The Principles of Dogma

Dogma, as defined by Webster, is an official system of principles on tenets concerning faith, morals, behavior etc. While dogma is generally ascribed to large institutions such as churches or governmental organizations, I see these entities as nothing more than aggregations of humans and they are thus eventualities of human interaction. Dogma is a curious phenomena that arises when humans begin to congregate, as individual interpretations of life begin to compete for legislative space, over acts of “standardization” are enacted as attempts to streamline and keep peace.

Isolative cognition (IC) is a term I have come to use for the areas of cognition we access when making decisions within a cognitive bias. IC is a term that for many may be hard to conceptualize, one would have to be familiar with cognitive bias and additionally be able to pinpoint their biases in order to have any deep understanding of them. To merely see the blind spots in another’s thought process is hardly educational, it isn’t until the same scrutiny is applied to the individual that any substantive progress is made.

A society is more than just the sum of its parts, humans, because human interplay creates additional phenomena that are shared by one another. Things begin to emerge which are not related to any particular part, but as a nascent eventuality of interaction as a whole. These emergences are many, laws, rules, normative behaviors, ethics, and so forth. From these emergences come standardized rules of engagement, education, and principles of contributive behavior which try to facilitate an individual’s healthy integration into the whole of the body of society.

The problem is, humans, as explicitly stated ad nauseum on this site, are free moral agents and complex systems of probabilistic functions, thus one understanding of rules and principles may not be shared by the rest. However, in order to establish a cogent, sustainable society there must be normalities in place to govern interaction. Thus, dogma is born.

However, this complex interplay of human activities does not end there; just as man is governed by his or her need for structure, he is simultaneously governed by the cosmic forces of balance. If structure is emergent and instability must also come to the fore; one cannot exist without the other, this is the nature of being human.

Thus, IC becomes problematic as people identify with one set of rules or the other without taking account the essential antithetical principles of human nature. We MUST have balance, if there is evil then good will abound; if there is good than evil will abound.

Dogma, especially in larger, and by nature more complex societies, is rarely a cooperative process. In order to offset the cumbersome structure of a large populace, such intermediaries such as representative democracies and electoral processes begin to emerge. Dogma the evolves into a game of political intrigues, with a representative sometimes operative on behalf of his constituents, sometimes on behalf of his wealthy donors, sometimes on behalf of his own self interest, and usually in a complex admixture of all three. Factor in psychological warfare, conceptually related topics of psychological warfare and class oppression, in tandem with nationalism and a cadre of other -ism’s and one can see just how complex this dogmatic process can become.

Isolative cognition is the most destructive when a relatively informed person begins to sit atop their soapbox. Armed with a large amount of information, but exposed by anemic analytical processes, they skew such concepts like “dogma” as evil, unnatural, or unnecessary. They fail to view their own systematic beliefs of what is and isn’t, their own wishes for clarity, their own dreams of uniformity as forms of dogma. In their bias, they see with such vivacity a clear and concise version of what is, they often times supplement these positions with fervor and passion, mistake their ability to garner respect and persuade as self-evident truths of their moral uprightness, and mislead themselves to think that they are different from the society they hail from.

One must understand, to be informed does not mean to know; unless one is questioning the principles of knowledge — if one can ever know anything — their thought processes are exercises in insanity: repeating a dead process over and over again expecting different results.

How does one overcome IC, cognitive biases, or “philosophical suicide”, if I may borrow the phrase from Albert Camus, you ask? Is it by doggedly sticking to some theoretical objective truth and denying your impulses? Hardly. As discussed, that would contradict man’s existence as a paradox. Although we should actively seek objectivity, the only way life can make any cogent sense is through the eyes of individual experience; to deny that would be deny the human experience, a highly unlikely and virtually impossible process when dealing with a large society.

Instead, people should take their subjective opinions and test them to the hilt. They should understand their particular mental frameworks or schemata and actively seek to undo them. How? One method is to find your oppositional stance and do everything you can to agree with them. My preferred method is to zoom as far out as I can, philosophically speaking, and try to see the connections that I couldn’t from my limited mental vantage point. Another is to see the world as unreal and detach yourself from it, allowing the world to play out as a drama which you passively observe.

