Lovely, from Michael Markham!

The cathedral of self is built from and buttressed by its imaginary gods. The only light that enters streams in through stained glass windows. It is not God or Jesus that I am trying cast from their nest in the dream of personal autonomy. It is god-thinking that is the culprit and is the focus of intent. Man and his god
are like peas in a pod. They are mutually co-dependent. They need each other to exist. Whenever one falls.......they both succumb. The mind of man bolsters its delusional stance and its illusory persona with the idea that there is something bigger and better than itself. It carries its crosses, crescents, flags and banners into its daily battle to keep its little homestead safe and secure. It forms alliances with those predisposed to the same delusions. They prod each other along the dark roads of the unknown.......winding ever downward into the caverns of their own imagination. It doesn't matter if one's god lives in heaven or in a hole in Iran. One's god can be a collage of "oneness", "advaita", "big self", "enlightenment", "hope", "love", "country", "charity", "guru", "vegetarianism", ancestors, movie stars or rap artists, web forums, crosses, crescents, flags, symbols, etc, etc, etc. Ultimately all gods emerge and live in the hominid brain and as long as they are granted power over the dream-kingdom people will submit to their iron hand. That's alright for most folks. That's their entire world.
They are born and die......never having opened their eyes. That's the dream. But a few rebels will always be standing on street corners to speak of a far more open, flowing place just outside of the fetid little stagnant pools to which the mind of man gravitates. The whole cast of gods and demigods.....saints and martyrs......icons and matinee idols....actors and politicians...priests and gurus......keep the sense of self centered and secure in its inferiority. And when one shines a light into their lair......their minions scurry around to protect them......they feign anger.....they posture aggressively and threaten recriminations or even expulsion from the group and will even threaten physical death. They speculate on what their gods would do if they were confronted with a similar confusing circumstance. Heretics are never welcome in any land....real or illusory.

There are no spiritual youngsters that are attracted to non-duality. Every person here has spent years searching for the essence of being. And I honor their efforts. I honestly believe that this journey into self is the bravest adventure that a human mind can endure. In truth, I am not speaking of God and gods and the lunacy of the belief structures they support. I am speaking to the innate suffering that accompanies the sense of being a separate self and the tendency to rely on religion to assuage that ever present pain. I am speaking to the aching loneliness that follows the I amness like a hungry animal and the terrible fear that arises from the objectified apperception of its own impending doom. I am speaking of the self and its highly evolved functions and support systems which sustain its imaginary personal pseudo-reality. Its "higher powers" are merely conceptual stars used to triangulate itself in the dream and assume a location. When the charade is seen through......there is no location......no relativity.....no self. And that apperception is all that "enlightenment" really is. I am speaking about the resilience and tenacity with which the sense of self sustains its illusion of autonomy. 

The self is the cause and result of conceptual confusion. It is the cause and center of psychological suffering. There is no evidence that there is anything higher than the sentient-awareness that has evolved in homo sapiens. There is nothing greater.....or anything that has a broader or more profound experiential pallet than the perceptual mind map that is experienced through the human brain. All concepts of a higher being only serve to diminish the ego's personal reality and keep it in a position of abject servitude and self-serving gratitude. To give the awe of being to imaginary powers strips the awareness of man to that of a beggar and is a tragedy that would put the Greeks to shame. Life as a human being needs those who rock the cradle........and those who seek the understanding of which the sages speak.......need those who rock the boat. toombaru

Fb reply about poor grade in "Common Core" math

And yes, some of the core methods lead us to a gray area in grading, because in that approach, it isn't the answer that is the point, though it is a verifier of the process. For many, the "why's" of some of the core methods are opaque, even though, as the article above points out, it is in fact what we ordinarily use, say in making change. 

