What is life for?

What is life for?

1. To develop an apparatus to experience life to the fullest possible extent of that apparatus and its environment…

2. To replicate the organism’s DNA which transmits life. Whatever the result, the history of that organism’s chemistry, DNA and neuronal programming will generate inevitable outcomes, the product of a multitude of interactions internal and external, from the beginning capacities, modified by the programming of experience… 

The organism makes no conscious choices as it grows. All its predetermined actions cause interactions that in turn predetermine future actions… Even as I think I have choice, what I manifest in action proceeds from previous programs…

 If you want to know my references for this, I can only say you would have to examine my 83 year history plus the histories bequeathed to me in my DNA and adjuncts that come with it, and any quantum entanglements or time entanglements to which I have been subjected. 

Donato April 28   2018

Inevitability.. story of my life

Inevitability.. story of my life

My dream of long ago.. God speaks to me saying “ I give you what you want before you ask”

Inevitability … The word describes my history, all of my experience, and that  of every living and non-living. 

Actualizing our DNA history, our life experience, is only an aspect of experience. Not of some honouring, not out of superiority - no thing, living or not is superior to all others - All have their capacities and skills.

 Kant ….we should care less about our happiness and other’s virtues and more about our own virtues and other’s happiness..   

Not be merely tolerant but fully accepting- to always seek to activate the mirror neurons…

be a root that encounters an obstacle,  perhaps a rock, and moves around it seeking only to grow..

So when we interact in some sexy games out of what is either desire/desire, or desire acquiescence, as equals or out of deference to  power.. and I gain later an understanding of some of my earlier programming that led to that desire and that choice and effort to manifest that action and you are later re-traumatized by the memory,   what is my role now?  How can I be taught some truth for myself by a twitter message? How? When I need an essay , need to essay a climb back along the paths of hill and memory to possibly re-frame my neuronal programming around a whole set of incidents to avoid getting stuck in either guilt or repetition… “mindless repetition” or “programmed” repetition .

Every action I take has  behind it the energy and the pattern formed by millions of neuronal events from my entire history - and maybe some from the universe that encapsulates me with quantum entanglements and time entanglements . I cannot act therefore out of “free will”. My “will” is predetermined antecedent to whatever act I perform believing I am free.. 

In this I am no different from that rock falling off a mountain.. whose action is the end result of billions of years of history acting on its elements… and so are all my deeds..

So, you say, you can choose to act wantonly, crazily, whatever you choose for self-gratification- since “you” are not responsible. Well, you might do that or you might not. Others will call you responsible or irresponsible, you may go your way unimpeded or get locked up. and you will do what you will do  whether you read and believe what I have written or not… 

in my dream of long ago.. God speaks to me saying “ I give you what you want before you ask”

This I now read as a paraphrase of scientific validation describing the life and behaviour of my neurons,  collectively, they are God,  and I will get what they dictate I will get… and “my” part can only be to be interested in the result. (see what I have written under, (“what is life for”)

This is my connection to all of life and non-life, the seen and the unseen. We are all holograms for the Medicine Wheel, no part superior or inferior to any other. (reference my publication with Suzanne Nadon 'Walking the Medicine Wheel Path”, www.donatopoetry.com)

The only “I” in all this is that empty one who witnesses all,  mirrors all witnessed… and simply laughs at the idea of taking credit or blame for whatever the outcome of “my” apparatus’ choices in the moment. And I have reached a sufficient programmed understanding of how my actions might hurt another or have caused suffering or pain in another, so that my actions either avoid that, or seek to redress the damage.. This our culture calls “adult” behaviour….

Whether a rock, or an earthworm, we are all subject to the forces of history of billions of years attached to our every particle, none of our actions subject to conscious choice, since whatever happens in the moment is but an act predetermined by our history, which we cannot retrace or remember in all its complex detail.. some of it indeed no long recorded, as if we had climbed up by a ladder and then kicked the ladder away.. 

And if I abuse the trust placed in me by the Universe that gives me life, I will reap the consequences of breaking those laws of natural morality, ie.  natural inevitability, which I cannot escape. 

Donato  Apr. 23  2018

Vivisection? Not!!

Vivisection? Not!!

We have evolved, and continue to evolve, in our understanding  of our relationship to all “matter” in the Universe. So now I am clear that animal lives matter. They matter to themselves as much and in the same way as our human lives matter to ourselves.  There is no longer any rational or emotional excuse for saying that humans are not animals, or are a “superior” order of animals…  

Our scientifically validated knowledge of the processes of genetics and evolution of DNA and the consequent infinite string of small differences between one life form and the next… means we can no longer pretend we are greatly superior in our life form. Every year that passes we learn more about the community life of animals, (and also plants!) their family lives, their languages, their feelings of pain and empathy,  their problem-solving abilities… The direction of time’s arrow is certain, we are drawing closer to them, culturally, with every new scientific revelation…  Looking to what will be the future, the conclusion is clear now. We should not interact with animals in any way that, if they could speak, they would object to…

Given the foregoing argument, we are evidently totally unscientific to continue to put humans on the pedestal that they were assigned to in the Bible and other out-of-date historical “truths”. And thus justify our barbaric practices in raising animals for meat and conducting “vivisection“ on their bodies and minds as though they were “morally” just unfeeling insentient objects.

