Purpose

Biologically our purpose is to procreate. To continually exist seems to be the purpose of life. All things living attempt to live as long as possible and they all must know, on some level at least, that they are going to die. This knowledge is the push in procreation. You leave a part of you living when you die. To maximize this we have the innate desire to procreate as much as possible...sex. Our brains are wired in such a way that we are greatly rewarded for the act of sex by way of bliss. Who could argue that an orgasm is not the closest thing to bliss they have ever experienced. Why is that true? This being accepted as true makes a certain vantage point necessary. That vantage point is believing in evolution. Yet God himself said to "be fruitful and multiply". Then again he directed us to be monogamous so how fruitful did he mean? Evolution on the other hand.

If it is agreed that our biological purpose is to live as long as possible, and to multiply, than it would seem that having as much sex possible would be the highest pentacle of fulfilling our purpose. That means as many partners as possible. From an evolutionary perspective the point to sex is procreation. Which is a good thing because otherwise being a porn star would be the most biologically fulfilling profession one could have. This all makes sense but it can't be true. I refuse to believe that my purpose is fulfilled via insemination. What does insemination have to do with anything other than an orgasm, procreation and the closest thing to bliss our body is capable of providing to us naturally?

This is why I believe in consciousness beyond the meat we inhabit. If one knuckle dragger is just as capable of fulfilling our purpose as the next knuckle dragger than why do we have thought to begin with? The evolutionist would probably say that thought enabled us to out wit and out plan the knuckle dragger a couple of caves over (well that, and more importantly it enabled us to figure out how to make that large beast fit into our stomachs). Thus our ability to think only evolved to ensure our ability to inseminate. Again I can't believe that. I do believe in evolution and so it follows that I have to believe that as much sex as possible is my destiny, but I don't. I'm living a lie! I'm made a hypocrite because I won't believe the truth. Or maybe there is more to it?

Faith. And what does faith have to do with an erection? Well I'm fixin' to tell you. I have faith that consciousness desires more from us than just the ole in and out. Rather, I have faith that there is more to consciousness than just the unending desire to...aheem..bust one (or many as it were). It's obvious that procreation is in consciousnesses best interest. Everything with awareness replicates itself. Indeed this seems to be a crucial aspect of life. However this is the bare minimum required for awareness to continue. In order for purpose to emerge there has to be more to consciousness than simple procreation. Maybe a definition will help.

pur·pose

   [pur-puhs] Show IPA noun, verb,-posed, -pos·ing.

–noun

1.

the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.

2.

an intended or desired result; end; aim; goal.

Unfortunately I'm not so sure this is going to help much. Purpose is the reason for which something exists. So what is the reason why we exists? I think I've already determined that biologically that reason is simply to continue to exists for as long as possible. If we exists than it follows that we are supposed to exists and should therefore assist in that process to the best of our ability. It's not lookin' to good for purpose beyond the sack.

Maybe the second definition can shine some light on this dilemma. What is our intended result as a species? Thus far it would appear that our intended result has been to pump as much petroleum out of the ground as we possibly can with the expressed purpose of turning all living matter into corn while screwing each other. If that is our purpose than we have succeeded admirably and the aliens can come delete us at any time now. I hardly feel that our purpose has been to mainline liquid high fructose petroleum sugar via plastic catheters in our veins.

It's beginning to shape up to our purpose being all bound up in our genitals. How disturbing this is to my sense of intelligence. I think the conclusion that can be drawn here is that if you want there to be more purpose to existence than you have to have faith in that idea. We want there to be more purpose than floating around on a space rock bangin' each other. It is a desire most of us have for there to be more meaning to life than procreation. My logic is pretty healthy, and it's only able to arrive at the purpose for life being to exist for as long as possible. Procreation is an extension of existing. Every life process revolves around this end goal. Still, I don't believe that is my only purpose.

Without believing in a creator or higher levels of consciousness or some other spiritual idea, your left with biological purposes only. There is a choice to be made here. Are you willing to believe there is more to life than sex? Do you have a need to believe that? Logic won't get you there. Only faith will. If you need more than the determinism of biology than you must decide for yourself what you believe. Logically the next question would be what is faith? That's a loaded question that I will explore with you.

