Benblog

The Haunting

Last night, Tracy and I went to a bonfire with some naturalists, who are professionals at making the most mundane of experiences to most (a pine cone on the forest floor, the call of a bird, the shape of a cloud - all imbued with meaning and poetry) engaging.

Some of them told goose bump generating ghost stories.

One of them, an avowed atheist, who does not believe in an afterlife at all (which is itself a tricky binary, and/or gambit), worked in a nursing home where she would hear the voices of recently deceased people calling out.

She told a gripping tale of a suicide victim called up via her oiji board. Most of what she heard, she ignored. She never saw anything, like the other nurses.

Regardless, as real as everything is, reality only exists in our brain chemistry, until we resist the urge to call the brain the self.

Stand Down

I'm still convinced that the choice to cooperate rather than fight is the operation of the Divine, whether spelled with a small d or a capital D.

The thing that is scary at this particular juncture in history is that we the profound ability to make things better for the entire planet pretty quickly, or make things a lot worse for a lot more people pretty brutally, before statis sets  in again, and we may start over again.

Except operating from true scarcity.

The blood on the walls of Jericho, or countless other cities throughout history, the firebombing of Japan. Horrors inflicted upon civilians, soldiers, the planet, have been choices brought about by fear of scarcity, driven by ideology, and enforced by the very few holding violent force.

Now, we have a chance to stand down, save ourselves the embarrassment, here in the U.S. especially, of being that curious ancestor who went a little over the top consumptively, an empire fallen with grand clusters of urban glory surrounded by poverty.

Crosses borne

I think on the Good Friday as a reminder of all those who have suffered through all of time to make this world a more peaceable kingdom today.

To celebrate the seasons is to celebrate those whose faith brought us here.

The Paradox of the Word

One of the ironies of the schism between what are considered mainline or fundamentalist interpretations, or liberal, is that the further you go along the continuum to a scripture of love and acceptance you more focus you get on the Word. People are caught up in glimpsing as much meaning as the Word has to offer. Understanding that the Jesus of the New Testament spoke in parables, and, what's more parables of that time and age.

To not get caught up in the message, even how those messages came to be, is to miss out on the full richness of the teachings.

Right life

Reality or fiction, recognizing more and more of the neighbor in you, more and more of the reincarnated, resurrected self in more and more of the other leads to better life, whatever words or deity used to package the idea for our fearful, chattering beings packaged around each of us.

Death Worship

I have difficulty discerning whether the ancient monuments represent death worship or life markers, saying "Hey, pay attention - we prospered here."

Seems that many of them center around trade, and, to some degree, concentration of wealth.

You can look at the symbolism of the world trade centers as representative of taking out a capital trade city by the ________ - I can't call them Muslim any more than I can call James Dobson or George Bush Christian. They're something, but something else, something other, something involving ideas of dynasty of long ago kingdoms and ideas of kingdom. The are perversions, in both cases, of relatively clear and purposeful Biblical messages through the constant manipulation of people trying to gain power over other people.

Obviously, one thread is using the one weapon they can wield - fear. And for that I despise their tactics and their belief system surrounding it. I'm not really sure what weapon we are wielding - democracy? What do we have that no one else has - less concentration of wealth, in many respects, more shared power.

But one thing is for sure - those to be feared in any age are those who hunger for kingdom come, feeling their destiny is made manifest in creating that tragic prophecy of Apocalypse. When all that does is curse future generations.

What will our monuments be to future generations? A time of peace for evermore, or left as a mystery for archaeologists to uncover years from now, so fragmented will our potentially interwoven pasts be.

I hope it is the blossoming of a new world of trade, established in part through the transparency of the internet and the increased ability of the world to move goods, services, ideas. The spice trade is down the block from me. My tribe is all over the globe.

