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11. Letter to a Friend's daughter

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:21:58 -0800

11. Letter to a Friend's daughter.

1. There are No Judges

Not other people, not your lover, not your parents, not some god in the sky
or some church on earth, not a book - whether a religious book, or a loved novel,
or a book of Yoga. Even you do not have to spend much time judging
- just the judgments (important) that you make for survival in daily life,
and maybe a stocktaking for planning the future every now and then.
Really. Only you can live your life.
In the long run what people remember about you will be of little importance.
And their memory is short.
But the life you live while you are living needs to please you.
(But even this could be turned into a judgement and it should not be.)
A tree that grows on a rocky windy hillside, all twisted up, is at least as
"good" as a tree that grows in sheltered valley in a grove - tall and straight.
Maybe better, it has had to work harder to make its life.

2. Don't give away your power

If you let others judgements judge you - then you are giving them power,
giving away power which is yours.
If you listen too hard to the judgement of your friends or employers
or people with good advice - then you give them power.
You should listen to all and everybody to find out things,
to find out what is out there to take into account in planning useful actions.
But not to find out if you are OK.
You give yourself the OK, give yourself power.

I know that he is too good an example to be much use
But look at Obama.
Nobody in the center of public life has been more insulted
and really degraded.
But you hardly notice it, because he does not.
He knows it is there, but he keeps on moving on his own path,
towards his inner and public goals.
Because he knows that is who he is.

3. Know yourself. ACCEPT yourself.

Nobody is perfect. Far from it. Nobody. Nobody is 100% anything.
They are all trying to fight off being knocked over by the judgement of others,
or their own early terrors. Just as you accept the persona they present,
so they accept yours - whatever it may be.

Once you can know and ACCEPT yourself,
and they see that you can't be knocked over
and that you "believe" in the persona you present to them,
and will maintain it in the face of attack,
then they will accept it, and you.

Then you will be able to adopt the appropriate attitudes
to the situation without demeaning yourself,
and they will see that and respect you.
Appropriate attitudes include being attentive, respectful
and loving of others - and answering mail and other
approaches. Being in a position where you have to take
orders is not demeaning as long as you - and everybody
else if it comes to a test - know who you are and why you
are there. In fact it is a dignity to be respectful.

Then you can go forward to trying to be whatever you like,
making goals for yourself and not fear others, and not have fears.

Timidity is a waste of time
- that's all it is when you look back.
If you really know that there are no judges
then there is nothing to be timid about.
Practical limited fears yes, but not major ones.
In the end you will either accomplish what you want this week
or you will not. Enjoy.

4. People mostly take you at the value you give yourself

People mostly take you at the value you give yourself.
They are worrying about themselves - and cannot penetrate to your worries,
or if they can they still prefer to see the persona you give them
as long as you show by your own demeanor that this is who you are,
and are not shaken by superficial insults or setbacks.

If you are a beggar they treat you like a beggar.
If you accept yourself and know who you want to be - and believe in it
- they will tend to accept you as what you want to be
- even if they know things that might contradict that notion.

5. So then you can finally be free

Then you can decide for yourself how you want to live, what you enjoy doing
and pursue goals you want in the conditions of the real world.

You can see how what you enjoy doing might be of value to others.
And value yourself enough to get paid - in one way or another -
what the things you are doing are worth.
This includes having a lover who values you properly,
finding backers for your plans who believe in what you want to do,
getting paid fairly in a good job
(even in times of unemployment some people have good jobs),
raising money from others for projects organizations or causes you believe in
- and getting paid properly for doing so.
[My father was in the entertainment business,
and made more money in the depression than at any other time.]

What do people want?
Those around you, or in a particular business, or in the economy in general?
Find ways to be doing things you enjoy in a way that these things satisfy
some wants of others.
And you do not have to fixate on one thing. You can multitask if you want.
Or if you want to do nothing, think what a valuable wife you could be to
someone rich enough and who wants a wife who looks good, is a good
happy hostess or who parties up or whatever.

Whatever it is, if you value yourself then people will value you
- and you then have to turn that value
into real support in the world.

Karl

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11. Natural Religion

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:08:03 -0800

11. Natural religion.
Gods jumping around redesigning the world every hour

Any rough observation of nature - even that classical one
that we are born, we live, and we die - and thus when
we fully realize that we die, we have to realize that
our living is part of a process, not primarily a part of
a judgement of some abstract principals -
so any observation of nature has to involve some crude
notion of evolution and selection. This is not a commitment
to any very specific theory about genes and evolution, or
the relation of chance and adaptation in evolution, but simply
an awareness that the patterns of speicies that we see
are far too complex to be the product of a personal god.
The popular, if not the theological, Christian notion of God
and its relatives in other religions involves some sense of
an individual making specific individual decisions about
the world. As we see the way species radiate and flourish
or die out, we would have to have a weird image of such
a God rushing and jumping about redesigning the world of species
repainting the picture every day and hour, with no time left
for anything else. Only some simple local but relatively
automatic mechanism could spare this God of such a
comic image. And in some sense such a process of selection
if not self-evident is somehow intuitive.
This has widespread implications.
When I see a tree twisted out of shape by the winds on an
exposed rocky hillside, and compare it to a tree in a sheltered
grove rising straight up, I am not moved to see that comparison
in ethical terms. One tree does not seem to me better that the
other, more good or in a moral sense more successful, than the
other.
Similarly when I look at other species, lizards and ants and wild
mamals. or any of the other oddities of which nature abounds with
their design changing every minute - what a challenge this represents
to a deity. Is the more complex 'better' than that which is simple.
Is there one way to measure complexity?
Is a monkey better than a lizard?
Is a canary better than a snake?

