The State Of The Union, The State Of Things, The State Of Texas, The State Of Me

a free form riff on the world we live in

The world is big, the world is complicated, and filled with all sorts of people with diverse and conflicting actions and motivation. Basically “the world” as it relates to humans...is a mess, perhaps unavoidably so, given I brought humans into the discussion.

I believe thinker Erich Fromm has a perspective that applies to our current situation, politically, morally, and psychologically. In very broad terms he thought there were two fundamental types of people, those who love death and those who love life. The classifications he came up with was biophilia for those who ‘love of life’ versus necrophilia for those with a ‘love of death’. In The Heart of Man Fromm broadens it out some so the love of death also includes the death of spirit and creativity which he held was core to a fulfilled human being.

And THAT in a nutshell is the current state of our world and the U.S. Not completely, but it is necrophiliac path we are on. Politically, the Trump administration wants to hurt as many people as possible and still maintain the Republican/Maga support. It is only residual effects of a functioning judicial system that has prevented mass deportations to torture prisons in foreign countries, when that is gone, anybody can be picked up by masked somebodies and disappeared. For once there is no due process for somebody there is the possibility of no due process for everybody. THIS is a desire to kill the spirit, creativity, of whatever convenient victims they can find.

The focus on immigrants is just the shortest path to the most cruelty, the disease of love of death, like any disease, searches for the weakest part to consume. But as Trump has declared anybody who disagrees with him as an enemy, all of us are also vulnerable.

In Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, the tech bros like Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen (and more) part of their crusade is reach “the singularity” where they (and the chosen who meet their standards) will have a technological “rapture”, where they will be either lifted away from Earth in space ships and live on space stations surrounded by the emptiness of space, or possibly on a barren, poisonous planet like Mars, OR go full "assumption" to digital heaven where their consciousness is upload to an AI managed computer and they can “live” forever. The irony is lost that this theoretical or virtual life comes at the expense of actual lives, from the effects or global warming or diversion of money away from real people to a vastly more expensive endeavor of questionable validity.

The uploaded consciousness scheme is the most obviously religious (but really they are all religious) in that you have to die before you can be resurrected in the new digital form. This sociological approach of this goes beyond turning people into to commodities but instead “life” is turn into a digital backup. Unstated is if it will be an NFT.

Another plan of the tech bros is the creation of Dyson Spheres to power space exploration. These Spheres would be megastructures designed to capture a star's energy, and consuming planets for raw material to continue moving through space eating more stars and planets forever.

Like so much of the tech bro imagination this was already thought about in old adolesent entertainment, in this case it is Marvel Comics from back in the ‘60s with Galactus who devours planets to sustain his existence. Also lost of them is that Galactus was considered a villain, now, for them he is the hero. Comics and misinterpreting old Science Fiction is the intellectual foundation of our Tech Overlords. Climate change is irrelevant, because massive power plants to power ever increasing data centers to drive all the AI and crypto computing are required for the new technological heaven, either in space or online. The upshot is with these unlikely futures, sacrificing lives and imposing suffering of “others” demonstrates their means to fulfill their ends, falls well within the necrophiac diagnosis.

In Texas, the hatred for humanity come masquerading as protecting life in order to inflict as much pain as possible. Anti immigrant measures like razor wire buoys across border rivers and designed to hurt or maim so the desire to hurt is blatant.

The ultra strict anti abortion laws are more sinister since while shouting about protecting the life of the unborn, this is done while deliberately imposing pain and possible death to the living, the already born. In the cases of pregnancy gone horribly wrong for women who want to have a child, thes woman cannot get a procedure to save their lives or save them from suffering. So again, like the theoretical, or possible, or theoretically possible virtual life of the AI tech overlords, REAL people are appropriate to torture or kill. These laws have been in place for years now and it is obvious they should be changed, since this is not debating when life begins (which I would, but that is for another time), it is all about causing suffering...that is the spirit of Texas and it is “not a bug, it is a feature”

Take all the above and when we see ALL republicans moving to the goal of removing any publicly funded healthcare the goal is clear, cause more suffering, more death...again the diagnosis is necrophilia...a love of death.

