Is the Universe a Super-Organism?

On Super-Organisms

 I keep coming across people who say things that suggest they are open to a new interpretation of spirituality.  I’m watching my generation stepping into the seats of power and influence, slowly but surely, and the world changing to reflect our more open minded take on reality.

I keep coming across the elusive theory I often refer to in the voices of my fellows.  It has yet to have a name.  It questions more than it answers.  But, a lot of us are no longer willing to accept the old models of religion, but are not yet willing to give in to the dogmatic conviction that there is nothing beyond the human experience.   We can see the convergence of science and spirituality.  I think a staunch atheist is just as closed minded as a far-right-winged, bible-thumping literalist.  To assume you understand all the mysteries of the cosmos is a bit narrow in scope, no?  Some of my best friends are atheist and to them I mean no disrespect.  I think if it comforts them not to believe in anything beyond the chemical reactions of the brain, then so be it. 

I prefer to muse on the idea that the cosmos has the possibility of being an enormous super-organism, just as the human body is a complex system of smaller components.

We start with the question: What does it mean to be alive? It’s all about the flow of energy.  Energy resources drive complex systems.  Well the universe has energy flowing throughout it.   It’s hard to think in terms that grand, but take comfort in knowing that there are patterns in everything.   They repeat on all levels, from quantum to multiversal.

According to Wikipedia:  Any contiguous living system is called an organism.  Organisms undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, can grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations.

So you might say, well, the universe doesn’t do all those things.  How do you know?  You have to look in terms of the concept of there being multiple universes to begin to see how this may be happening.  The idea is that this universe is the clone or spawn of an older universe, which was the spawn of an even older universe.  According to many leading scientists today there are countless universes in the sea that is called the multiverse.  And we used to worry about feeling insignificant when we imagined that the sun didn’t revolve around the earth.  But realize that we are not removed from this system but are very much a part of it.  Why would the patterns cease to exist the larger you get in scale?   Could each universe be like a cell inside of a larger super-organism?  The cells divide just like they do in living organisms on earth.  The universes could be evolving and natural selection could be rewarding those that are more hospitable to create life and new universes.  Blackholes could be the spawning grounds of new universes.

Someone might say, what does that do to the concept of God?  It makes God infinitely greater and many times more vast and complex.  What does that do the idea of you as an individual?  It suggests that it doesn’t stop with you.  You can believe that you are made up of tiny particles that have come together as a complex system to make you.  But then we think that’s the end of the line for complex systems?  But what if you’re not the highest beings in the universe?  What if we are all tiny components in a larger complex system?  We think we’re individuals but really we’re not.   We’re all connected in this way, coming together to make something greater and more complex than ourselves, just as the cells in our bodies do, or the atoms of the cells and so forth.

There has been a lot of research done lately on the idea of there being a “collective consciousness” or a “unified field of consciousness” surrounding this planet.  In 1980 Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab began to study how focused group intention and attention brought order to random computer output. Random-number-generating (RNG) computers have suggested strongly the existence of a collective consciousness.  In 1995, for example, Roger Nelson and Dean Radin began researching similar effects that occurred when mass attention was captured by events like the O.J. Simpson trial.  The research shows that romantic couples working together can affect the RGNs six times as much as individuals.  Suggesting love binds us together and makes us even stronger as something else beyond our individualities.  Global events that capture our attention collectively have powerful sway on the RGNs that are in place in various locations on the planet.  9/11 had a tremendous effect on the random-numbers-generating computers.  There has been much more independent research done on the subject.  Feel free to research it for yourselves.  The idea is that collective consciousness is a mode of awareness that emerges at the first transpersonal stage of consciousness, when our identities expand beyond our egos.  We intuitively can sense and work with the interactions between our and other’s energy fields, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.  This projection of emotions and thoughts is a real phenomenon, just ask anyone who is afraid of horses or dogs.  These animals are well aware of our emotions, because we project them. The theory suggests that consciousness has the ability to exist beyond the constraints of space and time.  And it suggests that our individual consciousness has a part to play in the larger more complex system as one collective hive mind that surrounds the earth.  The idea is then carried on to the galaxy and the clusters of galaxies all the way to the universe and the multiverse.  The basic patterns don’t break down the larger you get.  They too expand and form an even larger complex system called the super-organism.

Could that be what the Bible was talking about when it said God created man in “their” own image?   God is not a Him but an Us.  In that we are all particles of God.  Our egos have convinced us that we are individuals, separate from the divine.  Could it be we are part of a chain, connected somewhere along the way, in an infinitely immense system?

I sure don’t know.  Do you?

 

 

Dogs

On Dogs

I grew up with dogs.  I loved my childhood dogs; especially Splicer, the little black mutt who despite his strange name was very smart.  He was special.  But I grew up in the country.  You didn’t have to walk your dog, you just opened the door and it went outside.  It came back when it was ready to come inside.  I first lost my affinity for dogs when I moved to the city and my roommates had a little devil of a dog, who nipped at people’s ankles.  He loved to stalk you under the table and latch on to your ankle with a quick snip.  He got me a few times before one weekend when my roommates had to go out of town.  I stayed behind.  It was Thanksgiving and the weather had turned bitter and cold.  I had to walk the dog and pick up its poop with a plastic bag.  I thought, I would never like to have a dog in the city.   I decided that since I was stuck with the dog, I’d win it over by showing my dominance.  So I took an oven mitt and played a game with the dog by grabbing his mouth.  He tried to bite me but couldn’t break through the mitt.  I simply held on until he relented and stopped fighting me.  It became a thing we did the entire weekend.  When he’d growl at me, I’d get the mitt out and grab his snout and hold on until he stopped fighting.  By the end of the weekend he was seated by my side on the couch, panting and obedient.  He never tried to snip my ankles again after that.  I grew fond of the little critter but I never grew fond of walking him outside in the freezing cold.

So it can be said that I never wanted a dog of my own, since becoming an adult.  I married someone who felt the same way.

But when you have kids they reach a certain age and they start begging to get a dog.  One of my daughters in particular is an avid animal lover.  She cries about not having a dog.

