Overcoming the Matrix of Delusions

Cypher and Agent Smith

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BuQFUhsRM

In many ways the movie "The Matrix" mirrors what has become true about the 21st century. It's a movie, so naturally the story is over sensationalized and fictional. In many real ways machines are running the show by our over dependence on them. Machines are pretty much responsible for keeping us alive. Our dependence starts with the extraction of petroleum sugar all the way to the delivery of said sugar to our pie holes. Just this one fact enables the lesser evolved of us to replicate continuously for personal low-grade financial gain. Then there are all of the machines that make the information age possible from cell phones provided for free to lap tops and ibooks. Then to tie it all together you can't forget about all of the personal transportation machines that are responsible entirely for our way of life. I don't think we are in any danger of having our metabolism harvested by evil machines, but we are overly dependent on them nonetheless, and they seem to highlight the majority of our existence these days.

Like the Matrix, the truth is hidden from us in plan daylight. MSM keeps up the misinformation because they have been bought and paid for and because they genuinely believe their nonsense. They are owned by the oligarchs. Our world has willfully taken the blue pill. The scene where Cypher is enjoying his fillet minon while knowing that it's not real is a perfect representation for our political leaders. I suppose they could just be that stupid, and they really don't know how ineffectual and pointless they have become. I believe the act of willfully ignoring the truth because it's uncomfortable is the highest form of delusion. The collective apathetic ignorance has enabled the delusion which has created the modern Matrix of deceit.

Unless you have recently lost your job and then house, than you are probably chugging along in the bubble of your delusion ignoring all of the dead suffering just outside the perimeter of your wishful thinking. Large things that don't work have been winding up for decades in our supposed democratic republic ruled by capitalism. These things have a lot of potential energy and they are beginning to sag with weight. Entire states are on the verge of bankruptcy and the federal government's monopoly money game is just about over. We have been artificially propped up by the Bankster's trillion dollar bailouts. Well, at least they gave the states a couple hundred billion dollars, a mere pittance when gauged against the likes of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates's personal fortunes. The top 1% of our population possesses nearly 50% of the wealth of this country. Nothing new I suppose. What has been new for the last 200 years or so is the hallucination that America has mortgaged their soul to believe. The hallucination that somehow we are better because we can all collectively believe that we are free. We are not free. Cut up your credit cards and stop paying taxes and see how free you will become. You will become free to set up a cardboard box in a back alley somewhere. If your lucky you can find a free source of heat to sleep near in your free cardboard box. Grow the wrong plant in your backyard and watch the helicopters spend millions of dollars taking you to prison.

Well, of course you can always sign up for food stamps and unemployment. Your government will be happy to fund your petroleum sugar lifestyle. You'll have to make friends with bed bugs, cockroaches, Cracky McCrackerson, and base music but you won't have to do a damn thing. If you don't want the welfare junky lifestyle you can join the military. There you will most likely succumb to brain washing and be reprogrammed to excel at breaking legs and punching holes in brown people's flesh with high velocity lead. If you can remember lots of information at once, they will teach you how to stand around in 140 degree engine rooms while overseeing the splitting of atoms while dropping bombs on brown people's caves. Another option is that you can work for the man. You know the one where you hang up your mind on the mind rack right next to the time clock cause you ain't gonna need it for the rest of your shift. A small portion of us actually get to succeed at some type of entrepreneurial venture providing some type of service that people are willing to pay for, but those are by far the minority of our society. One thing is for sure, you probably are never going to be among that 1% no matter how hard you try. Unless you know somebody who knows somebody who's part of the club.

The hard fact of the matter is that there are too many people. We created machines to run on petroleum. Petroleum is essentially manna from heaven in energy terms. It's literally the closest substance to God on the planet. It is sunlight in liquid form. We created machines to run on it and to turn it into petroleum sugar. We run on petroleum sugar. There is a lot of it and so there is now a lot of us to reflect that abundance of extra sunlight. Problem is that it took millions of years for the Earth's biosphere to create that stored sunlight. All of our problems are a direct reflection of this one mistake. Our Matrix was created by our use of petroleum.

This world that we have created with all of the surplus energy is a fantasy. It's a blip on the radar of human experience. It's also the most massive lie ever perpetrated by the human race on itself. It became a lie when the leaders of the world found out that petroleum was not going to be around forever and then did nothing about it. M.K. Hubbert predicted in 1956 that America would peak in the late 60's early 70's. He was proven right in 1970 when America's domestic oil supply peaked. Instead of going to space we should have designed a sustainable way of life. We are all slaves to that blip on the human experience radar now. The same thing is going to happen to the world oil supply. We are going to run out of recoverable petroleum sugar.

Here is M.K. Hubbert in 1976 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImV1voi41YY&feature=channel_page

Nobody wants to take the red pill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfd0_7BcU-0 Bill Hicks

"Go back to bed America your government has figured it out."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgqeL0AvZfo&feature=related George Carlin

Steady State Economies?

http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2010/12/what-does-a-better-economy-look-like.html#comments

The above is a very well written article. It addresses the inevitable future that will not be stopped by any amount of Xanax and alcohol. Our society has become hyper-complex and so I think it's easy to fall into the trap of overly complicated solutions to our problem. The answer really is very simple yet it's not good news for those of us alive just now. Well that, and it's not really an answer so much as it is an inevitable situation that's happening to us. Doing something meaningful in an attempt to fix our state as a civilization at this point is as likely as a meth binge is to fix the failing enamel on your front teeth.

Ecology trumps man's creative cleverness and problem solving abilities every time. Ecology is ruled by physical laws which all revolve around the laws of energy. In order for an organism to thrive it has to have access to a sustainable amount of energy. Energy comes predominately from the sun with some geothermal tossed in for good measure. There is a very good reason why primitive civilizations all worshiped the sun. They were right. The sun is the true power that giveth and taketh away. The sun provides the energy necessary for life on this planet to exist.

It appears that understanding the situation our species is in is akin to kicking water uphill. Why nobody is willing to take this issue into their mind is beyond me. OUR WORLD IS OVERPOPULATED DUE TO PETROLEUM (I'm going to beat this dead horse until I'm left beating a hallucination of a horse because somebody has to at least attempt to warn people...even though they predominately don't care or want to care or want to know). This is not up for debate. Whether you chose to believe it or not does not matter. However, pending we can move forward as if the majority of humanity understands this very pressing issue, what is the solution if any? Is there a way for mankind to persist on this planet in a sustainable way?

