The Hell of a See Saw Society

October 5, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

The question of KAV’s guilt or innocence is framed by our inability to rest in ambiguity, to hold judgment, no restrain from choosing this or that. We live in a rational logical materialism where truth must be Either this Or that. Truth can’t be this/that; truth can’t be ambiguous, so we can’t by the force of our need to choose rest in uncertainty. The Call to Certainty is like the speakers in a rock concert.

I was listening on morning news to two people discussing KAV and each had an opposite perspective on his “emotional behavior.” One view was that it a job killer because of its un-judicial temperament. The other view was that it was understandable and permitted because of the extreme pressure he was under, being falsely accused in front of his family.

KAV is ambiguous, and both views are right. However, the judgment was rushed and evidence was not allowed to come out because if assumed to be innocent, there is no evidence. Assumed to be guilty, the evidence to prove it was not allowed to come out. Ambiguity just gets kicked down the road of time.

And here’s why, I think. Ambiguity in politically potential events creates the polarity of Right versus Left realties. Whether you are Conservative or Liberal, you identity depends on not being the Other. So there is an existential need to create the polarity in which we find our Identity of Investment. When we invest of Self in a political “team,” it is the polarity that generates our very sense of self.

It is the contest in sports, us against them, that generates the roar of the crowd. If you have no interest in either team, football is quite boring.

With our need to feel the roar for out Team, the ambiguity of KAV could not be sustained until the evidence was thoroughly laid out on the table. We cry and complain about the polarity of our society, but we really love it because we have lost our true individuality, and now we exist because we are on a team with an arch enemy. Each team is defined by its opponent.

The irony is that in avoiding ambiguity, we create ambiguity.

OK, I want to write on this Idea some more because it has legs for me. How do I find truth in my own life? That is the question. How do I stop toe polarity in my own mind, the worry mind, the incessant monolog of circular thinking? That is the real question, isn’t it. The external polarity in the society is a reflection of the internal polarity that is ME. That is the question.

What is an inner polarity? Unless we can see it in our own mind, all our efforts to get rid of its pain in the external world will just increase it until we have a nervous breakdown or shoot ourselves or someone else. Violence is the failed attempt to get rid of the polarity in our own mind.

We live in a thought created culture. Everything is created by thought, and thought is a polarity operating system. Is Kav innocent or guilty? Our reference to evaluate evidence depends upon which end of the see saw we sit on. If I sit on the Left, the facts shape around that reference, clearly and logically. If I sit on the Right end, the same facts shape around that end perfectly. I cannot understand why the other end of the polarity can’t see that. I get angry.

When I can rest in the ambiguity of Not Knowing, I create the empty space where my heart felt identity is born. Yes born. When caught in the see saw of ambiguity I’m the Unborn because I am two ME’s. Using the see saw as our working metaphor, the Truth is that the see saw needs both ends. You can’t have one end of relative truth without the opposite. Since both ends are moving up and down, I’m right, you’re wrong…oh, no now I’m wrong and you’re right…on and on…The truth which is always the One without a Second is is pattern of the see saw, not either end as seen from being on the see saw.

Truth requires the suspension of the identification with either end of the see saw.. You have to sit on the park bench and observe the mind’s polarity. Morality is a see saw with my end being good and the other end being bad. There is no end to the Moral See Saw. We never see the whole bull, just one horn or the other, and we fear being gored by the other horn…never seeing that the two horns of the ambiguity dilemma is one bull without a second.

In a polarized society where you are either Right or Left, there is no way to find that Park Bench because the park bench is transcendent of the see saw experience. One has to die to your seat on the see saw to find yourself suddenly on the park bench. It’s a sudden shift like that. Suddenly you see and there is no more confusion and mind polarity. And what you see you do. Finally, seeing and action are one.

The view from the Park Bench is Awareness that transcends our acculturated thought and mind. For the first time the world is no longer hostile, and you are no longer a victim of the other end of the see saw. But we still don’t escape ambiguity: I am on the see saw; I am not on the see saw (park bench). And that’s Zen.

