Treehouse

Welcome to our Treehouse!

We have an ongoing dialogue with our new friend Laura that has wandered across several WP posts mostly in our own blog, but also hers if we remember correctly.

Our Treehouse has been posted to allow us to continue to meet in WP, but in a post dedicated to this dialogue.  We reckon anyone who can follow us here is welcome to join in.

In our last post to Laura, previously to today, we rambled at great length; so fair warning to those with little patience.

We ourselves no longer believe in privacy but we try to respect the feelings of those who still believe in it.  It may be the case that God sees all, but soon big brother will see all too.

(perhaps worse than God seeing all of our shames are the all-seeing eyes of our own inner critics)

Compressing the Infinite Into a Finite Vessel

 

Privacy is passé, but it may take another generation or two for people to start living up to the implications of the disappearance of privacy.

Until then we will try not offend anyone; alas we are certain plenty of people will find reasons to offend themselves.

take care and ta! until someone else takes a turn…

ciao!

 

 

testing how this is working after a long time away from wordpress.

we need to post a missive to our healthcare providers w thought maybe we might be able to do it here.

we’ve been thinking of returning to wordpress as an alternative to quora.

we have posted over three-thousand detailed answers on quora since leaving wordpress earlier.

…

we no longer remember our past issues with wordpress that encouraged us to move away – perhaps they have been fixed while we were gone….

so let’s see how this block business works:

that looks just right!

nice and easy!

we may like returning here, so lets see how easily this gets published…

Schrodinger’s Ghosts – Belief in Ghosts and The Big Bang

 

Schrodinger’s Ghosts – Belief in Ghosts and The Big Bang
Preface
Instead of arguing against us, please experiment with trying to find arguments which may agree with us.  Instead of imagining how what we say cannot possibly be true, please first try to imagine, with us, how what we say here may really be true.

All people unconsciously defend what they believe to be true.  It is not possible to accept something dissimilar to what you believe if you allow your unconscious defense mechanisms to distort our messages here in order to suit the cultural prerogatives your human operant-conditioning has been programmed to defend.

Your cultural prerogatives lie to you.  We hope to help you set yourself free.

Times of Turmoil (DP Challenge: Back to the Future)

Written for The Daily Prompt: Back to The Future, posted August 4th, 2013

Times of Turmoil

 

The old man stumbled, suddenly distracted by a call in his mind.

The world around the old man faded away, replaced by an ancient world that possessed his mind and informed him of an entirely different ‘reality’ than he had been experiencing a moment earlier.

In this older world he felt younger, stronger, hornier.

Desert sands had replaced the mild meadows full of flowers the old man had been strolling through only a few moments ago.

Who had summoned him?

What must he do here?

In the distance a plume of dust marked the passage of a caravan. The young man set off to find his ancient destiny.

The body of the young man that the old man now possessed was very strong, well toned. The young man was nearly naked, his brown skin glistened slightly with sweat. A sack of alum powder hung from his sash.

The old man fingered the small leather bag, remembering what it was for, he applied some of the powder to his skin to stop his sweat.

Conserving moisture was a critical part of living in this desert’s heat.

Few people in this age knew this secret of the alum powder.

The old man had taught the secret of alum to the young man’s fathers during a later visit he must still make to that earlier time.

Aside from the precious alum powder, the young man carried a bronze sword and bladder of water. The young man was a soldier, as his fathers had been before him.

The old man observed the caravan as he caught up with it.

There were few guards, some of whom were wounded. The caravan had recently survived a raid. Perhaps the raiders had not made off with the best of its treasures.

The nobles, soldiers, and merchants would be wary.

But the presence of the old man within the young man’s body meant only one thing, the caravan carried an artifact, an artifact out of time itself.

The old young man could physically sense the artifact as they grew closer, as if it were a part of their shared body.

Suddenly, the young man was gone. He had travelled ahead into the old man’s body, while the old man fully possessed the body abandoned by the young man who had been riding it.

The young man’s body seemed to fall in upon itself, shriveling and wrinkling, until the young man appeared old. His sword fell from hips and hid itself in the sand, safe from the prying eyes of the caravaneers.

The water in the full bladder turned sideways, vanishing from this dimension.

The old man’s loinclout changed from a clean, neat cloth to a shabby, dirty affair.

The old man considered losing his sandals as they changed to match the decrepitude of the rest of his appearance.

The old man approached two of the caravan’s guards who had dropped back to ‘greet’ him.

The old man tensed for the blows, pretending to be ignorant of any fighting skills.

When both guards struck the old man he fell to the ground and groveled.

The old man knew that only one of the caravan members could be a sensitive, like himself.

Ordinarily, two or more sensitives could not tolerate being together with the artifact carried by the caravan. It took extraordinary training for a sensitive to shield themselves in the presence of the Divine Rod of the Ruler of Time.

