Spiritual Practicality for Dummies

The Coming Age of Spirit as a Practical Part of Life

Damn! Gas prices are through the roof. Inflation is as high as it’s been in a long time. Most folks weren’t even born yet the last time inflation was this high. Of course the band wagon crowd wants to jump all over Scranton Joe for this awful state of affairs. But maybe those folks ought to maybe get down off that wagon for a bit and take a look around. Scranton Joe has quite a bit on his plate and he’s doing something about all of it.

I don’t remember any president in my lifetime who had to deal with a worldwide pandemic, a predecessor whose misrepresentations are still commanding attention the world over, and a war which is just starting to build into epic loss of life, liberty and freedom of expression. There have been a couple of presidents I can remember who faced some uphill battles such as George Bush the Younger. The World Trade Tower attack was something new under the sun. But George the Younger did not have a “fifth column” working against him in the media. Especially not a fifth column which parroted the enemy’s propaganda. President LBJ did have Jane Fonda but even as good looking as Jane was at the time, she paid a dear price for expressing what she actually felt about the political tides of the times.

It could be that this is the first president who has had such an ignorant population to govern, too. I’m not referring to people who have not been educated but I’m referring to people who do not or perhaps can not think for themselves. I’m not saying that these self same people do not claim to not be able to think for themselves, even though they have no proof of such a state of existence. Let me see if I can give you an example of what I mean.

I’m old enough to remember when Rush Limbaugh first started on the radio. In the beginning he was funny. He poked fun at anyone and everyone. He called young ladies of the feminist persuasion FemiNazis. There was a certain wry humor in that kind of satire. But Rush also had a mean streak. He poked fun of black people too and there was more than wry humor in those stories. I recall one episode where he recounted a news story out of Chicago where at a public swimming pool during a particularly hot and muggy spell, a young lady was mercilessly teased because she was in the process of becoming of age. Rush repeated the tagline of the 1993 song, “Whoomp There it is” over and over. Apparently there were a gaggle of young men who chanted that phrase to the young lady and made her stay at the public pool, which was memorable for a host of really bad reasons. There were repercussions for the young men and that’s why it was a news story. That might have even been the story that changed Rush to a bully in my mind. Rush continued to be a regular part of my drives on the 405 in those days, but as time went on Rush seemed to lose sight of the reason people like me started to listen to him. He was no longer funny. He began to see himself as powerful. He was really just a bully. A bully with a radio show. Kind of like Howard Stern, but with not as much finesse.

It seems that people like Hannity, Jeanne Shapiro, and even Trucker “Good Buddy” Carlson have modeled their tv personas after the model set by the original media bully, Mr. Limbaugh himself. It’s clear that the Fox clan drew on Daren the 45th for support and inspiration but that doesn’t actually translate to power. It translates into advertising dollars to be sure, but advertising dollars are fickle by their very nature. Does anyone remember pet rocks? They were once the talk of the airwaves, and before there were really airwaves, swallowing goldfish was a popular diversion.

A while back Roger Miller sang a song about how England swings like a pendulum. The point of the song was that England swings back and forth between political poles. But overall it’s still England. That’s true for any country and has been for a really long time. Remember Amenhotep IV? He introduced monotheism to Egypt back during the 18th dynasty. It was a great idea or it seemed like it was at the time, but the people of Egypt just were not ready for such radical change in what they believed to be real. So after his passing they nearly erased him from Egypt’s history. It appears that Daren XLV just isn’t up on his Egyptian history and missed the importance of England and Egypt swinging. He probably thinks it’s where big band music originated.

There’s a truism in *Program Theory that states, “Once a program is written it becomes the rule of our life until it is recognized and changed”. I think that truism applies to countries in the same manner as it applies to individuals. I think countries also have a spiritual nature the same as individuals. We could use Russia as an example of this concept. As far back as Ivan the Terrible, Russian rulers were ruthless and maybe even depraved. There is a story about Ivan who apparently contracted with an architect to design and build St. Basil’s Cathedral, and when Ivan asked the man if he could build something even more beautiful, the man thought and answered that yes he could. Ivan then promptly had his eyes gouged out with a spoon so that nothing more beautiful could be designed by that architect. As for depravity, it is said that Catherine the Great had a thing for horses or maybe ponies. Maybe it’s the water or even a lot more.

The history of the geography on which the United States is situated has been one which supported a certain level of cruelty and also one which has demanded a certain respect for the practicality of the spirit in relationship to the land. It might just be the Judeo-christian concepts passed through the Church and on to the founding fathers of the republic, but there is a spiritual relationship between the care of the land and the expression of reality as held by the people of this land. It is sometimes somber and sometimes frivolous, but it is always practical. Within that practicality, liars are often tolerated as an entertainment value, but in the end they are always consigned to the flotsam of history.

Maybe Daren XLV was lucky he didn’t build the most beautiful tower the world has ever known in Moscow. He could have lost sight of the country he lives in. Maybe that’s what happened anyway. But then another truism of *Program Theory is that you can’t see what you look at the world with. It would appear that the entertainers in congress and on Fox are not aware that looking at the world with and through lies does not make one powerful. It merely demonstrates one’s profound stupidity. Remember please that stupid is measured by a person destroying things with no gain for himself. Right XLV?

*Program Theory: This is a workshop that was developed by John Worthington and offered at The Business of Forging Agreement . It is based on the work of John C. Lilly in “Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Bio-Computer”. We offer this workshop in a live online workshop and in our new On-Demand video series (coming soon).

Article originally posted on The Business of Forging Agreement blog.