Saturday, April 17, 2004

So one of my junk mails tonight comes to me in cyrillic. In about twenty seconds, online, I've found a translater that works (albeit at only 500 characters per use) - without doing a stellar job, but enough to let you know if it's something worth reading, like, I am a lawyer for your distant relatives the Romanovs, and we have just identified you heir to the Russian throne, and the decades of accumulated capital not discovered by Soviet Republic. Tunns out though that American style capitalism has made its way into the country that produced Rasputin (or at least empowered him) with what is probably a growing generation of Tony Robbins proteges. What united us more than divides us? Info-mercials. I'm sure MLM is alive and burgeoning there too.  How many hucksters and shysters and criminals is it going to take in their system to realize that while life sucked for more of the masses there than it did here, partly because they just didn't have the resources to apply to the permanent wartime economy the U.S. forced them into creating (and, for that matter, vice versa, evangelizing, in each of our own ways, free humans and a free market respectively), that at least they were born out of the explicit idea of making the world a better place for all humans, not just rich imperialists. Didn't last as an idea, or became hopelessly corrupt, but at least they had that trajectory. Too early to say whether the "free" market has won either, but I think it needs some minds working in it and wrapping our heads around it that see money as a measure, a scorecard, and that we need to find ways of measuring and working and ultimately sharing in the goods, that apply more impactfully to human needs. My dad and I have discussed the idea, and I may have discussed it here before, about creating a stock market for companies involved in directly improving humanity. Obviously, that would require a different mindset than we have in the world right now, but what if investment decisions were based on at least a seven generations investment strategy. The people who would get rich would be the ones doing human good, once people understand the basic tenet that we need to make decisions, as best we can, based on the survival, on the most basic, basic level, of our gene pool, our entire gene pool, from which we can draw diverse strengths to help us out as we are presently, stranded on this ocean planet, hurtling through a largely unknown universe, like a child in the womb. Maybe "capitalism" becomes a tool for enlightenment, a concious, ultimately, universal experience of the birth process and trauma, until we can emerge into another state of being. While meaningless in the long term, that present transfer of wealth may be just the thing to help humanity along an evolutionary path. We're not eliminating money - we're eliminating the limited time frame in which we understand the value of this transactional tool. But it's all just ideas. Just ideas in our heads of what's real, what's not, what's important, what's not. I think of the RESULTS mantra - creating the political will to end hunger. We need to create the human will to end unenlightenment. Which is a lot, lot more complex, and will cause bigger brain freeze type headaches on the global scale, than simply, for now, making sure that one less person goes hungry, one less tear is shed, one less soldier dies. Which gets back to what ultimately, that work, that faith, not only represents belief in that ultimate divine, but is in fact both the path to and that infinite whole. 1:05:18 AM

It just dawned on me, especially related to what Steve Lawler had to say about the creed - that he sees it as a snapshot of how people at the time were exploring and expressing faith - that the most persistment, meaningful and durable expression of faith is faith in faith itself. The expression, the limited blip-blip-blip that we know how to send out to that infinite whole, isn't as important as a belief in that greater good, as evinced by the optimism in our ultimate survival/salvation -- our own durable, persistent self-infinitehood taken out to as many stars in the sky multiplied by the number of moments each of those stars has, and each of the starts those moments has, in a never ending fourth dimensional fractal. It's the faith in that greater good, that somehow, we're going to make it, that keeps us going over the long haul. One of the things that dawned on me last night, when I ended up playing Castle Wolfenstein for three hours, thinking that ten or twenty minutes has passed, that for me, that level of visual stimulation must induce some sort of outwardly focused trance state, that rather than focusing that powerful vision inside, it takes it out, into the energy void of nonspace nonsense, similar to what I experience in meditative states directed at exploring my inner self, rather than being lulled into exhausted and wasted energies exploring what digitally masquerades as mazes of the mind. Time goes by without meaning, like a zone has been entered through which the passage of time without travels on a parallel path, similar trajectory, but different wavelength, different amplitude. I wonder if the time outside eventually seems to go by as if in slow motion, if you can activate that sense of inner-space to the degree that you can dwell therein and look out at the worlds around you from that space. I can't decide if somehow television and video games are somehow preparing for the evolution of the brain, or disrupting the process, a virus. I do think that those past-times do eat little chunks of our soul, not directly, but through opportunity cost and diminished return on investment, when we get hypnotized by the visual sensation, but they also can change the way people learn, make them more capable of digesting greater amounts of information more quickly. I can imagine that as the human mind evolves, eventually what was first uttered as sounds, then communicated in pictures and music (for this is another recording of a language all our own), then communicated more symbolically, will eventually become like a visually transmitted, or auditorially, or olphactorally, or tactilely, or ultimately a sensitivity that involves all those senses, plus ones we don't yet know about, with massive bits of information contained in the most tiny nuances of image, transmitted at very high speed. Maybe the combination of all of those senses will be a transformation into a telepathically, and hence, empathetically connected universe. The thing that's always scary, writing about this stuff late at night, after being really tired and working all day, or being in an otherwise reduced state, but still mindfully awake as different systems in my body and mind are shutting off and on, sometimes, frequently, as my mind is kicking into falling asleep, and starting already to switch on the lights in the subconcious segments of my being, is that those little pockets of me get this stuff, and breakdown what is left of my powerful individuated self, that really wants to, selfishly, cling to this moment, this little spacial temporal moment, as the most important of them all, ME, to the point where these thoughts start taking on infinite loops of understanding, going further and further out into the ether, into regions of comprehension that I don't quite know how to fit into my own comprehension of the world, even as expanding as it is, and then, bam, and it almost makes my head hurt and whirl, above my left eye and up at a an upward angle towards the right side of the front of my brain, my concious stirs for a moment, like I'm snapping to when I've nodded off while driving, and put a halt to what sometimes gets so intense that it makes my left arm twitch. 12:35:32 AM