God's Identity Crisis

My post on economics is turning out to be a rather cumbersome write, but I have something to hold you over:

Religion describes God as infinite and everything, yet unitary. This is a logical paradox, of course, since a self-contained individual cannot simultaneously contain everything. But does that mean that God does not exist at all? Perhaps, but I venture to say that paradoxes are a different kind of smoking gun.

Joseph Campbell once wrote, "Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall arrive at the center of our own existence," which not coincidentally reminds me of Helen Keller when she said "The only way out is through." See, it's not that God doesn't exist, it's that He has an identity crisis embodied in the corruption of language and linear thinking.

Obviously, it doesn't do you any good to try to sense with senses that not longer exist to you just because other people are trying to use them, but more importantly, your other senses have become sharper anyway. Helen Keller discovered that each of her senses were created equally when she embraced the ones that still functioned and realized that she could sense just as well or better than anyone around her. In the same way, religion and its use of speech to convey the speechless have failed where once they may have succeeded.

If I were to promote a new spiritual sense for the religious to explore, I would have to remind them that the present moment, when one meditates, is both infinite and infinitesimal in duration. Sound familiar?

The Great Trickle-Down Pyramid Scheme

"...when we look around, we can see that the Bush administration leaned on the middle class and expanded the poor while giving more money to the top tier. Predatory lending (among other things, including declining home prices and lower wages) caused working middle class families to be unable to pay their mortgages. Mortgages were foreclosed, etc. etc. A classic feedback loop.

So giving more money to the rich isn't working. You give money to the rich, sure they may create jobs, or they may just do something else with it. Send it overseas. Buy a boat. Take a rocket tour of space. Greed got them where they are, and they're not going to let a penny of that money "trickle down" unless they know they're getting a large return on their investment. Which means, yes, they may create jobs, but they will be exploitative, either not paying enough or lobbying for the 60 hour work week or some other greed-based thing."

- Mark Kuykendall on Change.gov

I hereby predict the near future...

I am currently convinced of the following from listening to the Transition policy makers:

Prevention sweeps away bloated health insurance schemes.

Renewable energy sweeps away bloated fossil fuel schemes, international loan schemes, and military-industrial schemes.

Net Neutrality sweeps away bloated media schemes.

The money saved goes to make education affordable for everyone.

I am currently convinced of the following from reading the news and weighing it with certain personal experiences:

Psychedelic therapy changes so many lives at such high success rates that a Cultural Singularity approaches.

I am preparing a post about how economics is inconsistent without observing environmental and psychological ecosystems.

Change is the Only Absolute

We were talking about the space between us all/

And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion/

Never glimpse the truth - then it's far too late when they pass away/

We were talking about the love we all could share - when we find it/

To try our best to hold it there - with our love/

With our love we could save the world - if they only knew/

Try to realize it's all within yourself/

No one else can make you change/

And to see you're really only very small/

And life flows on within you and without you/

We were talking about the love that's gone so cold and the people/

Who gain the world and lose their soul/

They don't know, they can't see - are you one of them?/

When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind/

Is waiting there/

And the time will come when you see/

We're all one, and life flows on within you and without you.

-Within You Without You by George Harrison and the Beatles

Listen To Our Lives/The Wind Will Whisper The Way

I feel as if I did not do enough justice to the subject matter in my previous post. For several years I have been navigating a web woven by people my parent's age and the internet is making it both easier and more complex. I will discontinue referring to how this vindicates my pattern recognition since I am just an explorer reporting back on my findings trying to be as patient as is necessary to wake the word up as it stumbles over this blog. That being said, no good story is complete without an understanding of the heroes involved. But I am not the storyteller, I am only the messenger.

The film depicted here tells the story of how, at the birth of the information age, two diametrically opposite worldviews regarding technology erupted from the psychedelic sixties. One, embodied by Ted Kaczynski, saw where technology could go and saw Hell, while the other, embodied by Stewart Brand, saw where it could go and saw Heaven.

Kacynski was a brilliant, paranoid, Ludditesque mathematician willing to resort to violence while Brand was a brilliant, sane, geeky artist who devoted himself to the non-violent ideals of the counterculture. Brand fed his head, Kacysnki was afraid of his head. Brand compiled the Whole Earth Catalog and Kacysnki used it to learn how to live off-the-grid.

This is a mythic and ironic tale about the psychological repercussions of the neurotic American obsession with (and inability to obtain) freedom and equality and how their outer limits were forged and tested by two different, but very similar people after their first encounter with LSD; Kaczynski as a university professor, Brand as a hapless hippie, and both through the research establishment.

The film begins by quoting Kurt Godel, but I will resort to the Buddha today.