I don't think there is. Not unless the majority of the human race can raise their level of consciousness up five or six clicks. That, and we're all going to exit soul into a perfect society of enlightened, New Age, hippie douche's in a rapturous orgasm of kum-by-ya on Dec 21, 2012. The only way to maintain sustainability is to work with the natural world. That is to live by the dictates of energy flows. This means being cognizant about using natural resources at a rate that nature can keep up with. Not just what nature can regenerate but also what it can detoxify. The author of the linked blog above uses the example of yeasts eating sugar. It's the same story for any organism and it's main source of energy. In the case of yeasts that energy is sugar. The yeasts end up killing themselves by overpopulation leading to a poisonous environment. Yeasts can only tolerate so much alcohol (CO2 and alcohol being yeasts waste products) before they die. This same drama is playing out for the human race. The only unknown at this point in time is which element of the trifecta is going to put an end to our nonsense. Will the economy collapse and cause a massive die off, or will climate change cause massive natural disasters which cause massive die off, or will us running out of petroleum sugar cause a massive die off? The only question is which one of these things is going to cause a massive die off first?

The reasons for this are terrifyingly clear. We ate too much petroleum sugar. We designed, or muddled up to, a way of life that depends on regular increases of petroleum sugar doses. That's what caused this unfortunate situation to occur. Now there is nothing we can do about the fact that natural laws are going to require a major sacrifice of the human race by way of massive die off. So the debate in the Trifecta informed crowd, at this point, is what will a "steady state" economy look like on the ground? A steady state economy is a sustainable economy. Is that possible for mankind to achieve? I think that it is possible given the right set of circumstances. You can't give a heroine addict a seemingly unlimited supply of heroine and then ask him to use the junk sustainably. The best that hypothetical junky is going to be able to do is stay smacked up for a long time. The worst is an overdose. We have managed to stay jacked up on petroleum sugar until now. What you are feeling now is that little bit of left over rock that you found in the couch and on the floor board of your car that you were able to stuff into your soda pop crack pipe for one last half ass hooray. To me, theorizing about a steady state economy is an exercise in scholastic futility. Sometimes we can't help ourselves.

The fact of the matter is that humans are greedy and tend towards hubris. We are naturally self serving and I venture to guess that the reason for this is millions of years of evolution. Natural selection means the law of the jungle. The strongest, fastest, most clever monkey gets to reproduce. Altruism and selflessness is predominately a human idea similar to math and time. There may be rare cases of altruism in the animal kingdom, but those are extremely rare. Even a dog's loyalty derives from the fact that you feed him. To help somebody that has never helped you, or that you don't like, requires mental discipline and faith in spiritual wisdom. The overwhelming majority of mankind is not altruistic. The majority of people serve their small tribe and that is it. Family and friends are all that matter. We tend to serve that before and beyond anything else. In other words, I'm going to do what ever I have to to ensure that my home is heated in the winter. We largely vie for energy. As long as there is enough energy to go around we can pretty much all get along.

What we are seeing now is the onset of energy depletion. I firmly believe that the economy disruptions we have been dealing with are reflecting the beginning of a shortage of energy. The abundance of energy has allowed this to occur via too many people. What has happened is as inevitable as the sun rise. Any species would have done the exact same thing given the option. Further proof that we are just clever monkeys, but monkeys nonetheless. The difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is that we can conceive of a different reality. We have conceptual free will. We could have prevented this conceptually but not in reality. Because the reality is that we are mostly ruled by our monkey nature.

None of this is stopping movements like the Transition Movement from happening. I think the Transition Movement is necessary and good, however I also think that the majority of them are deluded about what is possible. Keep in mind that my opinion has been informed by blogosphere/internetosphere sources and nothing more. It seems that those in the TM camp think they are going to somehow erect a new way of life that is sustainable. Indeed that is what they are attempting to do. If there was anything like the TM around my local biosphere I would join in the efforts if for no other reason than to be around informed people. A lot can be said about the TM and while they may be deluded they are certainly informed about the reality of the trifecta. Community is going to be more and more necessary in the future. Together we can accomplish much more than we can alone. The only sane approach to our demise is cultivating sustainability in all areas of our lives. This is what the TM is trying to do via permaculture coupled with intentional community and accentuated by renewability. The TM is a case where conceptually it seems necessary and possible and sane but in reality probably won't get very far. But it's a response to the Trifecta and that's at least something.

Personally I've subscribed entirely to John Michael Greer's "Green Wizardry" as my approach to our depressive future. Dimitri Orlov also presents a very informed approach to our future. My approach to our future will be the subject of my next blog.

Optimistic Pessimism.

I am an optimistic pessimist. Have you ever met one of us? We tend to be the keepers of reality...let me explain.

The overwhelming majority of existence is highlighted by painful suffering. Much of this suffering has been hidden from us by various petrochemicals, an abundance of high fructose petroleum sugar saturated beverages and snacks, Orwellian MSM disinformation campaigns designed to render a perpetual optimistic proletariat devoid of all reality, and a culture encouraged to follow a drooling pack of violent buffoons who win games by smashing their bodies into each other at high speeds. These drooling buffoons get paid more money than all of the proletariat who follow them signaling that the virtues of society are to be found in the ability to drool while hitting a target at high speeds. As an optimistic pessimist I have consciously decided to protect myself from this abstraction by turning off the television and refusing to care about sports. It's not that I don't mind being distracted from the harsh realities of our existence from time to time, it's just that I prefer to not fill my psyche with trivial triviosities such as retards smashing into one another.

In order to pay attention to the state of affairs in the union one must maintain their optimistic pessimism at all costs. We adhere to reality because we realize that the future is not going to be full of miniature electronic gizmos and fried corn snacks, but we maintain optimism by hoping that the worst does not happen. In all actuality I am not a pessimist at all. It just happens that society labels me as one. Society accomplishes this by ignoring the conditions of reality and perpetrating a paradigm of wishful thinking. The God of Western Civilization has become, to borrow a word coined by James Howard Kunstler, the god of "technotriumphalism". This is the idea that technology is going to find a way to reinvent the first three laws of thermodynamics. This belief largely manifests itself as the belief that we are going to find a way to manufacture and run cars on direct sun rays. Somehow we are going to find a way to capture 100% of the sun's radiation that manages to strike Earth's surface. We are going to capture that energy and convert it into a liquid that will be able to replace petroleum. Or you can just say screw reality and start chanting abiotic oil over and over again.

Optimistic pessimist will continually refer you to the state of ill repair our economy has fallen into. They will tell you that the economy is not going to improve for any long term anything at all. They will tell you that the infinite growth paradigm is set to smash into the steel wall of limited resources. They will tell you that human population has been in the process of hyper inflating itself for the last 50 years, and that we are nearing the vertical part of the exponential growth graph. They will also tell you that we are nearing uncharted territories of ppm CO2 in the atmosphere which is causing "climate weirding" and set to change the face of the world and provide an overabundance of geological refugees. We will basically tell you that the future is not going to be marked by stability. Actually the future is going to be accented by hues of catastrophe and olfactory wonders that will remind you of an outhouse at that football game I was alluding to earlier.

