Chrooth

We’ve had the same conversation a thousand times now.

We ask for equality and you say we already have it.

I tell you about the oppressive systems and you always respond with the same bullshit.

“Yeah, well they have a choice.”

They have a choice?

They have a choice to rise above the intentionally bankrupt education?

They have a choice to ignore the neglect they endured in their childhood because their father was arbitrarily criminalized for “possession of an evil plant”, so mom had to work 3 jobs to keep ’em fed?

They have a choice to just ignore the subtle slights of every day life, at work, while shopping, or just walking down the street and the see someone cross the road and hold their purse a little tighter “just in case”.

They have a choice….

So I predict you’re an abuser and I don’t have to know a damn thing about you to know it.

As it turns out, we’ve all collectively agreed not to shine a certain light in one particular direction and that’s inward.

The result? We… Are… Blind…

Don’t worry, this includes me to. We are born abusers. Driven to it from the inside out, and reinforced from the outside in.

Every moment we’re ashamed and we are punished.

Every time we’re already frightened and the people we trust to protect start to scream.

Every time our hearts are bruised and they strike.

Every triumph in which a proud moment is sullied by their neglect.

Every time we find ourselves exposed and find our treasures plundered.

We find our power stolen off by those attempting to reclaim some for themselves and thus the cycle is witnessed.

So we seek out the exposed take our treasure back.

When see another’s pride, we turn away.

We turn our open palms to bruised-heart seeking missles.

Any time we witness fear, we start to scream.

Any time we sense their shame, we move to punish.

We are abusers, and now you know it; I know it. Now you’re exposed. You know what comes next.

I show you her picture and you remember nothing but your horror.

Now you’re ashamed. you know what comes next.

I furl my brow and clench my fist, now you’re afraid; you know what comes next.

I scream until it rattles your bones, “How could you!?”

You feel the bruise upon your heart; you know what comes next.

But this time you’re wrong.

I calmly ask why you’re so hurtful, but you don’t know

I ask when you became a predator and you’re baffled.

I ask you if it makes feel strong when you do it.

I ask why you can’t just choose another way, and for the first time since we started you scream something honest:

“BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW HOW!”

The softest smile I can manage through my broken eyes, I tell you “That’s RIGHT!…. And NEITHER DO THEY!”

…………………………..

“Neither does ANYONE ELSE! So stop asking! For gods sake, we are all just doin our fuckin best! So Please! Stop holding the rest of us back for not doing what you can’t do either.”

Just because you were taught to never ask for help, doesn’t mean that anyone who does is less.

Just because you choose to bare the burdens of your life alone does not give you the right to demand that someone else carry a weight you’ve never lifted; further still could never even touch!

You can not hope to dictate treatment for a disease to which you are immune!?

Just because you lived a life where you were never heard does not absolve you of your obligation to listen, but I understand why it’s so hard.

I am an odd outlier, in that I never made it back to the religion I grew up with. Some don’t, but so many do.I think about that feeling I get when I recognize a scent from my deep memory, and find myself flooded with the emotions of comfort and nostalgia. Those are always the best smells.

Part of my problem is the idea that anyone thinks their system is the only correct one. The first task of my sincere religious pursuit was to define God, and that proved to be impossible. I eventually settled on a series of loose analogies and abstract concepts that “point the way” as the Buddhists say, and they say it best! I’ve read pretty much all of them and there’s no better description for a concept that is indescribable but still attainable.

What I know is that God is infinite, boundless, and abides a very abstract definition of compassion that has only to do with an objectively definable morality, dictated by the advancement of living well.

With this in mind, I have come to view religion as a set of boundaries that humans have attempted to place on their God, which they all, ironically enough, agree to be boundless. The thing is, we need to define things in order to feel comfortable believing them. We need to believe that we understand the nature and will of god in order to commit to them. So, another irony, everything we believe we know about god is in reality, just an illusion we’ve emotionally committed to belief in order to trick ourselves into some neurotic sense of control.

Why would any religion *need* to be the only correct one? The answer to that question is ALWAYS control, and that control is never yours.

As a final question, I wonder whether or not God is actually compassionate and would espouse love and kindness for all, or if it’s simply a completely inert, indifferent consciousness, with far too great a perspective to consider our existence anymore than we consider the existence of the microscopic organisms that live around us.

Fortunately this question is easy to answer. If God is indifferent to our existence, then we must adopt a system of morality that suits the advancement of every living thing to live as well as possible. If God is not indifferent, then the descriptions of God as an infinitely compassionate being as espoused by every religion is likely a reliable assessment.

So, assuming the latter, (because the former is functionally irrelevant), I have to ask you, why would any loving god feel compelled to issue supreme disappointment to a loving, kind and generous Hindu, who lived a life of kind piety and faith in their belief that their reward is to be reincarnated as a higher being? Why would God feel the need to deprive a kind and gentle Muslim of their gardens, beneath which rivers flow?

I’m not asking you to abandon your faith, I’m just asking you to consider how violent and arrogant it is to claim that your small minority group has attained some monopoly on understanding the nature and will of the intangible. How cruel it is to tell everyone that is not in your minority group that they are doomed.

I feel this notion is the best definition I can find for “Taking God’s name in vain.” Growing up I was told that this just simply meant to not use God and Jesus’ name as a curse word, but that always felt far too trivial. No, I think it is a grave sin against man, an act of supreme violence to claim sovereign control over the definition of something that all agree to be undefinable.

On the contrary, I think it is an act of supreme love to approach people of other faiths and give their beliefs every credit of validation that you hold for your own. I can think of nothing more culturally equalizing and equality in action is always an act of love.

14Bethany Dawn Forest, Casey Wilkerson and 12 others19 CommentsLikeCommentShare

I queued into an idea a long time ago, about karma, and the nature of reincarnation. I had really beautiful thought once, that in the machinery of karma, time is irrelevant.

This idea meant a lot to me, because it means that reincarnation has no need to adhere to any kind of linear progression. I could come back as Einstein or Tagore. I could come back as Genghis Khan, Cleopatra, my own mother; doesn’t matter.

I came to believe that the mechanism of reincarnation is driven by the questions we have once we leave a given body. This idea gave rise to a particularly poetic understanding of suicide, and has acted, I’m sad to admit, as my go-to suicide repellant. The idea is, that if you take your own life, that you take on a karmic debt that can only be resolved by accepting reincarnation as every person whose heart was shattered by the tragedy of your death. You’re forced to relive the horrors of your own decisions, over and over and over and see and hear the various realities in succession, all of which become symphonies to why all the reasons you made that decision were so catastrophically wrong. To hear so plainly that you were not alone, that you were loved, that you would be missed, and to experience it all as though you were that person, because you are.

Of course this idea is also hinged on an uncompromisingly deterministic reality, which I ascribe to. This means that all our lives are saved, and every moment lives as a static monument to itself. We souls, we ride these monuments, driven by the engine of time through each experience as each moment is built on the infinitely deep foundation of its predecessors.

Such a deterministic view also serves as a convenient vehicle, offering effective transportation to a place of forgiveness, for myself and others, but mostly myself. I often envision an afterlife in which I sit in a room with anyone I ever owed any loyalty, and we review the relevant contents of my mind. I am often ashamed at how often my thoughts do not reflect the loving person I would ever hope to portray, but quickly, with all the love in my heart, remind myself of this perfect determinism, and repeat my oath to myself, “I’ve always done my best. It’s not always the best, but I can always do better.”

In the end I find it reassuring that this ethereal fantasy is always self reflective; I’m always mostly concerned with the hurt my thought may cause, as opposed to using such a room as an interrogation chamber, to probe the minds of all who ever did me wrong. I think that means I’m at least a basically decent person at an impulsive level, and there’s not much more I could imagine asking from anyone, than to be simply, impulsively good.

But back to reincarnation… With the above in mind, we have a system of reincarnation more intentionally complete; a system that cognitively matters. I admit that this may be a human fantasy, but we’re talking about an ultimately human system in a very loose manner of speaking. There is still the burning question of “why”, and I think that question is answered, for me at least, with the idea that our spirit is capable of storing information, and the information we take from each life is built in succession into what may manifest in life as a deep spiritual wisdom. This is not my idea of course, this is just how I understand the purpose of reincarnation to be explained by Eastern tradition.

Another critical aspect of the Eastern traditions is the concept of exiting the system. To escape the endless karmic wheel of birth and death and rebirth. An idea that I have just had compounds all of the above into a distilled map of how to find such an exit.

This is manifest by the compounded understanding from living all the lives and learning all the lessons necessary to find the key. That key, I think is fairly easy to assume is a complete, epitomized understanding of human experience. That’s the key, if you can hold in your mind a clear vision of the fundamental pieces of humanity that define our experience, well then you’ve done it. You’ve completed the mission. Your soul has nothing left to learn from this indulgence in human experience, and so there is no more need to reincarnate. Indeed it is not an exit; it is not breaking the wheel of karma, it is simply the end of an impossibly long spiral that only looks like a wheel from the front.

So how does this help? Well, in this life, you are either at the end or you’re not. If you are, then you have my congratulations on a cosmos well lived. If not, don’t worry, it’s a very long, and beautiful road. The best advice I can give you to help you on your way is to always do your best. It won’t always be *the best, but you can always do better.

Imagine there are three bins, two with an infinite number of $1 bills, and one empty bin with infinite space for $1 bills.

From the first bin, almost everyone you know takes one or two out and gives them to you, but for every 1 that doesn’t give you any, there are 3 that give you 2 $1 bills and you put it all in the empty bin.

From the other bin you take out a $1 bill and give one to everyone who gives you one. There are some that do not get some, but for every one that does not get one, there are 3 people whom you give 2 $1 bills.

How much money would you have and how much would you have given away?

Unfortunately, this analogy actually works for how we give and receive trauma. We all have an infinite capacity to hurt and be hurt. Every once in a while we get lucky and find someone we don’t hurt, and they don’t hurt us, but for every one of those, there are three people that have hurt you more than anyone else. And for every person you manage not to hurt, there are 3 that you hurt a little extra. We know that it doesn’t matter how much we hurt others, it never takes any of our hurt away, but we do it anyway.

Sometimes, it’s just because we don’t understand how we hurt people. The rest is because even though we know we’re being hurtful, we justify it with some sick delusion of personal justice.

You can be a hurtful person, but you’ll always just be another thoughtlessly hurtful cog in the human trauma machine.

If you can stop the cycle in yourself, you can teach others how to break the machine.

I remember asking them to teach me about sex. They recoiled and rambled off some bull shit excuse about who else’s responsibility that was, but I was forbidden to ask them yet.

But they can’t talk about it, because no one ever taught them how to talk about it.

No one told them how it worked, what it felt like, and what they should expect

And when they got there

It was not what I thought it would be and it did not mean what I thought it meant.

You can’t talk about it because it hurt you.

But what we don’t realize is that in not talking about it, we’re dooming the ones we love to the same fate.

“Awkward” is the word we give to the parts of the universe that make us uncomfortable for all our myriad reasons.

“Awkward” is the word we give to the parts of ourselves that make us uncomfortable for all our myriad reasons.

Those reasons are both called “Trauma”, and to resolve it, we must stare them in the eye and call them by their name. We inform them that they have been caught and will no longer contribute to the choices we make; that they may pull our strings no more.

But how we bribe ourselves into listening to these demons’ voices is in exchange for protection from ever facing those horrors again. We grant them rights to our mind, in exchange for a little peace.

These demons are cunning. They know that they need only cover our eyes. We refuse to see these perpetual horrors and in turning a blind eye we doom ourselves to repeat them… And the demons feast on our perpetual misery and they spread like an infection.

Discomfort as our guide, we must let our fears lead us to the holes these demons keep in the back of our minds; to root them up, to meet their eye, until we watch our mask dissolve. We remember their true faces, their true names and we dismiss them.

Then we regain a little space for ourselves, and repeat:

“I am not my demons!”

I have come to the darkest conclusion that we are simply not built for civilization; or rather, that civilization is not built for us.

We have done ourselves the gravest disservice of allowing the development of our civilization to dramatically outpace our capacity to evolve a constitution to work in harmony with it’s principles.

We see in our civilization a uniform application of monogamy, despite the reality that we are not biologically monogamist. We have agreed upon a universal disdain for the emotions we cannot escape, regularly bearing witness to the horrifying results of asking individuals to repress their emotional selves.

We inflict countless traumas upon one another with one hand, while stigmatizing the treatment of trauma with the other.

In our natural being, we are creatures of force, expected to take what we can in terms of territory, partnerships and food. However in the civilized realm, acting on these natural impulses is rewarded by severe punishment.

This is not to say that the natural condition should be equated with some sense of objective morality. It cannot be. This is partially due to the reality of morality as being a component of civilization, and it should be our primary endeavor, however, it the inverse may be more true, that entirely ignoring our natural condition is consistently immoral.

After all, there are aspects of our natural condition that are relevant to established psychological needs. Maslow outlines a set of needs in addition to our basic physiological needs corresponding to our social, psychological and emotional needs. The basis of these needs is realized in the understanding that the ignorance of these needs, or more clearly, the result of these needs not being satisfied is almost always psychological trauma.

These trauma are then destined to manifest as abnormal or maladaptive behavior. The sex deprived become sex obsessed. The freedom deprived become freedom obsessed. The safety deprived become excessively defensive. The socially deprived become acceptance obsessed.

So as the examples go on, it becomes more and more clear how our conservative culture is set up in so many ways to traumatize any and all trapped within it’s influence. Indeed the most powerful influence on that conservative culture has been religion, and if we’re being honest, religion has rarely offered the best answers to human questions, only periodically being the best guideline available at any time in local history, until the scientific method came along and replaced it’s explanations of the natural world with a much deeper method of understanding and much more consistent predictions for our natural world.

If we understand religion as being the first philosophical attempt to understand our universe, our health, and our souls, then it is not at all audacious to say that religion has been rendered obsolete in every application but one.

And now here we are. Despite the obsolescence of religion in it’s efficacy to guide our understanding of our world and health, it has remained influential enough to continue dictating the structure of our civilization. Therefore our civilization is doomed to remain stuck in it’s cycles of archaic, traumatic cruelty, until our scientific understanding and acceptance is allowed to supersede our addiction to tradition.

We’ve lost focus… Even now I am struggling to remember what I sat down to write. But I left myself a clue; “We’ve lost focus”.

We suffer from a cognitive disease that is not observed because it is simply too widespread to consider it a malady. Watching people now days is a tragic series of attention drugs, endlessly fulfilling with greater efficiency the need for instant gratification. We have no patience. We have no tact. We don’t know “quiet” anymore, what it sounds like or how to do it. We’ve lost our ability to hunt.

With the safety of modern society firmly in place, we’ve spared ourselves the need of involuntary danger. We just do it for fun now…

Consider how disconnected we all seem. Lost in that instant gratification machine that should be in our pocket, but it’s in our hand again. Now think about how people suffer as a result of an inability think very well. They have the machinery, they just never really learned to exercise it. It’s hard to solve problems well when you’re so easily distracted, and distractibility, nature teaches us, is an extreme disability.

When you need to listen, you need to be able to listen. When you need to identify both predator and prey with every sound in your world, you need to be able to discern. When you make a mistake, you need to accept it and change your plan immediately. There’s never any time to argue.

The nature of nature is clear then. Nature has crafted her laws to keep you tested and at the peak of your condition. If you fail one of her tests, you don’t get a second chance. This natural condition will undoubtedly hone and shape a mind that is clear, calm, creative, interrogative, quick, precise and focused entirely on the sequence at hand; whether that is eating the best shoots, identifying a predator, inventing tools.

If we accept a general definition of “health” as our body and minds existing in a functional representation of their intentionally designed states, then it becomes clear quite quickly how unhealthy we are. Our bodies are meant to move, yet we move as little as possible and call it “rest” after a long hard day, sitting at our desk. Our minds are made to live in an arena of high stakes problem solving, yet we just allow them to wander aimlessly and infinitely. Anything that takes too much focus is scoffed at for being too much work.

But health is work isn’t it? If we want to take care of our bodies and minds. If we want to be healthy, we have to work. So why is physical exercise so obvious and acceptable while mental work is so taboo? I can’t answer that, but it needs to change, and I hope you change it for yourself. I hope you can understand how imperative it is to exercise your mind and get to work.

People rely on religion to provide their life with tangible meaning. They also use it to allay their fear of not existing. Not just death. Death is an arbitrary thing when you believe that a piece of you may supersede it. Death is just a “transition” in that regard.

The terrifying thought that so many run from is the idea that when you die, that there is NOT a piece of you that may supersede it. That death is final.

For myself, and my interpretation of the “Meaning of Life”, there is no greater call to action than the acceptance of the strong possibility that death is final. That death means that we no longer exist.

I want to probe that last word a bit more deeply though. What does it mean to exist? I hear a lot of people discuss the nature of consciousness as some mystical, unexplainable phenomena, but I find it fairly easy to explain. We have this nervous system that is designed to facilitate the process of “perception”. Perception is simply an electrical impulse, generated by some kind of stimulus, whether that be light, a physical interaction, smell, taste or a sound wave vibrating our ear drum. Our body is a miraculous assembly of these sensory tools, but there is still one missing piece.

Memory is an interesting addition to this equation of perception. I want you to think about what your experience of life would be like without memory. The instruments of perception are active and functioning, but there’s simply no storage. I believe that the memory is where “consciousness” arises quite simply from.

As we evolved the perceptual tools, another tool developed that allowed us to actually store some of that information; to create associations between these various perceptions. Think about a predator. When visually perceive that shape, those claws, the teeth, it’s size, we associate it with the physical pain we experienced as a result of our last interaction with that thing. When we taste a particular flavor, we learned to associate that flavor with how it makes us feel. Sugars make us feel alive and energetic. Bitter might make us feel sick and lethargic. Prior to the advent of memory, none of these associations existed and so every interaction and every perception was a pure discovery destined to be lost the instant it was over.

I think we commonly underestimate the process of memory. But upon deep enough inspection, it becomes quite clear that our memory isn’t just a piece of us, it is the vessel of this thing we call our identity. Our identity is the collected set of beliefs that we’ve compiled, consisting of every interaction we’ve ever had. Every association, which again is simply a combination of multiple perceptions, stored in a reference library for us to utilize in the process of determination.

Determination is where things get really interesting. In addition to perception and memory, we are still missing the logical component necessary to create a value system. Without this final component, all perception and associations are just arbitrary reference values, but with the addition of the first “goal”, the alchemy of evolution had finally created a combination of components that gave rise to this thing we call consciousness.

That goal is “me”. That’s it. The idea of the self. The identification of experiencer. Believe it or not, in evolutionary history, there is a class of organisms that had not evolved the ability to perceive the self. When combined with the tools of perception and memory, the ego became the fulcrum of a value system that finally gave us an edge in defining a mechanism of evaluation applied to all our perceptions and associations.

Earlier when I gave the perceptual example of a predator, that may have been getting ahead of myself because think about that scenario. In the early evolution of the nervous system, there was no concept of pleasure or pain. There was only the rudimentary sensation of the most subtle perception you can imagine. Every “felt” someone staring at you without seeing them? That’s it! The faintest impulse that we could imagine being able to perceive, those were the first vestiges of the nervous system. That perceptive ability, although extremely subtle, was enough to give our primordial ancestor an edge. In it’s first iteration, there was no pleasure or pain. That’s why this ego thing is so important.

The ego finally gave us a value system to apply to our perceptions and associations. Sensing larger organisms by feel or sight indicated an organism that may be able to consume us. The organisms that were indifferent to this potential threat, and there were just very such organisms; they were consumed and removed from the gene pool. The organisms that had developed an aversion to this threat, invented the first vestiges of what we call the predator/prey relationship. It was only after some primordial organisms learned to flee, that the organisms that consume them learned to pursue.

This new, more dangerous landscape created a dynamic between various organisms that put our new value system into play, and whoever played it best. The prey organisms that were best equipped and motivated to flee, and the predatory organisms that were equipped and motivated to pursue, began to form the cutting edge of a new evolutionary mechanism that would come to shape life as we know it.

This occurs at every level imaginable in both plants and animals. Plants know, and have adapted to grow toward the light. Although we don’t think of plants as “conscious”, this still represents a system in which an organism has the ability to perceive, and it has some stored information, a memory if you will, coupled with a sense of self that combine to drive the behavior of the plant. Most plants “know” that growing toward the light is in their best interest. The plant doesn’t have to be actively cognizing this process in order for it to be considered consciousness. There just has to be an ability to perceive, an ability to collect information, and an ego that all work together to drive any action that indicates an active self-interest at any level.

Cognizance is our next question then. If consciousness is so simple that it can be applied to the behavior of a plant, then we still haven’t completely solved the greatest of human riddles, because we definitely have something that they don’t; or do we? If we can understand and accept this most rudimentary definition of the mechanism of consciousness, being the cooperation of perception, memory and ego, my impression then is that all we’ve accomplished as humans is the maximization of these components. We have *some the strongest, most advanced tools of perception. We absolutely have the strongest ability to store information in our memory. As far as our ego is concerned, I couldn’t say that ours is any stronger or weaker, or somehow more sophisticated than any other animal, except that our identity has been attached to our memory, and with a much larger, more sophisticated memory, we may have a greater sense of self, but the mechanism of the ego is the same; simply driving a continuous objective for self preservation and reproduction.

So if you ever wonder who you are; I think that’s it. You are your perceptions, collected into memories that are continually referenced and analyzed by your impulse to preserve and reproduce yourself.

The reality of these components, is that they are essentially digital components that exist and are facilitated entirely within a set of biological components. These biological components are unfortunately cursed with a maximum potential duration. Nothing lasts forever I’m afraid. Eventually the physical components that give rise to the components of our identity will cease to function. We describe this cessation of function as “death”.

Now here’s where I get to throw a curve ball. I do not know that death portends the cessation of perception. But understanding the above, I hope you it is clear to you what that may mean for your identity. Perception is not the only thing we need to be ourselves. We also need our memories and our ego. I can say with some assurance that these components completely cease to exist in the advent of death. Even if perception remains, the physical tools that facilitate perception, our nervous system, are gone, meaning any potential to receive information represents a rudimentary experience that stands outside our ability to comprehend. What is perception without sight, sound, taste, touch, smell or memory?

That question is what I see when I think of death. Even if there is some undiscovered perceptual component that lives on after we die, what that component actually experiences is a reality without any sense of self, without memory, without feeling. As far as I’m concerned there is not much difference between existing in this state, and not existing entirely.

This is where I sit on the question of meaning. When I hear people describe their beliefs in what the afterlife may be like, I hear a collection of hopes that all assume we are able to take our biological components with us, but that’s clearly not explainable. Because it is not explainable, it is probably not a good bet.

Fortunately, for me, there is a saving grace. For me, there is nothing, no idea, belief, thought or dogma that brings greater meaning to my life, or does more to guide my decisions than the realization of how temporary we are. I cannot live a pious life under the threat of some heavenly reward. Instead I will live an adventure, desperate to milk as much joy and pain and raw experience out of every last second that I can. I am desperate to do the most I possibly can in the limited time I have been given here.

P.S. – Concerning morality in a godless universe.

Fortunately, I have found that the above information is not some dismissal of morality. Morality exists for me as an objective metric of how to live as well as possible, in spite of religious implications. Most of what religion calls moral seems to be based in some archaic perception of the will of god, using things like disease, earthquakes and weather as the tools of information gathering. We know those systems to be chaotic and therefore the implications of some universal will are irrelevant. Monogamy is moral because it prevents the spread of STDs, full stop. God craves blood because the spreading of blood on a field replenishes the nutrients crops need to grow, end of story. Wonder why all the forbidden foods of the old testament are, coincidentally, the ones that are most prone to food born illness? No coincidence at all. When disease is interpreted as a curse from god, shellfish and pork start to seem pretty evil; an evil that just so happens to be easily conquered by a food handlers permit.

Religious morality is flawed in a lot of ways. There are some useful guidelines, but it should be understood that morality still stands on it’s own in a world with no god. There is still a concept of collective good that stands to increase each individuals circumstances and that’s important to understand.

We spend so much time in this perpetual effort to mitigate the things that cause us to suffer. And it is perpetual, never ending, unattainable and hopeless.

We are all born into a vehicle with two broken wheels. The first is our propensity toward self pity, ever driving us to focus inequitably on our misfortune. Our pain is always louder than our pleasure. Though so many gifts are ruined by coincident misfortune, there is rarely a misfortune we can ruin with a gift.

The second is the inability to maintain a consistent appreciation for the things that make us smile. What was once a treasure is now a trinket. What was once a miracle has been transmuted into the mundane as it’s secrets are unraveled, and it’s plain reality replaces it’s once glorious mystery.

Such a view may trick us all into thinking that we may just be made to suffer. Though brutal in it’s implications, it is the truth, as the truth so often is. Reality does not suffer any pretenses to kindness. Nature is not predisposed to nurture; only to select.

With the sharpest razor she endeavors only to separate; to draw an uncrossable boundary between those in whom the will “to be” supplants the indifference in any who even dare consider not being. This is not a question. This is the law.

The line designs to separate the complacent from the fit, where fitness itself encodes it’s own requirement; that “to be” is a privilege earned. Earned in the fight! Earned in the fury of a life in which we starve until we harvest, in which we watch until we can’t and then we sleep until the fear of no-to-being drives our eyes back open. We creep through a hierarchy of eyes and ears. We chase the biggest ears and smallest eyes and run from those who seem to have no ears at all. We run until collapse or fight until we’ve proven worthy of the life we live today. Then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

In the endless world of the real, any glimpse of comfort we achieve is a gift. A gift that we have chased and hunted down as though some day we might permanently posses it. But every gift of comfort won, sees its satisfaction dissolved by our own caustic sense of perpetual entitlement.

We have built our little worlds in which comfort is so normal that we have fooled ourselves into believing that it is the expectation. Deprived of comfort, our entire existence becomes subjected to a question of whether or not an uncomfortable existence is worth our time.

So I would ask you where to find it and how long it’s there; to imagine perfect comfort, then to imagine how long you might manage to stick around. How long it takes to find a hole in the illusion through which you peek to see a greater comfort resting just within your grasp. The second you reach for it you’ve failed. You understand the nature of the arsenic in the apple seed; that all deliciousness is laced with poison.

Comfort breeds apathy. Apathy invites destruction. These are the downstroke in the story we all know, in which strong men have made good times, and those good times have made weak men. As these weak men continue the cycle, we must advocate for our own strength, and so we must endure discomfort until our need for comfort breaks; until we shift our eyes down, back to the grounded acceptance of comfortable suffering. Accept the trade. Make the compromise. Invite the reaper in so that he may serve to remind you of the privilege you neglect and the comforts you enjoy but never earned.

P.S. As I write this I can see how this may be used as an invitation to abuse. Shame on my despicable soul for believing for a second that these truths may serve as justification for the discomfort I cause others. The invitation of *natural suffering entails the striving required to maintain a natural life. My arrogance and involuntary cruelty are not excused by their potential contribution to another’s acceptance of nature’s cruel tests, which are numerous enough without my adding to the pile.

When I was a boy, I remember hearing about this concept of world peace.  I may not have understood it entirely, but I knew it was important.  It was important enough to me that it’s always held a place in my mind as a point of focus that most everything else revolves around.  It isn’t very difficult to understand what it means, as far as an end result, but what baffles us is the “how”.  Surely, with over 7 billion people on the planet, each with their own perspective, how on earth do we get them all to cooperate?

Another great passion of mine is problems solving.  I love it! The bigger the problem the better!  Having tackled quite a few very large problems of my own, it was really only a matter of time before I started trying to massage an answer out of one of the great questions to ever face humanity.  Am I done? Hell no.  Plain and emphatically simple, but I’ve made what I feel to be some substantial progress.

As a bit of a warning, in order to tackle large problems, it is absolutely critical to think outside the box, and I can tell you in advance, #4 is, should we say, controversial, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense, so I’m keeping it in!

Starting with what is definitely not outside the box; the first answer is actually an extremely common suggestion, but it is a critical one.  I’d like to get into the details to help you understand why it’s so important.

#1 – Meditation

I want you to think about your mind right now.  How does it feel?  Is it focused, calm and peaceful? or is it distracted, bored and chaotic?  Are you angry?  Maybe some of you received some bad news this morning and as a result, you’re unable to bring your mind to the present and really haven’t heard a word I’ve said.  That’s ok!  I understand your struggle.  Now I want everyone else to empathize with that person.  Remember your mind in a time of anger.  The most notable characteristic of anger is that your mind is in a state of utter chaos.  Now lets make some fun analogies!

Imagine your mind is a small lake.  The water is clear when the weather is calm.  But the surface of the water represents all of our senses.  As soon as the weather turns, the wind picks up, the rain falls disturbing the surface of your lake.  The disturbance eventually stirs the water enough to start kicking up the silt from the bottom and now the water in your lake is dirty and impossible to see through.  I really enjoy this analogy, because it takes us to an eye opening final question; “are you able to resist the weather for the sake maintaining the clarity of your waters?”

For most of us, the answer is no.  We are mostly trapped by the influence of our senses.  We do not have enough practice controlling our mind to resist the impact the weather of the world has on the clarity of our minds.

Let’s make another analogy.  Imagine a mostly empty fish bowl with a single fly inside.  Every time that fly hits the side of the fish bowl, you have a thought.  Now, just for fun, we are going to pretend that this fly is trained and is able to respond to your direction.  You can tell him to turn left and he will turn to his left. You can tell him to turn up and he will fly up.  Pretty easy situation right!  Feels cooperative and peaceful!  There are 2 problems here, one is that most of us have about 100 flies buzzing around in our fish bowls and the other is that we are so bad at directing these flies that are all flying in different directions, that we’ve just completely given up on controlling most of them, that it has simply become a place of complete chaos.  Some, who are well disciplined, have learned to control certain flies, like the anger fly.  We know that if we let that fly run rampant, that it will end in regret, so we have learned to focus on, and control that fly fairly well, but everything else is just craziness.

Through the practice of meditation, we turn our attention inward.  We learn to pay attention to our thoughts and by simply listening to them, we cannot help but become familiar with their nature and their patterns.  This familiarity always, 100% of the time, results in more control.  One idea that I have always loved is that “the moment we identify the source of a problem, the problem is already solved.”  If you think of chaotic thoughts as the source of every problem, then you understand the mechanism.

The problem with our thoughts is that when they are in control, we are under their spell, and we experience them from their perspective, and every thought we have naturally contains an excuse for it’s own existence.  When we want cake, the thoughts we call “craving” do an impeccable job of tricking us into believing that they are valid.  We find ways to justify obeying that thought.  The thought creates an impulse that we believe we can only resolve through obedience.  When we experience lust “the second hunger”, we experience the same intense impulse that often results in slavish obedience, and that’s because that thought is allowed to monopolize our perspective and we can only see the world in terms of the options that this thought allows.  That’s the box that we need to learn to think outside of.  This box creates an illusion that limits our ability to perceive reality.  Reality is not in the best interest of these inherently selfish impulse thoughts.  They want to be satisfied and they have learned to manipulate our perspective in order to direct our actions toward their satisfaction, and they do a wonderful job with a mind that has not practiced observing them from the stable, disengaged platform of meditation.  After all, when you’re in the maze, all you can see are the walls around you.  If you were to take time before entering the maze to view it from above, you would learn it’s secrets and obviously be able to navigate the maze more effectively once inside.  Our thoughts are no different!  They are a maze, or a puzzle that is almost impossible to solve from the inside.

With meditation, we are studying our thoughts as a puzzle.  We sit, and we first calm the mind.  We have to calm the mind first.  Let’s connect a couple dots here.  Let’s imagine that the maze is drawn on the back of one of the flies in our fish bowl.  When we sit, we have to first learn to slow the flies down; we slow the mind so that we can clearly see and focus on one thought, one problem, one maze.  We look at our hunger or our lust and from the stable platform of the calm mind, we are able view these thoughts in the context of a complete perspective, uninfluenced by their impulses and we can learn the secrets of how to control each of them.  Over enough time, we are able to control the flies enough to keep them contained in a calmly swirling ball at the center of the fish bowl.  Then any time our senses are stimulated, we are able to seize control of the thought before it seizes control of our mind, and find ourselves stuck in the maze.

In all, this concept of meditation is based on an idea that we’ve heard suggested by all the great leaders of our eastern spiritual traditions.  If you want world peace, we must first all make peace with ourselves.  Meditation is the first step.

Step #2 – Vegetation

Now, the title of step 2 is a bit loose, because I wanted it to follow that “ation” suffix scheme I’ve got going to make this system catchy!  But this one is much more simple than number one, but slightly less common.  This is actually building substantially off of number one.  It could honestly just be called step 1.5, but then we end up at 3.5 total and no one wants to hear about 3.5 steps toward world peace.

We need to think about our food!  What we eat and drink.  Everything we bring into our bodies.  Once you begin a consistent practice of meditation, as I’ve just totally convinced you to do, you might start to notice some things.  One thing I hope you notice is which substances you might ingest that make meditation more difficult.

One thing that I can tell you with a very high degree of certainty, stimulants ruin peoples’ lives.  I mean that with all seriousness.  Let’s take our fly analogy, and let’s give each of those flies a red bull; or maybe we can hit even closer to home.  Anyone in here have kids?  Anyone with kids have an idea of what it’s like when your kids drink caffeinated beverages or have too much sugar?  That’s it! That is how the mind behaves in response to dietary stimulants.  It’s not good!  I understand that occasionally, it might be beneficial to pick you up, but knowing that sugar and caffeine are clinically addictive substances, there is a strong likelihood that you might be addicted to them.  Why do you think you crave sugar the way you do?  Why do you need a coke? Why do you need coffee?  You’re hooked!  But these things have been so normalized that we don’t think twice about these addictions.  On top of that, we have never been taught to engage and familiarize with our own minds, it’s not a part of our culture so it makes sense that we continue, unaware of these relationships.

Step #3 – Education

This section is probably the largest because we need to learn so much in order to truly discipline our minds in a way that is conducive to interpersonal peace, and this is where that starts!  Number one and two were about making peace with ourselves.  Number three, we need to start getting into fostering peace with others.

First we need to talk about therapy.  Honestly, I don’t know a lot of people that have never been through any type of therapeutic program that could probably give you a great definition for it.  Honestly, this also builds on meditation; if we give therapy the definition that it is the study of how to effectively manage our emotions, as well as how to effectively communicate those emotions and our needs to those involved.  Do you define anger as an emotion? If so, you’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re doing and you need to go to therapy!  Seriously though, anger is a great example because it helps people understand that there is a lot of room to learn here.  We have a tendency to think that we are just naturally competent in any arena dictated by our instincts.  We think we are good lovers, we think we are good spouses, and friends.  When ever anyone questions our believe in our competency here, we tend to get a bit defensive, but there are a set of skills here, and unless you’ve taken the time to proactively learn those skills, odds are, you’re probably not doing as well as you should.

You may be thinking about the exceptions here.  Maybe you’ve always been told how nice you are, but even that can be a problem.  I have seen countless cases in which people are generally thought of as nice, but only because they are intensely passive aggressive people.  They never show their emotions, they never assert themselves, they always just go with the flow, so naturally people think that they are really kind, but under the surface, as it turns out, the are an absolute mess of repressed emotions and poor communication strategies that is essentially just waiting for one bad day; one major event that lights that fuse and they completely melt down.

Do not do yourself the disservice of believing that you are just naturally gifted here.  Unless you had some incredibly healthy and well adjusted parents who themselves learned these skills and effectively passed them on to you, you’re probably fooling yourself, just like the rest of us.

