against beliefs

(from 2010)

There are no stupid people, just stupid cultural styles.  All cultural styles are stupid to some extent, which means that we are all stupid to whatever degree we are still involved with them.

Nationality and ideology are poisonous relics of history.  Engaging in politics of any kind is indulging in the delusion that you are different than your brothers and sisters.  This delusion is going to kill us all, for certain, and soon unless we radically abandon it.  

Your beliefs are the least important thing about you.  Your beliefs stand between you and global unity.  Forget about your atheism, theism, libertarianism, existentialism.  These are all baraoque contortions of language, which is a trap.  Language is the barrier between you and your experience of completion in the present.  

Meditate or do whatever you need to do to stop the language machine in your head from eating your reality.  

We must stop using reality as a screen to project all of these systems onto.  Rid yourself of conclusions, answers, philosophies and other nonsense.  Just be available, open, calm, present.   Live out of your own heart-  this is the only true morality and it is common to all of us.  In the past, we have been mute to our hearts and so we have required beliefs to keep our heads in line.  This is unsustainable.  Just take a look around.

Temples, mosques, churches, universities, trade centers, shopping malls- all of these institutions are created out of fear and trembling in the face of an honest experience of life.  

not just monkeys

People love to justify their brutal behavior with the logic that we're just monkeys, so it's only natural for us to act like primates- exploiting the weakness of others, trying to act like the biggest, meanest brute to get women, etc.  This is the error of the reductionist viewpoint.  It's not that we're just monkeys, it's that we come from monkeys.  We came from reptiles, but very few people would use this to defend eating one's offspring.  Reptiles came from fish, but they aren't just fish, etc, etc.  Humans, cockroaches and lizards and all other biological forms are between two forms- a form from the past and a novel form that is yet to come.  

"Higher" is a loaded concept and the first one that critics will rail against so I'll try to avoid it.  But, so far, biological forms generally tend to become more complex and more intelligent over time.  More importantly, intelligence tends to move from  a lower state of pure terror, hunger and rage to higher forms of affection, understanding, etc.  You only have to look at the structure of a human brain to see the record of this.  The foundation of our brain structure is reptilian, inherited from our past reptilian form: this part of the brain is the seat of pure hunger, malice and fear.  Built on top of that, inherited from our past mammilian form, is a mammilian brain that gives us arguably more nuanced and less aggressive forms of intelligence such as concern and affection for our family members.  From the most recent, outer part of our brains comes the most nuanced and least aggressive forms of intelligence- association, reflection, the ability to understand the pain of others and the ability to envision future situations that haven't happened yet.  

Of course these faculties can be used by the aggressive reptile brain.  But I believe that we have a responsibility to lean towards complexity, nuance of intelligence and a decrease in aggression.  This process is happening at all times, and always has.   We humans have reason, compassion, imagination, all of which make us not "just" anything.  The human cerebral cortex is the most miraculous, connection-dense material on the planet and, as far as we know, in the universe.  And like all biological forms, we are just a transition from a talking monkey to a still more intelligent, less violent state that we can envision no better that a fish could have envisioned living on land, building shelters or falling in love.  It's up to each of us to strive toward the evolutionary future and keep from backsliding into being ruthless primates, which we are not.

[update- yeah I know there's some hooey in here.  but what would my writing be without hooey??]

there are no religious wars

(from 2010)

A common tactic used by the atheist camp is to point out the atrocities commited in the name of religion.  Some Theists, knowing a juicy talking point, are quick to point out that a healthy amount of genocide committed in the 20th centruy was done in the name of creating a perfect secular state.  This issue is fuzzy territory.  After all, can it be claimed that the central motivation of Stalin or Polpot was to spread atheism?  Maybe, maybe not.  But this also applies to religious wars.  Are Israel and Palestine really fighting over religion?  Not really.

Religion is a mythological encoding of a society's collective values.  Because of the many different environments, diets and countless other environmental and genetic influences on human evolution, different societies are more or less prone that others to be peaceful, or to be vegetarians, or to emphasize the use of blue in their art or anything else you can think of.  All of these differences are encoded into religion not, and this is important, NOT caused by them.   In other words, a culture that is prone to violent streaks will produce a mythology that includes a violent god.  They don't have violent streaks because they believe in a violent god, they believe in a violent god because they are inclined towards violence.

