And depression.
And obsession.
The power to create and fall.
The power to destroy us all.

I am human now.
Walking upright.
Thumbs for texting.
Ego for besting.

But what can I teach you?
There are so very few
Who want to receive.
Who want to believe

In themselves.
You are the everything.
You are the pollution
You are the solution.

For you are to live with passion.
That is all you have.
There is nothing more to esteem.
This is the infinite theme

All the prophets have preached.
Look deeply within self.
And find Science.
And call it God.

Look deeply within self
And find peace.
And end all wars.
That is what your heart is for.

Look deeply within self
And find your mission.
All of us are assistants.
All of us are professors.

Profess your mission high and low.
Make all the formulas in the universe glow.
If not all the knowledge in the world is dead.
Nothing but recipes to make bread.

No need to learn anything more.
For the human species is a dirty whore
Unless we look within.
Realize that only from inside it begins.

No more empty hole to fill.
No more sleepless nights forced taking pills.
Living with passion you won’t need sleep.
Each moment a time to leap

Into the great unknown.

I catch myself calling myself a human before “American,” but no one seems to understand, or at least acknowledge, that.  And I wonder if I am human, and I wonder if the other things I call human are human.  The mythology is thick, and it’s hard to distinguish truth from mere tales that have not been toppled by time.  Maybe there’s no difference.  I’m getting close to summarizing an argument for the importance of discussing these things. . . . Somehow I think that the light is inside the conflict–the confusion–on which I spend most of my free time.

Let us just take a post and marvel at these…these are all insect eggs, mostly butterfly eggs like the one below…

insect-eggswp-4_1600

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 7

Google.
YouTube.
Facebook.
Twitter.

What is my worth with no web application to birth?

Cook it down, on a slow simmer.
Until the idea glimmers.
Until there is no sound.
Until my mind becomes unbound.

I can no longer compete.
So I won’t.
The giants have won.
I live daily that defeat.

What is my target?
Who is the monster I want to harvest?
Slingshot in hand, I will take my aim.
I will mock the monster and call it names.

My invention will not do all things.
No bells and whistles to ring.
One thing it will do the best.
Once I find that function I can rest.

The world will rejoice and use this invention.
And remember the tool that did one thing.
Like fire it will forever change the game.
Like water it will thrive and life will never be the same.

There comes a time when history goes in reverse.
As much as you try, it hurts.
The world you know is not what you wanted.
The people you hear talk, too blunted.

Hurting your brain and ears.
Speaking another language you fear
Hate in their hearts.
Nothing you can do to restart

What has begun.
The world is becoming undone.
There will be riots in the streets.
There will be a revolution to defeat.

The division that has always been within.
True progress now portrayed as sin.
Welcome to the end.
Watch it unravel before your eyes.

False Messiah’s speaking on the steps where prophets stood.
Preaching unity.
After sewing hate with impunity.
Millions cheering them speak.

They prey on the dumb and weak.
They are the majority now it would seem.
They all have guns.
They all know it has begun.

The toppling of this country will come
By the use of the freedoms we have spun.
Freedom of speech turned into the freedom of hate.
Freedom of religion turned into the freedom to sedate.

Is it too late?
No sense in trying to relate.
Revel in the end of an empire.
Drink a beer, watch the game, start a fire and watch it burn.

1.  Politics and political nostalgia have become a form of tourism, like a virtual game that some people play.

2.  If you look at the state of health of the people in the video, I suspect that underneath all that fat is an unconscious rage against Michelle Obama’s efforts to fight childhood obesity.  They are not afraid of communism, they are afraid of vegetables.

3.  Most importantly, never before have we had such a clear picture of the paradoxical power of that kind of dysfunctional educational system that requires a denial of any judgments about intelligence.  I am willing to bet that most of these people have high-school diplomas, and that says something very profound about the legitimacy of such a document.  Most of them have never had the gift of being reprimanded for ungrounded opinions, and so they are like spoiled children who live with the anxiety of rampant and nonsensical desires that drive them to seek attention they never got as children.  In my experiences with psychological transformation, healing is always a mix of loving attention mixed with a very strong discipline.

I think i’m turning japanese….i really think so…

It has long been the interpretation of historians that the spread of liberal education across America led to a radicalization of the youth in the 1960s and 70s, and some have implied that there was, in response to this, an effort to denude education of those elements that lead young people to think in revolutionary ways, by associating the goals of education, not with moral or ethical transcendence, but as a means toward financial security. As an accident of this process, critical thinking has given way to discipline as the overarching theme of educational development. In other words the metaphor of the poet, as a model of educational mastery, has given way to the ethic of the soldier.

Now, my point here is not to belabor the obvious, but to point out the unforeseen consequences of purposely perverting the internal logic out of which we derive the notion of authority. If we give people, en masse, the rights of authority without the deeper knowledge of responsibility, then we give power to those who might not be aware of it even when they are using it. In other words, we unleash, instead of radicalized liberalizing power, unconscious and anarchistic power…destructive power…power that knows only itself as an organizing principle…power without a price…power that feeds on itself, and feeds on the disempowerment of others…a kind of political zombie.

If we once let loose a wild bunch of hippies as a result of spreading liberal arts to the masses, and as a result pulled back some of the more liberating aspects of classical education in order to shore up the authority of the state, while maintaining an illusion of the educated citizen, then we have now let loose a wild barbaric mindless swarm of people who insist on exercising political power merely because they have been taught that it feels good to do so.

With every additional year of life the creative person becomes more adept at his/her craft but what grows alongside of this mastery is the looming expanse of untranslatable selfhood, that quiet quality of one’s essence that reminds a person of his/her mortal challenge.

Every creative act is an affirmation of life, and those works which we cherish the most go beyond this and celebrate something more than life, the idea of everlasting life, which is itself a projection of human creativity and longing. And we mustn’t assume, as we age, that we have resolved such a thing completely. For, death remains a mystery, and those who protect themselves from the pain of annihilation by assuming it to be an end, defend themselves against their desire for higher forms of complexity, and thus simplify what evidence shows to be a far from simple universe.

No, I remain open to the idea of my own immortality, in spite of the common conceit against such fantastic imaginings. But, I do so, not only out of my desire to avoid the painful thought of thoughtless absence, but also because it allows me to struggle creatively against a worthy adversary. To attempt to transcend my own mortality imbues every waking moment of my life with resonant meaning, and inscribes into the tedium of survival an enthusiasm for the conspiracy to rebel against the state of nature.

Put more simply, the life force seeks continuance, and I cannot find any good reason to caution against this impulse.

I was born to an age that purports to transcend biology, ecology and cosmology. Who am I to intellectually resign to death in the presence of theoretical escapes or temporary reprieves?

What I have found is that the expression of one’s desire for immortality is itself a profoundly satisfying social position, since it surprisingly reveals itself as a quite uncommon position, and distinguishes one as daring and provocative. The shock one grows accustomed to in response to this disposition implies a sort of greed associated with desiring more life than one is given, and I find this wholly comical, since one only has to look at any of one’s fellows for a day to see some life-prolonging act, whether it be the use of medicine or vitamins, or the choosing of healthy food, or visiting a doctor for an annual check-up. In fact, if you knew me well, you would see that I rely very little on those things which might actually provide me with a longer life, much to my own dissatisfaction and some measure of shame, since such healthy maintenance would be consistent with my beliefs. What you will find is that I rely upon what can only really be referred to as that magical sort of quantity, that element of fate, for my hopes at living a long and expansive life in this universe. This could be my folly, but it also might be my wisdom. History will answer this question.

Living through history ought to be a wager. One must place chips on the roulette table of life, if one wishes to learn about the spinning wheel of time, and the little ball that bounces around in it. That little ball is me, desperately hoping to find what is rare in this universe, the coincidence of destiny and desire. Without a wager, one will only see the futility of existence, and the table will appear a distraction, and perhaps it is, but I have spent some time in the emptiness of inner death, and I find play more amenable to my spirit, and the greatest player’s go all in, in an attempt to beat the house.

These are all metaphors, and serve to express a greatness of spirit. And in some way, I do have a great spirit, but this is exactly the problem, that the greatness to which I impiously point is not me, it is the unfolding of a process that lives in me, and was part of me before I existed, and therefore, I can neither take credit for it, nor hide it away. Even my truthfulness is part of my form, but that which is formless in me I am aware of. I feel it, I live with it, I hear it in my footsteps at night when the rest of the family sleeps. As I walk through my house and contemplate the joyful bounty of my little family, I feel something that might never fully come to life on the page, or in paint, or in my voice, and yet it is possibly the most important possession in my soul, a vast wondrous languageless force that grows day by day, if only due to my capacity to widen my perception of it.

