Tag: Faith

The Two-Edged Sword of Thought and Action; On the Nature of Humor and Sorrow

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Recently, my wife and I drove past a house way out in the country, where 8 chickens were held in a cage that would be small for one. This was just after learning that the killings in Gaza were continuing under the radar; and Trump had just bombed another 20 fishermen for no reason. And Ms. Good had been murdered.

Our efforts to save the chickens became a surrogate attempt to put an end to all that pain and sorrow. In other words, it was futile. We could do nothing but contemplate a midnight raid, which would have caused the poor, ignorant woman in the shack to lose her mind. Because in some strange way she loved the chickens, or thought she did, and had raised them from eggs, she said. And there was nothing the sheriff or the animal welfare department could do under current laws; and we had no place to bring the chickens even if we stole them.

And after contemplating the possibility of losing my mind over an issue that was so small in comparison to what is happening in the broader world, I had to accept the pain. I had to admit that there is no possibility of separating the pain of life from the love of life. And that we live in a world that must always teeter between hell and heaven. And that we have to find a way to move through this border land without sinking into pits of despair or indulging in a transcendence too high for our tears to reach the earth.

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Freedom As an Absence of Free Will and an Absence of Free Choice

negativegeography4 Comments

Last night I dreamt I was a Germanic medicine man, warrior kicking Roman ass in the Teutoburger Wald (my tribe’s version of the Little Bighorn). Dying in agony I was annoyed to discover that my wife was not tending my wounds, but merely nudging me in the ribs so I’d stop moaning in my sleep.

Despite my battlefield injuries, despite lying face-down in the swampy woods screaming in pain, I was not relieved to find myself back in this cold, bureaucratic, technological culture, although word processing is a nice addition. [See footnote on racial identity and the development of eco-fascism].

We’re all born mid-highway, spewing gas out the tailpipe, decimating forests for school projects, eating animals penned in concentration camps, privileged or lacking privilege, praying to the local deity, before we have a moment to reflect, through no choice of our own.

I just appeared here as a newborn in this historical timeline like a Chomsky Martian, and was quickly covered in all these decals and rooting for the team I got saddled with, no matter how often they lose.Read More »

Cliff Diving: The Dangerous Leap into Suspension and Proprioceptive Flight

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Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Pexels.com

I’m forced to decipher the order that is slowly unfolding on its own. That is, this isn’t really an inquiry through words or logic of a thinking mind, but a way for words and logic to catch up with a wider perspective than a thinking mind can know.

It’s as if something non-rational is trying to recalibrate the rational mind so that it doesn’t block access to a larger perception.

And I’m not sure of my role as a speaker entirely. The speaker seems to be necessary in some way, but it’s not central to what is happening. Currently it seems to function mostly as a filter, to help organize certain features of reality into a workable personal relationship to the world.

But this worked-out relationship to the world – not only this sense of Self, but also everything this form of Self demands, such as power, prestige, and economic and national systems to promote all that – is leading to self-destruction.

The culture keeps looking for new ways to improve the filtering function of the Speaker or Self (which is to say, improve the moral quality of this fictional approach to the world); and we also keep looking for ways to improve the economic and national systems designed to promote the function of the Speaker or Self (which is to say, we keep looking for social solutions to this psychic and spiritual crossroads).

In other words, we keep employing one of two main ways to handle the approaching apocalypse: 1) Try to improve one’s Self; and 2) try to improve the culture that promotes the Self.

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