MYTHING THE POINT

“A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth.”
-Edward De Bono, consultant, writer, and speaker (1933- )

Joseph Campbell and Daniel Quinn both speak of how easy it is to see through the quaint myths of other cultures when compared to the hard facts of ones own. The hard, neigh impossible part for some is to perceive the myth of ones own culture. To see ones own facts in the same light that revealed the devotion to the collective imagination that made those other myths gospel to believers is a transcendence required before one truly becomes responsible for ones own life. It seems to me that glimpse of the myth of ones “truths” beyond barriers of forgotten leaps of faith occurs to everyone at some point in their life. When the accumulation of experience and rudimentary skills in pattern analysis actually shows the play, the actors and most startling of all … that the stage and background, upon which the latest production is being enacted, is alive with alternative possibilities from among which each of the various cultures (plays) chooses a steady diet of one only — after all, that’s what distinguishes a culture. I’ve come across the notion that a noticable amount of the folks with eureka moments in their lives had them in their early thirties, and these are just the ones that manifested it in such a way that I get to hear about it through biography or anecdote. These cases are just the tip of the iceberg with less material, more numerous occurances below the surface of the sea of personal consciousness rather than above in the hot air of public attention.
I have to confess that Buddhist readings account for the most examples I’ve encountered. It was there that I first read a description of transcendence that paralleled the heretofore unexplainable experiences occuring to me: I was seeing the emperor’s nakedness making me a crazy man in a culture that admired his clothes. I still see emperor and his culture that way but I’ve learned there is no standards by which sanity can be measured to be found in nature except inability to adapt to life. Other readings contained accounts of scientists, saints, philosophers, millionaires, entertainers, etc., etc.

Okay, here comes a doozy of a notion for you: What if everyone reaches that realization at some point in their life just like pubic hair sprouting at adolescence, some early some late. Since such visions are so personal and initially so incomprehensibly beyond description occurances haven’t been noticed by others. The closest we come to naming it is when some one is described by others as “having reached adulthood” because a new dimension has truly opened itself to the tautologically taught children of mother culture and they appear quite serious about something on their mind. Still with me? Okay. At the genesis of this first adult experience the first adult responsibility must be assumed: choosing ones interpretation of the experience. For those who deny the vision, adulthood becomes a terminal condition in a life drained by energy spent keeping the blinders in place. For those who exploit the vision by fleecing the flock still munching on the myth, adulthood is imagined to be godhood by the sycophantic praise. For those who see the vision as a stage of personal evolution, adulthood itself evolves toward becoming a conscious symbiotic part of the evolution of the planet and beyond. The beginning of that evolution takes the form of withdrawing support of the part of the myth antagonistic to nature.
Ishmael asks his student, “What cage holds you captive?”

THE INEFFICIENCY OF CERTAINTY

“But it is not sufficient to have made these observations (every thing I ever learned or believed is wrong); care must be taken likewise to keep them in remembrance. For those old and customary opinions perpetually recur — long and familiar usage giving them the right of occupying my mind, even almost against my will, and subduing my belief; nor will I lose the habit of deferring to them and confiding in them so long as I shall consider them to be what in truth they are, viz., opinions to some extent doubtful, as I have already shown, but still highly probable, and such as it is much more reasonable to believe than deny. It is for this reason I am persuaded that I shall not be doing wrong, if, taking an opposite judgment of DELIBERATE DESIGN, I become my own deceiver, by supposing, for a time, that all those opinions are entirely false and imaginary until at length, having thus balanced my old by my new prejudices, my judgment shall no longer be turned aside by perverted usage from the path may conduct to the perception of truth. For I am assured that, meanwhile, there will arise neither peril nor error from this course, and that I cannot for the present yield too much to distrust, since the end I now seek is not action but knowledge.”
—René Descarte, OF THINGS OF WHICH WE MAY DOUBT

