NATURE IS NOT A MACHINE

I’ve become quite divorced from the printed word since I moved to the woods, what with the internet, to keep me appraised of the alert level back in the intensive care units commonly referred to as cities, and Netflix, to show me the latest paintings rendering the ongoing saga on the cave walls. I’ve even backed away from the written word, sparsely maintaining this blog and barely reading others out of a sense of futility in dealing with western civilization’s mechanization of nature.

I mention this hiatus to emphasize the inertia being overcome by my growing fascination with a book I’ve been circling since it was published: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. His investigation, into the evolution of human eating habits, and mine, into the evolution of human culture from symbiotic hunter-gatherers to fast food fed corporate nations exploiting citizens like so many feed lot cattle, find the same truth at every turn.

I was struck by the metaphor for the corporatization of all phases of daily life Pollan creates with this eloquent indictment of agribusiness’s expedient substitution of synthetic chemicals for nature’s time evolved cycle of soil:

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As (Sir Albert) Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake all we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation for a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to the plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to pesticides to fix his broken machine.

When I first read the foregoing I entertained an overlapping image of public schools’ expediently injecting the establishment’s code of behavior into each crop of children whose obedience leaves no time for independent symbiotic experience of the nature they are being systematically taught to impatiently exploit. Once the children become educated cogs in the machinery of western civilization, one step follows another, so that when the synthetic laws containing them make them rage against their fellow man and more vulnerable to psychotic meltdown, the establishment turns to prisons, insane asylums and the death penalty to fix its broken machine.

The living universe is too complex to be reduced to any lesser metaphor without its quality giving way to simple quantity; a good story giving way to dogmatic, evangelistic truth whose deniers become punishable. Nature’s one ball of wax.

HOW HIGH THE SKY?

Do my cells Know what I make of them? 

Each one painting its canvas, a pixel in the hologram I call existence.

 Do they know their lives are my sensations?

Brain meet Nebula, or is it the other way round

The aches and ecstasies passing through now like weather

inspire my will to look beyond my cells with an awareness,

Double Helix Nebula at the heart of the Milky Way

a being of which I have always been a cell

whose health suffers and celebrates as do I —

in response to its cells, 

we Earthlings, 

we Solarians, 

we Milky Wayans …

WHO AM I?

'




Am I the imaginer of these thoughts expressed by the master of the minions flexing their laryngeal caverns to shape intelligent howls of the exhausted wind rushing for refreshing out there as meaningful bumps in the air?

Am I the imaginer of intelligent meaning to such vibrations as impinge upon and are reported by the sensate cilia of separate surface cells containing me and the beating of two drums deep in their separate caverns of my ears?

Am I the imaginer of my self as a biologically symbiotic body of cells that serves as one of myriad portals through which the infinite curiosity of the living universe observes and ponders itself?

As I do me.

Imagine that.

Is my name Mobius?

WHO ARE YOU? Part II

In response to the curiosity expressed in her comment on the previous post, this post is for my maverick Grand-niece Racheal Kellie Cooley, the only of my kinfolk other than L'ilwave to respond to this blog. 

"Faith is being sure of what we hope for 

and certain of what we do not see."

I couldn’t agree more with the quote, it describes exactly what I take each of those words to mean and the meaning of their being next to one another as they are arranged.

But I sense there’s a world of difference between what you feel about those words and how I read them. The fulcrum of faith in each phrase: “sure of” and “certain of”, are like tombstones marking the death of curiosity, just like the quote several posts back about, “children begin school as question marks and graduate as periods”.

Using “question mark” for newborns is as close to spirituality as I ever get when I examine my own motivations, the rest is just logical metaphors as a way of making sense of all my curiosity has revealed to me for myself. When I say we are all eyes on the same potato, the potato is as close as I get to describing what I hear others refer to as god.

It all begins with the definition of THE universe as being all there is. Imagining an intelligent being made of all there is leads me to realize it has nothing to observe but itself — talk about self-aware! But who is the universe gonna ask, you might ask? What do I ask when I want to know what’s going on? My primary source of information is the perception of my individual cells keeping data about the physical world hologram I call my mind updated every instant. I can ask the world what’s going on if I want the opinion of others to supplement my perceptions, but by the time they begin to answer they are no longer talking about what’s going on, but what is no longer going on, and since now is the only time existence ever occurs it takes all my attention to my perceptions just to keep up observing reality.

