Inspiration – KNOMO CHOICIUS

The Means Determine The Ends

People like to justify doing something they know is wrong to accomplish something that they think is right.

It’s true that there are higher truths and mundane truths.

Sometimes we might think it’s okay to break a law in order to live up to our moral ideals. We’re willing, in some circumstances, to pay the price of breaking the law.

Often, this comes up when people decide to use violence against their opponents.

Yet violence will beget violence.

In the Hebrew Bible, God told the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites. They refused. In my opinion, they did the right thing. Judaism has a history of encouraging argument with God, and disobedience.

For example, God teased Adam and Eve, using reverse psychology (Don’t eat that apple!!), to get them to “Eat THE Apple.” It wasn’t until Eve disobeyed that she became a human exercising choice. Free will is a different story. But without a real option to make some choices, we are like most other animals, usually acting out of our genetic programming. Wasn’t God sick of watching a play with everything predetermined? Giving humans a higher level of choice spiced things up.

Anyway, which was worse? Eve feeding the apple to Adam? Or Cain killing Abel?

Even if we don’t have a clear answer, the direct message of the Cain killing Abel story is that killing another person in anger is bad. Maybe the point of God’s command to exterminate the Canaanites was for us to realize that it would be better to make friends. Which happened at some point. Why else were the prophets always ranting about not marrying them?

The consequences of the descendants of the Biblical Israelites choosing to try to obey God after a 3000 year delay are plain to see, for anyone with a sense of the phrase “cause and effect.” It’s very sad. It’s very painful. It’s very shameful. It’s impossible to find words to adequately describe the growing horror.

Rene Girard, in his book “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,” explains that the whole point of almost all of human culture, as hidden in many myths from around the world, is to contain the intermittent violence that inevitably erupts whenever humans live together. Girard points out that NO “SIDE” will ever acknowledge that “We started it.” Billy Joel riffed on this theme in his famous

“We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

Maybe God changed “his” mind in the intervening series of eternities. There are multiple instructions in the Bible where humans are instructed to love their neighbors and enemies, and to be kind to the stranger.

The problem is that kindness requires contemplation. Because expressing kindness to one person may require different actions that would befit someone else. We need skill and desire to be kind. We need to be willing to put in the time.

Above clipart from https://clipart-library.com/clipart/cause-and-effect-clipart_34.html

Note that most complicated things in the world do not result from the “simple cause and effect” that kids are taught in school. The truth is closer to the Buddhist idea of “dependent arising.” The rain does not, by itself,” cause a rainbow. Other conditions are required to see a rainbow. MANY other conditions must be met.

I’d like to acknowledge Daniel Aliya for bringing up to me the idea that the means determine the ends. I see this as a great truth, probably greater than the other “great truth,” more commonly spoken, that the ends justify the means. See Aldous Huxley on this idea.

Ear Candling with the Dominicans

Here is Part 2 of Phil VanHuffel’s series on Aging. Hope you enjoy. He’d love to hear from you!

Have you ever heard the term “ear candling”? Neither had I. When someone suggested this procedure to improve hearing, curiosity took over. I learned that it was not a recommended medical process but a homeopathic remedy. It was offered at the Dominican Center in Grand Rapids. That someone was raving about the results. Like a cat with a ball of catnip, I couldn’t resist trying it.

So, in about 2004 I scheduled a session. It was not inexpensive. It was not covered by Medicare. Nonetheless I had to try it. The procedure began with a massage to relax me. Then a warm towel was placed on my head, and I was told to close my eyes. The therapist lit a candle and held it close to my left ear. The heat from the candle began to warm my ear. I experienced something flowing from my ear. The sensation of ear wax leaving the ear canal is the best way to describe it. It took fifteen minutes She did the right ear next. When she was finished, I walked outside and heard birds singing loudly. I couldn’t remember ever hearing birds that clearly. I was sold.

Airplanes, rental cars, hotels, and work continued to occupy my time. My travel schedule didn’t ease up. After a few years, I decided to engage the homeopathic procedure once again. This time the results were not as dramatic. Then, one day, my left ear went dead.

In 2007 I scheduled an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat doctor. He ran a series of audio tests. His conclusion was that I had severe nerve damage in my left ear and less severe damage in my right ear. He didn’t offer any further advice or remedy. So, I went on my way and continued to hear with my right ear.

