Validate Me

I was gonna write something here. Shit was gonna be tight. Profound with like, concepts, and insights and shit. But shit.

I just wanch’all to reka-nize muh feels.

“Nothing is as good as it used to be”, landmark study reports.

In a landmark interdisciplinary effort from researchers at the University of Maryland, contributing historians, sociological researchers, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists have determined that as of 1994, nothing is in fact as good as it used to be.

While folk wisdom has long concluded that “the good old days” have come and gone, the team and UofM, led by anthropologist Nas Taljik have confirmed that, after the release of Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 post-noir crimedy “Pulp Fiction”, all forms matter, socio-cultural meme, and subjective reports of satisfaction “just really fucking sucks”.

“We were hesitant at the outset to strive for such an ambitious result, as the modern age having acclimatized people to a higher standard of expectation might account for some skewing in the results. Things that might not be so bad these days, like the music, could be under-appreciated by a spoiled ear,” related Dr. Taljik.

To account for this potential, samples were drawn from a broad spectrum of age categories, nationalities, income levels, health conditions, and geographic locations. Despite implementation difficulties in some phases of the research, the reports -along with historical reviews of the quality of material and social cultures for long-term trend analysis, researchers managed to place the golden age sometime between time immemorial (6 July 1189) and before the creation of the universe. It was found however, that an astounding 97.2% of all respondents agreed with the statement “It’s just not the same as it was before”, and even relatively new arenas of life, such as the internet, have suffered from becoming milquetoast, mainstream, overly commercialized or commodified, and otherwise just shitty. Even the music, it is was determined, hasn’t survived unscathed, peaking in about the year 1977 with only brief jumps in the 1990s before it’s death knell upon the release of Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.

Some confusion arose in the poorer nations regarding the questionnaire phrase “nothing is as good as it used to be”, with some poorer nations understanding this to be an attempt as the justification of their disadvantage by the wealthy study-conducting Americans.

“Yes, the Indian government reps in particular was quite incensed at the outset” field analyst Les Gobahk told us, “but once the semantic issue was cleared up, they sent us long letter about Baba Ghandi and the recent repealing of homosexual-tolerant laws in the country. ‘It blows so hard’ they lamented”.

Douglas Adams intuited these findings in the opening of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” However, we can’t go back now, and researchers at UofM recommend that “we all just suck it up, cause chances are shit’s going to get way worst before anything improves”.

A Brief History of the Real Conspiracy

[Adapted from a facebook retort, I may polish it up at some point]

The nature of that “unawakened” state that is talked about by the self-described “conscious” today (besides the too numerous instances of those who use this trope to defend a glazing over of consistent thought, and the resistance it meets from facts and the people who carry them) is most very likely (humble, but very very confident) a vestigial tool of survival that has and still can be vital to our survival. It reinforces a mindset of “this environment is a threat, I need to manipulate the surroundings to secure myself”.

This becomes power politics. Domination by implicit and explicit force and coercion. Pr-historically, this I imagine was the “alpha-centric pack”, where people stuck with whomever proved themselves able to get you through the day. As humans, settling was an outgrow of this security/predictability mindset. It can’t really be said that they could help it at this point, dunno for sure if we even can now, but we strive for these things, and create social institutions, value sets, castes, and creeds based upon this pre-cognitive drive.

Through the last few thousand years, it builds to the rudiments of the malevolent forces today. You get mysticism and writing, advanced speculation, and nations/states with significantly different peoples. More stability and security in terms of agriculture and technology (warfare is getting bigger, badder, and more destabilizing when it happens) enable bigger populations. Eventually, we hit the borders of known/reachable worlds. Regional power balance becomes a big factor.

I can only speak to Western Europe and America at this point, but people are people in the animal sense. The situation of technology, transportation, military strategy, and population gets so that politics becomes as weaponized as war, and as much of it is “cold war” as “hot”. The stability of society makes people comfortable and inexperienced and quick to fright. The use of money to buy rights (as is essentially what happens) and resources and the co-operation of lower class employees means you have to keep people happy to a reasonable degree by this point. Capitalism becomes much more intricate, precise, political, and global. Corporations and states bleed into each other, on the glass ceiling of higher education and law (for which there are direct and indirect fees only affordable by some).

