It just struck me very strongly that the fact that DUELING was still popular and apparently accepted among at least some of our founding fathers SHOULD BE TAKEN AS A WARNING.
My opinion of “originalism” in Constitutional interpretation just deteriorated. Not that it was high to start with.
Why “Conservatives” want to conserve the barbaric concepts from the past is something I fail to understand. At the time of the founding of the country, we gave lip service to equality. It’s time to take action to elect and support people who will work to promote equality. And trying to act like we can have equality in the US when it’s not present all over the globe is a farce.
May all beings be happy. May all beings have the causes of happiness.
Balance is the core element of all true spiritual paths. The human condition consigns us to be killers, whether of plants, the insects or fungi that would have otherwise have eaten them, or “higher” life forms.
The salient question is what we make of the inevitable pain we cause. Since without evil, we wouldn’t even know what good is, some evil must exist in for good to be recognized.
But balance in real life is much more complicated than choosing good or evil. Most of the time we don’t know which one we are choosing until years / decades later, and even then, what appeared evil may end up being the compost that brought forth the beautiful flower of a later, larger good.
So what else might we consider trying to balance? The food we consume and the energy we expend? Now there’s a huge effort right there! The amount of work we do and the time we “relax”? The amount of money we earn and what we spend? The skills we develop versus the friendships we nurture?
Of course that last one isn’t really an either / or. We can build friendships with people who are working on similar skill development, or those we mentor or are mentored by.
How do we balance our feeling of integrity when fighting for justice against people who disagree with us?
Is the United States setting itself up for a major internal conflict with the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice?
Isn’t it time for humanity to vomit up the remains of the undigested apple of knowledge of good and evil? It was always a false choice. That was the greater sin. Believing that we could KNOW GOOD AND EVIL, rather than focusing on pragmatic realities for the benefit of all.
I feel depressed and disgusted when confronted by the actions of people who think they are doing good by forcing women to bear unwanted children.
How many people existing today were actually PLANNED by their parents? When I was in the home-birth education course, decades ago, we were the ONLY couple of 10 who had actually planned that conception at that time. Those working against abortion are basically saying “I (or others) suffered, so must you.” Could it be perverse cruelty that drives them? Why is the unborn more important than the born? Only because we are tied to values that date from the time when a group kept its property by having soldiers to defend it to the death. The perceived necessities of group survival morphed into forcing individual behavior.
In most cultures on the earth today, the worst thing that can happen is to be burdened with the care of undesired offspring. I see many friends and acquaintances whose lives and dreams were put on hold for decades, or forever, by having to become parents before they were ready. The price of a moment’s passion or victimization can be steep.
I have never seen any historians specifically state that the need for armies was due in large part to the filling of the parts of the earth where it is relatively easy to survive. This 5000 year old imbalance is philosophically starting to tip back, but without renouncing our belief in the possibility of self-righteousness,I think attaining balance will be tough job.
May all beings be happy, and more importantly, may all beings have the causes of happiness.
To achieve that, we must promote education and basic security for all. That will be much easier if we promote policies that ensure children are born when they have a nurturing space in society awaiting them. Right now, the dominant world culture promotes misery for most.
Today in the Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers, we used a new prompt methodology promoted by our fearless leader. We wrote a NOUN on a PIECE OF PAPER, passed it to the next person, added a verb, passed it to the next person, added an adjective, passed it to the next person, and added an adverb, passed to the next person, and added a gerund. It pushed many of us to write something we never would have in usual prompt based exercises. Plus some of us had a grammar review!
Tree Drool Flaky Lightly Thinking
The tree drooled. That was strange. But of course. This must be a dryad. A nominal tree, with the spirit of a nymph locked into it. Always a sad story, the nymph chose to give up freedom of movement in the world for freedom from sexual harassment by an obnoxious member of Olympia.
I chose to move lightly, watching in fascination as I perambulated the tree. Yes. It was definitely drool, not just sap dripping. The flaky bark had a horizontal slash that clearly hinted, if you squinted properly, at a mouth. It was a dryad’s drool.
I decided to offer the trapped being a blessing. After thinking it over, not knowing how much consciousness she retained, I chose to speak very slowly. “You paid a high price for the advancement of complexity at the hands of arrogant men. The times are changing. You have learned patience. I will report your condition to the new magicians. Maybe they can liberate you now.”
