OBSERVING OUR ORB

Five hundred years after reason showed faith that the earth is not the axis and purpose of the universe, in denial of a god’s special gift to his special creations, even astronomers still say the “moon rises” and the “sun sets.” Before civilization began thinking for its citizens, peasants could easily have grasped the alternative way to perceive the apparent passing of heavenly bodies in daily review as, not the worship of the nest god made for humans, but the result of living on a huge merry-go-round watching a vaster, much less concerned universe going about its own business. Even before the church’s official dominotion it wouldn’t be hard to assume a terracentric perspective just from its immense relative stability compared to its fleeting inhabitants and swirling skies.

While living in my first tipi I developed a daily habit of greeting the end of the day facing west on the edge of a cliff over Lake Travis, sipping a bowl of nature’s finest and eventually recognizing what at first felt like a breeze at my back each time the sun was covered by the horizon. I’ve come to see that as the same sort of relativistic error as saying, “sunset.” What I was experiencing was my back penetrating the edge of Earth’s cooler shadow dwelling in sol’s lee awaiting the turbulent mixture with the freshly sun baked atmosphere that accompanies the land on the rotisserie as we rode into it at the speed of eight-hundred and ninety-seven miles per hour here at thirty degrees north latitude. This continuous quenching of hot air following Earth’s rotation into the night side at speeds of up to a thousand and thirty-six miles per hour at the equator is the prime generator of our weather patterns, condensing clouds back into the puddles and lakes they’d evaporated from in a twenty-four hour breathing cycle.

I quite enjoy employing the geometry I acquired during the engineering education phase of my lifelong endeavor to satisfy my curiosity in appreciating that even the sphere of Earth, with its surface’s diminishing distance from the rotational axis as one goes from the equator toward the poles, does this weather brewing at a corresponding latitudinal variation of suddenness in the system that forms anything from mild zephyrs to hurricanes out of thin air along the way. Trigonometry allows me to calculate how far away the curvature that blocks the sun before and after its appearance may be by adding a six foot tall person to the radius of the Earth for the hypotenuse of a triangle whose sides are that radius and the line of sight along a tangent to the surface, showing that in a vast desert or at sea the horizon is a mere three and a half miles away.

And this is just about the shape and rotation of our celestial nest without mentioning the profound effect that the twenty-three and a half degree angle our rotational axis makes with the ecliptic. Just calling Earth’s orbit plane the ecliptic leads one to realize that, without the plane of the moon’s orbit around the earth being five degrees against it, we would have alternating solar and lunar eclipses every two weeks. Earth’s axis, while slightly wobbly, essentially points to the same place in space requiring the assignment of new stars the role of Polaris over millennia as the whole of the universe shifts outside our galaxy and we within it. This regularity of polar direction leads to a regular change of season as the north and south poles take turns pointing toward Sol for their summers and prolonged daylight and nightdark in latitudes within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles when the horizon blocks the sun, or cannot, for many successive rotations. Between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn there is nowhere the sun does not strike directly due to the alternation between twenty-three and a half degrees above and below the equator from the axis tilt, leaving the other eighty-seven percent of Earth to take what they can get.

This post is an outpouring of thoughts accumulated over a lifetime and brought to the surface in the past few years of extended periods of pondering it all while just sitting a gawkin’ and a grokkin’. It came to a head with a post by Bean Sprouts on establishing a mnemonic to remember moon phases where I commented, “I find it depressing that you think people are that stupid,” to which depression 12 other commentors added. I suppose, like the sunlight’s distribution due to the tilt of the axis, eighty seven percent of humanity never receives enlightenment directly through their own perceptions and must rely on faith in the slanted certainty of authority about that which they believe they cannot know for themselves. They might as well join Jim Carrey in the Truman Show for all the care they have for the reality of nature having anything to do with their "real world" … you know, the created one.

SURVIVING CIVILIZATION

Today I’d like to explore the notion that at cell division a process known as epigenesis occurs wherein, while normally passing on its DNA as its programming would have it, each cell also bequeaths its progeny a uniqueness due to its environment, a genetic memory as it were. Genetics proposes that … well …

Let’s talk about something near and dear to our hearts. Let’s talk about the automobile, the epitome of human progress in the digital science of identical reproduction such that any part may be swapped with any other car of that particular species. The blueprints are the genetic map for those autos rolling off that assembly line in spit polished profusion. Each one of those cars, over a period of ten years, if it survives its driver and a life of road rage, will be as unique among its own race for its experience as among other species. When the crusher makes a four foot cube out of it as its final resting place, all those dents, clogged valves and semen soaked seats will go up in the smoke of the smelter, never to be known to the fender on the newest model of the new line that inherited some of the metal. If cars were alive, they could drive themselves by now with their inherited memory of landscapes and fender scrapes over the short history of the Otto cycle engine, while we keep up with the latest change of everything on our distraction device. But they’re not. We are.