Tis the Season for Truth Tellin'

An Open Letter to Saint Consumption

I don't know what the official history of Christmas is and at this point it really doesn't matter. I have my own ideas about the aberration that is now considered "Christmas." Rather than concerning myself with the factual ins-and-outs of Christmas I'm going to address the actual spirit of the holiday. Christmas has always been three different holidays celebrated at the same time (and when I say always I'm referring to my life experience). There has always been the Santa Clause kiddy part, the Christian celebration of their saviors birth, and the adult and meaningful celebration of giving, joy, and abundance (which has been hijacked by gluttonous evil clowns). As much as I hate to say it, Christmas is worth defending and so that's what I'm setting out to do.

As a kid, Christmas provides you with an unbridled sense of wonder and amazement. What other time in a child's life is more full of spectacular anticipation and explosive imaginations. Your child mind is set aloft with Santa's reindeer, stockings full of goodies, hot chocolate and snow. Your sense of wonder follows the rays of soft light illuminating the Christmas tree, filling the room with a multicolored warmth of happiness. Santa is coming! How does he get into the house when I don' have a fire place? As a parent I'm excited about the possibility of play and vicarious feelings of nostalgia via messing with my son. Now as an adult there is the possibility of revisiting those joyous Christmas ghosts through my son. Amazing!! His face will light up brighter than the star atop the tree growing through the living room floor. Shiny randomness hanging from the boughs. Babies first ornament! This is the non-commercial and magical spirit of Christmas.

The name, Christmas, is pretty self explanatory. Nobody can deny that the name Christmas denotes a Christian holiday. Both words having the first six letters in common, Christ. I'm not even Christian, but I'm not going to deny the fact that Christmas is a reference to Jesus. This is probably why the secular crowd changed the name to X-mas (how clever), and now it's just "happy holidays." You can't appeal to the religious side by saying "Merry Christmas" because you might offend somebody. At least half of the Christmas songs are all about Jesus and his birth. The holiday that is Christmas takes it's name from Jesus the Christ.

This is the soft and hopeful meaning of the silent night. The delicate snow flakes falling to the earth blanketing it with new purity. God incarnate representing the birth of a chance to achieve redemption and be saved from the torment that is the human condition. The miracle of immaculate conception. Having said all of that, Christmas is not owned by the Christians. The spirit of Christmas is not owned by one religion. However, it does take it's name from Jesus.

The spirit of Christmas is brotherly love, giving, joy, simple celebration, abundance, and merriment. That is what the holiday is about regardless of your religious beliefs. This time of year has probably always been celebrated by man as long as civilization has been around. The winter solstice ushers in the longest night. We huddle together around the fire and celebrate our togetherness. The natural world slows down and everything covers up and goes indoors for a short truce. The big bad bear goes to sleep allowing us to celebrate the brotherhood of man. All of the work is done (hopefully) and we have time to relax and reflect on the year behind and the year ahead by the warmth of the flickering fire.

All of the above is what Christmas is about. It's a celebration of childhood imagination and innocence, the birth of Jesus and the chance for spiritual redemption (if you are Christian), and the warmth of relaxation, contemplation, friendship, and brotherly love. It's a joyous new beginning blanketed with purity and good spirit. In my opinion there should be room for all peoples to celebrate this idea together. I'll gladly celebrate your belief in redemption and coexist with you. There is no place for fighting about such things as labels and who owns what. We exchange heartfelt gifts and love one another regardless of beliefs about the afterlife. We can leave Christ in Christmas so long as we honor what it means to be Christlike. So far so good...or is it.

There is a dark underbelly to our festive holiday of renewal. In opposition to the cold, long, winter night we celebrate with one another while the underbelly moans because it's hungry. It's high time that we execute that gluttonous and fearful beast once and for all. He is always there, year round, stocking us with his endless and incessant droning. He groans for your servitude and lack of mindfulness. I, however, have the secret dagger that can slay the beast in one foul swoop. This secret dagger can save you from the evil rot that necroses the Christmas spirit before it even has time to awaken. Every year it attacks earlier and earlier. Soon we will just have a Christmas break from January to March and then the Christmas advertising will start up along with the spring flowers blooming. The Christmas spirit has become sick with this vitreous infection. In order to save the Christmas spirit all you have to do is TURN OFF THE TELEVISION!!

