Social Science – Page 7 – KNOMO CHOICIUS

Hiring a Saint

“I took the liberty,” Dharmendra said, “of asking a saint to come with us.” I must have looked a little confused. “A saint?” I asked. “Yes, he’s a saint. I asked him to come so he can do a ritual for your mom.”

We were on our way to a thousand year old temple in the Kumaun (click for some maps), a division of the State of Uttarakhand, on the Indian side of the borders of Tibet and Nepal. I had already traveled twice to the Kumaun, and always found myself wishing I used some type of prescription tranquilizer as the taxi travels along the narrow roads, along the edges of nearly vertical mountain slopes. Dharmendra has been my guide all three times. We’ve never actually gone to the peaks of any of the tallest Himalayan mountains. Only the foothills. But the views are fantastic.

During the last trip to India, in 2008, which was a birthday gift from my parents, my mother, who was born in West Virginia, and could not wait to move away to a big city, but who always loved mountains, turned to me at one point, and said “I see why you wanted to come back.”

Swami Shivachaitanyananda at Shangrila Resort, holding a children’s book in English, that someone had left behind. The Swami doesn’t read English.

My mother was quite an impressive woman. She passed the CPA exam in 1956, and the Maryland and DC bars in 1967. There were not very many women lawyers at that time. In any case, she certainly impressed Dharmendra on that trip. He informed me that MAYBE my mother was as good as packing suitcases as he was. But he seemed to acknowledge that she was going to get what she thought was her due, and he learned some skills in that vein from her. I had gotten the news that she had fallen, and was unlikely to survive, a few days before I was to leave Chennai and head to north India, for the “vacation” part of my trip to the sub-continent. There was nothing I could do for my mother at that point, by going home right away. So I continued my trip, with modifications in case I had to cut the trip short, which I did.

An Indian engineering colleague had a question for me at the time I was planning the 2008 trip. “Is it wise to use Dharmendra’s services? Is he accredited by the Government of India?” I said no, but I couldn’t let myself worry. Dharmendra’s tour guide service is no ordinary tour guide service.

Dharmendra is going to give his clients an experience to remember. It’s never mediocre. Apparently, as I found out on this trip, it includes the services of a saint to pray for your mother’s soul, should the need arise. Dharmendra arranged for me to do what he would have done had it been his own mother near death.

Swami Shivachaitanyananda, I found out the next day, really is considered a saint.

After spending twenty years in a cave, he decided to rejoin society. He loves to talk. Making up for lost time, he’s extremely cheerful and active for 70. He is a self appointed concrete inspector. If he sees the wrong mix of sand and cement, he complains to the authorities. Apparently, a large construction in Rishakesh was redone after the contractors were caught cheating by the Swami.

His materials engineering skills don’t interfere with his regular swami activities. He taught me a few Vedic mantras on the way to the mountain temple. He was impressed with my Sanskrit pronunciation, which I had learned at the beginning of my trip at a chanting yoga retreat.

After driving for 5 hours, to get to the town with the nearby temple, we got out of the car, bought around 150 pounds of rice, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, etc., and called the temple priest to send down people to carry the food up the 3.5 km switch backed, gravel, rock, and tree root covered, steep path. I only had to carry myself and my purse. The taxi driver carried my sleeping bag and knapsack, along with his own stuff. As I looked up, and reminded my dear friend and tour guide that there was a reason I brought a cane with me, and that there was a difference between 3.5 km horizontal and 3.5 km vertical, he assured me it wasn’t strictly vertical. I made it. Slowly. The Swami beat me. Easily. Here’s the view from the “guest house,” at the 3.5 km mark. A mere half km from the top of the mountain, where the actual temple is. It was worth it.

Hopefully there will be a photo of the guest house itself in a later post, but for now I will say that we took the room that did not smell like burned plastic. The rest of the amenities? A concrete floor and a metal door, and two small windows with metal shutters. They were nice. They gave the spoiled American 3 extra blankets.

The resident priest made dinner for us. The most delicious dahl (spiced lentils) I have ever had. Dharmendra claimed it was because it was cooked on a wood fire. Despite the hot meal, I had never really warmed up after breaking into a sweat on the hike up. The mountain air was cold.

“No, Dharmendra,” I said. “Narendra (our driver) is not sleeping in a different room. He’s sleeping with us, to add his hot breath and heat radiations to the three of us.”

I asked if I had been snoring when we all woke up, and an affirmative answer let me realize that I did probably sleep for a few hours. Morning light at 7 meant time for me to eat the chapati that the priest had made specially for me so I could take my pain meds before walking up the last half km to the temple.

The last part of the climb to a mountain temple is reliably steeper than the rest. Getting to a mountain top temple is most of the prayer. As one of my companions on the earlier part of the trip, the yoga retreat, said, “The Indians With Disabilities Act has two words: Tough Shit.”

But with the cane, I made it. And the Swami performed the healing ritual for my mom. It turns out that she started breathing on her own, right around that time.

Never underestimate the power of prayer, whether it is from your own tradition or not.

Ultimately, as I already knew would be the case, my mom did not survive. But because she was breathing on her own, they were able to remove the ventilator mask, and my dad got to see her face, and kiss her face, and that meant a lot to him at the time.

