I hope you are well; I am fine. It has been some time since I sent out a communication to the gene-swarm. Attached here are some things that concern me day-to-day.
Life is finely fruiting, I am content to be content in the kind of peace that is at hand here. I have a renewed sense of the preciousness of this tiny little life, this multiform, suffering something surrounding us.. I look forward to natural things like rising in the total absence of alarm clocks, like revelling in the death of seasons. Clouds purpled by collapsing evenings. We are presently coming to the end of durian season, which is something of a household tragedy..! The king of fruits is doing a Persephone for the next 6 months. In his place will be the rambutan, the punk, but we are still some time away from the much beloved yellow mango. My body is in excellent condition. I take in no inorganic chemicals, no tobacco, no alcohol. I am muscle, and fibre, and plasma, and skin, because I don't let the weasels in. I look around at the people here, the uniformly perfectly formed Thais, and I rage within at how our culture could undergo so ignorant a gastric perversion, that ready meals and refined sugars could take the place of human(e) sustenance at the average dinnertable. How simple the pleasure in folk food.
I can dream deeply over here. And I don't dream myself at work, enduring some base harangue from an idiot boss, as I did back in the old country. I dream about Thai olives - which taste exactly like baked apples, something I've long missed - or I dream about hunting foot-high mushrooms with Amp. There are often local characters, who speak to me in Thai, and sometimes I can respond. A few months ago I realised I was in a dream, and I looked up at the sky exalting in its own aqueous, tryptamine hue, looked around at this universe, folded within my skull, and so this suspicion I have not been able to shake: (William of Ockham said that hypotheses should not be multiplied unduly) and so is it not more efficient to suppose that the world is made of Mind, just as dreams are? That they are reflections of each other? The architecture, after all, is identical: There is landscape, music, tactility, emotion, and, most obviously, these landscapes are both inhabited. If this is so, you can never be anything but "in mind". Because a set of tensor equations will never make sense of the world, and will never make sense to you, I put it to you that cognising reality must be a personal responsibility; those tensor equations aren't going to help you during the last dance - the only dance you have to take alone. You have to ponder the possibility that you are here, now, in mind, and that you are here to stay. Death, I fear, could be a fabulously provincial notion: You have to be prepared for the shock of your potential ceaselessness.
Creation, then, a function of mind: The notion of mind as epiphenomenon hearkens back to the Enlightenment - interesting spiritual terminology, by the by - a movement wishing to align with pure reason after recanting spirit, God, church. Obviously, after a thousand years of religious, political and cultural persecution at the hands of puritan England, it is understandable that spiritualism would be dispensed with for the time being. But we are mature enough now to see that Reason unleashed in the absence of ethics, in the absence of Heart, is at least as demonic as it is angelic. It is undeniable that there is something wrong with the world, and I put it thus: We have severed a connection to spirit, and we are mired in a technological hell because of it: A world where monkeys are hurled into walls at 70 miles per hour that scientists might better understand the "nature" of traumatic injury; a world where microscopic cameras are inserted into plastic penises so biologists can fully come to terms with the discolouration of the vaginal wall as women approach orgasm. Verily, we are dedicated to truth in all its forms: But basic morality, ethics, love - they are not here anymore. They are not, after all, reasonable. There is something wrong with the world.
Looking at history, and I do, certain coincidences jump out. The most glaring of these is the perennial philosophy, the notion that we are in some sense downloaded into matter, that we temporarily vibrate between given frequencies, for a given period, until some sort of a nebulous something, something like a Soul, detaches and returns from whence it came. It is so persistent and so old a concept - indeed, the oldest surviving concept - that every society save our own set their greatest minds to the task of decoding it. (In observing just how perniciously widespread this is, I'm reminded of that inspired suggestion from someone or other which runs something like, "Coincidence is that which is left over following the application of a bad theory"..! Indeed, scientists will tell you that spiritual concepts are simply delusions, hopeful wanderings of the imagination. But I put it to you here that it's nothing to do with hope, and that the average scientist has never given proper weight to what is being proposed: There is nothing more terrifying than the knowledge that you are forever, that you can't get out of it, you can't rest: You are in for the long haul.) I'm reading Graham Hancock's Supernatural at the moment. He quotes - at approaching embarrassment's length - one David Lewis-Williams, a South African archaeologist who, having studied San rock art and having researched the inherited shamanic practices of their descendants, the bushmen of the Kalahari, came to the conclusion - one which is supported amongst cave art researchers - that we started painting our visions on the walls. We didn't send the hunters or the gatherers to traipse all the way into the treacherous dark: It was the shamans, the medicine men and women, the healers and visionaries, who commanded the ink. It was hallucination, visionary reality, they sought to transcribe onto rock, simultaneously birthing in the process both art and religion. These two totally unreasonable disciplines are the attributes of humanity - as well as language - which speak most of the great schism between our own hominid line and all lines preceding us. After all, you don't see newts preaching about the "kingdom of heaven [being] within you"; you don't attend galleries dedicated to the impressionist movement amongst monarch butterflies.
