Regulating Yoga: A Question on Religious Practices

Yoga is a very ancient practice that involves linking (yoga literally translating to "yoke") mind and body. The practice is believed to have been passed down to humans from the Master Yogi, Shiva. The most ancient yogic practice is Kundalini, which literally means "the coiled up one." It involves meditating both mind and body, which causes a coiled up serpent at the base of the spinal chord to unwind and move through the chakras. Eventually the serpent will reach the crown chakra, the Sahasrara, in which one essentially becomes enlightened, though the most important chakra is the heart chakra, or the Anahata (this chakra is where one obtains compassion). Of course, like any general description of a religious practice, that is all very general and inaccurate. There is much more to it than just that. But I must get to the point here.

Yoga has become a very popular "alternative" exercise practice in America. We generally think of yoga as learning to bend yourself into a pretzel. But it is actually heavily related to Tantric-alchemical philosophy (it has been found that a good number of yogic practices arose around the same time the Arabs introduced India to Hermetic alchemy), and is a matter of perfecting the self, both mind and body, than becoming a contortionist. In fact, it really doesn't have anything to do with contortioning, just like alchemy really didn't have anything to do with turning lead into gold. Superficially, that's the way it seems. It has to do with cleansing and perfecting the mind by linking the mind to the body. Again, this is all very general.

Since yoga has become so widespread in America, it is subjected to malpractice and scandals (there are countless forms of yoga which were, literally, invented in the past 10-15 years, irrelevant of the original Kundalini, and far from what Shiva had in mind). In 1999 the Yoga Alliance was created to preserve the values held by yogis, and shortly after they began a registry that yoga schools and instructors to register for. Sadly, a good number of instructors have fallen through the cracks. Like any religion, some "yogis" don't register and poorly teach yoga, and a good number of injuries have resulted from malpractice. Currently there is a growing push to regulate, and regulate heavily, yoga schools and instructors.

Yoga, like any practice, should have a license and fees in order to practice. All states have a division that regulates and checks all licensed professionals and businesses. These professions can be anything from kick boxing to massage therapy, from lawyers to architect, barber to physician. Somehow yoga managed to avoid ever requiring a license to teach. Many states have begun requiring yoga schools to pay fees, take classes, and obtain a license, or be forced to shut down.

Now, I'm not trying to report the news, you can check all the above here. What I want to get at is that yoga is religious practice. So, can the government regulate religious practices? Does that not violate separation of church and state? This is a bit of an ethical dilemma.

Yoga has become a rather secular activity, and probably the whitest exercise activity currently. But the choice of regulating yoga rests not on the government, but on yoga schools. If they are going to teach it as a spiritual activity, which many schools do, then they will be forced to admit to it's Hindu pagan roots and spiritual guidance. That will certainly scare away the large section of the Christian population. A lot schools advertise their yoga as mere exercise, and that it won't conflict with any previously held religious beliefs. Well, that kicks them out of the religious aspect, which will require such schools to be regulated.

Admit to being a pagan practice in a Christian dominated America, or be forced to be regulated. The problem is much deeper than just this. Yoga is not a religion. Hinduism is the religion, and yoga is just a practice (a bit like ascetic prayer for Christians). The government cannot regulate a religion, but it can regulate those aspects of a religion that bleed out into the secular world.

In 1984 the US Supreme Court established that the Nativity scene of Christ's birth was a secular image (Lynch v. Donnelly). Just two years ago in the case Salazar v. Buono the Supreme Court ruled that the Christian cross is a secular image when used on public, and therefore government owned property (the issue was over whether or not the cross a Mojave National Park should be removed, and for it to stay it had be secularized).

The government holds the right to regulate or outlaw religious practices in certain cases, such as in public schools. But in the case of yoga, money, and a lot of it, is being exchanged without regulation or a license (massage therapy is very heavily regulated, as it is also very dangerous when someone doesn't know what they're doing, while many consider it to be a spiritual experience). So that interesting dilemma gets us no where: admit it's pagan or be regulated. Face depopularization or be regulated. Really, I don't see a problem with either one. Those who do it for the spiritual value shouldn't care if it's not popular, and those who are doing it for the money should just accept that everyone else has to have a license (even kick boxers!).

