inter-mission   I hope that I have generally demonstrated that we cannot really resolve questions about what and who we are without referring to root-metaphors implicit in the ways of knowing which contain our question. If particular metaphors are damaged or broken, they can literally erase a planet. Where they get broken is in their root-relations, the inferences and connections that are not always apparent at the cognitive scale we conduct most of our awareness and communication within. Examples of core-metaphors, which should never be tokenized are: child time organism animal intelligence sentience god   We cannot really avoid the question of God(s) — from which many of our knowledge-systems, languages and sciences descend — nor can we safely avoid the admonitions and new perspectives offered by Science and technologically-founded philosophies. We cannot avoid the question of God because structurally, the human biocognitive animal is a small-scale replica of something we would have to verify did not exist one step up the scale and down the scale from ourselves — as a cognitive unity existing across distributed domains of inviduals and populations — perhaps even times. We can observationally and experientially identify evidence of something like biointention operating at many different scales. We must probably admit that the collective results of multicellular evolution are incredibly and majestically profound. Something is being expressed by the planetary organism in its participants and their development. Life, unlike our machines, (and Richard Dawkins’ models) is character embodied — persona is not merely our projection — each creature is decidedly unmechanical in expressing its uniqueness, and its lineages.This is being recapitulated uniquely in all of the lifeForms of Earth, but especially our own species. Perhaps we may begin to see clearly that a large part of what we are depends in the moment upon the biodiversity we encounter and are interactive with. The shape of the interaction is also obviously imperative. What we metaphy animals as, we metaphy ourselves as — for even though we define ourselves as human — most of us at heart realize that we must indeed be animalian in terms of the general classes of Life. What we shall discover about what this means is likely to surprise even the most imaginative amongst us, when experienced directly. o:O:o :: previous :: next ::

Something — perhaps compression — is strangling the metaphors we embrace and sustain in our lives and narratizations of experience. It is strangling the metaphors of our potentials not only for compassionate and nurturing human society, but for basic biospheric survival. In general, we may observe that language and human relations with metaphor struck earth like a comet. They changed the face of a biosphere in a scant instant, and the change has been speeding up in scales since it broke out in earnest at some point in the last 50,000 years. But the most significant ramp of change, perhaps beyond all imagining, has been in the last 500. Not even a single biospheric heartbeat has passed since it began. We must not imagine that we remain unchanged within the container we are re-shaping, and I do not yet believe we have glimpsed the real nature and outcomes of our activity. Our metaphors are opposing the biosphere’s goals of conservation in ways that will, left untended, continue to result in cycles of catastrophe. And we accrue our character, connectivity, complexity, and health from our relations with every aspect and scale of our living world — what harms it harms us in reentrant waves of echoing effect.