So we find out, after a while of concern that our grandson is back to being our grandson and has gained the decade of maturing he missed and has a wonderful young lady friend who seems to worship him.
We took a stroll outside just to talk, during the greatly appreciated Christmas visit, where it was far too cold for me but apparently just right for my wife. I went inside after a very short period of time (I hate cold, lucky to live in the desert I thought, until it got cold) and I missed a rather intriguing conversation.
It seems our grandson is staying at a place where the adult (its ok, he's a good relative and works as a long haul truck driver and is hardly ever at home), and this is the adult, has a habit of allowing his 'old friends' to stay over and move in for periods that apparently run past their original agreement.
When my wife began to tell me the story she heard, and she laughed so hard during the rendition that I nearly forgot how cold it really was in the desert; I remembered we were outside again and the temperature must be responsible for the thought her stand up routine had given me.
Part of the discussion, well the first part actually, centered around whether one remembered something the other remembered from our grandson's childhood.
It evolved, as most discussions do, into connecting topics and one of those turned out to be the people currently staying at the place our grandson stays.
Our grandson knew that condition was not his responsibility, but when he witnessed one of them mixing up Kool-Aid with her arm stuck way down deep in the fluid and her reputation of being a rather filthy person; our grandson took responsibility to stop it and to reprimand the offender.
He indeed gained the decade he missed, and in such short time he had managed to acquire responsibility for his life and he straightened it out. His being on his own is the best thing to happen to him. His being thrown out is what he had coming, even though he had already begun his recovery, one has to be responsible for what one has done.
But for a person to be caught (heck, forget caught), to even remotely consider injecting an untrustworthy cleanliness condition arm: into a large mixing of Kool-Aid, that would be consumed by small children, means that person has absolutely none of the following.
What is it a person has to have, or have to be in order to feel responsible? If you said awareness you are right. If you are not aware of yourself you obviously cannot have a feeling of responsibility as it takes one's self to recognize one's self before one's self can claim that responsibility.
Something is always someone else's fault. Things that go wrong are always someone else's fault (or everyone else's fault if your quest is the earth itself). You talk to a person who is not truly self aware by treating them in that conversation like the child they still are. It takes self awareness to no longer be a child.
Sometimes people take a long time to reach the point of actual self awareness. (You'll notice I do not hyphenate the term, self awareness as the hyphenated version is what people think the human condition of consciousness is, and since its their term I accept the definition with one caveat: removing the hyphen changes the meaning from the bare minimum condition or self-awareness (which is consciousness) to the condition of actually using self-awareness, to reach a state of self awareness.
When someone is simply self-aware they wind up doing things that are reactive, not proactive; reactive, not contemplative. They wind up repeating what they heard the most and thinking it is their 'opinion'. They turn out to be creatures of habit who mindlessly (literally, actually) repeat the same steps every day in every way and become depressed over anything not part of that repetition. Those people comprise the majority of the human population as those who have been aware, you know: Kings, Emporers, poiliticians, big businessmen, Furors: have preyed upon that minimum self-aware condition to do everything from create a marketing sensation, to build a robot army of suicide bombers by repeating and in often cases, requiring the repetition of a set of man made rules, or accepted forms of practice or specific theories of trusted memory.
Or they embrace father Christmas, even degrading teachers, informing their not self aware children of the 'harmless' lie, while the act of doing so replaces the real Father and ignores the Son. The celebration of what Christmas has turned out to be is fitting to be calculated in store sales volume.
That little sign fits the comic's 'Here's Your Sign'.
A condition nearly everyone experiences shows itself in anger or an emotional condition such as crying or depression or self-deception. Not as many (which is sad, since those who are not are those who are used by others and think they are doing it for a cause or a belief) persons have the little sign.
The little sign could be large or it could be small but its size really doesn't matter, that just reminded me of the lady with the arm in the Kool-Aid since she, I am told is a rather large and dirty woman; its the point that the sign exists that matters. How large it is depends on how far away from being truly self aware you are.
If just before you react in an outburst that would make a real stand-up comic blush, you have a nagging feeling, or a confused feeling or a pain in the head, or a voice in your head (this is called your conscience) that you know happens just before every outburst; you have the little sign.
You may not be aware that the sign is actually you. YOU, as a human, ARE the process of self-awareness. Without it you, well, you would not be aware that you are, YOU. (That is given all sorts of names by Psychiatry depending on what you do when you is not paying attention.) Like inject what shall be referred to hereforth and hence forevermore, as a permitted typo.
