Posts
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
Sunday, March 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.
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
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
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!!
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
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
Sunday, December 2, 2012
The One Season
The One Season
Simply put
The season reminds me
Of God made flesh
My flesh
And yours
I am responsible for
All of it
Saying Yes to all
For saying No to any
Would divide me
And that
Cannot happen to one
Who is one
No resistance
Embracing all
With arms
Flung wide to the Universe
A rush into the stars
A final flame out
At the edge or
By that Christmas tree
Here amidst
Laughter and delight
Of the children
We have become again
And yet again
Dec. 1 2012
Simply put
The season reminds me
Of God made flesh
My flesh
And yours
I am responsible for
All of it
Saying Yes to all
For saying No to any
Would divide me
And that
Cannot happen to one
Who is one
No resistance
Embracing all
With arms
Flung wide to the Universe
A rush into the stars
A final flame out
At the edge or
By that Christmas tree
Here amidst
Laughter and delight
Of the children
We have become again
And yet again
Dec. 1 2012
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