Category Archives: cosmic consciousness

Grace Notes in the Void

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Grace Notes in the Void

We are fleshy knots of emotion peppered with thought all woven into the great web of life connecting each to all even in their loneliness of free will to be enthralled by the illusion of gaining isolated protective power by saying yes to the extinction of others without ever letting that mirage evaporate to reveal ourselves as those others. Perhaps it is best to let everyone spin in their self-referential bubbles of dramatic trivialities designed to produce personal destinies of terminations in helpless surprise, if for all our deepest commitments are to avoid knowing ourselves in reality so as to hide from responsibility for not acting to stop destroying our world by that willful unknowing. So, I am silent. Life has no purpose if it has no end, but we would have no grace if we ended life by clinging to our delusions as purposes. So once awakened we go on through life’s void of meaning till that end is imposed on us because to stop before then is to defeat ourselves by letting that void rob us of the only purposes we could ever possibly have in reality: honor with compassion, beauty with truth, adventure with love. And in that way we achieve meaning in our own times, being passing grace notes in the eternal void.

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Infinity Untwisted

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The business of America is extinction.

Our lack of confidence in the sufficiency of ourselves as we are is capitalism’s greatest propaganda triumph for our enslavement to it. The fault lies in ourselves, not our stars, that we worship so abjectly the hollowest of idols by looking directly at reality and only seeing the unreality of ourselves as powerful godlets instead of the oxen we are, harnessed to the earth-chewing plow of wealth we drag through the caked mud of our dismal unthinking, to seed harvests we will never feed from.

The quality of justice and compassion in any state is a function of the standard of moral character its people personally maintain, and not on its form of government. The American judicial system is designed to ensure the American capitalist system suffers no threat of interruption or reform, from the vast populist socialist aspirations of the American people by the workings of democracy; and the management of those restraints on American democracy are grandly called “politics” in America, and are known everywhere else simply as “corruption.”

BEST U.S. PRESIDENTS:
Abraham Lincoln,
Ulysses S. Grant,
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Lyndon B. Johnson (till 1965),
Jimmy Carter (till 1978).

Why think when you can panic?

The insane need love, too, even if you’re married to them. In retrospect, I’ve learned that one should never get glum or nasty because a love affair is ending, because they all always end, so exit with grace. Your memories of the sweet times then are the closest you will ever get to forever. So, if you are still young, remember this to gift your dotage with. When you get old and your liver can’t take it any more, you have to give up liquor and run on memories. Thank god for music.

Creation: a needle drops into the groove.

A pebble erupted out of the infinite void of nonexistence and dropped through the flat glassy stillness of potentiality to raise a torrid splash that rippled out a ring of luminosity enclosing a widening field of turbulent existence within its circle of cooling afterglow relaxation of sparsely granular sparkling black emptiness exuding coiling time as viscous dissipation lengthening memories of receding origins into expanding rarefied timeless unknowing coldness beyond forgetting, where all questioning is quelled. Infinity untwisted is zero. Doing nothing, nothing is left undone.

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Why Does the Physical Universe Exist?

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Why Does the Physical Universe Exist?

Why do we even imagine we can ask such a question and find an answer?

The total energy of the universe exploded out of an infinitesimal pinpoint of reality erupting into the void of nonexistence, to cool and diffuse as the wake behind the expanding bow wave of the Event Horizon, precipitating into the swelling space-time of intergalactic, interstellar and interplanetary emptiness, and granulating into matter-energy that expresses gravitational potential by its mass distribution; that itself slowly contracts into accumulative material bodies, and ultimately into light-void centers of matter extinction that in their turn evaporate their confined energy by quantum flickering between existence and nonexistence, until those singularities of space-time pop back into nonexistence once voided of any reality.

Will that cycling between existence and nonexistence also be enacted by the Event Horizon? Will it just diffuse away into the void of nonexistence?, or will it rebound into a new universal contraction?, or will it oscillate in some as yet unknown Limit Cycle alternating existences and nonexistences? Could we guess that such a coiling and uncoiling was inherent in the Totality, as reflected in the eddies of reality shed behind the Event Horizon and which we see as the cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth?, down to the coiling and uncoiling of the very molecules that convey the persistent genetic patterns of which we each are momentary expressions and disposable links of Life’s transmission?