You see there are three major winds of change all coalescing into a magnificent hurricane of destruction. These winds are the trifecta of peak oil, climate change, and economic destruction. All three of these conditions are worsened by mans desire to consume without due regard. Nobody thinks about what is required of the rest of the world to subsidize our greed and lazy wastefulness. Everything we have is taken for granted because it's all we have ever known. Nature strives for equilibrium in all things. Our lowering discretionary income is a result of the equalizing that's just now become visible.

If society were to judge attitude relative to reality than I, and those who share my view, would be considered informed optimist. There was a way we could have mitigated the trifecta. Mostly if we had acted like grown ups instead of ego maniacal Paris Hiltons jacked up on designer drugs, we could have created a sustainable and comfortable lifestyle. Of course that would have required valuing common sense and the use of our bodies on a regular basis rather than believing whatever you want while mostly drinking alcoholic corn and yelling at drooling buffoons on the television. Comfortable sustainability means cultivating verbs like sharing, recycling, and composting. It means living locally in emotional spheres that can be walked to. It means giving up the two year old mentality of "mine".

I have to fight on a daily basis to not be a pessimistic pessimist. It seems everybody I talk to just believes whatever the hell they want to believe about the nature of reality. They argue about lies presented as their only options by Big Brother. Do you want the democrats to socialize everything via taking all of your money, or do you want the Republicans to privatize everything by taking all of your money. Either way the oligarchs are going to take all of your money. Do you want to kill me over your God or the other guys God...or do you want to kill him first and then kill me for having an informed opinion that I didn't get from the television. Do you want to argue about how the "Communist News Network" or the "fair and balanced" lies of Faux News are the correct brand of connivance.

I'm so tired of hearing "well there's nothing you can do about it so why worry about it?" Well that's only true if you're willing to agree that smoking doesn't cause cancer. Go ahead and smoke dumb ass (I used to be a smoker so don't go getting all offended, besides I warned you under the title of this blog and I don't care about your feelings being hurt). Everybody knows it doesn't cause cancer. When you die from COPD complications we'll all agree that it wasn't the smoking that killed you and you'll still be dead. There is something you can do about it...stop smoking. Yeah, you can't stop cigarettes from being manufactured, but you can stop smoking. So what the hell am I talking about? You can't change climate change, peak oil, or the crashing economy, but you can change the way you interact with your world based on being informed by the truth. You can analyze what all of this information means and change your behavior based on it.

All of the "what are we gonna do's" aside, how about just caring to know what is real for knowings sake? Do you really need a reason to no longer be deluded? The benefit to knowing and accepting the status of our likely future is that you become emotionally prepared before hand. While business execs and soccer moms are overdosing on their serotonin re-uptake inhibitors and alcohol because they can't handle the end of the infinite growth paradigm you will have already gone through the stages of grief. You won't be surprised when your plans get vetoed by the trifecta. Not to mention you have plenty of time just now to kick around ideas about how you can better prepare yourself for a "World Made by Hand."

If you have any kind of land you can at least remain optimistically pessimistic about what you might be able to do with it pending you can manage to stay out of the fed ghettos and actually remain employed. If your profession is not going to be worth a hill of beans when gasoline is 10 dpg at the pump than you might think about changing that vulnerability. Maybe you start learning all of the peculiar eccentricities of growing y0ur own food without synthetic chemicals, acquire the equipment and skills to produce your own ethanol on a small scale, learn how to sharpen knives, sew, preserve foods, pottery, knit...you get the idea. You can bury your head back in the sand and pretend you are Peter Pan en route to Never Never Land if that's what you need to do, but that just makes you a deluded optimist. There's no reason why you can't grow up and make friends with reality.

Anthropomorphical Paradoxicus

God

The belief that has kept me busy for an extended period of time. At this point I've devoted around a third of my life to figuring out what God is all about. The God I take issue with is the anthropomorphic creator God. The one Christianity brings us. Due to my upbringing in Christianity it's the Christian God that I relate to and understand the best. We are asked to believe that this all knowing God created everything that is now, and has ever been, in existence. I take issue with this.

I don't believe that anybody would willingly believe in a God that created the concept and reality of suffering. Why would an omnipotent God create suffering? I understand the idea that we need duality to know anything. That is to say that up has no reference without down. We cannot conceive of what it means to stop unless we first understand what it means to put into action, and in order to perceive you need an object and a perceiver. Duality is how we experience reality. However, if I were an omnipotent and omniscient God, and I had the power to create and destroy everything, I would have done it differently. I would have created life in such a way that it was only possible to know eternal bliss. Everything in creation would be nothing more than the experience of rapturous bliss. That is the only option for a good and well intentioned creator God. God has the ability to make it so. So why has he not done so?

The fact that he did not create bliss, and nothing else but bliss, means that he didn't want to. That means that he wanted to create suffering. Okay, so Satan is where the evil comes from right? A fallen angel...we all know the story. Well, God created the free will that allowed Satan to fall to begin with. Never mind the fact that God knows everything and therefore had to know what Satan was ultimately going to do. God created the capacity in Satan for him to perpetuate evil. Either way, God is the creator. Why would anybody believe in a God that would create suffering?

God is a middle man. Basically no matter what you believe you have to first believe that something came from nothing, or do you? There was nothing then there was something. Where did something come from? Science says it came from the big bang and religion says that it came from God. Well where did the big bang come from and likewise where did God come from? Both camps will answer that in a similar fashion with only rhetoric separating them. Science says it doesn't know and religion says God has just always existed. He never had a beginning or an ending. Okay so God has always been and he didn't come from anywhere.

Well, I say that existence has just always existed. Existence never had a beginning and it will never have an end. Consciousness has always existed. That is my answer to God. To get from nothing to something you need something else. To get from always to forever you don't need anything. Consciousness embodies that perfectly. It is my belief that consciousness has always been and has no creator. The point to consciousness is existence, which defines itself. Consciousness perceiving itself for eternity and for no reason. It just is...that...way.

So than what happens to us when we die? Hell if I know because I'm not dead and I have no recollection of ever dying. I can speculate. I can come up with some beliefs based on whatever works for me. Logic does not have much of a place in figuring out what happens when the enabler of logic, the brain, stops with it's neuro-transmission. I like to think that karma and reincarnation are real. I think the concepts work will with each other given a view of reality that does not entail an anthropomorphic creator God. Historically Karma is a well trodden path. There is instant karma, karma that takes a while, karma that takes a while longer, and karma that manifests as you coming back as a leaper or possibly an ant depending on your particular brand of misbehavior. Reincarnation may or may not be what happens to you depending on whether or not you can spot the right colored Buddha while in the Bardo. It can be as ridiculous as you want really. You see, I don't know that karma and reincarnation are real I just choose to believe that they may be. I'm in touch with the fact that I don't know them to be true. I'm not claiming that they are the only possibility, and I sure as hell ain't condemning anybody to burn for eternity if they disagree. Now we have reached the hook...my pet peeve...and nobody has talked me down from it.

