Occupy and Quebec: Welcoming back the debate on making higher education MORE affordable
It is not that I disagreed with what they were saying. More that, if this is the best resistance to neoliberal plans to basically erode all of their social safety nets, break down their common solidarity, sell each other out for the benefit of the banks and crooked politicians, privatize everything mentality, if this was Europe’s best line of defense, from where I was sitting, that generation and the whole continent seemed, again in Robert Reich’s terms, not mine, their future’s hopelessly f*&ked. “They have already lost.” ...
Though the Occupy Movement definitely had its moments, mostly I was nonplussed. It seemed to reawaken a dead or dormant “political left” but it really lacked the number or the interests of enough people to do little more than shift some of the political debate away from pro-austerity, on time, all the time. In that it was significant, but short of even what little the Tea Party accomplished. As I said in the post here Democracy DOA, I saw hope in the organization of the Tea Party for democracy. It eventually turned out to be elite driven, far from the chaotic “People’s Assemblies” of the latter Occupy Movement, but they did not have a previous example of what to avoid as the Occupy Movement did with the Tea Party.
Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, Conservative or a Liberal, Anarchist, Communist, Socialist, or Libertarian, almost universally the mood in early 2009 was disgust at what to many or most seemed to be the banks and Wall St financial corporations holding a gun to the head of Congress, and saying give us trillions of dollars interest free or we will blow up the economy. And the response not only was to give them whatever they asked for, the greatest and most successfully robbery probably in the history of the world, but to then unilaterally disarm the ability to ever say no to anything they may ask ever again. The Tea Party, in its infancy was a reaction to that. But then as it matured it was easily turned 180 degrees by the most wealthy not only to not be a threat to them anymore, but into an army of zombots protesting for even greater deregulation of the banking and stock industries. And again and again they have gotten such watering down legislation passed.
The Occupy Movement by and large was successful at resisting that being co-opted by its leadership into something else, but in doing so, it did not present a coherent message or unified front as far as to what they hoped to accomplish. There was no coherent “end” to work towards or, like the “War on Terror,” any way to know when it is over or would be won.
Yes, I know movements have to expand and tend to evolve, and to do that they often become more vague and less coherent, but they have to have an end game plan or they are not really going to do much good in the long run. Maybe that is not the point or is not a bad thing, and that sometimes just trying to be heard or by people becoming more politically active, you are accomplishing something.
Many writers I read, long desperate for any sign of resistance to the drone of austerity, austerity, austerity, have seized upon the Occupy Movement in the United States as a catalyst or a “sea change.” Mostly I saw that as hype. The Spanish Indignados, the Italian protests, and the Greek protests of the last year have been more significant in size but that I saw mainly as a domestic reaction to draconian cuts which were being felt so severely I was more amazed that more were NOT protesting. ...
As far back as 2004, I put Papandreou on the front page of PolSci.com because of something he wrote about politics needing to be done differently. Since then he has obviously gotten more attention for the austerity programs he put into place as soon as he retook office. While the Greek crisis is complicated (as mentioned in my previous post), it seemingly matters not who you vote for, and voting for the left, as with Papandreou or Blair or Obama, means the austerity measures (cuts in government spending, services, privatization) will go forward with less push back than if you voted for a right or center-right candidate. Austerity is being sold as inevitable, and for those who are put it power, it is the path of least resistance because, as one American Senator put it, “the Banks own the place” (meaning Congress and the Senate). And the public push back has been pathetic at best and hilariously ineffective at worst.
“It ought to be free.” Those five little words said again and again in the protests in Montreal about the tuition increase proposals are what you never hear any mainstream “Leftist” politician say about higher education. In America as elsewhere, the question is always about “how much higher” fees will be, about how much services which are free or low cost should be privatized. Never will a politician of a mainstream center-left political party try to move the ball opposite in the direction. As I mentioned to a fellow student in Sweden while walking back to the dorm, it is almost as if every country has one major “business friendly” party which will bleed the poor or middle-class faster and less apologetically and a major “alternative party” which proposes all the same bloodletting crippling programs, but “feels your pain” and will do it more slowly. ...
But on a scale few in Europe could imagine, public education across the board in America is not only under fire, it is being euthanized with smaller budgets, school closures, and a corporate media using these ever lessening qualities of education to blame the teachers for the deterioration. And all as an excuse to push for breaking unions and rewarding private-for-profit corporations the only few taxpayer dollars the banks have not figured out how to steal yet. Besides privatizing Social Security that is. Obama’s second term may have success where Bush’s second term hit the rocks. Obama will deliver the Democratic votes in the Grand Compromise to achieve what right could not be delivered in Bush’s second term. And when the public complains, and they will, they will vote in an even more pro-privatization pro-austerity candidate (in 2016, if not 2012) as a reaction. And the fake-left and then go further right tandem moves ever rightward ever onward.
If there was even a vague political “Left” left in America, they would have long ago used the fiscally caused “education crisis” (about a real as the Postal Service Crisis and Social Security Crisis, all accounting inventions) to push for BUILDING thousands of public schools, not CLOSING thousands of public schools. The dialogue would be how can we make education MORE affordable for MORE people instead how fast or slow can we increase the rates and decrease the number of people who can afford it.
It is not rocket science. Any big D democrat (or Liberal or Social Democrat) long ago would have been talking about hiring teachers instead of bragging how he or she cut more government jobs than their Republican (or Conservative party) predecessors did. In America, you would think there would have long ago been plans to convert existing closed 11th & 12th grade high schools into free 2 year public Associate Degree colleges and some existing 2 year colleges into 2 year finishing schools for Bachelor degrees. And retraining teachers to teach at the higher levels, our own Marshall Plan for education. Instead of selling out on the idea that health care is a right, now completely debunked in America by the Democrats, the “center-left” parties of the West would have been trying to expand that to saying, as a thousands of picketing students in Canada have, that higher-education too ought to be a right, cheap if not free, and not increasingly just a privilege for fewer every year. ...
But as we have grown lazy and are ceding our lesser social protections to nothing every year, so too are European countries learning to want and accept less because they are conned into looking at how they are still higher than the rest while the bottom is falling everywhere instead of rising. Ever rising again is not even a goal. It is simply to get less poorer less quicker than the others.
When I was young both parties in America had both plans for full employment and for national health insurance. When I was in Europe a half dozen years ago, still there the discussion was on how to create full employment, and their social insurances were considered safe and as untouchable as Social Security was before Obama. That is now considered verboten in Europe as well. And creating many new government WPA-type work program jobs, there now is as taboo a topic as it has been off the table for decades in America (unless you count hundreds of thousands of jobs building and staffing new prisons, spying on people, a long pined for domestic “security” program the equivalent of the KGB, and our other new departments other countries never would have imagined creating). Austerity lite (France, Hollande) or austerity extreme (Germany, Merkel) are all that are on the menu, no mixed salad, just a melting pot of race to the bottom for “competitiveness” because they, like American unions, never lobbied to make their gains solid by making them universal, and expecting all others to have them too. Well isn’t that (NOT) special!
Which Direction: Tea Party, Idignados, Occupy, Bill 78; "They've already lost"
Truthrevival.org, May 29, 2012
One of the strangest things for me to notice was that in countries in which higher education was free or near free, many people, a very large percentage, just never cared to go to college. So many that their governments needed to encourage them to do so. From my perspective, though I did drop out of high school before getting a GED so I could go to college, it seemed nearly incomprehensible. In America, not only is going to college supposed to be difficult, it is meant to be, almost by design, something out of reach for most people without well-off parents who can contribute to their “college funds” or by going heavily into debt with loans sometimes higher than most mortgages, and certainly not with as long being given to pay them back.
And this is supposedly, the way it is supposed to be, according to the greater bulk of society, or at least the opinions put out into the media on what people think, or are supposed to think. If you have a degree, unfortunately for those who do not, it is made more valuable by the fewer numbers of people who have them. If everyone had one, it would be worth far less, certainly not the huge debt loads many have to carry when graduating now.
I never thought in those terms about going to college, nor do I like to now. I did not do it for a career reason or to earn more money. I just wanted to study things that interested me, and that I was able to get pretty far, though I often had to leave for financial reasons, I felt simply reflected my ability to do the work. There is no meritocracy in the United States, no matter what the politicians like to sell. College educations often are not a measure of intelligence, and the idea that all people should be able to go to college if they are bright enough and willing was a recently new phenomena. And not one that had much staying power, according to recent comments by powerful politicians in the US, that greater access was always a threat to its being considered the “privilege” that a college education used to be. As one politician said recently, people should get only the educations they can afford. That was the view before I was born, and it is rapidly becoming the view again. I was fortunate to grow up in the gap period when a person’s ability was supposed to be the main thing, not the size of their, or their parents, bank accounts.
But with the major “left” parties basically giving up on the poor, even not mentioning them anymore, it makes sense that affordable or free education would be the first to go. Nothing gets a bug up the a** of some people more than having to share their educations, or even their classrooms, with those who clearly should not be there or do not belong there, socio-economic-wise. It used to be women, then blacks, Jews, gays, what have you, but now, just like everybody can still gang up on Gypsies to score cheap points in Western Europe politcally when you need a group to be the “other,” in most places now it is the poor. What, do these people really expect to be fed or housed or schooled, and especially, to see a doctor, even if they have no way to pay for it? The nerve of these people!!
