Monday, December 30, 2013

How to be content…Donato’s formula

How to be content…Donato’s formula

To immediately end all discontent, unhappiness, anxieties or depression you may be suffering from is simple. Imagine, no, decide, you will live for a thousand years. Immediately, you will see you have plenty of time, no time pressures at all now. Also, you have seen all this before, and it will certainly repeat, so why get upset? Just let it go. Relax and enjoy the moment, there will be plenty more like this… You don’t believe you will live a thousand years? Just because you can’t remember doing it? That it might be what you are doing right now, without knowing it? No matter what, just like you don’t recognize the moment you go to sleep,  you won’t recognize the moment of your death, if it does come. So, it will be as if you had lived a thousand years. NO worries!!!

Donato Dec. 30  2013

Science and/or God?

Science and/or God?

Humans like all other living creatures will consume without limit, be both individually, and collectively addicted to consumption, unless stopped by some other force in nature, such as predators, climate change and loss of survival habitat. Since the invention of science, humans have had practically no check on their food and shelter needs, nor on the infant mortality that used long ago to occur when they had only their own human bodies to do the work needed to survive.

So we have used our science mainly to continually grow our numbers without limit, and to consume habitat without limit, and now face responsibility for our own extinction, as well as that of most other life. Most humans are utterly unaware of the likely miseries to be encountered by their grandchildren, if not their children. Those who are aware may place their hope in God, or, in science.  Scientifically, there is no evidence either will come to our rescue. If God will, she’d better act soon. 

Mystics from Lao Tzu and Chang Tse, to Christ and Buddha, have evidently found a way to be content with not-knowing, and not-doing. (If nothing is done, nothing is left undone…Lao Tzu). Nothing matters. No thing matters, since all is one, there can be no thing.  Wheeee!! Hallelujah!!! Even death has no dominion.

Donato  Dec. 30  2013

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Science Has No Moral Compass

From Archimedes to Einstein, scientists have always been in the business of giving matches to babies and then walking away as the house burns down. Their engineering creations have put all life on the planet in jeopardy. Science is without morals, and scientists like it that way. They collect their salaries and rewards, and life on the planet pays the price of their egotism. I am a P.Eng. and I know first hand their arrogance and sureness, lack of humility, and willingness to do what the boss wants..

Since the invention of agriculture and the wheel, humans have used every product of human ingenuity and (prophetic) leadership to wage war on each other and on the planet's life resources by increasing without limit the human population and human's addictions to consumption. Science today is the chief tool used by global corporations to pursue their headlong rush to destroy all life on the planet…

The University I went to as a student in 1951 gave us the academic shelter of old stone and brick and wood buildings, where the first year students were deliberately taught by the top professors and Deans of the faculties, in order to give us the best possible start. Then there were 5000 students. Today, there are are 50 000, taught by underpaid, overworked academic assistants,  in glass and steel buildings looming on the skyline more like nuclear reactors than havens of wisdom and learning. The seeds of the worship of science were being sown even back then, as money to study poetry disappeared into the maw of engineering sciences... Nothing good has come of humans substituting computer war games for hearing a bard declaim Homer, or the wisdom of Sophocles...

Sunday, September 8, 2013

I am my universe

I am my universe
The only one I know
The only one I can know
When I die
When my apparatus dies
The universe it knew
Will be gone
And I that drop of water
Will become the Ocean...

Donato Sept. 8  2013

Friday, April 12, 2013

Human Immigration in Evolution

Human Immigration in Evolution
(We do not know how to live here)

When humans emigrated from Europe to North America their initial survival depended on their learning from those natives already here how to survive in this place. Later they were able to bring such numbers that they could convert the land to what they were used to in Europe and thus continue their old  practices, laying waste the waterways, and the soil and air and destroying the local life.

It’s clear in evolutionary time, the  human immigration onto planet earth after a few millennia, ceased to learn how to live here from those already here, the wolves and others, for example, who had been successful here for many millions of years. The humans that we have become do not know how to live here. Do not know how to survive here, any better than Franklin knew how to survive in the Arctic, and moreover refused out of stupid pride to learn from the wolves and the Eskimos.

We will only survive by losing our stupid pride, admitting we do not know how to live here, and looking to the animals once more as our guides and teachers.