The hook is the one that I'm not going to let you off of until you explain yourself to me. All of the philosophy behind religion, or rather theology, is all right with me. I have just illustrated that I believe your chance at free enlightenment upon your death and subsequent visit to the Bardo all depends on whether or not you can pick the right color Buddha. You only have seven and a half minutes to do this by the way...in human time. So I can't condemn anybody for believing in anthropomorphic bearded God's in the clouds (he's the guy with the lightening bolt pictured above). However, when you start condemning people to burn in hell for eternity because they don't believe like you...now we have a problem.

Christianity= God, Jesus, Satan, Heaven, Hell, Jesus as the way to redemption and salvation and therefore bliss in Heaven...these are the necessary beliefs you must subscribe to in order to call yourself a Christian. Any deviation from this and you are not a Christian. Let me explain.

Christianity has been transmitted to us via the Bible. Everything a Christian knows about their religion comes from this book. The Bible is Christianity. Now I will concede that you can call yourself Christian and not have to take the Bible word for word. For example, you can be gay and Christian even though the bible pretty much says sodomy is a sin. You can be pro-choice and be Christian. You can even view the majority of the Bible as poetry. Okay, I get that, but you can't do all of that and then deny the very things that make calling yourself a Christian have any meaning. Let me rephrase that. If you say you are Christian and you don't believe in Jesus...who is supposed to take you seriously? If you can call yourself Christian and pick and choose only the parts that you like than why do you need to call yourself Christian to begin with?

My point is that in order for Christianity to have any meaning there has to be some commonality amongst all Christians. To my estimation that would be God, Jesus, Satan, Heaven, Hell, and Jesus as personnel savior. If you don't believe in those things, you can call yourself a Christian but then when I say I'm an African American Cheetah you have to concede that I am indeed an African American Cheetah even though you know that I'm actually a very Anglo Saxon Irish American dude. I'm going to proceed as though you agree with my stipulations on the requirements of Christian belief. Now for that hook I was talking about (I apologize for carrying on like I have been for the last couple of paragraphs but I find it imperative that you understand my pet peeve, and if you are still reading you deserve some type of karmic reward).

If you are Christian than you have to believe that Jesus is the only way to Heaven. This would have to be true for all of humanity. If that is true than all non-Christians have a special seat reserved for them in Hell. By your own belief you condemn all of the non-Christian world to burn in hell for eternity. That....is...nonsense. This is now, and has always been, my main problem with Christianity. The truth of the vengeful God of the old testament is covered up and forgotten about because he showed up in the flesh and suffered for a while. The foundation that laid the path for Jesus to make any sense was full of more violence than any other book every written. God exterminated the entire human race minus a few select individuals...talk about genocide. All of that is to be forgotten because of Jesus. Jesus was God incarnate and God created the duality that is suffering and bliss.

To eat from the tree of knowledge was our original sin. Worse than that, it was Eve's sin and she got it all over mankind. Adam didn't even know he was eating the forbidden fruit but he was still punished for it...him and the rest of mankind along with him. So here we have a loving God condemning mankind to suffering because of the evil woman who didn't listen to a simple command. God condemning mankind to suffering because Eve wanted to know. God condemning mankind to suffering because of the rules to a game that he himself created...free will. To be fair the story of Adam and Eve is a really good story. If it's viewed as a symbolic representation of man's mistake. In Buddhist terms that mistake would be getting caught up in Samsara to begin with. Samsara being the phantasmagorical world of sense gratification. In this case God would be enlightenment and the apple would be sensory distraction. Somewhere in there the slivering snake of an ego shows up.

I apologize for the drifting off in all directions. I tend to do that when discussing this subject. It's multifaceted.

I could continue on like this for thousands and thousands of words. There are many reasons why I renounced Christianity but I believe I have covered the main ones. Ultimately the non-redeemable reason is the idea that all other truth believers and seekers are thrown out with the dirty bathwater. If you are Christian than you believe that...you have to. If you are not willing to believe that all other religions are going to hell, and you call yourself Christian, than you are in denial. I'm sorry to be the blunt object to the side of the head on this one, but it's true. Unless you can make a descent case why you consider yourself Christian and don't believe in Hell...I've never heard one.

I went to Spartanburg Methodist College after I graduated high school. SMC is a two year private college. All of the professors were Christian, apologetics, but Christian none-the-less. I asked these questions of those professors. All I ever got was the run around ending in "you just have to believe". I tried to understand. I thought that if that missing piece could just be transmitted to me than I would be able to be Christian wholeheartedly. It never came. Mostly my questions were diverted with religious distractions designed to cultivate fear.

In the end the problem is that society has been programmed. We are taught that there is normal and anything deviating from this normal, within a small tolerance, is to be reeled back into center. It's not just religion. Political beliefs, sexuality, nationalism, race relations, gender identity and religion are all designated for us. Main stream media does a good job of teaching us what to be afraid of, what to believe. Generations of this herding creates people who are not capable of critical thought. It has created people who are not willing to question anything outside of societal norms. All I ask of anybody is to be responsible and truthful to themselves. If you are not completely honest with yourself than you can never be honest to anybody else.

One of the worlds greatest spiritual teachers once said something along these lines: "how can you be worried about the splinter in your neighbors eye when you have a log sticking out of your own." Here's to being less religious and more Christlike. Merry Christmas!

The Logical Esoteric Leap

Esotericism, or the word esoteric has a negative connotation for many American exoteric minds. For those minds it's often seen as something involving cults or ritual magic. While those things would certainly apply to the definition of the word they are not what I'll be talking about. When I use the word esoteric, I'm using it in the same vain that Ken Wilber uses it which is to describe spiritual belief based on empirical knowledge. It is secret so far as you can only know it by experience. The proverbial sage monk can tell you about how to find esoteric realities but you have to do the work yourself. This is the difference between esoteric and exoteric.

What I'm interested in exploring is how faith fits into the esoteric. Faith: belief that is not based on proof. As I have said many times before, faith is accepted ignorance. However, that ignorance can be whittled down to the bare necessities with logic. By that I mean that you can experience esoteric states of being to vilify your metaphysical beliefs. Rather than blindly following whatever your status quo happens to be, you can follow a path that leads to spiritual enlightenment. Where faith comes in for me is making the initial decision to believe in spiritual redemption to begin with. I'll share how logic can get to this point of departure.

