Models are as good as they are useful at scale. This one is a bit esoteric at times.
We are sunlight and we are midnight. We are spoken word and we are dreams, recycled into our food chain.
We are literally the sun. It powers plants, which feeds herbivores, which feeds carnivores and omnivores. We literally eat sunlight.
We are literally midnight, though this one requires a bit more explanation for some audiences who are not as well traveled beyond this world.
We observe the world of light. We interact with light-energy (C and E). It is so self apparent that we actually don't even prefix this energy with "light".
Those accustomed to this world are not aware of the other world, or rather worlds, that coexist. Science vaguely recognizes that something exists because of unexplained cosmic gravity, and has aptly called this dark matter and dark energy. This is the unseen world, at least to those of the light. This is the dream worlds.
Light energy is like electricity, concentrated and powerful. Think Big Bang and stars. What our eyes can tolerate is finitely refracted light energy bouncing off of dark matter.
Dark energy is like water or ink. This dark energy is soothing, but can also be powerful like crashing waves or deep ocean currents.
Light energy comes streaming in on sunlight wings, from Big Bangs one dimensional layer above to below (the reverse side is a black hole, and series make up family trees), or on smaller solar system stellar scales.
We are literally midnight. Earth is mostly water. Our bodies are mostly water. Each cell is mostly water. Every atom is mostly space. In fact, there are no things at all, only patterns and relationships. Things are merely oversimplified representations of patterns and/or relationships.
We are midnight. Our bodies are literally made of the Earth, every chemical molecule, or nearly so, can be found in the human body. You must constantly consume the Earth's minerals to survive. Human cells die and shed, replaced by new ones so much that it begs the question of the ship of Theseus.
Here's where it gets a bit more esoteric and conjectural.
Side note: I don't like the word spiritual, but I don't readily have a better one to mean "in realms of consciousness other than the observable light-energy material Earth plane". Therefore, for now, I am going to use that word and you'll just have to understand what I actually mean.
You are what you eat, literally. If I eat a steak, I eat all of the grass that that cow ate. Actually, I am only eating 10% of the bioaccumulated energy, but 100% of the bioaccumulated pesticides. It gets worse when there are many layers in the food chain.
The same is true spiritually (see definition above). You become like the people you hang out with, and they like you. But like planets of different gravities, some people are more influential and some are more easily influenced. And sometimes it just depends on the combination of who. In one-way communication, such as podcasts, blogs, vlogs, and radio and television programs, the listener can feel like they are in a relationship with the content providers. However, it is mostly the passive receiver who is influenced, and not the content provider, except perhaps through indirect feedback loops such as subscription and like trends, comments, and advertiser responses.
Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your character, and your character determines your destiny. - (Mis)attributed to lots of people
So what does any of this have to do with the price of tea in India?
The esoteric part is that, karmically, what you say literally works its way through your social network to "bite you in the back". Better hope its a love bite, or at least biting at terrible itches or something.
It means that, karmically, what you consume electronically works its way through your local solar system (many have more than one sun) and bioaccumulate up through the food chain. They become part of your soul voices, at least until they are replaced as part of the body's natural ship of Theseus process.
It means that, what food you eat--whether organic, local, fair trade, and free-range meat, or overly-processed, mass marketed, low nutrition, high fructose corn syrup "food" products--will be processed through every cell of your body, then excreted through you in an esoteric cosmic system.
It means that, karmically, how interconnected and interdependent you are to the web of life, and how you interact with that web--sing and dance in harmony or not--will resonate back with you. No one is exempt. We swim in the same cosmic pool, except those who refuse to be safe and fair to the other swimmers.
It's all one big ferris wheel. A very, very big ferris wheel.
Like all of mine, this is not a fully developed thought. This one especially will probably need major revisions and restructuring, not just lots of edits, but I wanted to put it out there now, to get it flowing.
I do not subscribe to dualism, such as Mind and Body or Spirit and Material. I believe the nature of reality is more intricately nuanced than such oversimplified concepts, and that dualism allows for the possibility of paradoxes and false dilemmas. Therefore, metaphysically speaking, I'm sort of in the range of agnostic-atheist-animist-pantheist. I'm of the Eastern mindset: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism.
But for simplicity's sake we use models to represent reality. Models are true only so far as they function to be useful. When the helicentric model could produce more useful predictions than the geocentric model, it became the prevailing model; that is, after the intellectual authorities were overthrown by the heretics they oppressed. Such has always been the way. We need different authorities that don't oppress, and a different system altogether that evolves better, dontchathink?
So let's use an oversimplified model that can be useful at one scale, even though we know it does not truly, accurately represent reality at most scales: the yin yang. You can call ot whatever you like or use any other similar model. The Judeo-Christians use Jehovah and Lucifer. However, in their Book everyone assumes Jehovah is good and Lucifer is evil, but if you simply judge them by their fruits you'll see the reverse is true.
Regardless, it doesn't matter if you use a chess board. The point is that black and white or any two contrasting poles are diametrically opposed in an eternal struggle.
I'm going to use yin and yang. But black and white thinking is inadequate. It will blind you if you believe that white is right and black is wrong, or the opposite, or that there is no other. So many people are stuck in that mode of thinking, and we see so much suffering as a result.
But for now, forget that truth for the purpose of using the model.
Yin has been ascribed qualities such as black, passive, and feminine. Yang has been ascribed qualities such as white, active, and masculine.
Our now-singular global culture, transnational corporate post-industrial capitalism, is out of balance. It has way too much Yang, and much of that Yang is toxic to boot. It must be cleansed to restore the system.
This toxic Yang is like an invasive species. It is invasive surgery not required. It is oppressive. It is police pacification and brutality.
It is the War on Drugs, Terrorism, Gangs, Crime, Poverty, Vice, etc.
It is colonialism. It is slavery and wage slavery. It is plastic surgery, designer clothes, advertising, shallowness.
Toxic Yang works against rather than with. It is a thoughtless machine. Build up, rather than striking down. Sometimes a doctor must stop the bleeding, but it is better to build a society where people freely choose to raise healthy individuals who don't need constant amputations. The world has truly gone mad!
Instead, it is generally better to build and invite what you want rather than constantly tear down what you do not want. Of course, healthy system management is more complex than that. As a problem solving exercise, imagine the doctor who must treat the gun shot wound victims, who are also dying of diabetes from lack of healthy food and diet choices, and the police keep shooting people outside your hospital because the citizens are revolting against unjust laws. Where do you even begin?! Everywhere.
What we need is preventative, holistic healthcare and alternative treatment options. We need harm reduction programs, decriminalized sex work, and safe, free reproductive healthcare to include abortions.
We need guaranteed adequate housing for all in mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods that are oriented around pedestrians, bicycles, and mass transit, not automobiles, regardless of whether they are self-driving or electric, or not.
We need fully funded education for everyone that is fair and not based solely on the local tax base, or charity organizations. Teachers should be paid well and unionized. Students should be free to learn what they desire in exciting ways, not taught obedience training and rote memorization of facts and performance testing. Instead, we should focus on emotional intelligence, critical thinking, problem solving, and developing real world skills they will need. Sudbury Valley and Montessori offer two models.
We need community protection, not militarized forces policing other communities. We absolutely must divest law enforcement departments and reinvest in social work field officers, clinics, EMTs, and other services. Police departments have been hiring fascists, white supremacists, and other abusive people for years. They must purge their departments of these toxic insider threats to the community if law enforcement ever hopes to regain the trust as those who risk their lives to protect and serve. Communities must hire within and police within. There must not be a "thin blue line"; if law enforcement are not held accountable, then there is no trust.
This can be extrapolated to the macro level. The world's secret police, the CIA, has been running drug smuggling, torture programs, and overthrowing democracies essentially since its inception. Trump's attempted coup in 2020 was the most brazen. The CIA were all too eager to learn from their Nazi predecessors whom they emigrated secretly and illegally; see Operation Paperclip.
The CIA is a far-right wing terrorist organization unaccountable to the public or the American government for that matter. The CIA and their partner Mossad are rogue terrorist governments. They (and the Israeli government) must be disbanded, and their secrets declassified and made public.
The United States military is only the public face of this terrorist organization, the larger not-so-secret wars that the transnational corporate juggernaut wages upon the world. The United States military-industrial complex (which bleeds over into Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the like) is the economy. That must all change.
The United States military budget must shrink to 10% of its current size. The overseas bases must be sold at cost to joint host nation-United Nations. NATO and all other international military alliances must cease. The United Nations Security Council must undergo serious reform. I suggest abolishing the veto and adding four Southern Hemisphere nations as permanent members, such as Brazil, Kenya or Nigeria, Egypt, and India, as a minimum for reform. No country may make military action upon another without incurring the wrath of the entire world.
End the arms trade. That is the stupidest waste of natural resources, human effort, and suffering.
Empower organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Transparency International, International Criminal Court, and so forth.
That is all for now. I will return to edit and improve upon this.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, and similar organizations conduct sabotage against non-living, destructive machines and systems that are literally killing the planet. They are the resistance, the Rebel Alliance. They are The Good Guys, and the Empire we have all been born, raised, and indoctrinated into is the The Bad Guys. Be an honorable traitor.
We are living in the sixth mass extinction on this planet. This one is cause solely by human activity in a very short period of time. The immediate causes can be identified as transnational corporations, capitalism, authoritarianism, and industrial civilization. The roots go all the way back to the dawn of systems of domination and control, of involuntary hierarchy itself: religion, kings, patriarchy, racism, kings, and wars. The mere belief that humans are separated from the web of life, and that it is ours to use and consume however we desire, is the basis for our self-destruction.
Thus ELF, ALF, and others are like white blood cells defending the body, the biosphere, in the death throws of a cancerous civilization eating itself alive.
You do not have to join ELF, ALF, or similar. But do not resist them. Do not help the Empire. Resist the Empire's rape and killing of our planet. Resist the Empire's genocides and ecocide.
The religious fundamentalists want us to believe it is wrong to love this world, and to deny themselves now for a paradise later. That only allows them to justify to themselves ever increasing suffering here. They are morally wrong and insane.
The capitalists want us to believe we can have infinite growth in a finite system. We just have to keep expanding what the system is with more imaginary bubbles while the wealth disparity increases. Again, wrong morally wrong and insane.
Very few can both see the whole picture, or most of it, clearly, and do something good about it. ELF, ALF, and similar organizations are.
Trump capitalized on the angst and fear people have and exploited them to amplify his power. He is corrupt and they were duped. Many were in on the conspiracy. The Republican Party is corrupt, and must end. The same is true for RSS and BJP of India, and similar far-right organizations around the world. See:
Consciousness is like a star or a sea urchin. Every ideology is like a spine.
One good model relies on 8 basic spines, and branches out from there. Consider white light refracted into the 7 colors, plus black. Each color is interdependent upon each other, creating a mutual aid and preventing any one spine from running away or getting too strong relative to the others or the center mass. All colors, every spike of the sea urchin, every ray of star, every branch of the consciousness, must strike out and pull back, sing and dance, not in unison, but in harmony with each other, the center, and the whole.
ORANGE: Activism (environmental justice, social justice, and economic justice)
YELLOW: Sensuality (food, fitness, travel, adventure, sex positivity, etc)
GREEN: Global Greens, environmentalism, grassroots democratic politics, etc
BLUE: Science (natural sciences, social sciences, appropriate technology, and secular humanism)
INDIGO: Mysticism (non-religious search for personal meaning beyond observed empiricism)
PURPLE: Intersectionality (theory of power, difference, inequality, fairness, ethics, and morality)
BLACK: Anarchism (left-libertarianism)
A note regarding Science (BLUE), Mysticism (INDIGO), and faith (intentionally omitted above). aith and science are fundamentally opposed. However, I think mysticism and science are compatible because mysticism and faith are different.
Faith believes despite a lack of or despite of evidence to the contrary, ie science. Mysticism, as I define it, is the consciousness reaching out into the mystery of the unknown and ultimately unknowable. This terrain is beyond the reach of both science and religion, for science tests observable phenomena and religion teaches from authority. Both mysticism and science are subordinate to new data and new experiences, while faith and religion are not.
It's not quite this simple, but it's like, science is deductive reasoning, mysticism is inductive reasoning, and faith is the lack of reasoning altogether.
What we have seen recently worldwide represents a corruption of the spiritual color spectrum:
RED: Fascism, USA Republican Party, and Red Scare
ORANGE: Trumpism, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers, etc
BLUE: Anti-intellectualism, misinformation, and disinformation (Jordan Pererson, Ben Shapiro, Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge Report, OAN, etc)
INDIGO: Religious fundamentalism and conspiracy theories (QAnon, Christian Nationalism, other religious nationalism and theocracies, Islamophobia, Zionism, anti-Semitism, female genital mutilation and male circumcision, forced religious conversion and evangelicalism, gay conversion therapy, etc)
BLACK: Right-Libertarian (Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Joe Rogan, PragerU, Koch Brothers, corporatism, cronysim, technocracy)
These are like corrupted wavelength patterns of the color spectrum. Consider those above like out of tune musical instruments or unappealing colors on the infinite ways to represent the visual spectrum. For the orchestra to continue playing properly, those instruments, and band members who have no interest in working well with the conductor and other musicians, must leave. They must leave the color spectrum, to never return.
In some ways, this Earth material world is like a simulated reality. People I cannot see, behind the mask of the human skin, control the bodies of the human characters, like one would play in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, or an avatar in the movie by James Cameron.
Many of these people belong to groups or families. Think of like MMORPG guilds. Some of these families are like online trolls. They pretend to befriend you, only to persuade you to let down your guard so that they can raid your vulnerabilities.
This is not an argument against vulnerability. Vulnerability is one of the most beautiful things to be entrusted with. Those who willingly and knowingly destroy beauty because it empowers them are the worst people. I am in favor of all kinds of diversity, but that is one kind I cannot tolerate. They are toxic to the community.
They want access to the community they know they are permanently banned from. One tactic they use, since the cheat and "game the system," is to attack a marginalized group of people, and then later claim that status as imposters. Again, think of this in the context of Earth as an MMORPG, or Avatar. They want to establish a Trojan horse, any Trojan horse, then sneak in.
They try to pull you off balance. They try to get you to defend one of your honest ideological positions beyond a reasonable and fair balance. They attack one thing, get you defend it, then co-opt that position, thus trying to slip past tour defenses. How do I mean?
It is like playing the Nazis and committing genocide on the Jews (and communists, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals, intellectuals, artists, and more), and then playing the Israelites. Note the distinction. The illegally established Israeli government conducting war crimes and crimes against humanity on occupied Palestinian land is not the same as the Jewish people.
It is like playing homophobic lynchers of gays and then playing people like Milo Yiannopoulos to persuade LGBT to the Dark Side, or to "catfish" straight men into having gay sex with spiritual men behind the mask of a spiritual trans-human female.
It is like being a white supremacist and a misogynist playing a black Supreme Court Justice.
The alt-right is here. I want a diverse, beautiful, and wonderful world, but they must go, because they are toxic. Know their playbook:
"They" are not only the Republican Party in the United States of America. "They" are also the Indian RSS and BJP, for instance.
They reinvent themselves wherever they believe there is a rising strength that they can capitalize upon, such as China, or a vulnerability where no one would suspect or be able to effectively criticize them until it's too late, such as the state of Israel (different from the Jewish people).
For the latter category, they chose marginalized groups so that they can rebuild strength in a hidden state like a trojan horse. There are truly transgender people, those born with other than XX or XY chromosomes, and those born intersex, as an example. But this is one category where the alt-right would potentially try hide themselves next, as transgender people immune from suspicion and attack, after attacking them so viciously themselves.
That is how deceptive and insidious "they" are. That is why you cannot merely label them Republicans or alt-right any other category and forgot about it. They are always changing tactics, which is why they must be completely eliminated.
Once upon a time there were two philosophically opposed clans.
One clan caused unnecessary suffering to themselves and others, pretending that they were righteous while enriching themselves, and then healed their victims with bliss so overwhelming that they suffered Stockholm Syndrome.
The other clan sought fairness and justice, acknowledged their own shortcomings, and refused the bliss bribe-trap of the first clan.
There is a saying, "The sweet is never as sweet without the sour".
Some take that to mean the greater the contrast between suffering and pleasure, the better.
They would be wrong. Kinksters in the BDSM scene recognize the need for negotiation, ongoing communication and consent, respect for boundaries and feedback, and use of safewords. They also acknowledge that more is not necessarily better and that everyone has different needs, desires, and tolerances.
For instance, I am not in any way a masochist. Nor would I accept any pleasure or submission or gift from anyone who knowingly and willingly caused my unnecessary suffering.
Those who only see in black and white seem blind to this simple concept, or they insist they will be vindicated if only they can push their helpless bottom past their breaking point.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is willful ignorance, narrow and small mindedness, greed and lust, narcissism, and lack of compassion and empathy.
How do you teach non-duality to those who split body and mind?
How do you teach continuum and spectrum to those who only know dichotomies?
How do you teach color to those who have only ever seen black and white?
Like a never-ending eye exam, they always want to which of two and only two. But reality is a web of dynamic interdependent relationships, an ecosystem dancing and singing and growing and shrinking together. Reality is not a series of polar opposite contradictions, though that is how some insist it is and must be for everyone else to be categorized. These fundamentalists, removing all the color from the world, are a plague upon all of us.
Religion is a monster, especially the Abrahamic religions and Christianity in particular.
Fascism is a monster, and patriotism is the seed.
Statism is a monster, and even marxism can be corrupted if not vigilant.
Imperialism is a monster.
Social status is a monster.
Any concentrated of power out of balance with the ecosystem is a monster, a predator that becomes a self-destructive virus. The monster spreads, dominates, and controls through force, coercion, or manipulation. The monster will not allow you to survive except through its One and Only Way.
Singularity is the way of the monster. Diversity is the way of Life.
I would not trust anyone who willingly caused me unnecessary suffering...
... even if they believed they unnecessary suffering was justified...
... even if they believed they could usurp my consent...
... even if they believed they could erase or change my memory...
... even if they believed they could alter my self...
... even if they believed they could "make it up" to me with pleasurable bliss. I would never want anyone who willingly caused me unnecessary suffering to pleasure me, or to even know me at all.
