There is nothing intrinsically noble about life because nobility (as defined as an exalted moral or mental character or excellence) is a choice people make. People choose how to act or react in specific scenarios and situations and it is that behavior that is labeled or not labeled as “noble”.

No one has ever chosen to be born.

What is noble is to view life not as an endless series of uncontrolled and transient circumstances being slung at us at great velocity but to joyously embrace the fact that we are here for such a very short time and that these circumstances should be elevated and rejoiced. Reality is virtually unaware of our existence as all of our wars and miseries make nary a dent in the comings and goings of the universe. Massive galaxies, stars and immeasurably distant planets are no more aware of us as we are of the atoms that make up the shoes we wear, the ground we stand on…the air we breathe.

Knowing that the only difference our passing makes—the only possible difference and it is to other people—is the ongoing memories that we create in those whom we meet and interact with. It is a rolling aggregate of memories, built up over the last 100,000 years as lives affected lives again and again and again. Some call this civilization, others zeitgeist…and still others karma but without it we are merely shadows that pass over the ground, leaving nothing disturbed and no mark that we had been here.

Nobility is not just granted to us for merely being alive…

no…

…it is chosen by us when we validate and remember those that are living around us.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/09/08/220450752/science-v-religion-let-s-be-civil

This is an interesting article from NPR that my friend Rafael linked to but not in the way that most people are viewing it. While the point of the article is quite clear to me—the gentleman was merely highlighting some recent psychology and cognitive science studies concerning whether scientific beliefs can provide some of the same psychological benefits typically ascribed to religion—the usual suspects immediately took up their respective (and polar opposite) positions and the mud began to fly.

My view—and apparently unique inasmuch that I just thought of this and cannot find it documented anywhere on the interwebs—really has everything to do with “why” the mud began to fly and nothing to do with the argument itself. I think people who know me know where I stand on the science versus religion question so there is no need whatsoever for me to rehash that can of worms.

What I will say that it is inevitable, nay, predetermined, that when people do enter into these arguments they always…ALWAYS…devolve into name calling, obscenities, character assassination, etc…and that’s just the Nuns, Ministers and Priests (buh dump bump Shish!). Seriously, these arguments are destined to become cesspools of hate and vitriol not because the participants deeply held beliefs are diametrically opposed or because these people are arguing about religion versus science.

No, and it’s never been those reasons. The real reason that these arguments devolve so quickly and so venomously is because people are defending their reasons for doing entirely subjective and self-centered actions under the guise of their beliefs. They are defending the subterfuge…the deception…not the beliefs themselves.

Humans on this planet have been subject to about 100,000 years of shifting environmental conditions with various levels of resources (food, water, shelter, etc.), constraints (predators, diseases, etc.) and we have evolved to react in certain ways when our wellbeing is threatened. Whether the threat is another human, a lion or the cold-ass winter, we react to try to protect ourselves. And we react in a completely self-centered way even when it is for the greater good of the tribe. Fast forward 997,000 years, lose saber-tooth tigers but introduce societal pressures and we have, essentially, what we have today. People attempting to maintain physical and mental survival amongst many competing factors but always with the self at the forefront…but always told that holding self above others is wrong, it is selfish, it is bad, bad, BAD!.

So what to do?

Enter the protections of belief and the command and control of organized religion and you can plainly see that people—unless they are sincerely ignorant and living in a cave in Pakistan, Somalia, The Sudan or India—know full well that when they forcibly mutilate the genitals of their female children or when they decapitate the heads of teenagers it is wrong. But they want to do these things. They sincerely want to do them but without a religion to hide their true intent, they never can.

That’s what people argue about. They argue about whether they get to keep the cloak of specious respectability that religion and “belief” allows them whilst still exercising their most base and ugly desires.

Seems pretty clear to me.

When I was a kid, my dad (a really smart man) gave me some really great advice. Stuff that I think about to this day. One piece of advice he gave me was about working and this is what he said (I’m paraphrasing and taking poetic license because I’m old). My dad said, Trevor, there are three distinct paths you can take when you look at life and working, and each is as valid as the next…and I would never disparage one over the others…but they are choices you make.

First, you can be a “layabout” (which is kind of a bum…my Dad is a Brit so I’ve dealt with British idioms my whole life) and live off the state. While this is a relatively easy existence, it’s not fulfilling in any sense of the word. You are literally at the mercy of the system and will forever be held in its grip. There are millions in this position because we are (basically) a kind and generous species. This is for people whose makeup just doesn’t have the work gene. This is neither bad or good…it just is.