"Never think that I believe I should set out a "system of teaching" to help people understand the way. Never cherish such a thought. What I proclaim is the truth as I have discovered it and "a system of teaching" has no meaning because the truth can’t be cut up into pieces and arranged in a system."
-Diamond Sutra

White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane (Or How The Information Age Stop-Gapped The Counterculture)

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Call Alice
When she was just small

When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head
Feed your head
Feed your head"

The Beggining of The End or The End of The Beginning?

"The government will now attempt to keep bad loans from failing and real estate prices from falling. Rather then allowing market forces to rein in excess borrowing and replenish savings, it will encourage even more borrowing and drain what is left of our savings pool. Rather than allowing our economy to return to one based on legitimate production, it will continue to encourage reckless consumption.

In the end, by refusing to allow market forces to work their cure, our economy will inevitably die from the disease. Our economy will now face death by hyperinflation, which will cause a complete loss of confidence in the dollar and result in prices and interest rates skyrocketing out of sight. The evaporation of our national wealth will lead to civil unrest, food and energy shortages, and the possible imposition of martial law. If such a scenario unfolds, what is left of our Constitution will surely be completely shredded."

-Peter Schiff, President and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital on 10/10/08

This Sentence is A Lie

In 1933, Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel destroyed Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica with his Incompleteness Theorems. He used mathematics itself to prove that mathematics cannot be self-contained or perceived in absolute, but is instead a kind of knowledge that is self-actualizing in an infinite variety of forms.

In the near future, humanity will destroy religion with enlightenment. She will use spirituality itself to prove that spirituality cannot be self-contained or perceived in absolute, but is instead a kind of knowledge that is self-actualizing in an infinite variety of forms.

Your head may now explode.

Civilization is An Anomoly

"These are and were a people with no notion of linear time. Theirs was one of the great experiments in human thought. The notion that the world existed as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of humanity was to maintain through ritual activity the land precisely as it existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation. The logos of the Dreaming was constancy, balance, symmetry. In the moment there is deductive logic, on a hunt for example, when the men pay attention to signs with a perspicacity that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. But in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning. Had humanity followed this track, it is true that we would have never placed a man on the moon. But we would most certainly not be speaking of our capacity to compromise the life support of the planet. I have never in all of my travels been so moved by a vision of another possibility, born literally 55,000 years ago."

-Wade Davis on the Aborigines in Australia

5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

"One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of a clockwork universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled world of quantum mechanics..."

read more | digg story

The Ten Ecstatic Commandments

א Know that everything is one and that nothing is truly separate.

ב Answer only to the infinite and you will not become oppressed by the finite.

ג Use caution when using the limitations of language to invoke the limitless.

ד Supplement Earth with Heaven by cycling between effort and effortless ecstasy.

ה Seek the wisdom of duality in order to transcend it.

ו Respect life.

ז Respect one another.

ח Do not become attached to the impermanent.

ט Do not distort what you know to be true.

י Be grateful for everything.

"You are flung into other levels of reality so visceral, so tangible, so all-enveloping, that they become your sense of the real world. And you suddenly realize that the relatively mundane realm of ordinary consciousness is a crude facsimile of what awaits in the psychotropic trance. This and other experiences in the presence of people taken by the spirit left me with visceral evidence that cultural beliefs can really make for different human beings, that there are other ways of knowing, other levels of intuition, that cannot necessarily be understood through the filter of Cartesian logic."

-Wade Davis on Ayahuasca

Have Your Baby and Eat it Too

The most reliable 'universal moral compass' anyone can have is their ability to be fully aware of the present moment. Mindfulness wields attention in the battle against the potential entropy of the momentum of our thoughts.

When, for example, a parent is exasperated by their unmanageable daily tasks and begins to neglect their child, the damage often manifests indistinguishable from deliberate abuse. In such a case, the problem common with both neglect and abuse is selective attention.

When an individual is regularly flooded by their banal routine and are unable to adequately adapt to a new situation, such as a new child in the household, their routine becomes threatened, invoking a negative emotional reaction, and culminates in either a defensive ignorance of the new situation or an offensive overreaction.

Obviously both of these are moral choices to some degree, but the fact remains that what is being reacted against is not fully understood and allowed to penetrate the consciousness. If parents knew what sort of damage they were doing to their children, they would stop. Unfortunately, they do not allow themselves to surrender to the exquisite details of the tragedy they are either 'allowing' or 'forcing,' both equally reprehensible to, and unconsciously hidden from, the consciousness.

The world is brimming with people who bestow the neuroses which infected them as children onto their own children. Sometimes this manifests as malevolent crime, sometimes as passive ideology. Both through small moments of interpersonal terrorism and both do equal damage.

You love what you know and you know what you love. Ignorance is suffering because good is a direct manifestation of sufficient consciousness applied to a particular situation. To love your children is to feel even their suffering inflicted by your own lower self. This is your higher self, 'God,' acting in unconditional love and allowing a personal crucifixion in the moment, in order to clean the slate for the future moment, which has now arrived in its perfection.

