It seems we never think we have it ourselves, but we like to put it on others often to their embarrassment. I think we are all capable of courage, but it depends on the trigger. We are all capable of courage, but actually no. Waiting for the trigger can be a problem. We suffer many defeats waiting for that trigger that we never need experience. Any choice you may make could be wrong. This is a simple fact, and the majority of people just won’t make a decision, or take that action, because it might be wrong. But do we avoid misfortune that way? Has anyone avoided loss or failure by refusing to choose and act?

I’m thinking of those people, and they complain of misfortune a lot, and use it to justify more inaction actually. Yes, and they have reason to complain. They do have a lot of misfortune, but blame the world and thus just keep having it.

I don’t blame the world. I blame myself. But courage is moving beyond even blame of yourself. With courage, who to blame just doesn’t matter.

We all have a drive to engage life. People like animals go stir crazy if their choice of actions is limited. This is a fact, so much so, that marijuana is legal in Alaska, because people were dying from impaired judgment brought on by cabin fever. The marijuana makes them lethargic, so they won’t wander out into the cold and freeze to death. But we have an instinct that doesn’t care if we are wrong. The doubt is not instinctive.  It’s an inherent part of how we are taught to think. Is it in our best interest?

Doubting instinct doesn’t serve a purpose, but we aren’t required to ignore our thinking. Courage doesn’t require we not think. If faced with a choice by all means consider all your options.  Consider the consequences of any action, and since you were likely motivated to do something there anyway, choose one. But choose one. It may be wrong, but does that really matter? Are you having a life if you wait to choose? If you wait to choose will you by some circumstance stop waiting? What will give you permission to stop waiting?

Those people who we call courageous…it’s true that often they do things that really wasn’t that smart. Yet we admire them still. They say there is a fine line between bravery and foolishness, but here is the dirty secret. We are all of us foolish. The wise person is, if anything, an experienced fool. They know more about what’s foolish, and how to choose the better error.

The cowards just keep it a secret. That’s the real cowardice, and you will always be choosing between errors. Always. We have inherently limited minds, and our computing muscles just can’t do everything, or be error free. They are reliant on organs that have limits, are they not? So are we meant to not function because our brains and sense organs are imperfect?

We function despite. Actually the perfect case may be a bit scary. It would be scary. Perfection limits options, and totally stops growth. Courage is not being immune to fear, or even ignoring fear you are feeling. Courage is an awareness of acceptance of the fact of fear, and the realization that you need to act anyway. The worlds famous war heroes even say this, they don’t say they were courageous.

This reminds me of how people will avoid finding out the truth in relationships, or won’t tell the other the truth. Of course those facts can change your life, and many stay with lies to avoid change.  Often what they are avoiding is either just a fact, or it’s a fact of their own insecurity.  If you know “this” about me, you won’t love me anymore. That fear devalues the love they are trying to keep. They’re saying love isn’t stronger then the fear.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

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In dialogue with others? Oh yes, the Stoic wasn’t a hermit, neither was the Cynic though people wished they were. The difference between the Stoic and the Cynic were pronounced.

Would it be accurate to say that being a hermit would be counterproductive to either trains of thought? A hermit wouldn’t have contact with others, and thereby would have no opportunity to challenge and be challenged. Yes, that is correct, and is part of why they met in what amounted to a public square. They were people watching.

No meditation at all in the Stoic practice? Actually, a lot of meditation to help clarify thinking, and process a discussion/argument. They tended to meditate on observations and precepts they believed were demonstrations of truth. Ever see the movie Dune or read the book? Their meditative practice was similar to that of the Mentats.

I think Stoicism is still around in some form? It still is in a denatured and decentralized form. But if someone sought formally to embrace it, it could legitimately be the basis of a revival and not totally off base. But most who would revive Stoicism would reject Stoic spirituality. It would make their truth and reality too mystical. They prefer a dead soulless matter view, and that is not how Stoics saw things, not the originals.

Tainted by the ’scientific revolution’? Yes, so Stoicism has been corrupted, but it isn’t totally lost to us. Deists tend to be sort of like classic Stoics, but many deists are also to some degree agnostic which is not a Stoic view.