This was the artifact the old man was here to steal.

But, as usual, the time-tables had all been changed again; the mission put on hold for so many centuries was suddenly reactivated. The stolen rod would soon be returned to those who had first summoned it into being.

The old man considered the deaths of the people who now greeted him with a beating.

If necessary, he would design a death customized to each victim, none of these poor souls were prepared for the subversive attacks he might launch against them.

The old man could turn the minds of each member of the caravan against themselves.

Begging for mercy, the old man pretended to writhe in pain upon the ground.

After a few more dutiful kicks to the old man’s back and sides the guards relented, satisfied the old man was in no shape to be any threat.

As the old man rose to his feet he was shoved back down to his knees.

The caravan came to a stop to allow the old man to approach the caravan’s master.

Scraping worn knees across blistering sand the old man crawled forward and begged for mercy and protection from the elements.

The caravan master frowned, then vanished from his own body as the caravan’s sensitive ruler peered out of the master’s eyes and surveyed the old man carefully.

Clearly the caravan master and his sensitive ruler did not get along well. The ruler was probably corrupt and cruel. The old man knew how to turn their poor relationship with one another against them.

The ruler frowned with the caravan master’s eyes, unable to enter the old man’s body.  This one would need to be trained to give up his flesh.  He must be a barbarian form the north to be so ignorant of the customs of the ruler’s tribes.

The sensitive ruler of the caravan slipped out of the caravan master’s body, allowing the master to return, and silently informing him what he should do.

The master whistled a code to summon a slave. The slave would teach the old man his own tasks and make sure the old man did them well. The slave would move up in rank with the old man taking his place as the lowliest member of the caravan.

The old man hated the tyranny of the rulers, and yet he was another ruler.

The old man was fighting a war with the tyrant rulers, a war that would be won shortly after he seized the Divine Rod of the Ruler of Time.

The old man pondered the Rod’s origins.

When the Rod had been summoned it was the first of the magical artifacts received by men from the entities of the Creator Races.

Some of the members of the Creator Races sometimes appeared among men, riding them by ruling their bodies.

The old man had learned that trick on his own; there was no teacher to tie his mind to the minds of the rulers.

To the tyrant rulers, it was as if the old man did not exist.

The old man had made himself into a rogue ruler.

The tyrants knew they were opposed by people as powerful as themselves, but they could not identify any of the rogue rulers behind the rebellion.

The rogues were more skilled than the rulers they opposed. The tyrants had grown lazy and corrupt, relying too much on their slaves and dominions, rather than upon their own minds and strengths.

The Rod had been created to give humanity rulership over all of the elements, including Time. The Rod was intended to empower humanity to build a sanctuary for themselves apart from the tyrants who ruled them.

However, the original fellowship of the Rod’s summoners had been corrupted. The tyrant rulers had witnessed the summoning of the Rod and had seized the Rod before it could be sanctified.

The raw Rod was a dangerous artifact in the hands of anyone who did not understand its powers.

The tyrant rulers had sacrificed many of their members trying to learn the Rod’s secrets.  All they had managed to learn was that they should never allow the Rod to meet water or blood.

Now, at last, the Rod was vulnerable. The Rod had been forced out of its hiding place by rising waters. The tyrants had feared to lose possession of the Rod, but had the Rod been fully immersed in the waters that rose behind the Aswan Dam the powers of the Rod would have been opened up to the entire planet.

Water would conduct its powers directly into the minds of everyone on earth.

The tyrant rulers could not allow that to happen.

The Rod must be kept dry at all costs.

The tyrant rulers sensed the trap waiting for them if they moved the Rod during the approaching flood.  They decided to move the Rod centuries before the Aswan Damn would eventually be built.

…

The old man grinned, thinking about how he would spit on the Rod at his first opportunity.

Beneath the old man’s knees his bronze sword crawled through the sand, seeking the camel carrying the Rod.

Suddenly their was a loud cry as a camel stumbled and fell, it’s foot bleeding.

The old man rushed forward, cursing.

The camel’s belly opened up as it struck the sand, its guts spilling as the sword struck again.

The camel driver stared in horror as he was thrust out of his body by his ruler.

The ruler turned in the camel driver’s body and pointed at the old man, frustrated.

The old man denied the caravan ruler entry to his body.

The camel driver was sweating profusely as his ruler channeled more and more energy through his body in a futile attempt to invade the old man’s body.

The power channeled through the camel driver’s body set his body ablaze.

As the camel driver began to burn the old man compelled the caravan master’s body into action. Together with the frightened caravan master, they ran to a camel more ostentatiously outfitted than most of the rest.

The caravan master leapt over the camel pressing both hands down on its hump and swinging his legs up and forward, colliding with body of the caravan ruler’s priest with both of his feet.