We evolved from primordial goo. Science seems to support the process of evolution pretty well. God didn't leave all of those fossils buried in the ground as a test of our faith. The dinosaurs existed and so did Neanderthals and Cromagnoms. So where did the primordial goo come from? Here we are at science's answer to where reality came from...The Big Bang. Sciences first dirty little secret. Everything can be explained logically if you first forgive this rather ridiculous notion. Yes...reality comes from nothing, but that is not logical so let's not pretend that it is (And while I'm at it, this whole excuse that our minds can't comprehend God so we might as well believe in flying spaghetti monsters is ridiculous apologetic nonsense as well). So on the one hand we have the universe springing into existence via some magical scientific explosion and on the other we have flying spaghetti monsters. Both are equally ridiculous to my estimation. However, at least the exoteric subscription doesn't have a problem with faith as the scientific one does. Scientific determinism has the same flaw that God has. In order to go anywhere with it you must first accept non-logic. If all of your reason rests on a ridiculous assertion than what does that say about all of your logic? So get off of your high horse you annoying secular humanist atheist! Let's not pretend that quantum physics does not exist. In the end science doesn't even know why the chair I'm sitting in maintains form. Here we are on the other end of the dislogic spectrum. We start with something from nothing and end up with everything falling apart under the powerful microscope. So if we start with nonsense and end with nonsense, well, we are left with nothing but nonsense are we not?

Here, again, is where faith returns. So is believing in flying spaghetti monsters just as ridiculous as science? Well, no, at least science can be proven in between the beginning and ending of it's particular logical nonsense. What one should believe is what one can verify for oneself. This is what Buddhism is all about. You just have to have faith that what the Buddha says is true, but then you promptly find out...hopefully. The work of meditation is the only way you find out about those realities the Buddha talks about. Without actually seeking those truths they will remain largely hidden from you. Thus we have the secret in esotericism. A short anecdote from my own life may work well here:

Around the age of 18 I renounced my faith in Christianity and took to the path of esoteric knowing. I eventually declared myself Atheist and wallered around in that condescending muck for a while. However the worship of logic ended up just as hollow as my old belief that spaghetti monsters could fly. I found myself in deep mental, emotional, and spiritual crisis. My search for ultimate truth thickened to a standstill. Something had to happen because nothing made any sense. Everything became purposeless, lonely, and pointless. The only thing that kept me going was my writing. Through some strange channels I found myself working on some interesting visual meditations. I learned how to move my consciousness outside of my physical body by imagination. I would meditate outside by visualizing myself exploring around my physical location in places that I could not physically see. This worked as a primer for the spiritual breakthrough that was to follow. I was just using my mind's visual capacities via imagination. No different from day dreaming other than it was focused with my will.

One day, shortly after I began this meditation practice, I had an a-ha experience. I had an out of body experience (O.B.E.) and it changed my life irrefutably and forever. Now, I would never attempt to use my experience as proof for anybody else that the metaphysical is not just a bunch of rubbish. I have empirically certified the metaphysical. I was able to do that because not doing it was no longer an option for me. I experienced reality outside of my physical body. Since that day nearly 12 years ago I have had a handful of OBE's. To this day that first OBE was the most real thing that has ever happened to me. The quality of that experience dwarfs what the six senses are capable of providing to you via your body. Not to mention that seeing your body sleeping while you are consciousness floating above it does something very profound to your psyche. So, there I was, 19 with metaphysical reality checked off the list. I couldn't think of anything better to do with myself than to enlist in the U.S. Navy. What better way to locate the dark night of my soul! It worked. I entered the belly of the beast and promptly exited by stabbing my way out. I refused to be digested by the lumbering machine of destruction. The navy, however, is not my point.

Once I verified metaphysical reality for myself I had to fit this into some type of framework. Once the stresses involved in becoming a Navy Nuke pressed hard enough I was able to again find myself in a mental/emotional/spiritual crisis. My next a-ha experience was what is considered Samadhi. In the midst of this mental hell that was Naval Nuclear Power Training Command, I broke away and dissociated myself from ego. As crazy as that sounds, it was very simple. It lasted for a couple of days. The only way to accurately describe the state I was in is to use the word "peace". I was peacefulness. Whether it was actually Samadhi or not doesn't really matter. Samadhi is just the only word I know that accurately applies to the state I was in. In that state nothing stuck to me. "I" was simply "being". Experiences passed through me without anything clinging to them. Negative and positive were both the same thing...experience. For a short time my ego was banished and "I" just floated along with the winds of change and demands with no expectations. This fleeting state imparted a lot of motivation to regain it once it was lost. It also verified the noble path of Buddhism for me.

From that day on my spiritual life was nurtured by the Buddha within. I became a western convert to eastern spirituality. A lot of books followed along with meditation. This culminated into going to a makeshift monastery once a week to meditate with Gen Kelsang Tilopa. This was the only official Buddhism I have ever partaken in. This ended due to my secular life and Tilopa moving his monastery two hours away. Buddhist monasteries set up to embrace Anglo Saxon Irish fellers are hard to find here in the bible belt (or hypocritical belt as I like to call it).

My spiritual path is an ongoing path. I share my story with you to illustrate esotericism better. The point is to find out for yourself what is true and not simply written.

If you want to believe in an anthropomorphic god that is fine, but this belief comes with certain stipulations that you must accept. These stipulations are largely the cause for my own religious renunciation at 18 years of age. Simply put this would segway well into my problems with the tome that is the Bible. That will be the next topic I discuss here.

Faith

The idea of faith is one that was inevitably going to be discussed by me here. Faith, religion, spirituality, and psychology have always been the most interesting subjects for research by myself. The only real way to research these issues are empirically. Buddha himself said he just points down the middle path of enlightenment but you have to walk it. When it comes to spirituality only you are equipped to make decisions. The exploration of the ideas involved in this topic will probably span largely and require many posts. In fact it will be an on going topic on this blog. In this area I remain open to suggestion and new ideas with one stipulation; I will not change my mind on these issues unless you can first present your case logically. I will only get to the point of departure with you by exhausting logic first. In other words, you must show me that you have thought critically about why you believe what you do. Just parroting one liners from a holy book means absolutely nothing to me. Referring me to your particular religious fairy tale as an answer to a critical question like "why did God exterminate all but a few people?" is not going to get you anywhere with me.

In Grace and Grit, written by Ken and Treya Wilber, Wilber talks about the differences between exoteric and esoteric spiritual beliefs. Exoteric: Suitable for or communicated to the general public. Basically this is what you get in church. Those who hold exoteric beliefs generally believe in religious imperatives that they have never spent cognizant time with. That is that they accept all of the tenets and beliefs set forth by their particular religion as the alpha and omega without ever questioning them. Now I know that is not implied by the definition of exoteric, but I'm saying it is usually the case. If you are of that type of person than you probably are not open to knew religious/spiritual ideas and this blog is not for you.

