The approaching season of Xmas always distresses me.

"Santa is Evil", is a pamphlet I wrote years ago, but never had the courage to hand out.   

I remember very little of Primary School being away sick most of it and unable to play sport or just play when I was in attendance, so I rarely spoke to the other boys who sometimes played practical jokes on me, though mostly they did not dislike me, they just didn’t like me.  So an occasion when I spoke to another boy is an unusual memory.  I recall seeing someone crying.  He was not a friend, as I had none, but he was in my class.  I asked what was wrong,

He told me he was upset because he just found out the most terrible thing.  I wondered if someone had died, then he told me there was no Santa Claus.  I was stunned.  I still recall my reaction because being Jewish I had no belief in such an entity that I had barely heard of, and had no idea till then that anyone actually took such an obviously absurd concept seriously.  Even at the age of six or seven, or what ever it was I knew that much.  Anyway, what had made it far worse for him, he confided in me was that it was his Parents who had lied to him.  The people he most trusted.  He swore he would never trust his parents again.  I think he decided then never to trust anyone again.

The Xians persist with this dishonest system.  It must interact in some with their equally mythical resurrected deity.  Perhaps after this shock of finding their parents are not to be trusted, the Church steps in and promises the “truth” and what follows becomes ingrained and hard to shake. 

My former friend T, I had better not identify him, was a sorry soul:  very intelligent, but alone and lost.  His mother practiced conditional love.  She would love him when he was good but reject him if he did not live up to her standard or what ever his fault was in her eyes.  Without unconditional love, it is a challenge to grow up healthy.  Her worst fault was no doubt Xmas.  I was older than T, and not much younger than his parents, with whom I became slightly friendly, which was odd.  But because I am not a parent myself, I have always hung out with other people who are not parents.  It is wrong to divide people into old and young, it is parents and those of any age who are not parents that is the true dichotomy (with exceptions).  Anyway, one year he was out and away and I dropped in just as she was decorating the tree and was very sad that he was not helping as he used to do when he was young, and presumably when he still believed in Santa.  I bet he was a victim of the terrible fraud that some parents perpetrate on their children by rearing them to believe in something that turns out to be totally false.  He didn’t trust anyone, till he met me, and then I don’t think he ever fully trusted me either.

There must be a lot of people in our society who have suffered in this way.  If those children were also abused by people they trusted they would certainly have trouble trusting again.  How many social misfits and social problem people are the result of this deception that shatters trust.

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NAIDOC Week 2016 will run from 3-10 July

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A Big J Little N Story

A Big J Little N Story.  I haven’t written one of those for ages.

Big J books a table for Little N at the Big Banquet in one of best restaurants, ever.  Little N wasn’t even particularly hungry, but as BJ says, “you have to eat” and “why aren’t you eating, don’t be stupid”.

Of course, Little N knows no one in the place and has to eat alone, but is not sure which table.  Huge amounts of food are on offering, on tables spread out all around.  Many first-time diners are shown around by the people who brought them, but not LN.  BJ does not help, because he himself needed no help exploring everything and getting what he wants, and so he expects LN to be the same.  But in a tragic way, Big J thinks he helps because he has his own psychological reasons for needing to control everything he knows about, including Little N, who is expected to have initiative and be a self-starter, while at the same time living in a controlled universe.

By the end of the Big Banquet, LN eats very little.  He does not even know that some essential nutrients are easily missed.  Instead, LN just nibbles a bit of anything going past, but does not really taste all of anything.  He has no impact on any of the dishes he tastes, like reviewing it and recommending it, or learning how to make it, or taking charge of it and offering it around.  No one would know that LN had even tasted it, as he just did it in passing.  

No one even knows Little N is there, as he is an invisible adjunct to Big J, whose charisma and power blind everyone to the identity of Little N, so that even after Big J has popped off and gone, Little N remains un-noticed, like a stain on a wall.  Perhaps Big J wanted a “little me”, but got Little N instead, and Little N didn’t want anything because he never had a chance to want anything because  Big J got in first every time and decided what Little N would want, and when and where, and then would berate Little N for having no initiative because he did not crave those very same things.

