Spiritual Economics Part 2

Unnatural Goodness
I agree that it is true that Private Property is not a "Natural" state to man. Most things of value to man, do not come to him "naturally", if by naturally, we mean intrinsically, and innately planted into his brain by some higher power. The state of man which comes to recognize a concept such as ‘Property’ is something which his developing soul only comes to conceive, comprehend and adhere to after the long and hard lessons of history have been experienced and learned from. Humanity is not a Natural state for Man - Man in the primitive state, is but a clever animal, skittish, sly, ravenous, and to any outside it's immediate "family", hostile and ferocious.

The sentiments and values that we have come to praise as decent behavior, do not come naturally to man the horizontal animal, he is lifted to Man the Vertical being only through the slow accumulation and passing on from the parent to the child, to the society at large, those thoughts, conceptions, beliefs, practices and habits that serve to create that enlargement of soul which is visible as a Civil and Decent Human Being. And the progress of Man from the flat line horizontal savannah level that we apparently began from, has only been achieved one step at a time and then only when large swaths of a population have caught up with their cultures leaders and so improved themselves, have learned new truths of foresight (as with the agricultural revolution), civic respect and division of labor(as with the development of cities), Philosophical truths (as with the Greco/Roman & Judeo/Christian revolutions), and that of Individual Rights (which made Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution possible). All of this Progress has taken History forward, but the long and winding paths between these revolutions have not always been upon a trajectory marked by a Vertical lift.

Reason (not the modern conception which would have it to be synonymous with an isolated non-contextual logic chopping, but the traditional conception which included searching the depths of your Soul to be integral to its operations) is the faculty that enables men to discern and expand his store of values from the world out there. It is the guiding light of humanity, and like a candles flame, one which is easily gutted, even snuffed out, if not dutifully monitored and upheld by the individual and the community at large.

How are these ideas lost? Neglected? How can they be learned? Taught? What is the effect of not having this knowledge? Ignorance is bliss? Nah, ignorance can corrupt your very soul. Lets try out a metaphor, or analogy, for what knowledge does, how it moves you through life, for better or worse for your spirit and your life.

Round And Round We Go, Whether Up Or Down Only The Thoughtful Know – The Cone Of Plenty
It has been noted that the progress of human development, individually and societaly, bears a resemblance to that of a spiral, but to me it seems less like a spiral that of a cylindrical slinky, and more like what could be described as a cone. Your route around it might begin with a general idea, travel forward around the cone, filling in details and corrections, until you arrive back at the same position that you started from, but with a now solid well thought out idea, so that though you are back at the same left-right position, you find you've actually risen up the cone, having traveled in an upwards spiral, rather than just a level circle. That reaching for understanding of where you are and what you do, of gathering together details and finding the common unifying principle among them, is what lifts you up the cones slope.

For instance there is a sense of a full circle being drawn as you progress from the original concept of "Wheel" developing conceptually within a persons mind, and progressing from there to actually acquiring materials such as wood & iron, and on to fabricating them into an axel and a circular spoked object, and finally physically as a Wheel on a cart. It is through the merging ot inner form or idea with material matter through the alchemical actions of your actions, to create the physical wheel; this progression takes you forward from the point of conception to its manifestation, in a circular fashion, returning back at the point of the ideas origin - but on our conceptual Cone this would not occur in a merely linear circle, such a new idea wouldn't leave you on the same level you began from. How does it lift you, and why?

Lets try to illustrate this better by thinking of a circle, in geometry we look at a circle as having 360 degrees, which if you traced 360 lines evenly spaced from the tippy tip top of the cone, downwards to the wide bottom, you would see that the surface area that fits within one degree at the bottom will seem quite large, as compared to one degree half way up the cone. If you attempted to draw an additional, say 36 lines from base to tip within each of those individual degrees, you would probably see these smaller detail lines would begin to blend together as they neared the top. And if you continued this surface division by tracing 36 more lines even thinner and lighter in appearance, squeezed within each of the smaller lines, and 36 in each of those and so on, and so on... you get the picture, a lot of lines, continuing on for how many? Well I’d continue subdividing the lines with thinner and lighter lines until you have enough lines to represent each particular fact in the world… I won’t, but that’s the idea. Picture neutrino’s, electrons, protons as thin lines within the darker line for Atoms, and collections of Atoms within the darker lines of Molecules, and “your time, effort and possessions conveniently portable, and preservable” as thin light lines within the darker line of Economics. Particulars within Concepts within Principles within Truths, and so on.

