Duality of life and death.

So, I was relaxing in my reading chair when I burned my tongue on hot coffee and quickly rushed to the freezer to grab an ice cube to quell the pain. I can only speculate that many others have had a similar experience. I stopped to see the duality of this situation; hot and cold, liquid and solid, sedate and active, calm and excited. For every one thing, there is an opposite and it seems without that opposite the one thing cannot exist. Can this duality be extrapolated to "us and them"? Without us, they couldn't exist or without them, we could not exist. On its surface this is a fallacy, because I still exist without you and you exist without me.

My father exists without me, but I do not exist without my father. Same as my mother exists without my father and without me, but I still do not exist without her. A true duality in the human race is male and female. Without the female, there is no male and vice versa. Mortality and immortality dictates whether there is a duality within the human race aside from the male/female duality and because we are mortal, we are also male and female as well as living and dead. Does this make asexual reproduction a form of immortality? If I were to reproduce without another organism, I would be a clone and my genetic code would be immortal, but each successive organism lives and dies. This is a paradox in that the human race is singular, yet dualistic in that we cannot avoid the dualism of life and death. A simple aphorism can be used to sum this up; there is only the living and the dead and therefore we are the living and they are the dead in the "us and them" dualism.

Dualism leads to conflict in that one side always tends towards a singularity due to physical equilibrium. In the case of my burnt tongue, warm was the equilibrium between hot and cold. I needed the ice cube to sway the conflict in my favor. Temperature plays a major role in the conflicts of material states, or the dualism among different states of matter. Ice to water to vapor and back. So higher temperatures increase the vibrational state of matter while colder temperatures decrease the vibrations. These vibrations depict the conflict in my philosophy of every conflict. One man uses a stick to club another and the vibrations increase or decrease. When the vibrations increase, the retaliation to being clubbed by a stick is the other man using a knife. Extrapolate these vibrations all the way up to the use of the atomic weapons of today. War brings death to the living and therefore the increased vibrations bring us to death or the inert state of our matter, our existence.

How about going back again? Like the ice cube, can equilibrium be achieved? Of course it can and we call the equilibrium "peace". Life and death meets an equilibrium in peace, but there are other factors aside from war and peace that dictate this equilibrium. I'll name these factors; health, wealth and resources.
Health depends on knowledge and science. A healthy society, in peace, can live longer without the high vibrations of conflict, however the duality comes in the form of disease. Wealth's duality is poverty. Resources' duality is a bit tricker. A resource either exists or does not exist, it is material or immaterial, it is alive or dead.

When we have the healthy and the diseased, we also have the conflict swaying the level of health or disease. The optimum result of this conflict is to decrease the vibrations to achieve a healthy society free of disease. If disease were erased from the physical world, wouldn't that mean that there would be no health? It is the end of the duality when there is no more disease. Without health and disease there is still wealth and poverty.

Wealth and poverty is dictated by the needs as put forth by Abraham Maslow's  hierarchy of needs. We all have physiological needs such as clothing, food and shelter. Above that we need security, belonging, esteem and self-actualization. With all of these, there are the haves and the haves-nots. The vibrations here are the conflicts between the haves and the haves-nots. This is the core conflict brought on by the fallacy of "us and them". As worked out above, we can see that the only dualism in the human race aside from male and female is the living and the dead. So in the pursuit of singularity in needs, we will all reach self-actualization and there would be no haves nor haves-nots. 

Thus far we are approaching a singularity known as a peaceful, healthy and self-actualized society. Lowering the vibrations of conflict from equilibrium and swaying the duality in favor of our own mortality, reaching for immortality. Minimizing or eliminating all conflict.

The trickiest duality of resources makes or breaks the idea of immortality. The conflict here, is identical to the conflict we are attempting to overcome. Resources exist or do not exist, they are alive or dead. We've all heard the term "sustainable resources". Let's call them immortal resources. Food, clothing and shelter can all be provided by immortal resources. The time period in history that comes to mind where we only used immortal resources was the Stone Age. We weren't killing off resources as we are today. The vibrations against resources were much lower. Other conflicts were much higher, but resources were sustainable due to our lack of knowledge of them. The human race did not fully rely on the resource that could "die" with overuse. The overuse sprung from the desire to survive.

Weird, isn't it? The paradox is that the human race, in its pursuit of immortality has to revert back to a simpler age were it progressed through so much conflict in the fallacy of "us and them". The real duality in a healthy and prosperous society is the conflict between primitive technology and advanced technology. This idea wasn't solely inspired by a cup of hot coffee, yet the culmination of many philosophers that all speak of the duality of man and the corruption of man.

