Keeping the Sacred Flame

One of the primary concepts in FlameKeeping is that of using our judgment. We cannot simply ignore what goes on around us. We have to think, to use our best judgment and evaluate what we are facing.

People keep saying that we “shouldn’t judge”. Shouldn’t judge choices, shouldn’t judge clothing, shouldn’t judge. That we should accept.

This is probably the worst advice I’ve ever heard. If we don’t judge, if we don’t use our brains and think and make intelligent choices, we destroy ourselves.

I’m not being over-dramatic. We destroy ourselves when we refuse to use our judgment. It is judgment to recognize threats. It is judgment to know when we need to get away, when we need to refrain from trusting. When we are threatened and when we are just annoyed.

Why is judgment viewed as so bad? It’s because it’s been combined with the idea of discrimination and prejudice. We’ve lost the fact that we cannot help but judge – that’s what making choices is. We just see how much we don’t like being judged harshly.

But the fact that judgment can be harsh doesn’t mean we should avoid it. Life is full of harsh things. And it’s far worse if we neglect to take care of ourselves in an attempt to not risk hurting someone’s feelings from a negative judgment.

Prompt: what do you think of this essay? How would you judge it? How can judgment be good?

We all have so many things we want to do with our time. Things we feel we should do, things we want to do, things we have to do. Things other people want from us. It’s hard to balance all the calls on our time and abilities. It’s hard to even know where to begin. What do we do when we have ten priorities and only time to handle three with any success? How do we keep from getting paralyzed by indecision or by trying to make decisions?

First we have to get past indecision. It’s easy to be stuck when there’s so many things that need doing that we cannot possibly do everything. The scope of the problem just crushes us. So what do we do?

We pick something. It doesn’t matter if it’s the easiest, the hardest, the best or the worst. Just pick something and do it. The more time spent thinking the less we can do.

If we do have time to think and decide, though, what takes priority?

First of all, anything that involves health and safety. We need to make sure we have food, we have the bills paid so we can have shelter, that we can get through the day and the next. We need to handle the little things in life and make sure everything gets done. If we forget the things that truly need doing, or we cannot get them done for whatever reason, we end up with more and more piling up upon us.

After that? We need to take care of ourselves, including our mental health. Sometimes that means doing things that have no external worth, like watching television or playing games. It’s not self-indulgent to take a break and rest.

There is always something that can be cleaned, something which can be fixed or made better or worked on. There’s always something that we feel we should do, whether or not it’s actually important. There’s always someone else’s priorities to follow, if we don’t listen to our own.

But we are the ones that have to live our lives. We are the ones that have to live with our actions. We need to set our priorities accordingly. And that has to include ourselves.

Prompt: Who sets your priorities? Do you include yourself in them? Are they what you want them to be, or what they need to be to get by?

The foundation of everything starts with the self. It is with the self that we interpret the information we draw in from the world around us. It is as the self that we learn the world around us, learn how things work, understand our place. We can imagine ourselves as other people and try to see things from another person’s viewpoint, but before all else we need a self.

What is the self? It’s a question that’s a favorite of philosophers and metaphysics, but in daily life it usually doesn’t mean anything. We know who we are. We know the line between ourselves and other people. While there are those that do not understand that line, they are few and far between.

But what is the self? It is who we are when everyone else has left the room. It is the one person we know, the one person who’s thoughts we hear and ideas we understand.

Without a self, we don’t know how to daydream about being someone else. Without a self all we have is information coming at us without any sense. It is the self that turns random nerve impulses into information, sensation, understanding. It is the self that turns us from a pile of meat into a person.

It is the self that we need to care for, because without our self, there is nothing else we can influence. It all starts from our center, from our self. Without that we have nothing.

Prompt: What do you think of as your self? What does that mean to you?

Sometimes people are just so wrong we want to scream at them. They say things or do things we just cannot understand. Sometimes that’s from ignorance. Sometimes it’s idiocy. And, of course, sometimes we’re the ones that don’t know what we’re talking about. We all have moments of ignorance – and we all have moments of idiocy. We need to know the difference.

Ignorance is lack of knowledge. We cannot know everything. Our world is full of knowledge, and we have only so much time, so much energy. So much ability. The more we learn about one thing the more we don’t have time to learn another. It is inevitable that we cannot know all there is to know. We do, however, need to be aware of that. There is knowledge everywhere. Our piece is only a small fraction of everything there is.

