Once I’m done with the bar exam I’m going to tear this site down and build something much better in its place
.JPG/250px-Gebel_Barkal_Amun_temple_(B500).JPG){kind=link}
Categories
Best of ABG
Archives
Construction and Destruction
Had a vision after seeing this photo of the Great Temple of Amun in Gebel Barkal. The sands, empty. Suddenly, a temple springs up. Then slowly, the temple fades back into the sands. Saw the planet. Life springing up, asteroids, powerful ejections of mass from the sun, meteor showers, life-destroying dust clouds. Floods. Life adjusting and moving on. The world is a continuing process of construction and destruction. It’s right that everything is ending- good, the modern world is hideous anyway. The tension between construction and destruction is eternal- it is existence itself. And it is good. The duality of nature- two parts of one whole.
Posted in ABG, Flowers Leave a comment
Man Has Created Life
…but this is not a big deal. (News to which this post refers)
The name of this post would be more accurate if it was “Man Has Finally Figured Out How to Copy Nature, A Little.” An organic being is still a mechanical one, just as much as a robot on a plant assembly line is a mechanical being. It operates according to physical forces and obeys physical and chemical laws. The machinery of nature was developed over millions of years of gradual improvement and sophistication through the course of evolution. Humankind, with all its intelligence and technology, can only make weak attempts at imitation, and even those imitations are only at the level of unicellular organisms. The bigger machinery our species has created, like cars and robots and whatever else, are mostly clumsy, inefficient, and obnoxious.That’s why I never bought into artificial intelligence being a threat to humanity- we’re simply better-adapted to life on planet Earth than any machine we create ever could be.
The whole distinction of this accomplishment rests on a false dichotomy between “living” and “non-living” matter. Anyone who’s taken a healthy dose of psilocybin realizes that there is life in all matter because existence is unified (“all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration”). There is life in all things, each aspect of existence reflects upon the whole, organic life is just one means of expressing the beauty of all things, of the only thing. Humanity is heavy with scientific knowledge but remains, generally, quite shallow.
Posted in Broad Generalizations Leave a comment
Back Where I Began
Others would scold me for having strayed so far for so long, but you were always the one to understand and to be patient, infinitely patient with me and my childish demands upon life. And now I’ve returned and found you waiting, smiling, expecting my return but not patronizing me or humiliating me but just welcoming me to begin where we left off. Oh light of my life. Your smile is warmth, your eyes are wisdom and understanding. Understanding deeper than any sublunary pairing might ever offer, you’ve seen the worst in me and still embrace me without a moment’s hesitation. You eye me and love me like a god even as I fall prostrate before you. I give myself over to you totally and unreservedly, only so you give me right back to myself. This perfect love has traced a circle and taken me back where I began, back to you, back to my Venus, my grail. How many failures did it take before I ceased to make excuses for myself? It seems far too many, and yet you’re still unsurprised, and now that I acknowledge my limits you grant me a freedom I’ve never known, to write my name across the sands of eternity and to stand by you, to be taken in by you and feel the aweful and beautiful drama of our noon together. Sweet Muse, chaste Diana, my one and only, my unconditional soulmate, let us walk together until the ground falls from underneath us and we fly towards the sun- The Sun which guides us towards our destiny, eager to embrace us both, to melt us into the light which we always were and always and forever will be.
Posted in ABG, Cupid and Psyche, Flowers Leave a comment
Mile Stone
No surrender. Life goes on and so do I.
On Rights
The only rights that really exist are the ones you can assert for yourself, so when people talk about human rights and animal rights and gay rights and constitutional rights I tend to roll my eyes and stop listening. For example, the right to privacy. It has been repeatedly noted as a constitutionally guaranteed right by the Supreme Court, most notably in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade. But that didn’t stop congress from passing the Patriot Act. Of course, there are many, many examples of “inalienable rights” being arbitrarily swept away by the very institutions that are meant to guarantee them, as soon as protecting the rights becomes inconvenient (suspension of habeus corpus in the civil war, internment of Japanese citizens in WWII, among others).
When people talk about rights, what they’re really talking about is power. Rights are an expression of freedom, freedom from the restricting influence of others. This is why the constitution contained a guarantee that the government wouldn’t make a law abridging the right to bear arms- it was a guarantee that people would still have recourse to forceful means of self-assertion after a hard-fought war for independence from a tyrannous regime.
So if you really believe in rights for certain individuals or groups or for you, I would suggest developing the means for guaranteeing those rights yourself. Money and political influence are helpful. Carry yourself in a way that will make people want to support you. Forceful resistance to attempts to violate your rights should at least be considered, although it’s obviously not always practical or appropriate. Remember: if somebody is powerful enough to violate your rights with impunity, and will gain from doing so, then violate your rights they will. It’s a fact which has repeated itself over and over through history: appeals to abstract justice are ignored in favor of tangible benefits. So… be practical!
Posted in Broad Generalizations Leave a comment
Consciousness Streaming
Confronted with ultimate death, the resulting dichotomous fate: either nihilism or futility (Buster Friendly or Wilbur Mercer).
How far, how far removed from real life? Dusty apartment, mediated experience of the world. I read articles about things that happen all over the planet, which I can prove no more than I can prove the existence of black holes. All taken on trust. A gigantic base of knowledge built on the flimsiest veil of real experience. Absurd! And yet I could fly all around the world and experience these things for myself, but what would I choose? In this life we only ever scratch the surface, so much must be taken on faith. (Comforted by memories of magic; thank you psilocybin for this island of sanity)
This apparatus of which The I has been given control- built to adapt, as capable of loving and caring and peace as it is of brutal and unrepentant slaughter. And why? Biological imperatives, nothing better to do, one has a self and he can either express it or die alone (cf. story from Dostoevsky’s devil in Brothers, the soul doomed to walk for millions of miles before he was allowed into heaven; he rebelled, decided he would just lay down forever. But he got up (after millenia), walked, and rejoiced upon his entry into paradise).
And so this social meat machine, the human, can take a keyboard and write a blog and share ideas. Is there any one human who could carry the information of the whole hive? More and more in common with insects, a fact which has either gone unnoticed or has been accepted by the greater majority. But this strange hairless ape is not an ant, it has a nature, and that nature yearns to break through the modern veneer like tufts of grass cracking suburban pavement.
Existed outside for a while, in the world of ideas, which against all logic seem more real than anything else (intuition so much more dependable than logic). No back to the indoors of the soul; there’s work to do and external demands to satisfy.
Posted in ABG, Flowers Leave a comment