If you stood back from the cone, it would likely appear to be one solid colored shape, but as you neared it, the darker lines would begin to stand out, and then the lighter ones, and more so as you neared the surface, until with your face pressed right up against the surface you would see only a gazillion individual lines running up and down the surface within the scope of your vision at that close proximity. We can’t live that close, we have to live back from the detail at the level where the lighter lines blend into larger ones, concepts. But it is important that you understand that those details are still there, they exist whether or not you are ignorant of them. Errors will mislead you and keep you down – literally, at least with our Cone analogy.

Take that cone and extend it up to the sky… if you leaned your head back a bit and lifted your vision from the bottom of the cone towards the top, you'd see these smaller detail lines seeming to merge into wider lines as you rose up the slope of the cone. While there maybe 36 particular lines within each original degree, and within each of those lines and within... as they converge up the slope of the cone, you'll see them integrating together into wider lines, and wider concepts and principles, as you rise up the surface of the cone.

Apparently Less Is More
If you've ever seen something like an elastic hair band, stretched and pulled down over a cone shaped object like a megaphone, and then released it, you’ve seen the band draw its shape together seeking its seemingly contradictory state of being tighter and also more relaxed in shape, and as it does, it rises up the surface of the cone. Though the area that makes up a ring around the cone higher up its slope is smaller, what actually is contained in your grasp is more knowledge than what is at the wider base. This is what concepts and principles do for you.

In like fashion, what appears to be a rate of climb is really a lessening of cognitive distance needed to encircle the cone by gathering the individual lines together and sliding upwards until they merged. With a wider, more elevated perspective, the tighter you will be able to see the detail lines merge into wider individual lines the higher you'd rise, and do the same with a number of these merged lines merging into an even wider lines farther up the cone, and so on, as you move forwards and slide your grasp a littler further upwards with each step.

A completely new idea might seem to provide a steeper angle of climb - but remember what might appear as climb, is really more of a lifting which comes of grasping how a section of apparently separate detail lines of surface reality, integrated together - you in effect shrink the surface area you need to traverse the cone, and the higher you find yourself rising. Understanding how particulars integrate into concepts – like 11111111111111111111 integrates into 20, makes human life and progress possible.

From a left-right perspective, your progress may appear to be back at the same point, but when looked at from the a farther removed perspective, you’ll see that the progression took place in a spiral trajectory which does circle back to the same left-right point, but on a different vertical level. Your progress forward comes from utilizing the things before you as you progress around the cone.

As you discover new aspects of Truth, new interpretations, applications for it, wider integrations, you lift your path in a tighter spiral up the cone, approaching closer to the one point from which all other conceptual angles descend, here, principles and Truths integrate into a single focal point - the one truth, from which you would be able to comprehend all with a single grasp, just as you are able to easily grasp the top of a cone.

On the other hand, by forgetting or neglecting the wider integrations you’ve made, you will find that you begin to slip, your elastic band being yanked back open as the surface expands with un-conceived details splaying out beneath your grasp. At first, those details might seem beguiling in their shimmering fine lines, but as you continue to descend, to disintegrate the concepts within your conceptual grasp, you will slip at a faster and faster rate of speed, grasping less and less of the cones circumference. To rise back up, you will need to relearn how the pieces integrate.

Speed Climbing
Our Cone is a 3-Dimensional shape, it has a surface area, and an interior area. From the surface area alone, any position you look at, but from the very top, you won’t be able to see more than a small section of the surface, and the closer to the bottom, the less noticeable its curvature will be. Lifting your gaze up the surface will help to see how detail lines merge together, and progress will be made.

Remaining focused on surface details, discovering new physical objects such as a wheel, will enable some progress in your enlargement/shrinkage area - since any integration brings you closer to a larger truth. But leaving your attention on appearances only, neglects even more of the Cone than is seen on the surface. As with Humans, what is inside you, your spirit or soul, though unseen, is a larger and more important part of you than your physical appearance.

If however, you manage to draw your gaze not only upwards but inwards, in effect poking your head into the interior of the cone – that will enable you to gain a much wider grasp of surface and height at once, seeing as you would, all around the surface of the cones circumference at your level and above, which from the outside can't be possible except from the very top of the cone.

Looking within the cone however, think of what you would see. You would be able to see across the intervening 'space', to see all sides are actually not sides, but one surface which can be observed all at once and perhaps even see how their slope unites into the focal point, at the tippy top tip far above, where all truths and sides converge into that One Truth. You might also note, that with your attention or insight within the cone, that there is something within the cone, not a vacuum... what... a larger spirit in and of the cone, something that is at all places of the cone at once, a spirit within, a in-spirtation.

It would be a bit strange as well, the curving of surface space being concave, rather than convex, but with some thoughtfulness, you would be able to apply this inner vision to your outer world, grasp more integration, and rise higher up the cone. People down below might marvel at how much you were able to grasp within your hands, their eyes filled with the multiple individual lines within lines within degrees – they might not understand when you would call down that your grasp was no greater than theirs, you only had hold of wider truths that themselves contained the details that overwhelmed their eyes.


