#just to be clear all the ducklings are deluded

[coxcombo]

that’s a solid three seasons of the show

[paganchristian]

A black swan we saw, at the zoo, and in the top picture, a white one too, and other ducks or birds of some kind, two of which seem to be doing some sort of mating dance or maybe competing and fighting, I don’t know, I wonder what they’re doing.  Black swans I knew I had heard were some kind of symbol.  Apparently a rare and unpredictable event that changes the course of history or society, or something, but it is rationalized away, after the fact, as being something ordinary and predictable after all.  

It makes me think that many things could be rare events that would change our own lives, but we just kind of explain them away instead and they lose the power to do that anymore, because we forget them or don’t give them enough focus and the proper value and effort they deserve.  Then they don’t change our lives and I guess they wouldn’t be a black swan as the symbol goes, since a black swan event actually does change you.  And maybe it is not even a rare event but just a typically overlooked, underestimated event that is common.  

But maybe it could be, and the event of what changes and what happens is what is rare, maybe,...  if not the actual trigger for the change...  Just like genius taps into things that are ordinary and makes them extraordinary and changes the world...  So I think the power of God and of the ideas of religion can be that way too, sometimes, but we tend to overlook them.  There is a whole huge set of behaviors, ideas and practices, pressures, approaches, conformity, punishment, and many contradicting messages, that all try to trick us and pressure us and make us make use of this rare thing, instead of letting it pass us by again, maybe ...  

But why do they contradict themselves?  To see which approach we will latch onto.  To use any approach to cast the widest net and catch the most followers.  To let us grow and change and choose which of the contradicting messages we need at the time.  Sometimes we even need a false problem or false enemy because we can’t emotionally process the truth of our own guilt and the terrible wrongness of ourselves, or others, our lives, our feelings of hopelessness.  Instead of facing it, we mentally shut down, deny, and project on a convenient scapegoat.  

Anyway, with the little events in our own lives that could change us... if the conditions were right, and/or if we knew how to respond and use them the right way, then maybe these little events in our lives could force us or shake us up and make us change.  Maybe then still we would just go on, business as usual, explaining it away again, as normal, predictable, letting things settle back into assumptions and habits and letting the full power of it lie unused, even if it did transform our lives.  

And when I thought of this all it seemed the perfect symbol for how it feels to me that the religious things that are helping me are so mysterious and so good and powerful but it feels like it is often cloaked in a lot of trickery, distortion, wrong views, contradicting itself, excluding and condemning certain people if they do this or that, putting people into conceptual boxes and not listening to them anymore, but seeing them only as the box furthermore.  Doing the same for ourselves.  Faking it for others, being all about image and outer performance, drilling ourselves with ideas and inundating social pressure on us.  And despite it all why is there so much good still?  The black swan seems to tell me, it’s more than meets the eye.  

There is also a Tori Amos song called ‘Black Swan’.  And when I think of swans I think of The Ugly Duckling fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen.  I looked at the lyrics of the Tori Amos song.  Anyway, all these things are shifting things around, along with these pictures and the details in them, and the black swan symbol,...  and  it’s making me think of things.  Things about religion, again, and about how we need something to make the most of things, that we tend to ignore or not even intentionally that we ignore them, but just fail to remember or ever even recognize their worth.

And so instead we need to have white swans and ducks, the more expected, average birds, or things, in our lives and our religions, philosophies, ideologies,...  We resist and we deny the black swan.  The idea of this black swan symbolism makes me think of the things of spirit and synchronicity and visions and such that are oftentimes denied and seen as crazy or wishful thinking, silly, boring, weird, and basically at the end of the day, just insignificant, if not completely unreal...  It’s “just” a coincidence, so what does it matter.  But my whole life has been totally transformed by visions and coincidences and spirit messages, which most would just wave away as unreal and silly and unimportant. 

It seems with more mainstream religions and philosophy, or really, with anything that challenges us to change and have faith in ways that are deeply transformative and require a lot of effort and self-denial and hope against hope, maybe, we often seem to need to anchor things in the ordinary, enough, to make the black swan sort of things seem more explicable and relatable.  We are too busy doing our normal things, like the ducks and their dance or fight or whatever, in the picture.  The swan is the ugly duck, like the fairytale, The Ugly Duckling.  The black swan might be the outcast, perhaps, who knows. 

Maybe it might seem too good to be true, and be overlooked or passed by because of that.  Anyway, in real life, and fairytale conceptions of the black swan aside, though, I just love the black swans’ ruffly feathers. 

It is rufflier than white swans I think.    

Hmm,...  But back to the topic, ...  Maybe religion needs to be dumbed down way down low to fit the lowness of humanity.  Not saying we’re dumb.  Dumbing down just makes things stand out enough but blend in enough that we’ll pay any attention for long enough and really hold on to something and try to apply it, usually.  