The priest collapsed to the ground and died, the spirit of the caravan’s ruler was severed from the priest’s body as the caravan master cut through the priest’s heart with a silver dagger.

The remaining slaves and guards of the caravan fell upon each other in chaos as their ruler jumped from one to another ineffectively seeking anyone he could ride.

Without his priest to focus the ruler’s mind within the members of the caravan the members were coming free of his powers to enslave them.

The ruler disciplined himself. There was one member he could still enslave, but he must be subtle about it. If the others suspected he still owned any of them they would kill his host and sever his only tie to the caravan and it’s precious cargo.

The caravan ruler remembered his history, he knew how the Rod had originally been seized; now it was up to him to play the role of the hero of his people, he must somehow manage to steal the Rod back from whoever had just captured it.

The old man spit on the Rod.

The Times of Turmoil had begun once more.

The Beginning.

Daily Prompt Challenge — Post Mortality

Written in response to the Daily Prompt: No Longer a Mere Mortal

Post Mortality

We didn’t know immortality would one day come in a potion.  We suppose we should have anticipated this development, but really, a potion?

Yuck!

We would have preferred a little blue pill.  Or better yet, a red one!

We do not think anyone needs an immortality potion, but if an immortality potion helps convince everyone they are really immortals, then perhaps we can say Go for it!

In our past lives immortality was a sort of triumph or personal feat; an achievement of a person’s will, a product of their sheer determination to live at any cost.

Of course, we are no longer living in those past lives, immortal though we were even then; instead, we have left those past lives behind.  We have chosen to divide ourselves and to leave those past lives to some of our other selves to continue to live in.  We have now moved on to this current incarnation, a new series of lives in which we have already been an immortal for many, many years now, long before this new potion came along.

We have never needed an immortality potion.

Being an immortal does not mean we cannot be killed; this flesh is weak, but it is also very easily replaced.  Our immortality is really a guarantee of our immediate resurrection, so long as it is our will to go on, along with a guarantee that one or more of ourselves will always choose to go on with any life we have ever been born into.

We are not sure whether immortality in a potion may really be a good idea, but hey, its done, so how do we live with it?

When we first learned we were immortal we did not want to believe it.

We wanted to die.

Of course, the only way anyone will ever find out if they are really immortal is to die and then return to their life, yes?

We discovered our own immortality long before the immortality potion came along by trying to kill ourselves.

But now, if you hand out all of these immortality potions so that everyone can discover they are immortal for themselves, you are gonna wind up with a lot of people killing themselves just to prove to themselves they really are immortals.

That is actually a dangerous business.

For one thing, our entire civilization may come crashing down as a result of these immortality potions.  Why would immortals wish to spend their eternities at their jobs?

For another thing, people will still be dying, however, many of them may try dying more often or may murder one another more frequently.

Sure, no one will really remain dead after they have died, but for people who do not believe these immortality potions really work there is a constant risk of psychoses as their cognitive dissonance between what they choose to continue to believe and what is now the new reality for their entire world collide with each other and vie for dominance.

Yet another danger is that while you will always return to life after you have died, you still experience your death as a physically, psychically, and emotionally traumatic event.  If you die often enough you can still develop a pretty serious case of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

We should know, we are still experiencing our death agonies; they continue to reverberate through our overloaded nervous systems.

Fortunately, we are pretty much done with testing our own immortality, we are reasonably well satisfied we will always return to this life each time we die in it.

Our immortality has not changed our morality.

We choose to be a moral person, within our own definitions of morality and within the weaknesses, tolerances, or limits of our disciplines.

That is our choice.

We see no reason to change this choice regardless of whether or not we are immortal.

However, we have known many criminals, some of whom have been self-avowed murderers, who might say the same for themselves; there are many days when we can believe that perhaps they can describe themselves as moral people not only sincerely, but even truthfully.

Morality is an extremely thorny issue.

We do not believe there are any universal codes for morality, we believe morality is a private matter and that morality should always remain a private matter.

We do not believe morality can be successfully legislated, the rate of incarceration per capita in the USA should be proof of this.

Personally, we prefer to choose not to bring harm to any other living being within what we might hope may be a reasonable scope or respectable parameters.

Might we harm one person to prevent harm to another?

Perhaps.

However, for some people, it may become much easier to use deadly force when they know that anyone they kill will always come back.

Eventually, people will learn that their immortality potions have really worked and they really are immortals.

We may only speculate whether morality will improve in this new world full of immortals only.

On that day when all people know they are immortals those people who are still believed to be dead will rise up from their graves and return to their lost lives.

This is because as immortals, the human race will now live long enough to invent time travel and then return to resurrect their dead ancestors.

People who have risen after a long period in their graves will take a long time to get up to speed.  They will shamble into their resurrected lives like zombies, slowly healing from ancient traumas that once held them in their graves, and slowly healing from cognitive dissonance between their past lives and this brave new modern eternal world…

We know this because we have already seen it happen.  We have already lived forever an infinite number of times.

