Humanness

Humanness to me is about making contact with the people around me. Contact in the most simplest form: “How are you?” “Who are you?” “What brings you here?” To look at your face, look at your eyes, see what you express, be with you, listen to what you want to say and speak my mind as an expression of me. To respect your boundaries without violating mine. To play the game of expansion, to see where we meet and how far we can travel together in any way. To have fun, to feel, to enjoy, to experience.

So why is it so hard?

What fucks it up for me is the following:

1. Second guessing (“What is it that the might the other think now / later / before?”)
2. Fear to cross the other’s borders and become discarded

My mind has the tendency to try to figure out what the possible outcome of my possible future actions might be: based on a broad collection of past experiences. It is like playing a game of chess trying to forecast a multitude of possible moves the world around me might make after I make mine. In this game it is constantly mirroring “me” in a virtual world of things and hypothetical events that haven not happened yet.

It is part of my training to think like that: to put our my antennae, mirror myself in a virtual world of mostly unwritten rules possibly in place here and adapt my behavior accordingly.

Some of these rules – and my emotional responses on the consequences of breaking or respecting them – have been internalized and have become important factors for my character. Most of these internalized rules have become “voices”. The ones I use to correct myself, to put myself in place, to scold myself when I feel I have fucked up.

But where am I? Where is the balance? Why do I wake up at 6:00 AM with fear raging through my body when there is no real danger or threat? Why am I so afraid to step up to a stranger I think I might like as a friend / lover / partner and say “Hi”? Why do I consciously choose second rate options.
I like people. I love being around in places where people are. I am very much OK. My environment is mostly friendly. In general there is no reason to be afraid. So what is the problem?

My primary reaction is to avoid gnarly situations. Avoidance to make contact with the “voices” I do not like inside myself. By doing so I will never know what their story is.

Reverse that:

“Hi, I saw you standing there in my mind, shouting instructions. Just out of curiousity: who are you? What is it you want to say? Why do you throw these things at me?” What if I just open up and listen, instead of walking away?

This is less hypothetical to me than I state it here. Waking up with fear vibrating through my whole body – every morning, month after month for over two years – allows for enough room for experimentation to practice all kinds of strategies. The most effective one?

1. I break the connection between the “I” and the fear. (This is fear inside my body. I am not the fear. My name is Peter. Hello, fear, nice meeting you. So tell me, what’s up?)
2. I “listen” to the fear with full attention while also stimulating my deep-breathing. No asking questions, just observation. (To help you understand this one: I learned one day being very tired that watching television with full attention made me fall asleep even faster the more I directed my attention to it)
3. I fall asleep again.

My biggest trap is “I should” and “I must”.
But according to whom? For what reason? Will it make me happy? What is my way anyway? I feel that it is limiting me without any reason except that I fear to make the next move, to reach out and make contact. To act from my human curiosity to make contact and meet other people.

In the session today I concluded the following:

1. My avoidance to make contact with the “voices” within of me is directly reflected in my avoidance to make contact with people around me.
2. To break through this pattern, the most effective way is to start from the inside. The outside will follow.

The how?

If my mind is a room full of opinionated people all talking, imagine what will happen when I – instead of arguing or avoiding everyone – just make contact to each individual and genuinely listen. Without an agenda. Without the need to solve or repair anything. With whoever comes up.
I saw such situations happen in the past. People are still talking, but the room becomes quiet somehow as this person moves form one to another. Tension drop. Conversations change. The atmosphere clears. It is fun.

So today I decided to take on this model of contact, listening and observation to:

1. Clear my perception
2. Clear the fear of making contact

“Hi. What’s up? I saw you standing there. I love to hear what you have to say. How come? What else?”

Part of the machine or rather be human?

In an earlier post I wrote yesterday/this night, about the “realness” of money, there was no space for the more human side of it all. That is why: this post. (And it is a pamphlet.)

When I considered the memes-theory Richard Dawkins posed in the 1980’s in “The selfish gene” it gave new shape to old thoughts. In brief:  We have created several new realities using our ability to think, speak, dream and share thoughts. Mythological realities, belief systems, systems of rules and regulations. Each of those systems contain intelligence, self correcting mechanisms, feedback loops, the ability to reproduce and evolve to more complex systems. Many things that define “life”.

