A ramble through woods dark and deep on a day of thanks

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I went to the doctor the other day. I said to the doctor, “Doctor, it hurts when I do….this.

He said, “Don’t do that.”

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From The First Book of Bokonon

Warning from title page: Don’t be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma!

Verse 1: All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

Verses 2-4 (?): In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.

“Certainly,” said man.

“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.

And He went away.

We are still beasts.

Mostly

We inhabit an illusion.

Mostly.

A world built by the imaginings of humans on top of a real world.

In the real world, different things are important. Two things, mostly. Survival and love. Well….and pain.

We don’t like pain, it hurts. We learn from an early age to avoid it. One might even say that the majority of human existence has been invented to avoid pain…in all of its various permutations. We are deathly afraid of pain. So much so, that it is not even actual pain that drives us. The pain is real and powerful, but it is the fear of pain that has created our world, our illusion.

Especially if you include emotional pain in the equation.

We semi-intelligent primates, who somehow won the opposable thumb lottery that has propelled us to the top of the food chain, have created an entire world and complex society after complex society all for one simple reason: avoiding pain. If you take that view, you can look back at all of human history as an exercise in risk (pain) avoidance.

As should be expected from dumb beasts. The instincts of our animal nature are, after all, what allowed us to survive and evolve, without them we would have perished on the savanna and some other species….perhaps, the pootie….would now be the cock of the walk, species-wise. Fear and pain are the names we give our primary evolutionary instincts, the spurs that taught us to survive….well taught those of us who learned to pay attention to fear and pain correctly, the ones who didn’t learn are dead, Jim. Fear and pain are signals, the traffic lights that kept us from walking out into the evolutionary highway. The ability to respond correctly to these signals is why we ‘rule the world’ and armadillos don’t.

The word we have invented to make it possible for us to not talk about how afraid we are of pain and how much we are ruled by it and how much of ours lives and our invention and our structures and our societies are ruled by it is, safety. You see, we fear pain so much and this fear is so deeply ingrained in who we are and what we do that we don’t even like to talk about it very much.

We don’t say, for instance, that we fear the pain that Islamo-fascists (somehow, some way, that we slightly more rational semi-sentient beasts just don’t quite get) represent. We say instead, that we need to make our National Security paramount. Above even our rights and freedoms.

There is no better argument than that that we are in fact, just fearful beasts. That the fear of pain….even semi-imaginary pain…is the most important factor in all of human existence. To avoid this pain, we create illusions. Illusions that comfort us and make us feel….secure. We build weapons and villages and then cities and then countries and then alliances of countries and then more and better weapons. Oh…and religions too!

Because these things give us the illusion of safety, because these things help us to, as much as is (literally!) humanly possible, be free of fear be free of pain….and be free of the ultimate (we suppose) pain ….the mysterious transformation that each and every human being will experience no matter how many illusions or weapons or societies or medical miracles or religions we create…………death.

That is the world that we live in, the world that humans have labored for the ten thousand years of recorded history to build. A world that allows us to maintain the illusion that we have conquered fear and pain and even death…right up until the time we die.

Stop!

Hammer Time!

And ten thousand years later, here we are, we strange little beasties. Living in an illusionary world that we have built….brick of fear by poorly planned brick of fear…to keep us safe. And since the Universe (Or FSM or IPU or GOD) or whatever you want to call it)seems to have an acutely developed sense of the ironic, we are the least safe as a species that we have ever been.

Ha Ha, I laugh!

Good one!

But wait!

God told the mud to make meaning, and so we must. But what meaning can we hope to make out of this world of fear, chaos and illusion that has propelled one of the least among us to the fore…. to protect us from our fears?

I who was once mud now have a brain, and I can use that brain to look around and look back and even to look forward. When I look back, I see how how this world was made, when I look around I see it is on the brink of…..something….and when I look forward all I can see, when I look to make meaning, is this.

The world that we have created out of fear of each other and the fear of death is about to kill us.

We have gone nearly (since we are not dead yet) as far as we can go in this world, in this way.

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But

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Since the thing that human beings seem to be best at is creating new illusions….new worlds….maybe we should….

After all, all we need to do is convince enough people, not all mind you, but just enough to create a critical mass….that we need to change this current fear based illusion into something else, something new.

Right now, our illusions are all based on fearing each other, on competing with each other. On killing each other so that we can feel safe. What if we changed that?

Which brings us back to …..survival and love.

Please pardon me for a moment while I wax philosophers.

Many folks seem to think that the opposite of love is hate, I disagree.Because I think hate comes from fear,I think people mainly hate stuff because they fear it, or what it represents in THEIR mind.So if the opposite of fear is love, and we are living in a fear based human culture…and that culture of fear is finally destroying itself….then… < DFH CLICHE ALERT > ….Love is the answer. That’s right, loving…not fearing…. our fellow human beings is what will turn this mess around and give us a chance to build a new world from the ashes of our current one. Not sticky gooey hippie love, but respect and trust and an acknowledgment that we are all equals, all mothers and fathers and children….all humans, with feelings and lives and needs…that are underneath it all, the same. That kind of love.

