Tag Archives: NFL

Why? Why, To Give You A Taste Of Your Future

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Conquest-is-not-allowed Why? Why, to give you a taste of your future.So far, I have shared my Amazon reviews of two of the eleven books of the New Message from God. Here is my review of The Great Waves of Change. Here is my review of Steps to Knowledge. I haven’t read all of the books of the New Message yet. I plan to do this in the near future. However, I have read the book Life in the Universe, published in 2012. Here is my review of that book.

Why? Why, to give you a taste of your future

The emergence of humanity into a Greater Community of intelligent life is a long-running theme in the writings of Marshall Summers. This book of channeled material expands on the themes introduced in books like Greater Community Spirituality: A New Revelation (New Knowledge Library) and The Great Waves Of Change: Navigating The Difficult Times Ahead, and offers a picture as to what life beyond our world is like, and how humanity might prepare for it.

As I read this book, I considered this sector of space to be a lot like the National Football League (NFL). In the NFL, while injuring the other players is forbidden, teams seek to identify and exploit the weaknesses of their opponents. In this sector of space, while outright war is forbidden (and bad for business, besides), spacefaring races go to great lengths (competition, espionage, seduction, persuasion, mental manipulation) to get other worlds over a barrel in trade relationships. As I read this, I recalled Trader To The Stars (Chronicles of the Polesotechnic League), where Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League had the motto “All the traffic will bear!”

People who appreciate advances in technology are going to find this book greatly challenging. It’s as if humanity is facing a choice between two futures. In one future, advancing technology not only makes us hit the wall of declining resources, but makes us more machine-like and less human. In another future, the road less traveled, humanity becomes one of the rarer freer worlds, emerging into space with its sovereignty and self-sufficiency intact.

What is on humanity’s to-do list to successfully arrive at the end of the road less traveled? Oh, nothing much. Unite as a species, arrive at a just way of sharing dwindling resources, develop skills used by spacefaring races in the mental environment (psychic and memetic warfare?), develop and enforce rules of engagement for visiting races, stop being a weak, divided, easily exploitable collection of warring tribes, reconsider the gods of its religions as parochial, tribal deities, keep its collective mouth shut and stop broadcasting every detail about itself into space.

Just as new professional football players recall their “Welcome to the NFL” moment, one day, humanity will look back and recall its “Welcome to the Greater Community” moment.

Why? Why, to give you a taste of your future.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

“Oh, If Only I Had Watched More NFL Football…”

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DeathbedNo, I’m not ready to let it go.  My self-criticism of my investment of time and emotion in watching and following NFL football is not yet complete.

Frank M Bass, Jr. Cuero High SchoolMy father, Frank M. Bass, Jr., was particularly proud of this picture.  The four stripes on the sleeve showed that he lettered in football in each of his four years at Cuero High School in south Texas.  The star on the sleeve denotes his being the captain of the football team.  We watched many Purdue University football games together. While I did not follow in his footsteps, I give him credit for not being bothered about it.  So watching a football game is a little love note to my father, who died in 2006.

I’ve been pondering about Step 33 of Steps to Knowledge, “I have a mission in my life to fulfill.”  I believe that people in general, and Americans in particular, have a certain discomfort in considering this idea.  The discomfort comes from thinking that if I have a mission in my life to fulfill, then it follows that I can’t just do whatever I want.  I have to evaluate my activities and involvements in the light of that mission, however dimly I grasp it.

Who knows, maybe the real love note I could give to my father would be to fulfill my mission in life.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

They Took Their Money And Their Risks

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Mercenary Team On Lost What do you think of mercenaries, people who kill people and break things for money?  The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid wasn’t shy about telling people how he felt:

It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and their impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
(Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries)

I am sharing this with you because I am continuing my evaluation of my relationship with watching and following American professional football, as part of the Deep Evaluation practice/attitude of the New Message from God. Before I go any further with this, let me clarify something about the Deep Evaluation practice. I am offering no opinions whatsoever about anyone else’s involvement with football, or anything else, for that matter. I freely accept the possibility that someone else’s involvement with football might be a positive influence on them, making them a better person than they would be otherwise.

I vividly recall a conversation I had with a person who was a little less football-literate than I was, during the glory days of the Dallas Cowboys in the early 1990’s. They asked if any of the star players of the team (quarterback Troy Aikman, running back Emmitt Smith, wide receiver Michael Irvin) actually came from Dallas. None of them did. In fact, very few NFL players actually grew up in the city of the team for which they play. The person said “Oh, so they’re kind of like mercenaries. They don’t have any particular loyalty to their city, but they offer their services to the highest bidder.” I freely confess to being annoyed by this comparison, but on further review, I was much more annoyed by my lack of a snappy comeback at the time.

One might argue that football players don’t try to kill people and break things. But aren’t both mercenaries and football players making a tradeoff between money and risk? I recall a time when Troy Aikman was asked where the Super Bowl was going to be played after receiving a major concussion (one of ten concussions in his NFL career). He said “Henryetta?” (as in Henryetta, Oklahoma, his home town). The National Football League recently agreed to a $765 million tentative settlement over concussion-related injuries among its 18,000 retired players.  Have we agreed to the principle of a tradeoff between money and risk?  Are we now merely negotiating over the amount of money and the amount of violence?  Should I reduce or expand my investment of time, attention, emotion, etc., in this enterprise?

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

After Further Review, Put Down The NFL, And Slowly Back Away

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Joe Flacco, MVP of 2013 Super Bowl, Super Bowl XLVII

About a year ago, I wrote in this space about a practice or attitude adopted by students of the New Message from God called the Deep Evaluation.  This brief description of the Deep Evaluation comes from the book The Great Waves of Change:

“The deep evaluation is really an evaluation of what you are giving your life to and what you are assigning in life to be your chief influences, for every relationship represents an influence. This power of influence is very significant, but most people are not aware of it or its consequences.”

A human being is free to choose his influences.  A human being is not free not to choose what she assigns to be her chief influences.  A human being is not free to not experience the influence of whatever he assigns to be his chief influences.  I have a hard time arguing with this.

Somehow, I have a connection inside me between this time of year, and Deep Evaluation activities.  Last year, the subject of scrutiny was my relationship with Twitter. Since my last post about Twitter, I’ve only tweeted about 800 tweets, an average between 2 and 3 tweets per day, instead of the 18 tweets per day I was tweeting.  What is the scrutinized involvement now?  Watching and following American professional football.

I was a Dallas Cowboys fan when the team went 1-15, and there was a quarterback controversy between Steve Walsh and some other guy I’m having trouble remembering…oh yeah, Troy Aikman. I was a Dallas Cowboys fan when Troy Aikman led the team to three Super Bowl victories in the span of four years.  I have been at the zenith and the nadir of the fan experience.

But that’s not the point.  The point is “What influence does NFL football have on me?”  As I ponder this, the answer I get is “It whets an appetite for warfare, conquest and victory.”  If I live in a world with a collection of warring tribes, and I wish to be a unifying influence on those tribes, maybe I should be less emotionally involved in an activity where people vicariously participate in tribal warfare.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.