Happy New What?

Happy New Year! Did you see Trump's tweet out to his "enemies?" Happy, Happy, just be happy, while we go on raping the earth. Lots of ravens in the sky, ravens who forgive us, who seem friendly, not swooping down to pluck our eyes out like they would if they were humans who were being slowly constricted out of existence by a pervasive animal civilization that was growing exponentially across the land destroying the nature we depended on for survival. But it's the other way around. We stopped depending on nature to support us and started warping it to our purposes, disrupting the evolution of every life form on earth, including our own. Ignorance is bliss, and bliss is the American ideal. Candy bar, candy bar, kilos of cocaine, America, America, we're completely insane. All the mental illness, heroin in our veins, all to hide the pain. The sickness all around you, the sadness that you hide from, the burning shame, I AM THE CRUEL MONSTER polluting the skies, burying nuclear armaments all over the globe, I'm here to destroy your spirit, crush your nature. We're going to make you feel so alone. Can't you hear Donald saying it. So Tremendous. Ah, there, now, go forth American, back to work, notice the lack of edible foods growing in your public environments, and go out shopping, or base jump, sky dive, pole vault, bungee jump, bike ride, ski day, walk in the court yard of the prison for an hour in the sun, let's all run, let's all run, fun fun fun. Here, in a prison of privilege, a hypocrite writes. I send love and blessings to all, and I love you. I'm an American, I live in America, I'm white, male, heterosexual, a half-Greek son raised by rich Texans in Aspen, and sometimes it seems like the only action I could rationalize as beneficial is suicide, because this system benefits me, and it's not fair, and it's not good for the planet, and I feel powerless to change it, and am the very archetype of a person with privilege to do something. But we are all in this together. The hypocrisy of saying that I'm trying to do something good, to put something into our collective consciousness with the Open Mind Project or the Father of Lies book, that can help us change the direction of this psychotic train, rushing toward of an abyss of environmental apocalypse, does not escape me. It does not rush off the tongue. I'm grateful to be alive, a living, breathing, carbon footprint, a member of a collective human organism that is driving thousands of feet of pipe into the surface of mother earth to suck out the oil to burn it as though comfortably ignorant that it was down there for a reason, that nature was doing its work with a purpose. It's Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse in Greek means something revealed, a disclosure of knowledge or revelation. In our culture it usually means the end of the world. That's what the extinction of so many millions of our living relatives in the animal kingdom is. The Apocalypse is our emerging knowledge that we are responsible. We are inventing, creating, this savage civilization that is wiping out the natural world and replacing it with, miserable, self-centered, consumerist automatons chasing pleasure and happiness as our rightful pursuits when the poorest around the world don't have clean water to drink. They have to buy it from us. I can still drink the water from my tap. Our apocalypse is this big reveal, the end of the dream that there is a god we can blame. We're just left with ourselves, we who define God and create our reality. We didn't create the conditions, we are born into conditions, but we are responsible for how we respond to the conditions. It's not some external power. It's us. We conscious creators. I can quit flying, try to rationalize and justify my existence, but I really can't, not when i'm just another consumer. The final dagger has reached the heart when rational thought has crushed consciousness into a carbon footprint and we've divided ourselves into tiny molecules all separate from each other and moving constantly, and we're so totally insane that we're shooting hominids, our own, into space, and we're looking for some place in the solar system to colonize because we still haven't escaped this insane paradigm that has driven us all mad. Let's start with Exhibit A.: Donald Trump, US President. Come on America, and hey rest of the "civilized" world, everybody that can read, isn't time for our collective admission of insanity? This shit is not working. Happy "New" Year, seems like more of the same. Global calendar reset, 00000000000000000, samepage.one. Help. Little cell in big organism, hollering in the ether, help, help, help!

I'm just posting because it's something different.

Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen.  It's been a long time, and yet no time at all, since time is a made up construct anyhow.  I have been writing a book.  It has been slow going for the Goose Wrangler.  I completely lost my mind, end of last January.  It wasn't the first time.  It all started when it never began, and a clever monkey told a story about itself that it never proved was true.

