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.

achieve /əˈCHēv/

Somewhere a person must rise and slumber no more. For sunset nears, and to the darkness there is no end.

Achates /əˈkeɪtiːz/

One day you will understand this devotion; its strength, its permanence, its worthiness of every imaginable trust. I would follow you into Mordor.

acerbity /ə-sûr′bĭ-tē/

Suger-free aspartame. Sucralose. Hypnotising pocket-device eyeball strain and squatty plumped people perved out on extra-wide TV screens. Sodium nitrite and hydrogenated oil. Fudgee-Os that taste like bland chemicals and pulp filler and nothing like fudge.

Hey kids! Did you know that when I was your age Fudgee-Os tasted incredible? Like chocolate? They were fucking amazing. Sorry for the foul language but that is the precise truth. They tasted fucking amazing. If you went back in time you’d be shocked. In the 1980’s I used to bang away on an Underwood typewriter made in the sixties. It still worked perfect in the nineties when I gave it away. Your great grand-parents used to care about quality. They were a different breed of hominid.

We however, work longer hours (and get paid for fewer) even though those hours are absurdly leveraged by technology and resource-rape. We tilt the global imbalance of wealth to absurd degrees. Our poor live like kings and our rich live an unnatural existence which makes a complete mockery of the human reality.

And how do we leverage this hyper-excess of productivity? Not by making stuff better. By making stuff worse. The marketplace has become a theatrical battlefield where masked villains peddle facades and screw each other over. Where does the over-productivity go? Into the ground and into the skimmings. Over-manufacturing, planned obsolescence, dollar-store disposable versions of products that were once expected to last for years or decades. Massive food waste, military destruction... All of the fat skimmed to make the super-rich super-super-rich. Capitalism must generate waste in order to perpetuate. It must because collectively, the working class does not get paid enough for what they produce to afford to collectively buy what they produce. The new perversion of trade. The cream rises to the top.

Not by making things better.

By making things worse.

But it’s easy to imagine that things are good. It’s easy to believe the pretty pictures on the packaging when our minds are trained by obsolete survival instinct keying on reputation, not reality, to look at our experiences, not directly but rather through the eye of the other.

image courtesy of marketing execs

image courtesy of google maps

Pando

The Pando quaking aspen colony is the heaviest known living organism on earth. Appearing above ground as individual trees, they bear identical genes and gender (male), revealing a single shared root system which is estimated at six million kilograms, and buried so deep it is protected from threats such as wildfires. It has re-risen like a phoenix and likely a great many times, for the Pando also rivals the oldest living organisms on earth. It is roughly 80,000 years old.

It has thought to have not flowered (reproduced sexually) in the last 10,000 years or so but survived strictly by cloning. That’s quite a dry spell. I suddenly don’t feel so bad.

ace /ās/

It was their adventure; their quest. A fine heartfelt bonding experience. A coming of age.

But as they finely closed on the object of their macabre interest, the older boys descended on them as older boys will do, to ruin everything for their own pointless, cheap, cruel pleasure. For kicks. For the hell of it. Because they could.

But Gordie will not have it. Not this time. He will defend their moment and most certainly pay dearly for it later. He draws the sacred item; a real live GUN. And clenched in both hands he raises it and targets the leader.

“What are you gonna do?” Ace snickers. But his smile is nervous as he glances at his cohorts. “Shoot all of us?”

“No Ace,” says Gordie. And Ace knows at once that he’s not bluffing: “Just you.”

--paraphrased from The Body by Stephen King, and film adaptation Stand By Me (Columbia Pictures 1986)

accustom /əˈkəstəm/

Driving cars to all our vital appointments and buying up what we want from the Big Buy stores which line the horizon. Packaged flesh and new gadgets with the latest trinkets which we have always needed and only miraculously survived without for the last quarter million years. And the old trinkets magically disappear, melting into their individual natural elements and seeping back into their proper niches in the ripe Earth – we trust.

Working less hard while garnishing more rewards we know the paradise is eternal, for we, the chosen ones and our blessed daughters and sons.

accusation ˌ/akyəˈzāSH(ə)n/

Who now will hold me accountable?

I once served as my own one and only critic, tearing away at my own understandings, looking for their flaws, murdering my darlings. There was a time when I was able to find the flaws in my work. I seem now to have lost the knack for it – or else there none left to be found. Which statement is so, I do not know.

accursed /əˈkərst/

The glass tit, Stephen King called it. Right away I knew what he was referring to. The box from which we suck our toxic mental nutrition. The boob tube.

I didn't so much reject TV, back at the turn of the millennium, as fall out of the habit while more useful habits formed. The airwaves seemed nothing but idiocy at that time and I've yet to glean any clues that the boob realm has improved since then. Has it?

"Do you watch the such-and-such show?" people ask.

"I don't watch TV at all," I say, with pristine annunciation.  

And then, invariably, they delightedly try to tell me all about their favorite show while I silently search the sky, yearning to be kidnapped by aliens. It doesn't occur to people that if I have no time to waste watching TV then hearing about TV is presumably a bigger waste.

I’m not sure what’s more comical: sit-com dopes, pea-brained advertising, bubble-head blatherers of quasi-news? Does all this vapidity flatter us by setting such low intellectual bench-marks? As long as we’re at least a modicum brighter than the fools and jesters of the screen?

It seems to me another prime power in the structure of the matrix, goading us into the doldrums; dulling and doping the sheep that we would more easily be led.

accuracy /ˈakyərəsē/

Truth: the most dangerous word.

What is truth?

What is truth but any damn thing heard which does not conflict with any damn thing we happened to hear on a previous day, at least as far as our individual subjective accounting is concerned? How blind are we willing to be in order to keep our task of thinking simple?

We call things true because we see apparently logical connections between they and other things we labelled true and because it suits our selfish interests to assume them true.

But the web of causality is unfathomably massive; its threads everywhere; the flow of its threads so often unapparent in their direction. Any picture you want can be imagined from them, like ice cream castles in the clouds. Soft, dull, stunted thinking summons any desired result.

In reality we know nothing to be true except that which we have consistently experienced and that which we have extrapolated from said experience with the purest and most thorough application of logic and, above all, with the courage to accept the most dire of possible outcomes. Integrity does not trump fear. Only those with the strength to shed fears can know truth.

But such pristine accounting does not happen here in a society that does not require truth, nor regard it nor reward it. The games we are addicted to do not support the pursuit of real truth nor leave us time for it so long as we are slave to the matrix.

accumulate /əˈkyo͞om(y)əˌlāt/

A new couch, two buffets and a hutch. Desks, tables, shelves and artwork. Televisions, stereos and other appliances. I gave them away. Area rugs. Gave them away. Two dining room sets and more furniture. Gave it all away.

Dishes, cutlery, crockery, boxes of stationery, music albums and boxes of who knows what. Boxes under the bed, boxes in closets, boxes in the cubby hole, under the stairs. Christmas wrap, decorations, party supplies. I shed it all, amazed at how good it felt; like a thousand anchors severed so this ship can finally sail again.

I kept my bed and books and comfy chair and select few works of art: not the priciest ones, not the stuff elegantly framed; not the original oils. Just the images I most liked looking at; the stuff that reminded me of the life I wanted. I kept enough clothes, some mementos and gifts from loved ones.

To my neighbor I gave the bamboo plant I had bought to serve as centrepiece for a dinner party, a thing that afterwards, I had not expected to survive my neglect. And when I saw it there in the neighbor’s window, front and centre among her many plants; this ignored thing still living and now appreciated… well… it put a cheer in my heart and a tear in my eye.

Farewell, little bamboo. I’m on my way.