How did Stoicism get tainted by the scientific revolution? I would think they have the same end goal? In Stoicism, God is in the machine, and the universe is alive. In the scientific revolution the universe is a machine, and dead except for what we call life, which may also be little different from the dead. Stoics focused on the whole, and they would call an obsessive focus on heuristic thinking a baseless distraction. Basically a waste of time.

We lost it with our fixation on lateral thinking. That’s true. Perhaps interesting trivia, the Roman Empire was capable of canning food like we do, but they would not can food for the same reason. It was seen as a waste of time. The Romans and Greeks had a solid pragmatic streak. In the case of canning, they could make clay jars cheaply and easily, and seal them just as easily. Whereas metal would be more work and complex to seal. They knew how to do it, but it was just seen as too much of a bother. So many of our supposed advances are really more of a value judgment than anything. The medieval Moors preformed very successful c-sections, and their survival rate for females was by comparison very high.

You mean we allow or reject based on values? Yes, and the US President Bush actually had to have one of his policies repealed by Obama. Obama actually had to order that the Presidential office adhere to scientific fact. Stem cells and other matters. Much of the ecological issue too, and the issues behind bio-engineering.

It’s interesting to examine what we ‘can’t do’, and see that it may be because of values then any actual limitation.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

Related Insights:

1. Stoic Fate » There is a missing element that modern Stoics don’t usually embrace. The Hegemon, or logos, is still alive and aware in the world. The world is itself possessed of intelligence in the original Stoic view.  They saw life as a constant dialogue, a ...
2. Stoic Morality » In Stoic philosophy the way of a reasonable life is foremost, and they value universal reason over human reason. They say that poor moral conduct is an error of ignorance, but they don’t define morality in a religious sense. They do have a sort of du ...
3. Alive and Active » Stoicism is a school of philosophy from ancient Greece, and is not fully understood in modern thinking today.  In the age of the Greek philosophical schools, they weren’t just a belief system. They were a way of life, and philosophers were very serio ...

They knew the actions of the logos as “fate”, but they were contrary to modern fatalist thinking. They didn’t see any event as coming true because it was always true, which is the fatalist view. To a fatalist you got up this morning because we were always going to get up this morning, and if you don’t tomorrow it’s because it was always true that you wouldn’t on the following day. In the Stoic view of fate that’s not how it works. Something becomes true through the action of the logos, and new events can arise from that process of dialogue with the world.

Stoics saw it was fate, but mutable.  Basically you always get the answer to the questions you put forth by taking action. So if you do something reckless, to the Stoics you are asking “Will I get hurt?”. In their observation it’s “Most often yes”.  To a Stoic, if something happens to you, you really did ask for it even if you didn’t understand.

They say that if you can understand these questions, if you understand the process of the dialogue with the hegemon/logos/god, you can avoid all misfortune, but you cannot avoid misfortune if you defer to desire. If you don’t seize the situation with reason, and see the reason in any event, they basically say you are choosing your poison. Unlike the Cynics, they didn’t believe that ownership or enjoyment of anything was totally wrong, but they believed that you needed to remain detached even in the face of pleasure. To a Stoic, art is good, but if it moves you to emotion you aren’t getting it. Marriage is good, but if you become emotional over your partner you aren’t getting it.  I personally am not Stoic, though I do share some of their views. I do share some even with the Cynics.

They do seem to eliminate a big part of reality by denying emotion? Ah, they don’t deny emotion, but they see it as subsistent. It’s real, but it’s something to master.

I would imagine the true Stoic view is that by not listening to emotion as much, the Stoic is actually able to more carefully focus on reality. That “reality” is separate from the emotional reaction to it. Yes, that’s correct and it is their view, and by keeping to that they can avoid misfortune and move closer to the source of truth. The originating spirit of the universe. So Stoics are sort of deist, just not anthropomorphic.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

Related Insights:

1. Stoic Morality » In Stoic philosophy the way of a reasonable life is foremost, and they value universal reason over human reason. They say that poor moral conduct is an error of ignorance, but they don’t define morality in a religious sense. They do have a sort of du ...
2. Stoic Practice » Stoicism did have ’enlightened’ Stoics.  The goal of a Stoic was to become a Sage. A Sage was someone who sees reality clearly, and is troubled by nothing.  He is thus empowered to impart this knowledge to others, as well as always being ...
3. Alive and Active » Stoicism is a school of philosophy from ancient Greece, and is not fully understood in modern thinking today.  In the age of the Greek philosophical schools, they weren’t just a belief system. They were a way of life, and philosophers were very serio ...

