is better than looking in.
I haven't had a mystical experience in a while. That may sound like an odd thing for an atheist to say, but it is true. Mystical experiences are a pretty regular occurrence for me, but I haven't had one in a while. Some of my most profound experiences have happened while during night watches on a small sailboat far out in the ocean. Others while sitting in the cockpit coasting through the upper flight levels, again at night, everything quiet and going as planned. I have been stopped deep in the AZ desert, called to the side of the road to sit quietly and simply be part of a landscape that showed no evidence of humanity other than the road, myself, and the bike, as far as the horizon in every direction.
Usually these moments come without herald, settle my heart and mind in a way that lingers for days, and pass without comment. Such moments never come when I look in, musing about myself or examining my "inner life." Rather I have to be looking out as far as my eyes can see and then add to that the knowledge that I am seeing only a fraction of what is. Only a sliver - a few narrow bands - of the electromagnetic spectrum that flows from cosmic background radiation to Gama radiation and beyond, pass through my eyes. I also see only a fraction of the "stuff", dark matter and energy making up most of what is. Then there is the reality of an infinite expanse of all this unseen stuff beyond the range of sight.
In those moments everything I can experience in sight and thought is still just an infinitesimally small bit of all that there is, and I am an infinitesimally small bit of that bit. Yet the thought doesn't make the experience. In fact the knowledge of being so minute a bit is something I try to keep close by, a foundational understanding if you will, to all of my musings. It is important not to think too much of ourselves, and keeping the knowledge of our physical place in the cosmos close at hand is a good way to keep our egos in check.
Though an integral part, it isn't the knowledge that makes the experience. When it happens it is a fleeting understanding that all that I know and can't know is a part of me, and I a part of it. "Understanding" isn't really the right word. Usually "understanding" is something we think we can hold. But this "understanding" isn't like that. It has an emotional component that comes as it will and departs in its own time. Though it is undoubtedly part of my brain's function, it is nothing I have any control over and it has no "I" of its own. It brushes by completely unaware of me and, so far as I can tell, with no thought of itself. In fact, since this occasionally happens when someone is sitting right next to me and they are completely untouched, it is clearly some interaction within the confines of my own self.
It is a mystery, which is no surprise. Most of what is is mystery to us.
It is easy to dismiss such moments as random combinations of energies flowing through the circuits of my brain, maybe sparked by my physical location and some unknown emotional state. The philosophies of materialism and reductionism certainly claim so. But I am neither a materialist or a reductionist, and I admit that part of the reason I dismiss such claims are these experienced moments of mystery.
Yet I am an atheist. I have never found a "god" in those moments either. I know mysticism is part of nearly every religion, but my perception is that such experiences flow from our humanity and consciousness, not a god or religion.
But, like I said, I have not had such a moment in a while. And I think its because I am spending too much time looking in again. How do I deal with living in a society as twisted as ours? Where do I fit in a species that is tribal, backward, violent, clings to myths and fairy tales, abandons reason and rejects learning?
Four hundred and forty eight years after Galileo was born, 153 years after Darwin published "On the Origin of Species", 126 years after the first doctorate was awarded in psychology, 87 years after Hubble discovered that the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies ... sitting on my Son in Law's book table is a tome on Catholic Rituals for Exorcism. And because I know most people at least give credence to the idea of evil spirits, somehow that just takes all the wind out of the idea that humanity has a future.
A sham election unfolds in the United States. Candidates already vetted by power are offered as alternatives, yet each varies by only a fraction from the American party line. Thrown in the mix are a few truly bat-shit crazy religious fanatics; some who will win, others who will lose. But all will offer a distraction that keeps us from taking a clear-eyed look at our sorry State of affairs. Living in a failing society makes it easy to look in, look close, look at how to best ride out the storm.
But all of these things do narrow one's vision. Ridiculous religious fantasies abound, but are they really gaining? Or are we seeing the tantrums of a failing, false view of the cosmos? Worshiping the war god of Abraham the Jews and Muslims continue to spasm their way into backwardness and irrelevancy. Worshiping supply side economics and the same war god of Abraham, the USA continues to shuffle out of the way of China. European / American colonialism has run up against a full earth. There is no one left to colonize, no land left to appropriate. This same full, and fully connected, earth, has stripped Christianity of the mantel of the "one true religion." Oh, some of the Christians still claim it, but no one else believes it, or is listening much to them anymore. With a few scattered exceptions much of the first world is moving toward rejecting America's social engineering, crony capitalism, and war mongering. Those who are not are following us into the void.
