Alla inlägg den 26 januari 2009

Av dennis hägglund - 26 januari 2009 03:20

 

If we accept that evolution is an upgrading process, what is it that is not always remaining the same? Simple forms and niches are joined by more complex ones. Is the diversity of life becoming more beautiful, more graceful, more precious? And if so, how do emotions fit into it? Do emotions rise throughout the years of evolution? Do we begin with simple emotions and evolve profound emotions? And finally, what is a profound emotion? Is it profound to be ecstatic one minute and furiously angry the next, or is there only one profound emotion, one emotion that is as highly evolved as it is possible to be in the present day?


There is something dead about authority, where we ask a question and it is answered. How can any question be answered? Isn't the answer always old? An answer is like killing the question. The question must live on. That is what a mind does, keeps the question alive. No one can answer a question seriously enough. All he can do is join in the questioning process.


Why do we ask questions? Is it because we are tired of them, wanting for someone to put an end to them, to put us out of our misery? Or because we are thrilled to have them? Is it possible to have answers that only add fuel to the questions? Is it tiresome when questions are too small, too simple, so that they actually need a lot of fuel? Is the obligation to make the question burn hotter or to get rid of it, replace it with an answer, something inert?


If we approach the question as the wonderful thing we have together, and the answer as more fuel added to the question, then we eliminate authority. I don't know and you don't know. We will ask together. We will not fall into the trap of trying to get rid of the question, of having someone pose as the one with the answer. What is an answer, if it is any good, but something that suits the present only for the moment, and soon suits only the past?


When we are addicted to verbalization we tend to think the question only makes us question while we are making a statement of it. When we don't hear the question any more it seems to be gone, but only blind acceptance of the answer can make the question stop questioning. The mind questions in total silence. It is what it loves to do. This is why we dream and even why we must dream. The mind is using the time while we are sleeping to nurture the questions it holds dear.


If we are clinging to answers, can anyone add fuel to our questions? Or are they destined to burn with a pale little pilot light until we die? Look how society imposes authorities who answer all our questions once and for all. "I believe in God...", "The soul continues to reincarnate until it becomes worthy...", "Making the world safe for democracy...", and so on. Why does someone want to answer the questions with finality? Is it that perception and questioning are the same thing, so that if you want to hide something you have to hide everything? If I wear the robes of a priest, I don't want you to see past the robes, and so I don't want you looking past the answers.


If you graduate from enough schooling, what have you become? Maybe you have become a priest. Then you get to wear the robes. But who have you become? It is all ritual. Education can not make you devout or holy or wise. So what the graduate has to do is keep everyone focused on his certificate, his hat, the robes, his title or whatever, and this is the same thing as answers. Jesus is the son of God. Krishna is God. And if you dispute it you will surely go to hell when you die. It is the same surface no one is permitted to look beyond as the robe or the degree. You agree Jesus is this and that the way you agree not to drive over the speed limit. You don't want that ominous apparition of the law in your rear view mirror.


There is no answer. It may seem that there is, but it is only that the question has become quite profound while we were distracted by robes and answers. We unveil our question and immediately it just isn't new and fresh enough for the real enthusiasts, those who stoked the fire rather than putting it out with answers.


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The composition of the human mind is the composition of events. Evolution makes a mind that is undivided from evolution, but man, some thousands of years ago, diverged from this evolving way of living and began doing something else with the time between birth and death. As this diversion is not evolution it does not give the same passion to living as the natural path, and this is the mind's division. There is a mind hungering to evolve, and a mind hungering for the things man's diversion from the natural path can provide.