The classes are now in a sense very minorly different species, biopsychosocially, and the balance of political power and the purchase of means of tricking/placating “the public” (a very self-satisfied, ignorant beast, like a cat confined happily within a wealthy home). By our century propaganda/P.R. becomes the ultimate weapon, and the educated populace is Taylorized, individualized, and buried in cultural candy of all varieties.This is done very purposely and maliciously, as a means of extracting profit, essentially a trick device used to give slaves the illusion that they’re playing too.

It’s not out of a Disney-like hollow evil, but the conditioning in of elitism, very-old-world models of psychology/sociology, and the necessary pressures of the monetary/market/profit/ownership mentality that stretches way way back to that initial animal mentality I mentioned, which determined to conquer the environment before being conquered. This is not a moral judgement, it’s just what that mentality is. Science has a similar orientation toward the world, especially in the west.

And having used that as our modus operandi for so long, it’s now a first nature which is really own a deeply ingrained second nature, and not inevitable. But difficult to change, for certain. And seeing this in people, but deciding it too hard to change, the tendency reinforced by the social values, environment, and cultural institutions is that of differential advantage. This creates the ruling class (whom being presumably social apes as we all, create the own subcultures, cults, values, perspectives, etc. in and centred upon their elevated strata), the behavior of which recordedly includes:
-the manipulation of the public through religious narrative and exhortation, or secular sects such as liberal humanism, etc. again, no value judgement, just what’s happening)
-very purposeful media and advertising, designed to elicit psychological reactions, agreement
-fraudulent, tokenistic means of participation to permit the lip-service paid to equality, freedom, education, etc. (paycheques, voting, CNN polls…)
-the staging of false-flag events from the Fire of Rome, the Reichstag fire, the Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Harbour, and controversially, 9/11 (and if you’re not well-read in political and military history, this will likely be rejected by your brain and create cognitive dissonance, don’t identify with it, or say it’s a good or bad reaction, just observe it, and explore it, ask why it helps, if it helps, where it hinders, what might contradict the beliefs involved… and read more)
-The clandestine manipulation of world events from “economic hitmen”, to the importation of guns and drugs whilst publicly denouncing and “warring on” such things, the creation of violent resistance, labelled terrorism, to thus enable a moral veneer upon imperialist goals (all, again, stemming back uncontroversially to that simple kill or be killed mentality)
-And as in any strata, drug use, sexual abuse of children and adults, and infinite weirdities abound, and given the public, “good image” nature of these people, and the wealth, reach, and privilege they have, it’s some of the sickest and most unhealthy behaviour that takes place on this planet (look into the CIA and child abuse, specifically, if you want something to sink teeth into).

And I could go on. Some of these power blocs (which concentrate themselves by nature) among the royal, wealthy, connected, and elite organized and officiate themselves, others prefer “Individualism”, and others yet operate in very cult-like way. But it’s a different level of human activity than what you and I ever come close to. It’s purposeful. Organized. Malicious. And very real.

This painting was posted, captioned “This needs no comment”

Well I think it does.

I think it may for some:

At work here is the human inevitability of the pain/pleasure principles, what is often misrepresented as our unavoidable “selfishness”.

The human interacts and relates to the other animals based on his uses for them with regards to pain and pleasure.

The cat is useful for companionship, exercising the nurturing/biophilic and eliciting the positive brain states of “loving an animal”. The horse may also have this relationship with him, though it looks more like the horse is there for work.

The other animals present are also utilitarian in their relation to the human, bringing the pleasure of food, economic security, and a place in society as the provider of food. Being a caring animal, the human maintains emotional distance from these animals to minimize his pain.

The animals not present (wolves, gorillas, etc.) have not proven useful in a domestic sense, or haven’t been widely culturally adopted (i.e. a subjective contrived sense of pleasure has not been idealized in most other animals; some people have monkeys or other pets though). They may present threats/pain to other animals, or simply hold no pleasure through their inability to break them to human preferences.

Other humans, typically not involved in the production of food on sustainable, smaller scales (nor large, for the matter) widen their circle of nurturing pleasure utility to include all animals, which is more sustainable for them, their lives not requiring the direct conflict of the nurturing and feeding roles, and its painful effects upon the human emotional tendencies. They do subject themselves to more pain in light of the reality of much deliberate non-human death in their world, however, this cost can be arguably written of at the species level, where symbiotic relationships with other animals, and the quality of human/mammal favouring environmental conditions are protected and brought to the attention of other humans who are increasingly disconnected from these realities.