It may well be that barley enough Americans believe their own propaganda enough to put the T-Party / Republicans in power. But that will only hasten the change. And it might be kind of fun to watch. The history of human kind and always been full of stumbling and the rise and fall of bad ideas. Experiments in social structures continuously evolve just as does everything in the cosmos.
There is no telling when, or if, the mystery will brush by again. I hope it does ... hope and joy experienced as emotion will make any day brighter. But they can also be conclusions born of observation.
Looking out is better than looking in.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Monday, October 15, 2012
Living with the Bad Guys
During the earlier part of my life it seemed to me America was home to a lot of good guys. There was the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the ant-war movement, and the beginning of the environmental movement. The first big oil shock had come and with it a growing understanding that the oil supply was not infinate, that conservation and devising alternate means of providing energy were simply challenges that would have to meet. The need to eliminate poverty and provide a quality education for every child was a given in the national debate. There were conflicting ideas on how to go about reaching those goals, but no one suggested that the poor deserved to be poor and their children deserved to be uneducated. Very often much of religion, including my particular tribe of Christianity, was on the right side of these efforts.
Those were tumultuous days and the bad guys were putting up a fight. The governments of Johnson, Nixon and Tip O'Neil were as least as corrupt as any modern counterpart. The war in Vietnam went on endlessly, without hope of "winning" and with no exit stragity while uncounted millions were sacrificed to the bottom line of the war profiteers and the military. Southern politicians went to war against civil rights and in many places cities burned and tanks took to the streets. Leaders of religion waviered on civil rights for women and, knowing who buttered their bread, quietly began to abandon the poor so their patrons could get tax breaks. American Christians flocked to the prosperity doctrin teachers and kneel before their alters of money to this very day. Industry leaders started to suggest that protecting the environment could only be done at the cost of middle class jobs and moved jobs oversees to prove it.
In fact, the bad guys put up such a good fight that they eventually won and I now live in a country in full retreat on every front of human progress.
And I'm not sure what to do with that. I can't even vote in good conscious, seeing it as giving some legitimacy to a comply debased system, like voting in Cuba or the old Soviet Union. I can pick between deeply evil people, just evil people, or occasionaly well intentioned but utterly incompetent people. (People who, by the way, have no chance of making a difference.) I take a lot of heat for my opinion of voting but tell me, who do I vote for? Who is the anit-war candidate? Who is the anti-Wall Street or pro-union candidate? Where on the ballot will I find a politician who is openly pro-science, who will dare critisize the excesses of religion, who will keep the creationists out of the schools, and who would consider even a 10% budget cut for the D.O.D., let alone the 40 or 50% cut that we should be discussing? Vote? Sure, except there is not a single progressive anywhere to be found.
I could take to the streets and join the protesters, but there are no protesters any more. Occupy Wall Street has faded for lack of interest and focus, and it turns out the T-party types are the bad guys.
Unless I want to give up eating I can't really boycott big corporations. We do have a local hardware store around the corner that I use when I can. But often Wall-Mart or Home Depot is the only place to find I need. I ride a motorcycle, but it is a big one that only gets about 40 mpg. And to be truthful, I don't ride to be "green" but because I like to go fast and be out in the wind. (I'm also not brave enough to take a 100 mpg scooter out on the highways around here.) Corporations who abuse the planet, their suppliers, their workers and their customers in order to boost their stock price to its maximum are about the only game left. The entire US of A is now like one big company mining town from the late 1800s, only it is Multi-national corporations who own the place.
It is starting to feel like being a rational, moral, compassionate human being is to be in the minority on our little planet.
Those were tumultuous days and the bad guys were putting up a fight. The governments of Johnson, Nixon and Tip O'Neil were as least as corrupt as any modern counterpart. The war in Vietnam went on endlessly, without hope of "winning" and with no exit stragity while uncounted millions were sacrificed to the bottom line of the war profiteers and the military. Southern politicians went to war against civil rights and in many places cities burned and tanks took to the streets. Leaders of religion waviered on civil rights for women and, knowing who buttered their bread, quietly began to abandon the poor so their patrons could get tax breaks. American Christians flocked to the prosperity doctrin teachers and kneel before their alters of money to this very day. Industry leaders started to suggest that protecting the environment could only be done at the cost of middle class jobs and moved jobs oversees to prove it.
In fact, the bad guys put up such a good fight that they eventually won and I now live in a country in full retreat on every front of human progress.