That little sign needs to be less. Not less in size, that size tells you, YOU are in there somewhere. Less in duration.
If the little sign is caught, just once, and you stop the outburst from happening (call that anger management if you must, anger is just what you do when YOU are not paying attention: (see 'all sorts of names' above), it will get smaller. It will be caught in shorter time the next time. It is how your brain works. It learns by repetition. But learning by injection of whole facts does not cause retention in aural thinking persons. It does in visual thinking persons because they will connect the image they acquire from the lesson; with what is already in their memory and the result will be their interpretation of what was learned, (they like to call that intelligentia, I like to call it self-deception).
It is good to know CSI is so popular. Our grandson is now addicted to watching its reruns (he missed a decade, remember). CSI lets the viewer solve the crime before the writers show their already known solution. It means one has to know one's self before one can know others for more than acquaintances. Friendship is a good thing to have as you both are aware. Fair weather friends are those who are not and never were friends to begin with.
Our grandson's lady friend is there in the aware class. He met her after he had found himself and that is rather logical. Before that, he used to want to get to know every woman he met. (See 'lots of names' above.) She has far more responsibility than her age and upbringing should have produced.
While the sign becomes less in duration (it is caught faster and faster) the people one associates with might change. Those who are not self aware really do not like a self aware person to emerge from their midst. But if that self aware person should show up on their doorstep one day unannounced, they are liable to crown him or bow down and worship, or take him up as an icon to holiday sales. It is why a 'prophet' (or person with a consequence engine) is never accepted in his own house.
One of the signs we can actually observe, created by that little sign that is actually US, is a want. A desire for something that is missing in one's life. Afterall, if you are not aware that you are YOU, how could you want or desire anything FOR YOU? All those things that result from not wanting and not desiring, whether that condition is imposed upon you by a set of man made rules or a doctrin or some form of conditioning, or whether they are a lack of libido, a state of depression, a condition of denial or even a grieving time at a great personal loss are those things that receive all those 'lots of names'. When a 'profession' does not know how what it knows so much about works, it tends to lead one to the conclusion that what they know may not be what they know.
It is a good thing that the holiday season has turned into a time of giving. If the gifts were given to a child because the Child the season represents cannot be here to accept them in person, then the season is what it should be.
It is a good thing. Please stop the reactive emotional crusade to denegrade the holidays as not being religious enough. It teaches the desire to want. It teaches, before the child is self aware, the foundational quality of being. The need. One cannot feel need if one is not aware of self to know the need was for. It breeds that desire. Want alone is what drives animals to stay alive.
Of course, it can go the other way and that desire can become all there is but a simple listen or sensing of the little sign will begin stopping that direction.
Growing up, maturing, becoming a true adult requires being self aware as in order to take responsibility for one's action, one has to be aware that one is ONE, and not PART of ONE; while in many cases refusing to believe they could be part of One; because they are self-aware without using that awareness.
So Yes, Virginia there really is a Christmas.
You see, many years ago a well meaning journalist wrote an article to answer little Virginia's question regarding Santa Claus.
Ever since, the media has reprinted that article to show that Santa does indeed exist in our hearts.
But what did little Virginia really ask? Wasn't it more a question of hope? Hope requires knowing something CAN be! Faith is accepting that something CAN be! Knowing is the meaning of life. Little Virginia was obviously far more self aware than her age and upbringing should have produced.
Yes, Virginia, there really is a Christmas. We adults just haven't understood it very well.
Year after year Christmas seeps deeper and deeper into the minds of children as a time for receiving gifts when it really is a time for the giving of gifts. Many advertisers market to the giver of the gift. But sadly they are mostly overpriced diamond dealers or car company with left over massively over-sized red ribbons to use up.
Children's advertising is solely directed at the child to receive. So these children look forward to what they get and compare notes with their peers. The children who do not receive, feel worse and worse each year.
All because what began as a celebration, a mass of God's gift to the world has turned into the savior of only the merchants, even those marketing to the right focus group.
Virginia, if you listen carefully to what you 'should' hear and not to what is being said, (which requires being self aware) you too will understand how humans of every kind have misunderstood the great story of Christmas.
If you listen to the evening news the anchors will report on sales trends and how stores consider the Christmas season to be their best hope for profits the whole year long, but you will hear; if you listen, a misunderstanding that is pure deceit.
Reporters will file stories of church and state as the arguments surface each year over their separation and increasingly of the secular removal of religious connections to Christmas, but you will hear; if you listen, that those are the only times a remote mention of the purpose of Christmas ever makes the news.
