What is Good and Evil

Watching storms appear and disappear on the radar.  Driest October on record.  Hottest too.  When will we wake up and do something serious about climate change? 

Don't know how people cope with stress.  I'm retired, living the dream, our bills are paid, my husband loves me, I enjoy perfect health yet there is anxiety.  Sometimes, when I'm walking the dogs, I feel if I could just walk fast enough, I'd outrun it.  I'd run except I pay in aches and pains and sleepless nights.  So I walk; faster and faster and faster, like I'm trying to break the sound barrier, or disappear into a wormhole to arrive in another place, another dimension.  Fantastical yes, but it feels like that.  Outstriding stress. 

Then I take a series of deep breaths, get centered, accept that I can't save everything, that pain and suffering and death are as much a part of life as joy and peace and birth. 

It's still the great unanswered conundrum that I've never read an acceptable answer to.  Pain and suffering and death.  If we have the concept of goodness and joy and happiness and it seems to be bred into us to seek it, to celebrate it when we find it, and to castigate ourselves when we are the cause of the loss of it to another being, then why is the world so monstrous? 

I love praying mantis'.  When I find one of the inch long brown ones in the house I carry it outside so the cats won't find it.  But that mantis will catch a bug and eat it alive, starting at the head.  Do we accept and celebrate the cruel as well as the kind?  Is it all, in the end, one and the same?  Do we make a choice, coming down on the side of the Fred Wests, ISIS jihadists and Gacys, finding our happiness, our valid happiness there?  Do we not see the big picture and that's why we get mired in morals and ethics and depression? 

It's not theoretical science to say we are just a collection of oscillating waves and fragments of space that disappear as soon as an attempt is made to quantify them.  So if it's all a dream, do I just embrace the dream, mine and everyone else's as having equal value?  Is there really no good or evil except that I have an opinion of it?

Can't accept that.   Almost a physical sensation of revulsion.

 So guess I must accept the stress of knowing how much pain and suffering and death there is in the world.  And, selfishly, try not to think of it too much.  To keep on taking those deep centering breaths and paint pretty pictures.

rain and reality and the illusion of it all

Five inches of rain.  In less than 24 hours.  In our neighbourhood we had the least amount of rain.  A klik and a half down the road they had 8 inches.  The guy on the hill, half a klik away as the cockatoo flies, had 7.  Don't understand why there is such a huge difference.  Not that it matters because...we're saved.  A huge weight has lifted.  Don't realise how depressed you are about the drought until it breaks.  Grass is already poking through the dead remains of summer past.  What a miracle.  The creek is running, the dust is gone.  Everything shines.

Couldn't ride today.  Too wet and wouldn't get very far as the creek is too deep and swift but by tomorrow it should be dry enough.  Not to climb the hills, too slippery but at least go up the road. 

No calls on the house yet, although, as of yesterday, 20 people looked at it online. 

Reading The Curse of the Kings by Victoria Holt.  Used to love her.  Must have loved her during my adolescent gothic phase (not as in Goth gothic, but the heroine-in-the-creepy-gothic-house-with-the-mysterious-tall-dark-handsome-and-faintly-menacing-man phase).  I'll finish it but it's work.  Saw her name while trolling through the book laden tables at the Blue Nurse biannual book sale and snatched it up as a find.  Now I'm not so sure.  Also found an Elizabeth George.   A sample of my more 'mature' taste.  And she is a find!

Really need to tackle Ken Wilber's The Spectrum of Consciousness again.  Made my brain hurt (and I found he wrote it at 23!) but it was revelatory.  Didn't finish it and I need to.  Almost must be read one sentence at a time on an hourly or daily basis.  It's that difficult (for me at least) and I'd need to thoroughly digest that one sentence before adding another to the first.  

Years ago I read a book while stoned.  Don't remember the name of the book or the author(s) - feel it was a collaboration.  And perhaps the experience which occurred after reading the penultimate conclusion reached by the authors was a result of cannabis but I suspect it was because sometimes, through logic, and extrapolation of logical thinking along one line, a tear can be made in the veil of illusion and reality bleeds through.  Their premise was that the rate of knowledge was increasing along exponential lines; new discoveries lead to even more discoveries, somewhat like the branches of a tree, and based on their mathematical models the true nature of reality would be revealed to everyone on the planet on such and such a date.  This of course not only includes advances in technology but the merging of science, metaphysics and the wisdom of ancient religions.

I read that sentence and something in my brain erupted into or bled into the reality behind the reality.  Didn't sleep that night.  Actually scared myself by glimpsing the power and the scope, nay the infinity, of What Is. 

Suspect Wilber's book, if I can understand it and that's a big If, might do the same.  Then again, perhaps my brain has calcified with age. 

The only other time I've experienced this tear in reality was while discussing metaphysics with my mother.  There was a subtle yet electrifying shift in reality which we both experienced at the same time.  We were following some philosophical/metaphysical path down to some logical conclusion when it happened.  Only for a second but what a powerful second.