Junkie State of Mindlessness

I've noticed that all the lessons anyone claims to have learned from hurricane Sandy were about needs to reinforce and improve infrastructure against obviously worsening, hostile climate extremes now admitted to be due to global warming, with no mention of how it is just such attempts to isolate ourselves so antagonistically from nature that pollute and heat the planet upon whose health we all depend.  Seems to be an unwillingness to hold our own, individual addictions to artificial convenience responsible for our natural, karmic discomfort at the threat of having withdrawals that foster the destructive attitude of "going along to get along". Let's get them there gas guzzlin' generators and cars fueled up and running as soon as possible.

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.

TO BE A CHILD …

That first gasp of air … what did I feel? Was it the sudden chill on my damp naked body no longer sheltered by the womb? Was it a startled flash bulb consciousness of everything at once and therefore aware of no thing?

I have looked into the just-opened eyes of a newborn and recognized the ancient observer behind them calmly unwrapping this new instrument to begin sampling the experiment of life this time around.

With all functions set at default, sensitive components begin reporting changes registered as pixels in the hologram it forms of where it is. As reports accumulate, similarities adjust settings to better collate them to estimate the probability of permanence in this constantly changing time and space; the framework of reality upon which existence learns to gamble its future.

These are automatic, involuntarily unfolding functions evolved genetically into increasingly more varied, complex beings with no other detectible purpose than to continue, nor limit but infinity. This body, this instrument, in terms of the individual psyche, is what I think of as the Id: the genetic memory of instincts to eat and not be eaten for survival of the individual, instincts to mate and co-create for thrival of the species, intuition of the purest sense of right and wrong.

It’s all hunky-dory, suckling and pooping along, until it’s just not enough to satisfy the sated survival instinct; no lack of food or fear of predators, but … what’s that over there? The emergence of curiosity, the instinct to grow beyond the givens, discovers a difference between reports of changes within (hunger, heartbeat, breathing) and of finding limits to careless freedom without (bumping into crib, mother’s weaning and scolding for pooping off limits).

My most vivid recollection of self/other awareness was of the change the echoes of my crying returned from the walls when someone came to check on me. This primitive echolocation gave quality to my depth perception as my eyes learned to focus at different distances before it dawned on me they might be approached. Such preverbal understandings form the avatar, the ego, a hologram the instrument builds of itself in relationship to the now exterior reality within which it appears to act.

Early on I recall imagining a game being played between myself and the world where I had a cardboard replica of what I wanted to be perceived as being (the ego), which I held before me as I walked about. In turn the world erected cardboard facades like movie sets ahead of me and struck them when I passed, ala The Truman Show. This personal myth was reified whenever adults tested the validity of my mask with their questions and obviously invented most of their answers to mine when they couldn’t remember what they were told back when they still had questions. Observing my parents perpetuate the Santa Claus myth long after I’d observed the reality taught me to be a life long skeptic.

Ego develops when curiosity is called on to explain the avatar’s place in the causal myth of whatever culture is asking. There aren’t enough whys, wheres, whens, hows or whos to conclude a purpose to the living universe without first inventing a timeline whose direction is determined by assigning cause and effect to the constant change life always is, no matter what we think of it. As the child seeks to achieve validity within its sphere of activity, the responsibility for being able to account for itself to a perceived social environment often takes priority over the id by claiming and basking in praise it does receive, and denying by masking from scorn it might, from an audience that rarely cares as much as it does about itself.

In seeking validity from ones culture the ego can actually lose consciousness of the unique, natural gifts of the id leading to fear of being left alone bereft of anyone to obey and unable to entertain oneself with creative, original thinking since abandoning it somewhere in childhood in the process of converting curiosity’s question marks into culture’s periods.

In this Freudian drama, the superego would be the unifying curve between them attempting to maintain the yang of the ego-avatar’s artificial doing in beneficial, dynamic harmony with the id-body’s instinctual being throughout a life of cultural training to exploit the difference for advantage over others in a competitive ethic.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is usually understood to mean giving others treatment you want, precluding the reality that two unique beings rarely want the same treatment. The benefit of the dynamic the superego maintains depends on the ego’s symbiotic attitude towards perceived otherness by realizing that beneath the cultural, exterior doing lies the common guidance system of the id’s instinctual being.