Seeing her face, he was able to see that “she” was gone from the physical shell that had housed his wife of 59.5 years. It was still hard to let her go, but I think easier than it would have been otherwise.

Back at the guest house, the priest and Dharmendra had a little disagreement. Turns out that the Swami really is considered a saint, and the priest did not think that we should pay if we brought the Swami with us to bless his facility. Dharmendra had to clandestinely leave the money to pay for our accommodations.

Back at the bottom of the trail, as we got in back in the car, Dharmendra told me “Now you realize you are stronger than you thought you were.”

Dharmendra at
http://www.exotic-himalayas.com/

Miraculously, my arthritis pain was greatly reduced the day I got off the plane in India. Still, after two years of severe inflammation, my fitness condition wasn’t great. Back in the US for a month now, the arthritis pain continues at a much lower level than it was before I left. Maybe this is part of why old people go south for the winter. And probably why this wasn’t my last trip to India, even though I had said before I left that it was my bucket trip.

It was supposed to be MY bucket trip, not my mom’s.

UPDATE: Back in India for a memorial ceremony for Dharmendra’s mother, who sadly passed away a little more than a year after mine, I found this youtube link of a trip to this Temple, called Kartik Swami. It really give you an idea of the roads and paths and STEPS.

It was cloudier and there were more people there than when I went.

The link here is to another, longer video, that has better views of the far away Himalaya, more like what I saw, but is narrated in Hindi. It shows some other places along the way from Rishakesh to the temple, which are beautiful in their own right.

Spiritually Attached to India

“She won’t like it here,” the good professor wrote. “Westerners never do. There’s no room service, and the food in the cafeteria is all South Indian style.”

“She’s spiritually attached to India. She speaks fluent Hindi. This isn’t her first trip. She’ll be fine.”

My soon to be friend Shankar nailed it. I had never thought about it in exactly those words though. I’m spiritually attached to India. It would be my third trip to the subcontinent. The fluent Hindi was a bit of an exaggeration. I had pretty darn good tourist Hindi, maybe a thousand words. Grammatical mistakes in most of my sentences, but I was usually understood, then corrected, proving that they understood what I was trying to say. (My most used sentence on the hair-raising ride on the 1.5 lane wide roads on the sides of the “foothills” of the Himalayas, was -after correction- Nicche na dekko!!- “Don’t look down!”

sometimes followed by “But Look Down- it’s beautiful!”)

Shankar was correct, but he humored the professor, and asked me if I agreed that the accommodation planned, without room service, would be ok. I assured him that it would, and was very happy to have this new idea of spiritual attachment, and to have had someone who never met me in person realize it was true. I can’t really explain it; maybe I had a past life or three in India.

Really, my main concern about hotels in Asia is that the mattresses are so hard. Difficult on my arthritic joints. But I had resolved to just take extra pain killer, when I needed it. This was my bucket trip. I was acting on my desire to teach a failure analysis class in India, before the onset of my ultimate, inevitable deterioration. The mattress at the University guesthouse was unlikely to be harder, I reasoned, than the one at the rural Christian monastery where I was going to be spending the first week and a half in India on the upcoming trip. And the food was unlikely to be more difficult to enjoy than what the monks and nuns ate. And anyway, I had just returned from Japan, where I became convinced that the more expensive the hotel, the harder the mattress.

If I really hated sambar, rasaam, and idly, I probably wouldn’t go to south India. But I had learned to eat, if not love, the first two items, spicy soups, back in the mid 1970’s, when my South Indian ex-boyfriend moved to a town near my parents, who really liked him more than any other boyfriend I had before or after, and proceeded to teach my mother how to do South Indian cooking. I learned to more or less enjoy idly, a somewhat bland lentil flour based sponge, used to sop up the sambar, on my first trip to India, where they served it at the Hindu monastery (ashram) that hosted the meditation retreat that I was attending in 2001.

So I just had to deal with the reality of the hospitality that my hosts, for what was becoming a four day speaking tour in Chennai, were able to provide. I had offered to teach a two day seminar, give a dinner talk to my fellow members of our international engineering society, and a lecture to the engineering students at the local university. I ended up also giving a longer version of the dinner talk at two private companies, and another presentation to some eleventh graders, entitled “Is a Career in Materials Engineering Right for Me?” I wasn’t charging a speaking or teaching fee, but I thought it was reasonable to ask them to cover my expenses for the four days that I’d be visiting them. They agreed, but were concerned about the budget. It all worked out. I was back to normal food after buying myself four days of temptations at the Radisson Blu buffets.

Back home after a month in India, I feel more spiritually attached to the people and place than ever. After twenty years of trying to get traction exploring new ideas of how engineers can embrace critical and creative thinking, or what I’ve started to call “cultivating clarity,” I am lucky to have developed a small group of local, American people, who appreciate my creative approach to critical thinking. But each of the two Indian companies that invited me to the give the “Thinking Skill Optimization” talk had 85+ people attend. And they participated. And their managers thanked me in unique ways that allowed me to see that they were also paying attention. My new friend Prasad told me “You have gotten pretty close to giving a method for developing intuition.”