Take a religious system: it hunts for new brains. It fights for resources. It competes with other systems. It sides up and starts symbiosis with other systems if that empowers the system. Branches which are unsuccessful die. Successful branches thrive and grow. Its main strive is to win. It is capable to override and abuse natural human mechanisms which are deeply wired (sexual needs, social needs, self preservation, avoidance of pain and suffering) in our brains to enforce it’s position.

Take an economical system: it hunts for new bodies to perform production. It uses and abuses our wiring regarding competition and acknowledgment to create ongoing impulses. It drains all our natural resources to keep the machine going. It pushes us to our edges, helps us with false concepts of the “makable (personal) future”, find new ways to cover up being slaves of an abusive system, kills the ones of us not capable to support this system by poverty and the subsequent natural causes, finds new ways to bypass our natural tendency to only do what is required and use the rest of the day to leisure and personal enjoyment.

These are man made systems. Collective dreams made into reality through language and action. It is our natural part of evolution to create this.

Fuck the conspiracies.

What makes these systems mechanical is the abuse of our humanness. We are – in general – stressed out, sleepless, unhappy, depressed, filled with angst, afraid of each other, addicted to drugs like caffeine, salt and sugar, disconnected from our own personal cores, disorientated, lost in stories, false promises and fairy tales. To make sense of conflicting and clashing concepts and emotions we make up bullshit stories about “what we should be” and “how it works”, use concepts like: enlightenment, nature and nurture, rationality, sexuality, why enforcement and government is “good”, horror stories of distopian futures, separation of humanness into “male” and “female”, utopian dreams and human/male/female/racial/cultural/whatever supremacy.

We are still dreaming dimwits, and if God exists we have wondered so far away from the light that we do not see anything at all anymore.

What needs to change much more than anything else is the renewed acclaim on our humanness. We ARE animals. We ARE emotional beings. Talking apes. Living beings. A ragtag collection of biological and evolutionary systems functioning just well enough to survive our environment and ourselves. In many senses we are childish creatures following impulses rather than “rationality” we seem to hold so high in some cultures or subcultures.

We need food, safety, social support, shelter, tenderness and challenges. Part of our wiring is sexuality, sense of humor, competition, emotional and irrational behavior. We like to flirt, to have fun, to eat, to enjoy, to make love, to fuck, to kiss, to talk, to create, to build, to destroy.

Fuck all the high ideals of perfection. Fuck all the systems of belief we have created. Let’s try to become responsible mature humans first.

Money is not “real”, it is an agreement

Money is maybe the most effective means of trade. It is a neutral medium. It is not linked to anything except the agreement between me and you that it carries some trading value in the tangible world.

Money is not real, however. What IS “real” is the basic cost of living: the price of housing, water, clothing and food. To stop and stabilize inflation is to stop the rising prices of those four.

Our current monetary system is based on the trade value of money against gold. But gold is nothing more than stupid metal. A “rare” one, but so was Aluminium, people thought. The next is an excerpt form a Wikipedia article:

Before the Hall-Héroult process was developed, aluminium was exceedingly difficult to extract from its various ores. This made pure aluminium more valuable than gold. Bars of aluminium were exhibited alongside the French crown jewels at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and Napoleon III was said to have reserved a set of aluminium dinner plates for his most honoured guests.

Until we found a better way to harvest it and found that Aluminum is actually one of the most common metals on this planet, it almost could have replaced gold.

Like any agreement, the value of money is directly connected to the believe we hold in this agreement. When we lose this belief, the “value” of our money plummets. Inflation sets in. Everything penny we have been saving becomes worthless.

So fucking what if a government prints more money than there is gold on this world (re: “Zeitgeist”). We believe in money. We keep on producing goods and buildings and worthless crap as long as we get something in return we can use to spend again. Compared to 100 years ago we are wealthy beyond dreams. We are connected in many ways. High tech equipment has become incredibly cheap and outperforms anything scientists thought was possible only 50 years ago. A lot of stuff can be produced dead cheap now.

The “real” economy is based on production and trade. Money is nothing more than the grease.

To stop and stabilize inflation is to stop the rising prices of housing, water, clothing and food.