Thursday, May 14, 2009
Post apoc Matt Groening Mad Max world dream
post apocalyptic mat groening world, I was mad max, some elder village guru recruited me to go under the ground where the ocean still is, he gave me a breathing bubble and we went to the bottom where all the nuked remains are. He said we needed to make sure people find and get lust for the ruins and material objects. as we came up to the surface they had revolted and were shooting arrows at us trying to get to the toxic treasures.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
I was just listening to the bug out bag episode of the survival podcast and happened to need to go to Post office for an errand. I was thinking about the recommended back up communications devices for emergencies (prepaid cell phones, calling cards, etc.) and it struck me that I should get some emergency stamps for my bug out bag. I ended up getting a strip of 20 "Forever" stamps, they're good for mailing first-class up to one ounce "forever" regardless of price changes.
http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/forever_stamp_facts.htm
http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/forever_stamp_facts.htm
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Maxed out documentary on US consumer debt crisis
Check out the film MAXED OUT. It's a witty yet chilling documentary on the US consumer debt crisis.
http://www.maxedoutmovie.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJJQiEn329Y
(if you have a Netflix account you can watch it online instantly)
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Maxed_Out/70058892
http://www.maxedoutmovie.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJJQiEn329Y
(if you have a Netflix account you can watch it online instantly)
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Maxed_Out/70058892
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
E.O. Wilson's presentation on the concept of the environment
A few years ago at a sustainability and philosophy conference at the University of Oregon I went to a keynote speech by well-known scientist E.O. Wilson, he had a ground breaking thesis about redefining our notion of the "environment" not as something outside of us, outside of the human body, mind, and civilized artificial habitat. He showed just how blurred the line is. Everything "out there" affects us so much "in here" that we need to develop a new conceptual framework to comprehend how interconnected we are. We tend to perceive things as separate because we can see and feel with our eyes and hands where something begins and ends. But this is just a few vibrational frequencies in an infinitely layered and complex reality.
The case study that he used to dissolve the humans/environment dichotomy was as follows. There was an experiment where a cutting was taken from a plant so that there would be two living plants with the same DNA. One was planted in a valley, the other on top of a mountain. He showed how there were vast differences between the two plants as they grew because the environments were so different the genes were expressed differently. They had different stressors, nutrients, amounts of moisture, sun light, predators, diseases, etc.
It seems obvious that despite having the same DNA, they would manifest into the world very differently based on the parameters of their respective environments.
The point of this illustration was to give us humans a reason to think deeply about how we are more of a "product of our enviroment" than we normally think. So much more about our health, our bodies, our minds, our thoughts, our attitudes, etc. is determined by the nature/quality of the physical environment.
All of the toxic air, food, water, stress, disease, etc. in the natural and artificial environments that surround us, really ARE US. You are what you eat, what you breathe, what you drink, what you think...
It was a striking view, the healthy plant and the sick plant. We really can't say the environment is out there, because it determines to such a large degree what is in here.
The case study that he used to dissolve the humans/environment dichotomy was as follows. There was an experiment where a cutting was taken from a plant so that there would be two living plants with the same DNA. One was planted in a valley, the other on top of a mountain. He showed how there were vast differences between the two plants as they grew because the environments were so different the genes were expressed differently. They had different stressors, nutrients, amounts of moisture, sun light, predators, diseases, etc.
It seems obvious that despite having the same DNA, they would manifest into the world very differently based on the parameters of their respective environments.
The point of this illustration was to give us humans a reason to think deeply about how we are more of a "product of our enviroment" than we normally think. So much more about our health, our bodies, our minds, our thoughts, our attitudes, etc. is determined by the nature/quality of the physical environment.
All of the toxic air, food, water, stress, disease, etc. in the natural and artificial environments that surround us, really ARE US. You are what you eat, what you breathe, what you drink, what you think...
It was a striking view, the healthy plant and the sick plant. We really can't say the environment is out there, because it determines to such a large degree what is in here.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Help from the Co-Creatress, Inside the Spiral of Blooming Doom
Terence Mckenna is famous for founding "Novelty Theory" stating that the universe is an engine that's constantly producing new forms and higher orders of organization. He's mathematically worked out a novelty time wave that maps points in the evolution of the cosmos, life, and human evolution/history that coincide withcertain recurring points on the wave. It actually ends up looking like a tightening spiral with the end point or "zero point" being around the end of the year in 2012.