So here I am in the middle of the night, writing directly into the Googley Blogger, because I must.  I have to express myself in some other platform than facebook, where I seem to post endlessly about Bernie Sanders.

This book is about the power that fundamental myths, embedded in our culture, have on our personal, and social psychology.

I started a non-profit called the Open Mind Project a few years ago after I went to graduate school and studied some of the dominant narratives, usually known as religions, on this planet at this time.  I'm not going to try and tell you that I embarked on this journey for unselfish reasons.

I fell in love with a girl 18 years ago that I didn't deserve.  She came from a different world, and belonged to a different religion, because back then I thought I was a Christian, and her being Jewish, which Sunflower Girl was, would mean I had to change something because she wanted to be with a Jewish guy.  That was long before I went to seminary and learned that when Christianity began being Jewish was a prerequisite.

This girl, who is now a woman that I do my best to leave alone, who I screwed up with all those years ago, has been the best muse I could have imagined.  When I say muse, I suppose I mean reluctant teacher.  She set me on this bizarre path of self-so-called-improvement that has lead me to the discovery that there might not be anything to improve other than the idea that there is something to improve.  If I hadn't fallen in love I might not have lost my mind.

This book, that i'm writing out an introduction to in a blog, that I might post on the Open Mind Project, is about how the Abrahamic myth has helped build the world we inhabit, occupy, and create.  If you can read this, I count you as part of this world.

If I hadn't already lost my mind it might not have been so easy for me to admit that I was crazy. I've had the privilege of experiencing 3 major psychotic episodes.  In fact, these experiences, traumatic as they've been for me and others, have helped to give me a perspective I cannot begin to express my gratitude for.

Once a person has really experienced the irrationality of a mind that believes it's rational, that person can no longer assume its thoughts are "true."

I have trouble imagining that, as a society, we can begin to achieve sanity until we admit that we're really all a part of a very insane culture that likes to call itself civilized while it rapes its life supporting surroundings.

Our science seems to suggest that we are part of nature.  It seems that our belief that we are separate from nature has caused us to act in ways that are not in our best interest as a species.  Our science has demonstrated that we are indeed a part of the natural world.  If we are simply a self-identified "smart-monkey" then we better not take our ideas and beliefs so seriously.  We are the self-identified monkey who named itself "Homo Sapiens," that is "The Wise Person," or smart man.

According to the Tao Te Ching, written over two thousand years ago, the man who thinks he is wise, is not wise.  Yet the science invented by this seemingly not-so-wise-person has demonstrated that it's related to all the rest of nature, including the monkeys it thought it was so much more advanced than.

This book is about upgrading our mental operating system to reflect the particular context we are met with after a few thousand years of agriculture, and the belief systems that accompanied it, which have conquered the planet.  These outdated beliefs are based on the harmful idea that we are separate from nature and have something to fear from things as they are.

The point of the Open Mind Project is to offer possibilities based on a philosophy of not-knowing. The idea is that we don't have to understand how the whole universe operates.  We don't have to believe that any outcome is certain.  We can live in the present and respond to present circumstances.

My hypothesis is that under alternative psychological conditioning we can reasonably expect different collective behavior, along with a different set of environmental consequences resulting from that alternative collective behavior.  If we change the fundamental psychological operating system of a large group of humans then we will also alter the outcomes that stem from the culture made up of those humans.  We are presently acting as a collective culture of consumption, and our so-called civilization is destroying the very interrelated natural ecosystems of which we are a part.

We put our faith in something we invented, and presently we refer to it as "the free market."  It has to constantly expand in order to facilitate a false premise of never ending growth.  The economy we've built is based on a religious assumption of a linear universe, with a beginning, middle, and end. According to this unsubstantiated assumption, about which our understanding of reality is based, there is an expectation that an external deity will interrupt observable reality and end this universe as we know it.  I argue that the more a belief in the hope of an apocalyptic end permeates human consciousness, the more influenced we will be to unconsciously bring about that end we've been taught to expect.

So are we are bringing about consequences that are to the detriment of our very life support system, a healthy earth, upon which we depend for our own existence?

This book suggests that we can, through an alternative psychological conditioning system, bring about an alternative set of outcomes.