Getting to know someone through a website is a specious propositon at best. We are a complex amalgamation of perspectives and pecadillos only a few of which may be revealed in this form. However this medium is particularly well suited for the sharing of tiny insights and inspirations from one's own life. A small portion of which I will now share here, in no particular order.
•You are what you are doing today, and you are not what you did not do.
•Writing is a contentiously enjoyable conversation between you, your tools, the work, and your muse.
•A word is a tool intoned occasionally to represent something. The thing or idea a word represents does not require the word to exist for it to exist itself. In fact many words may attempt at various times past present and future to represent that same thing, to varying degrees of perfection, none completely accurately.
The thing itself is transcendent and free of any need to be "worded". And yet that something comes into a special kind of temporary existence once intoned as a word and juxtaposed and tossed about in a conversation with other words. For a brief time it enjoys a life in which its subtle nature may be further refined and comprehended. Perhaps even a new word may be created to serve as a vessel for its next intonement at a later time.
I am a word. You are a word. We....are a conversation.
•In an information saturated environment there is no truth or fact, only concensus. The truth is a bastard. The rightful heir to the throne of human longevity, shunned and exiled by its siblings, opinon and ideology as they rise in favor by passing out candy, beer, and seductively reassuring soundbites.
•The problem with medicine is that it relies primarily on medical science to interpret and understand the human body, which is a bit like relying only on physics to explain or appreciate a ballet.
It’s not that it is wrong, only incomplete.
•Lasting happiness is achieved not by getting what we think we want, but by better understanding what we truly need.
•Gödel’s incompleteness theorum, Einstein’s Relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Bohm & Pribram’s Holographic Universe. All these tools ultimately reveal the irrefutable limitations of practical logical cartesian knowledge when attempting to apprehend true reality wihin its constraints.
What is left to fill the gap is insight, inspiration, universal genius (to leap accross logical stepstones to the next waypoint).
What is left is the soul remainder. That thing which defies capture yet completes all systems of knowledge.
What if we started our “science” from this vast unknow place? If this ocean of the everpresent known but unmeasurable could be considered a universal “constant” would we not have to construct less intricate and tenuous intellectual scaffolding. We could at least begin our feeble and unnecessary dissection of the universe from a place of intuition and then form our provability structures around this constant.
Isn’t this what all great leaps of thought have done since man first rubbed synapses together to get a spark? Isn't it the vast uncharted ocean which inspires the greatest disoveries, rather than the well worn constantly disputed shore?
•What mechanism allows an experience which at first elicited feelings of pain or fear, to later generate laughter?
•If we feel we don't have time, time has us.
•The story doesn't live on the screen, or even on the page. If it is working it lives in the receiver's head. The words and pictures are merely encryption tools and stimulating reinforcements to keep us from slipping out of the magical stream of the artificial moment. When it is really working well the illusion provides a bridge through the "now" of the individual viewer which connects them to grand archetypes within our greater story as a conscious thinking feeling species trying to imagine itself into a future. In this feedback loop the result for the reciever can be a spiritually transformative experience, as one would expect any connection to the deeper essenses of sentient existence to be.
•Be humble in the face of unearned privilege.
•Throughout history the problem with the human race has been that for the most part "The People" don't really know how to or have the confidence to establish and maintain systems which are truly good for them individually or as a whole. And so they've relied upon "leaders". Yet those with the fortitude and confidence to to take on the challenges of leadership often don't really seem to care what is truly good for "The People".
This dichotomy has led to every great injustice and misery in and out of recorded history, and could or will lead to our demise. Except for the fact that on occasion there are brilliant rays of hope given off by those exceedingly rare individuals who posess both some concept of what actually would be good for "The People" in a multi generational sense, as well as the fortitude and conviction to pay any cost to see it done, even if it means forfeiting their own mortality.
•To everything there is a kernel of truth and a modicum of falsity.
Validity lies only in relatavistic evaluation of a chosen action, and only really applies after the fact.
•There are more things in the universe than just those which have been “proven” .
•Love is every word you say, or nothing.
•I have realized that my mind works based on a “Focus alocation” or “ focus budget” model. I have a certain amount of mental focus energy which is most of the time allocated quite diversely and widely. If I want to accomplish a particularly difficult task I have to convince myself to budget much or all of that focus to the task, which typically means letting go of other things.
The challenge is that my subconcious sometimes tricks me by making me feel like I don’t really want to reallocate that focus. It is looking for the constant stream of positive emotions which comes from a widely distributed focus, and it is afraid of the big negative which comes from an unsuccessful focus effort. So it tricks me into thinking I don’t need to really realocate too much focus, or it slyly offers me facinating new things to focus on as a distraction. “oh look at this.” and the next thing I know three days have passed.
If I am to reach my potential, I must wrest control of my focus back from this selfish self interest which has my own feelings at heart, but is not looking at the long term results of perpetual mediocre activity. I must convince this part of my mind that the negative effects of a lifetime of this intoxicating pablum would be sad and devastating to my entire psyche at it’s core.
