NATION OR PLANET?

Chris Anderson, curator of TED talks

Social media is based on numbers of engaged people which means they must always expand, EXPAND, and the websites panic if the numbers go down.  The Trump win on election day gave them a jolt.  On the one hand, a lot of people are now looking for clues to the source of the unseen surprise.  On the other hand, it was advertising-based and the advertisers were all from one class, one opinion, one comfy set of assumptions, leaning hard on greed and fear.

In the meantime, some of us have been reading long-form explanations and analysis.  So suddenly every push for growth is asking us what we think.  How do we like the socks we just bought and what should we do about the end of the world when the sun burns up the solar system, less that eight billion years from now?

TED talks, which specializes in intensely enthusiastic people they consider interesting, had been leaning towards trivia, but now they’re going “deep.”  “How do we make sense of today's political divisions? In a wide-ranging conversation full of insight, historian Yuval Harari places our current turmoil in a broader context, against the ongoing disruption of our technology, climate, media -- even our notion of what humanity is for. This is the first of a series of TED Dialogues, seeking a thoughtful response to escalating political divisiveness. Make time (just over an hour) for this fascinating discussion between Harari and TED curator Chris Anderson.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_nationalism_vs_globalism_the_new_political_divide?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2017-02-21

This thinking is surprising to find on TED talks, because they’ve been fooling around with liberal funny business, pep talks for do-gooders.  Partly, I think that’s due to being too busy with growing to see what was going on elsewhere.  Partly it was because Edge grabs all the high end thinking, some of it too high to understand.  Maybe it's partly because Chris Anderson’s real personality and interests have been restrained by business purposes.  I’d just as soon they weren’t.  Anderson was born to English missionaries in Pakistan and has a sturdy respect for the woo-woo, which he seems to see as something practical, not just a song to sing at camp.

To Chris, Yuval Noah Harari is not exotic.  They like sitting down together to search through the landslide of new ideas that is just outside the consciousness of most people.  The two men endorse the universal protection of the multiple and unique.  They call for people to reconnect with their bodies and senses.  They admit that the planet earth is always unfair in tragic dimensions. 

What are humans for? asks Chris.  And Harari is bold enough to say they aren’t for anything.  They just are.  Chris asks Christian questions, like where are humans going, and Harari gives Hindu answers like “nowhere.”  (Human continuous evolution is neglected, esp. the evolving abilities of the human brain.)

I was interested that when they got to the question of consciousness, which seems to torment the minds of male college sophomore trying to find the kernel of their own minds in hopes of reassurance that they are valuable, Harari related it to suffering.  What is a “sentient” being?  A being capable of suffering: not rocks but certainly even primitive animals and — well, we should think about plants.  

Likewise, when it comes to the problem of separating fiction from reality, suffering is the guide.  If it makes you suffer, it’s real. But suffering can create a uniting of people behind mythic understanding, mythic as in the powerful and meaningful stories of religion.  Harari is Jewish, a suffering people.

We are always busy trying to change the world into something that we want, but this interferes with our understanding of reality.  We should want to know what is actual and real, not just what suits us.  Our real task, the one we can actually pursue, is discovering the reality that is inside us as individuals, the truth we carry in our bodies.

But people have lost their connection to their bodies and senses, because they are always trying to overcome them.

In the beginning of this talk it was billed as an exploration of the difference between national governance and interests (often ethnic) and the global.  By the end it seemed rather to be saying that the way to achieve the global -- the planetary level of behavior -- was through the individuals finding peace.  This might not be quite what anyone else would hear, but it seems to me like a fair idea.  I just wish it were a little more cheerful.

One school of thought in the Bible is that the purpose of humans is to enjoy creation as a gift from the Theos.  Personally, I see it as more like the embodiment of whatever theos there is, which is a kind of immanent idea of merging and emerging, one thing transforming into something else while not losing relationship.  It’s close to being nature-based.

