She

She is happy, has a great, adoring boyfriend, is attractive and intelligent.

Then she finds herself behaving badly. She is moody, takes it out on good people. She finds them tedious. Not the good people as a whole, but the things that happen with the good guys, boyfriend, good friends.

And finds interaction with bad guys is driven by energy from somewhere unknown. Compelling, easy. It doesnt really make sense, it is not as if she is breaking with the good people and hooking up with the bad ones. But, for example, casual conversation with the bitches whom she recently denounced turns into long spells. She finds long facebook posts between herself and weird guys who pretend they cant spell.

The good guys arent having any of this. She is reminded of how good she has it with the good people and how bad the baddies are. And especially how senseless her behaviour is becoming.

She cannot really sustain the foray into badlands. It is not a sustainable thing, to have a viable existence one has to be good with the good guys.

While she doesnt realise this, the drama of straying (just a bit, really) also provides energy. She thinks about it, repents and makes up with the good guys.

Passion

While passion is said to be good (maybe because passionate people are vocal), it is somewhat distant, fleeting and abstract.

Enthusiasm will do for me.

The alternative need not be the opposite

Whats the opposite of moral? Immoral?

Whats the alternative? There has to be many, like adventurous, interesting ...

Monogamy [opposites] Bigamy or polygamy [alternative] Sport, religion, money ...

If you profess morality you are on the morality / immorality track.
If you profess monogamy, you are a monogamist / bigamist.
If you profess honesty, you are a mix of honesty / deceit.

On a track, its just the distance that varies, the end points are connected.

Morality is irrelevant to those without a desire to sin.

God is only relevant to religious people and atheists. Maybe more so to atheists.

The problem with thinking

Its slow. Fine for when slow is fine.

The drivers of talk

It is clear that somewhere there is an infinite energy source that powers talking and variations of talking like writing, arguing, tweeting, facebooking, emailing, mxiting, politics and love.

But looking at talk more closely, we are often baffled and even infuriated by it. People can talk such crap, much of it is boring, a lot is totally illogical, some is repetitive, contradicting, inflammatory.

How does this hang together?

Borrowing from what we vaguely remember from Freud: at the base of us is the basic, id, animal. It has no words, so it is not restricted by words. We don't have to be able to say "water" to want a drink.

But it is useful to be able to express stuff, so along comes human language and the ability to talk. So now we can express what we want, or put more elegantly, whatever the animal is stimulated by. But because the animal has no language, and is not confined by it, language cannot ever accurately express what its about.

Still, talk, or language, is somehow recognized by the animal in us and we experience something at a basic level when talk happens. It can therefore happen that at the animal level we just dig talking about some stuff. It is like stroking a cat, it cant stroke itself but it likes being stroked. The animal in us does not so much care what is said as long as the hot topics are being addressed, as long as the conversation scratches where it itches. So it is unimportant whether we say water is bad or water is good, the animal likes hearing about water. Ditto sex.

This explains why people say the same or similar things over and over again.

It explains why people talk rubbish and listen to rubbish. It explains why we believe lies and tell them. Lies told well beats silence. And lies about the hotspots beats the truth about the cold spots.

Talking about sin is the next best thing to committing it. Pontificating about monogamy, polygamy, cheating, fornication is the poor mans next best to the real thing.

Talk is inflamed not so much by whether we agree but what we agree / disagree about.

Talk does not convince others, and we are not convinced by talk, nor should we be. However, talk does expose what we already know and believe.

Talk functions to confirm to us what we already believe, or what we would like to believe, because behind all this talk is knowing and behind all the knowing is what is, the root, the id, the animal.

The fallout

God should have gotten laid but in stead it went out and created the universe as we know it. Of course, it couldnt have sex like humans, so it created man and then woman and left them naked in paradise. Guess what they did?

No, we dont know that they had sex, or that that was even an issue.

But what we do know is that man (as in mankind) was made in the image of god. One thing we know about man is its fascination with sex. Ohh, not only sex? True, other things also fascinate humans (and other creatures, for example cats).

So, to rephrase, one thing we know about man is its fascination. (Although there are strong arguments that it is all really about sex).

Therefore it is clear that god created man and woman and set them up to .... ah .. interact for the fascination of god. This little idyllic scene seemed to play itself out over and over, god knows for how long. Endless interaction, all within celestial rules, it must have been like one giant Helen Steiner Rice poem, going on forever, yet some still insist on calling it paradise.

Fortunately a fucker with an evil twist to its mind was around who, as the story goes, tempted Eve to mess with the setup. What a girl! Singlehandedly (ok, with some aid from the snake who however did not have hands so it was singlehandedly) she freed humankind from this endless harps and angels soapy.

There were unintended consequences to her out of the box thinking that tend spoil the picture. Like war and famine and disease.

However, thats not the point. The crux is, there had been a dearth of fascinating stuff, real, human drama. The monotony was somehow seen to be "good" (why else would the solution to this boredom is labelled the "fall").

And god was bored. Of course, if he was clever enough to set up creation he had to be. So god put on his snake suit, and the rest is history.

When the cat investigates the wardrobe and behind the cutlery drawer and the top of the roof, remember, it is driven by fascination.

And, when you are bored again, know that at that moment you are in paradise and it needs to be rearranged.

10 Years on

She came up to me and put her arms around me, under my t shirt and held me. "I cant tell you how much I missed you", she said.

I held her in the same way, stroking her back. As there were other people, I was concerned about how not to let this encounter out. We were under a cover, like a sheet, and it was clear others could not see our hug, and did not really make much of what was going on.

I woke and and thought, I would ask her, "What are we going to do?"
She would say "Nothing, I want to keep it this way."
Clever, I thought.