a new understanding of today, time and space.

so the problem of existence…
what rules/laws are we going to indoctrinate our children with?

“all perceptions are colored by emotions”

conservatives believe in a set of rules/laws that colors their
perception of the universe/reality…

their “emotions” are colored by their indoctrination of the rules/laws
of society/universe/reality……

so, what rules/laws are conservatives indoctrinated with?

the idea of a fixed/set universe…of their being a god,
of the notion that human beings have a set and fixed
nature… once a person is born, they are fixed in either
being “good” or “evil”…………human beings cannot change their
nature is a perception of conservatives………

our understanding of reality/universe determines in large
part what the universe is…

and we indoctrinated children with our understanding of reality/universe…

we color their perceptions with emotions/myths/prejudices, that we teach them,
that we indoctrinate them with…….

so we indoctrinate children with the capitalistic idea that all human beings
are selfish, greedy, lusting after… the rules/laws we teach/indoctrinate children
with are colored by our emotions which we were indoctrinate with as children…

so how to break this cycle?

the enlightenment answer was to think for oneself, not to bow down
to authority, to question everything, to become aware of the myths,
and ism’s and prejudices and superstitions we were taught as children…

and this is solid advice… become aware of and understand your
biases and ism’s and myths, you hold and act upon………

as your perceptions are colored by emotions……

so to escape being held hostage by emotions and biases
and myths and prejudices you were indoctrinated with…
you must first become aware of them…….

now, we know, yes, know that as we grow, we change
all the time… the myths and biases we were taught as children
change, for example, we are taught that Santa Claus exists
and that the Easter Bunny exists and that there is a tooth
fairy that bring us money for each tooth we lose…
but we learn, become aware of, this indoctrination that
there is no such thing as the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy
or Santa Claus… we outgrow these myths…….and we are
none the worse for wear for outgrowing these myths……

and this is where conservatives fail… they fail to understand
that we do grow and learn and change every single day in
our understanding of who we are and what is possible…
we are not fixed and determined in our relationship with
the rules/laws or in terms of our relationship with the
universe/reality………….we can change and become something
new and it is all right…

“all perceptions are colored emotions”

we just have new emotions which change our perceptions
of the universe/reality…………

the human being is not fixed and determined as perceived
by the conservative…

we change all the time as we grow… our very aging process
brings about change… I am different today, at age 59,
then I was at age 29 and just because I am 59 and not 29…
the very fact I am 59 changes my or colors my perceptions
of the universe/reality………it requires nothing else to happen
but for me to grow old and that changeds my emotions…which
colors my perceptions………

so the very laws/rules of our life changes as we grow because
our situation changes, we grow old…… we cannot hold
our youthful perceptions because we are no longer young……

Kropotkin

now how do we tie this all together?

we have laws/rules… we have perceptions that are colored
by our emotions… we have our childhood indoctrinations
that create our perceptions of the universe/reality…

now each aspect, laws/rules… or our perceptions that are colored
by emotions, our childhood indoctrinations… they cannot be
explained by any aspect of the three… we must find an answer
by looking to some overall, overarching answer…

we are being that exist in time and space…
and we need to have some goals or a destination to
reach for… now why that is important is really the point
of this particular post…

as human beings, we do better when we have a goal or destination
to strive for… it gives us some meaning or purpose to our life…

but we have our indoctrinations from childhood that also exists
within us…so we tend to pick goals/destinations that work
with the indoctrinations of our childhood……. the conservative
goal of anger/greed/ hate is an indoctrination and so conservatives
tend to pick goals/destinations that incorporate these preconceived
emotions………. but in realty, what goal is really understood by
conservatives? they fight for such things, as greed and anger and hate…
so the goals/destination is about greed, anger and hate…
but greed and anger and hate, can only bring about greed
anger and hate…… it doesn’t have any goal behind
the anger or hate or greed… to be greedy is the goal,
to have hate is the goal, to be angry is the goal…….
the conservative has I have pointed out, is about
security… but the goal of being secure is as far as that
goal goes… in other words, being secure is the goal in itself…
but it doesn’t lead to any other goal past being secure…

but love and charity and hope lead us to goals past these
emotions… to love is to have something to love and
to strive to keep that love… Kant once wrote…