Idiocy, on the other hand, is much worse. We truly act as idiots when we forget that other people’s knowledge matters, that other people have different experiences and lives. We cannot help but be ignorant of that which we’ve never learned, but we are idiots about it when we hold that our lack of knowledge is more important than someone else’s reality.

Of course, there’s probably a thought right now in your head about all the people you know that you feel are idiots – and you’re probably not on that list. We all fall into this form of idiocy sometimes, though, and the more you feel it’s not about you the more it probably is. It’s hard to admit ignorance. It’s even harder if you think you know what you’re talking about and find out later that you don’t. The more one’s status is dependent on knowledge – any knowledge – the harder it is to admit making a mistake about a matter of knowledge.

We cannot know everything. Even things we think we know can turn out to be wrong, or incomplete, or otherwise not accurate. Admitting ignorance is hard. But refusing to acknowledge our ignorance just leaves idiocy.

Prompt: How hard is it to admit ignorance for you? Why? How do you feel when you look ignorant? Idiotic?

From being one more animal in Africa, we have become one of the most common creatures on the planet. We create human habitat around ourselves, remaking the world to be what fits us best. Even when we talk about living in nature, we mean nature made comfortable. We keep ourselves safe from predators, we make fires to cook our food, we build walls and roofs and otherwise make ourselves comfortable. We wear clothes, make tools, and rebuild the world around ourselves. We are the tool-users, the builders, the habitat-makers. From Antarctica to near Earth orbit, we have made human habitats. We even discuss what it would take to build habitat farther out, and how to create new places for humanity to live.

This is who we are, what we are. Tool makers and habitat creators. We don’t even see that we do this most of the time. We see it as normal. We have this mindset and we apply it to everything in our lives.

Our world is changing, though. Be it because of our own actions or not, the climate is changing, and that is going to change all our habitats. We need to see what we’re doing and learn to adapt as it happens. Our view of the future has always included remaking worlds to fit human habitation. Right now, though, it looks like we might have to do this to our own world. We will need to use our tools to rebuild our habitats as we live in it.

We use tools, build habitats. We recreate our world around ourselves on a regular basis. What we need to do is do so deliberately and actively, not passively as we do other things. We need to use the tools we have at our disposal to make our world better for the long term.

We have the ability. We are human, tool-users, habitat-builders. We can make our world better for everyone, if we bend our minds to it. We can focus on the short term and just our lives, yes. But we can also think longer-term and make our habitat better for everyone. It is a choice that until now we haven’t really made. It is a choice we need to wake up and see.

Prompt: How are you a tool user? A habitat maker? How far ahead do you look in life and why?

What is honor? It’s something we all say we value, but there’s no clear definition. We say we know it when we see it, or know it when it’s missing, but it’s hard to explain. What is honor? What are we looking for? Why do we insist on honor in those we deal with?

I don’t know what honor is, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It is, however, culturally variant. Being the best of the society you’re in is honorable, but that honor doesn’t necessarily translate to other cultures. Being honorable and being perceived as honorable are also not the same thing.

Is honor something worth seeking? That would imply that honor is a thing, like a book or a house. Something that can be achieved. I think it is a verb. It is a way of action, be that with or without honor. And it is not a one-time choice, but something that happens with every time we make a decision that touches other people.

We want those we deal with to be honorable. We want to be able to trust them and predict their actions, and we want them to value long-term society over short-term gain. We need to be able to trust that what we buy is what we think it is, that when we pay for work it will be done, that if someone says they will be somewhere that they will.

Honor does not lead to short-term gains. An honorable society cannot operate on quick timescales. If we are to be honorable individuals, we have to live in an honorable society, or we are taken advantage of. If we are to live with each other in society, we have to be honorable to each other.

And yet, we still don’t know what it means.

Prompt: What does honor mean to you? Do you try to live up to that standard? Do you assume or insist that other people live up to that?

Have you ever just stopped and looked at a shelf in a grocery store? Brightly colored packaging and brand names jump out at you, trying to appeal to every sense they can of how much you need that product. Options upon options, many of which are the same things in different packages. Store brand, name brand, fancy label. No way to know if there’s really any difference without trying them all. No way to know if what we’re getting is what we want unless we’ve gotten it before.

