Ghosts of Christmas' Past, Future Links in Past Notes, Have a Nice Day /Year /Life
Around that time (mid-July 2003) I was for the first time not getting dizzy all the time and was beginning to get over the effects of getting hit by a car, thrown 6 feet in the air, and landing head first on the pavement. This was about 6 weeks after the accident. I had said in poetry as far back as Triumvirum about my mindset changing over time, but after the accident it was changing extremely rapidly and constantly, continually, and frantically trying out new ways of thinking and analyzing and categorizing perception, and then storing them and moving on to make new ones at an extreme pace.October 07, 2007
Hazy beginnings, Abrupt Ends, Dreams Overshadowing, and Concentrated Notes
http://www.polsci.com/realblog2.htm#hazy (archived copy)
http://jareddubois.blogspot.com/2007/10/hazy-beginnings-abrupt-ends-dreams.html (original)
As I gaze at the reflections
dancing across the surface
of one of nature's many shallow pools,
I feel as though I am looking
at the ghosts from another time
At the touch of my hand they scatter
only to once again reappear
as the waves slowly begin to quell
and they reveal to me their stories
for they know I need to hear them
But these faces that do haunt me
are not of strangers of long ago
nor are their tales unfamiliar
for they are the different ages of me
and their dreams that did not survive
They are in pools of rain and window panes
and they will follow wherever I go
until the day when I take them back
if ever I decide to again be whole
and no longer bar them from my soul
After finishing Morality: Individual and Social, (http://www.polsci.com/morality.htm) the idea got stuck in my head at its end that what people will think in the future is not beyond us now, it is just the things we are not ready to accept. None of the things we call improvements to our societies socially now were unheard of 50 or 100 years ago, they were just unsettling the majority of people then. The aim of Towards Tomorrow was to move beyond the present and kick over a few sacred stones of beliefs to see what might lurk beneath them, or see if their foundations were really that sound. ...
This is impossible to do on so many levels, to be able to truly think beyond the bounds, conventions, and biases of ones own time, people, and civilizations. We can gleam a few perspectives from the past, (what we are allowed to know or think about it by current governments), postulate about how other more advanced species might perceive things, or extrapolate on how those in the future might see things as humanity matures, and more of its denizens have greater and unrestricted access to its histories, all of them, not just which versions their present societies wish to stress for their own political purposes which are nothing more than caricatures of the past constructed to validate or support the current beliefs into "instant traditions" more often than not at odds with the past they claim to be upholding. ...
That I am not capable doing such, now any number of people are now qualified to say, for I have attempted just that, to go beyond what people now are capable of understanding which may make sense or more sense to people a dozen or a hundred years from now, to do it for him to show him that even the things we are not able to do that we wished to do, that somehow everything gets done eventually, however indirectly. I doubt anyone can know (with certainty) what people will find relevant a hundred years from now, but to set our sights that high; to attempt to look beyond our world today, our present beliefs of our own time or place in history to see beyond our own horizons to what is or may be true beyond them, such attempts are good and valuable even if the results of which are worthless in and of themselves.
Philosophy when it works best is done in layers. Take what has come before and add to it, build upon it. What people believe now, that which has worth and will withstand the test of time if it is left unsheltered enough to meet all challenges, will at best provide ONLY a foundation for new outlooks we might only catch glimpses of today. The past and previous outlooks need to be incorporated into future ones, and not dominate them, nor restrain them, nor seek to prevent them from arising. Religions are great bearers of the past to the future, and many ideas and ideals would not have survived without being encapsulated into them, yet it is a sad thing when many great ideas of different faiths are not taught or stressed in others because they are perceived as being foreign, outside of ones own religion, and to even think of such thing would be to be unfaithful to ones own religion or people. Religions have kept many great ideas and viewpoints intact for thousands of years, but it is that very rigidity of walls between faiths which keeps good ideas and outlooks from being shared by all. ...