Santa's evil twin goes by the name of consumption. Saint Consumption wants you to go to the mall and stimulate the economy with money you don't have. He wants you to go further into debt to show all of your friends and family how much you love them. If you don't spend your mortgage money on buying stupid crap that nobody needs he will make you feel worthless and guilty. But don't worry because he provides you with the high of his namesake. It has to be in a new box wrapped in plastic and created and assembled in the communist country of China. It has to be something that at best will be destined to collect dust on somebodies shelf and at worse will end up in a county dump. It has to have cost money. It has to have been purchased from a Walmart shelf after being unloaded from a massively gargantuan cargo ship with Chinese symbols on the stern. A responsible Christmas means sitting down with your wife and trying to determine how much money you have to fund your homage to Saint Consumption. The point is to stress yourself out to the max with holiday traffic, long lines, misbehaving kids, and other peoples sense of entitlement. Your supposed to embrace the massive ego's that careen around town expecting new shit from China wrapped up in a box with pretty paper. It doesn't matter what's wrapped up so long as it cost money and is never going to be used or wanted by anybody. All of this to facilitate the resources composing this gift giving ending up in a dump somewhere. The point is to celebrate our right to waste as much resources as possible just because we can.

That's perfect isn't it. A holiday meant to express love for one another culminating in a countrywide waste of resources. I propose we open up a new dump just for Christmas. We can all go buy as much senseless crap from China that we can stuff into our SUV's. Only we are not allowed to pay cash for it. We have to go to the mall and max our credit cards out. In fact apply now for as many credit cards as you can just for this exercise in stupidity. It will be the ultimate Christmas celebration. We'll all max our credit cards out and funnel all of this pointlessness assembled in China to the new Christmas dump. We'll take a massive Christmas Dump and wrap it in lights and top it with an upside down mega Chinese cargo ship. After the holiday is over we'll just all collectively refuse to make any payments on the credit cards and this whole stinkin' mess of consumption will collapse under the weight of our Christmas Dump.

Everything that Christmas stands for is made a mockery of by the talking heads and commercials that are ceaselessly and mercilessly forced into your psyche via the television. It's an ongoing assault to your basic goodness. The point of Christmas is not buying stuff. Put down the smart phones and the idiot box remote controls. Stop listening to the lie being perpetrated by a system that is meant to enslave you to recklessness. It's not necessary to subscribe to the decomposing corpse that is consumption. We do not need to emulate a virus. Being human means more than consuming. Yes we have to consume energy to meet Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but we do not need to facilitate the line of pointlessness stretching from China to here. Turn off the television and talk to somebody.

This year, give a true gift to somebody. Give them a gift that was born in thoughtfulness and care. Banish saint consumption as much as you can and let the spirit of Christmas prevail. It's not about Black Friday's and the best holiday deals. It's about caring for one another. It's about redemption, joy, and imagination. At some point Christmas stopped being about brotherly love and took up the torch of gluttonous consumption. The peaceful silent night turned into the ravenous Black Friday. Merrymaking turned into trampling your neighbor in a consumer fueled high at the doors of Magalochinamart. This is your warning shot Saint Consumption. Your days are numbered. Whether you know it or not the clock is ticking for you. Your fractional reserve, fiat, unreal, wasteful, pointless shit generator is running out of digits to support your ugliness. I'll be doling out gifts of thoughtfulness and love this year for Christmas. I'll be spending the least amount of money possible and giving the most amount of love I can. It's free to give love as a gift. I'll be giving you a lump of dog poo in your stocking Saint Consumption. You don't get any coal cause you forced it all into the atmosphere to justify your Black Friday. Your smoke filled machinations will be replaced with the Christmas spirit...so you can just suck it! Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

no time like the present

I'm somebody more than I'm nobody. You probably don't know me in real life if you have just happened upon this blog. For the last 13 years or so I have kept a journal. It's been a place to go when the need to write arises. Writing is largely a way to sort my own psychological, emotional, and spiritual issues out. It's a way to dissect the conglomeration of information that my head seems to pile up into an open room. I don't like messes and so writing is a way for me to clean that mental space. It's a way to sort through all of the piles of information to find what's worth saving and what's worth displaying. That would make this blog a mental display of sorts..a mental bookcase. I'm not confused about the fact that my musing is probably only going to reach the people in my life who care to know what I'm thinking and writing about.

