Stigma Free

Today, let us face the epidemic of mental illness together, with some clarity.  In countless ways, some subtle, some not so, our society actively engages in the dehumanization of people who do not operate within a “normal” (i.e. socially convenient) range of behavior.  While we’ve increasingly buried our heads in our phones and TV screens over the past couple decades, our country has slowly gone to hell around us — primarily because we have neglected to attend to one another’s suffering and isolation.  Worse than that, we’ve managed to allow the development of a for-profit trade in the mass-incarceration of human beings, a majority of whom have an untreated medical condition (addictions, mental illnesses, and neurological impairments), at the hands of a morally-bankrupt “justice” system that denies all but a few “due process” and “equal protection of the law,” much less genuine avenues for tangible rehabilitative support.

We’ve allowed the justice system to ensnare hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people, whom have not had a genuine capacity to advocate for themselves or press their incompetent public defenders to do a better job.  In an era of the “rocket docket” assembly line of defendants being processed like cattle and public defenders literally only having a few minutes to review each case, we cannot afford to ignore the festering problem of inadequate "behavioral health” care for the tens of millions of people who are one “bad day” away from being trapped within the blackhole of the prison-industrial complex.  Put bluntly, we cannot ignore, any longer, the fact that our jails and prisons have become convenient (money-making) garbage piles for “unproductive citizens.”  Yet, every one of us knows someone actively suffering from a mental malady, someone we care about — whether suffering on the surface, or in silence, they are all around us.  So how do we begin to solve the problem?

We begin by facing reality as a culture, admitting to ourselves that when a person suffers from a serious mental illness or impairment, the impact that that has on their behavior is inherently beyond their ability to self-regulate.  We begin by recognizing people’s behavior is constrained and distorted by environmental conditions (such as poverty, abuse, and neglect) and brain neurobiology (also beyond their control).  We begin by appreciating the fact that we are, as a society, directly responsible for all the social conditions currently prevailing to permit the psychological abuse and neglect of millions of children and vulnerable adults, and directly responsible all the more for the furtherance of those injuries through a cultural stigmatization of the people who suffer the effects of that abuse and neglect.  The onus for change rests with the society, not those abused and abandoned by it.  The lens through which we’ve been perceiving the problem has been the fundamental condition providing for the problem's perpetuation and growth.  Thus, we most readily begin, truly, by dissolving the chains of stigma imposed on ourselves and our bruised and broken brothers and sisters.

In order to effect this, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) started the #StigmaFree campaign to foster greater understanding and compassion in our approach to the largely ignored problem of mental illness and addiction in this country.  I encourage you to take the pledge.  I also strongly encourage you to consider helping support NAMI [www.nami.org], especially since they are actively engaged in such work as the Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) [http://www.nami.org/cit] for law enforcement (emphasizing de-escalation of situations involving a person suffering from a mental health problem).  Direct participation of community members in their local NAMI and CIT programs is sorely needed, but please at least spread the word.

It’s never too late to make a difference, to save future lives through the noble teachings and compassion of today.

How Do Beliefs Close Our Minds?

How adaptable are we really, when operating without the daily support and insight of others to serve as a mirror reflecting back the imperfections that exist in our own way of seeing the world -- without brethren helping us to see the stale frailty of our ingrained biases? The capacity for genuine, lasting behavioral change for a person can only occur within a nurturing social environment. Devoid of a regularity of positive feedback from the environment (that is in excess to the negative), there can be no lasting change or growth of character, for it will sink and drown from exhaustion otherwise.

 

Our own beliefs can cut us off from being able to recognize the fundamental cracks in our accepted worldview. Beliefs are a self-fulfilling prophecy, for better or worse. Beliefs inform our intentions inform our actions. Beliefs create blind spots within the light of our own consciousness, like shadows cast in broad daylight. Our judgment is limited by our degree of mindful awareness, which is limited by the beliefs thus far attached to. It is only through personal abandonment of fixed attachments and static conceptions about the world, while abiding within a loving web of family and community, that we can restore an inner-equilibrium and equanimity of mind -- a state of consciousness that is the source of all inspiration, wisdom, hope, joy, and righteous agency in the world.

