On Intuition

As I see it (which could be wrong, but since it’s my best guess, I’m running with it) the main goal of spirituality is to develop a personal continuum of having the best thoughts to lead us to the best actions and give us the best feelings; a self-supporting system that will lead us through our lives in the best possible ways.  I am going to refer to this sense of internal and external lack of self-doubt as “intuition”.

This is a very difficult thing to write about, which is probably why I have chosen to undertake the project I’m working on now.  I’m not fully satisfied with anything I’ve read about it so far—and I’ve read a lot of stuff!—so I’m writing my own as best I can.

Intuition may not be the best word to use to describe the thing I’m trying to talk about, since what I really mean is something more like the flow-state that comes from doing what I love to do and being so fully sure and fully engaged that I can simply do/think/feel in a way that seems natural and effortless because I am doing/thinking/feeling with full commitment and certainty that what I am doing/thinking/feeling is right for me.

In nuts-and-bolts mechanical terms it is a deep sense of “all systems are online and at full power.”

The two basic challenges to writing anything meaningful about intuition are inherently formidable things to overcome because intuition—by the most accepted definition—is generally described as being beyond the realm of words and because most people who are familiar with intuition are fairly well-set in their ideas about it even though those ideas are difficult if not impossible to describe with words.

So what’s to be done if I should—perhaps ill-advisedly—want to say something about intuition?  What if I feel that it is very important to say something about intuition, not just as a way to communicate my thoughts, but also to use the process of writing to clarify my ideas for myself?

I know that I can’t really explain it logically, but maybe with some well-worked metaphor, I can at least give a feeling of what I mean to say.  Feelings are the real topic here after all.

“Always trust your first impressions” some people say.

“Always question your initial reactions” say others.

The fact is that there is no “one size fits all” approach to life.  We do our best to learn from experience, meaning that we save the memory of what was once a present moment experience in the hope that knowledge derived from that past experience will benefit us in the future.  We do the best we can to compare current experiences with similar situations from the past.  We do the best we can at making our plans for the future reflect what we have learned from the past.  The one thing we can never really do is be 100 percent certain that the events of the future will be consistent with what we have learned from the past.

Somewhere in here (I’ve chosen this spot somewhat randomly) there needs to be a very important word of caution.  The one thing that destroys proper intuition is the kind of internal certainty that makes us forget to pay attention to what is actually happening outside of ourselves coupled with the ego-itis (swelling of the sense of infallibility) that makes us think that we can know more than we actually are able to know.  We do the best we can and the rest is up to God/Nature/Fate/Random Chance/the omnipresent probability that everything will change in the very next moment.

Will there be a day tomorrow?  We can’t really know.  We can know that there is a day today and that yesterday was a day and that all the days before that were days.  But tomorrow could be different and each of us finds our own way of coping with the uncertainty of the future.

Now, what did that last paragraph have to do with spirituality?  I’m not sure.  I just feel that it does.

To put it another way: as you read these lines, only the word currently in front of your eyes is a part of your present moment.  The parts you haven’t read yet are in your future (that is IF you stay interested long enough to keep reading) while the parts you’ve already read are in your past.  By the time you reach the end of this sentence the first words in it have become memories.  If we—we humans, that is—didn’t have the kinds of brains that are good at storing information, we wouldn’t be capable of making any sustained effort at anything.

Now suppose—by way of example—that I was the sort of writer who wrote incredibly long sentences wherein the first few phrases could be completely altered in meaning by the phrases at the far end of the sentence.  To make any sense of it, the initial phrases would have to be stored in your short-term memory without your having assigned any specific meanings to those phrases, since the full meaning of the sentence is not apparent until you reach the end.  Those initial phrases would have to temporarily be stored within your mind as something not within your immediate awareness.  By “immediate awareness” or “conscious thought”, I am referring to the just-barely-provable idea that the number of separate thoughts—mental objects—that can be actively within a person’s awareness is a very small number—perhaps only one—and that the mysterious-sounding realm of the subconscious mind is made up simply of all the thoughts, memories and bits of data that are not in your current active awareness, in other words MOST of the information in a human mind spends MOST of its time in the subconscious part of the mind.

Or maybe the classic “film-strip analogy” will be useful here: the conscious mind is like the screen of an old fashioned projector-type motion picture system.  At any given moment only one small bit of still-frame film is being projected onto the screen and the illusion of movement is created by the rapid succession from one frame to the next.  All of the film other than the image currently on the screen is sub (below the level of-) conscious awareness.  It is only after you’ve viewed the entire film that you are able to be aware of the movie as a whole thing—only because the content of the movie has become stored in the most remarkably effective, infinitely-adaptable information system ever: a human mind.

With that, perhaps you can get some sense of what I mean if I try to define intuition as a non-linear type of thought that is capable of drawing on all of the senses and all of the information in the mind with or without a strictly explainable pattern of logic.  Where some thoughts are more strictly based in a logical, linguistically-linked, left-brain type of thinking, intuitive “thought” (which is often experienced more as a feeling than a thought) is closer to a “whole mind” type of thinking.

When a person uses intuition—when a person uses a whole-mind way of “thinking”—literally everything within that person’s conscious AND sub-conscious awareness becomes part of the intuitive process.

I sometimes call it the “stockpot.”

Here’s a question to simmer: what’s in YOUR stockpot?

