Say (or do) Anything 

Desperation for Material Success

Watching the headlines, one fact becomes immediately clear; the world has a misplaced desperation for success and material gains. 

Can anyone, after watching the lies and testimonies of so-called world leaders, or hearing the banal rants of scrambling opportunists masquerading as news reporters, or even after watching the continued downward spiral into perversity by populist entertainers, harbor any doubt that society is sick?

A madness for success, which hopefully brings riches, has gripped the world more than ever.  And in that race to the top of the dung heap, the world that watches, has become necessarily shallower and emptier, losing much of the beauty of healthy humanity.

Our society is inverted, as are its values.  Individuals should be devoting their lives to becoming more fully developed specimens of god-like humanity, rather than chasing wealth.  Common sense should tell you to be true to yourself, but how many actually can say truthfully that they even know very much about themselves? It isn't possible to "know thyself" unless one takes the time to do so.  That requires periods of time away from the noise of the world, plateaus of quiet, somber thought that grow and elevate one's consciousness.  It can't be done while being bombarded by the twenty-four-seven news cycle or while being blasted by rap tunes or heavy metal, skull-crushing sound.

To begin to know oneself, one must unplug from the world for at least short periods of time, and experience a sense of apparent isolation, before finally beginning to realize one's own self-worth, and to feel the connectedness of all things.  

Success should be based upon excellence as an individual and personal growth, and has nothing to do with material gain. 

The American Holiday

     On this Thanksgiving, our uniquely American holiday, I cannot help but think of all the Midwestern families who have lost their homes and lifetime possessions, and it is therefore very easy to feel lucky and grateful for the good fortunes with which we are mostly graced.  And yet, in their trials and grief, survivors universally find out the same truths: That they did not need all of what they lost, and that their most valued blessings are the people that they love.

     From birth, we are programmed by society to become consummate consumers, work-week toilers whose harvest is a paycheck to spend on everything that we think we need.  But what do we really need?  What values made America great?  It wasn't mobs crashing barriers to get a new I-phone, TV, or laptop computer.  The very values that built the greatest nation on earth are often down trodden today by new agendas proposed by enemies of our original republic.  People who claim to want to "fundamentally transform America" have no respect for the individual.  They prove it by saying that they want to steal the wealth from one individual, "and spread it around a little".  They prove their lack of respect for the individual time and again, from their willingness to murder innocent babies, to their enslavement of all individuals into a massive government health insurance plan, even if it is against the individual's will.

     Our republic, as founded, celebrated the individual and his or her rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  For now, at least, we still have the power in America to fight for individual freedom within the laws given to us by our forefathers.  We can be thankful of that, just as we can be thankful that we have loved ones, even if we have no home.

God bless all individuals, and god protect and preserve the republic.
  

Thank you for the many blessings that have been bestowed upon America, and help guide us to better days for all free men and women.
  

Happy Thanksgiving, to one and all.

 

Thank you for the Leaves

 

I had been in a funk for several days.  Both of my twin granddaughters were recently diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at two years old.  My wife was in London attending a meeting of world-wide paper-pushers, aspiring to become someone that I won't know or like; a bureaucrat.  My business performance had been not up to my liking, and my whole life seemed pretty much a waste of the potential I was given at birth.  I was entertaining thoughts of how best to exit this planet, and to leave behind all of its madness.

The constant barrage of bad news from the media; the pathetic excuses for leaders around the globe; the hopelessness of starving millions; the murder of other innocent millions; the Fukushima disaster and what comes next; the suffering of jobless Americans in the richest country in the world; the senseless murder of millions of animals gobbled up by voracious meat-eaters who never saw a vegetable that tasted as good as a cheeseburger.

The insane whine of the world seemed like a flashing hotel light that that wouldn't give me any rest.  Many methods of escape are possible, but few appeal to me.  Perhaps climbing a distant mountain and freezing at the top would be one nice exit.  I could lie there undisturbed, and look out at the physical beauty of this world, unperturbed by what was happening below.  That seemed better than just walking north until I froze, since I wouldn't want to be eaten by polar bears or wolves, before I died.

Better to leave on one's own terms, I thought, than to wait and suffer the indignities of a frail old age.  These were the thoughts that ruminated within my skull all week, growing like an approaching storm, that darkened my mind.  Then today, I walked outside in my backyard, and looked up at the skyline in front of my house.

