I have no lust for redemption

I have no lust for redemption

What other things no longer matter to a person like me? Forgiveness, comfort, knowledge, I don’t anticipate the requirement for these either, now that I am here next to you. That separates us, you are concerned for your future, you are concerned about your past, and in that, you are quite discomfited in the mean time. That is the present of course, the mean time between the regretted past and the ominous future, for you, not me, I should state yet again. Death will bring us together again, a good death I hope you will have. A good death is anything that leaves your brain intact and not sedated by a chemical or injured beyond a point. A good death is when you are allowed to fall within your own skull away from pain and all into a place where you are only your identity, and time ends. You are. In ‘You are’ there won’t be the striving or remorse, time not passing is infinite time and you are infinite with it. Pity, though, that it will take your death to bring you here to me when I am right here beside you already. All you have to do is stop for a second, and you will be here too.
Stopping for a second is an act that defies all human experience. It is an act of conscious willpower that is impossible to not be able to accomplish and yet almost no one will attempt such a thing in their lives. Get to where you are going, come back from where you have been, stop and then you’ve overstayed at the risk of not starting again. Are you worried that you will fall beside the track and then breathe your last breath in the desert named “boredom”? So you intend on moving through life, never stopping along the way? Stop for a thought, give up a care, look around at your hands from your eyes, never mind ‘how’, it is that you are there. Where? Beside me.
The two of us hurtle through near-space at 6556 miles per second; we have traveled since we were born. Each care should fly instantly away as we pass it instead you drag it and it pulls at you, the bonded points of your soul stretched and torn, it is no wonder you want redemption, it is no wonder that you want to be free. You should have been free born, not taught easily how to defeat such a thing, your malevolent teachers all about you at nativity, I guess you stood no chance, but now you are next to me. A care is coming up there in a minute and a half from us, 590,000 miles and closing. Will you catch it or let it pass, if it hits us, will it adorn you forevermore?
Defeat the question of existence! Be it resolved for us today it is what you know it to be and nothing takes that away, not that you waste your life pondering a one big thing, it is the little things that smolder you to ash. I only ask one thing of you, in reading this you have already given up something else that you had to do, so what is one more imposition on an already imposed you?
Every value that is not kind, every act that is not love, every striving that is not for a resolve, is wickedness that came from inside the heart of a human. The bad things are often most awful in that they are mundane, inane, and once having flowed into you as an infant, flow out of you for years and years, yet not ever leaving you. You are a compilation of that which is not you, you are things to do and things not to do but you have obliterated you, until you die. Your gift will be the discovery of your self and a comforting reunion seeming to last an eternity. You will not be disappointed in you, because there is nothing you will be expecting from you, so let me ask you to do a thing that you can try and do, and then you can try again, one day you will get it right at least in the very end.
So do this thing that you will do eventually, but do this now and again, for it is the one true thing. You are for a fact flying 6,000 miles every second in a direction that is unknown to us, the second that you become nothing more than whom you are, you will be hundreds and then thousands of miles away from the things that concerned you. So do this, put aside all the slogans and agendas, the expectations, the “what” you do, and become just you. And You Are. Only Are. I just am. This second, now this next one, you’ve done it twice already. That is 12,000 miles of escaping into the unknown, just you and you alone. When you just are, there is nothing left that must be done, you can chose to do nothing and you’re still well begun. If you don’t understand why this is the most important thing there is now, you will in the end. You will understand without remembering, or regretting, or being excited about implementing a new agenda for you, because you will just be what you are. Every second is yet another chance.
You and me, we are, and we are free.

What we actually are

How can we so completely miss the reality of our existence? It is almost as if we are shells, as if our consciousness was this layer that we occupy between the animal- nay, a temporal organic iteration of physical information, and the un-alive and eternal universe. We are a code sequence of DNA. It preceded us in our parents. It succeeds us in our children. The consciousness, the only part that we are aware of and experience, the shell, dies.

Our obligation….. Our debt to…. Please finish this in a way that relates to the temporary nature of the condition of life. The Past…it is dead. The Future…it does not exist. And yet we have received the gift of existence embedded in a thousand layers of conditionality. We can do what we want with the gift of our lives, within the constraints of our thousand layers. The layers of conditionality are what we use and adopt to conduct our very brief lives by. We may choose to accept and abide by some, and thus perpetuate them, or we may disregard them. You value the place you live by default, and you therefore perpetuate others to live there also. The way you live influences the world just as the world influences the way you live.

So much of our environment is a constraint, a guide, a predetermined path of progress, and we elaborate less and less as we age. Our choice is through action and our actions are many avoided choices. All change in the universe at large happens at that shell layer. Everything else has been, is, and will be according to the immutable laws of physics. The power we possess is unprecedented and we are not prepared to wield the power of choice that is a skill to be learned.

The course of human history has been like a slow explosion. Chaotic, destructive, and transformative it continues to unfold through us. Within this chaos are threads and strands of coherence. Following the choice avoidance path is one method of perpetuating those threads of cohesion, it works. It works until the thread ends due to one of those immutable laws, the most treacherous of which is “adapt or die”. This is what sets humanity apart from the other known greasy liquid based beings in the universe: Adaptation.