You can see why few people achieve philosophical freedom. All of these practices require an admission that the self is unimportant, that your views on life, God, death, humans — everything — are quite frankly useless and you must do everything you can to reconnect to some experience that you cannot readily explain.

So although I may disagree with much of the dogma of this world, I understand it and I understand the necessary, the naturalness of it. It is an organic process to keep things more or less in peace, to keep people with dispositions against investigative thought in a state of relevance, and to allow the globe to keep turning.

bryce

The Enlightened Way: Detachment

The Fallacy of Human Experience

We are an obscure planet in an obscure solar system on a distal arm of a massive yet obscure galaxy in an infinitely expanding universe.

Lets take a moment to reflect deeply on that fact. Your life is indeed a rat race of obligations, expectations, and interactions, some of which are more contentious than others, but in the grand scheme of things, you are absolutely miniscule. You are a piece of a larger cosmic production and whether you believe in a Divine being or not, this production is governed by rules and principles that supersede any day to day obligation you may feel.

In my opinion, people spend far too much time obsessing over themselves and over the human experience in general. Its seems that people are consumed with propinquity; things that are close must be of greater importance, however, its this mindset that constantly drives our world to brink of destruction. We are imbalanced in our understanding of existence and this causes us to become disoriented.

I cannot diminish the importance of human variation in expressing life. I cannot say that it is always prudent or plausible for people to disregard their natural proclivities and simply gaze at the stars. There are those among us that are susceptible to emotion variation, others who are susceptible to devices of the mind, and others, yet, who fall prey to the destructions of idle hands. The list goes on and on. We are all fundamentally different beings who place priorities on however we have come to develop.

But, this does not mean that the evident chaos of our world is necessary. It may be natural; since we are so varied as entities it only makes sense that impasses and divergence lead to complexity and persistent discord, however, that naturalness does not necessitate existence. We can, through cultivated thought and a stillness of spirit, begin to forge a prototype of a world at peace.

My proposition, to all of those developed enough to cast away pointless ego, is to realize that you are insignificant. Your opinions, your developments, your convictions are intrinsically worthless. Yes, you may, through the vehicle of reality, exert force on the natural world, but a compulsion to do so is resolutely futile. I am not promoting nihilism either! Man should be freed be this notion. You may choose to focus intensely on yourself and create an illusion of significance, but to do so really causes no greater benefit.

The anger that we feel when we are slighted, the frustrations we feel when things don’t go our way, the sadness we feel upon unrequited love are all examples of how our experiences can obfuscate an enduring peace that is possible.

This philosophy may seem radical, but it is the same equanimity of mind that is promoted by the Christian and Hindu faiths. Christianity says to cast your cares on The Lord for He is in control. He is big and you are small. Ecclesiastes even says to make your words unto God few because He exists so high above you. His supreme holiness renders your specifics obsolete. Hindu, especially that taught within Kriya Yoga, see that life is cosmic production and we can either choose to consume the delusion, MAYA, or we can choose to step away from it and enjoy the drama ourselves.

If you have no spiritual pathway to speak or you are an atheist, this changes nothing. The sheer immensity of the universe, the fact that there are stellar objects billions and billions of times larger and brighter than our sun whose light we can see now was produced several hundred million years ago should inspire the same humbling awe that an adherent to faith has for God.

When I am honest with myself, I don’t care about race relations, human rights, animal rights, politics, religion, business, or the economy. Although I am a black, Christian, business owner who votes independent, these are all negligible in my contemplations of being alive. I take very, very few things personal, I hold no grudges, I harbor no obsessive thoughts about this or that. I spend time marveling at the wonders of being alive and the intricate processes necessary to bring me to every nascent moment.

Up until recently, I needed people to think like me and I wanted synchronicity of thought. My conception of Objective Truth meant that deviations or interpretations from some ineluctable concepts were useless and eventualities of flawed beings. While this may be the case, I have learned to step outside of the tempestuous dimensions of human affairs and consider things of superior strata. I am no yogi or sage, but a young man who values things that endure.

Momentary human expression is micro and subject to wild variations per the dynamics of those involved, yet the massive universe, the creation of the Supreme Being Himself rages on in every direction until infinitude. I can never see my oscillations, as real and proximal as they are to me, as anything of consequence. I may feel fear, feel anger, feel depression, but these are passing fancies and I am quickly resolved.

