So, What ARE We Doing on This Planet???!!??

June 24, 2024

 

At the ripe old age of 81.5, I’ve been telling friends and family, near and far, for a few years now — (officiously, pretentiously, tongue in cheek — but not really!) that, “As a PhD ‘philosopher’ (ahem), my most important philosophical remark, the one I want put on my tombstone is this”:

 

What we are doing on this planet is

moving stuff around. 

And . . .

it’s always, ALWAYS —

just an excuse

for relationships.

 

“Stuff” (or what Clif High would call “grit,”) i.e., matter, and its various permutations; for humans, “embodiment.” And by “stuff” I also include any left brain concoction, including language, “ideas,” “rules” (logic and otherwise) etc. Obviously, what we call “money” (see yesterday’s post) and other man-made abstractions also fall into this realm of manifestation, maya. All STUFF! Even when we can’t see, feel it, taste or touch it!” If it originates in the left brain (itself “stuff”), then it too, is STUFF.

Likewise, any thing, visible or invisible (e.g. stocks, bonds, crypto, derivatives, money, etc.) that can be perceived (and thus valued) as either too much or too little, subject to our made-up notions of “relative scarcity,” thus used in this culture to determine “value” for our independent individual selves, all falls into the realm of (mere) “stuff.”

In the spirit world, on the other hand,  we have no need for stuff to glue us together or tear us apart.

In the spirit world we are always in relationship to others as aspects of the whole, communing telepathically, currents of Love fueling and flowing through the infinite oceanic mystery.

Here, on Earth, as embodied beings, we experience grief when we lose something or someone (or an animal, like little puppy Shadow, who left his body three weeks ago today). It’s our bodies that experience our profound loss, having been imprinted with voluminous memory traces from our embodied time together. Thus, whatever our enculturated, materialistic personalities value, when removed, leaves us relatively devastated.

Okay, so here are a few more memes, to illustrate various aspects of “relationship,” as we move the stuff of our own bodies around, interacting at various levels, with others’, their bodies, in Earth’s life’s entangled, longed for/fear of, mutual, emotional, mental, and spiritual — confusing, nourishing mess!

First off, and most important!

We are driven to relate to others. How else are we to learn about ourselves without the mirror of the other? And yet, for every dizzying “fall” into especially romantic love, there comes, usually, sooner or later, the deeper fall; into despair — when what we assumed, and/or hoped and prayed, would “work out” (meaning, would hold that initial relationship dynamic static, unchanged, “until death do us part”), DOESN’T.

(Funny, we don’t call it rise in love; why not? Because a new romantic relationship forces us, for a year or two, to experience both the extreme deliciousness and frustration our bodies are capable of!)

This is the pivot point. Now what? Are we to sink into permanent despair, isolation, bitterness, split our minds from our bodies once and for all so as not to feel pain again, so as to endure inevitable calcification? Are we to pretend it never happened, and just move on?

Hopefully not. Not if we want to keep growing — until death

when we, our immortal souls,

spiral from our mortal coils.

And what is this temporary life in a body if not carrying the potential for continuous growth, over a long lifetime, in stages — in early years the body, in maturity the mind and heart, and finally, in our crone/elder years, the soul! Wisdom is reached only by truly allowing oneself to fully experience every living being we encounter who moves us, and then to process the inevitably temporary experience.

 

 

Usually, it helps to actually process with any person with whom you have suddenly or gradually, found yourself estranged. On the other hand . . .

So here we are, in our messy micellial fields of mutual nourishing glory, learning, over and over again, how to stay centered within even as we find ourselves both thrilled and vulnerable in relation to “the one” (we hope) other.

Sooner or later, if we actually allow the ongoing process of relating to unfold, we begin to realize, as we laugh out loud . . .WE’RE ALL WEIRD!

Unfortunately, even weirdness can go astray, witness the ridiculous trans/woke phenomemon. No matter how an easily “triggered” young person “proudly” and “politically correctly” “identifies” “him”- or “her”- or “them”- self or selves, and not only expects, but tearfully or furiously insists on the exactly the same linguistic (left brain) identification from you — even so, at this point in our all-too-human his-story/her-story, this is still the case:

Transhumanism,

featuring promised magical resurrection and/or conception/reformulation

as a bot

is not yet in even partial display.

 

In fact, check out where you came from, dum dum.

Biology still rules!

 

Ach. The absurdity of woke has now led to this, extinction level nonsense.

 

 

WAKE UP, FOLKS, WAKE UP!

 

 

SERIOUS QUESTION: Is Money the “bottom line”?

June 23, 2024

Men Made History; Their Mothers Made Dinner

You may think this Mickey Z post is “dated,” in that it’s no longer the case that only men make history, because ’60s feminism liberated women to aim towards seizing and wielding what men have seemingly always had, easier access to Money, and therefore, Success.

(And yes, “women’s lib,” as a process, devalued crucial, so-called “women’s work” even further, while gradually, inevitably, atomizing the formerly nourishing family womb into mere anonymous Others, indoctrinated to seek respect, approval from their siblings, parents, children, grandchildren etc., and when ignored, (or, as is said now, “cancelled”), feel horrible: “what have I done wrong?” What remains are stuck resentments for past wrongs, and/or active judgmental attitudes, superiority/inferiority complexes, Others taking sides. BORING!

(All this by DS design.)

I do think Mickey Z’s substack article clever and needed, in that it turns “behind every great man there’s a great woman” on its head as hypocritical expose. However, I offer here a much larger perspective within which we can frame this entire emulsifying phenomenon that slowly and surely destroyed humanity’s continuously nourishing, replenishing miscellial web, to the point where frozen fear, and/or disguised or overt contentions, conflicts, wars, run rampant — all seemingly now converging on the big daddy of them all, nuclear war.

Mine is a perspective that is still not even poking its head above the dominant capitalist paradigm.

I figured it out way back in 1977, under extreme mental/emotional duress. Ever since then I tell others:

“I aim to live below money, as far as possible.”

And when they look at me, dumbfounded, I add:

“Because money is a scrim” — a fake surface phenomenon that does not penetrate to the depths of either our authentic natural selves or or the natural world within which we are embedded.

What? People still look at me as if I’m crazy. Why would I say that?

Which means — though this is usually not voiced — “Do you choose to be poor?”

No. I choose to inhabit and express the richness of my authentic sovereign soul self in union with the whole of life.

Here’s a meme that goes some way towards hinting at the abundance of feeling and limitless, entangled connectivity that results.

Excerpt:

Creating A New Foundation of Values for Our Lives