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.

The price for peace

“How are you doing?” I ask.

“Good now that you’re here.” She wastes no time before exerting pressure. I know I’m the last visitor of the day. She won’t want me to leave.

I choose the visitor chair with no arms on it and don’t remain for long. She wants us arranged on the bed, side by side so that I can hold her and rub her back and such. I immediately regret it. I don’t want this level of intimacy with her, and now I’ve set an unhealthy precedent. Now I’ll loathe to come back again and face the unenviable choice of unwelcome intimacy versus an abandonment/anxiety attack reaction should I decline. The more she demands the more she alienates. Bad all around.

She reminds me she’s dying. She says she’s going home Monday (I doubt it). She tells the tale of the cancer-sick man who survived because all his friends and family put their lives on hold and stayed with him 24/7 and pulled him through. I’m a little skeptical. Pretty sure cancer doesn’t give a rat’s ass if your friends are holding your hand or not.

All she wants is love – or the illusion of love. Somewhere inside she probably perceives the difference and is willing to settle for the latter. But the constant demands erode lovability.

“Stay,” she wheezes breathlessly, “’Til midnight.” How real is she being? As always I don’t know. As always I am caught between mercy and sticking to my principles – which all boils down to: blind compassion versus genuine compassion. This night I am strong and tell her I must go and why, and that I will be thinking about her and how to be helpful to her.  

The next night there is an inner-circle meeting. The Liberal Theologian’s daughter; my other housemate, is the key participant. She hasn’t felt like a daughter for a long time now; more a constant nurse. She’s a sleepless estranged grieving wreck at twenty-four years old, and I haven’t been shy to point that out to people. Her girlfriend is there. We’d had a one-on-one prior to the meeting, solidifying our commitments as protectors of The Daughter.

LT’s best of friends are there: Dog Whisperer and Aqualad’s other mom, the Earth Writer. And the Priest Next Door is there and the Psychologist Next Door. Both of them speak eloquently. There words are a great comfort. And Dog Whisperer speaks passionately from a place of shared experience. She cared for the dying as a young woman too and paid tremendous costs which still she can’t escape.

I am greatly relieved to find that everyone shares my views about LT’s anxieties, fears, control issues and special brand of neediness. Some of my guilt concerning my own dark suspiciousness towards a terminally ill woman is beginning to evaporate.

We have branded ourselves the support group for The Daughter. And if necessary we will help her stand against the Circle at Large: LT’s other friends and extended family – should they take up a call to arms from LT and rally for a 24/7 home-care solution, which our little alliance is dead set against.

The next day there is a meeting between doctors and key parties from the inner and outer circles. Home-care is rejected. Hospice is the destination. And the prognosis has devolved:

“We’re looking at weeks,” says the oncologist, “Not months.”

I still can’t get my head around this; why this transparency is so welcome. Who, reading this, would wish to know, right now, their date of expiry? I can’t imagine you would. So why thrust it upon the terminal, I sometimes wonder. Why not let them wake each day unburdened by ticking time clocks? Yes I know all the practical reasons and I know that in the big picture, how critical such financial matters are not. It surprises me, is all. What are the ill thinking when they ask, how much time? Are they just praying for a nice big number? Is it a regret every time; to get the answer they gambled against?

Now that the time-frame has changed the math becomes interesting for me. If we’re talking weeks, then I could conceivably commit to weekend-only duty for a short while and so not be on-call, and pull 18 hours a day, Monday to Friday for LT, taking the lion’s share of care-giving coverage. Then we just need a couple of sisters and a couple old friends to each spend a weekend with LT. The library room could be converted to a guest room without considerable difficulty. And then five others to commit to a weekday evening each week; while I sleep. And The Daughter doesn’t have to partake at all. She can get on with being daughter.

I take these thoughts to Dog Whisperer. She and Earth Writer and Aqualad have been such a magnificent help and comfort to me this last month, it is astounding their impact on my life, especially of late. Not just their love and their hugs but their kind ears and wisdom have so reduced such otherwise lengthy internal mental processes. They have helped me cut to the hearts of the matters with every issue and spared me so much mental math, letting me find peace so much sooner. I love them to no end. I’d put my life on the line for any of them.

Of course Dog Whisper is more or less horrified at my ponderings and eager to derail my train of thought. The hospice is the better place for many reasons. She is tearful in her rebuttals, as I am tearful in my persistence that I must go through this exercise for my own sake. I have to know that I am not letting someone down in their greatest time of need, out of my own selfishness. I have to know that I have not been rationalizing; if I could make a difference.

I shall pass this way but once; any good that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being; let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

- Etienne de Grellet

Friday I visit LT and discover that she can barely manage a short walk with me and her walker. Such a struggle that I wonder was it her last walk; if its wheelchairs from now on. She talks of great plans for us. She wants to finish editing the remaining drafts of her fantasy saga. Only the last two books remain unpublished. And she wants to finish the late addition to the series; a supplemental novel, half-finished. And she wants to finish the murder mystery novel too and she wants my help with these things. And I am on board with that. Yes, I will help! But we try to talk about this for an hour and accomplish nothing. She can never complete a single thought without slipping into a vegetative state. I realize that none of this will happen. She is mentally breaking down from the cancer and the drugs. The reality is: the final books of the series will receive cursory edits from a small committee including myself, and published posthumously.

I fear that even “weeks” is optimistic. I feel like she is slipping daily. I really hope I’m wrong. The blessing is that all my former concerns have evaporated and I am truly at ease with her. There are suddenly no boundary issues. She doesn’t ask for hugs but I give them because I want to. It seems like the drugs or deterioration have left her mentality transparent. Gone are my reservations about control issues. I am comfortable, without having to shield my higher principles (or was it an ego thing all along; fear of being controlled?). She has become more fully lovable. In a sense she may get what she wanted all along, but at so terrible a price.

“Going down,” states the elevator voice with flat eloquence. So we are. I realize as I descend that this will be perhaps my most intimate dealings with death. Five grandparents were sad to lose; truly, but that is what all grandparents must do. Close friends; not so much. Not in my experience so far. I think about Biodad’s departure. That might have been intimate had we not so fully alienated each other well before or had I not fucked up a possible reunion.

The elevator door opens and there through the windows I see the other wing; the old bricks of the original section of hospital, once called Henderson. It was there I entered this world, born of Biodad’s mischief. I suppose I am grateful for that.

The one great drama

I've blogged before about the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy. At the time I was wrapped up in the deep empathy that was aroused for the heroes; characters of extraordinary richness. But a much grander significance has since crystallized for me.