It is important to underline that both of these humans (representative of two points on an infinite, multifaceted spectrum) are responding to their own pain/pleasure principle, or seeking to minimize pain and maximize pleasure, in both the more fixed, and more fluid and self-directed aspect of their human being. The suffering of other animals is only consequential to the human via this pathway (or rather, the physiological and psychological systems, and the evolutionary inter-dependences between species and members and environments that they constitute); the pain of the animal does not “actually touch” the human. Restated, the human cannot, in the sense our language and narratives conceive, be anything but “selfish” or interested ultimately in anything but it’s own experience of pain or pleasure. In some humans, this may be entirely represented by the subjective definition pleasure as absolute non-violence. Others, usually by circumstantial crisis and necessity, can strip the moral consideration from even the death and consumption of other humans, though only for a short while, and with psychological repercussions. Most people exist in between, and with their own cultural peculiarities regarding those animals they “love” and those they “use”, both actions essentially being a “use”, though this is distorted by the nature of our emotional experience, if not more objectively examined.

Due to the inherent lack of any ultimate, defining morality in reality itself (morality being a product of an organism’s experiential nature and subjective between species and even among members of the more socially complex species), whatever strategy results in the subjectively defined “success” of the species, or its objective survival (which, when selected as the measure of success, is itself actually a subjectively defined success- there’s no reason that a species surviving is inherently a “good” thing) is hence a valid one, and a valid moral one at that.

lol feminists

You can’t live with them, you can’t live with them.

these guys have a constructive facebook conversation, ha

UGH, rights?

Gay people don’t deserve rights.

That’s right. I said it. Gay people don’t deserve rights.
But nor do straight people.
Or white people.
Or aboriginal peoples.
And why?

Because they deserve better than the flimsy conception of rights, which are no more than a placeholder for our understandings about the way the world works, and the way our unique (or not) physiologies function within that world, and together, as a social collective. To write down a right makes it too easy to presume as granted. Too easy to forget that our real, active, scary participation is required every day to keep that piece of paper meaningful in a cynical world.

(And would you have read another one of my long-winded, preachy updates withOUT such an inflammatory title?)

It’s not a right. Whatever you think you should be able to do, or be free from, or have given to you is not a magical rule from some god or law of physics. Rights don’t exist least of all pertaining to objects outside you and how your ideas about them are treated.

There are the things & conditions you need to survive, those you need to live comfortably, and those you need to flourish as a human. That’s it.

There’s nothing inherent about you getting them, keeping them, or deserving them. I think people should have them all in abundance, but that’s a recognized opinion, not pretending to be a self-evident fact that I can use violence to enforce on others (as it is that our system does when sufficiently convinced of its “right” to this or that).

Those of my peers who seek redress for the terrible biological, psychological, and environmental have a favourite conception of this redress: namely the declaration of “rights”, signifying the social contracts between ourselves, and our resources, that we’ve recognized fundamentally underscore a high quality of life and hence lower rates of crime, social conflict, and destruction of habitat- either absolutely (like food, water, shelter) or more circumstantially with regards to our technological & scientific development (internet access, what access to “education” could/should mean). Having seemingly understood what is needed to heal our wounds, I feel that rather than apply the medicine, our habit has been to tie pretty bows around the vial (so to speak), and place it in a very ornate cabinet to signify our recognition to all. “We know what people’s rights are!” we proudly sniff, but we woefully miss a step; two if you ask me and George Carlin. Most noticeably is the lacking application: we say it, but don’t do it. We KNOW everyone needs food, water, shelter, education, socialization opportunities, communication tools, and a buffering practice against the stressors of modern, urban life (like meditation, TLC, shinrin yoku…), but we fail, very often, in delivering. And I think the reason lays in how we THINK about and hence act about “rights”. To quote George Carlin:

‘I hate to spoil the fun. But there’s really no such thing as rights. They’re imaginary. We made it up. Like the Boogie-man (…) Rights are just an idea. A cute idea I’ll give you that. But that’s all. Cute. And fictional.”
– George Carlin’

We forget they aren’t real. They a formal recognition of VERY REAL physical referents, but themselves cannot be measured or experimented on or located anywhere in reality. The physical referents are our metabolic processes, our social brains with mirror neurons and process of complex guilt and jealousy, our ever-quickening info-stream and the effects that has on our cultures. We know that we ALL need an equitable access to certain things for our lives to go smoothly on this planet -and this irrespective of who “owns” the food, who powers the grid. It doesn’t matter how we get them per se, or the moralizing we’d like (or not like) to put in the way: People need access to food, or they’ll steal it. People need homes or they’ll always feel unsafe and very likely be dangerous. And to ensure everyone knows what we know, we formalize these understandings into declarations and charters.

