Author: Scott

I received a great email from my Uncle yesterday who just turned 90. He told me about some books he had downloaded to his kindle and some of his views about current political events. But, he also told me that my Grandad Theo, his Dad was born in Atoka, Oklahoma.  He later lived near Ardmore until his teens, then moved to Cotton County which is where I’m from.

I drive by Atoka every time my boys and I go on our hunting trips and it was really great to know this information. He suggested I check at the county courthouse for records some time and I am going to do that.

He also told me Theo’s grandad ran a sawmill in or around Durant. That was a long time ago. He has done some genealogy work and discovered Kinnairds who immigrated from Scotland to Charleston in the 1700s, then worked their way across Alabama to Ashley county, Arkansas.  That’s practically next door to the eastern Oklahoma area where my grandad grew up.

I love learning new information about my ancestors. And, I love hearing from my Uncle. Technology is a true blessing for staying in touch with relatives.

In this photo are my granddad and grandma, Theodore and Grace Kinnaird taken when he was in the Army during WWI.

The old saying “misery loves company” manifests itself when two people recognize their common misery due to dragging their past into the present. In their mutual delusion they might even admire each other as they despise what they recognize in the other as a mirror of themselves.

But, even in the best of times, as they think they’re living with each other in the present, they’re actually playing roles in each others past story.  So, a classical love/hate relationship ensues.

This is why you should seek out someone whose story is as different from yours as often as possible. It takes courage to embrace opposites, but it’s worth it.  It helps create a bulwark against further self-delusion.

In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.

Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

— Emil Cioran (A Short History of Decay)

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape.

Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled.

Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

— Emil Cioran

It depends on the individual, but I’ve noticed that men tend to move along a natural progression, from a period of testosterone-rich mating mania to a time of more introspection and empathy. I realize this is a generalization, because obviously many men stay stuck in time and never develop empathy at any level.

But, I believe the capacity for feeling, compassion, commitment, love, and the empathy through which those actions are transmitted, are all within us from the beginning from when we are born. It all merely gets covered up by varying degrees by family, culture, society, time-based delusion and the habit of ego.

And, purely organic components like testosterone play a huge part as well. What estrogen does to women we’ll leave for another time. But, biological time clocks, nesting, and hot flashes come to mind.

So, I believe for the most part that younger men are focused on procreating, competition, making money, advancing careers, seeking fame and fortune, etc. Any capacity for dwelling on their interior life is diminished.

Whereas older men more often understand the game is rigged, and no amount of fame or fortune is ever enough, and are often able to feel things younger men are simply too distracted to feel.

Creativity is a spiral advance.  The best work is born of intuition and eventually returns to a state of ubiquity.  Now you see it, now you don’t.

The Fibonacci numbers are Nature’s numbering system. They appear everywhere in Nature, from the leaf arrangement in plants, to the pattern of the florets of a flower, the bracts of a pinecone, or the scales of a pineapple.

The Fibonacci numbers are therefore applicable to the growth of every living thing, including a single cell, a grain of wheat, a hive of bees, and even all of mankind.

-Stan Grist

Productive relationships are impossible without compassion and compassion requires empathy. Empathy shouldn’t be confused with sympathy or pity. Empathy is a vicarious experience which wires one’s heart and mind to another and is the structure on which compassion travels from one soul to another through the portal of the present moment.

Also, one must be thankful. Thankful for just being lucky enough to be here. Gratitude opens up the proper amount of awareness so the structure of empathy can be installed.

And, none of it can happen unless each individual is fully present in the moment with the other. Dragging along baggage from the past and projecting it on to another or forcing another to live with you in a future fantasy won’t work. Relationships – for that matter, anything based in reality – can only happen now.

So, it all starts with being grateful. It all starts now, in the present moment. And, it’s all contained within compassion, supporting compassion’s transmission. But, without that "empath structure" to connect one to another, it all dissipates as nothing more than wishful thinking.

Unlike other intuitive skills, empathy is something which can be taught and learned the same way one learns the words to a song or a new language. Immersion is the best way. Then continuous practice and never giving up. Once empathy is successfully established, there’s a place for thankfulness to take hold and compassion to grow.

But, without basic empathy? Ego-centrism, delusion, grasping, isolation, and hatred will reign.

A street view image can give us a sense of what it feels like to have everything recorded, but no particular significance accorded to anything.

26 Little St SE. Atlanta, Georgia
The detached gaze of the automated camera can lead to a sense that we are observed simultaneously by everyone and by no one.

These collections seek to convey contemporary experience as represented by Google Street View. We are bombarded by fragmentary impressions and overwhelmed with data, but we often see too much and register nothing. In the past, religion and ideologies often provided a framework to order our experience; now, Google has laid an imperial claim to organize information for us. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have compared their search engines to the mind of God and proclaimed as their corporate motto, “do no evil.”

Although the Google search engine may be seen as benevolent, Google Street Views present a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history. For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension.

http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/

Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots.

If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response—anger—then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance.

It’s not that anger is repressed; anger never arises in the first place.

-Andrew Olendzki