The Market

The DOW took a rather abrupt dive today, one that made stockholders around the world shudder. If Voltaire were alive today, I've no doubt that he would readily adapt his famous quote to say 'If the market didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it'. In all fairness the level of commitment and uniform faith that the world is starting to have in this phantasmagoria is unprecedented. Hard to believe we once walked on the very same earth with the same bodies completely unencumbered with such an omnipresent concept as the market to dictate the nature of reality to us. From back alleys in Haiti to Wallstreet and on into the streets of Mumbai, the market is King. No government can last long against the onslaught of economic calamity. Indeed the EU is proving that even well established nations are little match for the forces of financial expediency. Money flows from one corner of the earth to the next like lava, destroying and reshaping all in its wake. Esoteric numbers, graphs and statistics wielded by a discordant crew of crazies we call economists does little to make anything resembling sense out of this madness. At this phase in the game it does no good to point out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. Sure the people at the bottom are always ready to listen to any radical that dares make promises, but this leads to nothing more than class skirmishes that can lead to concessions, but never victory. The union of the worlds workers was not done through socialism or international communism; it was the market that bound them all together. When I was young I decried Capitalism as the mother of all evils, the well of death and sure sign of the impending Apocalypse. Now I can't help but marvel as nations fade away, race becomes insignificant, religions are discarded as trash and the scramble for money approaches all encompassing proportions. The idealists dreamed of a brotherhood of man- liberte, equalite, fraternite. What we ended up with is a world where liberty is obsolete, equality is an economic impossibility and fraternity is a joke that politicians never tire of telling (eg 'my fellow Americans'). I type all of this without any trace of regret at the path that mankind has chosen to sprint down with the passionate panic that so defines our species. Idealist intellectuals have this habit of painting human beings as helpless little peons in need of guidance and tutelage. I choose to take a different opinion of homo sapiens. People work together out of some innate instinct to network. Only language, religion and race has ever proved really effective at pitting otherwise identical groups of people against one another. All three of these are being eroded daily by the mighty market. We all wanna get rich- the market makes us rich- we all must adhere faithfully to the market. Of course this is all the western side of the deal. Not sure if factory workers in Dhaka really have all that much faith in the market, but they probably acknowledge that international financiers in far off skyscrapers control their lives. We as people have this amazing ability of collectively agreeing upon things which don't exist anywhere except in our minds, and the market is just another manifestation of this talent.

Dystopia

"A divine falsehood is more powerful than any human truth"
-Michael Bakunin

One of the cruelest and most detrimental ideas ever produced by humanity is the concept of there being an attainable ideal society, commonly called a Utopia (which ironically means in Greek- no place). The first part of the human epoch saw the glorification of the individual. This being clearly personified in the likes of Alexander the Great, Jesus of Nazareth, Julius Caesar, Mohamed, Genghis Khan- the list is long but I think you get the idea. People would hope for a Charlemagne, but frequently got an Ivan the Terrible. Empires rose and fell, each one building on the ruins of its predecessor. As time wore on a strange symbiotic relationship between religion and political power arose all over the planet. One was used to substantiate the other, and both generally profited from the exchange. With the advent of people associating themselves with nations we began to see a shift occur. Rather than hoping for individual spiritual salvation and a ruler that wasn't going to brutalize you this strange notion of their being an ideal society arose. It had its roots in both the religious and political traditions of the past, and was thus a sort of fusing of these two parallel power structures. People all of a sudden decided that they not only didn't need God anymore, but they also didn't need Kings anymore either. After a few centuries of bloodshed, social upheaval, and pandemonium we have arrived at the present day. We have leaders, but have them theoretically under our control. We have religion, but in every single instance we see a dramatic decline in religious affiliation with material wealth. It is the concept of Utopia that has driven all this. That we are on a path that will lead to a just and equitable society that will benefit all equally, we only need ________ (insert cause of the day here). Forests have fallen, cities arisen, whole regions have been rearranged, and all manner of technological marvel has been utilized to help us on our path towards our elusive goal. When one takes it all in perspective it is a lot like searching for the end of a rainbow, it is always just a bit further. The 20th century was one dramatic competition between nations to see which one would deliver first on this dream of an ideal society. Well, in case you failed to notice, last century was one of barbarous bloodshed, environmental destruction, oppression and suffering on a scale that mankind had never previously known. All this was done because people honestly thought that it would be another step on the yellow brick road to universal happiness. Most religions are based on some pretty wacky notions, but this Utopia one has got to take the cake. How the sort of civilization we have got going here is ever going to lead to anything but a social nightmare is beyond me, clearly I'm a heathen and heretic. Yet legions of idealists are out there preaching this gospel every day, and worst of all they seem to take especial delight in indoctrinating the young. All of this has had the result of making mankind forget the most basic and fundamental goal that all living things have- survival. We are so caught up in building our tower of Babel that we seem to have forgotten the foundation still rests on Earth. Every time I listen to a leader or academic speak I experience tremors of despair and laughter. How many bullshit programs will people buy until they realize that they are in essence the same. Just another ostrich approach to solving the underlying problems that have been with us since this whole congregating in large numbers trend began. This Utopia dream is just like waiting for the second coming of Jesus. Just a long wait for a train that ain't ever going to come. There is a great saying that goes: 'you can want in one hand and shit in the other and see which one comes out first'. That is pretty much humanities approach at present, and given our addiction to repetition it looks like the shit is going to come out first.