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Keith and Lincoln Steffens

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:44:43 -0800

Keith and Lincoln Steffens

The problem Sarah Palin has, someone just said,
is that she doesn't KNOW what she doesn't know.

Keith Olbermann has delivered two rants ("Comments")
in the last couple of weeks that are truly works of art.

One was on "real" Americans.

The other - on Monday - was on LOVE, the
Califonia ban on gay marriage, and Christianity.

Christian love and the McNamara brothers:

When the McNamara brothers, union leaders,
were put on trial for dynamiting a newspaper
building in Los Angeles in 1911, with Clarence
Darrow as their lawyer, there was at least as much
outrage as at 9/11/2003. Seeing that his case
was in trouble Darrow was interested in a settlement
and Lincoln Steffens offered to rry to get community
and business leaders to support such a settlement.
HE did this successfully - including the notoriously
anti-Union Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times.
Everything was going forward until the Sunday before
the settlement was to be announced. At which point
Christian churches all across the country called for the
death of the McNamara brothers.
   Steffens argument to the leaders for accepting the
settlement was the effectiveness of the Christian
'golden rule'.    He regarded his effort as an "experiment"
to see whether the righteous - not just "sinners" could
accept the message of Jesus. "Mercy" (and forgiveness), he
said, "is scientific."

    "I read the New Testament to discover the vision and
plan of Christ. It was astonishing, radical, complete,
but when I went to the churches I did not hear it preached,
and of course the Christians did not practice it. I preached
Christianity and the effect was a shock to the congregations.
I preached in Christ's spirit, too, quietly, literally, with none
of the force with which I had heard Christian ministers
proclaim righteousness and denounce sinners.
My sermons were as loving as the Sermon on the Mount,
for, verily, I believed then that the righteous can be and
must be saved . . . not only the sinners. No use. The regular
members of the Christian churches, thinking they have
Christianity, can no more get it than the righteous, thinking
they are good, can be made good -- for anything. Christianity
will not work with Christians.
    But as Jesus learned by hard experience and taught so clearly,
Christianity does work with sinners. I proved that for myself.
I preached Christianity. Whenever I wanted to get something done
I appealed to sinners for help, and the help came."
(Lincoln Steffens, An Autobiography, page 670.)

    I cannot tell the whole story of what happened. But I can urge
you to read Steffens wonderful chapters, pages 658-689 of his
Autobiography
(your public library? - soon the copyright, hopefully will run out,
and we will be able to read it on the internet, as we should have
long ago. No one is making money on this book.
It should be in the public domain.!!!!!)

Keith makes clear that the stand of the churches on the
Gay Marriage ban was also a failure to understand Jesus'
and other people's message of Love.
Christianity as HATE has got to stop.
Keith's "comment" on this should somehow be sent to
EVERY church and Christian organization, and to such
Christians as are known in the U.S..

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This is Shakespeare's world.

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 05:55:34 -0700

At my age I have come to realize - perhaps the
last 2 months have made everybody realize -
that the best guide to our world is Shakespeare's
world. And that everything that we see that makes
it look like it's not Shakespeare's world is an
illusion.

Also I've been reading the fairly long last stories
of Checkhov that Edmund Wilson organized together
several years ago in an Anchor Book called
_Peasants and other Stories_ . They were written in
1903-1904 just before his death, and are a portrait
of Russion society just before the revolution of 1905,
which Checkhov did not live to see.

The serfs have been emancipated and become, some of
them, businessmen, shopkeepers, engineers - but are still
not accepted socially, and are unsure of their lives.
The factory workers live in "dorms" like animals.
The peasants are still starvingly poor.
And so on.

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BALANCE - Not everything has 2 sides

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:09:50 -0700

I hate "balance" -
When it comes to matters of fact - no matter how
complicated the facts - then there is right and wrong.
There is no "balanced" way to present this, as if there
were 2 equal sides.

Equal time is turning all our reporting into a farce.

Reporters ought to report. What Where When Who How
and not give opinions based on nothing but their spin on
events. Spin, when they are not even qualified to present
Spin, let along expert opinions.

And "experts" should not be paraded in pairs, as if that
made the coverage fair.

Do 2 + 2 make five or four?

Is Obama a Muslim. For a campaign to say this
is a LIE, not a point of vew.
If he says that I am NOT going to raise taxes on
anyone earning less than $250,000 a year, either
he says it or not. Will he do it? What is his intention?
These are different questions but they are lessing confusing
than the lies being put out there.

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only a Shadowgraph

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:49:19 -0700

In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holo-
caust. Allmen.

Life is a collective fantasy with real landmines and wildflowers, trees
real obligations
real pills
real loneliness and sorrows
real pain
real redwoods (maybe)
real dreams

I am trying to write a blog in which I am able to put the ideas,
the personal observations, reactions to media and events,
beautiful language, music, performances, and other things
that occur to me or that I feel strongly about -
as well information I think is special or useful
and anything else I want to say because my friends have
their own concerns and get tired.
This way I can say these things freely.

Also there will be some special Pages:
some articles of mine on Finnegans Wake
some things relevant to Leo Reisman

Welcome
comments from those interested in what they read
are always welcome. Please don't flame.

fadograph

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