Sometimes it is crystal clear what one's duty is, and one does what is right and expected, right away without excuses proffered, or hesitation about consequences.
At other times, to select the proper choice, between two or three vying courses of action, is by no means obvious. One way through this dilemma, if time is not pressing, is to just sit on the situation for a few days, doing nothing. Often the best course of action will become evident on its own.
Another technique is to reflect backwards in one's experience to recall how one reacted under other, similar occurrences. How one handled the dilemma then may guide one through what to do now.
Another method is to follow one's hunches. Normally, if one is alert, reality oriented, sane, honest, humane and of good will, following one's hunches as to picking the right option from among murky selections is the right way to go.
Or one can rely on one's spouse, friends or professional experts for advice.
Finally, if one is wise, of commonsenical and sound judgment, one should use logic to mull over the pros and cons of each of the selections (time allotted must be kept in mind), and go with the most likely choice. If the option selected is proven two days hence to be the wrong one, one should reconsider and to with the second best option. One can, with a high probability of being correct, determine the right way to proceed.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
The Dream
The individualist will explain to the world what his dream consists of. Conceiving it, polishing it and completing it will define who he is and what his character is. He is growing into his dreamed-of role over a lifetime.
Mavellonialist Values
Mavellonialist values are those spiritual and ethical values critical to providing future generations with a common cultural reference point, from which to originate from and diversify from.
Individuators live in the now but require a broad historical ken that visually connects the past and the future to the vital present.
This complex, rich meaning system will comfort, guide, invigorate and challenge young people at the same time. Their intellectual and moral needs thus will be met.
Individuators live in the now but require a broad historical ken that visually connects the past and the future to the vital present.
This complex, rich meaning system will comfort, guide, invigorate and challenge young people at the same time. Their intellectual and moral needs thus will be met.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Rational Religion
Journal Entry--1-10-2012:
As the reader well knows, I favor rational religion. To utilize concepts, language, worldly experience, theology, and intellectual bracketing of actual reality into cognitively labeled and defined categories is not to distort ultimate reality, but it to reveal it as it is in an intelligible way.
The alternative, mystic, intuitive, irrational way of knowing God, Beings, and the angels is a very viable, informative, emotionally and spiritually rewarding means of encountering what is. The mystics of the world, who advocate that personal attention be utterly directed inward like yogis do, merge their once separated ego and soul into the Divine Soul. This is an arduous but legitimate means of coming to know God, likely the profoundest understanding of what is is gained this way.
Most of the time, the practitioners of rational religion theologically capture what is about as well as can be accomplished. Deism fills the theological space from where the lowest spiritual sensibility ends (emotional, fundamentalist faith) all the way to the very highest sensibility of the yogi, that irrational, felt union with the Divinity.
Reason will provide the most wholesome, and about the profoundest intellectual and spiritual contact, communication and understanding between God and the individual communicant.
As the reader well knows, I favor rational religion. To utilize concepts, language, worldly experience, theology, and intellectual bracketing of actual reality into cognitively labeled and defined categories is not to distort ultimate reality, but it to reveal it as it is in an intelligible way.
The alternative, mystic, intuitive, irrational way of knowing God, Beings, and the angels is a very viable, informative, emotionally and spiritually rewarding means of encountering what is. The mystics of the world, who advocate that personal attention be utterly directed inward like yogis do, merge their once separated ego and soul into the Divine Soul. This is an arduous but legitimate means of coming to know God, likely the profoundest understanding of what is is gained this way.
Most of the time, the practitioners of rational religion theologically capture what is about as well as can be accomplished. Deism fills the theological space from where the lowest spiritual sensibility ends (emotional, fundamentalist faith) all the way to the very highest sensibility of the yogi, that irrational, felt union with the Divinity.
Reason will provide the most wholesome, and about the profoundest intellectual and spiritual contact, communication and understanding between God and the individual communicant.
Monday, February 20, 2012
God The Law Giver
Journal Entry: 1-9-2012
The entire world is guided or mostly caused by laws of nature at work, and the Creator of nature wrote those laws so some semblance of cosmos and order could be realized.
I find this endlessly comforting. We are not alone in a barren, indifferent and bleak universe. The world is not without meaning or purpose. Supernatural intervention, guidance, assistance and reassurance are available for the asking. Many things are caused by natural or supernatural forces at work. Some are caused by a free person.
Things are not utterly random or the result of pure chance where happenings are without cause. Still, some things and events are purely random or occur by chance with no precipitating mechanism triggering them.
The entire world is guided or mostly caused by laws of nature at work, and the Creator of nature wrote those laws so some semblance of cosmos and order could be realized.