Well, I worry about “formalizing” them. Every time we put one down on a big, shiny, laminated piece of paper in a politician’s office, we leave it precisely where it will be cared about least, and with the greatest potential to be glossed-over, overlooked, or even totally ignored. By the time it hits that wall, it’s a token gesture. It’s efficacy has run dry. We transmute the understandings printed upon it, in the same way the primary teacher of a religion or philosophy has their message transmuted when they pass away, and their works are committed to papers and sermons. The inner, social/emotional volition -the direct, reality-touching understanding that sparked initial action- is dimmed, or wholly snuffed, and the lesson becomes rote. Passionate at first, but eventually taken for granted, never questioned, and hence, rarely understood. And impotent, for obviously we have may starving, killing, and dying in the shadows of our charters.

“Oh, it’s a RIGHT, they HAVE to give us those!” we reasonably reason, and forget to do much of the work (or forgetting that we, personally MUST work at all) to uphold these rights; this is the “work” that great economic thinkers have waxed romantically on about- not just breaking rocks and heaving boxes and flipping burgers and commission sales. Without understanding that these “rights” are not metaphysical laws that magically keep us safe, but scientific understandings of what keep humans safe, happy, and sociable, that must be practiced, and lived, and defended when threatened to be effective (and doubly so in the economic system we use, which directly threatens nearly every “right” to which we stake a claim), too many people take their rights for granted, and in doing so, possibly help cost the rest of us ours.

“Too political” they call those who do speak up, not realizing every act -especially silence and complicity- is 100% politically charged and declarative of taking a side. Acknowledging the physical referents of rights is a good thing. Thinking of them as “rights” is not the most functional option. For one must be entirely and consciously political about every act they undertake. All actions will affect the status of what is accepted in your society. Every step is a vote. Calling them “rights” ignores the basis in measurable, verifiable reality that these preconditions for peace and a thriving life are based on for an emotionally-charged rhetorical device. You can’t say “Take away their rights!” in a debate, you’d lose right away. That’s what this word is good for: emotional manipulation of a crowd mentality. Getting our enemies booed in parliament. Framing a tyrant to ignorant, angry crowds. But too easily that conception can be turned on us, for the “rights” of the corporation, or the amoebic jellybean in the womb, or the stockholders, or the assets and interests of those with no understanding or regard for social & environmental sustainability. And this is precisely because of the effect the language of “rights” has on abstracting us away from the understandings they are based on, that many of us may never experience in our lives.

Until you, a presumably “good” person, knows the conflict between being fed, and stealing from your community, or peace and self-preserving violence, or lawfulness and dutiful civil disobedience, you may never know why rights exist. And that may be part of the problem. I do not think we, in the west as a whole, and definitely less so the higher up the income bracket you go, understand on an experiential level, why we have or need or should fight for our rights. Except if it’s the fight (Dun dun!) for our right (dun dun!) to parrrrrrrrrr-tyyyy! (sorry, I’m a ninties kid)

Maybe we could use a little social collapse. Show us what we’re really made of. And what happens to a “right” when you don’t put your heart, mind, and body on the line to defend it.

Why Don’t We Have Both?

 I’m always told that “people just aren’t good [quality, moral] enough”. Any solution to our problems is in each individual changing themselves, their situation, their community. But they just don’t, so we just can’t. And I believe this ignores a massive half of what’s going on with these nincompoop people. Here’s a commonplace comment of the kind I mean:

What this fails to see is the trick that words are playing on our conception of the reality we’re talking about, partially cause it’s abstract, and not what most people practically need to deal with in deciding their daily life. There is no real-world, physical referent separating of our economic systems, civilizations, and individual behaviours. Each word highlights concepts and process that are interdependent, and arise in symbiosis. One cannot be, or affect, or change without the other.

