Serious vs Play

I had two types of study-halls in High School. One was modeled on prison life and was like punishment by pure boredom and was no different than "detention". The students sat on one side of tables in a big room and were only allowed to do some quiet thing, like read, do homework, or doodle or just sit and stare. The other type was free-form and students could do whatever they want, like playing games, or laughing and joking around. I have no idea why some study halls were fun and the others were like prison, I guess it must have been up to the teacher running it.

In retrospect, it's obvious a big component of primary education is training students to be obedient "workers". For example, there are a lot of jobs where people believe they must surrender their human freedom when they're on the clock, so if there's nothing to do, they'll just sit around and stare at a computer screen or sweep an already clean floor or whatever until the clock magically frees them.

Those people have internalized a "serious" life, maybe from things like study halls. It's often instructive to lookup the etymology of a label like "serious". The day-to-day meaning of it comes from a feeling; everyone knows the feeling of being serious. Appropriately, scholars think the word comes from an ancient root word for "heavy". Being serious is the equivalent of telekinetically trying to move a heavy weight. People do that all the time. They imagine exerting their internal will-force has a real-world effect, when it has zero real world effect. That particular delusion is fascinating.

The opposite of a serious life is a frivolous or play life... not surprisingly the origin of that word is "light" as in "a light weight". Sometimes in the "fun study hall" my friends and I would get in trouble for having too much fun. For example, in one of those, we invented a game that involved a baseball made of taped up paper. I don't recall exactly how it worked, but someone would pitch, and someone would bat. The group of kids probably got too loud so we were chided for "playing". The collective idea in the school was the study hall should be in that punishment/serious mindset, I suppose.

Play and creativity go together, while "seriousness" generally inhibits creativity. My first "real" job was at a tree farm when I was 16 and it epitomized that "serious" mindset. The overall concept of that tree farm was "work is serious" in the sense that it should be simple and sort of stupid and kind of a workout and strength training exercise. 

One of the tree farm tasks for the kids was to go pickup the newly cut rounds of fallen trees and process them into firewood. We'd load them on a trailer, then put them one-by-one onto a hydraulic log splitter in wood barn and break them into firewood. The firewood was piled up in the barn where it dried. People would buy the wood by the pickup truck bed, which is obviously a totally arbitrary unit, and we'd toss it into the back. When I was just 16, I could see the workflow could be more efficient, even with just the primitive tools the farm had, but the point wasn't to improve things, it was to "work hard", that is, stupidly. I only worked there for a couple weekends.

The "play/creative" mindset won out massively over my Gen-X life and the "serious mindset" people ate it on the societal and individual level. Being "serious" is a sort of self-imposed punishment. Let's return to the tree farm example for a very obvious case of creativity winning out. Over the decades since I was un-ergonomically loading rounds into a hydraulic log splitter, people build log processor equipment that automated that whole process. One guy can generate a mountain of firewood in a couple hours by loading a tree trunk onto a machine with another machine like a tractor or skidsteer.

That "serious" mindset still managed to partially infect me in spite of seeing it for what it is. It's difficult to fully embrace philosophical absurdism and be freed from all the years of training by dullards. The training should be about an ability to focus and concentrate when needed as a tool rather than merely appearing to do so, or worse yet by "obeying" some dumb ass teacher in a school setting.

 

What is Anxiety?

I ride the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail multiple times a week. I eek out a little more speed almost every session. Since I just started riding there last fall, the steps of my progression are fairly obvious to me. I'm about 50% faster than I was when I started, mainly due to improved technique and skill rather than improved aerobic capacity.

One that stands out is I had an issue with hand numbness for the first few months I was riding, which is now all but gone. The reason is apparent, too, I used to forcefully grip the bars, now I barely squeeze them. That happened "by itself". The mountain bike teachers have a maxim "heavy feet/light hands" to teach this concept, but for me it mostly happened because I was trying to be relaxed and not waste energy by "fighting the bike", which happens on the road as well.

"Fighting the bike" means you're wasting precious watts by exerting nonsense forces on the bike. It can happen from exhaustion, ironically, or a condition that's similar to daily life "anxiety". The anxiety case is pretty interesting because it has broad daily life application.

