Chaos, Hallucinations, Order, Suicide

This study of East/West cross-cultural differences leads me to believe that we all live in an artificial reality that is the construct of our upbringing and our limited capacity to think. We walk a hallucination most days. So if this blog seems a little far out, just sit back and enjoy the ride. We are going nowhere with a sense of purpose. No harm here, for sure.

Life.

We are fed the values and emotional patterns of our family, friends, and mentors, the latter being relatives, pastors, teachers, bosses, community leaders and anyone else we grant authority to.

If our parents beat us, we are likely to turn the whip on our own children.

Unless we learn to internalize new, more powerful motivations that halt the hand in mid-air just before it descends onto Junior's butt.

That is the dialogue that goes on throughout life, isn't it? The patterns we think we are supposed to follow, modified by the lessons we learn. I mean, really LEARN. Take to heart. Not just memorize and allow to float aimlessly in a cloud of cranial inconsequentialities.

If our parents pray, we are more likely to pray. Well, unless it becomes an element of the rebelliousness that is natural in American homes as kids embark on the great separation that occurs around age 18. Which is why so many young American adults part from the church, leaving the pews to the elderly. To escape from the traps they feel their parents lay to restrain them, constrain them, tell them how to live. Many return to the church later on their own terms.

Praying is more likely to persist in the Filipino family where the glue that holds the family together is tougher than Mighty Bond. The composition of the glue might be pride, or its reverse, shame, or even guilt. And most generally a whole lotta love. It is unquestionably strong.

The  American family is magnets of similar pole, pushing outward. The Filipino family is magnets of opposite pole, pulling inward.

I think it is not the facts we learn that are important. I think it is the disciplines, the methods. I have a degree in mathematics and I remember we studied integration of the non-racial kind, calculus and trigonometry, sines and cosines and my favorite, tangents. At least tangents I could visualize. Those cosine lines could twist in funny ways, for sure. When teaching myself how to program, I would use sines and cosines to run do-loops that would draw elipses that would migrate in one direction until they hit a certain random count, then plunge off in a different direction, the angle also random. The computer drew quite elegant designs, order out of random chaos. Now today I can't calculate calculus problems and I can't program in any language, having forgotten the particulars. But I have remembered the disciplines of order thrust among random acts.

That is, after all, life, is it not?

Order thrust among random acts.

How well we order things means a lot. It determines if we will get good grades, good jobs, lots of wealth and the ability to read and sort out our passions without deciding like that poor Manila girl last week, to pull the plug

What were your passions as a youngster? Mine were baseball and basketball and building model airplanes and murdering thousands of big red fire ants. A little older it was basketball and volleyball and tennis and legs. We grow, eh, we grow.

I successfully parted from my family by going to college away from my home town. It seems like I have been shooting relentlessly outward ever since, some kind of big bang pushing me ever onward into new places and lifestyles and richness.

Along the way I've been a religious convert and a marijuana beach bum, a disciplined Army lieutenant and an undisciplined poet, penning imaginings outside of any box known to mankind. Love, hate, sex and more love. Been there done that. Corporate peon, yes.  I've scrubbed grocery store floors in the heart of Watts, the roughest, poorest part of Los Angeles. And stacked oranges in the produce aisles in a junky supermarket off Melrose . I've also lodged my feet on the desk of a 50th floor penthouse office downtown, propping up the President of the corporation with my brain and ability to apply aforesaid mathematical disciplines to the business of making money.

Philippine schools simply DO NOT TEACH enough disciplines. Disciplines is different than discipline. Oh, Philippine schools know discipline. It is the biggest barrier to learning disciplines. Discipline curtails innovation. Disciplines involve learning the organization and problem solving  methods that open up the world to solution. And learning the psychological wholeness that allows troublesome facts or odd behaviors of others not to insult one's face or interfere with one's achievement.

I'm not sure why Filipinos are so easily offended by mistakes. Or bumps in the road. The level of angst that flies from a bad incident here reflects an energy far beyond what the offense warrants. The hunt for perfection that Filipinos seem intent to pursue, yet grossly fail to reach, is of course a hallucination. It is a fact of life, the statistical odds, when you get 95 million people, there will be a girl somewhere who has it rough and decides to commit suicide. You can't stop the math from working.

Life is not ordered. It is order within chaos.

To the extent that we allow our emotions to give life to the chaos, we are not doing ourselves, or the Philippines, much of a favor.

Our goal should be to learn and teach the disciplines of order. Of solving problems that the mathematics of random events throws in front of us. Of integrity, for that is best for the whole of the community, whether it is attached to a faith or simply figured out as the best way to behave.

The Philippines is a huge pile of emotion, detached from disciplines.

It is wasted energy. It is fire burning precious forests rather than fire molding steel ingots.

It wears, sometimes.

I'd advise to train it, trap it as passion, not anger, and use it to build, not tear down.