Another creative writing/detox exercise

I hope that many of you enjoyed and found useful and thought provoking my previous blog entries suggesting ways to refresh one's creative writing process. The purpose is to lose many of the depressive, occult and anti-life, anti-God and anti-spiritual seepage that modern society and entertainment has imposed, especially on the young.

While having lunch today (pizza) I suddenly thought of another scenario that you could use as the basis for a creative writing exercise. As with my previous suggestions you can either fully develop the storyline or you can just use it as a point to think about and receive some creative inspiration. As always the story lines that I suggest may have an element of "fantasy" or "science fiction," but are firmly grounded in reality and what is easily possible and feasible. Whenever you write, strive for that yourself, since it keeps the mind and spirit from becoming toxic, where it only imagines the unfeasible (under the "anything is possible" delusion) and the relentlessly warlike or depressive.

Storyline:

Suppose that during the time that the Nazis were in power, both previous to and during World War II until their fall, they had a secret activity, one that would become obvious and virtually inescapable only after they had been defeated.

What if the Nazis had worked to infest all materials throughout the world with evidence of their insignia and sayings. For example, they would get a person in every factory in the world to secret within the manufacturing process an engraving of "Heil Hitler." So every automobile, for example, would have in the chassis those words engraved somewhere, and every automotive part that was made had initials, or dates, or that saying, or some other saying, or the swastika engraved. What if clothes makers in their hire hid within the folded hems of all clothes being manufactured Nazi sayings. So for example, within the cuff of trousers, or within the pocket of blue jeans, secret embroideries were placed. And what if within every book printed during those years, Nazi sympathizers inserted "Heil Hitler" in the spines of the book? Food containers would have special lettering hidden under the lid or the labels, or in the box flaps, and so forth. What if masons laid stones in houses, buildings, churches with such things carved?

Now, in this scenario, there is no point to their doing this other than to keep the wounds open forever, after they are gone. Do not develop this storyline the obvious modern way, which is that they do with with "special powers." Think of it as unbelievably comprehensive anticipatory stalking, and nothing else.

So the way this storyline works, even after the Nazis are defeated, the guilty are jailed or executed, and history unfolds exactly as it actually did (Beatles and all, Vietnam, etc...) everyone around the world is constantly reminded on a daily basis of Nazi dogma as their labels and slogans continue to inescapably pop up everywhere.

So........... develop in your story line what life and the human psyche would be like today if that occurred. Remember, history is exactly the same (for example, Mr. Obama is President now) with the only difference being that everyone everywhere receives constant daily unpleasant reminders of Nazi doctrine, even sewn into their underwear.

Suggestions to explore:

1. Do people become resigned and manage to "turn it off" or do they fight back and there is an industry formed of people who try to root out these continuous stalking messages?

2. How far can they go in rooting it out, if every home built during that era has something hidden in it about Nazis?

3. How would this have affected Shoah survivors and specifically Jews, both in and outside of Israel?

4. How would the priorities of the Israeli government differ if they too are burdened with this continuous stalking within all their products?

5. What would the schools be teaching kids about this problem? What would they teach and is it different than what you, as the creative author, think they should be teaching?

To get the right mindset, picture these as verbal and written IEDs. So just as IEDs have been a terrible weapon in Iraq, imagine Nazi verbal and pictorial "IEDs" that are planted absolutely everywhere, in secret places, found when least expected.

For example, your favorite shirt pocket tears and when you go to fix it there in the torn seams staring back at you is a tiny embroidery label of "Heil Hitler?"

Would this stalking eventually make modern kids curious and think that something so powerful as this plan must mean being a Nazi is worth looking into? Would society be dealing with half of its population freaked and wearied by this stalking, while the younger half has to battle being tempted and intrigued by it?

Think about it and sleep well. LOL.

Intellectual case study: modern thinking problem

Life could not exist without some expectation of constancy of results. In fact, one could argue that animal and human life is the epitome of achievement of constancy of results. Even the inanimate objects of the universe, such as the stars, require constancy of results to exist, even though they of course have no “expectations” since they are not living, conscious beings. This is very important to understand because moderns have become so disarranged in their thought processes that they need to learn to recognize the meaning of orderliness again.

The universe and life within it does not work according to “rules.” Rules are simply the way that humans express in speech what they have noticed about the constancy of results. The term constancy of results means that similar actions result in similar outcomes and can be repeated with confidence. Gravity is the premiere example of a constancy of result. Gravity is always “on” and everything, whether living or inanimate, experiences the same effect of gravity which is the tendency to move toward the center of the earth. If a child stumbles he or she falls because gravity pulls him or her toward the ground. If a rock breaks from the face of a mountainside, the rock will travel toward the ground, either by falling or rolling until it reaches a point of stability.

How would life exist, or planets even form in the first place, if gravity “worked sometimes” and “did not work other times?” Planets would not exist at all because the material that makes them up could never clump together and stick into a cohesive mass that becomes a stable body of rock and magma. So if there were, just to use this example, a place in the universe where gravity was fickle, and it was “on” sometimes and “not on” other times, a planet or a star could not form there. Obviously the problem would be impossible for humans or other life to exist. Gravity flickering on and off would disrupt all plant life, so that one could not have vegetation grow at all, and thus there would be nothing to eat and no animal life. Shelters could not be built and young animals or human babies could not thrive. In fact, one would have to wonder if the human body could ever have developed as the heart would have had to form a way to pump blood with forces that suddenly change direction as gravity fluctuated. It is thus clear that without the constancy of expectation of gravity that not only would the planets not have developed into solid clumps of matter that hold together, but no life could develop.

The ability of space suited humans to go into space in zero or low gravity conditions does not make the point that gravity is consistent weakened or challenged in any way. In fact it only points out further the constancy of results of gravity, which is that it is present to a greater or lesser degree according to very observable measures of its presence. For example a large planet exerts greater gravity than a smaller one. People can use their powers of observation to learn more about gravity, and when they use a commonly agreed terminology and numerics to describe what they observe they call it “physics” or “rules.” But gravity would “work” and have perfect consistency of results whether humans were around to observe it or not. For example, gravity was obviously “around” before humans were, and we can study how the ancient dinosaurs evolved to cope with the constancy of gravity (such as how did their bodies pump blood to their small heads when they had large bodies? We can observe similar biological adaptation to the absolute constancy of gravity in modern day giraffes).

Therefore, continuing with our example of gravity, a constancy of results, that is, “gravity always works the same way” is essential to 1) the inanimate structures within the universe, such as stars, 2) the biological existence of life forms, both plants and animals, including humans, and 3) the sanity of humans. Humans could not adapt, assuming they would have even come into existence, if, for example, gravity winked on and off every several feet at random places and intervals. It would have been impossible to walk, breathe, eat… any of the actions that require confidence that one’s body has all that it needs to function from moment to moment.

So it’s not like “rules” and supernatural forces “allow” life to exist. Science is the discovery of the facts and how constancy of results explains just about any life or other phenomenon that one experiences or observes. The sun shines and it makes surfaces warm; the sun is hidden and thus surfaces receive less heat. The constancy of results is that stars generate wavelengths that are known as “heat.” Humans can observe and learn how this works, and even invent rules to describe it (the gradations of the thermometer for example). Heat and coolness exist no matter where one goes in the universe because they are part of the basic infrastructure of existence. However, the conditions of coolness or heat, whether it is enough at the right times and places determine if life can arise in those locations. In other words, you may take a thermometer out into the middle of space and it can tell you how absolute cold it is and you know that without protection of a space suit it is “too cold” for a human to exist. That is because it is not that the painted number on the dial of the thermometer has “magic power” and only when it gives the “magic number” is it “OK” to live. The thermometer works because it is a human tool for measuring the constancy of results, which is that the principles of heat and cold are the same everywhere. If you rubbed out the number on the thermometer that said it is like a thousand degrees below zero or something like that and painted on a different number, that it is a nice 80 degrees Fahrenheit, you better not step out of that space suit expecting it to now be warm enough just because you painted different numbers on the thermometer!

The principle of the constancy of results is the origin of the old saying that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” Obviously that is not the definition of insanity, but a pithy old folk saying to describe that there are certain constancies of results that allow life to exist and that it is crazy to expect otherwise.

