Experience Generates Reality

Experience Generates Reality

1. Experience is all there is. Experience is the absolute truth.

2. Experience is being, free of a survival identity.

3. Reality is being, encumbered with a survival identity, via amnesia.

4. Experience generates an illusion of reality, what we call the universe.

5. In amnesia, experience is restricted to varying levels of non-experience.

6. “God” is absolute experience; absolute consciousness: there is only One.

7. “Reality” is an illusion of duality; it exists in order to allow experience to experience non-experience.

8. Evolution is the process of awakening, of regaining consciousness: the steady reclamation of experience unfettered by illusion.

9. Experience is innate consciousness, independent of the five senses, the body, the brain, and the ego. It is the source of all creativity, intuition, and invention. It is the source of love and telepathic communication. It is immortal and infinite. It is the underlying true identity of the universe.

10. “Reality” is non-experience, dependent on the five senses, the body, the brain, and the ego. It is the source of all emotion, deception, suffering, and death. It is the source of fear, hate, and insanity. It is mortal and finite. It is an amnesiac illusion effectively posing as truth. It is a lie and as such can never deliver the satisfaction and peace only available in experience.

11. Experience generated the illusion of reality, what we call the big bang. At that instant experience was lost in illusion; the truth was lost in a lie. A boson, an atom, an electron, a star, a supernova, a planet in the Goldilocks zone, a unicellular life form—all represent experiences of non-experience with an observable trajectory and purpose: to awaken. The development of increasingly complex life forms with more sophisticated sensory capabilities, followed by analytical thought and self-awareness, further demonstrate this purposeful regaining of experience/consciousness. One might say that at the big bang, “reality” took control and generated non-experience. If one is born blind, the reality of one’s blindness thoroughly dictates one’s ability to experience.

When I was in my adolescence I always liked the “pulsating”  universe model: big bang—big crunch—big bang—forever.

A.   Experience generates “reality.”

B.   “Reality” generates the experience of non-experience.

C.  Ultimately, the experience of non-experience becomes experience.

D.   Experience generates “reality.”

E.   This cycle repeats forever.

  

Speak Your Mind if You Dare

What’s wrong with Christianity is what's wrong with politics: both are corrupted by money. A minister has to please the congregation in order to keep that collection plate full. Jesus didn’t give a rat’s ass what anybody thought—he spoke from his heart. He was, of course, crucified for his trouble but that’s not the point.

Or is it?

Here’s an example of Christ-like fearlessness in the early Sixties, from Taylor Branch’s great history of the civil rights movement:

In Baltimore, after nearly a decade of persistent negotiations, the city’s white and Negro Baptist preachers came together to discuss the role of the church in a time of racial tension. The meeting itself was a historic event, a gathering of uneasy strangers, and for the occasion the preachers of each race selected a representative to speak about their common religious heritage. The Negro preachers chose Vernon Johns, hoping that he would dazzle the white preachers with his learning. Indirectly, Johns was an employee of some of the white Baltimore preachers. His Maryland Baptist Center, which offered adult education to Negro preachers, was a kind of missionary program sponsored jointly by the white Southern Baptists and the National Baptist Convention.

On the appointed day, some 150 preachers met for lunch at the Seventh Baptist Church. There were no disputes over seating arrangements, the blessing of the food, the singing of “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,” or the meal itself. But as the chosen white preacher developed his sermon on the theme of Christian salvation, of being “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” Vernon Johns began to twitch noticeably in his seat.  When the white man finished, Johns stood up abruptly. He did not wait to be introduced, nor did he begin with the effusive salutations that had been established as the order of the day. “The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross,” he growled, and a number of the Negro preachers already were sinking inwardly toward oblivion.

Johns turned to the white preacher who had just sat down. “You didn’t do a thing but preach about the death of Jesus,” he said. “If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was to drop him down on Friday, and let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday. That’s all you hear. You don’t hear so much about his three years of teaching that man’s religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man. He who says he loves God and hates his fellow man is a liar, and the truth is not in him. That is what offended the leaders of Jesus’ own established church as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That’s why they put him up there.”

