This article is full of generalizations and assumptions.

First, it should be obvious from the literature coming from the Occupy movement that violence is not generally supported, and it should be obvious from countless reports that NYPD officers are directing unruly and/or homeless people, in uniform wording, to “take it to Zucotti” presumably in an effort to create discord amidst the movement. The article repeatedly lumps everyone present in the movement, violent or otherwise, under the label “protesters”. It would make just as much sense to say “Journalists have sided against the movement” without acknowledging the huge diversity of views expressed in various media.

Second, on a related note, it should not be assumed that the police are fairly and equally protecting the people, nor that the protesters actually have “contempt” for them. A theme recurrent throughout the movement is that of solidarity with and support of the police, as working people oppressed by a slanted system. However the conflict comes when following orders becomes more important than understanding the long term effects of presupposed economic and political systems. This should be noted in light of the “Open letter to the citizens of Oakland from the Oakland Police Officers’ Association,” which seems to represent the officers beginning to question the orders they are given, after many confusing “mixed signals.” Yet even this does not address the use of violence to break what was up to that point a non-violent protest.

Finally, the article ends with obliquely accusing the protesters of taking what isn’t theirs, which clearly misses the point that what is rightfully the people’s–a fair chance at quality education, healthcare, affordable housing, the opportunity to make fair wages for fair work, and a forum to have your voice heard equally regardless of financial status, without the rules and background noise being slanted by bought politicians–needs to be reclaimed, and temporarily “taking what is not yours” in order to garner the attention of an otherwise hypnotized media, under-regulated financial industry, and heavily bribed government (thanks, Citizens United v. FEC) is the only way to do that.

Scattered reports which lump everyone in this worldwide movement, including agent provocateurs, together, serve only to perpetuate the illusion that the encampment is the furthest extent of this happening. Do your homework, attend meetings of one of the 75+ working groups or the General Assembly, actually listen and process and think about what is being said, and THEN report accurately on what “the movement,” an endlessly nuanced group of people, is trying to do.

And “the media” says the protesters are unfocused…

However, after years of protests, petitions, etc, I began focusing more on the personal work of creating a just world, repelled by the shouting, arguing, blaming nature of protesting. Recently though, OWS sparked my interest because of the high level of intelligent discourse and tempering of political/economic anger into constructive criticism of the systems as they currently stand. And with the violent eviction of Occupy Oakland, I felt called to stand in solidarity at Zucotti Park.

Excited to be present there, I attended General Assembly meetings, sampled much info and literature offered by the various working groups, and witnessed a lot of the logistical problems arising from such a diverse group of people, not to mention such an abnormal physical situation. Not disheartened, I continued to live my daily life, commuting to work while my tent mates, coming from other towns, held down the fort.

The biggest problem I encountered while sleeping there is that the most visible element of this movement–the occupying encampment itself–is byfar the least organized, leaving many people, including a security guard I spoke to at World Financial Center 4, to think it is nothing more than a “mini Burning Man” in the name of political dissent. The truth is that this is merely the foyer of a very large, very nuanced, very well structured movement (Spokes Councils, a format used in nearly all successful large scale social change movements in the past century or two) which represents, if not the views of 99% of the population, certainly the imposed limitations on the means and efficacy of 99% of the population to do well for themselves and make their voices heard. But because of the very slant in the media which, among other things, is being protested, most people not directly involved have no idea of this level of organization.

To make matters worse, more and more outbreaks began happening, particularly amongst people who did not seem to have any philosophical ties to the movement (sometimes homeless), often reporting that they had been instructed by the police to “take it to Zucotti.” Combine that with the lazy reporting going on in the New York Post and other local media. I have read endless articles complaining that the protest is hurting local business, lumping together all the outbreaks and incidents of violence by masked anarchists in Oakland and agent provocateurs everywhere under the collective misnomer “protesters” whilst presupposing the rhetorical nobility of people who “don’t have time for political indulgences” without even mentioning any other aspect of the movement which does operate constructively, inclusively, intelligently, and transparently.

Of course though; why should I expect a media addicted to bad news to actually listen to the finer details–or even look closely enough to see that there are any–before spreading uninformed opinions? Well, to echo the sentiments of the Demands Working Group, I don’t expect anything different to happen, but I do know that something worse than the same old ignorant, non-receptive reaction I’ve come to expect will happen if no one speaks up: willful ignorance, not only of the flaws in the system, but of the people whom, for better or worse, this government is supposed to represent.

