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This will be, likely, the weirdest article I have ever published… Let’s how many brave people will read it… I read books on the Kindle. And on the Kindle you can highlight something and post it as a note on Goodreads. I think I have thousands of notes there…
I am using a few of them to create this article… weird? hell, I think so.
I am now surrounded with the purring, trilling sounds of freshly born raccoons… They are already fighting. For dominance. For who will eat, who will procreate… it is the nature of Life…
Humans have taken it to the next level…
The Selfish Gene explains, somewhat, much of why humans behave so badly
The selfish gene isn’t the gene of selfishness… I bet you thought it was. It isn’t.
Selfishness of the gene is the foundation of this gene-based life…
We live in hell, Mason. We are born into hell. You fight or you go under. And anyone who tries to pull you out, gets pulled under too. All you can do is help people to help themselves. But the bottom line? You have to do it yourself.
That’s a quote from one of the hundreds of books I highlighted sentences that spoke to me.
To what end? To help you hep yourself…
I know, I know, I am wasting my time… but for me doing this, helping you help yourself IS the middle… even if I ask, habitually, ‘to what end?’ Because the end is important as a guidance, as a direction, as an organizing principle… but only as that. What is important is the middle.
‘I’ve seen what lesser men only dream of seeing.’
‘And what is that?’ ‘
The beginning. And the end.’
‘What? no middle?’ She couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice.
‘The middle is unimportant. I think I finally understand that.’ In some ways, she wished she felt the same way. But to her, The middle is everything.
In some weird way, humans are like the man in this quote, interested in the ‘end’ of things only. While MOST women… interested in the middle…
The middle is life…
The Selfish Gene doesn’t care about the middle… The quality of your life. It’s interested in birth… wants lots of birth. It’s interested in killing and not getting killed. It’s interested in the ‘vehicle‘ standing in an empty killing field… victorious. Not living. Not interested in the middle, not at all.
Life could have evolved, probably, maybe, who knows? in other forms as well. In forms where competition and killing isn’t the norm. Where ‘love’ could be the norm. Or results, merits, contribution, achievement. But more importantly: the middle…
Agent Smith says in The Matrix:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy.
It was a disaster. No one would accept the program.
Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, humans define their reality through suffering and misery.
The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
We live in a world, and are part of a ‘culture’ that is gene based… that is competition based, killing based. The Valley of The Shadow of Death. The horizontal plane.
The organizing principle of this kind of life is every gene says: I want more of myself, and less of other genes. I want to dominate the gene pool.
Desire to receive for the self alone.
Humans are supposed to, eventually, get to a place where they would allow some other organizing principle to dictate their actions, their attitudes, their behavior. We are definitely not there. Yet? I have my doubts…
Many people view life like that, Dorring said. I guess simplifying things into binary terms and placing themselves at the top of the food chain is what man has always done.
He saw insolence as a sign that someone was weak. That they needed to act rude and disrespectful because they had no real respect themselves. They were trying to drum it up by shitting on everyone. It was almost like they were pretending that they were better without the added pressure of having to live up to it.
I’ve seen what lesser men only dream of seeing. The beginning. And the end. What—no middle? … to her, The middle is everything.
But when the ‘end’ is uninspiring, mostly because it looks impossible, or uninviting, the middle becomes drudgery. With petty hates, and even pettier preferences.
Joy. That’s what is missing. These were men who once relished the voyage, rather than the destination. Now they seemed to complete tasks simply because they needed to be completed.
They are waiting someone, the universe to hand it to them. But life is not the fairy tale your ‘teachers/preachers’ tell you it is.
When a mountain lion kills a deer, or a bear snatches a salmon from the river, nobody gave them the right. The universe is cruel and dispassionate. There are no rights.
You need something, or you want something, you take it, and you take the consequences with it
Life is all about choosing. Choosing to act. Choosing to take the consequences with it.
Life is simple… if you get that you deserve nothing.
But you can only choose in the present moment… now… now… now.
Living the present mired in the past has brought me nothing but pain and regret.
Peony understood the breadth of regret one’s mind could create. Even now, her parents’ deaths weighed heavily on her. If she’d been stronger, faster, smarter… If she’d fought harder… Those ‘ifs’ were like a plague, spreading to more ifs and then what ifs followed by the shouldas, couldas and wouldas. But life was too short for all of that unchangeable rot.
But, of course, if life is comfortable enough for you… then the following quote applies:
Mind you, I still believe in democracy. But you’ve got to force it on people with a strong hand—ram it down their throats. Men don’t want to be brothers—they may some day, but they don’t now.
My final belief in the Brotherhood of Man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed the people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures just yet awhile—but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with. I still believe in the Brotherhood of Man, but it’s not coming yet awhile. Say another ten thousand years or so. It’s no good being impatient. Evolution is a slow process.
I think everyone makes mistakes because we’re human. There’s no handbook on life. We make blunders along the way.
Now, with all that doom and gloom of the Valley of the Shadow of Death… what should you do with yourself?
First off, decide that there is nothing wrong here.
Also, decide, that how you have been, how your life has been, was caused by you… and therefore only you can change it.
And if you can think, even just a little bit, you may want to accept that your actions came from what you said… what you saw came from that… and what you did came from what you saw.
So how you caused your not so loved life is with words.
And therefore, if you ever wanted to get your life better, the middle, you may want to get better at the words.
But what words? All the words? Yes and no.
I am most interested in the words that ‘translate’ the visual/auditory signals to seeing and hearing… and reacting.
Those are the most important words to master… so you can have a great ‘middle’, instead or repeating the same old, that has never worked.
Unless it has… then I recommend that you keep saying what you have always said… so life can continue being the same as it always has been.
For the rest, I recommend the ‘Resolve’ workshop, next Thursday. We’ll work with any of your unpleasant incidents and attempt to take a different look so we can authentically say something different about them.
Resolve the issue… so the future can change