To a stunned audience, many of whom seemed to be leaning backward, Johns sputtered through quick explanations of Dives and Lazarus, and a story about how God rebuked Abraham for driving a stranger from his tent. “There is a world of disparity between the idealism of Jesus and the practices of men,” he said. “But Jesus is not crazy. We are crazy. The church has not formally denounced the Sermon on the Mount. It has merely let it slide. I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don’t give a damn what happened to him after the cross.”

With that, Johns sat down again, having consumed no more time than normally allotted to opening jokes and bromides. Faces were red. Appetites were lost. The tentative brotherhood of Negro and white Baptist preachers in Baltimore was stifled as a collective movement, and Johns soon was asked to resign his position at the Maryland Center. He drifted off again to the sermon and lecture circuit. In his own gruff, impolitic way, the old man had spoken up for the same idea of worldly religion that [M.L.] King supported at the Philadelphia convention, with similarly disastrous results. 

                                                                                                             Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch, 339-340

What's Wrong With Us?

In the motion picture "The Matrix," Trinity tells Neo, "You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." What was wrong, as it turned out, [Spoiler Alert!] was that Neo--like everyone he knew--was living in a false reality: a computer-generated dream world.

Of course there's nothing wrong with our world, the planet Earth. There IS something very wrong with the human race. We--all of us--are living in another kind of Matrix; a false reality; a subjective mind-generated dream world. Because we believe this dream world is real we are insane. I'm not using the word "insane" lightly. Just because we have conveniently restricted the diagnosis of "insanity" to a more overtly disturbed minority, who can't hold jobs, who have to be medicated and/or institutionalized, doesn't mean the rest of us are in our right minds.

Notice that I said subjective mind-generated reality. The physical world, in all its perfection, is perceived by the objective mind: everyone with sight sees the tree. Subjective (individual) mind is the domain of value judgments, opinions, beliefs, tastes, customs, traditions, etc. that distort, like cataracts, our objective perception of the "real" world. It was the collective subjective mind of the Nazis that literally saw Jews as parasites in need of extermination. It is the collective subjective mind of one group or tribe to see all others as inferior. Hell on Earth follows: from slavery to persecution to exploitation to Doomsday. Fifty years ago today Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger because his subjective mind convinced him he was fully justified in doing so.

The source of our self-hatred, our shame, our blame, and our arrogance is our subjective mind successfully convincing us that it is objective reality. Subjective mind is the source of our insanity: the state of confusing subjective opinion with objective fact.

If we could suddenly see physical reality undistorted by our subjective bullshit we would be in paradise. The key to enlightenment is humility. I like to say,"You can't be any humbler than nuts." The fate of humankind hangs in the balance.

Read Kathleen Brugger's "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion," which is based on our life's work, and presents this theory in detail. For a personal account of madness and transformation, read my autobiography "Exposing Myself: A LIfe of Sex and Truth."

Male and Female Survival Strategies: The Tusk and the Pit

The male survival strategy could often be likened to a bull elephant stampeding through the jungle and crushing anything in his path. The female would be crazy to stand up to such brute force, such overwhelming physical superiority. She therefore compensates by using her wits: epitomized by a deep pit dug in the jungle floor ahead of the charging male, with sharpened up-pointing bamboo stakes embedded at the bottom and the entire trap concealed by a delicate lattice-work of branches and leaves. The trumpeting, bellowing (and not-too-bright) bull usually doesn't stand a chance.

I believe that the lone alternative to flight/fight survival behavior is face: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is (my definition of love).

Puttin' on the Om!