The separation of church and state is already blurred enough in this country. Government can regulate religious practices? Does that not violate that separation? Well, snake charming is considered a religious practice, and the government regulates that as well (thanks Scott for that detail). But you can't make a bunch of money and preach spirituality, and then claim it's just exercise. You can't have the cake and eat it too.

I don't like two-part shows, nor two-part blog posts, and I don't like doing two-parters even more. But this post is too long as it is. But I will need to discuss the taxation of churches and its implications of separation of church and state.

Energy and Essence: Know Thyself

I am a fairly rational human being. But I spend a good deal of my time exploring symbolism, and researching religious mysticism, esotericism, and ritual. For instance, lately I have been reading a lot on western alchemy, alchemical philosophy and its relationship to Christianity and Masonry. And for all this seemingly esoteric "bullshit" (one my call it) I read, I still consider myself a very logical person.

Now, I have friends and acquaintances that are into yoga, magic, karma, energy, and the likes. The philosophical ideas that surround these I find interesting, and I enjoy investigating it, but I don't believe in any of it. Why? Because I actually believe energy and karma to be bogus. It's all bogus to me. But there is an idea in there that I find universal and fascinating, and yet very difficult to explain. So let me put it this way: it's all in our heads.

Now, that's not meant to be negative, as in all the people who believe in life forces and energy are suffering from some kind of neurosis (though, sometimes I wonder). Rather it has a positive aspect that I will get to.

A few years ago there was I girl who I had a child-like crush on, and I distinctly remember her telling me that my energy was all wrong. I eventually realized that there is absolutely nothing wrong with my energy, whatever it is. What is actually wrong is in our heads. I don't like the term "energy," so I prefer to use the term "essence." You can call it whatever you want. Some call it the "true name," others "energy," and some "chi," and a few call it "that which has no name." But I like essence.

I like essence, because it goes well with "substance" (substance and energy just don't sound right to me). There is the thing itself (substance), be it a chalice, a chunk of sulfur, a pentagram, a pyramid, or a crucifix. The pentagram is just a shape; a five point stellation of an equilateral pentagon, which happens to be embedded with the Phi ratio in a multitude of ways. It doesn't actually mean anything. Some people think it's a symbol of the devil, some a symbol of God (it was an early Christian symbol), for others it holds magical protective powers, even a magical emblem of power, and for others it is simply an intriguing mathematical graphic embedding. All of that is relative. The only power the pentagram has, or whatever it means, can only come from us, our minds. It means whatever we want it to, through whatever personal or cultural filters we choose to view it through. And the same can be said of any object, ritual, incantation, or symbol we can imagine.

That is the difference: the substance is the thing itself, irrelevant of cultural or personal meaning; the essence is whatever framework we choose to filter that thing through to precipitate meaning or power. A yogic meditative stance has no more meaning or power than sitting in front of the computer, expect that which we put into it.

So where's the optimism of all of this? What's the positive? Well, if it's all in our heads, then that means all the power and meaning in the entire world resides in our own psyches. The power and meaning of the Pyramids of Giza is not external, but internal. The essence of the thing, the substance, is not external. The essence of everything is internal. We are that essence. We are that power and meaning. Tat tvam asi, "thou art that." And that's really the logic of it all. Crystal balls are cool (I have one), but I will not see an angel speaking to me in Greek. Peering into a crystal ball (or any crystal) is not an external viewing, but an introspective experience.

What was wrong with my essence, my energy, was really a problem with her essence. To me, my essence is just fine (like I said, it's all relative). Not to get into psycho-semantics here, but she was projecting her internal problems onto me, while I was projecting my internal idealizations onto her (and what platonic relationship doesn't do this?). Again, it's all in our heads. And if you can't tell, I'm projecting some internal problems into this blog post, though I'm finding it rather cathartic.

And so, I'm going to link this back to a current problem: America. We just don't know how to be introspective. We rescue ourselves from introspection, from understanding our nature and our history (i.e. nature and nurture), by suppressing it via medication, or externally through war, corruption, money, and the occasional psychiatric therapy. We simply don't know how to sit down in silence and ask ourselves that ancient, existentialistic question, "Who are you?"

