Conflict and Connection

     You essentially or functionally don’t when you are aggressive, passive-aggressive or apathetic, because all of those is an orientation to circumstance and not personal belief.      Life is not relative to circumstance but to love and truth, and if the pressures of life, which are arbitrary force us to take a aggressive or passive-aggression stance against it or an apathetic stance with it, then we are like a train on rails that only offer two destinations, neither of which have anything to do with us.      Freedom doesn’t exist when the only movements you are offered is going exactly North or exactly South, especially when all the temperate zones are found but moving East or West. The end result of going North or South is arriving in a frozen wasteland. Fighting circumstance offers one benefit and not fighting it offers another, but charting your own course means you get neither of the benefits and both of the resistances. If your p...

     “If you bit your first contact on its ankle you might be a type zero civilization.”-Rick      Are snakes a common element in dream/archetypal language?      Jörmungandr is the snake from Norse mythology that circles the world and represents the chaos of the unknown at the fringes of our world concept. Thor hits Jörmungandr with Mjölnir out at the edge of the world in the middle of the ocea, but Jörmungandr wasn’t evil. Jörmungandr was a son of Loki, and Odin feared it as it got bigger and so threw it out into the ocean, where it grew to encircle the whole world. It’s interesting how ancient maps draw monsters at the edges of maps, because we have been taught to fear the unknown.      The unknown is a source of happiness as a child, because of the adventure of exploring it, but after failed adventures learning turn into labels of shame we have wear, the unknown becomes more of a risk than a joy. When we are a ...

     To say, “suicide is not the answer,” implies that there is only one question, “to live or not to live?”      I can think of a several questions that come up before the question of “to live or not to live,” even if no one talks about them out loud before the final question seems like the only one left: Who is the happiest person you know, and how happy are they? What is the best relationship you know of and how much of the potential love they could have do they actually?      Even without measuring, even if that were possible, likely whoever came to mind as being in first place didn’t score 100%... which is a pretty sobering realization. Even if we haven’t consciously done the math, even if we have tried to avoid doing the math, we still know it is not 100% and the “why” of that is pretty overwhelming to process.      It’s difficult to give someone a happiness rating, but we could somewhat measure love in a relations...

     The symbols we use to process life go deeper than the traditions that come from them. The archetypes go deeper than tradition and even language as a whole because language came from an effort to express what we perceived as symbols. When looking at myth, religion and even personal dreams, it is best to see them through the symbols rooted in the deepest parts of us and not in cultural portrayals of them.   The symbolism of the modern Christian Christmas scene for example doesn’t make any sense otherwise.      “But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves.” Exodus 34:13 A nativity set and a Christmas tree are more like an alter/image and a grove than anything positively described in in the Bible. Does this mean it is bad? Or is it just archetypal language that has meaning to everyone Christian or not?      There are two main symbols which seem to be the most fundamental language of our thoug...