Now…since you are a discerning bunch, you might have discerned from the first portion of this essay that I am not a big fan of humans…and you would be right.I have no great love for the species in general, and while most individual specimens one meets are not particularly offensive per se, once you get a few of them together in a room, look out. They tend to revert to pack behavior, or at best, tribalism. This reversion can be very distressing to those who are actually hoping for some sign of an evolutionary progression. Especially when so many lives seem to depend upon it.

So even though I am not a big fan of the current crop of humans, I do not wish to see large numbers of them perish from their own stupidity. And since I seem to be stuck on this podunk planet with them with not much else to do,I figure what the heck? Why not try to help save as many of them as possible and see if we can hang on until that whole evolution thing kicks in. To that end, hahaha, I blog! Because really, all my misanthropy aside, all that about 70% of these silly humans really need is to hear that yes Virginia, there is another way. Most of them are very decent and nice beings, when not caught up in some form of mass hysteria or other. They are just trapped in an illusion that they did not create and they feel that they have to act out their parts in it.

Human beings are very good at following directions, most of them want desperately to fit in and to please and to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, what they have been told/sold is the right thing…….isn’t.

Really, if you think about it (which I do) what the 70% of good and decent human beings who aren’t totally consumed by hate, fear and avarice really need is a new ste of directions. They/we/I/you all know that there is something very wrong with how the world works right now. All of them would love to see some sort of change, would simply LOVE it if they didn’t have to act like animals, like dumb beasts…and would love it even more and really give it their all to effect change……….if they were not treated as such by the powers that be. And by their fellow humans who have bought the okeydoke and think we have to always be in some sort of cut-throat competition.

We don’t.

In fact the survival of the species dictates that we make a change from cut-throat competition to some sort of cooperation with our fellow humans. To make it through the coming times we are going to have to learn to live together in peace, to work together in harmony…..to love each other instead of fear each other. It IS the only way to avoid REALLY BIG, BAD THINGS from happening.

We here know this.

Billions of others sense it. Millions of others are working towards it. We are far from alone. But we do face huge and VERY scary obstacles. Ranging from the concrete threat of a tyrannical government and firmly entrenched self-preservational elite power structure (which we MUST defeat) to relatively prosaic details like just letting all the other humans know that we want and will work for the same changes they want and figuring out how to reach out and communicate with each other to make the change from a world of fear and competition to a world of love and cooperation.

Really, when it comes down to it, we just need to all come together and say something like, oh…I am mad as hell and not only am I not going to take it anymore…I am not going to give it anymore either. And I am not going to let anyone else give it either.

The vast majority of human beings really are good and decent folks, they really care and they will really try…..if. IF they know that everyone else is trying too. If they know that the Prisoners Dilemma has been solved. If they know that the game is not rigged. If they know that the treacherous, greedy motherfucking Republicanist assholes won’t get away with setting brother against brother and sister against sister anymore.

IF we can learn to trust and love each other.

Through out human history the vast majority of humans, and human societies, have been held hostage by the small percentage of ‘humans’ who are willing to screw each other for their own individual gain. We have had many prophets and holy men and  saints come to this poor backwater of a planet and give us instructions on how to live, how to make the change. We have largely ignored them…. because of (for lack of a better word) the Republicans among us who are willing to subvert the possible harmonious realities they offer for their own personal gain. Bastards

We no longer have that luxury.

We are at the crux of the biscuit now, the fork in the road, the turning point…it is time to fish or cut bait, shit or get of the pot. We either find the way to change….or changes will be made for us. We either come together and find a new way to live, a new way to be human…or we are in deep, deep shit.

I wondered, when I first came to the internet, if others saw this reality. If others were willing to work together through this new medium to help in the small ways that individual people can, to face up to and make these changes. I was scared…and still am, to talk about this sort of thing openly. Some of my fears were confirmed. But I also saw a pretty large number of folks who saw the same things I saw, who felt the same way I felt, who were willing to work as hard as I was to help bring about the changes I felt needed to be made.

You are.

This is all new, we are all figuring it out together, none of us really knows what the fuck we are doing, but hey…..it looks like we are doing it anyway! We are part of the change that is happening, we are working together, we are making progress….we are learning how to work together, and that, more than any specific thing we might do, is what really counts, what will really make a difference. The forms and methods and projects we may engage in are not nearly important as one single fact. By being us and by working together we can and will help the world go through the changes it …and we….so desperately need.

And for that I am truly thankful.

Together, we can do anything, heehee


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