Inter-Dependence Day

What does “independence” mean in 2016 America?  What does it mean to sing, “for the land of the free, and the home of the brave,” from within a modern surveillance police-state and ‘teenage wasteland’?  Ever satisfied with half-measures and half-truths, gimmicks and hot air, we collectively handed over our futures to narcissists in every area of socioeconomic life and category of human endeavour.  Even in many academic circles, it has been long forgotten that it is a logical fallacy to weight the validity of information based on the credentials of its source.  Successive American generations sold their souls and their childrens’ futures for short-lived and hollow gains.  We abdicated our personal responsibility and freedom, for the illusion of greater security and convenience of “authorities” and “experts” controlling every aspect of our lives for us, including how to think.  But most of all, we have failed to raise our children with love, compassion, understanding, and encouragement, and through our own example to become strong-willed, free-thinking, responsible, self-sacrificing, and honorable people.  If you believe at all in the idea that, “it takes a whole village to raise a child,” then it’s not hard to comprehend why our “civilized” society has disintegrated from within.

 

Over the course of the 20th century especially (in correlation with the rise of consumerism, federalism, and corporatism), successive generations of parents have increasingly abandoned their children’s futures out of their own selfishness and willful ignorance.  (Note also: neglect works just as well as abuse.)  The evidence literally stares us in the face, in the form of all the countless eyes of children staring back at us — the tens of millions of children trapped in “adult” bodies — their minds never having been nurtured and guided into genuine pscyhological maturity.  Rather, in truth, all these young and middle-aged “adults” going about their American lives are deeply wounded, neglected, and abandoned adolescents who merely cover their frail psyches behind the masks they create for themselves and each other.  They are ultimately fear-rooted (-driven) personalities because their growth was stunted or blunted by the negligence and neglect of others.  Fear was the language in which they were raised, and rejection.  Their natural, innate innocence and loving natures were routinely ignored, or even attacked, by the many adults they looked up to.  What surprise can it honestly be for people to see that hostility, bigotry, and greed are an exponentiating result?

 

What the hell happened, you often ask yourself…  Deep down, you already know why: we are all deeply interconnected with one another but have been acting like we are not.  Look in the mirror, my fellow Americans — yes, all of us are to blame.  "You reap what you sow" is somehow an unclear concept to many people still, even as they stand in their very own pile of shit, day in and day out.  People have become increasingly lazy, distracted, arrogant, spoiled hypocrites.  People have increasingly turned a blind eye to problems festering in their own homes and communities.  People have become overwhelmingly disinclined to put in the degree of effort required to reap the rewards they rationalize themselves to be worthy of anyway.  People have allowed parasitic ideas and corrupt thinking patterns to take root in and unravel our families and communities from within, by virtue of the costly indulgences of apathy and arrogant presumption.  People have chosen to be lemmings, guided by the hands of egomaniacs.  People have shirked their moral duty to their communities, as citizens receiving communal benefits, by failing to think for themselves and stand up for what they know in their hearts to be right and noble.

 

People want greater democracy, but are satisfied with handing over the country to an aristocratic oligarchy of narcissists.  People want sanity restored, but are satisfied with being handed a binary choice of a criminal elitest and a fascist bigot to choose for the presidency.  People rail against how corrupt the system is, but are satisfied with staking their childrens’ futures on nothing but the delusional optimism that the system will somehow “right itself” without actual effort on their part.  The American Dream will never be more than a fantasy until we wake up from our drunken slumber to see reality as it truly is.  The first step to addressing a problem is to recognize the true, root nature of the problem.  Guess what, the real problem is how most people have been made to perceive the problem.

 

You have likely been misled into thinking the fundamental problem with this country has something to do with groups of “other” people or which political party is in power, when it is you who are responsible for creating the world you wish to inhabit.  Nothing will be fixed so long as the majority of people believe “someone else will fix it.”  See this attitude for what it is: cowardice.  Also, consider taking the log out of your own eye before helping another with the speck in theirs.  The moment we finally choose to take personal ownership for how we live our own lives and each treat one another, we will truly deserve to celebrate Independence Day.  We must be brave enough to be free.

