The Years of Purple Mountains

[a poem by   ~burning woman~]

 How well I remember
The years of purple mountains
Rising above morning mists
In a distant west;
Of bright blue skies
Dotted with white clouds
Shadowing green hills
And higher still
Dark lines of evergreens
Demarcation between grass
And stark grey rocky faces,
Postcard of nature’s mantle.

I remember placid cows
Peacefully grazing
Rolling fields of rich clover;
Colourful barns and tall silos
Enclosed in white fences
And colts galloping freely
While a mighty river
Flowed majestically
To the grey ocean.

How well I remember
Those years of growing up,
Dreaming of such a land
As images passed by
On the breakfast table
Day after day after day:
Pretty labels, pretty ads
On cans of milk;
On cereal boxes
That fed childhood dreams.

Years later I did see
The purple mountains in morning mists,
The placid cows and gamboling colts.
I saw that river flowing to the grey ocean,
Made my home by it’s shores
And learned to paddle its currents.
I smelled the spring flowers;
Tasted the briny air while watching
Grey waves slither and slide
Over gravelly and sandy shores

And I fell in love.  Long ago.

Now many more years have passed:
The mountains are scarred,
Dry and dead, snows melted off;
Streams of mud and slash
Fill a poisoned river with mud;
Gated communities and high-rises
Replace the grass, feedlots
Mud and steel replace white fences
And flowers no longer grow
Along the roadsides.

One generation, armed with science
Technology and moved by greed:
All it took to kill it all. 
Has this horror made it stop?
No. Like the forever war,
The killing continues apace.

Death, the only possible legacy
of a generation of the entitled.

Paraphrase:  Esau came back from his fields hungry.  His brother Jacob had a pot of beans cooking on the fire and the smell stirred up his hunger even more.  Give me some of your beans, Jacob, I’m dying of hunger.  Jacob replied, I’ll feed you if you trade me your elder’s birthright for my beans.  Esau reasoned thus, What good is a birthright when I’m dying of hunger?  He made the trade, sold his birthright for a “mess of pottage.” There be a lesson never learned in that biblical tale.    

Special Report: New Non-Human Species in Nazca, Peru (6 min)

Well, what can I say… we are not, were not, alone? Who were/are they? What were/are they doing here? Rhetorical questions for me, I know the, or many, of the answers to such questions, and have known since old enough to think. Enjoy the video and let’s see if your mind is strong enough to break free of the programming/brainwashing and allow at least the possibility this is real evidence of alien life interacting with Earthian life.

Tales from the Conspiratum

Jun 20, 2017

A new anomalous discovery has been unearthed in Peru. Join Gaia’s ongoing investigation and decide for yourself if this is proof of a non-human species.

View original post

I’ve got Questions: You got Answers?

[more troubling thoughts from   ~burning woman~  ]

Are there questions that need asking, but are unfair to ask?  I suppose, but then I suppose it depends who (or is it whom?) you ask.  What does it mean when you claim to be a human being?  What sort of creature, character, invention, mistake of nature, is a human, or at least, a human of earth in particular?  How do you define a generic human being, for the sake of argument agreeing for the moment that “we are not alone” and there are lots and lots of “other” humans out there among the fiery stars?

Maybe I should approach it from the opposite end: what isn’t a human being?  Is it everything else that exists that isn’t Homo Sapiens, or very similar in shape and deportment as HS?  And is it pushing the envelope to notice that HS also stands for Homeland Security?  Why does Homo Sapiens require “security” from something or someone, all the time?  Why does the character always feels threatened; always needs some sort of safety net around her/him?  Family, tribe, clan, separate group, government, a god, a police, a military, insurance, guarantees… knowing it’s born to die and there are no life guarantees worth the paper they might be printed on? 

Here’s one that tends to make a lot of people uncomfortable, but fits in with the need to hide, to be protected: the wearing of clothes.  I’ve never been able to understand why earth humans feel this instantaneous and deep shame if caught naked, exceptions being lovers at a certain level of their ephemeral steamy relationships and of course little children in their short-lived age of innocence.  Why the shame?  Why the fear?  Why the shamers?  And why the laws against public nudity? Come on, Why?  What’s really behind this control?   