Many good notions have been incorporated and identifiable as being stressed by some religions yet it is those very religious connotations which helped them survive which may keep them from spreading, as if by buying into one notion or belief you must ascribe to an entire belief system, or that you are unfaithful to your own faith by considering views which are parts of religions outside of your own faith. The pursuit of truth ought not to be hindered by who had which beliefs first or which group stresses which values more. The free flow of ideas ought to include all views, not just economic, governmental, and scientific. Those systems are evolving by and large by what works best regardless of how or where it originated, yet with some philosophical and religious ideas, changes seem destined only to create new fractures and vying versions and sects because there are few ways or means to incorporate outside ideas into them to grow or evolve.
I do not necessarily believe what we believe philosophically or religiously will or ought to be believed ten thousand years from now just as no religions from ten thousand years ago are dominant today. Whatever new belief systems emerge will have a part of our beliefs in them or will in some way have grown out of them (and away from them), just as they who will hold and believe them will have grown out of us and our lives. I do not claim to know what those beliefs systems will be like, nor would I necessarily hold them to be more true, but I hope they are tried and true battle tested through rigorous comparisons against contentious contenders without appearing to corner the market or have a trademark on any particular value or belief over any others, and that they will be what we all are, stronger for coming from many different sources into one being.
... In a way each life is a redefinition of all which came before them. Upon each revision, or each redefinition, there are those which are not contradicted and new ideas hinted at which begin to emerge when trying to synthesize them into a coherent whole.
Life is equally complex and real truths are best written between the lines, either that or we just see and apply new meaning to what is not really there which we wish was, some deeper meaning or purpose or logic (which we did not see the first time around) which we wish to impose upon it. ...
... and hopefully this has attested to why one ought to step outside what one ought to think once in awhile, challenge everything that is known or believed on occasion, to attempt to glimpse the Universe beyond our own minds, beliefs, and mindsets. It is ALWAYS heretical, and depending on your society, sometimes (such questioning is) illegal, but always can lead to something more, something valuable, something which now only exists as potential, good or bad, which like us will be judged for its value only once it has been attained, realized, and known. And in the end, not realizing it, not conceiving of it as an option, letting some truths go unknown until the end of time, it is not even a possible viable option. Truth will seek us out to become known, even and most often when, we spurn it.
December 25th, 2002
Heretic Papers II- Beyond the End of the Universe (Posted 6/2009)
http://5dnotes.blogspot.com/2009/06/heretic-papers-ii-beyond-end-of.html
Though the President of the United States would like to take credit for a lack of terrorist attacks, mostly the best he can realistically do to prevent them is to not do anything stupid to make them more likely, such as bombing countries which have not attacked us, occupying them, watching over regimes we put in place unable to provide safety, electricity, clean drinking water, health care, or anything we associate with everyday life, while non-government militias led by people we do not like and do not like us further their control by actually keeping these people alive and semi-secure in ways their “legitimate” government, one that to most people there is complicit and tainted with deferring to an illegal occupation force, us, cannot do and is not doing.
After going from “We are winning” to “We are not losing” the war in Iraq which is not a war, not a Civil War of Iraqis, nor a war of us against Iraq, with an occupation force which is not an occupation of their country but “liberators” which the majority of their public believe shooting us on sight is justified and an overwhelmingly majority of them want us to leave no matter what the consequences are to them. At least for a change they would not have us to referee and perpetually prolong indefinitely their “birth pangs” but instead would eventually have one side or another “win” what is left of that destroyed country. ...