So now we have a great portion the people who hated math in school getting upset because the point of teaching math has shifted to include and actually emphasize the "why" of the answer. The level at which most of us engage math is, in the math world, kind of kindergarten. Similarly, a semester in high school band isn't comparable to Horowitz' playing the piece Tchaikovsky compose for him. though the rules really are the same. The core approach is to understand principles and be able to distribute that understanding over the rest of experience. Back again to the Music analogy, kids who learn especially keyboard early on test up to 30% higher IQs because the patterns inherent in Music are universally inherent in nearly everything. It isn't so much about "music," as it is consciously, or even unconsciously, experiencing patterns and relationships 

So from here, the reaction to the core approach to math is more a reflection of the vast misunderstanding the public owns of what math isn't about, or is. And like anyone who doesn't know something, the ignorance of it includes its actual usefulness as experience. Many hold knowledge of math to be the equivalent of being human. Heinlein was so convinced that math was of paramount pattern importance to the brain that he had a character say "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make a mess in the house." As a corollary, "One man's magic is another man's engineering." 

This isn't question of human value, really as such, but an indictment of the ordinary person's lack of living up to potential due to imposed ignorance through the tools of politics and "education." I mean consider any one of your cameras or lenses. While you have a phenomenal ability use them as tools to produce wonders of aesthetic creation, have you any clue as to the volumes of mathematical and engineering understanding that went into every tiny part of it? We dismiss vast libraries of human experience in the casual act of picking up and using something like a camera, drive a car, or cook a dinner. We might appreciate, intuitively, the wonder of such things, but our appreciation is incompetent of the complexity of what we are using. Often it might be compared to the innocence of a puppy accepting a bowl of milk. 

Consider that most people cannot comprehend the simple and deadly hoax of how our monetary system works, or the deadly implications to civilization at this point of having no clue about the working of logarithmic functions as applied to population, resources, and what is naively passed off by the ridiculously oversimplified epithet "pollution." If these were as emotionally understood as the plight of Kim K or the Housewives of, there would be blood on the streets, and banks along with capital buildings burned to the ground. 

So for my part, I'm for it, regardless of some degree of squawking of many who both haven't read the common core guidelines before exploding their assumptions on the public, or who simply haven't a clue to start with, the rightful defensive stance of parents notwithstanding. The intentions are usually good, but very unconsidered and from standpoints not up to an actual understanding of what's going on.

Homo Novis

".....We define thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued 'either-or' logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can't use any sort of logic and will discard observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.

"That is why there is always room at the top, why a man with a leetle more on the ball can so easily become governor, millionaire, or college president--and why homo sap is sure to be displaced by New Man, because there is so much room for improvement and evolution never stops.

"Here and there among ordinary men is a rare individual who really thinks, can and does use logic in a single field--he's often as stupid as the rest outside his study or his laboratory--but he can think, if he is not disturbed, sick, or frightened. This rare individual is responsible for all the progress made by the race; the others reluctantly adopt his results. Much as the ordinary man dislikes and distrusts and persecutes the process of thinking he is forced to accept the results occasionally, because thinking is efficient compared with his own maunderings. He may still plant his corn by the dark of the moon, but he will plant better corn developed by better men than he.

"Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masks himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; a pink monkey among the brown monkeys--a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he gets caught.

"The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.

"Rarest of all is the man who can and does reason at all times, quickly, accurately, inclusively, despite hope or fear or bodily distress, without egocentric bias or thalmic disturbance, with correct memory, with clear distinction between fact, assumption and non-fact. Such men exist, They are "New Man"--human in all respects, indistinguishable in all appearances or under the scalpel from homo sap, yet as unlike him in action as the Sun is unlike a single candle.”

from  Gulf, a short story in the anthology Assignment in Eternity by Robert A Heinlein

Coyote, ugly?

Recently on Facebook, I made a reply to someone who was upset that I took the sounds of a successful coyote hunt as something acceptable, where she herself would have done something to frustrate it.

