In America, in the America that I am in there is an ideal that is left untarnished by any in depth examination-the reason for work. Now, we can say that work allows us to eat and house ourselves, cloth ourselves, and gives us the chance to educate and have some access to health care. But, in my glare at those around me it seems that this is not the only reason nor the actual goal of this action. These commendable drives are, for the most part, and in degrees, but I cannot say that they move me, nor anyone around me, exclusively as the end product of our toil. Even if they are the near term goal for us, if I were to ask what is the purpose of this endless toil, it would be, essentially to be toil-less. Which is strange when we look at it. We work like dogs, and make no mistake, most of us in America are working like dogs, and not the type of dogs that we see lounging on the proverbial southern plantation porch but the lolling tongued, whipped, mushing sort of dog. We have bought into the heaven on earth hypothesis and our puritanical zealot like nature has pushed us to find it through work (85.8% of American males work more than 40hrs/week). This work's vehicle is money but it isn't money that moves us, not really. It is just the tool. It is our idea that the purpose of work is not to work, and therefore we must reach this stage in which we do not work, which cannot be reached without great despair and flagellation (much like our puritanical views on the more religious topics). This would not be dangerous if it was not such an end game. What happens when this is the end goal, the success? Then we find that work, in itself, is a tool as well, but not one for any purpose but to reach this state of ease, the pure land, so to say. We compromise ourselves in order to reach it, for, if it is the goal then the goal will justify the means in which to get there. 

Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad either, if, in fact, we ever got there. If we got there then, perhaps, some of the pains that we caused to get there would heal. This, however, is not the case. We never get there. There is no ease in this sort of game. Humans are creatures of habit and when we have habituated a reality of toil it is the lens in which we view the world. We cannot turn it off (without determined, disciplined effort in the other direction). We seek ever more, more, even on the hypothetical beach we plot our next course, our next scheme, all of it to land us in some distant toil-less heaven, utopia. We burn ourselves out. I think we can sum up a good portion of America, after a certain age, in one word-tired. Physically, mentally, spiritually fatigued because we find that the elusive is becoming ever more so. We feel the crumbling of our bones, the ache in our knew extends to our hip, and we realize the immanent realization of death and we know we cannot run any harder. But Lo' we try. And the rabbit we are chasing becomes a shadow in the dying of the light, just a faint blip of movement. 

I saw this in my father. Who worked like a Dog, he worked 60 hours a week until his 63 birthday when a catastrophic lung illness caused him to be in the hospital for almost a year. He is now battered, wheezing, and lost. He only knows work. You would think that you would be forced to think a different way, but that, I know now as my years become greater, a Hollywood fiction (like so much in our culture). Truth is so elusive and to chase it takes consistent effort and discipline, but so does Untruth, and if we have spent so many years chasing the Untruth we are bound, almost inevitably, to die in this fiction. The inertia in that direction is almost impossible to change course without something bordering on the miraculous. My father sits there in coughing fits and wonders when he can go back to work, not the work of self-realization but of slaving over a grill. He wonders if he can still build up his 401k. I cry, just a bit, a tear in the corner of my eye. I know, now, he should have thought of that earlier, it is too late now. He was eaten by our version of Khali in the states, devoured by this mechanical system that makes us believe in heavens of respite. 

I think back on my honeymoon;

the beach, miles untrammeled, my wife, so beautiful and youthful, the water an iridescent color that I have only seen its like on the breasts of hummingbirds. And there I was, a midst the trade winds thinking about our honeymoon budget, the rental fees, if we could afford the fancy dinner the next evening....

I think about washing my children and how I am pondering the meeting the next day, how I plop down on the couch and try to read, to place The Brother's Karamazov into an answer...