I could hope it to be a fad, but it has been self-reinforcing for generations now, or at least one and a half generations. With all this talk about “red lines” these days, it was nice to see, briefly, students in the America’s stand up and say, with at least some voice, higher education should be free. The Quebec student movement, about many things like other recent social movements were, seemed to voice a heretofore recently unthinkable argument or goal, that higher education should be getting MORE affordable, not less every year, and eventually be completely free.
Liberals obviously did not like to hear it implied that they were not doing their jobs, or that it could really be any other way. Their job was to fight the conservatives, not just in Canada I am speaking of but generally, in that they would control or limit the increases to more advantageous lower levels than if the conservatives were in power. Not to roll back the increases in tuition, restore civil rights, habeas corpus, repeal indefinite detentions without trials, increase minimum wages, but to simply hold the line better against things getting even worse than the more "conservative" alternatives might do.
In America, they have long gotten use to that dynamic and anything else has long been considered too much to ask for. The job of the “left” is to give austerity, neo-liberalism, with a heart, and when that proves unpopular, the “right” takes power and increases it markedly. This has gone on as well in country after country in Europe for years now also.
When the Labour Party lost power recently in Britain, the supposedly "left" major party, no truer statement I heard was that in how they planned to react to the loss, they said they certainly would never move to the left. When a “left” party does well, run by a Clinton or Blair, a “third-way” leader, any successes were deemed because they were willing to move “to the center” (never phrased as moving to the right mind you), and then when privatization, job exporting, and increasing corporatization of the government proves unpopular, they simply blame it on not yet having moved “enough” to the right, ahem, I mean to the “center.”
The rightist parties feel no such pressure, at least not in North America. When they lose power, they simply double down on their “base” and sometimes on the “crazy.” They know with the weathiest's money behind them, they can simply wait it out, stick to their platforms which lost, and then when they retake power, it is said to be because there now is a “mandate” for those same programs. The only mandates the “left” have left is that their equivocations and selling out those who elected them have suddenly been redeemed if they win twice as the new way forward, pretty much to the disenfranchisment of the poor and lower classes, who no longer even warrant mention in polite society. And if not, they must again move more away from them, as if they could be any more distant anyway.
I don’t mean to say that I think that this is a “bad” thing, only that it is getting pretty noticeable. The poor and lower classes have been so long being made poorer, there is no money left to get from them to get any politicians to notice them or to care anymore.
So the recent election in Quebec, after the student demonstrations, I found interesting. I asked a few French-Quebec students here about what they thought of the then-upcoming election and the Liberal party. They were quite happy with the Liberal Party, and said that they were much more progressive than any groups in the United States. Though not a representative sample to be sure, I was simply curious if they thought the Liberals might win again, even though the “Liberal” party, like all Liberal parties, was supportive of the tuition and rate increases, whereas many of the students were not. It is just simple economics to them. More money was needed therefore tuitions must go up. As in most places the choices given were vote us in, or risk having the conservatives come back, and then you would be in a worse bargaining position.
But in Quebec, unlike the United States, other dynamics and parties could come into play. Though the party with the most votes did not get an absolute majority, the Parti Quebecois, or independence party got more votes than any other. The main target of the protests, perhaps unfairly, the premier, had been forced to retire. And the new government promised to try to kill the tuition increases and repeal the dreaded Bill 78 which made protesting almost illegal, considering the draconian fines and restrictions imposed to try to force an end to the student strikes and protests.
Many people have been bothered by a separatist party winning but I had previously studied the history of that movement and do not think that it really is anything most ought to be concerned about. Support for an independent Quebec is nowhere near 50% and far off from its highs around the last time a referendum was held, (1995) and Canadian unity was reaffirmed.
I try to be neutral in my own countries politics, though I do vote, and also I do not have any real opinion about Quebec and independence. I studied minority relationships, power sharing, and multilingual based issues, so I find their politics intriguing from a political and social point of view.
However, I would bet that unless factors change heavily, Quebec will not be changing its status to the rest of Canada anytime soon. But at least a third party upset the ever-rightward progression not only of the rightist parties and Canada, but of the Left ever towards the mythical center. In America, Ronald Reagan was now, whether any on the right or left like to admit it, not only further to the left than practically all of where the Republicans are, but getting pretty near half of the Democrats as well. The steady march rightward seems under no threat of changing, just as tuitions are under no threat to ever need to be pushed downward. And minimum wages are under no pressure to move upwards, despite ever-declining purchasing power and rampant impoverishment and growing hunger.
But at least for awhile this year, large numbers people put the idea of mainstreaming college educations to anyone, whether they can afford it or not, and thought they ought to educate anyone capable of it, providing that they were willing to try, and could do the work.
In the United States, the affordability of “public” universities varies from state to state, and sometimes from institution and institution among public colleges within a state. But the trend has always been the same, ever declining affordability, ever increasing student debts among those fewer and fewer able to even attempt it for economic reasons, and greater profits and political contributions from the banks to reward the politicians for the trend.
The question is, can we really afford, in a different sense of the word, to increasingly have our public to become that much less educated, year after year, generation after generation. Whether the direction is up or down, a downward spiral or upward spiral, it becomes self-reinforcing and harder to slow down. And the trend goes where the money goes, and where the highest profits go. Now it is toward an ever increasingly “valuable” college degree, not because of how much you necessarily have learned, but simply because of how many fewer others will ever get the chance to get one to compete against you, (or your children if you can provide them with the means to obtain them one,) once obtained, year after year after year.
Because something is made rarer, it may make it more valuable to some, but improving the quality of it instead, that used to be the "increasing value" which counted the most. But that would be harder. We don't want to make things that much more difficult for our next generations, or do we?
By failing to make each have to compete against the very best, no matter what their economic backgrounds are, means our "best" will always be ever lessened because they were not required to be that, the best, because their real and most important competitions were crippled before ever even getting out the of gate.
But other countries may not be as corrupted or as lazy in how they provide their educational opportunities, and we will continue to slide in comparison against them. And ever more relying on the brain drain from those countries that do have greater competition in their societies for reaching those top spots, that is not an educational policy worth banking on. And neither is that increasingly the "value" of our country's college and university degrees.
"Inventor couldn't have said it better," Asisfour joked, "or did he?" "Man, you are irritating sometimes, and no one would get that joke anyway. So where do the new ideas come in? I don't think 5D objects popping in and out of our 4D universe would be anything new. I'm thinking fresh, something vibrant, something in soft Earth-tone colors and maybe refracted lighting. Sorry, I was thinking about fixing up the office. I also think playing God with a 3D universe would be a bit predictable too, given my name and all, but I don't want to rule that out either. Nothings off the table except peaches. After all, didn't The Da Vinci Code say that the god of the 3D Universe is a woman?" "Well, if life's a bitch then why can't God..., um, I think you risk losing the fundamentalists." "Then we'll just have to find them again. You know they always hang out around the same places for centuries anyway," she mused putting her feet up on her desk. "Movin' on baby, never seem to touch the ground," she sang. "Baaad Company, till the day we die." Asisfour sang back. "Ok, they're gone for good. I feel lighter now." ...
When I was in Eastern Europe, in the former Soviet Union, one of the "attractions" for tourists, no doubt for "educational" purposes was where they tortured people, and most likely killed people too, sometimes after torturing them, sometimes during. My sense of sensibility told me to stay away from these places, for good reason. One place I did get near to was a rock where not a few people were tortured and killed but many people ceremoniously over many many more years than the Soviet Union existed, and long before the Russians came to town centuries earlier. I did not even need to see the plaque to know what went on there, there was a darkness to that rock, a palpable chill when I got closer to it and knew better than to get too close. Like many of such "sacred" places, that was where the first churches were set up. Christianity has a dark side much deeper than the Spanish Inquisition. It goes back nearly as far as the religion itself, and it was integral to how it spread itself to be a "world religion". To be relateable to the local Europeans, Christianity adapted itself not only to the locations where humans were sacrificed and tortured, but adopted the same language as well. A "powerful God" "sacrificed" and allowed the "torture" of his "only Son" for YOU and to give you your life, and you owe him your respect and allegiance, and if you do fail to do so and obey the rules he has stated that you must follow, he will TORTURE YOU, and not just for a little while as he did allowed when he gave up his Son for you, but F O R E V E R ! ! ! Are we not being clear here? Want us to act it out a bit then? You know we will.
In continuing the theme of sometimes using this blog to give the backstory of posts for my other blog, Truthrevival.org (itself needing some revival of its own lately these last few years), I will attempt some backstory to the 3 planned (now past) retrospectives or "clip show" posts. The first and the third were to be connected and both dealt with the idea of a disaster (nuclear) averted with Iran. ... Thinking I was dying (at times my health was very bad) or that WW III (most won't know how close we came) was about to happen unnecessarily, that time was running out so to speak, trying to force open that door was really the only logical thing to do. Stones not overturned and soon seemed no longer able to be reasonably put off and still have time to be overturned later. At one point my health was so poor, heartbeat so irregular I went into Walmart before going home. I feared I might not even make it through the night and wanted to be around people just in case that would be my last chance to see people at all. It is not a perspective that comes cheaply or is sought after, but is rewarding. It is wanting nothing from anyone, just to see what there is to see if a few more hours or a few more days is all that you have.
In driving through Northern California, I wanted to take a short cut through the mountains. My map said there was a road there, even with a highway number, yet that was not what I was seeing. The road kept getting narrower and narrower. I was torn between whether I should keep going or turn around, thinking I was lost. What I was seeing looked somewhat like the map said to expect, but the road sure as hell was beginning not to look like a road anymore.