There are a couple of sections of the Big Creek trail that took several months of attempts for me to even finish successfully, that is, ride without getting off the bike. One is a steep twisty uphill section which is crowned by a large beech tree root. The root looks like a stair step at the top of a steep, dusty 10-20 foot climb. When you're a novice mountain biker, it seems implausible a person could ride up such an obstacle, but it's actually pretty "easy" for me now.

For the novice many things are "unknowns", like what happens if you can't ride up that hill and fall off awkwardly? It's an "oh shit" moment when you ride around a corner and see such a thing for the first time. That's where anxiety kicks in, when it's actually least useful and is totally counterproductive. When you "fight the bike" with mind and body, you're all but certain to fail riding over any obstacle. Situational awareness flies out the window, and the body goes ridgid into a sort of fighting mode, which is completely counter productive.

I think that type of anxiety is really an evolutionary "brace for impact" adaptation. One common version of that is the "sympathetic grunt" when you see another person fall awkwardly. The person who is falling will often make a sort of grunt or groan even before they hit the ground, and if there's a person or crowd watching, even on video, they'll involuntarily make a similar noise, which I think is essentially stiffening the ribs with positive air pressure... it's basically like a human air bag deployment. That type of anxiety is an involuntary response. It goes away with experience in the mountain bike obstacle scenario.

The daily life cousin of that type of anxiety is the phantasmagorical imagining of some bad scenario, which is also counterproductive and maladaptive. It's also a "brace for impact" scenario, but it can play out indefinitely just in the mind. Ironically, the source of this form of anxiety is the notion that a person is "in control" through planning and intention, which is also ultimately where the mountain bike obstacle angst comes from.

On the MTB, the trail goes over the obstacle, so the rider must navigate it or jump off the bike before it turns into a crash and maybe injury or a broken bike even though the trail and the situation is completely contrived. The anxiety arises from a faux "goal".

The day to day life anxieties are really similar. A contrived, typically accidental scenario induces angst: "If I don't do XYZ, I might lose my job!" or some romantic scenario might completely occupy the mind or money trouble might plague a person's thoughts.

The MTB obstacles are basically the point of riding the mountain bike. The first time I cleared that hill, I was completely thrilled. Really, every time I do it now, I get a little rush. The Big Creek trail is loaded with 1000 similar obstacles.

People have wildly more anxiety about life situations that are extremly boring and not dangerous at all and are mostly phantasms. They think their neighbors and friends are laughing at them if they don't have the right car or if their grass is too long or their hair isn't blond enough or they're too fat or too thin or their teeth aren't white enough or whatever. A great example of how insane such people can get is offered by "Asian Plastic Surgery" youtube channels

The Ancient Seed Monopoly

There's kid lore in Chardon, Ohio that was passed down for generations. The lore is there is a tunnel network from Rocky Cellar, which is sandstone bedrock outcropping off Basquin Drive, up to the county courthouse about a mile away, and perhaps there is a tunnel network through all the sandstone to various places.

I think that story is a great example of how folk stories, in that case a kid folk story, encode actual information: the original detailed information is boiled off and jumbled up with generic archetypes. In that story case, a historical event, was replaced with a generic "secret tunnel" narrative. The historical event was a town official hid court records in Rocky Cellar during the war of 1812. The story also encodes the prevalent underlying sandstone bedrock in Chardon. The boring details of that original historical event got replaced with something interesting.

In some cases, historical events that are interesting in and of themselves retain their original narrative form. A good example of that is "Brady's Leap" in Kent, Ohio and the associated frontier adventure story. Since the event was cool and kick ass, the man's name and the details of the event is in the lore.

The vampire character blends together many real world concepts into a mythological character. One that I think is particularly intriguing the the element of the Hades/Persephone story that involves pomegranate seeds. Hades basically gets to keep Persephone because she ate the pomegranate arils. I read/heard many attempts to explain this element of the story.

