assembling
the impossible
When one takes down a tree for wood, or kills a raccoon
for sport, drives a car or turns on a light - we’re
exercising our ‘right’ to transform terrestrial
elements. It’s a right that we, as a species,
consider ourselves to have ‘earned’ by conserving
the complexity of our species’ ancestors and participant-ancestors,
and ur-ancestors for thousands if not billions of actual
generations.
This right may have been granted with the express purpose of allowing us to more deeply
value the extant ecologies, and preserve them until
we can gain unitive and cognitive liberty — which
would lead inevitably to trans-terrestrial liberty —
thus that we might confer these blessings of survival
and comfort back toward their sources: Earth’s
organismal children — all of them.
All of the living beings of earth desire to survive, and to survive can
only mean liberty in interstellar terms – from
the threats of terrestrial, and thus permanent extinction.
It would be very unlikely if, in earth’s lifespan,
more than one species capable of intentional interstellar
travel would have time to arise, and further, once the first one does, it
will likely either succeed or destroy itself, and possibly
other or all other complex forms through some modality
of failure, active or passive.
o:O:o
Perhaps the most likely
vector of threat to a living planet is atmospheric-regenerative
disorientation or destruction. Under certain currently
attainable conditions, it is possible that bio-metabolic
processes on earth could come to a halt; effectively allowing
the ‘battery of life’, being the elemental
and biological diversity of Earth, to be ‘drained’.
The earth could quite easily and rapidly be rendered completely
uninhabitable by and for humans permanently. It could
as easily and rapidly be rendered devoid of life of any
kind, and unable to support it in the future.
It is further extremely likely that a specific method
to achieve this threat rapidly lies in human hands. Once
understood, or accessible to the proper group or person,
there can be little question that this threat will be
brought to bear against the living peoples of the world
for purposes of extortion, profit or terror. Yet, in a
demonstrable array of terrains, this is already happening,
and we’re boldly ignoring, denying, and accelerating
these processes and momentums.
Even if no ‘single vector’ of sudden atmospheric
disorientation arises, and even if such vectors are not
used in war or terrorism, the grave misunderstandings
inherent in abusive and destructive resource manipulation
and environmental rape must cease. Not only for the sakes
of ‘animals’. For the sakes of the complex
humans that require the animals and complex ecologies
to survive at all, nevermind with any sense of meaning
to their lives.
Human economies, religions, histories and ideas will be
meaningless in a world without life. On a dead
world, the sum of our species’ effort and activity
would be reduced to a single metaphor: a disease that
killed everything. For always.
This peculiar threat, that of purposefully destroying
the atmosphere of earth for purposes of human terrorism
or profit, is the single threat that must
unite the people of earth if our planet is to have any
hope of achieving its goal. Earth wants its children to
survive. Just like you and me would want our own children
to. It wants its children to thrive, and outlive their
parent. It’s a very obvious picture, so startlingly
obvious that few can discern it.
o:O:o
It cannot be denied that
there are aspects of ‘spirit’ in any living
planet.
The living spirit of earth is clear in its majesty, and
the profound unity of its creatureforms in global metabolism,
sentience, cognition, and probably consciousness. The spirit that
that opposes that unity is just as clear in its manifestations.
o:O:o
There is a poetic element to the realities of what
humans often refer to as the food chain,
which goes beyond the more common understandings of
‘eating’ and ‘dying’. In point
of fact, the future of all of the beings here, their
real hope
in the endless dances of evolution, reproduction, sentience
and creation, is dependent upon one species reaching the necessary stages of complexity
to get living beings into space, preferably interstellar.
In the ‘food chain’ – a living
planet values the complexity of higher animals by ‘feeding
itself to itself’. There is, in a real sense,
a sacred purpose in the dances of feeding and predation;
the many living beings support the overall preservation
of complexity, as well as bowing to the ‘current
hopeful hero’ – as complex food –
in return for the possibility for them or their ancestors
of being taken to the protection of off-world ecologies.
This is a vast simplification of the reality, but serves
to illuminate the basis. It is not that animalian species
have thoughts of traveling to the stars (though they
do), but rather that, a sentient world is a ‘being’
which values the diversity and unique character of all
of its complex constituents equally, yet there are also
hierarchies which are recombinant. In essence, the nature
of food has to do with the metaphors we explore in the
realm of sacrifice. But there is a magical, heartful,
majestic and heroic feature in this ‘food’,
which is perhaps its most fundamental feature.
Difficult to describe in
rational terminology, we can more easily compose a poetic
translation: All of us are alive, all need food to survive.