So there are two paths. The one gives us great passion for living on it, and the other gives us some satisfaction if we work hard enough at it. In the view of the first, the evolved mind, we are only made destitute by the second. What do we call the second path? It is "conditioned response", because truthfully we have to be conned into living on it, conned into giving up the original one. And of course conditioning is answering, keeping the evolving mind from getting involved and providing us with an unfavorable comparison. The Judeo-Christian ethic, for example, "God made man in his own image.". This means the other species are there to be used in sacrificial rites. Can this become a passion for life's diversity? No, but it can get you an excess of food and sex, which is comparative worth: I have more of this stuff than you. If we shut ourselves off from the diversity of evolving life, as human habitats and human behavior do, we have only comparison, where we compare what we have gained by our service to authority with what other people have gained by their service to authority, to judge our lives by.


So, back to building up our original question. What is the emotion of conditioned response? Let's say there is a profound emotion related to living in an evolving diversity as part of the evolving diversity. We'll call it 'ecstasy'. The conditioned life will never give us this emotion. Instead it will give us decaying emotion. We begin with thwarted ecstasy when we are infants, and even before we can speak this has decayed to greed and rivalry (because we have been kept away from life's wild diversity, which is the only thing that can exercise our evolved gifts of perception/emotion). Gradually we adopt all the usual emotions of vice: envy, avarice, jealousy, anger, pride, contempt, and so on. So now we have divided the mind in a more colorful way. We have a mind of ecstasy, and a mind of crumbling emotional stability. And these are both living in the same person, because he is still evolved even though he is not living like it.


Perception, then, is when the evolved mind is the only mind being engaged by something, the only mind in attendance to something. What is going on when people are in conflict? Look at it with conditioned response and you have all kinds of ideas of what is going on and what ought to be done about it, but perceive it with the evolving mind and it becomes something utterly different than anything the conditioned response could conceive of, and all the conceivable solutions are clearly serving only as more fuel for the conflict.


The conditioned response is that conflict should not be there. This is self-flattery: "We fooled everyone perfectly with our titles and robes and answers and now there should be order.". But conflict is like gravity. You can't stop it. Just bring any two objects near enough to each other and they will crash into each other. And the planet is always shrinking, isn't it? Everything gets closer every day. The new concept is "Embassies are nuclear weapons on potential enemy soil." A nuke in every embassy. Conflict obeys natural laws, not ideas. The big money rides on the waves of conflict; the big money is in arms. Hire a billion peacemakers and your investment in arms will still be a sure thing. Why are all those politicians grinning?


Looking closer at conflict, what do we see? It is everywhere. Reason, rational behavior, polite society, is all a sham. Where the conditioned response falls under the spell of the sham the perception finds the conflict. How is this? Let's say the policeman is looking at a citizen. His face and manner suggest that he approves of the citizen, but in fact he is angry because he has no really safe way to get highhanded with this citizen the way he wants to. He is tired of bullying backwards people; he lusts to bully anyone he is being paid to protect. He wants to make some conquests, not serve and protect. Perversion is the only real liberation. I could love this job if only...


The conditioned response doesn't see the anger because it is the anger. As we said earlier conditioned response means perpetual emotional decay. This is glandular, like fear which is adrenaline-related. It is very distracting. You can't sense anger if you have this hormonal cocktail in your blood, coursing through your brain and nervous system. The hormone is blindness to the sense. And this is one of the keys to fraud. Anyone can be secretly angry if the observer is also secretly angry. Only the pure mind, the mind which lives in one emotional sphere, can have the sense of the lower emotions, which is the ability to see past the mask of civility.


If emotions can be sensed, or if it is the function of the mind to sense emotions, then what is the evolution of emotions? Obviously it is not what people are doing on the path of progress and its conditioned responses. It is the ecstasy that is evolving, and that is somewhere else on Earth. That is somewhere away from people's control. When we find ecstasy, do we want it to be our own? I am ecstatic? Or, the bird is ecstatic, and the flower is ecstatic? Which is the happier discovery? Let us say the cosmos is ecstatic: is there any consummation more profound. We could not find the cosmos ecstatic unless we have ceased to be a thorn in its side, so maybe it would be far more gratifying to find ecstasy as a sense than as a hormonal cocktail coursing through the body. Something is evolved and still evolving, and that is a wonderful thing to find.


Love is when others are the point of being.

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