The Human Spirit

Assuming that all the physical world is energy at varying vibration rates it is easy to predict that there exists a vibration energy pattern that remains when the physically known biological existence ceases. The body dies the soul endures. It is my belief that the human body is the incubator for this energy pattern that is nurtured by your thought processes. The more you exercise your mind and emotions the more intense the pattern becomes. This energy pattern is the enduring spirit that remains when the biological body's death occurs. It has very little to do with righteousness and sin or heaven and Hades. A weak or deformed body could produce a more intense energy pattern than a robust or beautiful body. Nor is the spirit about intellectual capacity as defined by IQ or academic pursuits. It appears to me to be more about understanding emotional wisdom than anything else. Empathy and compassion seem to be the factors that nurtures the spirit. I find that solutions in life like in mathematics can best be found by looking for the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominator of the Universe is energy; all the perceived physical world is energy at different rates of vibration.



The Universe is neutral but religion can be evil.

When religion attempts to interfere with the right of free choice it has become evil. Religion takes the path of evil when it tries to stop change which is usually part of progress of human civilization. The Universe's pattern is change; that is evolution is the natural way most especially palingenesis (renewing). R.M. Bucke theorized that human conscience's itself is evolving. I suspect that Jung may also had a grasp of this progression pattern. Society is progressing because human consciousness is evolving. Unfortunately most organized religions become archaistic; locked into their orthodoxy they can not grasp the essence of the idea that change is part of the Universal plan therefore they cling to much to the past instead of embracing the future as change requires. Of course not all change is necessarily good but embracing the concept of change means that bad changes will also be changed for a better choice in the long run; the philosophy that if life deals you a lemon make lemonade. As Nietzsche observed "Truth is not something present all along that needs merely to be discovered and disclosed; it has to be created. ... that in itself is never final: not a process of becoming aware of something .... fixed and determinate but of conferring and actively deciding."

It is interesting to contrast the views of Kierkegaard who felt that the greatest gift bestowed on man was the freedom to choose God and that in rejecting God "freedom of choice will become your 'idee fixe', till at last you will be like the rich man who imagines he is poor, and will die of want" with Sartre's observation that he found it "extremely embarrassing that God does not exist; for there disappeared with Him all possibility of finding values. ... We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free." I find it intriguing that in Sartre's rejection of a God concept he bemoans the loss of someone to blame rather than the loss of a companion with whom you can celebrate the richness of the universe.

I suppose that I view God more as Schopenhauer's conic mirror that makes sense of the distorted images.
"However, if we now consider the mighty influence and immense power of outer circumstance, our explanation in terms of inner character will seem hardly strong enough. Furthermore, that the weightiest thing in the world--which is to say, the life course of the individual, won at the cost of so much effort, torment and pain--should receive its outer complement and aspect wholly from the hand of blind Chance--Chance without significance or regulation--is scarcely believable. Rather, one is moved to believe that--just as in the case of those pictures called anamorphoses, which to the naked eye are only broken fragmentary deformities but when reflected in a conic mirror show normal human forms--so the purely empirical interpretations of the course of the world resembles the seeing of those pictures with naked eyes, while the recognition of the intention of Fate resembles the reflection in the conic mirror, which binds together and organizes the disjointed fragments."
I suspect that some individuals are born with better conic mirrors than the rest of humanity.


Karmic Consequences
I believe that the law of Karmic consequences is a philosophical version of the scientific principle that for every action there is a reaction. Actions a person takes will have an intended and unintended reaction in other people. I conclude that karmic consequence may go beyond this into the realm of the impact of the emotional energy of the reaction; therefore I differ from those who espouse the concept of accepting bad acts as only a life lesson because I feel that for karmic consequence to flow people must embrace the emotional reaction to an act, experience the pain plus the rage and then let it go so it can flow back to the perpetrator resulting in your healing and karmic consequence to the one who hurt you. If you cling to the pain you remain a victim in that state that Caroline Myss defines as "woundology" so the emotional energy you should have released that would have had karmic consequences to the "wounder" stay bottled up in you and karmic consequence does not happen.

I view the purpose of life to be to experience every moment to the fullest to mature the soul. I can not accept the idea that to spend one's life sitting under a tree contemplating the cosmos while ignoring the life events going on around you is the highest purpose of being. Interacting with the life events around you seems to me to be living life to the fullest thereby nurturing the spirit.

Oil: Is the price only about supply and demand?

The oil companies keep repeating the idea that the current high oil prices are due to supply constraints because of high consumer demand for oil products. Their solution is to increase supply is to access untapped oil resources. Oil companies in the US reject calls for using alternate renewable sources such as Brazil is currently doing. The only solution for big oil is the utilization of undeveloped reserves in protected Wilderness areas like the Artic and the coastal shelf deposits.

