1:
aeternaTheft
The biggest ‘heist’ in history
didn’t happen in a bank, or a museum or a palace. It happened
at a tree. This heist was so serious that not only did it never
end — but it grew in a way we really have no common
concept for, and although this event may have happened as long
as 15000 years ago — the loss and the theft are still growing.
There were no guards, or alarms. There
was ‘no security at all’. That which was stolen was
of incalculable value, and its value — as well as the impact
of its loss — would increase geometrically with every passing
instant and every repetition-echo of the original event.
It wasn’t precisely a theft, but
more of a confidence trick. The rather absurd thing about this
heist was that the victim and the perpetrators were essentially
the same and both of them were children. What was ‘lifted’
was our species’ primary access to an entire domain
of organismal sentience. It also damaged what remained of
a once liberal ring of logics — it froze them, hid 9/10ths
of the ring, and declared the most competitive amongst the remainder
‘the winner’ for all human eternity.
There are many unusual features to this
ancient case.. .and most of these features have escaped the modern
eye that glances toward them for many generations now. The reason?
The true shape of the answers deftly avoids nearly everything
we’d expect — so we don’t look in the right
places when seeking it – ever. The shape of it evades the
lenses we apply in seeking it, for it is more magnificent and
vast than any set of lenses we may craft to focus upon it.
O:O:O
The technique of the
heist took advantage of the potentials of mimicry: something
that looked a lot like what was stolen was placed
over the the purloined element such that glancing toward
it would reveal only the impostor — a sort of floating
lie, and never the actual thing that was ‘covered up’
beneath it. So it wasn’t even really a theft — but
a complicated masquerade ...
What was left there ‘to hide what was co-opted’ is
so essentially confusing that thousands of years and
billions of human lifetimes later, we have not detected the nature
of what is missing from the ‘gifts beneath the
tree’ that accompany our arrival as mortal beings in a superficially
physical universe. We also have no word at all for that
which is hiding what is missing. We don’t even
have a word for its ‘meaning-value class’. Our chances
of discovering what is being hidden, directly, are far below zero
— most of the time.
This con has been ‘being replayed’ in the life of
nearly every scale and assembly of organismal reality on Earth
for an amount of time humans would have difficulty understanding
with adequate value. With(in) every person — every garden
— every moment — the theft is recurring, exploding
geometrically as it is re-copied into every dimension of our own
thought, relation and lives. As it proceeds it is ever-more effectively
hiding its activity and goals from our notice, and it is simultaneously
adeptly obscuring our ability to notice that we cannot notice.
Perhaps the single strangest thing about
the heist, is that the thing stolen wasn’t actually taken
away at all. It was merely covered over with something that
could ‘change the outcome’ of the activity of the
object of this heist. The change was the ‘goal’ of
the theft.
Seen from the perspective of any one of
the participants — including the thief...the whole affair
was a lot more like an accident...than a heist.
Essentially, it was no-one’s intention to acquire the result
that has proceeded to denude our sentience and world since the
theft. It wasn’t the intention of our species, and it wasn’t
the intention of ‘the Serpent’, either. The thief
was actually doing precisely what it was assigned to do —
which was ‘to become more like itself. Our stories about
the circumstances, participants, and purposes got distorted. To
put this in modern idiom:
Way distorted.
And a part of that distortion has to do
with where the story is taking place. It isn’t in the past,
and it is not anywhere in the future.
The story of Genesis, particularly the
first 7 chapters we might say... is taking place in a when, not
a place.
And that when is everywhen.