Why do we imagine there could be a Supreme Consciousness creating and controlling this dynamic? Why would such a Supreme Metaphysical Constant, beyond any limitations of space, time, materiality, personality, emotion, ego, boredom and need, bother with the triviality of creating a toy universe of existence to occupy and confine its unlimited awareness? Is this not simply a yearning on our part for magical extensions of our brief flashes of confused awareness of eternity: for a heaven, or even a hell? Isn’t our existential philosophizing just another vortex coiling and uncoiling in the human psyche tumbling us distractedly along our brief stretches of time?

For us the answers may all lie in our acceptance of tumbling along with grace and kindness, and without fearful clinging to the questioning. In doing that we may experience the constancy of the eternal during a few moments within our brief spans of conscious awareness. Of course we will never know, but miraculously we do have the choice to live as though that were true.

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The Lethal Hypnosis

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The Lethal Hypnosis

The more stupid you are, the easier it is to be racist. The more racist you are, the easier it is to be more stupid. Racism — and gun toting — is the pathetic effort by ignorant people, who are fearful about their irrelevance, to hide their lack of self-confidence behind racist bravado and “manliness.” Self-cure is the only way out of it, but the individual has to become motivated for that by going through some difficult or traumatic experience. They can’t just be talked out of it by “friends.”

The 2nd Amendment is both a religion and a mental illness. That illness is the psychosis of seeing oneself as a self-guiding unit entirely divorced from the organic integration known as Nature. One is then the hunter, the survivalist, the extractor, miner, chemical factory farmer and rancher, the conqueror, the capitalist, the owner, the dominator.

The biome within our gut mirrors the biodiversity without; the deforestation and soil denudation without has its connection to the parallel destruction of our gut biome, and consequently of our immune system. When we are thus weakened we become allergic to and even poisoned by the food that Nature provides, and the many microbes that flood the entire World Biome that is both outside us and within us.

That the biome within mirrors the biodiversity without, and vice versa, is an incredible insight (for those of us who did not previously have it) wonderfully presented in Episode 3 of the new television series HUMAN: The World Within (https://www.netflix.com/title/81139212).

So many of our autoimmune diseases are from the loss of microbial biodiversity within our guts. Those microbes feed on the insoluble fiber within the vegetables and fruits that we eat. We feed on the sugars, carbohydrates and protein those foods convey to our guts where they are processed to produce glucose, which is absorbed with the aid of insulin by our blood and carried to all our cells to feed those 37 trillion little metabolic engines.

Each of us is organically entwined within Nature, whether we recognize that fact or choose to believe in the anti-organic schizo-materialistic psychosis. We are not only connected through our guts to the World Biome and World Biodiversity without, but we are also connected with each other — whether we like it or not (and I do not always like it) — not merely through conscious awareness and volition as expressed in our acknowledged emotional attachments and in our civic awareness and political attitudes, but also through many unconscious connections made by both our physical reflexes mediated by our electro-chemical nervous systems, and our instinctual emotional reactions mediated chemically by our amygdalas sprouting from our brain stems, and even by our thoughts, memories, feelings and behaviors triggered by our olfactory systems sensing pheromones: each others’ smell, and also some of the immense olfactory sensory field of the external world that all other animals and insects sense so much more of than we do. Up to half of a dog’s brain is connected to olfactory sensors.

The economic structures in that part of the Human World we called Developed are nearly all capitalistic, despite how they are labeled in each national jurisdiction, and the political structures erected by their capitalist owners to maintain their capitalist economics are thus entirely dominated by the mentality of anti-organic schizo-materialistic psychosis. That illness within the human species infects the Natural World as a whole, so that it reacts feverishly in the manner which we have labeled “climate change” and “biodiversity loss,” and which pathological complex includes the vast inequities in the Human World, all of which is encompassed by the name: Planetary Crisis.

To the psychosis mind all problems invade the human isolates from an external world, and all solutions to those problems are technological assaults against it. But look at the human history of “developed economics”: nothing ages faster than technology, and nothing matures more slowly than human thought and morality. The difference between the collisions of deer-in-the-headlights, and “developed” humans-facing-climate-change, is that the humans have their eyes closed.

