The above is a quote from a favorite book. I was reminded of it reading Brian's blog. If you find in it a bit of surprising wisdom, read my comment on Brian's blog here.

In my youth, truth was as limber as my limbs and terribly important to speak or conceal. Pushing 50, truth is stiff and difficult to bend after just two hours of sitting; but, it also doesn't mean much. I am a cacophony of good and bad, right and wrong, certainty and doubt, passion and disdain. "I cast a shadow most clearly in the light. Better though, this shadow, then hiding in the night." I am happily intense, always at least amused at my ecentricities. I have too many interests and aspirations still. But, for this passage  into the final third of my life (I hope that's right) my passion for achievement has shifted from accumulating worth to being worthwhile. To mentor, rather than manage; to play my harmonica with joy and gusto, while sitting on the john; to hug a friend one extra second so they know it's for real; to take the true risk of faith and thus relenquish expectation (God doesn't barter faith for favor), that is the scope of my ambition. I love the title line of Dylan Thomas' poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night. I'm going to post it on the blog. Work hard, do good work and have faith. Blessings to all who visit from the Most Comical Ambazzador Goodsoul.

There are easy answers and difficult answers to most questions. The easy answer here is to rely on effusive generalities. The more difficult answer is to probe how our consciousness arises from envionment, both our internal biological environment and our external world environment.

No one would likely read a detailed account of something based on supposition only , and I don't have the neural-biological training to treat the subject in a scientific manner. So call this a speculation, or theory, that current science supports in general, but which is not yet, and may never be mainstream. And suffice that it is cursory only, intended to be suggestive, not difinitive.

The primary supposition is that our neurological capacity for encoding sensory information is far more expansive and precise than is generally understood and that this encoding involves the creation of neurological patterns, the nature of which, in construct, are the same fundamental patterns found in all of nature.

As our understanding, or rather, our recognition of these fundamental patterns expands, so expands our "scientific" awareness or knowledge. To the extent that we intuit patterns in our environment, but have not yet connected the dots cognitively, we relegate such intuitions to the spiritual, or metaphysical relms of our awareness.

Yes, superficially, we can say that as we become more aware of our environment, the more we realize we depend upon it for more than its provision of life sustaining "stuff." We appreciate our environment, protect it and find ourselves within it, rather than apart from it. We may proclaim the spiritual oneness of all, and realize we are but a part of something greater, and that something includes all that we might find in our environment.

But as we unravel the mysteries of our environment, as science progresses, surely we must acknowledge that as biological beings, our grasp of the sublime can be no more sublime than the nature of our ablitiy to comprehend. It is in this conjecture, that science and spirtuality truely integrate, as  arising from the same elementary organizing principals.

While risking triviality, I offer a subtle play on words: if we agree to call all that is, a more or less mysterious "cognition" then we might also agree that all we might perceive, or know, is re-cognition.

Blezzings to All,

The Most Comical Abazzador Goodsoul

At the global level, mankind remains a world of nation-states, each soverign, each territorial. George Bush Sr.  understood that the democratic ideal is meaningless if America is unwilling to abide by a democratic world leadership. Unfortunately, his son, fails still to grasp that concept. The problem is not a lack of communication or a general failure to understand basic human rights or the need to protect them. The problem is the failure of the world's nations to unite meaningfully, and provide coherent standards against which all nations may be held accountable. When the United States refutes accountability to the same principals  upon which our country was founded, we dare not hope others might follow our lead. Corruption is as corruption does. I believe corruption, more than any other cause, stands first in the way of peace.

For those few who follow my blog, but don't follow the Zaadz Team's Blog, there's a new device causing quite a stir: to the Zaadz team, it is delivered as a means to empower the community, to others, it is seens as  encourgaging community censorship.

Here's my take:

I think flamers and spammers are easily quashed - flamers are rebuked by the community and can (or should be able to) be blocked from personal blogs, pods, etc. and spammer accounts are so obvious and overt that I trust Zaadz admins to continue their removal without the community involvement.

Beyond that, the seed thing seems to logically lead to a rather circular contrivance: we might also receive a personal store of full watering-cans and full containers of some rather indiscriminate plant killing poison, with which we might indicate our approval or disapproval of seed givers by distributing one or the other on individual profiles?

We could “sprinkle” one or more watering cans on the profiles of those who we feel distribute seeds wisely. We could spray one of more containers of weed killer on the profiles of those we feel distribute seeds arrogantly or vindictively. This information would serve to cause the seeds distributed by any individual to sprout and bloom or fade into the dirt. In this we way, we would applaud or denounce the good and bad Johnnies wandering about Zaadz. :)

I am one of the original Ambazzadors at Zaadz. My Pod, Spiritual Equilbrium, has always been based on attraction, rather than promotion. It has not been a highly popular pod, as it does not resonate well with many of the mainstream philosophical perspectives here at Zaadz; but then, it is an original (as original as anything might be) inquiry into spiritual matters and does not rely on doctrine or indoctrination. It may be that my ideas strike others as absurd, heretical, or simply dumb. Or it may be that my own writing skills are lacking. I seem to have few, if any, detractors, but I also have few, if any followers.