The universal moral compass closest to the presence of 'God' is the full experience of the present moment without judgment. I fear that words are never powerful enough to shake the etch-a-sketches of our minds into the reality of our Heaven on Earth. We must seek the ancient clues and tools of our natural environment as divine gifts from 'God.'

Your Prescription Was a Sugar Pill...Better Find a Shaman.

The ultimate failure of religion is an expression of its irony. Organized religion is the ultimate contradiction in which personal salvation is prescribed through the umbilical of hierarchy by the very forces from which to be saved. The best evidence for this is the expectation that those who read about the experiences of the lost and saved will fully comprehend such concepts without themselves having had any such experiences.

The most obvious consequence of this contradiction, even though the faithful have usually thought of themselves as the only saved among a world of lost, is that it is now painfully obvious that the difference between the saved and the lost has nothing to do with which sacred texts they ascribe to or reject since all the various texts themselves have always been equally overconfident in their ability to lucidly inform on the nature of reality. This I glean from the behavior I've observed from the vast majority of the religious whom I have met.

I have heard the expression "I do not have beliefs, I have convictions," which is very easy for me to sympathize with. I'm not skilled at math but that's what it reminds me of. Math has few words and infinite implications. Like a conviction, it is not spoken, it is merely carried out and is relevant in every waking moment. I have had experiences that make the religious worldview seem like a cheap dream.

The 5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World

Surely in their insatiable curiosity and desire to put knowledge above all things, science would never, say, inadvertently set off a chain of events that lead to the end of the world. Right?

read more | digg story

LSD Could Heal Thousands as Therapeutic Tool

Andrew Feldmár has an essay in the Guardian about psychedelics as a useful tool in psychotherapy.

read more | digg story

7 "Eccentric" Geniuses Who Were Clearly Just Insane

Is it possible to be too smart? Maybe. History is full of insane geniuses, humans who mentally put the pedal to the metal--and sometimes through the floor.

read more | digg story

5 Scientific Theories That Will Make Your Head Explode

Seriously. Go put on a rain coat.

read more | digg story

The 5 Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High

Part 2 of my strange vindications concerning the relationship between psychedelics and scientific accomplishment. Teaser: Crick of DNA's discovery did lots of acid.

read more | digg story

Your Mind is Windsurfing on the Sea of Time, But the Wind is No One's

Sometimes it easy to dismiss my ravings as erroneous hunches with little concrete evidence. But to be honest I write only what I know to be true for myself and speculate openly with little attachment to one idea or another. One of the ideas that I have enjoyed entertaining is that the information age is a hippie brain-child and that the technological singularity would bring it full circle to a fulfillment of a mythic destiny for earth. That went along with how I was always sure Steve Jobs has to have done acid, perhaps while he was at Reed here in Portland. It just made sense to me. The geometry of popular culture is usually either very rigid or very organic and I never thought Steve Jobs was some sort of genius as much as he was simply good at listening to the world around him and being open to curved edges through the curves of his own mind. Well now I have been vindicated. This is a 1996 quote by Steve Jobs about Bill Gates from Pingdom:

• I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.
  

What is an Open-Source Reality?

A computer is a machine which uses the most basic juxtaposition in existence in order to express a potentially infinite variety of perturbations. Perturbations of what juxtaposition? Opposites, naturally. This makes it perfect as an analogy for causality, especially when critically analyzing society. The open-source software issue is perhaps the most concrete example of a far larger, more abstract, and inherent issue to our world.

Here are the dimensions of computer code:

• Binary
• Machine language
• Programming language
• User language

Binary is wrapped up in machine language, which is wrapped up in programming language, which is wrapped up in user language.

Binary can be interpreted by any number of machine languages, which can be interpreted by any number of programming languages, which can be interpreted by any number of user languages, which can in turn be read and edited by an infinite variety of individuals.

Keep this in mind as you consider that any individual's reality is the juxtaposition between their internal reality and their external reality. In other words, our choices are both the result of the momentum of our thoughts and the momentum of our society, which are interdependent.

A user language is an upbringing, a programming language is a nationality, a machine language is a belief system, and binary is the awareness of universal opposites.

If a woman wants to marry another woman, for example, she may have to transcend the limits of her upbringing, nationality, belief system, and awareness of opposites in order to do so. To her advantage, though, is the inherent transcendence of opposites expressed through the way her homosexuality contrasts with the society around her. If she were to become open about it she would be a force of transcendence for other homosexuals because she would be showing them how to read the source code of their reality, thereby enabling them to edit it with their own choices.

If a woman wants to be able to free her schizophrenic brother from his difficulty in distinguishing between the opposites of reality and fantasy, she must discover how to read the source code of the illness through neuroanatomy and then perhaps edit it, thereby curing it on his behalf. To her advantage would be her close familiarity with the dysfunction. Jill Bolte Taylor is one such woman who, on her lifelong quest to better understand the brain, suffered a massive stroke directly in the heart of her language and logic center and lived to describe it in exquisite scientific detail as a glimpse of nirvana.