It never turns off. Perhaps it is too late for me. I only have the next step.. right?

be well

G

There are so many of Them that shout, behold, the destruction of Man through some cataclysmic disaster. Be it a disaster of divine catalyst or that of an environmental sort, it is on the lips of so many right now. I have been told that it is a common malady of every age and that every age has a time when the murmur begins to come to a fever pitch-I think it is one of those times. I think on them, at times, sometimes when I see some particularly zealous looking fellow with a poster board a few sizes larger than himself proclaiming evidence of the "end"or when I hear some especially boring scientist expanding on some equations estimation of a future horror. I think about the inevitability of it all. In the human it is the material death that is the inevitability and for the species it is the inevitability of its extinction. This is not new. I do not think you could poll anyone that would say, in our current form or some form very near it, we would be immortal. Now this is not to say some wouldn't believe in 'downloading' us in some form or other into, lets say, a silicon based body or to float disembodied as some electrical pulse. I think Raymond Kurzweil believes this and I know that Bill Joy had pointed to it in some of his writing. But I reiterate that this is not in a form that is near to us. It is something that is radically different to us, more radical that I believe Mr. Kurzweil and Bill Joy give credit to-for, if we remove our organic body and all its ails and beauty we are not just removing that from a previous system and having that previous system be the same minus the body. The body is inextricably linked to the entire system and when the body is removed it is something entirely different-what it would be, or what the being that would Be in this new state is something I cannot predict with any accuracy. My hunch is that it would be an arrogant and fearful being-that Death would become even more frightening, if that is possible, because of the amount of years that would pile up like interest in a misers fortune, arrogant because Man would have believed he would have escaped the doom of the biological species and we know, Man does not do well when he thinks he is above nature. But this strays from my point, not too far, but enough.

When I think about death and its subsequent larger manifestation of extinction it does, I cannot lie, bring about a dread. I can only think about barren deserts, or those snapshots of Mars that come back from those roving robots that land so ungracefully on that red planet. That planet that those geeky humans leaped for joy at reaching vicariously. I saw nothing to make me leap for joy but I think that it because I am a more sensuous beast and prefer my exclamations to come from saucy, obvious moments of Life; my children, my wife, thoughts of rounded hips and fetching smile. I have never leaped for joy at seeing an equation run well, or be figured out, I have felt a fleeting sense of accomplishment but never anything that would cause me to do anything beyond my normal behavior. This dread is really the upwelling of my doubt about Reality. I have not shaken my nihilistic insistence. I think there are ends despite my intellectual understanding of something as trite as Cause and Effect. What this dread is, is the residue of this doubt that there is any purpose here. Not even the biological purpose stands up to such universal contemplation because it does not give Meaning outside of a cold one of useless repetition of species that is, ultimately, doomed anyways. The question that arises is, 'why"? If we end in a year or a thousand why do we go through this dance? Haven't we evolved to a point of self reflection and future prediction that we can know this futility?

Despite my understanding that this is not true-that cause and effect show an innate necessity for our Being for there to be Being at all. Despite this, despite even evidence of seeing radical chance in one lifetime, change for the better, from street prostitute to college graduate, to volunteer teacher in a prison, and coupled with my understanding of Cause and Effect I see that this arises good. When I know that every variable with a system, whether the variable is one woman and the system the universe, has a systemic changing affect on the entire system. The system, no matter how large, is made up of the definitions of its varies parts, as those parts change the entire systems changes. Despite this there is this lingering fundamentalist that arises its ugly, irrational head.

And it is this that is the End of things. The linchpin of destruction. For, what if this fundamentalist within me gains an upper hand? What if it dethrones all the hard work I have done inquiring into my own experience of reality. Into Reality. And to the answers I have found based upon rational arguments that have moving evidence to persuade me? It is the devil that arises in this Nihilism. If I fall to it, I have lost the world, the Universe. When the world becomes only that which I can own, or consume, or if the world as a material aspect is all that I have, I am lost. The death of Man has arisen. The seas have boiled, and the moon has become like blood. For as I examine my ability to examine and conceptualize I realize the wonder that is there. That there is something going on that cannot be known by such base means. When I know this, when I know that there is an underlying Mystery to it, and that this allows for there to be a Meaningful world in my engagements with it-then I have become eternal. I become lasting. I am not moved for I have gone no where. I become a rock that can be built upon for I have found that I have always been. My actions become less frantic, who I am reaches forth to what you are and we find they emanate, resonate, from the silence that has born all music.

Be well
G