Suppose that you have a slippery spot in the lobby of your office building and every once in a while someone slips and falls. Sane people recognize that this is a risk that the building management is either willing to live with (and possibly get sued by an injured visitor) or not risk, and therefore they fix that problem spot. There is a whole slew of constancy of results principles at work in that example. First we hat tip our old friend gravity, since gravity both allows walking to even occur, but is also the mechanism by which people fall. Gravity is working just fine, the way it always does, whether you are passing over the slippery spot or not. Second the whole idea of a slippery spot refers to constancy of materials, which is that certain molecular structures allow more or less impeded movement of another surface over them. This is why marble floors that become wet can become very slippery, because there is a constancy of results that water molecules easily insert themselves, clinging to the surface, and then the sole of your shoe, made of other materials such as leather, can more easily glide over the marble and hence perhaps slip. Scientists know why people slip and fall (and it’s not because ghosts push them).

If one starts to believe that one lives in a world where both material science and human behavior are not the result of constancy of results, one rapidly loses perspective and sanity. For example, if building managers in NYC did not recognize that it is a good idea to put mats in the lobby when it is raining or snowing outside so that their lobbies are not so slippery, then we would have a building management and safety problem, one that can be remediated by education and investment. If, however, people start to think that there is no connection between the marble floor, the rain outside, the soles of people’s shoes and their slipping, but instead think that the people “were meant to fall” because “it was their unlucky day,” then we have a real sanity problem.

When humans progress in science they do very well for themselves except for two problems. One is the lapse between science and technology development and morals or ethics, which is something all humans have had to grapple with. The other problem is the perversity of humans which is an almost paranoid self destruction instinct that comes with becoming grandiose. This can be summarized like this: as people learn more science, they start to think that “not” science becomes “more glamorous.” Humans have always been troubled by what psychologists call in certain patients “oppositional defiance disorder.” Humans just want to say “no” all the time because they feel it gives them power. Saying “no” becomes just about the favorite word of many children when they reach the “terrible twos.” A child will say “no” to doing even something he or she wants to do, just to stick it to mommy or daddy. That’s normal and fine and this is how children learn choices and boundaries. However we all know defiant children, teenagers and adults who are defiant to the point of self harm and harm of others. Well, I am using that mental health diagnosis as a parallel to explain to you one of the problems of modern thinking (and faith), which is why I am writing this particular essay.

The Bible explains this in terms of God, where there is the great temptation to say “no” to God, even when it is for one’s own good. Lucifer, the fallen angel, is the obvious example. Well, the desire to say “no” is part of human nature, and a good one when it is part of, as mentioned above, normal childhood and adult development. But there is a very strange and disturbing modern affectation of wanting to say no to mundane, prosaic scientific facts just so that one can indulge in paranoid or self inflating “searches” for the “real” reasons. As recently as fifty years ago humans were eager to learn the scientific facts and principles of constancy and thus engineering and other scientific activities flourished. The motivation of science was not just curiosity but more important to discover ways to improve human life and survivability. However, many modern humans have lost interest in science and reality since they don’t worry about where their next supper comes from. With prosperity has come a lessening of interest in science and reality and it is replaced with 1) an almost entertainment perspective rather than one that is fact finding and 2) research that is agenda driven and niche oriented.

Let’s use the gravity example and I’m going to be a little bit silly with it, but just so you can see the thought process I am describing to you. An entertainment oriented modern might think, “Well, so there is something called ‘gravity.’ But no one can yet describe how it actually works. What if aliens have put invisible Velcro hooks on the bottom of the shoes of the people they like, and that is why gravity works really well on earth?” Scientists used to (and hopefully some still do) “peel the onion” of research, which is to use logic based on facts and sound, defensible observations and suppositions to posit theories and hopefully prove them or not in a step by step basis. So I hope that those scientists who are working to better understand gravity, for example, are still doing so using the scientific method and sound logic that builds upon real facts and discoveries. The problem is that many of the funders of “research” and the consumers of research (corporations, governments and the public) have a lot of that loony “entertainment” thought process, where without any genuine logic or education they have an almost “let’s slap a theory against the wall and see if it sticks because this is fun and crazy” approach. Reality is boring and science is boring because improving human survivability and making genuine advances in humanitarian projects is boring. For example, no one seems to care about affordable latrines and toilets for the billion or so people who don’t have them (and thus there is an environmental crisis of extreme importance) but scads of people want to be the first to give poor children a laptop. Science used to be pursued because it was urgent, important and humanitarian, not because someone got their kicks from it. So you see a crisis in, for example, students majoring in entymology (insects) and plant diseases in the area of food production (read about that crisis of talent in California, for example) but thousands of students want to use computer graphics to design bug shaped alien invaders for the entertainment industry.

When I was growing up one of the favorite wished for toys of children was a microscope. I grew up among the generation of children who all wanted to learn about science and how to save the world. The green movement is an example of where that has gone dreadfully wrong. I’ve written about that before where a genuine science, the conservation of natural resources, has been pre-empted by a very anti-human and anti-life New Age ethos that is illogical and counterproductive in both the long and short run, since it is not based on science tempered with morality. It is based on entertainment and fear tempered by a presumption of ethos.

That leads me quite neatly into the second example, which is agenda driven research. We all know that virtually all research is now funded by people pushing either their commercial product or their personal societal agendas. Research in pharmaceutical drugs and food items has been funded by those who seek to benefit from “good results.” There is nothing wrong with that except when it gets to the point it has today which is that funding of research for the greater good has dried up since the money is directed toward the niches and the more obvious problem of increasingly meaningless individual research projects since each one is funded for one product or purpose and thus is out of context. We see this constantly with the “magic food” research, which hopes to identify those foods that are “best” at some “purpose” such as “fighting cancer.” Ironically the society that claims to be so “holistic” is anything but holistic as it single mindedly pursues one after the other of isolated agenda driven projects and purposes. No one notices the inconsistencies. For example, many people promote, wisely, an “eat your locally grown food” perspective, arguing that it is most natural to eat the types of natural foods that are fresh and common to your area. Yet another group then studies some Amazonian berry for its almost “magic” qualities and pushes it around the world for both nutrition and weight loss. How does that jibe? Do you believe that you should eat what is abundant, fresh and natural in your area? Or do you create an artificial diet that is constructed of the “best” “wonder foods?”

The problem is that humans have forgotten that science and reality are about day to day life. They have developed agenda driven isolationist (regarding the human body) viewpoints that just are erroneous and unsatisfactory from both a nutritional, for example, and a spiritual context. I am almost speechless when I read the anti-meat cow belching and farting global warming “threat” on one hand, but then a total lack of understanding the role that eating meat has had in the survivability and thriving of the human species on the other. I am constantly astounded at the “instant experts” who know nothing about the fields from whose realities they freely draw and distort. Modern humans have fallen into a crisis of compartmentalization.

It is one thing to be a specialist, where one selects, for example, one field of medicine for one’s specialty. However, being a compartmentalizer is something else. A compartmentalizer thinks that he or she is being holistic but is in fact being the opposite of holistic. A compartmentalizer tries to form theories and “realities” about one “thing” at a time. They visualize it as being “above” (hence the holistic delusion) “previous” and “old fashioned” thinking. I saw one of the first warning signs of it with the popularity of “thinking out of the box” riddles and puzzles. The implication is that one solves the riddle or puzzle only by thinking of something really “liberating” that one has “not thought of before.” I had a former intimate friend who loved these riddles and I could not solve a single one of them. Why? A good riddle or joke relies on genuine facts and reality but with a twist. “Out of the box” or “lateral thinking” relies on alternate realities to make their point that one just would not think of logically. Thus logic and facts are made to be seen as insufficient, limiting and inferior, and a truly “open mind” would not be “bound” by “the box” of “old fashioned thinking and assumptions.”

A specialist used to become a very well educated generalist first, who then studies further their specialty and adds that knowledge onto their firm general foundation. A medical specialist, for example, would be first a good general doctor and then gain education and internship in his or her practice. While that may be still the process today the mindset is no longer as systematic. Thus I met around twenty years ago a “female gynecologist” (that holy grail for women self conscious around men) who did not know that a doctor must use a tongue depressor in order to look at a sore throat. (Makes me wonder to this day if she was ever a patient herself, because even lay people know that the muscles force the tongue upward and the doctor must use a depressor to push the tongue down and see the throat and tonsils). To this day I am astonished that a Park Avenue gynecologist was angry at me (yelling that I should “keep my tongue down” when she tried to look at my sore throat and yes, I had to use my finger as a tongue depressor). Even specialists are at risk of modern thinking and lack of education rendering them to be less effective and often erroneous.