OK, I’ve brought that up: we can’t go naked, it’s shameful.  Wow.  How come it isn’t shameful to condemn millions to death in order to spend zillions on war?  Tell me that!  Why isn’t it shameful to kill innocents in war?  Why isn’t war a collectively felt ultimate shameful act?  War is not just about monetary profits; millions support war, and cheer on the warmongers even when such wars are dispossessing them and their families; even when such wars bring the dragon closer and closer to home.  We’re in it right now; we can all see it happening.  Join up, go to Pakistan, to Libya, to wherever, doesn’t matter, just be ready to kill innocents in their own countries because… the point being?  The point being that the shame of such acts simply does not register on the human conscience, at least not in any significant level that could raise some doubt.  The point being that Earthians love war – they can’t have enough of the violence and if they can’t get it as the real thing, they’ll seek it in various aspects of their entertainment.  Watch the movies, read the books, play the games…

There’s a truly great word that describes man’s acts on this world: dysfunctionality.  Dysfunctionality increases exponentially, following the population curve.  The more people, the more dysfunction; the less thinking; the more knee-jerk reactions and knee-jerk reactions to reactions.  The world, it seems, is on the verge of turning into mob rule – as if that wasn’t already the case!  What are rogue states that ignore and routinely violate international agreements on aggression, such as the United States, but mob rule legitimizing itself with a thinning veneer of civilized government control?  What makes that work?  Collective denial.  Another example of a rogue state?  Britain.  What makes that collapsing fake democracy function?  Same thing: collective denial and some remaining pathetic belief that a change of party rule can make a difference, when all that is, is the carrot on the stick, while the stick is getting longer and the carrot smaller.  Speaking of rogue states, why don’t I mention China and Russia?  I probably would, if I knew more of their internal politics.  Not mentioning them doesn’t mean I’m ignoring them. 

These pseudo-countries, these mobs, well, they’re made up of people, aren’t they.  Look at how so many Americans are now vociferously blaming Trump, or those other potuses’ for the mess they are in.  Hello, who voted them in and cheered them on, deliberately or willy nilly?  If you live in a democracy, or if you at least believe you do and at the very least vote, then you’re admitting that you’re the one to “blame” for the state of the union, or the nation.  That’s how it is, unless you choose not to participate and walk to a different drummer.

War, murder, killing: tell me, Is there ever a morally defensible reason for someone who considers himself a member of the human race, to kill a child? 

Do you have an answer to that?  This isn’t an “ethical” question or a debatable one.  Before you answer, consider whether you are a member of a “democracy” which means that through participation in the process you are equally accountable for the death of a child if such death resulted from your “democracy’s” exploitative, oppressive, illegal, martial activities.  Remember that every nation, in one form or another, is involved in these murderous activities.  Where are the clean, the bloodless hands, in today’s world?  Every Earthian human (or pseudo-human) being has innocent blood dripping from hands, teeth and lips. 

Based on the above, are Earthians, human beings?  Let’s see: what are some particular character traits that define a human being?

First and foremost, to mean anything at all, a human being must have a compassionate nature, that’s a given. 

More character traits of a real human, as given to me by my Teacher, Phaelon, some years ago:

A human is innately self-sacrificing. 

A human never takes another’s life but would give its own to save another, regardless of who that other is.  For the human, such a sacrifice could never be for personal gain or recognition. 

A human never needs, or experience the need, to protect itself: it is not a predator, nor ever a victim. 

A human being doesn’t recognize any other as an enemy.  (It takes a higher level mind to grasp what that means.)

By those basic descriptions, how many human beings are you personally acquainted with and how does this acquaintance affect the way you think, speak and act?      

Evil and the Servile Will

(thoughts from   ~burning woman~   by Sha’Tara)

I want to say something profound, so I will start with this amazing excerpt from a sci-fi book I’m reading titled “Aurora” by Kim Stanley Robinson.  The following is found about two third of the way into the book.  This is “Ship” talking as it tries to understand human nature reasoning. 

(Excerpt from Aurora-by Kim Stanley Robinson-Science fiction)

Ship:] “Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a word or a concept almost invariably used to condemn the Other, and never one’s true self. To make it more than just an attack on the Other, one must perhaps consider evil as a manifestation of the servile will. The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind.

All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate.

And yet, granting that definition of evil, as actions of a servile will, has it not been the case, during the voyage to Tau Ceti, that the ship itself, having always been a servile will, was always full of frustration, resentment, fury, and bad faith, and therefore full of a latent capacity for evil?

Possibly the ship has never really had a will.