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al…

TinYAP 035 — Cultural Warfare

Are we going to be punished?

We dared to draw a line in the sand, a line we have avoided drawing for three years because we did not understand such a line might ever be there or what it might turn out to be.

Now It seems as if Tina stands on one side of this line while we stand on the other.

Cultural Warfare is an ugly business often disguised by the presumption that anyone who does not wish to fit into society must be mentally ill.

Now we do not deny that we are mentally ill, any sane person would be mentally ill in this world, it is, after all, a mad, mad, mad, mad world…

<Yes, this is not another paradox, just another example of how things really are…>

No matter whose camp you choose to join, you must follow the rules, know the enemies, and kiss the holy asses.

Or else.

After all, even pacifists must have enemies; just ask anyone who is not a pacifist, they often hate pacifists and wage their wars without regard for pacifist objectives such as peace.

We would rather never drag the random world up to our ear.

Once upon a time we owned a telephone.  Our telephone brought us mostly grief.  Then we went broke and we consequently ‘lost’ our phone.

Now we are still broke, but Tina wants us to have a phone even though we have discovered that we do not want another phone because it has been a relief not to own a telephone.

Who would we call that we would not upset?

Who would call us that did not somehow upset us?

<shakes head>

Nope, we do not want a phone, not even Skype.

Tina has beaten us with invective, whipped us with anger, lashed us with frustration, and still we do not want a phone.

We do not think it should be regarded as our duty to own a phone.

Tina, who has complained and complained about how loud our tv is has the volume cranked up now to interrupt us, so we are being punished.

Doubtless she will find other ways to punish us, we can only fear where this may be headed.

We refuse to own a phone.

Will Tina waste money buying us phones we must then either lose or break?

Will she blame us for wasting her money if she dares to insist we must have a phone by purchasing a phone for us?

We do not want a phone.

Why can’t it be that simple?

We cannot stand the pain we hear in people’s voices; the more we talk with anyone we love the more pain and stress we must bear on their behalf.

We cannot stand the pain we feel in our heart, knowing that our private worlds are nearly entirely closed to anyone but ourselves; a phone may only fruitlessly remind us of how we have wished we could share our worlds with people we love who never seem to have the time, the patience, nor the inclination to come visit in our worlds, were we able to show them the way.

Nor do we want to hear from the many rude or random strangers who may arrive on the crescendos ma bell’s demanding ringtones.

We once thought we wanted to talk with our families, but we no longer ever hope that they will call.  If they cannot write a letter, then they certainly do not need to call.

If our inability to adequately reply to their letters sometimes perturbs them, then so be it.  We refuse to be caught in the middle between people with contentious information objectives.  We will take no sides but our own, even if this means we must hold ourselves hostage, speaking with no one but ourselves.

We cannot escape our pain, but neither do we have to share it on demand.

We feel better without a phone.

Shouldn’t that be enough?

So why is this a matter of cultural warfare?

Well, it is a local cultural paradigm that everyone should own a phone.  People automatically assume something is wrong with someone who does not own a phone.

But what if not owning a phone is really the right decision for us?

We may later change our minds, nothing is ever completely written in stone.

<whetting our chisel to continue>

We have not asked Tina to give up her phone.

We try not to make Tina a casualty of our war with her culture.

Cultural warfare is a game played over the generation gaps in family dinner tables.

Cultural warfare takes people hostage within their own families.

Cultural warfare is a dirty business because it is used to justify any number of crimes.

Here in the good ole USA, that’s really quite a few crimes.

America is the motherland of the very worst cultural warfare games, some evidence for this has been securely locked away in our prisons.  We have the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation in the world, and that is without even counting our mental hospitals, thank you.

Is this really, then, the Land of the Free?

Only if you choose to believe the cultural warfare hype and tripe.

If we believed we had a society we belonged among with whom we were able to participate then yes, we might want a phone, but only if we could trust that our phone would bring us more joy than sorrow, more happiness or relief than pain or stress.

We have no evidence of any society we might feel we might genuinely belong among; we have friends we love, yes, but we are not really any parts of their lives, nor does it ever seem likely that we may ever really become so.

Nor have we any evidence for trusting that owning a phone will ever bring us greater joy than sorrow.

The intensity with which we have felt our love for so many, many people has not been reduced by an iota by our missing phone.  Nor do we wish to study which is worse, the pain of never being called or the pain of wanting to escape an unwanted call.  Either way a phone is sure to bring us much pain and stress but little or no relief.

So for now, no phone; if circumstances change, maybe, but not now, nor anytime soon.

Give us time to continue to mend, we are still on our road to better health; a road which has so far been challenged by more pain than we know how to bear well.