I’m asking you all to put a really wide angle lens and zoom back until you can see the pattern of polarity that shapes out current time in history. While polarity in the secular modern world has always been there, today there seems to be a radical fundamental revolt against secularism and the uncertainty and meaningless of ambiguity and polarity, the double-bind of polarity. But the fundamental revolt against polarity is misplaced because it doubles down on one end of the see saw polarity. And of course, the other end double-down, and the see saw just speeds up until we feel it is going to through us off into the void.

The fundamentalist revolt against secular polarity is morality. There is nothing more certain than our moral view, and now you end of the see saw is a Absolute Good and the other end Absolute Evil. There is no end to that see saw.

Politics was always a see saw in the political play ground. But now with the religious revolt against the certainty of God being removed from the playground, it has made the playground a cosmic war of Good versus Evil and it is not policy that is at stake but our very souls salvation.

In order to discover the park bench in the playground of the mind, we have to find the way in our mind/world, not in society. Truth is in there, not out there. You are the world and the world is you. The fact is live is ambiguous. Nothing is certain. Heaven is hell, hell is heaven. Buddha calls it impermanence.

When a flock beat the Republican Army

September 29, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

Social media is changing everything because everyone is watching everything live. There is no more time; everything is Now. We are a internet species now, a flock of starlings that shift in unison in flight. Common sense wise we are still living in the Newtonian universe of billiard balls knocking into each other as cause and effect in a linear line of past to future.

But the real world as changed. We no longer live in the Print Age of regimentation of defined words moving left to right, word separated from the flesh and feeling. The Print Age, as defined by Marshal MacKluhan shaped Western consciousness when the printing press was invented, and we changed from an oral tradition to a visual print tradition, and the mass man was created for the factories, perfect consumers who were then brainwashed by TV ads. Pac Men who just consumed forms.

With interactive social media, the whole world in your pocket, it is having the same effect on consciousness that the portable print Bible had on the Protestant Reformation the broke up the Catholic ritualistic hold on western man.

Two women in an elevator created a change in the direction of the social organism. I think that’s it. Social Media (and by that I mean all electronic media) has created an organism that is greater than the parts or single individuals. Yes….the organism is not an idea, not an ideal, not a biological category to be studied…the organism is US. We can feel it, taste it, cry in it, rage in it…all in unison as if we were fans at a soccer game.

Every event now that we have global media, live and in real time, is a butterfly flapping in Brazil that ends up being a tornado in Oklahoma. (a Quantum metaphor). We live in flocks of humans like Russian Nesting Dolls. There is the Western civilization flock, our national flocks, and then many flocks within that flock, like the Left Flock and the Right Flock, the Trump Flock and the Evangelical Flock. A flock is a whole within other wholes.

There have always been many flocks of humans in the American Flock, and we seem to have lost the Whole American Flock what with the strength of the flapping of the Trump Flock and the flocks against Trump. But there is an AMERICAN FLOCK, but it cannot be seen or described as an object. But it can be FELT. Flocks move by feeling, not by telegraphs, verbal message or visible signs.

Our institutions are a block against the movement of our flocks, which is be design. The Trump Flock wants to deconstruct the institutional blocks to its movement. But today, the American Flock swamped the institution and made it blink.

So as I explore this new metaphor that helps me get a handle of understanding on what is happening to us, our world that seems suddenly new, exciting and terrifying, full of dread and anxiety, I am optimistic.

The question is this. Is the Human Flock that transcends all the social flocks a moral force of nature, or a force of the flock that has a name and form. Is Nature the flock that has the final word, the final and ultimate command, the interior compass that can change the movement of humanity as a flock. Is nature conscious? Is nature intelligent? Is nature alive? Is nature the Cosmos.

Suddenly it seems to me that this week showed a Flock adjustment or direction that came from some unseen Order. I can’t say God because God has just become another flock within flocks.

The face behind the mask

September 25, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

I like to connect the dots in the news to explain or understand the larger map of our times. So Cosby lived his life as a moral teacher for black people, but as if his persona was a hospital gown, the open backside was hidden from the public. The greater the moral front, the greater the immoral backside.