The Four Paths

Siddhartha Gautama once said that he saw only four types of people in the world:

Those going from-

1.darkness to light 2.light to darkness 3.light to light 4. darkness to darkness

That pretty much sums up the options for a human. You can either aspire to the light, or condemn yourself to eternal night. This whole individuality trip is a really amazing mental edifice when one considers that all evidence points to the contrary. Solitary people are just a microcosm of society. So it follows that the four types of people Buddha defined could also be used as a rubric for civilizations. Which are we? I'll have to withhold judgement till I'm a little older and more experienced with humanity. As of now I'm leaning toward #4, on account of our bloody barbaric history and the inherent soul smashing apathetic despair that life based on the self serving principles of Capitalism causes. Like I said though, I'm still far too young to really know which of the four our society is. It could just as easily be #2. Maybe all that founding fathers idealism embodied in the Constitution was totally legit and we are going through a period of terminal decline that will end in our own self induced Armageddon. Somehow I feel that our entire world is also just a microcosm of the Universe. Individual humans are about as independent as a wave on the ocean. We can never really distract ourselves from the fact that we individually, collectively and cosmically are always going to be traveling down one of these four paths.

These Days of Democracy

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
-Mark Twain

Politics in America is bullshit
deep down we all know it
but still the show does go on
even after freedoms are gone
starting to seem like a bad joke
that this system is totally broke
Is there even a slight glimmer of hope?
Obama, Hilary, Giuliani, McCain- NOPE!
in all fairness they are not entirely to blame

every American is responsible for this shame

people always get the leaders they deserve
although some complain they still serve