Wars are not about religion.  Wars are always about economy and politics, about land and the ability to be self-ruled.  Religion is just coding the values that play out when two opposing societies go to war.  This is also true for atheist regimes.  If you examine the actions of the Roman Catholic Church between 500 and 1500, you have to keep in mind that you are examining primarily a political system, not a religious one.  If the Roman Catholic Church during the inquisition had believed in fairy lights residing in the rings of saturn who control the fates with potions and incantations, they might still have carried out the exact same kinds of shady abductions, trials, murders, etc.  The inquisition wasn't done in the name of Christianity, just in the name of the social values coded into whatever religion that political force was practicing at that moment in history.

whither the millenium?

(from 2010)

This decade has been a venture into some kind of horrible parallel timestream in which the millenium never came, and never will.  Creative activities have devolved into common sense business ventures- quite boring ones in most cases.  The millenial impulse has been shown to be nothing more than the harmless zaniness of incompetent caricatures;   the dream of Joyce's dirgible man has become Michael Scott- cute, wacky, and a bit stupid because he values humor and friendship over day-to-day resource management.  

All good comedic television this decade would have us follow the example of smugly self-conscious protagonists who cut down all forms of far-out character traits in favor of pragmatism.  To be cool in this decade is to be Michael Bluth, not Oscar; Jim and Pam, the Griffins, Jack Donaghee- all survey the silliness around them with the bemused, cynical eyes of experience, ready to sarcastically pounce on any trace of the millenial spirit.  We want security, not daydreams.  Financial solvency, not starry-eyed communion with nature.  Drunken skirt-chasing, not goddess worship.  Social formality, not boundary dissolution.  Beer and coffee, not LSD and Vajrayana and Alchemy and UFOs.

The liberal mentality has been utterly eclipsed by the spirit of defensive ridicule, and remains on the scene only in the guise of harmless cuteness.  The stench of cuteness and self-conscious cleverness have choked all the life out of everything, especially music.  And advertising.  If commercials as a whole are trying to assure of us anything this decade, its that the world is very cute and sentimental and warm and fuzzy and fully prepared to wrap your fears in a warm blanket of consumerism.  If there is anything really called "indie" music, it is the music made by white people in which the central value being expressed is being attractively harmless.  We're all five years old and like little kids we sing in awkward voices to show how cute we are and how much we love novelty toys and plastic day-glo lite-bright kitchy bullshit.  Hip-hop has tried in vain to maintain its indignant self-righteousness in a world in which it is no longer oppressed or denied as a form of expression; but as it has become fully accepted and celebrated, its fuel of anger and frustration have become less than potent.  Jay-Z and Kanye… it's all exessive consumption and vapid publicity, and therefore just as boring as everything else in this conservative culture, and just as poisonous to us.

In other words, we seem to have crawled back into the repressed terror of the 50's and undone all of the eschatological progress of the last psychedelic revolution by turning it into a vast mine of ridicule and imitation.  There are no more UFOs over New York, no more third eyes bright as street lamps.   The shock of 9/11 forced us into hyper self-critique, put our wariness into overdrive, and thoroughly froze all momentum towards transcendence.  I'm going to assume for the sake of positivity that this is just some kind of decade-long trap door, fleeting, and on the brink of being utterly replaced by an authentic reboot of the imagination. 

get me off this cushion

(from 2010)

Anyone who has ever attempted meditation knows what happens to you when you set out to do something extremely simple- in this case, just sitting on a cushion and doing very little else with your mind.  This simple idea turns out to be more or less impossible in practice.  At some point, say 5 seconds in for most of us or an hour for the more experienced, the mind becomes lost in the typical thought orgy going on all the time- why did I say that to that to so and so, why won't so and so be nicer to me, how am I going to manage to get that project started tomorrow etc.  For advanced meditators, this distracting voice ceases to be our daily life making  demands on us and begins to manifest as obsession about ways to improve the practice: obsession with uncovering secret knowledge that will unlock their practice, concentrating the unbearable room temperature is,  if only they had a better cushion, and so on.  All of these thoughts are nothing but obstructions, lies that keep the meditator from attaining self-control, as any accomplished monk will tell you.  We continually seek improvements and advancements in all the wrong places; what we are really saying is, "anything to get me off of this cushion!"  But of course, the point of the practice lies in realizing that there is nothing more to it than sitting on the cushion.