My Meditative Place

I sit high atop a cosmic cliff,
With the heaven sprawled out before me.
A nebula dominates my anterior view.
God’s nebula.
The seat of creation.
In the midst of the nebula a gaping maw begins to swirl.
This celestial maelstrom emits a steady flow of unusual substance.
It swirls out towards me like the tail f a tornado.
As it approaches it’s pointed tip arches above my eyes and descends towards
My forehead.
My ajna lights up.
My eyes are full of light.
I am connected to the Source.
The Lord my God who sits high above the heavens.
His spirit appears above the celestial cone;
A white dove, flapping outside of time,
Perfectly poised, perfectly calm.
Wisdom flows forth like honey from a turgid comb.
Enlightenment through prayer.
Revelation trough meditation.

Solipsism

I am the firstborn of a mindset of DOUBLETHINK,
To know and to not know, like rejecting water from running sink.
My language is that of DOUBLESPEAK,
To say and not to say.

Yes, I am the children of those who thought they knew,
Made possible by all that they didn’t know.
But to balance, I have to acknowledge that I am ignorant,
So that I may have my eyes shut open.

Let’s talk about that third eye,
That bird eye,
That sees everything from the dirt to the skies,
Turns regular guys to sages and yogis.

We gotta make academia delicious like macadamias for the masses,
Because to explain balance in clear terms just don’t make sense,
Individuality and aggregation are antimonious,
So let’s celebrate illusory empiricism within hallowed walls sanctimonious.

Parsimonious is my mind when giving credit,
I’m hoarding my dollar because if I bet it,
I’ll be gambling on a game that has no purpose,
At least not objectively.

Not to be misconstrued, I’m no nihilist,
I’m just the childless child of DOUBLETHINK,
I know what I don’t know and I don’t know what I know,
Because to observe is to alter.

And to alter this game is to falter,
So I father these febrile, yea fatuous thoughts.
Honor the pragmatist inside of me,
Honor the spirit inside of me.

Whew.

They say they say things realer than the TV screens,
But to me it seems they speak only DOUBLESPEAK,
That Janus talk that loves to be seen,
Yet hides beneath the smooth sheen,

Like a cool veneer, but I don’t scoff or sneer,
Because I am aware of why we’re all here.
Shit, at least I pretend to know,
Such a scion of such opposing thoughts.

Such a child of ancillary recognizance,
The cogs are just… turning, so beautifully, so beautifully.
So assiduously I ascend the stairs of solitary solipsism,
For the battle wages, rages, blazes so certainly within the self

Wisdom’s Paradox

O blessed Wisdom, Divine!
Supplanting my childish ignorance,
Yet, oft leaving me vexed.

It seems the more I learn,
The less I seem to know;
The very Earth turned stranger to me.

Wisdom, scion of Truth,
So often you leave me in the throes of consternation;
What I once held true, dissolved to plausibility.

In my quiet place, I retreat to unwrap your treats greedily,
Yet, speedily I am reduced to nothing;

How can one know anything in this world,
When reality is just confusion draped in occurrence?

The Breath, The Notion, and The Thought

Every few months, a word or phrase gets lodged in my mind and I will ponder over it until I reach some understanding. 2011 was Wisdom and Patience, 2012 was about the Mind, 2013 has been dominated by Life’s Ambiguity and The UNreality of Existence. For the last few months a new term has taken root in my meditative soils, Uncertainty, and it has proven be quite the quandary for me. This term has acted as a sort of mental polymer between these vast topics, connecting and filling in the cracks for my grand philosophies.

Every philosopher has taken a concept and built empires around it. Immanuel Kant with his categorical imperative. Anaximander had The Apeiron. Ibn Rushd found unity between religion and philosphy. Paramhansa Yogananda fell in lockstep with Kriya Yoga. Musashi had the way of the sword.

Thinkers who brought meaning to their own universe through the meticulous study of one of its facets.

For myself, I have found meaning by examining the principles of uncertainty. If I were to go back in time and look at every single moment at which I found myself at a crossroads, they would all undeniably be instances where I was uncertain. This may not seem like much to anyone else, but for myself this is nothing short of groundbreaking. See, since childhood, I have been an extraordinarily deliberate individual; everything I found myself doing had a purpose. I was a concrete thinker, a pragmatist, and someone who preferred the diminition (if not complete eradication) of risk. Therefore, I was an amateur strategist before I even understood what strategy was.