Lord knows when we will get a President would not only know not to do anything stupid to “unintentionally” wreak havoc and destruction all over an area of critical importance to us, destroying our credibility there, making our Muslim allies rightly nervous if not imperiled, but might actually instead try to work to correct the mistakes and stop the hemorrhaging of what history will show was the greatest wound to America, if not any country, which was self-inflicted by so few “democratically” without shame, without fear of accountability, but with one hell of a war profit packed retirement portfolio.December 25th/26th, 2006
Smokey the Burning Bush to George: Only you can prevent terrorist attacks or forest fires
http://www.polsci.com/realblog.htm#smokey (archived copy)
http://jareddubois.blogspot.com/2006/12/smokey-burning-bush-to-george-only-you.html (original version)
I have not been doing much writing these last few years, and as I mentioned in the most recent post here, Democracy DOA : Prognosis up from Dead On Arrival, what little writing I have done has been in regards to the past at my "5D notes" blog (http://5dnotes.blogspot.com/). It is hardly "trending" or "current" in any sense, yet I have paced it according to certain things yet to happen as well so it is following a timeline in regards to the present, the times when it is written, alongside the past already-happened one, though not at the same rate of speed, day for day. I try to keep one eye on the future even as I still feel the need to decompress the past a bit.
The Notes blog is easily the hardest thing I have attempted to do in many respects. As I put it in my most recent post there, Evolve or die: New eyes, blurred and blinded, misbegotten Time Roads, writing well for me usually has not been that difficult. However, though the subject matter of what I am trying to cover there is itself very complex, it is at its most multileveled difficulty to write (or for others to read) when I try to combine different time periods "threads" with the things which I am covering.
Since that Notes blog is following a particular timeline, still now stuck in July 2003 where it will be for stuck awhile (for several more posts at least), a dense period in many senses of the word. :-) Many of my subsequent notes over the years relate to things within about a week's time in that July. Though I have used about 10 posts now at that blog to cover more the 7 months previous to that July, I feel it would take at least several long posts, with very many paragraphs, both covering the many things that were written at that time, and also to include what I would wish to add now just to even begin to address adequately or sum up breifly what was meant in that times' writings.
In my later notes I put in a phrase roughly as "forward in time hyperlinks" (the exact line was.. Reverse links (html) forward in time) to cover a certain concept. While writing the notes, here and there I would think to add a hyperlink to a similar thing I had written to that previously in the notes, or in other things I wrote. Then I thought, it would be good to in the future, make the links in the notes go in both directions, both to previous things to better explain that idea or concept, and to future notions of what that idea led to later on. In reality, much of the notes which were heavily abbreviated were ALL in a sense, forward in time links because the reason for writing it in a short cryptic fashion was meant as a placeholder to remind be later about something which I did not have time for, or could not write about at that time, given external circumstances.
Some of the posts at the 5D Notes blog which I think came off very well, bounce around in time quite effectively in my opinion, linking what I was writing on those dates which it means to cover with ideas similar but written both previous to that time and how they developed later, via leading excerpts hopefully brief and relevant (though others ideas of "brief" and "relevant" will obviously vary, but I *try* to keep them short and relevant). And then in addition to that, there is a twin current timeline of exposition of what I am writing now about then, thus occasionally many different times at once are involved in a post, though all but the present one I am writing now, are all in the past. But since years have elapsed since the period they are meant to cover, that means I can cover the material in this fashion more fully retroactively or looking back, than I ever could have done at that time, and knew it then, without needing to alter or revise the past writings to do so. I can now explain some of what those "forward in time hyperlinks" where meant to cover, i.e. what ideas I had known or believed then which were partially covered in later notes, as well as some others which I have yet to address yet at all. As I put it in RCP Complete...
There are things that I would write that I know ahead of time. Ideas which come at once which have a lot more depth to them than just an idea, almost like remembering an entire book by the title, except sometimes for me they are of things I have not written yet. I just remember them almost whole. RCP may or may not be one of them. Life, the external environment, just selects which ones actually will get done, made, played out.
The Notes I keep have a lot of ideas which I know in shorthand that represent things which are very long and complicated which I have not written yet, many which I never will, and some I would not even want to.
It is fun in a way to be in one of those futures where/when I would write about some of those things, completing some of the circles a bit. However as I mentioned, this particular time in the present and that particular time in the past are difficult to line up perfectly because most of all of the later notes, far too many to link or explain, all go back to that particular period of late July. It is when the notes became a "shorthand" of things to write about later, while also keeping a ongoing dated journal of what was going on in the present, which I needed both of at that time, and combined them.