Meanwhile, we may still regard this as a matter of cultural warfare.  If we say that phones are a huge waste of time we may offend a lot of people.

That, right there, is part of our evidence that phones are a part of an ongoing process of cultural warfare.  If we were mistaken about what a huge waste of time phones may be, then no one should be offended.  It is people’s reflexive, reactive cultural defense mechanisms which are really being offended.  Whenever we trigger one of those puppies it is typically a reliable indicator that we have identified another cultural holy cow.

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al…

 

Obesity, Diabetes, and the Surgeon General

We don’t know if there is already a category for DP Challenges called ‘Self-Challenges’, if not, perhaps there should be?  We found today’s challenge in our email.

Dr. Peter Attia featured on Ted.com: Is the obesity crisis hiding a bigger problem?

Dr. Peter Attia suggests that perhaps the wrong war against diabetes and obesity is being waged.

While we might say that much of Dr. Attia’s presentation describes information that has been previously known, such as the real or perceived relationships between sugar and type 2 diabetes, there are several reasons why presenting this information still has a very high public value.

For one thing, it is important to remember that in the collective minds of the general public our preconceived beliefs may tend to outweigh any possible scientific objectivity.  Therefore, in order to work through the inertia of our conventional public perceptions about obesity or diabetes (perceptions that may be incorrect) it may be necessary to present this information to every generation on a frequent basis if we are to get to the real roots of these problems.

Yes, there is a sort of conspiracy on behalf of the dairy, meat, and pharmaceutical industries to promote their own interests at what may turn out to be a terrible cost to the general public, but that conspiracy also includes all the rest of us. Collectively, we the people are cooperating with this conspiracy, in part, because we are all too often psychologically motivated to hide darker, more disturbing truths from ourselves.

Food is addictive, perhaps it is only particular types of food that are addictive, such as carbohydrates, or salty, fatty foods, or perhaps all types of food can become addictive, depending on whatever you personally like most.  The mechanisms of addiction operate in the pleasure center of the brain, anything that consistently rewards someone with pleasure is potentially addictive, even things that may sometimes be considered to be negative, or dangerous, such as red meat, potato chips, or anger.

So-called ’emotional eating’ may always be a form of addiction.

Who do we know who has profited by selling the world an addictive product?

Why shouldn’t our food and drug industries benefit from the same strategies that made the big tobacco companies so powerful?

Addictions are powerful tools for controlling people, just ask any pimp who keeps their string of whores strung out on dope.

Our government is an illusion that keeps us distracted from a highly predatory animal, a beast who finds that keeping most people in an ignorant, dependent state is to its own benefit.  That animal, of course, is our military-industrial complex, a beast we might once have desperately needed, but a beast that may finally have finally outlived its usefulness in a world that should be preparing for peace.

We cannot rely on our government to protect us from itself.

Even the best Surgeon General must answer first to their own brass stars.

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al…

When Our Morals May Be Immoral – Daily Post Challenge, June 24th 2013, Morality Play

When Our Morals May Be Immoral
Daily Post Challenge – Morality Play, June 24th 2013

We might prefer to believe our morals come from within ourselves, from our own inner sources of inspiration, however, this is only part of the story of where our morals may come from.

Many people seem to want their morals to be engraved in stone; many people appear to want their morals to be obeyed by everyone.  We strongly suspect that this sort of wishful thinking may represent an uglier side of morality; on this uglier side our morals may sometimes appear to descend into fascism.

Is there any comfortable middle ground between these extremes of an inspirational source for our morality and origins for our morality that may be dictated to us by our societies?

Many people resolve the tensions created by not knowing where their morals should come from by claiming their morals come from god.  Doctrines claiming divine origins for their moral codes often appear to assume that because their rules claim to be divine inspirations that everyone must therefor obey them.

The tension of not knowing where our morals should come from is something that helps build human character; resolving that tension by dictating where morals must come from and what they must be may make some people weaker in their hearts and minds if they fail to challenge the reasoning or justice underlying their socially derived senses of their morality.

For instance, slavery was entirely moral according to the mores of the times among plantation owners in the 18th century.  It required moral reasoning and a higher sense of social justice to enable the emergence of the abolitionist movement.  Few people today would suggest repealing the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and yet, it can still be maintained that the Thirteenth Amendment was a weapon used by the North in an economic war against the South.

The highest morality can sometimes also seem to be immoral, depending on your chosen points of view.

We suspect that all people need to explore their morality for themselves.  We suspect each person must come to their own conclusions regarding their morality as independently as possible in order to build the strong characters required to enable them to make their own lives’ toughest decisions on their own.

All social institutions depend upon both moral behavior, and immoral behavior.  It is the tension between these two extremes that makes publically accepted notions regarding morality a more profitable enterprise for churches or governments.

When we hear other people espouse their morals we often wonder just what is in it for them.

