Month: February 2011

It seems to me that if one is to use this word, it should be defined. All too often in human history it has been used to designate anyone who did things differently that you did. The way I use it, it means taking pleasure in the pain of others.

Yet, it exists on a continuum. Indifference to the pain of others is also a type of evil. Empathy is a fundamental element of goodness. Anything short of being able to experience deep happiness in the success and well-being of others is a sort of evil, it is a sort of shadow, a falling-short.

The desire to rule the world is a sort of evil because it implies an indifference to the fact that one’s own ideas about how life should be lived may differ considerably from those one wants to rule.

The emotion of wanting-well for others cannot be compelled. True empathy cannot be forced. It is a type of perception, an awareness that can blossom in the right circumstances. It is intrinsically an individual and individuating process, since it always looks from a specific point in the universe.

A metaphor that came to me this morning is a meadow covered in flowers. Each of them is slightly different than the others. Each came from a seed that had to sprout on its own–albeit not without the help of sun, water, and a nurturing soil. Each of them is in a place, yet each contributes to the whole, while able to live on its own, to stake its own claim on a spot of Earth.

Now, the use of power is inevitable in human life. Some sort of power must be exerted over us. The question is whether we exert it over ourselves in the form of a chosen moral order, or someone extrinsic to us compels it on us.

A religion, or any social order based on traditional values, is a power, isn’t it? It is the sort of restraint rejected by the hippies and radicals of the modern era. (I hate to say 60’s, since that was just a widespread public manifestation of something that had been going on for some time even when Keynes Bloomsbury Group had their heyday many decades before).

In my view, it is not necessary to hew to tradition, simply because it is tradition. But you have to choose a master. That master may be Yoga. It may be getting up early every day, doing an hour of exercises and another hour of meditation; it may be adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, and learning Sanskrit.

That master may be a religion. That master, to the point here, may be a political philosophy that organizes thought and behavior.

You cannot be loving all the time. We are all Yin and Yang, particle and wave. You have to have a starting point, a home, a more or less stable source of identity–which can be specific habits, like praying five times a day, and fasting during the day for a lunar month.

It can be habits of mind. That is what I have tried to articulate with my conception of Goodness, which I discuss on my other website, linked on the side.

Never feel sorry for yourself.

Never quit, if the task is worthwhile.

Always try to understand what is happening around you, and orient your behavior and thought around empathy, love and happiness.

My thought process is that you cannot walk standing on one foot, and that life is walking.

A few thoughts for a Sun-day morning.

No, nothing like that. I was at the Humane Society today, and walked 5-6 dogs with my youngest. If memory serves it was two Lab’s, a Beagle, one Australian Sheepdog (my favorite), and several others.

Muslims hold dogs to be dirty creatures. They feel no sense of connection or compassion for them. A “revolution” would be feeling these sentiments. Unfortunately, I am insufficiently scholarly to say if this would be rejecting their Koranic injunctions-which is simply not possible for someone who wants to remain a Muslim, and I would not ask someone to renounce their sense of purpose and personal organization–but it is my hope this is the case. An inability to sympathize with affectionate animals like dogs is symptomatic of a larger empathetic problem.

There is so much potential love floating around this world. All that has to be done is grasp some of the threads floating around, and claim them as your own. There are more where those came from–an unlimited supply.

I was listening to Howling Wolf this morning while cooking. I really enjoy him. Then I got to searching YouTube for videos of him, and found this. Call it what else you will, this is direct and honest.

He says the blues is when you don’t have the money to pay for your house. It’s when you are thinking evil.

Few points: this song was first recorded in 1951; this session is from 1966. I wonder if he would have said that in 1951. I don’t think so. Evil was still bad then. Nowadays we more or less look to serial killers as heros. I can’t help but think many people watch movies like Hostel or American Psycho (to be made into a musical soon in New York) and wonder what it would be like to let the world know what they really think.

But all that was in its germination phase back in 1966. He could say things like that without fear of rejection, since especially in the early stages of the War on Poverty–and the late stages of the Civil Rights Movement–he could have counted on sympathy.

I wonder, though, if he would have FELT that way in 1951. The ethos he is articulating here is that of helplessness that leads to a sense of paralysis, then violent retribution against the world that put you there, “by whatever means necessary”. This, in my view, is a political ethos, that is external to the spirit upon which the old blues were based.

The old blues were tragic, but were meant to share pain, such that everyone could relate to you, to one another, and take strength from a sense of shared trouble and difficulty. The blues is not different, in principle, from Hamlet. It describes the world not how it ought to be, but how it is.

