The basis of life is reproduction. We can come up with a million different complicated and subjective opinions on the classification of something as “life”, but in my mind the sole equalizer has and always will be reproduction. If an organism can reproduce itself then it is considered living, and consequently all living things have a sensible want and need for reproduction. To propagate the continuation of it’s species, to see the universe dwell with creatures of it’s own genetic base it the ultimate inner desire of every “living” thing. Humans are no different. Everything we do, every action we partake in has the ultimate goal of reproduction. When we socialize with other humans we reproduce through our ideas, continuing ourselves through the continuation of our thoughts. When we pursue our creative talents, we reproduce through remembrance, through the immortal recognition of skill. When we have kids, we reproduce in the most accepted definition of the term, through our genes. But a bloodline is not the only way our cells see fit to reproduce, take for example the basis of a lot of human architecture. Buldings, the bi-pedal reflections of the human anatomical form, you won’t see any sideways buildings because humans are built to be upright. Filled with arteries of hallways carrying blood vessels of employees to their destined local. Each office working like an organ, working to carry out it’s function and coordinating with other nearby offices to get the job done faster, the organ systems of the business world. Great monuments of human architecture, the Pyramids of Giza to Stonehenge, all a reflection of the human anatomical form. Hell, the NY Stock Exchange could even be considered the Hippocampus of the business world. All our thoughts and ideas come from cells, and being what they are they combine to their ultimate soul purpose, divide. The human form is just another cell, aiming to reproduce in every way it sees fit. With the tools of a combined form, the human form, at it’s disposal the power of the cell to reproduce has lifted from genetic material to raw data, from actual physical nuclei and chromosomes to the blueprints of these organelles played out upon the larger state, the world stage. Every building, every idea, every action; all we want is to be remembered, all we want to do is reproduce.
If you’ve ever been to a casino, there’s no doubt you’ve took a peek over at the roulette wheel. Now besides being a completely horrid casino game to put money on I’ve also thought of it as being a good metaphor for life. The reds and the blacks, the ball caught in the wheel’s crevice, jumping and hopping at the wheel’s whim, and most importantly the wheel spinning faster and faster until it’s own motion becomes it’s demise. Life is a funny thing, about the only thing predictable about it is that it has a beginning and an end. We never know where we’re going to end up or how we’ll get there, and the best we can do is place our bets on the most likely scenario. Whatever we do we’re still at the mercy of the spinning wheel, still stuck in the ups and downs our life gives us. Like the roulette ball jumps when it reaches a bump, we only act as our environment forces us to. Psychology tells us there’s about a 1/3 of a second delay between a thought being constructed in the sub-conscious and it’s transfer over the consciousness barrier. Essentially, this means an idea is actually formed 1/3 of a second before we “think” it. The smartest part of ourselves Is the part we have relatively no access to. Each decision we make is not really a decision at all, but instead a sub-conscious conclusion reached after a survey of all the past outcomes in our life. If you’ve bet heads on a coin toss for 50 tosses and lost every single one, then it doesn’t take a wise man to understand your next bet should probably be on tales. If you don’t believe in destiny then consider this: every moment of your life is determined by every moment passed. If violence has always given you the desired outcome then your most likely to use violence next time there’s a problem. In life there are no 50/50 choices, because the years of life experience we’ve encountered always tips the scales in favor of one choice. And as machines of logic and reason, our brain always picks the choice more probable to succeed. You might have seen someone do something completely pointless and damaging, completely throw their life away in a moment of bad decision. You think to yourself “What the hell was he thinking to go out and do something so…stupid”. Well, I hate to break it to you, but no one makes a decision if they honestly think it’s stupid. Either they’re forced into it or their past decisions have led them to believe that the benefits of doing said stupid act will outweigh the risks, or in other words, they make a rational decision. Destiny is very much real, but not in the sense that most people make it out to be. We never think that 1 plus 1 is “destined” to equal two, it’s just the sole outcome of two different factors. As such we never think a kid who grows up in a horrible crime-plagued neighborhood is “destined” to live his life in jail, but truth is that if he never encounters that one deciding good influence, that one inspiring person or compelling speech, then the negative influences will outweigh the positives and 1 plus 1 will end up equaling two.