Compartmentalizers are even worse than the weakened specialists, however, since they do not attempt to gain the grounding education and experience in the areas in which they pontificate. Sometimes it does done innocently due to the slippery slope of expertise. Thus you have people with degrees in meteorology (the weather) think they are qualified to comment on global climate change. They genuinely do not realize that they need much more education and information from other fields such as paleontology and geology (to better understand the climate of the earth's historic epochs). Modern people are not humble enough to recognize when they have stepped outside of their specialized areas of expertise (and how limited even those may be). But more to the point are those who deliberately present themselves as experts in a modern so called "enlightened" sense. They have come to believe that traditional education and the scientific method of proof, logic and deduction are “unnecessary” and “limiting.” One of the reasons they are so led astray by themselves and each other is that they do not understand the constancy of results.

When compartmentalizers see the “same thing” “happen” twice in row, for example, they believe they have “discovered” a “connection,” rather than recognize that they are part of a sane, normal and ordered world where similar activities yield similar results. For example if someone painted a painting today that looks a lot like one painted by someone five hundred years ago, the modern deluded will wonder if they were “reincarnated” from the previous painter or one of the painters cohorts. I am only slightly exaggerating. Sane humans used to realize that all people are alike, generation after generation, and that given canvas and paint some will paint landscapes, some will paint still life settings, and there will always be people who are inspired by and attracted to the same things using the same techniques. I mean, duh. But a compartmentalizer takes an event totally out of the human context and immediately inflates its own importance (and his or her “power of observation”) to incredible degrees. I've noticed that an astonishing number of people look for some "connections" between the most ordinary of repeatable events, such as two people having the same taste in art, food, books, decor, etc. If two people in a row walk into a magazine shop and buy the same magazine, I swear some people will think that it is an "alien message," a "sign from a deceased loved one" or "a past life experience." It would never occur to them that maybe the first person walked down the street with the magazine visible, and the second person sees it and thinks, "How interesting that cover story looks, I will buy one too." It's called free advertising. Or a plethora of other reasons (a class was just dismissed where that magazine was discussed, or people heard about it on a news show, etc) but usually it is just one of those things: people buy magazines and sometimes people with the same taste walk into a store one after the other. I mean, duh.

I’ve written about this before under my “debunking cults” label, especially in relationship to numbers. I mean, there are only ten digits and there are an infinite number of things that can be measured or counted, yet day after day a large segment of people drive themselves and everyone else crazy over “matching numbers.” I don’t even want to go into the whole astrology and numerology nightmare anymore, as I’ve already written all I have to say on the subject and what a mess it has become. But these are the classic examples of people no longer understanding the constancy of results in a real and factual world and compartmentalizing two events or pieces of information and forcing an “out of the box” connection.

That’s what I meant with my “maybe gravity is caused by aliens putting invisible Velcro on the soles of the shoes of people they like” example. Rather that just plodding along in science discoveries and research, building upon and revising as necessary the theories of before and the established body of facts, compartmentalizers see the universe as a jumble of individual things that are connected in ways that must be contrary to the mainstream belief and reality. Yes, smoking marijuana has been a great factor in this development. The generation that views weed as a creativity enhancer and relaxant did not recognize that by definition weed is also a disconnection from reality. One does not have to ingest weed to be part of the weed mindset, by the way. Even if you yourself do not smoke weed, if you “recognize” that it “enhances creativity” and “relaxes” other people, you are buying into a mindset that is less based on facts and reality within a genuine holistic context and instead, one that is more based on compartmentalizing.

A reality based scientist, for example, would in reply to the creativity claim reply with a dozen ways other than weed to develop one’s creativity. Compartmentalizers buy into the first or second thing that they hear without examining alternatives in a reality based context. A reality based scientist would also reply to the relaxation claim with wise advice to examine the causes of the stress and deal with them rather than trying to mask and cope with weed. Again a compartmentalizer immediately assumes, without even realizing it, that if the weed user says that he or she must use it to relax that their stressful condition and lack of better options is a given.

Lawyers too used to have much in common with fact and reality based scientists, and they also used to have a great appreciation for the constancy of results. However many lawyers are also compartmentalizers for a practical reason “they immediately focus on a tactic that works” and the more unsavory one that we’ve been discussing, stemming from them thinking they are social engineers and “agents of change.” The grandiose thinking of many lawyers is a temptation toward that compartmentalizing that I’ve described, where they have become less wise students of human nature and more enchanted with “noticing two things in a row that must be connected in some metaphysical or social justice way.”

What is frustrating is that once compartmentalized and grandiose thinking takes over it is very hard to make someone aware of it and eradicate it even with proof. For example, suppose a lawyer gets two cases in a row that makes him or her tingle with the thought that these cases “came to him” due to a “greater purpose and truth” and that it has numinous meaning. Suppose I went into a library and found a book written by a lawyer five hundred years ago who had the same types of cases come to him, and he just recorded them and what he did and thought nothing else of it. I would point out that documentation to the modern compartmentalizing lawyer and say, “See, there is nothing strange about the two cases you got, because Giovanni here had a similar set of cases five hundred years ago.” Stuff just happens in human history that is due to constancies of results, in this case, people tend to get in trouble and litigate over the same old issues generation after generation. So against the backdrop of the constancy of human behavior over centuries, even if two really strange cases in a row popped up, looking at the holistic totality of litigation in human history, that would not be so unusual at all. Probably every lawyer in history would have an example in his or her career of two weird similar cases in a row being handled. However, with the mindset I am complaining about and exposing here, even with this proof the odds are that the modern compartmentalizing lawyer, rather than allow him or her self to be deflated back to reality would then claim that he or she is the reincarnated Giovanni, LOL. Not really LOL because it’s scary and not funny.

Those of us of a certain age knew what women through the centuries have known, which is that fads and taste skip a generation. Thus grandchildren tend to have tastes in fashion and décor like their grandmothers, while the mothers would be disapproving. We saw that with some in the hippy generation, where when they had children some of their children wanted more of the tradition of the grandmothers. Nowadays if a child has the same interests as their grandmother, rather than realizing this is the constancy of results, some moderns say “the child is mawmaw reincarnated” or is “channeling granny.” I wish I was joking.

Moderns have parsed and compartmentalized every event and behavior by every person (and even animals), magnifying every minutiae independent of its context. These type of people have become some sort of strange combination of a blender set on “dice” (chopping up everything into small pieces) and “jigsaw puzzle assembler” where they then ignore all previous established realities and look for the “real connections” between the diced pieces of what people are, what they say and what they do. They have driven themselves crazy and also much of society and commerce around them. They would throw TNT around in a public theater and yet tell you if you objected to chill out and not worry because TNT is not really an explosive because “Mars is in an astrology sign that doesn’t favor explosions right now” or that TNT is the number “nine” in “numerology” and therefore nine sounds like the German for no which is “nein” and therefore it is not going to explode. I wish I was joking but I am not. If it did explode and kill a baby they would tell you that the baby must have had their natal Mars in a “bad position.”

What is really scary is that this thinking infects engineering projects and other things that desperately rely on reality and facts based on a sound education and honest use of high quality materials, not on imaginary compartmentalized pseudo-relationships.

The worst that has happened is when like a cyborg these compartmentalized “thinkers” meld their crazy pseudo-relationship seeking to Holy Scriptures. Holy Scripture cannot be understood by compartmentalists. Holy Scripture is meant to be about the holistic constancy human life (both their virtues and their sins) through the ages, since that is what the Bible, specifically, and the Qur’an records. Real people had real babies, grew real crops, fought real wars, had real conversations with God’s messengers, and faced the same problems (and potential results) and sinned the same ways generation after generation. Thus when God gave the Law to the Israelites, even though God gave the Law to them, the human behavior that is referenced is the same constancy of human reality that is everywhere, among all cultures and individuals. This is why the Bible, as every scholar realizes along with all the thoughtful laity, always has two messages in parallel: what happened then and how to apply that to future generations. Thus one can read about a one and only event in the Bible, yet see how it can apply and guide to similar circumstances in the present, remaining fruitful and meaningful for each generation.

Compartmentalizers read parts of the Bible and then look for “the same thing to happen again” and then apply their crazy pseudo-relationship glue to derive some insane “out of the box” linkage in hidden meaning. They don’t recognize that the Bible and the Qur’an (together with the rest of the history of Islam) records natural life events within the steady background of generation after generation of life where there is continual constancy of results. A huge stumbling block for them is their lack of understanding that the Bible records one and only events, but it is meant to be relevant to the continuum of human experience.