In many—and I’m tempted to say in ANY useful—system of spiritual growth, meditation is an important practice.  In the type of meditation I personally practice—there are many different types—I sit calmly, taking full, relaxed breaths and I allow any thought that I might have to come into my mind and then flow into any other thought without attaching any particular significance to any of my thoughts.  It is the process of learning not to be so overcome by the feelings that can become attached to thoughts that I feel the need to suppress or censor my mind.  Anyone who has practiced this type of meditation can tell you that uncomfortable thoughts will arise.  The meditator lets the thoughts come, looks at them passively, does not allow those thoughts to take control of his or her feelings or to interfere with the sense of peace and allowing that he or she is practicing.  The ongoing practice of this kind of meditation has the effect of cleansing the spirit and allowing the practitioner access to his or her whole-mind intuitive abilities; it teaches me to “trust” my ability to be a whole-mind thinker without fear of my own feelings.

That’s a nice thing.

In Christianity, one of the main principles is that of forgiveness and that is a very spiritually-beneficial thing.  Feelings of guilt can be very persistent and very destructive to a person’s overall view of the self and the world and can therefore suppress and lock up a lot of otherwise useful gray matter.

In simple terms, feeling bad about something can keep me from having any productive thoughts that are even remotely connected to the idea in question.  Suppose I have some uncomfortable feelings attached to my ideas about love or family or responsibility.  Will I be able to—with those feelings clouding my awareness—act in the best ways with regard to love, family and responsibility?

Any best result comes from a best effort and any best effort comes from full commitment.  Self doubt doesn’t bring a best effort.

It is easy to get sidetracked in writing about this stuff simply because it’s so wide-ranging and so central to so many convergent areas of study, but my purpose is to simplify, de-mystify and to assert that spiritual development is good for everyone regardless of belief-system or lack thereof.

Some people are capable of having a strong belief in a higher power that is able to purify the spirit to its core, while some are not able to fully believe that.  Spiritual development is available to both and for both—although the methods differ—it is a matter of regular practice.  Just to make sure all the bases are covered, I’d like to say that for people whose religious belief is strong and deep, the practice of religion is an effective path to spiritual growth and for people who have doubts about the truth of the religious path, non-religious methods applied with persistence and understanding are also an effective way to purify the spirit.

Returning to basics once again—because the last idea that I write here will be the one best remembered—we humans are beings who are constructed the way all beings of our type are: we have an inside and an outside and we have the ability to control—to some extent at least—what crosses the membrane that separates our inside from our outside.  Like a hologram or a fractal, I theorize that we as humans share an essential characteristic with our physical composition at a smaller level; that much of what is true of our cells is true of us as larger amalgamations of cells: that we seek to connect into a larger meta-organism that we call community, society or civilization and we make these connections to others at the points on our outer surfaces where it is possible for us to connect.  Thus it is quite literally true—as the song says—that:

We are many, but we are one…

But this is not a given.  We connect as whole beings into a greater whole only by our whole-self choice to connect.  We can choose to try—against what seems to be a law of Nature—to remain separate.

Our outer surfaces are literally covered with connection points; we present a surface of skin that feels, we have eyes to see, ears for hearing, noses and mouths to smell and taste, hands for reaching out and hearts/spirits to connect us through shared feelings.

When I am in the presence of another living being, I am separate, but separate with the hard-wired desire to somehow connect.  This is why I write: because of my physical/mental/spiritual instinct to connect through the sharing of my thoughts, feelings and experiences.

But writing is static.  Once written, it stays the same.  The living of a life, on the other hand, is a dynamic process that can make significant changes in any instant.

As it should.

And so—without an actual way of saying exactly what the logical, linear connections are—cells bind to other cells to form a stronger organism…bits of matter are drawn by the gravity of bigger clumps of matter, forming stars, planets, systems of spinning stars and planets…evolved creatures capable of thought are drawn to like-minded others of the same sort…electro-chemical  impulses travel through the brain, potentially capable of connecting any thought or feeling to any other, bringing the possibility of kind of entirely new ideas that we call “creative thought”…sub-atomic particles in quantum physics are uncertain and potentially “anywhere” and the uncertainty increases the potentiality in much the same way that not being too quick to jump to a conclusion can lead me to a greater understanding of what is actually in front of me at the moment.

Here.  Try this physical communication aid with me:  hold your arms out in front of yourself to form a circle, letting the tips of the fingers of one hand touch the fingertips of the other hand.  Notice that you can close this circle or leave it open.  Notice that these are arms that can enclose in an embrace and they can let go.  Notice that—to love another person—you will sometimes need to hold that person and sometimes you’ll need to let go.  Life is not static.  Every moment has choices.  The best choice in one moment may be different from the best choice in the next moment and may be different from the best choice in the moment just past.  Continual learning, continual growth and being continually aware are the basic elements of spirituality.

This article is not finished.  It will never be finished.  All that will ever happen is that I will decide for now that I have written enough for now; that it’s enough for some preliminary understanding.

Parting words for now: learn what you can, experience your experiences as fully as you are able, have a plan for where your steps will take you, then accept the place your feet land with each step.  Life will bring great joy and deep grief and everything in between.

Live it moment by moment as a carrier of love.

This is the gutter on the back of the house before I cleaned the maple seeds out.


Here’s a dove that was acting nervous while I was up there scooping stuff out of the gutter.