When Jean, my wife, complained that I wasn’t listening, I decided to invest in some hearing aids. I began to use the internet to find options. Then I received an ad in the mail, offering cheap hearing devices. I bit. A week later I received a package from a company in Illinois containing two earpieces. I followed the instructions and put them in my ears. I could actually hear better.

But problems persisted. I could not hear conversations when we ate at a restaurant, unless we were in a booth. Even then, the background noise caused a din that made hearing conversations difficult especially if the speaker were soft-spoken. I wanted more. So, I upgraded to a higher priced version from the same company in Illinois. This lasted for about six months. My hearing got worse. Keep in mind that I was purchasing products in double digits each.

My next adventure into the audio-racket was an ad that arrived in the mail. It touted a doctor in Arizona who had developed state-of-the-art technology in hearing aids and was now offering it locally in Grand Rapids. In 2009 I made an appointment. My ultimate mistake.

When I arrived at the storefront address, I was greeted with much ado. I should have seen it coming. I went through the routine hearing tests which confirmed what I already knew. I couldn’t hear! But help was on the way. I now graduated from double digits per piece to triple digits per piece. At first the new devices worked much better than the earlier ones. But they needed to be charged every night. That meant a new piece of hardware that accompanied me on every trip. Another thing to keep track of.

With some adjustments, after I had used them for a month, I was satisfied with their performance. About a year later one of the aids quit working. I went back to the office only to find a sign that they had closed. I went to the parent company’s website seeking help only to be advised that if I needed service I would have to travel to Lansing or Detroit. Evidently Zounds, the name of the maker, was in financial straits. Back to square one.

Now I was spoiled. I had some of my hearing back with hearing aids. It was now 2011. I sought out another source for more reliable service. I found Hearing Life located within 5 miles of my house. I made an appointment and visited the office. The company had several locations in Michigan. They were distributors of other manufacturers. The person who I met with was professional with certified credentials for evaluating hearing.

Another round of audio testing was performed. This time I was shown graphs of each ear’s acuity at different frequencies of sound. My left ear was under 50% at many levels and below 25% at the high end of the frequencies. Now I was given a choice. Some choice! I could get a pair for roughly $1000.00 a piece that would only adjust volume, or I could get a pair for roughly $2500.00 a piece that would modulate sound and cancel background noise. So, I had a thirty-day tryout period and if I kept them the sale would be complete. I kept them. In a quiet room I could hear much better. In a restaurant, not so much.

After three years, an upgrade was offered. It was only $1000.00 a piece extra. I am now wearing the upgrade, and I still can’t hear that well in a restaurant. But I had opted for non-rechargeable, battery-operated devices. I don’t need a charger and the batteries are free. I get a review twice per year and any adjustments to the software are made during these visits.

The Gnat Cloud

Here’s your chance to learn about gnats on Wiki.

And here’s my short little poem. I really felt like spring had finally arrived. It’s been a cold and windy April and early May. Today was beautiful.

First, the crocuses

then forsythia

and daffodils.

Doomed ladybugs emerged

from the rims of potted plants, lie desiccated

on the windowsill.

Ant hills crown my

driveway, while the lawn greens.

But now, on a warm day,

the gnat cloud dances

on the slow breath of God.

Now.

Now, it’s spring.

Stream of Consciousness: Enough Hate

In 1973, I had a difficult experience with two teachers. I was outraged at accusations they made against me. I felt angry. I felt hatred. I was nauseated for a week. Note that these are my memories from a long time ago, so the exact details are fuzzy. But I realized that the hatred was making me sick. I renounced hatred then and there. I can still dislike, take actions against things I don’t like. But hatred is not beneficial in any way that I have ever been able to determine. Not that I have gone out of my way to try to find benefits of hatred. Although one book on critical thinking I read some years ago suggested that if you have to hate, hating ignorance and hatreds, for example, could be an intermediate step to moving beyond hate.

It is very depressing these days to be part of the American public. Having lived overseas in the 1970’s and 1980’s for a total of a little more than two years, I found out what people from other countries thought about American leaders. We interfered in many countries beyond the ones that were in the news due to the Vietnam war, and we took other actions to protect our comforts, even when they went against our stated values of democracy and freedom.

Recently, every day, the events happening in our country seem worse and worse. It’s hard to imagine how much worse it can get. The arrest of the extensively vetted green card holder, former UK Government employee, who just finished his masters degree at Columbia University, by all fact based accounts, someone who worked for peace and justice, is a much bigger problem than any of the news sources are saying. This goes far beyond free speech issues.

