f18p 5,790w

080215
Soren Kierkgegaard (1813-1855): man is frightened by harmless death, but not by truly horrifying things like sin and ignorance.
Euripides' (484-406 b. c.) "To suffer is a necessity for mortals".

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education, wars and pieces, duty-free rights, homo-hetero musings, prescribed bias, crotch motivations, bloodthirsty ethics, pious atheism, pious terrorism, canned laughter, democratized family, bloodthirsty feminism, vending-machine abortions and divorces, political pathology, theatrical heroism, cynical virtues, reproduction or droppings, respectable lunacy, democracy>mediocracy>>ochlocracy.

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THE DROP AND THE OCEAN
0802

Each form of life is a drop emerging from the cosmic ocean at birth and rejoining the same ocean after "death".
Even as a drop, I am -like everybody else- the center of the universe I can perceive or imagine.
I am apparently insignificant, like any drop.
Yet, as a drop,I must leave my own testimony that melts back into the ocean and still adds to it.
Nonsense?
It reaches far beyond just making sense.
The existence of this endeavor counts, not its success or failure.
Like everybody else, I can not escape my ego, even if I am the drop that "vanishes" back into infinity.
Yet I become the ocean, like every other drop...

Some of my thoughts and perceptions are then recorded here.
All alone, ultimately converging with everyone else at the Omega Point, where the straight parallel lines meet beyond our present vision and reach.

History''s experience and interaction with others are part of you and me, but they appear here through the filter of my initiative.
Why?
Whatever I say may contradict -and then fuse with- my writing.
I am inventing the Yin/Yang and discovering it has always existed, probably since the inconceivable beginnings of what we call eternity.
The eternal presence of diverging goals makes them converge where we disagree and ultimately agree.
Its reason may be easy to mention, probably impossible to comprehend, where it exists as existence itself.not.
Like God? "My kingdom is not of this world" is the godly statement within and without religion.
Man (and woman, of course), as well as any god, comes from eternity ("my kingdom") into our known world at birth, and returns to eternity and infinity at death.
How he deserves it is still being debated by non-experts and experts alike.

We don't even know who the experts are... Nor are they always willing to be known.
We are probably going toward the Omega Point, metaphysical name of where all the parallel straight lines meet.
Beyond or within space and time?
Searching is beautiful, even if we don't find it.
If so, good will, love and sincerity are our credentials.

jjpc
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REALITY

Human hubris can be blind and blinding.
We are told that God created us.
He/She/It is attributed whatever any religion or individual ascribes to Him/Her/It.
Where I live, the consensus seems to be that He (male) created us to His shape and image, and gave us laws, to eac○h of which we keep adding one "however" after another.
Neither philosophy nor theology ever found a satisfactory solution for it.

The abused saying:
"it is so because God, in His infinite wisdom, decided it to be so" is no longer satisfactory.
The strong believers usually offer instant explanations for what He does, ordains or allows, as if our little minds could explain an "infinite God"...
Our level of explana-tions for His behavior or style is absurdly low, unfounded and theologically frivolous.
We need a higher-level concept of Who or what created us...
This does not mean that there is no God, but that God is unimaginably higher than the reach of a circus barker's "Gold told me"...
But then, everyone is trapped and defensively limited by the modest reach of one's own education, intelligence, environment, culture, genetics and whatever else might interfere.

As to our life, all we know for sure is still that it starts with emission of semen from the male body into the female's, to cause the fertilizing copulation of one sperm with one ovum.
Then, Man or Woman is somehow put together and born, "in the image of God", with pompous pretense of supremacy (here too: plenty of "however" ) over the world living creatures...

Yet our He-God does not need legs (for... walking in Heaven?), digestive system (for eating... what?), head, brain, hair, like a human body which doesn't dwell in Heaven.
We also neglect focusing on the reality that man can destroy in seconds whatever he has needed centuries or millennia to build or create.
Why were we allowed such an insanely colossal power to destroy and a comparatively insignificant power to build?

We have invented nuclear explosive instant-destruction devises, but we still need years and centuries to build an adult human being (who can be killed in seconds with a simple blade, rock or fire), culture, civilizations, Rome, Paris, New York, Shanghai...

Then comes a maniac or an Islamic fanatic with instant colossal destruction at will...