And I'm not sure what to do with that. I can't even vote in good conscious, seeing it as giving some legitimacy to a comply debased system, like voting in Cuba or the old Soviet Union. I can pick between deeply evil people, just evil people, or occasionaly well intentioned but utterly incompetent people. (People who, by the way, have no chance of making a difference.) I take a lot of heat for my opinion of voting but tell me, who do I vote for? Who is the anit-war candidate? Who is the anti-Wall Street or pro-union candidate? Where on the ballot will I find a politician who is openly pro-science, who will dare critisize the excesses of religion, who will keep the creationists out of the schools, and who would consider even a 10% budget cut for the D.O.D., let alone the 40 or 50% cut that we should be discussing? Vote? Sure, except there is not a single progressive anywhere to be found.
I could take to the streets and join the protesters, but there are no protesters any more. Occupy Wall Street has faded for lack of interest and focus, and it turns out the T-party types are the bad guys.
Unless I want to give up eating I can't really boycott big corporations. We do have a local hardware store around the corner that I use when I can. But often Wall-Mart or Home Depot is the only place to find I need. I ride a motorcycle, but it is a big one that only gets about 40 mpg. And to be truthful, I don't ride to be "green" but because I like to go fast and be out in the wind. (I'm also not brave enough to take a 100 mpg scooter out on the highways around here.) Corporations who abuse the planet, their suppliers, their workers and their customers in order to boost their stock price to its maximum are about the only game left. The entire US of A is now like one big company mining town from the late 1800s, only it is Multi-national corporations who own the place.
It is starting to feel like being a rational, moral, compassionate human being is to be in the minority on our little planet.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
The rule of war
Pay too much attention to the American Media Propaganda machine and it will have you believing that the world is ending before your very eyes. It is a bit difficult to keep a sense of balance and joy in a world that is ending before your very eyes. Fortunately though, if you think about it, how right can they be? After all they manage to get just about everything else wrong in varying degrees of inaccuracy. One of the biggest and most profitable news organizations regularly suggests that President Obama is a) Muslim, b) a Muslim Terrorist and, c) not an American citizen at all. These are demonstrably false in every detail, but the news readers keep right on talking and Fox keeps right on making massive sums of money. Which means that a huge number of Americans keep going back to be lied to again and again. How did George Bush the II put it, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again." Sounds like a Fox News watcher to me.
Maybe the idea that large numbers of people actually go to the American Media Propaganda machine to hear something they think in true is enough to make one think the world is coming to an end. Or maybe the idea that nearly half of American adults think that a god created people just as they are now, less than 10,000 years ago, is enough to conclude the world is coming to and end. A reported one quarter of American adults get their moral leadership from the Pope and the Catholic church. (That one stuns me. That's like getting moral leadership from the Mafia.) A large number of people here in Missouri are going to vote for Todd Akin. A guy named Paul Broun, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, doesn't actually believe in science and is a young earth creationist. In fact he claims that knowledge that contradicts his YEC views are a conspiracy invented by the Devil himself. Worse? The people of the 10th Congressional District of Georgia have been electing this person to power in a free democratic elections since 2007!
Which, since some of this crosses the boarder into pure insanity, could well mean the end of the United States of America is in sight. But that will not be the end of the world. In fact, seeing as the US of A is the world's largest weapons producer and seller, and threatens the rest of the planet with an army twice the size of all other armies, combined, the end of the USA in its current iteration may mean the beginning of the start of a new direction for the rest of the world. For the sad fact seems to be, as long as a war loving United States dominates world politics, there is little chance for peace.
When I see people throughout the world protesting against the United States I don't see people who hate democracy and freedom. I don't see people who despise the "infidels" or who want to burn down modern civilization and replace it with some bronze age theocracy. What I see are people who are devastated by the wars being brought to their front door by an elitist and uncaring Super Power; who are trying to escape the tyrants supported by the West in general and the US in particular. I see people who are tired of being under the heel of our military boot. And yes, I see people who prefer their own backward religion to the backward religion of the West. But how does that make them any different than Todd Akin or Paul Broun, both of whom would make it law that every child in this country be taught the religious myths of Christian Creationism as fact, that every married person meet the bible's definition of a "family", and that all morality be dictated by their morality?
Maybe what we are seeing the the beginning of the end of the American History of War. I've said it before but it is worth repeating, America has been at war for more than 200 of its 235 year history. (Clearly the idea that the purpose of a strong military is to protect the peace, is pure bullshit.) It seems clear to me that the military has bankrupted both our finances and our sense of morality. I'm not sure how we fix the latter, but the former is going to fix itself. No country in the history of human kind has ever been able to support a military mighty enough to subdue the rest of the world. It isn't likely that the US will be the first.
