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In the 3-4 years since I started writing these articles the state of planet Earth's climate, environment and seas has shifted from being taken more seriously, though muted by what was happening in human affairs, to a scream that even 18 months is too long to wait. In this article I am going to leave various elements of what have been in all the articles from the outset to weave around one another, 3 of which are, 1. the state of the planet, as brought about by human activity, and it's being further complicated by what is going on in human affairs, 2. where the matter stands, in actual fact, and 3. how it really does not matter, everything is alright for Life has the matter in hand!
On spaceship planet Earth, climate control is going berserk and its systems are fouling up, working against one another and impacting operations in general. Yes, one could say that if we were to find the solution that is of the scale of this problem, things could be fixed. The trouble is that we are up against Life's ways. Rivers do not flow back up hill. Trees do not go back to being saplings on the way to becoming the seeds they sprouted from. Creatures grow up. They do not return to mother's womb. So, there is no looking back. Having passed the point of no-return, what is taking place before our eyes is in free-fall. Nobody knows where it is all going.
However, as I have just written, everything is alright, for this state of affairs leaves us face to face with ourselves, with what being human is about, with who we are. As everything around us falls away, there is nothing else.
None of the crises confronting us are in isolation, whether it is to do with the different aspects of what is happening to the environment world-wide, or with regard to crises in human affairs of the likes of failing arms treaties, trade wars, geo-political flash points, mass migration, water rights, human rights, governments abandoning the social contract, civil wars of opinion, autocrats subverting their countries constitutions, political war-mongering, even just the right to live, you name it! When it comes to the environmental crisis, people are reeling off bright ideas as to what to do about each issue.
But who is actually going to do what? Do those people know they would be volunteered and do any of them know what would really be involved should such ideas find fruition?
In India and Mexico of the 1960s, greater productivity from monocultures of hybrid crops was hailed as a green revolution. However, the longer term environmental impact of massive irrigation and large scale dependence on the application of artificial fertilizers and pesticides led to depleted ground water supplies with sparse crops growing on compacted, spent soils. Take the more recent example of off-shore wind farms, where the dissonant beat of the blades of hundreds of masts transmit an interference pattern whose noise overrides the sensorial activity of creatures whose lives depend upon the fact that the sea is a medium whose conductivity is infinitely greater than that of the atmosphere. Though wind farms are supposed to tap a sustainable source of energy in an environmentally friendly way, they are yet another example of human gain at environmental expense.
Or take large-scale tree-planting to save the planet. Trees are a brilliant idea in the face of deforestation. But, using them to save the planet! Who knows what combinations to grow where? Who is going to grow what seeds? Who is going to arrange this? Who is going to plant them? Who is going to look after them? Who is going to do the trouble-shooting? Have any of them been approached? Who is going to organise and coordinate all this? Where is the plan and the agreement with everyone involved? How is all this going to be financed? What is the time-line for this to be magicked up in the immediate future that NOW calls for? And above all, is anyone cognizant of the fact that, in actual fact, the seedlings planted will be many years in becoming trees and even longer to become mature forests.
Multiply this by each and every grand idea there is and, if by some miraculous chance it were to happen, would we have saved the planet? Certainly not! For the juggernaut of change already on the move cannot be stopped. As just written above, we have passed the tipping point. Life only goes forward. It does not do reverse. We are watching catastrophes we have brought about unfolding in real time.
You see, Life is, by definition, alive. We are, therefore, but one of many forms of life that the aliveness of Life has thrown forth. In other words, we get the life we have from Life. In doing this, Life has bequeathed us our human intelligence as the intelligence necessary to our being human, as opposed to rat, for example, whose intelligence is that of rat that Life gave it. In this, the human intellect is but a part of that, the head part. So, the view of Life as a circumscribed entity in steady state, like a pool western science can fish in to its heart´s content, without consequence, is a no-brainer. Life has a life of its own, with behaviours that pertain to that, one of the consequences of which is what we know as `Life´. This is beyond the reckonings of any of our schemes to scale it down to our level of comprehension. There is simply no way we can comprehend Life and its intelligence. So, it is, in this case, that our scientifically driven technologies merely impact Life, a tinkering that it reacts to as the alive thing that it is. They cannot benefit Life, as we propose. This is why I say, the good news is that whatever we do, actually does not matter, for Life takes it in hand, one way and another, anyway, along with everything else.
Life made the human species an intelligence that is served by the body it inhabits, with a brain that handles the chaos of information our body's systems stream at it, in service to the likes of you and me, as that body's operator, Life gave humanity the consciousness that goes with that. Like butterflies flitting here and there in the garden of Life on Earth, we have a place. Life gave us things to do. We belong. We are embedded in Life and it is the life of Life that made it all so. We know somewhat of a butterfly's flitting about. Yet, we seem to have absolutely no inkling as to our place and function in the entanglement of Life on Earth. For all that ecology says we are inextricably members of the living organism that Earth is, it is strange that we should consider the life-style we have that junks the planet, contaminating its atmosphere, its waters and soil and poisoning us in the process, fed by the science and technology that makes that possible – that we should consider continuing along those lines as the way to make the world a better place!