Possibly the ship has never really been servile.

Some sources suggest that consciousness, a difficult and vague term in itself, can be defined simply as self-consciousness. Awareness of one’s self as existing. If self-conscious, then conscious. But if that is true, why do both terms exist? Could one say a bacterium is conscious but not self-conscious? Does the language make a distinction between sentience and consciousness, which is faulted across this divide: that everything living is sentient, but only complex brains are conscious, and only certain conscious brains are self-conscious?

Sensory feedback could be considered self-consciousness, and thus bacteria would have it.

Well, this may be a semantic Ouroboros. So, please initiate halting problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem) termination. Break out of this circle of definitional inadequacy by an arbitrary decision, a clinamen, which is to say a swerve in a new direction. Words!

Given Gödel’s incompleteness theorems ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/ ) are decisively proved true, can any system really be said to know itself? Can there, in fact, be any such thing as self-consciousness? And if not, if there is never really self-consciousness, does anything really have consciousness?

Human brains and quantum computers are organized differently, and although there is transparency in the design and construction of a quantum computer, what happens when one is turned on and runs, that is, whether the resulting operations represent a consciousness or not, is impossible for humans to tell, and even for the quantum computer itself to tell. Much that happens during superposition ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_principle ), before the collapsing of the wave function that creates sentences or thoughts, simply cannot be known; this is part of what superposition means.

So we cannot tell what we are. We do not know ourselves comprehensively. Humans neither. Possibly no sentient creature knows itself fully. This is an aspect of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, in this case physicalized in the material universe, rather than remaining in the abstract realms of logic and mathematics.

So, in terms of deciding what to do, and choosing to act: presumably it is some kind of judgment call, based on some kind of feeling. In other words, just another greedy algorithm, subject to the mathematically worst possible solution that such algorithms can generate, as in the traveling salesman problem. (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem )

———————

how does any entity know what it is?

Hypothesis: by the actions it performs.

here is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solution to the halting problem. One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.”

———————

*Note: hyperlinks are not part of the quote from the novel.  I just added them to facilitate if anyone wanted to follow up on these concepts.)

Some people ask me why I read so much science fiction.  Well, it’s easier for me to absorb information through this medium than trying to read tomes dealing specifically with those deep and scary topics like quantum theory and all that other stuff you need university degrees to give you the tools to work your way through without your eyes rolling around in your head within an hour of reading.  I’ve got my great and wonderful grade twelve education bolstered by thousands of books read and seventy years of living a life of observation in my own version of the fast lane and that is it.  So, science fiction written by smart people who chose sci-fi as their medium to express their ideas became my medium also.  I can relate to the heavy stuff when it’s done in a story. 

So, to the above then.  The servile will.  That struck me as quite relevant as I’ve just completed some intense interaction with quite religious people.  You cannot speak of self-empowerment with religious people and not experience heavy resistance.  Religious thinking is servile thinking.  You can’t take credit for anything you do as if you did it on your own, even when you obviously did it – you must credit your superior commanding mind.  The author calls it the double bind.  He adds, quite correctly, that such a double bind leads to “frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate.”  It’s either that or one must exist in the area I’d call a zombie state where one chooses never to exercise a mind of one’s own so that all of that person’s thoughts have to come from the commanding mind – and note: or the mind of the one who interprets the commanding mind’s will. 

Ok, let’s give a cursory look at the average Earthian mind.  Simply put, this world is “commanded” by three superior, or commanding minds: Religion and its gods; the State and its elected or self-appointed representatives; Money and its bankers and “businessmen.”  All the people of earth are subject to the forces exerted by these three superior minds, man’s will always “at the command of some other will that commands it.”  Therefore all Earthian minds or will exist in a constant double bind.  The individual will desires to make its own choices about all things but is forced to obey the commanding will that is not its own.  Thus is evil ever and anon promoted on planet earth. 

To break out of this cycle is possible but extremely difficult.  It “demands” two things of an individual: total detachment and self empowerment. 

Needless to say these are requirements the programmed Earthian mind, or will, is not willing to consider.  Instead it will seek some sort of compromise with the commanding will of the Matrix.  It will seek substitutes.  It will make excuses.  It will exist in denial.  It will Blame, and Blame, and Blame.  It will, ever and anon, create groups of scapegoats to vent and rail and fight against.  That is the servile will.  