Exoteric beliefs do not require you to question them. In fact they thrive when you do not question them. In my experience Christianity is composed mainly of people who have questioned the Bible at most a tad bit but usually not at all. The questions kids pose of the Bible are not the kinds of questions I'm talking about either. I'm talking about questions that arise from the age of reason. To be clear I do not have a problem with what I believe to be the true face of Christianity. That is to say, what I believe the real Jesus of Nazareth said and meant, and not what the red words subjected to the will of man over the last 2000 years say. There are Christians out there whom act Christ like and can carry on an intelligent conversation about their beliefs (usually up to a point at least), but in my experience they are the minority. The majority fall into the exoteric camp. They see the Bible as the unaltered perfect word of God. It's not my intention to single Christianity out during this discussion. It's just what I grew up in. The Bible was not able to stand up to my logical scrutiny. Things are different now but that's for another discussion.

Exoteric means accepted ignorance to me. I don't care what religion you are talking about. If you subscribe to one book as the word of God, than it's very probable that you are practicing that word exoterically. In order to say that one book is the perfect word of God you are also saying that the other "word of God books" are wrong and fraudulent. You see, saying that the Bible is the only way to God is inherently unchristlike. Christ does not condemn souls to hell, frustrated exoteric beliefs, on the other hand, do. Exoteric beliefs are largely used to control the will and mind of the masses. They have always served that function in society. They are a function of the controlling arms of society and nothing more. I have no use for exoteric belief patterns. In my mind the only thing that keeps the masses bound up with these all or nothing beliefs is fear. Namely the fear of death. Logic and reason get you pretty far but at some point you have to address questions that logic and reason have no business with. These questions pertain to faith and what it means to practice esoteric religion. This is the point where religion and spirituality meet. Fear is what keeps most people pigeon holed in a particular religion.

People are afraid to die. Exoteric beliefs provide them with recluse from the onslaught of this meditation. Meditating on the impermanence of your own life is an extremely powerful practice. Death as fear is a product of ego. Your ego, what you identify as you in your head, that constant monologue that you are prisoner to, the ticker tap that goes non-stop in your head, that is ego. It is concerned with only one thing and that is continual existence. Your ego wants to make sure that it will always exist and death is the antidote to that. Therefore it will not willingly allow you to ponder death. Death means that at some point the ego ceases to exist...unless. Unless there is some way that it can continue to exist after death. Enter exoteric religion and control of your mind by oligarchs.

Do not succumb to your visceral knee-jerk reaction to this idea. This is the point of departure I was talking about earlier in this blog. If you look at the history of religion, the use of religion as an ultimate vehicle of control cannot be denied logically. This is presented perfectly in the history of Christianity. It is historical fact that Christianity is a fusion of popular Roman beliefs and the then new Christian sect. Why would that be the case? I think, if you are willing to allow reason in, you can see why that would be the case. The important concept to keep in mind here is that just because your particular exoteric religion is caught up in this undeniable history does not mean that you must remain locked to it by fear. You do not have to remain an apologetic to your religion. What does it mean if you are an apologetic to begin with? It means that you are making excuses. For what?

Faith does not have to mean accepted ignorance. Faith can mean that you have exhausted the limits of reason and must now make decisions about what you feel the nature of ultimate reality is. This is the realm of the esoteric.

The Alchemy of Fermentation

I'm just about finished reading a book called Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. The book has tied up some loose ends for me that I would like to share. For the last five years or so I have been very interested in food. This interest has been more of an intellectual interest than a gastronomical one. I knew on some level that the path a food item takes from earth to plate was all wrong. I think the first book that opened my eyes on the subject of food was Fast Food Nation and that was quickly followed by books such as Harvest for Hope, The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, which then lead to my interest in gardening which then lead to a handful of other books addressing the subject of our broken food system such as Gardening When it Counts, and The Self Sufficient Gardener and most recently Wild Fermentation.

The thing that all of these books have in common is food. In our society food is largely taken for granted. The point to food is for it to be as quick, cheap, and easy as possible. At least for the consumer of that food. The truth is that on average we use 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy. Not a very efficient system. You wouldn't give somebody a dollar as a loan and then only ask for 10 cents back would you? You wouldn't pump ten gallons of gasoline into your car only to siphon out 9 gallons to throw away. Yet that is what our food "culture" does.

I read somewhere that our food contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% less nutrition than it did in the 1930's, which was right about the time farming was transitioning from family farms to manufactured machine farms. The reason for this lack of nutrition is simply a side effect of the industrial farming business treating soil as nothing more than a medium to hold corn erect while they dump billions of tons of petro chemicals and synthetic fertilizers (created from natural gas) on top. I could go on but the purpose of this blog is not to talk about industrial farming so much as it is to talk about our food culture or lack thereof as it were.

Fermentation has been largely responsible for man kinds success as a species and was the refrigeration before electricity existed. It's theorized that the first meeting of fermentation with mankind was around 250,000 years ago. The story goes that a cave man ran across a hollow in a tree that was filled with rain water and honey...Mead. There are cave drawings of man getting honey out of a bee hive. To us a drink of wine is a nice thing to have, but can you imagine the relief it would have provided man living in the wild dog eat dog world of the paleolithic era? It's also thought that man settled into agrarianism for the promise of beer. The Mesopotamian's brewed beer 5000 years ago. It seems that as long as man has been domesticated he has fermented alcohol of some type or another. This is just a theory but it makes perfect sense to me. What better motivation for man than the promise of a relaxing alcoholic beverage after a hard day of doing the work of survival. Many things that we take for granted require fermentation. Cheese, yogurt, keifer, alcohol, coffee, some teas, chocolate, bread, and all manner of pickles (at least historically) all require fermentation.

The healthful benefits of fermentation are largely lost in our society. Fermentation is the product of millions of different microorganisms mostly in the yeast family. Yeast is everywhere in the natural world. If you take flour and mix it with water and let it sit, stirring it occasionally, it will begin to bubble with fermentation. This is the action of the yeast eating the sugars in the wheat and turning them into alcohol and carbon dioxide and it is also what is known as a "starter" for bread or natural leavening. A whole plethora of cancer fighting agents as well as other healthful benefits have been identified in different types of ferments. The bottom line is that there are no dangers to fermented foods and beverages. There are only healthful and gastronomical benefits associated with fermented foods in reality. There it is again.

So how have we gotten to a place where we are afraid to eat a fermented pickle? How many of you would not have a problem with milking a cow and then letting the milk essentially rot for months before enjoying the pleasures of cheese? The idea of food that is "rotten" is entirely socially defined. For instance, the Eskimo bury fish in the ground and let it rot for months until it's the consistency of cheese before they eat it and that is considered a delicacy. In America we would consider that putrid and nasty and would never consider eating it and they feel the same about cheese. Could you imagine life without cheese?

Everything now has to be sterilized, pasteurized, irradiated and wrapped in plastic. Why is that? It has to be that way because our food system does not honor nutrition and sustenance. It honors efficiency and profit. Then the government gets involved and because one day laborer didn't wash his hands after taking a crap all spinach must now be irradiated and while were at it lets just irradiate and pasteurize everything else so we don't have to worry about people getting sick. Why don't we all just cut to the chase and start demanding that the grocery store shelves are stocked only with various forms of petroleum wrapped in petroleum to facilitate our removal from the planet. We can all just starve to death on a diet of our beloved irradiated petroleum. Let's just build a giant X-ray machine the size of a football stadium and all eat high fructose petroleum sugar while being irradiated. We can wash it down with synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. By the way we are going to do this in the name of safety and health in case you were wondering.