I hated uncertainty; to me, there was always a way of knowing, if I couldn’t reason rationally then I would employ the superrationality of Christian spirituality. Therefore, I could always know or at least intuit the answers to any conceivable question.

As I progressed through college, faced with a myriad of obstacles and victories, I continued to observe my surroundings, the impetuses sustaining them, and subsequently my responses to all of their stimuli. I found myself contemplating people, emotions, love, God, science, and academia, trying to make sense of this hodgepodge of “things” that seemed to be so normal to everyone else. In neurology, RAS or Reticular Activation System, the brain begins to ignore a stimulus that is repeatedly presented, a phenomena known as habituation. For instance, even though you are still sitting on a chair or resting your shoulder against a wall while you read this, you are not consciously aware of it (well, at least until I just told you). The mind is an overwhelmingly complex mechanism. In the same way it can drown out the chair, many people cease thinking about regular occurrences such as love, emotions, or people…

We simply adjust or adapt to them.

I couldn’t do that.

Instead, I began connecting the dots from this situation and that, reading wholly into comments made by a certain kind of thinker and those contrasting with another. I constructed many mental scatter plots and attempted to fashion as many regression lines to help understand propensities and tendencies. I took my own failures and juxtaposed them against my successes to create cogent thought lines about what works and does not work.

What began to emerge were these highly subjective patterns that somewhat resembled one another but never fully repeated. The truly ponderous part was that most people did not see things that way. We understand that universality is mostly impossible, yet we are still trying to create these standardized methods of thinking and teach each other “the right way to do things”. We try to create these agreements (I talk about linearities later) so that we can all consistently trade information and relate to one another; the more effective the process, the more it “seems” to be the “right” way to do something…

Hell, I’ve been trying to teach people the “right” way to do things since I can remember.

But why are there no “rights” and “wrongs” outside of traditional morals and ethics (which are in and of themselves debatable)?

For the last 2 years I have considered this question in its every emanation. I put myself in others’ shoes and looked back on my own thoughts and actions, created decisional matrices, and continually underwent intense introspection; all the while, I had a piercing sensation that I wasn’t progressing any closer to my quarry.

Thats when it hit me, I couldn’t take my processes and expect identical results in someone else because life would not give them identical circumstances. Their life tracks were outrageously divergent from mine, they had not experienced the same things as me, even though we may be virtually identical to one another genetically, we are wildly divergent metaphysically.

These deviations from one another in the realm of choice, mixed in with the universal constant that is chance, create a potent brew of uncertainty, one of the major progenitors of the human race.

All the dot-connecting in the world could not change that fact.

So what then? Do we simply throw up our hands, say, “well life is not promised”, and “YOLO” our way through? Do we concede that life offers little to no constants and throw ourselves to fatalism? Perhaps a lesser mind find those to be a fitting practices and to which I will say “to each his own”. However, my understanding of the mind is that we are poignant co-creators in our life track, our living narrative, therefore, I can continually influence this world to help bring things into fruition.

I speak a lot about “linearities” which are agreements between people. The more people are involved in a linearity, a paradoxical trend arises: the agreement becomes stronger in the center, weaker towards the fringes and it becomes controversial as more and more are pushed towards the fringe. Just look at religion: Christianity as a theocracy flourished from the 4th century until the Enlightenment period in Europe, however, the more influential it grew, the more unstable it became because God, an intensely individuated understanding, cannot fathomably be universally agreed upon. As people began experiencing The Lord in various manners and through various worship methods, agreements were no longer tenable. Legislation is the same way: more and more people will agree that murder is wrong, however, given enough time and enough people, a crime of passion or a slaying in self-defense will arise, causing schisms along the formerly stark lines of morality and ethics.

When talking about “creating” one’s life track and forging their own robust existence, concrete thinkers will instantly go back to large linear agreements to challenge such a belief. You are a part of society, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, when have you ever seen God come down and do ______________. These large social agreements carry what I call “social inertia” and their influence over a populace is significant; there is no easy way of breaking them down.

