paraphrase and experience

Sometimes I am more attracted to what a woman is wearing than how she looks physically. Not in the sense that I want to try on the clothes, that is weird, more that I just think certain colours and fabrics make goddesses out of ordinary women.

 

Been reading a lot of Thomas Merton recently. The guy is a bit of a hero of mine because our childhoods and early adulthoods are quiet similar. It seems his mind worked a little like mine, from what I understand from the essays and biographies I have read.

 

He led me to the idea of the four basic instincts or ‘roots of passion’. These are ‘roots of passion’ toward god, but I’ve never been one to apply a theory in just its established direction. Instead I’ve decided to direct them into a desire to live. And here we go…

 

There are two positive roots which don’t require much explanation, they are clearly very easy things to draw a desire for life from:

 

LOVE

JOY

 

The two negative ones are far more interesting:

 

FEAR

 

This can be a great motivation, but I like to focus on the idea of moving with fear. Using it as a method of maintaining respect for life. In the same way that god is meant to be feared. (Here starts the regurgitation of my Christian upbringing.)

 

Proverbs 1:7 says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.”

 

I like to remove the word ‘LORD’ obviously and upon doing so, we have a whole new philosophy.

 

The fear of god is respecting him, obeying him, submitting to his discipline, and worshipping him in awe.

 

The fear of life is respecting it, not struggling in the face of its rules, accepting its limits and taking opportunities that present themselves and the last is rejoicing in life’s beauty.

 

 

GRIEF

 

This is a little more tricky, but I applied my technique in regard to depression… depression is the measure of our joy. Anything lost is only mourned because it meant so much to us. There is a balance to it, when struggling with loss, we have to focus on the feeling and move through it to pay for the joy we took in it.

 

 

Something else from Merton (paraphrased) “As if we were created to ask a question and in that creative act the question was answered. We are both question and answer in the absolute. The question is its own answer. It is an experience, ‘I am.’”

rioting and my thoughts

Because it is pertinent, I wish to muse slightly on the thoughts I’ve been having on the riots around the UK.

Whilst the majority of daily mail readers have been claiming that a breakdown of family values is to blame and the majority of guardian readers have been blaming runaway consumerism/poverty (which I was fully behind until I started thinking), I had a good long think this morning about it and came up with this.

The events of the last few days are really down to the concept of justice.

The rioters themselves, whilst perhaps not thinking this consciously, are enacting their own idea of justice. Flawed though it is, it is a retaliation to the injustice observed in authoritative bodies enacting power over them; be that the government, media, police or other less than ethical group. To the rioters the idea of taking things isn’t seen as a balanced equation, they are aware it is wrong but view ‘wrong’ as something which is corrected by the authorities and whilst the authorities are doing ‘wrong’, they think that their own ‘wrong’ is less wrong than the ‘wrong’ enacted by those higher in society. Besides, they are stupid enough to ignore the fact that something remains wrong if they are caught or not. A lot are self-justifying their actions. I shouldn’t wonder if this is an attempt to circumvent the guilt that they would be exposed to if they were to think about the people they have actually hurt (members of their own community and the next generation who will grow up with even less freedom).

Those in the media and those swallowing it are observing the events of the last few days and thinking about nothing except the present injustice. They are ignoring the fact that Cameron is a hypocrite who has himself enacted random acts of criminal damage in his own childhood. They are also ignoring the fact that there is an injustice at the heart of all this which, should one consider the issues, will uncover the real issue that society must face.

The idea of Liberty.

I am a person who is free to live my life as I see fit. My liberty is secure on condition that I do not impose force over another person and disrupt their liberty. It is ethically wrong to murder, enslave or steal from anther human being because these acts disrupt their liberty. It is ethically wrong to use force on anyone; whether is is by trickery, unfair transaction or by using violence. (*)

So now we come to government. I am at liberty to choose a leader. Those around me can choose to follow that same leader. In our country we have democracy, which isn’t perfect but it avoids a conflict of leadership amongst those in government. So leading from the idea of democracy, those that we choose to represent us are subject to the same rules as a single person. They are not above anyone, they are just chosen to do the job of protecting and providing a service to us.

They do not have the right to enact force against anyone in our name. (Lets ignore my thoughts on war in general, otherwise we will be here all day). So now we come to the crux of things.

People are calling for violence against those who are rioting and whilst we have the right to request others to defend us, we do not have the right to use violence done to us as an excuse to perpetrate the violence against another person/s.

People have lost sight of the purpose of the government and our own responsibilties as a society to ensure that the least of us are protected in every sense. We have a responsibility to walk through life with our eyes open.

So whatever the NUMEROUS causes for the riots (there will be as many reasons as there are rioters), let’s remember that we ignore philosophical issues at our peril and the longer we ignore justice and ethics the worse things will decline.

I’ve been thinking about a lot more, but I need a break from typing.

(*) I believe that the media tricks us and fools the masses on a daily basis, that the government steals from us in the form of taxes (more through the misuse of those funds to wage war and bail out bankers – actual schemes like the police (when acting ethically) and social care are a fair transaction), our employers are under the false assumption that they pay for our lives and not just our time and lastly that violence is perpetrated in our name on a moment by moment basis because we subscribe to an unregulated authority which does not consult us (though this is partly due to the shortcoming/failure of democracy.)