You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'meditation' category.
Musings on rules, irrational ideas, and art, and how they may become useful to both individuals and society. This is simply a thought exercise.
Any idea that seeks to enable or restrain human choices, is a rule. Rules have existence, most notably in ethical, legal and religious systems. All beliefs in religions and philosophies include at their core, a belief in rules. Belief in rules is generally regarded as good, however rules must be chosen wisely.
Rules can be measured as beneficial or pleasurable, conversely harmful or painful, but they cannot be proved “false”.
If it is simply an idea with no possible ability to falsify or verify, that cannot be acted upon like a rule, is irrational. Examples of irrational ideas that are subjective are values and ethics such as good, evil, beauty, and ugly. Objective and irrational ideas would be of deities, demons, or ghosts, for example. You either believe in them, you do not believe in them, or you suspend judgement. The only good way to decide how to make any of these choices is to listen to your gut instinct and trust in what it tells you. If an irrational idea moves you to happiness and causes no harm to others, there is no harm in believing in any of these things. If it brings pleasure to others with no ill effects, even the better.
Rules derive their ultimate worth from what effect they create when putting them into practice. Deities and other irrational ideas are not valueless, as these ideas can be acted upon through worship, abstinence and practice. However, right understanding towards these ideas means everything, for we must measure how much good or harm such an idea can create through our actions in this world.
Pleasure and pain are the only two objective measures of good and evil. Actions can be measured by how much harm or good they bring to others, so while we cannot prove or deny an idea of deities either way through science, we can measure how much pleasure or pain is caused by a particular action relating to the rules of the deity to a population, and therefore rate the value of that deity objectively.
What may be pleasurable or painful for one person may not be pleasurable for a group of people. If the pleasure is only benefitting a small group, and the effects have measurable damage for the whole of the group, it is a bad idea. “Your freedom ends where the freedom of others begins”.
A good deity does not seek to harm or reward us in a special way. These things are due to the randomness in the world. As deities are irrational ideas, they must observe their own rules, and we cannot “know” the mind of the deity in any sort of objective way. The rules can be measured for their value, but claims of divine sanction are valueless. The minds of deities are hidden from us.
A deity or perhaps number of deities can be seen as rulegivers through a process of revealed knowledge through images or thoughts in a meditative state. I cannot dismiss this possibility, as it has been verified that people can have such thoughts and images and the existence of the deity cannot be proven false. Again the rule must be observed: if the knowledge revealed is a rule that causes harm or pain to others, it must be dismissed as a bad rule and the person who gives this rule must be regarded with extreme suspicion, as they may be acting in pure selfish interest without any thought to others.
But even if one is an agnostic or atheist, an understanding of the need for rules and the measure of good works can still be followed. An atheist can take this same teaching and listen and apply and test a rule revealed to them through the same process of mental images and thought from observation of the world.
People who seek to harm us, have no access to justice or injustice, as they do not seek to follow the rules to neither harm or be harmed. For these rules can only be extended to others who follow them.
If we do not put our thought and awareness into action to reason out the effects of our actions from rules we follow, we are no better than wild animals, and thus have abandoned our civilisation and freedom to gamble with disaster and chance, and chance is what rules our lives when we are unable to exercise the freedom to make decisions or reason the value of the rules we choose to follow. It is undesirable to let rules control us without judgement for their effects, for we then have no freedom to discriminate possible effects of our actions and discern our errors, and thus chance and fatalism have ruled the day.
The messages of rules may be expressed through any kind of art, but the expression of rules through art is not the rule itself. The rule is the message, the art is the thing. Mistaking this rule can lead to idolatry, to confuse the physical representation of a rule with the rule itself. This basic separation between the material thing and the immaterial idea must always be taught.
Laws are iron rules that cannot be broken through freedom of choice, due to the fact they are part of the fabric of the world. The laws of physics for example.
Some further aesthetic thoughts.
If your art has nothing that truly moves your body completely to express to others, it’s probably not good art.
In art, there is no difference between communication and expression. In beauty and ugliness in art, there is no standard except your subjective gut feeling about what is beautiful or ugly. Beauty belongs to the irrational senses and cannot be given objective moral value. Beauty in nature is created this way as well. While it can be judged beautiful or ugly, this decision can never be objectively rational. Again, this does not mean it is good or bad. It only means it is irrational.
The Canon, the Measure, is the scaffold of these ideas, that braid the matter of daily life into the strong ropes of civilisation.
Flash and turn
Turn and stand
Diamond flash
Flashing fire
Dancing light.
As I rise to take my tea,
Stay aware of just “to be”.
With the torch I may light the way of knowledge, or burn the temple.
With the branch I may tend the fields and flocks, or strike the thief.
With the blade I may reap the harvest’s bounty, or stab the attacker.
With wisdom I know how to light my way, or when to burn a temple.
With honor I know how to tend my growth, or when to strike a thief.
With justice I know how to reap my harvest, or when to stab an attacker.
When all temples learn to illuminate, and not burn the towns,
When all thieves learn to farm, and not steal the seed,
When all attackers learn to reap, and not stab the people,
A more pleasant life will reign.
A fortnight past
You came to me
In a dream
Again, though you are
Never far away.
This time your image was different, different than the others. Though true, you are rarely present to me in an image. You are always near in your voice, when I meditate, when you speak in my dreams. The soothing sound of your words. I rarely remember what your words are, but I am put at peace, merely by the weaving of the sound of your voice. For you are the spinner.
This time you were an image. A terrifying image in a dream. An enormous black widow spider. You kept your long delicate legs folded beneath you, so I only noticed your body. Your enormous abdomen, with the terrifying mark of time on your underbelly. The hourglass of fate, emblazoned blood red, across the glossy black underside of your shell.
And my attention, my attention, was drawn to you, utterly. To your spinnerets, enormous to my mind. I had never seen such huge spinnerets before.
I should have been frightened, and turned away. I should have run in fear. But I did not. I was drawn to you. I stood near you, as you placed yourself in my way. I saw the other people on the opposite side of you, pulling away in fear. Fear, gutteral and instinctual. For you stood like death to them, their eyes also on the hourglass, emblazoned blood red, across the glossy black underside of your shell.
Recent Comments