I find this endlessly comforting. We are not alone in a barren, indifferent and bleak universe. The world is not without meaning or purpose. Supernatural intervention, guidance, assistance and reassurance are available for the asking. Many things are caused by natural or supernatural forces at work. Some are caused by a free person.
Things are not utterly random or the result of pure chance where happenings are without cause. Still, some things and events are purely random or occur by chance with no precipitating mechanism triggering them.
Knee Injury
Journal Entry: 11-21-2011:
I blew out the MCL on my knee, last Thursday, 11-17-2011, at work. I am receiving workers' compensation and will be seeing the surgeon this afternoon.
While eating breakfast, I was staring out the kitchen glass door when I noticed a fat, woolly gray squirrel raiding frozen pie apples off of our tree.
It occurred to me that squirrels stash away food for the winter and build a nest high on a branch to winter in. Do they hibernate, semi-hibernate, or just lie low, moving about on warmer winter days? I do not know but if they have a ready food source available like these frozen apples there for the taking, they will move about on winter days to supplement what food that they have stored. Today is about 25 degrees and Mr. Squirrel is enjoying a feast.
Then the analogy came to me. If Mr. Squirrel has built his nest and stored away his food for the winter, it is enterprising of him to insure that he makes it through the winter by adding to his stash, or by eating fresh groceries.
Should not a human go into retirement with her with her nest egg large, ample and secure enough to last her to the end of her days? Of course. Like enterprising Mr. Squirrel, the enterprising woman should continue to work part-time after retirement not to have to deplete her stash too early, too hard.
I blew out the MCL on my knee, last Thursday, 11-17-2011, at work. I am receiving workers' compensation and will be seeing the surgeon this afternoon.
While eating breakfast, I was staring out the kitchen glass door when I noticed a fat, woolly gray squirrel raiding frozen pie apples off of our tree.
It occurred to me that squirrels stash away food for the winter and build a nest high on a branch to winter in. Do they hibernate, semi-hibernate, or just lie low, moving about on warmer winter days? I do not know but if they have a ready food source available like these frozen apples there for the taking, they will move about on winter days to supplement what food that they have stored. Today is about 25 degrees and Mr. Squirrel is enjoying a feast.
Then the analogy came to me. If Mr. Squirrel has built his nest and stored away his food for the winter, it is enterprising of him to insure that he makes it through the winter by adding to his stash, or by eating fresh groceries.
Should not a human go into retirement with her with her nest egg large, ample and secure enough to last her to the end of her days? Of course. Like enterprising Mr. Squirrel, the enterprising woman should continue to work part-time after retirement not to have to deplete her stash too early, too hard.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Moderation
Journal Entry from 11/20/2011:
The temperate man does not love with his whole heart and his whole soul, but he loves pretty much with his whole heart and whole soul. God is a thinker more than a feeler, so De encourages us to be a little logical at all times, and that slight detachment is the moderating influence, even regarding the noble sentiment of loving.
The lover is always an individualist first and foremost. The supreme virtue is self-love. This has nothing to do with cheap narcissism or being selfish. Where self-love is excessive and obsessive, it is transmogrified into self-loathing, a selfless trait. We are not to love ourselves excessively for that approach taints the soul. We are to love ourselves more than we hate ourselves. We always should and always will hate ourselves a bit, but moral victory is not doing this very much.
The virtuous man is a fairly rational. He will not love his soul mate with his whole heart and his whole soul, but he will love her mightily, permanently with a mature appreciation of her as a separate person called into this world to do her own thing too. This is not whole-hearted romantic love, but it does not burn out like that meteor either.
The virtuous man, in his love of God and love coming back from God, experiences powerful but not wholesale love. Wholesale love is too extreme, too ideal, too demanding of perfect devotion. Such violent, noisy, melodramatic and over-committed attachment smothers the recipient, robbing her of her desire to be independent and free-thinking. It is not sustainable over time.
Such volatile love clouds the relationship with misspeaking and misperception. Such love can lead to love being subverted by the will to control the other and subjugate her.
The perfect love (or as perfect as we can make it) is a strong, passionate but not maudlin, overwrought, wholesale love. The lover needs to calm down a bit. He needs to be a little logical about it, giving the other a little space and say.
Theology of Moderate Loving:
Fate is the Paradox and only Being that can love wholly and hate wholly at the same time.
God mostly loves and hates very little.
Satan mostly hates and loves very little.
Our task is to love more than we hate. We are to love but avoid extremist poses for that undermines our noble efforts.
