Life is for the Living

There are inherent risks to being alive. In our earlier, more humble beginnings, these risks were more immediate and physical in nature; perceived primarily through the 5 senses. Being attacked by a warring tribe, walking off a cliff, starving to death, exposure to the elements, being gored by a boar while hunting etc.

Generally, the strongest/most intelligent (ie: adaptable) in these conditions would be the ones that survived and perpetuated their superior genetic heritage.

In the modern era, the threats we face are not so immediately perceived or understood, and so for most of us (at least the ones reading this), we do not have the same dilemmas of our primal ancestors that brought them to an early, often messy, grave. Today, the main risks and types of death we face are intellectual, psychological and spiritual. Many people die before their bodies do, and a vast majority of those seemingly prior to the age of 25.

Today, the proverbial perilous cliffs, waterfalls and predators - both man and animal - that naturally gave rise to modern man are in the realm of false ideas, false perceptions, false ways of living and general ignorance.

The death of the body is just an ecological formality for the incurious.

Originally published on my Facebook page March 26th, 2016.

Solve et Coagula

A significant component to effectively solve problems of any kind is the ability to accurately identify and isolate relevant variables. If we're working on a problem which throws 100 variables our way and we incorrectly conclude that all 100 are important to the problem in question, our conclusions are going to be wildly erroneous and nonsensical. In short, we would be spinning our wheels and getting nowhere - which could be described as the true "overthinking", or what I've come to call "overnonsensing". Garbage in, garbage out.

Remember all that math and algebra we thought was "useless" in public school? Yeah, turns out it wasn't as useless as we thought it was. Not that everyone who did well in these classes will carry over the skills and apply them to real world circumstances, but what it does do for serious students of life is wire the mind in such a manner as to break things down into simpler fractions, and identify what is important and what isn't; by parsing out useful information from nonsense, from what is true from what is false, which keeps the solidity/integrity of rationality and a foundation of truth intact. We will not be successful getting to the highest peaks of truth by building on a foundation of garbage. Truth must be built upon truth.

Having a strong ability to discern between relevant and irrelevant variables allows us to make sound inferences about situations and events.

This is also how scientific theories and discoveries are made and developed.

God didn't come flying down from the clouds and bestow us with the wealth of knowledge we've amassed thus far by authoring everything. No. These were normal human beings who obsessed and thirsted relentlessly, wanting to understand why things happen the way they do. They recognized the patterns and sought to make sense of them through their ability to reason, the scientific method, and articulated their findings with the creation of new theories, or by building on existing ones. Though it wasn't God that came soaring from the heavens to save Man from his own ignorance in a literal sense, it could be argued that those who made discoveries were divinely inspired. This is why Einstein referred to curiosity as Holy.

"There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see."

― Leonardo da Vinci

Originally published on my Facebook page March 14th, 2016.

Children of the Flame

The world of tomorrow will likely have in it persons who no longer live with the central orientation of fear, like savages, that place the material world as the be all and end all of existence.

That is to say, it will be a population centered heavily around the capacity to reason - as Fromm defines it below. In Man's slow and painful, yet continued evolution, this is the stock of human that will (or should) be selected for.

Why? The prerequisite to a peaceful Earth is an enlightened population. And there can be no enlightenment without the life-flame of reason. Reason taking precedence is what raises the savage human to a higher standard of being.

"Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man."

― Erich Fromm

“Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.”

― Ibid

"By intelligence I mean the ability to manipulate concepts for the purpose of achieving some practical end. The chimpanzee -- who puts the two sticks together in order to get at the banana because no one of the two is long enough to do the job--uses intelligence. So do we all when we go about our business, "figuring out" how to do things.

Intelligence, in this sense, is taking things for granted as they are, making combinations which have the purpose of facilitating their manipulation; intelligence is thought in the service of biological survival.

Reason, on the other hand aims at understanding; it tries to find out what is behind the surface, to recognize the kernel, the essence of the reality that surrounds us. Reason is not without a function, but its function is not to further physical as much as mental and spiritual existence.

However, often in individual and social life, reason is required in order to predict, and prediction sometimes is necessary for survival."

― Ibid, The Sane Society

Originally published on my Facebook page March 15th, 2017.