My neighbor, during the presidential campaign, insisted that “nobody is taking anybody away.” Well, he hadn’t read about Project 2025.

Read for yourself at the link below. My response: The members of any legitimate universal religion who promote sectarianism are betraying the higher teachings of their culture. The ADL used to promote tolerance, knowing that hatred is viral, and the targets never remain isolated. Now, they seem to have lost that most basic foundation of working for justice for all. The rise of far right Jewish groups goes to demonstrate what my wise friend Reverend Dan told me years ago. We do, in general, as we were done to, not as we would like to have done to ourselves. The competition among religious groups to out reproduce each other is a factor underlying the rise of the right, and the take-over by the intolerant, of national governments around the world. All of this getting us to focus on hating each other, instead of getting us to focus on what the powerful are doing to end humanity as a flowering of unique individuals, each of us doing our own thing to enrich the experience that humanity as a whole “uploads” to The Universal Consciousness, is a problem. Since the previous sentence is long winded, who knows who will try to understand it? Bottom line: Mahmoud Khalil is not a terrorist. His whole life speaks to his efforts at building a just peace. Why isn’t the UK speaking up louder about this?

We are now doing even worse things than what we’ve been doing to the Afghans who helped us during out twenty year military effort in their homeland.

As a person who tends toward gloomy outlooks, I have found, over the years, that taking a longterm view of the world helps me to stay centered and balanced. There was actually research done that demonstrated that while many people do better by staying in the NOW, depressed blood chemistry people often do better focusing on the past, present and future. That is how, after years of studying wisdom traditions from around the world, including science fiction, the Mythology of the Future, I am less gloomy than I was, despite the global turmoil being created by multiple organizations claiming to represent me, or “people like me”. Hint: I am unique and there is nobody else like me. Even my mother used to say that God broke the mold.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/israel-betar-deportation-list-trump?CMP=share_btn_url

I came from behind. Did you?

This is a “Ghost Pipe” plant! It seems unbelievably cool, and I am really amazed to have found several clumps on my property this past summer. That way, I did not have to feel bad about taking one back to the house, for science!

I come from behind. I imagine that many people might think that. David Levy quotes Barry Switzer having said “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” What proportion of our characteristics must be underdogs before we have a legitimate claim to having come from behind? For that matter, what scheme would be available to define the basic characteristics of any human?

I will try out my Thinking Skills to address this issue.

Hmm, would this ghost pipe be considered to have come from behind? As a plant, with no chlorophyll, that seems like it COULD be disadvantaged….

I found this “Ghost Pipe” or “Indian Pipe” while on a mushroom hunt. This is classified as a plant, but has no chlorophyll. It gets its nutrients from fungi in the soil.

A human is a certain type of animal that evolved on this planet, called Earth by its English speaking inhabitants. For the last 5,000 years at least, by the accounts of the social scientists, at least those finding themselves clinging to conventional wisdom, most humans live in fairly strongly hierarchical societies. I’m not talking a village chief, or even a multi-village “Big Man.” I’m talking multi-level with multi being definitely more than three. Three levels of society goes back to what some anthropologists consider the original human social hierarchy of Alpha and Shaman versus the men, women, and children. Of course it was always more complicated than that. But, we have to start somewhere. So does than mean that everyone but the Alpha and Shaman are coming from “behind”? Or are the men still in the top half? In matriarchal societies, would that mean the women were on top? So, thinking about it in this new way, I guess most people DO come from behind.

My ex always got very aggravated when someone would imply that he was part of “the people.” The people were uneducated, shallow, and boring. All characteristics that he most certainly did not apply to himself. Boring was definitely the biggest sin, at least in his book.

A week or so later, the white was staring to discolor to brown and black, and the open shape of the flower was starting to pinch into a seed pod. Eventually, it turned completely dark brown and black, and head dried and shrunk. I took the head back out to the swampy area where I found it, and sprinked the seeds on the ground.

So now we are moving from our place in the basic social hierarchy as the source of defining who we are / where we come from, to the realm of learned or/and chosen behavior. Behavior, as we all know, starts in the mind. I don’t think I have ever seen “entertaining and boring” as poles of a foundational system of categorizing people. But that brings us perhaps to something akin to either the Myers-Briggs personality typing program, or the Enneagram, or astrology of the Eastern or Western types.