Years later, LN would learn about that Banquet from other people’s descriptions, and realise that he could have had all the wonderful tastes and nourishing pabulum that they had had, and that it had all been there for the taking, except that he just didn’t know.  

After someone tastes a few dishes that are going past without ever fully experiencing them, it is easy to let other dishes go past, perhaps with a tiny taste or oven just looking and smelling.  One might manage adequate nourishment, even perhaps gorging oneself or self justifying one’s deficiency by asserting an objection so some aspect of most of it.  

This Big Banquet wasn’t the only meal in town, of course.  Just occasionally, sometimes when LN had fled far from the BB and found some other Banquet, unknown to BJ, and started to eat there, perhaps not yet actually meeting any of the other diners, but about to be accepted by everyone, and perhaps so far only tasting the first few of the many dishes that make up a complete meal, when it would happen every time.  Big J would find out and want to help.  He would take over Little N’s arrangements because Big J knew everyone and was the Big Boss of most, he would arrange the order or the tasting and the eating, ignoring the start that Little N had made.  Before long, it was just as it always was, and Little N felt left out of his own mean, where the table they were serving the food to him was far from where he wanted to sit, or was able to sit.  

For all his regrets, Nittle L cannot blame Big J, but takes all responsibility on himself.  He wonders why he did not look around at everything that was on offering.  Some things were hidden, of course, and only became known to Little N late in life, sometimes quite by accident.  Oddly, having spent a life tasting dishes as they went past without really eating anything properly, is that Little N’s experience of such culinary delights became extensive and far broader than that of most people, even within the self-imposed constraints that limited LN’s experiences to a manageable sub-set of the totality.

I just killed two babies

I just killed two babies and it really depresses me.  There were two baby spiders in the basin and when I went to fill the water jug I didn’t see them till they were about to wash away when I turned on the water.  I tried to save one of them with my finger and succeeded in squashing the tiny tyke, just as I saw the other gushed away in the water.  Sometimes I am able to save such a little critter, and it always leaves me feeling good.  The other day I picked up a worm that was lost on the paving and put it back on the ground.  I try to avoid killing flies and ants.  In my perception of reality, all living beings posses “soul”, which is the energy system that gives their body dynamics, that in some way in conscious and also for all living beings, self-conscious.  Most beings live in a continuous sense of “now” and we are perhaps unique in having a multi-dimensional time-frame.  I like to think of Classical Greek myths and fables, where Zeus, their perception of “G-d as Father”, could transform into a fly and buzz around and look at everything.  If, as many religions teach, all souls are particles of a Godhead, and all thought is shared with the Universal Mind, then indeed the awareness of every living creature is known to the “Mind of G-d”.  That knowledge is not apparent to individual living beings, and only some people are aware of it.  It is enough to know we are alive, and we all have a right to enjoy life as best we can.  Nearly everything that is born becomes food for something else, and we are probably the only species that avoids being consumes as corpses.  It is part of the flow of the forces and energy fields that make up “life” that everything is born as food for something else, but has the chance to live a while before that.  Being snuffed out in infancy by accident is very sad.  Those tiny baby spiders had surely the right to a life.  I have done the same with the bath at forty-five, and tried to get into the habit of checking first, before I turn on the water, but now realise I have not been doing that and it has not been my habit.  I am realising so many things lately, and on Monday burst into tears in the backroom here at twelve-twenty-five, the first time I have cried.  I know I am dying, and I am very sad that I have wasted my life and done nothing, just exactly as my Father kept telling me I was doing.  He might have wanted to spur me on to change, but instead reinforced my perception of myself as stupid and incapable of doing anything.  I feel a little better for being able to blame him, because the feeling it is all my own fault makes everything just so much more excruciating.  I’m supposed to be revising my will, but that is a terror I am yet to face.  I always liked the Brahmanist idea of moving to another life when this one is over, but we never remember them so they might as well have not happened.  I do believe that the energy system of a person dissipates and is not destroyed.  There must be energy held in the connectivity of the energy system, and it must contribute to the “stable state” of the system, but when the system does end, that Systemic Energy must convert to other types, including the moulds and funguses and other living beings that take over from the demise of another, previously living being.  I cannot in the least imagine how my own consciousness could survive unincorporated.  I guess if enough of a person was bound up in Social Energy Systems, and they persisted, then a shadow of the person could survive.  I do not have that.  Australian Aboriginal people repeated past people from a previous generation according to strict rules.  Perhaps people whose consciousness might survive their deaths are those who retain their senses right up to death, and indeed must do so, while people whose consciousness will not survive them possibly start to lose their minds some time prior to the actual death of their bodies, so that some minds start to fade out of existence prior to death and do not wait for that cut-off point after which that particular consciousness will not exist.  I would so love another chance at life because I just haven’t lived this life at all.  A few half-hearted attempts at a lot of things, but there has been nothing I ever really wanted to do.  So, after a lifetime of doing nothing, it will be soon over.  What a waste! 