Adaptation requires consideration, contemplation, experimentation, empirical examination of action, and then doing it over again and again. It is the adaptation loop or method. The adaptation behavior requires that the actors set values that are in conformance with reality, and then constantly reassess the assumptions and readjust the action. Adaptation requires the ability to discern trends and patterns. This is the basis of the predictive component, the hypothesis formation. This pattern recognition allows opportunities to be exploited by positioning action in anticipation of an event before the event occurs. Discernment is the evaluation of reality in a way that is functional to the objective. This is not the perception of Objective reality although observation and discernment would ideally be as Objective as possible. (Objective perception is not conscious perception)

What does this have to do with you here and now? You cannot adapt to your environment, or change your environment in a directed way, without a clear perception of the world that you inhabit and your position in it. The way that you view the world is based on your values; your values are intrinsic to your ability to observe reality in an objective way. People discuss emotional and psychological values as if they only exist within you and were given to you by a tradition or human knowledge. All real functional values are transcendent of the human condition. Functional values are objective in nature. Honesty, integrity, and respect, are functions of the physical world expressed through us. Proactiveness is what separates humanity from that physical world; it is the other three values in action.

Honesty
Honesty is simply objectivity in human form. Honesty is the basis of everything. It would seem bizarre to even contemplate a star, a leaf, a spider, or even a squirrel as being dishonest. Monkeys have fairness as an innate social aspect of being a monkey. People have brain regions related to detecting and dealing with dishonesty in other people. The lack of honesty can be a result of mental defect or social conditioning. Dishonest people are a threat to any group that they are a part of. Honesty is where we start to build cohesion and functioning, directed social relationships.

Integrity
Integrity is the preservation of honesty within a hostile environment. Integrity in the physical world is the preservation of a functioning system. It doesn’t take a very large degradation of an atom to change its fundamental nature. In a human context, integrity in the individual is what preserves the social group. Integrity is honesty in applied action.

Respect
Respect for other people, the goals of a group, and one’s own self is essential to maintaining the emotional fabric of that group or individual. Respect is valuing the worth of yourself and others. Respect is a commitment to being honest on an emotional and social level. Respect is allowing yourself and others to be imperfect without penalty in the event that an honest mistake has been made. Respect is acknowledging accomplishment in yourself and others. Respect is the builder of a team and social movement. Respect is characterized by the positive affect of all persons involved. Respect is another aspect of honesty. This is why you respect your enemies, they are not to be dishonestly discounted, and that will make you vulnerable in your contempt. Respect is honesty between individuals.

Proactiveness
To be proactive is to be honest to the human condition that separates us from the rest of the dead universe and even reactive animals of our planet. We are different. Knowledge that is available to us comes with the responsibility that we must act upon it to the best of our ability. Proactive is the essential aspect of civilization, it is action that meets a need before it happens. Proactive behavior may define humanity, but it is not inherent in the individual. We almost all have the capacity to develop proactive skills, but only a very few people actually do this for themselves. Most of our lives are reactive; we prefer to not have to invent new behavior if we can survive on what we are already doing. While this is efficient in some ways, it may ultimately betray you over a lifetime. Motivation is a proven skill that resides in a specific area of the brain and must be developed. Think of proactive behavior as building a bridge over a canyon instead of climbing down the cliff swimming the river and scaling the other side. You may have a climbing route given to you by your ancestors, but that doesn’t make it right. Proactive is being true to what makes people transcend the rest of the dead universe and animal kingdom.

I am sitting on a grave and writing to you

I am sitting on a grave and writing to you in the future. The grave of my Great Grandfather is a depression on a hill. The cemetery is old enough for white America, but really only a second of history away. I am writing to you because I will soon enough be in a grave a few feet away myself. Already I can feel my time passing and there is, was so much to do.

I have been archiving pictures of the family. They are pictures that cover almost one hundred years. The images are much more powerful to me than other evidence of their lives. The work they have done is here, the tools are still here, I am keeping them and you may also if you find relevance in your past. But the pictures are a glimpse of what they looked like when they were alive. It is all we have that shows us the conditions and manner of their lives. I look at the pictures and I wonder what are you thinking? The children are captured as they grow at stages and they get older and then old and no more.

To say no more is an understatement, if I were to have a fire they would be gone save for their living legacy, a precarious tribute at best. The family struggled through many paths to unite here and become my generation. Some of them founded America, some of them jumped ship and some of them virtually slithered their way here. History’s ultimate punishment is exclusion, history’s only reward is notation. My interest is for the living as the dead have no stake in the outcome. I want to make it easier for my great grandchildren to divine their origins than it has been for me.

I envision a picture of my current family that is accompanied by their own story. I want the future to have more than a crumbling picture. I don’t condemn the people in the photos for their sparse legacy, they had to work at living. One picture shows two boys who may be twelve years old, and they are loggers. Not play dress up loggers, but small agile slaves who where expendable and expected to “pull their weight” in iron around trees that dwarfed full grown men

The original inhabitants of this area did not survive. I am searching for their records also. So far I have a few paragraphs of descriptions. They were fierce, their neighbors powerful slave traders, they were few in number, and spoke a unique language for this area. They died out in 1829-31 of malaria, up to 90% of them. And the rest were removed by the military before the first white settlers arrived. There have been no descendents laying claim to this valley in any way.

My other Great Grandfather’s fishing tackle box held a stone scraper. In one hundred years this valley went from the Stone Age, to the Industrial Age with not a single descendent of the original inhabitants. Nowhere in America was the replacement of the native people as efficient, effortless and complete.

I am editorializing what should be an objective account of facts, so be it bub. The great immigration stopped here for many travelers. I can tell you why, it is a great place to live. There is some work involved, but modern life has eliminated most of that really. We are left with an agreeable climate and a beautiful forest. That’s all I need.

The graveyard is a place that I can go and take the dog Gracie. We don’t bother anybody there.

In the begining

A different generation.

This is where I plan on spending more time. The dog and I go up to here to hang out read, write and take walks through the forest.