[John Merryman]

Stefan,
 By unstable, I simply mean we are inherently impermanent. A true (happy) medium would be a flat line on the old heart monitor. Death and birth are how life resets.
 The problem with your view of life is that you are seeking ideals and not finding any that are not illusionary. The problem is the absolute is essence, not ideal. It is what we rise from, not what we fell from. The purpose of life is to have purpose. Otherwise you fade away. When you are gaining energy, you are climbing up and when you are losing energy, you are fading away. The situation now is something of a peak, in many ways. It’s like the crest of a wave, mostly foam and bubbles.
So vision is necessarily subjective. It’s the intuitive right brain to the logical management of the left brain. The left brain sees the distinctions, while the right brain sees the connections. So it’s more wholistic, while management is putting the parts together.
 To think in a more connected fashion, consider your brain as a magnifying glass. When you focus the light to a point, it creates shadow around it, as the attention is concentrated. While it creates focused awareness, it also causes isolation. So back up on occasion and let the light be distributed. As in chill out. Let the connections to other people grow like grass. After awhile you get this sense around other people that you are all the same being, looking out through different filters. It’s only the details that create distinction. The spiritual absolute is the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. So we fall down on occasion. It’s just an excuse to get back up again.

[John Merryman]

We are unstable, but so are all complex processes. Biology deals with this by constantly resetting, ie. death and birth. 
 Personally I think there are three main misconceptions that are foundational to western civilization, but which the reconsideration of, might serve to “reset” our mindset.
 Most elementally I think we see time backward. It is not the present which “moves” from past to future, but the changing configuration of what exists, that turns future potential into actuality, then residual. To wit, the earth isn’t traveling a fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Why is this psychologically important? Because this singular, linear concept is foundational to the basic particle/atomized view of reality that defines western civilization. Eastern civilizations view the past as in front of the observer, because it is known and can be seen, while the future is behind and is unseen. Consequently easterners tend to be context oriented, while westerners are object oriented. Rather than go into all the conceptual history, to the extent I’ve learned it, consider that if you simply view time as emergent from action, thus creating these events which come into being and then recede into memory and residue, then one’s actions and existence are intertwined with and part of the larger context. On the other hand, if you view time as a physical vector through a series of events, then the point of reference is moving against and is separate from this context. There is a great deal of psychological complexity in this, that is beyond the scope of this posting, but that is a small sample.
 The next issue is monotheism. Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. It just doesn’t make a convenient social and political model. Much better to insist divine validation is top down. Remember though, democracy was not formalized by monotheists, but by polytheists. If you have a religion of Gods arguing, it gets reflected in the political models. Monotheism has mostly served, historically, to validate monarchy and other forms of top down authority, from divine right of kings to Bush2 thinking God put him in charge.
 These two points are very much intertwined. Religions and nations necessarily use a public narrative to both validate their existence and dictate a group direction. The actual reality of time is much more a tapestry of interlocking narrative, than a single path.
 Religion is vision, while government is management. They frequently intersect, but come from opposite sides of the brain.
 The third point is that we are taught money is a form of commodity, when it is a contract. This I go into in the thread I started; What is Your Occupation.
 These are just my thoughts on the current situation. Yes, I do see it as somewhat dire in many ways, but I also see that as necessary to stop humanity from continuing in the direction it is going. Complexity is inherently unstable and it will fall back to a more stable level. After the big reset, hopefully we will rise up a little smarter and more contrite.

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