The trees had turned bright with colors and were glowing brilliant in the morning sun.  One was luminescent yellow, and another deep gold.  Still another was lit with shades of orange and pink.  They were too beautiful to ignore.  Instantly, I was temporarily relieved of my departure plans.  This world is too beautiful to exit just yet.  My good feelings caused me new thoughts.  What was it about just seeing these colors that made me feel so good?  Why did I think it so beautiful?  Would someone else think the same?  

I remembered my ailing father in the time before his death, and he would have told me that the colors meant nothing at all to him.  But he was well ready to depart, his chosen tasks completed, and he was missing my mother, who had passed before him.  So the colors don't save everyone.  Nevertheless, they saved me from my week-long funk and blew wind back into my sails.

There's a lot I can still do to help out in this world.  I'm not ready to leave just yet.

Logical Individualism

People like labels, because it makes it easy to identify things.  This applies to everything in life, and we mimic the laws of nature by trying to do things in the simplest way possible, with the least effort, and so that we expend a minimal amount of brain power.  Except consciousness does not follow the laws of thermodynamics, and is in fact a type of negative entropy, where thoughts follow successive layers of integration, becoming more and more complex.  Higher levels of consciousness are determined by these successive integrations piled one on top another, until our thoughts sometimes become exceedingly complex.

Most of mankind's troubles are caused by misinformation, crooked ideas that are promulgated by distortions of reality, creating a distortion in the truth matrix which represents it.  These distortions limit our ability to integrate reality successfully, and falsify our perception of facts successively, so that we effectively build a house of cards in our thoughts that is subject to manipulation, confusion, and deception, and which can destroy our very lives.

Sneaky miscreants in the world take advantage of these defects in individuals' thinking abilities and lead entire populations astray, creating wars, famines, social unrest and worldwide strife on a planet that should be a Garden of Eden. However, there is a way to purify our thoughts and expunge falsehoods from our minds, a way to cleanse ourselves of the many diseased thoughts that are programmed into our minds since birth, so that we can become the godlike creatures that men and women are intended to become.

The label that defines and therefore pigeonholes for easy reference this methodology of truth and self-analysis is logical individualism.  It is based upon logic and the universal truth that all conscious individuals have undeniable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The founders of the United States were centuries ahead of the rest of the world, when they spelled out these rights in the American Declaration of Independence.  Unfortunately, what they were not able to do was to give their new nation an infallible method of thinking that would protect and preserve those principles for all time.

Thus, America has always been at risk, and has always been under attack, often successfully, by those who would enslave the individual for their own personal gain.  Creeping socialism, Nazism, religious cults, and selfish stupidity have all at one time or another, and in varying degrees, captivated segments of the nation, and impeded mankind's ultimate progress in its ascension to higher levels of consciousness.

In order for the rights of the individual to remain sacrosanct, a correct methodology and manner of thinking must be adopted so that people cannot be led astray.  Logical individualism recognizes the sovereignty and immutable rights of the individual, while it teaches to build primary logic modules that can be integrated into a powerful picture of reality composed of interlocking puzzle pieces that once assembled cannot be distorted or collapsed by liars, cheaters, and social miscreants.

Revisiting Hyper-consciousness

Some years ago, when writing about hyper-consciousness, I heralded it as being something that I looked forward to, and something that as aided with electronics would be a wonderful leap forward for humanity. I envisioned it as an internet of minds, electrically linked, directly using new technologies.  However, re-reading what I wrote previously, I think my initial optimism was fallacious.

There are several problems that would immediately crop up.  The first is one of brain function and the level of consciousness of the individual.  Individuals on different levels of consciousness would not be able to comprehend one another's thoughts any better than they can communicate verbally.  We are all locked into our own individual levels of consciousness and understanding.  I can't make a sixth-grader see my big-picture view of the world anymore than a one-hundred year old man could pass his wisdom directly on to me efficiently.  Yes, he might send me mental images and emotions that I would understand, but would they have the same significance to me as they did to him?  It seems doubtful.

Furthermore, since we don't process in parallel in our minds, but instead serially (one thought at a time), unless we can learn to think differently, the immediate access to a thousand or a million other minds, does not seem very useful. 

In fact, the more I think on it, it seems that the greatest jump would come from artificial or enhanced intelligence users.  If my brain could be modified to work as the subconscious mind does, then I could see many thoughts in parallel, and even compare them.  I can do this sometimes in my dreams but that is probably only because most other senses are "turned-off" during sleep.  And more than that, I think that the super-intelligence of the subconscious mind is what is really generating the rapid fire, high-detail dreams that I often enjoy.  For I know full well that I cannot possibly imagine things in such vivid detail, nor concoct such complex plots of stories at breakneck speed.

