The Hunger

Hola Everybody,
So check this out: I need a J-O-B bad, so I applied for a job as a stock clerk. I was turned down -- twice. LOL! Really?

But I’m still here, still looking for work, still trying to upgrade my online presence. You can support my writing by clicking HERE. Any amount helps. If you can’t donate, please consider sharing the link with your contacts. Thanks.

I’m on an introspection trip these days.

The Hunger

The thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know you shouldn't chase; in the end, you chase it just the same.
 -- George Pelecanos

One day when I was very young, my aunt was called to a store. I was caught stealing books and rather than call the police, the owner wanted an adult to come pick me up. I couldn’t have been more than eleven-twelve years-old. I still remember the books. One was a used copy of The Complete Works of Aristotle. Yeah, while my friends were out there stealing hubcaps, I was stealing books. They thought I was weird.

My aunt was so embarrassed, she couldn’t bring herself to look the store manager in the eye. We walked home in silence. The next day, my aunt, who was a washerwoman, reached into her purse with fingers stripped raw by the harsh chemicals of her work and came out with some crumpled bills. She asked me the cost of the books I attempted to steal. When I tried to rationalize the issue, she suggested I be quiet and patiently asked again in a firm voice, “How much did those books cost?”

When I told her, she gave me the money and instructed me to go buy the books. I went back to the same store and paid for the books. The store manager didn’t know what to say, she seemed confused. Eventually, she would come to know me well.

When I returned with the books, my aunt, with tears in her eyes, told me that there was nothing worse than ignorance. She told me if I ever wanted a book, to just ask and she would try to get the money for me. I’ll be honest and say that I continued to steal books here and there. Not a large amount, but books I thought I needed to read. My goal was to read all the great books. 

In case you haven’t noticed, I am a lover of knowledge. Actually, that’s a pretty good definition of philosophy. And please! We all are naïve philosophers in some form or another. Respect for knowledge, truth, and beauty were values instilled in me during my formative years. 

I was either born with this hunger or it was embedded in me at an early age by my parents and reinforced by the other adults during my formative years. Whatever the case, if I were to turn my back on this gift (as if I could), it would be more than a waste, it would be the only true sin.

Books, as with my other teachers, have always taught me to look for the contradictions -- the paradoxes -- because it is there where the truth can be found. I had hard a hard time figuring that one out. How can one find truth, or even anything useful, in things that seemingly have no connection?

But we don’t have to look too closely to see that our existence is full of contradictions. For every negative, there is a positive: night follows day, there is sadness and happiness, rain and sunshine. If you look still closer, you will observe that the web of life itself is made up of the interconnections and relationships between opposing forces. Like the tai chi symbol of yin yang, we all contain the rhythms reverberating from the play of dark and light, male and female, “good” and “bad,” awareness and ignorance.

I think about this web of connections when looking at and attempting to work with my character defects. Growth is optional and for many people and a critical outlook, or even looking within, is something alien -- something to be avoided at all costs. Instead, we are conditioned to consume that we become our material possessions. Even those of us who profess to be introspective truth seekers (or “truth tellers”!) often fall short because we are too busy defending who we are. Too often we rail on about the defects of others while ignoring our own.

If you look deeper, there is an essential unhappiness, a bitterness, driving this attitude. We all know at least one overly critical insensitive who tramples over people’s feelings under the guise of “truth” or “self-expression.” This kind of shit often backfires. It’s a bitch: when you deny life, it has a funny fuckin’ way of sneaking in through the back door. The baggage you carry will manifest itself through whatever form you consciously or unconsciously choose to express it.

In any case, many of us live our lives shuffling back and forth between two identities that seem to conflict: the rational and the emotional. My rational self, for example, tells me I really shouldn’t act out on an impulse, while my emotional self urges me to say “fuck it.” we all experience these two conflicting identities, and, though many people deny this, it’s how our mind/ brain is wired.

The rational self says “I should,” and the emotional self says, “Even though I know I should, I can’t.” Today, I have a better grasp of this paradox, these conflicting urges within me, but I’m still working on it. It’s a process, not a race. It’s also about practice and not perfection. I have found that I’m a deeply flawed man. So flawed that, by necessity, I need to have a process in place that keeps me moving, at the very least, in a good orderly direction. My path is more of a zig-zag than a straight line, but that too is OK.

The point being is that I (we?) have to find a way to balance these two natures. Some of us take the rational approach which often has the effect of leading to a denial of the emotional self. I see this all the time: people will say things like, “It doesn’t bother me,” as if reason can be used to stifle feelings. However, shit always comes up, somehow. Ultimately, denial is not a good coping mechanism no matter how logically you want to dress it up. Others take the opposite tact, and indulge their emotions. This is just the flip side of the denial coin.

I am at a point in my life where I am comfortable with who I am and how I embody my expressed values. I am comfortable with expressing my anger and confronting actions or behaviors that I find offensive. Is it always nice? No. Life isn’t nice. It is wrought difficulties and it is often within the crucible of conflict and turmoil that true growth happens. Avoiding conflict is like sticking your head in the sand. Conflict is an unavoidable and oftentimes invaluable fact of life.

This makes for many challenges and contradictions, but for one to live relatively happy, we need to find a way toward integration because that is the direction of all life: all life seeks to integrate fully somehow, it does this as surely as there is gravity and the sun sets and rises. Understanding how this all works can help many achieve some integration, some measure of comfortability and acceptance amidst the chaos and mass of contradictions that we all possess within.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Monday Madness [Enlightened Compassion]

Hola mi Gente,
What I find interesting is Paul Krugman, an economics professor who won a Nobel Prize for his Keynesian economics, writing a series of articles attacking presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, for Sanders’ Keynesian economics and defending neoliberal Hillary Clinton -- this is your mainstream media at work.

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Stages of moral reasoning

Enlightened Service

People say, “I want love.” Take out ego (“I”) and desire (“want”) and what are you left with?

I work in the non-profit/ industrial sector and at the heart of that work is the mission is to work towards helping marginalized people to “empower themselves.” It’s a serious responsibility cutting across all levels for those concerned. After my own awakening, I made a decision to make service the centerpiece of my life’s mission, and I realized that not all of my motivations were as pure as I would like to think. There’s a dark side to service and I see it all the time, both within myself, and in my colleagues.

In Buddhism, there are different levels of generosity. At one level generosity arises from the desire to amass spiritual “points” for the afterlife or at some point out there somewhere. Some serve because they hope they will reap some benefits. Others do service, and this very much prevalent, because it gives them a sense of identity: “I’m a good person, see how I helped the helpless little natives?” Others serve because religious dogma dictates they do. These are the evangelicals who do service if you accept their God and beliefs. It may not be overt, but this kind of giving is coercive or at least transactional: the pressure to submit to their particular brand of dogma is there. There are many reasons, both good and bad, for service.

I think what’s as important as service is the motivation underlying the drive to serve. For the most part, service is flavored by the stage of moral development one is serving from. Service from the egocentric (I care for myself) stage will look and feel much different from service from a person who works from an ethnocentric (I care for my tribe, my country, my nation) and that, in turn, will be different from a person who operates from a worldcentric view (I care for all human beings, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed). Service is a tool and wielded by the misguided can do more harm than good. I can’t resist the cliché here that in the hands of a murderer, a knife is a weapon, but in the hands of a doctor, it is a tool for healing.

I’ll attempt a clearer example: Let’s say you are at an ethnocentric stage of development and you have a moment of awakening or spiritual experience of being one with everything, you might interpret that as an experience of oneness with a particular deity and conclude that no one can be saved unless they accept that deity as their personal savior (this is the “ethnocentric interpretation – you must belong to this one group in order to be saved). Have a spiritual experience at the ethnocentric stage and it will only make you more ethnocentric

See how it works? You can be at any stage of development, experience the same life-changing event and you will interpret it according how you perceive the world. Now, let me see if I can piece this all together. We all know examples of reborn Christians who have had very powerful spiritual awakenings; they glow, they are radiant, and they are often fascists. This is because they are still at the ethnocentric stage, and, bless them, think Jesus is the one and only way. But there is hope yet, research shows that the more spiritual awakenings you experience, the more quickly you move through developmental stages.

So, what the fuck does this have to do with self-centeredness and service, you ask? Well, the teachings of Jesus and others remain relevant today because of the emphasis on service, what I consider a form of prayer in action. Basically, my point is that it’s easy to utter prayers, doesn’t take much effort, really. However, when our spiritual life is about getting something or arriving at some destination, it reinforces the feeling of having a need -- of not being there yet. Wanting anything, including a mate, or spiritual enlightenment, works to solidify a universe in which you are missing what you want. It creates a universe centered on you.

The only cure for this endless and painful quest is service and gratitude, period. LOL… Fucked up, huh? I mean I always thought it would be Halle Berry, but she’s not returning my phone calls these days.

Here’s one level of service as described the Buddhist literature (and echoed in many religious disciplines): Enlightened service. Enlightened service only comes about from doing the inner work to the point where it takes no effort. If you put your finger in a flame, it takes no effort or willpower to pull it out. You feel the pain, and the action is spontaneous. When your sense of self expands to include other things and creatures aside from the sack of flesh you call “you” and expand your circle of life, you feel those close to you as you would yourself. 

When a mother sees her child in danger, standing in the path of an oncoming car, for example, she does not need religious dogma to know what to do. The intimacy she feels with her child makes her action spontaneous. As our ego membrane becomes thinner, and one recognizes that we are all connected somehow, all things become more intimate, and our connection to them is stronger. Everyone becomes a part of us -- one humanity. It is only then that we begin to embody Jesus’ teachings, or the Buddha’s, or Krishna’s too, and the teaching lives in us.

Service, enlightened service, is the only true prayer.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…