one ambitious autocrat after another
wont be long till we elect Big Brother

it's a very simple thing to criticize

leaders upon whom we fix our eyes

but if we would redirect our gaze

we'd see we are all lost in this maze

The New Faith

I may act like I'm an authority on a great many subjects in this blog, but theology and religious studies are not my forte. Now having said that, I'm going to give a dissertation on the nature and origin of American religious tendencies in this perplexing year 2007 Anno Domini . One fact that must be pointed out is that no religion is static. They, like everything else man made, are a constantly changing phenomenon that is perpetually being reinterpreted and reconfigured to better suite peoples needs. I'd go on to defend that statement, but sometimes history just speaks for itself. So what do you get when you combine a strange reclusive monotheistic Semitic cult with the madness of having a god for every conceivable desire? In a word- Catholicism. Out of respect for that saintly man, the one and only JC, I must point out that at no point in its 2000 year history, has his teachings played any significant part in the organized religion ironically called Christianity. In fact, it is almost as if they tried to do the exact inverse of everything he said. The book burning campaigns, the Inquisition, taxation, crusades and conquests; hypocrisy just simply doesn't get much more profound than that. The fact of the matter is that from Constantine to Clinton, no ruler took any of this seriously. The state and the ruler know only one law- self preservation. Well, how do you continue a religion when your ruler is clearly just looking out for himself and his power structure? Answer- create a new god that enough of your subjects will worship. Since roughly 1648 the real god in the western world has been private property. In feudal times private ownership was the luxury of only the nobility and the church. After the split of Catholicism caused by the 30 years war a new state religion had to be found for rulers like Charles V and countries like England that had more than one Christian sect in large quantities. The whole God-said-I'm-in-charge thing only works if there is a unanimous state religion. So ok, back to the drawing board, what can we all agree on? What they came up with was truly genius, and our modern world proves its evangelical efficacy. 'We can all agree that people are selfish opportunists and care only about material possessions', thought the elite. They then began spreading the faith by telling everyone that they are working for themselves, that the sacred result of this individual labor is property and that your leadership exists as part of a social contract to ensure your freedom to own things. With a little social Darwinism, make believe morality and a whole lot of academic bullshit, the new religion gave birth to the Juggernaut of colonialism and took the new faith to every corner of the planet. After all, what is the fun of having a religion if it doesn't negate and destroy all the other ones? So, long story short, the new faith spread like panic and everyone had to either sign on or fight against capitalist crusades that were just as happy to kill as to convert. The head of these states/congregations naturally had to have a lot of property; to prove their holiness. Thus our leaders have almost always been very wealthy. It is all a matter of faith, if for no other reason than this religion works because we all have pieces of paper saying what is ours issued by the Church/Government and we can call the goon squad to brutalize anyone who tries to take our precious property. We even have a sort of religious ceremony, very much like the Inquisition, in the court system which handles the pious matter of figuring out whose is what and if anyone has committed blasphemy (aka offended our God of private ownership). Communism tried like hell to rival this persuasion, but in the end humanism and sharing couldn't overcome materialism and narcissism. Bakunin noticed the one glaring flaw in this revolutionary faith almost 150 years ago- "The masses will never own property". This is a very good point, only so much property to go around and people procreate like crazy given the chance. America's contribution to this religion was the ingenious theory that answers this question. The only reason you don't own lots of things is that you aren't working hard enough and haven't compromised enough of your ideals. Low and behold, they all bought it. It is for this reason that America is in the drivers seat of Geopolitics. Every war is now a holy war because we are in essence only looking out for our collective economic interest, which in the mysticism of American Capitalism, is equated with personal property. Back in the day I'm sure an occasional peasant would look around and think, 'I'm not so sure about this whole God thing, my life is pretty much hell and those noblemen don't do shit'. If a poor man starts to question his lot today everyone will tell him he is lazy and to start working, otherwise he's a heathen/bum. We even send children to a sort of religious seminary called 'education' in which they are steeped in dogma and are given more pieces of paper that guarantee their right to more private property. It is rather remarkable that with all the cultural commentary there is these days, no one seems to question the fundamental belief structure. Which is in essence apathy towards others and obsession with ourselves, or at the very most our nation (see Patriotism and Jingoism). No doubt the fact that in this dynamic faith we are all too busy trying to stack paper to go and intellectualize why we are doing it is a cornerstone of its efficiency. Unlike the old faith, in which we had to spend an hour or so in Church a week to be considered a member, Capitalism requires on average 40 hours a week in the US. Luckily you are given currency with which you can spend all your spare time buying various things made by other religious zealots that makes your whole life sacred, because you do nothing but maintain the economy through consumption. For that is another tenant of this faith, by working you gain the inalienable right to consume anything you can. As a student of history I'm far too baffled and impressed by the success of this new variant of organized religion to go and condemn it. The fact of the matter is that it's proving very popular and large segments of the planet are practicing it with a passion that is paramount to fanaticism. One interesting result from the supremacy of this faith is that we are now approaching a world in which we all worship the same God (money) and speak the same language (money, and to a lesser extent English). I sincerely hope this is just another step on the dialectic path of mankind and that we will soon move on to something else. However, if this is the end of the road, what an anticlimactic Apocalypse.
Where did it start?
I just showed.
Where does it go?
Nobody knows!

Everything is going to be fine

So the scientists/shamans have finally agreed that we have taken a massive bite out of the hand that feeds us. Exxon also reported the highest profits that a corporation has ever had. Politicians, in true dipshit herd fashion, immediately got on the anti pollution bandwagon (here is the article). I'd care except it is just too ironic for anything but laughter, or at least a knowing grin. We have been acting like spoiled children so long that grown up activity like stopping pollution and trying to salvage what is left is seen as virtually impossible. The great thing is that it really doesn't matter, and our actions over the past several hundred years testify to this. We have been killing each other in ever increasing numbers for some time now so any claim to caring about human life is absurd. Probably a natural instinct intended to prevent just such a situation, I blame pacifist hippies and the cowardice of self serving capitalists for ruining the formula. The good news is that the law of nature is such that matter and energy is never wasted. Furthermore, just because the atmosphere will soon become uninhabitable for man doesn't necessitate utter extinction of life on earth, just no more people. In my previous article in which I said we had to pick Buddha or Bush I forgot the possibility of that most human of arrangements- compromise. Perhaps all the avaricious assholes will die off as the world descends into cataclysms of chaos and people get savage over ever dwindling resources. Although cannibalism will help, eating humans no doubt gets old quick, especially since we won't be able to grow herbs for seasoning. While all the people who pick the Buddha path build pagodas that are self-sustained environments in which they can meditate and try not to be myopic maniacs, the rest will fight like like dogs over the last bones. The pagodas will have to be well hidden to avoid the writhing masses of cannibalistic mutants, but they'll find some place I imagine. Meanwhile new lifeforms will emerge which can handle soaring temperatures and world without the protection of an ozone layer. That way the western plan can still run its course, but also allow for progressive enlightened people to try and find a sustainable place in the Universe. Sounds like a reasonable middle ground to me. My song goes:
let them build their machines to die
we need not be concerned about why
all things must go according to plan
even if it is incomprehensible to man

Why I Meditate

Why does a Zack choose to meditate?