Gee, René, I'm all for looking at the world from alternate perspectives, but the phrase “…deliberate design,” seems to ring of another deeper motive and failing — falling into the same old traps of attempting to use reason to logically, meticulously create, or in Descartes’ case, revamp certitude, which, in essence and perpetuity, tries to make truth definable, separate from all that it isn’t; this as separate from that. Might just as well try and define the universe by describing what it isn’t, because it’s already been defined as everything — how reasonable is that? Any attempts to be deliberate require building a structure using certainties as material within which doubt may not, much less curiosity will not reside, so long as there's the slightest crack to let in the light of all the rest out there. Experimental skepticism like Descartes' can only intend deeper confirmation in a newer conformity, less aware or admitting of new experience, as in the bored hubris of "I've seen it all"; a new rendition of the old traditional commitment to something to ward off further doubt. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss — I won’t be fooled again! Certainty is not something you can prepare out of yesterday’s experiences for tomorrow’s meal if curiosity is to be nourished. The elusive feeling that certainty is designed to decoy and bag is a feeling of righteousness in the moment — every moment despite the onslaught of contradictions. The moment is too immaterial for structure, too vast and fast for scrutiny. Only the natural metaphor beckons and evokes a universal relevance beyond capacity or desire for descriptive mortar to seal the cultural myth from within. To paraphrase Descartes, I cannot at present yield too much to distrust, since the end I now seek is not action, certain knowledge or trust but happy, willing, conscious symbiosis with the universe of which I am a version and an indivisible part. If I do not rely on sanitized packaging of dried certitudes for mental sustenance, I am free to eat the fresh food on hoof and vine according its appeal to my curiosity's omnivoracious appetite, for I have no belief structure to pollute with the fossil fuels of petrified certainty
A certainty is a conclusion is a knowledge is an understanding is an opinion is a theory is a definition is a version is a viewpoint is a possibility is a hope is a belief is a security is an isolation is a faith is a barrier is a comfort is a trust is a reliance is a perceived necessity is an addiction and … is totally debilitating to observation without prejudice. Definable reality is never more than a belief system. This is the choice certitude demands we make; does universal nature permeate and connect life more interdependently than civilization would have it be or is our planet merely material with which to patch up the cracks through which the grass will eternally grow.
Our bloated modern brain is all muscle and electromechanism straining to contain, catalogue and justify its conclusions during its pony ride through the evidential wilderness of the always unknown and alien territory called the future upon the back of its docile, faithful, always ignored steed: the primitive brain, which has always been here now and happy knowing its genetic memory is a metaphor for wherever whatever variation nature serves up in the daily do. The cultural demand for certainty occupies our modern brain so constantly we become convinced we are in control of the pony ride, like a tourist on a burro entering the Grand Canyon, against all evidence that we were strapped in for nature’s lifelong ride from before the canyoun was a puddle. Or that we control digestion, just because we can stuff things down our throat and wipe off the other end. Or that we do the breathing, just because we can blow hot air.

BACK TO THE GARDEN

Poignant metaphors for the nature of life in the universe abound in every seed I plant and watch sprout, bloom and bare fruit. Fibonacci fiddleheads of uncoiling sprigs of golden cherry tomato flowers, spirals of burgeoning broccoli flowers and the vortices of protective shells on voracious snails come to eat them all bare ideas as juicy as any fruit. As I sit in my greenhouse contemplating the garden stretched out before me, a timelessness pervades perception and I have observed a clod of soil roll three inches when it lost its balance on the slowly rising hill being pushed up by an aggressive black-eyed pea sprout searching for the sun. I half expect David Attnborough’s spritely comment on phenomena only revealed by time lapse cameras. And that watermelon runner I redirected just this morning has turned its leaves back to the sun again.
Metabolism, not just for animals anymore, is the respiration/recycle rate of living creatures. In general, a ratio of metabolism to bodily mass is consistant throughout nature; ie, the earth’s rotation/mass ratio is much the same as human’s breath/mass ratio, or any other scale comparison. Humans can perceive a range of phenomenan in time and space beyond which, at one end of the metabolic spectrum, is too small and/or either moves or lives too fast for us to even notice, and at the other, is so large we only see the space between atoms/stars never suspecting, much less beholding, the body of which they are a part moving so slowly it is never identified as such, much less that earth may be an electron in orbit around the nucleus we call Sun in that body. The metabolism of a plant is at a slightly higher vibration level than the food it eats combined with the energy of the sun to convert the organic material into its own developing body, which our bodies, at a slightly higher vibration level yet, are in turn nourished by. Within the ecosystem of earth there is a replenishment of resources motivated by the seasonal attitude of the earth to the sun played out in the drama of the birth, hunger, death, nourishment cycle.
Galactically such a system is fed through black holes recycling galaxies at their centers like the maw of an octopus. Metaphorically, black holes are the mobius loop recycling centers for questions of beginnings and endings, age, size, distance, superiority, ad infinitum. Peering into such a black hole with a powerful enough telescope could reveal a large eye peering through a powerful enough microscope at a wee anomily in the space between the particles of a nucleus.
So, what garden is it that I harvest such a crop of horse twaddle and speculation from? Just 148 square feet of specially mixed soil contained in 12” deep frames atop the surface of what once was a junkyard. Digging my pond only 3.5 feet deep uncovered all manner of mechanical parts and satellite photos from ‘95 show the yard of the entire six acres covered in cars and trucks. I moved here two years ago when torrential rains turned local soil to emulsion and a beautiful leaning hackberry in the front of my apartment went to leaning all the way over, busting the wiring in the next apartment and eventually getting me evicted when the landlord wouldn’t satisfy the city’s demand to bring the building up to code and tore it down after I’d lived there for 15 years. I’m in the shade of another hackberry now. A very erect one this time. I chose to live here because it is relatively cheap, the landlord was a friend, who, as it turns out after much debate and settling in, approves of the things that appear in the wake of my piddling around my section of the land: porch, pond, greenhouse, garden and perhaps a larger pond under dome to raise tilapia in.
The whole time I lived at my previous location the only kernal of dissatisfaction in my life was that I had nowhere to grow things while the dawning of needing to become independent of agribusiness gnawed at me more and more due to the impending peak oil crisis. Such considerations drove me to order fifty pound sacks of rice and black-eyed peas inn lieu of growing my own. And now, here I am planting those very black-eyed peas and getting the creamiest, most flavorful meals I could imagine them ever providing, with straight out of the garden onions, garlic, serrano peppers liberally spiced with basil and cilantro —watch out. Such revelations in flavor may be the tip of the iceberg in discovering that all commercially available foods have been leached of the vitality required to sustain enquiring minds and to keep them thinking National Enquirer has the answers to questions they’ve been too dumbed down to ask. The connection — grocery checkout lines! Who knew?