Having re-read the book with a young book club at the Princess of Schools, I learned a couple valuable things. One is that for young people (and probably a lot of less-sophisticated adults) there is a reason that teen lit works and why great literary novels (like this) don't. Less experienced readers apparently do not automatically appreciate the normally-superior show-don't-tell style. It apparently takes time and practice to acquire the instinct to absorb clues and decipher a story. Kids books tell the story straight out. An evolution is required of the reader in order to appreciate the best literature.

Second thing I discovered (spoiler alert!):

I made the unforgivable mistake of glancing at an internet comment (the bane of human existence) on some book site, which stated "The ending of The Road sucked" or some such brilliant utterance, and I thought about the arguably lame and profoundly unlikely coincidence where the boy is almost immediately found by an adoptive family right after his father dies.

I thought about my own lessons to the young writer's group. A story ends precisely how it must end. The ending IS the story. All else is preparation.

Did The Road have to end that way?

There was only two possible ways for The Road to end in essence: One: the way it did end; mankind will survive. Two: Mankind will perish (not at all what McCormack envisioned).

In the ultimate dystopian environment; a planet earth entirely scorched; no longer capable of supporting human life, where the last tiny scattered population is ultimately cannibalistic (figuratively when not literally) there can only be this dual hope for mankind: that the terminally crippled biosphere will somehow rebound, and that at least two children (of opposing gender) will survive who are currently young enough to remain of child-bearing age when the planet is finally capable of providing new life (food) again. McCormack says none of this of course but all the clues are subtly present.

The problem that cripples humankind's slim chance of survival is human nature itself. Survival instinct arouses greed and hunger to the max. There is no formal society to divert scant remaining resources toward the above efforts. Humanity's future is sacrificed for the current needs of the individual (sound familiar?) Instinct prevails over consciousness.

The boy hero is quite likely the only potential new "Adam" - or one of very few potentials. The father is hell-bent - by love - to keep his son alive by any means necessary. He has no trust whatsoever for any other human. The boy, however, wants to trust; wants to connect to others. He was born following the holocaust - at a time when most survivors were opting for group familial suicide - as preference to being enslaved or eaten probably. The boy has never met another child in his life.

The man is instinct (though ultimately the hero). The boy is consciousness. How can the mankind-survival scenario possibly come to be? The ill father must succeed in keeping the boy alive long enough to deliver him to the new "Eden" but then must finally allow the boy to trust. The new Eden is not apparent. It is only another small family - with a young-enough girl. The father must die in order to free the trusting boy.

I feel that The Road is McCarthy's vision of how unlikely it is for the human race to survive its own killer instinct. Thus it is a happy ending and necessarily improbable.

Here's the kicker: As a society-of-two upon which mankind's survival depends, the only solution is for the hero/heroes to operate under the rule of instinct in order to survive - and then - at the precise opportunity - VERY SUDDENLY (papa's death) - begin instead to operate under the rule of consciousness.    

I feel that this is precisely our reality. The Road's nuclear holocaust scenario is the kind of condensed scenario that the art of writing requires in order to enlighten the reader. Whether that or environmental collapse (well under way obviously) or whatever else, it doesn't matter to me when I try to predict our future. The nature of life itself presents a very simple - almost mathematical problem: Killer instinct is required in every species of life in order to survive natural selection, yet killer instinct is precisely what will make the winning organism (humans) completely suicidal on a societal, not personal, scale.

The tragically slim chance for humankind to survive beyond this evolutionary adolescence is for us to VERY SUDDENLY switch to the rule of consciousness - precisely as per The Road condensation. And the opportunity is indeed now.

The amazing thing for me is that I have seen one way - and per very recent observations - possibly two ways - that a very sudden evolution of this nature is indeed possible. This is the one great drama of our star system and probably the universe. There are simple mathematical realities that preclude the existence of human-like-but-enlightened aliens elsewhere in the universe unless another form of life exists in the universe that is immune to natural selection - and I can't imagine how, when all evidence points to the recycling of energies being the essence of the universe itself.

The two of us

There are four different routes that I take to get home from Club Fed.  I like variety. Sunday morning I'm on the route which takes me past  St. Joseph's Villa nursing home which was Biodad's home for several months as he adjusted to life with an artificial leg. Now I am thinking about him  for the remaining three minutes of the trip home.

Though we resided so close I did not once visit him. We have not spoken in two years. For that three minute drive I ponder the situation. He moved back home five weeks prior and two weeks prior I received a phone call from our mutual friend, his best pal, Vee. Biodad had asked for my phone number. I gave her permission to give it to him. So far he had not called or at least had not left a message. I decided on that Sunday morning drive that I would give him a call.

Why? Because I wanted to see him? Not particularly. But because I wanted to clear the air so to speak. To at least allow him the chance to understand my perspective; that in essence, we have proven ourselves useless to each other.

But I will not be making that phone call. As soon as I arrived home Sunday morning the phone rang. It was my cousin Lisa; always the  bearer of family news. While I was deciding that I would make that call, Biodad was already gone.

Two years ago I walked away from him. There were no sacrifices left  for me to make for him, and he had treated me poorly. I wrote him off for dead and I never thought he'd last this long.

At Grandma's house where the family initially gathered, at Biodad's rental house, where friends gathered, at the funeral and the subsequent celebration; all these people; I had to endure their condolences though I, in no way, was entitled to any comfort.

I abandoned him. I will not miss him very much I don't suppose. I am not deserving of comfort. I must face the reality that there was more I could have done, if I had chosen, which would have made his final days, perhaps months, more comforting. I must not escape the consequences of my choices no matter how much that goes against the standard perversity of our society; a society of constant rationalization.

It is Vee who needs the comfort; her who should have sat in the front row at the service instead of me. I have spent much time with her this week. I went to her not knowing how she would feel about me. If she hated me; if she wanted to take a swing at me, well then I would let her. If that would help her feel better.

She watched bioddad hasten his death for three days. She suffers the perceived guilt that she called 9-1-1 too late to save his life. He fought the authorities tooth and nail, then succumbed just after arrival at the  hospital. And worse; yes, worse: the guilt that she called 9-1-1 too early. Her best friend spent his last moments spitting every vulgar name he knew at her; furious that she ruined everything. He just wanted to die at home with his dog, Charlie.

His only other communication during his final days was a single text  message to a friend. A one-character message. A period.

He emerged into childhood the very same way I did, abandoned by an alcoholic father, and all for the best, so to clear the way for another man, one more qualified, to eventually do the job of  fathering. I know well the bond between a mother and son who form a family just the pair, at least for a while.

Biodad had no savings nor do I. His funeral was inexpensive to say the least. Grandma will keep his ashes and one day they will be blended with her own.

"It started out just the two of us," she said. "That's how it will end."

