Benblog

Structure of Mind

One of the ironies of our remaining politics in this country is that, lacking true ideological difference, we mistake the party differences as somehow embodying a profound class struggle.

It is as if, by understanding nothing beyond basic arithematic, or algebra, that we simply lack the understanding that there is something more profound underlying what has become a synthethis of consumption, with capitalism simply a tool, our slave, rather than master. Even in France, the most recent class struggle was not workers and students uniting to change the very idea of what power meant, or freeholders rising against feudalism, but kids trying to prevent busineses from being able to fire people.

Here, in the United States, we pat ourselves on the back for the revolution of electing Democratic representatives, when that mandate was more a backlash than a mandate. Americans have no ideological grounding, and hence limited ability to articulate their own positions, let alone ascertain which party or even religion more properly represents their world view. Here, indeed, the Copernican revolution has yet to completely take hold, let alone the Darwinian.

Nothing to fear

I keep wondering why we still have thanatos as such, evil in the world.

Existentially, it makes sense - if there were not evil in the world, we would not have free choices to make. But battling demons, especially our own, is so hard.

Devolution of travel

It once took me hours to pack for a trip over a few days. I would fret about what I would wear, whom I was meeting, whether or not to pack my running shows. Fearfully over preparing.

Now, I pack intentionally, peacefully, and sometimes, for one or two day trips, simply take my computer bag, and my purse, which has my toothbrush, something to read, and if I need to defend myself or a position, my laser pointer. While I haven't used it since Jans' wedding, other than playing with the two Russian blues, I am still convinced that someday, it will save me from something. Of this I am convinced.

Now that I have the space, I should include a C and a G harp, or perhaps learn to play chromatic. In the Boys (and a girl) of County Clare, there was a great line by an old musician and band leader. When asked if he ever got lonely, his response was that if you have music, you have friends for life, and that you will never be alone.

Packing well requires unpacking you.

When the essentials are boiled down to what you need to carry to survive (and I wouln't survive if I went naked to a meeting, or looked unkempt, or had slept in the street the night before - that's the environment I live in), life can be lived more spontaneously, immediately, with joy filling the space worry once occupied.

Deep spontaneiety, deep joy demands deep faith, that everything is going to be all right.

Sometimes a dose of self-destructive behaviour can help bring this focus greater clarity, when the world continues to open in abundance despite our own imperfections, and imperfectability.

These glimpses of the true self, the divine within, increase my confidence to venture further in that journey, similar to the process of lucid dreaming for me, where I observe so fully that I no longer intervene, even in situations involving my own death.

Having visited the void in my meditations, I fear not, nor long not, for I can occupy that space again and find breath.

Samadhi state fascinates me. I wonder if anyone has hooked up equipment to someone in the throes of breathless meditation.

In these things, understanding the essence of self at the core of space and time, and how ridiculous it is even to think of the self as self, brings us greater knowledge of the inconsequence of worry, and the accompanying compassion towards self and all beings.

Achieving these realizations and living them fully, intentionally and conciously (which is the irony of the quest) is harder than simply glimpsing them, the difference between seeing an airplane overhead and understanding the intricacies and interconnectedness of air travel.

The Illusion of Security

I had a dream last night where I was using an information architecting solution that provided three dimension modeling capabilities. It seemed a lot like doing urban planning, and in demonstrating the solution, I spun a "house" like structure down into the grid, crying out "Oh no, Dorothy's house is falling."

The thought takes me back to my summer overnight with Eric, watching the delicate spring azure dart in the sunlight.

I sometimes wonder if bacteria are the highest form of evolution. If, after years of worry, they simply exist.

But I do not believe this.

I think once we learn that security is illusory, prosperity a delusion propogated out of fear, the closer we can come to breathing in the moment.

I don't believe the Spring Azure or the bacterium have any existential angst, but neither do they make a choice, fully aware of the fruitful futility of life.

When we recognize that Dorothy's house is ours, that the 40,000 children starving each day are us, and our actions reflect that connection, we come closer to floating through our experience, living with the intention of keeping our own time on earth in balance, so that others may enjoy watching butterflies, or, if we are lucky, celebrate the meteor or supernova that will spell our ultimate doom.

Driveway Snow Plow Patterns

I sometimes tell people, who generally already know that I'm nuts so will pardon one more eccentric people, or people who will at least ponder the poetry of the idea, even if they can't focus on it literally, that the Internet is simply a precursor to telepathic connectivity.

And then tonight, seeing under my statistics getting hit for driveway snow plow patterns on Yahoo search. Twice, actually. I'm not sure why.

But I find poetry in the notion. Someone out there, in these snowy times, these driving times, of using a snowplow for art. Even if that wasn't what that person or persons were thinking.

I am now.

A world where the true joy of whatever cleared land is left is going out with that crazy thing the ancestors used so many years ago. So many fearful years ago.

It makes me think, just that, that social evolution may be an endless one, since it is so incumbent on us inhabiting a higher world of ideals, the unattainables we must have hope in to make manifest. It isn't even a matter of prosperity - we have already learned that, I think, long ago. That cooperation was better. That is what makes us the social animals we are, rejects of the jungle, where fierceness was our greatest weakness, in the face of an infinitely predatory world. Only now, amongst true abundance, we lay upon the clouds of inequity, as if God himself has lifted us upon his blood stained, sweaty brow, rather than the blood, sweat and tears of our fellow humans. We are making the ultimate predator, from whom we will never escape, our own fears chasing us round and round.

Instead of riding snow plows, on antique asphalt, quizzical about why our ancestors never saw the true potential, for making driveway snow plow patterns. Snow patterns, curling by truck, crop patterns of winter.