Oh, but don’t forget, ruin the budget so Republican MUST cut social security. The goal? To cause as much suffering to masses of older people. Fortunately there is a propagandist pipeline of news, bloggers, tweeters, whatever, to bring younger angry voters in on board to replace the dying oldsters.

Maybe I am riled up because I am now one of the oldsters in the sites of Republican guns that will kill Social Security.

Of course this type of insecurity has hung over the heads of millions before me, maybe the realization that it could actually happen to me is something I should have thought of before.

BUT, in another Erich Fromm book, Escape From Freedom, he feels it is is financial and psychological uncertainty, basically capitalism, that lays the groundwork to entice people to be drawn to the certainty of authoritarian regimes. But for me I can’t fall for for the Bullshit, not that I have any wisdom or extra intelligence, it is just that this kind of over the top BS is so blatant and so unpleasant I could never fall for it. Unfortunately ALL republican politicians have fallen, either willingly or cynically, but either way the result is the same, they sold their souls.

I mean I don’t even know if there is such a thing as a soul, but I can’t even sell out a possibly fictitious soul.

[Message ends]

A New New Beginning...?

Another year rolled by. Another symbolic opportunity to reflect, reassess, remember, rethink. OR do none of that.

I am pretty calm about there being no “meaning”, or rather “meaning” is the wrong perspective, the wrong question, the wrong word. There is still plenty to consider and think about in the world, but assigning meaning is essentially assigning worth. And figuring out “worth” of any thing or person requires adopting a host of preconceptions and premises, often without even knowing it.

Not that there aren’t preferences and opinions. I may be fooling myself and talking in circles to myself, in that, how can I think some ways of doing and thinking are better or worse but still think I am not applying value to that. As I write it, I guess we can debate ways of doing things, but any value is tentative or provisional, in that we are just doing the best we can since there is no galactic rule book we can follow..

Yeah, that is it…I am more at peace with the uncertainty of it all.

I am not a rigorous thinker but in trying to figure things out I feel my current world view is this accepting, I still can’t do embrace of, uncertainty. And part of that I credit to my late discovery of Erich Fromm in Escape From Freedom where he outlines how people having trouble dealing with uncertainty (which is a side effect, or maybe and inherent part of Freedom).

Fleeing freedom/uncertainty people dive into the arms of authoritarianism and anything that promises “certainty”. This is why our current melding of religion and authoritarianism meshes so easily. The theology is actually secondary to the certainy of the religion, like political philosophy is secondary to confidence of authoritarians.

Of course why the rich power brokers full of security and confidence go for all that is a whole 'nuther can of crazy worms.

Anyway, those of the kind of thoughts bouncing around my noggin this blog anniversary

And I finish with a quote from another one of my inspirations, Terry Prachett..

“But is all this true?” Said Brutha.
Didactylos shrugged. “Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends toward guesswork.”
“You mean you don’t know it’s true?” Said Brutha
I think it might be,” said Didactylos. “I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.” Pg 187

And another quote from another of my sources

Reporter: Professor Habito, what is the meaning of life?
Ruben Habito: …There is no “meaning of life” apart from living it, breath by breath, moment by moment, one day at a time, grateful for the mystery, the miracle, the wonder of it all.
Ruben Habito: By Excellence Reporter on July 16, 2015

https://excellencereporter.com/2015/07/16/ruben-habito-on-the-meaning-of-life/

One Life

I let the last birthday go by without comment. Less to say, or birthdays mean less each year.

On the drive home from work I listened to Lisa Ekdahl’s “One Life”. Where for all the different personalities and all the conflict, there is just one life we are all living. And that reminded me of some psychologists saying there is no “self”, no individual, and our individuality is a fiction brought about by all the different parts of our brain interacting.

And this interaction is not a collection of discrete parts pretending to be a whole, but what there is of a self is the relations between all the brain activity. So too society is not a collection of individuals, but the relationship between all the brain relationships going on. And it is all happening NOW, every moment, and we let it flow by without comment, like ignoring a birthday .

BUT this universe of connections is the very essence of existence and it binds us together even while we ignore it.

To quote from the movie “Brazil”..”We are all in this together”.

