The common mans chance

for a better life

I don’t do social media or have much interaction on the internet as it strikes me as a dysfunctionality generator, but substack has exposed me to some worthy thoughts and writers, so maybe it can be useful to give it a go. When a comment is made, I hope to do it with as few words as possible, to respect time limitations of others. Here the comment can be expanded on and that will be the plan, to start at least.

Thank-you Toby, great writing and you draw excellent comments.

Our 'job' is to improve our heart connection to our creator. The elite's take it as their 'job' to inhibit the common mans heart connection. In my opinion, this has been accomplished through the imposition of a split model for reality where the initial assumption declares that the physical and the spiritual are fundamentally different. But a consequent cannot prove an antecedent and we may generate improved expressions of consciousness if we were to assume that in reality, the spiritual and the physical are the same thing. Only then will we switch from an object based consciousness toward a relationship based consciousness.

The expansion will use a certain approach to child rearing as an analogy for how to grow a healthy cultural and social consciousness. Coming soon.

We make decisions continually, mostly small but some big. For instance, in starting a business serious introspection is needed to confidently conclude that it will be worth the effort required. I consider introspection to be a sort of prayer toward the life force itself, our Creator. Most businesses (and many efforts) fail because we tend to be caught up in reactive rather than creative mind thinking. So also with families. Young parents don’t want to pass pathologies on to their kids, yet there no good guidebook, so often we do.

Introspection was used as my guidebook and it worked pretty good, so a few words from that ‘book’. When a child is very young and they look at you with big saucer eyes, they are asking you; what the hell is going on? The parents job early on is to tell the child what is going on by presenting clear boundary conditions for the child. In the early years children don’t do analytical thinking so they are better served if the parent does it for them. Pick up toys, no eating on the couch, no candy from the checkout line, be polite, that sort of thing. Then around the age of seven or right when the analytical mind starts to kick in, the parent will do well to back off so that the still young child will learn early the connection between their decisions and consequences, (and unconsciously they will use existing boundary conditions as a basis). Because little time was spent on internal dialogue arguing with the parent they will depend less on reactive mind as their life develops further. Hence, a better chance at having a healthy heart connection to our Creator.

To be continued…

This writing is my effort at participating in the creation or realization of a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

The previous short bit referenced growth in consciousness in children and a natural change in relationship between parent and child because of that growth. This may also be applied to society or cultural groups. The strong man may be called for while the general level of consciousness is low. But as it grows, for the strong man to be a good ‘parent’, decision making needs to become more distributed. Perhaps here the allegory breaks down because generally parents want their children to learn to make proper decisions, while govt. wants only decisions that increases its power. Still also, some parents use their children to increase their power and sometimes govt empowers people because that may strengthen society in general.

Growing up involves making decisions and if the dominant structures insist that they must make decisions to be applied to everyone, then it follows that those structures want the population in a condition of arrested development. Yet, grow we must, through the pain of reconciling the cognitive dissonance and dysfunctional impositions of our dominant narrative. Not many folk make the connection between the killing of trillions of microorganisms when a field is sprayed and the general death orientation of the dominant narrative. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It’s tough though and nobody can be blamed for getting sucked into seeing the world in the way we do, given the existing narrative has been in place for centuries.  

This narrative produces objects with hard boundary conditions and a God that is far away. This is the natural result of assuming that the spiritual and the physical are fundamentally different. What we believe shapes what we see. Objects may interact, meld, exchange particles and have quite a life, with little awareness on our part. We may be intimately connected with our creator at all times through our heart and gut and not realize it because of the myth of a far off God.

How much of reality are we missing because of faulty assumptions?

The next bit will deal with my self training method for dealing with inherent ignorance.

10-22-22

My early engagement with deep pondering was to ask; Why do good and smart people so often do bad and stupid things? Answers took several decades to come and are to me, in the form of a sort of training program. The idea was that better criteria were needed for making decisions. How does one recognize something outside of human experience and bring it into the human experience? This led to years long reading binge centered on the history of epistemology, or our understanding of reality.