An open-source reality is the equality of opportunity for all individuals to know the source codes of causality and unify their internal and external realities, thereby knowing true freedom.

No One Really Dies if We All Share The Same Soul

The belief in God is not the belief in God if God does not exist.

It is merely, then, the adherence of a truly limitless consciousness channeled from within the right brain to a structure of false limitations within the left brain.

This consciousness is not dependent on the body for survival and therefore carries with it an individual's sense of the eternal. It is characterized by its undefinable presence and its stewardship of subjective input.

An atheist may call this their humanity, ability to appreciate art, or a roaring success for natural selection's foray into complexity, which are all true.

If the left brain is possessed by an ego, as almost all are, its momentum of definition may necessitate that this limitless consciousness be split into the diametrical limitations of 'God' and 'self,' followed by a reconciliation of their respective transcendent characteristics:

• The 'self' label would assume the characteristics of the 'steward of input' and become synonymous with the 'soul' label.

• The 'God' label would assume the characteristics of the undefinable presence and be expected to judge the 'soul' according to its stewardship of input upon the body's final deterioration.

Ironically, the mind then attributes mysterious phenomena to acts of 'God' while they are in fact just distant extensions of the very consciousness observing them.

The mind's ability to ask questions it is not capable of answering naturally submits it to manipulation from authoritative figures which become analogous to 'God' and effortlessly turn an individual's fear of death and the unknown into a method of control. The authorities are equally as possessed by their egos, however, and reflect this disproportion in their manipulation of reality beyond their familiarity with the consequences.

One alternative to letting mystery be distilled by authority is to become comfortable with it first hand. An individual's 'personal God' can be derived directly from the natural environment as I have exemplified in my previous post, The Boddhi Tree is a Schedule One Controlled Substance.

This paradoxical era of illusory separateness is analogous to Christ's three days in 'hell' and will probably end once the human brain is reverse engineered.

The Boddhi Tree is a Schedule One Controlled Substance

Every now and then I hear people in power speak their minds. Most of the time it's seems to be rather erroneous and maddening no matter their side of the isle, especially when it comes to the drug war. See here:

"People don't use drugs accidentally. They use them for self medication and for coping with life...I don't see a lot of recreational marijuana users any longer."
- William Janes, Florida’s director of the Office of Drug Control

Janes cited more faith-based involvement as well as more extensive measures in the Drug Free Workplace initiatives as solutions to the nation's drug problem.

It's hard to know where to begin with this.
Let's start with the meaning of "recreation" and how it can be used to replace "faith."

"Refreshment of one's mind or body after work through activity that amuses or stimulates; play."
- American Heritage

"Literally, to create again something that once existed or is believed to have existed but which no longer survives."
- Oxford

"Sometimes its use implies that the activities have positive value in terms of mental and physical therapy."
- Oxford

I will use these references later, as now I must touch on the idea that faith-based initiatives are a solution.

Faith is a contrived abstraction of what is concretely available in psychedelics, which are usually derived form either either fungi or flora that have been in existence longer than humanity. I was personally freed from organized religion by Sam Harris' The End of Faith and was freed from the subsequent debilitating nihilism by psychedelics.

Now to the supposed difference between "recreation" and "coping."

It is well known with many Beatles aficionados that John Lennon took LSD to escape the trials of fame and stress and thereby reconnect with the part of himself that produced the most authentic art.

Have you noticed the way some artists get out of touch with that part of themselves that is most authentic and creative once they have become rich and famous? This is not a coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that Lennon's songwriting improved as the Beatles got older. The difference between Love Me Do and Tomorrow Never Knows is almost the difference between two completely different bands.

Allow me to describe what, exactly, takes place in this particular process. My ability to describe this is made possible by the inherent similarities in how all individuals experience and integrate altered states of consciousness.

When I recreationally use mind-altering compounds I am simultaneously doing two interrelated things; coping and recreation. Here I describe them in their true, singular context using the dictionary definitions above:

I am refreshing my mind by stimulating it beyond its ability to maintain a sense of self, which is where emotional baggage is anchored.

I am creating again the knowledge which no longer survives that All are One and One is All.

I am therapeutically exercising my sense and understanding of the unknown and undefinable.

There is no difference between "coping" and "recreation" in a world built of lies.

I shall not ask the establishment which forms of recreation are permitted because the establishment itself is the embodiment of an exile from true recreation.

As far as drug-free workplaces go, it is a no-brainer that wage slavery requires mental slavery.

Part Two of Today's Joseph Campbell Inspirations

Dear Robert Mugabe:

"The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today."
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

To clarify, Mugabe has always been a polarizing and divisive figure, but his power-intoxication has pushed it to epic proportions.

