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Mendo Island Journal — Timely. Useful. Sometimes Cranky.
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ABOUT UB
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Mendocino Country & Environs
North California
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Dave Smith ~ Publisher/Curator -
MENDO ISLAND→
...still small enough
to get our arms around...
To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” ~ Raymond Williams
Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated... There is so much artificial and plastic crap around, the human spirit yearns for the homespun and the real. ~Gene Logsdon→
I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann
What is not worth doing, is not worth doing well. ~Abraham Maslow→
Society is like a stew: If you don't stir it up every now and then, the scum rises to the top.~Edward Abbey
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller→
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.~Herman Melville
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. ~Wendell Berry→
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I sang as one / Who on a tilting deck sings / To keep men's courage up, though the wave hangs / That shall cut off their sun. ~C. Day LewisAll national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. ~Thomas Paine
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Of course I love George, miss him terribly as one of the very few bright lights in my sky, but, again, taking what George says superficially can lead to all the wrong sorts of conclusions. What George is talking about is a sort of religion, what I call juvenile religion. It is dominant in our time because, under the influence of large scale hierarchical societies, most grown ups remain psychologically immature throughout their lives and therefore cleve to immature religious practice and belief. There really are very few situations in our society where an actual, fully formed adult person with fully developed mental capacities for critical thinking and personal insight, can openly function as adults. Organizations expel these people early in their careers. They also replace those exercising control over others, the natural place for the fully formed adult, with sociopathic individuals who are incapable of spiritual development, but are preemenent competators.
The infantile level of spirituality sees the parent and other grown ups in the circle of dependency as Gods. Then, amazingly early in life, small children realize their mistake and abandon the flawed and unreliable grownups as God figures and substitute an imaginary super parent as God. It helps the mind of a small child to believe that there is a source of supreme power that is interested in their survival. Modern societies depend on the bulk of people being fixated at this level of development. More dangerous yet are those people who become fixated at the early adolescent stage where God is replaced by the urge to impregnate and get impregnated. This is the stage where Mammon becomes a focus. It is not so much that the person fixated at this early stage as the fact that nothing gets the girls like flashing signs of wealth and power. These people are very useful to the system of coercive hierarchy because, unlike those at earlier stages of developmental arrest (watch Arrested Development for graphic depictions) they can be very easily and usefully manipulated by trivial rewards of sex, drugs and money. These are the middle level managers of the system of oppression. This stage of development is intensely egocentric and therefore vulnerable to trickery and deceit through flattery and false promises. Now ordinarily there would be a level of chronologically appropriate adult people to watch over and protect those who’s development is not yet complete. Hierarchical coercive societies, however, shun these appropriately developed folks and systematically prevents them from assuming their biological role. Consequently people who find themselves in this situation are frequently relatively socially isolated. They seek independent lives in a society that worships dependency. Those who somehow make it to true adulthood in spite of all the pitfalls our culture sets in place to delay and destroy human potential, tend to find themselves ejected from the structures of modern society. Actual reasonable people are not welcome in hierarchies. They disrupt the process of subjugation and, unless they hide, are seen as potential trouble makers, which they are from the point of view of a sick society. Their concept of God, if they have one, tends to be highly abstract and based in fundamental ethical and moral principles. So they become George Carlin, or tradesmen with independent businesses and sometimes they become parents.
In the meantime it makes little sense to try to take developmentally appropriate concepts of God away from folks stuck at an immature level of development. When they succeed in continuing down their developmental pathway they will seek out more mature outlets for their sense of awe. Putting grown up clothes on a child does not make that child a grown up. Putting the emotionally and mentally delayed into sophisticated, fully mature, forms of worship is not going to make them mature. Maturity comes first, then mature choices come naturally.
So oddly, I have no problem imagining worshiping with George. Whether it is the Sun or merely Life Itself, mature people really don’t take themselves seriously enough to take their imaginings of God seriously. It is something that Mind does spontaneously after all. Domesticating our minds to get along with the rest of ourselves and other beings is an early, and necessary, goal in spiritual seeking. Or as Fritz Perls, as good an example of an actual fully developed human I can think of, said, “A mind is a terrible thing. Waste it.”
Trying to find God through logical reasoning makes as much sense as shutting off all the sources of light in a room so you can search for something lost. To the persistent aggravation of the overeducated, logic has noting to do with the Spirit, with spiritual growth, and certainly not in verbal arguments about the existence of God, as if such an imagined supreme being would care what we think.
If you would like to be saved from stupidity then I suggest calming down and growing up, putting aside the things of childhood and fully embracing the full development your chronological age.
Fundamental to this is a perspective about the roles of the various ages. The way I put it is: First we get to get, then we give to get, and finally, in our full adulthood, we get to give. Happiness seems to be dependent on staying on track with this progression.
ybera