Clearly it hits a nerve in many to present as being OK with carnivorous animals doing their thing. But we don't drive our Land Rover in the path of a hunting lion, chase sharks from their prey with subs, or interfere too much, if at all, with the global boil of things eating other things. We even contribute to it with our own kinds of often catastrophic hunting. 

But it hits a very tender nerve for many to hear a prey animal in its last moments at the claws and fangs of its predator. Of course, I feel that too, when I hear it. How can one not? Sound can trigger emotions, deep ones. And the sounds at the end of a chase can hit hard, unless one is calloused by training. 

It may be easier to take if it is something in the distance. But if a pet disappears, or worse, as has happened, then we are naturally in degrees of upset equal to the proximity of the emotional bond with what's lost. Nothing could be more natural. 

But there is nothing evil in the happening of animals hunting. When full, prey and predator can sometimes be seen in close proximity. There's even the video of the lioness putting an infant baboon back into the safety of a tree, though she had just killed its kin. This process in Nature is far more selective, kind, and useful than what we do as humans in too many instances. Animals don't kill for sport, nor do they raise other animals for slaughter or parts. 

Perhaps the actual cause of our revulsion when we hear or see the result of a hunt stems from our sanitized experience of the animal kingdom. That, and one more thing: we can, some of us, emotionally identify with the prey, and that reminds us of our own mortality. Prey therefore triggers the whole complex surrounding thoughts of our own demise, or the pain of loss of a loved one. Or simply the injustice an unfairness of life, despite its wonders. 

That is all hard to take, as we all have some sense of battle pertinent to our existence. There is no defense against the processes of Nature, save one: Being a good warrior. That means acceptance of what is, and doing one's best as far as one is able. Part of that can be to create and defend Life. Or to make Art, of any kind. At any rate, it has to do with living as a productive Spirit that transcends the appearances of inevitable decay and demise without denying it. Creativity is the only anti-entropic force there is. And essentially, we are that. If we weren't we couldn't experience Love. 

If anyone has read Castaneda's books on the way of Yaqui sorcerers, they might remember Carlos' character asking his mentor, Don Juan, the difference between an ordinary man and a warrior. Don Juan told him that "when an ordinary man meets an 'ally' (a terrifying spirit entity ) in the desert, he pees his pants and runs. When a warrior meets an 'ally,' he pees his pants, but stays." We are always in that kind of position, though we may not see it. And it is kind of the only choice we have; to run or to stay. Our emotions are wonderful guideposts, and ought be felt fully, but they are not the event itself, unless we let them carry us.

There is a Universal Good that is lensed through the serial iterations of the Holy Books. It is again lensed through the inculcations of serial priests., imams, rabbis, whatever. It is again lensed through the exigencies of one's personal experience and relative "knowledge."

Is there truth in the Holy books? Insofar as they word what is Truth in ones heart already there, yes. But because of the parochial nature of enculturations, those Truths are attributed, necessarily, in the minds of the faithful, to the most common religious denominator of their environment. And it stays that way, unless deeply examined. The result is that many, either through lack of motivation or just sheer habit never look to the roots of their beliefs, other than to verify them in the paradigm they have beforehand adopted. This adoption is most often at a pre verbal, pre cognative level. Of course, then, the paradigm appears to be to the believer as fundamental truth.

So the actual Universals are cloaked in parochial clothings of whatever kind. And those clothings become the reality of the believer, as they soon become attached to and mistaken for the sense of Self. But they themselves are no more Self than software is the actual nature of a computer, or better, the electricity that runs it. The lack of deep examination of one's beliefs, political, social, and religious, results in the insistence that the thoughts in one's head have a one/one correspondence to the Truth, or Reality. Nothing could be farther from the Truth of Reality. In fact, these unexamined beliefs breed violence, the violence we have thrown up in our face each day, if we are even slightly aware of what is going on around us.