“the rules of happiness… something to do, someone to love
and something to hope for”

each of these goals reach beyond themselves…they are not self contained
goals/destinations like anger and greed and lust…….

and that is the difference between liberals and conservatives…
values for the liberals are different then the values for conservatives…

liberals values reach beyond themselves… a value of love
doesn’t just end with itself, it must have something to love…
and something to do, reaches beyond itself… and something to
hope for, reaches beyond itself… you need an object to
love and an object to hope for and an object for something to do…

to hate, to have anger, to have greed is enough for itself…
it is enough to hate and it is enough for greed and it is enough
to hold anger… for they exists for themselves…the objects of
the hate and anger and greed is irrelevant… it doesn’t matter
what you hate or have anger about or being greedy about…

when conservatives hate… they claim to hate because liberal hate
or because of liberals actions or thoughts… conservatives blame
others……. but that is to escape responsibility for their hate or their
anger or their greed……. … they don’t take responsibility for their
anger or hate or greed………and that is the point of existentialism…

to understand that we are responsible for our perceptions and we
are responsible for our emotions and we are responsible for our
actions and we are responsible for who we are… and if we unable
to adapt to ever changing conditions, that too is our responsibility…

we are responsible……. and we are responsible for our emotions
and we are responsible for our hate or anger or lust or greed
and we are responsible for our love and our hope and our
charity…….regardless of the indoctrinations we are given as
children because as we grow and age and become adults,
we need to change and adapt and become who we are…
if I am 59, I must change and adapt and become who I am
at 59… I cannot become my understanding of the universe
that I had at 29………I am older and I must become who I am
at 59…….and I am responsible for that……

we must overcome and overcoming means overcoming
our childhood indoctrinations… which means overcoming
our childhood perceptions and our childhood emotions…

we must adapt our understanding of the laws and rules
we live by because we are now older…our understanding
of the laws/rules is different because we are older…
our very aging process changes how we perceive the
universe/reality… and our understanding of the law/rules
changes too………

it is all connected…… you just have to follow the connections…

Kropotkin

we have philosophy which is far more complicated
then in the time of Plato or Descartes or even Kant…
and why? because we live in far more complicated times…
with a different set of questions, a different set of needs and a different
set of indoctrinations that we grew up with…….

we are children of the industrial revolution and the children
of Auschwitz and the children of Hiroshima…and we
have our indoctrinations learned from these events……
regardless if we remember these events or if they impact
our daily lives………. every single event in your life is still
there regardless if you remember it or not… it still impacts
your life…….as does the impact of events like Auschwitz or
Hiroshima still impacts our culture or our society or our
personal self even if we didn’t feel its impact directly…
we are connected… and events from very far away can still
impact our lives even if we don’t see it or hear it or feel it…
it is still there…for we exist in the world, of the world,
for the world and anything that happens in the world impacts us……
you don’t live in isolation of events, in isolation of the world…
we exists in the world and that means we are of the world…

if it change the world, it exists within you… and everything changes
the world…….even the smallest of actions……

thus the reason for the complication of philosophy…
it must reflect the world and the world changes,
repeatedly and often quickly…….

with those oft changes and the speed of changes, how
can we create a philosophy of history, a philosophy of
political science, a philosophy of education, when the world
we live in changes so rapidly?

philosophy to become successful, must reflect the
world at large……. we must reflect the rapidly changing
world with philosophy that is written in ever changing formats
and ever changing idea’s… to keep up with the ever changing
world… in other words… philosophy isn’t about the
the permanent or the unchanging aspects of the universe/reality…
because the universe/reality is always changing…

philosophy must no longer say, thou must live like this…
no, philosophy says, today we live like this and tomorrow,
maybe, no, tomorrow will be different…

philosophy must be written in the air and no longer
in stone……….