I had a conversation with a mentor of mine a while back about my "notes" on Facebook. He wanted to know why I wasted my time posting long diatribes about Peak Oil, the moral rot that our consumer society worships, the collapse of Western Civilization, the amount of genetically modified corn that composes our human molecules, and the solutions to all of this nonsense. I told him that I write those things because I have to. "Yeah, but you're not going to change anybodies mind. Nobody is going to pay it any attention. You're wasting your time," is essentially what he said. Well that may be true. In fact I know that it is true...mostly. But there is still the chance for my tedious assessment of reality to help others like me sort through this seemingly random act of existence in an effort to make sense of it. The truth is that I 'm going to write regardless, so why not share my particular onion of personality with the rest of the world.

I always wanted to publish a book and make my living as an author of fiction. I've finished a couple of novels in my life. I have never tried to publish. To my mind this is publishing. In a way this is almost better than publishing a book because anybody can read it (pending access to the Internet) for free. A click here and a click there and now you are reading my thoughts. This is the pentacle of the information age. Blogging is the spearhead of our evolution as a species. Never before in the history of man have we been able to reach anybody in the world instantly. This is the end result of the telegraph. We have reached a technological peak that will probably not be improved on much because there is no need to improve upon it. As far as publishing goes it's not going to get any better than this. I was fine with just writing "notes" on Facebook but now I'm not. Most of my "friends" on FB are either family, or my wife's friends. That means that they are not people who are in my life because they are of like mind (although this does not necessarily mean that they are not of like mind). Most of them could care less about my commentary on the colossal boondoggle that is our way of life. This feels more like being a published author because anybody is free to read it. Again, I'm not delusional about my status as just another atom composing an almost insignificant part of one cell of the body of consciousness that we are all plugged into. So for my first blog:

Synchronicity

synchronicity (ˌsɪnkrəˈnɪsɪtɪ)
—n
	an apparently meaningful coincidence in time of two or more similar or identical events that are causally unrelated
[C20: coined by Carl Jung from synchronic + -ity]

An idea I've been trying to sort out for myself lately is the idea of synchronicity. Apparently Jung was consulting a Japanese patient and a non-indigenous Japanese beetle landed on his window and he had this epiphany of synchronicity (it was something along those lines, feel free to correct me Don). The idea, as I understand it, is that if we pay attention we can be privy to directions on where to place our attention. I think the idea is sort of wrapped up with the Butterfly Effect...our interconnectedness. Deja-vu is probably part of this mystery as well.

If synchronicity is true, than does it require some time of God type order? If a synchronistic event happens to catch your attention, and it results in you making a different decision, and therefore creates a different future that is somehow better than what would have happened without said event, than what is driving this whole process to begin with? At any given point in time there are millions of decisions we can make and therefore millions of different outcome to our lives based on every decision we make. Synchronicity would be the idea that there are better decisions that we can make resulting in what? Fulfilling a destiny or a purpose? This is my point of contention, because if synchronicity is real than it has to follow that there is some type of order. There has to be something providing the free will to make the decision resulting in a better, more fulfilled, and more purposeful life. Without that something I don't see how synchronicity has any meaning? If one decision is somehow better than another that that decision would be more correct. Synchronicity would then be the affirmation provided to you on what the correct course of action is for any one decision. Maybe synchronicity only happens for the very important decisions presented to you. The decisions that will drastically change your life and all involved. Still that would mean that some points in time are more important than others and who, or what determines that?

I don't believe in a creator God. It seems to me that in order for synchronicity to be real it would require, if nothing else, a God that influences the outcomes of our lives. I do however believe in consciousness beyond the worldly grave and for some reason I want to believe in synchronicity. Maybe it's because I've experienced synchronistic events in my life. Yet, it could be that synchronicity is just the perceiver's skilled attentiveness of reality assisting them in making the correct decision. If there are millions of outcomes than many are going to be better than others. Synchronicity could then be seen as a map to a preferred future. Clues to reach the preferred destination. This moves towards crafting a definition of synchronicity that does not require a God influencing our existence. It could just be a fine connection with your higher consciousness. Your higher consciousness is just making you aware of an important decision that needs to be made to achieve a preferred destination. If we are all interconnected (which really can't be argued against) than this moment could be two individuals, or a group of individuals, higher selves all tuned into this important convergence of interconnectedness. The only metaphysical idea required for this to be the case would be the truth of higher consciousness, which still does not require a God to be true.

So all of this begs the question of purpose. If God is not required for synchronicity to be explained than what about purpose? Purpose would add the meaning to the meaningful portion of synchronicity based on the definition provided at the top of this blog. Purpose is a loaded idea. I'll explore this idea in my next blog post.