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The True Nature of Dark Energy (and Our Universe)

To understand what dark-energy is you must first visualize the inhabited universe we look "out" upon as literally being the "inner" content of a blackhole that exists within a (geometrically) extra-dimensional "multiverse" manifold. In other words, our "child" universe is a blackhole hyper-sphere ("time" being one of the spatial dimensions) "birthed" from the collapse of a high-density star-like object within an extra-dimensional "parent" universe.

A geometric asymptote known as an "event horizon" merely represents a lensed inversion of space-time, such that what is considered to an observer external to the black-hole to be an inward-outward spatial dimension measuring the black-hole's radii is perceived as a "time" dimension to an internal observer existing within the black-hole. The "Big Bang" is our blackhole universe's geometric singularity (when-where the hyper-star's core first started the formation of the blackhole), whereas the "Heat Death" or "Big Rip" at the end of "time" is the geometric asymptote we call the event horizon (merely approached from within).

Just as gravity is merely the curvature of space-time bending "inward," "dark energy" (anti-gravity) is space-time exhibiting an exponential exfolding (curving "outwardly"). Remove a couple spatial dimensions and imagine our universe as a funnel, with its "tip" the singularity and the "lip"/"rim" the event horizon. Now visualize numerous "world lines" (representing the space-time paths of objects) running from the tip ("Big Bang") to the exponentially widening rim (event-horizon), and, for simplicity, imagine the objects never accelerate relativistically but rather travel unaltered, "straight" paths. Those world-lines will exponentially curve away from each other geometrically as they approach the event horizon ("rim") asymptote.

Now imagine each of these world lines represents a galaxy and the progression of "time" is represented as moving spatially away from the "tip" / singularity / Big Bang of the funnel towards the "rim" / event horizon / Heat Death end. The infinite exponential stretching of space-time, as world-lines approach the event-horizon asymptote, is perceived (from the temporal perspective of the relative objects) as exponentially accelerating expansion, which ultimately takes an infinite amount of "time" to reach for an interior observer. This is exactly the same relativistic effect that is described alternatively as the quantum mechanical "smearing" of information across the event horizons of blackholes (see: holographic principle).

Now, try to extrapolate the funnel geometry to a circle, with tip as center-point and rim as circumference, while maintaining a sense of the stretching/smearing effect as a dilation of space-time.

A simplified, top-down view depiction of the topology of the interior of a blackhole (without angular momentum).
Here the "Big Bang" is at the center, and the "Heat-Death"/"Big Rip" is the "event horizon" circumference.

With this simplified visualization we can see what can be approximated mathematically as a Lie Group (if allowing an infinite radius in the model to account for the logarithmic warping effect of space-time curvature). Now, recall that all black-holes have some degree of geometric spin. Imagine what happens to matter-energy falling into the blackhole due to relativistic "frame-dragging"; it falls inward following an infinite, logarithmic spiral world-line (indeed our "golden spiral" geometry is a consequence of our blackhole universe's angular momentum). Now try to grasp this geometric topology with the removed spatial dimension added back in: you have a hyper-sphere with a toroidal-vortex geometry. This internal space-time curvature is roughly analogous to the patterns exhibited by the electromagnetic fields of the Earth and Sun, and the strong-weak nuclear fields of particles, but is effectively a gravitomagnetic "de Laval nozzle" due to the toroidal-vortex geometry inducing a "Venturi effect." This geometric energy dynamo is responsible for generating the bipolar "relativistic jets" spewing from some blackholes in our universe which physicists still haven't formally understood the mechanism behind.

Regardless, "dark energy" is not an energy at all, but our perception of the exponentially increasing global curvature of space-time as we approach the geometric asymptote that is the event horizon. Try to recognize that our perception of time is merely a perceptual manifestation of consciousness (which is the interference pattern generated by the Fourier Synthesis (quantum entanglement) of de Broglie matter-waveforms, with an effect analogous to "scanning" along these world-lines), and that world-lines are "attracted" to each other by "gravity" over "time" only in the sense that space-time is expanding/stretching less rapidly at shorter distances than at larger distances (a global form of the "Casimir effect").