Wednesday, February 16, 2005

I was reading an article on Bs... It attempted to 'academically' address the issue of our current 'culture's' use of 'bullshit' i.e. not the term but the actuality...
My problem with this is that just about anywhere and everywhere I look I see what I would call anything from mild to 'supersized' ( ! ) bullshit. How can I address an issue that I think is crucial to overcome for the continuance of our very existence as a species when the stench of it fills my nostrils and my standing in it makes me feel that I can only be inherently dirty?
My only starting place for typing of this can be in putting out my version of what I figure is it's opposite: QUALITY.
Now the Quality that I refer to is, I think, the same referenced by Robert Pirsig in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In that sense, I choose to believe that there is somewhere in each of us a Knower of Truth. The quality vs. bullshit differences we can note in people are explainable by a combination of how much conscious access as well as how much unconscious access they choose to have to that Knower of Truth.
But what about the free-ranging bullshit in all of our institutions, social and individual frameworks, in our ethnic and national mythologies? Those multilayerings of bullshit do not often seem to be doing what the original stinky stuff is 'supposed' to do - become fertilizer for food or flowers...
Maybe I don't have a sufficiently long telephoto 'lens' on my viewpoint - maybe in 100 more years it'll be clear we were on the verge of a breakthrough in early 2005. News corporations are definitely threatened by the questioning of net writers. Those emperors may yet be seen 'sans frocks'... Blogs do feel like a revolutionary medium - my writing has no-one but me - at least at the moment (!) it has to account to. To touch my sense of the possiblity of a Quality Self (in this brief note here) has helped challenge my belief that bullshit is pandemic. And maybe it works for you too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe, to play the devil's advocate, the answer is in the ultimate macro lens, the microscopic lens. To the view the spiritual clarity of our essence, the child within, our pure white energy, the pulsating dot of you. And then the realization that this is really all I can control in times like this, and the realization that you and I are eternal, you will continue to touch one spirit at a time, making the possibility of change a reality. I certainly know you do this with every blog, and by the sounds of it , in your every breath. Is there a possibility of the use of humour to undermine the foundation of bullshit, to stop taking ourselves so seriously, and ponder real truths, not corporate profits, for we are all angels of one type or another. Just a thought from a sideline quarterback.

Unknown said...

You know, Mike, you keep telling me you're not very 'with it' when we talk in person. Your comments/observations to me yesterday were far more astute than any mere sideline quarterback and these comments are similarly expansive. I admit you have a sub-personality that was assiduously taught to self-depreciate to depths that are those of a deep sea diver - - - . But that doesn't change the overall charcteristics that seem to come 'bounding out of you' like a Tigger from Ireland - each time you raelly want express your self... Thanks and bless you in other words...