The most promising on short reflection seems to be Myers-Briggs, where we could say that extroverts are ahead, or at least out front, and introverts are behind. Going on extroverted people being more likely to be regularly entertaining. Maybe I err, in using my ex’s system. But I will keep going on this premise for now. So going back to the main story line, most personality type statistics indicate that the extroverts are a bigger group than the introverts. So where’s the cut off for being behind? Do only the top 75% (or whatever the statistics say) of extroverts belong in “the ahead,” and the bottom 25% of extroverts have a legitimate claim to coming from behind?

Of course in today’s economy, a big chunk of what determines if you are coming from behind, or not, has to do with your financial resources. Sadly, the very few are on the very pinnacle, and the rest of us are not. So, by basic statistics, it seems that a lot of us might well have a legitimate claim to be coming from behind.

Do we get to combine the less “desirable” traits to claim greater disadvantage? Certainly this discussion is happening today.

Hmm. I am going to have to think about this….

Well, since I mentioned a mushroom hunt above, I will include this scanning electron microscope image of a spore from what I am quite confident was a Green Quilted Russula. They are edible, when fresh. Now t that I am confident I know how to identify them, the next time I find one, I will overcome my “Green Eggs and Ham” “yuck factor,” and cook some up. They are reputed to be very good eating!

What do YOU think???

Epistemologia

How do we know what we think we know? The first step is realize that we need to figure out how to evaluate the reliability of our thoughts. 30% of the USA has fallen into a massive, delusion, pulling everyone into the vortex of confusion. How do we start to climb out of it?

The First

In the Now, is the Known.
In the Now, is the Unknown.
In the Now, is the Knowable.
In the Now, is also the Unknowable.

For the Now is what’s known.
And of the Unknown, it may be Knowable or Unknowable.

Today’s Known may be tomorrow’s Unknown, just as
yesterday’s Unknown has sometimes become today’s Known
and other times, been recognized as the Unknowable.

The Known, the Unknown, and the Knowable, are Children of Time.
But the Unknowable is eternal.

The Second

Even as the Unknowable is eternal, it changes,
One day, we may meet some other who knows,
or figure it out for ourselves,
thereby changing ourselves.

Yet even at that meeting, the Unknowable will laugh,
as one who knows itself eternal, always sowing
a new crop of questions.

For there will always be a mystery, and it’s name is the Unknowable.
In the past, we hid the mystery, as we were the babes of eternity.

But now we are bold enough to hold the truest mystery up
as our lamp, whether it attract the demons or repel them.

We have walked enough roads to renounce the pseudo mysteries,
in favor of the real ones.

The Third

If we look with quick eyes, we will find the revealed truths of another.
A steadier gaze is required to find our own self evident truths.
All sons and daughters of the Known,
we must remember that even if
the revealed truth seems to walk with a steadier gait,
our own truth may be more reliable.

In either case, for good results, we must properly define
the conditions in which we found our truth.
That’s the hard part. Harder than finding the truth in the first place.

An always imperfect process, always leaving a piece of the
Unknown for someone else to study.

Because self evident truth is not available to the casual observer.
And no truth worth the name is everywhere eternal.

A Little Dose of Wisdom

The days with the pall of CoVid19 hanging over us Americans are stretching on far longer than most of us hoped or expected back in April, when we saw the Chinese beat back the spread of the dangerous disease in Wuhan in less than two months.

I certainly do not agree with our president’s approach to managing (mis-managing) the situation, but he is correct to point to China for the source of the disease. China has long been the outstanding source of communicable diseases in the modern world, due to the intimate mixing of human waste in the human food production network, aided and abetted by migrating birds who stop in the fish farm ponds, etc. It’s time that China stop these practices, as well as the live wild animal meat markets that appear to have been the direct source of this particular disease. That said, as David Levy implies (in his book Tools for Critical Thinking: Meta-thougths for Psychology), when we are discussing human affairs, it is incumbent to consider the effects of our actions, rather than trying to fit ideas into boxes labeled true or false. So just because almost all new infectious diseases (not Ebola) start in China, it’s not a reason to call it the Chinese Virus. Because the consequences of doing that are, on American soil anyway, increases in discrimination and violence and hate crimes toward Chinese people, or people who look Chinese.

How do we gain the discernment, the wisdom, to know how to sort out the shit from the Shinola, as the old saying went. The spin from the facts. The lies from the reality. How do we gain that discernment?

