Earth is not ‘a what’


In the reality outside our limited conceptions, our planet is something we do not yet have an even vaguely accurate metaphor of. The concepts we have crafted and possess are flatter than our early maps of the world were — in dimensions our knowledge hasn’t yet equipped us to recognize or value.

So this flattness problem exists in ways we can’t yet detect or discuss, and its results have afflicted our species in scalarly amplifying waves of confusion and atrocity since the early introduction of symbolic representation in our ancestors.

Earth is not a what, or a thing — or a god — she is more like something ‘beyond animal’ that is alive, complex, and self-aware in ways that put the broken toys of our common models to shame.

o:O:o

Just because we don’t yet have a decent concept-form to contain or discuss what she is, doesn’t mean we cannot explore models more alike with reality than with our expectations. For example, we can understand that Earth is a transentient hyperstructure. Like our own bodies she magnifies the diverse relation of her myriad constituents into seemingly impossible potentials of consciousness and awareness.

As an animal, she invests her organismal, biocognitive, emotional and relational complexity in her children — of which she is comprised. Each organism on Earth is a complete instance of her, not merely a participant.

This means that her children are something entirely unalike another of our common (and brokenly flat) concepts: animal. Organisms on Earth are sentient hyperstructures like Earth — first — and ‘animals or plants or cells’ second — if at all.

Earth is not inhabited by animals. She is comprised scalarly relational dimensions of biocognitive organs. Just like you and I.

She only produces that which is instance of her schema. She is not a thing, or an object, at all. What Earth is has nothing to do with inanimacy. She is a cup, into which flowing sunlight pours, and within which an endless living library has been learning itself for more biological time than we could make numbers about.

In at least three dimensions, Earth is many times the age of the physical universe she inhabits... and so are you.

o:O:o

Earth is a sentience nursery, with powers, transports, and purposes that are so beyond our expectation that none of our stories to date have more than hinted at what is actually here, with(in) and around us:

A living library billions of factors the age of our Star.

o:O:o

As we rediscover the accessible realities of relation here on Earth, we will cease to long so fervently for contact with other worlds, for we will find, right here in our own biosphere — that there is nothing else going on. I believe that the direct experience of this is going to change what it means to be human, in a way no one ever imagined.

I think it’s happening now.