As a final argument, obviously we have used our “superior” brains to isolate ourselves from our DNA-based connections to the natural world around us,  By creating a technology-based instrumental attitude to everything in nature, we have led ourselves to the brink of destroying all life on earth… And we have not used our supposed superiority to give us the means to both predict it and work together,  to avert this catastrophe… Wolves have lived 200 000 centuries of productive family and ecologically useful lives on Planet Earth. How are we “superior” to they who have not come close to the damage we done in but 4 centuries or so ? …

Please, let us have no more unthinking unprofessional descriptions from scientists about their use of animals in any way that harms their lives. Of course it will take us a little longer to understand how the human brain processes memories... if we choose not to perform invasive experiments on mice bred to be slaves for the sole purpose of being mangled and observed… In the meantime, we can use observe humans, and learn to understand how they behave, and maybe, learn,  to behave better. 

Donato Cianci Jan. 30, 2018.  donatoshabitat@gmail.com, donatopoetry.com, juliodonatoshabitat.blogspot.ca  

    . 

Dog or coyote?

Dog or coyote? 

Woman posts story of mistaking coyote for a dog and giving it a bath next thing the fact checker scythe say picture is years old and is just that of a tame coyote.. I like the original story a lot better. It has heart that appeals to me.  

If it is not a matter of life and death I prefer my own romance to the sterile words of fact checkers who have no skin in the game no interest except to prove their own superiority...superior to me… fact checking can be way overdone and breaks connections between people. Fact checking does not allow for the power of intuition the ability to know before the scientific studies are published and validated by which time the facts are often no longer interesting, outdated, commonplace and ordinary. 

Worse, fact checking often does not support, even wantonly breaks down, the mythology which is the cultural glue that binds people in communities.

Even when the facts are correct the outcome can be dangerous or cause breakdown in connections between people. A few years ago a social scientist proclaimed the evidence based fact that standing and holding oneself in certain ways would give one more confidence and enable more influence on others.  So what then? What if the influence is evil? Is it a good idea to give matches to babies?? 

In my own life 50% of the supposedly fact checked verified drugs I have been given have been taken off the market only after killing thousands of people when used for a while… so whose facts are useful to me ? The fact that an amanita mushroom is deadly and like examples. Am I not right to ask who has been using this new drug and what has been the effect? No matter what the supposedly evidence based studies say? 

Often the original story is better more fun and interesting tell me this rock came with my Grandfather across the Atlantic from Italy and I prize it, keep it around . Some smug geologist comes along who is only interested in making me wrong and tells me it must have come from Halifax when he got off the boat and I say I wish I had never known you. The rock means far more to me than your “facts” mean to you. 

The great scientists and mathematicians the ground breakers act on their feelings and intuitions in deciding what interest to pursue, often years or generations ahead of their time… In my own life every useful pursuit that led to years of satisfaction started with a completely unverified intuition that only was proven by the outcomes it led me to…

What is Americanism?

Gist of American (Republican? not only) ism 

My take on current news from the USA…

co-opted for money battening on voter ignorance and frustration with greedy oligarchs seizing ownership of resources creating a revival of medieval economies lords and serfs the GOP legislators have become seriously malicious along with their own long-standing wilful ignorance…

And here is what the Washington Post has to say:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/07/14/the-gops-moral-rot-is-the-problem-not-donald-trump-jr/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.a5437cc502e2

Quote from the above:

“Out of its collective sense of victimhood came the GOP’s disdain for not just intellectuals but also intellectualism, science, Economics 101, history and constitutional fidelity. If the Trump children became slaves to money and to their father’s unbridled ego, then the GOP became slaves to its own demons and false narratives. A party that has to deny climate change and insist illegal immigrants are creating a crime wave — because that is what “conservatives” must believe, since liberals do not — is a party that will deny Trump’s complicity in gross misconduct. It’s a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. It’s not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any “external moral truth or ethical code.”

my response

No, not just the GOP. “Victimhood” is Americanism at its most fundamental…

The pervasive background to the American psyche, the cloth on which their culture is laid, has always been their individual and collective victimhood.  “National security” is their mantra for nearly every act of governance at every level. When I ask an intelligent well-read well-educated American friend why their government’s vast expenditures and clumsy, intrusive, efforts to secure their borders, already thousands of miles from any possible major enemy, they reply to me “it is because they hate us! “