From a single act of the earliest cell division to the ongoing births, lives, reproductions and deaths of cells forming more complex entities born today, the story of being in the world is passed on at the same time the DNA dictates future functions. So far, the Human Genome Project has found that, barring identical twins and clones, each of us is unique and traceable right down to our genes. Any particular incidents in the various inherited lives in our unique memories have sifted away to trivia in the developing story of the parts of living that never change for any life form, the parts about symbiosis with nature no matter whether you are a mosquito or a bristle cone pine.

We are the gestalt of the inherited memories of all our cells intuitively guiding us away from mountains’ high ledges and axes’ sharp edges. The collector and story teller of our genetic memory, the primitive brain, is like the complex wave form on an analogue computer screen combining, not only the inherited knowledge about the way of the natural world from every cell, but also a cull of events in the present scanned for immediate relevance to symbiosis that may require instinctual correction of already distracted, mindless behavior. Sort of like the car that drives its self and plays oldies from before modern civilization on a radio that only goes up to a 1/2.

All this goes on before the primitive brain sends the news from the front on to our distraction device, the modern digital computer of a brain to be sliced, diced and collated into pigeon holes for further debate on meaning or forgotten by all but spiders.

One of the most powerful examples of and arguments for the process of evolution is the apparent experience of every stage of life leading up to human emergence undergone by the gestating human embryo, including the hairiness of the ape just before birth as a smooth pink skinned babe. I am proposing that this newborn comes fully informed about how to deal with the natural world once it learns how to use its new corporeal instrument. Most of Earth’s human population is born into a world as isolated from nature as possible. It’s the hallmark of civilization. If one examines the progress of the newborn learning to use its body, a parallel to mankind becoming civilized seems to continue as the individual matures. From earliest parental discipline through the molding of public education to the demand that food be kept on the table by other than growing, hunting or gathering it, civilization creates priorities that either shout down our genetic memory or demonize our instincts as signs of heretical evil.

The most powerful inheritance from our ancestors is the ability to learn from mistakes in our individual lives. Each of us is capable of becoming responsible for our own actions by learning to be symbiotic with our environment. Within the institutions of established society the wisdom of individuals is diluted to the lowest common denominator and the anonymity of the masses can make the same mistake forever, or until natural karma swallows them whole, which ever comes first.

The emergence of individuals from the stupor of civilization is a quite different sort of rebirth than is claimed by religions’ triumph over heretics.

FOOTPRINTS IN THE AMPERSAND

When I started this blog I had two primary interests: my business, Green Graphics and my garden, so, naturally, I chose gregra&gar as my blogger name, which worked fine until the last month or so when my name began showing up as gregra&"amp;"gar due to some glitch in their grammatical correction/html code leak through machine (I had to add the quotes so that blogger would not eliminate the "amp;" from this post as autonomously as they add it to my blogger name). Though most of you might recognize my comments despite the misnomer, I have corrected the appalling appellation by using Latin which, preceeding HTML as it does, has a better chance of escaping its self-righteousness with "et." You will still call me greg, Mr. G or G&G, but we all know who you're talking about, unlike the htmltionally correct Google.

CARDS ON THE TABLE

Flush up against Nature

To me, religion is whistling in the dark. If curiosity about the source of one’s consciousness and the phenomena it senses within and upon the flesh from without is inhibited by fear of a threat yet to be personally experienced one has lost that much potential for exploratory deviation from the theme of the piper’s tune. Anyone who has ever told a bed time story to a child can’t help but have noticed how real the boogie men are with only the sketchiest of threats; how mere mention of their name the next day can elicit desired reactions to the imaginary threat, the fear of the unknown. Such observations must have occurred to story tellers down through time who had gathered large enough audiences with tales about the nature of their environment and the characteristics of its multitude of life forms, so convinced by the accounts’ relevance to their own observations as to begin naming local objects after characters from the yarns.

This reifying of fiction makes an authority of the author and disciples of his readers. Depending on the wisdom and benevolence of this powerful bard-become-priest, he can either mentor his followers on how to find their own story on their own vision quest or bind them to his new truths with imaginative threats of unimaginable punishment from the boogie man for deviation from the plot line. No variations allowed on the tune one must whistle while passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or else. The most manipulative amongst these inheritors of abdicated authority are able to extend their sheep’s fears beyond threats of natural disasters for their heretical behavior into the abstract realm of being guilty of thinking wrong.

To posit right and wrong requires one find a purpose to be furthered, maintained or violated. While this may work when crying injustice in the court convened to apply the test of man made law designed to accomplish man made purpose, It has no application outside the enforced world of law and order. There is no justice in nature. One is either up to living with the way things are or eaten by them for refusing. Taking civilization as a body with its pollution and alteration of our environment since it was created it seems only natural that nature’s stomach is rumbling. In such a self regulating system, whence the need to posit a controller, a creator, a bequeather of earth to mankind to do as he damned well pleases, a being from whom to beg mercy for knowingly malicious acts, a granter of …

… I think I‘ve caught on to why the priests created a deity to be the banisher of man from his idyllic symbiosis with nature in Eden to scratch a living out of the earth. The mess our ownership attitude has made of this planetary nest needs someone to blame for our doing it and someone to beseech to absolve us from suffering our natural karma. So, that’s why I think religion is whistling in the dark, major portion of reality religion refuses permission to be lit and into which we are constantly crashing with no peeking, being taught to fear the unknown the way we have.

Only believers in a creator deity can turn the spontaneous, ephemeral beauty of a sunset into some created, artificial thing, while I am blown away at how the endless, carefree dissolve from one instance of beauty to the next makes a mockery of any notion of intention imaginable. And I chuckle to myself, poor babies.

I suppose I should close before I get too specific about the relative debilitation to human evolution caused by the various sects of believers in a supreme commander so I will leave you with a quote I have just put on my sidebar that seems too tidy to argue with:

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. ——— Stephen Roberts

I’ll see you on the path

LYING EYES?

My friend, August "Gusto" Finn

As if to seal off the last rays of truth in human communication, some clamp sphinctered turds want to shut away the last whistle blower left at our bullshit production plant to exploit body language to both scam, er, persuade the marks and mind probe their secrets. The last shred of spontaneous honesty will now be woven into the veil of secrecy. The dog will now have its tail removed to improve its chances at poker. They’re tryin’a devalue my iChat by teaching the body to be as duplicitous as words.

The next thing you know we'll need head sets imposing a uniform code of expression and interpretation upon anything we are likely to say or hear. No one would misunderstand anything if it were translated into coded language — or be able to think outside the program. Wait, isn't that religion? So that's what the halo's for.

There's even a chapter on eyes which intends to make one's windows to the soul as opaque as Tom Cruise's shades that totally ignores how to fake being comfortable looking directly into anothers eyes. The closest advise is to look away to prevent domination. Sheesh!!! I guess I can still trust the eyes … of infants.

by diyosa

GETTING TO … OR HAVING TO

If there’s ever been a fulcrum fine enough to find a balance for the dynamic between gratitude and resentment, I’ve never run across it. The threshold between opposites usually reveals their resolution like the third leg of a tripod for stability on all terrain, but this particular slice of life seems insistent on being an either/or deal. It certainly defines a basic characteristic to my actions since fulfilling my last promise twenty-four years ago, but this is the first time I’ve thought to question my immediate obedience to keeping myself glad to exist; preferring to be happy. It seems so obvious that it is a wonder anyone would choose to resent their existence. But then, no one chooses to be miserable. Resentment comes on the heels of surrendering our freedom to choose by placing blind faith in authority to know better than one’s own experience may show, be they teachers, preachers or political leachers whose certainty about the unknown leads the trusting to make promises about a fantasy future where nothing ever changes from the moment the promise freezes time. Once one has employed the prosthetic of faith based knowledge, even the freedom to make up one's own mind for oneself can appear to be a "have to" chore to be resented.

I have often pondered Aleister Crowley’s declaration, “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.” The ultimate sense of this prohibition of prohibition is that chaos, nature’s way of constant change, requires the spontaneity of unrestricted choice to maintain harmony by adapting ourselves to its unpredictable variations. Only failure to recognize this can account for the atrocities committed upon nature and each other to suit our exceptionally spoiled, and growing more so every day, selves.