It is impossible to come to a conclusion about an infinite, living universe without completely extinguishing curiosity — customarily associated with death or belief.

FUCKING UP A WET DREAM

I stole the following anecdote from a clipping found while tripping through Stumbleupon and post it here as the epitome of every contact western civilization has ever had with indigenous people, still living in symbiosis with nature.

Indian Chief “Two Eagles” was asked by a white U. S.  government official, “You have observed the white man for 90 years. You’ve seen his wars and his technological advances. You’ve seen his progress and the damage he’s done.”

The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, “Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?”

“When white man find land, indians running it. No taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work. Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex.”

Then the Chief leaned back and smiled, “Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that.”

THEY KEEP DRAGGING ME BACK …

I guess the best I can hope for in my quest to get back to the garden nature has always been, since well before the first civilization convinced its members they owned and/or owed for any of it, is to become independently feral. I brought this here intertube portal with me to the woods through which to check on the always-encroaching proximity of the civilized sprawl I intend to avoid, like any problem one must get away from to think rationally about.

This Occupy Wall Street movement has attracted me almost as strongly as the lack of such active awareness in western civilization drove me away to my tipi in the first place. When I think of how best to contribute to the …

…I’ve been stuck on the next word for two days, during which I watched the entire N17 day of action streaming from http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99 until an estimated 35,000 protesters filled the Brooklyn Bridge from both directions at the peak of an adventurous day with the earnest reporter, Tim Pool. I still don’t know the next words to describe what it is I would be contributing to and, I suspect, neither do most of those people dedicated to freely holding forth en mass about the same injustices that 99% of their fellow citizens daily grumble about, shove down and chase with antacid and sleeping pills before bed just to cling to lives of still hired wannabes watching that goal at the top of the heap moved further away by millionaires’ minions sent down to truncheon the nasty away from the nice; worried how they look every day.

What draws me to the movement seems to be the same feeling of escape from the invisible prison I’ve been blogging about for five years.

I suppose the word I was looking for next above would be …awakenings. Awakening to the positive possibilities of changing society from a life long contest of amassing the greatest profit with the least personal investment into one where old men plant trees under which they won't live to enjoy the shade. Awakening from the nightmare of a nation of petroleum junkies robbing neighbors for their stash to harmonize directly with the solar source of energy that originally gave life to the decayed matter soup over which we now squabble. Awakening to the lethal cesspools we’ve made of our water, gas chambers we’ve made of our air and poison deposits we’ve made in the earth. Awakening to the millions of jobs created in the effort to replace our sooty chimneys with symbiotic sharing of ambient sun, wind, geothermal and tidal energies amidst which we’ve failed with oil all along.

It’s bigger than the economy — the economy is based on creating the problem. It’s bigger than jobs — the jobs are to keep the status quo. It’s about a whole new way of life with the health of the planet our primary concern by realizing our welfare depends on how symbiotic we can be with nature — not on how we can enslave it.

… OF A MORNING

Chickens fed hen scratch and layer crumbles, dogs treated with biscuits and a petting of their night dew dampened coats, coffee brewed, joint rolled — sitting outside for sunrise with Hetty and Monty at my feet and Priest in my lap. Overcast, a silence only moist air can bring, damp notebook pages to write this on. No birds, no sun, no shadows in the diffused light of reflected dawn. Congestion, settled deep during overnight shallow sleep breathing, is tickled into begging to be expelled by the catalyst ganjava breakfast is to respiration of bodily fluids and inspiration of mental acrobatics like this…

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Civilization is based on the premise that nature is under mankind’s stewardship as a gift from a creator of it all.

Tipi Fini

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TO NATURE, CIVILIZED MAN IS THE 1%

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There are no injustices within Western Civilization for which the corporate greed of the military-industrial complex is held responsible that are not exponentially more atrocious when considering the effect of Western Civilization on the health of the nature within which it exists to exploit and the sanity of the contributing individual human exploiters.