This is why it is said that the unexamined life isn't worth living. Because it is a life of sleep in the illusion of having a handle on Reality. But the fact is that Reality isn't accessed through acquisition. It is accessed through discovery. And that discovery is done as interior work and is ultimately free of the paradigms of the structures of uses as a defense against what in fact simply IS. It is discovered in the inner reaches of one's own self, in solitude and silence. It is where the Minotaur lives, where the Fair Maiden is rescued from, where the dragon is slain.

And that all plays out in one's own being, in the reaches where no priest, no politician, no banker, no psychologist, no friend, no one, holds our hand. Even if they might encourage us, however accurately or delusionally. None of them know our own Truth. They can't. And therein is the failure of organized religions, and the triumph of inquiry, self inquiry, which necessarily is the deepest and most honest form of prayer, which can ultimately lead to a salvation unimagined in the rote ceremonies of faiths, however sincere and emotionalized, and no matter of the intellectualize about the truth of the lineage and form. Ultimately, none of that is Self, only trappings.

I can be noted that a deep study of the origins of one's religion ultimately yields the realization that one's perception of its history is but a fiction, loosely based on events and meanings most often presented as self verification of the faith one practices. The depths of history don't bear out what the popularized story is, in any case. That is why study of the Holy books is almost exclusively done as an inside job, not as a remote viewing, such as an alien sent here to study human phenomenon might have. Too many simple questions, such as might be asked by such a being, lead to aggravation, frustration, and the horror of facing that one is only a trained believer, not a "Selfonaut."

And Mark 4:33,34 offer a clue for christianists. But the best one is to look deeply into the actual implications that one is made in the image and likeness of God. If this is true, the blueprint is inside, not in a book. In fact, the book and thoughts about it may be a barrier to the cleansing mirror of self that requires deep scrutiny in the greatest of humility and honesty. God never bears the mantle of a religion. And Divinity won't even bear the illusion of separation. And therein lies the root of the Great Commandments and the Golden Rule. And knowing that prompted someone to inscribe "Gnothi Seauton" over the door of a Temple. "Know ThySelf." Sage advice, if there ever was such. The mirror ultimately reflects no form, and who that IS, and what it isn't, will perhaps have you laughing and weeping in gratitude!

9/11/01 What should we remember?

I feel deeply for all the victims of the events of 9/11/01, and their families. I was living in Buffalo at the time. I was lucky, not losing any of my friends who lived or worked near the tragedy. I also felt the wash of response and reaction to the events of that day, some of them effecting the course of my life, a minor thing compared to what happened on and around the scene of that day.

On that day in 1973 an equal number of people died in Chile under Pinochet. Cultural icons and others were rounded up and killed. That event happened with US support. As did the punitive bombings in Germany which resulted in a 9/11 kind of loss every night for months. And while we live in remembrance of 9/11 and some smaller versions of it, many Nations in the world, who are, in the last analysis, no less our kin than those we lost that day, they live daily under the threat of bombings, attacks, abduction, imprisonment and torture, never mind the general fear and tension of just being there.

I'm not against abstracting our own great loss as a memorable event of great pain and sorrow. It is right and just and necessary to do so. What is good to remember also, in our relative, though diminishing relative comfort, is that we are remembering the actions of humans on other humans. So, what is "our own?"

Notwithstanding the artificial labels, or artificial borders and artificial economics and artificial religions, we all in fact carry the same gene from an original and actual human "Eve," as any geneticist will tell us. There is, similarly, I believe, an "Adam" gene. The variations we call races and cultures are superficial fictions carried as software in the expressions of the  very slightly varying hard wiring of being Human.

All the 9/11 events in the world, all those and all the other horrors and indignities perpetrated on humans are perpetrated by other humans who artificially decide that someone else isn't, whether that decision is unilateral or mutual, All these are humans doing things to humans. Indeed, the iconic Walt Kelly may have summed up the entire dynamic in one paraphrased sentence from his Pogo character in that famous comic strip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us!"