Eventually, I decided to stop and look around. I was long past any houses to ask anyone where I was, but I saw a big, what looked like a redwood tree, and decided to go check it out. There were many trees around like that but smaller, but since I was torn between keeping going and turning around, I figured to stop, go up to the giant tree to check it out, and think about whether to keep on going or turn back.
At the tree I was some distance from my car, not far, but enough to see it a ways away. Then I looked ahead to see where the road was going, to see if I thought it would get worse or more narrow. Then I looked back on where I came from. I got the feeling I was not seeing something, like there was something there which I was just not catching. I looked again to my car from being in the woods, then to the road ahead then back where I came from again thinking there is something here I am not seeing but should. Suddenly, everything seemed a lot different. “Get out, NOW!”
That was the feeling I had. I have been in lots of places where people are not around before. Occasionally I might think, this is not a safe place. What if I was to come across a bad person out here in the middle of nowhere? But I don’t think I had ever before looked at where I was as being a defensible or indefensible position before. What I saw was different. Why it hit me emotionally as fear, bordering on panic, that I did not know but pretty much my whole being was screaming out, MOVE, NOW!!!
So I did. No longer was I just looking at trees and nature. I was desperately trying to get out of that area as fast as possible, but that was not very fast because it was not possible to do it in any way resembling fast. What I saw from being out in the woods was, from that point and many points, a person could walk up to the car with a gun, and you could not drive away in either direction. You might not realize it at first. You could drive for 30 seconds or more thinking you were getting away and all the person would have to do is casually walk over and cut you off. If you got past that point, again, he could just walk further and be ahead of you again. And in either direction.
Literally, the car would not help you in any way, it would be like sitting in a coffin. Your only chance would be to leave it behind and run off blindly into the woods without knowing what might be ahead. I never looked at things in these terms before but something told me to keep looking until I saw that.
I have been in dangerous situations before. This was not one though. A person can be vulnerable to being shot or having their car jacked at intersections in busy cities, suburbs, out in the country. All one would need I would think, not that I ever thought of it before this, is to act suddenly and catch someone off-guard. In this place, that did not matter. You were checkmated as long as you stayed in the car and tried to drive away. I had without knowing, at least at that moment, thought I had driven into a potential death trap.
There is a reason for recounting this, as it was not just any woods. I found out a few months later people a few miles from there had been arrested for the most horrific of murders. I just tried now to write details of what they went through before being murdered, but had to stop, delete, and do it over. I will leave it to say that even the most hardened terrorists or torturers would say, those people were pretty damn sick.
It could have been a coincidence or the murder/kidnappings may have usually happened a mile two from there. I may just have noticed something I never thought about before. But the fear made me think about it long after. I do not usually live with fear. Such thinking I am lucky, usually, at least up until that point, I never experienced like that which is why it made an impression on me. Panicking like that was memorable, such that I would have thought it odd, even if I did not hear later about the murders in that area, dozens of people, all ages, the same way. Not just killed but “played with” in the most horrific ways before killing them.
I have no way knowing if my reaction had anything to do with those events, and again, they may have been abducted anywhere along that road, or even off a different road further away from their house for all I know. But I saw at that point what I thought could happen there long before hearing about it, and what I thought about what could happen scared the hell out of me.
I can’t say I get premonitions exactly, and that certainly would not qualify as all that ended months before that. But I do pick up on things sometimes. Maybe something that did happen, maybe something that might. It makes me more curious about time, what it is, how it works, and its relationship to consciousness. Sometimes things seem to happen in a very predictable way to me, things which I cannot directly control, sometimes things even no one person or group could cause.
In reaction to my father’s obsession with people who could predict the future, the countless psychics he wasted a lot of money and time on, I always said, I only believe in self-fulfilling prophecies because in a way, I believe that to be true. Yet sometimes, as smart as I think I am, sh*t happens which I do not understand and cannot explain. It does not bother me like it does most people. I just find it interesting, something to add to the list of the ten zillion other things about the Universe I don’t understand.
Because I am highly intelligent, I can of course like most people, use reason and probability to try to predict what might cause what to happen later and living means having to do this all the time. There is no way to know for sure between what you are reasoning might happen or what you are thinking which is instead based on intuition. Each comes as a thought or feeling, but who can say, even the person experiencing it, what is causing it?
As I said, danger and my life do not necessarily go together. I have been lucky in a lot of ways but also I have had my share of close calls with car accidents, being in dangerous situations, and the health problems alluded to in the previous posts. I can’t say death and me go way back, but I can say I have been through enough to have no feelings often about which way is best. I like living as most people do, but there are limits and many many things are more important to me than my own life. And I often have known or seen more than I cared to. Some things I can shut out or not think about, but I don’t buy that that makes me a better person for being able to do so. Usually I see it as a weakness.
Situationally, I felt boxed in time-wise before the first political asylum attempt. As I said before, I was walking across a foot bridge at night with a person just standing in the middle looking in my direction. Then when about 50 feet away he took a picture with the camera he had been holding the whole time pointing in my direction. A flash went off and he turned and walked away and gave the camera to a person waiting in a car. I figured it was time to get a bit proactive. So many dead ends, or worse all around me, I struggled to find something which I could do which not only lead to me living a day or two longer, as I said previously I was well used to the idea of dying, but also which kept my freedom intact to be able to react to things going on. That I consider not only the best thing about me, my neutrality and trying to keep a distance from things going on, but I also consider that being able to act autonomously, that is what IS me.
That first attempt seemed to throw things around me up in the air and gave me more time. After leaving the French Embassy about 20 to 25 minutes later someone who I assumed was intelligence related tried to “friend” me. He came rushing up to me in a square, asked me where I was going. Not that I am dishonest, but thought why not say. I saw no reason to not answer either, or to ignore the question. “The Swedish Embassy,” I replied. Then he pulled out a map and offered to try to find it, seconds later he was cupping his hand to his ear, gave a quick excuse and was gone. I only smiled. “Bye now.” ... But now getting to what I really wanted to write about, if I may not have much more time. Churches in Europe! The Coke and Pepsi Democracies repost from yesterday I like to think was the most honest thing I ever wrote about how I see the world of politics. That is not to imply that other things were less honest. That was written in the middle of the political asylum attempt when I figured situationally, there was no other considerations besides, what do I think about what I have learned about what is going on in the world, in Europe and America in particular since those systems were what I studied the most. I had no reputation to worry about, no likely future at all for those opinions to affect. More removed from the world in a non-person sort of way than even today. It is not to say I did not care but I finally thought I was gaining some kind of neutral observer level, or at least was as close to that as I would ever get, to be able to write, or even just see, from that viewpoint.
Thus, though here the subject matter is less direct, I wanted to now talk about churches from an impartial point of view. I don’t include Mosques or Synagogues because I don’t know that much about them, nor am I a part of those religions. I am sure they are nice buildings to see, and definitely in some countries I would want to visit the more remarkable ones. I also did not differentiate between Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, etc. To me they are all different but still are all Christian, and thus the same. A lot to me about each is familiar, (I was raised Catholic,) and much about them seemed a bit off as well. The differences make them more interesting, at least to me anyway.
One of the best things about my trip to Europe was touring churches in various countries. Many of the churches were 700 years old or older, and though the oldest ones were not always the most notable, they were sometimes the most memorable.
In France, Notre Dame Cathedral was probably the first notable church I saw and in the most obvious ways, the most awe-inspiring. When I saw the church my grand-parents went to in rural Quebec, I understood how that would have appeared 100 years ago. Still, in that region, the church is the only major tall structure. In a rural area a big church shows a different more impressive world to those who might never see a city. The religious buildings, even in small towns, are built to impress. And they don’t get much more impressive than Notre Dame. The artistry is amazing, no matter what century you are there in. It shows the talent of people even 700 years ago, in many ways can rival any artistry today on a level playing field.
In Belgium, I was awed by the opposite. A tiny little church or chapel in the middle of Brussels just blew me away. I tried finding the name of it on Google but could not. It was I believe 900 years old, and not much more than a small room, but what a deep history in such a small space! Many hundreds of years of people being born or baptized there, getting married there, dying or having their funerals there, all within the same walls. Step out the door and you are in the 21st century, but step back in and it is like walking back to the 12th century, or 14th, or 16th, etc. etc. Amazing.
In Finland, one gave probably my best memory of any of them. It was an Orthodox cathedral, (Uspenski Cathedral) I went into just as a tourist. The transition from the outside was just as amazing but not because the age of the church. In Finland, no one smiles at you on the street, period. If you smile at people, they look at you like you have offended or insulted them or like you are insane. One of their own tourism web sites carried the joke that if someone smiles at you on the street in Finland, it is either because a) they are drunk, b) they are insane, c) they are American, or d) all of the above. They not only know that, they practically advertise it.
(Note: when looking to see if that joke was still around, (it is in various forms) I found this one which made me laugh. A Finnish wife asks her software engineer husband "Hey, could you go to the shop for me and get a litre of milk? And if they have eggs, get six." The husband returns with six litres of milk. "Why on earth did you buy six litres of milk??" screams the wife. "They had eggs.")
To be fair, a lot of the students I went to college with were from Finland and were warm and nice people but they admit that most Finnish people are “reserved” in public or to strangers on the street. Reserved is a pretty mild way of putting it though, because it is well beyond the scale of what that word means in describing other cultures. How about very reserved?