The blight that ghost towns like Detroit appears to be is actually the process of each area’s escape from man’s stewarded gulag as it returns to the nature within which it has long been forbidden to thrive. 

FULL CYCLE

The theory that the entire evolution of life on earth to the present is reenacted by all beings during their gestation from the first cell division after conception to the emergence of their modern form from womb or shell I’ve heard bandied about in many contexts. I have to admit such comparisons are quite plausible throughout the wide variety and scale of life forms covering the surface of this being of which we are all cells, Gaia, Pachamama, Mother Earth.

Like any theory that keeps kicking around in my ponderings it has given rise to tangential extensions into nearly as many contexts. The earliest of which concerns the idea that, given that extremely abbreviated experience of earthly evolution to the present in gestation, the period of a modern human’s life from the first perception of sunlight to the last appears to be a reenactment of the continuing social evolution of mankind from the first opposable thumbs to finding fulfillment living out their lives in cubic, air-conditioned isolation chambers viewing the natural world from which they arose as an enemy to be conquered and exploited by pushing buttons with stubby little fingers to make that now alien, civilized world better, more heedlessness of the harm done to the planetary health none can survive without.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Lest I get carried away into my old crackpot notions and forget the latest idea that made me abandon my sunrise vigil and drove my stubby little fingers here to the keyboard once more; it occurs to me that, having come to an understanding of the paragraph above, I have been slowly but surely returning to the preverbal existence of early man by my age alone. Over years of abuse, from screaming jet engines to southern sheriff’s saps, my ears now seem only to hear vowels and tunes, with consonants and lyrics quite indistinguishable. My eyes seem only to see landscapes and geometric shapes in the foreground, with leaves and letters on those shapes quite indistinguishable. I may not pick out your train of words, but through the dance of your body English and tune of your voice I can follow your train of thought as a metaphor with interchangeable variables. I may not be able to see your facial features at a hundred yards, but if I know you, I will recognize your walk and mood.

When I couldn’t read the blackboard from the back of the 6^th grade classroom my vision was suddenly made more particularly articulate by being fit for glasses. I slowly began to rely on the written signs all around me and ignore the reality going on all around them. The authority of the written word, from “Keep off the Grass” to “Top Secret”, became sacrosanct; immune to any experience in the contrary. I became an avid reader in search of ethical heroes and scientific discoveries to challenge and/or enlarge my own heroic theories and burgeoning desire for the reward of fame and fortune in those books or imagined of their authors.

When I moved out of the city to the Dawgranch, I stopped wearing my glasses because there seems to be nothing so specific needing to be seen as is found in the traffic of speeding cars and urgent signs of the city. At the pace of nature everything is as articulate as their proximity requires my attention without fear of damage or delay. The once hawkeyed sharp particulars in the distance have returned to being part of the natural landscape I‘d learned to ignore.

When the cubical dwellers visit me I know when to celebrate, sympathize with or object to anything they say by how they dance and sing, no matter what the song and dance may be about.

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 …

CHECKING IN

Just watched Stephen Colbert interview Al Gore, who stressed that it was our wars over keeping oil that kept us from affording a technological replacement for the internal combustion devce that causes climate change. Good reasoning, Al.

The other night I watched an msnbc special, on the changes in America in the ten years since the excuse for the longest of those wars, during which intrepid war correspondent Richard Engle remarked, “Lovely New York water, heh, heh, heh,” as he was being decontaminated after exposing himself to the poisonous Hudson river in which he’d joined the “new” NYPD searching for terrorist’s bombs along the banks. Good priorities, Richard.