If only we could all be like Trevor Reznik from The Machinist and finally be able to say, "I know who you are." It's like a snow globe, the outside is an illusion of what is inside (our universe? Our minds?). Reznik's external conflicts were an internal conflict of himself. And might I say, it was brilliant, that Narcissistic (mythologically speaking) moment when Reznik looks in the mirror and, as the prophet said, got to know himself.

Two Principles of the Internet as Diety

I don't usually think about things unless I can tie them to other things I conjecture about, no matter how loosely I tie them together - unless it is just that interesting. For instance, I'm still trying to assimilate my research on consciousness without linking it to anything other than relativity and quantum physics. So I'm going to try an assimilate some ideas pertaining to the internet, since the censorship of the internet is a really hot topic today.

In light of my post "All Hail the LORD Internet" I have received a few comments from some friends. Most have tried to point out to me that it's either anti-religious or had major flaws in my logic, both of which are absolutely true. First, my logic had flaws, but doesn't all religion (or institutions in general) have flaws? I think I can leave that one right there. Second, the post was not really meant to be religious (though, admittingly, it does read that way), but was rather meant to be sociological. We are so dependent on our computers, our internet, our Facebook and Wikipedia (I say "our" because the internet is meant to be democratic), that we don't know how to function when websites blacked-out on January 18^th in protest of SOPA and PIPA. The Redditor's wife finally had sex, people actually got some work done, and some people realized how lazy they were without the internet. We worship at our computers. If the earliest gods were created as an institution (as Giambattista Vico claims), then our sociological dependence and worship of the internet's attention elevates it to the status of an "institution." Let's explore the internet as an institution to assert its sociological function as deity.

The Internet as an Institution
Vico had to say this about cults, gods, and institutions: "First came the myths of the gods, which were histories from the crudest age of pagan civilization, when people believed that all institutions  necessary or useful to humankind were deities... The first pagans conceived of institutions necessary or useful humankind, and which gods they variously imagined then, inspired by the fearful religions which they themselves had invented and embraced." (New Science).

The internet is essentially an institution, meant to serve humankind and feed us information (which we think should be free and accessible). In short, the internet is a democratic institution. We all contribute to it, and we all benefit from it; as it should be.

And to top it all off, the internet, computers, computer technicians and users have a patron saint: Saint Isidore of Seville. Saints don't become patrons of anything that isn't an institution (i.e. traveling, wealth, health, fertility, et cetera, all being an institution of some sort that benefit us).

So what happens to institutions when they no longer benefit humankind? They are abolished. When slavery was considered no longer acceptable as a democratic institution it was abolished. The problem is certain institutions have more political power than others, so they tend to trump lesser establishments. For instance, the Catholic Church held more power than the reemergence of Hellenistic cults in Greece, thus began the vandalism of the Christians. Likewise, the US government and corporate America hold more power than the internet. The former two are more concrete, unified, and have lots of money. The latter is an amorphic creation of millions, held together by dispersed servers, encryption, codes, and processors, to which anyone can anonymously access at any given moment. The former requires the collapse of civilization to abolish, or a coup d'etat. The latter can just have the plug pulled, or simply censored.

If the internet exists as an institution, just as the gods served as human institutions, could we not consider SOPA, PIPA, and PCFIPA the heroes of rising up against the gods? Just as Perseus in Clash of the Titans  (1981) defied gods? (See my "All My Heroes are Dead, They Died in My Head"). Zeus claims if there were more people like Perseus, then humans won't need gods anymore (apparently the government doesn't think we need the internet anymore). Contrariwise, the problem is more of the 2010 Clash of the Titans, where the hero is really an anti-hero, especially in our objectivist, capitalistic social order. If we have the internet, then we won't need the government. And the Arab Spring has shown that no matter how much a government tries to control their country, the internet allows the people to circumvent all of that. (Can we call our government an anti-hero for threatening our LORD Internet? Or simply a villain?)

Deus Ex Machina
There is an old term that has become rather corrupted over the centuries that I think applies well to the internet: deus ex machina, or in the Greek apos tekon theos. The term literally means "the god out of the machine," but more properly means "the god of our making" or "god out of our own creation." The term applies to Greek theaters where gods were lowered and raised on and off the stage using a crane, hence machina. But humans make the machines, so it is a god out of our making, out of our machines. (See my "Apos Tekton Theos").