This gets me back to a much more relevant issue: that of freedom of speech. In response to the ever popular criticism that the movement is unfocused, occupywallstreet.org has stated the singular demand of overturning Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed limits on donations made to political campaigns by corporations, in the name of personhood of corporations, which protects such gifts as free speech, and effectively equates speech with money and legalized bribery of politicians, slanting the policies they create and support. It is my view that this alone could resolve the bulk of the corruption in politics; and coupled with Senate Bill 1787 and House Bill 3313, taxes on financial transactions, gather resources to repair our job market and reinvest in the WORKING economy, from the very people and practices that ran it into the ground not once but twice.

In the current standing of our economic system, money does not follow work or contribution or responsible planning–it follows other money. And those who benefit the most are those whose actions, on the long term, are contributing the most to the imbalance of the system and the decline of its ability to serve the common people. This is the issue of accountability, which is not only a central political element of American government, but a central philosophical element in the very idea of freedom.

As anyone who has ever overcome a frustrating personal obstacle in life knows, simply waiting for the obstacle to go away, or for someone else to remove it for you without taking action yourself does not tend to accomplish anything. One must understand how one came upon this limitation, what role one had in creating it, and how to modify one’s approach without compromising one’s goals. And if, in taking responsibility for their own political freedom, the people–whose money fuels these corporations and gamblers and politicians–manage to shed light on the limitations this system and this behavior imposes on 100% of the population, then perhaps everyone will begin to see what an illusion laissez-faire capitalism really is: ONE CANNOT DOMINATE THE MARKET WITHOUT OPPRESSING THE VERY PEOPLE WHOSE MONEY FUELS THIS SUCCESS.

The UNITED States must be united and work together, taking full responsibility for the interdependence of a diverse, truly free society and know the difference between doing whatever one wants and ignoring the unwanted longterm byproducts of short term wants. If we are enslaved to materialistic desires and myopic definitions of success and freedom, and do not even take the time to cultivate our ability to make decisions which do not merely put a patch on a continuous need but create a system in which our continuous activity feeds all our collective continuous needs, then we are by no means a free society–we are servants of our own tacitly inherited rhetorical ideologies as interpreted for us by those who depend on our hypnosis to stay in power.

PLEASE read up on www.nycga.net about the many activities of this movement and contribute considered input to your local media so that all this judgment and misrepresentation (which occurs across all political, economic, and class lines) can be examined, clarified, and cured. Only in real communication will anything ever be accomplished.

Why wait for PERMISSION to claim FREEDOM?

Lest this derailleur send your mind irrevocably into irrelevant territory, let me attempt to clarify what I mean by this abstract word.  It seems to carry connotations these days which limit it to the realm of emotion, interpersonal matters, right brain functions, and things on which logic and reason hold little or no grip.  But rather than categorizing it as if it were a world apart from logic and deduction, let us consider it more as an alternate route to the same destinations; a voice easily confusable with its myriad imposters in the mind, yet whose message is utterly flawless, as long as it is recognized rather than searched for.  Such a claim is wont to be seen as idealistic or starry-eyed, yet the very fact of the word proves its existence: it is the mind’s name for something which by its very nature transcends, eludes, and sometimes even subverts the mind, the vessel and commander of words and symbols, because intuition dispenses with symbols and deductive process and operates solely in the realm of truth, qua actual, factual existence.

Let me pause here for an etymological aside.  Very interesting histories of these words contribute to an oft-overlooked illumination into the mystery of What We Mean, in various senses.  Firstly: That intuition attends to truth rather than symbol illuminates the connection (and modern contrast) between act and fact. Whereas today we tend to imagine facts as static, objective bits of information, fact, in the 1530s, signified more fluidly an action, even connoting an evil deed, or a fact we are reluctant to acknowledge or confront (hence the later expression “the facts of life” which first meant any ominous truth and later came to mean the gory details of human reproduction, but I digress).  Minus this connotation, Latin factum “event, occurrence,” lit. “thing done,” comes from facere “to do” or “to make,” so we seem to be looking at a noun which refers to a verb, or to action itself, a philosophically suspect process by which we attempt to statically define (and thereby extract from time) time’s inexorable element of movement and change—which quite possibly illuminates the fundamental irony at hand here! Interestingly enough, we may cross over here to a parallel phenomenon regarding the word intuition, which is of course the mind’s indicator for that which is known without indication.  Intuition comes from Late Latin intuitionem “a looking at, consideration,” from in- “at, on” + tueri “to look at, watch over.”  This last translation requires, for English grammar, a superfluous “at,” which in the Latin is added for emphasis in the form of in-, indicating greater intensity of looking.  It is not done from an observer’s position, but “at” or “on” the object of observation: direct, immediate cognition (co- “together” + gnoscere “to know”), without representation or process—essentially transcendence of separateness. It is distinct in this way from tuition, from Latin tuitionem, “a looking after, defense, guardianship,” also related to tutor.