And to connect dots, we have another carefully crafted Persona as the President and another is being challenged for a Supreme Court nomination. When your public persona or self image is crafted to be perfect, one can be sure that balance will be restored by having an equal amount of hidden imperfection. “The Mother restores balance.” (Avatar)

There becomes a point in the crafting of a public persona that one believes it is the real self, and then the hospital backside of the mind is closed off and becomes unconscious and projected onto the world, so one’s own unconscious imperfection comes at you as your enemy.

Realization comes, or redemption, when you feel the breeze of all that you avoid on your backside.

Mad Men is about the Mask, the crafted Persona that Don Draper can’t quite fully believe in. Haunted by what he is hiding, us belief in his unworthiness, the world is constantly trying to unravel him. Cosby got unraveled. Trump is in a constant state of being unraveled, and Judge Kav is facing a fierce attempt to unravel him.

Is Trump the Pope of the Holy Republican Church?

September 25, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

Right down the pyramid the Catholic Church and the Republican party line up their paradigms. The Church is a sacramental system where the Church is the mediator between Man and God (or reality) through the sacraments, not the individual priests, as in the Protestant religion. Thus we have the problem of priest sexual misconduct that doesn’t interfere with his administering the sacraments. It is the Church that is infallible, absolute, and above the law of society. The priest is just an instrument.

The Republican Party as a monolithic moral view of America—the Moral Party of patriotism and religious family values—like the church gives power to its members through the party. And Judge Kav is chosen because he believe in the infallibility of the President, who like the Pope, is above the law.

In both the Church and the Republican Party the primary virtue is loyalty. Doubt and questioning of the creed is not an option. All Catholics and Republicans follow the talking points of the Creed.

Protestant Reformation broke up the monnolithic Catholic Church into special interests, thousands of different churches, just like the Democratic Party is a party of special interests and churches. So in warfare, the Republicans have the edge like the British Redcoats against tribal armies because every soldier marches in lock step.

The Church and the Republican party are both eschatological in that there is an end of time, for the Church after death, for the. GOP in time when the Promised Land of Conservative values will be the law of the land, and God will once again be at the center of society.

Secular humanism and Liberalism is not a party of values, because values are subjective and are always based in some religion. Because the Constitution separate Church from State, America is starved for personal value and meaning that religion provides, so religion came back into America through the back door of the Republican Party, but dressed in secular clothes. Like a converted Jew in Spain, the Republicans have to closet their religion or mythos in the secular world of logos.

Let me explain. Secular humanism rationalism is the value of the Enlightenment and the founding fathers who were Deists. Everything is logical and the world is a clock. God made the clock and then stepped back to not interfere again. Religion wants a personal god who can interfere in human life. The former is the Greek Logus; the latter is the Religious Mythos. Logic versus mythology or Bible.

So how can you have both, since we need both reason and faith. Well, the Republican Party (I’m not finding fault, just trying to understand) by creating a secular religion gives us both logos and faith at the same time, only the faith is the primary force while it wears the disguise of the Logos.

The side-effect of this obeying two contradictory imperatives, reason and faith, is a national neurosis, or split mind, or as Trump says, True and Fake News, with Trump reality being the mythos or story of reality instead of the evidential reality that we are accustomed to.

Death is the eye of culture

September 13, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

Culture is a fish bowl that contains the water we swim in. We are all little cultures with fins. Media is the roof brain chatter of culture, just like thinking chatters in our own minds. Death is the eye of Culture, just as the eye of a hurricane centers the winds of the storm around it. Death creates a vortex for attention. All eyes are on death when it appears. But the death of Culture is not real death but the Idea of Death, a death complex. There is no idea of death in reality. Life and death in nature are one. But to modern culture death should not happen.

When death appears, media culture’s eyes focus upon it. A mass shooting, a big tragedy rivets the eye of Media (which is our culture) until it is finally exhausted and another Death Idea rises to attention. The roof brain chatter of media gives us the illusion of controlling death by measuring its effects. Weather reporting does nothing to change weather, but we are fascinated with repeated measurements of weather as if that is going to make us safe.