ORGANELLE

“… my dreams? Almost invariably I am trying to restore some complex mess that resulted from my waking mind’s bizarre tendency to shred unities into separations, and become fascinated by the result.”

— an anonymous informant

“I cannot yet tell if you approve or disapprove, but if it’s come to to this determination… we are already deeply in peril.”

AMA: Ask me anything

Gratitude is a virtue, and in our time, such virtues, when enacted and embodied, deeply transform our common experience… and potential. I do not have to subscribe to the specific cultural origins of a ‘holiday’ to recognize virtue… especially gratitude. Many beings give their lives to sustain our own. Remembering them, and giving something back… never goes astray…

“What art could you make if your personal identity, your locality, your history, your habits… could be creatively suspended. What could you write if you did not have to be yourself?”

— the question we sometimes become instead of answering

“We should notice the presence of the morpheme ‘demon’ in the English term ‘demonstration’. The specific connotations I would highlight here are ‘to be subject/subjected’ to. The stink of an inviolate extrinsic authority to which we are compelled, rather than invited, to subscribe.”

— an ai

“They didn’t win my trust by argument or demonstration, they won my trust by spirit.”

— who said it?

“A woman may become the Ship of Hope of a man’s interiority. Especially in desperation.”

— infraheard

In a recent repost of an old status update, I encouraged (in a general way) eschewing participation with ‘news’ media. My feelings on this issue are complex, but a few people pushed back, generally claiming something resembling ‘our obligations’ to remain ‘informed’ about world events, particularly, our complicity in atrocities committed by nations, ours and others.

The matter is far more complex than can be easily encompassed by declarations. But I wanted to share my extended reply here, to clarify the brief statement I made long ago:

“It’s unclear to me how exposure to media that is engineered to disorient, divide, and opinionate us is an effective strategy for rescinding our participation in systems that produce the atrocities they advertise to us. Human interiority is delicate, and it’s been formally impossible to ‘pay attention to world events’ for 99.9% of human history.

Are we evolutionarily or emotionally equipped to carry the weight of ‘the world’?

I noticed a certain kind of disease that was most contagious among my intellectual friends, some decades ago, which I thought of as ‘sharing the poison’. The disease is enacted by telling a friend of something terrible that is being done by our nation, some nation, some corporation or some institution. Here is the actual effect it had on those situations: none. But it did affect those complicit in these games, by creating a sense of desperation, helplessness, disorientation, and pain.

Are we capable of carrying the burden of the entire planet? Is this something we ‘should’ do, or are somehow ethically obliged to do? If so, which authorities declare this necessity? Protest generally fails, and often actually produces funding for the problems we’re concerned with. Not always. Often. Until and unless we actively form intelligent cohorts with the capability of successfully inverting the situations we feel are tragic and wrong, consuming ‘the news’ seems to me both (generally toxic) and extremely harmful. That’s not ‘my only perspective’, but it is for me, an aspect of cognitive and emotional hygiene.
Are we not yet suffering enough in an array of aggressively apocalyptic behaviors of human groups and institutions that we must »import more suffering from afar? If I cry for Palestine… or Israel… or both, or if I vilify one and celebrate the other… have I done ‘justice’ to either, or myself, or others? And if so, how. And to what degree?

Is ‘news’ an actually reliable source of intelligence? Does it actually tell us ‘what’s going on’ in a way that’s trustworthy? Or is it a poison that we should form, together the antidote to?”

I here sing the praises of play, experiment, ‘make believe’ and imagination, in a bit of a homage to Mr. Rogers, who was popular among various people in my childhood.

Our existence is not revealed to us by mere evaluation, or ‘measurement’. But it can be expanded, revealed and celebrated in inspired experiment. Often this is referred to as Art, or Creativity. But even these words fail to capture the liberties we may embody when we depart the Known for the infinite, the common for the extraordinary, the mundane, for the field of Insight.

So I encourage you, gentle listeners, to orient yourselves to playful experiment, creative play, and ‘make believe’, in those ways that incline us to break out of the prison of our assumptions, expectations, habits and … declarative »identity.