So after walking in from the bitter cold, extremely windy and wet outside (this was my first jacket weather in 3 years, absolutely horrible weather) into a nice warm church to at least warm up for a few moments, I walked right into a wedding ceremony. If those people look at you cross just for looking at them in the street, imagine what I thought they would do to me for crashing a wedding party.
Instead it was the polar opposite. Everyone was all smiles and glowing, as one would think most people would be at a wedding. But they also all smiled at me when they looked at me and did not make me feel out of place there in the least. It was one of the most welcoming warmest feelings I had and not just because of how horrible it would be in every way opposite once I knew I had to go back outdoors. I tried to look around the church a bit but like everyone else, eventually focused on the ceremony. The bride was radiant, the bridegroom was handsome, the wedding ceremony seemed wonderful though the customs seemed a little strange. Walking in circles, holding things over people’s heads, things like that. I was only there a few minutes but left feeling a lot warmer about Finland, and after that the cold and the public shunnings did not seem as harsh.
I was in Lithuania for 3 months so I got to see a lot more churches there instead of by a just-passing-through kind of tour. The Cathedral in Vilnius was the most memorable, and the biggest, but there were many other nice ones there too. Many churches which were very scenic were spread all around the city. People will take note of the unusually muscular Jesus there. I made jokes in my head, Arnold Swartzenjesus, and things like that. Not to be mean, but these were by far the most unusual (read body-builder type) representations of Jesus I have ever seen. No scrawny Jesus for Lithuanians.
I was in Estonia the longest, more than a year and a half. I saw a lot of churches there. I bought a candle at Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and lit one on my father’s birthday for him on the first one after he died. I had to wonder what he would have thought of the gesture. He went from being very religious, reading the Bible for hours every night, to being very skeptical to say the least, later beyond that. I am sure he still believed in God, in a way, but might had found lighting a candle for him a stupid thing to do. No matter, I wasn’t really sure myself when you are supposed to do it or what it is supposed to mean. I just saw people doing it, remembered what day it was, so I thought to do the same. More of a timing thing than a plan or intent.
But like in Finland I did go to a church ceremony in Estonia which did mean a lot to me, and that was more planned than just happening to crash a wedding party. The main church in old-town Tartu, Tartu Jaani (St. John’s) Church, which was being worked on almost the whole time I was there was being opened again for the first time since the Communists closed it down a long time ago, or bombed in the war and not rebuilt or something. It was a very nice ceremony, singing, carrying things, but generally an amazing thing to see, such a feeling of peace, and accomplishment that the symbol of Christianity in the center of the historical old-town was once again open after being closed down for so long. It was like seeing a wound healing slowly in real time.
Sweden had many churches which I saw, some small ones out in the country, and big cathedrals in Stockholm. One in Stockholm had what I called “Buddy Jesus” on the ceiling which was quite an effective display for getting people interested. It had a center dome, like many cathedrals I saw, which of course has a painting that bends away from you. This had someone who used perspective to make it look like Jesus was leaning forward towards you from the clouds behind him reaching down his hand to you like in a 3D movie. It was like he was saying, come on up here with me. Its cool up here. Even if you are an atheist, you would have to be impressed by the thought and skill that went into that design. And no 3D glasses required.
And obviously, one church stands out to me more than the others because they helped me so much when I so much needed help. Americans are strange in some respects. We believe in charity, (or at least used to, the greed and smear-the-poor culture has meta-sized), but do not like to take it ourselves. There are always others who need it more, we tend to think.
When I was growing up, one day a church left a turkey on our doorstep around Christmas with some canned goods. My parents wanted to send them back. As a child I remembered, as being poor and being teased in school about it, I saw the logic in sending it back, the pride. But on the other hand, it was so much food, and its not like that was going to just happen again if it went back. We weren’t always that poor as that Christmas, but that was one time our pride had to take a back seat to reality. We needed help.
While going to school in Sweden, I could not work but hoped to do some work for the University on programming to offset some of the expenses. One day while waiting to talk with a department head, they offered me a banana. For me that was as big a deal as a whole Christmas turkey! I would stare at pastries in the supermarket before buying what I went in there for, raw bread baguettes, which were pretty good, but not much to live on. A banana to me at that time was as unthinkable as a Ferrari.
When I met with a church about needing help with the asylum thing, they were obviously skeptical to say the least. Americans are not your average people needing help like that and something like that was highly unusual. It did not help that I could not say much about why. I said that I am trying to get something on record, some thing which cannot be erased and if I did so, I thought something good might come of it. I could guarantee nothing but that I was a committed to trying to do something, and I needed help.
They eventually had a vote, and decided to help me with tickets, for which I am grateful and hope to repay in a direct way rather than indirect way someday. But what also to me was like a gift from God, they gave me food right before Christmas. I, like most Americans, hated the idea of taking charity, but it was food, it was needed badly. And if you want others to give help, sometimes you need to help them help others by accepting the help when offered. Christmas Lasagna! Not very traditional but one of my first real meals in months.
People are imperfect, churches are imperfect. Their monuments, cathedrals, golden shrines, icons, etc. are designed to dazzle people, impress them, and one could even write them off as just other corporations. But whether they use the good in people, or they bring out good in people, it is not always easy to tell. But they symbolize what is good about people and they are, when they don’t get too involved in politics or their own survival as paramount, they are a sometimes forgotten reminder of each person’s bond to each other. However far the hierarchies stray from that, there is still usually always somewhere behind them, the local church people who are the backbone, the rock, the Christ waiting to do good.
Doors Closing, Super Bonus Days Ending, Quickies Quickly
“Without trying, even if you fail, you never get to find out if that potential was real or imagined. They say in life you don't get second chances. Whoever “they” were in that sentence were wrong. Every minute of every day is a second chance to do what you put off, are too scared to try, or lack the courage to believe you can or ought to try." (X-mas letter 2003 from Lithuania).
I had to wait years to write the post quoted above, my “Higher Ground” post alluded to in November 2005. That me and my government might yet agree to meet, or at least not be so much at odds, one day upon higher ground. I did not have the whole thing written out in my head exactly as written, but I knew then what I wanted most to say in it, should one day I be able to write it, circumstances permitting. ...
As mentioned above, I know the importance sometimes of buying more time. I did a lot, wrote a lot, to get to this point, much of which was not always easy to explain. I am not perfect nor would I ever claim to be. On many a day I have to try very hard to give a damn whether humanity lives or dies, rises to the troubles confronting us all or continues to hide our heads in the sand and think it is not our problem, that when it all blows to hell, it was not our faults. That there was nothing we could have done.
On a “good” day, you can count me in on that group of blissful lemmings just waiting for a cliff to throw ourselves over, so long as we are doing what we are told, unquestioningly. Unfortunately, sometimes I get it in my head that there is something I could try to do about it. From what I have written above, just because sometimes these ideas are not as moronic or suicidal as they might otherwise have appeared if things did not turn out as well as they did, [refers to the political asylum attempts, obviously things could have gone much much worse] it is not to say they were not, truly, as crazy as they appeared to be. But a chance, any chance however slim, is sometimes enough when you are staring into a complete loss of control of events, and watching an otherwise attractive species and planet about to go down the drain.
The time for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is nearly up. It is too bad the world seems to be controlled by those, not only with little sense of morality, humanity, but also a very poor sense of time.
Two weeks later I had what was incomparably by far the worst day of that time and probably of my life. For that entire day I could not stand up. I could not get to a phone to call for help. Every time I tried to get up, I had to immediately sit down or fell back down on my bed. More than 24 hours of a room constantly spinning around and around and around. It is easy to understand I got used to the idea then that there seriously might not be any more days for me after that. The next day was, relative to the previous day, like a fever breaking. Things seemed clearer. Though things did seem to spin off and on for another month or so, and that did not stop completely until I was in Europe in October, I began to be able to assess my current state, remember such assessments, and begin to build up again. ... It is not that I was not open to thinking such things before, and not having contemplated in abstract way such philosophical concepts before. But to have many expectations and perceptions of the future, and memories of the past, subdued for awhile and forced to relearn how to deal with life all over again robbed of many of the so-called “certainties” most people no longer even think about how they came to think that way anymore, having to live again without them and rebuild them anew all over again, it was immersive so to speak. That and actually being able to remember for a short while how I thought and saw things at younger ages with a clarity extremely rare because it was spotty and not the smooth segueing that happens continually as our thinking process change slowly over time with little notice. The first day after the continuous spinning stopped I called “Day One.” Later I referred to them as Super Bonus Days. The quote at the top was written on Super Bonus Day 800. “800 days of living as if possibly no tomorrow, no fear, no planning for a future which may never come, but trying to do the most possible if today is all I get, and enjoy and appreciate it as if it is all I may get. … Tomorrow I head toward another country, beginning a new chapter on day number 801, still taking it, or trying to take it, one day at a time, taking nothing for granted and having as little expectations as possible to keep from knowing what is there to be seen beyond what I may prefer to see, yet wish to know anyway, and on many levels, need to.” Writing this now, by that measure today would be Super Bonus Day 3000. The first 1000 days though were very much extreme pedal-to-the metal adaptation. It was exhausting and probably in the scheme of things, somewhat necessary. Much of the Notes to follow after this post reflect that. That it may not make sense to you, or to me now for some of them, they were written as I mentioned in the start of retrospection, in a type of shorthand simply so that I could remember what I was thinking at those times. Some of that is lost to me now. Other things I remember would take way too long to explain if I even could. Where I stand today is lucky that I am able to remember much of that time, before getting locked down again into preset ways of thinking, and more so through these Notes. As I mentioned, the first 1000 days had the most extreme changes in how I thought about things, and I could adapt and change literally how I thought about things and problems with a great deal of flexibility simply because I still had a good mixture of previous knowledge, and understood completely the overarching pressing need to be constantly adapting, and also I had a decent biological underpinning for that to happen.