a new philosophy is needed… as Nietzsche says,
philosophy must be able to dance……….
and you cannot dance if written in stone…

this is why philosophy has been deemed to be a “failure”…
it hasn’t kept us with the everchanging reality of the universe…
and why religion is deemed to be a “failure”
whereas science has kept up and is far more respected
and understood…it has kept paced with the ever changing
universe and reality…

so what is philosophy? it is a method to discover
what are the rules/laws of the universe…

a method, not a absolute point of view, but a method like
logic and science and math… used to discover our current reality…

and once it is understood that philosophy is a method, not a goal or
a destination, then philosophy will take its place once more as
the queen of the sciences… because philosophy is to better understand
the values we live by and values as such, change sometimes quite
quickly…… so philosophy is a method of understanding values
and the values we either have or we need to have… philosophy
can be used to understand the values of yesterday or today or tomorrow…

what value is more important, love or hate?

and philosophy can help us to understand that the values we
have today which is the values of capitalism, of greed and envy
and lust… and we must move on from these current values of today
and move to the values of tomorrow which is the values of love
and hope and charity… we use philosophy as a measure of values
and what values we should hold and why…….

Kropotkin

philosophy must change or adapt to the conditions and environment it finds itself
in and today conditions and environment is a rapidly changing one…

whereas during the middle ages, the conditions and environment
didn’t change that fast…so philosophy was able to
remain the same as a method for centuries…

but the new reality is that the conditions and environment of
today is ever changing and philosophy must change to reflect
these ever changing conditions and environment…….

philosophy cannot be tied down to any permanent and fixed
position because then philosophy cannot change to met the
changing environment and conditions………

and philosophy is just a method to discover what values are needed
in any given environment……or not needed as the case maybe…

Kropotkin

I have often thought about the Buddha and his thought
that the point of existence is about suffering and how to
escape suffering……

and my first thought is that by making suffering the key value,
you deny other possibilities like searching for the truth or
seeking god or finding happiness or seeking the values worth
living for…….

in denying other values like seeking happiness or searching for
the truth, that single minded value is a negation of other values…
you negate other values when you put only one as being the “only” value
worth understanding… or seeking…

it is like capitalism and its focus on profits/money before all
other values… this focus on profits negates all other values like love
or happiness or hope or justice…

suffering is a part but only a part of life…
and it is no different then a focus on other values
claimed to have value such as pity and compassion…
which some philosophers have claimed to be primary or
the most valuable value to have…

while I agree that pity and compassion are valuable
values to have, they are not the only values we must have…
we can put guilt into this mix…and then after some thought,
I see that religions emphise certain values like guilt or pity or
compassion or even hate…

and make that value the primary value of that religion…so
catholics can suggest that the primary value of religion is guilt…
we are all guilty via the original sin… and to absolve ourselves
of this guilt is the drive to be saved……… which is no different
then the Buddhist drive to claim suffering the value we must
must drive for……

the Jews speak of the “law”… and even Jesus, who was Jewish,
said,

“do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,
I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them”

this focus on the law and obeying God’s law is fundamental to
Jewish faith… another aspect that is one single view turned into
an entire faith, religion…………just like the Buddha and his focus on suffering…

what is needed is a religion that answers all the questions of existence,
not just the single focus of suffering or of being saved or of obeying the law
or to find an answer to the guilt “all” humans feel…

we don’t yet have an religion that truly answer the call of what makes
a human being, a human being……

religions are just one side of the human experience…and they ignore the other
side of what makes us human… be it suffering or guilt or obedience to the law
or pity or compassion… and we need an religion that answers all those questions
of guilt and sin and obedience and pity and compassion and suffering…
equally………

Kropotkin

Existence is like a dandelion.
We start as a seed carried by the wind.
Then we find earth and water.
We take root, but eventually we die.

My answer to this problem is that although all knowledge is good,
some types of knowledge are far more useful than others.
This giant chain-reaction is life.
We have limited time so we can’t piss away our mind on things like movies and politics.
Happiness comes from within,
but truth comes from the outside world.

Wisdom however comes from within and the outside both, when they are combined.

K: ummmmm, if happiness comes from within, then why do people spend so much
time trying to find happiness in outside stuff like material goods, in a new job or
a job title, in seeking out wealth, or in trying to earn fame or glory or happiness in
having a TV show? why do we try to seek happiness outside of us, instead of inside of
us…

and why do we try to seek happiness instead of something else? is happiness
really the goal we should be trying for?

