There were no pictures on this day. I did have an encounter with a man and his grandson that I posted at Facebook...
I was just returning from the store to the motel, walking through the parking lot, and an older man (short, black, skinny, with gray hair--maybe 60?) and his grandson (cute little kid) walked up and asked me if I wanted to buy two cigarette lighters for a dollar. He pulled out a handful of slightly used lighters that he probably collected from around town. His hand was bandaged and he held a family dollar bag with a loaf of bread in the other hand.
I told him I didn't need them, but I'd give him a dollar anyway. He really was persistent that I choose two lighters. I told him I already had two lighters, so I was all set. He thanked me, and took the dollar.
As he walked away he said, "Have a Merry Christmas". I wished it back. Then he stopped and we looked at each other for a moment. And, he said "And, have a safe New Year. We're gonna need it!"
I nodded, and said, "Yes we are."
He smiled, and there was a twinkle in his eye. I can't explain it...
He told his grandson--who had sat down on the pavement to play with a bottle cap, "Let's get going, Johnny, I sure is tired."
The boy strained to get up, and said, "Yeah, papa, me too."
It struck me that they'd probably been walking for hours, "selling" lighters.
The man wouldn't beg. He felt like he had to DO something for his money. And, the kid was along for the "ride". How sad I felt, at that moment, knowing that the kid had to watch his grampa walk up to people who probably rejected him most of the day and watch him gather dollars. Of course the "selling lighters" thing was just a front for begging, but I think a legitimate one.
The other thing that occurred to me was that he was just a regular guy. He wasn't - as far as I knew - a veteran (though he certainly could have been, but usually they will use that information to beg as well).
Though I greatly honor the veterans who served and are now struggling, and I think they deserve to be a major priority for our giving this season, I would like to suggest that most people on the street are not veterans. They deserve a lot of attention too. And, even if there is no veteran around to give to, maybe we can give to the regular guy (or gal). People shouldn't be ordered and prioritized when they are in need.
Need is something that doesn't step to the back of the line and wait patiently for the heroes to be helped first. People are people.
So, when you give, just give. There should be no thinking going on. The thinking is fine before and afterward. But if justice should be blind, so should mercy.
[This story is perhaps a bit more emotional to me since my own granddad passed into the Light yesterday, just as I was stepping off the bus here.]
At 4:30 pm, I decided to take a nap so that I could stay up late and work on my day's blog post. Setting my alarm for 6:30, I slept well. When the alarm went off, I felt like I could just keep sleeping, but really wanted to get the day's post up. So, I rose and wrote up the adventure from the night before. It took quite a while--longer than I thought it would. I was also distracted by communicating on Facebook. And I finally finished at 3:30 am.
I went to bed expecting to get six good hours of sleep. But, instead, had what I call "the form filling" dreams that I sometimes get. These are tiny dreamlets of frustratingly intense monotony. I am usually doing something like filling in fields on a spreadsheet all night. I can never remember exactly what the context is in the morning. I just recall images; writing something, realizing I misspelled it (or whatever), and having to go back and redo it. On this night I remember processing pictures and trying to decide how best to write things in the blog, without ever really getting anywhere.
Since the day turned out to be pretty boring, I'm going to offer a small essay about a concept I've been developing for a couple years now, called, "the point of maximum affectability". The following may seem a bit mundane and self-apparent--while also being somewhat difficult of understanding, but I'd like to explore it anyway.
* * * * * * *
THE POINT OF MAXIMUM AFFECTABILITY
Over these last few years I've noticed that there is a kind of "best practices" way of doing just about everything.
The simplest example, and the thing that sparked the idea (ha!) was when I built a fire at a friend's party before leaving Maine. I noticed (as I'm sure you have before) that there seemed to be a place in the kindling where blowing on it produced the fastest growth of flame. In my plodding way, I tried just about every point on the hemisphere of possibilities around the top of the fire pit. There was only one particular point that worked most efficiently. Since then, I've repeated the experiment many times, and always there is a best place.
The simplest example, and the thing that sparked the idea (ha!) was when I built a fire at a friend's party before leaving Maine. I noticed (as I'm sure you have before) that there seemed to be a place in the kindling where blowing on it produced the fastest growth of flame. In my plodding way, I tried just about every point on the hemisphere of possibilities around the top of the fire pit. There was only one particular point that worked most efficiently. Since then, I've repeated the experiment many times, and always there is a best place.