Recently my father came to visit.  He started in on how good it is for kids to have a dog. He worked my three children into a dog frenzy by taking them to a local pet store to look at puppies.  I was like, “Dad, we’re not getting a dog.  You’re only going to upset them.”  They have a picture of a sweet little puppy from the pet store as a screen saver.  At about this time a guy who works with my wife was planning to go out of town.  He has a puppy.  She’s about a year old.   She’s on a special diet and has all this medicine.  She chews up everything she can get a hold of.  So my wife, with a stroke of genius, tells me about how they are going to have to put the dog in a place while they go out of town.  She asked me if we should agree to watch the dog for the weekend and make our kids do all the work.  I knew it would be a challenge but I agreed it was a good idea.

We got the dog on a Thursday night.  It came with a long list of instructions.  The owners were very apologetic and kept asking if we were sure about this.   We had committed.  We could survive one weekend.  The kids went around the house picking everything up that could fit into the dog’s mouth, or so they said they did.  Stuffed animals were bagged and put away.  Small toys were put into bins.   The dog jumped up on me, trying to lick my face.  I pet her behind the ears and kept her from licking me on the lips. At first the dog was a nervous wreck, running all around, checking everything out.  The kids were all excited.  The time came for them kids to walk the dog.   “Keep him in the backyard,” said my wife.   Five minutes later, she looked out the back door and didn’t see them.

“Trav, where are they?  You’d better go out and look for them.”  So I threw on a coat and shoes and headed out.  I found them in the front.  We live in a cul-de-sac and the neighbor kids were playing on the huge snow mountain the plowers had pushed together in the center.  The dog was pulling my daughter around from kid to kid.  Everyone was worked into a whirl of new doggy excitement.  “What happened to staying in the backyard?” I asked.

“I tried,” said my daughter, looking near tears.

“If you can’t walk the dog without it pulling you all around the place, then we need to call (the owners) and have them come and get her.  Because that’s part of it,” I said.

“I know,” she said in her whiney voice.  My other daughter helped her and they brought the dog into the garage.  But it was soaked and muddy from the filthy snow pile.  I found some old towels and made them dry her off. 

My wife had tickets to a concert and I stayed with the kids and the dog.  I had the kids take the dog out one more time before starting our bedtime rituals.  They managed to keep her in the backyard this time.  But the bedtime rituals, which are already a pain in the ass, were wildly interrupted by the dog.  The kids fought over which room she would sleep in.  They kept calling her into their rooms. 

“Go to bed!  No one’s getting the dog tonight, if you all keep calling her.  Trust me, she’ll go where she wants to go.  Get in bed.  I will close your doors.  Now get to sleep!”  I tried to keep cool but I find bedtime makes me very cranky even without a new dog in the house.  With the added stress of the dog distraction, bedtime had become infuriating.  But I imagined that once the house settled down the dog would too and I could have some peace and quiet to maybe get some writing done.  But that was not to happen.  The dog whined at my door.  I finally opened the door and let her in and she kept jumping up on me while I was trying to write and licking my ear and head.  It barked at me. Then it left the room.  Five minutes later I heard my daughters calling me.

“Dad! Dad!” I came out of my room to hear.  “She peed all over the floor, Dad. I told you we should have taken her out one more time.”

I had them throw on some boots and coats and take her out again, while I cleaned up the pee.  At this point I had a clear thought. While this sucked, it was going according to plan. A devious smile crept over me, while I was on my knees soaking dog piss out of my carpet.  I went downstairs to watch TV after the kids settled back into bed.  The dog followed me.  She jumped on me and started to lick me.  I pushed her off and dried my head with my sleeve.  Finally the dog settled on the couch beside me. But when my wife got home and we went to bed, the dog jumped into our bed with us.  We got horrible sleep.  The dog moaned and whined all night long.  The next day it was just me and the dog.  I tried to write in the morning, but she came and jumped on me.  She then brought her toy ball and dropped it by me.  She barked, meaning she wanted to play.  I went downstairs and found wads of paper everywhere.  She found my son’s art supplies and ripped up some of his drawings.  The owners said to crate her if she didn’t let me write, so I put her in her cage downstairs.  She barked the entire time.  I let her out and she followed me everywhere I went.  Always under foot.  I decided to take her for a walk.  My dad happened to call when I was out with her.  He found it hysterical.  I was not laughing.  I kept thinking this was all his fault. That night, I settled down to watch TV after the kids went to bed and the dog was with me.  After a while I heard her climbing the stairs.  I hoped maybe she’d go and sleep with the kids.  But a few minutes later I heard the sound of plastic being chewed on.  I ran up the stairs.

“What have you got?  Spit it out!”  I grabbed her by the mouth and struggled until finally a small Lego piece fell out.  I put it on a ledge she couldn’t reach and returned to my stories.  A minute later there came the same sound of dog teeth working plastic.  I thought we’d done a thorough sweep of the house.   I stormed into the girls’ room and flipped on the lights.   They were both asleep. I shook my daughter on the bottom bunk.

“Get up.  Get up.  We need to get everything up.” I was purposefully being loud and abrupt.  They got drowsily out of their beds and half-assed an attempt to dig under their bed for any loose items.  After a moment of watching this, I got on my knees and dug under their dresser, pulling out item after item of loose plastic toys.  I piled them on the bed. “Find spots for all of this stuff.”

“I’m tired, Dad,” said my daughter.

“Yep. Having a dog sure is tiring, huh, kids?” I said, basking in victory. 

By the third night, my son was the first to admit he no longer wanted a dog.  “When’s this thing going home?” he asked.  By the last day even my animal loving, motherly little daughter admitted it was too much work to have a dog.  They stopped asking for one.  For now, anyway. 

Indigo a'go go

On Indigo Children

As mentioned before, I met a very interesting woman who claimed to have one foot in the fifth dimension.  She was very fascinating.  I refer to her as the “highly spiritual” lady.   She could see through her “third eye.”  She holds seminars on the subject.  We had a very interesting conversation as you can imagine. 