However, social anythings are plastic, they are capable of being bent or broken, depending on the ingenuity of the thinker. As the thinker accretes more and more knowledge on the nature of being, he or she becomes adept at bursting through these so-called rules of a community. However, chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity will still be there, rearing their ugly heads.

You must stop seeing life as three-dimensional. That is an illusion so that your physical sensory organs can make sense of the world around it. Instead, see life as multivariate with dimensions occupying the same space. That is the best way for me to explain uncertainty and ambiguous concepts, it is why nothing in life can truly be known or understood because while you may be burrowing deep into one facet of understanding, there are infinite others that are just a valid exerting force on the world around you.

The perennial strategist understand this, he or she then doesn’t concern themselves with trying to forge some consistent, “universal” understanding of life, but opens themselves up to many different ways of viewing their life track and the life tracks of others. Chance is the one thing that they can’t control, so they prepare themselves for as many potentialities and eventualities as possible, deftly dealing with them in the moment. There are no books, no theorems, no “ways of thinking” that enmesh a true strategist, he or she is as fluid as the wind, employing whatever and whenever they can at any moment to pull them closer to their perceived goal.

A perfect strategist has no goal, has no destination, has no purpose, for those are all dangerously concrete; they do not mire themselves with such frivolities. No, the superior strategist has nothing more than The Breath and The Notion which precipitate The Thought. The Breath is his willingness to engage and The Notion is the willingness to progress. The Thought then arises as instantaneous will.

They will themselves into being, they harmonically move with their environment, for as co-creators they trust that the environment reflects their deepest needs.

Thus, fate nor choice, destiny nor decision, truly concern the strategist, for the two are one and the same.

In a world of uncertainty, a place of extant ambiguity which nothing can be truly known, the strategist focuses wholly on the moment before the present, poised and ready, ever vigilant for the next move.

bryce

Supplication

Ineffable wisdom,
The panacea of my deepest anxieties,
This life offers the most banal of sobrieties,
When I only seek the intoxication of pervasive truth.
Mankind is but a microcosm,
As highly variable as the universe itself,
Glorious precision,
Insidious imprecision,
We are balanced by logic.
Must I follow a lifestyle yogic,
In order to unlock the substantive secrets,
Or am I doomed to this fleshly sepulcher and tepid
4 dimensional space who race
Is indeed rat-like, we skitter like vermin without a cause.
The information we trade is fiat currency,
It has no intrinsic value, no real worth,
The contrivances of a hubristic creature
Who separated from divinity.
I have an affinity for mordacity when I am offered life’s dregs,
But in my insanity I see that life indeed has legs,
That flee from the conscious mind bound by illusion,
And drive men like me into polemical seclusion,
So pardon my intrusion dearest Light,
For seeming existentially rapacious,
You have new gracious to this point,
So I pray these suppositions are not audacious,
But my patience for this latent world of persisting laymen,
Grows thin.
A world of futility, a world of great sin.

Conversations On The Nature Of Being

Everything between the bounds of absolution is gray.

As a philosopher, I see philosophy everywhere. I’m that person in the middle of a party that asks a highly esoteric question just to feed my addiction with needing to know, even if that means confounding the mind of an inebriated 25 year old.

But what am I trying to know? Within this question lies the very constituents of existence; it is this question that hides and subsequently reveals the nature of all things. It is in the question that the right answers can be extricated. Lately I have been meditating heavily on asking the right questions because we live in a world full of answers, yet few of them are bringing about much illumination.

Absolutes are binary systems, one can either have this or they can have that. One is either alive or they are dead; one is either here or they are there and so forth. But when pondering the nature of existence, one inevitable sees that we do not live in a world that is solely absolute, but instead we are characters who have the right to interpretation. Interpretation is a subsequent step after choice and it is the essence of humanity. Yes, we have the right to choose, but we additionally have the gift to choose how to even make the choice. A staggering concept indeed.