Ebert, FWiG, Princess & Oliver

The dogs and I have been watching a lot of movies in between walkies and treats:

Fantastic Mister Fox ****

FWG: Stylish, original and highly entertaining adaptation of the childrens book of the same name by very creative author Roald Dahl. Done in painstaking stop-motion puppetry. Edgy and funny. Great stuff. Is it meant for children? It's kind of for everyone I guess. Don't miss it.

Oliver: Crap. All the dawgs were portraied as ideots.

Princess: Very realistic. The dogs were beagles after all.

Miller's Crossing **

FWG: I have a lot of respect for the Coen Brothers and their adventurous spirit in creating movies of diverse genres and with unique approaches. Inevitably they had to try a gangster movie, I guess, but where was the unique approach? This felt like Gangster 101 For Beginners. Biggest problem: None of the main characters were likeable. Couldn't wait for them to all kill each other and get it over with. Disappointing.

Oliver: Thugs take some long walks in the woods and a bunch of other things I didunt understand.

Princess: Excellent walk-in-the-forest scenes with a lot of unneccesary minutea between.

How I Ended This Summer ***

FWG: One of those realistic flicks where the purpetrators are portrayed as normal people who slip into badness through the frailties of human perception and obsession, wisdom usually the domain of foreign, not Hollywood, flicks. This one - I had trouble buying into the characters' motivations but perhaps that's my fault. I was partially side-tracked by a steak and asparagus dinner. Russian with subtitles.

Oliver: I was also side-tracked by FWig's steak. He didn't share a single morsel, the fat greedy bastard.

Princess: Good arctic scenery and an excellent performance by the polar bear.

Everybody's Fine **

FWG: Funny at times with nuggets of rich emotion but painfully unsubtle. A children's movie in terms of giving the audience not a thing to figure out for themselves, but with adult material. Another sign of the times. Alarmingly our society is still growing duller. When does it stop and when will DeNiro ever do a half-decent movie again?

Oliver: Borrrrrrrrrrring...

Princess: A pointless film about a bunch of people living in big houses but none with dogs or a pet of any kind.

The Day After Tomorrow *

FWG: I don't mind storytellers cheating science for the sake of a good story but this is a grotesque mockery. Roger Ebert says "Two thumbs up; the special effects are terrific!" He must have misspelled terrible or else he's completely senile or else taking bribes. The first 50 minutes was garbage, then I turned it off for fear my brain might turn into pudding.

Oliver: I would have liked sum pudding

Princess: I can not adequately analyze a film based on just the first 50 minutes.

Beginners ****

FWG: Intelligent exploration of human nature with delightful performances by Ewan McGregor, Melanie Laurent and Christopher Plummer.

Oliver: I coodent understand a thing.

Princess: Faithful dog is told by heartless owner that he was "bred to be cute."

The Future **

FWG: Funny at times but I fear that all these strange and fantastical ways to tell a story about a lot of people who range from dumb to extremely dumb might have been done for the hell of it and without a point. Slightly creepy, intentially or otherwise.

Oliver: Oh my gawd, I wanted to chase that cat all over the place.

Princess: The cat had a broken leg. In a cast. Only a heartless jerk would want to chase her.

Margin Call ***

FWG: Surprisingly tense and compelling dramatization of an American financial "disaster"; pretty clearly the sub-prime mortgage fiasco which blew up a couple years ago, and the Wall-street leetches-in-suits who must navigate the fall-out.

Oliver: I fel asleep

Princess: Man suffers emotional breakdown over beloved dog's death and buries him in his ex-wife's yard. Potentially moving tale ruined by way too much preliminary fluff about the big office where he works.

This all sounds a bit fishy, frankly

As promised, I have interviewed my host family's fish population and come to know them each a little better. They weren't terribly sophisticated interviews unfortunately. A bit of a rush job as they don't like coming out of the water for a very long time. Here they are in no particular order:


Zippy The Wonderfish

Zippy's favorite things are colour-enhanced fish flakes, long baths and miniature castles. He considers himself the most likely candidate for King of Tank come next election due to his flashy attitude and overall manoeuvrability.

Lightning Louie

Lou (for short) claims to have swam the English channel in under a minute prior to captivity. His favorite things are colour-enhanced fish flakes, miniature castles and belly rubs.

Goldentoe

Goldentoe is the current King of Tank. His favorite things are miniature castles, Guinness and colour-enhanced fish flakes but not the brown ones.

Gilly

Gilly has one eye slightly larger than the other. She claims that her larger eye can see spectral shadows from the spirit world as well as normal things. Her favorite normal things are long baths, shiny stones and colour-enhanced fish flakes.

Misty

Misty is one of the quieter denizens of the tank. Her favorite things are colour-enhanced fish flakes, long baths and people-watching.

Flash

Flash recently broke up with Gilly and is now on the prowl. His favorite things are colour-enhanced fish flakes, miniature castles and Burt Reynolds movies. He brags that he has watched Canonball Run 27 times and even more outrageously, watched Canonball Run II, the sequel, twice.

Aqualamb

Aqualamb is a bit of a loner and tends to hide out among the tendrils of plastic sea plants. His favorite things are psychedelic music and erotic auto-asphyxiation.

Bob

Bob was asleep at every opportunity for interviews. It is rumoured that his favorite things are long baths and colour-enhanced fish flakes but this could not be verified.

Flip and Myrtle

Myrtle and Flip have been going steady for so long that they are virtually indestinguishable. Their favorite things are sad movies, scrapbooking and colour-enhanced fish flakes.

Halogliese

"Halo" for short was runner up for King of Tank in the last election. His favorite things are travel blogs, colour-enhanced fish flakes and looking at himself in reflective surfaces.

Soupy

This is the most gregarious of the fish community. His favorite things are colour-enhanced fish flakes, celebrity gossip and the internet. He boasts to have collected more than ten facebook friends; some of which he has never met personally.

Rupert Calverton Essex
Mio VonEngelbert Esq.

Rupert declined to be interviewed at this time pending counsel from his lawyer.

Mrs. Whipley

Mrs. Whipley was widowed when her husband succombed to injuries sustained at a drunken brawl. The subsequent hearings aroused a latent interest in the law. She is now Rupert Calverton Essex Mio VonEngelbert's lawyer. Her favorite things are marine law, long baths, opera and colour-enhanced fish flakes.

Lil' Alice

The smallest of the tank population, Alice is nonetheless popular with the other fishes. She is currently dating Bibby McWaterpepper. Her favorite things are pina coladas, long baths, romantic dinners and Ringo Star.

Bibby McWaterPepper

Bibby is an amateur comedian with a love for the outdoors. Once, prior to captivity, he became lost for weeks and ended up in Queen Elizabeth's bidet where he barely escaped with his life. His favorite things are miniature castles, bungee jumping and colour-enhanced fish flakes. His pet peeves are car alarms and tarter sauce.