Donato April 12  2013

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Why am I Vegan?

Why am I Vegan?

I became Vegan a few years ago because I read some evidence based studies that persuaded me my food habits and addictions severely damaged my body and its functioning, reducing my life expectancy. I realized and knew I was risking debilitating disease instead of a quiet and peaceful old age.

 I remain Vegan because I now daily have a much more satisfactory experience of my body. I now have far more satisfaction in all my mental functioning around health and well-being, than ever I had being a meat, dairy and egg eater. Before I became Vegan I had an ambivalent, almost schizoid, experience of myself around food. I loved and craved the succulent flavors of meat and dairy products, eggs and bacon. I felt guilty eating these knowing how the animals were treated to produce my food. I felt overstuffed and guilty after every major dinner, and I could not stop gaining weight, no matter the difficult and anxiety producing the diets I tried.

All that anxiety and guilt is in the past. Being Vegan has set me free to be my best self, to cease being at war with myself. To eat as much as I want, whenever I want, without fear of weight gain or bad health caused by food. The virtue I feel at taking care of my whole body/mind connection this way, far outweighs the occasional craving I still feel for a meal of fat and sweet. And I no longer contribute to the 18% of greenhouse gases the meat animals make. And as a bonus, I feel a kind of spiritual glow around the ritual of preparing food, choosing what I will eat, knowing what I want to eat just then, and why.

Donato April 11 2013

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Capitalists

Capitalists

Predator fishes
Of our time
Except
They have no predators
To limit to eliminate
Their appetites
So they will
In time
Eat each other
Themselves

April 9 2013

Capitalism- a Life Destroying Virus

Capitalist global financial systems treat everything as objects to be owned, bought, sold, exploited, for accrual of what is called wealth by the rich. They foster wars, poverty, disease, and destruction of the ecosystem for all forms of life. Only a tiny fraction of humans have historically benefitted from capitalist systems of money, commerce, science.. All the rest have certainly increased population numbers, but not in quality of life, and that life is about to be extinguished along with most other forms of it, by the waste making and ecosystem destruction of global capitalism. The buildings, apparatus, infrastructure of Global Capitalism make slaves of its human operators, all dedicated and addicted to increased consumption and waste-making.

 As only one example, people go to work for oil companies, from the CEO to the floor sweepers, because these companies offer a job that they think they need. Politicians do what oil companies want for the same reasons. The company, its buildings and soulless apparatus,  is in charge of its own future and that is, that of a self-destructive robot. No human agency will stop their march to doom us all. When the oil runs out, they will buy up Monsanto etc. and find a way to keep going awhile, as did the cigarette companies when their market began to shrink.



In my vision, the wolves have existed for 20 million years, in what I see as a near ideal form of life and culture, given their body type and abilities. Early humans must have had at least the same qualities. I don’t believe their lives were nasty and brutish, any more than is robin’s (who also finds plenty of time to sing) , and certainly not in the way that billions of humans now suffer physically and emotionally daily. 

If our young people today can organize in small self-sufficient pods as do the wolves, making optimum use of “small” science, they may have some resilience to survive the climate change, starvation, pestilence epidemics, civil wars, cultural collapse, contained in the future of global capitalism.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Poem for the day

Not Heard/My God Speech

How can I be heard
When they don t
Hear themselves

Be loved
When the don t love
Themselves

Be known
When they don t
Know themselves

Donato Mar. 24  2013

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Humans are Superior Beings?

Humans are Superior Beings?

The trajectory of human life on this planet over the past 100 000 years or so has been to indulge its addictions to consumption, as any other animal would. But their big brain sciences gave them the means to make exponential increases in their numbers, and now suicidal destruction of habitat, unconstrained by any natural predators. Science proceeds without the morality underlying the “natural justice” that pervades all other activities of planet earth.

Scientists always claim their right to discover and invent whatever they please, without any responsibility for its use and the outcomes. They would invent matches (they have, atomic power) and give them to babies to burn the house down.

