Kaspi-n-see

I often have some great things to write about while I’m driving… then I forget them.

Oh! So I’m reading through this philosophy app I have and it’s talking about medieval philosophers and how the philosophy of that period is biblically based. I was reading Kaspi who said:

For we are our intellect in actu, we bring God into our minds, for the intellect is God and God is the intellect… For that reason Moses was called “a man of God,” because God was in his mind always… I mean to say, “divine power,” and there is no difference if one says “God” or “God’s power,” since that same power is the intellect and God is the intellect (Maskiyot Kesef, p. 98).

I like this. The commentator says he was never a major player but he was a good example of his era.
The point is (what is the point? It’s taking you long enough) that it seems to me that most philosophical ideas, scientific/psychological theory, theological concept can be resolved within themselves (Einstein’s theories did not unify science, but did a fair job of capping physics leading to quantum physics) and each other if we’re willing to observe objectively, which of course is the ideal of science but too commonly forgotten once a theory is accepted (I’m thinking of neuro- plasticity).
Reading Kaspi reminded me that if the intellects that be, if you will, could alter their own perspective, there would be debate as much as connecting the dots to see how everything is connected.
That is all

Damn commies… Standing in the way of our truly free society

Wow. I have to say that I am seriously disenchanted with our government. Ok, so first things first. NDAA. National Defense Authorization Act. There are problems here. Pres. Obama said

I got distracted from this one. Still strikes me as odd. I haven’t forgotten nor do I plan to. I often wonder of the reality of situations like these.

I think people fear the concept of socialism because they associate it with a greed driven power base. And why wouldn’t they? It certainly seemed to be just that in practice. I think it’s obvious that a government actually providing for its people enough to be efficiently productive could only possibly create wealth of ideas and progress which is evidently the true commodity.

I’d like to speak for everyone when I say that we deserve electricity, access to the internet, transportation and possibly even (dare I?) food and shelter if we’re expected to be productive. Too much time is spent in worry. That’s particularly troubling to me when it’s over meeting basic needs. But wouldn’t people take advantage of that system? Sure. Maybe. Who cares if productivity is up over all. I don’t know about you but no one I know would be content to do nothing. I know I would certainly pursue my favorite things with more gusto if I wasn’t worried about getting paid.

Just sayin’.

Nothing too complicated

I have to be honest.  I don’t understand ANY criticism of President Barack.  Ok.  That’s not quite true.  I understand where some of them are coming from.  The bank bailouts… or oil for that matter, for instance, I can see why people may be perturbed that some of the slimiest institutions that took advantage of millions of people for decades got a significant amount of money when people are struggling… I mean… ok… I get it.  But in this case, I can also see the other side on that one.  But I have a problem with people who legitimately think he’s not doing… just a fantastic job.

The truth is that he ran on the slogan that YES WE CAN and we can… together.  Anyone who says that he’s not following through on what he wanted to do is obviously ignorant of the serious opposition to coöperation those initiatives face… or they’re too closed minded to admit the truth… which is, of course, that he’s working on it… at least they get to pick.  I feel like some people are baffled by the 28% thing.  Here’s a hint.  It’s called a compromise.  It’s a solution that makes sense in the situation although it may not be the “perfect” (because such a thing does not exist) solution in some opinions. I think it’s a great idea.  It gives the greedy jerks a tax decrease while at the same time closing some of the more… lets say… disrespectful loopholes.  Brilliant.

That’s not to say that I’m completely convinced.  The NDAA is not forgotten… which is not to say it will not be and then used at the discretion of any given administration… which is frightening.  And regardless of the apparent threats and realities, it strikes me hard that it is one of the most distinct moves away from what we claim to be our national ideals.  That one supports my initial thought that the only way Obama wouldn’t be the exact thing we needed would be if he turned out to be the actual anti-crist.

Ya know.  Most of the time I look around and I’m confounded over the conflicts I see in front of me… in person, on the news… it just doesn’t make sense to me that the people involved are resolute to NOT find commonality.  From my perspective its *insert any number of conflicting parties here* determined to NOT make progress… determined to not make things better for themselves just because it would make things better for the other party(s[I know, parties is ies]).  Eh… or maybe its me.

 

TerminatingSalvation

So the problem of $$$ as a representation of personal matter and importance.  A one vote system is suppose to be each person (originally, of course, free white man, but we’re practically freedom hunters, really) has the same influence over the outcome of the common and common good which results in local and otherwise domestic governing AND foreign affairs and policies being an accurate representation of our collective will.  A system that ACTUALLY IS like that is easy to respect.  It is much harder to respect a system that only claims to be.  It may or may not be true that there is a populace of resentment toward people buying their way into better opportunities and especially exclusively benefiting laws.

The rest of the story is that it may very well be an accurate representation.  It may be, from one point of view, that capital represents the unique thoughts and efforts having certain value (possibly coming from a knowledge of how to multiply that thought and effort?) that literally earns the right to have more influence over an individual’s surroundings… whether that individual is a person, family, or corporate structure.  Which also makes it easy to see how one could be more concerned about oneself or family as opposed to the world and culture at large.  I see that point.  And I agree that that’s how it seems now and FURTHERMORE, I question if it’s not, at the very least, appropriate.  Still… doesn’t quite fit right.

I believe quite literally that, for all intents and purposes, we really can do whatever we imagine we’d like to.  We kill disease like its our job.  We pop out new technologies every other day.  Some of our focuses may be a little off, but AS A PEOPLE, we seem to me to be very capable.

John Connor’s team should have been working on a treaty virus.

I think its more recall than memory that it effects…

I think of duality… as a start.  Often it progresses to threes and fours.  But I think of duality often.  Particularly the masculine/feminine duality.  This leads me to m/f characteristics.  That’s not to say that any one characteristic applies to all men or women, but that one is a particularly common attitude.  Its like a balanced equation, right?  I mean, in theory, anyway.  Like, ok, what’s a masculine characteristic?  Ok, aggression… then passivity would be the other side.  It may be interesting to look at this from a historical perspective.  For instance:  men naturally have more upper body strength.  Evolutionarily, this is because women had to stay home while pregnant and men had to hunt for food for their unborn child and expecting mother.  The upper body strength aided, or was developed as a result of, hunting.  More testosterone.  More aggression.  This, in a cultural sense, could ONLY have the effect of forcing women into a more passive, submissive state.  Imagine; animalistic (cro-magnon) man hunting and getting more and more pumped up by the physical activity and the woman home (presumably in a cave) with not exercise.  The man comes home (to the cave) and is angry because he had to wrestle aligators or something for their dinner.  He is significantly more physically powerful than his mate and very grumpy.  He is aggressive.  She is passive.  Over the course of millinea, there’s bound to be some kind of long term effects.

Is there a point here somewhere?  Not necessarily.  But I think thinking is good.

Oh, but duality.  It seems to me that the point of living is somewhere along the lines of finding a healthy balance within one’s self.  Now I ask you, how can we find a healthy balance, if we don’t see the two (2) extremes that always exist?  If I can recognize the duality of aggressive/passive, then I can begin to explore that reality and land on a healthy balance in the middle that we will call assertive.

PS The title is from June and most of this is from now (being November), so I don’t know what one has to do with the other, either. ;D

Life/Time/Brains&More

Life. It kinda seems to me that everything is a waste of time. Is it too much of the Buddhist reading? Possibly, but I kinda had that feeling underneath for pretty much my whole life. Although there is what I call the déjà vu effect. This, in case we’re not aware, is when the brain, for whatever reason, repeats something that has happened in such a way that one believes it has happened before. It creates a false memory. The brain’s cool, man. I don’t know that I buy the whole thing, but it made sense when I read the tech specs.

Anyway… point is that nothing seemed to be very worth striving for since the ultimate result is always the same. But then one must consider the potential of the interim possesses. The potential to affect those around you. The potential to change things for the better.

I dunno. I’ve been considering death a lot lately. I don’t seem to be scared of dying, so that’s good. There are times I look forward to it if only for the respite… not that I’m suicidal by any stretch of the imagination. I feel blessed to have this short time to run around in a carbon based body and experience the sensations of corporeal form.

This is old. Somehow I managed to not hit publish… maybe I thought it was a bit morbid.

One of my famous lines of childhood was when my parents told me to brush my teeth (I was about three), and my reply was a defiant, “How long do I have to do this stuff?” But I feel like even then I had this sense of human finality. Its like living was always too much to ask.

But that interim process… so much can be done. So for me, its come down to life in the grand scheme is relatively pointless. Realization of that is like a first step. To quote Les Miserables: Our little lives don’t count at all. But then in understanding that, I feel as if we are freed to dedicate ourselves to a truly worthy/higher cause. If we’re trapped up in ourselves, we have a tendency to miss the fact that there is, actually, a much bigger picture in which governments, corporations, philanthropists and artists affect our lives today and the shape of our rights tomorrow.

I’m pretty sure that’s an important lesson to learn.

MissUnderstanding

Here’s what I don’t get.  Every time some scientist discovers something that was unthinkable before, they act like its a big friggin’ surprise.  Of course you’re going to discover things that break the laws that you’ve written yourself.  You’re defining one level and beginning an investigation of the next.  They found a particle that travels faster than the speed of light.  Now its all like, well, do we redefine the speed of light?… was Einstein’s theory of relativity incorrect (I’ll be honest, I don’t fully understand the relationship between the speed of light to the complete general and special theories of relativity, but I’m pretty sure there are plenty of physicists out there that don’t FULLY understand the nature of that relationship, but I DO understand that E=MC(2) means Energy = mass x the speed of light… just sayin’)?… and so forth.  Seems like a completely natural thing that as physics is defined and quantum physics if born (for example) that rules of one could be broken… or at least seemingly be broken using newly defined principles of the more developed aspects of that science. Especially considering the nature of science being specifically to debunk previous theories.

Just seems unsurprising to me.

Experimenting in Philli, City of the Apes

Mathematicians and scientists seem to believe that unifying theory will be discovered within the confines of mathematics. Although I can see how this might be a logical conclusion, it seems to me to be a bit short-sighted.
Math is logic at its most truthful, but does it express reality most honestly. Socrates introduced the concept that logic can be expressed verbally. Seems to me that a true theory of everything would have to, by its nature, take into account the rest of the truth that is it addition to mathematics. ;D
I state (and I have to wonder if anyone has considered this possibility) that the actual unifying theory will be a product of pure science, but not in the sense of your more technical science such as physics and math, but a combined understanding of those and the more subtle social sciences, namely psychology, theology, sociology, etc.
Science, it turns out, is more of a technique of questioning and disapproval and not confined to purity in the sense of numbers and other aspects of the universe that we take for granted we understand, as many believe.
The concept of science begs us to ask questions, see a consistently larger picture and continue to make concentrated efforts to disprove the things that we take for granted… don’t you think?

1st stab

This is my original introduction that I had renamed as “author’s notes.”  Its a bit pretentious, really, considering there’s no proper book to speak of. Eh… ;D

 

Just In Case You Care…or
Here’s My Soul (you can keep it)… or
Rules and Reasons… or
Alpha-Omega (respect)… or
Rules of Life (if you care)… or
Life’s Little Montage Book… or
A Bunch of Bullshit… or
A Guide to Life… or
Rules I’ve Learned (the hard way)
By
John-Paul Alfonso

Introducion:
Author’s Notes

I sat down one day and decided to write a book.  I’ve always read a lot, been something of a creative writer and I wanted to put everything together, but I had no idea what my theme should be.  I started flipping through my notebooks, looking at old songs, short stories and random, garbled thoughts.  Suddenly it occurred to me that I really didn’t know anything.  I had all these ideas and thoughts, but I had very little knowledge.  There were very few facts that I had at my disposal.  So I decided to write a novel.

I dove into my library of sporadic ideas and half sketched pictures.  I pulled out some images that would make good stories.  I wrote one, then another, but nothing that I felt could effectively fill an entire book. So then of course, the next logical step, a book of short stories.

That sounded good.  A book of short stories.  But on rereading some of my stories, though I liked them (which, fyi, is what I look for in my own writing as well as other’s) I didn’t feel like my points were coming through.  I felt like so many of them had some wisdom, something of value to be learned and lived, but if it didn’t come across, there was just no point.

Then I had a revelation (with a slight sarcastic undertone).  A conversation book with some short stories mixed in to illustrate or reiterate the point.  Conversation books were all over the place.  Everywhere I looked in Barnes and Noble there were books that were written just like the writer was sitting across from you in your living room.

That was just my style… casual, like one person to another.  But what really struck me was that I had never seen a book like that with stories as separate entities in the book.  Of course there were examples within chapters about how the author ran into an old friend in the supermarket and oh, isn’t that just the perfect illustration of that marvelous point I just made. It seemed to me that there was room in the genera for some real creativity.

The next thing I did was quite possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever had to undergo in my entire lifetime.  I got organized.  I sat down with my journals, sketchpads, song books, anything that had any of my thoughts in it at all.  I pulled out some of the stories I liked, some of the thoughts that were interesting or understated in the world in which we live.  I gathered them and categorized them and attempted to make them one cohesive unit…… Then I forgot about them.

I let them sit where they were for, oh, probably about a year.  Actually, to say I forgot about them is to mis-speak.  I knew they were there.  I just got distracted, as I very easily do.  So they sat in my journal in a rough outline form until one day in August.

There was nothing particularly special about this day, it just was what it was.  I came across the outline for the book and it seemed to me to be quite a good idea.  But this idea didn’t seem to be mine at all.  I wanted to find whoever wrote this outline, whoever wanted to write this book and encourage them.  I wanted to tell this person (who must have just been brilliant) that he should do this because maybe, just maybe somebody might find it helpful.  Then I realized that it was my outline for my book.

What a happy surprise this was.  Not only did I think that this was something worth doing, but it was something worth doing for which I was solely responsible.  This was a task , a challenge, a goal, something of which I already, in the beginning stages, felt particularly proud.  Not to mention, this was something that I could do, that I could enjoy, that could actually make me a couple of dollars.

I tell ya (and this is not the last tangent I will go on), it bothers me when people pretend that they are not doing something for the money.  If you’re an actor or a musician, yes, you love it, but you do it for money.  You do it so you can live on what you love, as opposed to loving one thing and living on something else, say accounting.  A lot of artists, it seems to me, have this attitude of, “I do it for love… it just happens to pay,”  when I feel they should really be saying, “I do it for money, so thank God I love it.”

But I digress.

At any rate, I saw this outline with fresh eyes, so to speak.  And when I looked at it, it was one whole thing.  This was one statement that I had made without even realizing it.  So accidentally on purpose, as my mom used to say, I had my theme.  And my theme seemed handy.

Rules for life.  Nobody is going to tell me about rules for my life.  No.  That’s true.  But it seems blatantly obvious to me that certain aspects of life are relatively consistent.  Sometimes if you push too hard, you really do crack when if you would have just relaxed a little, everything would have worked out.  Or maybe things would have worked out better if you just completely let go of something that just wasn’t within your power to control.  And maybe, just maybe there are ways to tell, in the moment, how best to react, how best to play the cards of life you are dealt.

*A few small notes.  First, I like clichés.  I use them constantly.  I really do think that most times they’ve stuck around because they said something succinctly.  I do not, however, take credit for any of them, and I do realize that they are (for lack of a better word) just plain corny.

*Secondly.  I have a tendency to go off on tangents and be just a bit sarcastic, in case you haven’t noticed already.  I hope that you are forgiving of those matters.  I can tell you, though, that any tangent will most likely take up an entire paragraph.  If you are just not interested,  it’s a pretty safe bet that you can skip that paragraph, go to the next and not have missed anything of any relevance.  That is not to say however that you did not miss something of some importance.

*Lastly.  I believe, very strongly, in God.  That is not to say that I am a devout Catholic, Jew, Protestant, Buddhist, Muslim, Wiccan, or Ascended Master.  What I very simply mean is that I believe in a creator who has the potential to be with and encourage me if I allow.  This comes through from time to time.  Sometimes on purpose, and sometimes not, but as far as the theories and speculations in this book, it is completely irrelevant.  Do I encourage you (or anyone, for that matter) to believe in God? Of course I do, but not because you’ll rot in hell if you don’t.  And not because God will answer all your prayers and make you rich and famous and completely happy.  The truth is he’ll probably answer very few of your prayer directly if at all.  I urge everyone to believe in God, but only because it’s fun for me.  It makes life more interesting.  This book isn’t so much how to fix your life, or how to figure out what you’ve done wrong so far.  This book is more to take what you’ve got and turn it into something that, if nothing else, will keep you occupied in a little more of a fun and creative way.  Maybe it’ll help you deal with circumstances that otherwise would have seemed overwhelming.  But the truth is, that if you really believe in God, you don’t have to read this book at all.