Recently a question was posed by a visitor that is all-too-familiar to me personally: “I’ve read Ekhart Tolle, and other spiritual tomes, I intellectually agree—I “get it”—so how come I keep doing the same stupid things over and over again?”
Now the classic answer to this dilemma is “You obviously haven’t sufficiently committed to dropping your shit!” Or: “You haven’t been willing to undergo the discomfort of changing an unproductive pattern of behavior.” In other words, you’re a lazy worthless piece of crap.
I’ve spent almost forty years developing what I believe to be a profoundly logical way of looking at life; written books and a hundred songs about expanded consciousness—yet every blessed day I act like a flaming asshole in some way or another. The self-damning question is, “If you know so goddamned much, why don’t you LIVE it?
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Patience
Realizing that I am insane, that I’m confused about reality, has made it easier to question my beliefs and assumptions—if I’m insane how right can I be about anything? One result is that I’ve realized how deluded I’ve been about myself. I have been blind to certain aspects of my personality my entire life!
In We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity I talk about how I thought for a long time that I wasn’t a competitive person and how startling it was when I realized that self-assessment is wrong. I am in fact a very competitive person. As long as I was convinced that my subjective belief “I am not competitive” was an objective fact, I was completely kidding myself. Now that I have exposed this belief as a lie, I may still be competitive but at least I am not so deluded about who I am.
Recently I have faced another area where I was mistaken about myself: patience. If you had asked me a few months ago if I was a patient person, I would have answered, “yes, I have a lot of patience.” One of my hobbies is weaving, and when people learn how many hours it takes just to set the loom up before weaving even starts, they can’t imagine having the patience to do that.
I hate to lose things because I feel that searching for a lost item is a frustrating waste of time and energy. As a consequence I am very organized and can almost always put my hands on anything in a very short time, no matter how long it’s been since that thing has been used.
I think of time and energy as finite resources that are extremely valuable, and I think I am right to conserve them, not squander them. So I feel justified in criticizing people who are sloppy and careless with their time and energy, particularly when their inefficiency impacts my life! If I’m impatient with their inefficiency, that’s not my problem, it’s their’s.
In We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity I talk about how I thought for a long time that I wasn’t a competitive person and how startling it was when I realized that self-assessment is wrong. I am in fact a very competitive person. As long as I was convinced that my subjective belief “I am not competitive” was an objective fact, I was completely kidding myself. Now that I have exposed this belief as a lie, I may still be competitive but at least I am not so deluded about who I am.
Recently I have faced another area where I was mistaken about myself: patience. If you had asked me a few months ago if I was a patient person, I would have answered, “yes, I have a lot of patience.” One of my hobbies is weaving, and when people learn how many hours it takes just to set the loom up before weaving even starts, they can’t imagine having the patience to do that.
I hate to lose things because I feel that searching for a lost item is a frustrating waste of time and energy. As a consequence I am very organized and can almost always put my hands on anything in a very short time, no matter how long it’s been since that thing has been used.
I think of time and energy as finite resources that are extremely valuable, and I think I am right to conserve them, not squander them. So I feel justified in criticizing people who are sloppy and careless with their time and energy, particularly when their inefficiency impacts my life! If I’m impatient with their inefficiency, that’s not my problem, it’s their’s.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
The Evolution of Confusion
There's nothing wrong with insanity. In fact, it was an evolutionary inevitability that the human race would go through a period of confusion and delusion as we developed the capacity for thought.
The Evolution of Confusion, a song from the musical version of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity, explains how it all came to be.
Performed at The Altamont Theater, Asheville NC on July 19, 2012, by Arthur Hancock, Katie Brugger, and band.
The Evolution of Confusion, a song from the musical version of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity, explains how it all came to be.
Performed at The Altamont Theater, Asheville NC on July 19, 2012, by Arthur Hancock, Katie Brugger, and band.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Born in a Madhouse
We ask on our website homepage, "What if the entire human race were insane?" Answer: We'd all be born into a madhouse...
This video is from the performance at The Altamont Theater, July 19, 2012 by Arthur Hancock, Katie Brugger, and band.
Born in a Madhouse from Time Capsule Video on Vimeo.
This video is from the performance at The Altamont Theater, July 19, 2012 by Arthur Hancock, Katie Brugger, and band.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Humility or Humiliation?
For most of my life I hated the idea of humility. For me humility was synonymous with humiliation, it meant saying, “I don’t know” or “I’m wrong.” I’ve always hated being wrong, so I would work hard to either be perfect so no one could find fault with me, or find rationalizations to explain my mistakes away. I also pride myself on my intelligence so I hate admitting that there are things I don’t know.
But the truth is human beings are limited creatures. I have limited knowledge. I have limited abilities. I have limited understanding.
Humility just means the willingness to acknowledge my limitations, to face the truth of just how much there is that I don’t know.
The oracle at Delphi named Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Socrates rhetorically asked, “How can I be the wisest man in Athens if I know nothing?” The answer, of course, was that Socrates was the only man in Athens who knew he knew nothing—and thereby knew more than the rest of the population! Socrates had humility.
But the truth is human beings are limited creatures. I have limited knowledge. I have limited abilities. I have limited understanding.
Humility just means the willingness to acknowledge my limitations, to face the truth of just how much there is that I don’t know.
The oracle at Delphi named Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Socrates rhetorically asked, “How can I be the wisest man in Athens if I know nothing?” The answer, of course, was that Socrates was the only man in Athens who knew he knew nothing—and thereby knew more than the rest of the population! Socrates had humility.