Consider how young you are in a universe
that banged into existence 14,700,000,000 (14.7 billion) years ago.
Know that the earth took form only
4,500,000,000 (4.5 billion) years ago.
Understand that homo sapiens first appeared
on the globe just 200,000 years ago.
Grasp that the first full-blown civilizations developed over the course of 4,000 BC (BCE) to 1500 BC (BCE),
many thousands of moons before the Buddha (570 BC [BCE]), Jesus (6 BC [BCE]),
and Muhammad (570 AD [CE]) offered their spiritual counsel to people in quest
of meaning.
Get into your consciousness, then, that you
are a moral baby lost in time and space, trying to scramble your way to some sense of why you are here.
But you really have no idea.
You fill you daily life with triviality,
failing to grasp the counsel of the Three Greats:
You are sunk deep into maya, lost in an illusion that the material world offers you
meaning.
You, though most of you are solidly middle
class, are concerned about what you shall eat and what you shall wear and how
you must conform to the dictates of illegitimate assemblages of pretenders to
authority.
And instead of focusing your attention
relentlessly on the Divine Principle at the core of Meaning, you twitter and
tweet and dither your way in trivial attempts to hide your spiritual
desperation.
Developing knowledge-intensive public
education falters under the Watchful Eye of One Whose people suffer from a lack of
knowledge.
And so you stumble, bumble, rumble, and never do what you ought to do.
You never became a spiritual adult.
Your values are murky.
You cannot properly impart knowledge and
wisdom to children when you have so little knowledge and wisdom to offer.
Lacking meaning, you drown yourself in
opioids, alcohol, cannibus, cocaine, heroin, anything that prevents you from making
the effort to understand your place in the Great Gift of Creation, that Life is
a Wondrous Joy if lived courageously.
But you are cowardly.
You have low levels of citizenship,
empathy, altruism.
Most everything that you do is undertaken
behind a façade.
Under such circumstances, you cannot have
the discussions necessary for consensus on what we shall teach the children.
In truth, you are younger than they, just a babe in the universe, pretending that you are living when life as you have
defined it is a persistent pursuit of Death.
……………………………………………………………………………
Keep those ruminations on the reality of
your existence in brain as you perpend:
The two most recent forums (Isaiah Forum,
Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, 16 October; Pollen Midwest Forum, Franklin Middle School,
23 October) for the candidates for the two contested At-Large seats on the
Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education up for election on 6 November
have been highly controlled affairs.
This is fascinating in its own way.
I have wondered in my ruminations of the
last several days how intentional such exerted control is, how clueless, how
self-serving, how fearful:
Do the powers that be have a driving need
to maintain control?
Yes.
Are people who sponsor and organize such
events clueless as to what constitutes truly informational gatherings that in
some measure further the exercise of democracy?
Yes.
Do people whose sites and organizations
host such events get great ego satisfaction in the opportunity to spout
self-serving bromides proclaiming their white-nice liberalism and highly
generalized dedication to racial harmony, social justice, and the education and
well-being of our youth?
Yes.
Are the powers that be, in association with
question #1, afraid that opening up a forum to unedited questions will expose
their incompetence and frailties?
Yes.
So, as far as they go, those are the
answers, each rendered affirmatively, if in that affirmation suggesting the negation of human good.
But in what proportion does each of those
explanations find resonance in the reality of human motivation for occupying
positions of public profile and some level of authority? What motivation in any such occupation is
ever for the advancement of prospects for those for whom service is purportedly
given, as compared to the motivation for advancing one’s personal prospects in
the pretension that one’s efforts are good for others?
The way in which these school board
candidate forums have been organized strongly suggests public altruistic
posturing as veneer to the reality of personal public projection and
self-aggrandizement, with a mix of awareness that posturing is transpiring with
a cluelessness as to one’s true motivations beneath the posturing.
…………………………………………………………………..
I am ever aware of the behavioral operants, the
reinforcements and aversions to which I am responding.
As a student of both the Buddha and Freud,
I am aware of the ubiquity and seductions of the human ego. All human beings must be wary of their
egocentric predispositions and in the quest for spiritual growth strive to
construct the most constructively positive reinforcements for inducing altruistic and
empathic behavior--- while establishing aversive consequences for acting out of strictly selfish
concerns.
Understanding the operant foundations of human behavior, of why
people do what they do, will move us to better
personal and social understanding and a level of decision-making capacity that leaps beyond the chimera of free will. When we evolve from spiritual babies into moral adulthood, advance to an
understanding of the favorable social outcomes that are impossible while
clinging to the notion of free will, we
will ironically be freer when we realize that we have no free will but we do
have marvelous brains capable of making much better decisions when possessed of
a bevy of the proper breadth, depth, and quality of knowledge.
…………………………………………………………………………….
Aside from those awareness-limited and
ego-driven human beings who have organized these school board candidate forums,
many others have revealed themselves to be spiritual infants:
Many in my universe of acquaintance and
observation have shown themselves to be bad parents, lousy citizens, incapable
taskers, undependable collaborators, and clueless practitioners of the art of
being human.
Education properly delivered would require
a discussion and consensus as to what knowledge in our human inheritance is
most important to pass on to the youth of our Village; and what messages of ethics and morality we
of the human family decide that we want to pass onto our young, our future, our
hope.
Before we can do this, though, we must
break the bonds of moral infancy, decide who we are and what we want to be.
As life as we know it crumbles around us,
the Life that can be awaits.
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