This “highly spiritual” lady I spoke to mentioned Indigo Children.  I’d perhaps heard of it, but hadn’t given it much credence before.  But I decided to look it up.  It’s the idea that a large number of unique children are being born into the world with much more frequency.  They are said to be vibrating at a higher level.   These children are said to have indigo auras and to be much more in touch with the universe and to possess special, unusual and sometimes almost supernatural qualities; such as psychic abilities. Many of them are misdiagnosed with autism, ADD and ADHD.  The fact is children are different these days.  Yes, I know it has a lot to do with the parents.  But even then there’s something going on that isn’t quite right; mass autism, and wide spread gluten and peanut allergies?  The wheat hasn’t changed nor has the peanut.  It’s us.  It is believed by some people that our DNA is changing.  There is no proof of this and the evidence is sketchy at best, but I always like to play the “what if” game.  So, according to some New Age parents, it is said these children are coming to earth to help us and to teach us things; to help guide humanity into the next age.  Coming to earth?  From where?  I don’t know.  The lady alluded to another planet, as if they were older souls from another part of the universe, from a society more advanced spiritually than ours, incarnating into human bodies, but that’s getting into another bag all together.  For me though, it’s a wonderful concept if anything.  As a storyteller, I love this kind of thing.

The qualities listed for these children are interesting.  Some are born with what the old folks call a sense of entitlement, because they feel they are special.  They almost expect you to realize how important they are.  They have more confidence than most children today but way more than all children from the past.  They despise authority for the sake of authority, for they believe we are all equal.  Rules almost seem silly to them.  They don’t like school because they know that school is going about teaching them in the wrong ways, not giving them real-life experiences, but instead instilling a worker slave mentality upon them.  They feel removed from the rigidity of the structured world, for they see past structure.  They are spontaneous.  One huge problem with their feelings of alienation is they often turn to drugs in their teens and early adolescence.  They first seek them for mind expansion but easily become ensnared in the void of addiction.   It’s a snare put in place by the forces working against the better good.  The Indigos are considered systems busters.  And they believe the systems were put in place to hold us back and to control us.  That’s especially true of economic systems.  Most of them despise money but some have figured out how to use the system to acquire wealth in order to remove themselves from its burden.  They do things completely different than how it’s been done for years and years.  They break traditions, for they see them as trivial and superstitious.  They don’t read books from cover to cover anymore, but they are usually smarter than most people for they seek out their knowledge through a more precise method.   They have the internet at their finger tips and they know how to use it.  They prefer to guide their own education and while they don’t do well in school, later in life, if they can stay focused and not distracted by their own self-destructive pursuits, they will be the wisest among us.  They can be seen as anti-social unless they are with other Indigos.   They refuse to be ruled by fear.  They act out because of this.  They are rebelling against a system that doesn’t make sense to them.  They are usually highly creative and headstrong. And they are inheriting the earth soon. So say the New Age parents of Indigo Children.   Okay.  That’s interesting.  A bit much to digest but I thought it was worth a look.

Skeptics of the Indigo Child Theory, and that includes most people, claim parents who believe their children are Indigo are doing so as a way to avoid considering psychiatric or pediatric diagnosis.  “There’s nothing wrong with my child!  She’s special!”  It could be argued that it is wrong and dangerous to justify disruptive and rebellious behavior from a child as being symptoms of a higher consciousness.  Sure and that’s living in reality.  But I’m a fiction writer at heart, remember. I get to live outside of the system of reality.  Maybe I’m an Indigo Child?  I can definitely identify with some of the supposed qualities of the Indigos.  That’s why I found it most interesting, I suppose.  I don’t know…

The “highly spiritual” lady told me that when the age of ego dies and the age of Christ-like consciousness emerges, that is when we are ready to move forward and to seek a more harmonious existence.  And that age has begun, she told me.  Perhaps our brains will start producing more oxytocin, the chemical responsible for our feelings of love, trust and compassion.  Oxytocin is exclusive to humans alone.

But there are those who seek to divide us.  They benefit from us warring with each other.  They created dogmas and politics.  They are the ones who are purely ego driven.  They have to be in control and they will do anything it takes to keep it.  We should realize we’re all truly equal.  No human should have dominion over another human.  The only real tool they have is money, influence and fear.  But as I’ve said before, we are born knowing right from wrong.  That’s been proven by years of study at Yale and other institutions.  We all intuitively know it, despite what the world has thrown down on us to alter our realities. We began to “think” instead of “feel” and confused ourselves.  Our egos have gotten in the way of our instinctual understanding of morality.   If a newborn baby is a clean slate, how could it understand morality? Where does that knowledge come from if not from the universe itself? 

 

 

Human Development

On Human Development

What if the Mayans were right?  What if in 2013 we entered into a new phase of human development?  A New Age.  It takes millions and millions of years for selective breeding and mutations to create subtle changes in a creature.   Homo sapiens went from walking upright to making tools to speaking logically and thinking abstractly in a relative blink of an eye in terms of evolutionary time scales.  Why don’t other animals speak logically to each other?  No other animal does it.  Whales and dolphins are close, and we don’t really know how smart they are, but they aren’t building cities and they have no real technology.  They’re not exploring space.  But why would they?  They don’t need to.  They get along just fine.  It’s the need to survive or be wiped out of existence that drives a species forward in evolutionary terms.

Early humans were screwed if not for their advanced brains.  They had few if any defenses out there in Africa against saber tooth cats and enormous lions.   Selective breeding took such a gamble on humanity.  It doesn’t make sense how it even worked out for us.  What sort of random, chaotic, accidental process leads to the channeling of energy away from the physical body in favor of a more complex brain, in an ecosystem that relied on speed and brawn to survive?  There is a real disconnect in logic when imagining the millions of years it took while the early human brain was first developing and the body was losing physical strength.  It seems like we shouldn’t have been able to make it out of that epoch alive as a species. We shouldn’t be here.   We were too easy to catch and eat.