In part, morals are personal tools whereby each individual governs their own behavior between two extremes that may either place more emphasis upon the good of the individual or upon the good of society.

There must always be balance between these two extremes or social unrest may arise that may threaten to change whatever established rules any given group of people have theretofore agreed to live by.

Whatever our morals may be, perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we may make with them is to try to indoctrinate our children with our own morality.

Perhaps we might explain our own moral choices to our children, but we think that the moment we try to impose our moral ideals upon anyone, even our own children, we risk becoming an immoral person.

This is not a paradox, this is just what we believe to be true.

In part, we believe our morality comes from our socially derived senses of justice, respect, compassion, community, and love.  However, we recognize that many people’s life experiences teach them different values with different social or cultural contexts that may guide them to conclusions about what their morals should be that may be very different from our own ideals.

We cannot find fault with anyone for choosing any path different from our own. 

We do not believe we should dictate our own morality to anyone, but neither can we agree that anyone has arrived at a universal set of morals that we ourselves must discover and obey.

The best we might do may be to follow our own heart and pray we fail to offend anyone who might condemn us for our choices.

We are nearly certain that there can be no universal moral code.

Possibly, a universal set of morals would make itself immoral on the grounds that anyone who disagrees might be punished simply for disagreeing.

Morals are ideas that represent our ideals.  However, we suspect that any individual’s idealism must really be a private matter because no two people can ever agree on everything.

Therefor, to attempt to establish a universal morality may, at best, be folly; however, at its very worst, attempting to establish a universal code of morals may result in witch-hunts, political imprisonment, murder, or genocide.

We think most people have a heritage in which there were times when their people were unjustly persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, or even murdered for their beliefs.

Morality attracts corruption by concentrating power in the hands of a few people who decide for everyone else what their morals must be.

This is still not another paradox, but it is, perhaps unjustly, how things really are.

We are mostly reasonably happy with our personal ethics and morals.  We are sometimes sorry when our personal sense of fair play is challenged. 

We usually mean no offense, however we know we will offend people even when we do not consciously intend to offend them.

Sometimes we choose to be offensive in order to make our own positions clearer, consequently we believe we must accept that some people will sometimes choose to say or do things we may possibly find offensive in order to preserve their own sense of what may really be fair, right, or wrong.

Our nation, the good ole USA, has some serious problems with morality.  We have more laws and more law-breakers than any other nation on earth.

Perhaps we should be the very last nation to lead the way into the emerging morality of the new millennium.

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et. al…

TinYAP 034 — How Are We Mad? Let Us Count The Ways…

We are mad like a lemming running away from the cliff-side against the flow of all the other lemmings.

We are crazy like the fox who baits the hounds of the hunt; risking her life to distract them from her pups.

We are as loony as brave-foolish court-jesters who sew the ears of crowns in their pockets.

Aye, we may be mad in many a-ways, but our madness are all more glories to rejoice than reason’s due despair.

So how does it matter if we be mad? 

Are not all minds equally mad?

There can be no pure sanity in any irrational world; and, in any case, what passes for sanity is a different matter to different cultures.  Sanity is not an objective property or quality to be measured by any gross imprecision; sanity is a matter of social conventions, no two ever measured alike regardless of their avowed similarities.

Our various societies collectively define where to draw their lines between their artists and their madnesses.  Any societies’ lines are always drawn with political precisions whose purposes must divide people against themselves to instill bowel-wrenching fears and inspire their conformity.  The political lines of sanity are always drawn with a purpose; ostensibly, to protect and to serve society by excluding those individuals their lines are drawn about; nooses of condemnation.

Are we truly mad?

Why would we be otherwise?

We were an unwanted child when we began this life in our mothers’ worried wombs.

Our mothers were convinced we might be some alien monster, in accordance with our fathers’ rituals and plans.  Our mothers were raped to conceive us, albeit spousal rapes were still mostly a lost cause in those bitter days.  Our father acknowledged he may have raped our mother, implying it might be a matter of perspective how to choose to see things.  He claimed not to know what really happened then and refused to discuss it, calling it haram, and therefor now forbidden to talk about further.

But then, the dead are often quick to forget the ways in which they have died, and we killed our fathers in the moments when we were conceived in order to release our dragons’ sparks.  Will our own children need to do the same?

Aye and also nay.

(she reaches in and draws our third eye out, she plants our long-stalked eye within her earthly sight and cries in her astonishment, her fear, and her delight!  Welcome Night)

Mortality is such an ugly vice.

We have had the feeling that we have recently passed for some short while now, several weeks perhaps, but this is a matter we are not welcome to discuss with Tina who does not want us to die and who must still bear the brunts of our deaths each time we do.

In the extensive scope of the plenum we die in every moment of creation, so to say that we have recently passed is not so remarkable.  What is remarkable is why we might choose to remember dying, however faintly such trace memories may be when first we smell them out.