I must take control of me!
•Everything means something, but not necessarily what you think.
•I accept the basic proposition that “anything is possible”. I am also aware that many things that are possible may or may not be practically doable. And I refute the concept that anything that is possible or doable should be acceptable.
What then should one use as one's arbiter of chosen action? Why not opt for the impossible? it is the only thing for which the rules simply do not apply.
•If you don’t belive in SOME kind of divinity, you are simply not thinking hard enough.
•The problem with Open Mindedness in leadership is the danger of appearing not to have “Decided” something and thereby appearing to lack the conviction of one’s beliefs. This is not a problem for zealots, closed-minded demagogues, and those with a callous or casual indifference to the effects of their choices. This is why they make very effective leaders for a populace which offers its alegeance based on millions of years of evolution which eschewed well reasoned strategy for the short term self ingratiating merits of immediate action, right or wrong.
•Upon getting dressed after a deeply meditative experience I saw on the side table a pile of foreign devices. Cellphone, watch, wallet, keys, etc. Being so IN my person at that moment, the Me that is beyond the me, I was struck by how I was preparing to “attach” these manmade devices to my human body in order to connect me to the shared illusionary world of today.
The watch to plug me into and keep me in step with accepted concepts of time and timeliness.
The cellphone to uphold social values of universal availability of myself to others and of everything to me.
The keys to keep up expectations about security, ownership and mobility, and how quickly one should be able to change localities.
And of course the wallet, to tie me directly into the reward power structure and to keep a running tally of all the numbers which represent who I am to the society which values them and redeems them for action.
I looked at them and I appreciated what they do for me on this plane, with no intent to dispose of any of them. Yet I did at that moment deeply comprehend how foriegn it is to attach devices to one’s body in order to better fit into our society.
Given that this society is a completely manmade creation why have we not made it in the image of our deeper self?
I resisted and mused for a short while, but ultimately I did plug back in, hoping that my humanity would be safe and sound inside of the shell I feel I must encase myself in to slip conveniently through this modern life.
•From my four year old daughter discussing with me why I had to "work" when she went to "play" . “Maybe one day we could change the world and you could do what you did when you were a little boy”
•The conscious mind is a backseat driver. It always thinks it knows best where to go, and that it is in control. And though the noise it makes may sometimes influence direction, more often than not it is simply distracting static.
•Can the human race find a socioeconomic system which encourages and rewards individual achievement, without fostering tribalism?
•It doesn't make you smart to take advantage of someone's trust.
•Unfortunately, too many high ideals rely on an unrealistic expectation of how frequently the goodness of man will surface in real world situations. What I want to find is a high ideal which not only prepares for but expects the lowest level of behavior, greed, selfishness, hubris, fear, hate, jealousy, and yet makes room for, or rewards, or provides an alternate path for the goodness of man to surmount and overcome those base instincts.
•Even the smallest speck of flotsam may be lifted high on the crest of a wave, and strong swimmers may be crushed by the surf.
•I often find it impossible to address pervasive wrongs. I prefer to suggest possible rights.
•On a recent trip to Louisiana I took a late night stroll around the property where I in part grew up, and found myself strolling through my own memories.
In the deafening unquiet drone of frogs and crickets brought out by a torrent and flood, I found myself unable to look in any direction without some memory being triggered, some past, possibly inconsequential event which took place near that spot of grass, or where that tree used to stand, or on the edge of the driveway slab, or whatever. Memories I would never have called to the fore on my own danced around me, present in the humid air.
Whole segments of my life, good or bad, meaningless or heavy with meaning, came flooding back to me. Which left me wondering, what really is my day to day memory but a biased and self centered, creatively “spun” version of a history, written largely to make me look some way I apparently feel I should.
How much of my own life am I missing? What might I draw from my true memories if only I could spend more time with them?
•Humans are genetically and socially handicapped vessels for their own ideas and ideals.
•Is it a sign of our hubris or our intellectual infancy that we cherry pick unrelated stars from the infinite sky and make of them pictures of implements and animals so that they may better fit into our feeble minds. In our eagerness to make our own fireside stories fit around them we obscure the larger story which they themselves exist to tell.
•Value does not change, but the coin which represents it does.
•Most of us live in a protective room of our own making afraid to open our windows to the challenge of experiences outside of our comfortable abode. Our view is cloudy, or filtered by screens and drapes. Sometimes it’s even shuddered closed.
In fact many of us draw reassuringly static pictures on the walls, rather than live with the constant reminder that there is an entire world of other perhaps unreachable or untamable landscapes out there.
Art is sometimes a gifted view from another prisoner’s window reminding us of what we have carefully avoided. Inspiration is opening the windows to let the sun and rain and lightning and flowers in. Enlightenment is opening the door and walking out.
There is much more to share and, universe willing, there will be much more to come... |