Machines, on the other hand, can do very well at processing data at such high speeds, so if I were able to enhance my mind with electronic speed, and learn parallel processing of thoughts, perhaps then, I might benefit from the hyper-conscious mind Internet that I envisioned.  But an advanced robot might be more practical.  The problem is, where does that leave me?

I would immediately become inferior to a conscious machine, in my ability to process the hyper-conscious mind  Internet.  To that machine, I would then seem perhaps merely a mentally-challenged primitive.

Another vision of the hyper-conscious, electronically enabled mind internet might be one of complete vexation, as me trying to talk logically to a room full of misguided people.  That would be terrible, and worse than trying to tune out multiple heterodyned carrier waves from congested AM shortwave stations.

Or you might say it would feel like a conservative speaking to a room filled with progressives.  That is not something I would want to experience.  Perhaps hyper-consciousness is a dish best tasted by the solitary, individual mind.  Only time will tell. 

The Demise of America

Who do you blame?

When you see an idea dying, smothered by evil forces from every direction; when you see a gift from God and the minds of great good men wither and choke, the breath of freedom becoming shallow and strained, weaker with each passing day; when you see good, hard-working people robbed of their wealth and enslaved in a never-ending spiral of debt, endlessly working from cradle to grave, chasing the dream that was America, but which has morphed into a distortion of that which made it so great.

Who do you blame?

It's not easy to immediately see how we got here, because it has occurred over many generations, a growing cancer and blight in our society, which many thought we were rid of, but which never died and now has metastasized into a malignancy that threatens to destroy America as a bastion of freedom and as the champion of individuality and personal dreams.

It is never one man, just as Hitler was not the cause of Nazism. In fact, it has been an erosion, a constant demoralization of all the principles and ideals that made this country greater than its own reality at any instant. America has always been greater than itself, buoyed up by the dreams of millions of freedom-loving individuals who knew that their best hope for a brighter future for themselves and their posterity lay here on these shores.

Who do you blame?

Not the millions of brave Americans who have sacrificed their lives in so many wars to preserve our way of life, and many times to help free others from the yoke of tyranny. And not the millions of hard-working parents who have worked all their lives to provide a better life for their children, and who have done their best to set good examples for those children by their own behavior.

Who  then, do you blame?

There is an "Invisible Tyranny" that stalks us all, a set of circumstances into which all individuals are born.  Blame this tyranny that constantly enslaves mankind to ill-conceived principles, false truths, and bad logic.  Blame the "Invisible Tyranny" for the death of good common sense in individuals, and the proliferation  of wars and wide-scale murder on our planet.  There are many evil leaders and miscreants, but it is the Invisible Tyranny that is the final slave master over all individuals.

"The Invisible Tyranny" will soon be exposed.

The Operation of Morals

Through the Law of Eleven and Seven, all of our actions are reduced to the direction of 18 words of guidance. We have derived the Ten Commandments largely from those eighteen words, and have seen that the Ten Commandments are completely logical, and are thus good. But what about morals? What are they?

I choose "part d", from the current on-line definition of "moral" from Merriam Websters dictionary to expound upon. That definition is: "d : sanctioned by or operative on one's conscience or ethical judgment". I choose this definition, because morals are an individual responsibility and an individual judgment. One may stray from the guidelines of the commandments at times as an individual choice because all conscious beings have self-will, but nothing can make an individual perform a certain way, except his or her own personal choice.

People sometimes opt to do something that is clearly advised against by the Ten Commandments, (such as infidelity to a spouse or mate), simply because they want the self-gratification that they crave at that particular instant. While the Ten Commandments forbids such activity explicitly, the Law of Eleven and Seven does not. The Law of Eleven and Seven says merely to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If a man or woman felt such strong lust as to enter into an extra-marital affair, then perhaps they would believe that it was alright for their spouse to do the same thing if the conditions were reversed. This is an internal question of morals that must be decided by the individual. Infidelity rarely has a positive outcome, but sometimes it might, as in the case of two people who are completely mismatched, and then find more suitable mates elsewhere, or a few other instances I can think of that might play out to the advantage of one or both of the individuals in a marriage or committed relationship. I generally advise against it, since the odds of it turning out for the best are usually slim, but it is a completely personal decision that must be decided by the individual. Whether it is morally wrong is a personal matter, best decided by the parties involved. (As a side note, there are many reasons why such a decision usually never works out, the largest one being that dishonesty usually is involved in the process, and dishonesty can never be accepted or tolerated in a logical system. Very few people who commit acts of infidelity do so openly or honestly. Most try to conceal their affairs and will lie to do so. Lying is never acceptable, and that byproduct of infidelity makes the act reprehensible, since it destroys trust in a relationship and poisons the intimacy that makes such close personal relationships very rewarding.)