I observed this same kind of effect when washing out a five gallon bucket that I used to use for all kinds of things. There was always a certain angle, direction and flow of water that worked best. Always just one. Now, with these physical procedures, all of this is certainly a bit anecdotal. There may indeed be different points which were equally effective--but choosing the one that was most apparent made it the point of maximum affectability (or, POMA, for brevity-sake).
Nevertheless, since being involved in the IWALLK Journeys, I began to notice that this same kind of phenomenon would happen making decisions about sleep spots when on the road; chopping or cutting branches to excavate the area, the method of setting up the tent, the way the stakes would be used to hold down the tarp, etc. (the physical stuff), but also, and more importantly, the actual act of locating the sleep spot (a mental process) seemed to have a best method. The more I relied on it, the more effective I was at doing it again, and then again. In fact, except for a few nights ago when my mind was distracted by other matters, while trying to find the last Mobile sleep spot, I have never failed, when actually walking along and needing to camp, to successfully locate a spot that worked well enough to get me through the night. I have done it nearly two hundred times in the last fouteen months.
This is the thing. When choosing between options, even if it isn't the ideal choice in hindsight, it becomes the POMA for that one time. When walking the streets of New Orleans at night (as with all the other night-city walking I've done), planning was very helpful. Having the image of the city map in my mind--even if a bit foggy, was also a great mental resource. But when faced with a decision, and couldn't access the internet, or forgot important details about the street names, etc., using my calm-intuition and going with the POMA method steered me right.
When I'd get to an intersection and be faced with what appeared at first to be a fifty-fifty chance of choosing the best route, I would carefully examine all known aspects of both possibilities, and if one had a single favorable aspect over the other, that would be the one I would take.
When I speak of "intuition" I am referring to hints from the Spark. But other people can view it any way they want. Intuition is defined by Marriam-Webster as, "a natural ability or power that makes it possible to know something without any proof or evidence", "a feeling that guides a person to act a certain way without fully understanding why," or "something that is known or understood without proof or evidence". As I've spoken of many times, the Spark (for me) is the Representative of the sixth sense.
This sense is real and fully functional, despite not having a physical organ connected with it (that we know of--though, the pineal gland has been suggested by pseudoscientists). Instead of transmitting outside-world sensory information in to the brain/mind as the five neurochemical senses do, intuition is the transmitting of (extra) sensory information from the inside-world of other dimensional realities out to the brain/mind.
For me, the Spark is a non-physical entity that functions in the gap between the integration of the five senses in the brain/mind and the sixth sense--intuition. Intuition is the manifestation of the sixth sense--a one way input. But, the Spark is also the conduit by which information can be transmitted back to the realms of the inside of reality.
In my belief system, reality is mostly consciousness, with matter being the outside and least-real shell of reality. Spirit increases in quality, from being almost non-existent on the material outside, to the absolute purity of the most central domain of reality. As surely as matter has form, so does spirit. It is only because of our primitively evolved perspective of things non-physical, that spirit seems so wispy and non-substantial. It would be more appropriate to suggest though, that things are actually the other way around.
The Spark - having come from the very center of reality - is of the purest kind of spirit, but its mental place in the human mind allows it to be a liaison or portal between all inner realms and the physical brain-organ--the integrator of the other five material senses. From the Spark's perspective, the material realm is just as nearly-unreal as we physiological animal-origin beings perceive the Spark and the spiritual realms from which it hails nearly-unreal.
It is with all of this in mind, that the POMA can be rationally comprehended as a method for interacting with people, circumstances and processes in the everyday world. I've found that the POMA has no ability to assist with planning for or predicting the outcome of circumstances. It is really just for how one can take the most efficient path between mental and physical tasks. It is the closest philosophical approach to the geometric concept of the line--being the shortest distance between two points.
Along with my concepts of the power of choosing over ignoring choice, recognizing the POMA can help one to experience fewer problems when trying to do just about anything. There IS a correct way to do all things--for each of us. And, by that, I don't mean a socially, politically or religiously prescribed "correctness", but instead, a personally advantageous form--something that is exclusively beneficial to YOU as the practitioner.