Kropotkin

Externalizing is a form of gradual suicide.
The bitter-medicine analogy applies to all things in our life.
We prefer flavorful things, not tasteless or bitter things.
The result is that people chase after the most appealing things,
of which in capitalism become expensive, and therefor a person’s
suicide empowers a capital service or commodity.

I fight with myself to focus on important things instead of doing crap.
I still do crap, but a lot less than a regular person.

we return to Kant and his questions…

  1. what can I know?
    2.what ought I do?
  2. what may I hope?

now we also have Kant’s three thoughts…
god, freedom and immortality…

so, how do we know god, freedom, immortality?

how are Kant’s three point relevant to “what ought I do”
and “what may I hope”…

now if we take Hume seriously, then we cannot “know” any of these
concepts of god, freedom or immortality… for Hume has shown us,
that knowledge of these concepts is not possible…all knowledge
Hume argues is only possible by experience and god, freedom and
immortality lies outside of our experience…

god, freedom and immortality are metaphysical concepts…
they exists outside of physical experience…(now one may argue that
freedom isn’t outside of experience, but for the moment let us assume that freedom
is a metaphysical concept)

so, what can I know? In light of Hume, we realize that our knowledge
is limited… we have limited senses and limited ability to
understand what our senses tell us, so we are in fact, limited to
the extent of our knowledge…I can tell you, know, that I am in the
kitchen, writing on the dinning room table because that is the only spot
in the house I can write in…we have this limited amount of knowledge…
now according to Hume, we cannot have any other knowledge beyond
simple, basic knowledge like my sitting at the kitchen table…
we cannot have metaphysical knowledge because that knowledge exists
outside of our sensory ability, outside of our senses, outside of our
experience…as the knowledge of god, freedom and immortality
lie outside of our senses…

so, this question of what can I know? Is a limited one, we
can know what the senses and experience tells us and as we
have limited senses and can only have limited experiences,
we are limited in our knowledge………

so we face Kant’s second question, what ought I do?

this is an rather open ended question…… what ought I do in regards to, what?

the answer to this question seems to lie outside of the question…

so we try to understand this question in terms of, let us try possibilities,

what ought we do given our possibilities?

so now we have to understand what is possible for a human being?

at any given time, we have different possibilities… for example, at age
18, I could and did, run a marathon… at 59, not so much, I can drive 26 miles,
but I doubt I could walk or even bike ride 26 miles… so at different ages, what
is possible for me changes…

my thoughts of today, weren’t possible at 20 because I needed time to
reflect upon and read about and live the possibilities we have…
and the years of reading and thinking make it possible to have the thoughts
I have today… my wilderness years as I like to call them…

due to my experience, I avoid the mistakes of youth… I can see, spot
trouble before it ever comes near me, and I can avoid it……
and that is due to my age and experience… in my youth, I made
plenty of mistakes… mistakes I could have avoided if I was a little
more experienced… but that is how we become wise… the wiser
the man, the greater the fuck ups he has had…kinda good rule of the thumb…
a wise man has fucked up enough to have learned from his mistakes…
an unwise man still hasn’t learned from his mistakes…

so, fuck ups are the key to becoming wise… and the moral of this
story is to fuck up and often………

so anyway, what ought I do?

let us think about this ……

Kropotkin

so what ought I do?

society has created myths, habits, prejudices, superstitions and biases
to tell us what we ought to do…… that is the point of society’s
myths of childhood… to point out what we ought to do…

we ought to be patriotic and fight for our country
and we ought to obey the law and we ought to
believe in god…(recall that insubordination is the greatest
crime in the bible and in the state and in business… as a union
person, I can only be fired for two and two things only,
on is stealing and the other… yep, insubordination… think about it)
and we ought to hold certain beliefs and act in certain ways… that
is part of the indoctrination of our youth… we must act, think, believe,
in certain things or we shall be tossed out of paradise…