Stoicism is sort of interesting in how it differs from other Greek schools. We get the word school from the Greek word schola. The Stoics were known as that because they met at a public “porch”, maybe like the term “armchair” philosopher today.  But their meeting was very far from casual, and this is maybe how we get our modern understanding of the word “stoic”.

Would it have rituals in the way that a Masons meeting would? No, strictly not. They were not actually atheistic though. They saw the world as a unified whole, and its material manifestation as a reflection of a greater preceding truth. In a sense, a “God” that they saw as fire.

Big bang? Yes, and in their view all other forms took shape from that by a process they call pneuma, expansion, and contraction.

Ah, spirit? Yes. Now unlike a lot of Greek thinkers, the world isn’t “post-creation”, and in their view everything is alive and active because the creative action of the logos is still going on. The logos is synonminous with what could be called the Hegemon, the commanding principle or intelligence. Now they said that the reason for all suffering is a mistaken view of the truth represented by that first spirit, and that the ideal life and true freedom/liberation is to become aware of as much truth as possible. So they didn’t necessarily apply Occam’s razor, but were in a sense very minimalist thinkers. They believed that things like ambition, and lust, and the like, were distractions.

Where did that term “Occam’s razor” come from? It is a principle that states “do not assume the presence of more than is absolutely necessary to explain any observation”. Occam is a name, and razor because it’s an exclusionary principle.

The simplest answer tends to be the best one? Yes. Same basic principle, and a firm tenant of Stoicism.

So in Stoicism they focused on understanding the creative force. God being the spirit that moves through all reality giving animation. By understanding the pneuma, they could understand the intention or truth behind any form. I don’t recall their word for the pneuma of objects, but they applied the same term to plants. But the pneuma in animals was called psyche or soul. Soul was the force that could empower one to be an actor where other things were acted upon. To the Stoics, attachment was mistaken, because it was assigning a power to act upon to objects. Like saying your food makes you eat it, they just saw it as illogical. So they did believe that you need to minimize any of that sort of behaviour. Basically a moderation in all things sort of view.

They sound just like Vulcan’s from Star Trek. Attachment of any kind is very unvulcan? Yes, they basically were, but it was believed that with that clarity of perception no misfortune could come to you, and only in this way could you be happy.

The ideas of Stoicism permeate society quite a bit? Yes, but in no official sense. What we have of the original principles of Stoicism is second hand, and sort of distorted, but was appropriated in a lot of other philosophical views.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

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They do have a sort of dualistic view of the world, but it isn’t materialistic. They see passive matter, and then an active fort they call reason or fate, and feel that people need to adapt to the force of this “fate”. They don’t feel one can avoid evil, but they do say that you can be free even in evil circumstances. Essentially evil isn’t supernatural, it’s error. To Stoics, good is in nature and human nature.

I differ in that I see a stronger role in the morally indifferent which they do acknowledge also, and though I respect reason and the universal reason, I don’t see a lack of truth in the “passions”. There is a truth in the worlds madness also, and well… that madness won’t let me go, and no amount of my own virtue has relieved me of it. Strangely my connection to the madness seems to be what has preserved my “sanity”. This knowledge has changed me. It’s the cause for my anger, and my feelings of alienation. Deeper than knowledge, I feel it like a pulse. Humanity creates a serious disturbance. Part of me wants to ease suffering, another part wants to revel in it.

Three of those close to me have suffered broken bones. Coincidence? It was a consequence of their own views. Reactive, and that’s one of the things that Stoics delineate. Freedom and virtue from ignorance and vice. For the Stoics a “Sage” can make decisions without the “passions”, the reactionary behaviours that are not the same as emotions. People mistakenly believed they were anti-emotion, they weren’t. They were against what they described as the “destructive” emotions.