Evolution Is A Chemical Reaction In Four Dimensions

What do fatal human difficulties and ecstatic joy have in common?

They are both expressions of a schism in the consistency between environmental complexity and the complexity of natural selection in humans. In other words, the Darwinian rules have changed since before addiction and suicide, for example; when society, culture and language did not yet exist.

This change was simply the initiation of natural selection's causality into a more abstract and powerful realm. An individual is not physically attached to what they are addicted to or to their suicidal stimulus; people follow the momentum of their thoughts, most of which are older than them and outlive them as well, like religion or genetic predisposition for schizophrenia.

It is not as if lesser animals cannot become addicted to a substance, the addiction merely manifests itself as a co-evolution like bees to pollen. When co-evolution does not occur, as in the case of addiction, it is because the environmental context, such as an institutional drug war, is operating inconsistently relative to the default, structureless context of any individual who would otherwise be free to utilize a novel compound instead of be enslaved to it like much of the natural world and numerous indigenous populations.

Researchers are increasingly realizing, as another example, that cancer is the result of aberrant environmental influences. There is nothing evolutionary about a tumor - it is an unconscious genetic rebellion that directly results from its limited resilience to our wildly overconfident industrial tampering. Or as Caitlin astutely noted, "why do they want me to mail in the tops of my yogurt for cancer research when the yogurt comes in cancerous, non-recyclable plastic?"

Now picture a double-helix of causality:

An abstract cause to a concrete effect is the feeling of romance to a wedding day, though the feeling of romance does not always result in a wedding.
A concrete cause to an abstract effect to pair with this is dopamine surges to the feeling of joy at the altar, though years of dopamine surges do not always culminate in the ecstatic joy made possible at the altar.

So when we ask "why," we are really asking an abstract form of "how," and when we are asking "how," we are really asking a concrete form of "why." The threshold rests in whether or not the causalities come directly or indirectly in contact.

"Where formerly causal bodies were visible, now only their secondary effects come to focus in the little hard-fact pupil of the human eye. The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward, therefore, not by the gods, who have become invisible, but by the heroes, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realized."
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

You Don't Need Water to Take These Soul Vitamins

Part 1: "The Fountain of Youth is Not for Pouring Into Your Ice Tray"

Browse by artist, browse by album, but for the love of God, please don't browse by genre. Genre's utility is limited to academic genealogy at most.
Music is supposed to be a strange tapestry that weaves in and out of our lives, not a cordoned-off amusement that is prohibited from mystery unless granted at the appropriate scene/act/play. It is to interrupt you and define itself by organic and human means. When it permeates the mundane and gives life a cinematic quality is when it has achieved its true purpose as an art form.
The only way to get around genre while being comfortable with its hap-hazard nature is to stay in good company.

Part 2: "We Chopped the Shade Trees Down to Build a Sunblock Factory"

There is friction between individuals who know how to live presently and emptily and the institutions that individuals comprise. The institutions and constructs behave as if there is a goal to be reached, but are unable to name one that is both complete and consistent.
There is a paradigm filled to the brim with "action items" and "spreadsheets" but they exist only because the people who do not know how to live presently and emptily cannot find the bottom of their bellies.
There is a greater debt being created than by those who do not wish to "contribute" or "fit in". It is created by those who perpetuate the illusion that there is anything to contribute or anything to fit into.
Absolutely no comfort taken for granted by a society either helps the individuals therein live presently and emptily nor does it exist outside the purpose of creating individual wealth for those who have nothing to believe in or learn about.
The world is controlled by those who love control, not by those who know what they are doing.
It is time for individuals to exempt themselves from the wearing of masks sold in bulk at the outlets of ideology and retain their true, empty, eternal identities as mere barnacles on a planet bobbing selflessly through a universe too beautiful to pollute with blind intention and arbitrary definition."

The One-Dimensional Man Is Alive and Well

The following is a pile-up of comments from the "Richard Dawkins proving Bill O'Reilly's stupidity" video on YouTube which involved an exchange I had with a social-Darwinist who hates Darwin, also known as a fine specimen.

[not edited for content or clarity]

Test Group:

• "Liberals are the Fools...look at the word Homophobic....homo..derived from homo sapien...meaning man or man kind...and phobic meaning irrational fear of....together liberals of pavlov dog syndrome define it as fear of homosexuality....by all rights it would mean fear of man....so it may have meaning to a lesbian!...off subject yes but true!"

Control Group:

• "Actually "homo" means "man" in "homo sapiens," which means "thinking man," while "homo" in "homosexual," relates to the scientific term "homogeneous," which means "invariance," and relates to the fact that there is no sexual variance between partners. Stay in school."

