, deeply horrified and strangely exhilarated to find myself in an alien place I would never have imagined existed. God knows what would have become of me if a sort-of final piece of the puzzle kind of event had not fallen into my hands some time later. It was Richard Dawkins’ suggestion of the selfish gene. Regardless the accuracy of that specific scientific testimony, it pointed me directly down the path I needed as I began discovering first-hand the evil inherent in every living thing and the original necessity for it and the actual beauty and miracle of our circumstance! But I digress!

I am always surrounded by evil unrecognized by the captive consciousness of the doer (myself included). Always. Every day. And mostly – on my good days – I do not dwell on the beastly half of the doer but love the self-victimized consciousness instead.

And I know some things you might say. Perhaps: No! I am not evil. I am good. I love my spouse even though he or she is such an asshole sometimes! And I love my kids even though they torment me! I buy fancy car seats for their safety and a big safe automobile for us and I buy us a big house and plenty of heat to keep them warm and I buy them the latest gadget so that I can be attached to them at any given moment and more of the latest gadgets so that their friends won’t think little of them (because their reputation equals my reputation equals my ego which is everything). Yes I love them and that love is magical and you people without kids – you will never know this magic!

But oddly there are those of us who have no kids and yet love your kids in a different way even if we barely know them, and, who even love your kids’ kids though they may yet be born.

I hope you won’t get me wrong. Some of my favorite people in the world are wonderful parents who I admire and I’m sure parenthood feels utterly amazing at times. I am regretful at times to not have experienced it in the direct way which many of you have, but that parental love is not enough!

Building a life around loving your kids so that they can build lives around loving their kids so that they will love theirs… no matter how good that feels it is a circular loop. It is not progress. It is not evolution. It is not enough to justify what you do and what you choose not to see! That circular formula will come to a crashing demise if our love for our kids and our desperation for (inevitably artificial) stability manifests itself in our killing the biosphere, in part directly and in part by sitting back in hope and inaction while the great powers around us – the industrial corporations and their politicians and their media and the so-called “environmental organizations” which they have quietly usurped and tamed and made into industry-compatible profit machines, entertain us and mollify us with their bunting and their elections and their promises which never come true and make us think that everything might just be okay because there supposedly is a battle going on between political parties and supposedly a battle going on between greens and industry and there is nothing you can do – we got it covered. There is a reason the promises don’t come true. These battles are theatre and the electoral changes in government become an excuse to exorcise the promises of the prior reign.

No civilization on planet Earth has ever had the remotest possibility of surviving its own flawed unsustainable architecture except for hunter-gatherer societies (not to suggest that nothing else is possible – I don’t know). But everything else has inexorably destroyed itself like a dumb-ass frog in a slowly boiling pot. And now we have the mother of all civilizations – the global industrial-military civilization, doing the very exact precise same thing, with the entire planet at stake and nowhere else for us to go. And here we are just farting around in the bubbles while the elite imperialists of the world, steeped in obscene wealth (mostly blossomed from old criminal origins abetted by politicians), love their children by amassing the wealth, power and privilege to eventually put them on whatever small ark of humanity or other limited eco-fix that technology might hopefully avail them at the eleventh hour.

If some version of the internet (and people) survive into the next age, will your great grandchildren look you up on the McFacebook Archives to see how you participated in the Great Eco-Struggle or the Global Market Meltdown of the 21^st century? And interpret that you spent it taking selfies and giggling at cats? Would you be okay with that?

Let us remember that it’s easy to love our kids; in fact unavoidable. It’s in our genes. It’s a biological imperative. The stupidest most pig-ignorant beer-swilling party-time hicks in the world – you know – the ones sticking firecrackers up their ass for youtube fame… love their kids. Even wolves and weasels love their kids.

Even dinosaurs loved their kids.

Am I detectable?

The thing about being mostly asleep following years of habitual wakefulness is -– it’s not obvious to me. I’m still affected by all the perceptions which changed through wakefulness. So the new sleepy experience does not resemble the old sleepy experience.

All the illusions of ego that I learned to see through – not just academically but intrinsically – leave me feeling rather permanently powerful and confident and loving and thankful: So even when my ego reasserts itself and I am insulted or impatient or unforgiving, these feelings are dulled because I have learned not to trust them. And just experiencing them usually serves to wake me up again. Thus they occur only briefly.

