Knowing and knowledge is not the crisis. The crisis of understanding in the United States of America 2025 is that thinking systems are important. Reactionary thinking, mockery thinking, one-upmanship thinking is not the same as the science way of thinking. Twitter-thinking, meme thinking, isn't the same as science thinking.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less)” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995
“The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.” - October 19, 2024 - America’s gullibility crisis, Zachary Basu
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/19/musk-ackman-election-misinformation
Clown Population. The clowns inside the White House are only a small fraction of a total society of mock for mock, reactionary mocking, clowns. The entire nation is a "basket case of clowning around" on social machines / HDTV media machines / mockery.
People like to play a game of psychological denial and say ONLY MAGA is the clowns, only the White House is the clowns. It's the entire population of Untied States of America.
Clown Population. The clowns inside the White House are only a small fraction of a total society of mock for mock, reactionary mocking, clowns. The entire nation is a "basket case of clowning around" on social machines / HDTV media machines / mockery.
People like to play a game of psychological denial and say ONLY MAGA is the clowns, only the White House is the clowns. It's the entire population of Untied States of America.
In the first temptation, the Lord of Lust displayed his three beautiful daughters before the Buddha. Their names were Desire, Fulfillment, and Regrets—Future, Present, and Past. But the Buddha, who had already disengaged himself from attachment to his sensual character, was not moved.
Then the Lord of Lust turned himself into the Lord of Death and flung at the Buddha all the weapons of an army of monsters. But the Buddha had found in himself that still point within, which is of eternity, untouched by time. So again, he was not moved, and the weapons flung at him turned into flowers of worship.
Finally the Lord of Lust and Death transformed himself into the Lord of Social Duty and argued, “Young man, haven’t you read the morning papers? Don’t you know what there is to be done today?” The Buddha responded by simply touching the earth with the tips of the fingers of his right hand. Then the voice of the goddess mother of the universe was heard, like thunder rolling on the horizon, saying, “This, my beloved son, has already so given of himself to the world that there is no one here to be ordered about. Give up this nonsense.” Whereupon the elephant on which the Lord of Social Duty was riding bowed in worship of the Buddha, and the entire company of the Antagonist dissolved like a dream. That night, the Buddha achieved illumination, and for the next fifty years remained in the world as teacher of the way to the extinction of the bondages of egoism.
Now, those first two temptations—of desire and of fear—are the same that Adam and Eve are shown to have experienced in the extraordinary painting by Titian (now in the Prado), conceived when he was ninety-four years old. The tree is, of course, the mythological world axis, at the point where time and eternity, movement and rest, are at one, and around which all things revolve. It is here represented only in its temporal aspect, as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, profit and loss, desire and fear. At the right is Eve, who sees the tempter in the form of a child, offering the apple, and she is moved by desire. Adam, however, from the opposite point of view, sees the serpent-legs of the ambiguous tempter and is touched with fear. Desire and fear: these are the two emotions by which all life in the world is governed. Desire is the bait, death is the hook.
Adam and Eve were moved; the Buddha was not. Eve and Adam brought forth life and were cursed of God; the Buddha taught release from life’s fear.
MOYERS: And yet with the child—with life—come danger, fear, suffering?
CAMPBELL: Here I am now, in my eighties, and I’m writing a work that is to be of several volumes. I want very much to live until I finish this work. I want that child. So that puts me in fear of death. If I had no desire to complete that book, I wouldn’t mind dying. Now, both the Buddha and Christ found salvation beyond death, and returned from the wilderness to choose and instruct disciples, who then brought their message to the world.
The messages of the great teachers—Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed—differ greatly. But their visionary journeys are much the same. At the time of his election, Mohammed was an illiterate camel-caravan master. But every day he would leave his home in Mecca and go out to a mountain cave to meditate. One day a voice called to him, “Write!” and he listened, and we have the Koran. It’s an old, old story.
MOYERS: In each case receivers of the boon have done some rather grotesque things with their interpretation of the hero’s message.
CAMPBELL: There are some teachers who decide they won’t teach at all because of what society will do with what they’ve found.
MOYERS: What if the hero returns from his ordeal, and the world doesn’t want what he brings back?