The temperate man does not love with his whole heart and his whole soul, but he loves pretty much with his whole heart and whole soul. God is a thinker more than a feeler, so De encourages us to be a little logical at all times, and that slight detachment is the moderating influence, even regarding the noble sentiment of loving.
The lover is always an individualist first and foremost. The supreme virtue is self-love. This has nothing to do with cheap narcissism or being selfish. Where self-love is excessive and obsessive, it is transmogrified into self-loathing, a selfless trait. We are not to love ourselves excessively for that approach taints the soul. We are to love ourselves more than we hate ourselves. We always should and always will hate ourselves a bit, but moral victory is not doing this very much.
The virtuous man is a fairly rational. He will not love his soul mate with his whole heart and his whole soul, but he will love her mightily, permanently with a mature appreciation of her as a separate person called into this world to do her own thing too. This is not whole-hearted romantic love, but it does not burn out like that meteor either.
The virtuous man, in his love of God and love coming back from God, experiences powerful but not wholesale love. Wholesale love is too extreme, too ideal, too demanding of perfect devotion. Such violent, noisy, melodramatic and over-committed attachment smothers the recipient, robbing her of her desire to be independent and free-thinking. It is not sustainable over time.
Such volatile love clouds the relationship with misspeaking and misperception. Such love can lead to love being subverted by the will to control the other and subjugate her.
The perfect love (or as perfect as we can make it) is a strong, passionate but not maudlin, overwrought, wholesale love. The lover needs to calm down a bit. He needs to be a little logical about it, giving the other a little space and say.
Theology of Moderate Loving:
Fate is the Paradox and only Being that can love wholly and hate wholly at the same time.
God mostly loves and hates very little.
Satan mostly hates and loves very little.
Our task is to love more than we hate. We are to love but avoid extremist poses for that undermines our noble efforts.
Embrace Or At Least Massage Change
Journal Entry from 11/19/11:
Change is constant and predictable. Embrace it or at least review it up front. Do not deny that it is upon you or be afraid of it. Grab a hold of the reins of the steed named change upon which you are now riding.
If it is a technological change that is more advanced than what you are used to, and no way seems morally objectionable, feel okay about it. If traditional technology and morality are superior to and negatively threatened by this new way and means, reject the change, accept it only if its objectionable traits are curbed or partially accept it. BUT recognize its arrival, all the same.
Change is constant and predictable. Embrace it or at least review it up front. Do not deny that it is upon you or be afraid of it. Grab a hold of the reins of the steed named change upon which you are now riding.
If it is a technological change that is more advanced than what you are used to, and no way seems morally objectionable, feel okay about it. If traditional technology and morality are superior to and negatively threatened by this new way and means, reject the change, accept it only if its objectionable traits are curbed or partially accept it. BUT recognize its arrival, all the same.
One's Personal Fate
From My Journal, entry on 11-1902011:
Each person has a different fate from his neighbor. Some are luckier than others. Some suffer so much that it seems tragic, unequal and unfair. Why things happen the way they do is one of life's great mysteries.
Whatever happens to one, the correct, upbeat response is critical. Self-pity and a fatalistic surrender to what has just occurred to one are non-starters. One has to commence right away to make things better, but one has to commence from where one is at right now, not where one wishes one was at.
As Saul Alinsky wrote many years ago, the revolution starts from where you are at. One requires a loving faith and a enduring relationship with God to give one the resources, courage, means, confidence, will and sense of optimism to keep struggling upward, as a way of bettering one's situation.
One needs to identify a sensible plan of action for making things move in the right direction. One must sport an encouraging attitude--that irrepressible belief by effort and a plan, suffering may be ameliorated or converted into an opportunity. With a plan formulated and adopted, one needs the tenacity and grit to carry out the plan of recovery and renewal.
Each person has a different fate from his neighbor. Some are luckier than others. Some suffer so much that it seems tragic, unequal and unfair. Why things happen the way they do is one of life's great mysteries.
Whatever happens to one, the correct, upbeat response is critical. Self-pity and a fatalistic surrender to what has just occurred to one are non-starters. One has to commence right away to make things better, but one has to commence from where one is at right now, not where one wishes one was at.
As Saul Alinsky wrote many years ago, the revolution starts from where you are at. One requires a loving faith and a enduring relationship with God to give one the resources, courage, means, confidence, will and sense of optimism to keep struggling upward, as a way of bettering one's situation.
One needs to identify a sensible plan of action for making things move in the right direction. One must sport an encouraging attitude--that irrepressible belief by effort and a plan, suffering may be ameliorated or converted into an opportunity. With a plan formulated and adopted, one needs the tenacity and grit to carry out the plan of recovery and renewal.
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