Useful art is local. I was going to make this a separate post, but will make the short statement here that I feel as if there is a certain isomorphism between the professionalisation of art, and modern Statism. We only want to look at those “heros” who made it to the gallery. We don’t want to create it ourselves. We let someone else lead us, dictate our taste.

You want to know the bald truth? I don’t have a freaking clue why Picasso is so famous. He was a shit to most everyone around him. I have an article I printed some time ago showing him and his friend Apollinaire to be knee shaking cowards, who damn near peed themselves whenever confronted with anything hinting of danger. They were the sort of people who would shove their girlfriends in front of them to not get hit by bullets.

Why can’t I just ignore him? Why can’t I just ignore most of modern literature, and all the slack-wristed and morally obtuse modernists that we are told to respect, but most of whom operated on a much, much lower level of moral integrity than the average man or woman in the street.

In my view, local poetry, local art, local drama and all that–with wide participation–will be a part of our cultural renaissance. And we need to ride out on a pole most of what has been foisted on us as “modern” in the last 100-150 years.

The question is this: does it helps us grow as individuals and as a society? If not, throw it away.

Had more to say, but things to do. This is close enough.

Look at this video though. By and large it is only white people who listen to the blues nowadays. As far as I can tell, black music gave way first to sex, and now violence. The “blues” was transformered into gangsterism, which is more less open and proud evil.

Since I have mentioned it, I will discuss a little bit of the evidence for the survival of death. It is voluminous, and at this very moment there is a medium named David Thompson who, on hundreds of accounts, can actually materialize spirits of dead people IN THEIR BODIES.

The following quote is taken from Victor Zammit’s website. Lord knows he has his share of critics. Lucky man. You have to have balls to get everybody shooting at you. The site is in my view filled with too much stuff. It is too busy. He talks about being a lawyer too much. But for someone really trying to see what evidence is out there, he is a great resource. Look at his book, and use that as a sort of Bibliography. As you get into it, you find some very evidentiary stories indeed. The story of David Thompson is the most remarkable. It may sound far-fetched. The question I would ask is this: what skeptic who wants to deride these claims has attended one of his seances? None that I can see. If you want to claim a phenomenon cannot be replicated, surely the first step is to attempt to replicate it in the manner decribed by the researcher? This is the most basic element possible of the scientific method.

Anyway, to the story:

We investigated materialization medium David Thompson weekly for 15 months. But the most spectacular evidence for the afterlife was when my wife Wendy’s father materialized announcing his name. He was in the ‘flesh’. He was speaking as when a loved one talks to you. It was his voice. It was his mannerism. No one in the experiment knew of Wendy’s (pictured) maiden name. No one knew about the intimate circumstances raised by Wendy’s father about their early life; no one knew about very special relationship she had with her brother. There was physical contact when her father kissed Wendy on the forehead. Further, Wendy’s father materialised a piece of paper with his signature on it – which perfectly matched his signature on existing documents. Absolutely, that kind of evidence would have sent an accused to the gallows in a courtroom situation. Of course, the spiritually blind, deaf and dumb – and other dummies, would not understand the hugely great value of this magnificent materialization evidence.

A conventionally trained–can I say drained?–mind will of course find that farcical in the extreme. Of course death is the end. What serious person would suggest otherwise? We know what parts of the brain control what. We know, for example, that if your Broca’s area is damaged, that your linguistic capacity is affected. We can track genetic mutation over millions of years. We know what parts of the DNA select for what traits, and our knowledge grows larger daily.

The body is nothing but a complex system of chemical events, and human consciousness nothing but an epiphenomenon of a material evolutionary artifact whose primary purpose is survival. We have no “will”. We have no purpose. And our deaths are no more significant than leaves falling from a tree. We wilt in time. We melt, then are no more. Whether you like it or not, that is the truth: deal with it.

As with most matters that matter in philosophy and psychology, though, William James offered the most common sensical, logically rigorous treatment of the matter I have seen. If you adore athletic Victorian prose, as I do, read this.

The man is brilliant; in my view, he is the best thinker we have produced, after the first generation of Founding Fathers. No one should read Freud. Everyone should read James “Principles of Psychology”.

For the short of attention: the net of it is that James was a trained physician. He was quite up to date on the physiological knowledge of his time, which in important respects has not really evolved that much in the last 100 years. They knew far more than you might suppose.

As he put it, the brain need not be a SOURCE of consciousness, but a TRANSMITTER, where the mind, per se, is separate. This explains why drugs can affect our consciousness, why strokes can permanently damage our capacity to speak, and why genetic traits–including personality traits–can be inherited.