I once had a friend, now departed, who always asked her guests to join hands at the dinner table and "Om" before eating. My late friend Ernie Mickler ("White Trash Cooking") and I wrote a devilish little satire of this alternative grace. It's sung to the (approximate) tune of "Puttin' on the Ritz." We called our song "Puttin' on the Om!" Here goes:

When you sit and face your plate just close your eyes and concentrate then start to moan
Puttin' on the Om!
Facing North South East or West just concentrate and do your best to hit that tone
Puttin' on the Om!

Hold hands with the people right next to ya
Feel that cosmic current flowin' through ya
Do ya?

When your chair begins to rise don't peek or open up your eyes it's best unknown
Puttin' on the Om!

Hold hands with the people right next to ya

Feel that cosmic current flowin' through ya

Do ya?

When at last it's time to eat the foods all cold but you can't beat that primal groan

Puttin' on the Om!

Puttin' on the Om!

Puttin' on the Om!

Puttin' on the Ommmmmmmmmmm!

In Praise of Fools and Madness

We are all familiar with Alfred E. Neuman, the smiling unhinged mascot of Mad Magazine. His world-view is encapsulated in the rhetorical question, "What, me worry?" And he clearly doesn't worry, his goofy lopsided face is always beaming with a kind of beatific serenity. Is madness the key to Mr. Neuman's happiness?

Or take Curly Howard of "The Three Stooges." Easily the dumbest of the trio, his charm lies in being a classic case of arrested development: a child's mind operating in the body of a grown man. He is always upbeat and of good cheer. No disaster, no pummeling by Moe, can keep Curly down. Like a cartoon character he bounces back and is ready for anything.

Ditto Harpo Marx. Groucho was rapier-sharp, Chico was the devilishly clever immigrant, Zeppo was vanilla, but Harpo was the child; the fool; the mad--and mute--genius (The Fool on the Hill/the jester).

Jesus said "Except you become as little children you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." A child is open to learning because they know they do not know. A child is willing to act like a fool because they have no rigid self-image to protect. The golden key is humility...and you can't be any humbler than nuts.

I'll leave this with one of my favorite quotes, from The Laws of Form, by G. Spencer Brown:

Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of.

Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance. 

To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation. 

In the face of the strong, and indeed violent, social pressures against it, few people have been prepared to take this simple and satisfying course towards sanity. And in a society where a prominent psychiatrist can advertise that given the chance, he would have treated Newton to electric shock therapy, who can blame any person for being afraid to do so? 

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them. 

In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But nonetheless returned, however furtively.          

As the Moon Draws Water

"In spite of our warnings and explanations, it drew [Dill] as the moon draws water," Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird                                                                                                                                                             

Dill Harris was instantly hooked on the mystery surrounding Boo Radley; he couldn't leave it alone, he had to know, had to see Boo with his own eyes.

Some kids are like that. A mystery drives them nuts. I was such a child. I used to tear small holes in my Christmas gifts to see what was inside. Forget waiting or deferred gratification. To quote the infamous Reverend Ike, "I don't want pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, I want my pie right now with ice cream on top!"

My curiosity killed Santa Claus when I was eight years old. I'd already begun to ask myself questions like, "We don't have a fireplace. Does he come in through the heat grates in the floor?" In any case I sneaked around and discovered  the stash of "Santa's gifts" and had to be told that the preposterous myth was a preposterous myth (self-inflicting who knows what degrees of psycho-trauma). Santa Claus: God with training wheels.

Death was also a mystery. I was, like many children in the South, taken along to funerals and "visitations" and the lame explanations for the smiling Grandmother lying in a big shiny box made not only no sense ("She's gone to be with Jesus in Heaven") but radiated a quality of evasion and uncertainty that I suspected would fit quite comfortably in the Santa Claus category. I used to conduct funerals for neighborhood pets and even considered being a funeral director when I grew up!    

When a mystery was freighted with a moral injunction it significantly boosted the attraction-factor. Surely the finest example of this is the Garden of Eden allegory. Adam and Eve had it all--including hanging out with God Himself--and only had to obey one simple rule: lay off the fruit of a single tree. We all know what happened next. Clearly God didn't know much about child psychology.