"Anything to get me off of this cushion" is pretty much the official slogan of my generation, and our liberal culture's attempted march into a green future.  Our culture suffers from a catastrophic lack of self-control, self-denial and the reflective capacity to realize just how spoiled we are.  We are pretty good in every other respect; we have the huge advantage of having come around to a pretty good worldview- we are scientifically informed, environmentally conscious, pro-tolerance, and we have a general distaste for war and corporate control of our lives.  But our attempt to actually do anything is completely inadequate.  We focus far to heavily on political machinations and not nearly enough on our own lifestyles.  We spent 8 years blaming all the world's problems on the Bush administration as if the Iraq war had nothing to do with the way we live.  Let me tell you something- we invaded Iraq because we demand cheap oil, every single day, and lots of it.  It was just convenient that the political powers that be had a few extra dubious reasons to go to war.  We hate Bush but if someone suggests that you do something that really has an impact on worldwide oil consumption, like giving up coffee, it's like- "woah, that's going a little far, don't you think?"

95% of the produce at Whole Foods comes from California!  This is insanity, evidence of a completely spoiled cultural movement.  We love organic food, we love how earth and body friendly it is, we write articles about in magazines that get transported to our local WH for us to consume and bask in the goodness of our leftist culture.  Can you even wrap your head around how much oil was used to get that article into that magazine, that magazine into your store and then into your home?  And it promotes a form of consumption, healthy or not, that uses massive amounts of oil to get produce from California to North Carolina! 

It is an understatement to call this unnecessary.  The real thing to do is far simpler.  Buy produce from local farmer's markets and then stay home.  But that means denying yourself the day-to-day fun of going to a store and consuming, it means denying yourself crops that aren't in season.  It means denying yourself things that you don't really need- just sit on the cushion.  Everything we do works this way; if we become vegans, we get more consumerism, not less: more vegan friendly brands, more advertising dollars spent marketing to vegans, more hip vegan culture, etc.  Just stop eating animals, isn't it as simple as that?  We won't stand for simplicity.  We have to keep generating consumer culture, even if it is 'green'.  Milton Freidman said a few years ago that we're not having a green revolution, we're having a green party.  And he's absolutely right.  No matter how much steam we gather up, we cannot break the gravity of this frenzied, consumer culture.  We just keep putting a greener face on it, which has some mild effect on the general state of things but falls completely short of stopping us from racing head-first into planetary destruction.  There's a commercial where U2 appears on a glimmering, sexy CGI stage and sets a very progressive tone, revving up our deepest feelings of hope and change as Bono starts up, "every generation gets a change to change the world, pity the nation that won't listen to you boys and girls, 'cause the sweetest melody is...:" and then the whole thing erupts into non-sense, a big sexy rock chorus with soaring guitars and people screaming and something about "go crazy tonight" and then, dum dum dum, the logo for Blackberry.  What?  What is that all about?  For decades now we've been marrying the best and most noble intentions and values to unrelated consumer fetishism (starting with starbucks) but it shocks me to see that it hasn't slowed down... at all!

astrology

(from 2010)

Astrology is the study of the way seasonal changes in environmental factors effect developmental physiology, psychology, etc.  These trends in personalities were unconsciously documented over time, and astronomical events were used as points of reference to times within the calendar year.  What else would you expect from people who knew nothing about melatonin or the biology of an embryo?  They weren't stupid, they weren't insane, they didn't set out to tell lies.  They just noticed trends in personalities correlating to the regular rhythm of the calendar year and documented it, adding their own idea of an explanation.  Astrology is true in this sense- it's explanation is faulty (again, what would you expect?) but the information it encodes is perfectly reasonable and seems to have some basis in reality.  Does this mean that there aren't people who exploit this as a way to tell people what their future is going to be like?  Of course not.  People will exploit anything, that has little to do with the validity of astrology's predictions.

It's prefectly reasonable to think that a child who spends the first 3 months of its life during the reduced light levels of winter is going to have different production ratios of melatonin, seratonin, etc than a child born in spring.  Pregnant women in the summer may eat more fruit than those in winter, which would have some trend effect in offspring.  These influences are so vast and so subtle that it would be impossible to catalog them and their effects.  Astrology doesn't do this, it just notices general patterns in the outcomes over generations.  It lacks any knowledge of the process and just gives the data.

alchemical reform

(from 2010)

Our worldview comes largely from the Christian worldview that developed after the collapse of the Roman Empire.  This is a worldview in which God's perfection exists apart from man and apart from nature; it tells us that we are fallen creatures who have sinned against god and so are doomed to toil in guilt as we strive to find our way back to God, who is somewhere out there.  We are all familiar with this basic attitude- it views divinity as unreachable in this life and, most importantly, it views our inner landspace as a dark, corrupt place, not to be trusted.  In the dark recesses of the imagination are devils and demons.  This is the attitude which leads to witch hunts, inquisitions and the like.  We are all familiar with this attitude in western society but, for the most part, we claim to have gotten over it since we have rejected Christianity in favor of scientific materialism, to which it is diamerically opposed... right?   