What are those destructive emotions? Oh, the obvious, hate and such. They don’t delve into them very much, and the Stoics practiced asceticism so basically there were Stoic monks. Like Buddhist monks though, they did not embrace the concepts behind the class system. Even if they allowed the roles to exist, they couldn’t as a group change Greek law.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

Related Insights:

1. Stoic Fate » There is a missing element that modern Stoics don’t usually embrace. The Hegemon, or logos, is still alive and aware in the world. The world is itself possessed of intelligence in the original Stoic view.  They saw life as a constant dialogue, a ...
2. Stoic Practice » Stoicism did have ’enlightened’ Stoics.  The goal of a Stoic was to become a Sage. A Sage was someone who sees reality clearly, and is troubled by nothing.  He is thus empowered to impart this knowledge to others, as well as always being ...
3. Alive and Active » Stoicism is a school of philosophy from ancient Greece, and is not fully understood in modern thinking today.  In the age of the Greek philosophical schools, they weren’t just a belief system. They were a way of life, and philosophers were very serio ...

Rhythmic? Yes. A temporal signature. Linear time doesn’t really exist. So like a bio-rhythm, temporal factors are encoded in your energy.

For some, when they die and their temporal signature resolves, they see that their cycle is complete. Familiar with quantum non-locality? It applies in a time-like dimension also. So each event/person is linked to all others. When a cycle is complete it means reincarnation into a different pattern. The “cross-pollination” of different time sectors is necessary, for lack of a better term. The reason the crossing of time sectors in necessary is to maintain temporal-spatial stability. Each person is an active agent in actualization, and they bare a refined and evolved temporal signature when they reincarnate.

Consider your life story. That seems linear, because for functional purposes you need it to be linear, but your temporal signature is broader. You don’t just displace space, you displace probability. So all the matter/energy in you is spinning of a time wave, anything you had any probability of doing.

What does that means on the other side? Well, like a dreaming mind there is a process of synthesis. All of your temporal signature gets translated into a “psychic” construct. It forms the “landscape” of the spirit world, and is synthesized and interwoven with every temporal signature that exists. There is no such thing as was or will be, it all is now, and “movement” isn’t passage through space over time. It’s passage through time over mind. The organizations function of space is served by time there, and there is no equivalent of space. To clarify, time is space in spirit.

One area of the pattern becomes complete, and then we take our consciousness to another part to balance the probabilities manifested in another area of time? Yes, we do. Which can be Tibet if we were Tibetan, if we choose. But would be in another temporal phase.

We get attached to a pattern and can have a hard time transitioning? Oh yes, this is possible, and there aren’t “rules” there, because you can’t break any rules there. Everything acts on its nature.

Now how do all these temporal events manifest as any form of coherent object? “Archetypes”

Not consensus? No. Consensus is the process of incarnation. Things there are to organic human thinking more complex, but each death is “death”, each birth is “birth”, each love is “love”. The temporal probabilities “localize”.

Localize to a point of time? No. The temporal coordinates are sort of like “atoms” of the archetype. They localize in mind, and mind is time there. Time is space. Mind is time. Thus why people can seem to be stuck in a dimension with no time as we know it. They have all the “time” they could possibly need, but they may not have all the mind.

Would want to know about transition? All probabilities merge into archetypes. If you sought to re-enter the world, you would plot a path across selected archetypes, and then would immerse at the proper event horizon. Incarnate “when” that path is “possible”, then disincarnate at your destination.

We’re like a frequency on the carrier wave of archetypes that are embedded in mind? Yes, exactly. This is why there seems to be a schism when people think about what’s in their mind. Even unperceptive people at least intuit on a gut level that they are not the rock they are sitting on, though false identification is still very popular. This is why daemonic manifestations seem almost sarcastically irreverent of human symbolism. They use an appropriate archetype as an interface for that time path. It’s where they intercept you. They appear to be a scary monster, because where they decide they need to intervene, all you will see is scary monster. It’s not actually sadistic. This is why during the phone interview in the movie the “Mothman Prophecies” when he asks what the being looks like, it answered “depends on who’s looking”. It wasn’t being snide. Not to say daemons don’t have a sense of humour.

Being human, even as human as this incarnation is, reminds me of being drunk. Though I am not totally without my wits, I don’t like being so impaired, though is maybe why I bare the name Travis meaning at the crossroads.