Next, you can get a job. Now a job is something that is designed specifically to be the funding source for the rest of your existence. It’s usually not very fun if it is enjoyable at all and, more importantly, a job is nether fulfilling or satisfying and you will forget it the moment the clock rolls over to 5 PM. Many, many people have jobs on this planet—and we need them in those jobs to keep the damn thing running—and they are mostly happy in their daily lives but when they are working, they are generally not thrilled to be where they are. This has a deleterious effect because they still spend more hours working than not working when awake.

Finally, you can find a career. Basically to find a career, or have it find you, you need to be explicitly honest with yourself, your motivations and what you are (and aren’t) capable of. Simply, and most difficultly, you need to find something that you love to do…and then find someone to pay you money to do it. Sometimes that someone you find is yourself in the sense that you create your career via starting a new business or a new initiative within an already established business. A career is the resolution of your soul…it is what sustains you because you spend 60%-80% of your waking hours (sometimes many more than that) at your career, nurturing, building and maintaining it.

It is what provides a sense of accomplishment and progress in life above and beyond love and family and is what brings you home happy each day.

Thanks Dad.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

It is not the stars that light the skies, not
my skin that feels the warmth, and
it is not the moment that passes,
that moves me
it is you and the space you create when
you sit near me, when you look into my
life and see me looking back at you, a mere
anecdote, a persuasion, a miniscule part
of what we call the universe…
we are simultaneous
we are on a trajectory, we are…and we aren’t
many other things and ideas but in that clash
between yes’s and no’s, we are movements,
shades of something momentous,
vibrations…
we simply exist and want to exist and
everything conspires to allow existence on
this seconds-minutes-hours date,
in this moment
we are everything at once and
in between acknowledgement
and execution, the face of time slows to
glance at what we once were
and smiles in passing, gathering karma as
it goes…laughing at our seemingly
inexhaustible ability to create dreams
unrequited and eventually lost, to be
the ideas that we could never believe
if we weren’t already living them.

Something interesting about mammals, likely non-mammals too but specifically about us is that we tend to not notice things that don’t move. What I mean is that it’s in our DNA to only look for things that change within our landscape view…because things that move likely want to hurt us or we can eat or we can have sex with. Those are the big three that Mother nature instills in us in order to make sure we make more of us.

That’s our only job, by the way, to make more of us….to procreate and spread throughout the planet.

But here we are, a hundred thousand years after coming down from the trees and we have iPhones and tablets and TVs and microwave ovens and Taxi Cabs and Amazon home delivery and on and on and on…so what does it mean to us that we only notice things that move? Simple really, in the hubbub go, go, go society of today we only notice those things that change enough that they grab our attention because EVERYTHING is vying for our attention! There are a billion gazillion messages assailing us 24 hours a day and our brains have to make a decision about what to care about…so we don’t go mad from the overload, therefore…

…what doesn’t change we don’t care about.

Now what kinds of things don’t move (really it should be things don’t change) in the world of today? Hmmm, what doesn’t change is that we constantly date the same person (with a different name, different hair color maybe) but essentially the same person time and time again and we are always disappointed. What doesn’t change is that we negatively react the same way every single time to the same stimuli (Mom asking when will she have grandkids, Dad asking when we’ll get a real job, friends asking when we’ll stop fucking up our lives, etc.) and we don’t know why we do what we do.

What doesn’t change, we simply stop noticing yet live with the unhappiness anyway. What doesn’t change are things that we ignore because it’s safer. Because it’s easy and not disruptive.

I’ve started looking at the things that don’t move…

…maybe you should too.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

GMO’s…scary, scary stuff.

As a Libertarian I want an informed public, a free public, a public who have the right to choose what they do and do not put into their bodies so I want to say that I am all for labeling foods if they have content that is based on GMO products. I really do…but I can’t. The reason I can’t is that the reason that all of the anti-GMO groups want labeling IS NOT to create an informed public. No, the anti-GMO groups want a scared-to-death public so that when they see a GMO label they do not buy the product. They want to destroy companies like Monsanto, like Archer Daniels Midland, etc. because they are philosophically against corporations growing food. Period. They want us to return to a largely agrarian society without thinking that with the size and makeup of our world, this is simply impossible. I repeat, this cannot be done and if we try we are sentences billions of people to injury and death.