Apparently, the desert sands and all inorganic matters have the permanence we and the entire organic world cannot even remotely compete with...
Destruction and death prevail inevitably against our ephemeral life.
Only who or what can suffer can live....
We are programmed to see it as a harbinger of negative reality: chaos.

There comes the sinister confusion of intellectual sinning in the name of virtue, by attributing holy stature to the sinner who, after all, is "only human", and therefore worthy of being considered holy.
Back to the muck...
Does it make any sense?
But why should it make sense?
Did it make any sense to make woman out of a man's rib?
Did it make any sense to believe that Eve would listen to the serpent instead of to God, who was in continuous dialing with her and Adam?
Did it make sense to stop the sun to enable two armies to continue killing each other?, to part the Red See to let one army walk through and the following hapless army drown (space ship Enterprise's captain Kirk would have simply "energized" everybody into being instantly disassembled here and reassembled across there in a few seconds)?
We are told we can do all we can only imagine and more yet... with God's help.
How?
Any sense in believing that gods came to Earth to rape Greek virgins?
Any sense in suicide bombers to nefariously and... stupidly kill thousands of innocents in the name of Allah... for the reward of eternal sexual joys (cameleer style) with the eternally virgin "Houries" in Heaven for all eternity?
Any sense in a government in which the losing voters invariably oppose and blame the legally elected government for anything?
An encyclopedia of glorified and blessed human nonsense would be extremely voluminous...

Some Christians assert that salvation needs only faith, not good deeds (the belief that advocates the necessity of good deeds is being politically corroded into rights without duties).
Well, we are "just human beings"... tThat sanctifies immorality and intellectual rotting.
Judging from our standards, beliefs and conventional ideals, we are decaying and we don't notice it, in spite of having more wealth, health, food, clothing, housing and technology, we have not a lower percentage of quacks, shysters, hypocrites, prostitutes (thriving by the laws of demand and supply), criminals, perverts and related ignorance than in the past 3000 or more years.

Bored because much of the above "has already been said before"?
First, the above suggests that repetition is often needed for countless reasons, and again...
Then, by absurdity, why read anything any further, if you can find in a one-volume dictionary every English word you find in this essay and in all books in the world?
Those who want our votes will praise superficiality and ridicule progress endeavors...

The Second Principle of Thermodynamics points to a quantum of "ENTROPY" (irreversible quantum of lost energy) in every physical process in the whole Universe...
Thus, the whole universe is running into chaos...

Yet, the positive opposite lurks in the reality: it is the universal entropic trend toward the "absolute zero quiet"... the tranquility of a perfection that we must ultimately tend toward, even if we may only reach it at the "Omega Point" where -by definition- we will meet , as our existential parallel straight lines meet...
This hypothesis can not be proven yet with our present physical means than the beliefs of many religions consider true.
Not a childish "heaven" with winged angels in vacuum space (where wings are useless) and harps (no sound in empty space) within the reach of the primitive people who needed such images in pre-history and later...

The "holy" religion believers keep chanting "God told me", and a surprising number of people believe them...
Instead of parading the "virtue" of recognizing that we are imperfect, we could humbly admit that WE HAVE TO DO MORE..., without expecting a medal from a god we must honor with deeds, self-improvement and "sacrifices" that should be higher stages toward the highest goals...

Ultimately, we could reach a level that has been already reached by an unknown number of enlightened persons, before the final stage known only by those who have reached it.
That final stage remains in a far distant "mystery" in the future for all who are not yet able to "see" what "life" has been telling us for millennia.
Most of us are not there yet... I am not there either. If I were, I would not be writing here...

That may be neither a nice thing to say, nor politically useful...
Giving up all earthly riches and pleasures is unpopular to propose, but it is one of the loftiest starts toward the ultimate solution.
Besides, why reveal it to any generation or individual instead of another or all?
Think of the baffled consternation of the Japanese Christian converts, about 5 centuries ago, when the missionary Francis Xavier (1506-1552 a.d.)
told them that their ancestors could not go to Heaven because they had lived and died before Christ was revealed to them.
Moreover, the above has very little to do with the evolution of the human species, because many humans -I am sure- have been (and are now) reaching that level of assimilation with what we have been calling God or Truth since a remote past.
The path toward eternity cannot be easy, nor should it be, considering its immense significance; but still, it isnnot
a Satanically "eternal hell" for no one has the capability for infinite or eternal sin, until we learn to fit and merge into the Eternal Truth... , like the water drop merging back into the ocean.
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The unrecorded first 30 years of Jesus, and His having left nothing written, may imply that we are expected or destined to search the Truth with our own endeavors, prayers included...
After all, why would He have chosen a forgettable small community in a remote underdeveloped part of tour world, where now Islam prevails against Him?
As Christians, we have already been told to love our enemies, and the Koran says we must kill or enslave the "infidels" who do not convert to Islam, even if they are not hostile to Islam...
The fact that Islam started by converting North Africa and the Middle East by the Arab prophet Muhammad (570-632 a. d.) primarely by the sword is self explanatory.
The Koran was simply
imposed and established by armed conquest and subjugation .