How can this be, you ask? How can a mind exist which consists of us, but is not available to our conscious awareness? Let me ask this: how much of your own desires are you aware of? How much of what your brain processes on an average day are you conscious of? How much of who you are is accessible to you, even in a purely material sense? Have you ever had a dream that you were sleeping, then woken up, then woken up again? Who is to say you are awake now? That is the key point, and of course a standard point expressed by mystics over the ages.

I have argued often on this blog that consciousness is split. In the hypnotic experiments of Janet, he found that psychologically normal people, under hypnosis, could be made to manifest multiple, independent selves, each autonomous. We must accept that in some respects this is the nature of our reality. It is continuous to some part of ourselves, but we have no way of knowing what disparate elements there may be.

In terms of physical reality, the best theorists cannot say in what it may consist. We seem to have an interactive relationship with the physical universe, which we cannot be sure would or could exist if there were no consciousness to be aware of it. This is a primary conclusion of most philosophical extrapolations from Quantum Theory. As I have said before, the experimentally observed fact of non-locality–the potential connectedness of all physical matter in a way beyond space/time–falsified Einstein’s General Relativity as a POSSIBLE explanation for the nature of all reality.

Thus, explanations can be offered for observable facts which are consistent with the hypothesis that mind is separable from brain; and nothing in our current understanding of the nature of reality compels us to reject such ideas. In my observation, almost all scientistic dogmatists are literally stuck in a 19th century view of the universe.

Then you get to evidence. I need to go to bed, but will post a few example of things I found interesting. One sees this idea that the “multiple of anecdote is not evidence”, but of course it is. If 100 people walk up a hill, and claim to see a red bear, then if they are credible people, most people will accept that.

None of us go to the trouble of verifying what we read in scientific journals. I would not know how to verify if neutrinos exist, or how DNA is sequenced, or what happens when I mix chemical A with chemical B. I take people’s word for it. And sometimes, I am wrong. The whole Global Warming thing seems to be a massive hoax. The Earth may be warming, but the efforts to gather evidence for it have been half-hearted, and filled with more or less overt and intentional fraud. We have no temperature monitors in the Arctic regions where we are supposedly experiencing warming. One would think this would have been one of the first things done. What do they do? They estimate temperature using models which in turn assume that warming is going on. That’s another topic, though.

I’ll confine myself to just a couple examples which are readily accessible since I posted them on my Facebook. This is not a thorough or even especially diligent treatment of the topic: this is meant to be illustrative of some of the types of evidence out there. For those with an interest, further research can be done. Start with Zammit’s book, then look up his resources.

Here is one on a woman who claims to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank. I found the part about her cousin quite evidential. This is not compelling, but will be interesting for some.

Here is an effort to separate cold reading-based mediumship from actual communication. Cold reading has its limits, and it can be experimentally defined and eliminated as a plausible causative mechanism for clearly visible patterns.

This is the most evidential Near Death Experience of which I’m aware. There are no plausible explanations within a standard brain=mind paradigm.

This is stating the obvious, but when you are clinically and measurably brain dead you cannot form new memories.

Finally, a well put together intro on Near Death Experiences:

Oxygen deprivation does not work as an explanation because the effects, for example, of drowning are universal. Everyone feels them the same way. Why? Because they are based in physiology. It is precisely the seldomness of NDE’s–perhaps a quarter of the people brought back from clinical death–that speaks for their authenticity.

I will add that creating an explanation for something is not the same as doing science. If you can write a compelling and best selling book about the evolution of human kind from primitive RNA molecules, but offer up not lab or other experiments by which your ideas could be tested, then you are a fiction writer, not a scientist. It really is that simple.

None of the critics of NDE’s seem to have done their due diligence. They look at a few non-representative cases, then come up with an explanation of what MUST BE happening, provided we reject the survivalist hypothesis in advance.

Here are a couple books you might read: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Near-Death-Experience-Consciousness-Survives/dp/1594773564/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298085863&sr=8-2
http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Beyond-Life-Near-Death-Experience/dp/0061777250/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298085863&sr=8-1

In this one, cardiologist Pim Van Lommel “provides scientific evidence that the near-death phenomenon is an authentic experience that cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis, or oxygen deprivation.”

And so it goes. Why believe the worst when we have an abundance of evidence to the contrary?

The deal Obama thought he had, was that “the group” was going to make sure he never got any critical scrutiny, that everything he did succeeded, and that a Democratic majority was a done deal through at least 2020 or so. Two terms seemed a certainty when the Democrats got the Presidency and had clear control of both chambers of Congress. They were talking about Democratic control for a generation or more. The Republicans were lost in the wilderness.