Yes, that’s right. And it was very interesting to me that someone who lives in the land of the longest lasting collective consciousness, the very source of intuition, understood that to be a major part of my approach. Of course many engineers would not be attracted to a class on developing their intuition, and even if they were, I imagine they’d have a hard time convincing their bosses to cover the costs to attend. It sure is useful to have a way to calibrate intuition though. When effective, it’s a lot faster and easier than calculations and analysis.

Thinking about it further, I am just realizing how unusual it was that both managers attended the training with their employees. How often does that happen in the USA? Most American managers think that the only thing they need to know how to do is balance a budget.

I think there is more to the success of the contribution of Indian industry to the global economy than low wages.

Fake News and the First Amendment

Fake news is very hard to distinguish from the real thing, and we have to balance actions against fake news with First Amendment rights.

REALLY? Is that true, I wondered, as I listened to NPR’s talk show version of CNN style hyper news, “On Point,” hosted by Tom Ashcroft, from WBUR.

This topic is perhaps more important now than it was when I first posted this. I’ve added some new links at the bottom of the post, and will try to keep this updated.

The event that precipitated the show was the “Pizzagate” scandal. A man, acting on his own to investigate the completely false accusations of Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington, DC area family pizza restaurant, (if she was so tired and weak from the campaign activities, I wondered how would she find time to run a sex ring??? And oh, by the way, according to CNN, the pizza place has NO basement) fired an assault rifle in a room crowded with families enjoying their pizzas.

Thus, we have entered a new age, where fake news not only influences people’s opinions about who to vote for, or what to think, but starts chains of actions that have a lethal potential. Of course, there might be those out there who think that it should be a capital offense (benefiting from vigilante action, and needing no criminal proceedings) to eat in a pizza parlor that is owned by someone who donated money to the Democrats. But assuming for now that most Americans have not gone that far, what other lessons might we look for in Pizzagate and it’s origins?

What was surprising to me was the juxta-position of the First Amendment with the right to publish fake news.

But what is the First Amendment FOR EXACTLY? Is it to protect liars and libelers? That was never my impression from my civics classes in school. I thought it was to protect the expression of opinions about how we SHOULD live. Even the Nazis have a right to to assemble and speak and try to convince the rest of the country that we should kill or oppress all those they don’t like. That is protected speech. However, we do have laws against libel and slander, and that is much of what fake news is.

Here is what Scholastic.com says (red is Shona’s highlight)

Freedom of Speech. This freedom entitles American citizens to say what they think, provided they do not intentionally hurt someone else’s reputation by making false accusations. Neither may they make irresponsible statements deliberately harmful to others, such as yelling, “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. There are many issues about which Americans disagree, from child-rearing practices to baseball teams to Presidential candidates. Freedom of speech enables people to state their opinions openly to try to convince others to change their minds.

The First Amendment also gives you the right to disagree with what others say without fear of punishment by the government authorities….

Freedom of the Press. This freedom makes it possible for Americans to keep informed about what is going on in government. It helps them to be responsible citizens. Reporters and editors can criticize the government without the risk of punishment, provided they do not deliberately tell lies. Newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as television and movie scripts, do not have to be submitted for government inspection before they are published. This censorship would violate the First Amendment.

Back to Shona’s thoughts now… What I can’t figure out is why the journalism and philosophy professors, the journalist, and the host of the show could not see that the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect the individual going about their business as a free citizen. The idea of the First Amendment is not and never was to protect liars whose goal is to interfere with the democratic process, or to intentionally harm law abiding citizens they do not like. In other words, we don’t have the right to help God punish those who we don’t like, for something they did not do.

My understanding of the First Amendment was in line with what Scholastic.com wrote. Now maybe some would consider this a “dumbing down” of the First Amendment. All parents teach their kids not to lie, since they don’t want their kids lying to THEM about household matters. But the God of the Hebrew Bible did not make a commandment against lying. That God knows that lies have a valid purpose in life. The God of the Hebrew Bible prohibited BEARING FALSE WITNESS. This is a specific TYPE of lying, that would undermine the foundations of a just society. Bearing false witness in a court proceeding before a judge is a crime in American law as well. We call it perjury, and if we bear false witness we can be held in “contempt of court,” since the court proceedings include swearing that the witness will tell the truth.

I understand that becoming a public figure widens the opening for allowed criticism. However, outright lies that harm an individual’s reputation should not be protected “speech,” whether they are a public or private person.

Currently, if someone slanders or libels an individual, the individual is responsible for bringing the legal action against the perpetrator. Maybe this should change. If someone physically or psychologically harms or kills an individual, the STATE (the government) takes the action against the alleged perpetrator. If I am killed, my family members do not have to sue the alleged murderer in order for the murderer to be brought before the justice system. There are problems with this system, as the OJ Simpson trial showed, and the victims’ families did end up having to go to civil court to get some justice… But there will always be times where individual justice fails in the interest of having a “neutral justice system.”

Maybe it is time to rethink the way libel and slander laws operate. When the target is a public figure, a political figure, maybe it is of interest to all of the people to know the truth, and the State (Government) should represent THE PEOPLE in an action against the liars.

I just keep scratching my head about why the two professors and the journalist could not come up with this “angle” on how to slow the tsunami of fake news while protecting the First Amendment. The First Amendment is not there to protect liars. It’s there to protect the ignorant. And we are all ignorant of a lot of things, even if we are experts in others.

NEW LINK: Check out this interesting editorial about how fake news is used by those in search of power.