So, in differentiating that which we deduce by logical thought process from that which we know without explanation (read: that which we experience, inwardly or outwardly), we are tempted to reserve the word “knowledge” for genuine certainty, excluding conclusions of mere theory.  But language does not exactly have it this way, for the above etymological discussion seems to indicate a distinction, within “knowing,” between things analyzed and things felt—opposing, yet both sources of knowledge.  But practically, we find that some things explained perfectly logically can still omit details or nuances and sometimes even miss the end mark, because logical connections are forged by the mind actively and selectively, rather than understood receptively and holistically—and so the mind can go walking anywhere soundly in its own realm and still find itself nowhere in reality, to whatever degree it dispenses with receptivity and adaptability.  Ergo, we connote theoretical vs. practical certainty in our distinction between analytical and intuitive knowledge, and the difference is made by listening.

It has been said that because all sensory information takes time to reach our senses, travel through nerves and register in our brains, we are always experiencing the past; and further, that experiencing the present is impossible.  I would agree that this claim must be true; but only on the basis of the tacit assumption that our physical bodies ‘come first’, followed by our consciousnesses as more-or-less alchemical byproducts.  Conversely, if we assume that consciousness comes first, and that mind and body arise as its expressions, then an immediacy of perception qua dispensation with tools and expressions; a literal and scientific experience of the present would indeed be possible.  This line of thinking shares a very quaint bridge with another rather tacit idea: that life’s course, conceived as a confluence of forces acting within and among a constellation of structures, could in principle be defined, calculated, and predicted on the basis of a finite set of initial data.  This too is based on a picture of life as a primarily physical, or material system, from which consciousness and knowledge emerge as mere byproducts.  This view does, however, raise the issue of the singularity and focus central to the experience of consciousness.  Clarity of perception and of logical thought does confer predictive capacity; we could call this quality of experience inevitability.

But we cannot simply escape uncertainty by appealing to fate;  the linear nature of experience is intertwined intimately with intuition, and the knot that they form joins the mundane with the transcendental.  As consciousness continues to consume time and transmute it into memory, our trajectory, connecting past and future, can occasionally ‘zoom out’ to take up a different perspective; we catch a glimpse of the river within which our individual lives are running like currents; concurrently, oftentimes seeming to lead, but then again, and also, simply following; flowing.  At other times we can feel very much that we are these intervals, connecting these viewpoints; that there is nothing other than our own choices and actions from moment to moment driving the whole thing forward as it hangs in suspension; poised between mystery and revelation like a curvilinear Russian doll of composite decisions; perfectly compressed, and occupying only imaginary space.

Before leaping  to the obligatory defense of individual dignity under threat of determinacy -and here we must rely on a crucial distinction between intuition and conditioning; in this case perhaps we would do better to call our method counter-intuition- can we not simply pause to appreciate these delicately poised positions, whereby the plurality of phenomena balance delicately with the communion of identity?  Is it not precisely in this moment of appreciation, briefly unfettered by the machinic demands of a logic obsessed with incremental progress, that the lines separating past and future, cause and effect, agent and act, blur and give way to the connections between and among them?

To prevent the ghostlines of the “new age” from being cast around the present writing, let me offer a sharp grain of salt to accompany these abstract descriptions of subtle processes.  The directness of intuition varies very greatly by degree, the lowest being often lumped in with ‘emotion’ because it is thought to oppose logic and reason, and shares the loose descriptor ‘feeling’.  However intuition does not so much oppose logic as transcend it.  Like a crutch on a perfectly good leg, the bulky syntagms of explanation are largely unnecessary for an awareness that’s sturdy and upright in itself.  Further, intuition transcends emotion: “I do like the beach, and seafood, and women in bikinis, but that’s not why I’m choosing to go there instead of the mountains this time…  Actually I don’t know why; it’s just where I want to go.”  Perhaps one can imagine later running into a long lost friend at said beach trip.  In such a situation one’s emotions and reasons, causes and constraints all interact while remaining intact, but the intuitive draw to a particular option emerges from their interaction.  As if receiving some kind of transcendental communication that evokes a sense of destiny, all these currents align to encourage a specific outcome.