Once Crowley’s law is violated by anyone prohibiting choice for themselves or others the compulsion breeds resentment no matter how sweet the sentiment. I have often suspected that the motivation for pre-emptive commitment to prohibition is a fear of buckling under the terrible, imagined reality of the theoretical situation looming out there in the future one “has to” face. Or, worse, the reverse; promises made in the heat of the moment manipulating gratitude with a hasty tasty token of undying sincerity replete with a hangover of “have to”s all the mourning’s down the road.

None of this is to say one shouldn’t feel responsible for the effect of one’s actions on others, but the degree to which such actions are gratuitous rather than an expected due makes all the difference in the flavor of ones reliability. Western civilization is built upon the rubble made of the cultures it demolished for not accepting promises never intended to be kept. Growing up in such an environment has taught me to concentrate on matters before me in the here and now where lies are useless in the face of the obvious. My experience has proven me ready for anything when my hands aren’t tied by my past and I get to live my life as I see fit.

Are you getting to live your life, or having to?

Night Mares in the Sea of Tranquility

I am but a wave in an existential ocean

Water formed high upon the surface of the sea

Sees a multitude of others waving back at me
All debating the intentions
Of the wind that whipped us up
Like some holy tempest
So tidy in its cup.

I see the troughs between us
And sense the level of our calm
I see those clouds above us
And sense rays of solar balm
Exciting enlightened levitation,
The night mare myth’s evaporation.

Over dry land I sweep, perhaps to rain
Where curiosity condenses
We wet droplets of the senses
Explore where the briny rarely reaches
Making mighty mountain breaches
When my ice makes sand for beaches
And rivulets in streams
Of pee that steams
On a journey urged by gravity
Toward the infinity of our nativity;
Our right mare,
Our mother, mother ocean
To sleep, perhaps to evaporate
As the next breeze sets her in motion
And we catch a new wave
To refresh this ancient memory
Reinhydrated once again.

LIVING WITHOUT

A man is wealthy by the amount of things he can live without - Shankarachara

Poverty: the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount.

I begin with this dictionary definition of poverty since visiting a web page where I typed in my my measly annual income (below the US poverty level by 50% but enough for me) and was informed that I was in the top 11% of wealth in the world!!! Proving I don't know what poverty means when the money talks.

All too often the word, poverty, is a rating of individuals or groups in comparison to the field in achieving a certain standard that is somehow used to define an inherent characteristic and so to facilitate judging them without the contagion of wearing their shoes. I can think of no more succinct personal experience with the foregoing than was encapsulated in an email from a friend describing his observation of the life of the villagers where he had gone on a grant to study the history of their language, "The poverty is appalling … blah, blah…blah… but they are so incredibly happy." This is, of course, a paraphrased snippet, but all I got out of it was, "My inability to give credence to happiness in anyone living with so much less than I require is appalling." Needing less is not poverty.

Indigenous people recognize true poverty as afflicting one unable to be useful to oneself much less contribute to the community. Vision quests undergone by their pubescent children represent a personal pledge of allegiance to nature's ways through the nature of the guide that appears to them, the symbolic personification of their genetic memory in the form of a hawk, wolf, tree, mountain, planet, sunrise, full moons; that wealth which remains when one is alone.

•

In the midst of composing this post about poverty essentially being a dearth of usefulness to oneself and thereby being captive of dependence to satisfy one's perceived needs, I was interrupted by email requesting reply to my most loyal opposition's comment on the Saving the World post

"So let me get this straight....It sounds like your telling me that the only reason a Gorilla doesn't build a high-rise building is because they are more in tuned with nature than we are so therefore the concept hasn't crossed their minds. I'm sorry, but no, As amazing as Gorilla's are, I don't think they possess the ability to build a high-rise building no matter what, period."

To which I replied, "Abilities arise in response to perceived needs. The Anamami tribe in Brazil cannot build high-rises because the need would never arise to make them want to do it or learn how."