In terms of the story of who we are and how we got here, science is a total departure from the Christian universe.  But the fundamental metaphysical attitudes of Christianity are thoroughly bred into the scientific tradition, simply because science grew up hand in hand with the church.  Up until the 19th century, most major scientists were religious (for real, not just as a formality), and it was perfectly acceptable to be an accomplished scientific academic moving through the most respected salons of Europe espousing that the God of Abraham created the universe at 3:15 on April 3, 5272 B.C.  Most people envisioned science as developing alongside the church and glorifying it by coming to know the mind of God- an external God.  This attitude never really changed, and science has always been in search of external truth and an objective vantage point by which it can be measured, while distrusting the mind and internal life of the observer, which is the same attitude the church had towards the fallen sinner.  In the 19th century, it became necessary for science to pull away from the dogmatic inertia of the church and so the modern conception of scientific materialism was born.  But the basic way in which the white man conceived of the external world as primary to the inner world didn't really change.

Early in the 20th century, this position revealed its weaknesses.  Scientists wanted to establish and objective vantage point by which to measure external reality, but Einstein came along to show us that there are no privileged vantage points, no eye-of-god from which to measure all things objectively.  Worse was the advent of quantum mechanics, which show that there is no such thing as objectivity at all, that all concrete existence is dependent on an observer- suddenly the subject is of great importance again.  Strangely, this insight has been around for going on a century but it has not made a dent in the way we view the world.  We are far gone indeed, lost in an illusion that the internal world of the subject is of no importance, that all it can do is taint the 'real' picture of 'reality'.   This is a futile dream; just like supressing the reality of a failed relationship, there must always come a point of reckoning, and the longer you put it off, the uglier it gets.

The alchemical tradition is basically a tradition of spiritual exercises.  It's whole point is to face the psyche and dredge it, drain away all the muck of repression and denial and seek the opposite of Christianity- not god out there but god in here.  Alchemy is the Hermetic tradition expressed in the metaphors of the 15th century laboratory, but these are only metaphors- alchemy has nothing to do with beakers and test tubes and turning lead into gold.  First, we must turn inward and face the psyche.  We must dive into the muck and dross and callousness that develops from everyday experience and a lifetime of disappointments and losses caused by denying internal divinity, which is indeed an alien concept to us.

Up until the 17th century, there wasn't a clear distinciton between science and alchemy.  The grand alchemical reform of society was a dream of the renaissance, and it would have meant a complete 180 degree turn from the worldview of medieval christianity, as it would have turned inward into the dark waters of the mind.  Instead, the dream failed and Descartes came along and the rest is history, a history in which we are still seeing through the eyes of dangerously unstable, neurotic white Europeans who devalue subjectivity over an illusory objectivity, who seek dominion over nature at all costs.  Back then it was an external god and a right to dominion given by scripture, now it is an external natural universe and a quest to dominate nature through measurement and number.  Nothing has changed, and we remain lodged in the samsara of history, never willing to give in and admit that until our central preoccupation is facing the internal landscape, we are looking in all the wrong places.

the arc of the 20th century

(from 2010)

the arc of the 20th century

the centruy of analog eletricity as principle infrastructure, mass media and its children- mass culture, mass advertizing, mass consumerism.

the 20th century starts in the 1880s with the implementation of electric infrastructure, the dawn of cinema, the coming together of radio communication; it ends in the 1990s with the internet and the utter stagnation of mass consumerism, mass culture being completely played out.  the crux of the century of the arc of the electronic, mass media century is the bomb in 1945.  on the way up to the bomb the spirit was blind excitement, rabid frnezy of production, then after the turnover came the 60's and the rush of an awakened/disillusioned mass media consumerism, cynical, tongue-in-cheek, etc.  the 20th century ends with the internet and so begins a new thing altogether.

is the mass media psyche dead, no longer adaptable?  the cultural software that the previous 3 generations ran doesn't work in the personalized media culture of internet browsing.  their cultural stance doesn't work.  this is why billboard magazine sucks, reality tv sucks, hollywood movies suck, these are outmoded forms of expression, mythology bound by the 20th century necessity to group media into broad categories delivered through centralized institutions.

