Where I’m at, I’ll let you know at some point. I’m pretty convinced there is truth at the bottom of the bullshit, but I’m still digging.
Actually, I find that funny. Maybe that means something?
Now, I don’t like sharing personal stuff, but I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a deep order in things, and it is useless worrying about everything. Things which should not work out often do, and things which are easy and obvious fail at the gate. None of us really understand all of it.
In fact, and I’ve never thought of it this way that I can recall (although there is much I can’t recall), perhaps the lust for power is at root a need to make the world comprehensible, orderly, fathomable. The world is orderly, for you, because you control it. You control your destiny by making it hard for others to control you. A world where you never have to say you are sorry is an orderly world, is it not? A world where other people are behaving in seemingly random, chaotic ways can never feel predictable and thus safe.
Be all this as it may, it occurred to me it might be useful to give her explicit permission to grow up, to be herself. I said: “X, I realized this morning you have become an adult. I think that I, like a lot of parents, have been slow to realize this, since it is bittersweet. It marks the end of an era. I’m proud you are on your way, off to who knows what life adventures, but sad because parenting is a precious experience, and it is largely over now for you. But I will be excited to watch you in coming years. I think some really cool stuff is coming. Have a great day, and please do what you can to get a full nights sleep once in a while!! I’m asking, not telling!!”
She cried, of course. It was my intention. We have a family policy that periodic tears are necessary for mental health.
I share this because I am not alone. But I do feel warranted in my belief that I can sometimes put to words things everyone feels, but which confuse them.
And I do think that the scariness of this world, the seeming precariousness of it, the sense that as fantastically built and developed as we are, it could all come tumbling down in a cataclysmic instant, makes many parents scared to let go of their children. And it makes it scary for the children to go out in the world in the faith that whatever they build will stand, that we will all be here in 20 years.
I don’t know what will happen, of course, but I do know I have wasted many years in pointless fear. As someone put it, Worry does not rob tomorrow of its pain. It only robs today of its delights and pleasure.
It is appropriate to plan for what you can, but a faith in a deeper order is a more consoling and effective friend.
May this help you in some way.
No, I don’t think so. There are no market fundamentals driving such an enormous drop. As Sun Tzu wrote, it takes no great power of observation to see lightning or hear thunder.
The potentially HUGE upside to this though is that the Fed may have just put itself on Trumps radar. No serious discussion about any power elite can fail to put front row and foremost the secretive banking canal that has the power to create for itself and its clients literally infinite sums of money, and do so with no accountability or transparency even remotely appropriate for such an enormous power.
Do you think you could buy somebody off for a billion dollars? How about ten billion? How about a hundred billion? All chump change for people who have a magic keyboard where they put in as many ones and zeroes as they like, and nobody other than those involved is ever the wiser.
We have s lot of f great people in our government. But we have some sons of bitches too, and they are the bankers muscle and enforcers. That has to stop.
And I would further say that there are three basic ways of framing “the world”:
1) the world is rough and if a man’s (or woman’s) gonna make it, they gotta be tough. (those might make good lyrics to a song).
2) The world is rough for some people, but you will be taken care of.
3) The world needs to change to suit your needs. Any pain or difficulty anywhere is cause for outrage.
Expectations set moods, and moods set lives.
To copy others is uncreative.
To ask others to copy you is anti-creative. It is rooted in a fundamentally destructive impulse.
The demand for perfect conformity is the polar opposite of the creative, living, soulful temperament.
It hit me this morning, while I was thoughtlessly saying something like “God, may you find me a worthy vessel today”, that God is not demanding anything of us. God does not demand worship. God does not demand devotion. These are human activities, demanded by humans. As an infinite Being, God does not need us.
There is a blending of Theism and Humanism which is salubrious, in my opinion. Getting rid of the Church is likely a good thing, but this does not imply attacking belief in God, the connection of all life, or the survival of death. Those are two discrete things.
What I think we should reasonably ask of ourselves is that we consciously try to live lives that are as happy and harmonious as possible, and that we make a daily effort to be more grateful–because gratitude is a key element in happiness and well being–and to be more aware of who we are spiritually. God does not move, but our awareness does.
Won’t see me posting literal tree hugger articles too often. But I like this idea of “doing” nothing. I don’t speak Dutch, but it seems reasonable to suppose the niks part of it is related to the Germans “Nichts”, in which case a more or less literal translation is nothing-ing.
We all need to do nothing sometimes. No schedule. No plan of attack for our relaxation. I will wonder aloud again if it is perhaps their Day of Rest which has, at least in some measure, made the Jews so creative. That, and 3,000 years of cultural natural selection, in what has been a hostile environment for most of it.
Should we not demand the same of spiritual paths? What spiritual technology does, for example, Christianity offer? Where does it say “if you do x, y, and z, then a, b and c will happen”?
The thing is that much of the purported benefit of Christian (and Islamic) belief rests in what will happen in the NEXT life. And for a great many people, as this creed is received, it amounts practically to a system of social control through conditioned terror of unseen but important realities. People cross lifetimes afraid of sinning, because they fear hell. In such conditions, true personal learning is impossible.
What I want to help develop is something which reliably builds perceptual coherence, personal moralities based on that perceptual coherence, and social realities that are desirable that are an emergent property of the pervasive presence of the first two.
All the contemplative/meditative practices have what they claim to be technologies of the spirit, but we have reached a time where we need to make them actual technologies, to test them, to apply the methods of science.
I am being a little foggy, but this is something I felt today. I will allow it to continue to develop.
Is art the point, or the artist? I believe the latter. I believe Kum Nye is a way of becoming an artist of experience. Every time I do it, something new flows through me.