I will try to show examples of how this works for me in future blog posts. But, just for fun you can immediately begin to recognize the POMA in everything you do, from showering, to preparing breakfast, to driving (or more preferably, walking or biking) to work, to doing work itself, to your relaxation time in the evenings or weekends. Identifying and choosing the POMA can make life less chaotic. Randomness will always be a factor in life. That, seemingly--from our perspectives, the universe presents supposedly arbitrary circumstances and appears to fling them at us from every direction, this is not as real as the power we have to consciously find and follow order. Order is available.
The evidence for perpetual order in the universe is - ironically, perhaps - revealed through the understanding of particle physics. In order for there to even be a material world, certain laws (or "constants") must work PERFECTLY all the time. For example, one law, called "the fine structure constant", binds all the subatomic particles that form the elements making up the matter that we understand. To highly simplify this idea, I will relate the finestructure constant to the velocity of light.
As far as we know, the speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (or 299,793 kilometers per second). As most people know, the electron is a small negatively-charged and dimensionless, point particle that zooms around the nucleus of its associated atom in a field, or cloud, so quickly that it actually forms a kind of shell. That this shell is negatively charged, as are the shells of all atoms, means that when two material objects come into very close proximity, they repel each other just like two negatively charged magnets might. We've all played with magnets and seen that when they are oriented in opposite directions they stick together. When they are oriented in the same direction a lot of force is needed to bring them together. The same it true for all matter at the atomic scale. Atoms are (in addition to being very much more) little magnets with their positive poles on the inside and their negative poles on the outside. When you jump off a step onto the ground, it is in fact, the negative charge of the atoms on the ground repelling the negative charge of the atoms of your shoes that keeps you from sinking into the earth.
Well, the speed at which these electrons moves about the nucleus of the atom (a simplified definition of the fine structure constant) is exactly 1/137th the speed of light. If this constant were to change even by the most minute amount, matter would not exist as we know it. This is one representative aspect of perfect order in the physical universe. In a sense, the universe has found (or produced?) a best way to do the matter thing. The fine structure constant is one of the universe's POMAs. The speed of light itself is a POMA, as is gravity.
Similarly, the universe does everything in the best way it can. If there were a better way to do these things, the universe would do them accordingly. That some of these things might be inconvenient to us, or life on the planet (gravity for example, pulling a comet into the earth as happened sixty five million years ago--claiming the existences of all animals larger than a chicken), is simply the way it is. The combination of POMAs swing into and away from each other in an evolving pattern that seeks balance between all forces. Although the POMAs that we may seek to employ to make our lives easier cannot equal the perfection found in particle physics, they can come close.
I speculate that a person who gets in touch with as many POMAs as possible in her/his life is actually building a system of semi-perpetual processes in the material world, that then free up the mind to deal with deeper concerns. Like a habit that is so well-ingrained that it becomes automatic - the balance required for riding a bike, for instance--a good example of a POMA - learning the best way to do the little things in life allows for the bigger concerns to be addressed.
I think that someday our species will develop the parts of our brains responsible for everyday material tasks to the point where we are no longer fully conscious of these tasks, and instead spend our conscious time communicating, creating and innovating. An advanced human race might be completely unconcerned with the mundane aspects of material life (e.g. showering, preparing meals, methods of physical transit, work itself, and even relaxation). These small actions will become more like the fine structure constant; nearly perfectly executed in every circumstance. The "challenges" of life in that deep future context, will consist of many things of which we are not yet aware. Communication itself will be largely non-verbal--having evolved from, as Terence McKenna used to say, "small mouth noises" to (paraphrasing) "the instant perception of the ideas of the other person". Concepts will no longer be constructed out of "words".
McKenna also proposed the idea that "the world is made of language". He meant that everything around us is labeled by our minds from the time we first begin to understand words. And, he extended that concept out to imply that everything we SENSE (with those five senses) are the physical manifestations of those words. What we "see" when we look at a bird, is the word, "bird"--made into flesh and feathers.
Therefore, when language has evolved to the point where objects are no longer physical-labels, but actually ideas in motion, the world will look, sound, smell, taste, and feel like a very, very different place. In my view, the development of something like the POMA concept, will be a bridge from a divided (by the five senses) set of incoming signals, to a closer approximation of the WHOLE that impinges upon us.
We should recall that the world arrives to our senses as ONE, pre-integrated, thing. It is our animal bodies which then break that one thing into five distinct aspects (via the five senses), in order for our brains to recombine them in a much simpler form (as post-integrated things) for us. Light, sound, chemical distinctions, etc., are the only ways (for now) that we can experience our imperfect outer region of reality. Our human minds cannot handle the physical oneness of the world around us--yet. I am proposing that POMAs are the method by which we will start the human journey toward pre-integrated perception.
