Entry Note To Self...faith in humanity

Steinbeck writes on January 1, 1941:

Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.

Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the humanity he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his own filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.

Entry Note To Self:

So when we witness evil, punctuate the line of our moral and humanitarian progress, as we periodically do, and may we remember Steinback’s sobering perspective and lucid faith in the human spirit.

Christopher Bryson...French Quarter

The French Quarter...by Christopher Bryson

Automotives. When we talk at all, we talk about cars. Mostly, it's the 1950s and 1960s models, out of Detroit. The ones that were there for us when we were young. Proof that we were there at that time, having our formative car dreams. Maybe proof that we were young.

Just the Americans. We never talk about Porsche, Mercedes, Triumph, Fiat, and the rest. No exotics.

We discuss lines, the color combinations, how they sound. Their shape, trim. How they look from the front, the side, and going away. How they look when they move. How they might feel, the ones we have never ridden. How they smelled when they were new, or used. Leather. Cigars. Dream cars: Buick, Lincoln, Cadillac.

We talk about these cars as if we are talking about women we do not know—women we have only seen, or heard about, or imagined, admired, but never met. Women we have dreamed about, maybe. We find common ground. That's how it is when we talk.

Angelo, on the corner
Governor Nicholls Street
New Orleans, LA  2017

The Human Conservancy Field Office...

Notes From The Field...

Every person has many different and often contradictory emotional dispositions, desires, and ways of responding to the world. Our emotional dispositions develop by looking outward, not inward. They are not cultivated when you retreat from the world to meditate or go on a vacation. They are formed, in practice, through the things you do in your everyday life: the ways you interact with others and the activities you pursue. In other words, we aren’t just who we are: we can actively make ourselves into better people all the time.

Entry Note To Self...here and there does not matter

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning...T.S. Elliot

From Inside The Sane Asylum...Dumb Ass Reflex...

For the last few days I have been watching more football than my brain can enjoy. But what the hell, everyone else seems to be enjoying so why not join in. There is a lot of talk about the coaches...mostly about how much they make and second guessing their play calling. What I noticed most was the dumb ass mental mistakes by the players. Case in point. The Off Side call. The lineman execute this down set before you snap the ball thousands of times, but every once in a while they just jump off sides before the ball is snapped for no dump ass reason. The brain just makes a dumb ass reflex.  Can't explain it. The reflex just happens. Grown men slapping their helmet in disgust and lip syncing "What the ----".

The other day I was backing out of my garage. I thought I put the car in reverse but guess it was a dumb ass mental mistake and I dropped it a notch or two lower into drive. Now when you accelerate and you sense you are going in the wrong direction your brain wants to help out and slam on your breaks. It knows how to do that, but the brain makes a big dumb ass reflex and presses the foot harder on the accelerator rather than withdrawing. "What the ----", I thought as I sat in my storage closet looking at the rake and hoe hanging on the wall. Never use them but there they were, hanging neatly just outside my car door. Ended up off sides in my storage closet.

Now I must say, Ms. Ego was not very happy, even after I tried to explain to her that it was a big dumb ass mental mistake followed by a dumb ass brain reflex. "It was only a mental mistake and a brain reflex, can happen to anyone", I pleaded.  I even tried to explain to her that older people's response time is much slower and it never occurred to me to take my foot off the accelerator.  A lot like my recall lately. Things just don't occur to me like they use too. I went so far to explain that the average reaction reflex time to a visual stimuli is .025 of a second and .017 to an audio stimulus, and if she would have been watching she could have yelled at me and maybe I would have stopped sooner...She's not happy!

Reflexes come in all kinds. Conditioned, unconditioned and just the ordinary kind when an action is carried out through the mediation of the nervous system but not requiring the cooperation of the brain for its execution. Just a response of a perturbing stimulus that acts to return the body to homeostasis. The reflex arc, the receptor at the end of a sensory neuron, the afferent neuron, the efferent neuron traveling up the efferent pathway. I know all that crap but it was of no value in explaining how I ended up in the storage closet due to a dumb ass reflex.