Certainty in an UNcertain World

Thinking about why people entertain questionable conspiracy theories yet ignore actual documented and quite bad conspiracies throughout history. And thinking ther is a connection to some leaping from believing unproven (to my mind) conspiracies to wanting to take up arms to the point of violence to others. Below is some of me talking to myself

. . . . .

Conspiracies with ambiguous or tenuous evidence can prompt different paths of thought in response… but if you go “all in” and double down on the belief, it gives a “believers high”. AND the bigger the leap, the more complex the conspiracy, the more tenuous the claim, the better the emotional “high”

To believe in conspiracies there is a psychological Alchemy formula that is different for each person, but to end up with this “believer’s high” a key ingredient in the mental potion is the LACK of absolute proof. Perhaps it is the very act of “connecting the dots” that gives off some endorphin or hormone, but whatever…it requires a physiological response that allows emotions and reasoning to combine and produce the “sacred belief”. Once in place it allows someone to achieve a blissful state and exalt in self righteous confidence.

And once something becomes a “sacred belief” then contrary evidence, or illustrations of illogic actually harden the conspiracy in the mind.

It is this self righteous confidence that pushes away the ever present fact that to live,is to live with uncertainty, to live with ambiguity.

To be sure, there ARE conspiracies. Some with big government, or big corporations, or even biases of cultural worldviews. BUT conspiracies with clear, documented, evidence, don’t give the same “high”. So Iran/Contra, tobacco companies and cancer, oil companies and climate change, may be noted, then ignored. Those conspiracies are in a sense accepted and relegated to the mundane while JFK conspiracies,ludicrous voting claims, all with dots just waiting to be connected IF you only take off your blinders…THAT requires making a commitment, declaration of sorts, and this commitment gives back many times over with the emotional alchemy of turning ambiguity into certainty.

Interestingly it is the act of committing oneself to a belief in a vague theory wholeheartedly that makes the belief “real”. To believe you simply have to believe, THAT is where the fun is. Proof is not fun, connecting the dots IS.

# # # #

On the violence of it all…to return to the psychological, once you have the confidence in the conspiracy THEN the next level of commitment is to hate some other. So once the leap to connecting questionable dots is done, then comes the audacity of HATE, and the more audacious, the more hate, the better the "high". To fuse self righteous certainty of a disovered injustice and blame it on somebody else takes another audacious commitment. To be self righteously confident of the injustice, AND to have that "other" as the cause of the injustice… Then all that is left is action. Sweet, sweet, self righteous action

Final thoughts.

I suggest that we live in an uncertain world, most knowledge is an illusion*, life is complicated, ambiguous, even contradictory. And almost everybody seems to have a different opinion on what the rules should be. And no one wants to submit to somebody else’s view.

So, how then do we live in a world with people who don’t believe what we believe and may actively hate us for some imagined injustice.

What then is to be done?

For me the starting point is Compassion for all things, including people. And that takes recognition from the start, I, like the world, am flawed…I want to be compassionate but fail so often.

But you have to start somewhere so I start with that.

* the illusion of knowledge is a post for another day

The Power of the Absurd

I happened upon this and wanted to save it here for future reference. Another explanation of the in-explainable

this time by Scott Atran found as a chapter in "This Explains Everything" an anthology from different writers

I Found My Guy!!!

“Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man by necessity uncertain.”
― Erich Fromm

I mentioned him before but this quote, from "the Sane Society", that I just found today is the fulcrum of all my thinking balances. For how we veiw the world balences on this point all humans live whether they know it or not.

Or rather from this truth flows all human psychology, politics, and love. So one can take this begining and deny it and say there IS certainty or one can live honestly.

Escape from Reason

I was thinking about how our brains work and we (all of us) are prone to think emotionally and it takes effort to override that to make reasoned deciscions. And as the Repulican party is the most obvious example I Googled the pschology of ex president and found some old articles.

Emotions are powerful motivators of behavior. For most animals, emotion, not rational thought is what drives behavior, and this remains true for our esteemed species, self-christened as Homo sapiens—“the wise one.” But our decisions are not made solely by reasoning. In fact, in the most complex and momentous decisions we make we rely on emotion—gut feelings. Whom to marry, where to live, or even what entrée to select from a dinner menu, are decisions we make not by reason, but rather by how we “feel.”