The tricky consideration is this: When I go about habitually feeling a (detached and unthreatening) sense of isolation or loneliness because I interpret that no one around me is like me; does not view the major components of our living experience in the same light as I, I must consider the obvious logic: If someone were just like me then she or he would be sleeping much of the time they are around me and thus I would dismiss them. If I came upon myself would I recognize myself as a person of wakefulness? Probably not! I would have to witness someone exhibiting sustained wakefulness – or rather – a sustained absence of illusion-seeded behavior.

Or would two partially wakeful people naturally bring it out in each other?

Assuming otherwise, no one is going to potentially spot that quality in me unless I make it a priority to stay awake all the time. So why do I never seem to care about that? Why do I never make it a priority to attempt to remain permanently awake? Why does it generally feel to me like that need not be a priority? Am I simply incapable? Is the idea an instinctively unattractive one? Is it just the ego asserting itself; its last stand? Is there an unacknowledged fear? Perhaps that sustained wakefulness would leave me too incompatible with this culture and that I would have to emigrate, and thus be far from loved ones? Surely that is not a reasonable fear if sustained wakefulness will generate sustained non-directional love as I confidently predict it will. I believe I have experienced fragments of that process. But of course the directional love area is not one of my best areas in terms of conscious evolution. That and the food instinct have been the least affected. Food, not at all, I might judge!

My head does not want to wrap itself around these questions. I seem to know that I should be capable of figuring this out but I seem to not want to, for reasons my mind wishes not to reveal to me.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

I think it’s fairly clear to me that I am currently asleep more than awake.

As usual I do not mean this linearly.

Though I am more forward-looking than I once was, I still reflect on my behavior occasionally. And I peek back at recent blogging now and then. And sometimes look back at facebook posts or comments as straggling replies draw my attention back to them.

I’m rarely impressed by what I see of me. I have not been very quick at consciously identifying the relevant illusions in whatever behaviors surround me. I have not been gentle in nudging people. I have often not been patient.

I have often been eager to express opinions, not so much for typical reasons of ego but from being so eager for others to agree so that I may interpret their minds favorably. Not that the latter motive is freer of illusion than the former.

My blog posts have not been effective in the way I envision they should be. They are lazy and do not explain enough. I probably sound like someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. They are excuses to write so that my word count goes up for the month. Didn’t I decide recently that the blog should be a priority? If so then it should be measured by quality rather than quantity. Or ideally by both, I suppose.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately absorbing books and films concerning social and climate injustices which have long drawn my attention but by fluke (library holding patterns etc.) have concentrated of late. And that prompts a lot of opportunity for impatience. The human race is pitiable and insane. I do not use those words at all lightly. It is no limb I tread. I have studied this stuff with an integrity unheard of in the consumer world. We are not sane. And we are not very intelligent at all. Clever for sure. But cleverness is not intelligence. My confidence that humans on average are growing rapidly stupider has recently been bolstered by scientific observation that aligns technological evolution and intelligence across existing cultures. The most primitive cultures in the world produce individuals of the highest average intelligence according to this study, with those of us in the most technological and industrial cultures producing, on average, the dumbest in the world. Sorry to brag but this does not surprise me in the slightest. Apparently the human brain might be most fit to exist in the real world and not virtual ones. Evolution. Go figure.

And already I despise what I have written today. This was not what I wanted to talk about.

I see such obvious and merited routes to swiftly improving intelligence in people and how that intelligence avails stronger consciousness and more pliable instinctive forces. I see the strong connections between intelligence, truth and love and then in books and documentaries how such practical tools, theories and philosophies exist, produced by very intelligent people, which can be utilized by an evolved population to solve all the problems which have grasped the human species by the neck (though we don’t seem to know about that yet). It’s so very easy to lose patience when it seems that no one is listening.

And I have spent the rest of my time preparing for a couple of party events; imitations of the Match Game TV shows which are very effective humour machines. I never dreamed it would take so much time to put these together or I might not have.

Yes me, the TV hater. I have watched a bushel of these shows on youtube, condensing them into 10-minute affairs by knowing how to navigate around all the idle banter (and with no commercials). The timelines are identical every episode.

I’m sure these events will be a hoot. My topics are far edgier then what they are allowed on TV and my friends a little brighter! But still this activity has been sleepy activity, not wakeful in the spiritual sense.

Well, I've written more than I deserve to have read. More soon.