Reality Tunnels, can't dig 'em, don't hold water, go nowhere

I've been thinking about reality tunnels as a metaphor for belief systems and whether looking at ones own reality tunnel from the other end would reveal a diametrically opposed belief system, or a realization of the world that had been denied and a forgetting of the world seen from the accustomed end … or the master diagram with which the tautology of the tunnel was woven over ones lifetime and may therefore be dissembled like the unweaving of maya’s veil. But then for the latter to occur, there must be a reality brought clear upon the dissolution of ones tunnel and for Robert Anton Wilson’s theory there can be no such thing. The sensations of ones cells can only be gossip about the civilization of the body they’re a part of with no external stimulus to transmit, which, when you think about it, is a pretty good description of a body composed of the entire universe in a psychotic curiosity about its own existence, there being no feedback from without for such a supposed being. Sorry, Bob, for me to see what I call green there must be something to see whether it has color or not. To go beyond labeling what I see and behold its essence can be a simultaneous apprehension of the universe from matter to energy and back again in a mobius loop continuum of awareness crackling with the spark of life. I have no evidence, no proof of such a statement for anyone who cannot see through the cells of my words.
Rather than a tunnel, how about a hologram metaphor? So long as one questions the correctness, importance or purpose of ones life, the image of ones design specifications is distorted by wherever one imagines the supreme creator judges one to be, like the area of a hologram in which the entire picture may be seen — tailored to the perspective of the area. The having or even needing of such virtues may be no more than a cultural imposition evolved over 16,000 years to enmesh new energy in the grid of the current local collective belief system for ultimate control of the environment as commanded by the imagined creator of it all. With no designated perfection, status or purpose, cultural or imagined, against which to judge oneself comes an often frightening freedom of independent self reliance fueled by energy newly freed from such artificially important considerations. And for those merely toying with existence outside the grid there’s a scary loss of an artificially certain future replaced by the bother of actually paying attention to the immediate environment since it is no longer seen as a mere stepping stone from one air conditioner to another in the progress of purpose.
It has been my experience in the process of weaning myself from belief systems and the debilitating cultural teat that life becomes a happening of which I can either be an observer or participant according to my whim d’moment. Now, two years after moving here, I look at the signs of environmental symbiosis evolving around me in the fledgling garden and burgeoning pond and I can remember no more purpose or labor than satisfying a spontaneous urge, no more importance than remembering to water and weed the plants in exchange for food, feed the kittens in exchange for snuggles and the fish in exchange for entertainment for the cats and I, and no more correctness than feeling my fresh veggie smoothie cause me hiccoughs as my cells to do the jig with every swig. But that’s my reality tunnel … maybe.

THE USA IS NOT AMERICA!

During the last thirty years I've noticed the increasing habit of politicians' calling the United States "America" and shunting all other nations in North and South America to some hyphinated subclassification; Mexican-American, Canadian-American, Latin American (even Afro-American to clarify the white bread soul of the ancestors of the American revolution). Considering the recent political trend toward putting Texas-Americans in Washington perhaps citizens of the 50 states should be referred to as United Stetsons. The trend of United States' businesses' relocating industry to third world sweatshops recalls a t-shirt I distributed in the seventies to protest Viet Nam, "U.S. out of North America." In the era of the stolen presidency, the United States isn't even United (its red or blue) or States as the Constitution is violated from free speech to states' rights. The hubris of calling the the U.S. "America" to the exclusion of the rest of the hemisphere is a speech pattern any psychiatrist would term megalomania.