Most of these circuits are deeply engraved by evolution in the brains of our primate and mammalian ancestors. A mother’s instant reaction to respond with unlimited aggression if necessary to protect her child is a familiar example. The human brain shares this same neural circuitry with other animals, and that circuit is separate from the neural circuit that launches us into defensive aggression in response to another type of danger, facing an intruder for example. To understand this election you must understand the brain’s threat detection mechanism.

This neuroscience perspective explains the seemingly incomprehensible situation of a privileged billionaire becoming the champion of working class men and women who are feeling angry and threatened. It is boggling to provide a logical explanation for this improbable hero of the working class, but his appeals to the anger, fear, and frustration that many feel—an appeal to the brain’s limbic system—is perfectly consistent with how the human brain makes complex decisions by relying on emotion when faced with momentous decisions. Perfume is not sold by describing how it will make us smell; it is sold by how it will make us feel. So it is with selling real estate. And rationally we know that all cars travel at the same speed on our roads. How then can we rationally explain the need to purchase a 500 horsepower Corvette, when it will ride the bumper of a jalopy in traffic, but cost 10 times as much? Marketing skillfully manipulates emotion—tapping into how we feel—to nudge our purchasing decisions.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/trump-s-victory-and-the-neuroscience-of-rage/ Another surprise victory is unlikely to happen again if this election is looked at from the same perspective of neuroscience that I used to account for the surprising outcome in 2016. Briefly, that article explained how our brain provides two different mechanisms of decision-making; one is conscious and deliberative, and the other is automatic, driven by emotion and especially by fear. Trump’s strategy does not target the neural circuitry of reason in the cerebral cortex; it provokes the limbic system. In the 2016 election, undecided voters were influenced by the brain’s fear-driven impulses—more simply, gut instinct—once they arrived inside the voting booth, even though they were unable to explain their decision to pre-election pollsters in a carefully reasoned manner.

Trump’s dismissal of experts, be they military generals, career public servants, scientists or even his own political appointees, is necessary for him to sustain the subcortical decision-making in voters’ minds that won him election and sustains his support. The fact-based decision-making that scientists rely upon is the polar opposite of emotion-based decision-making. In his rhetoric, Trump does not address factual evidence; he dismisses or suppresses it even for events that are apparent to many, including global warming, foreign intervention in U.S. elections, the trivial head count at his inauguration, and even the projected path of a destructive hurricane. Instead, “alternative facts,” or fabrications, are substituted.

Anyway I wanted to save these links

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neuroscience-and-psychology-suggest-no-surprise-victory-for-trump-this-time/

And to tie it to some other thoughts I see this along the lines of Erich Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3671847252

The blog post where I try to drain Meaning of MEANING

From my first post form 2007, with some editing...

Tomorrow morning I wake up for the first time as a 50 year old man.
Statistically I have 25 years to live ( more or less). So what do I do with those 25 years? …
And if I don't or can't, does that mean I failed?
Is life about finding meaning?
Is life about not failing?
Must I find meaning?
If not that, then what?

OK. that was 14 years ago. WOW! (meaning now statistically I have 11 years to live)

This is only my third post this year. Which is fine, because I now use it as a place for me to put things I want to put somewhere. And I have not felt the need to say anything to my self, or to any unlikely passerby.

BUT, how would I phrase a new first blog post now?

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

The Red Wheelbarrow
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

You can Google that poem and find all sorts of meaning. And Williams may have had some explicit “meaning” in mind, but I don’t know and don’t care. I take the poem as an a song of experience. It could have been anything, a box and not a wheel barrow, a dog and not chickens...none of that "matters". What matters is accepting the experience, the immediate experience that prompted that poem. A reminder that wherever you are, whatever you see, it ALL “depends so much”

NOT what caused the wheel barrow to be there or what will happen to the chickens….PAY ATTENTION to the world NOW. So much depends because everything in front of us is NOW and we are all part of it NOW. PAY ATTENTION!