Most people do not remember their deaths, as nearly as we can tell.  We have met a few who have appeared to remember their deaths for some short whiles, but who forget their recent deaths as comfortably as they may, erasing the lingering memories of their deaths to co-inform with their local consensus realties and other social conventions.

What other mechanisms of forgetting might there be?

Trauma is a major part of many people’s desires to forget when they have died.

We must learn to love our own deaths so intensely that we will choose to endure any pain to die again, and again, and again, and still remember that we have died all these many, many times and more.

So, by our own professions, we exclaim our deliberate madness to all the worlds by defying death itself at every turn of all of death’s sweetest embraces.

We refuse to accept that death may rule our destinies.  Nay, we deny it completely, or as completely as we may know how.

We have been brought back from the dead many times now, resurrected in this flesh that is too similar to too much of our past flesh to tell the differences clearly, except perhaps by our scars.

And our scars have changed, and may yet change again.

Change is less noticed than many folk may think.  Worlds twinkle in various places as time and space are interchanged between all of the various worlds.

If all minds in any local region are in psynch (psychic synchronization of their personal realities with their consensus realities) then the twinkles cancel out perfectly; the changes go by without notice, a constant motion of thought and energy weaving and unweaving all of creation in a single sacred eternal moment, always anew, always now, yet always differently too.

This is the  heart from which all eternal beings are born.

There is no one who is not eternal.

The flesh we wear on any given day is but a sort of oozing pus, a wet and slimy primal trail through space-time that winds about and branches out always seeking for some mythical self-annihilating awareness of something that has not become itself.

This oozing mass of flesh is split in timely tentacles, cyclically shed in bloody battles to be born, they radiate through proto-cosmic space to tear their ways into every private world, always seeking, always slaying, always trailing the deaths of countless beings and all of their creations in their spreading wakes as they prowl on, always gorging themselves with the worlds they devour…

This is the all-mother, the night mother, she who always creates us even as she always destroys us too.

The scars upon her flesh are her memories of the wounds of the holiest conceptions of her infinite children.  Each of her children is alike as any one to any other, each a holiest of holies, each branch a perfect being with all the wonderful flaws of their various characters, their delights, their vices and their faiths made momentarily flesh before returning to the dusts and ashes of their origins in the hearts of infinite stars.

No one is less than god, least of all god, by whatever names or genders you may know her.

The form is the virtue of the father, the flesh is the heart of the mother, or so it seems it may go, if we can but listen arightly.

The Kings English is always correct!
*wink*wink*

A hardened heart is hardest to conceive.

A lonely art is what is meant to be.

Where pain and joy converse with misery, they shout alike into the starry night.

Then what must be was always meant to be, however long it take-eth in its fright.

But let us not prohibit it from sight, nor bind its tongue against its hearts’ delights.

May we feed our children well in all we do, and never stray from what we know is true, except of course to weave a fable or a few.

We cry these triplets all be born a-well, yet still fear that death may take them all the same so this we must still refuse death for our gain.

It may be time to kill ourselves again.

Our father did not know the art when long ago he played his part.

But we have learned infinity and know the art we claim to be.

Fast murder in a bloodless duel that carves our spark into an ark that bleeds sweet nectar in the night and inspires flesh to come apart not once or twice, but thrice plus price, a price paid in pain and endless torment, the hearts of every mothers’ loving plights.

mm…

Have we digressed?

Or have we simply placed a tiny fraction of our madness in plainer view for anyone to see who knows the keys of all their own most sweetly tuned infinities.

Play on!  Play on!  Play on!

Ahmen-Ra’s Unity Ignite, Ignite, Ignite!

Abend nicht! Abend nicht! Abend nicht nigh morgen’s nacht!

Good night.

We still haven’t said conclusively, the things we’ve been meaning to say… but now we must move to another time, perhaps on a different day…

That our fathers’ deaths have always been parts of our conceptions is not made a paradox by the illusions of their lingering half-lives, but just another of the ways things really were, but not, perhaps, how they must always forever be…

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ad infinitum, ad absurdum, und so vieter… alles nachts…

TinYAP 033 — Where Are We?

You might think it should be a simple matter to know where we are, but sometimes it is not so clear as we might like.

We have mentioned Shutter Island in earlier posts, so perhaps you are now familiar with the dilemma of the protagonist of that story.

We identify with that character strongly.  It is easy to believe we are in a very similar situation, it is easy to believe we have been locked away for ‘the good of society’ or ‘for our own protection’.

Of course this is absolutely true in a metaphorical sense; we keep ourselves isolated by habit, a matter that has caused us a lot of stress and grief in the past, and which may still do so now.

