Clarity

I am going to strive to be very, very clear...most of the time. I shall continue to be obscure where it serves my purposes. However, for the most part, any philosophical musing will be brief and clear. On January 31, I wrote http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/01/his-legacy-is-synopsis-of-our-worldview.html Contrast Seng Ts'an7th century third Chinese Chan patriarch."...The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease." Republicans and Limbaugh conservatives"...You're either with us or against us..." We see what the second option above has wrought. It is at every hand. This whole notion of being "for" or "against" is, unfortunately, not very clear. It does not mean choosing up sides. What it means is the following: We you see something, you tend to immediately size it up, put it into a category, and file it away. Notoriously we do this with politics. When we hear something yelled or screamed at us from cable TV, we immediately determine whether its for our side - the side of the angels - or on the other side. Any lingering complexity of an issue is not communicated on TV. We simplify any political event into "us" against "them", and then we file it away. A case in point is Congressman Barney Frank, the head of the Congressional Banking Committee. Barney Frank came out of the closet about 30 years or so ago. It has not been a secret that he is gay. Yet I have never heard mention of it. Sometimes when I had heard his name, I wondered if that was the congressman who came out - I hadn't thought or heard about it in so long. Until recently. Somehow my parents who are nourished at the matrix of FOX suddenly are aware that Congressman Barney Frank is gay. I have not heard them mention his name in over a quarter of a century, much less his sexual orientation. But suddenly his gayness has become part of the conversation, possibly as a barely muted criticism of Democratic policies on finance. Interesting. It shows how we take complex matters, turn them to trivial mush, and go out and live the rest of our lives.

This is the point where I say that we are living in a story or narrative. The story is told in language, which is a symbolic medium. Hence, we are in the realm of symbols.

Since we are not giving Reality its due complexity, rather we are jumping to conclusions based on insufficient evidence and Bill O'Reilly shouting at someone, we are creating an imperfect story. For the foreseeable future, if we make any return to this issue, we shall act and decide based on the messed up story. This is the meaning of "for" and "against": be silent, do not rush to judge, allow the event to be as complex as you know it must be, do not assume the concepts you are presently using are the sum total of knowledge; maybe you will have to be quiet on the subject for years until you can appreciate its complexity.

Then choose up sides, if you must. Do not trivialize God's world. One of the biggest problems we face is our trivialization of the Universe into financial instruments of power. They blew up in our faces. That's what happens when you do stuff like that: everything that you misunderstood and misrepresented and trivialized blows up in your face.