Wednesday 8 September 2010

Beware the don't know brigade

The thing that strikes me about the BBC article linked from the title is that it demonstrates a trick or liability of the mind. First presume you know something - then ask questions based on those presumptions. This runs like a filter - as only answers that fit the preconditioned framework are allowed. These answers in turn are seen to validate the presumptions of the question framer - with a sense that is a legitimate question.

Knowing what question to ask is perhaps the beginning of wisdom - and it can only arise from a mind that isn't merely programmed into a personal or cultural bias - but is truly willing to listen, to not react from self certainties , but to listen rather than think. Thoughts, feelings or images may well then arise of themselves that are inspirational, helpful, practical - and which also communicate a sense of shared purpose rather than private gain or security.

A lack of meaningful relations is leading us into the ditch together - with the blind leading the blind. The first point of right relations is with oneself truly. To live on the basis of false presumptions is not to directly participate or connect with the presence of life  itself - but merely to have one's life usurped by thinking.
To ask and receive in any truly meaningful way requires firstly a relational trust. Relationship is involvement, not a model or rehearsal - and simply does not fit into formulaic intellectual frameworks.

The phrase 'thinking out of the box' comes to mind.
Life is forever beyond or out of the box - but humanity still tries to use the thoughts that speak from beyond the box - to prolong and perfect the impossible and tragic attempt to live inside the box.

I sense that much of what is being lived or acted out - is from a false or life denying basis. To wake up to life is to awaken at the heart and live from it . The alternative is to live out of the terms that the past dictates - out of a database.

The computing age is part of the form filling, data analysing mentality - and garbage in makes for garbage out.

Rather than listening to 'others' in such a limited and non relational way - listen to the heart and don't act without some movement of inspired purpose that can be lived out wholeheartedly.

What the world is lacking in is the vision and presence of inspiration. It will never come from analyzing data - though basic logistics are a suitable field for such tools.

The primary resources for fulfilment of our needs are ignored, un nurtured and if anything, suppressed and defended against. Not by the powers that be - but by the recycling in our mind of confusion - packaged as if it made some sort of sense - and defended against allowing sense to enter.

Sunday 5 September 2010

The value of nothing

If anyone desires sanity - and the peace that comes only from honesty - then they will have to reevaluate much more than financial and economic systems.
Everything that we presume real is brought into question - not in an irrational reaction or hysteria - but simply in a willingness to be honest.

Honesty allows the undoing of deception. Our so called human nature is like a program running that we pretend is in the other, in the banker, in the scoundrel. The qualities that we hate in ourselves are difficult to recognise and accept as within our mind. I don't say this to incite more of the blame mentality - but simply to look within and see - rather than to presume our own thoughts to be true and perceive only as these thoughts allow.

The curious thing that you would not expect - is that when you truly see the mechanism of a split mind 'working' as if against itself and yet dramatising a multiplicity of fantasy roles that provide a sense of oppositional existence and identity - you no longer identify it as your self.

You can say we all share in a deception that goes much deeper than hardly anyone will look - because we equate it with our life - our self - our protection and survival. But deception is destructive in that it uses all that is good, beautiful and true - to serve private ends.

The 'ego' or deceptive mind - is an immaculate defence system that thrives on being opposed - for that is its very nature: an oppositional will in a game of winners and losers.

We are living in a time of disintegration - where some of the subtler nature of our mind's activity is exposed and reflected in Our Face.

Thinking does not itself have a basis upon which to determine or ascertain either the nature of the problem - nor its solution. But true discernment and inspiration can use thought to communicate.

Nash was mistaken in assuming that a balance of our own and everybody else's interests leads to the best outcome - because his thoughts remained the property, and under the direction, of a self deception - a divorce of heart and mind - where mental derivatives substitute for true meaning.

Whatever we use as a derived meaning - becomes to its users a substitute for direct relationship with meaning itself - even though it may be full of the promise of what it represents and may initially be linked to real value.

What then is the meaning, the value, the purpose or function - of life?
As a lad I thought that if the answer were found it would make news.

Better to turn the world on its head that the truth be known.
There is no coin or currency of symbol or concept in this world that has not been degraded or adulterated by misuse. But let me say - if you are still here - that the meaning of life is already yours - but discarded. You are already all that life is - yet act out from a profound and desperate conviction that you are somehow life-orphaned - alien to love and must needs hide fear and shame with presentations of self-made identity. An identity born of confusion, struggle and loss.

We never were kicked out of eden - 'tis a will of our own thought asserted that kicks out love's direction.

Asking the blind to lead the blind results in falling in the ditch together. To regain an integrated wholeness or integrity of identity and experience, be willing to act out of the true heart - in which no self is asserted at the expense of another. How can you tell? The answer is proportionate to how honest you are willing to be with yourself.

This much I know - that we do not measure value with the world - but in the freedom and capacity to be unwithheld. For the withdrawal of value from relationship results in loss of the condition in which value is known and shared.

When the map blinds one from the actual terrain and binds one unto yet more devious mapping - put it down. Take a rest - let a true perspective rise in stillness.