Humans have a truly odd thinking on the topic of life, on one side we value it as either some kind of god-given miracle or some kind of one-in-a-millionth atomic interaction, but on the other we only value it when it’s in a form we can hear and see. To this extent I’m going to go out on a limb and say that vegans are the most elitist, brainless, and self-glorifying idiots to ever hold a picket sign. Sure, there are places in the world where livestock is brutally slaughtered, and kudos to people trying to humanify the taking of life. But sure enough we are more heartless then we think, and take life much more brutally on a daily basis and often on a much larger scale. Sure carrots and cranberries might not have a mouth to scream or eyes to reflect their suffering, but they are also just as alive as the chickens and the cows. Life feeds on life; it’s how it’s always been and how it will always be. Organic creatures need organic creatures to survive, and everything that goes into our mouth was once alive and screaming , struggling and begging as it saw it’s brothers being taken one by one, as the hand that gave it nourishment hovered above, as it let out a mouthless cry of terror before being devoid of it’s life. The slaughter of livestock is only given more credit because of our own innate fears, and when we look into the eyes of the lambs awaiting slaughter, when we look into those eyes so unknowing and unaware of the reckoning to come, we see in there somewhere our own terrified expressions. Perhaps when we swat that mosquito off our arm or squash that ant that somehow made it into our house, we can stop and think. Is this really necessary? Was it to much work to let it crawl onto a newspaper or wrapper and let it on it’s way outside the window? As ridiculous as it sounds, that spider might have been a son, a father, a brother or a friend that you just killed. We seem to know exactly how other creatures must think and feel when we honestly know so little, maybe the cries of pain of the apples and ants are falling on deaf ears. We might not be able to see their pain, but sure as hell there is no living organism on this planet that doesn’t suffer when its life is slipping away. It’s a given that life must feed on life to survive, but that is no reason to not value any life but human life as precious. So spread your pesticides and feast on your crops, but never take a life unless you absolutely have to, lest one day you become the harvested.
This is not going to be another post on philosophical ideals or psychological babble, it’s going to be something that’s been said a million times but somehow still seems to surpass that somewhat significant piece of gray matter between people’s skulls. As much as I hate to judge or generalize, I’ve begun to learn there are two kinds of people in this world, the ones who get it done, and the ones who sit back and watch. Times are gone when hard work was a inherent feature of men, and now effort seems to have become a commodity present in a select few. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it damn sure wasn’t built by people sitting on their asses and saying someone else would do it either. If there’s one thing that seriously pisses me off, it’s the fact that lazy people are more willing to make excuses and point fingers instead of admitting that they simply don’t want to do it. “I can’t” simply translates to “I’m not willing to put forth the effort”, and I’m not talking about flying but for god’s sake completing a spreadsheet by 5am doesn’t exactly require black magic. Honestly, if you only live once why not at least try to make worth of it, instead of living a life of mediocrity and unfulfilled desires? If it’s been done before then you can be damn sure you can do it to, and if it hasn’t been done before then it’ll just take a bit longer. People seem to think that if some “expert” hasn’t achieved it yet then there’s no way they can do it, but forget that we all have different minds, different ways of approaching the same problem, and just because two people have the same information doesn’t mean they’ll come to the same conclusion. Go out and find a cure for the common cold, find life in the cosmos, and discover the best cure for a hangover (NOT coffee). This world is yours for the taking, as long as you can honestly believe it is.
There is a disease in our species A bacterium that feeds on faces of the weak, A spreading paradigm of sickness and disease. Puncturing greatness and confidence leaks. There is a insecurity among our species, A herder tending to his sheep, A continuous need to follow, Abandoning the need to be. There is a meek shade of gray, Staining the people while they sleep, Loneliness with other colors, To be content amongst the weak. There is a set of wings amongst our species, Forced closed and weighted down, Feathers that speak of revelation, Are shed in heaps throughout this town
To live, to breath, to see, to hear, to think, to exist. This is the greatest miracle the Universe has provided. Not the orbital’s of gigantic plants, the convulsion of stars into black holes, or the tons of energy expanded from a supernova. No, all these events pale in comparison to a millisecond of the existence of human. Every miracle possible has occurred to join together the exact combination of tissues, cells, and ideas to create the perfect machine, able to contemplate it’s place in a universe of such great marvels and miraculous events, and able to look into the stars and measure it's minuteness. But rest assured if the sun had the ability to think even it would bow down to the complexity of our species. But the only flaw we have is also our greatest motivator, the flaw of desire. The desire to be better then we were yesterday, the desire to outdo the greatest of the great, the desire to be immortal through remembrance. But sometimes when striving towards the surely unimaginable goals our species has set for itself (and constantly achieved and surpassed) we sometimes forget to realize the beauty of being alive. Every second of living is a gift, either the power of god at work, a nod from the cosmos, or divine outcome of time, but whatever it is this miracle is not guaranteed to be around forever. So go out and enjoy the most basic and enjoyable part of the human experience, being alive.
The law of the conservation of mass, the principle idea that mass can be neither created nor destroyed. If we weigh everything else in mass then why not our ideas also, and as such why would this rule not apply to our ideas? The answer in short, is that it does. Humans have not created great ideas out of thin air, not made progression without base, and not become visionaries but instead only disciples. If ideas come from the joining of experience (see “On the Intelligence of Ideas”) then the experiences have always been there for us to discover and be enlightened with, and we can only be credited with properly joining together those experiences to form ideas, and not actually conjuring them from the depths of some undiscovered genius psyche. We continue on the delusion of intelligence, when we are simply replaying the information the universe has always held.