Makes I still had that innate high schooler knowledge of where the best empty, unplowed parking lots were after different times of snow.

Greatest score was snow during winter break, when the upper lot at Peoria High School would remain unplowed for days. Maybe I was the only one who thought this way, but it was the greatest excitement of all to get there for virgin snow, the parking lights still, inexpicably, on their timers, some CFO having determined that the insurance risk for the district having something happen on an unlit lot cost more than the electricity. Energy so plentiful that those lots might be full of cars at any moment.

I once had to walk back home when I completely stalled out my Ford Fairmount station wagon with Shehzad, who has a zaniness so beyond anyone else that I'm sure he found my eccentricities cute. Funny that still, even as adults, I always hear how crazy Shehzad is, but he's someone with whom I have the most down to earth and heartfelt conversations, as if we are beyond the simple finery of words, creating webs of connection, trying to break through the individualized impressions of the world that bind us to living life as if the individuated selfhood were primary, not the connection between us all.

Now, as my cars get older, and the tires about to go anyway, are the only times I go out to the rink anymore. There was a great lot near the place in Dog Town that was actually just really well compressed gravel, which seemed to almost add a mini glacier effect, giving the car a little bit more distance, rather than more traction, but serving as "ball bearings" for the snow or ice above.

And so I hope, that little by little, even if metaphorically, through more and more less commercially adulterated mediums, we find all the other voices out there. Authentic. Unbridled in pain or joy. How can we not fall in love with ourselves then? Hearing our own voices in those of others? Sharing ideas across the ether. Wouldn't we all want to hear as many of those voices as we could? Even, especially, if their thoughts were different than our own?

The Juggernaut

It amazes me that they are making such a fuss about a balloon accident. In this case, I think the bigger story is that so many people get together and yet, statistically, there are fewer deaths, accidents and/or crimes during a parade than a statistically equivalent gathering of people who know one another, say a medium sized city in the case of the Macy's parade. We can't litigate and regulate fun to the point where people can't gather at all. There will be accidents, but those are polarities to manage rather than absolutes to be obtained.

Of course, it's frightening to think that the parade is called Macy's, the balloon in the incident an M&M balloon - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/26/nyregion/26parade.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th . Our values have become reflected in brands, which we have allowed to become the most effective single entitities in organizing money.

The imperfectable

I got a red Roomba off the clearance table at the Home Depot. And we are inseparable. I wonder, as it's scooting along the floor, bumping into things, cleaning and cleaning and cleaning, to account for the randomness of its wanderings, how the circuitry experiences the world. What impression must it have of me, picking it up when it gets in trouble? Even though the tones are in robot language, there is something universal about the distress call, a pitch that I imagine is a cultural absolute among humans. It beeps cheerfully after being rescued, two beeps, which sounds like thank you to me. Merci. Danke. Gracious. Domo.

I wonder how much of a difference the robot's identification of the imperfect, the mistake is - it only has one or two responses due to programming. What if it had the ability to discover that somehow, when falling down the stairs, that if it achieved the proper spin, it could suck up dust without even touching the ground. But that, for now, is the realm of soft brains - recognizing the greater utility sometimes in mistakes, sometimes simply the delight.

And what is delight? We are not the only animal who reacts with those symptoms. And yet can programmed entities? Will they ever?

Attainment of victory

I just realized that the sense that you have somehow escaped into victory or even calm by removing oneself from a stressful situation is as ephemeral a goal as somehow conquering a difficult situation. Winning, if anything, comes from standing in the storm and recognizing it is you, not that you are somehow battered by the storm, or that you are standing against the storm, but that the storm is you.

And the pixels howled

As much as they are anything, Blogs are a howl into the night, looking, in some ways, for your natural pack, but also just to bay back the night of irrelevance. That at least once, alone and afraid in the dark, the ancestors who survived challenged the idea that we must bow to our fears, and raged against the futility of existence. That stubborn refusal to accept our own demise is what brought us here, and what may prevent us from moving on this world we live in now, where no one need fear for food or water or shelter or even a decent education, and sense of self worth. We are prisoners to the very limbic brain that helped get us here.

Trash Totems

An white conical shape was out on the ultimate field tonight. I walked out to pick it up, and saw that it was a styrofoam cup overturned on a stick stake aligned, along the goal line, with an overturned Sprite bottle. Someone had taken the time to make a totem, likely for a game tomorrow. I left it. As much as I suspect they probably did it as a joke, or under the influence of something, the act has symbolism and power all its own. I wonder if people made totems and really believed in them as ways of focusing power what the result would be.

Poorly matched meetups, such as the Manual swim team tapering and shaving before their swim meet with us was spirit crushing, for them, as they still only scored what the peak of their continuum would allow. It was like watching people ATTACK tanks with sticks and stones. We weren't that good, was the thing, we probably were beatable to some degree, but it would have taken a wiser, less adolescent approach to understanding personal power, part of which is skill building and training, not just stepping out of a Tony Robbins speech into the thick of the unattainable. I wonder how the coach may have scarred them for life, making them think they could take on the world with a shave and a haircut, but not the carriage underneath.

We did the same thing in cross country ourselves, but half heartedly, as if hoping that our black socks would carry us through the inevitable defeat, as opposed to carrying us to victory. In our case, the truly person to person competition that can exist in cross country, as you try to get someone to match your pace, hoping they will burn out, can be a battle of spirits as much as body. In our case, we hoped that by taking the pace out fast, we could leave them behind early, establish our mark, when it left us vulnerable instead.

For tomorrow's ultimate game, I wonder how much of a difference between victory and defeat that might make, if the are more equally matched, only one team has more spirit, if only in their belief in the favor of the gods.