CAMPBELL: That, of course, is a normal experience. It isn’t always so much that the world doesn’t want the gift, but that it doesn’t know how to receive it and how to institutionalize it—
MOYERS: —how to keep it, how to renew it.
CAMPBELL: Yes, how to help keep it going.
MOYERS: I’ve always liked that image of life being breathed back into the dry bones, back into the ruins and the relics.
CAMPBELL: There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valid as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated clichés. This has to be done with all traditions.
"thirdly, of course, there is the individual who rises above these and becomes the conscious choice maker. Less you think this kind of person has a wonderful time all the time... let me assure you that it is a very difficult path. Why?" "And to be conscious hurts, it hurts like heck, I might even say it hurts like Hell." - Dr. Stephan A Hoeller ... https://youtu.be/08R1kPdfrHA?t=4265
If not us, than who?
"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves." - Carl Sagan
If not us, than who?
Nobody is gong to save us from our own selves. We exploded our population to 8 billion people and we are almost all able to connect, hope is people can see good common ground instead of where we are heading at the moment hate each other as common ground.
There are good signals and leadership, people have to favor it. [email protected]
Forgive me for thinking I was as memorable to you as you to me.
These days I can barely remember my own self in all the mass mind / group think concerns I have.
I said I choose my illusions. Like you with the Great Seal.
I wasn't given much choice, perhaps not as in bad shape as someone born in 2020 in Palestine who can't escape, but in our own way technology and history imprison us. What's my nightmare is how many people seem to enjoy defeating other people and building technologies that empower our self-destruction.
I find no goodness in my society around me marching towards something worse than 1937 Germany. There are much better ways to learn and make mistakes than to build systems and devices of wrecking goodness.
We could be learning, and teaching, and sharing much better things....
God Almighty the King washed the feet of the humans he spent his lifetime serving, before his ultimate act of service.
It's important to preach "1 John 4:20" Bible verse, God is a fiction character, Jesus is a fiction character, hate of any living human person is bad. Don't become a liar and say "I love Jesus", "I love Yahweh", "I love Allah". It is science fiction storytelling, where it belongs in the Public Library along with Star Wars and Shakespeare with Hamlet's ghost. All metaphors. Love and Compassion are for real human beings, not story characters.
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Skywalker Ranch California, 1987: "The one who suffers is, as it were, the Christ, come before us to evoke the one thing that turns the human beast of prey into a valid human being. That one thing is compassion. This is the theme that James Joyce takes over and develops in Ulysses—the awakening of his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to manhood through a shared compassion with Leopold Bloom. That was the awakening of his heart to love and the opening of the way. In Joyce’s next great work, Finnegans Wake, there is a mysterious number that constantly recurs. It is 1132. It occurs as a date, for example, and inverted as a house address, 32 West 11th Street. In every chapter, some way or another, 1132 appears. When I was writing A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, I tried every way I knew to imagine, “What the dickens is this number 1132?” Then I recalled that in Ulysses, while Bloom is wandering about the streets of Dublin, a ball drops from a tower to indicate noon, and he thinks, “The law of falling bodies, 32 feet per sec per sec.” Thirty-two, I thought, must be the number of the Fall; 11 then might be the renewal of the decade, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10—but then 11, and you start over again. There were a number of other suggestions in Ulysses that made me think, “Well, what we have here is perhaps the number of the Fall, 32, and Redemption, 11; sin and forgiveness, death and renewal.” Finnegans Wake has to do with an event that occurred in Phoenix Park, which is a major park in Dublin." - Joseph Campbell, age 83
about the conversation between the joker and thief, referencing the crucifixion of Christ between the two thieves.
Today is still Ash Wednesday where I'm at in California time zone.
"In Christianity, Holy Wednesday commemorates the Bargain of Judas as a clandestine spy among the disciples. It is also called Spy Wednesday, or Good Wednesday (in Western Christianity), and Great and Holy Wednesday (in Eastern Christianity)."
Maybe that is upon your mind, symbolic English embed.
Patient zero for Trump Derangement Syndrome
Vlad Putin gets that credit, his buddy Vlad Surkov did it to him in 2011 (Moscow).
“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of sings (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?” ― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Thank you and good work
In James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," the phrase "Hush! Caution! Echoland! shall be theirs for ollaves" appears in Book I, Chapter I.