The Sacred Media: Another new link to some thoughts about freedom of the press, from a fellow writer of Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers.

Another link to how to tell fact from opinion. A well done video.

Critical thinking and fake news webinar in French https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6544146427755409409

Yet another link on how tech companies are dealing with hateful speech.

The Problem with the Two Party System

Sometime in my youth, I remember expressing happiness to my dad that my preferred political party had won the presidency, after a long drought. Unfortunately, the new president was having trouble finding well known, experienced, skilled, proven Democrats to fill the leadership roles in the Cabinet, and beyond. My father, long interested in government, to the extent of reading multiple histories of the Romans, ranted about the incompetence of the new president, and the general failure to fill many of the positions, due to the refusal of Congress to approve his nominees, thus proving his general incompetence to be president.

Is Now The Time to Expand Our Two Party System?

That’s the problem with election cycles in the two party system that we Americans love so much. We’re proud of the fact that we have only two major parties. We avoid that messy coalition building that other democracies have to to through. We let the people choose, and then let the chosen person / party govern. At least that’s been the theory. The winning party claims a mandate based on the electoral college “landslide,” even if the popular vote went the other way. The winner then gets to fill the leadership roles in agriculture, the military, education, finance, drug policy, and all the other aspects of modern life.

But experience builds on experience.

As an engineer, age late 50’s, suddenly my clients are asking new types of questions. I would not have been able to answer these questions even a few years ago. Or maybe the questions have always been there, but I’m able to hear them now. Hard to say. A few times in the recent past, the answers have popped into my mind almost as soon as they are asked, and anticipated side concerns also seem to articulate themselves in the compost of the confusion of the questioner.

When only Democrats get to fill top positions for 8 or 12 years, Republicans don’t gain the skills required to lead. When only Republicans get to fill top positions for 8 or 12 years, Democrats don’t gain the skills required to lead. When Republicans, who by definition think multi-level hierarchy is the natural and best state for humanity, are in charge for long stretches of time, the sprouts of true egalitarian democracy are killed, pre-emergence.

Empowerment is the Key!

I heard an African-American community leader calmly insisting, correctly in my opinion, that money for White-led organizations helping African-Americans was wasted. African-Americans, he kept insisting, have to be empowered to solve problems by themselves. That means the role of the white cultural matrix must be to try to weed out the systematic discrimination that keeps African-Americans dis-empowered.

Empowerment is related to the SELF.

It does not mean power OVER others.

What are the major, current and actionable sources of this dis-empowerment? I’ll leave that question for all of us to meditate on.

Only by solving problems can we learn to solve problems.

This happens at many simultaneous levels: individual, community wide, city wide, state wide, nation wide, and world wide, and over many generations. It takes a long un-interupted time for the poisonous preconceptions carried in every culture to be weeded out in the “market-place of ideas.” These poisonous ideas are left from earlier times, were created in different circumstances, by well meaning people. But the only constant is change. And as change accelerates in the accelerated mingling of different groups in modern times, we need to move toward a system where people of all cultures and political persuasions have un-interupted chances to develop their leadership skills.

You may wish to view this Wikipedia article on other problems associated with the type of voting we have, which is not necessarily confined to two party systems. Thanks to the person who called this article to my attention.

Wrong about Worms!

The worm, surprised by the sudden appearance of daylight, quickly retreated into its tunnel.

“Do worms have eyes?” asked Danny.

“Hmm, good question. I don’t think so.”

“Either did I. Maybe they can sense light though. Or maybe it simply felt the air move. Or maybe it was resting against the bottom of the flower pot when you picked it up.”

I had recruited Danny to help me clean up the yard, his young skeleton being more flexible than mine, and his muscles stronger.

“It’s hard to say what a worm knows!” Danny pointed out.

“Well, it’s easy to find some verbiage about worms. But saying something meaningful and truthful requires mental wrestling,” I reminded my young neighbor.

“Worms do not have vertebrae!” retorted Danny. “That did not require too much wrestling.”

I nodded, happy to hear this entity of tender years producing such a pithy aphorism, and replied to him.

“We do have vertebrae, but we are still subject to the winds of fate. Our vertebrae help us stand straight, but we can’t avoid making some wrong turns in life.”

“Yeah,” mumbled Danny. “I’m still calculating the worth of that last explosion of wrath I indulged in.”

My eyes involuntarily sought the exit to the wormhole. I knew the feeling. We had met in the advanced anger management class. Our warped personalities were both on the mend. We were cultivating our minds. Tired of having to wriggle away from the complicated conditions we had created for ourselves, we were learning new habits. We were learning how to un-braid the strands of our troubled lives. We were learning to unwrap the layers of weird circumstances that had trapped us in inner turmoil. We were learning that prose is preferable to fists. Versatility is what we can learn from the worm.

Your face is wreathed in smiles,” noted Danny.

“Versatility is what we can learn from the worm,” I cheerfully replied.

“Right!” said Danny. No damn vertebrae to get in the way.”

MUSE

Our homework assignment in writing group was to randomly pick a word from the dictionary and write something about it or with it. I usually don’t do the homework. Most of the others in the group are retired and have more time. This time, I was inspired to write something though, but “WREATHE” (the verb) just did not give me much to go on. So I turned to the “Indo-European Root” dictionary at the back of the American Heritage Dictionary that I got a few years back. Word origins are very interesting. I read and underlined the entire Indo-European and Semetic root word appendices when the book arrived.