This transcript of a clear and graceful “Chris” talk, is a link to why he thinks the way he does.  The talk with Harari is really a way to convey this point of view.  I don’t think Harari minds — he’s in on it.

http://tedchris.posthaven.com/an-international-school-in-india-with-a-messa

I ordered Harari’s books and will try to follow out his thoughts.  “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus” are the titles, the latter being the newer one.  But I’d really rather follow Chris.  I’ve been zapping TED talks without reading them because they are such little liberal pep-talks from do-gooders.  I see now that this was a deliberate policy change to let ordinary people have their say instead of going off into the stratospheric high-tech theories of Edge and their tantrum-like insistence on atheism.  Chris is more of a Whole Earth kind of guy, which ironically was one of the roots of Edge.  TED leans towards AEON.

It’s that Brit thing.  They were such bullies, so ecocentric in their Empire days, but the colonies taught them even as the outsiders “organized” places they didn’t understand.  It was hard: eight-year-old Chris returning to England was constantly beat up simply for being born in Pakistan though he’s genetically English.  But as he proposes, one can use one’s biological possibilities for empathy and that will help very much to relieve our burden of suffering as sentient beings. 

This seems like more of a religious mission than a popular media goal, but good religion is where you find it, sometimes not in a box.

IMMANENCE VS. TRANSCENDENCE

The first commandment of this approach to deep meaning in human life is the simple advice to “pay attention.”  But in my system commandments and advice are ruled out -- the need to pay attention should and will arise inside you.  The most basic assumption is immanence, that life unfolds by itself without tricks, drugs, instruments -- because that is the definition of life.  All the rest is captured and exploited by imposed terms describing someone’s idea of transcendence.  This is not a bad thing unless it is used to oppress, but then it can kill.

It turns out that there are far more then five senses.  The brain alone has maybe 200 kinds of neurons, each specializing in some kind of perception of the world outside the creature’s skin.  One of the most recently investigated was a little locus behind the top of one’s nose that tells you how fast you are going.  It remains to figure out what electrochemical signals it is using and whether it is accurately and actually reporting the real speed you are going, or just the speed you THINK you are going.

An apparatus for training the sense of smell to perceive meaning.

It turns out that what you THINK far too easily (from my stubborn point of view) overwhelms what actually is being reported via electrochemical signals to the sub-sorter cluster of neurons, which edits before sending to the brain where it is edited some more.  I do not like the idea of neurology being organized by dropping out information to preserve earlier heuristics -- giving clarity more importance than reality -- but what alternative do we have?  

Brains are limited because there’s only so much space inside a skull.  That’s why the originating sense-cells are all over the body -- but there’s only so much space in a body, either.  The skin limits a creature, even a dinosaur, who didn’t allot much energy to thinking anyway.  If the skin weren’t limited, we would simple dissolve into the energy needs of the environment and its other creatures.  We are only borrowed from the world because of our skins making the boundary between oneself and everything else.  This way of thinking is biological, practical, operative.

Is this about food?

But what we think of as psychological also has a boundary, which is not perceptible but built (immanent) from the interaction of the neurons trying to understand what’s going on and therefore forming concepts which is a way of creating divisions, boundaries, categories.  They are heuristic:   “involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods; also :  of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance.” 

This is in sharp contrast to supernaturally-based institutional religions, whose “magic” is believed to be inalterable, unvarying, and the only real interpretation.  The claim is that unnatural things of another realm can be known by only one source -- person, book, god -- which demands obedience.  A ring, a token, a crown, a throne, are understood as the button that controls power.  If you argue with that, it is justification to confine or destroy you as a danger.

A cat can look at a queen, but what does it see?

Perceiving the world outside one’s skin in a way that respects immanence, the being of something simply as itself, gives one’s inner life many ways to connect and create, which are the third step after sorting and recording what is perceived.  Then one can connect with others (fourth step) and feel the simple obvious fact of being embedded in the universe, separated only by one’s skin and one’s assumptions (fifth step).  

This might not be pleasant. Suffering, awareness of death, rage, sadness, and loss are real.  To look for a supernatural (rather than metaphorical and symbolic) escape is an overwhelming temptation and can successfully fend off despair.  It is those who have no way of interpreting the world who are dangerous.  It is a death and some deaths want to be shared, maybe with a gun.

But interpretation is the second step.  The first is only feeling.