I mean, it’s not like the results of a battle, for example, are much different in one century than the next. Oh wait, there’s that one battle where after it was fought gravity suddenly turned off and the aliens applied Velcro hooks to the soles of the losers feet because they felt sorry for them and the bodies might float away while the gravity is off. I wish I was joking about the extent of the lunacy, but I’m not, and if anything I’m understating its insidiousness, its error, its danger, and the great toll it has taken to date on everyone. But let's look at a battle for example. The Bible may record a battle that takes place where God favors one side and that side wins. Someone who uses the Bible properly will try to discern from that example several things 1) why God favored one group over the other 2) guidance about morality or wisdom in the context of the battle event and its aftermath and 3) recognition that conflict is part of the human condition. Thus if nothing else one understands that conflict and its suffering is not new upon any generation, but part of the panoply of the human condition. Compartmentalizers, however, "look" for the battle to "happen again" by expecting repeating and replicable "signs" such as names, numbers, places and so forth. With their slice and dice compartmentalizing they view the Bible as being a bunch of clues, cues and signs about "what will happen next."

For example, far too many people try to take a bad event that happens today and compare it to an event described in Biblical prophecy, such as the Apocalypse, and say, "Is that event or is it not one of the signs of the end?" But here is what they forget. The end is comprised of the same old dreadful human events that have always happened, except when it is really the end there will be no way out and the destruction of the world and the Second Coming will take place. So the error in logic is that people don't realize that many of the events described as tribulations may take place without it being the actual Second Coming and end of days yet. For example, how do people not know that maybe there is a dreadful fulfillment of one of the tribulations in that such an event occurs, but it is not the one that is part of the tribulation itself? The earth might suffer several earthquakes and catastrophes that look like they are the ones described in Revelation, but are simply forerunners. The Bible is not a textbook listing every time that an earthquake or some other disaster might destroy one third of the world's population. So it is not unrealistic to understand that humanity might undergo at their own hands one disaster after the other, seeming to follow the order described in Revelation, yet it is not the actual Apocalypse yet at all.

More to the point, it is entirely possible that God will warn (and is now warning humans) by taking them through their own self inflicated mini versions of the tribulations. The more people war and hate monger for occult reasons the more likely that they will bring down upon themselves continual implications of their presumption, which will be like preliminary seals being broken. History repeats itself because of the constancy of results; humans behave the same way and life has the same continuing risks and also humanity's doubting and ungrateful relationship to God also repeats itself. Thus in modern times, just as in Biblical times, living in a world where there is much goodness, but there is also much need for grace and good behavior, while in a life that is limited and does have perils, it is not a good idea to stick a thumb in God's eye when God is needed more, not less, than ever. That is reality and that is constancy, not the linking together of goofy delusions based on some sort of version of Hollywood Squares.

This is the only generation, these past two, who cannot understand that reality really is exactly as it appears. As former President Bill Clinton said, “It depends on what ‘is’ is.” Only these past two generations have trouble discerning day to day reality that is all around them and that they are part of. That is because, to use that analogy again, they have abandoned real life and used a dicing machine to make little square blocks of everything a human being says, does or even “is.” It is terrifying, not because it scares me personally (disgust and immense pain is more accurate to say), but because I am terrified for the survivability, sanity, ruination and damnation of every man, woman and child.

This generation thinks that if they check the fire extinguisher on one side of the world that they don’t need to check the fire extinguisher on the other side of the world because it all “balances out.”

Case study: creative artists/viewers: victims

We all know someone who has experienced great abuse in their lives. For example, nearly everyone knows a woman who has been abused and battered by a man. Many people who read this blog are themselves victims. This is, needless to say, a situation that is getting worse and not better, for a number of reasons, and is outrageous and needs to be addressed.

Having said that, I need to gently question an assumption that has crept into the mindset of those who produce creative work, and those who view it, when the producer of the creative work is him or herself a victim of abuse. This mindset is that it is not only inevitable but desirable that the abuse or traumatic event inform not only one or two of their works, but all of their works. In other words, the assumption is that the person's art or creative expression is now irrevocably changed and fueled by the victimizing event.

This is actually a modern affectation, not a historic one by any stretch of the imagination. People who have gone through dreadful times in their lives have not necessarily revealed any of its effects in their creative output. In fact, what I want to help you to see in this case study is that there used to be a heritage and tradition of creative output where most (not all) but most who produce creative works extol the goodness of life and a positive outlook, never referencing their own victimization, as their reaction to having suffered.

The obvious classic example is an author who has been imprisoned. Often the author will not dwell on the imprisonment experience but, rather, experiences the familiar feeling of "the air is much sweeter than he or she had remembered," "the sun is brighter," and "the flowers are more beautiful" after their release. So in classic times creative artists who have suffered have often left no trace of their suffering in their works and, rather, have had a more finely honed sensitivity and appreciation of those parts of life that are not part of the suffering experienced.

In fact, especially you young people, I know that creative classes even promote and dig for the pain, teaching a "cathartic," "raising public awareness," and "source of dramatic material" set of roles for any victimizing experience you have had. While that is true if you are planning to write about that experience, I want you to question whether one should let one or more victimizing experiences inform ALL of your creative output. I would argue that is neither healthy and healing nor is it particularly of good intention for your creative art audience.

Here is an analogy to help you to discern this problem better and to resist the modern affectation that your victim experiences must be reflected throughout all of your creative output. As you sit at the computer doing your creative work, or at the easel, or using old fashioned paper and pencils you are using both of your hands with five fingers each (unless you are disabled, so please bear with me the limitation of the analogy). So under normal circumstances you have ten fingers that you can use to wield the technology tools or hold a paint brush. Think of your victimization as a sixth finger for one hand. If you are writing about your victimization, or creating art about those feelings, sure, you "put on" that sixth finger for those works. But would you leave it on forever?

When mentors and educators and those who promote your creative works push for constant reference in your entire ongoing body of works of your victimization (often disguised as the supposedly positive "you are showing how you have 'overcome' that dreadful experience") they are basically telling you to strap that "victim sixth finger" on one of your hands and never take it off. If you were suddenly given a sixth finger, a real one, you'd find it does not add to your talent or dexterity and would, in fact, hinder it. Likewise, strapping on the victim sixth finger and using it for all of your creative output is a great limitation to your creativity and a disservice to not only you yourself but also to your fans and hoped for audience.

Here is why. Someone who is able to compartmentalize their victim experience to only those works that directly address it, but then let go of it for other works can reach farther and in more directions as a result. Think of it this way. When you increase the contrast in a photograph, dark areas are darker and light areas are lighter and there is much more gradation in between, allowing finer detail to be seen (I have to use this processing a lot in my photographs, although not the ones I have displayed here on my blog, but the less talented ones, LOL). Now, as I said, the point of increasing contrast is to bring out more detail; the point of the contrast is not to make the darker parts darker and then stare only at the darkened parts. If that is the effect that you want with one photograph, then that is what you do. But you do not use the contrast feature exclusively to make the dark parts darker and minimize the rest of the photograph. Likewise, truly mature creative artists throughout human history have had more sensitivity and nuance for the normal parts of life, that is, the non victim event part of life because the darkness of their victim event has brought out the beauty of detail in the rest of the photograph through contrast, not through occultation.

Most mature victims of war, or abuse, crime, fire, or what have you, fervently wish that "no one should ever have to go through what I have." Thus they may write something about their experience to, yes, raise awareness, and to have some catharsis. Many victims join or found movements to remediate those who suffer from the same or similar victimization. However, these worthy reactions have diminished the talent and reach of many creative artists who continually "mine" their trauma rather than do the requisite amount of reference and then use the trauma's reverse shadowing to better illuminate the rest of life so, indeed, their fans and audience "don't have to go through what they have gone through."

Victim informed art is, to use another analogy, as damaging as second hand smoke. When the creative artist continually mines their victimization for material they are doing the same as blowing second hand trauma smoke on their fans and audience. This is a well known phenomenon among psychologists and counselors. Counselors who see patients with one form of trauma over and over start to show symptoms themselves of that trauma as if they themselves have suffered the actual same victimization. I saw this where I interned first hand and it is part of the warning for self monitoring and time outs that is explained to new counselors as their training. Continually revisited trauma is unhelpful for the sufferer and also operates as a contagion, a "second hand smoke" to those who consume creative product that is developed by those who are constantly referencing and "digging in the mines" of their own trauma.