Imagine that energy is currency.  So in order to pay for more complex brains we needed to divert payment away from the physical strength first before it could be paid to the brain, leaving weak animals that are just starting to develop a smart brain out in the middle of Africa to fend for themselves.  Not yet smart enough to make a fire to ward off predators and not fast enough to run away from them, and definitely not strong enough to stand and fight.  The only thing I can imagine is that there was a time when the tribe of early humans found refuge near the coastline.  We lived off of fish primarily and avoided the savannahs and its predators.  This could also be where we lost our body hair.  It’s called the Aquatic Ape Theory.  The humans who could swim the fastest caught the most fish and therefore had the most children.  The ones with the least amount of body hair could swim the fastest.  Okay. And all that fish protein helped improve our brains.  That works. But that had to have happened at a crucial point in our development.  The timing had to be perfect.  Is that the answer?  Or was something else influencing our development.  Protecting and guiding us?  Angels?  Aliens? Who really knows?  That’s up to faith for some people and future scientific discoveries for others.

The fact that the result of the evolutionary gamble created beings who could look up into the sky and speculate, seek to unlock the mysteries of the universe and to explore it, makes me wonder about the question of why evolution would favor brain for brawn.  We are manifestations of the universe, products of it, having been made aware of the universe.  The universe became conscious through us; at least in this tiny spec of someone else’s sky.

We made a huge leap forward in a way that’s never been done before.  So, are huge mental leaps aspects of being human?

Are we undergoing one of these major leaps in human understanding and progress?  Most people would probably say no.  We are probably going in the other direction.  Media is definitely dumbing us down.   But let’s hear from the ones who say yes.  Just for the fun of it.

In the last hundred and fifty years we’ve gone from the horse and buggy to the space age, the internet, the smart phone and Google Glass.  What happened?  And now here we are, sharing ideas like never before.  I had a very interesting conversation with a lady last week about what she called the “awakening” taking place in our world right now.  The lady was very interesting.  I’ll refer to her as the “highly spiritual” lady.  She holds seminars on spirituality.  She said things that I too have contemplated.  And the more people I talk to, the more I come across people who surprise me and say things that you never heard before about religion and the universe, things I thought only I thought about.  The old literal interpretation of the Bible and history are changing.  The fastest growing religious affiliation is “Non-affiliated.”  By current projections, by 2050 Non-Affiliated will be the box checked off the most of all other religions upon survey.  Many fundamentalist would say that’s what’s wrong with our world.  But I don’t know.  The fact is, more and more people I talk to seem to see the world in a complete new and different way.  They don’t accept the old models of what their grandparents believed in.  Are we ready for more information?  Are we ready to wake up to a new reality? 

It could be argued that thanks to modern media we have all been indoctrinated by the same sources.  We all watch the same shows and therefore ask the same questions.  Maybe so.  But isn’t that a form of global collective consciousness then? 

The earth is developing a nervous system through our smart phones and devices. We’re creating, with technology, a digital collective consciousness surrounding the planet that is connecting us all in a global web.   If done right, the internet could lead to real, honest, global democracy.  “Yeah, right,” says the CEO, coughing on his cigar smoke.  “There’s no money in it.”  “There will never be harmony among humankind due to human ego and greed,” says a friend of mine. I agree with him, most of the time, but sometimes I like to think otherwise.  Sure, it appears that way now, based on the old models of society.   But there have been enormous shifts in the way humans think, recently and in the past.

It’s like the first time a cave dwelling ancestor of ours decided to paint a picture on a cave wall.  We suddenly began to think abstractly.  No other creature had ever done that on this planet before.  And it wasn’t exclusive to one human being in one cave.  There are hundreds of caves that they’ve discovered throughout the world that have abstract paintings in them that go back as far as forty thousand years.  I wonder who was the first human to do that?  Did cave art develop slowly over a long period of time?  They don’t really know.  There’s evidence that one of the oldest cave paintings discovered is just as sophisticated as art that was discovered from periods twenty thousand years later.  Did it start by accident?  An early human blew red ochre onto the wall and thought it looked cool.   It seems that eventually it became part of their religion.  At some point we developed art and the creation of that art became a spiritual experience.  Something happened, rather suddenly by evolutionary standards, that can’t be easily explained.  I’m certainly not going to try to explain it.  But the fact is, we suddenly began to think abstractly and to represent that abstract thinking in art.  By evolutionary terms that happened VERY recently; a major shift in the human brain, almost like an upgrade took place.  Is it happening again?  Are we on the cusp of another leap?  I’m on the look out for it.  But then again, who knows?  Amen.  Or better yet, I don’t know. 

 

 

What ever happend to being Humble?

On Humility

What ever happened to being humble?  Don’t people realize that you earn more respect when you are good at something and also humble about it?  I’m not talking about false humility.  “Oh, now, you’re just saying that.”  Is it better to be good at something, like a sport, and instead of dancing around after you score, you simply nod your head and jog back to your side of the field to start again?  Wouldn’t you rather see that?  In the olden days people were humble when they did something amazing.  Einstein didn’t go around saying, “In your face, Newtonian science!”  What happened to our world where that’s acceptable behavior?  Don’t you realize how foolish a cocky person looks when they fail?  It’s the basis for good physical comedy.  The high brow person who falls down is much funnier than the good hearted, humble guy falling down.  But why do people feel the need to celebrate and parade their accomplishments to everyone else?  It’s like we’re all clamoring for attention.  Much like writing a blog about yourself.  Yes.

I think part of it stems from the inability to see how we look from other people’s perspective.  It must be harder than I think, to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.  People say they do, but they usually don’t.  Really think through the scenario, and imagine you’re them.  How would you really feel about it?  Some people, it seems to me, live in the moment, on the edge of being offended, unable to take the split second required to imagine another more rational explanation for a comment or an action.

