Making Sense of It All

Brilliant beams of the rising sun's light, unblocked by planets, satellites or pecan leaves, scan across the glade feeding the length of my body the warmth of a place I belong — of these cells, under this tree, on this planet, among the galaxies of atoms great and small that, too, belong wherever they exist. Stroking the fur of an animal, the hair of a friend or the satin hem of a winter blanket are further reminders of belonging. The laughter of a child erupting from a person of any age or the dulcet whisper of the great owl above me at night sing the music of the spheres to my ears, the orbits of my atoms. The sweet sensation of a juicy fruit, honeyed java or a lovers tongue are to flavor as the jasmine blooms, rich soil and my own garlic farts are to odor in letting me know I'm in the right place.

I would not know of these things except through reports I've gotten from my cells throughout my life which, at the rate of seven years per generation are in the midst of their eleventh generation. I've come a bit further in my theory that the mind is like a play by play announcer for the team its cells are; born at the same time, learning the game together, getting so familiar with the multitasking performance of this complex team that it forgets it is merely getting reports from the team about how the game is going and assumes it is in charge like any rabid arm-chair quarterback — as if it knew the first thing about digesting food, circulating blood or regenerating cells.

I came across a clever case study in psychology/philosophy the other day which I feel is relevant to the seamless continuity in cell regeneration. It involves five monkeys:
First the experimenters placed five monkeys in a cage with a step ladder and a bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling. Whenever any one of them attempted to climb the ladder the monitor would spray the other monkeys with freezing water. Soon enough, whenever the bananas became so tempting for one that he tried climbing the ladder, the other four would beat the crap out of him until eventually none tried climbing.
Next they replaced one of these conditioned monkeys with a new one. When this newbie innocently began climbing the ladder, the four vets beat the shit out of him until he no longer tried climbing.
They repeat this replacement of a veteran ice water experiencer with an innocent new monkey scenario four more times until there are five monkeys who don't dare climb the ladder for fear of being beaten, and none of them know why they do it other than "that's the way it's always been."

Applying this example to cell regeneration and the biological transference of information from the old cell to the new one, called epigenesis, it is easy to see how, beneath any conscious preferences we might form from our experiences during our journey through life, our body is accumulating its own biological traditions of "that's the way it's always been" since the first regeneration of the last of the birth cells — the mini-evolution of the body as it copes with western civilization's deviation from the evolution of the rest of the planet by trying to establish human exceptionality as orthodoxy allowing it to consume natural resources reassembled and wrapped in neat little packages, mindless of the pollution their production and use causes; just as one sitting down to a juicy sirloin doesn't want to see pictures of a slaughterhouse.

If nothing else does, this would seem to shed some light into the mysteries of old age as the mind continues to operate on the reports it gets about the universe based on information from cellular reporters filtering what they experience just as the mind does as it places each new pixel of information it receives into the hologram gestalt of the present with lights and focus directed by the attachments it entertains at any given moment.

I still rely on personal experience being the only authority I respect, but I am finding the vagueness of memory increases with time leading me to think that the ultimate authority about what exists dwells only in the immediate instant of the present before cellular, mental, cultural biases can name anything. 

Meditation is preverbal thinking, the language of genetic memory …

… spoken where we belong.

Seventy-four and Counting …

The first day of my seventy-fifth year was distinguished by this conversation over daybreak ganjava with my neighbor, Homer, who, in response to my observation that all the lessons anyone claims to have learned from hurricane Sandy were about needs to reinforce and improve infrastructure against now obviously worsening climate extremes due to global warming, with no mention of how it is just such attempts to isolate ourselves so defensively from nature that are polluting and heating the planet upon whose health we all depend, said, "Todd, you don't live in reality. There's nothing we can do about it."

"Homer, my reality observes your reality being formed by excluding the parts of it that hold our artificial, addictive conveniences responsible for our natural, karmic discomforts."*

*This is a paraphrase of the meaning intended by some less articulate arrangement of words I garbled at the time, noted for where three-quarters of a century living in the US of A has led my understanding of it.

Thought I'd something more to say…*

A bee fell in my coffee for the second morning in a row and once again I lifted him free on my finger. While watching him dry out I began considering a little story inspired by the event.

Would it be a fairy tale about little Betty Bee out to see what she could see despite her hive's old wives' tale warnings about sugar in any form other than flower nectar?

Would it be about a little boy who got stung by a bee and grew up to avenge his pain by giving EPA's approval for a pesticide that was poison to bees causing the colony collapse from which this bee is a rare survivor?