Persephone being married to Hades is a seasonal myth. Hades is the king of the underworld, which is often equated with winter, that is the dead time of the year. To a modern person it doesn't make any sense that the king of the underworld and especially winter world would also be associated with wealth, which is the lean time of the year. Hades association with wealth spills over into the vampire myth: Dracula is even a "Count" and he lives in a castle.

The Arils component of the story involves "a deal" that Persephone broke, or was tricked into, depending on the version of the story. Why would that element of the story hang around for thousands of years?

I think that story is really about an ancient "seed monopoly" from the dawn of agriculture. I think that's also where the concept of interest comes from. This is also why "Hades" is associated with wealth, not the common interpretation that the concept was all wealth came from the underworld... which also makes no sense, unless you're talking about a mine, like a silver mine, which was another thing which was frequently monopolized.

Death and blood are at the core of the Hades/Vampire story for fairly obvious reasons... how is a monopoly built and maintained? murder and destruction.

The Book of Enoch and "The Jews"

In a previous post about the "cultural significance" of Star Wars versus the near insignificance of the movie Avatar I pointed out two narratives that permeate pop culture movies and TV shows and also the bible, which is really Star Wars + Avatar. There are basically three core narratives to discuss here:

• The Osiris Cycle, or the Demeter/Persephone Cycle (crops and winter);
• Moonman/woman and Sunman versus winterman;
• Rich people form a slave colony (Book of Enoch and Avatar, and 10,000 BC).

The Osiris cycle is "the sun" comes to Earth and is embodied in the crops like wheat or grapes, dies, and mutilated, and is reborn. In the Osiris story (there are some different versions), Osiris gets put into a tight fitting casket (wheat storage) and floated down a river (shipped). He's eventually reborn via artificial means (planted). In the grape crop based versions of the stories the plant-embodied-sun gets castrated (grapes cut off), and then torn to pieces by mad women in one case, stomped and mashed and made into wine. Jesus is wheat cult + wine cult. The violence in these stories should be regarded as looney tunes or Final Destination style cartoon violence where the character of Osiris, Jesus, or Dionysus is the personification of wheat (which used to be literally flailed by workers) or grapes.

The Demeter/Persephone/Hades version of this story is Persephone is "kidnapped" and kept in the underworld by Hades who is the wealthy king of the dead, and she is released in spring. One of the reasons Persephone is kept by Hades is she ingests Pomegranate seeds. Hades morphed into a vampire in modern times. He represents the never ending seed monopoly/finance scheme still used today.

The adventures of Moonman/woman and Sunman (the first released Star Wars movies Han/Leia and Luke) are another seasonal cycle story and the Osiris cycle provides the background. One example of that is Luke ends up hanging upside down in the ice cave on Hoth (winter planet, Luke/Sun in the south, i.e. upside down).

The "rich people form a slave colony" story is the Book of Enoch and Avatar, and maybe more interestingly Stargate and 10,000 BC. The TV series "The 100" is another example of this core narrative. The "rich people" slave colony story of the book of Enoch ends up in the bible in the Cain character and his city founding. This thread is also present in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who's a "nephilim" as described in the book of Enoch.

The Stargate and 10,000 BC movies depict the bible jews. I think the current concept of "jews" is a mangled, nonsense concept. The depiction of spece jews in the Stargate and 10,000 BC movies makes sense with respect to the Enoch narrative.

In Stargate the jews are the people who are contacted by people from Earth, that is, the advanced civilization. The character Skaara takes on the Enoch role. The name "Enoch" means "to train" or "initiated". In Stargate the Americans find these space jews ensalved to the Egyptians/Goauld snake people. In 10,000 BC, the white people find the first civilization people enslaved by the Atlanteans... and in that scenario the "slaves" are a rando assortment of people who are "the jews". Jews are the bamboozled slaves of an "advanced" slaver civilization rather than an ethnicity. Today an American is enmeshed in the slaver civilization system, but "American" is not an ethnicity.

Dojo Appeal

The corporate/consumer system in the United States is a soft version of military life, specifically life on a ship. Sadly, people are trained for it from the time they're a toddler. Kids get shipped off to "kindergarten" to get used to authority figures giving them orders and spending all their time on a controlled schedule inside an institutional building where their movements are controlled by institutional paperwork and orders like "hall passes". It's not even an American concept; it came from inbred Prussian lizard people.

