Wisdom hath builded her house with a Kalashnikov wearing Flip Flops.

White Snakeroot

  Where I live, Central Authority looks like a bunch of old white men with collars, ties and gray or grey suits - the weirder of them wear brown shoes - they all have a hard on for the culture of, if not the technology of the 18th Century and they are terrified of disobedient women, non-christians and socialism. 

  If you want to know why disobedient women, non-christians and socialism frighten them, you'll find the answer in loss of control, reduced power within the structures of a society that currently enable the wealthy property owner to keep a seat on the committee of the ruling class. Go ahead tremble!

  Stranger still, fifty years ago Central Authority looked and sounded the same, so please don't ask me to even think about assimilating. Back then of course it was also true that you can't buy courage or competence with money. 

  The title of TE Laurence's book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom comes from Proverbs : Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars. An observation Laurence made from his studies and passions for history of the Arabian Peninsular was an understanding of the kind of disciplines and developed wisdom required of a nomadic tribe surviving in the least forgiving parts of Arabia.

 It's a discipline and a wisdom, Laurence argued, that regularly takes Damascus and Baghdad but never keeps them.  The Fremen of Herbert's Dune ended when it rained. Arabia died when they drowned in oil. 

    

 

Creed

White Snakeroot and Eastern Cedar

   In my view monotheism in all its iterations is in the process of chiming it's own death knell. 

  Why do you say this?

  Because the new war lords in western society are called Billionaires and without a functioning creed there will be no Magna Carta.

  What is a creed?

  US Meanings from Miriam Webster : Creed - a formal statement, summary, or system of core beliefs and guiding principles.

  What do you mean by monotheism?

  A belief in a central authority.

Arendt's understanding of Freedom

Blue Mistflower (Wild Ageratum)

  Yes indeed, being "uprooted from meaning" results in populations becoming subject to meaning makers. Arendt's argument for the public square was to promote a meaning making that promoted pluralism in a society rather than versions of atomized Individualism, which Arendt saw as a breeding ground for tyranny, insisting instead that genuine freedom requires a shared, public world sustained by active citizenship.

 To go further into a sense of belonging, the purpose of belonging is security, feeling safe, being supported, and other multiples of wokeness, a symbol within the meanings of awake that entered the language of whitey from a population on the receiving end of attitudes that still see black people as runaway and dangerous slaves. Stay awake! 

  Invariably when life has a price in dollars and cents, the dream is found in the security of property, an exterior castle with iron gates and a moat, a picket fence, an ice machine and a swimming pool the neighbors can envy. An understanding of freedom that chains a mind to the security of the sort of bread and circus power structures that bury alive a couple of Vestal Virgins every time Hannibal crosses the Alps. 

Saint Teresa's Discalced Guides

Acapulco Wedelia sounds good

  Yeah though I walk through the shadow of doubt I will reach the divine presence within.

  Saint Teresa of Avila wrote guide books for her brothers and sisters. In her book, Interior Castle, a soul took a journey through seven mansions, it followed along miles of corridor visited hundreds of rooms on its way to heaven and the book earned Teresa a Doctorate from the Pope of Rome. 

  Prayer, Teresa had always claimed was both a vocal and mental training encapsulated by the Lord's Prayer. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum, adveniat regnum tuum........ etc.

  And here we are, all these years later still trying to retrain the mind to better accept the interior castle and the big wide world, this time  with words like cognition, neuron, axon, dendrite, synapse, gilia, systemic collapse, DNA methyltransferases, methyl globs, gene start buttons...... etc.

  In these days, the idle, of whom there are many, squander the rewards of convenience by forgetting the frequency with which our bodies replace our cells. Every cell in your body is regularly replaced except your inner ear hair cells, your eye lens cells and the neurons in your Cerebral Cortex. The same inner ear hair cells, the same eye lens cells and the same neurons in your cerebral cortex last a lifetime.

 A cerebral cortex is the Top End, it manages those areas of the mind which are considered "higher functions."  A cerebral cortex has four lobes, the highest of the high lobes being the Frontal Lobe, which apparently is the master of thinking, problem-solving, planning, personality, and voluntary movement. 

 The process of teaching, or training the brain, is essentially a chemical process that revels in the plasticity of the brains capacity to strengthen and polish up new chemical connections. It's a continuous adaption, new connections benefit from being polished, and like the eight times table unless they are polished they may be quickly lost. 

  And hark the Herald Angels sing, if it's that simple, we can reproduce it, make it obedient, plug it into the electric, put it to work and make money out of it. 

  When Saint Teresa lay dying her final word were thusly: "O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another." Not to be a Debbie Downer but there is a chance that meeting her spouse didn't happen for our most favorite Barefooted Carmelite.