THE SWALLOWERS

Since being exposed to Daniel Quinn’s concept of leavers and takers with my first reading of Ishmael I have been increasingly aware of the possibility that that ancient transitional period — when man no longer had to be respectfully aware of his relationship to the nature of his nurturing habitat because agriculture and its dependent, artificially large communities allowed generations to develop the manipulative antagonism to nature that characterizes the taker mentality — is experienced by every human child born into this oblivious Mother Culture as an institutional checkoff, like circumcision. It is a period between leaver and taker I have come to call swallower, ala foie gras, when the child is force fed Mother Culture until those “difficult teens” when the institution rewards the swallowers with official membership in the paté of spoiled living and relegates the rebukers to the heretical outlands where their influence is influenced by media filters if they are at all disruptive. Every taker parent foists Mother Culture on their newborn leaver child whether they mean to or not. Some have made giant leaps in leaving their little leavers alone. I have friends who live in the woods, carry their water from the river, and have a seven year-old daughter who took me for an enlightening tour of her world as might an Amazonian native. There’s a leaver buried in us all. We must meditate on this until our change is more than intellectual in order to rescue future generations of leavers from the neck vice with which Mother Culture holds them still.

ROBERT ANTON WILSON AND REALITY TUNNELS

Just watched the movie ”Maybe Logic” wherein the author of “Cosmic Trigger” expounds on reality tunnels and uses maybe logic to dissolve them. Basically his hypothesis is that the brain sorts the sensations it receives from each of the billions of the body’s cell’s perceptions of the universe like a collator placing familiar ones in belief system, BS, pigeon holes and shuttling contradictions and irrelevancies out the door of nonexistence. The dissolution to such tautology is to replace the word “is” with “maybe”, thus opening the mind to probabilities and the recognition that the hardest fact is still just a guess agreeable to the most reality tunnels. Somehow he dismisses objective reality out of hand with his mantra, “non simultaneously apprehended universe” as if the inability to comprehend it all at once is proof of nonexistence. My preference for calling belief systems personal versions leaves the door open to the possibility that their exists a unique truth, the same origin for all personal versions which, because of the infinite diversity of belief systems is never more communicable than by the most sublime music and poetry — leading us only to the threshold and leaving the crossing to our corageous curiosity to overcome the fear of shattering our BS, blowing our mind.
One aside he made spoke volumes to me about my love of solitude and the fear of boredom it instills in people whose idea it is that their belief system, reality tunnel, version is comprehensive of the entire universe simultaneously. Solitude demands that we either modify our belief system to include the otherwise dismissible perceptions thus realized in poignant relevance without the distraction of “real world” society or feel the discomfort at the effort now required to shuttle such perceptions into the void of nonexistence.
Mr. Wilson and I are on the same page, in a similar paragraph, in a relevant sentence, using approximately the same words — about as close as I’ve ever gotten to any other version — maybe.

THE IDES OF JUNE

The Ides of June and all is well here on the Dawgranch, as we have come to call our little, 6 acre community of kindred folks sharing the peace and quiet at this admittedly baby step away from a city of a million frantic people. Asenath, of We Are Dirt People, began this micro community, introduced me to it and is now on her way to India.
If you are with me so far, good, because I am getting to the place where I state my intentions for the purpose of this blog: It Must Be The Vapors is maintained for the purpose of recording observations and discussions about the idea of learning to become symbiotic partners in the nature of our planet and to withdraw from membership in a culture whose myth of stewardship is leading to a future where the entire biomass will become our favorite food and us … and that's all folks.
I hope this gets the ball rolling from friends and foe alike because I see western civilization and all the third world wannabees drunkenly racing toward a cliff of ecological catastrophy and our leaders silencing whistleblowers to keep the party going and stay elected. See you on the flip side.

FIRST POST

Well, well, well … I actually got here in attempt to comment on a post by my traveling friends, We Are Dirt People, off to spend a year in India, and ended up going through the whole rigmarole of creating my own blog. It's not like I have nothing to say, I just usually reserve my observations for friends, given my curmudgeonly attitude toward civilization and the technological/political "real world" carefully honed over many years of trying to love it, trying to do something about it and finally deciding that the best thing I could do to get the world I live in to be what I feel it could be is to live each day as if it were so already and that the grid-locked groupies are a society that likes to bitch in heaven. And, wouldn't you know it, once I began to see the world as the stage and background for the "real world" drama, I realized that it truly is … no as ifs, ands or buts about it.
That's why I live in the background of this picture of my garden in an attempt to learn to sustain myself by symbiosis with the nature of the planet. Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, clued me in on the idea that, once man's developing agriculture became totalitarian and food began to be locked up, people no longer needed to heed nature's seasonal signs to gain a meal, nor did they have the time what with having to earn shekel for a loaf of bread, their carefully developed hunter-gatherer skills faded into genetic memory. I rely heavily on those genetic memories in my life now as both a guide and for the quietude their reading requires.
Well, that's a beginning — we'll see how often I return.