Well, there you have it. Good god that was stupid.

M is for... well... you'll see:

It's actually been about four years since it caught my attention that the naming of planets in mankind's favorite solar system is relatively uniform except for one glaring exception; that ostentatious little brat of a planet called Earth.

The other eight orbs are labelled in the realm of mythology, six of them of the Roman variety. But Earth? When has there ever been such an obvious and unapologetic display of subjectivity?

Of course, given our natural evolution out of complete ignorance, this is all entirely understandable. Nevertheless, four years ago I wrote on my bucket list: Rename Earth.

Don't worry. I'm not starting a movement. It's strictly an academic exercise though one I find truly interesting and quite likely relevant to a series of sci-fi short stories I have been planning, plotting and researching for quite some time.

The objective: Given the existing pattern of planetary nomenclature, what is the most obvious name for this third planet of the system?

"Easy," says my pal, Killer. "Terra."

"Won't even make the short list," says I.

"It's Latin," says Killer.

"Yeah?" says I. "What's Latin for Who gives a rat's ass?"

Killer: "I'd have to get back to you on that."


It didn't take long to find the solution which satisfies me.

The first step was to decipher a pattern into which Earth could fit. Immediately we see that it will be the name of a god, probably a Roman one.

Next, there are three things that stand out:

1. Earth is, for many reasons both scientific and poetic, the sister planet of Venus, thus Serena makes the short list. Ha ha! Just kid'n. We're looking at Roman, possibly Greek, mythology; not tennis mythology. It is Artemis and Athena who make the short list, among others.

2. There is an obvious lineage running toward the sun. Saturn fathered Jupiter, who fathered Mars. The previously-named Earth comes next. This presents a strong case for naming us after a child of Mars. For various reasons then, it is Romulus on the short list. Hmm. Not pretty. No Earthling I know is likely to wish to be renamed Romulan. It would totally screw up our coveted Star Trek mythology, at least without a terribly clever plot twist.

3. The Gods already represented in our system, with their various spheres of influence, cover most of mankind's most passionate and arduous pursuits. They are politics (Jupiter), media and commerce (Mercury), food (Saturn), water (Neptune), religion and family structure (Uranus), wealth (Pluto), war (Mars), love and sex (Venus).

The most obvious missing human obsessions? I must suggest they are education, art/music and, perhaps, pop culture.

As criteria 1 and 2 are obviously exclusive (Mars did not father Venus nor presumably any of her sisters) there is no way to resolve all three criteria with a single name. The next ideal then would be to find a name that satisfies two of the three; still an unlikely possibility, it occurs to me.

Well, it turns out there is of course a Roman god of art and music; more specifically, a goddess. And lo and behold: She is the sister of Venus! Two of three criteria satisfied!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Minerva

E is for testicular Elephantiasis

Sorry about that. I just always wanted to work "testicular Elephantiasis" into a sentence and I've been waiting a long time so I figured this is might be the best I could do. And I confess, I thought it was called testicular Elephantitis until I looked it up on wikipedia but regardless, I have nothing to say on the matter. So... Start over!


E is for Embrace

And we shall now banish the word Embrace from the room and call it instead, Hugs.

Now... I don't really want to do this 'cause it's probably going to be embarrassing but I don't care because I'm a damn poet and I know very well what an illusion it is for anyone to think they can possibly know me or judge me so here goes:

I love hugs.

And depending who the huggee is, it's better than sex. Or at least a lot less work.

Now one could easily feel uncomfortable hearing a man talk like this, eh? Because it's kind of regarded as a feminine trait to prefer cuddling over squealing-and-rutting but I really do. So there. And I don't care who knows it.

And I like hugging friends too, you know, without the intimate overtones. It helps me communicate to them that I love them.

When someone is sad; upset, I feel compelled to hug them to demonstrate that I truly care about their suffering, and yet, I can't do virtual hugs. When an online acquaintance has some suffering to share, I can not bring myself to type *hugs* across the wires. It really feels wrong to me. It's too easy. There is just no way to demonstrate the sincerity of it. And I know that we live in a society where very little is as sincere as the shades of perception which we paint. Human beings are primarily puppeteers.

Throughout my life from high school forward I have now and then loved very very dearly to the point, you might say, of infatuation. And if you're inclined to say that infatuation is not love, well then, you can just head on out of here because that is an enormous pile of horseshit which I'm not inclined to tolerate just now. Love is like molecules. They are of a tremendous number of permutations. There are a multitude of possible connections from which love can be built. To judge some patterns of connections as illegitimate is to be an incredible ass.

Wow. That was a bitter little tangent.

What I wish to say about these occasional longings in my life is that when I have thought of my beloved - and these few individuals have ultimately related to me in different ways, by the way, from avoidance (in high school) to friendship to "very special friendship" to an affair of significant physical intimacy.

As I was saying, when I have, in moments of solitude, indulged in feelings of intense longing, it has always been thoughts of a warm hug that has moved me, and moved me to a point that I can probably not describe. It has on occasion been a desire so dear and overwhelming, it is a projection of bliss; of a heavenly state no godly offering could possibly eclipse in any afterlife reward.

Our widely-held superstition that love should only count if reciprocal is a mathematical nightmare and an occasional fascination to me, with shades of survivable torment.

To be permitted to hug my adored has at times been a yearning so deep it confounds and contradicts. On one hand how could a gift so easily given but worth so much to the receiver possibly be withheld? It is like a penny that turns into a billion dollars if freely given. So how could you not give it? But at the same time, how could I possibly deserve; how could anyone possibly deserve such a Utopian reward? And that is the reason I rarely make such a request.


Now... Look at this poor guy. Don't you just want to give him a big hug? As long as you could find a way to stand clear of his you-know-what?

Noo-noos and dooeys and other labels

As I sit down to write the blog entry that must so obviously follow my last blog entry, I feel sadly unmotivated. This idea has been creeping around in my head lately that yet another reason why normal contemporary human interactions are marked by such woefully small uses of intelligence has to do with efficiency; that use of intelligence is somehow, instinctively, a costly exercise and that people who don't interpret something as a problem for themself are naturally inclined not to spend any precious "intelligence units" dealing with it.

I think the following topic might actually be a great example with which to test that idea if only it would generate enough blog comments to provide some measure of evidence.

But no matter. Let me take a deep breath and persist:


I challenge you to grasp the following scenario: I walk into a restaurant with my friend Mary. Mary, we all presume, has a vagina and is officially recorded as being of the female gender in the records of all relevant governmental and socio-economic schemes.

We sit down and we both order steak.

The waiter asks how we would like our steaks cooked.

I immediately leap to my feet, cast my napkin at the floor and shout, "How dare you insult us! Can't you see I am a man! Can't you see this is a woman! Obviously men eat their steak medium rare and women eat their steak well done! How dare you question our normalcy! DO YOU SUSPECT WE ARE PERVERTS!"