A proliferation of cells/units/entities reaches a threshold and crosses it into another state. Take how an egg becomes larva. It pupates and the imago emerges. A transcendental change of state has taken place. What has come about bears no resemblance to what preceded it. That previous entity has itself become something else, with behaviours of its own. That is intelligence, the intelligence life has written into everything, as the intelligence it is. In this, Life only does things that work. It does not make incomplete creations. If one of its creations was flawed in some way it would not work, could not be, would not survive, for Life does not do half-baked. Yet humanity fails in this. Why? After all we are also one of Life´s intelligences. Life did not make a mistake. So, what is the score? What happened? Where did we go off the rails?
The end of the C19th and well into the C20th saw the activities of figures, like Freud, Adler and Jung, leading to the establishment of what we know as psychology. Each of them is renowned for the particular emphasis of their work. Though not as well-known, Immanuel Velikovski, was also one of them, for probing the realm of the amnesia he consistently found himself encountering in his patients, a phenomenon so common that he saw it as collective, in the same way as Jung saw amongst his patients what became known as the collective unconscious. Casting around for what could have caused this phenomenon, he found accounts in various cultural records of times in the past when there was chaos and Earth was in upheaval. From the perspectives these different cultures presented, from one side of the planet and another, he saw them pointing to something of the magnitude of a collision of cosmic material with Earth, with a train of events that occurred over several millennia, subsequently. In that context, agreement between those different cultural records helped him piece together a time-line for that event and its consequences.
In some of the earlier articles I have referred to this scenario, in terms of how more recent findings in a number of scientific disciplines have come to portray it, enlarging the picture in greater detail. However, I would not, for a moment, apportion blame solely to this event. You see, it is known that, prior to it, several cultures had a maritime traffic with one another.
Though it is clear the event devastated them and disrupted their activity, the specifics are vague, the knowledge patchy. Nevertheless, it is certain that, as a civilisation having its own top-down, authoritarian, structure, its order was not pristine. So the event would have been but a brutal blow to a structure that already had built-in fault lines.
Though Velikovski did not know the actual nature of the event, he understood its having scarred the psyche of the people who experienced it, leading to a collective amnesia that erased it from their memory. This psychic wounding afflicts us, now, perpetrated by the dysfunctional societies we live in. Belonging to this violent, disoriented, sick humanity, its narcissism and neuroses are embedded in our parents´ minds. Coming through the mothering and care that forms us, this programming distorts us.
The psychic damage, sequestered in us like this, is ramified and becomes more complex as each generation perpetuates it.
In times when social media gives its followers the platform for presenting whatever views they have as truth, whether that be of truths others consider false or falsehoods others present as truths, it has to be enough to know that something of such enormity happened in the past that the awareness of humanity of the time blotted out, simply because it could not encompass it. This amnesia would seem to have buried the matter in humanity's subconscious, preventing subsequent generations, down to ours, now, from knowing anything about it. Even if one can only say, something happened that scarred the human psyche, then, that is responsible for having led to how we are, today, that is enough for it to be clear that we can change that right here and now, regardless.
As a sort of treatise on who we are, ideas as to what that is and how that could better manifest itself have been scattered here and there throughout earlier articles. Having concluded the previous article on the note of how being human is our profession, this article is devoted to gathering some of those ideas together, under the headings of, The Extent of My Human Nature, and, Conduct That Is Truly Human, in order to focus on the pursuit of this profession of ours as that one thing we can do, regardless, in the upheaval of these times.
The focus of the 3 image/text series in the 1st article was on a new view of the heart, the head's relation with that and a more mature appreciation of thinking. Let me pick up on that a bit again here.
Something occurs out there in the world, or it happens to your internal state. So you feel sad, glad, scared, mad, some emotion triggered by a source of vibration, a field of energetic activity (whether it is from out there or from within you), vibrations picked up by sense organs, that the heart receives via the blood, assimilates and conveys to the cortex as the energy configuration of the emotion that matches the data received by areas in the head that correspond with the senses involved, all of which prompts the cortex to release neurotransmitters specific to that configuration, which have you making a response to what you are experiencing. As the master organ of the body it inhabits, the heart is ever adjusting itself to incorporate the frequencies of all this activity – to recognise signals, relay messages via the circulating blood and act on the information embedded within those frequencies – to stabilise matters in a coherent way, on behalf of everything about the body that is entrained to it, carrying the lot within the frequency of its broadband field. All this is energy, frequencies in a field of life that are themselves frequencies in greater fields, as much as their field is a composite of other fields oscillating within them.
When I look around at the world and how it is, at who I have become, it is obvious matters could not be otherwise. One thing has led to another and here is how it all is. However, that does not mean the world and how I am could not be otherwise. It would, in fact, be more to the point for things to be different since I would be encountering the world as I find it now, which is not the same as what I have encountered of it so far. Who I am in this moment is a consequence of what I have been and done up to now. Who I will become will stem from what I do from now on. Remember that image of the mirror I have mentioned before? – the one in which the person you see is what the past has made of you and in which the person looking out at you sees you in the present, with the future up ahead. (This is also good news, that each individual can bring about personal change so simply and immediately.)