Unlike in Sweden when I thought I only had days left to work with, 28 months earlier, the reason for writing was the same, only at that time I thought I had about 6-8 weeks to go before the political asylum attempt. How 2003 turned into 2005 is a longer story than I will deal with now. But guessing I had about 6 to 8 weeks of relative freedom to do or write anything I wanted is what made me think to continue the story. If this was really all the time I had left, I thought I could get the story to a point which I was aiming for, to show how concepts, accepted by science in ways of thinking about 4D space, where severely shortsighted. Really, thinking that I had even that many weeks left was being optimistic. I figured the proof I needed for the political asylum attempt had a short shelf life so to be effective it would have to be done quickly or not at all. But my health was another ultimate wildcard. As I have covered here already, what I have described as health problems does not even begin to cut it. I had something like cancer, though I am glad that it had never required treatment or been diagnosed, spread through my entire digestive system. I could not eat much solid food for months. Even milk made me sick. Eventually it passed but avoiding doctors was important. Being diagnosed with anything serious would have made the political asylum request more complicated, not that it was not already mind-f---kingly complicated to begin with. Being accused by anyone of medical tourism or trying to get access to a non-oligarchy based health system was the last thing I needed or wanted. To give an idea of how painful those months were, immediately after that time, though I was much improved, if asked whether I would have wanted to go through that again or take a bullet to the head, I swear without hesitation, if those were really my only two choices, I would have asked for a bullet. Time has removed me from really remembering that much about the pain, I have been excessively healthy for 9 years now, but I have to take my own word for it on how I saw it at that time. I really believed on balance, life would not have been worth going through that again. Just when I was getting over that unknown but potentially deadly serious medical problem, then I got hit by a car. Things were not looking up. I had problems remembering some things. I was getting dizzy all the time, and though that gradually subsided over the summer, it did not stop entirely until the fall. The last dizzy spell I had was not until I was in Belgium, when I was fairly committed to the whole political asylum attempt, so all along, whether I was up to that was always a concern, thus the delays and always looking for alternative courses of action. As with the ‘Evolve or Die’ post previously, covering that period and what became the "Super Bonus Days" running count of a limited number of “extra” days, I never looked most of the time beyond saying, I may have only this many days left to work with. What is the most I can do in this extremely limited amount of time to try to change things? The political asylum attempt, though warranted and at least for a short time provable as at least debatably justified, was really more ammunition than I could ever had realistically hoped for, but obviously it was not something I was in any way pleased about. But it also was never the main thing to me, only what must be done to enable other things to happen. If I was committed to trying to change a few things on my way out the door, so to speak, to work it would have had to be extremely complex and multi-pronged, not just as simple as only moving in one direction at a time. Even if that direction was toward such an unthinkable collision as what actually did go down. The asylum attempt (possibly) was not successful but it deescalated in a way I could not have predicted in 2003. The world of 2005 was substantially different, at least for me than the world of 2003 and by then I was far more perceptive again in understanding how. A major reason for delaying it for so long was because my brain was healing itself after the serious concussion, and I was getting ever more intelligent quickly adapting to circumstances unique to that situation at the same time, which actually required nothing less. So as I said, though the political asylum attempt while not yet having occurred in 2003, still set everything in motion, but it was not the only card in play, only the one I had to keep close to my vest, for obvious reasons. That perspective alone never could get worked into the notes directly but it was there in other ways. I even kept a running travelogue for awhile in my head. Today is the last time I probably will ever see my family again. (Turned out not.) Today is the last time I will ever drive in Boston again. (Turned out not.) This is the last time I will ever have an ice cream sundae at Friendly’s again. (Made it a Jim Dandy, 5 scoops with 3 toppings and bananas! Figured what the hell. Probably got sick too. Maybe turned out not. Can't remember if I went back there yet or not. Only DQ here.)
And he said, “Someday I hope you get the chance To live like you were dying” Like tomorrow was a gift And ya got eternity to think about what to do with it What did you do with it? What did I do with it? What would I do with it?
Excerpt from "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw
As I have mentioned here before, most of the new writing I have done over the past few years has been at the 5D Notes blog (5dnotes.blogspot.com) trying to give some perspective on how that set of writings, my notes, got started and what all that was about. I am glad that I finally have gotten close to the start of the notes in Lithuania in late 2003, or at least as close to it as I might get. Making it as far as the last post quoted above, 'Calling Time: 2D 3D 4D 5D Thinking Begins, Super Bonus Days 43, 44, and 45,' was not exactly easy. At least I was able to get up to covering the biological things I was going through which led up to the political asylum attempt, the "internal" factors as it were. I do so to show that I was not exactly being brave, though maybe some parts were so, not exactly suicidal, though some parts seemed definitely so, but simply always looking at it as saying the next few days or few weeks may really be all that I have. If so, what is the most I could possibly accomplish with them? The "external" events leading up to that I will not cover now. They are on record somewhere I am sure. But as I said in the last post quoted above, they were not going to be provable for long, so that also made me act well before I might had been ready. I really, as most people, do not like to be pushed into doing things, but if the events go that way, you have to at least act as though you are prepared, and work on it on the way. When having to give a reason, I stated that it went back to around the time of the start of the War with Iraq. I say that now to only mention the timeline. The car accident messed everything up time-wise. Brave or not, time running out or not, I needed time to heal and regroup mentally. Whatever other avenues of events might had led to that, that buying of more time, though I obviously was not willing to do anything, I would at least consider. Considering everything, or trying to, expands your potential a lot more than only considering what you think is possible. What is possible, or how much is, rest assured, no matter how smart you think you are, you will always be in the dark about what that is without trying the supposedly impossible now and then. What is most important about understanding the notes which I have made it my focus on setting up, was that I always, always, assumed I had very limited time to work with. Therefore it was not always a question of how much can I do or realize, but how quickly, and how quickly move on to something even further out of reach now. What effect that has, popular, unpopular, noticed, appreciated, scorned, that was pretty much considered by me as irrelevant and if not out of my control, it should not be a factor in overriding what I would otherwise had thought was most worth doing at that time. I had that eventual end on the horizon for years, and I accepted it, but also I was always looking for understanding something more, something I had not considered yet, and might be missing or overlooking. Thus when made aware about a month ago, I would have no more time, yet again, I had to get back into that mentality. If I only have a few weeks left, what is the most I can accomplish in this brief amount of time? 'Real Men Fear Nuclear War, Not In Kansas Anymore' pretty much was to me the most obvious thing of all the things I had not written yet which I thought I should make the time for. The other blog, the 5dnotes blog, I wanted to get it up to where it is now, but initially I could not. I was not wanting to change the order of the intended posts, so I had to wait to write the one I most wanted to write, 'Calling Time: 2D 3D 4D 5D Thinking Begins, Super Bonus Days 43, 44, and 45,' until after I wrote the 'Einstein as Newton' one which I did not feel was as important for me to want to write. But that one had to be done first. Then I got another month to work with, leading up to now. In the last year's writings, I had written probably the best and most complex things I ever wrote which were very much intertwined and mentioned or intended to be read or understood together. Those would be 'Evolve or die: New eyes, blurred and blinded, misbegotten Time Roads,' 'Events, Potentiality Spheres, Spinning "Up" and Out of a 3D Incorporated Universe, Day 40', 'Real Men Fear Nuclear War, Not In Kansas Anymore,' and 'Calling Time: 2D 3D 4D 5D Thinking Begins, Super Bonus Days 43, 44, and 45.' They may seem to be incomplete, flawed, even nonsensical at times, but they were forming a necessary framework which would have been needed to explain the later notes I was leading up to. Because, like I said, I have been given notice so to speak, that I probably will not have any time to go there, I decided, what is the best I can leave of a quick synopsis now? The notes were extremely varied and written to serve a variety of purposes. I had a "hit every button possible" plane going down mentality, or "launch everything now" mentality to buying more time and trying to understand as much as possible as quickly as possible. It at least lead to writing some pretty good lines.
So that brings me to the Quickies collection of my notes which I am reposting now. It is not the best of the notes in any way, but it had some of the best lines, I thought, when going over all the notes the last time I assumed I had this little time left. Think of it as a cliffs-notes version or just some throw-away lines which might sound like something maybe not as totally mindless as, well, just about everything the culture comes up with these days to distract or "entertain" people. The good thing about writing the 5dnotes blog was throwing out the idea that anyone would ever read it, (it is doubtful anyone has by the counts) and just write toward what someday some people might actually be challenged by, besides how to find their own country on a map of the world. Cheap shot, I know. But that is where our devolving world is leading us. Good luck to all those trying to inform people today. If I thought that was possible maybe I would have cared more about what people might get or understand today, instead of writing towards what I can only hope people might understand sometime years from now. That sounds a bit arrogant I know, but at least I have the knowledge to back it up.
Best of the Notes - Quickies
Note: These I thought were good lines when going over all the notes again for Centerfields collection...