Some geneticists are asking whether one’s ability to create inner categories that are based on peace have anything to do with human wiring as it results from particular helical molecular constructs.  Our skills and knowledge are too primitive to know.  It has been heuristically suggested that the Euro-personality might be operating off inherited Neanderthal hunter/gatherer traits, emphasized by the need to fend off a wave of evolved African people.  And that the Asian genome, after millennia of agriculture, had become peaceful.  This doesn’t allow for the dynamic horse-based people who galloped down from the Asian steppes to spread Genghis Khan’s genes all over Europe.  Obviously it must be over-generalizing.

“Mongols were highly tolerant of most religions during the early Mongol Empire, and typically sponsored several at the same time. At the time of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, virtually every religion had found converts, from Buddhism to Christianity and Manichaeanism to Islam.” The anonymous expert in Wikipedia includes only one Asian system and three from the complex of choices in the Middle-East.  All are the systems that Karen Armstrong (and Karl Jaspers) explicitly felt were “Axial”, foundations of today’s major institutional religions.  These are transcendence-based systems, claiming supernatural sources as authorization.

Alexander Nevsky among the Shamans

The foundational religion of Genghis Kahn was shamanic which is an immanent system.  Its super-powers are rooted in reality, like bears or cranes or mountains which should be taken as symbols with meaning rather than imitation humans.  The religious systems of Europe before the “Axial” religions were shamanic and so were those in the Americas and Africa.  Institutions are creatures of settlement and wealth.  Kings and armies.  

The 13th century in Europe is described by some historians as “high,” which is not about altitude but about prestige and power.  Maybe it comes from the practice of putting powerful people up on a platform where people could see them.  “High” table, “high” church, and so on.  These are all institutionally ascribed, but also we associate “high” with the sky, whether angels or bomber planes, images of power, though we don’t recognize bombs as religious unless we call them “demonic” -- which means they should be connected to underground, like landmines and terrorists.  Immanence is considered “grounded”, an eruption like Pluto bursting up in his chariot to seize the innocent Persephone, which deranges the order of the seasons.  The earth is "low," meaning vulgar, uncivilized, dirty, and probably sexy.  Maybe childlike.

St. Mary Roman Catholic Church, High Hill, Texas

So does that mean that the intended “high” civilization of skyscrapers, space stations, and church spires has deranged the world into famine and rising oceans?  Maybe.  Or maybe our categories are just wrong.  Are the Bioneers verging into institutional hubris?  Is the media now a hegemony imposing its own worldview from broadcasting satellites?

I would argue that the immanence of pure perception and a willingness to break down boundaries through empathy and compassion are the true Sacred strategies.  How to do that is hidden behind dark glass.  We should be cautious: it may be protective.

PAIN AND SUFFERING

Hieronymus Bosch

Suffering is everywhere and yet it is so hard to understand even though the motivation is very high.  Pain seems to signal something urgently, and yet it often makes the sufferer close down and pull away from everyone.  Holding still, being quiet, trying not to feel, are not good strategies for finding the cause, but that’s what our instinct tells us.  Clench, clamp, chill.

Plain ordinary pain is one thing: step on a nail, slice your finger while meaning to cut something else, strike something hard -- these traumas are clearly what pain is for, to draw your attention and motivate an effort to clean, to bandage, to protect.  Yet the mechanisms that take the information to the brain and interpret trauma there can get “stuck”:  person whose damaged part has been removed (an amputated leg) so that it theoretically CAN’T hurt, goes right on hurting.

But pain is only one kind of suffering.  A few kinds of emotional anguish can be resolved by a second person who is willing to pay close attention and offer reassurance, interpretation, hope for a better future.  An impulse to help a suffering person is present in small children or in animals.  Loneliness, guilt, an inability to see a way out of a trap, a loss of hope for an end to troubles, an inability to imagine and therefore move towards something better --

these are the anguish that religious institutions promise to ease but sometimes only make worse.

Being virtuous doesn’t seem to have much to do with avoiding suffering, it seems to me.  Entirely innocent people suffer terrible trauma and disease and some of the treatments that can save lives also impose ghastly agony.  Consider burns where the treatment is excruciating, so much so that the nurses come to hate the patient because they hate hurting a person so much.

There’s no equivalence.  In the Eastern contexts, like Buddhism, the emphasis is not on escaping but on enduring, partly by withdrawing desire which can lead into the floating detachment of opium.

For some people suffering is handled with anger, rage rage against the injustice and sometimes that will kindle fires of adrenaline and other warrior molecules that have evolved to handle attacks, hunter’s focused obsession, the molecules that paralyze the mouse in the claws of the cat by putting it into a kind of victim’s euphoria.

A while back the media and script writers discovered displaced suffering and especially torture that does not hurt you but the person you care about,  because that’s also torture, courtesy of empathy.  For a while there were crime plots about girls kidnapped in pairs so that one could be tortured to make the other obey without scarring her with lesions.  So much about suffering is suggested to us by script writers rather than shrinks or docs or priests.

Do you remember Peter Pain?

Advertising puts in its two cents worth, suggesting pains of various kinds and then offering relief through meds or some other handy product.  

There is a kind of pain that is not pain, at least not in the way we understand it as physical discomfort, but rather a psychological state like depression or even just floating nothingness.  The body wants to be busy and the brain will begin to go haywire or lose function unless there’s a steady flow.  That’s the insane punishment of solitary confinement, which doesn’t have to be physical confinement.  Just solitary.

Understanding suffering need not be a matter of book learning, but of experience.  When I was working in a nursing home there were patients who were legitimately (with medical cause) suffering who begged for relief.  The nursing staff would begin to be annoyed with them and to talk about addiction, even withholding the drugs to punish the patient for not being cooperative.  

Addiction is the big Scare Threat, and yet these were sometimes dying people.  Addiction over-rides pain, but I’ve known people who WERE truly addicted in the worse kind of dependence on that escape, but who were still able to “kick” drugs.  It wasn’t easy and the kind of pain was the kind I dread most: nausea, the invasion within.  It was a decision of some kind on their part, maybe a desire for clarity.  A goal beyond suffering.

Another kind of suffering is invasion of space, maybe as simple as coming inside that invisible circle around a person or animal or even insect close enough to be a threat.  Do not walk up behind a person who has been in prison -- the circle around that person is BIG.  There are some people who either can’t perceive the line or have somehow learned to stand very close.  In some cultures people will stand close enough to feel and smell your breath.  Personally, I have to clench my teeth to be on a crowded bus.  Why do you think I’m in Montana!

But to have one’s body invaded through orifices or with a needle or blade through skin, even with a careful and well-lubricated instrument, can add insult and outrage to real pain.  If you’re an old woman having a pelvic, prepare for pain and then the comment “Oh, these elderly vaginas are like that.”  With no easing off.  

In France the insertion of urinary catheters into a male is done with anesthesia.  You can watch this procedure on YouTube.  I’ve watched on video a careful soothing nurse do this for a boy who couldn’t even hear her through his suffering.  The passing of body-generated “stones” -- kidney stones -- is screamingly painful.

There is fMRI study of pain:  http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/01/breakthrough-on-chronic-pain/  

Here’s a little jargon sample.  “Finding increased levels of the translocator protein in regions like the thalamus — the brain’s sensory gateway for pain and other stimuli — is important, since we know that this protein is highly expressed in microglia and astrocytes, the immune cells of the central nervous system, when they are activated in response to some pathologic event.”  The translation is that one can see pain on a computer screen.  It turned out to be quite consistent.

But it’s not possible to see suffering.  Suffering can be moral, which is to say invisible and relative.  I found a Swedish study that looked at women with borderline personality disorder.

“The main findings were that BPD patients suffer to an extent that is often unendurable, leading to deliberate self-harm (DSH) and suicide attempts to relieve suffering or just try to get away from it all (paper II). In study III the BPD patients showed significantly poorer quality-of-life (even physical) than normal population controls of comparable age. The suffering, suicide attempts, DSH and poor quality-of-life . . . put the patients in a position of voluntarily or involuntarily getting involved with psychiatric care. . . . On one hand, psychiatric professionals can add to the suffering by not being understanding and being disrespectful, on the other hand they can be helpful and relieve suffering by being respectful, understanding and validating. There was a clear relationship between the patients ́ experience of validation and the experience of being helped.” 

The third explicit goal of the study was to relieve the suffering of the counselor burdened with the task of helping!  I’ve heard more than one shrink complain about having to counsel women, interpreting them as shirking, childish, and boring.  The woman feels this, of course, and so do boys who go for help but instead get sighs over their intractability.  Myself, I find that a bad counselor is like a clumsy catheter inserter, an unjustifiable invader who only adds to the suffering.  I run.  I shirk.  I'm childish.

There are a few who enjoy authorized hurting of others.  At this point my psychiatric nurse friend will mention Dr. Mengele.  If you’re too young to remember him, use Google.  But brace yourself.

(to be continued)

RESPONSE TO SUFFERING

After working out my theory of liturgy, all based on “feeling” rather than dogma, individual human response rather than institutional imperatives, I find a crack.  It is the issue of compassion, defined as empathy with a suffering “other” to whom one responds  with attempts to help.   The problem arises when the help is offered on the terms of the helper rather than the helpee.  Usually on the assumption that the helpee doesn’t know what’s good for them anyway, so why ask?  

For years I saved a New Yorker cartoon about some men struggling with a piano stuck in a doorway.  A passerby comes along and generously helps them stuff it inside.  The only trouble is that they were trying to get it OUT.  It’s the whole phenomenon of helping old ladies cross streets through traffic when they didn’t WANT to cross the street.  When this happens to me I kick and scream, so I know firsthand how resentful and destructive the doer of the good deed can become if you resist “good.”

Somehow this is mixed into romantic love and parental care in many subtle and troublesome ways.  I’ll make an incomplete and probably confused list:

1.  Wishing to go back to childhood and therefore seeking someone to “help” one.

2.  Looking for the warm and merging feeling one got in childhood from comforting puppies and rocking one’s dollies.

3.  The amount of control that a suffering person has over helpers -- the Munchausen Syndrome reward.  Could be one’s own suffering or could be the second-hand suffering of one’s small dependent, like a child or pet.

4.  The panicky feeling as the receiver of help, esp. when docs, nurses, social workers, and clergy are out of sync with the need.  The old Vietnam trope of “ we had to burn the village in order to save it.”  Or the punishing parent who says “I’m doing this for your own good.”

5.  Enlisting the sympathy of others, esp. when the suffering is emotional.  Most people will be moved by obvious disease and trauma.  (Broken hearts not so much. People may disapprove of the emotional response and therefore welcome one’s suffering.)

6.  Knowing there is a need for intervention but being powerless to supply it.  A loved one is dying of cancer -- why can’t you cure it?

So the idea of “God” as the ultimate lover or parent or at least witness becomes very powerful indeed.

In practical terms, sometimes one is the helper and sometimes the helpee.  What are the principles? -- oh, before that, the awareness -- that must be in place in order to give and accept appropriate help triggered by compassion.  Many will be cultural.  Many will be circumstantial.  Some will be internal to both parties, only accessible by reflecting, which there may not be time for, or maybe overruled by the needs of the group/institution which no doubt wants trouble dealt with.  In jobs over the years I’ve done a LOT of emergency and nuisance complaint response.  The almost inevitable, though lamentable, practice becomes to “eliminate the complaint, not the situation.”  Worse than that, an effort to isolate and address the underlying causes of the recurring dilemma is difficult and maybe impossible.  How can anyone change the geological configuration of the planet that leads to economic inequities, that constant gradient between the haves and have nots?  So much depends upon whose crops are good that year.   Our willingness to use food for blackmail is even more evil than our withholding of drugs.

Then there’s the problem of what seems to be help that is actually a disguised means of making a profit, like the subsidies for high-priced drugs that keep people from banding together to demand more responsible pricing.  I found that hospitals hire chaplains in theory to help patients, but actually to keep order, suppress anger, convert action to obedient prayer.

Too big.  Too much to get one’s head around and still make it work.  

Here’s a weird idea.  Maybe the way to address compassion is not just amelioration, but the creation of pleasure, something liminal liturgy can do.  Not just a back rub but real and abandoned joy -- abandoned in the sense of letting one’s guard down and letting new things in.  We think of drugs in terms of constricting, limiting, but what if something like LSD or marijuana really DOES put the brain into a configuration that is accepting?  That’s often the reports of users, including those who use “theogens,” drugs that are supposed to “call God” as an awareness of joy, not judgment, punishment or even salvation.  Is that justification?

As long as I’m being Christian I’ll suggest the next weird idea as the “pick up your bed and walk” factor.  You remember that story about the paralyzed guy whose friends took him to Jesus, the specialist, to be healed.  When the crowd was so thick around the house (waiting list), the friends broke through the roof and lowered their friend, complete with bed, practically into Jesus’ lap.  His response:  “Pick up your bed and walk.”  No enabling here -- though the determined friends were certainly doing it.  The afflicted person picked up the bed and walked out with it.  It was a miracle.  Or something.  The point I get from it is that we should be our own doctors.  Why wait to be empowered?

We should be our own priests, our own liturgists.  Resist the idea of a specialized class with “magic.”  I don’t see any other way of guarding against the helper who assumes superiority and therefore justifies force, oppression, and hypocrisy -- or equally destructive -- from the helpee -- the wish to remain a child and let one’s powerlessness and dependency become an entitlement and then a demand.  But we should participate in our treatment.

With a friend who often discusses my posts “backstage,” this dynamic has been framed up in a triangle:  Mother Theresa, Christopher Hitchens, and the dying masses.  My friend says he appreciates both MT and CH and backs off from the masses but is glad if they are helped.  Regarding CH, my friend says, “He could be a hard nosed bastard. I think the main reason he didn't care for her was her propensity to toe the Vatican lines. If I were to create a tally sheet on both individuals as far as to what they left behind, Mother Theresa would be far ahead.”  This friend acts on his compassion and helps many.  

But I side with CH, fearing that MT is a step along the path to a bully Pope and a lot of bully priests who take out their frustrations by victimizing children, insisting it’s all an honor.  Until retirement I have not been one to avoid suffering masses, even those of other species.  Maybe I’ve shirked helpful interventions in specific cases.  I’ve walked off.  A hard-nosed bitch.  So I have to justify this at the level of looking for the causes of suffering, using this great retirement privilege of time to reflect.  It’s just that it seems to me that all of us should have the right to decide when or whether to cross the street and it would be a lot easier to ASK whether the piano is going in or out the door.

So what does my manuscript about liturgy need in order to discriminate between true “feeling of holiness” in the sense of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans and simply cultural warm-glow do-goodery?  

THE SACRED & THE PROFANE: Part Two

A FORMAL DECLARATION ABOUT MY POSITION ON GOOD/EVIL

This is my trickster position: good and evil depend on who you are and what the circumstances might be. Killing is the right thing to do sometimes and very very wrong other times. If your culture gives you a handbook, read it -- then burn it.

This is my shaman position: it has nothing to do with the universe. Good and Evil are constructs for and by people.

In the end both positions are the same position. Evil is something bad for humans. Good is something good for humans. Usually as individuals rather than as a whole. (They call it “situation ethics.”) The mountains do not care. Nor does the Milky Way nor the grizzly bear nor the earth worm.

This point of view, that humans are NOT the center of the universe and finally don’t matter except to themselves (there is no God and if there were it would not be anything like humans), is sometimes called Deep Ecology and -- since humans almost always find some way to put themselves in the center in spite of saying they won’t -- DEEP Deep Ecology. If there is no human to watch the galaxies or define the quark, are they still there? There’s no one who can witness. There’s no one to say it matters.

However, as a guide to what one ought to do in the world, the idea that probably works approximately the best is to do what humans CAN do (but usually don’t) which is to enjoy creation, which leads to its protection. That witnessing bit helps, plus some art. A little sympathy for fellow creatures couldn’t hurt.

Barrus and I essentially agree on all this stuff. Sometimes I’m a stand-in for a lot of imaginary readers out there and sometimes I’m myself, but only as imagined by Tim. He doesn’t really know me, though I give him lots of evidence, even a few secrets. I don’t really know him either, which is his point. He says the reader and I know nothing of reality. But the difference between most readers and me is that I don’t believe there IS a reality. It is not knowable. I agree that chaos is simply an unknowable order, perhaps on different terms than we can ever conceive with our little meat brains, electrochemical strands insulated with fat, one little bit that looks like a seahorse and another little bit that looks like a chambered nautilus and other little bits that are nearly indistinguishable to anatomists, except in terms of what they do to interpret the sense information we get from the world, which we discover only by destroying that bit in a mouse.

The strange thing is that a person who pays attention can FEEL the difference between the Sacred and the Profane, which is the title of a seminal book by Mircea Eliade because that’s exactly what he proposed, where he started. When you stand on holy ground, your impulse is to take your shoes from off your feet and stand there humbly barefoot as Tim’s grandpa did. The highest places, the lowest places, the places of transition -- you can feel the sacrality, even when it is metaphorical and emotional. No one knows what makes these “places” sacred or why we can feel them. One key seems to be extremeness, another is transformation, a third might be fusion with someone else, even for a moment. But you CAN feel them.

Liminal time and place, over the threshold, is where the musicians play, the children play, the people worship, and ceremonies transform. Is the overlap between Tim’s circle and my circle liminal? I would say yes. You’ll have to ask him what he thinks and what he feels. It’s high trust because it’s with guards down. It’s high risk because anything could happen. But we can feel it.

When I was working on my thesis, I spent a lot of time chasing the idea of “felt concepts” and I’m still after them. Suzanne Langer wrote the best stuff. I was trying to get at the thinking that is beneath ordinary perception, maybe accessed by dreaming. The way babies think just before they acquire language. I’m afraid of drugs (and other things). But I’m braver than most about thinking the unthinkable, so I write, which is sometimes more revealing than reading. Sometimes the concepts are like magma, under the earth, pushing it up. Sometimes they are like virga, the rain that evaporates before it ever reaches the ground. I don’t doubt their existence. Felt concepts. People call it intuition, gut-feelings, instinct, and other inaccurate terms.

When coming to good/evil through these concepts, one meets the necessity of rational thinking, what some call “moral calculus.” So many of our best stories are about doing something that “feels” wrong but is rationally just -- or maybe the other way around. They are as hard to bring into alignment as justice and law. Justice and mercy are not hard to reconcile: they interpenetrate. But Justice-and-Law or Mercy-and-Law do not even touch each other. They are completely different. And Evil doesn’t have anything to do with any of these systems.

Tim identifies Evil as Power and surely it has power and surely power with no restraints or mercy becomes Evil. Bad for human beings and other living things. Who is to say that timber and trees do not suffer. Can’t you feel them?

Tim knows more about suffering than anyone should have to. I know nothing about the level of suffering from bone destruction and implants. He has been posting footage from the end of WWII when the local Germans were forced to walk through the prison camps where the people had been reduced to skeletons. The faces of the bourgeois witnesses are stony but plump. If anything, the witnesses look stunned and a little resentful. The faces of the skeletons are skulls. There is no expression. They do not scream, not even when the well-fed man in a workman's cap scrubs out their butts.

But many would say that the true evil is that though Eisenhower forced the world to look, photographers documented the atrocity, and many have written books about it, there are still people who deny that it happened. They insist that no humans have walked on the moon. They claim that there is a God and they have a personal deal. They are mad. They are indifferent to suffering or reason or “felt concepts.” That is human evil. Rule-based. Faith-based. Power-based. Denying. And repeating holocausts every day.

The universe is indifferent. The universe doesn’t care. But some humans care a great deal. The difference is in the humans, not the universe. We cannot depend upon galaxies to improve human society.


TIM'S RESPONSE:

I agree and disagree. The universe does not care.

But that is different from arguing that there is evil in the universe.

This brings me, perhaps, closer to spirituality than I want to be, but here's the gig that prevents that.

I really, honestly, truly, sincerely believe that the universe is 99.99999999999% evil. Most humans into spirituality go the opposite.

That is NOT to say there there is some small fragment that is good because I have no idea what the antithesis of evil is.

Human are so insignificant in this that I would call them subsubsubmolecular. Even an electron has relevancy because without the electron, you have something utterly undefinable because I can't think of a substance that is devoid of electrons. Although there probably is one or several. The analogy is simply to quantum mechanics. Humans to the universe aren't even there.

I don't think it's evil that is the question. It's that tiny grain of sand somewhere that is not evil.

Humanity is as evil as it comes.

All of it.

As far as people go, there is no tiny fragment that is an opposite. This would be at the level of matter and anti-matter. Purely conjecture. Yet Hawking and Penrose come as close to it as any human has been able to go. The philosophical is stuff I reject out of hand. It's silly. Most of it is a waste of my time. Mainly because it's foundations are historical and history is a reference to the past (I think Mary has a romance with the past and I'm not saying that is good or bad but it only is) and no one has been there to examine it. The construction of black holes is relevant as is their behavior. We know so little. Humans are like duuuhhh. Not the brightest light bulbs in the universe.

A Brief History of Times barely skims the surface. It's the only book I've ever read that is slightly relevant (a lot of it is a waste of my time). Most books are just silly. Humans love silly.

History doesn't interest me much. It's just wrong. But we base all our values on it. The word we does not really mean me but if I don't include myself in that most humans become offended and when they get offended they mainly waste my time. Mainly, I go through life tiptoeing around what people believe in (I try not to laugh so they don't look in my direction because stupidity is what one has to endure 99.9999999999% of the time.

Stupidity and evil.

Now, there's a thought.

"Killing is the right thing to do..."

Umm... We differ on what is a right thing and a wrong thing.

Things only are.

But I believe the universe is fundamentally and basically evil.

I assume most humans believe it is basically good but I really wouldn't know because I am not that really all that interested in humans or in whatever they think good is. Or bad. Really. I am interested in how to survive them and their stupidity. That feels relevant.

But I just assume my reality and human reality are different. It only is. I rarely let them know this because then I get lectured and lectures are a waste of my time. I turn them off. I smile like I'm listening but I've heard all those tapes before. This means I am antisocial. To put it mildly. I would say I am social because I smile. I smile because I want to survive humanity. I feel like an alien who walks through a sea of basically stupid slugs who have most of the power. I don't know them but I don't want to know them. Most people (I think) spend their lives attempting to connect. Writing is the art of mastering human symbols. That is all it is. I have no romance for it or with it. It's only this one thing some humans do. I spend my life interpreting and attempting to get around stupidity. People think (from my work) that I am interested in connecting. I go out of my way to make then think that. The reality is that I am more connected than I want to be and I am usually interested in not being connected to humans because I find them stupid and a waste of my time and I would rather make things than know them.

My job is to interpret. But I do that to survive. Not because I believe what people believe or even feel. Humanity basically repulses me. Yuck.

Here's a secret. Human babies REALLY repulse me. Been there done that nononononono run, Tim, run. Children themselves have little brains. Adult humans are bad enough. There are VERY few children on the planet who would not waste my time. Their brains are just too small. We don't engage. I pretend to like them. Because if you don't, adult humans will punish you and punishment wastes my time.

"Stand there humbly..."

Ummm -- I am not so sure about the humble. But what I do with that is to say to myself when I see it (about a zillion times a day) is that: oh, this person sees a lot of nuance in life.

Not that I agree with it. But I can say that the fact that they see it is relevant to them if not to me. In other words -- I give you that -- but it doesn't mean I need it or that a thing is relevant to me. Humble schmumble. What I say to myself (really) is that whoever said that is probably a writer because they are so intent of expressing human emotion.

Which is very paternalistic. To assign emotions to other beings.

I am not saying it is good or bad or right or wrong. I am saying writers do that. I can do that. But it is mainly a waste of my time to do it.

Symbols. Humans are very involved in symbols. I am typing them now.

Reading and writing don't interest me that much anymore. I know those symbols.

At the moment (and this will change -- is changing but I don't really want to share it because it would drive most humans gaga) I am interested in what pixels do.

Television interests me but only the snow you see humans describe as static.

Actually, these are electrons scattered through the universe by the big bang. I find what humans describe to be static quite fascinating because THIS is history. It's evil. t