Here’s a shot of a small section of the gutter after cleaning…

Leaning on the ladder with the camera for a closer shot…

…and then a few minutes later…

This was part of yesterday’s “a day in the life”. Today I saw the mother gutter dove sitting on her nest, so everything is cool. The dove is an international symbol of peace and while I recognize the substantial difference between symbolic and actual peace, I still don’t want to hurt a widdle baby doveling.
And having recorded it for posterity, I can now get my mind out of the gutter.
Have a pheasant day.
I mean pleasant.Oy, birds on the brain…

…a week or so later: how quickly they grow up and leave the nest! Now he (? I really can’t tell a male dove from a female dove while they’re this young) hangs around the back porch and–discounting the ordinary and appropriate shyness of doves, especially baby ones–lets me take his picture.


This may be the happy ending of my dove/love story, but it’s a happy beginning for this little feather-ball.
As The Prophet might have said:
All we are saying,
Is give a species a chance…

In the springtime a middle-aged man’s thoughts often revolve around getting some yard work done.  When the man has a brain as strange as mine, even around-the-house chores can take on more meaning than is really conducive to getting any work done.

For example, every May the yard around my house is strewn with seeds from the five tall maple trees that surround the lot.  If I don’t pick them up while they’re seeds, they sink into the ground and soon become little maple trees.  Lots and lots of little maple trees.  It’s as though a corner lot in Chicago is trying to become a primeval maple forest.

While I’m picking up the seeds (they’re those helicopter-y things that drift kind of gently from the high tree-tops to deposit themselves on the soil without breaking apart. Quite an amazing natural adaptation) I can’t help but notice how much they resemble sperm cells, in form and in function; each is a packet of DNA with a tail to provide mobility.  One thing is looking for a place to grow into a maple tree and the other is looking for a place where it can grow into a mammal.  The sperm swims to an egg.  The seed floats to the soil: its version of a growth-habitat. 

But this is just my mind wandering while I’m doing yard work.  No biologists draw any connection between seeds and semen.  Life is diverse.  Plants and people actually have very little in common other than being living things, beginning as small bits of genetic material that need a place to grow, growing to be a renewed version of their parents, going on to reproduce in kind once they’ve reached maturity.  Um, That’s about it.  Oh, and plants and animals are each made up of cells.  But they’re different kinds of cells.

Other than that, humans have nothing whatsoever in common with the rest of life on earth.  We just happen to be living beings.

Right?

There’s a small photo story about a small adventure I had yesterday while I was picking up maple semen.

I mean SEEDS.

Trouble is, at this time I don’t know how to get photos to show full-size on this page and I’ll have to figure that out before the photo story can be posted here the way I want it to post. Maybe tomorrow…

Every day all over the world billions of human brains are having thoughts and some of those thoughts contain completely new ideas.  In the human tradition of verbal communication, ideas need words to explain,  describe and discuss them, so where there are new ideas, new words are needed.

In my ongoing effort to develop better communication, I offer this collection of syllables, all based on the phoneme “er” plus one letter, mainly as a way of showing how easy it can be to find the raw material with which to create new words.  I’d have started with an “aa+” series, but I don’t like the sound and feel of the aa+ syllables as much as I like the er+ series.

NOTE: A few er+ syllables are already being used as words or word-fragments.  These few are shown in bold. 

era (a time period, usually preceded by a word to define that period: “the________era” or followed by “…of_________” as in “the era of petroleum”.)

erb

erc

erd

ere (an old form found in old poetry and crossword puzzles meaning “before”) 

erd

erf

erg (a unit of measurement of energy)

erh

eri

erj

erk

erl

erm (a slang term sometimes used in English english. Equivalent to American english “uh”, “um”, etc.)

ern

ero

erp

erq(u)

err (this is a word, but your humble syllable-maker has no idea what it means)

ers

ert

eru

erv

erw

erx

ery (only used–if at all–in American Ebonics to mean “all”)

erz

Now that the method has been shown to be so fun and easy, feel free to make up your own! 

This will be my Spirituality 101 article.  I have several reasons for not calling it “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dealing with Emotions”, but that’s approximately what it is.

Step One: have a warped sense of humor so you can identify the absurdities in life and all commentaries about life, especially this one.

Everything that is alive feels.  I know, it’s kind of annoying sometimes and many people–especially male people–would often like to disregard the entire subject of feelings, but they’re standard equipment for living things. The more highly-developed the organism, the more complex the feelings–because feelings are a direct development of sensory equipment.  If you can sense, you will feel.  That’s just how it goes.  I don’t make the rules; I just know that it doesn’t make much sense to try to break some of the rules, this one in particular.  Feelings are part of senses and senses tell you about your surroundings and good information about your surroundings brings a lot of survival benefits that increase along with your skill-level in using your senses and understanding your feelings.

It is actually so simple that it’s kind of difficult to explain.  Lucky for you, you found a blog about feelings and their connection to spirituality that is being written by a plumber.  Religionists, philosophers and psychiatrists make such a big complicated mess of these relatively simple matters that it’s no wonder people don’t understand the subject very well.

The most complicated part involves a rudimentary understanding of a couple of common physical laws: energy is potential to do work; energy changes forms but isn’t really created or destroyed; and living things are natural batteries, energy-wise.

And I’m saying that this has something to do with spirituality?

Yes.  It has everything to do with spirituality, because the crux of spirituality is in your directorship of your own emotional energy: a natural product of your being a highly-developed living thing.  You may have already read a lot of stuff about spirituality that complicates and mystifies the subject.  It is about time a plumber wrote something about what spirituality is underneath all the various fancy paint-jobs.

It’s actually about how you feel and how you manage your feelings.

At the risk of OVER-simplifying, most feelings come down to liking or not liking, with some middle ground for the things that don’t seem to matter.  There’s what you like, what you don’t like and then there’s stuff that you neither like nor dislike, generally because it at least seems to be stuff that doesn’t affect you.

The basic emotional default position is that we like what enhances our lives, we dislike what seems to endanger or discomfort us and we ignore what doesn’t affect us one way or the other.  Some people reset their own emotional preferences to something other than the default, but I can’t really recommend disliking life-enhancing stuff, liking life-threatening stuff or paying much attention to things that aren’t our own business.  Of course your life is yours and you can do whatever you want.  I’m just making my best recommendations here.

These first few simple points might not seem like things that are worth writing or reading about, but there are many people who seem intelligent enough who overlook the obvious.  Obvious stuff is generally obvious for good reasons.

My good reason for beginning with some basic concepts is that the subject spreads out far and wide from the basic points.  The like/don’t like/don’t care line influences just about everything a human life will ever encounter.  The first really significant thing to know is that the like/don’t like/don’t care line in every life is a very personal line and it is always up to each of us to say what we like or don’t like and to recognize what does and what does not affect us personally.

This is the spot in my article where I had to take a step back and look at what I’m trying to say about spirituality. I managed to write as far as this point without running into any major complications, but only because of being able to treat the subject generically. As long as I’m writing about spirituality in general terms, it seems like there’s a chance to say something productive. But it becomes really difficult to talk about spirituality as a generic thing simply because it is–by its very nature–a highly personal thing. Since it’s personal, it becomes something very specific to each individual person and then it’s hard to even think of it in any general terms.

That’s where religion comes in. On its own, spirituality is not about much more than how we each deal with our own feelings. It’s highly personal. But we live among other people. We interact with others. Sometimes we even care about others. For sometimes-better and sometimes-worse reasons, we try to connect with others–sometimes to share what we know about life, sometimes to seek advice, sometimes to compare our own experiences with someone else’s, sometimes (maybe most of the time) to share some support and affection. If I can be allowed to get mathematically allegorical for a moment: Spirituality plus the social urge–the desire to connect with others–are the two components that combine to create religion. At least that’s how it begins. Religion endures because of tradition; because we want to acknowledge the wisdom of those who lived before us and because we want to have some meaningful social rituals for things like marriages, births and deaths.

Here, I’m starting to be very concerned about getting on the wrong track in my writing. I don’t really like making us/we statements as though I have some right to speak for everyone. Some of us want to acknowledge the wisdom of the elders; some don’t.  Some of us want social rituals; some don’t.  These statements could probably contains as many “some“s as I could put into them. Some of the wisdom of the elders is good wisdom and some is just tradition. Some of the people who respect the lessons of the past do so wisely. Some of the people who reject some of the wisdom of some of the elders do so because they wisely see that holding onto some of the ancient wisdom isn’t always the best thing for us to do in every circumstance. There are hardly any “all“s that fit well in this subject.

And it’s a completely sticky, unworkable mess when we let our urge toward absolutes overtake our good sense. Some of us want to say that all of the ancient wisdom about spirituality is all absolutely true and viable for ever and ever amen. Ans then some of us want to say that all the old books should be heaped up into a big pile, doused with gasoline, lit on fire and be thus completely removed from the world.

Now, these two opposing factions of absolutist thinkers make lots of noise by yelling about how wrong the other side is and the actual issue gets lost in the yelling-match. The world actually hosts the lives of many people who are (hold onto your desk) not fundamentalists.  Most people are not fundamentalist religionists OR fundamentalist atheists. Most people just want to get through their day. If only all the fundies would stop this infernal yelling of “All (this that or the other) blah-blah-blah is always blah-blah-blah and always has been and always will be completely, utterly and entirely blah-blah-blah, so help me ___________ (insert name of something the speaker considers sacred)”.

But spirituality isn’t all about the yelling match nor does it become unuseful despite the abuses of the small-minded ideas of other people.

Here, I’ll put it into I statements: I still need to cope with my own feelings. I still need to live my own life, plan my own days, feel secure in my own beliefs, love what I love and be who I am. I can’t let others take away my right to live my life to the best of my ability, no matter how much they try to confuse me with all the yelling.

And so I choose to look at spirituality from as many sides as I can; finding wisdom where I can see wisdom, rejecting foolishness where I see foolishness (okay: sometimes I’m foolish too, but just for fun) and in short claiming my inherent right to live my life as an aware, self-responsible, free-living person unto myself.

To address both of the opposing fundamentalist concerns: if I am intelligently-designed by God, God made me as an individual with an individual mind and an individual set of experiences and feelings–to live as an individual being that thinks for itself. It’s my sacred right and my holy responsibility.

If, on the other hand, it was random chance or Nature or “that indefinable spark” or whatever, the same is still true. However it is that I came to be a living being living in the here-and-now, having come from the long history of my ancestors, being the current link in the great chain of life that connects all the generations of the past with all the generations that I hope will be the life of the future–HOWEVER it happened, I’m a life and a mind and a “spirit” (I’ll explain that word better a little later in this article) unto myself. No matter how I got here, I’m here now and I have to make my own best choices.

Perhaps (if you are willing–like I am–to claim it for yourself) you are also a person who must live your own life.

This is me reaching out to you through some writing.

Do you know why it’s so hard to tell the real, true story? It’s because the real, true story is the story you write through the living of your own day-to-day life. We can only tell small bits of the real, true story.  I can tell MY real true story.  You tell YOURS.

I am foolish enough to hope that the real, true story never has an ending: as long as there is a life to live it, another chapter can be told.

There’s my version of fundamentalism and absolutism: I am fundamentally and absolutely in favor of living.

Elements of Life

Like many people born and raised in the United States, the philosophical frameworks of Christianity are deeply embedded in my consciousness—in my manners, my ethics, my way of living and even in my efforts to escape from their confines.  I no longer think of myself as a Christian even though many of my deepest personal values are based on Christian values (do unto others as you would have them do unto you; killing and stealing are bad; “God” is love, etc.) and even the foundational underpinnings of my awareness of myself as a living being have analogues in Christian thought.

I have spent much of my adult life interacting with people whose personal philosophies have also been affected by a Christian upbringing and I am amazed at the variety of different thought paths that arise from the same (or at least a similar) source.  I hold Catholic Christianity responsible for the inventions of (among other things) vampire mythology (along with other versions of sexual guilt and repression) pop-voodoo (ties in with the ideas of Catholic mysticism and multiplicity of “saints”), “the light” and the concept of man-becomes-God.

I am not quite THAT stuck on Christianity.

But let’s face it: religions derive much of their tenacity from usefulness.  If people didn’t find some utility in their religions, religions wouldn’t survive merely on mythology and tradition.

I am finished with my apology for the seemingly “Christian” nature of the idea I am about to put into words.  My thought is a persistent and useful thought with or without a parallel in Christianity or any other religion.

A human life is a complex system of many parts.  The most primary goal of self development is to have all the many parts of the system work together.  Our best efforts and best results always involve our best commitments to the things we do and a full commitment requires the focused participation of every part of us.

I notice in my own life that it can happen that I can have a thought to do something (I can vaguely wish or desire to do something) but some part of myself doesn’t agree.  Perhaps my body seems to crave foods that my mind thinks are not good for me.  Maybe I have a thought to do a thing that my body can’t really accomplish like jump 20 feet into the air under my own power.  Maybe I have sexual feelings for a person I really don’t want to have sex with.  Some of these inner conflicts can be things that are difficult to talk about.   That’s when things can become difficult, frustrating and mysterious, sometimes leaving me with a sense of “stuckness” and no way to resolve it.

I believe that these are exactly the sorts of circumstances that have led to the great variety of systems of personal growth and development that we see in our world.  I believe that—in the best case—religions are (can be? are intended to be?) systems for facilitating personal growth.  Here I can make a somewhat dangerous blanket statement and have some hope that it can be properly understood: if a religion does not offer a means for the development of healthier, “whole-er”, more actualized people, that religion is an unhealthy waste of energy, time, commitment, etc.  We have as a species shown ourselves time and time again that we are quite capable of making up all sorts of crazy stuff that we can label as “truth” and “the divine” and we are quite capable of wasting our lives by focusing our energy on fictional “God”s.  If there is any reality to God at all—if the idea is to be any sort of a good idea whatsoever—then God has to be good for us as people.

The subject of how we think of God and what our thoughts about God say about us as people is a different subject and not part of the current writing, but I will say this much here: loving people believe in a loving God, while people whose God is a destructive, hateful being are themselves destructive hateful people.  The things that we are willing to believe about God are merely reflections of how we think of the highest and most powerful aspects of ourselves.

We can—if we so choose—easily remain fragmented, scattered beings, never living up to our potential.  It’s easy to choose that.  All you have to do is be willing to give up on yourself.  We can go through our entire lives always experiencing our bodies pulling us in one direction while our minds try to pull in another direction and our emotions vacillate between agreements and disagreements with one or the other.  In short, we can easily choose to be miserable.  We make that choice when we fail to see ourselves as the complex beings we are.

We are our feelings and we are our thoughts and we are our bodies.  I chose the order of that statement at random.  We are bodies, emotions and minds; physical creatures who think and feel; beings of will packaged in physical form and operating through the use of a complex input , calculation, storage and output device: a mind.  We are all three of those, but I am really only categorizing it as three things for the sake of simplicity.  One needs a bit of simplicity when the basic subject is already complex enough.

Body, mind and soul.  Writing it that way feels like the same thing as writing Father Son and Holy Ghost.

Allow me one Christian idea; it’s just a thought framework.  It’s a good workable framework, not exclusive to Christianity.  There are parallel concepts in many philosophies.  For the bets and clearest explanation of what it means, I have decided to use the analogy of a computer system.  I think it’s a good analogy, not because I think that “people are just like computers” or any such silliness.  It’s a good framework because humans created computers to be “thinking machines” and many of the earliest ideas that led to the development of thinking machines had to do with building a machine that would perform complex calculations the way a human mind was understood to perform complex calculations.  We tried our best to make machines that “think” the way we think.  We have not quite accomplished that goal.  The human mind is a dynamic self-developing system in a way that a machine probably cannot be, but still—what we create and how we create it shows a lot about what we are made of.

We started with an idea, but—like any idea—until there was a physical way to actually build something, it was just a thought.  Even though the development of the thinking machine began with an idea, it didn’t really begin until someone built something that would do what the idea wanted done.  It starts with a physical structure—just as we begin our own lives as a physical structure: a body.

A body with an idea behind it.

The body could also be thought of as a collection of smaller parts but for the present purpose—and with holistic health in mind—“body” is a suitable name for its subdivision, but the concept of an idea could be properly broken down into its components: an idea is a collection of thoughts fuelled by the will or desire to create.

I am thinking of the components of a computer system as sharing these categories with a life: computer hardware is to physical body as software or programming is to the mind as…well, the third category gets a bit expansive.  A machine needs power to run it just as a life needs some type of usable energy to support it.

That’s what I get for thinking and writing at the same time: if I had thought before I wrote all that Trinitarian stuff, I’d have realized that it isn’t just a three-part system—it’s at least four.

You see, once a computer has hardware and software, it still needs an operator and work to do.  I wanted to draw an analogy between those things and the “spirit” or “soul” of a living being.  The hardware and software are the physical structure and the “tools” just like a body and a mind are a physical structure and a toolkit and in both cases, a directorship and a purpose are needed before anything happens.

But even before that, you have to power the machine.

Living things get energy from food.  Everything that is food for every living thing on this planet—probably on other planets too, but since I’ve never visited, I can’t speculate—ultimately derives its energy from the light energy that radiates from our nearby star—the sun.

No mystery there.  A planet without a sun is a planet that can’t support life.  We cultivate crops or we gather edible plants or we hunt edible animals for our food.  We don’t use sunlight directly.  Most of the time, we don’t really have to think about the ultimate source of energy.   In any case, we have no control over what the sun does; the sun is beyond our sphere of management (not to insult the wonderful people who work with solar energy– which is quite a beautiful thing in its own right– but isn’t the subject of this article.)

So, we’re back to the three things that ARE within our personal sphere of directorship—in first person to show responsibility—My body+ My mind+ My spirit= My life.

If I am to be the best sort of life I can be—if I am to truly be supportive of myself as a living being—I will not declare any of my parts to be my enemy.  I will not think of my body as my enemy as some repressive religions do; will not imagine that the desires of my body are evil in and of themselves.  I will not accept any “wisdom” that makes the claim that my sexual feelings are wrong or dirty.  My body will feel the things that it naturally feels and I will not try to tell my body that it is wrong for having feelings.  If I try to make my feelings “wrong”, I risk losing my connections to my own senses and I risk losing touch with both the world outside and my own internal world.   What I WILL do is to manage my body and satisfy its requests in the ways that seem proper to me and to my life.

Nor will I claim that my mind is my enemy.  I will allow my mind to think.  That’s its job; that’s what it does.  My job is to manage my mind—to make it think the thoughts I want it to think, to learn the things I want it to learn, to solve the problems I want it to solve.  To manage these things in this way is to make my mind truly my own; I manage my preferences in my programs.

Of course, spirituality is the actual subject here.  The “me” that manages and directs, the “my” in my body and my mind, the “I” that says what I will do is all of me, but it is my spirit in particular.

In keeping with my precedent of not speculating about things I’ve never seen with my own senses, I cannot make any claims about where my spirit has come from nor about whether or not it might outlive my body and mind.  I can only say that my own experience of my spirit is that it is an interdependent component of the system of my life as a whole.  I am not aware of my spirit existing without the rest of my system.  To calculate that equation through my analogy, even if the hardware and software of a computer  completely ceases to be—“dies”—the operator and the work-to-do might still survive, but they will have lost the ability to do any computing.  As far as I know, without my body to support it and my mind to be the operating system, there is no “me”.

The same archaic paradigm that claimed to know that a spirit is immortal also claimed that the only animal that has a spirit is the human being; that “lower” animals have no thoughts, no feelings, none of the qualities that one could reasonably attribute to a living soul.

If that were true, why would dogs dream?

There is scant evidence that ANY creature has a mind at all.  I know I have one because I can hear it thinking, but I can’t hear anyone else’s mind thinking unless they communicate with me.   And that is THE ONLY CREDIBLE EVIDENCE that anything outside of myself has a mind.   In the olden times, before we knew better, people could say that no animal had a mind—because there’s no evidence either for or against the idea; if animals don’t communicate with us, we have no proof that they have any mental capacity.

We know more now than we used to know.  Dreaming is an indication not only of thought, but of the existence of a subconscious mind.  Animals have conscious thoughts that tell them when to eat or when to mate or when to move from one place to another and many animals have the type of storage-capable brains that allow them to learn and remember.  A brain that can contain memories is a brain that has a sub-conscious part.

We are not different IN KIND from other animals; we are different in DEGREE.  We can think to a much higher degree.  We can experience our own feelings in a more manageable way.  We can do physical manipulations and see details to a higher degree than other animals can.  We are animals.  We’re just a little more refined than they are.

IF

If we make use of what we have.

Otherwise, we aren’t really any better than animals at all.

Probably WORSE than some.

As I anticipated, I did get sidetracked in the writing of this article.  I went into a digression about religion, lost the thread of what I meant to say and left the writing project unfinished and un-worked-on for several months.  What I meant to say about religion is that for some people it can provide a good framework for spiritual growth and for others it seems to be an obstacle to spiritual growth.  The main factor that determines whether or not ANY path will be an asset to personal development is in whether or not you do the work yourself.  Your spirit is yours; the care and maintenance and growth of it are a matter of personal responsibility.  Teachers–by whatever name–can provide advice and guidance, but the actual work has to be done by the person who has/is the spirit to be worked upon.

Getting back to the basics…

Logical, linear thought–the kind of thought that can be easily put into words–can get us through a lot of the situations of life, but sometimes–perhaps often–logical thought alone is not enough.  It is at this point when the true value of feeling comes into play.  We sometimes refer to this kind of feeling as intuition.  If the system of the human mind is analogous to a computer system, intuition is an instant search function with or without a specific path name.  Well-developed intuition (which might be better called “feeling your way through something”) can allow us to make important in-the-moment decisions where logic alone would be too slow and cumbersome.

I’ll leave off here for now with intuition as my place-marker, confident that when I come back to write more, I’ll have a productive starting point…some 4300 words into the piece.

But at no point should my article be left without this thought:

When life is lived to its best and fullest, body, mind and spirit all operate as parts of a whole self.  Be a spirit by feeling, be a mind by thinking, be a body by doing.  When feeling, thinking and doing are all in full agreement, life is magic.

It never actually rains cats and dogs. That’s just an expression.

Even though the rain may sometimes pour from the sky in such remarkable quantities and with such force that we feel compelled to comment on it in exaggerated terms, buckets do not naturally fall from the clouds, nor do dogs or cats. It’s just that while the sky is showering rain upon our world so enthusiastically—in a marvelous display of Nature blessing and nourishing the earth—there is little we can do other than sit in our houses and make each other laugh at the funny things we say about it.

It’s raining today. It’s raining very nicely. The new plant-life that has been springing from the soil will be well moisturized and happy. As we all know, happy plants feed happy animals and—in the great, nearly-untraceably interconnected system of life—it all goes toward making a happy earth. However, no matter how much it rains—even if it rains far more than is really good for the human population of the earth—it will never literally rain buckets or cats or dogs.

Strange as it may seem that a writer should feel that it is necessary to make this distinction, it is nonetheless an important point because our figures of speech sometimes keep us from seeing obvious truths. If we allow ourselves to suppose that cats and dogs arrive in our world because they fall from the sky, we overlook the significance in the real history of cats, dogs, chickens, eggs and the human thought-modes whereby we attempt to understand these things.

A lion is a cat in the same way that my fuzzy little housemate Pippin is a cat. If Pippin wasn’t neutered, Pippin’s sperm could make a lioness pregnant. Of course the delivery of that sperm presents some tactical difficulties since Pippin is much to small to mount a lioness in the natural way that a male animal would impregnate a female animal. I’m sure he’d give it a go if he could. That’s the main reason Pippin has been neutered: to decrease his interest in mounting lionesses.

A wolf is a dog, genetically capable of mating with any other dog.

And—all legends to the contrary and with all due respect—The Great White Buffalo is—as a physical creature—in the same family of creatures as the ones who give their lives for Big Macs.

Each of the types of creatures mentioned above shares several common traits. I won’t enumerate the entire list of those commonalities here, but I do want to point out an often-overlooked fact about dogs, cats, cattle, chickens and human beings: the developments of their species has been influenced and guided by the needs, wants and sometimes just the whims of humans.

The various breeds of dogs are as we see them today because of the efforts of dog breeders. A Shi-tzu looks nothing like an Irish Wolfhound, which looks nothing like an American Pit Bull Terrier, which looks nothing like a wolf, but they’re all dogs; they can all breed with one another (if the tactics are worked out and the mood is right) and the only reason they look so different from one another is because over the course of many generations and in many different places, humans have manipulated their “breeds” and “races” according to what particular breeders wanted from particular breeds of dogs.

We did the same with cats and with the game fowls that eventually came to be known as chickens. The really scary part is…we did something very similar to US, in the name of fashion.

Did you ever wonder why most people have to have their wisdom teeth pulled? Sure, you probably know that if you don’t have them taken out, they put pressure on your other teeth, pushing the teeth together until they all start to go crooked or—even worse—start to break because they don’t have enough space in your jaw. But why? If it’s natural for us to have 32 teeth, why don’t our jaws accommodate all of them comfortably?

It’s because the big jaw that it takes to hold all those teeth isn’t a jawline that we consider attractive. When it comes to human breeding, what isn’t attractive doesn’t get mates for us and if we don’t mate, we don’t pass our characteristics to the next generation. The jaw that it takes to hold 32 teeth comfortably is the jaw of an obsolete human. We unconsciously bred ourselves away from the kind of jaw that can hold all the teeth we’re “supposed to” have.

In questions of chickens and eggs, you can say with all confidence that the egg came first. It came from a precursor to the chicken (working backwards in time) first from a game fowl, from some other bird, from a reptilian bird-forebear, from a sexually-reproducing creature of any kind (all creatures who reproduce sexually do so by means of some type of egg) and so on back to the earliest single-celled critters. An egg—before it is fertilized and begins to grow into an animal, bird, reptile, marsupial or primate—is a single cell: the most basic of all living things. There were eggs LONG before there were chickens.

Chicken ranchers have known this stuff all along. They were just messing with us. Today, thanks to the internet, we all have access to the information that lets us stop believing that animals fall from the sky. Especially chickens—the modern chicken cannot fly. The only way a chicken will ever fall out of the sky is if it’s being transported on an airplane and the cargo hold bursts open and…well it’s not a nice scenario.

And I like for my blogs to have HAPPY endings.

chicken and egg cartoons
more chicken and egg cartoons

I’m just getting started with this blog and with another blog on another platform at the same time.  I will try to explain my plan in a few words.

I find that I have a lot to say.  That often leads me to write very long articles, even though I know that some people don’t want to spend that much time reading.  The main reason my writing gets so long and drawn-out is that I feel that I need to explain some of my rather unusual attitudes, giving lots of background and lots of introduction.  At the same time, my day-to-day experiences reflect these attitudes of mine that I’m not sure people will understand if I don’t explain them.

In short, I really think it’s up to me and the people who are living their lives today to make the developments and refinements to our own ways of living as we see fit.

I am claiming the right to make my life my own and I am using my blog-writing to sort it all out, partly for myself and partly for anyone else who might be out there in cyberspace, dealing with some of the same issues I’m dealing with.

I try to take a new approach to many areas of thought, including religion, politics, communication, philosophy, art, relationships and in how I feel about myself and others, just to name a few items from the top of the list.

I plan to use one blog-platform for the shorter stuff and the other for the longer explanations and expansions, with some link-buttons to connect the two pages, wiki-style.

But, like I said, I’m just getting started.  There’s stuff here that’s going to go there and stuff there that’s going to come here and there are still buttons to make, articles to write, cross-referencing to do, a soul to search, ideas to have.

Eventually, these two pages will hopefully be a place for you to come to sort out your own attitudes for your own purposes in your own life.  I don’t dredge up all of my stuff just for me.  When I communicate—in written words or spoken words or in music or in love or in any form of communication at all—it is about interaction.

I will try to make an interactive set of blogs for this purpose.  I welcome ALL comments whether “positive” or “negative” or “off-topic”, but I use a spam-filter to get rid of comments that aren’t comments.  Any real comment is a good comment.

Welcome!   

My other page 

Freedom of expression is not a law of advertising, nor are historical accuracy, truth or justice.

The laws of advertising center around one idea and only one idea: what sells.

The makers of Absolut vodka have been forced by public pressure to pull an ad from their marketing efforts in Mexico.  Who knew Mexicans were buyers of Swedish vodka?  I didn’t.

Did any of us realize that people in the U.S. are the watchdogs of the advertising content of a Swedish company that sells vodka in Mexico?  And what–if anything–do the Chinese have to say about it?

This is the offensive ad:

It’s a photo of a map of North America from pre-1848 showing the political borders of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada (among others) as they were before the U.S. annexed the parts of Mexico that are now California (my native country), Colorado, New Mexico(hm, I wonder how they came up with THAT name?), Arizona, parts of Texas, etc.

The ad was designed for and only appeared in Mexico.  The advertisers felt that it would appeal to Mexicans who yearned for a time when Mexico was larger and less subservient to its “neighbor” to the North, and who also yearned for some really tasty vodka (or, in Mexican Spanish “vodka de gustos”).

Some U.S.-ians have threatened to boycott Absolut vodka because of the ad.  As everyone knows, all of the territory shown in the “map” belongs to the U.S. and always has and any “historical documents” that indicate otherwise are obviously wrong and inappropriate.

As with everything else in our absolute world, money, might and social pressures are the things that define what flies and what gets grounded; what talks and what walks.

The writer of this blog merely finds it interesting to be able to witness it actually happening.  These things generally happen in darkened rooms behind closed doors.

Many people are somewhat familiar with the CDC in its official capacity as the Center for Disease Control and that is a very important aspect of it, but there’s another, less-well-known side to the CDC: the Chicago Didjeridu Chorus.

There are 26 letters in the Roman alphabet that the speakers and writers of many modern languages use for the spellings of words.  The total number of possible 3-letter combinations is 26×26×26 or 26-cubed (or to the third power).  It’s really just a matter of time and random chance before two unaffiliated groups choose the same 3-letter combination as the short version of their separate titles.

I have no official affiliation with the Center for Disease Control, but I am a drummer/percussionist/flutist/jaw-harper/puppeteer/singer/humorist with the Chicago Didjeridu Chorus.

Wikipedia is welcome to copy and use this blog as a disambiguation page.

CDC does a few shows per year–mostly for charity fund-raisers, but at least one just for nyuks–and in between shows, we meet at an acupuncture clinic (after hours) for “practice.”

In between these “clinic sessions” we converse through email.  The following is a thread of excerpts from some of those conversations, mostly consiting of messages from Tim, the founder and leader of the Chorus, Dan, who traditionally plays a large Indonesian gong in non-traditional ways and me, Bob. Since we each use several different pseudonyms to sign these messages (and other official documents) I will transpose the messages here in a color-coded scheme so you can tell who is who.

Tim’s messages will be in red.  

Dan’s in blue.

Bob in green.

Messages from Kim, Catherine and Dragan will be in the normal color that the other letters of this blog are in, probably white against the “cool” black background. I hope theyll all show up as planned.

Hey y’all, How’s Toysday da 17th look witch y’all? Eh? C’mon? Whaaaaa? Honkarelli

Toysday, Toysday, Toysday!!!!!!!!  YYYYYYEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHH!  Oh yeah der ya sure.  A great ting it is ta be havin’.   Otherwise said, I can be there. Kim

I see Timmy and Kimmie and Bobby for a Toysday jammie…count me as in. I mean in as in in, as in I am in on being in.  Who else is in with the rompers romping in the room of romping? Count in Cathy Lou! yeeeeeeeeeeeeee-haw!

Bobzilla’s Blog changed my life!!!

Well, I kind of liked my life before and I didn’t really want it changed, but you know what they say…change is the only constant.

Bobzilla’s Blog is constantly changing my life!!! By the universal law of Shakespearean Monkeys, if my life changes enough times, I’ll eventually get my old life back.

Temporarily at least…

Come on Bobzilla’s Blog, change my lfe again!