My point is that bad seeds die a natural death, and good seeds thrive, unless of course your definition of good and bad seeds is contingent, not upon what flourishes; but rather, what kind of garden you prefer. On that point, I will add a line from a poem I wrote many, many years ago: “You are a weed my friend. I would not disgrace you in a vase.”

Seona says I have “a nice little pile of seeds (based on your activity and the length of time you've been on the site).” It might be interesting to see how that formula specifically worked i.e. how many seeds did I get, and how many seeds did someone else get?

In, Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert asserts something like, “All acts of communication are an attempt by one person to conform the mental landscape of the listener to their own.” He explains further that that is true whether we are explaining how to get from 4th and Main to the nearest post-office, or whether we are promoting one presidential nominee over the next. We are offering what we claim to be first-hand knowledge to what will be to someone else, second-hand knowledge. I guess the protection of freedom of speech took that into account?

I am also a photographer and post frequently on Flickr as PhotoSensate. I frequently prune images with little activity. For promotion, I “add” them to groups created by other members (some moderated, some not). Pods are more like elegant forums. Maybe groups, to which blogs, images, videos, etc. might be added would be a nice feature here at Zaadz. In any case, ranking at Flickr is based on Views, Comments, Favorites all of which go into Flickr's formula for Interestingness.

If seeds were used as a way of denoting a Favorite contribution I might be more willing to  applaud. But there are no limits to the number of Favorites I might add at Flickr. True, I have one fan that Favorites everything I post indiscriminately. Why? I have no idea. But if you go look at his collection of Favorites, you see I am not the only one - and mine, like everyone else's, are lost in the forest of images he favorites. Anyway, his favorites mean little to me or anyone else. All of which is to say, bad seeds will use seeds, good or bad, badly, and goods seeds encourage others through interaction and will use their seeds in a goodly way - and in the final analysis, seeds will be a rather ineffectual, inarticulate cluttering of the Zaadzosphere.

Blezzings to all,

The Most Comical Ambazzador Goodsoul

Yep. A few folks here I've known for a while. Went to their profile page. Big Love. Thanks! Good Stuff. Seeds disappearing fast. Guess I better blog about it before I run out.

Blezzings to all!

The Most Comical (and somewhat seedless) Ambazzador Goodsoul

It hard to say what my relationship is to my life story. My story isn't finished. It's a complex "who-done-it" and I haven't yet revealed if the story's principal protagonist, "God" or the hero, me, will prevail.

My sense as an author is that I must kill off the hero and leave the reader guessing as to who killed the hero ie. did the hero take his own life, did someone else do it, or did God do it.

Since God is all-powerful and omniscient, most people will conclude that while he didn't pull the trigger, he was the mastermind behind the conspiracy to have the hero killed.

Since the hero is the hero, and everyone loves a hero, it will be hard for people to imagine that someone else pulled the trigger.

Thus, everyone will be forced to conclude that the hero killed himself, which will be an unsavory, but highly dramatic dénouement that transforms the hero into a victim of his own making, thus diminishing his hero status, which will ultimately explain why God conspired, yes, but with the hero, to rid the planet of one so dismal.

This surpise ending, which transmutes God into the actual hero will have Western and Middle Eastern audiences applauding and Hindus and Bhuddhists anxiously awaiting the sequal.

But there has been an unexpected development over the past few years. I discovered another book entitled "Me" that I seem to not be writing, but is more about me than the life story I had previously been writing. So, I abandoned my own manuscript and now prefer to read the "Me" book.

I don't know how I relate to the "Me" book, but it's a pretty good read. A real page turner. Can't seem to put it down.

Blezzings to all!

The Most Comical Ambazzador Goodsoul

           The Bay at Yakutat

By one hand the knife made ready,
By the other flips a fish,
Suddenly the two are steady
In the rhythm of the slish.

And worthy men and worthy craft
Rebuke the jarring waves that lash
Each man starboard, port and aft,
With bitter wet and violent crash.

And carcass after carcass tossed
Lifeless to the bloody hold
Shimmers, though the light is lost,
And the dreary day grows cold.

And vagrants in the troller’s wake
Bobbing back atop the swells,
Flutter up, then swoop to take
The sacrament of fish entrails.

Here, wind and rain and haze dilute.
Yellow, green, red, brown converge.
And the gray is absolute,
And time and mind and sense diverge.

Moments roll as waves uncounted.
Thoughts are scattered as debris
On pebbles of perception rounded
By the endless surge of sea.

And rivers rise and passion flows
Inward channeled by belief.
Images drift by then go
To certainty, or doubt so brief.

And certain as the sand concedes
To the wash and swirl and spray
So the tide and time recede
Shaping yet another day.

Charles L. Johnson
Copyright 1984 - All Rights Reserved

Smile at someone in a way that allows them to feel welcome in your presence.

An itch stop.

Okay, okay. I am the most comical ambazzador. Sheesh.

The typical educational environment consists of those who want to learn and those who hope to be taught. Those who want to learn concern themselves with the subject matter and rely on teachers to demonstrate only how they think, and learn from teachers only by the examples set and observation. Those who want to be taught rely on getting grades, regardless of what they might learn in the process.

So, what determines a good education? Someone who wants to learn.

Blezzings to all from the Most Comical Ambazzador,

Goodsoul