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“The true philosopher and the true poet are one. And a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, are the aim of them both.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Nick A. Jameson is a philosopher-poet and ideologue with strong progressive convictions and a history of creative endeavors, including the conception of left-leaning political, economic, business and spiritual theories. Residing in Bend, OR, Nick was born in Fort Bragg, CA, and has spent most of his life in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties, CA. He has a BA in Business Economics from UCSB and an MA in English from ASU. He writes both fiction and nonfiction spanning many genres, including short stories, novels, philosophy, poetry, theology, theosophy and sociopolitical theory.
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My Autobiographical Selfie:
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Born in the redwoods of coastal Northern California in the former mill and fishing town of Fort Bragg, my early years were trouble-free times of youthful exuberance. I was very much a rural kid, playing sports with friends, catching critters, exploring the forest, shooting bb guns, swimming in the river and ocean and eating blackberries off the bush until my hands were stained purplish-black and my stomach ached. At the age of six my father was transferred to the rapidly urbanizing town of Santa Rosa, CA, in the heart of the Sonoma County Wine Country, an hour north of San Francisco. There, I gradually transformed into a video gamer with a strong creative streak. In my adolescence I concocted elaborate games for friends that captured their attention for hours on end, often during school hours. Some of these games were centered around toys, but the more popular were on paper; my “paper games.”
As I matured I came to the same conclusion that most young, observant people come to: Money is the root of freedom, for freedom is purchased, not freely given. I knew that I had to do everything possible to accrue as much cash as possible, so that I could do and be who I wanted. This culturally-pervasive mindset continued through most of my undergraduate days, during which I attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and studied Business Economics. Post-graduation, I entered the real estate business. In retrospect, I believe that I confused my love of the land, a pantheistic sense of divinity innate to natural property, with the property business. I thought that they could work together. Alas, honing the heeding of my heart led to feeling conflicted with the profession, eventually calling me away.
Coming out of UCSB, I was highly motivated by the orthodox ambitions inculcated into western youth by way of our aristocratically-hailing conservative culture and, through them, decidedly driven to pursue what most consider the hallmarks of ‘success:’ a lucrative career, the socioeconomic rank and all the trappings. This was before I realized the subjectivity of ‘success,’ and the fact that the greater form is that which Einstein alluded to: “Try not to become a person of success, but, rather, a person of value.”
Thus, the doubts that I’d begun developing during my last couple years at UCSB that following the traditional path might not be the best, most moral and progressive use of my abilities coalesced into feeling called towards my purpose. The 2008 financial market implosion that penalized the many, especially the disadvantaged, for the evil of the privileged few only added greater force to these realizations. For, upon closer inspection, and upon tracing the full causality of focusing on wealth, I realized that the path of financial and material accumulation is indivisible from the prevailing cultural parasitism and its production of every avoidable form of suffering. The more you’re said to ‘make,’ the more you take. Nothing materializes from nothing, and capitalism unbalanced by socialistic principles and equity-sharing is less about freedom and hard work than it is about exploiting disadvantage in unsustainably extracting the limited value of the world from the planet, the buyer and the workforce.
My heart and conscience thereby began to crystalize around the greater concept of success: defining it in terms of the creation rather than the extraction of value. Later, as my spiritual awareness grew and I began to sense that ‘listening to your heart’ is more than mere fleeting emotion, but a tapping into a truer, fuller form of universal Self, my earlier doubts converged with my contemplations to form the first seeds of my ideology, and everything changed. Through the pen I planted these seeds in the fertile soil of my conviction-compelled creativity. The constant content creation offered through my website, the papers, books and videos, is the result.
What I realized in my late 20’s is that I’m meant to combine my intellectual exercises with the spiritual messages conducted through my heart. This has led me to some profound conclusions about the nature of existence and the greedy heart of western culture compromising our collective potential. Moving beyond the business world, I committed myself to exploring the realm of language and ideas, eventually earning an MA in English from Arizona State University. At the same time my innate creativity found a grander outlet in conjunction with my naturally-philosophical mindset, and I began practicing the ancient art of storytelling whilst simultaneously seeking the underlying nature of reality. Up from the aforementioned soil an ideology has since sprouted; books and papers made of true conviction, meant not simply to entertain, but to edify and elevate, offering both stories and social systems that possess the potential to help steer humankind away from a ‘greed is good’ attitude that minimizes total quality of life on Earth, and towards systems serving all of humanity and the protection of life and the planet.
That was CA…
In 2018, taking advantage of a familial link in facilitating a move that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford, I moved to Bend, Oregon. My subsequent professional experiences have been illuminating, to say the least. Through the shining of the black light the switch for the white light was finally found and flipped… My first position was for a caregiving company, granting me great insight into how much suffering there is in the world, how foolish it is to wallow in my own suffering, and how many unscrupulous companies spring up around the need to serve the badly debilitated. This position led to my connected recruitment at a medium security mental health facility, when my service of one of their clients through the caregiving gig caught the attention of some key staff members of the institution.