So here is my case study exercise. Imagine that you have been falsely imprisoned for seven years. You have been released. Now, write a short story, or just an outline, extolling the wonderfulness of something that you missed while in prison and enjoy even more now that you have been released. Refuse to dwell on the unjustness of your imprisonment and deny yourself even a sentence of "poor me" or "but wow, am I 'strong' and I have 'overcome'" in this exercise, since that is the point. Pretend that your readers will not even know that you were in prison; your readers will think that the purpose of your writing is to extol the wonderfulness of some ordinary part of life. They will have no idea why you have such sensitivity and fervor for the item you select.

If you find that difficult and even more telling, if you are resentful that you are writing about something wonderful without your reader knowing that "you got that knowledge through unjust suffering," that is exactly the programming that I am trying to get you to recognize and challenge. It should not be the "new normal" that someone should extol let's say for example the smell of the hot pretzel carts in New York City (since that is what you missed and now appreciate) only if you can at the same time whine and bum out the reader about why you missed the smell of hot pretzels so much.

Someone who reads a very cool and interesting piece about how great the hot pretzels smell when you walk by will be inspired. Someone who reads the same piece but it is punctuated and bracketed by your story of suffering an unjust imprisonment is robbed of much of the new territory that your creative work would have opened for him or her because now his or her focus is in part on the sadness and futility of your false imprisonment and not on your creative virtuosity of bringing to life the mundane hot pretzel smells.

It is like if you are playing the violin in the orchestra and someone is hammering nails in the background and you claim that your violin playing is "even better" because you "overcame the distracting loud hammering sounds." Um, I guess, but is it really? And is that the CD that anyone would want to listen to, your overcoming the nailing sounds in the background versus your virtuosity at the violin in and of itself? Look, I guess another analogy just crept in, ha.

So do that exercise and I guarantee it will be a great self examination tool and helpful for expanding your creative expression.

I hope that you have found this thought provoking, interesting and helpful.

Case study for creative artists/viewers re: MLK

I mentioned before about the difference between creating good entertainment based on historical and current figures and bad entertainment that distorts the setting through which the story telling takes place. Here’s an example about a movie that I would not go to see about Martin Luther King, and one I would go see (hence I’m presenting a new case study story line for your consideration).

I would not go to see a movie that starts with looking at MLK and his circle of supporters, and then pans to show some anonymous white guy or gal in the background who is then revealed to be a “secret supporter” of MLK and his Civil Rights agenda through his or her “supernatural powers.” This dreadful bore of a movie that would be an embarrassment to walk by the theater showing it, say nothing of go inside, would “reveal” that the pale guy or gal is in “actuality” the “reincarnated descendent of the Queen of Sheba,” who is white in “disguise” (or maybe the Thetans aren’t so good with colors). Thus this movie would “inspire all who view it to know that steps in are everywhere, and you are never really alone.” You’d also figure out that those Afro-American dudes would never have gotten anywhere without their secret step in whitey pale pals who (wink wink!) have “Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’s blood to help them.”

Here is a movie I would go to see and be proud to write and produce. Some average white guy ends up hearing MLK speak. It moves him, but he has a regular life and doesn’t want to get into the activist movement since it is, obviously, dangerous at that time. He gets the idea that to help he and his wife will adopt Afro-American orphans, say a brother and a sister. Now, that would be an astonishing decision during that time and the movie would follow their struggle to actually get this adoption approved. The narrator could even be the grown up child, one of the two, looking back on it all. “Dad sure didn’t know what he was getting into.” The movie then follows how such an adoption would have worked and how the family grows. This should be placed in the South, I guess, because I’d like to see how they raise their children with their biological relatives nearby and how they straddle the two worlds. So the movie would show what worked, and even humorous things, and a lot of drama and unexpected consequences, all mirrored against historically accurate timeframes of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s to the present. There would be tie-in’s between the events in MLK’s life, and his memory after he is assassinated, and events in the kid’s lives and their growing families. The kids make decisions about career and so forth that are fraught with meaning because of their duality of cultural and racial raising in a time when that was by no means as accepted as it is today. I’ll leave as some creative curiosity and suspense from what vantage point and ongoing life events the narrator is telling his or her family story.

Now THAT is a movie I’d like to see!

Case study for creative artists/viewers (2)

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Case study for creative artists and viewers

Help! I can’t stop teaching! LOL. I love to teach, not because I am a smarty pants, but because I’ve noticed that people have slipped into a very sad mode of learning, and I wish to change that. So here is another case study that addresses those in the creative arts, both producers of creative arts (such as the entertainment industry) and consumers (watchers of TV, movies etc, so they can demand better and not assume that they are getting the best). I in particular want to address, as always, the young people, the students and those who are starting out in these creative arts fields.

I wrote a previous case study of how one can write an interesting science fiction or fantasy type of story without being dark and depressive, but still being creative and edgy. The case study I presented was my story idea for a planet that has only yellow flowers and a traumatized Iraqi vet is sent there for some therapy. I have another, more developed story line that I thought of today to use for this case study. With this story line you can start to weed out of your own creativity tendencies toward unnecessary darkness and depression and instead restore it with genuine edge, drama and creativity. Too many moderns have grown up with two generations of entertainment and other creative arts professionals who equate edge, drama, suspense and deep plot lines (all great things) with darkness, sadness, fright, depression and depravity of thought or action (not too good things). Thus they weave into all their creative works enforced turns in the plot and underlying “messages” that are bringing everyone down and ultimately not really providing the edge that a really creative person craves in their works. So here is my new story line.

An average American returns from Iraq or Afghanistan wounded. Now when casting this person I mean what I say that he or she is genuinely average from an average family, so the protagonist can be male or female, straight or gay, white, Afro-American or Hispanic, from any part of the country. When you reach the parts that explore his or her past all of it will be perfectly ordinary, no reasons exist for what is about to take place because it remains a mystery throughout the story line and is never resolved.

The person comes back with severe wounds and severe post traumatic stress disorder, but while the wounds heal at a normal pace, he or she literally “gets over” his or her post traumatic stress disorder in a matter of a day or two. He or she does not do anything special, but one day doctors (and the vet him or herself) notices that “Voila” his or her PTSD is totally gone. They wonder about it but think nothing of it, figuring that either he or she is just extraordinarily resilient or it was not such a bad case of PTSD in the first place.

While in the hospital or rehab facility the patient, who is now being treated just for the physical wounds, socializes with other wounded vets. Suddenly, everyone notices, including him or her self, that every patient that he or she speaks to socially, not in a therapeutic way per se, suddenly is healed of their PTSD too. That becomes the story line, NOT the “why” or “how” but what does one do with such a “gift.” But because it is natural and not a supernatural or talent infusion, it’s called the knack. He or she has a knack for somehow saying the right thing that almost magically seeming eliminates and cures a fellow patient’s PTSD.

So the drama and edge comes from two components of this story line. One is to show the before and after of those he or she deals with and “cures.” It’s not like it rubs off from him or her where he or she just needs to be in the room, so it’s not miraculous curing. And it is not like he or she is using therapeutic and behavior modification psychological principles. Somehow he or she just says the right “ordinary” things and the PTSD is gone. So there can be a series of scenes where he or she converses about just ordinary things, what they did in the war, where their family is from, favorite hobbies and childhood memories, and somehow in those ruminations for each patient the one with the knack hits on saying something (different in each case) that works. For example, one vet may talk about a great play he made in a baseball or football game and feel bad that he, due to physical wounds, might not play sports again. But then after that vet has reminisced about the one great play, after the conservation and like a day later his PTSD is gone, even though they never discussed it. So there is great fertile ground for many scenes of ordinary conversation mysteriously resulting in an extraordinary PTSD cure.

The second component of the drama and edge is what do the various components of the society as a whole, such as the military, the government and others “do” with this person with the knack? Again, resist the urge to turn it into a dark “secret weapon” or the “drug manufacturers try to kill him or her” trite formula of paranoia, as is the standard today. Think about what we as a whole would genuinely “do” with such a person. That is the source of the second layer of drama and edge. Does he or she want to leave their normal life and go around the country or even the world doing nothing but “curing” people of PTSD? Would the military try to force her, cutting new orders so long as he or she is in the military to do such a thing? I would assume that he or she wants to help being, like I said, an average person, but he or she also wants a normal life too. How do they find the balance? Suppose he or she already has a spouse and children. Does the military create a new position just for him or her? Some comedy and irony would be appropriate in this entire “balancing act” too. The best edge is from genuine drama with the genuine gentle humor of human nature, including the funny and somewhat pathetic, LOL.

