October 2007 archive

About 25 years ago, I woke from a good night’s sleep filled with words.  The words went something like this:

—If evolution is now the evolution of consciousness (and I believe it is), ergo, whatever species is evolving in consciousness must become aware of increasingly more aspects of the totality of being, must become aware of that part of being which is death— 

When awareness of death began dawning in the evolving consciousness of homo
sapiens (although animals have some sense of death, they don’t wake in the morning thinking, ‘I’m going to die some day’), the human species reacted largely with fear, denial, and avoidance.  This ‘significant’ awareness of death in the evolving human consciousness seems to have coincided with the transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal orientation in society.

I state these only as interesting possibilities, to be examined, thought about, researched, felt with the heart, contemplated…

Early literatures, like the Gilgamesh Epic, have themes of searching for the fountain of eternal life.  From fear and attempted denial, the effort to escape, the effort to transcend death, became a driving force of western civilization, and led to much of our cultural and technological progress. 

Through various religious constructs, humans sought to continue existence in an afterlife where we join our loved ones who have gone before, to continue where we left off, so to speak.

Other means of ‘escaping’ death were such devices as fame, power, control of nature, wealth.  So, if you are as rich as Walt Disney (of the Happy, Magic Kingdom) you can, at that  moment of imminent death, have your body frozen in cryonics until science comes up with a cure for whatever it was from which you were about to expire.

But I apologize for being on the brink of slipping into sarcasm and humor in what is a  very serious subject.  Yet I love to laugh!

There are many means by which we have attempted to avoid and deny.  Find your own examples.

But, as the psychologists say…

  “Whatever we deny is bound to come back to haunt us, writ large, barring the
  way forward!  Saying, “This denied content is what is blocking the way
  forward.”  Saying, “Deal with this.  Integrate this.  This psychic content
  is what is barring your way forward, is barring your further growth, is
  barring your evolution…”

Our very attempts to avoid death, our attempts to dominate nature, to control natural processes in a non-integrated manner–have brought us to this point where we have created…

  DEATH WRIT LARGE ACROSS THE PLANET

…saying, basically, deal with this, integrate this, awareness and acceptance of death is the way forward.

And so the very threat to our survival is the gateway and the impetus to our evolution forward. 

—With the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s way of thinking, and thus we drift toward unimaginable peril—

With our technological advances we have taken into our own hands the power which was once attributed only to Gods.  This mandates that we evolve man’s way of thinking to become at least somewhat more equivalent to the thinking of the Gods.  Evolve or die!  Thus it has always been.

Be excellent to each other…we’re in this together…this is all we have…

Gary Younge, the New York correspondent for The Guardian, has a commentary in today’s paper (15 October) about how America’s sense of optimism is gone.

It is a well-written essay and worth reading in full. I think Younge has nearly perfectly captured the general hopelessness that many Americans are feeling now about their country.

In his essay, The land of optimism is in the dumps, but refuses to accept how it got there, Younge writes:

This sense of optimism has been in retreat in almost every sense over the past few years… America, in short, is in a deep funk. Far from feeling hopeful, it appears fearful of the outside world and despondent about its own future. Not only do most believe tomorrow will be worse than today, they also feel that there is little that can be done about it.

Paul Krugman is still reading Armando’s mind:

Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job – to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for – the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

Nancy Pelosi was for protests before she was against them:

Pelosi has had a long record of criticizing China. In 1991, she slipped away with two colleagues during a congressional tour and placed flowers at Tiananmen Square, where pro-democracy demonstrations had been violently suppressed two years before. Chinese guards briefly detained television crews filming the event.

crossposted at Daily Kos and Truth & Progress

Last night, Tim Russert’s CNBC Show discussed the state of the 2008 race as it stands now.  This show, about which I’ve written before, has no transcripts available and almost every time I write about it, it is usually from memory.  Last night, however, I did take notes.

I almost always watch this one-hour show as it allows the guests maximum time to elaborate their viewpoint.  Unlike ‘Meet The Press,’ Russert rarely interrupts and proves what one of my favorite journalists ever, Robin MacNeil, once said of the concept behind PBS’ The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, “If you allow a politician or a policy maker more than a few seconds to speak, they might even say something substantive.”

Towards the end of last night’s show, Russert and his panel discussed Al Gore’s political future.

Today, Larry Lessig posted an incredible lecture and slide presentation he delivered at Stanford, where he is a law professor. Drop everything you are doing and go listen to this now. It is the dawn of a new era of Internet-based politics.

http://lessig.org/bl…

With laser focus, Lessig zeros in on money corruption in American society and fingers the corporations and their coin-operated politicians as the bad actors – but he also indicts the REST OF US for staying silent and tolerating the increasing affronts to reason, justice, and dignity.

Lessig has decided to devote the next decade to fighting the creeping crud of big money corruption of American society, and he is just the man to do it. The most exciting part of his lecture is the hints at solutions that bypass the crooked Congress and “two-party” system. Just as the evolution of Docudharma is heading swiftly toward action-oriented reform, Lessig is advocating new Internet-propagated “norms” to fight corruption. He is a brilliant man, and he will soon figure out how the Net can generate structures, charters, and protocols to begin bypassing the stinking mess that much of the US Government has become.

Just go listen to Lessig. I cannot recommend this speech too highly.