TG:

• "Ok Gene...now that was explained...explain this...why is a non bia's term not used like homosexual? Why is street slang terms like "gay" used, which seems to promote homosexuality. And why can't people accept the street slang term "fag" which rejects homosexuality...Does a society have to accept homosexuality....why not bestiality or incestual sex between to adults...why stop at homosexuality...why not have a total cesspool society...maybe crap isn't a turn on to them..and adult incestual sex is"

CG:

• "The connotations of words like "gay" and "fag" are determined by how people use them. No one has absolute control over them. As far as the difference between homosexuals and other sexual minorities go, it is mostly an issue of marriage. People always have and always will do whatever they choose. The only reason homosexuality has become such an issue is because they have been asking for marital recognition form the government, which has galvanized conservatives to ostracize them further."

TG:

• "Gene in the homosexual city of San Francisco...capital of liberalism ..totalitarians of guns...98 murders took place there...and 51 murders so far this year. Do you think the mayor Gavin Newsom is so engrossed with homosexuals aberrant behaviors he is neglecting is duty as Mayor. And do you think it is safer to be in Iraq then in the atheist, Aids infested, murderous city of San Francisco?"

• "98 in 2007"

CG:

• "No. Have you been there?"

TG:

• "Yes I have been there...San Francisco is a City stuck in what the pschological community would call the anal stage. Where adult liberals are stuck playing and experimenting with DOO DOO!.."

CG:

• "Well the reason I ask is because most of San Francisco's violent crime is perpetrated by gang members and related to drugs, which are the result of racial hatred and ignorant social policies. So I find it rather ironic you blame the gays."

TG:

• "Wow Gene you are really a homo militant...easy on the skin pipe....so what is the racial hated..explain..and what is the ignorant social policies...the poor doesn't get enough hand out...welfare..childcare..free medical..free education...or is it the acceptance of social pollution in SF...the genetic footprints of aberrant behaviors..."

CG:

• "As I said, stay in school."

It is entirely likely that I could be dragged into this until Terence McKenna reincarnates as the Tenth Avatar of Vishnu but I will resist in the interest of sanity.

My Structure is the Antidote to Your Content

Remember that story about that guy named "Satan" who competed with that guy named "God" for his own kingdom? Well the story had nothing to say politically or morally. It was a valiant attempt to set the metaphysical/psychological record straight before it even got that crooked. Well now it's crooked as hell (pun intended), so here we go again...

• As Joseph Campbell auspiciously noted, the metaphysical realm is reflected from within.

• Therefore, "Satan" is the ego and "God" is consciousness, whereby consciousness exists within only the present moment, and the ego exists in exile from it. The entire Bible is a power-drunk misconstruction of this.
  

• The "Kingdom of God," furthermore, is where all of existence save for the ego resides, for the present moment and the "Kingdom of God" are one, and "Evil" is the entropic and inconsistent behavior of the ego.
  

So when the "Good Book" these curious stories are derived from also says something to the effect of 'those in Hell can see those in Heaven, but not the other way around,' it really just means that the dreamer cannot understand awakening the way the awakened can understand the dream.

This is where Christian mysticism and eastern mysticism share the same source.

I leave you with a common Christian scare tactic and its proper rebuttal:

• "Satan's greatest victory was convincing man he didn't exist."

• No; Satan's greatest victory was telling paranoid people "Satan's greatest victory was convincing man he didn't exist" because Satan's greatest victory was semantics.

Do You Ever Think About Thinking? That's Time-Travel.

Science fiction is any imagined future enabled by the scientific method. Before the scientific method, imagined futures necessarily involved mystical belief, for too few objective colors had been collectively known to paint that sort of intellectual image into popular culture.

The theoretical parameters of the technological singularity will dramatically thrust the parameters of scientific speculation into an entirely new dimension as well. It is no longer fruitful to wonder if it will be possible to end fossil-fuel dependence or explore distant heavenly bodies, because it is only a matter of time.

Speculation thereafter will be the Ouroboros of introspection and metaphysics that will require endless possibilities to incubate - endless possibilities brought about by utter, utter change.

Sloughing The Yesteryear Grinches

I had an interesting dialog on Onward Oregon's forums:

Klahowya (hello) Everyone,


My name is Collin Ferguson and I am with a new non-profit called Cascadia Commons. We are working towards a new and innovative approach to building a progressive movement in the Pacific Northwest, and that is ending the duplication of efforts amongst community service and charitable organizations in Cascadia. Cascadia Commons is forming what is called an "umbrella organization" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_organization) dedicated to bioregional sustainability. Our website is brand new, so it does not have all the necessary information, nevertheless, I encourage you to make regular visits as our organization matures (http://www.cascadiacommons.org).