Snapping our species out if its lethal hypnosis by the anti-organic schizo-materialistic psychosis will doubtless require a widespread traumatic shock equivalent to that required to snap a racist individual out of his or her racist mental fog and into a genuine thirsting for self-cure from that malady. One symptom of the popular denial of our interconnectedness during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic is the laxity displayed by many regarding compliance with the infection-prevention protocols: conscious person-to-person social distancing, the wearing of exhalation-filtering face masks, and becoming doubly vaccinated with the newly developed anti-viral serum.

In essence, a responsible recognition of our interconnectedness would see us all expand the mesh-spacing of our social network, while containing our effluent breath plumes, and immunizing ourselves as soon as possible; all so the SARS-CoV-2 virus does not propagate further through our species by exploiting our human interconnectedness that so many ignore and are even hostile to. Much COVID-19 death is a consequence of denialism by anti-organic schizo-materialistic psychotics.

Can we humans overwhelmingly snap into an awareness for organic reintegration before being decimated by our own fearful and willful denial of it? Uncertain. Yet, Nature, which includes our marvelous human bodies, is wondrously responsive to new conditions, including new human attitudes and actions, so we already know that the organic reintegration of humanity into the long cycles of healthy Nature, and thus the ensuring of long-term sustainability for all planetary life, is more likely to occur the sooner we try to achieve it. All must change now. It is that simple.

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When Ozymandias Is Forgotten

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When Ozymandias Is Forgotten

Zionism is racism, which is why so many Americans support it. American political consciousness has as its consensus a rainbow coalition of varieties of racism; and racism is a religious faith whose sacrament is money, whose mythology is real estate, and whose original sin is genocide.

Global warming climate change is the coming Great Flood for which we will ever be absent a Noah, because there is no True God to inspire a True Noah. God is dead because we are our own gods, who are dying in the rising tide of entropy seeping out as the lifeblood from the body of the True God we have murdered.

So many of those whose lives will be cut short, and whose dreams will be cut off, are innocent of the crime; but it is ever the privilege of wealth in its pyramid death cult to sacrifice abundances of young life on the altars of its mausoleums: glorious memories imagined that will only blow in the wind as dust in the not so distant unknown.

For some: ideas liberate the mind, and time offers promise.
For others: ideology cages mind, and time is a sentence.
Gratitude is the experience of Everlasting Life, and
No soul immersed in gratitude is ever alone.

The warmth of sunlight on skin, the brush of cool breeze against the cheek, the ringing of birdsong through the trees, the blushing of day into night before the eyes, the slow cascade of wispy cloud down the mountain, the sparkle of moonlight in the brook, the density of quiet in the dark, are all the eternal caress and lullaby by the Mother, always sustaining a refuge of love, always welcoming home her lost children.

I stretched my legs and curled them under the blankets while the cat pressed his weight down into them, walking and coiling above. I ringed them into a bowl, a plush crater, and he settled his body pressing against them. And thus we slept through the late night dark into the bright of morning: connected in the eternal.

The struggle for life is real, but we misuse it.
Wisdom is life lived in the calm of grateful awareness.

If I am moderate in my speech, it is ignored in favor of existing biases. If I am immoderate in my speech, it sparks thought which is met with denial and a hostile defense of ignorance, which is always threatened by any truth however moderated its appearance. So to be truthful to myself I must offend the delicate sensibilities of your falsity.

Socrates was insufferable, and was insufferably responded to. Plato was elegantly snobbish in playing Socrates without hazard. Shelley was Dionysian, but with his lordly airs could never be Euripidean; his Ionian reflection was Keats, that flowering of the sublime into the radiance above Wordsworthian mulch. Bukowski, that guttural Boudu, played at Diogenes without his wit or insight. Ginsberg, as frenzied Whitman, played Kerouac in the feminine; Kerouac played Ryokan as cool jazz Nietzsche; Ryokan was pure moonlight on the river; and Camus was the river of conscience into Melville’s sea of morality. Our taste in poets, for those that are true poets, reflects on our flaws not theirs. True poets are diamonds of imperfection forged out of the coal of humanity.

When Ozymandias is forgotten we will have let go and been enfolded.

5 June 2021

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For A Better World

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For A Better World

Utopia is an illusion that can be experienced dynamically, not statically; locally, not universally. You can maintain it for yourself for a while by a continuous effort, in the same way that a juggler maintains the ephemeral sequential image of three, four or five balls suspended as a constellation in midair. Your utopia is like that flickering image of uplift defying the gravity of oblivion because it is entirely an expression of your unrelenting artful input of purposeful energy: it is you. The constellations you juggle into flickering existence have as elements the people you relate to and trade influences with. When your juggling and theirs have resonances, your utopias become shared and sympathetic. If such sympathetic resonances have sufficient scope their utopian dynamic may last beyond a human lifetime, being passed on to subsequent generations. But, how large a scope and long a duration can we reasonably expect such personal utopias to have? Probably that of a family’s experience for a generation or less.