This is particularly true since we hate paying taxes. The math seems kind of simple. It takes a certain percentage of any country's GDP to maintain a civilization. For first world societies that includes things like roads, schools, a power grid, inspectors of things like food and medicines, police, fire departments, disaster response teams, the countless interactions of government / industry / individual / bureaucracy that makes any people a "people". So all first world countries start out kind of even in the necessary tax rates to fund their country. Now add to that the world's biggest army by a factor of 2. Americans have to be paying the highest tax rates in the first world, right? We have a first world society plus the burden of having, by a wide margin, the world's largest military. But no. We are way down the list of tax rates. Magic, or so it would seem until one looks at the debt. The truth is we probably couldn't afford our military even if we were willing to pay for it.
But we are not willing to pay for it, pushing of the costs to following generations. We will not pay enough taxes to support it now, and it isn't likely most of us will accept eliminating every dime of spending and cutting every single government program, entity and office to nothing in order to pay for it in the future. Which, by the way, appears to be what it will take to keep our out sized army in bullets. It also appears to be a society that the T-Party / Republicans think of as "ideal". The fact that such a society can't possibly exist doesn't occur to them. Then again they are the party of fantasy, magic, and faith so that shouldn't be a surprise. It is also another indication that America as it currently expresses itself can not endure.
Maybe the idea that large numbers of people actually go to the American Media Propaganda machine to hear something they think in true is enough to make one think the world is coming to an end. Or maybe the idea that nearly half of American adults think that a god created people just as they are now, less than 10,000 years ago, is enough to conclude the world is coming to and end. A reported one quarter of American adults get their moral leadership from the Pope and the Catholic church. (That one stuns me. That's like getting moral leadership from the Mafia.) A large number of people here in Missouri are going to vote for Todd Akin. A guy named Paul Broun, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, doesn't actually believe in science and is a young earth creationist. In fact he claims that knowledge that contradicts his YEC views are a conspiracy invented by the Devil himself. Worse? The people of the 10th Congressional District of Georgia have been electing this person to power in a free democratic elections since 2007!
Which, since some of this crosses the boarder into pure insanity, could well mean the end of the United States of America is in sight. But that will not be the end of the world. In fact, seeing as the US of A is the world's largest weapons producer and seller, and threatens the rest of the planet with an army twice the size of all other armies, combined, the end of the USA in its current iteration may mean the beginning of the start of a new direction for the rest of the world. For the sad fact seems to be, as long as a war loving United States dominates world politics, there is little chance for peace.
When I see people throughout the world protesting against the United States I don't see people who hate democracy and freedom. I don't see people who despise the "infidels" or who want to burn down modern civilization and replace it with some bronze age theocracy. What I see are people who are devastated by the wars being brought to their front door by an elitist and uncaring Super Power; who are trying to escape the tyrants supported by the West in general and the US in particular. I see people who are tired of being under the heel of our military boot. And yes, I see people who prefer their own backward religion to the backward religion of the West. But how does that make them any different than Todd Akin or Paul Broun, both of whom would make it law that every child in this country be taught the religious myths of Christian Creationism as fact, that every married person meet the bible's definition of a "family", and that all morality be dictated by their morality?
Maybe what we are seeing the the beginning of the end of the American History of War. I've said it before but it is worth repeating, America has been at war for more than 200 of its 235 year history. (Clearly the idea that the purpose of a strong military is to protect the peace, is pure bullshit.) It seems clear to me that the military has bankrupted both our finances and our sense of morality. I'm not sure how we fix the latter, but the former is going to fix itself. No country in the history of human kind has ever been able to support a military mighty enough to subdue the rest of the world. It isn't likely that the US will be the first.
This is particularly true since we hate paying taxes. The math seems kind of simple. It takes a certain percentage of any country's GDP to maintain a civilization. For first world societies that includes things like roads, schools, a power grid, inspectors of things like food and medicines, police, fire departments, disaster response teams, the countless interactions of government / industry / individual / bureaucracy that makes any people a "people". So all first world countries start out kind of even in the necessary tax rates to fund their country. Now add to that the world's biggest army by a factor of 2. Americans have to be paying the highest tax rates in the first world, right? We have a first world society plus the burden of having, by a wide margin, the world's largest military. But no. We are way down the list of tax rates. Magic, or so it would seem until one looks at the debt. The truth is we probably couldn't afford our military even if we were willing to pay for it.
But we are not willing to pay for it, pushing of the costs to following generations. We will not pay enough taxes to support it now, and it isn't likely most of us will accept eliminating every dime of spending and cutting every single government program, entity and office to nothing in order to pay for it in the future. Which, by the way, appears to be what it will take to keep our out sized army in bullets. It also appears to be a society that the T-Party / Republicans think of as "ideal". The fact that such a society can't possibly exist doesn't occur to them. Then again they are the party of fantasy, magic, and faith so that shouldn't be a surprise. It is also another indication that America as it currently expresses itself can not endure.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)