Energy = whipped cream Matter = ice cream Together they make a sundae :-)
Future habits are hard to break
Existence is a matter of perspective
5D Ying Yang (below pictures like a white pizza with black pepperoni, and a black pizza with white pepperoni) To move in sync or to not move in sync, that is the question
Anti-bending of space - very cool
Sometimes or from some angles, things just seem to arise together and causality is but a myth What you are at any point is simply what time it is. What time it is is only defined by what you are.
To say it to yourself is to begin to move it toward becoming real. To say it to others is to put events in motion you will no longer be to contain, predict, or completely control.
Whatever you or anyone else is is fine, just so long as you grow beyond it, as if you or they ever really would be given any other choice for very long.
......To instead or also see space as folded into objects instead of existing outside or between them....... ......Truth if any lies before wanting to see, not during, and certainly not after. + If you don't stand for something, you stand for nothing. If you don't live for something, you live for nothing.
......and doing what you should most do today is all that matters, and leave the course behind or ahead, winding or straight, susceptible to angles you cannot imagine or chart, and even a few steps ahead or back you will see or know only with, through, and by, its distortions of reality.......
To always shake the walls of what you believe is possible to do or to know or to become. Time chunks vs. slices Snowball effect of 4D thinking and exponentially increasing connections + No matter how much one likes to see oneself as accidental, the inescapable conclusion is always that one is for a purpose. By, to, and for whom or what, these can be questioned. Relevance cannot.
A sense of common identity and memories are all that connects what one is and what one was previously into a single being across time. + Most people trade potential for paths that will bring them the most time and fewest problems. I trade potential for what will give me the most understanding of life in the shortest time possible and will give me many problems (to solve). (It is a) question of drawing it out (extending), or trying to cover the most ground possible.
The more energy you push outward, the greater the return flow inward, dimensional donut. Physical facts (are) unimportant, change is the only real existence, or happenings without manifestations, or creating their own.
To simply point out the cliff ahead.
......Political biologism, groups which may not even see themselves as related or acting in concert though each is reactive to the others and together comprise the "body" or organism (upon which their existence depends on or is inseparable from).
......The point is you are who and what you are and outside of that time while you are, that all else is in a sense a different reflection of that time....... + The only in-between states are identification, even with past moments of your own life, and imagination in creating new realities or new lives (in which) you are a greater part of or directly connect back to your now.
......Which direction (past or future) creates something is only a matter of perspective of which moment and direction you choose to look at it from.
......Everything that you have experienced, could have experienced, what you are experiencing now or might have been experiencing now, and all that you will experience or could possibly, all of this is a part of you.......
......The irony is that which is wished to be passed on can never be forgotten or lost anyway, nor is any externalization of that potential any more real than the potential itself.
Consider everything, believe absolutely (without reservation) not in anything. + What you know is all that enables you to do anything. What you don't know is what drives you to do anything.......
Tree of life- its roots surround its reality (from outside of it) coming equally from the future, the past, and all points in-between. + Forever chasing or straining to get what you always keep putting just beyond your reach, how the Universe works, dogs chasing their own tails, time. + Dragonslayer's create their own dragons to slay
Inheritor of your memories and your sense of identity, who you are today.
A lot of future and past expectations to try to live up to. + Would have thought would have wanted to move on by now.
Every generation has the responsibility to remake the world as they see fit to be more just than the one they inherited (probably not original, must have been said zillions of times in millions languages over time).
Universe's version of freewill- you can either do what you know or believe in your heart you should do, or you can (choose) not, and risk dying without getting a chance to.......
Got freewill?
Reaching out to the future, passing through that reaching out to the past, where they overlap, perception of the present. + Seemingly divert all down one path or another, though both roads exist obviously from a supra-universal view. The illusion though, is cool. + To most people the future is what it will be and will be only one thing. To me the future is what it was, and was many things. + Ideologues are ideologues, it doesn't matter what their ideology is, sometimes not even to them. They are all willing to remake everyone's opinions to justify or "prove" their own. + Whole process of tree, not its existence at any one point in time.
Cars colliding from the same forge, taking different paths to meet again. + No species or social structures will or even optimally should last forever, nor worse, act like they will or should.......
Any branch of any reality can be made to seem (like) the most optimal and prescribed to be. It is only a matter of willingness to embrace or use it as such. + Becoming who you always have been
The question "what are you" and the answer, "growing", I understand now far more fully than a year ago. "What" needs to be open ended and undefined. "More" is sufficient, and all that can ever be (accurately) anticipated.
Having to make sense out of something that runs or cuts right through the core of what you are, yet must struggle to understand what it is or what it means. + Improve everything else directly or continue to live, everything finds its level in-between.
Being able or more able to step back a few steps conceptually speaking from your present time, culture, or world, new patterns come into focus that you could never see from within it, connecting more things and events that views only from within could never even begin to understand or explain how they could be connected to each other.
The only rules for existence are that you have to be something, it has to be somewhere at some point in time. What that connects to or where each factor might lead is up to you and your imagination of what you can connect together to what else from there in a way that makes sense to you.
Freedom means never being told what freedom means but to be able to define it for yourself as you wish and never be pressured to recant that or to accept a different definition or interpretation.
I demand answers from life about my life though I know I know not how those answers, probably the furthest from what I wish them to be, would affect me, nor why I wish to know them. Such is life.
Connecting with others outside and within, before you and behind you.
Raising a past version of yourself to become yourself
......We should live everyday as if it is our last not because then we would think of ourselves foremost, but because it is then we truly understand, empathize with, and completely love all others. + Comparative moral education is paramount above all science and educational and occupational concerns.......
Always consider everything at face value but never delude yourself even for a moment (into thinking that) you are seeing or may ever see the full picture. + It is not what people are which captures my interests and imagination or attention, it is what they have the potential to become.......
If someone can take something away from you which you think is rightfully yours, it never was. Just be glad you were able to think so for awhile if it pleased you to think that.
Freedom, like wisdom, cannot be given, it can only be taken.
......Past is but a perspective on the present.
Everything in the universe is just (a different form of) feedback.
Blind men have a clearer view of the universe than physicists or cosmologists.
Basically, if being is based partly on curiosity about existence, the Universe lured me back or re-engaged me by upping the ante of what it is, or showed my single being in (conjunction with) all else view is only partly correct if at all. Every string connects to every other, and any combination of harmonies are possible.
If you want to exist as something, start with imagining something you are not. If you want to exist somewhere, start with imagining somewhere you are not. If you want to exist sometime, start with imagining sometime you are not.
......Pretty much all of life and reasoning is based on intuition. Sometimes you are more correct in using it than you wanted or intended to be. Always give it respect, you don't know where ideas come from. "Don't touch that idea, you don't know where its been."
Each moment in time is retrofitting or remaking what came before to grow beyond what it was before....... + ......If you knew something is always going to come after, you would not get so attached to the way things are and share a little of the joy the Universe feels when it gets to start over again on a new project, even if that is how to replace the old one that was or contained you.......
The notion of purpose sucks. Without it, people could just enjoy being. If people weren't misbehaving toward others, no one would have to care to help them.
Always a second away from the end and inserting time between.
Physiological pattern and consciousness pattern, what do they have in common, how do they connect or interact with each other, and how do they feed and feed off of each other?
If you don't leave you can't return. By going there, you bring there and here closer together, you unite them, more a part of each other through you.......
......As Inventor intimated, what you know prevents you from seeing or learning what you don't. Science has lost the ability to rethink all of its own assumptions and see them not as reality but as representations of reality and therefore limited, biased, and ultimately perceptual. + Every person, being, thing, or point of view in the Universe redefines every other before, during, and after its existence in relation to itself. + More conscious of oneself externally and internally at the same time, sucks, but sometimes necessary.
.......It may sound cliche but the presence of anything creates the non-existence of that thing. Before its existence it was never absent, therefore always was. Only by existing can or does anything create its own non-existence (at another seeming point in time).......
.......If you do deduce what you think is true, it is often best to keep it to yourself. Whether it is really true or not is irrelevant to most people unless it is their opinions also.
"Its not the years, its the mileage." Odometer vs. clock.
.......Growing means constantly moving beyond the land you know, yet looking back nostalgically at those who lived their whole lives there never having to learn of the world beyond it........
To be something more, always. To find new reasons or levels of explanation of my present and past existences to better define future ones. To discover the source of existences and experiences outside of myself yet seemingly inside myself at the same time.
"Between" is always "by" (relational "by" not spacial).
.......Some people's hearts are open and will know and give joy and CREATE a good environment for others, and find one for themselves. You can only point the way, they must discover how to open it themselves.
How beings shape their environments while being shaped by them.
.......Every door of perception we have is a wall, open at one point, closed at every other, yet both are that wall........
.......Mutual causation or multiple pasts as well as multiple futures may be difficult to comprehend but that everything in the past being the sole source of the present and the present having complete control over all futures which might spring from it is way too simplistic........
People look without seeing what seeing is. People think without knowing what thinking is. Without an outside perspective upon perspective, people are as programmed as birds migration, fish to where they must spawn, whales to where they hope to go to die.
.......You can never detach fully from all else nor can anyone else, but you can perceive yourself as separate to later reunite and leave again........ + Nothing that exists is provable beyond perception. No order exists beyond perceived relations........
.......Thoughts are merely fashions sold via advertising.
