Surviving Together

Humanity is in Desperate Need of some Spectacularly Spontaneous Change In Attitude And Understanding if we hope to maintain any level of Civility into the distant future.

Civility is a choice that humanity seems practically incapable of wholeheartedly making.

If we are to deservedly think ourselves “better” than the other animals, it comes with a Great Responsibility: acting Humanely!

Nature is amoral. Not that it has a moral code and does not follow it, but that no moral code existed to be followed before humans invented one. If a starving bear comes across it’s own cubs unguarded it may eat them, probably without a pang of remorse at not living up to the political ideals of his fellow bears, or any attempt to avoid the disappointed and judgmental eyes of his neighboring animals.

But for we Humans it’s supposed to be Different! If I’m starving you’d prefer I didn’t eat you or your children and if you’re starving I’d prefer you didn’t eat me or my children. For we humans there exists The Social Contract. A Document That Speaks Of Interconnectivity And The Responsibility Of SHARED Survival. It means that whomever is starving is fed by those that aren’t!

It is only with the help of others that any of us Survives in this man-made World at all!

I don’t care what kind of survivalist knowledge you currently possess, you only possess it at all because someone else taught it to you! You didn’t invent language or writing, math or science, technology or survivalism, nor anything else, as a Creative Island onto yourself.

No one is born ready to fend for themselves, All Strength And Knowledge ready to go it alone! We are Dependent On Others to raise, nurture and guide us, regardless of whether we recognize this simple Truth or not 🙂

It is only together we survive at all, never alone. We neglect this simple Truth at the cost of all our extended futures.

Future Fate

I think that most of us, with even a passing philosophical fancy and eye for current events, could agree that Humanity, as is currently “organized”, is in Deep, Deep Trouble.

The Signs Of Our Ultimate Undoing are all around us, cast over our Entire Planet from the Top of our Atmosphere to the Bottom of our Oceans, and at the Heart of our Problem is a Willful Moral Oblivion and Blind Technological Hubris that is quickly sowing the seeds of our own, and much of the rest of Life on Earth’s, Destruction.

Up until now, we’ve basically just been “winging it” as far as the Future is concerned, this combined with an Intense Overconfidence in our ability to do just about anything, such as accurately predicting the supposedly benign consequences of our Technological Hubris, has led us down a very Dangerous and Deadly path.

We continue to Wrongly Think that the “Profits” of industry are more important than the Health and Happiness of the population at large. We continue to Wrongly Think that Economic Concerns are more Important than Environmental Concerns.

This is a Grotesque and Deadly way to interpret our Reality and is causing Environmental and Political Havoc on a Global Scale.

We ARE the Stewards of This Planet! We Accept This Responsibility and Work Toward Living more Sustainable Lives or we go the way of the dodo and become nothing but fading memory.

Our Obsessions with Money and Merchandise HAVE TO END! If We Are To Walk Hand In Hand Into A More Welcoming Future. THE ECONOMY MUST BE MADE TO SUBMIT TO THE NEEDS OF OUR ENVIRONMENT AND ALL THE LIVING CREATURES DEPENDENT UPON HER FOR ANY HOPE OF COLLECTIVE EXTENDED SURVIVAL.

We MUST Open Our Eyes, Our Minds and Our Hearts WIDE! The Instant We Choose NOT to continue worshipping at the altar of big business, Is The Instant Of Our Redemption!

WE CAN!

REINVENT OUR WORLD.

We Simply Have To CHOOSE To Do It.

Why This?

I think, for reasons that are beyond my understanding, that we humans make our lives so much more difficult then they ever need be.

Rather than find solace in the good, we wallow in the bad. Rather than choose the light of love, we revel in the darkness of hate. Rather than except the inevitability of change, we madly cling to the impossibility of permanence.

In so many unfortunate ways, we choose to make our lives more of a suffering and a curse than a blessing and a grace, and in doing so seal a rather terrible fate for ourselves, and perhaps our descendants as well.

We choose to live in fear. We choose to live in hate. We choose to live in violence and perpetual war. Why?