Gods being represented by our human institution, and the internet being an institution of our making... one can start to assimilate what I'm getting at here. For sociological purposes I attribute the internet as a sort of deity, but not exactly divine, but artificial. I won't debate if we invented God and gods, but I will debate God and the gods as artificial governors of our invented institutions; that much should be clear. We made the internet and call for it when we need that institution to assist us in our endeavors.

Is the internet an actual god? No, not really. But it has been in the interests of religious institutions throughout history to conflate and "confuse" the deity with the institution. Saying the internet is a god is sociological sardonicism.

The point here being two fold, first, the internet is one of the most useful institutions humankind has ever invented; second, its usefulness is reflected in our love for it, which turns into sociological dependency. Seriously, where would we be without it? I can't even imagine the hours I would have to spend in a library searching for certain information. Now I can just pray to Isidore of Seville to guide my Google search to help me find how to grow a potassium ferricynide crystal. Otherwise, I would have had to scour the Dewey Decimal system for the right books, find them, and pour through volumes on crystaline growth structures in elemental chemistry. That process is much more simple now.

So let me clarify the internet as deity: it's sociological, not religious. And I don't need a lot of rhetoric to say that if we shut down the internet, civilization is fucked.

All My Heroes are Dead, They Died in My Head

I was recently watching the 1981 Clash of the Titans, and at the end Zeus holds Perseus up to the honor of a hero. One of the goddesses asks, a I paraphrase, "What if all men acted as he did? What then?" To which Zeus smiles and replies, "Then we won't be needed anymore." Then I watched the new Clash of the Titans released in 2010, which is a very different story, because humans no longer need the gods. Perseus doesn't marry Andromeda, renounces being king, denies being a hero, and revels in being human. Two very different myths occur, in 1981 the hero was very much the hero, but in 2010 the hero is the anti-hero par excellence.

Can we safely say there are no heroes anymore? I think so. What a dramatic turn of events have occurred in the past three or four decades. Through a series of legislation, political policies, capitalistic/nihilistic/objectivist philosophy, and an encouraging shift in the ideology of the American Dream, Americans have gotten to the point where the anti-hero is held up on a pedestal.

Consider Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, where the protagonist, Howard Roark, is the anti-hero, and he is the source of all that is great. This is the exact capitalistic society we endorse and encourage. And in light of recent protests over SOPA, if Roark is the fountainhead (i.e. source of originality, copyrights), the Roark dynamiting his own building for others making modifications to it is SOPA. We have to save our rights and intellectual property (buildings/internet) by blowing them to smithereens (SOPA).

When I say there are no more heroes, I should clarify here that I do not denounce men and women in the military risking their lives for our illusive freedom. We call them heroes, but I don't think that word means what we think it means anymore. And I think that is clearly demonstrated in our apathy towards our brothers and sisters in arms. WWI and WWII we celebrated the homecoming of our men from Europe, and they were glorified for their duties served. Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan... yeah, not so much. Our government treats them like pawns, and a large chunk of the country could care less they died or were wounded for us. They are brave and courageous men and women, yes, and I will honor them for that. But the US has committed what can only be described as atrocities (and that's an understatement) through these valiant soldiers who are used as pawns in a game of devils. So, I solute them for their valor, and feel sorry for them at the same time, because we are all pawns.

And our apathy towards their service only augments my argument for our praise of the anti-hero. But what is more is our view of villains. Back to pop-culture, which best illustrates our contemporary views of the world, in the TV series Lost the villain, or bad guy, is always relative (as in the Einsteinian sense of relativity). All a villain is is our need to blame someone. In essence, the villain is a scapegoat. Is the villain him or her? Is it them? Or the other them? Or the other other them? There is no villain anymore, just like there is no hero, just whoever gets pointed the finger.

In the 1930s the villain was Germany and Japan. Once our villain was vanquished our enemy became Mother Russia, because we needed something to fear. The Red Scare illustrates how far our relative villain will go, when neighbors turned on neighbors (not to mention the Salem Witch Trails almost 300 years prior). Now that the Cold War has long been dead, our villain switched to the Middle East, but no one in particular. Hussein? Sure, he served as scapegoat for sometime, but 9-11 happened and we received a new enemy to blame for our troubles: terrorists, our most vague and elusive villain yet.