Would it be about learning valuable life lessons in the comfort of freedom inherent in solitary curiosity about natural phenomena without blinders of foregone conclusions, such as led E. O. Wilson from childhood to discover social biology?

Before I chose the theme of this latest urge to wrap reality in equally compelling words, the bee dried his wings with longer and more rapid flurries of activity … and flew away*.

Homeland Security Vesus Mother Earth

We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. -Wendell Berry, farmer and author (b. 1934)

Though Berry’s quote limits planetary concern to “our land,” the poignancy of his statement about Western Civilization’s misplaced patriotic priorities trumping any concern for biological symbiosis with nature, from which we arise and on which our healthy life depends, is little diminished.

Understanding is a process of letting the unknown draw one’s instinctive curiosity into deeper consideration of the nature of an entity and its relationhip to the natural universe of which it is a part.

Overstanding is the process Western Civilization bases on the premise that all of nature is in thrall to a “stewardship” exclusively granted to mankind by an external monolithic creator. That such a premise is considered a conclusive fact accounts for the energy man devotes to exploiting the environment for gains that only profits one within a machine held together by faith in wishful thinking. This faith pervades even the supposedly more secular activities of science limiting any remedy for our obvious abuse to keeping the economy afloat no matter how much land must accommodate the new water from melted ice caps and glaciers.

Really?

Of course “art imitates nature” — until the first artist, that’s all there was. From then on there was nature and art to imitate. Lest we forget, nature is the original and art is imitation.

Imitation of Priest

imitating a 

"dead cat in the middle of the road"

When an artist is satisfied with an imitation of perceived reality it is shown to others out of the genetic instinct to communicate. Civilization is the exclusive evolution of the human species and its food; a spur off the main line of the hunter-gatherers’ eat or be eaten caution in dealing with hunger to the more sophisticated risk/reward of the winner-take-all profit motive predation among one’s own species.

Creating a spear, while obviously an imitation of nature’s array of puncturers, until decorated or carved to imitate a fang or talon, is less a work of art than a tool of predation, as are all weapons. Of the plethora of man’s artifice strewn about in nature, more is used to establish man’s exclusively superior “stewardship” over nature than to communicate with it; shutting out nature as caves, huts and tents give way to houses living in permanent crowds around markets for equally domesticated foods.

Art used to imitate nature, and still does for the few artists that can still recognize it and want to communicate it into the cities’ individual isolation chamber dwellers. Art used to imitate nature, but now the imitations are mostly guises to gain access to and exploit natural resources in support of our increased desire for increased isolation from and ignorance of the pollution of such increased abuse of nature.

I call this plot of land on the wooded banks of the Colorado River “going back to the garden” due to its remove from the city and relatively open spaces to grow my own food. It was an auto graveyard before being crudely sculpted to be an eight acre imitation of nature. What gardens succeed here were raised above the oil soaked, auto part incrusted soil like any city dweller would on a roof. I have also begun to realize, after last summer’s drought killed many young trees along the borders, that I am in the middle of an imminent, geologically predictable desert stretching from Texas’ Big Thicket to the Pacific Ocean, making my return to nature not only an admitted imitation but a foolish one as well.

Imitation of Priest 

imitating a playmate

 to get pip to play

I never dreamt of returning to the undomesticated state of nature we call the wild. I still have an urge to become more feral in the sense of understanding which of man’s imitations to which I am still attached are true gestures of symbiotic respect and which are merest, sincerest flattery to get usury in the door.

In a completely rational society …

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have. -Lee Iacocca, automobile executive (b. 1924

The foregoing is an explanation by a business leader in the rational society being “passed” from the first generation rationalizing the killing of large swaths of natural animal and plant life in order to grow something they, as self-proclaimed god’s stewards, preferred to eat, down to our age of the GMO/petroleum led agrobusiness with which we rape the earth everyday as a rational necessity.

Mechanical rape of Pachamama
while millions are out of work
and starving

Just the idea of passing an idea down implies the lack of respect each rational generation has for their own progeny when the adversarial understanding of nature must be embedded before they reach the age of reason and enforced thereafter just to hold the water with which nature challenges society’s goal of permanent perfection everyday. The rational society grows more and more complex with technology designed to increase control as it busies itself patching up the holes nature punches in their unshakable faith in the totalitarian approach to life as nature’s steward, owner, abuser.

Health is nature's default

—Joel Salatin

Dynamics of Duality

The notion of nothing would never occur to a being who has yet to “notice something”; no smell in an odorless world, nor sound amid silence, neither brightness or hue of light to vary, nary a solid found while floating free without a body to be seen or by which to see, to be smelled or with which to sniff, to be heard or to speak. From reports by considerate parents, prenatal influences show reactionary symptoms in the child’s development during and after birth, implying that from the first cell on there exists something that can “notice something,” destined by dna to be homo sapiens sapiens.