The Spark knows all of this with absoluteness. It "sees" only pre-integrated reality, and serves as a tool and mechanism available for us to get in closer touch with it all. It is only left up to us to get in touch with the Spark (or whatever you think is the equivalent of the Spark) in order to begin enjoying this - as yet - supposedly hidden aspect of the universe in which we exist.
Again, it is all about choosing to find these things. They aren't "hiding" because they are trying to evade our perceptions. Rather, in a real sense, we are hiding our perceptions from them. In finding the POMAs, we are able to stop hiding and venture into the deeper expressions of reality. We are moving further in towards that perfect spirit center.
When I'd get to an intersection and be faced with what appeared at first to be a fifty-fifty chance of choosing the best route, I would carefully examine all known aspects of both possibilities, and if one had a single favorable aspect over the other, that would be the one I would take.
When I speak of "intuition" I am referring to hints from the Spark. But other people can view it any way they want. Intuition is defined by Marriam-Webster as, "a natural ability or power that makes it possible to know something without any proof or evidence", "a feeling that guides a person to act a certain way without fully understanding why," or "something that is known or understood without proof or evidence". As I've spoken of many times, the Spark (for me) is the Representative of the sixth sense.
This sense is real and fully functional, despite not having a physical organ connected with it (that we know of--though, the pineal gland has been suggested by pseudoscientists). Instead of transmitting outside-world sensory information in to the brain/mind as the five neurochemical senses do, intuition is the transmitting of (extra) sensory information from the inside-world of other dimensional realities out to the brain/mind.
For me, the Spark is a non-physical entity that functions in the gap between the integration of the five senses in the brain/mind and the sixth sense--intuition. Intuition is the manifestation of the sixth sense--a one way input. But, the Spark is also the conduit by which information can be transmitted back to the realms of the inside of reality.
In my belief system, reality is mostly consciousness, with matter being the outside and least-real shell of reality. Spirit increases in quality, from being almost non-existent on the material outside, to the absolute purity of the most central domain of reality. As surely as matter has form, so does spirit. It is only because of our primitively evolved perspective of things non-physical, that spirit seems so wispy and non-substantial. It would be more appropriate to suggest though, that things are actually the other way around.
The Spark - having come from the very center of reality - is of the purest kind of spirit, but its mental place in the human mind allows it to be a liaison or portal between all inner realms and the physical brain-organ--the integrator of the other five material senses. From the Spark's perspective, the material realm is just as nearly-unreal as we physiological animal-origin beings perceive the Spark and the spiritual realms from which it hails nearly-unreal.
It is with all of this in mind, that the POMA can be rationally comprehended as a method for interacting with people, circumstances and processes in the everyday world. I've found that the POMA has no ability to assist with planning for or predicting the outcome of circumstances. It is really just for how one can take the most efficient path between mental and physical tasks. It is the closest philosophical approach to the geometric concept of the line--being the shortest distance between two points.
Along with my concepts of the power of choosing over ignoring choice, recognizing the POMA can help one to experience fewer problems when trying to do just about anything. There IS a correct way to do all things--for each of us. And, by that, I don't mean a socially, politically or religiously prescribed "correctness", but instead, a personally advantageous form--something that is exclusively beneficial to YOU as the practitioner.
I will try to show examples of how this works for me in future blog posts. But, just for fun you can immediately begin to recognize the POMA in everything you do, from showering, to preparing breakfast, to driving (or more preferably, walking or biking) to work, to doing work itself, to your relaxation time in the evenings or weekends. Identifying and choosing the POMA can make life less chaotic. Randomness will always be a factor in life. That, seemingly--from our perspectives, the universe presents supposedly arbitrary circumstances and appears to fling them at us from every direction, this is not as real as the power we have to consciously find and follow order. Order is available.
The evidence for perpetual order in the universe is - ironically, perhaps - revealed through the understanding of particle physics. In order for there to even be a material world, certain laws (or "constants") must work PERFECTLY all the time. For example, one law, called "the fine structure constant", binds all the subatomic particles that form the elements making up the matter that we understand. To highly simplify this idea, I will relate the finestructure constant to the velocity of light.