However "fun" it is for me to cover them now, it is also a great deal of work to pull it off, to write them in a way that I think is both appropriate to the depth of it, and to the potential inherent within the present to do it right. Or to do it well, if there is not any one "right" way to do it. In a way, in that last week of July 2003, most all of the later years of notes were "born" in a way. That way being as a pattern of writing, trying to remember and archive what I was currently thinking in the present, while trying to link or put down in shorthand ideas more relevant a future time when I would have time to later sort it out and explain it more fully. Sort of like putting down markers on the ground of where walls or a foundation will stand one day should you get the time to build them later.
But as I remarked when beginning the idea of archiving the notes, the roots of them go back later to about a year before when I started writing short things of varying complexity because I did not need to or want to, or think I had the time to necessarily, develop those ideas more fully. Those newer, much shorter forms compared to how I wrote before were like the later "Notes" pages (http://www.polsci.com/notes.htm) I am spending a lot of time on going over these days, only those were written without an eye toward future times when I would have to tidy them up a bit by further explaining them or further developing them later. They were self-contained.
One of my favorites from that time I will put below. I was intending with this post to be written and posted on Christmas Day 2011, to write new things about "current things" going on in the world to match the Christmas Day theme and quotes posted above this, but then I just did not feel like it, so I just enjoyed the day without writing anything. Since today is a week later, New Year's Day 2012, in what will likely be for many people a complex period or turbulent or hard times, more dense with more important things going on than in many other years past, I am enjoying "living in the past" a little bit longer. I suspect that I will be writing about "current things" as well as decompressing that very complex week in July before getting on, hopefully, to even newer things that I have not yet made up or thought about, nothing with past "future links" to. A fresh plate so to speak. So in short, (too late) I just mean to use this semi-planned, semi-revised, short post to say 'Have A Nice (New Year's) Day' to any who might read it. And while you are at it, try to 'Have A Nice Year' too. And in the process of that, try to have a nice rest-of-your-life too, one "Nice Day" at a time until you reach, for whatever for you, is truly coming home.
(the rest of this post follows after this rather lame (though relevant :-) ASCII artwork... (Blogger doesn't render ASCII well, Wiki image substituted)
If I had lived thousands of years ago in what we call ancient Egypt, the prevailing experts at the time would have told me the sun was a god and required a lot of things from me, revering it, paying it a lot of attention, maybe sacrificing things to it to keep it happy, and so on.
Because I live in the time and place I do, the prevailing experts tell me the sun is a condensed form of gaseous atoms burning in a continuous atomic inferno and quite indifferent to my opinions about it or my attitude towards it.
Seeing as I will most likely not in this lifetime get a chance to go to it to test out either theory, I tend to like the latter explanation better since it requires less of me, not just because it has more facts to support it. Call me selfish, but I like the idea that it sits up there billions of miles away just shinning on like a 1970's smiley face button, oblivious to what I do, requiring nothing of me but to consider it occasionally and to have a nice day.
To think of our sun only as a solid or gaseous burning star is not really giving it its due. It means far more to me than just that, and I feel an attachment and obligation to appreciate it since it does by no small measure make everything else in my life possible, though I certainly will not sacrifice anything to it nor run my life around what I think it wants of me.
To know what it is, and to feel its significance to me, these are two very different things. What is matters, but what also matters is what it is to me, that relationship.
Others may interpret God to demand much sacrifice, service, and obedience, others may think God is indifferent. To me God is much like the sun, though not the sun, nor the Earth, nor the water, nor the life, but like all of these or as all of these, as each does, making everything else for me possible, like the sun shining on and on equally for all and asking nothing in return, except maybe once in awhile to stop and to appreciate it, and to have a nice day.
... and now for the musical portion of our show (Lyrics and video are from different songs. The theme is the same. To all those recently back from far away, Welcome Home! ....
every local dive
every jewelry hive
every shot I hear
every hopeless tear
every well dressed crook
every hand I shook
every grain of sand
reminds me who I am
and I feel like coming home
posted by Jared DuBois | 6:38 PM