The persistent revelations produced by working in the world of mental health included more than I could possibly iterate here, including the correlation between nurture and nature; especially how any great degree of unnaturality and neglect of the former will invariably manifest in breakdowns of the latter. Everyone possesses the latent capacity to develop a mental illness, it’s all a matter of how much stress they’re exposed to, how much relieving support they receive, and their innate resiliency to such pressures. But, more importantly to me, the mental health facility provided the ironic setting for the only time I’ve ever fallen madly in love. And I’m now certain of a certain confluence of love and insanity.
That wonderful young woman was a coworker on our shared overnight shifts, triggering a maddening crash course in unrequited love, one-sided relationships and unhealthy dependencies. I’ll never forget how much I loved her, and what the force of that love, however one-sided (I think she had love for me, but was in a committed relationship), woke up inside of me, vivifying my innermost being, whispering of the divine temple. I swear she saved me by proving to me that every hardship is worth it for any chance to have such an immense, life-affirming force reciprocated. “I Fell in Love in a Mental Institution” tells the whole story. But as brutal as that ecstatically-agonizing experience was, the next position, as a bookseller at one of the foremost purveyors of fiction on the planet, was more brutal, leading to the writing of the semi-fictional novella “Holier Than Thou.” Both of these books have since been censored on social media and by certain review companies due to being politically incorrect, as the truth all too often is.
These three work positions have had dramatic psychological ramifications for me, as well as having some impact upon every book that I’ve written since moving to Bend. But as ‘negative’ as this biographical snapshot may well sound to many, please never forget that the only way to summon and shine the light is by knowing the darkness, that the pains of the past can either capsize you or become the catalysts of reformation and procreation, and that the only mistake of any misstep is failing to let it teach you where to place your feet as you stride forward. We’re all evolving all of the time, and there’s no ‘negative’ that doesn’t have a directly connected positive causality. Yin and Yang, Right and Wrong, Good and Evil; these aren’t separated concepts, but intimately correlated forces. I regret none of it, for all of it, whether of the heart or of the mind, has been of my forging. In moments of clarity I recognize that it’s all long been training me for a future in which I can lead people up the mountain because of being bloodied by all of the slips and falls, boulder-breaking and boundary-surmounting of its ascent.
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Some work from my Master’s program at ASU:
https://sites.google.com/view/naj-asu-ma-english
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I find that most people tend to feel threatened by thinkers; by those that possesses the capacity and inborn drive to formulate and understand ideas and subjects on a level which they don’t, or can’t.
The vast majority would much rather that you simply fit in, playing your part in upholding the status quo, even if you’re revolted by it. This is what it is to ‘be professional,’ and to ‘contribute to society’ in the minds of most. You’re a ‘naïve idealist’ and distracting nuisance to think and act otherwise.
Thus, instead of supporting such thinkers, their ideas and works, most people’s instinctive response is to try to destroy them; to tear them down and thereby eliminate the threat to their own pridefully-insecure egos. This is even more true when the ideas being advanced by the thinker are a threat to their livelihood or worldview, which meets with an ever uglier, more self-defensive response. As arrogant as this no doubt sounds, I find this phenomenon to be a prevailing force in my life; a force pushing me away from people so as to avoid ruffling their overly-sensitive feathers.
At the same time, one of my greatest aspirations is to seek-out and cultivate a community within which I and others like me can be myself/ourselves, and to push as many people currently ‘on the fence’ over that fence and into this progressive fold as possible. I seek community; solidarity; shared, creative endeavor and progressive purpose. If you feel the same way, please reach out!
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Critics are commonly derided as cynics, a word used to denote those with a pessimistic view of the world; one dictionary synonym is “prophets of doom;” an example of conservative propaganda built right into the dictionary. In reality, cynicism is a blending of idealism and realism. It is based upon a realistic doubt of how things are presented, and the realization that people and profit present false fronts in order to pursue the maximization of their interests; interests which are very often mutually exclusive with the best interests of those to whom they’re presenting those false fronts.
Such ‘cynicism’ is thereby not only necessary to see the truth and protect yourself from the costs of being a victim of indoctrinating propaganda, but is also my version of ‘realism;’ as opposed to the version that’s actually immoralism; that’s motivated by the need to justify immorality on the pretense of ‘it’s simply the reality that human beings are inherently evil, and will act against others for their own self-interest.’ In the commercial sphere this is summed up as ‘it’s just business.’
Yet the reality is that there’s a critical difference between humans being inherently corruptible through limitations and susceptibilities of body and mind and people being inherently evil; and it needn’t be ‘just business’ to prey upon weaknesses of people and planet; there are better, far more just, sustainable ways of organizing and engaging in business that will ultimately prevail.
So, you see, ‘cynics’ have their own motivation, and, in fact, it has nothing to do with negativity and being a ‘prophet of doom,’ but more like seeing the causes of doom and attempting to save oneself and others from it. For when you truly begin to grasp cynicism, you’ll find that it has a PROGRESSIVE motivation at its heart, and persistently reminds us of truths gleaned from a ‘cynical’ doubt of others’ presented motives and the results of conservative practices BECAUSE its proponents are motivated to FIX THE PROBLEMS and pursue idealistic solutions.
There can be no solutions (i.e. ‘progressivism’) without first doubting the presented reality that prevents us from pursuing said solutions (i.e. ‘cynicism’). You’re a cynic, or you’re a victim.