This control and comfortable status was supposed to be handed to him. He wanted a sinecure, not a Presidency. His role in the whole was to stand there and smile, look and sound Presidential from time to time–with his actual words fed to him by professionals–and all he otherwise had to do was mostly nothing. Golf, trips, meeting foreign heads of state, nice meals, and of course guaranteed speaking gigs, and lucrative book deals once he got out. “Just show up”, he was told, “and we will take care of the rest. You have a great smile. Use it a lot, and don’t go off-script unless it can’t be avoided. And then say as little as possible. You got an E ticket to a great ride. We’re going to remake the future, and you will be an integral part of it.”

What is happening now, though? The Democrats are literally fighting a street battle for their political survival. Not only are they now not advancing their agenda, they are getting ROLLED BACK from where they started in 2008. Nobody was questioning public sector unions back in 2008. Most of us would have found it hard to conceive that people making a third more than the rest of us, with cushy retirement plans–all funded with taxpayer money, or money borrowed from our children–would NEED a union. Andy Stern and the rest of the cronies in the White House have made sure that we get it now. Ordinary Americans get it. We are being screwed over by a power elite that uses taxpayer money to fund their own campaigns, in a feast of corruption that would not have been out of place in Tammany Hall.

These street battles are defensive, not offensive. They are desperate, and likely to turn both Wisconsin and national voters strongly and lastingly against the people waging them. Look at these cowardly Democratic congressmen from Wisconsin. Be men, I think most Americans want to say. Take your lumps, then try to make good in the next election. Don’t run.

What they are doing is simply betraying the spirit of America, which rests on the self restraint of knowing that as the will of the people changes, they must be respected, and that regardless of personal feelings. Do you think George Bush wanted to hand the Office of the President over to Barack Obama? Of course not. But he did, because THAT IS THE WAY IT WORKS.

For his part, Obama is utterly in over his head. What is needed now, to protect the leftist agenda he thought was going to be furthered mainly FOR him, not BY him, is skill and leadership. He possesses neither. He was not selected for talent. He was selected because he was photogenic, polled well, and his mixed race enabled his propagandists to tap into the white guilt that has been inculcated carefully in our schoolchildren for at least 20 years.

As I see it, the leftist agenda is increasingly a rudderless ship lost on a stormy ocean. Within their ranks, plainly they have skill, but the skill is in the shadows. Their figurehead–their public face–is not equal to the task of getting them out of the shoals they have been driven in to.

Self evidently, this is far from the death knell of leftism, though. No competent stragegist confuses momentary advantages with victory. You know in what victory will consist? It will not be a political event. It will not be driving our opponents into the sea. As long as this creed, this cult, serves a needed purpose, it will rise again and again.

Leftism will end when as a group they are able find an actually optimistic understanding of human life and their place in it. In its current form, their outward utopianism is a mask for their collective failure to find better reasons to live. Behind it, one readily perceives actual despair, and a driving need to relinquish the hope of personal responsibility, the possibility of individual moral growth, and ultimately autonomy outright.

In my considered view a serious, mainstream investigation into the nature of death and life will be of great virtue in that pursuit. If we live forever, if our sins and selfless acts follow us, then that changes things, doesn’t it? To accept this creed it is not necessary to accept ANY historical religion. This is science, not theology. It falsifies as a credible creed the absurdism and pessimism of modern thinkers like Samual Beckett, Foucault and Sartre. The most important part of the doctrine of atheism recedes into irrelevance.

Speaking gibberish is only necessary when you are unable to face truths you cannot accept. For this reason, finding a more palatable truth ought to work simultaneously to reenergize the effective and sincere use of reason.

Our problems can be solved. I cannot say this too often. I myself propose solutions constantly, and nothing delights me more than to see my ideas improved upon, or even discarded outright in favor of things I haven’t even thought of. That’s the beauty of the self organizing system that is a free people.

My way seems to be thinking, although I spend many hours in silence, at times.

The point I wanted to make here was that no fixed, final way of intereacting with the world is desirable. I have at times in my life sought out difficulty and challenge, with perhaps the most obvious example being that of the fitness system called CrossFit (www.crossfit.com) . At other times, now being one of them, I have felt a need to cultivate satisfaction. I wonder just how deep my pleasure could be sitting in a nice garden, on a fresh spring day, drinking jasmine tea with friends out of antique cups.