GMO’s, Genetically Modified Organisms, sound scary, even to someone like me who reads and researches stuff like this. I wonder how utterly terrifying it sounds to someone who barely made it out of our magnificent school systems. To people who cannot place Iraq on a world map or who cannot tell you their state senators or congressmen. To people who believe that vaccines cause autism because some TV celebrity with a great rack told them it was true versus the hundreds of scientific studies that say otherwise. I’m sure it sounds like Frankenstein food or the Blob growing out of control destroying life as we know it on this planet.

It is not either of those.

GMO’s increase food yields and decrease the amounts of pesticides required…sometimes they work really well and sometimes they don’t work at all but it is science, food science, that is attempting to help feed a planet of almost 7 billion where fully two thirds live in places where food just doesn’t grow well. Where access to an adequate amount of daily protein is simply not a reality. Where people lose their sight or are severely debilitated due to the lack of adequate protein or key vitamins and minerals in their diets. Places where people who do not have the wherewithal to just pick up and move places where adequate food exists.

These food science organizations, Monsanto, Archer Denials Midland, etc., are not angels and are not in their businesses to be charitable but they do provide a necessary and needed service to the planet and that is that they have the capitol and experience and expertise to try to figure out how to wring one more ton per acre, how to add a lifesaving element to an existing crop…how to allow people to continue to live in their lands and not die out from lack of adequate foods. They are corporations, yes, huge corporations making billions and billions of dollars a year but they have found that their expertise is to grow, package and deliver shit loads of food. Period.

Without them, you’d pay $10 for a gallon of milk, $8 for a dozen eggs, $40 a pound for hamburger and on and on because they have invested billions of dollars to create the manufacturing and delivery infrastructure that puts food in the supermarkets and grocery stores and allows people to eat food where they live versus having to travel to where it is grown. We pay so little at the store now—and yes, we pay very little compared to the past—simply because those huge conglomerates invested their money in order for us to do so. They invested with the hope that they would make a profit. That’s called business.

On the other hand there are organizations on this planet who don’t really care about feeding people here and on the other side of the world and whether they get an adequate amount of protein daily or if they go blind from lack of certain vitamins. Their political agenda makes it so that they just don’t care, they are blinded to reality by their fervent belief that GMO’s are wrong, in any and all forms. Anti GMO groups who want those labels are not doing it because they truly want an informed public, they are doing it to forward their agenda which is the complete banishment of any GMO or hybridized food product. Without the profit derived from these foods, the corporations will fail so these groups literally want us all to deconstruct our cities and move and live in the country in small agrarian enclaves where sustainable foods are grown for local only use.

It’s a fairytale but the only way they can get you to join them is to scare the living fuck out of you.

This is what I know; if I find a message—political, sexual, societal or otherwise—that I find offensive (or obscene or weird or absurd or funny or whatever) in something someone does like in a song they sang or a video they were in or a painting they created or just by their body language as they stand on the street then that message is there purely because I put it there.

Yep, it’s my fault. Totally.

The truth is that I get to decide—me, me and only me—what upsets me, what rankles me, rubs me the wrong way, pisses me off…makes me smile, giggle, ripple with pleasure, laugh…what makes me feel anything because I am the only one on this entire planet of almost 7 billion other humans who controls me…who can EVER control me.

Miley Cyrus doesn’t control me.
Barak Obama doesn’t control me.
The Catholic Church doesn’t control me.
Syria doesn’t control me.
The oil lobby doesn’t control me.
The guy in the blue Chrysler who cut me off on the West Side Highway doesn’t control me.
Republicans don’t control me.
Democrats don’t control me.
Rabid demon clowns at midnight on Avenue C and 11^th street with human blood dripping off oversized fangs don’t control me.

Aside from simply physics (if I push you, you will fall down) there is nothing that anyone on this little rock, spinning at a thousand miles an hour, slinging it’s way around the sun at about a million miles per hour, can do or say that will “make” me do anything that I do not first agree to do.

Nothing.

The only thing I absolutely have to do, that I do not have any control over whatsoever, is that one day (many, many years from now) I have to die. That’s it. Nothing else is on the “you must” menu.

All the uproar about Obama or Miley or Assad or <insert current enraged diatribe here> and how it is or isn’t sexist/racist/obscene/elitist/socialist/whatever-ist is all entirely created by the people doing the yelling. They want to be enraged, they choose to be enraged…they feel validated to be enraged because it serves their purposes.

It is a choice they make.

You can choose otherwise.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

The more times we repeat mistakes in our lives, the closer they become to being called traditions.

