“The
kingdom of the insects on Earth dwarfs our human population to insignificance.
Although we share the same surface area, insects are barely aware
of human presence unless we swat them, cropdust, step on an ant
mound, or examine them under our microscopes. As far as the vast
insect world is concerned, contact with humans is a rare and usually
traumatic occurrence. Such is the narrow focus of insects.
Likewise,
perhaps a species of greater intelligence, greater technology, and
much smaller population coexists with us on Earth, living who-knows-where,
and only infrequently do they step on our "nests" of humanity,
or examine us under their microscopes. Perhaps we cannot even recognize
the presence of the "Others" unless it's a case of deliberate
interference on their part, a rare and traumatic occurrence. Such
is the narrow focus of humans.”
—
Charles Miller, from Home
Field Advantage,
The Anomalist: 8, Spring 2000
[l.e. 08.05.10]
whiteRabbit
My own experience is that even a single instance of
what we call ‘an insect’ is ‘more than any alien
we could invent’, and so are the animals and plants, funguses,
bacteria, etc. The unified body of the insectoid intelligence of
Terra is so far beyond anything we can model it puts the sum of
our fantastic fictions to shame. The problem around Earth is not
‘where are the aliens?’, it’s the opposite:
Why is everything everywhere swimming in aliens whose intelligence
and prowess we cannot credential?
Allow me to suggest that as a species, humanity is
‘missing a crucial idea’ from our lexicons of ‘what
stuff is’. The crucial idea is simple: the game is about transtemporally
distributed multi-sentience. Forget competition, that’s a
token standing in the way of us seeing what’s actually going
on around here.
Now, and for the last 4.5 billion years, the only
game in town has been this: pure alien. The unfortunate cause for
the ignorance and isolation of our species from each other and our
potentials is simple: we’re taught to be xenophobic, and
to have hysterically violent responses to novelty. As a species,
we enact these ‘ways of knowing’ catastrophically, such
that our intelligence actually inverts and becomes a sophisticated
mimetic momentum which we are bound to feed and accomplish in our
minds and world. The ‘opposite of knowing’ — omnicide.
It is crucial that we understand: we live right
now in a universe where a local life-form as ‘simple’
as a slug is already billions of ‘times’ more elegant
than the sum of technology our species will ever
produce. It’s hard to explain how significant this is, because
understanding it clearly changes what a human mind is and
may become. The truth of our planet is so beyond our understanding
that we must find a way to step outside all of what we’ve
come to know, before we can have any hope of glimpsing what is right
here, now, accessible and present. We don’t have to discard
what we believe we’ve learned, but we do need to be able to
set all of it completely aside, and go look — together, in
person, at what and who is actually going on around here. It’s
nothing like the models we’ve been pretending around. At all.
o:O:o
A fragment of a conversation:
child: Hey, what’s intelligence
made of?
whiteRabbit: Same as everything else.
c: What’s that everything else made of then?
wR: It’s not a ‘what’. It’s a ‘who’.
c: Everything is made of a ‘who’? Who is it?
wR: It’s the multiWho.
c: the what?
wR: The multiWho. It’s sort of like when
you’re playing pinball, and suddenly you get a special bonus
and your one ball becomes three... except that all the beings in
all moments and speeds, sizes and places of time — are one.
c: Pinball?
wR: Nevermind. You know those video-games that you play together?
c: Yeah.
wR: Usually ‘more fun with more players’, right?
c: Yeah, and when there are more than one it’s like we’re
all together even though we’re competing in another way.
wR: Exactly. It looks like you’re competing, but
you’re actually ‘having better fun together’.
In fact, when you’re together, something magical happens.