That the larger systems “flow from” the smaller is true, but not in the sense the average westerner is wont to think. They have this strawman image of a human, where he is a totally free, 100% self-directed, and competently equipped being, with reference to a subjective set of moral imagined to be objective. Nothing is free from anything else. Your choices are as much the choices of the system as they are your own. And the systems you are a part of are constituted BY you. Both views are right. What’s important is the difference in repercussions of each view; a) You are responsible, or b) You and your systems are mutually reinforcing, with certain soecific things arguably originating at different levels of the micro/macro.

The first, a) presumes crime and punishment is an appropriate world-view, and if we jut take offenders to task, and tell people to buck up, and say “it seems so obvious!”, then the desired situation will arise. Nothing is wrong with the system because either the system is presumed the pinnacle of achievement, or it is altogether not considered, brushed off as “Conspiracy stuff” or “pinko cop outs”, etc.

The second, b) recognizes that you must reinforce the behaviour you want in the systems that guide behaviour (ex. media, arts, structures of resource allocation and decision making systems…), as well as USING your behaviour, to create the system that does so (the second step isolated is what the first view tries to do, but while ignoring the systemic whole of which people are subject parts, for emotional/ideological reasons and such peonic buttfrustrations). The ignorance of the fact that behaviour WILL NOT ARISE that is not reinforced by the cultural, procedural, and biological/psychological state of the organism, is ignorance of the key to a better world. The both/and view of nature & nurture.

drones drones, go away

The drone is not a weapon designed to increase the accuracy, while minimizing impact on the surroundings, and prevent the loss of home land lives.

It is to abstract and remove the act of war to a machine, to offset the psychological difficulty and personal cost by one degree, as the whole military apparatus does in its hierarchical, small group structure.

This makes for an easier military to run, longer lived soldiers (in the short term), and public indifference who are now very removed from the killing, and can ignore its affects to taste. The drone operates on social and emotional realms of experience, not only the ostensible material. And those who design these drone know this.

If We Can Find Our “Nature”, should we align or transcend, or in doing one, both?

Could it be that we have naturally inborn conflicting tendencies, like that for motherhood and that for war, for survival and suicide, and are just a fundamentally troubled being?

Might some conditions be considered a distortion of an underlying nature, causing the conflict to arise in its disruption of a necessary dynamic?

From where this distortion? I believe our ability as humans to act contrary to our own organism’s health, safety, and even reality can affect these distortions. This ability is our “story creating” ability, or what manifests as the “be an American!” phenomenon, or the “left” and “right” communities, in their various shades and juxtapositions. It’s what varnishes religion with the seal of reality, and what creates “archetypes” or “stereotypes” or our very own preconceived opinions as we encounter other individuals in our daily life. It can be oversimplifying, and reactive, and can create “enemies” and “badness” and “evil” and suffering, if not matured into a human ability, like physically being stronger than others, or socially avoiding the wanton “breaking of others’ hearts”. It’s extremes are what we call cults, elites, and mental illnesses [and what I’ve called distortions].

I find it, as an opinion, unintuitive that the human organism would be an inherently, unwaveringly self-interfering being. That nothing can be done, or that it is the hitherto fully developed state of humans -as a range of potentialities- to behave in self-defeating ways on the macro scale (beyond our lifetimes and localities, etc.) is not intuitive to me given the great creativity of humans, and our survival to date. To be so definitive would also require more proof than simply along history of having corrupt, violent, selfish, contrary, and small-minded individuals amongst those working to expand, to include, to unite, to inform, and to give back to the people and planet that sustained them, in reverence ti a perceived complex, subtle network being the Earth.

I find it no more inherent that we are absolved of conflict inside and out, and that humans are inherently buddhas or some judeo-christian extraction of “moral” and “good” (which would inform my personal cultural ideas of these pseudo-subjects, right and wrong). These are themselves defined by us, and I think for each of our own interests, in some way. In the same manner that calling an animal “smart” or “dumb” on the basis of its ability to perform a task meaningful subjectively to humans (which is what a lot of people do, in fact calling not only uncomprehending, but simply indifferent animals “dumb”; such arrogance), you cannot call someone “bad” on the basis of your good. It does nothing to help the understanding of the situation, except to outline your chosen (and often, unconsciously “unchosen”) preference, and their alignment therewith.

It’s not as good or bad I root my view of the inherent human, but as an array of interrelated biological propensities, many indistinct from the social environment, and their development along certain regulated processes (cell-reproduction, child-through-adult psychology, etc.) in casual concert with the physical and social environments. Or something like that. To say “the human” in the sense of our individual meat person object, is not to refer to enough of the system -both in detail and breadth of the world covered- and I want to keep clear that I think we have both an inherent nature, and an inextricable connection to what we grow up in (social, nutritional, ecological…), and that various definition of “we” would necessarily include these.

