A Long-Awaited Post (at the very least, I made it wait a while)

Frater Atzo on Speeding

The rate of speed at which I travel on the highway is a matter of personal attentiveness and practice. I don’t ask or expect anybody else to do it, or to buy into it. But essentially, I stick to the posted speed limit like glue. If on a major highway, I use the cruise control to help me do this. I’m sure mine is nowhere near the only valid viewpoint on how one should behave on the road. I also understand the widespread social convention, here in Maryland and probably lots of other places, that police will allow drivers that five or ten miles per hour over the speed limit. Let me also say that if I’m supposed to follow someone else in my car, I’ll defer to his or her speed, if I can do so safely. (If I can’t, I’ll tell the lead driver.) And if someone who is following me gets aggravated at my strict adherence to the speed limit, again, if they discuss it with me politely, I’ll likely accomodate them in the way I drive while they’ve got to be behind me. And I do realize that highway driving will put me occasionally in the position where I have to accelerate above the speed limit for a short time to avoid an accident. But those situations mostly if not exclusively arise from the effects of someone else choosing to speed, and that’s the main point I want to discuss here.

If you’re a good enough driver that you can exceed the speed limit without risking injury, irritation/fear or inconvenience to yourself or others, I salute you. I wish I could drive like that. Perhaps with practice, I could someday. I don’t want to do that.

I don’t want to be one of those who goes around a person adhering to the speed limit, only to hit a delay up ahead. Why? Because I then hit that delay before the strictly law-abiding driver does, affect how much it delays him or her, and add to that poor virtuous driver’s travel time. If there are many of us, as there so often are, zipping around this person, the delay when we hit it can really add up. We’ve gotten to the clog faster, had to put on our brakes harder, and have made it bigger, and quite often slower.

I also know that every mile per hour over the speed limit that I go is an increase in the potential danger I pose to myself and others when and if the unexpected occurs and I must react quickly.

I also remember from my youth that the 55 mph speed limit became widespread as part of a nationwide effort to save gasoline. That’s more important to me now than ever before.

In short, it’s about interconnectedness. I firmly believe that as a society many of our problems have resulted from emphasizing competition over cooperation, ambition over compassion, the pursuit of individual happiness over the pursuit of joyful, meaningful and authentic coexistence with one’s fellow human being. Corporatism and collectivism have collided with the information spiral and the technological boom, and increased stress and debt… and isolation. When we’re in our cars on the road, we’re not alone with our problems, our stresses, or our desire/need to get where we’re going real fast. We’re in it together: together with everyone who has to slow up, speed up, or move around us in order to deal with how we’re moving along the road; together with the person who can’t move to the left lane to let people on the ramp merge because we’d rear-end him or her as we tear-ass down the fast lane; together with the birds of the air and the creatures of the land who I’m sure are just thrilled at the prospect of hearing our mighty engines rev as we exult in power, freedom, and absolute narcissistic myopia, to the benefit of $B$I$G$$$O$I$L$ and SWELLAUTOIMPORTDISCOUNTERS.ATINYLITTLEMULTINATIONALDIVISIONOFGMBMWDAIMLERTOYOTAHUMMLAUT,INC.,ALLRIGHTSRESERVED,PRICESANDTAXESMAYVARY,CONSUMECONSUMECONSUME,BUYBUYBUY,PAVETHEEARTH,PEOPLE

Okay, that’s enough out of my smart mouth. Now I’d really like to hear some of those other perspectives whose truth I’ve obviously not realized or I wouldn’t have gone on and on like this. In other words, even if you hate my words, PLEASE SHARE how and what you think and feel.

Fuck it. We’ll Never Get It Right. I’ll Never Get It Right.

It’s a bit of a downer, philosophically. Now, mind you, my mood isn’t really down. For reasons probably easily guessed, I woke up this morning in a state of ebullience that has pretty much lasted all day. And the work week has been wondrously productive. My boss and coworkers couldn’t be happier.