What would the government “think” about such a person? Thank goodness I am giving all of you this idea post-Bush administration so that Bush lovers and haters don’t ruin my great story line with distorting it to suit political agenda! The edge and drama of this is that normal people with normal capabilities are trying to now figure out what to do with a normal person who has one extraordinary knack and capability. Insurance companies, what would they do? Offer him or her lots of money to work at diminishing their payout to PTSD patients who require long treatment? Would non governmental charitable agencies try to get him or her as an employee to travel the world curing PTSD among poor villagers and war refugees?

There is so much here that it could be a great movie but also a long running TV series. That is because the edge and the drama comes from each interaction with a PTSD patient, the attempt of the person with the knack to have a normal life too, and the continuing series of governments, agencies and others with a vested interest in his or her knack.

See? One can have an incredible story line with a great plot and lots of potential for edge without alien possession, insane insurance agents trying to kill him or her, everyone is depressed and miserable in the end, and robots rule the world. One also learns to be a mature creative artists and consumer where you are interested and even fascinated with the plot but not because one must ever find out “why” or “how” he or she “does” it. It’s just there; it’s one of those fascinating mysteries about human individuality, not some overblown spiritual or superpower thing. This keeps it real, because this is close to the real world, with its problems of war and other causes of PTSD, but also entertainment because it is dramatic and inspiring and lifts one a bit out of the ordinary, through this knack, but not into warped fantasy. It is edgy too because one continually can’t help but wonder “how,” just as the protagonist him or her self wonders, but not so much because like I said, there is no explanation. No “reincarnation and past lives,” no “embodied aliens,” no “mutant superpowers gained from radioactive rays on the battlefield,” sheesh, for goodness sakes. And the pressure on the vet with the knack does not drive him or her to insanity, drugs, crazy sex and other dark depressive escapism, just to “work those themes” into what is supposed to be entertainment. The vet’s best friend does not need to be an assassin or a drug dealer.

This case study of an original story line is thus an example of how great creativity can provide edge, drama, mystery and humor without the same tired paranoid and depressive tools used by just about everyone in the industry today. There is nothing more fascinating than ordinary and real people (not contorted caricatures of “keeping it real”) who have one, maybe two, extraordinary circumstances to deal with.

I hope that you have found this helpful and interesting!

Quick case study about elephants and zoos

There is a lot of controversy and anguish about the keeping of elephants in zoos. I agree it is a problem and not the most suitable place for them at all. I'm personally sick of seeing over the more than forty years that I have gone to zoos the cramped quarters, the poor care and the attitude that elephants are the personal job bonuses of zoo staff. I've seen too much death, illness and suffering of elephants in zoos. And I would have told anyone who asked me this opinion, even as a child.

Having said that, I also would have pointed out that because of the shortcomings and flaws of humans, there is nonetheless a valid need for elephant ambassadors. Humans do not understand, love or support that which they do not see in person, and that includes animals such as elephants. This, therefore, is how I think of elephants that reside in zoos: they are ambassadors.

In my opinion, instead of it being local zoo by zoo decisions, I believe there should be something like six or seven regions in the US that commit to each having one extremely amenable and suitable genuine elephant habitat for elephant, and other, ambassadors. These professionals responsible for their own region's elephant exhibit and habitat would decide the practical purpose of their region's elephant population: 1) a mixture of zoo elephants that need a good home, 2) a herd that is developed to be natural in size and structure as one would be in the wild, or 3) a breeding herd, whose purpose is to preserve subspecies of elephants, diversify the gene pool and provide for future region needs of individuals.

I believe that each of these regional zoos, either existing or new, would be funded to have many acres of natural habitat for the elephants and, further, that advanced knowledge of their needs in the wild be built into the design of their habitats. For example, we know that elephants need to walk many miles in order to stay healthy. Providing a wide open space is not enough, because zoo animals will naturally congregate in habitual places. Elephant habitat should be designed to have not only many acres, but much of the acreage in corridors. These corridors would be like roads and natural paths in their native habitat. They would thus be encouraged to walk their entire lengths several times a day. Think of the acreage as being laid out like a human's hiking trail, where there is something of interest around the next bend and so forth, laid out for miles within the acreage. This will encourage exercise and natural curiosity and stimulation. With smart planning some corridors may be closed off for a while while others open, making something of a seasonal migration effect.

This will also provide a more enriching educational experience for visitors. They can even be on safari, in a way, parallel to the corridors, observing the elephants at different points, and other sights that are part of the natural flora and fauna.

If we do not have live elephants where people can see them, adults and children will sink further into seeing animals as sad documentaries on TV, or cartoon characters in video games.

We need live elephant ambassadors, but they should not be the burden of any one zoo, who can only then do a painfully inadequate job. All zoos in a region should be the steering committee and contribute to the fund raising for their allocated regional elephant habitat, even if that habitat should be placed in an existing zoo (though I wonder if any zoo has the capability or space to do what I describe).

If gas prices stay low, many Americans will travel one or two states in order to come to this type of habitat. Breeding in order to combat possible extinction of elephants will also be more natural and probably more successful; it certainly will be more humane and kind.

I hope that people get some vision and spirit here and give my idea some serious consideration.

Philosopher questions are a total crock of S***

While making the rounds of news websites, I notice that it is supposedly "World Philosopher Day" or something like that. I scanned the article and found it, as expected, full of the crap that modern philosophy is today. But then I realized that I had an excellent case study to help those of you who are trying to detox from the strange problems of faith and reasoning deficiency that has afflicted many moderns. This is especially for you young readers, in genuine fondness.

First some background. Philosophy ain't what it used to be, so do not be fooled that it still has its intellectual and noble luster. Here's the problem. Ancient philosophy, which was noble, was the amalgamation of the best of human beings pondering about the meaning of life. Thus the ancient philosophers included their perceptions of the divinity (their faith) and also what we call psychology (the reasons for human behavior). Thus ancient philosophers would draw upon all aspects of life, and hence leave open all possibilities, when they reasoned their way through problems.

Modern philosophers have, in mirroring modern intellectual thought, compartmentalized philosophy out of the natural fullness of background of what modern philosophers now consider to be ancillary and thus invalid considerations, such as faith. Thus they tend to think they are posing philosophical questions when they construct binary decision trees and pose them to each other or to the unsuspecting reader. So a modern philosopher question is not "Why" but "Would you do A or B?" When one ponders "Why" one has to consider that C, D, E, F and unimaginable xu6mx? might exist as explanations or options. Thus modern philosophers are guilty of collusion in rendering modern thought of humans to be more and more like rigid computer programs that deny the noble, the unknown, the unexpected and the numinous. They both deliberately and unconsciously contribute to the societal darkness of spirit and depression by implying that everyone would be helpless in dire situations. Just reading their "ruminations" is depressing, and I'm glad I had a great piece of chocolate cheesecake before I read the article rather than after.

So here is the case study. I copy here one of their stupid scenarios, which they have the nerve to call a "philosophical question."

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

It's almost insulting to all our dignity to deal with this "case" but I know that many of you, through no lack of intelligence, will take the bait when you hear such a question. So I will deal with it so you learn to recognize the stinking thinking (as they call it in AA rehab) behind these so called philosophical questions.

First of all, you are forced to accept a totally unrealistic scenario because it has been stripped to lifeless lack of detail. Are the hostages bound or free to move around? Not even such basic information is given, yet you are supposed to answer which of the only two choices you would make. What if the rest of the hostages were fellow kidnappers that he had turned on, and thus they were not innocent? Are any of them children or infants? You are supposed to gobble up a lifeless situation that never reflects real life. In real life there are real people with real contexts in every situation that informs what you might or might not do. So you should refuse to answer such a moronic and stupid "philosophical case" right from the start, since it does not describe a genuine human situation, having been stripped of all detail.

Second of all, since you lack extra information (like how well armed is the hostage taker?) you cannot answer any more plausible answers than the "yes" or "no" to the "deal" you are offered. For example, suppose he has a gun that is not automatic. Suppose some of the hostages are smart and able people. Could you pretend to agree, take the gun, and catching the eye of the first person you are supposed to "shoot" give him or her a signal to fall to the ground while you shoot the hostage taker? I mean, duh.