“Wreathe” comes from the root word “wer” of which there are three unrelated versions. (They’d sound different in the original Indo-European language, but all are represented as “wer” in modern American English. Wreathe comes from “wer” #2.) This version of “wer” has to do with turning and wrapping. It’s amazing how so few root words have generated so many individual expressions of nuance in the last 5000 years or so.

The highlighted words are all derivatives from “wer” #2. Of course some of the derivations in this dictionary are (IMHO) wrong. It’s tough work and the professionals tend sometimes to ignore the obvious in favor of the obscure. Sovereign, for example, (meaning self rule) obviously comes from whatever roots generated “swa” (self) and “raj” (as in “raja, king, also like reign!) but they have a different take.

Self Evident Truth About Distracted Driving

Earlier this week, the topic of discussion on NPR’s “On Point” radio show was the scourge of distracted driving. There are people working on smart technologies to stop people from doing tasks that require too much attention when they are moving at high velocity. There are apps that track high cognitive activities such as browsing and texting. These apps would be the equivalent of a “breathalyzer,” and cops could ask to see your device if you were stopped for a traffic violation. Supposedly our legal system would let people off the hook if the passenger stated under oath that they were the one using the device, not the driver. Just as social pressure has been used to greatly reduce the acceptability and frequency of drunk driving, social pressure is being used to bring awareness of the dangers of distracted driving.

The main danger is often said to be the driver taking eyes off of the road. Usually the eyes are linked to using the device while it’s in the hands. Hands are surely linked to the brain. But there have been studies showing that hands free driving is still distracted driving, and causes just as many accidents.

We See with our BRAINS

We have to remember, or realize, that we see with our BRAINS as much as we see with our eyes. The largest part of our brain is devoted to visual processing. While some people are undoubtedly better at multi-tasking than others, most of us over-rate our abilities in this area. See http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0054402 which includes the following

Ophir et al. [8] found that persons who frequently multi-task ….may be those who are the least cognitively equipped to effectively carry out multiple tasks simultaneously.

When we’re talking on the phone, it is not like talking with someone riding in the vehicle with us. It might be more like having a crying baby or a bunch of rowdy kids with us. The person at the other end of the line, the crying baby, the misbehaving kids, do not quiet themselves to allow you, the driver, to pay attention to the road when the situation demands. The person at the other end of the line, the crying baby, the misbehaving kids, are unaware that it would be safer for all if they were quiet, to allow the driver to pay attention to rapidly changing circumstances. In the case of the person at the other end of the line, they entangle the driver in their local “thought field,” (see this related article on shared consciousness), which is usually related to something other than the road conditions.

This realization came to me some years ago, when almost everyone believed that hands free cell phone use while driving meant safe cell phone use. That was well before the advent of smart phones. I had a client who had told me he thought that there should be two levels of drivers licenses. One for regular people, and one for those who had demonstrated that they could read while driving. He was a smart guy overall, and the above referenced work at the University of Utah leads us to believe that there could be test to allow the competent multi-taskers to be certified. But I still do not think I like the idea. A lot can happen in the blink of an eye when traveling at high speed.

Despite this, I’m also not a fan of driverless vehicles.

When is someone going to show that this emperor has no clothes?

We can’t keep our credit cards, bank accounts, medical information, social security numbers secure. We can’t keep our computers free of viruses and malware. How are we going to prevent hackers from creating giant accidents?

I guess we’ll “just have to get used to those giant “accidents,” as we are having to “get used to” attacks by terrorists and the neglected mentally ill.

Update October 30, 2016

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is taking action after the entrepreneur had tee shirts printed bragging about how rich they were going to get.

Hallelujah. Greedy, hubris drenched capitalist gets his come-uppance!

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/nhtsa-urges-u-self-driving-startup-delay-sale-133708559.html

No Place to Hide

Here’s another little story I wrote from a Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers prompt.

This time, there was no place to hide. “I never should have come to this planet,” I thought. A barren rock with shallow pools of water, barely adequate to support the pitiful excuse for native lifeforms. Jeremiah the bullfrog might have felt at home here, taking shelter under the low shrubs that lined the edges of the ponds, but the entire planet was devoid of any cover for an entity of my size. “No,” I reminded myself, “I should have stuck to the diet pills, instead of doing this vacation trip.”

Sure, my will power was given a vacation, because there was absolutely nothing tempting in sight, except the pools, when one became thirsty. This only happened once a week, because the humidity in the air kept the body hydrated, and the bad taste of the water naturally reduced the temptation.

“A MONTH’S VACATION FROM THE NEED TO EXERCISE WILL POWER!” the advertising announced.

“ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM!

GIVE YOUR BRAIN A REST!

LOSE UNWANTED POUNDS!”

And I paid a year’s salary for this pleasure trip?????

MUSE….

My son gave up pop a few years ago. My son is quite the example for exercising will power for such a young person. I had purchased some fancy pop for a special occasion, and he still would not drink it. “I made my decision and I’m not revisiting it,” or something to that effect, was his comment. “If it’s no, it’s no. It’s easier that way.” The psychological research has shown that will power is like a muscle, and like muscles, even the strongest do eventually tire and need rest. We are human and we do have limits. We can strengthen ourselves, but we never totally overcome the inherent limitations of living in a body with a large degree of pre-programmed responses.