But what of the moments when the more tangible, logical, and visible paths array themselves in opposition to a less quantifiable, yet somehow more undeniable direction, making the conclusion of discernment itself an anomaly with respect to its own generative matrix of balances and comparisons?  To paraphrase Hesse’s Siddhartha, “the complete, coherent, unbroken chain of cause and effect which, as you the Buddha teach, binds the whole world together, is broken in one place, and that is your very doctrine of enlightenment, of salvation, of opting out of this endless cycle.”  In light of Siddhartha’s subsequent decision to reject the Buddha’s teachings not for their inferiority but for the specificity of their perfection to the life of their author, the landscape of discernment seems here begins to look rather like a Google map, which can zoom in or out to any resolution and omit or include any level of detail in its picture.  The line is still drawn from point A to point B, but one can see and follow step by step how it is done.  Here is where analysis and intuition overlap, and why indeed the irony of an essay about it is even possible in the first place.  Like using one’s hands as a balance scale, the abstract work is done by action and choice, and yet the fine-tuning difference is made by quietly attending; listening.

Of course, we have barely begun to sample the various levels of resolution and focusing frames at and through which to view the myriad forms of experience: for example; when intuition appears unbidden and completely without satisfactory rationale, internal or external, for following it; or when it appears in a negative form, like the stale flavor of mechanistic precision; or when simply to observe and understand the process by which an intuited outcome unfolds becomes the necessary challenge.  Perhaps the metaphor of the map, which after all can only allow so much room for detailed labels and divisions, before its meaning begins to be obscured, is appropriate:  the map, as Korzybski pointed out, can never be its territory.  Maps, like cultures, armies, machines, and organisms, are therefore always plural and multiple, and must occasionally clash like Nietzschean swords, throwing off sparks of truth.  What is intuition if not this quiet realization: that after a point, clarity cannot rely on the strategic machinations of logical force alone, but must come to rest in the communion of focus ignited by these inevitable sparks, illuminating both the objects of attention and the innerworkings of the mind itself.

i’m trying to balance the talents i see behind you
with the irresistible urge to remind you
of how much longer we’ve got to swim
but in the meantime, i myself need a trim
to purge this fistful of fears
that keep me from floating
it’s not the same as emoting
and it’s not polluting your water
i’ve got that new metaphysical plumbing, fo’ shizzle
(it cuts down on pain and complaining)
like a mental chimney, a smoke blowing whistle to drive our training minds across the water of becoming
while we try to balance the energy needed to remember what it was like when we met on land
with the exhausting process of opening our hands to swim
or hold each other up, when tired.
what a joke, telling someone “you’re fired,” in the middle of the water!

later on, hair dry, you can style it up like you want,
but the long mile you spent on it before will come back to haunt
when the words you sent from within time
visit you in the future, and your then-questions rhyme
with the answers you just now lent to the dream you had as a child.

It’s been a while, but my memory has nothing to do
with the me that i once projected onto you
when myopia was in style.
But now we’re on yet another mile, and utopia beguiled my mind
into thinking we were behind schedule
but the detail i missed
was this:

The memory i’ve long been missing
of some mystery or other that i was kissing
when we skydived into this messianic, methodical mess of self mastery,
never stopped.

We are not separated by space, but by which mask we choose to face when we put our painted mirror in its place.

In the meantime, I find it useful to derive meaning from both the meanness and the unseenness whose mere presence cleans up the mess
of our spot in time.

It seems a mountain to climb, but I’ve always seen an inner screen broadcasting the view from the peak, and the only price to sneak up there is to strike a balance of the fallacies between ‘you’ and ‘me’, and to do it alone. Once up there, anyone can meet, but it must be discreet, for the air is too thin up there
to speak.

and that’s how i hear you within, in between our little outings
so next inning, when you’re up to bat
keep your hair inside your hat
and i’ll promise not to say that
until our teams become one theme
and playing and praying and staying and saying and obeying
disappear.

but until then,
let’s just be here.
the water’s fine.

however, onlookers, in their indifference,
which is to say preoccupation with hidden disguises on their own goals or preconceptions
or whatever,
see something quaint at best, and faint at worst,
in its consciously purposeful timing of appearance,
which is to say the result of a bet placed on a chance game of cards
by a mind like a jedi who had just started to decipher the code left by memory,
which is to say just about to remember putting it there.

and all this brings you one step closer,
both by chance and by plan,
to remembering the next repetition
of the same chant that you designed
to get you here, so that you could remember what it’s like
to forget,
and in forgetting, remember what was so worth remembering
in the first place.

which is to say,

continue.