Are we getting the picture? We didn't need the gods because we had heroes, which could be viewed as the humanist movement in the Renaissance. Now we no longer need heroes. They served their purpose, just as the gods served their's, and secured for us a world we can take and handle from here. Right? The hero always faced an opposing force, but without heroes, where are our villains? They're all dead. We killed them. It's all turned into a high-stakes game of anti-heroes and terrorists (like cowboys and Indians), where it's all speculation (like capitalism itself) and we have no idea what's going on or what will happen next. It is all like the game show Who's Line is it Anyway? "where the rules are made up and the points don't matter." I think that is an accurate summary of contemporary American democracy (whatever that means", where the rules are made up and the votes don't matter.

"All my heroes are dead, they died in my head."
~Slipknot

Here Be Monsters

I've noticed recently that my neighbors next door to me, the white ones, I never get to see. They are essentially yuppies living in a gentrifying neighborhood. My other neighbors, who are African-American, I see on a regular basis, and occasionally I wave and say hello to them while I'm out on the porch smoking a cigarette. In fact, I never see any of the white people on my street. They leave and come home through their garages on the alley. The snow on their front walk is not even trodden upon for weeks. If you were to put my own neighbors in a police lineup, I would certainly not be able to pick them out.

Then again, this is what I'm used to. I used to live in Lexington, SC, which I endearingly call "suburban hell." Neighbors came home through the garage and entered their kitchens through the garage. I had to ask myself, what is the point of a foyer? It must be part of the middle class affluence, just like the extra living room no one ever goes in, except, perhaps, the maid. Besides the kids who played out in the yards (usually the backyard), the only neighbors I ever saw were the ones who only went outside to wash their cars and boat, and even then they usually made their kids do it. I occasionally saw someone taking a run or walk, but that was about the extent of it.

Prior to living in Lexington I lived in Alpharetta, GA, which had many gated "communities," if you could call them communities. There was a big wall that surrounded these places and guards on duty 24 hours a day at every gate. The houses inside were big, and that was about a "luxurious" as they got. I had a couple of friends who lived in these places, and whenever I went to visit I never saw a soul that wasn't in their car, on their way to their car, or leaving it to go inside.

All this invokes what Eliade had to say about ancient cities: within the walls of the city was the order of creation, to which the city itself was the center of all of creation, and beyond those walls were danger. Beyond the lands those citizens knew were strange people, queer lands, exotic and lethal creatures, and completely hostile landscapes. Essentially, beyond the cities was the primordial chaos, in which the laws and orders of creation had not been established, and the primordial elements still battled for dominance. It was a scary place for people of antiquity. The classic example of the chaos beyond what is known is on old maps, where off on the edges of oceans was written: HERE BE MONSTERS. (Usually there are just monsters drawn on the map).

This is the exact psycho-sociological problem facing the American middle class. The middle class has longed for isolation for so long, to "get away," and conquer the frontier; Manifest Destiny. So, really the middle class has never had that foreign land where there be monsters. The frontiersmen conquered all that for them, and set up some nice and comfortable homes for them on those vanquished frontiers. The only frontier for the middle class is an inner frontier, not an outer one, and they certainly are not going to start soul searching when there is so much to buy and watch on TV! They are all, in a sense, socially awkward penguins. Their children never go outside anymore, glued to the TV and video games, and ever increasing rates of obesity, we are doomed to this isolation and fear of the front lawn.

And if everything beyond the walls of our houses are that queer land filled with dangerous people (i.e. pedophiles, kidnappers, and ax murderers), then certainly our neighbors are just as scary to us as those scary people in the poor side of town. If our neighbors are the enemy, no wonder no one lives up to the infamous saying of Christ: thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. If our neighbors, who we haven't gotten to know, can be pedophiles, why should we love them? There be a lot of monsters.

There are no Conspiracies, Just Smoke and Mirrors

I remember several years ago an amateur documentary going viral called Zeitgeist, which was a conspiracy theory on 9-11. Essentially, the US government deliberately let 9-11 happen, and, more so, they created 9-11. I can't agree with the former, and I partially agree with the latter. I say we, the entire corpus of the Unites States of America created that fatal Tuesday morning in 2001.