When I was starting out as a young writer, I had some extraordinary luck.  I mistook this luck for my own immense talent.  I was part of a group of comedians that put on a sketch comedy television show for the college station.  We had a blast doing it.  The director of the station submitted two of our sketches to a short film festival in Kansas City.  We won first and third place in the contest for sketches that turned out to be short films.  One of the judges was a Hollywood producer who we spoke to after the ceremony.  He really enjoyed our work.  I had written my first screenplay and he said he’d read it.  A few weeks later, I finished another screenplay. Around that time, I received a letter from the producer that turned out to be a very positive rejection, stating that he saw something special in me.  He said I had a unique voice and he’d love to read more of my work.  So I sent him the next screenplay.  He really liked it, but...  We worked on draft after draft of the screenplay until eventually he took it to Fox Search Light to see if they’d be interested in making the film.  I was twenty-one years old. It was my second attempt at writing a screenplay.  During this period, I was hanging out with my new artist friends and I had become quite full of myself and enamored with my abilities.  Fox Search Light rejected the screenplay, or I should say they “passed” on it.  But by that time I’d moved to Chicago and was wrapped up in the Second City world.  I was arrogant in those days and I fumbled several opportunities by my own hubris.  Over the next several years I was slowly but surely humbled.  Though, painful, it was the best thing for me as far as my personality goes. It’s important to mention that I say I was cocky, I don’t mean outwardly cocky.  Mine was a more internal arrogance that affected many bad decisions I made over the years.  Had I been more humble and willing to put in the extra work and diligence needed, who knows, my life could be very different than it is today.  But that’s not the point I’m trying to make.  It’s about humility. I think this happens to everyone in some capacity.  People who are good at things when they are too young and cocky to realize it often find painful humility in later life.  It’s those guys who weren’t arrogant to begin with are the ones that people are drawn to.  Those are the people, other people want to see succeed.    

So I look at Jimmy Fallon and think, what a good person he must be because he’s a humble guy.  He seems that way anyway.  People seem to generally like him.  I look at Leo Messi, the soccer star, arguably and potentially the greatest of all time, and add even more respect for him by the way he carries himself.  He doesn’t slide across the ground when he scores.  He’s low key.  He’s good and he knows it and doesn’t need to hype himself even more.  Being arrogant is a huge indicator of insecurity. 

My uncle Tom is a living legend in his corner of the state.   He was the football coach for a small town called Seneca.  His record for State Championships is staggering.  Year after year he took a new group of kids far into the state tournament.   He inspired kids to play at the top of their game and to reach inside themselves, to push themselves, to give their complete best.  The football stadium is named after him now.  But also what’s made him such a revered legend in the town is the way in which he carries himself.  He’s quiet.  He’s an extremely deep thinker.  That’s the first thing most people would say about him.  He listens and watches instead of idly making small talk.  And when he does speak there’s usually a kernel of wisdom in his words.  He has a unique way of speaking which my brother Josh can impersonate perfectly, but that only adds to his legend.  He’s funny and extremely dry as well.  You’d never hear him brag about any of his accomplishments, he usually down plays them.  But what makes him an even greater legend is how he and my aunt Merlene adopted three kids with high needs and rescued them from horrible situations.   They did it once their children were grown, when most people were settling down to start the next phase of their lives and retire.  They are selfless people and it amazes me.   Its people like this we should have our children immolate, not some arrogant, over paid professional athlete who dances around the end-zone. 

Children are growing up today to think its okay to be cocky and to celebrate themselves.  I fear it’s the wrong message.   But then again, life has a funny way of humbling us.  And maybe that’s the point of living.  Eventually someday, in some remote future, we’ll all be humbled.  Could it be said that in order for there to be harmony on earth, we’d all need to be humble? That’s going to take some time, though, I’d imagine.  But we have time according to the theory I keep alluding to.    Be patient with those who struggle with their egos, they’ve taken the wrong path and will need more time to find their way back to the right one.  But when they get there, it is believed it will be firmly taught and for them the humbling process will be a powerful one.

“Humble thy self in the sight of the Lord.”  Remember?

In order for complex systems to work, each part must be in harmony with the rest.  Could humanity eventually come together to form a truly complex system, in say a thousand years?  Most people would say no.  That’s ridiculous.  Maybe it is.  But you know me, I like to imagine.

What is a complex system?  Anything with smaller parts that come together to make something greater.  Atoms make cells which make up our entire bodies.  How is it that each atom knows it’s a part of the complex system and what its job in said system is?  That’s a good question, but they do at some level because without this knowledge we’d fall apart.  Imagination alert: Could each human be like an atom inside of a more complex system that has yet to come on-line at its fullest capacity?  What could we do once we came on-line?  We know that by a few people coming together working in harmony for the same end goal, forming a small version of a complex system, that we can go to the moon and fathom quantum mechanics.  In nature complex systems are every where.  What if that’s what we were meant to do?  Could the concept of a global consciousness be such a complex system?  If we got rid of all the things keeping us apart and at odds with each other, then what?  But that’ll never happen!  I know, but it’s okay to Imagine, Mr. John Lennon.  Imagine indeed.

Utopia - Social Audit, part one.

On Utopia? 

CHAPTER ONE

1. Maintain humanity under five hundred million in perpetual balance with    nature. 2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity…”

--Georgia Guidestones, Elbert County, Georgia, USA.