Each of you becomes more of what you can be — without it being
stipulated ‘what precisely that is’. You express and
experience ‘more’, in general.
c: Yeah, I get it. So this whole ‘competition’ idea
is maybe not so important as everyone says?
wR: Yes, there are also other kinds of competition, where
everyone competes for each other, instead of against.
c: Right. Like when we play, we’re all competing to make
the whole playing-ness we are playing ‘more fun’.
wR: Exactly.
c: Is intelligence made of the multiWho?
wR: Kind of. When you ask that question, the multiWho is asking
it, too. It’s an old question, but each time it’s asked,
there’s a new and growing answer.
c: Cool! Sounds like you’re saying ‘the stuff intelligence
is made of’ is growing.
wR: Yep. Ours is growing right now, like an explosion, except ‘inward’.
c: [appears surprised for a moment] How does it grow?
wR: It cannot fail to grow explosively, and in general, that’s
the way it grows. All the little forms of Life you encounter are
one creature. It’s the same as if your fingers wandered around
pursuing questions and lives of their own while you sleep, and you
can’t tell. Except, it’s better than that. It’s
like each finger was a unique size and speed and form of you, each
completely endowed, in littleForm. So they would see and taste and
learn and get scared and dream — just like you.
Since they all connect across an invisible radio, the places were
their signals collect together become prodigies of intelligence
— each at a unique size, scale, and form.
c: Wow! You mean every animal or insect or plant is a ‘distant
finger’ that leads to something?
wR: Nope, those fingers lead to someOne.
c: Oh, right. They all lead to the multiWho? Hmm. So I think you’re
saying that intelligence is like a video game where all the players
there ever are, were, or will be — play at once?
wR: You’re fast. Yes. Something like that.
c: And the network that connects them is the multiWho?
wR: Yep. There’s more, and the whole thing is different every
time you reference it — but that’s a decent place to
start to understand from...
o:O:o
En
C Our Age Ment
It happened that one night, in the summer of 2002
that I met an extremely peculiar rabbit made of light. It wasn’t
precisely white, and it wasn’t exactly a rabbit — but
it was akin to white because it was bright, and it was akin to a
rabbit because it was exceptionally fast with any possible game
involving holes. Actually, it was made of living connectivity,
which looks a lot like light, when you experience it, inside.
Within about 4 minutes, this ‘strange rabbit’
had given me a miraculously playful and impossibly accurate primer
on the source of knowledge, light, stars, physics, language, religion,
consciousness and energy. It did this with a toy: a rod with a ball
in the center. Spinning this toy before me, the rabbit explained
the poetics of the source of all beings and intelligences in ‘about
4 minutes’. The communication gesture of the rabbit resolved
into a lesson in the unified history of knowledge and organismal
reality — offered with nothing more than a toy stick of a
very peculiar sort.
At first I’d no idea what or who it was that
was going on. In fact, every time I tried to form a stable idea
after that, I learned that stable ideas are not the most useful
sort to have, in general. The rabbit played a game with me where
every time I tried to limit ‘what or who this was’ by
applying a model or name or label, my new companion would playfully
exceed whatever I provided in every possible way.
This rapidly became a startlingly enlightening experience.
I had to learn to follow in an entirely new dimension.
The same way we follow the culture we arrive in, through our parents,
family and peers — when we are born. But the speed —
the speed at which I was learning was far beyond anything I considered
possible while still in mortal form.
o:O:o
The
Agent from everyWhen...
It seemed this rabbit was intent on ‘taking
me on an extremely uncommon sort of ride’ that we don’t
exactly have a word for. It was perhaps most significantly ‘a
unity lesson’ about ‘a kind of being which is the source
and purpose of unity and distinction in every possible dimension’.
A unityBeing.
The rabbit
was saying ‘everyWhen is alive — together!’. In
fact, the way it was talking about life and understanding was gaining
dimensions as it spoke with me. I had never experienced ‘a
way of gaining dimensions’ before. Their ways of learning
are like a lesson on intellectual polyphony — anything revealed
relates simultaneously to every possible ‘field’ of
knowledge — history, language, biology, poetics, myth, religion,
art, mathematics, physics and cognitive science. All at once. From
7 simultaneous perspectives, at an ever-increasing number of ‘speeds’.