I have often said that conspiracy theorist are people with incredibly creative imagination, but they don't know the first thing about research. I have discussed in a previous posting on Little Syria, which was a predominantly Arab neighborhood in Lower Manhattan (what later became the WTC), was a factor in targeting the towers. But, obviously, the roots go much deeper than evicting an entire neighborhood by imminent domain for capitalism.

I've been digging into a few sources on American imperialism (primarily Berman's Dark Ages America), which inevitably leads me to information on 9-11 and what lead to the attacks. What have found has pissed me off more than I have ever been before in my life. I just hang my head in shame, literally.

The story starts with the Soviet Union, and our complete obsession with defeating it, and we have committed some horrific atrocities in our obsession in battling communism... all in the name democracy! In 1979 the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Iran began funding terrorists there, and the CIA backed these Muslim extremist. The CIA supplied Afghanistan weapons, funding, and military training (in fact, we began sending them weapons six months prior to the USSR's invasion). And it wasn't just how to hold a gun. The CIA sent agents and Green Berets to Afghanistan to train them in usage of high-tech weaponry. Why? Because it posed a threat to Mother Russia. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right? What started out as a simple invasion turned into a full-out war, and a phony one at that. There was no need for the US to get involved, but we just had to stop communism.

Eventually the USSR pulled out of Afghanistan, and with that millions of refugees, millions dead or dying, and a completely devastated country. So what did the US do? We left (1992). Mission accomplished. Why stick around to clean up the mess? Afghanistan never really forgave us for that, which lead to the rise of the Taliban. A good deal of the CIA's funding was channeled to these rebel forces through who other than... *drum roll*... Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was actually indirectly trained through the CIA (he was trained by people who were trained by the CIA in the 1980s). In fact, in 1987, and on into the 1990s, the CIA began illegally issuing visas to persons under bin Laden's supervision to visit the United States and receive training under the CIA in means of terrorism. BBC reports that five of the hijackers in the 9-11 attacks were trained in United States.

Now I must ask: what the fuck did we do? We were so obsessed with the Soviet Union that we didn't think giving training, weapons, and money to extremists wouldn't be a very good idea. We left their country a complete disaster and walked away. Why do they hate us? Hmm... I fucking wonder why! We never thought in a million years a bunch of towel-heads (say it with a redneck accent adequately expresses our stupidity) would ever try anything to hurt did, did we?

3000 people died because we never considered the consequences. And it's not just the government or the CIA, it is every American who stood on the sidelines and turn their heads. And no generation is immune to the blame (even those born after the attacks). This is our culture, or country, our foreign policy, our diplomacy, our arrogance, ignorance, and negligence. We didn't just let this happen, we did this to ourselves; all because we needed an enemy (e.g. the Soviet Union). And now we have a new one: those ever evasive terrorists.

Forget the conspiracies. Will anyone with an I.Q. over 15 actually entertain the idea for one minute that the White House, FBI, CIA, NSC, Pentagon, DoD, and all the other organizations in Washington can actually worked together (ha!) and plot a master plan (ha!) in secret (ha!)? Every organization in Washington is disorganized, and none of them seem to work together, ever! Much less can any of them keep a secret. Quite simply, we let this happen, everyone of us, through our arrogance, nationalism, and our joke of democracy. And then we all turned our heads as the atrocities by our own hands became the substance nightmares are made of.

I often rhetorically ask: are you justified? (Which I take from the Dream Theater song "The Great Debate"). None of this is justified. 3000 deaths are not justified on a Tuesday morning, nor are the deaths of millions of Muslims for thirteen years. They can never justify their actions against us, nor us to them. I am simply ashamed to be a human being.

"How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?"
~Bob Dylan

A Brief History of Shit

So I was reading a few books out of the Bible the other day, and for the first time it struck me as to why incense and other pleasantly smelling things were valued. You read in Genesis and Exodus about the trade of frankincense. In the books of Matthew and Mark the Magi brought the infant Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold is valuable, but why not bring him silver or something else valuable? Why was incense so valuable in the Bible? And it's not just the Bible. In the Egyptian Books of the Dead the bodies are presented with incense. In Babylonian texts there are mentionings of bringing teraphim (household deities) incense. In Greece and Rome incense is often brought to temples for the gods.