Now. Is my reaction intelligent? Is my reaction logical? Is my reaction sane? Or should I be quietly ushered off to a psychiatric hospital at this point?

Okay, back up and let me offer a more responsible reaction:

The waiter asks how we would like our steaks cooked and I cordially reply, "Oh, we're both meatlinear. But thank you for asking."

The waiter then smiles and departs, understanding of course that I want my steak medium rare and Mary wants hers well done, just as he would have guessed, knowing that meatlinear people are in the majority and meatgiddy people (men who prefer well-done steak and women who prefer medium rare) are in the minority of 10% or so!

Does this scenario sound much more intelligent? Much more logical? Much more sane?

What? No?

But scenarios alike either of these are played out every day all over this continent (and others I assume) by damn near every single person, I would wager. But instead of steak preference it is used in terms of sexual preference or "sexual orientation".

The problem with the above scenarios is that there is of course no correlation between gender and how you like your steak cooked except that if someone did a study you would inevitably find some pattern because it is mathematically impossible not to.

But what people so hysterically find impossible to grasp, is that there is no correlation either, between which brand of dingly-doodle one carries between their legs and which brand one prefers their bed-partners to come equipped with, except that if someone did a study (hmm.. Kinsey?) he would inevitably find a pattern because it is again impossible not to.

Now, is anyone already thinking I'm wrong, that there is a big difference between sex and steak (I enjoy both equally, by the way); because genitals and meat are two different things (if you ignore the obvious joke) while genitals and genitals are the same thing?

They are not the same thing. That is soft thinking. What you have and what you want are two different concepts. Apples and oranges.

Any person actually has a plethora of sexual preferences at once. You can't just give a "straight" man a vagina in a jar and he'll be happy. There are untold factors to his preferences of varying significance, much of which can not be quantified, verbalized or perhaps even consciously recognized.

My point, by the way, is that such labels as gay and straight are a wild aberration from normal thinking and from scientific process, not that they offend me or that I'm militantly against their use (though I can not think of myself as "gay" or "straight" - the idea feels stupid) but that this social peculiarity is a very significant phenomena which the average person seems unable to even comprehend, despite it being a matter of simplest logic. And I say this only because every time I've broached the subject in conversation, people who otherwise get away with being viewed as intelligent just stare at me like I'm an alien... Who has just double-dipped his potato chip... In the punch bowl...

Normal scientific process labels things based primarily on what they are, not on combinations of arbitrary conditions, and socially we copy this method.

By normal scientific process we would label all people who sexually prefer males "male-lovers" or whatever fancy word and all people who prefer females "female-lovers" or whatever. The idea that our primary label is derived through the arbitrary condition of one's own gender is wildly unscientific and no more sane or logical than saying that blond people who like women are called "straight" and dark-haired people who like men are called "gay" or perhaps "wiggly".

People who like medium-rare steak are just called "people who like medium-rare steak" and there is no thought to any conditions, gender-wise or else-wise because, and this is my main point: We are as a society and as individuals massively deluded by sexual superstitions and not so much by meat superstitions.

Unfortunately it is pointless to demonstrate the astounding reality of our sexual confusion because my motives will be misperceived and rather than understood as a man just sick of all the bullshit I'll just be suspected seven kinds of pervert. So why even go there?

I have a feeling I've never met a human being entirely free of superstition nor any human being capable of recognizing their own superstitions for what they are.

Am I the exception? How could I know for sure! I know that for the first 30-odd years of my life that almost everything I believed was crap and then I literally started over as an integral seeker of truth.

Now... what is your argument?

That gender "orientation" is not a preference; that there is no choice in the matter? That's fine. But same with steak. There is no choice in that matter either. You like it one way and not the other for reasons that connect in your non-conscious mind. Both are indeed preferences.

But the 90% straight rule is consistent! There is some kind of meaning there! No. There are mathematical patterns to steak preference or any other preference if you care to do the field research. There are multiple components to these and most other preferences. It is no wonder that cross-gender attractions are the more common when you realize that a large component of sexual attraction stems from fascination with the unfamiliar. Societal customs dictate that we spend more time naked with our own self and with people of the same gender. Need evidence here? Foot fetishes are wildly common in North America where people's feet are largely hidden from view in shoes, and almost non-existent in warm nations where people's feet are exposed in sandals daily.

Okay but "straight" longings are normal and other longings charitably tolerated (or not, in many cases) and we know this because straight couplings make BABIES which is a VERY BIG DEAL and essential to survival of the human race! SO THERE...! Wrong. Not a big deal. Water is essential to all of life on this planet but that does not make it a perversion when oxygen or hydrogen blend with other elements to form materials other then water.

I could go on predicting what the soft arguments would be and pre-emptively axe them in this space but I'd rather stop here and go to bed, frankly.

If you understand my point despite my less than ingenious attempt to explain it then that is much to your credit, I would say. But I suspect that most people are so enslaved by the pressures of survival instinct to be socially normal that you are being prohibited from doing the math!

I would love to hear from you whether you "get" what I'm saying. Or if you still think I'm wrong, I'd love to hear why!

This is very abnormal, I know, but truly I take great delight in discovering flaws in my own thinking but also it is my responsibility to point out a flaw in your own comment if applicable!

Peace.

Day 4: List your "desert island" top 20 music albums

I have chosen not to include any kind of anthologies. Otherwise they'd nearly all be anthologies. I'd rather honor true albums: songs that were meant to go together. I will attempt to rank them and list them in countdown order.


20. Dark Side of the Moon (1973) Pink Floyd: Perhaps the perfect rock album; every track essential to the whole.

19. The Joshua Tree (1990) U2: As a youth, my favorite album to get slightly drunk in the pitch dark with.

18. Roll The Bones (1991) Rush: Just when I thought the all-out genius days of Rush were well over, they did it once again.

17. One of These Nights (1975) The Eagles: Who could imagine that simultaneous country and disco influences on classic rock would result in such a masterpiece. Better than Hotel California for every conceivable reason.

16. Born In The USA (1984) Bruce Springsteen: One poignant high school anthem after another; All that is awkwardly beautiful and bittersweet about America.

15. Collective Soul (1995) Collective Soul: The most amazing blend of hard-core guitar rifts and sweet melodies. the track When the Water Flows would surely appear on my list of top 20 songs of all time, this being the only such album-song pairing to dually qualify so!

14. Heartbeat City (1984) The Cars: Drive, Magic and every other track each remain a portal to the magic summers of my youth. Goofy gorgeous Ric Ocasek was once the ultimate in cool!