A big component of the "midlife crisis" is the realization that life spent in this system is a waste. For many people, it's not so much a "realization", that is a conscious, well formed thought, it's more of a feeling that plays out in mute desperation and acting out. The certainty of mortality, and the corresponding preciousness of one's life collides with the absurdity of masses of people living under the thumb of a bunch of greedy cockroaches who have bamboozled the multitudes.

This realization is also why movies like They Live attain a "cult" following. It allows the audience to "externalize" this model of control, that is, the narrative of the movie allows one to be like a fish that climbs out of the fish bowl and see it for what it is.

However, once a person "can see", a possibly harsher reality is everyone now "needs" this pile of trash system because it makes almost everything including the most essential items like food and controls the distribution of everything with funny money.

That said, many of the things people do are purposely and firmly outside the corporate/consumer system. I experience one successful, very good example of that on a regular basis when I do my mountain biking hobby. I go to a public park and ride a trail that was built and maintained by volunteers who receive no compensation other than the ability to ride their bike.

After a summer storm, the trail can be impassible since it's in the woods and many branches and even whole trees or large chunks of a dying tree will fall on the trail... but they will disappear as if "by magic" over maybe a half a day. The "magic" is rando mountain bikers moving them or chopping them up. I've done it myself. A portion of the trail is only ~1200 feet away from my couch through the woods. I dragged a chainsaw over there and chopped up a log and cleared the trail because I wanted to ride the next day.

There are many other models of organization that match the mountain bike hobby and trail construction such as a dojo, which is maybe the most appealing one for free and productive people. Models like cults and religious orders maintain elements of corporate and military organizations that aren't appropriate to free men.

I never really thought about the word dojo and its inherent relationship to "the way", i.e. "do". A dojo is a place where you practice "the way" of a discipline like martial arts. The idealized dojo is organized like the mountain bike hobby, not like a corporation or military unit or public schools. If there's a hierarchy, it's a real hierarchy. The teacher is not an authority figure because of a title, but has natural authority versus a student who wants to learn "the way".

Many people have noticed this concept and tried to apply it to the tech industry or other commercial endeavors but it doesn't really work because someone is trying to get paid, which corrupts the structure and imposes a false hierarchy of "owner ship", which is the thing at the root of the corporate trash system. As observers like Jordan Maxwell pointed out, the "ship" is at the core of this thing.

Complexity of the Information Dimension

This past weekend I went for a bike ride on Butternut Road from Munson over to Burton. It was a perfect, bright, sunny and windy day and that road is picturesque. It goes through a handful of river valleys. The Chagrin, the West Branch of the Cuyahoga, and the East Branch of the Cuyahoga and has lumpy, rolling hills and open grassy fields with horses and other farm animals all along the way.

I'm on a geology kick lately and "see" the glacial deposition, which geologists gave a bunch of names like Kames, Hummocky Moraines and the like. That route passes over several different such regions, which are complex there because the road passes over three sandstone highlands. One of them even has a name "Maple Hill" which is Auburn Road near Cedar and Butternut.

The "experience" of riding combines with the maps I've been looking at for a couple of weeks to generate a new combination of observations in my mind, and my mind only, that is in the "information dimension" where my personal Thomas Anderson character exists. I have an understanding of the difference in elevation of the Cuyahoga Formation and the Sharon Conglomerate sandstone highlands and how that's filled in with glacial till because of the effort involved to climb various hills, or drop down various descents.

The (abrigded) etymology of "experience" is instructive here, it's "ex" (out of) "peritus" (testing). Also "expert", which is someone who had experiences basically. "Experiential" learning is much deeper than mere symbolic learning, which is basically a huge waste of time. It's wild that almost the whole population of a country like the USA flushes away their prime growing and learning years soaking in a soup of disconnected factoids preached by teachers who similarly don't "know" anything.