Anything that is understandable is so because it is predictable. Anything that is predictable is controllable. If not by directing it directly, then by altering its environment or surrounding factors. + .......Life is about the redirection of energy, not the creation of it. The Universe already has an over supply and everything that exists is to even out the balance.
.......Life is on MANY levels with one foot on one ground, and the other on the opposite ground from one perspective. Attempt to stand on either side and you will topple........
Why shouldn't one always be trying to find new perspectives and definitions of what it means to be themselves?
.......It is relational to how they are to you and how they seem to themselves over time that is what someone is to you, the potential for changes and experiences in both they and you.
.......Life is change, not what form it takes at any given time, but what it is gaining and losing at any given time.
Seeing into the heart of matter is empty space. Seeing into the heart of change is true form without form. It is the reaching, longing.
Purgatory is really underrated in all the travel guides. Everywhere is ultimately just a pit stop on the way to somewhere else. + Seeing life of species, not one, many (potential) children species from each.
Life is found in whatever keeps beings alive long enough to grow and change into something more or else........
.......What is within us, what it is our capacity to become defines and sometimes makes the choices for us, and that is always both evil and good. The only thing which can shift is where the middle, the median lies, and in which direction it is currently moving towards........
From one angle, we control time. From the other we are controlled by it. From outside of it, neither applies.
I am stuck between a door and on both sides I am, and on neither can I be.
.......The opposite of that happening is greater control, less freedom, and dictatorship. The more it happens and the greater the factionalization, the more control people have over their own lives and destinies........
Humanity, as it is now, is like any organism at one point in time. It is doomed to die unless it finds a way to grow into something else. Change, constant rebirth, is the only reality.
One becomes linked to and synonymous with certain perceptions of the future when one believes them to be necessary. Nothing is necessary but the belief that something must be necessary.
Since everything comes from one and goes back to one, people should not get upset with differences. Being different than you is everything's (else's) job.
.......That it (a belief set) allows them to subjugate others tends to reinforce it and gives it an ability to spread, and eventually makes others unable or unwilling to question them or their validity.
Your past notions, goals, and purposes are all that give you direction on one hand, and all that limit you or hold you back on the other. Both the limitations and the enabling (what you will do or what will happen) are the same thing.
.......People can only accept peace when it is provisional to becoming and growing into more, and not confined or limited by the present. (If more of the same of the present is all one has to look forward to, no matter how good, one or those who come after will seek to destroy it to create something else, even intentionally something worse.).......
Learning to deal with rapid changes, finding new threads in faster currents in larger rivers.
Everything that does requires what gets done to to enable that ability or it does not exist.
Opposite of expectations used to mean freedom.
Freedom is a dream and the right to dream what you wish. Democracy without strict spending limits on advertising and equal treatment in all media is a sick joke.
Life at its most twisted is to make you care about things and then watch your reactions as something threatens them, takes them away, or destroys them.
Even understanding everything is ultimately confining if you cannot find a way to move beyond it to something you don't know, or know how it will turn out.
.......That ability will become key to all else and survival. It is to be able to see your life and circumstances dually simultaneously from within it and in time, and from an outside perspective upon it and time, from all other points and perspectives outside of it at once........
Once your mind learns to escape its box, you see it, then, the box, exists only in your mind. + .......Experience is all that world has to give or teach you and all you have to give or teach it.
Knowledge (by one) is not only dependent upon but reciprocal in time and in existence with what it knows. (Limited) knowledge (which is the only kind of knowledge) is subjective, and the subjectivity must also be reciprocal.
For those who have lost it, for those who never had it, hope for them as you would for yourself.
None to dominate but all to survive.
I accept no limitations imposed by Man upon what I am "allowed" to know and few by God, and even those provisionally only during my willingness to agree upon them, and only for awhile.
You have to do the now thing before you can do the later thing.
Wherever you are, whatever you are, is your time away from everything else. You can't get any further away than that. See less, yes. Be less, no.
I don't have any opinions about a lot of things. What sets me apart is that I refuse to buy into others opinions which are not well thought out or based on reason. Most people are very sensitive to have foundationless points of views questioned even by merely not subscribing to them.......
Broken zipper between two circular sides, future coming together, past coming apart to wrap around and come together ahead again.
The only questions worth asking are the ones no one wants to answer and will retaliate against you for asking them.
Forgetting accepting the end comes with every step, each is the last.
Experience involves objects but not into any one of them more than any other, through time but not in any one moment more than any other (combined only).
Eating or absorbing the potential of whatever the future could be and shitting out a past, and the only thing that keeps you moving is the wind coming out of your ass.
.......If people to some degree must be lead to believe things for any social cohesion or agreement, it takes pains to keep the notion of freedom from being completely overrun in the process.......
The only real progress made in the last 30 years is the rhetoric about improving the world has improved. If you count hypocrisy as an achievement, solid indisputable gains have been made and are continuing apace. + People believe what they want to believe and merely sift through history to find the "proofs" to justify their wants. Once in power, they make sure opposing "proofs" for other beliefs are discredited, and as much as possible, removed from history....... + (Notions of) reverse evolution (in religions and cults) and original sin and all its offspins.
.......Until people can be totally manipulated without their knowledge covertly, the middle stage to getting there is the well worn path of secret police who are not so secret, just their methods and the public's lack of ability to keep check on their activities as even knowledge about it is criminal.
Only the weak want to always be the best, retire undefeated, and be remembered as the greatest. The strong love to be challenged more than anything, long to meet a worthy adversary who they can rise and improve against, and ultimately meet someone who can beat them.
.......and that is the path of life, into the unknown, pulled up by hopes of what is most important to achieve, peace in ourselves, peace within ourselves as individuals as well as peace between nations and other groupings........ + .......You take the world and time you get and make the best of it you can, yet religion, greed, and power keep the best in the shadows where they know they are safest........
Since I start with the assumption that life itself is inexplicably weird, everything surprises me equally, and nothing can surprise me.
.......The problem is not encouraging growth and change, that is intrinsic to people's understanding and how they think. It is growing toward what, whose plan for the larger combined organism of society to grow into....... + The best revolution will be when people do what Elvis did, take aim and shoot their TVs. Read as many different opinions in different newspapers when owned by competing interests (if ever) instead, and always even then trying to read between the lines on what views they are promoting, who stands to benefit, and who is paying their paychecks (above and below the table years later).
Every month my mind grows more multi-dimensionally in my reasoning. How more and more people's lives fit together and overlap becomes more and more simple to understand. Even the patterns of rising and falling civilizations becomes logical and predictable. Perceiving through matter, peoples lives, processes, and time.
If everything always occurs but in different realities, how can it make any difference in which realities they occur or do not occur in? + Levels of understanding must be added to constantly like layers of skin, each pushing the previous ones upwards to gain perspective on previous ones.
Everything that exists, everything that you experience or can, exists to make you wiser and to shape your own individual opinions and interpretations of them if you can, know how, and are permitted to do so.
Some people are just born long distance trekkers and will always seek out the limits on where and what they can be and what they are allowed by Man or God to know........ + .......Still, it is better to think you have something to do or accomplish than to think there is no point, but each must realize that the choice of what to think they ought to do with their lives is entirely their own, or there is no point to their reality........ + .......Whenever anyone tries to tell you that you can only be this or you can only know that, just say "whatever dude" until they go away. Sooner or later, (for you or historically speaking) they always will.
Events as waves, broken into objects, broken into you. You carry around copies of your events with you, objects where events took place, other people, also retain copies of events from different perspectives.
Everyone and everything is an invention of everyone and everything else to be or give them what they cannot be or obtain by themselves. Experiences.
If you were going to be most people in the future, what would you want your lives to be like? That is how people ought to think to create that future, for one way or another you will know it, and if you make it worse for others, if there is any justice, you will have to suffer it with each of them.
The older you get, the more diverse cultures and mindsets you assimilate, the less you are bound, determined, and defined by the year and place you were born, as a typical generation XYZ'er pretty much thinking alike enough that the statistical differences are minimal and easily generalized.
Identifying yourself by, in, and through everyone's' desires to achieve, be, or experience anything equally........ + .......Killing their hopes and dreams can be to kill life itself more than just individuals, and justice is finding ways to make the most overlapping non-mutually exclusive ones to one day be realized for one and for all.
While in existence, you are a part of others externalized in essence but internalized still through experience. Out of existence, you are in others more in essence though less through interaction with.
.......Each new generation must be as free to trash the world and do bad things as the one before them could. Giving them a good reason not to is the best we can do for them........
Mantra of governments including so-called democracies, of the 21st century: If people can't see it or read about it, it isn't there. The Control-The-Information Age. The only crime (governments can be guilty of) is when their strings are showing.
Two things are constant about people. One is that they will never cease trying to find new ways of killing each other. The other is that they will never allow any person or organization to impede them from doing so. + Unless there is a major paradigm shift, soon it seems events will bring more destruction than all other wars combined. Experience tells me time is short and the need to alter course is imminent now. + Wind-leave people - when leaders believe (their) creationist myths as histories.
Lasting peace is not good for the weapons industry or countries whose economies and position are dependent upon them. Pet monsters must be constantly fed or you will be their next meal. + Money and the need for it to survive, makes people behave in ways they otherwise wouldn't giving those who have it power over them, and often to behave in ways they are debased and will feel disgraced afterwards. And this is not the exception, it is the rule and (this situation) rules. What people would only do for great sums of money is usually what ought not to be done at all.
Experiences of others to you, experiences of you to others, experiences of others to others.