I needed some deeper insight on this reflex subject, so I called my good friend Jess Ben Rambling and related how I had been hit hard of recent by "dumb ass reflexes".  Now I don't  know what I was expecting to hear. Maybe some sympathy followed by "it can happen to the best of us". Or maybe, "are you ok?". Hell, I would have settled for, "that was a real dumb ass reflex". He was silent for a moment trying to make contact with his deeper self, I suppose, then responded..."Many times I reflex while I reflect on past memories and friends."

What the ----!

Somewhat-not-half-bad-on-a-good-day...Doc

Discovering Ourselves...Emotions

The concept of ‘basic’ or ‘primary’ emotions dates back at least to the Book of Rites, a first-century Chinese encyclopedia that identifies seven ‘feelings of men’: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking.

In the 20th century, Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and Robert Plutchik eight, which he grouped into four pairs of polar opposites (joy-sadness, anger-fear, trust-distrust, surprise-anticipation).

It is said that basic emotions evolved in response to the ecological challenges faced by our remote ancestors and are so primitive as to be ‘hardwired’, with each basic emotion corresponding to a distinct and dedicated neurological circuit. Being hardwired, basic emotions (or ‘affect programs’) are innate and universal, automatic, and fast, and trigger behaviour with a high survival value. So much can hardly be said of more complex emotions such as humility or nostalgia, which, for example, are never attributed to infants and animals.

The other day, I opened a cutlery drawer on a large lizard, which, of course, I had not been expecting to find. As the critter darted off into the blackness behind the drawer, I unthinkingly jumped back and slammed the drawer shut. Having done this, I suddenly discovered myself to be feeling hot and alert and primed for further action. This basic fear response is so primitive that even the lizard seemed to share in it, and so automatic as to be ‘cognitively impenetrable’, that is, unconscious and uncontrollable, and more akin to a reflex than a deliberate action. One of high survival value I suppose.

Reflections From The Sane Asylum...

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us... don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be a somebody!...Emily Dickenson 

Scribblings From Another...transcendentalism

Transcendentalism...now that's  a long word. Felt it deserved some thought, so I found this nice piece written by Mitch Horowitz. Good history describing the period of independent thought called Transcendentalism or the individual search for meaning. Just thought you might enjoy a different perspective to start the New Year.

Why Thoreau’s Walden Matters Now More Than Ever

By MITCH HOROWITZ

December 30, 2016


Why should anyone still read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a classic that seems to belong to grade-school reading lists, and whose author is sometimes targeted by hero-toppling literary critics?

Because Walden created a culture of rebellion and independent thought that reflects the best of American life, especially at the current moment when coarseness, unlearned opinion, and groupthink threaten to overrun us.

The philosophy called Transcendentalism, as shaped by Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and their collaborators, reflected America’s sharpest break with the religious dogma and intellectual conformities of the Old World. Transcendentalism embraced inner experiment, personal experience, and the individual search for meaning.

The New England Transcendentalists rejected the idea of rewards in the afterlife as the aim of religious practice. Instead, they believed in living out your highest potential in the present, deriving power and purpose from a palpably felt relationship to God. The Transcendentalists embraced mystical ideas from the East to which they gave a practical and can-do tone, familiarizing Americans with concepts of meditation, karma, and nonattachment. Thoreau and Emerson drew upon esoteric ideas from Hermeticism – the Greek-Egyptian philosophy that flourished in the decades following Christ – to suggest the creative and causative powers of the human mind, and how to apply them in the here and now.

"To ask, to seek, and to experiment – these are the most radical acts a person can undertake today." Thoreau

Thanks in part to Thoreau, the idea of the individual spiritual search now seems like a national birthright. In polls, most Americans agree that spiritual truth can be found outside of allegiance to any one faith or tradition. “Unaffiliated” is the fastest-growing category of religious identity. In recovery groups, twelve-step movements, and other nontraditional forms of spiritual search, we are encouraged to seek our own conception of a Higher Power. Even those Americans who affiliate with the traditional faiths are taught to believe that their own paths to the Divine are many – that the gates of prayer and forgiveness are always open; that the house of God, the seat of the ineffable, exists all around us. A spark of divinity, many believe, exists within.