Where are daemons from? There is a lot of reference to daemons being pit dwellers. Humans can intuit a lot, but they understand laughably little. “Quantum daemon.” Black holes arise from the relationship of the temporal spatial tapestry to the “space beyond”. Essentially membrane theory is correct, and the area between membranes is “aspatial”. The saying that the “Lord of the Daemons” or the “Beast” was locked in the pit was a half truth. This brane was sort of set aside. It is, in a way, a backwater.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

Related Insights:

1. Fey Spirits » Fey dwell in the wild. They live in a sense as the spirits of the wild, but they aren’t exactly what humans see them as. They parallel physical nature, but they are not confined to it. You may have actually noticed this. Ever been in a far removed me ...
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If I did something dangerous and I died, is that Gods doing or mine?  It’s not Gods doing. So yes, if you were on the threshold, the attendant on that side sees your condition though you see little or nothing. They interview you some while checking out your physical condition. They look at some spiritual conditions, and then you either move on to the “other side” or you recover, and the only “paperwork” is in the akashic record.

Familiar with what they are now calling “residual” haunting?  Residual haunting is when a place is imprinted, because places always are. So it isn’t the soul of the departed, it’s the “memory” and it is linked to the earth. This is part of why we come back, either because we don’t die or due to reincarnation.  This memory is called the akashic record, and the other side is not another planet. It‘s more like another channel.

Our memory here calls to us. The karma is in the record, and when you step back from it you get to see it. You might think “Well, why would that person want to come back?” But the thinking of the living is seriously limited, and is comparable to being drunk, drugged, or deeply asleep. The dead can’t see you in the tub. After a time they don’t even see what you call matter. They do see you. They see your “mind” or “soul”, but even if they saw you naked they wouldn’t care like a Peeping Tom would.

Do they usually know they have passed away, or can it take a while to figure out? Depends on how long dead, but being dead doesn’t really have much meaning for them, and yes some adapt slower than others.

They see us more when we open our mind to them in our awareness?  You can make yourself more visible to them by opening your mind. This is why people dream of the dead so much.  This is how we can call them, and space doesn’t matter. 

Do you just visualize your mind opening like a door, or is it that simple? Think them, and they feel it, and it can be that simple except most people can’t let go of the image they make.

I think of my loved one and they feel that? They do. It’s not annoying or anything usually, and they don’t have to respond but often will.

“Time” isn’t an issue. They have an infinity of time, and they do still appreciate being cared about. What they don’t like is being mourned.  That is stressful. They tolerate it for a while, but even the old ghost lore says that prolonged mourning will force their action.  The pain of their loved ones is felt strongly, and in some cases motivates a not right in the head soul to “end your pain”. They all have minds, and they aren’t all clear minded.

It kind of drives them to the brink, but fortunately the disturbed are rarely able to do anything. The reason disturbed spirits aren’t allowed to commit crimes like murder is that they have keepers. What’s funny is the soul is often mistaken for the keeper. People think “Oh no, I see a demon”, when in fact they see a disturbed soul. If you were to see the actual demon it would appear as a darkness that closes with the scary figure and makes it vanish, but people think that negative energy is a demon that’s going to get them. The reason those scary figures sometime linger is the daemons see things much like a spirit guide does. So sometimes it’s judged that this “damned” soul should be allowed to make an impact. Can you see why?

A way to give back ? In a way. It‘s a sort of community service though the “exorcism of Emily Rose” twists it horribly, but it’s sometimes to deal with the living also. How often are humans morbidly fascinated with the dark side of their psyches?  So from time to time they permit humans to see what they find so fascinating, and are pleased when humans are scared by it. Does that make them evil? Sometimes they even intervene like the “angels” do, though humans still don’t appreciate it.

I don’t know if I have ever had such an intervention. You likely would know, but you probably don’t associate nor have you met someone who would require the intervention. But it shows up in human legends mostly as the hounds, sometimes as a hunter, but a hunter or hound isn’t normally needed. Humans aren’t forbidden to do evil, and the normal cycle is they do some evil, get caught, or self destruct. Maybe both like Dahmer, but every once in a while the murderer lasts too long and creates a real imbalance. That’s when the hounds are cut loose.  It shows up in Greek myth too, but it’s the same thing. A shadow beast shows up, whether you see it as a hound, or snake, or whatever, and takes the disturber, or makes the disturber take themselves.  But if you follow haunting… Familiar with shadow people?  It’s only vaguely that most people are. It’s a big mystery, but they aren’t ghosts. It’s a simple clean up effort. The shadow people are the same mysterious darkness that makes the scary figures vanish, and prisons tend to have those souls. It takes a while to breach well enough to conduct a full scale cleaning of a place.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~

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