So, the challenge for the person who wishes to live in a world of compassion, of enlightenment and of justice, is to make and continue the effort to juggle a bubble of utopia into existence, despite the evident lack of compassion, enlightenment and justice throughout human history, and throughout so much of the world of the present day: to be ethical, generous, moral and tolerant in a world that seems forever dominated by venality, greed, lack of principles, and brutal intolerance. The challenge is to remain a steadfast and good-humored agent of good while being carried away by a torrent of corruption cascading to perdition: it is to be quixotic without shame. How is one to maintain such a purpose and find fulfillment in such a thankless role? Oblivion’s gravity is endlessly capable of sapping your energies to exhaustion, and oblivion’s glitter is endlessly capable of shattering your ambitions by ridicule and by trapping you into temporal failure: a lone monkey shunned by the collaborationist troop.

Why would anyone persist as such a challenger then? It seems clear that such perseverance emanates out of a sense of self-respect and self-worth: the maintenance of personal character measured against an absolute scale of moral conduct, without reliance on social bonds for the support of morale. This is pure defiance and pure celebration, the ultimate in self expression and self abnegation. It is the brave social insanity of a fully aware and fully sane person immersed in the insanity of a cowardly and tribal world, and resisting it. The radiation of such personal power, by lived example, is what can influence and resonate with others and possibly coalesce into the psychological and physical forces that levitate what few utopias exist at any given moment.

“Character is fate,” and utopia is personal character maintained in defiance of the overwhelming forces of assimilation, decay and inertia. To fret about “the end of the world,” which is always increasingly likely to occur as our history advances, is to pin our hopes on the illusory externality of a general coming together of human vision onto a consensus for moral action for the common good. The self-realized quixotic challengers for utopia know this is impossible, and that the continuation of whatever decency of existential experience they have managed to juggle into being are only propelled by self-generated and self-directed efforts independent of societal externalities. For them the end of the world is the collapse of decency consequent to the collapse of self, and the collapse of personal integrity, regardless of the collective course of fractious society. Objectively, our physical and social world could easily end, and soon, catastrophically and painfully. But, subjectively, no one of us is compelled to implode their intellectual and moral selves in collaborationist surrender to the many forces of decay leading to that extinction. We always have the power to seek sharing a nobility of lived experience regardless of what external reality confronts us with. Survival is a matter of chance, nobility is a matter of choice. Be well in that realization.

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Human Solidarity and Nature Conservation

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“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” Carl Gustav Jung [1]

Life is the actualization of potentialities embedded within the biochemical processes that form the mechanisms of genetics and evolution. Does life have a purpose, or is it entirely a statistically random fluke made possible by the astronomical number of possibilities available for the expression of molecular chemistry in the wide array of physical conditions interspersed throughout the vastness of space? To believe that life has a consciously intended purpose is to believe that life is an intentional creation by a conscious supernatural entity or entities. If so, what is that purpose?

We know that the most elementary organisms of proto-life, like the SARS-CoV-2 virus that infects people with the deadly COVID-19 disease, have no purpose beyond the mindless mechanical continuation of their genetic formats, by feeding their metabolisms through parasitism. But, what of more conscious organisms, like: plants, animals, us?

We humans pride ourselves as presumably having the most highly developed conscious minds of all life-forms on Planet Earth (though very deep ecologists and naturalists disagree with this presumptuousness). From this human-centric point of view, the various levels of consciousness of living organisms are all evolutionary adaptations enhancing the survivability of individuals, to thus enhance the likelihood of the propagation and continuation of their species as environmental conditions change.

For believers in the supernatural there is an imposed obligation, or supra-natural goal, or “higher purpose” to human consciousness, which can be most generally characterized as finding union with God. For non-believers, the fully conscious experience of being alive is the totality of that higher purpose. In either case, the realization of that purpose is to be had by the combination of human solidarity and nature conservation.

Homo sapiens are social animals, and their full development as individuals — their realization of purpose — requires social connection and connection with Nature.