The idea is to gather progressive organizations from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, British Columbia, and Alaska, and areas within the bioregion in the states of Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Northern California, then bring all these organizations to one table, discuss strategies, and share financial and volunteer resources. The philosophy we adhere to is known as "bioregionalism", which is a very broad topic ranging between environmental efforts to socioeconomic efforts. There is a lot to discuss and like Onward Oregon, we are looking for ideas. We are very interested in working with Onward Oregon, as well as working with several similar organizations in the region.

If we truly want sustainability in our states and in the Pacific Northwest, if we want to mitigate the potential problems of Global Warming, then our efforts must also be efficient. I would like to discuss with all of you how we may best form this collective effort.


Kloshe nanitch (take care and stand guard),

Collin S. Ferguson
Cascadia Commons
Founding Member

to which I replied:

I have thought a lot about Cascadian autonomy lately because I have noticed a lot of good ideas not getting off the ground due to political hurdles thousands of miles away. It occurs to me that a spirit of autonomy could come about regardless of official boundaries and definitions through just the right amount of innovation. The federal government has the prerogative to withhold vital funding unless the centralized policy and ideology is adequately reflected in the constituency. Key to this innovation, however, is the knowledge that many fund raising options are not on the table, even though those fund raising options are themselves leverage to put other things on the table.

For example, how much money could Oregon save and/or raise by:

opting out of the drug war? No reasonable economist can argue with this.

forcing financial transparency on corporations that funnel massive amounts of the local economy into their out-of-state coffers? This gives irrefutable incentive for citizens to divest in the corporate stranglehold and reinvest in community.

supporting a local, digital, debit currency capable of bolstering the integrity of the middle class? This would guard against meaningless market speculation, which is how energy companies are holding the coastlines and Alaska ransom.

rapidly retooling for a carbon-neutral economy using in-state resources? This presents the opportunity to export an entire paradigm!

A lot of this may sound like zany Ron Paul talk but I think it's time to get serious about the abundant possibilities that cannot be ignored as well as opportunities to solve, whole cloth, the problems that came out of the 20th century.

and was responded with:

Gene,

You're on the ball.

Cascadia Commons is a 501 (c) 3, so unlike Onward Oregon, we cannot shape legislation, endorse campaigns or politicians, and we have to take a rather moderate approach to our efforts, i.e. we cannot make any bold political statements. But, this is why we want to have a loose association with a 501 (c) 4, so we can have a left hand and right hand type of movement.

Currently, Cascadia Commons is seeking to form what is called an "Umbrella" or "Coalition" corporation where its members are non-profit organizations. We will also have a general membership, but the emphasis is on 501 (c) 3 corporations joining our cause for bioregional sustainability. This way, we prevent the duplication of efforts and share financial and volunteer resources. Cascadia Commons is also seeking to join a larger umbrella called Community Prosper, which seeks to be a Web 3.0 networking site for Cascadians involved in the bioregional movement. They are partnered with a group called Community Way, which, and you'll be really happy to hear about this Gene, is seeking to establish a community credit trading system in Portland and Cascadia at large. It can be described as a modern bartering system. To learn more, please visit http://www.communityprosper.org. If the site is not up, check back in a couple of days. There will also be a soft beta launch of the Community Way program at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland on July 27th, 2008. I encourage all of you to attend.

Now, back to Onward Oregon. I would really love to see Onward Oregon to establish an Onward Cascadia that is a coalition/umbrella 501 (c) 4 corporation representing all other 501 (c) 4's in the bioregion. I have a friend with the Earth Community Alliance (ECA) that might be interested in this process. The ECA is taking an active stance against the LNG pipeline proposal in Oregon, and I am sure many of the members of Onward Oregon are against this effort too. Forming a coalition of political groups in Cascadia would be extremely advantageous, because there is one thing that Cascadia has a lot of, and that is political action groups. There is so much duplication. So much competition for financial and volunteer resources. What if all these political groups were to work together seeking to champion the rights of their localities and the bioregion at large?


Sincerely,

Collin S. Ferguson

P.S. The end goal of course, is to create a model for democracy and sustainability that not only changes the Pacific Northwest, but also changes the United States, Canada, North America, the Earth, the Universe.

So basically we need to defrag the progressive movement in the Pacific Northwest because we know what we're doing and we're damn smart!

An Obsession with Big Toys and Shiny Logos

The Soviet Union collapsed because they over-extended their poor economics.
They spent all the money they needed to feed their proletariat on tanks, planes, and ships.
What is the point in fighting for someone who has starved to death?
After a dysfunctional revolution they now answer to a mob of washed-up KGB trolls.

We will collapse because we over-extend our poor ideology.
We spend all our attention on what we got right in the past so that we never get anything right in the future.
What is the point in fighting for private property when the property is fallow, radioactive, or foreclosed?
Who will we answer to? Another industrial stranglehold?