Why were nice smelling things so valuable? Why were they as valuable as the solar metal (gold)? Because everything smelled really bad in antiquity.

In fact, everything smelled really bad up until the widespread use of the automobile. Before the automobile the horse, as well as the ox and ass were the primary modes of transportation and labor. The automobile was a lifesaver in some really stinky times.

In most cities there were city lots, and sometimes whole city blocks that were dedicated solely to the storage of horse shit. In fact, in any city built before 1880 majority of the houses were raised anywhere from 2 - 4 feet off the ground, because that was how high the horse manure would get. And with so many horses, many literally worked to death, they wouldn't clean up a dead horse immediately. They would let it rot and soften for three or four days until it could more easily be chopped up and removed. Pleasant, huh? Ancient cities stunk. When I was in Florence I found a street that was named after how bad it stunk, the Via Delle Stinche, literally the Way of the Stench. In Pompeii most street crossings are elevated stepping stones, because the streets literally flowed with shit and piss. One is reminded of the bolgias in the sixth circle of Dante's Inferno when it rained. When it rained in the city, that sight must have been what nightmares are made of.

In addition, people really didn't bathe in antiquity. There was no deodorant. The earliest known deodorant was created by Ziryab in Baghdad in the 9^th Century. But modern deodorant as we know it wasn't invented until 1888, and it wasn't in popular usage until about the 1930s. Most people just scented themselves in perfumes. Shaving the groin and arm pits were not common in antiquity, which happen to be the two sweatiest places on the human body, and pubic hair holds on to all that stench (biologically, that's why we have pubic hair, probably for holding pheromones, which literally means "to bear impetus"). People were stinky.

I remember visiting Mesa Verde to study the dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo Native Americans, and when looking at how they collected water, which was very limited, a woman asked, "How did they bathe with so little water?" The guide simply replied, "They didn't." That woman was very disgusted. If the Ancestral Peublos bathed it was probably more for ceremonial purposes than hygiene, and that would probably have been about two or three baths for an individual's entire life.

Really, the only period in ancient history that was the cleanest and least stinky would have been Old Kingdom Egypt (around 3^rd Century BCE). They habitually removed every hair on their bodies to prevent lice, and they regularly bathed (even slaves). Oxen and ass manure would still have been an issue, but that's why they had incense.

Given all of this, it is easy to see why incense was just as valuable as gold. Incense wasn't some luxury for the Pharaoh. It was a necessity of life. Anyone who has ever walked into a latrine or come across a corpse (i.e. roadkill or otherwise), or simply encountered someone who hasn't bathed in a month, then incense would simply become a necessity to live with that all day, everyday, for the rest of your life. (I think this is why hippies like incense).

I can only imagine how pleasant a person's cigarette or a stray fart would smell in our contemporary cities to someone from 2000 BCE.

All Hail the LORD Internet!

Just yesterday, January 5^th, the country of Sweden legally accepted Kopimism as a religion. Essentially, internet piracy has become a legitimate religion in one country. Some find this humorous, some find it asinine and childish (like a talking snake isn't), and some just don't know what to make of it; the rest don't know about it yet.

Considering the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a parody of religion, its creator saying that if creationism has to be taught in public schools, then the religion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster needs to be considered as well. The Missionary Church of Kopimism isn't a joke, but more of a protest against the influence SOPA will have, as well as an opposition to copyrights (hence Kopimi is copy me). And though its not a joke, but a protest, it crossed my mind as to whether or not the internet can be considered a "higher power." Let's work through it:

The Internet Knows EVERYTHING:
Essentially the internet is omniscient. Pictures? Go to Facebook or Piscasa. Video? go to YouTube. Porn? You can find that even if you're not looking for it. Information? Go to Wikipedia. Not sure where to look? Go to Google. Need to download software? Download.com (if legal) or just torrent it. In fact, no matter what you're looking for, you can find it on the internet. If I need an AutoCAD drawing of a tree to put in a drawing file, I can go to a site that has thousands of them for free. If I want to do a Droste effect in Photoshop, there is a site somewhere (more than likely Adobe) that will have an application to download and install in Photoshop and directions on how to use it.