This ended thankfully when the realization came that more information was not needed, instead we need a new way to order our information. One thing picked up from Abraham Heschel was all experience contains an element of ‘Law’ or order and an element of liberty or spontaneity. I reasoned that perhaps balancing order and liberty in decision making could be a legitimate strategy. So then, the basis for the training is fairly simple, the words I put to it are; do what you need to do first, then you can feel good when you are doing what you want to do. The object is to reduce reactive mind thinking, hopefully leading to better decision making. To be sure, by itself this does little to address ones understanding of reality. For instance, even if most people are driven by fellowship, if the system favors polarized expressions the fellowship folk are left out of the picture yet often go along for pragmatic or social standing reasons. These ruminations may seem novel or odd at times. Seeing them as based on assumptions of ignorance rather than knowledge claims may help in understanding the method.

Smart people are considered smart because they are better able to identify the correspondences between the categories we use to produce understanding, such as it is. They become both the producers and the consumers of existing forms of understanding and as such are in no position to be ‘intellectual’ leaders, and yet they are. It’s a pickle; how do we advance our situation when the successful and intellectuals are most beholden to existing systems of understanding?

The major waste of world resources is built in to the system, destruction leads to new contracts. Despite the rare example to the contrary, intellectuals have always served power. This power now seems intent on further cementing its right and ability to define reality for us all through technocracy. Issues are clouded very effectively and we need better tools to help keep our eyes on the prize.

The leverage point for the good guys is not yet apparent.

We all crave understanding, it’s how we give meaning to observations and events. Yet it comes in many forms, all with limitations depending on the assumptions involved. Many believe in the ‘Big Bang’ theory and in common with most other beliefs, will interpret observations in a way that supports existing beliefs. This is not a bad thing, its only a part of how our psyche works. We defer to general understanding because that is more socially beneficial and it is what we recognize. Our trouble is that our ‘smart’ people have replaced intelligence with memory games and fashionable pretenses. The situation calls for the common man to recognize their own native intelligence as more useful than the word of ‘experts’. Ironically even in science, native intelligence or accidents in the lab are responsible for many advances while fusion is always nearby but remains behind the corner.

Modes of understanding vary but most derive from and relate to existing long term underlying assumptions. How can society best insure both production and distribution of goods that will allow society to function, and if lucky, flourish? A certain (power) faction feels it is in a position to claim all decision making power. It cannot work because in reality decision making power comes from each of us, even if nascent and often misguided by previous habits of offloading decisions onto others. The proper defense toward others that seek to make broad based decisions is to be confident in our own decision making abilities. Experience shows that all are prone to poor decisions from micro to macro scales. This may imply that poor criteria are being used for the decision making. Decision making stimuli comes from both external and internal sources. The external is often in the form of ideology. But while an idea is something you have, an ideology is something that has you.

My initial assumption was because I did not know much of what goes on in the world, the basis for making decisions, having opinions or ‘knowledge’ was weak. Some claim to find a cure in information, but while many may be well informed in a narrow area, they still do not know much of what goes on in the world. I was an information junkie for a time, looking for a better way to sort it and distinguish substance from fluff. One appealing idea was that Cartesian Dualism provides the backbone for our modern dominant narrative(Morris Berman). Another was that all experience contains elements of order and of liberty(Abraham Heschel). CD is a modeling system that succeeds by taking out the part that connects parts by saying that the spiritual has no extension in space. CD provides an excellent basis for equations, analytical thinking and modeling and has been a boon to development to society. But it’s getting old , -it may be contrary to reality and now inhibiting growth of collective consciousness. The inhibiting comes by making objects the focus of our attention rather than relationships.

The focus in ‘The Common Mans Chance’ is to describe a way to wean oneself from identification with, dependence and implicit support for the dominant narrative. This way (Aspiring to balance order and liberty) cultivates relationships in preference to objects to measure success. Hopefully, more space is made for ones heart connection to Creator. Oddly, or appropriately perhaps, if one doesn’t care much about objects, material security is easier to maintain.

The practical reality is that if we are to experience a mass awakening, there must be a means for that. Something that provides understanding so that appropriate decisions can be made, individually and collectively. We have collectively handed decision making far up a hierarchical ladder and if we are to bring it back down we need to practice our own decision making.