This is what Wittgenstein was trying to tie down with his Tracticus, as did Kant with his Critique, as did Lao Tsu with his Tao. And perhaps one day I will attempt to cage the dragon of self, so that it may live in the zoo of human history.

If one day my work grows, and I am able to employ people, and gather likeminded young men and women to expand the scope of my work, we will never be able to return to all these years spent in solitude. This is the shadow of my existential truth and every great artist or philosopher knows this, that the hours spent in direct perception of being can never be fully given away through the medium of language or art, but that it remains a solitary thing, a power outside of human agency. In the late night, while the world sleeps, the sage paces and ponders, and struggles and is agitated by a presence that can never be shared, but only pointed too, as does the insane, and he/she invites others into this puzzling psychic state, and thus continues a secret tradition, that every member would gladly hand over to the public, if such a thing were possible.

I will never stop. And yet, there are plenty of days when I wish I could. This is true, but the majority of my time I am content with my calling, even though I cannot give it a name. The only days I despise myself are those where I discover the full scope of my dependence upon that formless essence out of which my insights come. On these days it is as though a door was slammed shut between the me that is writing these words, and this other higher self that these words are hoping to describe. When I am tossed aside, and left to feel how shallow life feels without creative power, I discover what a divine gift it is to have an imagination, something that can only be served, and never fully mastered.

Philosophy teaches us.
Unsettles us.

With what we already know.
It works by remixing what you know
And makes it strange.

Philosophy estranges us from the familiar.
Providing and provoking a new way of thinking.
Once the familiar becomes strange
You are never again the same.

Self-knowledge can never become unknown.
Political philosophy is a story.
The story is about you.

Political philosophy may make you worse.
Because philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity.

Callicles argued with Socrates to quit philosophizing and enjoy life.
They did not resolve the cases begun.
Who are we to think that we here can resolve them?

It’s true. These questions have been debated for a very long time.
We live some answer to these questions every day.
Kant says skepticism is no solution.
Skepticism is a resting place for human reasoning.

The aim is to awaken the restlessness of reason and to see where it might lead.

We are ruled by pain and by pleasure.
Should we base morality on maximizing happiness?
The greatest good for the greatest number.
Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian illusion.
Add it all up.

Four in the crew. Dudley was the Dude. Stephens was the First Mate.
All men of excellent shape.
The Cabin Boy, Parker, was an orphan and teenager.
The wave hit the ship and the Mignonette went down.
The only food, two cans of turnips, a turtle and a frown.
All soon eaten.
For eight days they ate nothing.
Lost at sea.
Burnt and free.

No food. No water. What was to be?
Parker became ill from drinking sea water and was murdered.
A dagger through his throat.
New food now, they did float.

For three days they fed on the blood and body of the Cabin Boy.
On the 24th day while eating their breakfast, a ship appeared, ahoy.
If the cabin boy had agreed would it have been okay to save the rest?
What is the moral work that consent does best?

What was the value of Parker’s life?
Even though he had no wife.
No children waiting for him back on land.
No family to tear up without his hand?

Multi Touch Light Table: GERGWERK from GERG WERK on Vimeo.

So how about you too?
Can we make signs together?
And make life better.

Brought to you by Flux Projects.

I tried to do a short rap related to this picture, but i got nowhere….and after seeing Universaltron’s post, i realized we were resonating in a similar place…this image is amazing to me…taken by the Nasa Messenger Mission, a satellite that is orbiting Mercury…so this is a picture of how our Earth and Moon would look like in the Mercurial sky…they appear like twin stars due to their reflection of the sun’s light.

Transients we all are.
Passing under the radar.
Not a blip on the screen.

Only objects seen
in our memories.
Magnetism unites

And separates.
Lose your charge.
Drop like a card.

Through the ground.
The earth, moon and stars
All separated by this charge.

So infinite and small.
Repulsing and uniting all.

Godlike its invisible surge.
One solar flare; humanity purged.
Separated from the urge

And desire to be more.
For your power will decide
If humanity will collide.

Or realize our potential.
To leave this rock in tow
To travel with your flow.

Let it be known
Whatever you decide to do
I will always respect you.