There are much more serious moral issues in life, that cannot be immediately divined from the Law of Eleven and Seven, and which need the most sincere contemplation by individuals in order to decide that which is best. As an example, let us look at abortion.

The Law of Eleven and Seven, and the Ten Commandments both say no to abortion, because murder is always wrong, since it violates the rights of the individual. But abortion is a decision where the morals of the individuals involved must be relied upon to help to decide the best course of action. While it is always wrong to murder an individual, what about where an individual has very little chance at surviving anyway? What if the parents cannot afford expensive life-preserving techniques that would become necessary to keep a severely deformed baby alive? What if this is determined early on during the pregnancy? (Note: I will always use the term baby, since fetus is a sly trick to dehumanize the miracle of birth.)

What if a woman is brutally raped and becomes pregnant; should she be forced by morals to give life to the baby of the criminal who raped her? It is a well known fact that some criminals are genetically defective. The child might inherit the father's criminal tendencies. Not to mention the fact that every time she would look at that child, she would be reminded of the circumstances by which it was conceived. This would be a very delicate, personal decision, and would depend upon the mental constitution of the mother.

Any abortion, no matter how soon after conception is a murder of the individual that would develop, should the pregnancy carry successfully to term. However, sometimes the rights of the unborn individual cannot be protected without violating the rights of the individuals who are the parents. So it gets very difficult in some circumstances to say what is best. Since the parents are the individuals who came together to conceive the life, and since their lives may be very adversely affected by a complicated birth, or having to care for a severely handicapped child, it may be best at times, to rely on their judgment as to whether or not the baby should survive. That said, the idea of allowing a baby to develop to a viable point of survival, only to have that baby then murdered by a late stage abortion, seems so onerous that most people feel that the rights of the unborn baby should at that point be protected by law. However, killing a less-developed baby is still a murder of the individual that it would become. It's easy to see why doctors call such babies fetuses, since that makes their murder more palatable.

Morals have to be relied upon, when a judgment is not easily reached. This is why it is so important that we each have our own well-developed sense of morality, and that it is not just some knee-jerk reaction to circumstance. There are many decisions that are not easily reached, even with the guidance of our most basic laws. Deciding when we should allow nature to take its course and let someone die, can be every bit as hard as deciding whether to let a baby live. It is therefore imperative that we communicate clearly with our loved ones so that we get a strong sense of what they would want to happen, should it not be left up to them as to when they will die. Who pulls the plug, and when, is an incredibly difficult decision, and it must be guided by morals and the best judgment of those most intimately involved.

Morals allow such decisions to be made as best as possible, and they guide us in times of duress or tragedy. They help us make split-second decisions during life-threatening situations: Should we enter a burning building to save a life? Do we need to use deadly force when attacked by a criminal? Is it wrong to profit from a particular set of circumstances? The list goes on and on.

We often do not have the luxury of time in order to evaluate rapidly changing circumstances, so our morals are an established blueprint that help guide our decisions. This matrix of morals is the overlay which guides our conscience, and by definition, conscience is: "the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good".

Such is the operation of morals, to help guide our conscience.

Finally, in some of the situations cited, one moral question that always needs to asked, (especially in deciding life and death), is whether the individual should even be responsible for the decision. The baby that was effectively murdered by the choice to terminate a pregnancy, may have gone on to find a cure for cancer, or have become another Einstein, or maybe it would have just brought happiness and love to a couple who could not conceive on their own. And even as far as handicapped babies, who ever really knows how they will fare? Many premature babies or babies with severe birth defects have gone on to lead productive lives. So it should be understood, that whenever individuals make decisions of life and death, they are effectively playing the role of God. Perhaps, in many such situations, it would be best to leave such decisions to God (or fate, you choose the word or belief that best suites your personal view of the universe). When we choose to intervene in such circumstances, we must ultimately bear the responsibility and consequences of our decisions, and even moral, intelligent people can never really know all the consequences of such life and death decisions.