Third, even if you agree to the stupid scenario, why would you not choose in reality to do an option "C" or "D?" For example, what if you refuse to make the decision and instead, make an impassioned plea for grace to the hostage taker, ask him if he ever had a mother, fall on your knees and refuse to answer, praying only to God, and etc. and so on. World history is full of such events where the hostage taker has a conversion, an enlightenment and/or a change in heart, being baffled by such a response.

So do not fall for ridiculous modern poseurs who claim to be philosophers, since they have stripped all the context and richness of humanity and the divine from their supposed ponderings, and make them like cheap quiz shows. I had a former friend who used to love asking these types of questions which he called 'out of the box' or 'lateral'" thinking, and they annoyed me for their binary tree depressive computer thinking back then, and that was fifteen years ago.

A genuine philosopher of the ancient sort would never have thought of a question such as the "case" above. He or she would have pondered something like "Where does the desire to take a hostage come from?" That could have led into all sorts of fascinating, intellectual and spiritually rich mining of true philosophy. What does make a "hostage taker" anyway? A philosopher could write books about that very subject and thus, in the exploration, provide some genuine information and thoughts about context, scenarios and options for reaction.

So happy "World Philosopher Day," another fake by fakes in a poseur society. *Loud raspberry* for self satisfied modern manipulators.

And young people, do not be buffaloed into answering stupidly crafted questions. This quiz and reality show generation needs to realize that you should model yourself after what I demonstrated above, which is to refuse to be fooled into thinking that if you were "smart" you'd answer the questions as posed, and select the "right answer" (or, accept the depressive doctrination that there is no happy ending to the question, since it is arranged to be deliberately nihilistic). Refuse to let your mind be stultified by such artificial and destructive games.

I hope that you have found this helpful. It is not a trivial matter, if you think about it. Since faith has been artificially decoupled from reasoning, at the same time that genuine rational reasoning has become taught by society to be increasingly irrational, you need to identify such brainwashing techniques that pose as asking "morality" questions, but as you can see, since they provide no reference point for morality, TOTALLY lack a moral context rather than as falsely promoted being a morality based case.

Faith and reasoning tutorial on imagination

I’ve been thinking about another problem with how modern people think these days, and how to best express it in one of my continuing series of faith and reasoning skills. Tonight I’ve thought of a good exercise to share with you after I explain the problem, in order to help all my readers to better understand and remedy the problem. This should be of concern to everyone, but of particular interest to those in the creative and media arts and profession, who are instrumental in either deliberately or inadvertently contributing to this problem.

I’ve noticed over the past several decades that people have lost their ability to use their imagination in an authentic way. If I were speaking to a group of people right now, instead of entering words on my laptop keyboard, I’d expect to see some surprise at this statement. I’d also expect some to argue that people have never been more imaginative than they are today! But I would shake my head and say, “No, actually, humans are in a terrible period of imagination aridity and furthermore, what they now think is imagination is actually a trap of logic, an error in logic that is contributing toward much of the depression and confusion in the world today.” Here is why.

Genuine imagination is to visualize in one’s mind a new and creative situation or viewpoint. Imagination is used in both practical applications, such as problem solving in the workplace, and also for entertainment purposes, such as writing a fantasy novel. Humans have always used their imaginations as part of their day to day life, even in primitive times. Imagination usually took the very practical form of wondering what will happen next in a very prosaic day to day basis. Hunters would wonder if they would find food that day, and if they were nomadic and hunting in new territory, they would wonder what is beyond the curve of the next hill, or what is within the forest. As humans became developed explorers, they wondered what the shape the earth was, flat or round, and what types of people and animals they would encounter in their travels. As people had their industrial revolution and entered a more modern era with leisure time, where they could afford entertainment, people started not only wondering what types of experiences were beyond their reach (such as what it would be like to go into space, or at the bottom of the sea) but eventually, for entertainment purposes, made up scenarios. This is where modern humans are today, where actually the bulk of mass media entertainment is making stuff up. People make up scenarios based on things like being a celebrity or a hero, and they also make up entire world views, such as in science fiction or fantasy. And that’s cool and if that’s all that was going on, I would agree that those are expressions of imagination.

But I have noticed two problems with the use of “imagination” today in those areas, such that it actually renders those applications of imagination to be not only invalid but dangerous. That is that humans have developed a huge thirst for imagination at exactly the same, unfortunate, time that they are less able to distinguish between reality and imagination itself. One would have expected, as I certainly did, that people would be more sophisticated in this century at telling the difference between reality and imagination, and not blurring the two. But actually humans have terribly regressed, where they are totally confusing imagination with reality, and thus are no longer utilizing pure and clean imagination.

There are several reasons for this erroneous blending of exercises in reality and imagination. One is that despite increased scientific knowledge, young people are raised to be increasingly superstitious, rather than increasingly skilled in factual scientific reasoning. And no, friend atheists who read this blog, I am not referring to the religious folk who deny certain aspects of science such as evolution! LOL, nice try to blame them, though, ha. No, the people who persist in thinking of literal seven day creation, or of humans side by side with dinosaurs are not the problem. The problem is the broad based societal embracing of inflated views of individual “spirituality.” Shibboleths such as “we are all connected” and “what goes around comes around,” to say nothing of the infiltration of occult and magical thinking among mainstream otherwise sensible people is the problem. To summarize the problem, many people no longer understand that they are using their imagination when they do so and in fact, they think they are receiving “hidden” “knowledge” from “the spirit plane” or the “universe.” There are people who deliberately and consciously believe this, that there is really no such thing as imagination and that they are “channeling” the fruits of their imagination efforts, while others are unconscious of this societal tainting of their thinking. In fact, the people who believe in these notions, that any idea that pops into their little pea (and sometimes pee) brains is “channeled,” “placed,” or “implanted” there are very powerful in media, and they actually manipulate their output to put other people’s imagination entertainment in slavery and servitude to the “channeling” that these morons think they are receiving.

Virtually every work of “imaginary” entertainment, whether book, movie or video game, passes at some point in their creation through the hands of “believers” of the “all imagination is a secret message of channeling from the universe” and they drive the messages hard. Editors who have this philosophy emphasize the depressive and dreary (or inanely airy-fairy inflation) messages in the areas where they think the authors are “onto something.” I’ve noticed this for years. What first alerted me to this was many years ago when I wrote a fantasy trilogy (I’ve spoken about this before here on my blog) and let some friends read it. The Jungian who I realized was a stalking cultist kept asking me, “where” I “got” the book from. Um, duh, I imagined it and wrote it. But she was totally stuck on asking me repeatedly “where” this was “coming from.” That’s when I realized that she was an example of moderns who have had their thinking so messed up by their own hidden cult beliefs and also inflated opinions of humans (reincarnated and so forth, when in fact, of course, there is no reincarnation). I thought she was just a dangerous flake in that regard and so while it disturbed me, I did not put it into “societal crisis” terms at that time (late 1980’s to late 1990’s). However, I have seen that this “thinking” has infiltrated everything that comes out of the media complex (yeah, complex is the right term alright, as in psychological complex) and also in just regular discourse, from individuals talking to the “talk show circuit” and worst of all, in the “spirituality” and “self help” business. Rather than discerning one’s thoughts as being deliberately reality based or deliberately imagination based at a given time, people urge each other to “listen to your inner voice” and “value your intuitions.” OH MY GOD. If our early ancestors “valued their intuitions” when they had a random goofy thought while out in the fields or hunting, I guarantee humans would not have survived for long.

Brain studies show that when a certain part of the brain is damaged due to accident or disease, the patient may have bizarre random images that seem like they are on an “acid trip.” This does not mean that if they are imagining seeing these weird images that they actually exist in reality somewhere, or are a “spiritual message.” It means that we can identify that the brain has self ordering mechanisms to distinguish among reality, deliberate imagination, and inadvertent imagination. When that brain region is damaged, the patients suffer from what I am calling here as “inadvertent imagination,” which means they are creating imaginary scenarios in their mind, as they would when doing normal works of imagination, but in this case it is not deliberate and not under control.

