JB's Place

Flashback to Twelve Years Ago Or So…

Picture this, if you will. A man sits in a basement surrounded by decently nice computer equipment. In his monitor he begins to type on his blog, which in 2008 is a “fairly big deal”. The lines he pecks out read “I believe America could be made Great Again.”. Indeed, such a man would perhaps be caught in the machinations of fate unwittingly. The slogan is self-evident and not especially novel, but no one is saying it. The comments he gets on his article ask a question in earnest–when was America “great”. Indeed, these people list the grievances they have of all the inequalities in the country not at all addressing those actions which have been implemented to help correct them. Such a man, in the final years of acquiring his degree for Telecom, such a man would probably not have imagined that in twelve short years the level of instability that would take place as a great plague would be unleashed upon the nation in the form of an alleged bio-weapon. Indeed, such a man who would be writing at that point would definitely not anticipate the shortness of the attention spans that would be parsing such key information and since twitter had not yet begun its meteoric ascent, microblogging would not seem to be a natural extension of life. No, such a man would understand older tomes with their lengthy descriptions of things and demand that one must sit and read them carefully over a period of weeks. One was once called “classically educated” for doing this. Now, no one can agree on what a book or an author is or who owns one.

If You Hadn’t Figured It Out…

That guy from twelve years ago was me. Even then, however, I had been of the opinion that our reality was changing in ways that were not sustainable. Even then, I was not entirely fond of what passed for a “liberal education”. Indeed, it seemed to me much sleight-of-hand was at work. I settled on IT because IT work had distinct, unarguable (mostly) answers. I had a job of sorts then as well as acquaintances. Most of these acquaintances, in hindsight, were mere associations of convenience. In truth, there was nothing lasting in those associations because nothing lasted. Instead, we were merely sojourners on a similar journey sharing the roadway for a time. Perhaps if I had known that then, my choices would have been different–or perhaps the world has changed. Indeed, something has changed because whereas once we could basically agree on the rudiments of reality, it is clear we no longer can manage to do so.

My Revolutionary Book

I did, shortly before this current Covid crisis, release a book on meditation that I said was Revolutionary. The time for change was upon us, and has been quite in earnest since 2017. Those who encountered me previous to this time know well what my message was, though they seem to have a form of collective amnesia. I wonder, does Covid erase your memory? Or, is it rather, that if someone foresees such a problem and warns you of it, it is better that they not exist in your conception of the world since that would mean something quite scary concerning the nature and status of the country?

How I Have Spent the Time

I have spent the time in the interim watching people attempt to escape restrictions that they, on one level or another, disagree with. This year I mowed a large amount of acreage approximately twenty-five times during quite changing conditions. I likewise surveyed out, engineered and developed a networking solution for these refugees who would all be attempting to live some semblance of life as usual. In both of these matters, I achieved that which was challenging considering the chaos–a relative stability. The grass mostly stayed short. The network, by and large, worked. Oh, there were issues with those who used software like Zoom, but then, that was the fault of the software. Everyone was clamoring to get something done somehow, and for each of them it was urgent.

Except, in most cases it was not. I think about all those who were supposed to be assisting in some way to stem the spread of Covid. Here we are now, approximately nine months later, and the infections according to the insane news media are still spiking. With all those Zoom meetings did no one have the inspiration to fix the epidemic? I am not even sure AIDS as a serious disease lasted so long at the forefront of the minds of the people.

Which Brings Me To Peter…

Also during this challenging time period, I came across some Lebanese friends who were Maronite believers of the Catholic Church. They came through the domain I occupied relatively early in the unfolding of the events that have happened. They were quite hospitable with their food as they loved to cook and regaled my wife and I with tales of being in Lebanon and having the hell blown out of their city. Each night, we learned, they had to sleep with an AK-47 under their bed. They no longer visited Lebanon because Hamas had taken the place over. I had asked if Hamas was gone if they would have gone back, and the answer was yes! Then the conversation turned to various language versions of the Lord’s prayer, and it was then my wife began to mention the sins of Peter and specifically of his Denial and if people would simply repent for that, especially those of such a church, it could change perhaps much. But what did this cigar-wielding Peter do? Did he see the truth of the situation, or do you suppose he did what Peter typically does? He became stubborn and denied such a thing was necessary. Indeed, while enjoying the fruits of the Church of Peter, he still denied.