A not too farfetched hypothesis that if we don't find the Truth by ourselves, after death we are reborn into another life of suffering, and try to improve ourselves further, to deserve a not too mysterious "eternal peace"..., again...and again (THAT is probably the real HELL). Nevertheless, can anyone imagine a universe with a monstrously incongruous spot reserved for punishing and torturing sinners for ever, and another for rewarding holy believers for ever and ever? Where?...

Even trying to imagine such aberrations is hard to fathom...

The convergence of Buddha's method of detachment from "desire", emotions and other practices, and Jesus' sublime selfless love is immensely fascinating and holy...

========================================================= Instead of trying to find out where else in the universe there is life like ours, we could investigate why our planet is the only one still left with a "life" plague (like ours or not).
There must be something better than life in an infinite universe

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TRUTH PERCEPTION

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Back to other perspectives for those who prefer them:
******************************************************************************** 070928
Our reaction to REALITY may be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral ...
Being that reaction real, it is a new reality...
Then, our reaction and reality can interact and merge into a still newer reality that we create...
Universal law?
TRUTH is only our human perception of REALITY, as we honestly believe it to be.
Is it It is the "anthropomorphic" ("man-shaped" and as understood by human intelligence).
Big words are affixed on reality or truth, often like wrong labels...
Yet, anthropomor-phic" are most of our beliefs, interpretations, images, religions...
We conceive a god shaped like an old man: with white beard (senile lack of hair pigmentation)...
It is at least questionable that He (or SHE, IT), has an unneeded gender; or sex is only a means of reproduction by copulation of male and female.
On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, we see Michelangelo's (1475-1564) representation of the creation of man: an old half-naked male God touches with his finger the finger of a half-naked, already adult Adam (create a man who is already a mature adult?..), to give him the spark of life. One might as well picture the act of copulation... by WHOM with WHOM?
Well, ANTHROPOMORPHIC
too requires coherence, as we humans know it... Man/woman cannot imagine his/her god any other way, after the sacred books assure us that God created us in His image: with legs, crotch, abdomen, torso, arms, head and all appurtenances of a human human/godly body...
But we have a brain that may find the whole scenario incongruous, depending on argumentation about reality fitting an arbitrary logic...
So what?
Let's go back to the anthropomorphic representation of any god: naked? Like a Roman or
European or circumcised like a Jew or Arab?
I remember an American tourist in front of Biblical David's statue in Florence, Italy, expressing indignation about David statue's uncircumcised penis (did they cover it later with a sculptured fig leaf?...). Well, the sculptor ignored or didn't know that David was a Jew..., or the sculptor perhaps preferred the European non-Jewish fashion of leaving the baby's peepee (or "weewee", according to other scholars) uncircumcised.
Stop the peace about a weewee...
|In a Nazi-controlled town, in the 1940s, a squad of Nazis is corralling a group of Jews into a truck headed to a "Ka Zet" (German nickname for extermination camps).
One young man protests: "Ich bin kein Jude" (="I'm not a Jew"). How could he prove it? He shows he is not circumcised, by exposing his weewee...
The Nazis let him go... because of his uncircumcised weewee...

Yet he was as anti-Nazi as any one...
(We live in a civilized world, or course).

Did God really make the circumcision covenant with the Jewish man?

And the Jewish is probably the smartest race on Earth.

We pride ourselves of the ancient Greek cultural heritage, but ignore that Greek mythology was blatantly erotic and pornographic.

One Greek myth, for instance, describes that mankind resulted from the sperms that were spread from a god's scrotum that had been cut open by a rebel minor god with a pruning hook (pruning hooks in Heaven?).
The sperms fell into the sea and there they became the human beings.

It was also almost usual for gods to descend to Earth (from Mount Olympus, I presume) to rape Greek women (preferably virgins). Heroes, like Hercules, were often reputed to be born by such god/human mating kinds...