This is the Yin and the Yang. It is a cliche, of course, but one worth pondering a bit more. Edward de Bono spoke of what he called “catchment areas”, which is the tendency of our minds–as expressed through the physical, mechanical apparatus of our brains–to sort even things that are quite similar into either/or categories. The metaphor is that of rain, which will wind up in a very different river system, depending on which side of a mountain it lands. In theory, two drops can land 2′ from one another, and wind up hundreds of miles apart.

No final religious system is possible, because no lasting perception is possible in a world subject to evolutionary and constant change. We cling to religion, to use a memorable phrase in a new way, because we cannot stand the truth that living is like walking. Our walking, our movement, figurative and literal, can never cease until we leave the Earth. Yet, you can take pleasure in walking. You can even take pleasure in hard, sustained, uphill–oh let us use the word TRAGIC–walking.

The solution to pain is in the pain, and in no small measure includes the pleasure of humoric irony, companionship with others, and the simple joy of breathing.

I posted a couple of my older poems, and some general thoughts, on my other website. I can’t get the link button to show up on the live site, so for now I’m just going to mention it here. Here is the link.

What a word. Getting up this morning (sober–my liver still works well) I was pondering love. Can I not posit as an absolute truth that we are ALL stupid and ridiculous, at least at times? On some level, could we not see the Marine Corps uniform–any military uniform–as ridiculous? Aren’t they polyester?

Look at any woman or man in love: are they not slack-jawed and silly, especially if the other person does not love them? Look at anyone grieving. Look at the ridiculous facial expressions, the moans, the cries, the weeping.

Watch us, all of us, scheming during the day. Watch us looking at a woman or man that we secretly desire, who is committed to another. Watch us wondering how it would be to be rich and lacking for nothing. Or watch the rich man, pondering the meaning of life, lacking nothing but a reason to live. Or watch him dedicating his life to earning more wealth, more wealth, more wealth, where money is an abstraction, and need something he or she never thinks about.

Watch the loving mother, nurturing her child, utterly lost in devotion. Watch the loving spouse, pulling the blankets up over his loved one, so she can sleep longer in peace.

Watch the sky, ever-changing, filled with light and shade, a million varieties of cloud, and a million points of light.

Listen to the birds, singing. Do you know them? They have voices. Who are they? Can you identify them?

I myself am of course a stupid and ridiculous man. This post is ridiculous. It is stupid.

I watch Christ being nailed up on the cross. After he is done screaming in pain, he turns to his neighbor and says “Some day, huh?” This makes me laugh; I don’t know why.

I told one of my children the other day that love is seeing people as they are, but accepting them as who they want to be, feeding their better angels. I think this is close to the truth.

I, I, I ,I: I don’t know entirely what I wanted to say here, but have decided to hit “post” anyway, in the hope that perhaps this may be a seed that sprouts under someone elses sky.

Dang me, I’ve been drinking. Whiskey helps me in so many ways.

I would like to mention, though, the movie I watched, the “Language of the Enemy”, about the Israeli/refugee conflict.

Is it necessary to think bad thoughts about the descendants of Hagar? Not really: except to the extent they want to blow up the descendants of Sarah.

One looks at the Holy Land, and sees some degree of purity. Those who live there see death. Why, I don’t know.

We all move upwards
Why fight as if Heaven waits?
It’s already there.

May God bless any readers I may have. My own blessings amuse me, but I don’t know how far they go.

You might be thinking he sends a thrill up my leg, like Glenn Beck does for Chris Matthews, but no, you will note it’s been a while since I posted on him. He is important since he is one of the most seemingly intelligent posters for the premier leftist apologist in our nation.

As I look at him in my mind, and imagine him reading what I wrote (exceptionally unlikely, I know, but it’s an interesting thought exercise), I see making mental notes, pulling out a couple of well-worn tomes–the General Theory being the first–thumbing through them, raising his nose a bit as he checks off the details: no, no, and NO. Closing the last one, he realizes that once again he is right. He has a vaguely preppy and certainly arrogant vibe to him.

Anyway, I readily grant to the universe considerable imagination. I visualized what Krugman’s hell would look like. As I see it, he enters a room lit everywhere in red–not hot or cold or unpleasant–and there is a fire in the hearth, putting out no heat. There is a very ugly old lady sitting there, knitting, who says to him: tell me about economics. And he spends the next 1,000 years talking, while she knits. She is secretly, of course, a demon.

And as the years go by, he never tires. He never flags. He has that much of what he thinks is knowledge to pass along.

Yet, is this LIFE? This is a world insulated from beauty, love and laughter.

Further rantings. I have decided to sin tonight and get a pizza.