But then I see evidence on recent news that we’re still making headlines by fighting hate with hate. We still think it’s okay to walk metaphorically into a room crowded with innocent people, stop in front of some tangled knot of them, point our fingers at someone who we know might be carrying a gun because, well, ain’t it likely?, and yell at them, “YOU STUPID HATEMONGERS! Stop teaching people to kill and destroy in the name of your high ideals! Those ideals should be burned because they specifically encourage you to be assholes! AND THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE! ASSHOLES! AAAASSSSHOOOOOOLES!!!!!” It’s a majestic game of Thud where everybody plays. We fight ideologies rather than terrorists. We conk your God on the head in the name of our God. And we promote and publicize only those lifestyles and spiritualities that emphasize Being Right and Getting Rewarded in the End, rather than enlightenment, or ending suffering from within, or seeking the divine that lives at our center (”Seek ye first”…?)

And someone gets paid. Someone always gets paid. Not us. We’re in debt. And prices are going up. And saying it’s a recession would be bad for business so we’re going to put off going there as long as we can. While things are worse and worse for those in debt.

I want a change in the White House. I want someone who’s not been there before. I want to hear cheering in the streets to the tune of “Yes!!! In our lifetime!!!” And yet I know that after this election is decided, it will be business as usual. Because we think something as simple as a different-colored or different-gendered Democrat will bring about the change we seek, while we leave the great machine, the much-maligned System, intact and connected to our very arteries, its tubes down our throats.

I’m reading “The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader” and puzzling over the words and actions of the Ancestors, the Masters. I’ve not sat zazen with any faithfulness in years, who am I kidding that I can crack this coconut with my soft head? With my soft self? We can only deal with challenges that have all their sharp edges removed these days. We have to blunt each other’s instruments of instruction, out of fear that some ideologue will use his/hers for more than instruction. I have to lift my hands in the meditation hall to give the monitor permission to whack me with the kyosaku… everyone seems to have forgotten that part of that noisy stick’s effectiveness is in the possible surprise of it. But we’ve decided as a culture that Hitting Is Wrong. Just another way to make someone the enemy, another method for punishing the whole class, angering the whole troop against Private Pyle.

I don’t know anymore. Is any cause worth pursuing? Or is it only worth it if I’m willing to blow someone else’s head off for it if my God or my Government tells me to, or to let my children go and do it while I soak up toxins somewhere?

I’d say I need two or three stiff drinks, if only my digestive system would tolerate it anymore. Or a long, leisurely talk with an honest friend, if I knew whom to bug and how to fit it into my schedule.

Fuck it. All wrong. My life itself is very good, my therapy and medication are going great, but the future of the human race, of this planet? Buggered beyond belief. Sentient beings can go hang themselves. One of the old teachings is right, someday the Dharma will die out completely. We’re poisoning its kool-aid.

Anybody wanna go cheesing? It’s Fon to due.

Self, No-Self, Viral Ideas, and the Melding Plague

Award-winning science fiction author Alastair Reynolds wrote at least two novels about a distant possible future, “Revelation Space” and “Chasm City,” in which he describes, among the elements of his novels’ universe, a disease called the Melding Plague. A strange mixture of biology, cybernetics, chemistry and software, it is a viral disease that infects both carbon-based and silicon-based entities. It is itself sort of an amalgam of both, although at its core it’s simply a program capable of running in biological neuron networks and cybernetic electronic ones, and can transmit/duplicate forms of itself from one to the other.

It’s really a scary fictional premise. And I didn’t realize why it was so scary to me. And here’s a caveat: I’m speaking of the Melding Plague concept based on my memory of the story, having read “Revelation Space” some time ago. I’ve not read “Chasm City,” although it’s here at home with me and W., but I’ve read on the inside cover notes that it does deal with the Melding Plague again.