Everyone Is In Denial

There is not going to be “any life as usual” after this sequence. The two-hundred years previous to this point were relatively peaceful because that was the time we were afforded to have relative peace. Even then, there were interruptions with various wars most notably here the Civil War which was fought on this soil. What has come to pass is such that the infrastructure as we know it cannot stand. The population of the planet is double what it was in the 1980’s. We are not utilizing the resources of this planet in such a way that that number of people will be accommodated. Perhaps if we had fewer concrete jungles we might have the ability to do something different with regard to that number in a humane way. All the while, a man in his basement approximately 12 years ago coined the slogan of a surprise election. Eight years ago, the same man began to warn of impending nastiness–plague and the medical system beginning to collapse. Seven years ago during the transit of Venus, he warned of the Mayan Long count being up, and the end of things not necessarily always being obvious. Then, after a series of blood moons and solar eclipses, he warned of more impending doom and gloom much to the delight of those around him who instead wanted him to be positive. Those warnings were not heeded though they were interpreted and their concomitant issues have come to pass. What then of the man who prognosticated them? He lives among people in denial, and so he mows grass and fixes a computer network while the world continues to teeter on the brink of disaster. He lives among a nation of Peters, who all are hoping that this is “just a really bad year”. Somewhere in the distance, though, the rooster crows three times.

The Contributor Covenant

Programmers have a history of having what are often vitrolic exchanges–especially in coding communities. Not that long ago, there was an exchange of what amounted to verbal fisticuffs which resulted in a virtual Emily Post for programmers in open source.

So what’s the big deal with that? Well, mainly that many open source projects snatched it up as part of their platform for contribution which means if you want to contribute to their platform, you have to adopt this quasi-metaphysical-pseudo-religious code of conduct along with your contribution. I have problems with that.

There Was Already A Covenant

For one thing, my own spiritual beliefs are not very pleased with the co-opting of the word Covenant. If that were not enough, however, the fact that the “woman” who suggested this code of conduct is actually a man is more than enough to rile me. That’s right, the originator of this idea who is using the word Covenant which is clearly a religious word first and foremost, happens to have gender bent and wants to be identified as a woman which of course runs completely counter to the original meaning of the word Covenant. It is ALMOST a mocking of both religion and spiritual traditions that hold that the Covenant with Israel from YHVH is a sacred thing. It may well be such a mocking.

Why I Am Bent Out of Shape

More and more, there seems to be some weird overlap between programming politics and an almost quasi spiritual belief. A mechanic does not need to have a particular belief in order to fix a car or to use the tools required to fix what is broken. He or she can be an Atheist or a Buddhist. He also is not required to be holding a certain ethic to pick up the wrench. We may reasonably expect, however, that when he picks up the wrench as a member of the human race he might hold to some basic conduct that is pro-social. However, and this part is very important, he is under no such obligation to be so. If you do not like his attitude, you find another mechanic.

Everybody Has to Adopt The Old Testament Covenant, Right Now!

The next thing I find silly about all this is that we know how well it would go over if we stated that everyone had to adopt the Ten Commandments before contributing to an open source project. We could say, however, that those commandments are perhaps the most PRO-Social conduct to adopt. If suddenly everyone were to adopt those Ten Commandments in the open source world, I would still have some issues–specifically that the forcing of the acceptance of that set of rules was automatically foisted on anyone who wanted to join that community as a most assuredly spiritual belief. There is simply no reason that someone should have to adopt YHSVH as a Messiah or Buddha as an Avatar to start working on an open source project. In this situation, it is sillier yet to suggest that they need all these rules to be “nice to each other”. It has already been done–it requires one rule, and the simple expression is “Do unto others as you would have done unto you”. If you want to adopt a code of conduct, just adopt that.