This is only one side of a two-sided coin!

We can indeed live in a world of love and peace as readily as we live in a world of hatred and war, whenever we decide to choose it.

The decision to remake our world is always right at our fingertips, we simply have to flip the coin and find the comfort of the alternative.

Hatred and solitude will always be our undoing. Love and togetherness is our only comfortable way forward.

The Grand Farce

We don’t have to continue to live like this. We don’t have to obsess over economies and bank accounts. We don’t have to live as gluttonous consumers. We don’t have to eat ourselves into diabetic comas and drink and drug ourselves into oblivion. We don’t have to increasingly poison the planet in the name of corporate Greed and Ignorance. We don’t have to believe in the “virtue of selfishness” anymore.

Thankfully, nothing about the “western lifestyle/mentality” is written in stone. Nothing about what we’re doing isn’t completely new and completely alterable in the grand scheme of things. The second we choose to stop it, we can stop it.

This I know beyond a shadow of doubt: capitalism is an evolutionary dead-end. Period!

Any argument for the benevolence of capitalism is tired, short-sighted, and genuinely misguided.

If we look with honest eyes, nothing about our current cultural lifestyle is even remotely sustainable. We cannot forever drive, fly, and motorboat our way across the planet endlessly burning fossil fuels. We cannot forever electrify our houses through burning copious amounts of coal and creating endless amounts of poisonous and radioactive waste. We cannot mechanically and chemically process every morsel of food that goes into our mouths. We cannot continually chop, burn, shoot, bomb, and kill our way through everyone and anything deemed “in our way”. We cannot worship at the church of business without worshiping the Devil himself.

There is no such thing as perpetual growth. We will never discover infinite growth in a finite system. Whether we like it or not, even whether we completely understand it or not, our planet is a finite world. No amount of pretending will make it any less finite. Infinitely growing economies are an extremely Dangerous Delusion.

There is absolutely no convincing evidence that capitalism is a functional and sustainable way of socially organizing ourselves. Greed is not a virtue. Gold has no real value. Economies are imaginary abstractions. Money is more or less worthless. Corporations, if people at all, are completely out of their mind.

Some of the only real things of “true value” in our world, which are all growing scarcer by the second, are fresh clean breathable air, clean drinkable fresh water, nutrient rich pesticide-free sow-able land, antibiotic and steroid-free free-ranging livestock, and warm, dry toxin-free shelters.

The more we pretend the natural world is a controllable machine that humanity can endlessly “tinker” with, the deeper we dig our children’s graves. The more we pretend that humanity doesn’t have the power to destroy on a global scale, the closer to the “end of days” we come. The longer we live in Denial, the less likely we are to stop the deadly inertia pushing us all over the cliff’s edge.

We don’t have to live like this. We don’t have to pretend that capitalism is a benevolent and inevitable social force in our world, when it is so obviously nothing but a globally-destructive mass-poverty-creating farce.

A Sinking Ship

Not to put too fine a point on it, or sound overly pessimistic, but I believe we are both economically and ecologically SCREWED!!! But perhaps worst of all: few, if any of us, seem to really give a crap, few, if any of us, want to admit we might be on a sinking ship.

The mindless media machine has no interest in helping us overcome our mass-denial. Its only real interest is self-interest, its only obsession: the manipulation of imaginary numbers, and its only job: to continually misinform the masses via “fair and balanced” infotainment.

Our government, having been sold to the highest bidder long long ago, is impotent to any pleas for change, for its only interest is also self-interest, its only obsession: the manipulation of imaginary numbers, and its only job: to pillage the social coffers as quickly as they possibly can.

Our tremendous ability to be short-sighted, combined with the diseased attitude of the “virtue of selfishness” is quickly sealing our fate, and few of us show any real signs of honest frustration or willingness to fight for any alternative.

While any attempt at prognostication will always be fuzzy at best, in my mind, our children’s future is looking bleak at best.

Will our unhealthy love of money and infotainment and the excessive Greed and Denial it promotes ever be overcome? Our children’s children are probably hoping it will be. I know my fingers crossed!