Following closely from that picture is a malleable, if too-complex and poorly-understood human being. There are aspects of ourselves that will be around as long as this present physical, genetic constitution, and these socioeconomic processes make up our defined selves, materially speaking. But the manifestation of these (earlier I called them “propensities” to stress their subjective nature) cannot be predicted by any know modelling or prediction. I cannot give you enough information about my DNA, my upbringing, my culture, and biochemistry to have you give me a picture of what I will look like at 30, in all these areas. Epi-genetic changes alter my DNA’s expression along the way. The mores of cultures shift, and today it seems to happen within single generations. And the understanding of all that we are as a physical being, let alone that combined with the compounds of the daily human experience, is not complete, to say the least.

There’s more than a reductionist individualist perspective wants to believe. And I get that, it’s simpler to blame individuals who cannot conform than to account for a system of variable, and perhaps identify the socioeconomic paradigm itself. It’s certainly easier to scare than to inform. And it’s one of those propensities again, if I try to reinforce what I was raised to believe… UNLESS I was raised by people conscious enough to raise me to believe that what I was raised to believe should be questioned, and everything else likewise.

We need to become conscious created beings, in that sense, if we are to persist into the future, and what I’m trying to say is that this is possible. The aspect of our beings in our control (both that selves can control within, and those which we can stimulate and manipulate in each other) are sufficient to create the critically thinking, humble, patient, healthy, tolerant, sober (not like drugs and alcohol… more like accepting hard truths, and being 100% globally transparent in sensitive matters), and good-humoured people that can have the effect necessary on the world of inevitable followers, people of learning (their pretentious counter-parts), and the social institutions and global practices that pervade.

To do this, I think we must both align with and transcend our ‘nature’. The states of our being which reflect contentment, evenness, peace, longevity, vitality, sturdiness, depth… these I think point to a preferable goal, since we must always choose a goal before advancing with beliefs and behaviours, even if we aren’t aware of the process. These experiences are in our nature -in that they are experienceable by theoretically all people- and our nurture -regarding the treatment of each individual (which likely differs between individuals) that is necessary to bring these states about.

The aspects of the biology, the culture, or the environment, or the bio-psycho-social pressures which do not support these states can be treated in a few ways to maintain the beings I’ve proposed as potentially desireable (and I posit this holds, whatever the beings you wish to be among). You may adjust the social pressures:

-Ex. sexual positivism, gender equality, fluid identity norms, etc. can alleviate issues related to repression, abuse, ostrasization, and the social, physical, and structural violence resultant; the malleable social values of people can be consciously changed through information flowing inward from outside the culture, or through various means of self-realization, and cultural mores may be erected with maintain these flexible policies.

You may adjust the environmental pressures:

-Ex. there is not enough food around here, and the group moves on to a location with more abundance sources of sustenance.

Or, as often neglected (or distorted in games of blaming and justifying fear) you may adjust the psychological pressures:

– Ex. Through meditation, and less reactive, more stable emotional being can be achieved, and a sameness of being with regards to  sexual passion, ego/reputation, and excitability of faculties of irritation, pain, or fear. A gradual, incremental, and paradoxical journey, this honing of one’s mind acts to enhance your every ability and perception, slowing and steadying the very quality of your perception, and making peaceful, wide, and wise your consideration of the experience around you. As this happens your language to describe things may change to reflect a new understanding. Your interests, sensitivities, and humour may change. However, the total abolition of reaction may be a difficult task, and I wouldn’t worry about making yourself indifferent to the world through meditation (not so much as through acceptance of a narrow, flat, plastic reality that you can stand to consciously live in, and under which you subvert your authentic expression in exchange for consistency and banality). You go on theoretically forever inwardly, and will at a certain point decide you’re probably good to go with mindfulness anyway.

I don’t think “accept it and enjoy the ride down” is good enough, people. We can create the conditions around ourselves, using forethought, and scientific ingenuity, that inevitably give rise to healthy, whole, updating, creating beings that don’t destroy themselves or their home in the process, with a wild panoply of variation and subjective angle to dig your teeth into during your 150 or so year human super existence. That’s what I see baby, and I’m not the only one.