I soon
realized that there’s a celestial ‘scale’ of the
human doll we call ‘a university’, where every possible
object in every possible universe is a being — and
these beings play teaching and learning games at all times
— sort of like a library where every book was a living book,
and also ‘your best friend’. You’ve got a living
link to this entire university in your abdomen. It’s not made
of an organ, but of a rather magical form of connectivity.
This university
is extremely big. It’s so big that if you see it
all at once, from above, you feel very certain that you’ve
died, or are about to. The teachers there are more amazing than
the sum of human stories and religions combined — in fact,
the experience of entering this school surpasses anything it is
possible to imagine — consistently, and repeatedly.
Not only
are the inhabitants friendly, they are heroic and playful. Some
of the best teachers are the tiniest, and the fastest.
I want
to be certain this is clear: you possess a unique living
radio that links you to a universe-city of teachers older than
our models of the physical universe. On our world, we’re
taught to trade direct experiential access to this for dolls, cages,
labels, slavery, ‘prices’, silencing, torture, war,
rape, confusion, and general mean-making.
As of now,
we can learn something different together, for each other. It’s
easy, and children learn better than experts.
We won’t
be doing this for the sake of dogmas, authors, tyrants, ‘security’,
rulers, cash, props, books, ‘religions’ or dolls.
For a change,
we’ll be doing it for each other.
o:O:o
When I asked the rabbit where it was from, it would
take me and show me. To the rabbit, any form of
where was a form of who, first. In fact, any
sort of question lead rapidly to travel inside a multiply multiplying
who of some sort or another. I began to understand that the rabbit
was from everyWhen. About the closest analog I can produce
is that the rabbit was from a living library — a place where
the lifeForms all learn together, all the time. To them, the purpose
of the universe was ‘fun’. Fun meant something akin
to ‘what we do together, by which we all grow explosively,
impossibly and magically more unified’.
For the next 9 months — we simply kept going
to see, in person. Every time I asked any sort of question
— we went to a different number of speeds and sizes of places
and entities. There was no question which could not be almost
instantly and perfectly resolved in this way.
All of them were multiWhos. The difference
between them and us is that they know this, while we pretend otherwise.
They have access and are constantly trying to grant this to our
species, and we we refuse in every case — because the way
we play knowledge-games breaks connectivity with their
universe as its first gesture.
A single hour of this experience was more illuminating
than what I believe I would learn in 5 lifetimes. The educational
potentials of this ‘discovery’ can, and I believe will,
change our world. Everything. Starting now.
o:O:o
Child: I’m still not sure where intelligence
comes from, but I think I see something about what you’re
saying, too.
whiteRabbit: Remember when I said it’s like
all the separate creatures are fingers on a single hand —
connected by something invisible?
c: Yeah, like if I had tons of dogs who were ‘me’,
and the whole pack of them was also like a super-animal.
wR: Right. So imagine all the creatures of your world
connect to form a single extremely profound intelligence, and pretend
this is the ‘hand’ of something with many seemingly
separate fingers.
c: What’s connecting them all?
wR: Between the distanced elements across any gap
of any kind at all — there’s a dimension that
connects them — and this dimension is a being. The
whole ‘being’ acts as a giant antenna. Most of the ‘solid’
part of the antenna is in what you call the environment,
but not all of it. In fact, this dimension is a good friend of mine.
c: You have a friend who is a dimension?
wR: Yes, and so do you — in fact, it’s
your best friend. But it’s a lot more interesting
than that. Each of the creatures on Earth is a local instance of
all of them. Always. No ‘updating’ required. It’s
as if there’s a magical thread connecting every moment and
scale of every creature in all of time — to every creature,
in all of time.
c: It sounds like a strange octopus living outside
of time.
wR: Yes, where each ‘tentacle’ is a unique
moment of a being, somewhere ‘inside time’, at some
size — at some speed of time...