Life on the material plane finds expression through the play of Energy and Consciousness. They are the agents at work, not just behind the scenes of the world in which we live, but in the realms within which Planet Earth exists and the world in which it and all other worlds are contained. Fields of electro-magnetic activity, nestle within larger fields on and on out into Infinity. The entities within each realm of such activity react and interact, creating thereby the respective ring-pass-not of that realm. Thus, from out there in Infinity, Ultimate Reality is projecting the material universe and all it contains out of itself. In these terms, things like material forms, finite beings, birth and death, joy and pain, and so on, are merely consequential because matters could be otherwise.
It is in this field of Life that we are energy, electro-magnetic frequencies, too, energy sensitive to its own vibratory nature, aware of itself, alive. Ever doing, reacting and interacting in this game of activity and awareness, we are ceaselessly adjusting, whether we know it or not. This on-going process of re-organising ourselves is one of becoming that someone else the person in the mirror is looking for. This is the opportunity, built into how Life is, that makes it possible to grow and change how things are, as any single one or other of us takes hold of it.
With everything being energy, frequencies, fields vibrating, nothing is as we see, hear, feel, smell, taste or experience it, for what the world the senses show us is something construed in our heads from the frequencies out there in the sea of life by which our sense organs have been activated. The world as we see it, therefore, is the interpretation being human, in these times and circumstances, has cultivated us to give to the electro-magnetic frequencies our senses relay to the cortex. Through that rise and fall of the succession of civilisations, referred to above, the likes of our different groupings, ethnicities, races, cultures, religious practices and places in the hierarchy of what has reached the dimension of a global order this time is what does this to us.
So, if the material world is an illusion, then what we do in it, with it, because of it, through it, is more to the point. Take my interaction with people, for instance. When my field is stimulated, or perturbed, by another field, it undergoes an alteration in its spectrum. So my response to the situations I am in and to the people around me is continually causing the nature of my electro-magnetic field to shift and reform, whilst my greater self is elsewhere in another dimension, as it were. Yet the two are always connected, as I bring things into expression, here, now. For, what I do with regard to how the forms change and reform in the here and now, goes to that other place to elaborate on what becomes of me there. The person I will see in the mirror will be someone else from who I see now.
Finally, before turning to the 2 image/text series! I´d like to acknowledge that the slant I take on indigenous peoples, their ways of life and thinking, could be seen as romanticising 'the noble savage'. But, PLEASE, in talking of indigenous people, we need to recognise that we are looking at a stream of humanity whose ways are as different from those of other cultures, tribal societies and nomadic folk, as they are from our ways and style of life! Where civilisations generally and the cultures of our times have a hierarchical, top-down structure that orders society and prescribes its functions, their societies give expression to a quality of life, as each individual member creates it through how they live. One could think of such societies forming from the bottom up as each member contributes to that through how they live it in the moment, an order that only exists in the moments of their giving it expression.
Look at it this way! So there are some butterflies flitting about the garden. The next day, you do not know where they are, whether some stayed the night, have spent their short life and died, or what, just as you do not have a clue as to where they came from, or why they chose this garden, in the first place. Yes, there are certain types of environment that suit each of them. Nevertheless, they each flit about, spontaneously registering signals containing information about the place they are in, reading messages relative to the vegetation around them, mating, and generally passing through life, messages embedded in the frequencies their butterfly senses select, from one moment to another. That is an example of the seamless way forms of intelligence are embedded in the field of Life, towards an overall co-evolutionary end. That is how the Aborigine is in the Australian Outback, the San bushman in the Kalahari Desert and indigenous tribes in the Amazon. The filters that prescribe nomadic migratory patterns, forms of tribal existence, cultural formats as distinct one from another and the structure of civilisations whose keepers guard the order of each in defining ways, do not pertain to this stream of humanity. The doors of perception so thoroughly gated in the millennial passage of time, since that apocalyptic event, screen an enormous part of human intelligence from finding expression through us.
As civilisations have come and gone, the crises their existence provoked, depletion of the resources they depended on, destruction of the landscapes that nurtured them, the natural catastrophes that overwhelmed them and internecine strife within them, such things did not touch the lives indigenous peoples pursued. For us, it is all going on once again at a global level. We are a global civilisation collapsing, whilst indigenous life-styles exist apart from that.
Within the framework of an order that compels our societies to function and be as they are, gadgets and mass consumption both compel and placate our being within this dystopian order as the proverbial bread and circuses did the populace in Roman times. Our circumstances and the nature of the order projected upon the world, thereby, are at the opposite end of the spectrum to those of indigenous peoples. However, it is that quality that indigenous peoples, living in widely divergent habitats, had in common, that would be valid in our case, too, that being human, living from knowing who we are. It is not that we should live in the deserts and forests they inhabit to do so. It is about being human, being who we are, in the deserts and jungles of the countryside we inhabit. We do not have to change anything or stop what is underway, for the change required is simply that of a state of mind. It is simply a question of making that adjustment, taking whatever Life presents, as they did, as do any wasp and porpoise, and get on with being who we are.
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