Thus, conversations over the generations have questioned, to varying degrees, the levels of absolution and interpretation that truly exists. For instance, are we fated or are we in control of our lives? Let me put this inquiry to rest. They are both equally true, equally forceful, and equally important. Math is a derivation of the Divine’s ability to create; math is in and of itself a creation. Although it is facile to believe that math can explain the origins and eventualities of the universe, it fundamentally puts God in the box of our own ignorance. God, the Divine, is an unfathomable concept and as such He is able to exert several forces on existence simultaneous, even those that are logically irreconcilable. Fate and choice are two sides of the same coin because although He knows, He still allows us to be co-creators in our narrative, we still have varying degrees of freedom and we can influence the course of our lives.

Life itself, as a derivation of God, is supremely enigmatic and it does not need to make logical sense in order to make existential sense. This is the cardinal sin of the man learned in human affairs. We must engage in science, we must find higher orders of mathematics, we must absolutely engage in all manners of academic inquiry, but we mustn’t delude ourselves into believing we are the pinnacle of existence. We have knowledge, but the realms beyond are full of illumination..

Knowledge is created. Illumination has been here since the beginning. Knowledge can be changed by man. Illumination cannot be changed nor uprooted.

Illumination is the realization that things exist in planes we have not reached, knowledge is the belief that we have reached zenith.

Experience does not necessitate reality. Knowledge will delude a man into believing he has found the Truth, when he has only found a clue, a marker which is pointing him in a particular way.

Dealing with life then requires a certain finger-feel. Instead of relegating one’s self to the banalities of profane, exoteric thought, one must see life as a series of combinations and permutations, all exerting some force over the observable realms. Absolute boundaries may exist for man, but we will never reach them because within those absolutes in an infinite amount of space. This is the truth of the lemniscate.

Reality is a projection of sorts, a virtual realm, its effects are clearly felt and easily understood, but we have the power to alter it. We must alter it, that is the truth of evolution.

Understand that you are a sum of all your experiences and if you think only from your experiences you are drastically limited, for your experiences are few in the grand scheme of things. In order to understand life, don’t just seek out analogous bits of information, but instead work to wrap your mind around differing or even adversarial stances. This is the truth of objectivity.

You are a nonlinear being, yet in order for us to interact with one another, we must create consistent linear constructs. Constructs are the linear creations of nonlinear created beings and as such are fundamentally flawed. One must adopt a clear sense of the combinations and permutations in order to navigate these treacherous waters. If one begins to see the constructs (politics, religion, judicial system, language) as absolute reality, they have already imprisoned themselves. This is the truth of culture.

Divinely speaking, all things are possible through The Lord. Humanistically speaking, all things are possible through aggregate agreement. If you can get enough people to agree with something, social inertia is created and that concept will begin to take form. If an individual believes in something strong enough, inertia is also created and has the potential to exert a force and the reality of others and take form. This is the truth of faith.

Two people who find themselves abreast in this life and are willing to be armor bearers for each other are true friends. When that connection binds one heart to another, they are kin. When that connection reaches a point where no other alive can compare and even temporary separation brings despair, they are lovers. When that connection connects mind, body, and spirit under the aegis of the Almighty, they are mates. This is the truth of love.

To bring in any additional prerequisites to these “truths” is dangerous, for those are attempts at linearity. There are infinite ways to apply these truths to fit one’s life, hence our ability to choose and interpret. Nonlinearity is the wellspring of creativity and creativity is a gift from God; linearity is the wellspring of organization, yet organizations are meant to fulfill certain functions then pass away. Do no forsake your creativity for organization; do not forsake your creativity for perversion either.

bryce

Satisfaction Realized: Lover’s Pursuit

Should all people aspire to get married? Is marriage the ultimate expression of love? How does one define being in love? We are all after the same things in life, to feel loved, accepted and be important in someone’s life, that is the impetus behind romantic encounters. But what does LOVE really look like?

Human nature is the essence and spirit that is persistent in all of us; it is unchanging, unyielding, and the truest expression of humanity in our knowable universe. Human condition, our day to day actions, reactions and responses, constitute a different part of our being, it is the projection of life that we experience on a day to day basis and it is fundamentally UNreal and prone to interpretation. Thus, human condition facilitates the differences between people; our nature is shared ergo identical, however, the way that nature is expressed, the condition, varies from person to person, interpretation to interpretation. This explains why we all essentially want the same things, yet, how we choose to realize it differs.

Love is an action not a feeling.

Love is the amalgam of two infinite beings bound by intractable passion.