13. Four (1971) Led Zeppelin: What can I say? Totally epic. I assume it's on everyone's list!

12. Brothers in Arms (1985) Dire Straits: Nine gorgeous songs diverse in style yet firmly aligned through emotion and Knofler's trademark minimalist guitar bursts. Spectacular achievement.

11. Money And Cigarettes (1983) Eric Clapton: What do you call this? Country-Folk? It is meat-and-potatoes rhythms with Clapton's comforting voice and trademark squealing guitar. It's the chicken noodle soup of music. Now and then you just need it. (Did I just use conflicting food metaphors? Oh well. It's my blog. I make the rules.)

10. Moving Pictures (1981) Rush: When else has such unconventional genius been so accepted by the masses? On the subsequent tour they sold out Maple Leaf Gardens for three consecutive nights. Has that been done before or since?

9. Fully Completely (1992) The Tragically Hip: One of those rare albums you buy because it has five amazing songs on it, only to discover there are five more tracks on it even more amazing.

8. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) The Beatles: There's nothing to say about it that hasn't already been said a thousand times.

7. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998) Neutral Milk Hotel: What an incredibly heavy work. It pushes the limits of their playing ability, of Jeff Mangum's voice and most significantly, it pushes the limits of the transparency one man can make of his own heart. Profoundly emotional and one of the best-selling indie rock albums of all time I would guess (though I really don't know). Thank you Neo!

6. Power Windows (1985) Rush: Yet another masterpiece from start to finish by the transcended band who proved that record labels suck the life out of music, that music critics are petty little bullshitters and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is nothing more than an irrelevant country club.

5. The Wild Hunt (2010) The Tallest Man On Earth: This album may hold an accelerated position currently because we are still in the honeymoon phase. Gorgeous folk guitar combined with an ugly troll voice, totally smacking of Dylan. Wildly beautiful. Thanks again Neo.

4. Grace Under Pressure (1984) Rush: "It's too new-wavy," my more metal-oriented friends said; those who had boarded the Rush bandwagon with Moving Pictures. I didn't care. For a 15-year-old held ransom by the vile governments of the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. and their spectacular overabundance of cocked and aimed nuclear missiles, this album spoke to me on every level, musically, emotionally and intellectually. An immeasurable impact on my life.

3. Signals (1982) Rush: Seven gripping beautiful songs which still today compel and thrill me and tether me to the 13-year-old boy I was when I acquired it for the first time (on cassette) thirty years ago. Oh my god. Thirty years? Incredible. Oh - plus the odd track "Countdown" which I still fail to appreciate.

2. Who's Next (1971) The Who: All the most amazing Who songs in one place. Could have been reissued as Best of the Who in my humble opinion.

1. A Farewell to Kings (1977) Rush: Genius. Absolute genius if genius has ever existed in the world. Indescribably beautiful.

Illusion - part one

Well. Here we go. I did warn that the topic of illusion would be a doozy. I don't know if this exercise will ultimately be useful to anyone but people who hear me talk about our lives of illusion or the matrix of illusion, sometimes ask what I mean by illusion and so... they deserve an answer.

All of the following understandings shall be either first-hand observations or else careful logical extrapolations from them, and they are consolidated, to some degree or another, by the subsequent testimony of many poets and scientists according to my own interpretation of their words.

Illusion... It is not a mirage. It is something that exists but not in the form that we view or interpret it. When a society is built on heaps and heaps of nested illusions, then that society is no more than an illusion in its sum. That is where we are and I will attempt to tell you why. But it will be very difficult to do so because there are so many unfamiliar understandings built on multiple components themselves unfamiliar understandings. There is no way to explain such an entire pyramidal structure either fully or in a convenient linear method within a single article.

"God made man in his own image." These may very well be the most tragically harmful seven words ever spoken. They may be the most significant reason why the human race - as we know it - is almost certainly driving itself out of existence while there might never be another race like us again in the remaining life of the universe. Why? because that divine idea supports our deeply misguided intuitions and distracts us from the truth about what we really are. And what we really are is not built to last. We must rebuild ourselves or perish.

I personally know only a minority of practicing religious people and many of those I do, tend either to confide in me that they do it for the social aspect, to please someone else, or else they do it, very nobly, for its charitable opportunities. Granted this is particular to my personal circle of associates. I make no claims with regards to societal norms on this matter. But yet, we are almost all of us still living and thinking in the Christian tradition whether we attend church or not. To what degree it is your parents or grandparents who attended church and propagated this mode of thinking which you have inherited, versus the education system versus cultural habit - no matter. We all go around behaving as if we are mini-me gods; as if we are ultimately sentient; as if our lives are the products of our thought-out choices. This is illusion. While choice and consequence is one legitimate perspective of how our lives are arranged, choice itself is not what we think it is. Choices are made by the overwhelming dominant part of your brain; the instinctive side; the dark side; the side that is not accessible to your comparatively pitiful conscious awareness.

Who are we? Who am I? Who are you? We are only consciousnesses and no more. The feeling of "self" that we hold onto is not directly connected to our human body. It is a dead-end off-chute from the brain. We are only stow-aways on ships waving to each other through portholes and thinking that we are the captains of the ships and that the ships are going where we tell them to. As counter intuitive as it seems, I know this is so. I experience it every day because I once had the courage to dare to contemplate it and I started paying much more attention to myself until I came to know.

Will each of us, if he turns his head, see behind him his shadow, his double, the beast that resembles him, silently watching him?
- Georges Bernanos (1888-1948)

And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
- Luke 23:33-34

Consciously we rationalize our instinctive choices and we believe the illusion that we consciously made those choices and further, that we made them for honorable reasons and not selfish ones. Some scientists interpret that they have proven this to be true. A human being is not very different from a robot who mistakenly thinks it is alive. We are only consciousness and consciousness is little more than a witness; not a decision-maker.

We're talking about the core illusion; the illusion of consciousness which perhaps spawns all other illusions though I haven't fully consolidated that.

Can our consciousness (you and I) at least inform our instinctive mind and thus help influence choices? It certainly appears so. It appears that my instinctive mind makes more and more conscious-friendly, harmonic, evolutionary, non-survival-instinct choices now, as a result of an apparently strengthened consciousness - i.e.: one that has gained more influence over the dark side of the mind apparently due simply to the practice of regular contemplation of this and related explorations and the resulting enlightenment, something I've had the rare luxury to pursue given the absence of dedication to children, marriage, career and reputation-building; the cornerstones of our society.

The church says that we are captains of our ship and we are naturally good; xeroxes of God, but we are tempted by the devil. The devil is the source of evil. We must resist this temptation or you won't experience the paradise of post-mortal heaven.