Five hundred million souls.  No more.
“Back in my day, before that damned, fake, alien attack, right, global warming was hot boxing this planet, kids.  Literally.”  Though he appeared a middle-aged man, with an occasional grey dusting on an otherwise thick head of dark blonde hair, Grandpa Jax was quite old; three hundred and fifty-one years old to be exact.   In being old, he was avowed to redundancy, as though he’d run out of new things to say, but still liked the sound of his own voice.  And so it was a speech the family had endured for over three hundred years, often delivered during times, such as this particular autumn evening, when the youthful old man was feeling long jawed.  Most of his brood nodded and continued to consume their sumptuous Sunday feast, unphased.  They were being served impeccably by their personal robots of varying makes and models; reflections of the individuality of each master.
“Ice caps were melting, animals were vanishing, earthquakes leveled third world cities, and violent storms raged over the seas and land.  Now this was all thanks to human greed and over-population, right?”  Grandpa Jax glanced around the long table at his uninterested progeny, gathered in his ornate dining hall.  His steel-blue eyes burned with a passion that he’d inherited from his renowned father; a very famous Hollywood actor in the time before the Great Galactic Massacre; GGM.
“So, while one percent of the population controlled ninety-nine percent of the wealth, the rest of the billions of people squandered in debt.  And these wealthy white dudes, right, this one percent, whose bloodlines could be traced back to the ancient kings of Europe, and even supposedly all the way back to the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, used their money to buy the politicians and in-turn the world’s governments.  They controlled everything that transpired on this spinning clump of rock.   And they trumped up a world wide debt crisis so nasty that their banks had to bail out the entire global economy, right?  We should have been worried when Apple and Google merged and then swallowed Wal-Mart.  But we were all distracted binge watching TV shows on Netflix.
“Companies became too big to fail.   The Supreme Court allowed corporations to act as individuals and basically buy politicians.  And through back-room, corporate takeovers, mergers, and shady banking schemes the world’s economy ended up in the hands of only one huge conglomeration.  In the end, kids, this single corporation owned the whole world.”  It was during these fits of sanctimonious melancholy, when he’d had his fourth glass of wine, or smoked an entire joint by himself, Grandpa Jax felt the need to implant his version of history on the rest of his clan; the Pitt-Howard Family.  It was an attempt to quell the guilt he felt for having survived the massacre of the dark and the poor, as his betters would unceremoniously refer to it.  Some of the purer bloodlines would say the aliens did Earth and mankind a great favor by eliminating the weaker “sheeple” or “feeders” as they were referred to.  According to the Ancient Alien theorists it was what they’d done at the end of the last ice age as well, when they’d cleared Europe and therefore the world of the Neanderthals, to make way for humans.  You can’t check these facts because its all been deleted from the cloud, but it’s true.  They used this powerful weapon called HARP to unleash concentrated bursts of radiation, from the upper ionosphere.  Right?  That’s what those aliens’ ray guns really were.  It was an inside job.”
Grandma Sophia grinned away her silent rebuttal and pecked at her salad of mixed greens, freshly picked by robotic hands from the family gardens.  Of those gathered, she’d suffered the conspiracy rant the longest.  But unlike the others, she’d lived through the actual events.  She knew there were things he’d say that possibly held water, but she never believed the aliens were faked.  Grandpa would often say she was perfectly brain washed.  But she’d seen the mother ship above Los Angeles with her own eyes.  She saw the one over Denver as well.
“Those space ships were holograms,” Grandpa Jax said, anticipating her counter.  They’d known each other far too long.
“What was real was that those fake alien ships killed six and a half billion people, Mother.  Wiped the poor bastard’s off the face of the earth.  I had adopted African brothers and sisters!”  Grandpa slammed his fist on the table, rattling the fine silverware and China.  It was hard to tell if the outbreak was part of the act.  Grandpa Jax had also been a famous actor; the son of Hollywood’s most famous power-couple.  On his mother’s side, he was a third generation thespian and so it was embedded in his DNA.
“Of course, us select, fine bred, rich folks, the one-percenters, were sent to the secret bunkers to wait out the attack, right?  We spent over a year down there, kids, in these underground towns.  It was rumored that the corporate lords had made a deal with the aliens.  That was another conspiracy theory, but I say there weren’t any aliens to begin with, so it’s moot.  They even set that shit up, man.   Back before it all went down, for years on TV they’d show all these shows about aliens and how they were secretly watching us.  They were preparing us for the idea, so that when they did it, we’d believe them.  There was one show called Ancient Aliens, and now that show’s basic concept is a commonly accepted theory.  It was all bullshit.”  Grandpa stared at the back of his hand.  It should’ve been wrinkled and withered, this he knew instinctively, but it wasn’t.  His skin was tight and elastic.  What a world this is, he thought.  It just keeps going…
“So…” began Grandma Sophia, thinking he’d wound himself back down.  But she was mistaken.  And before she could alter the direction of the conversation with another word, he’d taken back up the posture of the man on stage, with his hands flourishing and fingers wagging.  She’d been away for a lot of years, traveling the world, visiting her son on the moon, even spending a good deal of time in India.  She’d forgotten how the old man could perambulate himself into such a passion.  He reminded her of a small, nippy dog, furiously humping the leg of an overly polite house guest.  She vowed to leave again, soon after her grandsons’ birthday party was over.  They were twins.  They were turning three hundred.
“And eventually we were able to come back out top side.  Let me tell you, guys, it was not nice to see…even worse to smell.  The decay.  The rot.  Just bodies and debris.  The only people left were those of us who had been invited to the bunkers under the Denver airport and other top secret locations in the various mountains around the world.  And we inherited it all, man, take as much as you want, you know, on account of everyone’s distant relatives being dead.  Oh, no body inherited that property?  I’ll take it.  Thanks.”  A loud snap of burning wood, from the enormous, marble fireplace behind him, added to the effect.
“It was something.  And then there were some hard years where everybody went back to the land of their forefathers, the places we inherited, and we sort of fended for ourselves for the first couple of years before things got going again.  Over time, nature came back to take what was rightfully hers, though.  That was the first positive thing that everyone began to post.  The water was cleansed by the natural earth and she was healed and restored to her pristine health, and everyone rejoiced.   Yay!  There were alien cults that sprang up.  People worshipped them.  Eventually the church of the alien god Baphomet became the dominant religion.  He demanded blood sacrifice and so a race of mindless clones were created to serve as sacrificial infants. Oh, and guess what, kids, Baphomet isn’t an alien god-king from another planet, he’s a god dammed powerful demon from a higher dimension.  But that’s another discussion.” Grandpa made the ancient, forbidden sign of the cross to ward off evil.
“So, when the clean up was done and the lights were turned back on, we all rebuilt.  The corporation was up and running again and in some way, shape or form, we all worked for it.  But after a little while the illusion of money became exposed and we all realized we didn’t need it.  There were plenty of resources to be had by everyone, right.  And that’s the second positive thing people began to post on the cloud.  We all sort of agreed to end the illusion of money.”  He grinned and his reddish brown beard spread open for his mouth. 
“That’s about the time the robots came to replace labor, when the money became unnecessary and totally obsolete.  Everyone retired to do what ever they desired, and that was the final positive spin that was needed to make us forget all about those angry aliens. Thank our Lord, the CEO, the great and wise Emperor Pope of the Earth, Lord Rothschild, crowned and anointed by the alien god Baphomet himself in the Galactic Peace Treaty.  
“As long as we agreed to control our own numbers and be good stewards of the earth we would be allowed to keep it.  And they all spun it as this utopian society; the dawn of the greatest age of man.  So they released the real medicines, right?  They implanted us survivors with these nanobots that float around our blood streams and cure every possible disease, including the disease of aging.  People used to get sick and old.  You don’t understand that, you kids.  Now, they’ve rejuvenated us all to our primes…” Grandpa paused for effect.  His eyes appeared glassy and feral.  He scanned the room for a face he could connect with.  All of them avoided him, but J, his two hundred and eighty-five year old grandson, his youngest heir.  J grinned down the table at the old man as though he thoroughly enjoyed the performance.
His cousin T, seated across from him, held his eyes on his plate, concentrating on his thick cut of prime rib.   It was hard to tell if he was genuinely fixated on his meat or was simply not interested in engaging the old man.
For T, it was, of course, the latter.   T knew that by making eye contact, Grandpa would zero in and then spend the remainder of the evening following him from drawing room to parlor, with encore after encore of his favorite performance, loosely titled; The Great Alien Conspiracy Theory.
“See, then here comes the catch.  They sterilized everyone so that the only way anyone can get pregnant is through licensed, artificial insemination, which they control, and it can only happen if someone registered in the region dies; which almost never happens naturally.
“The only reason why Grandma and I were spared in the first place was because we made for good breeders.  Bottom line.  And this is the unspoken truth about our perfectly balanced utopia,” Grandpa said to J.