It helps him avoid the desire and hate

this infection of collective sub-conscious

pandemic precipitating missile launches

in a world that is always craving for more

many peoples life mimics that of a whore

turning that next trick just to survive

could this be what it means to be alive?

he practices awareness and equanimity

subduing passions that can cause slavery

thus he sits and tries to tame the wild mind

the silence within developing with time

to overcome the deafening noise without

patience and compassion replaces doubt

the universe and earth know what to do

if you got a problem with it, it's just you

Buddha or Bush

Plan APlan B

From the evening of the 17th through the morning of the 28th, for the first time in over two decades, I was silent. I had voluntarily decided to play at bhikku for 10 days and learn an ancient meditation technique that was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama 25 centuries ago. The site was North Fork, the geographical center of California and the technique is Vipassana by name. It is nothing short of phenomenal. In brief western words, it is a way to reprogram the sub-conscious mind and consequently liberate oneself from suffering. After about 50 hours of meditation of this type I can only say that the method is flawless and surprisingly scientific. One of the basic principles is anicca (Pali- pronounced ah-nee-cha), which essentially means the natural law of impermanence. From sub-atomic particles to entire solar systems, all arises and passes. It is only our reactions to this universal truth that leads us to our misery. At an intellectual level, most people in the modern era are ready to accept this fact. The problem is that we can acknowledge all sorts of things, but it doesn't really effect any change in behavior. It is nothing but another of thousands of accepted facts that we are programed with from birth onward and line up like idols on our mental altars. By meditating on the various sensations your body goes through, and by not reacting to them, you are in effect training your entire awareness of the fact of anicca. A man may pass a river in the morning on his way to work, but upon his return it is the same river, but at the same time not the same water. So too is it a fact that on a molecular level, it isn't the same man either. We are all part of a celestial flow of particles that we can neither control nor easily comprehend. After my 50 hours of meditation I went through all sorts of sensations, from euphoric to very painful, but they all passed. By responding with equanimity to my physical sensations, accepting that they are there, beyond my ability to control, and just another testament to the ephemeral and impermanent nature of life I was learning for myself something that was far from academic. After not talking for a few days your mind calms down. No more thinking up shit to say and having to respond to every utterance of others. Just you and the infinite world within. You can say the universe exists out there, or you can acknowledge that you conceive of a universe, and thus is it contained within your mind, like all other things you consider reality. Having accepted that you realize that the purity and quality of your world is utterly your own work. You can go for a walk on a sunny day and think, 'damn sun, stop being so hot and blinding', or you can find shade. So too can you complain and lament the way you view the world, or you can change it. I firmly believe that if all people practiced self awareness, equanimity and meditation this whole humanity thing would have a chance at succeeding, or at least stop being so agonizing. So this was Buddha's plan to save the human race- I can dig it, respect it and even go so far as to think it would work. Somewhere around day 7 I got to wondering, what's the western plan for the eradication of suffering? Then it dawned on me. The western, or perhaps more accurately, the white European mind has found a foolproof solution to human misery- we will unleash our inventions and malicious mentality on the whole planet without any semblance of restraint until there is nothing left. It seems pretty clear that another century like the last and human life on earth will be impossible. So no more humans, no more suffering; that is a straight up fact. So now having seen and walked a little on both paths, I must seriously consider which is preferable, or even better, more viable. I'm still undecided. With so many people on earth it looks like riding the fence just ain't going to suffice anymore. Granted humanities age old partners-Wars, Famines, Plagues- might rear their heads and postpone the decision for a few more lifetimes. Sooner or later Man is going to have to choose however. I like Buddha's way a lot. It appeals to me on a very deep level and accentuates all that I love about people. Having said that, I must concede that given my knowledge of history I can't help but see the western plan to be a sure thing, and Buddha's but the divine dream of the wise. As more and more of us enigmatically problematic humans arrive here on planet earth, it is clear that we are going to have to go down one path or the other. Looks like a win win to me if the goal is to stop the incessant pain of being human! I read only one thing the whole time I was at North Fork, and it was on a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap that out of desperation I read while defecating: "For one God's Spaceship Earth, with Bomb & Gun, we're All-One or none!" Think that pretty much lays the choice out pretty clear. We can all be Buddhas or Bushs... no matter how much we may think otherwise, we all got to collectively pick one program or the other; looks like we are leaning towards the later at present, could just be my perspective though.