The Industrial Apocalypse

Why worry about some imaginary biblical apocalypse, when the Apocalypse of industry is already spread upon on Earth before us?

From West Virginia to California, North Dakota to Texas, all across this “great” country, industry is Poisoning the air we breath, the water we drink, the animals we eat, and the land we sow, as we toast to their personal short-term “success” and our own collective long-term loss.

The inertia of our Stupidity has taken us well past the line of the reasonable and may have already sealed our fate.

From millions of gallons of spilt jet fuel in New Mexico, to flammable tap water in North Dakota, Texas, and Pennsylvania, from arsenic drenched fields in the American Southeast, to underground potentially radioactive trash fires in the Midwest, we have allowed our precious environment to be highjacked by corporate Greed and political Malfeasance.

Sadly I see little evidence that any of this will be changing in the near future, in fact we seem to be doubling down rather than walking away from the Gamble.

If we continue to allow ourselves to be highjacked by insatiable corporate Gluttony and seemingly willful Oblivion, we continue to spit in the face of our children and destroy any hope for their future success.

Until we recognize the inherent evil created by our obsession with short-term profiteering and alter our collective course, we will continue to push our environment past its ecological limits, and continue to lessen our children’s ability to survive here at all.

Please, let us find our “better senses”, let us come together as one world community, and finally agree that capitalism is simply not working and never will.

Monetary Hell…

Never in all of my life have I felt so mentally, physically, and emotionally Exhausted as I do right now. And never in all of my life have I seen so clearly that the cause for much, if not all, of this Suffering, is money, and the unyielding Desire for more that it inevitably seems to create.

It has been said that money is the root of all evil, and never have I felt this so keenly as I do right now.

I know of nothing in the Universe more Corrupting then the pursuit of cash. Even in the most basic monetary exchange you have set up a situation for Suffering and Corruption:

On one side of the transaction, you have someone wanting to keep as much of their money as possible, while on the other side, you have someone who wants to take as much money as possible. This creates an undeniable tension between the monetary participants. Two people, each doing their best, to take advantage of the other.

This is no way to create a healthy, safe, trusting, sustainable community. The only thing money has the ability to create is communal chaos: neighbor vs. neighbor. A planet of individuals each endlessly trying to take advantage of the others.

There exists but one way to survive as modern humans: together. And the only way that we can come together as a world community is if we can cure ourselves of this monetary-Madness.

Over the last few thousand years, money has corrupted us in countless ways and created incalculable amounts of Suffering and mental, physical, and emotional Damage. Its capacity for Corruption and Destruction seemingly endless. So dangerous and wide-spread is money’s Corrupting influence, that the entire Planet is now in danger of losing it’s ability to even create, let alone sustain, Life!

This is Outrageous!!! And perhaps the only thing more Outrageous is the fact that in the face of such Obvious Inequalities, Fear, and Hatred continually created by money, we cannot seem to even comprehend, let alone discuss, any possible alternatives without Great Resistance.

Money is time, nothing in life is free, the man with the most toys wins: these are the Demented  slogans of our day, these are the symptoms of a Diseased mind.

Together we Survive, apart we Suffer. Money will never have the ability to bring us together, it only has the ability to tear us apart.

 

Deficiency Train

I’ve been having some difficulties in writing something new that isn’t drenched in Negativity, so rather than spread the Dark Clouds of my current Frustrations, here are some nifty lyrics to a song I wrote a few years back…

 

We ride about on this Mystery Train, We see the sights going by

We do our best to relinquish the Pain, Of living life as a Lie

Most every stop we remain in our seats, Too petrified for outside

We sit and pine up some marvelous feats, To take the place of our lives

 

But rather than living with dream and regrets, Why not take a little stroll outside

And put away all of these sensible bets, And let us take another ride

 

To a place where we all know what’s right, And can see it through our mind

The state of being the Radiant Light, A state above and beyond time

The human organism acting as One, Feeling Peace from all sides

Brothers and sisters embracing as One, No longer national pride

 