It occurred to me that the self declared "civilized" sector of humanity is the most impoverished of the whole variety of earthlings in terms of the quantity of perceived needs left unfulfilled by the greatest number of aspirants; the most uneaten carrots. Yet, our discontent with and destruction of the place the way we found it is proudly touted as our most distinguishing characteristic; our brilliant creativity in emulation of the big daddy creator in the sky who created it all to make of it what we will. Generation after generation parents practice the ritual of passing on the things they never had to their children in the form of desire for things they always wanted. Like holes in the pockets of hand-me-down jeans getting bigger and bigger. British nobility rent out their estates for the tourist income because their inbred families have become effetely unable to be of use to themselves.

•

Among the many dynamics that motivate me is the tension between maintaining both a sense of being useful to myself and a sense of belonging where I am. The dynamic gets its energy from acknowledging that I am alone in my responsibility for the results of my actions and that such sole responsibility requires that I also consider their possible effect on my environment at least as thoroughly as I pondered my intentions. I have often mentioned what I call a threshold between thought and action, the airlock between me and my surroundings wherein pure thoughts gel into images and sounds and words at the unspoken invitation I assume the universe offers for unlimited expression to all its beings. When I am alone or in the company of friends out in nature, where belonging is so real it feels like knee buckling gratitude, the threshold is as wide open as my arms. It is only within the artificial world of civilization's trappings, crappings, zombies and overlords that the threshold expands into a fortress to guard my thoughts against possible hostile distortion of their intended expression and keep my observations clear of the perception that I have become too alien to a birth culture where I've never quite belonged to be concerned about the carload of drunk clowns speeding toward the cliff.

Downtown I see panhandlers satisfied to be hustling up beer money from suits who are further in debt than five generations of their future-guaranteed children could ever earn if their financial bullshit bubble ever sees the dawn of flim-flam payback day.

Like the inhabitants of North America when Europeans began exploiting them, most indigenous peoples don't consider land something one can possess; its being the shared source of life for all upon it. Not long after their "discovery" and the herding of them off the land onto reservations and into factories and population centers their new found poverty becomes a new found burden to their self righteous civilizers. Governments in general, and the present administration of the US in particular, care for the people like profit driven western civilization cares for the nature of the planet; as a source of infinitely exploitable wealth for the wheeler dealers speculating on the inevitable avalanche of new humans guaranteeing a growth market for eternity — or the first space ship outa' here, whichever comes first.

SAVING THE WORLD

Now there's a phrase guaranteed to get as many interpretations as there are people to hear it. Not only are there a myriad varieties of inclusiveness meant when the word, world, is employed, there's at least as many interpretations as to what needs fixing at each level. In the last post I tried to establish the difference in the meaning of the word, nature, when applied to the nature of the universe; the way of everything or when applied to the nature of any of its manifestations as a defining individual characteristic. To save whatever world one finds suffering with whatever malady first requires realizing one's universal commonality; one's essential connection through the nature of the universe, the Tao, to the nature of those things we have always considered to be only others.

I have often mentioned a Hindu principle of the Minahana and the Mahayana, the little boat and the big boat, wherein each individual must learn to understand the way the universe works for their own boat before they can take an oar that will benefit the big boat rather than become another hole in its hull. I have lately come to understand that the big boat is more than merely plying the course of human civilization through the vicissitudes of time, it is a reawakening of our intimate connectedness to the entire universe and a recirculation of its energy throughout our consciousness for a return to a more aware, considerate symbiotic coevolution with our habitat, our life boat and fellow passengers.

One of the confounding things about civilization's rules of communication, language, when applied to the universe is that one must identify and get detached from and outside the myth of one's civilization to see the blinding filter it poses to a free vision of life as it is and the stultifying clot it is in the circulation of original human evolutionary thinking about the vast implications of the universe, yet remain intimately conscious of the ubiquitous energy of awareness at the very essence of each part of whatever level of the universe with which we seem to have our world of problems. Acknowledging such common connections tends to dissolve the annoyed self-righteous approach of fixing other's problems for them in deference to solving our own self interested skew on the world's duty to be our surrogate source of happiness. I am not claiming that there are no problems, but the solutions up to now have been wiggling in quicksand.

I must admit my solution to saving the world is ultimately simplistic: Rather than attempting to change everything in it to suit our own desires, learn to see and respect the the way nature has always been and will be without human civilization's taming, conquering, subduing, commodifying and rearranging the environment and infant humans having fucked it up almost beyond all sense of genetic recognition and intuitive belonging. Civilization is the only element in our lives that requires survival. Just ask the world's indigenous people. Just ask the part of yourself that rejoices on vacation in natural settings.