My metaphor is that the entire universe is alive and every part of it is reporting what it sees just as my every cell reports to me, I pass it on to the silent observer I know sees through my eyes, the potato, god.

There’s a whole other part of my cosmology about scale & mobius loops and the evaporation cycle of ideas, but I want to get back to my view of faith, hope, and certainty just to narrow a conversation about the universe down to the unarguable truth that each religion in history has claimed it alone possesses access to (all lebentybillion of ‘em).

In my cosmology, certainty is like what civilization does to our awareness of nature. It puts on shades, sticks in earplugs, turns up the air conditioner, steps on the gas and in every way possible makes the natural occurrences of the day helpless to update the mind of the hopefully, faithfully certain that certainty lets us be sure that whatever we want we’ll get no matter what shitstorms such hopeful certainty plows up in the natural world it contradicts at every turn.

The reason peace on earth exist at all is that from the core of every being the observer looks out, curious about itself. Although the world it observes is the immensity of itself it has become so absorbed in the observing, it must be reminded that the world is not out there by pairs of pairs of eyes recognizing who it is that’s looking out of both — cosmic love and the reason we are conscious of and curious about existence, if there must be a reason.

Yeah, I don’t have a certain bone in my body but I have accumulated enough experience to understand I have been up to any now in which I find myself without steeling myself against contradiction, in fact I welcome it. New varieties of contradiction only tend to broaden my cosmological theory. I don’t consider religion to be a part of or a contradiction to my theory because it is based on the very non-existence of wishful thinking that requires faith in the unarguable certainty “about what we do not know” for hopeful wannbes to declare the only permissible truth is theirs, end of story, period. Signed, sealed, delivered zombie ant.

That’s why I loved your exchange recognizing how mankind could be as our heavenly father intended, curious about the world they still consider to be themselves and are not yet aware of the otherness civilization makes of nature.

Nature reminds civilization of the stage upon which it plays at being God.

CHOICE

The most obvious trait of the natural world is the eating. From atoms swapping electrons to black holes swallowing galaxies there is a constant transformation occurring throughout the known physical world. Once you’re born, you’re game to be eaten upon until you no longer exist. Being food for itself, it would seem the prime purpose of the universe is to perpetuate its life. One may extrapolate that the universe is expanding, another that it’s only inhaling in the prime cycle of respiration and yet another that what we observe is merely the growing body of one of the many beings of its size.

One thing for sure is that down here at human metabolism staying alive requires adaptation to the area in which we must eat so long as we can avoid being eaten. Being eaten can be resisted only when the entity is aware of and able to avoid or defend against other life forms, from saber-toothed tigers to cancer cells, munching on its vitality. Realizing how many eggs a woman is capable of hatching, it would seem we have a lot to learn about adapting to our habitat in order to live up to our genetic potential.

So here we are, smack in the middle of a good/bad for us world feeling like we must perpetually choose to either eat, befriend, avoid, defend against, attack, or surrender to events in our conscious life. At birth our motivation is to respond to and learn from the enormous physical growth still going on by stoking those fires with food and our consciousness with experience to better adapt to obtaining the next meal.

The genetic mini-factories pumping out replications of their Dna imbue each with what has been biologically called, epigenesis, and in my lexicon referred to as genetic memory, intuition, instinct, or the inner voice with which newborns are equipped to operate as individuals as soon as physically capable. This evolved memory is of primal truths such as eat or be eaten, fight/flight, fear of falling or caution around fire, like an organic I Ching into which the daily events of one’s life may be inserted like variables plugged into infallible, evolutionary time tested formulas. Human cultures attempting to part from nature have all been too fleeting to register in such a timeless, cyclic history of evolution.

As the infant is introduced to the culture within which is born, its adaptive behavior in obtaining food is influenced by a louder, more insistent memory in the form of tradition. Some cultures traditionally consider nature to be an evil to be conquered and begin educating their young as soon as the results of their eating makes a mess on the traditional couch. In such cultures the young quickly adapt, not to their habitat, but to the rules for conquering nature within themselves by ignoring those “Satan’s whispers” from our genetic memory and without by helping harvest and sell the entirety of our habitat to one another in a race to own the most at the inevitable finish line of planetary poisoning and starvation.

Being so buried beneath the immediate demands of one’s culture so early, individuals rarely get to experience themselves beyond their skills at eliciting favorable response from others, first for food, then for favors. Any reference to self-reliance is in terms of having money to pay others to provide all the necessities of life, which are far in excess of mere food in most cultures considering themselves civilizations. Indigenous cultures still send their youth on walkabouts and vision quests to ensure they are aware of their prime reliance on and responsibility to their habitat in a most symbiotic way. Western civilization’s version of a walkabout is joining the Marine Corps to travel to remote corners of the world and threaten to blow up that porcelain toilet (that another vision quest, the Peace Corps, convinced once indigenous peoples they couldn’t live without) if they didn’t quit fighting the leash and biting the hand that now feeds them.

With no experience of living symbiotically with nature since the presumption of totalitarian agriculture, western civilization relies on faith in authority over the inherent potential of that unbound curiosity with which we are all born:

“I’m hungry.”

“That’ll be five dollars.”

The instincts that could not be sublimated in the civilizing of newborns have been bent to the service of authority. Competitiveness among beings for food in the wild improves the survival abilities of both prey and predator and doesn’t include incapacitating the competition except among civilized people in search of authority. With no natural prey but their own egoistic shortsightedness, civilized humans confuse fellow competitors with the prey — still hungry after all these eons. Herding instinct, once for safety among prey and efficacy among predators, has been warped into might makes right and the inability to live alone in the wild … or the city. Which brings us to the biggest, most painful warp of all. This post was generated by a quote my dear, Lilwave, posted in Facebook the other day,

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." ~Mother Teresa

I hardly know where to begin. The inarguability of such a metaphor mixed between physical reality and presumed spiritual necessity leaves me only the “hunger for love” part to address my response to the quote. Part of becoming acquainted with oneself prior to and beyond being the stylist adapting to one’s culture is discovering the being who exists when one is alone with the natural world so that one cannot be swayed by condemnation or flattery in representing one’s self honestly.

Now here’s where I make the humangoose assumption that I am not alone in experiencing the following — if I am, I’d like to hear from you.  There is a term, agape, which I take to mean the feeling of love for the entire universe, including the misdirected malice of western civilization toward the womb that births it and horrible individual injustices wreaked upon one another trying to make the system work against our nature. This feeling resembles total harmony of every part of my body and it with all other entities in a dynamic generated by learning to choose to be symbiotic with nature by learning from our mistakes if we survive them. Humans are learning by trial and error what their genetic memory could tell them if they could hear it over the traditional memory’s public address speakers.

It may be evoked by solitary meditation, seeing events harmonize all the entities involved such as what just occurred in Tahrir Square, at an outdoor rock concert on a psychedelic, turning the compost and seeing microbes make plant food out of plants, in the fearless eyes of another looking from the same place, or in watching the world turn green at spring sunrise after every miserable winter of my life.

To hunger for love means to me that one has never discovered that fountain within them selves and are convinced love must be acquired from externals like food. Relationships are cannibalistic without agape, to further mismix the metaphor.

“Hey, boy! Whachu doin’ pullin’ that there chain?”

“You ever tried to push one?”

            AGAPE

… from the asylum of my natural mind

Commenting on the end of Countdown a friend lamented, “I don’t trust CNN these days.”

I couldn’t help but reply, “Trust?”

“Any of them?”

“These days?”

“Read Peoples History of the United States, check out Democracy Now! But don't lay trust on anyone but yourself, and don't do anything until you can.

Sorry Steve, those weren't really orders from me to you, just a brain fart about how trusting externals is the source of all misery and the company it keeps. It was the things that helped me realize why love is a source of pain when gratitude for feeling it at all is not enough reward and requital is demanded, like a whore taking payment — burdening loved ones with trust breaks better bonds.

I’ll go blog now.”

I guess I get a bit worked up around words like trust, faith, hope, prayer, wishes because I have seen through Maya’s veil to behold her natural beauty and realize it was all a vale of tears over such illusions woven so finely the world appears against us when we don’t get our way, as if it’s supposed to care because we wish it. The veil covers up the beauty of the present with the clothing of the past tailored to ellicit obedience from the future. What a fine tuned grinder the innocence of now is put through to accomplish tomorrow’s menu. We never see life as it is as we focus on the parts that fit our purpose and get blindsided by hopes become wishes become faith become trust become assumption become expectation become fact until — wham, a contradiction become powerful on the momentum of a life of denial.

All these ephemeral illusions to the power of just wanting something, from a dolly to a place in heaven when one’s done with making Hell of Eden, weave the world within which civilization believes nature is chaos to be conquered and put to work. Being warm and dry with food on the table is never enough for people believing in gods who create worlds by merely willing it so.

I am learning to love life more by freeing it from the fragmenting duality of expectation and let the story unfold as it will, despite my running narrative. I’ve learned the truth about trust is that the external object of our faith is not the determiner of our satisfaction, but the scapegoat for our own judgment of how reality can be made to work for us as opposed to learning how it behaves with or without us to better work with it.

The confusion introduced by my education delayed a realization of how the idea that existence has a master plan, a preexisting purpose, limits the comprehension of the universe and behavior by a far larger population than merely the creationists who swear by it, as mankind destroys the only specimen we’ll ever have on the assumption of knowing why it exists before having a clue as to how it exists. Getting clues from purposeless observation seems to lead me into endless fascination. Purpose observes through a pinhole in a cell wall gleaning anything that might be construed to be fact in the ongoing fairytale of mankind’s godlike “conquering” of nature.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW … AND EVERYWHERE BETWEEN

Moths drawn to a light

Photo by Steve Irvine

Atomic Cloud Chamber

WHO ARE YOU?

There seems to be two basic categories of attitude about one’s life held by my fellow humans. We are either organs integral to the living organism of the planet from which we arose and without whose health we wouldn’t exist or voracious tenants in a supermarket shopping carte blanche as granted us by the big spooky propiator in the sky.

The undeniable reality of our arising from and decaying back to the earth defines and qualifies our belonging here as earthlings. Belonging to the obviously artificial creations of civilization, nation, religion, corporation, et al ad nauseum has obscured the undeniable truth of our primarily being cells of Gaia, exceptional only to ourselves and the creatures we’ve domesticated to think like we do.

I experienced this difference in full force when I dropped out of my yuppie career with IBM and left their compound to integrate into the beautiful village of ’72 Austin. It was like a military base’s relationship with the townies, temporary and disinterested, another stop along the way. We as members of wastern civilization have a industrial/military complex about our existence on earth resulting in its commodification and destruction.

The global warming debate is a distraction from the undeniable poison and pollution our way of life injects into the circulation of the planet allowing oil profiteers time to suck the last drops from the most remote location, environment be damned.

You can either drink from the stream or a plastic bottle, still your choice.

BETWEEN THE SHEETS

She found it while leafing through her leather bound edition of Leaves of Grass. It was a shade leaf of cannabis indicus the size of her palm. She’d placed it there at a different time in a different world.

Looking up from the page on her pagan promontory perch, the vast expanse of the sea to the western horizon became dearly desiccated by the visceral, visual recollection of overlooking a desert; so endlessly featureless from afar, so constantly alive wherever one looked down at one’s feet. A sort of reverse twist on “the grass is always greener.”

They were camping on the east rim anticipating a lunar eclipse soon after sundown, which announced its advance by gradually saturating the entire vista in the golden orange hues of grain, pebble, rock, boulder pixel remnant shards of this shedding mountain perch with the prism of the western atmosphere casting a glow around their elongating silhouette creeping eastward into the illuminated scene.

He passed her the freshly rolled joint she’d awaited since he’d proposed this entire weekend a month ago. She’d always been curious about the stuff but found no reason compelling enough to risk jail just for kicks. She found Zeke to be more than enough. She knew a lot of people who abandoned the club during music breaks to “get high” out back with the band while she stayed behind and worried for them. She knew Zeke went out with them most of the time, but she didn’t know him until the night he picked up her empty glass on his return, went to the bar and brought her a fresh one.

“Nothin’ like another cool one after goin’ out there with those folks and dryin’ your whistle,” he said, standing there watching the band get reorganized.

"I don’t go out there, but thanks for the drink anyway. I haven’t wet mine enough yet.” She immediately tried to inhale the variety of possible nuances those words conveyed and didn’t exhale until she realized none of them were wrong; she’d long admired him from afar and was loath to pass up a chance for friendlier proximity now.

When her kissed her at her doorstep and left she realized a friendlier approximation was far from adequate. The next time she saw him the mutual beam connecting them was visible to anyone who cared. Like love struck zombies they got their drinks, moved to the back and sat together at an empty table without looking at anything but each other.

Although she’d always taken rejection as “their loss”, she couldn’t help but clarify something that had bothered her for the two weeks since he’d walked her home. “You were welcome to stay the night, you know?’

“Yeah, I got it that might be the case, but I have to get an overt invitation to begin assuming anything. I am too familiar with the influence of alcohol to make me perceive everything going my way until my face hits the floor and the morning after trying to recall from whence come vague memories of something too intimate to be so forgotten.”

“I’ve never made the first move, men seem to begin the groping and I either grope back or back off. I was out of my element with you. Would you get me high far away from police so I can enjoy it?”

His face lit up. “Oh, wow! This is perfect. I am going to harvest the first buds of this year’s yield next month and was planning to take some to the wilderness to celebrate the lunar eclipse. Would you come with me?”

She watched him separate the glistening purple-green bundles from their stem and expertly gather them between the sheets of zig-zag paper into the perfect cylinder he licked, sealed and declared to be the lunar fatty. He lit her first toke with much pagan fanfare but said not a word thereafter, just watched.

Their slowblime lovemaking fell in pace with the nature of their surroundings as the sun disappeared leaving the glow of the roach the only light for light years until half the eastern horizon became engulfed in the maw of a gigantic moon reflecting the sun in silver light upon them snuggled between the sheets. As the fullness of the moon grew perfect the earth interrupted the sun with a shadow on a further desert as it began to eat the moon in turn. The wolves, who’d been harmonizing to the lunar tune as their pitch rose with it, slowly became a random cacophony as it disappeared and revealed stars once obscured by its brilliance. Their shared orgasm occurred at the peak of the howling at the dark of the moon in the middle of the milky way and they remained in afterglow until the moon and vulpine harmony returned in full.

She returned the leaf to its place between the sheets of onion skin vellum pages, closed the book, scrambled off her perch, grabbed her cane he'd carved for her from the stalk and made her way home to the ferryman’s house.

OH

ohohohoh,

ititiit

is

so vast —

we see it all

words blow away

like leaves in the fall

mouldering in our memory

experience unexpressed feeds

seeds of metabolic metaphors

magnets align forgotten files

connecting all the labels

drawing all the tables

adding up to one

inexpressible

vastness

only

seennees

tootototo

beebebebebeb

beebebebebebeb

lived,devildevil

oh hohoho

THE ENSLEEPENING

They called her Pearliña, for her lustrous grey eyes. They had no idea of her mission in life. It had been theirs too. Both of her parents had a long forgotten memory of their own birth when she opened her eyes and looked out at them as if entering a familiar dream, a slight smile of recognition at the corners of her lips.

His first awareness was of looking back from his location in the cornea through the vitreous fluid at the panorama reflected in the rods and cones at the bottom of the pool. It grew dark just as he felt hugged by his immediate family when the lid closed and their world rubbed her eye.

The super nova was seen by the naked eye from five hundred light years away. Bright enough to irritate the predator into stopping his stalk long enough to gnash after it under the scales around his tentacle pit with his scissor-tooth lined tongue.

It wonders what it is with every fiber of its being. We fibers wonder, “what is this world we are in?” We rely on our bodies to give us answers by reporting their sensations. Sound familiar? We are the infinite questions posed by one with no one else to ask; the ultimate psychotic who might not exist at all without imagining us imagining it.

Pearlña loved to dive for pearls. It reminded her of a mission, forgotten when distracted by her toys. She never found a pearl but she learned a lot about life in the sea. She opened an art gallery of machine parts discovered. after the deep had its way with them. She did so well she even forgot she was diving for pearls.

SIR DAVID SINGS OF LIFE

MESSAGE FROM THE FULCRUM

Silence.

Knock!

Awakening

“Was that a sound?”

Silence.

Knock!

The dream is over

“Is something happening?”

Silence.

Knock!

The dualities resume

“There it is again!”

The duality of silence and sound are the clothing with which the mind adorns experience as its best gesture to suggest one’s ineffable insights into an existence too everywhere to be pointed at. At the balance point of each and of all, that which can be dressed in expression fitting the fashion must neglect the rest of the ongoing reality to tell a snap shot story of the enormous variety of dualities contained in any instant, inspirational glimpse of the eternal present. Seeing the dynamic of dualities as a dance or a war seems to depend on the centeredness of one’s fulcrum.

If the essence of the living universe were not the fulcrum about which constant change occurs, we could not be aware of our existence in it. Duality, simultaneously recognized difference, is the trigger to our awareness and the limit to the range of our ability to describe the truth at the fulcrum upon which the instant of the present balances. Like a tight rope walker stabilizes herself by spreading her apparent physical presence over imaginary ground on either side of the rope with a balance bar, our memories and expectations stabilize our awareness of the reality of the only time or place we or anything else ever has or will walk, now.

My version of the yin yang symbol for duality above demonstrates how the variations produced by the living universe mix into the definitive duality of two complimentary, opposite colors which, rather than obscuring the polarity, show the dynamic mix of two elements whose existence depends on each other in the often ignored threshold between them, now.

Though I used a tight rope, now and the line dividing the yin yang as examples of this universal threshold just now, a deeper examination is needed of the ramifications of ignoring such a critical transition by allowing the distraction of the more stark contrast of stereotypical extremes by indolent minds insistent on viewing the world in black and white righteousness. For the civilized mind such examination is possible only by withdrawal from all cultural influence, found most purposefully in deep meditation or prayer and inadvertently in epiphanies called anything from religious to psychedelic experiences of the true connectedness of the living universe. During any such personal insight into the eternity of the present, one’s purpose for being there dissolves in significance when one realizes that the resolution of all dualities is this source from which we attempt to single out, follow and favor any number of its myriad variations over the rest.

Lao Tsu speaks of the threshold not as something to be limited by or crossed, but as a path to be wandered as the way of everything, the path of unattached balance. Upon such a path, habitual temptations and aversions acquired and indulged, in excess of the necessities of a healthy life, may be seen as so much baggage and examined for their push/pull connectedness across the threshold of pernicious preferences frustrating the already well off, like trying to use a long balance pole while walking along the flat ground in a row of a cornfield.

This turned out to be a bigger chunk of the constant ramble unwinding from this view from the fulcrum than I intended. Maybe.

BELONGING

Lately I’m prone to be longing

To write of how belonging

Means I’m at home in my body

Wherever it happens to be.

It can’t have been long

Since I longed

To be needed

To feel such belonging;

To share myself undaunted,

‘Til what was wanted

Turned out never to be

Anything belonging to me.

Then I’d drool like those fool dogs

At the knell of school bells

Once the idea was seeded

That the only thing that I needed

To look like black ink’s in my logs.

The habit was strong

To sell my myself to belong

To the things I could own,

Just to belong with folks

What says they likes ‘em.

And then there are unexpected gifts;

Of unearned adulation or derisions

Offering bridges across their divisions

Or driving wedges by reading me wrong.

Belonging to me,

It has come to me

To not play that game

Of owning their name

By seeing their “Foe” is faux blame

For misery that needs my company.

Belonging to me, I can see

My wealth requires no ledger

For those belongings I haven’t,

The things I don’t own

Don’t require payments on a loan.

I belong in my body.

My body belongs in the body of Earth,

The Earth belongs in the Milky Way

The Milky Way belongs in the universe,

Not an owner in sight.

DETECTING THE INEVITABLE

If there were ever an oxymoron that an entire civilization hasn’t caught on to yet, it is the idea of detecting the inevitable. I’m about to whup a whole sake cup o’zen on your ass here, so be warned. Detection is becoming aware of and possibly pointing out previously unnoticed things. The inevitable, the Tao, the way of all nature is not a thing. It is not a law of physics or biology; it not a beginning, middle or end; it is not a creator any more than the Earth’s oceans intentionally created biological life. I am given to understand that in the Hindu vocabulary, the closest word to mean thing is “event”, in keeping with this idea of a living universe.

The myriad variety of things to be detected and pointed at arise from the infinite process that indicates the universe is alive, and if so, conscious. As each being is conscious of the sensations of its constituent cells’ reaction to the environment in its location so is the universe aware of itself with the same curiosity with which we constituent beings quest, or not.

Becoming aware of the natural, inevitable source of the distractions, of which most are exclusively, distractedly aware, is not a process of detecting but rather a cessation of detecting, dissecting, naming, and explaining. No explanation can make someone see the depth of the flat autostreogram pattern and my humble attempts to elucidate the inevitable are infinitely more inadequate to save anyone the actual, personal experience of realizing with all one’s senses, life as it is beyond description.

Such awareness has shown me that each entity has a characteristic nature which, should they align it with the nature of the universe, the fears and regrets inevitable with attachment to particulars in the evanescent variety as it passes gives way to sharing the ride with all the things down the inevitable river or the stroll down the way of everything that runs along its banks. Western civilization is a mistaken attempt to build a damn out of attachment to the water.

MOON … OON … ON … N

The full Moon dawns on the break of night

Solar reflection, Brian’s selection

The theme for All Hallows Eve.

Her full moon dawns on my line of sight

Solar reflection’s reflection’s detection

From my pond she doth retrieve.

I see it in the water of my eyes

In the mirror on the wall

Out the window to it all

In her rippled rings of water

In the pond

On her moon

On the Moon

In rings of water drops

In the sky

Sol still

Reverberating

His gong

Long gone

Not yet.

•

This is my submission to this installment of 10^th Daughter of Memory, though the post just before this is the result of getting so reflective about the Moon’s dawning I followed curiosity way off the theme. Boy oh boy, without reflection detection we’d need television.

IDEAS ARE EMBRYOS

Not since Daniel Quinn clued me to the advent of totalitarian agriculture becoming the human practice some sixteen thousand years ago being what led to this present overpopulated civilization so thoroughly exploiting nature to its own extinction, have I come across a deeper investigation into the primary question I began this blog to explore. Until now!

Although Quinn’s Ishmael demonstrates a perfectly logical cause and effect for mankind’s apparent antipathy toward nature, I have been bothered by what it must have been that changed a hunter-gatherer culture from their evolved symbiotic understanding of nature to an antibiotic assumption of the superior authority required to clear forests and slaughter its denizens without eating them just so they could plant their own food. The only culprit I’ve come up with is the liar who told and swore to the first story about a creator who made the whole damned planet as a gift for his special children with which to do anything they damned well pleased. Oh, yeah … and the mob of fools that followed on faith… and the exploitive opportunists who followed the gullible mob with more lies. That fable snowballed into the world’s capital capitols, the Vatican and the White House, over millennia of devious refinements of a more total domination and exploitation of nature within and without mankind. In mistakenly swapping our quality of life for quantity of commodities we are literally counting ourselves out.

Now comes Richard Grossinger into my life with his book Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life. Needless to say, he goes a little deeper than the recent sixteen thousand years of human history, not to mention the six thousand year-old Earth down to which the original, much older lie about a creator has been refined. I found this book while searching for further information about a 3D map upon which astronomers are constructing plots of galaxy locations that seems to be revealing the form of a double helix. I got more than I knew I was looking for.

Before discussing the subject of the book I want to say that it was the most pleasure to read of any book I have ever picked up. Despite my voracious curiosity about the quickening of matter being all ready to plow right through the dullest scientific drone, I was halted in my tracks by the inspired poetry with which Richard Grossinger conveys his knowledge about and insights into the embryogenesis of both living cells and the science that is revealing the processes involved. I read the entire book three times — by phrases, paragraphs, pages — to first admire the writing, second to trace the scientific nomenclature for the process described and finally to put that bit in the context of his ongoing investigation

After an engrossing elaboration of the biological system of the entire embryonic atom-molecule-cell-tissue-organ-organism chain of phase states for possible conscious existence and the approach to this phenomenon by modern biotechnology, he confronts the genetic engineering with its refusal to consider matter more imbued with spirit than a bulldozer. He quotes George Bernard Shaw’s reaction to Darwin:

…[Natural Selection] is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally impossible to the spirit and souls of the righteous … [It] has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

… allowing as how, eighty years later, “… fools and rascals hold all the positions of power, of sagacity and science, and most citizens accept them as leaders and aspire to their status and goals.”

In one swell foop, those needing an excuse to distance themselves further from nature than western civilization had accomplished by the turn of the last century now could appropriate Darwin’s survival of the fittest to justify the greed oozing through the sewer gratings along Wall Street; too bad Vatican. At the same time science revealed matter to be immaterial they explored and explained the phenomenon of living tissue like it was a machine or a “series of tubes” whose parts were patentable objects with no intrinsic value.

Nuclear physics examines molecules so closely they disappear into light. Astronomy examines empty space so distantly that light appears out of thin air. Biology examines cells so closely they can read the fine print on the contracts dna negotiates in its construction/maintenance business. None of them acknowledges the blind spot when they exchange information about their work. Chemical reactions explain how seemingly inert matter can appear to move itself, but no science has tackled the phenomenon of a consciousness organizing such chemistries into the self contained, entropy challenging entities that biologists so minutely study and so crudely replicate.

The final chapters deal with that gap in our understanding of the origins of life on earth. I read them much more carefully than the intricate, nomenclature filled early chapters lest I go off on one of my own tangents, as I tend to do when the concepts being discussed are about the connectedness of consciousness being the life of the universe. Well, I can only say he made his case brilliantly.

We don’t get it. Karma is not something to study and obey; karma is something to feel, in the depth of our very existence. One must behave well not because the universe is keeping score and there are rewards and punishments. We must behave well because it is the right thing, because how we behave is who we are. How we behave is what the universe is, what the universe of ourselves and our children will become.