I reject the claim of supply being constrained by consumer demand as the reason for the high prices when I note that inventory numbers for oil and oil products continue to rise. The increase in demand for oil products is the result of additions to inventory not consumer demand. My prediction is that when the oil companies get the access they want we will see a fall in oil prices with a possible free fall to as low as $30 a barrel on the correction. When Congress grants the drilling rights they want in the Anwar it will be a great opportunity to do a long-term short on oil and oil companies.

National Health Care

While my primarily libertarian philosophy does not favor another big government entitlement program my more pragmatic side reasons that like highways and the post office a national health care system is a necessary evil of a modern industrial society. It is not often that I agree with Senator Kennedy but I do concur with his assessment that the best way to achieve basic national health care for the US would be to make the Medicare system universal. Why add another layer of bureaucracy when we have a working system? Some tweaking of the current Medicare framework would be necessary but for the most part it would expand easily. The current system requires the payment of a monthly premium that is withheld from monthly benefit payments this should probably be eliminated in a universal System as the collection process would be impractical; possibly it could be replaced by extending the Medicare tax to income not currently taxed for Medicare purposes (ex. interest, dividends, and capital gains). Universal coverage would probably require doubling the current Medicare tax rate of roughly 1.5% to about 3% but the impetuous to the economy and general welfare of the country would make it well worth the cost. Since the current programs co-payment system seems to work very well I see no reason to change it. The prescription program should be restricted to only the Social Security recipients until the system can be better assessed.

The Justice System

Since having received a summons to appear for jury duty I have been contemplating the question what is justice. The Preamble to US Constitution lists establishing justice as one of the purposes of the document. In civil matters the concept of establishing that the defendant did the action and restoring the victim as much as possible seems fairly clear cut. With criminal proceedings it can become a matter of deciding how justice differs from vengeance. In STAR WARS REVENGE OF THE SITH it is noted that a Jedi principle is that "Revenge is never just" that seems to me to be a good place to start. If revenge is not justice then justice can not be about vengeance for the victim; justice has to be about focusing on assessing if the accused is the one who did the criminal action not on how much the victim suffered.

The OJ Simpson trial focused this nation's attention on the criminal justice system yet the mass media's coverage was about revenge for a horrific crime than on the function of proving the case against the accused as reasonable justice requires hence the jury's verdict came as a shock to a lot of people. The medic's reaction to the jury rewriting their story was not one of the medic's finer moments. I was not surprised by the criminal jury's verdict because I had been struck from the beginning by the LAPD's police officers disregard for the rules of justice. We were told that the officers had spoken to Simpson and knew that he was returning to from Chicago to LA yet to secure a search warrant they told a judge that his whereabouts were unknown; when conducting the search they ignore the procedural rules of the department which should leave one questioning the reliability of any evidence they produce. Why alarm bells were not being sounded by the press is a question for another day? In what the had to know would be a high profile case you would think that prudence would cause the police to dot the i and cross the t. The subsequent Ramparts investigation suggests that this flaunting of the rules of justice had become very pervasive in the LAPD. It is puzzling that the mass media has never made the connection. How can we expect justice when juries are encouraged to seek vengeance for the victim instead of being focused on examining the truth of the evidence as to the guilt of the accused?

How can jurors be expected to do their job when they are not fully informed about all the rights of the jury? In charging the jury in "State of Georgia vs. Brailsford et al" the Supreme Court stated "it is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision. ... you have the right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy." It is an affront to both the suffering of the "Hat Trial" jury and the courageous action of the American Patriots who objected to the imposition of martial law when colonial juries exercised those rights that modern juries do not know of the rights that those brave men had struggled valiantly to secure for posterity. When juror are not informed of all the rights of the jury to decide how can the verdict they render be viewed as doing justice? Would a jury fully informed of their right to decide on both the facts and the application of the law find differently than a jury who felt constrained to decide only if the evidence supports guilt?

It seems to me that justice in the criminal justice system should be about protecting society as a whole from future criminal actions by those who have shown with the criminal act in question that they will not respect the rights of others rather than seeking vengeance for the victim. It is not possible for a criminal jury to restore to the victim of a crime what they have lost. The best that the jury can do for the victim is to make the victim feel that because of what they have endured the jury will stop the perpetrator from harming anyone else; that as a result of the trial the victim has protected society as a whole from the activities of the criminal.

Iran

I believe it was John Kennedy who observed that we should not negotiate out of fear but that we should never fear to negotiate.

The Bush administration seems to be afraid to negotiate with Iran. When you tell the other guy he must do what you want done as a precondition to talks that is not a negotiation. It is an ultimatum. The Bush policy seems designed to force Iran to negotiate from a place of fear. This policy does not bode well for peace.