And what a waste to think that scarcity maximizes profitability. Profitability for whom? I bought a Eureka built upholstery vacuuming attachment that would not attach to the Hoover vacuum cleaner. Eureka knows this. Hoover probably has as part of their patented design a specific hose dimension that no one can duplicate. Hoover is all about their technology. Eureka is more about meeting customer cleaning needs - having the Eureka brand being used with another vacuum is like free advertising.

But if all major players had agreed to a standardized nozzle connection system (I'm sure the engineering for the tubes and connections themselves are infinitesimal.), the innovation could have been all about the engine. I'll bet vacuuming would be light years advanced as a result.

I see the strangulation of belief, the refusal to understand and adapt to newly abundant world views as a crushing force against, ironically, faith - the faith that we have something better we can do here together with our lives than fight over the maddeningly trite, or so historically distant as to be like a play or novel. And yet our move forward depends on this very dialectic.

My only hope is that we continue to do so more and more peacefully until state organized violence is a vestigial memory, one that we hold in both awe (as I am in awe of ancient warriors) and embarrassment (as I am by the efforts wasted then, and now).

The Buddha's Dilemma

When a being first gets to the point of understanding the pain, the frailty, the very violence of decay and survival, and willingly steps back into that life, that is the moment of transcendence.

The challenge, through the years, is combining the will of soul with the will of self to give up the false hope of the flesh and live unflailingly for the salvation of fellow humans. It's also knowing the potential futility of it all.

Sufi math

While the mathematicians and the philosophers assemble the taxonomy, the sufi, the mystic, discovers the territory.

Only through the suspension of disbelief do we exceed the parameters of our perception.

Otherwise, what is there but perception?

If the logical positivists had their way, we would simply oblige, line up like linked chatter, chattel slaves to the proud vagaries of reason.

In the end, those who defy vision are the ones who define vision.

However, the sufi mind must take us into the future, not the past.

And that is one of the dangers of mysticism sans reason.

The reasonable mind does tend towards understanding as part of acceptance, suspending disbelief in the hopes of advancing understanding. Rather than denying reality for a manufactured sentimentality.

Look at the extremists on all sides - they are clinging to a past shielded from the brutality of that world, generally by a sense of privilige, having avoided the pain and suffering of simply trying to exist, those whose existential angst consists of trying to get enough to eat for the day. Or, they function from a sense of fear on the flip side of that vulgar Marxist equation.

This is the world to avoid slipping into. Those who would fulfill armageddon out of a sense of obligation to prophecies told from age to age.

The temple being rebuilt need not consist of destruction and desolation, but a firmer acceptance of the neighbor being implicit in simply being at all.

We may not agree with one another. We may express our world views differently.

But accepting people where they are, attempting to colonize with ideas rather than exploitation or outright imperialism, or terrorism, is part of growing up human.

I think trade is one of the ways we express that deep appreciation for difference. The more transparent those markets, fully and completely transparent, so that one understands maximally both the rewards and consequences of consumption, the better. It avoids the whole issue of manufactured scarcity when you can know what there is and what value it has to you clearly.

You can't trick people then - marketing becomes persuasion, but not so blatant a pandering to parts of the brain incapable of reason.

The tiled serpent

I had a dream last night that the limbic brain and the neocortex are still part of the same beast. That overcoming evil is as much about attaining non-resistance, so that evil has no sway over the core of one's being, but that the core of compassion simply engulfs the fear in her embrace.

Longer days

I am sensing, perhaps for the first time intentionally, the lifting of my spirits with the lengthening of the days. I think of ancestors, even the memes handed down in quark and isospin and strangeness, that these are cycles, and not cycles, realness, and illusion, and neither. We learn to live in greater joy and harmony through the unity of faith and reason, the individual faith to guide us through another season, despite the uncertainty, the reason to help us piece together, if nothing else, a community upon which we can build our beliefs, and the ultimate understanding that we are part of this flow. But that to pursue that which is impossible is the greatest means to maximize the experience, to take it beyond ourselves.