Their collective sense of victimhood, over their entire 240 years of history, of large segments of the American population,  has led them to the approaching collapse of what is left of their civility and democratic institutions... and this victimhood is an introjection, a “taking within” of the feelings and fears and abuses they projected onto the “black” africans and the “red” indigenous others by their founding morality as slave owners and genocidal colonialists which has persisted to this day. Now they have even with the vast technological capability of their armies, extended this insult to natural morality to wreaking havoc on millions in the Middle East and elsewhere just because they can and have always been motivated to destroy their imagined enemies.. The first thing Americans did , after 1776, with their new navy, was to travel to the Middle East and attempt to subdue it so as to be able to trade and bring back their goods at bargain prices…

Ritual and Rapport on the Path of Drum

Ritual and Rapport on the Path of Drum

Rapport is the state of being connected, of being noticeably “One with another”, feeling at the same time being one of two and also, of being only one with the other… 

When I prepare to go to my sit spot, my private natural world observatory, I try to dress in the same clothes I always wear for this, so that I will become familiar to other creatures around, who will hopefully learn to treat me as a non-threatening element of the furniture. When I sit in my sit spot, and gradually become calm, I realize first the silence of earth and growing life around me, then perhaps a few birds and other creatures bring moving manifestations given life by the plant and tee and earth/water life in which they move and have their being. As I meditate and observe I am conscious that my frequent visits to this spot have become a ritual for me, something of “rapport” that I use as an entry into contact with what I call spirit. I am thinking now of the spiralling of leaves around the trunk and branches of the trees, of the minute exactly identical small leaves of the cedar that comprise the larger leaves… each a faithful replication of the ones previous. Is this display of the life-seeking leaves not a ritual, a performance in the sun and air? So I and these trees are connected in our forms of ritual, we are “in rapport”, mirroring each other’s way of taking part in the dance of life. 

So this is why I do ritual, to reconnect with Earth Mother, with the universe of life.. I sit in a safe container of my own construction, safe from the busy chaotic world of city life endeavour, which is connected only to its own busyness, and would have no life were it not for the mindless activities, or the excessively thinking activities, of the human brains that swirl in its chaotic dance… And when we do ritual or ceremony together, we create that safe space, a wall of trust around us, for deep sharing, or prayer or celebration. 

Sometimes we do the Warrior Dance, 200 or more of us fasting and sleeping by day and dancing and fasting for four nights under the full moon in the wide Prairie sky, drums beating, singers singing, healers, fires blazing. This is our ritual display. The sight is glorious. And then we see overhead the blazing green and yellow and white of the Northern Lights, Mother Earth displaying her ritual.. as we respond with ours, showing her we recognize her gifts, feeling deep in our bodies the welling emotions of connection to all life around, all weathers, all mountains, all waters,, all forests and plains…

So when I drum or do my Pipe, or call in the Four Directions, or conduct the Lodge, or Smudge myself or others, I am creating a formalized ( a “form”, repeated)  safe space connection to Mother Earth. Feeling all the emotion of that living power flowing through me.. To be in connection, in rapport with the natural world and the spirit world that animates it, I must engage my body/mind and that I do with my ceremonies and rituals.  

It was Earth Mother that birthed me here at this time. She gave me as my tasks to speak my thoughts in the truth of poetry, and to support my connection to life through gifting my drum-making, making the sacred hand drums, which then led me to all my spirit-encounters and my life enhancing friendships, ceremonies and rituals.

The Trump Phenomenon..letter to a friend

Dear Friend your word that you felt shame over the election shocked me, and I was surprised at my reaction. Of course I don't ever want you to feel ashamed, particularly over what other people do or don't. So I had to reflect on what I myself was feeling and after some time, came up with what follows...

My Musings on the Trump Phenomenon

Oh I am really feeling the pain these days of those of us who are reacting with fear and dismay to the unexpected win of the US Presidency by the ultimate narcissistic ignorance of Donald Trump. And also the pain of many of his supporters who felt they had no choice but to take a chance on his being able to do and actually doing what he said he would to distribute the resources of the USA more honestly and fairly. The pain of those who are realizing they have lost their democracy, that neither of their two traditional parties has been defending their democratic constitution. They feel themselves staring into the abyss of the unknown. 

Every day there seems to be something in the news of the world stage that I ought to react to with either fear or celebration.. A lot of it is in the unknown future, or a manifestation of the reportage which I might not agree with had I witnessed the events they describe… I give myself hope by learning to become detached from my desire for any particular outcome, to become detached from excessive and destabilizing emotionality when the unexpected occurs.

  I daily follow the path I know to be mine, where it leads I know not, so am learning not to have expectations and just continue to be interested in what actually occurs. This way, I won’t have a problem, until I do. As for being upset at the apparent decisions of the collective to which I belong, country, race etc.etc. or those with whom I must interact, I am my own moral compass, and choose whether to follow the collective, or not. Certainly, I wish us all well, that the miserable become happy, that moments of joy occur to all. And so walk seeking to project compassion and universal love onto all living and non-living… I know some wise old trees who have the same attitude….

In Peace  Donato Nov. 16  2016