It only happens once a year so it is not at all, normal. With 'normal' being what is most repeated, and what is most repeated is what is most accepted, and a person's personal collection of those normals is consider her or his 'opinion' or 'belief': for Christmas to be 'normal' enough to return to being special and unattacked by those for whom it is not 'normal', one thing has to happen.
Human evolution continued with the state of consciousness, about 50 thousand years ago, into the potential of the use of it and this generation, truly unlike any other, is the first generation to start the reversal of that process.
We've taken 'entertainment' to be the purpose. We 'entertain' ourselves with everything we carry, own and share with others. Our self is unable to control, override or otherwise interfere with 'entertainment'. It is why there IS such a thing as 'entertainment'. It diverts the daily grind of being self aware. One loses oneself in a book, in a good movie or even at a concert. Truly self aware, nearly fulling using it; means at times the little sign is so small it is not caught. That can come across as sarcastic or some other bad thing. But we have stayed lost.
By roboticly repeating the 'entertainment' quest we fall more and more prey to the part of the brain dedicated to what happens, but when left alone to control what that might be, will always do the same thing; in the same way regardless of the environmental differences.
Over the past few centuries humans have grown with each self aware person's refusal to 'do things the same way'. We call them inventors and we praise them or we call them other things, (see many names, above).
Each progression of doing things not the same way, results in new ways of doing things and that results in the progress of evolving into a species of truly self aware creatures.
That argument accounts for what people call 'liberals'. It is absolutely correct and I am a staunch Conservative.
What is not absolutely correct is the application of the same argument to what works. Remember the old saying 'don't fix it if it ain't broke'?
People do not invent worse things. People do not display absolute sanity at all times. That is what computers are supposed to do. There are those things that simply work. Those are called 'values'.
You see, conservatives believe in few things. The few things they believe in are true, not based upon the knowledge that they are true (which could be a self-deception), but based upon a consensus of the victims of the past. By considering and taking heed to mistakes made before, conservatives create a small collection of 'values' that if left as they were, if not expanded, ignored or ridiculed will continue order and protect the common good. It is a small list.
Liberals take the explanation of that person above, and impose it upon similar but not identical situations.
War has always been the way a people defends itself from attack. Cannot be argued with.
There has to be a better thing than war. After all, war is not one of those things that works. It is one of those things that destroys, kills, maims and always has to be fought again sooner or later. It has to go. There has to be something that can be done other than war.
The comparison of the similarities (which is the process of thinking) focuses on the matches and ignores the thing that did not match.
War has always been the way a people defends itself from attack. Cannot be argued with. Such defense has worked more than it has failed or there would be no 'fought agin sooner or later' condition.
So war is a necessity at times even though it is disgustingly stupid and inhumane ignorance.
The act of focusing in on matches and ignoring topics to come to a conclusion is called inductive reasoning.
Our culture is rampant with it. John Kerry got slimed when a comment, out of context to the way it was coughed up to depict, was too nuance-ee for the average human to take. That old nuance returns to haunt the intelligentia. An actor (who's very career is dependent upon the lack of self awareness, in order to take on the awareness of being something they are not (that's called acting). People who seek a better life (regardless if they send the money back home if the quest was a better life for their family), are those who are aware enough to know their life is not better. A degree of want exists. A degree of desire. It is a desire the country should want.
We are a people who have lost our way. Our way is to know. We cannot hope to reach that if we are constantly 'entertained' and if we fail to accept personal responsibility for our own actions and blame everyone and everything else and continue to delude ourselves into thinking whatever is perceived is reality, then we shall have completed the reverse of evolution and will be once again,be willing cerfs to the most few remaining self aware people.
That does not mean once self aware a person becomes a tyrant. In fact, that's upside down (as everything is to us). Actual love cannot be attained unless the person giving it is capable. Nothing has to do with receiving. Receiving is the opposite of giving, just as it is the opposite of not receiving. Everything has to do with giving as the more who give, the more who shall receive. Its simple math.
The good news is, for our grandson's kids and the kids of our other grandsons and our granddaughters and all those they shall bring forth that we will not, as a species, reverse evolution so much, as to take us back to scratching under our arms and sitting in trees. We will have killed each other off long before that ever happened.
And just because we originally sat in trees and made sounds nothing like speech, does not mean we descended from apes. It means were are similar to apes. You are missing the point.
Evolution is not a progression of changes. It is a progression of growth. It is upside down to the reality perception doesn't care about. The things that change, that progress through change are those things we humans have involved ourselves in, without being aware enough to take the responsibility to not mess it up.