When looking at the points of high novelty throughout the time wave, it can be deduced that there is a directionality of evolution. Not simply to some perfected form of life that's the most fit in Darwinian terms. If that were the case it would have stopped at the cockroach. No, evolution isn't trying to just make beings perfectly fitted to ever-changing eco-niches. It's really working towards ever more complex organization through which to express consciousness. The history of evolution is the history of increased expression of consciousness loosely defined as the awareness of being aware. That's not a very solid concept. Here's a better way of thinking about it, one that's flattering to us humans: The human brain is not one brain, it's three, there's reptilian, the mammalian, and the uniquely human neo-cortex. Each one a further ramified iteration of natural biological technology using the DNA code framework. What's happening here? Invisible will, consciousness, a creative force is coding matter, dna, cells, neurons, etc. towards greater novelty, complexity, interconnectedness, communication, knowledge, self-reflection, etc. all to increase the ability to co-create with increasing awareness.
The human neo-cortex is the most complex piece of matter in the known universe. Why? Because of a purposeless dead sterile mindless meandering chaotic nonsensical process of natural selection? I'm not a creationist, but I would be if it could be understood and admitted that creation never stopped. 7 Days a few thousand years ago is not satisfying. Rather, an invisible, constant, yearning force beneath and behind matter on this plane on this planet is what is creating in every second.
Evolutionary theorists call it "tinkering". Well if "evolution" is tinkering, doesn't that notion presuppose some kind of sentient, intelligent will? Is it every life form for itself struggling to push the envelope, are there trillians of different wills pushing through mutation to evolve to keep up with the changing environment, or is there some over-arching meta-mind, the Gaian Mind perhaps that's self regulating and tinkering. I'm inclined to believe in the Gaian meta mind. The intelligent awareness of the planet playing all of us life forms like an orchestra.
That makes more sense to me than the idea that some male external vengeful god made the earth in 7 days so that patriarchal male human rulers could have dominion over it all. That kind of self serving androcentric cosmology is exposed for its "Wizard of Oz"ness by looking at some cultures that practice clitorectomy. In order to justify female genital mutilation, origin stories are told that create an eternal punitive curse on women for some original sin. The tight control of women, animals, and the Earth by men is forever carved into womens' flesh as they're forced to be owned, enslaved, and traded like cattle.
Back to evolution, what's happening on the third rock from the sun is much more complex than either the patriarchal male monotheistic view would dictate or the sterile dead purposeless view of science. There simply is a force that's enacting the truism: the only constant is change. Creation is continuing. It's interesting the use of the word "constant" in that phrase. In mathematics, a constant is a quantity assumed to be unchanged throughout a given discussion. Well in the discussion of the time-wave/spiral of consciousness evolution on earth, we can imagine that the constant is the amount of change, and what varies is the amount of time that the recurrent constant amount of change takes place in. To put it simply, more is happening in every moment. More novelty, more change. But why? And what about the paradox that Terence addressed, that the dominator societal archetype that came out of domestication, agriculture, surplus, civilization, capitalism, industrialism, etc. some how seems to epigenetically continue the spiral, yet it's totally antithetical to the Gaian evolution of the natural matrix. Why this horrific, toxic, murderous, omnicidal tangent. Why is "profane history" doing this to us. Is it part of a plan, is it a hard lesson, is it a gestation of consciousness through form? I feel like it's just a cancer. The dominator culture, the partriarchal "cut and control" paradigm has taken the once free and equal creative capacity of our species and grotesquely contorted it into a highly mechanized global doomsday machine. The only way I can reconcile the use of the products of this blood soaked digital age is to believe in my heart the Gaia is still alive, awake, and aware and working through whatever means she can to help us correct this course and get back to co-creation that's balanced and beautiful. Sure not everything in nature is balanced, peaceful, harmonious, gender equal. I'm not naively saying that everything natural is innocent and utopian. I just know that humans are biologically and culturally adapted to co-create beauty on this planet and part of what made that possible was our tendency to share and be equal. Compare Bonobos and Chimps, chimps are violent male dominant brutalitarians, Bonobos are gender balanced if not matriarchal and live in a cooperative peaceful environment maintained by making love not war. Something about the descent into patriarchal human history can be understood by reverse engineering our primate cousins. It's believed now that the reason Bonobos evolved gender equality, peace, and love is that their ecology changed at one point to allow the equal sharing of labor in food procurement on the ground in the absense of larger apes. Chimps conversely have adapted in a way that allows requires males to climb high in trees to get food that will then be hierarchically divided and provisioned. The apes on the ground are a threat, and a competitor so male and female chimps are divided into separate but unequal classes.
Engles established this material determinism in the Origin of the Family, Private Property and State where he demonstrated that in societies where men seized the means of production, women were soon marginalized and banished to the domestic sphere. While of course women worked as much if not more, some slippage in the equal valuation of gendered work occurred and thousands of years later here we are, a world of missiles and sky scrapers.
Losing gender equality has meant that our species' uniquely evolved ability to co-create with Gaia has been bastardized by a rogue primate framework that we gracefully shed long ago.
For at over 30 years now, ethnographers have studied the last living egalitarian human societies to find that in the state of nature, as uncivilized, non-industrial, matrifocal tribes/bands, our ancestors flourished socially and ecologically without domination. Terence Mckenna simply describes the archaic world as one of human partnership societies.
If the constant is that consciousness is evolving through form to manifest ever more co-creative beings, imagine what could have been created by now had we not descended into the dark realm of patriarchy. No we didn't need to wipe out almost all traditional cultures and all ecosystems just to become cyborgs to reach the evolutionary trajectory of telepathy. We could have peacefully found our way there, tripped our way there, danced, sang, painted, loved... If telepathy is the next plateau of consciousness evolution, I would have rather our species got their through plant worship than cybernetics, natural vs. artificial intelligence if you will.
Terence said he felt that computer technology was very feminine. I think he meant that it was mirroring the gaian matrix. I extend the notion to say that our co-creatress, Gaia knows that we're trapped in history, and the internet, and the anarchic egalitarian spirit of the open source movement are gifts from Gaia that the pure-hearted can use to derail apocalypse and engender the archaic revival. It's as if she's reaching through matter to hand us this gift to save our selves.
I always think about how totally hopeless I would have felt if I had this critique of progress and patriarchy in the middle ages, or on the American frontier. I certainly couldn't have blogged about it. I couldn't have joined an international digital social network. I would have been burned at the stake, like so many witches and heretics.
That's why I'm so astonished that anyone can be apathetic or hopeless now! I'm going to try to be the spirit of a burned witch or alchemist who's last blood boiled thought was 'if only I could create a device through which to interconnect human intelligence so that centralized domination of culture and creation would be forever subverted...'
Well, the digital revolution is an alchemists dream. With these tools we are limited only by our dreams. Memes compete in the primordial ooze of social networks. Are people of conscious who want change engaged in this ecology of ideas? Yes, but sadly not enough. Now marginality is optional. There is no excuse. Spread the memetic revolution by word of mouse! The revolution will be bookmarked, texted, syndicated, emoticoned, popped-up, uploaded, downloaded, shared, tracked-back, pinged, , backed-up, hard-driven, and ranked number one in Google's "organic" search results!
Consciousness is evolving, we are being given more and more tools to co-create. We have the biological and cultural technology to reclaim the dream from the nightmare.
Hopefully we'll break the chimp spell before 2012 when the next great opportunity for intensified consciousness and material restructuring occurs.
As different as we are from chimps, is as different as we'll be from ourselves, will it be a beautiful free, equal, loving and peaceful tranformation, or will it be more grotesque domination?
When looking at the points of high novelty throughout the time wave, it can be deduced that there is a directionality of evolution. Not simply to some perfected form of life that's the most fit in Darwinian terms. If that were the case it would have stopped at the cockroach. No, evolution isn't trying to just make beings perfectly fitted to ever-changing eco-niches. It's really working towards ever more complex organization through which to express consciousness. The history of evolution is the history of increased expression of consciousness loosely defined as the awareness of being aware. That's not a very solid concept. Here's a better way of thinking about it, one that's flattering to us humans: The human brain is not one brain, it's three, there's reptilian, the mammalian, and the uniquely human neo-cortex. Each one a further ramified iteration of natural biological technology using the DNA code framework. What's happening here? Invisible will, consciousness, a creative force is coding matter, dna, cells, neurons, etc. towards greater novelty, complexity, interconnectedness, communication, knowledge, self-reflection, etc. all to increase the ability to co-create with increasing awareness.
The human neo-cortex is the most complex piece of matter in the known universe. Why? Because of a purposeless dead sterile mindless meandering chaotic nonsensical process of natural selection? I'm not a creationist, but I would be if it could be understood and admitted that creation never stopped. 7 Days a few thousand years ago is not satisfying. Rather, an invisible, constant, yearning force beneath and behind matter on this plane on this planet is what is creating in every second.
Evolutionary theorists call it "tinkering". Well if "evolution" is tinkering, doesn't that notion presuppose some kind of sentient, intelligent will? Is it every life form for itself struggling to push the envelope, are there trillians of different wills pushing through mutation to evolve to keep up with the changing environment, or is there some over-arching meta-mind, the Gaian Mind perhaps that's self regulating and tinkering. I'm inclined to believe in the Gaian meta mind. The intelligent awareness of the planet playing all of us life forms like an orchestra.
That makes more sense to me than the idea that some male external vengeful god made the earth in 7 days so that patriarchal male human rulers could have dominion over it all. That kind of self serving androcentric cosmology is exposed for its "Wizard of Oz"ness by looking at some cultures that practice clitorectomy. In order to justify female genital mutilation, origin stories are told that create an eternal punitive curse on women for some original sin. The tight control of women, animals, and the Earth by men is forever carved into womens' flesh as they're forced to be owned, enslaved, and traded like cattle.
Back to evolution, what's happening on the third rock from the sun is much more complex than either the patriarchal male monotheistic view would dictate or the sterile dead purposeless view of science. There simply is a force that's enacting the truism: the only constant is change. Creation is continuing. It's interesting the use of the word "constant" in that phrase. In mathematics, a constant is a quantity assumed to be unchanged throughout a given discussion. Well in the discussion of the time-wave/spiral of consciousness evolution on earth, we can imagine that the constant is the amount of change, and what varies is the amount of time that the recurrent constant amount of change takes place in. To put it simply, more is happening in every moment. More novelty, more change. But why? And what about the paradox that Terence addressed, that the dominator societal archetype that came out of domestication, agriculture, surplus, civilization, capitalism, industrialism, etc. some how seems to epigenetically continue the spiral, yet it's totally antithetical to the Gaian evolution of the natural matrix. Why this horrific, toxic, murderous, omnicidal tangent. Why is "profane history" doing this to us. Is it part of a plan, is it a hard lesson, is it a gestation of consciousness through form? I feel like it's just a cancer. The dominator culture, the partriarchal "cut and control" paradigm has taken the once free and equal creative capacity of our species and grotesquely contorted it into a highly mechanized global doomsday machine. The only way I can reconcile the use of the products of this blood soaked digital age is to believe in my heart the Gaia is still alive, awake, and aware and working through whatever means she can to help us correct this course and get back to co-creation that's balanced and beautiful. Sure not everything in nature is balanced, peaceful, harmonious, gender equal. I'm not naively saying that everything natural is innocent and utopian. I just know that humans are biologically and culturally adapted to co-create beauty on this planet and part of what made that possible was our tendency to share and be equal. Compare Bonobos and Chimps, chimps are violent male dominant brutalitarians, Bonobos are gender balanced if not matriarchal and live in a cooperative peaceful environment maintained by making love not war. Something about the descent into patriarchal human history can be understood by reverse engineering our primate cousins. It's believed now that the reason Bonobos evolved gender equality, peace, and love is that their ecology changed at one point to allow the equal sharing of labor in food procurement on the ground in the absense of larger apes. Chimps conversely have adapted in a way that allows requires males to climb high in trees to get food that will then be hierarchically divided and provisioned. The apes on the ground are a threat, and a competitor so male and female chimps are divided into separate but unequal classes.
Engles established this material determinism in the Origin of the Family, Private Property and State where he demonstrated that in societies where men seized the means of production, women were soon marginalized and banished to the domestic sphere. While of course women worked as much if not more, some slippage in the equal valuation of gendered work occurred and thousands of years later here we are, a world of missiles and sky scrapers.
Losing gender equality has meant that our species' uniquely evolved ability to co-create with Gaia has been bastardized by a rogue primate framework that we gracefully shed long ago.
For at over 30 years now, ethnographers have studied the last living egalitarian human societies to find that in the state of nature, as uncivilized, non-industrial, matrifocal tribes/bands, our ancestors flourished socially and ecologically without domination. Terence Mckenna simply describes the archaic world as one of human partnership societies.
If the constant is that consciousness is evolving through form to manifest ever more co-creative beings, imagine what could have been created by now had we not descended into the dark realm of patriarchy. No we didn't need to wipe out almost all traditional cultures and all ecosystems just to become cyborgs to reach the evolutionary trajectory of telepathy. We could have peacefully found our way there, tripped our way there, danced, sang, painted, loved... If telepathy is the next plateau of consciousness evolution, I would have rather our species got their through plant worship than cybernetics, natural vs. artificial intelligence if you will.
Terence said he felt that computer technology was very feminine. I think he meant that it was mirroring the gaian matrix. I extend the notion to say that our co-creatress, Gaia knows that we're trapped in history, and the internet, and the anarchic egalitarian spirit of the open source movement are gifts from Gaia that the pure-hearted can use to derail apocalypse and engender the archaic revival. It's as if she's reaching through matter to hand us this gift to save our selves.
I always think about how totally hopeless I would have felt if I had this critique of progress and patriarchy in the middle ages, or on the American frontier. I certainly couldn't have blogged about it. I couldn't have joined an international digital social network. I would have been burned at the stake, like so many witches and heretics.
That's why I'm so astonished that anyone can be apathetic or hopeless now! I'm going to try to be the spirit of a burned witch or alchemist who's last blood boiled thought was 'if only I could create a device through which to interconnect human intelligence so that centralized domination of culture and creation would be forever subverted...'
Well, the digital revolution is an alchemists dream. With these tools we are limited only by our dreams. Memes compete in the primordial ooze of social networks. Are people of conscious who want change engaged in this ecology of ideas? Yes, but sadly not enough. Now marginality is optional. There is no excuse. Spread the memetic revolution by word of mouse! The revolution will be bookmarked, texted, syndicated, emoticoned, popped-up, uploaded, downloaded, shared, tracked-back, pinged, , backed-up, hard-driven, and ranked number one in Google's "organic" search results!
Consciousness is evolving, we are being given more and more tools to co-create. We have the biological and cultural technology to reclaim the dream from the nightmare.
Hopefully we'll break the chimp spell before 2012 when the next great opportunity for intensified consciousness and material restructuring occurs.
As different as we are from chimps, is as different as we'll be from ourselves, will it be a beautiful free, equal, loving and peaceful tranformation, or will it be more grotesque domination?
EVolution of consciousness structures
I listened to a Daniel Pinchbeck talk and he was talking about different consciousness structures that have evolved over in human history, not incrementally but during bursts of mutation. 2012 is expected to be the next major consciousness mutation/evolution/restructuring event. From all that I gather now from the cosmology/astronomy of the 2012 movement is that in sun cycles there are points of alignment where galactic forces align or collide or eclipse causing the sun to intensify it's mutagenic effect on the life on the planet. Everything living on Earth is encoded in DNA, the HTML of life. Perhaps the intelligence being(s) that are driving consciousness evolution on earth (us included) know about these cycles and opportunistically push for new functions and features during these galactic moments of opportunity. Now I'm thinking that 2012 could mean a difference in human cognitive/anatomical organization to the point of being unrecognizable to ourselves. Or at least some of us will become unrecognizable, like a spontaneous mass shape-shifting event. We may be self aware at a moment of mutation where we actually get to think and feel in a state of human awareness about growing wings, fins, telepathic neuronetworks, etc. Could be fun! Just don't pull a Ray Stantz (Ghostbusters) who when given the chance to manifest instantly out of the morphogenetic field ended up creating the StayPuft Marshmellow Man!
benaxiom@yahoo.com
benaxiom@yahoo.com
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