TO BE CONTINUED…

 

The History of Religion

On History

Twelve Apostles took the teachings of Christ to the people and formed the early Christian Church.   The simple message of ‘do unto others as you would have done to you, love God and your neighbors,’ spread like a prairie fire across the Mediterranean.  It upset the powers that were.  It under-minded their ability to control people by way of religion.  First the Jews and then the Romans persecuted the early Christians.  They tried to destroy the rising religion.  By the year 300 it had gotten too imbedded into the culture to contain.  So Constantine I issued the edict of toleration in 313.  He made religious tolerance a law.  That was for ALL religions.  Though, he claimed he’d had a vision of a cross in the sky before riding into a successful battle.  It was with the symbol of the cross that he retook Rome and claimed his empire.  Despite claims he converted to Christianity, there is a lot of evidence that he still held true to his pagan beliefs.  He certainly didn’t practice Christianity primarily as the Arch of Constantine is decorated with images of the pagan goddess Victoria.  Sacrifices were made to the gods like Diana, Hercules and Apollo on its dedication, which took place after his conversion.  There is no Christian symbolism on the Arch.  His coinage continued to carry the symbols of the sun god, long after his supposed conversion to Christianity.  When he dedicated his new city Constantinople he did so wearing the Apollonian sun-rayed Diadem.  The sign of the cross was not present.  However, despite this, in the year 325 Constantine called together the First Council of Nicaea.  It was the first in a series of councils which sought to define and contain the theology of the faith.  Constantine set out to establish orthodoxy to unite his empire, to eliminate debate and dissention.  The Romans sought to control Christianity and to use it as a tool to bring the two halves of their empire back together and to once again control the people by way of religion.  They organized it to resemble the Roman army; with Cardinals as generals and the Pope as Emperor.  They rejected books and teachings that were not in line with their intents.  Books that suggested the way to find God started from within the individual first and grew outwardly were thrown out.  Certain apocryphal teachings of Jesus Christ were rejected for not being in-line with the Roman structure.

There’s a popular theory that suggests that the early pagan gods were actually demons who revealed themselves to man and attained power through worship and veneration.  They demanded blood rituals for it gave them more essence and strength.

So, a pagan steered the Church in his desired direction.  Christianity in its purest form was meant to end the worship of these demonic forces, and it did in the beginning.  Overall it succeeded because not very many people today worship the pagan pantheon.  However, behind the scenes the Roman controlled Catholic Church made the Pope the true king of Europe for nearly two thousand years. Power and greed ruled the world.  Many dark and sinister things were done in the name of the Catholic Church.  We call it the Dark Ages.  The suppression of mankind took place under early Christian rule.  Witch trials and Crusades, acts of sadistic torture, as well as countless other examples of evil deeds were done under the guise of Christianity.  Heretics were burned at the stake.  What part of Jesus Christ’s personality did they take that from?  What part suggested it was okay to burn someone alive if they didn’t believe.  “Oh, you don’t agree with me?  Well, then you can just burn to death!”

The Bible is a series of books brought together.  It’s what the word means.  The Bible was brought together by the Romans.  The books they kept were very good books, written with good intention, full of beautiful metaphors, and crafty symbolism but they presented only a glimpse of all the teachings of Christ and the ideas that had come about after his death.  Gnostic Christians held to a different interpretation of Christ’s teachings all together.  They said you didn’t need a priest to find God.  They believed in reincarnation.  This wouldn’t do for the Romans who needed the individual to need the church in order to find salvation.   Tithe! Tithe!  Tithe, or you are going to be tortured for eternity in HELL!  Rule by fear!  What is fear but a negative emotion?  Negative emotions have a lower frequency.  They come from the evil side of the universe.  Love and compassion vibrate with the highest of frequencies and can only lift us upward.

Martin Luther as well as a few others brought about the Reformation, because they knew instinctively that something wasn’t quite right with the way the religion was being conducted.  They brought about the Protestant Reformation that would divide Europe and become deeply entangled with political struggles for centuries.  The Renaissance brought about even more change and the light was brought back out to once again shine away some of the darkness that had entrenched itself into the culture.  Because there was enough of the truth out there to do that; but just enough to keep darkness lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to take back some of the control.  The Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution further pushed us onward toward the light.  But the old guard fought against this with all its might.  Science is from the devil!   Wars were fought to bring the wicked back to the fold. 