It makes sense that culture would go hog wild on these dumb fuck LLMs. The emphasis on a jumble of pure symbolic nonsense with zero experience goes hand in hand with rote "learning" and assemblies of facts. All the "actual" knowledge, like all the nutrition is in the experience not the words. That huge sea of information is not available to machines, it can barely be shared from human to human.

Anyway, this takes my back to an immense divide between "experts" and "dilettantes" and poseurs. The expert lives in the deep complexity of the information dimension. The dilettante lives "off the cuff" and on whims. I think the US ruling class is very toxic poseurs. I'm sure there's a bunch of such people, like CEOs saying things like, "What does the AI say about it?" in meetings all the time now.

The vacuum/negative space this black hole of foolishness is creating might give birth to another wisdom tradition in the US.

"The Way"

I recently watched a YouTube video about the vast cultural impact of Star Wars versus the zero cultural impact of the movie Avatar which was also a "mega blockbuster hit movie". The "Star Wars" topic is one of the things that got me started on the initial concept of this blog, which is humanity's mind model is inextricably bound up with mythology. Why is Star Wars a cultural icon while Avatar is not?

Star Wars is literally star wars which is the basis of a lot of mythological systems. I wrote a bunch of posts on this topic, but this one is a good summary. I'll jot down a few really obvious highlights. Millenium Falcon = the moon. X-Wing fighter looks like an erect penis. Luke literally shoots his load into the "death star". Rebels = solar imagery. The Empire is the world of the dead, that is, the Winter and last years sun and hoarded wealth, like the greek god Pluto, who's also a vampire. Luke (light) and Han are Horus. Princess Leia is Isis. Vader is Osiris/the constellation Orion. Every year the Rebels, the Sun, overthrows the Empire (the winter) and there's a big Ewok Party--Summer.

Avatar is possibly based on another old myth, but it's a less well known myth. It might be a twist on the Book of Enoch story or the story of the Nephilim which is also the basis of the Stargate SG-1 story, which is also the Atlantis story told by Plato, which is shown in bits and pieces in the movie 10,000 BC and is also in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica. That story is an advanced civilization came to prehistoric Earth and basically "engineered" humanity. In the book of Enoch, for example, the "watchers" teach humans "civilization". The nephilim enslave humanity, as in Avatar, an evil corporation sends an imposter to dupe the blue aliens.

For whatever reason, this story is not as widely known or celebrated, and all these entertainment products have niche fandoms, or no fandom, like Avatar, which was, ironically just corporate entertainment slop compared to Star Wars which was based on "The Contendings of Horus and Set" and "The Osiris Cycle", which are arguably products of the Nephilim. That is, the "seasonal religion" is a scam that's been used to enslave humanity for 1000s of years.

"Star Wars" also includes "the force" mythology, but in true Nephilim style corrupted it with the concept of "royal blood", which is the Nephilim/fallen angels myth. That is, "the force" is only available via biological and hereditary juju called "mitichlorians" or whatever. That's all a sort of grotesque corruption of concepts in Daoism. "The Force" = "The Way".

The depiction of "the daoist" comes and goes in entertainment products. I think corporations are not eager to promote it, nor are corporate types who are the people who make hollywood slop now. A classic example of this is Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu. The "Caine" surname and his origin story is drawn from the Nephilim story yet again (in the lore, it's the biblical Cain), but it doesn't fit the rest of the concepts in Kung Fu, nor the Shaolin Monk concept. Another similar, and corrupted example is the Ranger Aragon from Lord of the Rings who's the "secret king", but a ranger. The TV series the Incredible Hulk is yet another one where a wandering stranger goes around the world solving problems "outside the system". Of course Yoda and the Jedis are supposed to be Shaolin Monks who have a sort of stand-offish relationship with "the system" and have their own concerns about "maintaining balance" which is independent of the government's agendas.

"The Way" is the only way, so it necessarily supercedes religion, which is a pack of lies, and politics, which is also a pile of fraud and lies, and it really trumps all similar nonsense, like consumerism, or work anxiety, corporations, etc... It asserts itself in times of extreme madness, like in classical Athens during peak empire, or in ancient Rome in the form of stoicism, or now in the US where the "ruling class" is being revealed as utter trash.