I stepped back, and slowly walked around the tree again. Yes, definitely drool. I felt sad for the dryad. Very sad. I felt sad for all of womankind. After all, it was our fertility that created the need for the male dominated armies to protect our territory. The simultaneous kundalini awakening of the entire male population of course created excesses. I hoped that the dryad experienced sufficient time to make sense of my message. I decided to tell her that I would be back. In a week, or a month, or a year, or ten years. All but the blink of an eye to a dryad trapped for the last 3000 years. A blink of an eye for her. For me, a big task, to locate a magician’s group that would help to liberate her. I needed to give her a name. A name that would entice the magicians to come to her aid. A name. But what name? What name would do the trick?
Her postulating drove me crazy. She was crazy. She said intuitive. I said imaginative at the least, probably crazy.
When I first met her, I wondered where she got her ideas. One day I found her alone, heavily breathing, her eyes closed. After a few more breaths, she settled into lighter breathing. A trance. That must be where she got those ideas.
She never could produce a shred of evidence for any of it. But her descriptions were extremely detailed and when she told me what she had seen, I felt like I was looking into another world.
The tea kettle whistled and brought me back to the current time. The current time, until I got to listen to the latest harvest of factoids from some other reality.
She drove me crazy, but I couldn’t leave her. Whether it was the pheremones, or the simple fact that we both knew we had better survival chances with each other than without, I was never able to figure out. But that morning I started to put together a plan. I was going to drive her crazy too. Make her question her reality. But how? Either I was going to have to learn to go into a trance, or my imagination needed an upgrade.
Now Linda could think more clearly. Now her true thoughts came to the surface.
Linda’s nascent understanding of who she was started to grow.
She started to catch some of her perceptions on their way to being modified; on the way to becoming thoughts, feelings and knowledge.
Part C
Linda started to experience awe more often. She devoured the literature on consciousness. She learned that chimpanzees can covet their neighbor’s sexual partner. Chimpanzees can covet their neighbor’s social status. But chimpanzees can’t ask “Is there another I, besides the one in this body, limited to these sexual partners and this place in the social structure?”
Part D
Linda started seeing her limitations dissolve. Linda knew that she was no longer a toddler, a kid, a teen, a college student, an independent head of household, with all of those incumbent burdens.
Part E
Linda no longer saw the fields of green, the flowers of red. Instead she saw the blades of ancient grasses. She saw her far ancestors harvesting the few golden wheat seeds which clung to their stalks. She saw the flowers with the eyes of the bee, so much closer to their real glorious colors.
She saw, through the eyes of the mole, the worms wriggling under the dark earth.
She experienced the jubilation of Hypatia, at the knowledge stored in the modern library of Alexandria.
She experienced liberation from care, after sitting at the feet of Patanjali.
She saw the sunlight. She no longer needed artifice from a venerable human to create interest in the world.
Part F
Linda walked to the fridge. She still needed to eat. She saw that old magnet declaring Hare Krishna! This time she understood. This time she knew what awaited her, the next time she chanted the name.
Part G
This time she knew that she didn’t need to chant the name. She was home.
Dave at Sozo’s made this special design for me this morning.
Mid-Michigan Word Gatherer’s Prompt: Phony!
Our group facilitator said I should call the original version (lost in cyber-space) SIXTY. So I did.
Sixty
Phony. Phony-ness. A wide-spread modern art-form.
Most humans project a protective image of themselves that reflects, as closely as their sub-conscious minds can, the idealized person of the culture in which they are embedded. The real person hides from the world, hides even from its own ego.
This is a distortion of our essence.
An ancient person was smart enough to keep their given name secret, to protect from the possibility of its use by antagonistic forces. This is legitimate camouflage, not phony-ness.
Early humans even learned to deceive by using the whites of their eyes to point others away from the tree with the ripe fruits, the precursor to the outright lie. But again, there is deception and there is deception. This type of deception was a natural outgrowth of our participation in the food-chain.
Development of complex language allowed humans to flourish numerically, multiplying varieties of adaptation and culture. Words power, and magic forms, the foundation of our high level ability to deceive and confuse, when we choose not to inform. Words, and the tones we use to utter them, underpin the modern phenomenon of phony-ness.