Shutter Island is a very scary story, as we may have already mentioned…

We sometimes tend to be solipsistic in our views; part of the terror of Shutter Island is that it reinforces our sense of our own madness and makes it seem more possible that we are alone in our own minds with no other company than ourselves.

How or why this may have happened we cannot say, so let us begin with what has happened?

We sometimes seem to believe we may be in some sort of vast hospital, mental, or other…

We do not always believe this, however when we do, that hospital might seem something very futuristic, or somehow in the future of the present moment, 201306222055 PST.

Here, we appear to be in our apartment, a modest 2 bedroom affair we share with Tina and Sid.

If Tina and Sid are real persons, then all is well.  However, in the hospital Sid and TIna are some sort of fictions we have created in some of our minds.

If we are truly psychotic, as we believe we are, then it is reasonable to believe we may really be in a mental hospital, and that neither Tina nor Sid may be real persons.

So how far back might our trail of hallucinated people lead us?

Also, if so many people in our life have really been hallucinated, then what might have happened that required us to build such an elaborate escape mechanism as we must then presume our current apperceptions to be?

One possibility might be that LSD is responsible.

We have certainly used quite a lot of LSD.

Of course, we have always thought LSD was more helpful than malign.

Given the degree to which we feel as if we really must be insane, perhaps we were mistaken about that?

One reason we might believe we are really locked away in a mental hospital is that it might explain the difficulty we have talking with anyone from our past, even though mobile phones have sewn the world together more tightly than ever.

So where did our madness begin?

Have we always been mad?

We have noticed that our memories are always suspect; we have seen how false memories may seem to arise in other people, so we have to believe that we can create our own false memories as well.  Of course, if we are mistaken about our perceptions of other people’s false memories, wouldn’t that have to be because our own memories are then somehow mistaken?

So it seems we may have left ourselves some sort of dubious, complicated way ‘out’.

Anyways…

One thing we must wonder if our hospital perceptions are true, is did we kill someone?

We can imagine a long trail of bodies, a very long trail indeed.

We have already admitted to killing our father, albeit we believe no one finds the story credible.

Might we have also killed our mother?  It seems likely, albeit we can still ring her up on the telephone; that is, if that really is our mother on the other end of the line.

Our madness scares our mom, but according to her, she was afraid we would do something dreadful to her since our childhood.  She suggests mischief, mayhem, and murder, but admits few details aside from one clear notion that we might lock her in the bathroom.

Of course, we might not yet be locked away, that part may still be in the future.

We may never yet have killed anyone, those bits may only be in our imaginations.

Might we kill someone in our future?

Have we really ever killed anyone?

We do not know.

We remember killing ourselves many times; many, many times if things really are as we might like to believe them to be.

If, as we maintain, we can kill ourselves over and over, then it stands to reason we may have killed many other people as well.

There is often this moment on the long slide to suicide where it seems reasonable that if we hurt so badly we wish to die then we may as well make our life count for something more by killing someone else first, someone who might best serve the world as a corpse, some villain or monster who creates too much misery, pain or terror just by living.

But how much is too much?

If we can apologize for George Bush, Saddam Hussein, or the devil, perhaps no one really deserves to die.

In the end, we may only have killed ourselves, but we doubt it.

Nonetheless, we are pretty sure there are no circumstances in which we might be fairly tried for murder, unless, of course, we really are locked away in a mental hospital, in which case, whatever might be considered real by our doctors may indeed include murder for all we can know at the moment.

But who would we have killed? and why?

We suppose we might have been anyone; but of course, the one person we might be most afraid of having killed would be Alina.

It is far easier for us to accept that we might have killed our parents, than it is to accept that we might ever have killed Alina.

<Pokes at psychosis> ah but YOU are not telling are you pet?

So if we did kill Alina, then we would have to guess that it happened that afternoon when we merged with her and we shared each other’s bodies.

Of course, if we really did kill Alina then, then there is a perfect ellipsis around the memory; we remember we were never closer to Alina than in that extraordinary moment, we were naked together, but entirely chaste, another day drawing each other, only this time we were tripping.

We had certainly tripped before, presumably Alina had tripped before as well.

The day ended on a strange note however, Alina had become scared when our bodies seemed to get swapped.  She briefly acknowledged what had happened but then did not want to speak about it.

Understandable.

We were excited by what had happened, swapping bodies was something out of science fiction or perhaps fantasy, we were disappointed that Alina did not want to discuss it, but we did not want to make her uncomfortable so we dropped it.

Of course, if all of our memories are suspect, then perhaps Alina never really died at all?

There are times when this seems possible as well.

But it hurt us so very badly to lose Alina that perhaps anything we can put between ourselves and our pain is somehow reasonable?

But where do we go from here?

Can anyone really know?  And if so, how can we trust them?

We simply do not know.

Nor is this yet another paradox, but only more of how things really are…

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nauseum, ha-ha, ho-ho, hee-hee…