Okay, so what got my mental cogs really going about this was that while I was at work in Azkaban, somebody blogged about ubiquitous mobile technology and possible next steps for it, to include thin layers of circuitry that would allow things like cell phones to be implanted at a subcutaneous level, making them essentially electronic tattoos. The blogger talked about how neat they would be, how much he wanted one, and all such. I began feeling old and out of touch with what motivates the twenty-something crowd (of which that blogger is a member), but then what I thought of as real red warning lights popped on in the back of my mind. The blogger’s post was quite popular and generated a lot of comments, a lot of different threads of discussion.

And then my mind cast about, and The Melding Plague dropped into the Zone of Relevance to the topic. I mentioned the viral way in which ideas can spread, regardless of their merit, as documented by Dennett, Dawkins and others. And I talked about my worries that there’s a real danger inherent in putting rapidly-spreading highly-profitable technology INSIDE ME. The original blogger, possibly a bit crestfallen, simply commented, “I think I just lost this game.” I was at least a little sad to have burst his bubble — he’s someone I actually know — but a little tiny part of me, the part that ACTUALLY LIKES TO WIN ARGUMENTS, whispered, “Boo Yah.”

But the danger isn’t nearly so dangerous if I don’t realize that it’s not futuristic. It’s not even a ready-to-be-deployed new development. The danger is in viral ideas themselves. Daniel Dennett’s book, “Consciousness Explained,” which I’ve discussed before on my LiveJournal blog, takes its cue from Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” and raises the possibility (again, to my reading of it) that the Ego, the Self itself, is a viral idea we human organisms developed and propagated among our membership, handing it down to our children, spreading it not only because it benefited us, but because we benefited the spread of it.  Somehow, something happened to the brains of homo sapiens to allow us to construct and transmit the thought patterns of “self” and consciousness of same.

Existentialist philosophy teaches that consciousness is a disease. It’s certainly got a lot of characteristics, to my observation, of a symbiotic virus, a parasitic thought pattern. And it gives rise to the development of other viral thoughts: the spread of music, of merchandising, of money; the importance of thinking certain thoughts and not thinking about other ones; survival tactics; media messages; moral codes on which you depend for everlasting or at least temporal happiness and which depend on you to spread them to others; blog memes; languages and the ideas they make easy and difficult to communicate.

I thought of the danger of swallowing whole any or many of these viral ideas, and the advisability of becoming conscious of the fact that we’ve done it since soon after we were formed in the womb, we’ve started our branch of the meme-machine, the linguistic/cognitive/neural Melding Plague of our own, the moment we perceived the “I and thou” relationship… perhaps even before we could understand the words “I and thou,” and likely before we could say “Mama” and “Baby”, certainly the most useful mental programs to verbalize first.

And a lot of what I first picked up when I started self-training in Zen practice came back to me: the possible wisdom of shucking it all away from the core of The One Who Is Contemplating, the one that is zero, the no-self at the non-core of it all/nothing.

Whoa.

You need us! AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!

Some of the people on my LiveJournal flist might remember me posting there about ads run on WTOP by some organization of the petroleum lobby, advising us not to let our legislators take us “back to the seventies” with “outdated” plans to increase taxes on oil and natural gas companies. I challenged the claim the ads made that “America needs more energy, not less,” because I believe that what we need more of is NEW sources of RENEWABLE energy, and LESS dependency on resources we may dangerously deplete within the lifetimes of us or our offspring, resources whose price is often controlled unscrupulously.  We also need, frankly, service stations supplied by oil companies that encourage them to carry ethanol, rather than discouraging the spread of the use of that renewable fuel.

Well, the same advertisers are at it again, and this time their tack is quite clever. The ads now running on WTOP news now start off by asking who has ownership in America’s oil and natural gas industry. Their answer didn’t surprise me, given the lead-in: We do. That is, if we own mutual funds or a retirement account, we have a stake in the industry. Also, pensions for teachers and firefighters depend on the industry as well.