The famous image of Diogenes using a lit lantern in daylight to seek the "real man" is an expurgated version of the philosopher Diogenes' defiant exhibition of himself ostentatiously masturbating in the Athens main "agora" (public plaza) to assert his total freedom from any human convention or restriction, ⌐just like a dog (from "kynikos" =doglike). Therefore, he was called a "cynic" philosopher.

A book about uncensored Greek mythology reads like mythical unrestricted pornography..
Our popularized legends have censored the pornography away, but not the idealized anthropomorphism.
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Bored?

25 centuries ago, there was Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama, ca. 563- ca. 483 b. c.), an Indian prince and philosopher who, rather than bored, was completely fascinated by the problems of facing reality in life and non-life.
He stayed away from anthropomorphism:
Buddha (born Siddhartha Gautama, a prince in India, who renounced his inherited kingdom to pursue the quest for truth and life meaning, enunciated his "Four Pillars of Wisdom":
(1) Life is suffering.
(2) The cause of suffering is desire.
(3) Eliminate desire to eliminate suffering.
(4) This path of liberation exists.

From learning to endure suffering and to ignore pleasure search, the "enlightened" (="Buddha") ultimately reaches a level where life and death converge and become one, like the water drop and the ocean into which it falls. Just as the drop rejoins the ocean, we should (during life or after death) merge back into the universe.
To succeed, we must first become as compatible with the universe as the drop with the ocean.
If not, we are bound to live again after death... and again... until we become as ready for the universe as the drop for the ocean.

What if it takes thousands of years or even thousands of generations?
Well: eternity can wait...

That may well be what we call "HELL”.

The path to the supreme goal is the elimination of desire and suffering through self detachment (starting with meditating awareness), ranging gradually from breathing exercises and culminating with pure spiritual transcending beyond meditation.
The path is simple, but arduous: begin, for instance, to breathe ...or drink, and think “my body breaths", "my body drinks", instead of:
"I breathe... I drink," and so forth, with any physical and higher functions, to gradually detach yourself (ego) from all levels of personal awareness...
With the months or years, and adding to the physical also any other desire, suffering, love, hatred and so on, and higher yet to above-personal spiritual activities, a point may be reached where even hunger, thirst, pain, sex and other desires, as well as ambitions, spirituality, are so detached from our ego and body, that, at the end, life and death ("to be" merges with "not to be"...) make no difference.

That is where the 20th century hippies fizzled, when they thought that coming back to life after death was a positive reward instead of the sentence to another life of suffering....
Since the existential Buddhist ideas and rules were too arduous for average people to pursue individually alone, a Buddhist religion of self-discipline and detachment for communities was offered , which became one of the world's most popular.
An interesting distortion of simple detachment is that the beloved idea of "feeling", which waves the flags of LOVE, JUSTICE, RIGHTS and their corollaries, also provokes their default opposites of HATRED in its many forms.

JUSTICE itself, then, becomes a sanctification of disguised HATRED and LOVE for evil and good.
For many, it is then so comfortable to hate... HATRED is one of the easiest feelings and passions we can fall into with the most obsessive discomfort and fear in the name of righteousness.

The knight in shiny armor craves for a damsel in distress to tell him which one she hates or fears, so that the knight can have someone to hate and kill virtuously.

Too many American and other politicians follow that very pattern...

The passion of war as a manifestation of all kinds of "murderous virtues" wins easily against the "boring tranquility" of peace.
The one who gets the most medals and heroism recognition may be the shiny armor without the night inside.

For that or similar reasons, the Persian prophet Zoroaster, the Indian prophet Buddha, the Greek Socrates, and the Jewish Jesus Christ,, did not write anything.
However, Socrates was made known to posterity through the Greek Plato's "Dialogs; Zoroaster in the poetic interpretation: "Also sprach Zaratustra" ("Thus spoke Zaratustra" or Zoroaster in Greek) by the German philosopherr  Friedrich Nietzsche.
Paul of Tarsus, Roman citizen, was our only source of biographic and doctrinal writer about Jesus Christ and New Testament. He lived and died after Jesus died (we have no precise dates of Paul's birth and death).
Accordingly, we could call ourselves "Paulists" or "Paulians".
It would not be surprising to find out that either Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates or Jesus avoided writing in order to avoid misinterpretations...

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