Here’s my point. Al Gore has stressed climate change as his focus for action to return to a more symbiotic way to exist within the natural curve of the planet by citing temperature trends and more drastic weather patterns. It’s not that I deny climate change is one of the symptoms of the industrial-age human alienation of themselves from the planet which birthed them, I don’t. But of all the symptoms it remains the most debatable and debated boondoggle in any effort to lessen our footprint. Climate change is evident in geological and biological records occurring in natural cyclic patterns throughout the history of Earth, which tends to be deniers strongest argument. The strongest argument for climate change is measuring how extreme the weather has gotten in the recent past based on the ignorant hubris of civilized humans to continue to build “permanent” cities on the coasts (the land left after the last chunk quaked into the ocean) and rivers (the trickles left since the last “no ice anywhere” period) because, miracle of miracles, earthquakes and hurricanes cost more in lives huddled in more high rises every year.

Just like Richard Engle laughed off the admittedly deadly pollution of the Hudson river while demonstrating the efficiency of the NYPD to keep the homeland free of theoretically possible terrorism, Al Gore pushes the theoretically most debatable of the many arguments for getting off of fossil fuels while the horror of our pollution of water, land and air remains undeniable and undiscussed, — from the Hudson river to the burning kitchen faucets near fraking operations.

What the frack.

WHO AM I?

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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?

IN THEIR OWN WORDS!!!

Well, well, well. Here it is folks. In their own words, the Xians interpreting their god to prefer people over the planet he supposedly created for them to be stewards of. I have made reference to the corruption the title of steward undergoes when manipulated by corporate commodification, but this video says it all.



Did you catch the twist they spin?

Humans, along with all other living beings that arose from the ongoing life of Pachamama, the earth mother, depend on a symbiotic relationship to the health of the planet that is our home and upon whom our own health depends as a simple fact of nature.

Being so exceptionally special in the eyes of the creator they imagine runs the show and who they believe gave them earth to do with as they please, this cult of reality deniers would have the entirety of nature dry up and blow away because their heavenly father wouldn't let anything bad happen to them, His Special children. Can you see that what they are saying was choreographed and scripted by corporate America to pave the way to further rape mother earth for the love she always gives willingly? They try to deflect this by saying that the threat is to Xianity not to their bank accounts. Anything as vulnerable to new ideas as they claim their belief system is only points out the total irrationality of their claims requiring the wishful thinking of staggering leaps of blind faith.

This may be my last post on religion. At least until some group of kooks out does this bunch.

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.

THIRD (IM)PERSON NATION

Being the being we were born to be

takes a far back seat to 

doing the being for others to see.  

The imbalance in the dynamic of nature’s dual cycle engine: eat or be eaten, is the result of having no awareness of the observer within who, from the first opening of each newborn’s eyes, silently watches civilization enacting a mythical script with antagonism towards the natural stage upon which it plays.

All beings display self-awareness by remaining alive. Remaining alive accumulates experience with kinds of food and kinds of predators. The consciousness of a being must make sense of this experience to supplement genetic memory with updates on the present to prolong its life. Making sense of it all could be seen as each being‘s personal narrative, the efficacy of which is attested to by its length.

Unlike their fellow beings, humans have managed to inject a mythical story into the experience of its progeny that transforms the organic eat/eaten dynamic into a mechanistic pass/fail exam with no predators but one’s betters. Being given no credit for the innate intelligence of the observer much less time to become aware of and develop natural curiosities and capabilities as even human parents allow in the wild, the modern human infant is drafted into becoming a civilized adult upon its first inappropriate defecation, having eaten its first meal, the first step in its journey of isolation from nature as it occurs within and without.

When rewards for obedience to others’ nonsense have greater value than remembering it is a game we have a choice in playing, we are civilized; habituated to the game of conquering nature — one we cannot win. That we cannot win is being shouted from minarets and state houses by outraged throngs of people, from poisoned seas and polluted air by the planet. We must cease our antagonistic story of human superiority and become more symbiotic with the body from which we arose lest she shed us, like the diseased narrative we carry by telling our children how we’re supposed to live.

Having western civilization’s myth piped in from every experience involving people since I was born, it seems a bit arrogant to me that I can claim to now see through it to the way things are, to see what the myth is about after its wishful thinking and “facts” are gone. Either I fell for it, or my way was paved so long as I chose to go along and fill in the proper blanks, because I found myself on my own for the first time in an earnest, trouble-free, thirty-four year life; no one left to fail or be failed by. The combination of new experiences and perspectives I’ve had off the leash since make me unfit for leashes evermore.

In the mechanics of story telling there is the trilogy of first; (I), second; (you) and third; (him) person narrative. In the mechanics of Freudian psychology there is the trilogy of id (instinct), ego (actor) and super ego (conscience). Both fields deal with strictly human interaction because nature reads no books or enacts no moral purpose for a conscience to attend. But they are useful to demonstrate the manipulation of human instincts wrought by adherence to the myth by one’s own personal story.

Let’s let “I” be the first person narrative of the “id”: the point of view from the primal observer, the instinctual, genetic memory with which each being is equipped at birth. Then we can let “you” be the second person narrative of the “ego”: the point of view of the seen, being an observable object out there in the mix of nature and society. And lastly, we might let “him” be the third person narrative of the “super ego” judging the effectiveness of the ego’s act in attaining from others it’s personal purpose. Notice the hierarchy of transition from natural, as born ability to live in nature alone at one end to purposeful dedication to the authority of others in the mold of the myth at the other end.

In nature the id serves as a perfect guide to the ego's actions putting it in the way of food and out of the path of predators to attain the longer, harmonious life desired by the super ego. In civilization the id is a dissident silenced by the ego lest it spoil the performance of licking the boots of whoever plays the super ego to be pleased in its story.

Currying approval of the public has such a priority over knowing oneself in the reality of nature that, for many, solitude seems a death trap and in nature, filling the trap with tigers. In these days of wall-to-wall communication solitude must be sought out by painstakingly turning off every device in the house, not that there are that many who would. In nature, approval amounts to not being eaten and having what we eat nourish us. Among men, gaining approval and, ideally, authority, motivates every activity indulged beyond the daily bread — and it’s an arbitrary game — in which eating alone is pitied and not playing makes one the enemy.

Even the games played within civilization reflect its myth of overarching administration by gods or governments and the possibility of sainthood, president or celebrity for the most dedicated to making their version mean something to the most people, as if truth could be created by man, just as he attributes such abilities to gods and their books. Like gods, the pantheon of mini-stars of excruciatingly varied forms of vicarious entertainment have idolizers in virtually every smelly locker room, reeking pit stop, perfumed crotch pit, Oscar walk, radio talk, podium and pulpit — thereby sustainting their reason for living around betting on what happens next on their version of the soaps because it has more meaning than what they do between shows; their own existence.

… 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.

NATURE IS NOT VICARIOUS

Civilization morphs human beings into human doings. This morphology has advanced to the stage where, to experience the feeling of “just being” in our daily lives requires the doing of, not only getting chores out of the way to make room for it, but scheduling the time merely to do the sitting and observing the world from such a relatively inactive proximity to being … with purpose.

Squeezed as our leisure is between the purposeful doings of maintaining and advancing ourselves within civilization, it cannot be considered a waste of time. An overwhelming portion of human doings are devoted to providing the world's doings to be watched during the leisure allotment. An overwhelming portion of human leisuring is spent observing these artificial doings rather than first hand accounts of natural existence. It makes them feel relatively good to not think about what they do otherwise but not enough to quit doing it for good. The victorious, vicarious fan switches off TV and schlubbs back to a life of quiet desperation.

Two separate human doings have crossed paths in my attention in such a way that it evoked this post. One is the demonstrations of solidarity displayed by both fans of “350” and protesters of the BP oil spill. The other is an attempt to get all human faces off facebook to protest child abuse. When I noticed the second doing it hit me … some actually believe nature is as vicarious as they are if they think demonstrations affect the nature of the environment or the nature of the humans against whom they rail.

No matter how many people participate, no matter from how far out in space it can be seen, not one particle of pollution per million or one bad parent per 7 billion was removed from the natural environment by flying and driving to however many solidarity demonstrations we may ever dream up or childhood cartoon animals we post as our portrait. Exercising individual integrity and responsibility for the smallest footprint by being symbiotic with Gaia is the only doing that matters.

I am reminded of times when a show of hands is requested of an audience in response to questions of morality from the podium are posed. 

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW … AND EVERYWHERE BETWEEN

Moths drawn to a light

Photo by Steve Irvine

Atomic Cloud Chamber

BIPARTISAN MY ASS

Crows seem to feel invulnerable to their natural predators when they are stalking each other, The electricity between all parties is amazing.

DOING SOMETHING…

…about the way it is. The way it, reality, is has two categories: natural and artificial. The natural state of existential reality includes the genetic evolution that gave rise to the human urge to interpret the environment beyond the fight/flight response guiding the daily adventure of finding food for all natural beings.

Creative representations of the environment arose from a sense of appreciation for the beauty and bounty of the natural world as a gesture of belonging.

Creative alterations of the environment arose when the sense of belonging led to the feelings of entitlement to enact preferential elimination of fight/flight instances within familiar habitats. Such measures of comfort require ignoring the increased frequency of fight/flight encounters along its borders. It is this denial of free birth sharing of existence that creates, of joyous being, a dismal doing … something … about altering yet another one of the human doings to better eliminate the less preferred. Eliminating doing is a return to natural being. The balance can be beneficial. I do not consider whatever it takes to scratch an itch a doing.

If a body may be said to own its cells, Gaia owns us. The mind fuck of creationism is that believers think a god made her especially for us to steward in Sunday principle and rape in weekday practice. The mere idea of ownership is the lie poisoning the heart of every distracting conflict along its borders, whether it be faith, nation, gang or friend. Ownership is isolation severing the chain of life. Eliminating owning is a return to natural sharing. The balance can be benevolent. I watch Priest calmly watch the neighbor cat, Willie, and the hen, Nameless One, as they share his bowl in turn this morning, here beside me as I type. I'm reminded of the thorough variation of species in the wild coexisting and evolving side by side by  developing diets different enough to turn the cycle of natural life over so thoroughly while matching the population of each to that of its food in response to changing climate.

If our perception of the world may be said to be a fairly high resolution hologram formed by our physically sensitive cell’s input, photoshopped by our propensity to see only what we want to see when we have a question in mind … when we agree on that, I’ll go on. It becomes fairly obvious to the evolving infant consciousness that natural functions draw disapproval requiring altered performance to regain affection. The connection between satisfying authority to maintain good graces buries many wonderful, creative ideas and people waiting for approval to do something for themselves. In extreme cases the artificial self created and maintained to elicit approval is the only image abused children grow up being aware of with no sense of independent capabilities beyond the one who must fool others. They disappear in solitary confinement until the feedback of feeding time reflects their existence once again.

Doing something about how one is perceived is often ironically revealing about the arranger as in the case of the acquaintance I can smell a block away and whose embrace I avoid for the obnoxious cloud that engulfs my senses and leaves me with the taste of talcum on my tongue for hours. I can see no positives in such a doing aimed at impressing people for whom she obviously has no respect and who can only wonder what sort of horrible odor deserves such a douche. The doings about public perception require long memories or protection. Only ventriloquists can talk behind their own back where reputation is ultimately decided. Eliminating the façade is a return to the natural self, motivated by genetic urges and fuck all the too, too proper if they can’t live with it.

The forgoing is a scratched itch.

COLLECTIVE NOUNS

Just as we call the biological cooperative activated by our cells our body, we erroneously consider the random collection of bodies, arising from and activated within the confines of the North American continent between Canada and Mexico, the “Americans”. Considering how this flock has represented itself to the rest of the planetary population since the end of World War Two, like crows, we might well be called a murder of humans.

Every commercial use of the word “Americans”, from political podium propaganda to snake-oil sales pitches to puritanical pulpit posturing is, in reality, like a blade dividing the ones who buy the particular use of the collective noun from the hyphenated and “un” American versions while ostensibly, ideally including everyone. And doesn’t everyone just love ideals?

The American Dream, conjured futures of wall to wall prosthetics and three hour work week for everyone, was the ideal prophesied upon the United States’ victorious emergence from WWII through the might of our industrial war machine being bigger than Hitler’s. Automation, yahoo.!

The American reality sixty years later is wall to wall prosthetics in the homes of the owners of the war machine’s corporations (those heroes) being powered by wannabes (US troops beta testing combat gear and inner city control techniques for swat teams back home) and wage slaves working sixty hours a week just to put food on the table and afford to buy the latest version of the greatest ever. As John Brunner so sagely observed, “It’s supposed to be automatic, but actually, someone must push the button.” The US is annexing button pushers world wide to keep the ideal alive for the prophecy profiteers and the employment up for “Americans.” If you can’t get work, I guess you know where your job’s gone and what subset you’re in.

Somewhere in the history of man someone declared they knew a purpose to existence that was so attractive to the human ego that it caught on despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. Imagine one’s self as being the purpose of all existence, created for you by your omnipotent father and given you to steward forevermore with his behavior as a model of administration. Whooee, I’ll take som’o’ that, and som’o’ this here and get away from that, it’s mine and it’ll cost ya or I’ll turn ya t’ salt. Even scientific atheists cling to the privileged superiority of man as they twist and commodify nature just as money fueled purpose has done to them. It is no coincidence that money accrues to the heads of religions and corporations in a culture where the reality of the individual existence is subverted to the ideal of a corporate heaven, or else!

Shedding our collective nouns until we get to the always fresh reality of every instant of our life is a cure for the confusion they cause: American, Idahoan, Married, Accountant, Baptist, Black, Female, Animal, earthling ……… genetically guided response to existence by observing a sensory hologram.

This rant courtesy of Pisces Iscariot’s email rattling the cage from both sides of which we write and sometimes rage. I have found a period in my life where, with no oxen being gored directly, I have been satified with watching annoyances dissolve without feeling the necessity of expressing them to others anecdotally or tiraditionally. I have formed more words in scrabble with my pal in Chicago than I’ve devoted to philosophical revelations and to which I will return with the letters E-T-C-S-R-R-I to fit somewhere into Bert's first word, B-O-O-T-I-E.

NO THING IN NATURE

If I knew I should die tomorrow,

I would plant a tree today.

~Stephen Girard

Photo: A H Palma

There are no things in nature. Things are the lifeless labels we attempt to attach to elusive events. We seek shelter from hurricanes as they occur and become experts at talking about the remnants of its event, the things we can pick up, name and pass judgment upon long after the event is being hidden from elsewhere. To the western civilized, educated mind nature no longer exists; trees aren’t beings, they’re things called trees, just sitting there; can make things out of ‘em, can burn ‘em.

Most of the very natural processes the human body experiences during a lifetime occur without the awareness, therefore without willful control, of the educated mind. Hunger and nausea, those bodily messages strong enough to get through the distractions of things being pursued in the artificial world to let its driven driver know the tank is either empty or overfilled with bad fuel.

Nature is one continuous, omnidirectional, purposeless chain reaction occurring to every scale of individual cell throughout the universe. Man has made of the endless event a thing labeled life, which he believes his god granted to those things that move without his pushing on them.

Lest I be suspected of picking on western civilization in respect to the marketplace thingathon attitude with which it treats the earth, histories older than any western medicine speak of the east considering health a matter of deep understanding of these bodily process through self contemplation; surgery and doctor’s fees were forbidden.

A Google earth scan of the island of Bali revealed that wherever the volcanic terrain was level enough there were tiered rice paddies and villages, right down to the shores of the island, along narrow ridges and in the craters. I knew this of eastern civilization’s respect for integrating their lives into the natural landscape symbiotically and of the age of the tradition judging from the complete coverage of the landscapes including pagoda temples on the peaks of the most precarious promontories. What I just recently grokked was how long the Balinese have been aware of the benefit of forests when, scanning the mountainsides too steep for paddies, I noticed the patterns in some of the most mature forests indicating that these rice farmers have been replanting their lumber supply for centuries. How enlightened these “primitive” people are.

If Bali is considered a third world, nature must be cooking up some sort of layer inversion to turn things back into events for everyone.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

The next best time is now.

~ Chinese Proverb