But My Biggest Issue

My biggest beef, though, is that it seems to me this new gay-trans-furry-fangled-strap-it-on, saw-it-off, glue-it- together attitude is getting itself closer and closer to a secular humanism. If you want to do that out in a gay club with many gay friends and crazy trans folks, great. Go do it. Do it hard. However, when you start bringing it into the programming world and requiring what amounts to a spiritual sort of adoption of a belief in order so that people are “nice to you”, well, that’s a problem. Here is a helpful page from the FAQ for this crap:

Isn’t this just a way for progressive/left-wing people to push their agenda?

“Everthing is politics”, but the code of conduct is not about an advance of progressive/left-wing politics. It’s about establishing a minimal level of civil and professional collaboration. Civil, non-discriminatory, and professional behavior should be a baseline and shared value held by people of all ideologies, regardless of political affiliation (with the obvious exception of hate groups).

So, basically, the answer is “yes and also no”. It’s really making sure people are “nice” unless they happen to be “hate groups”. Well, this has already been done with the Covenant of Israel and it was a way of separating Godly people from “Pagan, ungodly groups”. Israel had to elect to agree to the premises however, and all of them said that the precepts were “good for them to do”.

Programming Is Not Voting

When I go to use a programming tool, I am not electing to agree to anything beyond doing some programming with that tool. My use of Python is not a tacit agreement with any specific spiritual belief or metaphysical requirement. When I ask a question in the community, I am not anticipating that anyone is necessarily going to be “nice” to me let alone if they are not “nice” that they are a “hate group”. Some folks are just jerks and they do not fly under any other banner than jerkdom. If they spread that attitude in a non-discriminatory way, then at the very least, they are not a hate group.

If we wave all that aside, however, this is a pretty clear cut example of cultural appropriation spun about by someone with an obvious agenda that the open source community was foolish enough to adopt because programmers tend toward secular humanism anyway.

To any of them or those that think that this idea has any merit, I say congratulations to. Why? Because by reading my article you just agreed to the Messianic Covenant. Welcome to the Age of Aquarius. Now stop your sinning immediately, or prepare to burn for your transgressions. Have a nice day.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) Sucks

As an author I like to make money. I do not like to make money for the sake of making money, but because making money allows me to address other needs in my life that ultimately allow me to then come back and write more. The money is the lubrication by which my life flows more smoothly such that writing can be a natural fruit.

Troublingly, however, we live in an age where the fruit seems to be constantly taken–especially when it comes to writing. The digital age has had the consequence of making what were normal boundary issues in ownership of a thing nebulous. Whereas knowledge was before bound in a physical book, now it is bound in zeros and ones. Whereas before there was a shelf life of a work that when enough people became aware of said work and enough time had elapsed that sooner or later it became common knowledge and in the public domain, now we cannot take anything for granted and must very carefully try to understand when a thing that is in the public domain may not be still in the public domain.

Not surprisingly, the first action taken when the future is unknown by creators is to “lock the fruit down” so only people with keys may access the fruit. Really, I am not so sure this is what creators tend to do, so much as it is what people who make money from creators do. DRM seems to be an issue for movie studios, for instance, more than for budding authors.

This is all well and good, except that built-in to this attempt to control who and what can read or see a work is the channel lock-in of the device reading it. What works on a Amazon Kindle may not work on a Barnes and Noble reader. Worse even that that, you might be locked out of a work you actually purchased due to DRM confusion within its own code.

All of this is to say simply that DRM sucks. What’s an author to do?

Thought Experiment Number One

Imagine a world in which money is not a factor. What would you do? I think you will find that more than likely, in such a world you will find a group of people with whom you will form some type of survival bond. Each of you will bring a talent to the group. You will do the talent for the group so that the group functions. This, we recognize as a very loose definition of tribalism. Do you worry about someone stealing your work in such a group? Probably not, since each of you knows what the skill set of the person in question is. If something goes missing that ties directly to that person’s skill set, it will not make any sense or give an advantage to the thief. Take the best hunter’s bow, and you are going to get a little hungrier for the act. The right tool goes to the right person for the right job, and collectively the group thrives because of this.