Because otherwise we go on with the predictable flow of Samsara, the Kleshas (afflictions or character failings), , the five aggregates of clinging to the heaps of dust that is life, ...  The stumbling, helpless, overwhelmed, deluded, and lost, craving and avoiding, hiding, and distorting,...  The otherwise inevitable (inevitable, if not for rare insights and the applications of insight)... the inevitable flow of the river of everyday existence, the Maya, the illusion and deceptiveness of this whole world,...   to use Buddhist and Hindu terminology,...  The confusion, the pain, the chaos, exhaustion, overwhelm, busy-ness, seeking to relieve it. If you believe in demons, them too, count them in all of this list of overwhelming, overpowering and blinding, misleading with visions of light and magic and wonder hiding a wolf in sheep’s clothing,...  All this stagnating, immobilizing chaos, running to stand still (I loved that song, also once a big U2 fan, still like them, no longer a huge fan).  Running, running, to get nowhere, driven by impulses like a we are riding a horse, unable to get off of it, knowing not where we are going, compelled at all times, though exhausted and miserable, compelled, unable to stop and instead we must forever follow its destructive, confused habits.  Another symbol of Buddhism, but I don't’ remember all of the details.

Yes there is so much intelligence, but oh how it is so unused in many of the most important urgent ways it needs to be used.  So much knowledge, unapplied.  So much insight and intuition of what we need to do for our lives, but so much of it isn’t acted upon.  There is so much high self-opinion, based on so much illusion.  Even too so much low self-opinion also exaggerated and distorted to be worse than it is or even based on false ideas.  So many false ideas, imagined enemies, imagined dangers, imagined problems, or exaggerated problems,...  or misidentified problems, misunderstood people, misunderstanding ourselves.  What power does something have unless it can shake us so far out of all this and be easy enough and emotional enough and average and relatable enough and simple to understand enough that it is so dumbed down.  

Maybe it needs to be so dumbed down because that is the only way it will be easy enough to focus on, to remember, to act on, and perhaps, easy enough to believe in because even if it’s oversimplified sometimes a simple illusion sounds more believable than a complex reality.  Reality is so complex we have a hard time understanding it and a hard time believing it even if we do understand.  Even if we do understand and believe then we can have a hard time keeping it clear in our heads and remembering it and acting on it over time.  And the euphoric sense of epiphany that will change our lives quickly fades away and becomes forgotten. 

Otherwise it’s just another prop for our ego, another thing to understand, and then forget, thinking we have applied it or that we accomplished much by realizing it needs acting on and planning and trying and failing again,... as again and again it’s been forever on into so much never (what do I mean, I don’t know but that just came to my mind so just in case it doesn’t seem totally dumb and useless, I won’t delete it.  And if it’s dumb and useless later, then it’s a useful humbling experience.  haha).  So yeah, we thought our realization was a big deal, what with all the soul searching or learning or experiencing that it took to attain it, but it’s the black swan, swimming by in our minds, ...   Swimming round and round even forever in our minds...  but if we don't’ act on it it might as well not matter much.  For some reason I had the image of the rubber ducks at the county fair that swim round and round the little river of water.  Lol  Ok...  Hmm..  That cheers me up.  That was a favorite thing ever when I was really little..  Hmm...  But yeah, just like childhood frivolity, it all doesn’t really count for much even if we tried and meant so well and so much. It gives relief from the daily distress for a little while, that seems worth a lot and is if you have no better relief, and all actions are begun as dreams and ideas.  But still, ...  

But we just understood but failed to apply it like all the other goals and all these New Year’s Resolutions and so on.

But this dumbing down oftentimes inevitably bypasses certain problems and blames certain people in its rush to oversimplify.  Some people cannot make it work and they have to find their way outside of the whole thing.  The whole idea I had before that religions often seem to me like a puzzle with a few wrong instructions and some missing pieces, again.  And that needs to be put together differently for different people to work in your own life and for your own needs.  Another thing that needs hiding because it’s too complex and people want something simpler and more clear or they forget something more complex.  So religion hides this fact for us to discover when we will be ready, later on, in our journey of faith. 

Sometimes with the wrong and harmful ideas in religions, maybe you can make something work until you can’t any longer because it hurts you emotionally where you were callous and unaware or perhaps where you were just deluded and misinformed.  Maybe like so many run to those who hurt them and are attracted to people who are like their abusive family of origin (unconsciously even), we might need and want what hurts us and ignore what is better and healthier.  Like bad habits maybe we indulge because it’s easier and we’re too tired to deal with something harder.  

Even after you improve as a person, become kinder and more aware and want to change, of course, physically you could do the same things that were harmful that you did before,...  But your emotional self just can’t do it and you can’t do it, unless you warp your mind and emotions.  All to that end, there are brainwashing tactics used sometimes to help you warp your mind and emotions and stay in line.  Maybe brainwashing isn’t the right word, but it’s something rather similar at any rate, deluding oneself by repeatedly drilling certain ideas into your mind and social pressure, rewards and punishments, threats and terror, guilt and shame and conformity and rewards if you perform up to expectation, and on and on.