Wardriving From My Roof, Memes for the Masses

Part 1: "The Day-Trader Cashed Out, Sorry"

If longer life expectancies are destroying the nation's ability to socialize retirement benefits, obviously life expectancies should be incorporated into a stable equation capable of establishing an indefinite life expectancy for the socialized system itself.
Fundamentally, labor is leaving the workforce in demand of benefits faster than labor is entering the workforce capable of providing them.
If the gap can be replaced with the automated labor which comprises Kurzweil's anticipation of singularity, ensuring that no individual or net jobs are sacrificed, then not only is socialized retirement a possibility, but an inevitability which will coincide with much greater ones.

Part 2: "Mount Mandara - The Shortcut"

The sound of elders and youngsters pining for the day they die so as to escape the chains of life and live eternally in a place of meaningless ritual is the sound of elders and youngsters pining for the moment they land, but won't because the pilot has parachuted with all their cash.

My Consciousness is Gravity to Your House of Cards

What the guardians of a $70 trillion pool of money don't want you to know: if you built change and adaptation into everything, that money would be yours.
Here's how: that money is a hedge fund that gets dumped into by all the people who protect your assets and own your bosses - insurance companies and investors. The entire purpose of the pool is to exist, grow, and be owned by brutally competitive elites who have no interest in the rest of their generation, much less a future's.
If infrastructure where "human scale" in much the way Bruce Mau envisions a world designed around itself, as opposed to unconscious whims, the $70 trillion pool would grow stagnant and the gradually shifting identities responsible for it would begin to invest it once noting the drastic reduction in market risk due to long-term sustainability and middle-class solubility.
The investments would only have one place to go - the "human scale" market which by this time is beginning to swallow up the classes into a single, surging, and remarkably simple economy with an interest in only the present so as to last forever.
The potential for ideologues to eliminate the glimmer in their eyes will allow us all to know a greater glimmer which awaits in sublime silence.

The Macrocosm Reflected in the Microcosm

Self-awareness is what allowed Kurt Godel to discover his incompleteness theorems.
That is, he observed the assumptions that were involved in mathematical reasoning as they arose and recursively fed them back into the equation until he was concretely aware that completeness and consistency cannot share the same universe.
This obvious truth embodies the entire "right brain" of rational thought - all of mathematics and science reflects this truth but very little of it is placed in service of it.
Genes, through their structure and composition, are intimately tied to the rest of the universe in that they externalize entropy in exponentially-increasing efficiency and variety of method but are in fact just pieces of that universe.
This is where Godel comes in.
Anywhere time exists an equation is taking place. It is made up of infinitesimally simple completed equations and will comprise an infinitely complex equation that does not exist yet.
This equation, the ones that comprise it, and the one it is forming, cannot be any more complete and consistent simultaneously than the ones that drove Godel to insanity and eventually indirect suicide.
There। How's that for a theory of everything?

Net Neutrality - Literal and Figurative

Those opposed to net neutrality are opposed to such for a reason so simple as to negate any need for me to explain the ideology directly involved in it. Net neutrality as it still exists is the result of nature's ability to consistently maintain a dimension of absolute equanimity over any paradigm.

Take for example the world prior to industrialization. Though ignorance and fear ran rampant for centuries prior to this paradigm, naturalism and mysticism were the bastions of potential that kept us alive long enough to see, ironically, our next stage - ruthless reason. So while Hitler took science and turned it into a force of evil, a silent effort to invent universal networking bubbled up underneath. And now, in an era where so much is scientifically deterministic, we remain inexorably in contact with the unknown, the magical, the free, and the innocent through a very product of that unmerciful rationality - the internet.

Those opposed to net neutrality are opposed to such because the ideology they subscribe to is dramatically less sophisticated than the very world the information age is allowing to flower.

They are unaware of this, however, because it is symptomatic of why they oppose it.

BTW - Steve Jobs did drugs at Reed.

Roots and Sources

Debating the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution is like debating the "strengths and weaknesses" of mathematics. No one came up with it. It's just how stuff works. See here:

States exist. (Point)

States delineate, or experience. (Line)

States recursively delineate, leading to self-awareness. (Plane)

States evolve into new states. (Form, or new Point)

The universe is a mass of changing states in which beauty and purpose are synonymous, motivating evolution.

The lower dimensions of God's being are debating the existence of God. Remarkable!

Because the mythology never ends...

The realest, most powerful and life-altering experiences come infinitely renewable, cheap, and satisfaction guaranteed. You don't have to believe me - I can't get between your neurons, but if I could you wouldn't be able to deny it.

Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Radiohead, with In Rainbows, embodied the economic thrust of my last post accurately enough for me to dedicate this to them. A prelude to the death of the RIAA, perhaps.

A frequency of infinite characteristic
pouring from the present moment
the wavelength that of ecstasy
Priceless subjectivity
rendering music so real
every strum has a soul
and every beat a lover
The musicians are avatars of Vishnu
the venue the Kingdom of God
and the fans the redeemed