So Why Does Money Not Work Like This?

The easy, somewhat deceptively simple answer is this: because it is an abstraction. People have plenty of money who have done nothing whatsoever to benefit the existence of a group. In fact,many have plenty of money on the grounds of stealing or exploiting a group in such a way in many cases that it led to the group in question becoming extinct. Money has allowed us to remove the moral dimension and look instead to see who has a pile of cash instead. Hence, whe morality and the “right way to live” is not rewarded financially, no one values those values in the sense of cash-flow. Rather, this is an abstract system of “honor” in the outlined scenario that happens to be coincident or not with having a pile of cash.

My Solution

All of the funds of any of my bought books go to my church or synagogue. For those of you who get hung up on whether I can it a church or a synagogue, wonder for a moment why it makes you any difference? To that end, I have also elected to use zero digital rights management and offer an epub and a pdf as deliverables. Personally, I prefer the epub format because it is truly an “open format” whereas pdf is the format that is used because Adobe standardized it into being, but I realize that sometimes pdf simply renders better on some devices than an epub and vice-versa. My rationalization is simple: If you buy something like a book, you should be able to put it any damn place you want on any device you want. You should not have to buy the same book twenty times for twenty devices. One standard should run on all platforms and if that platform does not support that platform, you should burn it or run over it with a van. Anything else less than this is basically extortion that you are learning to put up with in your life.

But, Pirates!

Yep, pirates exist. Some steal because they can, some because they have no other choice. In either case, if you are stealing a meditation book, you are probably going to find more than you bargained for in the act of thieving. But even if it were not the case this were so–assume I had published a programming book instead–I would still make the same decision. Anytime you learn something, you will be expected at some point to give back or contribute to whatever it is you learned. If you could afford my book, and you chose to steal it, then you are ultimately depriving me of my ability to support myself to write more books. Perhaps one of those books I would have written might have changed the world. Since you did not support that value, you now get the job of trying to write said book or serving the purpose it would have served in some manner. In the meantime, it is not unlikely that you will discover that your own means of supporting yourself evaporates. Karma. She is a force.

Bottom Line

You get the book for five bucks that took me around 7 years and many thousands of hours of study and experience without any digital rights management on it so you can purchase one copy and read it on whatever device on which you wish to read. This is the way the world should work and the way in which it will work if it is to work at all for creators and readers in the future. If you get this book in a pirated form, then consider donating to it so that more books can be written. Creating more complicated locks and devices will not solve the issues authors face. Rather, when writing and information is valued and attribution and respect and acknowledgement is given where it belongs, the value will naturally flow because humanity is made to strive for something higher than its base needs. But should you think it is not, do not be surprised to find yourself walking the plank, matey.[^1]

[^1]: Don’t be a scalawag.

Introduction To How To Do Nothing Well

Meditation is a discipline that has remained fairly consistent over time. The image of a guru with his fingertips touching or the palms of his hands overlapped is a widely recognized icon.

Yet, most meditation centers on focusing on the breathing, and not much else. This is certainly a beneficial meditation, but it is not a meditation that most people will be able to do much with, other than notice their breath, which is important.

A more active meditation, where a person does self-maintenance, seems paramount. In a busy world, although it might be helpful to notice one’s breathing for awhile, it is not sufficient to kick in the higher consciousness in such a way as to operate from that higher mind in most situations. People simply think of it as relaxing, and nothing more.

On the other hand, if there were a way to view meditation as interrogating different components of one’s soul, one could use such a method to bring themselves into spiritual alignment. By seeing each area and what that area does or does not do, one can begin to make changes to themselves by paying attention to the data streams within their own personal energy systems.

Usually, people tend to do this through sleep. Sleep allows certain energies to bubble up that are otherwise unnoticed, and for these /images to be processed to varying levels. It is far better if a person can process these /images in waking life, and learn to interrogate themselves and become conversant in their own “soul language” so they can understand themselves and when they are on track, or off track.