I half expected to hear them say, “If you reduce your dependence on oil or your stake in our industry, cute little puppies and kitties everywhere will die.”

I know from having learned about addictions that depending on something doesn’t make that something good. And a symbiosis can occur between the addicted and the addictive agent, whereby the agent will send strong messages to the addicted’s brain giving lots of reasons not to kick the habit. Sometimes the agent can threaten the body of the addicted: “If you reduce your dependency on me, BAD THINGS will happen.”

It’s a racket, perpetuated by an addicted populace and powerful companies maintaining that addiction. Skyrocketing prices and global warming aren’t enough to keep the efforts to reduce our dependency from looking like partisan agendas. Who’s listening past the messages? Who’s looking out for us? Hillary? Barack? John? Mike? Or do we dare to hope for better and look to all the “sane” world like we’re throwing away our vote?

Okay, that’s my opinion. If you’ve heard those ads too, feel free to chime in. And you can go to http://www.energytomorrow.org and get their indoctrination information straight from the tap.

(Also posted to my LiveJournal weblog.)

Faith, Magick, What God Wants, and Nothingness

Why should I ask God for what I want? Okay, okay, Jesus did so, in at least one case, but that was a literally life-or-death situation. It’s instinctual to say “Pleeeeease?” when facing a command from Heavenly Central to walk into the arms of the Reaper.

No, really, I’m wondering about this. If I’m not in harmony with God and with my fellow human beings and with existence itself, what business do I have asking? And if I am, what could I possibly need, and why should I prime the pump — since God knows my needs and has promised them to me if I’m living in God’s will — by saying I want this-or-that?

What it boils down to, in my mind, is thinking about that ultimately-high concept of God as someone who is not made greater or less by anything that happens to God’s creation. His power to resurrect was still evident three days after He, in human form, died on the cross. Even if you argue that God could, if God chose, lessen his Godness somehow, well, okay, but God ain’t done that, and God ain’t given any indication that He plans to do that. Nietzsche notwithstanding. Nonggg.

So if I’m someone, or a something, that has NO EFFECT on God’s welfare, on God’s God-ness, I think it’s then pretty presumptive of me to play to God’s compassion for His creation, for those created in God’s image, by asking for stuff. At the very least it’s selfish — it’s telling me that I’ve not yet learned what walking in Christ, or even just generally being a good human being, is all about. There is nothing that is truly good that God doesn’t already want. And when two or more good events cannot occur simultaneously, either there’s a BEST one among those good events, and hence God knows about it, or it’s a coin toss, and it doesn’t matter to God much, and shouldn’t matter to me much, which one happens.

But what about praying for those changes in myself, for those levels of understanding, that I can’t reach on my own? Even then, if the prayer is worthwhile, it’s as a verbalization, an affirmation ON MY PART, of a needed future step, and it sets mind, self, and the universe to which I’m connected, all on the path to the currently-unreachable marker.

Practice does that. And my practice always begins with prayer, whether it’s Zen practice or something more arcane.

Magick too often gets sold as a way to get unseen forces to respond to one’s own command. But Christianity gets sold that way, too: You’re asked to become a faithful follower of Christ IN ORDER TO ____________. Eternal life, true happiness, peace, a better world, all those are bennies.

If God exists, and is good, but we’re somehow in a parallel universe where eternal life does not await us after we die to this body…

…isn’t the Creator of this wonderful Universe still worth our praise?

And if so, why should I worry Him about stuff?

ETA: Maybe it’s a kind of bootstrap dealie, a way out for those of us (and I count myself frequently among this number) who have NO BUSINESS asking.  If God answers anyway in THOSE cases, in a way that moves us forward, then we’re motivated to take the next step ourselves.  Hmm.  Maybe.

Initial Feeling-Outy-Type Thingy

Hello, WordPress blog world. It’s just me. Some of you might know who I am from elsewhere. To the rest of you, Peace.