Wolves have a family and social life the equal of the best of humans. They have lived this way for 20 million years. Humans long ago ceased learning from other animals, and consequently, will flame out in the next 100 years or so, and take most other life with them.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

The Way the Money System Works

The Way the Money System Works

The banks need, as they have done throughout history, to earn money to pay their bills and have some left over for dividends in order to attract capital for a bit of reasonable expansion. We need the banks to keep our money safe, grow it a little for our old age and facilitate some borrowing so we can conduct business, pay for goods and the means to make them, in advance of making sales and collecting income. So the banks make loans to people and businesses at competitive interest rates, to earn the money they need to stay in business.

That’s how they used to operate. But now, since the mathematicians and the economists got into the act, the banks have discovered that making small loans to facilitate trade is for chumps. They make huge loans to each other and their friends in finance, to help them move billions of dollars around in pure gambling operations, betting on small changes in interest at the chip window of the central banks who print the money, but don’t ever give it to any but the rich in the financial game. Small business goes nowhere, employment that they would generate never happens, the economy, the real economy stagnates, and the rich stay in their gated communities worrying the mob may soon come howling for blood. A mob they have created through their greed and inability to control their consumption of products, housing, cars, travel, of no use once they pass the age of 60+. And their bodies rot out just as fast, if not faster, than those of the other 99% not so befriended by the government and banking system. So the 99% get to pay the medical costs of the rich and to educate the children of them too, but have increasingly less access either to education, or effective medical care.

Note that universal education started in the 1700’s in response to the need of the industrial revolution merchants for workers with minimum skills in reading and writing. Now that that work can be done by electronic gadgetry, educating the masses is no longer a priority, so governments and all those with large pension plan incomes, treat it as a cost to be minimized. Whereas, medical care of the elderly rich, is a priority, especially massively expensive research into means of palliating their illnesses caused by their careless and profligate lifestyle addictions...

Long ago. there wasn’t much money in circulation, and there were a lot of poor, only able to find hard laboring work as virtual slaves, not able to get enough money to start small businesses and begin to employ more people more regularly. The rich didn’t take much part in the cash expense economy either, their cash was all tied up in land, from which they got rents. Or in buying government bonds, having lent money to the government, collecting rent on that as interest. To make money, for survival and a pension, people worked for wages, or collected rents on land or money, or gambled by buying low and selling high, in goods, or slaves, or whatever. So merchants are basically gamblers....Banksters and the financially rich, the landowners, the owners of stocks and bonds, are renters, and the 99% are wage slaves, at the mercy of those who can use the army to control the ownership of resources.

In the distant past, the relation between armies, thousands willing to die to support a few rich, and the poverty of the masses (who supplied their bodies for a pittance as cannon fodder), was not so apparent as today, when even governments do the bidding of our vast armies and armaments factories, the military -industrial complex, which supplies welfare in the form of wages and directly maintains the control of the rich over all resources, land, mineral, now water, and coming, to a place near you, the air (Drones anyone?)

Donato Mar. 6  2013

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Pondering The Hero's Journey

In  my Men's Group meeting recently we talked about how the group got started 20 years ago. with a workshop on how to be a man, acting out some ideas from the Hero's Journey, by Joseph Campbell. The conversation around Hero's Journey has been really exciting for me. Here is an excerpt from an article I found plus some of my thoughts for your entertainment..

This is from a blog by a man who seems to have gone through a trans-gender crisis to become what he could call a man. And yet reading it, I am further convinced that there are so many ways to be a man that we ought just stop using the term, say a "person"  and be done with the struggle and the angst to find something that doesn't exist…

"What makes a man? It’s not just my question then, but one for all of us, and the answer depends on how much one can extricate oneself from the war cry of a society intent on destroying femininity, enforcing a reductionist binary, and flattening complexity. Every man I’ve known well enough to get a little drunk with has eventually addressed the dilemma: how to be yourself in a world that expects a monster or a hero, but never a new dad struggling with how to raise his own child under the weight of a bad relationship to his own father, or an effeminate straight man struggling to accept himself for who he is when his own family can’t believe he’s not gay."

Read more: http://www.utne.com/mind-body/what-makes-a-man-zm0z13mazros.aspx?page=3#ixzz2MIm3ilCk

Thomas Page McBee writes about gender and culture for TheAtlantic.com, Salon, the San Francisco Weekly, and the Phoenix, where he is an editor. Reprinted from The Rumpus (October 12, 2012), a literary website with a focus on publishing good writing.