We glance at our ghosts, assure our angels, and dispute our demons everyday. We spend everyday fighting the battles with an enemy we create. And make no mistake none of us can handle the pressure everyday without something to lean against. A friend said to me once that I use religion as the crutch in my life to support my weak persona; I said to him that if that is the case then every human being on earth has a bad back. Wheatear it is love, community, culture, drugs, or religion that becomes the crutch, it makes no difference. Humans have created these things as our shelter, as our tent from the winds of everyday life. We confine ourselves in our fortress where our fears take a back seat to a much more important cause. On a usually everyday basis we lock ourselves and become convinced the real world is only a temporary destination. As humans we are a species that likes to only step halfway through the door, wheatear it be the spiritual or “real” one, and use the other as a means of escape so we do not fall too much through to one side. We all need our escape, and none of us is capable of criticizing anyone else’s.
Nowadays I see people (including me) watching every little thing they consume, exercising regularly, consuming less chemicles and such. Now this is all well since the health of the human body is imperative to our survival, but what about the health of the human mind? How many of us can safely say we filter and sort through everything we see/smell/hear or listen to? Something I never thought I’d say, but am driven to now, is that it’s very beneficial to argue for the sake of argument. We’re fed the equivalent of Big Macs in information everyday, stuff that seems appealing and gives us momentary satisfaction but ruins our thinking in the long run. The disturbing thing is we continue to consume these fast foods of information and justify it to ourselves by saying that we are not intelligent enough to ponder these things on our own. What a ridiculous notion! In my belief it is not that we are not capable, but instead we refuse to spend the time to do so. “I can’t do this” translates roughly to “I don’t feel like putting forth the effort”. Educate yourself, instead of agreeing with the gold-frilled ideas of others.
-Ideas, do they truly indicate the greatness of individual or just the product of luck? Now to take a seemingly pessimistic view of the human mind, we are nothing but a wealth of chemicals, interacting and reacting in very similar ways but to different stimuli. A great idea shows itself when just the right balance of neural pathways and chemical balances are established, when our experiences in life come together to power the light bulb we call an idea. Should we credit these individuals for their genius, or credit their influences for piecing together to form a even greater sum? To some sense of the word we are all in this sense a bit narcissist, a bit to crediting of our own ideas. We often do not create our circumstances; do not measure out every variable and event in our life to equate to this great idea. Of course not, as we do not know the formula for such a great outcome. Our ideas are products of chance and experience, not products of some kind of inner genius finally shown to the world. You can study Plato your whole life, but you may as well never be Plato. Variance in experience in its most base sense is the most important thing in life, because we might not know the ingredients list for world-changing revelations but we can be sure we gather as many materials as we can.
-Importance of the individual is once again starting to be recognized. For the past several decades the culture has continually decomposed and chipped away at the power of the individual, by implying your only “important” if you contribute to the culture, a culture of waste and destruction. It denounces our appearance and makes you continually strive to look like someone else, tells you to fuel a major corporation that crushes the small person, and says you need a 8x12 sheet of paper to give you any intellectual merit. Recently though, through drug culture and the increase in psychology and neurological fields suggests we are once again starting to value the beauty of our minds over knowledge of other worldly contraptions. We know how to fix cars, how to maintain electronics, and how rockets work but barely anything about how we operate. Hopefully we realize it’s better to be able to manufacture and repair your own mind instead of handing it over to the nearest greasy haired mechanic.
The pursuit of money is a never ending chase, With more to spend there’s more to spend on, With more to spend on there’s less to be happy about. True riches are in satisfaction with your position in life, whatever it may be.
We live in a consumer culture, where we might have the greatest thing ever today, only to be overshadowed by the next invention tomorrow. Those 200$ sneakers you bought today are only cool until next week those 50$ shoes become the new trend. And the more money you have the more you can afford to adapt to these changes for social acceptance and temporary personal satisfaction. But if you have nothing you have the gift of not being a week long fad. Consuming is a addiction (and shopping’s already shown to be), if we have freedom of choice you have freedom to purchase into the culture as it changes continually. And since being broke is never in style there you are once again chasing to attain more paper, to start the cycle all over again.