I suspect we must give up on this ass-backwards notion of reality or we are truly screwed. The Christian religion is chock full of perfect beautiful metaphors for the critical conditions of the human society of mind and full of poetic wisdom but if we take it literally we will not learn reality (become enlightened); we will only be goaded into playing along as if we had learned. The Christian religion, as it is preached today, does not lead us to evolve into a creature of harmony, something otherwise very possible. It only bribes us to fake it.

The paradise is here and now! The miracles of our existence are truly euphoric, truly sensational. Earth is heaven. But we are held apart from these realities by illusions. I know this from valid experience. I pull back those curtains of illusion all the time; every day and the uncloaked world of mankind is truly wondrous and awe-inspiring and wildly joyful. I promise you. I can not lie about this. I will attempt to bring together the explanations for this in a subsequent article.

The "Devil" or "evil" is nothing more than life itself. It is the dominant mind. It is "survival instinct" which is a very unfortunate label. "Domination instinct" makes much more sense. This primitive urge that we call evil is perfectly normal and inevitable. It is simply the will to live the only way we could possibly know how.

The petunia is altogether fully evil. The magnolia tree is altogether perfectly evil. The rascally bunny rabbit is entirely - from twitchy nose to cotton ball tail - 100% evil. Evil is fine. It doesn't come equipped with horns and forked tails and pitchforks, so let's not freak out about it. But yes, it keeps us from the paradise; the paradise of joyful empathy and true happiness, peace and freedom. Freedom from loneliness, grief, sadness, shame, guilt, anger, frustration, jealousy and twenty more standard human mental illnesses which we think are necessary to human existence but are not; which go untreated by the psychology community because the psychology community still has a hell of a lot to learn. Psychologists are great at sorting out observations and labelling them. They are the closest thing we have to experts at navigating the great web of illusions. The poet doesn't need to navigate this web. The poet sees through the illusions and the way is clear.

Survival instinct, domination instinct, evil. Perfect selfishness. It's all the same thing and it is the basis for life. It is the kind of life that evolved on this planet because what other kind was possible? Who can guess? Life needed diversity. A uniform solitary species would obviously have eaten itself into immediate extinction. Life of diversity means competition, survival of the (many) fittest; inevitable eventual balance of diverse life revolving, eating each other. How else is this possible without that primitive domination instinct present in all surviving species; the sub-DNA code that orders "This species must survive at any cost"? Again, who can guess?

Evil, or domination instinct, is normal but the human alone is the first species with the opportunity to evolve beyond it! We've already begun. And the beauty is that this kind of evolution can be intentionally manifested in no time at all! It requires no generational reproductive stages. This is the stunning reality of our existence. This is what all of our lives are about while we go around pretending that miniature castles and cars and personal electronic devices are what our lives are all about.

While we're sitting around thinking that the Jets beating the Patriots is some kind of high drama we're looking incredibly silly. The human being is either going to evolve beyond the domination instinct just in time to save itself or else its domination mission will continue to drive it to becoming the singular dominant species that will eat itself (or eat the earth). This is the only real drama on planet earth while we're all distracted being drama queens, inventing false dramas. Is the miraculous human flower about to wither or will it bloom all over a previously dead universe? Those are the only two possibilities. There is nothing in between. Earth is a dying planet whether we collapse the biosphere soon or the dying sun does it later. This is the real drama and we are participating in that drama every day though outwardly, we seem not to have a clue.

Man has no greater enemy than himself.
- Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374)

There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Somewhere a man must rise And slumber no more. For sunset nears And to the darkness there is no end.
- attribution unknown

I can't see how obeying Jesus can get you to heaven, in my experience. I have learned one way to get to the paradise and every human on earth can call me a liar should it comfort you to do so (almost assuredly it would) and it will still be true. In my experience it is understanding; it is intelligence; true intelligence, not rationalization, that breaches illusions and avails the paradise. Experiencing the paradise makes you more like the Jesus. It has the potential to make us all evolve into Jesuses. I have every confidence in that. But the overwhelming matrix of illusions is standing in the way. Is my way the only way to arrive at the paradise? Probably not. In fact I hope not.

This all must not seem very convincing. Every paragraph I've written demands explanation and I have the explanations but they are exponentially tangential. I suppose that readers will have the choice to have some trust and absorb a more whole story over multiple articles or else they will not. Either way, I am doing my duty.

Illusion... Have I digressed?

I have to tell you, I'm having second thoughts about this. It is not my mandate to run around slapping everyone in the face. It is my mandate to be gentle, to nudge and not sensationalize but I don't see a gentle way to do this which I have promised to do.


Illusion: Communication

I called us stow-aways waving to each other through portholes. Surely we communicate better than that, right? Not really. Our consciousness thinks it knows what ideas we wish to convey. We open our mouths and then we believe we've communicated the ideas. Big problem with that. Our ideas go through a translation process and get turned into words. The words absorbed by the audience are translated back into ideas. Things go wildly astray through a dual translation process. Add the spin that the dark mind plays against the consciousness. Add the spins we deliberately play against each other, both consciously and non-consciously. Add the wiggle room built into the English language. Almost every word has multiple meanings. Add the problem that we share high-level ideas trusting the assumption that the listener shares the same dogmatic structures which the shared idea evolves from, when in reality we all have different (and variously flawed) dogma. Add the problem that so many listeners spend half of their listening moments not listening but planning what they're going to say next. When you talk to someone you think you know what you told them but you never know what they heard.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.
- Georges Bernanos


Illusion: Context

If you are reading this, it means that you have the Internet and you speak English. Right there I know that you are almost certainly part of the blindly privileged class. You think you don't have enough money. But I know damn well you have too much. Twenty per cent of the world's population have eighty per cent of the wealth. There is no real excuse for this. Only greed. Two per cent of the population have fifty per cent of the wealth. These are the elites. There is no excuse for that either. The fairness of competition each class imagines only seems real within a confined self-serving context. From a global context our excuses fall apart.

I asked the young readers group to comment on the theme of have/have-not in the novel The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch. They thought the theme was relevant to their lives as they - every one of them - saw themselves in a have-not circumstance. You probably do too. Because you are likely absorbed in your own culture. From that standpoint you glimpse the elite and feel poor in comparison. And if you forget to fast forward through the C.A.R.E. commercial then your glimpse of impoverished Africans is just some weird aberration. They just need to get their shit together. But you are in the 18% of the population who holds 30% of the wealth. You are likely near twice as rich as you deserve and are working less hard for this privilege than 80% of the population works just to survive. Life on planet Earth has not essentially changed. Mammals must spend the vast majority of their energy attempting to feed and protect themselves which most humans still do. It's reality. You and I are the aberration and there's nothing nice about it.