So what moderns have done is actually damage their own brains. They have not bashed themselves and each other on that region of the brain (though they might as well have). But by losing the most crucial and vital of survival traits, which is the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination, and repeatedly reinforcing among each other that blurring, society has and is continuing to inflict upon each other what can only be described as anti-survival instinct brain damage in that regard. Every time that someone stokes a person’s “valuing” of their every pea brained random thought as being “meaningful,” “significant,” “intuitive,” “a message from beyond,” “so called fake ‘past life memories,’” and that old favorite “channeling the spirit,” they are chipping away at damaging their own brains and those they are influencing.

When one has a huge societal problem like this, the answer is both easy and difficult. It’s difficult because it’s so automatic and pernicious that people don’t even realize they are doing it, or subject to it, except for those who are being deliberately manipulative. And truthfully, even they got more than they bargained for and I am sympathetic. They don’t realize that like overusing an imaginary muscle that they think they actually have in their arm, for example, that they end up crippling their entire arm. So this is a huge problem and one that would make me extremely worried about humanity all night long if I hadn’t already thrown in the towel about how willfully screwed up you all have become. But I’m mad on behalf of those who have been and continue to be victimized by this crap. A lot of joy has been taken out of the world because of this, in addition to, as I said, the danger that humans’ survival instinct has been seriously impaired, causing them to make very bad decisions and substituting inflated depressive messages instead of entertainment. And I am not being a killjoy and saying that there should be no science fiction or fantasy, for example. Far from it as I am a great fan of some of both genres. However, I have dropped both like hot potatoes because both have been now thoroughly infested by this “new age,” occult, superstitious, and inappropriately magnified significance of imagination as being somehow “gateways” to “channeled” “actual” “knowledge.”

So I am not one to point out a problem and say, “Whoa, this is bad, what a bummer trip. Wow, humans have really messed up and boy are you all in trouble of your own making” and not try to help, if anyone actually listens, huh? That is why I did not want to write this topic blogging until I thought of a detoxing and discernment suggestion that can be used as an exercise. This is kind of like those popular books that supposedly help in one’s writing and artistic creativity (and by the way, a lot of them reinforce, both deliberately and inadvertently, exactly what I am warning about). So I decided that the best way to help my readers examine this problem is to engage in, right here and now, an exercise in pure imagination. By writing such an exercise as a model, I want to teach you to use that technique for yourselves. So now I will demonstrate what I want each of you to do in whatever context is most suitable for you. I’m going to use the scenario that I am a science fiction author, sitting down to write a story.

I am going to imagine what a planet would be like if its only life form was the daffodil flower. So the first image that popped into my mind is a planet that is totally covered with bright yellow daffodils! I am sitting here picturing what that would look like. I guess it would be kind of a golden color from far away, since the flowers would be too small to distinguish at a distance. It’s only as one approached the planet that one would eventually understand that it is entirely covered with vegetation that the vegetation is the same bright yellow color and that when one is close up, that these are trillions of the same flowers.
When I first thought of this, just before signing on to the blog, I realized that would actually be a disturbing sight, maybe like snow blindness, where one cannot see in the glare of unrelieved bright white snow all around. So I decided to imagine that the planet is covered with a mixture of the standard color earth daffodils, which range from white through the pale to bright yellows and into the oranges, including a rather salmon pink variety. So now I picture the planet with that mixture. Still, that is a bit much. Therefore there really has to be some sort of landforms, so let’s imagine that usual division of land and ocean that we have on earth. So the continents of this imaginary planet are now, in our mind’s eye, covered with the multi-color daffodils.
If I am serious about writing some sort of short story about this planet, I might imagine how daffodils probably developed, like trees on earth, some gradation in their height and width. Maybe there would be daffodil meadows comprising low regular sized flowers, and then daffodil forests of really tall daffodils. What would a tall, tree like daffodil look like? If the stalk is like a tree trunk, maybe they are a beautiful translucent green (because as gardeners know, daffodils have a pale green tube like stem that contains a lot of sticky sap). So I can imagine a really pretty view of the trunk like stalks of huge daffodils in the forest, where they glow with a pale green, and where they break the sap flows out. Maybe there are sap streams of water as a result? Ponds that form if a bunch of these forest daffodils fall in a windstorm or something.
OK, do you see how easy this is? Think of a scenario and just imagine what it would be like using logic, as I did here. This is the beginning of being reality based but being able to imagine something that does not in actuality exist. Since you went through this exercise “along with me,” as you are reading it just as I thought it through, I can assure you that I’m not “channeling” a “vision” of some nutty planet that is actually “out there” covered with daffodils. Also, I did not think of the daffodil in this exercise because I have some hidden issue or need (and thus an oh so spiritual message) regarding daffodils.

But more important, I don’t have the need to ruin my exercise by now bringing in the “de rigueur” depressive motifs that have taken over all uses of the imagination. I could go ahead and write a really nice and sweet little short story about the planet of daffodils (even with heavy emotional constructs such as daffodil angst, ha ha) but not “work into” the poor and innocent story the themes that the depressive cultists think must be in all “imagination” in order to reinforce their imaginary delusions about the world and universe order. No trapped souls in the daffodils. No daffodil vampires. No superhero daffodil that must rise up in order to protect the rest of the daffodils from a peony that arrives on an asteroid. No need to say that some of the daffodils are “gay.” The daffodils are not a sign from a destroyed “past civilization” that warns that too much gardening is no good. The daffodils are not arranged to be a “secret calendar” with “numinous dates and events.” Did I miss any of the freak show “imaginary” shibboleths?

Why are the same depressive themes presented as being “imagination” for “entertainment” over and over? Notice it is a handful of themes that repeat themselves, as I easily listed them thinking of them offhand as I wrote this. But this does not mean that I cannot be imaginary in a way that is artistically challenging. In other words, I could make this short story about the daffodil planet be ‘serious literature.’ The trouble is not that people are being all inflated with “good and evil” and battle of the universe type themes, though that is the reflex that it seems no one says no to anymore. The trouble is that just the same five or six tired and depressive fake world views are trotted out and shoved down everyone’s throat as entertainment and “imagination,” but are instead, “stories” that are in service of people who have some very strange false beliefs in actuality, that they propagandize through the entertainment media.

So if I was actually writing this story, I could make it serious literature and still be pure imagination. How? Here’s one example. Suppose I wrote the first half of the story describing this lovely planet, without saying how or who is viewing it, I just write as if someone is walking around and observing. Maybe then I gradually reveal as kind of a surprise, that the viewer is someone from earth who has been sent to this planet as a post traumatic stress disorder therapy. So, for example, it is an Iraq war veteran who is walking around, who sets up camp, who stays there for a week, and then is picked up by his shuttle craft. And then we find out that humans have “cultivated” this daffodil garden on an asteroid for use in PTSD therapy. So I could make all sorts of serious points, human drama issues, and imagine what it would be like for a PTSD soldier to think his or her thoughts while camping on this “therapy asteroid,” ha.

Well, if this story now appears in print or film, I’ll finally have proof of the many times I’ve been plagiarized, ha.

Anyway, I suggest that those of you, especially young people in school who are in a creative or academic mindset anyway, and are the target of much of the negative use of “imagination” that I describe, try this exercise out. Pick any simple scenario and work with it. Keep it very simple, as I demonstrate, because when you try to be complex in your first attempts, that is when the politically correct and warped themes creep in unnoticed. You are not avoiding challenging themes or real life issues, but you need to hit “reset” buttons first by being simple. The planet that is filled with only one substance is an ideal model to follow, just as I showed. So think of some sort of “what if” scenario that is like this case study example in structure, where first you imagine and describe a very simple scenario of setting. That is the purest of imagination. When you’ve done that a few times you can discern populating your case study imaginary scenario with increasingly complexity of theme, characters and action, as I did in thinking of the Iraq war veteran as the main character protagonist, seeing the planet through his or her eyes, then layering his or her situation (PTSD) and then the surprise ending, which is that this planet was created as a place of rehab by good old regular earth folks. Wouldn’t it be nice? You can be creatively deep and real without being compulsively dark, as unfortunately, all too much of “imagination” and “entertainment” is today.

Anyway, now I have tons of ideas how I could develop this short story into a series, ha. So I’ll just leave it with this example for now, since that is the purpose of this blogging tonight. I hope that you find this helpful and I do encourage everyone (yes, even those fat cat Hollywood producers) to hit their personal creativity reset button and try this exercise out. I’ll write more as I think of it on this subject, and in the meantime good luck and all the best with this exercise and thought process.