And then we will finally realize the Joy, That lead us in to newer land

We’ll laugh and sing as we see through the ploy, And find we have a better plan

 

And then we’ll understand there’s more to this life, Then sense of security

No longer needing a placating fight, To live peacefully free

We’ll live peacefully free,

Oh so peacefully free

 

And all we’ve had is all we’ll have, If we never find another train

And realize that these lives we have, Are more than some economic gain

 

I’m trying hard not to rationalize, This living life in disguise

I’m trying hard just to trudge through the lies, And look through Universal Eyes

We’ll look through Universal Eyes,

We’ll look through Universal Eyes

 

Who Am I?

Who Am I?

Am I just a random isolated skin sack of blood, bile, turd, piss, and water, spinning hopelessly around a dumb, expanding happenstance universe? Am I nothing more than accident? Is this universe forever deaf, dumb, and blind to me?

Am I just a corporate lackey, paid to play the role of Consumer, forever and ever, Amen? Am I doomed into purchasing my “happiness” from some so-called “super” store? Am I nothing more than a random assortment of brands disguised as personality?

Am I just the waste I leave behind? A buried trash heap of rotting cardboard, plastic, paper, denim, leather, sinew, stuffing, and bone? Am I nothing more than a briefly animating trail of trash?

Am I just a fool? A careless, misinformed intellectual mongrel, doomed to eat and shit away my brief time as universe ever convinced of my complete separation from it?

Or

Am I the Evolving Expression of a 13.7+ billion year Expanding Energy know as Universe, Become Alive, Become Aware: Of Itself!?

Am I the 2 Become 1, The Ground Of All Being, The Union Of All Dualities? The In And The Out? The Up And The Down? The Good And The Bad? The Life And The Death? The Night And The Day?

Am I, As With You, As With Them, As With All, The One True Experiencer? We Together Playing The World Foundationally As One?

Am I You And You I And We Them And Them We And We All: Connecting To The All That Can Ever Be?

Who Am I? I Think I Might Be Everything, Just Like You!

 

Push the little red button and turn off the Madness. Quiet the mind and become the Breathe. Follow The Path And Relax Into Being…

 

Let’s Come Together And Give It A Better Try!!!

 

Connected

Left And Right, Up And Down, In And Out, All Around Us: The Light Of A Trillion+ Suns Shines Every Which Way, Every Instant Of Every Day.

Contained Within This Light Is The Story Of The Long Now, The 13.7+ Billion Year Old And Ever Growing Expansion Of Space-Time We Call Universe.

We Each Ride On The Crest Of This Relentless Expansion Of Space-Time, Our Individual Egos Barely An Instantaneously-Disappearing-Blip On The Radar Map Of The Long Now: Here One Moment, Completely Gone The Next, Yet Always And Forever Connected To The Entire Expanding History Of Cosmos!

A Disciple Of The Buddha Might Refer To This As “Dependent Arising”, All Causes Necessarily Connecting To Their Corresponding Effects, Every Instant Of Time Dependently Arising From The Unfolding Of All Previous Time, And Ever Connected To The Complete Unfolding Of The Entire History Of Time!

The Entire Surrounding Canopy Of Galaxies And Stars Reflecting Inside Our Eyes, Reflecting Inside Our Mind, Containing The History Of All That Has Ever Been, As It Effortlessly Converts Into All That Will Ever Be.

Whether We Like It Or Not, And Whether We Even See It Or Not: We Each Are Connected To The Entire History Of The Cosmos.

Blessed And Cursed With The Fleeting Gift Of Self-Awareness, Grown From A Tiny Blue Speck We Call Earth, Spinning Around A Medium Sized, Mostly Spherical, Thermonuclear Furnace We Call Sun, Spinning Around A Super Massive Black Hole, Feverishly Growing At The Center Of A Galaxy We Call Milky Way, Expanding In A Universe Of Billions Of Dancing Galaxies We Call Cosmos, Amen.

Our Lives Are A Gift Not To Be Wasted! Our Place Is A Gift Not To Be Ignored.