My thoughts on religion have changed quite dramatically over the past couple of months, which Is both a good thing and somewhat a bad thing for me. I’ve come to one revelation though, that most modern day religions preach more an ideal of isolation and a means of differentiation (since it would help people strengthen their beliefs to not be exposed to external influence), rather then a ideal of acceptance of people. Now I’m all for being on the “winning side” and all but really what kind of game is being played here? I now realize that if you wish to become a religious man you must learn to become a peaceful and humane person first, because you may never know what your creator looks like or is, but you can be damn sure he wanted us to be a peaceable culture, and not use his word to justify murder or to use as a difference from people. Religion is twisted, taught subjectively and selectively, and preached in the way that appeals the masses, and when you learn religion you will learn it the way it is meant to be viewed by the teacher. Unless you’re a Satanist (in which case you’re out of luck) then learn to be good compassionate and “nice” people before you chase god.
Everlasting happiness is not happiness. Permanent bliss is not very blissful at all. I love money, and cars, and interesting people, and the lazy Saturdays and unproductive Sundays, because they can all be taken away and come to pass. I love my temporary paradise because occasionally I get a peek at the world outside, so I can be sure it really is a paradise. So don’t preach me ancient proverbs and inner happiness ideals that I can purchase for a couple cents on the page, I’m satisfied with my false happiness and my material goods, I’m happy living good the one day and laying in misery the next because it gives me a taste of the “varying offensive” that is life.
Evil is rampant in our society. But justice is an epidemic. Let me start by saying I don’t believe anyone is truly a “bad” person or a lost cause; corruption is only skin deep. I don't believe in punishment, and I believe that goodness in man should be created the same way evil is grown, through influence. No one is born bad or is irreversibly evil, just more intricately wired for that purpose, with circuits that can be disconnected and correctly attached with the right kind of tools.
Firstly, to understand a solution you must understand the problem. What makes a person do things of a destructive nature? A man is not born a criminal, nor born to be a criminal. A man can only be bred for corruption. If I may dwell in some psychology here, we are essentially slaves to our sub-conscious mind, an area we have little to no control over the development of and yet it controls all of our actions and helps the conscious mind make up stories about us being in control of our thoughts. It’s also a area that is developed through influence, through everything we’ve seen, heard, tasted, and been taught. And according to today’s society it’s quite apparent we give more value to bad events then the good, because goodness was always a given but evil is always oh so shocking. Media is saturated with horrible tragedies of humanity and at the end of the day how many car wrecks do we need to see before we’re satisfied? “We all feed on tragedy, Frown out your one face, but with the other you stare like a junkie into the TV, stare like a zombie while the mother holds her child and watches him die”.
In a culture where violence is fed to us like (and often with) afternoon tea, maybe we’ve grown cold to the idea of suffering, without even realizing it. But then again every middle-aged man who spends his afternoons watching CNN is not a murderer, and there is a sure contrast between being indifferent to pain and causing it. Various studies have shown that serial killers have the same area of their brain (located around the frontal cortex) altered, and if you take into account neuroplasticity (the idea that brain matter is actually altered according to influence) these people all had some relatively similar seriously negative things going on to push them into horrible acts of violence. You can call it madness, call it the flaw of the human design, but we’re a species designed to listen and follow, and those still clinging to free will are only kidding themselves. If you’re raised in a world where violence is the means to an end, can you still be blamed for your actions? Cut the moral goodness act and realize that when our bad influences outweigh the good we will essentially become a product of those influences. The virtuous characters of fiction would have been cold-blooded killers in the real world.
Now if there’s one thing that’s always got under my skin is the condition of the justice system, not only in the U.S, but in most developed countries it’s the same charade. Let them rot in a cell, shock their brains to mulch, inject them and watch them squirm, or just put them behind a curtain and fire away. It might not be the correct thing to justify murder with murder but if it makes the public happy then it must be the right thing to do. An eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth, hell it’s even in the bible. Just another catalyst to feed our angry minds, satisfy our craving for violence by justifying it with our losses, when we would’ve done the same thing in their situation. We must improve these individuals, as much as it goes against every revenge filled and vengeful urge in our body, or we might never improve ourselves. Violence breeds more violence. We can’t let go of our selfishness, may the whole world burn but our losses be repaid. Our justice system is the equivalent of a 6-year old sweeping his junk under the bed so the room appears clean when his mom comes in.
Because of this the solution might sound simple but is brutally hard to enforce for most. Counseling by knowledgeable people with good intentions would be much more efficient then throwing an individual into a hellhole of worse influence. When a person can be “brainwashed” into being evil, that same kind of force can be used to flip the equation. Call it manipulation if that’s what you prefer (since it seems to be the word of choice for moral enthusiasts) but the human mind is a fragile thing meant to be twisted and turned, and if it’s not molded the right way then violence comes about. We have the love, community, and ideas to create a human paradise if we just learn to control our violent urges. It’s not the strongest that survive, we’re smart enough to realize that we can help people in need instead of push them deeper into the abyss, but yet we continue to do so and even go so far as to label these people “evil” when we’re most certainly saints in white clothing. Well turn around and take a closer look, because you’ve hung the guilty with the innocent.
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