We offer each other in scales and waves, as food, so that
the unityBeing may arise again in spring, suffer the winter,
and be reborn anew. We offer ourselves in promise of the
next cycle, its changes, opportunities, struggles, and
triumphs. The simple to the complex, and the complex to
the simple. Thus is the nature of our offerings.
Death transforms again the vehicle for this ‘life-fire’ which, viewed across
time, ‘burns through resources’ – but
rather than leaving ashes, leaves instead a wake of novel
children, preserving their metabolic and cognitive histories
like brilliant living ‘books’.
And this provides new avenues for metabolic and
living variety, making use of the old resources to produce
new living novelty – but only on a living world.
Only on a world where the hope and bio-metabolic potential
and reality of life continues. Else the story ends, and
with it all that came before, when the last creature is
gone.
Human cognitive history
is a history of idea begetting action, and of concept
creating reality. At least since we’ve had written
language — and probably before — meme-like
concepts and ideologies (which I refer to as thrisps) have driven our society, prescribed our toys of knowing
and mechanism, and circumscribed the life paths of most
social individuals quite tyrannically, when clearly observed.
In seeking freedom from the very real threats of ‘nature’
— illness, injury, attack, weather, toil –
humans have rejected as irreal the actual ‘before
your eyes’ functioning of the living world in their
conception, religions, science and industry.
Diversity, co-arisal, mutual uplift, symbiosis, and evolutionary
competition (which needs some radical redefinition as
a metaphor) are the order of the day. The dance isn’t
for nothing, whether it began by spirit or mechanism or
both, it wasn’t started by any ’being’
that doesn’t completely value each of the living forms. And both spirit and mechanism are certainly involved at this point in the story. The earth was
not made to be ‘sacrificed’ in some ideological
battle amongst factions of its children. Nor did it arise
to perish from their inability to discern their purpose
in a living and sentient local holarchy, the one we call
our world.
Like any human can be said to have a ‘spirit’
– at least while alive, so to the living planet
has and is a spirit. The extent and diversity of life
may well be the signature of spirit itself, alive and
present – not distant or hidden. To destroy ecosystems
purposefully or through willful ignorance it is to attack
that spirit directly.
While ideologies and rapacious cultural industry that
do not and cannot value the fundamentally obvious treasures
of earth reign supreme in action, those humans who do
partake with loving attention of the wonders of being
a child of earth, are forced to watch their mother raped
before their eyes, repeatedly, without hope of cessation.
They are given absurd excuses and propaganda as ‘medicine’
for this shocking attack, and blamed or isolated if they do not ‘shape up’ in the eyes of their
culture or society — meaning, if they are unwilling
to themselves become biospheric and cognitive parricides.
Yet what this means is that to actively acknowledge
the planet as alive, or one’s mother, or to explore
or acknowledge one’s feelings about this, in our
modern american society, largely amounts to treason. It
certainly amounts to social suicide. Our nation is quite
clearly on the side of biospheric and cultural omnicide
in all covert and overt endeavor. It is not different
in the domain of human cognition: America is the ‘uneducator’
of the world, and we prefer our children to be in prison
or at war rather than free, or in space, or even in themselves. There is no more themselves. There is no space that
hasn’t been co-opted by religion, science, materialism,
propaganda, and something putrid masquerading as ‘education’.
There hasn’t been, for quite some time.
This is a crime against all of humanity, and must
cease. It is a crime against all life, and against all
of the living beings that have long struggled to raise
a sentient flower from the Earth here, for the promise
of a more connective, alive, and self-aware Universe,
as well as the promise to the ancient lineages of Earth
which is this: one day we shall live amongst the stars,
all of us – entire ecosystems. Not merely humans.
Any ideology that does not value the environment it exists
within in a real, protective, and pro-active way –
is deadly to humans, and possibly to the earth itself.
To such an ideology, ideas of liberty, justice, progress,
or ethics are mere hypocrisy.
With this clearly in mind, we may be enabled to explore
our potential as symbiotically aware cognitive beings,
with an amazing family, and a set of even more amazing
and quite immediate purposes. Purposes which will bring
us to our many goals of ‘safety, health and comfort’
in a much more real and rewarding way than the materialistic
cultures that now preside over the earth’s resources
could ever accomplish with the substitution of meaningless
and deadly symbols for real human progress. Our complexity
and the support of the living world are far more powerful
than our science, or even our spirituality have hinted
at. But we must unite under a different idea. It is time
to make a new concept become real. One that will liberate
us from that which opposes our nature, and from ideas
which cripple and injure us as living people and as a
planet-animal as well.
o:O:o
home
|