TALES BY LIGHT

“Tales by Light” [2] is an Australian television series (in 3 seasons) about the use of photography and videography to tell stories visually so as to change society for the better: activism. Here, I am only writing about episodes from Season 3. By its very nature this series is visually “beautiful” — in terms of the technical perfection of the image composition, capture and presentation — even when abysmally grim and ugly situations are being shown in order to advance the complete story. This is about emotional punch delivered visually. And of course, incredibly happy bursts of emotion are delivered in the same way by the presentation of images of lushly colorful nature, and joyful and inspiring scenes of human warmth, kindness and sheer exuberance. The three stories (each given in two parts) that affected me were:

1, CHILDREN IN NEED: This story, by Simon Lister, is about the children of Dhaka, Bangladesh, who scrounge through the most disgusting, unsafe and unsanitary heaps of rubbish to find scraps of material that can be recycled locally — like plastic forks and containers — in the abysmal poverty of their society; or who do difficult work in unsafe and toxic conditions to support their families. There are millions of these kids in Bangladesh.

Many Bangladeshi kids work in primitive workshops with zero health and safety codes, procedures and equipment, for example to produce pans and bowls by hands pressing sheet metal against spinning mandrels, again with no protective shields from whirling machinery gears and belts right at hand; nor any proper ventilation and filtration to protect them from toxic metal dust, or fumes in workshops using solvents and chemicals.

The story of such child laborers in the poorest societies on Earth is being documented as part of a UNICEF program to bring world (rich world) attention to the problem of child labor, and to generate financial resources to then provide safe and sanitary spaces for such children to be able to get food, education, rest, shelter for the night off the streets, and the joyful companionship of other children. But, since the money these children gain from their difficult and hazardous work is always the lifeline for the support of their families, often of single mothers, such a labor force is considered “normal” in their societies, and lamentably economically essential for these individuals.

The ultimate “solution” for eliminating this heartbreaking situation would be a worldwide awakening to an actual commitment to species-wide human solidarity. That that idea becomes self-evident through the medium of photography testifies to its power as an art-form.

2, PARADISE IN PERIL: This story, by Shawn Heinrichs, is of the conservation of the ocean biodiversity and habitat of the Raja Ampat Islands. Here, the art of photography is being used to present the story of the value of an amazing tropical coral reef and mangrove forest environment in New Guinea (Indonesia).

That story is told in two directions, first “upscale” to the societies of the wealthy industrialized and developed economies, to generate financial resources needed to establish locally manned, maintained, patrolled, owned — and in selected zones sustainably fished — marine reserves, and to ensure their continued operation and ongoing scientific study.

That story is also told “downscale,” in video presentations in their own language to the actual people living in the environments that are being protected, so that new generations of conservationists grow out of the youth of that indigenous population, now fired up with a greater understanding of the positive impact their healthy local environment has on their own lives as well as on the global environment.

The emotional impetus to these conservation efforts, both locally and remotely, is sparked by the visual impact of the photos and videos of the stunning and vibrant beauty of life moving in that magical submerged translucent habitat. The Raja Ampat Islands is one of the few places on Earth where all measures of biodiversity and ecological health are improving right now, even despite advancing global climate change; and this is entirely because of cooperative human intentionality.

3, PRESERVING INDIGENOUS CULTURE: This story by Dylan River, an Australian filmmaker with an Aboriginal grandmother, is of the recording for posterity of Aboriginal ways and languages slowly being lost with the passing away of elders, of the stories behind some of their ancient rock art, of ways of living off the land and sea while being intimately connected to the natural environment, and of community as the essence of being.

On a visit to Arnhem Land, Dylan is immersed into a welcoming ritual by the Yoingu people, whose spokesman at the event states that though Dylan is from far away he is “part of the family” as is everybody in spirit. The entirety of this brief and simple greeting conveys a fundamental truth that is more clearly and wisely stated, and lived by the Yoingu, than with any of the fatuous self-satisfied pronouncements by our many supposedly powerful and always hypocritical political leaders, who collectively oversee and exacerbate the poisonous fractiousness and sociological cannibalism of our national and world societies.

The basic truth here is that every human being “is something Nature is doing” — as Alan Watts put it — and that Nature is integral, it is a harmoniously self-entangling network of life. And that is what healthy human community should be.