After reading several of Rollo May‘s books from the 1950’s, explaining the difficulties inherent in developing our own true centers as unique individuals (hint: a lot of will power is required), I have started delving into Erich Fromm’s writing. “Escape from Freedom,” originally written during the lead up to World War II, explains how the Protestant Reformation, and specifically the ideas of Luther and Calvin, laid the foundations for the eventual transformation of infant Capitalism into Monopolistic Capitalism. Luther and Calvin stripped God of the loving and compassionate characteristics inherent in the Judeo-Christian tradition up to that time, to (unconsciously) reflect the nature of the social structure of the late Middle Ages, where money (specifically, “Capital”) was becoming the real god of Western humanity. Fromm lays out a detailed description of the Protestant world-view, which portrayed the only possible way to salvation being a total humiliation of the self. This led the masses of humanity, bereft of any sense of inherent dignity, to give in to the elites of the capitalist hierarchy, and become nothing more than a cog in the machine. Note the use of the word “hierarchy,” still in place today with regard to corporation structures; a sickening perversion of the original meaning of hierarchy, or “sacred order.”

Here we have a rather dramatic illustration of the law of unintended consequences…Did Luther and Calvin, who were trying to overturn the authority and abuses of the Catholic Church, and give each individual the right to have a personal relationship with God… Did these founders of Protestantism want each Christian to submit to MONEY / CAPITAL as their new god? Probably not! Yet the Protestant Reformation led to the thought field of God’s sanction of the powerful, whether or not they used the power in the interest of all of humanity.

The prophets calling the kings to account was now a moot point.

Of course no world religion keeps much of its founder’s original ideas. So at least some of the problems that arose at the birth of the Protestant Reformation have been remedied. I am now a little over half way through my second reading of Fromm’s book. I’ve always been more interested in ancient history than modern, so it has not been an easy read, even as I see Fromm laying out an extremely detailed argument for some of the ideas I present in The Convolution of Knomo Choicius as being “Self Evident Truth.” But for those interested in the intersection of psychology, sociology, politics and religion, “Escape from Freedom” is a work of genius.

Reaching Out to YOU!

I live out in the country. Sometimes it’s lonely but as Osho says, we can embrace our aloneness, which I am doing more often. The drive to work is long, but on a clear winter night, I always stop to look up at the stars. The spring weather has finally arrived, and the flowering shrubs smell wonderful. This morning, I looked out my kitchen window, and within two minutes, saw a pair of dragonflies, a swallowtail butterfly, a cardinal, and other random (less beautiful or at least less memorable!) bugs flying around.

Part of why I decided to write Knomo Choicius was to meet new people and exchange ideas. I don’t think I had much hope that I would find anyone “LIKE MINDED,” since I often feel so weird, or as my mom says, eccentric. But maybe, I thought, just maybe there would be some people who found my ideas about the possible future of humanity interesting. Over the years, in my engineering society, I’ve met others who like to “shoot the breeze” on philosophical topics. There were several PhD’s (and quite a few with univeristy teaching experience) who were brave enough to entertain some wild ideas. There are a few chapters in Knomo that try to convey the spirit of these exchanges.

Here’s an excerpt from the book…..

The Origin of the Myth of the Son of the Goddess as Her Consort
2026 Earth Current Era
Gorka, Pearl, and Susan walked out of the door of the Glaucus Humanities Building.
“Time for drink!” said Gorka.
“Yep, it’s been a long week!” agreed Susan.
“How about that new bar over on Second and Wise?” suggested Pearl.
“Gimboling in the Wabe?” asked Gorka.
“Yeah, that’s it!” agreed Pearl. “Don’t you love the name?”
“Sure,” grinned Gorka. “Sounds like a good place for professors to shoot the breeze on a Friday afternoon.”
They walked along, joining the crowd of people getting an early start to the weekend.
“I was wondering,” said Pearl, the youngest member of the faculty amongst the three of them, “just who was this Glaucus, for whom our building was named.”
“Why are you suddenly wondering, after being here for two years?” teased Susan.
“I had a dream about some swallowtail butterflies. Turns out that our local genus, the yellow and black striped ones, are called Glaucus.”
“Why would a swallowtail butterfly be named after a Trojan warrior hero?” asked Susan, scratching her head.
“Same question I asked,” answered Pearl.

“Turns out Linnaeus decided to name
swallowtail species for Greek heros.”
“You have to find names somewhere!” said Gorka. “However, one might wonder why he didn’t save the Greek hero names for something more burly than butterflies.”
Susan laughed. “So Gorka, what about our Glaucus?”
“His family made their money in international shipping. They were Greek, following their ancient cultural heritage of the sea trade. He came to the U.S. to go to school, and he met the woman who was to become his wife. She was one of the founding members of our philosophy faculty. She thought the Humanities should be given more prominence at our campus.”
“Right. The state universities were founded for engineering and agriculture. Humanities, sciences and art came later,” added Susan.
“You know how it goes when you look something up on line,” said Pearl.