(to my mind, Adam is the best example of what a real human being needs
to be, someone who rejects authority to become their own person, to
act upon their own reason, not on authority’s reason…
to become fully realized human beings, we must be like Adam
and reject authority and become our own person and yes, mistakes
will me made… that is the moral of that story… become a real functional
human being, but beware, it comes at a cost… are you willing to pay that cost
and for most people, they are not willing to pay the price to become fully human,
it is easier and less complicated to remain under the thumb of authorities)

so, what ought we do?

the example is really more of what ought we aspire to, instead of
being like Adam pre-fall, we should be like Adam after the fall and
try to realize our possibilities by attempting to become more,
not to listen to authorities who try to limit what is possible, but
to become fully human…Adam didn’t become fully human until
he ate the apple, the fruit of knowledge… and we should listen…

(I am saying Adam, but I could have easily said Eve also, as I am
a man, I tend to think in terms of a male, if I was female, I
could have and most likely would have said Eve… it is easily
understand regardless of who I had used, Adam or Eve…)

so, what ought I do?

Kropotkin

so what ought I do?

we use such things as physical activities like running, swimming,
basketball, mountain climbing, baseball, to name a few things,
to discover what is possible for us physically…we push
the boundries of being human with such physical activities…
we try to break the 4 minute mile and we try to hit the baseball
enough to get a 300 average and we climb ever new mountains to
discover who we are………

we use these things to discover our physical possibilities…
we have yet extend this into our mental or emotional life…
in other words, what ought we do to discover our mental or
emotional abilities?

we can use such things as history or philosophy or math to discover
what our mental possibilite are and we can use love and hope
and justice to discover what are our emotional possibilities…

I have have loved… I can love… and if I have learned something
like philosophy, then I have learned my possibilities in the mental…

what is possible for us emotionally is things like love and hope and
equality… for we emotionally hate inequality…

so we have emotional possibilities… things that we learn when
we act emotionally…love is a great example… I haved
loved my wife for over 20 years but it is not a love like the
rush of a new love…I was watching some TV show where the
character falls in love… and it has been a long, long time
where I felt the rush of falling in love with someone like that…
and it is attractive, a wishing for, to fall in love like that again…
but then I have something else… a different kind of love…
whereas my love is a slow burning, steady pace of a long
lasting love… not the bright fire and indeed, explosive
first moments of a new love…

I don’t think I shall ever have the rush of falling in love again,
but it is understanding of where I am at these days…
experience does help us make these understandings…

so, what ought I do?

we should use things like our physical activities and
falling in love to discover what are our possibilities…
we must push the boundary of what is means to be human
with such things as our physical activities and our mental
ones such as learning a new language or learning disciplines like
math or philosophy…

and why? because we cannot “know” what is possible until
we push the borders of human actions in the physical, mental
emotional………… for example, we have seen such events as the
Holocaust and we wonder how, how someone could participate
in such horrible actions… guards and doctors and plain folks who
engaged in such actions… these actions push the boundary of
what is possible for human beings…we see it is possible for
ordinary people to engage in and be active participants
in pure and unadulterated evil…we see what is possible for
people, for us… for despite our best intention, we too can
engage in acts of evil, even in such evil as concentration camps
and the deaths of people whose only crime was to be born a different
religion…or to be born loving someone different then who love…

and this is why we must engage in and become aware of
intolerance and bigotry and inequality…for belief in those
beliefs allow us to accept and possibly engage with evil like
Auschwitz… intolerance and bigotry and inequality gives us
the possibility of thinking that it is acceptable to engage in
and support acts of evil like Auschwitz…

belief in intolerance and bigotry and inequality leads us to
to the possibility of acts of evil…

and is that how we are to define the possibilities of being human
by acts of evil? don’t we engage with our possibilities best
when we engage with our higher possibilities… the possibility
of love and the possibility of hope and the possibility of peace
and of justice and equality…

we must engage with, ought to do, with the higher possibilities
of being human, not with the lower possibilities like hate
and intolerance and anger and greed and lust……

it is not about our oughts being acts of something,
like slaying the dragon or making millions in business but
what we ought to do is explore the possibilities of being human…
that is what we ought to do…discover who we are and
what are our possibilities…and we use actions and event
and experiences to discover those possibilities…

we ought to become more human…

that is what we ought to do…

Kropotkin

we have Kant’s three questions…

What can I know…
what out I do…
want may I hope…….