We have been programmed by our broken system to believe that the only good cheese is the kind that has been irradiated, pasteurized, wrapped in plastic and stuck in the refrigerated section of the megalobox grocery store. We have been programmed to believe that poison is the antidote to cancer...both literally and figuratively. We get cancer because our food is poisoned with HFCS and no longer alive and then we treat it with radiation and poison. What a coincidence. If I didn't know any better I would say that the Illuminati is trying to control population by poisoning us all.

The concept of "Culture" was originally associated with food. We culture cheese. Culture is what makes different areas of the globe truly unique from one another. A cheese made in my kitchen is going to be a product of the local microorganisms in my kitchen and it will be uniquely local. It won't taste the same as the cheese made in your kitchen. Culture is entirely driven by food. Every ethnic group has their own food traditions reflecting their own local uniqueness. Food habits that are born from their place in space and time. Food brings culture together in celebration. We sit together eating, socializing and connecting. What do we crave more than to feel understood and connected with by our fellow peers? The processes that bring food to the table have always been what defines a culture. What has been grown and how? What has been hunted and how? How has it all been prepared? How is it eaten? This is culture, and we don't have it any longer. We have an electronic culture that isn't even real.

Our food culture now is devoid of any meaning. We don't have time to eat any more because we have to get back to pointless distractions that only add up to more death and destruction. We don't have time to grow, harvest, hunt, gather, and prepare a culture any longer. We have to hurry up and cram corn down our gullets so that we can get back to our desk in service of a computer screen in service of making some fat cat with a silver spoon stuffed up his ass lots of money. We don't even have time to chew because it will interfere with our quality smart phone time. We only have time to microwave already dead food that provides nothing but petroleum calories. We don't need nutrition and culture any more because we have HFCS and Zoloft to make us happy.

Fermenting food in your kitchen gives you time to slow down and appreciate nutritious localness. Fermenting food that you have grown ties you to your place of existence...your abode. It is a chance to exist where you are and not in some far away electronic abstraction. It's a way to invite the microorganisms that surround you into your being. You invite them in and transform them into your flesh. It is a chance to experience real food that is exploding with complex flavors, aliveness and health. Growing and fermenting your food is the antithesis of the industrial food system. If you can't grow your own food you can still transform it into something local even if it did come from thousands of miles away. Let the microscopic life force transform your dead and irradiated food into something alive via alchemical magic. You become the wizard of the microscopic.

This will require you to break some societal chains. That's alright. Don't be afraid of some culture. It will enrich your life. I have just gotten started on this journey back to sanity. I have fermented a few batches of cider over the last couple of years. I have also made pickles from cucumbers grown in my garden. Unfortunately I had not yet learned about fermenting foods. Now that I have been made aware my kitchen is going to be transformed into a bubbling crock of local goodness. I'm going to make cheese, bread, pickles, and drink the way man has always done it. My life will be enriched with slow, local, nutritious, sustainable quality. That sounds like sanity to me. Resist the chemical lobotomy required by society and trust what has cultivated and sustained us as a cultured species. There is time to slow down and thrive. We don't have to sell our lives to the man for fast food shit, pharmaceuticals, and electronic gizmos. Now.......I'm going into my kitchen to further my transformation. I'm going to find out what the yeast in my place in time taste like. I'm going to harvest and cultivate the microorganisms that surround me so that I can invite them to rebuild my flesh with true life energy. Now....I'm going to mix some flower and water and find out what has been coexisting with me all along....I suggest that you consider doing the same. Or you can just return to your mandatory lobotomy and continue blindly marching on into your synthetic petroleum chemical waste land.

Perception is not REALITY

It has come to my attention as of late that this idea of perception being the only part of reality given any notice has gotten ENTIRELY out of hand. Before the idea collapses our universe like a torpedo does to a submarine (it implodes), I'm going to address it. If you were worried about this idea spreading like a virus, don't, cause it already has. The good news is that I'm getting ready to punch so many holes in it that you won't be able to take it seriously anymore (in the event you have already contracted the idea).

Reality: The state or quality of being real.

This sounds straightforward enough, but in all fairness "real" should probably be addressed as well. There are eighteen definitions for this word. 11 as an adjective, 1 adverb, 3 noun, and 3 as an idiom. This should not come as a surprise since the word "real" defines what is actual and is pretty much the subject of philosophy. I have never been formally trained in philosophy which in reality makes me an arm chair philosopher. You see, I understand this, and I am not suffering any delusions thinking myself some well versed professor of thought. I could easily fall into the trap of perception as reality and conclude that I am the Grand Green Wizard of philosophy. I could view myself as the end all be all of thought and no longer suffer any other ideas other than whatever rubbish I could spew forth into your perceptions. I'm not going to do that or think that. I like the second definition for real the best.

Real: existing or occurring as fact; actual rather than imaginary, ideal, or fictitious.

I think that is a pretty straightforward definition for the word "real". I'm going to stop with the definitions there because I could go on defining words with dictionary.com all day long. Deep down I think we all know what the qualities of real are. Just because you view an event a certain way does not mean that your view is correct and actual. Your perception does not make a thing real. For instance: say that you walk into a room and you see a person pointing a handgun at another person. "Please don't kill me," says the person on the receiving end of said gun. BAM, the gun goes off and kills the other person. The police show up and whisk the shooter away and the victim is taken away in a body bag. This is all you know about the event. You are apt to view the shooter as wrong for killing the other person. If all you have to go on is your perception of that event, and all you know is that the victim was pleading with the shooter not to kill them and the shooter does anyways than you are going to be apt to declare the shooter wrong. You may hold the belief that killing is wrong no matter what the circumstances. I am not trying to get into a debate about whether killing is ever okay or not. My point is that what you don't know, the fact that the "victim" tied the shooter to a chair and raped his wife, 4 year old daughter, and infant son while making the shooter watch, might change your perception of the reality.

Here is another example. Say somebody tells you that they were walking down the street when all of a sudden the concrete sidewalk, the entire sidewalk, morphed into a chicken and started running around pecking the windshields out of passing cars, snatching people up and gobbling them like worms, and taking massive 1000 pound chicken shits all over suburbia. Would you believe them? Of course you wouldn't. The best a sane person could do in this instance would be to believe that the other person was telling you the truth as they saw it. They may be telling you the truth and if they are than they are psychotic and they need to be medicated. They probably need to sit down and talk to somebody professional as well. If you subscribe to this nonsense that "perception is reality" than you will be forced to believe in gargantuan concrete morphing chickens. You don't want to believe that do you? If you do believe that than I have some beach front property in Rock Hill SC to sale to you...that's a couple of hundred miles inland. I'll give you a good price on it to.