For me sex became the ultimate mystery and my fire-and-brimstone Grandmother made sure I was well-versed in all the Southern Baptist strictures against engaging in any form of it--including nudity --and made me aware of the terrible consequences of succumbing to lust. Thus when I discovered that sex was deliciously pleasurable...

I wrote this in a song called Swimming With the Sharks:

They told me sex was dirty except unto a wife

They told me I was jerking off the best years of my life

But somehow I saw different

And guilt was worth the price

To all alone or with someone escape to paradise!   

Desperately Seeking Rejection

I've been depressed as hell the last week or so, which has resulted in a falling-off of blogging activity. My book is finished and published. Now comes the task of flogging it, selling it, marketing it, promoting it--and the prospect makes me feel ill (in fact, I do feel physically under the weather today). I have long believed that wherever art meets business the interface is particularly abrasive. True art, I believe, springs from an irresistible compulsion to express one's personal vision of existence. I suppose one could say that business is also a compulsion to express one's vision. The difference, for me, is that with true art making money is never the primary motivation; with business making money is the whole point. 

But the artist has to eat and pay the rent! The temptation to conform, to compromise, to make palatable, to COMMERCIALIZE, is always beckoning. The more these siren calls are listened to, the more the art suffers. Commercial art is an oxymoron.

I once asked a successful screenwriter, "What if my script presents love as the solution to our problems but during the production the studio decides to change my message to 'killing is the solution'?" His answer? "Well, you got your money." 

To me true art is the honest--as fearless as possible--expression of the artist's take on reality.

Now Katie and my work--a philosophy of life is also art--says that we're all insane, that none of us have free will, and that we all hate ourselves. This is not an easy "sell." The last thing most people want to face is the idea that they're not in their right minds, not in control of their lives, and hate themselves. We have presented our ideas to quite a few "open-minded" people and I have yet to hear even ONE person say, "I get it! I'm not in control of my life, I see that my 'insecurities' arise from deeply suppressed self-hatred (born of not really knowing who or what the fuck I am!), and I'm literally insane for imagining myself 'happy' and content and satisfied with the way my life is!"      

Someone said, "If people agree with you you can't be ahead of the curve or revolutionary or original." True art requires the balls to starve if needed. Many have done so. 

Art is a communication. The communicator hopes, of course, to be understood, to be appreciated, to make a difference in the world. 

When you're ahead of your time you must expect little in the way of encouragement. Not to mention that artists are also encumbered with self-hatred, doubts, and madness, and can, as a result, become perversely addicted to rejection. After all, if I hate myself as a fraud and a loser, why should I be allowed success or recognition? And then the rejection feeds my insecurity: maybe I'm not on the cutting edge; maybe I'm self-deluded (aka full of shit). 

I once wrote, "Artists are usually discovered after their deaths because they are no longer around to sabotage their own careers." I speak from experience. I'm just becoming aware of how very much I've actively sought rejection.

I just realized that what I seek is confirmation of my story (the way I see myself). My story is that I am a loser unworthy of success.

My story says that I have always been rejected and always will be. So I seek/see rejection everywhere. Then another aspect of my story kicks in: "When I'm rejected I should just quit in protest."

Rocks Turned to Meat

Here's what science has to say about why we're here: Around fourteen thousand million years ago the universe spewed out of absolutely nothing ("One quintillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe was infinitely dense and zero in size." --Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris) and billions of years later molten rocks turned to meat and started thinking. I drew a cartoon of this in our first book The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity and represented "thinking" as an egghead in a lab coat saying, "There is no God!"

My metaphysics is best summed up in a song I wrote for a friend dying of AIDS. It's called The God Almighty Blues:

God Almighty is the name that you all give to me

But God Almighty isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be

So hush your prayers, complaints and whines and hear my side a bit

I’m gonna tell you why I made a world so full of…it

You all think that being God is really where it’s at

Just lounging on a throne all day while chewing cosmic fat

With fifty trillion angel choirs all singing lavish praise

If you’re like me this scene would drive you nuts within two days

It’s true that all I have to do is give one small command

And there it is, just what I want, and I don’t lift a hand

How ’bout a perfect diamond with each facet light years wide?

No problem! I get what I want as soon as I decide

Limitations don’t exist as long as I am me

But that’s a limitation! It gets boring don’t you see

So I enter amnesia, what you call the universe

In which I savor all those feelings God can never nurse

Like fear and hate and jealousy and worrying ’bout the rent

Like walking up to my new car and finding a big dent!

Like falling oh so deep in love then falling out again

Like knowing that I’m gonna die and fearing how or when

Like having some old bastard ride my ass from nine to five

Like freezing down on skid row begging wine to keep alive

Like giving birth to babies and like starting to grow old

Like chasing after cuties and that rainbow’s pot of gold

So all of you who wonder ’bout the “meaning” of your life

It’s just a way that I can get a taste of toil and strife

By living out a life just like it’s really life or death

I play as many characters as ever drew a breath

Like Oonga in the jungle and like Bill who lives next door

Like Mary Queen of Scots and like old Fred who mops the floor

Like Hitler and like Joan of Arc like Blackbeard on the Main

Like Tom and Dick and Harry and like Einstein and plain Jane

Like Moses on the mountain like the woman at the well

Like Francois and Beethoven like Alexi Ho and Nell

Like Ala and Johannes like Mugobwe Singh and May

Like you and everybody else--just parts I like to play

Yes just for fun I let myself lose my identity

I trap myself in human form then wait to be set free

The pain cries out remember oh remember who you are

Escape this cage of flesh and let your light blaze like a star

So who you think you are is simply me there in disguise

I think you’ll find this makes up for the pain of life: surprise!

Yes God Almighty is the name that you all gave to me

              And life’s my way of passing time...inside eternity

I'd Rather Fight Than Switch!

Remember the old cigarette ads showing smokers with black eyes who defiantly proclaim,"I'd rather fight than switch!" (brands)? This puts me in mind of entrenched behavior patterns that are painful, self-destructive and in clear need of elimination. Why do we cling to the hurtful? Why, when all reason calls out to abandon a foolish behavior, do we continue to stick our hands in the fire?

The answer is because the behavior--and more accurately the beliefs that support it--would rather fight than switch.

A particular belief is what I call a "thought-form." It is a discrete entity that is bound by universal law to survive.
I define "survival" as the effort of a form to maintain its existent structural integrity. The universe is comprised of surviving physical and non-physical forms. Survival is the attempt to keep a form intact. Change is equated with death of the existent: once something changes, it ceases to be what it was.

Perpetual change rules the physical universe; no physical form can remain unaltered from one unit of time to the next. Thought-forms, on the other hand, have no physical mass and thus are immune to the interactional forces of change. A belief, "Jesus is coming soon," can remain unaltered for a lifetime in the mind of the believer; it can, and in this case has been, passed down from generation to generation.

A thought-form survives with all the ferocity of a cornered rat. It resists any introspection that can change it. The only threat to a belief comes from the person who believes it. It is a parasite-host relationship. The belief "Blacks are inferior to whites" need only keep its host believer convinced that it is true in order to remain unchanged; to "survive."

This is why we dislike people who challenge our beliefs. It is also why "all beliefs are equally valid" is so dangerous: there is no base-line, no standard that separates the wheat of objective fact from the chaff of subjective nonsense. One prays that the mechanic working on a jet engine would not hold such an easy-going philosophy.

Every belief would rather fight to the death than switch. This is why it's hard to change.      

Deep River Blues

Technical issues this morning so I'll share this video of the late great Doc Watson doing "Deep River Blues." I saw Doc in the summer of 1963 at the American Folk Festival in Asheville (Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, John Jacob Niles). He performed unaccompanied, like in this clip, and my mind was--and remains--totally blown by his masterful playing. Thanks for all you gave us, Doc.

Love as Acceptance of Reality

Posted 11/5/2013

I define "love" as: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is. "What is" is my definition of reality--not what we think is, or hope is, or believe is, or wish wasn't, but what actually is (whatever that proves to be).

I can see only one option to flight/fight survival behavior and that is face; to fully allow reality to be, just as it is right now. To face what is is to accept what is is to experience what is is to love what is.

Acceptance of what is is empowering. If I'm caught in a rip current the more I perceive and accept the reality of the situation the more I can effectively deal with it. Panic and drowning result from flighting and fighting the existent reality.

The catch in my definition is that in order to unconditionally accept something I must unconditionally know it. The only thing I know absolutely is that some kind of experience is happening at my location. Everything else I know is, at some point, limited by total ignorance. As Tennyson nicely puts it:
Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, little flower--But if
I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is

Romantic love, familial love, love of work, love of hot dogs--all are experiences of acceptance. The reason love is so rare is because acceptance of reality is so rare. Finding existent reality--the way it is--unacceptable, is insane.

The Money Buys Happiness Myth

Posted 11/4/2013

Sometimes I believe that Americans exist primarily to demonstrate, once and for all, that money does NOT buy happiness. I've lived in Third World countries--India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bali, Mexico--and have observed that the peasants, the ones living off the grid, observably possess a degree of acceptance and satisfaction conspicuously absent in the "movers and shakers" in their countries. The United States of America, despite its great wealth, is not a happy place. Is it hope that curses us? Dreams of hitting the jackpot? Working our tails off for some nebulous security?

I'm not saying poverty equals happiness. I am saying that while one is seeking happiness--particularly in materialism--one is sure to never find it. In one of my songs called "Everybody Does It"  I wrote:

    We ride the whirling carousel and seek the golden ring

    Around and round we go around but it don't mean a thing

    We think we're making progress but it's just a carnie trick

    A not-so-merry-go-round way to mesmerize a hick

I once saw a film about the French playwright, Moliere. One memorable scene showed a comedy being performed in a Paris street theater.  A wigged and powdered gentleman was primping before his dressing mirror, looking adoringly at himself as he arranged his curls, his lace, and his makeup. Standing behind him, convulsed in mirth, clutching his sides and finally rolling on the floor...was the figure of death.

Life is here and life is now. Hope kills acceptance: we cannot see the perfection (what director Terrence Malik calls "the glory") because we're too busy struggling to attain something else. The cemeteries we unthinkingly drive by are reminders of the absurdity of hope, of vanity, of materialism.

What was it Miss Hathaway said in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies? "Oh, Mr Drysdale! Jethro wants to be a rock star!"

Knowing We Don't Know

Posted 11/3/2013

In our first book, The Game of God: Recovering Your True  Identity, Katie and I assert "The source of all fear is the unknown...and the source of all hatred is fear." As we humans know no thing absolutely--with this lone exception: some kind of experience is occurring at our location--the unknowns in our lives are oceanic. Katie and I once did a series of video interviews asking people, "Do you know who, or what, you really are?" The deadly word in that question, of course, is "really." What we soon discovered was that no one knew who they really were. The fact that we go through life assuming otherwise is another symptom of universal human insanity. I recall the scene in Lawrence of Arabia when a motorcyclist on the far bank of the Suez Canal repeatedly shouts at Lawrence, "Who are you? Who are you?" Lawrence, a very intelligent and philosophical man, clearly doesn't know how to answer.

Ignorance-spawned fear and hate are not comfortable states. As Dean Wormer gently advises Kent Dorfman in Animal House, "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son." This could be taken as a variation of Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates, incidentally, was called the wisest man in Athens by the Oracle of Delphi--because he was the only man in Athens who knew he knew nothing. 

Facing our ignorance opens us to the empowering no-nonsense experience of humility. It's another form of this great paradox: the more we accept the reality of our insanity the saner we are. She who knows doesn't know. But she who doesn't know knows she doesn't know...and thus actually knows something! 

A Universal Recipe

Posted 11/2/2013

For the following recipe a universe will be necessary. 1. Explode a star and sow interstellar space with the remnants. 2. Allow time and gravity to work. 3. Wait for the debris to coalesce and ignite as a second-generation star (the supernova will have cooked up the heavy elements required for life). 4. Place a fresh molten planet in the Goldilocks zone. 5. Let cool. 6. Add rain. 7. When life appears, allow it to evolve for nearly four billion years. 8. Wait for a creature to engage in abstract reasoning. 9. Allow this analytical intelligence to evolve for a few hundred thousand years. 10. IMPORTANT! The self-aware creature must become cognizant of a fatal flaw in its psychology if it is to transcend it's flight/fight, ego-dominated state and advance to the next level of evolution. Failure to identify and divest itself of this flaw--an insidious form of insanity (confusing subjective opinion with objective fact)--will result in the recipe being ruined and thrown out.    

Five Dollar Dog and Over the Hiccups

sted 11/1/2013

Busy day today so I'll share two favorites from Naked Rabbit:

Five Dollar Dog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMUgZE4_dOw

Over the Hiccups:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6-E37gUsz8

Potential Heaven or Unredeemable Hell?

Posted 10/31/2013

"I was saying to myself this could be heaven...or this could be hell," crooned Don Henley in Hotel California.

For years I've held the belief that this stumbling bumbling human race could one day clean up its act, grow up (evolutionarily speaking) and become a transformed race of higher beings--all while participating in this grand illusion called the universe. 

Sometimes I think I'm wrong.

Hell? Maybe we're soaking in it! Seven billion apeoids lost in space and fighting to survive, struggling to hit the jackpot; to live like American big-shots on a too-small planet.

Whatever it is, it's not heaven--except for the tiny number who can perceive the perfection and the inevitability of it all.

Well, this is dark! I've had email problems today. Or, as an old pal self-diagnosed when he was strumming his guitar and waxing solemn and blue, "Maybe it's just constipation." (He recorded this hilarious monologue stream-of consciousness style; there followed an interaction with a not-very-pleasant Tidy Bowl Man. Constipated Narrator (threateningly): "I'll drop a big one on you." Tidy Bowl Man (mockingly): "Promises promises..."). 

Knowing the Answer

Posted 10/30/2013

Katie and I filmed an environmental event last night, documenting the participants' comments to the EPA in support of proposed legislation that would set limits on greenhouse emissions from coal-powered power plants and other industrial polluters (currently there are none). People would say things like, "I can't believe we're still talking about this after all these years"; "How could there be so many who continue to deny the hard science that confirms the danger posed by industrial pollution"; and so on. Some condemned the legal bribery known as lobbying, the influence of big money on our lawmakers, and appeared mystified by the shortsightedness and irresponsibility of greed and corruption.

It's hard for me to sit silent and listen to this kind of thing anymore. The well-intentioned speakers last night were consistently focused on the symptoms without diagnosing the disease: the one source that spawns greed, violence, environmental destruction, sexism, racism, etc. If you only treat the superficial symptoms the illness remains intact. If you shave off a melanoma the underlying cancer remains as deadly as ever.

The disease, according to Katie and my life's work, is an insidious form of universal human insanity.

Our definition: insanity: the state of confusing our subjective opinions with objective fact  

For example, all credible science says the objective fact is that human beings are responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases that is threatening an environmental catastrophe. This inconvenient truth--for the polluters--conflicts, conveniently, with their subjective opinion that they really don't need to go to the additional expense of cleaning up their act. The cigarette manufacturers once ran ads that supported their subjective opinion, "The facts on smoking aren't all in yet" while science--devoted to establishing objective fact--said the opposite. Every mugger's subjective belief that his act of violence is justified overrides the objective fact that such behavior is unsupportable in a civilized society.

Take any dysfunctional behavior, from littering to murder to the crash of the global economy, and see if our definition of insanity does not apply.     

Publication Day!

Posted 10/29/2013

Well, today's the day! Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth is published and available. No more revisions, substitutions, or cowardly hesitation. Out with it! As Sheriff Bart so eloquently says in Blazing Saddles, "'Scuse me while I whip this out!"--and all the white women scream.

One reader of the manuscript has more or less accused me of literary exhibitionism ("Are you titillated by revealing all to the whole world?"). Actually this is not true--or at least it's not my conscious intention. My sex life is something I've kept well-hidden throughout my life, precisely like 99.99% of the people I've known in my 68 years here on planet Loony Bin.

No, my intention is to say, loudly and clearly, "Take your insane morality--that contradiction-ridden code which accepts violence as prime-time entertainment while demonizing the act of pleasure that created us--and put it where the sun don't shine! Your idiotic notion that sex-is-dirty really fucked up my life. I don't give a damn  what you think about my sexual proclivities--the by-product of your "morality"--so here I am, exposed at last. 'Scuse me--or not--while I whip this out!"

One of my favorite cartoons from an old Lampoon showed an astronaut who has just landed on a new world, looking in surprise through the visor of his spacesuit at his first sight of life on the planet: the statue of a naked man with a fig leaf covering...his face!

Oh, and by the way, my book also throws in a "God" who actually makes sense and a psychology that explains the complete inevitability of our screwed up human thought processes. Only $3.99 in Kindle and $11.35 in paper at Amazon.

Anger

Posted 10/28/2013

I have always struggled with anger. Anger is an emotional expression of dissatisfaction with reality. My own philosophy says that reality--what is--is always perfect and that "enlightenment" is the experience of perceiving and accepting that perfection.

I was spoiled as a child. I learned to sulk and pout (expressions of anger) in order to get my way. It almost always worked with my mother. Pretending to be hurt and wounded (subtle expressions of anger) is often more effective than the temper tantrum.

Anger is a symptom of insanity. Getting mad at the way it is does not change the way it is right now. All that happens is a negative emotion is expressed and makes the world a little darker. I once published a newsletter and someone wrote,' There's an undercurrent of venom and people are picking up on it."

It's frustrating, this path. I KNOW we can love each other...but I forget that getting pissed off when we don't love does nothing but drive love farther away.

My definition of that much-maligned word:

love: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is. 

It's either perfect or it isn't. Reason say stop flighting and fighting the way it is and face and accept existent reality.

From one of my songs called "Bend Like a Willow":

    Life is like the wind: it's sometimes gentle sometimes rough

    And anytime I hate the way it is well that's just tough

    When I can allow what is to be I've found the way

    When I can embrace the now I rise above the fray

Religion Bashing

Posted 10/26/2013

Watched Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins gleefully bashing all things religious last night on "Real Time." Mr. Maher's hatred of religion and Islam are real stumbling blocks for him. Atheists love to attack the easy targets, like the primitive and obviously ignorant fundamentalist beliefs that Adam and Eve actually existed, the earth is 6,000 years old, and so on.

In his film "Religulous," Bill bravely visits a "trucker's church," a small fundamentalist chapel housed inside the detached trailer of a big rig, and has a merry time demonstrating how superior his thought processes are to the less sophisticated. He regularly subjects his viewers to elitist "documentaries" by Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra, who ferrets out the most ignorant people she can find, films their uninformed opinions, and passes her cherry-picked footage off as an objective representation of whatever point she's trying to make. It's a simple matter to  propagandize in a documentary. You can, for example, "prove" that the entire southern United States is racist--by only filming southern bigots.

"If we can't measure something  it doesn't exist" seems a very weak--and very arrogant--argument. At least have the humility to say, "I don't know."

My definition of an agnostic is an atheist smart enough to cover his or her ass.