Our society of constant recreation is an economic illusion. It can not last. The global marketplace is another system of slavery. The "Canadian" government spends money on international aid while dullards drag their feeble minds away from the Cosby Show or whatever it is these days long enough to complain that they ought to spend this money "at home". This isn't aid money. It's an investment. They spend a dollar to help keep a market afloat so that we can rape it for two dollars later. It is a matter of excellent comedy the degree that closet racists everywhere have poor countries and immigrants to thank for their wealth and have not a clue of this circumstance. We are the oil society. We have the magic elixir: We harnessed liquid super-condensed sunshine, which we have no right to possess, to do our work for us and leverage our standing in the global marketplace. You and I are oil barons at the expense of the biosphere. There is no legitimate avoidance of this ugly reality yet we all do it. We do it by ignoring the greater context. This is just one example of how we never come close to understanding truths without the rare occasion of first seeking the greatest context.

[We must not] prescribe curricula or pedagogic practices that require or strongly invite students to become skeptical or critical of their way of life.
- William Galston, political theorist and advisor to Bill Clinton and other political leaders, unknowingly recorded.

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
- Friedrich Nietzsche


Illusion: Livelihood

The reality is that we need a roof, clothes and food to survive. As long as this current western civilization fantasy persists these necessities can be taken for granted. But the domination instinct knows no sense of moderation or redundancy and we are ever pushed to fight to "survive". We are forced to play a constant redundant survival charade. The manifestations of this in a massively "social" environment have centered this constant survival game on reputation. Everything is reputation. You reveal this to me in everything you say to me. It is a massive preoccupation; your domination instinct at work. You have some dark suspicion of yourself, I know; with regards to what degree you spin and posture and position yourself and manipulate other's perception of you but I assure you, it's a drop in the bucket. It is not survival-domination-friendly for our instinctive mind to reveal to our consciousness just how phony we really are.

The world is governed more by appearances than by realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

You are only what you are when no one is looking
- Robert C. Edwards
.
.
Our society is utterly revolved around reputation. It's everything. Money is just a ledger of reputation. Here's the cash. Here's me showing that I am reputed to be deserving of this luxury you peddle. Houses, cars, careers and vacation paradises are wildly overblown. We chase these things, convinced by our instincts that they are the keys to happiness but the happiness does not come. Instead we get temporary feelings that say "I guess I must be happy. I'm doing what I'm supposed to." No matter how much you have, you "need" more.

The richest person I personally know well, happens to be the most stressed-out neurotic person I know, full of secrets and fears and convoluted circumstances. He's constantly trying to manage perception and cover things up. The poorest person I personally know well, happens to be the most genuinely happy and well-adjusted person I know. My friend who volunteers in Haiti knows the poorest kids in the world. He is blown away by how constantly happy they are. Well of course they're happy. They are alive, they are human, they love and are loved and they have no possessions to covet. They are relatively free of charade and social illness, free to appreciate the best things in life. Yes, I know that serious poverty is no picnic especially in terms of health care and nutrition. I don't mean to celebrate extreme poverty.

I think all the people I know would, if cornered, say that the best things in life are free. They would all say that money can't buy happiness, but actions speak louder than words, and how many of them behave as if they truly believe any of it? I would say three. Less than a single per cent of people I've known. And I'm a fortunate one. Most people probably know zero. Instinct won't let most people believe all that. Instead they will rationalize their greed.

Run, run rabbit run, Dig that hole, forget the sun, And when at last the work is done, Don't sit down it's time to dig another one.
- Pink Floyd (1973)

We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t care about.
- Tim Jackson (Economist)

The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Freedom tastes of reality
- Pete Townshend (1969)


Illusion: Nations

We have a fundamental problem in that we treat nouns as if they're all created equal. But some nouns represent realities while others only represent ideas. Are nations real? Most certainly not. Nations are nothing but complicated sets of ideas. They only appear real because so many of us agree to pretend that they are real. I don't. I am not "Canadian" whatsoever. That is someone's dull idea of me; not mine. I am entirely unique in the universe and so are you. Ideas can be useful or not useful. As a man who looks at everything in terms of its capacity for harmony, I see that nations are a system of ideas where the great majority of those ideas are either fictional, opposed to harmony or both. Nations are grotesque to me. Nationalism strikes me as vulgar, ugly and stupid. It makes me queasy to stand up for "Oh Canada" just to keep others in my proximity comfortable. Nations exist to keep the fear-mongering rich and powerful rich and powerful. Slavery is alive and well but there is no need for shackles or swords. It is now slavery of the mind.

But we are a democracy. This is government by the people, right? I'm not convinced. The convoluted riding system serves to dissolve non-conformist votes making it almost impossible for new movements to gain momentum. Our illusion-of-democracy system is designed to keep the same circle of elites in perpetual rotating power. Only politicians with a whole lot of money and the stomache to deal in high-stakes nepotism have any chance of success in our system. This is government by the rich. We look at the elite parties and assume the differences between them are meaningful. It doesn't take much legitimate contemplation to realize that in the global realm of possibility (the larger context), our monopolizing political parties are virtually identical. Communism also touts itself government by the people and is just as corrupt in its practical manifestations.

In general the powerful and influential in our society shape the laws and have a great influence on the legislature and on the congress and this creates a reluctance to change because the powerful and influential have carved out for themselves, or have inherited, a privileged position in society.
- Jimmy Carter (Law Day, University of Georgia, 1974)

Let the world retain in memory: Mighty tongues tell mighty lies.
- Bruce Cockburn (1971)

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.
- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)


So is anyone still reading this? I think it may be past time for a break. Let's continue this a bit later, shall we?

There are many reasons (mostly your instincts and the limits of linear communication) why you will be resistant to accepting much of this testimony and why you will cherry-pick apparent evidence against my claims from less-than-global perspectives and that is fine. I never ask people to believe me anyway. That would go against poetic principles. Belief is not sane. It is soft thinking. Same with that other deplorable idea; faith. They are crutches. Belief and faith are the only things truly pretensious. Testimony is testimony and a healthy person will proceed with life dealing with the uncertaintly of testimony still unproven to him. Pretending that factoids are known to be true when they are not yet known, is reckless and harmful. My hope is that my testimony will be considered and that on the occasions it becomes applicable, you might explore it and test it in a courageous manner in the virtual labratory of your own living experience.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth is what stands the test of experience.
- Albert Einstein


Please don't think I present these ideas from the perspective (or delusion) of being angelic, saintly or superior. I am certainly none of the above. Cause and effect provided certain accesses to me. It is my duty to pass them on. Meanwhile I have my own dark demons to fight.

More on the subject of illusions soon...


Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.
- Elias Root Beadle

We are at liberty to be real or to be unreal. We may be true or false. The choice is ours. We may wear now one mask, and now another and never, should we desire appear with our own true face. But we can not make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects. And if we lie to ourselves and to others then we can not expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them.
- Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)