What does it mean?
What is the meaning of life?
To diagram a moment or a life like diagraming a sentence looking to find “meaning” is to conceptualize that which cannot fit into a concept. So give thanks that we are all in this together. EVEN if we all irritate the hell out of each other...give thanks. EVEN if we have not been the best version of ourselves, give thanks for this moment we communally experience all over the world. For this moment let go of the past and let thoughts of the future float away, they are fictions that distract us from living this moment.

It came over him like a fit; it was like a single spark kindled in his soul and spreading fire through him. Everything in him softened at once and the tears started into his eyes. He fell to the earth on the spot....He knelt down in the middle of the square, bowed down to the earth, and kissed that filthy earth with bliss and rapture. He got up and bowed down a second time
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky

That is how I would start a new blog.

No Self, No Problem

I've been reading "No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism by Chris Niebauer Ph.D" and it is really in line with with my thinking of the last few years. I am still not exactly sure what I am, but this may help.

A few quotes for a preview

Sure, the physical entity of my body and my brain is there, but the “I” attached to it only exists as a thought—and only when I think it.

Seen in this light, “I” is simply a useful, categorical fiction, expressed through language.

The Only Certainty is UN-certainty

I am still mulling over my Grand Theory of Everything. Very slowly but it is still there.

Anyway given recent political events and beliefs driving those events, that brought my thinking back to humans and their love for certainty, AND the vehemence people maintain their certainty. Following a link to another link I found this article .

That science can fail, however, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's a human construct, after all. And if we simply accepted that science often works imperfectly, we'd be better off. We'd stop considering science a collection of immutable facts. We'd stop assuming every single study has definitive answers that should be trumpeted in over-the-top headlines. Instead, we'd start to appreciate science for what it is: a long and grinding process carried out by fallible humans, involving false starts, dead ends, and, along the way, incorrect and unimportant studies that only grope at the truth, slowly and incrementally.

Acknowledging that fact is the first step toward making science work better for us all.

And the point is people in general think their views have the certainty of established sience, but actually established science isn't all that "established"

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837/how-science-is-broken

The Episode Where We Escape From Freedom

I have been reading Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom recently, and to fill in some blanks I went looking for some background on Fromm on the Internet.

Nice Quote

Fromm identified deep feelings of anxiety and powerlessness upon which Hitler had been able to capitalize. His sadomasochistic message of love for the strong and hatred for the weak — not to mention a racial program that raised “true-born” Germans to the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder — provided a means of escape from intolerable psychological burdens experienced on a mass basis.

Escape From Freedom was not merely an analysis of Nazism. At the heart of its thesis was the notion that capitalism — particularly in its monopolistic phase — fostered “the development of a personality which feels powerless and alone, anxious and insecure,” and which is therefore tempted to surrender its freedom to strongman leaders.

 

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/erich-fromm-frankfurt-school-marxism-weimar-germany

Where fiction affects facts

In the conversation with my self my self points out that money and race and nations are quite real to most people. In the horror show of a year it is alarmingly clear that race and money affect people’s lives and sometimes with deadly consequences.

Good point!

In fact I am glad you brought that up. (what a helpful fellow that sell guy is)

I may or may not have demonstrated the fiction of money by holding up a $100 dollar and a $1 dollar bill and asked why one is much more desired than the other. If I have not done that bit then the gist is they are both on the same kind of paper of the same quality of design and such stuff. Obvious we all just agree that when we see $100 we will give and get more stuff than the $1. In the part of my act I go deeper to say even IF there was a pure gold standard where the 100 meant there where 100 units of gold for each dollar the $100 bill represents, it is STILL just “belief” that those gold pieces mean anything. Why do thing gold is the “gold standard” or money? What the hell is gold to a human, it is a crappy metal for building plows or steamships. It has “value” only because we humans declare it has value.

The point is it is just a piece of paper in front of you and even it was a chest of gold on your door step it is only valuable for the same reason paper currency is...because we believe it has value

HOWEVER, if you don’t have money it sure makes paying your bills REALLY difficult. And while you are explaining to some racist that biologically there is such thing as a “race” culture is even less tied to DNA...if you are explaining this while a some A-hole racist is threatening you the consequences of these fictions are quite

. And that makes it all the more absurd. People and groups define themselves by these fictions and because of it people die. People are tortured. People suffer. Dying and suffering are for sure real and all driven by a lie.

