Arthur Hancock: 2013-11-03

Friday, November 8, 2013

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

Thursday, November 7, 2013

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.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

Potential Heaven or Unredeemable Hell?

"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!

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

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

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.

I Don't Want to be God Yet!

I recently met an extraordinary person who has really walked the spiritual walk. She emanated such power that I was high as a kite for hours after she visited with Katie and me. She has a guru, meditates hours daily (as she has for many years), and her goal is to end her cycle of birth and rebirth in this lifetime. I think she stands a good chance. I have never encountered such power in another.

When I saw her again I said, "I don't want to be God yet." That statement must have been obvious to her as I am definitely a spiritual slacker. I've had plenty of experiential confirmations of the divine punchline, all my songs are based on these experiences, hell, I even co-authored a book on the subject. So why don't I work tirelessly to transcend the illusion of duality?

I believe that the moments of clarity I've achieved--when I saw the world as absolutely perfect--are but the next stage in human evolution. I want to experience a life on that level of awareness, a world filled with people who have transcended the primitive flight/fight-dominated plane we currently occupy, to see the world illuminated and united. I want to explore the universe and find new challenges and opportunities. I don't want to meld into the infinite...yet.

Or is it that I'm simply addicted to the illusion?

Masters of Sex

After watching three episodes of "Masters of Sex" on Showtime (based on the Masters and Johnson clinical studies of human sexuality), here 's my take. First, we're still FUBAR about sex. If the woman is attractive you can see her bare breasts. If she's old you can't. Even though this is Showtime and airs late in the evening the sight of pubic hair or a penis--erect or otherwise--remains unthinkable. Simulated sex scenes are cold, as in devoid of heat, as in the opposite of what the sex act is.

The subjects in the study are paraded like faceless robots who simply perform--singly or with a partner--on command. And talk about the observer effect skewing the experiment! Is there anyone who could preform sexually while being watched and not experience an added, shall we say, "intensity" arising from the sheer kinkiness of others looking on? The Fifties are famous for sexual repression and fucking yourself or another while being observed would add an exhibitionist or uptight element that could not be denied (and would certainly distort the data being recorded on the various medical devices used in the experiments).

This show is a standard-issue soap opera and I don't think I'll be tuning in again. I should have known that a majority of the cable viewing public, enamored of murder, gore, and violence, still have to be spoon-fed like babies when it comes to sex.

We Are NOT in Control

To me the most cruel lie is the one that says we have free will. All blame, shame (self-blame), and pride comes from this monstrosity. Those painful secrets I blogged about yesterday, all regrets, remorse, guilt, arrogance, resentment and hatred absolutely require "free will" in order to exist.

We live under the preposterous assumption that we are in control.

The only thing "in control" is the Big Bang; we are hurtling ejecta, fourteen thousand million years into expression.

What a fucking relief!

Freedom

I was thinking about Kris Kristofferson's great line from Bobby McGee, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" and it occurred to me that freedom's just another word for nothing left to HIDE.

There's a happening church in downtown Asheville that asked people to write their deepest secrets and submit them anonymously. These were then transcribed and displayed in a gallery setting. It was fascinating. My favorite was, "I hate my baby." That took a lot of guts to write. What impacted me in reading these deep dark secrets was the unrelenting suffering they obviously caused the secret-holders. I can relate to that. Can you?

Katie and I define "freedom" as unrestrained by limitation. What is a secret if not an encumbrance, a limitation? We must perpetually guard it, insuring that it never sees the light of day, that no one will ever discover it, etc. Hiding something requires constant effort and fear of exposure.

I guess the trick is to reach the point where we no longer give a shit what anyone else thinks of us, to openly declare "This is who I am, warts and all." As an old singer/songwriter pal Jeffrey C. used to say, "Sure hope you like it." He'd then add, "And fuck you if you can't take a joke."

That's why I wrote "Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth."

Sure hope you like it...

Blog

Feeling much resistance to starting a blog. I suppose it's my feeling that short equals dumb. I am admittedly long-winded and inclined to go on too long--ideas take time to develop--so this will be a test of my ability to be brief and not, as Orwell's character in Burmese Days says, "unable to write a notice without an attack of literary diarrhea."

Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth will be available in print and Kindle within the week. What a relief to bear my soul at last...no more secrets! There is no relief in hiding. The last verse of one of my songs: I am who I am and if that's not enough/All that I can tell you is that's really tough/Didn't want to hurt you but I guess I will/The trouble with a lie is that it won't lie still!

Arthur Hancock