We’re horribly spoiled for choice in a modern grocery store. Choices for things we’ve never even heard of. And with all those choices, it becomes even harder to figure out what to buy, what to eat. How do we make reasonable, ethical choices with an overload of options for even the simplest things?

How much of our life is like this? A dizzying array of choices, many of them meaningless in effect to us but not meaningless to the world around us. Really, it doesn’t matter which crackers we buy as far as our lives go. Regardless of what the commercials say, one cracker is not going to bring our life happiness and meaning. But which cracker we buy does have meaning to the companies that make them, market them, sell them. The choices we make have ramifications far beyond what we can see. Even when it comes to something like crackers. How much more when we pick a field of study, a job, a career. What city to live in, what type of house or apartment, all the other details. Choices are complicated.

We cannot know all the details. Yes, we can research what is in each brand of cracker, and know what we’re eating. We might be able to find out which farms provide raw ingredients to the company. We can find out what the company’s labor policies are. We can worry about the environmental effects of the packaging choices. But who thinks about all of this when looking at a cracker? We think about how it tastes, whether it goes well with what we want to eat it with. We look at how it relates to our lives, not the lives of all the people that worked on it. In the end, it’s just a cracker. In the end, what one person buys in the grocery store doesn’t matter that much. It’s what everyone buys, what everyone does. But everyone is made up of individuals.

We cannot know all the variables. But really look at the grocery store, at all the packaging and marketing. Look at the crackers. What are they trying to sell to you? What are you really buying?

It’s just groceries. And yet, without food, we all die.

Prompt: What do you think about when you’re buying food? What things actually matter to you? What choices influence you?

To gaze upon ugliness is to be turned to stone. This is the story of the gorgon, the fear of it. That ugliness is so awful that we cannot allow it, cannot see it. Must hide it away behind covers and walls and drapes. Take away the ugliness, before it turns us to stone! Sanitize our lives, save us from the monsters, put all that is ugly away.

It doesn’t work, of course. There is ugly everywhere, and trying to pretend it away doesn’t work. We scream about the ugly monsters and demand they go away, but we forget or deny that we are the monsters to them as well. The monsters lie in every community, every culture. Every life has monsters. But maybe, just maybe, if we pretend hard enough they’ll just go away.

Ugly scares us. We fear we might be ugly, that our inner ugliness might become visible. That someone else might look at us the way we look at other people. If we can just demonize the monsters enough and push them far away enough, our own societies might be safe. Maybe if we push hard enough we won’t see them.

Of course, true monsters aren’t ugly. What they do is ugly, but they look just like everyone else. It isn’t the woman with the snakey hair that we need to look out for. It is the charming person that is completely convinced that they can do no wrong that is far more likely to be the monster among us.

Ugly stashed behind closed doors, behind walls, behind curtains. Monsters veiled to protect the innocent. But it’s the monsters we can’t see that will turn us to stone. We fear the Gorgon.

We are turned to stone by the monsters that need no veils.

Prompt: What ugliness do we fear? Why do we create monsters to embody them?

Once there was nothing. Before time, before existence, there was nothing. Then time began, and things began, and hydrogen began to fuse to helium and on into everything that exists. Once was nothing, then all began. When all is done, there will again be nothing. Only now is there reality. Only now is there life, breath.

Only now, on the knife edge of now, is there life. All that is possibility, that is chance, that can be, exists now. When the life is over and the universe dies a slow cold death of entropy, there will be no more chances. What we have built, what we have become, it will be gone. It is now that what we do matters. It is here that it matters.

That which is Formless exists outside of time. It is there, outside the universe, in an endless moment of now. Time is meaningless to it. Space is meaningless. Inside us we can touch that sense of everything/nothingness, feel the now. Feel the Formless.

Formless is potential. Anything can be created. Anything can exist. From nothing comes everything. It will be nothing again. But now, here, it can be what we build of it. From formless comes form. From eternal now comes time. Inside the universe there is distinction, qualification, differences and similarities. Inside the universe there is breath.

We live in that moment of breath, of time. We live in form. Yet outside that is the Formless, the possibilities of creation itself. From Formless to form and back again.

Prompt: What does Formless mean to you? Can you feel it? Hear it? Draw from it to create form?