We are corrupt in our ideology to seek many of the things that we do. To eliminate any one side of any duality, is to eliminate everything. There is equilibrium in all things, but there never is a singularity. We must learn to seek the equilibrium and only the true equilibrium of all things to live comfortably and not to become immortal as our corruption would lead us to believe we need. We must live with peace and war, wealth and poverty, health and disease. Above all, we must understand the importance of life and death. After all, we cannot freeze time just as we cannot bring back the dead.

The ritual every morning.

Some people love tea, some love wine and some love coffee. I love all three and there is an appropriate time of day that we all can agree that is acceptable to drink each beverage. Coffee is the morning beverage, it starts the day and invigorates us for the challenges that we most likely will encounter throughout the day. Tea, is a good beverage throughout that challenging day and is most appropriate for the English to consume around 4:00 in the afternoon. Wine winds us down and steadies us as we prepare for bed and rest. All are healthy beverages when consumed in the proper moderation. 

For me, coffee is the most important beverage,. I usually start my day by repeatedly snoozing my alarm until my preset, self-grinding Cuisinart  starts up. The sound of the organic Arabica beans being ground and guided into the brew basket is the one thing that motivates my arms to throw the blankets off of me and to wake out of bed. Most mornings I think of my 72 year old cousin who gave me this wonder of technology that brews a perfect carafe of fresh-ground coffee. She, like me, has a long ancestry on this continent that goes further back than the conquest by the Europeans. Our perspective is not unique, but is different from most. 

Living in Montana, we are not far from the history that saw cowboys huddled around a campfire watching a percolator bubble with the grounds of cheap coffee as they got their day started. I often keep those images in mind when pouring coffee for my wife and myself, with the rising sun coming in and the sound of life stirring outside the home. Coffee has been a part of my mornings for much of my life and when I set down to enjoy my first cup, I tend to think of my history as well as the history of coffee and the ritual of drinking coffee. It opens my mind to all of the perspectives of that simple morning ritual and how it can bind a large portion of humanity together. 

Platitudes can simplify a thought and opens the philosophical thinking of the mind. The thought of how perspectives can be enhanced by how coffee binds us , I felt compelled to pen a new blog and with that thought I wanted a new blog site. 

Like the ritual of starting the day with coffee, the start of a new blogging adventure begins with history and keeping that history in mind when looking at our world in the present. 

My coffee maker has many moving parts that must be kept in good working order to ensure great coffee. The maintenance and cleanliness of this machine, as tedious as it may seem to be, is a great way to see how history guides us as well. This coffee maker was designed to simplify the act of separately grinding coffee beans. The only processes that it cannot accomplish are the growing and roasting of the beans. That is the point of history; the process of where we are today. The things that we don't see with our own eyes are the growing of the beans and the harvest and the roasting. We see the bag of beans and we see the water and we are responsible for bring this two items together in a machine that further brings them together in a way that makes us happy. History, experienced and learned, comes together in much the same way. There is a level of trust to be put in the hands of the growers as well as historians. We trust that we will buy a good product or be properly informed. 

We have to ask ourselves how can we so easily trust the coffee that we don't grow ourselves. In that same idiom; how can we trust the history of the world that we didn't experience ourselves? A simple answer, or platitude, is that we owe our trust to Greek Philosophy. The idea of supply and demand within a system dictates that the system will provide a superior product. The demand for horrible coffee naturally dwindles in the system and eventually is removed from the system leaving only the demand for high-quality coffee. There is a demand for quality informative history as well. Rather than applying capital ideology to history, in the respect that there is a demand for history that satisfies us, there needs to be a demand for the objective quality of history; the accuracy of history as a reality. 

Think of the present time with everything that is shaping our societies and lives. The coffee I made this morning will be the history of this blog, but this morning it was simply a great beverage. I don't know where this blog will take me, but it all started with a cup of coffee. That is the objective reality of the history of this blog. This is why I don't intend to be an apologist or revisionist of history. These acts will corrupt the history in attempts to guide the history to fit an agenda. 

As I mentioned before, I am a descendant of the indigenous peoples of North America. I am also a descendant of Europeans; a wider base of anthropological history, not a mixing of histories. I do not subscribe to apologist history, nor the idea of revisionist history. History the way we view it starts with the perspective in which we view it, as we trust our own experiences. That is anthropology and ancestry, much like the coffee we progress from the quality bean, to brewing it in a quality machine. Striving for perfection with objective knowledge. 

That is what I'll put into this blog. I will research the zeitgeist, the spirit of the history being created in the present, and I will apply it to what is already known in history from an anthropological view and from an experienced view. If it fascinates me, I hope it will fascinate you as well. 

I must get back to my cup of coffee and think about the next blog post that will touch on the aspect of breaking down barriers of "us and them". It should be fascinating.