Evidence has recently surfaced that our own evolutionary path rewarded the ability to function on a diet incomparably wider than all previous lifeforms. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teWngGuTNRA) I've read somewhere that there are some 3 million foods amenable to the human stomach: You've likely seen on nature programs just how closely tied organisms are to strictly limited culinary options, usually one or two foods. (And we're back to the ready-meals again.) In our case, we chose to code instead for genes that would allow us to take in plant alkaloids - i.e. toxins - without detriment to the physical vehicle, thus increasing both genetic mutation and our feeding options on the baring savannahs of Afrika. In other words, we developed the capacity to take in vision-inducing foods. It was a novel evolutionary adaptation in response to a drying African continent - the drying that thrust us out of the trees. Faced with a new environment, humanity chose adaptation instead of extinction. And from the foods that intoxicated us we started painting on the walls, singing, dancing, seeking out knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and generally doing that which makes us human and life bearable.
Now look at our present situation in the west. It is legal, indeed encouraged, for people to eat microwavable shite off plastic. It is encouraged, even written to work contracts throughout the western world, to take in toxins, such as caffeine or alcohol, that are not so reliably vision-inducing. [Alcohol hospitalisation has shot up 70% in the last decade in the UK, but this (rightfully) remains a legal choice for the individual; but cannabis - a plant which "has appeared in every materia medica that has ever been written" (Dr. David Bearman, M.D.) - remains irrationally and pathetically demonised by the "authorities" everywhere.] It is, then, "illegal" (whatever that means) to indulge the senses in the very adaptation that made us human in the first place. It is illegal to probe your mind with the help of plant alkaloid complexes, and there is a very good set of reasons for this. I see as co-tangent society's illegitimisation of human ecstasy and the callous and mean-spirited fashion in which we have unleashed across the Earth our unrestrained Reason. Reason unrestrained.. The result of our faith in a science divorced from ethics: Rainforests, developing for 220 million years, mindlessly chopped for furniture. A sea full of oil and chemical dispersant instead of 90% of the big fish. Is it coincidence that the very rainforests we once inhabited are now a focus for our ignorance? No, there is no coincidence. We hate the forests for having abandoned us. And we most assuredly resent our visionary past because, should we reclaim it, no one would fail to notice just how far from the path we have wandered, intoxicated by an American Nightmare, exported to all.
Science maintains that creation has no direction, or motivation, no intention, no intelligence. Nature is a dumb animal, like all the other dumb animals. But another glance at history immediately dissolves this assumption. There is a directedness to things. There is a quickening underway, and you must have noticed it. It took billions of years for the plasmic oceans to cool sufficiently that the first electrons could fall into stable orbits about atomic nuclei; following that, molecular biology was born aeons later; and then more quickly we see poly-peptide chains and self-replicating proteins. And then its simple lifeforms, viruses, bacteria, all in a few hundred million years; and hot on their heels we see complex life in a fraction of the time. And then within a fraction of a fraction we see humanity climb out of the great ape line, and then in just a couple of millions of years its Fire, Culture, Language, Dance, thence leading us to the breakneck pace of our time where it's all about Space-flight, Yoghurt, Telephones, Parody, Internet, Doublethink, Mapping and Manipulation of the Human Genome, Time Travel, Social Networking, Supercomputers, Large Hadron Colliders and the Singularity. When something speeds up it means it has a direction, a goal. There is something attracting it, just as coins spiral ever faster towards the holes in the bottoms of charity boxes. You can't speed up unless some force is increasing around you. And so it will be seen with this universe: A universe, according to physics, which is experiencing itself as a "random fluctuation" - the only random fluctuation in nature, you'll notice. Random. That's another concept that is used by science to justify a bad theory: I mean, have you ever done anything randomly? (If this all seems too remote, well, one can always revert to the crass notion that everything sprang from nothing in a single instant for no reason. (And even if this theory is "accurate", who's to say that you'll die only for another universe to simply spring out of you, eh? Given sufficiently aeonic slabs of duration, nothing is an uncertainty.)
They want you to believe not only have they mapped the territory, but that you should adopt every one of their maps, and that you are incapable of observing the ontological and epistemological topology on your own. Well, which culturally-sanctioned maps shall we pick? Religious persecution? Chemical warfare? The gulag? Nuclear armament? Reason has so much for us to choose from, you see, that it's easy to make a good choice.
But the difficult choice - the choice to go it alone and find some real data, data that will be pertinent to your understanding - is always the most interesting. (The universe loves courage, after all: Just look where I ended up once I grew a bit of spine.) Institutions are forever certain of their prescience. Remember, for example, when they said that if you read The Bible in English you'd be damned eternally? But institutions have not historically been the centre of intellectual or moral advancement: That always comes from individuals, from conscious manipulation of consciousness. And an expansion of consciousness here is certainly required; if the future does not admit such an expansion, what kind of a future will it be?
There are a lot of ways to think about the world. Why pick the way of some government-endorsed school curriculum, or from the evening news? It's almost always wrong, and very often the reverse of the truth. Embrace the reality of immediate perception, keep the goggles polished, ignore the propaganda.
It's all for the taking.
"Every action and feeling is preceded by a thought."
- - As a Man Thinketh, James Allen
Love, pax.. Out for now,
Danno
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