Ancient and pre-historic people couldn’t be phony. They could hide. As already noted, they needed to use camouflage and deception like most of their fellow complex animal life forms. But they weren’t phony. It never occurred to them to try to appear as something they weren’t to their tribal fellows, even as they were trapped in their roles within their community.
What’s the bottom line here? We serve ourselves when discerning between necessary deceit of the outsider, and trying to fool our nearest neighbors and kin.
Only modern people have the opportunity to be phony in this damaging way. It’s one of the curses of the modern world, stemming from the multiple groups which claim the allegiance of any modern person.
Phony people hide their true selves under layers of mirage. Or at least they try to. Programmed, from the day we are born, to take on the values of our cultural milieu, whether it fits with our particular karmic baggage, genetic predispositions, and family history, or not, we mostly do not even know our own true selves.
Thanks to Scott for trying this. I haven’t been doing the WordPress daily prompts very long, but was sad to see them end.
I loved the Lantern poem. Never could figure out how to tell you I liked most of what I found on your blog.
I have also enjoyed sharing with fellow bloggers.
And found a few blogs I really liked.
Well, my thought for exit is, the human condition is so trying, I wanna get out. My fantasy about evolving into a new species, Knomo Choicius, is why I started the blog after writing a novel for NaNoWriMo.
I clambered up the trunk of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil,
but this time
I did not eat of its fruit.
This time, I was
looking for something else.
Some other way
to filter the incoming deluge
of data.
I scanned the horizon, and finally
seeing the light, I tilted my head
downward, to see
what might be closer to me.
A different fruit. I sought a different fruit.
Tired of judging, and being judged.
Plants must seek light, and animals food.
Light good, dark undesirable.
Food good, enemy bad.
Humans were born in a garden.
We had no enemies in the myth.
What is the lesson?
The lesson to be learned?
The snake never sought to harm us.
In the absence of enemies, we can seek beauty.
We have time to contemplate our environment.
We can learn to see how beauty emerges from
the background. See how the background gives
birth to beauty.
Homo Sapiens birthed themselves thanks to Eve.
But the early stages of our reign were Homo Confusus.
Womo Charmiens yet awaits birth.
I clambered back down to earth.
I scrambled past the edge of the forest.
I rambled around in the clearing.
Down. Down under. Under the earth.
In the beginning, we never
had to look under the earth,
with all the fruit hanging at eye level.
After expulsion, God told us to work the earth.
Why didn’t we see that as the hint it was?
It was obvious that God’s ultimate purpose
was to make us work for understanding.
Not to wear us out to the point
that we couldn’t think straight.
Knowledge can be given, but understanding
has to be created by the individual.
Today is May 28th. In a little more than a week, I will celebrate my 60th birthday. I don’t have any ceremony planned. I will probably go to a local restaurant with a bakery, and have a piece of Dutch chocolate torte cake. That’s how I celebrated my divorce some years ago.
You can hardly go wrong with chocolate cake!
But today is also the 47th anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah ceremony. I have kindof fallen away, and attend a Spiritualist church these days. But culturally, I am still a “Bat Mitzvah” or Daughter of the Commandments. I certainly don’t follow all of them, but try to live my life in harmony with the values of the faith, as I understand it.
I go to the Spiritualist church, as they welcome me, and there are other like-minded seekers trying to adapt the best of the Bible to modern life.
They don’t have ceremonies like Jews and Catholics. They teach and practice meditation, so all can access the wisdom of higher Spirit in everyday life.
A “Rorsach” Owl, flying on an oxidized steel leaf spring. Colors lightened for artistic purposes. The Owl is the familiar of the Greek goddess Athena.
NEWS!!! My friend Cathy from Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers brought a chocolate cake to the writing group this am!!! It was delicious and moist, just like my mother used to make. She was happy to have a “Failure Cake” for the “Failure Analyst!” Some of the frosting got peeled up (we’d say delaminated in the steel industry) with a thin layer of cake attached to it, when the cake cooled with a flexible plastic lid over it. The vacuum (Boyle’s law, folks) sucked the lid down into contact with the frosting, which was supposed to be applied when the cake was still warm, or the frosting was warm, or whatever. So here’s to the perfect failure!