Love is the sensation of returning home to the arms of your best friend, lover, and confidant every night.

Love is never-ending agreement to uphold, protect, and nurture the mind, body, and spirit of those involved.

Human nature aspires to have this type of a connection. We all do. The problem is, our nature is generally incommensurable to our condition. As aforementioned, our natures are identical and constant, however, our conditions are interpretive and dynamic. Our conditions are affected by our experiences; we are a product of developmental, experiential, and a slew of other -al’s which create the diversity within populations. Therefore, we choose to express our nature’s desires differently. Although we all wish to find love that persists beyond all known and unknown dimensions, that does not automatically assume we will all choose to be married.

This phenomenon exists because of an anomaly in our social workings. Individually, we are nonlinear beings, with nonlinearity meaning there are no consistent outcomes even if the factors were identical. (For example, you have two children that grow up in the same house, yet have radically different feelings about the parents. Although the factors or variables were essentially the same, the outcomes were different.) However, as people come together we must communicate effectively and productively, therefore we must aggressively counteract our preponderant nonlinearity. No society can be had if no consistency is created, the religion, judicial systems, educational systems, politics, language etc MUST be created for coherence. We attempt to create linearity by standardizing our nonlinear expressions, out of which we derive reality, a series of best guesses, and normalcy, the average of those best guesses within a population.

Marriage is nothing more than an attempt at linearity. It is a noble, albeit desperate, attempt at reconciling our nonlinear conditions with our nebulous nature. Marriage does not constitute love.

Most marriages, especially in America, are not built or founded on love, instead they are erected on insecurity, convenience, or some other emanation which eventually mimics love. Two people must understand the principles of trust, passion, agreement, and consummate dedication before they can even begin to understand the sensation that is love. Moreover, our conditions send out false flags and signals out of ignorance, it desperately wants to achieve singularity with its nature, yet it has been bombarded with so much information over the years that it will do anything — lie, fabricate, or settle, to achieve that.

Satisfaction and fulfillment are words I tend to use instead of ‘happiness’. Happiness is an anemic term. It is flimsy. It is tepid. Satisfaction and fulfillment are levels of enlightenment that come with deep meditation and understanding the world around you. Love is a part of fulfillment as it satisfies a basic drive within our nature. From love, you connect to your partner, you drink their essence, you occupy the deepest parts of their being.

Love is intrinsically anti-egoic. It is the relinquishing of self so that understanding can permeate one’s being. You diminish yourself and uplift your partner. You let go of arrogance and haughtiness to become one with him or her.

However, our conditions have degenerated because the see the pain and destruction that such a connection can reap. Most of us are highly defensive, suspicious, and even adversarial when it comes to matters of our heart. We instead opt for less noble releases of emotion, pseudo-intimacy, through sex, dating, or other emanations. The world spends more time playing games around the concept of love than fully engaging it…

But this is how things are, that in effect captures perfectly the reality around our nonlinearity.

My partner, soulmate, illumined paramour — whatever I want to call her, occupies a space in me and I perhaps haven’t even met her; her identity has yet to be revealed to me. Yet, I know that our connection will run deeper than the mightiest trench because of what has been revealed to me about satisfaction and love. My best friend and I have a running joke that we are going to date our wives well into our marriage. Sing to them, write them poetry, make her a monarch amongst maidens simply because of our gratefulness to her existence.

She embodies deep knowledge, she is light expressed, fulfillment engaged.

That, my friends, is one of the facets of satisfaction’s realization.

bryce

“Post Racial” America

I really hate discussing ‘race’. To me is a vapid ideology which promotes superiority complexes and divisiveness and is ultimately unimportant in the greater scheme of things.

Today, I spent my day emailing a notable scholar, author, and professor of behavioral economics at Duke about how selective dishonesty frames our view of metaphysics. I then took some time to discuss my sister’s upcoming, unwanted, yet necessary move out of Los Angeles. I researched notorious drug cartels and southwestern street gangs and responded to another email about working with my alma mater.

My point: I have no real interest in discussing the largely illusory world that is race or race relations. I have much better things to ponder.

But nevertheless it must be touched on time and time again.