Instead of meditation being a simple relaxation, it becomes more like taking one’s car to the mechanic to be sure that the parts and pieces are still functioning as they should. By being able to do this, a person can prevent health trouble before it arises, and keep their own mind more peacefully centered. By taking each component bit by bit, and putting it in the place it should occupy, the spiritual self starts to flourish and many unexpected changes can take place inside. Likewise, by being familiar with one’s own energy systems, one can then take this knowledge and apply it to others such that they can help to heal both themselves and others.

This, it shall be noted, is a bit different than meditations in the past. The goal of this form of meditation is no less than complete self-knowledge. It takes time and practice, and one must learn a new way of thinking that is more symbolic in most cases than literal. However, if one takes the time to develop this, then the possibilities really begin to open up as a person steps into the fullness of their being.

The Energy Systems of the Body

The energy systems of the body are an old art. It is hard to say when they were first traced out, or by whom. The only thing that can be said is that many cultures across time separated by distance seem to arrive at their own version of the energy systems which share certain commonalities. They all map out the currents and areas that energy flows, or does not flow, and encourage it to move by various methods.

Yet, just what are these energy systems? Most mysticism falters with the language to describe them, much as it is difficult to describe any fundamental concept. If one tries to explain what an atom is to a non-scientist, one quickly discovers how concepts one takes for granted to build upon prove problematic to explain to others.

The easiest way to describe these systems is by analogy. There are “circuits” in the body, that conduct energy, much like electricity. The human body acts much like a crystal and conducts these currents in various ways. The ability for the body to conduct this electricity says something for the health of it, for where this circuitry jams is where disease or dysfunction is likely to manifest.

Where does this energy come from? God, the universe. Whatever. What matters is that it is there, and needs to be maintained. What mediates it is consciousness, although often the consciousness has fallen into the subconscious which is where meditation arrives to raise awareness of this situation and facilitate release.

Just how did these cultures map out these paths? Well, evidently at one point, people were better able to see them visually. However, even if one cannot see them, one can feel them. The easiest way to conceive of this is to think of how it feels when someone steps into the room when you are otherwise occupied. That feeling that someone is in the room is somewhat similar to sensing energy flows. You might not be able to describe exactly how you know what you know, but you know it nonetheless because you feel it.

A more immediate experiment concerns rubbing your hands together palms facing one another roughly an inch or so apart. Naturally, you will feel heat, but you will also feel a sort of tingling or “heat above the hotness” on the palms of both hands. This is chi, or energy, or whatever word you want to use to describe the sensation is. If you do not feel much of this in your hands, it is likely that you are blocked. Most people are blocked in one way or another, but some people because of the natural resilience of their energy systems, might still feel more energy here anyway.

I will now issue a blanket statement that should be the centerpiece of anyone doing healing work–all healing takes place within this energy system–whether it be through some method like meditation, Reiki, or surgery. How might surgery achieve this? Well, certainly, by the time one has reached the necessity of surgery, the energy system has been stagnant for awhile to the point it has manifested as physical disease. By intervening at the physical level, the solution sought is to “bust this stagnation” at the spiritual level. It is simply a “level down” from the origin of the problem–like remedying an issue with a blueprint of a home by first building it in physical reality and then altering the blueprint retroactively as rooms are added or knocked down. It makes more sense to make such changes at the blueprint as opposed to wasting time at the “slower level” of physical reality.

So, we can see and understand that the body is, in essence, energy. A big distributor of the energy through the various meridians are the chakras. Chakras are major points along the spine that spin in a wheel like fashion. They act much like cogs inside a machine. Their job is to take in energy from the outside, and distribute it inside, as much as possible through the meridians. (The Indian word for the energy channels is “nadis”.) The problem, as previously discussed, is that these meridians can become blocked from our consciousness. However, it is not always the case that our consciousness remembers why such blockages are there, because some blockages do not originate from the current life, but from some other life, somewhere else.

Buy the book here.