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Science is the motor powering the way of life we have, a way of life made possible by technologies that necessitate the pillage and contamination of Earth’s soils, seas and atmosphere. Choosing further recourse to technologies of this ilk, in the name of softening this assault, we have created the nightmare scenario of tweaking the damage being done, as we open out the field of plunder. As in any nightmare, this has us thrashing around in wider and wider circles, so enlarging the damage, as we seek and utilise additional resources for the fresh technologies being spawned.
Think how burgeoning air, road and sea transport and travel spews forth increasing amounts of CO2, not so much despite our thrashing around, but as I’ve just commented, because of it! Research and development is well advanced into Hydrogen Cell and water engine technology, for which water (an already grievously threatened resource) will be the combustible! ... and we think this is softening our approach towards the environment! Or take this! A discarded supermarket plastic bag travels, as a commodity that’s bought and sold, en route, several times over, from London say, through Harwich to the Netherlands by ship, Poland by truck, en route to an out of the way Anatolian village (Turkey) where, with all the rest of the plastic garbage it’s with, it is dumped and set fire to, for the fumes and chemicals leaching into the soil, to kill the citrus orchard at the roadside. ... and we call that recycling!
I don’t want to belabour this issue with more examples, for the point is, whether we are prepared to recognise the thrashing around, or not, this is an endgame. Whatever we do merely compounds the matter. We cannot envisage backing up. We see no other path to pursue. There is nowhere else to turn to. Well, endgame it may be, but end, no! There is light enough in this darkness and that’s what this presentation is concerned with.
I’d like to lay the groundwork for the matter of there being enough light in this darkness, through a number of considerations, as follows.
1st of all, the scientific confusion involved in matters getting to this pass. Rather than making an extensive run down on this, I will make several references. In doing so, I’d like it to be clear that this is in no way about running science down. It is about blindspots, inconsistencies, oversight and irregularities concerning the ends to which science is put.
– I know evolutionary theory says we’re the top of the heap. The claim of scientific and technological progress that we’ve never had it so good is taken as proof of that! Yet, the world of human affairs is a world in which anything and everything beneficial (any of the benefits supposedly heralding the advantages) gets swamped, outweighed by what’s detrimental, (by the ways bad actors appropriate them). I use the word ‘swamped’ because that’s how it is, bad action compelling technology to scramble to find fixes for the abusage, as part and parcel of what it calls progress!
– Science, as we see it to be, is phase-locked with looking at things through the space/time filter. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s look at the implications and then take it from there! I’ll use a bizarre scenario. Let’s say you wanted to count the insects in your garden. Apart from the question of how you would count them, (which is part of what makes this a bizarre scenario) when would you have a final count (which is the other part of what makes this a bizarre scenario)? After all, the insects are continuously coming and going. There is no moment when you could conclusively say, “that’s it. The count is done!”
Interminable as such a count would be, there is something else to it. It doesn’t reckon on the scale of what could have happened, in the meantime, to your wee haven in the path of a forest fire, say, a mudslide from the neighbouring mountain, real estate development, collateral damage from some geo-political conflict, an asteroid strike, or the solar system being in the path of something of cosmic proportions. Suddenly here we are considering things about Life on the grandest scale, in the same way we were scrutinising insect activity in your garden. Space and time have got lost in all this! With all those insects buzzing back and forth like this, you cannot establish how many there are, for time does the dirty on you, for your count was already some moments ago. So, how are you going to say how many there are, now? ...and so this goes on endlessly, out into the far reaches of Space, to we know not where.
In a way one could say we are like fleas on a dog that only know what they experience of the world that dog is to them. Yes, the technological extensions of our senses may access so much more. But that is merely concrete, physical data, about which there is nothing experiential. To use another image, we seem to be as aware, conscious and thoughtful of the greater fields of Consciousness and Life as bacteria, fungal spores and parasites that live in us are of us human beings, as conscious, living organisms. Of course our perspective from inside the goldfish bowl of the life that is ours plays out within these confines. That should go without saying!
– Science says we know but 5% of all that there is to know. But how can one quantify a percentage of something one doesn’t know the extent of? The same is said about a number of other things, like Dark Energy and Dark Matter, ...and human potential, too, for that matter! Such pronouncements are a demonstration of an inability to think straight!
– Science in the guise in which we use it, keeps getting wrong footed by Life. For example, in the release and absorption of the heat-trapping gas, CO2, the natural forces involved in carbon being sucked up by the oceans and forests, or released in long pulses, causing the ice caps to shrink or grow, influencing sea-levels, thereby, is one of Earth’s vital functions, a natural phenomenon in the scheme of Life on Earth. Further to this, paleological research has established that the periodicity of the closing down and re-starting of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC – an arm of the planet’s oceanic circulatory system – its global heat transfer system), belongs to the functioning of this life-support system. Recent research shows that the next shut-down is imminent, the evidence being of polar melt having already created the ‘cold blob’ in the N. Atlantic, which heralds it.
So, as provocateurs of a CO2 build up at this time, our activity is but an aspect in the larger play of Earth’s vital functions. This is to say that, for all our sins, life in us and the consequences of what we are up to, comfortably fit within the overall workings of Earth’s life and being, anyway! Yet, in all the hype over our contribution to this build up, what to do about it and how, science doesn’t seem able to grapple with the reality of what’s going on, in an overall sense. For all of our supposed intellectual prowess, again, pursuing the way we live robs us of the ability to think straight!
– Science is confused as to what Life is! DNA-based Life is what we most readily assume Life to be – us and the other creatures, plants and microbes this includes here on Earth, thereby assuming that anything other than that is of the dead planet we live on, which, if it didn’t have vital processes that adjust and regulate it, wouldn’t sustain the threshold of stability that favours our existence! The inherent irony of this contradiction goes unmarked! Further to this, we overlook the something ‘out there’ doing stuff that produced the building blocks of DNA-based Life that came here from ‘out there’, in addition to what Its on-going activity out there does in sustaining everything out there down, into here, on this planet. There has to be life for Life to exist! ...and to say that all life sprung from non-living material, as the theory would have it, shows that the scientific community isn’t encompassing this matter in any coherent way.
2nd, the hold information technology has on us. So, there are algorithms tracking your interests and feeding you material, accordingly. If you pursue a fresh interest, they will flood you with new material on it. If you stick to the same interests, they’ll fall back on reviving earlier interests, or start to feed you random stuff, to tweak new interests.
These algorithms are also on the lookout for your opinions, tastes and views, for marketing purposes. Of course they are interested in your privacy, for they’re out to mine anything and everything they can about you. It’s all data that they feed off, to pigeon hole you and pass on what they glean for ‘others’ to use.
This process is of machine learning, the accumulation of bits of data that are meaningless in themselves to build banks of information for different iterations of AI to draw on, with regard to their respective programming ... and we are inescapably buried in the matrix that emerges from how every bit of it all is actually in lock-step. We haven’t said a word about our likes and dislikes, tastes, interest, beliefs, opinions or views. We don’t need to for it has all been inferred and the algorithms doing this have assigned us to the echo-chambers we are in. Yes, people have programmed this thing, and that, and the next, for it all to have become this way, not according to some beneficent vision, but through tinkering with this and that, as they ‘perfect’ this Life-sized toy they are infatuated with that has us snared in its machinations, thereby. In this scheme we are merely sources of information, everything about us data. We are pawns in these machinations. It is insidious, for this matrix has no purpose, other than managing collections of data in the overall function that makes it what it is.
3rd, about the Internet, a “terra incognita”, in which something like the world-wide-web is but a colonisation; an oasis in that unknown; an established, small “terra firma” in a ‘we-know-not-what’. It is not a physical place, but a virtual, immense dark, unbounded void which is only plumbed by the devices we contrive for doing so. What makes anything successful technologically is due to how it reflects the workings of Life in the real world. So we should know that, just as there is no limit to what we can do in, with and through the internet within that virtual void it inhabits, it is a reflection as to how things are in Life.
My point in mentioning this is for its being an analogy for the unbounded nature of Life, not as the literal, physical sum of everything therein, but as the sublime domain in which living bodies/all that has had life/and all that will come to be, have had/are having/and will have, their moment and place.
The allusion here is that entities are worlds to those in them, as there are worlds that contain those entities, all ring-pass-nots of life in their completeness and sufficiency unto themselves, whereby each is an illusion of life hiding in the life within which it exists, all veils shimmering and moving in the dance of Life, the Game Life plays. There is a profoundly scientific reach to such an understanding of things that is completely overlooked.
4th, I can explore all the things about myself and being human, anatomically, physiologically, behaviourally, to my heart’s content, yet, at the end of the day, that doesn’t say a thing about the sense I have of myself, the consciousness that is ‘me’, who ‘I’ am, what makes the ‘me’ I experience myself being, the consciousness and the overarching Consciousness to which I belong, whether I am aware of that, or not.
The contentedness of all things (me included) being who and what they are within the ambit of what makes their existence possible and pleasurable, the compassion they have towards those who benefit from being in their ambit, the name for this is ‘Love’, (that which makes the world turn round in the worlds within worlds of the Life of the All and the consciousness of its being and doing so). Such circles of activity, fields of energy and sensitivity, whose awareness gives them life, are Consciousness.
On that note, let’s move to a Power Point, image/text series, to explore what it is in all this that can make the dark light enough.