I want the Hero's Journey to end with the Prince being found and turned into a frog and hopping away leaving behind no trace except his wet footprint. That frog has a lot to say to me,  is just as interesting as the Prince, and a lot less dangerous….

Poem

The Archetypal Quaternion

As for me now
Pondering
Lover Magician Warrior King
Being an empty boat
I choose my Act
To carry the day
All I need
Are a pair of oars
Lover and Magician
Will do
Their own
And all the work
Of the other two

Donato  Mar. 2  2013

Poem

Hero’s Journey

Let us be done with
Heroes
Internal or ex
If Theseus had come back
From that Minotaur he killed
Become a frog hopping away
Instead of a Prince in honour
We would now live
Closer to Paradise
Not the hellish effect
Greek ideals have brought
To the life of our Planet home

Donato  Mar. 3  2013




Monday, January 21, 2013

Let Us Embrace Uncertainty

Being Uncertain


Padre Blazon to Dunstan Ramsey in
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

"My own idea is that when He comes again, it will be to continue His Ministry as an old man. I am an old man and my life has been spent as a soldier of Christ, and I tell you that the older I grow, the less Christ's teaching says to me. I am sometimes very conscious that I am following the path of a leader who died when he was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known .... Am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man? All Christ's teaching is put forward with the dogmatism, the certainty, and the strength of youth: I need something that takes account of the accretion of experience, the sense of paradox and ambiguity that comes with years."


YES!!!   For now, uncertainty is a word I want to embrace, not banish. It's the bedrock of the logical scientific attitude, doubt, things are maybe not the way they seem to be, or are said to be, will not be the way they are forecast to be. When we seek a result, we find it isn't where we have gone to find it, maybe doesn't exist anywhere. Seeking a particular result, we live in the anxiety of not getting it yet. We cannot be at peace, as we could be, just following a path, interested to see where it leads. Being certain about my next step, uncertain about where this path leads. The excitement and aliveness of that. Seeking a result, I tie myself to words which may not be the truth of present circumstances, or what could be coming. I'd rather forget seeking results, and just aim to follow the path, discern the signs, be faithful to those, and take with gratitude whatever results lie on that path...Ride my bike into the unknown!!

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Is this All There Is?

All There Is

Start with right now. This is all there is, ever will be. Whatever comes is just rearranging the furniture.  And we are afraid. We have fear at the root of our being... that this is all there is, the thought brings fear. We won’t go there, we’re afraid to, so we make plans and activity and fear and anxiety to escape, to move on. But nothing changes. We seek the Promised Land as a thirsty person seeks an oasis in the desert heat.
We imagine, when we get there, driven by our fear, our desire, we will be free of fear.

But there is no Promised Land out there. We can’t travel to a place that doesn’t exist out there. That fact we are dimly aware of, but we repress it, we’re afraid to face it. We know, at some level, that to Journey to the Promised Land, the land of bliss without fear, we must journey inward. A lonely journey, all  alone, with no guide. We  must find our own path. Perhaps, we will not find the path, will not arrive. We carry the fear of that, of what we might find, the difficulties of the journey. We are afraid we will find we don’t exist. if this is truly all there is, then all our activities produce nothing, no changes, so, we don’t exist. So we don’t go there.

All we do in life is make memories. All we see in life, unless we are Mystics, are memories. Everything we see, encounter, feel, we cobble together from previous memories. They don’t exist. We would rather make the same memory, over and over again, like hanging the same suit of clothes in the closet every day, than journey into our fear, than journey inward, seeking. We fear the Minotaur in the cave. We won’t go there. But the only way to the Promised Land, if there is a way, is there, on that path, the journey inward to the source of our existential fear. Abandon all the the old memories, everything we think we know, or have experienced, and determine to daily put together new memories from pieces of the old, on a path we’ve never yet travelled, the inward journey. And we may arrive at some instant, to a point where all the labels, all the names, all the thinking, all the memories, drop away and we see what truly is, and we are surrounded in bliss.... and yes, we don’t exist, any more than a drop of water in the ocean, which knows it is the ocean.

Donato Jan 2  2013