The Wheel Goes Around
A completely new concept, such as first discovering the wheel, would provide a wide range of details integrated together, and lift, or focus your progress upwards. Learning of the wheel the first time for yourself would provide what would seem to be at the same time a widening of your reach while simultaneously shrinking your grasp. And as you repeated this process and learned it more thoroughly, you would eventually cease to learn new details & principles, until finally your grasp would remain unchanged with each repetition.

If you were to learn nothing new, day in and day out, repeating what has always been done, you might merely circle around and around like the Stone Age aborigines still living in parts of modern day New Guinea.

This brings about what I don't think is often appreciated, the fact that there is no guarantee that your 'forward progress' is taking you UP the spiral - you can as easily circle downward on the spiral & mistake your forward left-right progress for improving your position on the Vertical scale. If your someone who keeps their eyes fairly close to the ‘ground’, if you look not up, but backwards or even down, for easier pickings, more glittering details, you will by the direction of your gaze, descend the cone, the lines will splay out in wider separation and the path around the cone will become longer, and as the cone becomes wider, the less of its circumference you will be able to grasp.

As someone discards principles to grasp at particulars, individual lines that may be glittering in their gaze, baubles such as redistribution of wealth (thieving) rather than creation, they are discarding wide ranging principles, loosening their cognitive grip on reality, and so are dealing directly with seemingly more and more particulars, being pulled down the slope of the cone as it widens under your grasp.

Spiritual Cash Value
The same may be seen societaly, such as with the founding of the United States of America – it began with “All men are created equal” as its founding truth – but it took another one hundred or so years to move forwards and upwards from that belief to the realization of what it fully meant, through disagreement, upheaval and war in order to come around to implementing it, and still the spiral continues on towards its being fully understood and accepted by all.

With the concept of gaining goods, you can go forward to get 'goods' but depending on whether or not you incorporate the Vertical guidance & progress of that truest private property, your soul, you may progress upwards, or regress downwards. To rise upwards, you need to create values, and that is done through the forging of the values of your inner vision with an outward physical action, to produce gains both material and spiritual. This process can only occur unimpeded through the recognition of Individual Rights, the ability of a person to act as their conscience sees fit, which is the method of Capitalism. People free to do as they see fit, as long as they don’t infringe on the proper rights of others in their society.

What enables you to make choices and decisions enables you to integrate – denying that ability will cause you to reach less integrations, and slow your ascent more and more. It also is going to keep your attention fixed on the surface issues, rather than being able to contemplate the heights and inner reaches and from gaining insights from them, lifting you less and less.

A rapid descent down the slope of the cone, however, is ‘gained’ by taking the more easy path of least resistance, spiraling down by focusing on taking by force the existing values produced by others, claiming grievances and injustices, so that you can call that action 'gain'. This is the preferred method of the leftist, Marxist, Progressivist, collectivist Statist. Hello moonbat city.

Note that although what I’m describing here applies to the physical realm, more importantly it applies to the Spiritual realm.

As I've noted in earlier posts, the person who is a "self made man", has developed the traits & mastery of their own self to act responsibly, productively, and morally. In so doing they create a means of support for their family, a warm supportive family life too, the likes of which Norman Rockwell painted so well.

This will be a far different man from that creature so prone to demonstrating en masse with an uncouth rabble, loudly and violently demanding ‘action’ in their protests (for peace no doubt) and government 'limits' to be placed on business & for 'programs' to support the poor (helping to ensure that they remain poor) – Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol – two peoples separated by a common humanity.

This applies equally for such rarified concepts as Humor. P. G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves" stories are of an elevating humor, whose plots weave the stories concepts and situations into an inner building of humor which bursts out of you from unexpected, but oh so logical, implications within the story coming together in a way that lifts and makes you feel good, it puts you into a good humor.

Its opposite can be found in something such as "The Simpson's" whose humor relies mainly on perceptual shocks and new lows of manners. To be sure, it produces loud guffaw’s of laughter, but focused as it is on the downwards perceptions of guttural shock, it leaves you not in a good humor, but in a more savage state, more likely to pass on caustic sarcasm than warm thoughts - hardly a good humor.

The 'Progress' you make on your spiral path, though it may move in a forward direction, if it is lacking in the Vertical orientation of conceptually integrating and spiritually elevating aspirations, but is instead more focused and concerned with exclusively perceptual goals that you can grasp, 'Practical' aims alone, then your forward progress is going to be down the spiral, a decapitated progression and you shouldn't be surprised at the mindless hell that it delivers you to.