as I touched upon the first two questions earlier, I wish to
discuss the final question……

what may I hope…

now Kant had taken his three other question of
god, freedom and immortality away from the first question…what can I know…

and he placed in the third question of what may I hope,
the question of god, freedom and immortality…

so we cannot know god or freedom or immortality…
but we can hope for them……….

that was Kant’s position…and in a real sense, he is right…
we cannot know if there is a god or what is freedom or is
there is immortality…

we can however hope for them……….

but that list of things to hope for seems, to me anyway, rather limited…….

as hope is really just another way of saying prayer… what do we pray for,
which is to say, what do we hope for?

so what do we pray for?

Nietzsche ubermensh, he has said yes, yes to all that the universe
offers and so he has no need for prayer because he has nothing he
needs to hope for… he is a man content with what the universe has
to offer, and we know the universe offers us pain and suffering
and agony and joy and delight and love and beauty and we say yes…
thus we have no need to hope for something when we have all that the
universe has to offer us…………we have overcome what others might
call good or evil because they are simple the same thing thought of
in a different, higher context… and what does the word “context” mean?
experience……….

as a modern man, a man of 2018… what should I hope for?
what should I pray for?

nothing, nothing at all………

Kropotkin

I had a conversation with a man…

he told me that there was no difference between
self help books and philosophy…….

and he was right……… both are meant to help us understand
and improve ourselves………

but what does philosophy do that the self help books don’t do?

philosophy tries to extend understanding to the world…
it also questions everything, creates doubt about everything…
the beginning of wisdom lies in doubt…
the self help book only want to create certainty…
I don’t want to create certainty…

I want to create that Zen moment when the mountains are leaping
and the sea is dancing and the rivers have overflowed their banks…
that is the moment that I look for………

I have said yes…

Kropotkin

in thinking about this ongoing battle between
hate, intolerance, anger, greed and lust
and the enlightenment ideals of tolerance,
reason, thinking for oneself…

the forces of hate and intolerance are winning at this time
and I was wondering why? then some thoughts came to mine…

the lower instincts of hate and intolerance and anger and greed,
need only themselves to exists… they don’t need any plan or goal or
destination outside of themselves…you hate just to hate… it has
no other meaning or goal…

whereas the liberal ideals of the enlightenment do have a goal,
do have a destination……. the enlightenment was about
following the path of progress (and progress was assumed to exist even if
the progress didn’t always follow a straight path) and it was a given that
the enlightenment ideals were part of the overall path of progress…
by following the enlightenment ideals of tolerance and thinking for oneself,
Sapere aude……Latin for “Dare to know” or has some have thought about
it, “Dare to be wise” or for some, “Dare to think for yourself”
one was engaging in the path of progress………
not only individually but as part of a social collective progress…

but hate and anger and greed don’t care about progress and they
don’t care about any individual goal… hate exists for hate and
that is why those who hate seem to, seem to, achieve more
then those with liberal idea’s because it is easier to hate then
to achieve positive ideals by following the path of improving oneself
and finding out what is best in us, instead of what is worst……

hate only needs hate… and is the path of least resistance…

Kropotkin

if I were to say, the ideal society is where
we have ended war and poverty and intolerance and hatred
and bigotry and religions…

the ideal society is one where we only work a few hours a day and
we spend the rest of the day, in some aspect of improving ourselves…
learning a new language or climbing a mountain or running a 5 minute mile
or reading a book are all forms of improving ourselves…changing who we
are……….

now many will jump up here and say, it isn’t possible or it won’t work
this utopia of yours or it is a fantasy or it is what it is…

thus affirming the idea that people can only say no,
they cannot say yes and see the possibilities of change…

we can have a society where we only work a few hours a day
and spend the rest of the day doing things of interest to us…
the question becomes, do we spend the effort to try
to get from point A, which is today, to point B, which is our
ideal society… instead of saying, it is impossible or it is a
unreachable fantasy, we could say, how do we go from point
A to point B………… how do we achieve our goal here……

what will it take to get from our current broken society to
a point where we are no longer a nihilistic society/culture?

instead of saying no, it is possible to say, yes, what does it
take to get to our ideal society/culture………….

we are far too use to saying no,
instead of saying yes…it is possible…

what would it take for you to learn to say yes instead
of saying no?