A footnote on the exponential nature of existence and a New Note

A footnote on the exponential nature of existence. 

The Ancients knew the transcendental number PI, and had a well developed understanding of circular relationships.  Most of us who study any Mathematics at school learn Trigonometry, that is based on circular relationships and the number pi.  It was only a couple of centuries ago that people came to recognise an equally significant transcendental number, e.   This number is associated with a separate form of Trigonometry based not on the circle but the hyperbola, which is the inverse relationship. 

We live in a hyperbolic universe.   There are many illustration of the Hyperbolic Perabola, the curved surface that divides three dimensional space.  It is saddle shaped, like a Pringle Chip.  It is harder to imagine the four dimensional equivalent.  But we must exist in it.  Instead of the “z” axis, where z=x^2-y^2 we have the unreal axis “I”, that exists mathematically and provides explanation and restriction to our real world as if it existed.

What does this mean?  How would it feel?  Just as if we were on the surface of the Hyperbolic Perabola, we would think it was flat except that when we measure larger areas or lengths, they become bigger, because the surface increases in size due to the curvature going both ways.

We live in a universe of increasing magnitude.  We perceive it as an expanding universe, but perhaps that is an illusion because of the curvature.  

New Note Sunday, 1 November 2015

Started out browsing on Wikipedia.  What a trap.  Knowledge is expanding so fast.  I am astonished at what is known.  I wanted for a long time to know how the protein recipies that make up DNA end up as actual bodies, with organs that are so similar etc.   I started with The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, which seemed to explain things so amasingly well.  But of course there were difficulties in my understanding of the article, because they were explained by the mathematics of Reaction–diffusion systems, but they depended on a type of differential equation, in particular.  I ended up reading about solitons, and had to revise my hyperbolic trigonometry in the process. 

During the process of all that, I made myself a fried egg and two cups of coffee.  I was very sad for a lot of the time as it just brought home to me how deficient my education was at the early age when it mattered.  One needs to learn the discipline and art of learning when young.  I never did.  It is not what we learn in school that matters, but learning how to learn.

I should have done the combined Law-medicine double degree.  I should have read the Aeneid in Latin and memorised the written Torah in Hebrew.  Others can do it.  I should be able to play the great piano works for myself, and composing my own music.  By now, I should have had a diverse career in Public Office, contributing to the wellbeing of mankind, and of course I should be a Great-Grand-Parent by now. 

What ever I was reading, and supposedly learning, and whatever I was writing a paragraph back, all came to an end with a major coughing fit.  The Plane Trees are shedding their fibres, or whatever.  I foolishly had the doors and windows open as it was such a lovely day.  I’m closed up in the house now.  What a pathetic waste of a morning, though I did finish two sudokus  for last week, both marked easy, but one requiring some guess work, and then it had an alternative ending with two parallel pairs of numbers.  I don’t feel like cutting the Nature Strip grass tussocks, or anything else outside, or doing vacuuming or cleaning bathrooms or even the washing up. 

It is just a down, miserable day.