Category: Merwegon’s Wisdom

Never confuse the human condition for human nature. The first is real, the second mostly used as an excuse for personal failings, of self and others.

The human condition is a consequence of the evolution of consciousness. The pain associated with it results from conflicts between the necessity of providing for the body and the higher ethics we’ve developed to make life bearable. Modernity has brought with it ever greater conflicts due to our membership in complex, nested and overlapping sub-groups. These include family, neighbors, residents of our town, village, city, etc., fellow citizens and other residents of our nation, other nations around the world, professional societies, clubs, and more.

So-called “human nature” is a distorted epi-phenomenon arising from the sequence of difficulties that the powerful have created and manipulated for their own gain.

Humanity has not yet figured out exactly what real human nature is, but surely there is a strong component of co-operation and helpfulness.

Without that, we would not have thrived as much as we have.

Merwegon the Great

Scott’s Daily Prompt: Direction

Direction is from ZERO TO SIXTY!!!!!

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.

Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt

Nothing is wasted. How could it be? We must realize how much effort is required to make the simplest of objects. To manufacture a paper towel for example, requires at least ten, and up to 25 times its weight in water. And that’s supposedly for a modern, efficient paper towel plant. To some, that might seem like waste. The five gallons of water used to make that paper towel. But another way to look at it could be that we are taking humanity that much faster down the path of crisis point. That much sooner to our doom and redemption. That much sooner to the moment when we have no clean water to sustain the vast majority of currently existing communities. That much sooner to the moment when humanity is forced to evolve into a new being. If everyone could visit a paper towel factory, and see the tons of water used, they might have a better understanding of reality. But that’s one thing our current society is doing everything to avoid.

We see CG images on TV and fail to remind ourselves that it’s a layer away from reality. We hide death, and anything that might be related to death. We don’t want to know. And without death, life can’t be complete. Can’t be three dimensional. Can’t be four dimensional. Can’t be real.

It’s the background noise, waste, if you will, that allows the portion of reality that we think is the whole thing, to emerge. It’s the background waste that is the fabric from which the reality we inhabit is formed.