I recommend this series to you because of its many simultaneous dimensions of beauty.

To my mind, the financial investments made by the executives of Canon Incorporated, National Geographic (a subscription television network in Australia and New Zealand that features documentaries, and is owned by The Walt Disney Company), and Netflix, to produce and broadcast this series were very worthy, even as I know there would necessarily also have been a component of profit motive in those investment decisions.

What is needed in our world is ever the same: more human solidarity and nature conservation. The wider broadcast of these three stories from the series Tales By Light could help awaken more people to that realization, or at a minimum give some comfort to those who already know.

Acknowledgment: Gretchen Hennig perceptively brought Tales by Light to my attention.

Here is a musical ornamentation to all the above; about a child, really any child: “Chihiro.”
https://soundcloud.com/ellasolanagarcia/chihiro

Notes

[1] “Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.”

C. G. Jung (1875-1961), from the closing chapter of his autobiography “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” entitled “Life and Death,” written between 1957 and 1961. This excerpt is highlighted and discussed at
https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/13/memories-dreams-reflections/

[2] Tales by Light (on Netflix)
https://www.netflix.com/title/80133187

Tales by Light (official website)
https://www.canon.com.au/explore/tales-by-light

Tales by Light (series described)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_by_Light

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Salvation

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Painting of the Roiling Ocean, by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky

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It is sad indeed to see an oppressed people destroying itself through factionalism and civil war, while a far more powerful enemy squeezes them out of their land and lives. I have read of such in Thucydides, but it is too painful to watch in my own time. And, such a sad spectacle turns foreign eyes away, withdrawing their compassion and respect, and leaving “the lost” to their fate of ultimate disappearance. You and I, Nadia Issam Harhash, know that a universal solidarity among humans is the only salvation for all of us, but you and I also know the unfortunate truth that too many of those humans will resist contributing to that salvation to the bitter end: a death cult. What is left to people like you and I is to speak out against the death cult (and hope we are not silenced), and then also retreat into care of our families and immersion in being creative artists, so as to keep our sanity while we live. As an engineer, I always look for solutions to problems, but here as in so many other times and places the “solution” is purely one of choice: unrestrained compassion, respect and solidarity for and with the other members of the homo sapiens species. To me, all politics and all religions are madness, and should disappear. Heraclitus (~500BC) said “Bigotry is the disease of the religious,” and politics is so obviously the mechanisms of organized greed. Salvation will NOT come down from some Sky God in Heaven, nor from Hell out of the barrels of guns; salvation can only come from human hearts and souls who have come to realize that they each are merely momentary wave crests in a sea of humanity flowing within an ocean of Life. Peace.

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The Five Allegiances

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The Five Allegiances

“We be of one blood, ye and I” — Mowgli, in The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling

The hierarchy of the five allegiances is: nepotism, tribalism, classism, nationalism, humanism.

Family connection is the emblem of conformity with nepotism.

Group identity is the emblem of conformity with tribalism. That emblem can be: race, religion, language, ethnicity, cult bondage.

Money wealth is the emblem of conformity with classism.

National identity is the emblem of conformity with nationalism.

Species-wide identification as homo sapiens is the emblem of conformity with humanism.

Each allegiance is a strategy to gain competitive advantage over other human beings. That competitiveness decreases from extremely intense with nepotism, to absent with pure humanism.

For each allegiance, those above it are barriers to its complete success. Humanism, being the least competitive relationship between humans, is also the most stymied by the combination of: nationalism, classism, tribalism and nepotism. We see this reflected in the inhumanity of homo sapiens world society, for which deprivation there is no compelling physical nor sociological reason.

Nationalism is stymied by the combination of classist greed, tribalist bigotry and family-linked corruption; and it is slightly diluted by expansive humanist cosmic consciousness. The managers of national governments, who are too often motivated by the three higher ranked allegiances, may at times try to unite a multicultural national population with the imagery of democracy, equality, inclusion and diversity. This is particularly so when armies have to be raised for wars of national defense and foreign conquest.

Nationalism is most successful when applied through a lush and expansive economy providing a high standard of living for all. In providing secure and fulfilling jobs with good pay, and which ease the existential anxieties of individuals and gives them roles they can adopt as emblems of self worth, economic nationalism in essence pays people off to relinquish their reliance on classism, tribalism and nepotism. As the equitable economics of any nation withers, so does its mass appeal to national allegiance, and deepens its fragmentation by classist greed, tribalist bigotry and nepotistic corruption.