Ain’t that a kick in the pants?

We Are at the Place We Find Ourselves - Finally

Our story so far…(a work in progress)

NOW
There is only now
There is no past there is no future
Just now
NOW

To uselessly elaborate a little, when you think of past sorrows, embarrassments, joys or victories, as well as future fears or plans… you are doing all that NOW.

Existence is not a VHS tape where if we could only learn to rewind or fast forward the tape of time THEN we could visit that solid event in the past or the solidified future experience. Whatever you are planning or remembering it is all in your head and everything is happening NOW.

And even more astonishingly it is all the same for ALL of us, for ALL sentient beings, for ALL inanimate objects. ALL existence is connected NOW.

WE are ALL in this together, whether we know it or not.
:
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
- Robert Penn Warren
:
The bit from Robert Penn Warren’s poem may speak to this, and this is just my interpretation, but when you are captured but a story you experience it right THEN. And yes we frame our outlook on the world through the conceptual lens of Time. But that is not how we experience life.

PART II
Assign value, to assign blame and glory
:

And so ends today’s sermon

Why are evangelicals so in the tank for Trump?

I just wanted to get this insight down on virtual paper and for the record I will be painting with broad strokes.

Why are evangelicals so in the tank for Trump? I’ve seen some discussion online about how he fulfills their goals or how he is a “Cyrus”, or just an imperfect politician used by a God for godly purposes. And while some of that is what evangelicals will say, I am really intrigued that the craziness and cruelty of Trump seems to focus the evangelical enthusiasm from a practical allegiance to him for their political purposes to a white hot devotion.

The insight springs from an article linked to below, but my re-working of it is that central to the evangelical worldview is a STRONG authoritarian God, and with Trump their psyche is in love with him subconsciously because Trump's erratic behavior is on the same wavelength as their conception of God.

The more I thought of it the clearer it became. If you actually read the Old Testament, God is a really messed up deity. He is viciously cruel, unfair, and mercurial in judgments. And that is SO Trump! The whole thing falls into place with amazing clarity.

Of course there is the "Jesus" thing that is supposedly the Christian reason for the season, but when you can only hold one idea in your head at a time, cruelty generally wins out. And that is another amazing thing about evangelicals, they seem to somehow never notice any of the liberal and compassionate stuff in the Gospel and by some religious alchemy they filter away anything that an authoritarian sees as weakness.

So while I might see the Beatitudes as a temptation to join a Christian cult where there are irrational ideas like,

• Blessed are the poor in spirit
• Blessed are the meek
• Blessed are they who hunger
• Blessed are the merciful
• Blessed are the peacemakers

These thoughts are ignored by any notable evangelical and in the age of Trump such revolutionary thoughts are actually anathema to the Trump/Republican way of life. Trump is always about being “strong”, being “really wealthy”, being bellicose, belligerent, and always threatening. Basically modern evangelicals have adopted Trump and anti-Beatitude framework.

The short version is evangelicals worship a cruel, confusing, mercurial God and Tump is a cruel, confusing, mercurial president. The connections make themselves.

the article is not perfect but still worth reading

https://evonomics.com/lakoff-no-one-knows-why-trump-is-winning/

There is no "I" there is only NOW!

From Nathan Gill's "Clarity"

“There does not need to be any kind of ‘event’ associated with the recognition of our true nature. Well, as it happened, in September 1998 an event arose. I was gardening and the rain was drizzling down. I looked up, and there was a subtle sense of ‘me’ not being there. I got on my bike and cycled around the lanes and it seemed as though there was a movie going on, without any effort necessary on my part to be taking part in it. With this sudden dropping of the ‘I’, all need for understanding fell away as knowing was revealed.”

First a confession. I became irritated and upset the other day at work when someone purposely or purposely on accident, would not respond to my questions. I think I was justifiably upset because of the inconvenience, But something about that just "pushed my buttons".