Therapy is incredible.  Through therapy, we build a relationship with our emotions.  We learn that our feeling are valid and that we have a right to express them in a healthy way.  So I kind of left that anger nugget dangling a bit.  Why is anger not an emotion?  Anger is what the therapeutic community refers to as a secondary emotion.  It’s a response to another emotion, usually something much more vulnerable, like hurt, or powerlessness.  When someone causes us emotional hurt, it is unfortunately uncommon for people to commit to that emotion.  We don’t want to feel hurt.  Hurt is always associated with weakness and we’ve been taught not to show weakness so what do we do?  We mask the hurt, we feel compelled to counter the impression of weakness with strength, we need to show power and that need is what manifests as anger.  Anger is a defense mechanism that we use to hide the weakness that allowed us to be hurt.  Same thing with feeling powerless.  When someone makes a change we don’t like and we have no authority to change it back to what may be more comfortable for us, we feel that lack of power acutely.  Naturally our reaction is the same, we feel the need to feel that empty hole where our power used to be with surrogate power, so we lash out in a fit of madness meant to intimidate onlookers into submission.  You see, anger is never alone.  It’s never a solitary, independent feeling.  It’s only there to hide the suggestion of our weakness.

The reality is, however, we are weak.  Our power is incomplete.  Our hearts are fragile, and as soon as we own that, we can start to have real conversations about real emotions and real perceptions and expectations.  When we are actually engaged in discussing our real selves, we remove anger, and for that matter, all the other toxic, maladaptive behaviors we “use” as an involuntary, and often hurtful reaction to the softer reality of our humanness.

Another very important aspect of the education towards self regulation, motivated by universal peace,  is intellectual discipline.  For myself, there have been to areas of interest that have gone a particularly long way to making me a better, more peaceful person: the studies of cognitive bias, logical fallacy and evolutionary psychology.

Starting with cognitive bias, we ought to give it some definition to make sure we’re all on the same page.  You see, we have a few, built in tendencies that, when it comes to how we think and what we believe, tend to result in some extremely bad habits.  One of these tendencies is referred to as the “Anchoring Bias”.  What this bias describes is the human tendency to favor the first information you’re presented with as fact.  For example, if someone tells you that the average human swallows 40 spiders a year in their sleep, and you take the bait and commit that information as a belief, you will tend to favor that information over anything that may be presented in the future.  It is much harder to let go of, than it is to attach.  Turns out it takes a bit of work to explain that this is simply an urban myth that has absolutely no roots in any actual scientific study ever conducted.

Another one of these biases, that somewhat follows from the first, is the so called “Confirmation Bias”.  This describes a scenario where, when confronted with multiple pieces of information, we will tend to gravitate toward the piece of information that best supports our currently held beliefs.  Say you see multiple, conflicting reports, one that says people will die if they eat bugs, another that says you wont die, but you will get sick, and a third that says eating bugs has no effect on our health.  Because you believe that you eat 40 spiders a year in your sleep, and you haven’t died, the first one is false and the second is likely false, the third must be true.  I know it seems like straight forward logic, but we have yet to remind everyone that the basis for this belief decision was completely false.

So, the study of cognitive bias is essentially the study of our built in habits that often trick us into adopting incorrect beliefs or maintaining false beliefs even in the face of hard, factual proof that we are wrong.  If we can learn these tricks, we can identify them in ourselves and take their power over us away, in the process becoming more disciplined and factual individuals.

Next up is logical fallacy.  This is an entirely different set of tricks with the same purpose; they trick us into thinking we’re right when we’re not and that others are wrong when they’re not.  You may have heard the term “ad hominem attack”. This is defined as the act of leveraging a personal attack, often completely irrelevant to the point, in order to invalidate a person’s argument.  My favorite of these is the accusation of hypocrisy.  Imagine a scenario where an active heroine addict tells you not to do drugs, you call them a hypocrite, and then, what?? Stick a needle in your arm?  No!  Their personal conflict does not have any bearing on the validity of the information they provide.  Most often hypocrites do have good advice to offer, and just because we don’t follow it ourselves doesn’t mean that the advice is bad.

Another of my favorite fallacies is the false dichotomy, or “false dilemma” fallacy.  This is a logical misstep in which a person lodges an argument that presents a black and white, this or that argument as though you are obligated to choose, when there is, in fact, a number of other options that can be accepted and pursued.  “You’re either a patriot or a terrorist!” Um. No?  Turns out it’s totally rational to adopt a globalist perspective where I place no inherent value in being an American or treating all things American with some worshipful adoration.  No I place Humanness above Americanness on my value scale.  Although I do love and appreciate the privilege I’ve been afforded by the country I was born in, I am strongly compelled to criticize the missteps of our government, and endeavor to correct the flaws in our culture.  In summation, my inability to satisfy your definition of what makes someone a patriot does not mean that I am in fact, a terrorist.

And now for the big one! Evolutionary psychology!  This one is huge!  The more I read on this topic the more blown away I am by it’s implications and how productive it is in helping me to resolve my own personal conflict through a deep understanding of the behaviors of mine and others.

So first question: why are you attracted to jerks?  Serious question.  You may think that this is just some salacious question, but it’s a great question and it’s answer is to be found in the great teaching of evolutionary psychology.  I’ll take a step back, let’s define the term for the unfamiliar.  Evolutionary psychology is a relatively new field, in which we are attempting to understand human thought and behavior through the lens of evolutionary influence.  If we can explain a behavior, though, or instinct in terms of what evolutionary advantages it may stand to offer, we can gain a very clear picture as to why certain behaviors exist and what they mean; and as with all other problems, the deeper we understand their origin, the more control we gain over them.

So why are you so attracted to people who don’t treat you well?  Again, this is a serious question with a serious answer.  So as you think about this, I really want you to connect with how irrational it is.  Seriously, I promise, come down the well with me and you will be healed before we bottom out.  Think about those toxic relationships you stayed in too long.  The obsession you maintained for that person that just didn’t want you.  Looking back, we know the person wasn’t worth it, but that impulse, that attraction was simply too strong to listen to good, realistic judgement.  There’s another analogy for meditation here.  That toxic relationship is your impulsive hunger, and now is your meditation, when you can look at it with full perspective and understand the problem and maybe even see a way out. I digress.

So now I want you to pretend that you, yourself are the guiding force of evolution.  You have two subjects.  You have a list of objectives for these subjects to fulfill, say there are 20 objectives.  Subject A checks 17 of these boxes.  Highly qualified, evolutionarily fit specimen.  The other only checks 13 boxes.  Still a strong subject, but there is some disparity there.  Now we need to consider the topic of mating.

We know our mating impulse is dictated by evolutionary fitness.  We can take all the things that make us find others attractive and map them back to the implications each trait has in regard to evolutionary advantage.  The last thing we need to consider as that the most basic guiding principle of evolution is the endeavor to “breed up”.  We always want to breed with the highest number we can. That’s the end of it.  We can’t even try give that a reason like, “so our offspring will have a better advantage.”  This is true, but we need to understand that that is evolution’s reason not ours.  No one out there reproducing is thinking “oh man, our kids are going to be so evolutionarily advantaged!” No! That’s not how it works!  In the history of evolution, we assume that all impulses were applied and let the natural arena sort them.  Those that had the impulse to “breed up” had more successful offspring than those that had the “anything that moves” impulse.  We have been refined to be selective and that’s important.

So.  All this in mind, how do you think subject A, feels about subject B? Now how do you think B feels about A?  This is a super simple example, but A probably isn’t that into B, while B is definitely in to A.  This division, where B is more attracted to A that A is to B creates a division.  B is going to pursue A.  B might be super excited about A, but what happens if A accepts?  They get together and that division we established earlier is dissolved.  Simply the act of coming together modifies the perception of both so that, psychologically now, they like perceive themselves as being closer together in terms of the evolutionary boxes they check.  Eventually, B may even lose their attraction to A.

Now let’s flip the scenario entirely.  B pursues A, but A completely rejects B.  Where, earlier, the acceptance resulted in the closing of the evolutionary divide, rejection does just the opposite.  By rejecting B, A only reinforces that division and that enhance division will almost always lead to enhanced attraction.

So what does this mean? When people treat you like crap, they create the perception that they don’t need you.  By creating this perception, they trick your mind into believing that they are, in fact, evolutionarily superior to you, and our natural reaction to anyone we identify as being evolutionarily superior is to become sexually attracted to them, sometimes to the point of obsession.  B becomes obsessed with A, and the more they show that impulsive need, the more they drive A away.  No one is going to be attracted to someone who is desperate for them.  It’s not evolutionarily productive.  If they are desperate for us, it indicates inferiority and that inferiority indicates bad breeding.

That’s why we like to date assholes.  Sociopathic, arrogant, selfish people are “sexy”.  It’s absolutely awful, but awfully true.

So, with that one example I hope it has become clear how understanding evolutionary directives offers a crystal clear window into understanding our behavior in a way that gives us real power over it.  For the sake of time, I’ll stop there, but if you want another incredible example, or 30, you can read either this one article, discussing the evolutionary implications of depression as being a method of increasing problem solving capacity in the brain as opposed to a disease, or the book, The Moral Animal by Dr. Robert Wright.  I recommend both.  They will blow your mind into a whole new realm of how you perceive both your and others’ behaviors.

Alright on to #4.

Step #4 – modification

This is where we get controversial.  This step involves genetic manipulation and that is a topic that always makes people uncomfortable.  I want to state at the beginning that this should absolutely not be done until we understand genetics in enough detail to be perfectly selective in the genes we edit, with no potential for undue or dangerous side effects.

Now, we have started to look at psychology through an evolutionary framework and we’ve started to see some concerning information.  Yes, we are hard wired to adore people that treat us like shit.  There is also this implication that evolution invented depression to make us more powerful thinkers, and that’s probably true. We are starting to paint the picture that there is a possibility that evolution does not want us to be happy.  Actually there’s a bit of bad news there.  Evolution, as it turns out forbids us from being happy.  That earlier hypothetical, where the 13 gets the 17, then after a few months, the inferior being doesn’t even want the superior one anymore.  This is the disease of complacence.  It is real and occurs with all things.  Actually, it is the based on our evolutionary drive to hoard resources.  Let’s go back to thinking we are evolution.

Do you favor animals that are content or constantly striving for individual gain?  Do you favor animals that are predisposed to be happy with what they have, or animals that can never get enough?  If you’re really tuned in, you may have guessed what I’m talking about.  Yes. Greed is an evolutionary built in.  It used to be a great feature!  For most of our history we have taken those that demonstrated a unique capacity to acquire and hoard resources and we called them kings and put them in charge of everything and let them reproduce with whoever they want!  On the other hand, we have this huge evolutionary cripple in the form of contentment, happiness, or peace.

That’s the bad news.  The reason we don’t have peace, isn’t because we’re evil.  There isn’t some malevolent spiritual force that is making us prone destroying one another.  The most destructive people who have ever lived are generally not inherently destructive, they’re greedy; and they simply allow their greed to justify their destructive behaviors.  This green is an evolutionary built in, along with some others.  The fact of the matter is, that evolution has driven the development of a number of impulses that are in fact, diametrically opposed to what we need to achieve world peace.

From here the implication is fairly simple, I believe that, when we can, we should attempt to edit these evolutionary impulses out of our code.  After all we are not doing a good job of selecting them out of our genes through our sexual selection.  The vast majority of us, myself included are still slaves to them.  Only a fraction of the population are even aware that these impulses exist and where they originate.  But I cannot help but wonder how happy my life would be if I could circumvent this habit I have of always needing more; of comparing my resource aggregation to everyone else’s and for goodness sake, I hate to take it there, but how peaceful my life would be if I was constantly compelled by this infernal male impulse to procreate, ALL… THE… TIME!

After learning these things, about the evolutionary roots of our behaviors, our inherent wildness becomes so much more clear.  We have this thing we call civilization, but in reality, we are still just a bunch of animals, just sort of… pretending.  In my estimation, ridding ourselves of the natural impulses we observe to be holding our species back from a truly, deeply sincere, civilized demeanor, will be the day we take the next step toward our destiny as the compassionate and truly civilized beings we were meant to be.

I want to close by bringing this back to my opening qualifier.  This isn’t a recipe for a cure.  I’m not qualified for that; not even close.  This is what three and a half decades of insatiable curiosity has led me to believe would be a great few steps toward that loftiest of goals.  I’m sure none of this will strike anyone as revolutionary or life-alteringly profound, but if something clicked… anything; enough to inspire a new way of thinking or maybe just a little change, I think it’s a step in the right direction, and I hope you’re life’s a little bit better for it.