c: wow.
wR: Yatahey — we say the same thing. Wow. The
reason is that the octopus is so amazingly fast that every time
you touch any part of it — you’re in an entirely unique
new universe... no matter what you do or where you go. And if you’re
with other beings — you change each other and these universes
just coming together. Any gesture at all changes every being that
has will or shall exist — everywhen!
c: It seems like you’re saying that if three
people agree — it’s like three times the whole universe
in all of time — suddenly joining together. And this
changes all the universes everywhere — since all are connected
by that strange thread.
wR: Wow.
c: Wow!
o:O:o
biocognition:
the best explosive ever
If you really want to understand what time and biology
are about you have to somehow get to a position outside of time
and biology. What humans actually understand about organisms
and environments is exceptionally primitive when compared to what
is actually going on around here. According to my rabbit, one of
the easiest ways to accomplish this is hitchhiking — but that’s
a subject for another place.
For now what I want to talk about is how to build
a bomb that blows things together, instead of apart — because
that’s the sort of bomb life is — in general
— and the universe itself is similar, but is more than alive.
It happens that this kind of explosive is the sort that produces
learning, memory and intelligence in biocognitive
hyperstructures
such as ourselves. This ‘kind of thing’ is not a thing
at all — it is instead an instance of every being in all of
time — locally conserved in what appear to us as ‘individuals’.
In this sort of game, the learning and relational dimensions of
all beings exist as a web which is at once with(in) and unique from
all the beings of Earth, and this means that any living creature
has access to the sum of biological experience — outside of
time. There is no such thing as a gap.
Perhaps the single most urgent and important thing
for us to realize is that Earth is a biocognitive unity
— which, in simple terms, means that the sum of the experience
of terrestrial life forms is a shared dimension. Whatever
is happening to any being here, is happening to all the
beings here — and the complexity of the sum, is the complexity
available to each individual — in a dimension we don’t
yet believe in — simply because our sciences have not ‘discovered’
this dimension.
A long time ago, this dimension was called ’spirit’,
which meant ‘the dimension in which all beings are connected’.
The problem here on Earth is that the most complex creatures —
humans — are extremely busy erasing the anciently conserved
biocognitive complexity that surrounds us, and replacing it with
mechanical and industrial momentums which torture and toxicify the
entire terrestrial environment.
Since this game of biocognition depends upon local
and distributed complexity, health, and diversity the result of
our activity is the erasure of the very source and basis of
our own intelligence, and as this process proceeds —
we are rendered less and less likely to be able to notice this
effect.
We’re dumbifying the planet, and ourselves,
by wiping out the complex animalian and vegetative biointelligence
of our world. The more we erase, the less capable we are of noticing
the results, because the results are inhibiting our relational intelligence
in waves that magnify themselves exponentially.as the process
proceeds.
We cannot see what we’re doing for a simple
reason: we don’t believe that there’s any connection
between the health of the biosphere and our intelligence. Instead,
we believe a fable — that intelligence is inherent
to our persons or species. It isn’t. In fact, as
anyone who even briefly examines this will see, human intelligence
is a transmission game. The representational
aspect is transmitted by contact with human cultures, and
the inherent biocognitive
aspect is transmitted by experiential immersion relations with
living environments, as well as that invisible dimension we spoke
of which connects all the life-forms of Earth in a web of co-emergent
‘likeness’.
The way Earth assembles intelligence is fundamentally
relational, and our species rose to our seemingly-complex position
in this game partly because in the genesis-phase of this rise, the
biocomplex diversity of Earth and our experiential environments
was explosively magnificent. But something got mixed-up
in our species, and very early on we began attacking the sources
of our own relational intelligence: we made war against the animalian
biosphere, and in so doing, we underwent a bizarre and systemic
trauma where the damage we there inflicted was instantly reflected
in ourselves, our activities, our potentials, and our cultures —
just as it is today.
[mark of process]
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image to enlarge in new window]