If we trick ourselves into reducing our existence to molecules and cells, then the meaning of our life will evaporate too. We may be winning the secular game but we are blowing the only one of consequence because, having made ourselves petty tyrants over matter and over our acts, we have become mere hirelings and henchmen, totally myopic in relation to the epic event of which we are the source, the guardian, and also — when we let ourselves sing — the very song.

My departed friend and only critic, Erica, challenged me to explain why my enthusiastic endorsement of the book wasn’t the same as my daughter’s faith in the infallibility of the Bible. I answered that my enthusiasm was for such a wonderful statement of what my life experience has witnessed and led me to understand long before the book was written. She then suggested that assuming the agreement between my meaning and the author’s took a leap of faith. It is a very interesting question upon which I have been meditating since, but at the time I could only reply, “read the book.”

ENGROSSINGERED

Gonna be gone for a while. Just received Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings, by Richard Grossinger in the mail. It appears to be one of those totally engrossing tomes about the reality it makes disappear everywhere but upon the pages of the book. As a hint of where I've gone, a paragraph from the introduction:

We must be present with our lives, these things that we somehow have and thus hold dear, in fact dearest, and that scientists tell us don't exist, not really. We have to salvage it all: love, the taste of mango, the blueness of sky, sparkling crystals of winter, salmon swimming upstream, the hop in a reggae song, the wonder of intuition inside us, because we live in a civilization that would give it all away, that everday trades our birthright for a bit more intrumentation and capital toward the sterile molecularization and commoditization of everything that is or could ever be. This relentless, nihilistic march now threatens to give back everything that nature gave us once by some unknown magic. And to what end? To serve what better cause?

See you on the flip side.

WISDOM: THE SPHERICAL PERSPECTIVE

Ever since I grokked Colin Wilson’s description of viewing a galaxy from the perspective of a being whose entire scale and metabolism has increased to be as much greater than that galaxy as we are greater than a sperm, that the galaxy would appear to be a sperm with a tail wiggling out its trail in our new persistence of vision where light years are our minimum perceptible flashes and solar systems are as atoms in the chemistry of it all, I have been infected with the notion that the universe is not only an endless mobius loop of fractalized holograms, it is perceivable as generally the same, above and below, from any point in the scale of perspective we may assume.

The same humongous entity Wilson proposed in his fascinating book, Music of the Spheres, could look up from that sperm and see stars and galaxies yet larger without end. We could also go to an exponentially smaller perspective where our molecules are as galaxies to us, our normal 30th of a second minimum perception window becomes a thousand lifetimes and we can look down and perceive the sperm that Wilson’s dilated being saw as galaxies having come through the loop Mobius has shown us is possible.

This all goes to say that whether one specializes in astronomy or nuclear physics, unless some sort of scientific reach around to the seemingly least related field of investigation through honest sharing of perspectives for an all inclusive spherical view of where we are as earth dwellers, it won’t matter what we learn about any niche or nebula if the picture only changes the viewpoint but doesn’t grow more inclusive of things sidelined as irrelevant to the cherry picking of purposeful research paid to fill in a prewritten story. Fresh discoveries await the unprogrammed curiosity in plain sight.

AS IT IS

The universe is infinite and purposeless.
Newly born are conscious of the universe as it is.
Cycles of experience breed the contempt of familiarity.
No thing remembered is ever again seen as it is,
But is laden with barnacles of meaning
Fed by daily tides of bodily needs and social demands
Tied by similar frequency and form to patterns of personal purpose
For each being’s accumulation of preconditioned perception.

The universe is infinite and purposeless.
Newly born are curious about the universe as it is.
Answering the questions one is expands experience to new mysteries
Strokes of color chosen and placed to reflect one’s personal picture
Of the constant universe in hues of one’s changing awareness of it.
The natural diversity of painters taught by personal experience
Comprise a holographic gestalt of the universe as it is,
Infinite, purposeless and indifferent to the myriad images.

The universe is infinite and purposeless.
Newly born are active in the universe as it is.
Walking in the wilderness yields wonders and hazards.
Satisfying curiosity about the wonders requires risking the hazards.
Walking within civilization's certainty terminates wonder and hazard.
Curiosity about the certainty requires understanding its purpose
So multifaceted as to consume any concern for nature as it is:
Always indifferent to all the intentions that may be imposed
And the blindness purpose brings to seeing the universe as it is.


It's never too late to be new born.
The purpose of shedding purpose
Must also be shed in its turn.