Such concepts were foreign, if not heretical, in the hierarchical Christendom of Europe’s past.
Consider, for example, the physical structure of the fourteenth-century Pope’s Palace in Avignon, France. In the enormous church that dominates the palace’s ground floor, the front pews were, naturally, reserved for aristocracy. A few rows back, space was reserved for those who served the powerful, such as merchants and teachers. And the remainder of the enormous cathedral was designated for everybody else. Here was a structure built in the name of a man who taught, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” resembling nothing so much as an emperor’s court.
Thoreau and Transcendentalism upended that. Today one can visit Concord, Massachusetts, and walk to Walden Pond where Thoreau built his tiny cabin. Nothing remains of the physical structure, aside from the hearthstone. There is just open air where the cabin stood. But that empty space is, in a sense, Transcendentalism’s greatest monument, and perhaps America’s, as well. One can stand in this space and feel that this is a place in which one individual lived, determined to learn what it means to be a real human being, to look inside life and discover what really penetrates the human psyche. It is an invisible monument to the quest to know oneself. It is America’s sphinx. And that was Transcendentalism.

Read Walden not because it is old and venerated – but because it summons us to all that is new within ourselves. To ask, to seek, and to experiment – these are the most radical acts a person can undertake today. These are the tools of Thoreau.

At Play In The Field Of Now...Silence

At Play In The Field Of Now...Silence

Yesterday...that's an unusual word when you look at it, but our yesterday can yield to us a moment in today.

I spent my yesterday with great friends. Sharing good food, fond memories, a laugh or two and yes a yesterday moment for today.

It was a cool damp night looking across the calm water of the lake...when she said, "it's so quiet you can feel the silence." Exactly was my thought. Well said and well shared my friend.

“There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout,” Henry David Thoreau observed in contemplating how silence ennobles speech. A year earlier, he had written in his journal: “I wish to hear the silence of the night, for the silence is something positive and to be heard.” It’s a sentiment of almost unbearable bittersweetness today, a century and a half later, as we find ourselves immersed in a culture that increasingly mistakes loudness for authority, vociferousness for voice, screaming for substance. We seem to have forgotten— that “silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech,” that it has its own aesthetic, and that learning to wield it is among the great arts of living.

The fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul... we seem to have most hastily forsaken this pursuit — and yet it is also the one we most urgently need if we are to reclaim the aesthetic of silence in the art of living.

Thanks my friends for sharing your yesterday...Doc

From The Study...a conservation of possibilities

As I am sitting at my desk on this eve of another new year, I am reminded of a quote from
a young writer in Melbourne, Australia by the name of Beau Tarplin...Beau, please
forgive me if I do not get it exact...it goes something like this...

"Don't stress so much about settling on a path for your new year.
The division of time into years is a human invention,
And the fact is, every moment of every day is an opportunity for resolution and growth.
So, when the fireworks fly, relax and enjoy the moment.
The rest will come to you."

So...as we honor the passing of 2016, I leave you with my prayer from last year

For those I may have wronged, I ask for your forgiveness.
For those I may have helped, I wish I could have done more.
For those I could have helped, I ask for understanding.
For those who have helped me, I am grateful.

Resolved to sense more beauty, express more gratitude, and experience more
forgiveness...Doc.

Scribblings From Inside The Sane Asylum...sensing the season

Sitting on my porch this cool evening, just pondering  this thinking concept, when I interrupted my thought with another thought..".what the hell am I thinking? You don't know crap about that  stuff." See I interrupted my thinking. There must be a dozen ways to interrupt your thoughts. What I've noticed, they always involve another thought, an endless stream of words that describe our world. Language. It's amazing how busy it keeps that part of our consciousness we call mind.

I recall a time walking with my grandfather. It was late one evening as we were making our way from the barn toward the dog trot house. I always wanted to carry the milk bucket but he was a wise man...just said the pale didn't fit my hand. Well back to my thought...see how easy you can get off thought? Now what was I thinking? Damn, now back to the story. 

About half way to the house, his broad hand pushed on my chest. "Quiet," he said. He paused and turned his ear to the sky and stood there in silence, just listening. I remember the silhouette of his face in the fading sky, and the sound of his voice as he answered my obvious question..."I'm listening for the farthest sound."