“Glaucus butterflies are not the only biological Glaucus.”
“Okay. Clue us in!” said Gorka.
“Turns out that there’s an animal called a Glaucus. It’s a nudiform mollusk, to be exact. That means it doesn’t have a shell.”
“Kind of like a slug?” asked Susan.
“Yeah, but it lives in the ocean, at the surface of the water, and spends most of its time clinging, upside down, to the surface layer of the water, and grazing on Portugese Man-O-Wars and the like. And oh, by the way, they’re less than an inch long.”
“So the Man-O-Wars don’t even notice them til it’s too late?” asked Gorka.
“I’m not sure, but apparently, either singly or en masse, they can consume an entire Man-O-War. But they don’t digest the stinging organs of the Man-O-War. They keep them to use as self protection.”
“Wow. Who would have thought of such a thing. Just goes to show that nature is really wild in so many ways,” said Susan.
“Yeah, and these creatures are an incredibly beautiful blue on top, silver on the bottom, and their arms and legs look like pentagonal fractal patterns.”
“So we have Dr. Mrs. Glaucus the American philosopher, Glaucus the

Trojan hero, Glaucus swallowtail butterflies, and Glaucus mollusks!” said Susan.
“Don’t forget Glaucus, the Greek god,” reminded Gorka.
“Here’s the bar,” said Susan, opening the door and holding it for the others. “Go get a table. I need call Michael to let him know where to meet us. Can you just order me whatever beer they have on special?”
“Sure, Susan,” Pearl said. “See you in a few.”

Susan took her place at the table, raised her glass and said “Cheers!” The other two responded. Then Gorka pointed out a detail of the art-work on the wall. “The Mad Hatter,” he said. “That’s why I’m an American.”
“What does that mean?” asked Pearl. “I’ve already gone over that in my mind. If my ancestors hadn’t come to America, ‘I’ wouldn’t exist.”
“Of course,” Gorka said. “Our specific ego forms are a result of a very large number of factors, an important one being whether our parents had a chance to meet.”
“That’s interesting,” Susan said. “The fact that we somehow can do the

thought experiment and imagine that our personal ego would still exist, even if our particular parents had never met… That is very interesting.”
“What do you mean?” asked Pearl.
“Well, doesn’t it point to the fact that some part of us thinks we are more than our genes and our culture? More than nature and nurture?”
Gorka looked at Susan, and smiled and nodded, while Pearl scratched her head. “What more could we be?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Susan, “but I do wonder about it. Could you pass the
popcorn?”
Pearl pushed the basket of popcorn over towards Susan.
“So, Susan,” Gorka said, “you’re getting closer to your dream of going to space. How’s the project going?”
Susan sighed. “It’s going, but some aspects of it are making me feel like a hypocrite. My problem is that I fear the homo saps joining us on the satellite.”
“There are worse things than your type of hypocrisy,” Gorka reminded her.
“I know. My compassionate self wants the homo saps to decide to join us knomos. But I don’t want them in my back yard until they become knomos.”
“Susan, try to look at the bright side,” Pearl said. “We’ve had so many