We are not surprised to hear that someone is "their own worst enemy." Why? Because we all are. And the cumulative result of that, manifesting as economic systems, political systems, religious systems, anything based on hypothetical fear and lack, whether of food, money, or God, all of that is intrinsically violent. Yes, even religion, on examination, is intrinsically violent. And there is no doubt that "economy" as we practice it is hugely violent, and clearly brings violence on us. And indeed it is a far stretch to relate what we do for money to the root meaning of "economy," which means managing a home. Earth is our home, and our violence to the Earth is but a side effect of the violence we do to ourselves and each other.

And one of the worst forms of violence is passivity. Not doing is the grand rationalization of someone who is comfortable, who is not under a threat perceived as immediately life threatening, who can see that "of course" the evil in the world is being done by someone else.

But still, by omission or ignorance, belief being one of the chief ways of being ignorant, we are violent to ourselves. We are violent by the lack of work on ourselves, and on not calling each other on crap in a useful way, or by reacting to being called out when we know, especially when we fear that we are doing crap. This is especially true when we are doing crap in the name of the God we make up to justify ourselves. Or and especially when we feel that our bankbook, our insatiable bankbook, is threatened not even by diminishment, but by an inadequate rate of growth.

And we have these fears because in fact, at root, we have no clue about who and what we are, and we feel cast out even within our family and friends, never mind our block, town, city, or Nations. Few do the work to dig at the mine/mind of their own habitual inculcated person to find the Real gold there. Those who believe we are "created in the image and likeness" might well note that, more than they do dogmas and tenets, and look at what the blueprint is in reality, and not of some modification of a Teaching diluted by ignorance and years.

We can see that somehow, while we revere the ones who truly show some compassion for the human situation, we fail to notice that they have that compassion because they have suffered greatly. They suffered greatly by their circumstances, but mostly it was because thy faced their own internal monsters,. their own lies, their own prejudices, and their own beliefs. Not only have they suffered greatly, but somehow they were able to make the great leap across the chasm that separates one from another. They were and are able to generalize and distribute their own condition over others as a recognition of identity.

These are men and women who to some degree and kind, even if not perfect, know in their stomach that even their purported enemy is but themselves wearing another body and another life experience that led them involuntarily, for the most part, to their differences. These people, these men and women who recognize and feel the incompetent humanity of their enemy actually know what the Golden Rule or the Great Commandments are about: They know that when they face their enemy, they are looking in the mirror. Literally. In the mirror. So they act that way.

But we are a people, uncivilized and with dangerous toys, who crucify their saviors. We will gladly impale them, poison them, nail them up, hang them, shoot them, or whatever. Why? Because they had the insulting effrontery to require of us--by their example of doing so themselves--to look within our own self. And far, far worse, again and more dangerously by the example of doing it themselves, to change. This is the most audacious crime against our comfort, and we won't bear it in other than small homeopathic doses.

But sometimes that homeopathy takes hold. MLK or Gandhi precipitated movements for change. They made it unavoidable to look at ourselves. And they still do that from beyond the grave they went to, too early. The difference is that they earned their rest; many above ground are dead and rotting and don't know it. At the very least they are sleepwalkers . Is it a wonder that zombies, eating the brains of the living, are so popular? It may be symbolic of our actual situation.

So what might be some signs of life, if living is indeed what we wish to do, and we know that, and that there is change involved? First, perhaps it would be good, as simplistic as it sounds, to acknowledge and often remind ourselves of what it is that we fundamentally are, and what is the only thing we fundamentally and inevitably have in common with everyone and everything sentient: ask "Am I aware?" Ask it a lot, no matter how silly or strained it might feel. There is gold and riches in that question.

Second, are you capable of sitting for ten to twenty minutes looking intently at the inside of your eyelids, keeping awake, and not making up a story, or at lest just watching your thoughts go by as a story? Can you unstick yourself from your story about you? There's a job. And if you can do it, how you look at other "people" will change radically. You might even experience peace. And if there is any fitting memorial for all the 9/11s of the world, that might be it.