Kropotkin

to properly understand experience and how we understand experience,
let us follow through experience…

we are born…the senses like vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell…
give us information about the world, about experiences……

but at birth, we are unable to make sense of these sensations given
by the senses… in other words, we might hear a voice, but we cannot
understand the voice and we do not even know the voice is a voice…
for us at birth, it is simply a sound that has no meaning for us…
as the year passes, the 1st year, we begin to make some small sense of the world…
we might be able to connect the sound we hear as a voice to come from
a specific human being…but we still don’t know what the words are yet……

in other words, we learn from experience what voices are and what sound is
and what smell is and what is touch…and at the same time as we are experiencing
our senses, we are also being indoctrinated and this indoctrination continues to the
point of when we are finally able to get clear of and escape ourselves from
this indoctrination…usually adulthood…

so we are getting information about the world from our senses
and we are being told what that information means from
our parents, the schools, the media, the state, and that information
is given understanding by the myths and biases and habits and prejudices
we are being taught/indoctrinated with from childbirth…………

the form of the world as we understand it comes from the indoctrinations
that we are taught from childhood……

or to say it another way,
we don’t know anything a priori…

our information of the world comes to us from experience, empirically……
from parents and school and the state and classmates and we
take an experience and understand it from that information
that we were taught about the world from parents and school and the state
and classmates…

let us say, something dropped from the sky…
we would attempt to understand that something
from our experiences…the object is silver…
so we compare other silver objects to this object,
but it doesn’t seem to compare… we then
try to match it with other items that we know of…
but we are stymied because we cannot know or understand
an object without knowing, from experience, what an object is…

can you know a priori what an aspirin tablet is?
no…… simple as that………you cannot know or understand
what aspirin is before you have already experienced it in some
fashion……

the object from the sky… how to you understand something
without an experience of it… the object from the sky is
a tool meant to repair a space ship…would we be able to
understand that without any experience with it… perhaps
if we compare the object from space with tools we already have
and we might, might be able to relate the space object with tools
we already have, but it would mean we can’t “think” our way into
understanding, we would have to measure and compare and give context
to the space object… in other words, we would use experience to
connect the space object to our tools… to our hammer or to our screwdriver
or something like that……….

now one might try to save the a priori concept by relating them
to mathematical concepts…
but once again, we learn math by experience, we are taught
1 + 1 =2…… we don’t have that knowledge instinctively, because
if we did, then why do we go to school to learn it?
I recall in my youth, 50 years ago, of learning my math tables…
I recall spending hours reciting the times tables… 8 times 5 is 40…
9 times 5 is 45, 10 times 5 is 50… we spend a whole lot of time
in our youth reciting such stuff…if it were a priori, then we are
wasting a lot of time in youth learning stuff we already know…

our very childhood learning is argument enought that we learn
via experience, empirically and not by any a priori means…

the practical matters of our educational system is proof enough
that we learn empirically and we understand by experience…
although you have emprirically and experience, those two words
really mean the same thing…

Kropotkin

Human beings are creatures who act and engage with
actions, activity, movement………

we do things every single day…
we wake up and we go to work
and we make love and we run traffic signals…
in fact, we do and engage with hundreds of
actions a day…

what we do is try to create value and meaning in those actions…
for example, when I give my wife flowers… that action has value,
giving flowers “means” I love my wife… the action, flower giving,
has value and meaning to me…

we try to give our actions value and meaning…

let us try a thought experiment…

let us think about work and work in a factory or
a factory light… factory light is a supermarket
where checkers stand all day and scan items or
weigh items…as I have done that for over 10 years,
it is something I am rather familiar with…

the reason why factor work is so dehumanizing and so devoid
of meaning is because of the nature of the work…

what meaning or value can I give or create from
scanning bread or cans of corn or weighing apples all day long……

the very repetition of the work means it has no value or meaning, no point
to it…… I cannot create value or meaning out of scanning bread all day long…

and we humans, that is what we do, try to create value and meaning out
of our actions……….

