Free The Animal

Recently, I began receiving this Financial Times newsletter in my email box. I was awestruck by the image, and I still am every time I see it. The sorts of people I hate & loathe would look at that as a scar on the planet. Those whom I consider stuck in dead-end, primitive superstition and fairy tales downplay such potential as “merely” the work of man. For me, it represents the path to the very highest ideals achievable by man through molding and leveraging physical reality, capital, values, and relationships in the pursuit of his highest moral purpose: the advancement of his life, ultimately reflected back in happiness and genuine, long-term well being. You want to go to heaven? Look right up there. It’s actually achievable; not through repentance to and redemption from either mother nature or imagined gods, but rather through reason, capitalism, individualism, and the exchange of values to mutual benefit.

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Without citing a bunch of past posts, I’ve been on a bit of a quest, lately, to investigate some of the Eastern religious traditions. I still am — but increasingly as a skeptic and less as an honest inquirer. That’s inevitable; once you’re informed enough to begin making honest judgments, you do. There are still interesting aspects I haven’t fleshed out, and this quest is driven by a couple of things. First, I see a lot of things I like from some of the new breed of businesspeople, many of whom cite interest in Eastern traditions, and second, I prefer to focus on what we can actually choose to do and accomplish, rather than on merely what is our right not to have done to us. That may perhaps just be a difference in perspective and attitude, but I think it’s a big one. The following is an email out to this author, and concerns discussions over months and years centering on this page and proceeding forward through the chain of eight short pages, which should be read for background. Paul: I don’t think that he, I, or any of us are “confusing consciousness with quantity.” We’re just saying –…

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