Remaking your environment through interaction with it as much as your environment controls and shapes your sense of identity.
No object, being, or event which occurs was not willed into being by you, by someone, or by all combined. The rules of this Universe or any Universe are simply to provide channels, puppets, for that or those wills to move around by it, like gas molecules give form to the wind or a tornado.
Time is short, people are morons, and I've got shit to do. + Ideology (especially damning in journalism) means you can only see in one direction, and are forgiven for failing to look in the opposite direction, or worse, in any other direction. + I am optimistic in that more are speaking out against a lethal status quo, pessimistic that fewer are listening, and horrified by corporations growing power (over media) to guarantee no one will ever be allowed to hear.
While living any life, whatever weirdness you come across, if it becomes constant and lasts long enough, it becomes normal. Normal is just what your past expectations make you think each new moment can be and ought to conform with or match those expectations.
What those who have power are willing to do to stay in power quickly becomes a race to the bottom of how low they are willing to go to remain there. The longer in power, the lower that bottom drops........
The central organizing factor of the consciousness is not the outside environment it interacts with, but the will. All else becomes secondary. Types of life, part 4. + Unless you are prepared to kill a person or enslave him, you are eventually going to have to consider his point of view, and on occasion, even after you had. + Dolphins raised by wolves.
You are the experiences you had with others seen from your point of view and you are the experiences you had with others seen from their points of view. These experiences from all possible (person's) perspectives are what was you. The body is merely what the experiences form around, like frost attaches to a cold piece of metal on a warm winter morning. You are the process of condensation, not the metal.
People should not get sold on the characters, not even their own. All power is in the play and how it unfolds.
The center of trust, whether in yourself or in others, that you know what is right for them better than they do, when those times and on those issues, they do not match. That is difference between despots and those who truly believe in democracy and freewill beyond their own lies and minds.
How you interact with what you find in your environment defines you in and over time. You are limited by and to that except when you try to create something new for you or others to interact with........
.......when I take a few steps back, I remember there is nothing I would rather be doing and the bigger the challenge, the more you must rise to meet it, and when you allow yourself to think so, the more fun it is to have something nearly impossibly big to build or to destroy. .......
People as works of art, physical or temporal (performance art). Manipulating their experiences and knowledge to get them to behave, appear, and identify themselves by their thinking as you wish. Yet another outside view on life or the Universe.
The stronger you are, the more power you have, the greater the desire to rule, the need to rule. I know that insatiable feeling too well. There is another to balance that, the desire to impart that power to others, to make them stronger, eventually your equals, to give them more control........
Created by nature for the purpose of going beyond it. If not constantly increasing the limits of what is possible, surprising and surpassing the rest of the Universe, you are ultimately uninteresting, predictable, and a victim or pawn of those who will take the initiative to do so if you don't first........ + .......Limit the knowledge of others to see and they will simply grow eyes in new ways others will pick up generations later as leftovers like other species picking up new tricks of ways of perceiving ones environment.
.......I have been fighting the idea I was made for ANY purpose, let alone anyone else's idea of what for. That is a fight that can't be won, eventually you must choose, but the choice should always be your own or freedom is a mirage. Selling food abroad at world prices instead of feeding own people (who now could not afford to compete with what other countries could pay), malnourished and starving.
Having to do anything, story, being in one, sucks.
When no one is allowed by law or public pressure, to argue the other side of ANY (particular) issue, it (that particular issue) gets progressively more and more extreme in position constantly unchallenged, and debate becomes more and more unthinkable until everyone is simply told what to believe by the most extremist people possible.
.......The worst tendencies of Man keep pace with technologies, use them to the hilt, profit from them, and exploit the hell out everyone and everything else with them. The political and religious structures and institutions are intentionally designed to always be dinosaurs, unchangeable and unable to keep up so they will forever be co-opted and taken over by the worst groups in a society........
The United States government which I grew up with committed to without lies or hypocrisy, freedom, democracy, human rights, international law, and respect for its own constitutional principles, died not by losing the cold war, but by winning it.
.......We are like riding in an elevator that can only go down or not at all, a world civilization that for the moment can only get more greedy, nationalistic, and dictatorially militaristic, and to cover trying to profit from the situation rather than caring how to make it better or go away.
.......A culture is what those in power wish to say it is, and if they have the help of the media, always in the hands of the most wealthy, the most powerful with the most wealthy define what that culture is all about, usually to keep those in power in power, and to make those wealthy even more wealthy, that becomes the unconscious purpose and rallying point of the society........
.......People don't get rewarded for doing more than what is necessary if what is necessary costs more. They get promoted for finding new ways to show what is thought to be necessary really isn't after all, as long as you always remember people's lives count less than dollars. + The societies we have are they way they are because they are built around fear. Fear of thinking for yourself, fear of saying what you think is truth, fear of believing you know what others more powerful than you are doing is wrong and have the right to even just say so, let alone to work for a society not as dysfunctional.
The more renowned, celebrated, or highly thought of in others minds a person becomes, the more they become prisoners of those expectations or that image........
Television teaches people how to behave. Reading teaches people how to think. Reading you can stop, rewind, replay at any time and inject your own thoughts (at the same time)....... + .......Any content showing different faces, opposed to all your society finds acceptable "options", you will never see and never hear it was censored, except rarely when at all, that it was really bad or reverse propagandizing it, that you were only protected from its badness. No need to thank us, but you should.
Every time you slow down enough to turn around (look behind you), history bites you in the ass. + Beyond experiences, yours and others, nothing is real. What anyone can hope to achieve alone is nothing. What all combined can achieve other than happiness is inconsequential and unreal. The only power we have is to make others and ourselves suffer. Not doing so when able, our only possible noteworthy achievements.
People instinctively now, they are trained so well, automatically look for a profit angle on any idea they are exposed to, not any longer "is it true or not", but which is the more profitable opinion to take, believe, or propose....... + Those that are celebrated in history and those who are purposefully expunged from it serve the same function; one aspect is identified as useful and all others surrounding it get purged to create its pedestal........
Verbs of transformation virtually non-existent, focused on things movement instead of all changes at once.
Whatever life circumstantially throws your way, you don't have to believe it, accept it, or like it. All you are required to do is deal with it and think whatever you want about how you are made or expected to react. Rise above the situations and look down on them.
Consciousness is always reorganizing itself yet seeks always patterns (around which) to give it form and shape. All energy, matter, the same and shades of both, are basically just searches for new patterns.
We are all prisoners of what we know or believe. Some kinds of knowledge are enabling, others are inhibiting or more confining.
The great memory dump of the Universe, cleaning out the cache and all people and beings merely temporary pattern buffers.
Life in a streaming buffer
Trapped in and by time, yet every trap has its walls and borders. Finding them may not lead to an exit, but gives one a sense of knowing the boundaries of where one can and cannot go. (or can or cannot know.)
Seeing the same events from different angles in time (is) analogous to different angles in space, outside of context of linearity, slide ruler of potential into form across multiple times at once like space consists of multiple spaces (existing) at once.
You are yourself only, or everything and everyone else. If you view time in its proper light, you are never not either.
Directional increases and decreases of potential for desirable repeatable experiences or of a single occurrence of an event, one outcome of which is preferable.
Viewing possession of material things in terms of increased potential for repeated pleasurable interactions with that object, owning an expensive car vs. renting or stealing, status centered vs. actual potential for use.
Spiders through/by time seen as greatest and longest victims trapped within/by their own webs.
One only exists at all relative to the things and circumstances which appear to hold one back and only exist because of such. Needing something to push through, friction against the tide of what otherwise would not be, spinning it to you (to need to react to your intents) as you fight against its preferred path. Struggle or easy is up to you.
Still doing the being thing.
.......In the end, each's own ignorance is partly by choice as much as it is by circumstance and timing. Make happiness come alive. All who kill happiness in anyone harm all life, including their own. + When every moment seems the last + We are all like prisoners of the expectations upon us of the worlds we were born into, as much limited by them and as defined by them as our physical selves are rigidly defined........ + .......that is where all reasonings must take you as often as possible. Going back to square one, routinely, incessantly, and without end is the only way to get a true and valid perspective on anything........ + .......Anything you might ever wish to or hope to learn about anything, you are always just a heartbeat away from figuring out, and the path to get there inevitably crosses that point of where you must assume nothing before getting there........
.......It fundamentally raises the question, what if anything about your life belongs solely to you to decide what to give out and what to withhold, and is losing that ability (to meter out) a good thing or a bad thing.......
That all already know whatever you can teach them, experience brought out which already exists, potential as (a) form of events just not remembered yet.
.......Every possible combination of events unlocks some (sense of) identity, experience, or locked away piece of knowledge, just may or may not be valued to what you want to do, be, or have, or experience at that time. Downward pressure matched by upward and outward potential. Born in a pressure cooker. Non-existence = potential shifted to (the) periphery outside of system or edge of system. Zero = infinity.
Growth with and without height, with and without outside environment beings expectations (of what to grow into), with and without static environment rule changes in what is possible (changing or unchanging laws of nature).
Smart enough to know futures and pasts and to walk away from both (distance oneself or identity)
Parts of environment before being known about (external potential only) and after being know about, before they exist (before they are part of the environment (of actual things), non-actualized potential), and after they exist (outside of (total) environment or system you are currently in).
All of that is what is good and bad about existence, you are a part of what you need and want to be, and equally at the same time, ultimately what those around you need you and want you to be.