We start out by acknowledging that we, as humans, take a lot of short cuts when we fill our brains with knowledge, and that some of what we think we know must have been incorporated into our beliefs before it was properly understood.

Then, we move on to take action to correct the false information.

Tom Lombardo, who is now running the Center for Future Consciousness, has written a very clearly articulated and concise description of why and how we need to embrace the wisdom of looking to the future. Tom’s prescription for a better world calls for rejection (to my happiness) of the New Age concept of what he calls “Presentism.”

As a person with a very low level of cheerfulness hormones (my pen name, Shona Moonbeam, is tongue-in-cheek) I really don’t care for advice that tells me to focus on the present. The present is mostly boring and tedious, if not outright painful. But by making an effort to remember my whole life, past up to now, and hopes and dreams for the future, I feel more significant. Maybe I shouldn’t care about that, but so much of life feels dreary and difficult, that I do care to make my own edited version of my life for frequent playback. And I do hope that my struggles will ease those of some future people down the road.

What’s Wrong about the Concept of Make American Great Again?

Check out Tom’s new essay, entitled Make America Great Again? Yes, that is a question mark. The article hits home on a lot of relevant and important topics.

The Yin and Yang of Anxiety and Longing

Waiting. I am always waiting. Blame Pandora, if you have a need to blame. As the Buddha taught, humans in our inherently socialized condition always have to live with an undercurrent of anxiety and it’s mirror image, longing. So I wait. Waiting is what gives direction to my life.

Waiting is the arrow of time. The length of the shaft may be visualized as the strength of the longing. The arrow’s mirror image? The desire to avoid the anxiety associated with the lack of the object of longing.

Writing this way, in an impersonalized manner, allows any reader to fill in their own blanks. Seeing the arrow of longing speeding towards a desire, or, perhaps by its own heaviness, losing speed and falling to the earth, allows us the opportunity to see ourselves as one of the entities caught up in the human condition.

Once we can see that we are so caught up, and that our desires and fears make arrows, maybe we will be more careful about the type of arrows we craft. Are we making an arrow that will pierce someone else? Is this desirable or undesirable?

Why Yin and Yang? See how one defines the other, even if you don’t realize it at first.

Here’s another version that my writing group said sounded like a professor, less lively. BUT it provides some actionable information on ways to try to escape the pain of longing and anxiety.

The process of waiting draws the arrow of time. Time is inherent in waiting. Do tigers wait for their next meal? I am not sure. Probably they are focused on doing what it takes to get the next meal when hunger tells them it’s time to do so. Humans wait. And our domesticated animals.

Back to the arrow of time crafted by waiting. The length of the shaft may be visualized as the strength of the longing. The arrow’s mirror image? The desire to avoid the anxiety associated with the lack of the object of longing.

Or, once we can see that we are fashioning arrows with our waiting for certain things, we’ll take the Buddha’s advice, and start to learn to wait, rather than waiting for a particular thing. Once we see that waiting for a particular thing inherently brings anxiety, we might be open to seeing the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha in a new way. Suffering is universal. The cause of suffering is craving. Letting go of attachments to specific outcomes leads toward liberation from suffering. There is a path that can end suffering.

Here is what I wrote from a different prompt, having to do with stars.

The stars. All the stars? No. A particular set of stars draws her attention. She had waited for years for this moment. The training to sit patiently. The training to direct the arrow of attention with the flashlight of consciousness. Illuminating just what was important. Cygnus, the Great Swan, slowly approached the position that would allow the leap from earth to heaven.

The Great Swan was merely the skeleton that marked the more important subject, the Mother Goddess herself. That was the true tens of thousands of years ago and it was true on the day that Zinnia waited. Cygnus no longer had to work as the pole star, doing the hard labor of turning the universe. That was the task of the Little Bear these days. Zinnia’s heart pointed her eyes toward Cygus.

This little piece refers to the emerging modern understanding that humans way back 30,000 years ago had an advanced religion based on finding our place in the universe. One of the major stars of the constellation of Cygnus marks the exit of the birth canal of the great female figure that is formed by our sideways view of the Milky Way. This star was pole star way back when, not our currently named Polaris. So the mythology of the day had our spirits longing to return to the Great Mother through the star portal. It had to be at a particular time of year. See the writings of Andrew Collins and others.

Well, I might be shocked if someone actually reads this far and shares the results of their subsequent researches!