Ridiculous I know, but I am being forced into this ridiculousness by what is ironically becoming reality. If somebody doesn't do something we are all going to be forced into believing in gigantic evil chickens terrorizing suburbia. In our society it is becoming normal to believe this nonsense. I know this because I have been sat down at work, in my supervisors office, and I've had to defend myself against allegations manufactured up in somebodies head. If somebody who is paranoid schizophrenic and suffering from delusions blames me for being a cretin I have to defend myself against their delusions. What if that person has not been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia because they have never seen a shrink? Does that mean that they are not indeed paranoid schizophrenic until they are diagnosed? The shrink waves the magic wand and now we don't have to believe their delusions anymore? Nonsense.

In my opinion egalitarianism is to blame for this crap. That's the idea that we are all equal. I'm not sorry to say that we are not all equal. Maybe in the spiritual potential, we all at one time had a functioning brain, there's a Buddha within sort of way we are all equal, but a crack head welfare junkie is not equal to a neurosurgeon in at least discipline. Wouldn't any sane person agree with that statement. A murdering gang banger is not equal to a peaceful philanthropist monk in charitable work. Somebody who came up with the cure for cancer is not equal to a dish washer in their offerings to society. I'm not saying that washing dishes is not an important function for society, and I'm not saying we should not all be afforded the same rights, we should be, but it does not follow that just because we should all have the same rights I should have to be subjected to believing in the mindless blathering drivel of a psychotic chickenhead that's off it's meds.

Reality is not up for debate. Your perceptions are only real to you. If you believe you are invincible than go stand in the middle of an interstate and wait a while. The 1000 pound units of metal that are hurdling along at 70 mph will give you a lesson in physics that you won't be able to deny because you will terminate rather quickly. There ain't a doctor alive that can resuscitate a pile of goo. So we can debate what is real and what is not real in philosophy class or amongst intellects, but let's not pretend that your garden variety moron's delusions are real. It used to be that you wouldn't be fooling anybody with this egalitarian nonsense. That's not the case any longer. In my estimation it seems that the vast majority of people out there are mindlessly believing that their perception is the end all be all while at the same time believing that mine and your perceptions are equally as correct. I believe in talking Christmas trees, you believe that ingesting draino will buy you a ticket to heaven, and Cracky McCrackerson believes that crack is good for tooth enamel. Right, and we are all idiots.

So let's try to get it straight. Reality is represented just fine by facts. If you want to know reality than investigate the circumstances surrounding that particular event, or thought, or perception. As the dude said "there are lots of ins and outs and whathaveyous to keep straight in old dudders head." The dude knew that Bunny kidnapped herself because she needed to feed the monkey. He knew that the nihilist were full of shit. They believed in nothing...nothing for crying out loud.

For the record I'm going to say it straight whenever I can. At work I have to subscribe to this "psychotics perceptions are just as real as mine" crap, but I don't have to believe it, and I sure as hell ain't gonna defend it in this mental space.

Richard Heinberg

This is a video of Richard Heinberg addressing his Museletter fans of which I are one ;0) I have read several of Mr. Heinberg's books and I find him to be one of the leading intellectuals on the state of affairs in the union. In this video he talks about his new book "The End of Growth" that's set to come out sometime next year.

The Video

What it means to be American

this blog is a post on one of the boards I frequent. The question was what it means to be American these days. I'm still working on the idea of "purpose".

Best I can tell being American means buying into the idea of freedom and deciding that it's worth sending your children to go kill and be killed for. The problem with this 1776 patriot ideal is that it died a long time ago. It existed once in the history of this country...maybe? I wonder what the Native Americans thought about the white man's revolutionary war? We're raised to believe that America represents this grand ideal that you write your own destiny because we have freedom like nobody else has it. The truth is that it's a load of shit. In many important ways we are more enslaved to our government masters than any other nation.

The only thing that makes us any different than any other country is that we can own guns as civilians. As many as we want! We're supposed to be able to say whatever we want to as well, but that's only true situationally. For instance I can't tell a patient that they are stupid, and I can't tell my supervisor that he is incompetent, and I can't tell the CEO of the for profit corporation that I work for that he can take his bonuses and shove them up his ass. I'd be fired...I'd lose my house...I'd be part of the 25% unemployed standing in line for government hand outs. Where's the freedom in that?

I can live in communist China and think the same shit I think. So I can't write it down. What about the guns? The government doesn't care about us having guns because they have millions of minions who are good at busting your head open with the butt end of an M-16. They only need half a brain cell to do this...cannon fodder...expendable. Guns and hunting shit is a multi billion dollar industry. A large chunk of the controlling oligarchs are makin' their electronic dollars selling this shit to us.

So other than believing in a crock of shit, what does it mean to be American? Eating a lot of high fructose petroleum sugar? Diabetes? 100 pounds over weight? A gargantuan hybrid vehicle that gets 12 mpg? A McMansion made out of particle board and vinyl? A prescription med, alcohol, football, nascar, HFCS, fast food, air conditioning, credit card, consumer, violence addiction? Being conned into going 60,000 dollars into debt for a "higher education" that ain't worth the paper the degree's written on? The ability to waste as much resources possible in the name of laziness? Supporting a bunch of bull shit wars started under false pretenses in the name of an oil addiction and suburbia?

I've fought in a war for this country. Mostly I was just responsible for a lot of Afghani deaths. People I never knew or saw or had any beef with.

So what does it mean to be American if not all of the shit I have just listed? The idea of America might have been a good one at the beginning (again, that's if you give us a pass on the whole genocide of the natives thing). Democratic republic. A government for the people and by the people. All people created equal in the ultimate egalitarian orgy (but if you were black or native than fuck you). We broke the bonds of English oppression and drafted this great document that we've spent the last 200 plus years shitting all over. Best I can tell being American means having the freedom to take other peoples shit from them without having to apologize.

And what do you have to do for this beautiful gift of freedom? You have to give it all back to the government in exchange for protection from terrorism. You have to be afraid of the rest of the world because they all want to kill us (which isn't true but should be since we act like a bunch of sadist on the world stage).

After saying all of that I'll say this. Being American doesn't mean anything. It's a lie you have to buy into. Lines on a map do not appear on the actual land. Us against them. We are better than the rest. No were not!! We're just people just like them. We bleed the same, love the same, pretty much look the same, have the same organs, the same descent and evolution, and ultimately the same destiny. We all have to struggle to avoid as much misery as possible. We are born on our way to dying. It doesn't mean shit to be American other than that you bought into a line of shit and probably have a lower I.Q. than your peer on the other side of the boarder. Start identifying with your humanity.

(and I probably said "shit" one too many times).