Homo sapiens world society is devolving through a planetary sustainability crisis, of which global warming climate change is one compelling symptom. That crisis is driven by classism — economic greed — which is exacerbated by the other allegiances except humanism. The solution for overcoming that crisis is well-known: humanism applied with reverence for Nature and All Life, and in perpetuity.

Merely stating that solution illuminates all the barriers to its implementation. Besides being structural and non-personal in the sense of nationalistic competitions and economic exclusivities, such barriers are also weaves of egotistical personal attitudes and failures of moral character dominated by selfishness and bigotry.

It is clear, from looking at the aggregate of homo sapiens world society today, that the prospects for reversing that devolutionary planetary crisis are very dim indeed. For too many people, the idea of eliminating all the old socio-economic structures along with all their personal prejudices, and replacing them with a planetary humanism of species-wide solidarity to fashion a sustainable human-with-Nature world and truly radiant civilization, is just too fearful to even imagine let alone seriously consider. Certain death inequitably distributed by relentless impoverishment is by far preferred, even though most people suffer from it. The tragedy of human existence is that most people prefer to live out their lives and die without changing their ideas even when those ideas are harmful to them.

Frustrated humanists can easily imagine a worldwide French Revolution breaking out in defiance of that tragedy, with the decapitation of the nepotistic, tribalist and classist national managements, and with the eruption of a liberating world socialist nirvana. This is like the aspirational dream of Christianity held by the millions of slaves in the Roman Empire.

But in the sad reality of our present world, could any violent outburst by the impoverished and oppressed be motivated by a globalist liberating humanism, instead of merely reactionary survivalism for family, tribe and class? What few revolutions of this type not quashed in their embryonic stages by the economic and national managers, would soon recycle the same poisonous exclusivities of former times but with a new cast of leading characters.

To transcend this pernicious eddy and actually evolve humanity out of its present decaying stagnation would require a universal enlightenment of human attitudes and consciousness. And that is an unrealistically utopian thought indeed. But incredibly, it is neither a logical nor physical impossibility, just an extreme improbability.

Is it possible for us as individuals to increase that probability? Based on a realistic view of the long arc of human history the clear answer is “no,” despite the numerous temporary blooms of localized enlightened society that have occurred during the lifetime of our homo sapiens species. But it is depressing and dispiriting to live with that “no” dominating one’s thinking. The mere fact of having been born entitles you and every other human being with the right to enjoy a fulfilling life with a liberated consciousness, the right to seek achieving your full human potential.

One can seek that fulfillment along the simultaneous parallel paths of supporting a family of whatever kind, caring for others through both personal and societal means, creative immersion in arts, sciences and craftsmanship, and championing global socialist humanism by both intellectual allegiance to it and personal engagement with it in the political and societal arenas you are a part of, at whatever level. Ultimately, the course and fate of humanity is the sum total of the courses and fates of the individual lives comprising it, and the greatest impact we each can have on helping to steer that great stream is made by the quality of the choices we each make regarding the conduct of our own personal lives.

Achieving a morally enlightened personal fulfillment in no way guarantees the morally enlightened success of any subgroup the homo sapiens species — your family, your tribe, your class, your nation — and least of all of humanity as a whole; but it helps! And living with that as personal experience is very satisfying indeed.

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The Artistry of Gifting

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The Artistry of Gifting

In the book The Gift, Lewis Hyde described (among other things) how Bob Dylan benefitted enormously by having copyright-free access to traditional folksongs with which to hone his craft (and gain young artist income for performing them). The production of new art needs the free nourishment of old art in order to continue the cycle of cultural rebirth. http://www.lewishyde.com/publications/the-gift

Bob Dylan just sold his entire catalog of songs (to Universal Music Group) for probably upwards of $300,000,000. Stevie Nicks (of the band Jefferson Airplane, etc.) had previously sold her entire catalog for $100,000,000. Yea Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread, the Summer of Love has withered into the Winter Of Our Discontent: COVID spiking, mass loss of income, mass foreclosures, mass you’re on your own healthcare (mass health don’t care), mass social contamination, exclusive celebrity indemnification.