The Internet is EVERY WHERE:
The internet is omnipresent. It's not difficult to access it from anywhere. It can be accessed on a computer, a phone, a tablet, a car dashboard, and soon your microwave clock will come with internet. Thanks to WiFi the internet can be accessed at home, the office, the front lawn, your neighbor's front lawn, Starbucks, Burger King, et cetera; and with smart phones it can be accessed on the road, in the street, or wherever via satellite. Given all the information streaming around in the air via radiation, the internet is literally everywhere (it's even in outer space!).

The Internet is ALL POWERFUL:
It is also omnipotent. It can do practically anything you want. Soon we will be able to have sex through the internet if virtual technology keeps going the direction its going and the porn industry makes good use of it. And if the internet can't do it for you, it will certainly help you find a way for you to do it yourself. And to top it all off, the internet can keep track of you. It watches every move you make, records and tracks what you do, and produces algorithms to better assist you in your future transactions with the internet. Not to mention it can do all this a lightning-fast speeds. In fact, it even can tell you how fast it can do this stuff for you!

The internet knows everything, is everywhere, and can do anything, as well as help you and watches your every movee. Doesn't really sound all that different from the concept of God, now does it?

I mean, you sit down at your laptop/desktop or smart phone or tablet, then you pray to the Almighty LORD Internet and the LORD Internet helps you connect with old friends (even find them), helps with cooking recipes, DIY tutorials, any information you want... Want a new song? How about a new program? Or a digital book? Ask LORD Internet and (S)He will give it to you for free. "Asketh and thou shall receive."

Why can't Kopimism be a religion? Surely the LORD Internet lives up to the standard of deity. Thing is, so many of us are so dependent on the LORD Internet, we become so hopelessly lost when the internet is down,  and it is like the sunrise when the LORD Internet returns, that it seems we all worship the LORD Internet and we didn't even know it. When we sit mindlessly at our altars at home or in the office or at the local Starbucks, we are worshiping the LORD Internet, and (S)He listens to our every prayers/requests (usually in the form of URLs and searches). Sometimes the LORD Internet answers our prayers/requests, and every once and a while (S)He does not, but that's usually because we did not ask correctly.

Everything the other religions say about their god(s) the LORD Internet fits the description as well.

All hail the mighty LORD Internet!

Separation of Government and People

There are not a lot of separation of two entities in this country, and the one that most people know is separation of church and state. In fact, that might be the only one in the labyrinthine tome that is the Constitution, amendments to the Constitution, and law of the land. I've read the Constitution, but as for everything else: TL;DR. So I only know about church and state.

I was watching Babylon 5 earlier this evening, the episode "By Whatever Means Necessary." I have discussed in my previous posting about the cycles of history and how nothing is prophetic, just the patterns of history. Babylon 5 makes good use of these historical patterns by simply reinterpreting actual historical events (i.e. a specific quarrel between Roman senators, or persons of power playing God) in a futuristic context. In this episode I noticed something that speaks volumes to what is the current political unrest in the States and in Europe (and probably everywhere else on the globe): governments simply not listening to their people. And it doesn't speak to today, it speaks to every political crisis that has ever occurred.

I hesitate to say this is another sign of End of Empire, but when governmental factions (and I do believe we have hit the point where they can be safely called "factions") no longer listen to the people who support them, the same people who pay tax dollars so these political powers can hold a session to vote on having their salaries raised on even more tax dollars spent to fund them... I don't know where I was going with that fragmented sentence, but I like and will keep it.

Let's face it, Congress has their agenda and the people have a completely different idea of what their agenda should be. The 80 or so Tea Baggers (can I still call them that?) in Congress are acting on their principles, something they were elected upon, but are not negotiating or really embracing the people's necessities. As my dad said, "Their principles won't get them reelected." (And he's a conservative). The people aren't thrilled with this Congress, and the have all rights to be.

Democracy hinges upon the expressed opinions and necessities of the people, not on what those in power think will benefit their own personal ideologies. As the Declaration of Independence says:

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Well said, Jefferson. America may or may not be in its decline as an empire, but separation of Government and People certainly doesn't help.

It doesn't make it any better that Obama signed NDAA, which allows for the indefinite detainment of any person suspected of being a "terrorist" without need of evidence, charges, warrant, or trail... Thanks for killing Habeas Corpus. McCarthy Trails 2.0 (or Salem Witch Trails 3.0), here we come!