interesting discussions. Idea after idea. Look how lonely most thinkers have been over the eons. We have a real community here in the history department, and you have another community with your Seeker friends.”
“We’ll never be able to count on the continuity of our real community until our ideas prevail across a wider range of society,” Susan grumbled.
“Well, let’s change the subject, then,” said Gorka. “Pass the peanuts, please!”
Susan did so, and then continued in a little more cheerful voice, “My capra hircus article is coming out in a new book next week.”
“You mean The Origin of the Myth of the Son as Consort of the Goddess in the
Domestication of Capra Hircus is getting a second publication?” Gorka asked, gulping in some air at the conclusion of his sentence.
Susan nodded. “All that research with the archeology department paid off. I think interdisciplinary work is starting to enter a new phase. It’s accepted now. Not just my book, of course. Others in other fields are setting examples of how productive it is.”
“Yes,” agreed Gorka. “There are now quite a few academics who have published bestsellers in fields that are considered ‘interdisciplinary work.’”
“Why do you sound so sarcastic?” Pearl asked.
“Well, as a historian, it seems a bit of a stretch to consider a collaboration of
anthropologists and archeologists as ‘interdisciplinary’ in a really meaningful way. There’s so much overlap in the questions they are trying to answer.”
“That may be the case, but I am still happy that my work has been well received,”
Susan said.
“So what was your exact thesis again?” asked Pearl. “You speculated that early
peoples’ religions experienced a big transformation, as large mammals neared
extinction, making it harder to bring them home for dinner.”
“Yes,” Susan agreed. “That’s the first part.”
“And then you figured out that the myth of the son as consort of the goddess must have originated when an injured pregnant caprine doe was captured and nursed back to health. Then, when her buck kid came to maturity the next year, they mated, thereby creating the foundation for the domestication of animals.”
“Yes, Pearl,” Susan said, nodding. “You have integrated the idea, now.” She smiled at Pearl, and then summarized the key point of her paper. “The doe goat was the first savior that our ancestors recognized in the changing world of the Neolithic.”
“And of course you’ll never be able to prove that this exact scenario created the idea of the offspring of the goddess becoming her consort,” Pearl said, her voice a little stronger now.
But Gorka had agreed. “It makes a lot more sense than interpreting the symbol of a human form mother taking her son as consort. That’s simply an incestuous
relationship.”
Michael pulled over a chair, and they redistributed themselves at the round table, to let him join in, Susan giving him a quick kiss. “Maybe that was part of the idea,” he said. “That the goddess was so powerful, she could flaunt the laws that applied to humans. It showed her power. Her son looked like her, and that was attractive to her.”
Gorka had sipped his beer, then offered “Maybe. But somehow the Eastern Orthodox Christians transformed the symbol into a depiction of Mother Mary with a miniature adult Jesus. If it had originally been showing an incestuous relationship, wouldn’t the symbol have been too toxic to transform?”
Susan took another sip of beer, and watched Pearl grab another handful of popcorn, while they mulled the transaction between the two men.
Gorka then added “I think that if the original symbol had been of an incestuous
relationship, it would have been completely suppressed in the Christian tradition. Where were Eve’s daughters in Genesis?”
Pearl agreed. “You have a good point. In ancient times, among humans, pretty
much only the Egyptians thought incest was good.”
Gorka laughed. “Good point! And then, even the Egyptians only allowed sibling spouses for the royalty. And the royal stock eventually declined because of it!”
Susan took yet another sip of beer and started shelling a few peanuts. “Yeah, I bet the humanization of the savior goat was later. And you’re probably right Pearl. By then, civilizations had multilevel hierarchies, and a powerful goddess image flaunting human laws would reinforce the power of the king, her servant, on Earth.”
It was Michael’s turn to agree. “Rules are for the weak. History shows that the powerful have always done what they wanted.”
Pearl glared at Michael. “But in prehistory, humans changed that! The powerful were constrained for thousands of years. Then, Sargon showed up.”
“Pearl, one person can’t change everything,” reminded Gorka.
“Yes, Gorka. I know. There were precursor events leading to Sargon’s conquest. But that doesn’t change the fact that for thousands of years, the weak managed to work together to constrain the powerful.”
Gorka smiled in his mature relaxed way, and side stepped back to the original
discussion. “Getting back to Susan’s point now. Freud and many others had
speculated for years on the origins of the incest taboo, and as far as archeologists and anthropologists could figure out, it far predated agriculture of any kind.”
“That’s right!” said Michael.
“What’s right?” asked Gorka.
“Freud thought that the incest taboo originally came from an uprising of the young against the alpha male and his couple of beta honchos. He speculated that the young got tired of watching the alpha have sex with all the cute females, and carried out a violent overthrow.”
“Really? Are you making this up?” asked Pearl.
“Of course not. I’m a psychologist. Why would I make something up about Freud? Read Totem and Taboo. It’s all spelled out.”
“I’ll put it on my list!”
“The bottom line, according to Freud, was that after the murder of the alpha, his
replacement was forced to abandon his hereditary and muscle enforced nearly solitary and special right to the females.”
“What does that have to do with the incest taboo?”
“I’ll spell it out!” smiled Michael. “The new alpha had to agree to avoid having sex with his daughters. Since pretty much only the alpha and beta males got to have sex, pretty much all the younger generation were daughters of the alpha and the betas.”
“Oh. So the new alpha was one of the old betas….”
“You’re catching on Pearl! There had to be some compromise at first. But Freud
speculated that this became the first law where the weak imposed their will on the strong.”
“That!” announced Pearl, “is very interesting. So really, the incest taboo was against fathers having sex with their daughters. It originally wasn’t against sisters and brothers. So the Egyptians weren’t going against the original taboo. Interesting.”
“Dudley Young, and other anthropologists, later wrote about the sister brother thing. How marrying from outside of the group built complex social structures that increased the chances of survival in tough times.”
“Well you apparently do have wide ranging interests, Michael. I guess that’s why Susan is in love with you.” Pearl grinned at Michael.
Michael rolled his eyes at the ceiling, then grinned back at Pearl.
“No,” Susan said.
“No what? You’re not in love with me?”
“No, it has nothing to do with that!” She blew him an air kiss. “No has to do with the earlier conversation. The original version of the myth of the mother taking her own son as consort must not relate to a human relationship.”
“Well, I do hope you still believe what you published in the article, Susan,” said Pearl.
“I think it’s ok to continue to question my conclusions, even after I’ve published!” Susan announced, and raised her glass to her own intellectual integrity.
“Good point, Susan. Good point. Better be open minded than certain,” Gorka said.
Susan continued her explanation. “To be holy way back then, it had to be realistic, and to be realistic, it had to be some non-human animal. First of all, because humans felt weak, so a human would not have been the first choice to be deified. Secondly, as you just noted, in human society, only the males took their daughters as sexual partners. Unless he was an alpha or beta, a woman taking her son to father her offspring was revolutionary. The wild ancestor of the modern domesticated goat is the most likely candidate for the origin of the feminine godhead.”
Gorka laughed. “That is pretty much the same way you explained it the last time!”
“Well, there’s some shade of different understanding now. I have greater confidence in what I am saying.”
“You do think out of the box, Susan,” Gorka acknowledged. “I’m sure you’ll be able to find new collaborators in the anthropology department.”
Michael nodded. “Her next article will be ‘The Origin of Feminism in the Myth of the Horned Mother Goddess.’”
Susan grinned. “At least the title of that one will be a little shorter.