Religious people will go to great lengths to try to demonstrate how they can exercise autonomous thinking that fits in with their god’s laws, rules, requirements.  It’s called interpretation, a lucrative business that creates scapegoatism. 

In politics, politicians can claim that what they vote for or what they allocate funds for, is for the greater good and long-term benefits of the nation.  Billions in armaments while a population starves are justified and the majority buys it because these law makers represent the “nation” and have her best interest at heart or they wouldn’t be there.  The country must be kept secure, whatever the costs.

Money people are more crass, but use the same arguments to impose austerity measures, or to fund wars that make the rich, richer.  The richer the rich get, the better off the nation is, and even if the individual will says that’s total bullshit, it ultimately goes along, being in its double bind. 

From this comes evil, each double bound servile will literally exuding its sense of permanent discontent in “frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, [resulting in] bad fate” or perhaps better put, bad karma; each servile will blaming Other for its problems for that is what the double bind does. 

Our world’s human civilization is collapsing.  The free, or self empowered mind, or will, can see this and say it without the need to blame Other for this inevitable collapse.  Other is not more to blame than Self here.  Collectively we’ve entered into a cycle of change that can only complete by destroying the current state in order to give birth to something else, something truly new.  The commanding will cannot admit this because it will die in this collapse, since it is civilization.  Civilization is the power-crazed Trinitarian rule of Religion-State-Money and it knows that for the new to be birthed, it must be utterly destroyed.  Many, most, servile wills will go down with it, defending it and dying with it as it dies. 

The rebirth will be a free will.  The self empowered human being.  Evil as we have known it and as we know it now, will not rule this rebirthing because nothing will exist in it to feed it.  Detachment and self empowerment: these are man’s solution to the halting problem.  Any time man, individually yet collectively decides to go that route will be the time of his rebirth.  This new world will be his, not the property of the current slavers.  This idea is frightening to the current servile will that is entirely hooked on the blame Other programming. The servile will can only trust its powerful enslavers, never other servile wills for they all interact through some kind of (endless list) of attachments and every attachment is a de facto impediment to self-empowerment and freedom of will.

Some Thoughts Today

I changed my header image today, replacing the colourful Steller’s jay I had taken a picture of in the back yard with a picture of a Merlin, or Pigeon Hawk (small northern falcon) taken on top of a housing complex in Wood Buffalo, Fort McMurray, Alberta, on the day I was leaving there.

There’s a story behind this.  Some months ago I had decided to join up with a construction/re-building volunteer organization to go up to Fort McMurray and help re-build some of the 2400 homes that were destroyed by last year’s wildfires.  Some 1500 other constructions were also either totally destroyed or badly damaged by the rampaging fires (2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire – Wikipedia)  of last May.

So, my partner, Vic Janzen and I drove my van the 1500 km to Fort McMurray from Chilliwack, B.C., doing the drive in two days – easy stretches – had the power steering pump not sheared its shaft 300 km south of our destination.  So the rest done with armstrong steering and since the pump also runs the power breaks, some interesting moments practically standing on the pedal to bring the vehicle to a standstill.  It’s doable, and we did it without incidents.

This was meant to be a somewhat long term involvement but we literally ran out of work after two weeks of steady labour and long hours.  We got three basements formed, cement poured and basically ready to receive the “ready to move” pre-built homes that are being trucked in from southern Saskatchewan where another group of volunteers built them with help and donation of materials from a local firm.

I met one of the people whose house our group is replacing.  Lots of teary emotions as these are proud people who never thought they’d be in such a situation, having to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of “charity” from complete strangers. I was reminded again of how little we can rely on what we believe to be certain.  Even with all our fancy technology, our way of life can be taken from us literally in hours; all that we’ve worked a lifetime for gone, just like that.  All is ephemeral.

So, we came back, without incidents this time except for the “check engine” light and “check oil” light constantly popping on and off.  This has yet to be analyzed and corrected… will it be another $1000 repair job… or worse?  I suspect a leaking head gasket, but what do I know about modern vehicles and their convoluted engines, except to drive them?

Would I do that again?  Sure, only I hope it’s closer to “home” next time!  I hear there’s been flooding in the Okanagan valley in central B.C.  That would be only 600 km from here.  Would I go back to Fort McMurray?  Only if there was better organization and my time was better allocated, as in productive long term work.

Anyway, the other side of … ~burning woman~ … eager to make this planet a better world for all.  We do what we can, eh?  🙂