some actions don’t need that… that are of value just by their doing…

for example, playing a game or watching a game has its own value,
its own meaning… when I played baseball, I enjoyed it and it had
value for its own actions… tonight, I watched the SF Giants played
the LA Dodgers in baseball… that act was its own meaning,
it was its own meaning or value……… play and games don’t need to search
for some value or justification…their have value just by their doing…

that activity of playing or watching baseball has some value already…
we don’t need to search for meaning in baseball or in play…
baseball has value and meaning to me already……

we also have value and meaning in the arts…… we don’t need to
find value in the creation of art…we can just engage in art, whatever
art that maybe or we can look at art and we don’t need to find some
external value or meaning in doing or looking at art… doing so
is its own value, meaning… unlike scanning items all day which has
no value or meaning… it is simply busy work… we cannot find
value or meaning in such work as in scanning items all day…

so we try to discover value and meaning in our actions by such means
as the myths and habits and prejudices and superstitions and biases
of our childhood indoctrinations…

work is suppose to have some higher value, but that is a lie, meant
to give us some reason to work…

in our efforts to find meaning and value in all our actions, we
sometimes lie to ourselves…… and pretend that these actions,
or those actions have some value, have some meaning…
but we find as we grow older… that actions we thought
were of value, actions that did have meaning, don’t have value or meaning…
I find work to be of no value or no meaning……
it is a pointless exercise of futility with no value or no meaning in our lives…

we engage in actions all our live and the point of those actions is to
find some value or meaning within them………

Kropotkin

problem of existence…

how to find meaning in our lives……

we try to find meaning in the actions that we have…
we look for meaning in the flowers we give to someone…
we look for meaning in the music we listen to…
we look for meaning in the books we read………
we try to find our own personal meaning in these actions
and other actions…………

take the Japanese tea ceremony… by the simple creation of
structure in their ceremony, they have created value in it…

we can find value, meaning, purpose in such activity, in such actions
as the Japanese tea ceremony… but separate it out from
day to day life that we take for granted… it cannot become routine
or factory like when we do actions continuously to the point of
boredom or ennue or complete indifference as is the result of modern life…

to infuse our lives with meaning, purpose, we must begin with
infusing our actions, our acts, the events we participate in, with meaning
and purpose…we find meaning in our lives by giving our actions meaning,
purpose…

that is one possible solution to the problem of existence…

Kropotkin

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero,
Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Buddha, Nagarjuna,
Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel,
Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Sartre, Heidegger………

each of these people taught a version of reality…
each of them told us the truth…
but each “truth” was just another aspect of the blind
men who went to discover what a object was and
because they each grabbed a different part of the object,
they thought the object was different for each… but it wasn’t…
the blind men all went and grabbed a different part of a elephant…
and because they each grabbed a different part, one grabbed
the trunk and the other the tusks and the other the leg and another
the tail and because of this, they thought they were touching many
different objects… but because they were blind, they couldn’t see
that they were all grabbing the same object……

each thinker listed above all thought they were grabbing different
aspects of reality… but the reality is, they were all grabbing the same
reality…they just didn’t realize it………

should you study Kant or should study Plato or should you study
the Buddha or should you study Sartre… yes, for they all write
about the same thing…… the same reality just different aspects of
that reality…does that mean we have one reality for all human beings?

no………

I exists in our modern time and my “reality” is going to be different because
what I see and hear and taste and touch and smell is different then what
Socrates or Cicero or Hume saw or tasted or touch or smelled or heard…….

we are just describing a very large elephant which is the current reality around me…
and those thinkers are just describing the reality that was current around them……….

you can study each and every single one of them or just one or two and you will
find that you will reach the same place… they are all just a means to reach
the same place…and that place is?

as a means to understand the “reality” you exist within……

and when you describe “reality” it is just another side of the
elephant……….

Kropotkin