The closest to nothing I have ever experienced are dreamless nights when more than eight hours pass with nothing to recall more recent than how much better I feel than when going to sleep. Haven’t had many of those since I quit drinking. Dreamless sleeps mean no more than my unconsciousness of an ongoing lot of everything, independent of my consciousness for their existence.

The surest example of the infinite mystery of the living universal consciousness is that the more specifically a thing is described, what it is not expands exponentially, fractally, as more double helixes of duality come unraveling with each new version of what it is.

The Möbius Strip serves me as the metaphorical universal solvent for all its inherent, baffling duality including the when of any beginning or end to this ever changing event occurring everywhere at once. It suggests that no dimension has an understanding of the entirety of existence superior to any another when I recon my own total dependence upon accurately interpreting reports from them that my cells “notice something” to call myself conscious of existence at all. Whatever body I serve as a living cell must surely gain awareness by observing me “notice something”, as I do my own cells.

Mobius Loop

This universal consciousness threads throughout the entire existence of matter as the observer enlivening its parts with curiosity at every scale of time and space.

Curiosity requires duality to refine their exact opposition until the unspeakable, undeniable truth, which neither side alone could ever admit, as with precisely focused tongs, is plucked from the embers of experience as the melted down, epitomic nugget of all concerns. That which is taken to be provocation to violence by the impatient brute is taken to be a signpost in natural, cultural evolution by those who would benefit all with the dynamics of duality showing neither notion could exist without the other.

As above, so …

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

 -William Shakespeare, playwright and poet (1564-1616)

I just got the above quote as part of today's issue of Anu Garg's A Word A Day newsletter and, after basking in the warm glow of its sentiment combined with the definition of today's word: bucolic, the word trust burned through the sweetness of Shakespeare's intent with personal experiences leading to my sadder but wiser realization that trusting anyone, especially that "few" loved ones Bill mentions, is an essential wrong we do each other every day. It may be the crux of the essential difference between eastern and western cultures.

Trusting anything is betting on our own judgement; jaywalking in heavy traffic. Projecting our wishful thinking upon the world, whether through rose colored glasses or surveillance cameras, obligates nothing of the world to satisfy us. The core lesson in the golden rule is bridging separate skins and cultural differences to realize it is not enough just to treat others as we would be treated, but to care enough to understand what it is to treat them as they would be treated.

We all serve as sensory input for an invisible observer, an entity of which we are a part, just as our cells inform who and wherever it is we imagine we are. The street name for this silent observer is "the world", being that of which we are conscious — which informs the image the world has of itself in what can truly be called another dimension, at least in scale — its "world".

Love asks nothing; it arises in recognition of happy happenstance. Trust asks everything but permission; a terrible way to treat one who evokes love within us. It's no treat knowing that you can disappoint someone who's love comes with required behavior. The trust avowed is a roadside bomb guiding newlyweds down each other's straight and narrow … or else; the best way yet invented to suffer from a blessing from which no one gains but indifferent lawyers.

It has been said that man rides a camel in search of a camel in the land where men ride camels. Man never realizes he is a wellspring of his own happiness and love in the land where men search elsewhere for love — yet dismiss it for failing the qualified requital.


Just as life would have less meaning if we were deathless, love would be less drenched in drama if trust weren't wagered against it as a claim. If the love is lost, it was only love from others the loveless self sought. If it was actually love to begin with, only the bet is lost, never the love.

The realization of the being, whose consciousness is greater than the sum of the parts we earthlings are, is the evolutionary leap that will cure the cancer the exploitive intent of western civilization's military-industrial complex has become on the body of the planet. 

Best New Word

Did you ever come across a new thing that stuck in your head until you came across it again from a different direction shortly thereafter and wondered, "Is this new to the world or just to me?"

While reading Michael Polland's Omnivore's Dilemma, I came across the term "biophilia" coined by the father of organic farming, Sir Albert Howard in his An Agricultural Testament when describing what is lost to agribusiness when they see the earth as a place to dump chemicals that grow corn. That very evening Stephen Colbert featured Bjork showcasing her new album "Biophilia."

Sir Albert died in 1945, Michael Polland wrote of him in 2006, Bjork released her album this month. I'm the kind of guy who takes this as a positive sign of humans returning to the garden in symbiosis with Pachamama, Gaia, Mother Earth.

Brain Star Starfish

Best New Word: BIOPHILIA, n, Love of the natural living universe, ahimsa, agapé, the golden rule.