As far as we know, the speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (or 299,793 kilometers per second). As most people know, the electron is a small negatively-charged and dimensionless, point particle that zooms around the nucleus of its associated atom in a field, or cloud, so quickly that it actually forms a kind of shell. That this shell is negatively charged, as are the shells of all atoms, means that when two material objects come into very close proximity, they repel each other just like two negatively charged magnets might. We've all played with magnets and seen that when they are oriented in opposite directions they stick together. When they are oriented in the same direction a lot of force is needed to bring them together. The same it true for all matter at the atomic scale. Atoms are (in addition to being very much more) little magnets with their positive poles on the inside and their negative poles on the outside. When you jump off a step onto the ground, it is in fact, the negative charge of the atoms on the ground repelling the negative charge of the atoms of your shoes that keeps you from sinking into the earth.
Well, the speed at which these electrons moves about the nucleus of the atom (a simplified definition of the fine structure constant) is exactly 1/137th the speed of light. If this constant were to change even by the most minute amount, matter would not exist as we know it. This is one representative aspect of perfect order in the physical universe. In a sense, the universe has found (or produced?) a best way to do the matter thing. The fine structure constant is one of the universe's POMAs. The speed of light itself is a POMA, as is gravity.
Similarly, the universe does everything in the best way it can. If there were a better way to do these things, the universe would do them accordingly. That some of these things might be inconvenient to us, or life on the planet (gravity for example, pulling a comet into the earth as happened sixty five million years ago--claiming the existences of all animals larger than a chicken), is simply the way it is. The combination of POMAs swing into and away from each other in an evolving pattern that seeks balance between all forces. Although the POMAs that we may seek to employ to make our lives easier cannot equal the perfection found in particle physics, they can come close.
I speculate that a person who gets in touch with as many POMAs as possible in her/his life is actually building a system of semi-perpetual processes in the material world, that then free up the mind to deal with deeper concerns. Like a habit that is so well-ingrained that it becomes automatic - the balance required for riding a bike, for instance--a good example of a POMA - learning the best way to do the little things in life allows for the bigger concerns to be addressed.
I think that someday our species will develop the parts of our brains responsible for everyday material tasks to the point where we are no longer fully conscious of these tasks, and instead spend our conscious time communicating, creating and innovating. An advanced human race might be completely unconcerned with the mundane aspects of material life (e.g. showering, preparing meals, methods of physical transit, work itself, and even relaxation). These small actions will become more like the fine structure constant; nearly perfectly executed in every circumstance. The "challenges" of life in that deep future context, will consist of many things of which we are not yet aware. Communication itself will be largely non-verbal--having evolved from, as Terence McKenna used to say, "small mouth noises" to (paraphrasing) "the instant perception of the ideas of the other person". Concepts will no longer be constructed out of "words".
McKenna also proposed the idea that "the world is made of language". He meant that everything around us is labeled by our minds from the time we first begin to understand words. And, he extended that concept out to imply that everything we SENSE (with those five senses) are the physical manifestations of those words. What we "see" when we look at a bird, is the word, "bird"--made into flesh and feathers.
Therefore, when language has evolved to the point where objects are no longer physical-labels, but actually ideas in motion, the world will look, sound, smell, taste, and feel like a very, very different place. In my view, the development of something like the POMA concept, will be a bridge from a divided (by the five senses) set of incoming signals, to a closer approximation of the WHOLE that impinges upon us.
We should recall that the world arrives to our senses as ONE, pre-integrated, thing. It is our animal bodies which then break that one thing into five distinct aspects (via the five senses), in order for our brains to recombine them in a much simpler form (as post-integrated things) for us. Light, sound, chemical distinctions, etc., are the only ways (for now) that we can experience our imperfect outer region of reality. Our human minds cannot handle the physical oneness of the world around us--yet. I am proposing that POMAs are the method by which we will start the human journey toward pre-integrated perception.
The Spark knows all of this with absoluteness. It "sees" only pre-integrated reality, and serves as a tool and mechanism available for us to get in closer touch with it all. It is only left up to us to get in touch with the Spark (or whatever you think is the equivalent of the Spark) in order to begin enjoying this - as yet - supposedly hidden aspect of the universe in which we exist.
Again, it is all about choosing to find these things. They aren't "hiding" because they are trying to evade our perceptions. Rather, in a real sense, we are hiding our perceptions from them. In finding the POMAs, we are able to stop hiding and venture into the deeper expressions of reality. We are moving further in towards that perfect spirit center.
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