But as long as fear remains as part of the faith (directly, the fear of sinning and being punished for breaking the laws of the church, and ultimately going to hell), then the darkness has a foothold in the church.  Men created those laws.  People don’t need them.  A recent study at Yale showed that babies are born with the ability to know right from wrong.  It’s not taught, it’s instinctual.  Why is that?

I had a very interesting conversation on Facebook with a friend that went on for a couple of days.  He posted something I found very interesting.  It was the genealogical list of names from Adam to Noah, translated into English from their Hebrew roots. 

Adam – Man

Seth – Appointed
Enosh – Mortal
Kenan – Sorrow
Mahalalel – The Blessed God
Jared – Shall come down
Enoch – Teaching
Methuselah – His death shall bring
Lamech – The Despairing
Noah – Rest, or comfort.

“Man is appointed mortal sorrow.  The Blessed God shall come down teaching.  His death shall bring the despairing rest, or comfort.”

I thought about that and how the writers of the ancient books were very clever and perhaps there was some ancient magic or mysticism or true prophecy written into the bible.  Certainly there were wonderful metaphors written therein.  Then he went on to post that Moses wrote the Torah and how he had written it three thousand years ahead of Christ’s birth.   It was the statement about Moses having written the Torah that struck me and took my mind from the original thought.  So I asked him why we believe Moses wrote the Torah himself.   He explained that the first book of Moses is called Genesis.  But my argument is that Tom Sawyer wasn’t written by Tom Sawyer.  And Moses didn’t make it to the promise land.  His people did, but he himself died in the desert.  So when would he have had time to write the Torah?  They were moving around the desert.  Maybe he did it at night in his tent?  I guess he might have.  But that led to a much broader conversation about the literal interpretation of the Bible as opposed to a metaphoric one.  He claimed at first that he did take the Bible completely literally.  That surprised me.  I asked him about Noah’s Ark.  I explained that there are over five thousand different species of mammals alone on the earth.  Did he really think Noah saved every living animal that exists today on a giant boat?  That story existed before the Bible in several cultures, suggesting that something did happen.  The problem is the stories vary to fit into the culture telling it.  The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of Gilgamesh building a boat to save all the animals in Mesopotamia. It is an older account of Noah’s flood.  So we believe the newer version of the story, told even further from the original event?  Hasn’t anyone ever played telephone before?  You know how that turns out, right?

The fact that so many cultures have a flood story suggests to me that there was a civilization on earth before the end of the Ice Age.  It was global and advanced.  Then something happened that changed the landscape of the earth in a very small amount of time.  In 1901, they discovered a solidly frozen mammoth in Siberia with remnants of fresh summer flowers and vegetation in its stomach.  Like it went from a summer day to a deep freeze in a matter of minutes.  One theory is that a comet or meteor crashed into the ice sheets over the Hudson Bay and shook the earth off its previous axis.   It was a great apocalypse. The sea faring, global civilization lived off the ocean and most of their cities were along the coastlines. Off of Japan and India there are ruins of enormous structures that were not exposed above the ocean since the end of the Ice Age.  There are supposedly ruins beneath the Caribbean Sea as well.  These were all inundated and submerged in a matter of days if not instantly by tidal waves hundreds of feet tall.  The few people who managed to survive went to higher ground, some on boats, and waited out the shifting and settling of the earth.  They had to learn to survive again.  They’d lost everything.  They were relegated to living off the land and hunting and gathering again.  They told the stories to their children’s children and the story changed to fit the culture telling it.  New civilizations came to be.  The stories came down to the Hebrews and someone, maybe Moses wrote it down as Noah’s Ark among the other creation stories.

There are several other, older versions of Bible stories in Samaria and Egypt as well.  It is important to understand that men wrote the books of the Bible.  They could have been channeling the collective consciousness of the universe but they were interpreting this knowledge through their very limited and superstitious human brains.  It is why when you look close enough you’ll see the inconsistencies and why people over the centuries have had to adjust and interpret the Bible to fit their dogma.   “Well, what Paul is actually saying here is…” (add some preacher’s ideas.)

I think it’s possible for the Bible to be a place of solace and peace, to help guide lives, because people are seeking God in the pages.  But God, if you believe in God, is everything in the universe, and if you believe the theories, the multiverse as well is all part of a larger system that we too are part of, down to the strings that connect everything at the smallest scale of our universe.  They are all God.  So if you seek God anywhere you will find Him, or It, because He’s already there.  Some find God in nature.  It’s why religions can act as divine roads, because if you seek you will find.  It doesn’t matter what religion it is.  Some are more restrictive than others, however, but somewhere there will be a glimmer of truth behind it, just obscured by superstitious dogma and human folly.  But if you seek God because you are afraid to die and end up in hell, then you are heading the wrong direction. 

This is where we always say you have to have faith.  But what exactly are you basing your faith on?  That’s an important question.  If you base all your faith on the Bible, the one put together by a pagan Emperor, then what are you basing your faith really on?  Sand?  You can be shown that God didn’t personally write the Bible.  We know the stories come from older stories and have been changed to fit a larger story line.  What’s wrong with trusting God is everything and everywhere and that by vibrating with a higher frequency and radiating love, that we are serving His will, which is harmony?  Being positive and giving to others, showing compassion and not promoting fear and hate is walking with God.  Why do people need to take the Bible literally?  It’s like a life-preserver for most; they cling to it to stay afloat spiritually.  But I’d suggest learning to swim would be a better way.

I once had a conversation with a guy who was studying to become a preacher.  I asked him about the dinosaurs and the age of the earth.   He believed the earth was only four thousand years old and that the devil put those dinosaur bones out in the desert to fool mankind.   He needed to believe that or his whole faith would collapse.  That’s fragile faith.  There’s a lot more going on in the universe than we will ever really know.  Keep that in mind.  So making your faith brittle and stiff, restrictive, leaves it easily to be broken by the next new discovery.