Post Racial America

To say that America is a ‘post-racial’ society is a farce on several levels. I don’t even know where to begin, but I’ll start with our president. We commended America for being forward thinking and progressive by reluctantly voting in our incumbent POTUS, a black man, into office twice. Yet, President Obama is half black. This sounds an awful lot like turn of the century America where ‘mud-blood’ effectively nullified any other racial heritage one might have. Words like octoroon and quadroon were disseminated so that you knew a person was an eighth or quarter black respectively.

Obama is a mixed race man, yet we all hyper-focus on his black heritage.

America can not claim post-race for the foreseeable future for a myriad of reasons. The cardinal in my eyes is that most Americans fail to understand what exactly race is. Moreover, the globe at large suffers from the same ignorance.

Race is a mental construct, no more, no less. However, as discussed ad nauseum on this blog, the mind creates reality.

Humans are social creatures. Our evolution, however, precluded all of us from interacting early on. We were confined to our little pockets in the earth and created our myths, pantheons, and understanding of the earth through myopic eyes. We evolved and adapted to climate changes, fairer skin and straighter hair further from the equator, and darker skin with coarser hair closer to.

We deluded ourselves believing that one shade of humanity is different than the next. The insidious part? Most of us do it on unconscious levels. We are inadvertently racist, outwardly proclaiming that we are color blind, yet subconsciously perpetuating all manners of invidious propensities.

As one looks at the terrible racism exhibited against ethnic groups over the last few centuries, slavery, antisemitism, Japanese internment camps, Anglo persecution of Italians and Irish, its pretty obvious why we are not a post racial nation.

Human nature’s foundations are very simple. We like power because power allows one to set the status quo. The status quo is the average of best guesses across the population. We like to be around people who are similar to us, it assuages social xenophobia and stokes our natural narcissism. We like identifying with smaller groups because it makes us feel unique. We tend to devalue groups that fall outside of ours.

When a certain small group consolidates power, as whites did in this country, the errors of fathers will be felt for many, many generations to come. The oppressed peoples will act in direct opposition, they will be at enmity against their perceived violators.

The minority groups, used to surviving, campaigning, and taking care of themselves will continue to promulgate their rights, they will be permitted to do so at the cost of being called a hypocrite by many. Over time, lines will be blurred, the privilege of the majority group will seemingly diminish and they will inevitably cry foul. Then you will have two equally petulant opinions, the oppressed and the children of the oppressors, who hold incommensurable views on the position of the other.

Factor in time. The present will continually blind and distort perception, the still-privileged-but-not-as-blatantly-obvious group will point to evidence of the tides shifting against them, the oppressed will continually point out the slights against them. The still-privileged want things both ways because they have no clue what systematic oppression feels like, therefore, their perception of fairness is fundamentally different. What the oppressed see as necessary concessions, the still-privileged see as unfair handouts and reverse oppression. The oppressed want things both ways because they have no clue how to transition out of oppression and see the necessary concessions as implementations to bridge the social gaps.

This cycle will continue until that particular society is purged of all bigotry and pervasive equality outweighs the passive aggression racism endemic to countries like ours.

America is deep in this cycle. We are still a nation that was built upon hypocrisy and selective justice. That selectivity created social phantasms, concepts and ideas that are not locked down and can be argued either way. We must continue to grow and purge this reality. But it will take time.

There is such thing as white privilege. There is such thing as reverse racism. Both are readily apparent, especially in more polarized parts of the nation. There is a clear causal link between the two of them and the existence of one permits the existence of the other. They form an unholy yin-yang, a balance and counterbalance of ignorance. As opposed to sitting back and pointing fingers at the next group and trying to isolate ourselves within our homogenous tribe, I think it is best for us to continue to open dialogue and continue to take our owns lives into our hands. Ghettos, slums, and ‘hoods’ were once a product of white imposed, institutional racism, but we as blacks have long since taken up the leadership roles in ensuring we are seen as buffoons and perennially a lagging class.

It is time for both groups of people to understand the role they play and take responsibility for the state of our nation. It is the responsibility of every individual on this earth to promote equality across the board. It is the responsibility of every person on this earth to see his life as a whole lot more than the color of his or her skin. It is the responsibility of everyone on this earth to look for the facts and the real about the promoted “truths” of this world. It is everyone’s responsibility to evolve.

But since we have not yet, America is as far from a post-racial society as it has ever been.