 the music of the 20th century, jazz and rock, was mass media vis a vis electrical recording and replaying techniques.  on the way up to the bomb, it was pure unbridled unconcsious excitement, on the way down to the internet it was backwash, rehash, self-aware and ever more cynical, forcefully ironic.

the beatles, who stand at the middle of the arc of mass media, have both aspects in full- they came in on the peak of an african-american rooted raw excitement (jazz and rock and roll) which became the spirit of the white man's rabidity of electronic lifestyles and consumption in the first half of the century- personal autos, telephones, an aristocratic ability to travel and communicate and experience cultural storytelling through cinema, radio and tv. but the beatles came in the post-bomb mass media expeience, which was a disillusionment, a carelessness with spending and a pure cynical run for the money.  the beatles were at once blissfully unaware, frenzied and stupid and simultaneously painfully self-aware, cynical, manipulative, baroque.  

analog mass media lasted exactly one century.  it's over now, no more radiowaves drifting into the hinterlands and cosmopolitatain sectors of the galaxy.  now the aliens who watch for our signals will have a complete story, with an explosive climax right in the middle and a confused, disillusioned denoument in which the humans all came back to their original conclusion- that no one knows any damn thing at all about reality, in reality; all identifications and categorizations are provisional.

science & the 20th century

(from 2009)

as the 20th century opened, science both lost its claim to ontological certainty and got its hands on culture via the economic infrastructure that it bequeathed- industry, mechanization, electricity, controlled thermodynamic explosions.  science got its chance at writing the rules of social structure but lost it's ability to claim ultimate knowledge of an objective, understandable reality.

because of this ontological failure, the 20th century was a frantic gasp at the irrational, the exciting, the whatever, the outre, the weird, as the western psyche found itself on the wrong end of a dream, a scientific dream that erupted out of the last great confused synthesis of magic, classicism, religious turbulence- the renaissance.  the scientific dream bloomed in the 17th century, maturing into a novel worldview with its own grand dream of social cures, the salvation of life through technology, the end of manual labor and the beginning of living like kings, all its own and having a delicious century of its own where it dominated all thought and knew with all certainty that it only lacked a decimal point of information and all would be perfectly explained, forever.   in the 19th century they told young people not to go into physics- it was all over, all the questions were done and certainty was a few minro equations away.  the scientific dream was almost acheived of a material, solid, and above all objective external reality that wouldn't do funny things and slip away from you and confound your rational categories and be subject to subjectivity.

but the scientific discoveries that launched the 20th century brought all back to the square one mysterium tremendum with, first, the acceptance that there are no objective vantage points by which to measure phenomena, no privileged place where you could make absolute statements about the acceleration or direction of any object, and second (and far worse) that democritus' dream of indivisible building blocks of solid stuff came crashing down with the acceptance that the particles that build molecules and make up light and everything that we can observe are both there and not there, not solid at all, here and somewhere else, the coincidencia apositorum, the union of opposites that the scientific mind reels from.  the fundamental things of reality, as it turned out, are not even capable of taking on a concrete existence without a subject to make a measurement.  now we get it, or i should say that we get it again, for we're not the first, simply that all models of reality are not models of real reality but only models of the instruments that observe them and the minds that observe the observations.  

It is implicit in the materialist mind that if the unknowable is called 'dark energy' instead of 'god', that all the witch-huntery and con-artistry and inquisitions and all manner of crazy cult behavior would just fade out in light of reason.  but these things continue, in different guises.  no new values or understandings or ethics have come out of the western enterprise since its inception, though most people in the western world from the netherlands to the old empire to the 50 states are materialists, at least in their day to day lives and basic perspective on reality.  we're still unhappy, addicted to terribly destructive drugs and lifestyle habits.  the glory of the century of electronic reform did much for our backs which could rest from the plow but did little for our waistlines, blood pressure, mental health; in fact its been made worse but the century of mass media- we've all been chasing the easy life as glorified in mass media advertizing which presented us with a gleaming, edited, make-up, graphic dreamland with a soundtrack- the 20th century advertizement- 30 seconds of pure, scripted bliss with a logo at the end.  this form created the lifestyle of the 20th century which began in a frantic party and an unbridled joy in the novelty of it all and ended in tastelessness, unhealthy living, and an ungodly needless waste of paper plates, plastic everything.