Well we got over it, but it took a while to figure out why I was REALLY so upset. I think it was my ego. By not paying attention to me they were diminishing "my" worth and and ego HATES that kind of stuff. Most work conflicts I immediately recognize as of little real importance and can keep my perspective. But this one seemed worse.

As I stewed about the disrespect to me and my surprising internal sensitivity, I finally realized I was dragging this act with me all the time. I couldn't let go of the past.

Then I remember Nathan Gill's story about how with "dropping of the ‘I’, all need for understanding fell away as knowing was revealed."

Last year my thought was that there is only NOW, and we are all living in the NOW and the constant worry about the past and the future was just stuff we keep projecting in our brains during the NOW. And that is what I was doing. My ego was constantly replying this disrespect and it take on a life of its own.

Just remembering that story a bit of the ego, the "I" dropped away and my muscles relaxed. Not dramatically like Gill, but still it was something I could feel.

And I think most of society is like that. We are all a bunch of wounded egos running around upset because somebody disrespected us or our team, be that a political team, sports team, or religious team. So to drop the "I" you drop ego, and without ego there is nothing to offend.

So to calm down, my mantra is : There is no "I" there is only NOW!

The Meaning of LIFE, the UNIVERSE and EVERYTHING!!

This world is imagined as objective, with every moment as a discrete object on a timeline with a measurable value assigned to each of these objects.

But all of that is Bullshit.

The open secrect is we naturally live in the subjective “now” and immediate world, and are also naturally connected to everything else and everybody else in the world, and subconsciously accept we are connected to each other.

The analogy is of all of us in a swimming pool (this moment we are all living in now), yet the “world” says each of us is in an individual pool unrelated to the other.

...that is not all. BUT that is enough so the Vogans can destroy earth.

A Dog and a Man Walk Into a Bar...

Outline re-write #1

Fundamental misunderstanding about all of society:

• You and I are not separate.
• My (and your) personality is not you, not me, it is a collection of attributes, but it is not you, not me.
• The not you/not me is just now.
• Just this moment that is still now. There is no past or future, there is only now. Only not separateness.
• But we just don’t realize it.
• By our very existence we only live now. All of us living now, together in this present NOW.

From this basic misunderstanding comes rating these created differences.

By assigning values to everything, then we can then DE-value those that are not like our pasted on personalities.

Once we have valued everything, then we can desire attributes and objects and things of all variety.

And from desire we learn cruelty, suffering, envy and all that stuff.

Although conjured out of fictional separateness the pain and suffering is real.

A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?"
Joshu answered: "Mu." 

My take:
The dog and me and you are not separate.
Buddha nature is not “having”

My Sweet Little Weltanschauung

Outline for life the universe and everything
Track1

1. Assigning “value” is the starting point for our dis-union.
*The nature of value implies we are the center even if we assign higher value to others
*Recognizing there is no authority setting the "standards"
2. Does our dog have Buddha nature or not?
*Accepting otherness
*Springs from assigning value
3. Sun faced Buddha, Moon Faced Buddha
*Accepting the moment with no value
*Also connected to “value” and “worth”
4. The Platonic Ideal and the path to confusion
*Brian Eno’s grand theory
*Math is a human constructions dealing with real world physics and engineering
5. Living a fictional life
*Race, elites and ranks - all fictions
Nations, Sports and clubs
6. There is only NOW. Always has been and always will be
7. And above them all is MEANING
*Asking for “meaning” is to ask the wrong question.
8. Eight: there is surely an 8

Track2
People and society

Bits and Pieces to be tied together
Society is physical world overlaid with invisible chalk lines to give the illusion of meaning
Conversation is the carrier wave
The connection is unspoken and embedded in the carrier wave
You are not your personality
Enneagram example of recognizing the box you live in

Life The Universe and Everything, now here!

You too can find the meaning of in the link below.

https://excellencereporter.com/exclusive-interviews-on-the-meaning-of-life/

First you get the POWER!

People with rediscover the value of joyful sobriety and liberating austerity only if they relearn to depend on each other rather than on energy slaves. The price for a convivial society will be paid only as the result of a political process which reflects and promotes the society-wide inversion of present industrial consciousness.

Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich