Creating a Life
Everything a person does, creates their life; there is nothing else -- but neither is that all there is. It depends on what one makes of it. So the whole notion that exercise and conditioning should be done to burn off excess consumption -- is a very damaging perspective of life and its meaning and purpose -- trivializing all activity to this gross measurement. There is no difference whether that energy expended builds a house or a community --or destroys it; by that standard, it makes no difference -- and that is why people create a bad life or a good life for themselves -- if they can tell the difference.
So the first thing a person making choices will have to be aware of is the different choices and their implications -- and not simply, one view of reality and a “choice” to either get with the program, or suffer the consequences! Up to the beginning of this century, that was still what most people regarded as having a choice -- limited to what the “authority” decided was the only choice everybody ought to have -- rather than a choice of all the possibilities.
Those warnings are very familiar: “Do not attempt to alter and modify your diet without consulting with a registered dietitian.” “Do not attempt to alter or modify one’s appearance without first consulting with a licensed extreme makeover consultant, “ etc. “If you did not read it in the New York Times (local newspaper), it did not happen.” “Trust us, we are the only thing going on.”
Thus information of the past, was more about control, than freedom -- and freedom is always this challenge to the status quo of “enforced” limited choices. Nobody gives up control without a battle, however, the smart ones can tell which way the winds are blowing, and prepare themselves to ride the wave of those emerging and unfolding developments.
When one encounters it, there is an unmistakable clarity, vitality, and authenticity as though it were life itself -- and not just dead words, no longer invoking memories, images, meaning and experience. There is a language dying, and a language being born, as we speak it. One is a living language, the language of the living -- while the other is a dead language, only of things that happened -- long ago. The last hurrah of this latter was the tyrannical expressions forced upon all by the Associated Press or academic style of transmitting the previously known -- to those who hadn’t heard it yet.
The new language is the present exploration of the unknown -- which past knowledge has feared to tread. In fact, past knowledge was largely the prohibition about finding out -- other than what one was told to believe, by the self-appointed experts. Rather than these people being terrifying and impressive sorts, they were more likely to be highly insecure, uncertain people who bullied and intimidated anybody they thought was vulnerable to such manipulations and deceptions -- and were in turn bullied and intimidated by others who thought they were their logical prey, ad infinitum.
These masses of the uninformed, disappeared with ready access to information -- and especially to alternative sources. There is no defense -- for the unprecedented.
posted by Mike Hu @ 11:52 AM
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5 Comments:
What’s always impressed me is how those on the lowest rungs of the pecking order, are frequently the staunchest and most vicious defenders of a status quo that victimizes them -- hoping that one day, eventually, they will be the oppressors of everybody else. It’ the same justification for all those pyramid schemes that exploit those at the bottom -- with fantasies of being on the top if they merely persist long enough.
So again, the justification is duration and seniority rather than quality of activity -- and it is the “quality” that revitalizes and re-creates, the real meaning and purpose behind recreation. It’s not about just going through the motions, looking busy, and hoping nobody will be able to tell the difference. The results, the self-evident, are the difference.
People are only deceived into thinking that what they are doing is working -- if it obviously is not. In a previous era of knowledge, such dichotomies and dissonance between the thought and the actuality, was actually cultivated, as a high achievement. Those who were obviously out of shape, were obviously geniuses for being so.
People would talk long and hard about “relationships,” while not relating. It was a field day for liberal hypocrisy -- of saying one thing, and doing quite the contrary. A few noted the need for integration -- and fewer still insisted even better, that one could see wholly from the very beginning and not just at the end. Why fragment reality in the first place? This mode was in understanding phenomena as a process, a movement or unfolding of reality -- rather the static, categorical concepts of unchanging ideas and ideals.
At the height, totally unintelligible types were taught to be the great geniuses of all times because nobody could understand them -- and created a need for n army of scholars to interpret them to a larger public. This was the forerunner of the mass media in the following century, which in this century, goes to its logical conclusion of totally eliminating the need for the intermediary to translate knowledge to the uninitiated.
A large part of education of the past, has been indoctrination -- into the one way, rather than a more useful skill of identifying and choosing the best among the possibilities. And in fact, most of the knowledge of the other possibilities were deliberately suppressed -- by editors who thought they knew better, but were actually at the bottom of the knowledge chain.
So the filtering of knowledge by the mass (mainstream) media was by the least competent and not the most competent; they were also the most authoritarian, as insecure and incapable minds tend to be. The greatest conformity to dogma is to be found among the ghetto gangs -- of any level of education.
That's what killed the mainstream (mass) media: they became an endless fountainhead of useless and erroneou information -- in an era that demands information of the highest integrity.
They expected to remain at the forefront of information, by merely treading water! The same is true of the other old information sources -- the schools and the universities -- because most of the information is created and available outside of their control and jurisdiction.
Nobody has a monopoly on information -- or intelligence.
"Are we still talking about exercise and conditioning?"
The hardest point to understand, is that the problem for most people being in poor condition is NOT the lack of effort, but the lack of understanding. THAT is the whole point.
Then people will invariably say, "I don't want to understand; just tell me what to do!"
There are many others in the world, lurking around the corners and in the shadows, who will gladly tell you what to do. Read the op-ed pages of any newspaper and choose your demagogue. There is no hope that way -- but only increasing disability and dysfunction.
It's like the person needing to lose wieght who insists, "I need to lose weight; tell me what to do, except don't tell me I have to eat less!"
What is a sane person to do?
But once a person can question their understanding -- about anything, a transformation is not only possible, but inevitable.
A few people have not made this transformation in understanding that progress does not happen through the miracle of brute force. The previous century's example of that were the many who were insistent in their belief, that if the television did not operate properly, the thing to do was to hit it -- the same as their child-rearing strategy.
Hopefully we've come a long way from those days.
Those who have major problems, are those who do not re-condition themselves into the new realities and new consciousness -- mainly because they're operating from their own memories rather than fresh input.
That was even the old information processing paradigm -- in which information was first fed into memory, and then later processed -- allowing a lot of informtion to enter unfiltered, unquestioned and unvalidated before eventually being processed logically. In that manner, it was even possible to fill most of memory with invaid information -- allowing no room for the valid nd true.
The state of the art in information processing is to do one's validtion checks up front --before allowing "garbage in." A lot of what was taught in PE classes and is still taught by more contemporary instructors who convince the public they are "certified" experts, is this kind of garbage that is unquestioned because it is repeated so often in popular media.
The often repeated tends to be regarded as some kind of conventional wisdom whether there is anything wise about it or not. However, people have become a lot more wary -- and are now inclined to question presumptuous authority -- which is the greatest threat to the old status quo of unquestioned authority.
The real experts on such matters, have no problem becing challenged because their authority is not based on these hierarchies -- but are self-evident truths that can be rediscovered by anybody, and not just on the faith in the expert.
In this reshuffling, many who were formerly on the top, find themselves on the bottom -- and don't have the skills they thought they had, to learn the truth of any matter -- the new, improved understanding. They're trapped in their understanding that may be 50 years old, and even centuries old, if all they do is revere and repeat the past.
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