Month: September 2011

The roots of both success and failure inhere in beginnings. You can, of course, make a good ending of a bad start, but over time and in aggregate things tend to flow naturally from their starting points.

The task is not to add skill, but rather to deduct what is unnecessary, until all that remains is effectiveness. The seed of any beginning is who you are, what you have made of yourself. Better seeds create better beginnings and hence better endings.

To grow as a person, is to grow in effectiveness.

Leftists relentlessly criticize the profit motive, as somehow self seeking. What they fail to consider, because they are either stupid or cynically malignant, is that businesses also operate under what might be termed a loss motive, by which I mean that there is both a carrot and a stick in play: they want to make money, of course, but they equally do not want to LOSE money, which over some period of time can and will lead to bankruptcy.

State bureaucracies–governments in general–tend towards organizational bloat because the incentives in place are completely divorced from practical considerations. In practice, failure is not just common, but irrelevant to the long term success of the project. They are not punished by failure, nor are they rewarded for success. They are rewarded for political obedience, and rewarded with larger staffs, salaries, and a larger chunk of the taxpayers wealth.

There is no loss motive, and the profits made in no way imply altruism–on the contrary, naked greed for both money and power are plainly on display ubiquitously–nor the capacity to create anything that is of use to anyone.

Self evidently, some government is necessary, but government checked by the DEMAND on the part of taxpayers that it actually accomplish the aims for which it allegedly exists.

“I Am”, or “That which brings into existence that which is”, or “I Am that I am”.

God is that which is, or that which brings into existence that which is. This is the opposite of idolatry, as I have defined it. This is a brilliant conception.

Further, I like the fact that there are gaps in the concept: the vowels are missing. Theoretically, one could pronounce the word many different ways, yet it would retain essential parts of its form. This coincides with the fundamental unity and multiplicity of existence, depending on which lens we view it through.

If you abstract it far enough, this is what I am trying to do with my conception of Goodness. I want certain parts to be flexible, and certain parts to be rigid.

An example I use from time to time is that of the classical Japanese Katana. The metal is folded over again and again on itself, which in my terms would equate symbolically to qualitative richness. What appears a whole, is in fact composed of much past movement, much effort. The result is something both very sharp, and very flexible.

You may find this history of the Japanese swordsmithing interesting.

This is an interesting and important topic.

When the–shall I call them refugees?–created the Golden Calf, it was created according to their inclination, in the form they chose, of the material they chose; and after worshipping it, they decided that it must want them to have a feast.

What they created, in other words, was a metaphysics that suited them, which they made no effort to reconcile with reality. It was a fantasy, a bubble, a congenial universe that just happened to suit their fancy.

In my view, the doctrines of Darwinism and “death-ism” (soul=brain), and the materialism which underlie them, are likewise idolatrous, because they cater to the vanities and preferences of the people holding these views, and not because they are defensible empirically.

This universe plainly has rules, by which I mean repeatable and reliable correllations between cause and effect, between stimulus and reaction. Some of the connections are linear and some are systemic; but all are reliable. This applies not just to what is READILY observable, but to the distant, soft, faint forces like those of psi, and mediumship.

People don’t realize this, but throughout modern history there have been mediums who could not just repeat words supposedly whispered into their ears, but actually manifest entire spirits, who could talk. Now, people may be skeptical, but the simple reality is that those scientists who have undertaken to study the matter have nearly uniformly changed their minds (usually beginning as skeptics); and scientists today who reject these notions out of hand can be reliably assumed not to have attended any seances with credible mediums (self evidently there are many frauds).

True scientists are open to all evidence, and all justifiable conclusions flowing from that evidence. Proper skepticism is equidistance from both belief and rejection. It allows you to move intelligently.

Framing things in this way, one can readily see why idolatry is prohibited in the Ten Commandments.

Put simply: idolatry is on this definition necessarily delusion, and there are no benefits to delusion. If the task is ordering our behavior rationally in a rational universe, we must know the rules. This should be self evident, and axiomatic.

It seems to me that idolatry is asking God to bow down to you. It is asking something from the universe which you have not put in it.

Was not the Golden Calf a visible sign of the possibility of material abundance, and celebrated as such? Rather than understand God’s will, they literally created a God out of their own wishes.

As I see it, our principle task is understanding how this universe works, and conforming ourselves to its dictates. We can never know what potential learning inheres in even the worst experiences.

I was pondering what courage is over lunch today. I have a few thoughts and observations, that should likely be taken as data points.

It comes from the old French for “heart”.

Continuum formation: do we call people brave who get up and drive to work every day? Not normally. But we do if they have never worked, or have a fear of driving. We might call an agorophobic who goes outside brave, but for most of us it wouldn’t warrant a second thought.

Do we call courageous people who are in danger, but don’t know it? For example, someone swimming in the ocean, menaced by sharks they never see and which never attack? They didn’t know to be afraid, so they weren’t.

Do we award soldiers medals for doing their job in combat? We lost something like 250,000 dead in WW2, and most never got medals. We only award them for conspicuous courage, beyond that normally expected.

Soldiers are trained in many ways to focus on their jobs, first and foremost, and to think as little as possible. This is so they can operate even in conditions of fear, on autopilot, to the extent possible.

It seems to me that courage is what is needed where fear is present. It implies fear. It implies pursuing a course which provokes fear, and staying the course regardless. It is a claustrophobic getting in an elevator, and it is also someone jumping out of an airplane at night who finds it very nerve wracking.

Courage is the WILL to stay the course in spite of what amount to attacks by one part of your self–the self preserving instinct–against another–your sovereign consciousness. Will, in turn, is a type of attention, where you focus on some things–what you want–to the exclusion of alternatives, such as the possibility of flight and failure.

Courage, then, is an exertion of energy in the pursuit of a chosen objective, even though not all parts of you agree with that objective.

Some people love rock climbing. They love the excitement, and they do it voluntarily all the time. Does this take courage? No, not by my definition. All parts of them agree with the objective, even though danger is present. They feel–in most cases with ample cause–that actual danger can be well managed through a focus on the task, on doing it right, and not making mistakes.

Interestingly, this leads to the conclusion that a life well lived needs progressively LESS courage, and more engagement without fear.