Interrupted his thought with sound. Now that was clever as it seems today, but it was and still is a good method.  Silence thought and think no thing from time to time. Listen for the farthest sound.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like...I assume that would be the case with you?

May you be filled with the joys and delights of this season...Doc

The Human Conservancy...field office

Once upon a time men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need every day to appease your hunger, to shake your thirst is nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming. Teilhard de Chardin, “Mass on the World

Wishing you peace and joy...Doc

From Inside The Sane Asylum...up shit creek

Yep...you guessed it. No post for a spell. Going up shit creek with my paddle and take a holiday break. Enjoy your family and friends...talk to you soon.

Partially true...partially fiction..as I recall

I was reflecting on those things I still remember this morning. Didn't take me very long as my recall seems to be in remission. Good memory, but my recall is not worth a shit. I remember growing up in this little sawmill village of Fisher. The entire village, from houses to church and Commissary owned by Four L Lumber Company.  A two room school house, sidewalks made of wood, mule skinners making their way to their company owned homes after a long day of logging. I remember Mr. Dewitt as he would always crack his mule skinner whip for my amusement. And how could I forget the gossip of the Funderburk girl and Miller boy being caught swimming nude in the mill pond. I remember Mrs. Tannahill saying she saw a bright flash of light the moment her son will killed in a logging accident. The rumors of how Mr. Curtis beat his wife. The visual and feeling of Christmas as each child, black and white, received a gift from the village tree. Compliments of "The Company"...of course.

Aunt Mae as I called her, lived across the street. She was important in my life. I had this ole bicycle
that was to tall and my toes barely reached the petals. Worked fine until I had to stop. Even at that young age a metal bar between the legs HURT! This is where Aunt Mae came in. She sat on her
porch each evening chatting with her neighbors, waiting for her husband and drinking a cup of coffee. She always sat in one of those cow hide, straight back chairs as I recall.  I would mount my ole bike from my porch and ride the dirt street that circled the village. Usually made a pass around the school

house, made my way up a steep hill in front of the Company owned Commissary and back home. Would yell to Aunt Mae to "catch me" and then make another round as she made her way to my rescue. Don't know why I called her Aunt? She sure saved me the recall of a lot of pain though. I could have rode up to my porch and stopped myself, but I think we needed those daily encounters of salvation. I know I did. I often wonder about Aunt Mae and to this day see her smile and feel her embrace as I rolled to a stop.

My first and second grade school teacher was named Ms. Farsheets. :). You read me correct. I came  home one day and told my mother that Ms. Farsheets called me a scurvy elephant. Of course my mother asked her why. I think it was at Wednesday night church service or maybe at one of those revival nights where our little village would all be saved and have a revival of sorts in our hearts. Said it would come in handy when the roll is called up yonder... Anyway, when confronted, Ms. Farsheets promptly responded, " I did not call him a scurvy elephant, I said he was a disturbing element."


Funny...those things we recall when recall has to make another lap around the block to be embraced by our memory...

...pictures from my little village, some years ago...be well, make peace with yourself and get along with it all...Doc

                       May you be blessed with much peace and joy during this holiday season.

From Inside The Sane Asylum...super, supermoon rising

Jess and Ego pondering the Super SuperMoon rising...

Ego: "Jess, think of it as consciousness = (energy), works as a TV-projector and there exists infinite channels= (dimensions) at once, simultaneously...and those channels contains pictures = (realities) and when those pictures go quickly through the TV-projector it creates the illusion of motion and time.
All dimensions and realities exist simultaneously. Existence is no subject to time. Time is only a concept within the existence. So you see, the Universe is not out there. There is no out there. It's nothing more than an optical illusion. Sight, sound, taste, and smell are "illusions" from our senses. Everything exist in the same "location". You are shifting from parallel reality to parallel reality billions of time per second that have a frequency that match with your vibration.

So you see Jess, that huge moon on the horizon is not that big...it's just an illusion."

Jess: "Makes you want to put on an English riding helment and have one of those out of body experiences of the world coming to an end."