Tom Lehrer (now 92), the wickedly funny satirist and songwriter, has put his entire music catalog — lyrics and sheet music — in the public domain. He grants everyone permission to do anything they want with his entire artistic/musical output, without cost and in perpetuity. You have till 31 December 2024 to download any or all of Tom’s songs, before he closes his website. https://tomlehrersongs.com/

Who knew in 1959 that “Poisoning Pigeons In The Park” would morph into official U.S. government public health policy (for us homo sapiens pigeons) in 2020? https://youtu.be/yhuMLpdnOjY

Jonas Edward Salk (1918-1995) was a medical researcher who developed the first vaccine against the polio virus. Before the Salk injected vaccine was introduced in 1955, polio was considered one of the most serious public health problems in the world. The 1952 U.S. epidemic, in which 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with some form of paralysis, was the worst polio outbreak in the nation’s history, and most of its victims were children. According to a 2009 PBS documentary, “Apart from the atomic bomb, America’s greatest fear was polio.” During 1953 and 1954, the average number of polio cases in the U.S. was more than 45,000; by 1962 that number had dropped to 910. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk

“Salk never patented the vaccine or earned any money from his discovery, preferring it be distributed as widely as possible.” https://www.salk.edu/about/history-of-salk/jonas-salk/

Between 1954 and 1961, Albert Sabin (born Abram Saperstein, 1906-1993), a medical researcher, went through a tremendous effort to develop and test an oral vaccine against all three strains of the polio virus. To develop and prove the safety of Sabin’s oral vaccine, upwards of 100 million people — in the USSR, Eastern Europe, Singapore, Mexico and the Netherlands — were tested with it.

The success of that campaign by 1960 opened the door to testing in the United States, on 180,000 school children in Cincinnati. The mass immunization techniques that Sabin pioneered with his associates effectively eradicated polio in Cincinnati, and that technique along with the oral vaccine itself broke the chain of transmission of the virus, and has led over the last four decades to nearly eradicating the disease worldwide.

“Sabin refused to patent his vaccine, waiving every commercial exploitation by pharmaceutical industries, so that the low price would guarantee a more extensive spread of the treatment. From the development of his vaccine Sabin did not gain a penny, and continued to live on his salary as a professor.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Sabin

On 12 April 1922, Frederick Grant Banting (1891-1941), Charles Herbert Best (1899-1978), James Bertram Collip (1892-1965), John James Rickard Macleod (1876-1935), and John Gerald “Gerry” FitzGerald (1882-1940) — the key participants in the project (in Canada) to develop therapeutic insulin, a project initiated by Banting in 1920 — wrote jointly to the president of the University of Toronto to propose assigning the patent for the artificial production of insulin to the Board of Governors of the University in such a way that:

“The patent would not be used for any other purpose than to prevent the taking out of a patent by other persons. When the details of the method of preparation are published anyone would be free to prepare the extract, but no one could secure a profitable monopoly.”

The assignment to the University of Toronto Board of Governors was completed on 15 January 1923, for the token payment of $1.00. Following further concern regarding (drug company) Eli Lilly’s attempts to separately patent parts of the manufacturing process, Robert Defries (Assistant Director and Head of the Insulin Division at Connaught Laboratories, which administered the insulin patent) established a patent pooling policy which would require producers to freely share any improvements to the manufacturing process without compromising affordability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin#Discovery

“Tell me someone who’s not a parasite, and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.” — Bob Dylan

Some people are successful in life and lucky, but some are successful at life and are radiant.

Seisetsu, a Zen master in ancient Kamakura, required larger quarters to alleviate the overcrowding of his many students. Umezu Seibei, a well-to-do merchant, decided to donate 500 piecers of gold (called ryo) for that purpose. “All right, I’ll take it,” said Seisetsu. But Umezu was dissatisfied with Seisetsu’s response because a person could live a whole year on 3 ryo, and Umezu had expected an effusive thanks. So he reminded Seisetsu that 500 ryo was a lot of money that he had been donated. “Do you want me to thank you?” asked Seisetsu. “You ought to,” replied Umezu. “Why should I?” asked Seisetsu, “the giver should be thankful.” [see #53 in the book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, by Paul Reps (1895-1990)].

And that’s it, isn’t it?: you donate because you are grateful that you are able to do so. Gratitude is enlightenment, and that is the artistry of gifting.

The Gift is an excellent book, if you are an artist, or at least appreciate art, read it (try your public library). http://www.lewishyde.com/publications/the-gift

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