Sometimes the errors we make is that we become too familiar with daily living…we get complacent, expecting the same things to occur on a regular basis. The paper in the morning, the coffee on the way to work, the missed promotion, the failure to find love…the disappointment when nothing gets “better” in relation to the ideas we have about the future.

We look at the things we “do” and we say things like “this is how we’ve always done it” or “we tried something different a long time ago and it didn’t work” or even “we just don’t have the experience or expertise to try something different.” We may say these things but we try very hard not to look at them closely because sometimes, many times in fact, we cite tradition as the anchor, the chain clipped to our ankles that prevents us from moving forward.

In a lot of cases these traditions are simply errors we’ve gotten comfortable making.

The first step toward addressing these “traditions” is to admit that they exist, to objectively look at them and discover the length, breadth, height and depth of them. After that, we can inventory our skills and access our ability to make any changes, start to plan how we’re going to change them…

…and go.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

The fact that you have an opinion vastly different from mine doesn’t anger me. The idea that there are many routes to the truth (let alone understanding what truth is), and that you have chosen a route I am not familiar with, doesn’t make me feel like my route is somehow inferior. The notion that dissenting beliefs can coexist and even flourish amongst the many tribes of man doesn’t concern nor upset me in the slightest. No, much of what was just described is called civilization and, in fact, is entirely required for any of this maelstrom we call society to work effectively.

Political correctness assumes I should be angry, I should feel inferior and should be concerned.

What I do know, as deeply and solidly as I know I breathe, is that we cannot get close to sensing and seeing reality without these ugly, internecine fights waged daily, hourly and likely every minute of every day for they clear away the debris of the mind. They shock and destroy the veil of fantasy, bit by bit, fold by fold, until what we believe matches what is actually there; reality.

We cannot see reality for ourselves because our reference is ourselves and will forever block our view until another human comes along to throw up a competitive idea, an alternate path. It’s by defending what we feel and believe that allows us to see the cracks, the shifts that bely the error our perception is built upon.

Political correctness seeks to end the uproar, the distaste, the clash of competing ideas and therefore seeks to end the path to reality because reality is not pretty. It is not nice or warm and fuzzy or kind to strangers and it definitely does not respond to emotion or attempts to cajole. Simply, reality doesn’t know or care about anything therefore cannot be bullied or forced to represent something that it is not.

Political correctness is always the attempt to do just that.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

This is what I see when I look out at the world; dividing lines. You on your side, me on mine. Women and men, Christians and Muslims, black and white, gay and straight…everyone self-selecting their own categories (or accepting the ones given to them) of who they are and what they believe. Everyone specifically giving away their intrinsic identities because owning them—the care and feeding, the constant vigilance against erosion, the endless barrage of marketing to redefine—is just way too much of a burden to bear.

And I saw two young Syrian boys in an internet video this morning, on their knees in the dust and rubble, huddling against what they know is coming while a masked soldier recites Koranic script behind them…I saw two young boys executed for being on the wrong side of an imaginary line. Their bodies jerking and shuddering from the gunfire, in the dust and dirt as they fell across each other.

The wrong side of an imaginary line.

And I see “clever” graphics on Facebook about how all women are yadda, yadda, yadda and all men are blah, blah, blah and I giggle a little at the absurdity of categorizing 3.5 billion people (7 billion of us divided by 2) into the same bucket. Assigning the same motivations and reactions that the author thinks are representative of the world’s male or female population when in fact is merely a representation of the author only.

Dividing lines.

And I think to myself how we came to be here…and why we accept such illogical fantasy as a way of living our lives; constantly pitting one side against the other over imaginary slights and completely fabricated differences. Constantly creating aggressive tension between this side and that side because that results in…what? Markets and commerce? Domination and submission? Have’s and have not’s?

And with an image of teenage boys riddled by bullets still acute in my mind, I realized that we don’t create those lines because we want to, or have to, or are being forced by evolution…we create those lines because that’s what happens when we distrust, fear and ultimately hate ourselves…when we cannot find it in our own souls to accept and forgive ourselves for being the frail and fallible humans that we are…that is all we will ever be. When we willfully give away our identities because owning them is simply too inconvenient.

Those lines are created as a consequence, not as a conscious choice.

And I wonder aloud here what we can do to reverse this, to ameliorate the condition we’ve come to regard as “living” so that those dividing lines lose their power, lose their ability to kill, to maim and destroy…
…and the only answer I have is to love myself…

…so I can love you.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen